On+Systematically+Distorted+Communication

//Jürgen Habermas, “On Systematically Distorted Communication,”// Inquiry //13 (1970): 205-18.// – efe Summary: Habermas aims to incorporate Marxist terms, with communication terms, and Freudian psychoanalysis. So, men use symbols to communicate. These symbols gain meaning on language level, behavioral level, and psychoanalytical level. - Miscommunication is not really caused by ‘cultural, temporal or social distance’ - Pseudocommunication: Participants don’t realize that there is a miscommunication. - (Here comes Freud and communication) We need to discuss systemically deformed communication in order to understand the scope of specifically incomprehensible acts and utterances (in other words, communication in a social setting) - Habermas introduces three criteria for doing this: o Level of language: (I have no idea what he is talking about) o Behavioral level: I guess he says certain words trigger certain emotions and actions. o System of distorted communication as a whole: For instance the discrepancies between the self and the ego. - //Scenic understanding// claims that a patient behaves in the same way in his transference situations as he does in certain transference situations. o Three scenes are defined after this research: everyday, transference, and original. o I think this is where he tries to combine the social aspect of communication to Freud. Our behavioral patterns are in fact our acts of self-reflection, we try to reflect our self in a social environment which has its own rules (I cannot tell you how confused I am right now. If what I understood is true, the link between communication and psychoanalysis is very very very weak) - This understanding translates into ‘regular’ people’s lives as the difference between hermeneutic understanding and scenic understanding- the latter needs a theoretical understanding: o To explain the communication, you need to know what nondeformed communication should look like. o You need to understand the confusion during the change from prelinguistic era to linguistic-symbolic organization. o It is possible to connect deviant socialization with the patterns in early childhood. One of Habermas’s more controversial claims is that we can identify, or “rationally reconstruct,” universal presuppositions of communicative action. If people do not share these presuppositions, he argues, they cannot engage in communicative action. Also, when participants in communication violate these presuppositions, communication becomes “systematically distorted.” Systematic distortion is a communication failure that occurs as a result of either intrapsychic defense mechanisms or failed social interactions. The key type of failure that results from systematic distortion is the disguising and repression of conflicts. Systematic distortion allows intrapsychic and interpersonal conflicts to go unrecognized. In situations where it occurs, people continue to interact with each other as if they are not in conflict with either each other or themselves, when in fact they really are. In psychoanalytic terms, this means that conflicts are repressed, and that people who repress these conflicts communicate with each other under the shadow of unconscious deception. Such self-deceptions and repressions in turn lead to “disturbances of communication on both the intrapsychic and interpersonal levels”
 * Here is something I found online:**