Theory may be practice, but is theory experience?
I think part of my resistance to Flatley’s class has been the simple fact that I don’t identify with the models of subjectivity we’ve been studying.
As a sidebar. . .one thing to note for future (much future) syllabus-construction: The real object of study in a class should never, under any circumstances, be reflected in the course title. "History of Rhetoric" is in fact about pedagogy and epistemology; "Affect and Aesthetics" is about models of subjectivity; "Media Reception" is about, um, receiving media. Okay, so it’s a willful fallacy, and also, it’s just the way the database is growing. The history of rhetoric is, in part about pedagogy and epistemology, just as theories of affect and aesthetics are dependent on an understanding of how the subject works to apprehend his or her world–so, a study of subjectivity as well.
Back to bidness.
What makes Kant and Freud particularly difficult, I think, is that their models of subjectivity seem alien to my own experience. Kant describes an elaborate system of powers and abilities the subject possesses (imagination, judgment, reason, understanding) and each has its own appropriate abilities and functions and domains of execution. As a shorthand, I like to think of Kant’s model as describing the apparatus of subjectivity, because (although Kant is a transcendental philosopher), this model seems very mechanistic to me; just to look at an object and understand what it is requires sensory impressions from the imagination being compared to concepts of the understanding and then acted upon by the lawfullness of the reason (or something like that)–such that cognition becomes almost an assembly line construct.
Freud, of course, has his famous ego, supergo, libido, and id, which at the time of Studies in Hysteria had not been fully developed yet, but he’d already begun making the distinction between conscious and unconscious minds. For all the mucking about with the sub- and unconciousnesses, Freud’s view of subjectivity seems very biological, as though the mind were little more than an extension of the immune system. Trauma and emotional shock need to be properly abreacted by consciousness or else they take hold in the subconscious, like viruses almost, and generate hysterical somatic symptoms. Of course, you can always go through psychoanalysis and have the good doctor clear it out through the talking cure–where you have relive your trauma so the conscious mind can go at it properly this time.
Admittedly, I’m being vastly reductive in each case. But my comment remains the same: I don’t think my subjectivity is either the Kantian apparatus or the Freudian immune system. I don’t know what it is, but it’s hard not to reject either model outright when reading these descriptions.
Of course, then we read Rei Terada and found out that there’s no such thing as the subject anyway, so it’s kind of a moot point. More on that later.
