Cybernetics & Human Knowing : Gregory Bateson Essays for an Ecology of Ideas

Gregory Bateson s work continues to touch others in fields as diverse as communication, ecology, anthropology, philosophy, family therapy, education, and mental/spiritual health. The authors in this special issue of Cybernetics

Patterns That Connect Patterns That Connect: A Thematic Foreword

Frederick Steier and Jane Jorgenson

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In the film Mindwalk, Sonja Hoffman, a physicist played by Liv Ullmann, is asked by a politician (played by Sam Waterston) to name those thinkers whose work embodies this "new systems thinking" Hoffman is speaking so highly of. Three names come to her with the connector among them being Gregory Bateson. Such is Bateson s legacy that this film, made over a decade after his death, sees fit to put his name out there as a systems thinker that the world of film viewers ought to become familiar with. Mindwalk is an extended peripatetic conversation between a physicist, a politician and a poet, set in the inspiring natural and designed space of Mont St. Michel, with the haunting minimalist music of Philip Glass. It is fitting that Bateson s name should be invoked, certainly as a systems thinker whose work we need to know, but also as someone whose passions connect those with such diverse backgrounds and ways of seeing, as a physicist, politician and poet.

This special double issue of Cybernetics and Human Knowing is dedicated to the work of Gregory Bateson on the occasion of his centennial celebration. How do we connect Bateson, the cybernetic epistemologist with Bateson, the poet concerned with metaphoric process? How do we connect Bateson the scientist interested in human and animal communication and behavior with Bateson the learning theorist? How do we connect Bateson interested in the ecology of cities, with Bateson interested in an ecology of mind? And how might we, following Bateson, make these connections while examining our own assumptions, including the relational contexts within which we make them. And how might we explore our assumptions in ways that allow us challenge deeply held obsolescent traditions including diverse dualisms that have rendered such connections, such "in-betweenesses" as blindnesses in our ways of understanding.

The authors in this volume in many ways parallel the range of interests and areas of concern to Bateson. Included here are family therapists, communication scholars, anthropologists, psychologists, musicians, education theorists, as well as those whose work simply is self-described as cybernetics and systems practice. Yet, such traditional classificatory schema obscure the ways that each of them as individuals move fluidly across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and they also prevent our noticing the connections among all of them as a system of inquirers whose diverse interests are connected by the threads of systems thinking and cybernetics. Awareness of these connections creates the potential for a network of conversations among the authors, from which multiple perspectives and new knowledge can emerge.

Bateson consistently invites us to look to patterns that connect. "Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality," he tells his fellow regents at the University of California. "What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you?" he asks us to consider at the outset in Mind and Nature (p. 8). His focus on both the content and relationship aspects of all messages invites us to think about pattern also in human relationships and how we create patterns that we live and that define us. And Bateson s ideas of the relationship of content and process invite us to carefully consider patterns across time, and perhaps time as patterned occasion.

So in this introduction we bring together these essays not only as separate works, but as an interconnected web or the beginning of a web, at least to the extent that a book whose pages unfold in numerical sequence might allow. We will introduce the essays individually, but also highlight some manner of connection of each with the succeeding piece.

Thus we try here to create a way of introducing the volume whose process itself mirrors Bateson s very ideas that have meant so much to us.

In Julio Cortazar s Hopscotch, the reader is offered, in addition to the regular ordered sequence of chapters, an alternative suggested sequence. This alternative sequence allows new ideas and images to unfold with different readings. We invite the reader to try this with this volume as well. We realize that the features unconcealed by the connections we make are just some of many, and we hope that creating patterns between essays allows new features emerge in the relationship, in the in-between.

These authors, clearly, share a passion for Bateson s vision, and his concern for the relationship between our ways of knowing and our experienced worlds. They write from their personal engagement with his ideas and their awareness of how those ideas have informed their work. At the same time we see how their thinking, having been enriched by Bateson s ideas, can, in turn, inform and extend Bateson s work.

The kinds of connections discernible across essays are diverse. They include domains of content, cybernetic principles even the manner in which the writers weave their own patterns that connect. What, then, are patterns that connect our patterns that connect?

Mary Catherine Bateson recasts the theory of the double bind in the context of Bateson s ecological and environmental concerns. Her essay invites us to consider various forms of double bind inherent in the human situation. Rather than seeking to eliminate dissonances between logical levels, she invites us to think about preparing future generations to embrace them, and links this awareness to the design of educational systems.

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