The Pre-reflective (non-knowing) - Explanation from Susan Kozel's Closer (MIT: 2007)

 

A linguistically ambiguous zone often better captured by literature, poetry and art which Ian McEwan sketched in terms of flow, affect and colour:

 

“This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call mentalese. Hardly as language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second and blending it inseparably with its distinctive emotional hue, which itself is rather like a colour”

 

The pre-reflective is considered through:

-Language and gesture

-A spatial understanding of regions (similar to topographical mapping of external landscapes)

-An internal mapping of the regions of the body as if moving from topography to tomography.

 

Phenomenology is all about the logical problem in trying to use reflective practices to obtain access to the pre-reflective.

 

If we intend for reflection to suspend itself in the face of the pre-reflective, we make a commitment to maintaining the connection between reflection and its other in a fundamentally non-dualistic way, effectively a commitment to the porosity of reflection. It is not a steady state; it appears and vanishes in a constant sliding exchange with reflection.

 

Access to the pre-reflective can be obtained through particular suspensions of the reflective process, some of which resembles forgetting. Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. The relationship between knowing and non-knowing, between remembering and forgetting, further illuminates how, despite the seemingly oppositional or dualistic nature of the words, the states to which they refer are not mutually exclusive: there are patches of memory in forgetting and strands of non-knowing in the far-from-homogeneous fabric of knowledge.