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This chapter describes the famous occasion when three anthropologists met up on the Sepik River in 1932/3 – and which infamously led to Margaret Mead eventually leaving Reo Fortune for Gregory Bateson. It also looks as much to the anthropologists as to their ethnographies to suggest that a view of one is available in the view of the other. The chapter furthermore presents an interest in how Stocking makes economy of exposition – just ‘one sentence’ – speak so much, and in what he does not need to say; whereas saying it any other way involves a long story to make the same point. Additionally, it intends to use the events instead to look at the commentary and contemporary practices in order to explore continuities in anthropological quasi-scientism sensitivities concerning the proximity between social relations, analytical relations, and ethnography. Mead's art is one of extraordinary clarity, giving hard edges to what it depicts. When the three anthropologists met up in Kankanamun, they did so acting with a number of others in mind. Blackberry Winter recalls as ‘compass points’.

This chapter, by Nathaniel Brennan, discusses the efforts of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library to make use of captured enemy motion pictures on behalf of the federal government’s wartime intelligence programs during World War II. While the chapter presents an overview of the film library’s governmental intelligence work, ranging from matters of storage to the challenges of training analysts, the central case study examines the work of British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, whose work at the film library consisted of trying to define an objective approach to the study of culture through cinema and the preparation of a test film that would instruct American soldiers about the peculiarities of the German character. Although Bateson’s plans did not materialize, the efforts of Margaret Mead to adapt Bateson’s anthropological film methodology for the Cold War nonetheless influenced the development of postwar film studies and the analysis of national cinemas.

This chapter illustrates how several clinicians became interested in family pathology through their research and clinical efforts related to schizophrenia. It focuses on a research project that was organized by anthropologist Gregory Bateson in Palo Alto in 1952. This project discusses the historical nexus of schizophrenia, communication, and the family through a close analysis of the research group's development of the theory of the double bind. The chapter shows how the family came to be understood as a system by examining the role of cybernetics in shaping family therapists' understanding of schizophrenia and family processes. Family therapists relied on a systems framework to justify their therapeutic interventions, as well as to theorize their own relationship as therapists to their patients.

Gregory Bateson was an anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in New Guinea; worked for the OSS; introduced the concept of cybernetics into social science; developed the double bind theory of schizophrenia; and was a figure in the 1970s California counterculture. What can we learn from the life and legacy of Gregory Bateson with relevance to information operations? This chapter suggests how three of Bateson’s concepts might be employed. The first concept discussed is Bateson’s idea of the premise, cultural ‘facts’ considered to be true and axiomatic for members of a culture that weave together to create a coherent, intrinsic logic. The second concept with applicability to information operations is Bateson’s concept of schismogenesis, the patterns inherent in a social system that produce either equilibrium or disequilibrium and which, Bateson believed, could be manipulated to produce intended effects. The third and final concept considered in this chapter is the frame, a heuristic mechanism for organizing experience and guiding action that affects how we understand the world and how the world understands us.

The introduction claims that ecological consciousness and its sensitivity to environmental crisis--called an apocalyptic encounter--is the foremost intellectual experience of the post-World War II period. Gregory Bateson's double-bind concept distilled ecological thought's challenge to modern perception and human instrumentality. Bateson's extension of the double-bind concept from the psychiatric clinic to human-environmental relations is proposed as a vehicle to better grasp the change ecological consciousness calls for. This argument is placed in two contexts: the broad context of modern disenchantment, and the narrower 1960s context of the debate over the nature of revolution. The first involves postmodern transformations broadly described as the cognitive revolution, complexity studies, and the science of interrelatedness. Bateson drew on science's traditions in natural history to build on the communication theory, information theory, and systems theory pioneered at the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. The second context involves Bateson's appearance at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London in 1967, where he introduced a counterculture audience to the greenhouse effect and the prospect of climate change. A historical examination of ecological consciousness is defended as a way to approach the emotional force field surrounding the topic of environmental deterioration and global warming.

This chapter is set at the 1967 Congress for the Dialectics of Liberation, held over ten days in July in London. Drawing on transcripts and film of the event, the chapter presents a radical movement roiled by budding radicalisms: identity politics, second wave feminism, and an increasing commitment to militancy–all demonstrated in Stokely Carmichael’s divisive Congress appearances, both alone and on a panel with R. D. Laing, Emmett Grogan, and Allen Ginsberg. Amid this agitation, Gregory Bateson offered his synthesis of systems theory, cybernetics, and the ecology of mind. His speech is carefully explicated and annotated with Bateson's recent readings of T. H. White, Philip Wylie's The Magic Animal, and Irish myth. Bateson aligned with radical opinion in its critique of modernization, but it took that critique beyond the enduring problems of human aggression, political oppression, and psychic alienation, and into a more fundamental analysis of the instrumentalism at the heart of the modern worldview. Challenged by audience members over systems thinking as quietist and reactionary, Bateson defended his approach by explaining the greenhouse effect and the prospect of global warming/climate change. This was perhaps the first exposure of such concepts to a lay audience.

This chapter investigates how double-bind theory was received by the psychiatric community with respect to contested views of the etiology and treatment of schizophrenia. A moral model of schizophrenia is contrasted with a medical model of an earlier, more rigorously defined dementia praecox. The treatment of schizophrenics in the United States, especially during and after the world wars, is described as pragmatic and eclectic. The double-bind theory's environmental, biological, interactive model of the disease was met with hope among clinicians and helped shape new treatments such as group therapy and family therapy. As the double-bind group continued its work, Gregory Bateson was conflicted with his research team over fundamental matters of science: he recommended an approach that focused on pattern and relationship; they, more conventionally, focused on substance and measurement. His collaboration with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann lead to the Natural History of an Interview research project. It also took Bateson further from clinical work and toward research with octopi and the editing of the journals of an early 19th-century schizophrenic, later published as Perceval's Narrative.

In this chapter, Allen Ginsberg's reaction to Gregory Bateson and the greenhouse effect is revisited and amplified as an instance of apocalyptic encounter, a central experience of the ecological consciousness and the prospect of ecocatastrophe. That amplification includes the creation of his much-anthologized poem, "Wales Visitation." The trajectory of Bateson's career as a scientist, writer, and public intellectual after 1967 is sketched. This includes a well-documented conference he facilitated in 1968 and the publication of Steps to an Ecology of Mind in 1972. The year following the events described in this book--1968--is widely recognized as a turning point toward increasing violence and backlash, and the rapid collapse of the liberal consensus that had seen the United States through the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. The epilogue invites the reader to regard that turning point in terms of the emergent ecological consciousness the book has placed in context. The epilogue, too, leaves Bateson at a turning point. In contrast to the other principle figures at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, whose public influence peaked in 1967, Bateson's time as a public intellectual had just begun.

This chapter shows that the double bind, the claim that no matter what one does one cannot win, not only plays a role in determining the development of schizophrenia, as Gregory Bateson maintains, but is intrinsic to the emergence of the moral life. It views the double bind as a prior condition for deciding that a contemplated act is evil and for the sense of obligation that enters into the avoidance or pursuit of ends that are deemed to be evil. It argues further that double binds arise not only in individual but also in sociohistorical contexts in which otherness is in conflict with collective rules. The route taken in support of these claims will, of necessity, be circuitous. It begins with Emmanuel Levinas's premise that ethics originates in alterity, in the otherness of the other person, whose very existence, as it impinges upon the self, is experienced as a proscription against exerting violence against that other.

This chapter focuses on the implications and influence of general systems theory, which in the late sixties and early seventies clarified the theoretical underpinnings of ecological thinking. General systems theory, popularized by Ervin Laszlo, described how nested open systems governed by feedback loops had adaptive capacities that were tantamount to the workings of a mind. This made it reasonable to imagine animals, plants, and other natural systems as intelligent and sentient entities. Among the most referenced models of such intelligence was the process of coevolution. Supported by the new science of epigenetics, the theory of coevolution reimagined the workings of natural selection in a way that emphasized decision making rather than competition. Some people, inspired by Gregory Bateson and James Lovelock, envisioned the entire ecosystem as a single sentient and intelligent being, which Lovelock named Gaia.

This chapter interrogates Gregory Bateson's message to the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in particular, and his ecology of mind in general, on the question of defeatism and despair. If human partiality and purposive action introduce errors into the larger system, and if at scale, these errors are systemically destructive, how are human beings to respond to the social and environmental problems they face? Transcripts from Bateson's final appearance on a congress panel dramatize these questions. Actions and answers offered by Stokely Carmichael, R. D. Laing, and Emmett Grogan, the congress's most discussed participants, are examined. These figures took the position that solutions can be found in the ancient call for individual heroism. Bateson, in contrast, called for an indirect, non-purposeful class of actions that generate love of systemic integrity. These actions include the practices of art, ritual, non-utilitarian science, and "the best of religion." These practices may provide pathways to systemic correction. Because they come from a position of dependence, they call for trust. The debate between Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Niebuhr is revisited concerning the moral significance of human agency in order to underscore Bateson's argument for the immanence of mind in nature.

Around the time of World War II, Mead’s personal and professional lives changed dramatically. She divorced Reo Fortune to marry her third husband, Gregory Bateson. She gave birth to a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. She turned her anthropological lens on her own culture for the book And Keep Your Powder Dry, part of a larger effort to galvanize Americans for the war effort. Mead’s religiosity was attenuated in this period, for two reasons. One, Bateson, an atheist, did not want their daughter to be indoctrinated, and Mead complied. Two, Mead believed that the challenge of fascism called for a broadly ethical, humanistic response, in which religious narrowness—especially, the alliance of religion and nationalism—could be dangerous.

This chapter analyzes the theory of metabiotic autopoietic systems back to biotic autopoiesis and its subsequent developments, and towards the Gaia hypothesis. The theories of cognition from the previous chapters are rooted in the cellular sentience proposed by biological systems theory and validated by contemporary molecular biology and microbial ecology, all of which resulted in a corresponding conception of the biosphere. The chapter begins with tracing the history of the word ecology, citing Gregory Bateson’s collection of professional papers, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, as an influential work of the natural concept towards “an ecology of ideas.” Felix Guattari formulated his own ecological theory in The Three Ecologies, which can be juxtaposed to that of Bateson’s. The chapter explores Bruno Latour’s research on the film Avatar and its application of Gaian science, aka Earth system science.

The popularity in the seventies of ecological thinking (imagining natural systems as intelligent) was due largely to the impact of environmentalism, which brought systems theory to the attention of millions of Americans. Environmentalists used ecology to assert that if people did not quickly bring their behaviors within sustainable bounds, the collapse of the natural systems supporting them would force a radical and painful remedy upon them. This chapter begins by describing how systems ecology, the scientific basis of environmentalism, emerged in the 1950s from the integration of systems theory (cybernetics) and population ecology. It then summarizes the ecological critique of game theory, as both fields claimed the mantle of postwar cybernetics but took it in very different directions. The chapter goes on to recount how the mass popularity of the first Earth Day in 1970 expanded on the work of environmentalist writers like Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich.The idea of ecosystem collapse as nature’s feedback to errant humans formed the basis of an ecological ethic espoused by writers such as Gary Snyder, Gregory Bateson, and Stewart Brand. This stimulated efforts to define sustainable living practices.

In his first book, The Divided Self: A Study in Sanity and Madness (1960), Scottish psychoanalyst Ronald D. Laing presents a case study of a psychotic and concludes that the family colluded to kill the patient’s sense of selfhood. There are four interwoven assumptions in the patient’s story: the social rather than biological etiology of madness, the malleability of the human mind, the suggestion that shamming and inauthenticity poison human relations, and the idea of a sick society. The emergence of family-focused theories to explain the onset of schizophrenia came at a time when a biological etiology for mental illness had yet to be discovered. This chapter examines intrafamilial investigations into the etiology of schizophrenia, focusing on the work of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and her concept of the “schizophrenogenic mother”; Lyman C. Wynne’s experiments in which he combined psychotherapy of a schizophrenic patient with twice-weekly meetings with parents; and Gregory Bateson’s “double bind” theory.

This chapter surveys how major critics from the 1960s to the present have attempted to understand the connection between mind and reality in Stevens’s poetry. The initial focus is on the most obvious candidate for illuminating such a connection: what Stevens called his poetic “mundo,” organized as it is by the motif of the seasons and how each season expresses a certain inflection of the relationship between mind and reality. Upon closer inspection, however, we find that Stevens’s poetry relentlessly foregrounds its own performative, rhetorical character, and in a way that calls into question the adequacy of the epistemological and phenomenological frameworks that have dominated Stevens’s criticism. The performative and rhetorical character of Stevens’s poetry directs us instead toward the domain of form as the site where the operations of mind and reality are ecologically coimplicated and conjoined. As Gregory Bateson shows us, the logical problems of paradox, circularity, and so on that have bedeviled epistemological and phenomenological readings of Stevens are actually not problems at all in the context of the recursive operations of biological organisms. Stevens’s rhetoricity thus enacts the shared (and paradoxical) conditions of possibility for (non-logical) meaning that obtain for poetry and for biological entities.

In many respects the “thesis statement” of the book as a whole, this chapter attempts to theorize the meaning of paradoxical statements in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Sanders Peirce. Utilizing and extending Gregory Bateson’s theory of communication, this essay observes a distinction between content and form which then entails a “second-order” observation as articulated in the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Form is theorized as radical discontinuity, a concept without identity, the “double consciousness.” This thesis not only allows Emerson and Peirce to be drawn into the purview of systems theory, but it also discovers an unheralded “posthumanist” tradition in American thought.

This chapter illustrates how the categorization of metaphor and metonymy as two fundamental tropes arises from the distinction between the literal and figurative uses of language. In this distinction, metonymy is a detour from literal usage but ultimately returns to it; whereas metaphor is a more permanent detour. The chapter then tackles the concept of redundancy in relation to the language of cybernetics. Max Black states that receiving a correct message results in the reduction of uncertainty. Redundancy is a repetition for emphasis that is intended to ensure the accuracy of meaning, increase comprehension, and lessen the probability of wrong guessing. Gregory Bateson defines redundancy as the patterning of particular events within a larger aggregate of events, a relationship between whole and part, much like how the metonymizing process takes place.