All the recent brouhaha about the flock of drones besieging New
Jersey, and more generally the east coast, produces some real winners. It is an
alien mother ship sending out scouting vessels. It is a foreign power whose
mother ship is just off the Atlantic coast. It is a cabal of our own government
and technology companies preparing us for a complete take over. It is . . . . Fill
in your own blank to give it meaning beyond the probable truth, that some
jokers in Jersey and other places on the coast are whooping it up over the
trick they’ve pulled off.
Those “explanations” of the phenomenon are much like the
“explanations” that come from all the tin-foil hat conspiracy theories. The commonplace,
the everyday, the ordinary, the events that deserve no explanation because they
are simply random accidents in the flux of experience—all of them become grist
for the mill. Pennsylvania law does not allow counting of mail-in ballots
before the polls close on election day—therefore the surge of votes that comes
late on the day after election day must be an attempt to steal the vote. Area
51 is top secret because it’s where the armed forces develop their most
advanced weapons system—but obviously the secrecy means that there are captured
spaceships from alien cultures that are being reverse-engineered to produce
those weapons system. Photographic evidence for Big Foot, for Nessie, for
Chupacabras, for . . . is available and denying it is obviously the government
denying truth. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut might say.
The phenomenon reminds me of a chapter, “Serpents and Skulls,”
number 3.1.2 in Italo Calvino’s complex arrangement of experience in his Mr.
Palomar, a book—novel? collection of stories? meditations?—that should be
read repeatedly by every human. The numbers indicate that the chapter is
meditative (3), but about sensory experience (1) in a social context (2).
Because Calvino
invites it, I’ll be using terminology from Ferdinand de Saussure’s great
invention of structural linguistics, and so I want to define four of the terms
that Saussure deploys. The first is “signifier,” by which he means any
sensory experience, whether aural, visual, or tactile. Saussure says that
signifiers bind to “signifieds,” by which he means some conventional
concept that denotes the sensory experience. So, he says, a visual image such
as this

is bound to the concept “dog,” and we can speak of dogs without
having recourse to the visual image and conversely when we hear or read “dog” we have
the visual, olfactory, tactile, auditory experiences that the concept entails. The bound duality,
sensory experience/concept, says Saussure, is a “sign.” Finally,
Saussure posits that the meaning of signs depends entirely on the system of
signification within which the sign appears. What that means is that the
meaning of any sign is conditional on the system within which it appears. It
doesn’t mean that the binding of the sensory experience to the concept is
variable. The sign remains the same regardless of the system in which it
appears. Rather the meaning of the sign is absolutely variable. So, for
instance, in English a good buddy can be your “dog,” and no insult is
understood. But in French, to call that same buddy a “chien,” the French
word that denotes the sign, a dog, is definitely an insult. The meaning of the
sign depends on the system in which it appears. So in what follows expect
signifier, signified, sign, and system of signification.
“Serpents and Skulls” begins as Mr. Palomar visits a Toltec
temple located in Mexico. He is guided by a learned friend through the
collection of sculpted reliefs, sculpted columns, and chac-mools—free-standing
statues—that constitute the decorations, if that is what they are, of the
structure. They are the signifiers that Mr. Palomar and his friend encounter.
The signifiers in the reliefs express a language that has been completely lost
in the passage of time since the Toltecs disappeared. In effect, then, the
signifiers are unattached to any signified. There is, therefore, no concept to
which the signifier can be bound, and without the system of signification that
is Toltec language and culture, there is no way that the meaning of the images
can be deciphered. Nonetheless Palomar’s friend, “an impassioned and eloquent
expert on pre-Columbian civilizations,” expresses what the images must be and
what they mean.
The language that the learned friend uses indicates whence
the explanations derive. He tells Mr. Palomar that the temple they’re visiting
is “a step pyramid.” He notes that at the top of the temple stand four “caryatids,”
and that those figures are known as “Atlases.” The narrative voice—one of the
glories of Mr. Palomar, points out that “All this has to be taken of
faith,” but the friend’s methodology is obvious: each Toltec visual experience
becomes meaningful only as it is subsumed in a European category. Europe
becomes the system of signification that the friend applies even though the
linguistic and cultural vacuum in which those signifiers now exists makes the cognitive
content as well as the meaning of each image entirely undetermined and
undeterminable.
The problem is infinitely complex because, says the
narrator, “In Mexican archeology every statue, every object, every detail of a
bas-relief stands for something that stands for something else that stands, in
turn, for yet another something.” From the perspective of the modern human, all
of those visual experiences amount to nothing more than a series of accidental
collocations of signifiers without any signified in sight. In practice, making one
of the chac-mools a sign, i. e. binding the signifier to a specific
signified is akin to seeing a tree, giving it a scientific name and then giving
the sign a specific meaning by putting that scientific name into the pattern of
Darwinian evolution. Or it’s like seeing a tree and saying that it denotes the
nymph Dryope and then giving Dryope a specific meaning by placing her within
the full the system of the Greek pantheon.
Mr. Palomar’s friend, then, does exactly what the tin-foil-hat
conspiracy theorist do. He binds the signifiers, the visual experience, to a
more or less arbitrary signified and then puts the thus newly created signs
into a system that produces meaning.
While Mr. Palomar and his friend are wandering through the
Toltec temple, another voice impinges on their awareness. The voice belongs to
a schoolteacher who is taking his students, “stocky boys with the features of the
Indios, descendants perhaps of the builders of these temples,” through the
temple. As Mr. Palomar’s friend descants on the meaning of the visual
experiences that surround them, the teacher points to the image and says, “Esto
es un chac-mool. No se sabe lo que quiere decir.” Like the narrator, I’ll
provide the translation from the Spanish, knowing full well that to translate
is to assign meaning when, perhaps, meaning is undeterminable: “”This is a chac-mool.
We don’t know what it means.” In Saussurean terms, the teacher says, “This is a
signifier. It is bound to no signified. Meaning cannot be determined.”
Of course Mr. Palomar “is fascinated by his friend’s wealth
of mythological references: the play of interpretation and allegorical reading
has always seemed to him a supreme exercise of the mind.” The attribution of
alien secrets to Area 51 indubitably fascinates. But at the same time, as he
listens to the schoolteacher repeatedly assert, “No se sabe lo que quiere decir,”
Mr. Palomar also thinks that “The refusal to comprehend more than what the
stones show us is perhaps the only way to evince respect for their secret;
trying to guess is a presumption, a betrayal of that true, lost meaning.”
As they pass by the most spectacular frieze in the temple, the
teacher states what they are seeing—“This is the Wall of the Serpents. Each serpent
has a skull in its mouth.” And then restates his conclusion, this time
presented only in English—or in Italian in Calvino’s original: “We don’t know
what they mean.”
Mr. Palomar’s friend blows up at this point, asserting that
the frieze denotes “the continuity of life and death; the serpents are life,
the skulls are death. Life is life because it bears death with it, and death is
death because there is no life without death.” The friend’s statement is an
exact representation of Saussure’s linguistics. The signifier, skull or
serpent, is bound to a signified life and death, and the sign thus created is
given meaning in a system of signification that expresses a not particularly
unusual philosophical point of view.
Mr. Palomar meditates on his friend’s excursus into meaning.
“He asks himself,” says the narrator, “What did death, life, continuity, passage
mean for the ancient Toltecs? And what can they mean today for these boys? And
for me?” In effect Mr. Palomar is granting the possibility that the visual
experience, the signifiers that they’re all observing, is indeed bound to the
signifieds that his friend asserts. Let’s assume that the friend’s association
of signifier with a given signified is correct, that we now have signs—serpent/life,
skull/death, and so on. But then, wonders Mr. Palomar, what do those signs mean
in the system of signification in which the world came to have meaning for the
Toltecs?
Here the insufficiency of translation, even from one known
system, Spanish, to another known system, English (or Italian) seems to me a
faint analogue to what Mr. Palomar contemplates. Yes, “No se sabe lo que
quiere decir” means “We don’t know what it means.” But literally the
signifiers of the Spanish expressly say, “We don’t know what it wishes to say.”
In a more expansive sense, what exactly is it that the world of sensory
experiences, the sensorium, wishes to say to us? Can we simply assume that the
meaning we “discover,” or rather attribute to the sensorium is what it “wishes
to say”?
The chapter ends with the supremely human touch that
characterizes Mr. Palomar in every single chapter. As the narrator tells us,
Mr. Palomar “yet . . . knows he could never suppress in himself the need to
translate, to move from one language to another, from concrete figures to
abstract words, to weave and reweave a network of analogies. Not to interpret
is impossible, as refraining from thinking is impossible.” We simply cannot
tolerate the absence of meaning. Inevitably, it seems, we humans provide a a
system of signification to every signifier/signified, every sign, every sensory
experience, even when there is no possible system within which we can put those
signifiers.
Conspiracy theorists are just as human as is Mr. Palomar,
his friend, and all the rest of us. Having no coherent system in which to put
Area 51 or the post-election-day batch of votes from Pennsylvania or the shadow
on the surface of the loch that surely must be Nessie—lacking a full context
for the sensory experiences that they encounter, they create a system of
signification out of whole cloth. Belief in the meaning thus produced is
essential to avoid the vacuum of sense. The stronger the belief, the more solid
and powerful the meaning. As Neil Gaiman says in American Gods, it’s not
so much that Zeus doesn’t exist, but rather than no one believes in him any
more.