Of late, I confess, I’ve found myself exhausted with blogging or, more generally, communication. On the one hand, dialogue, especially academic dialogue, is constantly threatened by the perils of what Lacan referred to as the “imaginary”. When Lacan evokes the imaginary, of course, he is not speaking of what is imagined or fabrications of the mind, but rather the domain of identification with the specular image of our body. Of particular importance here are all the rivalrous struggles for recognition that Hegel depicted so well in the Phenomenology of Spirit. For some reason these struggles seem to occur with particular intensity and ferocity in academic dialogue. Indeed, where one might intuitively think that such fierce struggles are most intense between strongly polarized intellectual positions– for instance, the infamous split between Analytic and Continental thought –these struggles seem to occur with even greater intensity between intellectual positions that are fairly close to one another, thereby underlining Freud’s point about the narcissism of minor difference. To the outsider, for instance, it is very difficult to distinguish Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus from the work of late Lacan. Yet for partisans of these thinkers, deafening struggles ensue. Indeed, some of the most bitter struggles I’ve ever witnessed occur among the various Lacanian camps, such that smaller Lacanian groups must think long and hard over whether they would invite the wrath of Jacques-Alain Miller were they to invite Colette Soler to speak or submit a paper.
On the other hand, I’ve found myself haunted by this passage from Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:
If it happen, from a defect of the organ, that a man is not susceptible of any species of sensation, we always find that he is as little susceptible of the correspondent ideas. A blind man can form no notion of colours; a deaf man of sounds. Restore either of them that sense in which he is deficient; by opening this new inlet for his sensations, you also open an inlet for the ideas; and he finds no difficulty in conceiving these objects. The case is the same, if the object, proper for exciting any sensation, has never been applied to the organ. A Laplander or Negro has no notion of the relish of wine. And though there are few or no instances of a like deficiency in the mind, where a person has never felt or is wholly incapable of a sentiment or passion that belongs to his species; yet we find the same observation to take place in a less degree. A man of mild manners can form no idea of inveterate revenge or cruelty; nor can a selfish heart easily conceive the heights of friendship and generosity. It is readily allowed, that other beings may possess many senses of which we can have no conception; because the ideas of them have never been introduced to us in the only manner by which an idea can have access to the mind, to wit, by the actual feeling and sensation.
What I find particularly troubling in this passage is Hume’s reference to the man of mild manners and the man with a selfish heart. Hume’s thesis, of course, is that all ideas arise from experience. As a consequence of this thesis, the limits of our imagination are defined by the limits of our experience. Should the man with a selfish heart witness an act of genuine generosity or friendship, it would not, according to Hume, even register as such an act, for the associative web characterizing the thought of this man would immediately interpret the other man’s act according to his own universe where selfish motives are treated as axiomatic. As Lacan liked to say, “all communication is miscommunication”. Here we have Hume’s own version of this Lacanian thesis. Where thought is always situated or attached to a field of experience and where ideas are related by principles of association, it follows that no two people will exist in the same universe. Each event that occurs in the field of experience– hearing another’s words, for instance –will evoke different associations and relations, such that the relation between two people is a sort of babble or chaos rather than a communication. There are, of course, all sorts of problematic assumptions here about the nature of communication– namely the assumption that to communicate is to send a signal that is the same for both the sender and receiver –yet it is worthwhile to state the issue in the starkest terms possible.
While not endorsing Hume’s position, I do think that he is able to explain a good deal about about human formations of thought and interactions with one another with his sparse epistemology. Do we not daily see the results of this phenomenon in the way we judge others, detaching their words and actions from the context in which they occur, speaking of issues as if there were some abstract reason or common sense against which their actions could be measured, and transforming actions into acts based on abstract motives that we can then judge? This phenomenon is especially attenuated in the blogosphere, where the field in which we encounter the other person is restricted largely to words and images, sans their daily life, their work, their obligations, their passionate engagements, and so on. Divorced from all context– and no writer could ever be equal to writing context –words and phrases instead dangle for whomever might come along, actualizing all sorts of associations in readers without necessarily having anything to do with the context that first led the author to generate them as a series of 0’s and 1’s that appear on ones monitor.
The consequences that follow from Hume’s simple and straightforward observation are rather bleak. If he is right we are collectively doomed to a comedy of errors. Yet where the literary comedy of errors usually ends with the rise of the prince or love fulfilled, our comedy of errors seems to be one that ends only in cruelty, conflict, and war. This cruelty is all the worse in that it is seldom even aware of itself for the same reason that the mild mannered man cannot even recognize the intense passions of others. Like Derrida’s analysis of the gift in Given Time, where the condition for the possibility of the gift paradoxically consists in a complete unawareness of giving a gift coupled with no unconscious surplus-value drawn from the gift, this would be a situation in which we would be completely unaware of others by virtue of perpetually being trapped in our own networks of associations when relating to others. However, where Derrida shows how this is a condition of the gift– a sort of regulative ideal, as Kant would say –this would be a circumstance fulfilled each and every day in our relations to others. If we like, we can engage in a lot of hand-waving about the formation of shared horizons of meaning, the production of shared contexts, etc., but the situation would still be essentially the same. The question, then, is whether this is the circumstance in which we find ourselves, or whether there is no some minimal transcendence that allows us in certain circumstances– not all –to surmount the limits of our embeddedness in context to encounter some minimal otherness of the other. In encountering others, do we only ever see our own reflection in the mirror?
December 26, 2007 at 12:15 pm
I don’t know if you would appreciate how I respond – apologies if this isn’t welcome.
The question would perhaps be whether what you describe is a trap, or just a condition of possibility – whether, rather than describing barriers to interaction, you might instead be providing something more like a description of the media within which interactions take place?
So we begin from our reflections, because those provide a reservoir of metaphor and analogy, an orientation for organising new experience, but those reflections themselves can be a provisional basis – a beginning – something at stake, something to some degree risked in interaction – something that can themselves be disturbed and transformed.
In this regard, the Hume quote is on one level strangely optimistic, treating the initial experiential impasse as potentially quite plastic:
We may not be so readily transformable as this :-) And the impacts of encounters, the ripples and perturbations they may generate in our existing self-images and in the background reservoir of our experiences, may be unpredictable. But the web of elements through which we refract experiences is not itself so stable, impermeable, or essential to bar disturbance or impact – what is “us” gets shifted, drawn off course, reworked and rewoven – even if along homologous lines to whatever it may have been before, still those lines begin to incorporate traces of how others have impacted on us.
In saying these things, I’m not trying to minimise what concerns you, and apologies again if this is not the direction you were trying to take the discussion.
December 26, 2007 at 4:33 pm
I don’t think you’re entirely wrong here, nor do I entirely disagree, but I do think this way of parsing the issue is a bit glib and is too quick. Rather than jumping into the optimistic possibilities, thereby covering over or brushing away the issue of communication, I suspect that it is more productive to push the issue to its limit, discerning how it haunts and inhabits discourse. That is, I think there’s a way in which the problem is exacerbated when theoretically our first instinct is to solve away the problem. Here, I suppose, my thought on this matter is Freudian. The genius of Freud lay in his ability to treat the symptom, the break-down, the aberration, as the key to determining the nature of psychic functioning. Where the knee-jerk therapeutic response is to treat the symptom as a disease or foreign body to be eradicated as quickly as possible– to treat it as something outside the subject suffering from the symptom –Freud saw the symptom as a solution to a particular deadlock in the person’s psychic economy and revelatory of their desire. You start to move in this direction when you propose that, “The question would perhaps be whether what you describe is a trap, or just a condition of possibility – whether, rather than describing barriers to interaction, you might instead be providing something more like a description of the media within which interactions take place?” The problem is that once that proposal is out there, the phenomenon itself is quickly covered over by talk of fusions of horizons, analogies, and risking discourse.
In certain respects it seems to me that this question of how a relation to an-other is possible was at the core of Lacan’s analytic technique. Lacan ends his 11th seminar saying that,
A good deal of Lacan’s practice can be explaining in reference to this thesis: The manner in which the analyst refuses mastery (i.e., being one-who-knows), the famous analytic neutrality, the particular style of listening. On the one hand, the analyst comports himself in such a way as to make present the difference between the analysand’s mirror and the abyss of alterity. He makes present this abyss for the analysand, so that the analysand might discover the manner in which he defends against desire by existing in the belief that he knows how the other thinks, what the other demands or requests, and what the other wants. As a result, both the analysand’s and analyst’s desire is gradually able to manifest itself. Yet this possibility only emerges through all the detours and follies of misrecognition and miscommunication, where the failed message is pushed to its limit in the analytic setting (through analytic listening that strive not after the imaginary intention of what the analysand is trying to say, but rather in a listening devoted to what is other in the analysand’s own discourse… The slips of the tongue, homonym, equivocations, etc). Winning this alterity occurs here, of course, in a highly specialized setting. The question is how it might be possible in broader, more mundane, social interactions.
December 27, 2007 at 7:20 pm
Thanks for your thoughts on this. I’m always interested and relieved when I encounter others struggling with the threat posed by the seeming impossibility of conversation.
But I am curious–from whence this privileging of unity in discourse? As someone just beginning to confront Deleuze in Nietzsche & Philosophy, I am a bit surprised by your move to problematize Hume’s insight here. If we accept his description of ideas, but precisely as it is so “sparse”, can we avoid such depressing implications? I hope I am not being too predictable by raising Derrida or Gadamer here (I’ll stop short of Habermas). Perhaps, as I think as I write this, there is a practical problem at issue that is not coextensive with the epistemological–or metaphysical?–one arising from the infinite challenges posed by humanity’s factual division into individuals. More clearly stated, can the fact that we theoretically cannot communicate in terms of absolute verisimilutude really explain the rather basic and stupid barriers to communication that arise in day to day life in academia?