"Dream-work," translation, codes, anti-texts

Freud conceptualizes his "dream-work" as a process by which the "latent content" of a dream (i.e., its symbolic and/or metaphoric "meaning") is converted to the "manifest content" (i.e., the symbols and images which compose a dream and convey this meaning) that we, the dreamer, experience. This is, essentially, an act of translation - usually not a direct one, and one in which "latent" elements are often combined, confused, taken out of context or rendered into their own opposites.

Having recently read DeCerteau's "Walking in the City," I could see close connections between Freud's "dream-work" and DeCerteau's conception of walking in an urban environment as a kind of "speaking." DeCerteau writes, "[The] verbal relics of which story is composed [words]... are juxtaposed in a collage where their relations are not thought... articulated by lacunae... they produce anti-texts [within the text itself]." In DeCerteau's conception, walking/speaking is also an act of translation - one which necessarily seems to contest, or at least challenge, societal norms. With this in mind, we could place DeCerteau's conceptions as forms of Freud's "dream-work" - a rendering of the surrounding landscape into a different code which breaks down established structures. At the very least, these processes seem to be connected in that they function on the level of the unconscious.

Both Freud and DeCerteau do have a certain level of cautiousness about this "translation" as an act of personal freedom and agency, however - there are only a limited number of "codes" with which we can effectively "translate" that which is around us. These translations partake of the same logic - and the same problems - as the Situationist dérive. As Debord notes in Theory of the Dérive:

If chance plays an important role in dérives this is because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes... An insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance, and of its inevitably reactionary effects, condemned to a dismal failure the famous aimless wandering attempted in 1923 by four Surrealists... From that perspective, [tadpoles] could be considered more spontaneously liberated than the Surrealists, since they have the advantage of being "as stripped as possible of intelligence, sociability and sexuality," and are thus "truly independent from one another."

The psychoanalytic perspective, of course, reaches back to myth (Oedipus) for the foundation of these "conservative" operations of chance - the essentially normative codes with which we "translate" our "dream-work." From a filmmaking perspective, we can take the same approach to film genre - by looking at how generic codes, even on an "unconscious" and "spontaneous" level, shape our perceptions of moving image work. I would venture to say that generic codes can play a large role in our ability to perceive moving images, the basic reception of a message (i.e. "What makes a good film?"). Thinking in this manner can render genre into an effective tool for the film or video artist with a mind toward experimentation (manipulating points of genre and/or character identification, etc.).