3
The most recent convergence of ethnographic and literary concerns, to return to the point from which I began, does
indeed take place within the context of postmodernism. Scientific claims to truth are threatened not only by rhetoric and ideology but by indeterminacy and interconnectedness, these latter two terms reminding us of David Porush's description of the milieu of postmodern science. The Heisenberg indeterminacy principle,[13] it would seem, operates not only at the subatomic levels of physics, but everywhere, with the consequence that even as would-be disinterested observers we inevitably enter into relation with and have effect upon whatever it is that we observe. And now, beyond Heisenberg, there is Bell's Interconnectedness Theorem implying that—I know this only in Porush's account—local operations have nonlocal effects: everything we do and say, perhaps everything we think, alters the universe, an exhilarating or a frightening prospect.
The postmodern perception of a world organized in terms of signal/noise or figure/ground relations that are constantly shifting doesn't only blur genres, as Geertz might have it; rather, as I have several times noted, it blurs epistemological distinctions, asserting a kind of cognitive egalitarianism on the part of literature, ethnography, and even—at least at the highest theoretical level—the physical sciences. This particular sort of equivalence between truth and beauty is not at all of the sort apparently sanctioned by Keats's great lines, "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." For Keats, as indeed for Shelley in his Defence of Poetry , the identity of truth and beauty resided not in an equivalence
in the type of knowledge/experience each produced, but in a potential equivalence of function ; both truth and beauty were, each in its own way, conducive to the achievement of that more capaciously informed consciousness which—so it was hoped—might result in more just and generous living.
David Porush observes that the postmodern privileging of literary discourse comes as the result of literature's traditional ability to express "a vision of the beauty not only of order but of disorder" (388), something that is more difficult for the physical or social scientist. Porush further notes as "cybernetic laws" that humans 1) find it compulsory to interpret or disambiguate uncertainty—uncertainty I take as synonymous with a perception of disorder—and that 2) one man's noise is another man's signal, as, indeed, one person's figure is another's ground (396). But this latter observation makes problematic Porush's earlier claim: if anyone's figure may be ground for anyone else, how, then, to establish a distinction between "order" and "disorder" stable enough to support "a vision" of one or the other? How to determine that that vision does indeed express the "beauty" of order or disorder, inasmuch as "beauty" would have to be defined differentially in contradistinction to something that could be called ugliness, or some such? In the same way, Porush's overexcited suggestion that "any exchange of information creates a narrative" (379) seems to me also mistaken. For the term "narrative," like "beauty," or "order" represents a determination as to what counts as signal or figure; narrative, beauty, and order are sociolinguistic constructs, which is to say that only those exchanges of information we take as fulfilling the conditions we posit for narrativity can be taken to constitute a narrative.
I say all this by way of instantiating the importance of human agency. This is not, as I have had occasion to remark
earlier, to reinvoke humanistic claims to autonomous individualism or a fully self-present subjectivity. Rather, it is to centralize the observation that inasmuch as figure and ground, signal and noise may, indeed, be constantly shifting; inasmuch as no "apodictically certain grounds exist" (H. White 1973 xii) for our determinations as to which is which, that each of us must bear the responsibility at any given moment for our choices in these matters. (The influence of an older and currently largely disregarded existentialism should be obvious here.) In the same way, although it is no longer possible to believe that we can literally represent "reality," "history," or "truth," it still makes a difference whether one chooses or refuses to take it as axiomatic that there is, nonetheless, an aprioristic material reality, of whose history we can more or less speak, in a manner positing truth as a value.
I will here only repeat what I have said earlier, with reference, however, to anthropological theorists particularly. I believe, that is, with the anthropologist Jacques Macquet,[14] that if we cannot be objective, we can still be scientific in ways that allow that word coherent meaningfulness—by specifying the methods and procedures we have followed, by indicating the empirical as well as logical components of our arguments, and so on. I believe with Marvin Harris in "the struggle for a science of culture,"[15] whether that science is defined solely in Harris's terms or not. No one can doubt that such a science will be more modest and very different from what science has heretofore been in the West—but that strikes me as a good thing. I am reluctantly convinced, mostly by the work of Hayden White, that at
the highest levels of interpretation there are no secure epistemological grounds for preferring one account of sociocultural phenomena as more "realistic," hence more nearly "true" or "scientific," than another. For White, therefore, our preferences have the authority only of choices, truth becoming now not a matter of proof but of value, of our own sense of the beautiful or the good. While this may be the case at some ultimate theoretical horizon of these matters, where rhetoric rules with totalized effectivity, and the linguistic circle has no break in its circumference, I return, again and again, to Raymond Williams's sense of the way in which the very nature of cultural hegemony is such that it cannot help but permit breaks, blanks, holes, areas weakly (or un-) colonized, with room, thus, for "residual" and "emergent" elements to have a certain play. I suggest, at least by way of analogy, that a similar situation prevails in the epistemological realm, with the result that there may indeed be a good deal of practically occupiable space—short of the absolute theoretical horizon of cognitive and esthetic equivalences—space in which probabilistic and tentative statements that offer themselves as more nearly true than others, if not absolutely true, might yet be made effectively.[16]
Curiously, even Porush admits that at a practical, day-to-
day level, scientists operate and, indeed, achieve results in spite of the constraints imposed by the highest theoretical findings about an increasingly slippery and "undecidable" physical universe. In the same way, authors and readers achieve the communication of more or less "decidable" meanings, for all the poststructuralist insistence on the infinite semantic possibilities of the signifier's free play. In all these instances we have—and Anthony Wilden's work of twenty years ago is absolutely essential to an understanding of this matter—an unfortunate but typical Western capitalist insistence on digitalizing what is in fact a matter of the analog.
Let me return, by way of closing, to what I only passingly mentioned at the outset, that it is among the ethnographers more than among the literary people that some of these issues are most hotly being debated. No doubt this is because it matters immediately and materially to ethnographic work whether one believes that—I return to the quotation from David Porush—"meaning resides" in some "underlying [realm of] the inexpressible, inchoate, [and] silent" (377), and wishes to evoke that meaning in one's ethnographic writing; or whether one believes, however tentatively—and here I return to Nancy Hartsock—in "the goal of accurate and systematic knowledge about the world" (205), attempting, by whatever moves or means, to approximate to such knowledge. That these things do matter more to the ethnographer, to offer at least one bit of empirical evidence, I'd mention that the number of sessions devoted to literary theory and practice at the American Anthropological Association Convention of 1988 (the last I attended) was proportionally much greater than the number of sessions devoted to anthropological theory and practice at the 1988 Modern Language Association Convention. "New his-
toricist" literary critics, to judge from a recent collection of essays,[17] have only gotten as far as Geertz; they seem not yet to have discovered Clifford, Marcus, Tyler, Fischer, Rabinow, and others—although it is the case that these just-named students of anthropology, all of whom are fascinated by postmodern developments, seem (more or less) up on the latest in literary theory. Now that literary studies are enjoying a certain return to history, a return by no means limited to "new historicism," it remains to be seen what the anthropologists will do. As the literary canon opens itself and expands, and critics see the necessity of attending to multiple canons, most particularly what I have referred to elsewhere as local, national, and cosmopolitan canons of literature,[18] they—we—will need the expertise of ethnographers, not so much, to my mind, as colleagues in the decipherment of, and meditation upon, codes, but as providers of data for the understanding of other worlds.