Pattern and truthfulness

Update: This post is a partial review of Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind

On the heels of yesterday’s post, I should note that the popular model of communication—centered on content—that I opposed to Bateson’s model in Steps to an Ecology of Mind is not one that would be adhered to by all rhetoricians. I think a valid response to what I wrote would be that rhetoric has always paid a great deal of attention to the form and structure of speech, and that that form is universally regarded among rhetoricians as being very important to the reception of said speech. However, I feel speech is still widely considered to be primarily about some content and the form itself is considered successful if it serves that content. As I read Bateson, he is arguing for a different model. Though communication is about something, it is also about itself and the relationships between the people who are communicating.

In this light, in this post I will comment on Bateson’s explanation of these relationships and how they are communicated as well as on the ways in which certain kinds of communication are perceived as being more truthful than others.

In the first case, Bateson notes that symbol systems must be redundant—what Derrida referred to as iterable—in order for those systems to be understood by others. However, Bateson recognizes that this redundancy is often the primary reason for the communication. As he puts it ‘The essence and raison d’être of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information, and/or the reduction of the random by “restraint” ’ (131-32). Although he notes that communication has ‘meaning’ and carries ‘information,’ it is far more often a means of conveying or emphasizing ‘pattern’ and ‘restraint.’ Whatever is outside of this pattern—‘All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints—is noise,’ which is ‘the only possible source of new patterns’ (416). Again, meaning is only possible in relation to the overall structure that has been established by previous communications. If new communication is outside that structure, it is either ignored as ‘noise’ or adopted within the structure as something new. Here Bateson provides a developmental model for the evolution of language not as the process of the creation of new information but of new structures with which to pattern that information.

Secondly, keeping with this focus on how messages are communicated, Bateson pays a good deal of attention to the format of speech, accompanied by body language and other ‘kinesic and paralinguistic signals’ (370). These signals become important when the communicator realizes the rhetorical nature of signs, that they ‘are only signals, which can be trusted, distrusted, falsified, denied, amplified, corrected, and so forth’ (178). Because the individual recognizes that the sign is falsifiable, the importance of the paralinguistic skyrockets. The reason Bateson gives for this phenomenon is that because these paralinguistic elements are often involuntary and are out of the control of the untrustworthy other, they are more truthful. However, in ancient rhetoric (I’m thinking specifically of Longinus) it is generally accepted that once any particular behavior—in this case, whether linguistic or not—is accepted as conveying a kind of truthfulness, that truthfulness can be falsified. Bateson recognizes this fact (203), but his discussion of the matter brings up an important point for communication theory. Since the content of messages is often what is in doubt in communication, the only way to verify that content is through the assumption of or reference to structures that are perceived to be truthful, be they bodily signals or the assumption of different modes of speech that carry this information. An interesting example is the technologizing of communication. When communication is divorced from the often untrustworthy individual it is many times perceived to be more truthful. Bateson notes this phenomenon with newspapers, and it is similarly seen with some kinds of government or scientific documents which are designed to efface their authors and project the authority of some abstract entity.

Communication as relationship

Update: This post is a partial review of Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind

In his references to communication, Bateson provides an intriguing alternative to the prevailing model of the persuasive process. That process is largely considered to consist of an author/speaker presenting some superior content, and that content, through its effective presentation, persuading an audience of the author’s thesis. (This is certainly not the only model for communication, but I would think it is the one that most people—especially non-academics—would adhere to.) Rhetoricians would focus on the importance of the presentation, that is, all of the choices the author/speaker makes in presenting the content, but primacy would be given to the content. This formulation privileging content would not only be considered the best one, but possibly the most ethical one as well.

Bateson presents an alternative. Although he does not ignore the importance of content, his model of communication focuses on the presentation, what he refers to variously as “structure” or “patterns,” of that communication, rather than what is being presented, and these structures carry information about relationships. Referring to his own speech at an academic conference, Bateson remarks that his real topic “is a discussion of the patterns of [his] relationship” to the audience, even though, as he tells them, that discussion takes the form of his trying to “convince you, try to get you to see things my way, try to earn your respect, try to indicate my respect for you, challenge you” (372). In other words, the acceptance of the content is dependent upon how well he as a speaker is able to affirm that relationship. In another example, he points out that if one were to make a comment about the rain to another person, hearer would be inclined to look out the window to verify the statement. Though he notes that such behavior can seem confusing because it is redundant, this redundancy is not a question of the first speaker’s truthfulness, but rather an example of an attempt to “to test or verify the correctness of our view of our relationship to others” (132).

This patterning or structure, the need to comment on the relationship between speaker an audience by 1) conforming to arbitrary rules (another kind of structure) like those set up in an academic conference or 2) reminding ourselves that a person is a trustworthy source of information, is, to Bateson, representative of “the necessarily hierarchic structure of all communicational systems” which manifests itself in communication about communication (132). For Bateson, this realization has at least two outcomes. First, in learning it means that what is learned by the subject is often not the topic under study per se, but how “the subject is learning to orient himself to certain types of contexts, or is acquiring ‘insight’ into the contexts of problem solving,” that is, “acquir[ing] a habit of looking for contexts and sequences of one type rather than another, a habit of ‘punctuating’ the stream of events to give repetitions of a certain type a meaningful sequence” (166). Second, this means that these structures of “contexts and sequences” replicate themselves in learners, who then become audiences, and those audiences respond to recognition (perhaps the wrong word) of that structure. As Bateson says, “in all communication, there must be a relevance between the contextual structure of the message and some structuring of the recipient” for “people will respond most energetically when the context is structured to appeal to their habitual patterns of reaction” (154, 104). In these situations, what appeals to or persuades the audience is not the content, but the recognition of the familiar structure in the communication in question.

I think this focus on the structure of communication and the way in which that structure replicates itself across individuals highlights the technological dimension of speech—the way in which “meaning” is dependent upon the form of language—and has some interesting applications for the question of ethics and truthfulness in rhetoric, a topic I will comment on in my next post.

The Rhetoric of . . .

Update: This post is a partial review of Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Reading Gregory Bateson’s introduction to his Steps to an Ecology of Mind, two things jumped out at me. First was his notion that human processes had to that point (1971) been described in terms of energy, a tendency which Bateson points out is misleading, for it frames the discussion of human cognitive processes—“behavior”—in terms of “mass and length” (xxix). Instead, Bateson suggests that these processes should be looked at in regards to a completely different paradigm: that of ordering. Bateson calls the energy example “the wrong half of the ancient dichotomy between form and substance” (his point illustrated with two accounts of creation, both of which are focused on this division) (xxxii).

The form-substance dichotomy has interesting parallels with language theory, particularly in the flawed notion that substance is superior to form; in language, this distinction might be made between, speaking loosely, grammar and meaning. While substance/meaning is of great importance—in science as well as language—one cannot understand it apart from form. I was particularly interested in this point because this kind of investigation can take the form of a “rhetoric.”

I will explain with my second point of interest: this connection between form-substance and the practice of rhetoric (which I feel is significant, though I realize my statement of this significance is loose as of yet) seemed to be emphasized early in Bateson's introduction. He writes “But the definition of an ‘idea’ which the essays [in this book] combine to propose is much wider and more formal than is conventional. . . . let me state my belief that such matters as the bilateral symmetry of an animal, the patterned arrangement of leaves in a plant, the escalation of an armaments race, the processes of courtship, the nature of play, the grammar of a sentence, the mystery of biological evolution, and the contemporary crises in man's relationship to his environment, can only be understood in terms of such an ecology of ideas as I propose” (xxiii). Earlier he explains that the “ecology of ideas” he refers to is connected to what he calls minds. In the case of this long quote, I think there is an intimate relationship between many of the things listed (courtship, play, arms races, grammar) and what is known as rhetoric. Any one of the items I have just listed could be discussed in terms of “The Rhetoric of X” in the sense that Bateson is getting at. It is my feeling that he is attempting to ask fundamental questions about order that are related to the kinds of answers that rhetoric has tried to use to explain complex human interactions like persuasion. Certainly the part of “rhetoric of” that fails is when one focuses only on rhetoric textbooks, that is mere instructions of how to do something, but Bateson here opens the door (I think) to a conversation between rhetoric and his ecologies.

Bateson’s chapter “Experiments in Thinking About Observed Ethnological Material” in particular seems like nothing more than a rhetoric of scientific discovery, where he proposes that in science there should be alternate periods of “loose thinking and the building up of a structure on unsound foundations” followed by “the correction to stricter thinking and the substitution of a new underpinning beneath the already constructed mass” (86). One way in which this kind of see-sawing method can be achieved is through “train[ing] scientists to look among the older sciences for wild analogies to their own material” (87). Also interesting (I'll try and return to it later) is his worry that in some stages of his career he relied too heavily on words that were “too short and therefore appear more concrete than they are,” which seems to be a specific case of dissonance between form and substance (82).