STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 274

conventional projects in cognate areas, and as models for the future. A future
cybernetic politics that followed Beer's lead into subpolitics might well want
to bear in mind the democratic fragility of the VSM—while contemplating
algedonic meters as, shall we say, a desperate but entertaining attempt to open
up a politically deadening status quo.
Pinochet's coup in Chile was not the end of Beer's involvement in poli-
tics at the governmental level, especially in Central and South America. He
went on to consult for the governments of Mexico, Venezuala, and Uruguay,
as well as, in other directions from the United States, Canada, India, and Israel
(Beer 1990a, 318-21), and “bits and pieces of the holistic approach have been
adopted in various other countries, but by definition they lack cohesion” (Beer
2004 [2001], 861). 41 I will not pursue that line of development further here;
instead, I want to explore Beer's cybernetic politics from another angle.
The Politics of Interacting Systems
LAST MONTH [SEPTEMBER 2001], THE TRAGIC EvENTS IN NEW YORK, CYBER-
NETICALLY INTERPRETED, LOOK qUITE DIFFERENT FROM THE INTERPRETA-
TION SUPPLIED BY WORLD LEADERS—AND THEREFORE THE STRATEGIES NOW
PURSUED ARE qUITE MISTAKEN IN CYBERNETIC EYES. . . . ATTEMPTS TO
GUARD AGAINST AN INFINITE NUMBER OF INEXPLICIT THREATS DO NOT HAvE
REqUISITE vARIETY.
STaFFORd BeeR, “WHAT IS CYBERNETICS?” (2004 [2001], 861-62)
So far we have focused on the internal politics of the VSM—on social ar-
rangements within a viable organization. Here, the organization's environ-
ment was conceptualized in rather amorphous terms, simply as that to which
the organization needed to adapt. As we saw in the previous chapter, in the
1950s Ross Ashby was led to think more specifically about environments that
themselves contained adaptive systems and thus about interacting popula-
tions of adaptive systems, including the possibility of war between them.
Beer's experiences in Chile and of the subversion of the Allende regime by
outside states, especially the United States, led him to reflect along similar
lines from the 1970s onward. These reflections on the interrelations of dis-
tinct systems, usually conceived as nation-states, themselves warrant a short
review.
Beer's basic understanding of international relations followed directly