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sixties, closely associated with the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey's acid tests,
for example. Brand read Bateson's
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
when it first
appeared in 1972, “to find that it spoke to the 'clear conceptual bonding of
cybernetic whole-systems thinking with religious whole-systems thinking.' . . .
Relations between the two men expanded in the spring of 1974, when Brand
founded the
CoEvolution Quarterly
. . . . Part of his focus was now in homage
of Bateson.” In 1975 Brand introduced Bateson to Jerry Brown, the governor
of California, who appointed him to the board of regents of the University of
California in late 1976 (Lipset 1980, 286, 290).
17
At an institutional level, Bateson had various temporary teaching appoint-
ments over the course of his life. The last of these was from 1972 to 1978, part-
time in the Department of Anthropology at the new Santa Cruz campus of
the University of California. He affiliated himself there with Kresge College,
“the most radical of the Santa Cruz experiments in undergraduate education
[which] tended towards crafts, meditation, utopias, gardening, and poetry
writing” (Lipset 1980, 280). His last appointment, from 1978 to 1980 was
as scholar in residence at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, the epicenter of the
nascent New Age movement.
18
Bateson died on 4 July 1980 at the Zen Center
in San Francisco.
What should we make of this? Evidently, northern California was a key site
at which cybernetics crossed over into the broader field of the counterculture,
as it hung on there into the 1970s and mutated into New Age.
19
Gregory Bate-
son was at the heart of this, and the medium of exchange was a shared interest
in what I called earlier the performative brain but which is better described in
Bateson's case as the performative self—a nonmodern self capable of strange
performances and the achievement of altered states, including a pathological
disintegration into madness in one direction, and dissolution into nirvana in
the other. There is one other link between Bateson and the counterculture
that will get us back across the Atlantic. He was friends with R. D. Laing.
r. D. laing
I was tryIng to descrIbe the famIly “mangle,” the way famIlIes manu-
facture paIn for theIr members.
r. D. lainG,
IntervIew, quoted In burston (1996, 101)
R. D. Laing (as he was named on his topic jackets and known to popular
culture), Ronald David Laing, was born in Glasgow on 7 October 1927 and
