Ping Pong 59: The Platonism of the Language Machine The last Rant ended with a problem. There appeared two rather different possible takes on or version of justice. On the one hand one might seek to understand the just in terms of something inherent within life itself. As individuals live they are caught up in needing to be just and demanding justice. On the other hand justice might be caught up within individual societies and only applicable to individuals in that society. In the former, justice is universal but not confined to humans alone, while in the latter, justice is the sole preserve of human society. The problem is then where might one create a single thread which can tie together these very different takes on justice? That is, is there a single (or a set of) element(s) that define humans as something apart from nature, and yet then form individual systems capable of understanding what makes individual human societies (and what therefore allows for versions of justice). That is can one find the rules, the ideal type or the platonic ideas which underlie all theories of justice and which, operating from the ‘abstract ideal’ domain give us our world? In the mid 1960’s one school of thought, Structuralism, claimed to occupy just such a territory. At the heart of anthropological Structuralism lay a double claim about what made humanity different from nature, and in doing so also explained why humans formed societies and how those societies themselves came to differ (and have different conception of the just). Structuralism’s account started with the argument that there were in fact two activities that told humanity apart from everything else. On the one hand humans were the only creature to communicate by elaborate languages, and on the other they were the only one to have elaborate incest taboos. It was on these two alleged differences that Structuralism hoped to found a science of humanity which need not need to have recourse to theories of selfhood or individuality. That is a society of humanity that could do without any claims about the specialness of the human soul and therefore avoided the slippery slope of keeping the soul apart from everything else while plugging it into universal values. Each of these points will be considered in turn before the drawbacks of the method are then considered. Language's power lies in two quite distinctive elements. On the one hand language is something which all humans are caught up within. Meaning is something therefore we appear hard-wired to understand and accept. On the other, language is clearly never direct. There is little or no real relation between the barking animal and the word Dog. It is rather the case that ‘dog’ the word only works as a word because it exists in opposition to other words (cat, rabbit, lion etc.). Language therefore ultimately founds meaning in a system. The effect of these two points is then that meaning is no longer understood in terms of humanity, but will become rather the product of an a-personal machine. It is produced within our brains in a crypto-mechanical way, and may be understood as such. The hope of the arch Structuralist Levi-Strauss (and others) was then that this version of thought, would fit into the science of neurology better than other more personalized accounts of thinking. The aim of Structuralism was therefore to provide an account of thought that would then be more easy to translate into the science of brains. The prime unit of thought might thereby be transformed away from the human subject into the human brain and the thoughts that that brain initially produces as it grasps the world. Each of these three elements will therefore need to be considered in turn, before the other claim about incest can be assessed. Language changes the world by enmeshing it within meaning. This meaning is then always something pitched between humans, i.e. it is social. It has a certain intangible quality to it. Of course it is always the case that there must be any one individual in order for there to be meaning to be at all. That is without a human there, there would be no meaning in the first place. And yet the relationship is clearly two way, as without meaning that individual would not be as they are either. Humanity and meaning therefore are caught together. We are creatures of it, and we are what we are through it. And yet every society will of course have its own take on meanings. The various pointers and significance of our society are therefore simply not the same as the pointers and values in say China or India. Each society therefore naturally inhabits its own distinctive cosmology. The role of this cosmology is to ground the various social realities of that society (the power structure) within the natural order. Advertising’s historic meaning is therefore to ensure that we cannot look at the world without thinking of buying a product (and therefore capitalism). Or again the coverage of the set piece ‘special’ political events (elections, budgets, etc.) ties those very human (and often marginal) concerns to the changes in seasons and the ‘power’ of history (it is the budget that means it is Spring, or again we are voting because our forebears died for us to vote in this manner). The very impersonal nature of the system therefore becomes itself vital to how the system operates and what it does. Its function is to make what are in fact human constructions (budgets or wars or religions) appear natural and as irrevocable as the sky. Language is able to do this because it slips the gears of meaning down from specific events and individual experiences and into a broad and overarching system. Or to put it another way it is in the nature of words that their meanings are always slippery and complex. One cannot define a word apart from the system within which that word is found. A word of a lost ‘language’ remains at worst a grunt and at best an enigma which reaches towards a world without ever quite getting there. Language is therefore that which forces us beyond any one set present, and makes us understand ourselves within a wider orbit of meaning. In doing so its effect is therefore to reduce the power or effect of any one human being. A human only acts as a cog within a system, where no act and no word can be judged to stand alone. Structuralism therefore formally encodes that future of modernity: That it is often very difficult to pinpoint any blame or any real responsibility. In a sense a modern society exploits this difficulty. Our current political establishment appears to be a system for exporting and diluting blame (much as the Indian Caste system exorcised and diluted contamination). The system therefore makes sure that those that lie at its heart (the journalists and the politicians) are always blameless or always at least able to elude individual responsibility. Those that are blamed are then individual ‘fall guys’ (often not politicians but certain officials) who are set up to carry the responsibility for the entire system. That is, their blame itself is a social construct (they are our ‘untouchables’ – the living expressions of blame). Blame becomes then the province of systems (and so not applicable) and anti-heroes (who are forced to take the burden upon themselves). It goes without saying that for such a system any really effective accountability is a dream. The effect of such an approach is that humanity as such (or better individuality) loses the power to claim its mind as its own. On the contrary the stuff of thinking, that is the stuff of minds (and beyond this of our brains) is defined within terms in which any individuality is absent. We therefore become in a very real sense internal to our thoughts and the world they have already given us, and not the other way around. The argument then was that this impersonal thinking element is the one that is best suited to understand the interface between the mechanics of the brain and the realities of thinking. The argument here is deceptively simple. At its heart lies an analogy. Brains are almost by definition impersonal thinking machines. Structuralism then uses language to turn meaning into a similar impersonal thinking machine, in the belief that these two machines are in effect one and the same. Behind this extravagant claim there are three distinct moves. Firstly it is clear enough that structuralism was merely an early version of that modern game that wants to improve our thought by looking to the brain for paradigms. That is, by finding exactly what and where the brain ‘lights up’ when we think this or that, we hope to uncover exactly how and what we are thinking. We look then to the brain for inspiration about what to think and when: We look on it as a modern oracle within whose light the oddities of life might be expressed – ‘it is all about getting the right brain connection’. Secondly the individual analogy that Structuralism draws between a system of human thinking and a system in the brain, has proved to be far too simplistic. Or rather, given that the brain is the point that thought becomes impersonalized within something utterly else, there is no real need to rethink that impersonalization. It will happen anyway, and any system that pre-dates that happening is likely to distort the exact mechanics of what is involved within the point of transformation. Brains, and languages might both be meaning machines and yet they need not be the same one. But finally there is a real substantive point for Structuralism. In challenging our conception of the primacy of the self, they open up minds to the idea that what they are and what they think, needs to be understood in terms of a complex interplay of factors both individual and collective. One’s own mind, that is one’s own capacity to think, is never simply one’s own. To do justice to thought, is therefore always to allow for others to think through one’s own mind, and be present across whatever thought one claims as one’s own. The second main place that Structuralism argued that humanity different from nature was over incest. Human society was founded, the argument went, on exogamy. Every family therefore needed to look beyond itself and towards others for its brides (or its husbands) and the inbuilt biological needs of humanity therefore form the inner buttress to society. Or to put it slightly differently, because humanity appears (the argument went) hard wired not to marry its own brothers or sisters or children it follows that collective interest must arise between otherwise distinctive groups and with that interest an elaborate system for managing the potential conflicts that would otherwise arise from the need to find partners. Society therefore becomes directly founded on both biology and intimate feeling. This claim will again need to be understood in two main ways. The very basic claim that humanity is necessarily different from anything else in nature because it alone does not marry within the family has been by and large discredited. To put it simply there is very little evidence to support the existence of a universal incest taboo, let alone to support the idea that this taboo is central to society. All that is habitually (but not universally) condemned is child abuse, which is something rather different (although all too frequently caught up with incest). On the other hand the basic abstract claim that societies originate within human’s need to understand and relate to others, appears valid. What is lost is the individual differentiating difference within the global community. So we then in effect form some kind of single axis within which we can locate and understand our interactions with humans that might otherwise appear very different to us. Humanity does indeed appear locked within the paradox of always looking towards others, and yet then needing to obscure their very otherness, and to create a system of thought within which their ‘mystery’ is felt to be less perplexing and problematic than it was. The power of the Structuralist approach was that it allowed one to out-think the account of humanity based upon individuality. What it was to be a human became then not the province of any one human or even of anything within individual humans as such: Humanity was rather the product of a complex system within which elements of thoughts came together and bounced off each other. Societies were then, the expression of genuinely collective thought. That is, thought that one individual could at any point simply own and claim for their own. And yet the very power and efficacy of such an approach also provided its undoing. Once one allows for the idea that thought is often (if not absolutely) the construction of a structure where no individual is forming the agenda, then one does not need one system (say language) to understand how this system is created. Or to put it differently – anything, be it writing or the internal differences of species (urine scent uniqueness) might be understood through such an approach. Any claim therefore that such a system is rooted in language alone and so the special preserve of humanity is therefore lost. Ironically enough therefore, Structuralism founders on the fact that it wants at all points to save human specialness while in fact systematically undermining that very idea. Structuralism therefore in a sense betrays its own Structuralist aspirations in asserting at every point the power of human language. Structure (which was originally a mathematical concern) needs no such ingredient and any assertion that it does will simply founder. But this last point leads one to a double problem. On the one hand it is clear that Structuralism is leading one back to understanding humanity as a part of a wider living system. That is, to one of the poles for justice that was raised up in the last Rant. Structuralism appears to simply make a proper assessment of that topic all the more urgent. However before one attempts such an argument it is necessary to recall the other pole discussed in the last Rant, which founded human identity within individual actions and cultural practice. It is clear that pure Structuralism does not have much to say to such an approach. However it is not clear that Structuralism cannot be adapted to actually give an order to a sensible account of how individual habits and histories structure minds. It is to this account of how situations create individuals that the next of these Rants turns.

Ping Pong 59: The Platonism of the Language Machine

The last Rant ended with a problem. There appeared two rather different possible takes on or version of justice. On the one hand one might seek to understand the just in terms of something inherent within life itself. As individuals live they are caught up in needing to be just and demanding justice. On the other hand justice might be caught up within individual societies and only applicable to individuals in that society. In the former, justice is universal but not confined to humans alone, while in the latter, justice is the sole preserve of human society. The problem is then where might one create a single thread which can tie together these very different takes on justice? That is, is there a single (or a set of) element(s) that define humans as something apart from nature, and yet then form individual systems capable of understanding what makes individual human societies (and what therefore allows for versions of justice). That is can one find the rules, the ideal type or the platonic ideas which underlie all theories of justice and which, operating from the ‘abstract ideal’ domain give us our world?

In the mid 1960’s one school of thought, Structuralism, claimed to occupy just such a territory. At the heart of anthropological Structuralism lay a double claim about what made humanity different from nature, and in doing so also explained why humans formed societies and how those societies themselves came to differ (and have different conception of the just). Structuralism’s account started with the argument that there were in fact two activities that told humanity apart from everything else. On the one hand humans were the only creature to communicate by elaborate languages, and on the other they were the only one to have elaborate incest taboos. It was on these two alleged differences that Structuralism hoped to found a science of humanity which need not need to have recourse to theories of selfhood or individuality. That is a society of humanity that could do without any claims about the specialness of the human soul and therefore avoided the slippery slope of keeping the soul apart from everything else while plugging it into universal values. Each of these points will be considered in turn before the drawbacks of the method are then considered.

Language's power lies in two quite distinctive elements. On the one hand language is something which all humans are caught up within. Meaning is something therefore we appear hard-wired to understand and accept. On the other, language is clearly never direct. There is little or no real relation between the barking animal and the word Dog. It is rather the case that ‘dog’ the word only works as a word because it exists in opposition to other words (cat, rabbit, lion etc.). Language therefore ultimately founds meaning in a system. The effect of these two points is then that meaning is no longer understood in terms of humanity, but will become rather the product of an a-personal machine. It is produced within our brains in a crypto-mechanical way, and may be understood as such. The hope of the arch Structuralist Levi-Strauss (and others) was then that this version of thought, would fit into the science of neurology better than other more personalized accounts of thinking. The aim of Structuralism was therefore to provide an account of thought that would then be more easy to translate into the science of brains. The prime unit of thought might thereby be transformed away from the human subject into the human brain and the thoughts that that brain initially produces as it grasps the world. Each of these three elements will therefore need to be considered in turn, before the other claim about incest can be assessed.

Language changes the world by enmeshing it within meaning. This meaning is then always something pitched between humans, i.e. it is social. It has a certain intangible quality to it. Of course it is always the case that there must be any one individual in order for there to be meaning to be at all. That is without a human there, there would be no meaning in the first place. And yet the relationship is clearly two way, as without meaning that individual would not be as they are either. Humanity and meaning therefore are caught together. We are creatures of it, and we are what we are through it. And yet every society will of course have its own take on meanings. The various pointers and significance of our society are therefore simply not the same as the pointers and values in say China or India. Each society therefore naturally inhabits its own distinctive cosmology. The role of this cosmology is to ground the various social realities of that society (the power structure) within the natural order. Advertising’s historic meaning is therefore to ensure that we cannot look at the world without thinking of buying a product (and therefore capitalism). Or again the coverage of the set piece ‘special’ political events (elections, budgets, etc.) ties those very human (and often marginal) concerns to the changes in seasons and the ‘power’ of history (it is the budget that means it is Spring, or again we are voting because our forebears died for us to vote in this manner). The very impersonal nature of the system therefore becomes itself vital to how the system operates and what it does. Its function is to make what are in fact human constructions (budgets or wars or religions) appear natural and as irrevocable as the sky.

Language is able to do this because it slips the gears of meaning down from specific events and individual experiences and into a broad and overarching system. Or to put it another way it is in the nature of words that their meanings are always slippery and complex. One cannot define a word apart from the system within which that word is found. A word of a lost ‘language’ remains at worst a grunt and at best an enigma which reaches towards a world without ever quite getting there. Language is therefore that which forces us beyond any one set present, and makes us understand ourselves within a wider orbit of meaning. In doing so its effect is therefore to reduce the power or effect of any one human being. A human only acts as a cog within a system, where no act and no word can be judged to stand alone. Structuralism therefore formally encodes that future of modernity: That it is often very difficult to pinpoint any blame or any real responsibility. In a sense a modern society exploits this difficulty. Our current political establishment appears to be a system for exporting and diluting blame (much as the Indian Caste system exorcised and diluted contamination). The system therefore makes sure that those that lie at its heart (the journalists and the politicians) are always blameless or always at least able to elude individual responsibility. Those that are blamed are then individual ‘fall guys’ (often not politicians but certain officials) who are set up to carry the responsibility for the entire system. That is, their blame itself is a social construct (they are our ‘untouchables’ – the living expressions of blame). Blame becomes then the province of systems (and so not applicable) and anti-heroes (who are forced to take the burden upon themselves). It goes without saying that for such a system any really effective accountability is a dream.

The effect of such an approach is that humanity as such (or better individuality) loses the power to claim its mind as its own. On the contrary the stuff of thinking, that is the stuff of minds (and beyond this of our brains) is defined within terms in which any individuality is absent. We therefore become in a very real sense internal to our thoughts and the world they have already given us, and not the other way around. The argument then was that this impersonal thinking element is the one that is best suited to understand the interface between the mechanics of the brain and the realities of thinking. The argument here is deceptively simple. At its heart lies an analogy. Brains are almost by definition impersonal thinking machines. Structuralism then uses language to turn meaning into a similar impersonal thinking machine, in the belief that these two machines are in effect one and the same.

Behind this extravagant claim there are three distinct moves. Firstly it is clear enough that structuralism was merely an early version of that modern game that wants to improve our thought by looking to the brain for paradigms. That is, by finding exactly what and where the brain ‘lights up’ when we think this or that, we hope to uncover exactly how and what we are thinking. We look then to the brain for inspiration about what to think and when: We look on it as a modern oracle within whose light the oddities of life might be expressed – ‘it is all about getting the right brain connection’. Secondly the individual analogy that Structuralism draws between a system of human thinking and a system in the brain, has proved to be far too simplistic. Or rather, given that the brain is the point that thought becomes impersonalized within something utterly else, there is no real need to rethink that impersonalization. It will happen anyway, and any system that pre-dates that happening is likely to distort the exact mechanics of what is involved within the point of transformation. Brains, and languages might both be meaning machines and yet they need not be the same one. But finally there is a real substantive point for Structuralism. In challenging our conception of the primacy of the self, they open up minds to the idea that what they are and what they think, needs to be understood in terms of a complex interplay of factors both individual and collective. One’s own mind, that is one’s own capacity to think, is never simply one’s own. To do justice to thought, is therefore always to allow for others to think through one’s own mind, and be present across whatever thought one claims as one’s own.

The second main place that Structuralism argued that humanity different from nature was over incest. Human society was founded, the argument went, on exogamy. Every family therefore needed to look beyond itself and towards others for its brides (or its husbands) and the inbuilt biological needs of humanity therefore form the inner buttress to society. Or to put it slightly differently, because humanity appears (the argument went) hard wired not to marry its own brothers or sisters or children it follows that collective interest must arise between otherwise distinctive groups and with that interest an elaborate system for managing the potential conflicts that would otherwise arise from the need to find partners. Society therefore becomes directly founded on both biology and intimate feeling.

This claim will again need to be understood in two main ways. The very basic claim that humanity is necessarily different from anything else in nature because it alone does not marry within the family has been by and large discredited. To put it simply there is very little evidence to support the existence of a universal incest taboo, let alone to support the idea that this taboo is central to society. All that is habitually (but not universally) condemned is child abuse, which is something rather different (although all too frequently caught up with incest). On the other hand the basic abstract claim that societies originate within human’s need to understand and relate to others, appears valid. What is lost is the individual differentiating difference within the global community. So we then in effect form some kind of single axis within which we can locate and understand our interactions with humans that might otherwise appear very different to us. Humanity does indeed appear locked within the paradox of always looking towards others, and yet then needing to obscure their very otherness, and to create a system of thought within which their ‘mystery’ is felt to be less perplexing and problematic than it was.

The power of the Structuralist approach was that it allowed one to out-think the account of humanity based upon individuality. What it was to be a human became then not the province of any one human or even of anything within individual humans as such: Humanity was rather the product of a complex system within which elements of thoughts came together and bounced off each other. Societies were then, the expression of genuinely collective thought. That is, thought that one individual could at any point simply own and claim for their own. And yet the very power and efficacy of such an approach also provided its undoing. Once one allows for the idea that thought is often (if not absolutely) the construction of a structure where no individual is forming the agenda, then one does not need one system (say language) to understand how this system is created. Or to put it differently – anything, be it writing or the internal differences of species (urine scent uniqueness) might be understood through such an approach. Any claim therefore that such a system is rooted in language alone and so the special preserve of humanity is therefore lost.

Ironically enough therefore, Structuralism founders on the fact that it wants at all points to save human specialness while in fact systematically undermining that very idea. Structuralism therefore in a sense betrays its own Structuralist aspirations in asserting at every point the power of human language. Structure (which was originally a mathematical concern) needs no such ingredient and any assertion that it does will simply founder. But this last point leads one to a double problem. On the one hand it is clear that Structuralism is leading one back to understanding humanity as a part of a wider living system. That is, to one of the poles for justice that was raised up in the last Rant. Structuralism appears to simply make a proper assessment of that topic all the more urgent. However before one attempts such an argument it is necessary to recall the other pole discussed in the last Rant, which founded human identity within individual actions and cultural practice. It is clear that pure Structuralism does not have much to say to such an approach. However it is not clear that Structuralism cannot be adapted to actually give an order to a sensible account of how individual habits and histories structure minds. It is to this account of how situations create individuals that the next of these Rants turns.

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