Invitations and Becomings

Over at my other blog, I just posted a note on VoiceThread, a collaborative media site. It got me thinking about the profound socialisation of everything, from bookmarks to blogs to production processes, in the context of my Masters thesis.

There (ch3), I presented a version of the argument that intersubjectivity is a transcendental condition of our experience. If that's true then it raises the question of why we need to have the shared character of things reflected back to us, if they're inherently intersubjective?

In a nutshell, saying that intersubjectivity is a transcendental condition amounts to saying that, contrary to the standard view, it isn't the case that we first have an experience of things as being "out there", and only later an experience of them as being accessible to the perception of others. Rather, our experience of them as being "out there" - i.e. as transcending our own perspective on them - is inseparable from their being accessible to others.

I won't go into details here (at least not in this draft), except to say that the idea is that perceiving things as having a hidden side would be nothing more than predicting or imagining such a side, if that perception did not somehow include a reference to the possibility of another subject actually perceiving that side at this very moment.

Note that this does not mean there need be any existing subject perceiving that hidden side for me to see the thing before me as transcending my experience. This intersubjectivity is a referential potential inherent in the perceived thing, not a secondary result of my belonging to any particular community, for example. The others whose existence is implicated in my perception of something are anonymous and form an indefinitely large group.

What significance does any of this have for the socialisation of everything. Well, one way of characterising postmodernity might be by describing it as an era in which all forms of transcendence become untrustworthy, by virtue of their connection with the domination of a particular community (fascism, capitalist hegemony, patriarchy, whatever you like...).

The thesis of transcendental intersubjectivity (which comes from a phenomenology that precedes postmodernism) actually challenges the equation of transcendence with hegemonic social relations, but may help to explain this and the postmodern symptom of ubiquitous socialisation.

When we can no longer rely on appeal to a social order to articulate the transcendence of things from our experience of them (an appeal which only ever stood in as a representation of the transcendental intersubjectivity which really does guarantee that transcendence), we find ourselves in need of some reassurance of the world's independence by demonstrating the accessibility of things to others. What's more, the kind of demonstration we need is not a demonstration of consent among our brethren (that's just the kind of demonstration we no longer trust), but among anonymous others who form an indefinitely large group. Precisely the kind of unbounded, anonymous "community" that has become the symbol of the social web