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Fam Proc 11:349 -360, 1972
BOOK REVIEWS Harley C. Shands, Mouton, The The Hague and Paris, 1971, 128 The War with Words: Structure and Transcendence, by Harley pp. $9.50. I can easily remember the time when I heard a lot of talk about finding a single, unified explanation for human behavior. The "principle of parsimony" was held in great esteem during my undergraduate years (early sixties). It used to be put forth as a strong point of psychoanalytic theory, one reason why the Freudian approach was preferable to other theories trying to make their way at the time. Now it seems seems that all the hopeful, hopeful, singular singular explanations explanations of of human conduct conduct have fallen fallen into disrepute. disrepute. We are uncomfortable with reductionist arguments, and we are well aware that the positions taken by most behavioral scientists are well-coached pledges of allegiance to notions well-anchored in sociohistorical time and place. A stance taken generally tells us more about the vicissitudes of professional affiliation than about the behavior it purports to explain. The problem with striving toward the principle of parsimony is that in seeking the simplest explanation for the most human events, the competing views primarily challenge each other rather than examine their own epistemological foundations. A look at the roots by an outsider is sufficient to be satisfied that growth will be limited. Consequently, what we have witnessed in the recent past is not simply a change in the preference for theories of explanation, but the realization that the most basic assumptions, the "root metaphors" of most early theoretical systems, have been inadequate in the least, and disastrously erroneous in the extreme. In our chagrin we have turned from constructing theories of immediate explanation to the development of "meta-theories," or new dialects within which more delimited theoretical discourse can be spoken. The development of a transactional view based upon a fascination with the process of communication is a leading example. To my mind, the two figures who have given us most to think about, as we enter this new domain, are Gregory Bateson and Harley Shands.
The Search for Shapes The Bateson has just published a collection of all his important papers in Steps to an Ecology of Mind , (New York, Ballentine Walden Walden Edition, 1972), and Shands has published two recent books bringing us up to date on his work. The first of Shands' books, Semiotic Approaches to Psychiatry, (The Hague and Paris, Mouton, 1970), is a collection of 23 papers covering a wide range of subjects, all developing the basic observation that "every meaningful act is a function of patterned communication in some modality." The second, The War with Words , is a book that has finally reached the light of day after circumventing the hindrances of the bias against "speculative inquiry" that typifies our supporting institutions. This work is a summary of many years spent in "reflexive rumination" on the relationship of Communication and Consciousness. Shands uses the broad term "semiotics" to describe his subject matter, but it is important to remember that semiotics is "less a specialized field that a meta-discipline having to do with the elucidation of general patterns found in various manifestations throughout the study of the human condition." (11) Applying himself to this realm, his preoccupation with a truly general understanding is consonant with the highest traditional goals of philosophy. This is, indeed, a brilliant and remarkable work. I have never seen a study by someone trained in medicine and psychiatry that so combines an ambitious scope with such scholarly treatment and poetic rendering. This is a personal testament derived from years of sober investigation, a formulation of lucid though highly complicated ideas. Shands' effort has been to seek endlessly for significant common Shapes at many levels and in many different fields of content, and to integrate them in semiotic terms. In his search for patterns here that are isomorphic with patterns there, he shares a common style with the systems theoretical work we associate with Bateson. But where Bateson has taken the larger system as his focus of preference, Shands has chosen the study of personal experience. As an approach to studying the human condition, Shands has gone further than anyone in using the symbolic process to pull together together a wide wide variety variety of notions, notions, from from the relation relation of language language to its genetic and and physiological physiological substrata substrata in in one direction, to the possibilities for transcendence beyond linguistic mediation in the other. His study of the structure of language and its role as both servant and master to man is paralleled by his interest in dialectics of meaning as servants and masters of human groups. By virtue of his choice of a semiotic terminology, and through his constant attention to the symbolic process (that exclusively human specialization depending upon consensus for its very possibility), Shands has developed what is to my mind the most satisfactory framework for understanding the person available to those of us who favor a transactional and ecological point of view. Person and group are dual aspects of a single process, separable only for the convenience of verbal description. His focus on the centrality of communication preservers the matrix of self and other, self and group,
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group and community.
The War with Words What, then, is the War with Words to which the title refers? It is the struggle to break free from ordinary human experience as contained within the verbal condition. Words give us the peculiar human facility to "bind time" to experience a sense of history, to "internalize" a whole universe, which permits us, if we wish, to "live in the mind." Words liberate us, through the symbolic method, from the imprisoning "here and now" to which physiological process restricts all of our animal relatives. Yet as soon as we learn the verbal method, we become aware of its imprisoning qualities, and, in the characteristic quality of dissatisfaction, we seek for methods of liberation from symbolism. (Many of us now pay dearly to learn methods for lingering in the here and now, to which the success enjoyed by "gestalt" therapists now attests.) The War with Words is the struggle to attain again the feeling of liberation into a new universe of experience. This second liberation culminates in the "mystic experience" universally discoverable in reports from cultures of every variation. This experience in essence a feeling of surpassing intensity describes a grasping of transcendent reality, ineffable, and specifically beyond words. The paradoxical task Shands poses for himself is approaching as closely as possible an understanding of the ineffable in terms of epistemological insights into physiological process and into symbolic method. The nature of this paradox is dual. First, he is approaching what is "beyond words" through the intensely ratified usage of the words of science; second, as an avenue to the ineffable, he is approaching the verbal method through the use of the verbal method. We encounter an insolubility at the outset, which signals, then, that whatever follows must surely represent the highest form of play. The effort involved has been expended for the pure pleasure of the ruminative and descriptive activity, and not in anticipation of some great solution. For one need not be expert in Godel's proof or the Russellian paradoxes to know that a method cannot be both contained and containing, or capable of explaining itself completely with its own terms. We are now equipped to go back to the central problem and put it in Shands' own preferred dialectical language: "The book is an attempt to bring together (1) the thesis of scientific materialism with its primary technique of experimentation, and (2) the antithesis of mysticism with its primary technique of contemplation and meditation." (12). The most immediate synthesis is made possible by recognizing that both technologies are methods of attempted communication, albeit with very different subject matters. The significant feature in common between these two attitudes is that both ultimately depend upon consensus, whether the communicants are defined as the community of relevant scientists or the community of the relevant religious. We find over and over again that when any notion is accepted by the relevant community, that notion is true until falsified and replaced.
Shape After introducing us to the problem, Shands unfolds a series of chapters, which culminate in an awesome exposition of transcendental experience. Along the way he draws upon ideas and data from a variety of quarters, quoting split-brain research and Emily Dickenson with equal ease. His material is arranged in such a way that apparently discrete bits of information become amenable to an ordering in which we recognize the communalities and patternings that he sees. In poetic fashion, his own literary style and logic of presentation reflect the structure of the natural events he explains. The central and unifying concept throughout the book is that of shape. What Shands impresses upon us is that whether we investigate the subject matter of physics or of the symbolic process, shape , or "pure shape" or form or pattern are precisely what we are concerned with shape as abstracted, described, and serially metamorphosed. He writes comfortably about physiology and symbolism in the same paragraph having realized that it is not the "object" with which science is basically concerned, but the shape of objects as predictably described by verbal shapes (or by mathematical symbols), which again are themselves shapes of line or shapes of breath. Instead of two different universes, one characterized by introspectively experienced "feelings" and the other by objectively describable "things," Shands works in one, dealing with significant form. Throughout the book this notion of shape becomes the crucial determinant of "reality," whether "substantial" or "insubstantial." One of my favorite examples conveying a sense of the way Shands calls attention to similarities and differences of shape in distant quarters compares ideas with viruses: The similarity of verbal code and biological code is thus apparent, but the difference is equally important. Because the verbal code, translated into written form, can be both externalized and internalized through appropriate coding and decoding operations, it appears to be independently "existent." In fact, the verbal code differs from the natural code primarily in its susceptibility to consensual validation, not in its "independence." The analogy is perhaps most clearly demonstrable in comparing the relation of a verbal code to its setting with that of a filterable virus to a cell.
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A virus is very nearly "pure code" in that its whole function is to assure its own reproduction. Under suitable conditions, the virus molecule may be crystallized and stored in a bottle on the shelf, the virus is similar in some of its potentialities to the legendary genii in oriental folklore. When the virus is liberated from its passive state and enters a susceptible cell, it immediately takes over that cell's reproduction machinery for its own use. A parasite, the virus becomes master in its new "home." In quite similar form, an idea or a system framed in a verbal code may "exist" in stored form in a book on a shelf until it encounters a susceptible "host." The reader, taken over by the message of the book, may turn himself into an evangelist dedicated to the dissemination of the message, to its replication in a group of followers (22). That viruses are "substantial" and ideas "insubstantial" makes no difference when we pay attention to form and process, and to the informational impact resulting when a particular shape encounters a potentially receptive host.
Symbolic Operations A number of additional themes and ideas can now be introduced. My aim is simply to provide some initial access to Shands' intellectual universe. I must forewarn you that, although it is written in a clear and excellent style, this book is so saturated with creative formulations rendered in an unfamiliar terminology that only a close, thoughtful reading from cover to cover contains the promise of clear understanding. Early in the book Shands introduces the paradox that life is a continuous process of movement, but that grasping it requires stopping that movement through the application of verbal description. Central to his argument is that describing never effectively grasps "reality," while the only reality we can grasp is through description. Here he clearly shares the point of view identified with General Semantics in the tradition of Korzybski. "The map is not the territory," but all we have are maps. A complementary conception is that it is impossible to describe the circular patterning that defines behavior, or "being," because the nature of symbolic operations , that is, describing, is different from the nature of physiological operations. He suggests that we are stuck but find it easier to distort observations so as to reinforce the notion of linearity implicit in the linguistic method than to cope with the ambiguity implicit in circular physiological patterning. Observing this dilemma, Shands remarks, "It takes a long time for human beings to emancipate themselves from the tyranny of the linear mode." (33) Here and elsewhere, we are struck by the similarities to the insights of Marshal McLuhan.
Communications Theory Aspects of a theory of human communication can be found in several discussions throughout the book. In an early chapter, Shands reviews analog and digital coding, describing how the two forms complement each other in a wide range of communicative process, from the basis of neural transmission to the mental operations specified by Piaget. Later he moves from the more technical concepts to a theory of the self based in the communicative process. What is interesting about this book is that we find discussions here and there that call into mind such diverse sources as general semantics, systems theory, McLuhan, Piaget, Goffman, and more; but Shands lends significance to familiar themes through his own method. What we find is a variety of respectable ideas woven together in such novel fashion that we being to see the outlines of a larger, intellectual system. (Is this the hazy outline of the "meta-discipline" concerned with communication that Shands has talked about?) What grows steadily familiar is a "way of talking" or a "way of knowing" that encompasses a good deal of what we have heard spoken before, in a variety of tongues.
Relationships Precede Objects A formulation to which Shands pays constant respect is that relationships precede objects. He reminds us over and over that we can objectify and attribute meaning to something only after we recognize it in context. Less obvious is the fact that the verbal sign has meaning only in social context and that the categories selected or differentiated must be recurrently validated by consensus.
Consensus Shands is further preoccupied with the notion of consensus, and we find him emphasizing the requirements of achieving and sustaining it as basic to the human condition. The shape-name complexes used in description are the distinct property of the human access to reality. Signs and symbols represent abstract patterns that are communicable. They receive meaning only in some group or community. The meaning of meaning is basically consensus. Shands is concerned with this process in both kinds of groups under study: the social system as an organized human group, and the symbolic system as an organized group of tokens. In comparing the two systems and describing their interdependence, he says:
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Both groups are characterized by complex, highly integrated sets of rules: the human group demonstrates cultural rules, the symbolic group demonstrates grammatical rules. Neither the symbol system nor the social system can have meaning except in close association with the other systems, and both systems are constantly involved in accommodative and assimilative processes through which they interpenetrate in integrative fashion (47).
Portable Reality This enchantment with the interdependence of linguistic and social structures gives a new wrinkle to Bloch's "portable reality" notion. In its original form this concept referred to human replicative capabilities. Under the heading of portable realty, Bloch specifically dealt with the processes whereby persons modeled responses in new social settings that were of the same experiential shape as those of earlier settings, particularly the family of origin. Extending the trend against the early conceptions, which emphasized the "intrapsychic conflicts" and "traits" a person carries from setting to setting, Shands suggests that what is portable are symbolic representations sustained by group consensus. He explains that in animals, the significant context is a "territory." In human beings, because of symbolic operations, it becomes possible to feel "in context" through purely symbolic maneuvers. The human context is transportable, even internalizable to a remarkable degree. Where the solid, obviously present earth gives to an animal a predictable, regular background upon which to carry out his activities, in human beings much of the same regularity and predictability is made possible by symbolic processes and social conventions (50). The extent to which the human reality is both transportable and at the mercy of an exquisite kind of consensus, reaffirmed or denied during each and every encounter, is nowhere better illustrated than in the work of Erving Goffman. Like Goffman, Shands has great respect for the invisible power of mutually carried, repetitively enacted conventions and a keen sense of the vulnerability of every individual to the ritual code. While the symbolic method is portable, the "reality" it makes possible is reconstructed at every turn. This is so whether we refer to relations between one another (in which our self-esteem can be shriveled up at the slightest glance) or to the very basis of our identity. The "I" is inferred from the sequence in which we find it possible to communicate with past occasions of acting and speaking. "Any memory is a communication to a current self from a putative self of a former time." What persuades us of the existence of "I" is the unbroken series of such rememberings. The question of memory then becomes subordinate to that of communication. Instead of the question, "How do we remember past experience?" we can ask, "How do we communicate with a previous occasion of experiencing?" The notion of a personal identity rests upon the conviction that the "person" whoever he may be, including the self is a sequence of experiences bound together by the conviction that the sequence involves sameness (86).
Mutual Inhabitance In the first chapter, Shands states that, "The antithetical meaning of primal words is the basic paradoxical foundation of the human condition." (20) For example, we say, human beings join with friends against a common enemy but we say equally precisely that we fight with the enemy. Using words we convert the circular reality into a linear formulation; but no sooner have we done so than we find words betraying us by converting the linear statement into verbal paradox. Thus we must resolve and re-resolve paradoxes such as those of Zeno, and pseudo-problems such as the primacy of chicken or egg. Exploring the portability issue a bit further, we find just this kind of slipperiness in the following statement by Shands, identical to the central position taken by R. D. Laing: "At the point of sophisticated acculturation, we find then a central paradox: the human being lives in a system which in an important sense lives only in him." (68) It is indeed unfortunate that Shands does not develop this assertion further. For unlike Laing, who rejects the systems terminology and gives emphasis to the "family" as one's idea of the family, Shands touches upon the point of interpenetrating systems, emphasizing the linguistic-symbolic system itself as what "lives" inside us. The important difference here is that Shands is talking about a more "content-free," internal system than is Laing. Although I like Laing's idea that what we internalize are not "objects" but whole little "scenarios" involving ourselves and significant others, I like even more Shands' idea that what we internalize are the rules for patterning our behavior with others in the first place, permitting us to reconstruct reality wherever we employ the symbolic method. I wish Shands had developed this idea further because it opens up the one area that has been most inadequately dealt with in the theoretical formulations of human systems theory. As I see it, the central problem for the systems-ecological approach today is that it has not made explicit an adequate model of the person. That is, it has not described the nature of its elements or "constitutional determinants." When we look closely at the kinds of assumptions many systems theorists are 4
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forced to make about people, they are clearly absurd. In our efforts to break free from the reifications of "mind" and "personality" as the determinants of behavior we have avoided even mentioning the person like the plague. Consequently, we have spun off new models of family and community behavior that describe the roles played by persons making up these systems, which often make little sense when we are reminded that the occupants of those roles are in fact people like you and me. Perhaps without realizing it, like the early psychological reductionists who were unaware that groups of people behave in ways that are unaccountable by any psychology of the person, we have constructed models of social systems without realizing what kind of person we must assume to exist in order that the systems processes we propound be enacted. Clearly, people construct behavioral schemata and demonstrate internalized representations of the form and substance of human conduct. One person mediates system events in a way different from another; in certain circumstances feeling and fantasy unfold as a form of action in place of overt behavior. My point, implicit in this digression, is simply that we need to take account of the person more systematically more self-consciously even when we know that his behavior can only be understood and changed by attention to the processes describing his context of human relatedness. Shands' nascent formulation of the person is promising. It is concordant with systems theory, potentially capable of providing a decent model of the actor.
Inner and Outer Lest the reader be concerned from the preceding discussion that Shands sounds too much like an "inner space" advocate, let me emphasize that nothing could be further from the truth. In a piece entitled, "On Why the Mind is Not in the Head," he has prepared a provocative whimsey on the inadequacies of locating thought and feeling in the brain. Just how very much one must include even to suggest a reasonable description of "mentation" is the point of the paper. Also, elsewhere, Shands has described humans as "nodal points" in a larger network, that is, aspects or values in a communicational system, rather than "individuals" in the atomic sense. By the time he finishes The War with Words, the reader has the very clear impression that the very discussion of "inner and outer" results from a structure of thought imposed by the structure of language. Language prescribes for us a linear ordering of data in discursive sequence. When we talk or write, we emphasize an initial dichotomization for the purpose of differentiation. Since we dichotomize within a given context, we are actually differentiating the two termini of a dimension. Overwhelmingly and unconsciously influenced by linguistic method, we then decide and enforce acceptance of the notion that the universe is organized on this linear basis, in cause-and-effect, inner-and-outer patterns of general relevance. We soon learn, however, that in any delicate or complicated context we cannot find such a concretely defined order, except by imposing it. Thereafter, we operate by setting a limit in the middle of a continuous variation, which makes the distinction between "hypo-" and hyper-," between "normal" and "abnormal," between "inner" and "outer." Shands does not restrict us to categories of linear convenience. One can feel in his work the very struggle against the forcible occupation of the self by the linguistic system into which he happened to be born. If the rest of us worked half as hard with (against) words, the "field" would surely be more than twice as well off.
Human Feeling We can further elucidate how Shands uses language and consensus to make sense of what have been traditionally considered "inner" processes by examining his treatment of feeling. In the characteristic style and pattern of his thought, the following statement resounds like a cannon shot: The point appearing time after time is that feeling as we use the term in any sophisticated sense is not a matter of expression but rather a matter of training. The human being learns how to feel; the emotion is primarily characterized by significance, not by relief (81). Shands further notes that one develops human feeling in its mature form through a protracted history of intense relatedness to a series of "preceptors," all of whom demonstrate a certain consistency in the way they "view the world," which means, essentially, "the kinds of feelings they have." This observation could not be more strategic to a view that has been reformulating a conception of human feeling from the diverse writings of James, Dewey, Mead, Sapir, C. Wright Mills and Piaget to the recent work of Richard Rabkin. Taking account of emotion and feeling in a transactional field, this changing view emphasizes that the activity of feeling, like thought, undergoes a structuring and development within a specific sociolinguistic context. When we say someone "expresses himself," we mean he is acting through language (with or without words) and that this linguistic behavior must be approached, not by referring to private states "in" individuals, but through observing both its personal and social functions. Shands has now added to an additional dimension that rescues the study of feeling and motives from exclusive treatment at the level either of "sociology" or "private states." With the recognition that the self is a symbolic construction, Shands
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emphasizes the point that the linguistic alternatives that become available to a person, that is, his "vocabulary of motives," or "dialect of feelings," serve not only as the coordinates and predictors of action within the significant group, but also provide continually recurring options for the individual to reconstruct the meaning of events and maintain a balance of order in his everyday life. Bringing this conceptualization into the practical setting, one explanation for much of the personal misery we suffer, as we are torn apart routinely by our daily experiences, rests on the fact that the "series of preceptors" referred to above share increasingly less and less of a "common world view" with each other and with the human novice. The background of consensus required to sustain a feeling of wholeness and unity has dwindled around us. We are left conflicted and continually distracted, not only about who we are and how we relate to the world, but about the least minutia and trivia as well. We feel "together" and we feel peacefully free when we have the unnoticed conviction that our choices and daily movements come from within rather than from some alien system of control imposed upon us. What this means for Shands is that we share with the significant others in our lives the desire to be and to do what they would have us be and do. That we can now seldom share such convictions with the extended groups around us is increasingly apparent. A good illustration of the wreckage resulting from this deterioration of consensus is the rage expressed in David Cooper's futile book, The Death of the Family. Here, the "common view" or "common tongue" among groups and between generations can be seen to have been ripped asunder. It is clear that Cooper, and others for whom he speaks, feel victimized by family and community efforts of "control." Cooper describes being pushed and pulled into molds alien to him. He has felt forced to do violence unto himself in order to conform to the familial needs and expectations, which he ultimately disowns. Where did the "him" now alien to his family come from? What Cooper apparently does not see (or accept) is that his problem is primarily one of broken consensus and competing instructions from the pluralistic groups in which he must move as a self-conscious "member" of Lord knows what Modern Western Society. He seems to believe that, left to himself, he would unfold and develop into someone who is already there, in some sense, within, ready to "be" if given a chance, but who is ultimately suppressed and contorted through participation in a family. Shands' book is an effective antidote to this kind of native, Rousseauian image of the nature of man. Rather than characterize the self and human feeling as toothpaste, squeezing itself from a tube, Shands invites us to look at the experience of self and personal conflict through an examination of the integration and behavior of the relevant, socio-linguistically bound group. He gives us the outlines of a method more cordial toward natural history, building upon what is unique about the human species.
Creativity and Communion Through the first five chapters Shands has been leading up to what is the most instructive, secondary account of mystical and transcendental experience available. I will not attempt to convey it here. Every reader should savor it for himself. In approaching the ineffable, Shands moves through a discussion of creativity highlighted by the theme that "in order to understand the process of creation from a sober investigative viewpoint, it is essential to see that the creation or discovery is an event embedded in a necessary and protracted context of effort and instruction." (93) He sets the stage for an account of freedom and self-liberation by calling our attention to significant homeomorphisms with the creative process: The paradox evident in the pursuit of the comprehensive liberation of satori and similar states is the route of discipline. To liberate oneself, one has to submit to ritual demands of the system in which he is working. The freedom attained is not so much freedom of action as it is freedom from conflict and distraction (70). Having introduced us to the seeker's method, he recapitulates the central theme: Every system interested in indoctrinating novices or scholars in a meditative method uses verbal methods a feature in common through all variants of "higher learning." The goal of the meditational effort, however, is clearly that of getting past the verbal process, moving through and beyond words to a conviction of a deeper, intense, nonmediated communicative state a state of communion. The state achieved is transcendent , surpassing, immediate. In another apparent contradiction, the religious and philosophical systems oriented toward transcendent states universally emphasize discipline, often in a rigid, formal, ritual fashion (96).
Envoi Finally, in a convincing and poetic close we discover that we have been led all the way to the attainment of transcendence only to be told we can't have it at least not to keep. For the very achievement of a timeless present is not only difficult (if 6
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not impossible) to sustain physiologically, it is ultimately dysfunctional to both person and group. It seems that were it possible to extend the period of ecstatic communion, the system itself would be seriously threatened: The briefness of moments of communion is of importance, since such a state of so undifferentiated a peace threatens the function of an information-processing apparatus. If there is no difference, there is no novelty, and thus no information, so that a data-processing apparatus becomes functionless in principle. It is of considerable interest that states of mystical, ecstatic, or orgastic intensity which uniformly convey a notion of merging or unification are sharply limited in time. Further, since the moment of communion is so still, it is not possible to describe it while it is taking place. The descriptions which we have are all descriptions retrospectively put down. The describing resembles that of reporting a dream, looking backward through a rapidly closing porthole at a disappearing scene as the ship speeds on its course (118). And there we have it. One last comment is in order. It is significant that, having recapitulated his themes and sounded his climax, Shands turns to his professional identity as a psychotherapist to deliver the final note. In a very brief concluding statement, he summarizes his many years of experience as a therapist and brings home the chief implication of The War with Words to the context of systematically changing behavior. The new wave of "technologically" oriented therapists may not like what he has to say. For while he concurs that a social engineering model is appropriate to altering the systems within which we live, he still holds a very dear place in his heart for an intimate kind of individual psychotherapy. He reminds us that human beings learn objectivity through the path of subjectivity, and that they come to look at themselves only after developing an intense feeling of closeness with someone they can respect, whose posture can be adopted, and whose techniques can be learned. Furthermore, the ideal model for the dissemination of information is still that typified by the example of Christ and Freud: recruit disciples and form an organization. Here again, even at the last, Shands emphasizes the simultaneity of personal experience and the life of the group. Human beings are everywhere embedded in groups whose language, norms, and myths live only in their members. Before there was a human, there was the word and the group: but the word and the group could not have been formed without humans. Thus, life is paradox when shaped into verbal terms, and our analytic method, fragmenting and linearizing, has captured us. Donald Ransom, Ph.D. Assistant Professor and Director of Family Therapy Training Division of Ambulatory and Community Medicine University of California School of Medicine San Francisco
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