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 – increasingly heated after the watershed year of 1968 – 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’s he often quoted, Bateson spoke directly to praxis: “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.” What did that mean?

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’s 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’s relationship to Ashley might serve as an example, in Bateson’s own life, of doing good “in Minute Particulars.” Though he was under no professional obligation to carry on the correspondence, Bateson’s 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.

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’s thought in its historical and present-day contexts.