The Beauty of Detours: A Batesonian Philosophy of Technology

262 Pages·2019·1.456 MB·English

by  Yoni Van Den Eede

THE
BEAUTY
DETOURS
of

THE
BEAUTY
DETOURS
of
A BATESONIAN PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY
Yoni Van Den Eede
Cover art: “Chemicals Are Ready, Prepare to Flash” by Ellen Vandeperre (Vep),
© Ellen Vandeperre.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic,
magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Eede, Yoni van den, author.
Title: The beauty of detours : a Batesonian philosophy of technology / Yoni
Van Den Eede.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019011364 | ISBN 9781438477114 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781438477138 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Technology—Philosophy. | Bateson, Gregory, 1904–1980.
Classification: LCC T14 .E33 2019 | DDC 601—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011364
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction xvii
Part I: Laying the Groundwork
Chapter 1 Gregory Bateson’s “Ecology of Mind” 3
Chapter 2 Philosophy of Technology 17
Part II: Bateson and Technology
Chapter 3 Between One and Two: Epistemology/Ontology 43
Chapter 4 Conscious Purpose 59
Chapter 5 Remediating Conscious Purpose 79
Part III: The Art of Living with Technology
Chapter 6 Toward Batesonian Philosophy of Technology 99
Chapter 7 The Art of Living with Technology 131
vi Contents
Notes 177
References 201
Index 215
Preface
“We are not outside the ecology for which we plan—we are always
and inevitably a part of it.”1 Gregory Bateson wrote these words
in 1970. He passed away ten years later—before he could see the rise of
the Reagan-Thatcher era, the full deployment of neoliberalism, the digital
revolution, and the increasingly clear effects of climate change. But he saw
the writing on the wall. He noticed the tide approaching, right before the
wave rolled over us. As a pioneer of ecological thought, he was concerned
about environmental degradation and the exploitation of nature. He warned
about overly economic reasoning. Worried that we would be reducing reality
to something it is not (or at least not exclusively), he pointed to the risks
of single-sided quantification and calculation. Overall, his prime concern
was with dynamics in which, due to thinking patterns becoming ingrained
and turning rigid, and thus acquiring a taken-for-granted stature, some
species, group, organism, or individual—any species, group, organism, or
individual—comes to suffer at the expense of another.
Those developments that Bateson didn’t get to see have set us on the
way to where we are now, that is, the post-truth world of Donald Trump,
in which unashamed lying, bigotry, racism, and sexism have once again
become “normal.” It is also the ecological limbo we are in, where we are
increasingly aware of the environment’s terrible condition but cannot seem
to move ourselves to act effectively upon that insight. And it is the invisi-
ble algorithmic architecture that’s starting to envelop most of our everyday
lives, with our daily occupations becoming more and more imperceptibly
organized, shaped, and steered by algorithms.
I like to wonder what Bateson would have thought about our times.
How would he have looked upon “alternative facts,” for one? I imagine him
having let out his typical chuckle. But as often in his case, that chuckle
vii
viii Preface
would have been coupled with grave concern. The chuckle represents the
recognition: ah yes, this is humankind—in all its ridiculous, painful, beau-
tiful, horrible glory. But superposed onto that comes the critical concern:
it shouldn’t have to be this way; it could be otherwise. Chuckle and concern
are at the same time there, in equal measures. Things are amusing, and
they are serious.
Is there still such a thing as humankind? After decades of posthu-
manism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and the like, we are inclined to
say: no. The human being seamlessly flows over into “other things”: nature,
technology, society. In Foucault’s famous words, the human being is “a face
drawn in sand.”2 Bateson came, from another angle, upon a similar idea:
“We are always and inevitably a part of” the ecology. We should learn to
see and define ourselves that way: as network structures, essentially inter-
locked with other species, organisms, the biosphere in whole. Yet it would
be a mistake—a moral mistake—to leave it at that, shrug our shoulders in
resignation and say: if we’re nothing special, if we’re just “part of,” it doesn’t
really matter anymore what “we” do. It’s all one ecology anyway; what should
it matter? Well, despite that hybrid, dispersed, spread-out nature, we still
have responsibility. This is one of the main insights that the currently much
discussed notion of the Anthropocene attests to. No matter how authors
have questioned the anthropos part in that term—and proposed all sorts
of alternative cenes (Chthulucene, Capitalocene, et cetera)3—there always
remains the underlying recognition of us having bit off more than we can
chew. Humans are the prime cause of climate change, not dolphins, the
Amazon, or bacteria. So we face a burden, a challenge either to deal with
the consequences thereof or to correct for our mistakes (and probably a mix
of both). In this sense, we are responsible. And in this sense, at minimum,
there still exists a “we.” There remains at least one possible definition of
humankind, and that definition is ethical.
But because we have some ethical responsibility—we face the conse-
quences of what we’ve done—there must also have been a part of us inclining
in the first place toward those harmful acts. Reverse-engineering the human
being, starting from the observation of the result of its deeds—a wrecked
environment, cynicism, power abuse—and tracing back from there—what
caused this?—we must eventually bump into traits of the human animal
that made us this way. Bateson’s work is all about this. What makes systems
go haywire? What makes ecologies go out of balance? The human being, or
what’s left of it, seems to harbor in itself a quality that makes it badly attuned
to ecological balances. In Bateson’s view, that is our ability to chase after our
Preface ix
purposes—to achieve the goals we set out to achieve. Strangely, as such, that
quality is a good thing. It is a trait we share with other living beings: the
cat goes out to catch a mouse; the buffalo moves to the pool to drink; the
tree stretches out its roots to absorb nutrients. However, in humans, this
goal-orientedness has throughout history taken on globe-covering dimensions.
We built pyramids, invented capitalism, installed the Internet. Often with
good intentions, we set after a purpose, and got to work. Need to grow more
crops to feed people? Let’s develop fertilizer. A couple of decades later, we
find fertilizer causing major environmental harm and health problems. Or:
let’s put people in touch with each other. Here’s a solution: social media.
Some years later, it turns out that social media are a perfect instrument for
illicitly influencing people’s political opinions. Somewhere along the line
in many of our goal-achieving processes, a threshold gets reached, and the
system starts to go out of control. What was eventually meant to heighten
control—a good thing—spins out into wider territory somehow and we lose
control—a bad thing; or at the very least an ambiguous thing.
What lies at the base of this bizarre kind of dialectic of Enlightenment?
It is the nature-wide drive to get what one wants. But for some reason—intel-
ligence? social skills? speech? technology?—humans seem to have been, and
are still, most successful in spreading out their blanket of goal achievement
across the earth. In this sense, our times probably do not differ so much
from those in which Bateson lived. We may have that idea: that we live in
exceptional times—think, for instance, Trump again—but that is probably
because our horizon of a human life is too short to truly oversee historical
currents and constants. The dynamics that Bateson sought to describe can
still be recognized in us. Many of us still think—again, notwithstanding
postmodernism, posthumanism, and so on—that we humans are the pinnacle,
if not of creation, then certainly of evolution. If we don’t think it explicitly,
we must do so implicitly, because this is simply how more often than not
we appear to act upon this earth: strutting around, knocking things over,
unashamedly, hardly looking back, hardly looking forward.
So what happens in between a well-meant intention and a nefarious
end result? Production becomes pollution. Rationalization turns into suffo-
cation. Calculation morphs into alienation. Crosscutting all of this, Bateson
insists, is a very simple idea, really: trying to get what you want is never done
in isolation. You may in the process not have much regard for anything
else—but the world is still there. You may only have wanted to throw the
stone, but your actions create ripples on the pool of life. Given that we
lead our lives wrapped up, entangled in constellations in which everything