Chapter Two: Frameshift

Abstract

In social change and by extension in any transition to a lifeway, language is pivotal. So is the framing through language. What does this mean in a post-knowledge society, which in the words of Marazzi is a language economy evolved out of capitalism?

Whether in misrepresentations about animism, the miscommunication between a British and an American passenger on the train, the clash of liberal and non-liberal democracy, or the injustice of Putin’s invasion, the researcher has to discern the underlying frames of experience and subsequently be able to relate them, and comprehend the power of their shift. Inspired by the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, this chapter details the steps of de-simplication. For this purpose the book employs figures that are structuralist. By this I mean that the figures compare ideas by relating implied experiences. The relating is a tensorial skill.

How will the present be judged by historians in the future? We should ask ourselves as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson walks the deserted streets of besieged Kiev together with Ukraine’s President Zelensky in the company of armed guards.¹ To a solitary passerby Johnson praises Zelensky’s courage of withstanding the attacking armies. Glancing sideways at the camera, he addresses the civilian in a tone of voice reminiscent of his hero Winston Churchill. But do the standards of the mid-twentieth century apply? Twenty years after this war, will ‘the good side’ again be the country responding to attack by throwing the largest bomb causing the most casualties, by ruining another economy most effectively? Surely, future praise will be bestowed on the one leading us out of the logic of war.

What ethnographers perceive are practices, expressions, emotions, statements and conversations. How to reconstruct the frames of experience underlying these? The question has inspired the psychological domains of system therapy, non-violent communication and cognitive (neuro-linguistic) learning. Of particular import was the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, applied by therapeutic groups in the vibrant Palo Alto of the late 1960s. This chapter introduces his work.

Before we try Bateson’s remedy for the problem at hand, we should contextualize the problem. However improbable it may seem as each ‘modern’ subsystem screeches and closes in on us, we are all part of a transition to a new lifeway. In this social change, language and the framing through language are pivotal.

Post-knowledge: Simplex Frames in the Language Economy

It is time to revise the Marxist story of capital determining the course of society, Christian Marazzi writes. The post-Fordist economy trades in knowledge and more fundamentally in language.² Units of meaning, which evoke culture, determine the twists and turns of public attention. Units of meaning are even more volatile than capital or labor. Companies basically buy and sell concepts. That makes a knowledge economy potentially a post-knowledge one. The work force has been liberated from the stupefying shift between sirens, only to spend the better part of waking life thinking and conversing about the catchy idea and the right image, the bigger plan and therein a potential project. Because of these building blocks of work nowadays, and the mind never stops, wages cannot compensate for actual labor, and owners’ profits soar.

The financial system for its part fluctuates at the mercy of syllables uttered by Wall Street pundits. Inflation. Bank-rupt-cy. Crisis. Democratic elections can be won or lost depending on financed streams of communication.³ A tabloid sneer in the UK costs the king of jibes the next election. Cabinets cower at public health officials pronouncing an epidemic, journalists naming a scandal, the media hyping an outrage. Prognoses written and diffused about future events have become crucial, even if those prognoses themselves cause the events.⁴ What is being said counts. A lot.

But what counts need not matter. The expectation was that the economy’s substitution of language for the assembly-line would boost participatory democracy. Interest groups do establish digital alliances across the global network to discuss issues of welfare, technological design and so on. Sociologists at the turn of the millennium therefore reveled in the possibility of a ‘radical democracy’.⁵ What went wrong in the meanwhile? Here is the rub about units of meaning. Meanings (e.g., global warming) cannot be units—unless their relations with other meanings (e.g., exploitation) have been severed, that is: unless the frame of experience (e.g., urgency) these meanings together derive from has disappeared and so too people’s basis for connection and affinity. This basis (joint membership of a sphere or deeper still a shared source of production) would have permitted firm decisions on changing a way of life. It is unique in history that a temporary mobilization of people taking the right stance and subsequently subsiding into noise draws more attention than the implementation of reform. Neoliberalism, an anti-ideological belief in the free market, is after 2008 no longer a mentality or political movement but a default outcome owing to weakened points of reference in communication. The growing complexity of communication in globalization with more social interactions, hence a higher dynamic density, should mean a denser network of multilayered meanings and social interrelations to match. In practice, immovable ideas and rusty categories return in fleeting decisions and unkept promises. Social interactions are simplex: single-stranded and instrumental in view of a short-term effect.⁶

Why the UK’s destiny as the EU’s outlier suddenly materialized in a Brexit has been amply analyzed. About the background there can be little doubt: the post-Fordist communicative order that politicians were unprepared for. The EU’s tortuous administration to get previously hostile states collaborating as a joint economy was an easy target for simplex communication, in tabloids and by Boris Johnson. After Prime Minister David Cameron introduced the EU referendum in 2016, he went to the European council to negotiate the UK’s future position in the union. His frame for the referendum was a search for legitimacy, given the democratic deficit of his conservative party. Another layer of meaning was his pushing the limits for a hard bargain, on the assumption that the UK would remain in the EU anyway. Those layers, the goal of European peace and strategies of domestic politics, were lost on the public, so no concession Cameron returned with convinced. The message of ‘lost autonomy’ was the spell the island was under.

Simplexes (or simplices) characterize the information society in general and the post-truth era in particular. The era has little tolerance for ‘limits of communication’, for the difference of singularity, the unique frame of semantic layers eluding categorization and depending on personal experience. Ask any therapist, or yourself, what would be the number one cause of problems in a relationship, in a family or in the workplace, the answer will be faulty communication. A massive industry of study-based interventions has sprouted from the perceived necessity to ‘improve communication’.⁷ But what does that mean? Are humans less than ever able to communicate? Or have they finally begun to listen, discovering that they previously imagined to understand each other? I would answer ‘no’ twice. The expectation has changed: communication should be clear-cut and avoid the morass of perspectives. The expectation is of one-signal messages from sender to receiver. Discussion of subjective experiences because of the unique meaning of the message they frame is seen as failure. ‘Communication breakdown!’ raises alarm, resulting in reproach, anger or denial, illustrative of communication panic. The merit then of communication therapies is indirect. These rituals inciting to pour one’s gut out let participants discover for themselves that their messages and those of others always contain more than one signal. Participants in group therapy face the frames in communication. They rediscover culture, for frames are the stuff studied by researchers of culture.

Denied their frame, meanings become units to manipulate. That is when communication flattens into rhetoric. For example, xenophobic parties in Europe rejecting the niqab veil claim to protect the western value of gender equality. That voters could fall for the facile appropriation of a progressive value by an ultraconservative camp indicates disregard for the experiential frame. In the same flow of communication, wherein politicians juggle with terms like immigrants and religious traditions, progressive parties discourage wearing the Islamic veil, to protect the rights of girls at an impressible age. The strategies on both sides of the political spectrum to recuperate constituencies presume citizens to vote for bits of language, for opinions. Their trading in units of meaning makes abstraction of experiential frames. The network’s inflation of meanings without frame undermines the significance of opinions, like in biology an overcrowded cell culture succumbing to its own success. A process that globalizes the network without proportionally increasing the connectedness (via frames) between its nodes (opinions) reduces the impact of each node. This simple ‘law’ of globalization unfavorably coincided with the next process, which raised the tension between information and diversity.

After the agricultural and industrial revolution, most members of the human species today partake of the information society. By information a type of communication is meant that privileges knowledge, mass connectivity and flow. Castells famously locates us in ‘the network society’.⁸ The particular character of information is reflected in the importance of the internet, social media and the services economy. The information society links once distant communities in a social network. That network is necessarily very diverse. The pair of diversity and information installs a tension at the heart of society, because much of the information traveling between diverse groups will be incommensurable. An untransparent financing system can to some look like a free market with much liquidity. What is female initiation for the one, the other calls genital mutilation. The information network requires one translation to be correct. Politicians, scientists, school systems and journalists debating to take account of recalcitrant diversity are complicit in agreeing on that one formalist reduction.

The complicity shows among others in how international organizations take the relation between welfare and happiness for granted and as universal. With the welfare state came the simplex of ‘happiness’, an individual’s wellbeing, creating the image of a pyramid with Nordic countries at the peak and African countries at the bottom. That self-image with the tenor of a self-fulfilling prophecy is the simplification we are educated in, concealing a complicated series of assumptions. By ‘series’ I emphasize the lost interrelations. A simplex glosses over rampant stress and depression in the putatively happiest populations to state that welfare and also the presumably more fundamental happiness measured by international consortia points the direction for development interventions to follow.⁹ Another simplex concentrates on the coefficients and evolutions measured by the surveys, passing over the disparities that betray the global economy’s incapacity to cater evenly for all.¹⁰ Happiness is moreover presented as the universal preoccupation, a simplex whose individualist frame downplays alternative frames. Why would values such as honor, oblivion (nirvana) and collective wellbeing not be valid?¹¹

Scientifically grounded governments assume that happiness might not be thought of in the same way by everybody but is at least the same to every body. Restraining the extent of difference and domesticating it as mere ‘diversity’ is a way to resolve the tension within a globalized network. Speaker, listener or media channel can censor and scrape the dirty, rough angles of the meanings that frame an information. Imagining to understand each other works too: forget about the experiential frame altogether. In either case, the price for unhampered flows of communication is meanings disconnected from feelings.

Now we may begin to grasp the historical significance of the disconnection of meaning from feeling. A language getting away with that has formidable powers. Post-Fordist economy has paved the way for such language and for the post-truth communication that goes with it.¹² Making things happen without any link to a verifiable observation represents the apex of make-believe. Such act is more powerful than fact, because facts in themselves cannot steer action. The unit of this language is the simplex message bringing about an effect.¹³ To tackle simplexes we must concentrate on frames instead of facts. While facts propel discussions that merely continue the flow of communication, frames reflect on the flow to stop and redirect it. If we take the example of the endless flow of reports on global warming, the crucial question is not asked, whether reading the statistics can lead to resolute acts. Two simplicating words such as ‘the economy’ suffice for someone to sever the report’s link between fact and act.

It is the task of journalists to ‘produce facts’ against the lies spread by internet trolls. But why should ‘the masses’ not interpret the so-called counter-facts as produced out of antagonism? Why would the confrontation with data refuting accusations not irritate and frustrate the masses rather than change their mind? A stronger antidote to fake news than knowledge, bits of data fueling the conflict, is intuition strong enough to shift perspective. One intuits that the claimed acts do not fit the accused. For instance, the Chinese social network Weibo had as trending topics news items reporting about Ukraine soldiers shooting their own civilians and Europe discriminating Russian students.¹⁴ Experiences of European democracy and critical media help to intuit which news items are (im)plausible. Any positive intuition the Weibo users may have about Europe can be undermined by trolls inundating information inlets with reports systematically reproducing a certain frame. The news items on Weibo are adopted from the Chinese State media, whose framing is strategic. At the same time, this generally known intention of framing weakens the validity of anything the Chinese party states. Costly exercises of power and unrelenting indoctrination keep the party in charge, but with unknown salience.

A good story carries in itself power to frame. A friend just sent me a link to a documentary ‘revealing’ that Putin started his war against Ukraine for a greater cause, namely to end the hegemony of the petrodollar. The simplex idea is that nobody had the guts before to challenge America’s rule and that is why he demands rubles for gas, and America raised economic sanctions. For some the clip, of unknown provenance, makes sense. The idea selects and integrates a few emotionally charged elements such as expensive oil and gas, and America’s claim to world power. A knowledge society obsessed with accumulating facts has to learn about the lure of fiction. A related link asks why Russia’s attack is called an invasion while America’s wars in the Middle East, the Gulf and Vietnam were so-called acts of liberation. ‘Verify the facts!’ we hear from both sides. When facts contradict facts, which ones should have the last word? Frame against frame. Sphere against sphere. Culture against culture. The following sections train to perceive the dynamic between frames, how they simplicate the same event into opposite facts.

Miscommunication

A famous example of Bateson’s anthropological analysis is how the train conversation between two well-intending passengers, a reserved British and a talkative American, goes awry, culminating in mutual suspicions of arrogance. The reason neither of them is aware of: they hold opposite frames to interpret the other person’s behavior, due to opposite upbringings on whether it is speech (UK) or silence (US) that signals paternal authority. ‘When father comes home’ in the UK, the family at the kitchen table will listen to what he has to say. In the US, the tradition is to have the kids talk. Coincidentally, exactly the type of communicative frame that both passengers consider unfit in a casual first encounter and want to avoid, they now sense to be overly employed by the other passenger (‘father knows best’ and ‘let the kid talk’). As the American passenger struggles to enliven the conversation (in the polite US mode), the British passenger refrains from speech all the more annoyed (in the polite UK mode). Two frames, each determining what is good and what is bad, collide. They lead to escalation because what is right for the one has been taught as wrong to the other, and vice versa.

Drawing the chains of action and reaction as a sequence of vectors in a dialogue will not do to capture the gist of the passengers’ conflict, which I would categorize as a mutual simplication: ‘You treat me like a child (inferior)’, or (which comes down to the same): ‘You feel superior.’ The negative energy solidifies the simplication into a simplex. Instead of vectors of influence, we need to draw a matrix of frames. The speakers’ collision inheres the opposition of logics, rather than being caused by anything specific the interlocutors in the situation say.

Realizing the relation between frames should be a liberating insight for both passengers. Their conflict should dissolve. The necessary condition is their ability to differentiate and recombine four meanings. The matrix below, of two rows and two columns, schematizes the UK perspective in the vertical dashed lines versus the US perspective in the full diagonals crossing (see Fig. 1).¹⁵ The simplex perspective in terms of superior/inferior should be replaced by a relation between two frames. The oppositional relation expresses the intrinsic ongoing tension.

Fig. 1

Simplex and tensor of UK–US miscommunication

Bateson disentangled a cultural misunderstanding in the educational sphere. Each interlocutor suffered from a simplex concealing the frames at play. Neither had any clue about the affinity (even if it is an oppositional relation) with the other’s frame, because neither acknowledged there to be frames at all. The one who sees the semantic field, and tension at the heart of it, experiences a tensor. For that person, the matrix consisting of qualities (father, kid, speech, silence, instead of quantities: 0, 1) is what affects the wellbeing of the participants. The term ‘tensor’ better than ‘matrix’ evokes the person’s three-dimensional experience.

The steps of the procedure to discern the frame behind a simplex are schematized in the next section. The reader can do the same anthropological exercise to understand the tension between liberal and non-liberal voters whereby the opposite view comes across as an attack despite the motive of both being a preoccupation with sustainable society. Attention to the sequence of actions and reactions in the past, a ‘historicist’ obsession of news and social media, will not contribute to insight in the frames.

Reconstructing the Simplication

We begin by disentangling the two terms explicitly related in the simplex and place these in a diagonal. The two remaining empty spaces we fill in with their opposite or contrasting terms, which have not been mentioned but seem implicit. The procedure is applicable to any simplex.

For instance, in the simplex communication ‘You are paranoid’, I place ‘you’ and ‘paranoid’ in a diagonal (see Fig. 2). The two empty spaces that would be implicit in the message are not obvious finds, but a good start is to invert the meaning of the originals. The question ‘What would be the opposite of the said?’ broadens the semantic field of the message, ideally without adding new information. Inversion of terms seems an adequate step in our search to carve out the actual frame of reference hidden by the simplex, because a property of concealment or denial is to state the opposite of what one feels or thinks.¹⁶ My proposal would be that ‘you’ contrasts with ‘I’, and ‘paranoid’ with ‘trust’, as shown below. ‘Indifferent’ and ‘confident’ might be other candidates for the antonym of paranoid.

Fig. 2

Derivation of tensor from simplex

The frame covering both dimensions of the message ‘You are paranoid’ can now be read vertically, starting with the first column: ‘You trust. I am paranoid.’ Translated evocatively: ‘I reproach you because you have the trust I am afraid to be lacking.’ The addressed can hear between the lines the accuser divulging an inner worry. Why indeed would the drive behind the accusation originate from the addressed? The energy of the statement tells more about the accuser. Another version of the frame reads: ‘I am afraid (that) you are indifferent.’ In this case the drive could be self-esteem and the need of affirmation.

After allowing such translation of a statement and the extension with its opposite, the statement suddenly obtains affective significance, with explanatory value for the communicators, while the aggressive energy of the simplex recedes. The point of de-simplication is not to launch another simplex, which would be to arrogate that this person means the opposite of what he or she is saying, and like Sigmund Freud that we have discovered the actual meaning with the inverted term. The goal of de-simplication is to reconstruct the frames in a tensor, to get an overview of the field of meanings and their combinations. The combinations of the four terms into sentences are equally relevant, including the initial accusation of paranoia. What they point to together is a sphere of exchange where frames of reference meet. The analyst wants to capture the mood, the mysterious interstitial sphere originating between speakers. Therein frame analysis differs from discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis in particular, which following Foucault identify the institutionalized patterns of knowledge and power relations in language use.¹⁷ For the frame analyst, power is not a given but one particular frame next to possible others in a conversation, and a very coarse one at that. Much ethnographic analysis is invested in figuring out the culturally specific details of frames in communication.

‘Power’ often turns out a simplex explanation of communication. In rural communities where women kneel to greet male and female elders, like the Sukuma villages that have hosted me, it is hard for a European observer to not primarily see gradations of strength and weakness at work in interactions. Or to consider another case, I was surprised to note the readiness of anyone in the village during the morning greeting to communicate about a possible affliction, also its mental component. Was this not an unnecessary show of trouble? The frame of experience I had to learn about was illustrated among others in their Bantu language of KiSukuma, wherein to ‘have’ an illness is literally ‘to be with’ it (-li na). Alternatively, the patient is hurting (nalisaata). Serious illness in this community is not a quality defining the person at any moment. It is mostly an opportunity to undergo medicinal initiation, on the ancestor’s invitation. We note the difference between cultural frames.

The European tradition of defining mental illness has Christian roots. These roots should be further qualified, as sociologists know from the classic studies of Durkheim on suicide and Weber on capitalism. In the Catholic tradition, humans are weak, but will be absolved of the sinful behavior emanating from weakness, after confession. Someone having a mental illness has been dealt a bad hand by God. In the Lutheran tradition, a weakness cannot be absolved. The individual carries the responsibility of deeds. That does not apply to inborn disease (although in the Calvinist branch quite significantly a handicap can be a sign of God’s missing grace, precluding salvation). The old religious roots of a cultural system persevere in socialization. A society with Lutheran tradition will be more sensitive to the risk of stigma, given the assumed individual responsibility. In a mixed marriage, friction is possible between frames in that the Lutheran concerned over aberration because of self-image is unable to see the Catholic opportunity for absolution, and vice versa.

Frame rather than truth is what therapists reconstruct with their clients engaged in self-reflection. That is what the wise seek in order to snap out of a cycle of accusations.¹⁸ In one such case of a vicious circle, the younger generation blames the older about deeds in the past: ‘Our generation would not colonize, which yours did!’ Are the younger so sure of not committing the mistake of exploitation in another domain, with no less mixed intentions and damage? Frame-analysis raises reflexivity in order to curb enthusiasm about identifying ‘the’ cause, an ‘evil’ person or ‘witch’. As a Sukuma bartender retorted after I asked him about human remains for witchcraft found in a cave close to his village: “Aren’t we all witches?” His words instantly altered the mood because opened up an experiential frame on everybody’s search for magic, for a lucky break in life. Nobody in the bar talked anymore about indications of a wicked individual participating in a secret sabbath.

Already in his first fieldwork of the 1930s in Melanesia, Bateson intuited the importance of intersubjective frames, locally described as enveloping ‘clouds’. Iatmul communities speak of a disheartening cloud (ngglambi) surrounding the house of a bewitched person.¹⁹ A trained eye would be able to discern the cloud.²⁰ Carrying the mood of the witch, the cloud also determines the mood of the bewitched. The cloud acknowledges the frame of accusation and conflict through which both sides communicate. The Iatmul depiction of conflict refrains from lapsing into the simplex of one signal, one message, the binary illusion of good and evil, of who is right or wrong. An important task for anthropologists working in communities other than their own is to accept the multiplicity of contexts.

In the earlier example of a person accusing the other of paranoia, the simplex covered up affect. Besides fear, the frame contained feelings of distrust or lack of attention. In Bateson’s example, the various inversions of terms in ‘You treat me like a kid’ (namely ‘I treat you like a kid’, ‘I treat you like a father’ and ‘You treat me like a father’) could have brought the quarrelers in the train to extend their definition of the situation, reconsider the other’s intention, and enter a sphere to exchange educational frames.

The person addressed as paranoid may not have chosen to be involved in the communication, but cannot avoid to be part of the frame of reference. Such is the wisdom of the ngglambi cloud, and I might add as an Africanist, of practices of divination and ritual treatment that harness the frames of reference shared by interlocutors, as we will discover in Part II. The frame of what interlocutors experience broadens the focus, away from the myopic issue of individual responsibility and causality. From the point of view of the insulted individual, this may seem unfair. For the collective, however, care to continue communication is the condition for survival of the community. In a multiplex society, the frame in the sphere of divination relates to peace, a source of production.

Frame, sphere, source: two and three dimensions create a universe of possibilities, unlike the single-layered message. The frame breaks with the illusory dichotomy transmitted by the simplex stirring direct reaction. One might disparage my procedure for offering only one or two more dimensions (each moreover relying on binary terms). I argue that the mere addition of one frame, however embryonic, opens up a range of affects in the meeting of interlocutors.

A similar exercise can be done for technologies excluding human mediation. The clickbait on every screen communicating ‘This is needed’ is diagonally distributed to become a frame of experience in a sphere including the possibilities ‘Something else is needed’ and ‘This is not needed’. Seeing the frame amidst other possibilities might not stop you from buying the adverted item, but at least makes you think for a minute and contextualize the message (place it in a sphere) before you react to it. Autopilot and military drone, as detailed in “Chapter Three: Losing the Feel for the Craft”, materialize the message ‘technology is reliable’. The frame has as implicit layer ‘humans are a contingency’. They engender a tensor with the equally valid frames ‘humans are reliable’ and ‘technology is a contingency’ (see Fig. 3). This variation on frames in a certain sphere of technology has inspired classics of science-fiction and their semantic field.

Fig. 3

Simplex and tensor of science

Positivists adhere to the simplex ‘Science saves.’ The unspoken layer of the frame makes the concomitant claim that ‘Nature kills’, as in anxiety about wilderness, the wild state before humanity and ‘civilization’. The sphere of exchange adds the inversions ‘Science kills’ and ‘Nature saves’ which can be heard among anti-conformists. The frames keep the scientific obsession with fact versus fiction at bay by considering the inversions. The sphere raises the possibility that science kills, for instance at the collective scale if medication prevents nature from increasing group immunity. Further possible evidence for ‘science kills’ is that only the wealthier countries have the top scientists, and the rich have all medications at their disposal. The natural threats to our health are nationalized. Big Pharma capitalizes on the threats. Ecologists do suggest that (a return to) nature will save humanity. All these are the layers, or meanings of frames, conflated in the initial simplex ‘Science saves’. The phrase retains a conflated, dense energy raising suspicion and defensive reaction. The social analysis linking specific events in a network called Big Pharma implies a cultural analysis of the unsaid possibilities. A simplex is a condensed energy, event and meaning that carries the seeds of its de-simplication.

Animism: Frame Retrieval and the Species

One word, disdainfully reducing complexity, can suffice to establish a division in the world. What does it mean when someone says: ‘They are animists’? We have to be cautious about reading intentions in words. Use, which is a matter of frame, comes first. Some say ‘animist’ as a euphemism for ‘primitive’. Others mean by animism a universal religion teaching respect for all animate beings. Still, the connotation surfaces of ‘nature people’ lacking culture like ‘the civilized’. But was that the first thought that came to mind, this section asks, during the archetypical scene of a Spanish settler’s first contact at the shores of the mighty river Amazon in the age of ‘discovery’?

A term such as ‘primitive’, etymologically signifying ‘first of its kind’ and referring to preliterate cultures, may be well-intended. It went into disuse in academia after negative connotations. Colonizers projected lower and higher stages of social evolution on populations. ‘Primitives!’ can be heard nowadays to marginalize people. It has sedimented as a simplex. A term such as animism, however, which has been employed by some to stereotype societies as backward, still has a future on the condition that attention shifts to the meanings it frames. For academia to abandon this term as well would be to back down on de-simplication in the face of a simplex. Instead of lexical retreat, this chapter proposes conceptual activism. We look for what local spheres, distinct ‘cultures’, are telling about each other, which is to accept the existence of a human species all eventually belong to.

A simplex appears unrelated to anything else because it conceals the terms related to. Once we retrieve the relations, our intuition is restored and we can consciously steer the dynamic. An exemplary retrieval, although not propagated as such at its publication, we encounter in the work of a student of Lévi-Strauss. Philippe Descola studied animism among Achuar Amerindians.²¹ He was well aware that contemporary scholars avoided the concept due to the colonial association with primitiveness, and the binarity of nature versus culture. To describe someone as ‘animist’ sounded like an insult. Yet, does this mean the belief system which the word refers to has stopped existing? Would substituting another term for animism, in a bid for decolonial purity, make a difference in our way of thinking about the belief system? It is rather our way of thinking that requires critical examination. In other words, a structuralist analysis is in order about the binarity nature/culture.

The animism Descola described gains clarity for the reader as he manages to evince his own frame and its specific relation to animism. His frame of experience belongs to a cultural system, Western cosmology. Denoting his frame as naturalism, Descola concludes on a relation of inversion. The scientist is a naturalist, for whom there exist as many minds as there are individuals. What unites the many minds is the bodily organism taught about in biology classes. In contrast, the animist assumes one mind to pervade the many bodies. At a time when Spanish Jesuits in the seventeenth century contemplated the moral status of primitive minds, Amerindians tested the putrefaction of white bodies by dipping the corpses in the river.²² Many minds and one body for the naturalist; many bodies and one mind for the animist. Can the two frames of experience meet? For the structuralist they can, and intrinsically do.

Descola’s structuralist analysis overcomes the simplex by detecting the tensor that explains the tension between the two cosmologies. Through the opposition with naturalism, ‘animism’ gets rid of simplexity. The tool to de-simplicate (from simplex to frame) I named a tensor, from the Latin verb for stretching. The tensor sums up the simplication, namely the way it stretches semantic space. It exposes the tension between frames, more exactly how their meanings relate in a certain sphere, as schematized in Fig. 4. As opposed to public discourse treating animism as a concept complete in itself, independent from the naturalism of scientists, the tensor reveals the salient dimensions, in this case mind/body and many/one.

Fig. 4

Simplex and tensor of animism

The structuralist derives two remaining combinations beside animism and naturalism, which Descola names analogism (many bodies/many minds) and totemism (one body/one mind). He by the way finds analogism in China and the Renaissance; totemism in Aboriginal Australia. Structuralist divisions are holistic for their dual logic analytically covering all possibilities (here: states the world can be in, beginning with the duality of animists/non-animists). True, a specific phenomenon described in context will always be richer in meaning than such analytical retrieval, but no matter how richly the social analysis describes the context, the intrinsic relation between animism and naturalism will remain unseen. Structuralism, a cultural analysis, permits the ethnographer to interpret phenomena holistically through layers that relate seemingly independent phenomena. It approximates the holism of an actor sensing cultural affinity with meanings from a different cultural system.

Figure 4 schematizes the operation to retrieve two dimensions in a field of frames. The intersecting lines capture in a relative way what in absolute terms is labeled animism. The thick line ‘one—mind’ of the intersection refers to the experiential frame of Achuar animism. The thin line ‘many—bodies’ evinces the unspoken side of that cosmology. Another combination of the terms is the West’s naturalism expressed in the thick dashed line connecting ‘one’ and ‘body’. The thin dashed line between many and minds points to a second aspect of naturalism (which may feature less in public discourse).

To sum up, de-simplication uncovers layers of meaning wherein the frames collapsed to survive as a simplex. There may be more than two, but extracting an additional semantic layer from the one explicitly expressed in the message is considerable progress in the way of de-simplicating. We found a common sphere of exchange and shed light on the frames of reference covered up by the simplex. Going beyond a social analysis identifying the injustice suffered by Achuar Amerindians, the cultural analysis brought home their animist perspective as equivalent to anyone else’s.

Instead of this semantic analysis, why not simply forbid use of the simplex word? Giving up ‘animism’ would be to emulate the mistake of the white settler. As the figure below suggests, the settler may have been engaged in an act of covering up, quite strategic like the invention of the racialized category of ‘blacks’. My point, and in this I challenge a postmodern consensus, is that the two cosmologies (two frames from different cultural systems) do not lead distinct, incommensurable lives. As far as an ethnographer can tell, the Achuar have their ‘local reality’ with its own flow of information. It is culturally different, but why should it derive from a separate source of production? In Fig. 5, X represents the animist source and Y the naturalist source, besides incalculably more sources of production in the world. I object that humans do perceive common humanity and contemplate the one source of production. Members of the species have varied experiences but all depend on the same principle, life. Therefore, different concepts of life end up in the same table and partake of the one meaning system.

Fig. 5

The illusion of separate sources producing reality

The white observer of the corpse hanging in the Amazon river was ambiguously horrified by the affinity he sensed with the animist test, which was morally equal to his interest (inversely as a naturalist) in the workings of the ‘savage mind’.²³ He had inadvertently entered a common sphere by embracing the other perspective. He could only recover his poise through a reassuring simplex about ‘primitive tribes’ in the Amazon exhibiting the cruelty that ‘civilized’ minds are incapable of. The extent to which he could fool himself is unknown, but cynically his civilized gasp sounded amidst the invasion of his compatriots decimating Amerindians.

Why did the Spanish settler not take the chance of interviewing the Amerindian about the strange test performed with a corpse? The observer’s discomfort about the animist test indicates that he momentarily treated naturalism and animism as equivalent cosmologies. He shifted frames for the species (while having no empirical reasons to reject the animist possibility of all beings participating in the same mind). What then arrested him at the brink of entering a common sphere of exchange and possibly sharing a frame of experience? The answer is his cultural system that framed the Amerindian. The fixed frame facilitates the processing of radical difference. There in Brazil the simplex prefigured simplications at the start of the greater process of globalization. In contrast, a speciated history invites open attitude and experiment to figure each other out, and possibly raises awareness of uncertainty, the impossibility to know anyone for sure. Instead, the settlers went for the other’s outright exclusion, based on the frame of certainty that their imperial sphere depended on. “Chapter Four: The Human Experiment” pins down the nightmare the exclusion turned into.

Frameshift, Identity and Emotion

‘Are you assuming my gender?’ Miles asks on an internet forum. He was greeted as ‘mister’. She/he/they/x confront us with the simplex that divides everyone into man and woman. A string of hate speech ensues in response. Miles wants to make people aware about the gender category. In our words, the category is a simplification momentarily concealing its simplification. We called this a simplication. It might turn simplex. The responders reprove Miles’s assumption that their use of gendered terms intentionally attributes identity. Miles too has been simplifying their messages in denial of the simplification. How? By omitting to mention the most probable hypothesis that their use of ‘mister’ was out of accepted habit, by default and in the absence of counterindications. Miles made a point by questioning the habit. By lack of frameshift, one simplex was met with another.

The emotion, the mutual irritation, is significant. By introducing the gender issue, Miles seeks to distend the frame of the other participants in the sphere. Had they been merely invited to shift frame, they would probably not have been irritated. Now the other members have to either learn from Miles (distend their frame) or reject the latter’s membership of the sphere. The hate speech is an indication of the second. Outcasts proliferate as spheres contract.

Generation Z reports about the affective energy unleashed by the war of words on the social media. Besides ease of use and reductionism, simplication through categories of gender or identity serves an affective cause. Miles’s emotional recognition and moral disapproval contaminate.²⁴ Was the polarizing group dynamics it stirred intended? Simplexes are feelings on the loose, energies uprooted from a dynamic of (inter-)mediation. Frameshift can defuse the tension.

In an optimistic interpretation, the serial reproaches on social media illustrate the growing sensitivity of the internet generation to simplication and to the related disregard for singularity and difference, in casu of sexual and cultural identities.²⁵ As diversity in identity is delivered in simplex packages to bombard others with, radical difference less than ever has the chance of protruding. Users of social media learn to detect, and cope with, persuasion. Most have personally experienced the risks of avatar anonymity, trolls, catfishing, fake news and hoaxes. Disenfranchised groups prove to be aware of the manipulation of events and reports by the ruling establishment in view of the status quo. Wokeness becomes a simplex, abused by defenders of free speech to avoid mediation with those they disagree with.²⁶ The collateral damage of the success of a concept in mobilizing internet users is that the concept soon undergoes ‘memefication’. The underlying link with social reform vanishes—is simplicated away—as antiracism is trivialized in humorous memes (which have become the social media’s most common application of meme, a copied cultural element). Not coincidentally, what works best apparently is a kind of speech that pretends to be frameless.

Offline contexts too unleash emotional energy encapsulated in a simplex, with social consequences. Overhearing the conversation between parent and teenager about school performance, a third party interjects that the teenager should not accept ‘the insult’ because ‘a parent should only motivate’. The teenager’s demotivated reaction lends extra weight to the interfering statement. The parent’s cultural background amplifies misgivings among witnesses, about an unfit attitude regarding school. The communicative exchange may escalate into an informative moment about the parent, after which school authorities intervene. Exchange of each other’s unspoken frames—richer communication—could have stopped the aggravation and displayed the humanity of difference.

The Rapprochement of ‘Russia’

Now that we learned about frameshifts and their capacity to bring home the human, we may begin to dream of a better world. Following up on the Zelensky–Johnson scene in this chapter’s opening paragraph, could we not derive from a recurring simplex the tensor leading us out of the frame of war?

Does Putin have a conscience? So-vest is the Russian word for the English ‘conscience’. Both words are translations of the Greek syneidesis, literally ‘with-knowledge’. Conscience is an inner knowing that accompanies the scire of science, which etymologically ‘cuts’ the outer world into facts. Do we have reason to believe that such a thing exists, an inner knowledge about what is right? Tyrants that kill for the greater cause of the nation may think to be doing right. Since their concept of the good differs very much from their ‘victims’, what is the point of speaking of conscience other than as a belief system, a culturally specific and personally determined set of ideas? Is Putin invading Ukraine to restore the Soviet empire not doing his duty? Are the mafiosi liquidating a shopkeeper unable to pay his dues not culturally right, and their omerta afterward a conscience at work? The question stems from postcolonial debate on the cultural relativity of moral precepts, which has long seemed an achievement of the decolonizing West: to each culture its truth. It means that specific cultures have the last word. Do they?

Of course not. Otherwise why would Putin forbid the words ‘war’ and ‘invasion’ in reports on Ukraine? He cannot rid himself of humanity and its ethical effect on frames. Conscience is meant to be situated at the enveloping human level. Humans, including dictators and narcissists, can shift frames and internalize the various cultural systems of the planet because everyone’s local spheres exist in parallel to humanity. The matter is to give it space, as did the Russian grandmother. Conscience has no significance without the psychic unity of humanity, a meaning system accessible by all. Populist leaders of world powers denying the existence of humanity resuscitate a localized order in its death throes.

Globalization means that because of the free movement of ideas, people, goods and money, a sphere exists which we are all members of. Socially (the network) and culturally (the meaning system) humans are living again the reality of one species. Until we take up the challenge of a globalized knowledge society, demanding cultural translation, the globe verges on post-knowledge, a simplex society dividing. The disunity starts with reducing the scope of unity to a limited sphere like the nation or the circle of likeminded. The partial conscience of a dictator thrives on that delimitation.

When the United Nations celebrated the International day of conscience in 2022, several groups in parks around Lisbon organized ‘a silence for peace’.²⁷ Any method to radiate inner peace, whether through meditation, yoga, mindfulness, prayer or other contemplative act was welcome. ‘Not against some or in favor of others, but for the good of all.’ Standing together in a circle. In silence. For an hour. What is it good for? How could a circle of silence change anything? The intention contrasts sharply with the discourse of journalists and politicians, on Europe’s naivety, on the need of more weapons and larger armies, and on defending truth in an alleged information war. Counter-facts against facts was the dominant narrative from the start. The escalation of framing within that sphere was inevitable: rockets against tanks, and then tanks ‘to discourage Putin’. The circles of peace in Lisbon appealed to consciousness beyond frames and cultures or any specific, supposedly common values. Making room for silence is spiritual by planting a seed and generating unforeseen possibilities, hence breaking out of the cycle of counteracting.

Some participants may have believed in a material, energetic flow arising from the circle and actually changing the situation in Ukraine.²⁸ The least we can say is that the circle refers those hearing about it, or witnessing it, to the frames people can be stuck in. Nobody is condemned to a particular view. By embracing all views and seeing them converge in human consciousness, we take destiny in our hands. Not a particular someone’s destiny but destiny as such, the whole known as life, seemed to be embraced in that spiritual feeling of meaning. On the ‘International day of conscience’ the circles planted peace for all without polarizing with those wanting war.

The frame of war is contagious. Putin would be losing the information war because of the cunning of the director of national intelligence Avril Haines.²⁹ From those words we might as well conclude that despite decades of educational and parliamentary investment in peacekeeping and pacifist solutions the US and Europe have fallen into the old trap. They are playing Putin’s game. The current war is justified by pretending it to be a game with rules, resulting in a winner and a loser, whereby the humiliated party would never opt for the nuclear military option. Because that is not in the script? As governments enter into the sphere of war, the frame of the game gets stretched, as it did before from an annexation of the Crim to the invasion of a country. Recently we hear about ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, low-yield nukes. They will not take us out of the frame of war.

Once the invader has been defeated through military means, who will be victorious: Ukraine or Europe or the democratic West? No, the frame of war. Reminding us of there being a frame though, and thus allowing to question it, will contribute to peace. Which frameshift is needed?³⁰

As Russian soldiers upon meeting local resistance might suddenly come to their senses and stop the bloodshed ten days after the invasion, Kirill the head of the Russian-Orthodox Church was quick to hold a sermon justifying the war: humanity has to be saved from sin. Kirill saw a yet grander cause than restoring the Russian empire, which meant preventing Ukraine from becoming a NATO member and official ally of the West. A clash was going on between a god-fearing civilization and a godless one. Ukraine was about to enter the club of countries organizing ‘Gay Prides’. Russia’s neighbor wanted to be part of ‘the West’. Human rights, including the right to be gay, are considered a cultural imposition by the West, whose norms and values defy God and the truth.

The self-criticism that Euro-American scholars are brought up in since Enlightenment is an attitude, but crucially the frame of experience can be encountered in other cultures as well. The belief in universal rights and diversity is an outcome of that frame. Support of traditions in function of the group’s cohesion might be an outcome too at some point. What ruins the dialectic between applications of a frame and thus goes against the enlightened attitude is the idea that universal rights and diversity are the West’s cultural heritage. That rigidifies a frame. Reduction of a frame to one outcome is a culturalist error, feeding the illusion of cultures in conflict. The illusion has unfortunately appealed on both sides of the fence. Ukraine’s belief in democracy would be a choice pro the West, according to the Russian regime, which would be a choice against Russia. ‘Wanting to be part of the West’ is unfortunately an expression about Ukraine used also by Western commentators such as Friedman in the New York Times.³¹ It is a simplex equating a culture (a set of outcomes) with a people (persons who can shift frames). Putin’s delusional tale about Ukraine’s denazification to start a war killing civilians rests on the simplex treating countries as actors. He is helped by Europe’s sanctions against Russia no less equating a regime with a country. The simplex fuels antagonism with self-fulfilling effect. Sanctions ruining a country’s economy in order to squeeze the population into unrest that will supposedly topple the regime are not only immoral, because of the suffering inflicted on innocent people. The measures are naïve, because they assume the regime to care about the population or respond to its needs. The regime would adopt the democratic logic of giving in to the wish of the majority suffering. The sanctions are counterproductive. They play into the hands of the regime by delivering exactly what Putin sought. He has recovered legitimacy by being externally attacked in union with the people, who are objectively on the side again of the leadership. The simplex glossing over the distinction between country and regime fed the mistake. Because of the equation, Russians in search of identity will reject liberal ideas that had already germinated. Discussion in the aula, salon, bar or in a cabin out in the woods at the Finno-Russian border, would have vacillated between on the one hand human rights for sustainable globalization and on the other hand non-liberal ideology ‘wised up’ after communism’s failed experiment in breaching old traditions. A Russian and European sitting around the fire can share frames despite their ‘cultures’. It is in this dynamic, and not in ideology or debate, that peace can take root. Post-knowledge ruins frameshift.

The tensor in Fig. 6 tentatively dissects the simplex ‘democracy opposes authoritarianism’. The columns state in support of the Western frame that granting (human) rights to individuals sustains a peaceful collective. Recombining the meanings diagonally results in the opposite view that individuals will lead a happy, sustainable life if they support the collective by respecting its rights, namely tradition and authority. Note how interlocked the two frames, liberal versus non-liberal, are by stimulating opposite goals: the more the first insists on individual rights, the stronger the second senses the threat to the collective. Could insight in this tensor, a mutually reinforcing dynamic between frames, not pause the escalation?

Fig. 6

Simplex and tensor of liberal/non-liberal democracy

Russia’s future rapprochement with the West, however unthinkable today, will revitalize a cultural exploration which just after the fall of the iron curtain was stopped in its tracks as Europe hesitated to unite in one way or another with the big Russian bear. Identity politics since the 1990s widened the gap between the liberal and non-liberal concepts of democracy in west and east respectively. How could Russia and Europe enrich themselves again with the other’s difference? By not discussing ideologies but by recognizing the frames underlying them. The non-liberal community of Russians seeking truth in a Biblical original equilibrium would be shocked to realize the plausibility of the political experiment done in the West since Enlightenment, which is a dialectic organizing the free exchange of inspiration about the frames of subjective experience. The experiment is spiritual unlike what Kirill stands for, prohibiting the self-critical process. Governments of nations that are too big to be naturally cohesive like China and Russia fear the process and therefore filter the Internet. They keep up the illusion of culturalism. Frames should not meet. The nation equals a culture and the regime represents it—one frame for all.