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 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Shopping - Thousands of Stores. Millions of Products. http://shopping.yahoo.com/ --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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