Monday, August 2, 2010

Language Mediates Human Consciousness



Copyright 2009 by Christine M. Skolnik

Many neuroscientists and neuropsychologists currently adhere to the broad and convincing arguments of Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux, and Jaak Panksepp which connect consciousness to basic emotions that monitor essential bodily functions. The central theme of Panksepp’s comprehensive and highly authoritative scholarly survey and reference book Affective Neuroscience:The Foundations of Human and Animal Emtoions, for example, states that emotions “reflect our ability to subjectively experience certain states of the nervous system” (9).

Panksepp identifies four “basic emotion command systems” using upper-case font to distinguish his terms for biological systems from borrowed commonplace terminology: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, and PANIC (Panksepp 51). This new nomenclature indicates that biologists are beginning to delve into areas once forbidden by behaviorist tenets, while striving to distinguish their work from the social sciences (Panksepp 332). Within this conceptual framework, emotions tell us what our bodies are experiencing and how to evaluate external objects with which we come in contact and which are instrumental to our survival (Damasio 114-18, 139).

If consciousness mediates external and internal realities, then language has become a crucial element of that medium: a techne of consciousness (Solms 283). Language currently mediates our perceptions and representations of the external world and our internal states, for the purposes of survival broadly understood—but also for ethical actions, altruistic choices, and transcendent values (Damasio 124-26). Though I concur with the general concepts of affective neuroscience regarding the development and basic operations of consciousness, I also agree with rhetorical critics who recognize that such arguments tend to deemphasize and even elide rhetorical factors.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Freud's Promethean discovery . . .

“Such awe seizes man when he unveils the lineaments of his power that he turns away from it in the very action employed to lay its features bare. So it has been with psychoanalysis. Freud’s truly Promethean discovery was such an action as his works bear witness; but the same is no less present in each humble psychoanalytic experience conducted by any one of the laborers formed in his school.

As time has gone by, we can trace almost year by year this aversion of interest as far as the function of the Word and the domain of Language are concerned.”

Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Introduction)