Sigh. I was so hoping for a theory of alien invasion or at least a
rewriting of _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ as a dream snatching story.
>>In a message dated 10/26/98 8:26:13 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>>[log in to unmask] writes:<snip>
>In a message dated 10/26/98 Fred Welfare <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>Your notions of self as divided remind of anti-psychiatry, a movement
headed >up by Laing and Szasz. I wouldn't discount their views either.
Good!...? S is certainly critical of psychiatry's frequent
uncritical complicity with normativity.
>I am >referring to an 'explanation' of communication which recognizes not
merely the >signifier-signified relationship for any meaningful entity we
experience, >which could, hypothetically, occur internally, that is, between
split off >fragments of selves of the same selfand of other selves; but
also, the >existence of a designator, an other, which designates the signifiers.
I've already posted my thoughts on self and selves. Your
"designator" seems to approximate what is, in my vernacular, the Master: the
set of internalized interdictions, proscriptions and also prescriptions--
social norms, put simply; less simply put, the network of deflected desires
or "sublimations" that manage (and disguise) accession to the Law. The
designator designates a plausible field of action, "plausible" understood as
a negation or repression, in that it includes only the recognizeable,
readable, normative (this is what makes it plausible!). The
designator/Master outlines a normative field, a realm of the possible and
thus plausible.
>Otherwise, you have reduced meaning to its semantic-syntactic relations and
>obscured the pragmatic dimension.
If one were to insist that a linquistic paradigm be made to model
inter- or intrasubjective relations, I would agree with you. I don't so
insist, so I don't agree with the attribution. But how else might one
access a pragmantic dimension except through the matter of representation?
This question sustains a loyalty to the linguistic model, but broadens it to
recognize the social effectivity-- the materilaity-- of representations.
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