GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 75

fined it. The technologies that we need to explore, in contrast, undermine the
modern duality of people and things by foregrounding couplings of self and
others—another instance of ontological theater. On Walter's account, inner
states of the brain and, by extension, the self were not to be ascribed to pure
inner causes, but to intersections with the nonself, to external configurations
like the cross-conditioning setups associated with madness. To emphasize
this, I will refer to such techniques as technologies of the nonmodern self.
From this angle, too, we see how a conception of the performative brain can
lead to a nonmodern decentering of the self—a theme that will come back
repeatedly in the following chapters. 61
5. The Living Brain did not simply offer a catalog of altered states and tech-
nologies of the self. In more or less detail, Walter also sought to sketch out
the mechanisms that connected them. His most detailed accounts were of
the go of madness, along the lines sketched out above, and epilepsy (see be-
low). But he also argued that CORA could be taken to illuminate conditioning
mechanisms by which Eastern yogis acquired their odd powers over other-
wise autonomous bodily functions; that nirvana—“the peace that passeth un-
derstanding, the derided 'happiness that lies within' ”—could be understood
as “the experience of homeostasis” (1953, 39; more on homeostasis in the next
chapter); and so on. Again, cybernetics as brain science appears here as the
other side of a performative brain that inhabits spaces of ecstasy and madness
as well as the everyday world.
6. If Walter's list of strange performances and altered states seems odd and
wild, it is because the marginalization of many of its entries has been central
to the constitution of modernity and the conception of the dualist, freestand-
ing modern self. The East, with its yogis and fakirs, is the other to modern
science, the modern self, and the modern West. Dreams and visions are, shall
we say, at the edges of modern consciousness. 62 This is the nonmodernity of
cybernetics, once more. But . . .
7. There was a time when the list appeared less wild: the sixties. Madness
and ecstasy, the East and Eastern spirituality, strange performances, altered
states, explorations of consciousness—these were some trademark preoccu-
pations and practices of the sixties counterculture. We can examine below
a couple of direct crossovers from Walter and The Living Brain to the sixties,
but to make the connection another way, we could think of the work of a ca-
nonical sixties author, Aldous Huxley. Huxley's visionary account of his first
experience of mescaline in The Doors of Perception (1954) became required
reading in the sixties, along with its sequel, Heaven and Hell (1956; published
as a single volume in 1963). And what interests me here is that Heaven and