A Thousand Plateaus

For my sins I have been reading, or osmosing, A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze, G and Guattari, F, London, The Athlone Press, 1988) and encountered an interesting section on the apparatus of capture.

Referring to Dumézil's thesis on political sovereignty, they suggest that political sovereignty has two poles:

1. The fearsome magician-emperor who "operates by capture, bonds, knots and nets"; who is a one-eyed man using signs and symbols principally.

2. The jurist-priest-king who "proceeds by treaties, pacts and contracts"; who is a one-armed man using tools and mechanisms principally.

Here we are talking about two types of hierarchy, though it's clear that the authors would think it absurd to value one above the other or to suggest that one precedes the other in any sense. However, they go on to talk about the State and the sense that any mechanism of governing or running a State in some sense anticipates this kind of authoritarian control and either flows from it or grows up as a reaction against it or its potential.

For State read Organization.

So I'm wondering whether heterarchical forms of governance must always assume a position of opposition to hierarchy and either be imposed by the jurist-priest-CEO or emerge as a means of disabling the potential of the fearsome magician-CEO. (See also the earlier blog on imposing heterarchy at http://www.triarchypress.co.uk/blog/2006/03/imposing-heterarchy_31.html)

Education, Complexity, Luhmann and Clarkson

We received the following letter from Jan Ritsema, after he had heard about The Three Ways of Getting Things Done. I’ve reproduced it in full because it raises further issues about education. (See also the blog on Triarchy Theory in Education). But it also provoked a Google run-around which I describe at the end.

I am working in France, in an old convent which I bought last year (www.pa-f.net our website under construction) on an educational experiment of which the principles of self organizing and self motorizing are essential. In order to do away with the highly repressive methods of the command and control types of teaching and the simple minded cause and effect principles.

I feel very much acquainted with Jacques Rancière (emeritus professor at Paris VIII) who wrote The Ignorant Schoolmaster.

By starting this educational experiment I want to create an example that "students", I prefer to call them "not-yet professionals, can teach themselves much more than is allowed to them now. This will prevent them being stupefied by the educational system. On the contrary it will enhance their general intelligence.

I am a theatre director and business man (publication and bookshop) but with strong deschooling and open source principles.

This year we made a theatre production in English partly on the changes coming from the possible Hydrogen Revolution called KNOWH2OW and the year before a dance production, called BLINDSPOT, partly based on Luhmann's Systems Theory.

I am 61. Dutch nationality. Living in Brussels and near Reims in France.

We seem to have quite something in common as far as our interests and visions concern.

I start all this in France without any financial support, but with the strong support of the international experimental contemporary performing arts community.

I try to connect to people with similar quests.

Hopefully we can have some contact in one way or another.

Best regards,

Jan Ritsema

I Googled Luhmann out of interest and found a fascinating item at http://www.geocities.com/~n4bz/lusoc/lusoc1.htm

I quote just one extract:

In addition to increasing variety the hierarchical structure of complex systems allows individual levels of the system to interact as though they were simple systems The ant, for example, is a highly complex organism. But as Simon explains. seen as behaving organism wending its way across the beach it is quite simple. When we are considering the problem of finding his way home the ant can be considered as a machine with one predominant property, an instinct for knowing the direction to its nest. Each obstacle, then becomes a single isolated event, a simple choice between often arbitrary outcomes The property which allows us to consider the ant in this manner is what Simon called "near-decomposability," which simply means that each level of a complex system has a limited amount of autonomy and within those limits can be considered a simple system with only that variety faced by this level to contend with. Luhmann frequently used the term "reduction of complexity" in his works. If we see that the mechanism he is referring to is this property of complexity of reducing the amount of variety a system is forced to contend with through hierarchical structure, we can overcome the redundancy in Luhmann's descriptions and at the same time open the door to more and deeper insights into social structure.

This perhaps provokes questions about the extent to which autonomy can exist in an organization and the necessity for hierarchy as a means reducing unwanted variability.

At the same time, my search for Luhmann took me via chaos and complexity to a paper by Professor Petruska Clarkson at the Society for Organizational Learning - which stresses, amongst many other things that:

organisations who are surviving and even thriving in the light of an increasingly unknowable future have had to become more open to disorientation, turbulence, confusion, conflict and unpredictable changes. Therefore, new knowledge, attitudes and competencies are now required and enacted.

Most people probably recognise these twin requirements: for flexibility to manage the unknowable and for systems to manage the stresses of flexibility. That’s the kind of double bind that Clarkson is equally comfortable writing about in a psychotherapeutic context: she happens to be one of the country’s foremost experts (and probably the best current writer) on Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy. But you may also know her as a sex and sexuality guru and author. Truly a Renaissance woman for the 21st century.

Values, beliefs and information

The feedback to us at Triarchy on The Three Ways of Getting Things Done has been incredibly positive in that people know that they feel oppressed, often depressed, by hierarchical organizations and that they are excited by the idea that there may be alternatives. However, what they really want and need is to find helpful ways of making the change away from hierarchy to more dispersed systems. It is the 'how to' that is difficult. This may be what the debating pages here end up being concerned with -but it is not going to be easy...
I am not going to offer any pragmatic suggestions about how to move from hierarchy to flatter systems but raise a question that seeks to engage with Peter Farnden’s critique (read it on our Forum ) of Gerard’s book. I thought that, as we are communicating here via the internet, it might be interesting to consider this by thinking about global communication as an example of a flat system. First, I consider its impact on hierarchy. Then, I ask whether, as a flat system, it ends up behaving like hierarchies in terms of power and ultimate control. If so, how should we be viewing our place in the global network organization? My thoughts play through Peter’s comments on values and information.

The internet provides the freedom for people to participate in a flat system, and anyone who contributes to debates and blogs forms part of revolutionary social change in the way we organise ourselves.

An example of this is the way recent blogs from Iraq have impacted on our view of the war. These views, no doubt, put pressure on governments to make changes, if nothing else to the way in which they present and justify their intervention in Iraq. From this, it is fair to say that the voices from the net are seriously beginning to impact on and create tensions in hierarchical systems. Not just on governments, but also, for example, on newspapers. Because they are changing our view of publishing, of professional journalism and even on what constitutes literature (a recent blog from Iraq has been published and put forward for a literary prize...).

The mobile network is another loose organization and a technological tool that impacts on the dissemination of information.

I was recently speaking to someone who works in the military who gave me an example of how a voice from the bottom can seriously put pressure on those at the top of the command and control system. He mentioned that a senior member of the government had spoken by mobile phone to a private serving in Iraq. Having listened to the soldier's take on the war, including some criticisms, the government member used this view to immediately put pressure on people at the top. On one level, this is a sign of democracy in process – a rapid means to change. On the surface, that seems to present a good value arising out of the democratization of the hierarchy. But in reality, it may do little more than demonstrate the politician's need to interfere by using the soldier's tale as a tool to exercise power (there was no suggestion that he checked out the soldier's take before having a go at the top brass). This illustrates why Peter's point about power, values, information and supervision is a valid one.

I have no doubt that the guys (almost certainly!) at the top of the military considered that the intervention of the government agent after an informal conversation with a trooper showed a distinct lack of judgment, and probably an ill-informed one too! But how are we to decide?

Peter writes that:

All organizations are in some way in a principal-agent relationship and there are always the problems created by distortions in information and power between the two (agent & principal). Hierarchy is in a sense one response to this problem through the roles of supervision, roles and policy.

As the voices from the net begin to impress themselves on the hierarchies of newspapers and governments, the problem of 'whose values' raises its head. So too, does the question of who the principal is and who the agent. That is why the exercise of power and the problem of distortions in information are an issue in flat systems.
No doubt the military pointed this out to the politician!

As far as the net is concerned, this is a hot potato. Who exactly supervises and selects the excellent from the pernicious and ill-informed? (In the case of this website, by the way, it will be members of our team!)

So, Peter's question - How do heterarchy and responsible autonomy address these problems? - is an extremely valid and important one. He is right that hierarchy seems to be strong and clear about how it can supervise the value system. But it is probably the case in heterarchy and responsible autonomy too; the question of values and parameters must, as such, be the key to their respective success or failure.

The web and the mobile form complex, flat organizations. It is hard to work out just how to inculcate values and beliefs into flatter systems because the question always remains - whose values? If none are imposed you enculture relativism. But already most people in the west think that the fewer controls on net-voices the better - despite the dangers of the dissemination of bad information. This is exactly because we understand that supervision means someone else deciding for us what 'bad' is. And yet most of us hate the idea of free access to child pornography, right-wing politicos and extremist religious views. This is because we recognise the dangers to cultural values that most of us still share. We will trust to a hope that we will respond by resisting such information. But we know that some won’t.

So, once again, Peter's question about values, information and heterarchy and responsible autonomy hits the mark. But at the same time that we try to work out whether a common sense rejection of some information will generally prevail, are we missing something else out? In his book, Gerard talks about the hegemony of hierarchy. What this means is that the cultural ideologies are so deeply embedded that we don’t consciously recognise them, but subscribe to them without even being aware of it.

The question I would like to ask is, therefore, whether we should be thinking more carefully about the likelihood of a hegemony of heterarchy? How do we learn to recognise hegemony? For I suspect that the reality of the global network with its claims on democratization and freedom may not be quite what we think it is. We may seek supervision of fraudsters, paedophiles and terrorists on the web. But fears of supervision and invasions of our privacy are real too. And Google's recent acceptance of censorship on the Chinese web-search engine exposes the ability of this ‘invisible’ supervisory hand to control the heterarchy of the web. Hence, the recent new debate on the power of Google to survey and, potentially, intervene in all our lives. And if Google can do it, so, arguably, can governments and other institutions of power.

We are all going to have to work through these issues. One approach would be to hone our skills in ideological criticism – the ability to read the gaps and omissions in information that we are presented with. This skill applies just as much to a hegemony of heterarchy as it does to one of hierarchy. As a skill it will not entirely answer Peter’s question about the need for values, the supervision of values, and the ability to work out whose values they really are. But it sets us on our guard. This must be set in the context of the need and dangers of freedom. It is going to be just as critical to work out whether web freedom is real or being interfered with – and if the latter, to find out who is doing the distorting.

This is quite a challenge. But it is a necessary one because, whether we like it or not, the times, they are a-changing. I guess that we have to try to ensure is that flatter systems don’t just end up oppressing and depressing us as much as the hierarchical systems of which we are so critical. It is a question of being mindful about frying pans and fires.

Rosie Beckham