Re: dogs
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Wed, 20 Oct 1999 17:01:37 -0500
erespess@inil.com wrote:
> It seems that as
> we grow, human experience shifts from simple experience to names for
> experience. Of course infants experience emotion before the mirroring
> stage. I think my thought lies somewhere in this realm - When naming
> begins, do humans LOSE the abilty to experience without language?
Naming may begin at some point after experience, but the advent of
experience and *the possibility of naming* are exactly simultaneous.
Can it be agreed: you can't, and never could, experience something
that couldn't have a name. You can't be aware of something that you
can't also refer to somehow--or that can't be referred to somehow,
even if you aren't the one doing the referring. Even if the name is
inadequate. You can't experience something that isn't differentiated
from other experiences, or that isn't a mix of differentiated
experiences.
Basically, language works (Saussure) via differentiation. Nothing--no
thing--has positive value in and of itself, without recourse to some
other, different thing to give it that value. Not even happiness.
Why? quite simple, actually: happiness has no value whatsoever
*except as it is relevant to--and different from--sadness*...or any
other thing that is not happiness. You can't have one without the
other. Every time you experience an emotion, you simultaneously and
necessarily experience the absence of another emotion. This is the
same principal on which language works. "Phenomena predicated on
instances of difference," I have been calling it. When Lacan says the
unconscious is structured like a language, I insist he's talking about
tropes...tricks of language. The unconscious is a rhetorical
swashbuckler. But Lacan also has in mind this idea of
differentiation.
I do not believe that words are accurate, or even adequate, devices
for communicating feelings and emotions. Feelings and emotions are
infinitely more complex (and infinitely more corny than they are
complex), but they are still a product of differences.
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu