Deleuze & Guattari

Ok - here's the bad news for mainstream business education delivered by our nomadic poststructuralists, Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari:

• organisations are not discreet, identifiable entities which can be examined independently of their social contexts - this not only affects how we treat 'organisation' academically, but how we conceive our client organisations and how we work with them to define the scope of our joint educative endeavours
• it is a fallacy to think that organisations (whatever these are, given the above) are perfectible - hence the notion of performance improvement is immediately suspect since this implies that attainment of a stasis, which is unachievable. Poststructuralism rejects the 18thC. Enlightenment-based teleology of progress; unfortunately, since executive education is un-selfreflectively footed in the modernist mindset, here is a major blind-spot
• Capitalism's need to control and channel meaning, in order to remain unquestionable, is operationalised through the capture and control of the signifier. Capitalilsm appears to be aloof from question, certainly in the service industry of business education, when its analysis emerges from within capitalisms own regime of truth - this is a regime that is perpetuated by its own colonisation of signifiers (science, reason, measurement, evidence) on which business education is based and so we are too close to the problem to define it. Within the capitalist regime of truth there exists no mechanism for mounting such a challenge. Wouldn't this be an excellent basis on which to concieve of a 'becoming of leadership'?
• Organisations do not exist simply to provide goods and services as efficiently as possible in resonse to customer demand, they exist to channel desire (a key component of D&G's thinking) into the production and consumption of capitalism's outputs, and to disable the potential for desire to desire anything beyond, or alternative, to this - which has major implications on how we define what we do for the organisations and individuals that come to us

This is work in progress: I'm sufficiently stirred up to start a deeper reading of Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus. More later...

Leadership & Poststructuralism

This is a wonderful book: I've found it a tremendous companion along my rambling journey though poststructural texts - both primary and secondary texts. And for the first time I've come across a problem that I'll need to address in the poststructuralist leadership e-learning module that I'm creating along with Tony Hall. Davis introduces the work of Levinas as a pilot for poststructual apologists navigating their way around the ethical and political objections to poststructuralism. Specifically, and related to ethics, these criticisms depend upon the argument that poststructuralism dislocates or 'decentres' the human subject, leaving it incapable of choice or agency, and therefore undermining the grounds of ethical action. For without subjectivity there can be no ethics. I need to read Levinas to figure out the extent of the risks that are attributed to the tentative conclusions that there can be no general principles that can be applied in particular contexts; that every situation has to be assessed on its own terms, through the lens of Levinas's ethical notions. This is the familiar poststructuralist refrain, even though I've never heard it related to poststructural ethics: an intimate foreignness, as Cixous would call it.

The INTERCHANGES of the Text

Mireille Calle-Gruber (in Cixous' 'Rootprints') says of interchanges that they "constitute a weaving that makes the texts unique... it forms very subtle networks." I'd never thought of an interchange in terms of a woven fabric before, until reading this passage in Rootprints (p.25). She goes on to speak of a renewed urgency with which reading is considered: "Weaving, interchanges, reticular system, non-mastery of a subject of writing, all of this brings forth an exigency of the reading."