The Cybernetic Brain
Page 38
Beer then moves up the levels of consciousness. At the fourth level of figure 6.22 we find "cerebrum," the level of individual consciousness, which Beer identifies in the subtle body with Ajna, the sixth chakra. Then follow four levels having to do with social groupings at increasing scales of aggregation. "Neighbourhood" refers to the small groups of individuals that come together in syntegration, and "it must be evident that the theory of recursive consciousness puts group mind forward as the fifth embedment of consciousness, simply because the neighbourhood infoset displays the usual tokens of consciousness" (Beer 1994b, 248). From this angle, too, therefore, syntegration had a more than mundane significance for Beer. Not simply an apparatus for free and democratic discussion, syntegration produces a novel emergent phenomenon, a group mind which can be distinguished from the individual minds that enter into it, and which continues the spiritually charged sequence of levels of consciousness that runs upward from the neuron to the cerebrum and through the yogic chakras. At higher levels of social aggregation, up to the level of the planet, Beer also glimpses the possibilities for collective consciousness but is of the opinion that practical arrangements for the achievement of such states "work hardly at all . . . there is no cerebrum [and] we are stuck with the woeful inadequacy of the United Nations. The Romans did better than that" (249).
The ninth level of figure 6.22, "cosmos," completes the ascent. Here the mundane world of the individual and the social is left entirely behind in yogic union with "cosmic consciousness," accessible via the seventh chakra, Sahashara, the thousand-petaled lotus. And Beer concludes (255):
For the yogi, the identification of all the embedments, and particularly his/her own selfhood embodied at the fourth embedment, with the cosmos conceived as universal consciousness, is expressed by the mantra Tat Tvam Asi: "That You Are." These are the last three words of a quotation from one of the Ancient Vedic scriptures, the Chhandogya Upanishad, expressing the cosmic identification:
That subtle essence
which is the Self of this entire world,
That is the Real,
That is the Self,
That You Are.
_ _ _ _ _
Rather than trying to sum up this section, it might be useful to come at the topic from a different angle. Beer, of course, identified the spiritual aspect of his life with the tantric tradition, but it strikes me that his fusion of cybernetics and spirituality also places him in a somewhat more specific lineage which, as far as I know, has no accepted name. In modernity, matter and spirit are assigned to separate realms, though their relations can be contested, as recent arguments about intelligent design show: should we give credit for the biological world to God the Creator, as indicated in the Christian Bible, or to the workings of evolution on base matter, as described by modern biology? What interests me about Beer's work is that it refused to fall on either side of this dichotomy—we have seen that his science, specifically his cybernetics, and his understanding of the spiritual were continuous with one another—flowed into, structured, and informed each other in all sorts of ways. This is what I meant by referring to the earthy quality of his spirituality: his tantrism and his mundane cybernetics were one. Once more one could remark that ontology makes a difference, here in the realm of the spiritual.67 But my concluding point is that Beer was not alone in this nondualist space.
I cannot trace out anything like an adequate history of the lineage of the scientific-spiritual space in which I want to situate Beer, and I know of no scholarly treatments, but, in my own thinking at least, all roads lead to William James—in this instance to his Varieties of Religious Experience, as an empirical but nonsceptical inquiry into spiritual phenomena. James's discussion of the "anaesthetic revelation"—transcendental experience brought on by drugs and alcohol—is a canonical exploration of technologies of the nonmodern self, Aldous Huxley avant la lettre. Huxley himself lurked in the margins of chapters 3 and 5 above, pursuing a biochemical understanding of spiritual experience without intending any reduction of the spiritual to base matter, with John Smythies and Humphrey Osmond's research on brain chemistry lurking behind him. Gregory Bateson, Alan Watts, and R. D. Laing likewise ran worldly psychiatry and Buddhism constructively together, with a cybernetic ontology as the common ground. One thinks, too, of the Society for Psychical Research (with which both James and Smythies were associated) as a site for systematic integration of science and the spiritual (chap. 3, n. 62).
Figure 6.23.Chakras and plexuses. Reproduced from The Chakras, by C. W. Leadbeater (Leadbeater 1990, 41, table 2). (With permission from The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Chennai—600 020, India. © The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Chennai—600 020, India.www.tw-adyar.org.)
From another angle—if it is another angle—a canonical reference on the chakras that loomed so large in Beer's thought and practice is C. W. Leadbeater's The Chakras, continuously in print, according to the back cover of my copy (Leadbeater 1990), since 1927, and published by the Theosophical Society. Much of Beer's esoteric writing echoes Leadbeater's text, including, for example, the association between the chakras and nerve plexuses just discussed (fig. 6.23).68 Theosophy, too, then, helps define the scientific-spiritual space of Beer's cybernetics. And coming up to the present, one also thinks of certain strands of New Age philosophy and practice, already mentioned in chapter 5, as somehow running together science and spirituality, mind, body, and spirit.69
We should thus see Beer's cybernetic tantrism as an event within a broader scientific-spiritual history, and I can close with two comments on this. First, to place Beer in this lineage is not to efface his achievement. On the one hand, Beer went much further than anyone else in tying cybernetics—our topic—into the realm of the spirit. On the other hand, from the spiritual side, Beer went much further than anyone else in developing the social aspects of this nonmodern assemblage. Esoteric writings seldom go beyond the realm of the individual, whereas the VSM and team syntegrity were directed at the creation of new social structures and the rearrangement of existing ones in line with cybernetic and, we can now add, tantric sensitivities. Second, placing Beer in relation to this lineage returns us to questions of institutionalization and marginality. The entire lineage could be described as sociologically occult—hidden and suspect. Even now, when New Age has become big business, it remains walled off from established thought and practice. Despite—or, perhaps better, because of—its elision of mind, body, and spirit distinctions, New Age remains invisible in contemporary debates on the relation between science and religion. Like Gysin's Dream Machines, New Age spirituality and Beer's spirituality fail to find a place within modern schemata of classification. And, to change direction again, perhaps we should regret this. The early twenty-first century seems like a time when we should welcome a form of life that fuses science and spirituality rather than setting them at each other's throats. Again, this exploration of the history of cybernetics offers us a sketch of another future, importantly different from the ones that are more readily imagined.
Brian Eno and New Music
[BEER'S WORK] SO FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGED THE WAY THAT I THOUGHT ABOUT MUSIC THAT IT'S VERY DIFFICULT TO TRANSLATE INTO INDIVIDUAL THINGS, IT JUST CHANGED THE WHOLE WAY I WORK. . . . STAFFORD FOR ME WAS THE DOORWAY INTO A WHOLE WAY OF THINKING.
BRIAN ENO,QUOTED IN DAVID WHITTAKER, STAFFORD BEER (2003, 57, 63)
We touched on relations between cybernetics and the arts in chapters 3 and 4 as well as briefly here in connection with biological computing, and I want to end this chapter by returning to this topic. The focus now is on music, and the intersection between Beer's cybernetics and the work of the composer and performer Brian Eno. If Beer himself is not widely known, many people have heard of Eno and, with any luck, know his music (which is, like any music, impossible to convey in words, though what follows should help to characterize it). Eno's first claim to fame was as a member of Roxy Music, the greatest rock band to emerge in the early 1970s. Subsequently, he left Roxy and we
nt on to develop his own distinctive form of "ambient" and "generative" music (as well as important collaborations with David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2), with Music for Airports(1978) as an early canonical example.70 The content of this music is what I need to get at, but first I want to establish Eno's biographical connection to cybernetics.
In an interview with David Whittaker (Whittaker 2003, 53–63), Eno recalled that he first became interested in cybernetics as an art student in Ipswich between 1964 and 1966. The principal of the art school was Roy Ascott, Britain's leading cybernetic artist, who will reappear in the next chapter, and the emphasis at Ipswich was on "process not product. . . . Artists should concentrate on the way they were doing things, not just the little picture that came out at the end. . . . The process was the interesting part of the work" (53). Eno was drawn further into cybernetics in 1974 when his mother-in-law lent him a copy of Beer's Brain of the Firm, which she had borrowed from Swiss Cottage Library in London. Eno was "very, very impressed by it" and in 1975 wrote an essay in which he quoted extensively from Brain. He sent a copy to Beer, who came to visit him in Maida Vale (Whittaker 2003, 55–56).71 In 1977 Beer invited Eno for an overnight visit to the cottage in Wales, where Eno recalled that dinner was boiled potatoes and the following conversation took place (55):
[Beer] said "I carry a torch, a torch that was handed to me along a chain from Ross Ashby, it was handed to him from . . . Warren McCulloch." He was telling me the story of the lineage of this idea . . . and said "I want to hand it to you. I know it's a responsibility and you don't have to accept, I just want you to think about it." It was a strange moment for me, it was a sort of religious initiation . . . and I didn't feel comfortable about it somehow. I said "Well, I'm flattered . . . but I don't see how I can accept it without deciding to give up the work I do now and I would have to think very hard about that." We left it saying the offer is there, but it was very strange, we never referred to it again, I wasn't in touch with him much after that. I'm sure it was meant with the best of intentions and so on but it was slightly weird.
Now we can turn to the substantive connection between Eno's music and Beer's cybernetics: what did Brian get from Stafford? Speaking of this connection and apparently paraphrasing from Brain of the Firm,in his interview with David Whittaker Eno said that "the phrase that probably crystallised it [Eno's cybernetic approach to music] . . . says 'instead of specifying it in full detail; you specify it only somewhat, you then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go.' That really became my idea of working method" (57).72 And the easiest way to grasp this idea of riding the dynamics of the system is, in the present context, ontologically. Beer's ontology of exceedingly complex systems conjures up a lively world, continually capable of generating novel performances. Eno, so to speak, picked up the other end of the stick and focused on building musical worlds that would themselves exhibit unpredictable, emergent becomings. And we can get at the substance of this by following a genealogy of this approach that Eno laid out in a 1996 talk titled "Generative Music" (Eno 1996b). This begins with a piece called In Cby Terry Riley, first performed at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1964 (Eno 1996b, 2–3):
It's a very famous piece of music. It consists of 52 bars of music written in the key of C. And the instructions to the musicians are "proceed through those bars at any speed you choose." So you can begin on bar one, play that for as many times as you want, 20 or 30 times, then move to bar 2, if you don't like that much just play it once, go on to bar three. The important thing is each musician moves through it at his or her own speed. The effect of that of course is to create a very complicated work of quite unpredictable combinations. If this is performed with a lot of musicians you get a very dense and fascinating web of sound as a result. It's actually a beautiful piece.
Here we find key elements of Eno's own work. The composer sets some initial conditions for musical performance but leaves the details to be filled in by the dynamics of the performing system—in this case a group of musicians deciding on the spot which bars to play how often and thus how the overall sound will evolve in time. Eno's second example is a different realization of the same idea: Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain, first performed in 1965, also at the Tape Music Center.73 In this piece a loop of a preacher saying "It's gonna rain" is played on two tape recorders simultaneously, producing strange aural effects as the playbacks slowly fall out of phase: "Quite soon you start hearing very exotic details of the recording itself. For instance you are aware after several minutes that there are thousands of trumpets in there. . . . You also
become aware that there are birds" (Eno 1996b, 3). Again in this piece, the composer specifies the initial conditions for a performance—the selection of the taped phrase, the use of two recorders, and then "rides the dynamics of the system"—in this case the imperfection of the recorders that leads them to drift out of synchronization, rather than the idiosyncratic choices of human musicians—to produce the actual work. Eno then moves on to one of his own early post-Brainpieces composed in this way, from Music for Airports. This consists of just three notes, each repeating at a different interval from the others—something like 23 1/2, 25 7/8, and 29 15/16 seconds, according to Eno. The point once more is that the composer defines the initial conditions, leaving the piece to unfold itself in time, as the notes juxtapose themselves in endless combinations (Eno 1996b, 4).
In his talk, Eno then makes a detour though fields like cellular automata and computer graphics, discussing the endlessly variable becomings of the Game of Life (a simple two-dimensional cellular automaton, developed by John Conway: Poundstone 1985), and simple screen savers that continually transform images arising from a simple "seed." In each case, unpredictable and complex patterns are generated by simple algorithms or transformation rules, which connects back to Eno's then-current work on a musical generative system—a computer with a sound card. Eno had contrived this system so as to improvise probabilistically within a set of rules, around 150 of them, which determined parameters such as the instruments and scales to be employed, harmonies that might occur, and steps in pitch between consecutive notes.74 As usual, one should listen to a sample of the music produced by this system, but at least Eno (1996b, 7) found that it was "very satisfying," and again we can see how it exemplifies the idea of riding the dynamics of what has by now become a sophisticated algorithmic system.
Thus the basic form and a sketchy history of Brian Eno's ambient and generative music, and I want to round off this chapter with some commentary and a little amplification. First, back to Roxy Music. Eno does not include his time with Roxy in any of his genealogies, and one might assume a discontinuity between his Roxy phase and his later work, but the story is more interesting than that. Eno played (if that is the word) the electronic synthesizer for Roxy Music and, as Pinch and Trocco (2002) make clear in their history of the synthesizer, it was not like any other instrument, especially in the early "analog days." In the synthesizer, electronic waveforms are processed via various different modules, and the outputs of these can be fed back to control other modules with unforeseeable effects. As Eno wrote of the EMS synthesizer, for example, "The thing that makes this a great machine is that . . . you can go from the oscillator to the filter, and then use the filter output to control the same oscillator again. . . . You get a kind of squiging effect. It feeds back on itself in interesting ways, because you can make some very complicated circles through the synthesiser" (quoted in Pinch and Trocco 2002, 294). Here we find the familiar cybernetic notion of a feedback loop, not, however, as that which enables control of some variable (as in a thermostat), but as that which makes a system's behavior impenetrable to the user.75 We can think about such systems further in the next chapter, but for now the point to note is that analog synthesizers were thus inescapably objects of exploration by their users, who had to find out what configuration would produce a desirable musical effect.76 "The resulting music was an exchange . . . between person and machine, both contribut
ing to the final results. This may be why analog synthesists can readily recount feelings of love for their synthesisers" (Pinch and Trocco 2002, 177). In this sense, then, one can see a continuity between Eno's work with Roxy and his later work: even with Roxy Music, Eno was riding the dynamics of a generative system—the synthesizer—which he could not fully control. What he learned from Beer was to make this cybernetic insight explicit and the center of his future musical development.