Gregory Bateson Sentences

In the theory of histroy, Marxian philosophy, following Tolstoi, insists that the great men who have been the historic nuclei for profound social chance or invention are, in a certain sense, irrelevant to the changes they precipitated. It is argued, for example, that in 1859, the occidental world was ready and ripe (perhaps overripe) to create and receive a theory of evolution that could reflect and justify the ethics of the Industrial Revolution. From that point of view, Charles Darwin himself could be made to appear unimportant. If he had not put out his theory, somebody else would have put out a similar theory within the next few years. Indeed, the parallelism between Alfred Russel Wallace's theory and that of Darwin would seem at first sight to support this view.*

But, of course, it does matter who starts the trend. If it had been Wallace instead of Darwin, we would have had a very different theory of evolution today. The whole cybernetics movement might have occurred 100 years earlier as a result of Wallace's comparison between the steam engine with a governor and the process of natural selection... It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future. The Marxian error is a simple blunder in logical typing, a confusion of individual with class.

* The story is worth repeating. Wallace was a young naturalist who, in 1856 (three years before the publication of Darwin's Origin), while in the rain forests of Ternate, Indonesia, had an attack of malaria and, following delirium, a psychedelic experience in which he discovered the principle of natural selection. He wrote this out in a long letter to Darwin. In this letter he explained his discovery in the following words: "The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction sure to follow." (Reprinted in Darwin, a Norton Critical Edition, ed. Philip Appleman, W.W.Norton, 1970).

Relationship is always a product of double description. It is nonsense to talk about "dependency" or "aggressiveness" or "pride," and so on. All such words have their roots in what happens between persons, not in some something-or-other inside a person... the relationship comes first; it precedes.

Only if you hold on tight to the primacy and priority of relationship can you avoid dormitive explanations. The opium does not contain a dormitive principle, and the man does not contain an aggressive instinct.

If you want to talk about, say, "pride," you must talk about two persons or two groups and what happens between them. A is admired by B; B's admiration is conditional and may turn to contempt. And so on. You can then define a particular species of pride by reference to a particular pattern of interaction.

The same is true of "dependency," "courage," "passive-aggressive behavior," "fatalism," and the like. Allp characterological adjectives are to be reduced or expanded to derive their definitions from patterns of interchange, i.e., from combinations of double description.

Can the towel folding video be innately informative and relaxing or does it require a viewer?

It takes two to know one

http://www.gravitosardinha.com/blogs/11/uva-symposium-aims-to-revive-the-ideas-of-gregory-bateson

two towels?

war with apes seems immanent

crikey

/imminent (like I'm going to begin spellchecking now)

A joke is a Double Bind, but some of them aren't funny... the Bread-and-Butterfly has wings of bread and butter and a head made of a lump of sugar. Alice says, 'What does it live on?' The answer is, 'Weak tea with cream in it.' At this point she begins to perceive a difficulty: its head will dissolve in its food. So she says, 'What happens if it can't get any?' And the Gnat, who's acting as guide, says, 'It dies.' Alice says, 'That must happen rather often.' The Gnat says, 'It always happens.'

isn't "funny" also a product of double description?

The effect of hearing someone say "Wanna hear the funniest joke ever?" on your response to the joke

http://www.baumgart.org/computer_bums_lite.pdf

An absence is as significant as a presence
You may write an angry reply to a letter you didn't receive

>http://www.baumgart.org/computer_bums_lite.pdf

drat, I didn't even check to confirm that the Bateson story was included in this pdf, but it's just Brand's article on video games / the internet circa 1974, not the Bateson interview. Still an amazing article; I'm old enough to remember my dad talking about how someday everyone was going to have a Dynabook

I'm old enough to remember my dad taking community college classes to learn Fortran. He did not talk about it much. He talked more about how the tank game that came with the Atari was really boring. When we set our tanks to be invisible, the action or lack thereof was reminiscent of a Batesonian double bind.

emulation of 1962 Spacewar videogame running on PDP-1 - http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/index.html

[From Brand's Cybernetic Frontiers:]

The classic Bind. "Tell me you love me." "I love you." "Why do you only say that when I ask you?" The bouquet is elicited and then destroyed.

Gregory: "Then there is the more subtle case in which the rug is not switched. Shall we say a loving action is insisted upon by the recipient. The case in which A makes a spontaneous affectionate move towards B, and B grabs it. Which remarkably quickly destroys the relationship. Because the message is delivered into the frame in which it had to be delivered, it becomes a meaningless message. It doesn't mean any more than the smile of the porpoise, which smiles because he can't change his face."

I can hear it. "Tell me you love me." "I love you." "Thankyou." The bouquet, by being elicited, dismisses itself.

related

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/ANTICOMMUNI.html

hahahah I wondered if you were going to post that here.

Long ago, in 1949, when psychiatrists still believed in lobotomy, I was a new member of the staff of the Veterans Administration Mental Hospital at Palo Alto. One day one of the residents called me aside to see the blackboard in our largest classroom. A lobotomy meeting had been held there that afternoon and the board was still unerased.

This was thirty years ago, of course, and nothing of the sort could happen today, but in those days lobotomy meetings were great social occasions. Everybody who had had anything to do with case turned up -- doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and so on. Perhaps thirty or forty people were there, including the five-man "Lobotomy Committee," under the chairmanship of an outside examiner, a distinguished psychiatrist from another hospital.

When all the tests and reports had been presented, the patient was brought in to be interviewed by the outside commissioner.

The examiner gave the patient a piece of chalk and told him, "Draw the figure of a man." The patient went obediently to the blackboard and wrote: DRAW THE FIGURE OF A MAN

The examiner said, "Don't write it. Draw it." And again the patient wrote: DON'T WRITE IT DRAW IT

The examiner said, "Oh, I give up." This time the patient revised the definition of the context, which he had already used to assert a kind of freedom, and wrote in large capital letters all across the blackboard:

VICTORY

I love this thread

Gregory Bateson PDFs

http://www.radicalsoftware.org/volume1nr3/pdf/VOLUME1NR3_art02.pdf