Part II:  Canonical Collage-oscopes, or: 

Claude in Jacques’ Trap?  Not What It Sounds Like!

  

Click here for Part I

 

 

   “For a complete logical argument,” Arthur began with admirable solemnity, “we need two prim Misses –”

     “Of course!” she interrupted.  “I remember that word now.  And they produce -- ?”

     “A Delusion,” said Arthur.

     “Ye-es?” she said dubiously.  “I don’t seem to remember that so well. But what is the whole argument called?”

     “A Sillygism.”

     “Ah, yes!  I remember now.  But I don’t need a Sillygism, you know, to prove that mathematical axiom you mentioned.”

     “Nor to prove that ‘all angles are equal’, I suppose?”

     “Why, of course not!  One takes such a simple truth as that for granted!”

                -- Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno

 

 

Robert de Marrais

                 In our last exciting episode, we saw how the ashes of deconstruction rose, River-Phoenix-like[1], from the flaming out of structuralism; and how, specifically, the Mephistophelean bargain which brought Jacques Derrida to prominence (and disseminated his species of conceptual kudzu, choking the life out of humanistic studies across the ever-gullible, profoundly anti-intellectual U. S. of A.) was sealed by a subtle “bait and switch” trick at a famous conference, whose aim had been to coronate (but wound up decapitat­ing) the anthropological structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. 

 

What we didn’t see, though (and if this didn’t bother you at least subliminally, you’ve either not had enough coffee, you’ve sucked up too much decon­structive “theory” already, or else you move your lips while reading pictures in the supermarket-checkout-line tabloids and I don’t care about your bovine mind anyway) – what we didn’t see was just what, in fact, the “bait and switch” was, and what “baby” was tossed once the “bath water” was compromised. 

 

                Does the use of “quotes” around various words and “phrases” of seemingly “unproblematic” “mean­ing” in that last so-bilious sentence seem gratuitous to you?  Good. Your chances of recovery from three and a half decades’ Dark Night of the Sememe have just been deemed ever so much more likely by the Las Vegas odds-makers.  (Unlike deconstructionists, they don’t just take such “signs” apart, they take them seriously!)  In order to appreciate this properly, we can ease our way in, in two steps.  Let me start things rolling by directing your attention to a 1987 paper which Derrida gave at a West Coast colloquium.[2]

 

                The organizers had suggested as his theme, quote, “‘The States of “Theory”’ (with states in the plural and ‘theory’ in quotation marks)” –  a suggestion which, “probably due to a lack of attention,” Derrida admitted, he had read as “‘The State of Theory’ (with state in the singular and theory without quotation marks).”  This error provides Derrida with the launching pad for his whole discussion:  as he misunderstood the suggestion, it implied a question – “What is the state of theory today?” – whose answer, he joked, was self-evident:  “The state of theory, now and from now on, isn’t it California?  And even Southern California?”[3]

 

                But the difference between “theory” with quotes and without (and why the former is necessarily plural, and the latter, singular) leads him to consider the contemporary state of humanist (or rather, post­modernist, as there’s little that’s “human” still left in it) theoretics as dis­turbingly akin to recent trends toward disembodiment in the financial markets:  the rise of computer-based trading, and the lightning-quick arbitrage of nonlinear (and highly volatile) baskets of futures-contract options and hedges and abstract instruments like “derivates,” postdate his talk slightly, but suggest what he had in mind quite nicely.

 

The demarcation by quotation marks or inverted commas means that these labels have the exchange value of currencies meant to circulate and make possible the circulation of goods, the allocation of places, the situation and evaluation of pieces on a chessboard or in some Wall Street of the academy (that is, in a place of quotations on the stock ex­change as well as in the linguistic sense…) but without ever allowing anybody to appro­priate them or make claims for them as a monopoly.  And above all without any … Fed­eral Reserve Bank ... ever guaranteeing the issue of titles… But more seriously – and this is the reason why I talked of a quotation market – these quotation marks impose them­selves at a time when the relationship to all languages, to all codes of tradition, is being deconstructed as a totality and in its totality to an ever-increasing extent …[4]

 

                As with gold-displacing, megabyte-based financial transactions in our “Death of Money” epoch[5], marked by wheelings and dealings possessed of ever less traceable links to deli­ver­able commodities, the general trend toward “citationality” freed from all moorings among postmodern theorists creates anxiety (“as they leave no criterion to distinguish between use and mention”[6]) – and, at least as importantly, mu­tates the nature of citation (hence, scholarly validation) itself.

 

                Quote marks, traditionally used to present and insulate evidence leading toward a demonstration of an argument, “generally function as small clothespins meant to keep at a distance, without really touching them, clothes which, whether dirty or still wet, won’t be freed … and really touched until they are properly clean and dry.”[7]

 

                But quotes put around “theory” – and the “neologisms, newisms, postisms, parasitisms, and other small seismisms” Derrida alludes to in his title – stand the standard process on its head:  “far from keeping an impure concept at a distance,” they “convey a distrust toward a concept which is pure from any contami­nation and from an absolutely reappropriable proper sense” – and “It is this proper sense of propriety which, this time, is put in quotation marks and not the opposite, as has always been the case.”[8]

 

                But where did this crisis situation originate?  The Babel-like profusion of “states” of “Theory,” we are told, “could only take form ‘in the States,’ which only has a value, a sense and a specificity ‘in the States’ and at a specific moment, namely the last twenty years, that is, during the time of its formation”[9] – which is to say (as he was speaking in ’87), it shares its origins with “Flower Power” and drug culture, the radical escalating of the Viet Nam War and global student uprisings … and the first signs of the radical proliferation of computer (and other “high”) technology.  And one can narrow the focus even more than this, and point to a “founding event” that spawned the malaise:

 

It is more and more often said that the Johns Hopkins colloquium (“The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”) was in 1966, more than twenty years ago, an event in which many things changed (it is on purpose that I leave these formulations somewhat vague) on the American scene – which is always more than the American scene.  What is now called “theory” in this country may even have an essential link with what is said to have happened there in 1966.  I don’t know what happened there, and I have neither the tools nor the time necessary to talk about it here.[10]

 

                Mais d’accord, “he doth protest too much” – and his modest demurral “I don’t know what hap­pened there” is more reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s “I don’t remember” during the Iran-Contra hearings, less suggestive of heroic self-effacement (albeit the tenor of the whole talk also brings to mind Urkel’s post-disaster “Did I do that?” leitmotif.)[11]  For the conference is the one where Derrida made a very big name for himself – his closing talk being precisely the “event” in whose wake “many things changed.”

                As touched upon in the prior installment of this bloated rant, the Johns Hopkins colloquium was assumed by its organizers (and most of its attendees) to be a vehicle for providing the academy’s equivalent of a coronation ceremony, anointing the achievements of Claude Lévi-Strauss, godfather and most cele­brated exponent of the rapidly spreading intellectual fad of structuralism.  Instead, here is what happened:  a little-known French (actually, Algerian Jewish, but Americans can’t tell the difference) philo­sopher, at his first state-side conference, delivered a polite but marksman-like sniper’s attack on Lévi-Strauss’ methodo­lo­gy, one eyebrow arching noticeably high while locking the elusive bricoleur in his sights.[12] 

 

(I’ll expand on this later, but for now, suffice it to say that the bricoleur is a rural Mr. Fixit fami­liar in the French countryside, a sort of low-tech MacGyver for those who’ve watched too much television, which is to say a cross between a handyman and a jack-of-all-trades with a knack for “making do” in a pinch with whatever odds and ends lie at hand – just the sort of opportu­nistic and concretely manifest con­ceptual collaging Lévi-Strauss claimed epitomized mythic thinking.) 

 

During this ambush, the quarry was mysteriously decapitated:  the crowning image of the kaleido­scope, lavishly analogized to the mythwork in a three-hundred-word iconic apotheosis that served to put the wraps on the sustained personification of “la pensée sauvage” in the figure of the bricoleur, in an argument developed across two chapters and some twenty pages in his most famous book, was never so much as mentioned, much less formally addressed. 

 

This “new, improved” alternative to the anthropologist’s “Brand X” – one of the first, and some would say the most pernicious, of the numerous “post-structuralisms” (Foucault’s, Lacan’s, Lyotard’s, Deleuze’s, Baudrillard’s, Kristeva’s, Zippy the Pinhead’s, et cetera) that would soon duke it out for market share – soon became known as “deconstruction,” although its propagator professes he himself regrets his promotion to promi­nence from semantic obscurity of this archaic and misleading word.[13]

 

Similar reservations, however, of the likewise obscure word made prominent by Lévi-Strauss are hardly in order:  it has, as few words not wrapped in a symbolist poem do, a wealth of analogical reso­nan­ces that serve to unfold, rather than detract from, its fundamental sense.  The activity of the bricoleur, “bri­colage,” suggests in both English and French a relationship with the homophonic collage that (as adum­brated in my last installment, and as I’ll develop later on in this one) must surely have been, if not exactly intended, at least accepted after the fact of coinage as a welcome objet trouvé:  the two words can, in fact, be found juxta­posed with obvious forethought in the very same sentence of The Savage Mind![14] (The prefix “bric-,” mean­while, also fits, as words like “bric-a-brac” make obvious.)

 

The word also bears, in its older meanings, a sense paralleling that of the less happy terms invent­ed by evolutionary biologist C. H. Waddington, “chreod” and “homeorhesis,” to describe, respectively, trajec­tories of development or telos which are relatively impervious to deflections, or, one could say, “stable under digres­sion pressure”; and, the conditions or processes which maintain this stability.[15]  In this sense, bricolage bears a remarkable affinity with the mathematical “figures of regula­tion” which René Thom’s Catastrophe Theory deployed in a fertile attempt to underwrite Wadding­ton’s vision with a finite collection of dynamic “seed-form” models.  (Unfurling from a single “germ,” as we shall see, each can “unfold” in a number of differently clustered and multi-petaled “blossoms,” arranged according to their “root structure” in what a Java or C++ programmer would call an “object hierarchy” of possibilities, writ in the dialect of differential topology.[16]  All terms in quotes, by the way, are standard technical terminology.)

 

In its old sense the verb ‘bricoler’ applied to ball games and billiards, to hunting, shoot­ing and riding.  It was however always used with reference to some extraneous move­ment:  a ball rebounding, a dog straying or a horse swerving from its direct course to avoid an obstacle.  And in our own time the ‘bricoleur’ is still someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman.[17]

 

                Finally, as the above passage implies, the culminating image of the kaleidoscope unfolds a parti­cu­larly abstract aspect of the semantic field of “bricolage” proper:  for a coup de bricole in billiards embodies what the mirrors of a kaleidoscope do to incident beams of light – use their “cushions” to induce an indefinitely iterated, precision ricocheting of  photonic “carom shots.”  But this is only half the story.

 

                The logic of the mythic imagination requires a special kind of “mirror play”; but it also requires this play to operate upon, and create symmetries responding to, the bits and pieces of colored glass and other oddments which are typically swirled about in the scope’s “object box” by rotating the viewing tube.  Just a page shy of the kaleidoscope’s intrusion into his text, Lévi-Strauss warns us of a paradox implicit in

 

the idea of a logic whose terms consist of odds and ends left over from psychological or historical processes and are, like these, de­void of necessity… [Yet] these odds and ends appear as such only in relation to the his­to­­ry which produced them and not from the point of view of the logic for which they are used.  It is with respect to content alone that they can be regarded as hetero­geneous... The significant images of myth, the materials of the bricoleur, are elements which can be de­fined by two criteria:  they have had a use, as words in a piece of discourse which my­th­i­cal thought “detaches” in the same way as a bricoleur, in the course of repairing them, de­taches the cogwheels of an old alarm clock; and they can be used again either for the same purpose or for a different one if they are at all diverted from their previous func­tion.[18]

 

                The notion of bricolage as “chreod” should be sensed by those who, reading the above, recall a quote stuck in the 14^th note of my first installment.  There, I cited Derridean interpreter Gregory Ullmer on the theme of “collage” to this effect:  “The two operations constituting the collage technique – selection and combination – are the operations characteristic of all speaking and writing.  Moreover, as in language us­age, the operations are carried out on preformed material.”  Here, this underground stream has finally bro­ken through all obstacles and emerged as a water hazard on the golf course of this argument:  note, too, as Ullmer tells us, “The effectiveness of collage is that, like metaphor, the piece, displaced into a new con­text, retains associations with its former context.”  And in that former context, it was noted that Ullmer’s claims to Derrida’s priority in linking the workings of collage to “the most characteristic mode of composi­tion in the modernist arts” and recent metaphysics is just wrong:  as the above paragraphs should make obvious, Lévi-Strauss was there “fustest with the mostest,” and in fact formulated his so-called “canonical law of myths” in direct reference to collage – in fact, in direct conversation with the creator of collage as a serious art form, his long-time friend Max Ernst:

 

Out of all the modern forms of painting, I am particularly attracted to those of Max Ernst.  Does some analogy exist between what I have attempted to do in my books, a long time after him, and the role he always assigned to painting?  Like his paintings and collages, my work on mythology has been elaborated by means of samples from without – the myths themselves.  I have cut them out like so many pictures in the old books where I found them, and then arranged them on the pages as they arranged themselves in my mind, but in no conscious or deliberate fashion.  The structuralist method, as we know, operates by presenting and systematically working out binary oppositions between ele­ments supplied by observation – the phonemes of the linguists or the mythemes of the anthropologist.  The method is easily recognized in Max Ernst’s definition of 1934, where  he extols “the bringing together of two or more elements apparently opposite in nature, on a level whose nature is the opposite of theirs.”  This is a double play of oppo­sition and correlation, on the one hand, between a complex figure and the back­ground that shows it off or, on the other, between the constituent elements of the figure itself.[19]

 

            The example cut-and-pasted from Ernst’s oeuvre is the famous “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” – the two “elements” clearly opposite in most apparent senses, with the table they’re placed on opposed to both in some ways that are clearly shared.  Lévi-Strauss elaborates on this for a few paragraphs, which I’ve stuck in the notes for those who might be interested;[20] above the waterline, though, I’d rather provide and elaborate an example which not only shows the “canon­ical law of myths” as such, but does so while contemplating the “chreod” of the bricolage notion itself – in fact, of bricolage qua “chreod” analog, as touched upon above.  (As self-referentiality is the essence of structuralism, according to some, you might say I’m having a nostalgia attack right now:  not to worry, things like this, like fads, like intestinal gas, quickly pass.)

 

                The figure of the bricoleur and the “bricolage” of mental-work collages he produces has, if any­thing, become so ubiquitous, in so many disciplines, that – like Xerox, Kleenex, and other overly success­ful trademarks – it is frequently invoked with no reference meant or clearly traced to its point of origin.  (The irony being, of course, that this fate of “bricolage”’s mention is precisely the nature of the uses to which it puts things!) 

 

One of the more philosophical vendors of the conceptual wares of artificial intelligence, for in­stance, Daniel C. Dennett, has analogized it to the encoding of an ugly workaround of the “baling wire and chewing gum” variety, known to programmers as a “kludge” (rhymes with “Scrooge”).[21]  In so doing, he tells us the term comes from biologists, citing a piece on “Evolution and Tinkering” by François Jacob[22] (which in turn, unbeknownst to Dennett, cites the relevant discussion by Lévi-Strauss as source for its own “tinkerer” motif – but without ever using Lévi-Strauss’ own term “bricolage”!)

 

As if this weren’t sufficiently bizarre in and of itself, the superlative joint effort by an “artificial life” theorist, a phenomenologist, and a psychologist – The Embodied Mind of Francisco Varela, Evan Thomp­son and Eleanor Rosch respectively – reports the exact same hallucinatory experience of “bricolage” after ingesting the article by Jacob.[23]

 

I’m forced to assume Dennett and this trio already had assimilated Lévi-Strauss’ image as “com­mon coin,” then used the now-anonymous term to characterize what Jacob’s “tinkerer” was about.  But then, because Jacob had fleshed it out with ample and surprising examples from evolutionary theory, he made the now commonplace term stand for something that suddenly seemed fresh again – thereby leading later readers to attribute an “original” exemplification of an “old” word to the reworker of the former and avoider of the latter!

 

I’m reminded of a West Coast movie reviewer who heard two Valley Girls discussing what they’d just been watching as they left the theater.  “I can, like, see why they called it that,” said one to the other of the film just made of the Nabokov book she’d clearly never read, much less heard of, “she’s so-o-o, like, y’know, a Lolita!”  This “Lolita effect” is the essence of the bricoleur’s anonymizing efforts.  It is an effect readily traced in the history of foreign inclusions (“sewing machines”) brought into juxtaposition with na­tive signi­fieds (“umbrellas”) in the context of a common language (“operating table”). 

 

In fact, one can elicit a rough­ly seven-stage process (like that of classical alchemy) of semantic morphing as alien “memes” in­vade, self-activate, accommodate themselves to the native terrain, then final­ly become domesticated, assimilated, and rendered indistinguishable from their semantic neighbors as they complete the process of “going native.”  This has been done with wonderful clarity in a recent study of how the highly conservative culture of Japan had been succumbing to the onslaught of American English (an on­­­slaught exacerbated by the “Trojan Horse” effect of the demand for American technology).[24]  But a like­wise exacerbated transformation has been the fate of native cultures everywhere, which makes this level of “pattern recognition” all too frequent for the anthropologist who, like Lévi-Strauss, takes the long view of the big picture.  And, in all such cases, the “Max Ernst triad” provides an exploratory device so pragmatic and ubiquitous in its manifestations as to lead to a formalizable rule. 

 

We can sum some of what we’ve seen above in just such a triad:  “The Darwinian Progress ethos makes modern theoretical biology look like bricolage.”  This may seem simplistic, but it’s not:  the brico­leur, con­trary to any typical personifier of evolutionary change, is a chronically conservative figure, as, “in the con­tinual reconstruction from the same materials, it is always earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of means…”[25]  Meanwhile, the underwriting of contemporary biology by genetics makes the think­ing of Darwin’s time reveal its “dark side” by contrast:  the predominant pre-Mendelian “ancestral theory of heredity” of Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, looks like a bricoleur’s notion of construction rules, with “earlier ends” – reversion to long-absent traits of distant progenitors – always amenable to sudden re-emer­gence as current or future “means,” where “each piece of the new structure is derived from a corres­pond­ing piece of some older one.”[26] Yet this suggests the exact opposite of the analogy between Wadding­ton- and Darwin- style theoretical vantages.  Such a triad, then, serves to organize fields of oppositions and correla­tions – fields, say, which may extend across the myths, hence variations in flora and fauna, meteoro- and even geo- logical contexts, of myriad tribes scattered across the Americas in language, space and time.

In an interview cited in a book review in The New York Times so long ago the reference has by now become thoroughly laundered, hence almost “Lolita’d,” in my memory, Lévi-Strauss compared the abstrac­tness of his approach (and hence, his “canonical law”) to that of classical astronomy, which – in re­cogniz­ing constellations – became the first physical science, precisely because its objects of observa­tion were so remote from us.  The “mathematizability” of human experience, he implied, is most clearly attain­able in studies of cultures completely alien to – hence, most distant from – our own; and, it would come to manifest its formalizability in “constellations” of the variety his “canonical law” would appropri­ate.

 

In his early work, he showed it was possible to study the extremely intricate patterns of kinship relations and marital eligibility among tribal peoples from a remoteness of vantage that led, inevitably, to his collaboration with one of the world’s great mathematicians, André Weil:  the exchange of women was transformed into an abstract algebra problem.[27]  He dreamed of extending this approach to a sort of “Perio­dic Table of Cultural Elements” parallel to Mendeleiev’s famous charting of primordial chemical units[28] … a guiding fantasy which sounded suspiciously Jungian to critics who liked neither his work nor that of the “archetypal” psychologist.

 

Numerous works on totemism, and the “concrete logic” of so-called primitive thinking, made him academically formidable; the accidental timing of certain key works’ emergence with the revolutionary ferment of the late Sixties made him a pop-culture icon (a status which he, unlike his contemporary, Mar­shall McLuhan, neither sought nor relished).  But his greatest work – the four volumes of the Mytholo­giques, whose publication dates (1964-71) spanned the emergence of the New Age counterculture, and hence the resurgence of popular interest in his general subject matter – was focused on the structural analy­sis of the mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

 

And since such myths were not sui generis, but were typically collages made from parts of many myths, some of which may have traveled through dozens of cultures and thousands of miles before reach­ing a particular people, hundreds of tribes’ ecological and cultural contexts would need to become familiar to an analyst of Lévi-Strauss’ ambitions.  This wealth of raw materials in need of consolidating required apparatus for analyzing myths into “constituent units,” then studying their reshufflings across cultural di­vides.  Lévi-Strauss spoke in terms of multi-dimensional computer models and punch-card data entry in ways that were anticipatory of the software revolution of “relational database technology.”[29]  His own scien­tific culture was prodigious, and references to geology, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, the topolo­gist’s “continuous transformation groups” and various areas of biological theory, are almost as frequent as his many informed discussions of music theory, the history of art, and world literature.

 

The bricoleur-like borrowings from many disciplines remote from his own Department of Anthro­po­logy are but half the story; for his analyses required much crossing of disciplinary boundaries not merely at the theorizing stage, but in the initial data gathering and “pre-processing”:  the natives, after all, didn’t write down their myths as self-consciously aesthetic works to be studied in Literature Departments; indeed, they didn’t write at all!  Moreover, the myths were intimately integrated into their daily lives, in the way that advertisements and the basic formal structures of the broadcast media are intimately integrated into the activities we perform, objects we make use of or consume, and goals we set ourselves for the long haul. 

 

All of which implies, if we’re to palpably grasp the “canonical law” (and then, suitably informed and pro­perly armed, return to Derrida), we should apply it, before all else, to the information-saturated, highly un­natural, bricolage-besotted world of “internet years” and “new! Improved!” non-innovations that we all live in.  Not ribald jungle tales, but porno ads, glib movie reviews, web-page come-ons and celebrity bon mots, will interest us now.  Consider, for starters, this review of Cold Comfort Farm, a cinematic hit whose hero is a bricoleur of sorts:

 

From the 1930s novel, John Schlesinger has fashioned a rollicking comedy about a well-intentioned young tinkerer who, despite the advice of her vivacious friend, ventures to the backwards countryside to reform an entire family, who make the Beverly Hillbillies look like members of the Myopia Hunt Club.[30]

 

                Here, we have the movie in question serving as “operating table,” with Hillbillies and Hunt Club as “sewing machine” and “umbrella.”  The critical “hook” that makes this work for its intended audience would clearly be lost on anyone who:  1) is unfamiliar with the old TV sitcom, long sent off to its eternal reward of endless cable reruns, about the misadventures of Ozark hicks who accidentally strike it rich and move to Hollywood; 2) isn’t from, or at least familiar with, the greater Boston area, whose residents (my­self included) are well acquainted with the near-mythic prestige surrounding the exclusive club where the “horsey set” trot and Presidents like to play golf; and 3) didn’t know “Myopia” in the club’s name is a red herring, which could inadvertently lead you into misconstruing the reviewer’s meaning completely.

 

                And that, in fact, is the point:  such formulaic expressions, while easy to concoct, and easier still to grasp “if you’re from the neighborhood,” require serious ethnographic insight to interpret if you’re from Mars (or the Left Bank of Paris, which is almost as far).  And while we live in a world of quantitative assessments and abstract concepts, the bricoleur does not.  (And when I say “we,” I’m referring to you the reader, and not, in all likelihood, to the people in line with you reading the tabloids or packaging your groceries the next time you run out of foodstuffs:  most people today live in a realm “indistinguishable from magic,” as Arthur C. Clarke presciently put it; the opposite mentality merely created all that tech­nology which has already gotten “beyond a certain point,” as Clarke predicted it would, for most “normals” and all deconstructionists.)  What we (same antece­dent as in the prior parentheses) see laid bare only in the marginal areas of our mental life, the tribal mind uses as basic scaffolding for its “concrete logic.”

 

                And speaking of  things being “laid bare,” my favorite instance of this amazingly ubiquitous “our stuff makes their Brand X look like the opposite of what both claim to offer” formula (and see the text between notes 23 and 24 in the first installment for another instance almost as telling) comes from a crass blue-movie ad found in the back pages of a left-behind tabloid on a New York City subway many years ago.  During the brief fling with embracing corruption at all levels that marked the Nixon Watergate scan­dal, where even the central figure of mystery, the still-unrevealed “Deep Throat,” gained his nom de guerre from a contemporary skin flick, certain cheaply-made hardcore products were touted for a while as “clas­sics” that all serious intellectuals (no, I’m not making this up) felt compelled to attend and offer commen­tary upon.  The crudely drawn ad I unearthed from the soiled pages between Sports and Gossip next to a snoring vomit-covered bum on a late-night Greenwich Village train ride touted a long-forgotten piece of porn called Flash, which wished to set itself apart from its then-famous competition like this:  “Flash makes The Devil in Miss Jones look like a PTA meeting.”

 

                This example is worth examining in detail for reasons complementary to those that made the Cold Comfort Farm reviewer’s copy interesting for us.  First, there is the formal aspect; then, there is the “bait and switch” tactic – which latter, as we’re about to see, is profoundly suggestive in ways not meant to titil­late.  The formal first:  the ad is a bald pitch for market share, its message totally focused on exploiting what Freud called “the tension of attention” of the passing eyes of random readers, its sole purpose being to plant a suggestion that they should pay to see it.  Let’s examine this dynamic, bereft of all content except “passing eyes” and competing objects:  the exercise is simple, and (as we’ll soon see) quite revealing.

 

                Long ago and far away (i.e., when I was in grammar school) eye exams of the simple “do you need glasses yet?” variety were conducted en masse in auditoriums.  When your turn came, you sat in a chair under a basketball hoop and were given two ropes to pull on, attaching in their turn to a pulley system which controlled the movements of two wooden blocks at some distance from your seat.  Your job was to manipulate the ropes until you perceived the two blocks to be exactly aligned, at which point someone work­ing with the exam­iner would observe, at a distance from, and perpendicular to, your line of sight, just how near- or far- sighted you seemed to be, and hence whether you’d be needing a visit to the optometrist, so that you could win the right to a new nickname (i.e., “Four-Eyes”) among your classmates.

 

                Now for the “bait and switch”:  in Consumer Reports, one typically is encouraged to make choices between alternatives by logical analysis.  Advertisers, however, would prefer to win you over by offering you “bait” sufficiently attractive or repulsive (but, in either case, irrelevant) to make you “switch” to what they’re hawking by propinquity (near-naked pneumatic pulchritude abutting a butt, say).  If such a “near occasion of spin” turns your head fast and far enough, you’ll first buy the proffered analogy, and then the product it’s shilling for.

                The “Flash” ad, unlike the grammar-school eye exam, sees exact alignment of its two “blocks” as the problem, not the solution.  (Likewise, the eye exam has non-trivial “bait and switch” if the kids don’t realize their pulley-play’s a test.)  So it dangles an image that the derby-hat-and-handkerchief crowd who frequent low-rent movie houses will see as a very red flag:  imagine the darkened privacy of the self-strok­ing denizens suddenly interrupted by bright lights and a crowd of straight-laced parents who want to know what you (yeah, you with the hat in your lap covering your writing hand, mister!)  intend to do to help out with the bake sale.  Sex put into practice to propagate the species and generate responsibilities is quite a different thing from anonymous romping sluts who hump you in your fantasies with no side-effects. 

 

The two “blocks” are really competing instances of one extreme pole of Nature’s most basic fork in the road:  the pairing of antithetical behavioral modes around the mating process is the most common single source, of course, of all advertising “bait and switch” positings, for obvious reasons.  The juxtapos­ing of PTA meetings with porn-flick audiences paints their opposition in the most extreme terms thinkable – and thereby shows just how many potential “binary oppositions” are collectible around a single well-posed “bait and switch.”  The density of such possible clusterings – and their amenability to being framed from alternative viewpoints (the same mythic material can be accessed to quite different ends than those suggested by our tabloid ad – just ask any right-wing Republican candidate in an election year) – makes the simple-minded logic of the “Max Ernst collage” something one can touch and feel. 

 

Once one has the concept, creating such triads – and seeing them everywhere – becomes remark­ably easy.  Just a couple more favorites should suffice to “burn in” the basic notion.  A billboard replicating a web-page, advertising a career-search service, claims its database of “hot job” prospects is so enormous that it “makes the Taj Mahal look like a studio apartment.”  (Here, the “goat in python” demographic of a certain age-slice serves as filtering device:  if you’re young enough, hence poor enough, to still be living in cramped urban quarters alone, consider yourself targeted – the Taj Mahal, as most folks know, was a royal palace built for love; you want in on the fast-track that’ll get you that penthouse with the babe attachment, right?) 

 

Another I’m fond of:  a famous witticism of an actual archi­tect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who placed his last great work in close proximity to its more staid competition:  his Guggenheim Museum, he said, would “make the Museum of Modern Art look like a Pro­testant barn.”  (One inference being that his museum saw itself as an analog of a Medieval cathedral in which art would be accorded sacred status; another, that your usual make-shift barn houses grains pri­ma­rily, conceleb­rants of devotional ceremonies only secondarily – and hence, art housed in it would be treated as “pro­duct” by the philistines running it, and only related accidentally to the structure containing it.)

 

Now, suppose we have thousands of motifs we wish to coordinate, using such “triad” structures as halfway houses on the way to building more elaborate armatures of, say, mythic frameworks.  Then we might want to hook together such building blocks, shorthanding their “valences” and symbolic labeling schemes to streamline the process efficiently.  You might reduce the framework of the “blue-movie ad” to two forces, for instance:  X (for “X-ratedness,” emitted by competing offerings) and Y (for “yearning” of the right variety, felt by susceptible candidates for ticket-purchasing as a compulsive, attracting force).  The two “objects” of potential interest (the competing theatrical events) might be dubbed A (for what’s readily “Available”) and B (for “Better offer” – the alleged “New! Improved!” product). 

 

If the imagery of the PTA meeting is to provide a repulsive force that turns your attention to B, then it first is invoked as an inverse of object A (write it A^-1), and then is treated as a “force,” operating on your objectified yearning.  To differentiate forces from objects graphically, we might use a capital “F” to indicate a force, with a particular force indicated by a subscript, and append parentheses to the “F” to act as holders of the object’s symbol.  We’re comparing two situations – the X-ratedness of B makes that of A look like “PTA-meetingness” putting a damper on the unfolding of your current state of yearning.  We could write this all down in a line this way, and then call it the “canonical law of myth”:[31]                

 

 

F_X(A) : F_Y(B) ­~ F_X(B) : F_A-1(Y)

 

Especially if one has piles of note-cards you’re trying to organize into relational arrangements (see the earlier note 29 for details), this sort of abstract formalization might prove convenient:  as written, it says nothing about whether the inverse picked “works” especially well, and ditto for all the other choices.  (It’s a remarkably common example of bad review copy, for instance, to find someone saying that “A makes B look like a walk in the park” – hardly as sharp as “PTA meeting” in the above!) 

 

Far from being a minor point, this is almost the whole point from one perspective.  There is noth­ing in this formulation that requires more than “getting the job done” – this is the theoretical biologist’s criterion of “satisficing” (taking a sub­optimal solution that is satisfactory) . . . and tantamount to endorsing the bricoleur’s willingness to jerry-build and “kludge” things:  if the “bait” catches the fish, it’s sufficient.  (And, for Lévi-Strauss’ analysis, attempts at precisely optimized trajectories through myriad notecards to concoct an “ideal” theoretic perspective are “traveling salesman” problems doomed to failure; his “law” serves to prune the multiplicity of viable trajectories that exist at any given stage of understanding.)

 

As with building complex microchip circuitry from Tinker Toy-like accretions of somehow “stack­able” modules, the “canonical law” approach is incredibly easy to generalize:  if everything in one’s life is mediated by ad-hype (which is not far from the truth, alas) then seeing everything in one’s life mediated by mythic thematics with their own pre- and pro- scriptive “bait and switch” dynamics becomes no less difficult.  Indeed, one can see both at once with very little stretching in the following passage from the third volume of the Mythologiques:

 

[F]ood taboos, good manners and utensils used for eating or for perso­nal hygiene, are all mediatory agents fulfilling a dual function.  As Frazier realized, they no doubt play the part of insulators or transformers which abolish or reduce the tension between poles, the respective charges of which are, or were, abnormally high.  But they also act as standards of measurement, in which case their function becomes positive, instead of remaining neg­a­tive.  Their ‘obligato’ use assigns a reasonable duration to each physiological pro­cess, and to each social action.  For, in the last resort, correct behaviour requires that what must be, should be, but that nothing should be brought about too preci­pitately.  And so it is that, in spite of the humble functions assigned to them in daily life, such apparently insignificant objects as combs, hats, gloves, forks or straws through which we imbibe liquids, are still today mediators between extremes; im­bued with an inertia which was once deliberate and calculated, they moderate our exchan­ges with the external world, and superimpose on them a domesticated, peaceful and more sober rhythm.[32]

 

                In all such instances, what is brought out by effective ad copy and persistent myths is “the func­tion which, in the last analysis, must perhaps be seen as characterizing all technical objects, as well as the culture which produces them:  the function of separating and uniting entities which, if too close together or too far apart, would leave man exposed to powerlessness or unreason.”[33]

 

 The mathematically naïve would typically see such a simple depiction of cultural dynamics as lack­ing in all those qualifications, reifications, and built-in referrals to more of the same that they take as proof of profundity in, say, academic philosophy.  The mathematical sophisticate, though, would be more prone to recognize in such a portrayal of social “force laws” an elegant paring down to the barest symmet­ries – the point where serious model-building actually becomes possible.  Deconstructionists seem incapa­ble of grasping this (or mathematics generally); yet great scientists assume this goes without saying.  The system of simple dynamic oppositions suggested by the anthropologist should be compared with the vision of natural law offered by one of our greatest physicists.  Another physicist, Heinz Pagels, tells it like this:

 

Richard Feynman, one of the inventors of quantum electrodynamics, once wrote that if all of scientific knowledge were destroyed in some cataclysm except for one sentence which would be passed on to the future, it should be, “… all things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.[34]

 

The system of alternating zones of attraction and repulsion (both of which being, in effect, func­tions of distance) can be generalized to an indefinite degree.  This is implicit, of course, in Lévi-Strauss’ “force model” given above, and can be inferred from explicit behaviors as well:  in certain formal socie­ties, many levels of ritual politeness must be addressed, and either passed through or bounced off, on the way to establishing intimate contact.  An old professor of mine once told me of a common scene in German bar­rooms he had witnessed more than once:  on the first drink, Herr Doktor Professor von Schlotterig toasts Herr Doktor Professor von Schmeissen with full name and titles; on the next round, the latter toasts him back, announcing “I throw away the Herr!”  Further along in the conversation, Schotterig orders a third round and says “I throw away the Doktor!”  By the end of the evening, the two are addressing each other as Willy and Franz.  (But of course, if either is not an experienced drinker, or finds some other reason unrelat­ed to degree of inebriation for disliking his partner, titles can be reassumed, and intimacy forestalled.)

 

Other concrete instances are easy to come by too:  there’s the “bucket brigade” model (it took more than a dozen servants, liveried according to strict pecking order, to bring a glass of water to the Queen at Versailles); the “delay and conquer” (W. C. Fields making trouble on an English train, being warned by progressively higher-level officials, until he reaches his stop and gets off without paying).  But even in the simplest cases – with two players, and two controls (of emotional drives, say) of the attraction or repulsion  between them– subtle dynamics are still possible:  Chris Zeeman made a cottage industry out of spinning off such so-called “Cusp” models (“fear” vs. “rage” driving the rat backed into the corner to retreat or else, once pushed too far, to suddenly reverse course and spring; the speed typist who, paying too much attention to how well the keying’s going, suddenly gets self-conscious and “fat-fingered”; “alienation” vs. “tension” mixed just right leading to prison riots; excess demand vs. speculative content governing bear and bull cycles, with occasional “crash” catastrophes, in the stock market; etc.).  He used just such a case to create a whimsi­cal but instructive model of “playing hard to get” (the girl only giving in to her suit­or when she senses he’s giving up)[35].  And if we have just two of these “hard to get” Cusp models hooked together “bait and switch” style, we have necessary and sufficient grounds for modeling the “canonical law of myths” with a Catastrophe Theory template.  In fact, the minimal requirements are easy to state, and bear framing in simple linguistic terms.

 

“Bucket brigade” models (with two or more controls guiding one behavioral pathway) can be turned into two-behavior “bait and switch” models by merely wishing, as Star Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard would put it, that someone who’ll do our bidding will “Make it so!”  This is the syntactic trick of the factitive:  “the operator,” Thom tells us, “which transforms ‘do’ into ‘cause to do’:  I have done this work à I have had this work done by my friend.”  Or, as we’ve seen above, “makes” and “look like” can be in­ject­ed into a two-term “bucket brigade” to bring in the PTA to induce a switch in focus.  This “complexi­fica­tion of the simple cusp into the double cusp” by wielding an instrument can be effected in more than one way, to more than one end (and this is where the fun begins).[36]

 

We now have all the ingredients needed to address Derrida’s “decapitating” of Lévi-Strauss at his coronation ceremony, and see it from the victim’s point of view.  Let’s review all the key dynamic terms used in describing the event, since Derrida has already washed his hands of such attempts himself; and then, let’s frame them in the mathematical language we’re beginning to get the hang of.  Three terms can be handled easily enough by expanding just a bit on the “bucket brigade” models (formal name:  “cuspoids”).

 

• We have “an event in which many things changed,” but about which the principal says, “I don’t know what happened there.”  Recall that, last installment, we heard Derrida’s disciple Gregory Ull­mer cite with approval a mathematician to the effect that since Catastrophe Theory “deals with the proper­ties of discontinui­ties directly, without reference to any specific underlying mechan­ism,” it is “especially appropriate for the study of systems whose inner workings are not known.”  So let’s describe the 1966 “event” in simplest terms:  as the simplest possible “cuspoid,” a “Fold.” 

 

What do we mean by that? Welcome to the world of “bump logic”:  the simplest “object” to the singularity theorist is just a stable pocket of containment, within which things stay put unless you do something special.  As the simplest linear trajectory of a projectile “object” is a parabo­la, this simplest container is just a parabola upside down:  present it by the “symbolic” equation X².

 Now, assume nonlinear interference effects – friction, perhaps, or the “drag” of a non-empty backdrop.  If you hammer a tent peg into the ground, then pull up camp, you have to extract it through the pile of dirt between you and it:  that’s a cubic force law, since the ground to be displaced fills a volume; but there’s a linear factor too – the length of the rope, which may catastrophically SNAP (like your attention-span in conversation when the phone suddenly rings).  If the rope breaks, you’ve lost the peg (or, if the phone rings, perhaps your train of thought).  Allow for running  the tape of this imaginary movie in reverse, too, and you’ve got generic footage for “beginnings” and “ends.”

 

Meanwhile, this simplest Catastrophe has “symbolic” equation X³ – uX, where u is the “control” governing overweighting associated with the depth the rope’s buried:  the so-called “load­ing factor” which can cause things to “snap.”  (And, if this equation is taken to be the argu­ment in a wave equa­tion, with u now representing the angle of elevation of an observer’s line of sight, we get the wonderfully named “Airy Integral” which tells us where the critical angles are where the rainbows show after a storm.)

 

• Derrida “delivered a polite but marksman-like sniper’s attack on Lévi-Strauss’ methodo­lo­gy, one eyebrow arching noticeably high while locking the elusive bricoleur in his sights.”  Of the many, many ways to frame the two-control Cusp, the most interesting for us is the predator-prey chain, due to Thom himself.  Let us frame it mythically:  in the Vedic lore of pre-Hindu India, the great god Indra – the Zeus of the Aryan invaders – had (or was trapped in) a magical net.  Depending on the story told, and teller’s point of view, Indra is the hunter and the hunted too.  According to the mathematics of Catastrophe Theory, this is fundamental, not unusual.  The theory’s creator typi­cally focuses on the single Cusp as the basis of all richer models (such as the Double Cusp of Petitot’s rendering of the “canonical law”).  Its stable “splits and mergers” mode of yoyo-ing between the Two and the One, he tells us, is “the most fundamental regulatory process” in non­linear dynamics:  not only in the abstract, but, under the guise of the “predation loop,” in the ultimate concreteness of animal feeding.  At least since the emerging of the amoeba, this is, sim­ply, merging:  “fundamentally, engulfing a prey into the organism” . . . and herein resides an enigma.

 

From the inverted parabola of the simple “object,” we added a tail to one or the other side and got the Fold; now we’ll interrupt the downward slide of the drooping tail, and bend it up to make another “bump”:  we now have a two-pocket “w” shape:  oscillating between one pocket and two is what this Cusp can do – aside from a “loading,” it also has a “splitting” factor, notated now as v and u respectively in this next-higher-order equation:  X⁴ – uX² –- vX.  The 2-D projec­tion of this 3-D surface is something we can see in tea or coffee cups on well-lit days sitting on the verandah:  the scimitar-shaped shadows (or, if the cup’s full, interference bands or “light caus­tics”) are isomorphic to the “control space” spanned by u and v in the predator-prey model.  (Have you ever seen these shapes before?  Most people haven’t, even though they’ve stared at them many thousand times!)  Circling the center of the scimitar’s curvature, we can draw a little loop which, when it crosses the edges of the scimitar, causes two competing states to merge into one, or the reverse.

 

Consider the loop as literally that:  a tape-loop, in fact, of some archetypal Buggs Bunny cartoon.  We see the rabbit stand alone; we watch as, unbeknownst to Buggs, Elmer Fudd enters the periphery of the scene; sneaking up on the bunny, a ritual conflict ensues, and the “silly wab­bit” (for the moment, at least) is “out of the picture” as a free agent.  We now have only one “stable regime” (Elmer plus full hunter’s pouch, instead of Buggs in standalone mode).  But the primitive math doesn’t care about names and faces:  the loop repeats, and now it’s Buggs who has the camera’s focus, making his escape, and Elmer is left “holding the bag” while Buggs, alone on center stage, takes his bows.  (And each time the loop plays twice, we get the cranking out of yet another formulaic cartoon plot: has Elmer Derrida finally “deconstructed” Buggs Lévi-Strauss?  Watch out, “it ain’t over til it’s over!”)  Thom formalizes the point like this:

 

If we continue to describe the unit circle, we see that, after a time, the predator, in a hungry state, becomes its prey!   This apparently paradoxical statement may in fact involve the explanation of a considerable amount of facts in mythology (the werewolf), in ethnology (hunting rituals involve in general simulation of the prey by the hunters), in magical thinking in general.  But, at a more fundamental level, this statement explains the main function of the nervous system in animals[, which] is fundamentally an alienation-permitting organ…. The role of the nervous system is to simulate the external objects, to recognize among them those (the preys and predators) which are fundamental for regulation.[37]

 

                Does Indra throw the net?  Or is Indra caught in it?  The “alternatives” are but par­tial viewings of the same primordial loop:  for the “veil of illusion” of the material universe – whe­ther impeding, elating, distracting, or disappointing us – is ”an alienation-permitting organ,” and hence can never satisfy us.  It can, however, induce us to unfold our potential:  and that, in fact, is what Thom’s theory concerns itself with before all else.

 

·         “And what ‘baby’ was tossed once the ‘bath water’ was compromised?”  Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is but one of many folksy images we’re all familiar with which indicate non­linear do­ings regu­lated by the next-higher cuspoid, the so-called “Swallow’s Tail” Catastrophe.  Different paths through the same process, for instance, give us “out of the frying pan, into the fire” dynamics, or the “slip­pery slope” morphology often suggested by the image of the frog in the pot of water which is boiling too slowly for him to recognize the danger and hop out in time to save himself.  Or one can think of how revolutions, like the God of Time, Saturn, eat their children . . .

 

The logic of odd and even:  for an odd number of controls, add a tail to the line of bumps; for even number, it’s bumps only, with no tail sliding off to plus or minus infinity.  But the Swallow’s Tail is odd, so there’s a tail – and hence, there’s a Cusp-like competition, with some typical paths through the teabag-like 3-D “control space” leading to the “winner” getting shipped off to parts unknown, doubtless writing, as in the Python movie, “Arrrrrrrgh!” on the cave wall as he falls.  To avoid this all-too-common (and literal) “pitfall” of revolutionary upheaval, addition of a new control (yielding the so-called “Butterfly”), or intervention from some second “behavioral space” – the deux ex machina, or else the “bait and switch” distraction source – is called for.

 

                Where is the “deus ex machina” that can save Claude from Jacques’ trap?  It will re-attach the lopped-of head:  the kaleidoscope can be addressed at last.  For, a few years after Derrida’s metaphoric act of regicide, a profound discovery was made, which I gave a prominent place in the first installment of this pejorative narrative or theoretic tract or whatever the hell this interminable text is:  here are the words of its unearther, the great Russian dynamicist Vladimir Arnol’d:

 

[I]n singularity theory, just as in all mathematics, there is a mysterious element:  the asto­n­ishing concurrences and ties between objects and theories which at first glance seem far apart.

 

One example of such a concurrence which remains enigmatic (although partly under­stood) is the so-called A, D, E-classification.  It is encountered in such diverse areas of mathematics as, for example, the theories of critical points of functions, Lie algebras, categories of linear spaces, caustics, wave fronts, regular poly­hedra in three-dimensional space and Coxeter crystallographic reflection groups.[38]

 

                Translation:  underwriting the form languages of ever more domains of mathematics is a set of deep patterns which not only offer access to a kind of ideality that Plato claimed to see the universe as cre­ated with in the Timaeus; more than this, the realm of Platonic forms is itself subsumed in this new set of design elements – and their most general instances are not the regular solids, but crystallographic reflec­tion groups.  You know, those things the non-professionals call . . . kaleidoscopes![39]  (In the next exciting epi­sode, we’ll see how Derrida claims mathematics is the key to freeing us from “logocentrism”[40] – then ask him why, then, he jettisoned the deepest structures of mathematical patterning just to make his name . . . )