Peter Harries-Jones, Dept. of Anthropology, York University, Ontario
peterhj[at]yorku[dot]ca

4. CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY
Bateson tried to incorporate both discontinuity and continuity in his models of recursion. This meant that the various models of cybernetic circuits, his models of a thermostat that he referred to in his major writings always had at least two levels, one representing continuity of self-adjusting circuitry, as was typical of organic homeostasis, the other representing a change in the bias of the thermostat, and adjustment of the whole adjusting mechanism to a new qualitative setting. Changes in the second circuit bias, resulting in ‘*second order change*’ (1987: Chapter IV) are injunctive; they are changes which, from the perspective of an observer observing second-order change, could be called meta-communication (meta- to adjustment ‘inside the thermostat’). Maturana, on the other hand, defined this perspective as being rele-vant to the observer alone; for all communication conditions ‘inside’ any living system’s auto-poiesis was always conforming to its own structural determinism i.e. a continuous relational ad-justment to its own organization.. Bateson was wary of recursive models that only represented continuous relational adjustment, since they did not account for seeming possibility for the dis-continuities of second order change. He also referred back to work done many years earlier on two forms of coding in the cybernetic ordering of communication, analog and digital, one con-tinuous, the other discrete – arguing that in neither case could the one be reduced to the other. A specific demonstration of his wariness is evident in the ‘metalogue’ between himself and Paul Ryan that occurred during the time he was writing Angels Fear (Bateson, 1980; Ryan, 1993).

Bateson’s wariness stemmed from the fact that whatever he said about communicative regularities among humans, communicative regularities in the biological world had to be true of evolutionary circumstance. In the evolutionary schema of Charles Darwin, Darwin had produced a model of continuous adjustment: natural selection operated through continuous adjustment in the phenotype, to which neo-Darwinist biologists in the 1930s and 1940s had added a more jerky, but still continuous, change in genotypes brought about by the spread of mutations in a population. Both Bateson and his eminent father W. Bateson, also a developmental biologist, had very fundamental objections to Darwin. Darwin had negated the possibility of saltation, or evolution taking jumps, yet so far as developmental biology was concerned that is precisely what the evolutionary record showed had happened. Bateson was unfortunately unable to take ‘punctuated equilibrium’(Eldredge and Gould 1972) into account, an account which confirmed Bateson’s ideas about evolution and which incorporates discontinuity within continuity in evolutionary circumstance. The account of recursion in Angels Fear follows this pattern of combining continuities and discontinuity.

5. AESTHETICS AND ECOLOGY
Bateson argued that ecological aesthetics is tied to communicational regularities in the biosphere so that any ecosystem exhibits ‘Interwoven [communicative] regularities in a system so pervasive and so determinant that we might even apply the word “god” to it…the peculiarities of the god whom we might call Eco’ (1987: 142). That aesthetics is attached to perception is in agreement with all other accounts of aesthetics; and that aesthetics is attached to religious traditions is also well established. Christianity, like other religions has a vibrant aesthetic attached to its rituals, performances, myths and metaphors of religious experience.

The second order aspect of aesthetics is, however, a theme that is original to Bateson. He scatters throughout his examples the problem that aesthetic communication, though it is about interwoven regularities, is not the sort of communication with which we engage in our normal descriptions. Part of the difficulty in deciding what an aesthetic judgment is about is that aesthetic events often occur beyond boundaries specifically marked for ‘non-communication’ as if ordinary descriptive communication would be sacrilegious in that context.

The attachment of aesthetics to ecology can be read in at least two ways in Angels Fear. The first is that of a metaphor for unity contained in the idea of an ecosystem, an aesthetic sensibility to pattern and modulation of pattern – this is the material for dream and poetry (1991: 256). The other comes about through a deep connection between epistemology and aesthetics. Bateson drew the connection in terms of a forked riddle: ‘What is man that he may recognize disease or disruption or ugliness?’ ‘What is disease or disruption or ugliness that a man may know it?’ The riddle’s two aspects derive on the one side from perceptual acuity in recognizing a difference between beauty and ugliness, and on the other an observer’s knowledge of patterns of disease, and disruption. The pattern of one percept does not flow easily into the pattern of the other and numerous tensions lie in the fork between the two. At the outset there are issues of perception stemming from seeming contradictions in perceiving pattern flow . Next there is the tension between appearance and descriptions of ‘reality’ applied to appearances. This set of tensions then becomes a problem of epistemology. Bateson suggests that working away at the fork of contradictions, the interface between aesthetics and epistemology, will likely promote a new conception of holism, and perceptually will draw us toward an awareness of beauty in a larger more inclusive system. Then the interwoven regularities of the structure may – as in all sacred realms – become the basis for awe.

Nevertheless, he draws a contrast between a religious experience of unity and an ecological epistemology of holism and unity. An ecological epistemology lies in an immanent world, and that is where we will find its unity, whereas the world of religious belief is usually transcendental. Religious conceptions of transcendental unity are defended by faith and belief, and even differences in explanation of what ritual signifies can result in charges of heresy or sacrilege. An ecological epistemology, with its congruent ecological aesthetics must be much more critical in its examination of unity. Since any self-recursive communication system must become aware of disruption in its own relations, it must acknowledge systemic discrepancies which necessarily exist between what we can say and what we are trying to describe (1987: Chapter XV). This means becoming aware of the myths by which we live and the way in which these myths help establish a pattern and habit (1987: Chapter XVI). The myths of dualism, mind separate from matter, body separate from mind, environment separate from cultural tradition are among the most conspicuous of these myths in both science and the humanities, as too, is the practice in science of separating of parts from the whole. The epistemological work attached to aesthetics must examine how mind creates its mapping of the world, and how often the map is mistaken for territory (1987: Chapter II).

He probed these issues in other writing, outside the covers of Angels Fear, whenever he elaborated upon his ideas of an immanent rather than a transcendent holism.

Since human populations are locked in the immanent conditions of their own ecosystems the patterns of repetition and change that make up biological order makes it difficult for any observer to construct clear points of reference within them. He drew upon a striking image, that of ‘free fall’. Without any register or standard of reference, ecologists are in the same situation as that of a parachutist jumping out of a plane with no instruments with which they can establish a relationship to the ground. They are floating into free fall, not knowing what their proper orientation to earth might be …up ….or… down .

It helps to recall photos from the early days of flight one hundred years ago, as an aid to Bateson’s image of the vagaries and dangers of free fall. The early days of flying sported magnificent men in their flying machines, machines with wings, like those of a bird, that the pilot pulled up and down, mimicking bird propulsion. Other machines had propellers operated by the feet, as if the flying machine was an extension of a bicycle (the Wright brothers themselves ran a bicycle shop) while other flying machines were catapulted from ramps over cliffs, as if the mere act of building wooden wings to a wooden frame would guarantee a safe glide towards earth. None of these machines succeeded because no one knew anything about aerodynamics nor did they know anything of the control relationship necessary to introduce a technical object into an aerodynamic field. In the few seconds that the pilots were off the ground and in the air above the ground, they were in risk of their lives because they were in total ignorance of the medium in which they tried to assert their control. They were in ‘free fall,’ as our civilization is in free fall because it knows little or nothing about the holism of its eco-dynamics nor the recursive processes of ecology. Hence, as Bateson reminds us, if we are unable to adjust our ideas of adaptation to the dynamics of eco-systems we will be unable to come to any judgement about the patterns of continuity and discontinuity in ecological order. (Harries-Jones, 1995)

Bateson knew about the potential for runaway in climate change, having investigated this issue in the mid 1960s and had come to the conclusion that its effects were likely to be much more grave than the ecologists of the time suggested. Industrial organization had such little conception of what non-linear eco-dynamics might be. One argument current during the 1960s which he spent some time examining was that an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be beneficial because it will aid growth of forests! However, much better modelling of non-linear eco-dynamics was no resolution for Bateson. Instead of calling for an improvement to quantitative analysis of ecological patterns, he argued that what is required is to study holism and not part-ism. Only the generation of standards of reference about unity and integration in a holistic order would enable rigorous statements to be made about unity such as the biosphere. Needless to say, these standards of reference would be quite different from the ‘registers’ of sentience of Hume, Locke and other empiricists. Nor would they be ‘registers’ of the sublime as perceived through the artist’s depictions of nature, the Kantian path to the beautiful; nor ‘registers’ of taste – cultural capital on display – as in the case of Bourdieu. They were to be aesthetic in the widest sense. Wherever we begin to have intimate appreciation of form, shape, pattern in nature, there we should also affirm aesthetic notions of how parts fit in relation to wholes.

In other writing he gave supporting reasons for developing an aesthetic outlook. It would seem, he said, from what we know of early forms of culture, that human beings took clues from the natural world around and applied those clues in a sort of metaphoric way to the society in which he lived. Empathizing with the natural world enabled early cultures to use that empathy as a guide for their own organization and humanity’s own theories of psychology. This was what they called ‘totemism’ (Bateson 1973, 2000: 492). What we require is a new form of totemism in which our ecological understanding of the general systemic vision of the world is once again an appropriate source of metaphor. The alternative to this aesthetic vision can only be to chop the world into innumerable dualisms that separate us from our experience.

Evidently, aesthetics belonged to that side of mind that dealt with metaphor, poetry, imagery and imagination and was a sort of meta-level aspect of that ordering process. Yet the abstraction that yields aesthetic judgment, the meta-level aspect, was different in kind from any abstraction in science, or any other prose-type description. The following exchange is indicative (Bateson, 1991:300):

Q. Would it be correct to suggest that the aesthetic is this unifying glimpse that makes us aware of the unity of things which is not consciousness?
G.B: That is right; that is what I am getting at. The flash which appears in consciousness as a disturbance of consciousness is the thing that I am talking about.

It becomes a disturbance of consciousness because consciousness as a manifestation of prose or scientific description tends to focus inwards, whereas notions like the sacred and the beautiful tend to be always looking for the larger, the whole. Bateson’s path to the discussion of unity would take in those regions of experience where holism and its configurations already existed and examine them for clues. Christian religion, and ‘fate,’ and ideas about ecosystem integration, are all patterns of holism. So, too, any investigation of the realm of the sacred would yield indicators of how humanity has made a search for larger more inclusive pattern.

Aesthetics, the unifying glimpse, provides a medium through which humanity can begin to communicate about how to understand wholes and thus the unity of the biosphere. The aesthetics of symmetry and ratio, rhythms and resonance inherent in metaphor, poetry and found in ecosystem integration disturbs the descriptive prose used by science. Yet the two, consciousness and aesthetics, are not separate from each other, and should become conjoined aspects of our ability to understand.

Bateson did from time to time wonder out aloud whether aesthetic sensibility might, like consciousness itself, contain its own pathologies. After all he had worked on German propaganda films during part of World War II and knew all too well about that theatre of blood. But he never investigated his own lingering concerns about this possibility of aesthetics as something other than a self-corrective to consciousness. It is an unfortunate lapse because there has been an undercurrent of concern since the days of fascism in Europe that an ecological aesthetics can be so easily folded into a pathological sensibility of humanity using nature to toughen itself, and instilling an aesthetic sensibility of toughness, as was the case in the Nazi Youth movements and Nazi films about athletic prowess. Bateson’s greater concern was the fact that western science explicitly removed aesthetics from scientific thinking, regarding it as something other than science, and in so doing science limited its ability to comprehend change. Without forms of comparison, reflecting part-whole relations, we will scarcely be able to undertake observation of an ecosystem at all. We should remind ourselves that all action in a recursive system lies at the interface of its sub-systems. The edges or the boundaries between subsystems of aesthetics and consciousness, aesthetics and morality, unconsciousness and consciousness, are where both gaps and interconnections occur. Here ‘difference’ is to be found and the differences that make a difference lie at the interface of sub-systems. Only here can the pattern of differences – together with change in this pattern – be perceived (Harries-Jones, 1995: 232).

6. INFORMATION PROCESSING, FAMILY THERAPY AND BIOLOGY
In this final section I propose to step outside Angles Fear in order to address briefly issues in the history of science raised by the two processes of recursion, the first in that of family therapy, the second in biology itself. I have already mentioned the debates of Bateson versus Maturana, namely the ways in which a structure-determined system is interpretative and the extent to which an interpretative system is structure-determined. Rather than engaging family therapists in self-examination, these debates of epistemology versus ontology in the early 1980s on logical types and recursive ordering gave rise to confusion and, in the end, either to total intimidation by, or to total disillusion in the two constructs (Held and Pols, 1985: 516).

Family therapists had long complained bitterly about the difficulties of understanding Bateson’s hierarchy of Logical Types, and were often in despair as to how they would put this idea to practical use. Bateson replied to his complainants that he never meant his discussion of Logical Types in double binds to be a practical tool in psychotherapy, more a demonstration of the way in which an interactive and communicative approach to psychotherapy differed in an epistemological sense from the older individualistic approach used in Freudian psychiatry. Family therapists complained again about difficulties in understanding the logic of recursion discussed in Maturana and Varela. From the outset there were challenges to their rationale of autopoiesis, together with critiques suggesting that any theoretical transposition from the world of biology to human beings and their complex relational networks was a risky venture at the best of times. As with Bateson’s hierarchy of logical types, complaints about Maturana and Varela also concerned the practical dimensions of a transposition of ideas from theory to practice. Maturana had seemed to change the rules of the game one more time. He argued that an autopoietic system will determine through its own self-organization whether a change in the medium will become significant for it, and that changes will only become significant information for it, if those changes help preserve its own systemic stability. That is, nothing external to a structure determined system can specify changes as a consequence of an interaction, because external instructive interaction is impossible in living systems.

Family therapists took his argument to be much more than person A cannot unilaterally determine what person B will do, a position which Bateson himself took. Rather, Maturana seemed to argue that the therapist’s ability to undertake any form of intervention in re-organizing family dynamics is very limited indeed since there is no transfer of data from one individual to another. Therapists began to feel that Maturana’s recursive bootstrapping approach gave too much emphasis to the autonomy of the structure determined system and too little to the family therapist’s own sense of responsibility in initiating any intervention with his patients or clients.

There was still one more looming question. When Maturana wrote of the closure of cognitive systems to information, and of information transfer (i.e. therapeutic intervention) being unable to alter behaviour of the living system, the only possibility left open for therapeutic interaction was that of the therapist ‘languaging’ with his client for the purposes of consensual coordination of consensual coordinations of behaviours. The domain of ‘languaging’ between therapist and client is transformed into a domain of the dynamics of emotion and not information. Change was possible only if the patient changes his or her emotionally accepted premises, as a result of emotions entailed in the interactions with the therapist during conversation (Ruiz, 1999). If so, Maturana’s structure-determined stance privileged the autonomy of the client’s self-knowledge; it also seemed to permit an ‘anything goes’ type approach to family therapy which made many therapists feel discomforted (Jones, 1993: 25). Indeed Family therapists found aesthetic satisfaction in coming to understand the social choreography of family interaction. They found that everything from family dinners, sexuality, relations with other families are organized around themes entailed in the difference between symmetric and complementary patterns of interaction, the whole of which created a sort of punctuated dance. And they saw it as their task to change the patterns of the dance wherever they believed some interactions were pathological.

But did Maturana mean that no semantic information was present in the recursion of autopoietic systems? Maturana certainly suggests that an autopoietic system is closed to the sort of information from stimuli that common experience suggests that it is open towards (see quote in Endnote). Bateson was willing to admit that there was pre-given conditions – ‘*readiness*’ – for any form of communication to occur, as Maturana suggested. As he wrote in Angels Fear, a preinstructed state of the recipient of every message is a necessary condition of all communication and this too must enter into our notion of structure. Yet Maturana’s virtual erasure of the idea of semantic information rubbed against his own approach to learning. In Bateson’s view, learning in any context, whether therapeutic or not, is subject to a triad of ‘stimulus , response and reinforcement’ which allows one component to be a comment upon a relation between two others. In other words, there were alterable control mechanisms in family therapy which permitted the therapist to explore variance of environmental circumstance and systemic interpretations of context change (1987: Chapter IV). The central issues of understanding information was first, to grasp the contexts in which information exchanges took place, and how those contexts related to each other in an interpretative as well as instructive sense. Second, therapists could examine the variety of ways in which coded information – analog (relational), digital (instructional), and iconic (metaphoric) – were transformed at their interface.

Francisco Varela recognized the quandary, even if Maturana was hesitant to acknowledge it. In subsequent writing Varela introduced the term ‘enactive’ to indicate that cognition in living systems is not entirely devoid of information, nor is cognitive autopoiesis existent in a pre-given world as their earlier writing had suggested. Instead, cognition in living systems requires the ‘bringing forth of a world based on history and the variety of effective actions’ that a person can perform (Dupuy and Varela 1992: 20). The correction seemed to come too late. Maturana’s ‘languaging’ became non-acceptable in systemic family therapy. Within the space of about ten years most systemic family therapists abandoned his structure-determined stance (also known as biological constructivism), in favour of social constructivism. Moving from one to the other drew family therapy into the influence of post-structuralist post-modernism- with its very different set of assumptions (Flaskas, 2002: 32).

What was unexpected was that subsequently, the same sort of issues about instructive versus mutually co-ordinative types of information would arise within molecular biology. Molecular biology was firmly wedded to its views about genetic information being entirely, and deterministically, “instructive”. As time went on genetic information conceived solely as instructive information began to raise more and more quandaries. These reached spectacular proportions soon after the announcement of the Human Genome Project that the human number of genes in a human genome was only 28-38,000, a far, far smaller number than that which biologists had believed to be the case. A project undertaken at vast expense to confirm the centrality of the gene as the very centre of the blueprint of life began to disconfirm standard assumptions of genetic information as the blueprint for point-to-point instruction of proteins (Fox, 2000). The 28-38,000 range clearly indicated that the whole idea of genetic information operating as a type of key unlocking all aspects of the machinery of life, had to be revised. Information operations were multiplicative and not additive, as Bateson had pointed out previously (Bateson, 1991: 175-184), moreover if they were multiplicative, the keys going around unlocking multiplicative locks would be very unlike singular locks for single keys as the central dogma of molecular biology proposed. Keller argues, in keeping with Bateson, there are now so many findings of extensive redundancy in the lock and key metaphor of genetic control that reasons for the conspicuous robustness of developmental processes against environmental disturbances need to be worked through once more. Both molecular and developmental biology will need to return to some of the same problems that were of central concern to many embryologists in the early part of the 20th century (Keller, 2000: 147). As a result of the new-found interest in redundancy different definitions of ‘information’ have quickly emerged, with none of the new definitions having clear conceptual links with the standard concepts of lock-and-key instructive information (Bruni, 2002: 222).

In which case one alternative would be to allow a semantic definition of information, and another would be to allow both semantic and signifying varieties of genetic information involving a number of processes of interpretation co-ordinating gene with its immediate environment in the cell and beyond. At least one group of biologists, the Biosemiotics group have taken up this proposal. They argue that signifying relations exist in a myriad of interconnected pathways involved in the regulation of cellular processes which range far beyond a genome or chromosome or even a group of cells in the phenotype. This leads them directly back to Bateson and his definition of information as sensing mechanism, comparing differences which make a difference to a living system and its members or parts, wherever there is a capacity to make an interpretation (Hoffmeyer, 2008).

The view of the Biosemiotics group is that biology should be less a science devoted to information processing and more of a science devoted to all aspects of ‘sensing,’ signals and signs. The most elemental interpretation of difference essential to living organisms is the difference between ‘self’ and ‘other.’ At the level of micro-organisms upwards, examples are most noticeable in symbiosis – but not exclusive to that realm. Even at molecular level an important aspect of interpretation lies in the set of relations established between a ‘self’ and ‘another;’ examples of interpretation of ‘self’ vis-a-vis ‘other’ abound in the immune system. In plants and animals and in plant-animal interaction the most common signalling phenomena between self and other is to be found in the abundance of pheromones released. Signification, interpretation and the world of signals and signs seem to be a universal aspect of living systems, a veritable semiosphere neglected by biological science (Hoffmeyer, 1996). So Maturana’s and Varela’s amended version of autopoiesis has found a new home. If there are new topologies of recursion to be found, they will be found in the recursive processes of this ‘semiosphere.’

ENDNOTE
‘the semantic value of an interaction…is not a property of the interaction, but a feature of the description that the observer makes by referring to it as if the changes of state of the in-teracting system were determined by their mutual perturbations, and not by their respective indi-vidual structures [co-ordinating the co-ordination].’ (Maturana, 1975 quoted in Dell, 1985: 11)

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