LECTURE 4

David M. Boje 655 Sept 24 2006

Ladies and Gentlemen:

As we talk to Jo Tyler. I thought it might be a good opportunity to discuss the relationship of Gertrude Stein (1935) four lectures against narrative and their relation to systemicity.

Jo and I both ordered collector’s edition copies of Stein (1935).

Narrative tells something that is not the telling of systemicity. Can a narrative telling not based in story detecting (as in detective story) tell us about the amplification, adaptivensess complexity of systemicity? Can narrative writing searching for completion, sequencing, the coherence of beginning, middle, and end – write about discover, change or emergence?

While Stein uses narrative and story interchangeably, my read is that she has one kind of narrative I call “retrospective control narrative” and another kind that I call “dialogic story” (Boje, 2006a). Narrative (and open system) “practically never tells anything about detecting” or pursuing mystery (p. 40).

I am perturbed that control narrative is not telling about people living in systemicity. Narrative is a way to influence people toward greater control systemicity, by conforming its processes to narrative, to the inevitability of beginning, middle and end. Storytelling that is more about happening, in the moment of emergence is detecting beginnings not arrived, middles that are missing, and the never endingness of unfinalizability, unfinishedness that is in dialogism (Bakhtin, 1990, 1993). There is this important distinction that Stein makes between narrative coherence of completion (think retrospective sensemaking) and the detective work of being in the moment detecting the emergent complexity. It is here, as I said in my last lecture that the bridge of systemicity intersects with the bridge of story dialogicality.

A digression. A professor ought to answer his own assigned question, deconstruct von Bertalanffy. In narratives of open systems, as your von Bertalanffy assignment was designed to explore, an audience of readers would learn nothing about what is happening in the moment of participative dialogicality.

As a biologist, von Bertalanffy (1968: 139) sets out to explain the difference between mechanistic and open system, with the tale of the difference of dead versus living dog, by “means of chemical formulas, mathematical equations, and laws of nature.” “In a living being innumerable chemical and physical processes are so ‘ordered; as to allow the living system to persist, to grow, to develop, to reproduce, etc.” (1968: 139). Mechanistic system theory approaches the dog as a clockwork machine (p. 140).

He reviews the genealogy of the machine model beginning with Descartes’ ‘watchmaker’ animal machine (and here we thought Herbert Simon invented it). Rather than mechanical machine (popular for many centuries), von Bertalanffy sees more recently the living being as a “chemodynamic machine, directly transforming the energy of fuel into effective work: (p. 140), then the World War II case of missiles, a thermodynamic self-regulating or “cybernetic machine, explanatory of many homeostatic and related phenomena”, and very recently, in the case of humans, the “micromachine” of DNA (p. 140).

As a biologist, von Bertalanffy finds Descarts’ clockwork machine approach to dogs insufficient because it does not explain a “universe of undirected physico-chemical events” of growth itself (p. 140). So von Bertalanffy moves along to Darwinistic epxplanation, but finds that even evolution does not answer his problems of “the origin of the machine” in nature (p. 140). Then von Bertalanffy’s concern shifts to the cybernetic problem of “regulation” of the “self-repairing” machine relation to “arbitrary disturbances” and the problem of how a living machine maintains by “metabolism” (“a basic characteristic of living systems” when it keeps expending fuel(p. 141). Notice how in each case the framework applied is that of biological and chemical science to explain the limits of mechanistic system theory.

His rendition of open system theory is the organic biological (“physical chemical”) model of living system bye “import and export, building-up and breaking-down of its material components: (p. 141). This is also known as “biophysics” (p. 142), where as with Katz and Kahn (1966) von Bertalanffy’s biophysics open system rendition tells us of steady state, growth, and “equifinality” (p. 143). His narrative, following Prigogine, centers on closers versus open “physico-chemical systems” where he finds statistical order, differentiation, and organization from his viewpoint of thermodynamics despite the tendency toward entropy of decreasing order and organization (p. 143). In other words, there is Schrodinger’s statement that ‘the organism feeds on negative entropy’” (p. 144). Here and there, von Bertalanffy makes the mega leap from animal to “industrial systems” that behave just like the “many processes in the cell” (p. 144), and this is as Boulding (1956) describes open system as a ‘cell’ complexity property obsession. Like Pondy (1976), von Bertalanffy does not go the way of Boulding and introduce “soul-like or entelechial factors into the organic happening” (von Bertalanffy, 1968: 144).

What about social ecology? For example Murray Bookchin theory of dialectical naturalism would not abide von Bertalanffy’s static ontology of social beings just being physical chemical processes of biophysics. Biophysics. There is also the entelechial development, “defined as self-formation through the actualization of potentiality… concerned with increasingly ‘subjectivity; in the development of each and every phenomenon.”[1] Let me summarize the web site’s entelechial development thesis. The blueprint growth of the acorn to the oak is a static single growth path solution, but in social evolution, there is dialectic causality, where this blueprint of cell to oak, interacts, and even cooperates with an eco-community, a becoming with greater complexity, and in the case of humans entering the social ecology, becoming greater subjectivity. The open system of organization develops towards not only its first nature of biophysical processes, but its second nature of cultural processes by cultural innovation.

What kind of dog is von Bertalanffy theorizing? It would seem to me to be akin to Burke’s entelechial dog, which is only one of five varieties of dog theorizing. The entelechial dog story by von Bertalanffy is a fiction of “’perfect’ embodiment of certain traits” of dog-ness.[2] But von Bertalanffy does not want to include “vitalistic characteristics of life” or make “vitalistic arguments” (p.144-145). His framework is stuck in cells, growing and dividing, importing fuel, metabolic reactions, and self-regulation which can be reported in nonlinear equations, and all these are subject to the “equifinality of growth” in the “continuous cell culture as applied in technological processes” (p. 148-149). When von Bertalanffy posits that a dead dog is a few degrees of separation from a living dog, but ignores vitalistic principles, he runs into trouble. He removes the essentially mysterious, in an attempt to explain life with a lifeless biophysics cell, matter, and energy/fuel model. As a biochemist, von Bertalanffy tries to create life in his laboratory, and his theory ends up being insufficient to specifying complexity properties of living human systemicity. Clearly he falls into an abyss of organicism, explaining vitalism as just chemical physical processes. Yes, organizations have biophysical processes of complex adaptive open systems, but are all the processes biophysical? Vitalism is the “the theory or doctrine that life processes arise from or contain a nonmaterial vital principle and cannot be explained entirely as physical and chemical phenomena.”[3]

Then the clincher, “The theory of open systems is part of a general system theory” which he self-deconstructs as a “doctrine” (p. 149). What kind of doctrine is it? It’s a biophysics doctrine riding roughshod over every other physical and social science, making human systems in our field, just cells in a bio community ecology. That approach to “cybernetic theory” is right out of Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) feedback and information loops. But as Benjamin (1936) tells us, there is need to move beyond information theory and into something else. My deconstruction is that von Bertalanffy rejects the vitalistic principle, yet turns around to impose a vitalistic principle from biophysics onto all other sciences. That is his narrative coherence structure, his control narrative, and it has been very hegemonic, and powerful. In his project, only quantitative, never qualitative insights are admissible (p. 150), and as we seen he rejects entelechial development, then imposes one of his own, “the arrow of time” actually it is borrowed from Eddington (p. 151). Yet we know that the arrow of time is neither one way nor linear sequence in human culture. Time past can be imposed upon time present. Time future is ephemeral and made less so by appeals of narrators to the concreteness of the past, which is to be imposed onto the present. Throughout von Bertalanffy reduces communication to just information processing theory of negative entropy.

Yet von Bertalanffy is narrating. His hero is another biophysicists (e.g. Trincher, p. 152) and “Beadle” (p. 152) since they allow von Bertalanffy to challenge Darwin’s theory of variation-selection-retention, and Einstein’s “play of the dice” (p. 154) as too oriented to perfecting organization or by randomness, whereas thermodynamics provides the more complete theory (p. 153) of open systems which is a project to make general system maxim the universal principle of all systems, all done in the biophysics worldview. Deconstruct to a more base level, and von Bertalanffy tells us a tale that the human systemicity world is rational, and explicable by multivariate differential equations, and we can simply ignore every subjective communication process. Yet the human soul and spirit, and other subjective irrationality deeply permeate human culture, including organization culture, and the levels of the systemicity complexity. That is the nature of the human mind. Therefore, von Bertalanffy has not succeeded in going beyond the mechanistic theory of Descartes, and open system that is organically registered in biophysics is yet one more rationalistic mind-body split out, accomplished as the open system theory of von Bertalanffy. Wittgenstein’s language game (which we will read in upcoming Pondy, 1978 leadership as language game) paper, is ignored by von Bertalanffy. Not just one language game, but a community of language games of the jargon specialties of complex organizations.

And von Bertalanffy is on board with the enlightenment project, not only rejecting subjectivity, but installing through rationalism and positivism the progress project, via information theory married to principles of biophysics, where mind is exorcised. Ironic move, since rational principles, be they empirically validated, are a product of the mind. These and other theoretical, methodological, and practical problems beset his information-processing model. In sum can formal rational principles be laid down to explain systemicity? We get a cell community model. Methodologically, what do we get when we restrict science to empirical objectivity of multivariate simultaneous equations? We ignore the human condition. Practically, what have be wrought when we exclude human subjectivity? We have a mechanistic model that says it’s an organic open system model but self-deconstructs as a reductionist biophysics’ explanation of vitalism!

Returning now from von Bertalanffy to Gertrude Stein, she looks more at how narrative coherence is privileged over the non-coherence, irrational, and subjective side of living systemicity.

The audience is brainwashed to believe in narrative structure (coherence, completion, finalizedness) and to ignore what is happening in the interdependent, even simultaneous moments of the act (Bakhtin, 1993), or as Stein (1935) puts in, in the moment of being. The open system theory of von Bertalanffy has explained away these moments by his reductionisms.

Narrative is a way of not knowing what is happening in systemicity and pretending to know and tell what is going on in words like complex adaptive system, morphogenesis, entropy, etc. Is a narrativist trained in coherence-completion capable of using these words to convey happening, systemicity emerging, in the moment. Is the audience blinded by narrative? And von Bertalanffy, like Stein say they are about explaining happening.

As the competencies of the storyteller (Benjamin, 1936) atrophy, or as Stein (1936) puts it, no longer is an Old Testament way of telling (which except for the begots is not about beginning, middle, or end). Where as Benjamin blames the changes in production community, Stein blames it directly on people being trained to do narrative paragraphing, to think and write in that horrid beginning, middle, and end prison. And von Bertalanffy’s beginning, middle, and end is a biophysics narrative teleology.

People know less about storying that is detecting, and fall upon their training in narrative sequence, in linear renditions of organizational life cycles (blue print cells), on cycles that repeat in fractal patterning (in the new versions). Here is the danger. People come to be schooled and to believe in systems designed within the lines and contours of narrative coherence, then create them. Ludwig von Bertalanffy creates them in narratives of biophysics principles being the end all of human systemicity. Coherence can be a very good thing. Too much coherence, or coherence that ignores by reductionism the dance with incoherence, is not a good thing (Boje, 2005d, Utrecht Lecture).

Stein (1935: 25) makes some important distinctions about narrative coherence of beginning, middle, and end being different from the in-the-moment unfolding emergent systemicity that is related to story:

…Beginning, middle, and end made every one have the emotion they had about anything….

…The fact that anything was existing was moving around by itself in any way it wanted to move that did not arouse any emotion…

…Escape from inevitability feeling that anything that everything had meaning as beginning and middle and ending…

…an existing without the necessary feeling of one thing succeeding another thing of anything having a beginning and a middle and an ending

What I take away from this is that narrative coherence (beginning, middle, end, hereafter BME) is but a small part of systemicity, be it open or otherwise. Further, it is storying that is about the moving, and the participatory moment. The whole thesis of emotionality is really a nice dovetail with Bakhtin’s (1993) emotion-volitional moment that shoots through the aesthetic, cognitive, and ethical. There is no emotion-volitional in von Bertalanffy, or is there. The volitional is a need for biophysics coherence to all levels of systemicity complexity, and a reduction of all science to quantitative, objectivist science, which in the end, ends up being just another variant of mechanistic science, relabeled as open, and organic.

Stein’s hypothesis is that emotion-volition is more tied to the need for coherence narrative in one’s systemicity. I read Bakhtin as being more about a participatory moment of the act, which would fit more with emotion shot through the storying. I read von Bertalanffy as denial of the participative moment of social evolution. Who is right? That is a matter for testing and multi-method inquiry into your own field studies. Finally, this inevitability feeling that BME is everywhere becomes an influencing factor on structuration and biological functionalism (organicism) of human systemicity.

Notes on Stein Lecture 1

I like Stein’s focus on contemporaneous in-the-moment, where “no part of it begins and no part of it ends” (p. 2). That too me is storying, which most of the literature on narrative misses. Work by system and strategy theorist Ralph Stacey (2006) gets at the relation of complexity, improvisation, and indirectly at story.

The main thesis for me in Stein is that there are different ways of telling. One way of telling, for me, is control narrative. Another way is dialogic story. Narrative does not get us to the everyday living, except through the window of control, and the control over story, the marginalization of others’ stories. This is clear in von Bertalanffy, Katz & Kahn, Senge, and Scott (though the last is more nuanced). This storyability ways dovetails with systemicity, in that different patterns of the triad (narrative, antenarrative, & storying) will manifest in different kinds of systemicity, and in different domains or spheres of systemicity. The interaction effects are what I seek to specify.

Story, narrative, antenarrative, and systemicity are different from one another, yet are intertwined, posing as one another, depending upon one another, influencing one another, morphing into one another. Story is mostly orality and narrative is mostly written, and antenarrative is in the act of pre-story becoming narrative, becoming story rooted in context of systemicity. And the context of systemicity is other narratives, antenarrative trajectories, and living storying. Narrative is more retrospective, antenarrative is emergent, and living story is in the moment of life every minute of every working day, and keeps moving (Stein, 1935: 4-5).

People who narrate, antenarrate, and story are conscious of different things. People who narrate, especially when they paragraph, are conscious of linear developmental BME. People who antenarrate are conscious of how in the act of becoming antenarratives morph as they traject, picking up and letting go of context elements, always in the act of becoming. People who story, are craftspeople, standing at the center of relationships, in the moment, acting with answerability to those relationships. Unlike Stein, I agree with Bakhtin. It is in the storying that the answerability is shot through with emotional-volition.

Story, antenarrative, and story will use the same words in different systemacalities. The narratives, antenarratives, and stories of two organizations of varied systemicity will be quite different, even though the words can be the same, what they mean in context is not the same. In one systemicity, people tell how they “live every minute of every day (p. 7). Since they share lots of time and space they can leave a lot to the imagination. But in a Tamara-land (Boje, 1995) the systemicity is fragmented in many different rooms, and order of encounter, who is in a room, and out, makes quite a difference. People network to make sense of what rooms they were not in when people were narrating, antenarrating, and storying. It’s the networking of tellers and listeners chasing one another from room to room, and playing catch up hearing the recounts of rooms they missed, is that Tamara-land is all about, and its very much about the intersection of storytelling and systemicity. As Stein would say, it’s all about listening, and not being able to listen, because people cannot be everywhere at once. And even people in the same room, will listen differently, depending upon what rooms (& room sequencing) they just experienced. And this is why organizations keep so many records, but who reads them? Who listens?