Longer Views (57 page)

The real generates an utterance via a
process
that allows us to recognize it as “true” or “false.”

If we introduce verbs into the language to stand for the specific generative processes, we fill a much stumbled-over gap. By recovering what is on both sides of the interface, and the direction the relation between them runs, we clarify much that was confused because unstated. Let us coin “generyte” and “misgeneryte,” and let us make clear that these processes are specifically mental and of the particular neurocybernetic nature that produce the utterances which, through a host of overdeter- mined and partially determined reasons, we have been recognizing as
“true” and “false.” If we introduce these verbs into our paradox, it stands revealed simply as two incorrect statements.

On one side of the paper instead of “The sentence on the other side of this paper is true,” we write:

“What is on this side of the paper generytes the sentence on the other side.”

And on the other side instead of “The sentence on the other side of this paper is false,” we write:

“What is on this side of the paper misgenerytes the sentence on the other side.”

Looking at either sentence, then turning the paper over to see if it does what it claims, we can simply respond, for both cases: “No, it does not.” One (among many) properties that lets us recognize a generyted (or misgeneryted) sentence is that it is in the form of a description of whatever generyted (or misgeneryted) it; neither sentence is in that form.
^*

A last comment on all this:

The whole problem of relating mathematics to logic is basically the problem of how, logically, to get from conjunctions like “1 + 1 = 2
and
1 +? 1 ≠ 3,” which is the sort of thing we can describe in mathematics, to the self-evident (yet all but unprovable) logical implication: “1 + 1 = 2
therefore
1 + 1 ≠3,” which is the process that propels us through all mathematical proofs.

Now consider the following sentences, one a conjunction, one an implication:

“This sentence contains ten words and it misgenerytes itself.”

“If this sentence contains ten words, then it misgenerytes itself.”

About the first sentence we can certainly say: “That sentence contains nine words,
therefore
it misgenerytes itself.” If that self-evident
there-fore
can be considered an implication, and assumed equivalent to (“to have the same truth values as” in our outmoded parlance) the implication of the second sentence, then, working from the side of language, we have, self-evidently, bridged the logical gap into mathematics!

Before making such an assumption, however, count the words in the second sentence . . .

29. Vanessa Harpington (during a period when she [not I] thought her work was going badly), shortly after Alfred's departure for Rumania:

“What use is love?

“It assures neither kindness, compassion, nor intelligence between the people who feel it for one another.

“The best you can say is that when good people love, they behave well. . . sometimes.

“When bad people love, they behave appallingly.

“I wonder what the brilliant Alfred will have to say about a paradox like
that!'

“First of all, Vanessa,” I reminded her as we walked the cobbled streets, with the Arno, dull silver, down every block, through the Italian summer, “you simply cannot take such abstract problems so seriously. Remember, you and Alfred are both fictions: neither of you exists. The closest I've ever been to passing a summer in an English country house was a weekend at John and Margery Brunner's in Somerset, and though I spent a few weeks in Venice once, I've never stayed in an Italian villa in my life! I've never even
been
in Florence—”

“Oh, really,” Vanessa said. “You just don't understand at all!” and, for the rest of the walk back, stayed a step or two ahead of me, arms folded and looking mostly somewhere else, though we did eventually talk—about other things.

30. Finished reading Gombrich's
Art and Illusion
yesterday. The oversized paperback seems to be losing most of its pages. A thought: When I hold up my hand in front of my face, what I
see
is my hand, in focus, and, behind it, a slightly unfocussed, double image of the rest of the room, those images further away blurrier and slightly further apart. (Actually, parts of the double image keep suppressing other parts, and then the suppression pattern changes.) How odd that in the search for more and more striking illusions of reality, no artist has ever tried to paint
this
.

One reason, I suspect, is that art has never really been interested in painting What You See; from the most abstract to the most representational, art is interested in purveying the concept of What Is There. Representationalists have, from time to time, used a limited number of tricks of the eye to emphasize (by making their paintings look
more
like what you see) that the subject
is
there. Abstractionists use the reality of paint, brush stroke, and material for the same end.

31. A common argument between philosophers often runs like this:

A. I have a problem within this particular context.

B. I have a context within which I can solve your particular problem.

A. But I want a solution within
my
context!

B. But I can translate your context, in all particulars that interest me, into my context.

A. But you can't translate my problem into
your
context so that it is still a problem and then produce a solution for it that will fit
mine!
Is there any way you can prove that, within my context, my problem is insoluble?

B. I'm not interested in proving your problem insoluble! I'm interested in solving it! And I have!

A. If you are interested in proving my old problem insoluble, then I am not interested in your new context! It doesn't relate to my problem!

32. The greatest distress to me of Structural Anthropology is its sexism. The primary descriptive model, “Society operates by the exchange of women,” as a purely descriptive model, has the value of any other: There are certainly contexts in which it is useful. The same can be said of such other famous descriptive models as: “Jews are responsible for the financial evils of Europe,” or “Blacks are lazy and shiftless but have a good sense of rhythm.” It is the nature of descriptions that, as long as they model some fraction of the reality, however minute (even to the fact that persons A and B have agreed to use model
p
as a description of situation
s
[which is the case with individual words]) they can be called useful. But pure descriptive usefulness is not in the least contingent on how much the internal structure of the description reflects the way in which the fragment of reality it models relates to the rest of the case. Such descriptions that try to mirror these relations, to the extent that they succeed, can be called logical (functional) descriptions. But the very form of the absolute statement precludes its being a logical (functional) description. And when a description is of a small enough fragment of reality, and it reflects neither the internal workings of what it is describing nor the external workings, it can be said to be an emblem—or, if it is made up of a string of words, a slogan. And it is the slogan's pretension to logical (functional) description that makes it so undesirable. When trying to establish a coherent system, such as a coherent anthropological discipline (as Lévi- Strauss is attemping), we want logical models that can also be used as part of a logical context. Such models as the ones above, as they pass into context, yield situation after situation where abuse is almost inevitable:

If a woman objects to being exchanged or refuses to be exchanged, for example, by the above model she can be described as opposing society's workings. But if a man objects to or refuses to be exchanged, he can be described as objecting to being treated as a woman! And on and on and on
ad
(in the manner of context models)
infinitum
.

What makes this so sad is that the original descriptive use is completely
subsumed by the double model: “Much of society works by the exchange of human beings,” and “In most cases, the human beings who do the exchanging are men and the human beings exchanged are women.” Without resorting to information theory (which tells us that the interplay between two limited descriptive models generates much more information about the context surrounding the elements of all of them than any one absolute statement of the same elements possibly can), I think most native English speakers hear the margin for self-criticism allowed. And I don't see how the informative usefulness of this complex model is any
less
than that of the absolute statement.

But if I thought anthropological sexism were merely a manifestation of a single, clumsily thought-out descriptive model, I would not be as distressed as I am. It appears again and again; the profusion alone suggests that it is inherent in the context. Three more examples:

In Lévi-Strauss's most exemplary short piece,
La Geste d' Asdiwal
(his analysis of a myth that has a range of male and female characters), we find statements like: “. . . the women [in this myth] are more profitably seen as natural forces . . .” (More profitably than what? Than as human beings? And who is this profitable to? But let us continue.) The myth, in its several versions collated in the forty-odd-page essay, begins with a mother and daughter, whose husbands have died in the current famine, traveling from their respective villages, till they meet, midway along a river. They have only a rotten berry between them to eat. A magic bird appears, turns into a man, marries the daughter, provides food for the two women, and the daughter and her supernatural husband have a child, Asdiwal, the hero of the myth. Some time later in the myth, Asdiwal, as an adult, meets a magic bear on a mountain who turns into a woman and reveals she is the daughter of the sun. After Asdiwal passes a series of tests set by the bear-woman's supernatural father, the bear-woman marries Asdiwal and they live for a while, happily, in the sky. Later they return to earth, to Asdiwal's own village, where Asdiwal commits adultery with a woman of his people. The bear-woman leaves him over this and returns to her father. Asdiwal marries another woman of his village, and the myth continues through a series of adventures involving several other female figures, some human, some not, their brothers (who tend to come in groups of five), the king of the seals, Asdiwal's own son by a mortal woman, and finally ends when Asdiwal, in a magic situation on top of a mountain, calls down to his second wife to sacrifice some animal fat, and she, misunderstanding his instructions, eats it; as a result, Asdiwal is turned to stone. I do not claim, in so short a synopsis, to have covered all the salient points of the myth in all its variations; for what it's worth, neither does Lévi-Strauss. There is a whole branch of the myth devoted to Asdiwal's son's adventures, which has many parallels with his father's
story. Still, I cannot see what, in the myth, or in the Timshian culture which produced it, suggests the interpretation “. . . all the women . . .” in the tale are natural forces. The bird-man, the bear-woman, her father the sun, as well as various seal-men and mouse-women, may well represent natural forces. But to restrict this unilaterally to the women seems to be nothing but a projection of part of our own society's rather warped sexist context. I have no idea if the society of the Timshian Indians who produced this myth is as sexist as modern Western society, less sexist, or more so. I might have made an educated guess from the myth itself. But even Malinowski's original reports, taken several times over several years, here and there resort to synopsis, at noticeably more places where women are the agents of the action than where men are. And I can certainly get no idea from the final critical model Lévi-Strauss constructs: a binary grid of repeated, symmetrical patterns, high/low, upstream/dow- stream, mountain/water, etc. By dissolving any possibility of male/female symmetiicality with the asymmetrical men = human/women = forces, he makes it impossible to judge (nor does he try to judge in his final model) any such symmetricalities that
do
exist in the myth—i.e., I think everyone, from the parts recounted, can see a symmetricality between Asdiwal's mother's marriage with the bird-man who brings plenty and Asdiwal's with the bear-woman who brings good times in the sky. Just how important this symmetricality is in terms of Timshian society, I have no way of knowing. My point is, neither does Lévi-Strauss—if he is going to impose the artificial asymmetricalities of our culture on others. Lévi-Strauss's avowed point in the essay is merely to show that there is
some
order in the myth; and this he succeeds in. But has anyone ever seriously maintained that any society has produced myths with
no
order at all? And it is implicit in his approach to show as much order as possible in the myth and then show how it reflects or is reflected by, and lent meaning and value by (and lends meaning and value to), the social context it exists in. There are certainly plenty of asymmetrical elements in both situations (as there are in all of the elements that he pairs as symmetrical), i.e., one marriage produces a child, the other doesn't; one involves inlaws, the other doesn't. But Lévi-Strauss's sexist context puts the whole topic beyond discussion.

Another example: During Lévi-Strauss's conversations with Char- bonnier, Charbonnier asks Lévi-Strauss if sometimes an anthropologist does not identify so much that he biases his observations in ways not even he is aware of. Lévi-Strauss counters with an anecdote of a United States anthropologist who recounted to Lévi-Strauss that he felt much more at home working with one Amerind tribe than another. In one tribe, this man reported, if a wife is unfaithful to her
husband, the husband cuts off her nose. In the other, if a wife is unfaithful to her husband, the husband goes to sit in the central square, bemoans his fate loudly to all who pass by, calls down imprecations from the gods to destroy the world that has brought things to this dreadful impasse, then curses the gods themselves for having allowed the world to become such a terrible place. He then gets up and returns to his wife, presumably much relieved, and life continues on. The second tribe, the American said, filled him with a sense of revulsion: Trying to “destroy the world, or the whole universe, for a personal injury” struck him as, somehow, “immoral.” He preferred working with the former tribe because their responses somehow seemed much “more human.” Now I have no idea whether either tribe was particularly sexist or not. Presumably if the women of the first tribe cut off the noses of their unfaithful husbands, whereas we might call them violent, we could not call them sexist. I do know enough of the social context of America to be sure that if this
were
the case, our United States anthropologist would have felt nowhere as “at home” with them as he did. And in terms of any of the tribes involved, including my own U.S. of A., I don't think I would trust this man to give an objective report on sexuality, sexual politics, morality, or humanity, as conceived subjectively, in terms of their own culture, by
any
of the three. In the context of the conversation, however, Lévi-Strauss uses the anecdote to point out, as politely as possible, that Charbonnier's question is mildly impertinent and that somehow this man is more equipped to be objective about the tribe he identifies with most than anyone else.