The Cybernetic Brain

by Andrew Pickering

  As a preliminary definition, then, we can regard cybernetics as a postwar science of the adaptive brain, and the question then becomes: What did cybernetics look like in practice? Just how did the cyberneticians attack the adaptive brain? The answer is, in the first instance, by building electromechanical devices that were themselves adaptive and which could thus be understood as perspicuous and suggestive models for understanding the brain itself. The simplest such model was the servomechanism—an engineering device that reacts to fluctuations in its environment in such a way as to cancel them out. A domestic thermostat is a servomechanism; so was the nineteenth-century steam-engine "governor" which led Wiener to the word "cybernetics." Working with servomechanisms in the war was, in fact, what led Wiener into the field he subsequently named. Walter's robot tortoises and Ashby's homeostat were more striking and original examples of adaptive mechanisms, and they were at the forefront of "brain science" in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. A phrase of Warren McCulloch's comes to mind. Speaking of another British protocybernetician, the experimental psychologist Kenneth Craik, McCulloch remarked that Craik always wanted to understand "the go of it"— meaning, to grasp the specific mechanical or quasi-mechanical connections that linked inputs and outputs in complex systems like the brain.4 Cybernetic devices like tortoises and homeostats aimed precisely to illuminate the go of the adaptive brain.

  There is something strange and striking about adaptive mechanisms. Most of the examples of engineering that come to mind are not adaptive. Bridges and buildings, lathes and power presses, cars, televisions, computers, are all designed to be indifferent to their environment, to withstand fluctuations, not to adapt to them. The best bridge is one that just stands there, whatever the weather. Cybernetic devices, in contrast, explicitly aimed to be sensitive and responsive to changes in the world around them, and this endowed them with a disconcerting, quasi-magical, disturbingly lifelike quality. Wiener himself was well aware of this, and his writings are dotted with references to the Sorcerer's Apprentice (who casts a magical spell that sets matter in motion and cannot be undone) and the Golem of Prague (magically animated clay). Walter likewise spoke of "the totems of primitive man" and invoked the figure of Frankenstein's monster (1953, 113, 115). This sense of mystery and transgression has always attached to cybernetics, and accounts, I think, for much of its glamour—the spell it casts over people, including myself.

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  I need to say more about cybernetics, the brain, and psychiatry. The early cybernetics of Walter and Ashby directly concerned the brain as an anatomical organ. The tortoise and the homeostat were intended as electromechanical models of the physiological brain, normal and pathological, with the latter providing a direct link to the brutal approaches to psychiatry that were dominant from the 1930s to the 1950s, chemical and electrical shock therapies and lobotomy. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, a different form of cybernetic psychiatry emerged, often, though somewhat misleadingly, labeled "antipsychiatry" for its opposition to violent interventions in mental illness (and, indeed, for its opposition to the concept of mental illness). I associate this latter form of cybernetic psychiatry with the work of the expatriate Englishman Gregory Bateson (1904–80) and, in the 1960s, with the radical therapeutic experiments of the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927–89).

  Unlike my four principals, Bateson and Laing are relatively well known to scholars, the subject of several book-length studies, so I will not discuss their work here to the same depth as the others. But I include a chapter on them for three reasons. First, because Bateson's approach to psychiatry exemplifies a move in cybernetics beyond a concern with the physiological brain and toward something less biologically specified. If Walter and Ashby focused on the adaptive brain, Bateson was concerned with something less precise and less structured, the adaptive subject or self, and how that could be disrupted by what he called double binds. Laing, from this perspective, played out what Batesonian psychiatry might look like in practice. Second, simply to emphasize that cybernetics was not forever irrevocably locked into the world of electroshock. And third, continuing that line of thought, because there is an important sense in which Bateson and Laing were more cyberneticthan Walter and Ashby. Laing's psychiatry took seriously, as Walter and Ashby's did not, the idea that we are all adaptive systems, psychiatrists and schizophrenics alike. I am interested to follow the practical and institutional ramifications of this move here.

  These features of Bateson and Laing's work—looking beyond the biological brain, and an extension of cybernetics into the field of the self and social relations—move us to another theme of this book, namely, the multiplicity of cybernetics, its protean quality. I began by defining cybernetics as the science of the adaptive brain, but even the earliest manifestations of cybernetics ran in several directions. Tortoises and homeostats could be understood as "brain science" in the sense of trying to explicate the functioning of the normal brain as a complex adaptive system—a holistic counterpoint to reductive neurophysiology, say. At the same time, as I just mentioned, tortoises and homeostats could also simulate the abnormal, pathological brain—madness—and hence stand as a contribution to psychiatry. Furthermore, these cybernetic devices did not have to be seen in relation to the brain at all, but could also be seen as things in themselves. Walter's tortoises, for example, were foundational to approaches to robotics that are very influential today—the situated robotics that I associate with the work of Rodney Brooks, and extremely interesting related work in biologically inspired robotics. From a different angle again, although Ashby's work from the 1930s onward has to be understood as attempting to shed light on the brain, by the 1950s he had begun to see his cybernetics as a general theory, applicable to all sorts of complex systems besides the brain: adaptive autopilots, the British economy, the evolution of species.

  The brain, one might say, could not contain cybernetics; cybernetics spilled out all over the disciplinary and professional map. It was a strongly interdisciplinary field, or, better, an antidisciplinary one: it did not aggregate disciplinary perspectives; it rode roughshod over disciplinary boundaries—which also contributes to its glamour. Bateson and Laing, as I said, went beyond the narrow focus of cybernetics on the biological brain to a wider focus on intrinsically social selves, and if we add in Beer and Pask the picture gets still richer. On the one hand, these two second-generation cyberneticians followed Ashby and Walter in the pursuit of material models of the adaptive brain, but in extremely original ways. Beer's experiments with Daphniaand ponds and Pask's with electrochemical "threads" were precisely attempts to "grow" adaptive brains—nondigital and nonrepresentational, biological or quasi-biological computers. This is some of the most striking and visionary work I have come across in the history of science and engineering. On the other hand, much of Beer and Pask's work can be seen as extending the achievements of the first generation, especially Ashby's, into new spaces, while echoing the social concerns of Bateson and Laing beyond the realm of psychiatry. Beer drew heavily upon Ashby's work on the homeostat (as well as upon contemporary neurophysiology) in developing his "management cybernetics" in the late 1950s, which later evolved into his viable system model of social organizations and his "team syntegrity" approach to collective decision making. Beer also extended his cybernetics beyond organizations into politics, up to the level of world politics, and even into the spiritual domain, entirely beyond the mundane world. Pask's elaboration of cybernetics started in the world of entertainment with the Musicolour machine and ran, in one direction, into the development of cybernetic trainers and teaching machines and, in another, into robot artworks, interactive theater, and adaptive architecture.

  The world of cybernetics was, then, very rich. Cybernetic practices and artifacts first emerged as brain science and psychiatry, but quickly and distinctively spread to all the fields I have just mentioned (and more): robotics, engineering, a science of general systems with applications in many fields, biological computing, management, po
litics, spirituality (if that is a field), entertainment, the arts, theater and architecture (music, too), education. Unlike more familiar sciences such as physics, which remain tied to specific academic departments and scholarly modes of transmission, cybernetics is better seen as a form of life, a way of going on in the world, even an attitude, that can be, and was, instantiated both within and beyond academic departments, mental institutions, businesses, political organizations, churches, concert halls, theaters, and art museums. This is to put the case positively. But from another angle, we should note the continuing marginality of cybernetics to established institutions.

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  I am struck, first, by the profound amateurism of British cybernetics. Key contributions often had an almost hobbyist character: Walter built his first tortoises at home in his spare time; so did Ashby his homeostat (at least, in the apocryphal version of the story); likewise Beer and Pask's experimentation with biological and chemical computers; Bateson never in his life had a steady job; Laing's experiments in psychiatry took place beyond the established institutional framework. Cybernetics welled up outside the usual channels, and it found little support within those channels. One might have expected the universities to be the natural home for such a field, and, indeed, Beer and Pask did hold a variety of part-time academic positions, but only a handful of academic units devoted to the production and transmission of cybernetic knowledge appeared in the West, and then only over finite time spans. One thinks principally of Warren McCulloch's group at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (1952–69), Heinz von Foerster's Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois (1958–75) (where Ashby was a professor for the ten years before his retirement), and, in Britain, the Cybernetics Department at Brunel (1969–85).5 (Interestingly, various versions of cybernetics were institutionalized in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. To follow that would take us too far afield, but see Gerovitch 2002.)

  Conferences and less formal gatherings instead constituted scholarly centers of gravity for the field: the Macy conferences in the United States; the Ratio Club, a self-selected dining club, in Britain (1949–58); and in Europe a series of international conferences held at Namur in Belgium from 1958 onward. Our cyberneticians were thus left to improvise opportunistically a social basis for their work. After graduating from Cambridge in 1952, Pask, for example, set up his own research and consulting company, System Research, and looked for contracts wherever he could find them; in 1970 Beer gave up a successful career in management to become an independent consultant. And along with this instability of the social basis of cybernetics went a very chancy mode of transmission and elaboration of the field. Thus, quasi-popular books were very important to the propagation of cybernetics in way that one does not find in better-established fields. Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics(1948) was enormously important in crystallizing the existence of cybernetics as a field and in giving definition to the ambitions of its readers. Grey Walter's The Living Brain(1953) found an active readership diverse enough to span protoroboticists and the Beat writers and artists. It was a turning point in his musical career when Brian Eno's mother-in-law lent him a copy of Stafford Beer's book, Brain of the Firm, in 1974.

  Sociologically, then, cybernetics wandered around as it evolved, and I should emphasize that an undisciplined wandering of its subject matter was a corollary of that. If PhD programs keep the academic disciplines focused and on the rails, chance encounters maintained the openness of cybernetics. Brain of the Firmis a dense book on the cybernetics of management, and music appears nowhere in it, but no one had the power to stop Eno developing Beer's cybernetics however he liked. Ashby's first book, Design for a Brain(1952), was all about building synthetic brains, but Christopher Alexander made it the basis for his first book on architecture, Notes on the Synthesis of Form(1964). A quick glance at Naked Lunch(1959) reveals that William Burroughs was an attentive reader of The Living Brain, but Burroughs took cybernetics in directions that would have occurred to no one else.

  Cybernetics was thus a strange field sociologically as well as substantively. We might think of the cyberneticians as nomads, and of cybernetics as a nomad science, perpetually wandering and never finding a stable home. For readers of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus(1987), the phrase "nomad science" has a special resonance in its contrast with "royal science." The royal sciences are the modern sciences, which function as part of a stable social and political order—which prop up the state. The nomad sciences, on Deleuze and Guattari's reading, are a different kind of science, one which wanders in from the steppes to undermine stability. We can come back to this thought from time to time.

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  THE STUDY OF THINKING MACHINES TEACHES US MORE ABOUT THE BRAIN THAN WE CAN LEARN BY INTROSPECTIVE METHODS. WESTERN MAN IS EXTERNALIZING HIMSELF IN THE FORM OF GADGETS. EVER POP COKE IN THE MAINLINE? IT HITS YOU RIGHT IN THE BRAIN, ACTIVATING CONNECTIONS OF PURE PLEASURE. . . . C PLEASURE COULD BE FELT BY A THINKING MACHINE, THE FIRST STIRRINGS OF HIDEOUS INSECT LIFE.

  WILLIAM BURROUGHS,NAKED LUNCH (2001 [1959], 22)

  As John Geiger (2003) discovered, if you look at the works of Aldous Huxley or Timothy Leary or William Burroughs and the Beats, you find Grey Walter. You also find yourself at one of the origins of the psychedelic sixties. From a different angle, if you are interested in the radical critique of psychiatry that was so important in the late 1960s, you could start with its high priest in Britain, R. D. Laing, and behind him you would find Gregory Bateson and, again, Walter. If you were interested in intersections between the sixties and Eastern spirituality, you might well come across Stafford Beer, as well as experimentation with sensory deprivation tanks and, once more, Bateson. In 1960, Ross Ashby lectured at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London, the hub of the British art scene, on "art and communication theory," and, at the ICA's 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition, Gordon Pask displayed his Colloquy of Mobiles—an array of interacting robots that engaged in uncertain matings with one another—alongside Beer's Statistical Analogue Machine, SAM. Pask's "conversation" metaphor for cybernetics, in turn, gets you pretty close to the underground "antiuniversity" of the sixties.

  What should we make of this? One might continue Deleuze and Guattari's line of thought and say that the sixties were the decade when popular culture was overrun by not one but two bands of nomads. On the one hand, the sixties were the heyday of cybernetics, the period when this marginal and antidisciplinary field made its greatest inroads into general awareness. On the other hand, the sixties can be almost defined as the period when a countercultural lifestyle erupted from the margins to threaten the state—"the Establishment." Given more space and time, this book might have been the place for an extended examination of the counterculture, but to keep it within bounds I will content myself with exploring specific crossovers from cybernetics to the sixties as they come up in the chapters to follow. I want to show that some specific strands of the sixties were in much the same space as cybernetics—that they can be seen as continuations of cybernetics further into the social fabric. This extends the discussion of the protean quality of cybernetics and of the sense in which it can be seen as an interesting and distinctive form of life.

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  Two more, possibly surprising, strands in the history of cybernetics are worth noting. First, as we go on we will repeatedly encounter affinities between cybernetics and Eastern philosophy and spirituality. Stafford Beer is the extreme example: he both practiced and taught tantric yoga in his later years. There is, I think, no necessary connection between cybernetics and the East; many cyberneticians evince no interest whatsoever in Eastern spirituality. Nevertheless, it is worth exploring this connection where it arises (not least, as a site of interchange between cybernetics and the sixties counterculture). In the next chapter I will outline the peculiar ontology that I associate with cybernetics—a nonmodern ontology, as I call it, that goes with a performative understanding of the brain, mind and self, and whic
h undoes the familiar Western dualism of mind and matter, resonating instead with many Eastern traditions.

  Second, cyberneticians have shown a persistent interest in what I call strange performances and altered states. This, too, grows out of an understanding of the brain, mind, and self as performative. One might imagine the representational brain to be immediately available for inspection. Formal education largely amounts to acquiring, manipulating, and being examined on representational knowledge. Such activities are very familiar to us. But the performative brain remains opaque and mysterious—who knows what a performative brain can do? There is something to be curious about here, and this curiosity is a subtheme of what follows. As I said, early cybernetics grew out of psychiatry, and the topics of psychiatry are nothing more than altered states—odd, unpleasant, and puzzling ways to be relative to some norm. We will see, however, that cybernetics quickly went beyond any preoccupation with mental illness. Grey Walter, for example, did research on "flicker": it turns out that exposure to strobe lights can induce, on the one hand, symptoms of epilepsy, but also, on the other, surprising visions and hallucinations. I think of flicker as a peculiar sort of technology of the self—a technique for producing states of being that depart from the everyday—and we can explore several of them, material and social, and their associated states as we go along. Walter also offered cybernetic analyses of yogic feats and the achievement of nirvana. All of this research makes sense if one thinks of the brain as performative, and it connects, in ways that we can explore further, both to the spiritual dimension of cybernetics and to the sixties.