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Authors of the Impossible: Notes Towards a Future Review Essay
Extremes appeal to the average person more than does the strict truth.
—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
I have often written about my distress at the relatively primitive level of discourse in the present debate between belief and disbelief. Of course, whether in faith or in politics, if one spends too much time on the nuances, one will have no time to devote to inventing new forms of credit default swaps, new apps for the iPhone, or other things that actually go towards making a living or being of genuine benefit to others.
And worrying too much about the alternatives to the extremes quickly mires one in a Sargasso Sea of pooled ignorance, unsupported speculation, or idealistic suppositions that usually dissolve upon attack from either side.
And the region-between really doesn’t support much of a career; it is hard to get funding or even academic approval for research on topics that will either get one hanged for heresy by the believers or shot for superstition by the disbelievers.
And yet. A friend recently recounted the tale of a relative whose supposedly incurable condition had just cleared up, much to the delight of the fundamentalist relations who proclaimed it a miracle. “They need to be told, no, it just happened,” she concluded with an air of scorn. And I thought, “but what if it wasn’t a miracle but it also didn’t ‘just happen’?” But that question leads off in the direction of devising medical experiments that get no respect.
As Wittgenstein wrote, thought proceeds as though in cart ruts. It is possible to switch from one set or ruts to another, but difficult to drive on the narrow ridges between them without having the ground crumble into one existing wheel track or another.
I keep thinking about Michael Taussig’s research into the society in which everyone knows that the shamans are engaged in fakery, but everyone demands that the tricks be performed competently, because if the fakery isn’t done right, it won’t help the patients recover. Is this the placebo effect as channeled through Jorge Luis Borges, or a case of imaginary gardens with real toads in them?
Put another way, “”The point is not to reduce one ‘false’ register to the other ‘true’ one. It is to confuse and destabilize both registers.”
That last comes from Jeffrey Kripal’s new book, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred. Kripal arrives at self-consciously slippery insights into consciousness and culture that overlaps more with the anthropologists than he does more than briefly footnote. (This is mostly because the same conclusions can be reached via different intellectual paths, and his four thinkers got there by way of the alternative routes; Richard Shweder’s Thinking Through Cultures is one of the few points of contact between his path and mine.)
I have tried to deduce a theory of consciousness from Kripal’s book—since the book is about a theory of consciousness, this should be, to use Nabokov’s oft-cited metaphor, about like looking for references to large cetaceans in Moby-Dick. But Kripal’s “authors of the impossible” have their own back stories, and his own theory has to be prised out from in between the traces left by the very different careers of F. W. H. Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee, and Bernard Méheust.
All four of these folks mucked about with disreputable topics, though Myers was as critical and skeptical of the psychics he studied as he was open to their possibilities. The same goes for Vallee and Méheust as regards the UFO phenomenon in its various appearances over the millennia; far from going for ancient-astronauts simplicities, they find repeated situations comparable to the ones described in Myers’ analysis: a confusing blend of misinterpretation, fakery, and genuine mystery (which can’t be reduced to emotion-evoking “mystery” or it wouldn’t be a genuine mystery, it would be a type of genre fiction). Vallee understands all the epistemological options. He has reluctantly concluded that given the combination of genuine mystery, systematic mystification for a variety of possible motives, and simple erroneous reporting, we may not ever have the evidence or possibly the cognitive categories to resolve or even quite understand the pending questions.
Which does not mean that the questions aren’t valid, or amenable to critical analysis. I would assume that the more sophisticated brands of sci-fi have incorporated the anthropological turn as well as the neurological (the present state of research into the neurological basis of consciousness being the topic with which Kripal concludes his book). Kripal is writing a more conventional history-of-religions book about the imaginative functions of contemporary pop-culture models of flawed superheroes, but I suspect that like myself, when it comes to sci-fi he hasn’t gotten much beyond Philip K. Dick.
Kripal’s dialectical pirouettes about “writing” and “being written” by culture, as well as his reflections on Todorov’s category of “the fantastic” are deserving of summary in the review I may never get written. For now, let me quote a passage that appeals to my anthropological sensibilities. I have had to introduce an extended paraphrase in brackets for the sake of avoiding an even longer quotation within the quotation:
“[William Irwin Thompson compares our situation to that of flies crawling on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, with no idea of the presence, much less the meaning, of the drama depicted beneath our “habituated perceptions”—indeed, “the illusions we share through culture we call reality, but the true historical reality of our condition is invisible to us.”] There is a double edge to such a line of thinking. One edge suggests that, as flies, we can never really know the meaning of the visions over which we crawl so ignorantly. The other suggests that, if we could fly back a bit and obtain a true historical consciousness, this might constitute a true gnosis, that is, an effective deliverance from culture and consciousness as they presently co-create (and co-constrict) themselves. We could see how consciousness and culture interact to create our experience of reality, which is never complete or entirely trustworthy. A truly radical historicism, that is a knowledge of ‘the true historical reality of our condition,’ would thus become an awakening.”
“Awakening” is a loaded word, and so is “deliverance.” I’m not sure if Kripal has really focused, as he says he has, on “the why-questions of meaning and story and not on the how-questions of explanation and cause”—though his recourse to literary theory just when we expect something less language-oriented is certainly provocative. (But that’s the paradox; as Wittgenstein said, pictures hold us captive in our language, not in our representational pictures. “We make for ourselves pictures of facts.” It is a world of words to the end of it, as Wallace Stevens said.) But the theory of consciousness he espouses (which is more deeply in conversation with the more conventional terms of current academic discourse than his detractors would wish to admit) at least offers us the prospect of, in the words I so often cite from Good Old Charlie Brown, understanding what it is we don’t understand.
Extremes appeal to the average person more than does the strict truth.
—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
I have often written about my distress at the relatively primitive level of discourse in the present debate between belief and disbelief. Of course, whether in faith or in politics, if one spends too much time on the nuances, one will have no time to devote to inventing new forms of credit default swaps, new apps for the iPhone, or other things that actually go towards making a living or being of genuine benefit to others.
And worrying too much about the alternatives to the extremes quickly mires one in a Sargasso Sea of pooled ignorance, unsupported speculation, or idealistic suppositions that usually dissolve upon attack from either side.
And the region-between really doesn’t support much of a career; it is hard to get funding or even academic approval for research on topics that will either get one hanged for heresy by the believers or shot for superstition by the disbelievers.
And yet. A friend recently recounted the tale of a relative whose supposedly incurable condition had just cleared up, much to the delight of the fundamentalist relations who proclaimed it a miracle. “They need to be told, no, it just happened,” she concluded with an air of scorn. And I thought, “but what if it wasn’t a miracle but it also didn’t ‘just happen’?” But that question leads off in the direction of devising medical experiments that get no respect.
As Wittgenstein wrote, thought proceeds as though in cart ruts. It is possible to switch from one set or ruts to another, but difficult to drive on the narrow ridges between them without having the ground crumble into one existing wheel track or another.
I keep thinking about Michael Taussig’s research into the society in which everyone knows that the shamans are engaged in fakery, but everyone demands that the tricks be performed competently, because if the fakery isn’t done right, it won’t help the patients recover. Is this the placebo effect as channeled through Jorge Luis Borges, or a case of imaginary gardens with real toads in them?
Put another way, “”The point is not to reduce one ‘false’ register to the other ‘true’ one. It is to confuse and destabilize both registers.”
That last comes from Jeffrey Kripal’s new book, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred. Kripal arrives at self-consciously slippery insights into consciousness and culture that overlaps more with the anthropologists than he does more than briefly footnote. (This is mostly because the same conclusions can be reached via different intellectual paths, and his four thinkers got there by way of the alternative routes; Richard Shweder’s Thinking Through Cultures is one of the few points of contact between his path and mine.)
I have tried to deduce a theory of consciousness from Kripal’s book—since the book is about a theory of consciousness, this should be, to use Nabokov’s oft-cited metaphor, about like looking for references to large cetaceans in Moby-Dick. But Kripal’s “authors of the impossible” have their own back stories, and his own theory has to be prised out from in between the traces left by the very different careers of F. W. H. Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee, and Bernard Méheust.
All four of these folks mucked about with disreputable topics, though Myers was as critical and skeptical of the psychics he studied as he was open to their possibilities. The same goes for Vallee and Méheust as regards the UFO phenomenon in its various appearances over the millennia; far from going for ancient-astronauts simplicities, they find repeated situations comparable to the ones described in Myers’ analysis: a confusing blend of misinterpretation, fakery, and genuine mystery (which can’t be reduced to emotion-evoking “mystery” or it wouldn’t be a genuine mystery, it would be a type of genre fiction). Vallee understands all the epistemological options. He has reluctantly concluded that given the combination of genuine mystery, systematic mystification for a variety of possible motives, and simple erroneous reporting, we may not ever have the evidence or possibly the cognitive categories to resolve or even quite understand the pending questions.
Which does not mean that the questions aren’t valid, or amenable to critical analysis. I would assume that the more sophisticated brands of sci-fi have incorporated the anthropological turn as well as the neurological (the present state of research into the neurological basis of consciousness being the topic with which Kripal concludes his book). Kripal is writing a more conventional history-of-religions book about the imaginative functions of contemporary pop-culture models of flawed superheroes, but I suspect that like myself, when it comes to sci-fi he hasn’t gotten much beyond Philip K. Dick.
Kripal’s dialectical pirouettes about “writing” and “being written” by culture, as well as his reflections on Todorov’s category of “the fantastic” are deserving of summary in the review I may never get written. For now, let me quote a passage that appeals to my anthropological sensibilities. I have had to introduce an extended paraphrase in brackets for the sake of avoiding an even longer quotation within the quotation:
“[William Irwin Thompson compares our situation to that of flies crawling on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, with no idea of the presence, much less the meaning, of the drama depicted beneath our “habituated perceptions”—indeed, “the illusions we share through culture we call reality, but the true historical reality of our condition is invisible to us.”] There is a double edge to such a line of thinking. One edge suggests that, as flies, we can never really know the meaning of the visions over which we crawl so ignorantly. The other suggests that, if we could fly back a bit and obtain a true historical consciousness, this might constitute a true gnosis, that is, an effective deliverance from culture and consciousness as they presently co-create (and co-constrict) themselves. We could see how consciousness and culture interact to create our experience of reality, which is never complete or entirely trustworthy. A truly radical historicism, that is a knowledge of ‘the true historical reality of our condition,’ would thus become an awakening.”
“Awakening” is a loaded word, and so is “deliverance.” I’m not sure if Kripal has really focused, as he says he has, on “the why-questions of meaning and story and not on the how-questions of explanation and cause”—though his recourse to literary theory just when we expect something less language-oriented is certainly provocative. (But that’s the paradox; as Wittgenstein said, pictures hold us captive in our language, not in our representational pictures. “We make for ourselves pictures of facts.” It is a world of words to the end of it, as Wallace Stevens said.) But the theory of consciousness he espouses (which is more deeply in conversation with the more conventional terms of current academic discourse than his detractors would wish to admit) at least offers us the prospect of, in the words I so often cite from Good Old Charlie Brown, understanding what it is we don’t understand.
