The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  (1) There is an aggregate of interacting parts, and the interaction is triggered by differences. We have already discussed this criterion in the case of the steam engine, the man chopping down the tree, and the blind man with the stick. In each case, information -- differences that makes a difference -- circulates through the system. The blind man suddenly slows down as the stick tells him he is at the edge of a curb; a whole different process is set in motion as he feels his way across the street. Differences in muscles make differences in movements make differences in retina make differences in brain make differences in exposed surface of the tree trunk, and such differences circulate around the system of man-cutting-down-tree, influencing one another in a continual, changing cycle.

  Furthermore, parts of the aggregate -- the tree for example -- may also satisfy these conditions, in which case they are sub-Minds. But there is always a Sublevel that is not alive, the axe by itself for instance. The explanation of mental phenomena is thus never supernatural Mind always resides in the interaction of multiple parts that may, of themselves, not satisfy the criteria of Mind.

  (2) These differences are not ones of substance, space, or time; they are nonlocatable. This statement represents another way of rejecting the Cartesian impact physics model, or linear causality. The model certainly works for interacting billiard balls, or Newtonian studies of force and acceleration, but once a living observer is admitted to be part of such cases, the cause of events is no longer a force or an impact. An observer, or receiver, responds to a difference or a change in a relationship, and this difference cannot be located in any conventional sense.

  Consider, for example, the difference between the blackness of the ink in this sentence and the whiteness of the paper on which it is printed. Few people would deny that there is a real difference here. But where is it? The difference is not in the ink; it is not in the white background; it is not in the "edge," or outline, between them, which is after all a collection of mathematical curves, possessing no dimension. Nor is it in your mind, any more than the ink or the paper are actually in your mind. A difference is not a thing or event. It has no dimension, any more than do such abstractions as congruence or symmetry. Yet it exists, and to complicate matters further, nothing -- that which is not -- can be a cause. As Bateson points out, the letter you do not write can get an angry reply; the tax form you fail to submit can get you in trouble. There is no parallel here to the world of impact physics, where impacts are causes, where real things must have dimension, and where it takes a "thing" to have an effect.

  (3) The differences and transforms (coded versions) of differences are transmitted along closed loops or networks of pathways; the system is circular or more complex. We have, essentially, discussed this criterion in our analysis of the feedback process. Another way of stating it might be to say that the system is self-corrective in the direction of homeostasis and/or runaway, and that self-correctiveness implies trial and error behavior. Nonliving things maintain a passive existence; living entities, or Minds, escape change through change, or more precisely, by incorporating continual change into themselves. Nature, says Bateson, accepts ephemeral change in favor of long-term stability. The bamboo reed bends in the wind so as to return to its original position when the wind dies down, and the tightrope walker shifts his or her weight continually to avoid falling off the high wire. Even runaway systems contain seeds of self-correction. Symmetrical tensions run so high among the Iatmul that complementary naven behavior is almost constantly being triggered. The alcoholic usually comes to AA when he or she has finally hit bottom. Marx's argument that capitalism was, by its very nature, digging its own grave, is also an example of cybernetic thinking; and phenomena such as famine, epidemics, and wars might be regarded as extreme cases of nature's attempt to preserve homeostasis. The current collapse of industrial society may well be the planet's way of avoiding a larger death.

  (4) Many events within the system have their own sources of energy, that is, they are energized by the respondent part, not by impact from the part that triggers the response. This criterion is another way of saying that living systems are self-actualizing, that they are subjects rather than objects. The reaction of a dog that you kick comes from the animal's own metabolism; the two feet it might have traveled from the force of your kick is less significant than the dog's subsequent response, which might include taking a chunk out of your leg.

  Given these criteria of Mind, the next obvious question is: How do we know the world; which is to say, other Minds? On the Cartesian model, we know a phenomenon by breaking it into its simplest components and then recombining them. Enough has been said already to indicate how fallacious this atomistic approach really is. In fact, in terms of cybernetic theory, Cartesian analysis is a way of not knowing most phenomena, because Mind can only be characteristic of an (interacting) aggregate. Meaning is virtually synonymous with context. Abstract a thing from its context (a ray of light, for example) and the situation becomes meaningless, although perhaps mathematically precise.

  In cybernetic theory, then, we can know something only in context, in its relation with other things.7 In addition to "context," Bateson uses other words to denote "meaning," and these are "redundancy," "pattern," and "coding." The circulation of information involves the reduction of randomness, a process that can also be called the creation of negative entropy (entropy is the measure of randomness of a system). If something is redundant, if it possesses a definite pattern, then it is not random and constitutes a source of information. Communication is thus the creation of redundancy, and redundancy is the central epistemologlcal concept in cybernetic theory, which is the science of messages. It is interesting to note, once again, that this concept is an advanced form of an idea first advanced by William Bateson, namely the "undulatory hypothesis" (see Chapter 7). Redundancy is an undulatory hypothesis; both terms are derived from the Latin word 'unda,' wave. A redundant situation is one in which wave after wave of similar or identical information washes over us. The holistic outlook of both Batesons is rooted in the notion that we know the world through redundancy.

  Gregory Bateson takes the following definition as his paradigm for knowing:

  Any aggregate of events or objects (e.g., a sequence of phonemes, a painting, or a frog, or a culture) shall be said to contain "redundancy" or "pattern" if the aggregate can be divided in any way by a "slash mark," such that an observer perceiving only what is on one side of the slash mark can guess, with better than random success, what is on the other side of the slash mark. We may say that what is on one side of the slash contains information or has meaning about what is on the other side.

  Much of the information we absorb is digital in nature, usually spoken or written. If I say "on the one hand," you know there is another hand lurking somewhere in the wings, and you know what this means. Clichés are redundant to the point of rigidity. The term itself originally applied to blocks of typeface which were glued together by printers because they occurred so often in published work. The English language is also redundant at the level of individual letters. Given a letter T in a piece of prose, we know that the next letter is almost certainly H, R, W, or a vowel (including Y). Words like "tsetse" and "tmesis" tend to catch our attention, for their spelling is less redundant than the spelling of "than" or "the."

  Most of the information we take in, however, is analogue, or iconic. As I walk down a street alongside a large building, unable to see around the corner, I expect to find right angles in both street and building as I make the turn. This is in fact the equivalent of a cliché. If, however, I frequently fell down a mine shaft as I turned such a corner, the situation would be so lacking in meaning that I would never leave my house, Clichés, as we know, are safe.

  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 se
en, 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 Bat
eson 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