Autho-ethnography and unconscious
being in a self- art-theraphy phase and reading Michel Foucault’s ‘The Order of Things’(which in French and Russian is “THE WORDS AND THE THINGS”)
all the key words of the ongoing research are all there: Words, Things, Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, Reflection
Just as psychoanalysis situates itself in the dimension of the unconscious… ethnology situates itself in the dimension of historicity…(p.410) Michel Foucault The Order of Things: An archaeology of the human sciences. Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005.
Psychoanalysis and ethnology occupy a privileged position in our
knowledge — not because they have established the foundations of their
positivity better than any other human science, and at last accomplished the old attempt to be truly scientific; but rather because, on the confines of all the branches of knowledge investigating man, they form an undoubted and inexhaustible treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and contestation of what may seem, in other respects, to be established.(p. 407)
…unlike the human sciences, which, even while turning back towards
the unconscious, always remain within the space of the representable,
psychoanalysis advances and leaps over representation, overflows it on
the side of finitude, and thus reveals, where one had expected functions
bearing their norms, conflicts burdened with rules, and significations
forming a system, the simple fact that it is possible for there to be
system (therefore signification), rule (therefore conflict), norm (therefore function)…(p.408)
…But this relation of psychoanalysis with what makes all knowledge in
general possible in the sphere of the human sciences has yet another
consequence — namely, that psychoanalysis cannot be deployed as pure
speculative knowledge or as a general theory of man. It cannot span the
entire field of representation, attempt to evade its frontiers, or point
towards what is more fundamental, in the form of an empirical science
constructed on the basis of careful observation; that breakthrough can
be made only within the limits of a praxis in which it is not only the
knowledge we have of man that is involved, man himself…(p.410)
And yet ethnology itself is possible only on the basis of a certain
situation, of an absolutely singular event which involves not only our
historicity but also that of all men who can constitute the object of an
ethnology (it being understood that we can perfectly well apprehend
our own society’s ethnology): ethnology has its roots, in fact, in a
possibility that properly belongs to the history of our culture, even
more to its fundamental relation with the whole of history, and enables
it to link itself to other cultures in a mode of pure theory.(p.411)
There is acertain position of the Western ratio that was constituted in its history
and provides a foundation for the relation it can have with all other
societies, even with the society in which it historically appeared. Obviously, this does not mean that the colonizing situation is indispensable
to ethnology: neither hypnosis, nor the patient’s alienation within the
fantasmatic character of the doctor, is constitutive of psychoanalysis;
but just as the latter can be deployed only in the calm violence of a
particular relationship and the transference it produces, so ethnology
can assume its proper dimensions only within the historical sovereignty — always restrained, but always present — of European thought and the relation that can bring it face to face with all other cultures as well as with itself.(p.411)
But this relation…does not imprison it within the circular system of actions and reactions proper to historicism; rather, it places it in a position to find a way
round that danger by inverting the movement that gave rise to it; in
fact, instead of relating empirical contents — as revealed in psychology,
sociology, or the analysis of literature and myth — to the historical
positivity of the subject perceiving them…Ethnology, then, advances towards that region where the human sciences are articulated upon that biology, that economics, and that philology and linguistics which, as we have seen,
dominate the human sciences from such a very great height: this is
why the general problem of all ethnology is in fact that of the relations
(of continuity or discontinuity) between nature and culture.(p.412)
But in this mode of questioning, the problem of history is found to have been
reversed: for it then becomes a matter of determining, according to the
symbolic systems employed, according to the prescribed rules, according to the functional norms chosen and laid down, what sort of historical development each culture is susceptible of; it is seeking to re-apprehend, in its very roots, the mode of historicity that may occur within that culture, and the reasons why its history must inevitably be cumulative or circular (прямолинейно или круговой), progressive or subjected to regulating fluctuations(движущейся только вперед или подчиненной закономерным колебаниям), capable of spontaneous (<нет этого слова) adjustments or subject to crises. And thus is revealed the foundation of that historical flow(отклонения) within which the different human sciences assume their validity and can be applied to a given culture and upon a given synchronological area(срез).
Ethnology, like psychoanalysis, questions not man himself, as he
appears in the human sciences, but the region that makes possible
knowledge about man in general; like psychoanalysis, it spans the
whole field of that knowledge in a movement that tends to reach its
boundaries.(р.412)
The privilege of ethnology and psychoanalysis, the reason for their profound kinship and symmetry, must not be sought in some common concern to pierce the profound enigma, the most secret part of human nature; in fact, what illuminates the space of their discourse is much more the historical a priori of all the sciences of man — those great caesuras, furrows, and dividing-lines which traced man’s outline in the Western episteme and made him a possible area of knowledge.
It was quite inevitable, then, that they should both be sciences of the
unconscious: not because they reach down to what is below consciousness in man, but because they are directed towards that which,
outside man, makes it possible to know, with a positive knowledge,
that which is given to or eludes his consciousness.(p.413)
…psychoanalysis and ethnology are not so much two human sciences among others, but that they span the entire domain of those sciences, that they animate its whole surface, spread their concepts throughout it, and are able to propound their methods of decipherment and their interpretations everywhere. No human science can be sure that it is out of their debt, or entirely independent of what they may have discovered, or certain of not being beholden to them in one way or another. But their development has one particular feature, which is that, despite their quasi-universal ‘bearing’, they never, for all that, come near to a general concept of man: at no moment do they come near to isolating a quality in him that is specific, irreducible, and uniformly valid wherever he is given to experience. (maybe because there is no such thing!)
One may say of both of them what Lévi-Strauss said of ethnology: that they dissolve man. Not that there is any question of revealing him in a better, purer, and as it were more liberated state; but because they go back towards that which fomentshis positivity. In relation to the ‘human sciences’, psychoanalysis and ethnology are rather ‘counter-sciences’; which does not mean that they are less ‘rational’ or ‘objective’ than the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction, that they lead them back to their epistemological basis, and that they ceaselessly ‘unmake’ that very man who is creating and re-creating his positivity in the human sciences.Lastly, we can understand why psychoanalysis and ethnology should have been constituted in confrontation, in a fundamental correlation: since “Totem and taboo”, the establishment of a common field for these two, the possibility of a discourse that could move from one to the other without discontinuity, the double articulation of the history of individuals upon
the unconscious of culture, and of the historicity of those cultures
upon the unconscious of individuals, has opened up, without doubt,
the most general problems that can be posed with regard to man.(p.414)
One can imagine what prestige and importance ethnology could
possess if, instead of defining itself in the first place — as it has done
until now — as the study of societies without history, it were deliberately to seek its object in the area of the unconscious processes that
characterize the system of a given culture; in this way it would bring
the relation of historicity, which is constitutive of all ethnology in
general, into play within the dimension in which psychoanalysis has
always been deployed. In so doing it would not assimilate the mechanisms and forms of a society to the pressure and repression of collective
hallucinations, thus discovering — though on a larger scale — what
analysis can discover at the level of the individual; it would define as a
system of cultural unconsciouses the totality of formal structures
which render mythical discourse significant, give their coherence and
necessity to the rules that regulate needs, and provide the norms of life
with a foundation other than that to be found in nature, or in pure
biological functions.
One can imagine the similar importance that a
psychoanalysis would have if it were to share the dimension of an
ethnology, not by the establishment of a ‘cultural psychology’, not by
the sociological explanation of phenomena manifested at the level of
individuals, but by the discovery that the unconscious also possesses,
or rather that it is in itself, a certain formal structure.
By this means, ethnology and psychoanalysis would succeed, not in superimposing themselves on one another, nor even perhaps in coming together, butin intersecting like two lines differently oriented: one proceeding from the apparent elision of the signified in a neurosis to the lacuna in the
signifying system through which the neurosis found expression; the
other proceeding from the analogy between the multiple things signified (in mythologies, for example) to the unity of a structure whose
formal transformations would yield up the diversity existing in the
actual stories.
It would thus not be at the level of the relations between
the individual and society, as has often been believed, that psychoanalysis and ethnology could be articulated one upon the other; it is
not because the individual is a part of his group, it is not because a
culture is reflected and expressed in a more or less deviant manner in
the individual, that these two forms of knowledge are neighbours.
In fact, they have only one point in common, but it is an essential and
inevitable one: the one at which they intersect at right angles; for the
signifying chain by which the unique experience of the individual is
constituted is perpendicular to the formal system on the basis of which
the significations of a culture are constituted: at any given instant, the
structure proper to individual experience finds a certain number of
possible choices (and of excluded possibilities) in the systems of the
society; inversely, at each of their points of choice the social structures
encounter a certain number of possible individuals (and others who
are not) — just as the linear structure of language always produces a
possible choice between several words or several phonemes at any
given moment (but excludes all others).
