Animal Ethology ㋡

5.3.1 The Communication of Preverbal Mammals*

Of the Cetacea I have had little experience. I once dissected in the Cambridge Zoological Laboratories a specimen of Phocoena bought from the local fishmonger, and did not really encounter cetaceans again until this year, when I had an opportunity to meet Dr. Lilly’s dolphins. I hope that my discussion of some of the questions that are in my mind as I approach these peculiar mammals will assist you in examining either these or related questions.

My previous work in the fields of anthropology, animal ethology, and psychiatric theory provides a theoretical framework for the transactional analysis of behavior. The premises of this theoretical position may be briefly summarized: (1) that a relationship between two (or more) organisms is, in-fact, a sequence of S-R sequences (i.e.,. of contexts in which proto-learning occurs) ; (2) that deuterolearning (i.e., learning to learn) is, in fact, the acquiring of information about the contingency patterns of the contexts in which proto-learning occurs; and (3) that the “character” of the organism is the aggregate of its deutero-learning and - gregory bateson - therefore reflects the contextual patterns of past protolearning.148

These premises are essentially a hierarchic structuring of learning theory along lines related to Russell’s Theory of Logical Types.149 The premises, following the Theory of Types, are primarily appropriate for the analysis of digital communication. To what extent they may be applicable to analogic communication or to systems that combine the digital with the analogic is problematic. I hope that the study of dolphin communication will throw light on these fundamental problems. The point is not either to discover that dolphins have complex language or to teach them English, but to close gaps in our theoretical knowledge of communication by studying a system that, whether rudimentary or complex, is almost certainly of a totally unfamiliar kind.

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The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The rela-tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The eyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if eyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.