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Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead: for God’S Sake, Margaret! 1 Inventing Systems: ToMaTo Spring Quarter 2006 Jeff Glassman/Arun Chandra Contents Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead: For God’s Sake, Margaret! 1 Gregory Bateson: The Position of Humor in Human Communication 15 Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow: Behavior, Purpose and Teleology 40 Heinz von Foerster: On Constructing a Reality 44 Invitation to Dance: A Conversation with Heinz von Foerster 53 Ernst von Glasersfeld: Distinguishing the Observer 57 William S. Condon: Communication: Rhythm and Structure 63 Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness 75 Herbert Br¨un: Declarations 81 Marianne Br¨un: Designing Society 83 Mark Enslin: Teaching Composition: Facing the Power of the Respondent 87 1 Preface........................................... ......... 87 2 ThePoweroftheRespondent. ............. 87 3 ImagesofTeacherandofComposer . .............. 91 4 ComposingthePerformanceofTeaching. ................. 93 5 WhatDoITeachsuchthatITeachComposition? . ................. 99 6 CompositionsthatTeach:OpenForm . ............... 101 Fredrick Engels: The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man 108 Fredrick Engels: Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 114 1 TheDevelopmentofUtopianSocialism . ................ 114 2 TheScienceofDialectics . .............. 119 3 HistoricalMaterialism . .... .... .... ... .... .... .... .............. 122 Karl Marx: The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof 132 Mark Sullivan: The Performance of Gesture: Musical Gesture, Then, And Now 139 Preface............................................ .......... 139 1.Prologue ......................................... .......... 139 2.AMedium .......................................... ........ 141 3. Formulation: TheProcedureofDistinguishing . ...................... 146 4.ContextualHistory ................................ .............. 147 5.Address.......................................... .......... 148 6.Performance ...................................... ........... 149 7.Configurations .................................... ............ 152 8.OneorAnother..................................... ........... 154 9.ProcessesofInvention . ............... 155 10.Posture ......................................... .......... 156 11.MusicalGesturesandMovements . ................ 159 12.AVignette....................................... ........... 162 13.AcousticGesture ................................. ............. 163 14.LinguisticGesture. ............... 164 15.MusicalGestureandLinguisticGesture . .................... 167 SPRING QUARTER 2006 ii Inventing Systems: ToMaTo 16.Movement,SpeechandMusicalGesture . .................. 180 17.MusicalGestureandMusicalGesture . .................. 180 18.MusicalGesture,Now . .... .... .... ... .... .... .... .. ............. 180 SelectedBibliography. ............... 181 SPRING QUARTER 2006 iii Inventing Systems: ToMaTo For God’s Sake, Margaret! Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead Stewart Brand, CoEvolutionary Quarterly, June 1976 Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were married in mation, and (this year) the American Association for the 1936. They had met and fallen in love in 1932 while Advancement of Science, and a Curator of the Ameri- both were doing anthropological fieldwork on the Sepik can Museum of Natural History, which continues as her River in New Guinea (Margaret was at the same time headquarters. In public affairs she seems to have taken with her second husband, Reo Fortune). In New Guinea over the Eleanor Roosevelt niche. Gregory’s unusual sense of theory met Margaret’s im- After Bali and the Macy Conferences Gregory Bateson proved field methodology and sparked much of the qual- went on to work with schizophrenics, alcoholics, artists, ity in Gregory’s opus on the latmul tribe Naven. dolphins, students, and a steadily more general set of Newly-wed in Bali, they spent two collaborative years understandings of what they have in common. He co- in the most intense and productive fieldwork of their authored a book, Communication: The Social Matrix of lives, developing, among other things, a still unmatched Psychiatry (1951–68, Norton), with Jurgen Ruesch, and photographic analysis of the culture. edited Perceval’s Narrative — A Patient’s Account of his Their daughter Mary Catherine, Margaret’s only child, Psychosis, 1830–1832 (1961, Stanford). Mary Cather- was born in 1939 in the United States. Gregory and Mar- ine, his and Margaret’s daughter, wrote a book about one garet worked together on the result of their Bali field- of Gregory’s conferences, Our Own Metaphor (1972, work, Balinese Character — A Photographic Analysis, Knopf). His collected papers appear in Steps to an Ecol- and then were separated increasingly by World War II ogy of Mind (1972, Ballantine), a book that wowed me and their own diverging interests. out of my shoes. If Gregorylives long enoughhe will get After the war they both were involved in starting the his Nobel for the Double Bind Theory of Schizophrenia. somewhat famous Macy Conferences (1947–53) that in- Margaret is now 75, Gregory 72. They meet seldom vented cybernetics. This interview begins with their joint though always affectionately. Gregory has a son John, recollection of that critical period. 23, by his second wife, and a daughter Nora, 9, by Lois Margaret Mead is one of the world’s most remarkable Bateson his present wife. This meeting with Margaret women. She got a full mixture of praise and notori- took place at Gregory’s home near Santa Cruz, Califor- ety (notorious in that day because women weren’t sup- nia, in March of this year [1976]. posed to talk about sex) with her first book, Coming of Stewart Brand: I need a little background,if it’s all right, Age in Samoa (1928). Since then there have been ten on how this whole Macy thing got rolling, why, and other books and numerous honors and positions, includ- when, and what the sequence was. ing President of the American Anthropological Associa- Gregory Bateson: There was this Macy meeting in what, tion (1960), and of Scientists’ Institute on Public Infor- ’42?1 1The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1930–1955. New York: The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1955, p.20 For God’s Sake, Margaret! 1 MEAD, BATESON AND BRAND Brand: Who started it, and what was it about? paper on cybernetics.3 Bateson: This was a meeting called “Cerebral Inhibi- Bateson: Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow. ‘Behavior, tion,” which in fact was a meeting on hypnosis.2 “Cere- Purpose and Teleology,’ Philosophy of Science, 1943.4 bral inhibition” was a respectable word for hypnosis. Mead: That’s it, you see. Most of what was said about ‘feedback’ was said over Bateson: It could just have been published at the time of lunch. the Cerebral Inhibition conference. Margaret Mead: Well, I know that’s what you always Mead: It was just coming out or just had come out. tell people, but I didn’t sit at the same place at lunch, and Brand: What was the experiment that that paper I heard what was said at that conference. But at that con- recorded? ference, which is the one where Milton Erickson hyp- notised that Yale psychologist, it was at the end of that Bateson: It didn’t record an experiment, it reported on conference that you really had the design of what needed the formal character of seeking mechanisms, essentially. to be done. And then you were caught up in war work Self-corrective mechanisms such as missiles. The mis- and went overseas and there was that long period. sile measures the angle between its direction and the tar- I think that you actually have to go back to that earlier get it’s seeking, and uses that measure to correct itself. meeting that was held in the basement of the old Psycho- Mead: But using some very simple psychological exper- Analytic building on the West Side the day of Pearl Har- iments that Rosenblueth had been doing at the University bor. of Mexico. Bateson: They didn’t go on from year to year, those Brand: Do you recall what they were saying that you early ones. Larry Frank was chairman I bet. overheard that got you excited? Mead: No, Larry never was chairman, you know. He al- Bateson: It was a solution to the problem of purpose. ways sat on the sidelines and made somebody else be From Aristotle on, the final cause has always been the chairman. Kubie was a very important person at that mystery. This came out then. We didn’t realize then (at point. least I didn’t realize it, though McCulloch might have) Bateson: Yes. Kubie was an important bridge because that the whole of logic would have to be reconstructed Kubie had respectable-ized Milton. There’s a whole for recursiveness. When I came in from overseas in ’45 I series of papers which are jointly Kubie and Erickson. went within the first two or three days to Frank Fremont- Now, in fact, they were Erickson’s papers. Smith, and said, “Let’s have a Macy Conference on that stuff.” Mead: And Kubie didn’t know what was in them. That’s the truth. Mead: You and Warren McCulloch had an exchange of letters when you were in Ceylon. Bateson: But Kubie did get right the energy problem. He was the first person that really took Freud’s ‘energy’ Bateson: We did? and said, “Look, look, look, it makes no sense.” There is Mead: Yes. You told me enough about it in some way. a very good paper by Kubie on the errors of Freudian en- I talked to Fremont-Smith. McCulloch had talked to ergy theory. [Goes to find the references] Huh. Kubie, Fremont-Smith. “Fallacious Use of Quantitative Concepts in Dynamic Bateson: Fremont-Smith told me, “Yes, we’ve just ar- Psychology.” ranged to have one, McCulloch is the chairman,
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