The remark by Irad Kimhi I posted the other day is at once creepy and profound. It is also more familiar than it at first appears; think of the stories and narrative methods employed in the following:
In several television shows and films, a character's everyday ego (his I) is unaware of who he really is. He really is a saboteur or a murderer, another person, and so on. Think of "The 4400" (Kyle Baldwin, son of the putz secret agent protagonist); "Angel Heart" (Harry Angel); "Battlestar Galactica" (the false surface consciousness of Sharon "Boomer" Valeri, as in Episode 1x3, "Water"); "Fight Club" (the narrator); "Evil Dead" (Ash's hand, which went bad, so he had to cut it off).
A different kind of thing-beneath-you is the fascinating depiction of the Echo-consciousness in Joss Whedon's current going concern "Doll House." Echo is perhaps a being underneath the surface of Caroline, the woman who semi-voluntarily gave up her body for five years for employment as a doll. In the first season finale, the two confront one another in a cleverly-devised scene. Echo is not quite Caroline's unconscious.
The "unconscious" (Freud's "Unbewusstsein") is not an especially helpful term for this kind of investigation. While evocative, on its own it does not do much work. Lacan's concept of desire, which fills the same logical position, is a little more helpful, since it at least names a dominant tendency or forcefield in the unconscious.
Three more tales display a related idea, one which however does not quite illustrate false consciousness. First, to use some common cultural currency, consider the narrative of the film "The Usual Suspects." About 80% of the film takes place in the flashback narrative of toady Roger "Verbal" Kint. It appears certain at the end of the film that important elements of Kint's story were lies, including such things as who people were, including his own identity, who committed crimes, and when things happened. The adhesion which we trust between story and what really happened is split asunder. In a sense we have experienced a lie throughout the film, and therefore experienced tellig a lie. Who was Verbal, as opposed to Keyser Soze? Take another example, from one of my favorite pieces of popular fiction in the last decade, "Battlestar Galactica." Early in season 2, as Commander Adama is recovering from being shot, the Chief comes to ask him to go easy on Callie. The Commander presses him on his relationship with Boomer, now rather dramatically exposed as a cylon in their midst.
Commander Adama: Did you love her, Chief?
Chief Tyrol: Excuse me?
Adama: Boomer -- did you love her?
Tyrol: I thought I did...
Adama: When you think you love somebody, you love them. That’s what love is -- thoughts. She was a cylon, a machine. Is that what Boomer was? A machine? A thing?
Tyrol: That’s what she turned out to be.
Adama: She was more than that to us. She was more than that to me. She was a vital, living person… aboard my ship for almost two years. She couldn’t have been just a machine. Could you love a machine?
Tyrol: No, sir. I guess I couldn’t have.
(See also general post on BSG from last November.)
This is similar to the experience of remembering false belief. You know that you thought something, and believed that you knew it to be true at the time. Yet it turns out to be false. The problem here is that with false belief about states of affairs ("I thought that man over there was my brother, but it turned out to be someone else"), finding out you were wrong clears everything up. In the dramatic scene quoted above, the characters have to wrestle with their false beliefs, and remain at least a little unsure what they think.
In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that if there were a verb which meant "to believe falsely" it would have no meaningful first-person present indicative use. (not quite quoting verbatim)
There is a tempting application to history and other social sciences: The idea that there might be a big narrative or plan or "logic" unfolding in time or structuring a space or community, which the individuals are not aware of. We should be very weary of this, since it is nigh unverifiable. For the same reason we should be weary of the original Freudian-Kimhian argument to which it connects.
At least two of these fictions (the example from Adama and the Chief and Wittgenstein's remark) might be described instead or as well by saying that a person consciously does not know or understand or recognize his own thoughts. Thoughts are not things standing before me for observation or for "grasping" in the Fregean sense. They are not things just as I am not a thing.
What about the idea of "becoming who you are", as Zarathustra put it? Over time, I write enough that I eventually draw my borders and emerge as a soul with a certain shape. Over time, the king and parliament of England make enough laws that there is a body of positive law to recognize as the English law. It is there. It was not an it at one point, but then suddenly when they looked for it, it was there. The Renaissance sculptors--I forget who (see Vassari's Lives) said that to carve a statue is like cutting away the extra rock that holds the already extant shape inside. See Michaelangelo's "Prisoners" in the Uffizi.
1 comment:
I don't think the two are incompatible. one takes a macro perspective (societies over time), the other takes a micro-pserspective, of the individual over time; can you deny that the individual exists in a powerfully influential culture? the water in which we are all swimming which we can't see. cultural anthropologists will argue the self is entirely socially constructed, meaning that others influence everything about who an individual thinks they are - even if it's nietzche telling them to "be an individual!" the norms and laws and traffic of society hold the "free individual" back, and constrain the artists final product...there is nothing in the stone without the artist who cuts it, friend, just as there was no "immaculate conception." the future is not already written - or if it is, this is worse reason to think there is any free will within it.
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