Dialogue and its Discontents

“The very notion of ‘dialogue’ is culturally specific and historically bound, and while one speaker may feel secure that a conversation is happening, another may be sure it is not.  The power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated.  Otherwise, the model of dialogue risks relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes ‘agreement’ and ‘unity’ and indeed that those are the goals to be sought.”

-Judith Butler, 1990.  (Gender Trouble.  New York: Routledge.  Pg. 20)

Sincerely yours…

“The contemporary proliferation of bullshit…has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticisim which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are…one response has been…a retreat from the discipline requires required by the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity.  Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns towards trying to provide honest representations of himself…he devotes himself to being true to his own nature…But it is preposterous to imagine we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake.  As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves without knowing them…sincerity itself in bullshit”

-Harry Frankfurt, 2005 (On Bullshit.  Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.  Pg 64-7)

Proliferating Bullshit

“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.  Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.  This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.  Closely related instances arise from the widespread notion conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.  The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more sever, needless to say, for someone who believes it is his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world”

-Harry Frankfurt, 2005 (On Bullshit.  Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.)