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attended; goods or services were accepted in lieu of cash . . .).” In our terms,
the Anti-University was an attempt to extend the symmetric cybernetic
model from psychiatry and Kingsley Hall to the field of higher education. Laing
gave lectures there on psychology and religion, “specifically on the accounts
of 'inner space' to be found in various mythologies and religions” (Howarth-
Williams 1977, 71). “Huxley gave a course on dragons and another on how to
stay alive; Laing gave a course; there were courses on modern music from
Cornelius Cardew; Yoko Ono did a course; I taught advanced techniques for
turning on and all my students had prescriptions for tincture. I'd give them
lessons on joint-rolling and so on” (Steve Abrams, quoted in J. Green 1988,
238).
54
Interestingly, like Kingsley Hall, “The Anti-University had a commune
associated with it; a significant number of the prominent members lived in
it, and the two 'institutions' became synonymous. Indeed, it seems to have
been one of the major lessons learned from the Anti-University that such en-
terprises need the domestic stability plus intimacy yet fluidity of a commune
to flourish” (Howarth-Williams 1977, 71).
55
The Anti-University was, however,
short lived: “[It] was a wonderful place. It provided a platform for people who
didn't have one, to lecture and talk. Either people who didn't have a platform
at all or who had perhaps an academic appointment and could only lecture
on their own subject. . . . The students were almost anybody: it was £10 to
register for a course and it went on for a year or two. But in the second year or
the second term it started getting out of hand. The idea became to charge the
teachers and pay the students” (Abrams, quoted in J. Green 1988, 238).
In 1967 the Institute of Phenomenological Studies also sponsored a “Dia-
lectics of Liberation” conference, held at the Roundhouse in London. This was
an important countercultural gathering—“the numero uno seminal event of
'67”—which brought together over a period of two weeks in July many of the
era's luminaries, including Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Bateson (the only card-
carrying cybernetician), Emmett Grogan, Simon Vinkenoog, Julian Beck,
Michael X, Alexander Trocchi, Herbert Marcuse, and Timothy Leary, “in order
to figure out what the hell is going on” (Howarth-Williams 1977, 69, quot-
ing Joe Berke).
56
The meeting itself was not a great success. Laing famously
fell out with Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers over the political role
of hippies. Laing felt that the hippies were already acting out a nonviolent
revolution at the level of communal lifestyles; Carmichael later replied,
“You will have to throw down your flowers and fight” (Howarth-Williams
1977, 73).
57
In Britain, at least, the counterculture had little chance of success when it
came to a literal fight with the establishment, and at the dialectics conference
