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The outputs of the simulated T-machine in successive time steps were re-
corded at Templeborough as a “generalized gestalt memory” indicated in the
lower left and right of figure 6.6, the left portion relating to inner states of
the factory, the right to its environment. These memories could be thought of
defining “two phase spaces in which the company and the environment can
respectively operate.” And the U-machine was intended to search for a set of
“preferred states” within this space via a “mutually vetoing system by which
the homeostatic loop in the diagram continues to operate until both company
and environmental points in phase-space (representing vectors of functions)
lie in the appropriate preferred states set” (Beer 1962a, 208).
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This notion of
mutual or reciprocal vetoing was very important in Beer's work (and Pask's),
so I want to digress briefly here to explain it.
The idea of mutual vetoing came directly from Ashby's cybernetics, and
here Beer, like Bateson and Pask, took the symmetric fork in the road. Imag-
ine an interconnected setup of just two of Ashby's homeostats, both of which
are free to reconfigure themselves. Suppose homeostat 1 finds itself in an un-
stable situation in which its essential variable goes out of whack. In that case,
its relay trips, and its uniselector moves to a new setting, changing the resis-
tance of its circuit. Here one can say that homeostat 2—with its own internal
parameters that define the transformation between its input from and output
to homeostat 1—has
vetoed
the prior configuration of homeostat 1, kicking it
into a new condition. And likewise, of course, when homeostat 2 finds itself
out of equilibrium and changes to a new state, we can say that homeostat 1 has
vetoed the first configuration of homeostat 2. Eventually, however, this recon-
figuration will come to an end, when both homeostats achieve equilibrium at
once, in a condition in which the essential variables of both remain within
limits in their mutual interactions. And this equilibrium, we can then say, is
the upshot of a reciprocal vetoing: it is the condition that obtains when the
vetoing stops and each machine finds a state of dynamic equilibrium relative
to the other's parameters.
This is enough, I think, to unravel the above quotation from Beer. One can
think of the U-machine and the firm's environment as two reciprocally veto-
ing homeostats, and the U-machine itself attempts to find a relation between
its inputs from the T-machine and its outputs to the V-machine that will keep
some essential variable standing for the “health” of the company within lim-
its. Beer never reached the stage of defining exactly what that essential vari-
able should be at this stage in his work. For the sake of concreteness, we could
imagine it as a measure of profitability, though Beer proposed interestingly
different measures in subsequent projects that we can review below.
