“Bateson sought continually to elucidate the basis of form and pattern in the living world. As a foreword, we will do an online broadcast of the documentary on Bateson’s life and work An Ecology of Mind, (2010), directed by his daughter Nora Bateson. Given the overlapping themes and chronologies of the essays included in each volume, we will be reading and discussing both volumes in parallel over the two sessions, according to the schedule outlined below. The period in between will be focused on the collection of essays that represent the most substantial body of his work, and which were published in two separate volumes Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and the posthumous A Sacred Unity (1991).

Our exploration of Bateson’s work is structured around the reading of four of his books, roughly organized in a chronological sequence, beginning with his first book, Naven, first published in 1936, and ending with Mind and Nature. His astonishing, radically different view of the world, woven into a long, complex and sweeping body of work, requires some time to get used to, hence the decision to dedicate a term to the task, and so as a group.

According to Charlton (2008), whose overview of Bateson’s work serves as a useful companion to our sojourn, it is precisely this “refusal to stay within the bounds of single disciplines” (ibid.: 1) that explains why Bateson’s work remains largely neglected to this day, albeit its significant legacy within certain spheres of the natural and social sciences and (post)humanities.

Bateson’s insistence that only a different, better, epistemology can tackle the world’s deepening crises by correcting the disastrous “self-conscious purposiveness” that guides much of today’s destructive thinking and behavior, is one that speaks directly to the reading group’s opening provocation of the Anthropocene not only as a new geological epoch, but as a new epoch of thought.Īnthropologist, social scientist, linguist, psychologist, ecologist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, cyberneticist, philosopher, naturalist, poet, Bateson is clearly one of the most original and intellectually promiscuous thinkers of our time. In doing so, we consider his claim that, “the major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” Arguably, one could switch the two verbs in Bateson’s provocation and reflect his view of the living world as one that is relational in its constitution and mental in its attributions. This term is dedicated to the work and ideas of Gregory Bateson (1904-1980).

Bateson steps to an ecology of mind