Grace in the age of the petri dish

• What can I know? (metaphysics)• What ought I to do? (morals)• What may I hope? (religion)• What is a person? (anthropology)

• (and really they are all anthropology)

• Neoliberalism as the fetishisation of instrumental reason

• ‘rationalisation’, accounting: productivity

• Closing of the gap between the real and the real

• (or why semiotics and Foucauldian analysis does not open a new political space)

• A politics beginning from bare life?

• Petri dish modernity and instrumental reason: why creativity/grace necessary

Being ‘sick’ is a healthy response to ‘sick’ environments

• Modern era characterized by reduced bounding of normality, and an increasing inability to conceive of difference. This reduced in a dumbing down of creative potential.

• Anxiety ‘is as much a sensible response to an insensible age as it is an illness as such, and why the deviations of actual phenomena from psychoanalytic categories – that is behave iors that don’t fit our models – present greater possibilities for “curing” than do those conditions that may be readily categorised’ (Napier 2003:xxii).

• Napier argues that new ‘pathologies’ might be the clues to new, creative and healthy ways of being (in an alienating world) 

• Napier argues that the dominant premise of modern life is that we survive ‘through the recognition and elimination of “nonself”’, which leads to the erroneous expectation that change should not be painful and the ‘equally unacceptable idea that “otherness” can be celebrated at an appropriate or politically correct distance, or conversely by virtue of an assumed and unearned familiarity’ (Napier 2003:xxiii).

• I.e. if you did not find this subject traumatizing I have failed as a teacher and ‘Culture fest’ is a celebration of sameness and the destruction of difference

• Potluck dinner: Everyone brings a different dish but we all eat by the same rules

 • Enforced multiculturalism is a foil for never

engaging difference, for never having to engage with someone who might actually be the catalyst for real change

• If it isn’t already dead, put it in a museum to kill it and keep it dead, quarantining it from life

• Modernity is a process of devouring the periphery (destroying difference), and hence the ability for both change and creativity

• We celebrate indigeneity and ‘human rights’ after the populations have been ‘pacified’ (conquered)

• Environmentalism becomes popular at the moment when all parts of the globe are affected by industrial capitalism

• ‘the scheme whereby the soul of the unknown or unknowable is destroyed, and its corpse tamed and revivified, is fairly consistent’ (Napier 2003:6).

Elimination of the internalized other projected everywhere

• Napier argues that immunological ideas now provide the central conceptual framework for how human relations take place in the contemporary world

• Humans revere and fear change

• Much attention to change (developmental, morphological, evolutionary) is actually directed towards stasis

• The very problem of taking an enactive approach seriously, putting development in the middle of being 

Numb at the centre of the petri dish

• Cells in the centre of a petri dish (like genes in a population) are least capable of adaptation, least dynamic

• Being numb at the centre of the petri dish ‘is a social hysteria wherein the absence of awareness of the “differences” that can only be experienced at the boundaries leads us to repeat in ever more banal ways our culturally valued narratives of change (hero epic for most of us). Like the repetitive actions of an autistic child or of a mouse repeatedly washing itself when confronted by a cat, these narratives these narratives are incessantly reenacted through the media and through life itself in ways that become increasingly facile, as if to remind us of a connection that we think we should have but that we cannot verify locally’ (Napier 2003:7).

Creativity is (only) possible at the periphery

• Across the boundary between consciously articulated and phenomenally sensed

• Psychological transformation and human change are creative acts that occur ‘when one encounters difference and finds some space in which the net result of an encounter with a genuine “other” is greater than the sum parts of that encounter’

• ‘now in our petri dish we see not only how static and complacent cells become at the centre of our “culture”, but by contrast how those at the periphery of the colony – where toxic wastes do not collect in high concentrations – tend to have access to the nutrients of change and therefore to be the most vibrant (Napier 12). 

The age of immunology

• Incessant repetition of hero epic, from Darwin to Pastuer to Clint Eastwood

• ‘cultural autoimmunity’

• ‘social and psychogenic shock where peripheral circulation shuts down in an attempt to salvage blood for the brain in the form of narratives of transformation that society values most, and where the subtle negotiation of our boundaries gives way, first, to a preservation of the body’s core, but eventually to the production of its own pathogens, to its own anaphylaxis’ (Napier 7). 

• Immunology, as the dominant paradigm of modernity, is a symptom of the dumbing down that we have allowed to dominate our creative inclinations

• Immunological view of the world, Napier argues, depends on innovation at the expense of creativity (invention), it is paranoid of difference, which is why our age, despite population growth and many more ‘educated’ people, produces less not more big ideas, Edisons, Einsteins and Bells

• Lab science concerned with reverse engineering rather than considering life as creative process

• Napier contrasts Balinese cultivation of otherness to Western immunisation against difference

• Balinese ritual engages otherness to provide some knowledge of the foreign, for us otherness just needs to be destroyed (ie culture fest, museums, etc)

• Dealing with demons and spirits as basis for new metaphors

• ‘much more likely to offer the world revised metaphors of immunological or viral transformation than we ourselves are’ (Napier 31)

• ‘A world in which individuals wander in search of another’s experience to appropriate and be empowered by – or where they merely follow the sgnposted footpaths set out by previous travelers – will necessarily lack the sensitivities that ritual creatively depends on. Here the sin of ignorance has the effect of killing off, even unknowingly, the very difference, the diversity, that is publicly heralded.

• ‘Such a world, where difference is diffused into an agreeable clone has formally, categorically, and indeed truly achieved an autoimmunological state, where so-called self-awareness has the effect of producing ontological ignorance, and where an increasing focus on interiority starves both the “other” and the “self”. Does this cultural autoimmunity, which is now so much a part of cosmopolitan life, signal something of a twilight of the Enlightenment? Well, how could things be otherwise?’ (Napier 2003:37).

• ‘Reinventing history is the only creative way of achieving transcendence’

• Critique of deconstructivist thought: Way out of ‘barbershop of mirrors’ of theories about theories that just reproduce the Enlightenment they critique

• Zizek: importance of hermeneutics, ability to tell a story: grounding theory of politically possible to lived experience, keeping the gap of thought open (from total ideological closure) 

• Critique of Dawkins & Wilson’s use of war and fraud metephors does not dissolve with shift to ‘network’ view of human being: agency of system without morality results in ‘schizoid hysteria’

• Tension between ‘evolution’ and ‘revolution’: ‘saltation’ is always possible, Darwin did not arrive at his ideas in an ‘evolutionary way’

• Insight is a different order to evolution

• ‘Without the moral connections that allow for intentionally risky experimentation beyond the network – for, say creating love rather than oppression – networkers themselves have little awareness of the consequences of what they do… their disinterest in looking at anything or attending to anyone not obviously powerful renders them incapable of understanding the mechanism of change… In short, networkers suck energy from existing relations because they do not know how to create energy, and they replace the reality of their own stasis with a language of supposed change’ (Napier 173).

• Fritjof Capra• John C. Lily• R.D. Laing

• Esalen, Santa Fe Institute

Cybernetics

• Cybernetics: the science of cause, effect, feedback... homeostasis, self-organisation, complex adaptive systems, non-linear dynamics, circuits, information: differences that make a difference

• Schismogenesis: • Competitive: arms race• Complementary: dominance and succouring

• Bali as a steady state: homeostasis across social ‘systems’

 

Mind and Nature

• ‘Mind is the essence of being alive’• Mind as a systems phenomenon characteristic of living organisms,

societies and ecosystems• Any system that satisfies Bateson’s criteria will be able to process

information and develop the phenomena we associate with mind: thinking, learning, memory, etc

• Mind is a necessary consequence of a certain level of complexity that begins long before organisms develop a brain

 • Life=mind=life • Mind is imminent in bodies and in the pathways and messages outside of

the body 

‘Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded up at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start half way up the stick? But these are nonsense questions (Bateson 1972:459).

Minimum criteria of mind:

• The system shall operate with and upon differences

• Thee system shall consist of closed loops or networks of pathways along which differences and transforms of differences shall be transmitted (What is transmitted on a neuron is not an impulse, it is news of a difference)

• Many events within the system shall be energised by the respondent part rather than by impact from the triggering part

• The system shall show self-correctiveness in the direction of homeostasis and/or in the direction of runaway. Self-correctiveness implies trial and error.

• The unit of mind is being-environment: relationship

• This is the same unit as that of evolutionary survival

• MIND IS NOT THING BUT RELATIONSHIP

• The unit of information theory is difference. The unit of psychological input is difference.

 

Ritual, integration and grace• Bateson refers to the union of the

discursive and the non-discursive as “grace”:

• “I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration, and that what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind – especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called consciousness and the other the unconscious. For the attainment of grace, the reasons of the heart must be integrated with the reasons of reason” (1972:129).

 

• On the importance of grace

• ‘The point, however, which I am trying make in this paper is not an attack on medical science but a demonstration of an inevitable fact: that mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life; and that its virulence springs specifically from the circumstances that life depends upon interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct’ (1972:146)

 

Pathologies of epistemology

• Totemism: empathy with the non-human world, metaphors for understanding human world

• Animism: Mind of human as metaphor for non-human world: extending human mind into non-human things

• ‘But when you separate mind from the structure in which it is imminent, such as human relationship, the human society or the ecosystem, you thereby embark, i believe, on fundamental error, which in the end will surely hurt you’ (1972: 485).

 

Instrumental reason is pathological

• ‘Unaided consciousness must always tend towards hate; not only because it is good common sense to exterminate the other fellow, but for the more profound reason that, seeing only arcs of circuits, the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when his hard headed policies return to plague the inventor’ (1972:146).

• This line of thinking gets developed in Rappaport’s opus Ritual and religion in the making of humankind.

• Rappaport and Bateson are each here drawing on William James (‘purposive reason’ as necessarily harmful): homeostatic approach to consciousness

• ‘If we go on defining ends as separate from means and apply the social sicences as crudely instrumental means, using the recipes of science to manipulate people, we shall arrive at a totalitarian rather than a democratic system of life. The solution that [Mead] offers is that we look for the “direction”, and “values” implicit in the means, rather than looking ahead to a blueprinted goal and thinking of this goal as justifying manipulative means’ (1972:160)

 

• ‘That is the sort of world we live in – a world of circuit structures – and love can survive only if wisdom (i.e., a sense or recognition of the fact of circuitry) has an effective voice.’

‘Today, we pump a little natural history into children along with a little “art” so that they will forget their animal and ecological nature and the aesthetics of being alive and will grow up to be good businessmen’ (1979:142).

• What Bateson was stepping towards was the collapsing of spirit and matter.

• These have not yet been collapsed.• There has not been a paradigm shift in

Western epistemology, or in the damage that purposive reason brings, even when we apply it to solve questions of ecology: mental health and climate change.

• ‘So how can the process of recreating humanity and society begin? Art, by becoming a true avant-garde, can provide new ways of seeing, being and understanding. It can point the way out of limitations of the present, and help create an enlightened citizenry capable of creating and maintaining a just and rational social structure’ (Krause 2011:93).

Joseph Beuys (1921-86)

• Social sculpture

• ‘Art must aid in the creation of viable countercultures, rather than simply subcultures that are allowed to exist as tolerated fringes posing no real threat to existing cultural and political institutions’ (Krause 2011:16).

• Krause bases his argument for how art should reposition itself within communities and with clear political intent by drawing on Dewey’s notion of art as ‘an experience’ and Beuys’s notion of social sculpting. Beuys conceived of creativity, the sine qua non of art and of humanity, as the ability to reimagine and reconstruct the world.

• ‘If every realm of experience could be approached artistically and creatively, it could be possible to enact what Beuys called “social sculpture” – a creative reconfiguration of every aspect of life’ (Krause 2011:17).

• Art that only talks about rebellion will be drowned out by commercial signifiers also using the ideas of revolution or resistance to sell their product.

• ‘This social organism is so ill that it is absolutely high time to subject it to radical treatment, otherwise humanity will go under. And our social organism exists like a living being in a condition of the severest illness’ (Beuys in Harlan 2007:21-2).

• Beuys sees art as the ultimate form of capital because it represents the ability to create and invent.

• ‘Art is capital. This is not some pipe dream; it is reality. In other words, capital is what art is. Capital is human capacity and what flows from it. So there are only two organs involved here, or two polar relationships: creativity and human intention, from which a product arises. These are the real economic values, nothing else. Money is not. However, we have a concept of capital where an economic value intervenes and wrecks everything, which therefore makes the economy revolve around profit, exploitation, etc.’ (Beuys in Harlan 2007:27).

John Dewey (1859-1952)• According to Dewey, art has been separated from life, and needs to be returned to the flow of human life

• Dewey defines art as a particular type of experience. He distinguishes experience (flow) from ‘an experience’. Experience is the result of evolving organism environment relationships. An experience is a moment of equilibrium, which sets of new struggles and relationships, and momentary equilibriums, .

• ‘form is arrived at whenever a stable, even though moving, equilibrium is reached’ (Dewey 1980:14).

• ‘A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or taking part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation’ (Dewey 1980:35). 

• Dewey defines art as a particular type of experience. He distinguishes experience (flow) from ‘an experience’. Experience is the result of evolving organism environment relationships. An experience is a moment of equilibrium, which sets of new struggles and relationships, and momentary equilibriums, .

• ‘form is arrived at whenever a stable, even though moving, equilibrium is reached’ (Dewey 1980:14).

• ‘A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or taking part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation’ (Dewey 1980:35). 

• Dewey defines art in terms of what it does (i.e. creates ‘an experience’) rather than what art is (i.e. some relation of form and content). Krause gives the following as examples of ‘an experience’:

• ‘A political campaign carried to a satisfying conclusion, or a conversation that brings definition to a formerly vague idea, may be so experientially similar to successful artworks that these things may as well be deemed a form of art’ (Krause 2011:27).

• All of these experiences organise the materials of the world into a stable, finished form with an aesthetic quality.

 • Beuys’s notion of social sculpting is the ultimate art form, a social

gesamtkuntswerk (total artwork) that reshapes society in such a way as to utilise uptapped artistic abilities of everyone to create new political structures.

Art should be part of daily life, not galleries or finance capital

• ‘Art has been perverted and bastardised by the schism between high art and ordinary life as well as the increasing dominance of the capitalist marketplace. Rather than vital additions to human life, the arts have largely been rendered either hallowed objects with no relation to life as it is lived, or mere commodities and passing fads, as hollow and disposable as any other marketable product’ (Krause 2011:45-6).

• ‘Both acts, creation and appreciation, occur within the flow of life, through it, because of it, and interaction with it. Art is the conversion of objective material into an intense and clear experience that occurs within the larger context of the interchange between the organism and environment’ (Krause 2011:25).

• Dewey’s locating of art in ‘an experience’ places the processes of creation and appreciation back within daily flows of experience, and emphasises that, whether in art or other domains of life, brings about the emergence of new forms of form and order.

• ‘We can measure the waste of artistic talent not only in the thousands of ‘failed’ artists – artists whose market failure is necessary to the success of the few but also in the millions whose creative potential is never touched’ (Duncan 1983:172).

• ‘Granted, creating a realm for artistic practice beyond the confines of the marketplace is indeed a difficult proposition. It will involve completely rethinking the role and function of the arts. Cultural institutions that operate on a human scale and create art divorced from business motives will need to exist’ (Krause 2011:73).

• Krause argues that reimagining art in the flow of life, as Beuys and Dewey did, would take us to reimagining progress in art, and the degree to which political institutions respond to needs on a human scale.