Reading Castaneda (Routledge Revivals)

A Prologue to the Social Sciences

David Silverman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317816799
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Carlos Castaneda's accounts of his meeting with the Yaqui Indian magician Don Juan are well known to sociologists both in Britain and in America. Using material largely from Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan, David Silverman here seeks to introduce the student of Sociology to some of the central epistemological concerns of social science. First published in 1975, the title assumes no previous knowledge of Castaneda but instead uses his work as a springboard to wider issues, in particular making sense of our reality and understanding each other by using language and communication. This is an interesting reissue, which will be of particular value to students of the sociology of language and communication, as well as Communication Studies more generally.

1

Reading Castaneda

For the sake of the argument that I want to advance, let us say that there are two kinds of introduction to a subject. The first emphasizes substance; it provides a kind of package tour of the major concepts and theories. The beginning student, it is hoped, will gain an overview of the subject as a whole, an overview that will allow him to understand more advanced courses, if he should choose, or will ‘fill him in’ sufficiently for him to relate the subject area to a more major interest.

The second emphasizes what it is to reason in the manner of the discipline and aims at the joint participation of writer and reader in negotiating the character of that reasoning.

As you may have gathered from the way in which I have worded these alternatives, I prefer the latter. Learning substance, as an end in itself, allocates an essentially passive role to the reader. It makes him the mere recipient of a cluster of facts, a kind of empty box into which information has to be pumped. Put bluntly (and unfairly to the rejected alternative), what matters in a first exposure to a subject is the encounter between reader and text – not learning exactly what X said and how it relates to Y’s opinions. What matters, fundamentally, is thinking together (where that ‘together’ need not relate to the physical presence of others but to the others that are always present with us in our language, in our history).

So The Teachings of Don Juan, as well as any self-proclaimed sociological material that you may come across, is, for our present purposes, less significant for its substance (as if words on a page could have substance!), than for what you make of it. By this I mean that you should not be afraid to take seriously your reaction to a book, a lecture or a film. It is your reaction and even should it elicit comments about being ill-informed, naive, or whatever, this cannot make it any less your own. However, as I will be arguing, our reactions (and the selves which they express) are never entirely personal. Our identities are expressions of our common humanity as that humanity is re-membered in particular communities at particular historical epochs. Indeed, the very language of our reactions cannot be private for it makes sense to others even though they have no way of reading our mind. So even as we voice a deeply personal opinion, we are giving expression to our membership within language, within community. Through and through, our selves are public.

To take a trivial example. When I come out of a cinema, I usually hear talk all around me which seems to relate to people’s reactions to the movie. Even though I don’t know the speakers or will ever meet them, I can immediately assign such a sense to comments like: ‘I didn’t like it because …’ or, ‘Well it didn’t get very good reviews but it was really funny (sad) (true to life) …’. Now, of course, context is always crucial for making sense of any activity. Imagine the comments I have given above being given in apparent reply to a question such as: ‘How are you feeling today?’ or, ‘How do you get on with Professor X?’; or someone emerging from a cinema and being overheard to say: ‘Very tasty – I must eat there again’!

Of course, if pushed, we could all make some sense out of these kinds of remarks in the course of a conversation. In making that sense, we would be imagining the kind of context in which such a remark would be sensible. Further, in hearing it as a remark rather than, say, an insult or a greeting, we would be exemplifying our ability to recognize an instance as simply an instance. To recognize that ‘something is happening’ rather than ‘nothing is happening’, is already to find ourselves deeply within language, within community. And this holds equally for our own speech and other activities as well as for our ability to make sense of the activities of others. So in locating contexts, understanding instances of particular kinds and in recognizing that ‘something is happening’, we display our membership of society, our public competences. Which is not to say we cannot think our own thoughts, think differently, but rather that own-ness, difference, is only possible within community.

When I ask you to take your reaction ‘seriously’, then, I do not simply mean that you should maintain it against all-comers. For this is simply stubbornness. To take one’s speech seriously can also mean to consider how its private character is available to you as a member of a public community. For instance, how your reaction to a movie could still be recognized by me as a possible intelligible reaction. As a reaction with which I might disagree but which, none the less, I might (but perhaps did not) have myself. As an utterance which allows me to formulate some sense of your intentions, your meaning, without my possessing any other way to get inside your head.

As I read Castaneda’s account of his initial conversations with don Juan, I sensed his incomprehension, even anger, at don Juan’s replies to his questions. Given the apparently opaque character of don Juan’s answers, it is an incomprehension with which any person reared on the Western way of knowledge can fully sympathize. But we need not just see the good sense of Castaneda’s reactions, nor, in the patronizing manner which it expresses, need we say of don Juan’s knowledge ‘how interesting’, ‘how quaint’, and then pass on. For this would be to fit a profoundly challenging way of knowledge into what we already take for granted; to render the unknown known, the incomprehensible comprehensible. Instead, we might consider the character of Castaneda’s incomprehension. We might use the ‘difficulty’ of don Juan’s answers as an occasion to interrogate our own system of rationality. An occasion to probe what we routinely take to be comprehensible, to be familiar.

For familiarity is usually only recognized by its absence. The experience of unfamiliar settings can make us recollect the taken form of granted familiarity of everyday situations, which, by comparison with what we now experience, seem on reflection, to be amazingly obvious and non-problematic. Now of course, the ‘unfamiliar’ is relative to persons’ recognition of situations. Engage in an activity repeatedly and its features become routine. Then you will hardly recognize that what is happening around you (and with your participation) is an activity and is that activity. The situation is, as it were, seen but unnoticed. Think, for instance, about your first day at school or at work and how quickly its unfamiliarity was lost from your attention. So, if one is concerned with what counts as knowledge within our community, we must seek for occasions which make unfamiliar that which we already know and hence have taken for granted. That is why don Juan’s way of knowledge, if addressed seriously, provides an occasion to interrogate our way of knowledge.

Castaneda’s confusion

Two-thirds of the way through the book, Castaneda reports a conversation with don Juan. He has just smoked a mixture of ingredients (don Juan’s ally – the ‘little smoke’) and, as usual, begins to describe his impressions:

‘I really felt I had lost my body, don Juan.’

‘You did.’

‘You mean, I really didn’t have a body?’

‘What do you think yourself?’

‘Well, I don’t know. All I can tell you is what I felt.’

‘That’s all there is in reality – what you felt.’

‘But how did you see me, don Juan? How did I appear to you?’

‘How I saw you does not matter …’

… ‘But I had my body, didn’t I, although I couldn’t feel it?’

‘No! Goddammit! You did not have a body like the body you have today!’

‘What happened to my body then?’

‘I thought you understood. The little smoke took your body.’

‘But where did it go?’

‘How in hell do you expect me to know that?’

It was useless to persist in trying to get a ‘rational’ explanation.

I told him I did not want to argue or to ask stupid questions, but if I accepted the idea that it was possible to lose my body I would lose all my rationality. (pp. 138–9)

How are we to understand Castaneda’s confusion? (1) Castaneda seems confused by the absence of any apparent way of establishing ‘what really happened’ when he smoked the ‘little smoke’. Notice how he uses the term ‘really’ in the first question of this exchange (‘You mean, I really didn’t have a body?’). He wants don Juan to tell him what really happened. Yet don Juan seems evasive and there seems to be no line of questioning which will elicit for Castaneda the ‘facts of the case’. (2) Don Juan keeps on insisting that Castaneda’s own experience is central (‘That’s all there is in reality – what you felt’) and that a second party’s observations are irrelevant – or, rather, that they make their own sense but cannot replace Castaneda’s experiences themselves. Yet in our everyday life we rely on others giving us their opinions when we think we might be mistaken. To be told ‘How I saw you does not matter’ seems to indicate that the speaker is being deliberately difficult. (3) Don Juan fails to concede to Castaneda that, in the midst of even considerable uncertainty, some things can always be relied upon. The world may seem strange sometimes but if you cannot count on remaining in your body, then strangeness becomes utter confusion (‘… if I accepted the idea that it was possible to lose my body I would lose all my rationality’). (4) One of the things upon which we count, even in strange situations, is that, perhaps only at some time in the future, we could locate an identifiable cause for a recognizable effect. Such causes will be acceptable if they seem to fit the ‘facts of the case’ and to be in accord with what everyone knows about time and place. Yet don Juan will not help Castaneda in defining the facts of the case, neither will he provide an acceptable cause for Castaneda’s peculiar experience. What can it mean to say ‘The little smoke took your body’, in terms of how either a scientist or the man-in-the-street takes account of the laws of nature? Utterly confused, Castaneda can only break off the conversation (‘It was useless to persist in trying to get a “rational” explanation’). Instead of aid, he has received only further troubles; instead of enlightenment, only deeper confusion.

Castaneda’s problem

Castaneda’s problems with understanding don Juan’s teachings relate to the kind of concerns that he brought with him. On the one hand, he wanted to write an acceptable anthropological study. On the other hand, he faced increasingly the practical problem of understanding and getting by that anyone experiences when encountering a new order of knowledge (the teachings of a brujo (or magician), sociology, baby-care). Perhaps the two concerns, academic and practical, ultimately merge for him as he tries to assent that he can make a sense out of don Juan’s teachings. For, if he cannot, he would class himself not only as a non-anthropologist but, more seriously, as a non-member, someone without the basic social competences involved in membership of some society. To accept this is to go out of one’s mind – to ‘lose all my rationality’. Yet, even given all the rewards of ‘knowledge’ (and the dangers of ignorance), Castaneda experiences great difficulty in making sense of don Juan’s order of knowledge:

To discover that order and to understand it proved to be a most difficult task for me. My inability to arrive at an understanding seems to have been traceable to the fact that, after four years of apprenticeship, I was still a beginner. (p. 19)

Let me formulate Castaneda’s problem in terms of a two-fold question. First, how do you find out? What methods work: trial and error, instruction, or what? Second, what do you find out? How things are related to one another? But what if ‘things’ are not as you had understood them and ‘relationships’ (e.g. between the little smoke and losing one’s body) seem nonsense? Towards the beginning of his conversations, Castaneda prods don Juan into revealing some of his teachings. Yet, in the ensuing attempt to discover his ‘spot’, Castaneda finds only bewilderment. He is only told that a spot is a place on the floor where he could sit without fatigue but he has no idea about how he should proceed to locate it, nor is he clear about what a ‘spot’ looks like. He learns further that a ‘spot’ is a place where a man feels naturally happy and strong and that don Juan is sitting on his own spot; but his attempts to find his ‘spot’ are greeted by protests from don Juan and, eventually, annoyance and accusations that he had not listened, perhaps because he did not really want to learn. When told that he has found his ‘spot’, Castaneda is no clearer about what he has really found, nor about how he found ‘it’:

It was not clear to me whether or not I had solved the problem, and, in fact I was not even convinced that there had been a problem; I could not avoid feeling that the whole experience was forced and arbitrary. (p. 36)

So Castaneda’s problem is more than just ‘how to do it’ – a problem with which we are routinely faced in everyday life and which we routinely resolve by learning and applying techniques. His problem, as he states it, is that it is by no means certain that he has a problem; yet another person insists that he has. Since he wants to learn that man’s knowledge, he must guess how to do ‘it’, without even knowing what ‘it’ is.

Now to be troubled but not to be sure what is troubling you and to suspect that it might be nothing at all, is not how we routinely experience the everyday world. To take his troubles seriously, as seems necessary to understand don Juan’s teachings, Castaneda must let go the certainties of his mundane existence. Yet, in doing so, he risks losing what he conceives to be ‘all his rationality’. He continually finds himself in situations where his only certainty is that somewhere there are unknown means to achieve undisclosed ends. For instance, some time after the ‘spot’ incident, Castaneda is using datura paste:

I rubbed my temples eleven times, without noticing any effect. I tried very carefully to take account of any change in perception or mood, for I did not even know what to anticipate. As a matter of fact, I could not conceive the nature of the experience, and kept on searching for clues. (p. 114)

Once again, he finds himself playing the self-evidently crazy game of searching for ‘clues’ when he has no idea of what he is looking for (‘… I did not even know what to anticipate … I could not conceive the nature of the experience’). To make matters worse, when Castaneda feels he is making some progress (to who knows where), he is frequently scolded by don Juan for not listening or seeing properly. For instance, after he has performed some operations with lizards who, don Juan assures him, will tell him anything that he could not find out for himself, he is reprimanded:

‘Next time you must listen carefully. I am sure the lizards told you many, many things but you were not listening.’ (p. 117)

It is perhaps instructive to compare Castaneda’s problem to the problems we encounter in trying to interpret the more opaque features of certain events. When we view what we take to be a ‘difficult’ film or play, we may come out asking: ‘What really happened?’ And we have a real problem – how to find out? But our problem is by no means as deep as Castaneda’s. For at least we know what we want to find out – the story, the fashionable opinion, the director’s intentions, etc. Our membership of society already makes available to us such areas of knowledge as reasonable ends of enquiry. By already knowing the character of reasonable enquiry for our society, we can safely pose questions and find answers that make sense. By gathering information, we use and sustain our way of knowledge. But what if the way to knowledge is itself the concern of our questions? If we seek, not fresh information, secure in the mode of understanding that allows us to generate and recognize it, but a fresh way of seeing?

Perhaps then we feel trapped in a vicious circle. For our understandings of another way of knowledge can only be from within our own way of knowledge. Our interrogation of the other way is already located within our way. To enter fully into that other way is not simply to learn new techniques or to gather more information. It is rather to adopt the model of reasonable enquiry which the way of knowledge provides. In seeking to understand how to do ‘it’, Castaneda must ask the kinds of questions which Yaqui knowledge allows to be asked of itself. In finding out what ‘it’ is, he must recognize that ‘it’ only arises through the adoption of what counts as a method of reasonable enquiry – which, in characterizing the world, constitutes the world (for the purposes of its investigation).

Now of course Castaneda could have offered an account of don Juan’s teachi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Reading Castaneda
• 2 Description
• 3 Method/Rule
• 4 Truth
• 5 Reading : the production of sense
• Bibliography