Freud’s past-oriented unconscious finds its mirror image in a future-oriented not-yet-consciousness
Evidence
Hence the dialogue with Freud: for Freud’s topology is the most striking model of time oriented around the past, a picture of an apparent movement toward the future whose vital incentives lie buried in early childhood; for such a model comprehension consists in a working back to origins. The Freudian unconscious is therefore a no-longer-consciousness, an unconsciousness of a world and a self which have officially, in the eyes of the reality principle, ceased to be: and this formulation is in itself enough to suggest the lines along which Bloch corrects it. For in this sense there is room, alongside this no-longer-consciousness, for a new and very different type of unconscious, a blankness or horizon of consciousness this time formed not by the past but by the future: what Bloch calls a not-yet-consciousness, an ontological pull of the future, of a tidal influence exerted upon us by that which lies out of sight below the horizon, an unconscious of what is yet to come. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 253
Categorization
- XREF: Bloch’s not-yet-consciousness as the dialectical correction of Freud directly parallels how Jameson will later position utopia against ideology, and connects to the reader’s deep-listening material on the soundscape’s ‘blankness or horizon’. — connects to: A future-oriented unconscious drives creation forward into the not-yet-existent
- DEEPTHINKING: Inverting Freud’s temporal topology — an unconscious formed ‘not by the past but by the future’ — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting reformulation of how subjectivity relates to time; the tidal metaphor is dense and resists one-sentence summary.
- SEED: The idea that we can be unconsciously pulled toward a future we cannot yet name — an ‘ontological pull’ — is a strong framing device for an essay about how political imagination orients toward possibility rather than origin.