Participant: Peter Harries-Jones
Affiliation: Department of Anthropology, York University, Ontario
Format: Plenary Speech
Themes: paradigm, praxis

In my last presentation to the ASC, I dealt with four ways in which Gregory Bateson altered arguments of cybernetic notions of information circuits in order to achieve an epistemology of meaningful communication. Pickering’s recent study of British cybernetics, The Cybernetic Brain now adds a fifth alteration, the notion of homeostasis. In Pickering’s view Bateson, together with Ronnie Laing, helped change the ‘black box’ approach to homeostasis typical of the earlier days of cybernetics, through showing how feedback emerges from performance and returns reciprocally to performance in ‘performatively adapting systems’ (Pickering). Bateson and Laing made this understanding the root of all their therapeutic intervention which invoked , at the same time, a duty to care.

My concern in this paper is transfer this frame of enquiry to the most recent conditions of ecological destruction, or in the words of Polly Higgins, ‘Ecocide.’ Higgins wishes to create enforceable, legally binding mechanisms in national and international law to hold account perpetrators of long term, severe damage to the environment: in short to place ecocide alongside the international conventions on genocide. In so doing, the law would create a ‘duty to care’ about ecosystems that would clearly hold corporate managers responsible for system destruction. Higgins brings together some hopeful signs, models for possible expansion to international law, among them the Philippine Constitution which Section 16 Article II states: “The State shall protect and advance the right of people to a balanced and healthful ecology in accord with the rhythm and harmony of nature.”

Nevertheless this paper claims that Higgins will require (1) acceptable definitions of an ecosystem’s sentience in order to define ‘ecocide’ and replace the currently acceptable notion of ecosystem-as-commodity (2) acceptable models of dynamic balance (feedback models) which address, in publicly understandable terms, the major characteristics of ‘performatively adapting systems” and duty to care (3) mapping devices, iconography, and diagrams – not merely numbers – to support (2). To support this discussion I will draw on examples from my last ten years with Biosemiotics especially with Bateson’s contributions to that sub-branch of science.