Printculture : Metaphor Man

Metaphor Man

by H Saussy | May 28, 2009 | Culture

I sat down the other evening to read some old articles by Gregory Bateson with some friends: a couple of psychiatrists, a philosopher, an anthropologist, and a large Newfoundland dog. (The science journalist was the person we really needed, but she was doing something else.) We get together periodically to eat pizza and kick around a book that isn't precisely in any of our fields, to find out what we all think about it. This reading, from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1971), had been proposed by me, because I find something dangerously attractive in Bateson's way of mixing up the disciplines, and I have noticed that most other people are immune to the charm. I thought this group might help me figure out why.

Noteworthy: the difference between the new edition on good paper with a handsome cover and a grown-up preface and my 1971 paperback, promising on the cover “A Valuable Document of Inner Space” and starting off with a preface by one Mark Engel that observed, inter alia, “The psychedelics are a powerful educational tool.” (And I thought it didn't get better than overhead projectors!) This wasn't the only thing that made us feel that the world had spun on its axis a few times since this book was first published. The delightful or infuriating thing about Bateson is that he was an immensely curious guy who couldn't stop taking models or methods from one domain of knowledge and applying them in other domains-- or in the wrong domain, if you happened to be a denizen of that cubbyhole. He grew up in a naturalist's family, trained as an anthropologist, was interested in Russell's paradox and set theory, and was a member of the great interdisciplinary tag teams assembled under wartime conditions, when the need for speeded-up advances in cryptography, automatic gunnery, and ethnographically-informed intelligence (i.e., theories of the enemy) brought us information theory, systems theory, cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, cognitive science, the theory of games, and the first computers. Bateson was in the middle of it all, not originating a lot of theory but making very novel applications of the things he heard. He was a seeker after big ideas, drawn by an admiration for models whose generality was such that they could be thought to unify disparate fields. He had a hospitable mind, got along with dolphins and was a natural for the sixties role of guru. (For a return to gurudom and the Big Sur of 1968, you can't do better than to check out the Batesonian II Cybernetic Frontiers by Stewart Brand, yes, him of the Whole Earth Catalog.)

After sixty years, the fields have moved on and the place where there was once a vital contact is now marked only by a ring of stones and some campfire ash. My psychiatrist friends didn't see much to applaud in the Bateson account of schizophrenia as a logical double bind, for example (“brilliant idea, but wrong” said one; “not as bad as Bettelheim, but still” said the other). The philosopher said it took him back to the days when he decided he wasn't interested in Russell or the theory of logical types (“and that's why you had to grow a beard,” said somebody; laughter was delayed and spotty). The anthropologist was leery of the wish to turn the observed detail into an example of cosmic significance, because that's not how ethnographers see their mission any more. As a group, the Gregory Bateson Fan Club we were not.

What accounts for the charm, then, that I seem to be one of the few to feel? To use a Bateson-ish word, metaphor. The guy's habit of flitting among disciplines gives him an inbuilt commitment to analogy. Every metaphor, whatever it says, implies a further optimistic claim about the making of metaphorical connections among the disciplines, whispers to us that there is a larger system of correspondences, if only we know how to discover it. And Bateson had the gift of devising metaphors that are vividly concrete and abstractly suggestive, and have many little hooks and crannies in them that you could rewardingly explore for sub-analogies. I know that my own predilection for such metaphors-- and probably, too, what small knack for crafting them I have-- can be seen as a weakness. One should knuckle down to a specialty and do intensive work only in its domain and on its terms, says Max Weber, if one is to make results that will last; and an analogy that speaks to the imagination may be only as good as the imagination is, therefore not qualified to ascend to the peaks where the air is thinner and the denotations more strictly denotative. Metaphor man is stuck in the middle, in the middle of mediation, and central only for a moment, until traffic reroutes around him.

Cautionary tale, I guess. And yet, what figures old Bateson could come up with. Here's one-- just one-- from a book abounding in them. I hope it will send you back to decide for yourself if the man is a genius of mediation or an insufferable mixer-upper of things best left plain.

I have remarked (e.g., when discussing the phenomena of phenotypic compensation) that in hierarchies of logical typing there is often some sort of change of sign at each level... This appears in a simple diagrammatic form in the initiatory hierarchy which I studied in a New Guinea tribe [see Bateson, Naven, 1936 and 1958]. The initiators are the natural enemies of the novices, because it is their task to bully the novices into shape. The men who initiated the present initiators now have a role of criticizing what is now being done in the initiation ceremonies, and this makes them the natural allies of the present novices....
I think that the functioning of such hierarchies may be compared with the business of trying to back a truck to which one or more trailers are attached. Each segmentation of such a system denotes a reversal of sign, and each added segment denotes a drastic decrease in the amount of control that can be exerted by the driver of the truck. If the system is parallel to the right-hand side of the road, and he wants the trailer immediately behind him to approach the right-hand side, he must turn his front wheels to the left. This will guide the rear of the truck away from the right-hand side of the road so that the front of the trailer is pulled over to its left. This will now cause the rear of the trailer to point toward the right. And so on.
As anybody who has attempted this will know, the amount of available control falls off rapidly. To back a truck with one trailer is already difficult because there is only a limited range of angles within which the control can be exerted. If the trailer is in line, or almost in line, with the truck, the control is easy, but as the angle between trailer and truck diminishes, a point is reached at which control is lost and the attempt to exert it only results in jackknifing of the system. When we consider the problem of controlling a second trailer, the threshold for jackknifing is drastically reduced and control becomes, therefore, almost negligible.
As I see it, the world is made up of a very complex network (rather than a chain) of entities which have this sort of relationship to each other, but with this difference, that many of the entities have their own supplies of energy and perhaps even their own ideas of where they would like to go.

Now that is a tremendous metaphor. It doesn't just establish, with a wink and a smile, the possible validity of metaphors in general, but also suggests that the relation of tenor and vehicle may be like that of truck and trailer (or trailer and trailer, and trailer, and trailer...). A friend of mine once told me, whenever he tried to conceive of Absolute Spirit he thought of making puff pastry (where you fold a sheet of dough around a pat of butter over and over until there are 1072 different layers). From now on, I'm afraid I will see a backing convoy of trailers and a tall, white-haired Englishman muttering behind the wheel in the cab of the truck.