File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_2000/habermas.0012, message 25


Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 23:50:15 -0800 (PST)
From: Gary D <gedavis1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: HAB: Re: Habermas & Freud


Ken,

I've decided against going back to the "Third Rock" series of
November postings, which was really others' discussion; so, I'll get
back now to your posting this morning (20 Dec).

>G (19 Dec). ... 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...

GD (20 Dec): Yes, but this is beside your earlier counterpoint, which
was to use the Whitebook quote to indicate continuity in JH's
thinking relative to Freud, against my recommendation (tacitly) of
reading earlier JH through the perspectives of later JH (which has
virtually nothing to do with Freud, while--I want to add now--the KHI
period belongs to its Cold War *socialist* hopes and its neo-Marxist
'60s audience). Yet "your" quote above wasn't about JH's relationship
to his reading of Freud; rather it's a claim--not by JH, by the
way--about a continuity of epistemic relativity, begging the
question--I want to add now--of how JH's approach to knowledge has
been changed by his evolving sense of many issues, as represented by
the philosophical contexts, say, of JH's work after TCA (which is so
unlike the KHI period in its approach to issues). Evidently, you want
to make points about JH's sense of experience (via a focus on
psychoanalysis) in terms of JH's disposition toward knowledge (which
has long left the emancipatory context of the psychoanalytic
example). 

The basic issue for me is to see JH's own development appreciated,
i.e., to advocate for his later work as a *product* of a continuous
development; ergo, the later being the significance of what was
early-on anticipated (apart from its dated audience engagements)--and
the appropriate basis for retrospective reading. The world we live in
now was not anticipated at all in the 1960s. Cognitive psychology was
new to the human sciences back then, while now cognitive science
(beyond a mere cognitive psychology, three decades later) gives
credence to JH's development far beyond what was imaginable earlier.
Without seeing JH's earlier work as on the way to what he's done
since 1980--without reading the relatively distant past through
relatively current work, as an anticipation of work after 1980--one
is not recognizing what JH was *back then* trying to do. The
psychoanalytic model and the emancipatory interest were--we know
now--efforts to work constructively with an innate interest in self
formative learning or cognitive development, in communicative terms
that can contribute to broadly reasonable ways of life. 

-------------------------------------------

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

>G (19 Dec): ....I disagree. .... The "talking cure" isn't about
*representing" the unconscious in language .... [W]orking-through, in
the richest cathartic sense of this....includes linguistification ...
*in the relationship*, the therapeutic alliance.

>K: [long quote from Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 26-27].

GD: I don't find the Zizek passage credible. But I don't want
presently to dwell on a new issue. I want to keep my response
relative to our dialogue thus far (There is an inestimable bredth and
depth of paths that interaction about JH can take, obviously, while
there's never been much focus in this email medium on any one
issue--exchanges die out pretty soon, due to lack of time for what
discursive focus requires [like I said earlier], for me at least
[and, to be generous, I suppose so for others, too]--which maybe
indicates something about discourse, if only the difficulty of
sustaining its value [as a matter of time, but of course also as a
matter of the things themselves]). I'm sorry that I have to do this.
I welcome exceptions from others. 

-------------------------------------------------

>G (19 Dec). This [therapeutic] 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!....

>K- Ok, just to be clear - we're talking about the linguistification
of trauma, right?

GD: *I'm" talking about the locus of linguistification being in
communicative interaction, not *representation* of the
unconsciousness of the trauma. You made a statement about resistance
to being drawn up in language, and I'm making clear that--if you want
to talk about the talking cure--you have to be attending to the locus
of linguistification, which is the INTERsubjectivity of the
therapeutic alliance, not a representation of trauma (which seems
subjectivistic).

>G (19 Dec): [JH] 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*.

GD: This fact is dramatically evident in psychoanalysis, where the
INTERsubjectivity of linguistification is the condition for the
possibility of subjective (client) recovery of the experience of
repressed trauma.

>K:  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). 

GD: You're stating your interpretive attitude, but very
enthymemically. The "rendered inaccessible" is a hermeneutical
hypothesis belonging to the psychoanalytic scene between client and
analyst. Talk about Pauline-Marxian themes is ingenuous, relative to
what JH is overviewing; and is irrelevant to the context of JH's
discussion and the accessibility of trauma to the therapeutic
alliance. 

>K: The analyst, like the Marxist vanguard, instructs the patient
....

GD: This is an invalid association.

>K: ...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)...

GD: Don't overlook the fact that this takes place over an extended
period of time, and NOT between two subjectivities
(interSUBJECTIVITIES), rather within a dramatically ambiguous
INTERsubjectivity. 

>K:... which is, in effect, a "return" of the excommunicated symbol
back to the subject in its "normal" public form,...

GD: Don't put a lot of weight on notions like excommunication,
outside of detailed contexts of a real life history and the intimacy
of the therapeutic alliance. Also, it's inappropriate to occlude the
intersubjective context of "return" in terms of "public" forms. The
*recovery* of experience is intimate and "contained" by the vessel of
the safe relationship.

>K: ... 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).  

GD: No, I feel the process begins with acts of understanding---that
become *faced* with resistance, on the shared way to fostering a
recovery of lost experience. The venue here, of course, is a life and
a sacred privacy. That life also lives publically, obviously, and the
resistances that inhibit learning oneself also inhibit genuine self
representation in public life (neighborhood and work). But the
interface of private and public is not nearly as immediate as you
might wish to read it.

>K  Habermas... adds, "The starting point of psychoanalytic theory is
the experience of resistance... 

GD: The *experience*—which is other than "targeting" resistance. 

>H: "...The analytic process of making conscious reveals itself...." 

GD: The process reveals *itself*--in-and-as a new intersubjectivity. 

Quite unrelated to this context (and very arguably invalid) is your
desired point that...

>K... according to Habermas, public communication is necessarily a
non-pathological form...

GD: What do you think the notion of systematic distortion in
communication *means*? (rhetorical question). 

>K: ...and the harmonious flow of intentions, actions and expressions
is the paradigmatic 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)... 

GD: No, re: "fits" etc. You're collapsing a big, complex context,
involving lots of mediations and relations over long periods of time
into a snappy (rhetorical) point. 

>K: ...my argument is that these distortions are constitutive of the
subject as such:...

GD: No, your *claim* is that etc. 

>K: How can privatized language, which is linked to trauma,...

GD: Linked?

>K: ...be brought back to a place that it never came to occupy in the
first place (publicity)[?]

GD: There's some basic misunderstanding here. Wrong kind of question.
You're thinking something you haven't yet found the appropriate words
for. Therapy isn't trying to restore trauma to some rightful place,
let alone public place; it's trying to dissolve the unconscious
effect of that trauma on an inhibited life. What this means for the
analogy to social critique is another matter (a matter of
disseminated educational processes of various kinds and an
industry--academic and not--of criticism which works LIKE a
therapeutic process writ large. But the analogy does cause as many
misunderstandings as it fosters understanding of a scientifically
relevant (see _The Talking Cure_, Richard Wallerstein, Yale UP 1995
or so for a definitive account of psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic
research into the efficacy of therapy) approach to the critical
social interest in knowledge. 

>K: Trauma still ticks away at us on an affective level, regardless
of how much we linguistify it, language / consciousness is a symptom.

GD: I think you're confusing a non-effective effort to *represent*
trauma and the therapeutic process of dissolving it (or else you're
*positing* the invalidity of therapeutic processes to suit your
preferred stance).

> G (19 Dec):. ...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 [say] 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.'

GD: So, you want to use Lacan to bolster a sense of untranslatable
trauma that Habermas is supposed to have anticiapted--and has failed
to theorize? 

>K:. 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.

GD: It isn't good practice to maintain something regardless of truth.


-------------------------------

>K: ....Gadamer argues that "understanding is the telos of language"
and Habermas agrees. I dispute this: understanding is the telos of
enlightenment, not language.

GD: No. Understanding is the effect of enlightenment. Enlightenment
advances understanding. But advances understanding to what it?
Wherever it takes us. We can't know in advance what understanding
will draw us into. But we can know that understanding will draw us
where it leads and following this is emanently worthwhile.
Enlightenment may accelerate our appreciation of what understanding
can grant: it's Appeal, like an Event that appropriates us to
appropriation itself, evolving understanding, like an autopoiesis.  

>H (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). 

>K: 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.

GD: No. The JH quote above is about the emergence of the unconscious
*into* communication, not the reduction of the unconscious to
linguistic representation. Read the "Postscript" to KHI, where JH
indicates the difference between phenomenality and what's relevant
for constructive processes and communicative interaction (too
briefly, but this is taken up again at length in the "Introduction"
to TCA). 

---------------------

>K:  the desire to learn should not be confused with the fantasy that
guides it.

GD: Rather, I would say: The desire to learn should not be confused
with fantasy. The desire to learn is not based in fantasy. Indeed,
there are fantastic notions of what can be known (mysticism, for
example). But the basic desire to learn is *to KNOW*. Why else do we
worry about the fate of the universe that can have no practical
effect on our lives? Or our "place" in the universe that is so
silent? Why hope for a "God" (in mythical-religious life) that
incomprehensibly cares about our evolution? It is simply (Simply) the
desire to know.

----------------------------------

>K (19 Dec): Fundamentally, [fantasy] 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...

GD: "We" might not. The desire for fundamental understanding
(enlightenment) is itself fundamental. It'sdifficult to actualize,
but not at all impossible. Why else would there be a *history* of
philosophy, science, ethical theory, etc., and not just an eternal
return of the same? There IS evolution. 



Well, this is my last posting for the year. Going away for a few
weeks. 

Cheers,


Gary






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