Global Endosymbiosis

Description

Matthew McCarthy:

"The concept raised here of ‘global endosymbiosis’ is quite straightforward; it is essentially the same as the idea of ‘embeddedness’, or ‘nestedness’, but aims to provide a slightly different connotation- namely, one which emphasizes the ‘living and dynamic relationship’ between different kinds of organizations.

The motivation to develop such a concept is similar to, or even a direct reflection of, an earlier string of ideas in this inquiry. When asking the question: ‘what is a social organization’? I had suggested (like many people) that a ‘social organization’ operates like an ‘organism’. I went on to suggest (others have not formally done this, I don’t think) that the concept of ‘endosymbiosis’ might be applied to a social context. The main motivation of the post was in outlining the various challenges in developing such a theory, of how ‘endosymbiosis’ as a concept may or may not be suitable when trying to describe or understand ‘social organizations’

As one might intuit, a social organism is an organism because it is a dynamic, living shared space in which agents are sensitive to and immersed in a ‘life-space’, a field in which state changes and interactions are entangled and meaningful. Each agent is sensitive and co-constitutive to the whole, and the parts and the whole are meaningfully and mysteriously entangled. The agents in a social system self-organize around this ‘whole’. Exactly how this happens and is maintained is a mystery, but the theory is developed to try and work towards better understanding that mystery."

(https://matthewthomasmccarthy.substack.com/p/global-or-complex-endosymbiosis)

Typology

Strong and Weak Endosymbiosis

Matthew McCarthy:

"If one might consider the concept a bit further, it is possible to suggest that there is an interesting line to be drawn between strong and weak endosymbiosis- which was hinted at, although not developed, in the post on social endosymbiosis, in the following passage:

One might say that one can be ‘inside’ a social organism in varying degrees of intimacy. Naturally, we might view a ‘family’ as a ‘social organism’, and within ones own family, for example, ones presence constitutes a much more important, meaningful, and emotional role; everyone knows each other to a highly intimate or engaged degree. At the same time, I can be involved in a ‘social organism’, like, for example, a ‘housing market’ which requires my presence as a financial actor in order to sustain there. Nobody else in this social organism has an intimate understanding of who I am on an emotional level, it’s self-organization only depends on my own ability to make certain payments. The important point here is that these are two highly different processes: one requires a complex presence which is intimately remembered among a family ‘field’, and a financial presence, which is far less complex in what it demands of me.

We might say, then, that global endosymbiosis can have ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ forms; it is strong when there are more robust and perhaps necessary relationships between organizations, weak when these relationships are not as robust or necessary. One might certainly be inclined to say that ‘weak’ might simply not be an example of endosymbiosis, but one’s presence in such a social system in the example above does shape and constitute one’s own being in profound ways, even if the relationship is not as strong or intimate."

(https://matthewthomasmccarthy.substack.com/p/global-or-complex-endosymbiosis)

Discussion

Matthew McCarthy further explains:

"The ‘dictionary definition’ of endosymbiosis is that it is:

A type of symbiosis in which one organism lives inside the other, the two typically behaving as a single organism.

And so, if the Cosmos is the unfolding of organizations and their cycles, then global endosymbiosis suggests that this unfolding and relationality is fundamentally co-constitutive with and through other organizations and cycles; that the Cosmos is not merely full of separate organizations which collide and interact, but organizations which are, to varying degrees, entangled and co-constitutive and sensitive to other organizations.

Put more poetically, we might say that it is through the World that we are what we are, or that anything is the way it is; that we are not a thing which merely interacts, but a process that is fundamentally alive and in tune to everything else. It is through relation that we become enlivened, through relation that embodiment is allowed and explored.

It is easy to see how one might be quickly turned off by the idea for a variety of reasons- the first being ‘this only applies to certain organizations’, or that this is solely a specific biological phenomenon. But why not adopt the concept and use the metaphor to consider the dynamics between organizations more broadly? Indeed, such is the aim, at least partly, of an artistic inquiry: to explore new and different ways of making sense of the World."

(https://matthewthomasmccarthy.substack.com/p/global-or-complex-endosymbiosis)