Why do I even bother trying to talk?

[tcepsa]

I've never been able to address it because the entire tangled mess of trying to deconstruct their prejudice, societal stereotypes, and my own ignorance would tangle in my throat and render me mute.
--dolphin__girl, A moment of contemplation

I've been reading the entry and it has been good and raised several important points for me to think about this, but that's the first thing that has made me go "whoa, I need to stop and write this down." And I'm a little bit unsettled that it's about communication in general rather than the specific topics of racism and privilege and stereotyping and privilege that she is talking about. At the same time, though, I think a huge number of the challenges that we face in these areas are deeply rooted in communication and difficulties therewith.

Also, it's something that I often find myself stymied by--admittedly not in the areas that she is talking about, but in general. Very frequently, when I'm trying to talk about something that is important to me, I get a sense that there is a very vast context needed to make that thing's importance apparent, and I have no idea how to convey even a part of that context. And then I start to wonder how anybody manages to talk about anything! Do most people have a greater shared context with each other than I seem to have with them, thus negating the need to transmit such a large chunk of it when they want to talk about something? Or do they just not care? Do they even realize it (and to the cynics out there, I urge you to think hard about this one before choosing to believe they do not)? Have they come up with some other strategy for dealing with it that I haven't hit upon (or at least realized)? Is this why it seems like so many people's conversations are about the most banal of things--they realize they can't talk about anything significant, but they still want to pretend like they're communicating? Or am I in a minority thinking that those things are banal, and they really are communicating?

If you were here in my head, what I am about to say would make perfect sense to you. But you're not in my head. I know this, and I despair.

Comments

[wetdryvac.livejournal.com]

Ah bugger. OK, I'll post the reply over in my journal. Got long winded and stuff.

[fallenpegasus]

I don't see it. Posted friends only?

[wetdryvac.livejournal.com]

Almost all my journal is friends-only, sorry about that.

That said, I'll toss you (and anyone else who asks) onto the filter it lives in.

[fallenpegasus]

Oh yes.

And my experience is that that more important the thing I want to need to say is, the bigger and more complex this problem is.

Giving someone else Understanding is hard.

[sucsays.livejournal.com]

I am going to go with "they can't talk about anything significant, but they still want to pretend like they're communicating." That said, I believe a great deal of reliance on banal subject matter is not so much the result of an inability to communicate context effectively as fear that others don't care or will judge us when we are honest about significant issues. To a large extent, this fear is totally justified, as I with my big mouth would know. In many instances, people do not want to confront significant issues even on a personal level and thus, the banal is a welcome distraction from dealing with potentially disturbing thoughts.

My own take on banal vs. significant conversation is that to truly be on the same page with someone else, one has to be able to do both with said someone else. Life is filled with the monumental and the mundane. To ignore either is to not fully acknowledge someone else's reality.

[coie.livejournal.com]

Welcome to my first semester in graduate school :-P They assumed I had some background in Derrida and Foucault I didn't have. Ironically, many critics of deconstruction argue that it is a nihilistic viewpoint which (crudely put) says that we can never communicate because we all have different points of reference. The whole argument is actually very complicated and took me a long time to wrap my brain around, and I know you are a super busy person already, but I think you might find that some of this philosophy speaks to you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

"Derrida states that deconstruction is what happens to meaning when language is understood as writing. For Derrida, when language is understood as writing it is realised that meaning does not originate in the logos or thought of the language user. Instead individual language users are understood to be using an external system of signs, a system that exists separately to them because these signs are written down. The meaning of language does not originate in the thoughts of the individual language user because those thoughts are already taking place in a language that does not originate with them. Individual language users operate within a system of meaning that is given to them from outside. Meaning is therefore not fully under the control of the individual language user. The meaning of a text is not neatly determined by authorial intention and cannot be unproblematically recreated by a reader. Meaning necessarily involves some degree of interpretation, negotiation, or translation. This necessity for the active interpretation of meaning by readers when language is understood as writing is why deconstruction takes place.
To understand this more fully, consider the difference for Derrida between understanding language as speech and as writing. Derrida argues that people have historically understood speech as the primary mode of language and understood writing as an inferior derivative of speech. Derrida argues that speech is historically equated with logos, meaning thought, and associated with the presence of the speaker to the listener. It is as if the speaker thinks out loud and the listener hears what the speaker is thinking and if there is any confusion then the speaker's presence allows them to qualify the meaning of a previous statement. Derrida argues that by understanding speech as thought language "efaces itself." Language itself is forgotten. The signified meaning of speech is so immediately understood that it is easy to forget that there are linguistic signifiers involved - but these signifiers are the spoken sounds (phonemes) and written marks (graphemes) that actually comprise language. Derrida therefore associates speech with a very straightforward and unproblematic theory of meaning and with the forgetting of the signifier and hence language itself.

Derrida contrasts the understanding of language as speech with an understanding of language as writing. Unlike a speaker a writer is usually absent (even dead) and the reader cannot rely on the writer to clarify any problems that there might be with the meaning of the text. The consideration of language as writing leads inescapably to the insight that language is a system of signs. As a system of signs the signifiers are present but the signification can only be inferred. There is effectively an act of translation involved in extracting a significaton from the signifiers of language. This act of translation is so habitual to language users that they must step back from their experience of using language in order to fully realise its operation. The significance of understanding language as writing rather than speech is that signifiers are present in language but significations are absent. To decide what words mean is therefore an act of interpretation. The insight that language is a system of signs, most obvious in the consideration of language as writing, leads Derrida to state that "everything [...] gathered under the name of language is beginning to let itself be transferred to [...] the name of writing." This means that there is no room for the naive theory of meaning and forgetting of the signifier that previously existed when language was understood as speech." "

[grum]

To paraphrase Tcepsa, "so deconstruction is the understanding of language?"

My reply, "yes"

That said, from a cursory read, my thought is that Derrida didn't go nearly far enough. It's not just writing that needs these filters, it's speech as well. It's any method of communicating from one to another. And, for that matter, this includes art.

My biggest frustration with art school was that "The meaning of [an art piece] is not neatly determined by authorial intention and cannot be unproblematically recreated by a reader".
My biggest frustration on a daily basis is that I have the same problem with the speech of my classmates and they seem to have reciprocal problems with mine.

I suppose you could make the argument that we come from different enough cultures that we are not using the same language, but having watched some of their interactions with each other, I don't think so. Anyways. If I'm out on an incorrect limb due to a cursory reading of a brief concept summary, please explain further and help me see the error of my ways.

[tcepsa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the response! On the one hand I find the domain very interesting (this is the first I think I've run into deconstructionism) but on the other hand I am inclined to disagree with Derrida on a few key points, especially--if I understand correctly--his claim that spoken language is directly understood while written language must be translated first. I'll give him the latter, but the former I reject wholeheartedly. All language is symbols, I accept that. However, whether it is being conveyed visually or aurally, both methods use symbols and both methods therefore require interpretation i.e. a conversion from the symbols (...does tone of voice count as a symbol?) and their arrangement respective to one another to meaning in the mind of the recipient of the symbols.

Then again, there were some parts that I'm pretty sure I just plain didn't understand (like all that business about signifiers and significations towards the end; how is it possible to have one without the other? What is a signifier, and what is a signification? And so on...)

Any chance I could get you to throw together an abridged version in language that Tcepsa is more likely to understand? Or at least let me know whether my comments above are accurate or completely off base? That was a lot more dense than I'm used to trying to wade through (while I disagree that written language must be less easy to immediately understand than spoken language, I must say this makes a strong case for it. Then again, if someone were to say these words aloud to me rather than provide them to me in a printed form I suspect I would extract even less of the author's meaning from them than I have!)

[coie.livejournal.com]

I will try, although I don't promise to succeed :) And I don't promise to be exactly heterodox either.

I take the last sentence I quoted to mean that it is easier to ignore the symbols in spoken language, but that its still a reality. "This means that there is no room for the naive theory of meaning and forgetting of the signifier that previously existed when language was understood as speech." I could be wrong on that front though.

Anyway, at one time, French philosophers were obsessed with origins. Then came the structuralists, who said that we could not understand a single origin of an event, because everything that happens is based on a structure, or framework, which can not be experienced but exists. I.E. the origins of the American Revolution are not just the discrete events like the Towshend Acts or the Boston Tea Party, but also the very nature of colonial society, underlying tensions, widely held political beliefs etc. Derrida argues that the structures themselves originated somewhere, and that you can't get back beyond that. In other words, those ideas had an origin, and the forces that shaped that had an origin, and, in fact, in order for something to shape something else, it needs to have structure. Thus, everything has a history, and you can not understand anything without knowing its history, BUT everything has original complexity built right in. And by definition, we can never completely know or understand that original complexity. (IE, everything has its own paradigm, and we can play with those to infinity)

Derrida was working across disciplines. "Among the questions asked in these essays are "What is 'meaning,' what are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under the rubric 'voice' as a value of presence, presence of the object, presence of meaning to consciousness, self-presence in so called living speech and in self-consciousness?" ... Derrida attempts to approach the very heart of the Western intellectual tradition, characterizing this tradition as "a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning." The attempt to "ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality" was referred to by Heidegger as "logocentrism," and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is essentially logocentric, and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism. He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist. Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture", arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, signifier/signified, mind/body), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings." Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction."

In other words, what Western intellectuals (broadly writ) want is a shared context, a common meaning. Often, they look to something beyond what we experience in our daily life; something that is trancendental, and works for all people in all times. In order to achieve this, they impose a structure that everyone is supposed to buy into. This structure divides things into neat boxes which society is supposed to teach and perpetuate. This allows people with different experiences to have a common framework to discuss ideas and events, but in doing so, it excludes everything which does not fit neatly into the structure. Language itself is a structure. Therefore, the very act of trying to take things you feel or know or believe and communicate them to someone else, automatically takes those things and changes them.

[coie.livejournal.com]

Now is where we get to the broader point of communication, and the reason why some critics think that ultimately this is nihilistic. Even though you and I were in the same group at the ISU freshman orientation, and although we went to the same events, we had different experiences. Everything that had happened to you up until that point in your life, all the books you read, the people you met, the video games you played influenced how you perceived those events. You experienced them in a different way then I did. Your structure is fundamentally different from mine. Or like my friend Louise and I joke, her experience of "cat" and my experience of "cat" are different. What she thinks of when she hears the word "cat" and what I think of are different. Its a different visual, emotional, physical memory. And of course both of us have flawed, or imperfect understandings of "cat". There is something essential that can't be captured. Therefore, in a fundamental way, when we talk about cats, we are not, nor can we ever, be talking about the same thing. However, society has set up a general meaning for the word cat, a structure by which we can pretend we are talking about the same thing, even though we are not. Now, if you take this to extremes, you can not communicate with anyone, ever, because you will never have a complete meeting of those contexts. There is no knowledge.

And I have to admit, when I initially started learning this stuff, that's how I felt. There seems to be no point in anything, because what is the point of a book or a game or what have you, if, fundamentally, you can not share that with anyone else? What is the point of a philosophy that denies our ability to communicate? But, the more I've played with the idea, the more I realized that most people do not understand that people have other experiences, which have led them to have other world views. The fact is that no word can be neutral. Everything has a meaning and a value and a history. And it is important to know where some of those things are, for yourself and for other people. In anthropology, for example, many books now have a whole chapter about the author, their life, and what they think got them to the point to which they were at the writing of the book. Why did they focus on those questions? How do they understand certain words, etc. And just like anything else, any time there is structure or order, it comes at the expense of something else. Therefore, although 99.9% of people may understand something one way, the odds are that someone understands it completely differently, and, for them, their way makes perfect sense. It may be a major topic, like race or sexuality, but it can also be something that seems perfectly ordinary and self explanatory.

"Derrida argues that, by understanding speech as thought, language "efaces itself." Language itself is forgotten. The signified meaning of speech is so immediately understood that it is easy to forget that there are linguistic signifiers involved - but these signifiers are the spoken sounds (phonemes) and written marks (graphemes) that actually comprise language."

People often forget to think that the very act of verbalizing has changed what it was they meant. The way the listeners understand those words can never be completely known. Now in and of itself, recognizing that you do not share a common framework does not solve a communication gap. But it does open up a place to start. And hopefully this makes sense, even though you can never perfectly understand me ;-)