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Communication involves several layers of relationship of self-with-others all at the same time, and people can easily get into a tangle or ‘bind’ with others. In any family, silence on the subject matter of relationship can lead to pathology, for it is never enough for human beings to agree that they love, hate, respect each other, they must forever re-affirm that fact. Silence is a condition of schizophrenia, and psychotherapists originally termed the condition a reversion to primitive mentality. Bateson re-evaluates schizophrenic behavior as an inability to perceive appropriate context in communication initiated by double binds of communication. Against arguments that schizophrenia is brought about by genetic determination, he argues for a many-level, or holistic approach, with therapy introduced by way of a theory of levels or logical types, with each logical type representing a relationship. R.D. Laing realized how profoundly Bateson’s notion of ‘madness’ as an ‘inner voyage’ with its endogenous dynamics spoke to his (Laing) own personal experience of mental illness.”Double Bind” was by far the most notable contribution of the Bateson Research Group at Palo Alto, which apart from the originality of its approach to pathology of communication, gave the English language a new phrase. A many-level approach continued at the MRI in Palo Alto after Bateson left his research team and can still be found today among those favoring a non-medical, alternative approach to schizophrenia, represented in a movement called “mad pride.”

This chapter examines John von Neumann’s theory of self-reproducing automata and Christopher Langton’s self-reproducing digital loops. Langton’s theory of artificial life (ALife) as a new science based on computer simulations whose theoretical underpinnings combine information theory with dynamical systems theory is contrasted with Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s theory of autopoiesis, which leads to a consideration of both natural and artificial immune systems and computer viruses.

The chapter argues that of the many Guattaris – the psychoanalyst, the philosopher, the scholar of the arts, the cultural critic, and the activist – the most lasting one will be the ecologist, and it places Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies at the conceptual centre of a schizoecological tryptich that consists of Schizoanalytic Cartographies, The Three Ecologies and Chaosmosis. It then traces some conceptual origins of and inspirations for what Guattari, borrowing a term from deep ecologist Arne Naess, calls his ecosophy. Other such borrowings come from the works of James E. Lovelock, Ilja Prigogine and Isabel Stengers, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Lucretius, Michel Serres and Gregory Bateson. By way of Guattari’s notion of the machinic, it then positions Guattari’s work in relation to various forms of constructivism. After delineating his own version of a schizoecologic and machinic constructivism, it shows how this schizoecology informs the schizoanalytic practices at La Borde clinic.

Chapter 3 pursues Chapter 2’s immanent critique of the new historicism. Whereas new historicism’s bedrock is epistemology—questions about the domain of rationality—metaphysics is the province of questions about reality. The change in Romantic poetry crystallizes in effects that resist our codes not through denial, displacement, or repression—the conditions for a hermeneutics of suspicion—but through something like indifference. We see a new kind of negativity. This version of Romanticism verges on withdrawal from the scene of interpretation, resistance to the depth hermeneutics of earlier Marxist criticism. It is enabled by Spinoza’s theory of conatus; the work of Sebastiano Timpanaro, whose Marxist historicism arises from the nature and biology side; and the notion of autopoeisis of neurophysiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. The relevant patterns in Romantic poetry are then illustrated through a reading of Wordsworth’s “Old Man Travelling: Animal Tranquillity and Decay.”