Neuroplasticity As An Ecology of Mind

Florence Chiew
Neuroplasticity
as an Ecology of Mind
A Conversation with Gregory Bateson
and Catherine Malabou
Abstract: Neuroplasticity research marks a considerable shift in focus

from localization theories of the brain to more holistic, or systems-
oriented, theories of the body-brain-environment interrelation. In
What Should We Do with Our Brain?, philosopher Catherine
Malabou calls attention to the political significance of neuroplasticity
for engaging questions of agency and accountability. This paper
addresses Malabou’s ethical concerns by way of anthropologist Greg-
ory Bateson’s ecological view of human agency. By redefining the
individual mind as an ecological ‘tangle’, Bateson’s perspectives
offer an important provocation, namely, a re-examination of the con-
ventional parameters that bound the mind or the brain as a localized
entity or that bound the mind or the brain as a property of an individ-
ual entity. This paper brings together Malabou and Bateson’s views
on agency and consciousness.
Introduction
Within the last three decades the term neuroplasticity has gained an
unprecedented currency in the scientific community. One of the most
compelling insights gleaned from this wealth of scholarship is the
brain’s ability to change and reorganize itself throughout life by gen-
erating new neurons and neural connections. Plasticity implies a
capacity for being moulded or altered. It is often used to describe the
Correspondence:
Email: florence.chiew@unsw.edu.au
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 19, No. 11–12, 2012, pp. 32–54
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011

For personal use only -- not for reproduction
NEUROPLASTICITY AS AN ECOLOGY OF MIND 33
neurological and behavioural changes observed in an individual upon

exposure to particular experiences. These changes, in turn, are
dependent on the frequency as well as the history of previous expo-
sure (Cicchetti and Curtis, 2006). Such experience-based, or use-
dependent, plasticity is reflected in learning. This is a radical shift in
interpretation from the established orthodoxies of neurological devel-
opment. Up until the 1970s, the dominant view maintained the pres-
ence of a ‘critical period’ in the growth of a newborn or in the early
stages of infancy, following which the capacity for regeneration of
neural pathways is irrevocably lost (Ramachandran, 1993; West-
Eberhard, 2003; Kelso, 1995). Consequently, the mature brain is per-
ceived to be resistant to change. This view has since given way to the
current endorsement of an enduring malleability in neurobiological
development.
According to neuroscientists, the brain learns to detect causal pat-
terns when certain sequences of actions or events recur regularly. The
stronger the synaptic connections, the more habituated or experienced
we get at particular tasks. For instance, brain scans of seasoned musi-
cians often reveal an enlargement in the somatosensory cortex
devoted to those fingers used to play their particular instruments
(Ramachandran, 1993).1 There is a popular dictum in neuroscience:
‘cells that fire together wire together’ (Hebb, cited in Cicchetti and
Curtis, 2006, p. 28).
Broadly taken, studies in neuroplasticity suggest a remarkable
degree of adaptability to life circumstances, highlighting that individ-
ual development is a process contingent on a diversity of contextual
factors such as cultural upbringing, social standing, physical environ-
mental conditions, and the like. Psychiatrist Norman Doidge, author
of the popular science bestseller The Brain that Changes Itself (2007),
expresses the broader sociological and cultural implications of neuro-
plasticity like so:
The plastic paradox is that the same neuroplastic properties that allow
us to change our brains and produce more flexible behaviors can also
allow us to produce more rigid ones. All people start out with plastic
potential. Some of us develop into increasingly flexible children and
stay that way through our adult lives. For others of us, the spontaneity,
creativity, and unpredictability of childhood gives way to a routinized
[1] The somatosensory cortex is the main sensory receptive field that incorporates tactile sig-
nals, including temperature, pain, and proprioception. An enlargement of the somato-
sensory cortex illustrates the use-dependent character of dendritic plasticity. Because den-
dritic spines play a role in determining the number of possible contacts between neurons,
thereby enabling a reinforcement of particular neural pathways, they are said to be impor-
tant for the consolidation of learning processes into long-term memory.

34 F. CHIEW
existence that repeats the same behavior and turns us into rigid carica-
tures of ourselves. Anything that involves unvaried repetition — our
careers, cultural activities, skills, and neuroses — can lead to rigidity.
Indeed, it is because we have a neuroplastic brain that we can develop
these rigid behaviors in the first place. (Doidge, 2007, p. 242)
This construal of the self-changing brain has urged the active partici-
pation of individuals in adapting to different, novel kinds of experi-
ence. People are encouraged to play an active role in constructing
their brain development. This is apparent in the rapid growth of the
‘brain-fitness’ industry.2 The emphasis of an enduring and, impor-
tantly, self-organizing plasticity has bolstered the wider appeal of a
‘learning for life’.
Within the humanities and the social sciences, the neuroscientific
turn is met with mixed reactions. On the one hand, neuroplasticity
research marks a considerable shift in focus from reductionist,
locationalist views to more holistic, or systems-oriented, perspectives
on the body-brain-environment nexus.3 On the other hand, because
the concept of neuroplasticity is increasingly evoked as a challenge to
the traditional view of biology as prescribed and therefore immutable,
growing empirical support for how experience modifies neurobio-
logical architecture has reinvigorated a contemporary minefield of
debates over the primacy of agency or structure, freedom or
determinism.
Malabou’s Intervention:
What Should We Do With Our Brain?
Writing at the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy, Catherine
Malabou interrogates these questions of freedom and biological deter-
minism through brain plasticity research. Her 2008 publication, tell-
ingly titled What Should We Do With Our Brain?, positions her
critique of the current scientific discourse around the flexible, plastic
brain. Although Malabou welcomes neuroplasticity’s challenge of
traditional technological metaphors of the brain as a machine and a
‘control center’ (Malabou, 2008, p. 33), she contends that subscribing
to brain plasticity as flexibility and adaptability is an erroneous move.
[2] For example, SharpBrains, an independent market research firm, has received exceptional
acclaim for its consumer guides to brain fitness. Its recommendations, culled from an
impressive advisory board of medical professionals, neuroscientists, and high-ranking
marketing executives, include everything from lifestyle adjustments to stress manage-
ment to a wide range of brain training software. See its website www.sharpbrains.com.
[3] The tension between locationalist and holistic views of the brain is a long-standing one.
For an astute analysis of this historical debate in the brain and behavioural sciences, see
Harrington (1999; 1989). See also Finger (1994).

Malabou’s primary concern is that neuroscience elicits in us a need to

constantly reinvent, refashion, and remarket ourselves, thus feeding
into the economic persuasions of neoliberal capitalism. She believes
that the earlier vision of the brain as a control centre has surrepti-
tiously transitioned into a ‘new world order’ of globalized social, eco-
nomic, and political control (ibid., p. 81). Put simply, the ‘centre’ has
moved from inside the brain to outside the brain, in society, in eco-
nomics, and in politics.
Malabou argues that the discourse around neuroplasticity appears
as a paradox of control: on the one hand the plastic brain is construed
in terms of delocalization and decentralization, and this registers a
shift from conventional views of biological matter as prescribed and
hard-wired. On the other hand, however, the plastic brain is also cast
as an organ highly susceptible to manipulation. For Malabou, conced-
ing plasticity as flexibility compromises our ability to become aware
of how our neural architecture, in its malleability, already determines
the way we unconsciously think, live, and act. There are significant
problems with this line of reasoning that will be unpacked in the fol-
lowing discussion. Before we do so, however, a closer reading of the
theoretical trajectories Malabou takes will stand us in good stead.
Malabou’s interest in plasticity continues from her previous writ-
ings on Hegelian dialectics, notably, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,
Temporality, Dialectic (2005). In her reading of Georg Hegel’s lec-
tures on the aesthetics of Greek art, Malabou calls attention to Hegel’s
frequent use of the word plastik to define sculpture as ‘the plastic art
par excellence’ and to describe influential Greek figures such as Peri-
cles, Plato, Sophocles, and Socrates as ‘plastic individuals’ (Hegel,
cited in Malabou, 2000, p. 205). Malabou interprets Hegel’s account
of plastic individuals as individuals who are ‘great and free, grown
independently on the soil of their own inherently substantial personal-
ity, self-made, and developing into what they (essentially) were and
wanted to be’ (Hegel, cited in Malabou, 2000, p. 205). Finding in
Hegel’s concept of plasticity a ‘model for the ideal philosophical atti-
tude’ (ibid., p. 206), an attitude oriented towards autonomy, creativity,
freedom, Malabou takes these philosophical renditions even further in
her elaboration of neuroplasticity’s importance for considering ques-
tions around identity politics and selfhood, what she refers to as ‘the
historico-cultural fashioning of the self’ (Malabou, 2008, p. 72).
Malabou reminds her readers that the word plasticity derives from
the Greek plassein, that is, to mould and to break the mould, to give
and to receive form: ‘Talking about the plasticity of the brain thus
amounts to thinking of the brain as something modifiable, “formable,”

36 F. CHIEW
and formative at the same time’ (ibid., p. 5). By the same token,
Malabou makes clear that ‘plasticity is also the capacity to annihilate
the very form it is able to receive or create’ (ibid.). Here she refers to
the French form of ‘plastic’, plastique, as a word associated with the
noun plastiquage and its verb plastiquer; both words convey the act or
event of using explosive substances made from plastic. ‘We thus
note’, Malabou writes, ‘that plasticity is situated between two
extremes: on the one side the sensible image of taking form (sculpture
or plastic objects), and on the other side that of the annihilation of all
form (explosion)’ (ibid.). Crucially, Malabou argues, it is in this ‘dia-
lectical play of the emergence and annihilation of form’ (ibid., p. 72),
that is, plasticity as a movement between creation and destruction,
that we can appreciate as well as challenge ‘the only real view of prog-
ress opened by the neurosciences’ (ibid., p. 68).
Therefore, as Malabou sees it, neuroscience’s tenet of the self-
changing brain can be recast for the general reader — with an ethical
charge. ‘What should we do with our brain?’ she claims, ‘is a question
for everyone’ in so far as ‘it seeks to give birth in everyone to the feel-
ing of a new responsibility’ (ibid., p. 14, emphasis in original). She
reasons that if one’s neurological apparatus is open to reorganization
through social and cultural activities, political leanings, and the like,
then the kinds of broad questions typically tackled within the humani-
ties that bear on social change, ethics, and freedom can be reinvigo-
rated. In this regard, Malabou makes some forceful assertions
highlighting the pragmatic impulse as well as the ethical call she
wants to summon through her engagement with neuroscience:
The entire identity of the individual is in play: her past, her surround-
ings, her encounters, her activities; in a word, the ability that our brain
— that every brain — has to adapt itself, to include modifications, to
receive shocks, and to create anew on the basis of this very reception. It
is precisely because — contrary to what we normally think — the brain
is not already made that we must ask what we should do with it, what we
should do with this plasticity that makes us, precisely in the sense of a
work: sculpture, modeling, architecture. What should we do with this
plastic organic art?… What should we do with all this potential within
us? What should we do with this genetically free field? (Ibid., p. 7)
For Malabou, because the phenomenon of brain plasticity occurs so
reflexively and intuitively, we are largely unaware of its effects on our
experience and decisions. Put another way, she understands brain
plasticity as a process of identity formation so volatile that one’s
(in)ability to weather, deny, or contest predominating social and

political ideologies establishes the very political leverage necessary

for, in her words, ‘the capacity to shape a history’ (ibid., p. 6).
In this regard, Malabou is troubled by the neuroscientific view of a
collapse in the distinction between the brain/biology and conscious-
ness/self. She believes that neuroscience has displaced the conven-
tional views of the brain as the prescribed centre of control/
determinism. Yet, for Malabou, the paradox of this displacement is
that this displacement has resulted in a growing lack of conscious
agency about how plasticity works in experience. In other words,
Malabou is of the opinion that individuals are not aware of how
immersed and ‘naturalized’ their cultural and political lifeways are
governing the very workings of their neurological (cognitive, percep-
tual, intellectual) processes (ibid., p. 9).
Indeed, Malabou argues that the political efficacy of any vision of
social change rests on the internal contradictions of a system/self:
The plasticity of the self, which supposes that it simultaneously
receives and gives itself its own form, implies a necessary split and the
search for an equilibrium between the preservation of constancy (or,
basically, the autobiographical self) and the exposure of this constancy
to accidents, to the outside, to otherness in general… What results is a
tension born of the resistance that constancy and creation mutually
oppose to each other. It is thus that every form carries within itself its
own contradiction. And precisely this resistance makes transformation
possible. (Ibid., p. 71, emphasis added)
In the main, Malabou wants to raise awareness of what she perceives
are the knee-jerk, almost surreptitious workings of plasticity. This is
an important intervention for her because it is a stepping stone to chal-
lenge the pervasive ‘self-help’ ideologies in contemporary life. As
Malabou sees it, flexibility is an equation with obedience, submission,
and passivity. Consequently, her own intervention comes by way of an
invocation of ‘resistance’ to what she believes would otherwise be an
utter vulnerability to the unconscious workings of plasticity.
A Plurality of Plasticities
Importantly, for the aims of her argument, Malabou reasons that
neurobiological development shifts between determinism as ‘the
definitive character of form’ and freedom as ‘the malleability of form’
(Malabou, 2008, p. 30).
By tracing the workings of three different facets of neuroplasticity,
namely developmental plasticity, modulational plasticity, and

38 F. CHIEW
reparative plasticity, she surmises that ‘there are not one but many
plasticities of cerebral functioning’ (ibid., p. 29, emphasis in original).
Malabou’s gloss on the three facets of brain plasticity is as follows.
Firstly, the human infant’s development is ‘subject to strict genetic
determinism’ (ibid., p. 18), in that the initial ‘sculpting’ of the brain
takes on a ‘determinate form’ in so far as the growth of axons and den-
drites or the neural configuration of synapses ‘corresponds to the exe-
cution of a genetic program’ (ibid., p. 19). This program that delivers
the genesis of the brain does so with progressive stability, internal dif-
ferentiation, but also reorganization. Here, Malabou informs us, as the
developmental process gets under way, this ‘“first plasticity” loses its
determinist rigor’ (ibid., p. 20). Then brain plasticity’s second role,
the modification of neuronal connections, ‘opens’ the initially
‘closed’ meaning of plasticity as determinacy. In other words, as a
function of experience, synaptic efficacy can be reinforced or less-
ened depending on one’s learned responses to life experiences.
Finally, Malabou stresses brain plasticity’s third area of activity, repa-
ration through neurogenesis, or the generation of new neurons. Repar-
ative plasticity ‘brings to light the power of healing — treatment,
scarring, compensation, regeneration, and the capacity of the brain to
build natural prostheses’ (ibid., p. 27, emphasis in original).
Malabou takes these ‘plural’ definitions of neuroplasticity as an
indication of a comparable ‘plasticity’ in social and political struc-
tures. She expounds:
The crisis of centrality rests on a delocalization and a reticular supple-
ness in the structures of command. In the same way that neuronal
connections are supple and do not obey a centralized or even truly
hierarchized system, political and economic power displays an organi-
zational suppleness in which the center also appears to have disap-
peared. The biological and the social mirror in each other this new
figure of command. (Ibid., p. 3, emphasis added)
For Malabou, the delocalization and decentralization of neural func-
tions reflects a similar dilution and redistribution of traditional social
hierarchies (ibid., p. 33). Therefore, to facilitate our thinking on the
social and political purchase of neuroplasticity, Malabou proposes
another kind of plasticity, one she says ‘never as yet envisaged by
neuroscientists’ (ibid., p. 69). This other plasticity, the ‘plasticity of
transition’, or ‘intermediate plasticity’ (ibid.), is Malabou’s call to
attend to the brain’s interaction with its environment ‘as a command-
ing authority, whose unknown form and location disrupt the tradi-
tional geography of government’ (ibid., p. 35).

It seems rather presumptuous to believe that neuroscientists are not

aware of the need to consider the broader contextual factors influenc-
ing brain function and development. In addition, Malabou’s gestures
at the biology–culture or organism–environment dichotomy are
indebted to longstanding controversies that lie at the heart of several
intersecting fields of enquiry.4 It is telling that Malabou makes no
mention of this lineage of thought, especially feminist interventions
into the Cartesian mind–body problematic. This is odd given her inter-
est in neuroplasticity as a site for refiguring many of the traditional
assumptions that see the brain/biology as the locus of determinism.
The way that Malabou sees it:
The question that inevitably poses itself is thus: How can we know how
to respond in a plastic manner to the plasticity of the brain? If the brain
is the biological organ determined to make supple its own biological
determinations, if the brain is in some way a self-cultivating organ,
which culture would correspond to it, which culture could no longer be
a culture of biological determinism, could no longer be, in other words,
a culture against nature? Which culture is the culture of neuronal libera-
tion? Which world? Which society? (Malabou, 2008, p. 30)
For Malabou, the problem of synaptic discontinuity corresponds to
the problem of determinism because she sees the relationship between
the biological and the social in terms of a discontinuous transition.
Malabou believes that within this ‘gap’ resides the transformative
potential of resistance.
There are pressing problems with this argument. Malabou con-
strues the relationship between the biological and the social as a gap, a
discontinuity that can be reconciled by a creative resistance to the
plasticity of plasticity, so to speak. However, as a consequence of her
presumption that the neurobiological and the sociopolitical are sepa-
rate ontological registers, whether cast in terms of how the biological
mirrors the social or how a decentralization of neural structures
reflects that of contemporary political structures, Malabou’s interven-
tion by way of resistance reinstates rather unfortunately the binary
opposition of an individual against an external source/cause. Her
[4] Scores of debates have been aroused over the question of biological determinism. Cru-
cially, feminism has made big strides toward unpacking the complexity of the relation
between biology and culture. Although they work in different contexts, feminists such as
Susan Oyama (2000), Karen Barad (2007), Elizabeth Grosz (1994), and Vicki Kirby
(1997) all underline the problem with a separatist view of biology and culture. Despite
Malabou’s insistence on the complicated transition between biology and culture, or neu-
rology and politics, she remains wedded to a view that situates biology and neurology
inside a bounded brain/body/self that interacts with various social and political
externalities.

40 F. CHIEW
view of transition as a differentiating passage between two enclosed

systems (neurological versus mental, or biological versus social, or
self versus political) short-changes the complexity of neuroplas-
ticity’s involvement in the messy entanglement of relationships.
By her account, Malabou seems to be suggesting that one is
unaware of her self/identity until and unless she is ‘liberated’ from the
discursive practices informing her brain’s troubling susceptibility to
manipulation. Surely, we might ask, even if Malabou’s call for resis-
tance is taken seriously, the very possibility of resisting itself must
already be enabled by plasticity’s creative energies. How can resis-
tance, in any real way, be solicited as though resisting can occur inde-
pendent of the workings of plasticity? Simply put, where will we find
resistance if, by Malabou’s thesis, we are never not plasticity working
itself in creative pathways? This is a question we will return to.
In sum, then, Malabou appears to have an ambivalent attitude to the
achievements of neuroscience. On the one hand she welcomes neuro-
science’s move away from thinking about the brain as a governing
centre of agency, stressing, instead, the protean nature of individual
development in relation to broader social and environmental changes.
On the other hand, however, Malabou is critical of neuroscientific dis-
course that ‘accord[s] an overly central role to the absence of center, a
too rigid prominence to flexibility, that is to say, to docility and obedi-
ence’ (ibid., p. 53). As she sees it, the plastic potential that neuro-
scientists champion is too often construed in terms of ‘freedom of
choice’, an ‘absence of hierarchy’ and an ‘equality of function’ (ibid.,
p. 53). Put differently, Malabou is keen to rethink traditional views of
the brain as ‘clichés of the center, of deterministic programming, and
of blind mechanics’ (ibid., p. 38). Yet, she does not want to relinquish
this notion of centrality either. Indeed, she sees an overemphasis in
neuroscience’s ‘legitimation of the demand for flexibility as a global
norm’ (ibid., p. 53), and cautions against this embrace of neuroplas-
ticity as flexibility. ‘Clearly’, Malabou asserts, ‘if we are not con-
scious of plasticity this is because, in accordance with a merely
apparent paradox, it is in fact so familiar to us that we do not even see
it, we do not take its presence, like an environment in which we main-
tain ourselves and evolve without paying attention to it. It has become
the form of our world (ibid., p. 9).
For Malabou, a conscious resistance to such an easily manipulable
way of life is a politically pragmatic move. In other words, to resist the
plasticity that is liable to determine one’s life choices and experiences
— precisely because he or she remains unconscious of this plasticity

— is Malabou’s intervention into the question she persists in asking:

what should we do with our brain?
Indeed, Malabou is emphatic that the ‘neuronal revolution’ of the
plastic brain has ‘revolutionized nothing for us, if it is true that our
new brains serve only to displace ourselves better, work better, feel
better, or obey better’ (ibid., p. 67, emphasis in original). This asser-
tion seems deeply muddled because it oscillates between attributing
accountability to an external source of influence (the unconscious
workings of plasticity is beyond one’s control) and seeking a supple-
mentary instrument as corrective (one should imagine another world
in which the unconscious workings of plasticity can be remedied by
actively resisting them). One must wonder, nevertheless, ‘whose’
agency Malabou is invoking when she makes an appeal for resistance
and ‘whose’ when she reminds her readers that they are not aware of
the plastic processes motivating their every thought and intention?
Consider Malabou’s response to her intervention in the concluding
pages of What Should We Do With Our Brain?:
To ask ‘What should we do with our brain?’ is above all to visualize the
possibility of saying no to an afflicting economic, political, and
mediatic culture that celebrates only the triumph of flexibility, blessing
obedient individuals who have no greater merit than that of knowing
how to bow their heads with a smile. (Ibid., p. 79, emphasis added)
These observations reveal a particularly pessimistic view of individ-
ual accountability. This is ironic given Malabou’s aim of advancing a
thesis on the pragmatics of ‘doing’, a collective consciousness, if you
like, that engages the bigger questions of ethics and responsibility.
Furthermore, Malabou’s insistence on a delocalized view of agency,
alongside a call to go against what she perceives as an ideological pre-
scriptive for how life should be lived, has the paradoxical effect of
presenting what seems to be her prescriptive for the ‘good’ way to
live.
Hence, despite Malabou’s emphatic wish to distance herself from a
biological reductionism of consciousness, she is forced to commit to
this same reductionism by dint of her presumption that conscious
agency is located inside the brain. Indeed this sidesteps the more criti-
cal challenge to rethink the seemingly self-evident identity/location of
the brain as a receptacle of consciousness, perception, or intention-
ality. More to the point, by presenting the relationship between the
neurobiological and the sociopolitical as two separate registers in a
relation of exclusivity, Malabou seems unable to clarify how her
‘plasticity of transition’ advances our current understanding of

42 F. CHIEW
agency. The problem is that when Malabou questions what we should

do with our brains, she has confined the notions of agency and con-
sciousness to a rather narrow view of human identity. What if we
approach this conundrum of ‘we’ by re-examining Malabou’s per-
ceived separation between human agency/consciousness and the ‘un-
conscious’ workings of plasticity?
Bateson and the ‘Pattern that Connects’

To this end, I want to move to anthropologist Gregory Bateson, in
whose work we may see a more pathfinding approach to these ques-
tions. Some half a century ago, Gregory Bateson proposed an ecologi-
cal theory of mind. Although working in a different context, he was
persuaded by the same principle that now informs neuroplasticity
research: how experience modifies cognition and perception.
Bateson’s aim, however, was a broader one. He wanted to challenge
his readers to think ecologically. By this he did not mean thinking
about ecological processes, but thinking as an ecological phenome-
non. Bateson believed that mental processes were never the activity of
a mind in so far as an individual mind was already an ‘ecology of
ideas’ (Bateson, 2000, p. 509), immanent in a ‘total system’ (ibid., p.
317). For Bateson, terms such as ‘idea’, ‘brain’, ‘mind’, ‘self’, or ‘or-
ganism’, generally used in isolation, can only be understood as semi-
otic relations. What we take to be one idea will recall others in so far as
an idea is exemplary of other ideas. Bateson is adamant that an exam-
ple is ‘not the Ding an sich; it is precisely not the “thing in itself”’
(Bateson, 2002, p. 10, emphasis in original).
We are used to thinking that thought or ideation is a human property
a tree, for instance, does not have. Yet, Bateson was convinced that the
traditional hallmarks of human identity such as language, communi-
cation, cognition, and technology are general expressions of the bio-
sphere. For Bateson, the human is an instantiation of social, cultural,
political, and environmental processes. For instance, he reasoned that
developing specificity in a system of competition and dependence is a
basic principle shared among different forms of life. This is the case
for organs and tissues as much as it is for species in a forest and human
relationships (Bateson, 2000, p. 437). In the same vein, Bateson
sought to expand the conventional view of human cognition. By open-
ing up the parameters of the individual mind to that of an ecological
Mind — what he refers to as the total system — Bateson’s approach
returns us to a very different outlook on notions of agency and human
identity.

By redefining the individual mind as an ecological Mind, Bateson

also refigures, as it were, the conventional view of the (social, politi-
cal, physical) environment as an externality:
The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is imma-
nent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a
larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This
larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people
mean by ‘God,’ but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social
system and planetary ecology. (Ibid., p. 467)
As Bateson sees it, it makes little sense to say ‘the individual’ acts or
communicates since she is also acted upon and communicated by a sys-
tem of relations that precedes yet embodies her. By the same token,
attempting to isolate the dividing lines or causal relations that purport-
edly demarcate ‘conscious purpose’ from ‘nature’ is a difficult
endeavour because it bears on the question of agency and control that is
not straightforwardly human-centred (Bateson, 2000, p. 432). Indeed,
if we bring Bateson’s ecological theory of mind in conversation with
Malabou’s ‘plasticity of transition’, we are faced with a temporal and
causal problematic that has significant political reverberations.
Bateson contends that the longstanding assumption of humans
exerting control over the environment rests on dichotomous views of
humanity and nature, culture and biology. The causal directionality of
these dualisms has also been construed in reverse, as when the rela-
tions between biology and psychology are explained as functions of
causal, deterministic factors (biology) that influence human behav-
iour (psychology). The problem with such a view is neatly articulated
by a prominent Bateson scholar, Peter Harries-Jones: ‘If organisms
are constituted and molded into biological order as an output of forces
over which the organisms have no control, then the whole world of
nature is outside any organism’s control’ (Harries-Jones, 2002, p. 35).
In this regard, ‘external constraints are the source of control of indi-
vidual behaviour and of individual response to social order’ (ibid., p.
36).
For Bateson, human identity is an ecological expression. An individ-
ual is as much a product of the system as she produces the system. This
principle of recursion is common to systems theory and cybernetics,
fields of enquiry which Bateson draws much inspiration from. In a nut-
shell, recursivity implies that any system is its own self-making pro-
cess, and this includes its perceived negations, aberrations, or errors
(Luhmann, 1995; Harries-Jones, 2002). In this sense, without the con-
ventional recourse to nondeterminism or, in Malabou’s rendition, a

44 F. CHIEW
resistance to being unconsciously determined (because the workings

of plasticity are largely impervious to us), Bateson takes as his depar-
ture point the challenge of isolating originating causes and, more gen-
erally, the problem of location.
Interestingly, Bateson is never quite able or willing to resolve the
dividing line between apparently isolated entities. As a systems-
thinker who values holism, contextual relationships, and inter-
connectivity, a distinguishing feature of Bateson’s work is its inquisi-
tiveness about patterns, gestalts, and the organization of information
by mental processes. Mental processes in Bateson’s view are charac-
terized by a general systematicity rather than a location-bound entity.
As Harries-Jones puts it, ‘the “mind” is systematic, not “inside” the
head’ (Harries-Jones, 2002, p. 74, emphasis in original).
Bateson’s Monistic Epistemology:

The Human is an Ecology
For Bateson, engaging the question of human cognition from an eco-
logical perspective means that the developmental/evolutionary pro-
cess of the mind is an ecologically given one.5 At first glance, this will
sound troubling as it amounts to the proposition that what ‘we’ can or
cannot do is defined by a system of prescribed causes. Indeed, some
scholars have interpreted Bateson’s notion of total system as a claim
for the predetermination of one’s social circumstances and political
positions. Cary Wolfe, for instance, criticizes Bateson for his
totalizing insistence that there is a single, total loop of overarching ‘pat-
tern that connects’ observer and observed, so that what looks at first
glance like contingent observation is instead determined ‘from behind’
by the total pattern of existence, generating what Bateson calls an
immanent ‘mental determinism’. (Wolfe, 1998, p. 57, emphasis in
original)
Bateson’s ‘immanent determinism’, as Wolfe (ibid., p. 59) sees it, is a
theoretical drawback that does not take into account a perspectival
contingency of observations, that is, the possibility to think/act other-
wise (ibid., p. 68).
In other words, what seems to be at stake for Wolfe is that a deter-
ministic worldview leaves no room for contingency. However, by
[5] Vicki Kirby (2005) makes a similar argument in a different context. By using the example
of facial reconstruction to illustrate individual morphology as a general, indeed worldly,
system of algorithmic prediction, she suggests that the problem of individuation can be
engaged more productively as a universal particularity. This thesis is further developed in
Quantum Anthropologies (2011).

carving up the spatial complexity of observation as two separable

spheres of operation, a determined existence overlaid with contingent
events, Wolfe’s critique misses the most provocative if also counter-
intuitive aspect of Bateson’s work: his monism.6 Furthermore, rein-
stalling determinism and contingency as opposing influences ironi-
cally leaves the conventional view of determinism unchanged. If we
take contingency to be determinism’s corrective, then all we have
done is to reinstitute determinism as a foundation for change rather
than a foundation that itself transmutes.
This is a difficult point to get across because it requires re-examin-
ing our conventional views on difference, change, and discontinuity.
Routinely, change is assumed to be a temporal shift between causally
linked events/entities. An originating source goes through a trans-
formative process and then becomes different. Now, Bateson wants to
understand the complexity of change as a general ecology of move-
ment. Keeping to his terms of reference, this means that an individual
mind (a perception, a sensation, a notion) is an ecology in so far as no
one individual is straightforwardly the originating author of her
motivations.
Indeed, a conventional way of thinking about determinism will see
this interpretation as an evasion of the question of individual responsi-
bility and accountability. In this sense, we might say that Wolfe shares
similar concerns with Malabou. Both are in search of politically prag-
matic ways to address the question of individual/human agency. Nev-
ertheless, can we rethink determinism instead of replacing it with a
tenuous view of contingency as the possibility that things can always
be otherwise, or freedom as the possibility to resist?
Bateson understands the process of perception as an ecological
phenomenon, highlighting the ‘patterns’ that link human communica-
tion with the forms of information exchange characteristic of ‘com-
munication’ in the broader sense of ecological processes. In other
words, he is persuaded by the suggestion that the complexity of
human interaction is generalizable to the myriad forms of biospheric
interaction observed in plant, insect, and animal interaction. Thus,
Bateson articulates his convictions in the form of an intriguing query:
‘What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the
primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you?’ (Bateson, 2002,
[6] Bateson describes his work as an effort to build a ‘monistic epistemology’ (Bateson, 1977,
p. 239). The enormity of this task is palpable, but perhaps more crucially, this exercise of
thinking in terms of a monism makes it possible for Bateson to open up the question of
what an individual means, or how localizing a ‘unit’ of information or a ‘body’ of knowl-
edge is not as self-evident as it seems.

46 F. CHIEW
p. 7). To apprehend the human context itself, Bateson argues that we

cannot begin a theory of mind or cognition with a presumed separa-
tion between the human and an external environment. The human —
and this includes perception, cognition, language, and technology —
is an ecological involvement.
What if, thinking with Bateson, determinism is read as an expres-
sion of the total system’s determination to reorganize itself? This
means that it is an ill-advised venture to interpret Bateson’s notion of
total system as an endorsement of ‘totalizing’ structures with no room
for change. For how can the very notions of contingency or determin-
ism have any critical leverage when interrogated as though they are
independent of the system that animates them in the first place? The
point here is that regardless of the name given to determinism’s
‘other’, the problem with finding an appendage or a substitute to cor-
rect its perceived limitations only reverses the terms of polarity with-
out confronting the real challenge: what enables determinism? How is
the spirit of agency operative in the system’s expression of tenacity
and resilience? What would it mean to take seriously Bateson’s com-
mitment to an immanent self-determination of the total (social, cul-
tural, ecological, cosmological) system?7
In its Greek root episteme as a ‘knowing how to do’, Bateson
returns to epistemology in its operative sense — the how — of learn-
ing. For him, it is by opening up the philosophical tradition of ques-
tioning the validity of knowledge (what is learned) and studying,
instead, how what is learned is learned, that epistemology can have a
general purchase beyond the disciplinary ken of philosophy:
[E]pistemology is the great bridge between all branches of the world of
experience — intellectual, observational, theoretical, verbal, and word-
less. Knowledge, wisdom, art, religion, sport and science are bridged
from the stance of epistemology. We stand off from all these disciplines
[7] This interpretation may seem impossibly generalized. Yet, the complexity of location/
causality is a subject of rigorous study at the cutting-edge of fields such as quantum
mechanics. For instance, in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), Karen Barad offers an astute analysis of
how fundamental concepts in quantum physics, such as Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle and Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle, radically revise how observation,
representation, and human intentionality are typically conceptualized. Importantly,
Barad’s aim is to highlight how the process of scientific measurement cannot be divorced
from the physical environment it strives to apprehend. She shows how the famous double-
slit experiment in quantum physics challenges the common assumption of language and
cognition as representations of an observer-independent reality. Barad argues that this
long-standing assumption fails to account for the quantum entanglement of observer and
observed in the measurement process of scientific experimentation.

to study them and yet stand at the center of each. (Bateson, cited in
Harries-Jones, 2002, p. 9)
Malabou’s intervention, as we have seen, can also be understood in
terms of these questions of knowledge and learning, and crucially,
‘who’ learns and instructs. Importantly, both Malabou and Bateson’s
work bring up the problem of disciplinary containment, how to
engage new insights and see empirical connections across apparently
discrete fields of study. However, Bateson’s approach suggests how
we might meet this problematic constructively so that we are not
restricted to another ‘two cultures’ separatism.
For Bateson, then, the real challenge is not only to theorize the rela-
tionship between the knower and the known but, more intriguingly,
the ‘leap’ from ‘not knowing’ to ‘knowing’. Yet, Bateson’s approach
to this ‘transition’, if we are to use Malabou’s terms, is a thoroughgo-
ing shift from thinking about transition as a linear process, as Malabou
herself appears to commit to. Recall that in Malabou’s view the
unconscious workings of plasticity mould individual behaviour and
consumer preferences so much so that unconsciousness is the rule
rather than the exception. However, Malabou is consequently caught
in a quandary given her curious reinstatement of — we assume —
conscious agents who are called upon to resist the unthinking deci-
sions imposed on them by economic ideologies of the day. This is the
problem with a linear reading of ‘transition’ as a temporal and spatial
discontinuity between consciousness and unconsciousness. For once
again we are reminded, on Malabou’s account, how do we determine
‘who’ is behind any view at all?
Bateson’s response to this question is an interesting one. His argu-
ment is that the mind is an ecological ‘tangle’. The word ‘tangle’ is
taken from the works of mathematicians Bertrand Russell and Alfred
North Whitehead, as well as semanticist Alfred Korzybski. In particu-
lar, Russell’s theory of logical types, or the paradox of self-reference,
caught Bateson’s attention.8 For Bateson, the significance of Russell’s
paradox bears upon a confusion in ‘logical typing’. That is, claims that
insist on isolating part from whole (or individual from collective,
organism from environment) fail to appreciate the tangled complexity
of these binary terms. As Bateson sees it, presupposing a separation
[8] Bateson argues that the consequence of Russell’s paradox is that every proposition carries
within it a self-referential contradiction. In mathematical set theory, Russell’s question ‘is
the set of all sets a member of itself?’ creates the condition for the following conundrum. If
the set of all sets is a member of itself, then it isn’t the set that contains all sets. However, if
the set of all sets isn’t a member of itself, then it can’t be the set that contains all sets includ-
ing itself.

48 F. CHIEW
between these terms will return us to Russell’s paradox of infinite

regress. The whole may seem more than the sum of its parts, but then
is the whole a part of a bigger whole still?
In this sense, Bateson argues that the individual experience of per-
ception is not separable from the general ecology of phenomena. As
Harries-Jones puts it: ‘We ourselves evolve in virtue of any design
that we perceive in nature’ (Harries-Jones, 2002, p. 201). This is a sig-
nificant point for Bateson’s argument because it suggests that percep-
tion is not a simple representation or replica of a pre-existing
environment. Bateson believes that learning, and indeed the question
of ‘how’ to know something, is an entanglement of the particular and
the whole, the subjective and the objective (Bateson, 2002, p. 108). In
a gesture of humility, perhaps, Bateson reasons that:
[E]pistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the
probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the
question of the nature of knowing? I surrender to the belief that my
knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits the
entire biosphere or creation. (Ibid., p. 82, emphasis in original)
Here we are dealing with an expanded notion of temporality and spa-
tial awareness. To put a slightly different spin on Bateson’s exegesis,
we can say that the subject who observes ‘now’ cannot position her-
self outside of her observations, recollections, the objects and people
she has encountered and will encounter. The individual, in this read-
ing, is not simply bounded and located as a separate being from other
beings. She is a general system of entangled relationality.
Bateson is fond of a French saying, ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la
même chose’ (Bateson, 2000, p. 232), which is commonly translated
as ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’. Yet, a
discernable indication of his being at odds with this problem is appar-
ent when he flips the saying to ‘plus c’est la même chose, plus ça
change’ (ibid., p. 447), that is, the more things stay the same, the more
they change. This aphorism neatly conveys Bateson’s wrestle with the
relationship between continuity and discontinuity, stability and
change, or rigidity and plasticity — the very dilemma we encountered
with Malabou.
In other words, central to Malabou and Bateson’s work is the ques-
tion of change. Both appeal to the notion of discontinuity, whether
cast in terms of neurology or ecology. However, a fundamental differ-
ence lies in the two thinkers’ understanding of what discontinuity
implies. For Malabou, discontinuity marks a distinct physical break
between entities (in this case synapses) that is made continuous by the

field of plasticity — habituation, cultural learning, a repetition of

events. Bateson, on the other hand, reads discontinuity as ‘transforms
of difference’. For him, the complexity of change is that the percep-
tion of continuity is itself discontinuous.
Compellingly, Bateson’s view of learning as a function of reorgan-
izational shifts in the brain–environment interrelation is commensu-
rate with what is gleaned from neuroplasticity research. He argues that
learning, perceiving, understanding — practices of knowing — rest
on ‘transforms of difference’. Bateson believes that perceptual experi-
ence is discriminatory, in other words, difference-oriented. Here, he is
well known for his definition of an idea or unit of perceptual informa-
tion as ‘the difference that makes a difference’ (Bateson, 2000, p.
318). Bateson says, for instance, that what gives rise to a neuronal
‘impulse’ of an axon is not straightforwardly localizable at a point
inside the brain. He reasons that searching for this skull-bound loca-
tion is a misguided resolve. For him, there are only relational shifts:
‘what travels is a difference, or a transform of a difference’ (ibid.).
To make this more concrete, Bateson’s analogy of a blind man and
his walking cane will illustrate the implications of his ecological
approach. Bateson asks:
[C]onsider a blind man with a stick. Where does the blind man’s self
begin? At the tip of the stick? At the handle of the stick? Or at some
point halfway up the stick? These questions are nonsense, because the
stick is a pathway along which differences are transmitted under trans-
formation, so that to draw a delimiting line across this pathway is to cut
off a part of the systemic circuit which determines the blind man’s loco-
motion. (Ibid., p. 318, emphasis in original)9
The purpose of Bateson’s analogy is to provoke a re-examination of
the boundaries that routinely circumscribe what we take to be an ‘indi-
vidual’ or an originating source. By way of elaboration, it seems fit-
ting at this juncture to incorporate some independent empirical
evidence for Bateson’s view before we take stock of what all this
means for our discussion.
The highly mutable nature of sensory modalities has been a grow-
ing area of scientific study. Scientist Paul Bach-y-Rita (1972;
Sampaio, Maris and Bach-y-Rita, 2001; Bach-y-Rita and Kercel,
[9] This example of the blind man’s cane is commonly employed to illustrate the problem of
boundaries in conceptualizing identity. Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has
used it to underscore the porosity of perception. See especially ‘Eye and Mind’ in The Pri-
macy of Perception (1964). Intellectual polymath Michael Polanyi has also engaged the
example of a blind man’s probe to consider the projection of one’s body into the world as a
learned process of skilful doing and knowing. See ‘Knowing and Being’ (1961).

50 F. CHIEW
2003) is a respected name in sensory substitution research. Bach-y-

Rita’s experiments demonstrate the rapidity with which sensory func-
tions alter in response to environmental or experimental conditioning.
One of his most groundbreaking experiments is the invention of a
device that enables congenitally blind persons to experience sight.
Bach-y-Rita’s (Sampaio et al., 2001) gadget works by way of sitting a
blind subject in a chair that is hooked up to a huge camera placed in
front of him or her. Images from the camera would send electrical sig-
nals to a computer, and these signals are in turn communicated to the
blind person through vibrating stimulators placed on her back. Within
minutes and hours she is able to ‘see’ three-dimensionally. That is, the
blind person can make out distances between objects, recognize faces,
and articulate precisely what people around her are doing. She can
also reach out to pick up objects or move objects around. Even when
the vibrating wires are positioned across different parts of the body, all
the blind subjects in this study continue to have curious ‘tactile-visual’
experiences.
Interestingly too, Bach-y-Rita and Kercel (2003) found that when
the blind persons were tickled on the arm, they did not mistake the par-
ticularly tactile stimulus for a visual one. It was as if the skin tacitly
‘knew’ the difference between seeing and feeling, yet could straddle
both modalities at once. Empirical data from sensory substitution
studies suggest that perceptual experience is not located inside the
brain, or simply triggered from incoming stimulations outside the
brain. The vibrations on the skin, in Bach-y-Rita’s experiment, do not
activate the sensory modalities in any novel or dramatically different
way. In fact, the skin receives the vibrating stimulations in the same
way as it would during ordinary day-to-day tactile encounters, just
from coming into contact with objects and people. All of this suggests
conceptualizing ‘the brain’ as an experiential node in the relational
webbing of perceiver, sociality, and even the physical environment of
objects and inanimate things — taking Bateson’s notion of the ‘total
system’ further than he himself did. Indeed, if the malleability of per-
ception suggests that each apparently discrete modality is in fact open
to substitution by other sense faculties, then even the very meaning of
‘substitution’ can be challenged. What does it mean to say vision is
substituted by tactility if touch can, in a very real sense, perceive?
Where or what are the dimensions of the body, if the prosthetic
device becomes perhaps an extension of body–brain activities in the
world? And if the vibrating chair-camera device facilitates such pro-
found perceptual experience for congenitally blind persons — whom

we assume have never seen the world as people with intact visual sys-
tems have — what does ‘seeing’ even mean?
By now, we are better placed to appreciate how intricately knotted
the problem of location is. To return to the analogy of the blind man’s
cane, recall Bateson’s description of the ‘systemic circuit’ that main-
tains the points of contact between the blind man, the cane, and the
object/ground. For Bateson, the point of connection between the cane
and the ground on which the blind person needs to move through
safely and efficiently acts as a transducer, a relay of perceptual infor-
mation. Remarkably, Bach-y-Rita and Kercel (2003) have developed
this line of thought in a series of studies which show how the stimula-
tion of the hand–cane interface, where sensory receptors are activated,
is perceived at the end of the cane instead of in the hand as one might
assume. In other words, the blind person’s perceptual experience is
oddly ‘externalized’ from the hand to the point of interaction between
the cane and the object/ground, suggesting that the cane has been
incorporated into his body schema, and one might say indeed that the
cane is the hand, or that the cane is the eye — and even that the ground
is the eye! The provocation here is that even the integrity of what we
assume to be a distinct and obviously localizable object, for instance a
stick, a hand, or an eye, is not straightforwardly ‘pure’ or secured as
such.
Neuroplasticity is an arresting phenomenon as it disperses and
complicates any simple notion of location and causality. For instance,
if we think about neuroplasticity in its broader sense, how do factors
generally assumed to be external influences on an individual, such as
one’s career, religious convictions, political leanings, physical local-
ity, and so on, somehow ‘get under’ our neurological apparatus and
substantively reorganize the patterns of neural communication that
inform our experiences? Returning to Bateson and Malabou, their
assertions of discontinuity, when placed in juxtaposition, are very dif-
ferent even though they share an interest in the same term. Bateson’s
argument, that the problem of location is its systemic entanglement, is
not the same as Malabou’s claim, which takes discontinuity to mean
that the locatability of a centring agency (the brain, synaptic connec-
tivity) is delocalized. Malabou’s view reinstalls a fissure between
change and stability as a simple relation of cause and effect: a location
that initially rests on constancy is then subject to a transformative pro-
cess. Whereas, with Bateson, change is a general movement of contex-
tual shifts that instantiate the locatability of an event or an entity.
Importantly, here, the question of cause and effect is a question of

52 F. CHIEW
entangled causal relationships. This is why Bateson insists on looking

for ‘patterns that connect’ seemingly random and isolated occurrences.
By way of summing up this last section, Malabou’s view on neuro-
plasticity’s broader implications is worth repeating:
The entire identity of the individual is in play: her past, her surround-
ings, her encounters, her activities; in a word, the ability that our brain
— that every brain — has to adapt itself, to include modifications, to
receive shocks, and to create anew on the basis of this very reception. It
is precisely because — contrary to what we normally think — the brain
is not already made that we must ask what we should do with it, what we
should do with this plasticity that makes us, precisely in the sense of a
work: sculpture, modeling, architecture. What should we do with this
plastic organic art?… What should we do with all this potential within
us? What should we do with this genetically free field? (Malabou, 2008,
p. 7)
Recall that, for Malabou, the notion of the self-changing brain is revo-
lutionary because it is a shift away from the traditional model of the
brain as a control centre. Yet, if neuroplasticity illustrates how the
empirical complexity of social life is already present within the
psychophysiology of any one individual, the real challenge should lie
in rethinking how we conceptualize limiting conditions. Where does
the neurobiological end and the sociopolitical begin? Or, in light of
Malabou’s claims, where does determination end and freedom begin?
Stated differently, is the biological a reflection of a social environ-
ment that is external to it, as Malabou understands? Because on this
account, biology and sociality (or neurology and politics) are con-
strued as two separate domains positioned in a relation of exclusivity.
Might the complexity of neurobiology — and by extension the
achievements of the neurosciences — be more productively engaged
when they are seen as instantiations of eco-logical enquiries into the
nature of communication itself? What I am trying to encourage here,
in other words, is a broader sense of agency/determinism that we find
in Bateson, one that reworks Malabou’s constrictive view of docile
and gullible individuals condemned to economic and political manip-
ulation. After all, how can these very ideologies exist ‘outside’
anyone’s susceptibility to conform to them?
It is telling that Malabou ends What Should We Do With Our Brain?
with these futuristic recommendations: to ‘invit[e] readers to do what
they undoubtedly have never done: construct and entertain a relation
with their brain as the image of a world to come’ (Malabou, 2008, p.
82). In the final analysis, such a thesis cannot be sustained because it
rests on looking for agency ‘elsewhere’. Bateson’s view of agency,

instead, compels us to re-examine what it means to be an individual,

indeed a human individual. By suggesting that the identity of the
human is an expression of biological and ecological processes,
Bateson in effect reorganizes our perceptual frame of reference. The
questions of conscious agency, ‘who’ has it, and what we ‘should’ do
with it become radically reworked if human-ness is a systemic articu-
lation of a general ecology — Bateson’s total system.
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Neuroplasticity As An Ecology of Mind

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Neuroplasticity As An Ecology of Mind

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Florence Chiew

Abstract: Neuroplasticity research marks a considerable shift in focus

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 19, No. 11–12, 2012, pp. 32–54

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neurological and behavioural changes observed in an individual upon

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Malabou’s primary concern is that neuroscience elicits in us a need to

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political ideologies establishes the very political leverage necessary

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It seems rather presumptuous to believe that neuroscientists are not

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view of transition as a differentiating passage between two enclosed

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— is Malabou’s intervention into the question she persists in asking:

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agency. The problem is that when Malabou questions what we should

Bateson and the ‘Pattern that Connects’

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By redefining the individual mind as an ecological Mind, Bateson

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resistance to being unconsciously determined (because the workings

Bateson’s Monistic Epistemology:

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carving up the spatial complexity of observation as two separable

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p. 7). To apprehend the human context itself, Bateson argues that we

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between these terms will return us to Russell’s paradox of infinite

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field of plasticity — habituation, cultural learning, a repetition of

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011

2003) is a respected name in sensory substitution research. Bach-y-

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011

entangled causal relationships. This is why Bateson insists on looking

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011

instead, compels us to re-examine what it means to be an individual,

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011

Paper received December 2010; revised May 2011.

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011

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