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H263 Language, Culture and the Unconscious
Lecture 1 1992
Coda (on George Steiner)

Garry Gillard

Steiner

Now I move on to a kind of coda. What I propose to do now is to touch base with each of our four fathers again, but this time in a more critical than expository vein, and to do this I'll bring to bear a critique from George Steiner, from a book called Nostalgia for the Absolute. 1 It's not a very new book, having been published in 1974 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for which he gave the five lectures the book contains, but the notion of nostalgia as a critical term seems still to be pretty current. Steiner's thesis is that the decay of organised religion had left a vacancy which had to be filled by 'meta-religions' like those of psychoanalysis and marxism, for which Steiner prefers the term 'mythology.' He says that a mythology has to have certain characteristics: it has to make a claim of totality, it has to have recognizable forms of beginning and development, and thirdly, it has to have its own language, idiom, metaphors, body of myths. If it has these things, it is a 'substitute theology'.

I want to suggest to you [writes Steiner] that these features directly reflect the conditions left by the declines of religion and by a deep-seated nostalgia for the absolute. That nostalgia—so profound, I think, in most of us—was directly provoked by the decline of Western man and society, of the ancient and magnificent architecture of religious certitude. Like never before, today at this point in the twentieth century, we hunger for myths, for total explanation: we are starving for guaranteed prophecy. 2

Leaving on one side Steiner's discussion of Marx's romanticism, and his claim that marxism can be expressed in terms of historical epic (though I'm hard put to restrain myself from pointing out that this anticipates Lyotard's analysis in terms of master narratives or metanarratives 3); without going into Steiner's analysis of Marx's translation of the theological doctrine of the fall of man, or original sin, and of ultimate redemption, into historical, social terms, nor into Marx's identification of himself with Prometheus—because Marx is not 'on' this course—let me come to what he says about Freud. Freud also identifies with—or 'self-projects' onto—a mythic figure. Each of them is not only aware of the power of the Biblical prophets, but sees himself as the prophet of a new sect, which will transform the world. Freud sees himself as Moses, says Steiner—Moses who 'was a great leader, severe, unyielding, destined to lead mankind, or some significant portion of it at least, to a promised land of rationality, of psychic equilibrium and scientific truth.' 4 But whereas Marx looked nostalgically back to a lost Edenic paradise, 'a lost childhood of man' 5, Freud looks forward nostalgically to death, to entropy, to the triumph (as in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) of Thanatos—the death wish—over Eros—the pleasure principle.

An internal entropy is at work. A great quietness will return to creation as life reverts to the natural condition of the inorganic. The consummation of the libido lies in death. 6

Another mythic aspect of the Freudian school of psychoanalysis is its claim to status as a science, and I hope to have a little to say about this in the third lecture of the course. 'Freud was determined to give to psychoanalysis a biological foundation.'  But Steiner sees a widening gap developing in Freud's perception between the psychoanalytic mode of thought, with its architecture of id, ego and superego, and its dynamics of repression and sublimation, on the one hand, and the sciences from which Freud got his early training on the other, which led to neurophysiological and biochemical treatment of mental functions. 7 Steiner tells us that Karl Popper, noted philosopher of science, sees the Freudian apparatus as he does the Marxian: as a pseudo-science, because it is not subject to falsification through experiment. We might take this up again later in the course. But before I leave Steiner's view of Freud, I must share with you the secret of where the latter got the idea of the tripartite structure of the mind.

I put forward with hesitation, but with, I hope, some seriousness, the suggestion that the famous division of human consciousness - the id, ego, superego - has in it more than a hint of the cellar, living quarters, attic anatomy of the middle-class home in Vienna at the turn of the century. 8

Coming again to Lévi-Strauss, then, the nostalgia then is clearly for the lost innocence of the natural which we have abandoned for the cultural, and we continually construct myths the function of which is to attempt to mediate between the two. And anthropologists, in performing their function, have played a part in the loss of the natural, our distancing from what is left of the primitive. Because of the observer effect, any primitive society studied by anthropologists is changed forever, brought inevitably into the cultural. Steiner sees Lévi-Strauss as possessed by a negative vision: the anthropologist as entropologist (the pun is perfect in French). But it is not just the primitive that will be lost from the earth: it is the lot of the anthropologist to preside over nothing less than the extinction of everything human from the earth.

Lévi-Strauss, then, is like some Mephistopheles, leading the shades of the fallen into the Limbo of non-existence. Like St John the Divine he foresees the end of the human race.

Can we extend this nostalgic theorisation to Bateson and Whorf? If we look at the Introduction to Steps, we may think so. He seems at least unable to tolerate fools gladly. Bateson says, for example, 'I discovered that what made it difficult to tell the class what the course was about was the fact that my way of thinking was different from theirs.' 9; and 'I have often been impatient with colleagues who seemed unable to discern the difference between the trivial and the profound.' 10 Bateson, like Lévi-Strauss, has a vision of lost innocence: he also travels to remote communities in the hope of a glimpse of the pristine. He also has a vision of the future. But Bateson's future, it seems to me, is the future of Bladerunner, of Total Recall, of the cyborg . If he had been asked, perhaps he would see himself as Prospero, perhaps as Arthur C. Clarke. He writes this, not long before his death.

What I am suggesting is that the process whereby double binds and other traumas teach us a false epistemology is already well advanced in most occidentals and perhaps most orientals, and that those whom we call 'schizophrenics' are those in whom the endless kicking against the pricks has become intolerable. 11

I'd like you to try to remember this idea, as something like it should come up in the lecture by Lois Achimovich later in the course, so I'll repeat the last part of the quotation.

... Those whom we call 'schizophrenics' are those in whom the endless kicking against the pricks has become intolerable.

I got this from a book called About Bateson, which is in the Murdoch Library if you're interested. The point I'm making by quoting the passage is that Bateson's view that the world is such a nutty place—being dominated by a 'false epistemology'—that you're quite justified in going crazy, but the further implication is that only superior people like him can see the processes which cause this, better than not only 'most occidentals' but also 'most orientals' as well.

I'd like to take a closer look at a passage I quoted before, in which Bateson was taking a shot at Freud, Marx and Jung (like George Steiner). Back in the 1970s, when the 1960s got to Australia, I remember that some of the people with whom I was associated then were very concerned about not making judgements, and they invented the barbaric term 'judgemental', as the most extreme of pejorative terms; and in that context someone once showed me that when you point a finger at someone else, three fingers point back at you. That made an impression on me, and I have noticed on a multitude of occasions since then that I often accuse others of what I most fear or dislike in myself. I am of course not alone in this.

Now, what we find Bateson expressing in this passage is a dislike of grandiosity, or what is sometimes called 'megalomania'—again that of which Steiner accuses Freud and Lévi-Strauss. You remember that he said that 'the next step in supernaturalism after the invocation of "energy" is the belief in Lamarckian inheritance and ESP', and yet he himself uses the concept of 'energy—if you remember that from the quotation about schismogenesis—he mentions 'energy supply' as being precisely something which applies to human relationships. I am aware of the difference between a quantity and a quality—well, I think I am, but I still wonder: if Bateson is talking about a quantity of something in the phrase 'a limitation of energy supply', what is it a quantity of?

It seems to my limited understanding that Bateson is invoking not only energy, but also a lot of other physical properties, including schismogenesis, to apply to human beings, human relations and human societies, and this may well license him, in his view anyway, to make judgements about human societies, judgements which can lead ultimately to 'tyranny and oppression.' So that he might—and I think does—judge Balinese society to be superior to the Papuan Iatmul society, a judgement which one could imagine leading to a different attitude on the part not just of anthropologists but, also, say, in this context, of foreign governments and funding organisations.

Let me try to give you an example of what I mean. You may be aware that the WA Aboriginal Heritage Act requires that for a site to be registered as sacred (and therefore not able to be alienated and mined) there must be ethnographic research available—which means the involvement of an anthropologist. You may have been aware of news stories about an anthropologist Rory O'Connor favouring one Aboriginal group over another, presumably on the basis not only of his observation but also the theoretical spectacles which frame his gaze, that is, his judgements. And that another group of anthropologists at the University of Western Australia disagreed with him regarding sacred sites in the latest area to be opened up for mining. In 1991 the Premier called for a third opinion from anthropologists from out-of-state—which seems very odd to me, in that I thought anthropological judgements were to be based on long familiarity and observation over a long period. And such judgements can have the result that groups of Aboriginal people will either lose or not lose the rights that they claim to the land.

This might suggest one area on which you could base one of your projects. I'll end there, without laboriously carrying my Steinerian analysis on to Whorf.

Footnotes

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