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adaptation rather than hierarchical power relations; experimentation with
novel forms of social organization; a mystical and Eastern spirituality as a
counterpoint to madness—all of these were just as much the hallmarks of
the sixties as they were of cybernetic psychiatry. And the basic point I want
to stress is that these resonances are again markers of the ontological affinity
that we have met before between other strands of cybernetics and the sixties.
In different ways, Laingian psychiatry and the counterculture (and situated
robotics, complexity theory, and Ashby on planning) staged much the same
ontological vision: of the world as a multiplicity of exceedingly complex
systems, performatively interfering with and open-endedly adapting to one
another.
In this instance, though, we can go beyond ideas of resonance and affinity.
One can argue that Laing and his colleagues had a constitutive role in shaping
the counterculture itself; they helped to make it what it was. I want to exam-
ine this role briely now as the furthest I can go in this topic in tying cybernet-
ics and the sixties together. It is ironic that this example concerns technical
practice that did not explicitly describe itself as cybernetic, but I hope I have
said enough about Laing and his colleagues and followers to make the case
for seeing their work as a continuation of cybernetics, as playing out the basic
cybernetic ontology.
We can begin with Laing himself. It is said that in the late 1960s Laing
was the best-known psychiatrist in the world. I know of no hard evidence to
support that, but it certainly points toward his prominence (and to the fact
that the sixties were perhaps the last time the world was much interested in
psychiatry—as distinct from pharmaceuticals). And his public fame and no-
toriety derived from his writings, rather than his day-to-day practice, and es-
pecially from his 1967 topic
The Politics of Experience
.
49
Politics
therefore bears
examination. The first few chapters are cogent, but hardly best-seller mate-
rial. They run through social-constructivist and labeling theories of madness,
drawing on Laing's earlier work as well as the work of now-eminent scholars
such as the sociologists Howard Garfinkel and Erving Goffman. None of this
seems remarkable in retrospect. The topic explodes in its concluding three
chapters, however, and these are the chapters in which Laing quotes Bateson
on the “inner voyage” and then embroiders on the theme, focusing in particu-
lar on the inner experience of the voyage and “transcendental experience”
(the title of chap. 6).
I mentioned chapters 5 and 6 before, and all that needs to be added con-
cerns the topic's last chapter—chapter 7, “A Ten-Day Voyage.” Originally
published in 1964 (before the establishment of Kingsley Hall), the chapter
