This intellectual biography covers the trajectory of Bateson's career,
from his anthropological work in Bali alongside his wife, Margaret Mead,
to his contributions to family therapy in the United States, and to
studies of recursion as a feature of communication patterns in both the
human and in the animal world. Layers of feedback with their many
differing contexts, highlight the presence of meaning in social
relations in contrast to that absence of meaning, purposefully proposed,
within information theory. Throughout the human and in the animal world,
recursion of feedback accounts for grasp of patterns, their difference,
and with ability to communicate, enable transduction of perceptions of
difference.
Bateson's insistence on feedback and communication re-frames many
aspects of culture, psychology, biology, and evolution. His legacy is
recognized as an important precursor to the formation of a new science
called Biosemiotics.
Harries-Jones argues that Bateson turns conventional causality upside
down through showing how humanity's perceptions, as with perceptions of
all sentient beings, are anticipative. All sentient beings abduct from
recursive patterns, rather than relying on linear evidence gathered
about time/space movements of objects. Thus circular pattering provides
clearer perceptions of the difference between sustainable creativity and
current biocide, between our appreciation of nature's aesthetics and
time/space 'games of power' which underlie so many social and biological
theories.
