Interface: connecting the work of Gregory Bateson, Deleuze and Guattari, and Alain Badiou

My thesis derives its impetus and its structure from the work and thought of Gregory Bateson. My aim is to demonstrate the ongoing vitality of his ecology of Mind by tracing the connections between his work and that of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Alain Badiou. Part I represents a broad overview of Bateson's major works, emphasizing his theories of abduction and recursivity as critical philosophical concepts. Bateson's notion of abduction as a third investigatory methodology suggests a means for connecting his work to that of other theorists. A pioneer of cybernetics, his probing of the recursive role of information feedback and of the pragmatic interface between organisms and their environment can be read as a meta-model for a multiperspectival approach to environmental issues and texts. Part II explores the differences and the reiterative similarities in the work of Bateson, the French writing team of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, and contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou. Using mathematical notation as metaphoric semiotics, I argue that a theoretical multiplicity moves rhizomatically between and across the very permeable boundaries that may be drawn between these theorists, and that the emerging connections describe a pregnant holism. Part III moves to employ the insights of this theoretical analysis in a more pragmatic application of these shared insights and concerns. In a recent journal article. Dr. Robert Cox urged the environmental communication community to define itself as a crisis discipline. Bateson's vision for ecological holism was predicated on respecting the dangers inherent in ad hoc intervention in systems whose interconnectivity may be little perceived when defined in causal and linear terms. The dangers of rhetorically limiting the semantics of environmental communication to a heuristic rather than a holistic approach are further explored using the work of Deleuze, Guattari and Badiou. This section provides a discursive and diacritical response to Dr. Cox's proposals. My thesis concludes with the recognition of the depth of Gregory Bateson's vision and of the contemporaneity still vibrant in his perspectives. Bateson is in many ways the exemplar of an environmental humanities scholar, and I weave that thread into my concluding remarks.