Julie's invocation of the unconscious

[David Samuels]

Julie,

This is responding to an old message; I've been out of town.  But I want to
clarify that when I talked about Freud, Wertheimer, etc., I was being
critical of them.  I don't think that resolution is a prerequisite of
either a narrative structure or for creativity to take place.  I think
creativity always takes place.  Creativity is involved in saying "good
morning" to your milkman -- there are all sorts of coordinations of
context, timing, volume, intonation.  One difference between linguistics
and discourse, I think, is in their disparate judgments of what counts as
"the same" (linguistics assuming that phonological, morphological,
syntactic forms circulate wholly made, discourse investigating what
accounts for that circulation and the ideology that the resulting forms ARE
"the same.")  The non-purposive state is Kantian, and is, I think
questionable from the standpoint of ethnography (since it implies that
there is a place that transcends context for the creation of art).

Best,

David

David