I really am avoiding reading as I focus on the writing. It’s not as if it’s any kind of crime not to have read all the writers and books on any given topic and with such a broad and inter-disciplinary topic as mine, there are literally millions of things to read, fictional narratives as well as would-be factual treatises. I took my lead initially from Pirsig, whose psychiatrist told him to just write something, even as a therapy to escape the numberless frustrations between the life-experienced and the words of received-wisdom already “out there”. Reading lists are never-ending to start with and counter-intuitively they grow the more you read. It was Eco that cemented the idea that even books acquired for one’s library could remain unread on the shelf – his “library of unread books”.
Re-shelving several half-read / un-read books recently, I have accidentally slipped into reading mode just occasionally, but yesterday I stumbled upon a writer and a book in that unread library that I had studiously avoided reading for a some time. In fact I only acquired in in guilty response to some very personally directed criticism that I didn’t feel the need to know Gregory Bateson’s work, given my clear interest in Macy and Cybernetics. He was part of those foundations, I already knew that, but you can’t read everyone and everything.
I was prejudiced against Bateson, from very negative opinions of Quine (Gavegai?) and Dennett about Bateson’s, and his first wife Margaret Mead’s, early anthropological work on “tribal” language evolution and development. And frankly, as I’ve said elsewhere, any systemic study of human organisational processes is anthropology by any other name – it’s where I’d started long ago in my 1988/91 Master’s work. So, Bateson wasn’t for me it seemed.
I’ve absorbed plenty of his “Ecology of Mind” ideas by osmosis from other sources I’ve read as part of the Psybertron project, but still hadn’t read his original collection of “Steps to an Ecology of Mind”. I can pretty surely say his ideas in this area are consistent with plenty of my own. I’m not reading him not because I reject his work, but because – see priorities – it feels like more reinforcement of the track I’m already firmly on.
But what of that earlier prejudice? Clearly Nora Bateson, his daughter (b.1968) with his third wife is very active in this cybernetics / systems / complexity space in the 21st C developing and promoting his thinking. Mary Bateson his daughter (b.1939-d.2021) with Margaret Mead was also a strong supporter, co-authoring later in his life, picking-up his unfinished work after his death and in providing a (1999) foreword to the second edition of his (1971/72) “Steps”.
In his own 1971 foreword he says:
“My first anthropological field work among the Baining [tribe] of New Britain [Bali & Papua New Guinea] was a failure, and I had a period of partial failure in research with dolphins. Neither of these failures has ever been held against me.”
Mary’s 1999 foreword acknowledges the failure of his early anthropological work, though widely read suggests he was misunderstood in the context of his wider work which didn’t yet exist, that he was in some sense both ahead of and behind his time. Hard to be sure now, but relieved to find I didn’t imagine that his failure really had been held against him.
Lots of good stuff in the foreword texts and the chapter titles, so good that I may uses some as titles of my own “Pathologies of Epistemology” and “Metalogues” for example but also so many topics already considered here, William Blake, Versailles and more. Not actually that impressed with his writing, none of the chapters I skimmed hooked me – many transcripts of talks? – however good his ideas, so back on the shelf for if-and-when needed.
If he says anything you think I’ve missed, let me know.
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