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campus for a conference on self-organization—an offer which Ashby under-
standably accepted without hesitation (Beer 1994 [1960], 299-301).
At Illinois, Ashby's formal position was that of professor in the Depart-
ment of Electrical Engineering with an associated position on the biophysics
committee. His primary affiliation was to von Foerster's Biological Computer
Laboratory, the BCL. The BCL was an independently funded operation
housed within the Electrical Engineering Department and was, during the
period of its existence, 1958-75, the primary institutional basis for cyber-
netics in the capitalist world.
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At the BCL Ashby became the only one of
our cyberneticians to enjoy full-time institutional support for his work, both
in research and teaching. Ashby retired from the BCL in 1970 at the age of
sixty-seven and returned to England, and Conant (1974, 4) records that “the
decade spent in the United States resulted in a host of publications and was
in his own estimation the most fruitful period of his career.” It seems clear
that this time of singular alignment between paid work and hobby was also
one of the happiest periods of Ashby's life, in which he could collaborate with
many graduate students on topics close to his heart, and for which he is re-
membered fondly in the United States (unlike the Burden) as “an honest and
meticulous scholar . . . a warm-hearted, thoughtful, and generous person,
eager to pass to his students the credit for ideas he had germinated himself”
(Conant 1974, 5).
Most of Ashby's cybernetic career thus displayed the usual social as well as
ontological mismatch with established institutions, finding its home in im-
provised social relations and temporary associations lacking the usual means
of reproducing themselves. In this respect, of course, his time at the BCL is
anomalous, an apparent counterinstance to the correlation of the ontologi-
cal and the social, but this instance is, in fact, deceptive. The BCL was itself
an anomalous and marginal institution, only temporarily lodged within the
academic body. It was brought into existence in the late 1950s by the energies
of von Foerster, a charming and energetic Austrian postwar emigré, with pow-
erful friends and sponsors, especially Warren McCulloch, and ready access
to the seemingly inexhaustible research funding available from U.S. military
agencies in the decades following World War II. When such funding became
progressively harder to find as the sixties went on, the BCL contracted, and it
closed down when von Foerster retired in 1975. A few years later its existence
had been all but forgotten, even at the University of Illinois. The closure of
the BCL—rather than, say, its incorporation within the Electrical Engineering
Department—once again illustrates the social mismatch of cybernetics with
existing academic structures.
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