Figure 6.14.Operations room of Project Cybersyn. Source: Beer 1974a, 330, fig. 12.1.
The system 4 operations room loomed ever larger as potentially the visible symbol, the icon, of Project Cybersyn (fig. 6.14). Detailed design was turned over to Gui Bonsiepe in Chile, from which emerged a plan for an octagonal room ten meters wide that would serve as an "information environment." Information on any aspect of the functioning of the economy at the desired level of recursion would be displayed visually on panels on the walls, including flashing warning signals that registered the algedonic "cries of pain" from lower levels, mentioned above, and an animated Checo simulation of the Chilean economy that could be used to predict the effects over the next decade of decisions taken today. These days, computer graphics could handle what was envisaged with ease, but in the early 1970s in Chile the displays included hand-posted notes (of algedonic warnings), banks of projectors, and slides prepared in advance of meetings (showing quantified flow charts of production). The Checo display "certainly worked visually; but the computer drive behind it was experimental and fragmentary" (Beer 1974a, 329–32). The target date for completion of the control room was set as 9 October 1972; in fact, it was in "experimental working order" by 10 January 1973 (Beer 1981, 270).
Project Cybernsyn evolved very quickly, but so did other developments (Beer 1981, 307):
As time wore on throughout 1972, Chile developed into a siege economy. How ironic it was that so many eyes were focussed with goodwill on the Chilean experiment in all parts of the world, while governments and other agencies, supposedly representing those liberal-minded observers, resisted its maturation with implacable hostility. The nation's life support system was in a stranglehold, from financial credit to vital supplies; its metabolism was frustrated, from the witholding of spare parts to software and expertise; literally and metaphorically, the well-to-do were eating rather than investing their seed-corn—with encouragement from outside. Even more ironic, looking back, is the fact that every advance Allende made, every success in the eyes of the mass of the people (which brought with it more electoral support) made it less likely that the Chilean experiment would be allowed to continue—because it became more threatening to Western ideology.
Before Allende came to power, copper had been Chile's major source of foreign exchange, and "we were to see the spectacle of the 'phantom ship' full of copper that traipsed around European ports looking for permission to unload" (307). Economic collapse was imminent, and Beer's thought was to "search for novel and evolutionary activity whereby the Chilean economy might very rapidly enhance its foreign earnings" (308). His answer was indigenous crafts, wine, and fish, and in 1972 and 1973 he sought to mobilize his contacts in Europe to expand those markets—without success. There was nothing especially cybernetic about those efforts, but they do indicate Beer's commitment to Allende's Chile.
In 1973 the situation in Chile continued to worsen. In September 1973, the Cybersyn team received its last instruction from the president, which was to move the control room into the presidential palace, La Moneda. "By the 11 September 1973, the plans were nearly ready. Instead La Moneda itself was reduced to a smoking ruin" (Beer 1974a, 332). Salvador Allende was dead, too, in the ruin: the Pinochet coup—Chile's 9/11—brought a definitive end to the Chilean experiment with socialism, and with it went Cybersyn. Beer was in London at the time but had prepared for the end by devising three different codes in which to communicate with his collaborators and friends in Chile, who were, through their association with the Allende government, in very serious trouble. Beer did what he could to help them. On 8 November 1973, he wrote to von Foerster at the University of Illinois: "My dear Heinz, I think you know that I am doing everything possible to rescue my scientific colleagues (at the level of Team Heads) from Chile. It is going well—10 families. There is another problem. My main collaborator is held in a concentration camp, and is coming up for trial. There is a real risk that he will be shot, or sent down for life."31 The collaborator in question was Fernando Flores, who had risen to become Chile's minister of finance before the coup. Beer enclosed the draft of his personal statement to be read at Flores's trial and urged von Foerster to send his own. In the event, Flores was imprisoned for three years, until Amnesty International helped to negotiate his release, when he moved to the United States, completed a PhD in Heideggerian philosophy, and became a highly successful management consultant.32
The Politics of the VSM
THE PROBLEM IS FOR CYBERNETICS TO DISCOVER, AND TO MAKE ABUNDANTLY CLEAR TO THE WORLD, WHAT METASYSTEMS TRULY ARE, AND WHY THEY SHOULD NOT BE EQUATED WITH THE SUPRA-AUTHORITIES TO WHICH OUR ORGANIZATIONAL PARADIGMS DIRECT THEM. IT IS AN APPALLING [SIC] DIFFICULT JOB, BECAUSE IT IS SO VERY EASY TO CONDEMN THE WHOLE IDEA AS TOTALITARIAN. HENCE MY USE OF THE TERM: THE LIBERTY MACHINE. WE WANT ONE THAT ACTUALLY WORKS.
STAFFORD BEER,"THE LIBERTY MACHINE" (1975 [1970], 318)
Beer's daughter Vanilla recalls that "Stafford and I generally ran Jesus and Marx together in an attempt to produce metanoyic possibilities," so I turn now to Beer's politics and its relation to his cybernetics; later sections will focus on his spiritual beliefs and practices.33
As a schoolboy, Beer shared a bedroom with his brother, Ian, who recalled that Stafford "painted the whole wall . . . with extraordinary apparitions. In the centre of the wall was the original 'Towering Inferno'—a huge skyscraper with flames all around the bottom licking their way up the tower." Vanilla Beer adds that the picture was called The Collapse of Capitalism. In the late forties, Stafford fell out with his father, who pressured him into admitting that he had voted for the Labour Party in the recent election (Ian Beer, letter to Stafford's family, 25 August 2002). Later in life, Beer sometimes described himself as "an old-fashioned Leftist" (Medina 2006) or even as "somewhat to the left of Marx," though it would be a mistake to think of him within the conventional frame of British Marxism: "Stafford was fond of telling the story about Marx that had him saying 'Thank God I'm not a Marxist.' He didn't usually describe himself in this context but Stafford had a great deal of admiration for Marx, especially his early writings on alienation. He wasn't much of a fan of Das Capital mostly on the grounds of dull and repetitive."34
Little of this found its way into Beer's early writings. Until 1970, his books, essays, and talks were largely couched in a technical idiom and addressed to a management readership. But in 1969 (Beer 1975, 3)
I had come to the end of the road in my latest job . . . and re-appraised the situation. What was the use of seeking another such job all safe and sound pensions all that from which haven to speak and write as I had done for years about the desperate need for drastic change and how to do it in a sick world? Not even ethical. How to begin? It was almost 1970. A decade opened its doors for business. There were speeches to be made already committed throughout that first year and I must see them through. What's more these platforms gave me the opportunity if I could only seize it to collect my thoughts for a new life and to propound ARGUMENTS OF CHANGE.
This series of talks, with assorted explanatory material, was published in 1975 as Platform for Change: A Message from Stafford Beer. In 1973, just before the Pinochet coup, Beer continued to develop his thinking in public, this time in the Canadian Massey Lectures on CBC radio, which were published the next year as Designing Freedom (Beer 1974b). The focus of these works, and many to follow, was on liberty, freedom, and democracy. Marx is not mentioned in them, nor any of the classic Marxist concerns such as class struggle. Instead, Beer attempted a distinctly cybernetic analysis, which is what interests me most. Here we can explore another dimension of ontology in action: cybernetics as politics.
The distinctly cybernetic aspect of Beer's politics connected immediately to the ontology of unknowability. Other people, at any scale of social aggregation, are exceedingly complex systems that are neither ultimately graspable nor controllable through knowledge. And along with that observation goes, as I noted in chapter 2, a notion of respect for the ot
her—as someone with whom we have to get along but whom we can never possibly know fully or control. And this was Beer's normative political principle: we should seek as little as practically possible to circumscribe the other's variety, and vice versa—this was the condition of freedom at which Beer thought politics should aim. This, in turn, translated into an explicit view of social relations. If the ontology of knowability sits easily with an image of hierarchical command and control, in which orders are transmitted unchanged from top to bottom, then Beer's notion of freedom entailed a symmetric notion of adaptive coupling between individuals or groups. In a process of reciprocal vetoing—also describable as mutual accommodation—the parties explore each other's variety and seek to find states of being acceptable to all. The ontological and practical resonances here among Beer and Bateson and Laing are obvious, though Beer was operating in the space of organizations rather than psychiatry.
Beer recognized, of course, that any form of social organization entailed some reduction in the freedom of its members, but he argued that one should seek to minimize that reduction. In reference to viable systems, his thought was that freedom was a condition of maximal "horizontal" variety at each of the quasi-autonomous levels, coupled with the minimum of "vertical" variety reduction between levels consistent with maintaining the integrity of the system itself. Hence the notion of "designing freedom": as Beer explained it, the VSM was a diagram of social relations and information flows and transformations that could serve to guarantee the most freedom possible within organized forms of life. As we need to discuss, that view did not go uncontested, but let me emphasize now two features of Beer's vision.
First, there are many absorbing books of political theory which go through immensely subtle arguments to arrive at the conclusion that we need more freedom, fuller democracy, or whatever—conclusions which many of us would accept without ever reading those books. Beer was not in that business. He took it for granted that freedom and democracy are good things. The characteristic of his work was that he was prepared to think through in some detail just how one might arrange people and information systems to make the world freer and more democratic than it is now. Beer's specific solutions to this problem might not have been beyond criticism, but at least he was prepared to think at that level and make suggestions. This is an unusual enterprise, and I find it one of the most interesting and suggestive aspects of Beer's cybernetics. Second, we should note that, as already remarked, Beer's talks and writings did not foreground the usual substantive political variables of left-wing politics: class, gender, race. They foregrounded, instead, a generic or abstract topology in which the exercise of politics, substantively conceived, would be promoted in a way conducive to future adaptations. We should perhaps, then, think of Beer as engaging in a particular form of subpolitics rather than of politics as traditionally understood.
That said, Cybersyn was the only cybernetic project discussed in this book to be subjected to the political critique I mentioned in the opening chapters. I therefore want to examine the critique at some length, which will also help us get Beer's subpolitics into clearer focus and serve to introduce some more features of Cybersyn.
The Political Critique of Cybernetics
The early phases of Project Cybersyn were conducted without publicity, but public announcements were planned for early 1973. Beer's contribution to this was "Fanfare for Effective Freedom," delivered as the Richard Goodman Memorial Lecture at Brighton Polytechnic on 14 February 1973 (Beer1975b [1973]). The previous month, however, reports of Cybersyn had appeared in the British underground press and then in national newspapers and magazines (Beer 1981, 335), and the media response had proved hostile. The day after Beer's "Fanfare" speech, Joseph Hanlon wrote in the New Scientist that Beer "believes people must be managed from the top down—that real community control is too permissive. . . . The result is a tool that vastly increases the power at the top," and concluded with the remark that "many people . . . will think Beer the supertechnocrat of them all" (Hanlon 1973a, 347; and see also Hanlon 1973b). Hanlon's article thus sketched out the critique of cybernetics discussed in chapter 2: cybernetics as the worst sort of science, devoted to making hierarchical control more effective.
Beer replied in a letter to the editor, describing Hanlon's report as a "hysterical verbal onslaught" and resenting "the implied charge of liar" (Beer 1973a). One H. R. J. Grosch (1973) from the U.S. National Bureau of Standards then joined in the exchange, explicitly calling Beer a liar: "It is absolutely not possible for Stafford Beer, Minister Flores or the Chilean government or industrial computer users to have since implemented what is described." Grosch further remarked that this was a good thing, since Cybersyn "well merits the horror expressed by Dr Joseph Hanlon. . . . I call the whole concept beastly. It is a good thing for humanity, and for Chile in particular, that it is as yet only a bad dream." Beer's reply (1973b) stated that the Cybersyn project had indeed achieved what was claimed for it, that "perhaps it is intolerable to sit in Washington DC and to realise that someone else got there first—in a Marxist country, on a shoestring," and that "as to the 'horror' of putting computers to work in the service of the people, I would sooner do it than calculate over-kill, spy on a citizen's credit-worthiness, or teach children some brand of rectitude."
The political critique of Cybersyn and the VSM was further elaborated and dogged Beer over the years, and I want now to review its overall form, rather than the details, and how one might respond to it. The critique is fairly straightforward, so I shall present it largely in my own words.35
In 1974, Beer said of Cybersyn that it "aimed to acquire the benefits of cybernetic synergy for the whole of industry, while devolving power to the workers at the same time" (Beer 1974a, 322), and there is no doubt of his good intentions. His critics felt that he was deluding himself, however, and Hanlon's description of Beer as a "supertechnocrat" presaged what was to follow. I find it useful to split the critique into four parts.
1. The VSM undoubtedly wasa technocratic approach to organization, inasmuch as it was an invention of technical experts which accorded technical experts key positions—on the brain stem of the organization at levels 3 and 4. No one had asked the Chilean workers what sort of a subpolitical arrangement they would like. Nor, I believe, did Beer ever envisage the basic form of the VSM changing and adapting once it had been implemented in Chile. There is not a lot one can say in reply to this, except to note that, on the one hand, the fixity of the overall form of the VSM can be seen as a noncybernetic aspect of Beer's cybernetic management. As ontology in action, the critics seized here on a nonexemplary feature of Beer's work. But we might note, too, that expert solutions are not necessarily bad. Beer's argument always was that cyberneticians were the experts in the difficult and unfamiliar area of adaptation, and that they had a responsibility to put their expertise to use (see, e.g., Beer 1975 [1970], 320–21). To say the least, Cybersyn was a new and imaginative arrangement of socioinformatic relations of production, which might, in principle—if the Pinochet coup had not happened—have proved to have increased the freedom of all concerned. Beyond this, though, the critics found more specific causes for concern within the structure of the VSM itself.
2. Another thread of the critique had to do with the algedonic signals that passed upward unfiltered to higher levels of the VSM. Beer spoke of these as "cries for help" or "cries of pain." They were intended to indicate that problems had arisen at the system 1 level which could not be addressed there, and which therefore needed assistance from higher levels in their resolution. Beer assumed that the upper levels of the system would adapt a benevolent stance relative to the lower ones and would seek to provide genuine assistance on the receipt of an algedonic signal. Critics pointed out instead that such signals could also constitute a surveillance system that would sooner or later (not necessarily under Allende) be used against the lower levels. A profit-maximizing higher management might readily translate too many algedonic warnings into a rationale not for assistan
ce with problems but for plant closures. Again, it is hard to spring to Beer's defense. He might have replied that to think this way is to denature and degrade the biological model behind the VSM. Brains do not jettison arms and legs every time we get pins and needles, but the obvious reply would be that this simply brings into question Beer's biological model for social organizations. For Beer, this was a normative aspect of the model, but no one could guarantee that higher management would accede to this.
The Cybernetic Brain Page 33