The Cybernetic Brain

by Andrew Pickering

  It is clear that for Laing, Watkins's voyage was a paradigm for the uninterrupted psychotic experience, a trip to another world from that of mundane reality, both wonderful and horrifying, even encompassing the acquisition of new and strange powers in the everyday world—Watkins's new-found ability to control his fellows by just looking and thinking. And if we want to understand the appeal of such writing to the sixties, we have only to think of the sixties' determined interest in "explorations of consciousness," and of The Politics of Experience as an extended meditation on that theme, with chapter 7 as an empirical example of where they might lead. Perhaps the best way to appreciate the wider significance of the book beyond psychiatry proper is to situate it as a major contribution to the countercultural canon, in which Aldous Huxley's glowing description of the mescaline experience in The Doors of Perception (1954) was a key landmark from the 1950s, shortly to be followed by Carlos Castaneda's otherworldly explorations in The Teachings of Don Juan (1968) and John Lilly's descriptions of his transcendental experiences in sensory deprivation tanks in The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space (1972).

  At another and entirely nonliterary extreme, Laing's interest in LSD coupled with his psychiatric expertise gave him an important place in the London drug scene of the sixties. Laing's home, for example, figured as a place to take people who were having a bad trip. "I felt great all of a sudden and I didn't give a shit about Sarah any more. Ronnie was looking after her. The Man. I'd taken her to the Man. I went and lay on the bed and in the end it was the greatest trip I ever took." Syd Barrett, the leader of the early Pink Floyd, was progressively wiped out by acid, and his friends took him to see Laing, though without much effect. In 1964, Laing visited the acid guru of the U.S. East Coast, Timothy Leary, who returned the compliment some years later, remarking, "You will not find on this planet a more fascinating man than Ronald Laing."51

  Beyond Laing's individual connections to the sixties, Kingsley Hall was a key institutional site for the counterculture. Experimental artists and composers would go there and perform, including Cornelius Cardew and Allen Ginsberg, and here some circles begin to close. We have already met Ginsberg taking acid for the first time in a flicker-feedback setup when we examined the connections between Walter's cybernetics and the Beats.52 Cardew gets a mention in the next chapter, as assimilated to the cybernetic musical canon by Brian Eno, himself much influenced by Stafford Beer. One begins to grasp a significant intertwining of cybernetic and countercultural networks in the sixties, though it would be another project to map this out properly. Kingsley Hall also figures prominently as a countercultural meeting place in Bomb Culture, Jeff Nuttall's classic 1968 description and analysis of the British underground. Going in the opposite direction, the Kingsley Hall community would issue forth en masse to countercultural events, including the famous 1965 poetry reading at the Albert Hall, one of the formative events of the British underground scene. "Ronnie Laing decanted Kingsley Hall patients for the night, thought they'd have a good evening out. Real schizophrenics running around the flat bit in the middle. . . . All the nutcases ran jibbering round," was one rather uncharitable description (Sue Miles, quoted in J. Green 1988, 72).

  Kingsley Hall was also for a while a blueprint for another institutional future. In 1967 Laing left the Tavistock Institute and he and David Cooper, Joseph Berke, and Leon Redler founded the Institute of Phenomenological Studies (Howarth-Williams 1977, 5), which in turn sponsored the establishment of the Anti-University of London with an interest-free loan.53 The Anti- University opened its doors on 12 February 1968 (Howarth-Williams 1977, 71): "Again [at the Anti-University] we find a concern to break down internal role structures. Foremost amongst its aims . . . was 'a change in social relations among people.' Primary amongst these relations was, of course, that of staff/student. Although there were lecturers (who were only paid for the first term), the emphasis was on active participation by all. . . . There were, of course, no exams, and fees were minimal (£8 a quarter plus 10s per course attended; goods or services were accepted in lieu of cash . . .)." In our terms, the Anti-University was an attempt to extend the symmetric cybernetic model from psychiatry and Kingsley Hall to the field of higher education. Laing gave lectures there on psychology and religion, "specifically on the accounts of 'inner space' to be found in various mythologies and religions" (Howarth- Williams 1977, 71). "Huxley gave a course on dragons and another on how to stay alive; Laing gave a course; there were courses on modern music from Cornelius Cardew; Yoko Ono did a course; I taught advanced techniques for turning on and all my students had prescriptions for tincture. I'd give them lessons on joint-rolling and so on" (Steve Abrams, quoted in J. Green 1988, 238).54 Interestingly, like Kingsley Hall, "The Anti-University had a commune associated with it; a significant number of the prominent members lived in it, and the two 'institutions' became synonymous. Indeed, it seems to have been one of the major lessons learned from the Anti-University that such enterprises need the domestic stability plus intimacy yet fluidity of a commune to flourish" (Howarth-Williams 1977, 71).55 The Anti-University was, however, short lived: "[It] was a wonderful place. It provided a platform for people who didn't have one, to lecture and talk. Either people who didn't have a platform at all or who had perhaps an academic appointment and could only lecture on their own subject. . . . The students were almost anybody: it was £10 to register for a course and it went on for a year or two. But in the second year or the second term it started getting out of hand. The idea became to charge the teachers and pay the students" (Abrams, quoted in J. Green 1988, 238).

  In 1967 the Institute of Phenomenological Studies also sponsored a "Dialectics of Liberation" conference, held at the Roundhouse in London. This was an important countercultural gathering—"the numero uno seminal event of '67"—which brought together over a period of two weeks in July many of the era's luminaries, including Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Bateson (the only cardcarrying cybernetician), Emmett Grogan, Simon Vinkenoog, Julian Beck, Michael X, Alexander Trocchi, Herbert Marcuse, and Timothy Leary, "in order to figure out what the hell is going on" (Howarth-Williams 1977, 69, quoting Joe Berke).56 The meeting itself was not a great success. Laing famously fell out with Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers over the political role of hippies. Laing felt that the hippies were already acting out a nonviolent revolution at the level of communal lifestyles; Carmichael later replied, "You will have to throw down your flowers and fight" (Howarth-Williams 1977, 73).57

  In Britain, at least, the counterculture had little chance of success when it came to a literal fight with the establishment, and at the dialectics conference Laing argued instead for the possibility of radical political change at a mesosocial level (Laing 1968b, 16): "In our society, at certain times, this interlaced set of systems may lend itself to revolutionary change, not at the extreme micro or macro ends; that is, not through the individual pirouette of solitary repentance on the one hand, or by a seizure of the machinery of the state on the other; but by sudden, structural, radical qualitative changes in the intermediate system levels: changes in a factory, a hospital, a school, a university, a set of schools, or a whole area of industry, medicine, education, etc." Kingsley Hall, of course, was a real example of what Laing was talking about, a new form of midlevel institution that enacted a novel set of social arrangements outside the established institutional framework; the Anti-University followed the next year.

  To wrap this discussion up, I can note that the most systematic institutional theorist of the counterculture in Britain was Alexander Trocchi— Laing's friend and fellow Glaswegian. From the early 1960s onward, Trocchi laid out a vision of what he called sigma (for "sum," and favoring the lowercase Greek symbol), an institutional form that would link together existing countercultural institutions and accelerate their propagation. Trocchi was clear that the aim should indeed be a sort of parallel social universe, through which the counterculture could supersede rather than take over older institutional forms: "History will not o
verthrow national governments; it will outflank them." As exemplified at Kingsley Hall and later Archway, and again instantiating the cybernetic ontology of exceedingly complex systems, Trocchi imagined sigma as a site for the endless emergence of nonmodern selves: "We must reject the fiction of 'unchanging human nature.' There is in fact no such permanence anywhere. There is only becoming."Concretely,

  at a chosen moment in a vacant country house (mill, abbey, church or castle) not too far from the City of London we shall foment a kind of cultural "jam session;" out of this will evolve the prototype of our spontaneous university.The original building will stand deep within its own grounds, preferably on a river bank. It should be large enough for a pilot group (astronauts of inner space) to situate itself, orgasm and genius, and their tools and dream-machines and amazing apparatus and appurtenances; with outhouses for "workshops" large as could accommodate light industry; the entire site to allow for spontaneous architecture and eventual town planning.. . . We envisage the whole as a vital laboratory for the creation (and evaluation) of conscious situations; it goes without saying that it is not only the environment which is in question, plastic, subject to change, but men also.

  Trocchi even thought about the economic viability of such a project, envisaging sigma as an agent acting on behalf of its associated artists and designers in their capacities as producers and consultants. A nice vision. In Bomb Culture (1968, 220–27) Jeff Nuttall records an abortive 1966 "conference" aimed at launching sigma. Attended by several of the principals of Kingsley Hall (Laing, Esterson, Cooper, Berke, and Sigal) as well as Nuttall, Trocchi, and several others, the meeting staged again the usual socio-ontological clash. On the one side, "the community at Brazier's Park, a little colony of quiet, self-sufficient middle-class intellectuals, totally square with heavy overtones of Quakerism and Fabianism, was anxious to extend every kindness and expected, in return, good manners and an observation of the minimal regulations they imposed" (222). On the other, amid much drinking, the artist John Latham built one of his famous skoob towers—a pile of books that he then set alight (226). Later, "in the house everybody was stoned. . . . Latham had taken a book (an irreplaceable book belonging to a pleasant little Chinese friend of Alex's) stuck it to the wall with Polyfilla, and shot black aerosol all over the book and wall in a black explosion of night. . . . At mid-day we fled from one another with colossal relief" (227).

  Trocchi himself had noted that sigma "will have much in common with Joan Littlewood's 'leisuredrome' [and] will be operated by a 'college' of teacherpractitioners, with no separate administration."58 Littlewood's leisure drome, otherwise known as the Fun Palace, was the most sustained attempt in the sixties to create such an experimental institution, and we can return to it with Gordon Pask in chapter 7.

  ONTOLOGY, POWER, AND REVEALING

  The key ontological thread that has run through this chapter, which we will continue to follow below, is the symmetric vision of a dance of agency between reciprocally and performatively adapting systems—played out here in psychiatry. We began with Bateson's ideas of schizophrenia as the creative achievement of a bad equilibrium and of psychosis as an index to a higher level of adaptation than could be modelled with homeostats and tortoises, and we followed the evolution of Bateson's thought into Laingian psychiatry, Kingsley Hall, and the Archway communities as ontology in action: the playing out of the symmetric cybernetic vision in psychiatric practice. We could say that Bateson and Laing were more cybernetic, in a way, than Walter and Ashby, in a quasi-quantitative fashion: Bateson and Laing understood psychiatric therapy as a two-way process, enmeshing the therapist as well as the patient; while for Walter, Ashby, and the psychiatric establishment, the process was only one-way: therapy as ideally an adaptation of the patient but not of the therapist. But as we have seen, this quantitative difference hung together with a dramatic contrast in practices. If the paradigmatic therapy of conventional psychiatry was ECT in the 1950s moving on to drugs in the sixties, the paradigm of the Bateson-Laing line was that of symmetric, open-ended, and reciprocal interaction.

  We can phrase this in terms of power.The conventional mental hospital staged a linear model of power in a hierarchical frame of social relations: doctors, then nurses, then patients. The aim of Kingsley Hall was to set everyone on a level plane without any fixed locus of control. Of course, neither of these visions was perfectly instantiated. Formally hierarchical relations are always embedded in informal and transverse social relations; on the other hand, doctors, nurses and patients cannot easily escape from their traditional roles. Nevertheless, I hope to have shown above that these different ontological visions did indeed hang together with distinctly different practices and institutional forms. Ontology made a real difference here.

  My last observation is that conceiving these differences in terms of a notion of power is not really adequate. The contrast between Kingsley Hall and a contemporary mental hospital did not lie simply in the fact that the "staff" of the former thought that hierarchy was bad in the abstract, or that it would be nice in principle not to exercise control over the "patients." Something more substantial was at stake, which can be caught up in the Heideggerian contrast between enframing and revealing. Conventional psychiatry, one could say, already knows what people should be like, and it is the telos of this sort of psychiatry to reengineer—to enframe—mental patients back into that image. That is why a hierarchical system of social relations is appropriate. Power relations and understandings of the self go together. The Bateson-Laing line, of course, was that selves are endlessly complex and endlessly explorable, and the antihierarchical approach of Kingsley Hall was deliberately intended to facilitate such exploration in both the mad and the sane. This is the mode of revealing, of finding out what the world has to offer us. We can, then, name this contrast in social relations in terms of power and hierarchy, but that is not enough. The sociological contrast echoed and elaborated a contrast in ontological stances—enframing versus revealing—which is, I think, very hard to grasp from the standpoint of modernity.59

  PART TWO

  BEYOND THE BRAIN

  6

  _ _ _ _ _

  STAFFORD BEER

  from the cybernetic factory

  to tantric yoga

  Our topic changes character here. Grey Walter and Ross Ashby (and Gregory Bateson) were first-generation cyberneticians, born in the 1900s and active until around 1970. Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask were central figures in the second generation of British cybernetics, twenty years younger and active in cybernetics until their deaths in 2002 and 1996, respectively. What the two generations had in common was the defining interest in the adaptive brain. Where they diverged was in the question of how the brain fitted into their cybernetics. To a degree, Beer and Pask carried forward the attempt to build synthetic brains that they inherited from Walter and Ashby, in their work on biological and chemical computers discussed in this chapter and the next. Even there, however, the emphasis in Beer and Pask's work was not on understanding the brain per se, but in putting these "maverick machines," as Pask called them (Pask and Curran 1982, chap. 8), to work in the world. More generally, psychiatry was not a central concern for either Beer or Pask. Instead, they found inspiration in ideas about the adaptive brain in their extensions of cybernetics into new fields: Beer in his work in management and politics and even in his spiritual life; Pask in his work on training and teaching machines, and in the arts, entertainment, theater, and architecture. This is what interests me so much about the cybernetics of both men: the many projects they engaged in help us extend our range of examples of ontology in action. What also interests me is that, like Bateson and Laing, and unlike Ashby in his understanding of clinical psychiatry, Beer and Pask took the symmetric fork in the road. The referent of their cybernetics was always reciprocally adapting systems.

  I should add that Beer and Pask were extraordinary individuals. Beer displayed fabulous energy and creativity. Reading a diary that he kept during his first visit to the
United States, from 23 April to 12 June 1960, leaves one limp (Beer 1994 [1960]); his career in management was accompanied by awesome literary productivity (in terms of quality as well as quantity), mainly on cybernetic management and politics, though he was also a published poet (Beer 1977); he painted pictures, and some of his works were displayed in Liverpool Cathedral and elsewhere (Beer 1993b); he also taught tantric yoga, loved women, slept only briefly, and drank continually (white wine mixed with water in his later years).

  After an outline biography, I turn to Beer's work in management and politics, focusing in turn on his early work on biological computers, his viable system model of organizations, and the team syntegrity approach to decision making. Then we can examine the spiritual aspects of Beer's cybernetics and the cybernetic aspects of his spirituality. The chapter ends with an examination of the relation between Beer's cybernetics and Brian Eno's music.

  _ _ _ _ _

  Stafford Beer was born in Croydon, near London, on 25 September 1926, nearly five years the elder of two brothers (his younger brother Ian went on to be headmaster of Harrow Public School and on his retirement wrote a book called But, Headmaster! [2001]).1 Like Ashby, Walter, and Pask, Stafford had a first name that he never used—Anthony—though he buried it more deeply than the others. His brother's third name was also Stafford, and when Ian was sixteen, Stafford "asked me to sign a document to promise that I would never use Stafford as part of my name. I could use it as I. D. S. Beer, or, indeed, using the four names together but he wanted the 'copyright' of Stafford Beer and so it was forever more."2 Early in World War II, their mother, Doris, took Stafford and Ian to Wales to escape the German bombing, and at school there Stafford met Cynthia Hannaway, whom he married after the war. In 1942 the family returned to England, and Stafford completed his education at Whitgift School, where "he was a difficult pupil as he was found to be unsuitable for certain Sixth Form courses or he demanded to leave them for another. He could not stand the specialization and talked all the time of holistic teaching and so on. He wanted to study philosophy but that was not taught at school. He was precocious to a degree. A letter written by him was published in the Spectator or the Economist, no-one could understand it." He went on to study philosophy and psychology at University College London—which had then been evacuated to Aberystwyth, back in Wales—for one year, 1943–44.3 At University College he swam for the college team and was English Universities backstroke champion as well as getting a first in his first-year examinations. In 1944 he joined the British Army as a gunner in the Royal Artillery. In 1945 he went to India as a company commander in the Ninth Gurkha Rifles and later became staff captain intelligence in the Punjab. In 1947 he returned to Britain, remaining with the Army as army psychologist with the rank of captain.