[lbo-talk] was Weath Distribution and hot air something

[wrobert at uci.edu]

> On 4/28/07, Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> CB: Note that both Levi-Strauss and Chomsky's grammars/structures are
>> unconscious. There is this big system of symbols in everybody's head
>> that
>> the average, native speaker cannot articulate abstractly, but which they
>> know and follow in speech and behavior.  Of course, in that period
>> Freudian
>> unconscious was still en vogue.
>
> ^^^^
> JM: The process of eye movement and mental adjustment that keeps
> continuity
> of vision is not conscious.  This kind of "unconsciousness" has nothing to
> do with Freudian metapsychology of the unconscious.
>
> The mental computations that go into the making of language are not
> conscious in the same way that the mental computations that go into
> continuity of vision are not conscious.
>
> I realize in mentioning Freud you are probably not trying to map Chomsky's
> notions of non-conscious physical processes and onto Freud's notion of
> "the
> Unconscious".  You are probably just pointing out a cultural tendency.
> But
> I think that it is important to distinguish these notions.
>
> The case is a bit different with Levi-Strauss, but since it has been 25
> years since I have read him, I will leave alone any confused thoughts I
> might have about the correspondence between Levi-Strauss and Freud's
> metapsychology.
> ^^^^

Just a couple side notes here.  First off, I think its worth keeping in
mind that Freud is not the originator of the notion of the unconscious,
there have been formulations of it that have come both before and after
him.  There is a real connection between Freud and Levi-Strauss though. 
First, in the way that LS takes the incest taboo as a structural element
of structures of society and also in the way that Lacan takes up LS as a
way of shoring up his understanding of psychoanalysis.

                       Robert Wood