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

CYBERNETICS

subjectivity of the world, its subjectivation, should be understood in non-idealistic terms: it has real ramifications.

The complexity of ecosystems, moreover, may be enormous; always in states of dialectical oscillation, often characterized by multiple levels and circuits of oscillation between as well as within levels, usually containing contradictions, needful of reflexive homeostatic monitoring yet sometimes giving rise to cycles of escalation, the passing of thresholds, and the onset of ‘runaway’ and system disintegration. Little wonder that from the Ancient Greek ‘Eco’ to the modern ‘Gaia’, its apprehension has been seen as a matter of divine mystery. But in fact there is no mystery, only beauty: patterns which map onto patterns which map onto patterns; patterns which connect. If there is something here which pertains to the ‘sacred’, then it is that the appropriate world-view is characteristic of those which preceded the Enlightenment, and eschews those dualisms which have plagued Western philosophy since—distinguishing humanity from nature, life from death, subject from object. What is necessary for ecological maintenance are correct ideas about ecosystems: namely, an apprehension of their systematization, of the recursive (meta-)patterns which connect all into a unified biosphere.

Anthropological applications

The influence of the above thinking has been enormously widespread, even if its attribution has remained implicit. R.D.Laing’s famous theory of the ‘divided self’ (1976), on the mutual constitutionality of separateness and relatedness, and the alienation and madness that can ensue from being unable to integrate into the self others’ paradoxical, logically incongruent and conflicting messages, owes much to Bateson’s ideas on schizophrenia as a communicational ‘double bind’ (1974). Goffman’s work, meanwhile, on how social structure and reality are maintained via a process of socially sanctioned, situational ‘encounters’, or ‘situated activity system[s]’ (1972:85) has a distinct cybernetic ring; that obligations are fulfilled and expectations realized is a matter, Goffman concludes, of people jointly participating in ‘closed, self-compensating, self-terminating concrete circuits of interdependent actions’.

Equally, there are cybernetic overtones in structuraliste notions of societies as systems of communication by which cultural messages of a binary kind are ever in the process of being conveyed. Indeed, LéviStrauss can be said to have adapted the cybernetic work which underlay the advances in computer science—computers as reflexive ‘thinking systems’—in his exploring of the coded combination and recombination

113

CYBERNETICS

of communicational units that went to make up socio-cultural phenomena as diverse as mythologies, economic exchanges and kinship terms (1963, 1969a).

Strathern (1990a), meanwhile, employs the science-fiction figure of the ‘cyborg’—part-human, part-machine; part-body, part-tool; part-self, part-other (the Six Million Dollar Man, the Cybermen, Robocop)—in order to overcome the false mathematics of seeing entities either as a series of discrete atoms or as parts of a monolithic, static whole. What is crucial is our appreciation of ‘the relation’ (cf. Strathern 1995); and how the nature of things in the world is an effect elicited by the ongoing (circuiting) reciprocal relationship between partners at a particular point in time and space.

Paine (1976) marries Bateson to a more transactionalist approach to social exchange by exploring how communicational circuits can be strategically managed and become political resources.As communication is wont to involve messages on more than one logical level—messages and also tailored information on how to interpret or decode the message—the so-called factual nature of human worlds is always entwined with matters of mediation, evaluation, rhetoric and power. It becomes impossible to differentiate between pure ‘information’ and socially intelligible ‘communication’, and truth becomes a matter of conviction.

Taking a more ecological perspective is the work of Rappaport (1968), for whom culture as a whole can be understood as a cybernetic system for regulating relations between people and their environment. Thus, the periodic cycles of ritualized warfare and peace among the Tsembaga of New Guinea, for instance, represent a strategy for the perpetuation of balanced, systemic relations between people, pigs and such natural resources as cultivatable land and wildlife. Or again, for Harries-Jones (1991), a cybernetic appreciation is necessary for negotiating our way out of an increasingly schismogenetic ecological predicament. Only ‘a recursive vision’ which points up how interpretations have consequences, continually entering into, becoming entangled with, and re-entering the universe they describe, provides such insights as are necessary for the survival of our human species-plus- natural environment.

Finally, Ingold (1992) adapts a Batesonian (-cum-Heideggerian) appreciation of our embeddedness in the world to give fresh understanding to human technological competency. It is a mistake, he argues, to abstract and objectify the techniques we use in relating to the world—to make an object out of our making of objects and relations. For what the Greek word techne should alert us to is the artistry, the expressiveness and the aestheticism inherent in crafting a world, and the

114

DIALOGICS AND ANALOGICS

bodily skills of practising within it.A ‘technologist’, then, is not someone who mechanically applies an objective system of rational principles and rules, but more properly a being wholly immersed in the rational nexus of an instrumental coping-in-the-world.

See also: Code, Consciousness

DIALOGICS AND ANALOGICS

The Dialogic Imagination was the title given to a highly influential collection of posthumously published articles written by the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1981). Anthropologists have borrowed the term ‘dialogic’, and set it against the term ‘analogic’, so as to convey a certain understanding of the way language is used, knowledge is accrued, and ethnographic data is represented.

Mikhail Bakhtin

In The Dialogic Imagination Bakhtin made a number of salient points. Only as an abstract grammar could a language be conceived of as a unitary whole. In the concrete it was inexorably ‘heteroglot’: an intersection and an expression of a multiplicity of different social, ideological, occupational groups and individuals, past and present, all coexisting as speakers of a language. Contra Saussure’s notion that the meaning of words in use is fixed by their relationship to others in a singular matrix as defined by an abstract system, la langue, Bakhtin appreciated that meaning is contextual and contested; it is open to continual redefinition within the meetings between different social classes, status groups and individuals. All words become assimilated to the specificities of their users’ conceptual systems, worlds of objects and emotional expressions.Words came to have ‘the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour’, being constantly enriched by new elements and shot through with the intentions, contexts and contents by which they ‘lived [their] socially charged life’ (1981:293).

This also meant that the ownership of words was contested, with some words resisting appropriation and use as the property of one group of speakers because of its close association with (even over-population by) the accents of others. What this came down to was language’s ‘dialogic’ nature, its betweenness and emergent quality. Language lay on

115

DIALOGICS AND ANALOGICS

the borderline between self and other, between speaker and audience, between past and present; also between centripetal and centrifugal forces. As a living thing, an instrument of contradictory ideologies, world-views, belief systems and histories, a language and every utterance within it was party to two tense, battling tendencies: the expression of an abstract unitary whole of denotational forms, and the expression of a heteroglossia of contextual, contested connotations. And what was true of the form was true of the content: what was known through language was equally dialogic and heteroglot.

When it came to representing sociolinguistic reality in a written text, moreover, Bakhtin also advocated dialogism (1984), à la Dostoevsky, say, and his attempts to capture the polyphonic interplay of characters engaged through an incoherent multiplicity of discourses, in preference to (a Tolstoyan) monologism, and the subordination of a diversity of characters’ voices to the single viewpoint of the author. By making the ground of scriptural style dialogic and diverse, one captured the truly open-ended, indeterminate, playful (‘carnivalesque’), interactive and perspectival nature of social life.

Anthropological dialogism

An early anthropological borrower from Bakhtin was Dennis Tedlock (1979, 1983). Anthropological knowledge exists in a contact zone on the frontier between an anthropologist and his or her informant, Tedlock asserts (cf. Hastrup 1995b:2–5). This betweenness is the world of dialogue; it is through the performance of dialogue that anthropologist and informant negotiate grounds of their meeting. The knowledge that emerges from their conversation is something new to both of them: a shared world or a shared understanding of the differences between their two worlds.

In accounting for anthropological knowledge, therefore, it is important to provide an account of its dialogic coming-into-being. And yet, traditionally, this has rarely been done. Not one native speaks in LéviStrauss’s concoction of South American myths, while the transformations in which he indulges makes them unrecognizably exogenous. Even Geertz’s claims to present field conversations are metaphoric, collectivized and generalized. Instead of dialogics, traditional anthropology has practised ‘analogies’. It has treated others in a closed, presumptive way, attempting to understand them via a priori reasoning; instead of having knowledge emerge from local dialogue, traditional anthropology employed extraneous analogies which derived from its own system of rationality. It then presented its data in a monologic, so-called objectivist fashion.

116

DISCOURSE

Taking this critique further, James Clifford (1988:39–46) has reviewed the new paradigms of dialogue, collaboration and polyphony which have arisen of late (cf. Rabinow 1977; Dumont 1978; Crapanzano 1980; Dwyer 1982); these should be seen as attempts to retain in the anthropological text the process of dialogue from which a (shared) understanding of ethnographic reality derives. Discourse in the field is shot through with multiple subjectivities in specific contexts, and meaning derives from intersubjective interlocution, and yet anthropological texts have a tendency to become monovocal and decontextualized, Clifford argues. Field events and experiences become patterned, simplified narratives, separated from their discursive occasions of production and, seemingly, not in need of being understood as the communication of specific persons.The narratives become evidence, rather, of a new englobing and integrating, generalizing and totalizing, context called ‘cultural reality’. With ambiguities and diversities airbrushed out, the dialogic and situational features of the field encounter are allocated only exemplary topoi (at best) in the textual account.

To open up this textualized fabric of anthropologist and informant, to displace, even if not wholly eliminate, the former’s monologic authority, is to recognize the contemporary heteroglossia of socio-cultural milieux. We are now all part of a world of ‘generalized ethnography’, an ambiguous, multivocal world in which everyone interprets everyone else in a bewildering diversity of idioms (Clifford 1988:23). Language becomes an interplay and struggle of dialects, argots, and individual speaker—hearers, while culture becomes ‘an open-ended creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions’ (1988:46). Language and culture are revealed as non-homogeneous and non-integrated wholes.

See also: Code, Literariness, Movement, Situation and Context

DISCOURSE

‘Discourse’, at its broadest, can be understood to mean ways of speaking which are commonly practised and specifically situated in a social environment: ‘speech in habitual situations of social exchange’. The significant elements contained in this definition are regularity, conventionality, propriety, diversity and context. The philosophical term to which discourse most closely approximates is probably Wittgenstein’s notion of the ‘language-game’ (1978); here is a type of speech-making,

117