Mar 07
eldonlanguage and culture, suitable quotations bateson, individual, lemke
4 thinkers, all men, who at different times have said almost the same things in different ways.
it’s not likely that V read any of the others, although L probably has. R&B, however, definitely did not read any of the other two. V’s was also in translation.
the meta-discursive meanings these guys were making then, were instances of different meaning “systems”, despite their being at another level instances of the same grammatical system, and dare i say, registers (this also despite the differences in orientation: the first uses a personal orientation (1st person), the second a third person orientation (it), and the third uses an inclusive ‘we’ orientation. at the same time, field may be considered similar due to repeated references to ‘individual’, and other lexical items in a sort of meronymic relation to ‘community’ [social, group]).
in view the differences in time of publication, and only one definite ‘cross-pollination’ of cultural (?) meanings, can we consider these quotation fragments as either ‘specimens’ (instruments) or ‘artefacts’ (objects) (in the halliday& matthiessen 2004 sense)? because they are not whole texts, and because they are not the subject of analysis at the grammatical level, perhaps – in this instance of their use – they should not be classed as specimens (of the language as system) – but artefacts…representative pieces of a larger puzzle? that larger puzzle, the way that meaning can be viewed, where it resides, how it comes about, how to think about meaning-making. and in this case, the mediating individual body is not viewed as the receptacle of meaning, rather the locus.
‘in this instance of their use’, the quotations are being used (by me) to highlight similarities in meta-meanings, through instances far removed in time and space. i’m always telling my students to only use quotations to illustrate or support their argument, not to make it for them. so, either i am not making an argument, or i am being hypocritical here and now.
Instead of talking about meaning-making as something that is done by minds, I prefer to talk about it as a social practice in a community. It is a kind of doing that is done in ways that are characteristic of a community, and its occurrence is part of what binds the community together and helps to constitute it as a community. In this sense we can speak of a community, not as a collection of interacting individuals, but as a system of interdependent social practices: a system of doings, rather than a system of doers. These social meaning-making practices are also material processes that bind the community together as a physical ecosystem.
[Lemke 1995: 9-10]
In point of fact, the speech act, or more accurately, its product-the utterance-cannot under any circumstances be considered an individual phenomenon in the precise meaning of the word and cannot be explained in terms of individual psychological or psychophysiological conditions of the speaker. The utterance is a social phenomenon.
[Volosinov 1973: 82]
At the group level, in addition to the verbal and non verbal processes,
present at the interpersonal level, we meet with new types of symbolization not ordinarily regarded as such. The patterns of the organization of the group leave traces in the participating individuals.
However, inasmuch as these individuals do not act as stations of origin or destination of messages, but often as channels only, codification at this level requires intactness in the organization as a whole. The group in action possesses the information, not the individual.
[Ruesch & Bateson 1951: 284]
Mar 01
eldonepistemology, suitable quotations bateson
The relation between information and value becomes still more evident when we consider the asking of questions and other forms of seeking information. We may compare the seeking of information with the seeking of values. In the seeking of values it is clear that what happens is that a man sets out to “trick” the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He endeavours to interfere with the “natural” or random course of events, so that some otherwise improbable outcome will be achieved. For his breakfast, he achieves and arrangement of bacon and eggs, side by side, upon a plate; and in achieving this improbability he is aided by other men who will sort out the appropriate pigs is some distant market and interfere with the natural juxtaposition of hens and eggs…[..]..Briefly, in value seeking he is achieving a coincidence or congruence between something in his head – an idea of what breakfast should be – and something external, an actual arrangement of eggs and bacon..[..]..In contrast, when he is seeking information, he is again trying to achieve a congruence between “something in his head” and the external world; but now he attempts to do this by altering what is in his head.
Feb 17
eldoncontext, epistemology, suitable quotations bateson
I remember the boredom of analyzing sentences and the boredom later, at Cambridge, of learning comparative anatomy. Bothe subjects, as taught, were torturously unreal. We could have been told something about the pattern which connects: that all communication necessitates context, that without context, there is no meaning, and that contexts confer meaning because there is a classification of contexts. The teacher could have argued that growth and differentiation must be controlled by communication. The shapes of plants and animals are the transforms of messages. Language itself is a form of communication. The structure of the input must somehow be reflected as structure in the output. Anatomy must contain an analogue of grammar because all anatomy is a transform of message material, which must be contextually shaped. And finally, contextual shaping is only another term for grammar.
So we come back to the patterns of connection and the more abstract, and more general (and most empty) proposition that, indeed, there is a pattern of patterns of connection.
Gregory Bateson (1979) from the Introduction to “Mind and Nature”.
Jul 22
eldonepistemology argument, bateson, description, explanation, logic, validity, value
In science, these two types of organization of data (description and explanation) are connected by what is technically called tautology. …
..Von Neumann, in his famous book [“The theory of games and economic behaviour. 1944), expressly points out the differences between his tautological world and the more complex world of human relations. All that is claimed is that if the axioms be such and such and the postulates such and such, then the theorems will be so and so. In other words, all the tautology affords is connections between propositions. The creator of the tautology stakes his reputation on the validity of these connections.
Tautology contains no information whatsoever, and explanation (the mapping of description onto tautology) contains only the information that was present in the description. The “mapping” asserts implicitly that the links which hold the tautology together correspond to relations which obtain in the description. Description, on the other hand, contains information but no logic and no explanation. For some reason, human beings enormously value this combining of ways of organizing information or material.
To illustrate how description, tautology, and explanation fit together, let me cite an assignment which I have given several times to classes. I am indebted to astronomer Jeff Scargle for this problem, but I am responsible for the solution. The problem is:
A man is shaving with his razor in his right hand. He looks into his mirror and sees his image shaving with his left hand. He says, “Oh, there’s been a reversal of right and left. Why is there no reversal of top and bottom?”
(Mind & Nature: 76-77)
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