"'In the first place, the original totem, and the one which continues to remain most common, is the animal; and, secondly, the earliest totem animals are identical with soul animals.' [Wundt; English translation, 192.] Soul animal (such as birds, snakes, lizards and mice) are appropriate receptacles of souls which have left the body, on account of their rapid movements or flight through the air or of other qualities likely to produce surprise or alarm." [148]
"The secondary revision of the produce of dream-activity is an admirable example of the nature and pretensions of a system. The is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unble to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one. Systems constructed in this way are known to us not only from dreams, but also from phobias, from obsessive thinking and from delusions. The construction of systems is seen most strikingly in delusional disorders (in paranoia), where it dominates the symptomatic picture; but its occurrence in other forms of neuro-psychosis must not be overlooked. In all these cases it can be shown that a rearrangement of the psychical material has been made with a fresh aim in view; and the rearrangement may often have to be a drastic one if the outcome is to be made to appear intelligible from the point of view of the system. Thus a system is best characterized by the fact that at least two reasons can be discovered for each of its products: a reason based upon the premises of the system (a reason, then, which may be delusional) and a concealed reason, which we must judge to be the truly operative and the real one." [119]
"Every day of our lives our experience is in a position to show us the principal characteristics of a 'system'. We have dreams during the night and we have learnt how to interpret them during the day. Dreams may, without contradicting their nature, appear confused and disconnect. But they may, on the contrary, simulate the orderly impressions of a real experience, they may make one event follow from another and make one portion of their content refer to another. Such a result can be more of less successfully achieve; but it scarcely ever succeeds so completely as to leave no absurdity, no right in its texture, visible. When we come to submit a dream to interpretation, we find that the erratic and irregular arrangement of its constituent parts is quite unimportant from the point of view of our understanding it. The essential elements in a dream are the dream-thoughts, and these have meaning, connection and order. But their order is quite other than that remembered by us in the manifest content of the dream. In the latter the connection between the dream-thoughts has been abandoned and may either remain completely lost or be replaced by the new connection exhibited in the manifest content. The elements of the dream, apart from their being condensed, are almost invariably arranged in a new order more or less independent of their earlier arrangement. Finally, it must be added that whatever the original material of the dream-thoughts has been turned into by the dream-activity is then subjected to a further influence. This is what is know as 'secondary revision', and its purpose is evidently to get rid of the disconnectedness and unintelligibility produced by the dream-activity and replace it by a new 'meaning'. But this new meaning, arrived at by secondary revision, is not longer the meaning of the dream-thoughts." [118]
Totem and Taboo
Sigmund Freud
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
"We know a dream from what seems as a rule a fragmentary memory of it which we have after waking. It appears as a mesh-work of sense-impressions, mostly visual but also of other kinds, which have simulated an experience, and with which thought-processes ('knowledge' in the dream) and expressions of affect may be mingled. What we thus remember of the dream I call 'the dream's manifest content'. It is often entirely absurd and confused -- sometimes only the one or the other. But even if it is quite coherent, as it is in the case of some anxiety-dreams, it confronts our mental life as something alien, for whose origin one cannot in any way account." [198]
"The cases of an external and an internal obstacle differ only in the fact that in the latter an already existing inhibition is lifted and that in the former the erection of a new one is avoided. That being so, we shall not be relying too much on speculation if we assert that both for erecting and for maintaining a psychical inhibition some 'psychical expenditure' is required. And, since we know that in both cases of the use of tendentious jokes pleasure is obtained, it is therefore, plausible to suppose that this yield of pleasure corresponds to the psychical expenditure that is saved." [145]
"In the examples we have considered hitherto, the disguised aggressiveness has been directed against people -- in the broker jokes against everyone involved in the business of arranging a marriage: the bride and the bridegroom and their parents. But the object of the joke's attack may equally well be institutions, people in their capacity as vehicles of institutions, dogmas of morality or religion, views of life which enjoy so much respect that objections to them can only be made under the mask of a joke and indeed of a joke concealed by its façade." [129]
"The cases of an external and an internal obstacle differ only in the fact that in the latter an already existing inhibition is lifted and that in the former the erection of a new one is avoided. That being so, we shall not be relying too much on speculation if we assert that both for erecting and for maintaining a psychical inhibition some 'psychical expenditure' is required. And, since we know that in both cases of the use of tendentious jokes pleasure is obtained, it is therefore, plausible to suppose that this yield of pleasure corresponds to the psychical expenditure that is saved." [145]
"In the examples we have considered hitherto, the disguised aggressiveness has been directed against people -- in the broker jokes against everyone involved in the business of arranging a marriage: the bride and the bridegroom and their parents. But the object of the joke's attack may equally well be institutions, people in their capacity as vehicles of institutions, dogmas of morality or religion, views of life which enjoy so much respect that objections to them can only be made under the mask of a joke and indeed of a joke concealed by its façade." [129]
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
"We thus reach what is at bottom no very simple conclusion, namely that at the beginning of mental life the struggle for pleasure was far more intense than later but not so unrestricted: it had to submit to frequent interruptions. In later times the dominance of the pleasure principle is very much more secure, but it itself has no more escaped the process of taming than the other instincts in general." [76]
"Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years to the questions we have put to it. They may be of a kind which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses." [73]
"Clinical observations led us at that time to the view that masochism, the component instinct which is complementary to sadism, must be regarded as sadism that has been turned round upon the subject's own ego." [66]
"At this point the question may well arise in our minds whether any object whatever is served by trying to solve the problem of natural death from a study of the protozoa. The primitive organization of these creatures may conceal from our eyes important conditions which, though in fact present in them too, only become visible in higher animals where they are able to find morphological expression." [58]
"It may be, however, that this belief in the internal necessity of dying is only another of those illusions which we have created 'um die Schwere des Daseins zu ertragen'. It is certainly not a primaeval belief. The notion of 'natural death' is quite foreign to primitive races; they attribute every death that occurs among them to the influence of an enemy or of an evil spirit." [53]
"But what is the important event in the development of living substance which is being repeated in sexual reproduction, or in its fore-runner, the conjugation of two protista? We cannot say; and we should consequently feel relieved if the whole structure of our argument turned out to be mistaken. The opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts would then cease to hold and the compulsion to repeat would no longer possess the importance we have ascribed to it." [52]
"I will add only a word to suggest that the efforts of Eros to combine organic substances into ever large unities probably provide a substitute for this 'instinct toward perfection' whose existence we cannot admit." [51]
"It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey." [49]
"Let us suppose, then, that all the organic instincts are conservative, are acquired historically and tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things. It follows that the phenomena of organic development must be attributed to external disturbing and diverting influences. The elementary living entity would from its very beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained the same, it would do no more than constantly repeat the same course of life. In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun." [45]
"I have argued elsewhere that 'war neuroses' (in so far as that term implies something more than a reference to the circumstances of the illness's onset) may very well be traumatic neuroses which have been facilitated by a conflict in the ego. The fact to which I have referred on pages 10 - 11, that a gross physical injury caused simultaneously by trauma diminishes the chances that a neurosis will develop, becomes intelligible if one bears in mind two facts which have been stressed by psycho-analytic research: firstly, that mechanical agitation must be recognized as one of the sources of sexual excitation, and secondly, that painful and feverish illnesses exercise a powerful effect, so long as they last, on the distribution of libido." [38]
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud
"Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years to the questions we have put to it. They may be of a kind which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses." [73]
"Clinical observations led us at that time to the view that masochism, the component instinct which is complementary to sadism, must be regarded as sadism that has been turned round upon the subject's own ego." [66]
"At this point the question may well arise in our minds whether any object whatever is served by trying to solve the problem of natural death from a study of the protozoa. The primitive organization of these creatures may conceal from our eyes important conditions which, though in fact present in them too, only become visible in higher animals where they are able to find morphological expression." [58]
"It may be, however, that this belief in the internal necessity of dying is only another of those illusions which we have created 'um die Schwere des Daseins zu ertragen'. It is certainly not a primaeval belief. The notion of 'natural death' is quite foreign to primitive races; they attribute every death that occurs among them to the influence of an enemy or of an evil spirit." [53]
"But what is the important event in the development of living substance which is being repeated in sexual reproduction, or in its fore-runner, the conjugation of two protista? We cannot say; and we should consequently feel relieved if the whole structure of our argument turned out to be mistaken. The opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts would then cease to hold and the compulsion to repeat would no longer possess the importance we have ascribed to it." [52]
"I will add only a word to suggest that the efforts of Eros to combine organic substances into ever large unities probably provide a substitute for this 'instinct toward perfection' whose existence we cannot admit." [51]
"It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey." [49]
"Let us suppose, then, that all the organic instincts are conservative, are acquired historically and tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things. It follows that the phenomena of organic development must be attributed to external disturbing and diverting influences. The elementary living entity would from its very beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained the same, it would do no more than constantly repeat the same course of life. In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun." [45]
"I have argued elsewhere that 'war neuroses' (in so far as that term implies something more than a reference to the circumstances of the illness's onset) may very well be traumatic neuroses which have been facilitated by a conflict in the ego. The fact to which I have referred on pages 10 - 11, that a gross physical injury caused simultaneously by trauma diminishes the chances that a neurosis will develop, becomes intelligible if one bears in mind two facts which have been stressed by psycho-analytic research: firstly, that mechanical agitation must be recognized as one of the sources of sexual excitation, and secondly, that painful and feverish illnesses exercise a powerful effect, so long as they last, on the distribution of libido." [38]
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud
Friday, November 21, 2008
A Lover's Discourse
"A man who wants the truth is never answered save in strong, highly colored images, which nonetheless turn ambiguous, indecisive, once he tries to transform them into signs: as in any manticism, the consulting lover must make his own truth." [215]
"... there is no other object in the amorous world. It is a world sensuously impoverished, abstract, erased, canceled out; my gaze passes through things without acknowledging their seduction ... In the code of the Japanese haiku, there must always be a word which refers back to the time of day and of the year; this is the kigo, the season-word. Amorous notation retains the kigo, that faint allusion to the rain, to the evening, to the light, to everything that envelops, diffuses." [174]
"It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with." [135]
"... this voice, when it reaches me, when it is here, while it (with great difficulty) survives, is a voice I never entirely recognize; as if it emerged from under a mask (thus we are told that the masks used in Greek tragedy had a magical function: to give the voice a chthonic origin, to distort, to alienate the voice, to make it come from somewhere under the earth)." [115]
"In the text, the fade-out of voices is a good thing; the voices of the narrative come, go, disappear, overlap; we do not know who is speaking; the text speaks, that is all: no more image, nothing but language." [112]
"Yet, within this infantile embrace, the genital unfailingly appears; it cuts off the diffuse sensuality of the incestuous embrace; the logic of desire begins to function, the will-to-possess returns, the adult is superimposed upon the child. I am then two subjects at once: I want maternity and genitality. (The lover might be defined as a child getting an erection: such was the young Eros.)" [104]
"The 'perpetual mutability' (in inconstantia constans) which animates me, far from squeezing all those I encounter into the same functional type (not to answer my demand), violently dislocates their false community: errantry does not align -- it produces iridescence: what results is the nuance. Thus I move on, to the end of the tapestry, from one nuance to the next (the nuance is the last state of a color which can be named; the nuance is the Intractable)." [103]
"The amorous catastrophe may be close to what has been called, in the psychotic domain, an extreme situation, "a situation experience by the subject as irremediably bound to destroy him"; the image is drawn from what occurred at Dachau." [48]
"Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move. Waiting for a telephone call is thereby woven out of tiny unavowable interdictions to infinity: I forbid myself to the leave the room, to go to the toilet, even to telephone (to keep the line from being busy) ..." [38]
"Throughout any love life, figures occur to the lover without any order, for on each occasion they depend on an (internal or external) accident ... No logic links the figures, determines their contiguity: the figures are non-syntagmatic, non-narrative; they are Erinyes; they stir, collide, subside, return, vanish with no more order than the flight of mosquitoes." [7]
"It is said that words alone have specific uses, not sentences; but underneath each figure lies a sentence, frequently an unknown (unconscious?) one, which has its use in the signifying economy of the amorous subject. This matrix-sentence (here merely postulated) is not a "saturated" one, not a completed message. Its active principle is not what it says but what it articulates: by and large, it is only a "syntactical aria", a "mode of construction"." [5]
A Lover's Discourse
Roland Barthes
"... there is no other object in the amorous world. It is a world sensuously impoverished, abstract, erased, canceled out; my gaze passes through things without acknowledging their seduction ... In the code of the Japanese haiku, there must always be a word which refers back to the time of day and of the year; this is the kigo, the season-word. Amorous notation retains the kigo, that faint allusion to the rain, to the evening, to the light, to everything that envelops, diffuses." [174]
"It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with." [135]
"... this voice, when it reaches me, when it is here, while it (with great difficulty) survives, is a voice I never entirely recognize; as if it emerged from under a mask (thus we are told that the masks used in Greek tragedy had a magical function: to give the voice a chthonic origin, to distort, to alienate the voice, to make it come from somewhere under the earth)." [115]
"In the text, the fade-out of voices is a good thing; the voices of the narrative come, go, disappear, overlap; we do not know who is speaking; the text speaks, that is all: no more image, nothing but language." [112]
"Yet, within this infantile embrace, the genital unfailingly appears; it cuts off the diffuse sensuality of the incestuous embrace; the logic of desire begins to function, the will-to-possess returns, the adult is superimposed upon the child. I am then two subjects at once: I want maternity and genitality. (The lover might be defined as a child getting an erection: such was the young Eros.)" [104]
"The 'perpetual mutability' (in inconstantia constans) which animates me, far from squeezing all those I encounter into the same functional type (not to answer my demand), violently dislocates their false community: errantry does not align -- it produces iridescence: what results is the nuance. Thus I move on, to the end of the tapestry, from one nuance to the next (the nuance is the last state of a color which can be named; the nuance is the Intractable)." [103]
"The amorous catastrophe may be close to what has been called, in the psychotic domain, an extreme situation, "a situation experience by the subject as irremediably bound to destroy him"; the image is drawn from what occurred at Dachau." [48]
"Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move. Waiting for a telephone call is thereby woven out of tiny unavowable interdictions to infinity: I forbid myself to the leave the room, to go to the toilet, even to telephone (to keep the line from being busy) ..." [38]
"Throughout any love life, figures occur to the lover without any order, for on each occasion they depend on an (internal or external) accident ... No logic links the figures, determines their contiguity: the figures are non-syntagmatic, non-narrative; they are Erinyes; they stir, collide, subside, return, vanish with no more order than the flight of mosquitoes." [7]
"It is said that words alone have specific uses, not sentences; but underneath each figure lies a sentence, frequently an unknown (unconscious?) one, which has its use in the signifying economy of the amorous subject. This matrix-sentence (here merely postulated) is not a "saturated" one, not a completed message. Its active principle is not what it says but what it articulates: by and large, it is only a "syntactical aria", a "mode of construction"." [5]
A Lover's Discourse
Roland Barthes
On the Way to Language
"Flame is glowing lumination. What flame is the ek-stasis which lightens and calls forth radiance, but which may also go on consuming and reduce all to white ashes." [179]
"That earliness preserves the original nature -- a nature so far still veiled -- of time. This nature will go on being impenetrable to the dominant mode of thinking as long as the Aristotelian concept of time, still standard everywhere, retains its currency. According to this concept, time -- whether conceived mechanically or dynamically or in terms of atomic decay -- is the dimension of the quantitative or qualitative calculation of duration as a sequential progression." [176]
"Originally the word "site" suggests a place in which everything comes together, is concentrated. The site gathers unto itself, supremely and in the extreme. Its gathering power penetrates and pervades everything. The site, the gathering power, gathers in a preserves all it has gathered, not like an encapsulating shell but rather by penetrating with its light all it has gathered, and only thus releasing it into its own nature." [159]
"It is enough to suggest it with a short remark. Rhythm, rhusmos, does not mean flux and flowing, but rather form. Rhythm is what is at rest, what forms the movement of dance and song, and thus lets it rest within itself. Rhythm bestows rest."
"We might perhaps prepare a little for the change in our relation to language. Perhaps this experience might awaken: All reflective thinking is poetic, and all poetry in turn is a kind of thinking. The two belong together by virtue of that Saying which has already bespoken itself to what is unspoken because it is a through as a thanks." [136]
"The essential being of language is Saying as Showing. Its showing character is not based on signs of any kind; rather, all signs arise from a showing within whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs." [123]
"Nor is the ability to speak just one among man's many talents, of the same order as the others. The ability to speak is what marks man as man. This mark contains the design of his being. Man would not be man if it were denied him to speak unceasingly, from everywhere and every which way, in many variations, and to speak in terms of an "it is" that most often remains unspoken. Language, in granting all this to man, is the foundation of human being." [112]
"We proceed too crudely, though, when we speak everywhere without further definition of signs, of something that signifies and to some extent shows something else ... What matters here is that we keep the entire structure of sign relations before our eyes, because it has remained the standard for all later considerations of language, although with numerous modifications." [97]
"An explanation within the scope of grammatical, that is logical and metaphysical, ways of thinking may bring us a little closer to the matter, though it can never do justice to the situation that the guide-word names." [94]
"These lectures make their way within the neighborhood of poetry and thinking, underway on the lookout for a possibility of undergoing an experience with language." [92]
"To the modern mind, whose ideas about everything are punched out in the die presses of technical-scientific calculation, the object of knowledge is part of the method. And method follows what is in fact the utmost corruption and degeneration of a way." [91]
"For man is man only because he is granted the promise of language, because he is needful to language, that he may speak it." [90]
"When thinking tries to pursue the poetic word, it turns out that the word, that saying has no being. Yet our current notions resist such an imputation. Everybody, after all, sees and hears words in writing and in sound. They are; they can be like things, palpable to the senses. To offer a crude example, we only need to open a dictionary. It is full of printed things. Indeed, all kinds of things. Plenty of terms, and not a single word, because a dictionary can neither grasps nor keep the word by which the terms become words and speak as words. Where does the word, where does Saying belong?" [87]
"The word for the word can never be found in that place where fate provides the language that names and so endows all beings, so that they may be, radiant and flourishing in their being." [86]
"Analytic philosophy, which is set on producing this super-language, is thus quite consistent when it considers itself metalinguistics. That sounds like metaphysics -- not only sounds like it, it is metaphysics. Metalinguistics is the metaphysics of the thoroughgoing technicalization of all languages into the sole operative instrument of interplanetary information. Metalanguage and sputnik, metalinguistics and rocketry, are the Same." [58]
"To those who are superficial and in a hurry, no less than to those who are deliberate and reflective, it must look as though there were no mystery anywhere." [50]
"For your gaze into the nature of language does not fasten upon the phonetics and the written forms of the words, which are generally conceived to constitute the expressive character of language." [35]
"Hints need the widest sphere in which to swing ... where mortals go to and fro only slowly." [27]
"Hints and gestures, according to what ou indicated, differ from signs and chiffres, all of which have their habitat in metaphysics." [26]
"But the way there cannot be staked out according to a plan, like a road. Thinking is fond of a manner of road-building that is, I would almost say, wondrous." [21]
"How is one to give a name to what he is still searching for? To assign the naming word is, after all, what constitutes finding." [20]
"Regardless of what the aesthetic quality of a Japanese film may turn out to be, the mere fact that our world is set forth in the frame of a film forces that world into the sphere of what you call objectness. The photographic objectification is already a consequence of the ever wider outreach of Europeanization." [17]
"We Japanese do not think it strange if a dialogue leaves undefined what is really intended, or even restores it back to the keeping of the undefinable." [13]
"The danger of our dialogues was hidden in language itself, not in what we discussed, nor in the way in which we tried to do so." [4]
"I: Do you need concepts? J: Presumably, yes, because since the encounter with European thinking, there has come to light a certain incapacity in our language. J: In what way? I: It lacks the delimiting power to represent objects related in an unequivocal order above and below each other." [2]
On the Way to Language
Martin Heidegger
"That earliness preserves the original nature -- a nature so far still veiled -- of time. This nature will go on being impenetrable to the dominant mode of thinking as long as the Aristotelian concept of time, still standard everywhere, retains its currency. According to this concept, time -- whether conceived mechanically or dynamically or in terms of atomic decay -- is the dimension of the quantitative or qualitative calculation of duration as a sequential progression." [176]
"Originally the word "site" suggests a place in which everything comes together, is concentrated. The site gathers unto itself, supremely and in the extreme. Its gathering power penetrates and pervades everything. The site, the gathering power, gathers in a preserves all it has gathered, not like an encapsulating shell but rather by penetrating with its light all it has gathered, and only thus releasing it into its own nature." [159]
"It is enough to suggest it with a short remark. Rhythm, rhusmos, does not mean flux and flowing, but rather form. Rhythm is what is at rest, what forms the movement of dance and song, and thus lets it rest within itself. Rhythm bestows rest."
"We might perhaps prepare a little for the change in our relation to language. Perhaps this experience might awaken: All reflective thinking is poetic, and all poetry in turn is a kind of thinking. The two belong together by virtue of that Saying which has already bespoken itself to what is unspoken because it is a through as a thanks." [136]
"The essential being of language is Saying as Showing. Its showing character is not based on signs of any kind; rather, all signs arise from a showing within whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs." [123]
"Nor is the ability to speak just one among man's many talents, of the same order as the others. The ability to speak is what marks man as man. This mark contains the design of his being. Man would not be man if it were denied him to speak unceasingly, from everywhere and every which way, in many variations, and to speak in terms of an "it is" that most often remains unspoken. Language, in granting all this to man, is the foundation of human being." [112]
"We proceed too crudely, though, when we speak everywhere without further definition of signs, of something that signifies and to some extent shows something else ... What matters here is that we keep the entire structure of sign relations before our eyes, because it has remained the standard for all later considerations of language, although with numerous modifications." [97]
"An explanation within the scope of grammatical, that is logical and metaphysical, ways of thinking may bring us a little closer to the matter, though it can never do justice to the situation that the guide-word names." [94]
"These lectures make their way within the neighborhood of poetry and thinking, underway on the lookout for a possibility of undergoing an experience with language." [92]
"To the modern mind, whose ideas about everything are punched out in the die presses of technical-scientific calculation, the object of knowledge is part of the method. And method follows what is in fact the utmost corruption and degeneration of a way." [91]
"For man is man only because he is granted the promise of language, because he is needful to language, that he may speak it." [90]
"When thinking tries to pursue the poetic word, it turns out that the word, that saying has no being. Yet our current notions resist such an imputation. Everybody, after all, sees and hears words in writing and in sound. They are; they can be like things, palpable to the senses. To offer a crude example, we only need to open a dictionary. It is full of printed things. Indeed, all kinds of things. Plenty of terms, and not a single word, because a dictionary can neither grasps nor keep the word by which the terms become words and speak as words. Where does the word, where does Saying belong?" [87]
"The word for the word can never be found in that place where fate provides the language that names and so endows all beings, so that they may be, radiant and flourishing in their being." [86]
"Analytic philosophy, which is set on producing this super-language, is thus quite consistent when it considers itself metalinguistics. That sounds like metaphysics -- not only sounds like it, it is metaphysics. Metalinguistics is the metaphysics of the thoroughgoing technicalization of all languages into the sole operative instrument of interplanetary information. Metalanguage and sputnik, metalinguistics and rocketry, are the Same." [58]
"To those who are superficial and in a hurry, no less than to those who are deliberate and reflective, it must look as though there were no mystery anywhere." [50]
"For your gaze into the nature of language does not fasten upon the phonetics and the written forms of the words, which are generally conceived to constitute the expressive character of language." [35]
"Hints need the widest sphere in which to swing ... where mortals go to and fro only slowly." [27]
"Hints and gestures, according to what ou indicated, differ from signs and chiffres, all of which have their habitat in metaphysics." [26]
"But the way there cannot be staked out according to a plan, like a road. Thinking is fond of a manner of road-building that is, I would almost say, wondrous." [21]
"How is one to give a name to what he is still searching for? To assign the naming word is, after all, what constitutes finding." [20]
"Regardless of what the aesthetic quality of a Japanese film may turn out to be, the mere fact that our world is set forth in the frame of a film forces that world into the sphere of what you call objectness. The photographic objectification is already a consequence of the ever wider outreach of Europeanization." [17]
"We Japanese do not think it strange if a dialogue leaves undefined what is really intended, or even restores it back to the keeping of the undefinable." [13]
"The danger of our dialogues was hidden in language itself, not in what we discussed, nor in the way in which we tried to do so." [4]
"I: Do you need concepts? J: Presumably, yes, because since the encounter with European thinking, there has come to light a certain incapacity in our language. J: In what way? I: It lacks the delimiting power to represent objects related in an unequivocal order above and below each other." [2]
On the Way to Language
Martin Heidegger
Monday, November 3, 2008
S/Z
"'Life' then, in the classic text, becomes a nauseating mixture of common opinions, a smothering layer of received ideas: in fact, it is in these cultural codes that what is outmoded in Balzac, the essence of what, in Balzac, cannot be (re)written, is concentrated. What is outmoded, of course, is not a defect in performance, a personal inability of the author to afford opportunities in his work for what will be modern, but rather a fatal condition of Replete Literature, mortally stalked by the army of stereotypes it contains. Thus, a critique of the references (the cultural code) has never been tenable except through trickery, on the very limits of Replete Literature, where it is possible (but at the cost of what acrobatics and with what uncertainty) to criticize the stereotype (to vomit it up) without recourse to a new stereotype: that or irony." [206]
"As though terror-struck: who is speaking here? It cannot be Sarrasine, even indirectly, since he interprets La Zambinella's fear as timidity. Above all, it cannot be the narrator, because he knows that La Zambinella really is terrified. The modalization (as though) expresses the interests of only one character , who is neither Sarrasine nor the narrator, but the reader: it is the reader who is concerned that the truth be simultaneously named and evaded, an ambiguity which the discourse nicely creates by as thought, which indicates the truth and yet reduces it declaratively to a mere appearance. What we hear, therefore, is the displaced voice which the reader lends, by proxy, to the discourse: the discourse is speaking according to the reader's interests. Whereby we see that writing is not the communication of a message which starts from the author and proceeds to the reader; it is specifically the voice of reading itself: in the text, only the reader speaks." [151]
"Yet this noise, this uncertainty are emitted by the discourse with a view toward a communication: they are given to the reader so that he may feed on them: what the reader reads is a countercommunication; and if we grant that the double understanding far exceeds the limited case of the play on words or the equivocation and permeates, in various forms and densities, all classic writing (by very reason of its polysemic vocation), we see that literatures are in fact arts of "noise"; what the reader consumes is this defect in communication, this deficient message; what the whole structuration effects for him and offers him as the most precious nourishment is a countercommunication; the reader is an accomplice, not of this or that character, but of the discourse itself insofar as it plays on the division of reception, the impurity of communication: the discourse, and not one of another of its characters, if the only positive hero of the story." [145]
"It follows that the meaning of a text lies not in this or that interpretation but in the diagrammatic totality of its readings, in their plural system. Some will say that the scene in the theater "as told by the author" has the privilege of literality and thus constitutes the "truth," the reality of the text; the reading of the orgasm would therefore be a symbolic reading in their eyes, an unwarranted elucubration. "The text and nothing but the text": this proposition has little meaning except intimidation: the literality of the text is a system like any other: the literal in Balzac is, after all, nothing but the "transcription" of another literality, that of the symbol: euphemism is a language. In fact, the meaning of a text can be nothing but the plurality of its systems, its infinite (circular) "tanscribability": one system transcribes another, but reciprocally as well: with regard to the text, there is no "primary," "natural," "national," "mother" critical language: from the outset, as it is created, the text is multilingual; there is no entrance language or exit language for the textual dictionary, since it is not the dictionary's (closed) definitional power that the text possesses, but its infinite structure." [120]
"To depart / to travel / to arrive / to stay: the journey is saturated. To end, to fill, to join, to unify -- one might say that this is the basic requirement of the readerly, as though it were prey to some obsessive fear: that of omitting a connection. Fear of forgetting engenders the appearance of a logic of actions; terms and the linkns between them are posited (invented) in such a way that they unite, duplicate each other, create an illusion of continuity. The plenum generates the drawing intended to "express" it, and the drawing evokes the complement, coloring: as if the readerly abhors a vacuum. What would be the narrative of a journey in which it was said that one stays somewhere without having arrived, that one travels without having departed -- in which it was never said, having departed, one arrives of fails to arrive? Such a narrative would be a scandal, the extenuation, by hemorrhage, of readerliness." [105]
"Sculpture is said to struggle with matter, not with representation, as in the case of painting; it is a demiurgic art, an art which extracts rather than covers, an art of the hand that takes hold." [99]
"All subversion, or all novelistic submission, thus beings with the Proper Name: specific -- as well specified -- as is the Proustian narrator's social position, his perilously maintained lack of a name creates a serious deflation of the realistic illusion: the Proustian I is not of itself a name (in contrast to the substantive character of the novelistic pronoun, XXVIII); because it is undermined, trbouled by the disturbances of age, it loses its biographical tense by a certain blurring. What is obsolescent in today's novel is not the novelistic, it is the character; what can no longer be written is the Proper Name." [95]
"Thus begins a process of nomination which is the essence of the reader's activity: to read is to struggle to name, to subject the sentences of the text to a semantic transformation. This transformation is erratic; it consists in hesitating among several names: if we are told that Sarrasine had "one of those strong wills that know no obstacle," what are we to read? will, energy, obstinancy, stubbornness, etc.? The connotator refers not so much to a name as to a synonymic complex whose common nucleus we sense even while the discourse is leading us toward other possibilities, toward other related signifieds: thus, reading is absorbed in a kind of metonymic skid, each synonym adding to its neighbor some new trait, some new departure ..." [92]
"The game here is grammatical in essence (and therefore much more exemplary): it consists in presenting, acrobatically, for as long as possible, the plural diversity of possibilities within a singular sytagm, to "transform" the verbal proposition behind each cause ("because he was hard of hearing") into a double substantive ("hardness of hearing"); in short, to produce a constant model carried out to infinity, which is to constrain language as one wishes: whence the very pleasure of power." [58 - 59]
"State by the discourse itself, the ironic code is, in principle, an explicit quotation of what someone has said; however, irony acts as a signpost, and thereby it destroys the multivalence we might expect from quoted discourse. A multivalent text can carry out its basic duplicity only if it subverts the opposition between true and false, if it fails to attribute quotations (even when seeking to discredit them) to explicit authorities, if it flouts all respect for irign, paternity, propriety, if it destroys the voice which could give the text its ("organic") unity, in short, if it coldy and fraudulently abolishes quotation marks which must, as we say, in all honesty enclose a quotation and juridically distribute the ownership of the sentences to their respective proprietors, like subdivisions of a field. For multivalence (contradicted by irony) is a transgression of ownership." [44 - 45]
"In modern texts, the voices are so treated that any reference is impossible: the discourse, or better, the language, speaks: nothing more. By contrast, in the classic text the majority of the utterances are assigned an origin, we can identify their parentage, who is speaking: either a consciousness (of a character, of the author) or a culture (the anonymous is still an origin, a voice: the voice we find, for example, in the gnomic code); however, it may happen that in the classic text, always haunted by the appropriation of speech, the voice gets lost, as though it had leaked out through a hole in the discourse." [41]
"The five codes mentioned, frequently heard simultaneously, in fact endow the text with a kind of plural quality (the text is actually polyphonic), but of the five codes, only three establish permutable, reversible connections, outside the constraint of time (the semic, cultural, and symbolic codes); the other two impose their terms according to an irreversible order (the hermeneutic and proairetic codes). The classic text, therefore, is actually tabular (and not linear), but its tabularity is vectorized, it follows a logico-temporal order. It is a multivalent but incompletely reversible system. What blocks its reversibility is just what limits the plural nature of the classic text. These blocks have names: on the one hand, truth; on the other, empiricism: against -- or between -- them, the modern text comes into being." [30]
"... the readerly text is a tonal text (for which habit creates a reading process just as conditioned as our hearing: one might say there is a reading eye as there is a tonal ear, so that to unlearn the readerly would be the same as to unlearn the tonal), and its tonal unity is basically dependent on two sequential codes: the revelation of truth and the coordination of the actions represented: there is the same constraint in the gradual order of melody and in the equally gradual order of the narrative sequence. Now, it is precisely this constraint which reduces the plural of the classic text." [30]
"The five codes create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes (or rather, in passing, becomes text). Thus, if we make no effort to structure each code, or the five codes among themselves, we do so deliberately, in order to assume the multivalence of the text, its partial reversibility. We are, in fact, concerned not to manifest a structure but to produce a structuration. The blanks and looseness of the analysis will be like footprints marking the escape of the text; for if the text is subject to some form, this form is not unitary, architectonic, finite: it is the fragment, the shards, the broken or obliterated network -- all the movements and inflections of a "dissolve," which permits both overlapping and loss of messages." [20]
"Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us 'throw away' the story once it has been consumed ('devoured'), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality: rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology ('this happens before of after that') and recaptures a mythic time (without before or after); it contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is a primary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only , afterwards, have to 'explicate', to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read: there is no first reading, even if the text is concerned to give us that illusion by several operations of suspense, artifices more spectacular than persuasive); rereading is no longer consumption, but play (that play which is the return of the different)." [15 - 16]
"... but the step-by-step commentary is of necessity a renewal of the entrances to the text, it avoids structuring the text excessively, avoids giving it that additional structure which would come from a dissertation and would close it: it stars the text, instead of assembling it." [13]
"If we want to remain attentive to the plural of a text (however limited it may be), we must renounce structuring this text in large masses, as was done by classical rhetoric and by secondary-school explication: no construction of the text: everything signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure. Whence the idea, and so to speak the necessity, of a gradual analysis of a single text." [11 - 12]
"Reading involves risks of objectivity or subjectivity (both are imaginary) only insofar as we define the text as an expressive object (presented for our own expression), sublimated under a morality of truth, in one instance laxist; in the other, ascetic. Yet reading is not a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing which we endow with all the glamour of creation and anteriority. It is a form of work (which is why it would be better to speak of a lexeological act -- even a lexeographical act, since I write my reading), and the method of this work is topological: I am not hidden within the text, I am simply irrecoverable from it: my task is to move, to shift systems whose perspective ends neither at the text nor at the 'I': in operational terms, the meanings I find are established not by 'me' or by others, but by their sytematic mark: there is not other proof of a reading than the quality and endurance of its systematics; in other words: than its functioning. To read, in fact, is a labor of language. To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept toward other names; names call to each other, reassemble, and their grouping call for further naming: I name, I unname, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metonymic labor." [10 - 11]
S/Z
Roland Barthes
"As though terror-struck: who is speaking here? It cannot be Sarrasine, even indirectly, since he interprets La Zambinella's fear as timidity. Above all, it cannot be the narrator, because he knows that La Zambinella really is terrified. The modalization (as though) expresses the interests of only one character , who is neither Sarrasine nor the narrator, but the reader: it is the reader who is concerned that the truth be simultaneously named and evaded, an ambiguity which the discourse nicely creates by as thought, which indicates the truth and yet reduces it declaratively to a mere appearance. What we hear, therefore, is the displaced voice which the reader lends, by proxy, to the discourse: the discourse is speaking according to the reader's interests. Whereby we see that writing is not the communication of a message which starts from the author and proceeds to the reader; it is specifically the voice of reading itself: in the text, only the reader speaks." [151]
"Yet this noise, this uncertainty are emitted by the discourse with a view toward a communication: they are given to the reader so that he may feed on them: what the reader reads is a countercommunication; and if we grant that the double understanding far exceeds the limited case of the play on words or the equivocation and permeates, in various forms and densities, all classic writing (by very reason of its polysemic vocation), we see that literatures are in fact arts of "noise"; what the reader consumes is this defect in communication, this deficient message; what the whole structuration effects for him and offers him as the most precious nourishment is a countercommunication; the reader is an accomplice, not of this or that character, but of the discourse itself insofar as it plays on the division of reception, the impurity of communication: the discourse, and not one of another of its characters, if the only positive hero of the story." [145]
"It follows that the meaning of a text lies not in this or that interpretation but in the diagrammatic totality of its readings, in their plural system. Some will say that the scene in the theater "as told by the author" has the privilege of literality and thus constitutes the "truth," the reality of the text; the reading of the orgasm would therefore be a symbolic reading in their eyes, an unwarranted elucubration. "The text and nothing but the text": this proposition has little meaning except intimidation: the literality of the text is a system like any other: the literal in Balzac is, after all, nothing but the "transcription" of another literality, that of the symbol: euphemism is a language. In fact, the meaning of a text can be nothing but the plurality of its systems, its infinite (circular) "tanscribability": one system transcribes another, but reciprocally as well: with regard to the text, there is no "primary," "natural," "national," "mother" critical language: from the outset, as it is created, the text is multilingual; there is no entrance language or exit language for the textual dictionary, since it is not the dictionary's (closed) definitional power that the text possesses, but its infinite structure." [120]
"To depart / to travel / to arrive / to stay: the journey is saturated. To end, to fill, to join, to unify -- one might say that this is the basic requirement of the readerly, as though it were prey to some obsessive fear: that of omitting a connection. Fear of forgetting engenders the appearance of a logic of actions; terms and the linkns between them are posited (invented) in such a way that they unite, duplicate each other, create an illusion of continuity. The plenum generates the drawing intended to "express" it, and the drawing evokes the complement, coloring: as if the readerly abhors a vacuum. What would be the narrative of a journey in which it was said that one stays somewhere without having arrived, that one travels without having departed -- in which it was never said, having departed, one arrives of fails to arrive? Such a narrative would be a scandal, the extenuation, by hemorrhage, of readerliness." [105]
"Sculpture is said to struggle with matter, not with representation, as in the case of painting; it is a demiurgic art, an art which extracts rather than covers, an art of the hand that takes hold." [99]
"All subversion, or all novelistic submission, thus beings with the Proper Name: specific -- as well specified -- as is the Proustian narrator's social position, his perilously maintained lack of a name creates a serious deflation of the realistic illusion: the Proustian I is not of itself a name (in contrast to the substantive character of the novelistic pronoun, XXVIII); because it is undermined, trbouled by the disturbances of age, it loses its biographical tense by a certain blurring. What is obsolescent in today's novel is not the novelistic, it is the character; what can no longer be written is the Proper Name." [95]
"Thus begins a process of nomination which is the essence of the reader's activity: to read is to struggle to name, to subject the sentences of the text to a semantic transformation. This transformation is erratic; it consists in hesitating among several names: if we are told that Sarrasine had "one of those strong wills that know no obstacle," what are we to read? will, energy, obstinancy, stubbornness, etc.? The connotator refers not so much to a name as to a synonymic complex whose common nucleus we sense even while the discourse is leading us toward other possibilities, toward other related signifieds: thus, reading is absorbed in a kind of metonymic skid, each synonym adding to its neighbor some new trait, some new departure ..." [92]
"The game here is grammatical in essence (and therefore much more exemplary): it consists in presenting, acrobatically, for as long as possible, the plural diversity of possibilities within a singular sytagm, to "transform" the verbal proposition behind each cause ("because he was hard of hearing") into a double substantive ("hardness of hearing"); in short, to produce a constant model carried out to infinity, which is to constrain language as one wishes: whence the very pleasure of power." [58 - 59]
"State by the discourse itself, the ironic code is, in principle, an explicit quotation of what someone has said; however, irony acts as a signpost, and thereby it destroys the multivalence we might expect from quoted discourse. A multivalent text can carry out its basic duplicity only if it subverts the opposition between true and false, if it fails to attribute quotations (even when seeking to discredit them) to explicit authorities, if it flouts all respect for irign, paternity, propriety, if it destroys the voice which could give the text its ("organic") unity, in short, if it coldy and fraudulently abolishes quotation marks which must, as we say, in all honesty enclose a quotation and juridically distribute the ownership of the sentences to their respective proprietors, like subdivisions of a field. For multivalence (contradicted by irony) is a transgression of ownership." [44 - 45]
"In modern texts, the voices are so treated that any reference is impossible: the discourse, or better, the language, speaks: nothing more. By contrast, in the classic text the majority of the utterances are assigned an origin, we can identify their parentage, who is speaking: either a consciousness (of a character, of the author) or a culture (the anonymous is still an origin, a voice: the voice we find, for example, in the gnomic code); however, it may happen that in the classic text, always haunted by the appropriation of speech, the voice gets lost, as though it had leaked out through a hole in the discourse." [41]
"The five codes mentioned, frequently heard simultaneously, in fact endow the text with a kind of plural quality (the text is actually polyphonic), but of the five codes, only three establish permutable, reversible connections, outside the constraint of time (the semic, cultural, and symbolic codes); the other two impose their terms according to an irreversible order (the hermeneutic and proairetic codes). The classic text, therefore, is actually tabular (and not linear), but its tabularity is vectorized, it follows a logico-temporal order. It is a multivalent but incompletely reversible system. What blocks its reversibility is just what limits the plural nature of the classic text. These blocks have names: on the one hand, truth; on the other, empiricism: against -- or between -- them, the modern text comes into being." [30]
"... the readerly text is a tonal text (for which habit creates a reading process just as conditioned as our hearing: one might say there is a reading eye as there is a tonal ear, so that to unlearn the readerly would be the same as to unlearn the tonal), and its tonal unity is basically dependent on two sequential codes: the revelation of truth and the coordination of the actions represented: there is the same constraint in the gradual order of melody and in the equally gradual order of the narrative sequence. Now, it is precisely this constraint which reduces the plural of the classic text." [30]
"The five codes create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes (or rather, in passing, becomes text). Thus, if we make no effort to structure each code, or the five codes among themselves, we do so deliberately, in order to assume the multivalence of the text, its partial reversibility. We are, in fact, concerned not to manifest a structure but to produce a structuration. The blanks and looseness of the analysis will be like footprints marking the escape of the text; for if the text is subject to some form, this form is not unitary, architectonic, finite: it is the fragment, the shards, the broken or obliterated network -- all the movements and inflections of a "dissolve," which permits both overlapping and loss of messages." [20]
"Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us 'throw away' the story once it has been consumed ('devoured'), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality: rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology ('this happens before of after that') and recaptures a mythic time (without before or after); it contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is a primary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only , afterwards, have to 'explicate', to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read: there is no first reading, even if the text is concerned to give us that illusion by several operations of suspense, artifices more spectacular than persuasive); rereading is no longer consumption, but play (that play which is the return of the different)." [15 - 16]
"... but the step-by-step commentary is of necessity a renewal of the entrances to the text, it avoids structuring the text excessively, avoids giving it that additional structure which would come from a dissertation and would close it: it stars the text, instead of assembling it." [13]
"If we want to remain attentive to the plural of a text (however limited it may be), we must renounce structuring this text in large masses, as was done by classical rhetoric and by secondary-school explication: no construction of the text: everything signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure. Whence the idea, and so to speak the necessity, of a gradual analysis of a single text." [11 - 12]
"Reading involves risks of objectivity or subjectivity (both are imaginary) only insofar as we define the text as an expressive object (presented for our own expression), sublimated under a morality of truth, in one instance laxist; in the other, ascetic. Yet reading is not a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing which we endow with all the glamour of creation and anteriority. It is a form of work (which is why it would be better to speak of a lexeological act -- even a lexeographical act, since I write my reading), and the method of this work is topological: I am not hidden within the text, I am simply irrecoverable from it: my task is to move, to shift systems whose perspective ends neither at the text nor at the 'I': in operational terms, the meanings I find are established not by 'me' or by others, but by their sytematic mark: there is not other proof of a reading than the quality and endurance of its systematics; in other words: than its functioning. To read, in fact, is a labor of language. To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept toward other names; names call to each other, reassemble, and their grouping call for further naming: I name, I unname, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metonymic labor." [10 - 11]
S/Z
Roland Barthes
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