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that he could use them for his own purposes of growth. . . . Perhaps it was here
that he learned that if people were laughing at him it was a laughter in which
he could join. John remained a student but applied his happy new awareness to
the way he went about it. He remained in London studying Japanese with the
intention of translating ancient Zen manuscripts.
The sane could have transformative experiences in these communities, then,
just like the mad, and, in fact, very similar experiences. And this, in the end,
is how one should think about the Philadelphia communities. Not as a place
where the mentally ill could be restored to some already given definition of
normality, but as a place where all the residents could open-endedly explore
their own possibilities in an interactive and emergent process with no pre-
defined end point —a collective exploration of nonmodern selfhood. This is
the final sense in which these communities staged a symmetric, rather than
asymmetric, ontological vision. They aimed to make it possible for
new kinds
of people
to emerge, beyond the modern self. And here we could note one final
aspect under which Laingian psychiatry went beyond the basic image of the
homeostat. As discussed in the previous chapter, Ashby's homeostats as real
electromechanical devices had fixed goals: to keep certain electrical currents
within preset bounds. Clearly, as ontological theater, Kingsley Hall and the
Archway communities acted out a more adventurous plot, in which the very
goals of performative accommodation were themselves emergent in practice
rather than a given telos. Who knows what a body and mind can do? This is
the version of the cybernetic ontology that interests me especially and that
will remain at the center of attention in the chapters that follow.
For the sake of completeness, I want to comment on two further aspects
of these Philadelphia Association communities. First, one might wonder
whether they worked. This is not such an easy question to answer. I know of
no quantitative comparative data which would enable one to say that it was
more or less beneficial to spend time at Archway or a conventional mental
hospital, and since the mainstream aspiration is to control rather than cure
schizophrenia, now with drugs, it seems likely that such data will never be
forthcoming.
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It is also clear, I hope, that these communities problematized
the very idea of success. If the ambition of conventional psychiatry is to pro-
duce people like, shall we say, Ross Ashby, then counting successes is not so
much a problem. If the aim is to let a new kind of person in touch with his
or her inner self emerge, the counting becomes difficult in the extreme. It is
