THE ADAPT IVE BRAIN - The Cybernetic Brain - page 13

In the next chapter I will outline the peculiar ontology that I associate with
cybernetics—a nonmodern ontology, as I call it, that goes with a performative
understanding of the brain, mind and self, and which undoes the familiar
Western dualism of mind and matter, resonating instead with many Eastern
traditions.
Second, cyberneticians have shown a persistent interest in what I call
strange performances and altered states. This, too, grows out of an under-
standing of the brain, mind, and self as performative. One might imagine the
representational brain to be immediately available for inspection. Formal
education largely amounts to acquiring, manipulating, and being examined
on representational knowledge. Such activities are very familiar to us. But
the performative brain remains opaque and mysterious—who knows what a
performative brain can do? There is something to be curious about here, and
this curiosity is a subtheme of what follows. As I said, early cybernetics grew
out of psychiatry, and the topics of psychiatry are nothing more than altered
states—odd, unpleasant, and puzzling ways to be relative to some norm. We
will see, however, that cybernetics quickly went beyond any preoccupation
with mental illness. Grey Walter, for example, did research on “flicker”: it
turns out that exposure to strobe lights can induce, on the one hand, symp-
toms of epilepsy, but also, on the other, surprising visions and hallucinations.
I think of flicker as a peculiar sort of technology of the self —a technique for
producing states of being that depart from the everyday—and we can explore
several of them, material and social, and their associated states as we go along.
Walter also offered cybernetic analyses of yogic feats and the achievement
of nirvana. All of this research makes sense if one thinks of the brain as per-
formative, and it connects, in ways that we can explore further, both to the
spiritual dimension of cybernetics and to the sixties.
I have been trying to indicate why we might find it historically and anthropo-
logically interesting to explore the history and substance of cybernetics, but my
own interest also has a political dimension. The subtitle of this topic— Sketches
of Another Future —is meant to suggest that we might learn something from
the history of cybernetics for how we conduct ourselves in the present, and
that the projects we will be examining in later chapters might serve as models
for future practice and forms of life. I postpone further development of this
thought to the next chapter, where the overall picture should become clearer,
but for now I want to come at it from the opposite angle. I need to confront the
fact that cybernetics has a bad reputation in some quarters. Some people think