Thinking China Through “Ideography” – II

Derrida’s essay “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” written around the same time as Of Grammatology, grammatological in content, yet for some reason not included in Of Grammatology, presents a picture of grammatology—which he understands as the “history of writing”—within the context of Freud. Here, with Freud’s help, Derrida shows how “writing” is inscribed upon a surface. Alongside hieroglyphs as Egyptian writing, “Chinese writing” also plays an important role in this exposition.

Just as Derrida approaches the “history of writing” as grammatology, and thus, even if chronologically, in a certain sense as a “process”—especially when one considers how thinkers such as François Jullien or Byung-Chul Han, on the grounds that Chinese thought lacks notions such as essence, substance, being, and truth, claim that Chinese thought is not only inherently deconstructive but also consists entirely of “process”—Freud’s transition to “writing” likewise takes place within a particular “process,” even if it may be argued that he expresses more or less the same thing through different means. It may be said that this “process” proceeds from its first stage—the physiological explanation of the psychic, regarded as being more closely aligned with the natural sciences—toward more substantial contributions emerging through psychoanalysis’s self-grounded analysis. In both cases, the framework essentially consists in attempting to explain “memory” (hafıza), a term increasingly rendered in Turkish as bellek. Yet, provided that one does not lose sight of the fact that both remain fundamentally biological, physiological concepts gradually give way to more psychoanalytic ones, and the resulting picture moves from the physiological toward the psychoanalytic.

Within this framework, although Derrida occasionally returns to what is said concerning the interpretation of dreams (in the sense in which he himself employs the term, that is, in relation to “writing” in its most general sense), he draws primarily on Freud’s 1895 text Project for a Scientific Psychology (to use the title of its Turkish translation), in which the psychoanalytic mode of analysis is not yet fully visible, as well as on the 1925 essay “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad” (which is, in fact, a genuinely fascinating text), and rereads them from the standpoint of “writing.”

The first of these texts, which states its aim as “to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction” (p. 15), is highly technical for our purposes, and therefore any attempt to summarize it here would lead us elsewhere. Nevertheless, one point should be recalled so that Freud’s effort to transform psychology into a natural science through the concepts he employs may be properly understood: the “material particles” referred to in the quotation are “neurons”; and the “quantitative” designates, in accordance with the general law of motion, that which distinguishes a “static” state from an “active” one. Yet the concept that drives this entire draft of Freud’s is “representation”; that is, the determination of what relations among neurons, considered quantitatively and irrespective of their origins or how they come into being, represent psychically. In order to avoid becoming entangled in this technical exposition, we shall attempt to present it as briefly as possible by relying on Derrida’s use of it, while also paying attention to where Freud speaks and where Derrida intervenes, and by keeping in view both its relation—and its lack of relation—to “writing.”

To summarize roughly, Freud, who sought to explain these phenomena qualitatively on the basis of “pathological clinical observations,” describes—or, more precisely, “represents”—“neuronal activity,” which is evidently somatic, that is, biological, whether it originates externally or internally from certain needs, as if it moved along a “path” (Bahn), and as if it gave a quantitative form to excitation according to its “contact” with this “path,” which may be conceived as a channel of transmission. In this sense, certain neurons are readily “facilitating” (or, in the sense in which the word Bahnung is used in Turkish, “path-opening”). These neurons, which serve perception and transmit incoming excitations to one another without resistance, proceed in a permeable fashion, as though there were no obstacles whatsoever in their “contacts.” That is to say, they retain no “obstacle” along the “path” (or, in Derrida’s terms, no trace or impression). Other neurons, by contrast, are those in which “contact barriers” make themselves felt, and are therefore impermeable, permitting excitation “to pass only with difficulty or only partially.” These constitute memory and, by that same token, psychē; and they are not merely perceptual or somatic, but also psychic, because they “can pass into a state different from the preceding one after each excitation and thereby make possible the representation of memory.” “Thus, there are permeable neurons serving perception (offering no resistance and retaining nothing), and impermeable neurons (charged with resistance and preserving [quantity]), which are the vehicles of memory and, consequently, probably of psychical processes in general” (p. 19; italics in the original).

According to Derrida, this picture requires Freud to occupy a distinct place within the metaphysical and onto-theological history of writing—namely, grammatology—because psychic processes are always constituted by difference. As Derrida states in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” one may therefore say that “quantity becomes psychē … and mnēmē (memory, remembrance) through differences rather than through totalities.” (The “difference” at issue here, moreover, resembles the play of forces that is also to be found in Nietzsche [p. 270].)

The remainder of Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology need not concern us very much, except insofar as it reminds us that, in order to overcome the difficulties involved in treating psychē—which bears a meaning almost equivalent to that of “memory”—as though it were a purely physical movement consisting solely of quantity, Freud introduces a third type of neuron as a quality not originating from the “external world”: namely, “a third system of neurons, excited together with perception but not through reproduction [with the aid of memory], and whose states of excitation give rise to different qualities—that is, conscious sensations.” This, in turn, points to a psychology that is scientific, that is, compatible with the natural sciences and inclined toward physics; yet at the same time, in the face of the quantitative character of “any psychological theory worthy of consideration,” which must also “provide an explanation of memory,” it requires a qualitative feature—not exactly as a topography, but rather as a placeholder or, in Freud’s own words, as an “extension”—through which consciousness emerges as that which makes room for quality. Beyond emphasizing that Freud thereby constructs, through these three classes of neurons, an apparatus, a representation, or a picture, this aspect does not particularly concern us here (pp. 29–31). It should nevertheless be noted that Freud attempted to render this picture coherent by means of various diagrams—that is, drawings which are not “writing”—while striving to overcome the difficulties posed by a quality added to, or seemingly mediating, the quantitative process.

The step Derrida takes in this context while constructing Freud’s “scene of writing” is, however, of great importance. Although Derrida takes bold steps in assembling the apparatus Freud devised in order to overcome the difficulties before him, he argues that, once the neurological explanation is set aside, it is now “writing” that begins to take the stage. Put differently, the trace of the neurons becomes gramma, while the “path-opening” or “facilitating” milieu becomes an encoded spacing. Freud himself takes this decisive step in a letter to his friend Fliess. There, seeking to transform into a “machine” the pictorial apparatus constituted by the qualitative explanation grounded in neurons and by the insertion of a qualitative element that makes room for consciousness, Freud no longer contents himself with a few diagrams. Instead, he reconstructs his entire system—or “machine”—in a layered fashion through a “graphic conceptuality,” and henceforth operates with terms specific to “writing,” such as “sign,” “recording,” and “transcription” (p. 276).

It is precisely in this passage of Freud toward “writing” that the “process” moves toward a point at which it will also pass through Chinese writing. Yet this is, with respect to the “history of writing” that Derrida himself constructs as grammatology, both of value and of no value at all. It is valuable because Chinese writing here is woven from elements drawn from one part of the “history of writing,” perhaps even from its entirety. It is of no value because “writing” here is in fact inscribed in psychē. What Derrida, despite his sensitivity to “difference,” somehow fails to notice is that Freud already “represents” neurons in a manner amenable to comparison with hieroglyphs or Chinese ideography. For in Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud designates general quantity by Q, quantity in terms of the force between neurons by Qη, permeable neurons by Φ, and impermeable neurons by Ψ (though he does not, for example, treat psychē or “memory” in this way as a form of “representation”). This is intriguing and certainly cannot be regarded as a mere reflection inherited from physics by a psychology modeled on physics. For the same Freud will, in The Interpretation of Dreams, turn to hieroglyphs and Chinese ideography as different methods of dream interpretation. Derrida, however, rather than dwelling on this more immediately apparent relationship, devotes lengthy explanations to showing that Freud’s model in Project for a Scientific Psychology and his model in The Interpretation of Dreams, though subject to different “discourses” (even if Derrida himself does not put it this way), nonetheless share the same apparatus.

To be sure, offering even a brief and general assessment here of what Freud sought to accomplish in The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900—apart from noting that, through various extensions, it moves from a psychology grounded in physics toward an analysis of psychē—would be unnecessary for our purposes. Moreover, if one takes into account what Freud had already said in his earlier text concerning “memory” and “consciousness,” this is hardly a matter that can be dealt with easily. Yet, with Derrida’s help, at least one point is important for our present context of “writing”: Derrida claims that immediately after Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud moved toward a form of print, which he calls estamp (estamp, according to the Kubbealtı dictionary, is “an image printed on paper after being engraved on zinc, copper, or wood, or produced through lithography.” In the English translation, the French term L’estampe was most likely rendered as print, since estamp would have been unfamiliar to English-speaking readers. This, incidentally, is a point significant enough to require a rewriting of the history of print itself).

According to Derrida, Freud possesses an analysis that is “represented” as a physical movement and that, by its very nature, excludes any “origin” (in the sense of essence, substance, being, truth, logos, and so forth). Yet he argues that with the introduction of the estamp—which fails to recognize that a form of writing is already operative through the use of “letters,” or at least “signs,” such as Q, Qη, Φ, and Ψ in a neuron-based system—something akin to an origin must nonetheless be introduced, at least as a “supplement.” For Derrida points out that Freud, who states in Project for a Scientific Psychology that “dreams generally follow the paths of old facilitations” [that is, the movements of the “path-opening,” permeable neurons], turns with the estamp toward a “landscape of writing” (or, using the English equivalent, toward a pictorial “landscape”).

What this means is that the “landscape” here is constituted by a “lithography” that is “not merely a transcribed writing, nor the petrified echo of muted words, but a lithograph that precedes words: metaphonetic [beyond silence], non-linguistic, and non-logical.” Put briefly, “writing” is not (yet) there, but at the same time it is there—not as an “origin,” but only as an “originary supplement”; it simply has not yet been put into words. Derrida also explains this as the “metaphor of writing,” and he interprets the “metaphor of writing” in Freud of the 1900s as an appropriation of “both the problem of the psychic apparatus in terms of its structure and the problem of the text in terms of its texture [fabric], the text understood as something woven.” It is precisely this appropriation that governs the “landscape” of Freud’s interpretation of dreams (p. 277; translation modified).

Of course, Freud’s interpretation of dreams proceeds by means of an interpretive knowledge derived largely from his own dreams and his clinical observations—a lithographic interpretive knowledge grounded in images, one that has not yet become, and perhaps can never become, a logical or verbally articulated “proposition.” Lithography has not yet become phonography, nor will it ever become so. Yet it must be emphasized, against Derrida, that when China is concerned, this interpretive knowledge is not connected solely with “Chinese writing.” For example, the examples involving the “artichoke” in The Interpretation of Dreams deserve separate examination. It should also be recalled that when Freud analyzed his dream in which he saw a plant belonging to the cyclamen family (known in Turkish as tavşan kulağı or buhûrumeryem), he associated the act of “tearing apart leaf by leaf like an artichoke” in the dream with “an expression that continually rings in our ears concerning the piecemeal disintegration of the Chinese Empire.” Ultimately, through a chain of associations—“Cyclamen – favourite flower – favourite dish – artichoke; tearing apart leaf by leaf like an artichoke … – collection of dried plants – book – worms whose favourite food is books”—Freud traces the dream back to “a childhood memory in which, when I was about five years old, my father gave me a coloured picture book to tear apart” (The Interpretation of Dreams, Vol. I, Öteki Publications, pp. 285–286). Let us repeat: the plants deserve separate examination; but the conjunction of China and the “coloured picture book” is certainly intriguing.

By now it should be clear where we are heading. Behind the operation, in The Interpretation of Dreams, of a form of “writing” that as yet has no “sound” (or perhaps can never have one) lies precisely this psychic conception of “writing,” and it is in this context that Freud refers to “Chinese writing,” alongside hieroglyphs. Certainly, provided one keeps in mind that dream interpretation generally operates according to the principle that “for the dream, whatever is visual is something capable of representation … So long as dream-thought remains in its abstract form, it is unusable; but once translated into the language of images, oppositions and identifications—which the dream-work requires and creates if they do not already exist—can be established more readily between the new mode of expression and the remaining material underlying the dream” (The Interpretation of Dreams, Vol. II, p. 82), hieroglyphs—that is, Egyptian pictographic writing—correspond, in the language of dreams, to the fact that “an element in the dream-content” is “comparable to the determinatives used in pictographic writing [hieroglyphs], which are not pronounced but serve only to explain other signs.” Consequently, in dream interpretation they may function as something “unpronounced”—that is, something that cannot be put into words, but whose sole role is to refer one sign to another (The Interpretation of Dreams, Vol. II, p. 60).

“Chinese writing,” on the other hand, functions not according to fixed meanings or the arbitrariness of an old-style dream book in which every image has a simple key, but rather as if it guaranteed the very mode of signification characteristic of scientific dream interpretation: “The uncertainties that still accompany our activity as dream interpreters arise partly from gaps in our knowledge, gaps that may be filled as progress is made, and partly from certain characteristics of dream symbols themselves. These symbols frequently possess more than one, indeed several meanings, and, just as in Chinese writing, the correct interpretation in each case can only be derived from the context” (The Interpretation of Dreams, Vol. II, p. 98).

In this case, although hieroglyphs are a form of writing in which one sign refers to another, and although ideography, in the form of Chinese writing, is likewise a form of writing that permits multiple interpretations—or multiple readings—depending on context, both are, as forms of writing that do not yet possess a “sound,” merely supplementary forms of writing added to psychē as supplements to an otherwise purely lithographic writing. It is nevertheless clear that both are “soundless” and therefore “without an alphabet.” Although Derrida attempts to present Freud as someone who, even if not entirely outside metaphysical logocentrism, at least stands on the threshold of a movement seeking to free itself from it, Freud falls into the classical grammatological “prejudices” the moment he moves from neurons as “representations” to “writing.”

For this reason, Derrida’s words, intended to push beyond logocentrism, ought truly to surprise us: “It should not surprise us that Freud constantly appeals to the spatial synopsis of writing—or of pictographic writing, illustrated writing, hieroglyphs, and, more generally, non-phonetic writing—in order to bring out the strangeness of the logical-temporal relations in dreams. Not stasis, but synopsis; not a tableau, but a scene” (p. 289). Here, “writing,” whatever its form, even when psychic, is ethnocentric insofar as it functions as a “supplement” that operates like an “origin.” Derrida, by contrast, whatever may be seen in dreams, transforms the dream itself—whether hieroglyphic or ideographic—into a pictographic-scriptural, synoptic “scene.”

But is there not, then, a phonetic “writing” in Freud? Freud’s 1925 essay on the Wunderblock—which is in fact a simple toy (translated into Turkish as gizemli yazı tableti and into English as Mystic Writing-Pad)—may help us here. The Wunderblock, simple versions of which can still be found today as toys designed to keep preschool children from scribbling everywhere with whatever pen they happen to pick up, impressed Freud so profoundly that he saw in it a picture of “memory” resembling both his conception of neurons and the models presented in The Interpretation of Dreams. (Indeed, Freud’s fascination with it is so remarkable that one cannot help wondering what direction his theory might have taken had he encountered the Turing machine.) Yet what is equally interesting is that the relation between “memory” and “writing” here is Platonic.

For Freud, while arguing that the relationship between “memory” and “writing” can be explained in two different ways, conceives “writing,” where memory is not entirely reliable, as an auxiliary extension of memory; otherwise, as though it were “a materialized part of the mnemic apparatus,” serving to “complete the work” of memory and secure what would otherwise remain invisible (A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad, p. 227). One of these methods is writing with ink on paper. Although this method possesses the characteristic of a “permanent memory-trace,” the limited nature of the recording surface requires the use of additional sheets of paper. Moreover, over time, that “memory-trace” on paper may cease to be interesting and lose its value.

The second method is writing with chalk on a blackboard, which, unlike paper, offers an unlimited surface. This method appears more useful because what is no longer of interest can be erased and rewritten. Yet it differs from the first precisely because it leaves no “permanent memory-trace.” If something new is to be written for the benefit of “memory,” what has previously been written must first be erased. Thus Freud notes that external devices aiding “memory” involve either “renewing the receptive surface or erasing the note.”

It is precisely because the Wunderblock contains these two opposing features simultaneously that it attracts Freud’s attention. In the Wunderblock, the receptive surface can be renewed and the inscriptions erased; yet, owing to the wax slab beneath, the traces remain and can be read again upon careful inspection, even after the writing itself has been erased. Without dwelling too much on the details—while recalling that these details are in one way related to the very “process” Freud had begun with neurons—it may be said that Freud here conceives the entirety of psychic processes as a “machine,” however simple, like the Wunderblock itself, and understands its inability to function without external intervention as an intermittent mode of operation. Consequently, he argues that “this discontinuous mode of functioning lies at the basis of the origin of the concept of time” (p. 232). Psychic processes, as is evident, have thus been transformed into a “machine” operating intermittently, even if by means of external interventions. Here, once again, “writing” is like a “trace” and possesses no intrinsic quality. One may write on the Wunderblock with the Latin alphabet, with hieroglyphs, or with ideography alike.

The problem, however, is that in this case “writing,” without excluding the possibility that the “machine” itself may be understood metaphorically, is, so to speak, without a subject. “Writing” is not written in order to be read; it merely assists the functioning of “memory.” But “memory,” too, is not all that accessible to, for example, perception—or, more generally, to mental activity. It always works in the background. More than that, it operates as the “unconscious” (or, more literally, the “unconscious” rather than the customary unconscious found in Freud translations). It is a pictorial “representation” that requires certain recollective triggers before it can become an object of reflection. Most intriguingly, however—although it may require verbal transmission, as in dream interpretation—it possesses either a hieroglyphic or an ideographic character.

In that case, is “Chinese writing” truly inherently deconstructive? Certainly, if it is possible to relegate China to an “unconscious” topography, then it may be called deconstructive. After all, does saying that it is “without sound” and “without an alphabet” not amount to the same thing?

*Photo: A toy “writing tablet” resembling Freud’s Wunderblock.