{"id":539,"date":"2012-06-08T06:59:38","date_gmt":"2012-06-08T06:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/?page_id=539"},"modified":"2012-06-08T07:00:41","modified_gmt":"2012-06-08T07:00:41","slug":"gregory-bateson-and-the-murderer","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/?page_id=539","title":{"rendered":"Gregory Bateson And The Murderer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Participant: Anthony Chaney<br \/>\nAffiliation: University of Texas at Dallas<br \/>\nFormat: Presentation and Conversation<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/?page_id=95\">Themes<\/a>: paradigm, praxis<\/p>\n<p>The nineteen-sixties were characterized by great sensitivity to the need for change. One argument \u2013 increasingly heated after the watershed year of 1968 \u2013 was where this change should be located: in culture or in structure; in ways of thinking or in collective action against the institutions of power. It was a question of praxis. During these years, Gregory Bateson emerged as a public intellectual urging paradigmatic change in our underlying depictions of reality. He found a sympathetic audience, but also one pressed by the urgency to act. In a line of Blake\u2019s he often quoted, Bateson spoke directly to praxis: \u201cHe who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.\u201d What did that mean?<\/p>\n<p>Earlier in the decade, Bateson held a two-year correspondence with Clarence Edward Ashley, a man who, for much of that period, inhabited a cell on death row at San Quentin. The two came into contact through Bateson\u2019s role as consultant at Atascadero State Hospital, where Ashley was temporarily placed following his conviction for the rape and murder of a six-year-old girl. Bateson\u2019s relationship to Ashley might serve as an example, in Bateson\u2019s own life, of doing good \u201cin Minute Particulars.\u201d Though he was under no professional obligation to carry on the correspondence, Bateson\u2019s letters to Ashley might be described as a kind of therapy by post. Yet culturalist answers to the question of praxis were vulnerable to the criticism of structuralists on precisely this score: to center change on ways of thinking was essentially quietist, and merely therapeutic.<\/p>\n<p>Employing the critical methods of intellectual history, my paper will open up the central ideas contained in these letters and suggested by this relationship so as to generate discussion of these on-going questions concerning Bateson\u2019s thought in its historical and present-day contexts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Participant: Anthony Chaney Affiliation: University of Texas at Dallas Format: Presentation and Conversation Themes: paradigm, praxis The nineteen-sixties were characterized by great sensitivity to the need for change. One argument \u2013 increasingly heated after the watershed year of 1968 \u2013 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/?page_id=539\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":26,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-539","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=539"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":541,"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/539\/revisions\/541"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}