Re: trainlasting
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Mon, 18 Oct 1999 18:59:07 -0500
I wrote:
> > I don't know about your unconscious, but mine's
> > structured like a
> > language...
Mark asked:
> How do you know, Matt? You aren't aware of your
> non-conscious processes - that's why they're called
> unconscious.
It's the basis of Lacan's neo-Freudianism, and I mentioned it because
I though it might make Will (or William, as he is now) chuckle. But
beyond this, isn't it a debatable matter whether the unconscious is
strictly non-conscious? Both Freud and Lacan, as it happens, see the
unconscious manifest itself in otherwise conscious activities. When
it shows up, it *is* strcutured like a language. For Freud, the
unconscious is always a literary genius (if a little autistic at
times). It works strictly via literary tropes--displacement and
condensation, for example, which are basically so many variations of
metonymy, synecdoche and metaphor. Dreams are full of lanuage games
and symbols, from associations along the axis of contiguity (I'm
thinking of Jakobson's article on aphasias, which is fascniating in
its own right but also relevant to the language/unconscious issue), as
in Freud's dream where the name "Flora" ends up linking with actual
flowers, to associations along the axis of selection, as in the same
dream where a botanical monograph (some vaguely scholarly publication)
ends up liking to an otherwise unrelated scholarly article the dreamer
himself published. These are tricks immediately associated with
language use. Lacan is even more interesting on the topic, but it's
alway hard to imagine exactly what he's talking about. People exist
and interact in a state Lacan calls the "symbolic"; we pass into it at
the close of the mirror stage, during which (to put it simply and
probably a little incorrectly) we fist distinguish between ourselves
and the things that are not ourselves. Interesting--that very moment
is a linguistic moment. It's predicated on difference. me and
not-me, presence and absence, etc. Also interesint: we enter into
identity at precisely the moment we first substitute symbols (images
of the self in the mirror, for instance) for reality. Word for the
thing it represents. The idea that the first thing we do is get a
name has obvious linguistic implications in identity, but the more
general idea is that the world we know and the self we know in it are
only a matter of language.
>
> Still, that statement is interesting to me. Do you
> mean you believe that your experience of reality is
> pre-structured by linguistic thought processes?
Without a doubt. The only way we can make sense of reality--the only
way we can experience anything and then later call it reality--is
through language. You may think you have experiences that precede
language, but anything outside of language is inaccessible. We can
only gesture to it, and even that's sort of a problem, since strictly
speaking, anything not part of the realm of language is unimaginable.
How can you imagine anything without using the linguistic signs that
make possible the activity we call "imagining"? It should be noted
that by "language" I mean anything predicated on the pricipal of
difference. Not just English and German and Spanish & c., but ones
and zeros, presence and absence, yes and no... It's an
epistemological argument, basically. All experience is structured
like a language because all experience is made of language.
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu