 | It felt real, the pace was paradoxically real, bodies moving musically, barely moving, twelve-tone, things barely happening, cause and effect so drastically drawn apart that is seemed real to him, the way all the things in the physical world that we don’t understand are said to be real. |
Previously on Skandalon: Point Omega, Don DeLillo.
| The problem with people saying that others have deceptive goals (such as manipulation, hidden strategies and conspiracies, which can fit into what Habermas calls “systematic distortion” in The theory of communicative action, volume 1, 1984, Boston: Beacon press at page 332) while communicating is that if no other ground of justification is provided aside from an alternative view of the deceptive party’s real intentions, that hidden-but-revealed ground means not much more than the accuser’s own preconceptions of the world and the motives of those who participate in it (example: “corporations control our desires” is an assertion which is hardly grounded in any alternative view. As corporations reach into deeper layers of our psyche, as they permeate every aspect of our daily lives, and mostly, as they predate our own generation, who is to know what a genuine desire feels like or how it is autonomously produced ?). The latent character of deception provides a specular avowal of its discoverer’s self-interest (like the weird idea of genuine desire). His accusation cannot be extracted from its context to mean something more “real” or “true”, only another attempt at control or deception. |
