STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 272

feel about specific government policies, but they can never find out whether
people's real concerns lie entirely elsewhere. Polls can never contribute, then,
to the emergence of real novelty in real-time politics, only to a fine-tuning of
the status quo. In contrast, the algedonic meters constituted an open invita-
tion to genuine experiment. If a politician or journalist were to float some
wild idea and the integrated meter reading went from lethargically neutral to
wildly positive, there would be reason to think that some genuine but hitherto
unthought-of social desire had been tapped.
And here we can return to Ulrich's critique of the VSM as purposive rather
than purposeful. Though Beer did not try to build into the VSM any substan-
tive goals, he did try to think through the ways in which the system could ar-
ticulate its own goals, in practice, in a nonhierarchical fashion. We can think
of the algedonic meters as expanding the VSM as a subpolitical diagram of
social relations and information flows in such a way as to enable any organiza-
tion to become purposeful, rather than purposive, on its own terms. Ulrich is
wrong here about the VSM, at least in principle, though, as above, practical
concerns are not hard to find: it would have been less difficult for General
Pinochet and his friends to eliminate algedonic meters than, say, rifles in the
hands of the workers.
One last thought about the algedonic meters. What did they measure? At
the individual level, an unanalyzed variable called “happiness.” But for the ag-
gregated, social, level Beer coined a new term— eudemony , social well-being
(Beer 1974a, 336). Again he had no positive characterization of eudemony,
but it is important that he emphasized that it is not any of the usual mac-
rovariables considered by politicians and economists. Eudemony is not, or not
necessarily, to be equated with GNP per capita, say, or life expectancy (Beer
1974a, 333). Eudemony is something to be explored in the adaptive perfor-
mance of a viable social system, and, obviously, Beer's algedonic meters were
an integral part of that. This thought is perhaps the most radical aspect of
Beer's subpolitics: the idea that social systems might continually find out what
their collective ends are, rather than, indeed, having those ends prescribed
from above (the wonders of the free market, for example). And this remark
gets us back to the general question of cybernetics and goals. Beer's cybernet-
ics, unlike that of Walter and Ashby, did not enshrine any idea of fixed goals
around which adaptation was structured. Goals, instead, could become in
Beer's (and Pask's) cybernetics. As ontological theater, then, the VSM staged
a vision of open-ended becoming that went an important step beyond that of
the first-generation cyberneticians. Beer had not, of course, solved the prob-