First Published Aug 2014
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Wikipedia Commons Illustrations to Thomas Gray |
Perhaps we fail to look
for Blake's influence on scientists, or social theorists.
Gregory Bateson, one of whose many accomplishment was
contributing to the origination of the science of cybernetics,
owes to Blake much for his means of approaching an understanding
the mind and societies. Bateson applied the diffuse, holistic,
non-linear methods of thinking, writing and imaging which Blake
used, to solving the issues which presented themselves to his
scientific mind.
Cybernetics has been defined as 'means of knowing what sort
of world this is, and also the limitations that exist concerning
our ability to know something (or perhaps nothing) of such
matters.'
From an article in the
Guardian, we learn:
"He [Gregory Bateson]
had grown up in a house where William Blake's paintings hung on
the walls, where art and poetry were revered as the acme of
human achievement yet at the same time considered, as his father
put it, 'scarcely within the reach of people like ourselves'"
...
Dreams, religious experience, art, love - these were the
phenomena that still had power, Bateson thought, to undermine
the rash/rational purposeful mind. Of these four, art enjoyed
the special role of fusing different 'levels of mind' together:
there was necessarily consciousness and purpose in the decision
to create, but creativity itself involved openness to material
from the unconscious, otherwise the work would be merely
schematic and transparent."
We read further of the
influence of William Blake on Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) in this
Obituary from the website of Intercultural Studies:
"To begin
with, he proposed above all a way of looking at phenomena; he
was visionary in the sense that one of his models, William
Blake, was - he "saw" in a particular, unified, and in
relation to many of his auditors and readers, original way. As
Roger Keesing (1974) put it in his review of Steps to an
Ecology of Mind, "To have a vision of the world one's
fellow men do not share is lonely and even frightening. . . .
Gregory Bateson has been blessed, and cursed, with a mind
that sees through things to a world of pattern and form that
lies beyond." Keesing and a growing number of others
(including ourselves) shared the vision, at least in part, and
shared a conviction of its importance and urgency, but to do so
was a matter of temperament and of a particular intellectual
history.
...
Bateson belonged to no academic discipline. In his formation and
career he was an "original," an "autodidact." His knowledge and
sense of problem were formed in an exceedingly rich early
intellectual milieu, by his lifelong informal intellectual
network (which included a good sample of the century's better
thinkers), by a genius for close observation of what fascinated
him (essentially the structures and processes of the reality
created through communication), and perhaps by some painful
alienation from the ordinary. Although highly cultured in his
understanding of European tradition, he was no scholar of
contemporary documents in the social sciences. His favorite
references are to William Blake, Samuel Butler, Larmarck,
Alfred Wallace, Darwin, C. H. Waddington, R. G. Collingwood,
Whitehead, Russell, the Bible, St. Augustine, Von Neumann,
Norbert Wiener, and Lewis Carroll.
...
These kinds of arguments are based in large part on analogies.
In his search for significant similarities and contrasts in
systems involving communication and meaning, Bateson believed
(and here he picks up emphases of Vico and such Romantic
protestors against empiricism as Blake) that it was
legitimate to use intuitions based on
aspects of order glimpsed in the examination of any complex
"cybernetic" system (and perhaps based, ultimately, on our own
sense of ourselves as organized systems of person/environment)
to explore other organized realms. He called this abduction
"the lateral extension of abstract components of description"
(1979:142), which he took to be as important as deduction and
induction. "Metaphor, dream, parable, allegory, the whole of
art, the whole of [social?] science, the whole of religion, the
whole of poetry, totemism . . . the organization of facts in
comparative anatomy - all these are instances or aggregates of
instances of abduction. . . ." He then, characteristically, pushed
the idea further in his search for analogies of order.
"But obviously the possibility of abduction extends to the very
roots also of physical science, Newton's analysis of the solar
system and the periodic table of the elements being historical
examples" (1979: 142-143).
...
The cure for the inadequacies of consciousness, of purposive
rationality, is not to reject it in favor of a passionate
nonrationality (and here Bateson separates himself from the
extreme Romantic position) but to augment and complete it. For
Bateson the inadequacies of linear, purposive, discursive
processes of consciousness are corrected by enlisting the aid of
the nondiscursive, pattern-comprehending, emotionally saturated
"primary processes," in Freud's sense, processes which to
Bateson, however, quoting Blake's "A tear is an intellectual
thing," represented legitimate aspects of knowing. Art,
aspects of religion, and complex symbolic form are vehicles for
conveying necessary information. Taking his metaphor here from
religious language, art, for example, is "part of man's quest
for grace." He thought of grace as involving the integration
of "diverse parts of the mind - especially those multiple
levels of which one extreme is called 'consciousness' and the
other the 'unconscious' (1972:129). When the world is
viewed as circuits of information and meaning in which the
submind of the actor participates, then the world's problems
centrally include, as we have noted, failures of conscious
understanding that involve for Bateson errors in the
epistemology of individuals."
A reader of Blake will struggle to follow relationships, and
shifting images. The reader will be surprised by the appearance of
new characters without introductory material. Interruptions in the
flow by extraneous references from disparate sources may tax the
readers' comprehension. Bateson used his familiarity with Blake's
techniques of writing to apply them to how the mind processes
thought. Following multiple pathways, shifting from the parts to
the whole, attending to input from the unconscious, removing
obstructions which hinder perception: these are all ways Blake
encouraged his reader to modify the tools through which he
understands his mind and how it relates to his world. Bateson had
been infused with Blake's thinking processes to the degree that he
could apply them in a theory of internal mental activity and
external communication.
In the following passage from an Editorial from the University of
Toronto Library, look for relationships between what you know of
Blake and what you know of Bateson.
"Bateson was, if nothing else, a pioneer in stressing the
importance of perception to the study of mind. This point is
summarized in the expression that Bateson borrowed from Korzybski (see Skibinski)
that ‘the map is not the territory.’ In recent years laboratory
studies have caught up with this remarkable insight. The eye has
no equivalent of a photographic plate in the visual cortex. Nor is
there one place in the brain in which nervous electrical messages
are retranslated into a faithful image of the world ‘out there’.
There is not even a single all-encompassing visual cortex, instead
there are a number of discrete cell ensembles, each analyzing
different features of the world, some responding only to
horizontal, some to vertical lines, some to edges and angles, some
to colour and some to motion. Each ensembles
creates its own map of the world, but which aspect of which cell
responds to the topography of the world it interprets depends on
its connectivity with other cells, and not upon its distinctive
properties. Hence it is the brain itself, the whole organ that
puts vision all together, the activity of the whole organ on its
parts still remaining an unknown process (Rose, 2004).
Perception, as Bateson stressed, is an unconscious process, over
which an individual has no control. In an experimental context, one
of the most appropriate means for the investigation of this
unconscious process is by investigating perceptual illusions or
through study of impossible objects, like Necker cubes and the Klein bottle (McNeil,
Rosen, Ryan) or the Möbius strip
(Rosen), or the strange loops of a hierarchy in graphics by M.C.
Escher. All these yield perceptual confusions and in order for
any meaningful interpretation to occur, require some
‘dialectic’ between orienting stabilities of form - usually forms
that are subject to classificatory denotation - and perceptual
signification (Neuman, Harries-Jones)."
Milton, Plate 4, (E 98)
"Anger me not! thou canst not drive the Harrow in pitys paths.
Thy Work is Eternal Death, with Mills & Ovens & Cauldrons.
Trouble me no more. thou canst not have Eternal Life
So Los spoke! Satan trembling obeyd weeping along the way.
Mark well my words, they are of your eternal Salvation
Between South Molton Street & Stratford Place: Calvarys foot
Where the Victims were preparing for Sacrifice their Cherubim
Around their loins pourd forth their arrows & their bosoms beam
With all colours of precious stones, & their inmost palaces
Resounded with preparation of animals wild & tame
(Mark well my words! Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies)
Mocking Druidical Mathematical Proportion of Length Bredth Highth
Displaying Naked Beauty! with Flute & Harp & Song"
Jerusalem, Plate 32 [36], (E 179)
"And many of the Eternal Ones laughed after their manner
Have you known the judgment that is arisen among the
Zoa's of Albion? where a Man dare hardly to embrace
His own Wife, for the terrors of Chastity that they call
By the name of Morality. their Daughters govern all
In hidden deceit! they are Vegetable only fit for burning
Art & Science cannot exist but by Naked Beauty displayd
Then those in Great Eternity who contemplate on Death
Said thus. What seems to Be: Is: To those to whom
It seems to Be, & is productive of the most dreadful
Consequences to those to whom it seems to Be: even of
Torments, Despair, Eternal Death; but the Divine Mercy
Steps beyond and Redeems Man in the Body of Jesus Amen
And Length Bredth Highth again Obey the Divine Vision Hallelujah"
Letters, (E 703)
"But as I
cannot paint Dirty rags & old Shoes where I ought to place Naked
Beauty or simple ornament I despair of Ever pleasing one Class"
.
