HIERARCHY, CLASSES, AND LOGICAL TYPES

The idea of classes and hierarchy can help in explaining and under-standing relationships within patterns. As we have seen, hierarchy was a lifelong theme with Bateson. With both Russell and Whitehead as Cambridge neighbors and family friends, it is not surprising that the Prin-cipia Mathematica with its emphasis on logical types and hierarchies of classes should be part of his intellectual equipment. Bateson saw the hier-archy of logical classes as a way of understanding the communicative aspect of artistic activity. The core of the matter is his attempt to get over to the 1967 conference and subsequent readers the idea that the world is composed of systems: each containing smaller systems and embedded in larger systems. This conception is essentially biological: Bateson was to say, during his last years, “I have been a biologist all my life” (1979a, 8). Art, for Bateson, is biological too; it is a practical (if also cultural) way for us to reestablish ourselves in nature. For him, life is a matter of

patterns within patterns, all beautiful and hence aesthetic, arranged in levels and differentiated into logical types of lesser or greater generality.

These levels are really scales: varying sizes of system (e.g., cell, organ, organism, ecosystem, or culture), with distinct qualities emerging at different scales.

For Bateson the Russellian levels and logical types are also episte-mological levels of knowing with some exchange of meaning between levels. Remember that Bateson applies the terms “knowing” and “knowl-edge” to a wide range of biological activities. There is evolutionary knowing; knowing as “adaptation,” for which the genome must contain, for instance, in the case of a shark, “information or instructions which are the complement of hydrodynamics.” The genome cannot contain hydrodynamics but the evolutionary process must “know” (carry the rele-vant information) about what hydrodynamics requires and be able to build that into the shark’s genome. Similarly, migratory birds must carry the unconscious knowledge that enables navigation (134). Importantly, larger processes (“higher” classes) may contain wisdom about their component processes. There is “wisdom in the larger patterns.” Our biological world contains wisdom that is badly needed in human deci-sion making today. For Bateson there are many ways of knowing. There is mental knowing and there is knowing through the senses. Sensory knowledge can become mental knowledge.

The Primacy of “Primary Process,”

Meaning, Integration, and Beauty

Bateson now approached the core material of his lecture—that artistic process, the aesthetic dimension of living, is able to enhance the possi-bility of our refinding grace, specifically because art is not subject to purposeful, language-bound, conscious rationality. He considered the division between “consciousness” and what he called (following Freud)

“primary process.” Denying the Freudian assumption that the “uncon-scious” is no more than a repository of repressed fears and unresolved issues, he also denied the primacy of the conscious mind. Knowing already the wide understanding of mind and mental process that Bateson had, this will hardly surprise the reader. Primary process includes all the mental processes that are not consciously rational and mediated by language and logic. The “processes of the heart” or of the unconscious, claimed Bateson, are poorly accessible and cannot be expressed in language.

While secondary process is conscious and language based, primary process has no access to negatives, has no tense (no way of operating on

past or future), and has no linguistic mood. “Mood” is a term from linguistics that refers to the choice of verb forms or inflections made by the speaker or writer. Such choices indicate the speaker’s belief about the truth or likelihood of the fact or action being considered. The subjunctive mood suggests doubt, the indicative mood would suggest acceptance as fact. The imperative mood is used for commands. All these, claimed Bateson, are attitudes to which the unconscious mind has no access. Consciousness talks about specific things and persons and attaches predicates to them. Primary process usually does not identify things or persons. Its focus is the process of relationship between them. It is primarily metaphorical, depending on the equating of like with like, which is the essence of pattern. The subject matter of primary process is always the relationship between the self and other people or environment.

This is the context in which artistic activity takes place (140).

Primary process deals with feelings and emotions but these “reasons of the heart” can be “very precise algorithms.” “Algorithm” is a term from mathematics meaning a method of solving a problem by a series of small steps, particularly by a recursive series of actions—a thought that must have appealed to Bateson’s cybernetic mind. Feelings and emotions, which are “the outward signs” of precise and complex algorithms (Bateson here threw in a metaphorical link to the ancient statement that sacraments are the “outward and physical signs of an inward and spiri-tual grace”), are the subject matter of primary process: love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, and so on. These abstractions, said Bateson, refer to patterns of relationship that are now misleadingly characterized by quantity: “a nonsense from psychiatry” (138–39). The fact that artistic, metaphorical, and relational activity takes place in primary process, while discussion, analysis, and verbal appreciation of art occurs in the secondary linguistic and rational realm explains, said Bateson, why we find it so difficult to discuss art or related matters such as ritual or mythology. There are many levels of mental activity between sensory feeling and thinking. There is “complex layering of consciousness and unconsciousness.”

In illustration of this layering of the multiple levels of the mind, he offered four examples from other thinkers. The first was Samuel Butler’s dictum that the better an organism knows something the less conscious it is of the knowledge or habit. The knowledge sinks to deeper levels, as exemplified in Zen thought and Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (1953).

It is, claimed Bateson the same for art. Secondly, Adalbert Ames’s percep-tion experiments (Bateson 1979a, 32–37) show that we make conscious images (from the reports of our sensory organs) by processes to which

we have no access and cannot control. Van Gogh’s odd perspective in his chair painting “dimly reminds the consciousness of what had been (unconsciously) taken for granted.” Then there is the Freudian under-standing of dreams as “metaphors coded according to primary process.”

Bateson suggested that style (e.g., neatness or boldness of contrast in painting) is similarly metaphoric. Lastly, Bateson referred to the Freudian view of the unconscious as the repository of painful or fearful memories, placed and kept there by repression (2000, 134–35). This last Freudian belief he saw as mistaken and undesirable, holding that there is much more than the unpleasant memories predicated by the Freudians in the unconscious primary process of mind. Primary process includes, for instance, most of the premises (the knowledge already held within the system) of mammalian interaction. These mental capacities exist in “the idiom of primary process, only with difficulty to be translated into

‘rational’ terms” (135). This enlarged understanding of primary process is highly relevant to Bateson’s project of producing a theory of art. He suggests that such a theory will extend beyond the visual arts to poetry.

Poetry, he says, is not distorted prose. It is the reverse of that: prose is poetry that has been subjected to logic (136).

Not all kinds of knowledge, said Bateson, can be conscious. Of the

“many sorts of knowing,” the “many levels between sensing and thought,”

only some types of knowledge reside in surface consciousness. These include knowledge that is required when behavior must be modified in new instances. Consciousness must always be limited to a small part of mental process. We do not have the physico-neurological resources to keep in consciousness all the multiplicity of items of knowledge, infor-mation, bodily control sequences, and so on, that are called for in everyday life. Nevertheless, sensory knowledge and such knowledge as that enabling reproduction and evolution are real forms of knowledge.

Consciousness must be husbanded. All organisms must be content with

“rather little consciousness” (143). Habitual unconscious processes and the inaccessibility of the processes of perception economize on both thought and consciousness. We cannot expect to bring artistic or creative process wholly within the world of conscious purpose and description.

The price of such economy, said Bateson, is inaccessibility; we may be unable to know about the primary process stimuli that produce our conscious conclusions or inclinations (136). Our unconscious compo-nents are continuously present in all their forms. For instance, in relating with others, we involuntarily exchange messages about the unconscious materials. It is important to exchange these metamessages to qualify the partly unconscious messages. We may consciously produce deceitful

messages but our “semi-voluntary kinesic and autonomic signals . . . provide a more trustworthy comment” (137).

Note that “the characteristics of primary process . . . are the inevitable characteristics of any communicational system between organisms who must use only iconic communication” (e.g., those without language, artists and artworks in communication with their public or the dreaming self). Organisms are forced into “saying the opposite of what they mean in order to get across the proposition that they mean the opposite of what they say.” The meaning of this puzzling sentence becomes clear if we consider the exploratory behavior of dogs and humans: the playful bite, the “inverted statement,” sarcasm, and other sorts of humor, in dream, in mythology, and also in art. Bateson sees animal discourse as always concerned with the self and with a physically present other, or with the animal’s environment. The relata are always perceptibly present to illus-trate the discourse, which is “iconic,” that is, composed of part movements that “mention” the whole action proposed. He instanced the cat meowing, suggesting that the cry we hear as “milk” is really one expressing a dependent relationship; the cat says “mama,” we guess

“milk.” Such communications are far older than language and resonate more deeply with our feelings (136).

We can now see that, implicit in all this, is the explanation of Bateson’s claim that artistic engagement can provide us with the grace that offers recovery from the ecosystemic ruin produced by human conscious purpose. There is a natural tendency for human minds to conserve their limited capacity for conscious operation by sinking into the unconscious primary process area all those activities for which the limiting conditions are normally unchanging. Because our interactions with our surround-ings have (until recent times) been constant, they have been consigned to primary process operation and so we no longer have the conscious capacity to deal with environment wisely. Our habits of relating with our world are no longer appropriate for its rapidly changing condition. We have no direct access to primary process. Conscious process is inadequate in our rapidly changing ecology so we create more environmental damage whenever we attempt to correct our actions. However, artistic engagement, active involvement in the creation and appreciation of beauty, provides a route into primary process whereby the buried wisdom, the otherwise inaccessible responsiveness, can be accessed and utilized. The most important aspect of this buried knowledge is the fact of our unity with the rest of the living world, our inextricably integrated membership of the family of living beings. By engaging with beauty in art or nature we may be reenabled as responsible members of the living

world. Bateson approaches with care the subject of meaning in art. It is a

“slippery” term. Characteristically, he sees it in terms of the transfer of information. Seeing artworks as “encoded messages,” his interest is in the meaning of the code chosen rather than in possible messages.

His definition of “meaning” is offered in the framework of four

“approximate synonym[s]”: pattern, redundancy, information, and

“restraint.” All four of these terms are systemically related to each other.

Any creation, a spoken sentence, “a painting, a frog or a culture,” will contain redundancy, by which Bateson means that there is internal rela-tion so that one part will give informarela-tion or knowledge about other parts.

Another way of saying this would be that an observer could guess from one part of the creation, with a “better than random” chance of success, about the nature of other parts or elements. This would also mean that the creation was patterned. “Restraint” is a cybernetic term for anything that reduces the chance of wrong guessing. The part of the creation that is thus linked to another part may be said to have information about the other part. This information is meaning (130–31). Bateson offers exam-ples of redundancy or restraint. These include the probability of certain letters of the alphabet being followed (in English words) by other partic-ular letters and the fact that we can guess at the syntax of a complete sentence from knowledge of part of it. The sight of a tree allows us to guess at its roots; knowledge of one’s employer’s actions yesterday will permit a forecast of how he will act today. In each case, knowledge of one part of the process or entity discloses information or meaning about the wider relational context. Hence, meaning is always about connectedness to a wider context: “psychic integration,” patterned relating, the recovery of “grace.” Communication is “the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information and/or the reduction of the random by restraint.” We are to see the artwork as both internally patterned and part of the larger patterned world, the world of culture (130–32). Art undertakes the role of metaphor in communication. Like dream and myth it is primarily concerned with relationships—with relating (150).

Bateson says that metaphor makes it possible to understand relationships and to transfer those understandings to other situations because it preserves the relationships involved while substituting other sets of things or persons as the relata. Metaphor is very different from simile in that there is no “as if ” statement; the claim of metaphor is that the relation-ships, whether in our internal primary process (perhaps as dream), in creating art or in living rightly within an ecosystem, really are the same relationships (140). Bateson is not discussing the stories artworks may present or the mythology around them. It is the aspects that resist

reduc-tion to language that concern him most. He sees style in art as being primarily a matter of what he calls the code, “the . . . rules of transfor-mation” derived from the culture, mediated through the cultural and personal experience of the artist, by which “perceived objects or persons (or supernaturals) are transformed into wood or paint.” There is “psychic [that is, psychological] information” in the art object that was derived (as code) from culture but which, reexpressed through the artist’s process as style, will be made available again to the culture. The artwork becomes a recursive source of information about the culture. It becomes, again, a tool for understanding our systemic relationships (130).

Skill is the capacity to express the unconscious elements of artistic or other creative process. Bateson believes that what we recognize as skill is an indication that there are large unconscious components in the perfor-mance. In developing skill the artist has been able to allow the acquired knowledge to sink into primary process and is no longer compelled to think about many aspects of his practice. Bateson’s question is: “What components of this message material [the artwork] had what orders of unconsciousness (or consciousness) for the artist?” Art can communicate about the various forms of unconsciousness. He refers again to Isadora Duncan: “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” Bateson suggests that she means, “This is a particular sort of partly unconscious message. Let us engage in this particular sort of partly unconscious communication,” or “This is a message about the interface between conscious and unconscious.” Skill, he says, always carries this message (137–38). It may be useful for the reader to look back at the discussion of the metalogue “Why a Swan?” in chapter 4. Bateson sees as important the fact that communication through artistic media is iconic.

When we communicate by using pictures, some of the characteristics of the picture will correspond to characteristics of the matter communicated about. Even verbal description is often iconic in its larger structure: a scientist describing an earthworm may start at the head and provide “a sequential elongated account.” However, most verbal or written language communication is limited by the fact that language is digital, the medium itself (as the constituent words and signs) is arbitrary. In language, lying and deceit are possible but with iconic communication there is necessarily some correspondence between image and reality (133).

Bateson’s message is, predictably, about integration. We are members of a complex world. We, ourselves, are patterned organisms, living within a world that consists of patterns within patterns. As a species, we lose our sense of oneness with this world at our peril. Engagement in art and art process is a way to reengage as members of the world, a creative and

healing activity that is helping to keep us aware of our role within complexity. For Bateson, the aesthetic, the beautiful, becomes (in later work) the hallmark of the sacred.

Example: A Balinese Painting

In the 1967 presentation, Bateson concluded by using the process of examining a single painting from the Balinese collection as a way of summarizing his main points (147–52). As noted above (see chapter 4 and Geertz 1995, introduction and chapters 1 and 2), these paintings were traditional in the sense that they were made by local painters following an established practice of painting significant scenes from their own village societies. Some techniques had been modified due to contact with Western artists but the new methods had been largely assimilated to the native genre.

The painting (see illustration on p. 111) is of a funeral procession.

The central feature is a cremation tower, carried by men, approaching the narrow entrance to a “serene courtyard” followed by a procession of mourners bearing the coffin, set against a conventional and very detailed background pattern of leaves. The picture is framed by darker areas, signifying that the subject is “out of this world” even though it is a familiar scene. It is densely “filled ,” there are no vacant spaces, and so it appears

“fussy.” To an occidental viewer it suggests anxiety and compulsiveness.

The composition of the lower half is turbulent, the upper half is serene, the reverse of Western expectations.

Bateson notes some particular aspects. The cremation tower is less prominent than it could have been, the coffin does not catch the eye, there are “whimsical details” like a snake and little birds in trees, the people (while doing ritually correct things) seem also to be details whim-sically added. He sees possibly unconscious sexual symbolism in the tall,

Bateson notes some particular aspects. The cremation tower is less prominent than it could have been, the coffin does not catch the eye, there are “whimsical details” like a snake and little birds in trees, the people (while doing ritually correct things) seem also to be details whim-sically added. He sees possibly unconscious sexual symbolism in the tall,