On Representations (Part 2)

A Conversation with Luc Hoebeke

This is the second part of my conversation with Luc Hoebeke. If you haven’t read the first part, I’d recommend you do that before reading this one.

Ivo:

My idea was to talk about representation at the individual, organizational and state levels. One of the things that resonated when I first read your book was something that I had a problem with but could not articulate clearly: the nation-state. Then I found that, well, another person already had a problem with it and explained why it doesn't work and why representative democracy doesn't work at that level. So, if you could somehow bring forth these ideas. Some time has passed. Maybe they have evolved. But starting from the link between representation and representative democracies, the size of the country, and the idea that the country is related to territory, which is something determined by wars and, as you mentioned in the book, this is a misinterpretation of the ideas of ancient Greece that apply to city republics and then the new version of that from Renaissance Italy, and that it was somehow patched on what it is in conflict with, the feudal state, from which we have the current contraption that we now foolishly cherish.

Luc:

The issue was the revolutionaries fought against the church and aristocracy, and so the problem they had was a problem of scale. They had no other model than the Greek model, and the right size of the representative democracy is a city. But they were confronted with something else. And you know very well, for instance, at the start of the United States that Jefferson was against democracy as we mean it now. And you know the writings of Tocqueville, who went to the States and said that cannot work. It cannot work because representativity is linked to relations with people. And what has changed in the nation-state is people have been replaced by aggregates, anonymity and aggregates. There is no relation with aggregates. The nation-state is purely a concept. It's so beautiful in the Constitution of the United States, the first constitution: “we the people,” which is plural and singular. They have never been able to combine both. There is no something like “we the people.” There is a “we” and something we call “people,” but “we the people” is a nonexistent entity. It's an ideological invention.

Ivo:

The same pattern of objectification.

Luc:

Exactly. The nation-state is a machine-like whole structure. Now I have written an article about the difficult role of being a representative because there is something if you are a manager in a company – I have worked with teams, my team, I had 15 people working with me in a structure – you need someone to respond because if something happens, it's good to have someone who is called accountable, not responsible, accountable, which means I don’t have to talk to the 15 people. I can talk to that person. Now, what is happening in democracy is that, in fact, the representative is the one who makes his constituency. The constituency never makes its representative. Authority means the one who increases, increases the place of the system he is representing. He's not in power, because, in fact, and I come back to something you wrote, perhaps it's very critical about what you wrote, the split between decision maker and agency. There are no decision-makers. There are only people declaring intentions. It's a person who acts or doesn't act in certain circumstances. Acting is decision-making. There's a whole mythology about delegating decisions and so on. It’s a machine-like structure, which doesn't work. It has never worked. It is the person who is confronted with environmental variety in a certain situation who takes action or doesn't take action in that sense. Omitting action is also action. All the stuff of the operation research about decision making and so forth, then, already in the 60s, I said that's nonsense. The concept of decision-making as it is used is nonsensical. I like what you wrote there, because it becomes visible that it is avoiding responsibility. You can only be responsible for what you say, for what you do, and for what you don’t say or do; you can never be responsible for its effects. Because the effects of it are how it is received by the other one, who gives meaning to it and who acts. But you are responsible for paying attention to the feedback which comes back to you. That's the only material you have. But the whole idea of delegation and delegation of power and so on is nonsensical to me. It is the one who acts. 

I have worked for the Dutch Railways, and that was a beautiful example in the Dutch Railways. They have policies, you mentioned policies, and then they have the policy to be more customer-directed. Okay, what does that mean? In practice, there is a train coming in, and there is one guy who defines when the train can go further. This guy sees an old woman trying to catch her train. It's up to him to take the decision of delaying or not the train, and there are consequences because if he delays too long, the whole net will be in turmoil. And if he only thinks about customer directedness, then the old woman should get the train. Because whatever he does with his Weltanschauung, we come to do what you wrote about, about balances, because he has to balance. And the whole idea in strategy now you have to be customer-directed. I was in strategy groups, where they said, we want to be customer-directed. And I asked them who was against it? Nobody. Then it's already there. We don’t have to talk about it. If nobody's against it. But then the question is, what do you mean by customer? In the bureaucracy — and then our dear friend Checkland is very useful — it is the boss who is the customer. How do I know? Because the boss is paying you. You get a promotion from the boss, and so on. Not the guy to be helped. No, no, no, because I have nothing to do with him. My life is determined by what my boss thinks about us. He is my customer. And I discovered that in, I have been teaching once in St Petersburg in ‘93 that was a joint venture with the University of [Louvan la Neuve...], and I was talking about customers and so on. Then big silence. What's happening here? The customer is there to be cheated, because that perception of the customer was the guy who is to be cheated in that system, at least, at least they were honest about. The whole ethos of Western companies for customer-directedness is a lie. Public relations. They are not customer-directed. Organizations are autopoietic systems and institutions are busy with themselves. The customer is material to be used and abused for the system, as simple as that.

Representative is always related to face-to-face relations with people. And the maximum group is about 200 to 500 people. There, it works. And I see organizations as networks of these groups, informal or formal. That's not important. And then you have some people appointed formally or informally.

Ivo:

Tell me more about the story behind this — because it's something very pronounced in your book — idea about the span of relations, this idea about that things work up until certain threshold, and then they stop. And you already defined a concrete number. What is the story behind the realization of that, and then later on, how in your life it was verified? 

Luc:

I started as consultant in ‘79, and then I got training in group dynamics. There, I discovered the difference between the two groups. I mentioned the first two groups, the small group and the big group. The group dynamics training I got was through the Tavistock Institute in London. You know, the Tavistock Institute is at the base of socio-technical thinking. Groupthink is a dangerous thing for small groups. And a small group is, let's say five people, but it can be seven to nine people. That's not important to fix it. But let's say the difference between the small group and second layer of groups is that in the second layer, people could fall asleep while in the group. The energy level in the group varies, and not everyone is attentive and focused all the time. The small group has a tendency in its autopoietic behavior to close and to start groupthink, so dissension is not possible anymore because belonging to it becomes more important than what the group does.

Ivo:

There are also groupthink tendencies in big groups.

Luc:

Less. I’ll come later to that. But that's why the family and family dramas are so terrible; they are small groups. Many families get pathological because dissension is not possible. That may be either the patriarch or matriarch, but it is not important who but belonging is important; we have to stick together. We have to stick together becomes the target, and not anymore why are we together? For what? What purpose? In the larger group, when you get more than 10, you always get dissension,  explicit or implicit. What happens is, many times in Belgium, when people want to belong to this group, they will not say “no,” but they will act as “no” because you get dissociation between what the group says and does. It is better to create conditions in these groups. 

I worked with big groups based on the ideas of socio-technical thinking, you know, Emery and Trist. He started what he calls search conferences or stakeholder conferences. The idea is to get the system in one room. You get the various Weltanschauung, and then what Peter Checkland calls you accommodate. Being different in opinion is tolerated. You don’t have to vote for certain things. The only thing in these conferences is that some people present an action in the circumstances. I give an example here. I want to do that. Who follows me for doing that, and the other have not to agree with it. Have only to say, I don't put a veto. I am not against. I disagree. I think it will not result in anything. But go ahead. That's a different sort of voting.

The first conference I did was in Finland, in the north of Finland, in Oulu, an impossible region. The only factory there was a paper pulp factory smelling as hell. At first, there was an university, then there was a city. The one who started the process there was a local musician, because each year there was a kind of music festival. And the Finns like music very much. They like very much tango, for instance. Argentines and the Finns, these are the two Tango people. And the region was in dereliction, the industry disappeared, and so on and then, and one of the persons of the city, working at the university there, was in training, where I started to talk about search conferences, bringing the stakeholders, not looking for unanimity. In a big group, you never look for unanimity. That's the big, stupid nonsense of Europe. Unanimity with 28 is nonsense. In a small group with five, you can have unanimity, but in the second layer of groups, never look for unanimity because it's a lie. It's a lie. There must be dissension. If there is no dissension, it's pathological. But the dissension is expressing itself and saying, okay, and that's why it is so interesting. Out of the search conference come project leaders. They have an idea, and they present the project, and they are not in a hierarchy. They say, I know, having listened to the various voices and so on, I get an idea. Who joins me? And maybe three to four people in this big group who say, I'm interested in going with you. And then the question is, who is against it? And that against it is, in fact, construing the ambition level of those who want to do something. The dissension is, I agree, because the scale which is presented, I accept, it will not be, you will fail and so on, but it will not be catastrophic, because the dissension can express itself, not by saying I vote for or against, but by saying I let it go. Although I disagree, I let it go. And that is happening in the second-tier groups. From 10 to 50 I've worked with, I have even worked with groups of, I think the biggest one has been 80, where there's much energy. And then the biggest group is the one where the people still know each other by name.  And that's 200, 300 people. You can talk to someone. There are faces. No anonymity, no aggregates. That's because we are tribal people. Human beings are still tribal people. At the scale of tribes where we feel at ease, and these big aggregates, no, we don't know how to cope with it, and that's very visible. Look at big organizations, or at states and governments and so on. The representative is useful when representing faces, not aggregates. Aggregates are purely mental constructs. Constructs are not realities but ideologies. It's pure idea. An aggregate is an idea. We the people. You cannot live people. You cannot represent people.

Ivo: 

When you mentioned the importance of dissent, this reminded me of Rancière’s theory of dissensual democracy. Do you think that if we placed greater emphasis on dissent, we could live in a better society? Focusing more on dissent than on artificial consensus.

Luc:

Quantitative voting is an aggregate way of thinking and doesn't work. Democracy is possible when dissension is possible. You can express your dissension or by saying I don't agree, and we agree not to agree, but the one who does agree or not agree is a face, is a person, and you have a real argument. You mentioned Rancière, I don’t know, but there is a Belgian politician, Chantal Mouffe, who says that the essential thing of democracy is dissension. But how structurally to copy dissension? It is not by voting. Governments represent small groups. Cannot be anything else.

Ivo:

In your book, you wrote that they do represent, but not their voters. They represent the lobbyists. 

Luc:

Exactly. 

Ivo:

Let's clarify about the size. Apart from the need to know them by name, because this is the size of the tribe, are there other reasons to come up to a few hundred and not 90 or 1000? How come we stop at this?

Luc:

In the Basque country, they have these famous Mondragon cooperatives. I worked for them. In their way of developing lots of companies, they had stumbled against limits of size, because, you know, in their system, the workers are also owners. And the idea was that the conflict between workers and owner should disappear until in one factory, they got a strike. Which is crazy. 

Ivo:

Strike against who? 

Luc:

Yeah, exactly, but that's where they discovered that if it grows above 200, 300 you get another dynamic. And they, in fact, the factories which later on, because they believed falsely in the economy of scale, they let grow some of the factories to 1000 and 2000. Yeah, that is a beast. They got broke. And that's something they found out organically. Practitioners reflections. They were practical people, and Mondragon is a real learning organization, because it started with a school. Quite interesting. It started with, how do we call it in English, a craftsman school, with making furnaces and so on. And there's a technical school.

Ivo:

Not only a school, but a school for learning practical things, not theories.

Luc:

Exactly, yeah, okay. And that was how I discovered it. But then, where did I find it? There was another author who was talking about social psychology, and he also found these kinds of limits. What is the group size in which you can act, in which things can happen.

The thing in Mondragon is that they elect their management and their workers' council. Yeah, they have a workers’ council. The dialectic is implemented, and maybe that at a certain period, for two years, which is also very clever to see it for two years. Then, the director becomes a representative of the unions in the next cycle, and that's where this tension can be managed because our balances are manageable when they are between people and not between concepts,

Ivo:

Pirates elected their captains.

Luc:

Pirates? I didn’t know that.

Ivo:

That was a remarkable thing in those days, even if we strip down the romantisized versions. They elected their captains and they voted for the articles, the Pirate articles. They voted for them. They also elected their quarter-masters who observed the order on the ship but they also represented the crew and could challenge the decision of the captain in some cases. This was an impressive thing, and it was often exaggerated in accounts where people claimed it was the first democratic governance, or something like that. It wasn’t quite like that, but it's still impressive. 

Luc:

The Benedictines also elected the head of the monastery. He was elected. And, very importantly, strangers who visited had the first word. When they all go together, the ones who did not belong to the group could speak first. And the second speaking were the youngest ones.

Ivo:

Let’s discuss representation in organizations a bit more. You made it clear that your boss is your customer, but the boss actually never represents the customers. So, even as an intermediary, it does not really connect with them. In what other ways does representation play out in organizations?

Luc: 

Apparently, the splitting between acting and thinking, which comes from the Greek tradition, is a pathology of organizations.

Directors have things to do. Have to be busy with material things. They don’t have to be in a factory. I have worked with directors. The outcome of whatever work is action, not a policy, not a strategy. If it is a policy and a strategy, the attention to the form in which it is expressed, the representation of the work they did, was very important to me. For instance, in an electricity company in Spain, the result of such a meeting was a poem. Because that’s generative. If they want to be customer-oriented, they have to think which is their customer as director. And then they see that, in many cases, it's the subordinates who are their customers. There is a kind of reversal. Where did you put your energy? Sometimes, people put energy outside the organization. That's good. They represent the organization outside, and they act there. That's, for instance, lobbyists. They have a function. For me,  the essence of democracy is lobbying, influencing each other, but nominally and not talking about things to be influenced there. It is about you and me. It's about the human scale.

I have organized a funeral of a project. It was a research, and in research and development, many things don't surface. It is rare that an innovation goes through but many people have put energy, that was the idea, and then it failed. I became aware, because the same people were busy with another project, and then they were replaced with new people, and they were depressed. Now, you cannot be innovative if you are depressed. So I suggested let's organize a funeral. I remember it was a very creative group,  with Philips, which made an electronic toy for children, which failed. Okay, I said, make a bricolage. Bring all kinds of illustrations and so on, yeah, and on big tables, yeah. And then cutting things. And then make visible. Yeah, what you want to remember of the project visually, because they were busy with visual design and so on, and it was a marvelous experience. They copied it, and they put it in a book. And I asked for a book, and they didn't want to give it to me. It was too intimate of them.

And also also that is human activity. We have too few funerals in organizations. We don't know how to stop things. To stop things is as important as to begin things.

Ivo:

Let's now build on something that I noted when we last talked, which was one of the things that triggered today’s discussion. I noted the following: “representation becomes more important than what you represent and is always in the past.” That was one thing, and the other was: “representation is meaningless; meaning can come — I might’ve noted it wrongly, but you can correct me — when embodiment links representation and intuition.” Let's start with that. How and when it happened, that representation started to become more important than what it represents?

Luc:

When art and science split. That's why I was mentioning Jena. The Enlightenment is where it went wrong. The objectivity, the very idea of an objective representation of reality, is a contradiction in terms. People try to represent reality as in information plans. When scientists stumbled against the boundaries of consciousness, they invented information as a surrogate for meaning.  Meaning is always linked to a person and cannot be objective. The ethos of objectifying is to make something as if information is a thing. And it went completely wrong because information is nothing.

Ivo:

But how come it is useful? You use a mobile phone. It's all information technology. You use a computer, and you benefit from technologies.

Luc:

I'm not against technology. Remember the Cybersin of Safford Beer, which was very important. With a very primitive technology was able to do quite something. He needed the technology. He needed the telexes in Chile. And it improved.  Technology is useful in that sense — where we have seen it in COVID — when I have a relation with someone, work  relation and so on. Then, if he is at quite a distant place, I can communicate with him because it is as if space and time don't exist anymore, but they are very important. You have to be aware of it. If you are not aware of it, you are starting to live virtually. And living virtually is being dead. 

I'm not against the technology. I know and I work with technology, then I follow up on what happened in technology, I'm very glad to have my iPhone and so on. But when you use in human affairs the word information, you have to be aware that that word has no content. What is important is the receiver, always the receiver. What is called information is noise, and the receiver makes something out of this noise, which is called meaning. One of the problems we have now is that we are submerged in noise. We are living more and more in noise, and more and more difficult to give meaning.

Ivo:

At some point, I was quite disappointed by the fact that smart people keep talking about this Ackoff pyramid: data, information, and knowledge. And I was and I am in the minority that finds it nonsensical, and I wrote this piece to explain why. There, when I was discussing the information, the only definition I found sensible was the one from Ivan Thompson, based on Bateson and Susan Oyama: “information, dynamically conceived, is making of a difference that makes a difference for some-body somewhere.”

Luc:

Right, right, right. The last part is the most important for some-body somewhere, and I like “some-body,” yeah,

Ivo:

yes, the word body is emphasized. 

Luc:

The concept of structural coupling is much more interesting. It, of course, does not need information as a concept.

Ivo: 

Another thing which I noted: “representation is mixed up with signification.” That’s interesting to me because signification is related to both meaning and importance. It somehow links with George Spencer-Brown that you cannot make an indication if there is no value for you in making it. Value, meaning, distinction and indication are linked in this way.

Luc:

Yeah, you mentioned Spencer-Brown. I think he tried to formalize something which is nearly impossible to formalize. But his idea of a mark, marvelous concept, which places the subject in the center of mathematics. What happened in physics, where the researchers and researched objects became linked in a lot of ways, he did it for mathematics. And where the intention, behind each representation, there is an intention. And that’s the concept of the mark, or how I understand it? 

Ivo:

The interesting thing about the mark is that it makes several operations at once. It makes a distinction, indicates two states, inside and outside, it is an invitation to cross, and it also indicates the one who makes the distinction. Also, the names of the different equations in the primary algebra are so physical, like conceal in one direction and reveal in the other. The time the observer is always there. For example,  he calls the “=” sign “can be confused with.” It can only be confused by somebody. The observer is there. 

Luc: 

The basis of creating something is always a separation. To create something, you have to make a mark, but then you have to be aware that both sides of the mark belong to each other. You separate them, but you see the unity between them.

Ivo:

yeah, because you cannot define one without the other 

Luc: 

Exactly, exactly. And that's very Kabbalistic. 

Ivo:

Now, that is something I want to learn. How come it is Kabbalistic?

Luc:

Well, all the classical contradictions that we have, good and bad, life and death, I and the other, there are all these distinctions or marks which imply both that you cannot separate good and bad. What is called the tree of knowledge of good and bad, is perverted by thinking good or bad. No, it is good and bad that has to do with life and death. Life and death belong together. If you look at evolution,  without death, there is no evolution. This life cannot live without death, and that's why I say ending things is as important as beginning things. It's very physical. Yeah, the separation between mother and child is the birth and is the start of another kind of relation because they are separated, because there is another unity. I find Spencer-Brown very Kabbalistic.

Ivo:

In fact, there is a very impressive work demonstrating how Laws of Form is linked with Greek Mythology, Christianity, Sufism, Buddhism and so on. The Esoteric guide to laws of form. I thought at first, it’s something far-fetched, but then reading on, I quite liked it. 

Luc:

I'm not surprised by it, yeah, because I think all persons, human beings, who continue to research, who go to the boundaries of what can be found in relation to reality, discover the same principles. In the Hindu, it's Advaita, or nonduality, but that's a contradiction because you call it duality. That's very profound. 

That's where the split between art and science, art and religion and science has been catastrophic for the West. It permitted the West to become the hegemon of the world. But then we are discovering that there are limits.