The Beauty of Detours

Yoni Van Den Eede

Description

Winner of the 2020 S.I. Hayakawa Book Prize presented by The Institute of General Semantics
Winner of the 2020 Susanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form presented by the Media Ecology Association
The Beauty of Detours proposes a new way of understanding and defining technology by reading systems thinker Gregory Bateson in the framework of contemporary philosophy of technology. Although "technology" was not an explicit focus of Bateson's oeuvre, Yoni Van Den Eede shows that his thought is permeated with insights directly relevant to contemporary technological concerns. This book provides a systematic reading of Bateson that reveals these under-investigated elements of his thought. It also critiques the field of philosophy of technology for still reifying "technology" too much despite its attempt to de-reify it, arguing instead that it should incorporate Bateson's insights and focus more on processes of human knowing. Sketching a Batesonian philosophy of technology, Van Den Eede calls for greater attentiveness to the purpose of technology and its role in our lives.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I. Laying the Groundwork

1. Gregory Bateson’s “Ecology of Mind”

2. Philosophy of Technology

Part II. Bateson and Technology

3. Between One and Two: Epistemology/Ontology

4. Conscious Purpose

5. Remediating Conscious Purpose

Part III. The Art of Living with Technology

6. Toward Batesonian Philosophy of Technology

7. The Art of Living with Technology

Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• Science
• Mathematics
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438477138
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE BEAUTY of DETOURS
THE BEAUTY of DETOURS
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
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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Laying the Groundwork
Chapter 1 Gregory Bateson’s “Ecology of Mind”
Chapter 2 Philosophy of Technology
Part II: Bateson and Technology
Chapter 3 Between One and Two: Epistemology/Ontology
Chapter 4 Conscious Purpose
Chapter 5 Remediating Conscious Purpose
Part III: The Art of Living with Technology
Chapter 6 Toward Batesonian Philosophy of Technology
Chapter 7 The Art of Living with Technology
Notes
References
Index
Preface
“ W e 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 invisible 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 would have been coupled with grave concern. The chuckle represents the recognition: ah yes, this is humankind—in all its ridiculous, painful, beautiful, 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 posthumanism, 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 interlocked 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 consequences 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 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—intelligence? 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 suffocation. 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 we do is connected to something else (and that to still something else, and so on … indefinitely), there can never be something like a pure neutral act. We may like to believe so. In fact, we consta