Inroads Macintyre Final Desilvajohnson

8/8/2019 Inroads Macintyre Final Desilvajohnson

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Song of Childhood When the child was a child

It walked with its armsswinging,

wanted the brook to be ariver,

the river to be a torrent,and this puddle to be the

sea.When the child was a child,it didnt know that it was a

child,everything was soulful,and all souls were one.

When the child was a child,it had no opinion about

anything,had no habits,

it often sat cross-legged,took off running,

had a cowlick in its hair,and made no faces when

photographed.When the child was a child,

It was the time for thesequestions:

Why am I me, and why not you?

Why am I here, and why not there?

When did time begin, and where does space end?Is life under the sun not

just a dream?Is what I see and hear and

smellnot just an illusion of a

world before the world?

Given the facts of evil and people.

does evil really exist?How can it be that I, who I

am,didnt exist before I came

to be,and that, someday, I, who I

am,will no longer be who I am?

When the child was a child,

It choked on spinach, on peas,

on rice pudding, and onsteamed cauliflower, and eats all of those now, and not just because it has to.

When the child was a child,it awoke once in a strange bed,

and now does so again and again.

Many people, then, seemed beautiful,

and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

It had visualized a clear image of Paradise,

and now can at most guess,

could not conceive of nothingness,

and shudders today at thethought.

When the child was a child,It played with enthusiasm,and, now, has just as much

excitement as then,but only when it concerns

its work.When the child was a child,

It was enough for it to eat an apple, bread,

And so it is even now.When the child was a child,

Berries filled its hand asonly berries do,

and do even now,Fresh walnuts made its

tongue raw,and do even now,

it had, on every mountaintop,

the longing for a higher mountain yet,

and in every city,the longing for an even

greater city,and that is still so,

It reached for cherries intopmost


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branches of treeswith an elation it still has

today,has a shyness in front of

strangers,and has that even now.

It awaited the first snow,

And waits that way evennow.

When the child was a child,It threw a stick like a lance

against a tree, And it quivers there still

today.

Unmarked Inroads to Truth:Alasdaire MacIntyre and Antirational Ontology

Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, CUNY Graduate Center, 2007


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I. Can there be a correct road to enlightenment? Is rational,

scientific inquiry and its methodological practices the responsible,

surefire way to accurate information? or have we painted ourselves

into a restrictive corner that confines the mind/human abilities for

plugging into whatever ontological or underlying truths may exist?

As anthropologists, we are never far from this question. By definition

our field/work/field-work 's very function comprises an attempt to

reconcile the inherently psychological/personal/nonrational in our

observations of ourselves and eachother with a desire to create work

that is validated by (dare I say) "data." Uniquely in our craft, the self --

so frequently removed from research authorship -- appears and

disappears, like a nervous director on the sidelines of the stage. But in

this receding figure lies great potential: access to an an ancient

ontology left behind by the strictly rational but can this work have

(lasting) value? Is there accuracy or viability in whatever data we

collect, even as we temper it with the subject?

In our language even now my words have already enrolled in a school

which qualifies the existence of something that might be called " data "

at all -- something that smarts of engagement with what we know to

be the product of Enlightenment thinking. A project which privileges

scientific inquiry and its methodologies above all else in the


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determination of "fact," one which forever has attached the idea of

being "enlightened," (a state which it could be argued is in its essence

non-rational) to these modes of thinking and operating.

Through engagement with the work of Alasdaire MacIntyre, the

Anthropologist can enjoy a moment of productive Intellectual

Nomadism 1: finding not only sympathetic solace but, too, strategies for

approaching our particular professional conundrum: reconciliation of

the empirical to the self-in-time, self-in-space. It can be, for instance,

incredibly useful for the social scientist to have support suggesting in

no uncertain terms that this Enlightenment idea may have in fact

brought us farther than ever before from a close relationship with

whatever ontology we may have a chance to plug into. To take the

tongue out of the cheek, there is much to be gained from a reading of

MacIntyres approach to the problem of an empirically formed view of

epistemology, one that opens new doors in response to how do we

think? for every modern layperson -- but in particular, on a

professional level, for the Anthropologist.

One might identify in the development of MacIntyre's body of work

some parallelism with the history of Anthropological thought: his, too,

1 An idea developed in Pierre Laszlo's The Nomadic State , who perhaps even moreso than MacIntyre sees

more alike than different on both sides of "The Science Wars" in the process of "postmoderning

debunking."


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is a path that in turns attempts to qualify its tenuous relationship to

truth "production" -- and/or documentation -- through the acceptance

and then rejection of strict scientism, humanism, psychology, history,

myth, and a move towards less-rational resources: ie, the voice of the

Other/the "subaltern," 2 visual media, literature/prose form, and other

non-traditional forms of description and "method."

In MacIntyre we are re-introduced to possibility . To what one of my

favorite lay-philosophers of this age refers to as "Pronoia"3

: the idea

that in our epistemological crisis itself lies richness, lies the ontological

fact rather than its lack. It is a seeming joke in all seriousness

suggesting we have been wrong all along: in this light, Hume's

approach becomes cause for concern, whereas Kafka is seen as fact

the author of an intuitive, rich, philosophy of science. "There is

perhaps," he writes, "a possible world in which 'empiricism' becomes

the name of a mental illness, while 'paranoia' is the name of a well-

accredited theory of knowledge." (MacIntyre, 1977, p.64) In this

counter-modern reading of our traditions we as social scientists stand

to inherit breathing room from other disciplines and a faith in human

knowledge quantifiable only insofar as linguistically required so that we

may "understand" one another. 4

2 later in this paper developed as a form of accepting/priveledging the "anti-rational" as backlash

3 Rob Breszny. Pronoia is defined as the suspicion the Universe is conspiring on your behalf.

4 I can't help but think of Crapanzano , Hermes' Dilemma , here, and be inclined to careen off topic. Crucial


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MacIntyre has described the essay, "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic

Narrative, and Philosophy of Science," (1977) 5 as marking "a major

turning point in [his] thinking in the 1970's," one in which he began to

move from criticism and "sterile," "negative conclusions," 6 towards a

productive philosophy of virtue and constructive character. The long-

term efforts that were introduced into MacIntyre's thoughts/canon by

this piece not long after culminate in his most well known,

controversial, and influential piece, After Virtue , in 1981.

In The Uses of Philosophy MacIntyre recently commented on the

importance of this essay as, too, marking a shift in his own attempts to

negotiate both science 7 and materially grounded social science; 8 it

to a more involved discussion of the issue at hand however would necessarily be what role our need to uselanguage to communicate plays in our ability to disengage from an enlightenment method. Even as a non-empircal approach is herein envisioned, there is innate fixity in the sharing of language that we cannot inour current state imagine avoiding. (If empathic communication becomes viable, perhaps... ) MacIntyredoes touch on a similar issue regarding cultural functionality (through shared "schemata"; more detail tofollow) that acknowledges this challenge in Epistemological Crises... though language is not the focus of hisargument here.5 Originally printed in The Monist , this essay has been reprinted multiple times in other periodicals, aswell as compilations of MacIntyre's work (most recently in 2006), and in edited volumes.6 An early history that makes even more natural a situation of MacIntyre's approach and, too, thesis into thecanon of the Big Men of Existentialism and Phenomenology. It can be considered a positivist reaction to(even subconsciously, yuk yuk) or a rejection of the nihilistic leanings of the former, but the leadingquestions of that tradition are firmly ensconced at the center of MacIntyre's intellectual motivations.7 In particular, psychology must have appealed to a young MacIntyre as offering a scientific umbrella of sorts between the rational and unrational which so clearly continued to persist in human experience. As this

quote from The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis , (1958) suggests, it was at this point a pretty widelyheld consensus that of the concepts fashioned by recent and contemporary psychology none [had] soimpressed itself upon the public mind as the concept of the unconscious. Among other reasons, it seemedto alleviate many of MacIntyres (and others) concerns that, perhaps, this essentially simple notion seemsable to relate a far wider range of disparate human phenomena and to subsume the wildly abnormal and thetediously normal activities of human beings under the same headings far more easily than any other explanatory concept. Seems able, rather than is able, for here I am speaking of claims made and impressionreceived rather than of facts established. (MacIntyre, 1958)

8 He moved away, in particular, from earlier attempts at integrating a Marxist perspective -- one could


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serves as a signpost, a passage through crisis within his own take on

the episteme that which leads him to reject empiricism as an

endpoint for critical analysis. One can surmise that this journey was

incredibly personal, as it would later lead him to join the Catholic

church in the mid 1980s a bold act for a man of (even social)

science, and perhaps one which lends the gravity of non-objectively

derived belief to his conviction that counter-enlightenment processes

continue to be central in (post)-modern experience. It bears noting for

the purpose of dramatic narrative that MacIntyre opted in to religion

after years of writing from a pure science perspective, and that this

decision was not prompted by a change of life or the winnowing of

days, but rather came about quite in the midst of health and a

successful career, not long after the publication of After Virtue .

In Epistemological Crises... , then, we are blessed because in this slim

essay we can locate the kernel of MacIntyre's philosophy as he

answers the question: how we know . In these pages he develops a

theory of how our individual judgement comes to be formed (and

therein swiftly handling the "nature/nurture" debate) in relation to

cultural knowledge and dominant methodologies of truth production for

and due to material and/or practical means.

argue, however, there remains some trace overlap in his narrative treatment with the basic tenets of historical materialism.


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Even while commenting on the flawed nature of "reason" MacIntyre

never strays from an understanding of our need for shared conceptual

devices so that we may operate in a society at all like the one in which

we find ourselves -- and it is this which makes a heuristic reading of his

work possible for the practitioner of Anthropology. However, lest it be

suggested that stricture based on a counter-empirical approach (which

I will argue is intrinsically tied to a self-actualized authorship) is any

more viable, let me stress that neither this paper nor MacIntyre's could

-- in keeping with the thesis -- go so far as to demand adherence to

different, opposite, equally flawed "method."

That said, by perusing a brief outline of the essays key points, we may

reflect on strategies divergent from the Enlightenment path (in favor

of, cough, enlightenment ), identifying key components to the approach

to social science practice embodied in Epistemological Crisis . This

overview will be followed by a handful of authors/persons who could be

considered to be illustrative of "MacIntyrean Anthropology" -- though

only one finds himself in that discipline, per se. Through these

examples I hope to offer a textual glimmer of another approach, one

that seizes the crisis of representation not as apology or self-

deprecation but as central nerve to the discipline.

So, specifically why read MacIntyre? As an anthropologist, one asks


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oneself what the conversation we are having with this body of work

includes on both sides -- if we are the audience, what is the intention of

the speaker/author? are we meant to merely criticize ourselves anew?

Or is there a more positive outcome? I posit the latter. If we situate

MacIntyre's main points within a heuristic device that guides our

approach to fieldwork/writing, what are we left with? What must we

include, or be careful to avoid?

We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable peoplewe are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there's good reason for that.

We've never tried to find out who we are. How could it ever happenthat one day we'd discover our own selves? With justice it's been said

that "Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also." Our treasure lies where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are

always busy with our knowledge, as if we were born winged creaturescollectors of intellectual honey. In our hearts we are basically

concerned with only one thing, to "bring something home." As far asthe rest of life is concerned, what people call "experience"which of

us is serious enough for that? Who has enough time? In these matters,I fear, we've been "missing the point."

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 1887

II.

Rewinding for a moment, (and with nods to his own thesis) it is crucial

to situate an analysis of MacIntyres work within a narrative

intersecting not only with the canon of anthropology but also (broadly,


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as our purposes require) within a singular moment in history .

Why is it that MacIntyre, in the mid 1970's, turns his attentions to the

question of empiricism as a justifiable approach to truth-seeking? Why

might the project of the Enlightenment be on the chopping block as

perhaps failing to acheive its lofty ambitions? In MacIntyre's thesis,

even in the "hard" sciences leaps into the unknown are necessary

when a previous theory no longer holds water -- and so it was for

MacIntyre, a philosophical mirror for the state of much brewing around

him. As Darwin followed on the heels of archeological novelty, filling a

gap of knowledge, here we find lacunae of explanation for current

events, psychological tendencies, emotion, guilt, and so too

physical/natural phenomena in our selves and our environment. The

modernity myth is shot through and holding water fast... perhaps the

bomb was not a good idea after all... jesus, what did we do in

Japan/Korea...? architectural modernism has created a glut of ugly,

non-functional cities... can we solve our crises created by rationalism

with rationalism? In response to these sorts of considerations, the

prospect of another answer was surely appealing. So too had "scientific

inquiry" opened up a can of worms with large scale interest in the idea

of the unconscious, which despite its academic roots allowed for mass

consideration of non-rational tendencies and patterns even in our own

brains . So the time was ripe for such a theory -- and for its connection


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to the question of ethics and of virtue as it relates to the larger nature

of epistemology.

While "Epistemological Crises..." does not focus on the issue of virtue

per se, in preparation for the evaluation of science as a truth-seeking

methodology, MacIntyre (1977) spends a good deal of effort in setting

up a conceptual framework which explains culture as the sharing of

"schemata which are at one and the same time constitutive of and

normative for intelligible action by [ourselves] and are also a means for

[our] interpretations of the actions of others" (p.55). The development

of our character, he posits, is central to our development of a system

of thought and action altogether, one we develop in our formative

years through fables and other moral devices.

Philosophy, MacIntyre contends, assumes in our adulthood the job

assigned to these tales in the years wherein our schemata are realized.

However, to raise the question of truth need not entail rejecting myth

or story as the appropriate and perhaps the only appropriate form in

which certain truths can be told. (59)

An account of how our common schemata -- heretofore entrenched in

the rational, Enlightenment project of science = progress = good and

right -- have trained us to priveledge empiricism as not only viable but

just is central to these linked topics. For it is due to this we have


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abandoned and even without our conscious decision discounted our

non-rational perceptions and their essential relationships to

"experience" and, critically, "reality."

The scientist is therefore posited as a position of extreme

responsibility; one who claims to seek and determine "truth."

MacIntyre employs this disjuncture to evaluate the project of a

sociology of science and, in particular, the seemingly non-reconcilable

writings of a number of persons on this issue. This is echoed in Laszlo

(2000) who states that "to be a scientist is a gift, which carries a

responsibility. ...part of a social responsibility to the people," situating

what he calls "the science wars" within a postmodern moment in the

1980's, very much the continuation of the conversations MacIntyre

responds to here. Perhaps MacIntyre would be included in one of

Laszlo's camps rather than merely surveying the scene, however, as

the latter pits "scientists against sociologists of science."

In this schema, scientists are said to "fancy themselves the

interpreters, to the polity, of truths about the natural world," while the

second views them as "ideologically motivated" players in a

community hinging on power struggles related to truth-claims. The key

difference is that MacIntyre's condemnation of cartesian thought goes

beyond a war with scientists, per se, to the larger issue of the


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ubiquitous adherance to these processes that is reinforced by those in

the business of truth production and analysis. MacIntyre will use his

narrative approach, inclusive of our human experience in which our

scientific forays are embedded, to revive and interpret these warring

analyses.

What is MacIntyre's intention, then? Is it to find fault with

contemporary sociology of science and/or scientific inquiry? While part

III of his essay focuses his earlier thesis on others' writing regarding

the big question: how do we know , rather than considering the former

mere preparation for the debunking and analysis process therein, the

more productive act for the Anthropologist is to read in this section

how and whereby MacIntyre finds fault with the conclusions (and

somewhat, processes) of Kuhn, Lakatos, Kertesz, and so forth. These

authors thereby become illustrations of incomplete or malfunctional

methodologies, warnings for our own participation in knowledge

seeking and production. MacIntyre ultimately finds, after all, the only

credible driving force behind the insistence on empiricism to be "a

deep desire not to be forced into irrationalist conclusions,"(74), fear of

the suggestion that ultimately we cannot know. We are concerned with

ontological truth and therefore we make it be so -- which upon close

examination, has culminated in the linking of our discrete sciences in

essentially irrational ways to complete this fiction. The only nonfictional


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element is the narrative of these leaps and links, the persons who

made them, and their motivations.

So. The brass tacks of a MacIntyrean approach, to apply both

processually and analytically (as he has done with the authors above)

is to be found in Parts I and II, which we have in no particular order

been discussing up to now:

- acknowledgement of shared schemata: a culture concept:MacIntyre illustrates our need to develop moral/rational schemata as

both personal and common ground on which to establish functionalityboth as individuals and as common society. A set of common schemataare given as the basis of a functional culture to whom manyindividuals will belong and therefore are not only subject but anoperational part of a larger conceptual unit.

- history of the epistemological crisis = history of thought, crisis =truth: The epistemological crisis is identified as the grating betweenour selves/internal narrative and our ability to conceive of externis in acodified manner. In this moment we lost the ability to render our selvesintelligible, and the schemata appear rival, incompatible.

Unfortunately, the Enlightenment and particularly its central crisis,that of Descartes have inexorably altered our reaction to such acrisis, in that we cannot escape from understanding, (that is,rationally conceiving of) the experience.

- means by which empiricism came to have a privileged position, potential in dramatic narrative: Scientific inquiry/rational thought isthereby established as having the role of ultimate, modern,guidepost for self-evident truths via proof/experimentation. As acounterpoint, narrative/history is suggested as an indication/account of interpersonal, anti-rational, sensory and perhaps psychological truthsthat for MacIntyre exist as a continuous whole encompassing jumpsand bouts of rational thought, discoveries, as well as crises of (in)comprehension. Fictional narrative (and monologue in particular) isgiven as an indication of a more-complete human relationship toperception but so too then is a historical narrative of knowledge andthe quest for it suggested as a more accurate account of the processtowards truth-discovery than could ever be a meta-analysis of experimentation, re-experimentation, and the methodological changes


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therein.

- the position of the self in the narrative condition of expression:Central to the narrative condition is an acknowledgement of the self both as the vessel through which our experience is sieved but also as

always and inescapably shaped by tradition and language, asinexorable from experience. Theory, too bears the marks of [contentious human] encountersthe marks of its passage throughtime. (62) Only time and conflict are constant.

* A central thesis emerges around this point: dramatic narrative is thecrucial form for the understanding of human action, and naturalscience can be a rational form of enquiry if and only if 9 the writing of atrue dramatic narrative that is, of history understood in a particular way -- can be a rational activity. Scientic reason turns out to besubordinate to, and intelligible only in terms of historical reason. And if

this is true of the natural sciences, a fortiori it will be true also of thesocial sciences.(66)

- illustration of issue in postwar science criticism/philosophy of science:In part III, then, the idea of conflict tradition in science is brought tobear on the Incommensurability thesis, that which attempts torationalize the leaps in faith required at moments of crisis in scientificdiscovery/explanation. Here MacIntyre suggests this could beimmediately reconciled through an admittance of the authorship andhuman conflict within a continuum in which these scientific effortswere entered.

___________________

. ..my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those whostrive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of

the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all seriousendeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me,

if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can beexperienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose

beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection,this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder

at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere imageof the lofty structure of all that is there.

Albert Einstein

So while a move towards science may be functionally necessary in

9 My italics. Note that if and only if, also notated as iff is the standard notation in logical proofs.


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these times , the concept of ethical action (and its narrative source) is

never far away -- for while this leads us in our decision making

processes and our path towards "discovery," 10 so too does our

relationship to virtue get tangled in the priveledged position we give to

a cartesian, rational form in considering the idea of virtue itself. We

confuse too often what is in fact merely historically pertinant "ethics"

with an epic divide between right and wrong, one which MacIntyre

would argue can only, ever, be contextual -- the consistency is in fact

an evershifting narrative that must and needs be historical and

interpersonal in nature.

It has been said that the only thing that we can expect to be consistent

is change itself -- that to desire things to remain the way they have

been, we must allow for change, for it is the only true constant. So too

does MacIntyre introduce the thesis of narrative or history -- and

specifically, a social, dramatic narrative containing non-rational jumps

in "thinking" (occuring at moments of epistemological crisis, cyclically)

-- as the human constant we are ignoring in our strict adhesion to an

empirical meta-analysis of 'methodological' shifts. Leaving his native

Philosophy behind, he suggests attention to use of narrative in fiction

and drama: for there exists in the human, the emotion of such

accounts "information" (for lack of a better word) that is otherwise lost.

10 The purpose of this groundwork for MacIntyre is herein the analysis of scientific inquiry as a valid formof seeking truth, but the argument for how we come to conceptualize good vs. bad as contextualized actions(and not ontological narratives) is made generally.


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So too, he suggests, do we lose information regarding the science

itself when we detach our "findings" from the process of paranoia,

scrapping of old theories and/or methods, and, generally, other leaps

of faith that without fail accompany our greatest breakthroughs in

"scientific inquiry." There exists herein an admission of the intrisic

existence of nonrational conceptualization 11 in the scientific process,

one which MacIntyre contends gets us closer to the core of the issue.

When we approach a civilized man and ask him to take interest in self-realization, he will say that he simply wants to work to satisfy his stomachand that there is no need of self-realization for a hungry man.

from Vedic literature

Epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe isalways in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the

nature of knowing? G. Bateson, from Naven .

III.

By now as academics we have likely grown weary of the theory is a

toolbox adage, but so it remains: ultimately all of these can be

seen/used as tools rather than ends for the practitioner of

anthropology, and my own purpose here is an engagement with how

we as academics, authors, and those engaged in social research

(ever more a conundrum than pure science) can utilize the narrative,

contextualized form to enliven and bring truth to our accounts even as

11 In an attempt to describe our nonrational perceptions and how it becomes understood, so too is this paper linguistically trapped in an inability to escape a largely western, Enlightenment notion of thoughtor conceptualization which inherently involves rationalization in its very interpretation via our functionalschemata.


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we include and remove ourselves as participants, in turns.

I will end by suggesting attention to three different disciplinary

approaches to the act of depicting/describing a post-modernanthropos; practitioners who together are constitutive of an

Anthropology such as MacIntyre might prescribe: the anthropology of

Gregory Bateson, the diaries of Anais Nin, the films of Chris Marker,

and the prose/poetics of Charles Olson. The act of identifying such

candidates and examining their approaches within our heuristic is a

particularly useful exercise, as MacIntyre provides textual analyses of

only natural science on the one hand and literature on the other. The

task of the anthropologist is in some ways similar to that which he

embarks on, perhaps, but no single instance of fieldwork (study of

people , of networks and figures of a necessarily non-empirical nature)

has been put under MacIntyre's lens.

While the work of each strays from empiricism in fact, none but

Bateson attempts a fieldwork model -- so to does each enter the

moment of epistemological crisis so as to fully realize the human in

their subjects and themselves. Hopefully, these illustrations serve as

constructive suggestions towards an enriched anthropological practice,

one that MacIntyre might find more ethical.

It is by now a truism that our ethnographies and ethnologies are alwayslimited by our social and cultural investment. However critically reflective we


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are, we can never attain to an investment-free vision of the way things are.Wherever there is insight, there is blindness. Wherever there is blindness,

there is insight. Crapanzano, Afterward to Irony and Illness

All these practitioners are anthropologists in their way. Each seeks an

understanding of the modern human subject that eschews the canon

and the ways in which it controls and damns our reading/writing/re-

presentation of what we experience. Each could be called political,

for a rejection of institution so often is, but so too is each a model of

individualized methods specific to their own authorship. Is it counter-

rational to cite inspiration?

Gregory Bateson : thoughts on Naven and Ecology of Mind

While the ethnographic text couched within Batesons methodological

frame and critical analysis (of both his observations as well as of thesemethods themselves) has served as a touchstone for those completing

fieldwork-based writing since its publication (and continues to), I will

posit that what makes the book unique in the canon is the illumination

it offers as a document of disciplinary growing pains.

In its rigorous attempts to qualify and integrate these two

methods, the Naven *becomes* an illuminating account of not only a

cultural ritual but of the Anthropologist caught between

methodological frameworks. Batesons answer to the potential conflicts

this presents is to categorically approach and separate his


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observations and their psycho-emotional suggestions, a division which

he himself describes as arbitrary and artificial. The reflexivity of his

writing regarding the texts methodology is prescient, critical, and

honest -- while there may be much to question as to the viability of his

claims regarding the ritual, Naven can offer much as a document of

disciplinary engagement and evolution. An early review of the books

initial publication received from Radcliffe-Brown, an admittedly major

influence on Batesons approach, described Naven as the intellectual

adventures of an earnest and capable thinker seeking for a satisfactory

method for the study of human society in all its significant aspects, and

this gives it an importance that perhaps might not attach to a mere

study of a remote new Guinea tribe.

The voice employed by Bateson rings of a marked effort at

scientific detachment and empiricism -- as if in tandem with his

admission of Ethos and emotion, fallibility and psychosis, he vied to

require doubly from himself a commitment to proof within light of the

previous research paradigm. One aware of the criticism that faced

Boas regarding his questionable data (the methodological gateway to

Mead and Benedict) would have taken pains to avoid similar critique

when making claims outside the realm of accepted categorization,

i.e.: networks of structure and function.

Appropriately, given the contradictions inherent in Naven , the

concept Bateson introduces as central to the performance of the


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Iatmuls titular ritual by is schizmogenesis, a process of categorization

by means of discord. Both the framework of the book and the

psychological framework he develops to understand the ethos out of

which the naven is produced and performed are defined dialectically:

through seeming opposites and contradictions that balance to maintain

stasis in both Batesons methodology and the Iatmul culture to which

he applies it.

Later work of Bateson in particular, Steps to an Ecology of

Mind , will return to the concept of schizmogenesis and herein we

have an anthropologist returning to his own literature, his own words

holding on to the real of his Iatmul experience, and criticizing his lack

of contextuality. Both books are enlightening however the first as a

Hamlet -type account of the self-actualization we can experience in

fieldwork, the second as a critical form still inclusive of the author

and further, criticizing himself as author, planting himself even more

firmly in a MacIntyrean read by affirming a need for synthesis with a

time-scheme. A beacon of self-actualized practice.

Anais Nin : Diaries :

Becoming more and more aware of this inner unconscious life weneed a corresponding change in our art forms. The realization that fantasy and memory are not separate activities but the basic key toour secret life demands a change of focus, a freedom from old molds,a technique to encompass new dimensions of character and insight.The music, too, has to seek sounds which match our contemporary moods and sensations.


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The experience of Venice was captured by layered sequences of images, superimpositions, which combined memories of Venices past with personal dreams of Venice, and the constant presence of Venicein all its moods, working, cleaning, laundering, daily, homely Venice. 12

Nin is somewhat of a controversial figure, but like MacIntyre (andOlson,

below) can be someone seeking a positivist conception of the self

amongst mid-century ideas of the modern and in particular of the

subconscious. Like a colonial writer her Diaries smart of historical

blunders in language but so too does this situate her without

question in a particular period of time, space, and cultural/schematic

history. More than carefully selected words an introspective account

such as Nins makes clear the situation in which she finds/and against

which she posits her self.

The diaries in particular are illuminating for their empathic descriptions

of the very human goings on of those involved in thought and art

creation in a certain period. The experience is much more so one of

being there than nearly any fieldwork I can think of and this is due

not in small part to its subjective nature, its lack of attempts at

empiricism. I do not suggest that the anthropologist become mere

diarist but a reading of such an account productively asks the question

of whether we ever leave that role in more than our naming of

ourselves. If to write as a diary, complete with internal monologue, is

the most honest production we can garner.

In addition, the history of the writing she is producing simultaneously 12 The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume Five, 1947 1955. p 137.


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alongside the interpersonal and politic struggles this always involves

gives a historicity to the material-cultural experience of these days in

the way MacIntyre suggests might verily accompany a chronology of

scientific discoveries.

Chris Marker : from Sans Soleil (1983):

Like Nin, Markers mastery could be said to be found in his ability to

capture rather than strangle aura , that which is inexpressible in the

experience of time, place, moment of what we observe that is not

entirely image or word. His narrative voice is off-camera, reading

letters from yet another unseen, unexplained subject . These

descriptive letters accompany visual documents of various landscapes

Iceland, Africa, Tokyo. The letters have the sense of those sent home

from the fieldsite and yet in their personal nature leave behind any

empirical thrust, instead creating in the viewer a separate mental

image sprung from words that accompanies those seen on screen and

the white noise therein.

He described me me his reunion with Tokyo: like a cat whohas come home from vacation in his basket immediately starts to inspect familiar places. He ran off to see if everything was where it should be: the Ginza owl, theShimbashi locomotive, the temple of the fox at the top of the Mitsukoshi department store, which he found invaded by little girls and rock singers. He was told that it was nowlittle girls who made and unmade stars; the producersshuddered before them. He was told that a disfigured woman took off her mask in front of passers-by and


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scratched them if they did not find her beautiful.Everything interested him. He who didn't give a damn if the Dodgers won the pennant or about the results of theDaily Double asked feverishly how Chiyonofuji had done inthe last sumo tournament. He asked for news of the

imperial family, of the crown prince, of the oldest mobster in Tokyo who appears regularly on television to teachgoodness to children. These simple joys he had never felt:of returning to a country, a house, a family home. But twelve million anonymous inhabitants could supply himwith them.

He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains, tied together with electric wire she shows her veins. They say that television makes her people illiterate; as for me, I'venever seen so many people reading in the streets. Perhapsthey read only in the street, or perhaps they just pretend to readthese yellow men. I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku. The graphicgenius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScopeten centuries before the movies compensates a little for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines, victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship.Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on thewalls. The entire city is a comic strip; it's Planet Manga.How can one fail to recognize the statuary that goes from

plasticized baroque to Stalin central? And the giant faceswith eyes that weigh down on the comic book readers,

pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.

Charles Olson : on A Special View of History: Notes from Black Mountain and Correspondence

I happened upon Olson late in the game of this self-assigned exercise

and found him a perfect match also one that helped in the distinction

of the narrative/non-empirical approach extended by MacIntyre as that

which is subjective vs. objective. The emergence of the subject as the

opposite of rationality is extremely different from that which extends

all else into what we envision or call irrational. Olsons relationship


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near and with the canon of anthropology (and in particular the Culture

of Personality school, reflected below in correspondence with Ruth

Benedict) is illustrative of a larger correspondence between canonized

methodology and without reminding us that what we has become

institutionalized is again the result of naming and word-reality ties.

It is my feeling that the record of fact is become of first importancefor us lost in a sea of question In New History, the act of theobserver, if his personality is of count, is before, in the collection of thematerial. This is where we will cut the knot I think if you burn thefacts long and hard enough in yourself as crucible, youll come to the

few facts that matter, and then fact can be fable again. from a letter to Ruth Benedict

Olson takes as an epigraph to A Special View of History a quote from

Heraclitus, suggesting that man is estranged from that with which he

is most familiar, a concept that he extends to both ourselves and our

subject. This idea and the deconstruction of it are well suited to the

problem faced by the self-actualized practitioner particularly in

Olsons hope, as the text goes on, that we may no longer need to be

thus estranged.

Even as I write these pages I look back and edit, noting my own

learned tendency to slip back behind the curtain to give credence to

my words, to let them stand on their own. Are words what sticks to

the real? Jack Spicer wrote that words are what we hold on with,

nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing


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to be tied to. This work is perhaps intended as a call to let go of the

value we ourselves have given to the words we then seek confidence

in to free from stricture, to see a window. My mother used to say,

Whenever God closes a door, he opens a window and without

getting into who is playing God, lets just say MacIntyre offers just

such a window for those feeling the claustrophobia of the Door of the

Enlightenment.

Good thing, too.


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Works Cited

Crapanzano, Vincent Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlets Desire: On theEpistemology of Interpretation

Harvard University Press, 1992.

Laszlo, Pierre The Nomadic State. With permission fromwww.pierrelaszlo.net

MacIntyre, Alisdaire "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative,and a Philosophy of Science, (1977), in The Tasks of Philosophy: Collected Essays . Cambridge UniversityPress, 2006

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory . University of California, 1981.

Marker, Chris Sans Soleil . 1983, USA.

Nin, Anais The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume Five: 1947 1955.Harcourt Brace, 1974.

Olson, Charles A Special View of History . University of Michigan, 1970.

Correspondence with Ruth Benedict excerpted from:Civil Disobediences: Politics and Poetics in Action , p.

450.Waldman, Anne. 2004. Coffee House Press.

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