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ended his career. I noted, though, that Ashby was hardly a disruptive nomad
in his professional home, the mental hospital. There, like Walter, he took for
granted established views of mental illness and therapy and existing social
relations, even while developing novel theoretical accounts of the origins of
mental illness in the biological brain and of the mechanisms of the great and
desperate cures. This was a respect in which Ashby's cybernetics reinforced,
rather than challenged, the status quo.
The last feature of Ashby's cybernetics that I want to stress is its serious-
ness. His journal records forty-four years' worth of hard, technical work, 7,189
pages of it, trying to think clearly and precisely about the brain and machines
and about all the ancillary topics that that threw up. I want to stress this now
because this seriousness of cybernetics is important to bear in mind through-
out this topic. My other cyberneticians were also serious, and they also did an
enormous amount of hard technical work, but their cybernetics was not as un-
remittingly serious as Ashby's. Often it is hard to doubt that they were having
fun, too. I consider this undoing of the boundary between serious science and
fun yet another attractive feature of cybernetics as a model for practice. But
there is a danger that it is the image of Allen Ginsberg taking LSD coupled to a
flicker machine by a Grey Walter-style biofeedback mechanism, or of Stafford
Beer invoking the Yogic chakras or the mystical geometry of the enneagram,
that might stick in the reader's mind. I simply repeat here, therefore, that what
fascinates me about cybernetics is that its projects could run the distance from
the intensely technical to the far out. Putting this somewhat more strongly,
my argument would have to be that the technical development of cybernetics
encourages us to reflect that its more outré aspects were perhaps not as far out
as we might think. The nonmodern is bound to look more or less strange.
A New kind of science:
Alexander, kauffman, and Wolfram
In the previous chapter, I explored some of the lines of work that grew out of
Grey Walter's cybernetics, from robotics to the Beats and biofeedback, and
I want to do something similar here, looking briefly at other work up to the
present that resonates with Ashby's. My examples are taken from the work
of Christopher Alexander, Stuart Kauffman, and Stephen Wolfram. One
concern is again with the protean quality of cybernetics: here we can follow
the development of distinctively Ashby-ite approaches into the fields of archi-
tecture, theoretical biology, mathematics, and beyond. The other concern is
to explore further developments in the Ashby-ite problematic of complexity.
