Support H-Net | Buy Books Here | Help Support the NBN and NBN en Español on Patreon | Visit New Books Network en Español!
- African Studies
- African American Studies
- American Politics
- American Studies
- American South
- American West
- Asian American Studies
- Australian and New Zealand Studies
- British Studies
- Canadian Studies
- Caribbean Studies
- Central Asian Studies
- Chinese Studies
- East Asian Studies
- Eastern European Studies
- European Politics
- French Studies
- German Studies
- Iberian Studies
- India Studies
- Indian Ocean World
- Iranian Studies
- Irish Studies
- Israel Studies
- Italian Studies
- Japanese Studies
- Korean Studies
- Latino Studies
- Latin American Studies
- Mexican Studies
- Middle Eastern Studies
- Native American Studies
- Pacific Studies
- Polish Studies
- Russian and Eurasian Studies
- Southeast Asian Studies
- South Asian Studies
- Turkish Studies
- Ukrainian Studies
- Western European Studies
- World Affairs
- Animal Studies
- Anthropology
- Archaeology
- Business, Management, and Marketing
- Media
- Critical Theory
- Disability Studies
- Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
- Education
- Economics
- Finance
- Geography
- Gender Studies
- Genocide Studies
- Higher Education
- Human Rights
- Journalism
- Language
- Law
- LGBTQ+ Studies
- National Security
- Philosophy
- Policing, Incarceration, and Reform
- Political Science
- Politics & Polemics
- Public Policy
- Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work
- Sociology
- Sound Studies
- Sports
- Urban Studies
- Big Ideas
- Celebration Studies
- Co-Authored
- Cover Story
- Historical Materialism
- History Ex Silo
- Invested Investor
- Landscape Architecture
- Mormonism
- NBN Book of the Day
- NBN Seminar
- Postscript
- Practical History
- Preparing for Life After Grad School
- Psychology and Climate Change
- Interpretive Political and Social Science
Oct 4, 2018
Upside-Down Gods
Gregory Bateson's World of Difference
Summary
The work of polymath Gregory Bateson has long been the road to cybernetics travelled by those approaching this trans-disciplinary field from the direction of the social sciences and even the humanities. Fortunately for devotees of Bateson’s expansive vision, Peter Harries-Jones has continued the expert analysis that gave us 1995’s A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson, with his 2016 offering, Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson's World of Difference (Fordham University Press, 2016). Harries-Jones has clearly thought deeply about the totality of Bateson’s corpus while drawing upon a wide variety of sources including personal correspondence. The result is an illuminating study that, amongst other accomplishments, productively positions Bateson’s work as a foundation of today’s burgeoning field of biosemiotics. In our wide-ranging conversation, Harries-Jones warns us of the perils of a strictly algorithmic “world without mind,” details Bateson’s intellectual tussle with Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Logical Types, and amplifies Bateson’s bold challenges to the social sciences to let go of the centrality of power and control and replace them with an appreciation of aesthetics and form, to heal the “epistemic cut” between the human and the animal, and even dare to recuperate selected elements of the thought of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in a challenge to Darwinian orthodoxy. All of this makes for a conversation that is as incisive and articulate as his highly readable monograph asking us to carefully consider the intellectual and ecological benefits of Bateson’s “upside down” ontology with “mind” as foundation rather than emergent phenomenon.
Related Topics
Your Host
Tom Scholte
Tom Scholte is a Professor of Directing and Acting in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia located on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the Musqueam people
