Garry Gillard > writing > 263 > Lecture 1

H263 Language, Culture and the Unconscious
Lecture 1 1992
Introduction to the Course
28 July 1992

Garry Gillard

This course is about solving problems. In it we will have a good look at the thoughts of some thinkers who many people think were good at doing puzzles, and we'll consider whether their way of approaching problems is any good to us now. So there will be three stages: the first is a close reading of just one book by each of our star thinkers; the second will be a revaluation, either through the writing of people who come along later, or in one of the lectures, or in your own critique; and the third stage will be to attempt to apply one or other of the original theories to a textual analysis that you think might benefit from this approach, that might particularly lend itself to this approach.

The problems and puzzles we will be concerned with in this course have to do with language, with culture and with the unconscious—and one of the ways to work through it would be to examine each of these concepts in terms of its own development, and also in its relationship to the others. Another way to begin would be to indicate some of the main lines of thought of the individual thinkers whose writing we read during the course of Language, Culture and the Unconscious: Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Bateson and Whorf. In this lecture I will mainly employ the second of these two approaches. In the one which follows Jennifer Nash will employ the second, in giving a brief history of the career of the unconscious.

I thought it might be useful to give this introductory lecture covering the whole course, even though it will require referring to material you won't have read yet. This lecture is a quick tour of the whole museum. So, if you'll follow me: off we go!

In this course we will be 'mucking-about', 'tinkering', to anticipate a key idea from Lévi-Strauss: doing what the French call 'bricolage', using any old concepts that we might find lying around if we can usefully make something else out of them. To understand 'bricolage': if you think of having a workshop in your backyard with a lot of tools in it, and secondhand building materials and car parts, that kind of thing, and then if you think of going there to put something together to patch something up with, or make something out of: that's my understanding of bricolage. I think the nearest word in English is 'tinkering'—although 'mucking about' is a more Australian equivalent. The person doing the tinkering or mucking about is a 'bricoleur'.

[Overhead 1]
Language Culture and the Unconscious indicates its area(s) of interest by its title, although not its period: some relevant dates are: Sigmund Freud 1856-1939, Claude Lévi-Strauss born 1908, Gregory Bateson 1904-1980, and Benjamin Lee Whorf 1897-1941. I mention the dates so that you can see readily that the thought with which we are concerned in this course is all in the recent past and therefore provides part of the foundation for some of the ways we think now. Much of the period covered is what we are now accustomed in some contexts to call Modernism—although as we are now tending to find, all Modernism is also Postmodern. To put that another way, in this course we are concerned with thinkers who are all very interested in Structure, but they are all also always already in the process of deconstructing what they build on.

This is a course in the Language and Discourse stream of Communication Studies—although there's also a Culture and Communication stream, so I suppose it's in that too. What makes it different from the other courses in the language stream is in its emphasis on those aspects of linguistic and cultural behaviour which are unconscious, that is, need to be examined in other than the 'natural', common-sense, everyday attitude to yield up their 'true' meaning. It might be worth noting, right at the beginning, that there are many senses of the word 'unconscious', and Jenny Nash will be suggesting more of them next week. Bob Hodge—and therefore also this course—are interested in the idea of a cultural, or collective, unconscious; but to begin with we shall be concerned with the Freudian notion of a personal unconscious.

Freud
The most significant thinker in the course is Freud. In mentioning some of his ideas which are more productive in the context, I'll give some examples from the Introductory Lectures, which might be useful for this or next week's tutorial. Turning to the topic of language, I'll begin with this quotation from Elizabeth Wright, from her book with which some of you may be familiar, Psychoanalytic Criticism. 1

[Overhead 2]
Psychoanalysis addresses itself to the problems of language, starting from Freud's original insight concerning the determining force within utterance: he draws attention to the effects of desire in language and, indeed, in all forms of symbolic interaction. 2

For Wright, psychoanalysis is intrinsically concerned with language, because language is intrinsically bound up with desire. She continues.

Psychoanalysis explores what happens when primordial desire gets directed into social goals, when bodily needs become subject to the mould of culture. Through language, desire becomes subject to rules, and yet this language cannot define the body's experience accurately. What is of peculiar interest to psychoanalysis—some would say peculiar in the sense of both special and bizarre—is that aspect of experience which has been ignored or prohibited by the rules of language. 3

[Overhead 3]
I want to discuss two aspects of language in Freud: firstly, as one of the main ways through which we can become aware of the existence of the unconscious; and secondly, that is through the agency of language that we can unburden ourselves of some of those things which trouble the life of the mind. On the one hand, diagnosis, on the other, cure.

As for the first, Freud believed he could see in those slips of the tongue—those little mistakes which in fact we have come to call 'Freudian slips'—evidence that there was more going on than a meaningless stumble over a syllable, and that these 'parapraxes' were relatively trivial evidence of the drives of which we are normally not aware—and of which we do not normally need to be aware, unless either they cause us problems in our daily life, or else we are academically or clinically interested in psychoanalysis.

If, as Elizabeth Wright says, desire has become subject to rules through language, it follows that we analysts will become aware of unsatisfied desire when it is seen to break the rules, when it spills over their boundaries. And you will notice that when Freud starts the first lecture proper after the Introduction to the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, the very first thing he adduces in order to begin the description of the process of discovery that led to the idea of the unconscious is these slips of the tongue, failures to say what you really mean.

[Overhead 4]
It's interesting to note, by the way, that the order of events as presented in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis is different from the way Freud developed his ideas in major early publications. Freud started with dreams, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and proceeded to 'Freudian slips', or parapraxes, in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). Jokes, in Wit and the Unconscious, follow in 1905. But these topics are presented in a different order when Freud is trying to persuade his audience (and us, posterity) to accept the Freudian hypothesis. So he begins with what we are most likely to accept as evidence of the existence of parts of the mind of which we are normally unaware: the everyday mistakes we often call 'Freudian slips'. The point I'm trying to make is that Freud is making a selection on the basis of rhetoric—persuasiveness—rather than history—the order in which his 'discoveries' were made.

Slips of the tongue are the most common examples of what are called in the standard translation by the rather hideous term 'parapraxes'. Apart from the occasional Latin term like 'libido', Freud did not usually need to introduce foreign barbarisms like 'parapraxis' into his discourse, and was able to use words made up of everyday Germanic roots. 'Parapraxis' is a translation of Fehlleistung, a word which comes from two commonplace ideas: fehlen is to lack or miss or fail; leisten is to carry out, to perform, to succeed. What's going on here then is an attempt to carry out something, and a failure to complete it successfully. The word is an oxymoron, the idea is a paradox. The translator's note suggests that we think of parapraxes as 'faulty acts' or 'faulty functions', but I like the suggestion made by Walter Kaufmann, if only because it is one word rather than two: 'mischievements'. 4 The prefix 'mis' has a similar sense to the German prefix 'ver' which precedes many of Freud's examples of parapraxes: versprechen, etc.. Then there is 'chieve' obviously from 'achieve'. And finally there is the association with mischief, the feeling that there is another power, out of your control, which is making you do these silly things. The power, Freud will argue, is of course not outside you, but inside—unconscious.

This was a digression, but a useful one in that it permits me to make these points: firstly, that we will be much concerned with translation in this course, though we might not use the term very often. Because what we will often be doing is translating sets of cultural phenomena from one area of human life into another, from one 'discipline' to another. Freud, for example, speaks of the task of translating the symbolic language of dreams into that of our waking thought. 5 Bob Hodge, analogously, talks about 'mapping', about mapping the system of one of these thinkers onto that of another.

The second point that might be worth making is that when dealing with the unconscious we will often be dealing with paradox, something which seems illogical in a conscious, rational sense, and with oxymoron, something which is oxy (= sharp), and moron (= foolish) at the same time. Thirdly, just in case it's not obvious, I'm having to have recourse to linguistics, the study of language, to make these observations about Freudian thought.

Turning now to the second aspect of language in Freudian thought: Freud developed in his clinical practice what he himself called 'the talking cure'. He believed, and claimed to show, that if people could be persuaded, by one means or another, to talk about what was on their (unconscious) minds they actually got better—just by virtue of having talked about it. He first got his patients to talk by the use of hypnosis, but later found that free association worked as well if not better, that is, if people were allowed and encouraged to talk about anything at all they sooner or later, with a bit—or quite a lot—of persuasion from Freud, got around to talking about what was screwing them up—which was usually the frustration of a sexual drive.

So, in the Freudian model, in order to understand the way in which culture frustrates and distorts our nature, language is a means both of diagnosis and of potential cure. In the third lecture, the week after next, I plan to say something more how language works for Freud in dreams and jokes.

Before the next lecture, next week, please read the first half of Freud's Introductory Lectures, and then complete reading the book before Lecture 3. As I said, Jenny Nash will be giving the next lecture, followed by me again. The third lecture in the Psychoanalysis and Culture block will be given in absentia by Zoë Sofoulis, and before that lecture you should have read all four readings for Block 1, two of which are by Melanie Klein, whose work Zoë makes use of, and two are by Zoë herself. I'll just rephrase that to be quite clear: all the readings in the first block in the Reader are there to support the lecture by Zoë in Week 4. You should give the higher priority to the Freud text: read that first. We'll deal with the extra readings in the tutorials in Week 4.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
[Overhead 5]
I turn now to Claude Lévi-Strauss. He was a French anthropologist who, coming along a little later than Freud, was able to take advantage of some interesting developments in structural linguistics, which was also the basis for semiotics—and then led—with some help from Bob Hodge and his colleagues—to Social Semiotics, which some of you will have studied in H240.

The founding father of French semiotics was Ferdinand de Saussure, who continued a continental tradition of finding binary oppositions everywhere, which goes back, for example, to Hegel (thesis and antithesis), and before him, Descartes (mind and body). Saussure liked to draw the distinction between diachrony, the development of something such as a language up to a point in time, and synchrony, its structure at a given moment in time. Similarly he distinguished between langue, the system of language, and parole, any given individual utterance. As you can imagine, as a structural linguist, he was interested in the former—the system.

Lévi-Strauss applied this linguistic analogy to anthropology, and sought to discover in cultural systems, such as kinship and myth, structures which were homologous with those of the mind, or what he called la pensée sauvage, the 'savage'—or primitive—mind. But unlike Freud, who believed to a fault in development, and who was therefore always trying to discover the origins, the genesis of phenomena 6, Lévi-Strauss—or at least Lévi-Straussian thought—is capable of finding the same unconscious drive to create meaning in all societies, not just 'primitive' ones or those which have not developed writing. So the word 'primitive' has a different meaning: for Freud, the etymological one of 'first' (from the Latin for first); for Lévi-Strauss, it refers to those societies he studied as an anthropologist—as opposed to those studied by the sociologist—usually defined as those societies not having developed a technology of writing.

However, there are a number of subtle analogies or coincidences which I believe can be perceived between Freud and Lévi-Strauss—referring here to œuvres—bodies of work or thought—and they may very well be influences of the older man on the younger. I'll mention just two.

[Overhead 6]
First: they both indicate the power of language in healing. I'll refer to the paper called 'The effectiveness of symbols', first published 1949, and Chapter 10 in your text, Structural Anthropology. It is, says Claire Jacobson, one of the translators, 'an analysis of a strictly psychological shamanistic cure for difficult childbirth. It concludes with an illuminating comparison of the shamanistic and psychoanalytic techniques in which the role of symbols in bringing about a cure, whether of a psychological or a physiological disturbance, is cogently demonstrated.' 7

Listen to Lévi-Strauss's account of the way in which a shaman—or 'native healer' or 'witchdoctor'—uses language to change the structure of the universe of experience in which a sick woman experiences pain which for her is incomprehensible—meaningless.

That the mythology of the shaman does not correspond to an objective reality does not matter. The sick woman believes in the myth and belongs to a society which believes in it. The tutelary spirits and malevolent spirits, the supernatural monsters and magical animals, are all part of a coherent system on which the native conception of the universe is founded. The sick woman accepts these mythical beings or, more accurately, she has never questioned their existence. What she does not accept are the incoherent and arbitrary pains, which are an alien element in her system but which the shaman, calling upon myth, will re-integrate within a whole where everything is meaningful.
Once the sick woman understands, however, she does more than resign herself; she gets well. 8

There's very little difference between this description and the kind of thing Freud describes in some of his case studies. In both cases it is in the emergence in the conscious mind—through language—of what had been repressed that makes a huge difference. Lévi-Strauss continues:

The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed. And it is the transition to this verbal expression—at the same time making it possible to undergo in an ordered and intelligible form a real experience that would otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible—which induces the release of the physiological process, that is, the reorganization, in a favourable direction, of the process to which the sick woman is subjected. 9

Both the shaman and the psychoanalyst offer the patient a language which provides a structure in which the illness becomes meaningful for the patient, or, as I would prefer to put it, the illness is inserted.

Turning back to Freud for a moment, to pick up my second point of comparison: I have already mentioned 'Freudian slips'—and I noted that they are the first phenomena he adduces to begin his proof of the existence of the unconscious. The next area of psychic life to which he refers to continue his demonstration in the Introductory Lectures is that of dreams—and I'm sure you all know quite a lot already about dream interpretation—and some of your 'knowledge' perhaps comes from Freud's work.

It might be interesting for you to ask yourselves just what you think you know about dream interpretation as you begin the course, especially if you haven't read any Freud yet—and where you think that knowledge came from. Then, as you read the Introductory Lectures, compare what you thought it was about with what Freud says. If you are going to keep a journal or workbook for this course—some of you may be writing in them at this moment—that would be one thing I suggest you write about. Among other things you might find

1.           that you had an accurate notion of Freudian dream analysis; or
2.     that you had an inaccurate notion of Freudian dream analysis—a vulgar Freudian notion—and you found reading Freud either (a) enlightening, or (b) confusing, or (c) wrong; or
3.     that you have already received a sophisticated and critical attitude to the usefulness or otherwise of dream interpretation, and reading the Freudian account is like looking back into history.

This is one of many things we could discuss in the first tutorial next week.

The equivalent to dreams in Freud for Lévi-Strauss is myth [and we might analyse some of those too]—and I've found remarkable the similarity between the way he writes about myth and the way Freud writes about dreams—and this is my second point of comparison. Here is another quotation from the paper I mentioned before.

Whether the myth is recreated by the individual or borrowed from tradition, it derives from its sources—individual or collective ... —only the stock of representations with which it operates. But the structure remains the same, and through it the symbolic function is fulfilled ... There are many languages, but very few structural laws which are valid for all languages. A compilation of known tales and myths would fill an imposing number of volumes. But they can be reduced to a small number of simple types if we abstract from among the diversity of characters a few elementary functions. 10

As a commentator says:

Lévi-Strauss's concern is ultimately with the extent to which the structure of myths prove actually formative as well as reflective of [people's] minds: the degree to which they dissolve the distinction between nature and culture. And so his aim, he says, is not to show how [humanity] thinks in myths, but 'how myths think [themselves] in [human beings], unbeknown to them.' As in the case of kinship, the 'unconscious' structure of myth turns out to yield itself most readily to a 'phonemic' analysis of its phenomena, whereby the fantastic profusion of myths in the world may be reduced to a manageable number of recurrent elements, whose presence has genuine structural and structuring significance. 11

Here's how Lévi-Strauss himself puts much the same idea—although more straightforwardly.

On the one hand it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is likely to happen. There is no logic, no continuity. Any characteristic can be attributed to any subject; every conceivable relation can be found. With myth, everything becomes possible, But on the other hand, this apparent confusion is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions ... If the content of a myth is contingent, how are we going to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar? 12

So what I'm suggesting by placing this quotation in this context is a comparison of Freud's thinking about dreams with Lévi-Strauss's about myths. The analogy contemplates on the one hand the individual dreamer who draws from a stock of random material, tinkers with it, mucks about, bricole, and constructs the dreamwork. This dreamwork can then be analysed and the latent meaning brought out. On the other hand, a lot of people over time, also draw from a stock of cultural material—also tinkering—to construct myths, which also may be analysed, this time by the structural anthropologist. Lévi-Strauss calls this the working of la pensée sauvage, the primitive mind; but this kind of analysis seems to work very well with our own culture, so that we still in some sense partake of the primitive mind. This is also obviously something we will want to discuss in tutorials.

Before I give the first lecture in the Myth and Society block on Lévi-Strauss (Lecture 5) you should have read the set text and the first two readings—by Lévi-Strauss and Leach—in the course Reader. I'll be concentrating particularly on Part Three of the text, the section called 'Magic and Religion', and especially on the paper called 'The structural study of myth.' Then you should read all the other readings in this block, the ones by Rubin, Irigaray, and Creed, before the next lecture, to be given by Jenny Nash. The third lecture in the block will be from me again, and you should be very familiar for that with Part One of the Lévi-Strauss text, on 'Language and Kinship.'

Benjamin Lee Whorf
I quoted a sentence a moment or two ago which makes a very nice transition to another of our thinkers on this course, and could also, I suppose, serve as an epigraph to the course as a whole. If you substitute in that sentence the name of Benjamin Lee Whorf for that of Lévi-Strauss and the more general category of 'language' for that of 'myth' you get this proposition: 'Whorf's concern is ultimately with the extent to which the structure of language proves actually formative as well as reflective of [the human] mind....' It's the word 'formative' that is most important here. It is suggested that language forms minds—as in the so-called Sapir/Whorf Hypothesis which can most briefly be summed up in the phrase 'language precedes thought'. (Sapir was another anthropologist who was also a linguist, and who slightly preceded Whorf.)

[Overhead 7]
Or, as Whorf himself puts it: 'linguistics is fundamental to the theory of thinking, and in the last analysis to all human sciences.' 13

Whorf makes two cardinal hypotheses [writes a commentator]:
First, that all higher levels of thinking are dependent on language.
Second, that the structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner in which one understands [one's] environment. The picture of the universe shifts from tongue to tongue. 14

Another writer sums up what Whorf called the 'principle of linguistic relativity' as this single hypothesis: that the structure of a human being's language influences the manner in which [that person] understands reality and behaves with respect to it. 15 The human being is of course unaware of this influence; once again, it is unconscious. Whorf was concerned to bring this unconscious influence to consciousness; he saw this as 'essentially the quest for MEANING.'

The 'real concern' of linguistics, he wrote, 'is to light up the thick darkness of the language, and thereby of much of the thought, the culture, and the outlook upon life of a given community with the light of this "golden something", as I have heard it called, this transmuting principle of meaning. ... The investigator of culture [he goes on, and he could equally well be speaking of Freud and Lévi-Strauss as of himself] should hold an ideal of linguistics as that of a heuristic approach to problems of psychology which hitherto he may have shrunk from considering—a glass through which, when correctly focused, will appear the TRUE SHAPES of many of those forces which hitherto have been to him but the inscrutable blank of invisible and bodiless thought.' 16 The rhetoric is rather unrestrained, but I hope the point is clear.

Whorf is dealt with in the last section of the course, which has the title Linguistics and Cultural Analysis. Professor Michael O'Toole, the senior academic in the area, will lead off, followed by a most interesting application of linguistic theory from Grant Hewson. The last lecture in the course will be given by its founding father, Bob Hodge, in absentia by videotape: so you should make a point of attending the final lecture before you fade away forever.

Gregory Bateson
The last of our four big thinkers is Gregory Bateson, who died in 1980 after a very diverse intellectual life. Three years before our textbook Steps to an Ecology of Mind came out, in 1973, Bateson gave the 1970 Korzybski Lecture, on 'Form, substance, and difference' on the theme of 'the area of impact between very abstract and formal philosophic thought on the one hand and the natural history of [human beings] and other creatures on the other.'

I mention the lecture so that I can read this brief extract, to give you something of the flavour of Batesonian cybernetics—not to mention the 1970s...

The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in the pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by 'God,' but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.' 17

In the same context I might draw your attention to this quotation from the introduction to Steps [your textbook].

I found that in my work with primitive people, schizophrenia, biological symmetry, and in my discontent with the conventional theories of evolution and learning, I had identified a widely scattered set of bench marks or points of reference from which a new scientific territory could be defined. These bench marks I have called 'steps' in the title of the book. 18

[Overhead 8]
Much of Bateson's work was done as an anthropologist, a lot of which he did with his first wife, Margaret Mead. He also made an important contribution to psychiatry, and so is useful in bringing together for us the disciplinary interests of the first two blocks of the course: psychoanalysis and anthropology.  But he is mainly of interest to us here, however, as a person interested in using cybernetics—or 'control theory'—for cultural analysis. He is perhaps best known for his theory of the double bind, which has passed into everyday use, and which he applies, for example, in a significant paper on the ætiology—the development in an individual—of schizophrenia, which a practising psychiatrist who works in a Batesonian tradition, Lois Achimovich, will be discussing in Lecture 9 in this course.

Let me give you an example of Bateson in action: in trying to develop some techniques from what he calls 'communication engineering' to apply to social phenomena, in this case to Balinese society. There's a well-known (1949) paper by Bateson called 'Bali: the value system of a steady state', which I believe is often read by people doing Asian Studies, and some of you may already have read it. 19 It's in your textbook, so you will read it soon.

[overhead 9]
In this paper Bateson wants to compare the Balinese society he studied with Margaret Mead (he calls it 'Balinese data') with the Iatmul tribe of New Guinea he had previously worked on, and he wants to say people get on better with each other in Bali than they do in New Guinea. To do this he finds it necessary to say that each of the societies studied is a different kind of system: the Iatmul is schismogenic, while the Balinese is a nonschismogenic social system. (Schismogenesis is defined [in an earlier paper, 'Culture contact and schismogenesis' 1935 20] as progressive differentiation, that is, getting on worse and worse, falling out more and more.)

Iatmul society Bateson sees as a prototype of schismogenic systems, because it 'includes a number of regenerative causal circuits or vicious circles.' 21 It has a different ethos from that of the Balinese, 'ethos' being defined as 'the expression of a culturally standardized system of organization of the instincts and emotions of the individuals.' What I want to draw attention to in Bateson's language is the characterisation of human drives and behaviour in terms of the characteristics of systems as understood in the domain of natural sciences such as biology (—and I suggest that he has this in common with the early Freud, by the way). For example, Iatmul society is seen, as I said just now, as possessing 'regenerative causal circuits'. '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.' 23

Now if Whorf is right—if there is anything in the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis that 'the structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner in which one understands [one's] environment', then these are not superficial metaphors that Bateson is using to describe human behaviour: this is what he actually thinks human beings are: this is how he understands them. He does, admittedly, put the word 'relay' inside quotation marks, but all his other terms: 'energy source', 'causal circuits' and so on, are the words he uses to understand the things themselves, that is, people. He says, for example, of schismogenesis, that its 'increase may be limited by factors which are internally or externally environmental to the parts of the schismogenic circuit. Such factors which have only small restraining effect at low intensities of schismogenesis may increase with increase of intensity. Friction, fatigue, and limitation of energy supply would be examples of such factors.' 24 Which sounds to me the way I would expect an engineer, or maybe a physicist, to talk. However, when we get to Bateson we will want to test the usefulness of such a way of thinking about human relations.

Bob Hodge says that he has found the notion of schismogenesis useful—and Alan Mansfield will be reflecting on the concept later in the course, in the first lecture in Block 3, Cultural Pathologies. Alan is an expert on the Northern Ireland situation, and he will use the concept of schismogenesis in a discussion of that conflict.

For the purposes of this course, then, there is an obvious analogy between Batesonian cybernetics and Lévi-Straussian structuralism, if only the superficial observation that they both understand human behaviour in terms of systems which can be broken down into parts. There is a more subtle connexion with Freud, which has to do with his early work in neurology which he did not continue as such, but which goes, as it were, underground in his later work, but is still perceptible in such of his notions as drives, frustration, repression, sublimation, and so on. Despite this commonality with Freud, however, Bateson is quite critical of some of what has been made of Freud in this connexion, and he finds Freud himself to be partly to blame for the emergence of what he calls 'the new supernaturalism', in this extract from a letter he wrote about the concept of energy. He says that energy is not a substance or a pattern, but a quantity, which is 'very tightly defined'—as in the definition E = MC2, for example—and he continues.

Now the rub is that no quantity can ever generate a pattern, and to assert that this can occur is precisely the entering wedge of the new supernaturalism, for which Freud, Marx, and Jung are much to blame. (They 'could' have known better.) 25

I guess this is an example of what I was saying back on page 2 about the way in which people deconstruct what they build on. We too will come along after Bateson and say 'He could have known better.'

This might be a good place to pause, in the midst of a discussion of the force of a particular word in its function at the leading edge of what is asserted to be a new kind of tyranny, that is, at the moment of the bringing into consciousness of the latent force of a linguistic element in contributing to the hegemony of a pseudo-intellectual movement, at the moment of the exposure of the political power of language in remaining unconscious, at the intersection of language, culture and the unconscious.

Thank you for your attention!

See also the Coda on George Steiner's Nostalgia for the Absolute

Footnotes

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