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You also find yourself at one of the origins of the psychedelic sixties. From a
different angle, if you are interested in the radical critique of psychiatry that
was so important in the late 1960s, you could start with its high priest in Brit-
ain, R. D. Laing, and behind him you would find Gregory Bateson and, again,
Walter. If you were interested in intersections between the sixties and Eastern
spirituality, you might well come across Stafford Beer, as well as experimenta-
tion with sensory deprivation tanks and, once more, Bateson. In 1960, Ross
Ashby lectured at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London, the hub of
the British art scene, on “art and communication theory,” and, at the ICA's
1968
Cybernetic Serendipity
exhibition, Gordon Pask displayed his Colloquy
of Mobiles—an array of interacting robots that engaged in uncertain matings
with one another—alongside Beer's Statistical Analogue Machine, SAM.
Pask's “conversation” metaphor for cybernetics, in turn, gets you pretty close
to the underground “antiuniversity” of the sixties.
What should we make of this? One might continue Deleuze and Guattari's
line of thought and say that the sixties were the decade when popular culture
was overrun by not one but two bands of nomads. On the one hand, the sixties
were the heyday of cybernetics, the period when this marginal and antidisci-
plinary field made its greatest inroads into general awareness. On the other
hand, the sixties can be almost defined as the period when a countercultural
lifestyle erupted from the margins to threaten the state—“the Establishment.”
Given more space and time, this topic might have been the place for an ex-
tended examination of the counterculture, but to keep it within bounds I will
content myself with exploring specific crossovers from cybernetics to the six-
ties as they come up in the chapters to follow. I want to show that some spe-
cific strands of the sixties were in much the same space as cybernetics—that
they can be seen as continuations of cybernetics further into the social fabric.
This extends the discussion of the protean quality of cybernetics and of the
sense in which it can be seen as an interesting and distinctive form of life.
Two more, possibly surprising, strands in the history of cybernetics are worth
noting. First, as we go on we will repeatedly encounter affinities between
cybernetics and Eastern philosophy and spirituality. Stafford Beer is the ex-
treme example: he both practiced and taught tantric yoga in his later years.
There is, I think, no necessary connection between cybernetics and the East;
many cyberneticians evince no interest whatsoever in Eastern spirituality.
Nevertheless, it is worth exploring this connection where it arises (not least,
as a site of interchange between cybernetics and the sixties counterculture).
