Source: SoSE 2018 – Paris

Drawbacks to visual thinking

 Mark Nicoll

Continues in source: Drawbacks to visual thinking • Meaning Guide

How to bridge the complexity gap

My colleagues and I have been studying the complexity gap for about 15 years now.

It all started when we were hired in 2002 by a U. S. federal agency to conduct research on what it takes for leaders to make good decisions under VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) conditions.

I’m using the term leader here, fully aware that some people might use managerinstead.

We began the project with a study of leader decision making, ultimately interviewing several hundred employees representing every level in a large federal agency’s employee hierarchy. The only group we were unable to interview were leaders at the very top.

Thinking complexity

The interviews were wrapped around a set of “wicked” workplace problems — complex problems with VUCA features and no “correct” solutions. We studied these interviews, scoring them for their complexity level with the Lectical Assessment System, while thoroughly documenting the ideas and skills demonstrated in responses (so we could construct descriptions of how ideas and skills changed from level to level).

Role complexity

As we completed the first phase of the project, which focused on thinkingcomplexity, we began developing an approach to determining role complexity, again using the Lectical Assessment System. This was an interesting challenge. We settled on an approach that started with a basic Lectical Analysis of easily observable increases in the number and complexity of stakeholder interests associated with decision making ateach higher level in the agency’s hierarchy. Then we zoomed in, examining the complexity associated with the work of different departments within the organization, and finally, the complexity associated with work in specific roles.

The figure on the left shows the results of the thinking and role complexity analyses. The basic story here is that the complexity of roles increases in a linear fashion as we move up the hierarchy, but the average complexity of leaders’ thinking does not.

However, that’s not the whole story. From semi-skilled roles to entry level roles, role complexity and thinking complexity are pretty well aligned. Then there’s a flattening out of the curve from the mid- to upper-levels, and a return to growth in higher work levels that’s parallel to, but well below, the role complexity curve.

Our client wasn’t surprised by this pattern. Our client reported that the agency routinely hired for senior roles by going outside the agency — because existing employees were not developing the skills required in higher roles. We weren’t surprised either. The agency had a command and control culture. Nothing stifles development like command and control, because there is generally no role for critical reflection — essential for development — at lower levels in a command and control hierarchy.

Continued in source: How to bridge the complexity gap – Theo Dawson – Medium

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The social world as morphogenesis

Critical realism has progressed far since Roy Bhaskar’s early writings on the subject in A Realist Theory of Science.  One of the most important thinkers to have introduced new ideas into the debate is Margaret Archer. Several books in the mid-1990s represented genuinely original contributions to issues about the nature of social ontology and methodology, including especially Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach and Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory.

Archer’s work addresses several topics of interest to me, including especially the agent-structure dichotomy. This is key to the twin concerns I have for “actor-centered social science” and “autonomous meso-level explanations”.  Anthony Giddens offers one way of thinking about the relationship between agents and structures (link).  Archer takes issue with the most fundamental aspect of Giddens’s view — his argument that agents and structures are conceptually inseparable. Archer argues instead for a form of “dualism” about agents and structures — that each pole needs to be treated separately and in its own terms.   (Chapter 5 provides a detailed discussion of both Bhaskar and Giddens on levels of the social.) She acknowledges, of course, that social structures depend on the individuals who make them up; but she doesn’t believe that this basic fact tells us anything about how to analyze or explain facts about either agents or structures.  Here are the opening paragraphs of Realist Social Theory.

Social reality is unlike any other because of its human constitution. It is different from natural reality whose defining feature is self-subsistence: for its existence does not depend upon us, a fact which is not compromised by our human ability to intervene in the world of nature and change it. Society is more different still from transcendental reality, where divinity is both self-subsistent and unalterable at our behest; qualities which are not contravened by responsiveness to human intercession. The nascent ‘social sciences’ had to confront this entity, society, and deal conceptually with its three unique characteristics.

Firstly, that it is inseparable from its human components because the very existence of society depends in some way upon our activities. Secondly, that society is characteristically transformable; it has not immutable form or even preferred state.  It is like nothing but itself, and what precisely it is like at any time depends upon human doings and their consequences.  Thirdly, however, neither are we immutable as social agents, for what we are and what we do as social beings are also affected by the society in which we live and by our very efforts to transform it. (1)

Continues in source: Understanding Society: The social world as morphogenesis

As if on cue, via CX Digest, mathematics and underlying patterns.

A re-watch of ‘All Watch OVer by Machines of Loving Grace part 2 – the Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts’ raises some interesting questions.

(Two openly available versions below)

Wikipedia summary from All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (TV series) – Wikipedia

Part 2. ‘The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts’

This episode investigates how machine ideas such as cybernetics and systems theory were applied to natural ecosystems, and how this relates to the false idea that there is a balance of nature. Cybernetics has been applied to human beings in an attempt to build societies without central control, self organising networks built of people, based on a fantasy view of nature.

Arthur Tansley had a dream where he shot his wife. He wanted to know what it meant, so he studied Sigmund Freud. However, one part of Freud’s theory was that the human brain is an electrical machine. Tansley became convinced that, as the brain was interconnected, so was the whole of the natural world, in networks he called ecosystems, which he believed were inherently stable and self-correcting, and which regulated nature as if it were a machine.

Jay Forrester was an early pioneer in cybernetic systems who believed that brains, cities and even societies live in networks of feedback loops that control them, and he thought computers could determine the effects of the feedback loops. Cybernetics therefore viewed humans as nodes in networks, as machines.

The ecology movement also adopted this idea and viewed the natural world as systems, as it explained how the natural system could stabilise the natural world, via natural feedback loops.

Norbert Wiener laid out the position that humans, machines and ecology are simply nodes in a network in his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, and this book became the bible of cybernetics.

Howard T. Odum

Howard T. Odum and Eugene Odum were brothers, and both of them ecologists. Howard collected data from ecological systems and built electronic networks to simulate them. His brother Eugene then took these ideas to make them the heart of ecology, and the hypothesis then became a certainty. However, they had distorted the idea and simplified the data to an extraordinary degree. That ecology was balanced became conventional wisdom among scientists.

Meanwhile, in the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller invented a radically new kind of structure, the geodesic dome, which emulated ecosystems in being made of highly connected, relatively weak parts. It was applied to the radomes covering early warning systems in the Arctic. His other system-based ideas inspired the counterculture movement. Communes of people who saw themselves as nodes in a network, without hierarchy, and applied feedback to try to control and stabilise their societies, and used his geodesic domes as habitats. These societies mostly broke up within a few years.

Also in the 1960s, Stewart Brand filmed a demonstration of a networked computer system with a graphics display, mouse and keyboardthat he believed would save the world by empowering people, in a similar way to the communes, to be free as individuals.

In 1967, Richard Brautigan published the poetry work All Watched Over by machines of Loving Grace. The title poem called for a cybernetic ecological utopia consisting of a fusion of computers and mammals living in perfect harmony and stability. The arguments in this part of the documentary closely echo Andrew Kirk’s 2007 environmental history of the California-appropriate technology movement, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism.

By the 1970s, new problems such as overpopulation, limited natural resources and pollution that could not be solved by normal hierarchical systems had arrived. Jay Forrester stated that he knew how to solve this problem. He applied systems theory to the problem and drew a cybernetic system diagram for the world. This was turned into a computer model, which predicted population collapse. This became the basis of the model that was used by the Club of Rome, and the findings from this were published in The Limits to Growth. Forrester then argued for zero growth in order to maintain a steady equilibrium within the capacity of the Earth.

Jan Smuts

However, this was opposed by many people within the environmental movement, since the model did not allow for people to change their values to stabilise the world, and they argued that the model tried to maintain and enforce the current political hierarchy. Arthur Tansleywho had invented the term ecosystem, had once accused Field Marshal Jan Smuts of the “abuse of vegetational concepts”. Smuts had invented a philosophy called holism, where everyone had a ‘rightful place’, which was to be managed by the white race. The 70s protestors claimed that the same conceptual abuse of the supposed natural order was occurring, that it was really being used for political control.

At the time, there was a general belief in the stability of natural systems. However, cracks started to appear when a study was made of the predator-prey relationship of wolf and elks. It was found that wild population swings had occurred over centuries. Other studies then found huge variations, and a significant lack of homeostasis in natural systems. George Van Dyne then tried to build a computer model to try to simulate a complete ecosystem based on extensive real-world data, to show how the stability of natural systems actually worked. To his surprise, the computer model did not stabilize like the Odums’ electrical model had. The reason for this lack of stabilization was that he had used extensive data which more accurately reflected reality, whereas the Odums and other ecologists had “ruthlessly simplified nature.” The scientific idea had thus been shown to fail, but the popular idea remained in currency, and even grew as it apparently offered the possibility of a new egalitarian world order.

In 2003, a wave of spontaneous revolutions swept through Asia and Europe. Coordinated only via the internet, nobody seemed to be in overall charge, and no overall aims except self-determination and freedom were apparent. This seemed to justify the beliefs of the computer utopians.

However, the freedom from these revolutions lasted for only a short time. Curtis compares them with the hippie communes, all of which had been broken up within a few years by, “the very thing that was supposed to have been banished: power.” Aggressive members of the group began to bully the weaker ones, who were unable to band together in their own defence because formal power structures were prohibited by the commune’s rules, and even intervention against bullying by benevolent individuals was discouraged.

Curtis closes the episode by stating that it has become apparent that while the self-organising network is good at organising change, it is much less good at what comes next; networks leave people helpless in the face of people already in power in the world.

Critically, the wikipedia for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature includes:

Despite being discredited among ecologists, the theory is widely held to be true by the general public, with one authority calling it an “enduring myth”.^[2] At least in Midwestern America, the “balance of nature” idea was shown to be widely held by both science majors and the general student population.^[1] In a study at the University of Patras, educational sciences students were asked to reason about the future of ecosystems which suffered human-driven disturbances. Subjects agreed that it was very likely for the ecosystems to fully recover their initial state, referring to either a ‘recovery process’ which restores the initial ‘balance’, or specific ‘recovery mechanisms’ as an ecosystem’s inherent characteristic.^[7] In a 2017 study, Ampatzidis and Ergazaki discuss the learning objectives and design criteria that a learning environment for non-biology major students should meet to support them challenge the “balance of nature” idea.^[8]

The concessions to ‘superseded by chaos theory and catastrophe theory’ seem to me to provide an immediate way out (being, it seems to me, entirely systems theory and demonstrating maintenance of whole-system equilibrium in some meaningful sense), and also the demonstrations of homeostasis are still valid, even if demonstrations of non-homeostasis are also valid. And systems thinking and cybernetics, in any non-trivially dumb form, do not need any global, holistic or metaphysical ‘tendency to stability’ to justify their existence! And even if such a fundamental Hegelian-like grounding were needed, I’d plump for entropy and emergence any day…

BUT – is this something important? Useful? Have I finally understood some point of where complexity theory and ‘living systems’ people talk dismissively of ‘mechanistic’ systems thinking and cybernetics?

I don’t actually think so – just see my recent Andrew Pickering post for a much richer reading of cybernetics (I’m putting Adam Curtis in the ‘George Monbiot’ annoying, occasionally interesting, usually ideological and sometimes willingly lying box for now – though like the Jan de Bont Award for Worst Screenplay, the crown is unlikely to be taken from the title-holder in a rush ;-)) – but it would be interesting if people could respond….

I mean ‘there was no difference between humans and machines’, ‘both were just nodes in networks’ – that kind of characterisation actually makes me quite angry – I can open any page of the transcript of the Macy Conferences at random and find something to definitively refute that! Grr….

ROY MADRON

Completing ‘Super-Smart Democracies: Dissolving Neoliberalism, Managerialism and Elitism’. Former Research Fellow in Participation Research Unit at MBS.

May 11

Continues in source: Socialists and Systems-Thinkers Can Co-create a Better World.

Systems Thinking for 21st-Century Cities: A Beginners Introduction — Part #1

Why it matters, what it means, and 3 steps to start

Our 21st century demands leadership — and many are turning their eyes towards our world’s cities.

Why? By 2050, 65% of our global population — an estimated 6 billion humans — will live in cities. Cities, accounting for just 2% of earth’s landmass, produce 70% of global GDP, 70% of global C02 emissions, and 66% of energy consumption, they are growing in political power, and enliven society as cultural hubs. One could say that cities are our bellwethers, our global pulse points…as cities go, so goes the world.

To take a pulse today, cities indicate a global system in distress. The symptoms and warning signs are clear. Cape Town is set to run out of water. San Francisco is failing their homeless population. Beijing is enveloped in critical smog levels. San Juan is rolling with power outages. Caracas is stricken with hunger. My home city, Philadelphia, is grappling with 25% poverty.

For decades, scientists and urban experts alike have stated that cities are — borrowing a term from ecology — ecosystems, hybrid ecosystems consisting of both natural and human-made elements. Like natural ecosystems, cities evolve through a combination of chaos and order. The late urban writer and activist, Jane Jacobs, once said, “cities happen to be problems in organized complexity” and warned against predicting city’s futures. “People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists [today]…are always wrong.”

Undoubtedly, the future of our global cities will be emergent in ways we may or may not predict — from social uprisings like new populism, new technologies like blockchain, or climate events like Hurricane Sandy. Yet, we are not powerless in our city ecosystems. Chaos is paired with order, and we have power — with the right leadership, knowledge, and tools — to reimagine a new, 21st-century order for our cities and our world to thrive.

Tackling wicked problems with systems thinking

Today’s cities (and our world-at-large) face wicked problems, problems that are “difficult or impossible to solve…because of complex interdependencies.” One can imagine the complex interdependencies in Cape Town’s current water crisis, for example — natural (drought, groundwater), human (attitudes, household usage, population growth), social (data, media coverage), physical (leaking pipes, desalination equipment availability), political (government leadership, policies), and industrial (water use for industry and agriculture).

Solving a city crisis or challenge — Cape Town’s water crisis or San Francisco’s homelessness – can seem impossible, especially if we take a reductionist approach. Mainstream education and culture often reinforce reductionist thinking — breaking down wholes into parts and studying parts in isolation from their roots. Reductionism, in the case of wicked problems, isolates problems from the complex systems in which they operate, and treats a problem’s observed symptoms instead of its root or systemic causes.

Continues in source: Systems Thinking for 21st-Century Cities: A Beginners Introduction — Part #1

Emergence is cool. It’s what happens when things interact in new ways and produce unexpected results. But it ain’t the only game in town. Cosmologist George Ellis explains in this lecture* how complex systems do a dance of give-and-take between higher level, top-down causation and bottom up emergence.

We all like for our world to make sense, so when it gets messy and unclear we look for how it can come back to order, and one of the best places to look for change is the surface — the day to day stuff, like us humans interacting with our environment, the disorder itself. Emergence.

But Ellis explains that there’s a ceiling to how much complexity you can get from bottom-up emergence before you once again encounter top-down causation. In other words there’s a limit to how much sway emergence (including innovation) has on a system before built-in mechanisms kick in and reinforce the higher structures upon the lower.

This happens in even the most innovative cultures and the flattest workplaces. Eventually, a higher order such as your founder’s directive, your budget, prevailing attitudes or regulations come to bear on what can happen next. And that’s well and good because if no one ever drew boundaries anywhere to interact with what emerged, the whole works would fall prey to entropy.

Higher levels of order, which tend to be autonomous and more static, draw on the randomness of lower orders to create new possibility, but they aren’t controlled by them. (Example: higher order – the organization’s mission; lower order – the daily moods and inspiration levels of your content creators).

I think eureka moments occur when, as if by magic, selections from the lower and higher orders seem to arise mutually. This is where a complex system finds resilience, the dry land in an ocean of possibilities. In a dynamical system, resilience to small perturbations can lead to a kind of stability, or coherence. The hierarchies of top-down causality and bottom-up emergence that make up a complex system are working together to produce possibilities that we can begin to identify. In other words, stuff starts to make sense.

In complexity-savvy organizations, we hopefully build top-down hierarchies to be flexible, allowing random innovations to help us periodically revise the higher-level structures that steer the ship, but we don’t become so enamored with emergence that we sail completely off course in search of sirens.

The HumanCurrent podcast is hosted by Angie Cross & Stacy Hale. Subscribe in iTunes or listen at www.human-current.com.

Source: Emergence & Higher Order — HumanCurrent

(Sorry for the formatting, I decided life was too short to edit html!)

Source: Top Inspiration, Events and News on Systems Change 

From service design to systems change

Reshaping what’s desirable, feasible and viable using ‘Systems Leverage Maps’.

“The end goal of a design thinking work process is to create a solution that is desirable, feasible and viable.” A quick reminder of what that means in practice:

Desirable — your service satisfies the people using it

Feasible — it’s technically possible to implement

Viable — it’s got a sustainable business model

There’s not much to disagree with there. Every service should aim for these characteristics, and a successful design process should achieve them.

So where’s the problem?

It’s arguably becoming harder and harder to fulfill these requirements meaningfully — especially for non-profits and the public sector, which are attempting to support vulnerable populations in a context of austerity. The needs of people accessing key services are growing, to a point where it is often not possible to adequately meet them. Simultaneously, the resource to develop and maintain services is under pressure.

Of course desirable, feasible and viable services can still be created — tight constraints can be the prompt for ingenious solutions. Nonetheless, the terrain for service design is more challenging.

There has been a lot of talk recently about how ‘systems thinking’ approaches can help us navigate this new, more challenging terrain. A recent RSA reportshows how systems thinking and design thinking can be integrated. Systems analysis at the ‘front end’ of service design can help us to better understand complex social problems and identify opportunities to respond more effectively and profoundly. Equally, systems thinking provides tools and mindsets to understand the power structures and ‘system immune responses’ which so often kill new solutions before they get off the ground.

I’ve found this model helpful, together with guidance produced by Lankelly Chase and NPC which aims to nudge traditional design practice towards systemic change.

But in building the case for this way of working, I’ve sometimes struggled to articulate how we might expect the ‘result’ to look different in practice when compared to what exists already.¹ As a consequence, I worry sometimes that there’s a danger of embracing the theatre of systems thinking — using it to position services and to navigate what’s desirable, feasible and viable within the existing system — without actually reshaping the system itself.

Continues in source: From service design to systems change – Adam Groves – Medium

With no apologies, this is a straight-up pasting of an advert for Barry Oshry’s books. Barry is (whisper it) more than 40 years old, but is a truly valuable thinker for those of us who value human freedom, human systems, and the insight that systems thinking can offer. Please share.

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Celebrating Four Decades
of Barry Oshry

Transforming System Blindness Into System Sight

“Oshry, one of the truly great management educators of the era, has offered a whole generation a new way of thinking about leading human systems. Every manager, executive, and leader benefits from the insights that jump out of his provocative writings. His ideas will still be sparkling decades from now.”

Kenwyn Smith,
Professor, Wharton Business School and the Fels School of Government.

SPECIAL DEALS AND CELEBRATORY PROMOTIONS FROM POWER + SYSTEMS!

With your purchase you receive:

Copies autographed by the author

The Organic Systems Perspective 
Oshry’s provocative pamphlet describing the theory of human systems underlying all of his work.

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The illustrated e-book relating the transformation of a harried Middle from frustration and despair to empowerment and contribution.

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Exclusive for teachers of Organizational Behavior and related subjects:

A one-hour on-line seminar with Barry and your graduate student class. 
A limited number of these class dialogues are available. There is no cost for this session. The sole requirement is that one of the following books be purchased for or by each student. The book chosen, its implications and applications, will become the subject of the dialogue. Contact Barry directly to arrange for a seminar.

Context Context Context 
Systems Letter 
Seeing Systems 
Leading Systems 
Possibilities of Organization 
In The Middle

Faculty examination copies 
We offer faculty a 55% discount on all of these titles.

Faculty members can order one copy of any or all books and receive this discount by placing the word “Systemo” in the promotional code box at the check-out.

Please note that the delivery address for the book must be an academic institution.

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Context Context Context (153 pages)
by Barry Oshry

New. Using the tale of an organization in its struggle to achieve excellence, Oshry illuminates the power that comes from transforming system blindness into system sight. Witnessing the dialogue between mentor and mentee, the reader gets to the core of the awareness and choices underlying individual and organizational transformation. It is a tale with the potential to transform any organization – to bring insight into who we are and what we can become in all the systems of our lives.

“With immense care and great clarity, (Oshry) sets out a powerful language to describe and understand whole systems. The concepts not only help us to grasp more securely the profound personal and organisational consequences of our blindness to the contexts in which we live our lives but also grant us fresh perspectives from which to appreciate those contexts anew.”

Martin McNamara, Professor and Associate Dean for External Relations
UCD School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Systems

Your Price: $21.00

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The Systems Letter (139 pages)
by Barry Oshry

Early in his career, Barry Oshry felt dismissed and disregarded by an organization that had meant so much to him. Rather than simmer and sulk, he struck back with a a systems letter aimed at illuminating a whole system in all of its complexity. While it was addressed to specific individuals and sub-groups, to leaders and members, it was also addressed to all who have ever suffered indignities at the hands of their organizations. It offers invaluable insight for both the oppressors and the oppressed, while providing hope and inspiration to all those who have felt diminished, dismissed, and disrespected by their organizations.

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Creator of Holacracy

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Seeing Systems 2nd Edition (266 pages)
by Barry Oshry

BEST SELLER. A critical antidote to the personal bias that dominates much of our thinking about life in the organization. Oshry demonstrates how many of our costly relationship breakdowns are systemic – not personal – and how they develop out of our blindness to the human systems of which we are a part. Using a lively mix of cases, dialogues, poetry, and cartoons, he shows how we can develop productive partnerships when we recognize and develop system sight.

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Senior Advisor at G100 Companies

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Leading Systems (193 pages)
by Barry Oshry

Oshry shares the lessons he’s derived from his decades of work with the Power Lab, the leadership program that’s an intense microcosm of system life. He challenges conventional thinking by shedding light on the limitations of consensus, the importance of unilateral action, the restrictions our values can place on our power. He demonstrates what it takes to break out of familiar destructive patterns and elevate ourselves and our systems to higher levels of possibility.

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Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus, MIT Sloan School of Management

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Possibilities of Organization (208 pages)
by Barry Oshry

THE BOOK THAT STARTED IT ALL. In this disarmingly simple book, Oshry strips away the mystery and mythology of organizational life. Part I deals with “Internal Warfare”, a painfully familiar scenario in which organizations go to war with themselves. Part II demonstrates how misunderstandings and conflict develop across organizational lines. And Part III confronts us with our blindness to our own worlds and the critical choices we face daily that can transform our lives and the lives of our organizations.

“Anyone working with (or in) an organization can benefit from this book. The power is in its simplicity. But don’t let the simplicity fool you. It is the real deal. Good, effective writing and presentation. I’m director of a nonprofit that does training, and I’ll be using these principles within our organization, and with clients, every day. Thank you, Barry Oshry, for making them so accessible.”

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In The Middle (101 pages)
by Barry Oshry

THE book for those who regularly find themselves torn and pulled between the conflicting needs, demands, and priorities of others. Oshry demonstrates how the blindness to systemic forces diminishes individual effectiveness and contribution in the middle and limits the collective contribution of middle peers. It lays out strategies that enable Middles to become more confident, effective, and respected contributors to their organizations.

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Source: Celebrating Four Decades of Barry Oshry – Celebrating Four Decades of Barry Oshry

Continues in source:  Wikipedia and the Oligarchy of Ignorance

By Alexander R. Galloway

We live in an age of heterogenous anarchism. Contingency is king. Fluidity and flux win over solidity and stasis. Becoming has replaced being. Rhizomes are better than trees. To be political today, one must laud horizontality. Anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism are the order of the day. Call it “vulgar ’68-ism.” The principles of social upheaval, so associated with the new social movements in and around 1968, have succeed in becoming the very bedrock of society at the new millennium.

But there’s a flaw in this narrative, or at least a part of the story that strategically remains untold. The “reticular fallacy” can be broken down into two key assumptions. The first is an assumption about the nature of sovereignty and power. The second is an assumption about history and historical change. Consider them both in turn.

(1) First, under the reticular fallacy, sovereignty and power are defined in terms of verticality, centralization, essence, foundation, or rigid creeds of whatever kind (viz. dogma, be it sacred or secular). Thus the sovereign is the one who is centralized, who stands at the top of a vertical order of command, who rests on an essentialist ideology in order to retain command, who asserts, dogmatically, unchangeable facts about his own essence and the essence of nature. This is the model of kings and queens, but also egos and individuals. It is what Barthes means by author in his influential essay “Death of the Author,” or Foucault in his “What is an Author?” This is the model of the Prince, so often invoked in political theory, or the Father invoked in psycho-analytic theory. In Derrida, the model appears as logos, that is, the special way or order of word, speech, and reason. Likewise, arkhe: a term that means both beginning and command. The arkhe is the thing that begins, and in so doing issues an order or command to guide whatever issues from such a beginning. Or as Rancière so succinctly put it in his Hatred of Democracy, the arkheis both “commandment and commencement.” These are some of the many aspects of sovereignty and power as defined in terms of verticality, centralization, essence, and foundation.

(2) The second assumption of the reticular fallacy is that, given the elimination of such dogmatic verticality, there will follow an elimination of sovereignty as such. In other words, if the aforementioned sovereign power should crumble or fall, for whatever reason, the very nature of command and organization will also vanish. Under this second assumption, the structure of sovereignty and the structure of organization become coterminous, superimposed in such a way that the shape of organization assumes the identical shape of sovereignty. Sovereign power is vertical, hence organization is vertical; sovereign power is centralized, hence organization is centralized; sovereign power is essentialist, hence organization, and so on. Here we see the claims of, let’s call it, “naïve” anarchism (the non-arkhe, or non foundation), which assumes that repressive force lies in the hands of the bosses, the rulers, or the hierarchy per se, and thus after the elimination of such hierarchy, life will revert so a more direct form of social interaction. (I say this not to smear anarchism in general, and will often wish to defend a form of anarcho-syndicalism.) At the same time, consider the case of bourgeois liberalism, which asserts the rule of law and constitutional right as a way to mitigate the excesses of both royal fiat and popular caprice.

We name this the “reticular” fallacy because, during the late Twentieth Century and accelerating at the turn of the millennium with new media technologies, the chief agent driving the kind of historical change described in the above two assumptions was thenetwork or rhizome, the structure of horizontal distribution described so well in Deleuze and Guattari. The change is evident in many different corners of society and culture. Consider mass media: the uni-directional broadcast media of the 1920s or ’30s gradually gave way to multi-directional distributed media of the 1990s. Or consider the mode of production, and the shift from a Fordist model rooted in massification, centralization, and standardization, to a post-Fordist model reliant more on horizontality, distribution, and heterogeneous customization. Consider even the changes in theories of the subject, shifting as they have from a more essentialist model of the integral ego, however fraught by the volatility of the unconscious, to an anti-essentialist model of the distributed subject, be it postmodernism’s “schizophrenic” subject or the kind of networked brain described by today’s most advanced medical researchers.

Why is this a fallacy? What is wrong about the above scenario? The problem isn’t so much with the historical narrative. The problem lies in an unwillingness to derive an alternative form of sovereignty appropriate for the new rhizomatic societies. Opponents of the reticular fallacy claim, in other words, that horizontality, distributed networks, anti-essentialism, etc., have their own forms of organization and control, and indeed should be analyzed accordingly. In the past I’ve used the concept of “protocol” to describe such a scenario as it exists in digital media infrastructure. Others have used different concepts to describe it in different contexts. On the whole, though, opponents of the reticular fallacy have not effectively made their case, myself included. The notion that rhizomatic structures are corrosive of power and sovereignty is still the dominant narrative today, evident across both popular and academic discourses. From talk of the “Twitter revolution” during the Arab Spring, to the ideologies of “disruption” and “flexibility” common in corporate management speak, to the putative egalitarianism of blog-based journalism, to the growing popularity of the Deleuzian and Latourian schools in philosophy and theory: all of these reveal the contemporary assumption that networks are somehow different from sovereignty, organization, and control.

To summarize, the reticular fallacy refers to the following argument: since power and organization are defined in terms of verticality, centralization, essence, and foundation, the elimination of such things will prompt a general mollification if not elimination of power and organization as such. Such an argument is false because it doesn’t take into account the fact that power and organization may inhabit any number of structural forms. Centralized verticality is only one form of organization. The distributed network is simply a different form of organization, one with its own special brand of management and control.

Consider the kind of methods and concepts still popular in critical theory today: contingency, heterogeneity, anti-essentialism, anti-foundationalism, anarchism, chaos, plasticity, flux, fluidity, horizontality, flexibility. Such concepts are often praised and deployed in theories of the subject, analyses of society and culture, even descriptions of ontology and metaphysics. The reticular fallacy does not invalidate such concepts. But it does put them in question. We can not assume that such concepts are merely descriptive or neutrally empirical. Given the way in which horizontality, flexibility, and contingency are sewn into the mode of production, such “descriptive” claims are at best mirrors of the economic infrastructure and at worse ideologically suspect. At the same time, we can not simply assume that such concepts are, by nature, politically or ethically desirable in themselves. Rather, we ought to reverse the line of inquiry. The many qualities of rhizomatic systems should be understood not as the pure and innocent laws of a newer and more just society, but as the basic tendencies and conventional rules of protocological control.

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Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books and dozens of articles on digital media and critical theory, including Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2006), Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota, 2006); The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), and most recently Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), reviewed here earlier in 2014. Galloway has recently been writing brief notes on media and digital culture and theory at his blog, on which this post first appeared.

Source: The Reticular Fallacy | boundary 2