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From Three Farmers on Their Way To A Dance:



The paradox of the self-attacking observer is this century’s hallmark, reached simultaneously in countless disciplines. Psychologists now know there is no test so subtle that it won’t alter the tested behavior. Economic tracts suggest that Model A would be inviolably true if enough people realized its inviolability. Political polls create the outcome they predict. Even in the objective sciences, physicists, in describing the very small, have had to conclude that they can’t talk about a closed box, but that opening the box invariably disturbs the contents.

These are the recognizable bywords and cliches of our times. Casual talk abounds with the knowledge that there is no understanding a system without interfering with it. This much I knew well. What did not occur to me until the second time through the Ford biographies is that this position is itself tangled. Generalized, it attacks itself. "All observations are a product of their own times. Even this one."

This recursion is critical, not because it places a limit on knowing, but because it shows the impossibility of knowing where knowledge leaves off and involvement begins. If there is no independent vantage point, if the sitter’s life is not separable from the biographer’s interfering observation, then each of the sitter’s actions must similarly be tied to biographical impulse. The two are inextricably tangled. Describing and altering are two inseparable parts of the same process, fusing into a murky totality

Now the zoologist on expedition to Africa to study the great apes is not freed by this paradox of the observer to make up figures or indulge in poetic whimsy. The scientist is obliged, however, to acknowledge that the presence of a field team and film cameras tells the apes as much about human motives as it tells humans about apes’ behavior in the wild.

With every action, we write our own biographies. I make each decision not just for its own sake but also to suggest to myself and others just what choices a fellow like me is likely to make. And when I look back on all my past decisions and experiences, I constantly attempt to form them into some biographical whole, inventing for myself a theme and a continuity. The continuity I invent in turn influences my new decisions, and each new action rearranges the old continuity. Creating oneself and explaining oneself proceed side by side, inseparably. Temperament is the act of commenting on itself.