Participant: Bruce Clarke
Affiliation: Literature and Science. Texas Tech University
Format: Presentation and Conversation
Themes: recursion, paradigm

This talk will reflect on the remarkable circumstance that a key statement in Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind repeats nearly verbatim a passage from Frank Herbert’s celebrated science fiction novel Dune. Setting up this comparison so that the passage from Dune can echo meaningfully against Bateson’s text, I will offer some historical and conceptual interpretations for this striking resonance. Both Herbert and Bateson inherit the stateside inflection on the shift in the discipline of ecology in the 20th century from a descriptive form of natural history to a theoretical systems science. Arriving in the vanguard of 1960s counterculture, in the name of the science of ecology, Herbert’s fiction presents mind expansion and alternative communities in a context of global environmental concerns. Bateson carries out a comparable shift, from ecology as a natural-scientific metadiscipline on a par with cybernetics and specifically focused on the interrelations of life and environment, to ecology as a traveling concept, a mobile philosophical figure for any situation of systemic complexity and interdependence. In their own ways, both mark a particular cultural crest, when the discourse of ecology—ecosystem ecology in particular—is joined with its sibling discourse of cybernetics by thinkers crossing over from mainstream scientific ontology to the new epistemologies of the systems counterculture.