Understandably so

First, a quick apology.  I referred to Jurgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action in my last post as a “lousy book”, and was quickly called out on it by an old friend in the UK who, apparently, wrote his doctoral dissertation on said book.  In fairness, the book isn’t lousy; it’s a bit densely written, which is in keeping with it being a work of philosophy by a German author, and I’m not sure I’m wholly convinced of the argument within it, but it’s closely reasoned, provocative, and intelligent.  And not lousy.  This also gives me a chance to link to my friend’s own writing, as the way he writes and what he writes about is worth checking out – please visit.  He’s also a wayward banker, so for those of you thinking about concepts of value and credit and their changing essence, you’ll enjoy visiting his work.

In reading Habermas – with even greater attention after been reprimanded for a lazy critique of his book – I’ve been struck by what I think is a common theme in the philosophy of communication, namely, the focus on communication as a means to act, and more than that, to act rationally.  By this I mean that philosophers tend to view communication – largely linguistic acts, speech and writing, although occasionally they acknowledge non-verbal forms of communication as well – as a mechanism for generating action in the world by human actors.  There is a focus on dialogue and argumentation as a result, but also on speech acts which drive action in general – command speech, rhetorical speech designed to convince or convert, political speaking.  Habermas almost exclusively focuses on this but he goes a step further and seems to try to show that all language is in some way linked to action – either explicitly, such as the forms just mentioned, or implicitly, in that other speech that may seem non-action oriented is in some way geared to eventually drive action in the future.  This becomes his notion of “rationality” in a fundamental way: speech is rational through its capacity to drive action.  Reason is therefore the essential tool in understanding language.  I’m overstating the case slightly here as he also addresses irrational speech, but, I would argue, the core remains: rationality is an expressive form of communication that drives action in the world and amongst its actors.

I don’t wish to diminish Habermas’s work, and I’d emphasize that he’s writing as much about the process of social research and critical theory as he is about the process of communication.  But his writing regularly blurs the line, largely because of the substantive remit of social theorists to examine all aspects of the human condition and the resulting exploration of nearly all aspects of human interaction.  His examination of the process of building human structures – all human structures – and the process of understanding how we examine the communication processes between individuals in doing so fires clearly at the concept of communicative theory in general.  His thesis is broad and I’m not going to try to summarize it in a sentence – but within it is a concept that communication itself is a process that is susceptible of rational examination, and indeed we should apply reason to our understanding of communication to examine how it exists as a process between individuals and within societies.

I’m not convinced of this at all, and in fact I think this is a quite poor expression of what communication is.  By “poor” I don’t mean “bad”, but rather I mean poverty-stricken; it is an expression of the end goal of communication that removes us from what I think is actually a much more primal reason we talk to one another and engage in discussion, which is simply to be understood and to attempt to see others as selves which can be understood.  I want to be clear on this: I’m not talking about being understood so as to convince someone else of my being correct, or to seek them to act in a way which aligns with my understanding.  When I speak of “understanding” here, it is an outcome unto itself.  It is our driving need to seek existential relief of the loneliness of the self – to be understood as a being, in our uniqueness but also in finding commonality with other unique beings whose selves are, without the gift of communication, just as isolated, just as solitary.  I also want to be clear that communication makes possible a much broader set of potentialities – including the construction of social structures which itself creates the potential to construct social lifeworlds – but to abandon the foundational roots of communication is to impoverish what it is in our lives.

Understanding among sentient beings who have the capacity to imagine and create meaning is both essential and, as I talked about in my prior post, impossible to achieve in its purest form.  From the moment we achieve self-awareness, we also achieve the ability to create worlds which are inaccessible to others – the worlds of our imagination and memory, which are each in their essence, completely personalized.  We know others have the same experience and we are desperately curious about what their experience of imagination and memory entails.  We communicate – in all of its forms, not just speech – in an attempt to share our imagination and memory and participate in one another’s experience of the same.

This has been hammered home to me recently in a variety of settings, but in all of these situations there has been no objective to the conversations – there is no point, no dialogue to emerge from with agreement or an expression of validity or non-validity, the only potential point really being to determine whether or how to extend the conversation – and in many cases, the communication has been non-verbal.  There have been exchanges of emotion, of feeling and perceptions, that have been sometimes physical, sometimes verbal, sometimes expressed in silence – and not the overinterpreted silences which Habermas and others view as extensions of words, but as simply silence, the ceasing of exchange – and all of it has offered windows into the experience of being another being, of living with the capacity for imagination and creation that is different from mine and creates a different world than the one I live in.

I see this first in my son.  He’s discovering his capacity for imagination and a creative self in ways which are invisible to everyone else – it’s the process of becoming a self – but he still comes to me, and his mother, seeking to be understood.  He needs to be hugged sometimes, often completely out of the blue, and we can sense that he’s trying to be reassured after his imagination has created something which, for the time being, is to a greater or lesser extent incomprehensible.  His body is still hard-wired to his mind and his self in ways that makes him spin into a cyclone at times, and we use words but more often we use our bodies to help reverse the spin, to bring him back to ground.  The process has made me much more aware of how powerful my body is in communications – not just lame “body language” garbage that inspires limp half-day corporate seminars, but how much I express and ask to be heard with my body, how much understanding I acquire from and through my body, not just as a tool to manipulate whether I get a raise or not but to ask for comprehension as a human being.  In doing so I’m also reminded that communication is not an act with an action outcome: it is an act unto itself.  The hug I’m asked for or that I give is a kind of reassurance of presence in addition to being a transmission of love.  The calmness I try to radiate to my wound-up son is an expression of the other, to remind my son’s nascent ego of the other, and of its capacity for calm.  I can’t convince him to be calm, I can only remind him of my humanity and my capacity for calm, and see what happens next – which usually is nothing, frankly, but oh well.  The point was not to calm him down – although if that occurs, it’s a lovely outcome – but rather simply to be calm and radiate that as a kind of understanding.

I watch my father – and talk with him, and share space in the living room with him – and see the same on the other side of life’s spectrum.  His body is not as capable as it once was, and his generation in any event was ramrodded into shutting down the body as either a receptor or generator of communication.  His command of words is extraordinary – I find myself craving his ability to turn a phrase, to use words to express what to me can only be said with topologies and vibrations of strings – but his body is now almost inert most of the time, wracked with pain, muscles atrophied and bones slowly fusing into a solid mass.  I’m not seeking anything from these conversations – I’m not trying to convince him to vote Democratic or to include me in the will – but I am seeking to be understood, and seeking to understand.  I’m not even sure I want to do anything with that understanding – I suppose if pressed, I’m interested in understanding how my father is facing death as a kind of lesson on what I’ll need to inevitably do myself someday, but that’s not it, and to put it in those terms seems, well, wrong – on multiple levels.  What we’re both seeking is the presence of one another.

I often write these essays while sitting in the living room, and I’ve come to notice that my father will interrupt me every now and then, asking me to look something up on the internet for him or asking a random question inspired by something he was reading.  I love it when he does that, because it’s reaching out to me and sharing himself with me, but it also strikes me that he does it because me sitting across from him, head absorbed in a screen, tapping the keyboard, is a reminder that I’m not present even though my body has a physical presence.  That is, existentially speaking, terrifying: you’re aware of your own self’s existence, you’re empirically convinced there is another person in the room, but that other person seems to not share your existence.  Most of his questions, I think, are more about the reassurance that I am present.  I appreciate that, very much, and it’s lovely to be reminded that he is still there, too.

I don’t see this particular lens of communication in Habermas’s theory of communicative action; nor, for that matter, do I see it in others in the dialogic tradition, whether Aristotle or Wittgenstein or Bahktin.  Augustine comes closest but there is still an object for him that lurks behind even our existential need for reassurance – God – and my universe doesn’t have that object, at least not as an object.  The idea of communicative rationality is too constraining for me to consider it as much more than a specialized branch of communications, but it also seems – much like Shannon’s mistitled Mathematical Theory of Communication – to be somewhat dangerously named in that the “rational” is all too often paired against the “irrational” and as such viewed as not just superior, but as the sole valid focus of our discourse.  Habermas and others seem dimly aware of this risk, at least in their occasional reference to love or to personal communications, but only dimly.  For him discourse has a purpose almost by definition – society is defined by rational discourse, in a very real way – but the discourse is purposive.  I’d share his view that society is defined by discourse but I think we’re on a different page: my view is that society is formed by communication, but not all communication is discourse, and non-discourse communication is just as vital in forming society as rational discourse.

This aspect of communication has been poignantly reinforced to me recently as the girlfriend and I have had what feels like a final break – or at least, we’ve broken apart because our attempts at understanding reached a breaking point.  Intimate relationships are almost non-existent in sociological constructions of human discourse, but I understand why: they exist in a discourse space which, from a social theory standpoint, seem to violate the terms of what a society consists of.  We form intimate partnerships not for a purpose – although often purposes emerge within them, such as parenting or an economic joining of resources – but because of this need for understanding which can never really be fully satisfied.  Intimacy (on all levels – physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual) is a kind of chase for understanding, to be understood but also to find in another a recognizable mirror of being.  What I mean by that is we seek to cure the existential curse of uncertainty that we are so unique, our self is so unimaginably different, that we may really be alone – the fear, that is, that the universe really has no analog whatsoever for our self.  In another person, we find evidence that we aren’t alone, that we are alive together, and in intimacy we explore how much we are both different but linked, different in expression but linked in meaning and in shared understanding of who we are.

Relationships fail regularly, of course, but a conversation I had a long time ago with another friend made me realize that all relationships can work.  What makes them succeed is not an object – “let’s have kids” or “let’s get a house on Peaks Island and live happily ever after” – but the sense that there is more exploration of each other’s selves that we want to continue to explore.  What makes them fail, moreover, is a lack of desire to keep exploring.  It takes two forms.  One is just exhaustion: we explore but we realize that the exploration is taking us too far away from our self and we can’t continue the journey.  That’s what happened in my marriage, mostly for my ex-wife: she was exploring my self but it was so far away from her self that she couldn’t keep up any more.  The second, though, is that we find, in the other, elements which we don’t want to explore.  They disrupt something in us uncomfortably, either out of fear or disgust, or else it is simply something which is supremely uninteresting, so boring that we can’t hide our disinterest.  We reject that element of the other person, even if it’s essential to the other person.  Intimacy confronts us with all that a person is, including that which makes another not so much unknowable as not worth knowing – and while it’s difficult to say “I don’t want to understand X about another,” it doesn’t make it any less true.  When we face that realization, intimacy dies.  Other relationships can survive it, but intimacy – where we are in a position of validating one another’s core existence – can’t.

The mirror is also true: we are seeking understanding, and when we feel – rightly or wrongly – that the other partner is failing to understand something core to ourselves, we experience a kind of toxic shock.  For me it was needing but failing to be understood as a parent, which is admittedly a strange and untranslatable kind of experience – I realize now how foreign it must appear to non-parents.  I never had the kind of epiphany many parents describe at the moment of birth, the “this changes my entire life” feeling, and it used to bother me when parents would talk it – but I get it now, and even if I didn’t have a moment where I realized I had been changed, it happened.  Non-parents are, most likely, as uninterested in that transformation as I was before it happened.  Being a part of another life in the way parents are is a commonplace, but being understood in what that means, in how it can inspire you (sometimes without consciousness, but sometimes with full, painful awareness that you’re going to change and it will lay waste to prior decisions) to reorient your life, is not trivial.  And as a parent, if you’re not understood in that – or if someone seems uninterested or even repelled by what that means – you end up back in the primal existential terror of feeling as if you’re alone, utterly unique, utterly without recourse to the thought that you might be comprehensible to others.  Which, on some level, is where I find myself today.

That, in the context of what I think communication is, is telling.  We don’t enter into intimate relationships for a reason: we are almost compelled to do so when we discover someone who seems capable of, and interested in, understanding our self fully on a level we can’t find in “normal”, non-intimate relationships.  Often it’s simply physical, as “normal” relationships in Western society usually exclude physical intimacy, but for me at least, it’s always been something intellectual and emotional and physical and spiritual at once – I don’t become intimate unless there seems to be a chance to express the entirety of me, and I resist intimacy with people unless they seem open to expressing something of the entirety of themselves.  Again, though, there isn’t a purpose, as such, except to explore – except to try to understand.  I don’t want a point beyond that, and if an objective emerges, I’m almost pathologically resistant to it.  Meanwhile, I’m also willing to hive off any external objectives I have, in pursuit of being understood and in pursuit of understanding this intimate other, this alter ego who might give evidence that my sense of being a self is not unique – even if my self is unique.  I’m not seeking to form a community, or change society as I encounter it – I’m just seeking understanding as a self, as a being at once severed from but potentially linkable to other selves – and I am aware that the only potential pathway to do so is through offering up my willingness to understand another person in intimacy.

I don’t think this is rational, by the way – in the sense that it is tractable through normalized means of discursive logical thinking.  Understanding (as I’m talking about it) is off the rational grid; it embraces both a physicality and a spiritual dimension that isn’t subject to the rules of causality and correspondence that we expect rational discourse to follow.  It’s a powerful instinct, however – but instinct isn’t the word either, as it implies something pre-rational.  This is both a rational desire – if we agree that our selves are unique to us, and we also acknowledge an existential sense of isolation that is concurrent with that, then seeking to be understood through communication with other selves is eminently rational – and yet it is informed by something both pre-rational or instinctual and draws us outward via something which is not of ourselves.  This drive for understanding – and, indeed, the conception of it itself – embraces both the rational within us and the other-than-rational.  I’m not using “irrational”, mind you, because the term is counterposed to rationality and what I experience is skew to that notion – it is not of the same plane.

In all of this, however, I’m cognizant of the fact that the structure of language itself seems to be rational – that is, it seems to possess an internal coherence which seems driven by a kind of logic, even if the nature of language means we can’t directly access the structure of that logic through words.  But communication, again, is not limited to linguistic exchange – to speak of it as such is to rob it of much of its depth and meaning.  Thinking of communication only in the realm of words – only in the rational – leads us to an incredibly impoverished concept of the potential power of communication.  We communicate to understand, and understanding is rich, it is deep, it is necessary to us as beings who recognize the self within us and seek to find the selves around us.  It is not a rational process; rather, it is an essential process and much deeper than rationality alone can access.

I was asked once why I write this blog, and later was asked why as someone who is rather private in many ways I publish my thoughts on the internet.  The answer to both is, I’m seeking to be understood.  This blog is an opening into me, and by your individual acts of reading it, I gain access to a community that I can come to know as existing.  It’s only words – and that is a poor way of knowing me – but it is a start, and a continuance.  Thank you for joining me.