Monday, September 06, 2004

Private Language?

'Freud recognised that each signifier in the dream is linked – symbolically and/ or metonymically – to the signified through a largely private chain of reasoning and association. For Freud the explanation for this privacy of language (the encrypted, circuitous characters of the dream) was repression and censorship. Such encryption was a by-product of the censorship mechanism. But could not this encryption be, at least sometimes, the desideratum of the dream work. Could not dreams be that nocturnal avant-garde studio wherein we attempt, impossibly, to create a private language - non-conceptual, hot-wired to our mnemonic and nervous systems, and twisted to fit the obscure idiosynracy of our singular and defining jouissance? Can repression really acccount for the sheer joy-in-productivity of dream work- condensations, displacements, recodings of everday bric-a-brac, electrifying juxtapositions and all th eother customary signatures of Modernist experimentation'.