CULTURE, MIND, AND PHYSICAL REALITY:
AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ESSAY
Lee Drummond
Director
Center for Peripheral Studies
Palm Springs CA
www.peripheralstudies.org
leedrummond@msn.com
December 2001
published online June 2010
ABSTRACT
Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality: An Anthropological Essay
The recent debate concerning the relation between anthropology and science
acquires a much-needed focus when applied to a question now engaging thinkers
in a variety of disciplines: What is the nature of mind or consciousness?
Although cultural anthropology has been largely dealt out of discussions of this
question in prominent national forums, this essay proposes that a considerably
reworked concept/theory of culture holds the key to resolving the issue. Such a
reworking is necessary because cultural anthropology has lost its grip on its
pivotal theoretical construct. How this curious situation has come to pass requires
an interrogation of the discipline on the way to exploring the interconnections of
culture, mind, and physical reality. In particular, an application of concepts now
being developed in theoretical physics and chaos-complexity theory suggests the
fruitfulness of a monistic theory of culture, mind, and physical reality. [mind,
consciousness, theory of culture, semiospace, intersystem]
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Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality:
An Anthropological Essay
Still, the situation is very surprising. Once any two photons, pets, or
anything else have interacted, one cannot separate any description of the
properties of one from the properties of the other. Given any one electron,
its properties are entangled with those of every particle it has interacted
with, from the moment of its creation, indeed quite possibly from the
moment of the creation of our universe.
Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos
Au contraire d’une philosophie qui confine la dialectique à l’histoire
humaine et le interdit de séjour dans l’ordre naturel, le structuralisme admet
volontiers que les idées qu’il formule en termes psychologiques puissent n’être
que des approximations tâtonnantes de vérités organiques et même physiques.
Une des orientations de la science contemporaine auxquelles il se montre le plus
ouvert est celle qui, validant les intuitions de la pensée sauvage, réussit parfois
déjà à réconcilier le sensible avec l’intelligible, le qualitatif avec le géométrique
et laisse entrevoir l’ordre naturel comme un vaste champ semantique « où
l’existence de chaque élément conditionne celle de tous les autres ». Non pas un
type de réalité irréductible au langage mais, selon le dire du poète, « temple où
de vivants piliers laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles » . . .
Claude Lévi-Strauss, L’homme Nu
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A Troubled Sleep: surRendering Culture
Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist nicht. Just a touch of vertigo to start things
off. If we are to do anthropology with a hammer (but, remember, wielded like a
tuning fork), then let’s first take that hammer to the cerebral gyroscopes that
direct us along well-charted, rational, and ultimately fruitless lines of thought.
This essay strives to emulate the chaotic journey of life (that is, of life among the
non-academic living): our craft is tumbling end-over-end; our instruments are
reading gibberish; the controls are chattering uselessly in our clammy grasp; for
the rest of the way we’ll be in free fall (in a free f ’all).
Since our world is composed of them, let me begin by noting two
paradoxes at the heart of the present somnambulistic malaise in cultural
anthropology.
In the ongoing debate over the relation between anthropology and science,
it is curious that cultural anthropologists, those dedicated observers of the Other,
have become increasingly self-absorbed and inward-looking. What we learn
about other people seems always to return us to ruminations about ourselves, the
nature of our discipline, and even the intersubjective basis of knowledge in
general. If it is possible to speak of an organizing principle for a project that
insists on the fragmentary nature of human experience and the systems of
knowledge that issue from that experience, it may be said that postmodernism is
based on the idea that the relation between observer and observed (and hence, for
cultural anthropologists, the relation between ethnographer and “native”) can no
longer be considered transparent. The litany of positivism, which Marvin Harris
has recited through seven editions of Culture, People, Nature, is pretty much
exhausted – not dead, perhaps, but dependent on some major academic life
support systems to continue drawing breath (named chairs, emeritus positions,
programs in development anthropology). Few graduate students beginning
fieldwork get off the boat (or, increasingly, the cross-town bus) with a healthyminded empiricism directing them to conduct observations, gather data, frame
hypotheses, test theories. Instead, their young (and, again increasingly, not-soyoung) minds are troubled. Their relations with local persons (no longer
“informants”) begin with confusion and embarrassment, and only get messier as
time goes by. The supposedly clear-cut program in which a scientist investigates
objects immediately loses its transparency; the ethnographer’s relation to others
becomes ambiguous, occluded, sometimes even dangerous.
Of course, even before s/he gets off that boat or bus the new ethnographer has
been exposed, often fatally, to the virulent attractions of interpretivism, has come
to expect thickets of description to be her/his lot in the field. What s/he does not
figure out by her/himself is copiously supplied by the theoretically and
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methodologically exciting writings of Clifford Geertz, Jean-Paul Dumont, Paul
Rabinow, James Boon, Donna Haraway, George Marcus, James Clifford, Ruth
Behar, Michael Herzfeld, Dennis Tedlock, and others.
All this wallowing in interpretivist angst may sound like a distressing – and
certainly depressing – way to start out on the long, slow death of dissertation
research and writing, but many thoughtful anthropologists think that, as Martha
Stewart says, it’s a good thing. And I pretty much agree. For reasons that I go
into later, I believe the postulates (if you can call them that) of interpretivism (the
relativity of observer-observed; the inevitability of thick description; the
intersubjective nature of human experience and knowledge) have profound
affinities with developments in intellectual fields as far-flung as theoretical
physics, fractal mathematics, and chaos-complexity theory. Thick description is
not intellectually naive, nor is it easy. As many of us have discovered, doing
interpretive anthropology is an extremely tough, and generally thankless, job.
Still, like they used to say about democracy (before George W. came along), it’s
better than the frightful alternatives.
But. But . . . a promising beginning guarantees little except, perhaps,
disappointment. And I believe that interpretive anthropology / postmodernism –
whatever we might want to call it – has led to disappointment. There are a couple
of major issues here, including the connection (as I see it) between interpretivism
and science or science-like fields. I address this extremely important issue later in
the essay. Of immediate concern, though, is that occluded relation between
observer and observed: the angst-thing, the intersubjectivity-thing I’ve been
discussing – what Ruth Behar powerfully describes as “anthropology that breaks
your heart.”
The disappointment I feel and sense in others is, to turn the phrase, that
virtually no anthropology actually does break your heart. It may tickle it a little,
but that’s about as far as it goes – and even a chuckle is hard to come by in all the
volumes pouring out of university presses and academic journals. (Even my own
turgid prose has been criticized by AA reviewers as being too “casual.”) From
Clifford Geertz’s 1973 clarion call to interpretive anthropology in “Thick
Description,” through feminist- and Marxist-inspired cultural studies of gender,
race, and nationalism, through George Marcus’s call for experimental
ethnography, through Michael Jackson’s and Richard Price’s literary monographs,
and on to Tedlock’s evocation of Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination and Behar’s
fine-grained account of relations in the field, there is not, as far as I can see, a wet
eye in the house. Nor are there many blazing eyes, fired with enthusiasm for a
new vision, ready to push things to the limit to get at something like truth,
something resembling beauty. If we are to operate as ethnographers of ourselves
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and our struggling discipline, we must begin by facing the fact that most cultural
anthropology is b-b-b-boring.
In this essay we cannot remain strangers to irony, and it is bitterly ironic that
brilliant anthropologists who set out to reinvigorate the field with accounts of
lives as they are lived in all their passion, confusion, and tragedy should have
fallen so far short of the mark. If there are occasional flashes of passion or
glimmers of insight in the interpretive / postmodernist works of the past quarter
century, these are mostly buried beneath stylistic and ideological posturings that
belong to a secondary or tertiary literature. Geertz says somewhere that the
ethnographer is a failed novelist; I fear s/he is more likely a failed literary critic.
If you can’t do, teach. If you can’t teach, teach education.
How else, really, do we explain the proliferation of bloodless terms, of
stylistic conceits belonging to a courtly literature only a Castiglione could
admire? I cannot be the only anthropologist who has grown bone-weary of shrill
accounts of the hegemonic discourse of a globalized culture appropriating this-orthat, accounts bolstered by the thinnest stereotypes when the discussion, finally if
ever, gets down to flesh-and-blood specifics of the this-or-that. And I go from
being bone-weary to downright alarmed when things take, as they too often do, a
sinister turn, when, for example, the mild-mannered (and quite eloquent)
naturalist Edward O. Wilson is treated like the victim of a lynch mob at an annual
meeting of American anthropologists. Or when, in what seems to intimate a
Stalinist purge, ridiculous labels are thought up, attached to individuals, and then
used to denounce those individuals’ ideas.
Right now the most egregious example of this is the campaign being waged
against “essentialists” by – who else? – “anti-essentialists” anxious to cast out
revisionists and lackeys in their midst (a campaign recently canonized (!) by the
American Anthropologist; see Rodseth 1998). But here is a question: Does an
anti-essentialist believe there is something essential about an essentialist’s
essentialism? This is exactly parallel to Russell’s famous Barber of Seville
paradox. If the anti-essentialist is correct in her/his view that everything in human
life is circumstance and context – in short, contingent on a vast edifice of
hegemonic discourse (love the phrase!) – then certainly any view an essentialist
espouses is, in reality (whatever that is), not actually essentialist. So the
essentialist, far from being the evil enemy, is just another highly circumstanced,
conflicted, confused-all-to-hell guy/gal like the rest of us. And how can we hold
that against her/him? Huh? Exactly so.
It is Lilliputian almost beyond belief. You could spend months stopping the
wo/man in the street, asking thousands of people about the disagreement between
essentialists and anti-essentialists, and come away with nothing but
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uncomprehending stares. Is this what we have to show for a quarter century of
interpretive anthropology?
And I fear we interpretive anthropologists are largely responsible for this
lamentable isolation, this near-complete irrelevance: we can’t shift the blame to
the oppressive influence of Marvin Harris and his positivist minions or to the
essentializing, backsliding Trotskyites in our midst. Where ethnography is
concerned – I will leave the question of theory aside for the moment – I believe
our problem, our failure to connect, arises from our being too timid or, frankly,
too untalented to follow the exhortations of Marcus, Clifford, and others to
produce experimental, literary ethnography. Although Harris and those positivist
minions of his roundly criticize literary ethnography as unscientific, my own view
is that the problem with literary ethnography is that it is not nearly literary
enough. Our best efforts (Michael Jackson, Richard Price, Ruth Behar) simply
fail to deliver a literary intensity or immediacy that draws us (even as a highly
specialized audience) into their texts, that produces what Roland Barthes called a
quasi-sexual jouissance of writer-text-reader.
I realize these remarks are highly subjective – my own peculiar and personal
reaction to works other anthropologists doubtlessly react to differently. More is
involved here, though, than simply leaving things at the “I like it and you don’t,
and there’s no accounting for taste in literature” stage. It is a question of the
utmost importance: How do we render culture? How do we construct accounts of
lives lived by others, often in faraway places, that convey a synthesis of
information, meaning, emotion, that speak to the human condition? I would hope
that these questions are in the mind of anyone who sits down to read an account of
others’ lives – and not just a two-pound ethnographic tome, but a daily
newspaper, an in-flight magazine, a novel from the supermarket shelf. And I
would certainly hope those questions are crucial to anyone sitting down to write
about others’ lives.
Perhaps of more general importance (since, let’s face it, few of us have a
novel, ethnographic or otherwise, in us) is what, in the role some of us have as
teachers, we propose to other, younger minds as reading material.
I wrestled with this problem some years ago, when I taught a “Peoples and
Cultures” course on the Caribbean. Again, irony pushes its way to the forefront.
Caribbean societies are highly complex, dynamic little worlds fashioned in the
horrific crucibles of Amerindian genocide, African slavery, East Indian
indentured servitude, and postcolonial turmoil.
Yet the professional
anthropological literature on those blood-soaked, tempestuous scraps of sand is
anemic and soporific beyond belief. Lives fueled by sexual passion are reduced
to relationships of “consensual cohabitation” and “coital frequencies”; the
hardscrabble of existence to ponderous accounts of the plantation economy;
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complex ethnic identities to tired debates over the plural society and
multiculturalism. My selection of course readings was made especially difficult
by the fact that a good number of my students had Caribbean backgrounds: a
predicament ethnographers of urban societies increasingly face. In this situation,
reviewing the literature with more than a theoretical interest, it became clear to
me that the very best works I knew on the Caribbean were by nonanthropologists, were, in fact, by novelists, poets, literary essayists: Edgar
Mittelholzer; Wilson Harris; V. S. Naipaul; George Lamming; Edward
Braithewaite; Peter Mathiessen. Of these, only Mathiessen lacks a Caribbean
background. Yet his Far Tortuga is extraordinary for its fidelity to the life and
language of small-island fishermen, and remarkably presented in the form of
loosely connected prose poems and Zen koan – the very kind of thing to give a
right-thinking, just-the-facts-ma’am, positivist ethnographer a case of the fits.
The ironic predicament literary ethnography faces extends well beyond the
Caribbean, and takes a rather nasty turn when we examine the place
anthropological writers occupy on the national scene. For that place is pretty
much non-existent; and cultural anthropologists are sharply critical of those few
anthropologists whose work does attract anything like a national audience. We
devour our own kind. All the exhortations to interpretivism and empathy have not
given us a postmodernist Margaret Mead (there’s a scary thought!), nor even a
widely read theorist (outside the rarefied atmosphere of the New York Review of
Books Clifford Geertz appears to have a small national audience). To the
interpretivists’ chagrin the one anthropological theorist with any sort of public
following or name-recognition is Marvin Harris, whose perennial textbook and
series of semi-popular trade books make him the closest thing to Mead’s
successor. But Harris’s semi-popularity pales in comparison with the literary
successes of two anthropologist-writers who are figures of national prominence –
and whose prominence drives most anthropologists absolutely bug-hunting nuts:
Carlos Castaneda and, just in the last couple of years, Kathy Reichs.
Castaneda’s work is routinely reviled (though the latest edition of Don Juan,
segregated as it is in the “New Age” section of Barnes & Noble, still contains the
concluding “Structural Analysis” that makes up about a fourth of the book). And
his recent The Art of Dreaming, universally ignored by anthropologists, is more
interesting than lots of the dreary stuff now being written about cognition and
consciousness. For her part, Reichs has achieved – probably unintentionally – the
ultimate comeuppance for literary ethnography.
One of those physical
anthropology types whom Jonathan Marks rebuked in a recent Anthropology
Newsletter (39: 5: 4) for not having their ontology in the right place (A politically
incorrect ontology! Imagine!), Reichs has authored a pot-boiling, page-turning
mystery based on the unlikely doings of a forensic anthropologist investigating a
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series of murders in Québec. A colossal bestseller (probably the only people who
haven’t read it are anthropologists), Reichs has put anthropology before the public
in a way unequaled by legions of interpretivists.
Anthropology and/or Science
A second paradox accompanies this peculiar state of affairs: Although
much of contemporary cultural anthropology has assumed a decidedly cerebral or
idealistic posture, preferring texts to tool types, the mind to the material world, we
find ourselves mostly excluded from wider intellectual forums now engaged in
discussions of the nature of mind or consciousness. And this segregation has
occurred at a time when consciousness studies are big among name-brand
scholars: Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind; Steven Pinker, How the Mind
Works; Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained; Francis Crick, The Astonishing
Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul; Marvin Minsky, The Society of
Mind. Names of anthropologists are sadly lacking here. Even an apparent
exception – An Anthropologist on Mars – turns out to be written, not by an
anthropologist, but by the well-known neurologist, Oliver Sacks (tellingly the
book’s title is a self-description by one of Sacks’s autistic subjects).
An intriguing, almost cult-like phenomenon (surely worthy of ethnographic
attention) is the “Consciousness Conferences” held in Tucson over the past
several years. These are interdisciplinary with a vengeance, and have attracted
most of the name-brand scholars mentioned above. Anthropologists, however,
have been notable by their absence from lists of featured speakers. The sense
among conference organizers, rightly or wrongly, seems to be that the real action
in consciousness studies is happening everywhere but anthropology:
neurophysiology, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and, that happy
catch-all, cognitive science.
It has been half a century since Lévi-Strauss crossed the Atlantic to declare,
at a major conference in Bloomington, Indiana, that an “uninvited guest” was in
attendance at that meeting of anthropologists and linguists (1963:71). The
uninvited guest, he continued, was the human mind. The guest, perhaps sensing
that it was not only uninvited but also not particularly welcome, promptly hitched
a ride with Lévi-Strauss back to Paris, where it received a more congenial
reception.
Despite the fact that anthropology has accommodated a well-organized
research interest in the problem of consciousness – witness the Society for the
Anthropology of Consciousness and its journal – I believe it is nevertheless true
that cultural anthropologists of very different theoretical persuasions have pretty
much avoided anything smacking of consciousness studies. Witness, for
example, the remarkable intellectual odyssey of Stephen Tyler, who broke off
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mid-way from developing a systematic cognitive anthropology to proclaim an
anthropological dadaism. So the invitations from Tucson do not arrive because, if
anything, American anthropology itself has drawn back from the flame, has failed
to extend its own invitation to that guest so long neglected.
In this vein, it is instructive that, besides Lévi-Strauss, the only other
prominent anthropologist to make a theory of mind the cornerstone of his work is
Gregory Bateson.
An impressive pair of outcastes from the camp of
postmodernist anti-essentialists (where declaring oneself “poststructuralist” is part
of the price of admission), Lévi-Strauss and Bateson would not receive a much
warmer reception at one of the Tucson conferences. For in their separate ways
both thinkers put forward a holistic, interactional notion of mind-nature that
makes the rather scientistic Tucsonians uncomfortable.
Ourselves students of marginalized “natives,” we are in turn marginalized
by that well-educated, intelligent segment of society that, while keenly interested
in the world, is not all that interested in what anthropologists think of it. We are
all dressed up, but nobody has asked us to the prom.
The sprawling enterprise of science dwarfs the tiny subdiscipline of cultural
anthropology, and so it should come as no surprise that our voices are drowned in
the maelstrom of public opinion. To give a scale to this disparity, compare
Scientific American (circulation around 800,000, with fantastic graphics and bigbudget ads) and the American Anthropologist (circulation around 8,000, with page
after page of double column text, broken only by the occasional black-and-white
photo, pulse-quickening graph, or university press ad).
It would be easier to rationalize this disparity, this unhappiness at missing out
on the prom, if we could persuade ourselves that the American Anthropologist is a
specialized journal which thrashes out the technicalities of intellectual issues that
then get reported, in diluted form, in mass circulation publications like Scientific
American. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We are spared the annoyance of
being misreported in the popular press; we are simply ignored.
Still, Scientific American is a great magazine – but it ain’t got much culture.
Or, to be a bit more precise and grammatical, the authors of articles in Scientific
American present their material and carry on their debates with very little recourse
to the anthropological concept/theory of human culture. As a life-long reader of
Scientific American and as a cultural anthropologist who at least subscribes to the
American Anthropologist (and in the process suffers from what Tom Wolfe calls
“subscription guilt” over the accumulating stacks of mostly unread volumes
staring back at me from their dusty shelves), I have pretty much resigned myself
to this state of affairs. For although it rather grandiosely bills itself as the
“science of humanity,” the discipline of anthropology is a notoriously “soft,”
qualitative pursuit. Thus one would not expect it to have a conspicuous place in
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a publication devoted to the latest work in the physical and biological sciences
and in mathematics. This is especially true where cultural anthropology is
concerned, for practitioners of that subdiscipline have by and large allied
themselves with the theories and methods of the humanities. If anthropologicallyoriented work appears in Scientific American at all, it is always the work of
scholars in one of the other subfields claimed by the discipline: prehistory or
archeology, hominid paleontology, primatology, and certain branches of
linguistics.
For all its marginality, however, I would suggest there is a very good reason
why scientists and the scientifically informed public should pay more attention to
cultural anthropology: its organizing principle, the concept/theory of culture, is
critical to resolving a major scientific debate. That is the debate over the nature of
human thought (mind or consciousness) and its relation to the world of physical
reality as studied and explained by scientists.
This debate figures prominently in contributions to Scientific American. See,
for example, that journal’s special issue on “Mind and Brain” of September 1992
and its “Trends” essay, “Can Science Explain Consciousness?” of July 1994.
Neither of these important reviews featured an anthropological contributor nor, to
my knowledge, mentioned anthropological work. Although numerous labels and
theoretical nuances attach to each side of the debate, the central issue is quite
straightforward: Is the mind or consciousness strictly a set of physical, organic
processes, or is it a special, transcendent phenomenon, something, in the wellworn phrase, that is more than the sum of its (organic) parts?
How can the upstart field of cultural anthropology hope to make a
meaningful contribution to this mega-problem that engages some of the best
minds in the fields of biology, physics, computer science, mathematics, and
philosophy? I think it can meet this demanding challenge by identifying a vital
ingredient, in a word, culture – that protagonists of each side of the debate have
ignored.
As always, though, things are not so simple as this scenario of the
anthropological white hats riding into town with their quick-draw theory of
culture to save the hapless townsfolk. Things are a good deal messier, and
certainly a great deal curiouser (and curiouser). Cultural anthropologists today
are not really in a position to export their concept of culture to other disciplines or
to apply it themselves to an important interdisciplinary issue such as the problem
of consciousness. And why not, you may justifiably ask, having invested much of
your career in assimilating and promoting that concept? The answer to this
question opens onto one of the more bizarre chapters in recent intellectual history:
the concept of culture has become an embarrassment for cultural anthropologists.
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Fifteen years after founding a Society for Cultural Anthropology and
launching a journal appropriating that subdiscipline for themselves, American
cultural anthropologists have recoiled from the implications they now read into
their focal concept. Seized with the deconstructivist fervor of postmodernism, the
staid concept of “culture” now seems altogether too essentializing, too
hegemonic, too canonical (to use all the good bad words). To advance an
organizing principle is to promote (doubtlessly with subterfuge) a social
arrangement in which a few do the organizing of and for the many. Thus a
theory, even an anthropological one with good liberal credentials, is simply an
ideological tool of the oppressor. And yet there is still the Society, still the
journal, still that almost colonial stigma of “culture.”
Just to make things even more confusing, while the standard bearers of
cultural anthropology were distancing themselves from the constraining paradigm
of “culture,” along came that unruly mob from departments of comparative
literature, English, French, women’s studies, and area studies proclaiming an
engaged if amorphous “cultural studies.” Their protagonists began doing many of
the things cultural anthropologists had been doing, only better. They wrote more
compellingly about contemporary issues, and placed their work before a far wider
audience than professional anthropologists had been able to find. Lacking any
sort of social science background, these upstarts were under no obligation to give
even a passing nod to the idea that they might be erecting a theoretical edifice. In
fact, the very idea of theory building was anathema, a sign of going back to work
for The Man. Remember the old existential joke: We still don’t know who
discovered water, but we’re sure it wasn’t a fish? In the same vein, we’re not sure
what cultural studies studies, but we know it’s not culture.
As the new century begins, cultural anthropologists (at least, we might like to
think, the best and brightest) find they have become an agnostic clergy, akin to
those theologians who, at the beginning of the last century, had to assimilate the
works of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. It is a troubling, exciting, and, again,
extremely curious time.
With its uncertainty it is not surprising that
anthropologists have been hesitant to proselytize their trademark concept of
culture, or that thinkers in other fields have refrained from looking to us for help.
And yet, with all this uproar, the institution of anthropology still clanks along: I
am told that courses are still being given (and taken!) in the “theory of culture.”
What is taught in those courses? More importantly, what is thought of what is
taught? With the postmodernist turn, it is as though the professor of a “theory of
culture” course announced that “culture” consists of an endless jumble of
dialogical encounters, of sub-texts and sub-sub-texts, while across the campus a
physics professor (thoroughly anti-essentialist) was expounding the latest theory
of matter: “We’ve noticed there are all these tables and chairs and buildings and
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things, all this stuff, hanging around, and, well, that’s ‘matter.’ Now, for your
next lesson, please read . . .”
Things are not that droll. Are they? There’s got to be a better way. There’s
got to be more to it. That’s what this essay is about.
I propose that the way out of the current impasse is to fashion a considerably
reworked theory of culture. Such a theory would do two things: enable cultural
anthropologists to produce significant contributions to major intellectual debates,
such as the nature of mind or consciousness; and inject anthropological
perspectives into the forum of public opinion, where our pedanticism has
heretofore excluded us.
Let me illustrate this argument by applying an anthropological perspective
to an extreme position in the debate: the physicalist theory of mind advanced by
Francis Crick in The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul
(1993). The kernel of Crick’s argument (like that of “strong AI” theorists in
computer science) is that an understanding of neurophysiological processes is
sufficient in and of itself to explain the phenomena that other, fuzzier thinkers
take to be distinctive properties of “mind” or “consciousness.” The human brain
is an object, it occupies a discrete place and time, and so whatever goes on inside
it is the entire working of the system – whether we want to call that system
“mind,” “consciousness,” or some other lofty term.
What is wrong with this argument, which has the admirable goal of focusing
research on specific, down-to-earth problems while discouraging flights of
speculative fancy? I believe there are three very serious shortcomings with it, all
interconnected: it leaves unanswered or simply unaddressed the question of
boundaries, the role of peripheral systems, and the reflexivity or iterativity of the
system.
The Brain’s Boundary
The brain, as Crick emphasizes, is a physical object that houses the welter of
neurological processes we gloss with the terms “thinking,” “feeling,” “knowing,”
and so on. But what – and where – is the boundary of the brain? This is not an
easy question. Obviously, the skull contains all the brain’s gray matter where
neurophysiological events occur. It neatly packages and separates that gray
matter from what is outside it – the environment. But the skull is a defective
container; it is full of holes. And it is through those holes – the eye sockets, nasal
passages, mouth cavity, ear canals, and the base of the spine – that bundles of
nerve fibers continually carry a vast number of signals to and from the brain. This
permeability of the brain, its acute sensitivity to an incredibly diverse and everchanging stream of signals, is its distinguishing characteristic. That, after all, is
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what the brain is for, and that is why we can speak of its boundary or integrity in
only the most circumspect terms.
The brain’s sensitivity to signals that impinge on it is evident when we
consider the complex effects even the most minimal signal can have on its
workings and those of its human host.
Suppose, for example, that you are attending a professional conference in a
small city you have never before visited. At the conference you meet someone
who lives nearby and who invites you to dinner at his home. He tells you he is
also inviting a number of other conference-goers, most of whom he has just met.
The next evening you find yourself seated around your host’s table, in the
company of strangers. A sumptuous meal is served, featuring an excellent
breaded cutlet with grated Parmesan. As you and the other guests consume this
dish, you compliment your host on the delicious veal. Your host smiles at your
remark and says, “Oh, actually, that’s the neighbor’s cat.”
“It’s what?” you ask incredulously.
“The neighbor’s cat,” he replies again, matter-of-factly.
At this the dinner party erupts in pandemonium. You put down your fork,
which still holds a piece of the suddenly repulsive flesh, and push away from the
table, a wave of nausea sweeping over you. A couple of your companions,
evidently with more delicate constitutions, jump up from the table and rush out of
the room, making horrible gagging sounds as they go. Among the ashen faces
around the table, though, you notice two other guests who appear quite nonplused
by your host’s revelation, if puzzled by all the excitement.
Note that all this commotion is produced by an infinitesimal bit of speech: the
final “t” of “cat” as uttered by your host. There are a number of possibilities here.
Perhaps your host – whom you’ve just met – speaks English as a second or third
language, and sometimes has difficulty with words ending in aspirated or sibilant
sounds such as “high,” “rose,” “muff,” and so on. In speaking he tends to clip off
the endings of these words, breaking the aspirated flow of the consonants and
imparting a “stopped” feature to them. In this way, an aspirate-final word such as
“calf” may sound a good deal like a stop-final word such as the allophonic “cat” –
differing only in their terminal consonants. Your host’s neighbor may be a
farmer, who has provided him with some excellent grain-fed veal for his dinner
party. And his remark to you that the meal featured the neighbor’s “calf” was
simply his (earthy) way of acknowledging your compliment.
Another plausible explanation for the disastrous turn of events is that your
host is rather more exotic than you had supposed. He may well hail from a
society in which cats are routinely featured on the menu. His only failure as a
host thus lies in not having recognized the very different standards of edibility his
guests bring to his table. Or some of his guests at any rate: the two members of
14
the dinner party who appeared unconcerned by his revelation may be fellow
exotics who share his taste for kitty cutlets.
As one tries to understand the event, unrecognized complexities inherent in
the situation come rushing to the surface – a welter of possibilities that vitiate any
simple this-happened-and-caused-that-to-happen explanation. Because so much
(if not all) of human life is like our abortive dinner party, Clifford Geertz (1973c)
has argued that ethnographic research inevitably yields a thick description of
social life: a careful elucidation of the discrepant ideas and expectations that
participants bring to and take from an event.
For present purposes, the important aspect of Geertz’s claim is that it forces
us to give due weight to the vast edifice of mitigating circumstances that impinge
on and determine an event. You were perfectly happy, sitting there munching on
your cutlet, your taste buds registering only pleasure with the substance presented
to them. Then your ears detected the tiniest of sounds, a /t/ where there should
have been an /f/, and things changed abruptly. But what exactly changed? If we
try to couch this in terms of Crick’s physicalist theory, do we say that the taste
buds suddenly began sending a different signal? Or that the taste signal “into” the
brain was somehow rerouted to produce the antithetical message of disgust with
what the tongue was tasting? How can the same physical stimulus produce, in an
instant, contradictory responses?
And there is still the matter of that /t/ /f/ contrast – a difference so very
minimal that it easily eludes speakers of many languages. If the guest sitting
beside you at that ill-fated dinner party happens to be a native speaker of a
language that lacks final stops (compare the French chat and cat for example),
does he hear /cat/ or only /ca-/? Presumably identical acoustical signals were
registered in your inner ear and that of your neighbor, so how is it that you “hear”
the /t/ sound and he does not?
For an anthropologist, the answer to these troublesome questions lies in a
direction that takes us away from Crick’s physicalist theory of mind and toward a
conception of the brain-environment relationship as an exceedingly complex
boundary phenomenon. The ear does not simply perceive raw, “natural” sounds,
nor does the tongue simply react to the intrinsic molecular properties of
substances; the activities of listening to speech and eating a meal involve your
prior assimilation of cultural systems that have no strict physiological basis in the
brain. For you to hear a meaningful difference (and how very meaningful it was
in our example!) between /cat/ and /calf/, it was necessary for you to learn from
the cradle the phonology of a language such as English, which incorporates a
distinction between the /t/ and /f/ sounds. Some languages may utilize one of
these sounds but not the other; and some languages may have neither. Of some
one hundred twenty distinct speech sounds identified by the International
15
Phonetic Alphabet for languages around the world, English contains only thirtyfive or forty. In a similar vein, cat flesh would be a perfectly acceptable protein
source, but for the all-important fact that we are taught, again from the cradle, that
whatever qualities cats may possess (cuddly companions, vicious predators,
witches’ familiars), being edible is not among them.
When you sat down at that dinner table, you brought a great deal with you in
addition to your physical self and its 1600 cc of gray matter. You brought, in a
word, culture. Your speech, gestures, dress, and appetites are less attributes of
your physical self than they are items in a tool kit which you have been given or
selected, and which you use in your own, perhaps distinctive, fashion.
These observations may seem rather obvious, but pushed just a bit farther
they get us to the important issue of the boundary of the brain. For if your speech
is not strictly a part of your physiological being and yet the abstraction of the
“English language” depends on you to bring it to life, then just where is this
elusive speaking subject? I would suggest that it is impossible to get very far with
this question while operating within the physicalist theory of Crick because that
theory rests on a simplistic topology: it insists on a clear separation between the
brain and its environment (see Figure 1). Common sense and habit lead us to
suppose that the brain, tucked away inside the skull, is one physical system while
the environment “outside” the skull is another. In this way we get drawn into
arguments over what happens “in here,” versus what happens “out there.”
Whatever is going on, and however much we differ in our interpretations of what
is going on, we still put our faith in a fairly distinct line that separates brain and
environment. But what if that line is far from clear (as Figures 1a and 1b depict)?
What if instead it is infinitely convoluted (as Figure 1c depicts)?
16
Figure 1. The Brain's Boundary, as Enfoldings/Unfoldings of Semiospace.
Three modalities of a brain-environment system. Physicalist theories of mind or
consciousness assume that a distinct boundary exists between the neural functions
of an organism and its surroundings ("environment," "nature," "physical reality").
That assumption may yield useful results when the organism under study is
extremely simple, such as a bacterium (a). It becomes progressively unworkable,
however, as the complexity of the organism increases (b), and is quite useless for
understanding the human brain-environment system (c).
I would suggest that Figure 1c is a far more accurate representation of the
human brain-environment boundary than Figures 1a or 1b. Figure 1a, which
corresponds to our commonsense notion of that boundary, is probably a fair
depiction of how an extremely simple organism, a bacterium say, interacts with its
environment.
The unicellular bacterium has relatively little internal
differentiation, and its environment is correspondingly undifferentiated. It does
not receive a great variety of stimuli, and those stimuli it does receive are not
subject to a wide range of responses. Introduce a heat or light source and the
bacterium moves toward or away from it. Introduce a particle of agar and the
bacterium approaches it and feeds. The bacterium doesn’t have to worry about
following dinner party conversation, or about knowing whether a particle of agar
was produced from the body of a cow or a cat. It doesn’t have to deal with a
phonology or a dietary system.
With humans and their brains it is a different story. We do utilize
phonologies and dietary systems, and these can only exist in a highly dynamic,
differentiated environment, one that contains an infinity of folds, crevices, twists
and turns. It may be convenient to refer to such an environment as a semiospace
17
(Drummond 1995, 1996). As Figure 1c illustrates, a distinguishing feature of
semiospace is its blurring of figure and ground: the multiple convolutions, or
interaction sites, between figure (brain) and ground (environment) are so
extensive that it becomes impossible to distinguish which is which. They become
elements of a single synthetic, and highly dynamic, system.
In such a system the line that does the separating has acquired some unusual,
if familiar properties: in its infinite complexity it resembles nothing so much as
those lines Benoit Mandelbrot describes (1983), lines that comprise boundaries
such as the coastline of England, the fractal patterning of a tree’s branches, or the
outline of the Mandelbrot set itself. Intriguingly, this formal property of the
brain-environment boundary is also present in the physical structure of the brain,
an organ whose creases and folds increase its surface area exponentially.
Perhaps the most curious feature of Crick’s book is that he should have
chosen to title it “the astonishing hypothesis,” for in its strict adherence to a
physiological model it is both dated and backward-looking. For whatever
reasons, he has proceeded without discussing a contrary model with its own
considerable literature that stretches from the earliest works in philosophical
psychology to present-day research. That is the tradition established by
Vygotsky, Wittgenstein, and Bateson, whose otherwise disparate works concur in
maintaining a necessary unity or synthesis of brain and environment. At a time
when other psychologists were resolutely embarked on a strictly behaviorist
program based on the unquestioned assumption that readily identifiable stimuli
produce readily identifiable responses, Vygotsky proposed that mental events and
physical actions are inextricably connected. There are not two things going on,
one acting unilaterally on the other (stimulus/response, cause/effect), but a single
recursive, mutually implicative process.
Writing at almost the same time (in the early thirties), Wittgenstein similarly
maintained that thinking is an artifactual process, involving the eye, hand, and
implement as much as the head. In this respect he and Vygotsky are direct
precursors of Bateson and his “ecology of mind.” Wittgenstein’s position is
spelled out early on in The Blue Book:
Let us go back to the statement that thinking essentially consists in
operating with signs. My point was that it is liable to mislead us if we say,
“thinking is a mental activity”. The question what kind of an activity
thinking is is analogous to this: “Where does thinking take place?” We can
answer: on paper, in our head, in the mind. None of these statements of
locality gives the locality of thinking. The use of all these specifications is
correct, but we must not be misled by the similarity of their linguistic form
into a false conception of their grammar. As, e.g., when you say: “Surely,
18
the real place of thought is in our head”. The same applies to the idea of
thinking as an activity. It is correct to say that thinking is an activity of our
writing hand, of our larynx, of our head, and of our mind, so long as we
understand the grammar of these statements. And it is, furthermore,
extremely important to realize how, by misunderstanding the grammar of
our expressions, we are led to think of one in particular of these statements
as giving the real seat of the activity of thinking. [[1933-1934] 1958: 15-16,
emphasis in the original]
These pioneering works did not turn back the contrary tides of behaviorism
and physiological determinism. Those bastions of “normal science” still swallow
up tens of millions of NIH and NSF research dollars through the practice of what
Richard Feynman, characteristically acerbic and straight to the point, termed
“cargo cult science.” However, Vygotsky, Wittgenstein, Bateson, and others
formulated ideas that are bearing fruit in sophisticated contemporary work on
“distributed cognition” and “situated learning.” Like the two sides of Saussure’s
piece of paper, the two topics explore aspects of a common (monistic)
phenomenon. Studies of distributed cognition (Cole 1996; Cole and Engestrom
1993; Bechtel 1993; Wertsch 1991) explore the “connectionism” between mental
event and cultural practice. Paralleling these psychological studies of cognition
are ethnographic works that document the sociocultural situatedness of learning.
Brown et al. (1989), Lave (1988), Lave and Wenger (1991), and McLellan (1995)
demonstrate that most learning is not the abstract exercise of classrooms and rat
mazes (whose similarity would permit us just as well to call them ratrooms and
class mazes). Learning in the walking-around-in world (life among the nonacademic living) is a cultural practice, inextricably bound up in a complex pattern
of social interaction and cultural belief. Yucatec midwives learn to be midwives,
navy quartermasters learn to be quartermasters, and drunks learn to be drunks
through close association with experts in those disparate pursuits as they go about
their daily lives (Lave and Wenger 1991).
Peripheral Systems
The infinitely complex boundary of the brain does, however, differ
significantly from boundaries such as the coastline of England or the outline of
the Mandelbrot set: events along the brain-environment boundary are far more
diverse and dynamic. The physical system that determines the ever-changing
contours of the coastline of England is fairly simple and uniform: molecules of
water, air, sand, and rock interact to produce large or small scale movements in
those constituent elements. For the Mandelbrot set, two simple equations
determine whether a given point lies inside or outside the set. The distinctiveness
19
of the brain-environment boundary is due to the fact, remarked on at the
beginning of this essay, that the skull is full of some very interesting and
important holes. Our eyes, ears, noses, taste buds, and sensory-motor nerves
interact with their environment in highly specialized ways, sending signals to the
brain that represent quite different experiences. The various nodes or pseudopods
of the brain-environment boundary mapped out in Figure 1c may be said to
correspond with the visual system, the auditory system, and so on which tie an
individual to the world (see Figure 2a).
Figure 2. Texture and Pattern of Semiospace: The Human Brain-Environment
System at Different Resolutions and in Different Configurations.
The peripheral or perceptual systems (a) of the brain-environment system are
densely packed and interwoven, so that information received or generated in one
minute sector (interaction site) triggers neural events throughout the system. An
individual's auditory system (b, c) may be configured in such a way, for example,
that its messages ~ hearing "cat" versus "calf -- have dramatic effects on the
individual's gustatory and tactile experiences. But first that auditory perception
must occur. In (b) a fine-grained detail of the auditory system of a native speaker
of English reveals separate interaction sites for discriminating the phonemes /t/
and /f/. In (c) a comparable detail from the auditory system of the speaker of a
non-Western language indicates that what English speakers hear as /t/ or /f/ is not
a significant distinction for that speaker.
__________________________
20
Like the coastline of England and the Mandelbrot set, these discrete
perceptual systems possess an infinitely detailed or fine-grained nature. As
discussed above, we do not simply hear the sounds that are “out there” in the
environment; we hear the sounds that a mediating phonological system has
presented to us as meaningful. If we zoom in on an interaction site in our map of
the auditory system (Figures 2b and 2c), we find that a native speaker of English
presents a map quite different from that of a native speaker of a language which
does not happen to differentiate the /t/ and /f/ sounds. These microregions or
interaction sites on our map of the perceptual system may be likened to the
microregions of an embryo, where cellular structures form and reform partly in
response to environmental conditions and partly in response to genetic coding.
As well as being highly differentiated, interaction sites within the perceptual
system are also highly dynamic. It would be a mistake to regard the preceding
discussion as simply a statement of the plasticity of human perception – the oftremarked fact that we learn to hear and see in culturally conditioned ways. For
the brain-environment boundary is a two-way street; it is permeable or plastic in
both directions. What is “outside” – the culturally conditioned coding – is itself
in flux, undergoing its own changes that are not determined by how any one
individual hears or sees things.
To keep with our linguistic example, the phonology of the English language
is by no means a fixed set of rules for discriminating sounds. It is also a dynamic
system, experiencing major transformations over the course of time. We as
individual speakers remain largely unaware of those changes because they
generally occur only over periods that exceed a human lifetime. Put on an
historical scale, however, it is quite remarkable how much a language changes.
Our ability to understand the everyday “English” speech of Americans alive
during George Washington’s presidency would be seriously impeded by the lack
of fit between their English and ours. And we would find the spoken “English” of
Chaucer’s time – a mere six hundred years ago – pretty much unintelligible. The
same point holds, of course, if we should wind the clock ahead: Americans of the
mid-millennium will be speaking an “English” markedly different from our own
speech.
The intricate detail and powerful dynamism of the brain-environment
boundary should alert us to the critical importance of the edges of things: the
events that define a system occur on its periphery. Note that this perspective
represents a fundamental departure from the prevalent tendency to frame the
object of study in terms of its singular nature or essence. I believe that Crick’s
physicalist theory of the brain runs into trouble from the outset because he
proceeds as though the brain were a discrete, well-defined physical system whose
21
working parts he simply needed to describe. But it is not, nor, in all likelihood,
are any of the entities science seeks to understand. If my preceding arguments
have any validity, then it seems we should consider identifying the objects of our
studies, not as self-contained systems, but as intersystems which take shape
according to events on the periphery of erstwhile (virtual) generative systems
(Drummond 1978, 1980, 1981, 1984, 1987, 1996).
As much recent literature discusses, a crucial (if excusably parochial)
example of such a virtual, generative system is the human body itself. Our
corporeal selves, far from delivering on the solid promise of their “corporeality,”
are a turbulent mass of discrete and often conflicting perceptions, thoughts,
emotions, all strung between one writhing tendril of protoplasm (“me”) and
numerous “others.” A thorough and most useful discussion of this revived
anthropological interest in embodiment is found in Lock (1993).
Cultural anthropology’s interest in edges may be traced to two major schools
of thought that flourished in the late sixties, seventies, and into the eighties, before
transmuting or being swept aside by the whipsaw of postmodernism and cultural
materialism: Victor Turner’s work on liminality and ritual process (Turner 1967,
1969, 1974) and Fredrik Barth’s on ethnicity (Barth 1969 , 1987). These diverse
literatures (which can hardly be surveyed here) embrace the common and
fundamental position that it makes sense to speak of “systems,” “structures,”
“social groups,” “societies,” and “cultures” (and, I would add, “humanities”) only
in terms of interaction and meaning generated at their peripheries. Social groups
are not just out there, bumping up against one another; they form and reform
within that virtual semiospace which Turner called “a realm of pure possibility
whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (1967: 97).
It is a tragedy and scandal that these deeply theoretical positions have been
mostly disregarded in current debates over multiculturalism and globalization –
intellectual pabulum that should be the stock-in-trade of social workers rather
than cultural anthropologists. This harsh assessment is justified in view of the
fact that recent work in fractal mathematics, chaos-complexity theory, and
quantum theory emphasizes the fundamental importance of boundaries and
intersystemic messages. We are, in fact, at a turning point in our understanding of
the world: the metaphor of Gestalten that inspired the Benedictean rhapsody of
whole cultures has exhausted itself, and is now rapidly being replaced with a
metaphor of boundaries, edges, and virtual systems. Our much-discussed ability
to pick out an incomplete figure from its background counts for little in a world
where lines are so convoluted and tangled that the only reality of the system is its
edges, not its supposed “form.” In such a world “objects” lose their definition,
becoming phantom images that we extrapolate on the basis of fragmentary
22
information about some, doubtlessly idiosyncratic, field of experience. As with
the Mandelbrot set, there are no woods, only an awful lot of trees.
But if the essence of a thing is its edges, how do these articulate to produce
anything like coherent action or, in the case of the human brain, coherent thought?
How does the flood of utterly discrepant stimuli from a variety of peripheral
systems, including vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, come together to form
a distinct impression, to motivate a specific action? Cultural anthropology, or any
social science, cannot go much further here; at best we can only suggest what
seems to be a promising line of inquiry while warning against false starts.
Clearly, one such false start is Crick’s physicalist theory; the human brain is
not a self-contained neurophysiological system. Another false start, closely allied
with Crick’s, is the “strong AI” approach to consciousness championed by Marvin
Minsky, dean of American computer science (1986, 1994). Minsky’s oft-quoted
remark that the human brain is simply a computer made of meat seriously distorts
its nature – although not quite in the way that many people think. Humanistic
scholars generally take offense at Minsky’s provocative claim on the grounds that
it reduces the fascinating play of ideas in the mind to the status of “meat.” In
reality, neither Minsky nor his humanist critics pay enough attention to just how
clever meat can be.
Some four billion years of biological evolution have given Homo sapiens a
brain that is intricately connected to its environment through the “meaty”
peripheral or perceptual systems we have been considering. Whatever goes on in
the brain, it is utterly unlike what goes on in the central processing unit of a
computer for the simple reason that the brain has evolved to coordinate (and
initiate) a welter of signals coming “into” it from the sense organs and muscles of
its host body. Even the most sophisticated computer is impoverished in this
regard; it can only handle data from a tiny slice of the perceptual and motor fields
of a human. It is, in effect, comatose. The computer sitting on your desk can
trounce you at chess, but while it’s waiting for you to make your next blundering
move, can it go downstairs, fix a tuna salad sandwich, brew a cup of coffee, and
bring these back upstairs to enjoy as its victory lunch? Hardly. It lacks the
integrated peripheral systems of vision and manual dexterity that would allow it to
negotiate stairs, open cans and jars, slice bread, carry a cup of liquid, and so on.
The computer can’t do these things because, unlike the human brain, it is not
made of meat and does not have the meaty appendages essential to functioning in
its environment.
How, then, does the brain work? And what sort of organization must it
have to enable it to work in that fashion? If cultural anthropology can’t help
much with the specifics of these questions, perhaps it can at least endorse a line of
research. I think the best way to approach the system comprised of the brain and
23
its peripheral or perceptual subsystems is as a dynamical system of vector fields
that operate in a many-dimensional manifold of semiospace.
The major argument of this essay is that the mind-brain and its environment –
physical reality – participate in a unified, monistic system. “Culture” is one term
for that system; for several reasons I happen to prefer the awful neologism
“semiospace.” 1 Any term, however, will suffice, provided that it denotes two
essential attributes of the system: (1) it is (multi)dimensional, having many
“degrees of freedom” (as mathematicians say); and (2) it possesses sentience or
sapience. Simply put, the (for-now) human mind-brain is an incredibly complex
multidimensional entity that owes its existence to an incredibly complex
multidimensional entity we like to call the “physical world.” The mind-brain
sloshing around in the three-dimensional confines of the skull processes
information from a vast array of sources in that world. We may attach various
labels to that processing activity, such as “consciousness,” “thinking,” and so on,
but at base it consists of transforming one set of signals into other sets of signals,
then transforming those new sets into others, and on and on. Iterative
transformation within a sentient system – that is the key to describing the mindbrain as a dynamical system of vector fields operating within semiospace.
I advance this line of thought because some of the most promising recent
work in neurophysiology employs the same physical and mathematical concepts I
have used here and elsewhere. The “tensor network theory” of Pellionisz and
Llinas (see, for example, Pellionisz 1984, 1985 and Pellionisz and Llinas 1985) is
an explicitly geometrical model of brain function, in which the brain, its sensorymotor systems, and its environment are described as distinct phase spaces
(literally, Turner’s realms of possibility) where vectorial movements in one are
transformed into different sets of vectors in the others through the mathematical
operation of tensors. Pellionisz and Llinas developed this physical-mathematical
model of brain function because research findings indicated that neuronal activity
does not follow the stimulus-response pattern of a causal or deterministic model;
rather that activity is all about pattern or orchestration.
Once convinced that the connectivity of arrays of neurons [Note: arrays
rather than individual neurons] is crucial to explaining how a given input
yields a given output, the investigator must find a way to characterize the
relation between the input arrays and output arrays. In mulling over the
patterns the computer simulation yielded and the problems the cerebellum
had to be solving as its contribution to sensorimotor control, Pellionisz and
Llinas began to think that what the network of cerebellar cells did to its
input could be characterized by means of a tensor – a generalized
mathematical function for transforming a vector into another vector, no
24
matter what the frames of reference involved. The basic mathematical
insight was that if the input is construed as a vector in one coordinate
system, and if the output is construed as a vector in a different coordinate
system, then a tensor is what effects the mapping or transformation from
one vector to the other. Which tensor matrix governs the transformation
for a given pair of input-output ensembles is an empirical matter
determined by the requirements of the reference frames in question. And
that matrix is implemented in the connectivity relations obtaining between
input arrays and output arrays. [Churchland 1986: 416-417]
Firmly rooted in the physiological basis of brain function, this intriguing
research program ties together the physical structure and function of neurons and
a theory of how the brain synthesizes neural activity into thought and action. It is
crucial to note the tremendous difference between such a bottom-up theory of the
mind-brain and traditional approaches which reify a “higher” function
(consciousness, language, reason, aesthetic sensibility) and attempt to explain that
function as a thing in itself. No better example of such an imperious approach is
to be had than Chomsky’s (1972) theory of language as a specialized function, the
unique prerogative of humans, with its own self-contained center in the brain (the
infamous “language acquisition device”). Linguists, philosophers, and many
psychologists have persisted in embracing such a sentential theory of
consciousness: the essence of thought is to be found in sentences. Our linguistic
endowment explains our brain functions and our concepts of the physical world.
Die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist. That theory ignores the fact that human brains
have evolved from primate brains which, for some sixty million years, have been
superb processors of dimensional sensory-motor information but lacked anything
resembling Chomsky’s LAD. If you’re swinging around in the forest canopy
eighty feet up in the air, it’s a good idea to have your tensorial transformations of
eye-hand-object vector systems in excellent operating condition. Of course, that
depends on what your definition of the word “is” is.
The implications of tensor network theory are profound. Rather than a
sentential world constructed from language-derived concepts and pieced together
by vaunted human reason, representations of the physical world are first of all
dimensional forms in complex, dynamic relationships.
In geometrical terms, the coordinate transformation tells us how we have
to deform one phase space to get at the object in the other phase space.
Tensors are a means whereby the nervous system can represent the very
same thing many times over, despite the differences in coordinate systems
in which the thing is represented. In sum, then, representations are
25
positions in phase spaces, and computations are coordinate
transformations between phase spaces. [Churchland 1986: 426, emphasis
in the original]
Representations – everything we take as “knowledge” – are not a repository of
concepts, intellectual capital to be hoarded and guarded, but series of movements,
ripples in the fabric of semiospace, the turbulent currents of sapience. 2
You are sitting at your desk and reach absentmindedly for the cup of coffee
beside you. How many centimeters must your fingers travel to reach the cup’s
handle? Exactly how will you arrange your fingers to grasp this particular cup
handle, since handles differ greatly in their configuration? At what velocity will
you bring the cup to your lips? Somehow taking into account whether the cup is
brimming full, half-full, or almost empty, how careful must you be to keep the
surface of the liquid level with the ground (which, if you are sitting on the seventh
floor of an office building, you cannot begin to see)? Will the temperature of the
liquid (which you can only guess at) dictate a gingerly sip with pursed lips or a
hearty, coffeeholic swig? Unless you happen to suffer from an acute obsessive
neurosis, these and a host of similar questions never occur to you as you take a
drink of coffee and set the cup down while concentrating on some other,
completely unrelated project. Yet this simple act possesses an incredible intricacy
born of millions of years of hominid biological and cultural evolution, an
intricacy you do not begin to appreciate until you attempt to instruct a child, a
stroke victim, a computer, or a chimpanzee in its execution. You accomplish the
task so easily only because your action is not the effect of a self-contained brain
operating upon an external environment; it is a movement within a dimensional
system already infused with sentience (a semiospace), a movement orchestrated
by an integrated brain-environment entity, a holographic engine. You, your brain,
your mouth, your arm and fingers, the cup, the surface of the desk, are equally
components of that holographic engine, parts working together in unison that
separately would be meaningless appendages. These form what Gregory Bateson
called an “ecology of mind” (Bateson 1972, 1979, 1991).
The terms I have just been employing – in referring to the brain-environment
system as an orchestral movement, as parts working in unison – are meant as
more than figures of speech. Rather than conceive of the brain working through a
chain of cause-and-effect neurophysiological reactions, it is probably more
accurate to think of those reactions as elements in complex patterns of harmony
and dissonance. Perception is less a synapse-by-synapse sequence of firings than
a jumble of neural events all going on at once, amounting to something like a
musical score.3 This, at any rate, seems to be the well-argued position of one
group of neuroscientists (see, for example, Freeman 1991). And I think it is the
26
interpretation that is the most useful for cultural anthropologists, who must
proceed on the basis of a close inspection of social, rather than
neurophysiological, events. How else do we account for episodes like the dinner
party incident, in which a vast number of signals (the elaborate decor of your
host’s home, the polite conversation, the refined manners, etc.) were overridden
by a single discrepant item: the fateful change (or perceived change) of phoneme
that transformed “calf” into “cat”? Like a voice singing off-key in a large chorus,
we seize on the tiny discordance and let it color our experience of the whole. You
can effortlessly read page after page of a text, and suddenly be brought up short
when you come across one little typpo.
Reflexivity/ Iterativity of the Brain-Environment System
What happens in the brain has consequences in the environment, and what
happens in the environment affects the structure and functioning of the brain.
What happens in the brain as a consequence of what happens in the environment
. . . and on and on, through a very large number of iterative loops. Elementary as
these repetitive steps are, they have important implications for understanding the
nature of mind or consciousness: the iterativity of the brain-environment system is
one of its distinguishing features. That is why the brain’s boundary is so
convoluted, and the problems raised in investigating it so complex. Whatever we
may want to say about the nature of consciousness, we cannot forget that it is a
process, a set of movements along a (multidimensional) continuum, and not a
discrete and bounded state of matter. Ignoring this aspect of the subject has led to
some of the errors in work critiqued here. For although researchers in a variety of
disciplines readily acknowledge the iterativity or reflexivity inherent in the brainenvironment system, they do not give due credit to its processual nature.
Approaches such as those of Crick and Minsky, for all their supposedly hardnosed empiricism, nevertheless reify what is a shifting, chameleon-like entity.
They treat “mind” or “consciousness” as a fixed entity – a terribly complex entity
to be sure, but still one that has a specific (human) nature which one can
understand once and for all if only one has the correct research program. In the
best scientific manner, neurophysiologists and computer scientists want to roll up
their sleeves and get on with exploring the black box or wondrous mechanism
there before them.
An anthropological perspective is useful here, for what it lacks in
methodological rigor and mathematical sophistication it makes up by insisting on
placing the problem before us in the big picture: consciousness is not a “steady
state” phenomenon because the brain that somehow hosts consciousness is itself
one stage in the long process of hominid evolution. That process has been
underway for some five million years, and during that time has transformed the
27
hominid brain from a 500cc organ in an ape’s body to its present size and neural
organization – triple the size and specialized for functions unattainable in any ape
brain. And although it may trouble us to contemplate the suggestion, we must
presume that biological and technological evolution will continue to transform the
brain-environment system in the future.
We need always to remind ourselves what a very brief history humanity has
experienced. Our biological species itself, Homo sapiens, is perhaps 100-120,000
years old – a fraction of the time that earlier Homo lines and their ancestors, the
australopithecines, flourished. A fully formed human language – without which
the little incident at the dinner party could never have occurred – is younger still,
dating from the appearance of truly modern Homo sapiens sapiens during the
Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition (also called the Middle/Upper Paleolithic
revolution) around 40,000 years ago, a mere 2,000 generations. At present we
find ourselves in the grip of dramatic technological and biotechnological
processes that are reshaping our bodies, our societies, our experience of what it is
to be human (or whatever we may be in the process of becoming). Where along
this roller coaster ride do the fundamentals of consciousness or mind reside? The
only plausible answer is that they reside everywhere and nowhere: we cannot
single out any set of neurophysiological events or computer instructions as
definitive of consciousness because consciousness is an unbounded process, an
unbroken continuum that leads back into the ape brain and forward into some
dimly imagined cyborganic future (when We will have become Something Else).
If it is rather counterintuitive, even painful, to think of the human mind as
quite so unformed, as the provisional result of iterative processes still underway, it
is perhaps even more disconcerting to think of the “environment” component of
the brain-environment system in the same way. Just as we conventionally hold to
the notion that there is a “human nature” which can be fixed on a pin and studied,
so we cling even tighter to the belief that we humans inhabit a Nature that is “out
there” (like Fox Mulder’s truth), implacable, apart from our petty concerns. After
all, aren’t those associations – of immutability, exteriority, immensity – just what
the concept of “Nature” entails? But difficult as it may be, an anthropological
perspective on the brain-environment system requires us to give up these
established views in favor of one that is far more involved, messier and, one
hopes, accurate. Again, the key to this way of looking at human nature and at the
world around us is the phenomenon of iterativity or reflexivity: the fact that things
happen as they do is a result of complex elements combining in complex ways,
over and over again. Our classical concept of Nature simply cannot be made to fit
this way of looking at things, for that concept is all about an insular constancy and
not about the all-important interaction of elements in a dynamical system.
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It is highly ironic that this fixed-and-exterior concept of Nature has over the
past two or three decades become the ideological basis of an emerging
environmental awareness. [A cultural analyst of this phenomenon, several steps
above our intellectual pay grade, was George Carlin. See his “Saving the Planet”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw ]
Few of us are impervious to the suggestion, trumpeted from every television
documentary and popular magazine, that Nature is fundamentally separate from
Man and his works, and that Nature would flow quite smoothly – “naturally,” in
fact – if we did not disrupt it with our infernal technology. In a general and rather
unhelpful sense, this lament is perfectly valid: people are indeed busily mucking
up the environment and quite probably precipitating another mass extinction in
the process. But in our rush to accept the blame for this lamentable state of
affairs, we tend to ignore the fact that humans can produce such disastrous effects
in the natural world only because the brain-environment system has evolved over
millions of years into a highly intricate, symbiotic, self-organized whole. We
cannot be cast simply as the black hats in the present ecodrama, corrupt enemies
of an immaculate Nature, because we are part of nature and, moreover, nature is
part of us. Again, the blurring of figure and ground characteristic of the brainenvironment system (see Figure 1c) usually makes it impossible to say
unequivocally that a particular point or region is this rather than that, that here we
have a cultural system which is operating on a natural system over there.
Let me illustrate this rather abstruse point with a brief case study – an
elaborate anecdote, really, the sort of argument anthropologists forever resort to
because their subject matter is so complicated and their analytical procedures so
feeble.
In the popular imagination the great savannas and desert areas of eastern and
southern Africa, with their herds of antelope, elephants, and zebras and their
fierce predators, the lion, leopard and cheetah, are the embodiment of what we
mean by “nature.” After all, those animals are regularly featured on a television
program bearing that very title, and it is almost impossible to surf the educational
channels (PBS, Discovery, The Learning Channel) without encountering them.
Of all the highly publicized African animals, none is more prominent than the
lion. We learn from early childhood that he is the King of Beasts, and with his
imposing stature, tremendous strength, flamboyant mane, and thundering roar,
few would deny that he looks and acts the part. In a global, media-saturated
society, our ecological sensibilities are fueled by the same sources as our more
whimsical diversions, so that the worlds of Greenpeace and of Hollywood are
often not all that different. From a cultural analytical perspective, the African lion
and Arnold Schwarzenegger have much in common.
29
Although only a tiny percentage of us have actually journeyed to Africa and
observed lions on the open savanna (“in nature,” as we like to say), we all
probably share a remarkably consistent image of this animal known to us from the
occasional zoo excursion, magazine article, or television program. The most
vivid element in that image, the one burned deepest in the minds of us relatively
weak and vulnerable primates, is the lion’s ferocity: he is the major predator on
the savanna, truly the King of Beasts, and as such kills and eats what he chooses –
including us. We look at the lion, this frightfully large and powerful beast, and
we fear it. And justifiably so, it seems, for what we see on television and read in
the popular press confirms that lions are indeed aggressive animals. You
wouldn’t just go out unarmed for a stroll on the savanna or, in Gary Larson’s
hilarious Far Side cartoon, go sightseeing in a convertible, because lions would
hunt you down, kill you, and eat you. The situation is brutally simple; it is Nature
red in tooth and claw. It is how things have always been until we humans started
moving into cities and, if we dared travel on African savannas, made sure to carry
high-powered rifles and to avoid convertibles.
30
Except that things aren’t that simple. Even on those African savannas, in that
last bastion of Nature, things are as convoluted and nuanced as that ill-fated
dinner party we have been considering.
The source of the complexity is to be found in the evolutionary record. When
we think of ethologists going off to Africa to study lions, we imagine that they
will collect information about the “natural” behavior of those animals, before that
behavior was disrupted by peasant villages, cattle herds, and roving bands of
guerrillas armed with automatic rifles. Lions and the other animals were there
before us, living a “natural” existence before humans began messing things up.
Many of us probably even nourish the hope that this tragic process can be slowed
through the creation of game reserves and the imposition of strict controls on the
killing of wildlife.
What is wrong with this picture, which anyone with a grain of environmental
awareness finds compelling? What is wrong is that it does not square with the
facts of evolutionary biology: the big cats, particularly lions , were not out there
on the savanna chasing elands from time immemorial until Man the Hunter
arrived and upset the natural order of things. We, or our ancestors the
australopithecines and the early Homo lineages, were there first: hominid
evolution on the African savannas has occurred over the past five million years,
while lions have been a distinct species only for some 700,000 years. In a
stunning paradox, these creatures we take to be emblematic of all that Nature
represents are in fact the product of tens of thousands of generations of protolions
and protohumans interacting on the African savannas, each population influencing
the behavior of the other, each shaping the future genetic composition of the
other. Lions are an iterative construct, and so are people.
______________________________________
Lions are the most recent of the Pantheras, evolving on the savannahs
of Africa only some 700,000 years ago. Until very recently, lions were everywhere
that there were no glaciers, including North and South America, all across Asia,
down into India, Europe and the British Isles, the Middle East and all into Africa.
The northernmost lions were enormous, and known as cave lions, with the longer
hair necessary to survive the Ice Age. They have only recently become extinct.
History and Culture of Wild Cats
http://www.hdw-inc.com/historycultureofwildcats.htm
__________________________________________
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The anthropologist, novelist and ethologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has
described this process in The Tribe of Tiger (1994), and indicated how very
rapidly dramatic changes in lion behavior can occur. When Thomas lived among
Bushmen groups of the Kalahari in the 1950s, she reported that lions and
Bushmen appeared to have developed a remarkable détente over a doubtlessly
long period of coexistence (Thomas 1959). Although Bushmen did not possess
anything like the fearsome weaponry of warring tribes such as the Bantu and
Maasai, their flimsy spears and deadly poison arrows made them a force to be
reckoned with by the far more powerful lions. The implication is that over
countless generations of protolions and protoBushmen, a tacit arrangement was
worked out whereby social groups of lions hunted by night and retired during the
day, when human hunters and gatherers occupied the savannas. Although an
individual lion could always kill an individual human, the risks of several lions
taking on several humans involved mortality in both groups. An evolutionary
process thus selected for lions and humans who respected the paws/hands-off
arrangement.
Thomas cites an amazing episode in which a group of three Bushmen,
pursuing an antelope one of them had wounded, tracked the stricken prey down
only to discover that it was surrounded by a large pride of more than twenty lions,
intent on having it for themselves. With only the flimsiest of arms, the Bushmen
proceeded to speak to the lions in firm but respectful tones and to toss small clots
of earth at the more aggressive animals. The lions retreated, allowing the
Bushmen to claim what, according to an ages-old code, was rightfully theirs.
The thought-provoking subtitle of Thomas’s book is Cats and Their Culture,
and the anthropologist author does not use the term loosely. When she returned to
the Kalahari after an absence of a quarter of a century, Thomas discovered that
the behavior of lions had changed so markedly that she could only attribute it to
the animals acquiring a new culture, a new set of learned and transmitted
behaviors. During Thomas’s long absence the Bushmen, an integral feature of the
dynamic intersystem of lion-human relationships, had been displaced, driven
away by ranchers or, in a crowning irony, by park rangers administering newly
created game reserves. Here is the distillation of all that matters in the present
discussion: Acting according to the maxims of a newfound environmental
awareness, park authorities thought it necessary to restore the “natural” order by
forcibly removing the “unnatural” human presence represented by Bushmen
groups. It simply went against the grain to allow wandering bands of huntergatherers to be killing off animals the parks were meant to protect. And so the
entire system, the result of an immensely long and intricate co-evolution,
transmuted into something new, and something really quite ugly. The Kalahari
lions began to live up to outsiders’ conceptions of them as fierce, marauding
32
beasts. Lions began to attack cattle, camps, and people they caught on the open
savanna. “Nature” as it is now being acted out on the Kalahari is in fact terribly
unnatural; lions have gone from being respected and respectful citizens of the
savanna world to being a rootless and dangerous element, the Bloods and Crips of
the Kalahari.
Thomas’s provocative findings should sound an alarm in other fields of
inquiry, particularly those “scientific” investigations into the nature of mind that
assume a clearly delineated boundary between brain and environment, nature and
culture, the innate behavior of one species and that of another. The profound
differences between Kalahari Bushmen and Kalahari lions issue from a profound
interconnectedness of the two, from an iterative chain of associations that has
helped to shape each species. We humans possess a particular “human nature”
only because we have incorporated, over millions of years during which “we”
went from something distinctly non-human to our present state, the essence of
beings as diverse as lions and elands, as cats and calves.
It/Bit: Physical Reality, Representation and “Law” in a Postinterpretivist
Anthropology
If biological scientists like Crick and computer scientists like Minsky are
prone to a naturalistic fallacy, according to which the mind-brain may be studied
as a natural object, separate from the subjectivizing influences of human
observers, cultural anthropologists are similarly prone to a culturological fallacy,
(otherwise known as “postmodernism”) which would install the human mind and
its productions – particularly written language – as a distinctive form independent
of its physical makeup or surroundings. The manifesto for this position may be
found in two of Clifford Geertz’s early essays, reprinted near the beginning of The
Interpretation of Cultures: “The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind”
(1962), and “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man”
(1966). A principal theme of both essays is that the world of nature, with its
physical and physiological processes, has, with the advent of humanity, given way
to the world of culture, in which symbols have replaced genes as constitutive
elements. Geertz would draw a distinct line between the two worlds, assigning
one to empirically-minded scientists while reserving the other for philosophers,
literary critics, and cultural anthropologists who regard social action as texts to be
interpreted.
In this essay I have argued that such a line is impossible to draw, since the
putative worlds of nature and culture, brain and environment, are inextricably
linked in a single complex and dynamic system. Anthropology has had enough of
dualism; let’s give monism – and peace – a chance. Figure and ground are so
complexly intertwined that what is interesting about them is not how they may be
33
teased apart and treated separately, but how they interconnect to form novel, and
always changing, patterns. The view I recommend here is not new: at least
twenty years ago Gregory Bateson already envisioned a world that incorporated
“a necessary unity of mind and nature.” What is relatively new, however, is a
series of developments in, of all areas, theoretical physics that is strikingly
reminiscent of Bateson’s arguments.
Three hundred fifty years after Descartes, our thought is still so infected with
his dualistic bias that we typically accept without question the validity of
distinctions like nature/culture, brain/environment and, perhaps the ultimate
duality, mind/matter. I have urged here that the first two of the above dualities
are specious: their terms cannot be meaningfully disentangled. But even if we are
now prepared to entertain the rather bizarre thought that there are not lions and
people, but only a welter of intersystems of the two ideal types, we are probably
not ready to adopt, except in a New Age, mystical way, Bateson’s postulate of a
unity between mind and physical reality. The mind/matter duality seems
impervious to our petty arguments: surely any study we undertake must proceed
on the basis that a physical reality exists, about which we may make various
statements. We see an object, reach out and touch it, perhaps take a measurement,
and in the process formulate thoughts about it, obtain information, which we may
then write down in sentences or equations. But who, apart from a fanatical
Berkeleyian (or a strident postmodernist), would confound observation and
object, and even give priority to the observation? What could it possibly mean to
suggest that the information we obtain about the world has priority over the
world’s objective existence?
Remarkably, just this suggestion inspires the recent work of a number of
theoretical physicists and their chroniclers. John Wheeler (1990, 1991), John
Gribbin (1984, 1993, 1995), Murray Gell-Mann (1994), Wojciech Zurek (1990),
and George Johnson (1995) have separately or together proposed that information
is not a derivative of observation, not about some thing, but a fundamental
property of the universe, at least as basic as matter and energy, the foundations of
conventional physical theory. John Wheeler was perhaps the first to articulate the
idea, and certainly provided its most dramatic (and pithy) statement. Wheeler
asked whether we get Bit from It or It from Bit.
In the world of commonsense and normal science (that is, science practiced
by scientists who remain aloof from the weirdness of quantum theory), we
unquestionably get Bit from It: we observe an event in the physical world (It) and
compile information (Bit) about that event. In the new “physics of information”
being developed at the Santa Fe Institute, Los Alamos, and Princeton, an event in
the physical world is first of all an informational process. When two electrons
collide, they do not actually bang up against one another; they exchange a photon,
34
a message, a Bit of information that conveys something about the particle
interaction. When two billiard balls collide and go off in altered directions (a
standard example in classical mechanics), the clear-cut event we believe we have
observed is in fact a massive exchange of photons among the electron shells of
atoms at the point of “impact.” The physical reality of the event is an
informational process. We get It from Bit.
In an earlier essay, “The Logic of Things That Just Happen,” I suggested that
cultural anthropologists, busily duking it out in the trenches of the science wars,
have largely ignored developments in science and mathematics (such as the it/bit
discussion) that make their debates seem dated and wrong-headed. For the most
part, anthropological positivists and postmodernists have seized on stereotypes of
each other and of the enterprise of science, with the result that their contributions
to the anthropology-and-science issue are just more highly exaggerated
stereotypes. I was even uncharitable enough to suggest that this behavior is
strikingly reminiscent of the schismogenesis Gregory Bateson postulated to
explain the conflictual, self-destructive lives of the Iatmul, who piled stereotype
on stereotype in a way that could only lead to suspicion, hatred, and violence. If
our theories of culture are not Batesonian, at least our agonism is (once again,
anthropologists become their own best ethnographic subjects).
Jousting with stereotypes can have bizarre consequences. In a curious twist
of fate, the project of postmodern or interpretivist anthropology, for all its antiscience rhetoric, makes a better fit with contemporary physical theory than the
cause-and-effect determinism of positivist anthropology. The new physics of
information, with its it/bit dialectic, thoroughly confounds the old positivism by
positing a physical reality that is a vast collection of messages – a text to be
interpreted. The world cosmos is a book, and who better to interpret it than those
master readers Clifford Geertz, George Marcus, James Clifford – even that doctor
of dada, Stephen Tyler? It seems the path of hard science leads us straight
through the looking glass, into a topsy-turvy world that confounds the healthyminded empiricism of Marvin Harris, Roy D’Andrade, and their positivist coterie.
I believe the world is just such a looking-glass, topsy-turvy place as I have
attempted to sketch in this essay, a world of calamitous dinner parties, of
impossible choices, of untenable identities, of lions cum Bushmen and Bushmen
cum lions. As the eminent scientist J. B. S. Haldane remarked, “The Universe is
not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Moreover, I
believe that a rigorous interpretive or postmodern anthropology would abandon its
literary conceits (which, as I have suggested, are more conceited than literary),
would cease its own canonical prattle of hegemonic discourse, globalization, and
commodified identities (jargon more stupefying even than the Thanksgiving
35
turkey), and pursue a starved, reckless, take-no-prisoners cultural analysis of the
inherent strangeness of our species.
Unhappily, just as literary ethnography has failed to deliver on its promises,
so I fear interpretive anthropology has failed to provide more than the vaguest
hints of a theory of culture. This can hardly have been otherwise since
postmodernists denounce the very idea of “theory” as ideologically tainted and
find “culture” an embarrassingly old-fashioned, essentializing notion. As cultural
anthropologists who’ve given up on culture, we’re really up the proverbial creek
without an oar.
Conceptually allied with some of the most promising and forward-looking
developments in physical theory, interpretive anthropology has nonetheless
adopted a revanchist position that justifies – through a schismogenesis that would
make an Iatmul proud – its own anti-science program. With the fundamentals of
our thought propelling us in one direction (toward a new, synthetic theory of a
sign-infused reality) and our stereotypes in another (back to the comfortable if
threadbare formulation of the “sciences” vs. the “humanities”), we opt, like the
Iatmul, for the stereotypes. Consequently, the representation of reality – physical
or social – in interpretive anthropology proceeds in a fashion directly contrary to
scientific representation. This, I believe, helps to account for the inability of
contemporary cultural anthropology to engage in any meaningful way with the
social issues of our time, or, as we have seen, with theoretical discussions of
broad topics such as the nature of consciousness. Starkly put, the two modes of
representation differ in that interpretive anthropology is backward-looking and
(despite all its badmouthing of hegemonic discourse) intrinsically authoritarian,
while the best contemporary science looks ahead, continually striving in the most
provisional fashion to glimpse the not-yet-known.
Interpretive anthropology can only be backward-looking since, from Geertz’s
classic essay pretty much to the present, it has incorporated a hermeneutic
(Herman who?) approach directly contrary to the empirical analysis of science.
Such an approach forces cultural anthropologists into an embarrassing and, I
think, repugnant alliance with lawyers, liturgists, and bureaucrats: all embrace a
“law” that is already established, a Law enshrined in sacred texts that must be
consulted, added to, interpreted. In “Deep Play” Geertz (1971: 29) proposes the
admirably anti-colonial, egalitarian idea that the anthropologist does not
interrogate his ethnographic subject, sift the facts, and arrive at an objective truth;
instead, he “strains to read over the shoulders” of the native, adding his own,
inevitably flawed interpretation of cultural texts to those of his subject. This
sounds good to liberal-minded anthropologists, but from the native’s point of
view, sensing the white man looming behind him, he is more likely to think he’s
about to be ambushed (to phrase it politely) than to have his text interpreted.
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For all its anti-essentialist cant, postmodern anthropology lapses into
essentialist error on two fundamental points: it fetishizes language and it reifies
the notion of “humanity.” Both errors issue from its ironically pre-postmodern
hermeneutic orientation, its cozy embrace of a body of authoritative texts
(whether law books, religious scriptures, literary classics, oral myths, or even
one’s own field notes) which, even as they are deconstructed by the righteous
anti-essentialist, remain a noose that tethers and strangles him, and with him any
genuinely new, creative way of looking at the world. That’s why the “law”
associated with a hermeneutic anthropology cannot be reconciled with the
physical “laws” of science, particularly a Vico-style new science of sapience such
as I have outlined here: those laws are always provisional, intended to sum things
up while looking for a better formulation.
The great thing about science is that you get to think about new stuff, and in
the process make new things (whether you call them toys or instruments) that let
you think about more new stuff, inconceivable only a couple of decades ago.
Dark matter, dark energy, quasars, clones, cellular automatons, trans-specific
implantations of fetal neural tissue – all exciting new stuff with profound
implications for human understanding and for the future of the human species.
How boring, and how terribly damaging to the spirit of inquiry, to invoke a dreary
anti-science rhetoric that dismisses these marvels as tropes of a globalizing,
hegemonic discourse.
Yet that is just what much of contemporary cultural anthropology amounts to,
with its practitioners behaving like the schoolmasters and schoolmarms they in
fact are, keeping the classroom desks in tidy rows, clutching at the straws of a
coda ignored by the world at large. Because their lives, from early childhood
through that fateful granting of tenure, are immersed in the joys and trials of
language, it pains them that their sacred “texts” count for next to nothing in a
world of big business, bigger military, and a rising generation that knows far more
about Nintendo than about Nietzsche or Nureyev. These essentialists-in-denial
never seem to consider that written language itself is a transient phenomenon, as
fragmentary and fragmenting as any postmodernist trope. Surely in a few
thousand years “texts” will be something wholly other (perhaps shared brain
waves, perhaps shared brains, perhaps – and this is the most likely scenario –
something unthinkable today). Postmodernists simply cannot have it both ways:
if our experience of the world is inherently fragmented, contingent,
circumstantial, then language, and in particular writing as an institution of that
world is just as transient. Still, they cannot bring themselves to confront the
disturbing truth about the project of inquiry on which they claim to be engaged:
the whole problem is to use language to overthrow language.
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In launching deconstructionism, Derrida exhibited a similar failure of
nerve. He convincingly established the importance of writing, arguing that its
appearance utterly transforms spoken language, but ignored the possibility that
the writing-mind may in turn be swept aside by cultural forms already coming on
strong as he completed Grammatology. If writing transforms speech, don’t
television, movies, telephones, faxes, e-mail, etc. transform writing and the
intelligence it nourishes? Sauce for the goose. Still, one can’t judge Derrida too
harshly. After all, what Parisian intellectual wouldn’t rather crawl through the
fires of Hell than contemplate a genuinely postliterate world?
The other major error in postmodern anthropology is to essentialize
humanity. Postmodernists talk a good game about the fragmentary nature of
experience, but when the chips are down and the hands are shown they turn out to
be just old-fashioned, moralizing humanists. At bottom, they believe in folks who
are folks, not in Bushmen who are sort-of-lions, and definitely not in lions who
are sort-of-Bushmen.
Their intellectual conservatism is consistent with
interpretive anthropology’s ties to scriptural and legal hermeneutics: texts are
meant to be interpreted over and over again, not chucked out in favor of
something radically different (in favor of Something Else).
The fundamentally transient nature of writing and of present-day language is
merely part of the transient nature of our species. Postmodern anthropologists,
that hard-charging avant-garde, have somehow missed this truth, preferring the
comfortable fictions of an old humanism that proclaimed Man the center of all
things. How ironic: these visionaries cling to an anthropocentrism that they still
strive to expunge from the tender minds of their charges in Anthro 101. Having
skipped courses in evolutionary biology and hominid paleontology in favor of the
glitzy offerings of comparative literature, postmodern anthropologists have not
acquired any thorough (dare I say “scientific”?) understanding of how
exceedingly brief and erratic the human career has been. By any standard, we are
a flash in the pan, an evolutionary oddity that can only transform into Something
Else or go extinct, clearing the way for other possibilities – sapient squid, perhaps
(In the great crapshoot of evolution, I have a small standing bet on the
cephalopods, but that won’t pay off for a hundred million years or so).
If postmodern anthropologists can be forgiven their lack of attention to protosapient squid, it is less understandable that they have clung to an essentializing
humanism in spite of two bodies of work that demolish that position: those of
Nietzsche and Lévi-Strauss (two thinkers not often paired). Intellectual historians
of anthropology may remark on these peculiar blind spots, since Nietzsche’s work
lies at the origins of everything that is modern in philosophy, while Lévi-Strauss’s
still towers over all of contemporary anthropology.
Do today’s
“poststructuralists” reject Lévi-Strauss for the reasons they cite – that his work
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denies the emotional and processual in human life – or for the very different
reason that his magisterial logic leads him to a conclusion they find disturbing, if
not terrifying: the goal of anthropology is not to constitute, but to dissolve
humanity? Isn’t this hauntingly similar to Zarathustra’s refrain: “Man is a thing
that will pass.”? For both thinkers humanity is a way station or, in Nietzsche’s
term, a bridge to Something Else, to some other form of sapience.
The many and vocal critics of postmodern anthropology (see, for example,
Lewis 1999:717) tend to accept postmodernism’s claim to Nietzsche as one of
their own, as their clan ancestor. These critics also assume that Nietzsche’s work
means pretty much what postmodernists say it does, which is more or less what
the critics themselves have gleaned from an introductory philosophy lecture or
commentary somewhere along the way: all that stuff about knowledge being
derivative of relationships between master and slave, der Wille zur Macht, etc. I
would caution that this is highly mythologized terrain, in which one stereotype
feeds on another and antagonists work themselves into a frenzy flailing at
windmills. We are back to Bateson’s schismogenic anthropologists.
Nietzsche’s work is complex, profound, and riven with internal contradiction,
all expressed in scathing epigrams that trail away into madness. He makes a poor
mascot for the postmodernists or for any other “school of thought” (a phrase and
idea he detested). Like Bob Dylan’s Joey, he was always on the outside of
whatever side there was. Particularly in the charged atmosphere of today’s
science wars, we should look very carefully at the proposition that Nietzsche was
somehow “anti-science.” Though he harbored a peculiar dislike for the concept
of gravity (it interfered with dancing, so important to a Gay Science), he was
impressed with Francis Bacon and with the British empiricists. And he was
unimpressed with efforts to substitute a literary rendering of the world for the
world itself (though he was not too impressed with the world, either). At a time
when many of us have about decided that cultures are texts, when we speak about
“writing culture” (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Clifford
1988, 1997) and “reading television” (Goldman 1992), when we discuss film as
“signatures of the visible” (Jameson 1992), doesn’t the following sound like the
sour-grapes lament of a hopelessly passé essentialist (one of those doddering old
fools who still believe there is a unity behind the multiplicity of texts):
What is the mark of every literary decadence? That life no longer resides in
the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the
sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, and the page
comes to life at the expense of the whole – the whole is no longer a whole.
This, however, is the simile of every style of decadence: every time there is
an anarchy of atoms. [1888] 1950: 61, emphasis in original]
39
Applying their own dictum, postmodernists have textualized Nietzsche’s
work in a way they hope will further their cause. And they have succeeded, at
least to the extent that their critics have accepted their version, their “knowledge”
of Nietzsche. But as one who has read and reflected on Nietzsche’s writings over
a good many years, I find their account deeply flawed. Nietzsche took long,
solitary walks in the Alps, and his Zarathustra strode from mountain peak to
mountain peak, returning alone to his companions, the serpent and the eagle.
These postmodernists would return Zarathustra to the valleys, to the squalor
where the flies of the marketplace buzz incessantly, to the schools and scholars
with their endless disputations. I happen to believe that a Nietzschean
anthropology is possible and that it is one of the few ways out of our current
malaise. [See “Shit Happens: An Immoralist’s Take on 9/11 in Terms of SelfOrganized Criticality;” “News Flash! Cultural Anthropology Solves Abortion
Issue! Story at Eleven! (Being a Cultural Analysis of Sigourney Weaver’s Aliens
Quartet);” ms1 and ms2 at www.peripheralstudies.org .] Such an anthropology
would depart radically from the postmodernists’ fetishism of texts (from what
Pálsson imaginatively calls the textual life of savants), and instead would adopt
Nietzsche’s notion of humanity as a unitary phenomenon in process of
fundamental transformation. Also Sprach Zarathustra sings with the dialectical
tension of the antithetical yet mutually implicative processes of untergehen and
übergehen, of humanity as a dynamical system always caught up in a going-under
and a going-over. Man is a thing that will pass. (But it was fun while it lasted.
We really got blasted!)
One bridge that might have intrigued Nietzsche connects his own work to
that of Lévi-Strauss. For Mythologiques is a vast edifice of bridges, of hundreds
of myths that derive their meaning, not from their identification with a particular
social group, but from their effect on other myths.
La pensée mythique est par essence transformatrice. Chaque mythe, à
peine né, se modifie en changeant de narrateur, que ce soit à l’intérieur du
groupe tribal ou en se propageant de peuple à peuple; certains éléments
tombent, d’autres les remplacent, des séquences s’intervertissent, la
structure distordue passe par une série d’états dont les altérations
successives préservent néanmoins le caractère de groupe. [1971: 603-604]
Infinite and infinitely fine, transformations of myth nevertheless incorporate
organizing principles of change: they are subject to the workings of a mind that is
far from a collection of random movements, that is itself an organized process (or,
in the language of complexity theory, a self-organizing process; see Bak and Chen
40
1991, Poundstone 1988). But is this enstructuring device, this “totemic operator,”
this “strange attractor,” this “tensor matrix” at all like what we conventionally call
the human mind? Not really, or not necessarily and entirely. With their deep
interest in bridges and boundaries, Nietzsche and Lévi-Strauss stand together in
rejecting the comfortable notion of a paramount “human nature” that is the arbiter
of all things, the game warden to the universe.
In the concluding passages of L’homme Nu, Lévi-Strauss responds vigorously
to a litany of critics who have rejected his work as depersonalizing, as ignoring
the importance of all those buzz words one finds in contemporary works of
cultural anthropology: intersubjectivity, performance, discourse, affect, drama.
Mais on perçoit aussi les raisons profondes de cette véritable perversion
épistémologique à quoi le renversement de perspective qu’ils prônent
entraîne les philosophes: méconnaissant les premiers devoirs de l’homme
d’étude, qui sont d’expliquer ce qui peut l’être et de réserver provisoirement
le reste, les philosophes se préoccupent surtout d’aménager un refuge où
l’identité personnelle, pauvre trésor, soit protégée. Et comme les deux
choses sont impossibles à la fois, ils préfèrent un sujet sans ratonalité à une
rationalité sans sujet. [1971: 614]
Heavy Levy in the Strauss Haus! A rationality without a subject! No wonder
the Pomos have banished Claude from their tribe! What could be worse news for
those busily making cultural anthropology a haven for self-absorption and literary
gamespersonship? With Lévi-Strauss as with Bateson and the present essay, we
come to realize that our “science of humanity” can only function as such because
as anthropologists we systematically explore the boundaries and transgressions
(the over-goings) of human-ness. We study people before they were people
(australopithecines and the early Homo lineages); we study evolutionary offshoots
(primates) who are something like people; we study – a few of us – what we will
be like when we stop being people (cyborgs? sapient squid? transgenic mute
ants? or just plain old-fashioned deviated pre-verts?). [What did Jeffrey Dahmer
say to Lorena Bobbit? . . . You threw it away?! But that was the best part!] The
old humanism in the glitzy wrapping of postmodernism offers up a subject that is
a pauvre trésor, indeed. If it is to survive, anthropology must necessarily become
part of a comparative science of sapience; we must pursue the study of a
rationality which, if not entirely lacking a subject, possesses a subject that is not
much like folks.
When L’homme Nu appeared in English as The Naked Man, no one was very
happy with the title’s translation. Yet the real loss was not in the clumsy if
41
amusing English title; it was in the abandonment of the original’s cover
illustration: a painting by Paul Delvaux, illustrating a naked wo/man (?) climbing
up into a tree. The figure has ascended the trunk and is about to select one of
several large branches spreading out in all directions, about to continue her/his
climb along just one of those branches. The spreading tree, icon of the manifold
complexity of a world of fractional dimensions (fractals), maps the future of a
species about to transmute from its modest presence at the base of the canopy into
a wealth of possibilities, a riot of diverse beings some of which we or our unusual
heirs may even choose to call “human.” [See photograph]
42
For all its emphasis on the intersubjective nature of human thought and
action, postmodern anthropology accords a privileged place to the anthropologistobserver and, through him, to a generically human presence at the heart of the
message-sending, message-receiving process. The universe, as Charles Peirce
claimed, is perfused with signs. But, for Peirce and for contemporary postmodern
anthropologists, someone must be there to interpret those signs. With the best
will in the world, we are nonetheless back to an anthropocentrism that restricts by
fiat what might be said about that universe of signs. Interpretive anthropology
founders on that rock, just as Peirce’s semiotic could not survive its fatal embrace
of dualism: the sign interpreter here, the universe of signs over there.
Where is the way out of this thicket? Where, as Microsoft’s current
advertising slogan says, do you want to go today? (Hint: not to court!) Like my
earlier proposals, these parting words do not offer much comfort for anyone still
nourishing the hope that a humanistic anthropology may succeed. Peirce’s system
became more and more elaborate and unwieldy without capturing the meaning of
his universe of signs because Peirce insisted on separating, on drawing one of
those fateful lines between his actions as an ostensibly privileged observer and a
world out there which he observed. With the new physical theories in mind, I
would propose that the universe is not just perfused with signs; it is itself a system
of signs. In William Poundstone’s intriguing phrase, it is a recursive universe.
The logical corollary to this claim is that our services as interpreters are not
required to give meaning to the world; the cosmos is quite capable of sustaining
its own exchange of messages, of interpreting itself. If we are to understand the
world around us, we must learn to stop thinking of ourselves as arbiters of truth,
as game wardens in the Kalahari, and instead realize that our humanity, including
all our vaunted intellectual powers, is of a piece with the world around us. We are
not set up to monitor calls: we are just a minor participant in that vast party line
placing them.
In trying to make sense of quantum theory, some have been led to believe
that consciousness, or at least the act of measurement, is necessary to bring
about what we consider the real world. But many scientists are suspicious
of what sometimes seems like a self-centered attempt to elevate humanity
and the classical [physical] world we experience to a special, almost Godgiven role. As Gell-Mann likes to say, “When it comes to quantum theory
even the most intelligent people can start talking nonsense.”
If we follow the approach of some of the people at Santa Fe and Los
Alamos and admit information as another fundamental, along with mass and
energy, then quantum theory can be viewed in a subtly different light. All
that is required to break the symmetry of the wave function is information
43
processing. Not only are conscious observers superfluous – the theory does
not even require artificial observers like photographic emulsions or
photoelectric cells. The universe itself might process information just as it
processes matter and energy. Seen in this light, our role as informational
spiders, stringing and restringing our conceptual webs, is as natural as
anything in the cosmos. We try to set ourselves apart from the universe and
pretend to see it whole. But we are inevitably a part of what we are
observing, and our observations may be but a single circuit in a great web of
flowing bits. [Johnson 1995: 161]
If the cosmos possesses a sentience, and even a form of sapience, then it may
be that we “informational spiders” are so adroit with signs, not because we have
called them into being with our exceedingly frail and transient faculty of
language, but because we are ourselves formed of stardust, atomic and subatomic
particles of the cosmos that endow us with their capacity to know. Culture, mind,
and physical reality : a necessary unity.
Afterword / After Words / Afterwards . . . Then What?
This essay has spoken of cats and calves and Kalahari lions, and in the
process intimated the possibility of a Nietzsche-inspired outlaw anthropology that
may dispel the miasma shrouding contemporary theory. One of the grand ironies
of Nietzsche’s thought (in view of his posthumous stature he would perhaps have
termed it a “world historical irony”) is that this master of language was led, in the
penultimate event of Zarathustra, to despair of language and to turn instead to the
eagle and serpent sharing his mountainside cave, leaving it to them, as beasts
devoid of “language” (temple où de vivant piliers: Ah, the resonance of those
stricken contemporaries, Baudelaire and Nietzsche!) to announce the eternal
recurrence:
“O Zarathustra,” the animals said, “to those who think as we do, all things
themselves are dancing: they come and offer their hands and laugh and flee
– and come back. . . Everything parts, everything greets every other thing
again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now,
being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is
everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.” [[1888] 1954: 329-330]
Postmodernists who embrace Nietzsche while denouncing science would do
well to note the scientific affinities of the above passage, particularly one
recognized by Nietzsche himself: the new theory of thermodynamics embraced
the possibility of any arrangement of atoms repeating itself over and over – a
44
scientific version of eternal recurrence. The eagle’s and serpent’s refrain also
suggests Einstein’s schoolboy reflections on what it would be like to hitch a ride
on a ray of light: time and space would collapse into a Now in which all “being
begins,” and a “bent” eternity would fold back on itself.
A Nietzschean anthropology similarly needs to incorporate the best ideas of
contemporary science, particularly if we are to resuscitate the exhausted and
discredited concept of culture which has been our organizing principle since the
discipline’s beginning. It is a simple enough question to pose, if not to answer:
Are we or are we not interested in developing a science of humanity? If not, then
instead of following Zarathustra we can follow Zarathustra’s ape and produce
“literary ethnographies” that are not literature, “cultural materialist analyses” that
are not science, “development studies” that are not anything.
If, however, we wish to follow Zarathustra back into the mountains and the
deserts (but if the latter, be sure there’s a good water theme park nearby!), then
we really need to possess or very soon acquire something of his gifts/curses of
passion, humor, and lucidity. All anthropological knowledge and practice must
flow from these; otherwise we’re just engaged in a pointless and abusive exercise.
Of the three, humor should be the most attainable, and yet the mirthlessness of
anthropological writing invokes Nietzsche’s maxim: “We should count as false
every truth that does not contain at least one laugh.” Nietzschean passion is a
double-edged sword, combining a burning curiosity to know with a smoldering
rage at the inequity and ugliness of life. Nietzsche’s passionate curiosity is
decidedly that of the scientist: rather than follow Kant and Hegel in their elaborate
system-building projects, Nietzsche, who called himself a psychologist and not a
philosopher, saw his work as a series of experiments (hence his emphasis on
suchen and versuchen). But when the experimenter or ethnographer looks life full
in the face, its ugliness is overwhelming (hence his despair at the human-all-toohuman). Life sucks, then you die.
Here we come to understand why cultural anthropology is not the pursuit of
literary critics (successful or, as I have suggested, failed). From our discipline’s
beginnings to the present day we have borne witness to the death and destruction
of countless peoples around the world; in our meticulous dissection of those sick
and dying societies we resemble no one so much as the pathologist. Ethnography
is a pathology of the social, and the ethnographer, like the pathologist, may be
drawn to the work by a certain morbidity. In a stunning passage in Twilight of the
Idols Nietzsche suggests as much for the philosopher’s pursuit of truth: “Could it
be that wisdom appears on earth as a raven, inspired by a little whiff of carrion?”
[[1888] 1954: 473]
45
The final paradox or, perhaps, prank (Unruh) is that in an incoherent world
and with our last hope, language, crumbling to dust in our hands, a Nietzschean
anthropology persists in its quest for lucidity. Not cleverness, not scientism, but a
full and passionate account of what, for now, is the world of humanity, the world
ethnography seeks to chronicle, and the world anthropology seeks to know.
We need a general theory of culture.
Camille Paglia, “Introduction,” Vamps & Tramps
46
Acknowledgments.
This essay was composed without foundation support or academic affiliation.
As such, the ideas developed here are provisional, unsanctioned, perhaps
analogous to the chemist’s free radicals: incomplete, unstable, highly reactive
elements that transform their passive, established neighbors. They stir things up.
At least, that is my hope. As ever, thanks to those old boundary hunters, Claude
and Ludwig, Greg and Fritz, founding members in spirit of the Center for
Peripheral Studies whose collaborative productivity is virtual-lee . . . limitless. A
number of the Center’s productions may be found at www.peripheralstudies.org ;
fellow peripherals might also visit the cutting-edge site for new, big-gun boundary
hunters at www.edge.org .
Note that the title page of the essay bears the inscription, “Rejected by the
American Anthropologist.” Over a period of nearly three years, the editor of that
august journal and a platoon of “peer reviewers” provided a raft of comments
which helped to transform the original work from what I had intended, a play of
ideas, to its more ponderous, not to say lumbering, present form. At the end of
that process, the editor found it necessary to reject the essay. I herewith
acknowledge their contribution. In the companion piece to “Culture, Mind,
Physical Reality . . .,” (see the next item in the list at www.peripheralstudies.org :
“Pee-You! Review: Rejected by the American Anthropologist”) I provide the
intricate details of that review process, including my correspondence with the
editor and all copies of “peer reviews.” I furnish this material as a case study of a
phenomenon which has attracted a great deal of attention among anthropologists,
at least among anthropologists of a certain persuasion: the social constraint or
control of the production of “knowledge.”
Yet while this has become a favorite topic, even something of a mantra,
among that coterie, it is often addressed in terms too general, too vague, too
make-you-feel-good-by-telling-you-how-bad-things-are: the powerful (Them) not
only have more money, bigger houses, nicer cars, longer vacations, and so on than
the weak (Us), but, through manipulating sources of and access to information,
they even control what we think we know to be true; They fabricate Knowledge
itself. Scary stuff, and doubtlessly right on target in many cases. Witness how
the Bush-Cheney-Rove cabal managed to reduce a once-strong, proud and selfreliant people to a bunch of scared rabbits by bombarding them with the Fear
Message of Islamic Terror.
What is missing from this picture, particularly when painted by
anthropologists, is how this phenomenon, the production of Knowledge, takes
47
shape on a very small scale, where virtually nothing is at stake, where hardly
anyone gives a damn. It is what Hannah Arendt might have called the banality of
the phenomenon. Here anthropologists, even those who so enjoy the apparent
thrill of grandstanding, of taking on those cancerous evils of globalization,
racism, sexism, and so on need to get down from their soapbox, roll up their
sleeves, and begin to do what they say their discipline is really all about:
ethnography. We need to nibble away at a little corner of the puzzle, to see if just
perhaps we can tease out a few threads that may spread through and even begin to
unravel the larger picture. That ethnographic project is what I hope to accomplish
in compiling all the documents and accompanying arguments involved in the
unsuccessful submission of my essay to the American Anthropologist. Neither a
gentleman nor a scholar, I am not in the least reticent in providing this material to
whoever might find some interest in it. If anthropologists, particularly in their
crucial role as ethnographers, hope to acquire insights into the actual workings of
their own and other societies, they really should start by taking a close look at
how they conduct themselves, at how they produce the authoritative discourse
(oh, sweet, sweet term!) that passes itself off as anthropological knowledge.
48
Notes
1. Those reasons are presented in detail in chapter 3 of American Dreamtime,
“A Theory of Culture as Semiospace” (Drummond 1996: 51-125).
2. A complementary literature is the discussion of “multiple intelligences”
and “mental modules” initiated by Howard Gardner (1983, 1993) and Jeremy
Fodor (1983, 1987) and developed by the flourishing school of evolutionary
psychology (Cosmides and Tooby 1992; Cosmides and Tooby 1994; Barkow,
Cosmides and Tooby 1994). Of these, Gardner’s work is most amenable to the
argument of this essay, for his “multiple intelligences” both relegate language to
one among several intelligences and operate within a dynamic, internally
transformational system consistent with tensor network theory. Unfortunately,
the main drift of ideas in evolutionary psychology seems to be away from the
boundary-defying sets of transformations of neural ensembles and toward a
boundary-enforcing notion of “mental modules” whose compartmentalization
inhibits the transformational activity essential to the mind. Steven Mithen, in The
Prehistory of the Mind (1996), has added an intriguing (and probably unwelcome)
twist to the evolutionary psychology literature in claiming that, while discrete
mental modules or intelligences were characteristic of earlier Homo lines, modern
humans possess a “cognitive fluidity” in which the separate modules are
integrated. He does not detail the nature of that integrative process, but it would
seem to be compatible with tensor network theory.
Considering that so much of perception is visual, dimensional, and, if we
accept some of the arguments of tensor network theory, the product of
interference patterns among diverse arrays of neurons, it is intriguing to consider
the mind-brain as a holographic engine (see Drummond 1996, where this wild
card is played).
3. Time plays tricks, not only on one’s memories, but also on one’s basic
sense of how things are. Over thirty years ago I was greatly impressed by a
remark in Geertz’s important essay, “The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of
Mind.” Arguing that culture is not reducible to genetics and biology, but is a
domain apart, Geertz wrote that “you won’t find a symphony at a nerve ending.”
The complexities of the cultural event – all those musicians, the conductor, the
composer, the score, the audience – are simply not reducible to physical events in
the brain. That well-turned phrase stayed with me, and I found myself invoking it
on numerous occasions to counter arguments I found superficial and scientistic.
49
With current neurophysiological research in mind, it now appears that a
symphony is precisely what you do find at a nerve ending: a synaptic symphony
in the brain at least as complicated (and interesting) as what is going on in the
orchestral pit. Might it even be that symphonic movements of the mind-brain –
the fact that we experience the world through choral ensembles of neurons and
not in some other way (cause-and-effect synaptic firings, for example) – go a
certain way to account for the fact that (a very limited number of) humans are
capable of producing musical symphonies? In turn, might it be that the pleasure
music gives to lesser, non-composing members of our species is linked to
perceptual mechanisms already at work in the human mind-brain? Food for
thought, a tune to hum, a melody for memory – that slouching beast.
50
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