THE ADAPT IVE BRAIN - The Cybernetic Brain - page 11

The Living Brain (1953) found an active readership diverse enough to span
protoroboticists and the Beat writers and artists. It was a turning point in his
musical career when Brian Eno's mother-in-law lent him a copy of Stafford
Beer's topic, Brain of the Firm , in 1974.
Sociologically, then, cybernetics wandered around as it evolved, and I
should emphasize that an undisciplined wandering of its subject matter was a
corollary of that. If PhD programs keep the academic disciplines focused and
on the rails, chance encounters maintained the openness of cybernetics. Brain
of the Firm is a dense topic on the cybernetics of management, and music ap-
pears nowhere in it, but no one had the power to stop Eno developing Beer's
cybernetics however he liked. Ashby's irst topic, Design for a Brain (1952), was
all about building synthetic brains, but Christopher Alexander made it the
basis for his irst topic on architecture, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964).
A quick glance at Naked Lunch (1959) reveals that William Burroughs was an
attentive reader of The Living Brain , but Burroughs took cybernetics in direc-
tions that would have occurred to no one else.
Cybernetics was thus a strange field sociologically as well as substantively.
We might think of the cyberneticians as nomads, and of cybernetics as a no-
mad science, perpetually wandering and never finding a stable home. For
readers of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1987), the
phrase “nomad science” has a special resonance in its contrast with “royal
science.” The royal sciences are the modern sciences, which function as part
of a stable social and political order—which prop up the state. The nomad sci-
ences, on Deleuze and Guattari's reading, are a different kind of science, one
which wanders in from the steppes to undermine stability. We can come back
to this thought from time to time.
The sTudy of Thinking machines Teaches us more abouT The brain Than
we can learn by inTrospecTiVe meThods. wesTern man is exTernalizing
himself in The form of gadgeTs. eVer pop coke in The mainline? iT
hiTs you righT in The brain, acTiVaTing connecTions of pure plea-
sure. . . . c pleasure could be felT by a Thinking machine, The firsT
sTirrings of hideous insecT life.
WilliAm buRRouGhs, naked LunCh (2001 [1959], 22)
As John Geiger (2003) discovered, if you look at the works of Aldous Huxley
or Timothy Leary or William Burroughs and the Beats, you find Grey Walter.