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bounded locus of agency, again centering on representation, calculation,
planning, and will. I have not sought to delineate the modern self at all sharply
(imagine a race of accountants), but it is clear, I think, that the cybernetic take
on the brain and the self was very different. Cybernetics began by imagin-
ing the brain (and later the self) as performative, and, as I said, it is possible
to be curious about the performative brain in ways that hardly arise within
the modern perspective. Right from the start, Grey Walter was interested
in madness, epilepsy, visions, yogic feats, and nirvana—topics that escape
from modern discourse, or at most appear as regrettable deviations from the
norm. We could say that cybernetics had a more capacious appreciation of the
possibilities of brains and selves than modern discourse sanctions—an open-
ended vision of what people are like and can be, in contrast to the narrowly
conceived field of the modern self.
From a cybernetic standpoint, there is always something more to be found
out in exploration of the brain and the self. Hence the trajectory that led from
flickering stroboscopes via dynamic visions to Gysin's Dream Machines, and
another trajectory in the same line of descent leading to EEG biofeedback and
brainwave music. In the same vein, Bateson and Laing (and Huxley) pointed
to the possibility of the dissolution of the modern self and related that both
to schizophrenia and to Buddhist enlightenment. Madness as not only a
sad aberration to be stamped out by electroshock or drugs, but perhaps an
opening, too—an opening seized upon by the sixties, with its “explorations
of consciousness” but also long central to Eastern philosophical and spiritual
traditions, as taken up in these pages and integrated with cybernetics by Staf-
ford Beer (and others).
I have found Foucault's notion of technologies of the self useful here. Fou-
cault used it to point to strategies deployed in the construction of varieties of
the modern (in my sense) self—freestanding and self-controlled centers of
will and calculation—technologies of self-enframing. In the history of cyber-
netics, we can apply the phrase quite literally, but now in reference to tech-
nologies ranging from flicker to meditation that somehow elicit and explore
other states beyond the range of the modern, selves that are out of control,
techniques that might even dissolve the modern self. Technologies of the self
as technologies of self-revealing.
S P I R I T U A L I T Y
From nonstandard selves one can drift almost continuously into a discussion
of nonmodern spirituality, but a few more specific points are worth making.
