El impacto ambiental y la huella ecológica

The most important development in Bateson’s thinking in the early 1950s is, as recounted in chapters 2 and 3, the achievement of his insight about the mental nature of systems beyond the human mind. When this under-standing was added to his existing awareness of the integrative nature of cybernetic aesthetic processes, Bateson was able to begin the move toward his later conviction that art process is capable of freeing contemporary humans from the vicious effects of “linear conscious purpose.”

1951a (with Jurgen Ruesch) Communication:

The Social Matrix of Psychiatry

In 1951, in collaboration with Jurgen Ruesch, Bateson produced the book Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. Bateson, writing in 1950 and 1951, was in his period of major focus on psychiatry. This book is concerned only with human communication with other humans, though an increasing ecological awareness is evident in places. Apart from two collaborative chapters (in which art and artists are not mentioned) each of the two men made himself responsible for partic-ular chapters so there is no doubt about which parts of the text represent Bateson’s thinking.

By this time, Bateson was adapting his understanding of cybernetics and communication theory to the concerns of psychology. In chapter 8,

“Conventions of Communication: Where Validity Depends on Belief,”

he addresses “the idea that man lives by those propositions whose validity is a function of his belief in them” (1951a, 212–27—Bateson’s emphasis). This is, itself, a cybernetic, process-related thought. Though there is no refer-ence to the aesthetic as a concept (in fact there is no index entry for it), art and artists are now seen by Bateson as members of the class of “the great creative fields of human communication,” along with play, religion, epistemology, and psychiatric theory (224). The membership of classes is, once more, an important feature of explanation and a basic tool for understanding the interrelationships that are the core of his message.

The comments on art and artists appear in the context of a discussion of truth in linguistic communication. Clearly, Bateson sees art as a method of communication that has important similarities with language. He asserts, for instance, that the linguistic communication “The word ‘cat’

stands for a certain small mammal” is neither true nor false. It is only true if both partners in communication agree that it is true. To thus agree is, in fact, to make a statement about codification. The category of such state-ments is, he says, a category that includes many conventions: those of local phonetics, vocabulary, syntax, timing, pitch, emphasis, tone of voice, “and all the other modalities of verbal and nonverbal communication.” These are the conventions of coding. Statements about codification are a sub-class of metacommunicative statements—statements that communicate about communicating. Metacommunication, claims Bateson, is neces-sarily subject to internal contradiction, to paradox, when it is combined with objective communication. This view is derived from Russell and White-head’s theory of “logical types” which, as we have learned, insists that no class of phenomena or ideas can be a member of itself. Hence, any state-ment that is both an objective statestate-ment (hence, a communication) and a statement about communication must produce paradox. As an example Bateson cites, in cut-down form, the paradox of Epimenides: “I am lying.”

Statements about communication are members of one class (the class of metastatements) while the objective statements are members of their own class. Statements that combine objective messages and metamessages are, thus, members of two different logical classes, one of which contains the other and cannot itself be a member of the less general class. This is what produces the paradox or internal contradiction. This is another example of a situation where formal logic does not work in the “real” world. In practice, writes Bateson, “we must accept and must expect to find in the great creative fields of human communication—play, art, religion, episte-mology, and psychiatric theory—paradoxes of the general type contained in the statement ‘I am lying’. . .” (1951a, 224). So what does Bateson mean when he writes that the processes of art must convey the paradox-ical message “I am lying”? He considers the nature of play, art, and reli-gion. In play the paradox is clearly visible: The mutually accepted rules, the conventions of opposition and competition, the agreed codification of gains or losses are all fictions. We say “It’s only a game.” In art the matter is less clear but it will help, writes Bateson, to consider the difference between art and propaganda. The propagandist attempts to convince the audience that what he says has more than the truth of normal communica-tion, that his message is objective truth and not metamessage. In propa-gandist films and plays, the intention is to convince the audience that the

fiction is objective truth, that what is portrayed is “typical” reality. Bateson was here using his wartime experience of analyzing Nazi films in order to understand their effects as propaganda (1943a, 1943b). The artist, how-ever, says openly: “This is my creation—this is how I react to some part of my world,” admitting that this, no less than the propaganda, has the potential for paradox. “I am lying” is openly said as “this is my interpreta-tion.” Bateson sees this as “perhaps the greatest formal distinction between art and propaganda” (1951a, 224–225).

This same ambiguity of classification is, says Bateson, at the core of religion. Religion, he writes, contains complex objective, propagandic, and artistic elements that “have been a source of strife through the centuries.” Christianity is notorious for insisting on objective historical truth for its mythologies and even for its parables. “Anti-religionists” are

“equally stupid” in denying metacommunicative or relative truth to any religious text that may be subject to objective doubt. For instance, Chris-tianity carries inherent statements about God’s omnipotence and about the Father/Son/humanity relationship. Whatever their objective truth, these statements “carry implicit in their poetry a large number of asser-tions of the type we are here to discuss” (i.e., metacommunicative statements) such as “the brotherhood of man,” which has profound impli-cations for mutual human relationships. Metacommunicative truth, which Bateson now begins to call “deutero-truth” is always a function of belief.

In very many situations an increase in belief permits an increase in validity.

Such “truths” are implicit in all religious processes: in mythology, ritual, ethics, and the ways we form worldviews. Religion, particularly, is “one of the mass agencies which determine our epistemology”—which deter-mine, that is, how we form our knowledge of the world.

In chapter 10, “The Convergence of Science and Psychiatry,” Bateson explores tendencies in science and in psychological practice. Propheti-cally, he sees a general trend away from “hard” nineteenth-century science toward a more “humanist” and interrelated way of working that includes the observer or therapist in the processes. In other words, he hopes for, and is willing to assist the process of change toward a more cybernetic, recursive and engaged science. To illustrate this (1951a, 267–68), he imagines four representative people standing in a wood.

One is a woodsman engaged in cutting down a tree. He is watched by a nineteenth century scientist, a humanist artist (perhaps a poet), and a

“modern” scientist “of the circularistic variety,” that is, a scientist enlight-ened by cybernetic understanding. The conventional scientist will calculate formulae for mass, energy, and the trajectories of a simplified axe blade striking a fictitious homogenous substance. He will “say very

little about himself .” The humanist-artist will say much about himself, may include the observer in the description of the process—perhaps to the extent of excluding the woodsman. He may respond to the contrast between strength and precision (in the woodman) by using his own strength and precision to create an artwork that will carry important deutero-messages: messages about communication that may enrich the lives of others. He will have “said” something obscurely true about rela-tionships: the relations between the woodsman and his axe, between himself and the woodsman, between himself and his art medium and between himself and his audience. Such “statements . . . are relevant to the human spirit. But the humanist—be he artist or even poet—will be unable to say what it is that he has said.”

The cybernetic scientist will accept the nineteenth-century formulae but will go on from these to find that “the strokes of the axe form a complex series, each single stroke being partially determined by the state of the tree trunk left by the previous strokes,” thus leading himself into complexities not solvable by nineteenth-century science. He will include the purposive characteristics of the woodsman. He will be aware that he is himself part of the system he is describing. His study will include inter-active relationships and many levels of reference (e.g., microscopic self-correction combined with great forces) in himself as observer/

analyst as well as in the woodsman. He comes close to the position of the artist but must also examine the internal logic of his synthesis and test it, so that he can know his own codification system. He will value knowing exactly what he is saying.

The purpose of this tale is to provide a parable. Psychology, says Bateson, was (at that time) evolving in two directions, roughly compa-rable to the humanist and the “circularistic.” He sees the humanist psychologist as a person who works with patients as one human being with another. Intuitively responding from his own emotional resources, he can “act spontaneously out of his own integrity,” using that integrity as a check on his understanding—much as an artist might evaluate his work. The circularistic psychologist will be, quite consciously, a scientist.

He will try to be totally articulate about his methods and results and will aim for predictability and logical coherence. Bateson sees the way forward as a compromise, a working together of the two types of opera-tion. The intuitive humanist may find ways of working that are useful, the scientists will follow with precise examination and description. Some of the precision will be useful to the intuitive practitioner who may again improve his methods, drawing ahead of the scientists who must then describe the process.

Finally Bateson stresses that complete description or prediction can never be possible because, as Gödel (1931, 173–98) proved, “no system of propositions can be complete in itself and not lead to contra-diction” and, thus, the more humanist psychologist has no need to fear the scientific dehumanizing of his therapy. Hence, humanist and scien-tist, artist and theoretician are all needed to form the cybernetic unity of healing.

1954 Metalogue: “Why a Swan?”

“Why a Swan?” ([1954] 2000, 33–37) is the first of Bateson’s “meta-logues” to contain significant aesthetic material. The metalogues are fictional conversations between father and daughter, which may owe something to actual discussions that took place between Gregory and Mary Catherine but are mainly constructed by Bateson himself as a free-form method of exploring ideas and the relationships between ideas.

Bateson was using the metalogue form before 1948 when he considered publishing a book of them (Harries-Jones 1995, 26). The earliest of those eventually published, “Metalogue: Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?”

(composed in 1948, reprinted as 2000, 3–8) was written when Mary Catherine was nine years old and Bateson was living away from Margaret Mead and what had been the family home. Bateson describes a meta-logue as “a conversation about some problematic subject”(2000, 1). This was one of his solutions to the difficulties of setting out innovative ideas within the academic paradigm. The structure of a metalogue is metaphor-ically related to its subject, though only some of the metalogues achieve this. “Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?” is muddled in form as well as dealing with muddle, tidiness and order in its content. It is really about entropy and negentropy; about (as Bateson says) the fact that there are many more possibilities for disorder than there are for order.

Bateson comments that “the history of evolutionary theory is inevitably a metalogue between man and nature in which the creation and interaction of ideas must necessarily exemplify the evolutionary process”

(2000, 1). Harries-Jones (1995, 92) explains that “Metalogues are literary forms through which a ‘message’ or content of a proposition is presented in the manner of an imaginary dialogue.” He continues, interestingly:

“More than this, metalogues reveal that any message is meaningless until it is related to a classifier or context which limits what the message can be about.” He points out that within the metalogue form it is possible for processes of reiteration, feedback, and circular logic to be used in ways precluded by the conventions of academic writing (92–93).

In the glossary of Angels Fear Mary Catherine Bateson writes (1988, 210) that “A metalogue is a conversation dealing with some aspect of mental process in which ideally the interaction exemplifies the subject matter.” Bateson placed the metalogues at the beginning of Steps to an Ecology of Mind—the first items (after the introduction) that the reader encounters—an indication of their importance in his eyes. In her intro-duction to the 2000 edition of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Mary Catherine stresses the importance that her father attached to the metalogues: “It is no accident that a group of the father-daughter conversations he called

‘metalogues,’ especially those written in the 1950s, stand at the begin-ning of this volume: Daughter is uncorrupted by academic labeling and becomes Father’s excuse to approach profound issues outside their boundaries.” Most of the metalogues were initially published in period-icals of the General Semantics Movement, which offered, to new disciplines such as cybernetics, an interdisciplinary setting for discussion of processes of communication (2000, ix).

Returning to the current example, “Why a Swan?” the metalogue is about the representation of humans and other animals in art, specifically in Tchaikowsky’s Swan Lake ballet. Daughter asks “Why a swan?” to which Father responds: “Yes—and why a puppet in Petroushka?” Why represent a human by a puppet, or a swan by a human? They agree that both the puppet and the swan are “sort of” human, but move on to say that each is “sort of” the other though this is using “sort of” in different ways.

Bateson claims that the relationship that is implied by “sort of” confers meaning and importance on “the whole of fantasy, poetry, ballet and art in general.” In examining the significance of this metalogue and Bateson’s increasing awareness of artistic process, we might remember his (then recent) love affair with a dancer in New York (M. C. Bateson, 1984, 49).

The message of the metalogue is that we can only understand the metaphorical relationship of puppet, dancer, and/or human when we know what “sort of ” means. More precisely, the relationship is between ideas that we have of the dancer, the swan, and so on. Bateson contrasts this with an area where the relations are not “sort of.” Sacraments and sacrificial behavior are different. Men believe that the bread and the wine really are the body and the blood of Christ and will die for that belief. Is Swan Lake a sacrament? Possibly, because the costume and movements of the dancer could be for some people “an outward and visible sign of some inward and spiritual grace of woman.” The dance may be for some a metaphor, for others a sacrament. And which it is must be essentially

“secret”—that is, it cannot be told, cannot be put into words. The dancer

cannot tell you what the dance has meant. Elsewhere (1972d reprinted in 2000, 137; 1970a in 2000, 470) Bateson has quoted the dancer Isadora Duncan as saying “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” “I mean” writes Bateson (2000, 37), “first that great art and religion and all the rest of it is about this secret, but knowing the secret in a conscious way would not give the knower control.” It is the combina-tion of the “pretend” and the “pretend-not” and the “really” that together constitute a sacrament; they get fused together. The logicians would keep them separate but ballets and sacraments are not made that way.

It is evident from this metalogue that Bateson had realized that the metaphorical functions of art processes are the central and most impor-tant dynamic aspects of the relationship between artworks and those who interact with them. He was to go on repeating and explaining this truth to the end of his life. It is the metaphorical nature of art that may become the tool by which, even yet, we may seek the “grace,” the renewed capacity to live compatibly with the rest of the natural world.

1955a (written 1954) “A Theory of Play and Fantasy”

It was in the early 1950s that Bateson, as director of the team working on

“the role of the paradoxes of abstraction in communication” (which eventually produced the double-bind hypothesis) developed an interest in play among nonhuman animals. With Weakland, Haley, Fry, and Jackson he produced this report for an American Psychological Associ-ation conference in March, 1954 (1955a reprinted in 2000, 177–93).

The report describes how the team watched and filmed monkeys and, later, otters engaged in what was clearly play in the San Francisco zoo.

The core of the Bateson team’s thinking was the idea that real play is only possible if the organisms involved are able to transmit the message

“this is play ” and also understand the message as a message about the nature of messages. That is, they must be capable of second-order thinking about messages. In play-fighting the signals passed between the animals were similar to but not the same as the signals in real fighting.

“The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (2000, 180). This thinking was extended to such areas of interaction as threat, histrionic behavior, deceit, and ritual. The playing animals “do not quite mean what they are saying but, also, they are usually communicating about something that does not exist.” In humans, similar processes lead to all the complicated inversions of play, fantasy, and art. Bateson is suggesting that play is meaningfully similar (i.e., of the same logical type) to aesthetic engagement and that ritual is

something of the same order. In ritual, we only partly separate the deno-tative action and that which is denoted. The action or symbol represents the denoted object. Finally, says Bateson, “in the dim region where art, magic, and religion meet and overlap, human beings have evolved the

‘metaphor that is meant,’ the flag which men will die to save, and the sacrament that is felt to be more than ‘an outward and visible sign, given to us’” (182–83). We half-consciously choose to blur the distinction between the information, signal, or code and the real object or event. As well as forming the basis for the double-bind theory, this work on play

‘metaphor that is meant,’ the flag which men will die to save, and the sacrament that is felt to be more than ‘an outward and visible sign, given to us’” (182–83). We half-consciously choose to blur the distinction between the information, signal, or code and the real object or event. As well as forming the basis for the double-bind theory, this work on play