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the psychedelic sixties, with the sixties, too, graspable as ontological theater
and ontology in action.
At the same time, the history of Walter's cybernetics begins an exemplifi-
cation of what I called the protean quality of cybernetics, with the tortoises
spanning the worlds of brain science, psychiatry, robotics, and entertain-
ment—and we can now add to this list the Dream Machine and biofeedback
setups as pivots to the wider culture and the arts. This multiplicity can be
associated with the lack of any stable institutional basis for cybernetics, with
first the Ratio Club and then the Namur conferences as key nexuses in Brit-
ain and Europe; and with the disorganized, undisciplined mode of cybernetic
transmission and the possibilities for mutation that went with that.
Next we come to Walter's contemporary in the first generation of British
cyberneticians, Ross Ashby. As we shall see, Ashby's cybernetics grew around
a notion of adaptation that was different from and richer than Walter's, and
it was, in fact, Ashby's vision of adaptation (shared by Gregory Bateson) that
informed the work of the second generation, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask.
