Garry Gillard > writing > 263 > Lecture 13

H263 Language, Culture and the Unconscious
Murdoch University 1992

Lecture 13
The unconscious revisited

Garry Gillard

3 November 1992

We are so befuddled by language that we cannot think straight, and it is convenient, sometimes, to remember that we are really mammals. 1

In my first lecture I perambulated through the grate thorts of the four big blokes following signs that said 'language.'  I want today to take another wander through the territory, this time looking out for the marks that indicate 'the unconscious'.  'Culture', on this occasion, will have to look after itself.  I begin, as I did in my first lecture, with Freud.  However, instead of following Freud in trying to persuade you that the existence of the unconscious is a useful hypothesis, I'll do what Viktor Shklovsky says art tends to do: I'll make it strange. 2

Freud

Here's something pretty strange to begin with.  It's the recipe for Unconscious Tomatoes, from Freud's Own Cookbook. 3  This is supposed to be Freud speaking here.  [Read recipe.]

In 1988 an ex-colleague, Lesley Stern, wrote about Fremantle during the Americas Cup yacht race series that it was like 'Freud's description of the unconscious as a location where "nothing ends, nothing happens, nothing is forgotten".' 4  Which makes the Freudian unconscious sound to me a bit like a play by Samuel Beckett: like Waiting for Godot, for example.  But it's even stranger than anything Beckett imagined.  When I read Freud writing about the unconscious it's like reading science fiction: and I suppose it is science fiction.  Thinking about the unconscious is like imagining the strangest world you can force yourself to think of.  In this world—Freud's name for it is 'Ucs'—there are no contradictions.  Nothing is logical, or, to put it another way, there is no logic, no rationality whatsoever.  There is no time: everything is eternally present, without beginning, end, nor duration.  You can't get bored in Ucs.  There are no entities in this world, no beings, and of course no events can occur, given that there is no time in which they could occur.  However, there is mind, and in it there are contents and mental processes.  These processes are very powerful, very mobile, and are driven by a desire to make connexions.  They are so powerful that they have to be constrained by an entity that guards the door out of this world—a guardian , or gatekeeper, or censor, so that none of them can escape.  But they can make connexions with the outside and frequently escape, but always in a disguised form and always attached to something tangible.  There is no language in Ucs, but there are pictures.  We are in contact with this other world, this alternative reality, but we only make this contact when we least expect to: when we are asleep, or day-dreaming, or thinking about something and making a mistake of some kind.  So, there you go: a pretty weird idea.

Now if you were a fan of this fantastic science fiction writer, Siggy Freud, and you were lucky enough to meet him and congratulate him on having the weirdest imagination that anyone ever had, you would be astonished when he told you that this Ucs in fact exists, and it was in your own mind.  Thus Freud writes, '… if someone objects that here the unconscious is nothing real in a scientific sense, is a makeshift, une façon de parler, we can only shrug our shoulders resignedly and dismiss what he says as unintelligible.' 5  He would go on to say to you that he could prove the existence of the unconscious—although he would be prepared to qualify that statement by saying that he could at least prove the necessity for the hypothesis—and he would prove it by giving you examples from the behaviour of people who were at least a bit crazy, if not a lot. 6  And if that were not enough to bemuse you, and if you were still listening, he might go on to tell you that the things going on in the unconscious were quite likely to make you go nuts too—but that if you did go bonkers he could cure you by helping you to become conscious of these unconscious drives.  As soon as you were prepared to admit that they existed—as soon, that is, as you agreed with the Doctor—you would instantly get better again. 7  And be a better person for the experience! 8  What a powerful and wise man!

By this time you might be so shocked that you would no longer be listening to Freud trying to tell you that most of these unconscious drives were sexual in nature.  You would be resolving to go back to reading Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, and to stay away from this avant-garde form of science fiction writing.

Before I leave this weirdo though, I must just emphasise the science, as well as the fiction, if only because Freud himself was so serious about being scientific, particularly in his earliest writings on the unconscious, in the Project for a Scientific Psychology.  The Project only survived by chance, because Freud sent it to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, the inventor of the 'nasal reflex syndrome'; Freud himself never published it, but used some of the same jargon in the 1915 paper called 'The unconscious.' 9  This was one of twelve so-called metapsychological papers which Freud wrote in that year, only five of which survive.  These circumstances suggest some lack of confidence on Freud's part in what follows.  It was from the 1915 paper that I was mostly drawing in my description of the strange world of Ucs.  'The system Ucs' is one of the quasi-scientific terms which Freud uses in this paper; this one to indicate the unconscious.  He also conceives of another system called 'Pcs', the preconscious, which plays the part of the gatekeeper I mentioned before.  And of course there is the conscious, about which Freud sees nothing problematic at all.  I wanted to draw attention to this proposed systematisation in Freud's theory of the unconscious in order to suggest its similarity to Bateson's way of viewing the human organism—which I'll come to shortly.

Freud changed his topographical model of the mind more than once in his career, but he did not vary much from his 1895-6 conception of the dynamics of the unconscious: a model based on his biological and neurological research, but one which because of its deterministic and engineering characteristics has also been called a hydraulic model: to do with pressures and flows, drives and blocks. 10

In order to make the transition from Freud to Lévi-Strauss I want to read you a quotation from my favourite Bateson paper.  It's one we haven't focused on until now, so you may not have read it.  It's the 1967 essay called, 'Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art', and I shall be quoting from pp. 138-9 of Steps.  In this brilliant passage Bateson manages to condense a good deal of Freud into a couple of sentences, to make an insightful comparison between him, Pascal, and Lévi-Strauss, to deal with important distinctions between three different meanings or kinds of 'unconscious', and also to begin to make his own idiosyncratic position stylishly clear.  He also touches on the need for translation, which I have consistently seen as a recurrent theme in this course.

"The heart has its reasons which the reason does not at all perceive."  Among Anglo-Saxons, it is rather usual to think of the "reasons" of the heart or of the unconscious as inchoate forces or pushes or heavings—what Freud called Trieben [that is, drives].  To Pascal, a Frenchman, the matter was rather different, and he no doubt thought of the reasons of the heart [139] as a body of logic or computation as precise and complex as the reasons of consciousness. 
(I have noticed that Anglo-Saxon anthropologists sometimes misunderstand the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss for precisely this reason.  They say he emphasizes too much the intellect and ignores the "feelings."  The truth is that he assumes that the heart has precise algorithms.)
These algorithms of the heart, or, as they say, of the unconscious, are, however, coded and organized in a manner totally different from the algorithms of language.  And since a great deal of conscious thought is structured in terms of the logics of language, the algorithms of the unconscious are doubly inaccessible.  It is not only that the conscious mind has poor access to this material, but also the fact that when such access is achieved, e.g., in dreams, art, poetry, religion, intoxication, and the like, there is still a formidable problem of translation.
This is usually expressed in Freudian language by saying that the operations of the unconscious are structured in terms of primary process, while the thoughts of consciousness (especially verbalized thoughts) are expressed in secondary process.
Nobody, to my knowledge, knows anything about secondary process.  But it is ordinarily assumed that everybody knows all about it, so I shall not attempt to describe secondary process in any detail, assuming that you know as much about it as I. 11

(I'll return to the idea of 'secondary process' at the end of this lecture.)  Bateson then goes to on to develop further his idea of the relationship between conscious and unconscious, which I shall get to myself in a moment.  But first I want to deal with Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Lévi-Strauss

When we come to Lévi-Strauss, it becomes necessary to make the first of two distinctions important in this context: the first is the one between the personal unconscious of Freud and the collective or cultural unconscious of those other thinkers whom we are now approaching, beginning with Lévi-Strauss.  Not that Freud was not aware of the imbrication of the personal and the collective or cultural, but in his analysis he placed the emphasis on what was happening in the individual, on the way that culture constructs itself in individual members of societies as they develop, and on the way that this process may cause conflicts (or double binds) in those individuals, which in turn may cause mental instability.  With Lévi-Strauss, however, the interest is less within the individual member of the group than in the structures which are the basis of the relationships which individuals form with each other.  Lévi-Strauss likes to think of these structures as 'laws', not in the sense of statutes and regulations, but in the sense in which we speak of the 'laws of physics.'  These are 'universal laws which regulate the unconscious activities of the mind.' 12

In an earlier lecture I drew your attention to the influence on him of Freud, of which Lévi-Strauss was aware.  In the same way that Freud came to believe that phenomena like dreams had an unconscious content which was concealed in a manifest content, Lévi-Strauss found the same two levels in myth.  And he even finds an equivalent to Freud's secondary revision, in what he calls 'transformation.'

There must be, and there is, a correspondence between the unconscious meaning of a myth—the problem it tries to solve—and the conscious content it makes use of to reach that end, i.e. the plot.  However, this correspondence should not always be conceived as a kind of mirror-image, it can also appear as a transformation. 13

The difference, however, is that whereas a dream seems to belong primarily to an individual, a myth belongs to us all.  Lévi-Strauss actually claims at one point that no matter how much a myth is distorted in translation it is always readily perceptible as a myth, because of the quality of its story. 14  Though I personally cannot follow Lévi-Strauss that far, and especially as I want to use the term 'myth' for other kinds of stories and concepts than those we normally associate with the word, I must say I remain intensely interested in the idea of a 'collective consciousness' which is the hypothetical agency which produces not only myths, but also rules about who we can marry, and other social phenomena.

Lévi-Strauss is, I think, the only one of the boys actually to use the term 'collective consciousness', as in this brief passage from the 1951 paper on 'Language and the analysis of social laws.'

... the so-called "collective consciousness" would, in the final analysis, be no more than the expression, on the level of individual thought and behavior, of certain time and space modalities of the universal laws which make up the unconscious activity of the mind. 15

These time and space modalities take the form of structures which inhere in varied and different human constructs, and Lévi-Strauss mentions customs, 'the kinship system, political ideology, mythology, ritual, art, code of etiquette, and—why not?—cooking. 16

Bateson

The second of the two distinctions I want to make in this lecture is related to the one I made earlier: the distinction between the personal unconscious and the collective or cultural unconscious: and it is the distinction between the unspeakable and the unthinkable. 17  Bob Hodge points out that whereas the Freudian method (that is, psychoanalysis) aims to recover the unspeakable, to bring the unconscious into language, a method employed by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead in Bali tends also to recover the unthinkable, in that it observes directly the language of bodies rather than in words.  By the use of an ethnographic method that used film among other ways of observing what people were actually doing to each other, as opposed to what they might say about what they were doing, Bateson and Mead were able to study unconscious structuration in Balinese society.  What they claim to have discovered was arguably speakable, in that it was not repressed in the Freudian sense, but it was on the other hand unthinkable, in that there was no way that the participants could have become aware of the real import of what they were doing, their actions were so ingrained and habituated.

The unconscious in Bateson is largely a matter of structures—structures which underpin social organisation.  When he actually uses the term 'unconscious' himself, as he does for example in the essay about 'Primitive Art' I quoted from earlier, he does not employ the Freudian gross bi-partite (or tri-partite) division into conscious and unconscious; he prefers to talk about levels: '…those multiple levels of which one extreme is called "consciousness" and the other the "unconscious." 18  There's a fascinating passage in that essay where Bateson actually gives a critique—for want of a better word—of Freudian theory.

I believe [he writes] that much of early Freudian theory was upside down.  At that time many thinkers regarded conscious reason as normal and self-explanatory while the unconscious was regarded as mysterious, needing proof, and needing explanation.  Repression was the explanation, and the unconscious was filled with thoughts which could have been conscious but which repression and dream work had distorted.  Today we think of consciousness as the mysterious, and of the computational methods of the unconscious, e. g., primary process, as continually active, necessary, and all-embracing. 19

(I'll return to the mystery of 'consciousness' at the end of this lecture.)  It might be helpful to repeat that whereas the unspeakable, that is, the repressed, is in the unconscious, and that's not now regarded as strange—the unthinkable is part of consciousness, part of what we do every day, but it is a part of what we do of which we are unaware: we just do it, we don't think about it.  Whereas Freud was interested in the 'return of the repressed' in a therapeutic context, Bateson is interested, we might say, in the 'analysis of the ordinary'—but only when it is necessary to explain something.  Most of what is available to consciousness is best left unconscious.  Bateson, in fact thinks that Freud was actually wrong in trying to recover all the contents of the unconscious.

Freud, even [he writes], is said to have said, "Where id was, there ego shall be," as though such an increase in conscious knowledge and control would be both possible and, of course, an improvement.  This view is the product of an almost totally distorted epistemology and a totally distorted view of what sort of thing a man [sic], or any other organism, is. 20

You will be familiar with the old idea of the difficulty of trying to think about riding a bicycle (or walking) while actually doing it.  There is a definite risk of falling over.  I find quite delightful the analogy that Bateson uses to give an image of the problem of bringing to consciousness all that is habituated.  He asks us to imagine the quandary of a television set being asked to report on what it is doing.

Consider the impossibility [he suggests} of constructing a television set which would report upon its screen all the workings of its component parts, including especially those parts concerned in this reporting. 21

Not only is there a problem about the dedication of resources to be both doing something and reporting on it at the same time, but there is an additional problem of recursion—an endless series of feedback loops—in that you need to have a mechanism also to report on the activity of reporting, and also a way of reporting on that reporting, and so on.  I think this makes it clear why it is necessary that there must a great quantity of the merely unthinkable in the Batesonian unconscious.  'The unconscious contains not only the painful matters which consciousness prefers not to inspect, but also many matters which are so familiar that we do not need to inspect them.  Habit, therefore, is a major economy of conscious thought.' 22  To summarise this part of the discussion, I don't think I can do any better than quote Bateson when he is so clear about his own way of thinking that quoting him is better than any paraphrase.

It follows that all organisms must be content with rather little consciousness, and that if consciousness has any useful functions whatever (which has never been demonstrated but is probably true), then economy in consciousness will be of the first importance.  No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
This is the economy achieved by habit formation. 23

One area in which we can and do refer to this kind of unconscious, though, Bateson suggests, is the sphere of art, which he suggests is a kind of play behaviour having the function, among others, of communicating about this kind of unconsciousness. 24  The artist is like someone 'on a sort of moving stairway (or escalator) about whose position he [or she] is trying to communicate but whose movement is itself a function of his [or her] efforts to communicate. 25  'Clearly, [this] task is impossible [writes Bateson], but, as has been remarked, some people do it very prettily.' 26

Before moving on from Bateson, I shall mention one or two of the kinds of things which are the contents of the Batesonian unconscious.  Firstly, there is a term that he employs which I suggest does duty as the name of what I am calling the 'Batesonian unconscious', namely the term 'ethos'.  He defines 'ethos' as 'the expression of a culturally standardized system of organization of the instincts and emotions of the individuals.' 27  And we see here again the emphasis on the notion firstly, of a system which, secondly, is unconscious in the sense that it resides in an area of which we do not need to be conscious for much of the time, the area of our 'instincts and emotions.'  It is the Balinese ethos which is the essential characterisation of its difference from the Iatmul, or the Anglo-Saxon, or the 'Murdoch ethos', or whatever.  So that's if you like the macro level of the Batesonian unconscious.

At the micro level we encounter phenomena such as 'regenerative causal circuits', and all the other electronic apparatus in Bateson's analogy for the way in which the human social mind (or collective unconscious) functions.  You'll remember that he writes about social organisation in terms like these.

Each such circuit consists of two or more individuals (or groups of individuals) who participate in potentially cumulative interaction.  Each human individual is an energy source or "relay," such that the energy used in [that person's] responses is not derived from the stimuli but from [their] own metabolic processes. 28

This is from his discussion of 'schismogenesis': the pattern of causality in our tendency to fall out with each other and start arguments, fights, and wars.  The point about the causes of such phenomena as wars is an indication of the importance of Bateson's contribution to the understanding of the unconscious and hence to the better understanding of and therefore control over those things that drive us crazy.  Not only can we learn to use this knowledge to avoid undesirable outcomes, we may be able to use this self-knowledge creatively.  Here's my last quotation from Bateson, from the same paper as the first, the paper called 'Double bind', 1969.  You'll recognise the familiar structure of the double bind, but Bateson here adds a new dimension to its structure.

…Severe pain and maladjustment can be induced by putting a mammal in the wrong regarding its rules for making sense of an important relationship with another mammal.
... if this pathology can be warded off or resisted, the total experience may promote creativity. 29

Whorf

The unconscious in Whorf is neither a topographical nor even a dynamic concept.  He uses the word in its adjectival or adverbial form to refer to a mode of habit formation, a customary way of doing things, and specifically of speaking—although this is a less technical and more everyday use of the term 'habit formation' than the way it is used in Batesonian economics.  Whorf himself quotes Sapir using it in this commonplace way.

... the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group ... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.  (Sapir) 30

He uses the concept himself in his 1936 paper, 'A linguistic consideration of thinking in primitive communities', in which he distinguishes linguistic rapport as opposed to linguistic utterance, when dealing with silent thinking or unconscious thought, for example in thinking of gender difference: the sex-gender system. 31  We are again clearly in the presence of the unspeakable, in Bob Hodge's sense.  Again, in 1940, Whorf published this view of the unconsciousness of language.

... the phenomena of a language are to its own speakers largely of a background character and so are outside the critical consciousness and control of the speaker who is expounding natural logic. 32

The structures that produce the utterance are unconscious in the sense they that are not explicitly marked in its form.  If you asked an English speaker how they knew that Jason was a masculine name and Sue a feminine one they would be likely to say that they didn't know how, but they 'just knew.'  They might even say that it was 'natural'.

The unconscious elements in language for Whorf are such things as 'covert categories' and 'cryptotypes': A cryptotype [such as 'up', 'un'] 'is a submerged, subtle, and elusive meaning, corresponding to no actual word, yet shown by linguistic analysis to be functionally important in the grammar.' 33  So these unconscious elements are not necessarily repressed, nor unrecoverable, they are just latent, covert, hidden, until uncovered by 'linguistic analysis.'  The unconscious in this sense may be seen as one of the characteristics of culture, one of the more important systems of which is language, which is 'one especially cohesive aggregate of cultural phenomena.' 34  All cultures possess languages, and all languages have these unconscious elements, so there is nothing particularly threatening or dangerous, provided that we have linguists like Whorf, and the social semioticians who followed him, to unpack the systems that structure these unconscious elements.  On the other hand, Whorf is concerned to point out that 'a language is a system, not just an assemblage of norms.' 35  That is, it is not merely a behavioural category, apt for study by psychologists of the behavioural science persuasion, but a system with rules which cannot be better understood than by those people whose training is in the interpretation of systems, people such as—linguists.  And these are people who are also clever enough to understand the difference between an 'especially cohesive aggregate of cultural phenomena'—which language is—and 'an assemblage of norms'—which language is not.

There is nothing irrational about Whorf's unconscious.  'Indeed [as he says], covert categories are quite apt to be more rational than overt ones.' 36  The paradox here betrays the desire to shock and to reverse the usual prejudices of the Bostonian middle-class that was Whorf's first readership.  As with many people who have left their own culture to live in intimate contact with that of another people, Whorf seemed to enjoy reversing the normal stereotypes that he inherited in the acquisition of his original prejudices.  Like Lévi-Strauss, he came to see so-called 'primitive societies', or we are apparently now expected to call 'tribal' societies, as being actually superior in significant ways to the much-vaunted civilisation of the West.  Here is Whorf, for example, in what I might call Lévi-Straussian, or even David-Mabury-Lewisian mode.

From this point of view many preliterate ("primitive") communities, far from being subrational, may show the human mind functioning on a higher and more complex plane of rationality than among civilized men [sic]. 37

There is of course an Orientalist element in this nostalgia for the primitive. 38  This is not to deny the hypothesis, nor to dismiss the evidence, but to draw attention to the drive which is gaining expression here: a desire that runs through a good deal of the thought that we have examined in this course, a desire to get in touch with one's basic feelings and instincts, which urban Westerners like to fantasy is the enviable state in which 'tribal people' always already live: a state in which they have immediate and constant access to the wellsprings of their spiritual being.  In a fascinating moment, Whorf displays what I see as his naivety when he refers in the same breath to Freud and Jung and Lévy-Bruhl, in drawing on the latter's 'concept of participation mystique' 39 and in the equation of "primitive" to "infantile" used by Freud and Jung. 40  This is, ironically, from a work entitled Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, literally meaning: 'Mental functioning in inferior societies'.  'Participation mystique', Whorf's editor tells us, 'refers to a special kind of psychological relationship with the object, in which the individual cannot clearly perceive a separation between himself and the object. 41

It's possible to think of the unconscious in Whorf as having the sense, not only of those things that we have not yet recovered by analysis, but also those things that we have forgotten in our phylogenetic development, that we have left behind in earlier forms of societies.  The moral position that this view allows you to take up is doubly praiseworthy: on the one hand you can continue to see Western civilisation as superior in being the later development, while on the other hand you are in that perspicacious minority of people who are aware of what has been lost, and how superior in fact so-called primitive societies are.  Once again, the unconscious is the name of my superior knowledge: I know something about you that you don't know yourself.

Coda

I now return as promised to the mystery of 'consciousness', but only to leave you with a question.  In a poem I wrote when I was at high school I suggested that one left school with a 'guilty ignorance', and I want to lay that on you now.  This course has been centrally concerned with revealing the nature of the unconscious, in the Hodgean sense of the unthinkable, the taken-for-granted.  Among the one or two billion things not dealt with in this course, probably the most interesting is the thing that the course has taken for granted, which I now draw to your attention as the question with which I leave you: what is consciousness?

Garry Gillard | New: 19 November, 2015 | Now: 20 May, 2021