The work of Giorgio Agamben is better understood as presenting theories with concepts for understanding organization, rather than as a theorist of organization itself or even an organization theorist as Campbell and Munro suggest (2005: 8). Agamben is not a thinker of the organization of the “seemingly well-ordered place” and doesn’t – but maybe only at first sight - share an interest in what may be at the heart of thinking organizations (managers and their tasks, workers, hierarchies and bureaucracy,
shareholders, system and institutional theory and so forth). But, as I will argue, Agamben’s work may be extremely helpful in furthering our
understanding of the dark side of organization (Muhr & Rehn, 2014: 226) and, furthermore, open our thinking to different spaces of organizing.
Agamben has not entered the field organization studies to the same extent as other contemporary thinkers and philosophers, who also could be situated within other areas such as sociology, linguistics, philosophy or cultural theory have. There are a few exceptions. René ten Bos sees Agamben’s
engagement and interest with the human being (also at the core of any study of organization) as a first entry point for his work in the field (2005: 16).
While this is certainly true, I would like to carry the argument a bit further by bringing in his conceptualization of the camp as a space of possibilities for a different politics. This means there are two more points of departure to add, which make his work fruitful for the study of organization: firstly, and as I have hinted at, Agamben’s work helps shed light on hidden, ‘darker’
organizational forms: the prison, the gated community, the camp, hence engaging with the military instead of the manager, the refugee instead of the retailer, the prisoner instead of the (entrepreneurial) pioneer. Secondly, and while doing so, it may also help in seeing the similarities between the ‘dark side of organization’, as it has been coined, and the seemingly ‘normal organization’: which logics to be identified within the analyses of, let’s say a prison, can be found when closely looking at, let’s say, a strategy
consultancy? How are we to understand the architecture of space and power in a major cooperation and why could the work of Agamben be fruitful in this regard? Can the distinction between the dark and the normal organization be read as more or less constructed and to which kind of question would that lead us? Could for example, and also in light of the discussion on the politics of organizational studies and the stream of literature on engaging the ‘other’
(space, subject or organization itself), the heart of darkness be found in the normal organization. To stay with the literary original, here, isn’t the heart of darkness also within the ivory trader Kurtz and not only deep in the jungle of the Congo at former Stanleyville (Kisangani)? Isn’t the heart of darkness not also embedded in Charles Marlow himself as well in the ivory industry? And isn’t there a clear connection between the (seemingly normal) organization
“International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” and the report Kurtz is writing for them and his Postcriptum: Exterminate all Brutes?
What is at the margins, what is at the core of organization here? Maybe it is the capitalist trading company, situated in the urbanized centres of Europe, which is at the margins, and that means we, at the heart of darkness,
together with Kurtz, are at the core of organization (and possibly so, hence:
darkness). Joseph Conrad himself hints at this, or, at least, at the
impossibility of distinguishing the two, when he lets Marlow reflect upon the infamous lines of Kurtz we have encountered before “The curious part was that he [Kurtz] had apparently forgotten all about that valuable postscriptum [Exterminate all brutes], because, later on, when he in a sense came to himself, he repeatedly entreated me to take good care of ‘my pamphlet’ (he called it), as it was sure to have in the future a good influence upon his career” (1899: 103 – 104). And we may speculate, that it would not have mattered at least (for further elaboration see the discussion under 3.5 - The body and its politics, especially the section on the Muselmann).
With these kind of questions, ones similarly posed by K., Agamben comes to the fore, notably in his Homer Sacer project, in which he studies the unfolding of “an archeology of politics”, indeed detecting and reflecting upon the space on and through which contemporary political power unfolds itself in hidden and obvious ways (Agamben, 2015a). The project is anchored
by repeated inquiries into the means of exclusion and their expression in religious, cenobitic communities, in state apparatus, in mammalian
classification systems and so on. In these he shows how through an active concern for ‘other’ kinds of being, we assure ourselves of what remains (the believer, the citizen, the inhabitant, the society, which belongs) of its
inclusion (Agamben 2015b: 263ff.). In the State of Exception, for example, Agamben identifies the founding elements of the juridico-political machinery used by western states as a doubling structure, constituted through the juridical in the strict sense, the machine of law, rule and order, the nomos and the extrajuridical and anomic, the latter being used to warrant the existence and management of the former. Relatedly, in his Kingdom and Glory, Agamben identifies glory as an apparatus “directed at capturing within the economic-governmental machine the inoperativity of human and divine life that our culture does not seem to be in a position to think and that nevertheless ceases to be invoked as the ultimate mystery of divinity and power” (2015: 265).16 In a similar way, an earlier text of Agamben, ‘The open’ has tried to elaborate and the distinction between man and animal as product of the anthropological machine of the west, the anthropozoen project maybe.
Ten Bos notes how Agamben, has, as most organizational scholars, a profound interest in the human being as we heard before, while his interest leads him into a different direction: “The kind of human beings portrayed by Agamben are probably not the kind of human beings you are likely to
encounter in and around organizations17 […], on the contrary, Agamben’s work seems to focus on those who are, for many different reasons, excluded from these seemingly well-ordered places” (2005: 16, Italics in original).
While it is certainly true, that such a reading of Agamben points at this early
16 For a further discussion of the subject, see also the discussion of the history of spaces in chapter 4.4 Abstract Spaces
17 While I fully agree with the first part of the argument, I have tried to outline my scepticism regarding the limitation of organization to the, in lack of a better word, economic-managerial sphere, or as ten Bos himself puts it: “the contemporary capitalistic organization” (2005:17).
I will deepen the argument throughout this section, the next chapter 4) on ”The Space and its Bodies and the analyses, see chapter 7) The Production of Paradoxes and the
Possibilities for Politics.
stage at a central concept within Agamben´s oeuvre – that of exclusion – I would still argue that it tries to incorporate his philosophical endeavour into the realm of established organization studies, instead of, as I will try,
perceived it as an invitation and urge to focus on other loci of organizational force (and well-ordered places these can be). In this sense, the perception of Agamben in Organization Studies remains rather limited. While a certain amount of literature is positioning itself “against” Agamben, for his writings on the governmental machinery only originate in a western school of thought (Liu 2015) or seeks to “resist” him on his account of shame developed in response to the remnants of Auschwitz (Guenther, 2012) others try so to defend his notions, such as Prozorov (2011) writing on Agamben’s
terminology of the profanation and the possibility of messianic ideal, those engaging critically with the contemporary aesthetic production of the politics of remembering (McKim, 2011), and those linking his writing to extreme cases of capitalist companies possessing life over death powers (Banerjee, 2008). This rather patchy reception of his work within organization studies is not mirrored in other fields such as legal and political studies. It is in this context that I propose to bring Agamben to bear on the study of the threshold space of the camp, as a thinker almost uniquely capable of
offering theoretical framing for an inquiry into what is temporary, evasive and opaque yet also startling present at the same time, for what is dark, brutal and seditious yet also potentially redemptive.