Tim Scott - Organization Philosophy: Gehlen, Foucault, Deleuze

Organization Philosophy

Gehlen, Foucault, Deleuze

Tim Scott

Senior Lecturer in Organization, University of St Andrews

Tim Scott 2010

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To Laurie and Molly

Work and organization are embodied practices originating in the imperative for Man to create the conditions for his survival. Technical innovation arises from Mans 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 Deleuzes 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 Humes 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.

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 Deleuzes books, neglected on the shelf. I would reflect upon Levines truism that the most practical thing is a good theory, Robbe-Grillets distinction between information and meaning and Robert Coopers 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 Hardts excellent Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Having read most of Deleuzes early works on the history of philosophy, I found that Hardts anarchistic synthesis offered a coherent narrative on the development of Deleuzes thought, through his Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza studies. I adopted Hardts 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 Deleuzes Hume study at the head of the Deleuzian narrative, and expanded on the theme of Spinoza and 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 Deleuzes 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.