o Preamble to First Column Article
In this month's Postmodern Dreaming Column I would like to quickly spend this
month
with a general introduction to the postmodern and how it differs from the Modern and
what it might have to do with dreams and dreaming. Later articles will then wander
organically, if not randomly, through the Postmodern ideas, reading them together with
dreams and dreaming ideas in hopes of producing new concepts, ideas and practices that
might enrich both.
o Forward into the Past
It has been of interest to me for some time that there are a great many parallels
between
the history of the interpretation of literature/poetry/texts and the history of the
interpretation of dreams. Like dreams, early sacred texts were seen as sacred and messages
from the gods. While this view continues even today, new streams formed and diverged.
The author's intention (what the author meant to say) was seen as important. Others
began to view the text separately from the author and saw the meaning resting in the
reader's response. Others found the meaning by looking closely at the structure and
context of the text, seeking both the archetypal and social forces at play. This sequence
follows quite closely the ways of interpreting dreams.
By the 1960's it seemed that all the ways of interpreting a text had been played out
and
there was nothing much left to do but categorize these elements. Then a
postmodern
revolution occurred. Some anticipated it coming. In dreaming Jung, and later James
Hillman, began talking about something irrational in the dream image that needed to be
encountered to avoid getting stuck in dead categories. They knew that only a break with
old patterns offered new pathways. And they knew that archetypes were not just
stereotypes and categories. Encounters with the numinous core could strip away old neurosis and open the
door to the unrealized. Had the postmodern revolution occurred first in Switzerland, it
may have been very different.
In 1968 the country (France) was temporarily shut
down by a country wide walk-off of workers and students, backed by the French-Marxist
who were at the time denied any political power. But within days the Marxist
representatives had traded most of their political positions for government positions and
the country was up and running, except for the intellectual Left who felt betrayed and now
drifted from Marxism. It was clear that even the most radical of political groups could be
tamed and dominated by the seduction of power. Perhaps, it was thought, that
organization itself might be the culprit. In literature, philosophy, critical theory, linguistics,
psychology, leftist politics and art a radical departure from the values of the past was in the
making. This departure was so powerful that a lecture by Jacques Derrida in America in
the 1960's lead to a widespread movement of American Deconstruction in literature,
philosophy and law. But the intellectual aspects of the movement remained in America
mostly in academic, and it wasn't until the advent of the Net that the ideas became more
widely disseminated in North America.
The implications for interpretation, of dreams and text, as well as politics,
religion,
recreation, sex, identity, psychology, play and other social practices are so strange and
uncanny that Americans have barely begun to grasp their implications and significance.
This may, as some suggest, be because we already act out so many of the postmodern
paradigms anyway, even if without the intellectual baggage. We tend to *make* and *do*
things in America. Again, the Internet may be *the* postmodern expression, with
emphasis on dissemination, multiple identities, unrecoverable authors, multiple levels of
meaning, social practices crossing boundaries and categories once thought to be in-violate,
the championing of the particular, organic-ordering, non-hierarchical, non-human,
fluidic space, the linguistic, textual and graphical, the metamorphic.
o The History of the Interpretive Response
There is a correspondence, or at least, strong parallels between the history of
literary
interpretation and the interpretation of dreams.
The earliest writings include the recording of dreams and their interpretations in
Sumerian cuneiform tablets. In these writings, it is assumed that the author of the dream is
a god and the the dream is a message to the dreamer. The dreamer, like many a scribe, are
seem merely as conduits of the divine or demonic.
And the study of the interpretation of sacred texts, hermeneutics
(HERmenOOtiks)
which originally referred to theories of biblical interpretations, later came to refer to the
theory of interpretation in general. The center of hermeneutics is the belief that the text
contains a stable meaning that can be determined and possibly recovered. This was first
extended from religious texts to legal, historical, bibliographic and literary texts, but by the
19th Century had been extended to all works in the humanities and social sciences.
From
this emerged the idea of what is now called "Authorial Intention". Here, the meaning of
the text has to do with the author's attempt to use commonly know language to produce a
meaning. The recovery of the meaning is found in forming a hypothesis about the author's
meaning and attempting to confirm or invalidate this by continual reference to the text.
In Psychoanalysis, the true meaning of the dream text was arrived at by a close
reading as
well. Results of Free association we added to the patients clinical material and historical
background to discover the true meaning of the dream, the true unconscious intentions.
These ideas carried on into the middle of the 20th Century.
By the 1940's an 50's, this interpretive text approach was giving way to New
Criticism.
There was a shift from history and content to form. At the heart of this approach was the
autonomous *image* in the text, independent of the author. The image, such as a poem,
could now be analyzed at several levels, the particular image (or poetic line), the genre, or
the place in literature in general. The old focus on the intentions of the author were seen
now as guilty of committing the "intentional fallacy"(Wimsatt & Beardsley 1954) which
sees the appeal to an author's designs as irrelevant to the autonomous structure of a text.
Who can really know the author's intention? Perhaps even the author him/herself may not
really understand the motives and intentions that went into text.
Conflicts and resolutions in the text were seen as the guiding path into the texts, with
the
focus on coherence and internal tension. Universal collective patterns were found, and as
Kugler (1987) has noted, this literary style reflects more Jung's approach to dreams. The
focus on image patterns, the move to deeper collective themes, the discovery of paradox and
reconciliation, and the ultimate belief in the coherence and unity of the psyche were as
important to Jung as the New Critics.
Now all these style have been called into question. Not only authorial intention, but
the
texts unity, autonomy and ability to reveal some referential truth have been seriously
questioned. The first new trend to emerge out of all this doubt was called Structuralism.
o Structuralism
Structuralism is a complex intellectual movement that became important in France
about
1950, and included such the work of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Literary Critic
Roland Barthes and A. J. Greimas. By the 1970's there influence was considerable in
England and the United States. The roots of Structuralism are diverse, but usually traced
to the Swiss linguist, Fredinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and his theory of language as
based on a system of internal differences rather than in resemblances to objects in the
material world.
- Signifier - The acoustic sound or material written word
Sign =
- Signified - The concept to which the signifier refers.
Language, and thus the text and dreams made up of language, are seen as closed,
culture
bound systems. This new science of linguistics , Semiology, would study all of the signs that
make up a culture, their nature, their laws. A key to understanding this systems approach
is the idea of words or signs as having both a signifier and a signified. The signifier is the
word itself, like "tree". The signifier is seen as arbitrary. I could have used arbre in French,
dendro in Greek , silvus in Latin. Or "tree" in English might have not ended up as "tree"
but "oglot" and we would have all gotten by just fine. And know when someone says
"tree" it is "tree" because the way it sounds is *different* than "me", "free", "treat" and
so on. Thus the material acoustic sound "tree" is unique because it is surrounded by a
whole system of differences. Try describing any object-word in your room, a desk, a chair,
a door, without referring to how it is different from another object and you will quickly see
how difference plays an essential key.
Now each word or sign also points to something beyond itself. In normal usage
we talk
about what the word refers to, a particular tree in material reality. But as a sign, it also
points to a concept, (as in the concept of "trees") and this is called by Saussure the
"signifed". We can think of the signified as the concept or idea that a community of
speakers associate with the sound or written word. And again, the relationship between the
signified and the signifier is arbitrary as well. Saying "Tree" in one culture may refer to
the concept of "Bringing me some fish!"
The point of all this was to constuct a view of language not tied to material
objects. The
rules are inherent in the structure of the parts. Just like a chess or checkers game, the
pieces could all look very different, as long as the underlying structure of the game
remained the same. The authors intention (the inventor of chess), the historical shapes of
the pieces and the materials they are made up of take a back seat to the rules of the game.
o Structuralism at Work
By the early 1950's and 1960's people such as Roland Barths and Claude
Levi-Strauss
had extended Saussure's semiological approach to anthropology, literature and culture in
general. In the new interpretive vision, the sign's ability to reflect or mirror nature and the
human psyche gave way to this study of how the words and images work as a system of
structural relations.
In 1949, Levi-Strauss reformulated Freud's unconscious into two parts, the
subconscious
and the unconscious. The Subconscious is much like Jung's personal unconscious, and
Freud's unconscious, full of psychic substances, memories & imagos, and associations
collected during the course of life. The Unconscious was (structurally) more like Jung's
Collective Unconscious, devoid of images and full of structural laws. Levi-Strauss saw the
personal subsconsious like the personal words & pieces of life gathered, while the structural
unconscious is what really creates the rules that the pieces play out in life.
By 1953, French psychotherapist Jacques Lacan adopts this idea of the unconscious
as full
of rules, processes and structural strategies and proposes a three part psychic system, the
Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. "The object as such, attempting to be know" is the
Real. We only experience this indirectly. The representations of the object constitute the
Imaginary. The Symbolic is more structural and organizes representations into meaningful
images. The self for Lacan is a linguistic construction. Language here is extended to mean
any psychic capacity for representation. In the act of representation we can represent
ourselves thus creating self awareness. However, this ability to represent divides us into a
self that experiences and a self that represents what it experiences. The experiential self on
one hand is only known because we can represent it, ("I"), but at the same time separate
from those representations and excluded from the common world we all share through
language/representations. This exclusion leads to an unconscious order of existence, which
may be seen as all our unmediated experience.
The structuralist project focused on these representational realms and worked
toward
developing an objective science of interpretation, capable of revealing the symbolic
structures underlying all narratives. But by the 1970's even the main proponents of the
movement were beginning to questions the usefulness and desirability of extracting a
collection of abstract rules in every narrative and text. Essentially, the text, once
categorized and filed in the place of all the narratives, loses its uniqueness and its
difference.
o Poststructuralism
A new movement was arising that was to shun the search for structural similarities
between texts.
This post-structural movement found its root influences in such thinkers as Hegel,
Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida. The key idea was a suspicion of any project of
interpretation that tried to ground itself in an absolute, such as truth, reality, self, center,
unity, origin and even author.
Whenever we have a set of rules or system, there is always a grand ole idea that
stands
outside of the structure and informs it, though the grand ole idea is always itself outside of
explanation. Derrida point out in a seminal lecture (Derrida, 1966) an example of how
these ultimate first principles work in removing themselves temporally, either ahead or
behind of the system they explain. An example with dreams would be the theories that posit
anterior causes, such as biochemistry, drives, family, trauma, childhood and day residue.
All explanation in these systems refer to an event in the past that caused the dream, but is
itself never questioned. Or
the dream is posited as moving forward in time towards ultimates such as Self,
Wholeness,
Unity, Death and God. To work, the principles have to be removed and the status has to
be different.
These transcendental god-terms function as the lynch-pins for the entire Western
theory of
interpretation.
Derrida points out these are not grand eternal structures we assign to them, but
linguistic
by products of a naively representational view of language. These terms are... fictions.
Useful, but none the less made up. There is no language that is literal, even science. It is all
metaphorical. All language is ironic, both revealing and at the same time concealing.
Even dream interpretation systems that simple describe the dream images (such as
versions
of the Phenomenological approach), certain terms will be literalized and given a privileged
status, and all the rest of the terms in the system will revolve around this term and refer to
it. Notice in dream theory how these terms are privileged: wish, oedipus complex,
archetypes, drives, phallus, desire, imagination, self, repression, compensation. One term is
seen as the orgin, such as the Jungian Self, or in Freud, the drives.
Try raising the question of origins without thinking about the origin of *that*
origin. It
is next to impossible. "Origin" is now the transcendental term and all further thinking
about it will refer to it, though it remains outside interpretation itself. Origin now explains
everything but itself.
Now this dissatisfaction with central explanatory principles was not new to the
Post-structuralists. Nietzsche had been working on this "god is dead" theme since the end of the
last century. The post-structural addition extends this idea to language and begins to show
how hidden in everyday language, this first principle still exists. As Deleuze said, all word
point to Pharaoh, meaning that there is inherent in our language the implication of center
to which it is all referring. And yet linguistically, we never reach that center. Instead there
a hole in the center of the universe. Those with faith or a flair for gnostic or mystic contact
can say the hole is not empty in the way an atheistic approach might have it, but this must
always be either private experience and or belief. Shamanistic approaches try to bridge this
gap by providing mediating and initiatory experiences for the sake of the seeker, but these
generally lie outside of the realm of interpretative theory and are based on relationships of
trust between shaman and initiate, or teacher and student, or guru and disciple.
The shift from structural to post-structural interpretation is that of seeing the text
as a
closed unity with decipherable meaning to viewing the text as irreducibly plural, swinging
from literal to metaphorical significance(s) which can never be fixed to a single center,
unity or meaning. When we are aware that the theories by which we see the world are just
that, theories, then we can pick and choose among them. When we forget that they are
theories, then they become more unconscious and begin to structure our views, fooling us
and tell us that they are really real. As James Hillman has pointed out, dreams are so
wonderful a teacher in this area, because during a dream we realize that we are in the
image, the image is not in us.
Does this all sound a bit like Nietzsche and the death of god? It should as Derrida
and the
other post structural thinkers are all profound readers of Nietzsche. Not only is the idea of
a center looked at with suspicion, but all structure is seen as founded on an untenable
paradox found in all Western Metaphysics. And yet there is no call to despair. Though the
origin cannot be recovered, the awareness of this leads to a particular kind of freedom,
what Derrida calls "freeplay"
Since these early days of Derrida, many thinkers made the poststructural shift,
including
Julia Kristeva & Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis, Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau
in history, Jean Francois Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze in cultural-political critique and
oodles of others in literary and aesthetic criticism. Though each has his/her own unique
contribution, the was a general abandonment of explanation of meaning via first causes,
origins and orders based on binary oppositions. The idea that there was even a single "me"
or "you" was abandoned as well. The idea of a single text is replaced by the word
"discourse" generally meaning that anything longer than a sentence erupts into history,
breaks into contexts, decenters the subject and distributes a continual flow of meaning.
(How like the dream.).
Even the concept of "man" or "Humanity" becomes a linguistic construct. We have
no
nature, or more properly, to speak of our Nature is to get caught up in the linguistic binary
game of what is nurture, what is nature, and thus it has no meaning outside of this game.
All universals that are posited as valid fall into this new paradox.
While this movement was highly involved in linguistic critiques of social and
political
practices, showing how language figures in the construction of the possibilities of meaning
and reality, the larger cultural movement, postmodernism has extended itself into and
beyond these initial linguistic and social critiques to include the signyfying practices of the
culture at large. In literature, the writer may have the text become self conscious and have
the text converse with the story itself. In architecture, what is usually seen only inside a
building might be found on the outside. The general significance of the postmodern spills
out into the streets and is as relevant there as with the avant-garde. (How like the Dream)
o Sign of the Times
Increasingly important in Postmodern thought is the Sign in Culture. The social
order
shifts from
productive to reproductive, and simulations and models of reality begin to replace
what
was once thought to be real. The differences between appearance and reality fade.
Representation is replaced by presentation. Singularity of truth is replaced by plurality of
viewpoint. Lyotard speaks about the grand narratives being replaced by more local
accounts of reality. Just as the emphasis in structuralism moved the attention away from
the concrete object to the objects sign, the postmodern continues to move the attention
away from the signified (concept) to the signifier or the signifiying act. Like an
improvisational jazz movement or a rock and roll concert, the meanings may swirl around
the event, but the focus is on the instrumentality or acoustic materiality of the moment.
I
Dreams and the Postmodern: A brief account to date
There have been a few attempts by dream theorists to move dreamwork and
dreaming
into the postmodern, but these are mostly scattered talks and texts. In 1989, Harry Hunt's
book the Multiplicity of Dreams was published. In this close examination of the coginitive
science of dreaming, Hunt revealed how bias of perspectives also bias the not only the
interpretation of empirical results, but choice of the objects of study and the funding as
well. Hunt also recognized the core of dreaming as "exterioriz(ing) the processes of cross-modal
synesthetic translation and mutual reorganization that may constitute the core of all
symbolic intelligence." (Hunt 1989 206).
Here the process of cross-modal synesthetic (hearing colors, tasting sounds)
translation and
mutual reorganization refers to a post-representational presentation in which meaning is
generated in the freeplay of being, becoming and re-becoming. Bert States, in his book
_the Rhetoric of Dreams_ explores Dreams and the Freudian Primary Process, (the dream-work
of displacement, symbolization, condensation and so on) in literary terms of Irony
and other metaphoric shifts brought about by language. Paul Kugler, a Jungian (post-jungian?)
and Gordon Globus have both given presentations at the Association for the
Study of Dreams on the postmodern and dreams. Kugler attempts to question the limits of
dream theory as we move from the modern to the postmodern. Kugler asks of any dream
interpretation:
Where is the dream being literal, and where is it being figurative? To what does the
dream
refer, the inner world, the outer world, or is it self-referential? Who is the author of the
dream, biology, a wish, a desire, a deity, or is there no author? How do we develop a dream
theory that is itself self conscious? That is, capable of carrying an awareness of its own
figural aspects and assumptions? ( its own unconsciousness?). Gordon Globus has been
attempting to construct a connectionists theory of mind/brain and apply this to dreaming
as a way to move into viewing dreaming without getting caught up in representational
thought. In his Neural Net theory, the brain flows, and in this flow of interactive influences
there are valleys and hills that we settle for a few moments and experience one of many
possible worlds. Dreaming is simply the flow of these neural nets without the constraints of
outer stimulation. James Hillman has also attempted to view dreams without importing
theories from the past and his _Dreams and the Underworld_ creates a bridge between the
structural projects of Jung and the Postmodern psychoanalytic theories that remove the
idea of the Self as a central organizing principle to open the individual to a specturm of
archetypal influences which may play out on a larger cultural theatre than the therapist's
couch.
However, the most explosive and creative venure for postmodern dreaming has
been the
Internet. Some ideas are more apparent than others. The ideas of the pre-commercial Net
have influenced contemporary Late 90's Cyberspace, which include sharing of resources,
the acceptance of multiple identities, the encouragement toward the non-familiar, the
cooperative spirit of helping one another get these ideas up and out to the public, general
trust of chaos and anarchy and relationships bonded by mutual interest rather than
coercions. Though most of these concepts have collapsed under the proprietary and
territorializations of the commercial networks, they are the backdrop that have provided
support to what I'm calling America's Postmodern Dreaming in Cyberspace. Here the
multiple forms of trans categorical presentation erupt in ever new forms. Typically we
catagorize them, dream art, dream work, dream sharing, dream science, lucid dreaming,
shamanic dreaming, spiritual dreaming, journey dreaming, psychic dreaming, dream
journals, dreams comments, dream inspired poetry and so on. But these dream eruptions
generally defy any classification and break many boundaries. At one moment a dream is a
journal entry, the next a discussion between people from around the world in a simulated
virtual room. Later a picture emerges on a Web site and it is linked to the sleep research
laboratories in Cincinnati. An individual following this path may be involved in the
meaning of the dream, but they are also involved in the track of the dream, the medium of
the text in a chat room, in an email, and on the Web, as a gif or jpeg. This, I feel, has been
America's contribution to the Postmodern, a computer mediated anarchical network of
discourse vibrating with the eruptions onto its virtual surface.
What seems to be missing is a reading together of the pragmatic American
know-how
with the continental discourses on theory. Instead of using new ideas to explain the
meaning of what we have done, the idea here is to use the ideas to further what has been
done, to break through old concepts and restrictions of the real, to reach, as the surrealist
call it, the Surreal.
In dreamwork online we have in many ways already achieved postmodern status.
The
identity of the player is always in flux and there is an emphasis on play itself as important.
We often acknowledge the inability to establish the meaning of a dream for another
subject, and thereby all agree from the start that all meanings are really our own. A dream
might mean a life style change to one participant, while another may build a new
community, another take on social injustice. We are deeply aware in the late 20th
Century
of all the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity and chaos. To move into the
postmodern is not to transcend this, nor to counteract it, nor even to find the eternal
elements in it. Rather, we learn to swim in it, to wallow, to witness as if that is all there is,
Samsara is Nirvana. Thus, this column plans no particular direction or schedule. At this
moment it appears there is a postmodern attitude, but this may change. Deleuze suggests to
'develop actions, though and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction," and
"to prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities,
mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but
nomadic." (Preface, Anti-Oedipus). How like the dream.
-Richard Wilkerson, May 1997
If you are interested in learning more about Postmodern(ism)? I have set up an
index site
to online texts. I recommend first reading the alt.postmodern faq file.
www.dreamgate.com/pomo/
Beginning Book Suggestions:
Best, S. & Kellner, D. (1991). Postmodern Theory: Critical
Interrogations. New York: The
Guilford Press.
[an overview of the postmodern from the Jump--Right-In school. Some
generalizations
may be confusing and the use of language and style often needs more investigation]
Berman, Art (1988). From the New Criticism to Deconstruction: the reception
of
Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[a very good analysis of the American Reception to poststructuralism and its
influences.
Tends towards literary and philosophical types, misses a lot of the cultural stuff]
Adams, Hazard & Searle, Leroy (1986) Critical Theory Since
1965. Tallahassee, FL:
Florida State University Press.
[for the history of interpretation this is a great sampling, with some introduction to
dozens of prominent and classical texts in critical literature]
+Harraway, Donna(1980) "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and
Socialist
Feminism in the 1980s" (Linda J. Nicholson, ed. *Feminism/Postmodernism*. NY:
Routledge, 1980, pp. 190-233)
[This seminal essay is a must for everyone in cyberspace. Suggestions for how the
mix of
technology and humanity will break down both categories and re-assemble a more even
playing field for women and other repressed minorities].
Anderson, Water Truett (1995). The Truth about Truth: De-confusiong and
Re-constructiong the Postmodern World. New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher
[A collection of quick takes on the postmodern from a wide variety of
authors]
Leitch, Vincent B. (1983). _Deconstructive Criticism_ new york:Columbia
University
Press.
[an overview of deconstruction in literary theory - assumes reader has some
familiarity
with a pre-deconstructive philosophy and theory]
Bibliography
++Adams, Hazard & Searle, Leroy (1986) Critical Theory Since
1965. Tallahassee, FL:
Florida State University Press.
++Anderson, Water Truett (1995). The Truth about Truth: De-confusiong and
Re-constructiong the Postmodern World. New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher
++ Barthes, Roland (1977). The Death of the Author. In Image, Music, text. Trans
Stephen
Heath. New York: Hill and Wang.
++Berman, Art (1988). From the New Criticism to Deconstruction: the
reception of
Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
++Best, S. & Kellner, D. (1991). Postmodern Theory: Critical
Interrogations. New York: The
Guilford Press.
++Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn Press. Originally Published as L'Anti-Oedipe, 1972 Les
Editions De Minnuit
++Derrida, Jacques (1966). Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human
sciences. In The Strucuralist Controversy, Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato,
eds. 1972,
The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Also available in (1991/1972). Structure sign and play in the discourse of the
human
sciences. Criticism: Major Statements, 3rd editon Charles Kaplan and William
Anderson
(eds) New York: St Martin's Press pp. 513-534 SF PN 81 .c85 1991
reprinted from Richard Macksey & Eugenio Donato
(eds)(1972). The Structuralist Controversy. John
Hopkins University Press.
++ Foucault, Michel (1977). What is an Author? In language, counter-memory,
Practice:
Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans. Donald F Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithica, NY:
cornell Univ. Press.
++Harraway, Donna(1980) "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and
Socialist
Feminism in the 1980s" (Linda J. Nicholson, ed. *Feminism/Postmodernism*. NY:
Routledge, 1980, pp. 190-233)
++Hillman, James (1979). Dreams and the Underworld. New York:
Harper and Row,
Publishers, Inc.
--------. (1979). Image-Sense. Spring, 130-143.
--------. (1978). Further notes on images. Spring, 152-182.
--------. (1977). An inquiry into image. Spring, pp. 62-88. ++Hillman,
James (1973). The
dream and the underworld. Eranos, 42 237-319.
++Hillman, James & Roscher, W. H. (1988). Pan and the
Nightmare. Dallas: Spring
Publications, Inc.
++Hunt, Harry (1989). The Multiplicity of Dreams: Memory, Imagination
and
Consciousness. New Haven: Yale University Press.
++Globus, Gordon G. (1993). Connectionism and sleep. In A. Moffitt, M. Kramer,
R.
Hoffman (Eds.), The Functions of Dreaming. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
--------. (1992) Toward a noncomputational cognitive neuroscience. Journal of
Cognitive
Neuroscience, 4(4), 299-310.
--------. (1991). Dream content: Random or meaningful? Dreaming,
1(1), 27-40.
--------. (1989). Connectionism and the dreaming mind. The Journal of Mind
and Behavior,
10(2). 179-196.
--------. (1988). Existence and the brain. The Journal of Mind and Behavior,
9(4). 447-455.
--------. (1987). Dream Life, Wake Life: The Human Condition Through
Dreams. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
++Kugler, Paul (1987). From Modernism to Postmodernism: Some Implications for
a
Psychology of Dreams. Presentation at the 1987 Association for the Study of Dreams.
++Lacan, Jacques (1966). The insistence of the letter in the unconscious. Yale
French
Studies: Structuralism, 36& 37,
pp. 112-147.
--------. (1953-54). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Jacques-Alain Miller,
(ed). Book I,
Freud's Papers on Technique. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [selections on
dreams]
++Lakoff, George (1993). How metaphor structures dreams: The theory of
conceptual
metaphor applied to dream analysis. Dreaming, 3(2), pp. 77-98.
--------. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal
about the Mind.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
++Lakoff, George & Turner, Mark (1989). More than Cool Reason: A
Field Guide to
Poetic Metaphor. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
++Leitch, Vincent B. (1983). _Deconstructive Criticism_ new york:Columbia
University
Press.
++ Lingis, Alphonso (1988). Deleuze on a deserted island. Chapt. 6 in Silverman,
Hugh
(ed.) Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty
++ Nietzsche, Frederich (1954). On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" In The
Portable Nietzsche. Trans and ed, Waleter kauffman. New York: Viking.
++Norris, Christopher (1982). Deconstruction: theory and practice. London:
Methuen.
++States, Bert O. (1994). Authorship in dreams and fictions. Dreaming,
4(4), 237-253.
--------. (1992). The meaning of dreams. Dreaming, 2(4),
249-262.
--------. (1990). Dreaming and storytelling. The Hudson Review,
XLIII(1), 21-37.
--------. (1988). Rhetoric of Dreams. London: Cornell University
Press.
[Introduction/Rhetoric and Repression/Metaphor+notes]
--------. (Spring 1986). I think, therefore I dream. The Hudson Review,
39(1), 53-80.
--------. (1983). Dream and memory. Dreamworks, 3(2),
153-159.
--------. (Winter 1978-79). The art of dreaming. The Hudson Review,
31(4), 571-586.
++Wimsatt, W. K. and Beardlsey, Monroe (1954). The Intentional Fallacy. In The
Verbal
Icon. Lexington: Univ of Kentucky Press
There has been a growing critique of reason and rationality in the last century that
was
pre-figured with the Romantics, given its first technique of investigation with ideas of the
unconscious and then fearfully brought into the mainstream culture with the advent of the
atomic bomb. The cold war kept us in America believing it was only the Communist who
were irrational and needed to be controlled and contained. By the end of the 1960's the
rational policies of containment, mutually assured destruction and the cold war were
exposed as paranoid delusions. The peace movement, grassroots coalition, novel social
contacts, psychotherapies and ecologically minded living offered contact with a productive
irrationality. Some felt we just matured in our ideas of what is rational, but others see that
rationality itself may be the culprit.
The pragmatic critique of the Modern World has continued in the America and
produced fabulous responses in architecture (i.e. insides of building found on the outside),
politics (i.e. grassroots movements) , law (i.e. extreme reform), therapy (i.e. contact with
irrational), science (i.e. chaos theory) and alternative culture( i.e. cyberspace). In Europe,
the critique has been more intellectual and has produced an even wide variety of social,
philosophical, literary and political responses. Generally these critiques, responses and new
productions are often called "Postmodern", "Postmoderinity" and "Postmoderism", but I
want to note that there is no one movement or set of ideas that contain the postmodern.
Many would argue that it has nothing to do with the move from rational to irrational.
In France psychoanalysis was slow to take hold, being seen as a German Project in
the
irrational. The French considered themselves as coming from the rational tradition of
Rousseau. By 1940s and 1950 things began to shift. The Literary Left tended towards
Marxism and the Structuralist projects of Levi-Strauss in anthropology and Jacques Lacan
in psychoanalysis had taken shape.
How like the dream. And here I hope to read dreams through the lens created by
postmodern writers. The purpose is not to break down the illusions of the past views in
hopes of recovering some hidden truth. Rather the hope is more that these lenses,
themselves fictions we will use for temporary viewing, will move us towards fictions we find
more significant, more meaningful, or even to those categories beyond meaning and
significance that cannot be named. To move not towards the dream, as if it would finally
open up and reveal its secrets, but with the dream, as a co-player in the creation of the
improvisational universe that lives between reality and fiction.
I would recommend having one or more dreams at hand as you read through the
history I
have presented below on dreams and the postmodern. How does each approach change
your relationship with the dream image? What does each approach offer or promise?
What does each approach tell you about *what* you are interpreting when you do
dreamwork? What does each approach say about who the author of the dream might be,
and what the author's intentions are? Who is the reader? How much of these questions
and answers are dependent on the language we are using?