Complex Systems, hypnotism, magic

Update: This post is a review of Kenneth Boulding’s Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal Evolution

Bateson’s idea that communication is a replication of structure from one person to the next is also found elsewhere. In Ecodynamics (1978), Kenneth Boulding argues that the power of human communication comes from the ability of our brains—an ability for which he uses the metaphor ‘know-how’—to replicate structure across other brains (128). Boulding finds this tendency in structures like DNA, the structure of which attracts ‘a similar structure from its material environment’ and those new entities are able ‘form themselves, as it were, into a mirror image of the original molecule’ (101). Similarly, communication works by structures in one person’s ‘head’ ‘replicating’ themselves in the head of another. Or, to avoid the complications involved in going inside heads, it is the propagation of the know-how through the various structures for which it is coded.

This explanation of communication provides a partial understanding of hypnosis. In effect, hypnosis works through the physiological repression of the various means of suppressing this propagation of the code. Bateson describes this process in a circus animal, which he feels ‘abrogate[s] the use of certain higher levels’ of thinking; he argues that it is also the means of hypnotism (369). If the higher levels of intelligence are circumvented, either through the conscious will or through suggestive or physiological means, then there is no interference to prevent the code from replicating.

This realization leads to a biological explanation for effective communication. First, the code must be able to be received without interference. Second, it must have what Boulding calls the sufficient ‘material’ means to propagate (101). In the replication of DNA, this would mean the correct molecules and nutrients; In human communication, it would be effective channels by which the code could spread. Third, the code must be correctly encoded for the material in which it wishes to move. Both Bateson and Boulding suggest that magic represents an ineffective communication of this kind. If a person can be persuaded to do something by words or actions, the practitioner of magic argues, so can nature. However, nature is not designed so as to be able to receive communicative codes and is therefore not influenced by the majority of them (typically words or ritual behavior—changing the code so that it can be received by natural bodies, however, such as fertilizing a plant or seeding a cloud, does result in effect code propagation from humans to nature).

The similarities that are seen between code propagation across persons and in biological structures like DNA prompt both Bateson and Boulding to make a connection between minds and nature. Bateson points out that the basic unit of evolution—the interconnected system—is also the unit of the mind, which is not necessarily limited by the skull. Similarly, Boulding suggests that like environments, individual minds are connected through ‘writing, sculpture, painting, photography and recordings’ into a ‘single mind’ in that each individual mind ‘participates in the experience of other minds through the intermediary of communication’ (128). This fact leads to the interesting conception of the individual not as an individual, but as a part of a larger whole. Since most theories of communication are based on the first model, appropriating the second should have interesting effects on communication theory.

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.