From: <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca> Subject: Re: HAB: Slow reading KHI - part II Date: Mon, 25 Dec 2000 10:54:41 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time) On Sun, 24 Dec 2000 19:21:00 +0000 Gelder-AT-em.uni-frankfurt.de wrote: I've participated in several 'slow' readings on line, very few of them have ever worked. But I'm willing to give this one a try, and I'll try to stay focused. I'll qualify this in two ways: first, I'm not a psychoanalyst and, second, I'll be reading along in english (although I have a copy of KHI in the origin, so please feel free refer to it), third, I tend to jump tracks so feel free to reel me in whenever I do so. Finally, I'm going to try to keep editing to a minimum. > Habermas' *Knowledge and Human Interests* (KHI) FvG> At the *object* level the discussion is admirably straightforward: the nature of *dreams*. Everyone remembers this or that dream, everyone knows that a dream can be puzzling, disturbing, vague, vivid, satisfying, 'beautiful' or whatever. No one denies ever having *had* a dream, although frequency and content varies surprising from one individual to another. K's Comment: the object (dreams) first becomes relevant to us through the appearance of symptoms - more or less pathological behaviour / expressions (obsessive, hysteric...) which cannot fully be accounted for - symptoms are the scars of a corrupt text. In contrast to neurotic symptoms formulated within structures of communication, Habermas maintains that the dream is a non-pathological model of such a text (Habermas, KHI: 219). K's Question: The Freudian point to be made here, contrary to Habermas, is to avoid a fetishistic fascination with the 'content' of the dream, which supposedly hides behind the dream form rather, the 'secret' to be unveiled is the secret of the form itself. Dreams, in other words, are entirely normal, and the essential constitution of a dream is thus not its latent thought, which can be formulated in language, but the constitutive work (condensation, displacement) which confers on it the form of a dream (Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology: 11-12). For Freud, then, dreams are the work of unconscious processes (desire). As Freud notes, "what is most overlooked in dream analysis is the distinction between the latent dream-thoughts and the dream-work. At bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature" (Freud, Interp of Dreams: 650). FvG> At the *methodology* level - how do we strive for something like scientific certitude on such a puzzling topic - the argument starts to get more complicated. Habermas does *not* say: a dream is like any other phenomenon: you start with individual observation, description, case studies, on the basis of which you form a tentative hypothesis, which you put out for discussion amongst your peers, and which you seek to validate or disprove on the basis of some kind of testing procedure. In the case of dreams it is not ridiculously far-fetched to suppose - as Freud did - that they have something to do with neuro-physiological processes and the working of the human mind. The word 'psychoanalysis' *itself* has these very connotations: namely that the study of dreams and related phenomena is a way of coming to grips with the working of the psyche, and that the investigative and testing procedures upon which we have to rely in such an enterprise are no different from any *other* scientific project. Habermas claims the exact *opposite* of the above: if you stick to the ordinary, 'hypothetico-deductive' procedures in Psychology, you miss out on something essential to the whole process of *understanding* what a dream 'is': the process of *self-reflection*. FvG> "Die Psychoanalyse ist fr uns als das einzige greifbare Beispiel einer methodisch Selbstreflexion in Anspruch nehmenden Wissenschaft relevant." (262) [Psychoanalysis is, for us, relevant as the only tangible example of a Science whose method is based on Selfreflection] FvG> For Habermas, dreams have this very peculiar quality: they remain forever inexplicable if approached from what, in the days of Nagel, Popper, Parsons, Merton was mostly called the 'hypothetical-deductive method' and nowadays 'evidence-based' medicine: the inductive, analytic, 'conjectures and refutations' approach to a problem. Habermas claims: it can be shown conclusively that what we call 'self-reflection' lies at the very heart of Freud's discoveries on the nature of dreams, and that this is *in principle* ungraspable if approached with 'positivist' assumptions on scientific objectivity. "Das wir Reflexion verleugnen, *ist* der Positivismus." (9) [That we deny self-reflection *is* positivism.] K's Question: the idea that dreams are "self-reflection" is important. Is Habermas saying, then, that the "dream" is (roughly) analogous to an "undistorted speech situation." He does say that a dream is a non-pathological model. If this is the case, then the analogy would be precisely that. Dreams are to the psyche what discourse is to language... Is this a fair analogy? K's Second Question: this poses itself as highly problematic, because the dream is equated with linguistic grammar - however it is a *remarkable* innovation and analogy - and perhaps quite productive. Examining Habermas's analysis of dreams, Rainer Nägele notes that, for Habermas, dream language has no grammar, quoting Habermas, "The sequence of visual scene is no longer ordered according to syntactical rules because the differentiation linguistic means for logical relations are lacking; even elementary basic rules of logic are canceled. In the degrammaticized language of the dream, relations are constituted by fading over and by condensation of the material" (Habermas quoted in Nägele, Reading After Freud: 81). Nägele notes that Habermas's account is significantly different from Freud's. For Freud, the description of the possibilities of dream language point in another direction. Freud was not so much concerned with the "lack" of logical signs, what Habermas considers a degrammaticization, but emphasized that dreams present a problem of a different media of representation, and Freud uses the relationship between literature and a painting as a paradigm (Nägele RAF: 81). Quoting Freud, "The plastic arts of painting and sculpture labour, indeed, under a similar limitation as compared with poetry, which can make use of speech; and here once again the reason for their incapacity lies in the nature of the material which these two forms of art manipulate in their effort to express something. Before painting became acquainted with the laws of expression by which it is governed, it made attempts to get over this handicap. In ancient paintings small labels were hung rom the mouths of the person represented, containing in written characters the speeches which the artist despaired of representing pictorially." Painting, in other words, has its own order of representation, its own syntax or grammar. This syntax, as Freud discovers in the dream, is closer to the tropes and figures of rhetoric than to the syllogistic figures of logic. As such, it represents a kind of language that cannot be relegated to the exceptions of "poetic license" (Nägele RAF: 81). The dream, as it were, speaks its own language, but it is a language of images. In other words: the translation (reading) of a dream into language is fundamentally a distortion. The equation here must be this: a dream is to images what discourse is to language. What appears to be missing in Habermas's analysis is this: what is the 'secret' of the form: why dreams? why language? What do we start dreaming? Why do we start speaking? (why do we wake up? why do we stop talking?) What is the relevance of the form in regards to the content? FvG> But the plot thickens. On the proof of the existence of phenomena *not* explicable with 'ordinary' inductive procedures of investigation - self-reflection - there rests a quite different line of thought. <SNIP> FvG> (If instead of 'dreams' one says: 'language use' then it becomes clear that the argument is the same: in *both* cases - dreams and language use - we are dealing with experiences, competences and skills *not* explicable if we stay within a form of knowledge which expresses a 'technical cognitive interest' - the KHI formulation - or within an 'objectifying' orientation towards the world, the TCA formulation. In *this* respect, i.e. that the Habermas both of KHI and TCA draws our attention to experiences *not* explicable within the 'positivist' framework, the argument of KHI and TCA is - pace Gary - similar enough, although other assumptions have indeed changed.) K's Question: It would seem, then, that both Nichols and Grunbaum (1984 - The Foundations of Psychoanalysis) [and perhaps Gellner?], who have argued that positivist frameworks can come to terms with dreams (and criticized Habermas), have misunderstood Habermas's objectives here. Thoughts? Also, there is, what appears to me, to be a glaring problem here: Freudian analysis isn't limited to the analysand. Freud's most famous analysis of psychosis is derived from a text, not an actual participant in dialogue. So how might Habermas respond to this in light of 'self-reflection?' What is at issue, it seems to me, is the idea of reconstruction as a science and reconstructive as a narrative (rhetoric). Jay Bernstein aruges that reconstruction is the creation of a narrative that the analysand can say "yes or no" to. This is not "knowledge" in the scientific sense, rather, "self-knowledge" and aesthetic. FvG> On the *first* set of issues - the putative 'scientistic self-misunderstanding' of Psychoanalysis - Habermas' position does not change after KHI; on the second set set of issues - the relationship of psychoanalysis to critical theory - it does. This change is easy enough - as far as the texts are concerned - to localise: it is marked by the 1973 *postscript* to EuI - which in English is published separately as ?????? (There seem to be different editions around.) The english postscript to KHI: Habermas, Jürgen 1973 "A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests" Philosophy of the Social Sciences 3: 157-189. This is the only place I've found it. Yes, I agree, it is a shame that it wasn't published in the later editions of the english trans. of KHI (I checked the most recent edition, just to make sure, last week). I think McCarthy summarizes the 'change' best: McCarthy, after summarizing the relation of psychoanalysis and critical theory in Habermas's work, agrees that there is a danger in a strict application of clinical analysis to political activity. In particular, he asks "What would correspond to ‘working through' and ‘transference' at the political level?" (McCarthy 1978 [The Critical Social Theory of JH]: 212). Perhaps, he notes, "we have taken the model too literally, and there is no need to find a correlate for every feature of the psychoanalytic situation" (McCarthy 1978: 212). In short, psychoanalysis "serves primarily to highlight the normative goals of enlightenment - self-emancipation through self-understanding , the overcoming of systematically distorted communication, and the strengthening of the capacity for self- determination through rational discourse - as well as the standards of validation for critical social theory - ultimately the successful continuation of self-formative processes on the part of the addressees" (McCarthy 1978: 213). Although McCarthy is surely correct, as Gadamer and others have mentioned before him, that the Habermasian correlation of psychoanalysis to political activity is a problem, the gist of McCarthy's analysis suggest that psychoanalysis offers us nothing other than a nicely wrapped package of intuitive insights. If we follow McCarthy's suggestion, then psychoanalysis has nothing to offer critical theory that cannot be accomplished elsewhere ("take the psychoanalytic episteme and run!"). And this certainly seems to be the path that Habermas has chosen, aside from scattered passing remarks. This leads to an important question: what is so wrong with Habermas's interpretation of psychoanalysis, or psychoanalysis in general, that it need be cast aside? My dissertation is seeking to provide a series of responses. First, that there is indeed something wrong with Habermas's appropriation of psychoanalysis. Second, that this problem can be traced back to Habermas's reading of Hegel which can be traced back to his reading of Kant. Third that if we read Freud via Lacan, then psychoanalysis can be seen to offer something quite different to Habermas's reading. And, finally, that such insights contribute meaningfully to critical theory as an indispensable resource. ken --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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