Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 09:27:15 -0800
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-california.com>
Subject: Re: the rest is silence


Anita,

I liked your restatement a lot, but of course we have to
negotiate the terms of our language here, too, in order to
make progress.  I think your restatement did much to help
me find my bearings within a collaborative language with
you.  So maybe I can make a statement that makes some
sense to you, as it does to me.

First, I do know what you mean when you speak of the
illusion that so mesmerizes people and causes us to fail
to understand each other in western culture, the illusion
of a reality that is not socially or linguistically
constructed, and a language that references that reality
unamibuously.  As Derrida would say, this is our
logocentrism, our particular logocentrism, and it licenses
us to commit violence against alterity. It is an illusion
so profound, I believe, that even you and I, following
this breakthrough and talking here like this, are likely
to turn our heads and do violence against other's
realities, simply by failing to calibrate our key terms
sufficiently to understand what others are talking about,
imposing our preformed meanings, failing to give credence
to complaints that are cast in languages we have not
learned to understand.  Moreover, I must say, that I am
not sure that "right" is on the side of failing to do
violence.  When we see other societies "violating human
rights" (say mutilating women to make them non-sexual, or
even being cruel to animals in the preparation of them for
food) should we give priority to their values over our
own?  I'm not sure.  Is this unsureness the vestige of my
logocentrism?  Or can I escape the logocentrism and
champion values that I hold dearly in some way?  By
altering the sanctions, perhaps, that I am willing to use?

But I come away from Lyotard with great optimism about
this process.  I'm a psychotherapist.  After reading Le
Differend, PMC and Just Gaming, I came away seeing Le
Differends in people's lives, our failure to communicate
because we fail to calibrate our key terms, to stabilize
their meanings and to find a way open the creation of
meanng between us (which I think of now as paralogy) in
dialogue.  Seeing the problem is half of solving it.    I
am not discouraged by seeing the problem, because the
problem was already there, evident in all of our lives.  I
am encouraged by gaining this glimpse of what our problem
is.  I believe Lyotard saw, and i see, how we are already
making great strides towards learning to make meaningful
discourse together, that this is what postmodernity is.

With regard to courts, this problem seems more difficult.
Perhaps we can think about it together.
Maybe the alternative here needs to be something other
than paralogy?  But still something that recognizes the
injustice of "justice."

What do you think?  Do you feel optimism about our
learning to dispell differends outside of courtrooms?  And
have any idea of where to turn with regard to LAW?

..Lois Shawver