Hopefully I will have time to finish three new (or mostly new) papers for the final deliverable from our Bateson research project (https://www.enactingecologicalaesthetics.com), which will I think be a significant new collective contribution positioning some of Gregory Bateson’s thinking in relation to contemporary questions regarding the challenges facing ecological design, strategy and planning in an era of extreme socio-ecological uncertainty. The abstracts of my three papers:
Goodbun – Bateson Book Chapters
Gregory Bateson and the Political
This paper below has evolved out of an introductory paper of the same name, written for a dialogue panel led by the author with Phillip Gudemmi and Fred Turner, hosted by Systemic Design Association at the RSD11 conference in 2022, and which can be found online. The original paper was thus written before the start of the research project which this book is a product of. However, this paper provided a significant framing for some research questions that were taken on, including a repositioning of Gregory Bateson, not as the a-political figure that he is so often presented and received as, but instead, as someone rather more complex, who moved through a series of distinct situated practices which had significant political aspects.
I argue in this paper that there are two periods of quite significant political engagement, where Bateson directly reflected upon, and made real contributions to, significant strategic and meta-political (not a-political) questions (many of which contain significance for design and planning today). The approximate chronology I proposed defines a younger period from the mid thirties until the end of the war in 1945, and a second period which really gets going with his participation in the Dialectics of Liberation Congress in 1967, until his death in 1980.
Importantly, this paper also brought into focus as a new area of Bateson research, the significance of his reflection upon the ‘lack of a theory of action’ found in the widely overlooked and then out-of-print paper from what was considered to be his ‘failed’ 1969 Wenner Gren symposium on the ‘The Moral and Aesthetic Structure of Human Adaptation’. I use the framing of ‘-action’ to name the three distinct periods outlined above: Naive Action, Actionless-Action, and Wise Action.
In this revised and extended paper, I have expanded upon some of the key contributions of the paper noted above, and I have removed some sections – such as the cross reading with Felix Guattari’s work – which whilst relevant, are now dealt with in another chapter in this book.
The Two Orders of the Three Ecologies –
An Introduction to Gregory Bateson and the Double Binds of Design
In this paper I try to answer the question: Why should we read Bateson today? I give an overview of both Bateson’s own trajectory, and his influence upon many of the environmental humanities thinkers who are so important to us today. Noting that Bateson is both everywhere yet strangely absent, I suggest that it is perhaps his critical extensions and revisions to all three of the great intellectual patriarchs of western modernity: Marx, Darwin and Freud, which has made him both easy and difficult to consume. Building on arguments introduced in ‘GB and the Political’, I further unpack Bateson’s position by exploring what I call his ‘Three Ecologies’ period, in particular through a reading of his 1969 paper ‘Pathologies of Epistemology’, and the cosmology of ‘eco-mental systems’ which he proposes therein. I suggest that the call to action (!) to the therapist community that he concludes the paper with, was heard by at least one activist-therapist – Felix Guattari – and I spend some time in a close parallel reading of Bateson’s and Guattari’s three ecologies. I ask, with Bateson and Guattari, how ‘selves’ are produced transversally across three systemic ‘types’ or ‘scales’ – individual organisms, social organisations, and environmental worlds – and how these must all be understood in relation to a quite different ecological dualism that Bateson reveals, between the material-energetic and the informational-semiotic (hence ‘the two orders of the three ecologies’). I conclude with Bateson that some kind of ‘ecological therapy’ is needed (for both ecological disciplines, the ecosystems that are their subject matter, and anyone with goals to act in such contexts), and I wonder in passing if this might also be a way of reimagining what ‘design’ is? In closing, I suggest that ‘Surrealism,’ which historically positioned itself as a synthesis of Marx and Freud, might provide the basis for a new ecological project across the two orders of the three ecologies: an ecological surrealism, this time based in a Batesonian rather than Freudian unconscious.
The Ecological Aesthetics of Empathy and Alienation
‘So by ‘aesthetics’ I mean responsiveness to the pattern which connects. The pattern which connects is a meta-pattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that meta-pattern which defines the vast generalisation that indeed it is patterns which connect.’
Gregory Bateson
‘The senses become theoreticians in their immediate practice’
Karl Marx
Building upon my conclusions in ‘The Two Orders of the Three Ecologies’, in this paper I suggest that we can indeed define a Batesonian ‘ecological aesthetic’, but that this is not a style guide, or a design tool or anything like that. Rather, it takes as its basis a totemistic/animistic empathy or mimetic metaphor, as the core semiotic process of acting-perceiving organisms engaging with a world which is always their unconscious. As such, a Batesonian ecological aesthetic is also the basis of what we might call a Batesonian science – or a Batesonian re-imagining of the project of science.
For Bateson, the concept of empathy was key to the ethico-aesthetic practice of perceiving patterns that connect. This in turn was central to the possibility of learning how to act-with-wisdom within ecological and systemic complexity. It is not clear to what extent Bateson knew the etymology and history of the word ‘empathy’, but in this paper I explore that history, and the surprising connections between the concept of empathy and firstly, the concept of space in a particular tradition of architectural aesthetics, and some recent returns to that, via the neuroscience of spatial perception. Secondly, between Marxian conceptions of alienation and mimesis.
I use these readings to approach three very different case studies. Firstly, with the help of one of Bateson’s favourite references – Carl Jung – I consider the ecological aesthetics of the phenomena of UFO/UAPs. Secondly, I find some empathy building tools in some of the props and diagrams that Bateson used in his teaching practice. Finally, I consider the implications of an ecological aesthetics of totemistic empathy with damaged eco-mental systems in relation to a particular situated design research project on Urban Evaporative Cooling and the Ecological Semiotics of Heat and Pollution in Athens.
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