Wednesday, May 7, 2008

The unconscious(es)

There are perhaps more unconsciouses than we think there are whenever we talk Freud. I've heard three so far, and am realizing that what I've always thought was the right view (the last--Zizek's) might be helpful if it were not asserted as correct against the others but put beside them and used when the occasion permits. I'll therefore do so here:
First, we get the unconscious (Unbewusst) as merely sub-conscious or not-conscious. Freud explicitly rejects this view in The Interpretation of Dreams, a fact that is probably more significant than we usually think. It means resisting, to some degree, any dialectic between the two systems. Thus the perception-consciousness system, which resides between the two in the earlier writings, becomes crucial.
Second, we get the unconscious thought not in opposition to the conscious--that is, as a separate system--but with certain elements that consciousness exhibits attributed to it. This is the unconscious of classical ideology (when it does not merely mean subconscious), but it is also the unconscious of many remarks in the work of trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth. All of these people talk about "unconscious memories," or "forgetting trauma," which are things that would happen not in the unconscious proper, but in the perception-consciousness system. Obviously this gets more complicated with trauma, masochism, and all the economic problems that make Freud change his model to the I, super-I, and It model later, and so it might help to be open to this view.
Third, the totally unconscious. No memories (though there are inscriptions, psychic energies, etc.), and no talk of "changing" anyone's unconscious by reverse-ideology tactics of whatever sort--at least changing it directly. The only one of these that would do anything is the extremely indirect (though, when used badly, direct--and therefore useless) Lacanian model of critique and analysis. It is utterly foreign to discourse, though able to be localized by certain structures of that discourse. In a certain sense, it is like the Kantian sublime: it exceeds our capacity to cognize what it might be whenever it presents itself to us as such. Paradoxically and crucially, it is not able to be cognized precisely because the truth of the matter is that what we cognize daily actually is it already. That is, the effect of its rupturing our consciousness when it presents itself is to keep us from knowing that there is no real difference between what we cognize and it. In a sense, we make our reality uncognizable in order to keep ourselves from cognizing it, when it irrupts into cognition.

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