Original Sin

In a world conceived as structure, all terms function relationally. A structural view that originates “from afar,” when it becomes an object of study, can serve as a means of evaluating Western concepts that make of nature a background to social struggles. Critical of teleology and dialectical resolutions that relegate nature to a decor, structuralism is symptomatic of wider epistemological shifts. It has brought to knowledge what might be called a scene of “deep focus.” All elements within its purview have an equal meaning of importance. Lévi-Strauss’s brand of structuralism favors thus a diversity based on the right to live and on criteria of aesthetic pleasure taken from contemplation of the world that is not motivated by profit alone.1

At slight odds with Lévi-Strauss on how myths ground and maintain culture, the British ethnographer Gregory Bateson exercised a decisive influence on many French thinkers of 1968. He also deals with mental patterns that shape the world and studies how humans interact with each other and their environment. It was he who coined the concept of “ecology of mind,” a science of the interrelations of ideas and of the relation between ideas and habitat, to show how dynamic interactions of ideas give form and meaning to the world. Combining science and humanities, he explores relations between nature and the living. Lévi-Strauss’s reading of human endeavors focused aesthetically on the multiplicity of ways in which humans adapt to the world. Bateson, more attendant to information theory and the efficacies of communication per se, is interested, on the one hand, in the mind (in what it means to think) and, on the other, in how ideas take hold, contend, struggle, or push each other out.2 The question becomes one pertaining less to cause and effect than to operating constraints. What Lévi-Strauss developed in a more philosophical key, through structural methods, Bateson interrogates from the point of view of information theory and cybernetics.3

In “Pathologies of epistemology,” Bateson conceives the mind as a system with written programs in which differences are transmitted (Bateson 1972:478–87).4 Living systems consist of networks of pathways. Along them move differences—rather than impulses—that are transmitted on neurons.5 These notions give a different conception of the world and new ways of thinking about mind. Bateson’s systems are said to consist of loops or networks of pathways. Events are energized by the respondent part rather than by impact from the triggering part. The system’s self-correctiveness leads it in the direction of homeostasis and/or in the direction of runaway. Mind is a function of the appropriate complexity wherever it occurs. It extends beyond cerebral areas into nature where total systems, whose energy is supplied by their metabolisms, act in variously self- corrective ways. The metaphor can be extended to human societies as well. Many events are energized by the respondent part, not by the impact from the triggering element of theChaos and ethics chosen part of the system (Bateson 1972:482–3). Bateson’s theories of closed and interconnected loops have been discredited. Theories of pressure relations, however, still hold in science and humanities.6