Alternative Strategies: Deleuzian Folds Mobius

(a brief section from a monograph I am finishing up on security design and deconstructing modern military strategy and planning methodologies):

Deleuzian Folds present different philosophical (epistemological and ontological difference on what war is, how and why it forms and functions) constructs that are not a substitution for the familiar legacy modes of decision-making. Thus, inserting a Deleuzian Fold approach into some step in the Joint Planning Process, NATO-OPP, or similar strategic/operational decision-making method while leaving the rest of the framework largely unchanged will not accomplish much and likely create confusion and hostility toward this alien interlocutor. Such application of a postmodern construct requires different language, the application of unfamiliar metaphoric devices, new methodologies and the formation of different conceptual models that draw from different theories on war. “The mind folds a body that floods another body’s mind until… your own discourse is the other’s unconscious.”[1]?The swirling of ideas, objects, minds, and living beings become tangled in relationships that shatter traditional (Western, modern military) orderings of things.??In another suggested example of how strategic designers might apply Deleuzian Folds, the unfamiliar mathematical and scientific concept of a ‘Mobius Strip’ is incorporated as a metaphoric device and modelling framework. The illustration below introduces a Mobius Strip to operate in the similar ‘Russian Doll’ series of complex folds.

A Mobius Strip is a peculiar construct discovered in Germany in 1858, several decades after the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s theory of modern nation-state warfare would publish. Yet despite the close chronological ordering of the ideas, the Mobius Strip has never (in any searches conducted by the author) been applied to warfare or military strategy. This is probably because the concept itself is challenging and disruptive, and in many ways paradoxical to Newtonian Style thinking. The Mobius Strip presents several curious properties that make it quite different from straight lines of effort, systematic causal (input leads to expected output) structures and other spatial frameworks that underpin classical military thinking; the traditional domains of land, sea and air that fostered much of modern military theory and practice does not have many practical examples of what the Mobius Strip introduces. It is the simplest non-orientable surface in three-dimensional space, meaning it is a surface with only one side and does not feature the concepts of ‘clockwise’, ‘counterclockwise’, or other orientable phenomenon of everyday life.?

For instance, were one to start at one point on a Mobius Strip and begin a path around the entire surface, at the completion of the strip one is in an opposite point to where one began. Only by completing a second full loop will one return to the original starting point, making the strip a peculiar non-orientable surface. Were an object to rotate around a Mobius Strip and attempt to look at oneself as if in a mirror, there would be no ‘mirror effect’ because anything within a Mobius Strip cannot orient to itself. In orientable contexts and spaces, a person can look into a mirror and see everything reversed. The peculiar property of a Mobius Strip denies this phenomenon for those existing within a reality shaped in a Mobius Strip form. There are several other unique mathematical properties of the Mobius Strip that exceed the intent of this section, and for a Deleuzian Fold application for strategic designers the illustration below builds off the previous graphic in the Russian Doll ‘nesting’ for folds. However, this nesting arrangement now has Mobius Strips within other Mobius Strips, creating folds within folds, where each Mobius Strip creates itself with a twist in its one-sided surface and the nesting of multiple Mobius Strips creates interiorities and exteriorities of Deleuzian Folds as well.?

If readers reapply the same ‘1, 2, 3’ sequence of organizational, belief-based, and action-oriented security topics from the earlier Deleuzian Fold illustration [see earlier post by the author last week on Deleuzian Folds for that graphic] the peculiar twists of the Mobius Strips arranged in a nesting relationship of folds, unfolding, and refolding provides a sophisticated arrangement of ideas on a complex security challenge?differently than possible in traditional military campaign designs or strategies.?This does not correlate to ‘better’ or any potential evaluation, rather the change in rendering complex security challenges using postmodern ideas enables a greater opportunity to think divergently, toward potential advantages when considering complex, dynamic systems, and an ever-emerging reality. There are an infinite expansion of other ways to envision Deleuzian Folds for complex security challenges; these two examples are provided to stimulate further research and experimentation by strategic designers.?????

This monograph introduced Deleuzian Folds along with the overlapping postmodern concept of ‘rhizomes’ as part of the idea of indirect strategic design and how complexity requires vastly different conceptual tools than what the legacy frame for warfare offers. Defenders of the modern military institution may object to these positions as well as the notion of bringing postmodern concepts, complexity theory, systems theory, and social paradigm theory into a Newtonian Style, technologically rationalist approach to modern warfare. Yet modern military decision-making methodologies and strategies have never successfully accounted for how objectivity (science of war) and subjectivity (art of war) interact?systemically. McCaffery cites Merleu-Ponty with an important idea on this: “No matter how strict the connection between external facts, it is not the external world which is the ultimate justification of the internal; they participate together in an ‘interior’ which their connection manifests.”[1]?This perspective illustrates how Deleuzian Folds work logically, where the interiority of ideas within an individual mind fold and unfold with external reality.?

Objective facts that are quantifiable interact with subjective perspectives enabled by a second-order complexity of human socialized construction where qualitative is perhaps the only option of inquiry. This gap between qualitative and quantitative is itself an artificial imposition created by academics of rival disciplines and belief systems, yet both ultimately admit that complex reality encompasses both of them… and neither can ever sufficiently address that complex reality in total.[2]?Modern militaries are institutionalized to obsess over scientific objectivity and analytic optimization at the detriment of subjectivity, interpretivism, and those significant phenomenon and patterns in warfare that cannot be measured, isolated, or rendered predictable in formulas and rules. Western modern militaries use the decision-making methodologies such as NATO-OPP, JPP, MCPP, MDMP and other variations on the same framework today attempting an objective rendering of a complex reality. Tomorrow’s strategic design of another decision-making methodology could shift from this and consider alternatives that might produce deeper appreciation of those same complex security challenges.?

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[1]?McCaffery, 110.

[2]?Pamela Tolbert and Lynn Zucker, “The Institutionalization of Institutional Theory,” in?Handbook of Organizational Studies, ed. S. Clegg, C. Hardy, and W. Nord (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 175–90.

[1]?McCaffery, 106.?McCaffery cites Nacal.?