Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
despite its ramifications outside that field, it left clinical psychiatry itself
largely untouched. Walter and Ashby's cybernetics in effect endorsed exist-
ing psychiatric practice by modelling and conceptualizing the action of
electroshock, lobotomy, and so on. In this chapter, I want to look at a very
different approach to psychiatry that grew up in the fifties and sixties that was
also identifiably cybernetic, and that I associate primarily with the work of
Gregory Bateson and R. D. Laing.
The pivot here can be Ashby's contrasting analyses of war and planning.
Ashby understood both on the model of interacting homeostats searching for
a shared equilibrium, but he thought of war and psychiatry (“blitz therapy”)
in an asymmetric fashion. The general and the psychiatrist try to stay the
same and force the other—the enemy, the patient—to adapt to them: the de-
feated enemy accedes to the terms of the victor; the patient returns to the
world of sanity and normality embodied in the psychiatrist. This asymmetric
vision was the key to the reconciliation between early cybernetics and its psy-
chiatric matrix. On the other hand, Ashby envisaged the possibility of a more
symmetric relation between planner and planned: each party, and the plan
that links them, can adapt homeostatically to the other. In this chapter, we
will be exploring what psychiatry looked like when it took the other fork in
the road and understood social relations in general on the symmetric rather
than the asymmetric model. As we will see, big transformations in practice
accompanied this. This chapter can also serve as a transition to the follow-
ing chapters on Beer and Pask, who also took the symmetric fork in thinking
about reciprocal adaptations of people, animals, machines, and nature. It is
this symmetric version of the cybernetic ontology of performative adaptation
that interests me most in this topic.
Four more introductory points are worth making. First, the object of
Walter and Ashby's cybernetics was the biological brain: they wanted to un-
derstand the material go of it, and the go of existing psychiatric therapies.
This was not the case with Bateson and Laing. Neither of them was concerned
with the biological brain; the referent of their work was something less well
defined, which I will refer to as
the self
. Their work remained cybernetic inas-
much as their conception of the self was again performative and adaptive, just
like the cybernetic brain more narrowly conceived. Second, we will see below
how this concern with the performative self provided further openings to the
East and accompanied an interest in strange performances and altered states
more generally. One can, in fact, specify the connection between madness
and spirituality more tightly in Laing and Bateson's work than was possible in
the previous chapters. Third, I can mention in advance that while Walter and
