Enacting Ecological Aesthetics

Recording of an hybrid event as it is. Daniel Christian Wahl in conversation with Dulmini Perera. Including a panel response with research team + discussion with audience.

In this session we will reflect on intersections and interstices between Bateson`s ecology of the mind and decoloniality with a special focus on the echoing yet different concepts of the double bind and differential or border consciousness. These issues are directly linked to the onto-epistemic processes of sensing-knowing-making and therefore to decolonizing aesthetics through aesthesis, crucial for reimagining design of/by the South. In the second part (Q&A session) we also look forward to expanding the discussion on the relationship between questions of aesthetics and decoloniality in relation to design/ architecture/artistic research and methods. As such we warmly welcome researchers, graduate students, and others who may have specific questions regarding their research/practices to join us.

In this conversation, we explore the relationships between Gregory Bateson and Francisco Varela's work, particularly the ways in which their work contributed to expanding our understanding of the 'mind' in the context of living. Starting from their time at Lindisfarne Association in the 1970s, a context that had multiple relationships to their intellectual projects, we will explore how they reformulated concepts such as wholes, boundaries, and recursion in their respective critiques of mainstream Western science/epistemology. The discussion would end with a focus on action. How does their expansion of the notions of 'cognition', 'mind', and consciousness' enable us to think about (design) action within the context of the present ecological crises? All interested are welcome. Evan Thompson is a writer and professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He works on the nature of the mind, the self, and human experience. His work combines cognitive science, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Asian philosophical traditions. He is the author of Why I Am Not a Buddhist (Yale University Press, 2020); Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2015); Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007); and Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception (Routledge Press, 1995). He is the co-author, with Francisco J. Varela and Eleanor Rosch, of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991, revised edition 2016). Evan is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Bruce Clarke is the Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science Emeritus at Texas Tech University and the 2019 Baruch S. Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. He explores critical ecologies of narrative and systems theory in relation to posthumanism and Gaia theory. Together with Henry Sussman he is the editor of the book series Meaning Systems at Fordham University Press. With David McConville and Dawn Danby he curates the website Gaian Systems: Planetary Cognition Lab. This event is a collaboration between the Enacting Ecological Aesthetics( EEA) project and the Speaker Series of the American Society of Cybernetics(ASC).

In this conversation, we look at Gregory Bateson’s intelligence work at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the 1940s, a moment when military uses of anthropology left Bateson facing an ethical dilemma and influenced his lifelong scepticism of applied science. Bateson’s later writings often highlight the problematic relationship between ‘conscious purpose’ and ‘action’. By looking at the broader socio-political context that anthropology was embedded in during WWII, we will look at how Bateson and Margaret Mead’s anthropological research on ideas of ‘cultural order’ and ‘stability’ were reflexively informed by their engagement with multiple sites and intelligence projects that had a relation to design decisions made at the broader level of governance and policy. The divergences that happened towards the end of this period between Mead’s and Bateson’s thinking on the notions of ‘culture’ and ‘applied anthropology’ would also be a focus. At a moment when different versions of ‘anthropological intelligence’ are still used to aid various forms of colonisation, the ethical quandaries that emerge in Bateson’s story during WWII have much to offer contemporary efforts that call for taking multiple cosmologies and different worlds seriously within various processes of design. This research is supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation) grant number 508363000 and the AHRC (United Kingdom).