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Conversely, in seeking to create a community of interest for his work,
Ashby. like Walter, systematically looked beyond his profession. A journal
entry from early June 1944 (p. 1666) records that “several of my papers have
been returned recently & it seems that there is going to be considerable dif-
ficulty in floating this ship.”
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At this point he began writing to other scholars
with whom he appears to have had no prior contact about his and their work,
and it is notable that none of the people he addressed shared his profession.
Thus, the small existing collection of Ashby's correspondence from this period
includes letters to or from the experimental psychologists Kenneth Craik and
E. Thorndike in 1944, and in 1946 the anthropologist-turned-cybernetician
Gregory Bateson, the eminent neurophysiologist E. D. Adrian, the doyen of
American cybernetics, Warren McCulloch, the British mathematician Alan
Turing, and Norbert Wiener himself. In most cases it is clear that Ashby was
writing out of the blue, and that he identified this extraprofessional and proto-
cybernetic community from his reading of the literature. Through these
contacts, and also by virtue of something of an explosion in his publication
record—around twenty cybernetic essays appeared in various journals be-
tween 1945 and 1952—Ashby quickly assumed a leading position in the na-
scent cybernetic community, though, as we saw in the previous chapter, this
was itself located outside the usual social structures of knowledge production.
In Britain, its heart was the Ratio Club, the dining club of which Ashby was
a founder member; Ashby was an invited speaker at the 1952 Macy cyber-
netics conference in the United States, and he regularly gave papers at the
Namur cybernetics conferences in Europe. As far as knowledge dissemination
was concerned, Ashby's route into the wider social consciousness was, like
Walter's and Wiener's, via the popular success of his topics.
Ashby's cybernetics largely existed, then, in a different world from his
professional life, though that situation began to change in the late 1950s.
Through what appears to be a certain amount of chicanery on the part of
G. W. T. H. Fleming, who was chairman of the trustees of the Burden Neu-
rological Institute as well as director of Barnwood House, where Ashby then
worked, Ashby was appointed in 1959 to succeed Golla as the director of the
Burden. His ineptitude in that position—including trying to purge the library
of outdated topics, setting exams for all the staff, and setting private detec-
tives on Grey Walter—remains legendary in British psychiatric circles, and
Ashby was saved from a disastrous situation by the opportunity to flee to the
United States (Cooper and Bird 1989, 15-18). Stafford Beer's diary for 1960
records the circumstances of an offer from Heinz von Foerster to join the fac-
ulty of the University of Illinois, made while Beer, Pask, and Ashby were all on
