The thing is I’m not the kind of type saying ‘hurra’ whether the assignments are good or not. But I learn how to play along. Sometimes it seems like my leader lacks an understanding from what is different from her/his behavior.”176 Here the psycho- or the image-analysis is allowed being the director of bad conscience. Instead, it should let the unconscious relate to the Outside and breakthrough, actualize its singular lines of escape by becoming the master of the words it speak in order to make language answer its need.
Every investment is social. An organizational life expands as it actualizes its potential, by constituting an investment in the social field. This is a desiring life. What does desire do, and what does it produce? Desire lives, and thereby it produces more life to come.
embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”178 Foucault constructs the concept bio-power as a bio-power that has life itself as its object. The bio-power to create, manage and administrate a life.
Bio-power is caused by two poles: 1) the rise of human sciences studying human life, an anatomo-politics of the human body. 2) the technique to regulate life population, e.g. eugenics, propagation, a bio-politics of the population. Bio-power is what brought life and its mechanism into the realm of explicit calculations and knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.”179 In many respects bio-power corresponds with capital, e.g. capital that disciplines all facets of life including leisure time. All aspects of life become objects for capital, similar to Henry Ford who made his workforce dependent on capital. Capital, however, would not have been possible without “the controlled insertion of bodies into machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.”180
The transformation caused by the regulations, control, and discipline of bio-power had devastating consequences. It distributed life in the domain of value and utility and the political struggle became an issue of life rather than the law. This is the background that enables us to understand, writes Foucault. The importance assumed by sex as a political mean to access both the life of the body and the life of the species. “Sex is worth dying for…: the desire for sex – the desire to have it, to have access to it, to discover it, to liberate it, to articulate it in discourse, to formulate it in truth. It constituted ‘sex’ itself as something desirable.”181 Sex is a subordinate to sexuality, a way of life’s perseverance.
In Foucault’s later work about the history of sexuality he moves towards an ethic. He returns to the Ancient Greeks and their two notions of ways of being: care of the self and the Delphic principle know yourself/thyself. According to Foucault, the first precept “care of the self” was one of the main principles for the Greek cities to achieve happiness, wisdom, and harmony; despite the fact that we only remember the latter Delphic principle through the history of philosophy. Through the precept to “take care of oneself,” Socrates taught “people to occupy themselves with themselves, he teaches them to occupy themselves with the city.”182 Philosophy and politics intersect through the care of the self. Today our political existence also places our actual being in question, and vice versa. One must take care of himself to acquire techne. In this manner, the care of oneself is both an active involvement in the political life, and a personal issue of becoming acquainted with oneself. An ethos becomes an approach towards life, a practice.
Foucault relates writing with the notion of the care of the self. He writes: “Taking care of oneself became linked to constant writing activity. The self is something to write about, a theme or object (subject) of writing activity.”183 Similarly, Arendt illuminated that the notion of contemplation was active: She writes: “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice.”184 In the process of writing one characterizes oneself, “action without a name, a ‘who’
attached to it is meaningless” Arendt states, and because of that the ‘who’ is followed by a ‘what’ she continues: “The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is…” Moving from who to what is also a manifestation of the character and his qualities, but such a description often tends to be narrow (i.e. class, title, gender, race, etc. or ipse).
Arendt, however, points out that the action and speech always go on in-between as a practical fabrication or morphology. It is a matter of inter-rest that ties people together. Real stories, such as the event which just occurred, have no authors. “Who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero – his biography, in other words; everything else we know of him, including the work he may have produced and left behind, tells us only what he is or was.”185 The author becomes unimportant as a person, he becomes impersonal. Foucault states that there are only statements and not authors, and that in a statement everything is real and all reality is manifestly present.186 The author is revealed as only a life (Foucault does not look for the origins of a statement. Instead he replaces it with origins, i.e. the statement as a multiplicity – this is relatable to the art of Warhol and Duchamp as mentioned earlier). Deleuze writes: “The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from accidents of internal and external life... It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization: a life pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, for it was only the subject that incarnated it in midst of things that made it good or bad.”187
Foucault emphasizes that “one must become the doctor of oneself”, and “get prepared for a certain complete achievement of life. This achievement is complete at the moment just prior to death.”188 Life is not limited to the moment just prior to death. It is everywhere, just as sex, power, and desire are. For this reason Foucault also emphasizes that each statement (or life) is a multiplicity, and in order to learn we must develop “the art of listening.” If we recall Plato once more, then he would state that we should listen to ourselves to discover the truth from within; whereas the Stoic’s version of the truth lies in the logos. The path we will follow is the third one. Both Plato and the Stoics are
right in the sense that each person has a potential which will be actualized through living; but it is not pre-given how the potential should be actualized. Deleuze describes the voice of Being as something which “it is said, and that it is said in one and the same ‘sense’ of everything about which it is said. That of which it is said is not all the same, but Being is the same for everything about which it is said.”189 This means that the potential can be actualized differently, or that the potential is already different. The proposal of the path in-between Plato and the Stoics is also where we understand truth as becoming or invention, and not as discovery. Since we do not know the potential we cannot know what would be an authentic act. The statement, similar to the Being, does not refer back to any origin or transcendental subject because there are many places “from which any subject can produce the same statement, and they can vary greatly.”190 For Foucault the truth becomes an ethos, as the truth becomes a process, a subjective development of that which is both new and universal. New in the sense of the Stoics and the art of listening to logos. This appears unforeseen at first. The unforeseen should be understood in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of desire as something constitutive for the subject, of the unconscious, i.e. the unforeseen. Universal is that which is of common interest for humanity. In order to become, one must “take care of the self” which means to participate in the political life, and at the same time one will have to listen and be open towards the encounters that one body has with another body. To
“take care of the self” is to participate in the social life and to listen, which takes endurance, but by doing so one can reach the universal “know yourself,” which is of general human interest.
It has become comme-il-faut within HR and western societies in general that the workforce (and the people) must learn and develop ad infinitum, almost making it absurd. One important element (that many organizations often tend to forget) is the predisposition of the workforce. It might be useful to create small pockets of slowness so that the workforce, in its rush to learn and learn does not end up forgetting how to smell or hear, relate to its colleagues, to answer and participate in various groups. I do not believe that learning is a matter of life and death. If the workforce has to learn and develop all the time it will loose its interest, its “perseverance in being”, it will loose itself. Learning becomes shallow if it is the only drive, and what we might learn becomes secondary. We experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and we experience sadness when a body or ideas threaten our own coherence. Both the employee and the organization must have courage;
the employee in order to move in accordance with his own necessity and the organization must be open towards the internal differences of the workforce. The common, that the employees share and which combines the organization transversally, is gradually produced. The HR Department in NNE
cannot exclusively decide which courses and seminars to be offered. The knowledge that one project develops for the construction of a new plant in China relies on knowledge passed from the projects in Kalundborg, Denmark. This sharing produces new knowledge which might create a need for other courses and seminars. Doing strategic HR becomes a matter of facilitating this transversal flow of knowledge. The facilitation of this “biopolitical production” to highlight that HR not only involves the production of material goods in a strictly economic sense but also touches on and produces all facets of social life, economic, cultural, and political.191 We cannot distinguish disciplines such as economy, humanities, and politics since ideas and thoughts constantly emerge in and between. Instead we must try to re-connect. In this respect the area of HR is everywhere and nowhere. It does not only deal with recruitment, or with organizational development. On the contrary, HR should not be viewed as a specific area since it is relevant everywhere, HR, i.e. Human Relations happens everywhere. Therefore, I believe that HR will move towards being the movement or dynamic between places and people. And this might also be the most affirmative critique of HR.
Because today all the organizational processes are evaluated from a HR perspective, although one exclusive place cannot be defined. Instead of developing a kind a HR terminology or meta-language often based on abbreviations or various “personality types” based on Jung, Belbin or other theorist from psychology, the vocabulary of HR should be based on fitting criteria. “We must also learn to legitimize our services in economic terms otherwise the NNE-Management won’t listen” as the HR manager of NNE points out. Another HR consultant adds: “Sometimes we might be a little to quick to put people in boxes, even though it ought to be used as guides not conclusions.”192 It is obvious that the various test-tools used by HR can help to qualify or open a dialogue in a department or in a conflict, but HR must be aware of the unsaid, the things taking place in-between, which a template might not cover. They must master the five senses and develop their intuition in order to locate the potential for something else to take place. We must produce new concept, we must learn to think.
However, it is difficult not to view situations from a specific perspective, and often a new perspective can enrich another area. Nevertheless, the organizational processes between employees, managers, customers, stakeholders, etc. should not be evaluated within a HR framework unless that frame is able to include differences without reducing them. There is only one case, one sociality,
“every formation is nothing but relation, everything is only relation,” writes Serres. Outside of relation between employees, managers, customers, stakeholder or any other element in the process of social organizing are “only clouds in the void, letters or atoms. Language is born with things, and by the same process…, all this is never anything but a network of primordial elements in communication.”193
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HR must be its own censor or doctor (Foucault), which can be done by taking care of the self. In the same fashion Kierkegaard emphasized the importance of receiving when communicating. Listen, participate, communicate – one does not participate by communication alone. By doing so, it might be possible to avoid the more negative side of rhetoric as an instrument to achieve certain ends.
Instead, it can be used as a tool to actualize the best possible story.
We witness the same process in The Seducer when Wergeland takes care of himself through his involvement with the nation’s history and later by producing a documentary about famous Norwegians. But it is not until he decides to show them that he realizes that he has experienced something of general interest in the biography of Liv Ullmann or Edward Munch. He makes their lives immortal by reliving it once more, the same way that reading Plato makes Plato immortal.
Wergeland becomes impersonal; he becomes that force which produces a form of life. Similar HR must become impersonal so that the message of the workforce, the leaders or any one else does not disappear in the vocabulary of HRM. HR must learn to acknowledge that the workforce is a bit wiser when it comes to work and organizing but that does not mean that HR cannot carry the message. It is not a matter of asking the workforce whether this work is good or bad. Instead the workforce must open up for plurality. Serres write: “Every body, each thing is of a particular tissue and presents its own original network and web.”194 HR must be specific. HR should try to express the singular; it should remain open to the complexity and concreteness of labor. It is through imperceptible departures from an ideal path that the formation of the organization emerges.