Enigmatic Signifiers and Organizational Cognition

There is a concept in psychoanalytic theory known as the enigmatic signifier: communication that is unmistakably meaningful yet resistant to interpretation.

The classic examples come from early childhood. Infants absorb tones, gestures, affective cues, invitations, and prohibitions — all charged with meaning, none of it fully understandable. As psychiatrist Ladson Hinton summarizes:

Jean Laplanche has created an extensive metapsychology describing this situation, emphasizing the original helplessness of an infant who is bathed in enigmatic messages from its very beginnings. These messages from the adult other are often sexualized, and are partly or largely unconscious to the sender. Laplanche calls this situation 'primal seduction'. The immature human cannot fully metabolize such adult messages, and through 'primal repression' they remain as the unconscious core of subjectivity. They disrupt psychological life, conveying a sense of signifying something to the subject. What they signify is an enigma, like finding a hieroglyph in the desert. The story of relationships and culture is the story of our repeated attempts to translate them, to respond to them.

Much of what drives us is meaningful to us without being known by us.

As Michael Levenson writes in Modernism, "Art, or the will to art, precedes desire." We do not know what we want until an external form gives it shape.

Nietzsche opens On the Genealogy of Morals with a similar intuition. We are strangers to ourselves, oriented not by self-knowledge but by what we habitually serve. Attention goes somewhere first; meaning accrues later, incompletely, and never quite settles.

The enigmatic signifier in art

Some artworks do not merely engage our desire for symbolic fulfillment — they thwart it, and operate enigmatically by design.

Einstein on the Beach, the 1976 collaboration between Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, is a canonical example. The opera is composed almost entirely of signifiers that feel coherent and consequential without resolving into narrative. Language, movement, repetition, and image all generate significance without telling us what that significance is for.

Will it get some wind for the sailboat And it could get for it is It could get the railroad for these workers And it could be where it is It could Franky, it could be Franky It could be very fresh and clean It could be a balloon All these are the days my friends And these are the days my friends

To experience Einstein on the Beach is not to solve a puzzle. It's to remain inside an ongoing act of meaning-making without resolution. The work doesn't reward interpretation so much as attention. Its architecture is its meaning.

For this reason, people describe the opera as hypnotic, irritating, revelatory, unbearable — sometimes all at once. It doesn't guide the audience toward closure. It asks you to stay present to significance without explanation.

The irreducibility of Einstein on the Beach makes the work cognitively instructive, not just aesthetically powerful. It trains a particular capacity: staying engaged with systems that are clearly consequential but not immediately legible.

Levenson again: "Art, we might say, is instead a social practice of culture… What sustains the social practice of art is miscellaneous and inconclusive talk."

Meaning isn't extracted and resolved. It's circulated, inhabited, continuously reworked. Art does not resolve meaning; it teaches us how to live inside it.

The enigmatic signifier at work

Organizations, like families or nations, have their own aesthetic architectures. They crackle with unstated meaning. They are, in a real sense, strangers to themselves.

In organizational life, many behaviors are meaningful without being consciously available to the people enacting them. What looks like a "personality quirk" or "leadership style" or "growth area" can also be understood as a repeated attempt to enact and resolve a personal enigma — a charge of energy and tension that can't be named directly.

Across a given culture, these personal enactments of unresolved meaning form a lattice: an invisible architecture that organizes behavior and is intrinsic to human cognition. It is generative, creative, and always oriented toward some form of release. These patterns cannot be fully translated into explicit explanations without losing what makes them operative. To demand immediate legibility is often to flatten the very dynamics that allow a system to move.

Living — and working — inside this zone of meaning-making is more fertile than mistaking the legible surfaces of an organization for its underlying reality. Colluding with what can't quite be seen or named expands the available energy and allows for deeper and more original insight.

Participation over decoding

A central insight of cybernetics is that we don't understand complex systems by standing outside them and decoding their meaning. We understand them — partially and provisionally — by participating in them, disturbing them, and being disturbed in return.

Self-actualization begins not with explicit understanding, but with living alongside one's own enigma — discovering where energy pools and learning how it moves. This orientation involves grief and humility, because the interpretation of the human condition offered here is partly tragic. But it also opens the door to deeper connection and creativity. Our lives are works of art, and artworks are living, shared practices.

As the world gets faster, more conflicted, more saturated with tools promising instant clarity — this capacity becomes more precious. The capacity to honor what makes human cognition irreducible and different from AI. To stay with what can't be resolved.

All these are the days, my friends. And these are the days.

RIP to Ladson Hinton and Robert Wilson, both of whom passed away in 2025.