ABSTRACT
The aims of this book demand that we simultaneously acknowledge the scope of the well-entrenched orthodoxies of assimilationism and multiculturalism, and disturb the horizons of expectation they set in place. How might this doubly oriented approach be pursued? In traditional association experiments, randomly chosen stimuli, such as words, are placed in particular proximity in order to trigger diverse, and often unrelated, associations, impressions, connotations and mental images. For Freud, the significance of such outcomes was that they can belie the arbitrariness of the stimuli that provoked them. The associations and images thrown-up in this process were, he argued, not arbitrary, but ‘always strictly determined by important internal attitudes of mind’ (Freud 1991: 136). As such, any investigation of the determining capacities of those internal, unconscious attitudes can only be inhibited by logical styles of thinking – after all, such styles of thinking presuppose the elimination of arbitrariness. Arbitrarily chosen words are deployed in such experiments precisely for their capacity to loosen the inhibiting effects of logical thinking.
