As I was reading James Gleick’s [amazon_link id=”0007225741″ target=”_blank” ]The Information[/amazon_link], I started pulling threads online and came across Jannis Kallinikos’ post on the LSE Review of Books about books that had inspired him. The selection was sufficiently interesting that I ordered from Abe the one I’d never read, nor even heard of, Gregory Bateson’s [amazon_link id=”0226039056″ target=”_blank” ]Steps To An Ecology of Mind[/amazon_link]. Last night, I started reading it. I don’t know whether this section of the Preface was written to amuse, but it made me laugh:
“Gradually it appeared that for the next advances in the study of logical typing in communication [not sure what that means] I should work with animal material [maybe ‘typing’ is a typo?] and I started to work with octopus [definitely – never heard of an octopus that can type]. My wife Lois worked with me, and for over a year we kept a dozen octopuses in our living room [as you do]. This preliminary work was promising but needed to be repeated and extended under better conditions. For this no grants were available.
At this point, John Lilly came forward and invited me to be the director of his dolphin laboratory in the Virgin Islands. I worked there for about a year and became interested in the problems of cetacean communication, but I think I am not cut out to administer a laboratory dubiously funded in a place where the logistics are intolerably difficult. [That went well, then.]
It was while I was struggling with these problems that I received a Career Development Award under the National Institute of Mental Health.”
Terrific stuff. I’ve not started the book proper yet but am now looking forward immensely to reading it. So thanks to Prof Kallinikos.
[amazon_image id=”0226039056″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology[/amazon_image]
Somebody said a few weeks ago that anthropologists are the off-road vehicles of social science, and I can think of nobody who illustrates that better than Gregory Bateson. He was married to Margaret Mead (before he married Lois), and was formative in the development of cybernetics, transforming what might have been a dry and dismal discipline into one that inspired Salvador Allende and Stafford Beer, The Whole Earth Catalog, Deleuze and Guattari, NLP, and the art school intensity of Brian Eno and Andy Mackay.
While you wait for the book, you may enjoy “From Versailles to Cybernetics” , especially if you already know Keynes’ “Economic Consequences Of The Peace”. Bateson’s family was badly affected by The Great War; his eldest brother died in battle, and the second brother committed suicide in Piccadilly Circus. The surviving brother’s work is systematic, systemic, compassionate, and quirky. I hope you appreciate it.