Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
387. "central to both the theories and practices of liberalism is the rift between individual and society" which "fundamental and rarely acknowledged division defines the conditions in which 'communication' can be imagined"; "for theorists, the problem of communication is how to reconcile individual creativity in meaning-making with the social and public nature of meaning's materials (culture and language)"; "communication appeals to us because of the way the concept seems to put humpty dumpty back together again"--it's "a description of the flowering of the private into the public, the overcoming of divisions of subject/object"
388. ..."the elusive betwixt-and-between quality" of which scholars dealing with have "usually retreated into a language of mystery and miracle" to discuss--dewey gives it "the job of mediating between matter and mind, nature and imagination"; according to moscovici "the individual is one of the most important inventions of modern times. individuality is a political, legal, religious, and scientific creation possible only in a constellation of specific social conditions. the individual becomes a sovereign lord over his or her own life only as the social fixation of status and station recedes."
389. "locke's individualism extends from his politics to his linguistics: for him the individual (and not society, language, or tradition) is the master of meaning, which makes common understanding between individuals both desperately urgent and highly problematic"; "central is his 'idea' idea. an idea, according to locke, is an 'immediate object of the Mind, which it perceives and has before it distinct from the sound it uses as a sign of it'"--he puts this term "to a bewildering variety of uses...but it is the basic unit of his [empiricist] epistemology": "all genuine knowledge can be ultimately traced to simple ideas that have passed into the mind through the inlets of the senses"
390. "real knowledge comes through 'complex ideas,' which people may create through a variety of mechnaistic operations....whereas the mind is passive in the reception of simple ideas, it is active in the making of complex ideas from simple ones." and language "is not a source of knowledge, a shaper of thinking, or a part of the very definition of human being. it is 'the great Instrument, and common Tye of Society" that god gave to humans, so that they could be sociable creatures (essay, III.i.1)"; "for language is ancillary to ideas, and when it intervenes in the flow of ideas, it causes amusement at best and chaos, strife, and confusion at worst"; "words do not point directly to things, or to the world, but to ideas in the minds of individual speakers and hearers."
391. "locke thus posits two parallel systems: ideas, which are the source of knowledge and yet are neither social nor linguistic, and words. words are subordinate to, and parasitical upon, ideas. the meaning of words comes, for locke, not from their interrelationships in a total system of signs (as for saussure), nor from their reference to objects in the world (as for augustine), but from their connection to ideas in people's minds....'meanings are in people.'" [this popular slogan & its concept] "could be called semiotic individualism." "in most seventeenth-century english, communication mainly referred to physical processes of transmission and metaphysical processes of consubstantiation: tangibles such as robes, fortunes, plants, commodities, as well as intangibles such as light, heat, blessings, praise, secrets, vices, thoughts, and ideas"
392. unrealistic much? locke's conception came with "a striking requirement indeed: people, in speaking, must match ideas 'exactly' or else their talk risks being mere noise and confusion....it is striking how locke expects communication to work given his commitment to the individual as the source of meaning" (& by "striking" here i think he means something more like "absurd"): "locke thus protects each individual from the tyranny of language: if another's words threaten to break through the hedge surrounding my mind, i can simply realign the 'ideas' to which those words are linked"
393. "if each individual is the legislator of signs, what is to keep society from becoming an anarchy of monads, with each person shut up in the solitude of his or her own ideas and experiences? or conversely, what is to protect individuals from being violated when the communication of ideas works too well?"; "scientific practice offered a model for the intersubjective merging of perceptions seemingly divorced from language and discourse. everybody could look through a telescope, say, and have the same 'idea' (percept)"; "locke's age saw science not only as the study of nature, but as a means to undo babel's curse"
394. i.e. science showed us God, characterized by nature's "order" and "beauty"; rhetoric, on the other hand, like metaphor, "may be employed when it is clear that amusement is the aim, but when 'we would speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetorick...[is] for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment' (essay, III.ix.9)"; "locke understood communication not as a kind of speak, rhetoric, or discourse, but as an alternative to them"; both his "politics and his psychology...intertwine. both defend the individual as an owner of private property, whether it be the private property of consciousness ('ideas') or real property ('life, liberty, and estate')."
396. "if individuals do not control meaning, we fear, then tyranny is hovering nearby. heidegger's dictum that we do not speak language, language speaks us, for instance, is often misunderstood to mean that human beings are the involuntary zombies of language"; "the freedom of individuals may consist in their ability to compose new sentences, never before heard, that speak to their condition. it need not consist in the solipsistic reassembly of words and ideas. because we speak in the midst of language, act in the webs of history, society, and nature, and think in dialogue with the living and dead, does not mean that we cannot speak, act, or think creatively"
397. "it is incoherent to see the origins of public, intersubjective meaning in something that is not public (even though locke and his myriad disciples have taught us to do so)"; "communication sometimes masquerades as the great solution to human ills, and yet most of the problems that arise in human relationships do not come from a failure to match signs and meanings. in most cases, situation and syntax make the sense of words perfectly clear: the basis of conflict is not a failure of communication but a difference of commitment. we generally understand each other's words quite well: we just don't agree"; "to describe the social life of language as communication empowers the individual as lord of the signifier but makes any conception of public meaning both unintelligible and dangerous"; "we almost always find ourselves reenacting a philosophical and political drama first written by john locke."