Organization Philosophy
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Organization Philosophy Gehlen, Foucault, Deleuze Tim Scott Senior Lecturer in Organization, University of St Andrews
Tim Scott 2010 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-24722-2 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-349-31977-0 DOI 10.1057/9780230277557 ISBN 978-0-230-27755-7 (ebook) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
To Laurie and Molly
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Contents List of Figures Preface Foreword Acknowledgements xi xii xiii xv Introduction 1 Guide to the text 3 1 The Organized Body 9 1.1 The organic sense of organization 10 1.2 Organ-Machines 13 1.3 Anthropology and organization: Gehlen s Man 15 1.4 Man s burden and relief 16 1.5 Burden and relief in the organization of mind 18 1.6 Man s affective response to world-openness: Motivation, work and organization 19 1.7 Embodiment and organization in sociology 23 1.8 Internal and external disciplines of embodiment 25 1.9 Examples of embodiment: (I) Sitting and walking 27 1.10 Examples of embodiment: (II) The hand 29 1.11 The mutual organization of hand and mind 32 2 Technologies of Embodiment 34 2.1 A medicine of species 35 2.2 The primary spatialization of pathology 36 2.3 The secondary spatialization of pathology 39 2.4 The tertiary spatialization of pathology 42 2.5 The common syntax of illness and speech 44 2.6 The glance and the knife: Dissection and organization 46 2.7 Clinical organization: The role of medical technology 48 vii
viii Contents 2.8 The stethoscope 49 2.9 The spatialization of medical technology 50 2.10 The ophthalmoscope and ophthalmometer 53 2.11 The laryngoscope 56 2.12 The X-ray 57 3 Subjective Empiricism and Organization 59 3.1 How mind is organized into a subject by the natural principles of association 62 3.2 Sensation and organization 66 3.3 The general rules: Artifice and organization 68 3.4 Hume s critique of egoism: Partial sympathy, the natural unit of society 71 3.5 The rule of property 73 3.6 The institution as the social embodiment of practical reason 75 3.7 Hume s theory of power and organizational implications 76 3.8 Some further implications of Hume s empiricism: Relations and difference as the bases of organization 79 3.9 Conclusions: Hume and organization 81 4 Organization and Becoming 83 4.1 Hegel s logic of determination 83 4.2 Bergson s critique of the dialectic: Contingency and abstraction 86 4.3 Difference as the internal movement of being: Causa Sui 89 4.4 Organization is unforeseeable 91 4.5 Bergson s critique of the One and the Multiple 95 4.6 Against state philosophy: Order v. organization 97 4.7 Organization as the actualization of the virtual 98 4.8 Bergson s critique of possibility and realization as the locus of order: Virtuality and actualization as the locus of organization 100 4.9 The limits of Bergsonism: Differentiation is only the first part of organization 101
Contents ix 4.10 Difference and univocity: Towards an organizational logic 103 5 Organization and Affirmation 107 5.1 Nietzsche and critique 107 5.2 Total critique as re-evaluation: Pars Destruens, Pars Construens 108 5.3 Nietzsche s perspectivism 110 5.4 The form of the question in Nietzsche 113 5.5 Nietzsche s slave logic and master logic: Who wills organization? 115 5.6 Nietzsche s critique of humanism 121 5.7 Organization: Consciousness and the body 123 5.8 The path to self-consciousness in Hegel: Labour, desire and consumption 125 5.9 Nietzsche on labour, desire and consumption 127 5.10 Labour as human essence 128 5.11 Nietzsche s dicethrow: Will to power and eternal return 130 5.12 Organization: Will to power and eternal return 132 5.13 Organization: Burden or relief? 134 5.14 Nietzsche and organization: Affirmation of affirmation 135 6 Organization as Joyful Practice 138 6.1 Spinoza s materialism: Substance, attributes and modes 138 6.2 Spinoza s expressivism and organization 141 6.3 Spinoza s analysis of power: Organization, a power to affect and to be affected 143 6.4 Spinoza s corporeal philosophy 147 6.5 Implications of Spinoza s corporeal philosophy for organization theory 149 6.6 The passive and the active body/organization 150 6.7 The embodied power of organization: The conatus 153 6.8 Desire is the desire for organization 154 6.9 Spinoza s adequate ideas: Understanding and organization 156
x Contents 6.10 Towards a Spinozian ethics of organization 159 6.11 Spinoza s theory of Right 161 6.12 Spinoza s theory of Reason 163 6.13 The Common notions: Steps towards an organizational ecology 164 6.14 Forming common notions: A basic organizational principle 166 6.15 The common notions: An ethical practice of organization 168 6.16 Towards a new conception of organizational effectiveness 171 Conclusion 174 Glossary 177 Bibliography 178 Index 185
List of Figures 6.1 A body s internal structure of power (Adapted from GD 73) 147 6.2 From passion to action (Adapted from GD 100) 172 xi
Preface Work and organization are embodied practices originating in the imperative for Man to create the conditions for his survival. Technical innovation arises from Man s ability to manipulate objects and ideas in the distinctive human interval between stimulus and response. The embodiment of technologies is apprehended in developments in pathological anatomy and medical instrumentation since the late eighteenth century. These combined to disclose a new model of the body as a system of organs and the body thus organized became the prototype for a model of medical organization and for social organization more widely. But empirical methods arising from such developments lost sight of their origin in the body, and of an older, more subtle empiricism revived in the early philosophical works of Gilles Deleuze. By addressing Deleuze s works on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, we can recover the significance of organization as embodied practice. Hume explains how subject and society are organized by material forces surpassing the human. Bergson discloses an ontology of efficient difference as the positive movement underlying Hume s analysis. Nietzsche comprehends how this movement contains a will carrying within it the seminal idea of organic composition or organization. These two movements constitute an affirmative genealogy of organization which Man sadly contradicts, not only by the organizations he forms, but also by the negative ( critical ) tendency of his organizational scholarship. To become a truly active, organizing being, Man must overcome his reactive nature. Spinoza explains what we must do to realize this destiny: combat the sad passions and inadequate ideas we suffer under the natural conditions of our existence; cultivate the joyful passions and the power of action by organizing our encounters with others. This is what is meant by a post-structural revision of organization. xii
Foreword This manuscript was originally researched and written between January and December 1995. It rose from the ruins of a very different book which, after four years of frustrated writing, I destroyed; an act I have rarely regretted. Par destruens, pars construens. Why have I waited until now to publish? Several reasons, but mainly a lack of confidence. Was it sufficiently original? Would it resonate with any reader? Another reason was that the era that would be known as Deleuzian, predicted by Michel Foucault, was then only just dawning. It is now full morning, with a more widespread interest in the ideas and influences referred to here. Following its completion, I entered health services research, which I thought might benefit others more than a monograph on organizational philosophy. A practical philosophy should, I thought, be followed by applied research. But I found there was nothing especially practical about health services research. Immersed in the minutiae of randomized controlled trials, my eyes lingered on Deleuze s books, neglected on the shelf. I would reflect upon Levine s truism that the most practical thing is a good theory, Robbe-Grillet s distinction between information and meaning and Robert Cooper s trenchant remark that organizations hate one and love the other. Hence, I eventually abandoned health research to return to organization studies, more specifically to its maligned underclass of critical and post-critical marketing and consumer studies. Another concern was that in writing the later chapters I might have drawn too much on my reading of Michael Hardt s excellent Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Having read most of Deleuze s early works on the history of philosophy, I found that Hardt s anarchistic synthesis offered a coherent narrative on the development of Deleuze s thought, through his Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza studies. I adopted Hardt s basic narrative structure for my chapters four to six. I see now that my discomfort about my debt to Hardt was partly hubris. Rereading Gilles Deleuze as I edit this manuscript, I do not think I have overstepped the bounds of scholarly community. I have brought together lines of thought from philosophical anthropology, the history of ideas and of technology and sociology and tried to place the Bergson-Nietzsche-Spinoza narrative into a wider philosophical context. I have also added a chapter on Deleuze s Hume study at the head of the Deleuzian narrative, and expanded on the theme of Spinoza and xiii
xiv Foreword organization considerably. These chapters are at minimum a development of the Deleuze-Hardt narrative. I set out to read Deleuze with the specific problem of organization in mind. Deleuze often refers to organization in passing; Hardt contrasts organization with order. I have taken the analysis a stage further, to read Deleuze as an organizational philosopher. Of course originality is a problematic notion, especially by Deleuze s own mores. All the philosophical works read herein are interrelated. Gehlen refers to Nietzsche, Bergson to the Scholastics, Foucault to numerous historical and unacknowledged philosophical sources, Nietzsche to Spinoza, Spinoza to Descartes and so on in a dance of ideas that varies from courtly formality to intellectual brawling. These comments apply mainly to chapters four to six, but they prompt the question of originality more broadly. When asked when he got his most original ideas, Igor Stravinsky is said to have answered, [w]hen I am working. In philosophy the answer would surely be when I am reading. It is in conversation with a text that the mind is most creative: if ideas are to come at all, that is when they are likely to appear. But ideas are not singularities. One has only to read authors like Heidegger or Derrida, who work with ideas as if they were Russian dolls, to see that no concept has any origin or end, for those trajectories presume thought without language.
Acknowledgements A number of people may be surprised to learn that they have helped and encouraged me to finally bring this book to light. My special thanks to Iain Munro and John Desmond for their friendship and intellectual community; Richard Wieskopf and Bernadette Loaker for helping revive my enthusiasm for the project; Ken Munro and Roger Stapleton for technical helping retrieve the original electronic files and Paresh Raval and the volunteers in the University of St Andrews Alternative Format Suite for transforming the manuscript into an electronic document. Without the assistance of the foregoing I doubt if I would ever have got this far. It remains to add that if I had felt it necessary to update the book in light of all the relevant literature published since 1996, then I would not have published it. I would rather it remain as it was first written. As a series of essays and commentaries on works in philosophy and philosophical anthropology, it does not contain time-sensitive data. Regrettably, of course, this means that in 2009 numerous authors go unacknowledged. I decided not to attempt to update the bibliography, as this would effectively have meant starting over. xv