Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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crucial for our earthly survival. Furthermore, anthropology had to be a non-specialist, ‘interdisciplinary discipline’ because only in a holistic (however seemingly seeming amateurish) use of all manner of information could it expect to tackle the ‘vast intricacies’ of the worlds of cultural construction and social interaction (Bateson 1959:296). Hence the need for an anthropological understanding to connect up with ethnology, ecology, biology, philosophy, aesthetics and psychoanalysis. This might then give onto a new ecological world-view where aesthetics and consciousness combined to form a ‘sacred’ recognition of the one-ness of life, of life’s ontological monism.

Holism called for a new language, one which transcended the long tradition in Western metaphysic of positing dualisms: between human and animal, between nature and culture, between mind and body. In this search, Bateson was variously inspired: by the English poet William Blake, by his naturalist father, by his own fieldwork among the Iatmul of New Guinea (1936). Significantly, he was also inspired by the new theme of ‘cybernetics’, as coined by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener.Wiener’s realization that the social-scientific concept of ‘information’ and the natural-scientific concept of ‘negative entropy’ were in fact synonymous represented, for Bateson, ‘the greatest single shift in human thinking since the days of Plato and Aristotle’ (1951:177). Or, in Wiener’s own words (1949:18):

The notion of the amount of information attaches itself very naturally to a classical notion in statistical mechanics: that of entropy. Just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganization: and the one is simply the negative of the other.

Let me backtrack, however, and offer nine basic steps to a Batesonian appreciation of the ‘recursiveness’, the circuiting, of life on earth.

I: ‘Maps are not territories’

According to Bertrand Russell’s theory of logical types, there is an inevitable discontinuity between a class and its members; the term used for the class belongs to a different level of abstraction from the terms used for members. Bateson borrowed this Russellian insight and made it fundamental to his conceptualization of the universe of human behaviour. Logical types and levels, for Bateson, characterize, differentiate, hierarchize and interrelate world, biosphere, society, body

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and mind; and there is an infinite regress of such contexts. For example, there is a world of material objects, of things-in-themselves, which is distinct from (which is known differently to) the world of human bodies, of metabolic supplies and channels, which is in turn distinct from the world of the mind, of narratives, thoughts and ideas.The mind can thus be said to be made of parts and processes which are not themselves mental but metabolic, while consciousness represents a transformation of unconscious metabolic processes.

Linking one logical level or context to another is a complex network of meta-relations. Moving from the world of one logical type or level to another always entails, for Bateson, a transformation of knowledge: a recodification of how and what is known. Between distinct logical types or levels, however, there can be no direct knowledge and no ‘complete’ communication. Hence, the metabolic processes which give rise to the rich content of consciousness are not themselves subject to direct introspection or voluntary control. Similarly, ‘maps are not territories’; the worlds of human experience are distinct from a noumenal world of external things, of things-in-themselves. There are no rocks, trees, or even people in the human mind, Bateson is wont to say, there are only ideas of rocks, trees and people. Things enter the human world of experience, of meaning and communication, by our ideas of them— whatever else they may be in their thingish world. Ideas are the only things human beings can know and we cannot otherwise imagine the world ‘as it is’.

Ideation, the processes of perceiving and thinking and communicating about perceiving and thinking, involves a transformation or codification (translation or substitution) which might variously be described as ‘symbolic classification’, ‘naming’ or ‘mapping’.We attribute names and qualities to things and so ‘produce’ them by reproducing them in a world of human experience. Ideation Bateson describes as itself an operation of logical typing; but since direct communication between logical types remains impossible, the ‘things’ that enter our minds as ideas are at best guesses at the things-in-themselves. For the mind as such is a no-thing, existing only in ideas, while ideas are also nothings; they are not the things they refer to.What occupies the mind, in short, is an abstract account of a concrete external world which otherwise remains itself, distinct and mysterious.

What ideas do involve are differences.

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II: ‘Information is difference which makes a difference’

The mind operates with and upon differences; differences are the unit of psychological input. So that if minds are aggregates of ideas, then what minds contain are differences: ideas and differences are synonymous. For to perceive something, to recognize a thing, is to recognize a difference between it and some other thing or some other perception. Things are thus defined by and through their differences. To the extent that things enter the world of human experience they do so as aggregates of their differences.

Another way of saying this is that human thought is relational. We perceive and think in terms of relationships—difference is a relationship—and not in terms of things-in-themselves.Things enter the world of human experience (are seen as separate and real) only through their interrelations; they are epiphenomena of the relations to which we perceive them to be a party: relations to ourselves, to other things, and to themselves in other contexts.

Information about the world Bateson then defines as differences which make a difference, which human beings see, and see as relevant, at a particular time. Information is ‘news of difference’ (1980:37), while maps are organizations of news of difference.

III: ‘All phenomena are appearances’

Since the mental worlds of human beings are about maps, and maps of maps, and not about things-in-themselves, all human phenomena can be said to be abstractions, their truth-value turning upon appearances. The Berkeleyian motto, ‘To be is to be perceived’, therefore applies to all human behaviour, for the human universe has no objective features. Even so-called natural-scientific knowledge shares this character; Euclidean geometry, for example, is not about space as it exists but as it is defined by a human perceiver or imaginer.There is an infinite number of potential or latent differences and relations between and within things in the external world but only some of these become ‘effective’, meaningful or manifest in the world of human ideation—differences which have made a difference and become information. Hence, we create the world we perceive, editing and selecting from the noumenal universe so that it conforms with our beliefs, with our vision of ‘order’: of the orderly relations between objects.

To this extent, objects (as well as their being experienced) are subjective creations. Indeed, all thinking and all human experience can be said to be subjective: a matter of the images our brains make about

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the ‘external world’, a matter of the mediation of our sense organs and neural pathways. Even pain is a created image. And while nineteenthcentury science founded itself on the claim that this subjectivity was ‘in fact’ objective, it was the latter which was illusory. Human knowledge and conditions of knowledge are always, and inevitably, personal; knowledge is a relationship in the eye of the beholder.As Bateson pithily phrases it (1951:212): ‘man lives by those propositions whose validity is a function of his belief in them’.

In this way, the subjective viewer and the personal world which he or she creates can be seen as one; since things-in-themselves never enter the mind, only complex transforms of these, there is a one-ness between the perceiver and the things perceived. Rather than subjects and objects there exist subject—objects and perceiver—perceiveds: always the purposive organism in interaction with its created environment; always the territory of things and objects filtered into a mental world of subjective images and maps. Bateson talks of the ‘mental determinism’ immanent in the universe (1972:441).

In this way too, worlds are multiple. If order is defined as the privileging of one or more of an infinite number of possible relations between objects and events, between things in the world, then the perception of any two viewers, or the same viewer at different times, need not overlap. Even two individuals in interaction have a freedom regarding how they interpret: both how they codify the world and how they act upon their codifications. And differences multiply. Because to assert one thing, privilege one pattern of relations, is to deny something else.

Finally, visions of order are self-fulfilling. Human individuals live in worlds of their own perceiving, codifying, creating, imagining, because they set out to establish a correspondence between what is in their heads and what is outside them, and in large measure they succeed. They see what they want to see and want to see what they see. Or, as Bateson puts it, value is a determinant of perception, and perception a determinant of value; evaluation and codification are aspects of the same central mental phenomenon.We must wish things to be as we see them, and vice versa, or our actions will bring us frustration and pain instead of success. In short, in the perception of a particular set of relations between things, a particular order in the external world, value and information meet.

IV: ‘Patterns connect’

While there are discontinuities between logical types and levels, between classes and members, Bateson also posits the existence of corresponding

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patterns between the components of particular types and levels which connect those types and levels. Similar relations between parts evince meta-patterns: shapes and forms of an aesthetic kind. The process of recognizing connecting patterns between logical types and levels, Bateson calls ‘abduction’. He finds it in metaphor and in dream, in parable, allegory, poetry, totemism, and comparative anatomy, and he believes that what he calls ‘abductive systems’ characterize great regions of nature and human life, linking the body and the ecosystem (1980:158).

For example, stereoscopic vision, provided by two eyes which are logically discrete but perceive corresponding patterns between the component parts of the worlds they perceive, amounts to an abductive system. Similarly, a routine relationship of exchange between two people is an abductive system: a relationship Bateson describes as a double view of something or a double description. Not internal to a single person, a relationship is based on the recognition by the parties concerned of corresponding patterns of behaviour and response on each side. Or again, an abductive system characterizes the process of perceiving an environment. A difference between a standing and a falling tree is transformed into a difference between neurons in the human brain; the physical event is translated into an idea, a piece of information, which bears a commensurate pattern between component parts. The mental process entails a sequence of interactions between neuronal parts, which is a coded version, a transformation, of events perceived in the external world. There is a relationship of commensurate difference which connects the two.

V: ‘Mental processes are recursive’

A clear emphasis in Bateson’s understanding of how we come to perceive both difference and sameness is upon the movement inherent in mental processes.We come to know difference by cognitively moving between two or more things, or moving ourselves relative to a thing, or moving between two of our cognitions of a thing. And we come to know sameness by abducting, by moving between patterns of relations between things and appreciating the meta-patterns that they share. Knowing entails cognitive movement.

And we remember these movements, Bateson next argues. If we value the information which they provide us, then the cognitive movement is reinforced and comes to be habitual: a habitual pattern or pathway between neurons in the brain, a habitual association of ideas in the mind. These remembered, habitual movements, Bateson calls a ‘cybernetic

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