The Reenchantment of the World (30 page)

 

 

For Bateson, then, it was not the gene, but the pattern or form of an
organism which was the crucial element in heredity; and if so, then
symmetry must be the key to the lock. The basic facts of his study
came from examining segmentation, such as that which occurs in the
earthworm. Biologists call this phenomenon "meristic differentiation,"
the repetition of parts along the axis of an animal. This axial symmetry
can be distinguished from the type of radial symmetry displayed by
starfish or jellyfish. Both types of symmetry show the continuity of
cell generations and behavior we call "hereditary." But whereas the
segments of the radially symmetric animals are usually all alike,
transversely segmented creatures are capable of a dynamic asymmetry
between successive segments -- "metamerism." In other words, anomalies
of merism are the result of a disruption of normal functioning, and this
leads to variation; but this process is itself normal. Nonrepetitive
segmentation, such as occurs in the development of the lobsters claw,
falls into this category. For William Bateson the study of metamerism
opened the door to a concrete demonstration of the primacy of form over
matter, and enabled a systemic understanding of heredity and variation. As
such, his work constituted a first step in developing an alternative to
chromosome theory. He eventually came to argue that what was transmitted
in heredity was not an objective substance, but the power or faculty of
being able to
reproduce
a substance: tendency, disposition, was what
was passed on.6

 

 

Bateson, however, did take one idea from Victorian physics, which was
having its own struggles trying to reconcile matter and force. A number
of physicists, including Maxwell, had suggested that for heuristic
purposes only, the atom be viewed not as a Newtonian billiard ball, but
as a smoke ring, or a vortex. The advantages were obvious. The so-called
vortex atom made possible an explanation of the universe which was not
completely deterministic. The image embodied the unification of matter
and force, as Sir Joseph Larmor, its leading exponent, once declared,
and it enabled one to talk of force and change without relying totally
on Newtonian rearrangement. Like a smoke ring, the vortex atom was seen
as being able to twist and divide, producing new loops; and although
Bateson did not discuss the vortex atom explicitly, he emphasized
spontaneous division as the key characteristic of living matter. His
own notion of living matter, derived partly from ideas already current
in Cambridge zoological circles, held that an organism was a "vortex of
life." In 1907 he wrote that animals and plants were not simply matter,
but systems through which matter was passing. Consciousness apart, said
William Bateson, any entity that, like a smoke ring, could spontaneously
divide had to be regarded as a living entity. There is no vitalism in
his work, no assumption of "God" or an 'élan vital.' But his is a type
of explanation which has little in common with traditional physics,
and in fact much more in common with alchemy. In both -- as in what
would later become information theory -- nature is first and foremost
"a perpetual circulatory worker."7

 

 

The image of the vortex -- what would later be called, in cybernetic
terminology, the concept of circuitry -- was, like the argument of
the primacy of form over matter, essential to Bateson's repudiation of
chromosome theory. If an organism is an integral whole, a system rather
than a mere assemblage of "characters," variation is a phenomenon
that has serious consequences, for it must precipitate a coordinate
change throughout the entire organism. In the nineteenth century, the
French physiologist Claude Bernard had spoken of the 'milieu int&eacue;rieur'
(internal environment) of an organism -- an environment that Walter
Cannon, in "The Wisdom of the Body" (1932), saw as being maintained by
a process he called "homeostasis." This notion was William Bateson's
central holistic principle. He wrote to his sister Anna in 1888:

 

 

I believe now that it is an axiomatic truth that no variation, however
small, can occur in any part without other variation occurring in
correlation to it in all other parts; or, rather, that no system,
in which a variation of one part had occurred without such correlated
variation in all other parts, could continue to be a system.

 

 

Initial variation thus acts as an environmental change, setting off
a chain reaction throughout the "circuit" or "vortex." Some time must
elapse before the organism is once again a system. As Gregory Bateson
would argue years later, any system, whether a society, culture, organism,
or ecosystem, which manages to maintain itself is rational from its own
point of view; even insanity obeys a "logic" of self-preservation. As
the years went by, William Bateson became increasingly convinced that
the interrelations of the parts of a system were subject to geometric
control just as concentric waves in a pool, and that the key to the laws
of form involved finding the "accommodatory mechanism," or homeostatic
prinople. Furthermore, he guessed that this "mechanism," which he believed
coordinated the organism as a whole, would be a periodic phenomenon,
like a wave. During the mid-1920s, the father began to draw the son
into his research. They coauthored an article in which this "undulatory
hypothesis" was extended to the study of partridges in an attempt to
explain how rhythmical banding develops and spreads over the organism,
even down to the tips of the feathers. The "analogy with the propagation
of wave-motion must, in part, at least," wrote the authors, "be a true
guide."8 Whether this hypothesis is valid or not, it is clear that the
concepts and methodology developed by his father formed the matrix of
Gregory's early scientific experience. "I picked up a vague mystical
feeling," wrote the latter in 1940,

 

 

that we must look for the same sort of processes in all fields of
natural phenomena -- that we might expect to find the same sort of
laws at work in the structure of a crystal as in the structure of
society, or that the segmentation of an earthworm might really be
comparable to the process by which basalt pillars are formed.
>>Fractal geometry

 

 

Above all, it was William Bateson's attitude toward reason
itself which shaped so much of Gregory's scientific and emotional
consciousness. Reason, writes Coleman, was for William not the mere
Newtonian shuffling of atomic sense impressions but "the intuitive
grasp of essential relations." He saw the vortex atom, or any such
scientific model, in the same way he saw an oriental print. It had
conceptual wholeness. It inspired the imagination to an understanding
not attainable by rational calculation. William Bateson saw this sort of
intuitive insight as evidence for the view that there was a limit to the
truth of any scientific explanation, and that there was a deeper level
of reality (Mind) which lay beyond its reach. This notion of necessary
epistemological incompleteness, that the Mind can never know itself,
is perhaps the crux of Gregory Bateson's whole metaphysics. And if this
is the rock on which modern science has finally foundered, it has also
proven to be, in Gregory Bateson's hands, the foundation on which a new
science might be built.9

 

 

To turn, then, to Gregory's work, we can summarize his intellectual
development as follows. In the 1920s he studied biology and anthropology,
roughly following in his father's footsteps at Cambridge. The 1930s were
devoted to anthropological fieldwork, first among the Iatmul people of
New Guinea, which resulted in the publication of
Naven
(1936), then
among the Balinese, where he collaborated with his then wife, Margaret
Mead. Bateson served with the American Office of Strategic Services
during the War, and then took part in the postwar Macy Conferences at
which modern cybernefic theory was formulated. Soon after he coauthored
"Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry" (1951) with psychiatrist
Jurgen Ruesch, and spent roughly the next decade as an ethnologist
at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, California. It was here that he had
an opportunity to work with alcoholics and schizophrenics, applying
the concepts of cybernetic theory to these "diseases" and generating
a novel approach to both of them. This work, as well as his work on
interspecies communication during the 1960s, eventually enabled him to
elaborate a new theory of learning. Finally, the 1970s were characterized
primarily by the attempt to integrate the insights from his previous
investigations with a revision of Darwinian theory, a new approach to the
problem of evolution resulting in the publication of "Mind and Nature:
A Necessary Unity" (1979). With this work Bateson had come full circle,
returning to his original interest in biology after having completed one
of the most creative intellectual journeys ever undertaken by a single
individual. For the purposes of exposition, I shall devote the present
chapter to the work in anthropology, ethnology, learning theory, and
abnormal psychology, deal with Batesonian epistemology and its ethical
implications in Chapter 8, and devote part of Chapter 9 to a critique
of Batesonian holism as a future metaphysics.10

 

 

As Bateson explains, certain biological analogies he learned in the
1920s, and his fathers approach to the natural world, led to his study
of the Iatmul people of New Guinea. Bateson's investigation focused
on the transvestite ceremony known as "naven," but the nature of the
ceremony itself proved to be much less important than the fact that the
investigation uncovered, in Bateson's eyes, the nature of scientific
explanation itself, and ended in the formulation of a model that might
explain the essential character of all mental interaction. Since this
model and the methodology that generated it contain the seeds of many of
Bateson's later theories of social and natural phenomena, it is important
to examine his investigation of naven in some detail.11

 

 

Naven is a ritual performed by the Iatmul in which the men dress like
women and vice versa, and then act out certain roles normally associated
with the opposite sex. The occasions for naven are the achievements
of the 'laua,' or sisters child, and the celebration itself is the
responsibility of the 'wau,' or mother's brother. Hence the essential
relationship is between uncle and niece or nephew, but naven is in
fact performed by "classificatory" 'waus,' not by the actual maternal
uncle. "Classificatory" 'waus' are relatives related to the 'laua' in
a matrilinear way, for example, the great-uncle or male relatives who
are in a type of brother-in-law relationship to the father of the 'laua.'

 

 

There is a whole list of standard cultural acts that call for naven, acts
which are most important when performed by a boy or girl for the first
time. These include (for a boy) the killing of an enemy or foreigner;
the killing of certain animals, or the planting of certain plants; using
certain types of tools or musical instruments; traveling to another
village and returning; marriage; possession by a shamanic spirit,
and so on. For a girl the list includes catching fish, cooking sago,
or bearing a child, among other instances.

 

 

In the ceremony itself, the classificatory 'waus' put on bedraggled female
costumes, take the name of "mother," and then go searching for their
"child," the 'laua.' The ritual pantomime might consist of dressing and
acting like decrepit widows, and deliberately stumbling about, while the
children of the village follow with peals of laughter. When women play
a part, the (classificatory) aunts may beat their nephew or niece when
his or her achievements are being celebrated. Unlike the men, the women
do not dress in filthy garments, but put on the most fashionable male
attire. They may paint their faces white with sulfur -- the privilege of
men who have committed homicide -- and carry male ornaments. They are
referred to by male family terminology (father, eider brother, etc.),
and affect the bravado commonly associated with male behavior among the
Iatmul, while the men act in a self-humiliating manner. The ceremony
may also include a pantomime reversal of overt sexual activity. Bateson
observed one ceremony in which the 'mbora,' or 'wau's' wife, dressed as
a male and simulated the actions of copulation with her husband, taking
the male-superior role; Sometimes the 'wau' will pantomime giving birth
to me 'laua.'

 

 

From a Western point of view the whole ceremony, with its deliberate
confusion of sexual roles and attire, seems totally incomprehensible. What
could the Iatmul possibly think they are doing? In trying to answer
this, Bateson followed his hunch that the difference between the
radial and transverse segmentation of the zoological world had a social
analogue. It turned out that the larger Iatmul villages were unstable,
always on the point of fissioning along patrilineal lines: father broke
away and took his son with him. Unlike the Western situation in which
the break is essentially heretical -- an ideological difference --
the Iatmul situation is schismatic. The breakaway group forms another
colony, but with the same set of norms as the parent community. The
Western model of heresy is similar to metamerism or dynamic asymmetry,
whereas the Iatmul model is analogous to radial segmentation, in which
the successive units are repetitive.

 

 

The problem of social fission, said Bateson, becomes clearer when
we realize that the analogy can be stretched to a comparison of how
social control is exerted. The mind's eye might conceive of a radially
symmetrical animal as being centrifugal, without any controlling center,
since the emphasis in the pattern seems to be in the surrounding
segments. The Iatmul are similarly centrifugal, because they have no
law, no central established authority that imposes sanctions in the
name of the whole community. Offences always take place between two
segments, and social sanctions are "lateral" as well. Western society,
on the other hand, emphasizes the state versus the citizen. If I rob my
neighbor he may be angry, but it is "the Law" that goes after me and
takes action against me. If he should attempt a lateral sanction and
decide to take the law into his own hands, he might find himself in as
much trouble as I am. Because of this high degree of centralization,
Western societies can accommodate a new group with new norms only if
it is relatively unobtrusive about its existence. Should it advertise
its difference from the center, or assault it, that center will launch
a determined counterattack. Iatmul society has no such center, and no
such rigidly defined norms. Norms for the Iatmul are seen as conventions
to be broken -- if one wields sufficient personal power. And since male
charisma, so essential to Iatmul sexual ethos, is very much admired, the
communities are always on the verge of fissioning along patrilineal lines.