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“operations” within its large circle). Likewise, the 3-4-5 brain at the top of the
spinal column is itself enclosed in a square box, indicating that it is part of a
level 1 system of some bigger system. Beer felt that such recursivity was a nec-
essary property of viable systems—they had to be nested inside one another
“like so many Russian dolls or Chinese boxes” in a chain of embeddings which
“descends to cells and molecules and ascends to the planet and its universe”
(Beer 1989a, 22, 25).
The VSM was thus a vision of the firm in the image of man. Especially, func-
tions of management and control were envisaged on the lines of the human
brain and nervous system. The brain and nervous system were simulated by a
combination of information technologies and real human beings appropriately
arranged. One could say that the VSM is one of the most elaborated images of
the cyborg in postwar history, though the word “cyborg” is tautologous here,
standing as it does for “cybernetic organism.” Any viable system was exactly
that, according to Beer. We should also note that the VSM was the “circuit dia-
gram” (Beer 1981, 123) of a time machine, an adaptive system accommodating
itself to the exigencies of the unknown in real time, ranging from mundane
disturbances at the level of production to world-historical changes.
The VSM as Ontology and epistemology
The basic ontological vision that the VSM conjures up is the same as that of
the cybernetic factory before it: the world as an ungraspable and unmaster-
able space of becoming; the organization as open-endedly and performatively
adaptable. The VSM, however, also suggests some refinements to that picture.
First, my portrayal of the cybernetic factory was centered on the brain of the
firm as a unitary entity, the U-machine, in dialogic conversation with the
firm's environment. Beer's conception of the VSM, in contrast, was one in
which the overall behavior of the firm was the upshot of an interplay of many
active but quasi-autonomous elements, the VSM's systems 1-5, themselves
also interacting with different aspects of the firm's environment. The recur-
sive aspect of the model adds an indefinite sequence layers of elements to this
picture. The VSM thus moves us toward a vision of ontological multiplicity , a
multiplicity which is, furthermore, irreducible : the system 3 of a given organi-
zation is not reducible to the organization's system 4, say, or to the system 3 of
another organization. 22
Second, we can return to the question of goals. Walter's and Ashby's devices
had fixed goals that organized their adaptation: the homeostat reconfigured
itself so as to keep its essential variables within preset limits. Beer's concep-
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