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To cite this Article Mathur, Piyush(2008) 'Gregory Bateson, Niklas Luhmann, and Ecological Communication', The
Communication Review, 11: 2, 151 — 175
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10714420802068391
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The Communication Review, 11: 151–175, 2008
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN 1071-4421 print / 1547-7487 online
DOI: 10.1080/10714420802068391
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The Communication Review
Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, Apr 2008: pp. 0–0
Piyush Mathur
G. Mathur
P. Bateson, N. Luhmann, and Ecological Communication
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I would like to thank Dr. Michael Smith, at Virginia Tech, for his consistent critical input
into the writing of this manuscript. Sincere thanks are also due to Bruce Williams for his strate-
gic advice regarding the structure of this manuscript, and to Tatiana Omeltchenko for her sup-
port through the long process of peer review.
Address correspondence to Piyush Mathur, Department of Communications and Multimedia
Design, School of Information Technology & Communications, American University of Nigeria,
Yola, Adamawa State, PMB 2250, Nigeria. E-mail: pspecial@gmail.com
152 P. Mathur
tion” (Cox, 2007, p. 12).4 Worse, the essay, which ends up being an
appeal to the readers to start “acting like members of a crisis discipline,”
does not live up to even basic logical scrutiny (Cox, 2007, p. 10).5 Indeed,
from this issue of Environmental Communication, EC comes out more as
a discipline in-crisis than as a crisis discipline (-to-be)!
What the above discussion indicates is that the spirit of collegial famil-
iarity has left little incentive for EC contributors to develop robust critiques
of their own ideas, or to be ambitious or meticulous in thinking about eco-
logical communication. In conjunction with the drive to institutionalize the
discourse as an academic discipline (within the United States), the EC fra-
ternity has also created an ethos that does not quite favor cosmopolitan
voices and globally informed (or oriented) intellectual traditions at least
within its publications. Moreover, there remains a somewhat blind focus
within the discourse on an empirically inclined, limiting approach.
In such a scenario, raising genuine questions for the sake of invoking
genuine responses is replaced—as if as a matter of rhetorical, inspirational
ritualism performed by a clique—with raising those questions whose
answers are already known. In this sense, the discourse has clearly deterio-
rated in substance and quality since the publication of The Symbolic Earth
(1996), an edited collection of essays that did raise some pioneering ques-
tions and also addressed them with appreciable rigor and depth. In its current
state, the academic discourse of EC could therefore look to those perspec-
tives that are not part of its official promotional scheme—even if only to
reject them after all—in order to situate itself, to look back at itself. By the
same token, independent observers of intellectual traditions and activities
ought to be able to look for—and bring to everybody’s attention—alterna-
tive vantage points from where emergent discourses such as EC could be
looked at (and hopefully prevented from turning into stodgy orthodoxies). It
is in this spirit—of looking for alternative frameworks for the sake of ensur-
ing theoretical, analytical, and intellectual savvies for what ecological com-
municators do—that I hereby turn to the work of Gregory Bateson.
154 P. Mathur
one system” (Ruesch & Bateson, p. vii). It is such a theory that they
sought to provide in the given treatise.
On the broadest level, Ruesch and Bateson refuse to reduce communication
to the verbal or written exchange among humans. Instead, deeming “[the
psychiatrist] and the communication engineer, of all scientists . . . to be
most aware of the laws of communication,” Ruesch looks toward cyber-
netics and communication engineering for their key conceptual defini-
tions (Ruesch & Bateson, p. 13). The reliance on the above fields has
partly to do with the assumption that they bridge the gap between human
and nonhuman domains by focusing “not upon the person or the group,
but upon the message and the circuit as units of study” (Ruesch &
Bateson, p. vi). In sync with the above, Ruesch defines communication as
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the one hand to a series of perceived stimuli and on the other hand to
a series of anticipated reactions of the organism. In order to facilitate
a decision in the face of these multiple choices, the organism
subdivides the perceived stimuli and the anticipated reactions into
groups. Through a series of complicated processes, the individual
finally comes out with a statement of preference. Such a statement of
preference we shall term value. (Ruesch & Bateson, p. 45)
Perhaps the most important facet to keep in mind about the psychiatric
system here involves the norms of circularity and self-preservation (the
latter being closely related to self-correction or self-organization): They
both point up the requirement for psychiatry and psychiatric discourse to
be able to explain consistently, rationally, and fully (at least) the most
important concepts and events typically involved in the praxis—in the
terms that they themselves proffer. That is because circularity is to be
expected not just from the operational reality of an actual psychiatric or
communicative system in society, but also from the mechanism employed
to explain it. In other words, circularity is also to be expected from the
theory of psychiatry (or communication), whereas a theory of psychia-
try—just like a psychiatric or social system—would attempt to “preserve”
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Of all of the above, the last bit is perhaps the most significant because
it underlines the communicative relativism among humans as well as with
respect to the environment—and the effort involved in connecting. In
relation to the above, Bateson argues that
Ecology
In the foregoing section, I discussed how Bateson (and Ruesch) viewed psy-
chiatry as a mightily useful subset—and the handiest exemplar—of
communication, which in turn was the general epistemological framework of
his choice.14 However, Bateson’s subsequent writings suggest that ecology
ended up replacing communication as his chosen general epistemological
framework. Keeping in mind his philosophical nomadism and mutability,
I personally consider this development a matter of chronology rather than
a decisive evidence that ecology finally superceded all else in his thought
on the whole. Hence, I shall view ecology as only one of Bateson’s major
concerns;15 of interest would be its shape and character within his writings.
The significance of discussing ecology in the context of Bateson lies
primarily in the fact that it did not mean to him just what it commonly
does—let us say, (the study of) the relationships and interactions among
G. Bateson, N. Luhmann, and Ecological Communication 163
In the past few days, people have asked me, “What do you mean, ecol-
ogy of mind?” Approximately what I mean is the various kinds of stuff
that goes on in one’s head and in one’s behavior and in dealing with
other people, and walking up and down mountains, and getting sick,
and getting well. All that stuff interlocks, and, in fact, constitutes a
network which, in the local language, is called mandala. I am more
comfortable with the word “ecology,” but they’re very closely related
ideas. (1991, p. 264)
Though it may seem from the above that the older Bateson turned out
to be a New Age guru expounding the virtues of obscure oriental spiritual
cults, the fact of the matter is that the man remained heavily invested in
figuring out a “neutral” way to speak about how this system called “the
world” works! The thrust in the above passage, therefore, is on
“network”—though it is true that Bateson also wrote, cursorily, about
Occidental and Oriental systems of thinking and doing (critiquing modern
science and technology of the West for their belief in control of nature). In
any case, he did not consider (his) spiritualism to be opposed to verifiable
or rationalistic truth; quite the contrary, he believed that the real reality,
164 P. Mathur
For the staunch relativist that Bateson was, he considered both restraints
and the resultant patterns integral to the overall communicational dynamics
called existence or reality or truth. The fourth reason, then, why Bateson
preferred the cybernetic approach was that it could capably explain the
logical only in relation to the nonlogical, thereby making it unavoidable
to include both as equally central and germane to the process of explana-
tion and to communication as a whole.
Bateson introduced the concept of redundancy in elaborating his
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CONCLUSION
NOTES
(2006). Outside EC, the treatise has been discussed in some detail by Blühdorn
(within the European context of socio-political theory). Indeed, the environmen-
talist neglect of Luhmann’s overall theoretical ideas led Blühdorn to state the
following:
[Luhmann’s model of contemporary society] is fundamentally incompatible
with ecologist thinking, which is probably why ecological theorists and
environmental sociologists, in particular, have so far refused to engage in a
serious exploration of this work. (p. xv)
That said, Luhmann’s ideas—as expressed in his publications other than Ecologi-
cal Communication—have since been discussed, applied, or mentioned in a few
publications belonging to the following environmentally oriented fields: ecologi-
cal history (Simmons, 2000); ecological modeling (Grant, Peterson, & Peterson,
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the individual and events encompassing several people and larger groups”
(Ruesch & Bateson, 1968, p. 62). He attaches a universalistic significance to the
proposed framework—because the connections between the internal and external
world form the crux of the generic psychiatric conundrum. Evidently, the focus
within the treatise on valuation or choice assists in the atriculation of such a
framework as it points to the connection that the individual—observer—seeks to
establish between his internal mental world and the larger external system of
communication. This is because “[t]hrough statements of preference, the inner
workings of the mind of a person are revealed” (Ruesch & Bateson, 1968, p. 45).
9. Claiming that the “brain is predominantly digital in its functioning,” and that
“codification must . . . be systematic,” Ruesch and Bateson go on to detail the
functional system of codification. This is significant to their framework because
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[t]o describe codification [at the intrapersonal level] is to specify the rela-
tion between the neural, chemical, and other signals and the internal or
external events to which they refer . . . At the interpersonal level, [on the
other hand,] the description of codification will define the symbolization
processes of language together with the more tenuous symbolisms present
in nonverbal communication. (1968, p. 283)
For all that, Bateson considers codification the central conceptual bridge
between the so-called “mentalist” and “organicist” approaches within psychia-
try—the former focusing on the individual (mind), the latter on the larger con-
text (Ruesch & Bateson, 1968, p. 169).
10. Whereas
[t]he condition which the psychiatrist labels “psychosis” is essentially the result
of the patient’s misinterpretation of messages received; and the condition
which we commonly label “neurosis” is the result of unfortunate attempts of a
patient to manipulate social situations with the purpose of creating a stage to
convey messages to others more effectively. (Ruesch & Bateson, 1968, p. 88)
11. Ruesch argues the following:
The central problem of psychotherapy may . . . be restated as follows: How
does it happen that in the interchange of messages between two persons
with differing systems of codification and evaluation, a change occurs
in the system of codification and evaluation of either or both persons?
(Ruesch & Bateson, 1968, p. 82)
12. As Bateson concludes, “[T]he introduction of consciousness as a concept will
not profoundly modify the type of question which is here studied” (Ruesch &
Bateson, 1968, p. 183).
13. See Bateson (especially in Ruesch & Bateson, 1968, p. 186).
14. Ruesch and Bateson did not intend their findings to serve as a mere reworking
of psychiatry, but also as a general epistemological framework for the social
sciences at large. In this regard, consider what Ruesch notes:
The present book has been dedicated to the task of stating and illustrating
at length the premises which underlie the various approaches to social
172 P. Mathur
representative concern.
16. A clear hint of Bateson’s resolute truth-centered objective is found, ironically, in
one of those elusive literary genres called poetry. Bateson wrote the following
(referring to the manuscript of what his daughter further developed posthu-
mously and published as Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred
(1987):
“The Manuscript”
So there it is in words
Precise
You will find nothing there
For that is the discipline I ask
Not more, not less
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