only retain those who would rather prefer playing for a small soccer team in Norway, instead of Real Madrid. Many organizations seem to fear themselves, and their own methodology. It is a useless return to Hobbes’ world. The paradox is that this fear creates rigid rules which probably end up destroying the imagination and productivity, the qualities which should have carried the organization ahead.
If leadership is about feeling and expanding the rhythm so that the workforce can join for a jam-session, then the vision must be what initiates it. A leader must facilitate and organize various qualities, e.g. competences and people to make the process of working productive. He must become a messenger. Leaders as messengers are mediators, who are themselves in movement. Only by being in movement can the leaders communicate or carry a message. However, in order to communicate the leader must set some sort of frame, a “what” which enables the communication to take place.
Such form of leadership designates a space of opportunities as an open network of “how”, a network of variation and diversity. The “what” is what organizes the difference together by what agitates the workforce, and what keeps pulling the workforce apart and back. Earlier I mentioned that all relations are external, now we can add that we live only by relations.
The rest of this chapter will deal with the concept of Utopia and vision as a parallel to the concept of conquest, and hereby come closer to understanding the capacity of “what” and “how”.
its ordinary senses: “reason,” “word,” “principle,” “discourse,” “law,” etc.; i.e., the principle governing the cosmos, or the source of human reasoning about the cosmos. Reason, as we know it today, was born under the Greek name of logos which later, by the Romans, was translated into ratio.
Ever since the Roman translated reason into rationality many have forgotten that reason is not only an instrument (ratio), but also a dialogue, a communication. Reason as rationality is more concerned with proportion, with measurement, or with quantification in general; whereas reason as logos is more concerned with empathy, sensitivity, or with quality in general.291
In Plato and Aristotle’s work a similar function is performed by nous (Gk., mind or spirit) as the faculty of intellectual apprehension, as distinct from mere empirical knowledge. Plato describes nous as the quality enabling one to apprehend the forms, i.e. an aspect of our own reasoning which found its raison d’être in the soul’s contemplation of its relation to the Idea or the Good. For example, when Plato describes logos as “the soul’s conversation with itself” or “if all knowledge always exists in the soul, then the soul must be immortal.”292 Therefore, logos, in Plato’s oeuvre, are an uncovering of the truth located in the soul (i.e. anamnesis, the process of going back to the primary object of truth: the soul). Logos, defined by Plato, is a portent in the sense that it stretches out into the future like an already existing master-plan. The later Stoics have a somewhat similar concept, the seminal reason (logos spermatikos), the cosmic source of order; its aspects are fate, providence, and nature. Here it becomes more obvious that logos is relatable with Utopia. Logos becomes a necessity that a transcendental being (e.g. a God) manifests for the creatures on earth. This, however, does not necessarily mean that it will stretch out in the future. Something else might be actualized. The future is only an approximation. The present carries the potential for several futures but only one will actually unfold. Kirkeby accents that the word “fate” esteems from the Latin word fatum which has close relations with the Nordic etymology of the word: creation [at skabe].293 We are folded in the Great Cosmos (Gr. Taxis kai kosmos) tying the individual together with the state and the universe into a mixed body. Such a mixed body is an organizing organization. “The mixture thus tends towards the manifold, partes extra partes. The discontinuous merges from continuity, like whole numbers on the line of real numbers.”294 The multiplicity and the singular become a limited singularity of mixtures. According to Serres, it is Harlequin dressed in his coat which is a mixture of various colors, a mosaic coat. When NNE is productive, it too, is colourful, mixing many aspects into one. An employee says: “There is a high level of autonomy in NNE that I really appreciate. It took awhile before I realized that you must be upfront if you want to achieve something. You can
really try many things out; of course, sometimes the organization doesn’t seem willing to try something new. Some people here have a really diverged career.”
If we recall Nietzsche’s use of the concept: amor fati to express the will to love the necessary or the fate, and thereby actualize its potential; then we might understand that the actualization takes place in-between fate and necessity. The Stoic philosopher Chrysippos accepts fate but not the idea that everything has a causal relation (i.e. determinism); alternately, fate is only tied to the effect which a collision with an exterior cause will redeem (religious) or create (i.e. fatum). In the story about Wergeland fate constantly hits him in his face, e.g. the girls he meets, the various people he meets and portrays, the stories he is being told, the different studies and works he experiences; and each time he connects with those experiences in a necessary way, he creates or actualizes something else. He accepts his fate with necessity by transforming it into something productive for his further existence;
this transformation is initiated by his characteristic imagination, spontaneity, and openness.
The potential of the world, or the virtual world, is already prepared right before the people. Now it only waits to be unfolded. In many respects this is similar to Plato’s logos. However, to paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, it is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.”295 The world exists as potentiality yet to be actualized, and one way of actualizing this potential takes place as soon as it is transformed when spoken about (i.e. logos becoming a Utopia actualized). The unexploited potentiality in life is what happens to us while we are doing something else. It is through the Wergeland virtues: spontaneity, creativity, and play that we may get familiar with it. Similar, Deleuze and Guattari define a concept as something which “speaks the event, not the essence or the thing – pure Event, a haecceity, an entity: the event of the Other or of the face.”296 The creation of a concept is a way to bring out the consistency of the Event and delineate a territory that belongs to the person carrying the potential to produce them. Man’s thought is the junction of the three planes in the Great Cosmos, i.e. the individual, the society or state, and the universe. If ‘the brain is the screen’ as Deleuze stated, then this means that we might be absent from ourselves, from society, from the universe but nevertheless we are always within. The brain is the mind itself and only the brain is thinking, not man. Deleuze and Guattari write: “It is the brain that says I, but I is another.”297 The subject is created by different injections of life consisting of various experiences.
Life is an eventuality.
Another equally important element in the Greek’s teaching of philosophy was the idea of the Master, whom the students would follow around and, through him, listen to logos such that the Master only was regarded as a medium through which logos emerged. Therefore, logos can, even with Plato, be understood as an immanent or already existing argument or guidance just waiting to be unfolded through actualization (i.e. Utopia). The question is whether the truth is to be uncovered, or created. The former being Plato’s thoughts, whereas the latter being Deleuze’s who wrote “the news that sense is never a principle or origin, but that it is produced. It is not something to discover, to restore, and to re-employ; it is something to produce by new machinery.”298 Sense is something to be produced when different machines connect in a mixing body. The oil, which ties and facilitates the connections, is added by the leader. As the recruitment pyramid illustrated that the workforce is plunged into a space of opportunities, a communicative space of “how.” The open and fluctuating network of the organization is stable for itself. The encounters between Masters, Professionals, and Trainees are nothing but a brake, a hindrance in the precipitous rush towards the base.
The concept space of opportunities is a form of organizing that does not separate varies forces as either good or bad because that would turn the organization into a reactive force. A reactive force is separated from what is can do. “Indeed, everything which separates a force is reactive as is the state of a force separated from what it can. Every force which goes to the limit of its power is, on the contrary, active.”299
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Earlier (in Part 1) we dealt with Foucault, who seemed to come in-between those two thoughts presented by Plato and Deleuze when he drew a distinction between the Greek dictum: know yourself (contemplate), and: take care of the self (create); claiming that the latter is actually primary despite the Oracle of Delphi. In order to know yourself you must first take care of the self by creation and becoming, as an approach in which one gets familiar with what happens in life. To take
“care of the self” was similar to the pagan understanding of logos as the art of listening. Listening is one form of development; the important element is that it is not the Master who speaks, but logos through him, or as Heidegger claims: “that which really speaks is language.”300 In other words, man does not master language, it is the other way around; it is language (logos) that masters man. It is a form of balance between what one perceives and encounters, and thereafter translates into ones owns production as a way of bringing oneself into the life and world of others. This translation,
again, is what we can expect a leader to master, but not to become a Master of. Similar to Heidegger, we could claim that which really speaks in an organization are the competences. An organization is what it can (become).
In the following I will propose the thesis that this transformation or actualization is similar to what we later would name Utopia, which, unlike a cosmetic surgery, does not deal with a change of the surface, but Utopia is a transformation from within. In order to understand this comparison between the concepts vision and Utopia, we will begin by describing the vision and gradually relating it to the concept Utopia before dealing more thoroughly with the latter.