STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 251

tion of the VSM, in contrast, specified no goals whatsoever, except adaptation
itself. And we could think of Heidegger: adaptation in the VSM was a process
of revealing rather than enframing. The process that Beer called reciprocal
vetoing between levels of the system, for example, was by no means as nega-
tive as the phrase suggests. A veto from one level to another was at the same
time an invitation for a novel counterproposal, a way of finding out what the
other had to offer.
The VSM was explicitly about information flows and transformations, so
we can return now to a consideration of cybernetic epistemology as well as
ontology. In Beer's vision, viable systems do contain knowledge—represen-
tations of their own inner workings and of their environment—principally
enshrined in the OR models at level 3 of the VSM and the projective models at
system 4. What should we make of this? First, we could recall that in his work
on truly biological controllers, Beer had sought to avoid this detour through
representation. His biological computers did not contain any representational
or symbolic elements; they were intended simply to do their adaptive thing.
The VSM, then, one might say, was a concession to representation as a re-
sponse to the failure of biological computation. And it is appropriate to recall
that, as I remarked before, Beer did not much trust representational models.
He did not think, for example, that one could arrive at a uniquely correct
model of the firm and its environment that could function unproblematically
at level 4 of the VSM. This is a direct corollary of the idea that both the firm
and its environment are exceedingly complex.
Beer did not, however, take this to imply that the construction of repre-
sentational models was a useless endeavor. His idea, instead, was that the
models in question should be continually examined and updated in relation to
performance—“ continuously adapted ” (Beer 1981, 185) or even always “abort-
ing” (Beer 1969 and 1994b, 151). The company should act in the light of the
future projections of the model at level 4, but then actual developments in
time should be compared with expectations from the model's simulations.
These would not, in all probability, match, and the model should be adjusted
accordingly. 23 The VSM thus stages for us an image of a performative episte-
mology—a more elaborated version of what we have seen in the preceding
chapters. The “knowledge components” of the VSM were not an end in them-
selves; they were geared directly into performance as part of the mechanism
of adaptation, and they were revisable in performance, just like the other com-
ponents of the VSM; they were not the controlling center of the action.
Here I need to enter a caveat. What might adaptation of these models in
practice mean? I just described adaptation in the VSM as open ended, but