1915: "divide the dream into two 'text's - the manifest text, the part Freud remembers when he wakes up, and the latent text, the thoughts and associations that come to him when thinking about the dream. Rather than one being conscious and the other unconscious, it's clear that both texts' are in fact conscious or perfectly capable of becoming conscious. So we have to look for the unconscious in a system that operates on the connection between the two"
Common currency of two systems (conscious + unconscious): thought. What constitutes "a thought"?
1928: Georges Politzer's Critique of the Foundations of Psychology
"The unconscious, for [Politzer], expresses a first-person drama via a "personal dialectic" as he called it (Politzer, p. 69). The job of interpreting the formations of the unconscious - dreams, for example - is one of uncovering these intimate rather than conventional significations... Politzer rejected what he saw as Freud's impersonal characterization of the unconscious in terms of agencies, forces, and psychical economy. Politzer was opposed to any abstraction in psychology"
"Instead of two texts in reality we have just one. The dream isn't derivative of anything... It is simply the same idea expressed differently... We can still say the dream has a meaning, but that meaning is immanent to it in the same way that the theme of a play is immanent to its text, or the laws of gravity are immanent to the forces of nature. It does not exist separately alongside them"
1960: "This second text is inscribed, but we need to look for its inscription in strange places, which he says may range from the body, memories, distortions of memories, semantic evolution, and cultural traditions (Ecrits, 259)"
"Prägnanz is the idea, drawn from Gestalt psychology, that our visual perception has the tendency to organize the images we see into a neat, regular cohesion... for Laplanche, this provides a model for how unconscious and conscious systems interact"
Leclaire: "The unconscious is not the ground which has been prepared to give more sparkle and depth to the painted composition: it is the earlier sketch which has been covered over before the canvas is used for another picture. If we use a comparison of a musical order, the unconscious is not the counterpoint of a fugue or the harmonics of a melodic line: it is the jazz one hears despite oneself behind the Haydn quartet when the radio is badly tuned or not sufficiently selective. The unconscious is not the message one strives to read on an old parchment: it is another text written underneath and which must be read by illuminating it from behind or with the help of a developer" (quoted by Lemaire, p. 137-138)
The way this article frames the unconscious, it seems like the semiotics of the unconscious becomes a necessary task. However, if knowing the unconscious becomes impossible, perhaps a better approach would be an "unconscious of semiosis"?
