on Gregory Bateson – Everything is connected | The Guardian
Everything is connected | Books | The Guardian
Tim Parks on Gregory Bateson: an anthropologist who believed the arts could diminish our desire to control the world
Global warming, global terrorism, food crises, water crises, oil conflicts, culture wars – “civilisation” seems to be accelerating towards self-destruction. These are circumstances in which art and artists tend to get political or, alternatively, resign themselves to insignificance. In literature, the phenomenon is exacerbated by the difficulty many people have reading for anything beyond content and immediately communicated emotion. As Borges once remarked, since most critics have little sense of the aesthetic, they have to find other criteria for judging a book – political persuasion being the most obvious.
At such a moment, it may be worth looking at the work of a man who had a rather unusual take on the relationship between art and politics, who saw the two as intimately related and mutually conditioning, art being allowed a certain, perhaps even pervasive, influence, but not in the crass sense of grinding an axe, or even exploring controversial situations; on the contrary, art might be most “useful” when, to all intents and purposes, most “irrelevant”.
Gregory Bateson (1904-80) was born into a family with a history of spirited scientific controversy. His father William, a distinguished naturalist, was responsible for coining the word “genetics” and had been both translator and vociferous champion of Mendel’s pioneer work on hybrids and heredity.
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Over his lifetime, Bateson was involved in a wide range of studies, the early anthropological explorations being followed by work on families and mental health problems (when he invented the idea of “the double bind”), studies in cybernetics and communication, and even in the “language” of dolphins and other creatures. What seems to have fascinated Bateson was the question: how does a complex culture maintain a relatively steady state, adapting to outside change and correcting internal imbalances? Perhaps, having been brought up in a family always engaged in public polemics and torn apart by the conflict that led to his brother’s suicide (another older brother was killed in the first world war), Bateson was looking for the sort of mechanisms that can prevent tension from blowing up into tragedy; hence the rather surprising way he would often mix his anthropology with diagrams of such things as thermostatic cut-out systems, or steam engine governors. In any event, it was his eye for the way negative situations are, or are not, defused before the worst can happen that led to his formulating some interesting reflections on art.
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The curious nature of Bateson’s “epistemological” approach was that it prevented him from proposing remedies to the problems he identified. His thinking contained a kind of catch-22: the conscious mind, his own included, was of its nature incapable of grasping the vast system of which it was only a very small and far from representative part; hence any major intervention to “solve” a given problem would always be ill-informed and inadvisable. The only possible solution would be a radical change in our way of thinking, or even our way of knowing, a new (or ancient) mindset in which conscious purpose would be viewed as only a minor and rather suspect part of mental life.
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Dreams, religious experience, art, love – these were the phenomena that still had power, Bateson thought, to undermine the rash/rational purposeful mind. Of these four, art enjoyed the special role of fusing different “levels of mind” together: there was necessarily consciousness and purpose in the decision to create, but creativity itself involved openness to material from the unconscious, otherwise the work would be merely schematic and transparent.