Published by Triarchy Press in 2016
Paperback List Price: £17.50/$20
210 pp. ~ 15.6 x 23.4cm
ISBN: 978-1-909470-96-5

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Readership

The book will interest anyone who knows the work of Nora Bateson, her father Gregory Bateson and the International Bateson Institute: social and organizational theorists and practitioners, futurists, systems thinkers, psychotherapists, and general readers concerned with where our world is heading.

Preview the book in the Biblet
See book reviews
See interviews with Nora
Read the Glossary
Press materials
Details of Dialektikon - a play reconstructing the 1967 ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ meeting in London at which Gregory Bateson was present.

Keywords

Systems thinking, education, social anthropology, environmentalism, Bateson, symmathesy, inter-learning, knowledge, transcontextuality, Ecological Design, Regenerative Economy, New Economics, Futures Studies, Thrivability.

"If I have a hope for this decade, it's that we might stop coming up with goals."
Nora Bateson, Jan 2020, Communities for Future: Online Summit

Small Arcs of Larger Circles
Framing through other patterns

Nora Bateson

This is an important first collection of essays, reflections and poems by Nora Bateson, the noted research designer, film-maker, writer and lecturer. She is the daughter of Gregory Bateson, president of the International Bateson Institute (IBI) and an adviser to numerous bodies at international and governmental level.

Building on Gregory Bateson’s famous book Towards an Ecology of Mind and her own film on the subject, Nora Bateson here updates our thinking on systems and ecosystems, applying her own insights and those of her team at IBI to education, organisations, complexity, academia, and the way that society organizes itself.

She also introduces two terms:
• ‘symmathesy’ to describe the contextual mutual learning through interaction that takes place in living entities at larger or smaller scales
• ‘transcontextuality’ to describe the multiple, interlayered spatial, social, temporal, cultural, ecological, economic contexts in which symmathesy takes place.

While she retains her father’s rigorous attention to definition, observation and academic precision, she also moves well beyond that frame of reference to incorporate more embodied ways of knowing and understanding. These are reflected in her essays and poems on food, Christmas, love, honesty, environmentalism and leadership.

The book offers important advice and new thinking on issues like immigration, systems thinking, new economic and financial models, future thinking and strategic planning, sustainability and governmental ethics, agency in organizational leadership, the education system and organizational governance.

As Nora says in the opening chapter of her book:

“For you, a respite of uncontainability. Safe pages for words, to taste them as they find their rightness. Let them rest in their silky beds of lyrical dreams. Let them run like rivers down mountain-sides, arranging curves and switches where the textures change. Thoughts yet unmet arrive in cloaks of language, becoming bards to take you where you can see that you are wide inside.

Words are delicious, but cannot say much. They often lose the water of meaning before it is delivered. But they can be stirred to form descriptions of the breath, glances, gestures, and pulses between lives. Perhaps writing is finding a scrape in the skin of knowing, where the sting and dirt and blood of the day is let out, and music is let in.

There is no language to define the spiraling processes of the vast context we are participants in. We do not have names for the patterns of interdependency. To lock down the delicate filigree of life in explanation is to lose it, but not to see it is disastrous. Words are what we have. The why, of why we do anything at all, matters.

An inside-out kaleidoscope—a de-fragmenter—might be useful for looking at a fractured order through a lens of unity. A superhero in a comic book might have such a tool at her belt. The way we see affects what we do, in both the broad strokes of global study, and the details of a day. Playing with the limits of our perception, our knowing, and tweaking the cultural script is like using a lemon juice wash to reveal the invisible ink and unspoken scaffolding we inhabit.

The ink of interrelationship bleeds across the boundaries between professionalism, academic research, and the banality of daily life. Theory and philosophy are stained with the mundane and both are vis-à-vis. What holds this collection of sightings together? What holds anything together? Glue is superficial, so not that. Thread is better, sewing, mending the torn-apart seams of perception—possibly. It is the right question—what is holding it together?—and the question alone might be the source of inquiry. Surely a search for the elegance in a mess of weighted compensations, and river-washed shapings of the context of life, is enough of a spine. Perhaps?”