Schismogenesis

This paper weaves together two recurring themes in philosophical and political debates of recent years: the idea, loosely inspired by Walter Benjamin, that describes melancholia as a dominant structure of feeling and desire among the left; and the suggestion that we are currently witnessing a revival of debates on the question of organisation. My argument identifies not one but two left-wing melancholias, the specular relation between which precludes the work of mourning and deprives us of the conditions for thinking organisation concretely. I follows that a real return to the question of organisation can only take place if we escape this melancholic mechanism; I propose that the very idea of organisation might offer us theoretical resources with which to do so. We come to love our left passions and reasons, our analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that would be aligned with them. … What emerges is a Left that operates without either a deep and radical critique of the status quo or a compelling alternative to the existing order of things. But perhaps even more troubling, it is a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing. Wendy Brown The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

.....the double bind as constituting an entirely new, non-material, principle of evolution, major conceptual revisions may need to be made in our general understanding of evolution as contained within the “modern evolutionary synthesis”.

KEYWORDS:
behavior, communication, context, contradiction, deutero-learning, double bind, epistemology, evolution, incompleteness theorum, kinesics, learning, logical type theory, metacommunication, metamessages, metatheory, mystification, paradox, relationships, schismogenesis, schizophrenia,  scientific elegance, symmathesy, teleology, temporality, transcontextual, transdisciplinary, trauma

Anthropologists have traditionally classified foragers on the Pacific coast of North America into two major culture areas, characterized by strikingly different social and ethical systems. These are " California " and the adjacent " Northwest Coast. " Foragers in the northern part of California exhibit many elements of Weber's " Protestant ethic, " such as the moral injunction for community leaders to work hard, seek spiritual purpose by introspection, and pursue monetary wealth while avoiding material excess. By contrast, the social organization of Northwest Coast foragers bears comparison with that of courtly estates in medieval Europe, where a leisured class of nobles achieved status through hereditary ranking, competitive banquets, dazzling aesthetic displays, and the retention of household slaves captured in war. Remarkably, the coexistence of two such clearly opposed value systems among foragers inhabiting adjacent parts of the Pacific littoral has excited little interest in anthropologists, historians, or archaeologists to date. We consider the implications, which cast doubt on some key orthodoxies concerning the nature of culture areas, modes of subsistence, and political evolution. We argue that the political creativity of foraging peoples has been severely underrated. [hunter-gatherers, slavery, schizmogenesis, culture areas, North America]

This article (book chapter) explores major the most complicated instrument of the maqām tradition with a fixed supply of pitches, the qānūn plays a central role in the definition of the Near-Eastern tuning system. Originally this instrument had to be retuned separately for every scale structure, comparably to the Iranian santur. During the first half of the 20th century, mandal-s, movable levers, were applied to every course of strings with which the intonation can be adjusted during performance. These small metal bridges, however, have also caused confusion between theory and practice because they are tuned, on all common models, upon the tempered twelve-note scale that has little in common with pure Pythagorean and harmonic intervals as they are described in the traditional treatises. The study provides a brief account, containing four existing systems invented during the 20th century.

Paper presented at Annual Conference 6th & 7th of March 2015 “Permanence and transition/transitoriness: anthropological perspectives” organized by the Anthropological Association of Ireland at University College Cork, Ireland.

FAMILY AND COMMUNITY CONTINUITY

Co-Creating Transitional Spaces for Permanence in Change

Dirck van Bekkum (MSc), Self-Employed Clinical Anthropology at Moira CTT, The Netherlands, moira@ctt.nl.


Are families, communities and societies capable of remembering, of creating continuity and of correcting/adapting themselves to changing environments over several generations? If this is the case, as we assume in this paper, which concepts and integrating framework are available to make sense of what happens in intergenerational reproduction of families, communities and societies?

In a long term clinical anthropological fieldwork project (Kleinman 1980; Rush 1996) in transcultural psychiatric and youth care practices and educating transcultural family therapists in The Netherlands answering this question proved both relevant analytically in research and clinically in therapeutic practices.
Intergenerational transmission of pathological relational/communicational patterns and life-phase transitions are central re-occurring themes in the family therapy theories and in clinical practices (Falicov 1988; Schuetzenberger 1998; Krause 2002; Jessurun 2010; Tjin A Djie & Zwaan 2007; 2013).
Also the concepts of liminality and schismogenesis are common in transcultural (family) therapy (Keeney 1983; Imber-Black et. al. 1988; Di Nicola 1997; Krause 2012). In 1996, in a Handbook of Transcultural Psychiatry & Psychotherapy, the phenomenon of migration was redressed as a life-phase transition based on Victor Turner ritual processual theory in which ‘liminal vulnerability’ was coined as an explanatory and diagnostic device to de-pathologize effects of migration in psychiatry and youth care settings (Van Bekkum et. al. 1996; Van Bekkum et. al. 2010).
Schismogenesis in family therapy theory was introduced by Gregory Bateson and with the concept of complementary and symmetric communication pathological relational patterns can be detected with families in therapy (Doherty & McDaniel 2010).
Combining frameworks of Gregory Bateson (1972; 1979) and Victor Turner (1969) on process, system, ritual we introduce an integrating concept of Family & Community Continuity (FCC) which serves to redress the frequently rebalancing of permanence and change in families and communities.
Bateson’s cybernetic system’s theory is outlined in which families and communities are taken as self-generating, self-organizing, self-correcting over several generations (1972; 1979).
Change and continuity are central in Bateson’s thinking (Eriksen 2004). Applying transformational active ingredients, detected by Victor Turner, during the second ‘liminal’ phase of rites of passage could add a new explanation of containing the destructive, ‘runaway’, effects of schismogenesis.
Co-creating ‘transitional spaces’ during culture-bounded rituals in family therapy offers a clinical model to research and analyse permanence in change. During these spaces also non-rational remembering emerges with which families, as cybernetic systems, can transform stagnations, distortions and disruptions.
We will demonstrate the analytical and clinical value of these concepts by presenting the cases of Amet, a young men from Roma families/communities, and of Eric, from post-colonial Eurasian families/communities.
Keywords: schismogenesis, liminality, cybernetic systems, rituals, clinical anthropology, transition, change and stability, family & community continuity.
Literature
Gregory Bateson (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Bantam.
Gregory Bateson (1979) Mind and Nature. Glasgow: Fontana.
Vincenzo Di Nicola (1997) A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy, Norton: New York.
William J. Doherty & Susan H. McDaniel (2010) Family therapy, American Psychological Association: Washington.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2004) Bateson and the North Sea ethnicity paradigm, http://theriksen.info/Batesonethnicity.html
Celia Jaes Falicov (1988) Family Transitions: Continuity and Change Over the Life Cycle, Guilford Press: New York.
Evan Imber-Black, Roberts, Janine & Whiting, Richard. (1988) Rituals in Families and Family Therapy, Norton: New York.
Nel C.M. Jessurun ( 2010) Transcultural Skills for Therapists, Coutinho: Bussum. (in Dutch)
Bradford P. Keeney (1983) Aesthetics & Change, Guilford Press: New York.
Arthur Kleinman (1980) Patients and healers in the context of culture : an exploration of the borderland between anthropology, medicine, and psychiatry, University of California Press: Los Angeles.
Inga-Britt Krause (2002) Culture and System in Family Therapy, Karnac: London.
Inga-Britt Krause (ed.) (2012) Mutual Perspectives: Culture and Reflexivity in Systemic Psychotherapy, Karnac: London.
John A. Rush (1996) Clinical Anthology, An Application of Anthropological Concepts Within Clinical Settings, Preager: London.
Anne A. Schuetzenberger (1998) The Ancestor Syndrome: Transgenerational Psychotherapy and the Hidden Links in the Family Tree, Routledge: London.
Kitlyn Tjin A Djie en Irene Zwaan (2007) Protective Wrapping, Transcultural Help to Families, Uitgeverij van Gorcum, Assen (in Dutch)
Kitlyn Tjin A Djie en Irene Zwaan (2013) De Family-Soul, How your cultural history can help you during your life path. Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, A’dam. (in Dutch)
Victor Turner (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Aldine Publishing: Chicago.
Dirck Van Bekkum & M. Van de Ende, S. Heezen, A. Hijmans Van den Bergh, Migration as Transition: Liminal Vulnerabilities in Migrants and Implications for Mental Health Care, in: Handboek Transculturele Psychiatrie en Psychotherapie, J. de Jong en M. v. d. Berg, (red.) 1996a. (in Dutch)
Dirck Van Bekkum & Kitlyn Tjin A Djie, Glenn Helberg & Irene Zwaan (2010) Rituals & Protective Wrapping, in: Handboek Culturele psychiatrie en psychotherapie, Joop de Jong & Sjoerd Colijn (red.) de Tijdstroom, Utrecht. (in Dutch & translated in English)

Written in German for Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (eds.: R. W. Stoll & F. Lamberty), IV/2010.

Nie zuvor wurde in der zeitgenössischen Musik die Auseinandersetzung mit fremden Traditi-onen so umfassend gefördert wie heute. Die Konfrontation des Diversen verlangt jedoch von ihren Dialogpartnern ein neues, selbstkritisches Verständnis innerkultureller Prozesse. Am Beispiel der Türkei, wo westliche Musik sinnbildlich für die Kultur des Abendlandes steht, werden Möglichkeiten und Gefahren einer globalen Neuen Musik analysiert.

Since the late Ottoman era, musical life in Turkey has been restructured by Western influences. The early Republican government introduced polyphonic music with the aim to create a new cultural expression for a modern, democratic society while the classical Ottoman tradition was officially marginalized. However, many current composers of Western music in Turkey have shown growing interest in the Ottoman musical heritage. The disruption of mu-sical life in Turkey exemplifies how poorly Westernization and radical top-down transforma-tion serve the development of a genuinely modern society. Contents and meanings of Western art music have merged into objectified statements rather than effectively assisting this culture to evolve from the proposals of modernism. Rather than promoting an organic evolution of cultural expression, Western music has become the symbol of an intellectual and economic elite that is forced to redefine its political stance in face of Turkey’s growing islamization. Contemporary Western art music with its present focus on cross-cultural interaction is hereby confronted with the consequences of the radical postulations from which it evolved in post-war Germany.

In this article, we explore what happens in qualitative terms when a social phenomenon accelerates in quantitative terms. We do so by introducing escalation as an analytical concept through which to understand sudden processes of accelerating change. Using the Danish cartoon controversy as the ethnographic prism, we show that accelerating dynamics may not only imply the quantitative growth of “things” but also that the qualitative scales underpinning and measuring change are themselves changed in the process of growth. We take escalation to refer to this “change of change” within processes of sudden accelerating growth. By introducing a new theoretical concept, we aim to contribute to discussions of social and cultural change in anthropology and elsewhere and to enable and encourage future comparison between different ethnographies of accelerating changes.

Raccolgo e rielaboro qui una serie di riflessioni sulle rappresentazioni della guerra in Ucraina che ho pubblicato in ambito divulgativo (mediatico e social) durante i primi tre mesi del conflitto. Il tema di fondo è quello del rischio antropologico del riemergere di una concezione dello Stato nazionale come “società guerriera” in seno alla postmodernità occidentale; questo a partire dal riaffermarsi dell’estetica etno-nazionalista moderna del morire per la patria, della difesa dell’identità, della bandiera, del confine, come corollario
necessario di una poetica del fronte, di lotta armata contro l’invasore che antepone questi valori a quelli dell’esistenza individuale, della ricerca soggettiva di una buona vita.

This paper engages with the loosely bounded, ill-defined Anonymous movement, in order to develop a theoretical reflection on the process of self-reference within contemporary collectives. It is grounded on a socio-cybernetic framework and builds on a computationallly-assisted interpretative analysis of a huge dataset of Facebook posts related to Anonymous’ self-descriptions. As selected examples show, Anonymous results inherently contradictory. Its boundaries are radically contingent and performative, to the extent that it is impossible to distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic. The collective defines itself as ontologically multiple and radically anti-essentialist. Moreover, whereas Anonymous’ actions are systematically contradictory, Anonymous self-descriptions, relying on arguments mirroring poststructuralist theories, can only be tautologically or paradoxically expressed. Building on Luhmann’s claim that the reproduction of modern societies depends on concealing their se...

This paper engages with the loosely bounded, ill-defined Anonymous movement, in order to develop a theoretical reflection on the process of self-reference within contemporary collectives. It is grounded on a socio-cybernetic framework and builds on a computationallly-assisted interpretative analysis of a huge dataset of Facebook posts related to Anonymous' self-descriptions. As selected examples show, Anonymous results inherently contradictory. Its boundaries are radically contingent and performative, to the extent that it is impossible to distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic. The collective defines itself as ontologically multiple and radically anti-essentialist. Moreover, whereas Anonymous' actions are systematically contradictory, Anonymous self-descriptions, relying on arguments mirroring poststructuralist theories, can only be tautologically or paradoxically expressed. Building on Luhmann's claim that the reproduction of modern societies depends on concealing their self-referential foundations, the conclusion argues that Anonymous, by embracing its own constitutive paradox, pushes the process of autopoiesis to a new, radically recursive logic, departing in this even from recent theorizations on reflexivity.

In this article, we explore what happens in qualitative terms when a social phenomenon accelerates in quantitative terms. We do so by introducing escalation as an analytical concept through which to understand sudden processes of accelerating change. Using the Danish cartoon controversy as the ethnographic prism, we show that accelerating dynamics may not only imply the quantitative growth of “things” but also that the qualitative scales underpinning and measuring change are themselves changed in the process of growth. We take escalation to refer to this “change of change” within processes of sudden accelerating growth. By introducing a new theoretical concept, we aim to contribute to discussions of social and cultural change in anthropology and elsewhere and to enable and encourage future comparison between different ethnographies of accelerating change.

Parlare di cittadinanza significa parlare di migranti. Oggi è in gran parte così in quanto in Occidente la questione epocale dell’inclusione (o esclusione) dei migranti si realizza, da un punto di vista istituzionale, attraverso il conferimento (o la negazione) della cittadinanza.

Given the contemporary ambivalent standpoints toward the future of artificial intelligence, recently denoted as the phenomenon of Singularitarianism, Gregory Bateson’s core theories of ecology of mind, schismogenesis, and double bind, are hereby revisited, taken out of their respective sociological, anthropological, and psychotherapeutic contexts and recontextualized in the field of Roboethics as to a twofold aim: (a) the proposal of a rigid ethical standpoint toward both artificial and non-artificial agents, and (b) an explanatory analysis of the reasons bringing about such a polarized outcome of contradictory views in regard to the future of robots. Firstly, the paper applies the Batesonian ecology of mind for constructing a unified roboethical framework which endorses a flat ontology embracing multiple forms of agency, borrowing elements from Floridi’s information ethics, classic virtue ethics, Felix Guattari’s ecosophy, Braidotti’s posthumanism, and the Japanese animist doctrine of Rinri. The proposed framework wishes to act as a pragmatic solution to the endless dispute regarding the nature of consciousness or the natural/artificial dichotomy and as a further argumentation against the recognition of future artificial agency as a potential existential threat. Secondly, schismogenic analysis is employed to describe the emergence of the hostile human–robot cultural contact, tracing its origins in the early scientific discourse of man–machine symbiosis up to the contemporary countermeasures against superintelligent agents. Thirdly, Bateson’s double bind theory is utilized as an analytic methodological tool of humanity’s collective agency, leading to the hypothesis of collective schizophrenic symptomatology, due to the constancy and intensity of confronting messages emitted by either proponents or opponents of artificial intelligence. The double bind’s treatment is the mirroring “therapeutic double bind,” and the article concludes in proposing the conceptual pragmatic imperative necessary for such a condition to follow: humanity’s conscience of habitualizing danger and familiarization with its possible future extinction, as the result of a progressive blurrification between natural and artificial agency, succeeded by a totally non-organic intelligent form of agency.

« Les regards anthropologiques sur la violence : Alain LeRoy Locke, Gregory Bateson, Marcel Mauss », p.95-130 in Christiane Chaulet-Achour (ed) : Etats et effets de la violence, Publications du Centre de Recherche Texte/Histoire, Amiens, Encrage Editions, 2005, 311 p.

Cet article propose une réflexion sur les structures interactives de la violence. À partir d’une anthologie de textes historiques, anthropologiques, sociologiques sur les contacts culturels, éditée par le penseur afro-américain Alain Locke en 1942 (When Peoples Meet, A Study in Race and Culture Contacts), je mets en relief deux principaux modèles relationnels : celui de la schismogenèse, théorisée par Gregory Bateson, et la logique du don, tel qu’il s’est trouvé analysé par Marcel Mauss. Je montre comment les interprétations de ces deux modèles par leurs théoriciens respectifs échouent à saisir la véritable logique de la réciprocité, sur laquelle n’ont cessé d’insister les penseurs afro-américains. En m’appuyant sur les travaux de Claude Lévi-Strauss et de Marcel Hénaff je montre pour conclure que la logique du don et de la réciprocité implique avant tout une politique de la reconnaissance, dont l’exigence se trouve au cœur de la littérature d’idées et d’imagination afro-américaine.