The Reenchantment of the World (34 page)

and
as an item within that class. The class
is being forced to be a member of itself, but since this situation is
not allowable according to the formal rules of logic and mathematics,
a paradox is generated. The statement itself is being taken as a premise
for evaluating its own truth or falsehood, and thus two different levels
of abstraction, or logical types, are being scrambled.

 

 

Now the truth is that neither human nor mammalian communication conforms
to the logic of "Principia Mathematica." In fact, all meaningful
communication necessarily involves metacommunication -- communication
about communication -- and is therefore constantly generating paradoxes
of the Russellian type. Let us take human communication first. Suppose
I announce to you, just as we embark on some particular action or
conversation, "This is play." The message I am conveying is, "Do not
take the following seriously." What does the phrase really mean? "This
is play," says Bateson, can be translated into the statement: "These
actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions
for
which they stand
would denote"; or, since "stand" and "denote"
mean the same thing here, the translation can be rendered: "These actions,
in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those
actions which these actions denote." If I give my lover a playful nip,
the nip denotes a bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted
by an actual bite. It is not an act of aggression, and I express this
by using the act to comment negatively on itself. But neither this
behavior, nor the statement "This is play," are allowable in formal
logic. The "translated" sentence is a good example of the Liars Paradox:
the word "denote" is being used in two degrees of abstraction, which are
incorrectly treated as though they were on the same logical level (one is
allowed to contradict the other). Both the nip, and the statement "This is
play," set up a frame which is then allowed to comment on its own content.

 

 

This discussion returns us to the Fleishhacker Zoo, and the question
of what we can learn from monkeys. Metacommunicative messages are
logically inadmissable, because they are frames that comment on their own
content. This point is clear enough in the case of a verbal statement,
such as "This is play," and in fact we are constantly checking the frame
of reference in ordinary discourse: "What are you really saying?" "Do
you mean that?" "You've
got
to be kidding!" and so on. But, says
Bateson, although we are capable, unlike monkeys, of spoken or written
metacommunication, we are like them in the following crucial sense:
the vast majority of metamessages remain implicit. "I love you," I say
absentmindedly to my lover who just walked into the room in search of my
attention or affection, while my body language and tone of voice say,
"Leave me alone so I can finish writing my chapter on Bateson." As for
our mammalian cousins, they are limited by the lack of language such that
they can refuse or reject an action, but not negate or deny it. Two dogs
meet, and neither wishes to fight. They are unable to say, "Let's not
fight." Being friendly does not solve the problem either, because it is a
positive statement that omits any "discussion" of fighting, rather than
specifically deciding against it. So the dogs bare their fangs, stage a
mock brawl, and then stop. The message exchanged: the nip is not the bite,
or "These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote . . ., etc." Play
is a phenomenon in which actions of play denote other actions of not-play;
and like dogs or monkeys, we exchange such messages all the time. In
fact, says Bateson, on the human level we have evolved some very complex
games based on a deliberate confusion of map and territory. Catholics
say that the wafer is the body of Christ, a sacrament. Protestants say
it is
like
the body of Christ, a metaphor. Millions have been
killed in war, tortured or burned to death over just this issue,
and millions
continue to die for this or that flag -- bits of cloth which are much
more than metaphors in the eyes of the soldiers who march under them.

 

 

Here, then, is the similarity between animal communication and primary
process. Like dreams and fantasy, play deals (though not exclusively)
with 'relata' rather than content. The significant message in any dream
lies in the relationships between the things in the dream. The image
employed in the expression of the relationship is less important than
the relationships themselves. Unlike secondary process, primary process
cannot comment on itself directly.20 Map and territory are equated. The
frame itself, as Bateson says, becomes part of the premise system; it
is metacommunicative. Every fantasy, for example, includes the implied
message, "This is not literally true."

 

 

Finally, we must ask: So what? So what if most of our communication
violates some abstract theory of logic that was formulated in the first
decade of the twentieth century? The significance lies in the fact
that
it is largely this violation of logic which constitutes most
of our deutero-learning
; that we obtain a personality, and a world
view, by means of a pervasive system of cultural, metacommunicative
messages that can be understood in fairly precise terms; and that in
comparison to deliberate, conscious, digital knowledge, this analogue
knowledge is incredibly vast. I shall return to this last point, the
"principle of incompleteness," in Chapter 8. For now, it is important
to understand where Bateson's investigation of learning theory took
him. Whereas traditional scientific investigation scrupulously avoids
any overlapping of fact and value (this, as we have seen, is the cause
of its disembodied quality), Bateson deliberately merged the two, or
rather, he did not force the usual artificial separation. As a result,
the answer that emerged was both precise and meaningful. A person's
"truth" is also his or her "character," and the patterns of formation
are to be found in the modalities of nonverbal, or meta, communication.

 

 

The work that Bateson is probably best known for, his study of insanity
and the formulation of the theory of the double bind as the formal
etiology of schizophrenia, is in fact a brilliant elaboration, and
verification, of the above theory of learning. As well as any other
example we might give, this work illustrates clearly the genesis of
world view and personality, and reveals the "cardiac algorithms" that
underlie the process. It is a type of proof by counterexample, however,
a 'reductio ad absurdum,' for madness shows what happens when the ability
to metacommunicate is absent, or severely attenuated. What, Bateson asked,
was being learned, or rather mis-learned, in the manufacture of madness?

 

 

Bateson's exploration of learning theory thus far had led him to the
conclusion that the metacommunications system of our culture taught us
how to use frames, and that their use defined personality, world view,
and social sanity. It was the thesis of one of Bateson's colleagues, the
psychiatrist Jay Haley, that the symptoms of madness might be due to an
inability to discriminate between logical types. The individual who took
metaphor for reality, who insisted,
outside
of church, that
the wafer really
was
the body of Christ, was classified as
psychotic. In the
paper on play and fantasy, Bateson had been content to ask: "Is there
any indication that certain forms of psychopathology are specifically
characterized by abnormalities in the patient's handling of frames and
paradoxes?" The seminal paper on the double bind, written together with
Haley, Don Jackson, and John Weakland, appeared the foliowing year,
and suggested an affirmative answer.

 

 

As far as Haley was concerned, the ability to distinguish between the
literal and the metaphorical was the touchstone of sanity. Bateson himself
points to the situation in which the schizophrenic patient comes into
the hospital canteen, and the woman behind the counter says to him,
"What can I do for you?" He does not reply, "I'll have the steak and
kidney pie today," but instead he stands there trying to figure out what
sort of a message this is. Is she offering to sleep with him? Is she
trying to do him in? Is she going to give him a free lunch if he asks for
it? The point, says Haley, is that all human messages violate the Theory
of Logical Types. There is always an accompanying metacommunication,
usually a nonverbal one, and sanity is the ability to decipher and use
this code. Our patient would be correct in concluding that a sexual
advance was being made if a certain tone of voice, or body language,
had accompanied the woman's question, but he is unable to make such
a discrimination, and it is this inability that justifies the label,
"insane." Haley gives the example of a schizophrenic man who had been
given ground privileges and abused them, escaping from the institution
by climbing the fence surrounding it. The police finally found him and
brought him back. A few days later the man showed Haley the point in the
fence where he went over and said, "There's a stop sign there now." As he
spoke, however, there was a twinkle in his eye. Haley suddenly realized
that the patient was not being literal. Rather, he had learned to comment
on his own messages, and was thus on the road to recovery.21

 

 

How does a person get to the point of constantly confusing logical
types? Bateson believed that we ,should not look for some childhood
trauma, some watershed event, but instead examine what was
regular
in
the childhood of the schizophrenic. Somehow, he or she had been trained
not
to metacommunicate, not to comment on the messages of others,
and such an inability was so aberrant that it was doubtful that one
single incident could have precipitated it. In cybernetic metaphor (see
Chapter 8), metacommunication is feedback, and the psychotic is like a
self-correcting system that has lost its governor, endlessly spiraling
into distortions labeled "catatonia," "hebephrenia," "paranoia," and
so on. In fact, these distortions are alternatives to commenting on the
messages of others, which for some reason the schizophrenic feels he or
she must not do.

 

 

What Bateson, Haley et al. did was to investigate the entire family
situation, rather than (as is still the norm) the isolated schizophrenic.
Bateson and his fellow workers believed that the patient was gripped
not by a "disease" mysteriously caused by genes or brain chemistry,
but by a process, a pattern, that had been going on for years. As
R.D. Laing, whose own work was based on the "double bind" theory, has
shown, the difference between treating a schizophrenic as an "organism"
emitting "signs of disease," and as a person engaged in a process,
is the difference between night and day. In "The Divided Self," Laing
reproduces the famous account (1905) provided by the German psychiatrist
Kraepelin of the latter's presentation of a schizophrenic patient to a
lecture room full of students:

 

 

The patient I will show you today has almost to be carried into
the rooms, as he walks in a straddling fashion on the outside of
his feet. On coming in, he throws off his slippers, sings a hymn
loudly, and then cries twice (in English), "My father, my real
father!." He is eighteen years old, and a pupil of the Oberrealschule
(higher-grade modern-side school), tall, and rather strongly built,
but with a pale complexion, on which there is very often a transient
flush. The patient sits with his eyes shut, and pays no attention to
his surroundings. He does not look up even when he is spoken to, but
he answers beginning in a low voice, and gradually screaming louder
and louder. When asked where he is, he says, "You want to know that
too? I tell you who is being measured and is measured and shall be
measured. I know all that, and could tell you, but I do not want
to." When asked his name, he screams, "What is your name? What does
he shut? He shuts his eyes. What does he hear? He does not understand;
he understands not. How? Who? Where? When? What does he mean? When I
tell him to look he does not look properly. You there, just look! What
is it? What is the Matter? Attend; he attends not. I say, what is
it, then? Why do you give me no answer? Are you getting impudent
again? How can you be so impudent? I'm coming! I'll show you! You
don't whore for me. You mustn't be smart either; you're an impudent,
lousy fellow, such an impudent, lousy fellow I've never met with. Is
he beginning again? You understand nothing at all, nothing at all;
nothing at all does he understand. If you follow now, he won't
follow, will not follow. Are you getting still more impudent? Are
you getting impudent still more? How they attend, they do attend,"
and so on. At the end, he scolds in quite inarticulate sounds.

 

 

Kraepelin added the following notes to this description:

 

 

Although [the patient] undoubtedly understood all the questions,
he has not given us a single piece of useful information
. His
talk was . . .
only a series of disconnected sentences having no
relation whatever to the general situation
. [Italics Laing's]

 

 

Now what is going on here? The sort of "word-salad" reproduced above is
very common among schizophrenic patients, and it was Bateson's contention
that since the crux of insanity was the inability to metacommunicate, such
"word-salad" must contain a comment on the situation, but in a safe, that
is, indirect and disguised, form. In fact, unbeknownst to Kraepelin, the
patient was parodying the whole interview, and in such a way that allowed
him to tell Kraepelin to fuck off: "You want to know that too? I tell
you wno is being measured and is measured and shall be measured. I know
all that, and could tell you, but I do not want to." "This seems," Laing
comments, "to be plain enough talk. Presumably he deeply resents this form
of interrogation which is being carried out before a lecture-room full of
students. He probably does not see what it has to do with the things that
must be deeply distressing him." Thus when Kraepelin asks him his name,
he replies in a way that comments on Kraepelin's whole approach to him: