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

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circuit’ or ‘system’: a pathway, and network of pathways, along which information and transformations are transmitted (1972:434). He also calls them ‘circular (or more complex) chains of determination’: a dynamic processing of information in recursive patterns of relations between neuronal components of the brain and ideational components of the mind (1980:102). Even the simplest cybernetic circuit possesses such memory, Bateson insists, based upon the travel of information; and as the mind matures, so it comes to consist of habituated loops of thought and networks of such loops: a total completed circuitry. Hence, an appreciation of this circuitry is essential for an understanding of human behaviour, for this is how we think, this gives onto what we know.

This also reveals how we know that we know, how we become selfconscious. It is recursive circuitry which produces an organism’s autonomy and its self-control. For by getting messages about messages, a repetitive spiral is entered into, which eventually results in the crossing of a threshold: to awareness.Thus, an organism comes to know itself. It can correct itself and make choices—to change or stay the same. Through the process of recursion it is as if the differences between certain parts of the brain and mind—‘transmitters’—caused other parts to become ‘receivers’ (a ‘sensory end-organ’), responding to the differences between them (1980:106). In fact, there is no ‘ghost in the machine’ of this kind, no Cartesian res cogitans, it being simply an effect of recursion: of the reaching of a level of complexity (and hierarchy) of circuitry which causes the organism to perceive its own prior perceptions. And Bateson concludes that this is how one might define something as having consciousness: something which is turned in on itself, acts on itself and is able to control itself through recursion.

VI: ‘Knowledge is both evolutionary and tautological’

The notion of memory, of habit and reinforcement, which Bateson introduces to explain the process of recursion, whereby a maturing body and mind will contain an increasing number of cybernetic circuits— habitual pathways between neurons in the brain, between ideas in the mind—also introduces the equally important notions of development, stasis and change over time. The knowledge which the organism possesses is not fixed. Being a matter of recursion, of cybernetic circuitry, movement is indeed inherent in its nature. But more than this, the circuitry of the brain and the mind is not fixed. Habit is certainly a fixing process, but not everything in human life is habit, and habits themselves change. As individual organisms die and are replaced in a population, whole networks of habits die and come to be replaced too.

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Habits are not everything and habits change, Bateson now explains, because new relations between things in the world, new pathways between neurons in the brain, new associations between ideas in the head, are always being created by the individual. Each individual human body is an ‘energy source’ (1972:126), and the energy of its metabolic processes translates as a constant perception of possible new relations in the world, and hence new objects. In his quest to see the meta-patterns between logical types, Bateson refers here too to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of entropy, whereby ‘the randomness of probability will always eat up order and pattern in the world’. That is, while each purposive organism will have created an order for itself by selecting a set of possible relations between possible things in the world (and defining it as ‘order’, or ‘law’ or ‘custom’ or ‘norm’), still its world will tend towards entropy because any number of other possible permutations of relations are likely to occur to it in future. Order and pattern in the world are eaten up by the organism shuffling and recombining the relations between components of circuits and networks of circuits in its body and mind—ideas and neurons—and shuffling and recombining the relations between components of its external world— objects and events. In short, proceeding alongside the habituation of life is a degree of entropy: relations between the components of an aggregate being mixed up, unsorted, random, unpredictable, unorderly.

The organism deals with entropy in two contrasting ways. Bateson calls them evolutionary versus tautological: an embracing of the implications and ramifications of possible change versus a homeostatic eschewing of them. The watchwords of the latter tautological process (also to be known as ‘epigenetic’ and ‘embryological’) are: coherence, steady state, rigour and compatibility. The process acts as a critical filter, demanding certain standards of conformity in the perceiving and thinking individual. Left to itself it proceeds towards tautology: towards nothing being added once the initial arbitrary axioms and definitions of order have been laid down. Hence, the first test of a new idea is: is it consistent with the status quo ante? is it entirely latent in the original axioms which supply the ‘proof of its correctness? In the tautological procedure, in short, every ‘becoming’ is tied back to existing conditions.

Contrastively, the evolutionary process is exploratory, creative and stochastic, feeding on the random to make new designations of order. From the steady supply of random perceptions, from ‘no-things’, new information is made, new ‘some-things’, by a non-random selection process which causes some mutations of prior order to survive longer than others and so be maintained and taken into the future. Here is an ongoing, endless trial and error with new things and relations, setting off

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down new, randomly presented pathways, some of which are then chosen as components of a new order. Collecting new mutations, new imaginations, evolutionary thought gathers new ‘solutions’ to the problems of meaning in the world, empirically testing these solutions according to new cybernetic circuiting.

If the tautological process is seen in terms of the DNA of an embryo which will determine how that organism will develop over time only in accord with latent, originary genetic terms, then the evolutionary process is one of genetic mutation where random changes will continually throw up potential alternative pathways of adaptation. And Bateson deliberately juxtaposes the patterns of these different logical levels. Tautology operates alike at the logical level of the individual organism and at that of thought in its cranium, at the level of cultural patterns and again in terms of ecological systems. Evolution occurs in the mind as in the brain and as in the gene pool of the population.

VII: ‘Evolution and Tautology are dialectically linked’

If there are two realms, that of tautology (whose essence is predictable repetition and replication) and that of evolution (whose essence is creativity, exploration and change), then life entails an alternation, a dialectics, between the two. As mental processes and phenomenal happenings the two may be adversarial, but a zigzag between them whereby each determines the other would appear to be necessary for the continuation of life. Homeostasis and adaptation, structure and process, form and function, status and learning, conservatism and radicalism, quantity and pattern, homology and analogy, calibration and feedback—these are ‘dialectical plural necessities of the living world’ (1980:237). The survival of life involves the marriage of random mutation, completely independent of existing ordered environments, and environmental demands, the regularities of functioning systems (minds, bodies, social systems, ecosystems). The procedure of life runs continuously between disruption and self-healing consistency.

VIII: ‘Social processes can be seen as recursive systems of relations’

Traditional modelling of the world in the West has employed a linear dynamics: external forces act on things, cause reactions, and so give rise to events; order derives from maintaining these factors in balanced equilibrium. Cybernetic models of order in the world, however, are based on inherent circularities and oscillations, and on dynamic thresholds. Cause is circular and reticulate, a matter of mutual feedback.

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Instead of ‘things’, then, there are relations between the parts and the whole of systems; instead of facts there are messages; instead of externalities per se—objects, forces and events—there are mutually implicating structures: patterns of constant and habitual interaction between co-dependent members of communicational systems.

Relationships, like ideas, are founded upon differentiation; only the distinct can be related. Once differentiation has occurred, however (and a relationship has been construed between distinct ‘individuals’ or ‘clans’ or ‘nations’ or ‘species’), relations can proceed on the basis either of similarity between the partners or of difference. Moreover, since entropy always eats up the fixed orders of life, such relations between partners do not stay the same for long. Hence, two processes can be observed: schismogenesis, where partners become increasingly distanced from one another, and integration, where they become increasingly close.

Schismogenesis itself can be of two kinds. If relations between partners is based on similarity, then a kind of schismogenesis can occur which Bateson calls ‘symmetrical’: each tries to outdo the other by adhering closer and closer to the common terms of their relationship. This is how nations get involved in arms races and Kwakiutl bigmen in potlatches. If relations between the partners is based on difference, then another kind of schismogenesis can occur: ‘complementary’. Here the progressive change in relations takes the form of different partners becoming more and more different or polarized in their behaviour.This is how class divisions and exploitations deepen, and how people become immured in sado-masochistic exchanges.

In the same way that ‘cumulative interaction’ (Bateson 1936:175) between partners to a relationship can lead to a process of schismogenetic differentiation—each reacting to the reactions of the other and so causing exponential changes in relations which follow simple mathematical laws—this might also lead to increasing integration. If partners’ relations are based on their similarity, then a kind of integration can occur which Bateson calls ‘peripheral’; here is a league of nations, or a valley of farmers, whose community is nurtured by a sense that ‘the more you give the more you get back’. If relations between the partners are based on difference, however, then another kind of integration can occur: ‘centripetal’, where increasingly complex divisions of labour or systems of welfare are engendered by people having their differences organized, say by a central administrative authority.

Schismogenesis and integration Bateson recognizes to be ideal-types. Ordinarily as social relations develop through time, and as habit counteracts entropy, so there will be a mixing: people getting both closer

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and further apart, tensions rising and falling. Two things, nonetheless, remain the same: there is always change, and there are always relations of cumulation. Only in terms of recursive circuiting can social relations— whether dyadic partnerships (between individuals or groups) or complex assemblages—be comprehended. They are communicational systems between co-dependent members whose habitual interaction is characterized by circularities, oscillations, dynamic thresholds, and feedback.

IX: ‘The biosphere is a mutually causal living system of communication’

The natural world of living forms, too, becomes a matter of organized communication. Living forms are not separate from nature but in recursive relationship with it. Indeed, living forms are coupled not only to their conceptualizations of environments and environmental order but also to embodiments of their ways of thinking about these and acting upon them in interactions within environments. Hence, all organisms contribute to the ordering and organization of the biosphere, and the perceptions held concerning the natural environment are part of their natural fitness.

Organism-plus-environment modify and generate each other, and just as there are no agents independent of interactions (and vice versa) so there are no organisms independent of environments (and vice versa). Natural order and a human or animal construction of it are, in short, inseparable. Instinct and culture can be understood alike as sets of propositions about the world by which different species communicate with the world; both are processes of adaptation. Life on earth concerns ecosystems wherein the material and the ideal are combined; the ‘ideal’ of conceptualization and information speaks of material events, is carried by material signals, and has material consequences. Information and natural order (negative entropy) are one.

If the organization of the biosphere should be considered a communicative recursive order rather than a material one, then to study it is aesthetically to appreciate pattern, context and meaning. Quantitative analysis may be sufficient for an abstract study of physical particles, but for a study of living forms, cultural, biological or ecological, a qualitative epistemology is called for; it makes no sense to attempt to factor in ‘energy’, ‘power’ and ‘control’ as isolated material phenomena. Indeed, the human aesthetic appreciation of the ubiquity of circuitry is vital for ecological survival; we are born of our world-views, their validity is a matter of our belief, but if they do not map correctly onto the environment, we can destroy it and ourselves. In this way, the

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