/lit/ - Literature

>>14766510
Bateson in particular is quite an interesting and underrated thinker, bridging aesthetics, cybernetics, psychiatry, epistemology, biology and etc. not only the double bind theory of schizophrenia but also the plateau(this last deriving from Bateson's and Mead's anthropological and photographic study of the balinese)

>–3 But even more: plateaus do not climax only to then disappear. They work on consistency as change and subsist towards an open end. The anthropologist, psychologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson first introduced the term in his book ‘Steps to an Ecology of Mind’ when describing behavioral patterns in Balinese society. Bateson went to Bali in 1936 together with his then wife Margaret Mead – the two were actually married on the trip, in Singapore. Bateson and Mead documented Balinese culture in extensive field notes and by the use of photography and motion picture film – now a seminal early anthropological research. This research is part of Bateson’s endeavor to describe the tool of ethos, which he names as the “expression of a culturally standardized system of organization of the instincts and emotions of the individual”. Bateson is interested in describing basic theories of conflict, a field he later terms schismogenesis (Bateson, 1972: Steps to a Ecology of Mind, p. 116 ff.). Conflicts, to him, most often imply a form of cumulative action – the rising of a conflict, which he first and foremost finds in relation to erotic interactions. He concedes that complementary action between humans are all to often structured by “curves bounded by phenomena comparable to orgasm”, i.e. a built-up of intensity, a climax and a decreasing action. Now, within Balinese society, Bateson does not find these patterns at all. Rather he finds the opposite, a state of interaction he terms plateau. For this interactive state, his main example is erotic games between mother and child: The mother excites her child “pulling its penis or otherwise stimulating it to interpersonal activity” only to turn away as soon as the child is “approaching some small climax” (Bateson, 1972: Steps to a Ecology of Mind, p. 121) and urgently asks for further stimulation. But rather, the mother leaves the child alone and becomes a mere “spectator”, not reacting even to angry and physical claims of her child. Bateson concludes that thereby a basic human tendency toward “cumulative personal interaction” is muted and proposes his idea of plateau: “It is possible that some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for climax”

https://plateauhamburg.de/2014/11/07/what-is-a-plateau-on-immanence-and-ongoing-discussion/