Orders of Change

Orders of Change

Bateson asks what actually changes when we say that something has changed. Beginning with Alice in Wonderland, he distinguishes things from our descriptions of them, then follows perception, biological adaptation and the ways surface changes preserve deeper stability. He turns to schizophrenia, the double bind and moments when destructive patterns of relationship dissolve. The discussion opens into Jung, consciousness, fear, humour and a conception of mind that extends beyond the individual.

1. 0:00 — Language, identity and the problem of change
2. 6:38 — What does it mean to be stable?
3. 9:32 — The cat and our description of the cat
4. 16:21 — Perception as news of difference
5. 21:58 — Leonardo’s waves and the continuity of life
6. 25:57 — Reversible change, learning and evolution
7. 33:17 — How surface changes protect deeper stability
8. 40:38 — Schizophrenia and the double bind
9. 44:27 — Animal communication and human relationships
10. 50:06 — The child, the puppet and conflicting messages
11. 58:44 — Dissolving psychological tangles
12. 1:03:21 — John Perceval, laughter and moments of insight
13. 1:08:34 — Questions: perception, sanity and Learning III
14. 1:11:23 — Jung, distinction and information that never arrives
15. 1:18:29 — Phenomenology, consciousness and the limits of language
16. 1:29:56 — Psychosis, ecological balance and recovery
17. 1:34:32 — Why change produces fear—and sometimes pleasure
18. 1:41:25 — Dialogue and the self beyond the skin

Gregory Bateson — 1 recording in the archive.

Related reading: Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson.

I agreed some while back to talk on quote orders of change. And anybody who tries to talk about change of course is in trouble from the word go. And in order to get your kind sympathy, I am going to complain a little about the nature of that trouble. You see, the monstrous thing about language is that it contains not only nouns, which is bad enough, but words like it. And you see, the difficulty with change is that you never know what it is. You remember Alice going through the woods found a mushroom I suppose an Amanita. I mean to goodness sake you know people who write books about mushrooms which alter their personalities, disturb their consciousnesses and change their size would seem to know too much about mushrooms. Anyway, on top of the mushroom is a caterpillar who is the sort of prototype of all psychiatrists. And the caterpillar when he finally notices Alice because like a good guru he pretends not to notice. Uh turns upon her and says, "Who are you?" Alice says, "Well, I don’t really know because you see, I've been changing so much." The caterpillar says, "Explain yourself." And Alice says, "I cannot explain myself." That is it. For Alice, the the that which has been changing is not something that you can point to. Is Alice at the moment when she's talking to the caterpillar the same Alice with a difference or is she a different Alice and that difficulty of being a identifying the it runs through all discussion of change. Uh, the Naropa Institute is somewhat different this year from what it was last year. Is there an it which has changed and that is the difficulty. Alternatively, if you avoid talking about some substantive, some it which undergoes the change and use the word it to describe the change, to refer to the change, it's what I'm studying. Then you have condensed into that single little word a whole mess of sentences and everything is left ambiguous as before. At at the moment for the last year and a half, I guess I'm on a rampage against the word it. I refuse to accept sentences from students which say, quote, "He took his dog for a walk on Tuesday, and that shows that he loved it." Unquote. Was it that it was Tuesday that showed that…