On Representations (Part 1)

A Conversation with Luc Hoebeke

Representations dominate our lives. Most of our day, we interact with and are guided by digital representations. Even before going out, we prefer to check the feels-like temperature on our smartphones instead of stepping out for a few seconds to feel ourselves what it is like. Science is done through representations that are supposed to capture the important parts of reality only to find that it's not always the case, sometimes because a signal was discarded as noise and sometimes because of the limitations of the representation technologies used. Our brains are said to work by manipulating representations of the outside world, the majority of cognitive scientists still claim. We are governed by political elites representing their own interests instead of the interests of those who elected them. Globalization makes many decisions and actions to have a global impact, but in making such decisions, the globe is not represented.

Some time ago, I had lunch with Luc Hoebeke, and our discussion—always fascinating—moved towards the topic of representations. And I asked him, why don't we dedicate some more time to talk only about that and then record and transcribe our conversation? He agreed, and that's what we did a month later. What follows is the transcript of our conversation with some references and clarifications added.

Ivo:

Let’s talk today about representations. There are many disturbing things about representations. For example, recently, I wrote about how the accumulation of technical debt in organizations is mainly due to space and time not being represented on the project board. On a societal level, underrepresentation has more significant consequences.

We are having this conversation in Magritte's country, and he was one of the first to make a lot of people rethink representation. That was in 1929 and only a few years earlier, The Meaning of Meaning was published with the now famous semiotic triangle. I wonder if Magritte has read that book.

Luc:

Well, in 1938, Magritte gave a talk¹ in Antwerp exactly about this issue, about representation. It was quite an interesting talk because it was very early.

Ivo:

Yes, I had no idea he gave talks. His expression was art.

Luc:

Well, painting, and he willfully painted badly. He did not want to paint to be a good painter because he was busy with language but with visual language. You know that he never invented an image. He always took images—many times it can be retraced here—from movies. He went to many of the movies and then,

Ivo:

but there were not many movies at that time.

Luc:

No, exactly. That's why they can be traced. Yeah, it seems that he's a very original painter, but he was not interested in painting. He was interested in language and representation and what's going around it, and he expressed it in his paintings.

Ivo:

But representations took different paths. They took one path through art and another through symbols, language, and print.

Luc:

For me, that's all the same. The technology, the means, the essence of representation, is in the world. It forgets what is present to represent it. We live continuously in the present time.

Apparently, human beings have the capacity for memory, and the capacity of memory is linked to representation. Its means may be literature, painting, or a combination of both. That is because even the cave dwellers started to represent what they were busy with, and that's something that is important for me. Behind every representation, there is an intention, implicit or explicit. You have written somewhere about representation of reality. I say that doesn't exist. It's always a representation for reality. We use our memory, we use our reading, we use our representations because there is an intention behind them. That has helped me very much in placing my criticism about the media, because the media act as if they represent reality, but it's impossible to represent reality. Every image is cut. There's a time-space that is cut out: a reduction. Representation is a reduction, and behind each reduction, there is an intention, and we see it now with social media. The intention is to earn money, whatever happens. The content is not important. That's why these platforms want to get rid of the content. But in fact, they are structuring reality with an intention. Journalism is one of the big lies. Well, you mentioned it also in one of your writings. Objectivity doesn't exist. There's the idea of an objective reality, but reality is not an object. Reality is something you live in. It's not an object, but we have the capability of what is called objectifying. But objectifying is always making a frame, choosing a frame, and reducing it to something that we are interested in reducing for representation, implicitly or explicitly. And the scientific endeavor of making representations of reality is, to me, a fallacy. I learned that with Stafford Beer in one of his first books, Decision and Control, when he was writing about models, because models are representations.

Ivo:

That’s interesting, and it just triggered two thoughts. One is, what you said reminded me of this recent book, The Blind spot about why science cannot reject human experience. There was a podcast with Evan Thompson, who is one of the authors, where he said that, in fact, the objective method is something that produced a lot of valuable things, but science seems to forget that it's only a method. It's not the whole thing there is. The same is with the idea of truth. He said the truth was entirely now understood as propositional truth, but the truth of presence, when we reveal something, it comes to presence, evidencing of something. And now, we think of truth as something different from how we think about beauty.

Luc:

In Dutch, there is a beautiful word, which is waarnemen. Waarnemen means to perceive, but it consists of two words, waar is truthful and nemen is grasp thus, perceiving is the only truthfulness you can grasp. That's perception.

Ivo:

The way certain concepts crystallize guides the thinking, metaphors and theories around them. Maturana gave an example with language. And how something that you cannot say, languaging, reflects better what is actually going on, this coordination of coordinations. Similarly, John Vervaeke reminded us that attention comes from attending. Now, there's so much focus on attention as a noun, something that is a commodity, something that you strive for, something that you would like to keep, for voters, for people on social media and so on.

Luc:

I mentioned last time the works of Iain McGilchrist, the psychiatrist, about the relation between the two brain halves because he uses that, in fact, a forgotten brain half is that one that [attend, that is aware without intention...], the other one is master in representation, and both are needed. But he uses the word attention. That's quite interesting. [He uses comprehension for the perception of the right half of the brain, and apprehension for the perception of the left half brain cf Evan Thomson and Merleau Ponty...] his issues here, his issues are confirmed by brain research, not brain research, not neuronal research, is really looking at the brain as a system and not as a machine. I read your critics of cognitive science, which looks at the brain as a machine, which is partly exact, but only part of it, but it was missing the intention and missing the attention,

Ivo:

and the embodiment, situatedness, and extension and…

Luc:

It focuses only on representations and not on presence.

Ivo:

The second thought was about models. You said that you discovered this fallacy of representation through Stafford Beer. But how come, since his whole work is heavily dependent on models?

Luc:

Models are very useful, and there I come to the work of Peter Checkland. If you are conscious of the intention behind the model. One of the errors that I have seen continuously with the Viable System Model is to try to implement it. It is nonsense. You can't implement models. Models are reductionist ways of looking at things and making sense of things. I made the error early in my consulting activities to try to to create an organization mapping the VSM. I tried it once, and then I stopped and said, that doesn't work. That doesn't. It's the wrong end. No, the model is a reduction, which helps you to clarify the intentions of the ones who are busy with the models. I started as an information manager, and I always worked with users.

And then there was the whole mythology that you have to make information models to show how the information flows in reality. If you try to do that, you come in a complete mess. To get the value of reduction, first, you declare that it is not reality; it is a choice. Why and for what do you make that choice? And then you see that information, what could be made with users in a very user-friendly and simple way, asking the question, what for. Not asking how? Because you know this information models input, output, all this kind and you get all walls full of representation of reality, which is nonsensical, because reality cannot be taken in one representation. Reality is reality. It's immensely rich, yeah, and thus the reduction is essential. But then the question is always, what for, not why? That's a scientific question. Why is it? For me, it's an irrelevant question. I am not interested to know why things are as they are. I am interested in, if things happen, what for? What is the intention? You are impacted by this reality, you are obliged to reduce it, by asking the question, what for. In fact, it is what you did with the microphones. Yeah, the microphones are directional. You choose directions because you have a model of what is happening on the table here, and you are reducing, trying to get out the noise, and so on. That's why my book is a practitioner's reflection. And once you are a practitioner, what for—and I am an engineer—becomes the most important question.

Then I came to the work of Peter Checkland, and I worked with Peter Checkland, who very clearly determined that. In fact, in one of the books he wrote, a book about action research and SSM published some 15 years ago, Peter asked me to write the foreword. And then what I wrote, I learned consciously with the work of Peter Checkland to make models for.² You know that with the soft systems methodology, you reduce the whole reality to one input, one transformation process, one output, and the output you have to re-find as transformed input. Very, very rigid, strong rule, but so marvelous to discover for the people in organizations. I use in organizations, always the question, what is your truth? How do you perceive it? And that's the Soft Systems methodology, a marvelous methodology for, first, it tolerates all different perceptions. Yeah, because you know his example of a prison.

I did some work also with Philippe Vandenbroeck about health systems. The ethos that came up was: there is something bad in the world: suffering and death. We have to fight against it. We are at war. Our system is at war against suffering and death. And then I said to the group, you know, war, yeah. War reaches until there are no means anymore. And that's what will happen to you. The insurance will take over; the insurance determines the end of the war. The bookkeeper is the one who ends the war because there are no means anymore. The important thing is, if you call it a health system, you have to look at the health, not at the sickness. You have to look at the health.

I learned also this way of perceiving things when I was working in ex-Yugoslavia, in Slovenia and Croatia, because the classical way of looking at problems, everything was a problem, ownership was a problem, the money was a problem, inflation 1,000%, everything was a problem. Just don't try to solve that. Let's study. How is it that there are still products coming out, that there are people coming to work each day, that things are working? What is the anima, what is the soul which make this thing still alive? Because that's health. It's still alive.

Ivo:

Isn't that the same as the Appreciative Inquiry approach?

Luc:

Later, I found it…

Ivo:

So you were already practicing and only later you read about it?

Luc:

…because I met Suresh

Ivo:

the second author of the initial paper from 1987

Luc:

Yes, but he has been very badly understood. Suresh was from India, yeah, it comes from his brain because it is an Indian mentality, and it has been perverted by the Americans as positive thinking. It has nothing to do with positive thinking. It's looking at reality and finding that reality is good because it is reality, without judgment if it is positive or negative. No, if things are there, that's because they are bound to be there, thus they are good.

In fact, what I'm saying now is in Kabbalah. It's worthwhile to be there, even the worst things, we evaluate as war and murder and so on is part of reality because it has some function in the totality of what is going on. I'm not defending murder and so on. That's nothing to do with that, but you get another view, like what I said about the factories in ex-Yugoslavia, finding out, where is the life in that system. Because violence is an expression of life. What's the function of it? It is in my article about the Decalogue. It's when you kill desire you create violence. It is the commandment: don't kill. Yeah, it's not only killing physically. Don't kill is also about killing the desire of another and the creativity because, after the desire, is creativity. If I have an intention, I want to realize, to realize something. Okay, that's a desire to realize. And if that is frustrated, it will automatically transform itself into destructivity. Destructivity is the other coin side of creativity you cannot get rid of one. Destructiveness should be forgotten. Destructivity should be bad. Should be stopped, but creativity should become something. No, both are inseparably linked together. Destructivity is a positive energy that is badly placed. All energy is positive, but it can be badly placed.

Ivo:

Nice. Let's go back to where we started. Let’s discuss information and models as two popular ways of representing.

If you can just talk a bit about information as representation, what happened, and what is happening now, and, of course, the associated pathologies. I think if we discuss the good parts, we will need days. Let's just focus on what is not working. After information, lets t’s talk about models. I remember your comment in that same paper about the Decalogue,³ was that theories should be generative, not explicative.

Luc:

The concept of information is a bogus concept. It's something that has been coined to avoid the concept of meaning. In the communication model of Shannon and Weaver, sender, channel, receiver, they liked it because they could express it mathematically, but they didn't understand anything because only the one who receives information makes meaning out of it. He is the processor. All information is noise. This person who is embedded in that information, that information starts to reduce, represent, yeah, and give meaning to it.

Ivo:

That’s what Lakoff and Johnson called the “conduit metaphor” of communication and earlier Maturana and Varela explained why the reception cannot be instructed from outside but is structurally determined by the received and everything coming from outside is only an irritation. There is no decoding going on.

Luc:

As a consultant also in education, I said don't bother about how you communicate to get your message right. Forget it. Your message is always wrong. I say the basic material of good communication are misunderstandings, because then you can have a dialog. Because then you know the PR, where it comes from, and how Hitler got his knowledge from the PR people of the States⁴, from the ones who started marketing. He called them in because he knew that was propaganda. Propaganda is the contrary of communication. Broadcasting is the contrary of communication. It's creating noise. But then, how can you do that? That's where autocrats and dictators—I studied the life of Franco—they are masters in it. They get rid of certain meanings. They kill another perception of the truth than their perception. And we live in that. We are in a dictatorial world. They are not all such destructive dictators as Hitler was, but the whole PR way of thinking, the marketing way of thinking, is, how can I kill the meaning and the desire of another so that they get my meaning. Which is terrible. And that's what's happening in social media.

What happens in England is marvelous in that sense because, again, the frustrated creativity has been directed in the service of this activity that is linked to a scapegoat. I'm frustrated in my desire to fulfill something because of circumstances. What can be triggered in me is an external enemy in which I can focus my creativity by destroying it. And that's violence. And we live in a violent world. And that's why we live in a world of terror. Terrorism is pervading the whole society, and you see it. If you go to an airport, you see it. My son was in France on vacation. On the péage, you have soldiers with automatic guns, big guns, an experience I had in South America to say, oh, to give a sense of security, you have much more sense of security when there are no soldiers or police in the neighborhood. When there are many security people in your neighborhood, you get a sense of insecurity. When I saw in Bogota before each bank was a soldier with a heavy weapon, yeah. Did that give me a sense of security? You try to solve the problem by creating the contrary.

When you put your energy into avoiding something, you create the conditions that it happens. A friend of my daughter is working at the hospital here, the University Hospital, and she has a terrible life. Out of economic reasons, the shortened time that patients are in hospital. More or less 80% of the patients going out of hospital, then in two to three days are back in hospital, because, of complications and so on. And that's a nonsensical thing. I have read the book of Salman Rushdie The Knife. Have you heard about it? It's a marvelous book, because of this story of what happened to him, and then his revalidation and so on. And he gave three beautiful examples in his period when he was seriously ill and had to recuperate, of what is called iatrogenic interventions. That means that the doctors created a problem three times in trying to avoid it.

That’s also in Stafford Beer. You don’t have to put belts on the driver. You have to put pins on the wheel. Then you will not have any accidents. It is nonsensical, but it shows a very big truth.

Ivo:

So Shannon and Weaver, they started with this, and then what else happened that now we have now an Information Society.

Luc:

There is a marvelous story of IBM. IBM made accounting machines with pins and so on. They became aware of the computer technology. And in fact, the great discovery of Watson is that he discovered how people will always get money when they are anxious. Anxiety is the best marketing trick. And what happened after the Second World War, you get the United States who profited from the war because they had no war. They started the military industrial complex. It came from the Manhattan Project, and so much money for the atomic bomb and so on. And as you know, organizations are autopoietic, so to continue, they invented the Cold War, etc. So that American companies, they went all over the world. It was a bit before the second world, the multinationals, later on the Marshall Plan and so on. And they were losing control, because they had to control different laws in different areas, in different countries, different customs, different cultures. And Watson created a machine that, you know, the babies, when they cry, you put something in their mouth, a pacifier. You put it in a bit of sugar. Well, IBM computers were very expensive pacifiers, giving the illusion that you were under control. And you see it in the images, also in the marketing images of IBM in the beginning, you see the manager sitting on a desk, and he has everything under his fingers. He is in control. The idea of information and control as a flow, he has marketed that based on a study or an intuition, very marvelous intuition, by the way, how do I create something which is not needed? Information systems are not needed. I have multiple examples.

For instance, I studied the order of Benedictines. That is fifth, sixth century, seventh century, no phone, no transport systems and so on. They had monasteries from Ireland to Turkey in a coherent way. These were coherent without any communication. It was completely under control without any communication. means. How? You have to read the institutions of Saint Benedict. He was a marvelous manager.

Another company which is more known, Solvay, they started by building factories on the mines, where the mines were, in Chile, in Russia and so on, because that was the best way, instead of transporting all that stuff now to create the factories in the place where the mines. Also coherent without information. But you know that in Brussels you have the Ecole Solvay, where the future plant managers were trained and educated.

Another example is the British Empire. India, immense land, with all kind of cultures. How did they maintain coherence? By creating schools. Because it was three years or four years of preparation for so that you get the mentality of Solvay, the mentality of being a Benedictine, the meaning you attribute to the things you see was inculcated through very strong education system and a very selective one because if they don't work out very, very strong rules for going through it, yeah, because it was through human beings who had the same—and that's the work that our friend Peter Checkland used—Weltanschauung. How do I create a coherent Weltanschauung, which is, in fact, the model. If I send people over the world, they keep the same Weltanschauung, and that's where the coherence come from.

Part 2 of our conversation with Luc Hoebeke is coming soon. Stay tuned.

1. René Magritte gave this talk: La ligne de Vie in november 1938 at the Antwerp Museum of Art.

The only thing that I left was a particular way of painting with which I solved the problem of the representation of the essence of objects (Luc’s translation)

2. Hoebeke, L. (2000). The Emergent Properties of SSM in Use: A Symposium by Reflective Practitioners. Systemic Practice and Action Research. https://www.academia.edu/103331841/The_Emergent_Properties_of_SSM_in_Use_A_Symposium_by_Reflective_Practitioners

3. Hoebeke, L. (2010). The Decalogue and practical wisdom: Rereading a seminal text. Journal of Management Development, 29, 736–746. https://doi.org/10.1108/02621711011059176

4. Ivy Lee, the founder of modern public relations (PR), “advised foreign governments and provided public relations counsel to a German company during the early days of the Nazi government, work that put him in communication with the party leaders, possibly including Adolf Hitler.”