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a clear professIonal IdentIty, he lacked a comfortable professIonal
base and a secure Income.
Mary CatHerine Bateson
(2000, vIII)
We can leave Bateson by examining the social basis of his cybernetics, and
the point to dwell on is his nomadism. Even more than Walter and Ashby,
Bateson was a wanderer. He never held a permanent position in his life; his
work always lacked a secure institutional base. Instead, apart from temporary
teaching positions, he took advantage of the ample funding opportunities
available in the postwar United States, although this sometimes left him with
no support at all. The schizophrenia project was funded in its first two years
by the Rockefeller Foundation, but the grant was not renewed after that and
“my team stayed loyally with me without pay.” Eventually, “the Macy Founda-
tion saved us,” followed by grants from the Foundations Fund for Psychiatry
and the National Institute of Mental Health. “Gradually it appeared that . . . I
should work with animal material, and I started to work with octopuses. My
wife, Lois, worked with me, and for over a year we kept a dozen octopuses
in our living room. This preliminary work was promising but needed to be
repeated and extended under better conditions. For this no grants were avail-
able. At this point, John Lilly came forward and invited me to be the director of
his dolphin laboratory in the Virgin Islands. I worked there for a year and be-
came interested in the problems of cetacean communications, but I think I am
not cut out to administer a laboratory dubiously funded in a place where the
logistics are intolerably difficult” (M. C. Bateson 2000, xx-xxi). And so on.
Bateson's octopuses in the living room remind me of the robot-tortoises
in Walter's kitchen.
13
Again we are in the presence of a life lived at odds with
and transversely to the usual institutional career paths. What should we make
of this? Bateson was a scholar with no scholarly place to be, and we could
think of this in terms of both repulsion and attraction. On the former, Bateson
tended to be critical of the fields whose terrain he crossed, and none more
so than psychiatry. Unlike Walter and Ashby, Bateson was intensely critical
of orthodox psychiatry, and his analysis of the double bind implied a drastic
departure from orthodox modes of therapy, as we can explore further below.
Here we approach Deleuze and Guattari's sense of the nomad as a threat to the
state and the established social order. From the side of attraction, Bateson was
always searching for like-minded people to interact with, but never with great
success. Lipset (1980, 232) records that in 1959 Bateson applied for a three-
year fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The director,
