3. Immanence
Pop Art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside.
- Andy Warhol, POPism
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Fredric Jameson illustrates the same schism through the difference between Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes, A Pair of Boots, and Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes. In Warhol’s work Jameson claims that what is “most evident is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense.” Warhol’s work explicitly turns around the commodity fetishism and is just the beginning of the cultural expansion throughout the social realm, which also leads Jameson to state that everything in our social life “from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself …, have become cultural in some original and yet untheorized sense.”62
There is no longer an outside as something distinctive from an inside; instead the outside must be distinguished from an exteriority, which is folded as an outside already being inside. The exteriority should be understood as a force which can connect with the already existing assumptions of what art is. After Duchamp’s art becomes something else, something more. Gilles Deleuze states that forces operates “in a different space to that of forms, the space of the Outside, where the relation is precisely a ‘non-relation’, the place a ‘non-place’, and history of emergence.”63 Therefore, if each art institution is a constellation of concepts or compounds of affects, e.g. the Fontain, then the outside is the mixture of forces that bursts through and animates exteriority. The affects of the outside are separated from the art institution; however none of them can do without each other. Nonetheless they can never become identical.
Jameson refers to Heidegger’s text Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks, where Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the pair of peasant shoes really is in truth (cf. “the silent call of the earth”). This entity emerges into the unconcealment (Greek, alétheia) of its being. Van Gogh’s painting illustrates a longing for an original life (the earth as an origin or Heimat in Heidegger’s terms), a longing overturned by Warhol’s flow of images, where no perception can be recognized as privileged or original, but mere as one image among others. A flow of becoming. This difference in paintings also indicates an affective difference in thinking.
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The French philosophy of the sixties, with work by Foucault and Deleuze or any other les grands maîtres, puts forward the concept of difference. Difference was described as a concept which should not only be understood as a mere distinction between two opposites such as: black versus white, or young versus old, or inside versus outside. Rather, the challenge for the coming global society was to manage a hybrid of different identities. Today some critics and some sociologist (e.g. Bauman and Sennett) believe that the processes of globalization only result in homogenization, e.g. how the American pop culture (represented by Hollywood and Coca Cola) destroys the differences. That, of course, is to attribute the can of Coke with far too much homogenizing power. However, the process of globalization might not only be reduced to a well-defined distinction between system/environment, where the system slowly will reduce the environment towards the same as what the system represents. Also it heterogenizes, i.e., it creates new differences, or it resurrects old differences. This indicates that the world cannot be viewed as homogeneous; instead we have a differently differentiated world. Duchamp, for example, illustrated that the art institution could be differently differentiated. The Coke can might just as well as Duchamp’s Fontain open up for new beverages produced locally; also we could point out that Duchamp’s work was powerless against the judgement of the curators, but, on the other hand, the work was powerful in a much broader perspective.
I will try to clarify more thoroughly what I mean by differences and similarities.
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The symptoms of the process of globalization that we have experienced the last 20-30 years are often labelled as Postmodernism, which – in general - favors the process over being. What is of importance when dealing with the processes is that just stating that everything is a process or in movement does neither produce nor tell us anything. Still it is important to realize and acknowledge the point of departure which might best be exemplified by drawing an analogy to a Bedouin camp. The Bedouins have, like every human being, always been travelling. They are wandering; they are nomads.
The Bedouins used to travel during the more cool nights across the Sinai desert by using the stars for orientation. During the day they would camp and try to avoid the burning sun. When the sun sets, they would leave their camp behind, and that specific camp would be a point of departure
because when they take off, they do not know at which place they will be stopping. This is a simple example of a process acknowledging the point of departure. These points of departure are important because their existence tell us that not every point of departure can be true. The Bedouins are always aware of the here and now as useful elements in their future journey. In some respect the Bedouins produce their own culture by making the future more important than the past, which only can be done by being sensitive and attentive in the present. It would be a romantic mistake not to acknowledge that most of the Bedouins (except of those Bedouins working in the tourist-industry) have travelled into the future as well. Today they rather use jeeps than camels, compass than stars for navigation, and so forth. They are not primitive or barbaric with huge swords between their teeth’s like the tales of Arabian Nights. What is the real nature of the Bedouins? Such a question implies that an original nature of being a Bedouin exists. However, if natural equals old fashioned and regressive, then natural (read: a well-defined research program or school) is too rigid to acknowledge that there is no privileged Bedouin, only a bias which implies so. A Bedouin, who does not travel at night and therefore does not fit the general assumptions, is he not a Bedouin? Of course not. The form of the world is always in transformation, and if we hope to acquire any information through research, the researcher must be in transformation. The past and the present becomes a zone of indistinction for the Bedouins. The Bedouin, like everyone else, lives in a mixture of relations; they too have evolved as becoming a subject of their relations, of the forces that affect them. This work is also placed in a zone of indistinction, because when we move beyond what we cannot speak about then we cannot refer to well-defined categories, but instead we must try to grasp the complexities as we follow it along.
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The process of globalization today can, of course, lead to severe forms of exploitations and new forms of sufferings in labor and life. Nevertheless, the process can, at the same time, provide the potential for new forms of liberation in labor and life. In this respect research has become two-sided: (1) one has to resist the elements of control and exploitations, but also we should not limit ourselves only to respond against something; instead (2) one has to grasp and affirm the potential and create new forms of life, new mechanisms for liberation. The Bedouins did not just reproduce their ancestor’s traits and forms of life. One should not look at the Bedouins as a system of population such as Bedouins versus Egyptians, a system which first has to operate and continue its operation (i.e. repeat the same) before it is able to use the difference internally produced as a
distinction. Such an approach would distinguish between difference and distinction; this is normally done in order for the observer to distinguish himself from what he is observing. However, nothing is either black or white, which does not mean that everything necessarily has to be grey and without character. The Bedouins are still Bedouins, although they live differently from their ancestors. They have gradually expanded new ways of being a Bedouin by including elements from their surroundings. They have not limited themselves as being only a respond to Egyptians; rather they have actualized themselves as another form of life within the Egyptians. Similar, the artist Duchamp did not limit his productivity to a simple response; instead he opened up for new ways of becoming an artist.
It is important to acknowledge that both similarities and differences exist. Everything is not different, just as everything is not the same. The latter is what causes many organizational theorists to end up proposing holism, i.e., that everything is equally good, that the employee should be a whole individual, as the ideal. I do not think that man is holistic, nor organizations; instead man and organizations have some similarities and differences. The point is that we should be careful not to reduce everything to the same, e.g. the same value or potential, a holistic sameness, since it is through the tension of differences that man and organizations can enrich each other. An employee is not a so-called whole individual but consists of many dissimilar ingredients. Similar, the organization consists of dissimilar elements, employees and parts. It is the differences that enrich each of them differently. By this I mean nothing else that the difference forces of the outside enrich each person differently, which is also the reason why we should be cautious to make hasty assumptions based on experiences someone experienced differently.
Holism is not interested in differences but in similarities which might be seen as a reaction to the changes that the modernization caused. The succession of economic paradigm in the dominant capitalist countries since the Middle Ages are normally viewed in three distinct moments: 1) a paradigm in which agriculture and the extraction of raw materials dominated the economy, 2) a paradigm in which the industry occupied the privileged positions, and 3) our current paradigm in which services, information and communication dominate the production.
The passage from the industrial modernization towards the informational economy has for many made the world appear extremely complex for which reason some tend to favor holism as a longing for something known and recognizable. The idea of holism is closely related to and initiated as a
response to the opposite idea, the idea that everything is different. It is in-between these two extremities that we find a positive or affirmative ontology which underlines that the world consists of different similarities and similar differences between different levels in the world – differently differentiated. For example, when Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim that today we are in a permanent state of war and that war has become a “regime of biopower, that is, a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but producing and reproducing all aspects of social life,”64 then we might draw similarities between war and labor. Today, in the western capitalistic countries, we are also in a permanent state of work, which also produces and reproduces all aspects of social life. It is not the same but there are similarities, and it is the differences and the similarities which bring us new experiences.
The example with the artist Marcel Duchamp and the Bedouins were used to emphasize that the researcher should be very sensitive and not operate with a bias; otherwise we might exclude a fabulous piece of art from being exhibited or reduce the Bedouins to one naïve and prejudiced definition. In an interview with Michel Foucault, Deleuze gives his explanation of the relationship between theory and practice: “Practise is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another;
theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, a practice is necessary for piercing this wall”65 Michael Hardt unfolds the argument further by stating: “Without theory there is no terrain on which practice can arise, just as inversely, without practice, there is no terrain for theory. Each provides the conditions for the existence and development of the other.”66 We can only develop a theory through practice and only qualify our approach towards practice through theory. Theory and practice remain autonomous and equal. There is no synthesis of theory and practice, and no priority between the two; both are necessary for a complete description.