Do you read me?

Kaum etwas ist mir so zuwider wie der Terror der Verständlichkeit.

- Herbert Achternbusch

Plus d'un, comme moi sans doute, écrivent pour n'avoir plus de visage. Ne me demandez pas qui je suis et ne me dites pas de rester le même: c'est une morale d'état-civil; elle régit nos papiers. Qu'on nous laisse libres quand il s'agit d'écrire.

- Michel Foucault

I've been thinking a lot recently - and because of particular (you might also say: personal) circumstances - about communcation, or rather: about the failure of communication, more commonly known as: misunderstandings. Jacques Derrida's point, if I remember correctly, was: Dreadful as it might be, misunderstanding is not, as it were, an exception or mishap of communication, quite to the contrary, miscommunication is the rule. In the spirit of Paul Watzlawik one could say: You cannot not miscommunicate.

Just as one can read a text in innumerable different ways, never coming to a closure, to a definite, "true" meaning, there are innumerable different ways to understand an oral utterance. Usually, we assume that because oral communication is more determined in terms of context (deixis of the present situation being bound by particular material circumstances, presence of all the people participating in the communication, etc.), we actually understand what the other person is saying (and in case we don't, we can always ask: what do you mean?). In most cases we get away with that assumption quite well. That is, I believe, because we sort of learned the game of convention; because we don't start to question the meaning of every other banal, quotidian utterance, like for example "I'm going home" (If you look at toodlers' sometimes highly annoying and potentially endless chains of "why"-questions, you can see where trying to understand an utterance without the conventionality of communication can lead to. The "why"-question-game is of course, and this adds to the delight of children playing it, unanswerable, that is: never ending).

I think those conventions of communication (which, let's face it, make our life a whole lot easier) yield from us the (quite uncanny) fact that we don't really know another person; others are the Other. And because of that there is no way we can ever fully understand all the nuances of the meaning that a simple phrase like "I'm going home" has for a particular person at a particular time and place in a particular circumstance (let alone understand a person). What's more, even the person uttering the sentence doesn't grasp all its meanings: not only because an "author" has no control or right over the interpretation of his/her own words, but, even worse, because no one really ever knows himself/herself, and thus can never know all the possible meanings of what s/he was saying (just remember the Freudian slip, for instance; it's the unconscious talking us).

So why bother with this crap at all? Okay, we communicate without really understanding each other; why don't we just accept it and get on with our lives? Why try to make someone understand what you mean, why try to understand someone? Even more: Why worry about being understandable, about making yourself clear; why put so much effort in trying to put things the right way? (That's the big puzzle, for me.)

In the end, I have come up with two answers. First of all, it's a question of ethics or morality: We need to pretend we understand each other (and we need to pretend that we ourselves know what we mean when we talk), because you have to assume responsability for what you say. Language, then, is not simply this fluffy, conveniently transparent medium, but your words are part of you (and you do not merely express your identity with words), you have to take full responsability for them. Which, when you think of it, is quite an imposition; but even though, you probably won't get away by citing Derrida when you insult a police officer.

Secondly, we want to reach out to the Other, and we want to be touched by the Other, and that's because - pardon me if I'm being too banal or one-minded here - language, as Lacan would have it, tries to compensate for a lack: the corporeal feeling of symbiosis we lost and can never return to. And of course, where there is symbiosis, there is no misunderstanding, because there is no need for communication.