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Trocchi even thought about the economic viability of such a project, envisag-
ing sigma as an agent acting on behalf of its associated artists and designers in
their capacities as producers and consultants. A nice vision. In
Bomb Culture
(1968, 220-27) Jeff Nuttall records an abortive 1966 “conference” aimed at
launching sigma. Attended by several of the principals of Kingsley Hall (Laing,
Esterson, Cooper, Berke, and Sigal) as well as Nuttall, Trocchi, and several
others, the meeting staged again the usual socio-ontological clash. On the one
side, “the community at Brazier's Park, a little colony of quiet, self-sufficient
middle-class intellectuals, totally square with heavy overtones of Quakerism
and Fabianism, was anxious to extend every kindness and expected, in return,
good manners and an observation of the minimal regulations they imposed”
(222). On the other, amid much drinking, the artist John Latham built one of
his famous skoob towers—a pile of topics that he then set alight (226). Later,
“in the house everybody was stoned. . . . Latham had taken a topic (an irre-
placeable topic belonging to a pleasant little Chinese friend of Alex's) stuck
it to the wall with Polyilla, and shot black aerosol all over the topic and wall
in a black explosion of night. . . . At mid-day we fled from one another with
colossal relief” (227).
Trocchi himself had noted that sigma “will have much in common with
Joan Littlewood's 'leisuredrome' [and] will be operated by a 'college' of teacher-
practitioners, with no separate administration.”
58
Littlewood's leisure drome,
otherwise known as the Fun Palace, was the most sustained attempt in the
sixties to create such an experimental institution, and we can return to it with
Gordon Pask in chapter 7.
O N T O L O G Y, P O W E R , A N D R E V E A L I N G
The key ontological thread that has run through this chapter, which we will
continue to follow below, is the symmetric vision of a dance of agency be-
tween reciprocally and performatively adapting systems—played out here
in psychiatry. We began with Bateson's ideas of schizophrenia as the creative
achievement of a bad equilibrium and of psychosis as an index to a higher
level of adaptation than could be modelled with homeostats and tortoises,
and we followed the evolution of Bateson's thought into Laingian psychiatry,
Kingsley Hall, and the Archway communities as ontology in action: the play-
ing out of the symmetric cybernetic vision in psychiatric practice. We could
say that Bateson and Laing were more cybernetic, in a way, than Walter and
Ashby, in a quasi-quantitative fashion: Bateson and Laing understood psychi-
atric therapy as a two-way process, enmeshing the therapist as well as the pa-
