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enterprise, and I find it one of the most interesting and suggestive aspects of
Beer's cybernetics. Second, we should note that, as already remarked, Beer's
talks and writings did not foreground the usual substantive political variables
of left-wing politics: class, gender, race. They foregrounded, instead, a generic
or abstract topology in which the exercise of politics, substantively conceived,
would be promoted in a way conducive to future adaptations. We should per-
haps, then, think of Beer as engaging in a particular form of subpolitics rather
than of politics as traditionally understood.
That said, Cybersyn was the only cybernetic project discussed in this topic
to be subjected to the political critique I mentioned in the opening chapters.
I therefore want to examine the critique at some length, which will also help
us get Beer's subpolitics into clearer focus and serve to introduce some more
features of Cybersyn.
The Political Critique of Cybernetics
The early phases of Project Cybersyn were conducted without publicity, but
public announcements were planned for early 1973. Beer's contribution to
this was “Fanfare for Effective Freedom,” delivered as the Richard Goodman
Memorial Lecture at Brighton Polytechnic on 14 February 1973 (Beer1975b
[1973]). The previous month, however, reports of Cybersyn had appeared in
the British underground press and then in national newspapers and maga-
zines (Beer 1981, 335), and the media response had proved hostile. The day
after Beer's “Fanfare” speech, Joseph Hanlon wrote in the New Scientist that
Beer “believes people must be managed from the top down—that real com-
munity control is too permissive. . . . The result is a tool that vastly increases
the power at the top,” and concluded with the remark that “many people . . .
will think Beer the supertechnocrat of them all” (Hanlon 1973a, 347; and see
also Hanlon 1973b). Hanlon's article thus sketched out the critique of cyber-
netics discussed in chapter 2: cybernetics as the worst sort of science, devoted
to making hierarchical control more effective.
Beer replied in a letter to the editor, describing Hanlon's report as a “hys-
terical verbal onslaught” and resenting “the implied charge of liar” (Beer
1973a). One H. R. J. Grosch (1973) from the U.S. National Bureau of Standards
then joined in the exchange, explicitly calling Beer a liar: “It is absolutely
not possible for Stafford Beer, Minister Flores or the Chilean government
or industrial computer users to have since implemented what is described.”
Grosch further remarked that this was a good thing, since Cybersyn “well
merits the horror expressed by Dr Joseph Hanlon. . . . I call the whole concept
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