Gregory Bateson

scientist · 23 mentions across 5 readings

In this course

Gregory Bateson was a polymath anthropologist and systems theorist who bridged cybernetics, information theory, and cultural analysis—appearing here as a participant in mid-century conversations about creativity and systems thinking at the 1949 Western Round Table on Modern Art. His presence alongside artists like Duchamp and architects suggests the course mobilizes Bateson to theorize how artistic creation, feedback loops, and observer-participant relationships function as information systems. The readings invoke him to complicate linear models of authorship and intention, centering instead the recursive, contextual nature of meaning-making across disciplines.

Mentioned in 5 readings

Notes on À bruit secret_ Notes on Duchamp

Cybernetics, CIA, and Organized Crime

15

The Western Round Table on Modern Art (1949) featured artists and thinkers (all men) including Marcel Duchamp, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the composers Darius Milhaud and Arnold Schoenburg, and the anthropologist Gregory Bateson spea…Bateson immediately grasped Duchamp’s line of thinking – it reflected ideas that he had been engaging with at the Macy cybernetics conferences and their precursor, the 1942 Cerebral Inhibition Meeting, where (among other topics but of parti…Diagram from Behavior, Purpose and Teleology by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow in Philosophy of Science, 10 (1943) Both the paper and the Cerebral Inhibition Meeting (Per Bateson “Cerebral inhibition was a respectabl…

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Yuk Hui ChatGPT

or the Eschatology of Machines - Journal #137

3

We live in various positive feedback loops represented as culture. Since the beginning of modern industrial society, the human body has been subordinated to repetitive rhythms, and consequently the human mind has been subsumed by the prophe…[^6]: Yuk Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). [^7]: See Yuk Hui, “On the End of Philosophy,” e-flux journal no. 134 (March 2023). [^8]: Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Univoca…[^12]: Brian Cantwell Smith, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment (MIT Press, 2019). I engaged more with Smith’s argument in chapter 3 of Art and Cosmotechnics (e-flux and University of Minnesota Press, 2021). [^1…

Carole L. Crumley

Heterarchy

2

For example, an individual may highly value human life in general and be against abortion rights, but be for the death penalty (or vice versa). The context of the inquiry, along with changing (and conflicting) values, mitigates this logical…Archaeological, ethnographic, and documentary evidence demonstrates great organizational diversity in powerful societies; in North America alone, indigenous Cherokee, Coast Salish, and Iroquois polities utilized careful checks and balances …

Tiqqun

The Cybernetic Hypothesis (2001)

2

State and Market, preferring to work through micro-mechanisms of control -- preferring devices. The fundamental law of socio-cybernetics is as follows: growth and control develop in inverse proportion to each other. It is thus easier to con…Spurred on by the Cold War and its "witch hunts," the socio-cyberneticians thus tirelessly hunted down the pathological couched behind the normal, the communist sleeping in everybody. In the 1950s, to this effect, they formed the Mental Hea…

Marcel Duchamp

The Creative Act

1

The Creative Act Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity. To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic b…