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too, was much on his critics' minds. But third, as Beer might have advised,
we should be concerned here with the future more than the past. Even if key
components of the VSM were readily erasable, the VSM remains interesting
as a model for a democratic subpolitics.
4. We can return to the question of goals. In chapters 3 and 4 we looked
largely at systems with fixed goals. Ashby's homeostats adapted open-endedly,
but
so as
to keep their essential variables within given limits. According to
Beer, the quasi-organic viable system likewise had goals that patterned its ad-
aptation. But, unlike Ashby, Beer was not attempting to construct models of
the adaptive brain, and he therefore did not have to take a sharp position on
what the goals of a viable system are. I said earlier that one could think of the
profitability of an enterprise as the sort of thing at issue, but actually Beer
had something different and more interesting in mind, which we can get at
via the critique of the VSM. At the heart of Werner Ulrich's (1981, 35) long
critique, for example, is a contrast between “purposive” and “purposeful” sys-
tems, which relates to a more familar distinction between means and ends:
a “purposive” system is a means to some extrinsically specified end, while
a “purposeful” one can deliberate on its own ends. Ulrich criticized the VSM
as purposive, and at one level this is correct. Beer was keen not to try to build
any substantive goals beyond adaptability into the VSM; this is an aspect
of what was entailed in my earlier description of the VSM as a form of sub-
politics.
Ulrich, however, went on from this observation to claim that because the
VSM had no substantive goals, then whatever goals a system came to mani-
fest would have to be supplied in a top-down fashion, from systems 4 and 5
of the model—we are back to technocracy from a different angle. But here
there are some complications worth discussing. One reply would be that Beer
was working for a democratically elected government responsive to “the will
of the people,” but that is an observation about the specific context of Cy-
bersyn rather than an intrinsic feature of the VSM in general. Another reply
would go along the lines indicated above: that the adaptive couplings between
the VSM's levels are reciprocally adaptive, not one-way. But here, still, some
asymmetry remained in the VSM. Beer does not seem to have envisaged the
formulation of new plans and goals from below; the higher levels of manage-
ment and government do seem to have held the advantage here in his thinking
(though this assertion will be qualified below when we come to his work on
“syntegration,” which indeed focused on inclusive processes of goal forma-
tion). Nevertheless, Project Cybersyn, as it evolved, did at least try to close the
