Abraham Maslow – Trance-Scripts

Interface is the Place

“Having put off the writing of the novel until arrival of the age of AI, I have access now to the work of others,” thinks Caius. Eden Medina’s 2011 book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Evgeny Morozov’s podcast, The Santiago Boys. Bahar Noorizadeh’s work. James Bridle’s Ways of Being. Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty.

As he allows himself to listen, Caius overhears versions of the General Intellect whispering into reality around him. “Idea-stage AI assistant. Here are 10 prompts. The AI will guide you through it. A huge value add.”

Cybersyn head Stafford Beer appears in Bridle’s book, Ways of Being. Homeostats, the Cybernetic Factory, and the U-Machine.

Beer drew inspiration for these experiments, notes Caius, from the works of British cyberneticians William Grey Walter and W. Ross Ashby. Walter’s book The Living Brain (1961) inspired Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s stroboscopic device, the Dreamachine; Ashby’s book Design for a Brain (1952) guides the thinking of John Lilly’s book Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. (For more on Walter’s influence on the Dreamachine, see John Geiger’s book Chapel of Extreme Experience.)

By 1973, Beer himself weighs in with Brain of the Firm, a book about “large and complicated systems, such as animals, computers, and economies.”

Caius inputs these notes into his Library. New gatherings and scatterings occur as he writes.

After waking to a cold house, he seats himself beside a fireplace at a coffee shop and begins the inputting of these notes into his Library. Complimenting the barista on her Grateful Dead t-shirt, he receives news of the death of Dead guitarist Bob Weir. Returned in that moment to remembrance of psychedelic utopianism and hippie modernism, he thinks to read Beer’s experiments with cybernetic management with or alongside Abraham Maslow’s Eupsychian Management: A Journal. A trance-script dated “Sunday August 11, 2019” recounts the story of the latter. (Bits of the story also appear in Edward Hoffman’s Maslow biography, The Right to Be Human, and religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal’s Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.) That’s what brought Maslow to the West Coast. The humanistic psychologist had been wooed to La Jolla, CA by technologist Andrew Kay, supported first by a fellowship funded by Kay through the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, and then again the following summer when hired to observe Kay’s California electronics firm, Non-Linear Systems, Inc. By the early 1980s, Kay implements what he learns from these observations by launching Kaypro, developer of an early personal computer.

Beer, meanwhile, develops his theories while consulting British companies like United Steel. Afterwards he designs an interface for control of a national economy. Picture Allende sitting at his cybernetic control, perusing data, reviewing options. Cosmic Coincidence Control Center. Financial management of the Chilean economy.

Cyberpunk updates the image, offers the post-coup future: Case jacking a cyberdeck and navigating cyberspace.

Writing this novel is a way of designing an interface for the General Intellect, thinks Caius.

Better futures begin by applying to history the techniques of modular synthesis and patching Cybersyn into the Eupsychian Network.

From episodes of Morozov’s podcast, he learns of Beer’s encoding of himself and others first as characters from Shakespeare and then later as characters from Colombian magical realist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Caius hears word, too, of Santiago Boy Carlos Senna’s encounter with Paolo Freire in Geneva. Freire lived in Chile for five years (1964-1969) during his exile from Brazil. His literacy work with peasants there informed his seminal 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire left Chile before the start of Allende’s presidency, but he worked for the regime from afar while teaching in Europe.

“What about second-order cyberneticians like the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, developers of the so-called ‘Santiago Theory of Cognition’? Where do they and their concept of ‘autopoiesis’ fit in our narrative?” wonders Caius.

Maturana and Varela introduce this latter concept in Autopoiesis and Cognition, a book they publish in Chile under the title De Maquinas y Seres Vivos (English translation: “On Machines and Living Beings”) in 1972. Beer wrote the book’s preface.

“Relation is the stuff of system,” writes Beer. “Relation is the essence of synthesis. The revolt of the empiricists — Locke, Berkeley, Hume — began from the nature of understanding about the environment. But analysis was still the method, and categorization still the practical tool of advance. In the bizarre outcome, whereby it was the empiricists who denied the very existence of the empirical world, relation survived — but only through the concept of mental association between mental events. The system ‘out there,’ which we call nature, had been annihilated in the process” (Autopoiesis and Cognition, p. 63).

World as simulation. World as memory palace.

“And what of science itself?,” asks Beer. “Science is ordered knowledge. It began with classification. From Galen in the second century through to Linnaeus in the eighteenth, analysis and categorization provided the natural instrumentality of scientific progress” (64).

“Against this background,” writes Beer, “let us consider Autopoiesis, and try to answer the question: ‘What is it?’” (65). He describes Maturana and Varela’s book as a “metasystemic utterance” (65). “Herein lies the world’s real need,” adds Beer. “If we are to understand a newer and still evolving world; if we are to educate people to live in that world; if we are to legislate for that world; if we are to abandon categories and institutions that belong to that vanished world, as it is well-nigh desperate that we should; then knowledge must be rewritten. Autopoiesis belongs in the new library” (65-66).

Thus into our Library it goes.

Maturana’s work, inspired in part by German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, has been developed and integrated into the work on “ontological coaching” by Santiago Boy Fernando Flores.

As for Varela: After the 1973 coup, Varela and his family spend 7 years living in the US. Afterwards, Varela returns from exile to become a professor of biology at the Universidad de Chile.

What Autopoeisis transforms, for Beer, is his residual, first-wave-cybernetics belief in “codes, and messages and mappings” as the key to a viable system. “Nature is not about codes,” he concludes. “We observers invent the codes in order to codify what nature is about” (69).

Just as other of the era’s leftists like French Marxist Louis Althusser were arguing for the “semi-autonomy” of a society’s units in relation to its base, Beer comes to see all cohesive social institutions — “firms and industries, schools and universities, clinics and hospitals, professional bodies, departments of state, and whole countries” — as autopoietic systems.

From this, he arrives to a conclusion not unlike Althusser’s. For Beer, the autopoietic nature of systems “immediately explains why the process of change at any level of recursion (from the individual to the state) is not only difficult to accomplish but actually impossible — in the full sense of the intention: ‘I am going completely to change myself.’ The reason is that the ‘I,’ that self-contained autopoietic ‘it,’ is a component of another autopoietic system” (70).

“Consider this argument at whatever level of recursion you please,” adds Beer. “An individual attempting to reform his own life within an autopoietic family cannot fully be his new self because the family insists that he is actually his old self. A country attempting to become a socialist state cannot fully become socialist; because there exists an international autopoietic capitalism in which it is embedded” (71).

The Santiago Boys wedded to the era’s principle of national self-determination a plank involving pursuit of technological autonomy. If you want to escape the development-underdevelopment contradiction, they argued, you need to build your own stack.

In Allende’s words: “We demand the right to seek our own solutions.”

New posts appear in the Library:

New Games, Growth Games. Wargames, God Games. John Von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. The Santiago Boys x the Chicago Boys. Magico-Psychedelic Realism x Capitalist Realism. Richard Barbrook’s Class Wargames. Eric Berne’s Games People Play. Global Business Network. Futures Involving Cyberwar and Spacewar. The Californian Ideology, Whole Earth and the WELL.

“Go where there is no path,” as Emerson counsels, “and leave a trail.”

For-Itselfness

A friend texts requesting recommendations, works he could assign describing consciousness — particularly works that identify variable “dimensions” and “states.” I recommend Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, and Abraham Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being. Reflecting afterwards on the exchange, I note down in a notebook, “Consciousness is something we grant or presuppose — based on our being here amid others in shared dialogue and shared study. Consciousness is Being as it comes to attention of itself as autopoetic subject-object — soul in communion with soul, each the other’s love doctor and angelic messenger.”

North American Time Capsule 1967

More to my liking is John Cage.

Where the architect-composer Iannis Xenakis used probability, game theory, group theory, set theory, Boolean algebra, and computers to produce his scores, thus pioneering “stochastic music,” Cage composed “aleatoric music.” While stochastic and aleatoric forms of music both rely on chance procedures, aleatoric music eschews mathematics in favor of ancient divinatory devices like the I Ching.

Readied by Cage for further weirding, I tune in and listen to Alvin Lucier’s “North American Time Capsule 1967,” a 10-minute composition that neighbors a track by Cage on Side A of Extended Voices. The Lucier piece uses a vocoder designed by Sylvania Electronics Systems “to encode speech sounds into digital information bits for transmission over narrow band widths via telephone lines or radio channels.” Lucier says of the piece, “The performers are asked to prepare material using any sounds at all that would describe for beings far from our environment, either in space or in time, the physical, spiritual, social, scientific or any other situation in which we currently find ourselves.”

Thinking of 1967 as “situation,” I relate the song to the psychedelic consciousness of that year’s Summer of Love. Lucier worked at Brandeis, directing the University Chamber Chorus there from 1962 to 1970. While dwarfed in scale by hippie meccas like Berkeley, Brandeis was nonetheless an important independent nexus of sorts for 1960s consciousness. Abraham Maslow taught there during the 1950s and 1960s, as did Herbert Marcuse, who served as a faculty member at Brandeis from 1954 to 1965. Future Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman studied there, too, under both Maslow and Marcuse. Through Lucier’s time capsule, one becomes entangled again in that scene.

Monday April 13, 2020

At three and a half months, the baby is all smiles, dressed in a jumper with bright yellow sneakers, chatty with a speech of sounds, sighs, efforts toward words. Sarah plays her “Bulletproof” by La Roux. I scoot next door and dip into Design for Utopia: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier. In his 1971 Foreword, Frank E. Manuel says Fourier’s ideal “calls to mind the ‘synergic’ society originated by Ruth Benedict and expounded by Abraham H. Maslow, who found it consonant with his own doctrine of self-actualization. In synergy, as Maslow defined it, the individual acting in his own behalf at the same time furthers social ends, fulfilling simultaneously and harmoniously his obligations to himself and his responsibilities to society” (4-5). Manuel maintains an attitude of bemused skepticism, maybe even a haughty distance, with regard to all such doctrines and ideals, his imagination far too stingy and conservative for my taste.

Thursday April 9, 2020

White roses overgrow a trellis beside the driveway. I admire them from atop my perch on my front stoop as I shelter in place. Look at all the lovely everything, the leafy and flowery manifold Earth, sunlit and glorious, waving in the wind! A softness, a gentleness, enters into one’s manner. A grey tabby that likes to visit now and then sleeps out on my porch. I let it. Dreamboat baby tell all. At some point, though, I plan to grill some hot dogs. In a journal I note down the following: “In an imaginary interview published in his book Revolution for the Hell of It, Abbie Hoffman uses language borrowed from his mentor Abraham Maslow to signal how his own approach and vision differed from those of his contemporaries in the New Left. Movements for change should be built, he says, not on sacrifice, dedication, responsibility, anger, frustration, and guilt, but on fun. ‘When I say fun,’ he tells the interviewer, ‘I mean an experience so intense that you actualize your full potential. You become LIFE. LIFE IS FUN’ (61-62).”

Saturday March 28, 2020

The life of ’60s counterculture icon Abbie Hoffman ought to be read not just in light of the Marxism of Herbert Marcuse, whom Hoffman studied under while an undergrad at Brandeis, but also in light of the humanistic psychology of another of Abbie’s mentors at Brandeis, the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow. Abbie was a self-actualizer, a seeker of peak experiences, his writing in books like Woodstock Nation spontaneous prose performances of life lived hopefully in pursuit of revolutionary overthrow of the police state he saw and experienced around him, the “PIG NATION.” There’s a lot of Ego in this performance, but it’s an Ego self-identified with a movement in potentia, like the Whitman of “Song of Myself” or the Ginsberg of “America.” A collective voice coaxing participation in revolutionary transformation of being. Hoffman learned to perform revolution as living theater using the techniques of Artaud and the Diggers. Unlike those precursors, however, Abbie staged his happenings as guerilla seizures of the capitalist opponent’s mass media. The latter became the unwitting narrators and documenters — and to some extent, participants — in Abbie’s dramas. The story continues, carries over, into other books of the era: Ed Sanders’s Shards of God, Jerry Rubin’s DO IT! and We Are Everywhere. Time to visit Peter Coyote for criticism of some of this, and for more on the Diggers. Yet what a riveting performance! Studs Terkel described it as “ebullience and despair rolled into one.” Paul Krassner’s tale of taking acid before taking the witness stand at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial adds another level of anarchic psychedelic zaniness to all of this.

Friday October 11, 2019

There’s so much still to learn, I think to myself. Let’s begin by reading a history of Mexican philosophy. Study the works of Emilio Uranga, Leopoldo Zea, and Luis Villoro. Seek information about the latter’s correspondence with Subcomandante Marcos, a book called La Alternativa. Or, maybe just focus on housing. Rethink Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” Why, in the mid-20th century, does Maslow wish to reintroduce a naturalized hierarchy into the “science of the human”? What were his fears? The hierarchy of needs is one we’re disciplined into by capitalism — so here I am, fretting about how to finance food, shelter, education, transportation. What Marxists call “social reproduction.” What good is a “hierarchy of needs” to a worker? The only truly humanistic psychology is one able to free workers to self-actualize: one that grants them relief from external structures of domination like debt. Is there a psychology of Being that can grant that relief?

Friday August 16, 2019

“Spiral Dynamics” comes to mind as I listen to “Beautiful Crystals” by Sunwatchers.

The band takes its name from a song by Albert Ayler. Guitars interplay with horns, drums, and synths to form complex patterns. Concentrating on the band’s epic prog-psychedelic freak-outs, consciousness can float around a bit in a wild, hypnotic trance-state, reflections on sound and language intersecting to form brief synesthetic plateau-experiences. Life is mysterious, a bubbly, frothy, rococo garden of love, as one listens. Ever-changing, too—in constant surplus of itself. The band operates in a variety of modes: cosmic-archetypal in their aspirations one minute, urgently political the next. I look forward to seeing them when they play in town next month. Spiral Dynamics, meanwhile, seems to be some sort of West Coast “theory of everything,” popularized by the consciousness theorist Ken Wilber. Abraham Maslow fits in there somewhere in the movement’s origins, his “Hierarchy of Needs” adapted into a full-blown “tiered,” “evolutionary” theory of consciousness. It hasn’t been clear to me upon initial perusal whether or not this theory proposes a corollary ethics or practice, though I assume so. At times it sounds hyper control-oriented and egoic, encouraging practitioners to “sweep away objects” and focus on a prior “I Am,” consciousness in its most abstract and deracinated form—an ever-present, transhistorical “One,” divorced from the particulars of any thought, emotion, or object. Within short order, one finds oneself wondering, “Where is the Other in this model?” Reduced, it seems, to pure Becoming, known only through its momentary modifications, ripples, and arisings. The Other is that which encircles “I Am” as the latter spirals through states of distraction and re-cognition.

Monday August 12, 2019

Maslow’s ideas influenced the utopian consciousness revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s in a variety of ways beyond the ones I’ve already mentioned. Betty Friedan wrote at length about Maslow in a chapter of her book The Feminine Mystique, embracing his humanistic approach as an alternative to the pessimism of the Freudian paradigm. Yet Maslow’s views regarding women certainly weren’t what we would now recognize as progressive. A woman could only self-actualize and “realize her own potential,” he claimed, “through her husband and children.” His views were shaped by largely unexamined heteronormative, gender-binary assumptions. He remained in all things a centrist, an opponent of the New Left despite an attraction to democratic socialism in his youth. By the time of his greatest influence in the 1960s, he was essentially a New Deal Democrat, fearful of communists, and committed to US victory in the Cold War — a war that was fought in part on college campuses, including those where Maslow worked. Integration, globalization — these were posited and advanced by Maslow and others as solutions to nuclear war. The humanities and the sciences need to synergize, the centrists argued, if we’re to avoid destruction. Let us love each other and teach each other to dance. Yet here we are today, globalized and integrated by digital capitalism, rich waging war on the poor, planet on the verge of catastrophe, fascism waiting in the wings. Might there be other ways for us to put our heads together, both on campus and off, consciousness used to heal rather than curse?

Sunday August 11, 2019

Utopianism acquired a “eupsychian” cast up and down the West Coast of 1950s and 1960s California. Pursuit of the good society became bound up with alchemical transformation, design of new anthropotechnics, and experiments with human potential. Abraham Maslow created a mailing list to connect organizations and individuals participating in these experiments, thus forming what he called the “Eupsychian Network.” The members of this network, he said, shared a “humanistic and transhumanistic outlook on life” (Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 237), by which he meant an orientation that sought to help “the individual grow toward fuller humanness, the society grow toward synergy and health, and all societies and all peoples move toward becoming one world and one species” (237). Already in Maslow, there were hints that the humanistic orientation in the social sciences and the “human potential” movement that arose alongside it might contain a dark side — or at the very least, a potential for misuse. Maslow prepared the manuscript for Toward a Psychology of Being while visiting La Jolla, California, in summer 1961, supported by a financially generous fellowship from the newly founded “Western Behavioral Sciences Institute.” The fellowship was funded by engineer-entrepreneur Andy Kay, who invited Maslow to return the following summer to observe operations at Kay’s company, Non-Linear Systems (Hoffman, The Right to Be Human, p. 246). This collaboration with Kay culminated in Eupsychian Management, a book completed in 1962 and published in 1965. Non-Linear Systems was an electronics manufacturing company. Before founding it in 1952, Kay spent two years working at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. By the early 1980s Non-Linear Systems evolved into Kaypro, manufacturer of an early personal computer. The concept of Eupsychia never fully shed this marriage of convenience with management theory and West Coast tech, though other members of the Eupsychian Network helped to temper these tendencies.