A multiparty imaginary dialogue about power and cybernetics1

Abstract

This article is written as a multisided dialogue intended to present a number of ideas about power. Some of these ideas are my own, expressed in a kind of evolutionary idiom of adaptation though they were partly developed in reaction to Foucault (and are far more indebted to Foucault and cybernetics than to contemporary evolutionist thinking). There is a deep irony in that my way of thinking is primarily rooted in the cybernetic anthropology of Gregory Bateson; however, he was deeply sceptical of the concept of power. My personification of him in this dialogue, as ‘Bateson’, demonstrates this scepticism and brings into the discussion other relevant ideas of his. The third participant in the dialogue, Mary Midgley, is included because her consideration of Hobbes’ ideas leads us to consider yet another, probabilistic, way of thinking about power.

Guest editorial: resilience and ethics in social systems

“…The ideas of generations of cybernetic thinkers can be brought to bear in clarifying the isomorphisms and metaphorical relationships between the domains of the physical, ecological, psychological and social. For example, Gregory Bateson critiqued the metaphorical use of the concept of “power”, derived from physics, in the domains of the social and the biological (Bateson, 1974 and Guddemi, 2010). It may be useful today to consider how Bateson would have viewed a similar metaphorical application of physical properties in the literature of resilience.…”