Conversation and the “Best Possible Point of Encounter”: Cavell’s Emersonian Perfectionism and Dewey’s Cultivated Naïveté

Abstract

In her very thoughtful and provocative essay, Naoko Saito begins by acknowledging her inheritance of “the Deweyan task of creating democracy from within,” including, as a key component, the potential “fertility of Deweyan communication.” Yet there is also an uneasiness here (call it a troubled inheritance) that Saito soon identifies as the “dark side” of Deweyan communication, that is, the possibility for “mystifying” the “inner life” of the other at the “limits of communication.” This is where (a) “disagreement,” (b) “refusal,” or (c) the “untranslatable” or “incommunicable” impede or obstruct conversation, yielding, at times, a “complacent,” detached state of “mutual respect” that can be interpreted as a kind of “denial” or evasion of the “unknown other.” Indeed, Saito claims that (d) the failure of communication with the unknown other due to incommunicability is essentially where John Dewey found himself after his “cross-cultural experience in Japan in 1919 and 1921.”