One conclusion from Plato’s problem worth drawing, if only in order to examine it more closely, is: that which is known absent instruction or experience has been rendered so that it may be comprehended as not incompatible with what is already known. Reduce it to say the fragmented other tells you just what you want to hear. Such ‘clarity of vision’ applied in a post-hoc fashion to what Chomsky characterized further in his 1986 lectures as the ‘surprising’ aspect of this problem was subsequently colored as ‘astonishment.’ These two acquired ways of seeing sum up a well-worn countertradition of devaluing this problem (once it has already been solved for you). This is independent any authorial intention. The trouble is that nothing would ever count as new information within such a framework. At best you would have ironic contestation through affirmation. A second implication is that, to be understood in order to feel connected cannot continue to be a primary motivation in language production since, in the first place, it then becomes evident that there would’ve had to have been social coercion backed by brute force for the condition of multitude to obtain and, secondly, to say just the thing that grants passage as a consequence of this first limitation can’t be carried through death and retained on the other side, since it is in itself an expression of the condition of forgetting. Any such expression tinted as symptom, in which I say just the thing that compels movement or obeisance from inanimate objects, must be what Lacan meant when he said that repression and its symptom are on the same side (of death). Understanding this necessarily changes how communication is understood.

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