The Disorders of Desire

Humans are sense makers and sense takers; pattern formers and pattern recognisers. That’s a familiar enough claim.

It seems all the more true in times of crisis. Established patterns, norms and conventions are disrupted. But we adjust, quickly, partially, sometimes completely. Not all of us, but most, and naturally.

That shows then that sensing and settling in to patterns comes as second nature to us. It’s part of the form of human life.

Whilst in the past the crises confronting us have been war, pestilence and famine; today, it’s plague. Our response is to lock ourselves down. Unimaginable just days ago. Now it’s how we do things. New patterns have emerged. 

We already know the rules: 2 metres apart, hands washed; stay at home, save lives.

I want to connect this insight to a question I am confronted with: what does leadership amount to in a time of crisis? 

I feel an expectation, a demand. Eyes have turned to me. However disappointing I take what follows to be an important part of my response to that demand.

Leaders excel. They stand out, are out-standing. In what ways?

Leaders don’t (necessarily) do different things but (necessarily) do things differently. They do what we all do, but perhaps just more consciously or explicitly. Sometimes maybe more deeply or powerfully. More insistently, more wisely. And so on.

That applies to sense making and sense taking. Sometimes leading is sensing (and reacting to) patterns that others don’t (sense and react to). Other times it’s imposing those patterns, on to situations, circumstances, people.

One might think of that as the ability to normalise the abnormal. To render sensible the insensible. To order the chaos. And so on.

In their famous “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making”, Dave Snowden and Mary E. Boone, separate out five ways in which leaders make sense of things. Four are relatively straightforward, as domains (“ontologies”) of order and sense making: the simple, the complicated, the complex, the chaotic.   

There is a fifth domain (stripped of the definite article): disorder. This domain interests me.

The domain of disorder for Snowden and Boone is in fact where we all start. It is the antithesis of active, autonomous sense making; the kind of sense making we might naturally call leadership. Leaders stand out from, stand against disorder. 

Disorder is however not chaos; there is order in our baseline but it’s inauthentic. In some sense, the sense we make is not fully ours. It’s sense that has always already been made (by someone else).  It is the form of life that we are inculcated into. One could call it culture, tradition, Bildung.  

It’s sense making, as Snowden puts it, that’s based on “habituated patterns of . . . past decision making”:

We do not see things as they are but see things as we are.

As habituated creatures, few of us are aware of this – our culture, tradition – as a superstructure of sense. It’s like the (semantic) air we breathe.

Leaders on the other hand, know where they are, epistemically and ontologically. They know which of the ontologies confronts them: the simple, the complicated, the complex, the chaotic.  And know how to navigate, transition between them.

But Snowden’s insight, that doesn’t come as clearly into focus as it might, is the risk that even as a leader one settle in turn too comfortably into these ontologies and the sensing associated with them. 

One might all too easily again start to see the world not as it is but as we are (this time as supposed leaders not punters). To the hammer everything is a nail (the simple; cause and effect). To the system theorist everything is complex, fractal, emergent. And so on.

To not fall back into disorder, leaders have to keep themselves constantly moving. In that sense, disorder is the natural domain of the leader. Not inauthentic static disorder, but, as Snowden says, the “dynamic transition between domains, authentic disorder”. 

Leadership is something liminal, between states (of being).

That generates another hypothesis: leadership is authentic disorder. That’s a more surprising claim than the one I opened with. Surely leadership (as sense making) is about the creation of order, not disorder?

Yes, but let’s suppose that our thoughts are not our own, that we are caught in the “habituated patterns of past decision making”. Then might leadership not (simply) be the breaking out of such patterns? Might that breaking out not justify the label disorder? Maybe so.

I want to test that thought in the context not of the leadership of thought or straightforwardly action, but something we might call the leadership of speech.

Of course speech is action (and for that matter, often, thought). That insight is the legacy of the great ordinary language philosopher J. L. Austin. 

He famously distinguished between the locutionary content and illocutionary force of our words: saying “I buried the hatchet” describes what I did. Whilst saying “I do!” in the right context is not describing anything, it’s doing something (e.g., getting married). 

Like a badge of honour, such illocutionary acts tend to come with an exclamation mark: “I name this ship!”. “I object!”. These are doings, not (just) sayings.

For Austin the locutionary and illocutionary acts are distinguishable but not separable aspects of the same “total speech act”. They are ruled, ultimately, by convention, by law, by order. In their saying (and doing) they literally make sense.

But there are times when we run out of road, so to speak. There are times when there is no right thing to say, no well trodden linguistic path. Such moments need not be inherently momentous. They happen all the time. 

But in moments of crisis when our conventions more fundamentally run aground – as they have done in lock down, in the face of a catastrophic plague – we find ourselves torn from our habituated patterns of past decision making. In such siutations the decision at stake is the decision about what to say, right here, now (which is the essential leadership moment).

There is no right or accepted thing to say. This is what Snowden calls chaos: “no manageable patterns exist – only turbulence.” The question then: what is the authentic leadership response to chaos, to crisis?

Snowden says “communication of the most direct top-down or broadcast kind is imperative; there is simply no time to ask for input”. That bears repeating: there is simply no time to ask for input.

This is the claim I want to interrogate: when our habituated patterns dissipate, when we see things as they are and not as we are, there is simply no time to ask for input. There is only time for leaders to broadcast, to impose, to direct. To command and control.  

This is such an ingrained, almost natural thought that it’s difficult to expose it as a challengeable assumption rather than an axiom. 

But I do want to oppose it. Not completely, absolutely. Not to the extent of denying that there are circumstances in which to command, to control, to broadcast may very well be the very things needed from leaders. 

It is however (always) the circumstances that will dictate what’s needed rather than the expectations borne from an habituated concept of leadership.

I simply want to hold out for the possibility of a different sort of leader(ship) in the face of the turbulence. The sort of leadership in which there is only and always time to ask for input: leadership as a reciprocal rejoinder.

To see the shape of such a possibility I want to (re)turn to Austin. In the total speech act – the act of saying something specific in a specific situation – there is a third often ignored aspect: the perlocutionary act. It is not what is said in saying something, nor what is done in saying something, but what is done by saying something. 

A distinctively perlocutionary verb in the space of leadership is to inspire. Unlike the illocutionary “I object!” which crowds out input, and brings definitive order through speech as action, the perlocutionary is resolutely second person: it makes room for you, not I.

Perlocution is bringing about effect, affect. It takes (at least) two to perlocute. Leadership as locution (stating) or illocution (doing) can be social but in fact in essence needs only the leader; it can be effectively a one person show.   

So a leader who says “I inspire!” (as locution or illocution) comes close to performative contradiction. Other than in the oddest of circumstances, such a thing is unsayable by anyone who stands a chance of meaning it sincerely. 

You may say it of me, but never can I (should I?) say it of myself. That ruling out of the first person pronoun is definitional of the perlocutionary.

I am associating leadership here with perlocution and in so doing I am drawing on a notion of Austin’s by way of his great student Stanley Cavell: leadership as passionate expression. 

This is intended to contrast (not completely, but enough) with leadership as performative expression, as stating and doing, as commanding and controlling. This is what one might think of as the dominant sense of leadership.

Cavell says: “We might say: perlocutionary acts make room for, and reward, imagination and virtuosity, unequally distributed capacities among species. Illocutionary acts do not in general make such room – I do not, except in special circumstances, wonder how I might make a promise or a gift, or apologize, or render a verdict. But to persuade you may well take considerable thought, to insinuate as much as to console may require tact, to seduce or to confuse you may take talent. Further, that perlocutionary-like effects – for example, stopping you in your tracks, embarrassing or humiliating you – are readily, sometimes more effectively, achieveable without saying anything, indicates that the urgency of passion is expressed before and after words. Passionate expression makes demands upon the singular body in a way illocutionary force (if all goes well) forgoes.” (Cavell, “Performative and Passionate Utterance”)

In the radically perlocutionary (speech) act – let us suppose in the moment of crisis or emergency – there is no conventional response, I am exposed, I speak with the “urgency of passion” but that is not all, critically (and contra Snowden) I precisely do not crowd out others, rather: I always invite a response, hopefully, in kind.

Cavell again: “In acknowledging as mode of speech in or through which, by acknowledging my desire in confronting you, I declare my standing with you and single you out, demaning a response in kind from you, and a response now, so making myself vulnerable to your rebuke, thus staking our future . . .” (Cavell)

Even in the face of chaos, there is (almost) always then “time to ask for input”. I single myself out – which is precisely the standing out of leadership – and I single you out, as the one addressed.  There is both radical individuation and socialisation in the leadership moment. 

And the form of that address requires not force but tact, not certainty but imagination and virtuosity, not rank and authority but persuasion. And so on.

As a form of passionate expression, this links leadership intrinsically to the emotional and moral domains which struggle to find full expression through (merely) locutionary and illocutionary acts. Command and control – performative expression – seems at least awkward as a form of moral or emotional “leadership”.

There is no final word in the reciprocal rejoinder of perlocution, of passionate expression: denial, refusal are themselves often part of the “game”. Just as there is (should be?) no final word in leadership (even if there are always times when words run out and action or inaction ensue). 

Here, now, as a leader, in a moment of what we might call authentic disorder, I am not reading from a script or score, resting on habituated patterns of past decision making, rather I am improvising. 

A third and final quotation from Cavell: “a performative utterance is an offer of participation in the order of law. And perhaps we can say: A passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire.”

This is the distinction I have been searching for. It captures exactly what I take Snowden to be meaning when he talks of leadership as authentic disorder: leadership, as passionate utterance, is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire, not an offer to participate in the order of law.

I started by saying that humans are sense maker, sense takers; pattern formers and pattern recognisers.

Although obviously true and necessary (otherwise chaos ensues) I have tried to bring out the price we pay in being embedded in patterns of sense. Traditional conceptions of leadership including notions of leadership as sense making, seem only to allow for leadership as participating in the order of law, of convention, of patterns already established or at best of forcing patterns onto chaos.  

I have tried to outline a way to understand leadership differently not as an ever deeper participation in the order of law but precisely as a refusal to pay that price, and to see leadership instead as an invitation (to others) to improvise in the disorders of desire, of speaking from a position of passion, of not knowing how one will be received, but of simply having the courage to invite a response.

Of course, things need to be built, instructions and orders given, but perhaps in the context of a crisis there is more space for a different more passionate form of leadership than one might have imagined?

A rhetorical question nevertheless intended as an invitation to respond . . .