Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

CONSCIOUSNESS

Nevertheless, such definition should not be allowed to gloss the diversity of opposing hypotheses and conclusions concerning the nature of consciousness. For the sake of convenience, contemporary explanations of consciousness (whether empirical or philosophical) might conveniently be plotted as a continuum. At one pole is found a ‘closed’ view of consciousness which sees nothing that is not ultimately reducible to materialist explanation: to a physical theory of mind in an objective world. At the opposite pole is found an ‘open’ view which emphasizes the unconfined scope of the imagination and the potential infinity of linguistic expression, and concludes that there is a unique subjective quality to conscious experience which transcends a purely objective accounting (cf. Cornwell 1994:10/4–10/ 6). Traversing the continuum, a sample of such studies might include the following:

1Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis. The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994): conscious awareness, sentience, feeling and intellectualization derive from the assembly of nerve cells in the brain, their networks and oscillation (at 40 hertz). Neurons fire and consciousness results; humans are no more than the sum of their molecules.

2Hans Moravec, Mind Children (1988), or Colin Blakemore, The Mind Machine (1988): the brain amounts to an evolved, biologically programmed computer which gives merely the impression of free will. There is no substance to the ‘mind’ and it should simply be

identified with some of the faculties, states and activities of the body.

3Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (1989): mechanical computation could not possibly propagate consciousness. But the latter could be an outcome of microcosmic physics: the effect of quantum gravity in the brain.

4Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991): the brain is an ‘anticipation machine’, working on a principle of ‘parallel distributed processing’. Consciousness is an illusion, a series of shifting ‘multiple drafts’ with no ‘centre of narrative gravity’ and no continuity.There is no Cartesian theatre where ‘I am’ comes together; moreover, the qualia of experience, the way things seem, are far from ineffable or merely subjective.

5Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (1992): consciousness is an intractable problem which Dennett (et al.) explain away rather

than explain. Accounting for the presence of consciousness in a world of physical objects and processes, understanding the self, free will, meaning and knowledge, simply transcends our natural powers; it is

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too great a problem for human intellect ever to surmount. Or Patricia Churchland, ‘Can Neurobiology Teach us Anything about Consciousness?’ (1994): despite the spectacular advances in neuroscience made this century, and even if we eschew the mind—body dualism, how human consciousness emerges from networks of neurons yet escapes scientific understanding.

6John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992): to insist on treating ‘objectively observable phenomena’ alone is to ignore the mind’s essential features. Hence, while we might accept that both consciousness and intentionality are biological processes of the brain, we need not accept a materialist orthodoxy which would either eliminate consciousness—because it is observer-relative, or because it is really something else (language, environment)—or else reduce it to something more basic (such as computation). Rather, we must insist that consciousness and intentionality are both intrinsic and ineliminable. We all have inner subjective qualitative states of consciousness; we all have beliefs, desires, intentions, perceptions et al. which are intrinsically mental.

7Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992): to reduce a theory of an individual’s behaviour to a theory of molecular interactions is simply silly. The way the brain develops and works (before as well as after birth) is more like an object undergoing natural selection in an ecological habitat than a computational system, hence the ceaseless novelty, creativity and change of our mental processes. Consciousness is a habitat ultimately beyond the physical, and science will never ultimately explain the human individual.

8David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996): consciousness arises from the mind but is intrinsically beyond the material facts of the world. The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, what it feels like for an individual to be looking out at the world from the inside, is beyond the ken of science.

9John Eccles, How the Self Controls Its Brain (1994): a purely materialist explanation for consciousness is by no means inevitable; some form of dualism is inevitable. For, through language, consciousness transcends its own biological bases, becoming conscious of the latter and even exerting some control over them. As ‘mind’, dead matter is transcended.

Given the importance of consciousness, and the diversity of competing claims concerning its nature, one might expect anthropology to have been insistent long ago on making its own contribution. And for this to have been welcomed. For, as historian of science, Roy Porter, recently

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concludes: the hard sciences still tell us far less about the aspects of the ‘soul’ (the self, personality, individual identity) that really matter—about the details of the subjective nature of consciousness, and about ‘the stupendously complex dialectical interplay of subjectivity, self and society’—than those first-hand observations of the ‘moral narratives’ by which meaningful lives are lived (1994:7).

Conventionally, however, as has been explained, après Durkheim, the anthropological appreciation of the problem of consciousness has been somewhat narrow. Even in the work of Clifford Geertz, responsible for an interpretive anthropology which recognized that the conscious imposition of meaning on life was the major end and primary condition of human existence, and that ‘becoming human was becoming individual’ (1973:52), still consciousness is seen solely as a collective phenomenon which pertains to the culture or the social group. For Geertz postulates that we become individual only in the context of ‘cultural patterns’: under the guidance of historically created systems of meaning ‘in terms of which we give form, order, point and direction to our lives’ (ibid.). Even though individuals are ever making interpretations, these are determined by the systems of significant symbols and particular cultural contexts in terms of which they are expressed. In this way, Geertz claims human thought to be ‘out in the world’; it represents merely an ‘intentional manipulation of cultural forms’, of systems of symbols of collective possession, public authority and social exchange (1983:151). Moreover, such thought is publicly enacted: tied to concrete social events and occasions, and expressive of a common social world. In short, giving meaning to behaviour is not something which happens in private, in insular individual heads, but rather something dependent on an exchange of common symbols whose ‘natural habitat is the house yard, the market place, and the town square’ (1973:45). The symbolic logic and the formal conceptual structuring of this thought may not always be explicit, but they are socially established, sustained and legitimized. Cognition, imagination, emotion, motivation, perception, memory and so on, are thus directly social affairs, while outdoor activities such as ploughing or peddling are as good examples of ‘thought’ as are closet experiences such as wishing or regretting.

In Geertz’s adumbrating of ‘an outdoor psychology’ (1983:151), then, culture (as systems of historically transmitted symbols) is constitutive of mind, while individual experience and memory of the social world are both powerfully structured by deeply internalized cultural conceptions, and supported by cultural institutions; life in society entails a public traffic in significant cultural symbols. Geertz concludes that the webs of significance we weave, the meanings we live by, achieve a form and

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actualization only in a public and communal way. There can be no private (individual, unique) symbolizations for mind is ‘transactional’: formed and realized only through participation in cultures’ symbolic systems of interpretation. Furthermore, different ‘individual’ minds within the culture are neither opaque nor impenetrable to one another, for they think in terms of the same shared beliefs and values, and operate the same interpretive procedures for adjudicating reality. To construe a system of cultural symbols, in sum, is to accrue its individual members’ subjectivities.

In this way, Geertz‘s interpretive anthropology may be aligned with preceding anthropological approaches to consciousness. In Durkheimian (or Saussurean) terms, individual interpretation is prefigured by a set of collective representations, while individual consciousness as such is a manifestation—temporary, episodic and epiphenomenal—of a collective conscience; the particularities of conscious individual expression (or parole) simply depend and derive from an enabling collective language (or langue).

Consciousness as movement

It is the ‘terrifying feature’ of studying consciousness, as Searle has put it (1992:16), that the ontology of mental states is a first-person phenomenon while the epistemology and methodology is third-person. It seems that we know what consciousness is for ourselves—our consciousness is ineluctably ours, however all-encompassing, diaphanous, momentary, multiple and impossible to circumscribe it also seems—but we can judge its existence in others only by inference. As we have seen, Geertz’s ‘outdoor psychology’ obviates this problem of knowing other minds by regarding ‘minds’ as consisting of nothing more than publicly exchanged symbols. Notwithstanding, other methodologies do suggest themselves by which consciousness can be treated more humanistically and individually and still be approached ethnographically. These centre on notions of movement: on the movement of consciousness, and on consciousness as movement.

A good place to begin is with William James’s (1961 [1892]) conclusion that consciousness is not so much a substance as a process, continuous and yet always changing. In existentialist writing of later periods, too, there has been an appreciation that individual consciousness is a matter of an ongoing (and never completed) project. The process of consciousness, in short, entails the continuous ‘writing’, rewriting, erasing and developing of a narrative of being and identity. The individual continually defines and composes the story of his or her life,

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and it is in the composing and in the telling (to themselves and to others) that consciousness arises and dwells. Consciousness comes to know itself in and through the movement between different points of view in time and space. Moreover, this involves directedness or intention: relating consciousness to itself and to otherness for the purpose of coming to know it, and be it, in relation to others. Consciousness is thus both innerand outer-directed; it possesses ‘open closure’, in Ong’s words (1977:338). Moreover, being a process of becoming, something which attains to knowledge via cognitive movement between ‘itself and what is ‘other’, consciousness offers at least potential access from outside; as a narration of otherness, consciousness is more observable than if it were an unchanging substance or thing.

An early anthropological appreciation of this relationship between consciousness and movement is to be found in the work of Gregory Bateson (1951, 1972). The human brain, Bateson begins, thinks and knows in terms of relationships: all knowledge of external events is derived from the relationship between them (1951:173). Indeed, things and events are epiphenomena of the relationships which the brain conceives between them. Moreover, to conceive relationships (and so create things) is to move or cause to move things relative to the point of perception (the brain) or relative to other things within the field of perception; subject and object, perceiver and perceived are thus intrinsically connected. Movement is fundamental to the setting up and the changing of relations by which things gain and maintain and continue to accrue thingness. And since one of the ‘things’ that thus comes to exist as an identifiable thing is ‘oneself (the perceiving brain as objectified ‘out there’), movement is also fundamental to the thingness, the identity, of the self.

There are a number of implications of these conclusions. The first is that the things which derive from cognitive movement in this way— differences, relations and things—are material and immaterial alike. Ponds, pots and poems, are all the outcome of engineering movement relative to a point of perception; to cause to move relative to a point of perception is to construct an ambient environment that is both ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’. All experiential phenomena in human life are, thus, ‘appearances’, that which is perceived to be.

A second implication is precisely that the mind is ‘individual’ in its constructing. Bateson describes the individual as an ‘energy source’ (1972:126), responsible for the movements which underlie the perception of difference, as well as the point of perception per se, and thus responsible too for energizing the events in the world; it is not that the mind is merely being impacted upon by environmental triggers.

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