Toward Batesonian sociocybernetics: from Naven to the mind beyond the skin

Abstract

PurposeTo construct, from Bateson's social ideas ranging from Naven to the 1979 Mind and Nature, a Batesonian sociocybernetics.Design/methodology/approachThe paper considers Bateson's ideas about the delineation of systems by the observer, as they were taught to his classes in the 1970s and as they were expressed in the so‐called first, 1936 Epilogue to Naven, and shows how these ideas led Bateson to a skeptical, anti‐reificationist social cybernetics.FindingsBateson de‐emphasized system boundaries, instead seeing systems as creations of the observer and as arbitrary cuttings of a continuous web of cybernetic processes.Research limitations/implicationsBateson's argument in Naven, a work originally published in 1936 and partially based in a sociological tradition which also forms some of the roots of Luhmann's thought, is surprisingly relevant to contemporary issues in second‐order cybernetics and sociocybernetics.Practical implicationsBateson's skepticism about reification, and emphasis on the observer's role in the construction of system boundaries, can point a way for sociocybernetics to address those cybernetic systems which do not fit Luhmann's or Maturana's strict criteria for autopoiesis.Originality/valueThis paper attempts to show the sophistication and relevance of Bateson's social thinking to the field of sociocybernetics.

Steps toward a digital ecology: ecological principles for the study of digital ecosystems

“…Other notions of second-order cybernetics, most prominently autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela, 1992), emphasize the boundary between system and its environment created and maintained by the system itself, such as cell walls or human skin. Bateson’s opposition toward such boundaries was not that he denied that cells have walls or humans have skin but that those were not the only possible boundaries of living systems (Guddemi, 2007, Star, 1995:19). 3 For him, the whole unit of organism and environment was systemic; and while cutting this unit into system and environment was obviously necessary, this could be done in a multitude of ways depending on the observer’s purpose.…”

In the shadow of sociology: Bateson through the lens of Durkheim

“…Bateson tended more and more towards a ‘scepticism of most of the explanatory methods of the social sciences’ (Guddemi, 2007: 911). In a lecture of 1940, Bateson explains how he became sceptical of the assumption that the objects of sociology could be dealt with ‘as though they were concrete entities’ (Bateson, 2000 [1972]: 83).…”

“…Bateson did inspire eminent sociologists such as Erving Goffman (1953Goffman ( , 1974 and Niklas Luhmann (Guy, 2018;Mathur, 2008), but in general, his ideas are not well-known in social science, a fact lamented by Guddemi, who takes the observation a step further: Not only is Bateson not well-known in sociology but only a 'few people are using Bateson in the field of sociocybernetics, the application of cybernetic ideas to the study of social life'. This situation, Guddemi (2007) adds, is 'ironic because the study of human social life was Bateson's forte ' (p. 905).…”