Accept the differences as difference, as a singularity. Not necessarily as something to be imitated, but as something which is, and which should be given the space to remain, something which might inspire and challenge or own prejudices.
This second part deals with organizational space framed both by visions and leadership, or rather self-organizing leadership. That is the language of the conqueror.
that the fantasy creates. The passage from being seductive towards being a conqueror is the shift from a situation where fantasy, imagination, and creativity create the real towards the situation where the real (the historic heritage and memory) creates a fantasy. As a seducer Wergeland created new differences, and as conqueror he resurrects old ones. A biography is only one persons view on that person, in this case Wergeland. However, in both books he is described as being affirmative.
Now, what Wergeland wants is light, and therefore sex becomes a mean to something else.
Wergeland comes to resemble the last 20-30 years of modern management which has reached the limit of capitalistic growth, as in Weber’s exposition of the modern bureaucratic principle of efficiency and science as intrinsically instrumental and value-free, or as in Taylor’s scientific management and Fordism. When Henry Ford raised the wages of his workers, he only presented the workforce with a relative deterritorialization because the workforce was not able to free themselves from the money, from the workplace. Capital initiates a deterritorialization of flows, but at the same time it blocks the flow. A continuous deterritorialization is a way to liberate oneself; however, when Ford raised the wage he did not enslave the workforce. The workforce enslaved themselves when they want their own bondage – money – as if it was their freedom. The challenge for the workforce is to liberate itself from its own love of what dominates it. Therefore, in the Henry Ford example it is only a relative and not an absolute deterritorialization. Deleuze and Guattari write: “Capitalism is in fact born of the encounter of two sort of flows: the decoded flows of production in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labor in the form of the ‘free worker.’… [T]he capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field.”251
Money is decoding everything. Ford might be able to seduce his workforce by raising the wage;
today organizations can seduce its workforce by offering various programs of education and goods.
This change might produce something good, i.e. employees might get the opportunity to grasp the possibilities and liberate themselves. Also the change might lead to new forms of exploitation, e.g.
when capital tends to be moving toward a decoding that will destroy the social relationships only to unleash a flow of greed.
In The Conqueror Wergeland visualized a world wherein a potential was hidden which he tried to unfold by moral suasion, though he did not claim that the universe is moral per se. Actually he did not claim anything. He was only being open towards different kinds of interpretations. “One could become more”, says Wergeland and continues “We are not, we invent ourselves.” He did not seduce
in order to lead away from life, but to lead elsewhere towards different modes of existence. He never agitated for taking the easy road; on the contrary he would state: swim the river instead, split off.
“To split off necessarily means to begin on a road that cuts across and leads to an unknown place…Depart. Go out. Allow yourself to be seduced one day. Become many, brave the outside world, split off somewhere else.”252
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The Norwegians understand this transformation as a rape due to the fact that the concept conqueror is two-sided: it consists of both transcendental and immanent elements. Similarly, the workforce has a tendency to feel misused when an organization changes direction. This feeling is based on the failure of the managers, who falsely think that they are outside the process of organizing. An employee says: “I have attended seminars with this department for five years now, and every time we decide to focus on the same issues but nothing happens. It seems like our manager does not understand that in order to change it is not enough just to say so, it takes time. My guess is that we next year will talk about the same stuff at the seminar.”253 This indicates that some managers in NNE do not understand the process as a process, but think of it as something static moving from A to B. The strategic work on such seminars is unproductive, perhaps because the criterion of productivity is the risk of failure.
In continuation of the missing understanding of a process as a process, that is, something dynamic and changing it seems like we are witnessing a shift legitimizing one’s judgements from above (transcendental) towards affirming the potential from within (immanence). Conquering is not a matter of being right, but of gradually becoming better. Wergeland never stands before the world, but is in the world, he is touched by it. In order to expand one’s horizon one must construct another space, which is composed by including elements such as human beings, technological inventions, and affects. All are enriching qualities. Based on the diversity one cannot construct a homogenised system. The difference between Wergeland and the nation’s understanding of his actions comes to light through the passage from personal to impersonal. According to Deleuze one of the most original characteristics of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the transformation of the question: “what is…?”
into “which one is…?” In other words, we must rid ourselves of all ‘personalist’ references. “The one that… does not refer to an individual, to a person, but rather to an event, that is, to the forces in
their various relationships in a proposition or a phenomenon, and the genetic relationship which determines these forces (power).”254 This shift from the personal “what is…?” towards the impersonal question “which one is…?” is what makes Wergeland less definitive and less abstract, but much more concrete. By doing so he operates on the materialistic terrain of efficiency. He draws another cartography, which is like a timetable outlining various lines pointing in various directions, and some pointing in the same direction differently. The nation judges Wergeland with their abstract speculations, i.e. using transcendental categories or manifesting a social segregation. We could relate this difference to Habermas’ scheme in his discussion of different incentives of the quest for knowledge; Habermas distinguishes between three distinct Erkenntnisinteressen (motives for knowing):
technical interest, practical interest, and emancipatory interest.255 The Norwegian nation’s motive for knowing is technical, their aims are to know how and why Wergeland did as he did, they want to control the functionality of his TV-programs, his behavior, his presence etc. – they treat Wergeland as an object to be manipulated claiming that he, before they, was doing the same. On the other hand, we would claim that Wergeland’s approach to knowledge was guided by emancipation, e.g.
asking which one is capable of making the world better. To answer this question Wergeland proposes 23 people’s lives and the changes that they made possible. This emphasizes that Wergeland never claimed to know how we should live our lives, although he is judged this way. He presented alternatives. To make this difference more clear I think it is important that Wergeland is viewed as a conqueror and not an explorer. Conquering, for Wergeland, means absorbing the world and not being repellent. Or in Serres’ precise words: “…; when I think a given concept, I am entirely this concept, when I think tree, I am the tree, when I think river, I am the river, when I think number, I am through and through and from head to toe, number. That is the unquestionable experience of thinking. No invention, no innovation without it. This verb to be is also a blank domino, a joker…The I is nobody in particular, it is not a singularity, it has no contours, it is the blankness of all colors and all nuances, an open and translucent welcome of a multiplicity of thoughts, it is therefore the possible. I am, indeterminately, nobody. If I think. I am nothing and I am nobody. I think, therefore I am not. I think, therefore I do not exist. Who am I? A blank domino, a joker, that can take any value. A pure capacity.”256
As an open and inclusive person Wergeland is capable of multiplicity. He thinks, therefore he is a vessel for thought. He is far more undetermined than what the judging nation assumes. He is not yet full, he is not yet formed; he is in transit. Similarly, we could claim that an organization’s identity, as far as we can locate such identity, can never be more or anything else than the competences
connected with its organizing. An organization is always in movement, it is always in the process of being born, i.e. organizing. Identity is a temporary mix of different aspects simultaneously.
In the chapters to come I will outline some significant characters from Wergeland’s life and gradually relate them more specifically to concepts such as vision and organizing.