Tag: Phenomenology

The SBs: Stewart Brand and Stafford Beer

Caius revisits “Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox,” an interview with Gregory Bateson included as the first half of Stewart Brand’s 1974 book II Cybernetic Frontiers. The book’s second half reprints “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” the influential essay on videogames that Jann Wenner commissioned Brand to write for Rolling Stone two years prior.

“I came into cybernetics from preoccupation with biology, world-saving, and mysticism,” writes Brand. “What I found missing was any clear conceptual bonding of cybernetic whole-systems thinking with religious whole-systems thinking. Three years of scanning innumerable books for the Whole Earth Catalog didn’t turn it up,” he adds. “Neither did considerable perusing of the two literatures and taking thought. All I did was increase my conviction that systemic intellectual clarity and moral clarity must reconvene, mingle some notion of what the hell consciousness is and is for, and evoke a shareable self-enhancing ethic of what is sacred, what is right for life” (9).

Yet in summer of 1972, says Brand, a book arrives to begin to fill this gap: Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

Brand brings his knack for New Journalism to the task of interviewing Bateson for Harper’s.

The dialogue between the two reads at many times like one of Bateson’s “metalogues.” An early jag of thought jumps amid pathology, conquest, and the Tao. Reminded of pioneer MIT cybernetician Warren McCulloch’s fascination with “intransitive preference,” Bateson wanders off “rummaging through his library looking for Blake’s illustration of Job affrighted with visions” (20).

Caius is reminded of Norbert Wiener’s reflections on the Book of Job in his 1964 book God and Golem, Inc. For all of these authors, cybernetic situations cast light on religious situations and vice versa.

Caius wonders, too, about the relationship between Bateson’s “double bind” theory of schizophrenia and the theory pursued by Deleuze and Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

“Double bind is the term used by Gregory Bateson to describe the simultaneous transmission of two kinds of messages, one of which contradicts the other, as for example the father who says to his son: go ahead, criticize me, but strongly hints that all effective criticism — at least a certain type of criticism — will be very unwelcome. Bateson sees in this phenomenon a particularly schizophrenizing situation,” note Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. They depart from Bateson only in thinking this situation the rule under capitalism rather than the exception. “It seems to us that the double bind, the double impasse,” they write, “is instead a common situation, oedipalizing par excellence. […]. In short, the ‘double bind’ is none other than the whole of Oedipus” (79-80).

God’s response to Job is of this sort.

Brand appends to the transcript of his 1972 interview with Bateson an epilog written in December 1973, three months after the coup in Chile.

Bateson had direct, documented ties to US intelligence. Stationed in China, India, Ceylon, Burma, and Thailand, he produced “mixed psychological and anthropological intelligence” for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to CIA, during WWII. Research indicates he maintained connections with CIA-affiliated research networks in the postwar years, participating in LSD studies linked to the MKUltra program in the 1950s. Afterwards he regrets his association with the Agency and its methods.

Asked by Brand about his “psychedelic pedigree,” Bateson replies, “I got Allen Ginsberg his first LSD” (28). A bad trip, notes Caius, resulting in Ginsberg’s poem “Lysergic Acid.” Bateson himself was “turned on to acid by Dr. Harold Abramson, one of the CIA’s chief LSD specialists,” report Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain in their book Acid Dreams. Caius wonders if Stafford Beer underwent some similar transformation.

As for Beer, he serves in the British military in India during WWII, and for much of his adult life drives a Rolls-Royce. But then, at the invitation of the Allende regime, Beer travels to Chile and builds Cybersyn. After the coup, he lives in a remote cottage in Wales.

What of him? Cybernetic socialist? Power-centralizing technocrat?

Recognizes workers themselves as the ones best suited to modeling their own places of work.

“What were the features of Beer’s Liberty Machine?” wonders Caius.

Brand’s life, too, includes a stint of military service. Drafted after graduating from Stanford, he served two years with the US army, first as an infantryman and then afterwards as a photographer. Stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey, Brand becomes involved in the New York art world of those years. He parts ways with the military as soon as the opportunity to do so arises. After his discharge in 1962, Brand participates in some of Allan Kaprow’s “happenings” and, between 1963 and 1966, works as a photographer and technician for USCO.

Amid his travels between East and West coasts during these years, Brand joins up with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Due to these apprenticeships with the Pranksters and with USCO, Brand arrives early to the nexus formed by the coupling of psychedelics and cybernetics.

“Strobe lights, light projectors, tape decks, stereo speakers, slide sorters — for USCO, the products of technocratic industry served as handy tools for transforming their viewers’ collective mind-set,” writes historian Fred Turner in his 2006 book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. “So did psychedelic drugs. Marijuana and peyote and, later, LSD, offered members of USCO, including Brand, a chance to engage in a mystical experience of togetherness” (Turner 49).

Brand takes acid around the time of his discharge from the military in 1962, when he participates in a legal LSD study overseen by James Fadiman at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park. But he notes that he first met Bateson “briefly in 1960 at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, California” (II Cybernetic Frontiers, p. 12). Caius finds this curious, and wonders what that meeting entailed. 1960 is also the year when, at the VA Hospital in Menlo Park, Ken Kesey volunteers in the CIA-sponsored drug trials involving LSD that inspire his 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Bateson worked for the VA while developing his double bind theory of schizophrenia.

Before that, he’d been married to fellow anthropologist Margaret Mead. He’d also participated in the Macy Conferences, as discussed by N. Katherine Hayles in her book How We Became Posthuman.

Crows screeching in the trees have Caius thinking of condors. He sits, warm, in his sunroom on a cold day, roads lined with snow from a prior day’s storm, thinking about Operation Condor. Described by Morozov as Cybersyn’s “evil twin.” Palantir. Dark Enlightenment. Peter Thiel.

Listening to one of the final episodes of Morozov’s podcast, Caius learns of Brian Eno’s love of Beer’s Brain of the Firm. Bowie and Eno are some of Beer’s most famous fans. Caius remembers Eno’s subsequent work with Brand’s consulting firm, the GBN.

Santiago Boy Fernando Flores is the one who reaches out to Beer, inviting him to head Cybersyn. Given Flores’s status as Allende’s Minister of Finance at the time of the coup, Pinochet’s forces torture him and place him in a prison camp. He remains there for three years. Upon his release, he moves to the Bay Area.

Once in Silicon Valley, Flores works in the computer science department at Stanford. He also obtains a PhD at UC Berkeley, completing a thesis titled Management and Communication in the Office of the Future under the guidance of philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle.

Flores collaborates during these years with fellow Stanford computer scientist Terry Winograd. The two of them coauthor an influential 1986 book called Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Although they make a bad wager, insisting that computers will never understand natural language (an insistence proven wrong with time), they nevertheless offer refreshing critiques of some of the common assumptions about AI governing research of that era. Drawing upon phenomenology, speech act theory, and Heideggerian philosophy, they redefine computers not as mere symbol manipulators nor as number-crunchers, but as tools for communication and coordination.

Flores builds a program called the Coordinator. Receives flak for “software fascism.”

Winograd’s students include Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Tuesday March 3, 2020

It’s a daunting task: trying to talk to one’s colleagues about consciousness. Is it a quality? Is it a substance? Do we wield it — or is it the nature and seat of our being? And what is its relationship to this sphere of action known as language? Consciousness trance-scribing itself for others. I want to say thought, consciousness, language, narrative: all are simultaneous, intermixed. I walk around, stare at three orange and white daffodils beside a small creek. Water runs across rock as a runner runs past as cars drive past, the world a series of concentric rings through which consciousness vibrates, even as with a body, with fingers typing on technology, words are produced. It all happens temporally and simultaneously. Consciousness is what allows us to perform these tasks. We move among sights, sounds, movements, actions, words, interactions with other beings. But then I also wish to say that consciousness is an awareness, a state into which one awakens gradually and intermittently amid cycles of sleep. We can put ourselves into better states through achievement of consciousness. Lukács uses the term in this sense in his book History and Class Consciousness. And for many Marxists, this achievement is to be sought against a backdrop of “false” consciousness. In a racist society it can transform into what W.E.B. Du Bois called “double consciousness.” And of course it’s what second-wave feminists addressed when they organized themselves in the early 1970s into consciousness-raising groups. How does one say this for friends and colleagues? I practice the yoga of baby-holding while simultaneously listening to birds and crows, contemplating a solution. A way of saying, so as to facilitate shared awareness. What is this thing, this abstraction, this manifestation of mind that persists amid disruptions?

Sunday April 28, 2019

Revive the phenomenological category of the “lifeworld.” Review its history and weave it into the act of sitting, being-with-nature, the appearance of a pair of cardinals, lovers chirping, flitting from branch to branch amid a grove of trees. How can we best experience the sense of life as it unfolds into consciousness? Sarah steps around the corner, visits me to talk about pens beside a burst of pink flowers. Think of this, and of the cardinals, too, as signs of grace — sunlight through trees, enlightening signals of love and goodwill. The goal, as always, is to formulate a vision of wellbeing more compelling than the neoliberal “eudaimonic” subject. Perhaps I should read the work of Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla, one of the so-called hiperiones, a group that also included Emilio Uranga. Time to school myself in Latin American philosophy, so as to better understand the interventions of El grupo Hiperión. With the arrival into the lifeworld of the Other (an arrival that has always-already occurred except in myth), the lifeworld divides into “homeworld” and “alienworld.” And this process of division continues indefinitely, with the proliferation of the Other into multiple Others leading to the reconstitution of the arrivant’s lifeworld into an interface with an ever-changing multiverse. Countless leaves, branches, insects, birds — being transforming day by day. The past, persisting for potential reactivation by consciousness, allows the latter to travel among worlds, entering and exiting identities as in a dream.

Friday November 23, 2018

The world operates unpredictably but for the most part pleasurably when I smoke weed; some wonderful but as-yet-unnameable “sense” or awareness enters the equation, a buzz or vibration, a field of energy operating outside space-time, in some other dimension. I enter a state of rapt, bemused fascination as I wander this new “inner space,” floating free in a sea of untranslatable semiotic matter. Lewis Carroll captured or came nearest to approximating the sensation with his description of Alice’s tumble down the rabbit-hole. In so doing, his text provides an anchor, a constant amid the experience of changing worlds. It’s how we lead ourselves from one world to another. With the comfort as well that time’s passage feels slow and dreamy, until suddenly we land and follow the rabbits of our curiosity. Is fantasy a realm of the head, a mere idealism? Or is it instead (for who is to know otherwise?) a portal to a world as actual as any other? Subjects and objects are units of language. Carroll (AKA Charles Dodgson) doesn’t appear to have experimented with drugs recreationally; he arrived to altered states by way of linguistics and mathematics. But Disney embraced the psychedelic interpretation of Carroll’s work as part of its marketing strategy for a re-release of Alice in Wonderland in 1974, encouraging viewers of the film’s trailer to “Go Ask Alice.” The cause of Alice’s descent is her falling asleep — daydreaming instead of completing her lesson. Doors, rabbits, magic potions: these are all manifestations of her unconscious desires projected into dream. Drugs and dreams inspire similar lines of thought: they strip the ontological ground out from under us, suspending the normal rules of reality. Instantaneously — just like that — we become convinced emanationists. “Our normal waking consciousness,” as William James wrote following his experiments with nitrous oxide, “rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded” (The Varieties of Religious Experience). Addendum: The psychedelic interpretation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was propagated in a number of texts of the counterculture: Grace Slick’s lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” Go Ask Alice (1971), Thomas Fensch’s Alice in Acidland (1970), an anti-drug film of that name from 1969, and another called Curious Alice (1971). Mike Jay’s book Emperors of Dreams (2011) took up the question of Carroll’s relationship to drug experiences, suggesting that Carroll borrowed the psychedelic motif from Mordecai Cooke’s The Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860), a book describing use of fly agaric mushrooms among Siberian Shamans.

Sunday March 18, 2018

Compose mildly, humbly, yells a voice from ahead on the line. We of the chain gang. Every breath a guess, a near fumble. Conversations, dialogues, words assembled from channel-surfing, dial-turning snippets of  televisions and talking radios. It’s as if the larynx, a highly sensitive vibrational surface, were suddenly set aquiver, collaboratively operated by self and other, floating among oceans of sound. Songs for breakfast, songs for lunch. Rapid montage sequences flit past. Like horseshoe crabs, we possess receptors useful for sensing changes in moonlight. I imagine a fictional universe, perhaps I’m programmed to do so, I’m not going to delve into agency, will, all that David Copperfield kind of crap. Rice Krispies crackle loudly as the childhood self leans his ear to a bowl of cereal. The inner voice speeds up, acquires greater proficiency. “My environment,” I tell myself, “has been carefully designed to draw me to this state of mind.”