The Conversation
At the foundation of a conversation are our desires. For instance, a man that desires a woman speaks to her in a flirtatious way – he produces innuendos and sustains eye contact.
While desire is fundamental to conversations, this example presents a simplistic view that overlooks the inherent dynamism of real conversations.
As an active production, a conversation’s dynamism changes our desires in the moment. What may have started as a desire to avoid an awkward dinner conversation can morph into a desire to win a political debate.
Once immersed in a conversation, we can begin to develop a desire for connection – a feeling that comes when a relationship emerges.
The production of a connection begins with the merging of minds. As each speaker produces speech the sounds circulate in both minds simultaneously as if they were one circuit. But this shared experience is complicated by interpretation. In order to form an emotional connection that allows for a sense of a relationship to emerge the speakers must take the other’s interpretive habits into consideration.
This act of considering the other’s interpretive perspective is what I call transperception. Transperception is a constant action that allows us to test the boundaries of the other’s interpretive habits. Once we have an idea of how the other thinks, transperception seems to fade into the subconscious mind and only emerges when statements we are considering are judged as ambiguous to our concept of the other speaker’s interpretive habits.
As two people with different histories, the perspective of the other can sometimes be opaque leading to a failure in transperception and the inability to create a connection. Unable to form a connection with others can create a lack of confidence in one’s own perspective triggering a downward spiral.
On the contrary, two people with similar experiences may have the ability to perceive the world like the other and form a connection that allows for a relationship to emerge. Unlike a failed connection, the emergence of a relationship can strengthen one’s confidence in their perspective.
But transperception is ultimately a filter; its function is to prevent certain utterances. As a fundamental component of conversations, transperception allows us to invert the common understanding of a conversation from being defined by what is said to what is not said. Perhaps one easy way of illustrating this is to consider how flirting creates a particular relationship. If someone says “you have nice lips”, they are choosing not to say “I’d like to have sex with you”. By omitting what is implied in “you have nice lips” from the conversation one creates a surplus that is the very thing that constitutes the reproduction of the relationship of the two people in the conversation.
