Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2001 19:31:00 -0800 (PST)
From: Gary D <gedavis1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: HAB: re: Nonconscious vs. Unconscious




> --- kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca wrote (13 Jan):

K> > ...what if repression far from simply blocking the verbalization
of conscious discourse...

> G: As distinguished from *unconscious* discourse? Of course not;
there's no such thing. So, you must mean consciousness (since
discourse is a highly derived construction, far from mere
verbalization of anything)

K (today): One of Lacan's famous phrases is this: "the unconscious is
structured like a langauge." 

G: Yeah.

K: ...The unconscious can only be apprehended in language - discourse
- 

G: But not ‘discourse’ in JH’s sense; ‘discourse’ in the mundane
linguistic-theoretical sense of a piece of conversation, but
unconscious-as-language is only validly an *analogy*. And ‘discourse’
isn’t constructive here (not that I enjoy being disagreeable).

The unconscious can be apprehended *by* the analyst in dramaturgical
(“staged” scenic understanding) aspects of the therapeutic alliance
(typically representations by the analyst of transference and
projective identitifications, which are cognitive-affective, not
primarily linguistic), which are represented linguistically by the
*analyst* in fallibilistic interpretations employed silently, at
first (later as tailored interpreations far from the array of
unconscious observations that the analyst formulated on the way to a
mirrored interpretation). The unconscious itself *shows* primarily in
the *interactivity*. A semiotic notion of language (like Lacan’s)
cannot capture the illocutionary or actional character of the
unconscious’ INTERacting “like” (*analogously* to how) language goes.
The unconscious shows itself like a backstage actor looking for a way
to communicate without upsetting its good face in the limelight.
Apprehension of the unconscious eventually in language by the analyst
*for* the client (silently) is normally not representation in
language *to* the client of direct apprehensions of the unconscious
(not mirrored *as* report of what’s unconscious, though this probably
happens, too--depending on the approach, of course); rather,
“critical” interventions *with* the client in terms of specific
contents *by* the client earlier are *communicated* overtly by the
analyst in terms of small-scale interpretations (e.g., mirroring
incongruities, “teachable moment” interpretations of key themes in
specific narrated situations, etc.). 

So, of course--

K: ...language - discourse - this is not identical with the
unconscious. For Lacan, bringing the unconscious into speech is a
painful process whereby part of the unconscious is torn into
language, it is a distortion from the beginning (since the
unconscious isn't language). 

G: Sure, but either you or Lacan are missing the interactivity of the
“bringing”. Representations like “bringing the unconscious into
speech” abstract from long processes of scenic interaction. There is
no direct translation of the unconscious into speech by the client.
There are *eventually* translations of *memories*: painful returns of
the repressed. But this return of contents from unconsciousness to
consciousness is not a bringing of the unconscious into speech by the
client, in my view. Repressed trauma cathexes abruptly, when it
breaks through. But it breaks into the *scene*, typically as negative
affect toward the analyst. 

I, by the way, don’t doubt the overwhelmingness of suddenly
remembered trauma, for those who have been living in severe
repression (post-traumatic stress invisibility, one might say). But
I’m against normatizing the pathological condition in metatheory of
mind and philosophy. 

....

> K:...[repression] is also [consciousness's] indispensable
precondition? 

> G: Respectfully, I say this is nonsense. (And it's a domesticated
version of 
your earlier claim to me that *trauma* is unavoidable, which I
associated with 
infant abuse, not an essential aspect of the psyche).

K: Ok, I'm going to stop using the word "trauma" and remain
consistent with Lacan's terms: jouissance. 

G: I thought this was a Habermas list. 

K: I subsituted trauma to illustrate a point and now it has made
things unclear. The idea of repression being the condition of
consciousness has to do with the way in which we acquire language. 

G: Says Lacan. But he’s wrong. Apparently he (or you) are
generalizing from the situation of extreme pathology to claims about
mind (“the way we aquire language”).

K: Without going into a summary of Lacan's mirror phase (the
imaginary identification with a fiction) - basically Lacan's thesis
is this: when we learn a language it is imposed on us by the Other. 

G: This applies only to authoritarian parenting styles. Good parents
love to pretend their child can speak and understand more than can be
verified (i.e., there’s good openness), as part of the romance of
shared word play. If anything, the baby seduces mommy into word play
(in healthy parenting). By the way, the so-called mirror phase has
been disproved by clinical infant research; it is indeed a fiction or
adult reconstructions, but it's not indicative of what infants really
go through. 

K It is, literally, foreign to us. 

G: No, it is, literally, that which we call *mysterious* to baby. The
foreign is alien, but Mommy’s word play is enthralling to baby (like
delicious mystery is to children), as an extension of baby’s
being-with (or emotionally grand Belonging). Relatively late in
infancy, mother gains differentiation as mOther, episodically in a
thrilling dynamic of individuation-separation, where difference is
awesome.  

K: Even if we possess a genetic predisposition to learning language,
this is not coordinated through a specific language. 

G: Sure it is. It’s called one’s *first* language--mommy’s / "Our"
language. 

K: Language, then, imprints or carves itself on our  psyche. 

G: Ouch. You need to read some stuff on child development. 

K: This forces "something" out so that language can take "its" place.


G: Again, Ken, it might be good to read some stuff on how children
acquire language, according to cogitive psychologists of the past two
decades or so, rather than depending heavily on Lacan’s speculations
from clinical practice with adults. 

K: Something (jouissance) must be repressed in order for us to
"learn" anything. 

G: See, there’s nothing you’ve said above that makes your claim any
more credible at all. It’s *invalid*. 

K: Hegel's understanding of experience is no different: we have a
'new' experience whenever an 'old' experience is negated,
contradicted. 

G: Hegel? You’re going to back up claims about infant development
with Hegel (grossly out of context; Hegel’s not talking about
language acquisition, he’s speculating about adult phenomenology--and
doing so wrongly, as far as negative dialectic modeling is involved
in phenomenology of *experience*). 

K: Repression, in other words, is the condition of learning. We can't
keep everything in our heads all 
at once. 

G: At best, you’re confusing the difference between suppression and
repression. But the more apt difference here (your second statement
immediately above) is between *inattention* and attention;
inattention is nothing like suppression. Inattentive knowledge and
understanding remains preconscious, available to recall when called
for by experiential cues. (Probably, it’s been some time since you
remembered your automobile license plate, but you haven’t been
repressing it). 

K: In truth, I was actually surprised when you called this nonsense,
since I had thought it obvious... (although I'm glad that you aren't
mincing your words here).

G: OK: *obviously* nonsense. 

> K: > This [axiomatic repression--this positivism of the repressed -
GD, today] would render any kind of "undistorted speech situation" a
conceptual impossibility....

> G [yesterday}: In fact though, an undistorted situation is *quite*
conceivable (in a phrase: enough openness during enough time) ; you
must mean practical impossibility or unrealizable possibility. But
this is invalid, since the definition of undistorted speech implies a
condition that is, in principle, quite *practically* accessible
(given education and experience): analytic  *skills* to question at
all relevant levels that concern a person, *opportunity* to question
and work through to understanding with local others, *openness* to
radically different views (that are credible); and so on (in accord
with JH's formal definition, which could be re-posted).

K: As far as I can tell, Habermas's positing of undistorted speech is
little different from the status of Kant's postulations. 

G: Habermas doesn’t “posit” undistorted speech. 

K: ... Undistorted speech has the precise status of being the fantasy
of a democratizing and pragmatic approach to language. 

G: No, the *model* of undistorted speech (idealized speech situation
[ISS], presented so many years ago) has the “precise” status of a
counterfactual standard for evaluating actual scenes of
communication. It consists of *specific* aspects which are themselves
evaluable, as to their *aptness* for modeling highly desireable
communication scenes (e.g., Do you find the value of fair turn-taking
obscure? Having the competence to consider hypotheticals? Etc.). 

K: Habermas draws on the presupposition of undistorted speech as a
normative ground.

G: OK, to a degree. Yet, more aptly (in my view): Habermas has drawn
on the ISS as an evaluative norm (not the ground of anything, except
in the trivial sense that any norm serves to ground an evaluation). 

K: Here I think it is helpful to read Hegel's logic of essence as a
theory of ideology (see Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative). 

G: No thanks. JH’s sense of idealization is not related to Hegel’s
logic of essence. 

K: As is well known, Habemas argues that modernity cannot and will
not borrow its normativity from another age: "it has to create its
normativity out of itself" (PDM). 

G: See? I told you so. But “...has to create...” doesn’t entail a
strident “...cannot and will not....”

K: This is a vicious circle in and of itself. 

G: Vicious is as vicious does. 

K: But Habermas's claim is not merely tautological: 

G: I agree--because it’s not tautological in any way. 

K: ...his argument takes the position that modernity has to
constitute itself litearlly by presupposing itself in its
exteriority, in its external conditions in earlier periods. 

G: No. You’re exhibiting the kind of subject-centered reason that JH
is criticizing in PDM. You’re treating modernity like Subjective Mind
(as Hegel did); but there’s no basis for this in PDM. By treating
modernity as a subject-write-large (world-historical individual as
historicality), the notion of “out of itself” looks like
bootstrapping. But the “itself” of modernity is the whole manifold
differentiatedness of group-to-group identities, institutionalities
(interdisciplinarities), etc. that interacts generatively over space
and contemporaneous time (which necessarily has nebulous boundaries,
as youth faces earlier generations over years of interaction at
various levels of comprehension and mutuality, etc.). 

K: The return to external conditions must coincide with the return of
the foundation, to this very normativity itself. 

G: No. “External conditions” is your projection of Hegelian rhetoric
onto a very tiny quote (scapegoating the text?). 

K: The external relation of presupposing ground is surpassed by means
of which normativity presupposes itself. 

G: Presupposing ground is an internal relation. Normativity is
established through various means: conventionally, as sedimentation
of diverse practices by social selection (shake out, one might
say--typical of youth culture); postconventionally, by procedural
means. 

K .... The 'transcendence within' which is felt on the level of
practical reasoning is the result of the subject's spontaneous
synthetic activity: the establishment of the absolute....

G: I’ve snipped parts of your passage (between "The external
relation..." quote and "The 'transcendence within'...") which are
elaborating on your earlier comments, which are invalid (in the
senses I’ve indicated). This transcendence-within comment (which
doesn’t seem to follow from your earlier statements) is clearly the
rhetoric of subject-centered reason. 

K: The idea of communicative freedom, then, realizes itself through a
series of failures,...

G: Learning never ends. (Am I entering a twilight zone of
deconstructive response: Ken as self-betraying confessor--a
unconscious peeking through the pretense of Hegelian argument for me
as Habermasian analyst?).

K:...every particular attempt to realize it may fail - freedom
remains an empty possibility, but the very continuous striving of
freedom to realize itself bears witness to its 'actuality' (in the
Hegelians sense). 

G: Realization of invalidity *is* indeed a *valid* learning
experience. Invalid reading (normative invalidity of construal,
pretense of correctness which is incorrect) may mirror itself (in the
resistance of the text to the reading), causing a subjectively valid
experience of reflective learning. There is validity in the
realization of invalidity. 

K: What is interesting about this logic here is that the the
possibility of communicative freedom exerts actual effects, which
disappear as soon as it actualizes itself ('approximated in
discourse'). 

G: The appeal of the opposed other mirrors the emancipatory interest
in (re)initiating a self formation; the *possibility* of releasement
drives the interest in emancipation from illusion and misconception.
Once released, though, the emancipatoriness of this interest
dissolves *into* the self-formative interest that it already always
was, now in a renewed life guided by a new level of learning that may
no longer need straw men and scapegoats to motivate creative
advancement. Others may cease being opponents and become complements
in a greater project. (I *am* enjoying myself here).

K: This short circuit between possibility and actuality. 

G: You’re missing a verb. The invisibility of the repressed or / and
resistance to learning (to moving to a new level of learning)---

K: The actuality of communicative freedom arrives to us as a 'threat'
- ....

G: Yeah, before the dissolution of resistance the tacit prospect of
being overwhelmed by a new stage of realization can cause one to want
to escape into comfortable stereotypes of understanding. This is
shown in moral development research as early adolescent regression to
earlier ways of problem solving before cognitive growth spurts into
formal-operational ways of problem solving (whose relative complexity
of possibility is intimidating-- 13-to-15 year-olds are *impossible*
in their willful misinterpretation of things). 

K: ...the more communicatively free we are, the more worried we
become of not being communicatively free. 

G: This is adolescence precisely. 

K: The hegemonic, then, enters when possibility is manipulated into
assuming an authoritative voice (fooled by the 'threat' of
actuality). 

G: Teenagers are *so* paranoid about adult authority. 

K: This is precisely what happens in Habermas's razor sharp
distinction between the good and the just. 

G: Wow: razor in a vicious circle--hey, I’m outta here.

K: The authoritative voice, demanding consensus, imprints itself on
the discourse itself. 

G: Who’s demanding?

K: This matrix leads to a strange dialectic: ....

G: Indeed.

K: ...that some 'transgressions' of communicative freedom become
permissable if 'communicative freedom' is to be preserved (ie. the
church condones 'small infringements if they stablized the marriage).


G: Moderation in all things (the young adult learns). 

K: To say this in Lacanian terms: universal communicative inclusion
becomes a fetish,...

G: If I had any doubt about losing interest in Lacan long ago, I am
now, to be sure, a free man. 


'nuff said (for now),
ken


I should say.

gary





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