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In important respects, Ashby went through with this plan. Especially at the
University of Illinois in the 1960s, his demonstration machines became leg-
endary, as did his qualities as a pedagogue.
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It is certainly not the case that he
gave up his research after 1958—his “hobby” was always his raison d'être—but
his major subsequent contributions to cybernetics and systems theory were
all in the realm of theory, as foreshadowed in the first quotation above. As a
full professor at a major American university, Ashby's funding problems ap-
pear to have been significantly alleviated in the 1960s, and there is one indi-
cation that he returned then to some version of DAMS as a research project.
In an obituary, Oliver Wells recalled that Ashby's “love of models persuaded
von Foerster to have constructed what was called the 'The Grandfather Clock'
which was designed as a seven foot noisy model of state-determined complex
'systems' running through trajectories of cycles of stabilisation and 'random-
ness' ” (Wells 1973). One has to assume that nothing significant emerged from
this project; like the English DAMS, it was never the subject of anything that
Ashby published.
The stars were in a strange alignment for Ashby in the late 1950s. Immedi-
ately after the deflationary post-Namur note he added an interstitial, undated
note which reads: “Here came the Great Translation, from a person at B. H.
to Director at B. N. I. [the Burden] (Appointment, but no more till May '59)”
(p. 6060). But now we, too, can take a break and go back to madness.
Madness Revisited
At the beginning of this chapter I noted that Ashby's career in Britain was
based in mental institutions and that he was indeed active in research related
to his profession, publishing many papers on explicitly psychiatric topics. I
want now to discuss the relation between the two branches of Ashby's work,
the one addressed to questions of mental illness and the cybernetic work dis-
cussed in the preceding sections.
My starting point is Ashby's 1951 assertion, already quoted, that his cyber-
netics, as developed in his journal, “was to me merely a delightful amusement,
a hobby I could retreat to, a world where I could weave complex and delightful
patterns of pure thought.” This assertion deserves to be taken seriously, and
it is tempting to read it as saying that his cybernetic hobby had nothing to
do with his professional research on pathological brains and ECT. It is also
possible to read his major works in cybernetics, above all his two topics, as
exemplifications of this: there is remarkably little of direct psychiatric inter-
est in them. The preceding discussions of the homeostat and DAMS should
