IMAGE IS THE MEASURE

NOTES ON INCOMMENSURABILITY
AND THE DREAM

by Terry Blake

Let's start with a story:

One fine summer day when Jung was 12 years old he left school
at noon and came into the town square where a cathedra! The post-modern condition as a condition of our post-industrial
glittered in the radiant sunshine. Overwhelmed by the beauty of societies is the generalization of this experience of Jung's. A giant
the sight, he thought: "The world is beautitul and the church is turd tram God is falling on our collective myths, our grand and
beautiful, and Goct made all this and sits above it far away in the beautiful cathedrals, shattering them.
blue sky on a golden throne and ·-•. Then he had the feeling that The post-moclem is a manner of living with multiplicities and
something terrible, a dreadful thought was coming, too terrible to incommensurabilities, without the simplifying security of a method
think. For three days he fought to keep from thinking the thought or doctrine that would allow us to guide our lives according to
some unitary moclel.
He was anxious and exhausted during the day, and could barely
sleep at night Finally he concluded that God wanted him to think Of course, this is nothing new. As a contemporary cliche, we
this . terrifying thought: ·1 gathered all my courage, as though 1 find it everywhere from ·ooing your own thing· or ·rm OK -
were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire and let the thought corne. You're OK9 to the latest avant-garde experiment As a
1 saw before me the cathedra!, the blue sky. God sits on His trans-historic possibility (or archetype) it cannot be tied to the
golden throne, high above the world - and from under the throne present but can be found throughout history.
an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it. The beauty (and the irritation) of the term ·post-modern" is that
and breaks the wall of the cathedra! asunder·. The lnfinite had everyone can have their own idea of what it means and have their
shattered its conventional image in the religious code of Jung's favorite examples. Anyone who attempts an objective definition or
childhood. an authoritative exposition stands condemned by the notion itself.
Everything is there in this beautiful story. The stifling oedipal (The two traps to avoid are ·1 know the post-modern· (the stance
background - Jung's father was a country parson, weak and full of the expert) and, worse, ·1 am the post-modern· (the stance of
the messiah).)
of doubts; his mother was strong and ·uncanny". The powerful
religious code with its principles of order, beauty, and morality. So in this paper I will speak as a simple dilettante, interested in
The violent encounter with a force that shatters the grip of the a set of diverse conceptual systems and their inter-connexions,
conventional codes. The violent resistance. The feeling of trying to map out parts of my idea of the post-modern.
liberation, of grace. The royalty to the lived event rather than to If ·post-modern" is to refer to something more than glib
precepts, doctrines, dogmas. The feeling that this thought came mind-games, trendy opportunism or avant-garde marketing (the
from the Other, the rhizome, and not from the world of post-modern cliche), it must refer to those crucial experiences of
conventional perception and judgment, the blossom. everyday lite and their aftermath, when your world cracks and you
One aspect of the post-modern according to Lyotard, is being are forced to think and feel and act differently. (The old code no
open to the event. Every event has potentially the power to wake longer works for you and you are left face to face with fragments
of the unknown.)
us up out of the sleep produced by our systems and methods,
Jung speaks of being divided into two personalities:
which try to imprison the event. know it in advance, keep us in the
sleep called ego. The child Jung was awakened from the sleep of No 1: the young clumsy child interested in science, belonging
to the everyday world, that of the ·blossom".
his piety, from the trance of collective beliefs, by an unexpected
~vent, a mental image that came not from his conscious ego but No 2: a sort of timeless figure "born, living, dead, everything in
rom the unknown. me a total vision of lite", belonging to ·Goo's world", that of the
"rhizome".

ON THE BEACH ... 3

Wanting to forget the "Other" and devote himself to a normal lite constructing a science of the unconscious was to recf uce these
a~d a scientific career, Jung tried to overcome this inner split but elements, these phrases, to a common measure: .
fa1led: ~Again and again events occurred which forced me out of "To succeed in articulating the empty rumblings coming fro~ the
my ordmary, everyday existence into the boundlessness of 'God's unknown in bursts of dreams, symptoms and slips. To constitute
world"'. the disorder into regularities and thus to find rules". .
Ju~g came to regard this doubling of awareness as an essential lt would seem that Feyerabend's "Against Method: Outlme of an
pol~nty ~f the_ psych~. promoting the flow of psychic energy and Anarchistic Theory of Science" is a better guide to our dreams
1ts rnt~~sIty. His ~utob1ography is full of inner experiences, dreams than Freud's "lnterpretation of Dreams".
and v1~1ons. He lives lite on two separate planes at the same time: "Dreams, peripheral thoughts, vague disconte!'lt now cease to
the rhizome and the blossom. What Deleuze and Guattari call the be subjective afflictions as well and become possible avenues to
planE~ of-consistency and the plane of organization. reality".
!h1s double awareness that includes both the tree and the There are many thinkers who èall our age one of transition
rh1zon:1e can be seen in Jung's last recorded dream which came a between two epochs.
f~w nights before ~is death. ln it he saw: "A square of trees, its For Lyotard, we are moving from the modern age with its great
f1brous roots, commg up from the ground and surrounding him. legitimating staries (liberation, Marxism, positivism) to a
There wer~ gold threads gleaming among the roots". Barbara post-modern age of experimentation and incommensurabilities.
H~nah, fnend and disciple of Jung, refers to these roots as the For Marshall McLuhan, we are passing from print technology and
rh1zo~e that Jung had always regarded as his "true invisible lite". linear consciousness to electric technology and
This double ~wareness can be seen throughout the work of multi-conséiousness.
post-_modem thmkers both as a problem to be overcome and as a For Michel Serres, we are moving from an age of solids, global
solution (what the book RHIZOME refers as "the magic formula space and unities to an age of fluids, local spaces and
that we are all looking for: PLURALISM = MONISM"). multi-plicities.
For Fritjof Capra, we are passing from a Newtonian-Cartesian
INCOMMENSURABILITY paradigm to one based on holistic systems .
. If you ha~ to summarize the whole of post-modernism in a For Alvin Toffler, we are moving from a social system and
worldview based on the second wave of industrial technology to
~rngle wo~d 1t would hav~ to be: incommensurability. Technically,
m the ph1losophy ?f science, _ mcommensurability refers to the one based on the new information technologies.
~bsence ?f deductive connections between sufficiently general For James Hillman, we are passing from monotheism to
nval theones (and thus the breakdown of comparison by content polytheism.
or classe~) or, m_ore g_enerally, the absence of any neutral, Ali this is no doubt both very simple and obvious on the one
non~uest,on-beggmg cnteria of theory-appraisal (ie comparison hand and very doubtful and complicated on the other. And gives
and JUdQ9ment). Thus the whole notion of a single scientific rise to very weird movements of fashion. schools, clans, churches,
method and of .purely objective science, fails. The whole monist and mutual admiration societies of all sorts. ln the gap between
ideal ?f sc_iencè - r~rch converging on the best theory for a the old and the new, amazing little cuits grow up. People who have
~omarn,_ single ~ digms and rationality of consensus, - is caught what Hillman calls "the French disease" can make careers
1mpract1cable. Knowtedge must be conceived in a pluralist out of re-hashing Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and beyond without any
manner as an ocean of incompatible and incommensurable ~e~I . exr,erie~ce of confronting the unconscious. They have a
alternatives. ~nt1cal att1tu~e to analysis but don't explain how they can
Abstracting from the specifics of this epistemological debate, d1scuss theoret,cally what all their sources say is an experiential
we can say that the tact of "incommensurability" calls into d~main. Many people feel that you must repeat all their own
question the whole manner of thought based on the notion of mIstakes and wr~ng turns, duplicating their bibliographie flight
some sort of common measure between events or elements of path. The pomposIty of a D~rrida "deconstructing" Freud 50 years
whatever kind, and not just between theories. One can speak of ~fter he had become unbehevable to any but the pious is but one
incommensurable standards, values, perceptions, regions of msta~ce of wh~t has become enshrined as a mode of teaching -
reality. The rationality of our theories and of the world is only local ama_ zmg paras,!es spring up. Instructive is the most recent book
- the world itself is a sort of patchwork of the different local ?f lngaray: Eth,cs of the Sexual Difference. lt is full of beautiful
· rationalities that compose it Each event and each regime or 1deas. But she did not invent thE:m. What she has done is to give a
system of events contains its own measure. general survey of post-modern 1deas but assign all the old values
Jean-Francois Lyotard uses "incommensurability" in this to_ "~an" ~nd all t_ he new ones to "woman". lt is easy to see who
extended sense when he surveys recent theoretical trends: w,11 fmd th1s stutt "1lluminatlng" or "convincing".
' "If what you call recem French philosophy has been in some way Another typical character is the meta-post-modern socialite.
post-modern, it is because via its reflexion on the deconstruction The ~~cialite _never actually expounds an idea but cites large
of writing (Derrida), on the disorder of discourse (Foucault), on the q~antItIes of 1deas. people, groups, trends in an attempt to place
paradoxes of epistemology (Serres) on alterity (Levinas), on the hImself on~ ~tep beyond. "Ali this is now old hat" is the implicit or
production of meaning by nomadic encounters (Deleuze), it has even exphc1t message. Beautiful, exciting ideas that could :
l)laoed the emphasis on incommensurabilities". transform a lite are disposed of by people who confuse an abllity •
.OrAgain: to re-~~ate ideas in an ironie and contemptuous tone of voice with
· ,"Post-modern knowledge ... refines our sensitlveness to an abIhty to understand and criticize them.
differences and increases our capacity JQ tolerate the ~n ~mazing thing about post-modern French
incommensurable". p~1losoph100-psychological te><~s is that they almost never
For t'ff>tard, "incommensurability" refera to the heterogeneity of d1scuss d~ms - ne,ther specit1c Clreams nor dreams in generai
. phra'Sèif(or events), that there is no fixed rule for ~oing fr.am one Yet the 1mage-concepts_,that stud., fo( e).(ample, lrigarary's texts
phrase téir another, thatthere is a void between events. or ~el~uze and Guattan s cou Id bè,· aeen to constitute the
A spin-off from this discussion of lncommensurability could be beg1nn!n9!S_ot a phen~menology of ~reams considered as ma 5
lt)e question "What ls an anarchi~iic approach to dreams ?" of the lflten$ltles and images that ÇQ'mpps~ us H'II . p
al '8 pluralist model of .fij . , : 1 ma~ regards
atJ~:c~~·
For Lyotard, if.bè dream is mad~ of Incommensurables: "none of the dream
the presenlafi.<Îns of . de_s,re, _d_r ea~ symptoms. is interpretatlve rf!ove of substituting and ~e1ects the
ôommensurable.~ 1Jelth~r m . 1ts_ manif~ aspect nor in its
black snake cornes in a dream r • . P or an image. If a
. ,' • . YOU could spend h
supposedly latéht meanmg. w1th its ldea . The project of Freud in rnterprèti~g. '.1t (as repressed sexua'l-it or·· an our
whatèv~r b1;.1t "the moment you've defi;. yd, the ba~ mother or
- . ne the snake, Interpreted 1t.

4 ... ON THE BEACH

tou've lost the snake ... The task of analysis is to keep the snake and concepts. ., .
:here"). On reading DeleuZe and Guattan s books the reader may fin d
The danger of an intellectual approach to a dream is that it his head in a Whirl trying to figure out such terms as body without
i bsorbs the unknown into the known, it imposes the common organs, deterrttorialization, plane of ~sistance, mach!flÏC
n easure of a doctrine (commensurability) and thus keeps your assemblage, producing the unconSCIOUS. the Outside,
magination asleep. becoming-animal, becoming-plant. becomïng-rnineraJ, and_. of
Lyotard contrasts waking up with knowing or dominating. Any course, the rhizome itself. These terms seem never to be deftned
avent (for example a dream-image) has the potential to wake you quite clearly and if they have any meaning, it seems to be
up, "suspend the diachrony of identities". As both Lyotard and metaphoric and multiple. On turning to the few commentators that
McLuhan show, post-modernism is not,iust novelty but retrieval of exist. we find that they seem to be bluffing: they repeat the
old ideas. ln discussing the ltalian painter Baruchello in relation to terminology without clarifying. fill in a bit of the supposed
the post-modern sublime Lyotard retrieves Taoism, Zen, historical context and that's all. There is no attempt to read the text
~uddhism and the Yi-King as more adequate to the logic of in relation to an outside, as it itself demands. but purely in its own
incommensurables of the dream than Freud's systematizing. Here terms.
he "unconsciously" repeats Jung. Aside from Hillman. who is a The problem cornes from the concepts developed, which are
Jungian analyst it is only McLuhan and Deleuze and Guattari who concepts that designate multiplicities:
explicitly make the connection between post-modern "If the concept truly designates a multiplicity, it is attributabJe to
multi-consciousness and Jung. ln Mille plateaux Deleuze and societies according to certain of its lines, to groups and families
Guattari cite the famous dream that pre-figured Jung's separation according to certain others, to individuals according to others ·
from Freud: again; and each thing to which it is attributed is in its tum a
While on a voyage to the U.S. Freud and Jung were together multiplicity".
every day and analyzed each others dreams. On one occasion. This Logic of multiplicities is yet another name for the rejection
Jung dreamt he was in a house "his house", in an upper storey of the common measure and the acceptance of
decorated in a slightly antique style. Descending to the ground incommensurabilities or variable measures:
floor, he found the decor was much older. dating back to the 15th "We have no unities of measure. but only multiplicities or varieties
or 16th Century. Thinking he must explore the house. he tound a of measure". Applying Hillman's dictum that the image is the
stone stairway leading down into a cellar with walls dating back to measure of the event. we conclude that these concepts are
ancient Roman times. Descending even further he reached a image-concepts, and the language is psychological.
c~ve with scattered bones and broken· pottery. There he lt is as if the world and us included, are made of images and the
d1scovered two human skulls. very old and half-disintegrated. ego and its reality are just one set of images amongst many.
Then he woke up. ln a late dream, Jung entering a chapel saw a yogi.
Forgetting the house and its many storeys of different ages. cross-legged, deep in meditation. On looking at the yogi's face
Freud, who had twice before fainted in Jung's presence when more closely he realized il was his own. He awoke thinking ·Aha.
death had corne up, insisted on knowing what Jung thought in so he is tt:ie one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am
connection with the two skulls. whose skulls were they? Lying to it".
placate Freud. who insisted they must mean a wish for someones' If I have spent so much time talking about drea.ms. it is because
death Jung said •My wife and my sister-in-law". Deleuze and 1take seriously the idea of a pop-philosophy. The depressing thing
Guattari remark that the unconscious is made of multiplicities (eg about a conference on the ·post-modern· is that it could lead to
the rooms. the bones and bits of pottery) but that Freud constantly the territorial antics of the usual pack of experts and judges. The ·
reduces it to unities. For them. the house in Jung's dream is a body hor~or o! thosE: who want to ·explain· the post-modem, or own it or
without organs. a multiplicity of multiplicities. For Jung. the dream ~e 1t, or Judge It, to place it in its context To giw it its correct place
was a "structural diagram of the human psyche". msomecode.
lncommensurability, then is one of the key concepts of Another wa~ of treating an idea is to regard it as an image that
post-modern thought and in its most general torm refers to a lack ~akes you ~mk. !hat may make YoU think of something totally
of common measure between two (or more) terms. Depending on d1ffere~t. An 1g~a Is a sort of pulsation between a concept in a
the domain considered the common measure could be God, the -~od: ( co~rect _1deas·) a':'(I an image in a flux of images ("just an
moral law. the scientific method, efficiency, common sense, 1dea ). lt _ ,s th1s pulsatlOfl between images and concept that
Euclidean space ...
charactenzes a style (of thought of writing, of lite).
The practice of th~ common measure is the translation of . Y?u can _add post-modern to your inventory of concepts, where
events into the terms of a general system permitting a univocal 1t w1II prov1de .m?re or less information according to the case. or
description. According to Hillman a whole psychology of the you can treat 1t hke a dream. as an image that can lead you on to
measure becomes possible if we consider the attraction of the others.
act of measuring and its ability to convince. us. lt is within the
BIBLIOGRAPHY
"rhetoric of the measure" that an opposltl'ôn between the one and
the many. between monism and pluralism is produced. The DELEU~E. Gilles and GUATT ARI, Felix
measure tends to become a ccite·rion of exlstence: what can be MIiie Plateaux Les Editions de minuit. 1980
measured, exists; what cannot be measured doesn't exlst.
FEYERABEND. Paul
F_or Hillman, mea~ur!ng_is not Just a scientlflc operatlon but also Against Method. New left books. 1975
eth1c~I and _estheJ1c m 1ts Implications. An avent occurs in a Science in a Free Society, New left books. 1978
certain conf1gurat1on wlth its own intrinsic dimensions and is
JUNG, Carl Gustav
measured in terms of its .owrt,J(rlherent form. Each event ~ontains
meaning, an image to be obtimèd by the preclsion of its content Memories. Dreams, Fleflections. Collins Fount Paperbacks, 1979
LVOT ARD, Jean-francois
- wher~ precis!~ inql,u'des the ethical. esthetic and
psycholog1cal specINc~ :o t the avent. lt is the image of an avent "La Peinture do secret à l'~re Post-Moderne: Baruchello· in
Traverse~•. Centre G. Pompidou. 1983 ·
which constitutes its ~ flc measure. An imaginative language
La Cond1t,on ~ost-Moderne. Les Editions de Minuit 1979
measures an eyernt :moré p r.eclsely, because mor~ completely Tombeau del 1nt8/lectuel, Editions Galilee, 1984
than the tr~nslaben of the event into an operational .system. Such HILLMAN. James
language 1s "psychological" >'Ïfrl· Hillman's sense of an attitude of
"La Mesure des Evenements· in Science & Conscience. Ed M
~eeing aH events as métàp,~f rlçal; of seeing through events to the Cazenave. Paris, 1980 · ·
image or fantasy that is in ttriem, of de-literalizing our experience Inter Views. H_arper & Ro~ . New York. 1983