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Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns Paperback – October 23, 2016
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- Print length216 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTriarchy Press Ltd
- Publication dateOctober 23, 2016
- Dimensions6.25 x 0.7 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-101909470961
- ISBN-13978-1909470965
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The way we see affects what we do, writes Nora Bateson near the start of this exploratory, far- ranging foray into unauthorized knowledge . In a series of premise-investigations undertaken by way of essays, conference talks, autobiographical story, quotes and poems, ranging through linguistics, biology, semantics, cognitive theory, justice awareness and embrace of paradox, Bateson invites and advocates suppleness of perception, rigor of mind, and depth of feeling. In this book that moves above all by its questions, Bateson embodies that rarity, a truly free thinker also fully engaged with the fates of all. --Jane Hirshfield, Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets
This is a book for the adventuresome, prepared to travel, relying on their own resources. It is a little book, but it is dense conceptually. The chapters are both independent arcs and parts of the whole, which indeed does circle around. If I were to name an orientation for this circling, it would be something like a desire for a more fluid and dimensional way of doing things such that ethical behavior can more readily be realized in any relationship, including our relation with the biosphere. The book is realized in various forms ranging from essays, to poems, from conference presentations to personal reflections, including an email to a friend. The style of writing varies, not only between chapters, but often within a chapter. One needs to be nimble to follow the shifts, much like travelling through a highly varied landscape with attention ranging from delight at distant views, concerns about safety of river crossings, to investigations of odd scratches on a tree or delight in a frail flower nestled among rocks. --Pille Bunnell in Cybernetics and Human Knowing, Vol. 24, No.1, 2017
Product details
- Publisher : Triarchy Press Ltd; 2nd edition (October 23, 2016)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 216 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1909470961
- ISBN-13 : 978-1909470965
- Item Weight : 13 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.25 x 0.7 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #376,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #500 in Consciousness & Thought Philosophy
- #14,584 in Social Sciences (Books)
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We are led from the life of a twelve year old peering into a tidal pool with her father, Gregory Bateson, one of the founders of cybernetics, to that of a woman who reveals her search for this father lost to her so young. We journey into her maturation as a daughter, then mother confronting education systems, and personal difficulties brought home to be faced not as dilemmas but as learning opportunities. All difficulties are to be faced not in their polarity, but in their complexity and that is how we learn and grow.
This book calls to mind the diary of Anais Ninn who so openly showed herself in the world. When an author is this intimate, it begins construct of intimateness between the reader and his or her own world, the creation of vulnerability that must occur as we face our future at this most precarious time. Nora doesn’t flinch as she contemplates what we want the world to look like after the failure of its current construct. Ecology is not simply the interconnectiveness of all of nature, humankind included. Where does perception and Mind fit?
I cherish this collection. It is infused with integrity and grit and demands the same of us as we experience it. I am called to mind a song of Leonard Cohen and the lines: “you know that you can trust her for she’s touched your perfect body with her mind”.
By Steve Glass, former attorney, environmentalist, disenfranchised Democrat, sometimes activist, and wannabe poet.
By the time I had read to page 55, the author had shown, by the insights that impress her, a naivete that had undermined my trust.
From page 55 I skipped to page 168 to familiarize myself with "symmathesy" and the "vitae" of which it is composed, or which contribute to the process ... and my interest was restored.
I appreciate Nora Bateson for taking her father's work another step forward, and for restoring the spirit to the concept of systems: the idea that wholeness is greater than the sum of its parts -- even when the parts are recognized to be systems! Synergy and feedback and interdependence are at the core of Nature itself, and the evolution of our own learning must take that into account.
Bryan W
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His daughter Nora (° 1968) initially took a completely different path in life and became a film maker. But she has struggled all her life with the intellectual legacy of her father. In recent years in particular, she has made re-evaluating and re-interpreting Gregory's views into her main activity, for example through a film about her father ("An Ecology of Mind", 2010) and her chairmanship of the International Bateson Institute in Stockholm (° 2014) .
This book bundles various articles she has written in recent years, readings, essays, but also poetry, drawings and loose musings. The great thing about this book is that it builds directly on the thinking of Gregory Bateson (which has now become much clearer to me) and also of her grandfather William Bateson (1861-1926, a famous biologist). Of course, she offers her own, albeit privileged, interpretation of their views, and alignes them with the problems we are confronted with at the beginning of the 21st century, hence my title "Bateson 3.0". For obvious reasons her emphasis is more on ecological thinking: looking at reality as a complex ecological system, which is interconnected in various dimensions and scales, and itself consists of a jumble of ecological systems that relate to each other in a particularly complex way. Nora Bateson's own contribution is to add contextual thinking: not only the interrelationships, but especially the different contexts of those relationships are important to her. She herself speaks of trans-contextuality. “Transcontextual description as a starting place opens the possibilities of better understanding the interdependency that characterizes living (and arguably many non-living) systems. With a transcontextual lens I find interfaces of mutual learning. This lens opens up entirely new dimensions of information where the data has otherwise been flattened into a single plane or a single context. I also find that the multiplicity of the descriptive process demands that I never lose sight of the many perspectives that are integrating.”
She immediately adds that the key to reading trans-contextuality is above all the process of "mutual learning": various contexts are constantly learning from each other, so that an even more complex dynamic whole is created, which is constantly adapting and constantly interacting. I particularly like that dynamic aspect; as Nora Bateson herself indicates, it takes into account the time factor, a factor that is overlooked by most other analyses, making reality rather static, as represented in a model, a chart or a map. Of course, as a historian, I like her take on this.
That shift in Nora’s view, compared to her father’s, stems from a discontent with the path that systems thinking and complexity theories have taken: although they are fundamentally anti-reductionist and anti-deterministic, they have become, according to her, more and more mechanistic, ending up in an engineer's approach that cannot really solve the fundamental problems of our time: “the linearity and the mechanistic principles of reductionism in western culture have wormed their way into the systems vocabulary. The result is that we get strategic methodologies and defined models for fixing isolated issues within complex living interactions that have a living context.”
She is also critical about the recent tendency to connect systems thinking with holistic approaches and to constantly speak in terms of parts and wholes: “The very idea of interconnectedness has allowed lines to be drawn lazily between nodes or parts of the whole system. The world may be able to use the terms of systems thinking, but some of the thinking has lost its real value and become muddled into something more akin to ‘oneness’.”
Hence her emphasis on trans-contextuality. And also - instead of engineering methods - a more aesthetic approach (and this is in line with her father's thinking): the artistic is a way of dealing with reality that is more transparent and above all shows more respect, in contrast to the control obsession of mechanistic thinking. “In all forms, art can offer an experience of integration that calls upon our cultural language of symbols, our imagination, our history, our intellect, and our emotions. (…) As I see it, art allows us to perceive from multiple perspectives simultaneously. In order for science to really work with complexity, we need art to help give scientists a more developed capacity to perceive context, one that includes all the disciplines, emotions, cultural symbols, and personal memories. As Blake said in ‘The Grey Monk’: “A tear is an intellectual thing.””
That may all sound abstract, and Nora Bateson admits that her discourse does indeed remains fairly theoretical. But for her that other way of looking at reality is the only way out of stalled scientistic thinking, of which many well-meaning approaches (such as holism, systems thinking, etc.) still are permeated. On top of that, for Nora, this new approach is really needed if we are to tackle the enormous challenges facing humanity, - the apocalyptic perspective of climate change and the decline of biodiversity -, in a much more appropriate way. With a typical Batesonian twist, she goes one step further in that thought process: why not start from the worst case? Can we make an exercise that takes the apocalypse as given, and think back from that perspective?: “Using this kind of ‘pre-hindsight,’ different directions for our actions may become imperative, and for very different reasons than we might expect. Looking backward from the rubble of our mistakes we may see our current priorities from another angle. While this thought exercise may appear to embody a loss of hope, it is also likely that leapfrogging on the timeline of consequences may provoke a kind of thinking we do not otherwise have access to.” That sounds problematic, but it is at least a challenging proposal.
The multiformity of this booklet in itself testifies to the pluriform nature of Nora Bateson's thinking and how it is based on uncertainty and complexity, all in line with her father and grandfather. She remains modest, because she is well aware that her approach remains very abstract and theoretical, but it is at least a good, practical starting point: “In defense of a world that is characterized by mutual learning between variables in a given context—a world that does not stay the same, a world that won’t be mechanized or modeled—in defense of that world, I maintain that nothing could be more practical than to become more familiar with the patterns of movement that life requires. The goal is not to crack the code, but rather to catch the rhythm.”
In one of her essays she makes an attempt to put her approach into practice in a more systematic, theoretical framework, with the central notion of the "symmathesy" instead of the term "system". I’m not sure this approach is the way to go, because it remains very abstract. Time will tell, but it is at least worth the effort to walk the path. She herself is rather optimistic: “I maintain, at the risk of being called abstract, that the possibility of an increase in our ability to receive nuanced information about the interactions in a complex system exists. This is my optimism. This is where I place hope for the coming eras. We need that sensitivity to live better lives. This is the sensitivity that will allow us to understand our spouses better, to raise our children better, to grow food better, study life better, and organize our world better. It will also make us into artists. I maintain that nothing could be more practical”.
Nora Bateson writes with the intention of carrying on a family tradition. Her father was the anthropologist and cyberneticist, Gregory Bateson who sometimes talked about the "path which connects. Her work includes a film about him. In the book she talks about this and her grandfather William Beteson who was a Professor of Biology at Cambridge with achievements of his own, and how she is continuing to expand this legacy. But of course she is aiming for more.
The essays and poems in this book look at a range of matters from ecology, philosophy, economics as well as experience of body, attitudes to nature, the complexities of human nature, bringing up children, rape and science. Many of the poems and prose poems capture moments, feelings and dillemas. In short this is a stunning survey of the contemporary existence written with a stunning brevity and precision. Each one is an arc of the larger circle which each piece is a fragment of.
Such diversity perhaps has a problem that read as a whole it risks becoming too diffuse. But this is no more than any other anthology of verse or articles. The book it self could either be read as a whole or dipped in at random, like such volumes. There is scarcely a dud. This is a book to keep at one's side for a lifetime of wealth. There is much to enjoy here as well as a large sum of enlightenment.
Buy this book; dip in and out, enjoy the touches of beauty, the challenges and at times, the raw honesty.





