76. Geiger (2003, 72–77) also discusses the deliberate production of flicker effects in film, especially Tony Conrad's 1966 film The Flicker,and mentions a flicker sequence in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.Theodore Roszak wrote a fabulous novel, also called Flicker(1991), in which aManichaean sect develops very sophisticated flicker techniques in cinematography to act in sinister ways on audiences. I thank Fernando Elichirigoity for bringing this book to my attention.
77. Here and elsewhere "the sixties" refers to a specific cultural formation rather than a well-defined chronological period.Writing this book has brought home to me how much of what one associates with "the sixties" in fact originated in the 1950s (Huxley's books, Naked Lunch)or even earlier (Walter's work on flicker, for instance). Further exemplifications of this observation in the chapters to follow. The chronological sixties were, of course, the period when the developments at issue became very widely known and practiced.
78. "Trepanning" here refers specifically to the practice of removing part of one's skull with the object of achieving some form of enlightenment. It appears that very few people actually went through with this procedure, but it was certainly part of the cultural imaginary of the sixties. See J. Green (1988, 67, 97); and, for more detail, www.noah.org/trepan/people_with_holes_in_their_heads. html (I thank Peter Asaro for directing me to this website). Walter mentions that "some ancient skulls do in fact show trephine holes where there is no evidence of organic disease" (1953, 228) but assimilates this to the prehistory of leucotomy.
79. On later experiments at the Burden Neurological Institute using theta feedback in a "vigilance task"—spotting vehicles that would occasionally pass across a TV screen—see Cooper and Bird (1989, 39–40). Borck (2000) discusses biofeedback experimentation in German aviation medicine in WorldWar II, with the object, for example, of flashing a warning signal to pilots that they were about to faint due to lack of oxygen before they were consciously aware of the fact.
80. I am especially interested here in brainwave biofeedback, but such techniques have also been applied to other bodily parameters—the heartbeat, for example (and hence a possible connection to yogic feats). Butler (1978) lists 2,178 scholarly publications covering all areas of biofeedback research.
81. Returning to a familar theme in the history of cybernetics, Robbins also discusses the continuing marginalization of biofeedback in psychiatric research and practice—"part of the problem is the fact that biofeedback doesn't fit neatly into any category" (2000, 144).
82. I am very grateful to Henning Schmidgen and Julia Kursell for alerting me to this cybernetic connection and pointers to the literature. Rosenboom (1974, 91–101) is a bibliography of books and articles on biofeedback and the arts, listing around two hundred items.
83. Lucier (1995, 46) ascribes the original inspiration for this work to conversations with Edmond Dewan when they were both teaching at Brandeis University. Dewan was then working for the U.S. Air Force, who were interested in the possibility that flickering reflections from propellors were inducing blackouts in pilots prone to epilepsy.
84. Teitelbaum (1974, 62–66) also discusses works in which he "played" the synthesizer used to convert the EEG readout into an audible signal, referring to his role as that of "a guide" who "gathers together the subject's body rhythms and helps make a sound image of the electronically extended organism. The sound image thus created becomes an object of meditation which leads the subject to experience and explore new planes of Reality. . . . Even the audience seemed to enter into a trance like state, thereby entering into the feedback loop and lending positive reinforcement to the whole process. Describing her own subjective response later, Barbara Mayfield said it was 'like having an astral body through the wires.' " He also mentions that in 1969 the group used another technology of the self, yogic breathing, to control heart rates and alpha production. Evidently my imputation of a simple hylozoism to such work requires some qualification: turning brain states into music was highly technologically mediated (as in the setup depicted in fig. 3.15). The contrast I want to emphasize is that between composing a musical piece note by note in advance and seeing what emerges in real time from a biological system such as the human body. In this sense, one might see Lucier and Teitelbaum's compositions as a hybrid form of ontological theater. As usual, I am trying get clear on the less familiar aspect of the assemblage. I can note here that Teitelbaum (1974, 69) mentions a dark side of biofeedback: "With some of the most technically 'advanced' psychology work currently being carried out in our prisons [under] the guise of aversion therapy and the like, there is clearly great cause for concern." One thinks of the graphic portrayal of aversion therapy, complete with EEG readout, in Stanley Kubrick's film of Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange(1963). We can explore this "double-valuedness" of technologies of the self further in chapter 5, on Bateson and Laing.
85. One tends to imagine that biofeedback music died some time in the sixties like other cybernetic projects, but, as usual, a quick search of the Web proves the opposite to be true. "Brainwave music" turns up many sites, often with a distinctly New Age flavor. Feedback music is still performed; one can buy EEG headsets and PC software that converts brain rhythms into MIDI output that can be fed directly into a synthesizer. For a recent report on the state of the art, which includes an excellent overview of postsixties scientific EEG research, see Rosenboom (1997).
Notes to Chapter 4
1. This biographical sketch is based upon a typescript biography dating from the late 1960s in the Biological Computer Laboratory Archives, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, S.N. 11/6/26; B.N. (cited below as "BCL archive"), much amplified by information from Jill Ashby and John Ashby, for which I am very grateful. I also thank Peter Asaro for many conversations about Ashby over the years, Amit Prasad for research assistance, and Malcolm Nicolson and Steve Sturdy for their help in understanding medical careers.
2. In a biographical notebook, Ashby (1951–57) notes that his father wanted him to grow up to be "a famous barrister or a famous surgeon" and that he was "savage when annoyed" and "so determined and forceful" (10, 27). He recalls Hans Christian Anderson's story of the little mermaid who suffered horribly in leaving the sea for love of her prince, and he identifies the prince with his father (and presumably himself with the mermaid), continuing, "I learned to hate him, & this held from about 16 to 36 years of age. Now, of course, as a person, he's just an elderly relative" (28–31). "To sum up . . . one could only describe [my life], so far, as thirty years of acute unhappiness, ten years of mild unhappiness, & (so far) a few years that might be described as breaking even" (22).
3. Some measure of Ashby's financial circumstances can be gauged by his only known self-indulgence: sports cars. When he went to Palo Alto, he took one of the first Triumph TR2s with him. When he moved to Illinois it was a Jaguar XK120 (John Ashby, personal communication).
4. Since I began my research a wealth of archival material has been deposited at the British Library in London by his daughters, Jill Ashby, Sally Bannister, and Ruth Pettit, and I thank them for early access to this material, which is now also available on the Web at http://rossashby.info/. Jill Ashby's sons, Ross's grandsons, John and Mick Ashby, have been very active in making Ashby's papers and works publicly available, and I thank them both for much assistance. The most valuable archival resource is a complete set of Ashby's journal running from 1928 to 1972, some 7,189 pages in all, cited below as "journal" by page number and date (sometimes only approximate). I have also drawn upon a biographical notebook that Ashby wrote between 1951 and 1957 under the title of "Passing through Nature" (Ashby 1951–57); another notebook titled "The Origin of Adaptation," dated 19 November 1941 (Ashby 1941); copies of Ashby's correspondence, cited by correspondent and date; Ashby's list of publications, as updated by Peter Asaro; and a family biography of Ashby including many photographs written by Jill Ashby. For a collection of papers presented at a conference marking the centenary of Ashby's birth, see
Asaro and Klir (2009).
5. See Hayward (2004) on Golla's central role in British psychiatry.
6. There is an interesting parallel here with the work of Walter Freeman in the United States. After extensive unsuccessful attempts to identify organic correlates of insanity, Freeman went on to become one of the key figures in the development of lobotomy: Pressman (1998, 73–77).
7. I am grateful to Jill Ashby for providing me with copies of annual reports from St. Andrew's, and for the information that Ashby joined the hospital as a pathologist, bacteriologist, and biochemist on 27 March 1936 at a salary of £625 per annum.
8. Mrs. Ashby to Mai von Foerster, 5 August 1973; BCL archive: S.N. 11/6/26; B.N. 1.
9. The quotation is an edited extract from pp. 6–13.
10. Letter from BBC to Ashby, 21 February 1949.
11. We can make this machine seem a little less strange. A 1932 paper by L. J. Henderson (1970 [1932], 163, fig. 1) includes a diagram showing four rigid bodies attached to a frame and to one another by elastic bands, as an exemplification of a system in the kind of dynamic equilibrium discussed in the following paragraph. Ashby drew much the same diagram to make much the same point nine years later, in his notebook "The Origin of Adaptation" (1941, 35). What Ashby then added to Henderson's picture is that the elastic bands can break, as discussed in the next paragraph but one. I have not been able to trace any reference to Henderson in Ashby's journals or published writings. Henderson was a Harvard colleague of Walter B. Cannon, on whom see the following note.
12. Ashby's journal, pp. 2072–81. A note on 28 December 1946 (p. 2094) records, "I have devised a Unit which conforms to the requirements of pp. 2079 and 2083," and includes a sketch of the wiring diagram (reproduced here as fig. 4.3). On 3 May 1947, Ashby wrote: "Triumph! A unit has been made to work," and a note added records that the machine was demonstrated at a meeting of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association held at Barnwood House in May 1947 (p. 2181). On 3 March 1948 Ashby wrote, "Have completed my new four-unit machine," discussed below, and drew a more detailed circuit diagram (pp. 2431–32), and on 16 March 1948, he could again exclaim: "Triumph! The machine of p. 2432 the 'automatic homeostat' was completed today. . . . After all the trouble, it works" (p. 2435). This is the first occasion on which I have found Ashby calling the machine a "homeostat." It is clear from his journal that he got the word fromWalter B. Cannon's 1932 book The Wisdom of the Body,but it is also clear that Ashby's cybernetics owed little to Cannon (and that Ashby had trouble spelling "homeostasis" for many years). The first mention of Cannon that I have found in Ashby's journal is in an entry dated 8 October 1937 (or just later) (p. 365). (This is at the end of Ashby's volume 2 of the journal. The earlier entries in this volume are from 1931, but it seems clear that Ashby went back later to fill this volume up. Other notes from 1937 appear in volume 3.) Here, in a long sequence of notes on the literature that Ashby had been reading we find under "Cannon,Walter B. (ref. 399)" this entry: "He spells it homeostasis. Richert (Ref. 414) said 'The living being is stable. It must be in order not to be destroyed.' Nothing much." Reference 399 is a 1929 paper by Cannon which Ashby lists with the title "Organisation for Physiological Homoe[o]stasis." The third "o" is an insertion by Ashby into a word already mispelled. All the evidence, including that "nothing much," suggests that Ashby did not draw any inspiration directly from Cannon. Earlier in the same series of notes on the literature, we find "Edgell continues: '[To Prof. Jennings] an organism does not reply to its environment by a simple reflex which is at once relevant to the situation. On the contrary, stimulation is followed by many & varied movements from which the successful movement is selected by a process of trial and error. It will be that movement which relieves the organisation with respect to the stimulation in question' " (p. 341, dated 8 October 1937). This passage anticipates the key features of the homeostat; the book under discussion is Edgell (1924). Cannon's name next appears in Ashby's journal within a set of notes discussing a 1933 book by George Humphrey, where the sole comment is "Cannon (Ref. 399) calls all stabilising processes 'hom[o]eostatic' (note the title of Cannon's paper) (to be read)" (p. 793, dated 26 January 1940). Two pages later, we find a striking series of protocybernetic remarks. Still discussingHumphrey (1933): "He considers the animal as a system in mechanical eq[uilibriu]m. . . . Ostwald (Ref. 402) 'A petrol motor which regulates its petrol supply by means of the ball governor in such a way that its velocity remains constant, has exactly the same property as a living organism.' " Ashby then goes on to discuss an early twentieth-century phototropic robot which homed in on a light, much like Walter's tortoises: the citation is Loeb (1918) (and see Cordeschi 2002). We can note that Ashby (1940), his first cybernetic paper, was received at the Journal of Mental Science on 25 February 1940, just one month after this passage in his journal, though, typically, Ashby makes no mention of this publication there. Cannon (1929) reappears briefly in an entry made on 30 July 1944, where Ashby copied out a quotation (as well as one from Claude Bernard), and ended: "Summary: Some other people's quotations on equilibrium" (p. 1721). Finally, on 9 June 1947 Ashby noted that "I have just read Cannon, W. B. The Wisdom of the Body. London.1932. He points out that the recognition of stability is as old as Hippocrates' recognition of the 'vis medicatrix naturae' four hundred years B.C. In order to avoid misunderstandings he coins a new word 'homeostasis' (note spelling). His definition is vague and unhelpful." Following this Ashby transcribed four pages of quotations by hand from Cannon plus two pages of typescript inserted in his journal—transcriptions interspersed with comments such as "Why in Heaven's name doesn't he conclude. . . . How can anyone be so blind?" (p. 2196) and "He gives Four Principles, obvious enough to me but quotable" (p. 2197) (pp. 2195–98).
13. On the Barnwood House demonstration, see the previous note; on the Burden Neurological Institute demonstration, see Ashby (1948, 383n4).
14. Ashby (1948) cites Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow's key 1943 essay and mentions radar-controlled antiaircraft guns, but he does not cite Wiener's book or use the word "cybernetics." He does cite his own 1940 essay, in effect asserting his priority in the discussion of negative-feedback mechanisms. In Design for a Brain(1952, 154), Ashby does use the word "cybernetics," crediting it to Wiener, again in a discussion of antiaircraft gunnery, but without citing Wiener's book. This passage disappeared in the second edition (Ashby 1960) as did "cybernetics" from the index, though a citation to Wiener's Cyberneticswas added.
15. This concern with what the world must be like if we can learn to adapt to it runs throughout Ashby's work. One can find it clearly expressed in his journal at least as early as 15 January 1940 (p. 482).
16. Ashby's four-homeostat setups could be more or less symmetric. The fully symmetric version was the one in which in all four homeostats were uniselector controlled and thus able to adapt to one another, and this is the version referred to here. The less symmetric version was one in which the parameters of the three world homeostats were fixed and the brain homeostat did all the adapting. Even in this second version the world remains intrinsically dynamic and performative, responding in specific ways to specific outputs from homeostat 1. Nevertheless, the question of whether a given situation should be modelled by the symmetric or asymmetric configuration could be highly consequential. In psychiatry, for example, this marked the point of divergence between Ashby and Bateson, as discussed below.
17. "Twenty-five positions on each of four uniselectors means that 390,625 combinations of feedback pattern are available" (Ashby 1948, 381). Something does not quite make sense here. Figure 4.4c indicates that each homeostat unit contained three uniselectors, U,one for each of the input lines from the other units (but not on the feedback input from itself). If each of these had twenty-five settings, then each unit could be in 253 possible states. And then if one wired four units together, the number of possible states would be this number itself raised to the fourth power, that is, 2512. I have no convincing explanation for the discrepancy between my cal
culation and Ashby's, except that perhaps he was thinking of each unit as having just a single uniselector switched into its circuits, but nothing in what follows hinges on a precise number.
18. In the same notebook Ashby (1951–57) also mentions the "emphasis laid in my early theorising on 'nirvanophilia,' " and in a journal entry on 8 October 1937 he remarks that "Jennings may be added to the list of 'nirvanophiliacs' " (p. 341). In the previous chapter I mentioned the connection Walter made between homeostasis and nirvana, and Ashby clearly had a long-standing interest in this topic, identifying the brain's achievement of dynamic equilibrium with its environment and the experience of Buddhist detachment from the world: "Nirvanophilia is identical with stable equilibrium" (journal entry dated 4May 1939, p. 586); "the adaptation is perfect, intelligence infallible, all in Nirvana" (13 June 1959, p. 6118). One might wonder whether Ashby's military posting to India bore upon his spiritual views, but the interest in nirvana predates that, and "Passing through Nature" makes no explicit connections to spirituality in connection with his time in India. He remarks instead that "the army and India released something in me. (. . . In India I first played like a child, & enjoyed it all with immense delight, packing into a year all the emotions of a decade.) Since then I have become steadily more active, tending to emerge from the shadow in which I used to live" (p. 56, written between September and December 1954). In the passage immediately preceding the "Time-worshipper" quotation, Ashby recalls something like a spiritual awakening early in World War II. He was overcome by a mysterious illness which resulted in admission to Northampton General Hospital for several days at the time of the German air raids on Coventry in November 1940, which he heard from his hospital bed (pp. 31–36). "What this 'illness' was I've never discovered. . . . I felt, in Stephen Leacock's words, as if I had 'swallowed a sunset.' . . . What did the old writers mean when they said that God threw . . . into a deep sleep, and spoke to him, saying '. . .'—I have a very open mind on the question of what that illness really was" (1951–57, 35–36; the last two groups of three dots are Ashby's; one should read them as "X").
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