GORDON PASK - The Cybernetic Brain - page 353

ater director, “a self-educated working-class woman who defied the middle-
class monopoly of theatre and its domination by metropolitan hierarchy and
English gentility. She believed in realising the potential of every individual,
being in favour of 'that dull working-class quality, optimism,' a necessary vir-
tue in a life dedicated to demonstrating that political theatre wasn't always an
oxymoron” ( Guardian 2002, Eyres).
Pask's involvement with the theater in the sixties did not, then, lead him
into the high culture of the British establishment, but rather into the counter-
cultural, antiestablishment milieu, here typified by Littlewood, that somehow
succeeded, for a brief moment around that decade, in becoming a defining
formation in British culture. We have examined before the ontological reso-
nances between cybernetics and the counterculture—flicker and the Beats,
Bateson and Laing's radical psychiatry, Beer and Eastern spirituality—and
Pask's alignment with Littlewood should be understood in just the same way.
We can return to this theme below, but we can note now that this alignment
also doomed cybernetics to going down with the ship. Cybernetics has itself
continued up to the present, but its visibility in popular culture declined with
the overall decline of the counterculture. Littlewood herself seems to have
become disgusted with the form of life that went with being a successful Lon-
don theater director. “Success is going to kill us,” she wrote in the mid-1960s.
“Exhausted and miserable, she walked out at the crowning moment when
she and Raffles had managed to buy the [Theatre Royal]. She disappeared
alone to Nigeria to work on an abortive film project with the writer Wole
Soyinka. She returned but never recaptured the momentum: if it meant dilut-
ing standards or becoming a full-time impresario, she did not want to” (Ezard
2002, 20).
Cybernetic Serendipity
In the 1960s the ICA, the Institute for Contemporary Arts, in London was
Britain's center for new developments in art. If something exciting and im-
portant was happening in Britain or abroad, the ICA aimed to represent it to
the British public. 37 Conversely, a show at the ICA ratified a new movement
or whatever as, indeed, exciting and important. Jasia Reichardt, who had
organized the first show of British Pop Art in London, Image in Progress , at
the Grabowski Gallery in 1962, joined the ICA as assistant director in 1963,
where she organized a show on concrete poetry in 1965, Between Poetry and
Painting (Reichardt 1971, 199). In the autumn of that year she began plan-
ning “an international exhibition exploring and demonstrating some of the