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ontology of becoming, but within a fixed framework. Beer would no doubt
have remarked, as he did of the VSM, that any form of organization exacts its
price, and that the price here was worth paying for the symmetric openness
to becoming that it made possible. One can also note that syntegration was
a finite and limited process; participants were not locked into it, in the way
that they might be within a business or a nation. So, in the next syntegration
participants could take other positions within the diagram, and, of course, the
entire general topic could shift.
Throughout this topic we have been concerned with the socio-ontological
mismatch between cybernetics and modern institutions, with the amateur-
ism of Beer's work on biological computing as our latest example. In the
earlier chapters we also ran into examples of a constructive response to the
mismatch: Kingsley Hall, for example, as providing a model for a new social
basis for cybernetic forms of life, the germ of a parallel social universe as
Alexander Trocchi envisaged it. Beer, too, contributed to this constructive
project. As we saw, he played a key role in the establishment of the Depart-
ment of Cybernetics at Brunel University—a partly successful attempt to
implant a sustainable cybernetic presence in the established academic order.
From another angle, the VSM can be seen as an attempt to reconfigure the
world of organizations along cybernetic lines, to make that world an explicitly
and self-consciously cybernetic place. And we can understand the team syn-
tegrity approach to decision making similarly—not now as the construction
of enduring institutions, but as making available a finite and ephemeral social
form lasting for just a few days, that could be mobilized ad hoc by groups
at any scale for any purpose, from reorganizing the British OR society up
to world governance.
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One does not have to subscribe to the details of the
VSM or team syntegrity; the point here is that Beer's work can further enrich
our imaginations with concrete examples of what Trocchi's parallel universe
might look like, and that those forms would indeed be importantly different
in specific ways from the hegemonic forms of our present social, political, and
subpolitical arrangements. Again, ontology makes a difference, here in the
domain of subpolitics.
Cybernetics and Spirituality
IN INDIA THERE ARE MANDALAS—PICTURES CONvEYING SACRED INSIGHTS NOT
EXPRESSED IN WORDS. OUR MODERN CHIPS MAY NOT BE SACRAMENTALS, BUT
