Radical community

We often presume that we seamlessly share the same cognitive or semantic context with others. The context, most of the time, is variegated among people. There are some road intersections (a mystery!), but the view of the whole may be radically different across individuals. I'm reminded of a poem by W. Stevens which practically says the world is as many or as varied as the number of individuals looking. This is a radical way of defining individualism or individuality, something more or less built into the composition of ''individual'' as a word itself. There is obviously a form of overlap and encounter, or else we won't even imagine the notion of ''context'' or the shared horizon of understanding called sensus communis. Yet, this is probably better seen less as a constant or stable frame than as something that must be built up concurrently with the ongoing speech or script act.

Perhaps a good way to negotiate these extremes is to look at them as assigned points in a kind of discourse or language game, necessary for taking stock of positions and tracing out the meanderings of communication or conversation. I recall here D. Davidson's idea of radical interpretation where the context is basically an emergent aspect of the speech or script act. That is, whatever the object text is, as utterance or as printed material or multimedia, part of the identity, content, message, information, or meaning of that object text is the emergent context which allows that meaning to become perceptible. Put another way, ''text'' and ''context,'' in the manner or extent that they are said to be ''connected'' in understanding, are emergent poles of the communication event as a radically creative or inaugural semio-poetic process, with all the attendant technological, socio-psychological, and political dimensions of perceptual formation and/or deformation.