30. Finished reading Gombrich’s Art and Illusion yesterday. The oversized paperback seems to be losing most of its pages. A thought: When I hold up my hand in front of my face, what I see is my hand, in focus, and, behind it, a slightly unfocussed, double image of the rest of the room, those images further away blurrier and slightly further apart. (Actually, parts of the double image keep suppressing other parts, and then the suppression pattern changes.) How odd that in the search for more and more striking illusions of reality, no artist has ever tried to paint this.
One reason, I suspect, is that art has never really been interested in painting What You See; from the most abstract to the most representational, art is interested in purveying the concept of What Is There. Representationalists have, from time to time, used a limited number of tricks of the eye to emphasize (by making their paintings look more like what you see) that the subject is there. Abstractionists use the reality of paint, brush stroke, and material for the same end.
31. A common argument between philosophers often runs like this:
A. I have a problem within this particular context.
B. I have a context within which I can solve your particular problem.
A. But I want a solution within my context!
B. But I can translate your context, in all particulars that interest me, into my context.
A. But you can’t translate my problem into your context so that it is still a problem and then produce a solution for it that will fit mine! Is there any way you can prove that, within my context, my problem is insoluble?
B. I’m not interested in proving your problem insoluble! I’m interested in solving it! And I have!
A. If you are interested in proving my old problem insoluble, then I am not interested in your new context! It doesn’t relate to my problem!
32. The greatest distress to me of Structural Anthropology is its sexism. The primary descriptive model, “Society operates by the exchange of women,” as a purely descriptive model, has the value of any other: There are certainly contexts in which it is useful. The same can be said of such other famous descriptive models as: “Jews are responsible for the financial evils of Europe,” or “Blacks are lazy and shiftless but have a good sense of rhythm.” It is the nature of descriptions that, as long as they model some fraction of the reality, however minute (even to the fact that persons A and B have agreed to use model p as a description of situation s [which is the case with individual words]) they can be called useful. But pure descriptive usefulness is not in the least contingent on how much the internal structure of the description reflects the way in which the fragment of reality it models relates to the rest of the case. Such descriptions that try to mirror these relations, to the extent that they succeed, can be called logical (functional) descriptions. But the very form of the absolute statement precludes its being a logical (functional) description. And when a description is of a small enough fragment of reality, and it reflects neither the internal workings of what it is describing nor the external workings, it can be said to be an emblem—or, if it is made up of a string of words, a slogan. And it is the slogan’s pretension to logical (functional) description that makes it so undesirable. When trying to establish a coherent system, such as a coherent anthropological discipline (as Lévi- Strauss is attemping), we want logical models that can also be used as part of a logical context. Such models as the ones above, as they pass into context, yield situation after situation where abuse is almost inevitable:
If a woman objects to being exchanged or refuses to be exchanged, for example, by the above model she can be described as opposing society’s workings. But if a man objects to or refuses to be exchanged, he can be described as objecting to being treated as a woman! And on and on and on ad (in the manner of context models) infinitum.
What makes this so sad is that the original descriptive use is completely subsumed by the double model: “Much of society works by the exchange of human beings,” and “In most cases, the human beings who do the exchanging are men and the human beings exchanged are women.” Without resorting to information theory (which tells us that the interplay between two limited descriptive models generates much more information about the context surrounding the elements of all of them than any one absolute statement of the same elements possibly can), I think most native English speakers hear the margin for self-criticism allowed. And I don’t see how the informative usefulness of this complex model is any less than that of the absolute statement.
But if I thought anthropological sexism were merely a manifestation of a single, clumsily thought-out descriptive model, I would not be as distressed as I am. It appears again and again; the profusion alone suggests that it is inherent in the context. Three more examples:
In Lévi-Strauss’s most exemplary short piece, La Geste d’ Asdiwal (his analysis of a myth that has a range of male and female characters), we find statements like: “. . . the women [in this myth] are more profitably seen as natural forces . . .” (More profitably than what? Than as human beings? And who is this profitable to? But let us continue.) The myth, in its several versions collated in the forty-odd-page essay, begins with a mother and daughter, whose husbands have died in the current famine, traveling from their respective villages, till they meet, midway along a river. They have only a rotten berry between them to eat. A magic bird appears, turns into a man, marries the daughter, provides food for the two women, and the daughter and her supernatural husband have a child, Asdiwal, the hero of the myth. Some time later in the myth, Asdiwal, as an adult, meets a magic bear on a mountain who turns into a woman and reveals she is the daughter of the sun. After Asdiwal passes a series of tests set by the bear-woman’s supernatural father, the bear-woman marries Asdiwal and they live for a while, happily, in the sky. Later they return to earth, to Asdiwal’s own village, where Asdiwal commits adultery with a woman of his people. The bear-woman leaves him over this and returns to her father. Asdiwal marries another woman of his village, and the myth continues through a series of adventures involving several other female figures, some human, some not, their brothers (who tend to come in groups of five), the king of the seals, Asdiwal’s own son by a mortal woman, and finally ends when Asdiwal, in a magic situation on top of a mountain, calls down to his second wife to sacrifice some animal fat, and she, misunderstanding his instructions, eats it; as a result, Asdiwal is turned to stone. I do not claim, in so short a synopsis, to have covered all the salient points of the myth in all its variations; for what it’s worth, neither does Lévi-Strauss. There is a whole branch of the myth devoted to Asdiwal’s son’s adventures, which has many parallels with his father’s story. Still, I cannot see what, in the myth, or in the Timshian culture which produced it, suggests the interpretation “. . . all the women . . .” in the tale are natural forces. The bird-man, the bear-woman, her father the sun, as well as various seal-men and mouse-women, may well represent natural forces. But to restrict this unilaterally to the women seems to be nothing but a projection of part of our own society’s rather warped sexist context. I have no idea if the society of the Timshian Indians who produced this myth is as sexist as modern Western society, less sexist, or more so. I might have made an educated guess from the myth itself. But even Malinowski’s original reports, taken several times over several years, here and there resort to synopsis, at noticeably more places where women are the agents of the action than where men are. And I can certainly get no idea from the final critical model Lévi-Strauss constructs: a binary grid of repeated, symmetrical patterns, high/low, upstream/dow- stream, mountain/water, etc. By dissolving any possibility of male/female symmetiicality with the asymmetrical men = human/women = forces, he makes it impossible to judge (nor does he try to judge in his final model) any such symmetricalities that do exist in the myth—i.e., I think everyone, from the parts recounted, can see a symmetricality between Asdiwal’s mother’s marriage with the bird-man who brings plenty and Asdiwal’s with the bear-woman who brings good times in the sky. Just how im
portant this symmetricality is in terms of Timshian society, I have no way of knowing. My point is, neither does Lévi-Strauss—if he is going to impose the artificial asymmetricalities of our culture on others. Lévi-Strauss’s avowed point in the essay is merely to show that there is some order in the myth; and this he succeeds in. But has anyone ever seriously maintained that any society has produced myths with no order at all? And it is implicit in his approach to show as much order as possible in the myth and then show how it reflects or is reflected by, and lent meaning and value by (and lends meaning and value to), the social context it exists in. There are certainly plenty of asymmetrical elements in both situations (as there are in all of the elements that he pairs as symmetrical), i.e., one marriage produces a child, the other doesn’t; one involves inlaws, the other doesn’t. But Lévi-Strauss’s sexist context puts the whole topic beyond discussion.
Another example: During Lévi-Strauss’s conversations with Char- bonnier, Charbonnier asks Lévi-Strauss if sometimes an anthropologist does not identify so much that he biases his observations in ways not even he is aware of. Lévi-Strauss counters with an anecdote of a United States anthropologist who recounted to Lévi-Strauss that he felt much more at home working with one Amerind tribe than another. In one tribe, this man reported, if a wife is unfaithful to her husband, the husband cuts off her nose. In the other, if a wife is unfaithful to her husband, the husband goes to sit in the central square, bemoans his fate loudly to all who pass by, calls down imprecations from the gods to destroy the world that has brought things to this dreadful impasse, then curses the gods themselves for having allowed the world to become such a terrible place. He then gets up and returns to his wife, presumably much relieved, and life continues on. The second tribe, the American said, filled him with a sense of revulsion: Trying to “destroy the world, or the whole universe, for a personal injury” struck him as, somehow, “immoral.” He preferred working with the former tribe because their responses somehow seemed much “more human.” Now I have no idea whether either tribe was particularly sexist or not. Presumably if the women of the first tribe cut off the noses of their unfaithful husbands, whereas we might call them violent, we could not call them sexist. I do know enough of the social context of America to be sure that if this were the case, our United States anthropologist would have felt nowhere as “at home” with them as he did. And in terms of any of the tribes involved, including my own U.S. of A., I don’t think I would trust this man to give an objective report on sexuality, sexual politics, morality, or humanity, as conceived subjectively, in terms of their own culture, by any of the three. In the context of the conversation, however, Lévi-Strauss uses the anecdote to point out, as politely as possible, that Charbonnier’s question is mildly impertinent and that somehow this man is more equipped to be objective about the tribe he identifies with most than anyone else.
Somewhere, in the sciences, especially the human ones, we have to commit ourselves to objectivity. And, especially in the human ones, objectivity cannot be the same as disinterest. It must be a whole galaxy of attractions and repulsions, approvals and disapprovals, curiosities and disinterests, deployed in a context of self-critical checks and balances which, itself, must constantly be criticized as an abstract form capable of holding all these elements, and as specific elemental configurations. (Indeed, “objectivity” may well be the wrong word for it.) One of my commitments is that self-critical models are desirable things. I would even submit that cultures, be they Amerind or European or African or Indian or Chinese, are civilized to the extent that they possess them. Now “civilization” is only a small part of “culture.” Culture, in all its variety, is a desirable thing because, among other things, it provides a variety of material from which self-critical models can be made. Lévi-Strauss himself has pointed out that one purpose of anthropology is to provide a model with which to criticize our own culture. But an anthropological model that only provides a way of seeing how other cultures are structurally similar to ours but literally erases all evidence pertaining to their differences, doesn’t, in the long run, strike me as anthropologically very useful.
If other cultures are to teach us anything, and we are not merely to use them as Existential Others that, willy nilly, only prove our own prejudices either about them or ourselves, interpretative models that erase data about their real differences from us must be shunned.
My third example:
Some months ago, Edmund Leach, one of the major commentators on Lévi-Strauss, who has criticized many of Lévi-Strauss’s findings and has also praised many of his methods, spent a lecture urging the rein-stitution of segregation between the sexes in Western universities. He proposed doing it in a humane way: “Women might be restricted to the study of medicine and architecture. Men would not be allowed to study these.” Man’s providence, apparently, is to be everything else. He claimed to be aware that such segregation in the past had had its exploitative side. But he felt we should seriously look at primitive cultures with strict separation of the sexes in work and play for models of a reasonable solution to contemporary stresses.
My response to something like this is violent, unreasonable, and I stick by it: Then, for sanity’s sake, restrict the study of anthropology to women too. It just might prevent such loathesome drivel!
Reasonably, all I can say is that modern anthropology takes place in such a pervading context of sexism that even minds as demonstrably brilliant as Lévi-Strauss’s and Edmund Leach’s have not escaped it. And that is a tragic indictment.
33. Confessions of a science-fiction writer: I have never read a whole novel by Philip K. Dick. And I have only been able to read three short stories by Brian Aldiss (and one I didn’t read; I listened to) end to end. (I did read most of Report on Probability A.) On several separate occasions, I have bought some dozen books by each of them, piled them on my desk, and sat down with the prime intent of familiarizing myself with a substantial portion of their oeuvres.
It would be silly to offer this as the vaguest criticism of either Dick or Aldiss. It’s merely an indication of idiosyncracies in my own interpretative context as far as reading goes.
At any rate, the prospect of Dick’s and Aldiss’s work is pleasant to contemplate. It is something I will simply have to grow into, as I grew into Stendahl and Auden, John Buscema and Joe Kubert, Robert Bresson and Stan Brackhage.
I’m making this note at a solitary lunch in a Camden Town Green Restaurant. From the cassette recorder on the counter, Marinella, echoed by the chorus, asks plaintively again and again: “Pou paome? Pou paome?” Interesting that the question of our times emerges in so many languages, in so many media.
34. In the Glotolog foothills resides a highly refined culture much given to philosophical speculation.
Some facts about its language:
is the written sign for a word that translates, roughly, as “a light source.”
is the sign for a word that translates, roughly, as “rain.”
is the sign for a word that translates, very roughly, as “I see.” , , are roughly [and respectively], “you see,” “he sees,” and “she sees.”) But I must repeat “roughly” so frequently because there are no real verbs in the Glotolog language in the English sense.
The relationship that various forms of have to other Glotolog terms is modificational. In traditional Glotolog grammars (which are all written, traditionally, in English—in much the same way that traditional Latin grammars were written in Greek) they are called adjectives. “ ” is a common (and grammatically correct) Glotolog sentence—given the weather, it is one of the most common Glotolog sentences, especially in the north. It would be used in just about any situation where an English speaker would say, “It’s raining,” although there are some marked differences. “ ” would also be used when you mean, literally, “I see the rain.” This is perhaps the place to make the point (made so clearly in chapter three of most standard Glotolog grammars), always takes , and usually the is placed before it. The logi
c here is very simple: You can’t see anything without a light source, and in Glotolog this situation is mirrored in the words; without a is simply considered grammatically incorrect. (, however, does not take , but that is another subject.) Obvious here, and borne out by dictionaries, Glotolog grammar assigns two distinct meanings to (but not, however, to , or ): both “I see” and “There is . . .” (i.e., “It might be seen by me . . .”). Although this double meaning is the source of many traditional children’s jokes (heard often during the winter when the clouds blot the sun), in practice it presents little confusion. If I were to come into a Glotolog monastery, with the oil lamps in the windowless foreroom gleaming on “. . . my traditional okapi jerkin where the raindrops still stand high” (my translation from a traditional Glotolog poem; alas, it doesn’t really work in English) and say, stamping my Italian imported boots (the Glotologs are mad for foreign imports and often put them to bizarre uses; I have seen red plastic garbage pails used as hanging flower planters in even the strictest religious retreats—though the Glotolog’s own painted ceramic ones seem, to my foreign tastes, so much prettier) “ ,” it would be obvious to all (even to those frequent, aging, Glotologian religious mystics who have forgotten all their formal grammar—if, indeed, they ever studied it; formal language training is an old discipline among the Glotolog, but it is a widespread one only in recent years, well after the formal education of these venerable ancients was long since past) that I am speaking in what is called, by the grammars, the assumptive voice. The logic here is that the words, when used in the assumptive voice, are to be taken in the sense: “It is assumed that if [i.e., that if there were a light source and if I were there, seeing by it], then it would reflect off and I would see it. . . even though I am now inside the monastery and, since my entrance, the world may have fallen into total and unexpected night. In other worlds, the use of as “there is . . .” is not quite the same as in English. You use for “I see . . .” only when what there is is within sight. Otherwise, though you actually say the same word, i.e., , you are using the assumptive voice. In old Glotolog texts, the assumptive voice was actually indicated by what is called, in that final appendix to most standard Glotolog grammars on outmoded traditions, a metaphoric dot, which was placed over the and the . When speaking in the assumptive voice, and were said to be in the metaphoric mood. No dot, however, in a sentence like “ ” would be placed over . The logic here is that, in the assumptive voice, one of the things assumed is that the rain, at any rate, is real.
Longer Views: Extended Essays Page 43
