STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 273

lem of building a machine that could mimic the human facility of formulating
goals; his systems could be adaptive at the level of goal formation precisely
because they contained human beings within themselves.
Where does this leave us? After reviewing the critiques of the VSM and Proj-
ect Cybersyn, I continue to think that we can see the VSM as enshrining a
very interesting approach to what I have called subpolitics. The VSM offers
a considered topology of social locations and relations, information flows
and transformations that, to a considerable degree, promises a dispersal of
autonomy throughout social organizations. The key elements of the VSM,
from this perspective, are the adaptive, homeostat-like couplings between the
various levels of the VSM, and the algedonic signals that travel back up the
system. Like Beer's earlier experimentation with biological computing, his
work on the VSM seems original and singular to me. It is hard to think of any
equivalents in more conventional approaches to political theory and practice.
And for this reason I am inclined to point to the VSM as another item on my
list of striking examples of the cybernetic ontology in action, in politics and
management. Here again we can see that the cybernetic ontology of unknow-
ability made a difference.
Turning to the critics, it is significant that they seemed unable ever quite
to get the VSM into focus. Beer's overall cybernetic aim, to bolster the adapt-
ability of organizations, was never, as far as I can make out, mentioned by
the critics; neither was the key cybernetic idea of adaptive coupling between
levels. Instead, the critics focused on a cybernetically denatured version of the
VSM, a version from which the distinctively cybernetic elements had been
removed, turning it into a nightmare of command and control. The critics
mapped the VSM onto a distinctively modern space in which it did not be-
long, and they found it wanting there. This inability to contemplate the thing
in itself I take to be further evidence that ontology makes a difference. 40
Having said that, I have also recognized that the critics' concerns about
the VSM were not empty. It does seem clear that systems like that envisaged
in Project Cybersyn could be readily stripped down in practice and turned
into rather effective systems of command, control, and surveillance, the very
opposite of what both Beer and the critics aimed at. But as I have said before,
the object of this topic is not to resurrect any speciic cybernetic project, in-
cluding Cybersyn. It is to exhibit and examine a whole range of such proj-
ects—as a demonstration of their possibility and their difference from more