Part II:
Canonical Collage-oscopes, or:
Claude in Jacques’ Trap? Not What It Sounds
Like!
“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 14th 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]
FX(A) :
FY(B) ~ FX(B) : FA-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 . . . )
