Steps Around a Theory of Action: Notes on Seven Bateson Conferences

I’m really happy to see the online publication of a joint piece that I’ve been collaborating on with the ‘archive team’ (myself, Dulmini Perera, Simon Sadler and Ben Sweeting) from our ‘Enacting Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design’ AHRC-DFG funded research project (which also includes Joanna Boehnert and Marie Davidova). This piece was conceived and led by Dulmini, who also worked with Leonie Link, Florian Tudzierez, and later Paola Ferrari and Stefanie Huthoefer on the associated interactive graphic component. See: https://www.enactingecologicalaesthetics.com/batesons-cosmos/

The piece draws upon previously unpublished archival material around a series of conferences that Gregoray Bateson was involved in through the late 60s and early 70s and provides a series of framings which help to make this period of Bateson’s thinking available to us today, as we continue to confront the practical and political questions around the possible forms (social, political, spatial) of human adaptation within a context of multi-scalar ecological complexity.

Dulmini gives an introductory text to the project. I contribute short texts concerning two conferences, the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Congress, and the 1968 Conscious Purpose and Human Adaptation. There then follows a series of brilliant short texts by Ben Sweeting, Dulmini Perera and Simon Sadler.