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Leon Redler, and largely of Eastern origin (Redler invited Zen masters to stay
at his apartment). Burns (2002, 28) mentions hatha yoga and “sitting”—Zen
meditation—and the list continues:
Other techniques include Aikido and tae-kwon-do, oriental martial arts with-
out the aggressive factor. Zen walking, moving through hatha yoga postures and
Aikido are all forms of dance. Massage became an important part of community
life at different times; one of our residents set up as a practicing giver of mas-
sage. . . . Various herbalists and acupuncturists applied their techniques. We
realized the importance of the body, of the body-mind continuum. To think of
mental illness outside of its physical context seems absurd. Thus much of the
cooking at the community was vegetarian; there I received my introduction to
the virtues of rice, beans, and vegetables. We had become aware of dance, of
the movement of the body; we also became aware of music. . . . Music was al-
ways important to us, whether listening to records, playing the flute or chanting
the Heart Sutra. Laing is an accomplished pianist and clavichordist. He would
come visit us and play the piano, or organize a group beating of drums.
Various aspects of these developments are worth noting. “Twenty-four-hour
attention” clearly continues the Barnes-Berke story of experimental perfor-
mative engagement, culminating here in a relatively stable set of arrange-
ments to protect members of the community from each other and the outside
world while supporting their endogenous dynamics. One has the image of a
set of homeostats finally coming more or less into equilibrium through the
operation of this technique.
42
Burns's list that starts with yoga requires more thought. We could start
by noting that here we have another instance of the connection between the
cybernetic ontology and the East, though now at the level of performance
rather than representation. Bateson appealed to Zen as a way of expanding the
discursive field beyond the modern self in order to conceptualize the inner
experience of schizophrenics; at Archway Zen techniques appeared as mate-
rial practices, ways of dealing with inner experiences.
Next, the items on Burns's list are technologies of the self in very much
Foucault's original sense—ways of caring for, in this instance, the nonmod-
ern, schizophrenic self. They were not understood as curing schizophrenia,
but as ways of making it bearable, as “specific techniques for relieving stress
or exploring one's inner world” (Burns 2002, 27). And this returns us to the
question of power. As discussed so far, cybernetic psychiatry appears as a lev-
eling of traditional hierarchies consistent with the symmetric version of the
