Adam Kohler has asked an excellent question in regards to my post from this morning:
From a Sartrean perspective, if we are able to become aware of the unconscious in the form of its influences, would that not then be a logical contradiction? To be conscious of an unconscious?
I know this may come across as silly, seeing as I just posted my first entry and am already responding to comments, but I have two motivations for doing so: (1) Lacanian psychoanalysis is something near and dear to my heart and does not get a proper reception in the States, even in "Continental" programs; (2) it gives me the chance to engage (albeit indirectly) with Sartre, with whom I'm not very familiar. If there's anything that torments a philosophy student (and I'd like to think I'm not alone), it's that there isn't time to read everything. So hopefully this will be a chance to meet in the middle; I can defend something I've read and conjecture about something I haven't.
Down to brass tacks: I feel this is why Lacan goes to such great lengths to redefine the field that Freud had established (Perhaps lengths too great--style is certainly not something I hope to inherit from his work. If anyone out there has seen Zizek!, you will recall the scene where watches the an old clip of Lacan's: "What interest me are his propositions. The underlying logic, not his style. His style is a total fake; I try to forget it." Which is certainly more honest than those Derrideans who feign ignorance, as Michael Naas from Depaul did when he visited my school: "I have no idea why people say [Derrida] is unclear. I find him very clear." But anyway, end parenthesis). This is why I find it much more helpful to stick with terminology that doesn't carry as much of a misleading connotation (e.g. the ego, the unconscious).
Rather than conscious and unconscious, let's distinguish between the Imaginary and the Symbolic order (in a way that won't force me to re-write Lacan's whole seminars). Our shortcut for making this distinction will be through the other/Other. I find this helpful because I can pickup right where a certain line in Adam Kohler's recent post on a common misunderstanding of existentialism here:
Sartre explains that our awareness of ourselves is contingent on other people. Whenever I reflect on who I am, that reflection is not without my awareness of what others think me to be. Essentially, "hell is other people" means that no matter how much I want to be something, I can never fully be considered as such if another has an opposing view. In that type of situation, I am constantly struggling to find a medium between what I want to be and how I am perceived to be.
I may not know Sartre, but there is something I spontaneously agree with here, in strictly Lacanian terms that I hope to develop here. If you are familiar with Jacques Lacan directly or indirectly through his following (Badiou, Miller, Kristeva, or more precisely in this case--Zizek), you have undoubtedly encountered two key terms: Autre et autre (big Other and little other, often as "the object petit a"). What is their distinction? The little other is that which is not really other, but is the product of transference: in othering ourselves we become subjects, finding ourselves in the external world. The assurance of our own figure reflected in the mirror. In the course of analysis, this transference finds its place in the "subject supposed to know," the analyst who supposedly carries the "truth" of the patient's symptoms even prior to their being discussed. Yet this inscription of images (of the Imaginary Order) is still structured by a more radical otherness.
The big Other is the Symbolic Order itself, the signifying chain that sets the coordinates or parameters of our experience (i.e. Law, the syntax of Language), or rather, this Symbolic as it is particularized for the subject. The Other thus has the form of any other subject, yet is also the order which mediates our relationship with this other subject (otherness as such).
To better answer Adam Kohler's question, one might say that "unconscious" is more helpful as an adverb than as an adjective. As an adjective--are we conscious?--the distinction falls apart just as Adam describes. But as an adverb--do we decide consciously?--we understand the term in its psychoanalytic sense. The point being that, even if we all become psychoanalysts and theorize the very details of the social effects on the individual personality, this would not provide us with any means of "escape." We are inextricably bound to language, or the Symbolic as such. That is to say, we conceive of ourselves as objects (Imaginary; other) and, in the performative dimension of linguistics, as subjects (Symbolic; Other). This is the split subject: the enunciated subject and the subject of the enunciation.
We could very well turn this around and address the original question by reformulating the quote from Adam Kohler's blog, Epoché Today:
Sartre explains that our awareness of ourselves is contingent on other people (on both forms of otherness). Whenever I reflect on who I am, that reflection is not without my awareness of what others think me to be (towards the subject of otherness as such, the big Other). Essentially, "hell is other people" means that no matter how much I want to be something, I can never fully be considered as such if another has an opposing view. In that type of situation, I am constantly struggling to find a medium between what I want to be and how I am perceived to be (because there is a gap in the subject, splitting it as object and subject between its imaginary unity in the other and its symbolic position in the Other).
I know my posts here are a short and rushed. I would rather develop ideas later, in a string of such short, rushed entries, than bore you with a wall of text.
So I'm just getting around to posting on this thing and immediately I'm confronted with an uncomfortable pressure to explain myself, or at least to introduce myself (which amounts to the same thing). I'll try and spare you any obscene biographical post--isn't it enough for me to say that I'm a student of philosophy? A student, so that I can preemptively excuse myself for any shortcomings in my analysis (shameless cowardice); of philosophy, this blog's primary content. There, I hope you can forgive this very brief personal intrusion and that we can put this behind us.
I promised Joe Holmes (and myself) that I would write about James Cameron's "Avatar," but will put that off for later in the day so that I clear my head with a few thoughts about Gilles Deleuze. Although I've made it a project to follow Deleuze's work from beginning to end, and consider myself to be "Deleuzian" (although this is as ambiguous a term as "liberal"--perhaps my next post could be: "Who is Deleuze? What does that mean for me?"), I am by no means a faithful mistress. In a spontaneous way, I experience this as a problem. To quote a scene from Grey's Anatomy--and I'll go as far as to rank this television show in league with Gilmore Girls so that you won't mistake this for an endorsement--where Callie Torres, after having a thrilling sexual experience with a women, repeatedly cheats on her with a male colleague: "I guess I thought there should be a difference." Specifically, I'm referring to Hegel and Lacan, two other resources I find invaluable (perhaps just as important for me as Deleuze himself). I guess I thought there should be a difference: something incompatible in the content of their philosophical projects that would prevent such an alignment.
So I warn you: this is not an interesting blog post. Not interesting in the standard sense--this is really just an exposition of a certain experience I have of Deleuze's work and not to be confused with high scholarship, nor will it have any appeal to a general public. Fortunately for me, this is the internet, where the hysterical subject is most at home.
Before we begin (if we begin, at this rate) I’d like to provide another brief anecdote that should illustrate my frustration—and perhaps you’ll understand immediately if you’ve ever been gay: “coming out” is never easy, but circumstances often allow in high school for boys to exhibit all the tell-tale behaviors and mannerisms of being gay while still pressured to stay in the closet. After adapting completely to this survival method, these boys (I would add “skinny” and “Christian fundamentalist”) take it too far—they find a girlfriend. The mechanism falters. We become frustrated and shake them by the collar: “Get a hold of yourself! Listen to what you are saying! You like men!” This is a round-about way of illustrating my own frustration with Deleuze’s mixed signals:
“Listen to yourself, Gilly! How can you claim to depart from Freud’s conception of the unconscious? How can you claim to be opposed to dialectic procedure? Who are you trying to kid?”
I am not an idiot—as far as I can tell, there is a gap; that the Deleuzien individual is opposed to the Hegelian general concept; that Deleuze finds Lacan’s so-called structuralist approach too dependent upon the symbolic dimension of reality. I don’t believe any two thinkers are seamless, identical with no left over. All I am saying is that, at least in a few of his earlier monographs (Nietzsche and Philosophy and Bergsonism in particular) he appears to accomplish the very opposite in fact of what he claims explicitly. This becomes more palpable—almost comical—when it occurs within the span of a page or two.
“What Bergson calls ‘pure recollection’ has no psychological existence. That is why it is called virtual, inactive, and unconscious. All these words are dangerous, in particular, the word “unconscious” which, since Freud, has become inseparable from an especially effective and active psychological existence. We will have occasion to compare the Freudian unconscious with the Bergsonian, since Bergson himself made the comparison. We must nevertheless be clear at this point that Bergson does not use the word “unconscious” to denote a psychological reality outside consciousness, but to denote a nonpsychological reality—being as it is in itself… has only ontological significance.” (Bergsonism, 55-56).
This is a beautiful definition of the unconscious—not the psychological reality that Deleuze attributes to Freud, but the very alternative nonpsychological reality that Deleuze admires in Bergson! This is a rather typical characterization of Freud—it is as if history forgot the falling out between Freud and Jung. Let me elaborate: we can understand the unconscious properly if we explore its development (briefly, I promise) between thinkers—Freud: Jung and Lacan. If Freud’s definition of the unconscious is less than unambiguous, we should be clear that it is because his project is psychopathology (consciousness), and thus its formulation was put in terms of consciousness. You could say that a preliminary formulation may have been: if consciousness is primarily a psychological existence, and it is structured unconsciously to meet certain nonpsychological parameters, these parameters are thus unconscious. Of course, I’m using Deleuze’s own terms. Lacan took Freud’s idea further, elaborating upon this symbolic order, the coordinates of the possible which engender any particular psychological form. It wasn’t Freud, but Jung who gave this unconscious a consciousness of its own (the “subconscious”). Under its new guise, the unconscious became a shadowy ghost, a second personality that subsisted our own—influencing our decisions, our aspirations, our destiny. Here Deleuze is directly aligned with Lacan and Freud (I am shamelessly biased against Jung).
Deleuze often provides better illustrations of the unconscious and of dialectics than many psychoanalysts and dialectians themselves (his case for a nonpsychological dimension is quite beautiful in Bergsonism). Many will remember Deleuze, often for no other reason, for declaring the intellectual environment of 20th Century France to be thoroughly "Anti-Hegelian." Stephen Houlgate mentions this in the preface to his acclaimed Hegel Reader. As you may know, Houlgate is himself both a Hegelian and a Nietzschean scholar, and his Criticism of Metaphysics begins significantly with, "Anyone attempting a comparison of the philosophies of Hegel and Nietzsche is immediately confronted with what seems to be an intractable difficulty, for the two men represent 'fundamentally divergent philosophical styles and temperament.'" In the final instance of his analysis, in a veritable head-to-head: Hegel wins. But the man is a Hegelian, so no one was holding their breath.
What does this have to do with anything? Aha, well, Deleuze's statement on anti-Hegelianism appears in the book entitled Nietzsche and Philosophy. Deleuze keeps Hegel at arms' length, and throughout he reiterates that Nietzschean "affirmation" is preferable to the negative, contrived character of Hegelian dialectic. "Gilly, listen to yourself!" Do we not find, explicated beautifully, the spitting image of the dialectic in Deleuze's illustration of the "eternal return" vis-à-vis Nietzsche's last, posthumously published work The Will to Power? Dialectic properly understood--for if we follow Deleuze, we misunderstand eternal recurrence if we interpret it as the eternal "return of the same [content]". It is only in his hands that Hegel and Nietzsche can kiss and make up.
Despite all these mixed-signals (or, rather, because of them), I am inclined to believe that it may have been intentional. I shouldn't need to reproduce here the famous quote of Deleuze's that calls the history of philosophy a sort of "buggery" (probably the most polite translation). The master of critical second readings, of taking thinkers more seriously than they themselves do, of pushing ideas to their end, of re-appropriating narratives and concepts, could these mixed signals be red herrings, invitations for interpretation? Perhaps I refuse to believe that Deleuze just "didn't understand" Hegel or Freud. Students of Deleuze who do not carry back to Deleuze his own approach, his own spirit, do not recognize their master.
Like I said, nothing of any real consequence. Not interesting in the standard sense. But I needed a first post. Now I can start writing.
