Date: Sun, 22 Jun 1997 15:06:04 GMT
From: Chris Burford <cburford-AT-gn.apc.org>
Subject: M-PSY: Re Habermas, Marx, Freud


On Wednesday Tod Sloan came back:

[one request Tod, I had a problem with reading
your post fluently because of wrap around of 
the long lines. I don't know how many other subscribers
have this problem but a line length of 70 characters may avoid 
this on all screens.]

I like the point that "They are called 'unconscious' because they 
are difficult to recognize and reflect upon." 

This includes a lot of communication. 

I agree with the importance of a sociological and political
theory embracing those processes that are unconscious, but 
I would not agree that the only reason is to explain why 
a repressive system like capitalism is accepted. I think
any economic or political system (except in a subsistence
economy) has got to have methods of accumulating and 
organising the surplus. Capitalism is rather efficient at 
doing this in such a way as to increase use values by
lowering the average amount of socially necessary labour time
required to produce them.

I agree that the capitalist system privileges instrumental
thinking, though not in the promotion of goods.

I am not sure Russell would agree with this and I do not
know all the connotations of "symbolization" but I would
have thought that advertising and designer labels very much
sells commodities for their symbolic significance.

("The piece that Habermas does not
develop much, but which I think is promising, is his use of Lorenzer's concept of
desymbolization to account for the systematic distortion of communication that occurs
as the lifeworld is increasing colonized.")

I do not know whether this can link with semiotics,
but the word that strikes me in Tod's description of what
would be a healthy lifeworld, is "mutuality". 

Intense commodity
exchange can create a lot of symbolic meanings since many commodities
now meet a need of the imagination as much as of material needs.
However the cash nexus is rapid and not reciprocal. The complex
web of interdependence implied by the mutuality of most societies
cannot occur in capitalism, or only as an exception - the small
shop keeper on the corner before he or she is driven to close
by the supermarket, for example.

Chris Burford
London.



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