RCA School of Architecture ResearchRCA SoA Research

“Steps Around a Theory of Action” is an archival and interpretive project within Bateson’s Cosmos that reconstructs a series of conferences through which Gregory Bateson developed his late ecological thought. It was produced by the 'archive team' - Jon Goodbun, Dulmini Perera, Simon Sadler and Ben Sweeting - of the AHRC-funded two year research project into Enacting Gregory Bateson's Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design. This output was published as a website in 2025, and will also be included in the projects forthcoming book, due to be published by end of 2026.

Curated and introduced by Dulmini Perera, the project situates Bateson’s work not as an abstract body of theory alone, but as something formed through sites, conversations, correspondence, workshops, conferences, drawings, institutions and encounters. It draws on archival materials including transcripts, letters, reports, audio recordings and conference documents, and presents Bateson’s ideas through multiple voices rather than a single authoritative account.

Perera’s introduction is significant in explicitly identifying a short exercise led by Jon Goodbun during the group’s 2023 archival visit to Santa Cruz as one of the prompts for the project’s visual and conceptual form. Goodbun asked the group to draw two lines: one tracing Bateson’s movement across different landscapes, and another tracing each participant’s own movements of interest in ecology and design. This exercise helped make visible the relation between Bateson’s changing contexts and the researchers’ own intellectual trajectories, and Perera notes that it produced the initial outlines of what became Bateson’s Cosmos. The resource therefore emerges from an explicitly situated and reflexive method: it maps Bateson’s worlds while also acknowledging the contemporary researchers’ own positions within those worlds.

A further conceptual thread in the project — the question of a “theory of action” — was also one that Goodbun had already helped to foreground for the group. He had first articulated its importance in relation to Bateson’s politics in a panel convened with Dulmini Perera on “Gregory Bateson and the Political,” with Philip Guddemi and Fred Turner, for the Relating Systems Design conference in 2020. This earlier discussion framed Bateson’s ecological work not simply as a theory of communication, mind or systems, but as a problem of action: how to act within complex systems without reproducing the narrow, purposive and instrumental logics that generate ecological crisis in the first place. This emphasis becomes one of the organising questions of Bateson’s Cosmos.

Goodbun’s two contributions, on 1967 and 1968, form a crucial hinge in the larger project. The 1967 essay reads Bateson’s appearance at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London as a turning point: the moment when Bateson’s work on double bind, psychiatry, cybernetics, communication, art, ecology and consciousness begins to crystallise into what Goodbun elsewhere calls his “three ecologies” period. The Roundhouse setting becomes more than a venue; its indeterminate, post-industrial form offers an architectural and abductive metaphor for Bateson’s argument about form, purpose and systemic wisdom. Goodbun places Bateson between the New Left and the counterculture, arguing that his critique of “conscious purpose” offered both audiences a way to understand ecological crisis as a crisis of perception, epistemology and action.

The 1967 essay also repositions Bateson politically. Rather than treating him as detached from political struggle, Goodbun shows him engaging Marx, Laing, anti-psychiatry, existential phenomenology, anti-colonial and countercultural currents, while simultaneously warning that revolutionary or therapeutic action could reproduce the same epistemological errors it sought to overcome. Bateson’s warning about short-term purposive action, including his striking discussion of atmospheric carbon dioxide, is presented as an early and powerful ecological-political intervention. Goodbun’s reading casts this as a turn towards “wise action”: not withdrawal from action, but a demand that action be rethought through larger ecological systems.

The 1968 essay follows this turn from the charged public atmosphere of the Roundhouse to the more concentrated setting of the Wenner-Gren conference at Burg Wartenstein. Here Goodbun shows Bateson attempting to formalise the questions opened in 1967 into a research programme around “The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation.” The essay tracks Bateson’s exchange with Lita Osmundsen, the emergence of the “explosive memorandum,” and the shift from a general concern with consciousness to a more precise critique of conscious purpose. This shift matters because it distinguishes Bateson’s ecological cybernetics from the increasingly instrumental, engineering-oriented cybernetics that he feared was losing its philosophical and ethical depth.

Goodbun presents the 1968 conference as an experiment in method as much as content. Its small residential format, shared papers, slow dialogue and refusal of premature solutions enacted the very problems it sought to address: how a system learns, how action can be imagined by actors who are themselves inside the system, and how ecological crisis intensifies the very operationalist habits that produced it. The presence of Mary Catherine Bateson is central here, especially her role in understanding the group itself as a cybernetic model of its subject matter. In Goodbun’s account, this becomes a key moment in the formation of Bateson’s ecological aesthetics: an attempt to cultivate forms of perception, empathy, learning and aided consciousness capable of resisting the narrow violence of purposive action.

The other contributions extend and contextualise this arc. Ben Sweeting’s account of the 1969 Wenner-Gren conference, “The Moral and Aesthetic Structure of Human Adaptation,” follows the unresolved questions of 1968 into Bateson’s explicit demand for a theory of action within large complex systems, where the actor is both part of and product of the system. In the context of Bateson’s Cosmos, this point resonates with the theory-of-action question that Goodbun had already foregrounded in the group’s earlier Bateson and politics discussions. Sweeting foregrounds Bateson’s insistence that premature action risks reproducing the same epistemological errors it seeks to correct, and shows how Bateson’s concern with action moves increasingly towards metaphor, aesthetics and the possibility that action must be planned, if at all, on an aesthetic base.

Dulmini Perera’s essay on the 1969 Princeton conference, “Human Distress and Rapid Social Change,” shifts the question of action into the terrain of social distress, institutional pathology and environmental violence. Bateson appears here as a kind of planetary psychiatrist, urging participants to move beyond “screwdriver questions” towards ecological questions concerning the deeper communicational, semiotic and systemic patterns through which distress is produced. Perera reads pollution, smog and environmental disorder not simply as material waste or technical failure, but as signs that a system is stuck, losing flexibility and “room for manoeuvre” under conditions of rapid change.

Simon Sadler’s essay on the 1970 Wenner-Gren conference, “Reconstructing the Ecology of a Great City,” brings Bateson’s ecological cybernetics directly into contact with urbanism and planning. Organised around New York City at the moment of Earth Day, ecological urban politics and new media experimentation, the conference moved beyond conventional environmental concerns such as waste, pollution and transport towards questions of social ecology, local expertise, heterarchic governance and the city as an information-rich ecology. Sadler’s account is especially important for architectural readers because it connects Bateson’s work to urban ecology, “Flexibility and Ecological Planning,” and the possibility that cities might become sites of learning rather than instruments of linear control. This urban reading is also indebted to the line of argument developed in Goodbun’s earlier AD essay, “Flexibility and Ecological Planning: Gregory Bateson on Urbanism,” published in the Architectural Design special issue Scarcity: Architecture in an Age of Depleting Resources. That essay had already established Bateson’s relevance for architectural and urban thinking by linking ecological planning, flexibility, cybernetics, learning and the critique of purposive control.

Sadler’s second contribution, on the 1974 Tarrytown event “After Robert Moses, What?”, continues this urban-political thread through the problem of power. In the aftermath of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Bateson uses urban governance to rethink power itself through cybernetics. Power is not treated as a simple force possessed by individuals, but as a metaphor for patterns of interaction, information, reward, punishment, context and feedback within complex social systems. Sadler’s account also draws out the limits and ambiguities of Bateson’s politics: his ecological critique of mechanistic power opens possibilities for pluralist and heterarchic thought, but remains uneasy around conflict, class, race, gender and the practical mechanics of collective urban change.

Finally, Perera’s essay with Stefanie Huthoefer on the 1975 Lindisfarne Summer Conference places Bateson’s ecological thought within the emergence of planetary culture, counter-institutional experimentation and ecological imagination. Lindisfarne is presented as an attempt to create a different intellectual and cultural space outside the monocultures of the corporate university. Bateson’s thought is connected to slow temporality, autonomy, autopoiesis, coevolutionary design, the New Alchemy Institute, John and Nancy Todd, Lynn Margulis, Sim Van der Ryn and the search for forms of ecological culture beyond industrial modernity. This contribution shows how Bateson’s work moved into a broader field of ecological design, planetary technics, sacred ecology and experiments in institutional form.

Taken together, Perera’s introduction, Goodbun’s 1967 and 1968 essays, and the further contributions by Sweeting, Perera, Sadler and Huthoefer frame Bateson’s Cosmos as more than a historical reconstruction. It is a model for ecological research practice. It shows how Bateson’s thought emerged through movement between disciplines and places, and how its contemporary value lies in helping designers, architects and ecological practitioners think about action without reducing action to planning, intervention or control. Goodbun’s contributions are particularly important because they identify the late-1960s conjuncture as the point at which Bateson’s work becomes directly relevant to ecological design: a theory of action begins to emerge, but only by passing through critiques of consciousness, purpose, cybernetics, politics, technology, empathy and systemic wisdom. The surrounding essays then show how this problematic unfolds into aesthetic action, social distress, urban ecology, power, autonomy and planetary culture.