REVISITING ANGELS FEAR:
RECURSION, ECOLOGY AND
AESTHETICS
Peter
Harries-Jones
Dept. of
Anthropology
York
University, Ontario
peterhj@yorku.ca
© This paper may not be reproduced without the permission of the author.
ABSTRACT
In honour
of the centenary of Gregory Bateson’s birth, this article revisits some
of the themes of his posthumous publication, Angels Fear. Some of the
book goes over ground that Bateson had covered in prior publications, yet it
contains three new themes. The first of these concerned recursion. Generally
unnoticed by the reviewers of the book is that Bateson presents a reply in his
discussion of ‘structure’ to the concepts and topology of
structure- determined recursion articulated in Maturana
and Varela’s notion of autopoiesis.
The second and third of these themes are those of ecology and aesthetics, and
their juxtaposition as ecological aesthetics. These are viewed from his
communicative perspective and in an entirely novel way he links ecological
aesthetics to epistemology. For example, he argues that the science of biology
required an ecological aesthetic because biology, like any self-recursive
communication system, must become aware of the disruption of its own relations
with the unity of nature or forever continue to conduct bad science. The final
section of the article steps outside Angels Fear to address briefly
issues raised by the introduction of two processes of recursion, the one
semantic and interpretative (Bateson), the other structural (Maturana). The first exemplar raised is family therapy, the second exemplar is that of biology itself. It
concludes that the world of signals and signs seem to be a universal aspect of
living systems, a veritable ‘semiosphere’
of signification and interpretation neglected by biological science . If there
are new topologies of recursion to be found, they will be found in the
recursive processes of this ‘semiosphere’
(Hoffmeyer, 1966).
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