From: <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: HAB: Balancing practicality & self formativity
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 10:45:06 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)



On Wed, 10 Jan 2001 23:32:41 -0800 (PST) Gary D <gedavis1-AT-yahoo.com> wrote:

> I appreciate, I believe, your interest in the importance of 
aesthetic-imaginary moment[s], since this is very important for me, too. But 
the context of practice pertinent to realistic (client-centered or 
other-centered) interests in emancipation and education is very different from 
the self-centered (in the healthy sense) interest of aesthetization (a luxury 
impertinent to needs of a not-yet-practical-enough life, which motivates an 
emancipatory interest). 

Here's a practical-educative example: WATERFALL. Now, I'll bet the first thing 
that popped into your head *wasn't* a dictionary definition, I'll wager Freud's 
Interpretation of Dreams that a thing-representation struck you first. Now this 
is important: without the thing-representation - there can be no communication 
- and, ever more to the point - the *image* serves as the (narcissistic) 
guarantee of any possible communication. Far from a self-centred aesthetic 
luxury, emancipation qua education is coherent *only* insofar as the the 
unconscious accomplishes *more than* the conscious thought. Didn't Freud once 
say, "the most complicated mental achievements are possible without the 
collaboration of consciousness?" To put it differently, in order for one to 
understand anything, the textbook definition that we all have rattling around 
somewhere in our heads must be eclipsed - the context informs us far more than 
the dictionary. There is nothing more realistic and practical than 
understanding this point. Another example: we must "forget" grammatical rules 
in order to construct sentences. If we are concerned about grammar while we are 
constructing it, we can't build anything - we get caught up in the details. We 
can then, after the fact, revisit these rules to catch the gist of their 
appropriateness. No amount of proceduralization can eliminate the spectre of 
aestheticism... it isn't just a matter of a 'passion for critique' - it is also 
a matter of the passionate critic.

> It seems to me that you tend to aesthetize trauma, confusing high-cultural 
theorization with the modest aims of education that are pertinent to normative 
life and our social-systemic kind of metropolitan life.

As Freud well knew, trauma is something that consciousness simply cannot 
tolerate or cope with. But the point not to be missed here is that the 
avoidance, the turning away from, this trauma is precisely what constitutes 
secondary processes. Trauma does not designate any particular or determinate 
objective reality, for what it entails is precisely the inability of the 
psyche, specifically the ego, to determine an object. In other words, there is 
a displacement, what Freud called a "signal." The result being a two way 
street, an avoidance and displacement, and the creation of anxiety - the 
dynamic of waiting for a danger-situation - anticipated. The problem here, as 
far as I can see, is that neurotic anxiety a la Habermas cannot simply be 'put 
back in its place' - returned to public discourse. Anxiety *is* this lack of a 
proper place, the attempt of the ego to construct or delimit such a place is 
inevitably another displacement and dislocation. It seems to me that this is an 
extraordinarily important consideration when we're thinking about "normative 
life."

> Romanticization of trauma...

I'm not sure that I'm doing this, but I might not be my best interpreter.

> (... I suspect that your comment today [yesterday, KM] is a footnote to those 
dissertative sketches, so what can I say).

Actually... no (surprise surprise - I typed that out freehand, no cut and 
paste). But I think it will be. The discussions that we've been having here 
have been quite helpful and productive...

> K: ...Tradition is tradition only insofar as we constitute it as such....

> G: This looks like a subjectivistic stance which occludes the enormously 
*inherited* aspects of cultural life, through ordinary familial maturation and 
social education--what I like to call the Lemarckian dimension of our 
evolutionarity (which is constituted historically through intergenerational 
bonds and local engagements). 

But isn't this the aim of psychoanalysis - and, in fact, ethical discourse in 
general - to bring the subject into a place where they can take 
(recognize) responsibility for the internalized "foreign territory" ? For the 
idea of responsibility to make sense, the "foreign territory" must always 
already be self-posited. Certainly we 'inheret' a great deal of Otherness, but 
insofar as it is constitutive of the self, it is already "ours" - whether we 
recognize it or not - which, in terms of moral theory and individuation, must 
necessarily be understood as tradition constituted by us as tradition. If we 
don't constitute it "as us" already, then it is possible to avoid 
responsibility for it: "that's not me, it is the alien Other - I'm not 
responsible for it." How did Hegel phrase it - not as substance but as subject?

The thing is, life is a dream. The entire charge of aestheticism is somewhat 
misplaced. The more appropriate emphasis should be placed on fantasy, or the 
imaginary. When translated into Habermas's tripartite model - it appears 
aesthetic... but this doesn't really touch the nerve of what is at stake here, 
or, at least, it does, but awkwardly.

ken



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