"I rarely concentrate on on unravelling a problem of sociology or ethnology without having, beforehand, braced my thought by reading some pages of the 18th Brumaire or of the Critique of Political Economy." So Claude Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques. Marx's restless energy of thought, his power to dissolve and to create concepts, innervated Strauss's own power to break open received ideas and conceive new ones. Perhaps we all have passages or authors like this, who seem like a shot of caffeine to the mind, who put us in touch with possibilities of thought and perception that the pragmatic accomodations of the daily-grind leach from us. Sometimes, too, we feel compelled not only to re-read certain totemic passages but to copy them out. In part this answers to a weak mimetic impulse in us: copying out these sentences, we are reduced to a receptive neutrality, so that the movement of thought incarnate in those sentences seems to lend itself to us for a moment, or we cleave to it, suddenly outside ourselves, our thinking subtly retuned and toned. Anyway, one such piece of writing for me is Hegel's Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, from which comes this:
'Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why. Subject and object, God, Nature, Understanding, sensibility and so on, are uncritically taken for granted as familiar, established as valid, and made into fixed points for starting and stopping. While these remain unmoved, the knowing activity goes back and forth between them, thus moving only on their surface. Apprehending and testing likewise consist in seeing whether everybody's impressions of the matter coincides with what is asserted about these fixed points, whether it seems that way to him or not.
The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar....
Whereas we might spontaneously agree that familiarity blocks understanding, it is more difficult to say exactly why this is the case. It is tempting to say that familiarity is on the side of experience and that philosophy must pass beyond experience to the concept. But surely the point about the familiar is that it is not experienced. A commonplace example. Living in Oxford for five years, those buildings that visitors inspected with awe and fascination were to me practically invisible. The sheer presence for them of the architecture for me sunk back into the merely assumed. As such the familiar is scarcely an object for us at all. It has ceased to stand over against us and confront us. As such it is on the side of the subject. We must therefore find ways to objectify it ('to defamiliarise'), not so that we can pass beyond experience but return to it. The only sure route to the concept is actually to see something in its specificity, and it is this specific mark which familiarity misses. All that is familar has been 'filled out' with the memories and associations of the Subject. It has dissolved into us, or we into it - it amounts to the same thing.
The second little parable about 'understanding' is from Levi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology. As is well known, Levi-Strauss discovered a logic implicit in the behaviour of certain tribes, structured around clear and predictable oppositions (eg masculine/ feminine, for the sake of argument). But this logic was, at the level of conscious experience, unknown to the tribesperson. 'If he is asked why he built a hut in his village in such and such a place, his answer seems to have nothing to do with the fundamental oppositions that structure his world." '
Thus, although a concept or set of concepts organize actions/ are programmed into behaviour, these concepts do not feature as an object for the ego.. Indeed, were they to become an object this might impede the prior programming of the concept at the level of behaviour. The experiential story that the ego has been sold allows the Unc. to go about its work. 'Experience' is decentred. It becomes a 'moment' in the movement of understanding.The task of understanding is to grasp the place and function of experience within a system or structure unknown to it.
This reminded me of certain charges sometimes brought against 'understanding', especially in such contexts as 'understanding terrorism' etc. In such instances, to understand is said to concede too much, to at least flirt with exoneration. But this is perhaps because 'understanding' is being equated with a kind of 'attempt to empathise' (as in 'love and understanding'), to get inside the experiences of those perpetrating the terrorist acts or whatever. Such an understanding of understanding is misconceived. 'Understanding, ' rather than re-tracing - but in your own language - the experience of what is being understood - actually does violence to that experience, dis-members and displaces it. Funnily enough, in other contexts, understanding is accused precisely of this. Again, think of September 11th. Those who, although experiencing the shared affect of horror, tried also to understand why the thing had happened, were quickly accused of, again, flirting with exoneration. To depart from the level of experience was automatically suspicious.
A further permutation of the structure/ experience relation, and an intriguing one, relates to my previous post on Sartre. The situation is that of a colonialist beating a native. "the colonialist beats not the empirical individual but The Native, the alien presence (Other) incarnate in him, and the empirical individual allows this alien presence to be beaten, even while suffering the blows himself."
The interesting point here is that the colonialist seems to directly address a structural position rather than the person who is experientially present. And the native seems directly to live a structural position. Thus, in this instance, even in experience is experience is subordinate to structure.