The Cybernetic Brain
Page 23
GREGORY BATESON ET AL.,"TOWARDS A THEORY OF SCHIZOPHRENIA" (1956, 208)
In the same 1956 publication, Bateson made another important move which again echoes the general concerns of cybernetics, this time with strange performances and the East, but making a much tighter connection to psychiatry than Walter. Bateson noted a formal similarity between the double bind and the contradictory instructions given to a disciple by a Zen master—Zen koans.7 In the terms I laid out before, the koan is a technology of the nonmodern self that, when it works, produces the dissolution of the modern self which is the state of Buddhist enlightenment. And Bateson's idea was that double binds work in much the same way, also corroding the modern, autonomous, dualist self. The difference between the two situations is, of course, that the Zen master and disciple both know what is going on and where it might be going, while no one in the schizophrenic family has the faintest idea. The symptoms of schizophrenia, on this account, are the upshot of the sufferer's struggling to retain the modern form while losing it—schizophrenia as the dark side of modernity.
This, then, is where Eastern spirituality entered Bateson's approach to psychiatry, as a means of expanding the discursive field beyond the modern self.8 And here it is interesting to bring in two more English exiles to California, Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley. Watts was a very influential commentator on and popularizer of Zen Buddhism in the United States in the 1950s, and he was also a consultant on Bateson's schizophrenia project (Haley 1976, 70). Two of the project's principals, Haley and Weakland, "took a course from Watts on the parallels between Eastern philosophy and Western psychiatry, back in the days when he was Director of the American Academy of Asian Studies. I think the focus on Zen offered us an alternative to the ideas about change offered in psychiatry in the 1950s" (Haley 1976, 107). It makes sense, then, to see Zen as a constitutive element of the Batesonian approach to schizophrenia. And, interestingly, Bateson's cybernetics also fed back into Watts's expositions of Buddhism. In The Way of Zen(1957, 57–58), Watts drew on cybernetics as "the science of control" to explain the concept of karma. His models were an oversensitive feedback mechanism that continually elicits further corrections to its own performance, and the types of logical paradox that Bateson took to illuminate the double bind. Watts also discussed the circular causality involved in the "round of birth-and-death," commenting that in this respect, "Buddhist philosophy should have a special interest for students of communication theory, cybernetics, logical philosophy, and similar matters." This discussion leads Watts directly to the topic of nirvana, which reminds us of the connection that Walter and Ashby made between nirvana and homeostasis. Watts later returns to a discussion of cybernetics (135ff.), now exemplified by pathologies of the domestic thermostat, to get at a peculiar splitting of the modern mind—its tendency to try to observe and correct its own thought patterns while in process—and he also mentions the double bind (142), though not in connection with madness, citing Jurgen Ruesch and Bateson (1951). Here, then, we have a very interesting instance of a two-way flow between cybernetics and Buddhist philosophy, with the nonmodern self as the site of interchange.
Next, to understand Laing's extension of Bateson it helps to know that Aldous Huxley had also evoked a connection between schizophrenia and enlightenment two years prior to Bateson (neither Bateson nor Laing ever mentioned this in print, as far as I know; Huxley cited D. T. Suzuki as his authority on Zen, rather than Watts). In what became a countercultural classic of the sixties, The Doors of Perception(1954), Huxley offered a lyrical description of his perceptions of the world on taking mescaline for the first time and tried to convey the intensity of the experience via the language of Zen philosophy—he speaks of seeing the dharma body of the Buddha in the hedge at the bottom of the garden, for example. But he also linked this experience to schizophrenia. Having described his experience of garden furniture as a "succession of azure furnace-doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian," he went on (45–47):
And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad. . . . Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgement. . . . I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. The fear, as I analyse it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols could possibly bear. . . . The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away . . . [and which] scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate of countermeasures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other.
Huxley's first-person account of his mescaline experience served to fill in a phenomenology of enlightenment and madness that Bateson had left undeveloped, and it was this specific phenomenology that informed the sixties imagination of both—and that, conversely, made schizophrenia a key referent (among the much wider field of mental conditions that concerned Walter, Ashby, and orthodox psychiatry).9
We can return to Bateson. In 1961 he took the development of his thinking on schizophrenia one step further in his new edition of Perceval's Narrative, a first-person account of madness and spontaneous remission dating from the early nineteenth century. In his introduction to the book, Bateson described madness as a temporally extended process with a distinctive structure, which constituted a higher level of adaptation than those modelled by Walter's tortoises or Ashby's homeostats.10 Here is the key passage (Bateson 1961, xiv):
Perceval's narrative and some of the other autobiographical accounts of schizophrenia propose a rather different view of the psychotic process [from that of conventional psychiatry]. It would appear that once precipitated into psychosis the patient has a course to run. He is, as it were, embarked upon a voyage of discovery which is only completed by his return to the normal world, to which he comes back with insights different from those of the inhabitants who never embarked on such a voyage. Once begun, a schizophrenic episode would appear to have as definite a course as an initiation ceremony—a death and rebirth—into which the novice may have been precipitated by his family life or by adventitious circumstance, but which in its course is largely steered by endogenous process.
In terms of this picture, spontaneous remission is no problem. This is only the final and natural outcome of the total process. What needs to be explained is the failure of many who embark on this voyage to return from it. Do these encounter circumstances either in family life or institutional care so grossly maladaptive that even the richest and best organised hallucinatory experience cannot save them?
There is more to be said about Bateson, but this is as far as we need to go in exploring his cybernetic understanding of schizophrenia. In this passage he arrives at an image of the schizophrenic as an exceedingly complex system, in Stafford Beer's terms—a system with its own dynamics, with which one can possibly interfere but which one cannot control, "a voyage of discovery . . . largely steered by endogenous process." From one perspective, the model for the voyage could be the homeostat or DAMS or one of Stuart Kauffman's simulations of gene networks, but Bateson alluded instead to richer and more substantive referents: initiation ceremonies and alchemy (the motif of death and rebirth). Schizophrenia and recovery appear here as a sort of gymnastics of the soul, as Foucault might have said—a plunge beyond the modern self, precipitated by adaptation to double binds, with psychosis as a higher level of adaptation that returns to a transformed self.
THERAPY
WE DO NOT LIVE IN THE SORT OF UNIVERSE IN WHICH SIMPLE LINEAL CONTROL IS POSSIBLE. LIFE IS NOT LIKE THAT.
GREGORY BATESON,"CONSCIOUS PURPOSE VERSUS NATURE" (1968, 47)
At this point it would be appropriate to move from psychiatric theory to p
ractice, but since Laing and his colleagues went further than Bateson in that direction, much of this discussion can be postponed for a while. What I should emphasize here is that Bateson's understanding of schizophrenia hung together with a principled critique of orthodox psychiatry, and this gets us back to the fork in the road where Bateson and Laing split off from Ashby and Walter. Just as one can think of relations within the family on the model of interacting homeostats all searching for some sort of joint equilibrium, one can also think of relations between sufferers and psychiatrists on that model. Ashby, of course, thought of the psychiatric encounter asymmetrically, as a site where the psychiatrist used electric shocks or surgery to try to jolt the patient back into normality. Bateson, instead, thought such an approach was worse than useless. Implicit in the notion of the self as an exceedingly complex system is the idea that it is not subject to any sort of determinate, linear control. One can impinge on the dynamics of the self as one can impinge on the dynamics of a homeostat, but not with any determinate outcome. From this perspective, the chance that blasting someone's brain with current would simply straighten that person out psychiatrically is very small. And if one adds in Bateson's later idea of psychosis as a voyage with an adaptive course to run, then such interventions appear entirely counterproductive—"hindering and even exacerbating circumstances during the progress of the psychosis" (Bateson 1961, xvi)—which simply leave sufferers stuck in their double binds without any possibility of escape.
Already in the early 1950s Bateson echoed Harry Stack Sullivan's critique of "mechanistic thinking which saw [man] so heavily determined by his internal psychological structure that he could be easily manipulated by pressing the appropriate buttons." In contrast, Bateson favored
the Sullivanian doctrine [which] places the therapeutic interview on a human level, defining it as a significant meeting between two human beings. . . . If . . . we look at the same Sullivanian doctrine of interaction with the eyes of a mathematician or circuit engineer, we find it to be precisely the theory which emerges as appropriate when we proceed from the fact that the two-person system has circularity. From the formal, circularistic point of view no such interactive system can be totally determined by any of its parts: neither person can effectively manipulate the other. In fact, not only humanism but also rigorous communications theory leads to the same conclusion. (Ruesch and Bateson 1951, quoted by Heims 1991, 150)
Adumbrated here, then, is a symmetric version of cybernetic psychiatry, in which the therapist as well as the patient appears within the frame, more or less on the same plane as each other, as part of a continuing process that neither can control.11 But still, just what should this process look like? The most enduring legacy of Batesonian psychiatry is family therapy, in which the therapist enters into the communication patterns of families and tries to help them unravel double binds (Lipset 1980; Harries-Jones 1995). Bateson's own favored approach seems to have been simply an unstructured and open-ended engagement with sufferers—chatting, eating together, playing golf (Lipset 1980, chap. 12).12 More on this when we get to Laing.
AS NOMAD
UNTIL THE PUBLICATION OF STEPS [BATESON 1972], GREGORY MUST HAVE GIVEN THE IMPRESSION, EVEN TO HIS STRONGEST ADMIRERS, OF TAKING UP AND THEN ABANDONING A SERIES OF DIFFERENT DISCIPLINES; SOMETIMES HE MUST HAVE FELT HE HAD FAILED IN DISCIPLINE AFTER DISCIPLINE. LACKING A CLEAR PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY, HE LACKED A COMFORTABLE PROFESSIONAL BASE AND A SECURE INCOME.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON(2000, VIII)
We can leave Bateson by examining the social basis of his cybernetics, and the point to dwell on is his nomadism. Even more than Walter and Ashby, Bateson was a wanderer. He never held a permanent position in his life; his work always lacked a secure institutional base. Instead, apart from temporary teaching positions, he took advantage of the ample funding opportunities available in the postwar United States, although this sometimes left him with no support at all. The schizophrenia project was funded in its first two years by the Rockefeller Foundation, but the grant was not renewed after that and "my team stayed loyally with me without pay." Eventually, "the Macy Foundation saved us," followed by grants from the Foundations Fund for Psychiatry and the National Institute of Mental Health. "Gradually it appeared that . . . I should work with animal material, and I started to work with octopuses. My wife, Lois, worked with me, and for over a year we kept a dozen octopuses in our living room. This preliminary work was promising but needed to be repeated and extended under better conditions. For this no grants were available. At this point, John Lilly came forward and invited me to be the director of his dolphin laboratory in the Virgin Islands. I worked there for a year and became interested in the problems of cetacean communications, but I think I am not cut out to administer a laboratory dubiously funded in a place where the logistics are intolerably difficult" (M. C. Bateson 2000, xx–xxi). And so on.
Bateson's octopuses in the living room remind me of the robot-tortoises in Walter's kitchen.13 Again we are in the presence of a life lived at odds with and transversely to the usual institutional career paths. What should we make of this? Bateson was a scholar with no scholarly place to be, and we could think of this in terms of both repulsion and attraction. On the former, Bateson tended to be critical of the fields whose terrain he crossed, and none more so than psychiatry. Unlike Walter and Ashby, Bateson was intensely critical of orthodox psychiatry, and his analysis of the double bind implied a drastic departure from orthodox modes of therapy, as we can explore further below. Here we approach Deleuze and Guattari's sense of the nomad as a threat to the state and the established social order. From the side of attraction, Bateson was always searching for like-minded people to interact with, but never with great success. Lipset (1980, 232) records that in 1959 Bateson applied for a threeyear fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The director, Robert Oppenheimer, put him off, on the grounds that the institute was not interdisciplinary enough, to which Bateson replied, "I sometimes think that the ideal sparring partners died off like the dinosaurs at the end of the eighteenth century." In the absence of a stable group of sparring partners, Bateson tried several times to assemble temporary groups in the form of intense conferences (echoing the Macy conferences), the best known of which were two long meetings in 1968 and 1969 sponsored by the Wenner-Grenn Foundation, organized around Bateson's ecological concerns (Gordon Pask was one of the invitees).14 Again we return to the improvised basis of cybernetics.
Having said all that, we can now note that there was one social location that offered Bateson a home. Though Bateson's biographers show little interest in this, one can easily make a case for a close association between him and the West Coast counterculture, especially in the later years of his life. The connection Bateson made between madness and enlightenment became a standard trope of the sixties, of course, but Bateson's interests in strange performances and altered states ranged far beyond that. In 1974, for example, he returned to a topic of his prewar anthropological research: the states of trance he had studied in Bali (Lipset 1980, 282–84). Lipset (281) records a conversation about LSD at around the same between Bateson and Carter Wilson: Wilson "finally asked him if he thought there was something truly different about the kind of experience LSD provides. Long pause. Then Gregory said slowly that yes, he did think you could say that the experience under LSD was different in kind from other experiences. And that once you had had it then you knew—a very long pause—that it was an experience you could have again for a dollar." One can deduce that Bateson was no stranger to the acid culture of the time, even if this entailed a degree of distance.15 Along much the same lines, on 28 October 1973 Bateson wrote a brief account of his experience of floating for an hour in John Lilly's sensory deprivation tank: "Mostly away—no—just no words? Briefly a dream—switching to and fro between the others (?Lilly. J.) is a boy; I am a man. And vice versa he is a man, I a boy—mostly just floating. . . . Relaxing from all that—very definite process, interrupted by Lilly calling to me 'Are you a
ll right?' Opened lid which for two of us sort of joke" (Lilly 1977, 189).16
Bateson scholars refer to Lilly as a man who did research on dolphins and gave Bateson a job. But he was also a leading figure in the U.S. counterculture and the New Age movement, one of the great explorers of consciousness, finding his spiritual guides while spending long hours in his tanks under the influence of LSD (Lilly 1972). Another friend of Bateson's was Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, another key figure in the psychedelic sixties, closely associated with the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey's acid tests, for example. Brand read Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind when it first appeared in 1972, "to find that it spoke to the 'clear conceptual bonding of cybernetic whole-systems thinking with religious whole-systems thinking.' . . . Relations between the two men expanded in the spring of 1974, when Brand founded the CoEvolution Quarterly.. . . Part of his focus was now in homage of Bateson." In 1975 Brand introduced Bateson to Jerry Brown, the governor of California, who appointed him to the board of regents of the University of California in late 1976 (Lipset 1980, 286, 290).17
At an institutional level, Bateson had various temporary teaching appointments over the course of his life. The last of these was from 1972 to 1978, parttime in the Department of Anthropology at the new Santa Cruz campus of the University of California. He affiliated himself there with Kresge College, "the most radical of the Santa Cruz experiments in undergraduate education [which] tended towards crafts, meditation, utopias, gardening, and poetry writing" (Lipset 1980, 280). His last appointment, from 1978 to 1980 was as scholar in residence at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, the epicenter of the nascent New Age movement.18 Bateson died on 4 July 1980 at the Zen Center in San Francisco.