The Trickster and the Paranormal

by George P. Hansen

  For social life, there must be shared assumptions, symbols, and meanings. Rationalists assume an objective reality exists and that it provides the required foundation. It is assumed that the objective world is independent of our representations of it—that representations (e.g., thoughts) do not affect it directly. The scientific enterprise accepts and upholds these ideas. Admittedly they usually produce a good, first-order approximation of reality. But they don’t always apply. The practice of magic and the data of parapsychology demonstrate that fact.

  The agenda of rationalization faces an almost insurmountable problem—the serious study of magic has a magical influence. Thus the disenchantment process must eliminate not only magic, but also serious consideration of it. A number of techniques have been developed to assure that it remains marginalized and outside the awareness of academe. Freud linked magic to the infantile and the neurotic, and his followers aggressively promoted that view. In our society, “magical thinking” is disparaged, and it is now used as an epithet by debunkers to discredit those who show an interest in the paranormal. Such belittling discourages use of magic by status-conscious persons.

  Anthropologists writing about early cultures face a problematic situation. Without a doubt, totemism can justifiably be called irrational. But to make that explicit leaves one open to charges of ethno-centrism or even racism. Today the designation “irrational” is considered derogatory, and those who wish to instill a neutral or positive attitude toward primitive societies find it is easier to ignore the problems posed by totemism and magic. Those are seen as remnants from a superstitious past, embarrassments, and best forgotten in the effort to increase the respect for earlier peoples. However, scholars who ignore the issue come to believe that they hold an unbiased view of the primitives, but they are blinded by their own beliefs. At least the ethnocentrism of Frazer was overt.

  A vast number of academics who write on magic today are not only unable to grasp it, but unlike the earlier commentators, they do not realize their failure. They almost universally ignore or deny the intrinsic efficacy of magic (i.e., psi). It is problematic, and merely thinking about it raises their anxieties. Making this explicit is, of course, not welcomed by those who have devoted their careers to fostering rationality. As such, it is unreasonable to expect academe to explore totemism much further. Nevertheless, some progress can be made with structuralist methods.

  I do not wish to make academic science a scapegoat for the sins of rationalization, and it would be wrong to attribute the problems solely to that quarter. As I explained earlier, similar trends are seen in much of religion. Mainline liberal Protestant Christians may profess a belief in miracles, but ones that happened long ago and far away. The miraculous is placed at a distance. Even Rudolf Otto’s writings show some leeriness toward supernatural phenomena. Both establishment science and orthodox exoteric religion display the same trend. one can only conclude that the roots of rationalization, the downplaying of miracles and mysticism, must be far deeper than just ideology and belief. They are inherent in the structure of our society. The primitives’ taboos against contact with supernatural forces are with us still, though in veiled form.

  Totemism Summary

  This chapter covered a cluster of topics of preeminent importance for the social sciences: religion, magic, social restrictions on sexual behavior, taboo, and classification. These are all relevant to the trickster. It is no accident that early sociologists and anthropologists devoted so much effort to magic and totemism. It is also not happenstance that the trickster played a major role in the mythologies of many primitive peoples.

  Durkheim, Frazer, and Freud wrote about the numinous, the sacred, the supernatural. They did not shy away from the irrational aspects. Today anthropologists know that totemism formed the basis for social organization of many cultures, but they almost completely ignore it. The early academic debates are forgotten, quaint relics of a bygone era, and many presume the issues to have been resolved. They weren’t.

  Even more amazing is the neglect of taboo, holy dread, and the numinous. order and stability of society were maintained through these. Academics now dismiss them as vague emotional responses, even though they are central to the religious experience of all humankind.

  Totemism is a difficult topic. Not only is it extremely varied, but the issues blend and blur together, and they are nearly impossible to arrange coherently. Totemism deals with classification and shared meaning.

  Magic and religion need to be understood in relation to issues of foundations, classification, and boundaries. The primitives recognized that when foundations are upturned, classification schemes violated, or boundaries blurred, then supernatural powers erupt. A liminal, antistructural condition is created.

  The primitives also understood that taboos could be violated in order to release magical power. Society would be partly deconstructed in the process. This might be done inadvertently, or intentionally with ritual protection. In either case, danger and chaos were invited. Foundations were suspended. This was magical, numinous.

  Like totemism, the trickster has been difficult for scholars to comprehend; he resists being placed in our rational categories. He disrupts; he crosses boundaries; he thrives in paradox and ambiguity. He is associated with the supernatural. Theories of the trickster and those of totemism illuminate each other.

  Today academic debates regarding the paranormal are not much different than those on magic a century ago. They are laced overtly and covertly with religious issues, so much so that detached, dispassionate examination is the exception. The discussions, of totemism and magic, previously, and the paranormal today, need to be understood in this light.

  CHAPTER 23

  Literary Criticism,

  Meaning, and the Trickster

  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

  John 1:1

  The trickster is a literary figure. He is central to the problem of meaning. In fact, the term hermeneutics (the study of interpretation) is derived from the name Hermes, the trickster of the Greeks.

  Meaning is the explicit concern of literary criticism, an innately reflexive discipline—it uses language to study language. Literary critics have long pondered the limitations of language and developed some understanding of them, and it is no accident that they have generated the most important insights on the trickster.

  The trickster is also intimately involved with magic (psi). Though magic and meaning are not quite identical, they are closely related, and at times they blur into each other. The similarity is profound; one can work through the other. Hermes is the messenger god and is central to information, language, and meaning, but also to limits, and to reflexivity. These issues cannot be neatly disentangled, which is in keeping with the trickster.

  Literary criticism is a vast area, and I cannot attempt to survey it. Instead I will focus on that small part which involves structuralism and its intellectual descendants—deconstructionism and post-structuralism. They fomented controversy, but they are still not too well understood despite the resulting publicity.

  I introduced the French structuralist movement in the discussions of Claude Levi-Strauss, but structuralism encompassed far more than anthropology. It also included literary criticism, religious studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and linguistics, and there were many variants of it.2 It was not a closed, self-consistent school, nor is it particularly easy to define. Readers who have only a passing familiarity with structuralism should not feel intellectually inadequate if they failed to grasp its central issues. Even Levi-Strauss admitted that he didn’t understand some of the uses to which his ideas were put. Ambiguity is an important issue in the structuralist lineage; it’s not to be neglected or lamented. Ambiguity highlights the limits of language, and the failure of meaning.

  As a movement, structuralism is dead. Its ideas cannot now be effectively understood without considering deconstructionism and post-structuralism. I will provide a brief overview of th
ese and some of the people involved with them.

  Concepts from the structuralist lineage are now almost exclusively applied to literary endeavors. That restrains the ideas, restricts them to text, and that makes them safe for academe. This chapter will escape those shackles and cover anthropological ideas that receive little attention by literary theorists. One commonality between literary and anthropological concepts is the theme of binary opposition—a theme also found with the trickster and in primitive classification.

  Structuralism, semiotics, deconstructionism, and post-structuralism all display the influence of French philosophy, which has a strongly rationalistic bent. It is marked by abstraction and little empirical content, and many decry it for that reason. However, the extremes make both the strengths and weaknesses of rationalism apparent. The excesses are instructive. As I will show, deconstructionism is the logical culmination of rationalism. This will surprise some and be abhorrent to others, because deconstructionism lays bare the pretensions of rationality.

  Structuralist Theory

  Structuralism emphasizes patterns of differences. Communication systems use patterns of matter or energy as signals. For example, computers utilize strings of 1s and 0s (bits); they may be printed on paper (matter) or put in the form of electronic impulses (energy). It is the arrangement that is important. But the “meaning” of the information lies outside the formal system. Meaning requires interpretation, because the same “information” can mean quite different things to different people. It is here that ambiguity and the trickster enter.

  Two key aspects of communication and information can be identified: distinction and representation. Communication requires differences; one entity (e.g., event, person, idea) must be differentiated from others. Something is only in relation to something else. This wholistic concept is a fundamental tenet of structuralism. The second aspect, representation, is an inherent part of this process. In representation (e.g., gesture, drawing, speech, writing), one thing is taken to indicate another. It is not the thing, but only an indicator of it. Language is a form of representation; a name is used to represent something, and we have few effective ways to communicate without using names for things.

  Structuralists saw culture and all its products as a form of communication. For example, social statuses differentiate people; they serve to form a structure because individuals have separate roles. A person’s position in the structure communicates who he is, both to himself and to others. Edmund Leach’s book Culture & Communication (1976) provides an introduction to the ideas and explains the premise from an anthropological perspective.

  Many things can be seen in terms of communication, and structuralists’ search for commonalities in such diverse areas as kinship, language, and myth might seem unlikely to be fruitful. Yet analogous explorations in physics and engineering produced spectacular results. For instance, buildings in earthquakes; electrical circuits with resistors, inductors, and capacitors; and certain hydraulic systems are all governed by the same mathematical equations. What is learned in one area applies to others. Edmund Leach was the foremost English structuralist, and as an undergraduate he studied engineering. He mentioned that his familiarity with binary arithmetic helped him appreciate structuralist ideas about binary oppositions. Structuralist theory cannot claim the magnitude of success attained by the physical sciences, but if its ideas are rejuvenated, further developed, and more widely disseminated, it should produce some surprising insights.

  Structuralism has some compatibility with parapsychology. Both express themes of interrelatedness not found in other sciences. Sociologist Michael Lane described structuralism saying that “its fundamental tenet, lies in its attempt to study not the elements of a whole, but the complex network of relationships that link and unite those elements.”5 He went on to say that “structuralism is effectively anticausal. The language of structuralist analysis in its pure form makes no use of the notions of cause and effect: rather, it rejects this conceptualization of the world in favour of ‘laws of transformation’.” Psi does not conform to causal patterns, and transition and transformation are liminal processes and ones hospitable to psi. If structuralist ideas and parapsychology are to inform each other, development will be required, but the fundamental outlook is so similar that it demands investigation.

  Ferdinand de Saussure

  Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, was a most influential figure for structuralism. His best known work is Course in General Linguistics. He died in 1913 before he could write the book, but two of his colleagues gathered his students’ notes and formed them into a volume that was published in 1916. This constituted a major reconceptualization, and today it is recognized to have been an important advance in linguistics.

  Saussure pointed out that language is a system of differences. Various sounds are in opposition to one another; they are differentiated amongst themselves. He emphasized language as a system. Saussure explained that: “to consider a term as simply the union of a certain sound with a certain concept is grossly misleading. To define it in this way would isolate the term from its system; it would mean assuming that one can start from the terms and construct the system by adding them together when, on the contrary, it is from the interdependent whole that one must start and through analysis obtain its elements.” British linguist Geoffrey Sampson in his Schools of Linguistics (1980) noted that Durkheim’s influence can be seen in the writings of Saussure. Durkheim showed that social facts have an independent existence and that social phenomena cannot be reduced to that of a collection of individuals. Saussure saw language as a social fact with an existence independent from any individual. As a system, language is shared; as a system of collective representations, it has a life of its own. This collectivist, anti-reductionist approach typifies both Durkheim and Saussure.

  Saussure raised issues that are often glossed over in texts on linguistics. He grappled with the problem of how sounds (speech) are connected to concepts and ideas. He pointed out that “Psychologically our thought—apart from its expression in words—is only a shapeless and indistinct mass … without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.”8

  He illustrated the model with a diagram, and Figure 3 is patterned after his. The top irregular area designates thought, and the bottom designates sounds; between the two is a nether region. The vertical lines divide all three areas, showing the associations of thoughts and sounds. Saussure explained that “language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses,” and he further commented that “Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a substance” (Saussure’s emphasis). Thus language has a betwixt and between quality.

  Edmund Leach

  Edmund Leach explained the importance of distinctions vis-à-vis language in a famous essay entitled: “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse” (1964). That paper is of special merit because it displays the real power of structuralism to illuminate connections of seemingly disparate topics. Leach ranged over taboo, profanity, and the valuation of animals, among other matters. In discussing the development of language, Leach “postulate [d] that the physical and social environment is perceived as a continuum. It

  does not contain any intrinsically separate things.” He went on to say that “Language gives us the names to distinguish the things; taboo

  inhibits the recognition of those parts of the continuum which separate things.” 12

  He illustrated his ideas with several very simple diagrams.

  Figure 6 Taboo Areas (Following Leach, 1964, p. 35)

  Leach’s formulation shows the interplay between the continuous and the discrete, a theme pondered earlier by Levi-Strauss and Henri Bergson. We also see that language plays an important role in making distinctions, as names make designations. But Leach went further and said th
at “by suppressing our recognition of the nonthings which fill the interstices, then of course what is suppressed becomes especially interesting’ (emphasis added). In our modern, rationalized world, the suppression has triumphed over the interest, and many have missed the deep implications of Leach’s paper. Leach was an anthropologist rather than a linguist, and as such he emphasized the world as much as he did language. Most other theorists focus on language or text. The consequences of the usual one-sidedness are typically neglected, but we will explore them a bit later.

  Semiotics and Umberto Eco

  Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, and it has much in common with structuralism; the two shared ideas and leading exponents. Semiotics’ groundwork was developed independently by Ferdinand de Saussure and American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Neither Peirce nor Saussure lived to see the fruits of their labors in semiotics; Peirce died in 1914, the year after Saussure.

  Like structuralism, semiotics is not too well known, and I have encountered a number of Ph.D.s in the sciences who did not know what the word meant, even though there are professional academic journals devoted to it. Semioticians also see culture and its products as a system of communication, and they study patterns in order to discover hidden messages, even in such things as food, dress, toys, and buildings. For instance, our choice of foods depends upon the time of day, our social class, religious observances, and other factors. The selections usually have nothing to do with nutrition. Food choices mark differences, and as such they can be seen as a form of communication about other aspects of our lives. The book Structuralism & Semiotics (1977) by Terence Hawkes provides an accessible introduction and explains the overlap of the fields.