I/thou and I/thou/it

Judy Diamondstone (diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu)
Tue, 7 May 1996 19:41:11 -0400

I'm a bit vague about my question here, but it has to do with
the value of "it" in I/thou relations - or maybe as Francoise
referred to, the importance of difference {which I doubt that
Jay would dispute!) But before broaching the problem of difference
where "I" and "thou" are necessarily still different, let me
take on Jay's proposal to person-ify all that has been conventionally
object-ified: "the tool, the tree, and such things as texts,
social norms, folktalkes, beliefs, and values..."

What we have as a result are I-thou relations within a
person-ifiable system. If texts, social norms, etc. were
subject-ified, would we lose all referentiality, or what?

Thinking about this in terms of Bakhtin's dialogicality - Dialogism,
when conceived as only a horizontal interplay of voices, invokes
something like "I/thou" communication - not "I/Other" struggle. In
contrast, the vertical struggle over what's authoritative to the
subject invokes something beyond two speaking persons, beyond speaker
and addressee. As I see it, dialogism needs both axes to be an
effective theory of discourse. Thus, I am suggesting, we
must include "it" after all in our engagement with texts,
social norms, and undoubtedly one another.

I am thinking of Jay's proposal for a "sense in which
practices-by-Persons... become individualized instances of
typicals" (where the "it" becomes another "thou") in terms of what I
understand to be the tension between phenomenology (Gadamer)
& a critical theory of communciation (Habermas) and specifically,
the tension between what counts as a mediating object of discourse in
these different traditions. I don't know Gadamer well yet & my
interpretation should be taken in that light. But as I see it, the
mediating object of discourse for Gadamer is subverted by
the shared desire of two subjects to arrive at a shared understanding
of some subject matter, and for critical theory, the mediating object
is valorized as something like "an understanding of the system" --
that is, some intervening theory about how things work. Habermas
takes his intervening theory very seriously, but from my perspective,
it does not need to be a true theory - simply a framework that the
topic of discourse may be referred to, so that agreements and
disagreements can be articulated in reference to a third term beyond the
immediately negotiated subject matter - not just I/Thou/It, where
"It" is saturated with the perspectives of "I" and "Thou," but
also I/Thou/It in relation to a distant IT - a theory of how things
work - which the speakers do not need to agree on [?] but need to take
into account in determining their positions vis a vis the more
proximal "It" and presumably also vis a vis each other - or in other
words, if "It" is saturated with the mutuality of desire of
I and Thou, we need a bigger _IT_.... Or do we?

Let's say we agree that knowledge is distributed AND that where
there is know-how there is consciousness. Let's say that
knowledge/know-how is an emergent property of a unit's (a dyad's,
an individual's) ideological becoming (as is the communion that
binds I to Thou). Still, I and Thou will need some reference
point to commune. So I invite Thee to take this subject as a
matter of mutual attention.

I don't mean to do away with a perspective that might serve as a
corrective to our thing-izing everything and defining our personhood
against everything-other-than-us before that perspective has been
real-ized even in the slightest way, but I do mean to invite an
elaboration that would help me to make sense of sense-making in
these terms....

- Judy

Judy Diamondstone
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08903

diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
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