Frederick Steier – författare

In bringing cybernetic insights to her work as a cultural anthropologist, Mary Catherine Bateson inspired new ways of thinking about contemporary global challenges. This collection of essays from authors representing a range of disciplines from anthropology to design to creativity and spirituality, as well as transdisciplinary perspectives that are at the heart of cybernetics, honours Mary Catherine's life and work. Just as Mary Catherine found resonance in the metaphor of composing as a creative process that unfolds over time in response to ever-changing contingencies, these essays bring forth and build upon the many themes from her work, such as interdependence, reflexivity, continuity/discontinuity, and cybernetics as a living process, recombining them in new ways to offer novel insights.

This volume is grounded in a deep appreciation of the rich and cohesive constellation of ideas developed by Humberto Maturana which, taken as a whole, can be understood as a biocultural matrix of human understanding. As a way of thinking, these ideas comprise an epistemological shift that changes the way we regard 'reality' as we are compelled by his work to consider not only how we do what we do, but also how we know what we know.

The backgrounds of the contributing authors reveal how Maturana’s work resonates with a variety of domains that range from art to family therapy, from education to organizational life, and from biology to dialogue. At the same time, these authors offer transdisciplinary perspectives rooted in cybernetic understanding. The papers in this volume invite us to reflect on Maturana’s contributions to our ways of being in the world, and of constituting and living in the worlds we create.