34. I. Beer (2002); email messages from Vanilla Beer to the author, 3 April 2003, and Allenna Leonard, 5 April 2003. The only published discussion ofMarx that I have found in Beer's writing is the following passage, which concerns Beer's work in Chile in the early 1970s (below): "President Allende was a Marxist-Leninist who did not accept the model now in use in the USSR. . . . Allende was well aware that the Hegelian concept of the dialectic, used byMarx, was paralleled in the ubiquitous biological mechanism of homeostasis [citing Ashby]. . . . My idea was to replace theMarxist 'classes' (where the ruling class exploits the proletariat) with a richer and less tendentious categorization based on shared information. 'Exploitation' then becomes the deprivation of information. . . . What are (laughably) called the 'mass media' very often carry not zero, but negativeinformation" (Beer 1994b, 11).
35. The two most extended pieces of critical writing are a long essay by Ulrich (1981) and a review of both technical and political critiques by Jackson (1989). Beer (1983) gives a short reply to Ulrich but focuses on a difference of paradigms between his own cybernetics and Ulrich's Kantianism. I find it more useful to think here about the details of the VSM, which is why I formulate a response to the criticisms myself. We could note in passing that a few decades down the line we are all enmeshed to an unprecedented degree in a vast multiplicity of noncybernetic, hierarchical systems of surveillance and control, and that most of them are simply taken for granted.
36. Beer called this the gremiostrike, but it was commonly referred to as the October Strike, the Paro de Octubre(Medina, personal communication, 21 September 2007).
37. Beer understood this change in the mode of operation of Cybersyn as an instance of the "redundancy of potential command" (n. 21 above).
38. A standing concern of cybernetics from its earlier days was that feedback systems can show pathological behavior when responding to out-of-date data— the thermostat that turns the heating up after the temperature has already risen for other reasons.
39. The cybernetic innovation here hinged on the usual move from representation to performance. On general election nights, Bob McKenzie's swingometer would display voting trends relative the previous election, but after the votes had been cast and not in an attempt to influence the process of voting. In contrast, Beer's algedometers were designed to make possible an emergent realtime interplay between the parties they coupled.
40. Presumably this is why Beer chose to reply to Ulrich in rather rarefied philosophical terms rather than responding to the details of Ulrich's charges (n. 35 above).
41. See also Bula (2004) and Donoso (2004) on applications of Beer's cybernetics in Colombia.
42. Crises in the environment and the third world are mentioned in many of Beer's post-1970 writings; see, for example, Beer (1975 [1970]).Much of Beer's reflection on Chile and Cybersyn took the form of an analysis of "the cybernetics of crisis" (Beer 1981, 351–78).
43. The SyntegrityGroup based in Toronto and Zurich offers to help "organizations gain clarity and conviction as they tackle complex, multi-faceted challenges and opportunities" and lists a long string of clients running from Canadian Blood Services via multinationals such as IBM and Monsanto to the World Wildlife Fund: www.syntegritygroup.com (accessed 12 April 2005). Syncho is a British-based consultancy specializing in both the VSM and team syntegrity. It was founded in 1985 by Raul Espejo, who was earlier the senior project manager on Project Cybersyn and is currently both director of Syncho and a visiting professor at University College, Worcester, England: www.syncho .com (12 April 2005). The inside cover of Beer (1994b) notes that he was then chairman of Syncho and of Team Syntegrity (Canada). Another management consultancy firm, Phrontis—"a registered partner of Microsoft"—lists team syntegrity in its repertoire: www.phrontis.com (12 April 2005). The director of Phrontis, Anthony Gill, was a director of Syncho from 1990 until 1996 (see the Syncho website, above).
44. Beyond Disputealso includes a "Collaborators' Surplus" comprising seven essays on syntegrity by other authors variously involved in the project.
45. The origins of team syntegrity lay in Beer's reflections on what he later came to conceive as the adaptive connections between levels in the VSM. Allenna Leonard told me (22 June 2002) that he would try to gather representatives of the unions and management after work at United Steel for glasses of whisky, in the hope that this would precipitate open-ended discussions about the state of the company and its future contours, and this was the approach that was formalized as syntegration. Beer (1994b, 9) describes syntegration as "a means of capturing the informal talk [at a meeting] 'Later in the Bar.' "
46. Beer understood the self-organizing quality of infosets by analogy to Mc-Culloch's notion of the redundancy of potential command in the brain (mentioned above) and as an argument against fixed hierarchical structures in organizations. Thus, Beyond Dispute(Beer 1994b, 148–61) includes a very interesting discussion of the 3-4 homeostat in the VSM, suggesting that its constituents in practice are not necessarily the people one would imagine, and that syntegration might be an effective way to bring them together: "Take, for example, the leading directors of a company board; add the most respected staff aides; include (possibly) representatives of workers, clients, and the community: here are 30 people strongly committed by a motive, a collegiate purpose. Can they afford to meet for an intensive 5-day exploration of the future of their enterprise, using the Team Syntegrity model and protocol? If not, they are probably condemning themselves to years of orthodox, strung-out committee work that ties up thinking time, exhausts patience, frustrates innovation— and may be too late" (159–60). At a more macro scale, Beer likewise argued against a fixed hierarchy of government in human affairs running from local through national to transnational (e.g., the UN) and possibly global levels. Instead, self-organized infosets could themselves be seen as "centres of potential command" at any level of governance in respect of the specific issues in which they especially engaged and on which they were especially knowledgeable.
47. Fuller analyzed the peculiar properties of his domes in terms of a notion of tensile integrity, or "tensegrity" for short. It turned out that "tensegrity" "had been appropriated for commercial use by architects," so Beer adopted the suggestion that his approach should be called "syntegrity," once more invoking the notion of synergy that had gone into naming Project Cybersyn (Beer 1994b, 13–14). Fuller constitutes another link in our story to the counterculture, especially in the United States: he was a role model for key figures such as Stewart Brand, and his domes were the preferred architectural forms for communes (Turner 2006). Like the cyberneticians, Fuller espoused a strange and nonmodern ontology, this time a non-Cartesian spatial geometry, but I cannot pursue that here.
48. In Beyond Dispute,Beer mentions the 1970 syntegration devoted to the formulation of a new constitution for the OR society (Beer 1994b, 9), and another in 1987 devoted to the political future of Ontario (10). Among the 1990 experiments was a syntegration on "world governance" held at the Manchester Business School (chap. 3) and another on "the future" in Toronto (chap. 6; discussed in the text above). The book includes the chapter "Governance or Government?" (chap. 10), in which Beer contrasts "government" as an enduring entity endowed with specific powers with "governance" as the openended deliberations of concerned citizens—organized here as syntegrations on "world governance," ad hoc assemblages transverse to global entities such as the United Nations. The point of such syntegrations, as I understand it, would be to articulate a range of issues and concerns that might not otherwise figure in the political discourse of nations and their aggregates—another attempt to open up a space for disussion outside the frame of established politics (cf. Beer's contrast between algedometers and opinion polls).
49. This quotation and the following are from I. Beer (2002).
50. Phone interview with Stafford Beer, 23 June 1999; conversation with Allenna Leonard, 22 June 2002.
51 . Beer (1994b, 227): "In my teens I had set down this statement: 'Ther
e is only one mystery: why or how is there anything.' " In an interesting echo of Grey Walter, Beer also remarks that "there appears to be a complicated set of rules for computing with neurons which prevents many of them from working at once. The neurons are electrically triggered, and if the rules are broken we get an electrical overload. This is the cybernetic explanation (in brief) of what we usually call epilepsy, or (perhaps) what our forefathers called 'possession' " (Beer 1965, 294).
52. I am not sure how meaningful these words might be for readers, but to inject a personal note, they ring true for me. They remind me of my days as a postdoctoral researcher in theoretical particle physics, spending weeks and months trying and failing to understand mathematically how quarks interact, while being painfully aware that the quarks themselves were doing their own thing all the time, in real time, "getting the answer continuously right," throughout the cosmos (or so I believed at the time). That kind of experience leaves one with a feeling for scientific knowledge as a pale simulacrum of the world (or not even that in my case), a simulacrum one nevertheless finds it hard not to mistake for the thing in itself. That, I think, is the origin of Beer's awe and wonder at the indefinite excess of the world itself in relation to our representational capacity.
53. Beer never used the word "hylozoism," as far as I know, though the protocyberneticist Kenneth Craik (chap. 3) did. Speaking of his philosophy of mind, Craik (1943, 58) remarks: "It would be a hylozoist rather than a materialistic scheme. It would attribute consciousness and conscious organisation to matter whenever it is physically organised in certain ways." The cybernetic artist David Medalla also described himself as a hylozoist (chap. 7, n. 51).
54. This is my performative gloss. In second-order cybernetics, Spencer Brown's Laws of Form(chap. 5, n. 25) is often invoked in this context, the idea that drawing a distinction creates two terms and a relation between them from what was originally a unity.
55. I do not mean to suggest here that the Christian tradition is entirely lacking in resources for articulating a spiritual stance like Beer's. Beer (like Laing) was happy to draw on a whole variety of traditions including Christianity in mapping out his own spiritual path, but the emphasis was always on mystical experiences and practices, and Eastern traditions thematize these in a way that modern Christianity does not.
56. I am grateful to Allenna Leonard for giving me a copy of the manuscript. Page citations below are from this version. An unpaginated version is now available online at www.chroniclesofwizardprang.com.
57. Thus, in chapter 17 Prang contests a returning disciple's Buddhist understanding of time and reincarnation, suggesting that she is trapped within a "paradigm," meaning a "not negotiable model" (Beer 1989b, 149).
58. Kripal's (2007, 18–21) history of the Esalen Institute (see above, chap. 5) includes extended discussions of tantra, which he associates with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. "Whereas ascetic Asian traditions . . . tend to privilege strongly the transcendent order . . . and consequently denigrate or renounce the everyday world (samsara)as illusory (maya)or as impermanent (anitya),the Tantric traditions tend to insist rather on the essential unity of the transcendent and immanent orders and in fact often privilege the immanent over the transcendent in their rituals and meditations." Hence Kripal's conception of "the enlightenment of the body" and the fact that a Web search for "tantra" leads largely to sources on tantric sex. Eliade (1969) discusses tantric yoga at great length, emphasizing its embodied and performative aspects, as well as its connections to magic and alchemy. All of this helps to illuminate what I describe below as Beer's "earthy" form of spirituality.
59. Prang puts this phrase in quotes, and continues. "You couldn't define that, and besides the phrase was associated with strong drugs. Candles and incense have effects on the nervous system too, but you never have a 'bad trip' " (Beer 1989b, 41). One can think of Beer's demonstrations of immunity to pain, mentioned earlier by his brother, as also hinging on a technology of the self.
60. When Beer described himself as teaching meditative yoga on the inside covers of his later books, it was the transmission of this form of knowledge and practice that he was referring to. Most of the conversations and interactions in Prangtake place between Prang/Beer and his "shishyas," female apprentices, especially Perny, his current apprentice in the stories.
61. Beer 1989b, chap. 2, p. 15; chap. 5, p. 36; chap. 15, p. 116; chap. 6, p. 51; chap. 15, p. 119; chap. 15, p. 124; chap. 16, p. 142; chap. 5, p. 42; chap. 18, p. 166.
62. On siddhis,see, for example, Eliade (1969), Kripal's (2007) history of the Esalen Institute, and an enormous compendium of strange performances published by one of Esalen's founders: Murphy (1992).
63. He adds that he used the enneagram in devising the layout of his set of paintings relating to the Requiem Mass that were exhibited at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool in 1992 and again in 1993. For more on this exhibition, see Beer (1993b).
64. I am grateful to Joe Truss for showing me the enneagrammatic trajectories in a model icosahedron (there turn out to be many of them), though I doubt whether I could find them again unaided. Beer (1994b) offers a textual and diagrammatic description of how to find them, but I cannot claim to follow it. Properties of three-dimensional geometries are extremely hard to grasp without a three-dimensional object to refer to; one could describe Beer and Truss's explorations of the icosahedron as genuine research in this sense.
65. Beer also discusses other mandalas that can be associated with the icosahedron. One can, for example, construct a dodecahedron from twelve pentagons within the icosahedron, and Beer comments that the "central dodecahedron thus became inviolate in my mind, and because for years I had been using these forms as mandalas in meditation, it acquired the private name of the 'sacred space.' . . . I shall add that the sacred space 'breathes' with the cosmos through invisibly fine tubes connecting the centre of each dodecahedral face to its orthogonal vertex. The bridge from this mystical to the normal description lies in Aristotle's pneuma, the chi of Chinese medicine, and ends up (quite safely) with the segments of polar axes which subtend the dodecahedron" (1994b, 192–93). Discussing certain planar projections of the icosahedron, he remarks that "many Indian mandalas reflect this configuration" (195).
66. Beer develops a formalism to explain this theory of consciousness in Beyond Dispute,chapter 13, "Self-Reference in Icosahedral Space," with acknowledgement of inspiration fromHeinz von Foerster. Beer, Pask, and von Foerster were among the leading contributors to the development of a cybernetic theory of consciousness, also elaborated in Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's theory of "autopoiesis." Beer wrote a preface for their Autopoiesis and Cognition(1980; as mentioned before, Varela was a Buddhist). I have two reasons for not going further into the cybernetic analysis of consciousness. One is that it seems to me largely theoretical, rather than connecting to novel domains of worldly practice. The other is that I do not understand it (or have perhaps failed to get some key point). I am reminded of the idea common to early cybernetics that closed loops of neurons might be entailed in memory, and I can see how that works, but I cannot see how reentrant loops connect to any idea of consciousness that I can grasp.
67. To make the contrast it might help to go back again to AI as a model of the modern brain and the rational self. AI has few if any resources to make bridges to the spiritual.
68. Leadbeater (1990, 40): "The radiating spokes of the chakras supply force to these sympathetic plexuses to assist them in their relay work; in the present state of our knowledge it seems to me rash to identify the chakras with the plexuses, as some writers appear to have done." Evidently Beer was rash enough. For some background on the British occult tradition in which Leadbeater's writings can be situated, see Owen (2004).
69. In this conection, I think of The Web of Life(1996) by one of the leading thinkers of the New Age movement, Fritjof Capra. This book is one of the best popular introductions to contemporary work on complexity and self-organization (see chap. 4 above), tying t
hem into a Buddhist perspective on being while acknowledging Capra's many personal contacts with key figures in cybernetics and related fields, including Ilya Prigogine, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and Heinz von Foerster. Beer had no active connection to the New Age movement as far as I know (though perhaps he might have if "Wizard Prang" had been published). His tantric teaching in Wales appears to have been a distinctly old-fashioned operation, not, for example, advertised in the New Age literature. On the other hand, a few leaps of association are enough to bridge the gap. Beer (1994b, 203) mentions that the monk who gave him his enneagrammatic mandala (above) was based in Santiago at a "mystical mission known as Arica," and that after leaving Chile he learned that Arica's founder, Oscar Ichazo, used enneagrams in his teaching on "how to break the tyranny of ego." One can learn more about Ichazo in John Lilly's book The Center of the Cyclone(1972), which recounts Ichazo's attempts to develop courses in his own esoteric system and describes Lilly and Ichazo's early involvement with the Esalen Institute (see also Kripal 2007, 177–78). I discussed Esalen as an epicenter of the New Age movement briefly in chapter 5 (nn. 18, 19, 25, 43), including tentative connections to Beer and Laing, and Laing met Ichazo during his trip to the United States in 1972, the trip on which he also met Elizabeth Fehr (see chap. 5 and Burston 1996, 121). Esalen was also one of the origins in the United States of the "human potential" movement growing out of the writings of Huxley and others, and, as mentioned above, Michael Murphy shared the cybernetic and spiritual fascination with strange performances and wrote a striking book, The Future of the Body(Murphy 1992), very much in the tradition of William James (1902) and Aldous Huxley but thematizing more strongly the supernormal powers that accompany spiritual practice.
The Cybernetic Brain Page 59