Part 2: Face-to-Face Democratic Culture (see 6/19 post)

A very dear and good friend of mine had some reservations about my earlier posting (June 19, on needing local institutions to develop face-to-face democratic culture). It seems what I said about "authenticity" didn't quite sit wholly right with him. Here's part of what he said:

My resistance, skepticism, fear, call it what you will --centers on two things:
1) the difficulty of identifying or finding or discovering the authentic (how do we do that? how can we be sure we are not being caught up in language even as we do that? etc. etc.); once we are already thrown into the world of language and history (once we are historical subjects) is there any going back? Any way out?
2) It's worth considering that history provides some cautionary tales about people trying to get back to or usher the authentic into the world. It is, or it can be, a Utopian impulse. That's where I start to worry about bloodshed.

Here was my response to him:

I am recalling once when you and I were in a San Francisco BART station together, many years ago, and I had a flash of thinking, that every single "word" in our language -- because its usage rests at some level on a mutual agreement and on mutual listening and understanding -- at some level represents an instance of love. You really liked the thought. In response, you talked about Augustine's notion of community -- I think it was "things loved in common."

I like how Humberto Maturana talks about some of the preconditions of languaging in the loving relations of human animals. He has a wonderful piece about mother and child reflecting one another's movements and expressions, developing what he calls "consensual coordinations," and he talks about how it was necessary for human beings to live together a long time in groups in stabilizing consensual coordinations before languaging could emerge -- on top of that, as it were, as a basis -- as consensual coordinations of these consensual coordinations. I.e., our shared knowing of shared patterns of experience is a necessary precondition for talking, and talking itself is a consensual coordination relative to such shared experiencing.

As to the difficulty of finding or discovering the authentic -- first, it's not something difficult; not in the way I mean it. It's in fact the easiest, most natural and most ordinary way of our being. We are not talking about something esoteric to be arrived at. I am not talking about anything more difficult than being a baby, or being an adult and having a good laugh or a good cry or a fear -- and when did anyone need to "be sure" he or she was "not being caught up in language even as we do that"? My interest has little to do with fear of being caught up in something or in somehow getting out of or away from language. My dad said "be a doctor or a lawyer, so you get respect." That was language. I was aware at some point I didn't feel good about accepting that advice. You could say, I suppose, that the "not feeling good" came from some perspective "outside" of my dad's languaging. Bush says "they want to kill us because they hate our freedom." That's language too. Sure there are cautionary tales and it's possible to construe any talk about authenticity (or about anything else) as something scary and worrisome. A utopian impulse, I take it, signifies a mismatch between ideal and practical, with potentially dangerous consequences. Yes, that can be very dangerous. Sounds like authentic fear. So where if anywhere is there room to talk about love and community?

My response to your question -- "the difficulty of identifying or finding or discovering the authentic (how do we do that?)" -- is what I was writing about in the first place. My talk about "how we do that" has had to do with the importance of orality and face to face relating in a culture of "mechanical reproduction" (to use Benjamin's term), in an age of mechanically-reproduced and promulgated words and images. So I am making specific proposals about arrangements to support authenticity.

"Authenticity" is a word popularized in philosophy by the early Heidegger of Being and Time. It also happens to be a big t-group word. 14 people sitting face to face in a circle, speaking and being present to one another, processing together their responses to one another, their feelings, their judgments regarding one another's purported authenticity, regarding involuntary outbursts, etc. I can never fully be "sure" of another's authenticity. I can never really be "sure" of my own. Simply raising the question, I know, introduces the uncertainty. But I also have known many moments where the question is not there and I am being in the moment, enjoying and loving being with others. T-groups are one place I have seen whole groups move over time from a place of anxiety and caution to an increasing sense of safety and intimacy, playfulness and love.

Are we naturally loving animals? Delight is natural and reactive, and opens us towards the other. Fear is natural and reactive, and we flee or fight. We want love. Do we desire fear? My sense is that we are drawn forward, all of us, by a desire for engaged concord.