The Beauty of Detours

A Batesonian Philosophy of Technology

Yoni Van Den Eede

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438477121, 9781438477114
• eBook ISBN: 9781438477138
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Proposes an innovative, holistic understanding of technology.

Winner of the 2020 S.I. Hayakawa Book Prize presented by The Institute of General Semantics

Winner of the 2020 Susanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form presented by the Media Ecology Association

The Beauty of Detours proposes a new way of understanding and defining technology by reading systems thinker Gregory Bateson in the framework of contemporary philosophy of technology. Although "technology" was not an explicit focus of Bateson's oeuvre, Yoni Van Den Eede shows that his thought is permeated with insights directly relevant to contemporary technological concerns. This book provides a systematic reading of Bateson that reveals these under-investigated elements of his thought. It also critiques the field of philosophy of technology for still reifying "technology" too much despite its attempt to de-reify it, arguing instead that it should incorporate Bateson's insights and focus more on processes of human knowing. Sketching a Batesonian philosophy of technology, Van Den Eede calls for greater attentiveness to the purpose of technology and its role in our lives.

PART I

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK

CHAPTER 1

Gregory Bateson’s “Ecology of Mind”

Away from the big spotlights of intellectual history, burrowed between tree roots, lies the work of Gregory Bateson—glimmering like a diamond unfound. Surely he is still well known. But he is famous in the way unfound diamonds tend to be famous: by name or by their ideas, without the two being connected in a systematic manner within the public consciousness. We may know the name “Bateson” and we may know some of Bateson’s ideas, but we perhaps don’t know the two are linked.

This might have a lot to do with the shape of Bateson’s career. Trained originally as an anthropologist, he dipped his toes in several different disciplines. Remarkably, he helped to force a breakthrough in each. Cybernetics: Bateson was there at the Macy Conferences that shaped the field. Anthropology: together with his then-wife Margaret Mead he pushed the methodological and conceptual boundaries of that discipline. Psychology: he and his colleagues developed the notion of double bind and laid the groundwork for family therapy. He was a forerunner of ecological thought, one of those pioneers in the 1960s and 1970s who rang the alarm about things such as pollution, deforestation, and pesticides, when much of the world was still blissfully oblivious of them.

Nevertheless, this way of lining up his “successes” may be more symptomatic of our tendency, nowadays as strong as ever, to think in terms of neatly demarcated academic specialisms. In each of these, typically something like “excellence” is to be strived for. Such a view however doesn’t necessarily serve to clarify Bateson’s importance. He himself, although struggling throughout his career to find conceptual coherence, was largely immune to such policing of disciplinary boundaries. He was on the lookout for what he called, with Augustine, the “Eternal Verities”: truths about the world and life that are valid across the disciplines.1 Eventually, the methodological perspective (if this term is warranted) that for him came to aggregate most of his concerns was epistemology.2 Under the banner of this notion, the seeming inconsistency of his work dissolves and morphs into something resembling a clear-cut story.

In this chapter, I introduce Bateson’s outlook—sketching it in broad strokes here, to allow deepening along specific thematic axes further down the line. First, I briefly situate Bateson in his historical context; the word “context” as such proves to be crucial. Second, I list and discuss his most important concepts. Third, I investigate his legacy by way of a succinct survey of contemporary interpreters of his work, especially zooming in on media- and technology-related topics. Fourth and finally, I reflect upon acquiring the Batesonian perspective, a slightly experimental practice that we may exercise so as to really make the analysis that will follow fruitful.

Conscious Effort versus Context: Bateson’s Career

Gregory Bateson grew up in an English family in which the scientific attitude was held in high regard and practiced fervently.3 His father, William, was an established biologist who, by the time Gregory was born in 1904, had already been doing groundbreaking work on heredity and biological variation (most famously, he is said to have coined the term “genetics”). Being an atheist, William Bateson instilled his children with the spirit of independent research—probably not a trivial influence on Gregory, given the son’s later wide-ranging palette of interests and unstoppable inquisitiveness. Gregory went on to study natural science and thereafter, not wholly to his father’s liking, anthropology.

His subsequent working career reads like a postmodern novel. There just doesn’t appear to be a clear narrative arc, a direction, or even a logic that ties together the different elements. The protagonist seems adrift on a sea of endless trial and error. At one time a spike in the narrative tension occurs, when Steps to an Ecology of Mind is published in 1972—a book that succeeds in eliciting some public attention.4 But at heart, the volume simply reproduces the seemingly erratic sequence of his professional activities up to that point. To that extent it keeps confusing readers, even to this day. As said, it is as if Bateson dabbled along in several disciplines without much direction.

Strikingly, he appears to have looked at himself largely in that way, judging from Rollo May’s comments: “He described himself as being like a cork carried along on the current of the stream.”5 Also according to May, he said of himself: “I have never made a free choice.”6

Those lines seem frivolous, yet they are significant, attesting to a kind of worldview or perspective which for us westerners of the twenty-first century is hard to get our head around. They speak of a kind of resignation that is hard to digest. We expect straight story lines—we are trained in that way. Preferably, the hero in our stories overcomes hurdles and generally fights against the odds, by force of willpower, work, and perseverance. To hear someone claiming unreservedly that he has never made a free choice, even suggesting to derive some pride from that, is for us like hearing a joke (a split second later, one starts to hesitate: is he serious?). We want someone fighting the odds; not swimming or, better, drifting on waves of odds. We need our protagonist to develop plans and strategies for conquering and winning, not “letting it happen.” Yet with Bateson, exactly the shape of his career—if this term is fitting—mirrors his thinking. Bateson is the personified illustration of context. (This in itself is an important Batesonian idea: a practical process should reflect in its form the conceptual infrastructure that it tries to bring into being. Thus, for instance, teaching about collaboration should be done in a collaborative way.)

We are so used to conceptualizing personal biographies in terms of conscious, planned, and intentional efforts that it takes a good amount of unlearning on our part to start seeing the interaction between those efforts and contexts—be they historical, social, economic, political, or personal. In fields such as science and technology studies (STS), scholars have since a couple of decades ago successfully put this unlearning principle into practice, showing how the “individual genius” image that is classically cast of scientists and inventors, is not the whole truth. Inventors’ and scientists’ achievements may just as much be the result of the right societal and social conditions as they may be of individual perseverance and brilliance. In Bateson’s case, the biographical pattern seems so haphazard that it forces us to look at the contexts in which his work arose—for lack of a consciously strived-after program, or at least one that is immediately apparent; more on this shortly.

So, there is his upbringing in a science-oriented environment. He studied natural science and anthropology, then undertook several field trips to do anthropological research (some of these with his soon-to-be first wife, Margaret Mead). Patterns of interaction and communication already formed a central focus of Bateson’s work at this stage, and they would return in his research on dolphins on the Virgin Islands (1963–64), for the Oceanic Institute in Hawaii (1965–72), his work with psychiatric patients and on family therapy in Palo Alto (1949–62), even in his wartime work for among others the US Office of Strategic Services (1943–45). But perhaps the strongest impact on his thinking was his participation in the round of conferences that began the cybernetics movement, from 1946 onward: the Macy Conferences. Cybernetics was from the start a multidisciplinary field—a perfect environment, so it would seem, for the intellectually voracious Bateson—aiming to understand how systems work. In the first instance the field investigated machinic systems, but several scholars quite quickly tried to transplant the analyses of classic cybernetic cases such as target-seeking missiles (cybernetics arose during World War II) to sociological, psychological, or even philosophical spheres. Bateson was one of those figures.7 Cybernetic vocabulary and imagery provided him with just the right tools to systematically expound some ideas that were already brooding in his mind and that he had started to develop during his anthropological field trips.

For one, under the influence of the nascent field of cybernetics he was able to fully work out his account of feedback processes of social interaction. There is positive and negative feedback. In positive feedback processes, two parties reinforce one another’s behavior. I get mad at you, and in reaction you become mad at me, spurring me to become madder at you, you then becoming even madder at me, and so on. Such a vicious circle or “runaway” process usually ends in bitter frustration, violence, or some hard-won form of reconciliation. In negative feedback processes, by contrast, the two parties develop opposite reactions. I get mad at you, but you find some clever way to deflect my grievance or to put it in another light (you don’t “take the bait”), inciting me in turn to soften my disposition. The conflict doesn’t get out of hand. Negative feedback patterns generally create more stable societal constellations.

In each new work environment, Bateson was picking up on new cues. And yet, notwithstanding the importance of the contexts in which he, like a cork on the ocean, finds himself arriving each time, there also begins to appear a line—the contours of a search, a quest. This quest takes shape through the perhaps unconscious act of stringing these contexts together, but the stringing soon starts to suggest a pattern. Indeed, there is a “drive” behind Bateson’s thinking; I already mentioned how he was on a search for, as he eventually started to put it, “Eternal Verities.” Once again, exactly the notion of context is central in this regard. Let’s take a brief exploring look at his central framework.

Mind and Matter: Bateson’s Framework

All across the apparent diversity of Bateson’s professional career runs one thread: eventually he identifies the fundamental orientation of his work as epistemology. Bateson’s epistemology is panoptic: it has an unusually broad scope, enveloping not just the human being, but all living things. All organisms according to him have mental capabilities: all have mind. Before one would suspect him of panpsychism, it is worth noting that Bateson’s notion of mind is not spiritual but biological or “structural” in nature.8 For a clearer grasp of what Bateson tries to point at, it helps to temporarily bracket one’s common-sense understanding of mind as something exclusively belonging to humans and certain other mammals and related to the elusive concept of consciousness. In a sense, Bateson seeks to build the notion of mind anew, from the ground up. Mind in his view has more to do with the general act of coping in an environment. All organisms engage in such activity: the oak tree as well as the salamander, the amoeba as well as Homo sapiens.

What are the structural characteristics of mental activity that all living beings share? Mind, Bateson argues, basically entails the perception of differences: “Our sensory system—and surely the sensory systems of all other creatures (even plants?) and the mental systems behind the senses (i.e., those parts of the mental systems inside the creatures)—can only operate with events, which we can call changes.”9 Out of all events, changes, differences that an organism perceives, it needs to distill the important ones. These are what Bateson terms differences that make a difference.10 Plainly put, they are the differences that urge an organism to make a change.11 For instance, a gazelle may notice a lot of events in its environment that do not concern it in a direct way, such as the presence of other animals. However, if one of those animals happens to be a predator, for instance a cheetah, that specific appearance, or difference, for the gazelle becomes a difference that makes a difference: it urges the animal to flee.

Bateson equates the notion of information with exactly these differences that elicit an action or a change in whatever form on the part of the organism. Indeed, “mind” at the very least assumes the ability to handle “information” in this way. The definition, moreover, helps to point out that all living creatures do not just passively receive signals from the environment; they also respond to them actively. “The end organs are … in continual receipt of events that correspond to outlines in the visible world. We draw distinctions; that is, we pull them out. Those distinctions that remain undrawn are not.”12 Perception, although it depends on impulses coming in from the surroundings, is a creative process.

It would also be a mistake to regard Bateson on this basis as an idealist of sorts—as if “all” is mind. Matter still has a role to play in his perspective, but not as we know it. In essence, Bateson’s project turns out to be—and he presents it thus himself—an attempt at solving the mind-body, or mind-matter, problem: to bridge the long-standing gap between idealism and materialism. The materialists especially are often a target of scorn in his work. Contemporary science in his view is riddled with an inappropriate version of materialism, given that it reduces all processes to matter—bundles or packages of atoms or other elements—and in tandem with that, to the equally undefined concept of “energy.” He speaks of the “materialist superstition” that “quantity … can determine pattern.”13 Phrased differently, materialists assert that quantity can explain pattern. They believe that processes—patterns, events—can be exhaustively explained in terms of material units, the connections between which can be expressed in quantitative form.

Yet the idealists are no better. They in turn nourish the “antimateriali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Laying the Groundwork
• Part II: Bateson and Technology
• Part III: The Art of Living with Technology
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover