The Reenchantment of the World (39 page)

 

 

The entire world of metacommunication also has this structure. From a
gesture or tone of voice we guess across the slash mark what is really
meant:

 

 

"I love you" (impatient tone of voice)/Rejection

 

 

For this same reason, as we have already seen, there is no such
thing
as an "ethos" or "character." "Dependency," "hostility,"
and so on are
patterns, and from a person's behavior we guess their state of mind,
that is, across the slash mark. A redundant behavior pattern, such as the
ones Freud records in his list of human defense mechanisms, or those that
Eric Berne reproduces in "Games People Play," does tend to become like a
cliché, and lead us to think of the pattern as a concrete item, a "trait."

 

 

By contrast, one reason we enjoy a demonstration of skill, whether the
performer is playing the piano or juggling balls while balancing on a
monocycle, is that we understand instinctively that skill is a coding of
unconscious information; a coding that is, unlike a cliché, difficult to
achieve. The gracefulness of the act reveals a certain level of psychic
integration, which, understandably, fascinates us. In such cases the
redundancy takes this form:

 

 

Performance/conscious-unconscious relationship

 

 

It is this type of redundancy that enables us, for example, to appreciate
the art of cultures completely different from our own. We can somehow
feel the degree of authenticity, or the degree of conscious-unconscious
integration, from the skill or performance shown.

 

 

It is at this point that the principle of incompleteness, or
indeterminacy, as is present in quantum mechanics, becomes crucial. In
Chapter 5, I pointed out Bateson's essential agreement with this notion,
as opposed to the Freudian or Cartesian notion that everything can, in
principle, be known. Our discussion of redundancy shows us that if all
tacit knowing could be made explicit, all unconscious information be made
conscious, there would not be anything that was not a cliché. Everything
would be totally stylized, totally formalistic, and thus also totally
random -- meaningless. The general structure of communication, of meaning,
is necessarily part-for-whole; and to have it all spelled out, to erase
the slash mark altogether by making everything redundant, erases the
possibility of creating redundancy at all. It is not without good reason
that Polanyi calls the attempt to do this, to make everything explicit, a
program for reducing the human race to a state of "voluntary inbecility."8

 

 

The principle of incompleteness gives Batesonian holism its real
power, turning what is a weakness in conventional science into a
source of strength. It says, in a nutshell, that mind is not Mind,
nor, in principle, can it ever be so. It argues that by definition,
tacit knowing can never be rationally expressed. But we can recognize
its existence, we can work with it in our attempt to know the world,
and in fact we must do so because circuitry, in the cybernetic sense,
is the way reality is structured.

 

 

At the time of his research for "Naven," Bateson had seen incompleteness
as a problem. In particular, he felt that "ethos" was too intangible
(analogue) a thing to grasp. The real weakness in his study, he stated in
the 1936 Epilogue, was not so much his own theoretical treatment as the
absence of any science of tacit knowing. "Until we devise techniques for
the proper recording and analysis of human posture, gesture, intonation,
laughter, etc.," he wrote, "we shall have to be content with journalistic
sketches of the 'tone' of behaviour."9 This lacuna continued to
confront him in each area that he studied. Deutero-learning was largely
a matter of analogue cues. Schizophrenia pivoted on disturbances in
metacommunication. On the surface, a science of analogue behavior seemed
to be precisely what was needed for the resolution of such problems. In
his Balinese studies, Bateson tried to fill this gap by a very innovative
use of field photography; and Jurgen Ruesch (a later coworker) and
other researchers went on to make the whole subject of kinesics and
paralinguistics into a separate academic discipline.10 By and large,
however, Bateson's own work ultimately moved in a very different
direction. He not only came to the conclusion that it would be unwise to
try to illuminate fully this sort of unconscious information, but that,
in principle, it could not be done; that analogue and digital modes of
knowing were not really mutually translatable. He became convinced that
this gap in our knowledge was not something for science to "solve,"
but that it constituted a scientific fact of life. The situation
is similar to the relationship between figure and ground in gestalt
psychology. They are not symmetrical, their relationship is not one of
simple opposition. Digital knowledge makes itself evident by "punctuating"
analogue knowledge; the latter is hardly dependent upon the former for
its existence. Analogue knowledge is pervasive, vast; it is the ground
of perception and cognition. In premodern culture, the digital (when
it did exist) was the instrument of the analogue. After the Scientific
Revolution, the analogue became the instrument of the digital, or was
suppressed by the latter entirely, to the extent that such suppression was
possible. This distortion, which Freud exalted as the hallmark of health,
Bateson saw as the crux of our contemporary difficulties. Converting all
id to ego, or trying to spell out cardiac algorithms in cognitive-rational
terms, was a continuation of the program of the Scientific Revolution and
its distorted epistemology. In a healthy epistemology, the two modes of
knowing would be used to nourish and complement one another. Our culture,
with its heavy emphasis on the digital, could restore such a complementary
relationship only by recovering what it once knew about archaic modes
of thought. But to try to elaborate these modes in empirical-conscious
terms was, Bateson concluded, in fact to destroy them in the name of
understanding them.11

 

 

To understand this point more clearly, consider the popular theory that
language replaced earlier iconic systems of communication in the history
of human evolution. Once messages could be articulated verbally or in
writing, communication by way of signs, drum beats, and so on simply
fell into disuse. The problem with this theory, says Bateson, is that
analogue communication, including human kinesics, has in fact become
richer. Rather than being discarded, these archaic modes have themselves
evolved. We now have Cubism as well as cave paintings, ballet as well as
rain dances. This is not to argue that modern forms are more sophisticated
than archaic ones, for evolution is not synonymous with progress. But
our repertoire of communication has become more sophisticated with the
passage of centuries; and the evolution of iconic communication suggests
that such communication serves functions somewhat different from those
served by language, and that it was never intended to be replaced by
the latter. To translate kinesics into words (specifically, prose),
says Bateson, falsifies things, because such translation must give the
appearance of conscious intent to a message that is unconscious and
involuntary. Since the essence of an unconscious message is that it is
unconscious, that there
is
such a thing as unconscious communication,
the translation necessarily destroys the nature of the message, and thus
the message itself. Freud's theory of repression, that the unconscious is
the repository of painful memories, is a very confused theory in that much
of what exists in the unconscious was always there. According to Freud's
view, poetry would be a type of distorted prose, whereas the truth is that
prose is poetry which has been converted into a "logical" presentation.

 

 

I have already noted Bateson's example of the hypothetical television set
that reports on its own internal workings as an illustration of the limits
of consciousness. We see the paradox at once: it is as though I were to
say to you, "Speak to me about what you are speaking as you are speaking
it." In order for the television to report on the workings that make
possible that very report, another unit would have to be added to it. But
since this new unit could not report on
its
own workings, a
unit would have to be added to that, and so on. One would soon confront
an infinite
regress, a set of Chinese puzzle boxes. The attempt of the conscious
mind to explicate its own mode of operation involves the same sort
of paradox. But there is an additional confusion that derives from the
different types of communication involved. As already noted, all analogue
communication is an exercise in communication about the species of the
unconscious mind, about the way it itself works. But the unconscious
mind is no more able logically to do this than the conscious mind; it
can only show what it is about by working in the way it does, that is,
according to the rules of primary process. A skilled performance is the
deliberate attempt to display the nature of spontaneous, nondeliberate
behavior. Thus Bateson suggests that the usual interpretation of a
remark attributed to lsadora Duncan is wrong. She supposedly said:
"If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing
it." As Bateson says, the common interpretation is something like,
"There would then be no point in dancing it, because I could tell it to
you, quicker and with less ambiguity, in words." This interpretation
is all of a piece with the program of making the unconscious totally
explicit. There is, says Bateson, another possible interpretation,
one which Isadora probably had in mind:

 

 

If the message were the sort of message that could be communicated
in words, there would be no point in dancing it, but it is not that
sort of message. It is, in fact, precisely the sort of message which
would be falsified if communicated in words, because the use of words
(other than poetry) would imply that this is a fully conscious and
voluntary message, and this would be simply untrue.

 

 

Digital knowledge can only communicate conscious intent.
If the message
itself is, "There is a species of knowledge that is not conscious or
purposive," its expression in digital terms is necessarily the falsification
of the message rather than the expression of it. "Let me dance to you
an aspect of tacit knowing," Isadora is saying; let me show you what
life is really about. It is not merely that what we consciously know is
only a fraction of reality, but that incompleteness of knowledge is the
source of knowledge itself (if I could dance this book, I wouldn't have
to write it). If Western science could somehow achieve its program of
total certainty, at that very moment it would know nothin~ at all.12

 

 

As I stated at the end of Chapter 7, the Batesonian paradigm cannot
genuinely be formulated in a digital fashion, any more than the alchemical
paradigm can. Both recognize that incompleteness is inevitably part of
the process of reality itself. The closest we can come to formulating
Bateson's paradigm is through the study both of specific examples
(as we have done) and the method of his investigation. We thus have
holistic answers to questions such as: What is schizophrenia? What is
alcoholism? How do mammals learn? It seems to me that the holistic
approach can be extended to questions such as, What are light and
color? What is electricity? Why do objects fall to earth? Our present
mechanistic answers to such questions are clearly insufficient, especially
because they incorrectly leave the observer and his entire range of
analogue/affective behavior out of the investigation. The research
undertaken by a future holistic science would take incompleteness and
circuitry as axioms; would seek to uncover the cybernetic properties of
a situation, while including the human investigator in the circuit being
studied; would show how the analogue and digital patterns interlock;
and would consider a specific piece of research "finished" when the
nature of the Mind present in the situation had been satisfactorily
explicated. Ultimately, the explication may not take a digital form at
all, but instead appear as a videotape, a mime, or a book filled with
collage. The goal of the research would be to deepen our relationship
to nature by demonstrating its beauty -- as was, for example, Kepler's
purpose in his study of planetary harmony. The end result would be a
better orientation of ourselves in the cosmos. The notion of mastering the
cosmos would, in a society built on holistic thought, make schoolchildren
giggle, and produce blank, uncomprehending stares in adults.

 

 

What might a holistic society be like? I have argued that the horror
of the modern landscape can at least partly be traced to the Cartesian
paradigm, and have suggested that its insistence on a split between fact
and value, or epistemology and ethics, is particularly to blame. For
modern science, "What can I know?" and "How shall I live?" are totally
unrelated questions. Science cannot, supposedly, tell us what the good
life is. Of course, this modesty is highly suspect: "value-free" is
itself a value judgment, amorality a certain species of morality. In
Batesoninn holism, as in the Hermetic world view and other systems of
premodern thought, this false modesty is happily absent. A certain
ethic is directly implicated in Bateson's epistemology; or, as he
himself puts it, "the ethics of optima and the ethics of maxima are
totally different ethical systems."13 Since we already know a great
deal about the ethics of maxima, of trying to master the environment,
it will be necessary to conclude this chapter with an examination of
the ethics of optima, and the sort of society that might be congruent
with the holistic or cybernetic vision (I shall have more to say about
this matter in specifically political terms in Chapter 9).
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