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

Comments

[wetdryvac]

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]

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]

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]

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

[gipsieee]

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

[tcepsa]

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

[coie]

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