From: <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: HAB: Re: Habermas & Freud
Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 10:48:19 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)


On Tue, 19 Dec 2000 23:06:18 -0800 (PST) Gary D <gedavis1-AT-yahoo.com> wrote:

G>. Whatever the context of Whitebook's assertion, it's undeniable that JH's 
analysis of language has been deepened and refined since his *interpretation* 
of Freud (What would it mean to call it a "reinterpretation", since 
interpretation belongs to the original inspiration of psychoanalysis, long 
before the Frankfurt School "discovered" Freud?).

K- Ha. I didn't even consider that, "interpretation" - I was thinking that it 
was a reinterpretation because JH isn't just interpreting Freud, he is changing 
the key tenets of psychoanalysis... so, a reinterpretation of psychoanalysis 
along the lines of a critical social theory viz the FS. So, I was thinking that 
the FS interpreted Freud, and JH provides a reinterpretation. Of course, this 
is probably just awkward on my part. I think it's because I started off my 
chapter with something about Marcuse... (excuses excuses).

G>. Consequently, the Whitebook quote above [language is the only thing whose 
nature we can know, KM] could be deemed counterproductive, since it occludes 
the importance of development *by* (of, in) JH's thinking, especially *about* 
developmental processes (as part of that thinking).

K- I agree that Habermas has developed his idea of development, but I don't 
think he would dispute this claim. For Habermas, we can't know anything outside 
of language, not with his usual understanding of knowledge...

>K:  [There] is something about the unconscious, trauma for instance, which 
fundamentally resists being drawn up into langauge.

G>. And again, I disagree. I don't just disagree, though. I *know* that the 
assertion above is false. The "talking cure" isn't about *representing" the 
unconscious in language (inasmuch as we're talking about the unconscious 
now--while psychoanalysis itself isn't basically about the mediate goal of 
erasing unconsciousness); long-term therapy is about working-through, in the 
richest cathartic sense of this, and working-through centrally *includes* 
language--includes linguistification of the sacred, linguistification of "the 
Shadow", etc.--but *basically* working-through happens *in the relationship*, 
the therapeutic alliance.

K- "Habermas reduces the work of interpretation to retranslating the 'latent 
dream-thought' into the intersubjectively recognized language of public 
communication, without accounting for how this thought is 'pulled' into the 
unconscious only if some already unconscious wish finds an echo in it by means 
of a kind of transferential 'short circuit.' And, as Freud put it, this already 
unconscious wish is 'primordially repressed': it constitutes a 'traumatic 
kernel' which has no 'original' in the language of intersubjective 
communication and which, for that reason, for ever, constitutively, resists 
symbolization - that is, (re)translation into the language of intersubjective 
communication. Here we confront the incommensurability between hermeneutics 
('deep' as it may be) and psychoanalytic interpretation: Habermas can assert 
that distortions have meaning as such - what remains unthinkable for him is 
that meaning as such results from a certain distortion - that the emergence of 
meaning is based on a disavowal of some 'primordially repressed' traumatic 
kernel. This traumatic kernel, this remainder which resists 
subjectivization-symbolization, is stricto sensu the cause of the subject... "
(Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 26-27).

G>. This alliance does *foster* "being drawn up into language," such that 
resistance to a deeply mutual being-drawn may *also* be part of the 
working-through of the alliance. I'm sure that you agree. But so would 
Habermas! He does. He readily agrees that the phenomenality of experience is 
irreducible to linguistification. BUT only *inasmuch as* linguistification is 
possible can experience figure into *communicative processes* and thus 
*critical* distantiation or reframing or transformation into something 
*constructive*.

K- Ok, just to be clear - we're talking about the linguistification of 
trauma, right? I agree that it can be 'partially' linguistified, but I disagree 
with the way in which Habermas sees this. Habermas argues that the privatized 
language of the unconscious is rendered inaccessible to the ego, with the 
result that the ego necessarily deceives itself about its identity in the 
symbolic structures that it consciously produces (Habermas 1971: 227). Through 
this, Habermas is able to reproduce the Pauline-Marxian theme of "they know not 
what they do" with recourse to Freud (where distortions in language are 
understood to be analogous to the dynamics of the unconscious). The analyst, 
like the Marxist vanguard, instructs the patient in reading his or her own 
"texts" which have been internally mutilated and distorted, and assists in 
translating (reversing) symbols from modes of expression deformed as a private 
language into the mode of expression of public communication (Habermas 1971: 
228) which is, in effect, a "return" of the excommunicated symbol back to the 
subject in its "normal" public form, unmutilated and undamaged and a 
re-harmonization between motives for action and linguistic expressions. In this 
way, the psychoanalytic process begins with the targeting of resistance that 
blocks "free and public communication" in what he identifies as the "act of 
understanding" which leads to "self- reflection" (Habermas 1971: 228).  Symbols 
"split off" from this harmonic unity indicate what Habermas calls a 
"communicative disturbance" within the self (Habermas 1971: 228). Habermas 
further adds, "The starting point of psychoanalytic theory is the experience of 
resistance... The analytic process of making conscious reveals itself as a 
process of reflection in that it is not only a process on the cognitive level 
but also dissolves resistances on the affective level (Habermas 1971: 229). In 
other words, "analysis has immediate therapeutic results because the critical 
overcoming of blocks to consciousness and the penetration of false 
objectivations initiations the appropriation of a lost portion of life history; 
it thus reverses the process of splitting-off. That is why analytic knowledge 
is self-reflection" (Habermas 1971: 233). In short, according to Habermas, 
public communication is necessarily a non-pathological form, and the harmonious 
flow of intentions, actions and expressions is theparadigmatic model for 
rational communication (it should be noted that this idea is foreign to 
Freud)... So, the key idea here is that distortions can be reversed or 
dissolved (which is the bringing up of trauma into language which 'fits' 
with public useage)... my argument is that these distortions are constitutive 
of the subject as such: How can privatized language, which is linked to trauma, 
be brought back to a place that it never came to occupy in the first place 
(publicity). Trauma still ticks away at us on an affective level, regardless of 
how much we linguistify it, language / consciousness is a symptom.

G>. ...to argue that "the ego...itself [is] a defensive mechanism" is a 
special, if not extreme, interest in defensiveness, not a tenable theory of ego 
(self, I) generally, i.e., relative to healthy ontogeny or ordinary lives 
considered all in all.

K- Then there is no such thing as the Freudian "primordially repressed" ... the 
idea that something must be 'given up' in order for the subject to acquire 
language. In Lacan, we can simply this by saying that there is being and 
subject. In order for the subject to exist, it must eclipse being - it must 
surrender jouissance (enjoyment/trauma) in order to be a subject. This does not 
result in the erasure of being, rather, being is repressed and the subject is 
split. In the process of acculturation, this is a 'forced choice.'

>K: In a way, Lacanian analysis helps us to see that critical theory has a 
hermeneutic dimension which exceeds a philosophical hermeneutics, and has a 
scientific dimension which exceeds positivistic science. 

> G: Habermas does it better. 

K- That's what my supervisor is going to say.  ; ) However... I still want to 
maintain (even if I'm wrong about this, or fail to make a case) that human 
beings don't just use language, language uses us.

>K: ... but I've argued ... that Habermas's defense of formal pragmatics begs 
the question - he gets caught in a circular argument, assuming precisely that 
which he needs to justify.

G>.: JH doesn't merely "defend" formal pragmatics; he *defines* it, 
preliminarily explicates it, and greatly applies it in a theory of social 
evolution, discourse ethics, philosophy of procedural democracy, etc. His 
formal pragmatics is part of a fallibilistic *research program* that, in part, 
*hypothesizes* what it *advocates*. The tenability of this metatheoretical work 
depends on *knowledge" about language--what research indicates about our 
linguisticality. And let me tell you: a lot of research supports the tenability 
of  linguistics having a cognitive basis.

K- First, just because something is part of a larger research program doesn't 
mean it can beg the question whenever it wants. Second, I have no doubt that 
linguistics have a cognitive basis. I dispute the teleological dynamics of 
this, however. For instance, Gadamer argues that "understanding is the telos of 
language" and Habermas agrees. I dispute this: understanding is the telos of 
enlightenment, not language.

G>.: One shouldn't be surprised that psychoanalysis is the basis for 
explicating a psychoanalytic concept. But he doesn't claim that "the 
unconscious is solely derived from language," just as he doesn't claim that 
systematically distortive processes in society are all linguistic. But ONLY 
inasmuch as distortion can be *translated* into articulations can its 
counterproductive (if not destructive) power be eventually annuled.  

K- "[Consciousness] is attached to linguistic communication and actions. It 
satisfies the criterion of publicness, which means communicability, whether in 
words or actions. In contrast, what is unconscious is removed from public 
communication. Insofar as it expresses itself in symbols or actions anyway, it 
manifests itself as a symptom, that is as a mutilation and distortion of the 
text of everyday habitual language games. In complementary ways the experience 
of resistance and the specific distortion of symbolic structures have the same 
reference: the unconscious, which is ‘suppressed,' that is kept from free 
communication, but which creeps into public speech and observable actions 
through detours, and thus ‘urges' toward consciousness. Repression comprises 
both submergence and active emergence... Starting with the experiences of the 
physician's communication with his [or her] patient, Freud derived the concept 
of the unconscious from a specific form of disturbance of communication in 
ordinary language" (Habermas 1971: 238). Perhaps the unconscious is not solely 
derived from publicity - but Habermas does maintain that there is no 
nonlinguistic substratum (Habermas 1971: 241) which basically means that 
any 'content' of the unconscious is fundamentally linguistic.

>K: And if that is the case, how did critical theory acquire knowledge about 
this life? 

> G: Isn't that like asking how a child acquired interest in learning? If the 
child doesn't know, is the desire to learn thereby undermined? *Critical 
Theory* acquired this "knowledge" as the history of philosophy acquired this 
knowledge, you know JH claims. 

K- How one acquires an interest in learning is a fair question. It has to do 
with desire - which we learn about through fantasy. But the desire to learn 
should not be confused with the fantasy that guides it.

>K: Fundamentally, it is unrealizeable. 

G>.: Since you can "fundamentally" only speak for yourself, let me happily hope 
that, fundamentally, you're wrong. As for the rest of humanity, hope is 
ultimately all we have.

K- My point being that enlightenment, as a project, is necessary and 
impossible. As such, we might want to consider a more antagonistic model of 
democracy as appropriate...

G>. Anyway, high levels of disagreement can be sublime learning experiences 
(Response is not mere re-presentation, but articulation!). Discursive 
disagreement *can* be very constructive. Even contentiousness can be a 
Gadamerian play of light on water. 

K- Sublime! That's just it. When the thunderclouds piling up in the sky and 
move accompanied by lightning and thunderclaps, when volcaoes with all their 
destructive power leave a wake of destruction... we find ourselves enthrawed by 
nature, fascinated and fearful - provided we are in a safe place: we are 
subjects watching nature subjected to the monstrous Law of nature. This Law is 
the superego which we are only protected by through fantasy. Ultimately, we are 
not in a safe place, and our perspective is an illusion: but without this 
illusion we cannot cope. The price we pay for this illusion rides on a 
necessary deception: we must believe it, we must trust it, nonetheless, it is 
false.

again, many thanks and appreciation,
ken



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