Although in the previous discussion I think we got at some powerful ideas about psychotherapy, I'm not satisfied with our simplicity/complexity theory of perception and intelligence where it comes to the mind, reflection, language, thought. I'm also not convinced about the relationship, so long and so widely overlooked, between the cognitions we enact with our imaginations, and the cognitions we enact with our words. Even Freud has to say there is a latent text to a dream, and Lacan-- well, Lacan is a nutcase-- Lacan emphasizes language structures as well, famously. The question has to be whether language structures are indeed cognitive structures, and this may very well be something like the Chomsky argument. Is there any separation from the way we work with images and the way we work with language? Chomsky also moved from a paradigm of surface structure/deep structure in terms of syntax, which seems psychoanalytic in nature, to a minimalist program, in which the Move and Merge functions alone are responsible for language, in the most elemental way. He is however so perpetually focused on the language function and I have never read or seen him even so much as address the issue of imagination and the relation of imagination to thoughts, which is quite peculiar.
But, thoughts are images. And in effect Chomsky is Descartes-ian, and cannot respond to what Schopenhauer has said contra Kant, that the perception is itself intellectual. Yet I'm not sure I've really overcome Cartesian dualism myself, in the sense that the problem seems to be re-articulated as perception and agency ... which is the problem of causality itself. If a force acts upon an object, the object's movement is not a pure extension of that force, but an adaptation to that force, in which the being of the object enacts its own force in conjunction to that adaptation. In this way it is like when an object moves because of a wind blowing it, let's say, the object is not the wind, the weathervane behaves as a weathervane, and not as the wind. Thereby agency considered independent of perception is identity and being, it is our experience, our memory, our psychic complexity, everything that makes us us to ourselves, which however, is not completely ...
[hard right turn again]]
Basically the problem of agency and perception can only be resolved in connection, which brings us back to continuity. As well as with valuation. Because perception, agency are both sides of a relationship to plurality, and this unity between them, this simplest of all concepts which will permit us the most complex understanding, must be connection, relation, itself. It is like what I said a while back-- before this blog began, for the outside-- about Force-Desire Relation as the essence of psychic time. Force informs the desire that is agency and will, force received through perception. Relation was at the center, was the present moment. And I perhaps like connection better because it is a bit less of a philosophical term, a more everyday term. Merge and Move, the reason Chomsky can say that, is because two forms of movements occur, moving and being-moved, move expresses the causal network. Merge expresses the place where things are moved into, the anywhere where the anything is moved, or moved from.
Thereby we do not just have a perception, but a perception/agency connection. All unities are connections, as the whole world is a unity and a plurality at once. This is why our monolithic, most simple concept-- like the original geometric shape of the "line"-- has to be a connection. A self-enclosed unity will but float in space without plurality, like a perception that does not even know it is a perception because it has no plurality to witness, or an agency that does not even know it is an agency because it has no plurality to be involved in. In causal chains, pluralities converge on an object which they then diverge from, and this object in the simplest terms is a connection.
So going back to Jung, synchronicity is an acausal connecting principle. This might be the same as saying it is the purely connective principle, because it connects causality to effectuality. So rather than getting stuck on "autocausality" or "acausality," individuation or synchronicity, or the whole "collective unconscious," and how that attempts to bridge the one and the many, the singular and the plural, one can assess the whole territory with connection, and say that every unified object, every unity is a connection. And from here we can accommodate "complexity" itself, by reducing the binaries that continue to emerge in intellectualization down to the unit which synthesizes all binaries. The transcendent function is essentially connection, and the whole world, inasmuch as it is a singularity and a plurality is a connection. Thus, components are relations, archetypes, if they exist, are archetypal patterns, relation-patterns.
This is coherent with what I was trying to do when I was still working in psychology and hadn't moved out into philosophy: a self/other unconscious, sexual archetypes. Relation or connection as the nature of the center, rather than a mystified self. Now we see this as a factor of spatial relations themselves, as a necessary factor of conscious life, and intelligence. So let us move back into psychology now. We said before, there is this self/other relation in the unconscious which becomes split by consciousness, and so the self fashions itself, and its desire, in the manner that is coherent with that unconscious sexuality, which is not desire, but a conjunctive sexual energy. Now we see how that unconscious self/other situation reprises itself within the mental life of the self. For the self becomes a connection between receptive perception and creative agency; it is other to the world in its perception, and only a self in terms of its representative agencies. We said in the past that the inner other is what contains us, what perceives us, it is who we are in our self-perception, in the consciousness of our representations. Thereby in waking sexual life it is the recognition of our perception in another that causes strong arousal, and the non-recognition of that perception which causes frustration and detachment. Thereby, when we consider the very complex elements of a psychological self, their past history and its evaluative matrix, what we have is a complicated network of connectivity, and the unconscious other is the reflection of that pure connectivity, its shape and design, its simplicity and aesthetic nature, rather than the contents, which are still linked with the self. The other connects these elements together through bonds of association, and represents thereby the simplification of the complex form of the self, for being the network without the contents. Intelligence and sexuality are not counterposed, and nor is intelligence the same as philosophical proficiency, et cetera, but a remark upon interactivity. We love, value what reflects-- not the specific contents of our own life-- which is absolutely no guarantee of compatibility-- but the interaction with those specific contents, its degree and organization of connectivity. It is this that fashions recognition, and love, something like an archerelation, an a priori network of associations within self without self, and to whatever degree. In short it is relation to ourselves that decides how we are related to the other, and this relation to ourselves is a cognition about it, linkages which all establish judgments. The sexual valuation that combines self/other is itself relation, a style of relation, which is however, potentially pathological, for its disorganization, a lack of a dynamic receptivity/creativity which stems from a fragmentary self-connection, a surfeit of unexamined psychic contradictions, troubling memories that have not been fully understood, associations that could be made between memories that have not been made. The simplest organization of these psychic contents permits the most complex evaluation of them, and one major obstacle to the discovery of such a complex evaluation, so-ordered, is that complex evaluations are everywhere extremely discouraged.
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