I want to make a subtle change to how we can think of organizations as living systems. My purpose is to improve the way of thinking about organizations as extimate symptoms. Essentially, it is us speaking beings who are alive. Whether or not an organization is alive depends on how we choose to use it. For an organization to be ‘alive’, then, we need to be thinking in terms of its Libidinal Economy of Discourse (LEoD) being supported by its organization of behavioral strategies.[1]
Speaking being
To be a speaking being starts from understanding ourselves to be biological systems qua living systems. To this we can then add the entanglement of our neural networks with our embodiment. The subtle change is first in understanding a living system as having a ‘perverse’ structure that is a quadripod dynamic structuration of relations between the four causes (Figure 1), the quadripod making three ontic, epistemic and relational ‘cuts’ in ways that are singular to its way of being alive. Second, it is in understanding that a biological living system exhibits some combination of four different kinds of behavioral strategy, each realizing a different relation between the selection-replication-repair-metabolism quadripod through which it deals with the ‘reality’ with which it is structurally coupled.
Figure 1: The ‘Living System’ Quadripod
The Lacanian quadripod (Figure 2) then describes the entanglement of our neural networks with our embodiment as a living system. It is this entanglement, in itself radically unconscious, that gives rise to (what Freud referred to as) a ‘psychic apparatus’. In this entanglement, the individual experiences an impotent relation of ‘truth’ to his or her singular relation to an originating loss, the repetition of which is experienced as the production of a discourse. Realized socially through the Peircean quadripod[2], this gives rise to four different forms of discourse. Each one reflects a different generative strategy for bringing the social into relation with this radically unconscious lack, each a different way of being in relation to pleasure/pain.
Figure 2: The Lacanian Quadripod
From this follows the distinction between a socially-mediated generative relation to pleasure/pain (the ‘pleasure principle’) and a perverse relation to pleasure/pain, pleasure/pain arising as an indirect effect of how we feel required to deal with our ‘reality’ (the ‘reality principle’). The resultant LEoD, relating the generative to the perverse, is then an emergent effect of how we live our life. The three-moments-and-three-crises speak about transformations in how we identify with the ‘truths’ in how we are living that life. In these terms, the organizations that an individual ‘uses’ are extimate symptoms of his or her way of living his or her life.
Organizations as extimate symptoms
This brings us to our experience of organizations as mediating the way our identifications are supported by the nature of the ‘truths’ that they provide support for. In a creative process, an individual seeks to be supported in a generative relation to his or her ‘truths’, even though this support may in fact be being constrained to a perverse relation dictated by (what are presented as) organizational necessities. The presence of an impasse between the generative and the perverse takes the form of a strategy ceiling[3], the overcoming of which leads to a process in which the double task of balancing individual need with role requirement has itself to be doubled in order also to balance the interests of the value-capturing organization with the interests of those benefiting from its value-creating roles.
The level of this strategy ceiling is an effect of the nature of the identifications of those individuals with the power to command obedience to the organization’s behavioral strategies. Some of these identifications will be with the ‘truths’ of the organization’s behavioral strategies. Some, however, may be with other aspects of their lives. The LEoD, then, is a way of describing the systemic characteristics of the unconscious dynamics between those individuals with the power to command obedience.
In this LEoD, the four generative discourses have a ‘live’ relation to the unconscious and lack. In contrast, the four perverse discourses, while inherently unstable as ways of giving agency to the ‘truth’ of a discourse, are stabilized by their ‘truth’ being identified with some aspect of the behavioral strategies of the organization. Each generative discourse in a LEoD is in a different kind of relation to each of the four perverse discourses through relations of dependency, pairing, filiation[4] and fight-flight. The eight Lines of Development[5] refer to those aspects of an organization’s leadership and behavioral strategies that correspond to the different forms of support they are providing to the LEoD.
Why, then, would we want an organization to be alive? Because for it not to be alive is to risk its becoming maladaptive to its environment with all the consequences for itself and others in the wider society of scapegoating, turning a blind eye and the discluding of ‘otherness’. To avoid this maladaptation, there has to be a circulation of discourses within the LEoD, with which comes the ability to engage creatively with
- what is the organization’s architectural place as a value-creator within the structural ecosystems of which it is a part;
- what is the externalist impact of accelerating demand tempos on its value-creating place; and
- what these architectural and externalist consistencies require of its internalist ways of capturing value.
Notes
[1] These are the r-type (archaea), c-type (protobiota), K-type (bacteria) and P-type (eukaryota) behavioral strategies identified with different ways of creating value aka being ‘selected’.
[2] In the Peircean quadripod, the relation to doubt is added to the Peircean three: S1 = Thirdness, S2 = Firstness, $ = Secondness and (a) = relation to doubt.
[3] An employee may question behaviors below the ceiling, questioning behaviors above the ceiling is ‘none of your business’.
[4] Filiation = follow what I say and not what I do, contrasting with dependency as the reverse of this.
[5] Leadership: Edge Outcomes (Hysteric), Leadership and Education (Master), Doctrine and Operational Concepts (University), and Situational Understanding (Analyst).
Behavioral strategies: Materiel and Technology (r-type), Facilities, Infrastructure and Logistics (c-type), Personnel and Shared Culture (K-type), Mission Alignment and Interoperability (P-type).