(Following from previous post)

The connection that Bateson and his collaborators sought to establish, via the concept of the double bind, between metalevel difficulties in communication and pathologies of relationships gained diffusion within large publics as it inspired or got integrated into clinical practice in various currents of psychotherapy in the 1960s and 1970s. Bateson himself, however, eventually came to express impatience and frustration at times with the popularity that the double bind hypothesis had achieved in some psychiatric circles and Euroamerican public culture (e.g. 1972a). This popularity largely eclipsed and passed over in silence that there was another side to his inquiries into paradox and difficulties at the metalevel, and one he considered of much wider import and relevance — indeed, he was to argue in fine that paradoxes of abstraction were central to the evolution of patterns of relationships in ecosystems, and thus to the natural history of forms of life itself. This other part of his analysis is quite relevant, I now want to suggest, for interpreting Yasser’s pick of a text that precisely extols the relationality of ‘kinship’ or ṣilat al-raḥim by means of entangling the reader into difficulties at the metalevel.

One would be misguided to project from Bateson’s elegant account of the (sometime) psychic pathogenicity of double binds a longing for well-ordered, smooth, transparent communication, or to draw from it the conclusion that we would be better off if only people obeyed in their everyday communications the rules of formal logic. Not only, Bateson had to constantly remind his readers, do paradoxes of communication involving contraction and confusion between multiple types of signals pervade ordinary exchanges, and do not usually result in anything regarded as pathological. (In fact, “there is nothing” in double-bind theory, he provocatively told the attendees of a psychiatric congress celebrating its tenth anniversary (1972a: 272), “to determine whether a given individual shall become a clown, a poet, a schizophrenic, or some combination of these”.) Not only were communications entailing uncertainty as to ‘what sort of message a message is’ precisely what make play, humor, art, fantasy, dream, etc. possible, and thus what drove the exploration of relationship and the evolution of new patterns of interaction. Bateson also consistently maintained that if the most acute, painful double binds could drive one into insanity, they also seemed to be straits one had to go through to force oneself or others into “wisdom” or “enlightenment”. The original and best-known text on the double bind thus already contains the early mention — curious, on the face of it, in a psychiatry article — of a Zen master holding a stick over a pupil’s head and declaring: “If you say this stick is real, I will strike you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will strike you with it. If you don’t say anything, I will strike you with it.” Bateson adds that “the schizophrenic finds himself continually in the same situation as the pupil, but he achieves disorientation rather than enlightenment” (1972: 208, emphasis added).

The reference is to the pedagogy of the koan in the Zen tradition, specifically in the Japanese Rinzai school of Zen. To put it briefly, a koan (lit., ‘public record’) is a case or “problem” that the Zen master presents to a student for her to concentrate her mind upon and resolve (Suzuki 1963). It often — but not always — takes the form of an insurmountable paradox, as in the example given by Bateson, or the demand to “let me hear the sound of one hand clapping.”¹ This paradox is to bring the student’s mind into such tension that it suddenly opens onto a different and more expansive state of consciousness, to which the mind could not come left to its own habits of thinking. “When the koan is resolves, it is realized to be a simple and clear statement made from the state of consciousness which it has helped to awaken” (Miura and Fuller Sasaki 1965: xi-xii). In the case mentioned by Bateson, such a resolution on the part of the student could mean (and has meant) grabbing the stick away from the master, breaking it into two, and walking away — not just from the master’s impossible demand to “say something”, but also from wasting her mind in a muddle of metaphysical questions, from the misleading reifications internal to human language, and from obedience itself as the yardstick by which to know how to live one’s life.

Bateson frequently referred over the years to the Zen tradition, usually in discussions of learning and habit.² His companionship with Zen had a lot to do with the recognition in this tradition that facing up to (rather than avoiding) the double binds that naturally arise in complex forms of life was a necessary pathway to “wisdom” or “enlightenment”. Bateson called this mode of learning through staying with and engaging difficulties at the metalevel Learning III, “in which there is a profound reorganization of character”, as opposed to Learning II, in which we learn and habituate ourselves to the contexts of life presented to us (1972c). He also observed that Learning III was “difficult and rare even among human beings” and that expecting it “of some men and some mammals is sometimes pathogenic”. In Learning II, we learn the contexts of life: we learn, that is, to “punctuate” events into a contextual structure, schemes for putting the information together. We learn, usually through trial and error, that this I am a part of right now is a case or context for, say, being romantic, enacting kinship, or playing fetch. In doing so, we also learn the implicit premises or propositions that govern punctuation, the background assumptions of this or that context of life, and commit them to the unconscious of habit. These implicit and habituated premises can be of various order of generality, from “the soul is separate from the body and can control it” to “a good girl never says ‘yes’” to premises relative to the history of individuals in relationship (“A has a debt towards B”) —, and they primarily make sense under the restricted circumstances of the context of life they underwrite: having absorbed and committed them to habit, I will mold the context of interaction to fit the punctuation of events, the way of putting together the information in front of me, that I previous learned to recognize and participate in. For this reason, they also become self-validating, and this and habituation make them hard to unlearn, however maladaptive they may (and frequently prove to) be under other, or changed, or larger circumstances.

Life (and people, and institutions) presents us with double binds, or with difficulties at the metalevel, when the premises we learned in one context of life prove to be at odds with the premises internal to another, successive or larger context of life: when the premise “it is important to participate in academic conferences for professional development”, for example, is at odds with the premise that “air travel GHG emissions must be reduced urgently for the planet to remain habitable”. The most common inclination in the face of this type of dissonances are attempts to avoid or manage them, in a manner that will entail oscillations, pain as we saw before, and in the end breakdown or disintegration. What seemed to fascinate Bateson in the Zen tradition of the koan is the avoidance of the avoidance of dissonance. The Zen pedagogy of the koan does not aim at managing dissonance. It deliberately organizes confrontations with difficulties at the metalevel as a method for the student to revise or unlearn self-validating, habituated epistemological premises acquired from previously learned contexts of life and, in the end, relevant to them and to them only. For the two koans I mentioned above, the student could come to change her relation to language — come to see that her sense of reality has always been dependent on tropes chopped out of interactive sequences and sedimented in language. Or she could end up learning from the master that obedience or faithfulness to the master will not indicate to her how to live a life like the master’s. In the process, unexamined premises will be thrown open to question and change, there will be a collapsing of what had been previously learned and habituated, and a profound reorganization of one’s contexts of life in the direction of a larger, more encompassing context. For Bateson, at the end of this arduous kind of learning, there could be the revelation of “a simplicity in which hunger leads directly to eating”. There could also be “a world in which personal identity merges into all the processes of relationship in some vast ecology or aesthetics of cosmic interaction” — the power and innocence “to see”, in a Blakean fashion, “the World in a Grain of Sand” (1972c: 306).

Bateson, Gregory. 1972a. “Double Bind, 1969.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 271–79. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1972b. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1972c. “The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 279–308. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bateson, Gregory, Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley, and John H. Weakland. 1972. “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, 201–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bateson, Mary Catherine. 1980. “Six Days of Dying.” CoEvolution Quarterly, no. 28: 4–11.

Miura, Isshu, and Ruth Fuller Sasaki. 1965. The Zen Koan : Its History and Use in Rinzai Zen. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace.

Suzuki, D.T. 1963. “The Koan.” In Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, edited by D.T. Suzuki, Erich Fromm, and Richard De Martino, 43–58. Grove Press.

Bateson developed his analytic of the radical disorientation attendant to “difficulties at the metalevel” while working with patients diagnosed as schizophrenic in a Palo Alto hospital in the 1950s. This research project famously led to the double bind hypothesis (Bateson et al. 1972; Chaney 2017: 45-63). According to this hypothesis, the schizophrenic’s condition originated in one particular, human variant of the (logical) “paradoxes of abstraction” that pervade and constantly find their way into “the mental process and communicative habits of mammals” at large (1972: 180). Such paradoxes arise from condensation and contradiction within the hierarchy of “levels” or “modes” of communication on which depends the possibility to know, precisely, “what kind of message a message is”. For a message to be interpreted felicitously, it must me accompanied by a metamessage — another, and one degree more abstract, “class of information” (1979: 115) — labeling the message as, for instance, literal, metaphoric, playful, humorous, dead serious, ritualistic, fiction etc. One ordinary example of paradox of abstraction, then, would be a message (say, “take me into your arms”), framed or reframed by a metasignal (the speaker’s body stiffens as she receives the hug she requested just moments earlier) that casts uncertainty onto whether and how the message was meant (1972: 217). Bateson wrote elsewhere and often of the pain (and even of the “extreme pain”) that can be inflicted on humans (and on dogs, and on dolphins) through exposing them to such paradoxes (e.g. 1972: 241-2, 246, 278, 478, 1979: 118-123). For him, withdrawal from linguistic and bodily communication (catatonia), flight into distrustful, delusional interpretation (paranoia), or into disorganized thought and discourse crammed with unlabeled metaphors (hebephrenia, “word salad”) were not adequately described as symptoms of a mental disorder ascribable to (or locatable in) a bounded self. Rather, they were adaptive dispositions, acquired or learned in a dynamic dialog with a larger life environment, and “in some sense appropriate” (1972: 206) to dampen the repeated experience of the pain generated by paradoxes of abstraction. Those dispositions or “unconventional communicative habits” were particularly prone to develop when a young human grew up within an early communication system (typically, amongst close kin) in which routine contradictions or lack of clarity in the labeling of exchanged messages made it extraordinarily difficult for her to know what sort of message was being communicated — while, at the same time, any interpretation exposed her to rebuke or punishment for being unsound. The accumulated effect of such “unresolvable sequences of experiences” (ibid.) could be a breakdown, rather than development, of the child’s communicative system, a learned incapacity to discriminate “what sort of message a message is” (including for interpreting the messages internal to her own thought and emotional processes), and withdrawal or flight into one form or the other of psychic seclusion. One may well remember here Arendt’s formulation of worldliness as a material-semiotic horizon ahead of us, for example, her claim that “with word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance” (1958). While Bateson himself does not use this language, the victim of the double bind was, perhaps, forced or kept in his analysis into a form of worldlessness.

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: E.P. Dutton.

Bateson, Gregory, Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley, and John H. Weakland. 1972. “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, 201–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chaney, Anthony. 2017. Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

One simple but profound observation I feel I finally understood from Bateson today is the following. In any kind of communication the question: who am I to you? who are you to me? is at stake.

And there is no escaping this, this is so even if the communication is ostensibly ‘just’ about the transmission of information about something else. That is, the transmission of information is always, has to be, also transmission of information about the relationship.

Otherwise (if there is no transmission of information also about the relationship), then there can no be no transmission of information, even about something else, in such a way that this information can be interpreted, can make sense at all.

At least this is so for communication between mammals. But then, for human mammals, it has to be a very dangerous game.

The dog — she pretty much only communicates with me about the variations of our relationship and very little about anything else.

Even behaviors to the effect of ‘I want to play frisbee’ or ‘I like it so much when you dry me with a towel’ — it looks like it is about (it stands for, manifests) something else (‘tastes’, forms of enjoyment) but it is fundamentally about a “you and me in the world”.

Whereas for human mammals, it becomes very hazardous precisely because they can transmit information apparently autonomous from the relationship (i.e. from the ongoing exchange), yet even that has to, and will, carry information about the relationship.

I can think of at least three variations of how it becomes gut-wrenching. One is when we think, in good faith, that we talk about something else, something autonomous from the state of the relationship, and we inadvertently destroy the relationship.

This one, the one variation I just mentioned, it’s something that can and should be worked upon (tactfulness, I guess) although it will probably happen to everybody one day.

Another one is the communication of pain between, for example, relatives. As my friend Nabil says, “to your mother, even if you’re on the verge of dying, you must say ‘I feel strong like a horse!’”.

The other one is when we feel a bit unclear about where or who we are, we think (or are told) that trying to articulate it in language will help, but it will not necessarily do that in fact since the ‘who I am’ is always, has to be, a ‘who I am to you’.

I would guess that it is so even in a psychotherapist’s office.

This is why, I guess, communication with and between nonhuman mammals can strike us as so poor and so rich, or so full, at the same time. They cannot seduce themselves into the ‘who am I’ kind of communication, and the dark labyrinths it opens, it’s always ‘who am I to you’, period.

This is probably an example of discovering the Mediterranean sea as the Spaniards say, or at least it’s what I remember reading they say.

[…]

By onto-ethics of worldliness, I mean, for now, a broad but specific register of the ethical life anchored in a sense, or hunch, that the self’s relation to the world could and should be more admirable, more far-reaching, and more wittingly reciprocal, than it is in the present. Such an ethics presupposes an original orientation to self and world that does not see their consociation as fixed but rather apprehends both of them as unfinished and co-emergent. It also entails the apprehension of a tendency running counter to this orientation in the human self, a disposition to be out of kilter with the world, or a comfort found in a state of relative alienation from it.

To be sure, the type of incipient striving towards worldliness I am painting here with broad strokes can be, and has been, interpreted, intensified and socially absorbed through very diverse and at times divergent configurations of ethical life. In the Euroamerican philosophical tradition, many will associate the concept of worldliness with the major and quite distinct elaboration it received in the twentieth century in the thought and writings of Hannah Arendt (1958a, 1978). Worldliness is, in one of her commentators' words, “what Arendt prizes most” (Kateb 1977: 142), that of which the ever increasing impracticability informs her critical diagnosis of the modern age, and that of which the restoration orients her political and moral theory. For Arendt, worldliness anchors itself as the highest pursuit in the existential condition of natality: the “naked fact” of one’s “appearance” into being, which presupposes an immanent power to appear and thus also the “appearingness” of other beings recipients of my appearance (1978: 19-23, 1958a: 175-181). Every living entity’s appearance, in this Arendtian sense, is an ontological event that makes sensible in the present an as yet indeterminate future in which this entity will have been seen, heard, and otherwise pulled “out of the darkness of sheltered existence” by other entities that it will have similarly grasped and engaged in various ways (1958a: 175-181). This material-semiotic “play” (1978: 22) of appearances is what Arendt called “the world,” which thus emerges and lies, in her formulation, “in-between” (inter-esse) the entities that appear to each other.

This is a picture of my father, François Perdigon, who died by taking his own life this week 26 years ago. The plump, wide-eyed puppy sitting on his lap is me at the age of 0. I’m posting this here, including the manner of his death, for two reasons. One is that this year, now, is the last year that I pass this anniversary while still younger than he was when he decided to end his life — next year I will remember the manner of his death as the choice of a relative ever younger than I am — and there is an overwhelming sense of impending transformation, and vertigo (and a bit of fear) that goes with that, of a life-threshold for me, not unlike other life-passages (weddings, graduations, etc.) which are made more real, including to ourselves, through being ritually shared with others, on the web amongst other places. I’m remembering Hannah, too: “Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life — the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses — lead an uncertain, shadowy existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and desindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance.” The other reason is that, frankly, as I’m reaching this old age, I am also growing tired and impatient with the etiquette of silence surrounding suicide within kinship, or the assumption that only traumatic or traumatized discourse can happen in its wake. Making it visible as I’m doing now is brutal, but keeping silent about it is brutal too, and not just for the one who keeps silent. So here is a small experiment, in mourning and remembering. Surely there should be a way to celebrate the natality and passage through the world of even those whose final act speaks poorly of natality, of the world, and perhaps of themselves, the possibility of an effort to make them, still, ancestors rather than ghosts.

I still apologize if you found this post brutal. (It’s good, at least, that I have this space to do that, rather than being tempted to write one of those ghastly French papa-maman novels that Deleuze abhorred so much.)

“We hold ourselves in place through the interactional texts we build with and through others, and in the shadow of institutions of force. To use language effectively, all subjects must be able to operate-if not consciously understand-the principles by which texts cohere as the same principles that allow for their reformation. In short, the subject must learn to rely for survival on her provisionality within any one unfolding discursive space and her displacement across discursive spaces as her means of survival. In doing so, she places herself in the human lot: Every day, without relief from birth to death, she will remake the here and now whether she likes it or not, whether she knows it or not, in the context of institutional threat and incitement.

To be sure, these institutions might seem a welcome external brace, a resting place…"

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2001. “Sexuality at Risk: Psychoanalysis Metapragmatically.” In Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, edited by Tim Dean and Christopher Lane, 387–411. (p. 404)

I am buying an espresso at Abu Naji’s, a coffee stand/minimarket on Bliss street. I have not showered because there was no hot water at home, and I am wearing a beanie and a buff that I use when hiking because it is very cold today. Ba'ash, the employee in charge of sandwiches who is Palestinian from Sabra tells me:

“You look like Beethoven.”

Which, as a matter of fact, is true.

It’s from one incarnation of the whiteman to the next I guess.