foucault and bateson

Bateson first article explains Maragaret Mead’s idea that a transformation needs to occur in the way in which human affairs are conducted. The approach of focusing on the ‘means’ and ‘ends’ of affairs should be changed to a more hopeful and invigorating method whereby a ‘direction’ and ‘value in the means’ is prized over a goal or final objective. In a way, Foucault expands on how we have gotten to the point that Mead critiques. Our education and history or socialization has been formulated so that our body “is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces” (Foucault 126). This is Foucault’s idea of discipline. In regards to education, it has been formulated by the manners in which the church and military were structured. A mass of individuals that can be supervised, instructed, and ranked became the objective, thus the structures and instruction changed.

Foucault and Bateson seemed to be arguing that we are being inculcated to automatically respond to signals. Foucault expresses this when speaking of the school where the students are instructed to enter their benches and the command or signal has a corresponding bodily reaction. Bateson expresses this in his idea of deutero-learning. From my limited understanding, deutero-learning is something like ‘learning to learn’. It is the ability to respond to signals with the blueprinter’s desired response. With these two ideas, Mead and Bateson would suggest that we can transform the future of social affairs and our current institutions by valuing the means more than the ends or by taking the focus off of discipline and the coercion of bodies in moving it to the experience of doing what once for its intrinsic joy.
Is this possible in our goal-driven, capitalistic world? Bateson and Mead seem to believe that history can be far more easily changed than Foucault who sees the effects of discipline in all aspects of life – spiritual, educational, political, and the places we work.