Subject: Re: HAB: A non-intersubjective Other?
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 11:19:35 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)



On Wed, 05 Jul 2000 07:43:30 PDT matthew piscioneri <mpiscioneri-AT-hotmail.com> 
wrote:

> > an undigestable moment of any kind of intentionality (a "blind spot?").

> I want to know more about the ORIENTATION of the participants taking part in  
a process of reaching understanding. This via reduction suggests a distributed 
rationality...

I'm not sure what you mean by distributed rationality. Habermas has clarified 
this "blind spot" in his debate with Gadamer, through his theory of distorted 
commmunication. Ordinary language entails necessary blind spots which 
constitute the very identity of those speaking (ie. you can't have cognitive 
development in an "ideal speech situation"). As such, I think I'd like to 
suggest that monological systems, as logical and self-transparent as they are, 
are also constructions of an identical nature. In other words: the orientation 
toward truth, on a theoretical level, itself is constituted by certain "blind 
spots."

> >We communicate precisely because we do not understand? (since when we do 
understand something, we cease to talk about it until we no longer understand).

> This point also touches on the distinction Habermas makes use of between 
> illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. Here the difference appears to 
> be in 'the heart of the utterer' as it were, which reinforces the location 
> of the essential rationality in the orientation of the participant to taking 
> part in a process of reaching understanding. I am also sceptical that there 
> exists an actual rationalised space in which the sphere of validity claims 
> operate autonomously apart from the intentions of participants.

Two points:

First, the implications of my question point to an essential "irrationality" in 
the orientation of a speaker --> ie. that the attempt to understand something 
is an impossible task. This is something which Habermas does not, in fact, 
actually deny, since understanding is potentially in infinite task. Habermas 
does, however, kind of brush this aside by stressing the role of reasonable 
consensus. This blind spot is precisely that moment that is concealed in 
consensus: we all agree, with the best of reasons, yet there remains more to be 
said (but we aren't going to say it).

Second, this "bone in the throat" is not rationalised space, something more 
like a vanishing mediator (a necessary kernel that must be repressed in order 
for understanding to take place). This isn't so much autonomous as it is 
constitutive. This vanishing mediator, at least the concept, can be found in 
Schelling and is outlined in more detail in the work of Jameson and Zizek (when 
they talk about the quadratic structure of Hegel).

Zizek writes, "Fascism, to take a worn-out example, is not an external opposite 
to liberal democracy but has it roots in liberal democracy's own inner 
antagonisms... This is why negativity must be counted twice: effectively to 
negate the starting point, we must negate its own 'inner negation' in which its 
content comes to its 'truth' (Fascism, although opposed to liberal capitalism, 
is not its effective negation but only its 'inner' negation: effectively to 
negate liberal capitalism, we must therefore negate its very negation). This 
second, self-relating negation, this otherness reflected into itself, is the 
vansihing point of absoulte neativity, of 'pure difference' - the paradoxical 
moment which is third, since its is already the first moment which 'passes 
over' into its own other. What we have here could also be conceptualized as a 
case of retroactive determiniation: when opposed to its radical Negative, the 
first moment itself changes retroactively into its opposite. 
Capitalism-in-itself is not the same as capitalism-as-opposed-to-Communism: 
when confronted with the tendencies of its dissolution, capitalism is forced to 
negate itself 'from within' (to pass into Fascism) if it is to survive..." 
(Zizek, For they know not what they do, 180-181).

The same kind of analysis applies to communication... ??

ken



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