Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language

A Jungian Interpretation of the Linguistic Turn

Bret Alderman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317405887
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Every statement about language is also a statement by and about psyche. Guided by this primary assumption, and inspired by the works of Carl Jung, in Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language, Bret Alderman delves deep into the symbolic and symptomatic dimensions of a deconstructive postmodernism infatuated with semiotics and the workings of linguistic signs.

This book offers an important exploration of linguistic reference and representation through a Jungian understanding of symptom and symbol, using techniques including amplification, dream interpretation, and symbolic attitude. Focusing on Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty, Alderman examines the common belief that words and their meaning are grounded purely in language, instead envisioning a symptomatic expression of alienation and collective dissociation. Drawing upon the nascent field of ecopsychology, the modern disciplines of phenomenology and depth psychology, and the ancient knowledge of myth and animistic cosmologies, Alderman dares us to re-imagine some of the more sacrosanct concepts of the contemporary intellectual milieu informed by semiotics and the linguistic turn.

Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of depth psychology. However, the interdisciplinary approach of the work ensures that it will also be of great interest to those researching and studying in the areas of ethology, ecopsychology, philosophy, linguistics and mythology.

Chapter 1

Anatomical bodies

Fleshing out the image of linguistic reference

Of linear perspective vision and two types of bodies

Imagine this: A young Flemish anatomist, Andreas Vesalius, gently slices into a female cadaver. His incision reveals a tripartite sternum, thereby disproving the classical Greek belief that the sternum was composed of seven separate, yet connected, bones. It is 1543, the year that Copernicus died, after having sent the earth in motion around the sun. Vesalius is one of very few people in centuries to cut into human flesh in this way (Ball, 1910). Before this incision upon a female breast, dead bodies were not dissected, but commemorated, not de-membered, but re-membered. But with Vesalius, a scalpel cuts into human ligament and bone, tendon and cartilage, fibrous tissue and blood vessel, and with every carving motion of his incisive blade, the bodies of the deceased acquire a different meaning: Cadavers, as objects of study, no longer bear any relation to the souls of the departed. The corpse is invented—whereas before dead human bodies memorialized these souls, and the living related with empathy and respect to the stilled bodies of the dead, refraining, even criminalizing, incisions made upon them, with Vesalius the dead become inert material to be displayed and dissected, mapped and measured. They become anatomical bodies, the objects of a new science of human structure (Romanyshyn, 2004).

In this year, Vesalius will publish the first edition of his classic work Fabrica. Less than a century later, Descartes is to write his seminal Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes & Tweyman, 2002). The former inaugurated the age of modern anatomy, of which he is widely considered to be the father. The latter birthed modern philosophy and one of its more trenchant dualisms, that of res cogitas and res extensa, or mind cleaved from matter.

In Technology as Symptom and Dream (2004), Robert Romanyshyn describes the invention of the corpse, the birth of the anatomical body, as part of a much larger process of cultural evolution involving a new, modern sense of self as detached spectator, and the body as spectacle and specimen. Born of the Renaissance, and having come of age in the Enlightenment, this new anatomical conception of the body arose from a zeitgeist of scientific rationality that finds full expression today in the technical expertise of the specialist, as well as the technological innovations that surround us—from smart phones to infrared scanners, nuclear bombs to nanobots, microchips to MRIs. It is an understanding of the body as an object to be opened, manipulated, diagramed, dissected, and explained. It differs greatly from the medieval understanding of the body that was revered even in death, a sacralized body, the postmortem evisceration of which could only be understood as irreverent and profane. The profanation lay in the fact, or belief, that even dead human bodies were imbued of soul, imbued of anima. Cutting into them, therefore, could only be a desecration and violation.

Now, another image: The year is 1911—well over three hundred years after the founding of modern anatomy. The place is a lecture hall at the University of Geneva. Ferdinand de Saussure is giving one of his now-celebrated lectures on linguistic structure, lectures that, once collected and reassembled from the notes of his students, will be published as the Course in General Linguistics. This work will not only revolutionize Saussure’s own field, but will form the primary impetus for structuralism, an intellectual movement that exerts a formidable influence on the humanities and social sciences to this day. Copernican in its implications, Saussure’s linguistics in many ways represents as radical a change in modern thought as the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric cosmology. Just as Vesalius, Copernicus, and Descartes serve as historical signposts indicating the advent of a new zeitgeist, so does Saussure—his work helped form the ideological foundations for many postmodern modes of inquiry, including deconstruction and post-structuralism, but also, beyond this, it helped set the foundations for a more general postmodern ethos and sensibility.

A blackboard stands behind the middle-aged Swiss professor whose thick dark mustache virtually covers his entire mouth. On the blackboard is an oval traced in chalk with the French word for sign written above it. The oval itself is divided into two halves by a horizontal line. Above the line is the word concept, and below it, sound pattern. The distinguished gentlemen states in a ponderous yet emphatic tone, that “a science which studies linguistic structure is not only able to dispense with other elements of language, but is possible only if those other elements are kept separate” (Saussure, Bally, Sechehaye, & Riedinger, 1986, p. 14).

The two images, that of the sixteenth-century anatomist, and that of the twentieth-century linguist, appear to share little in common. Yet to an imagination imbued of symbolic vision, they have much more in common than what might first be supposed. Both form part of the same process of cultural evolution involving a new, modern sense of self as detached spectator, and the body as spectacle and specimen. A similar sense of self has been described in terms of a Cartesian split—the aforementioned dualism that divides the world into a res cogitas or mind and a res extensa or matter, including the body (Bordo, 1987). Many writers from a variety of disciplines (Berman, 1981; Brooke, 1991; Johnstone, 1992; Kleinberg-Levin, 1988; Spretnak, 1999) have told similar stories of estrangement in which a mind observes an object-body while a more viscerally felt body is implicitly omitted, or pejoratively reduced to something merely subjective. All tell tales of a mind purged of body and a body purged of blood.

The images of Vesalius and Saussure form chapters in this same overarching story of estrangement, in all of its various iterations, an estrangement brought about by a growing distance between two types of bodies: the anatomical body and the animate, ensouled body. Saussure’s role as protagonist of this story is particularly relevant here because, in the years since his lectures were delivered, they have also become a seminal influence upon a variant of postmodern thought that undermines the referential aspect of language, the sense in which words might refer to, and reveal, things and phenomena. In so doing, this new school of thought calls into question the very possibility that the language we speak and write can be used to accurately portray any reality beyond itself (Alexander, 1995; Norris, 1990). Understood as such, Saussure’s work represents a significant step in the severing of language from its other—a process by which many have come to understand human communication as taking place within a self-enclosed system of signs that has little or no relation to anything beyond, that is to say, anything transcendent to itself.

Let these two images play upon your imagination as you read the pages to follow: that of Vesalius standing before a corpse to inaugurate a science of human structure, and Saussure standing before a chalkboard to inaugurate a science of human signs. By way of these images, I intend to interpret a dream, one that is also a cultural-historical-psychological disposition within which we still very much find ourselves today as heirs to Vesalius, Descartes, Copernicus, and the scientific-technological rationalism that they helped create. The two images form both primary associations of this dream, and attempts to amplify its meaning.

Amplification and association are means by which Jung practiced a symbolic attitude that balances reason with imagination. Amplification is a more rational (though by no means comprehensive) description of the meaning of a dream image. Association is useful, in turn, when one is too bound to rational thought, when a person’s fantasy has been stifled by a scrutinizing intellect that will not allow for the spontaneous associations that appeal to our felt, intuitive sense of a situation (Whitmont, 1969). Both amplification and association are needed to adequately apprehend symbols. Both are needed to have a symbolic attitude. In these pages, I attempt to write with this symbolic attitude, that is to say, to weave the intuitive development of image with the rational argument of idea.

To this end, I want to flesh out (pun intended) these two bodies—the anatomical and the ensouled. The German language is blessed with a terminological distinction lacking in English that may help us in this regard: The word körper refers to the physical, material body, extended in space and visible to the eye. Leib, in turn, is something a bit more subtle and elusive. It is most often translated into English as the lived or living body (Aho & Aho, 2008). It is not an object, but an experiential subject. The cold cadaver beneath Vesalius’ scalpel is not a living body, not leib. It is körper. It is an anatomical body, one of technical function, an object, an epithelial container of an interior space filled with organs. The difference between this body and the animate or ensouled body is perhaps most clearly and poignantly brought to the fore by way of a kiss, or, more precisely, by an exploration of two very different ways of understanding kisses. When the body as technical function kisses another such body, “a rush of neurochemical processes initiated by pressure contact between two pairs of mucous membranes” occurs (Romanyshyn, 2004, p. 9). Your average Don Juan, doting mother, or celibate cenobite knows nothing of such a kiss; there is no insatiate eroticism, no lavish affection, no chaste longing by which each, in turn, might identify their own sense of what a kiss is. Such coupling of mucous membranes communicates little of the lived experience of any kiss, or any kisser. Yet the description is accurate. Kisses do, in fact, involve neurological processes and the meeting of mucous membranes, regardless of whether they are tentative and fleeting, decisively plucked, or coyly granted. The description is technically (or one might even say technologically) accurate, which is to say that it is accurate according to a particular style of vision, and a particular understanding of what is real and relevant. Within a given frame, the statement could not be more true.

I am not choosing the metaphor of a frame gratuitously. Framing, by way of the mathematical coordinates of linear perspective, is the cultural habit of mind that makes possible such an anatomical vision of the body. This artistic technique that sees by way of a geometric grid has become the cultural vision, the epistemology, that has come to form our contemporary technological world (Romanyshyn, 2004). Unknown before the fifteenth century, such a technique often involved the setting up of a frame between the painter and the object to be portrayed. The frame was divided by threads into small squares so that a grid was formed, through which the artist viewed a geometrically divided scene. This technique created a certain geometric sense of space: The establishment of vanishing points and horizon lines, the drawing of squares to be divided and subdivided, and the determination of a fixed vantage point, produced the illusion of a level plane that disappears in the distance. This plane was measurable and quantifiable. In the space that it created, we humans of the present era now live. We have come to see by way of this geometrically sectioned framing, and we have come to live by seeing.

The consequences of such a framing are formidable. Every procedure and condition involved in the creation of linear perspective has its implications: The establishment of a vanishing point necessitates the creation of a window which separates the subject as spectator from the object as spectacle. This separation eclipses the living, animate body insofar as it de-emphasizes the senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell in favor of the sense of sight. The world, held at a distance made evident by the separating frame, becomes a mere matter of optics (Brooke, 1991; 2000). The location of a vanishing point—no higher than any figure to be depicted in the painting—creates the sense that all objects lie on a single uniform plane, implying a certain “erasure of differences so that things, like angels and demons, which belong to other levels of existence, become a subjective matter” (Romanyshyn, 2004, p. 54).

Pinpointed and focused, this style of vision stares straight ahead at the world and seeks to penetrate the depths out there. The creation of a fixed distance point, intended to be the viewpoint of the spectator, implies the static, almost inert, character of this spectator. In being placed directly opposite the vanishing point, it also creates an ideal space of potentially infinite vision. These procedures and conditions, in their attention to the world as a question of optics, create a vision that measures by way of quantifiable distances, spatial proportions, angles, and configurations. In ages prior, or in any form of painting that does not share this particular sensibility, the size of figures might be determined by their relative significance; an important personage like the Virgin Mary might appear to be three or four times larger than any other human figure in her surroundings. This was not intended to communicate that the mother of God suffered from gigantism, had hormonal issues, or lived amidst dwarves. Her measure upon the canvas was simply not metric. Her size could be perceived by the eye, but was not solely determined by it. She did not belong to a geometric space. Her measure was of importance or value. It sprang from an imagination informed by something more than the eye. Her size upon the canvas was brought forth by a more fully human engagement with her image that includes those other “levels of existence” that have become merely a subjective matter, according to the logic of linear perspective and scientific-technological rationality. In linear perspective vision, the size of a figure is determined solely by what the eye can see. It is the eye’s perception alone that matters. Seeing in this way, we come to discount the “living relation between our flesh and the flesh of the world, and both size and distance as indices of value are eclipsed by size and distance as measured functions” (Romanyshyn, 2004, p. 56).

Through this vision, the corpse is conceived, for the anatomical body is a spectacle out there. This body is to be seen but not listened to, not tasted, not smelled, and touched only as needed. It is not the body through which one sees, but it is something that can be looked at. It does not feel. It cannot dream or desire. Because it is without sentience, it is not a somebody. It is nobody and no one. No person is there, no life, no self. This body is perceived by way of distance, even when it is one’s own. Thus, Descartes writes, “the first thought to come to mind was that I had a face, hands, arms and the whole mechanical structure of limbs which can be seen in a corpse, and which I called the body” (Descartes, cited by Johnstone, 1992, p. 23). Such a mechanical structure of limbs is one whose depth can be penetrated and pierced by the eye. The Cartesian body is perceived by sight; it is first and foremost an object to be seen, a visual spectacle (Johnstone, 1992). To the extent that we now live in this visual, geometrized space that cuts the whole into parts, the space that forms the very sense of ourselves as mechanical structures of limbs, the corpse is the body that is real to us (Romanyshyn, 2004). The anatomical body is the real one—the living, animate body is not. Kisses have become merely the meeting of mucous membranes, and our own felt experience of a kiss has receded into the illusory realm of the subjective. We have succumbed to a disembodied understanding of what is real and what constitutes real knowledge.

What happens to the living, animate body when I perceive the world and myself through linear perspective vision? What happens when this way of perceiving becomes my own habit of mind? For this vision, the inner space that is filled with organs, tissues, and viscera is considered real, whereas the fantasies, longings, fears, dreams, and joys that I live daily are relatively illusory. The condition this provokes is one of radical estrangement:

Today we know quite well this experience of estrangement, for the distance which separates our knowledge of the world from our experience of it has only increased. Between my body, which I know in living my life with others, and the body of medical knowledge, or between the atomic structure of matter and the things of the world, which I sense with my body, there lies an immeasurable distance, and in most respects each of us remains a stranger to these constructed realities. We know, often in fine detail, the world we have imagined and dreamed, the world we have created, but cannot experience it. No matter how hard I may try, for example, to experience my sight of a beautiful sunrise as the impact of electromagnetic radiation upon the retinas of my eyeballs where complex electrochemical reactions take place transforming physical stimuli into physiological events, I am doomed to fail. (Romanyshyn, 2004, p. 68)

The experiential, ensouled body is marginalized when the world and oneself are perceived through linear perspective vision. A critical estrangement arises between what is known and understood as real, on the one hand, and what is intimately experienced, on the other. This estrangement, this distance between the ensouled body and the geometric space that creates the anatomical corpse, results from a cultural habit of mind, the habit that believes the measure of the world is optical, and little more. If you doubt the centrality of such a form of vision for the present era, direct your attention to the near-ubiquitous experience of watching television, surfing the Internet, playing video games, or any other form of inhabiting virtual realities. Humans have become transfixed by screens, the contemporary iterations of Renaissance frames. We slouch before them, curving our necks toward apparatus alit with flattened images. Such a habitual way of perceiving, like most habits, functions without any real awareness on the part of the person, or culture, that has come under its sway. Without consciously knowing it, we have come to see the world as if our eyes were camera lenses.

One way of becoming aware of such habits is to search for the special and specific procedures and conditions that make such perceptions possible. I have already given a cursory sketch of such procedures and conditions as regards linear perspective vision. In addition to these, and implicit to them all, is some form of disruption; in order to see my own body as an anatomical object, I must be cut, wounded, or broken open in some way. Indeed, the very term anatomy is rooted in the Greek and Latin words for cut and dissect. For Vesalius to conceive of such an anatomical object of study, he had to acquire dead bodies to be incised with a scalpel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language
• Research in Analytical Psychology and Jungian Studies Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Anatomical Bodies: Fleshing Out the Image of Linguistic Reference
• 2 Abandoned Earth, Abandoned Nature: Language Theory as Dream of Departure
• 3 Earthrise: The Ecocentric Critique of Dissociated Reference
• 4 Promethean Postmodernism: Stealing Fire from the God-Terms
• 5 Promethean Purpose as Renewal of the Gods: Reconceiving the Alienation of Sign from Referent
• Conclusion
• Index