Freud

One of the ideas that heavily resonated in my head while reading (for the first time) The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, was last week’s reading of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and Barthes Mythologies. The most important notion and technique that I picked up from this reading Freud was that of reading a text, reading a sign. It seemed very similar to Saussure’s and Barthes’s respective projects. The most interesting part (the similarities are here) about Freud’s project is the transformation of an image (if that is what a dream is) into text. Our minds, our craniums, do not have a USB connection where we can connect a flash drive and download what is there to be analyzed in an external apparatus; in this case we would like to download the images or video, which our dreams are. If we could see these we would have images instead of writing. That’s interesting. Freud doesn’t analyze a picture, he analyzes language, writing, text, much in the same way Saussure analyzes a sign and Barthes analyzes myths (these do include images, films and other materials). To analyze the mind, the psyche, at least in Freud’s way, you inevitably have to turn what is in mind into writing. To me a dream is like one of Barthes mythologies. I may be wrong, but I like this idea. The dream thoughts and dream content stem from each word that is analyzed, and so on from each other. I’d like to think of these as signifier and signified. The dream, just like the sign, is arbitrary. It has no direct relation to anything outside of itself. The signs that constitute the dream get their meaning by their difference with the other words. Although there is a difference in the way Freud analyzes the dreams, which is somewhat different than what is given primacy in Saussure and Barthes. This difference is based on the synchronic and diachronic classes of signs. Saussure and Barthes seem to give primacy to the synchronic aspect of language; the plane where all language is without regards to time or evolution. Freud has similar concepts: ‘the work of condensation’ and ‘the work of displacement’. In the work of displacement there is a constant evolution of dream thoughts, they, as the name suggests, displace one another from a fixed, central position. There is a story being developed here which is a string tool for dream interpretation as opposed to just studying the condensed dream thoughts. I think Freud acknowledges the inseparability of the paradigmatic from the syntagmatic. All of this is housed in the unconscious. In a sense, that which is behind the sign and inseparable (signified and signifier) is in the ‘unconscious.’

The Communist Manifesto

This is my blog for The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, but first I would like to allude to a previous text on which we have commented. That would be the one on Guy de Maupassant’s short story Toine. In this story we have a man, Toine, who presides over all the land of the town. Presides is, perhaps, a soft word to use; rather, he is the owner of the land. But he is not just owner of the land; he is owner of everything on the land. He is not legally the owner of everything, but he owns the means of production and controls the labor force and also the ideological state apparatus that serves his needs. He enemies, to him, to his realization, could only be anyone like him; this is although is a not an issue because he holds a strong monopoly over the land (perhaps this is more what I mean by ‘owner of the land’). The story doesn’t start of at the beginning stage, the story of his development, up until the current situation. What is seen at the start of the story, through narrative technique, what is shown as if through a microscope, is an already developed Toine, an already advanced bourgeois. Around him we see a mingling lower middle, middle, and upper middle class. His inseparable antagonist is non-other than his wife. She is the labor force, the body, whom he exploits, and has exploited for more than thirty years, and whom has allowed him to amass the huge body that he has, due to his idleness, and also the huge amount of wealth. The time came where all Toine’s possessions cannot save him from his inevitable decline and the takeover of the labor force body, in this case his wife. This is at the end is not resolved; what is shown is his ever intent to keep his position. I have not intended to label with the proper external terms, as I deemed it, rather I argue the text shows these politics at work. There are many other discourses at work in the text, but this is at the center; the other discourses are complimentary to these politics. This story is not a retelling of the communist manifesto nor is this one of the other; again, that is not what I intend. There is although, this will be part of my argument, something very similar at work, connecting both of these works. The history of Marx’s proletariat and bourgeoisie and their current state of being details the formation of an antagonistic social body. The communist manifesto touches briefly on this point, which is the significance of bodies. The most important note it makes is when it proposes that the proletariat only has, or his most important good is, his labor to sell. Let’s remember Toine’s wife has not given him (nor received from him) anything of use but her labor; no children, no happiness. At work in the text is a discourse on the body; a politics of body. Which bodies matter? Is life just a body? What has been the the development of discourse on the body from the 19^th century to the 21^st? Gender is also an important part of this development… that is all for now.