GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 74

a limited degree, in its scanning mechanism), but it is part of what I tried to
get at in chapter 2 by mentioning the work of Kauffman and Wolfram on the
endogenous dynamics of complex systems, which we will see elaborated in in
the following chapters. 59
3. It is clear that Walter spoke with personal authority about some items
on his list of strange performances, while others were abstracted from a more
general awareness of other cultures, especially of the East, with India never
all that far away in the British imagination. What strikes me about all of the
items on the list is that they refer to aspects of the self that are devalued in
modernity. We could think of the paradigmatic modern self in terms of the
self-contained individual, dualistically opposed to other selves and the mate-
rial world, a center of reason, calculation, planning, and agency; and mea-
sured against such a yardstick dreamers and madmen are defective selves. Or,
to put the point more positively, it appears almost inevitable that curiosity
about the performative brain is liable to lead one to a nonmodern conception
of the self, different from and more expansive than the modern. We might see
yogic feats, for instance, as another example of ontological theater—pointing
to an understanding of the brain and self as endlessly explorable, exceedingly
complex systems and, at the same time, pointing to the sort of performances
one might attempt given such a conception of the brain (but that one might
never imagine in relation to the representational brain). We can also note
that a certain nonmodern spirituality begins to surface here in association
with the nonmodern self—a species of earthy spirituality that goes with em-
bodied yogic performances, say, rather than the purified spirituality and the
“crossed-out God” of Christianity that Latour (1993) characterizes as part of
the “modern settlement.” This form of spirituality will also reappear in the
following chapters. 60
4. Walter associated particular altered states and strange performances
with specific technologies of the self , as I will call them, following Michel Fou-
cault (1988). We have already encountered several examples of these—the
specific material setups that Walter used to drive his robots mad (contradic-
tory conditioning across different sensory channels), his techniques for re-
storing them to sanity (leaving them alone for extended periods, switching
them on and off, disconnecting circuits), and their presumptive equivalents
in the human world—and we can examine more of them as we go on. But now
I should note that the technologies that will concern us are not substantively
the same ones that interested Foucault. Foucault's concern was with the his-
tories of specific techniques of self-control , aimed at forming specific variants
of the autonomous freestanding individual, of the modern self as I just de-