The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenologies and Organization Studies 0192865757, 9780192865755

Table of contents :
Cover Page
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Preface
List of Figures and Tables
List of Contributors
Introduction—Phenomenologies and Organization Studies: Organizing Through and Beyond Appearances
PART I PHENOMENOLOGIES AND BEYOND: ORIGINS, EXTENSIONS, AND DISCONTINUITIES
1. Tracing Phenomenological Sensibilities in Continental and Post-​Continental Philosophies
2. Husserl: Reason and Emotions in Philosophy
3. Heidegger, Organization, and Care
4. Gaston Bachelard and the Phenomenology of the Imagination
5. From Phenomenology to a Metaphysics of History: The Unfinished Odyssey of Merleau-​Ponty
6. Phenomenology and the Multidimensionality of the Body
7. The Self in the World: The Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur
8. Phenomenology and the Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt
9. Experience as an Excess of Givenness: The Post-​Metaphysical Phenomenology of Jean-​Luc Marion
10. Extending and Discontinuing Phenomenology with Michel Henry
11. Foucault and Phenomenology, a Tense and Complex Relationship: From Anti-​Phenomenology to Post-​Phenomenology
PART II THE EXPERIENCE OF ORGANIZING: EMBODIMENT, ROBOTS, AND AFFECTS IN A DIGITAL WORLD
12. On the Way to Experience with the Phenomenological Venture of Management and Organization: A Literature Review
13. ‘In the Future, as Robots Become More Widespread’: A Phenomenological Approach to Imaginary Technologies in Healthcare Organizations
14. Max Scheler’s Phenomenology of Personalism and Paradox: Implications for Leadership Relations
15. At the Crossroad of Phenomenology and Feminist New Materialism: A Diffractive Reading of Embodiment
16. Bachelard’s Backdoor to Happy Business School Phenomenology
17. Exploring the Role of Bodies and Gestures in Management with Merleau-​Ponty
18. Queering Organizational Appearances through Reclaiming the Erotic
19. Animal Ontologies: Phenomenological Insights for Posthumanist Research
20. ‘How about a Hug?’: Aesthetic of Organizational Experience and Phenomenologies
PART III EVENTS AND ORGANIZING: ACCELERATION, DISRUPTIONS, AND DECENTRING OF MANAGEMENT
21. Is the Phenomenal Difference of the Entrepreneurial Event Opening on Its Repetition?
22. The Process of Depth: Temporality as Organization in Cinematographic Experience
23. Organization as Autopoietic ‘Understanding’?: Whitehead, Merleau-​Ponty, and the Speculative Promise of a Process Phenomenology for MOS
24. What Silence Does: An Arendtian Analysis of Quaker Meeting Practices
25. Tuning into Things: Sensing the Role of Place in an Emerging Alternative Urban Community
26. Embodied Perception and the Schemed World: Merleau-​Ponty and John Dewey
27. Enframing and Transformation: Serequeberhan’s African Phenomenological Approach
28. Phenomenology in Japan: A Brief History with a Focus on Its Reception in Applied Areas
PART IV TOGETHERNESS, MEMORY, AND INSTRUMENTS: ALGORITHMS, GESTURES, AND MARGINALITY IN ORGANIZING
29. Organ-​izing Embodied Practices of Common(-​ing) and Enfleshed Con-​vivialities: Perspectives on the Tragicomedy of the Commons
30. It’s All Method: Schmitz and Neo-​Phenomenology
31. Squatters and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Tales from the Occupied Theatre
32. Listening to the Sounds of the Algorithm: Some Remarks on Phenomenology and the Social Studies of Finance
33. Producing the Organizational Space: Buddhist Temples as Co-​Working Spaces
34. Organizing Research Excellence: A Pheno-​Ethnomethodological Approach to Studying Organizational Identity at Research Centres in the Global South
PART V CONCLUSION
35. Between Being and Becoming: Appearances and Subjectivities of Organizing
Afterword: Why and How Phenomenology Matters to Organizational Research
Postscript: An Anthropologist Lands in Phenomenology
Index

Citation preview

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

P H E N OM E N OL O G I E S A N D ORG A N I Z AT ION ST U DI E S

The Oxford Handbook of

PHENOMENOLOGIES AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES Edited by

FRANÇOIS-​X AVIER de VAUJANY, JEREMY AROLES, and

MAR PÉREZTS

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2023 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022940758 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​286575–​5 DOI: 10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780192865755.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Preface Hartmut Rosa

At first glance, it would appear that Management and Organization Studies (MOS) are the least likely places to attract the attention of phenomenologists—​or, vice versa, to profit from and thrive on phenomenological accounts. In short, it would appear that these two fields of study are mutually deaf to each other; if not straightforwardly incompatible, then at least incommensurable. The reason for this is that in the social sciences as well in the humanities, there are, generally speaking, two paradigmatic ways of looking at processes, institutions, and events: One is from the outside, from a third person perspective, i.e. from a perspective in which the observer stands apart from what is observed and remains, as much as possible, unaffected by what she observes. The other is from the inside, from a first person perspective. Here, the observer takes the impressions, affections, and intentions that connect her with the observed phenomena precisely as the starting point for social or philosophical analysis. This analysis, then, of course needs to be intersubjectively and dialogically discussed and validated. This latter approach is called ‘phenomenology’, and as this book makes very clear from its title as well as from its contents, there are many different versions of construing and pursuing such an approach, which is why the editors aptly speak of ‘phenomenologies’ in the plural. Now, the main thrust of MOS generally follows a third person perspective approach, frequently modelled on the natural sciences, trying to produce and analyse models and data that can stand the test of hard sciences. Yet, if we try to really understand what is going on in organizational life, in managerial action, and in the fabrication, change, and devolution of institutions, we quickly realize that we cannot simply do away with the embodied inside, with the first person perspective. Organizations would be ‘dead structures’, devoid of any action without the acting subjects as centres of experience: It is their motivational energy—​it is their hopes and fears, aspirations and inclinations, perceptions and affections—​that ultimately serves as the motor and fuel of institutional life. Hence, we need some sort of hermeneutical or phenomenological reconstruction of these hopes and fears, attractions and repulsions if we want to fully capture the inner logics of organizations; not just of how they work, but also of where, when, and how they fail to work properly.

vi   Preface Alas, as every sociologist will be quick to point out: it would be completely wrong to rely on the inside, on agents’ intentional, motivational, and affective stance and states alone, because we know by now pretty well that these states and stances are strongly influenced, shaped, and moulded by organizational rules, routines, and processes, by institutionalized expectations and temporalities, etc. Hence, what is needed is a form of ‘perspectival dualism’ (to borrow a term from Nancy Fraser1) that allows us to go about organizations from both sides simultaneously. In this way, we can gain valid insights into the multiple, embodied, and material as well as cognitional and intellectual forms in which the inside and the outside shape, mould, and transform each other. Such insights are all the more called for in times of heightened social acceleration and progressive digitalization, when steady organizational transformation has become an institutionalized requirement. It is important to note here that this dualism is perspectival, it does not contradict the phenomenological insight, stressed by the editors in their introduction to this volume, that the strict separation between an inside and an outside world is itself highly questionable. Quite the contrary, it is only when we realize that both perspectives ultimately need to be integrated into one account of ‘the world’, or of social life, that we become capable of reconstructing the myriad ways in which what is perceived as the inside and the outside resonate with and thus mutually co-​constitute each other. By consequence, what is dearly needed in Management and Organizational Studies are approaches that put phenomenologies to work within and for the analysis of organizational life and formation. The most difficult challenge thereby is the task to transform philosophical ideas and concepts into workable instruments to actually embark on empirical analyses; the task to develop something akin to an empirical phenomenological methodology for the social sciences. This Handbook does not claim to be a unified textbook for such empirical research. But it opens up a most impressive and most inspiring multiplicity of routes to get there; it provides ample evidence for the enormous fertility of phenomenological approaches to MOS, and for the power of phenomenological approaches to gain new insights into the ‘inner’ logics of organizational life. The book makes it beautifully clear that phenomenology as a method is not about taking subjective experience as rock bottom evidence, but as contextual evidence the validity of which can be assessed by detracting the ‘merely subjective’ from the more generalizable elements of such experience. Thus in the end, after reading through the multifaceted texts assembled here, it turns out that there could hardly be a more suitable field to explore the need and the possibility of connecting the two perspectives, the inside and the outside of social life, than the study of Management and Organization.

1  Fraser coins the term for a quite different context, i.e. in the debate with Axel Honneth where she seeks to combine the claim for redistribution with the struggle for recognition (Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution of Recognition? A Political-​Philosophical Exchange, London: Verso 2004, pp. 63−6).

Contents

List of Figures and Tables  List of Contributors  Introduction—Phenomenologies and Organization Studies: Organizing Through and Beyond Appearances  François-​Xavier de Vaujany, Jeremy Aroles, and Mar Pérezts

xiii xv 1

PA RT I   P H E N OM E N OL O G I E S A N D B E YON D : OR IG I N S , E X T E N SION S , A N D DI S C ON T I N U I T I E S 1. Tracing Phenomenological Sensibilities in Continental and Post-​Continental Philosophies  Jean-​Baptiste Fournier

27

2. Husserl: Reason and Emotions in Philosophy  Elen Riot

38

3. Heidegger, Organization, and Care  Robin Holt

57

4. Gaston Bachelard and the Phenomenology of the Imagination  Michèle Charbonneau

79

5. From Phenomenology to a Metaphysics of History: The Unfinished Odyssey of Merleau-​Ponty  François-​Xavier de Vaujany 6. Phenomenology and the Multidimensionality of the Body  Erol Čopelj and Jack Reynolds

97 123

viii   Contents

7. The Self in the World: The Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur  Paul Savage and Henrika Franck 8. Phenomenology and the Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt  Lucie Chartouny 9. Experience as an Excess of Givenness: The Post-​Metaphysical Phenomenology of Jean-​Luc Marion  Sara Mandray 10. Extending and Discontinuing Phenomenology with Michel Henry  Eric Faÿ and Ghislain Deslandes 11. Foucault and Phenomenology, a Tense and Complex Relationship: From Anti-​Phenomenology to Post-​Phenomenology  Aurélie Leclercq-​Vandelannoitte

146 161

180 194

215

PA RT I I   T H E E X P E R I E N C E OF ORG A N I Z I N G : E M B ODI M E N T, ROB OT S , A N D A F F E C T S I N A DIG I TA L WOR L D 12. On the Way to Experience with the Phenomenological Venture of Management and Organization: A Literature Review  Leo Bancou, François-​Xavier de Vaujany, Mar Pérezts, and Jeremy Aroles

237

13. ‘In the Future, as Robots Become More Widespread’: A Phenomenological Approach to Imaginary Technologies in Healthcare Organizations  Jaana Parviainen and Anne Koski

277

14. Max Scheler’s Phenomenology of Personalism and Paradox: Implications for Leadership Relations  Leah Tomkins

297

15. At the Crossroad of Phenomenology and Feminist New Materialism: A Diffractive Reading of Embodiment  310 Silvia Gherardi 16. Bachelard’s Backdoor to Happy Business School Phenomenology  Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Matilda Dahl, and Jenny Helin

330

Contents   ix

17. Exploring the Role of Bodies and Gestures in Management with Merleau-​Ponty  Albane Grandazzi

347

18. Queering Organizational Appearances through Reclaiming the Erotic  Mar Pérezts and Emmanouela Mandalaki

364

19. Animal Ontologies: Phenomenological Insights for Posthumanist Research  Géraldine Paring

384

20. ‘How about a Hug?’: Aesthetic of Organizational Experience and Phenomenologies  Antonio Strati

396

PA RT I I I   E V E N T S A N D ORG A N I Z I N G : AC C E L E R AT ION , DI SRU P T ION S , A N D DE C E N T R I N G OF M A NAG E M E N T 21. Is the Phenomenal Difference of the Entrepreneurial Event Opening on Its Repetition?  Xavier Deroy

417

22. The Process of Depth: Temporality as Organization in Cinematographic Experience  François-​Xavier de Vaujany

440

23. Organization as Autopoietic ‘Understanding’?: Whitehead, Merleau-​Ponty, and the Speculative Promise of a Process Phenomenology for MOS  Andrew Kirkpatrick

462

24. What Silence Does: An Arendtian Analysis of Quaker Meeting Practices  Lucas Introna, Donncha Kavanagh, and Martin Brigham

488

25. Tuning into Things: Sensing the Role of Place in an Emerging Alternative Urban Community  Boukje Cnossen

508

26. Embodied Perception and the Schemed World: Merleau-​Ponty and John Dewey  Sun Ning

522

x   Contents

27. Enframing and Transformation: Serequeberhan’s African Phenomenological Approach  Abraham Olivier

532

28. Phenomenology in Japan: A Brief History with a Focus on Its Reception in Applied Areas  Genki Uemura

555

PA RT I V   TO G E T H E R N E S S , M E M ORY, A N D I N ST RUM E N T S : A L G OR I T H M S , G E ST U R E S , A N D M A RG I NA L I T Y I N ORG A N I Z I N G 29. Organ-​izing Embodied Practices of Common(-​ing) and Enfleshed Con-​vivialities: Perspectives on the Tragicomedy of the Commons  Wendelin Küpers 30. It’s All Method: Schmitz and Neo-​Phenomenology  Lydia Jørgensen

575 602

31. Squatters and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Tales from the Occupied Theatre  Mickael Peiro

622

32. Listening to the Sounds of the Algorithm: Some Remarks on Phenomenology and the Social Studies of Finance  Marc Lenglet

640

33. Producing the Organizational Space: Buddhist Temples as Co-​Working Spaces  Tadashi Uda

652

34. Organizing Research Excellence: A Pheno-​Ethnomethodological Approach to Studying Organizational Identity at Research Centres in the Global South  Juan Felipe Espinosa-​Cristia and Nicolás Trujillo-​Osorio

672

PA RT V   C ON C LU SION 35. Between Being and Becoming: Appearances and Subjectivities of Organizing  699 François-​Xavier de Vaujany, Jeremy Aroles, and Mar Pérezts

Contents   xi

Afterword: Why and How Phenomenology Matters to Organizational Research  Haridimos Tsoukas Postscript: An Anthropologist Lands in Phenomenology  Tim Ingold Index 

707 719 725

Figures and Tables Figures I.1 Five trends in the history of continental philosophy

2

I.2 From pre-​phenomenologies to ante-​phenomenologies and beyond

13

I.3 Overall logic of our edited book

16

3.1 William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience (1853)

63

12.1 Research articles with ‘phenomenology’ published each year in first circle of MOS journals

244

12.2 Research articles with ‘phenomenology’ published each year in second circle of MOS journals

245

12.3 Network mapping of ‘phenomenology’ related scholars (citations) in first circle of MOS journals

245

12.4 Network mapping of ‘phenomenology’ related scholars (citations) in second circle of MOS journals

246

20.1 Antonio Strati, Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace (2021) 397 24.1 Quaker Meeting House in Epping

496

Tables I.1 Authors and Concepts Selected in This Handbook

15

I.2 Structure of This Handbook

18

7.1 The mimetic cycle

152

12.1 Number of articles per phenomenologist (mentions) in first circle of MOS journals

248

12.2 Number of articles per phenomenologist (mentions) in second circle of MOS journals

249

xiv   Figures and Tables 21.1 Non-​orthodox phenomenological approaches of the event

423

22.1 Three features of depth in The Name of the Rose 457 22.A Interviews with Jean-​Jacques Annaud about The Name of the Rose 459 31.1 Data collection and number of participations

629

Contributors

Jeremy Aroles Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of York Management School, York, UK Leo Bancou  PhD Candidate at DRM, Université Paris Dauphine-​PSL, Paris, France Martin Brigham  Senior Lecturer in Organization Studies at Lancaster University, UK Michèle Charbonneau Professor at ENAP (École nationale d’administration publique), Quebec, Canada Lucie Chartouny PhD Candidate at DRM, Université Paris Dauphine-​ PSL, Paris, France Boukje Cnossen Professor of Entrepreneurship, Organization, and Culture at the Institute of Management and Organization at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany Erol Čopelj  Independent Researcher, Australia Matilda Dahl  Associate Professor at the Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University, Visby, Sweden Pierre Guillet de Monthoux  Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) and the Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Stockholm, Sweden Xavier Deroy  Professor of Strategy & Organization Studies, NEOMA Business School, Rouen, France Ghislain Deslandes Professor at ESCP Business School, Department of Law, Economics and Humanities, France François-​Xavier de Vaujany  Professor in Management and Organization Studies at DRM, Université Paris Dauphine-​PSL, Paris, France Juan Felipe Espinosa-​Cristia Professor at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Chile Eric Faÿ  Emeritus Professor at Emlyon Business School, Ecully, France Jean-​Baptiste Fournier Associate Professor of Philosophy, Sorbonne University, Paris, France

xvi   Contributors Henrika Franck  Dean at Arcada UAS; Affiliated Professor, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Silvia Gherardi  Senior Professor, Sociology department, Università di Trento, Italy Albane Grandazzi  Assistant Professor of Organization Studies at Grenoble Ecole de Management (GEM), Grenoble, France Jenny Helin Associate Professor at the Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University, Visby, Sweden Robin Holt  Professor of Organization Studies at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Denmark Tim Ingold Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK Lucas Introna Distinguished Professor of Organisation, Technology, and Ethics, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK Lydia Jørgensen Postdoc at Department of Sociology and Cultural Organization, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany; and Lecturer the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School (CBS) Copenhagen, Denmark Donncha Kavanagh  Full Professor of Information & Organisation, UCD College of Business, University College Dublin, Ireland Andrew Kirkpatrick  Academic Tutor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Anne Koski  Political Scientist and Senior Research Fellow at Tampere University, the Faculty of Social Sciences, Finland Wendelin Küpers  Professor of Leadership and Organization Studies, Karlshochschule International University, Karlsruhe, Germany & ARTEM & ICN Business School Nancy, France Aurélie Leclercq-​Vandelannoitte CNRS (LEM UMR CNRS 9221), IESEG of Management, University of Lille, France Marc Lenglet Associate Professor, Strategy and Entrepreneurship Department, NEOMA Business School, France Emmanouela Mandalaki  Associate Reims, France

Professor

at

Neoma

Business

School,

Sara Mandray  PhD Candidate at ESCP Business School, Paris, France Sun Ning Associate Professor of School of Philosophy, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Contributors   xvii Abraham Olivier  Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Fort Hare and Visiting Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Bayreuth University Géraldine Paring  Associate Professor, Paris School of Business, Paris, France Jaana Parviainen  Associate Professor, Senior Researcher, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University, Finland Mickael Peiro  Assistant Castres, France

Professor,

IUT

Paul

Sabatier—​ LGCO,

Toulouse-​

Mar Pérezts  Professor of Philosophy and Organization at Emlyon Business School & OCE Research Center, Ecully, France Jack Reynolds  Professor of Philosophy, Deakin University, Australia Elen Riot Associate Professor in Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Université de Reims, France Hartmut Rosa  Professor of Sociology at Friedrich-​Schiller Universität, Institut für Soziologie Paul Savage  University Teacher, Aalto University, Finland, and Affiliated Researcher, Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland Antonio Strati  Senior Professor, University of Trento, Italy, and Chercheur Associé, i3-​ CRG, CNRS, École Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris Leah Tomkins  Writer and Consultant on Leadership and Organisational Change Nicolás Trujillo-​Osorio Post-​doc Researcher and Lecturer at Universidad Alberto Hurtado. Lecturer at Universidad Adolfo Ibañez (Chile) Haridimos Tsoukas  Distinguished Research Environment Professor of Organization Behavior, Warwick Business School, UK Tadashi Uda  Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Faculty of Economics and Business, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan Genki Uemura Associate Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Okayama University, Japan

Introduction

Phenomenol o g i e s a nd Organiz ation St u di e s Organizing Through and Beyond Appearances François-​X avier de Vaujany, Jeremy Aroles, and Mar Pérezts

I.1  Why Phenomenologies and Why Now? . . . something concealed comes into unconcealment. (Heidegger, 1977a: 11) In every phase of metaphysics there has been visible at any particular time a portion of a way that the destining of Being prepares as a path for itself . . . (Heidegger, 1977b: 54)

The exploration of phenomenologies in the context of Management and Organization Studies (MOS) inevitably raises several questions. Indeed, many scholars would argue that, as a topic, phenomenology is rather old hat and that we are venturing on a well-​ trodden path. However, as the variety of contributions in this volume will exemplify, there are yet many ways in which phenomenological approaches can help us revivify MOS debates. By offering a means to problematize ‘appearances’ and ‘what is appearing’ in our field, phenomenological approaches may allow us to ‘see’ things in a different light, to uncover what is invisible, concealed, or hidden from our consideration by our theoretical or ideological assumptions and habits (Alvesson and Sandberg, 2011). However, it seems only fair to first humbly lend an ear to the many arguments that put phenomenology (we stress the singular form here, as its varieties and complexities are often simplistically lumped together) in the dock. We’ve thus heard that phenomenology

2    De Vaujany, Aroles, and Pérezts is ‘too humanistic’ and that ‘we need posthuman views now’. We were told that it is not ‘processual enough’, that it ‘makes materiality either a mystery or a starting point’. We were also advised that it is too focused on the issue of ‘consciousness and intentionality’, and that it is therefore too ‘dualist and Cartesian’. Not uncommon was also the remark that phenomenology is ‘distinct from pragmatism, postmodernism and process studies’, that it ‘came before or incidentally on the way to more relevant metaphysics or ontologies’. Such occasions are key instances in which the philosophical attitude of phenomenology can be put to practice. In our discussions on phenomenology, we also met numerous scholars stressing the ante-​phenomenological stance of some leading contemporary philosophers such as Cobb, Deleuze, Foucault, or Latour. Phenomenology would be ‘out of the scope of speculative realism and the kind of metaphysics we need now’. Other colleagues also stressed the absence of instruments, techniques, governance, and management at large in phenomenological discussions. The list could probably continue but, in short, phenomenology would be outdated, something worth archiving in the museum of old ideas. In light of these numerous critiques and this hesitancy, asking what phenomenology has to say about contemporary issues at stake in MOS seems like a daring, yet important, endeavour, and not only within some closed specialized circles. To open up the debate, let us consider for a moment Figure I.1. This figure shows the surprising vitality of phenomenology, and even a kind of second life from the 1990s onwards. This corresponds to a period of major ruptures from technical (birth and diffusion of Internet), geopolitical (end of a bipolar world), economic (mutation of our economic crises), and societal (connected society) worldviews. Of course, these trends need to be interpreted cautiously, since Ngram viewer focuses on a corpus of books (and here on the English-​speaking community only). Yet, it is an interesting first sign on our way to showing that phenomenologies are not exactly disappearing, but faithful to their etymology—​from the Greek word phainomenon (φαινόμενον): of that which appears—​continue to be a relevant path to study the things

0.000650% 0.000600% 0.000550% 0.000500% 0.000450% 0.000400% 0.000350% 0.000300% 0.000250% 0.000200% 0.000150%

0.000100% 0.000050% 0.000000% 1800

Marxism

Phenomonology Postmodernism Progmatism Process philosophy 1820

1840

1860

1880

1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

Figure I.1  Five trends in the history of continental philosophy (Ngram viewer)

Phenomenologies and Organization Studies    3 and events that appear to us (Zahavi, 2018a). But what is this ‘us’, and what are these ‘things’ and ‘events’? Most phenomenological, and even post-​ phenomenological, approaches make of that point a question of transparency (1) and reversibility (2). First, these appearances are a transparency in the sense that we are just in the world, inside it, and inside what we do. The world is immanent and immediate (instead of mediated by something), just like our actions and our place in this world. This is what Henry calls ipseity, the ontological passivity whereby life is received, leading to the immanence of our self-​affection, which hasn’t been ‘perverted by the eye’ (Henry, [1963] 2011: 800) and other objectification practices or devices. Put differently, our own presence in what we do is unquestioned, and it is precisely its ‘invisibility’ that allows us to become intelligible to ourselves and to others (Marion, 2012). It is Heidegger’s ([1927] 1962: 79−90) famous Dasein or Merleau-​Ponty’s ([1945] 2013: part 3) être au monde, which also stress this immediateness or obviousness of our being in the present. Imagine for a moment when, sometimes, something goes wrong. Our smartphone takes a minute longer to respond than we expected. A friend behaves erratically. A person in the underground is aggressive and breaks social conventions. Such unexpected events, however small or insignificant, make something inside of us snap and we are suddenly ‘awakened’. At this point, the world recovers all of its overwhelming texture and density. This ‘us’ as well as all the events outside us are distinctively and agentively present. We feel precisely where we are, what we can and cannot do. Our corporeal capabilities are thus revealed in the tensions, affects, and all the movements of the situation that are received by our ontological passivity as a transparency. Second, an appearance can also be a reversibility. As suggested by Husserl ([1912] 1989, [1913] 1989) and extended by Merleau-​Ponty ([1945] 2013: 251−89, 1964), reversibility is a way to stress the importance of experience at large beyond the ‘us’ and the ‘events’. Common sense often views perception as the relationship (and isomorphism) between someone perceiving and something perceived as distinct. However, most phenomenological and post-​phenomenological approaches (we will clarify this distinction very soon) radically question this divide. Following Husserl’s depiction of two hands grasping one another, Merleau-​Ponty ([1961] 1964) emphasizes that, phenomenologically, it is not possible to distinguish which hand is touching the other. There is a ‘functional unity’ in the experience of touching; both hands reversibly touch one another. The world, as an appearance, is in-​between; it is relational (Letiche, 2006). This questions the very distinction between a world inside and a world outside. The world is as much inside ‘us’ as it is outside ‘us’. I feel the brightness of the screen or the plastic tactility of the keyboard in front of me. I am inhabited by their possibilities (except, again, until something unexpected happens and disrupts the flow of events and perception). In turn, the keyboard is covered by all my intentionalities, all the events my presence could trigger. I am even materially in the keyboard, which becomes almost a cyborg extension of myself when my thoughts are pouring frantically onto it to be put into writing. The position, a few inches away from my chair, is that of my body typing. The keyboard, the screen, and the chair follow the imprint of my past physical presence out there, ‘melting me’ with the world.

4    De Vaujany, Aroles, and Pérezts Of course, consciousness as an embodied instance always involved in the ‘network of my intentionalities’ (Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 2013) is an important aspect of appearances, of how things, events, and selves jointly come into presence for a subjectivity settled by events themselves. Yet, most phenomenologies also open a space and time for instruments (Simondon, 1958), flesh (Henry, [1965] 1975; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), what is produced in-​between events (Merleau-​Ponty, 1964), narratives (Ricoeur, 1983, 1984, 1985), and what is happening far beyond and below consciousness. Consciousness itself, as part of the potential events of the world, is much more settled by events than it is productive of them. Most phenomenologies are thus far from Cartesianism (at least the way it is often thought of) and surprisingly are even close to a form of posthumanism (if humanism is understood as the idea of a pre-​defined individual or set of agentic and rational individuals giving a perceptual centre to the world, being the main and ultimate sensors of it). Most of all, phenomenologies are not about pure contemplations of the world, introspections, or solipsism. Commenting on Henry and ‘intersubjectivity in the first person’, Jean (2011: 58) argues that ‘what others say, express and do [ . . . ] is [ . . . ] “co-​ born in me,” in such a way that I become “contemporaneous” with them’. This goes for both human and non-​human ‘others’ that enter into resonance with me and allow for the very possibility of my own subjectivity. Experience is very often relationally interwoven with agentivity, collective activity and affectivity, and even politics (see also Merleau-​ Ponty, [1945] 2013, 1955, 1964, on these issues). Reversibility feeds itself through being in the world and acting in/​through/​with it. But where do these ideas and in particular the two key dimensions stressed here (transparency and reversibility) come from? What is the genesis of phenomenology? Can we think of it as a homogeneous continent or is it instead a scattered or even invisible archipelago? How does it relate to other philosophies, ontologies, or metaphysics, and how? This is what we will explore in the next section of this introduction.

I.2  Scouting the Phenomenological Archipelago Explaining the genesis of phenomenology is a difficult and perilous exercise. On the way to appearances, most phenomenologists explored and discussed ontological and metaphysical issues. In the vocabulary of our field of MOS, we can say that they discussed organizing processes in and beyond appearances. Following Ricoeur (1975), it is thus tempting to distinguish a core ‘phenomenological moment’, mainly embodied by Husserl ([1912] 1989, [1913] 1963) and Heidegger ([1927] 1962), followed by numerous ‘heresies’, some of which have constituted or fed alternative philosophical movements. Another equally tempting possibility is, following Zahavi (2018a), to start the story much earlier, with Greek philosophy and later in the thought of the18th and 19th centuries (which have also partly fed the phenomenological moment).

Phenomenologies and Organization Studies    5 For the sake of clarity, and attempting to articulate and integrate the classifications proposed by Ricoeur (1975), Henry (1991), Schrift, (2010), McCumber (2014), Zahavi (2018a), and Renaudie (2020), we could distinguish five main historical streams that are related positively or negatively to phenomenology:

•​ Pre-​phenomenologies •​ A phenomenological moment (sometimes related to what is called ‘pure’, ‘classical’ or ‘orthodox’ phenomenology) •​ Post-​phenomenologies •​ Ante-​phenomenologies •​ Non-​ phenomenologies (with some points of intersection or friction with phenomenologies) Pre-​phenomenologies date back to pre-​Socratic and Socratic thoughts (Landmann, 1941; Hansen, 2012; Kontos, 2018) and pursued until the 18th and 19th centuries’ post-​ Cartesian thoughts (Zahavi, 2018a), and to some extent bear Spinozian influences. Issues of experience, subjectivity, soul-​body relationships, and history were then central. The term ‘phenomenology’ first appeared in an (unpublished) essay of Christoph Friedrich Oetinger in 1736. It was entitled Philosophie der Alten. Phenomenology is defined here as the divine science of relations, i.e. relations between things of the surface of the visible world, and not between things and their hidden causes. However, it is with Lambert ([1764] 2002) that phenomenology appeared fully as a philosophical stream with its specific language. Lambert’s thought was about ‘obviousness’ in everyday experience. Lambert explained (p. 33) that ‘the concept of appearance is derived, for the word itself and its first origin, from the eye and from vision, and has been then extended to other senses and to vision, and in this way, it became both more general and more equivocal’. Interestingly, Lambert’s thought is combined with or alert to ontological issues. He thus explains: ‘if a change occurs in appearances, then a change also happens in reality. But it remains indeterminate if it happens in the object, in the meanings, or in the relationship between both of them. Nonetheless, the change occurring in appearances shows what is relative in a real change’ (p. 33). Activity and passivity of the mind (two important dimensions of the upcoming phenomenological moment and post-​phenomenological streams) are part of his thought (p. 100). Interestingly, Lambert also stressed the importance of resemblance in the process of appearance: commonly, we look more willingly and almost always at things from the side that offers most resemblances, even with regards to things that are not usually tied to emotion and, often, without being aware of it, we derived from the content of our emotions the metaphors from which these things are labelled. (p. 103)

In a world on its way to enlightenment, modernization, bureaucracy, rationality, linear progress, and increasing technicization, phenomenology, as a vocabulary and a

6    De Vaujany, Aroles, and Pérezts new logic, (re)affirms the importance of history, genealogy, subjectivity, experience, and aesthetics. Oetinger ([1776] 1979), Lambert ([1764] 2002), Kant (1781),1 Hegel ([1807] 2012),2 and Nietzsche ([1887] 1985)3 are very important pre-​phenomenological thinkers. They paved the way to the ‘return to things themselves’, to presence and a coming into presence, to modes of existence, historicity, embodiment, relationships between appearance and ontology, topics that will all be foundational for the phenomenological moment. Reason and rationalism are part of the story. Descartes (1637, [1641] 1979) is often the counterpoint. History is a question of dialectics, forces, thesis, and anti-​thesis. Marxism grows in this context as well, with a focus on praxis, dialectics, and real forces against an abstract progressive force at stake in history. Importantly, the key moment happened with Husserl ([1912] 1989, [1913] 1963) and Heidegger ([1927] 1962). Husserl, with his work on ideas, logics, and his later more ontological discussions, settled the debate. What matters is coming back to things themselves, how they come to appear to us. The idea is to understand the tree not as it is substantially, its a priori matter or immediate physical mechanisms. Rather, it is more about how it comes to be a tree in our (everyday life) experience. This is rooted in a method Husserl named ‘eidetic reduction’, or epoché, i.e. the process through which we focus on a phenomenon, we try to suspend our more general experience and beliefs in order to understand how this thing comes to mean something. Another key aspect of this ‘seminal’, ‘orthodox’, and also sometimes called ‘pure’ phenomenology (Zahavi, 2018a) is the issue of intentionality, which is strongly inspired by Brentano’s work ([1874] 1911/​1973). For Husserl, consciousness is a key dimension of our experience of the world. Yet, contrary to some Cartesian interpretations, it is not a pre-​ existing, pre-​defined instance expecting the presence of the world and objects of the world. Our consciousness is plural and grounded in our activities and directions in and for activities. More precisely, it is interwoven with ‘intentionalities’, i.e. our projections in and towards the world. A consciousness is always a consciousness of something. It is transitive. The keyboard in front of me is part of the intentional process of writing this introductory chapter. Through this projected event in the flow of my activities, consciousness happens. It flows as part of the process of typing, which is not a chaotic one. It flows from a teleology, which is consciousness itself. Activity as such is also primordial. In a way, it precedes consciousness. As shown by Merleau-​Ponty ([1966] 1996), we often act first, and give a meaning and explicit teleology to our actions after the first course of our activities. We often act in a meaningful way, and to do so, we put aside many meaningful events from our field of activity and focus of attention. Likewise, Husserl introduces a key notion, which Merleau-​ Ponty ([1945] 2013, 1964) extended and refined: reversibility (see Part I). Our perceptions, agentic 1 See

Mohanty (1996) and Rockmore (2011). Kant is a very important step in the emergence of phenomenology. 2  See Lauer (1974). 3  See for instance Poellner (2006) and Geniusas et al. (2013) for an exploration of the relationships between phenomenology and Nietzsche.

Phenomenologies and Organization Studies    7 capabilities upon the world, the shapes, forms, and movements inhabiting the world are ‘inside’ us. Likewise, the external world is covered by our intentionalities, past activities, tactilities. We are unable, in the flow of experience, to distinguish one hand touching the other without being touched in return (Merleau-​Ponty borrowed this example to draw radical ontological implications; see Merleau-​Ponty, 1964). Still part of the phenomenological moment, Heidegger (as a former student of Husserl) further explored experience and being in the world. For Heidegger ([1927] 1962), what matters from a phenomenological point of view is transparency. We are in the world, invisible for ourselves, just in the flow of our activities. Beyond any intentional and conscious issues, what matters is this flow, this becoming going through without seeing or sensing us. We are just here. We are a Dasein (Heidegger, [1927] 1962). The world is ready at hand. The world becomes sensible only in processes of breakdowns, when something goes wrong. To understand this process, Heidegger ([1927] 1962) invented a fully temporal new vocabulary, likely to grasp the dimensions of the transparency, facticity, and sociality of our experience(s). Most of all, for Heidegger, the underlying process, before any consciousness, is time itself. We are temporalities. Heidegger supplements Husserl in a way by coming closer to our ordinary experience of the world. In his later works, he also dealt with techniques, ethics, and broader ontological issues, the relationship between appearances and the world beyond appearances, between being and beings (as part of an appropriative ‘Beyng’4), the interlacing between experience and events. Interestingly, both Husserl and Heidegger will feed numerous traditions in Germany, France, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and Europe at large—​a genealogy discussed in the first chapter of this volume. Their approach to life and existence and their vision of episteme were a powerful way to explore a world deeply in crisis. Europe had gone through two World Wars, major economic and technological transformations, deep spiritual and religious upturns, and several institutional crises. The existential layers of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s thoughts were a way to think both of the how and of the why in a period during which the why was highly problematic (and maybe still is). During, and just after, the works of these founding figures, numerous phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies blossomed. German traditions of the 1920s interested in ‘being-​with’ were largely fed by Husserl’s contributions in their attempts to explore intersubjectivity, sociality, and community (see Zahavi, 2018b). This is the case with Scheler, Walther, Gurwitsch, and Schmitz, for instance. Hermeneutic traditions exploring issues of narratives and times extended the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger and tried to overcome their apories (see Ricoeur, 1983, 1984, 1985). The political philosophy of Arendt (1954, 1972) questioned totalitarism, the crisis of culture, and our contemporary approaches of democracy. Existentialist thoughts of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, in particular Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-​Ponty, also drew largely on the ‘phenomenological moment’ to understand the contingency

4 

See Heidegger (1938) or de Vaujany (2022).

8    De Vaujany, Aroles, and Pérezts of our lives. Henry’s insights were triggered by his experience of resistance in the maquis during the Nazi German occupation in France during World War II and following Husserl (1970) warned against the risk of what he called ‘barbarism’ following the crisis of objectively rooted science and knowledge. Yet, as stressed by Ricoeur (1975), very quickly, ‘pure’, ‘orthodox’ phenomenologies would be used as points of departure more than final destinations. Heretics of Husserl proliferated. Eidetic reduction is both used and criticized as an interesting impossibility paving the way to something else. Intentionality is questioned and transformed into networks of intentionalities grounded into activities (Merleau-​ Ponty, [1945] 2013). Increasingly, the idea of consciousness itself (a key tenet of the phenomenological moment) is debated. The thesis of Husserl on logics and ideas is discussed and questioned. Embodiment, intercorporeity, emotions and affects are introduced in the discussion. Subjectivity, experience, existence, consciousness, and instruments become the consequence of events. Subjectivity is no longer a power ‘exerted’ by pre-​ defined subjects. Subjectivation itself is a process. It happens (or not) in the process of becoming. It needs a will, a form of courage to find a way as a resistance (Revel, 2015). This is what we call here ‘post-​phenomenologies’, i.e. a stream of philosophies in conversation with the phenomenological moment, centrally or accessorily, both continuing and discontinuing it, using some key phenomenological constructs as points of return and even sometimes, points of regeneration. Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-​Ponty (the early one probably more than the later one), Levinas, Derrida (2012), Henry (1991), or Marion (2018) (among many others) can be put into perspective with these traditions.5 Henry (to whom we devote Chapter 10) and Marion (Chapter 9) later became the central actors of a ‘new phenomenology’ (‘nouvelle phénoménologie’). Simondon’s phenomenology of techniques and their modes of existence questioned the presence of techniques as mere objects already there, waiting to be ‘instrumented’ (Simondon, 1958). More recently, Schmitz ([1966] 1987, [1969] 1988, 2000, 2012) offered a phenomenology of atmosph and quasi-​objects. With him emerged a ‘neo-​phenology’ (different from the French ‘New phenomenology’; see Chapter 30). Numerous other traditions also emerged outside of the Western ‘centre’ of phenomenological thinking, e.g. in South and Latin America, in Africa, or in Asia (see Schrift, 2010; Zahavi, 2018a; and Renaudie 2020; as well as Chapters 27, 28, and 33, for instance),6 provoking heated discussions around the reception of ‘pure’ phenomenological thought while also developing parallel conceptions with both striking similarities and divergences that, once brought to the table, can lead to most interesting discussions on common themes.

5  Very often, their early works clearly stick to the phenomenological moment, while their later works both continue and discontinue it in various ways. 6  In the book he edited in 1956 about philosophers from antiquity to the 20th century, Merleau-​ Ponty devoted a full section to ‘the East and philosophy’ (‘L’Orient et la philosophie’) with ‘Two Indian philosophers: Buddha and NammaLvar’ (pp. 51−70) and ‘Two Chinese philosophers: Siun tseu and Tchouang tseu’ (pp. 82−101).

Phenomenologies and Organization Studies    9 Of course, post-​phenomenologies also intersect or overlap with the Frankfurt School, from Adorno to Habermas. Habermas for instance has extensively drawn on Husserl’s notion of lived experience (see Ion, 2015). His view of emancipation, communication, and systems is deeply grounded into phenomenological logics. More recently, the third critical school, represented by Hartmut Rosa, also follows phenomenological as much as post-​Marxist logics. Rosa’s recent exploration of resonance is extensively conceptualized and documented from Merleau-​Ponty’s work about reversibility, embodiment, and flesh. Rosa’s (2019) vision of experience is thus largely intertwined with Merleau-​Ponty’s ([1945] 2013, 1964) view of perception, perceptive faith, and late sensible ontology. Even the political (chiasmatic) vision of domination and emancipation (not at all in line with Marxist doxa of dialectics) is also coherent with the political writings of Merleau-​Ponty. Interestingly, sometimes in a very responsive and hostile way, other traditions also emerged. Those are the ones we propose to label ante-​phenomenologies. Foucault,7 Deleuze, and maybe in a less straightforward way Derrida (who remains in another way a post-​phenomenologist) will go in other directions, fed by structuralism, process philosophy, and Asian philosophies. On the way to ante-​phenomenology, a key dimension probably separated most projects: subjectivity. While Foucault keeps a space for subjectivity and subjectivation in his late works, Deleuze clearly focuses on an asubjective or pre-​subjective metaphysics (Revel, 2015). ‘Phenomenology’ or phenomenologies,8 when they are mentioned, are often very important counterpoints, philosophies put at a short distance from humanism and Cartesianism. Nonetheless, they remain essential material in the conversation built by Deleuze with other thoughts and traditions.9 This is at least the most common view amongst these three philosophers and their legacy. For Foucault, recent historiographies stress a stronger paradoxical complicity with phenomenology than ‘appearance’ would show. A recent special issue of Etudes Philosophiques (see Depraz, 2013; Le Blanc, 2013; Sabot, 2013; and Chapter 11) thus sheds light on the presence of Husserlian thoughts from the very first text of Foucault to the last. In particular, the idea of an archaeology of knowledge appears linked to the presence of archaeology in Husserl’s writings. Likewise, the vision of corporeity and embodiment in Foucault and Foucauldian studies appears both in continuity and discontinuity with some phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies. Most of all, Foucault’s late work about ‘subjectivity’ and ‘attitude’ shows unexpected continuities

7  In Chapter 11 of this book, we will qualify this statement for the last (ethical) Foucault who came back to a more post-​phenomenological posture. 8  Most of the time, implicitly or explicitly, Husserlian phenomenology. 9  Paradoxically, Husserl is explicitly present in his elaboration of ‘aberrant movements’. For instance, in the second opus of the work with Guattari, the two authors explain: ‘Husserl mentions a proto-​ geometry dealing with fuzzy morphogenetic essences, that is to say errant or nomads. These essences could be distinguished from sensible things, but also ideal, royal or imperial essences’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 454). Deleuze was also in a complex relationship with Merleau-​Ponty, in particular the late one. His own topological vision is thus fed both constructively and critically by the topology elaborated by Merleau-​Ponty, e.g. his conceptualization of depth and folds (see Chapter 22 of this Handbook).

10    De Vaujany, Aroles, and Pérezts with phenomenology, in particular the work of Merleau-​Ponty (Revel, 2015; de Vaujany, 2021; see also Chapters 5 and 11).10 Likewise, Deleuze’s work, although (again) explicitly against and beyond any phenomenological project, clearly makes more sense as a discontinuity from it (which paradoxically requires a good knowledge of phenomenologies to grasp its full potential). This is epitomized by Deleuze’s (1983) work on cinema (see also Chapters 21 and 22). Repeatedly (although often in the form of quick mentions in the full text and more detailed remarks in footnotes), Deleuze positions his vision of movement-​images and time-​images with the early phenomenology of cinema of Merleau-​Ponty (1945), Laffay (1964),11 or, more generally, phenomenologies of cinema. Sometimes, there are even some continuities or possible continuities (e.g. with Scheler) that are stressed. Deleuze thus explains: There is here a reconciliation [rapprochement] to offer. Phenomenology, first with Max Scheler, has offered the notion of material and affective a priori. Then Mikel Dufrenne has given to this notion an extension and a status detailed in a series of books [ . . . ], by problematizing the relationship of those a priori with history and with art piece: in what sense are there aesthetic a priori, in which sense are they created, as such a new sentiment in society or such a nuance of color for a painter? Phenomenology [La phénoménologie] and Peirce never met.12 It seems nonetheless that the primeity of Peirce and the material and affective a priori of Scheler and Dufrene coincides in many ways. (Deleuze, 1983: 140)

Beyond that, many unexpected continuities could also be stressed between Deleuzian philosophy and post-​phenomenologies, in particular Deleuze and Merleau-​Ponty (see Lawlor, 1998, and Reynolds and Roffe’s (2006) fascinating analysis which cannot be detailed here). Non-​phenomenologies, in particular North-​American philosophies, cover the non-​ continental philosophies that aimed to offer experiential philosophies, ontologies, and metaphysics with some interesting commonalities with continental phenomenologies. So-​called American philosophy (which would be more relevantly called US philosophy) is particularly grounded into transcendentalism (Emerson, [1837] 1982;13 Thoreau, [1854] 2006) and its exploration of self-​reliance, non-​conformity, and nature or ordinary life at large (see Porte and Morris, 1999; Myerson, 2000; Misak, 2008). These traditions were partly reactive to continental philosophy of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, their modernity or romanticism. Emerson’s [1837] 1982 intellectual declaration of independence has opened the way to a description of ordinary life, ordinary aesthetics, and the 10  After 1976, subjectivity becomes a major point of disagreement between Foucault and Deleuze (Revel, 2015). 11  With the wisdom of hindsight, a reference that appears as central in his approach and criticism of a phenomenology of cinema. 12  We will come back very soon to this issue which is not fully exact. 13  See Porte and Morris (1999) and Myerson (2000).

Phenomenologies and Organization Studies    11 spirituality of ordinary man in front of or outside nature. This happened in contrast with and in reaction to European romanticism, stressing the importance of sublime, exceptional, and heroic transcendence. A couple of decades later, this pre-​civil war thought opened the way to Pragmatism, its consequentialist aim projecting and unifying plurality in experimentations ahead (Misak, 2008). Pragmatism has very interesting intersections, crossed conversations, and common roots with late-​19th-​and early-​20th-​ century phenomenology. William James was in conversation with Edmund Husserl, and part of his experiential thought and psychology shares very interesting common points with Husserl’s (who was himself an attentive reader of James).14 Likewise, part of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics and pragmatism is largely interwoven with phenomenology (Spiegelberg, 1956; Houser, 2010). Indeed, Peirce (1955) built what he called his own ‘phenomenology’ (see Rosensohn, 1974), which is sometimes forgotten in MOS historiographies of pragmatism. His approach to signs was nonetheless more autonomous, world-​making, than Husserl’s views, which explains the role played by Peirce (1955) in Deleuze’s theory of cinema. Likewise, Dewey’s experimentalist pragmatism also includes numerous phenomenological dimensions (see Chandler, 1977; as well as Chapter 26). More generally, process philosophy, as elaborated, e.g. by Bergson ([1889] 2013, [1896] 2004), Alexander (1920), and Whitehead (1929), also incorporated the kind of subjectivism that is typical of some subjectivist views of the phenomenological moment (see Lango, 2008, Stenner, 2008, on this very important issue). Consciousness was a key topic in the early work of Bergson ([1889] 2013, [1896] 2004). Experience has a space or, rather, a temporality among events. Prehension, ingression, and the actual events described by Whitehead (1929) are not incompatible with the sensible and resonant events described in phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies such as those of Merleau-​Ponty ([1945] 2013, 1964, 1995), which have been partly fed by process thinking.15 The time inside of consciousness and temporalities, the becoming and duration inhabiting phenomenological debates share strong commonalities with process metaphysics. Nonetheless, Whitehead’s (1929) metaphysical project probably systematizes the reflexion further, giving a relevance to events and fields of events beyond or below the ‘fields of presence’ or ‘phenomenal fields’ (see, e.g. Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 2013) that are the primary object of interest to orthodox phenomenologies. In addition, Whitehead’s philosophy is in conversation with the evolutionist debates of his time (Darwin published his book about the origins of species in 1859), a topic which is not covered by most publications we relate here to the phenomenological moment.16

14  To have an idea of the reality and complexity of this relationship, one thought often extending the other, but also sometimes circumventing it or despising it, see Tavuzzi (1979); Spiegelberg (1981); and Geniusas (2011). 15  See Chapter 22 of this Handbook. 16  Some post-​phenomenological publications will come back to the issue of nature and evolutionism, e.g. Merleau-​Ponty (1995) and his lectures at the College de France about Nature.

12    De Vaujany, Aroles, and Pérezts To sum up, it is thus tempting to see phenomenology either as a very important epiphenomenon within process metaphysics, an ontology (in the end, close to a phenomenological metaphysics) stressing the chiasms between flesh and events or experience and events, or more radically to see in each of them different process thoughts paving the way to different kinds of posthumanism and allowing or not a space to subjectivation or allowing different spaces for subjectivation (see Revel, 2015; or Chapters 7, 10, and 12 in this Handbook). To explore these complex issues in the relationships between phenomenologies, post-​phenomenologies, and process philosophy that we have only touched upon here, we invite our reader to consult Gratton (2014), Sparrow (2014), Whitehead (2015), and Girardi (2017). In continuation of this analysis, the divide between the transcendentalism attributed to some phenomenologies and the speculative realism attributed to process philosophy is increasingly questioned and put into perspective historically. What constitutes a key point of dissention are the views of times and temporality that result from each philosophy. In the coming years, the conversations nurtured by other traditions and cultural contexts, in particular Asian philosophies that have strongly influenced both phenomenologies and process philosophies (and vice versa), could provide a way to reduce their differences. Both ante-​and non-​phenomenologies (and some post-​phenomenologies) share a common point: they explore life in experience but also beyond experience. They understand time as a process, but they are also interested in pure events, events not necessarily grounded or productive of a sensibility or a subjectivity.17 Our world is a huge, incommensurable becoming interlacing all events, far beyond phenomenological intercorporeity. This is probably the main difference between phenomenologies and post-​ phenomenologies. Not the stress on subjectivity of the latter in contrast to the former (both emphasize subjectivity and objectivity). Not the focus on individuality versus collectivity or holism. Both stress individuality and collectivity. Not the concern for immaterial processes for the latter and processes of materiality or materialization for the former. Both stress sensibility, embodiment, and materiality as consequences. Both try to overcome usual Cartesian categories. Importantly, the main divergence could be more in the ultimate scope of our world, what they would call nature as a temporal phenomenon. The infinity of the latter responds to the finitude of the former. For phenomenology, sensibility, emotions, affects, and/​or perception need to form part of the story at some point. In light of such discussions, two things appear quite clearly to us, pushing us to outline the contours of this volume: First, that discussions about and around the relevance of phenomenological thinking, concepts, authors—​for, with, or against them—​are far from settled; second, that scouting the phenomenological ‘archipelago’ is both a daunting and fascinating task. In order to address this second issue, proposing a mapping seems like a natural next step, in order to see more clearly how the discussed authors, streams of thoughts, and philosophers appear to be (dis)connected. Figure I.2,

17 

Non-​phenomenologies and ante-​phenomenologies are often pre-​subjective or asubjective.

Phenomenologies and Organization Studies    13 NonWestern James Philisophies Emerson Alexander

NonWestern Philisophies Other phenomenlogies and non-phenomenologies Dewey

Whitehead

Barad

Rorty

Thoreau Peirce Pre-phenomenologies (18th-19th centuries)

Post-Phenomenologies (Mid 20th-21st centuries)

Phenomenological moment (Late 19th-Mid 20th)

Heidegger I

Kant Hegel Nietzche

Heidegger II

Marion

MerleauPonty I

Sartre

Husserl I

Lambert

Latour II

Bergson

Bachelard

Arendt Levinas de Beauvoir Simondon MerieauRicoeur Ponty II Henry Ante-phenomenologies

NonWestern Philosophies

Foucault

Derrida Deleuze

Latour I

Figure I.2  From pre-​phenomenologies to ante-​phenomenologies and beyond

inspired by the historiography and analysis of Ricoeur (1975), Benoist (2001), Misak (2008), McCumber (2014), Schrift, (2010), Zahavi (2018b), and Renaudie (2020), as well as by the process of this edited Handbook, allows us to visualize this variety and its fruitful points of tension. Figure I.2 is not meant as a static mapping. Each of the ‘islands’, composed of one or several authors, or part of an author’s work, is broadly located in order to situate their thinking in relative proximity to or distance from others. They are not exhaustive and neither is their position fixed; rather, they constitute opportunities for discussion in the chapters of this volume. This volume will attempt to cover all these islands within the phenomenological archipelago, the intersections, the lines, this depth, chiasms, claimed or attributed legacies inside the debates, and the flow of the debates about what phenomenologies are or are not, make visible or not, conceptualize or not, the agencies they foster or not. However, the metaphor of the archipelago can be seen as misleading in that it could convey a sense of motionless, static reification. As will be shown through the variety of the contributions in this volume, phenomenology is also and remains most of all a movement. A movement paradoxically overcoming itself continuously through its outgrowths (excroissances), heresies, external appropriations, and numerous intersections with other fields, which often are as much ‘in’ as they are ‘out’ of it. Phenomenology is nothing but diversity. It cannot be other than contradictory, as life and events are themselves, recalling that the key aspiration of orthodox phenomenology is to go deeper into life and eventfulness itself. Interestingly, phenomenology is indeed a ‘place’ to which many 20th-​century and contemporary thinkers come back in order to refine, position, and generalize their own thought. In a certain sense, it is a very paradoxical Sisyphus rock, that while we

14    De Vaujany, Aroles, and Pérezts seem to be pushing endlessly up the steep slope of thought, and it keeps coming back again and again, through the back door or the window, yet, in a sort of haunting yet profoundly stimulating manner, it seems less of a Greek curse than representative of a horizon line pushing back the boundaries in new directions with every new step. To give just one example, Latour’s (2005) work is perhaps the epitome of this trend; his Actor-​Network-​Theory is highly postmodern, posthuman; the network of translation incorporates its spokespersons, assembles its allies, and empowers various key actants. But he was always in dialogue with phenomenological questions, for instance about the body (Latour, 2004) and more recently, in (re)stressing modes of existence (Latour, 2012) and downward verticality (Latour, 2020), he has given a depth to his argument, making it both more terrestrial, material, and existential.18 The focus on the description of our attachments, our locality in the world, the affects we invest have mainly post-​phenomenological tones. The regular coming back to Husserlian constructs in Foucault’s thought, from the archaeology to the genealogy and the ethics period, the embodied dimensions in Butler, Agamben, or Habermas, the affective turn in Deleuze and Guattari: all these turns and returns are regenerated, positioned, and singularized by the Sisyphus rock of phenomenology (in particular seminal concepts and debates of the ‘phenomenological moment’). It is pushed behind, thrown ahead, but it keeps coming back in the debates as soon as issues of embodiment, emotions, affects, sensibility, existence, meaning, temporality are at stake in one way or another. This begs the question: Who will definitively rid us of this conceptual curse? But, maybe more interestingly, would that necessarily be a good thing?

I.3  Towards the Project of This Book: The Realized and Potential Contributions of Phenomenologies in the Exploration of Contemporary Management and Organizing For this edited book, our Ariadne’s thread is the history and genesis of the phenomenological stream in its full diversity. We thus include an in-​depth presentation of

18 

Latour is a very interesting touchstone for this argument. The (other . . .) Latour (of Figure I.2) is the one not claiming any phenomenological legacies, even if his symmetric ontology, his description of modes of existence, or his approach to techne shares many commonalities and continuities with the late Heidegger or Simondon’s (1958) phenomenology of instruments; even if his approach to Gaia and depth shares very strong commonalities with Merleau-​Ponty (1995) and his lectures about Nature; even if the existential layer he recently added in his conceptualization of crisis and Anthropocene borrows much from the late Heidegger.

Phenomenologies and Organization Studies    15 Table I.1 Authors and Concepts Selected in This Handbook Pre-​Phenomenologies Phenomenologies

Post-​Phenomenologies

Authors directly covered in the chapters

Hegel, Kant

Husserl, Heidegger (before and after Kehre)

Ahmed, Arendt, Bachelard, Sartre, Merleau-​Ponty (early and late), Ricoeur, Henry, Marion, Foucault, Schmitz, Young

Authors indirectly presented

Aristotle, Descartes, Nietzsche, Spinoza

Brentano, Stumpf, Scheler, Stein

Derrida, de Beauvoir, Levinas, Patockas, Simondon, Jonas, Zahavi, Rosa

Concepts

History, categories, dialectic, reason, Cartesianism, cogito

Epoché, eidetic reduction, intentionality, consciousness, reversibility, Dasein, care, historicality, being-​ in-​the-​world, time, temporality, Ereignis, appropriative event, abyssal ground

Imagination, poetic ontology, topology, existence, contingency, corporeal schema, reversibility, presence, intercorporeity, flesh, depth, time, temporality space, donation, instruments, modes of existence, affects, emotions, acceleration, resonance

key philosophers related to pre-​ phenomenologies, phenomenologies, and post-​ phenomenologies (see Table I.1). For obvious reasons, we did not detail anti-​or non-​ phenomenologies. Nonetheless, in view of the presence of process and pragmatist philosophies in MOS, we gave a significant space in our project for cross-​comparisons, cross-​histories, and cross-​fertilizations between these perspectives. Several chapters are thus opportunities for systematic comparisons between philosophers, e.g. Heidegger and Whitehead, Merleau-​ Ponty and Dewey, and the implications of their écarts for MOS. This book is most of all a process. Inspired by the proliferation of prior works on the intersections between phenomenological insights and MOS questions (e.g. Introna, Ilharco, and Faÿ, 2008; Holt and Sandberg, 2011; and a myriad of articles and chapters; see Chapter 12 for a literature review) we felt that the maturity of discussions and the times called for an overarching volume dedicated to bringing together these multifaceted debates, to explore their intersections, tensions, and horizons. The process involved identifying a variety of phenomenological debates and topics as they appear or could appear in the MOS literature. Discussions between editors, conversations with and between contributors, and a more systematic literature review19 resulted in the mapping structuring this book (see Figure I.3). It consists of five building blocks, detailed next. 19 The

opening chapter of Part II (Chapter 12) is devoted to a detailed presentation of the phenomenological literature in MOS.

16    De Vaujany, Aroles, and Pérezts Key philosophers Key concepts

Research methods MOS scientific knowledge

PART I: PHENOMENOLOGIES AND BEYOND

Key debates Robots Organizational aesthetics Embodiment Artificial Intelligence

Organizational memory Togetherness Community

Part IV: TOGETHERNESS, MEMORY AND IINSTRUMENTS

Atmosphere Collective activity Instruments

Mind-body Digitality PART II: INSIDE THE Perception EXPERIENCE OF Body at work ORGANIZING Emotions Organizing Gesture Affects Animality Managerial Intuition

Algorithms

Flesh

Leadership Coworking

Silence

Organizational practices

Time

Part III: EVENTS AND ORGANIZING

Events Temporality

Passivity

Institution Organizing Remote work

Figure I.3  Overall logic of our edited book Note: topics in red are empirical topics related to management and organizing today.

The first block of this Handbook ‘Phenomenologies and Beyond: Origins, Extensions, and Discontinuities’ will present systematically authors and concepts related to pre-​ phenomenologies, phenomenologies, and post-​phenomenologies. The second building block will delve into ‘The Experience of Organizing: Embodiment, Robots, and Affects in a Digital World’ through Chapters 12 to 20. In particular, through the pre-​phenomenologies and phenomenologies presented in the first block, this section of the Handbook will explore major issues of embodiment/​disembodiment, automation, body at work, instincts, and intuitions that seem to be at stake in contemporary MOS debates. Here, we will project key seminal concepts of pre-​phenomenologies and phenomenologies (e.g. perception, intentionality, embodiment, consciousness, mind-​ body relationship, affects, animality, aesthetics). The third building block, ‘Events and Organizing: Acceleration, Disruptions, and Decentering of Management’ will present Chapters 21 to 28 to explore events and organizing, and to zoom out from contemporary management and organizing concerns. Issues of time, temporalities, eventfulness, depth, openness, passivities, institutions, connectivity, remote work, distributed and decentered modes of organizing, leadership, silence, and collaboration will be analysed. This section will also allow for a cross-​ conversation with pragmatism and process studies which also have much to say on the topics detailed here (see also Chapter 12). This part will also be an opportunity to explore how post-​phenomenologies are often posthumanist in many ways (exactly like most ante-​phenomenologies and non-​phenomenologies also explored in this edited book). The fourth and last topical block of this book discusses ‘Togetherness, Memory, and Instruments: Algorithms, Gestures, and Marginality in Organizing’. In Chapters 29 to 34,

Phenomenologies and Organization Studies    17 it will focus on the more political issues explored in particular by post-​phenomenologies and non-​ continental phenomenologies (which will have a very important space and role here). Experience is always political. Society, togetherness, plurality, and the Anthropocene are at stake in all experiences of the world. We will cover here issues of organizational memory, organizational memorialization, managerial instruments, scientific instruments, atmosphere, returns to communities, models of collective activity, algorithms and their role in society. (See Table I.2.) In the final block of the volume, a concluding chapter from the editors will summarize some of the main take-​aways from this volume in terms of both theorizing and illustrating how phenomenologies, as a conceptual frame, can revamp MOS scholarship in the exploration of issues and concerns pertaining to management, organizations, and organizing. We shall also recognize the necessary limitations of our endeavour, each constituting potential paths for further developing our phenomenological adventure in MOS. In the end, there remains much unchartered territory within phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies. These also constitute a crossroad or a crossing point for many streams of research in our field, implicitly or explicitly, visibly or invisibly. Understanding this heritage or imprint is important for scholars and students interested in coming closer to the lived experience of our world of work and management. Most of all, while deeply engaging in phenomenological and post-​phenomenological thought, our aim with this volume is also to stress the context and limitations of each stream of research, literature, and concepts, to elaborate a detailed, critical, reflexive, historical narrative about phenomenologies, their key concepts, and how they can relate to debates in MOS. To conclude, leaving the reader in the hands of eminent scholars who we are proud to have been able to rally for this project, we would like to thank participants of the various Dauphine Phenomenology Workshop who have supported this project to widen discussion around phenomenology in MOS. We would like to thank in particular Karen Dale, Gibson Burrell, Dan Zahavi, Jérôme Mélancon, Anne Simon, Julien De Sanctis, Richard Kearney, Matt Statler, and Otto Scharmer for all the very helpful conversations we had around the topics of this book. Our deepest gratitude also goes to Hartmut Rosa and Hari Tsoukas for respectively contributing with an engaging Foreword and Afterword, and to Tim Ingold, whom we thank for bringing this volume to a close, but never a closure, with his Postscript. We would also like to thank each of the colleagues and friends that have supported this project from inception to fruition for providing insightful comments and remarks and for accompanying us on this journey. It is our deepest hope that the contributions of this edited volume might continue to trigger debates and conversations in our field. Paradoxically, while us three have engaged with phenomenological concepts and literature at some point, none of us would define ourselves as phenomenologists. Jeremy would emphasize his attachment to process philosophy, in particular that of Deleuze. Mar would recall how the awe of embodied existence was one of the reasons that drove her to study philosophy in the first place, and that this sense of embodied

Chapters and Authors

Perspectival Dualism: Why Phenomenology and Organization Studies Are Unlikely Bedfellows Who Make a Perfect Match (Hartmut Rosa)

Chapter 1: Tracing Phenomenological Sensibilities in Continental and Post-​Continental Philosophies (Jean-​Baptiste Fournier) Chapter 2: Husserl: Reason and Emotion in Philosophy (Elen Riot) Chapter 3: Heidegger, Organization, and Care (Robin Holt) Chapter 4: Gaston Bachelard and the Phenomenology of Imagination (Michèle Charbonneau) Chapter 5: From Phenomenology to a Metaphysics of History: The Unfinished Odyssey of Merleau-​Ponty (François-​Xavier de Vaujany) Chapter 6: Phenomenology and the Multidimensionality of the Body (Erol Copelj and Jack Reynolds) Chapter 7: The Self in the World: The Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur (Paul Savage and Henrika Franck) Chapter 8: Phenomenology and the Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (Lucie Chartouny) Chapter 9: Experience as an Excess of Givenness: The Post-​Metaphysical Phenomenology of Jean-​Luc Marion (Sara Mandray) Chapter 10: Extending and Discontinuing Phenomenology with Michel Henry (Eric Faÿ and Ghislain Deslandes) Chapter 11: Foucault and Phenomenology, a Tense and Complex Relation: From Anti-​Phenomenology to Post-​Phenomenology (Aurélie Leclercq-​Vandelannoitte)

Chapter 12: On the Way to Experienc with the Phenomenological Venture of Management and Organization: A Literature Review (Leo Bancou, François-​Xavier de Vaujany, Mar Pérezts, and Jeremy Aroles) Chapter 13: ‘In the Future, as Robots Become More Widespread’: A Phenomenological Approach to Imaginary Technologies in Healthcare Organisations (Jaana Parviainen and Anne Koski) Chapter 14: Max Scheler’s Phenomenology of Personalism and Paradox: Implications of Leadership Relations (Leah Tomkins) Chapter 15: At the Crossroad of Phenomenology and Feminist New Materialism: A Diffractive Reading of Embodiment (Silvia Gherardi) Chapter 16: Bachelard’s Backdoor to Happy Business School Phenomenology (Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Matilda Dahl, and Jenny Helin) Chapter 17: Exploring the Role of Bodies and Gestures in Management with Merleau-​Ponty (Albane Grandazzi) Chapter 18: Queering Organizational Appearances Through Reclaiming the Erotic (Mar Pérezts and Emmanouela Mandalaki) Chapter 19: Animal Ontologies: Phenomenological Insights for Posthumanist Research (Géraldine Paring) Chapter 20: ‘How About a Hug?’ Aesthetic of Organizational Experience and Phenomenologies (Antonio Strati)

Titles of Parts

Preface

Part I Phenomenologies and Beyond: Origins, Extensions, and Discontinuities

Part II The Experience of Organizing: Embodiment, Robots, and Affects in a Digital World

Table I.2 Structure of This Handbook

Chapter 21: Is the Phenomenal Difference of the Entrepreneurial Event Opening on its Repetition? (Xavier Deroy) Chapter 22: The Process of Depth: Temporality as Organization in Cinematographic Experience (François-​Xavier de Vaujany) Chapter 23: Organization as Autopoietic ‘Understanding’? Whitehead, Merleau-​Ponty, and the Speculative Promise of a Process Phenomenology for MOS (Andrew Kirkpatrick) Chapter 24: What Silence Does: An Arendtian Analysis of Quaker Meeting Practices (Lucas Introna, Donncha Kavanagh, and Martin Brigham) Chapter 25: Tuning into Things: Sensing the Role of Place in an Emerging Alternative Urban Community (Boukje Cnossen) Chapter 26: Embodied Perception and the Schemed World: Merleau-​Ponty and John Dewey (Sun Ning) Chapter 27: Enframing and Transformation: Serequeberhan’s African Phenomenological Approach (Abraham Olivier) Chapter 28: Phenomenology in Japan: A Brief History with Focus on the Reception in Applied Areas (Genki Uemura)

Chapter 29: Organ-​ising Embodied Practices of Common(-​ing) and Enfleshed Con-​Vivialities: Perspectives on the Tragicomedy of the Commons (Wendelin Küpers) Chapter 30: It’s all Method: Schmitz and Neo-​Phenomenology (Lydia Jørgensen) Chapter 31: Squatters and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Tales from the Occupied Theatre (Mickael Peiro) Chapter 32: Listening to the Sounds of the Algorithm: Some Remarks on Phenomenology and the Social Studies of Finance (Marc Lenglet) Chapter 33: Producing the Organizational Space: Buddhist Temples as Co-​working Spaces (Tadashi Uda) Chapter 34: Organizing Research Excellence: A Pheno-​Ethnomethodological Approach to Study Organizational Identity at Research Centres in the Global South (Juan Felipe Espinosa-​Cristian and Nicolás Trujillo-​Osorio)

Chapter 35: Between Being and Becoming: Appearances and Subjectivities or Organizing (François-​Xavier de Vaujany, Jeremy Aroles, and Mar Pérezts)

Why and How Phenomenology Matters to Organizational Research (Haridimos Tsoukas)

An Anthropologist Lands in Phenomenology (Tim Ingold)

Part III Events and Organizing: Acceleration, Disruptions, and Decentering of Management

Part IV Togetherness, Memory, and Instruments: Algorithms, Gestures, and Marginality in Organizing

Part V Conclusion

Afterword

Postscript

20    De Vaujany, Aroles, and Pérezts wonderment has kept popping up in the various organizational realities that she studies. François-​Xavier would stress his interest in contributing to a ‘metaphysics of history’ (something he sees as interweaving process philosophy and hermeneutic philosophy). Hence, our objective with this volume is neither to blindly defend nor to document phenomenology’s relevance for MOS. Instead, what we would like to do here is to critically engage with phenomenologies in their diversity and contemporaneity. In doing so, we depart from the idea that phenomenology is a closed ‘school of thought’, and that as such it would be a minor or downward trend. Rather, we argue that, in a way, phenomenologies are an unchartered archipelago whose presence could be made much more visible in the context of MOS (as much as in the broader context of the Humanities and Social Sciences), and that this visibilization could bring about more than meets the eye. In order to do so, we have included a series of chapters by a variety of authors who were willing to navigate these troubled and unchartered waters with us, and we are extremely grateful to each of them for their inspiring contributions. We believe this volume responds to a renewed interest, in the field of MOS, for conceptual approaches that allow a capturing of the experiential and lived realities of organizational life. It is our desire that this volume should reflect the spirit of openness and reflexivity with which we set out to write it, and that each of the individual contributions should partake in the mapping of this rich field with its endless possibilities.

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PA RT I

P H E N OM E N OL O G I E S A N D B E YON D Origins, Extensions, and Discontinuities

Chapter 1

Traci ng Phenom enol o g i c a l Sensibilit i e s i n C ontinenta l a nd P ost-​C onti ne nta l Phil osoph i e s Jean-​B aptiste Fournier

1.1  Introduction: The Notion of Phenomenon ‘Phenomenology’ is quite an ambiguous word. First, it refers to the radical method invented by Edmund Husserl in 1900−1, but, in a much wider sense, it is the name given to any attempt to describe one’s inner experience as opposed to the outer world—​that is to say: the phenomena as opposed to the ‘things in themselves’. In order to perceive the specificity of phenomenology as a philosophical movement and method, one has to begin by clarifying the latter meaning of the word and ask what it means to describe phenomena. A phainomenon, in ancient Greek, is ‘what appears’ (phainesthai); as such the term can potentially be misleading, since it can be used to refer to something with an appearance that misrepresents what the thing actually is (i.e. ‘what seems’); or it can be used to refer to something real that appears to (‘i.e. comes into being before’) us, and that it has to appear to us in order to be real for us. This ambiguity can be found even in the concept of phenomenon developed by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant distinguishes between, on the one hand, the ‘things in themselves’, i.e. the things as they

28   Jean-Baptiste Fournier are independently of how we might perceive them, and, on the other hand, the ‘things as we perceive them’ and which constitute the only world we can actually perceive (Kant, [1781] 2012). In principle, it is impossible for someone to perceive a thing in itself, since this would be outside of our perception. Thus, the phenomenon is at the same time the only reality we have got and an ‘unreal’ or ideal reality, since one cannot know whether or not our subjective way of perceiving things has altered or transformed them from how they are in objective reality. We live in a world of phenomena, but we cannot know for sure that this world is not a mere world of appearances and actually be ‘false’. Yet, what would ‘true’ or ‘false’ mean outside the realm of phenomena if this realm is the only world for us? Kant’s argument is that our thought and the concepts by which we try to grasp something real (the ‘categories’) can be fully satisfied, even if they can only grasp a world of phenomena. Moreover, in this world, there is a place for the difference between ‘mere appearances’ that are misleading and can be corrected by further experiences, and ‘true’ phenomena which can be fully known and experienced. In Kant’s sense, the study of these phenomena (what we could call ‘phenomenology’) is nothing less than the study of the world—​the only knowable world for us. Yet, Kant believed that one could guarantee, once and for all, that our concepts are fit for providing knowledge of phenomena. The renouncing of our capacity to have knowledge of things in themselves was thought to secure us this knowledge of the world understood as a world of phenomena. But having demonstrated (as Kant does it in the Critique of Pure Reason) that our mind can grasp phenomena does not mean that we have established the legitimacy of all of our concepts. For instance, the fact that space is a pure form to our sensibility guarantees the possibility of geometry, but it does not actually show which system of axioms should fit the space thus constructed. In a stricter sense, then, phenomenology as a study must clarify the relation between our concepts (the ‘logos’) and reality (understood as phenomena). In doing so, one has to acknowledge that constructing our concepts of phenomena can only be achieved progressively: the description of phenomena, the patient elaboration of their stratifications, the constant investigation into the pertinence of our concepts in order to produce a knowledge of them are necessary steps towards establishing the validity of science. This is the broadest but most essential sense of phenomenology, and it pertains to very different philosophical movements to the phenomenology of the Husserlian sense: to show the pertinence of each and every concept by a progressive construction of their grasp on our experience of the world—​that is to say, not of the world ‘in itself ’, but of the world as we perceive it. This definition, first outlined by the French philosopher Jocelyn Benoist (Benoist, 2001) even applies to the work of philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap who, in a way, could be seen as an anti-​phenomenologist. In the Logical Structure of the World (Carnap, [1928] 1967), Carnap argues that every concept used by empirical sciences could be ‘reduced’ to simpler concepts and eventually, by recurrence of this process, to the most basic concepts: those describing our immediate lived experience. In other words, one can elaborate a progressive construction of

Tracing Phenomenological Sensibilities    29 the concepts of science on the basis of phenomena, and the task of logics would be to achieve this phenomenological foundation of science.

1.2  Husserl’s Concept of Phenomenology The philosophical movement created by Husserl in his Logical Investitations ([1901] 1973) and to which he gave the name ‘phenomenology’ is just such a progressive construction of the grasp of our knowledge on phenomena, but the term here requires further elucidation. In order to understand what phenomenology is, in this new sense, we should begin by explaining the concept of ‘epoché’. In the introduction to the second volume of his Logical Investations, Husserl claims that philosophy should go ‘back to the thing itself ’ (‘ad res ipsas!’; Husserl, [1901] 1973). This phrase could be misunderstood, as one could think that Husserl is rejecting the study of phenomena in order to go back to Kant’s ‘things in themselves’. On the contrary, the ‘thing itself ’ is the phenomenon itself. But what are phenomena themselves? Moreover, assuming that we should “return to them” supposes that we had lost them or that we were situated in a position where we would not be surrounded by such things? Is there something outside the “thing itself ” and what does it mean to go back to it? We can understand this movement in two different senses, but eventually they come to the same thing. (1) First, in the logical context of the Logical Investigations, one has to seek truth in phenomena as opposed to the ‘mere words’ (Husserl, [1901] 1973) on which we are usually focused. As Heidegger will later magisterially show us, our words carry a very heavy metaphysical charge that we unconsciously take for granted, so that a scientific construction based on a study of words or concepts (as Carnap’s) will necessarily become trapped in a loop: instead of helping us to find the right concepts to express what one actually finds in a given reality, such a method would only lead us more deeply in the misunderstandings that our intrinsically language produces. In order to avoid this loop, one has to depart from analytical methods focused on words and go back to what is actually being examined itself in its purest form. (2) Then, going back to the thing itself means getting rid of the theoretical constructions elaborated by the empirical sciences. For instance, if one is to give a proper account of what ‘life’ means, one must not rely on the results of biology any more than on a cultural or religious belief. One must go back to the thing itself, i.e. the actual lived experience of life—​in other terms: the phenomenon of life. And in fact, going over the results of science and going over the ‘mere’ words comes to the same thing, as the words we use are filled with the combined heritage of our scientific knowledge as well as our metaphysical and cultural beliefs.

30   Jean-Baptiste Fournier To return to the thing in itself, one has to apply the method of phenomenological epoché and set aside everything we believe we understand about a field of objects in order to be able to see these objects as they actually appear and not through a conceptual scheme (Husserl, [1913] 1982: §32, p. 60). Applying phenomenology to a field of knowledge, as we try to do it in this book, must then first mean: put into brackets everything that we think we know about this domain and turn back to our actual experience of the objects concerned. Instead of trying to apply our concepts to them, one has to patiently describe them as they are (subjectively, even if this subjectivity is in a constant correlation to objectivity) in order to give a new meaning to our concepts or ‘fulfil’ them with an actual, meaningful sense, based on real experience. The notion of fulfilment is a key concept in Husserl’s phenomenology since it has both a descriptive and a methodological value. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl shows that both our understanding of language and our perception of spatial objects obey the same law: something is first only meant or aimed at (the intention), and then it is fulfilled by the actual donation of the object. For instance, when I say ‘London’, I aim at something which I do not yet perceive and the meaning of this word will be (partially) fulfilled by the actual experiences that I will have when I walk in London or when I see it from above. And if we forget the word ‘London’ and turn to the perception itself, if we then ask how this object, the city of London, is actually perceived, we must acknowledge that it is never fully perceived: one sees an aspect, a perspective, a certain presentation of the object (Husserl calls it an ‘adumbration’ (Abschattung)), but through this aspect, it is the city itself which appears; it is the object of an intention which every experience that one is going to have of it is going to fulfil. Thus, an object such as a city and in fact any spatial object is characterized by the fact that it is never fully given: one always intends more than is given and the further course of experience fulfils the first void intention. This structure of intention/​fulfilment can be applied to more complex theoretical processes and even providing the principles of a new method of scientific research. How indeed could concepts such as ‘employee’, ‘manager’, ‘enterprise’, etc., receive a deeper meaning independent of the beliefs and theorizations that we inherit from the different sciences that are supposed to elaborate them? One cannot simply choose an employee or a manager and describe them, since one would inevitably produce a merely subjective or particular description and be incapable of reaching any objective or universal concept. At the same time, however, nothing other than this individual employee or manager is actually available to us. This is why, in order to “fulfil” scientific concepts, one must apply the method of eidetic variation. This method can be understood as the radicalization of a very simple and obvious scientific method which consists in accumulating the descriptions of individual objects in order to construct a general concept of these objects based on what is found to be common to them all. But the method we are discussing is in fact quite different. First, instead of accumulating experiences of many objects of the same type (which presupposes that we somehow know in advance that they are objects of the same

Tracing Phenomenological Sensibilities    31 type, as if we already possessed the very concept we want to elaborate), this method is based on imagination. One must take the individual object and make it vary in as many directions as possible until one reaches something that cannot be varied further, the invariant—​and this gives us the structure or the ‘essence’ of the object. For instance, in order to give a proper account of the concept of ‘human’, one cannot just take 1,000 humans and take away from them everything that they do not have in common, since it would mean (1) that the concept thus reached would be limited to the number of cases taken into account; (2) that in order to select the panel of human beings, one had to presuppose some features that, according to a certain usage of the word ‘human’, were supposed to pertain to human beings. Thus, if we are to stick to the principle of phenomenological epoché, we have to set aside any such concept and turn ourselves to what is actually given: the actual human that I, for instance, am; or the individual employee or manager that is present, here, in front of me, in person. The main features of the essence of a human being or of an employee or a manager are exemplified in every human being, or employee, or manager, so that it is useless to try and multiply the examples, since everything is already here, in sight. Thus, one must only describe the individual object that is actually given and make it vary, not in a finite way such as in the classical method of accumulation, but infinitely. This journey to the limit allows us to see the essence of the object in the individual object itself; but, unlike the general concept attained by the elimination of everything particular in the accumulation of examples, the essence thus obtained is much richer, since it is founded on the full individuality of the described object. This is the paradoxical discovery of phenomenology: the real essence of an object, the one that can give a deeper sense or really fulfil its concept, is to be found in the most specific or individual features of objects as they are given in our lived experience. Thus, in order for instance to understand what a manager is, or what a certain behaviour is, one must not multiply the examples or try to get rid of their individuality, by means of statistics or general theories; one must instead go ever deeper into the description of that individual instance of the examined concept in order to fulfil it with a general (since it is obtained by eidetic variation) yet rich (as it is founded on the description of a concrete experience) sense. All these methodical principles (returning to the thing itself, phenomenological epoché, and eidetic variation) aim at providing a meaningful fulfilment to scientific concepts, but they rely on a founding principle which Husserl calls the ‘principle of all principles’, and which he expresses in his Ideas Pertaining to Pure Phenomenology: No conceivable theory can make us err with respect to the principle of all principles: that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its ‘personal’ actuality) offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there. (Husserl, [1913] 1982: §24, pp. 43−4)

32   Jean-Baptiste Fournier Yet, this principle can be rendered even more precise than we have thus far put it: Husserl does not just say that one must only take for granted what is actually given in a ‘presentive intuition’ and accept it as it appears or ‘as what it is presented as being’, but he refers to an originary intuition. What does it mean for something to be given originarily? At first sight, one could say that it only means ‘actually’ or ‘really’ given, which, in a sense, is true. But in the field of phenomenology, the originarity refers to a certain type or sphere of experiences that leads us back to the phenomena. In order to understand it, one has to consider that what we usually consider as actually given (the world, the objects that we encounter in it, the other subjects who live in it . . .) is not originarily given: it is a construction elaborated by our consciousness on the basis of its lived experiences. For instance, as Husserl argues in a famous passage of the Ideas, when I see a table, the table is never really given to me: what I actually perceive is an adumbration of the table, an aspect of it, but my lived experience of this aspect is structured by the intention of the whole object. The phenomenon of the table has two sides: what appears to me is the table as a fully constituted object, but if I turn back to my actual lived experience, I can see that what is originarily given is a certain perspective experience of it plus the act of aiming at or intending the whole table as an ideal object (which means, an object which could only be fulfilled by an infinite number of experiences). Thus, the world appears as a construction that we take for granted (because we need to!) in our ‘natural attitude’, but which finds its origin in the sphere of pure phenomena, pure lived experiences, which is nothing other than our consciousness. This leads us to the most specific feature of phenomenology as a method that can be applied to any empirical science: one must not consider things as they appear objectively, as this objectivity is in fact a mere construction; instead, one must only describe things as they appear to the agents who actually live them, since it is in their experience that these things or processes will find their true originary sense. Thus, phenomenology is nothing less than a new way to perceive things or processes and it offers a complete change of perspective. Yet, it would be a mistake to understand this method as a subjective one, whose interest would be the subject and its lived experiences as opposed to the objects themselves. On the contrary, the main interest of Husserl’s phenomenology is the object or thing itself. Many scholars such as Jocelyn Benoist, Claude Romano, and Dominique Pradelle have argued that Husserl accomplished an ‘anti-​Copernician revolution’, i.e. the reverse of Kant’s Copernician revolution. Indeed, Kant argued that the form of an object depended on the subjective form of our representation, which is the subjective form of our sensibility—​space and time—​and of our understanding—​the categories such as causality, quantity, etc. Against Kant’s view, Husserl argues that the fact that objects are constituted by one’s consciousness does not imply that their structures are only subjective: on the contrary, the object, as ‘transcendental guide’ (Husserl, [1913] 1982: §131, p. 313), ‘motivates’ the constitution, i.e. it indicates how the perception of the object must be pursued in order for its undetermined aspects to be fully determined. Kant said that the fact that this table appears in space is only true to us; Husserl answers that the spatial structure of the table only depends on the essence of spatial objects and dictates the way any perceiving subject

Tracing Phenomenological Sensibilities    33 can perceive it, so that ‘even God, if he perceived it, would perceive it by adumbrations’ (Husserl, [1913] 1982: §150, p. 351). Thus, the aim of phenomenology is not to describe the structures of consciousness in a psychological way; it is, through the description of these subjective structures, to give an account of the objective structures of the world. The best way to describe a domain of objects is to describe the types of acts that we are compelled to accomplish in order to fully perceive that object. We only have access to an object through its constitution in our consciousness, so we have to follow its constitution in order to understand it. Yet, describing the acts implied in the constitution of objects does not only inform us of the essence of these objects but also of their articulation to each other and, thus, of the layers of the world itself. In his Ideas II, Husserl gives an overview of the main domains of objects—​spatial schemes, natural things, animalia, and spiritual objects—​each of which is correlated to a different science which determines its relevant methodology and type of discursivity. For instance, a careful description of the difference between mathematical idealities such as geometrical figures and, for instance, a tree should make us realize that the method of idealization, which is relevant in the case of the mathematical objects, would be irrelevant in the description of the tree. In order to be rigorous scientifically, natural sciences have to acknowledge the fact that they cannot reach the same exactness as mathematics—​not because they are weaker or less advanced, but because their objects are not and will never be ideal objects and cannot be treated as such. In other words, the elucidation of the ontological type of a given object may teach us the relevant methods that could be used to give a rigorous account of it. Yet, the elucidation of the ontological type of the object actually depends on the description of the acts through which the object is constituted. Therefore, the deepest foundation of a science lies in the description of these acts. For instance, a proper foundation in human sciences should begin by determining how, as a human being, something may be constituted in our consciousness. In his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl gave an account of the constitution of the other egos. The constitution of the other as an alter ego is rooted in the experience that I have of a certain relation between my mind and my body, not as a mere material body (Körper) but as a living and animated body (Leib). When I observe that, in the world around me, certain bodies share some similarities with my own (i.e. physical resemblances or similar behaviours), I transfer onto them the same structures that I experience in my own body—​and, in particular, a relation to a mind. Even though the other’s mind is never given to me in person, its ‘appresentation’ in the other’s body is sufficient to give me access to an intersubjective world, i.e. a world in which I am never alone but always in a certain relationship with other human beings—​a world about which we can talk, in which we can build a society, give value to things, and in which each individual has to construct their own identity and distinguish themselves from the others. This human and intersubjective world is not only the background (or horizon) and the field of every human sciences, but it is also the object on which phenomenologists after Husserl will focus.

34   Jean-Baptiste Fournier Martin Heidegger, for instance, who was Husserl’s student and assistant, refuses to take Husserl’s egological point of view and prefers to start his phenomenological account of what he calls ‘Dasein’ by a description of the intersubjective world in which we are always and already in relation with others.

1.3  Heidegger and Phenomenology On a certain point of view, Heidegger goes even further than Husserl on what the latter called the ‘radicality’ of phenomenology (e.g. Husserl, [1929] 1960). The term Dasein is a typical example of this attempt. According to Heidegger, all the concepts that we generally use to describe the type of beings that we are (‘human’, ‘subject’, ‘ego’, ‘consciousness’, etc.) are in fact misleading, since they carry a very heavy metaphysical burden. For instance, the term ‘human’ is the result of a philosophical tradition which, through Humanism and Enlightenment, gave us a very particular universal concept of humanity. The simple fact that we use this concept forces us to implicitly admit certain theses which, on the contrary, should at least be examined and possibly even rejected, for instance, in the very specific relation between human beings and animals that it conveys. This is why Heidegger never uses traditional concepts but instead creates an entirely new philosophical vocabulary. Instead of speaking of ‘human beings’, we have to use a neutral term such as Dasein which, in German, only means ‘existence’, since the only obvious fact pertaining to us is that we exist—​i.e. we exist in a certain way, which should yet stay undetermined since it is the thematic object of phenomenology and not something that we might presuppose. With Heidegger, phenomenology becomes the ‘analysis of existence’ or Daseinsanalyse: in order to hold to phenomena as they actually appear to us, one has to stop considering individual objects or subjects and to turn one’s sight towards the global phenomenon of the world—​i.e. the existential fact that the Dasein has a world and that he or she is always in a certain relation to the world. More precisely: there is no such thing as an individual Dasein on the one hand and a world on the other, which could then, another time, be linked to one another; on the contrary, the relation itself comes first, and its terms (the Dasein and the world) are nothing but abstract ‘moments’ that can be separated by analysis but which are not actually given in the experience of having a world, which is the first and more significant fact of our existence. Everything we do, everything we perceive, reveals a certain way to have a world or to be in the world, that is to say a ‘possibility’ of the Dasein. Moreover, we always see objects as connected to the world and to our existence in the world. For instance, when I see a nail, I also implicitly see the ‘complex of objects’ in which the nail has its place (the hammer, the wall, the picture) and I always see the existential context in which this complex of objects takes place: the decoration of the house, which refers to the possibility of existence that we call ‘living somewhere’ or ‘inhabiting’, and which defines a certain way to be in the world.

Tracing Phenomenological Sensibilities    35 Heidegger’s Daseinsanalyse eventually leads to a founding structure of existence in the world, which he calls ‘preoccupation’, ‘care’, or ‘concern’ (Sorge): if we stay with the phenomenon of our existence, we can see that we are always preoccupied by something. We use things in order to build or make something with them, we are preoccupied by the other Dasein’s feelings or we want something from them, etc. In other words, to exist in the world always means to be preoccupied by something in the world. But Heidegger’s analysis goes even deeper into the phenomenon of existence, since he tries to describe an even lower structure of existence: that of anguish or anxiety. We, as Dasein, are essentially anxious: we instinctively feel that our existence is an infinite field of possibilities and that nothing ahead is determined for us. Our liberty implies a sense of nothingness as its counterpart: we can choose whatever we want and we feel that our loneliness is absolute. This is why as Dasein we need a world: we need to forget this loneliness and to give ourselves away to the world, to others, to anything but ourselves. We need to be preoccupied in order to forget that we are anxious. In describing this structure, Heidegger seems to go beyond the limits of phenomenology as he tackles a level of self-​experience that we could consider to be not entirely a given but merely reconstituted. But what exactly are the limits of phenomena—​and thus, of phenomenology?

1.4  Orthodoxy and Heresies The complexity of this question comes from a difficulty which has to be underlined at the very beginning of this book. As we have already seen, ‘phenomenology’ refers, on the one hand, to the very general assumption that one has to describe things as they appear to us, and, on the other hand, to the very specific method invented by Husserl in order to fulfil this assumption. ‘Phenomenology’ could be described as a very wide field or ‘cloud’ of philosophical theories assuming that one must keep to an examination of phenomena, at the centre of which we can place Husserl’s mature phenomenology. Thus, generally speaking, phenomenologists insist on distinguishing their method from that of Husserl, thus placing themselves in the field by means of a specific link they have constructed between their views and Husserl’s. In this respect, the history of phenomenology is nothing more than a history of complements or divergences (even heresies) from Husserl’s orthodoxy to which one has to consent in order to fulfil Husserl’s ‘Principle of all principles’ and to give a full and faithful description of phenomena. By means of showing fidelity to what they interpret as Husserl’s programme individual phenomenologists justify themselves as a phenomenologist. Thus, the main streams within phenomenology can be distinguished from one another by to the aspect of Husserl’s programme that they choose to emphasize. For instance, French phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-​Ponty or Michel Henry insist on the importance of the body. Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology begins with the study of perception as opposed to sensations, the latter not being the atomistic

36   Jean-Baptiste Fournier elements of a construct but, on the contrary, obtained by abstraction from perception itself (Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 2012). But what is essential in perception is the fact that it is always founded on the perceiving body of the subject. The body is not just a material object, a ‘corpus’, it is the actual source of consciousness. Against Descartes, Merleau-​ Ponty refuses the distinction between body and soul, since perception is conditional on the body itself. Intentionality is founded on the primordial opening of the body to the world, on the fact that our flesh is in a bodily, even carnal, pre-​categorial relation to the world. Even if he criticizes certain aspects of Husserl’s philosophy, Merleau-​Ponty extends his own insight on the distinction between the live body as subject (Leib) and the material body as object (Körper), and the deep relation that our body always has with the life-​world (Lebenswelt). Other phenomenologists criticize Husserl’s transcendental turn, such as Adolf Reinach, but here again, they only do so while maintaining fidelity to Husserl’s early works, and more specifically to the metaphysical neutrality which he used to claim before his 1905−7 works. For instance, Reinach refuses to consider that our lived experience is always intentional, arguing that intentionality must only be used to describe certain acts of consciousness. More recently, philosophers inspired by analytic philosophy or trying to fill the gap between phenomenology and analytic philosophy have gone even further in exploring the ‘limits of intentionality’ (Benoist, 2005). For instance, Jocelyn Benoist considers that intentionality can be very useful to explain certain kinds of phenomena and a certain use of language, but that it is an error to generalize this concept, and in particular to apply it systematically to perception (Benoist, 2013). Indeed, Benoist considers that perception is a way to face reality itself, without the mediation of the intentional object. His realism implies a strong criticism, not of phenomenology as such, but of the fact that the mere description of phenomena which Husserl initially wanted to accomplish lost its purity because of his attempt to generalize on the model of intention/​fulfilment. On the other side, philosophers such as Alexander Schnell consider that transcendental phenomenology, which Husserl had thematized since 1913, must only be deepened. Against the new realism of Quentin Meillassoux, who criticizes what he calls ‘correlationism’ (i.e. the idea that what is given is not the thing itself but a relation in which thing and subject are given together and correlated to one another (see Meillassoux, 2006), Schnell argues that we can always go deeper into correlationism. He says that once we have reached beyond the relation of object to subject to the relation between noema and noesis (the object in the sense through which I intend it and the act of intention), we can go even further into the tissue of phenomena and reach a level in which the temporality of consciousness gives birth to intentionality itself (Schnell, 2020). Here, again, he is following in the path opened by Husserl in his Phenomenology of Internal Time-​Consciousness (Husserl, [1905] 1990). Many contemporary philosophers have chosen not to focus on general problems of method as Husserl very often did, but rather to give phenomenological descriptions of more specific objects or to describe the structures of particular fields of objects related to different regional sciences. For instance, Jean-​Toussaint Desanti and Dominique Pradelle have developed a phenomenology of mathematical idealities in which they show the pertinence of Husserl’s insights, for instance his theory of categorial intuition

Tracing Phenomenological Sensibilities    37 or his stratification of logic in Formal and Transcendental Logic. However, if they underline the necessity of intentionality in order to give an account of the constitution of mathematical objects, they both criticize Husserl’s use of the model of perception in order describe these objects (Pradelle, 2021). Many phenomenologists have thus explored the domains of psychoanalysis, the phenomenology of possibility, of attention, of society, politics, art, etc. There are many other approaches within phenomenology, but one of the most important features of its development since Husserl has been in its capacity to take any object area and to cautiously describe it in such a way that at least some of its essential features might appear. Husserl’s work was born of a very rich scientific culture and he never neglected the importance of actual scientific work, but he was convinced that in order for a science to reach its full meaning and to raise itself to self-​consciousness, it had to take into account the subjective processes within which the object of its field is constituted. Thus, phenomenology may never want to challenge science, but it can give a proper foundation to any scientific discourse. The phenomenological attitude cannot replace the natural approach with which a science must be developed, but it can reveal the proper sense of a field of objects—​the sense that our consciousness actually gives to it.

References Benoist, J. (2001). L’Aufbau comme phénoménologie. In S. Laugier (ed.), Carnap et la construction logique du monde. Paris: Vrin. Benoist, J. (2005). Les limites de l’intentionalité. Paris: Vrin. Carnap, R. ([1928] 1967). The Logical structure of the world. Trans. R. A. George. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Heidegger, M. ([1927] 1996). Being and Time, J. Stambaugh, trans. Albany: State University of New York Press. Husserl, E. ([1901] 1973). Logical Investigations. Findlay, J. N., trans. London: Routledge. Husserl, E. ([1905] 1990). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–​ 1917). Brough, J.B., trans. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Husserl, E. ([1913] 1982). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy –​First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Kersten, F., trans. The Hague: Nijhoff. Husserl, E. ([1929] 1960). Cartesian meditations, Cairns, D., trans. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kant, I. ([1781] 2012). Critique of pure reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meillassoux, Q. (2006). Après la finitude: Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence. Paris: Seuil. Merleau-​ Ponty, ([1945] 2012). M. Phenomenology of Perception. D. A. Landes, trans. New York: Routledge. Pradelle, D. (2012). Par-​delà la revolution copernicienne: sujet transcendantal et facultés chez Kant et Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Pradelle, D. (2021). Intuition et idéalités: phénoménologie des objets mathématiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Romano, C. (2010). Au Coeur de la raison: la phénoménologie. Paris: Gallimard.

Chapter 2

Husse rl Reason and Emotions in Philosophy Elen Riot

2.1  Introduction Did Husserl, who is often considered the father of the phenomenology school in philosophy, believe his work was completed when he left his last book, The Crisis of Science, unfinished? His followers had a more relaxed and open view of the task of phenomenology: ‘The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoative style in which it proceeds are not the sign of failure, they were inevitable because phenomenology’s task was to reveal the mystery of the world and the mystery of reason’ (Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 2012: 21–​2, lxxxv). Husserl clearly believed he had to finish the hard work of building phenomenology. Whereas many of his books show the transformations of his ideas and his form of open-​mindedness in building a scientific method for philosophy as a universal science, at the end of his life Husserl clearly thought the future of humanity was in jeopardy. In his last work, he sadly deplored the lack of a unifying science to help in sharing the same meanings. He believed European sciences to be in a state of deep crisis. Reading Husserl’s work today is an interesting way to ponder this issue. This chapter is only a short introduction to the works of Edmund Husserl.1 We first present Husserl’s interest in a science of sciences and the obstacles to building such foundation. We believe this lack is also of concern to organization studies today. Therefore, the second part, developing Husserl’s method for seeking knowledge, could still serve as an epistemic inspiration today. Finally, we identify three important, interrelated questions in organization studies that Husserl’s philosophy may help answer which

1  For further reading, the reader can discover Husserl via his most famous texts in his (1999) and with the help of some of his key commentators (Bachelard, 1990; Zahavi, 2017). The use of the Husserl Dictionary (Moran and Cohen, 2012) may also prove fruitful as Husserl has a rich vocabulary of his own.

Reason and Emotions in Philosophy    39 relate to scepticism, grand challenges in the world of climate change, and the role of emotions and sensations in the realm of knowledge and science.

2.2  Husserl’s Transformation as a Philosopher Edmund Husserl thought scientists used naïve concepts with few of them questioning their crude, naturalist assumptions. As a consequence, he argued that there was a growing gap between this form of technical knowledge and what Husserl called ‘the world of life’. He suggested that this simplistic view in scientific techniques meant segmented, instrumental approaches to the world were imposed to transform it, influencing people’s minds and representations in return. Husserl looked for a solution in a recent science, psychology, resolving to create a new science of all sciences, phenomenology. Convincing his audience to adopt this new science became a daunting task for Husserl that he continued to the end of his life.

2.2.1 Husserl’s Interest for Logic and Psychology The critique of science came from no philistine. Husserl was well versed in the sciences and in mathematics, having initially studied astronomy (Moran and Cohen, 2012: 5). He became interested in the formulation of concepts and at first believed that psychology might offer a common ground for all sciences in relation to formulating a philosophy of mind (Zahavi, 2017). Under the influence of his teacher, Brentano (Fisette, 2018), he found logic too narrow and too dry. He soon discovered psychology was also positivist in its approach of interiority and consciousness, also separating it from the world of life. It simply aped natural sciences by applying their method to another ‘object’: the mind. Its developments, as a fairly recent science, did not offer norms and values that could provide a common ground to all disciplines. Husserl kept insisting it was important to get away from the dominant dualistic and naturalistic assumptions of his time (Husserl, 1981: §51). By arguing that science and knowledge must be related to life itself, Husserl referred to the notion of ‘life-​world’ (Lebenswelt), the world as it was experienced in everyday life, including ‘spiritually’ or culturally, that is, in social activities. Husserl also promoted an authentic rationality that makes the mind operations absolute. In choosing ‘phenomenology’ as the name for his philosophy, he was influenced by Hegel’s view of the mind in his Phenomenology of Spirit: ‘As a consciousness forced back into itself, it will take the inward turn and convert itself into true self-​sufficiency’ (Hegel, [1807] 2018: §193). He thereby orchestrates a form of self-​repossession. However, Husserl changed his mind several times on how to reach this goal.

40   Elen Riot Suzanne Bachelard notes that initially Husserl ‘thought it possible to remedy the insufficiencies of traditional logic by turning to psychology’ (Bachelard, 1990: xxi) as the study of mind. She remarks that, a few years later, reversing his views, in his Logical Investigations ([1913] 2012) ‘Husserl does try to reconcile the new orientation of his investigations with the anti-​psychologic thesis of the Prolegomena’ (Bachelard, 1990: xxvi). He then forcefully insisted phenomenological descriptions are not at all psychological descriptions: The necessity of such psychological founding of pure logic, namely a strictly descriptive one, cannot divert us from seeing the mutual independence of the two sciences, logic and psychology. For pure description is a mere preliminary to theory; it is not theory itself. [ . . . ] we do well to speak of phenomenology rather than of descriptive psychology. (Husserl, 1900, in Bachelard, 1990: xxvi)

In later works, looking for an alternative to psychology as a common ground for all sciences, he even suggested expanding the realm of logic to other spheres of knowledge, not just language. By this stage he had begun crafting his own terms, now the specific, easily recognizable vocabulary of phenomenologists (English, 2009). This approach involved the application of transcendental logic or logical theory, which is grounded in transcendental phenomenology, specifically in a theory of intentionality. Whereas formal logic focused on the formal structure of expressions in a language, relations of inference or consequence that depend on form alone, transcendental logic addresses the sense or meaning of expressions in the language, specifically where these meanings are drawn from the contents of intentional acts of consciousness. Husserl insisted on the mobility and intentionality of the human mind in its relation to the world as part of the world of life, with no move outside its realm. In Husserl’s philosophy, intentionality (Intentionalität) means the directedness of consciousness towards an object. Any act of consciousness is a consciousness of something, and in that sense, it is intentional. It is individual as ‘each cogito, each conscious process, we may say “means” something or other and bears in itself, in this manner peculiar to the meant, its particular cogitatum’ (Husserl, [1929] 1977: §14, pp. 31−2). Husserl decided to invent a new science that would insist on phenomena and intentionality.

2.2.2 Philosophy and the Need for Universal Knowledge Common to All Sciences Husserl was keenly aware that if no common ground existed between the sciences they would lean towards naturalism, namely positivist views based on unquestioned ‘facts’ observed in nature. He mourned ‘[p]‌hilosophy as a serious, rigorous science and even

Reason and Emotions in Philosophy    41 apodictically rigorous, this dream is over [der Traum ist ausgeträum]’ ([1935] 2008: §73, appendix xxviii). He believed this was not born of disillusionment due to a lack of faith, but that it formed the drama of his age, as the relation between science and religion claimed by Medieval philosophy was gone, leaving Europeans with ‘A dominant conviction. A powerful flood, overflowing and submerging European humanity: that of religious disbelief and that of philosophy in renial of its scientificity’ ([1935] 2008: §73). He wrote: ‘Merely fact-​minded sciences make merely fact-​minded people [Bloße Tatsachenwissenschaften machen bloße Tatsachenmenschen]’ (Husserl, [1935] 1981: §6) so to him ‘the faith [Glauben] of the possibility of philosophy as a task [Aufgabe], that is, in the possibility of universal knowledge [universale Erkenntnis], is something we cannot let go’ (§6). This involves a struggle between positivism (or naturalism) and phenomenology. This, then, represented a self-​imposed task and mission for Husserl which he saw as his vocation. He sought to awaken his own and thereby all of our passion of responsibility as ‘functionaries of mankind’, so that we may—​indeed, should—​‘inquire back into what was originally and always sought in philosophy’ (Husserl, [1935] 1981; §7). He adopted Aristotle’s vision of philosophy as the ‘science of Being as being, taken universally not in one of its parts’ (1924: K, 3, in Steel, 1924), deploring the fact that in past centuries, after the Enlightenment, so many sophisticated philosophical systems only offered divergent positions, debating within themselves with no concern for science. Why this urge to go back to Plato and Aristotle to defend a view of philosophy as a science and ‘science’ in the radical meaning of the term, as rigorous science? Some researchers hypothesized that Husserl was responding to a direct political danger in his last works. For instance, De Gandt (2004) insists that in The Crisis, Husserl was protesting against the racist, determinist biologism of peoples by Nazi theorists and their philosophical fellow supporters, among whom could be found some of Husserl’s own students. Husserl was undoubtedly interested in the collective psychology of social groups, peoples, nations, and he regularly exchanged with sociologists like Lévi-​Bruhl in France (Moran, 2012). His concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ that leads to objective knowledge based on social exchanges is inspired by Lévy-​Bruhl’s concept of ‘participation’ (Husserl [1935] 2008) and it later became central to anthropology (Duranti, 2012). In his view, philosophical work on the transmission of problems as a science is different from history, especially the history of great minds, with moral lessons (weeltanschaungphilosophie). In Philosophy as a Rigorous Science ([1911] 2002), Husserl claims both naturalism (that naturalizes all its objects) and moral history (that moralizes everything) are the opposite of philosophy. They are ideological; their concepts are both naïve and rigid. To Husserl, the contrast is sharp between their claims and their achievements because they fail to engage in controversies that would lead to a progress in knowledge, as is the case of science. This view that the history of mentalities shows transient ages in the transmission of ideas and modes of representations is an issue developed at the same time by scholars in the cultural dimensions in literature (Auerbach ([1946] 2013); the visual arts (Baxandall, [1972] 1988); everyday life (Bloch,

42   Elen Riot [1931] 1972); and the trades (Polanyi, 1944). The problem for the sciences was that is was set apart from many problems of knowledge and action in general, and Husserl made that point very clear. Still, scientific knowledge combined with experience may offer a way to reach a form of repossession of self with others in the world of life.

2.2.3 The Age of the Crisis and the Historical Turn Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology) (1936; also subtitled An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy) offers us an introduction to Phenomenology of a totally different kind than in all of Husserl’s previous writings. In Die Krisis, Husserl’s work takes a new turn. He insists on a parallel between a crisis in sciences and a crisis in life. The first chapter of the book is entitled: ‘The Crisis in Sciences as an Expression of the Radical Crisis in Life in European Humanity’. Indeed, Husserl wrote The Crisis in a difficult period of his own life too (Van Breda, 1959; Moran, 2012). In Nazi Germany, life in general was becoming more and more difficult for him as a Jew by birth. Life as a scholar exposed him to vexatious measures. He was required to leave Freiburg University although he was at that time one of its prominent thinkers. He lost his emeritus status through the actions of the new rector, his former assistant Martin Heidegger, as well as those of the Nazi State. His philosophical work had become a source of danger to the State, and his transmission of it was in jeopardy. Nonetheless, he continued to work hard in seeking to diagnose the causes for this crisis of European thought and to suggest solutions. In 1935, Husserl gave two very important lecture series: one in Vienna in May on ‘Philosophy in the Crisis of European Humanity’; and the other in Prague in November on ‘The Crisis of European Sciences and Psychology’. It was at the end of this year that his teaching licence was withdrawn. Nonetheless, using his two last lectures, he put together The Crisis, and succeeded in sending two parts of the manuscript off to Prague to be published. Deprived of all his academic contacts and left alone by virtually all his student-​disciples, Edmund Husserl died on 27 April 1938 at the age of 79. The context in which he wrote was never directly mentioned in The Crisis as Husserl set himself ambitious theoretical goals dealing with gnoseology (the theory of knowledge) and metaphysics (after Aristotle) and he never varied from that goal. He briefly mentions at the close of the text that ‘[a]‌lready in the early ages of philosophy, persecution sets in’ ([1935] 1981: §73). The fact that to the very end of his last opus (the most famous one today), Husserl stoically remained focused on the issue of science and the role of reason in directing our intentionality possibly explains respect he inspires to this day. Desanti (1976: 46) points out that, for Husserl in his last (unfinished) work, positivist science was his main focus because he saw it as incapable of solving its state of crisis, its paradoxes, and its unintelligibility due to its simplistic assumptions. ‘A priori sciences begin to offer a radical clarification of the meaning and origin of such concepts as: world,

Reason and Emotions in Philosophy    43 nature, space, time, animal being, man, soul, organism, social community, culture, etc.’ (Desanti, 1976: 248). Only this total a priori science could provide the foundation for authentic empirical science. To lay the foundations for this a priori science, Husserl has less a doctrine and more a method to offer, alternating between a reduction of essences and the constitution of a science of both ‘life word as universum and intuition’ (Husserl, [1935] 1981: §34) and as ‘the interpretation of the data of sensible intuition’ (Husserl, [1935] 1981: §45). This involves ‘self-​reflections about our own present philosophical situation, in the hope that [in this way] we can finally take possession of the meaning, method, and beginning of philosophy’ (Husserl, [1935] 1981: §354). For Husserl, reflexivity begins with a moment of suspension of existing, ingrained beliefs.

2.3  Husserl’s Method As Husserl believed in the rational pursuit of true knowledge, he suggests adopting a method of investigation rather than defining any a priori objects of truth. Although he claimed the heritage of metaphysics since Plato and Aristotle, he preferred to work on singularities in order only later to reach universal truths. He wrote that ‘every single process of consciousness has its own history, i.e., its temporal genesis’ (Husserl, [1929] 1978: 316). He further argued that ‘this [true knowledge of the world itself] is precisely what has been lost through a science which is given as a tradition and which has become a techne, insofar as this interest played a determining role at all in its primal establishment’ (Husserl, [1935] 1981: §57). The method consists in a period of suspension of and then a period of constitution of judgement. Whereas some dimensions, such as sensations and perceptions, are wholly included in this reflexive process, others, such as time, remain outside.

2.3.1 Following Descartes’s Way, Husserl’s Suspension of Knowledge Husserl shared Descartes’s belief as revealed in his Discourse on Method: the power to judge and distinguish true from false, good sense or reason, is naturally equal in all people (Descartes, [1637] 2020). He disagreed with Descartes on the radicality of his doubt whereby he rejects the existence of the world as being (possibly) a mere illusion. Husserl said he found this artificial, arguing: As a natural man, can I ask seriously and transcendentally how I get outside my island of consciousness and how what presents itself in my consciousness as a subjective evidence-​process can acquire Objective significance? When I apperceive myself as a natural man, I have already apperceived the spatial world and construed

44   Elen Riot myself as in space, where I already have an Outside Me. Therefore, the validity of world-​apperception has already been presupposed, has already entered into the sense assumed in asking the question whereas the answer alone ought to show the Tightness of accepting anything as Objectively valid. Manifestly the conscious execution of phenomenological reduction is needed, in order to attain that Ego and conscious life by which transcendental questions, as questions about the possibility of transcendent knowledge, can be asked.’ (Husserl, [1929] 1977: §41, p. 83)

Desanti (1976: 109) argues that Husserl invented the science of phenomena to avoid Descartes’s dualism. As Husserl himself specified, in the introduction of his book, Ideas ([1913] 2013), his science had been newly invented: ‘the science of the phenomena’, pure phenomenology, ‘is remote from natural thinking and therefore only in our days presses toward development’ ([1913] 2013: 27). To develop his approach, Husserl suggested no radical doubt on the reality of the world but just a temporary suspension all judgements and to reconsider the world anew. The term ‘epoché’ is borrowed from the ancient Greek. It means a stop, a suspension. Husserl uses it as a form of ‘bracketing’. The term describes a methodic process of setting aside all-​natural attitudes to the objective world, stretching the links that tie us to the world in lived experience. This corresponds to a phenomenological reduction that allows the intuition of essences and the understanding of the ego activities that constitute meaning. The phenomenological epoché differs from the Cartesian doubt in that it never questions the existence of the outside world. It is simply bracketed so that consciousness can discover the nature of its intentional relation to the world.

2.3.2 No Dualism between Mind and World: The Constitution of Knowledge After this suspension, a different picture of the world of life and the world of essences appeared in relation to pure consciousness. A new constitution of knowledge could take place. Transcendental idealism refers to Husserl’s doctrine that all objects are in principle objects of possible consciousness, capable in principle of being intended through some appropriate meanings or noemata, and in that way relative to consciousness. That view is quite different from previous use of the word ‘transcendental’, which meant it as an inaccessible ideal, or dimensions of space and time that could only be experienced in a subjective way. Husserl insisted that different orders of knowledge and truth coexist but that no dimension of the world of life is outside scientific reach. For instance, some sciences are more descriptive whereas others are prescriptive and normative: ‘if scientifically rational nature is a world of bodies in itself, then the world-​in-​itself must, in a sense unknown before, be a peculiarly split world, split into nature-​in-​itself [Natur an sich] and a mode of being [Seinart] which is different from this: that which exists psychically [das

Reason and Emotions in Philosophy    45 psychisch Seiende]’ (Husserl, [1935] 1981: §61). Yet they all contain two dimensions. Noema is the ideal content of an act of consciousness, with a noematic sense embodying the way the object is intended (an object ‘X’ and its predicates) and the thetic character of the act (perceiving, imagining, or judging, etc). Noesis is the real content of an act of consciousness, in which the ideal content or noema occurs or is realized. As an act of consciousness, it is the act’s intending or presenting of an object in a certain way, something that occurs in time, as does the act itself. What counts is their articulation in senses (Sinne) as ideal particulars: noemata and noematic Sinne are not universals, not properties of acts, but ideal particulars. [ . . . ] noematic Sinne [ . . . ] are complex structures of senses organized in various syntactic patterns [ . . . ]. For Husserl, it is by investigating the complexities of these sense structures that we uncover the complexities in the ways objects are presented to consciousness. (MacIntyre, 1987: 53)

In his analysis, Husserl tried to tie sense to content and meaning to act: if noemata are ideal contents, then a noema is not an object apprehended or otherwise intended in the act whose content it is. ( . . . ) it is not like the object grasped by the hand, but like the structure of the hand which is necessary for its grasping whatever it does. (MacIntyre, 1987: 535)

This leaves great emphasis on sensations and perceptions as they are the lived experience within (or, rather, by) which consciousness and intentionality exist. Intentionality gives the direction. The participation of the ego in the world only varies in modes of attentional consciousness, according to contrasted degrees of activity and passivity.

2.3.3 Perceptions and Sensations at the Heart of Reason In all perceptions, Husserl identified an intention. In his Logical Investigations ([1913] 2012) Husserl identified the perception of something (an inkpot, in his example) as ‘undergoing a certain sequence of experiences of the class of sensations, sensuously unified in a peculiar serial pattern, and informed by a certain act-​character or “interpretation” which endows it with an objective sense’. This act-​character is responsible for the fact that an object, the inkpot for instance, is perceptually apparent to us. Knowing is a slow process as each impression is specific and original: Meaning is related to varied acts of meaning, just as Redness in specie is to the slips of paper which lie here, and which all ‘have’ the same redness. Each slip has, in addition to other constitutive properties (extension, form, etc.), its own individual redness,

46   Elen Riot i.e. its instance of this color-​species, though this neither exists in the slip not anywhere else in the whole world, and particularly not ‘in our thought’ in so far as this latter is part of the domain of real being, the sphere of temporality. (Husserl [1913] 2012: §32, p. 330)

Husserl distinguishes between sensations (hyletic data) and objective sense-​perceptible qualities by using the example of shape and colour constancy, taking the example of a table (rectangular and brown) the appearance of which remains stable in time. The complex of the contents of sensation is quite varied, and yet the corresponding perceptions, by their very essence, pass themselves off as perceptions of the same object. Conversely, the same complex of contents of sensations can be the basis of diverse perceptions, perceptions of diverse objects, as every mannequin proves. (Husserl, [1907] 1997: 39)

Once the objects of intention have remained long enough in consciousness and have been thought through, abstracting single facts relating to essences, a form of knowledge emerges: What the intention means but presents only in more or less inauthentic and inadequate matter, the fulfilment—​the act attaching itself to an intention and offering it ‘fullness’ in the synthesis of fulfillment—​sets itself directly before us, or at least more directly than the intention does. In fulfillment our experience is represented by the words: ‘this is the thing itself ’. (Husserl, [1913] 2012, §8, 694)

This intentional process may be seen as the work of a single consciousness, focusing on its own objects. Yet other dimensions in Husserl’s view of the world of life show that this is not the case. This intentional quest for sense is not isolated from other spheres of life.

2.3.4 No Absolute Moral Duty above Knowledge In referring to the quest of knowledge as the intuition of essences, Husserl uses the ‘pure I’ (ego) (reines Ich), the subject of an act of consciousness, the enduring subject of the experiences in the unified stream of consciousness. This presents the subject in abstraction from his or her body in nature, and his or her role in culture is restricted to the aspect (part or moment) of him-​or herself as playing the role of being subject of consciousness. Yet this subject is also part of society and subject to making choices. To Husserl, intentional choices are based on the conscious quest for knowledge of the pure I. Desanti (1976: 148−9) points out that time and the other are the only remaining kernels resisting eidetic reduction.

Reason and Emotions in Philosophy    47 Husserl finds the ‘wonder’ of time-​consciousness corresponds to ‘the most difficult of all phenomenological problems’ (Hua X, 276, Husserl [1929] 1977), but also ‘perhaps the most important in the whole of phenomenology’ (Hua X, 334, Husserl [1929] 1977). Time explains the continuity of consciousness and intentionality. Time unifies the ego and the world of life and it also bridges all the different moments between perceptions. In his Cartesian Meditations (Husserl, [1929] 1977: Fourth meditation, §37), Husserl mentions time as: this most universal form, which belongs to all particular forms of concrete subjective processes [ . . . ] is the form of a motivation, connecting all and governing within each single process in particular. We can call it a formal regularity pertaining to a universal genesis, which is such that past, present, and future become unitarily constituted over and over again in a certain noetic/​noematic formal structure of flowing modes of givenness.

Yet it is still a problem to unify time itself: ‘Time is fixed and yet time flows. In the flow of time, in the continuous sinking down into the past, a non-​flowing, absolutely fixed, identical, objective time becomes constituted. This is the problem’ ([1917] 1991: 286). Perhaps what unifies time for a subject is his or her intention. For Husserl, intentionality is not a relation between a subject and empirical facts of the objective environment but rather a directedness that is inherent to consciousness itself. Spatial objects only appear for embodied subjects; in any experience, the body is the zero point (Zahavi, 1994: 65). The body’s kinesthesis assembles a plurality of appearances and so its position in time and space matters. It is also key to transcendental intersubjectivity (Zahavi, 1994: 73) as ‘the transcendence of the world is constituted by its intersubjective experienceability’ (p. 74). Beyond intersubjective experience, philosophy as a scientific endeavour involves others and collective work: ‘Accordingly, phenomenology demands that the phenomenologist foreswear the ideal of a philosophic system and yet as a humble worker in community with others, live for a perennial philosophy’, Husserl wrote in 1927 in his article on phenomenology for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Husserl believed a true philosophical attitude was to ground one’s reactions in scientific knowledge and reasoning. For instance, Husserl and Heidegger’s quarrel was based on divergent views on the role of philosophy in relation to scientific truth and reason. Between 1919 and 1923, Martin Heidegger was working as Husserl’s assistant, an important time that ended in deep disappointment for both men. When Heidegger presented Husserl his copy of ‘Sein und Zeit’ in 1926, Husserl invited him to cooperate in his article on Phenomenology for the Encyclopedia Britannica, but the cooperation stalled and then failed altogether. Conflicts involving ethical issues arose because Husserl did not find Heidegger’s work rigorous enough: a major failing for a scientist, and one equated with and characterizing moral failure. Husserl makes no real differentiation between the various types of reasoning on a given issue.

48   Elen Riot In this regard, Pradelle (2018) points out the differences between Kant and Husserl in terms of norms, principles, and values. Whereas Kant considered ethical laws (based on practical reason) to be a priori and superior to other forms of knowledge based on theoretical reason (sciences), Husserl insisted on the same reasoning taking place in all matters, arguing that the same discernment is necessary. Husserl only opposed blindness and foresight. When the farsighted recognizes an ethical norm in both spheres concerned by eidetic reduction, that of pure intuition of essences and that of sensible representations, and engages in a constitution of norms from the bottom up, the blind fails to distinguish just instinct from the keenness of analysis and assessment. To Pradelle (2012: 20), the main problem then lay in the constitution of a material scale of values and goodness, pleasures and feelings. Contrary to Kant whose philosophy avoids any form of tension in defining freedom, Husserl (1974) points at a duality between reason and sensibility (Pradelle 2012: 27). As a consequence, he argues, freedom is the result of this constant tension in intention, with phenomenology acting as a method of emancipation via the repossession of self. Freedom depends on a hierarchy of norms (Engel, 1989) one is capable of setting for oneself in accordance with others and in relation to truth.

2.4  Husserl’ Relevance Today for Organization Studies Possibly because his work is mostly concerned with the role of pure consciousness and knowledge, Husserl is seldom mentioned in organization studies compared with more popular figures in phenomenology such as Heidegger, Merleau-​Ponty, Schütz, or Henry. We believe four contemporary issues can revive Husserl’s ideas and give them an opportunity to contribute to organization studies. The first issue is that of knowledge and scepticism. The second deals with grand challenges. Two last issues are more specific to phenomenology and its interest in time perception, on the one hand, and in emotions-​ sensations on the other.

2.4.1 A Defence of Reason against Sceptics To Pascal Engel (2012: 34), one of the greatest challenges of rationalism is to maintain its principles of reason, its epistemic and ethical values within a universe of natural facts. What is the ontology and epistemology of these norms, what is their relation to values, and how do we have access to them? The sceptic paradox is looming: a norm is, by definition, ideal so that it does not always correspond to natural facts. Yet it does not either correspond to ideal facts. Besides, if its normative content is overly idealized, no being will take it as a norm.

Reason and Emotions in Philosophy    49 In Husserl’s philosophy, the normative is not independent from its natural basis, contrary to what Platonism argues. It covariates with it. Yet the problem of how norms are shared remains unclear, especially in the constitution of a hierarchy of norms (Engel, 2020). Desanti is satisfied with the fact that: ‘Before us, a system of phenomenological disciplines which fundamental ground no longer is the axiom “ego cogito” is replaced by a full, complete and universal self-​awareness’ (1976: 251). Yet both Engel (2020) and Parfit & Broome (1997) before him insist that senses, thoughts, and meaning are objective only insofar as they are the products of intentional acts of consciousness but there is no shared language for this. They find Husserl’s approach to knowledge idealism as his noema reflects a solipsistic view contrary to that of logicians like Brentano and Meinong who had taught him philosophy. We find this is not the case and that Husserl’s approach can fruitfully contrast power oriented and pragmatic visions of collective problems in organization studies. For instance, in the case of grand challenges (Gray & Purdy, 2018) when one must be able to share knowledge and act, so far in organization studies most authors insist on the need to conduct collective investigations and reach a consensus. Husserl’s vision of reason is neither empirical nor constructionist, it may even seem idealist in light of pragmatic methods such as an inquiry. This social process is triggered by the existence of a practical problem. It involves doubt and requires imagination, creativity, and social interaction. It equally utilizes reasoning and narration. It presents itself as a temporary compromise, always tentative and fallible. When the inquiry ends, the participants agree on whether the outcome is intelligible and actionable, this point of view may change. In turn, that change may show a need for new inquiry cycles (Lorino, 2018). It is still possible to find a common ground against scepticism in theories inspired by Hume and Kant as well as in pragmaticism. But other approaches to grand challenges tend to insist solely on the power and discourse dimension (Van Bommel & Spicer, 2011), downplaying the role of reason and knowledge. Although it may be argued contrariwise in critiques of this rational approach, like Foucault’s (Heidenreich, 2013), that somehow shared the same vocabulary, we believe a clear difference exists in their view of reason. One stems from scepticism, the epistemological doctrine that we cannot know such-​and-​such for certain; and, at an extreme, holding that we can never know anything with absolute certainty. The other fights scepticism by referring to the norms of reason. Whereas concerns were voiced in organization studies about the manipulation of public opinion and the disregard for facts in social media (Christensen, Kärreman, & Rasche, 2019), less interest, so far, has been paid to fake sciences and scepticism in theory and research. A disregard for factual truths and the role of reason is not a problem that scientists and scholars can solve in others if they do not feel any need for philosophical questions and scientific debates. Following Husserl (2002), we believe more insight into these recent (and ancient) phenomena would be needed in respect of scientific understanding before we can properly act upon the problem and make choices.

50   Elen Riot

2.4.2 Our Second Nature in the Age of Climate Change One of the problems raised about Husserl’s internalist view of knowledge is his idealism and a form of solipsism (Parfit & Broome, 1997). He argues that senses, thoughts, and meaning are the products of intentional acts of consciousness. While this view allows for full individual responsibility about one’s beliefs and the constitution of a hierarchy of norms, this leaves outside the external world and the need for a common language to express its nature. Husserl also insists on hyletic data but, as defended by externalists, causal relations only depend on what our senses perceive of the world (Dutant & Engel, 2005: 21). Husserl’s answer would be to suggest that equal attention be paid to perceptions from the outside world and from our own senses that perceive them: ‘So much by way of a general characterization of the noetic-​noematic themes which must be treated with systematic thoroughness in the phenomenology of attention’ (Husserl, [1983] 1991: 226). To Husserl, attention is subjected to intentionality. Eidetic intentionality means going from the individual and concrete objects of senses to abstractions (eidos in Greek means the shape, i.e. the abstract structure of the thing). So, attention is not a mental activity intensifying some sensations and psychic states via the sensory inputs of stimuli. It is a mandatory condition to gain and share knowledge. In this respect, Husserl shares Descartes’ and Malebranche’s rationalist conception of attention as being the fundamental condition of our freedom as knowing subjects. In organization studies, many authors insisted on the issue of attention in relation to the media and firms’ public relations efforts to influence their audience (Ocasio, Laamanen, & Vaara, 2018), often pointing at its limits due to actors’ strategies and contradictory intentions (Den Hond et al., 2014). Attention is presented as a game in the media to defend corporate actors’ image in the face of new information that may impair their reputation. Little is said about the state of doubt and the lack of knowledge about such major events as climate change whereas this lack of scientific knowledge of the world of life (using Husserl’s expression) may well explain, today as in past ages, key actors’ equivocations. Taken in this alternative way, the issue of what should be the focus of public attention involves dealing with collective choices with the classic terms of a problem of preferences. What is the price of future prospects and the value of future generations’ lives compared to the present (Broome, 2012)? Many problems remain unsolved, not by lack of ethical standards but because of the naturalistic view of sciences, which fails to challenge their naïve assumptions, and by a lack of interest in scientific knowledge.

2.4.3 Time and Collective Memories Husserl mentions norms as being the result of the phenomenological process of investigation for the ego. The ego and its consciousness exists and persists in time despite the indexical nature of sensations; namely, ‘I’ and ‘here’ can be used with reference to different contexts. Therefore, Husserl clearly identified ways to capture both the fleeting nature of sensations and the constant dimensions of consciousness in time:

Reason and Emotions in Philosophy    51 in Husserl’s view [ . . . ] perceptual experience [ . . . ] displays a phenomenological deep-​or micro-​structure constituted by time-​consciousness [ . . . ]. This merely seemingly unconscious structure is essentially indexical in character and consists, at a given time, of both retentions, i.e., acts of immediate memory of what has been perceived ‘just a moment ago’, original impressions, i.e., acts of awareness of what is perceived ‘right now’, and protentions, i.e., immediate anticipations of what will be perceived ‘in a moment’. It is by such momentary structures of retentions, original impressions and protentions that moments of time are continuously constituted (and reconstituted) as past, present and future, respectively, so that it looks to the experiencing subject as if time were permanently flowing off. (Beyer, 2020)

A recent stream of research has suggested paying more attention to time relations and collective memories in organizations (Wadhwani et al., 2018; Wadhwani, Suddaby, Morhiorst and Popp, 2013 ). This neo-​institutionalist approach pays attention to the role of ‘history as organizing’ and insists on the ‘uses of the past in organization studies’. That means the role of the past is constructed and predominantly power-​bound and instrumental. We believe time dimensions can also be analysed as collective operations of knowledge that demand an understanding of complex mechanisms of perception and interpretation especially as they involve norms for present and future perspectives. To this end, Husserl’s approach to time may be translated with profit to the domain of organization studies, as time is also a collective property constituted through historical time (the ground norm) and turned towards future possible orientations (the horizon). We see how he makes practical use of past philosophies to build his own. The ground norm (Grundnorm) is the norm or principle that defines what counts as a value in a given domain of values (for example, moral values or aesthetic values). The horizon (Horizont) is the range of possibilities left open for an object of consciousness, for example possible properties of the back side of an object as one sees it and possible relations of the object to other objects. Besides, considering the horizon of an act of consciousness means allowing that the object of consciousness also has possible properties and relations beyond those explicitly presented in the act as long as those properties are compatible with the content or noematic sense of the act. This leads to the various roles of imagination in relation to sensations and emotions, a subject that is at the centre of Husserl’s philosophy and what he leaves us with today.

2.4.4 More on Emotions and Sensations As we have seen, Husserl pays a great deal of attention to sensations and perceptions. This keen interest was recently included in a multidisciplinary approach combining Husserl’s philosophy ‘hyle’ (immanence of mind) with Eastern thought and psychotherapy to define the protocols of cognitivist experimentations (Depraz, Varela, & Vermetsch, 2003) as part of a ‘pragmatic approach’ of ‘awareness’. We believe that approach tends to downplay the issue of intentionality, and the role of strategic judgement in relation to

52   Elen Riot intuition, emotions, and sensations. In the realm of organization studies, Holt (2018), among others, investigated the aesthetic dimension of choice and its influence on reasoning. We believe more research could fruitfully be developed in that area especially as far as imagination is concerned. As we pointed out in the first part of this chapter, Husserl contrasted ‘philosophy as a rigorous science’ with the moral sciences and history. However, the latter cannot be completely discarded and forgotten as they inform some of our most immediate sensations. Knowing how to articulate them comprehensively remains an unfinished task. In his uncompleted book, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-​Ponty complements Husserl’s view of sensations in the latter’s also unfinished book, The Crisis of European Sciences by adding time and cultural representations as layers of meaning that inform our current sensations: The color is yet another variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attracts it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom. The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the fabric of the visible, and thereby onto a fabric of invisible being. A punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers and of the Revolution, certain terrains near Aix or in Madagascar, it is also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with the dresses of women, robes of professors, bishops, and advocate generals, and also in the field of adornments and that of uniforms. And its red literally is not the same as it appears in one constellation or in the other, as the pure essence of the Revolution of 1917 precipitates in it, or that of the eternal feminine, or that of the public prosecutor, or that of the gypsies dressed like hussars who reigned twenty-​five years ago over an inn on the Champs-​Elysées. A certain red is also a fossil drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds. If we took all these participations into account, we would recognize that a naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world—​less a color or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility. Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things. (Merleau-​Ponty, 1968: 23)

In his comment on this quote and after insisting on Husserl’s influence on Merleau-​ Ponty, Georges Didi-​Huberman (2021: 372) argues for the need to go even further

Reason and Emotions in Philosophy    53 towards a consideration of the mutability of all things, referring to such notions as atmosphere and intensity of desire in politics. As we said before, Husserl’s views on perceptions, sensations, and imagination have already gained importance for phenomenologists after him. So, taking another direction, we suggest considering this red color and its many occurrences that Merleau-​Ponty mentions, by going back to Husserl’s views on reason and emotions. It is not clear if we are or are not in the ‘crisis of European sciences’ that Husserl warned us about, but it is certainly true that some work still needs to be done to reach and speak to the flesh of things in a way that relates to both reason and sensations.

2.5  Conclusion Husserl’s work remains quite unknown in organization studies even if his ideas may prove a source of inspiration, especially in his efforts to build a bridge between self and the world and between reason, sensations, and emotions. However, many of the authors Husserl inspired insisted on focusing on existentialism and emotions, paying less attention to the role of reason. However, we believe the role of reason is so central to Husserl’s philosophy that it is impossible to understand his phenomenology without mentioning it. It makes his heritage especially inspiring and essential today. The idea of building a hierarchy of norms based on pure experience as a form of scientific knowledge of both personal and universal dimensions is especially interesting at a time when many authors are now satisfied with opposing Aristotle’s phronesis (practical reason) and scientific knowledge, insisting they belong to distinct spheres of knowledge (Flyvbjerg, Landman, & Schram, 2012; Lohmar and Yamagushi, 2010). Husserl referred to Aristotle’s work on knowledge, science, and action. His notion of intentionality is enlightening as it never distinguishes a priori between types of knowledge of the world of perceptions. We agree with this view that given the current challenges we are facing, it might not be possible to isolate scientific knowledge, pragmatic skills, and ethical dilemmas. At present, more should be said about Husserl’s interest in sensations and emotions, and how the body, the tangible ego, can convey meaning to help us comprehend and rationalize the world rather than simply as providing a source of noise for the mind. The Crisis insists on including the contributions of philosophers throughout history, from the time of Plato and Aristotle to the present age of philosophy. He insists that many skilled scientists ignore this tradition while others squander its heritage. His demonstration that reason as a source of universal knowledge is key in peaceful and troubled times alike is impressive and inspiring. It is therefore our hope that this message will be heard today and in future ages.

54   Elen Riot

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56   Elen Riot Ocasio, W., Laamanen, T., & Vaara, E. (2018). Communication and attention dynamics: An attention‐based view of strategic change. Strategic Management Journal, 39(1), 155–​167. Parfit, D., & Broome, J. (1997). Reasons and motivation. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 71, 99–​114. Polanyi, Karl (1944). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. New York: Farrar and Rinehart. Pradelle, D. (2012). Par-​delà la révolution copernicienne. Sujet transcendantal et facultés chez Kant et Husserl. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Van Bommel, K., & Spicer, A. (2011). Hail the snail: Hegemonic struggles in the slow food movement. Organization Studies, 32(12), 1717–​1744. Van Breda, H. L. (1959). Le sauvetage de l’héritage husserlien et la fondation des Archives-​ Husserl. In H. L. Van Breda et J. Taminiaux (eds.), Husserl et la pensée moderne, Phenomenologica 2 (pp. 1–​4). The Hague: Nijhoff. Wadhwani, R. D., Suddaby, R., Mordhorst, M., & Popp, A. (2018). History as organizing: Uses of the past in organization studies. Organization Studies 1663–​1683. Welton, D. (ed.) (1999). The essential Husserl: Basic writings in transcendental phenomenology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Zahavi, D. (1994). Husserl’s phenomenology of the body. Études phénoménologiques, 10(19), 63–​84. Zahavi, D. (2003). Husserl’s phenomenology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Chapter 3

He idegger, Org a ni z at i on, and Ca re Robin Holt

3.1  Making Organization Present Heidegger’s abiding interest was the nature of being. Being was not to be conflated with what materially exists as the stuff or substance of the world. Nor was it what appeared to a rarefied, ghostly consciousness or mind. Heidegger was interested in the metaphysical condition of being that was, nevertheless, experienced in the appearances (phenomena) of everyday, human lives (Erlebnis). His work is grounded in this phenomenological reduction of existence. When set against the phenomenologists’ concern with getting behind the filter of theories and instrumental relations in order to understand the thing in itself, Heidegger’s own presence is a disturbing one insofar as a thing in itself can be nothing more than how it ordinarily appears in day-​to-​day comings and goings. He argued that beyond this everyday setting there was no being. Being was tithed to human apprehension; what is and what appears were twins. The apprehension of being required the human senses, and most notably language, but it extended beyond them. Being was only being to the extent that it not only appeared through bodily touch, sight, and so on, but did so in meaningful ways. Hence, under the aegis of Heidegger’s phenomenology, being is a rich soup of materiality, sensory perception, affect, embodiment, collective activities, traditions, and thought, none of which could be sensibly separated out from the other. The nature of being was one of indebtedness to the human lives in which it was continually being taken up and disclosed. The way being discloses itself is in the significance it has for human beings. Heidegger’s phenomenology is adamant that meaning and things are inseparable. It is not as if behind appearance we get to the real thing, the essence: meaning goes all the way through, it is the breath by which being is animated and becomes that which ‘is’ rather than ‘is not’. A thing can be there, open to perception, but it is mute, dead unless it is encountered as a site of possible recognition, attraction, or disturbance. It is only when it is encountered by our body and grammar, when it is

58   Robin Holt gathered in significance and becomes a thing of interest, open to understanding, that it appears. What appears is always already steeped in the array of meanings by which it appears as something. Human beings—​Dasein —​are themselves coursing with meaning, it runs in our veins, as it is only in humans that the questionability of being (the relation to being that is established most explicitly by people like phenomenologists, for whom questioning being becomes a professional practice) is itself a condition of being: it is only with human beings that the state of being arises as a question. The world can have objective presence outside of human existence, but the question of being can only occur to humans as well as through humans, hence it is inescapably a phenomenological question: what appears is given clearance to emerge in the questionability that arises naturally in Dasein and which makes meaningfulness and being possible (Sheehan, 2014). Human existence exhibits an essential concrete reflexivity: ‘I must not only live, but make sense of life, not just of the being of entities at large, but also of my own being.’ Dasein therefore has the character of ‘mineness’ (Jemeinigkeit), the question of being is mine (Heidegger [1927] 2010: 42; see also Reedy & Learmonth, 2011; Golub, 2014: 200−1). What is most distinct in Heidegger’s phenomenology is its quiet insistence that, in Dasein, being and meaning share the same ontological condition: ‘The meaning of being can never be contrasted with beings or with being as the supporting “ground” of beings, for “ground” is only accessible as meaning, even if that meaning itself is an abyss [Abgrund] of meaninglessness’ (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 152). Outside of Dasein there is what Heidegger calls unmeaning, what is ontologically raw, but when things intrude upon Dasein, as events of nature can do when they break and destroy human lives, even then what appears are things that are a ‘this’ or ‘that’ and so already move within an established understanding of being: our facticity is already and always organized in structures of meaningfulness. If meaning, being, and Dasein are all inmates of the same ontological order, so too is organization. Organization, from organ, meaning tool, makes its appearance immediately insofar as things, to the extent they are significant, are being made intelligible and so present in relation to the concerns of Dasein. This ‘making present’ of things can be experienced in: the habituated use of things (these are relations that typically go unnoticed because they accepted and established); in the assembling and dis-​assembling things as a means to the experimental realization of other things (these are relations of explicit inquiry into how things might appear differently, and so an augmentation of the world); and in the presentation of things as objects of knowledgeable (these are conceptual and patterned relations encapsulated in theories, theses, etc.). Under the impress of organization not only do things appear meaningfully through the clearing provided in Dasein, they do so always in relation to other things. All manner of things are being brought into relational comparison: a shell, a star pattern, the spiralling layers of a Christian hell or the family tree of Russian tsars. Each of these apparently distinct things carries a distinction only in relation to how they appear under the plenum of organized concern and in whose light they are being brought into mutual relief. They appear having already been placed –​in the sea, or against the night sky, in an afterlife, or in mortal, family relations. The being of a shell, star, hell or tsar is wrapped

Heidegger, Organization, and Care    59 up in how each might service human desire, how they might constrain human excesses, how they might enhance human powers, and how they might exemplify human ideals, and organization sediments and distributes these relations in its multiple forms as: routines, hierarchies, networks, platforms, chains, boundaries, limits, suspensions, recesses, contracts, procedures, classifications, and lists. For example, one tsar appears after another in unquestionable patterns of hierarchical in-​breeding; sinners are declined in a declining and spiralling intensity of hellish sinfulness; stars are read in patterns that determine human destinies from birth; and shells are read as natural expressions of mathematically ideal number sequences that enumerate on the nature of fixed truth. And these are just some of many changing ways the things called shells, stars, hell, or tsars can and do appear, always exhibiting already agreed upon spatial positions and temporal rhythms. Organization is always and already there, and whatever appears does so having already been thrown into an organized condition, it is a thing whose structures, awareness, and movement are already settled, and from these settlements into objectivity things cannot move all that easily and remain intact. What appears, then, in everyday life, is not an array of things-​in-​themselves that are then brought together in organization, but already organized objects whose appearance is more or less unruly, more or less compatible to the prevailing norms and grounds by which they are deemed to be of service, to be amenable to experiment, and to be part of the known world. Organization is not an encumbrance, it is not a structuring condition behind which the real or authentic nature of things-​in-​themselves appear. Rather, organization mediates appearance, insofar as what appears meaningfully in perception already belongs to the world, as do the senses and affects by which perception itself is experienced, along with the cognitive patterns by which these perceptions become sedimented in habits and memories. Understanding what it is for tsar ascend to power, and to foretell this by reading the stars, for example, cannot be reduced to an array of physiological capacities, cognitive patterns or particle forces, nor can it be expanded into general conditions such as social convention, evolutionary fitness or laws of motion and gravity. It is not as if ‘ascending’ is coded into each human or celestial body as a basic capacity which then receives subtle refinements according to prevailing social and physical codes or spatial atmospheres. The innate cognitive and physical structure of ‘ascent’ is alive with acquired cultural representations. The organizational setting of any upward movement is teaming with suggestive and richly woven expression in which humans are all steeped from the get go—​there is no pattern of steady acquisition of the skill of ‘ascending’. Rather it is generated and regenerated in immediate, historical, performative events in which there is a coming together of neuronal connection, musculature, ostensive reasoning, sociality, history, which, when gathered together, goes by the name of existence in an open totality. Against this claim for organization as a priori, how then to understand the appearance of Dasein itself? If it is nothing outside of organization is it thereby nothing but organization? No, because the space open to being Dasein cannot be fully settled into relations of use value, of experimental inquiry, or known social and material facts. It belongs to all these organized conditions, but it is also present as that which is making itself present in its exposure, and so it is continually coming back to the question of its being the kind

60   Robin Holt of being that sustains itself in throwing itself open to appearance. It is not, then, something just ‘there’, but continually being pulled out of itself to then stand ‘there’ as nothing more than unfolding possibility (ex-​sistere), a stretching in which Dasein is alive to its being the space for instantiations of meaning that are held fast in everyday life as use, as experiment, and as truth or fact (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 375; Sheenan, 2014). Dasein occupies the privilege of interrogating being, an association that removes it from ontology and connects it to an ontic condition of dissimulating being through itself, a condition that then questions and so provokes ontology, it excites and disturbs what is there by the simple fact of being the being in which what ‘is’ finds its space as that which is being made present in its gathering to itself a history, a time that is its own time. Yet this ontic awareness of the bodily presence of perceived things—​the intentional isolation of subject and thing upon which Edmund Husserl fixates—​is itself, for Heidegger, ontological in that to be intentional requires an already existing grammatical architecture of prepositions (‘for’, ‘in order to’, alongside, etc.) whose meaningfulness is jointed to what is already organized as an immediately given world of tools and concepts (Kisiel, 1985). The self is aware of itself as a ‘you’, it listens in, as well as listening into the possibilities offered up as it is addressed through organization; ‘[H]‌igher than actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenology solely by seizing upon it as a possibility ([1927] 2010: 38).’ The phenomenological advance being made by Heidegger is to admit the ontological presence of expressive conditions (given organizational form) by which norms and grounds are continually sedimented in human life, and yet to find in this facticity moments of distance from this organized setting. And he does so without appealing to an inner life-​world of purely intentional consciousness. Dasein is distinct by virtue of its being a being that is continually making its own being present by holding itself open to being incomplete. Dasein understands itself not as an intentional being that is simply there, but as a being whose ‘being there’ is worked at by making itself present, and in making itself present the world also appears ‘[I]‌f no Dasein exists, no world is “there” either’ (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 365). In appearing to itself Dasein is not a shedding of, or opposition to, organization, but a taking in of what is being organized towards itself, such that no matter how dominant and dominating the organization is of the norms and grounds—​no matter how intense and all-​consuming the demand is to put the world into the service of human utility, no matter how busy the experimenters are in augmenting the world through experiment, and no matter how zealous the stewards of truth—​ Dasein retains to itself the responsibility of making these present in the very facticity of its own immediate presence as a space for holding open to the possibility of meaning (McNeill 1999: 116). It is a strangely elusive condition in which the question and questioned are held in an intimacy that requires a language that, though it is already there, nevertheless ‘houses’ being by holding itself open to what is not (yet) there (Krell, 2016). Heidegger describes this condition of Dasein as being in relations of care (Sorge). Dasein cannot escape the already organized condition of meaning: it encounters and is addressed by a world that is already, historically, organized. Things appear in relation to its needs, its questions, its

Heidegger, Organization, and Care    61 claims, and what is closest to it are the things with which it has most frequently and persistently considered its needs, claims, and questions: the friends and family, the cherished talismans, the worn-​down implements, the steadying values. Yet these closest relations to things might be better understood as those of concern rather than care. Dasein is forever coping with the world in which it is inevitably performing or accomplishing (Besorgen) organized life (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 191). And in being open towards being it is also directed towards something of itself, and it is this self-​relation that is care proper, as opposed to concern, for it is a self-​governed relation to its own being. Just what being-​in-​itself is, however, outside of what appears already organized as what is functional, experimental, or truthful, is a moot point. Was it being itself, as opposed to the being of things, that becomes subject to care? In talking of Dasein as a space for the holding open of being to disclose itself, Heidegger tempts himself into a mytho-​poetic metaphysics in which humans, who he likens to shepherds, become conduits of Being (with a capital ‘B’) that is finding its way by coursing through the expressive appearance of Dasein. Understood as a conduit of Being Heidegger’s Dasein loses touch with ethics (from ethos, a concern for developing one’s character in relation to both immediate appearance and maturing endurance), in favour of ontology (Golub, 2014: 242; McNeill, 2006). Through care Dasein becomes a questioning force in relation to Being, aware of how to practically act in the company of its ilk who are also struggling to experientially own what is own-​most to them (see also Sheenhan, 2014). But at times Heidegger wants to push the metaphysics further, beyond appearances by referring to an ahistorical condition of awaiting the arrival of Being. It is as if Dasein were to willingly cede itself to occupation by Being, and if this yielding is done collectively it all too easily becomes a dominating program of destiny politics such as the National Socialism for which Heidegger became an unapologetic and fervent advocate. It is in refusing Heidegger’s turn toward ahistorical Being, and remaining with the more prosaic phenomenology of ethical self-​awareness, that I wish to take up the condition of care in relation to organization. Care remains a fecund relation through which Dasein negotiates the conditioning norms and ground through which its own appearance is being continually organized. It cannot oppose or escape organization other than through the adoption of refinements, or alternatives, that are themselves always organized; each struggle to wrest itself distant from its already organized condition opens up a new condition, each distinction creates yet another world in which it appears as a ‘this’ or ‘that’. Nor can Dasein give itself over to something behind being, and to the extent Heidegger invokes Being he is at risk of falling foul of his own phenomenology which eschews the urge to find an ahistorical reality as that which lies fixedly underneath or behind things. Dasein persists as itself only in the continual effort of allowing space for the opening up of distinctions in meaning, in which effort there arises the dawning of a being that is, in an effortful way, continually being organized. That it does so haphazardly, with an enduring sense of uncertainty and even lostness, is testament to how, ethically speaking, Dasein has first to appear clothed, and then undress as it were, becoming exposed as its being slips outside of the already organized present, becoming present as a conscious force, whilst still being organized. In this distinction-​making it

62   Robin Holt continues as a force that prevails upon what it is becoming distinct from: its presence is vying with the present as a place of disturbance, not settlement, and it is here that consciousness becomes a conscience, for it is here that what appear as the organized norms and grounds of everyday life become questionable: are they open to the possibility of being otherwise? It cannot make the open itself present for the open is what presupposes Dasein in its appropriation of the open space of being, including its own questioning. It is one such event of Dasein making itself present as both itself and the open that I want to concentrate on. It is depicted in William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, painted around 1853 (Figure 3.1). The painting is a small object depicting an extra-​ordinary appearance embodied in the act of a woman rising from a man’s lap. Painted as an exemplar work of the Pre-​Raphaelite Brotherhood, an art movement of which Hunt was a devout member, it is an image steeped in hyper-​real, detailed symbolism. It is a painting designed deliberately to picture the norms and grounds being made present in countless human lives: a world of routines and moral principles that are questionable, indeed objectionable, and which ought, according to Hunt, to be organized differently. The rise of the woman is a rent in the settled forms of organization that can be read into the painting. Only this painting carries a back story that complicates Hunt’s message, and which gives the conscience of its title a far more troubled, uncanny, and so, in Heidegger’s terms, caring quality.

3.2  The Awakening Conscience The man in Hunt’s picture is more a type than a person: a wealthy, establishment figure whose entitled position requires he keep a mistress whom he houses alongside gaudy drapes and furnishings, one object amongst others. We the viewers are told the woman is his mistress by her loose hair, the suggestive lack of a corset, and her left hand: it is the wedding finger that is bare, whilst all the others are adorned with rings purchased, perhaps in the snatched moments of their stage-​managed trysts. The man slouches in a chair, a large moustache decorating a face that will, into old age, refuse the lineaments of wisdom. It is a face flushed with a sense of attainment won on the back of others’ struggles and for which it has offered, in return, the taut smile that is proper to those schooled, from childhood, in how to treat the inferior classes. The room is furnished in the heavy, empire taste that had stamped mid-​19th-​century Britain with a seal of self-​ satisfied certainty. Raw materials have been transformed into household objects through exploitative relations of production. Wood, having been cut from distant forests in the colonies, has become an overpolished and underused occasional table and piano; cotton picked by slaves has become ornate drapery; wool woven on steam powered looms tended by orphans has become a carpet; and arsenic-​based, blue dye mixed by artisans inured to their poisonous fate has become block printed wallpaper. As a furnished backdrop all appears as it should appear.

Heidegger, Organization, and Care    63

Figure 3.1  William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience (1853) (Presented by Sir Colin and Lady Anderson through the Friends of the Tate Gallery, 1976. Photo Tate)

Except, that is, the woman herself. Hunt is painting a moment of rupture. As she raises herself upwards the slight but distinct gap between her and the man is a splitting of the scene that is no less violent and decisive than would be a slash in the canvas. At least, it appears, that is Hunt’s intention. The textual backdrop that attests to Hunt’s motivation to paint the image is the proverb: ‘As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart’. The man is such a singer. He has only recently

64   Robin Holt arrived, having carelessly fallen into the soft furnishings, and has been playing the piano just as carelessly, with a still-​gloved hand, more mannequin than human, picking out the notes of a popular tune: Thomas Moore’s Oft in the Stilly Night, set to music by John Stevenson in 1818. As he plays, rather than listen, simpering, she has started to rise, as though the song has prompted something in her, her heart absorbs the affect, growing heavy, and she begins to push away her shawl. It is a song of memory and loss, in whose second refrain a sense of profound loneliness takes hold: When I remember all The friends, so link’d together That I’ve seen around me fall Like leaves in wintry weather; I feel like one Who treads alone Some banquet-​hall deserted Whose lights have fled Whose garlands dead And all but she departed! Thus, in the stilly night Ere slumber’s chains have bound me Sad memory brings the light Of other days around me

This atmosphere of loss in the scene is further intensified for the viewer if they look at the discarded score on the floor: Edward Lear’s setting of Alfred Tennyson’s poem ‘Tears, Idle Tears’, which the poet described as a poem of passion for the past whilst abiding with the transience of the present Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns The earliest pipe of half-​awaken’d birds To dying ears, when unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

The bottom right of the canvas finds a glimmering square of intruding sunlight, lighting up an unfinished tapestry, its open edges spilling down over broken threads of worsted littering the floor like the small thoughts she would have hastily discarded in order to then collect herself on hearing him come to the door. Is this light diminishing or growing? The awakening is signifying the abrupt affects of memory that have drifted unbidden into her consciousness and body, the songs have become reminders of a past when things were different, and certainly better and differently constrained than they are now in this her present predicament. She is pulled upwards, there is an intimation

Heidegger, Organization, and Care    65 that she is quitting the room, its bourgeois intimacies are giving way to a far deeper more profound intimacy with her own past self. As if to accentuate and catalyse the effect of this remembered self, she looks out through a large window onto the bright, natural world of a garden, one untrammelled by the frail finery and engrained sinfulness of her kept life. Both the song and the sun are putting her into obligation towards her own life, she is awakening. Holman Hunt has a particular form of Christian awakening in mind. Recalling the proverb that promoted the painting: once felt, the heaviness of heart is then to be lifted by turning upwards towards the love of god, responding to the calling of a higher love that emblazons nature with light, but which, hitherto, has only intruded into the house as a mirrored reflection in which she too is framed. The event is paused, she is surrounded by floral warnings: anemones as unrequited love, marigolds as sorrow, whilst outside the white dahlias are turning away, symbols of perseverance, honesty, and commitment. On the wallpaper birds are pecking at grain and grapes whilst cupid sleeps below, and beneath the table, skulking, a malevolent cat toys with a small, brown bird. Though apparently mute, every object is screaming at her, exhorting her to correct the wrongs into which she has fallen and might still remain fallen (see Prettejohn 2005: 113). John Ruskin (1904: 335) wrote of the picture: Nothing is more notable than the way in which even the most trivial objects force themselves upon the attention of a mind which has been fevered by violent and distressful excitement. They thrust themselves forward with a ghastly and unendurable distinctness, as if they would compel the sufferer to count, or measure, or learn them by heart. Even to the mere spectator a strange interest exalts the accessories of a scene in which he bears witness to human sorrow. There is not a single object in all that room—​common, modern, vulgar (in the vulgar sense, as it maybe), but it becomes tragical, if rightly read.

She is, god willing, though with a still small voice, relinquishing the clutches of her lover, and giving herself over to self-​care, which in Hunt’s patrician schema is to have the form of a care for her soul. The song, momentarily, has put her in touch with a more innocent past, it has jolted her from the space into which she has found herself thrown as casually as the discarded glove on the carpet, there is a glimpse of an opening, a window held ajar, another fate, she only has to keep rising. Yet it is just as likely she will sit back down, the moment of separation will pass, the sun recede, and the undulating fragility of her position resume is regular yaw. The time is five minutes to 12 o’clock, close to noontide, mid-​ way through the day, the time of decision is as brief as the pencil of sunlight caught in the glass cloche that covers the ornate gilt work of the clock. Might she abandon the scanty, material security of a drawing room and the clutches of an uncaring and abusive relationship doomed to end with her impoverishment? Might she? Isn’t it better just to hang on a while longer, after all, the cat hasn’t struck and killed the bird just yet, and might not do so, and her current state of boredom peppered with distraction is surely better than destitution. Yet the music has kindled something, and the sunlight through the window

66   Robin Holt speaks not only of the past but of a possible future; things might be becoming that much better. Hunt’s image of awakening is grounded, as with all good painting, in a concern for real-​world appearances. The detail combined with a rich tapestry of symbolism serves to distil and intensify the viewers’ awareness of the social conditions in which many such women were forced to live. Ruskin was profoundly moved by his encounter with Hunt’s image in which the most meagre of things contained the most elevated of truths (Prettejohn, 2005: 113). Ruskin (1904: 335) has nothing but praise for Hunt’s super-​ empiricism in which an obsession with the unity of concentrated detail and moral teaching found its apotheosis in ‘the very hem of the poor girl’s dress, at which the painter has laboured so closely, thread by thread, has story in it, if we think how soon its pure whiteness may be soiled with dust and rain, her out-​cast feet failing in the street’. And Hunt’s obsession was not limited to the painting itself. He had rented rooms specifically for the purpose of its composition, and the model was one Annie Miller, who he had ‘found’ working the streets of Chelsea, taken in, and tended. He had paid for clothes, board, and lessons in elocution and deportment, subjecting Miller to a course of Bildung that George Bernard Shaw was later to title Pygmalion, and to which the painting served as a narrative centrepiece no less detailed than the ornamentation it depicted. Indeed, Hunt went so far as envisage marriage to Miller, though of course only once she had reached an appropriate threshold of civility. Though Miller was supposed to appreciate and then fall in love with her benefactor and his righteous offer of loving, she demurred, and instead took herself to other painters in the Pre-​Raphaelite brotherhood, making a beeline for its more rakish members like Rossetti and Boyce, the ones that Hunt had insisted she should not see. Hunt became cool, thwarted, annoyed, whilst Miller pushed herself into the far less certain and constrained settings of a continual self-​reliance, modelling freely, and animated by the irony of being encouraged to swap one state of helplessness and organizational confinement for another. Her hem might get dirty, but it was to be, as far as was possible, a gathering of dirt immanent to her own being; unbeknown to himself, Hunt had painted Miller’s awakening conscience.

3.3  The Three Vectors of Care: Future, Past, and Present Miller’s awakening conscience is not, contra Hunt and Ruskin, one of spiritual salvation, but a struggle to refuse its limits, and in the moment of this struggle, in this distancing from the lap of convention, she appears as a self that is making itself present in its own time; it is being (sein) that is there (da) (McNeill 1999: 72). Like her character, Miller is also poised between states of care, but here the alternatives are not between different, already organized states symbolized in Hunt’s painting as a mirrored threshold between

Heidegger, Organization, and Care    67 two apparently feminine spaces: the interior and the garden. Rather it is a holding up of oneself between organization and an awareness of being organized. The character Miller is modelling is, in her awakening, sitting astride different organizational states, whereas Miller herself, in partaking of and yet experiencing ways of resisting Hunt’s project, is becoming aware of what it is to appear and to be alongside the multiplicity of norms and grounds held in the organizational forms that envelop ordinary human life: bar work, prostitution, domestication, belief, patriarchy, art, modelling, marriage. Without its own time, Miller has found her ‘self ’ being continually enlisted in others’ designs. In the moment of its own time, her ‘self ’ has a self-​organized place, that, now it has appeared, cannot be ignored or overlooked, it has its own duration, presence that, for Heidegger, bears the weight of three related temporal aspects: futural projection, past memory, and a recurring nowness.

3.3.1  Future That Dasein shows care means encountering possibilities which place it in obligation towards its continuous becoming, life is of interest (inter-​esse). Performing life is Dasein’s essential concern, about which it is concerned, even anxious, for the struggle is always accompanied by the possibility of failure. It is this obligation that affords Dasein its temporal location: its stretching out or projecting towards actual possibilities and away from unrealized or thwarted ones (Rouse, 2007). For Miller to be present as an artist’s model, for example, is to adopt one mimetic pose after another at an artist’s behest, she is acting for the sake of becoming a model, a striving to which she is continually becoming attuned, just as Hunt is acting for the sake of being an artist. They are both playing out assigned roles in the norms and grounds that make up the practice of painting, and of Western art, that emerge in Europe after the Renaissance, but which, in Hunt’s case, is avowedly pre-​Raphael in style. For Hunt, the fragility of Miller’s awakening lies in its being poised between projections of moral elevation or decrepitude. When set against his patrician and patriarchal norms and grounds, she appears as a being who ought willingly to subjectify herself to an improving regime of moral and social development; she was to acquire taste. This was a project involving time understood as a chronological ordering of occurrence structured in moments of before or after that enable a future projection of picture to take hold of the present: the improved-​upon Miller. It is in the nature of futural these time sequences to carry an inherent regularity, either in a scansioned sense, as with clocks or calendars, or more organically, as in processes of maturity or decay. Under the direction of Hunt, Miller can mature into an independence that might then warrant his further and more fervent interest. Further forms of organizing come in the prevailing orders of knowledge, power, and control that sustain the project, such as the cause and effect explanations and warrants upon which Hunt relies to prove the decency and cogency of his understanding of Miller’s predicament, and the economic wherewithal at his disposal to execute the project which he generated through increasingly successful

68   Robin Holt experiments in the mechanical reproduction of his paintings. Hunt’s concern is to control the present as a scene of deficit when set against a better future that he, with Miller and others, can bring about (Holman Hunt, 1969). But to confine the nature of the event of Miller’s awakening to such organized sequences would be to deprive it of what Heidegger called its ecstatic presence (Gegenwart). Miller’s event of awakening, the one depicted in Hunt’s picture, but not at all the one he intended to depict, is another form of making present in which organizational form itself loosens, and instead it is Dasein itself revealing to itself how, in such ordinary activity as posing as an artist’s model, it is Dasein committing to such activity, and not already organized histories, power, and knowledge. Though not free from time structures, or economic dependency, Miller’s refusal is an experience of Dasein being able to stand askance from the organizational forms that are continually connecting subjects to objectivities in various modes of appearance. Whereas for figures like Kant this standing aside was an intellectual and judgemental capacity to consider these allegiances of organization critically, Heidegger finds such intellectualism too rigid. The standing askance experienced by Dasein is more felt, immediate, and uncertain. It is Dasein’s acting for the sake of possible ways of being as it twists and comports itself towards futural possibility (Heidegger [1927] 2010: 145, 185). This is not a ‘conscious’, or deliberate review of what is available to it: it is not as if Miller has a distinct sense of a specific destiny fed by operational plans for its realization. In contrast, both Hunt and Ruskin seem to display more of this means-​end fervour by stipulating a future in time towards which their projects reach. Rather, in rising, Miller indicates an awareness of projecting towards possibilities in the very present of holding open the space for possibility as she rises (there is not an after being envisaged here). She is holding herself open by not being on the lap, and so to being itself. Heidegger ([1927]2010 145, 199) finds this futural appearance of care throwing up possibilities as possibilities, and, as such, letting Dasein be in its becoming outside of the familiar use of things (Heidegger [1927] 2010: 145).

3.3.2  Past As well as Dasein’s futural aspect, care is also conveyed through Dasein’s being held in an affective state of attunement (Befindlichkeit) stemming from its existential prior immersion, and finding its way, in the world. In Besorgen (concerned, practical accomplishing), Dasein makes use of its environment with which it gets things done, utilizing, taking possession of, safekeeping, and forfeiting equipment in the service of that towards which it acts (the first aspect of projection). It is both a being set against an already organized array of significance and an acquisition of familiarity and skill in acting This involves familiarity with the objects of its environment, being afforded by Dasein’s curiosity; its circumspective looking around and gaining acquaintance with the objects with which it is to cope (Kisiel & Sheehan, 2007: 159), and which are already

Heidegger, Organization, and Care    69 there, given by history, and into whose company it has withdrawn in readiness. There is a naturalness to the plight of both Miller and the character she takes on in Hunt’s painting, it is not untimely that they should find themselves in this particular position of having their interests assumed away from them, in having others manage what ought be of concern to them, in having their lives used up by others and others’ projects. This circumspective thrownness (Geworfenheit) into the world closes off the world. Dasein is already situated within the world and oriented towards definite ways for it to be (Rouse, 2007). The possibilities faced are thus not endless but are the outcome of an ongoing accommodation to what is afforded by circumstances in which the world is already encountered in the character of significance; anticipatorily grasped in this or that way (Kisiel & Sheehan, 2007: 159). In these concerned (Besorgt; see also solicitous (Fürsorgen)) dealings with the world, the entities with which Dasein concerns itself are typically encountered as things ready-​to-​hand (Zuhanden), organized in dedication to projected ends of engagement. Whether and how things are being made present in these dealings is subject to Dasein’s thrownness (second aspect) which then opens up Dasein’s horizon of possibilities (first aspect), thus delimiting its actual possibilities (Heidegger [1927] 2010: 199). Yet this definiteness and readiness is not totalizing. Ruptures occur, and they may begin with a few piano chords in whose plangent sadness Dasein can experience a welling up of feeling in which it is enveloped with a stalling intensity. The ordinariness of things is no longer agreed upon, it becomes a condition of disturbance that can be threatening, intensely joyous, or a sublime admixture of the two, or it can be a more gradual misting over of the definitions and distinctions that were, hitherto, so clear. Dasein no longer knows its way about, yet strangely, the loss can also open Dasein’s horizon of possibilities, as in Moore’s poem ‘in the stilly night | Ere slumber’s chains have bound me | Sad memory brings the light’. The piano, the lover, the drapery are no longer held ready to hand in the slumbering routine of Miller’s character; the woman is waking up and as she rises the world around her—​the atmosphere of objects, sounds, and values bearing the weight of prevailing organizational forms—​breaks into shards that obtrude and obstruct: the room and its air of false domesticity becomes oppressive, and is no longer silently and inevitably at work in the world. And for Miller herself the rupture is even more open, for unlike her character whose destiny is being scripted by Hunt and spiritually enlightened commentators like Ruskin, Miller refuses to tolerate the prospect of a new refuge into which she might unquestioningly fall. Whilst she abides by organizational forms (she cannot decide to absent herself from thrown projection), she is not subservient to them (she generates a voice for her own self by inviting authority into spaces that it cannot possibly control). She is making apparent the temporal (social and historically contingent) nature of the organizational forms into which she and Hunt have fallen. These are the forms carrying norms and grounds whose locality and place have limits. Miller’s refusal reveals these limits by embodying them, rather than invoking an abstract opposition to them. Miller’s refusal is an experiential one that encounters her own self as the only authoritative ground and source of care towards herself.

70   Robin Holt

3.3.3  Present It is in this holding open we approach the third aspect of care most clearly: the recurring present suspended in between the to-​and-​fro structure of Dasein’s projected future and thrown past. The condition of being present is taken up in Heidegger’s discussion of fallenness (Verfallenheit). Verfallenheit refers to Dasein’s absorption in, and fascination with, the world and its average everydayness (Carman, 2000: 19). In a fallen state, Dasein typically acts in accord with organizational forms. It is aware of what counts, the prevailing forms of ‘being’: roles, affordances, hopes, limits. Heidegger characterizes this habituated presence of being-​with-​others as ‘the they’ (or das Man). Das Man refers to the unspecific generality at work in the public world where Dasein is nothing in itself, but always and already a known thing: an office holder, a gender, a biological unit with a specific life span, all of which are categories that others also occupy; under das Man ‘everyone is the other, and no one is himself [sic]’ (Heidegger [1927] 2010: 126, 175). Every Dasein belongs to, and entrenches the power of, the others, even the way they withdraw from the great mass of thinking is the way ‘they’ withdraw, the feeling of shock is the way ‘they’ are shocked ([1927] 2010: 127). The fallenness of das Man characterizes Dasein’s lostness in the everyday public world. With Dasein’s lostness in das Man, its closest possibilities for being (tasks, rules, standards, etc.) have already been decided upon (Heidegger [1927] 2010: 268). Dasein inherits a fallen sociality which ensnares it into an already organized world in which disturbances to received opinion are ipso facto deplorable (Reedy & Learmonth, 2011). This fallenness permeates the (self-​)understanding into which Dasein already finds itself thrown (Mulhall, 1996: 106). Typically, the distinctive possibilities of Dasein are levelled down and accommodated to the averageness of ‘the they’ that is held fast in common sense (Dasein is encouraged to act appropriately), common values (Dasein is tempted to fall in with established belief systems), and common truths (Dasein refuses to acknowledge the worldly nature of truth).1 The possibilities open to Dasein are at the whim of others. ‘In its being’ says Heidegger ([1927] 2010: 127), 1  This

averageness need not, however, be limited to a surface-​level consensus. To take a current example, an algorithmically mediated and accelerated form of das Man comes in the form of recommender systems used to prompt users of social media and streaming services. Wendy Chun (2016) notes how the recommendations work on a principle of homophily in which like are gathered with like. To make the system useful, however (to be able to recommend other or further choices on the basis of an already executed choice), recommendations have to be nuanced. For example, grouping together those liking sunshine or opposing poverty is too general. The system tries to spot amplified deviations from the common denominator, and to group those deviating similarly—​they agree in their controversy. The system tries to identify those who are equally passionate in their likely or incipient deviance from the norm, and who are, because of their being emotionally charged, in an impressionable state. The system aims to create a passionate community whose commitments then become entrenched as a new gathering of cultural interests: predictability is steeped in controversy. The nature of these neighbourhoods of passionate connectivity is not readily contained using the established categories of isolating cultural groups (income levels, race, gender, education)—​these long-​established attributes of identity and neighbourhood have an uneasy relation.

Heidegger, Organization, and Care    71 the they is essentially concerned with averageness. Thus, the they maintains itself factically in the averageness of what belongs to it, what it does and does not consider valid, and what it grants or denies success. This averageness, which prescribes what can and may be ventured, watches over every exception which thrusts itself to the fore.

There is, however, as both Carman (2000: 21) and Golub (2014) argue, a constant discordant shimmer between the particularity of Dasein’s thrown-​ projection and the generality of the discursive terms with which it must express and communicate its understandings of its presence. Its mineness can become exhausted by or indifferent to the prevailing chatter of das Man, it falls out of place, there is an atmospheric loosening of purpose stained by mood. For Heidegger it is from within the experience of directionless moods such as anxiety that the daily grammatical churn of das Man stutters. The habituated ways in which ‘mineness’ is being organized break down: their form (norms and routines) crumbles, Dasein is being unhoused, the world loses the routine significance it once had, whether as an array of ready-​to-​hand tool-​like things invisibly arranged in the countless projects in which humans take part, or as a scene of theoretically understood, present-​at-​hand objects set in explicitly categorized causal relations (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 186). There is no discernible and directed opposition to the current organizational state; the mood is not one of anger or fear, which have objects in sight, and which carry a chain of problem-​solving, instrumental reasoning in their wake (Tomkins & Simpson, 2015). This unsettling is not a condition of opposition, but one where Dasein no longer makes itself present in and amid the established weight of organizational form, it is a state of profound indifference towards the normative calling of the everyday world (Golub, 2014: 227−8). Anxiety removes Dasein from the net of in-​order-​ to scenes of significance by which organization takes form. Without the prospect of projection, without the refuge of attunement, and without the distractions of idle chatter, Dasein is chipping away at the pre-​formed block within which it has been cast, it is being stripped back to the innocent, naked state of its being open as a scene of possibility. Yet Dasein is without recourse to the possibilities to which it has hitherto been enjoined, and unable to supply its own norms and grounds from within, for norms and grounds are not immanent to subjectivity, but to the world (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 187−8). Dasein finds itself aware that ordinarily: ‘[T]‌o expect something possible is always to understand and “have” it with regard to whether and when and how it will really be objectively present’ Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 262). But now, in a mood of anxiety, this ‘having’ appears fragile, laughable even, and not at all desirable or even objectively possible.

3.4  The Call of Conscience Along and across the three aspects of care, Dasein is attentive to the norms and grounds gathered in organizational form, and yet in such attentiveness comes to release itself

72   Robin Holt from their ministrations; its care is freed from a condition of sympathy for a cause or other persons (Elley Brown & Pringle, 2021). It is both organized and unorganized, notably in moody atmospheres of anxiety under whose pall organization loses practical and normative force: it continues as such, but gives no shelter. In mood, things do not take us in in quite the same way. They no longer carry instrumental power, they lack what the biologist Gibson calls affordance—​the tapestry no longer elicits concentration, the piano no longer prompts laughter, the cat no longer waits to be stroked. Such things remain proximate but forsake us; being and being-​organized dishevel. In being held in suspense by things, suspended from them, comes a dormant possibility of doing this or doing that, being able to or not able to. Once stripped of their readiness-​to-​hand, things are not equipment (Zeug). Listlessness gives way to pointlessness, and in the moment where we realize that, though anxious, we are still living, still going on (poter esse), there arises the inevitability of possibility, as Dasein becomes aware of the appearance of things still existing, alongside as it were, without as yet defined use-​value. And she rises, she pulls away, lurching and striving into the open where she becomes use-​less, no longer herself an object for enjoyment. Giorgio Agamben (2004: 47) defines this passage from utility to uselessness to openness using Heidegger’s: language of letting go and lying fallow, like a field lying in wait for the plants of the soil, for the fresh air, and for the sun (Geviert) to creep into the bottom corner. The emphasis here is on a facticity of birth, a natality, and that it is this condition of birth, of starting anew, that attains a pre-​eminence in the present, rather than understanding the present as that which is given, assured, habituated (Holt & Zundel, 2023: III). Here Dasein summons itself to itself as potential (as fallow, rather than as something already organized in das Man), and thereby suspends or defers or pauses before its possibilities for doing this or that, and turns towards itself as that which makes possibility possible, but not as an alternative, self-​willing source of its own norms and grounds; in care for itself it remains outside of itself (ek-​stasis) and so unhomed (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 274-​276). So how then is it possible for the likes of Miller to publicly warrant or persuade others of the correctness, or appropriateness, of her rupture? Moreover, in what ways can her experience be called upon as her own, as an event that is own-​most to her, given it was brought about by the haphazard and idle rendering of a memorable tune? If it is only through the affective disturbance of mood that an ethical awakening is possible, this appears a flimsy setting in which to presage the possible transformation of the norms and grounds by which humans are organized. Mood is unruly, it cannot be disciplined or induced, so in which ways might Dasein then prepare itself, if at all, given it too lacks an inner form or telos by which it might rule itself? The answer comes in how the call to conscience is being made, her refusal being her own calling. Like Hunt, Heidegger is also interested in conscience, but for him, rather than its being a source of accusatorial stricture, conscience has the more enigmatic role of being the caller and the called upon at one and the same time. The enigma is something all of us feel phenomenologically, as we listen to ourselves: given that the call of conscience so often dawns in an unregulated, disorganized way, and even against the

Heidegger, Organization, and Care    73 will of the one being called upon, is it Dasein that makes the call, or is it more the case that it is the call of the potentiality of being itself working itself through Dasein? There is no resolution here, it remains foggy, all one can say, phenomenologically, is that ‘the calls comes from me, and yet over me’ (Heidegger [1927] 2010: 275). Dasein is being called upon as a being that exists in its facticity: it is not a ghostly self-​projection, but a being thrown into existence, and yet in the phenomenal event of encountering itself in its own time Dasein does not experience itself as that which does the calling. Rather, as Heidegger ([1927] 2010: 275) hints it is the potentiality of being that calls, and it comes without being planned or being prepared for, yet phenomenologically speaking it remains undoubtedly this being, this Dasein, that grounds the possibility of the calling (McNeill, 2006: 59). The potentiality is not of Miller’s own making (it is not a self 'acting’ upon itself) but of the world’s: it is in being open to herself as a world, and in being open to the temporal horizon of the world, which is not the world of das Man, that Miller awakens her conscience. It is in the nature of conscience to call Dasein away from the guided and controlling expressions of solicitude and concern that make up the majoritarian aspects of care. In calling Dasein away from the norms and grounds settled in organizational form, however, conscience offers no alternative home, leaving Dasein unhomed from the dominant understandings of das Man and from the already attained conditions of immediate self-​awareness that are spilling away into history (McNeill, 2006: 62). In conscience an uncanniness pursues Dasein, a feeling that threatens its self-​forgetful lostness (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 277). The threat is felt in moods like anxiety, but it is in the dawning of conscience that the mood transforms into care. Typically care arises from having to owe something to someone, as in debt, and from being responsible for a person or state if affairs, and hence in calculating and caring for things. Heidegger calls these relations those of concern and solicitude, and not care proper. Ruskin and Hunt have concern for the plight of women forced into prostitution because of economic hardship. Along with other members of the Pre-​Raphaelite Brotherhood for whom the ‘lost woman’ was a recurring theme (Nochlin, 1978), the narrative is one of lost innocence, sinfulness, and possible redemption. The image shimmers with warnings: Miller’s character is as likely to end in the gutter as she is the lap of god, despite the chivalrous intentions of the painter who is casting himself in the role of knight errant. Yet none of this is care, for it is bound to prevailing and multiple interests. Care proper (Sorge) is what Miller experiences when rising and sensing that she is lagging behind her potentiality, she is becoming a ground that has as yet to be, she has taken over the condition of being the ground of projection without however bearing the weight of having chosen to be a this or that. Being in an originary state of potential (her immediate future advances in excess of attempts to determine its actuality, or the grounds for such actuality (McNeill, 2006: 64)); she is as yet not indebted to others, she does not owe them, nor is she responsible for them, nor they for her. Being [seiend] a self, Dasein, as self, is the thrown being. Not through itself, but released to itself from the ground in order to be as the ground. Dasein is not itself the

74   Robin Holt ground of its being, because the ground first arises from its own project, but as a self, it is the being [Sein] of its ground. (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 285)

Being the ground of its own being, Dasein is care insofar as its primal relation is to its own being: ‘[I]‌ts content is not founded in the substantiality of a substance, but in the “self-​constancy” [Selbständigkeit] of the existing self whose being was conceived as care’ (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 303). This care is expressed in the call of conscience, in witnessing what the painter Marlene Dumas calls the image as burden, made vulnerable and exposed by being in the frame. The frame is built from dwelling, a structure of self-​encounter for which Dasein assumes responsibility in holding itself open against the increasingly uniform forces of das Man, whether these be the individualizing forces of industrialism or the counter veiling spiritualism of Hunt and Ruskin. The call of conscience is, first, a calling itself back from the grounding fault line between the organized forms of presence in which it ordinarily projects itself. This first calling back reveals that, in its thrown projection, Dasein is a being that is essentially always grounded both outside of itself, and in organization: ‘in the fateful repetition of possibilities that have-​been, Dasein brings itself back “immediately”, that is, temporally and ecstatically, to what has already been before it’ ([1927] 2010: 391). Dasein acts and thinks by virtue of being thrown, from which setting all projection and attunement take their cue, such that even in the burdensome event if its holding onto an image of itself, das Man is always lingering, a stain as much as a distraction, a reminder of the finite nature of freedom. (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 194). There is no ahistorical, asocial ground to its own grounding, and to make this apparent is the demand Dasein must place upon itself as what is most own-​most to it: its care comes in acknowledging the groundlessness of all grounds. Organization is everywhere. The second call of conscience is a calling away from the feeling of uncanniness that ensues from the first appearance of calling back. This second call is a calling away to then call forth a readiness to be summoned by the potentiality of being, to be prepared to be called away from its lostness in the calls already organized as accepted norms and grounds, and instead to be the null ground of a null project: to simply be nothing, and so be open for what is to come (Heidegger; [1927] 2010: 288−9). In the hands of her awakening conscience, Miller’s life is no longer just a business, it is no longer just being calculated and regulated, it is no longer lost to ‘the they’, it is also, indeed becoming more so, an unorganized life being experienced as she rises up and so relinquishes the support of that to which she has hitherto been withdrawn. She is rising into ambiguity in experiencing the potentiality of being, but only by factually existing in this possibility, by then creating a distinction as she rises to which she then submits as a freeing up that has its own fateful trajectory into organization. The mood accompanying this understanding could be one of anxiety, she lacks the idea or goal or history that legitimates her move, and so she has to rise unaided, yet it is a mood for which she has a readiness, her conscience calls it forth, it is not unbidden. And in creating the distinction the norms and grounds that have found themselves being organized—​in patriarchal hierarchies, in the routines of bourgeois taste, in the rhythms of domestic visitation, in the collectively

Heidegger, Organization, and Care    75 mediated memory held in the distribution of popular tunes—​are disturbed, and forced to recalibrate themselves, and what co-​occurs with this recalibration is an awareness that it is possibility she both inherits and chooses in the present.

3.5  Temporality It is being both uncanny and open that conscience forms the call upon Dasein to care for itself outside of the limitation that befalls other ethical structures that rely upon ‘an outside setting’ to secure legitimacy and authority. Care is without measure. As Von Foerster (2003) remarked, only questions that are undecidable can give rise to a condition of care, outside of which there are answers already contained within the organized framework of the decision-​making apparatus to which appeal can be made. Rather than assume projection, attunement, and ‘falling in’ have anything complete about them, the end towards which care is oriented is a being that is ahead of itself which is given presence in the not yet (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 298, 317). Miller exemplifies this intimacy between care and the temporality of ‘there being’ experienced in immediate event and the developing of a self. She is rising in a state of resolve, anticipating what is to come, without at all understanding what it might be. She has been lost in habits and ideas of ‘the self ’ being presented to her in the organizational forms prevailing in the world into which she has found herself thrown. Phenomenologically, what appears already takes the form of norms and grounds carrying organizational form. For Hunt and Ruskin these forms are abusive and sinful, and they read the pose of the woman Miller is modelling as one who is held poised between the abyss and salvation. She can sit back down and be consigned to a dissolute life and early death, or she can continue awakening into a condition of spiritual enlightenment. Hunt is not resorting to easy binaries here. It remains a sustained and complex study using both narrative symbolism and technical mimetic power to embody a predicament for which he, as a radical artist, has a profound concern. The man and woman occupy distinct social strata that constrain their movements: forbidding natural expressions of affection, but permitting abusive, transactional ones. In presenting it Hunt was daring the salon-​going public to confront their hypocrisy. He was part of a painting movement dedicated to the recovery of the forms of spiritual and sexual affection that, somewhat ideally, they found embodied in pre-​Renaissance life. In this they were all inspired by Ruskin, and in Hunt Ruskin found a technically gifted and intensely thoughtful companion in arms. Ruskin read the awakening as a riposte to the rationalization bedevilling human experience: women like Miller’s character, and Miller herself, have been consigned to roles whose moral and economic precarity is enabled by a laissez faire atmosphere of uncaring, unfeeling common experience. Ruskin felt the sole concern of the modern order is the organization of trading relations to more efficiently satisfy distinct individual interests. Hence an awakening conscience is not simply a turn to God, but a restoration of medieval sensibility: a union of collective sensibility held fast by mutual love.

76   Robin Holt Yet Ruskin’s aspiration remains Miller’s confinement: the staging of her awakening is a falling from one organized state to another; the entanglement persists, and conscience, if it exists at all, does so only fleetingly, in the moment of fleeing from the exposure of having risen. Miller herself, however, refuses to flee. The event of rising is a dispersal of the fugitive acts of self-​concealing more typical to instrumental forms of care. Miller’s act is a difficult act of resolve that understands the facticity of Dasein, is open to the anxiety that attends this understanding, and yet which is also, potentially, joyous in its being freed from the idling and busying diversions that bedevil and so conceal the fact that what is most own-​most to us is also what is farthest from us and must be wrested from within us by moving away from that which we are. Her rising up does violence to the tranquility and ordinariness that otherwise confines us to already organized conditions (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 309−11). Phenomenologically, this experience is thoroughly existential—​i.e. it is existence that is calling itself ahead of itself, it is stretched into being beyond itself. The call contains no supporting vision of the future, it invokes no historical warrant, and it has shed the prevailing agreements of habit: it is not being taken care of by anything save itself, it is alone, with only the not-​yet, the null, the open for company. This care can take an ironic form. Charles Baudelaire’s (1986) flaneur, for example, is a reaction to the fleeting emptiness of ‘the they’; the flaneur participates in the anonymity and impermanence of das Man, whilst attempting to give form to the fleeting and contingent nature of urban living: ‘For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense job to set up house in the middle of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite’. Yet with Miller, care takes a form whose compulsion is more urgently felt than Baudelaire’s, there is a resolve about her. Indeed there has to be. The free-​ranging irony of a flaneur occupies the public space of a city in which men—​but less so, women—​ are free to roam. If the likes of Miller took to the streets they would be as likely to be arrested for solicitation as they would lauded for poetizing (Wolff, 2000). Miller’s care is a letting go (Gelassenheit) of the concern for propriety, slipping away from the qualities of good and evil to which she is being enjoined by Pre-​Raphaelite brothers, and in doing so she reveals what remains steadfast as a resolve to make rather than just occupy distinctions, a resolve that is held fast in the anticipation of projections that have, as yet, a null character: they are void. Being void they are points of resistance to prevailing organizational divisions. She withdraws into the company of her own haunting which calls her: ‘Remember me!’ (Krell, 2016). The certitude of her present is not the present of assurances, of being there, but a present that is exposed to the facticity of her own being which is given expression in, a cutting away and opening up. The experience of rising up from a lap is a stretching of an ek-​sistence (a being that does not coincide with itself, that is outside of outside) instantiated in beginning again. In that emptiness or nullity of setting forth elsewhere (ek-​stasis), her resolve needs nothing more than its own sense of certainty that it is being known to itself beyond the entangled forms of objective presence that, hitherto, have organized her life (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 298). In the

Heidegger, Organization, and Care    77 present facticity of the event of her rising up from the lap she is orienting herself towards herself in a relation of resolute anticipation that is, momentarily, beyond organization (Heidegger, [1927] 2010: 326). It is this flickering call of conscience, and this alone, that is making present the event of her rising up in a time appropriate to it, and which is made present without its being at all settled into what can be organized as being present.

References Agamben, Giorgio. (2004). The open: Man and animal, trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Baudelaire, Charles. (1986). The painter of modern life and other essays. New York: Da Capo Press. Carman, Taylor. (2000). ‘Must we be inauthentic?’. In M. Wrathall & J. Malpas (eds.), Heidegger, authenticity and modernity. Essays in honor of Hubert Dreyfus (pp. 13–​28). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. (2016). Updating to remain the same: Habitual new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Elley-​Brown, M. J., & Pringle, J. K. (2021). Sorge, Heideggerian ethic of care: Creating more caring organizations. Journal of Business Ethics, 168, 23–​35. Golub, Sacha. (2014). Heidegger on concepts, freedom and normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. ([1927] 2010). Being and time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: SUNY. Holman Hunt, Diana. (1969). My grandfather, his wives and loves. London: Hamilton. Holt, R. & Zundel, M. (2023). The Poverty of Strategy. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Kisiel, Theodore. (1985). On the way to Being and Time. Introduction to the translation of Heidegger’s ‘Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs’. Research in Phenomenology, 15, 193–​219. Kisiel, Theodore, & Sheehan, Thomas. (eds.) (2007). Becoming Heidegger: On the trail of his early occasional writings, 1910−1927. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Krell, David Farell. (2016). History, natality, ecstasy: Derrida’s first seminar on Heidegger, 1964–​1965. Research in Phenomenology, 46, 3–​34. McNeill, William. (1999). The glance of the eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the ends of theory. New York: State University of New York Press. McNeill, William. (2006). The time of life. Heidegger and ethos. New York: SUNY. Mulhall, Stephen. (1996). Routledge philosophy guidebook to Heidegger and Being and Time. London: Routledge. Nochlin, Linda. (1978). Lost and found: Once more the fallen woman. The Art Bulletin, 60(1), 139–​153. Prettejohn, Elizabeth. (2005). Beauty and art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reedy, P., & Learmonth, Mark. (2011). Death and organization: Heidegger’s thought on death and life in organizations. Organization Studies, 32(1), 117–​131. Rouse, Joseph. (2007). Heidegger’s philosophy of science. In H. L. Dreyfus & M. Wrathall (eds.), Blackwell companions to philosophy: A companion to Heidegger (pp. 173–​ 189). Oxford: Blackwell.

78   Robin Holt Ruskin, John. (1904). Lectures on architecture, painting, etc., 1844−1854: Collected works. (Vol. 12), ed. E. T. Cook & A. Wedderburn. London: George Allen. Sheehan, Thomas. (2014). What, after all, was Heidegger all about? Continental Philosophy Review, 47: 249–​274. Tomkins, Leah, & Simpson, P. (2015). Caring leadership: A Heideggerian perspective. Organization Studies, 36(8), 1013–​1031. Von Foerster, Heinz. (2003). Understanding. New York: Springer. Wolff, Janet. (2000). The feminine in modern art: Benjamin, Simmel and the gender of modernity. Theory Culture & Society, 17(6), 33–​53.

Chapter 4

Gaston Bache l a rd a nd t he Phenomenol o g y of the Im aginat i on Michèle Charbonneau

4.1  Introduction now that my herbarium of commented images extends beyond two thousand pages, I would like to be able to rewrite all my books. It seems to me that I would be better able to express the reverberation of spoken images in the depths of the speaking soul, and better describe the relationship between new images and those with deep roots in the human psyche. I would perhaps grasp the moments when words, today as always, creates humanity. Even in associating images, in grouping together similar images, I would know how to maintain the privileges of the incomparable. [ . . . ] Poetry is language freed from oneself. (1988: 29)

With these words, written in the twilight of his life, Gaston Bachelard expressed the problem to which his study of the imagination had led him and which had progressively put him on the path towards phenomenology. For Bachelard, the phenomenological method might allow him to ‘reach the origin of the joy of speaking’ (1988: 29) by studying the ‘reverberation’ of images on the human psyche, along with their innumerable variations, images that speak to the materiality of the world (its houses, trees, caverns, volcanoes, lakes, etc.). With these words, he placed language squarely at the cornerstone of the imagination, and imagination itself as the basis of any human relationship to the world. This chapter will seek to understand the manner in which Bachelard employed phenomenology to perfect his study of the poetic imagination, and to determine the contribution this could make to Management and Organizational Studies (MOS). One

80   Michèle Charbonneau difficulty should be considered. As noticed by Wunenburger (2014: 117–​8), although Bachelard eventually found the method he was seeking in phenomenology, he nonetheless intertwined in his philosophy notions and questions originating from a diversity of fields, including ontology and psychoanalysis, in addition to phenomenology. Given the complexity of Bachelard’s work and the numerous disciplinary influences to be found therein, this chapter will concentrate specifically on his own conception of the phenomenological method, starting with the writing of his poetics, when he fully embraced it. After having traced Gaston Bachelard’s biography and provided an overview of his work, the following pages will summarize the main components of his conception of the imagination, before presenting his phenomenological method. This will be followed by a discussion of its uniqueness, which will allow us to glimpse the renewal that Bachelard’s phenomenology brings to the study of organizational and workplace creativity, organizational poetics, issues related to the transformation of the material environment of organizations (including ecological issues), methods for exploring the imagination within organizations and research activities, as well as management education.

4.2  A Philosopher of Science and Poetry A great number of descriptors have been used in retracing the life of Gaston Bachelard. He has been called a ‘one of a kind professor’ (Dagognet, 1965: 4), who ‘welcomed all with heartwarming good humour’ (Ramnoux, 1965: 29); a ‘mischievous’ philosopher and a ‘polemecist’ (Dagognet, 1965: 4); an ardent defender of freedom (Parinaud, 1996: 236–​7); a constant reader, often sought after (Margolin, 1974: 5–​29), but seeking solitude (Parinaud, 1996: 237); and a ‘courageous’ man, very attached to Champagne, his native land (Dagognet, 1965: 2–​3). Gaston Bachelard was born on 27 June 1884 in Bar-​sur-​Aube.1 His father was a cobbler and his mother had a tobacco and newspaper shop. From a modest background, he benefited from a compulsory secular training programme (Wavelet, 2019: 36). At the end of his secondary studies, in 1902, he worked as a college tutor before joining the Postes et Télégraphes as a clerk the following year. From 1905 to 1907, he served in the military as a telegraph rider, before returning to Postes et Télégraphes. While working as a clerk, he obtained two scholarships and received certificates and degrees in mathematics and physics (Parinaud, 1996: 57). In 1913, after applying unsuccessfully to the École supérieure de télégraphie in order to eventually work as an engineer at the Postes, he obtained leave to prepare himself for the next competition and to pursue his studies. However, he was called to the field of battle before he could enter the competition. 1 

Most of the biographical data in this section can be found in the following works: Margolin (1974); Parinaud (1996); Bontems (2010); and Wavelet (2019).

Bachelard and Phenomenology of Imagination    81 During his period of military service, from 2 August 1914 to 16 March 1919, Bachelard spent three years in the trenches. He also took an officer training course which qualified him as a second lieutenant, allowing him to better support his spouse, whom he had married just before leaving for combat and who had fallen ill shortly afterwards (Parinaud, 1996: 58). In 1918, he received a Military Cross and a citation for having ‘established and without respite re-​established for two days and three nights the telephone lines which were constantly cut off by enemy fire, giving his sappers a fine example of calm, tenacity, and energy’ (Registre matricule militaire, 2015, quoted in Wavelet, 2019: 117). On his return, he was appointed teacher at the college of Bar-​sur-​ Aube and began work on 1 October 1919. While teaching physics and chemistry, among other subjects, he undertook university studies in philosophy. He obtained a degree in November 1920, an agrégation in 1922, and, in 1927, a doctorate. According to Parinaud (1996: 39–​40), his experience as a science teacher served as a laboratory of sorts for the philosophical theses he would later develop. This period was marked by the birth of his daughter Suzanne in October 1919, and by the death of his wife the following June. In 1925, after the death of his parents, who had been supporting him in his role as a father, he found himself solely responsible for his daughter’s welfare (Parinaud, 1996: 60). Despite these personal losses, on 23 May 1927, he submitted two theses in the philosophy of science to the Sorbonne which earned him, on the eve of his 44th birthday, the title of Docteur ès lettres along with the mention très honorable (Bontems, 2010: 13). His principal thesis, published in months that followed under the title ‘Essai sur la connaissance approchée’, was awarded a prize (Gagey, 1969: 24). In 1930, he left Collège de Bar-​sur-​Aube to join the Faculty of Letters of the Université de Dijon as professor of philosophy, and there he remained for the next ten years. Bachelard developed his epistemological reflections principally by drawing upon contemporary theories of physics, chemistry, and mathematics. In his view, knowledge advances through ‘rupture’ rather than in a ‘continuous’ fashion ([1928] 1969: ch. XV). Forging the concept of phénoménotechnique to underscore the ‘construction’ of scientific ‘phenomena’ (1931−2: 61), he deepened the complex connections intertwining theory and experience in order to go beyond ideas of rationalism and realism to describe scientific activity ([1934] 2020: 26). The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, among other modern theories, marked, in his view, the emergence of a ‘new scientific spirit’ which, without condemning Cartesianism (p. 150), rejects ‘the immediate nature of Cartesian evidence’ (p. 151). Bachelard was also interested in ‘epistemological obstacles’ ([1938] 1970: 13), which notably led him to delve deeper into the links between images and scientific knowledge by showing, for example, how the metaphor of the sponge had held back the comprehension of certain phenomena related to air and electricity (pp. 73–​8). Scientific rationality was only possible, he claimed, through a rigorous ‘dialectical’ approach which allows for ‘contradiction’ and ‘discussion’ inasmuch as any constructive exchange is dependent upon ‘rules’ and ‘evidence’ ([1940] 2005: 134–​5). During this period, Bachelard also reflected on the metaphysics of time. In direct opposition to Henri Bergson, he proposed ([1932] 1994: 15–​6) that time be conceived as a

82   Michèle Charbonneau series of ‘instants’, rather than as a ‘single continuous phenomenon.’ He also contends that these instants are connected through ‘rhythms’ which ‘construct duration’ by continuously ‘starting over’ ([1936] 2013: viii–​ix). Bachelard became a key figure in French philosophy during the interwar period (Bontems 2010: 178–​81). In 1940, at age 56, he was appointed as chair in history and philosophy of science at the Sorbonne, and was named director of the Institut d’histoire des sciences et des techniques. By the time he moved to Paris, Bachelard had already published two books on the philosophy of imagination. According to Gagey (1969: 57), his friendship with Gaston Roupnel, a historian of the French peasantry whom he had met at the Université de Dijon, marked a decisive step in his path towards the study of the imagination. The poetry and lyricism of Roupnel, it seems, awakened Bachelard’s awareness of his own subjectivity and of the poetic reverie (Gagey, 1969: 74–​8). Bachelard also revealed that the teaching of philosophy did not fully satisfy him, and that he was considering the idea of turning to the imagination when a student remarked that his ‘universe’ was ‘pasteurized’ (Bachelard cited in Gagey, 1969: 61). In La psychanalyse du feu, published in 1938, Bachelard proposed to study images not as obstacles to scientific knowledge, but rather in their own right ([1938] 1985: 14). He wished to deepen, through an objectifying approach of the images of fire, the ‘subjective convictions’ of fire in order to enable science to resist them (pp. 16–​8). In analysing the Isidore Ducasse’s Chants de Maldoror the following year, he attempted to study animal images used in the expression of aggression (1939: ch. 1, §I) in order to better resist them in life (1939: conc., §IV; Mansuy, 1965: 30). In Paris, where he associated with a number of artists and literary figures, including the proponents of Surrealism (Margolin, 1974: 16–​7), Bachelard completed his study of the images of the four elements by publishing L’eau et les rêves (1942), L’air et les songes (1943), La terre et les rêveries de volonté (1948), and La terre et les rêveries de repos (1948). According to Wavelet (2019: 184), poetry offered Bachelard a ‘refuge’ during the German occupation. For Jean Lescure, a poet and friend of Bachelard, his courses ‘excited’ (échauffaient) the students during this difficult period (Parinaud, 1996: 236). In his first two works on the imagination, Bachelard had adopted a psychoanalytical method which returned to certain ideas developed by Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung. However, in his subsequent work, he chose to distance himself from psychoanalysis ([1942] 2011: 13), notably due to the symbolic reduction of images it entails ([1957] 2020: 81); and he progressively shifted towards phenomenology. Plunging back into epistemology after having completed his study of the elements, Bachelard continued his work on the relationship between reason and scientific experience by deepening ‘applied rationalism’ and ‘rational materialism’ ([1953] 1963: 4; Dagognet, 1965: 28). He retired in 1954, having reached the age limit for teaching at the Sorbonne, but continued his work for a year as an honorary professor. Honours followed: welcomed to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1955, he received the Legion of Honour in 1960 and the Grand prix national des lettres in 1961. He continued to develop his philosophy of imagination by aligning it from then on with phenomenology, publishing La poétique de l’espace (1957), La poétique de la rêverie

Bachelard and Phenomenology of Imagination    83 (1960), and La Flamme d’une chandelle (1961). When Bachelard died in Paris on 16 October 1962, at the age of 78, he left behind an unfinished book which his daughter Suzanne, herself a philosopher of science who had lived with him until his final days, published in 1988 under the title Fragments d’une poétique du feu. Bachelard’s work contains two main areas of inquiry, one in epistemology, the other relating to poetic imagination. Common questions, including phenomenological reflections, cut across them both. Nonetheless, it is important, according to Bachelard, to ‘separate’ rationalism (epistemology) from poetic reverie (imagination) in order to return to each its function ([1953] 1963: 18–​9). This separation may be done ‘by accepting a double life’ which can serve as a ‘twofold basis for a complete anthropology’ (p. 19). For a number of his readers, the importance he gives to this double life and the links that it establishes between reason and imagination represent one of Bachelard’s key philosophical contributions (Wunenburger, 2014: 33–​6).

4.3  Bachelard’s Conception of the Imagination Bachelard undertook the study of the imagination by focusing on poetic images of materiality primarily found in literary works. To grasp the meaning he gave to his phenomenological method, fully adopted in his two poetics, it is important to understand it in relation to his conception of the imagination. Bachelard was interested in imagination understood as a ‘creative’ faculty ([1943] 2010: 7) which creates ‘novelty’ (p. 6) by transforming ‘primary images’ (p. 280), that is to say those images ‘which stir in us something primitive’ ([1957] 2020: 155). For him, imagination precedes perception ([1948] 2007: 65). An image will ‘engage’ the subject, and can bear the mark of ‘sensations’, but also that of ‘a more profound affectivity’ of the subject ([1948] 2010: 10) which it may then ‘amplify or muffle’ ([1942] 2011: 218). Daydreaming about flowers calls up ‘[n]‌ot simply sensitive images, colours and perfumes’ but also ‘subtleties of sentiments, the warmth of memories, the temptations of offerings, all these things that can flourish in the human soul’ ([1960] 2016: 135). The study of images, consequently, allows for access to ‘values’ ([1948] 2010: 10) and to an experience of the world ‘with all the subjectivity of the imagination’ ([1957] 2020: 50). Imagination is ‘dynamic’ ([1943] 2010: 8). It serves less to ‘form images’ than to ‘transform them’ (p. 5). As Bachelard himself points out, he could have studied the creative imagination by observing, for example, children imagining while playing in their games ([1960] 2016: 2). But he preferred to do so by studying ‘poetic images’ ([1957] 2020: 27). The poetic image has several features. First, it ‘emerges’ in one’s consciousness without having been ‘pushed’ there (p. 28). The creative act has no ‘past’ (p. 29), so that the condition for expressing a poetic image is that of ‘not knowing’ (p. 46). What then makes the poetic image possible is ‘language’ (p. 36): ‘The imagination, within us, speaks, our

84   Michèle Charbonneau dreams speak, our thoughts speak’ ([1943] 2010: 324). Through poetic expression, language evolves (p. 325, [1957] 2020: 305). Although nothing causes the poetic image to come into being, it can ‘reverberate’ ([1957] 2020: 28). Bachelard borrows the notion of ‘reverberation’ from the phenomenological psychologist Eugène Minkowski in order to underscore the image’s ‘sonority of being’ (p. 28). The reverberation of an image, which calls to the ‘deepening of our existence’ (p. 34–​5), is distinct from its ‘resonances’, understood as ‘sentimental repercussions, reminders of our past’ (p. 35). Even if he favours reverberation over resonance, ‘depth’ over ‘exuberance’, Bachelard contends that one must follow both ‘axes of phenomenological analysis’, since they influence each other mutually (p. 35). With the notion of reverberation, Bachelard also attempts to underscore the ‘communion by brief, isolated and active acts’ (p. 29) that an image can establish between a poet and a reader. For him, the images are ‘communicable’ (p. 29). When an image reverberates within us, it constitutes a ‘new being of our language’ (p. 36). The fact that a reader who knows nothing of a poet is able to react to an image bears witness to the ‘transsubjectivity’ of poetic images (p. 30). Thus, the reverberation which Bachelard explores in his study of poetic images is an experience of ‘intersubjectivity’ (p. 36). The possibility for an image to reverberate without preparation allows us to think that it has a ‘poetic meaning’ independent of its ‘psychological’ or ‘psychoanalytical’ meaning (p. 42). The task of the phenomenological method, therefore, is to capture this poetic meaning. To take a classic example from the author, if the image of a child bringing a blotting paper to an ink stain can be read as ‘a need to smudge’, another way of reading it is to see it as the dream of a child ‘drying up the Red Sea’ ([1948] 2007: 77). A second example stems from the meditation on these words by Paul Verlaine: ‘The sky is above the roof | So blue, so calm’ (Verlaine quoted in Bachelard, [1960] 2016: 9). Bachelard suggests that a psychological way of reading these verses would be to stress that Verlaine wrote them in prison. Another, more phenomenological way would be to dream with the poet, which Bachelard does here: ‘A sky from another time extends over the city of stone. And in my memory musical stanzas that Reynaldo Hahn wrote for Verlaine’s poems are singing’ (p. 9). For Bachelard, the phenomenological method appears as the only one that enables us to grasp the subjectivity and transsubjectivity of the image ([1957] 2020: 30). The phenomenology of the imagination consists, for him, in ‘a study of the phenomenology of the poetic image when the image emerges in the consciousness as a direct product of the heart, of the soul, of the human being understood in his or her present situation’ (p. 29). The image, a product of the consciousness, rather than an ‘object’ or an ‘object’s substitute’ (p. 31), is to be studied with a focus on ‘intentionality’ ([1960] 2016: 4). Nevertheless, the phenomenological stance cannot be ‘passive’; it requires us to ‘participate in the creating imagination’ (p. 4). ‘Plunged’ in our reverie, we are in ‘a world without exterior’ (p. 144) where the ‘duality of subject and object is [ . . . ] constantly active in its reversals’ ([1957] 2020: 31). The images of the house ‘are in us as much as we are in them’ (p. 52).

Bachelard and Phenomenology of Imagination    85 According to Wunenburger (2014: 30–​2), for Bachelard, the power of a poetic image stems from three sources: its roots in unconscious forces, the experiences of the body, and the materiality of the world. Even if the poetic image has no ‘causes’, it can awaken an ‘archetype’ which will have a profound reverberation ([1957] 2020: 28). For instance, the archetype of ‘returning to one’s mother’ contributes to the dream-​like power of images of returning to a cavern ([1948] 2010: 225). In contrast, a house without a cellar, itself an archetype, can have no profound reverberations (p. 120). Bachelard borrows freely from Jung’s notion of archetype (Thiboutot & Martinez, 1999: 6) and defines it as a ‘driving force’ and as ‘an image that has its roots in the most remote unconscious, an image which comes from a life which is not our personal life’ ([1948] 2010: 294). Similarly, the poetic image is enriched by the experiences of the human organism, without, however, being determined by it. The reveries nourished by the physiological needs of the child, as well as by the senses of touch, taste, hearing, and smell, are more powerful than those nourished by the sense of sight ([1942] 2011: 16, 173, 216–​8, [1960] 2016: 118–​23). For Bachelard, the rhythms of the body, in particular those experienced at work, also induce a dream-​like dynamism (Wunenburger, 2014: 32). The imagination also draws its dynamism from the materiality of the world. For Bachelard, reverie can focus on an ‘object’ ([1960] 2016: 132). However, the imagination takes its impulse from the ‘elements’ (fire, water, air, and earth) more so than from objects ([1957] 2020: 52). The imagination can be ‘formal’, ‘material’, or ‘dynamic’: consequently, one may see the form of an object, penetrate its substance, or experience its movement ([1943] 2010: 13–​5). The material imagination and the dynamic imagination have, however, a dream-​like power greater than that of the formal imagination (pp. 13–​5). In particular, the movement of ‘verticality’, which is a reminder of the vertical posture of human beings, has a particular value: it captures ‘all the subtle and contained emotions, all the hopes, all the fears, and all the moral forces that entails a future’ (pp. 16–​7). For Bachelard, reveries can be ‘extraverted’ or ‘introverted’, or the result of an ambivalent tension between the two ([1948] 2010: 9). Dreams of power and extraversion, ‘activist’ reveries, such as daydreaming of swimming in turbulent water, have a major dream-​like significance, the dreamer having to be ‘offensive’ in order to respond to the ‘provocation’ of the ‘resistant’ matter ([1942] 2011: 181–​2). However, the images with the most dream-​like power are those which play on an ‘ambivalence’ (p. 19). The dream-​like power of the four elements stems moreover from their capacity to prompt, at the same time, both ‘desire and fear’, ‘good and evil’ (p. 19). Air, for instance, can be an image both of falling and ascension ([1943] 2010: 117). This is also what gives power to those images which create a dynamic relation or a ‘dialectic’ between two poles—​shown-​hidden, soft-​ hard, miniature-​immense, high-​low, etc. For Bachelard, there can be countless dialectics playing out between two poles ([1948] 2010: 19–​36, [1957] 2020: 298). For example, some can unite or reverse poles. The image of ‘hot moisture’ ambivalently joins water and fire ([1942] 2011: 117). Cyrano de Bergerac’s apple, which contains a universe illuminated by a seed, inverts miniature and immensity as well as the values of the fruit and the germ ([1957] 2020: 222–​3).

86   Michèle Charbonneau Based on his conception of time as a succession of instants, Bachelard conceives of the poetic image as ‘the most fleeting product of awareness’ (p. 31). It elicits ‘wonderment’ in the dreamer ([1960] 2016: 3). Due to the dialectics at play, the ‘vertical’ poetic instant is ‘complex: it moves, it proves—​it invites, it consoles—​it is astonishing and familiar’ ([1939] 1994: 104). In tracking the dialectics present in the image and in alternating the meaning of tensions deployed within it, it is also possible to alternate the rhythms and to practice what Bachelard refers to as ‘rhythmanalysis’ ([1936] 2013: x–​xi). For example, while reflecting on the image of water that ‘rumbles’ ([1948] 2010: 100), Bachelard wonders whether it is a ‘rumbling gentleness’ or an ‘affectionate anger’ (p. 101). The alternation between these two rhythms makes it possible to rhythmanalyse the narrative (p. 101). Bachelard interprets poetic images to appreciate them and to praise their benefits (1988: 35): the imagination ‘awakens’ the ‘senses’ ([1960] 2016: 6), ‘invigorates’ ([1957] 2020: 39), and ‘raises awareness’ (p. 112). Both poetry and poetic reverie are ‘joyful’ activities ([1960] 2016: 3, 11) that enable us to probe human psychology (1988: 31). The imagination has a ‘positive function’ consisting in creating the ‘irreal’ ([1957] 2020: 48). It ‘opens up to the future’ and empowers us to ‘predict’ (p. 48). It enables us to ‘live what has not been lived’ (p. 43) and to throw ourselves into action ([1942] 2011: 88). The daydream also ‘helps us to inhabit the world’ ([1960] 2016: 20). Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘star-​isle’ ‘gives to water the meaning of the farthest homeland, of a celestial homeland’ ([1942] 2011: 61). The imagination of the house, in particular, has a significant function in inhabiting the world: ‘Our soul is a dwelling. And in remembering “houses” and “rooms”, we learn to “dwell” in ourselves’ ([1957] 2020: 52).

4.4  The Phenomenological Study of Poetic Images In the course of his work, Bachelard developed a method for reading poetic images. It is, for him, a phenomenological method, although he appropriates it freely (Wunenburger, 2014: 118), just as he did with notions borrowed from psychoanalysis. With the phenomenological method, Bachelard aims to study ‘the very being, the very dynamism’ ([1957] 2020: 28) of a poetic image, focusing on its ‘beginning’ in the ‘individual consciousness’ (p. 30). In other words, he aims to grasp its ‘original virtue’ and the psychic impulse it gives ([1960] 2016: 2). Therrien (1970: 336) describes the method used by Bachelard as a meditation capable of plunging into the ‘depths’ of the image and of soaring to its ‘heights’. This approach seeks to track archetypes present in images, but mostly to experience their reverberation in all their virtualities (Therrien, 1970: 335–​6). The phenomenological study of poetic images functions ‘on its own’ (Bachelard, [1960] 2016: 54), in ‘silence’ or by ‘silently declaiming’ the poem ([1943] 2010: 317). It consists of reading literary images and letting them inspire one’s poetic reveries. It requires also

Bachelard and Phenomenology of Imagination    87 complete immersion into the image ([1960] 2016: 3). To appreciate a literary image, the reader must ‘believe’ in it ([1943] 2010: 340) and read it with ‘sympathy’ and ‘admiration’ ([1957] 2020: 39). The reader must also read it slowly a number of times (p. 76) and, if necessary, copy it out ([1943] 2010: 323). The goal is to appropriate it ([1960] 2016: 4), to the point of provoking in oneself a ‘linguistic enthusiasm’ ([1943] 2010: 8) capable of inducing a desire to rewrite it ([1957] 2020: 76) and to prolong the poet’s reverie (p. 224). A literary image, a poetic image, must ‘[s]‌ignify something else and make one dream differently’ ([1943] 2010: 324). It is distinct from images that project human values into objects, such as the one that creates a love nest from a bird’s nest ([1957] 2020: 156), or from metaphors that have lost ‘all spontaneity’ (p. 138). Bachelard draws his literary images from a number of sources, including novels, poems, commentaries on art works, and dictionaries. He finds them in single words, phrases, or full narratives. The poetic reverie is to be done ‘awake’ ([1960] 2016: 10). It does not entail dreaming of a ‘project’ (p. 13), whether it be building a house ([1957] 2020: 119–​20) or avenging a tragedy ([1960] 2016: 19). Neither is it a matter of ‘describing’ a situation, whether ‘objectively’ or ‘subjectively’ ([1957] 2020: 56). A poetic reverie intertwines ‘memory’ and ‘imagination’ ([1960] 2016: 89) and ‘collects images’ around an object which is then transformed into a ‘cosmos’ in and of itself (p. 150). It ‘cannot be told’; it ‘writes’ and ‘rewrites’ itself ‘with emotion, with taste’ (p. 7). The reveries about ‘childhood’, which turn to the ‘permanent’ childhood in each being (p. 85), have a unique dream-​like value. In La poétique de l’espace, Bachelard adds to his reveries the ‘topo-​analytical’ method which consists in going back into his own memories by thinking about the places where they were deployed ([1957] 2020: 61). The house then appears to him as a privileged ‘instrument’ for undertaking such a topo-​analysis (p. 51), leading to questions such as: ‘was the room large, was the attic very cluttered, [ . . . ] how, in those spaces, was the being able to know silence [ . . . ]?’, etc. (p. 62). Sensitivity to the variation of images is a rule of thumb for assessing nuances ([1960] 2016: 2–​3). Bachelard deploys, in his readings and reveries, a formal, a material, and a dynamic imagination. He also meditates on the dialectics present in the image and the rhythms within it, sometimes alternating them. At times, he ‘exaggerates the exaggeration’ ([1957] 2020: 74) or amplifies the phenomenon contained in the image (p. 177–​ 8). He draws upon his senses ([1960] 2016: 6). He dreams of words ([1957] 2020: 15–​6), of their sound ([1942] 2011: 211), of their gender ([1960] 2016: 16–​7), of their different meanings ([1943] 2010: 328). As language evolves, he keeps his distance from etymological considerations ([1942] 2011: 213) and does not hesitate to make linguistic comparisons in order to explore semantic or phonetic specificities (p. 211). Finally, he combines his readings and reveries in a poetics by grouping them according to the numerous variations he finds of the primary image or the significant dialectics he uncovers in relation to the object under study. La poétique de l’espace illustrates various components of the Bachelardian method. In this work, Bachelard seeks ‘to determine the human value of spaces of possession [ . . . ] of beloved spaces’ ([1957] 2020: 50). By dreaming of a house in which the memories of all other houses, inhabited or dreamed, are intertwined, he observes that it constitutes ‘our

88   Michèle Charbonneau corner of the world’ and ‘our first universe’ (pp. 55–​6), and that its primary ‘benefit’ is that it ‘shelters the reverie’ and ‘protects the dreamer’ (p. 59). But, above all, the house is the ‘cradle’, an ‘enveloping warmth’, where one comes into being (pp. 59–​60). By wandering in a dream-​like state in ‘one’s birthplace’, Bachelard notes that it is ‘physically inscribed in us’ (p. 68), so that our very body would remember, for example, the ‘stair that is a little high’ (p. 68). Observing that the images of the house ‘disperse themselves’, reflecting its ‘complexity’, he endeavours to recreate their ‘unity’ (p. 55). As a result, he provides himself with another method: detecting the connections between images (p. 71), which he grasps in the dialectics traversing the life and the images of houses. Along the ‘vertical’ axis, he observes that one wanders from the attic to the cellar, as from reason to the unconscious (pp. 72–​3). The attic offers a refuge when one wishes to ‘dream clearly’, to see the structure of the whole, while the cellar allows one to dream ‘limitlessly’ of ‘subterranean forces’ (pp. 72–​3). Through a phenomenological study of the underground galleries found in one of Henri Bosco’s novels, galleries which he found too ‘complicated’ to understand on his first reading of the book, he concludes that they allow us to illustrate the ‘hidden goings-​on’ of the novel’s characters, who collect in the many recesses of the house ‘secrets’ and ‘initiatives’ (pp. 75–​6). Thus, Bosco’s cellar proves to be a ‘loom with which to weave one’s destiny’ (p. 76). The tension between the notions of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ strikes Bachelard as equally structuring in the house’s poetics because ‘one must also provide an outside destiny to the inside being’ (p. 64). However, while dreaming of a path to the outside of the house, he observes that the house’s power of attraction is greater than the reveries of extraversion (pp. 64–​6). Looking for images of the house concentrating ‘intimacy’ and ‘reveries’, he operates a variation of images and observes that a ‘palace’ does not necessarily allow us to find ‘centers of simplicity’, contrary to a simple ‘refuge’ (pp. 71, 85). The value of a refuge is that it expresses a desire to ‘snuggle up’, while feeling the ‘joy of inhabiting’ (pp. 85–​6). In this sense, the ‘hut’ appears as ‘the pivotal root of the function of inhabiting a place’ (p. 87) and as a ‘centre of solitude’ (p. 88). Following the musings of a poet, Bachelard observes that it is enough to turn on a light which had been switched off in a room for it to become ‘the eye of the house’ which ‘watches’ over the world (p. 90). The light which, from within the house, observes the observed without, leads him into reveries where houses sparkle like stars and where ‘stars inhabit the earth’ (p. 91). Focusing on a winter storm described by Charles Baudelaire, he concludes that, in the house, ‘we’re quite warm because it is cold outside’ (p. 96; italics in the original text). Next, the alternation between reveries of ‘cottage’ and of ‘castle’ in a text by Saint-​Pol-​Roux allows him to ‘rhythmanalyse the function of inhabiting’, a function which oscillates between the ‘needs to withdraw and to expand, the needs for simplicity and for magnificence’ (p. 124). Leaving behind the dialectical relationship between the house and the universe, Bachelard attempts to undertake a ‘phenomenology of the hidden’ by studying images of wardrobes (p. 52). Dreaming of the word armoire (wardrobe) itself, he writes: ‘Armoire, one of the great words of the French language, both majestic and familiar. [ . . . ] How it opens a breath with the a of the first syllable, and how it closes it softly, slowly in its

Bachelard and Phenomenology of Imagination    89 expiring syllable’ (p. 140; italics in the original text). Subsequently, his poetics of space leads him to meditate upon images of the nest and shell in order to show that they ‘solicit in us a primitivity’ (p. 155). Attempting to discover a nest through the eyes of a child, he unearths an ‘inhabited’ nest, since the ‘empty’ nest does not allow us to dream (pp. 157–​ 8). During his reveries, he detects ‘a sort of paradox of sensitivity’ which he expresses as follows: ‘The nest—​we understand immediately—​is precarious and, however, it triggers in us a reverie of security’ (p. 167; italics in the original text). For him, this reverie is a ‘call for cosmic confidence’ (p. 168). The ‘form’ of the shell leads him to reflect upon ‘the life that begins [ . . . ] by turning’ (p. 172). The inhabited shell then offers him the opportunity to make the ‘phenomenology of the verb to emerge’ (p. 176). To reflect on this, Bachelard broadens the emergence of the snail from its shell by imagining it projected onto a movie screen in fast-​forward motion (p. 178). Faced with the ‘violence’ of the escape imagined in this way, the ‘naïve’ observation of the inhabited shell becomes for him the experience of the ‘fear-​curiosity complex’, despite the minuscule size of the snail (pp. 177–​8). Moreover, having learned that some people bathe in the shells of giant clams (‘Grands Bénitiers’), he imagines himself in one such shell in order to feel the ‘power of relaxation’ and the ‘cosmic comfort’ (p. 191). Thus, the Bachelardian method invites one to discover, through the study of poetic images and daydreaming, the way in which human beings both imagine the world and create the world by imagining it. It also invites us to deepen our understanding of the way in which humans renew their dreams by focusing as much on the dream-​like potentialities of language and of the world’s materiality, as on the dreamer’s own affectivity and senses. Finally, it allows us to study the role of the imagination in the human’s being relationship to the world.

4.5  The Bachelardian Phenomenology and MOS In order to reflect on the contribution of Bachelard’s phenomenology of the imagination to MOS, it is worth underscoring some of its features by contrasting it with the phenomenology of the imaginary which an-Paul Sartre was developing at the same time. Sartre studied the function of the imagination as an act of consciousness (Sartre, [1940] 2004: 3). For him, ‘the image and the perception [ . . . ] represent the two great irreducible attitudes of consciousness. It follows that they exclude one another’ (p. 120). On the one hand, contrary to Bachelard’s contention, the qualities of objects can be described without interference from the imagination (Rodrigo, 2006: 46). On the other hand, imagination requires that we cease perceiving an object in order to conjure an image of it in our consciousness (Sartre, [1940] 2004: 120). So, for Sartre, the imagination creates objects that are irreal (p. 125), whereas for Bachelard it gives access to reality by ‘enhancing its value’ (Bachelard, [1957] 2020: 55; see also Wunenburger,

90   Michèle Charbonneau 2014: 127–8). For the latter, then, imagination has a ‘surreal’, rather than an ‘irreal’ function (Wunenburger, 2014: 128). For Wunenburger (2014: 129–​30), Bachelard’s capacity to grasp the dynamism of images is his most important contribution to the phenomenology of the imagination. Bachelard gives an example by referring directly to Sartre. Whereas Sartre attempts to understand the way in which the ‘viscous’ reveals its being to our consciousness by describing it as a ‘ventouse that sucks me in’ (Sartre, [1943] 2018: 652; italics in the original text), Bachelard responds that if Sartre had imagined the viscous as being manipulated by the dreamy and active hand of a baker, he might have imagined it at worst as a ‘transient offense,’ and a substance ultimately destined to ‘firmness’ (Bachelard, [1948] 2007: 113–​4). Beyond the production of a philosophy of the imagination, Bachelard endeavored, contrary to Sartre, to appreciate poetic images and the moment of their creation in and of themselves (Bachelard, 1988: 35). Research in MOS which draws upon Bachelard’s phenomenology of the imagination is still scarce. Nevertheless, four interrelated research themes seem to be emerging. Some scholars link Bachelard’s and Maurice Merleau-​Ponty’s works. In particular, both philosophers make room in their respective phenomenologies for the intertwining of perception and imagination, and of subject and object (Wunenburger, 2014: 146–​ 53). The first theme touches on creativity. Vesala & Tuomivaara (2018), who examine the relation between creativity at work and that in liminal spaces as experienced by professionals working in creative sectors, draw on Bachelardian phenomenology to conceive of the beach as a liminal space conducive to the imagination. To refine theories of creativity, Bachelard’s thoughts, which have many affinities with English and German Romanticism (Higonnet, 1981), could be linked to Thompson’s (2018) aesthetic and relational perspective of organizational creativity, which also draws on English Romanticism. Like Bachelard, Thompson (2018: 236–​8) recognizes the precedence of imagination over perception, the creative and dynamic features of the imagination, and its relationships with the body, memory, and perception. It seems that Bachelard’s three types of imagination of the materiality of the world (formal, material, and dynamic) could add to Thompson’s own theory of the imagination. Furthermore, Bachelard’s notion of the image’s transsubjectivity and his method consisting in letting images reverberate within oneself, that is to say, his ‘empathetic approach’ to the image (Higonnet, 1981: 35) could enrich Thompson’s relational perspective. This first theme also raises the question of relationships between the imagination, knowledge, and action. Along those lines, Magakian (2006) proposes studying the creative dynamic by examining it from three perspectives, one of which would be a poetic perspective developed with the help of Bachelard’s philosophy of the imagination. Hieronimus’s (2018) study could lead, through the notion of a ‘poetics of initiative’, to a better understanding of the relations Bachelard establishes between imagination and action. Pierron’s (2018b) work could help us to understand the Bachelardian meaning of creativity at work and oppose it to the neo-​conservative meaning of creativity (2018b: 148) often found in the management field. The second theme bears on organizational poetics. Küpers (2002) draws upon Bachelard’s work to integrate the phenomenon of wonderment elicited by poetic images

Bachelard and Phenomenology of Imagination    91 and the capacity for these images to trigger a creative imagination in a phenomenological approach to organization that is sensitive to aesthetic processes. Dahl, Guillet de Monthoux, & Helin (2021) and Helin, Dahl, & Guillet de Monthoux (2022) draw upon Bachelardian phenomenology to understand how ‘daydreaming,’ conceptualized as a soft management skill, helped a farm owner weather the crisis engendered by the fall in the price of milk. Kostera (2020) uses it to explore the creation of meaning produced at the junction of the ‘outward’ and ‘inner’ spaces overlapping in organizations. This second theme shows the relevance of Bachelard’s philosophy for a richer understanding of organizational spaces, as pointed out by Beyes & Holt (2020: 16), who include him among the key authors capable of nourishing the poetics of organizational spatiality. Bachelard’s ([1957] 2020) meditations on the human values found in spaces of possession could serve, in particular, to deepen our understanding of those inherent to organizational spaces. In order to refine the conceptualization of the aesthetic dimension of the organization (Strati, 2010), this theme could bring the notion of material imagination closer to Gagliardi’s (1990) ideas on the organizational pathos and those of Strati (1999) on the creative imagination in aesthetic experiences at work (Charbonneau, 2013: 103–​ 4). Bachelard’s method could also help produce a material poetics of an organization (Charbonneau, 2013: 110). To analyse organizational imaginaries, this theme could benefit from Bachelardian studies in other fields, including those of Berhouma (2017) and Wunenburger (2018) on the material imaginations linked, respectively, to workshop activity and manual labour, the latter study also allowing for reflection on the industrial imagination. The third theme focuses on the issues brought about by the transformations of the material environment in which organizations evolve. Few studies in the field of MOS seem to have drawn upon the Bachelardian phenomenology of the imagination to study these issues. On the other hand, other fields have done so. Thus, Pierron (2018a) suggests linking the material imagination to rational ecological perspective seeking to protect water resources within the framework of a poetic of water that could help enrich the ethical reflections that guide environmental action. For Huang (2020), Bachelard’s philosophy may help to design a ‘cosmopoetics’ by which one conceives that ‘the poetic images as phenomena of speech (logos) reveals the beauty of the world (cosmos) in rendering the happiness of living’ (2020: 42; italics in the original text). The substance of Bachelard’s studies on the four elements could fuel research on this theme (Macauley, 2010; Charbonneau, 2013: 110). In the same manner, one may think that Bachelardian phenomenology could offer a fresh perspective on management issues arising from the advent of the digital age. In addition to contributing to these three theoretical themes, Bachelard’s phenomenology of the imagination also allows for the renewal of certain epistemological and methodological questions. Studying the imagination in research activities, Maizeray & Janand (2017) use Bachelard’s phenomenology, along with some of his early psychoanalytical ideas, to explore the poetic imagination deployed in the research process followed in two studies in human resource management. Armitage (2012) refers, for his part, to Bachelardian phenomenology to test a process designed to formulate

92   Michèle Charbonneau research problems, a process which takes the form of discussions based on drawings. Focusing instead on the imagination deployed in an organizational context, Helin, Dahl, & Guillet de Monthoux (2020) use Bachelard to create a space for interviews (a caravan, in their case) capable of encouraging and sheltering their respondents’ poetic reveries. Still inspired by Bachelard, Dahl, Guillet de Monthoux, & Helin (2021) renew their analytical method, interweaving it with reading, writing, listening, and looking at photos (2021: 49–​50). They also devise a novel way of ‘writing’ their results by combining photographs of a farm with a poem and a portrait in order to communicate the poetic reveries of their respondent (p. 57). Bachelard’s phenomenology of the imagination, therefore, seems to allow for a significant renewal of research methods. One way of utilizing Bachelard’s works even more fully would entail deploying his method and poetics in order to read images inevitably contained in any research data. Although conducted in the field of gerontology, Baxter et al.’s (2020) offer an example of how to use Bachelardian phenomenology in the context of a hermeneutic study. Referring to Bachelard’s study of the symbolism of the door, the authors conclude that, in order to ‘thrive,’ the elderly living in senior’s residences must be able to freely open, close and walk through doors, whether they be physical, symbolic or metaphorical (2020: 865). Similarly, while conceptualising the practice of daydreaming, Helin, Dahl, & Guillet de Monthoux (2022) explore the poetics of a farm owner’s daydreams by using Bachelard’s notions of the material imagination, vertical temporality, and the imaginative relation to the space we inhabit. This fourth research theme could also provide an opportunity to discuss the limitations of the Bachelardian method. One such limit is related to the subjectivity of the dreamer. Aware of this subjectivity, Bachelard proposes at least on one occasion two different readings of the same verses ([1948] 2010: 30). The poetic reveries could, as a result, give rise to a fertile hermeneutic hesitation. Although, for Bachelard, the process of poetic reverie required solitude, he would also discuss his poetic meditations in class and in exchanges with poets (Pouliquen, 2005: 27). Consequently, the organization of such discussions, as incorporated in a number of qualitative research methods, could be added to the methodology. However, the type of exchanges likely to nourish a phenomenology of the imagination remains to be explored. Ultimately, Bachelard’s method is demanding (Therrien, 1970: 340), and requires constant and voracious reading in order to develop a sensitivity to the imagination (Bachelard, [1960] 2016: 23).

4.6  Conclusion While expanding of the philosophy of science, Gaston Bachelard developed an interest in poetic imagination. The philosopher from Champagne once wrote in a letter: ‘My whole life is under the sign of the late’ (Bachelard quoted in Parinaud, 1996: 25). His most significant studies may have been published relatively late in life, but the fact remains that his work, intensely rich from both a qualitative and a quantitative point of view, has garnered considerable international and interdisciplinary attention (Wunenburger,

Bachelard and Phenomenology of Imagination    93 2014: 16). Bontems (2010: 202–​3) observes that references to his work are multiplying. Interest in his work in the field of MOS, while less pronounced, seems to be following this trend. His phenomenology of imagination has shed new light on four research themes: organizational and workplace creativity, organizational poetics, issues related to the transformation of the material environment of organizations, and methods for studying the imagination in organizations and research activities. Imagination, which for Bachelard is ‘a major force of human nature’ ([1957] 2020: 48), remains a minor topic in management and organizational theories (Thompson, 2018: 233). Bachelard’s philosophy, with its dual conception of the being, joining rationalism and imagination, recalls a debate that has resonated in the field for over a century: whether management should be considered a science or an art. Bachelard’s phenomenology of the imagination, once resituated in the context of his entire work, could thus contribute to a fifth research theme in MOS, focusing on imagination in management education. A step has been taken in that direction by Dahl, Guillet de Monthoux, & Helin (2022), who call upon Bachelard in order to include art, poetry and contact with the materiality of objects, among other things, within management training, thus designing a poetic space in the classroom conducive to creative learning. Ultimately, the phenomenology of the imagination could teach us to dream poetically. The ability to use creative imagination resonates perhaps more strongly today than ever before given the complexity of some issues, including the ecological crisis. This may make Bachelard’s phenomenology of imagination even more relevant to MOS. It seems that the door which Bachelard ‘half-​opens’ in this field, to return to an image of which he is particularly fond ([1957] 2020: 307), is based on a ‘open’ and ‘participatory’ humanism, in the sense, following Préclaire (1971: 152–​4), that it invites each of us to speak up and to listen to the poetic reverie of the other resounding in oneself. Most certainly, it is a humanism that requires constant renewal, within a sympathetic relationship to the materiality of the world that leaves room for ambivalence, but one that projects us, along with others, towards the future. The achievement of this goal relies on our capacity to communicate a poetic relationship to the world, capable in turn of creating a surreality between two subjects.

Acknowledgements The author thanks Joanne Deller and Michel Bock for their assistance in translating this paper, including all cited excerpts from Bachelard’s work. The author assumes full responsibility for any error the translation may contain.

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96   Michèle Charbonneau Pierron, Jean-​ Philippe. (2018b). Travail, matière et imagination. Pour une analyse bachelardienne de la praxis laborante. Éthique, Politique, Religions—​Imaginaire et Praxis. Autour de Gaston Bachelard, 2(13), 147–​167. Pouliquen, Jean-​Luc. (2005). Gaston Bachelard, les poètes et la poésie. Reflexão, 30(88), 19–​28. Préclaire, Madeleine. (1971). Une poétique de l’homme. Essai sur l’imagination d’après l’œuvre de Gaston Bachelard. Tournai: Desclée & Cie. Montréal: Bellarmin. Ramnoux, Clémence. (1965). Avec Gaston Bachelard vers une phénoménologie de l’Imaginaire. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 70(1), 27–​42. Rodrigo, Pierre. (2006). Sartre et Bachelard. Variations autour de l’imagination matérielle. In Pierre Rodrigo & Jean-​Claude Gens (eds.), Bachelard et la phénoménologie. Cahiers Gaston Bachelard (Vol. 8, pp. 45–​55). Dijon: Centre Gaston Bachelard. Sartre, Jean-​Paul. ([1943] 2018). Being and nothingness: An essay in phenomenological ontology. New York: Routledge. Sartre, Jean-​Paul. ([1940] 2004). The imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination. New York: Routledge. Strati, Antonio. (1999). Organization and aesthetics. London: Sage. Strati, Antonio. (2010). Aesthetic understanding of work and organizational life: Approaches and research developments. Sociology Compass, 4(10), 880–​893. Therrien, Yves. (1970). La révolution de Gaston Bachelard en critique littéraire. Ses fondements, ses techniques, sa portée. Du nouvel esprit scientifique à un nouvel esprit littéraire. Paris: Klincksieck. Thiboutot, Christian, & Annick Martinez. (1999). Gaston Bachelard and phenomenology: Outline of a theory of the imagination. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 30(1), 1–​17. Thompson, Neil A. (2018). Imagination and creativity in organizations. Organization Studies, 39(2–​3), 229–​250. Vesala, Hanne, & Seppo Tuomivaara. (2018). Experimenting with work practices in a liminal space: A working period in a rural archipelago. Human Relations, 71(10), 1371–​1394. Wavelet, Jean-​ Michel. (2019). Gaston Bachelard, l’inattendu. Les chemins d’une volonté. Paris: L’Harmattan. Wunenburger, Jean-​Jacques. (2014). Gaston Bachelard, poétique des images. Paris: Mimésis. Wunenburger, Jean-​ Jacques. (2018). L’imagination au travail. Bachelard, philosophe des sociétés préindustrielles. Éthique, Politique, Religions—​Imaginaire et Praxis. Autour de Gaston Bachelard, 2(13), 169–​185.

Further Reading Rizo-​Patron, Eileen. (2017). Bachelard’s hermeneutics: Between psychoanalysis and phenomenology. In Eileen Rizo-​Patron, with Edward S. Casey, & Jason M. Wirth (eds.), Adventures in phenomenology: Gaston Bachelard (ch. 7). Albany: SUNY Press. Vydra, Anton. (2017). Bachelard vis-​a-​vis phenomenology. In Eileen Rizo-​Patron, with Edward S. Casey, & Jason M. Wirth (eds.), Adventures in phenomenology: Gaston Bachelard (ch. 6). Albany: SUNY Press.

Chapter 5

F rom Phenomenol o g y to a Metaphysics of H i story The Unfinished Odyssey of Merleau-​Ponty François-​X avier de Vaujany

Merleau-​Ponty is a singular philosopher in the history of philosophy.1 His dreamed masterpiece, the peak of his intellectual trajectory—​The Visible and the Invisible—​was brutally interrupted by his death in 1961. It is a partial, even allusive, piece in some parts. Most of his last books appeared as lectures delivered at the Collège de France in the second half of the 1950s, and some were retranscribed by his students before being checked by him or other philosophers (e.g. Claude Lefort). In a way, the late Merleau-​ Ponty is a disembodied or indirect presence, a movement towards something, a pure momentum. This is such a paradox for a leading intellectual who deeply explored the issues of perception and presence. Does this mean that such a momentum is not meaningful? Does this indicate that something is missing in the conceptual landscape offered by this French philosopher? Does this mean that Merleau-​Ponty’s legacy is not of interest because of its final incompleteness? Certainly not. The contributions of Merleau-​Ponty to phenomenology, continental philosophy, process philosophy, and political thought are obvious—​from the two founding books (based on his PhD dissertation) published in 1942 and 1945, namely, The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, to his final lectures at the Collège de France and his last books, such as the Eye and Mind.2 The thought of Merleau-​Ponty was always

1  As

a French speaker, I used only original sources in French, and I did my own translations. The pleasure to be immersed in the immediate poesy of Merleau-​Ponty’s writings and the desire to keep an atmosphere in the translation were stronger than my fear of losing my readers on the way because of my imperfect English. All misinterpretations and misunderstandings in the final quotes used here are mine. 2  In order to enter the world of Merleau-​Pontian thought, I recommend the handbooks of Carman & Hansen (2004) or Romdenh-​Romluc (2010) in English, as well as the books of Bonan (2010) and Vibert (2018) in French.

98   François-Xavier de Vaujany in movement, adventurous, reexpressing itself (his last book reexpresses directly and simply some key seminal ideas from the perspective of the experience of art), and continuing but also discontinuing itself on the way to an ontology of flesh or an indirect ontology (de Saint-​Aubert, 2006, 2018; Bonan, 2010; Vibert, 2018), contributing gradually as well to a metaphysics of history (Revel, 2015; Terzi, 2017; de Vaujany, 2021). Obviously, there is a first and a second (late) Merleau-​Ponty (Bonan, 2010; Vibert, 2018). The first Merleau-​Ponty extends phenomenology around the issues of perception and embodiment, and the second also discontinues it. The former is well-​known for his contributions to or critiques of the phenomenological continent, particularly in relation to Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. In many ways, the latter overflows phenomenology (e.g. with the presence of Machiavel, Bergson, Saussure, or Whitehead) and an unexpected continuity in the future with the work of the late Foucault (Revel, 2015; de Vaujany, 2021). I will use this simple two-​step history to structure this chapter, but I will try to emphasize both the continuities and the chiasmatic relationship between the two movements. The first Merleau-​Ponty is still present in the second (reexpressed), and the second Merleau-​Ponty is at stake in the first (see Carman & Hansen, 2004; Bonan, 2010; Vibert, 2018). For the second Merleau-​Ponty, I will stress a new metaphysics of history that was closely linked to his indirect ontology and that prefigured the historical approach of Foucault ([1982] 2001, 1984a) twenty years later (Revel, 2015; Terzi, 2017; de Vaujany, 2021).3

5.1  The Prima of Perception within Phenomenological Traditions: The First Merleau-​Ponty The first Merleau-​Ponty (1942, 1945) was mainly interested in perception, our perceptive relationship with the word. For him, the ‘I’ is an acting instance (consciousness is originally not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’;4 Merleau-​Ponty, 1945: 160). We perceive in the flow of our past, present, and anticipated activities this flow that we are thrown into. And the ‘I’ has no necessity. We are primarily a projective space, a decentred set of projections that punctually contribute to an ‘I’ in the flow of perceptions. These perceptions in and through activities require continuity—​our body as an experience. This is a major originality of the work of Merleau-​Ponty. The presence of our bodies (indistinctively individual and collective), the embodied memory of our past 3  See also Sabot (2013) for a conversation between the early Merleau-​Ponty and Foucault. This (very interesting) comparison will not be explored here. 4  Original quote in French: ‘La conscience est originairement non pas un “je pense que” mais un “je peux”.’

Phenomenology to Metaphysics of History    99 activities, and the scope of our perceptions are at the heart of our relationships with the world. They continuously space our world. As beautifully summarized by Giddens (1984a: 65), The body, Merleau-​Ponty points out, does not ‘occupy’ time-​space in exactly the same sense as material objects do [ . . . ] The time-​space relations of presence, centered upon the body, are geared not into a ‘spatiality of position,’ in Merleau-​Ponty’s words, but a ‘spatiality of situation’. The ‘here’ of the body refers not to a determinate series of coordinates but to the situation of the active body oriented towards its tasks.

Thus, everyday embodied activity opens its own time-​space interwoven within a shared space-​time (see Merleau-​Ponty, 1945: 291, his chapter about space). In this way, Merleau-​Ponty (1945) thus makes a strong distinction between the objective body (corps ‘objectif ’ ou ‘biologique’) and the phenomenological body (‘corps phénoménal’). The phenomenological body is perceptive. It has a history that is largely interwoven with our biological bodies and the wider expression of the world. It has potential for activity, and it is constituted by the activity feeling itself, delimiting itself, exploring its capabilities to live in the world and to transform the world. Far beyond the objective body by itself, the phenomenal body is not fully perceived as such. Introspectively, we never really directly see our bodies and ourselves. If we do, we need mediations, which only allow partial access to our body. As living bodies, we are always ahead of ourselves—​a couple of metres, seconds, and sequences ahead of what we do, perceiving our bodies primarily through our eyes and visual perceptions that locate ourselves in the flow of our activities (in advance of our activities). All our prehension capabilities are also dispersed ahead of us. Our grasping hands, our eyes, our feet—​we see our own body through the bodies of all those in front of us. We live our lives ahead and by procuration. This phenomenal body is a proper body (‘corps propre’). Merleau-​Ponty (1945: 245) explains, ‘The body itself is in the world like the heart is in an organism—​it continually keeps the visible spectacle alive, it animates and feeds it internally, and it forms a system with it’.5 Our proper body is our self. It is the singularity of any activity searching in its process the origins of its own flow. To explain what he means by a proper body, Merleau-​Ponty (1945) uses the example of someone visiting an apartment and the process of spacing it. He explains that the visitors do not experience a top-​down vision, an overhanging perspective. By contrast, they build the space from the very scale, possibilities, and perspectives of the walking body itself. In turn, the process of visiting the apartment opens the way to an agentic body, feeling itself and placing itself in the movements of the visit. The self is thus a part of the proper body and the spacing produced by our embodied experience of the world. 5  Original quote in French: ‘Le corps propre est dans le monde comme le cœur dans l’organisme: il maintient continuellement en vie le spectacle visible, il l’anime et le nourrit intérieurement, il forme avec lui un système.’

100   François-Xavier de Vaujany To describe our embodied capabilities, Merleau-​Ponty used the notion of a corporeal scheme (‘schéma corporel’ in French). He expounds, ‘My whole body is, to me, not a collection of organs juxtaposed in space. I hold it in undivided possession, and I know the position of each of my limbs through a body diagram in which they are all enveloped’6 (Merleau-​Ponty, 1945: 127). Our embodied capability is differentiated around numerous punctual, dispersed, and interrelated organs. But this process of differentiation, its systemic nature, is transparent for activity. Most of the time, as the ‘I’ is absent and activity itself prevails phenomenologically, the body is invisible to the subject produced in the flow of activities. The corporeal scheme is thus constitutive of its own space. It situates in this space its sub-​capabilities, all interwoven within the capabilities of the larger scheme. In the present of our acting in the world, we just feel all our organic capabilities as part of a general scheme. In using our cars, in the process of driving, we feel our right hand here, our left hand doing this, our left foot located here, our eyes staring at this point; we are just acting. All our organic capabilities are wrapped invisibly in our making of the world. Each organ, as the entire involvement of our phenomenological bodies, is just agentic. Our presence in the world is both central and anecdotal, invisible to ourselves but (paradoxically) visible to others, helping us to reflect our self. We exist continuously as ourselves mainly for others. From the inside of our lived present, we are more a multiplicity of doing than the clear-​cut presence of ‘I’. This joint exploration of space and the self is part of what Merleau-​Ponty (1945) calls ‘depth’.7 Depth is an exploratory experience and the emergent possibilities of this experience. It is the opposite of a pure imaginary experience. Merleau-​Ponty (1945: 380) explains, ‘The imaginary is without depth. It does not respond to our efforts to vary our points of view; it does not lend itself to our observation’.8 As an exploration, a playful exploration, perception is possible because of the depth of our experience.9 Later, Merleau-​Ponty ([1955] 2000: 147) expounds on how our experience of the world is a ‘system with several entries’. Thus, ‘in each perception, matter itself takes shape and meaning’. Materiality is a present temporality, as Bergson ( [1896] 2012) would have said, but it is a present involving simultaneously the reality of the world lived and the active exploration of its reality. 6 Original

quote in French: ‘Mon corps tout entier n’est pas pour moi un assemblage d’organes juxtaposés dans l’espace. Je le tiens dans une possession indivise et je connais la position de chacun de mes membres par un schéma corporel où ils sont tous enveloppés.’ 7  The meaning of this very important notion will evolve with the second Merleau-​Ponty (see Mazis, 2014; de Saint-​Aubert, 2018: 393–​5). Indeed, ‘from the time of his thesis projects in the 1930s until his last writings, the question of depth accompanies Merleau-​Ponty’s research as a new type of being, conceived as neither subject nor object, neither consciousness nor extension. [ . . . ]. We do not see depth, we see in depth: unobjectivable, depth requires that we abandon ourselves to it so that it might deliver itself as such.’ Saint-​Aubert also adds (p. 394) that ‘depth already envelops us’. 8  Original quote in French: ‘L’imaginaire est sans profondeur, il ne répond pas à nos efforts pour varier nos points de vue, il ne se prête pas à notre observation.’ 9  Deleuze would not say ‘our’ experience but, more directly, the experience of ‘depth’ itself (see my chapter (Chapter 22) about depth in Part III).

Phenomenology to Metaphysics of History    101 Another key concept—​intercorporeity—​is put forward to stress the individual and collective dimensions of our corporeity. To act together in a common world, we need to rely on a shared corporeal legacy, sedimented gestures, learned and acquired postures of a shared present, and embodied experiences that are both internalized and expressed as meaningful. This common body, both in and out (or rather, always in between), constitutes our perceptive and agentic worlds. Intercorporeity is continuously repeated, extended, and reinvented. Without intercorporeity, we would be stuck in opaque experiential bubbles. Intersubjectivity and interagentivity would not be possible. We would not even be individuals or individual bodies, as our perceptions rely on any embodied alterity that is likely to make our singularity resonant. Intercorporeity is a process beyond the individual and collective realms. In the background, the phenomenology of perception offered by Merleau-​Ponty is, in some ways, influenced explicitly by Gestalt theory (see Merleau-​Ponty, 1945). This theory is linked to a new psychology by Merleau-​Ponty, who states that we do not really perceive and sense reality. Rather, we keep reactivating larger forms, learned templates, and relations. We do not really perceive or sense an external reality; instead, we reactivate a living world that inhabits us as much as it is outside of us (as an experimented capability to view and act in the world). Part of our present perception and ongoing activity is always a past. Indeed, fully perceiving the world would be exhausting. We would not be able to act, move, or even think because we would drown in our own perceptions. The field of presence thus keeps selecting, stressing, or putting aside sounds, tactilities, and visual elements, with some focus generated by the flow of our activities themselves. The forms and shapes internalized in our past experiences help us to do that. However, in a way, these perceptive activities are also creative. When we yell at someone in front of us on the street, we perceptually imagine their faces and the parts of their bodies that we do not see (and have never seen). We keep prolonging lines, shapes, and even matters that are not part of our immediate perceptions. The past, present, and future have a strange co-​presence in our agentic relationship with the world. They continue to coexist in the field of presence. As suggested by Merleau-​Ponty (1945) in his chapter about time in Phenomenology of Perception, the past, the present, and the future flow simultaneously through our activities. They move together in our process of becoming. The first Merleau-​Ponty largely reminds us of and extends some key lessons from Husserl and Heidegger (see other chapters in Part I about these philosophers). He extends Husserl,10 as he comes closer to our experience of the world by further stressing its embodied nature. Heidegger is not only largely repeated but also discontinued by the first Merleau-​Ponty. The French philosopher is mainly interested in the issue of being, the obviousness of being, the transparent process of appearing in the world. Heidegger (1927) invents a systematic new language to express this sense of continuity, of obviousness, which is never questioned in our relationship with the world. For him, common

10 

See Chapter 2 about Husserl in Part I of this book.

102   François-Xavier de Vaujany language itself is part of the equation, making visible and sensible this sense of obviousness only in the context of disruptions, of breakdown, when things go wrong. I make phone calls every day using my smartphone. It is simply wrapped into movements and directionalities. However, one day, this technique does not respond as usual. The surface of the phone does not react to my fingers sliding on it. Suddenly, this transparent object has a volume, a weight, and a complex structure (again). But what happened before when it was just part of the flow of everyday activities? How could we describe this usual, habitual relationship with the world, this mode of being? Heidegger (1927) offers an extensive vocabulary to make sense of this ordinariness. Merleau-​Ponty (1942, 1945) extends these views by returning not only to our perceptions but also to the neurological and psychological knowledge of his time, offering a surprising interdisciplinary work in Structure and Behavior. He also makes a more obvious move towards metaphysical thought, something Heidegger kept departing from. Other philosophers, such as Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz, and, of course, Bergson,11 have also been put into conversation with this emergent phenomenology of perception. Overcoming traditional dualisms, such as inside-​outside, touched-​ touching, subject-​object, and subjectivism-​objectivism, was a key concern for the young philosopher, who was eager to illuminate the prima facie of perception in the world. But the ambition to describe perception from the within of a world already there settled major bifurcations towards a more ontological and even metaphysical approach.

5.2  The Second Merleau-​Ponty: Building an Indirect Ontology From the mid-​1950s onwards, Merleau-​Ponty both continued and discontinued his earlier work. Like Heidegger and, later, Foucault, he moved towards an ontology (called an ‘indirect ontology’, a sensible ontology, or an ‘ontology of flesh’; see Carman & Hansen, 2004; Bonan, 2010; Vibert, 2018; and Revel, 2015). Phenomenological issues, such as (intentional) consciousness, experience, subjectivity, and perception, remained central, but they acquired a different ontological status. They came from within the happening of the world. If Merleau-​Ponty (1945) acknowledged for long that we are thrown into the world, he did not get to the radical ontological and political implications of that stance before the second half of the 1950s. As thrown into the world, the subject becomes more and more secondary, consequential.12 As an intentional and constitutive instance, consciousness becomes a

11  See Chapter 23 by Andrew Kirkpatrick (in Part III of this Handbook about the relationship between Bergson, Whitehead, and Merleau-​Ponty. 12  I also see in that view many proximities with the pragmatist description of Mead (see Rosenthal & Bourgeois, 1991; Bourgeois & Rosenthal, 1990).

Phenomenology to Metaphysics of History    103 secondary topic, much more an event among others, a possibility rather than a starting point or a primordial constitutive instance. He thus explains in the unfinished manuscript of the Visible and the Invisible, ‘We need to take, first, not consciousness and its Ablaufphänomen13 with its intentional distinctive threads, but the whirlwind of spacing-​temporalizing (which is flesh and not consciousness in front of a noema)’14 (Merleau-​Ponty, 1964: 193). By this, Merleau-​Ponty means that flows and activities come first, as they are primordial to his new ontology. Perception is not a prior activity. Activity enables and opens perception. Activity is also primordial, before and beyond perception as a sensible activity linked to a delayed reaction (but this temporality, the in-​between of the event and the reaction, remains important). One of the central concepts in the indirect ontology of Merleau-​Ponty is that of flesh (‘chair’). Beyond any idea of an individual body and a located embodiment, flesh characterizes the whole ontological structure of the world, ‘among which the body is just a sample’ (Bonan, 2010: 236). It is ‘an element likely to be affected, which makes visible a part of being while keeping a latency, a part of the invisible, which is a reservoir of meaning’ (p. 236). Merleau-​Ponty (1961: 178) explains that ‘The thickness of flesh between the viewing and the thing is constitutive of its visibility as much as it is of the corporeality of the viewing of the viewer. It is not an obstacle between each of them; it is the meaning of their communication’,15 their mediation. Flesh is the general in-​betweenness of the world, a continuous process of happening, opening, and setting distances, forming subjects, objects, and responsive objects, in general. Viewing, perceiving, or feeling is not a property of a subject (e.g. a viewer). It is the process of the world itself—​what makes it alive. Flesh is the primordial process of the sensibility of the world and what enables attachments of and in the world. Flesh involves another key phenomenon—​ reversibility. Merleau-​ Ponty (1964) returns to his famous (Husserlian) example of the two hands touching each other. It is impossible to distinguish, phenomenologically, one hand touching the other. The sense of touching is largely reversible. There is a functional unity in this experience; all that happens is in between. From this, Merleau-​Ponty suggests generalizing this idea applied to the process of touching to our experiences of the world—​basically all our experiences. Regardless of the acting involved, we are inhabited visually, olfactively, auditively, and tactily as much as the world itself is acting upon us visually, auditively, olfactively, and tactily. And the reality itself of the world is in this relation and the modes of relations structuring it. This in-​betweenness is perceptually how the world happens in our present.

13 

Phenomenological flow, ‘phénomène de l’écoulement’ in French. quote in French: ‘Il faut prendre comme premier non la conscience et son Ablaufsphänomen avec ses fils intentionnels distincts, mais le tourbillon que cet Ablaufsphänomen schématise, le tourbillon spatialisant-​temporalisant (qui est chair et non conscience en face d’un noème).’ 15  Original quote in French: ‘L’épaisseur entre le voyant et la chose est constitutive de sa visibilité à elle comme de sa corporéité à lui; ce n’est pas un obstacle entre lui et elle, c’est leur moyen de communication.’ 14 Original

104   François-Xavier de Vaujany In a very processual way,16 the late Merleau-​Ponty transforms consciousness into a (beautiful) epiphenomenon and gives up any traditional philosophy of consciousness (Bonan, 2010: 71; Revel, 2015; de Vaujany, 2021). One of the turning points is the concept of institution, which features both a state (instituted) and a process (instituting) happening in the realm of signs and their differences. Thus, ‘institutions include not only events with major consequences but also matrix movements, those opening a historical field with their own unity. Institutions make possible a series of events, a historicity—​an eventfulness of principle’17 (Merleau-​Ponty, 1995: 24). In the abstract of his lectures at the Collège de France, Merleau-​Ponty more precisely defines an institution as follows: These events, in an experience that endows the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, will form a thinkable sequel or history—​or again the events that deposit a sense in me, not just something surviving or a residue but a call to follow, the demand of a future. (p. 3)

As with any event, an institution simultaneously has singularity, facticity, fecundity, and anonymity (Terzi, 2017: 8). Each event is unique (singular) in the world (and all the world is at stake in a single event); each event is productive, it makes, and it happens (facticity); each event calls for a future; each event becomes and is differential (fecundity); and each event is primarily an activity or a set of activities, making subjects secondary in the process (anonymity). Interestingly, an institution also fosters non-​events (for the inside of the process of sense-​making involved in collective activity) or prevents the occurrence of some events. It frames the world, opens some possibilities in its processes, and hinders others. Terzi (2017: 11) explains that an institution ‘includes mainly sedimentation and the forgetting of the event, its crystallization in the institution as a result, in the sense of what has been instituted and occults its original happening, functioning at the same time as what protects from the occurrence of new events’. An institution is thus both a creative (it calls for something, opens, and reconfigures) and conservative (it hinders, puts aside, and focuses) process. But beyond (and before) the productive differences between the signification done and the signification in the making (continuously reopening it), Nature (written with a capital letter by Merleau-​Ponty) becomes. This is the passage of time described by Whitehead (Merleau-​Ponty, 2003). Signs themselves, as self-​creations, in

16 Process

philosophy is obviously a source of inspiration for Merleau-​Ponty—​in his continuous (more or less visible) conversation with Bergson (as decisive as his conversation with Sartre), his reading of Wahl ([1932] 2004), and his use of Whitehead’s ([1920] 2013, [1929] 2010) thought in the lecture about Nature (see Merleau-​Ponty, 1995). For readers interested in these issues, I advise Vanzago (2008) or the great book by Hamrick & Van der Veken (2012). 17 Original quote in French: “non seulement des événements de grande conséquence, mais [les] événements matrices, ouvrant un champ historique qui a unité. L’institution est ce qui rend possible une série d’événements, une historicité: une événementialité de principe.”

Phenomenology to Metaphysics of History    105 their co-​presence and relative absence, in their productive differences, as in between ontogenesis, primarily co-​produce the world instituting and instituted by processes and can play with and generate beyond any intent or projection. The continuous reopening of the world primarily starts from nothing; or, rather, it is never inscribed in a predefined line linking the future to past events. Lived events continuously configure and reconfigure the lines at stake in experience. In his lecture about Nature, Merleau-​Ponty (1995) thus opens another interesting window to understanding the issue of temporality—​the experience of a melody. The thesis defended at this stage is very close to his argument about institution. Beyond his use of reversibility as a spatial process, he defends a more temporal vision of our experience of the world. For him, when one hears the first note of a melody, the last one is already there, part of the flow, the pace, the impulse, and the meaning of the lived melody (see Merleau-​Ponty, 1995: 228 in the section titled ‘The philosophical interpretation of the notion of Umwelt by Uexküll’). Likewise, when the last note appears, the first one is there. This also applies to the notes in the middle in their relationships with the other notes. Temporality then appears as a temporal arc, a temporal reversibility, a process always stretched by a memory and by anticipation, a past and a future. Our shared present and all events within it are experientially temporal arcs interwoven with one another, prehending one another. In our open lives, we are always in the between of numerous shared memories that enable collective activity and serve as the temporal bases of our opening to the world. As continuous movements, the melodies of the world make it possible to act upon the world. Institution is thus a temporal process of organizing (very important for the field of Management and Organization Studies (MOS); see de Vaujany & Aroles, 2019) that happens in and from the chaos of the world. Institution is not only the temporal structure of events (past, present, and future) in which any activity can occur and become meaningful, but it is also the very process of becoming of this temporal structure, it’s a continuous reconfiguration. An institution is continuously amended. Activity repeats it, opens it, and transforms it in the same movement. The discontinuities of collective activities need the continuities of institutions, and the continuities of institutions need the discontinuities of activities stemming from them. Related to his departure from a phenomenology of (intentional) consciousness,18 Merleau-​Ponty sheds light on a key tenet of his new indirect ontology—​the distinction between institution and constitution. He states, Constituting [ . . . ] is almost the opposite of instituting: instituted has a meaning without me; constituted has a meaning only for me and for the me of that instant. Constitution means a continued institution, i.e., never finished. The instituted strives

18 He

therefore criticizes Husserl for his long hesitation before moving beyond an intentional, constitutive view of consciousness (see Chapter 2 about Husserl in Part I).

106   François-Xavier de Vaujany for its future, has its future, its temporality, while the constituted inherits all from me that constitutes (the body, the clock).19 (Merleau-​Ponty, 2003: 46)

Indeed, consciousness is absent from the pre-​reflexive world of institutions. Subjectivity is a (possible) consequence of this process; it needs this world that is already there to happen. Subjectivation involves institution and institutionalization, as much as activity involves passivity. Subjectivation is interwoven with objectivation. Likewise, institution requires subjectivation and the continuous process of happening and novelty in and of the world20 that will be cultivated and expanded by subjective work not only in but also beyond what is instituted in the present. In this direction, Merleau-​Ponty opens a way for both flesh and materiality. He explains during his lecture about institution and passivity that The manner in which the measuring resists time reveals that time is included in its own substance and is not only something that participates. It is the piece of sugar that makes me wait; I thus need to put in it a duration (see Bergson in his work about immediate data of consciousness).21 (Merleau-​Ponty, 2003: 44)

The event of my waiting is part of a broader event in which the sugar is in a process of becoming, which is reality itself. The ontological duration of the sugar melting settles the duration of my consciousness that possibly conceives it. And, here, the sugar is not an institution, or if it is one, it is the most general institution of the world—​time itself. As a primary unstructured set of events, time keeps calling for a future. It is fundamentally a novelty calling for novelty. Here, we find a view very close to process philosophy, particularly that of Bergson ([1896] 2012); Alexander (1920); and Whitehead ([1929] 2010).22 It is notably with the lectures at the Collège de France (e.g. his lessons about institution and passivity or Nature) that Merleau-​Ponty has gradually elaborated his indirect ontology. In the writings of the French philosopher, institutions are increasingly linked to the locus of our passivities. A passivity is a set of perceptions that we no longer question. We

19 

Original quote in French: “Constituer ( . . . ) est presque le contraire d’instituer: l’institué a sens sans moi, le constitué n’a de sens que pour moi et pour le moi de cet instant. Constitution [signifie] institution continuée (i.e., jamais faite). L’institué enjambe son avenir, a son avenir, sa temporalité, le constitué tient tout de moi qui constitue (le corps, l’horloge).” 20  Following this argument, the work of Merleau-​Ponty clearly becomes a ‘metaphysics of history’. 21  Original quote in French: ‘La manière dont le mesurant s’accroche au temps, lui résiste, indique que le temps est inclu dans sa substance même, et non pas seulement participé: c’est le morceau de sucre qui me fait attendre, il faut donc que je mette en lui une durée (Bergson d’après les données).’ 22  A central reference in Merleau-​Ponty’s (1995: 153–​68) lectures about Nature; see his c ­ hapter 3 in part II, ‘L’idée de Nature chez Whitehead’.

Phenomenology to Metaphysics of History    107 act upon the world transparently. Interestingly, Merleau-​Ponty defends the chiasmatic relationship between activity and passivity. Our most extreme passivity (e.g. sleeping) is always active. Dreams epitomize this oneiric world, which is part of the flow still inside us. At some point, we wake up, suggesting a potentiality that is still inside us to come back to an awakened relationship with our world. The same applies to our activities. Being active involves putting aside many perceptions, both effective and potential. While I typed this text, my perceptions could be multicentred. I could pay attention to the sound of the water in the bathroom close to me. I could notice the birds singing outside or the quick movements of a child skating on the street. I could even take care of my own breath. But the flow itself of my activities generates some focus, and my passivities are, in a way, active capabilities. This complex ecology of perceptions and non-​perceptions, as events inhabiting my field of presence, is also the subject of a learning process. Of course, institutions are far beyond immediate perception. Institutions rely on numerous mediations, such as buildings, narratives, cultural artefacts, and Nature itself. This vast process of ordering from the inside of experience is also largely and reversibly outside of it, an immanent negativity calling for something, continuously inviting a directional future. The Google search engine, Google News, and Google Hangouts serialize, narrate, and eventalize our experiences of the world. We are inhabited and used by Google as much as we use it. We have, for instance, a Google-​like relationship with knowledge. We do not learn information, but we memorize the shortcuts and series of acts we use on Google to find an interesting page for a report asked by our boss. We do not devote a specific time-​space to learning (e.g. by reading at night by the fireplace at home), but we develop impulsive and consumerist relationships with short pieces of information continuously reassembled. This is beyond any use of technology and its electronic presence. Even when we do not use Google, even when it is not under our fingers, it is now part of our relationship with the world as something that can become immediately compatible with our other mediations with the world that are all Googlized. In his other lecture at the Collège de France about Nature, Merleau-​Ponty (1995) elaborates further, and perhaps more explicitly and systematically, the general content of his indirect ontology. He defines Nature as the soil (ground) bearing us. Nature is much more than trees, rivers, birds, winds, and storms, or what some people see as natural elements. For Merleau-​Ponty (in continuation with Schelling, [1799] 2000;23 Dewey, [1998]1925; or Whitehead, [1920] 2013, [1929] 2010; and before Descola, 2005; Latour, 2017a and b; Arènes, Latour, & Gaillardet, 2018), Nature and culture are largely reversible. Life itself is a complexification process, an extension that continuously interweaves things. Ultimately, Nature is the creative process of experience or what sustains it. At some point, the soil can collapse under our feet (e.g. during the COVID-​19 pandemic, which we are currently experiencing). This strong, embodied experience is a way of

23 Discussions

of a naturphilosophie are obviously the starting point of this ontological and metaphysical discussion of continental philosophy (see Hamrick & Van der Veken, 2013).

108   François-Xavier de Vaujany touching this invisible presence that is at the heart of our presence and co-​presence in the world—​Nature. This presence has depth and verticality (also a common point with contemporary debates about the Anthropocene and Latour’s view of Gaia). In the context of his lectures at the Collège de France, Merleau-​Ponty returns to process as conceptualized by Alfred North Whitehead. This is probably not his first encounter with the process philosopher. In the late 1930s, Merleau-​Ponty read the famous book by Jean Wahl ([1932] 2004), Vers le concret. This opus introduced the thought of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gabriel Marcel to the French-​ speaking world. For Merleau-​Ponty, this was his first exposure to process philosophy. Interestingly, the view of institutions as events ordering other events interpenetrating one another is also, in a way, processual. But it is clear from the lecture about Nature that the presence of process philosophy in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, particularly his new ontology, is becoming visible.24 Nature does not appear here as a set of plugged space-​ times, a set of locations in space. It is a complex set of events that prehend one another. Events just happen. For Whitehead ([1920] 2013, [1929] 2010), they are not structured by pre-​existing and causal materialities. Events ingress materiality. Materiality is event based. The force of materiality, its textures, and its agentivity are in the very happening and becoming of the event. In the context of this cosmology, Nature appears tattered (‘en lambeaux’), always in the process of the becoming of the myriad events inhabiting the past, the present, and the future of a fragile common world (Hamrick & Van der Veken, 2013). Merleau-​Ponty (1995) discusses in his lecture not only various kinds of simple and complex organisms but also automata and new automata (i.e. cybernetics) increasingly interwoven (since the Age of Enlightenment) with our naturalities. He warns the audience about what he sees as a potential drift in and manipulation of our experience and our passivities involved in it. Cybernetics automata simulate life; they do not live. They do not share our sensible experiences of the world. In a way, subjectivity is pre-​assigned here (it should be a work, an effort, a duration25). He also returns to this issue in his book The Eye and the Mind. Is he afraid of the possible presence of manipulative automata wrapped into our sense of togetherness? Is the main difference between life and simulation that of a subjectivation likely to take part in hyper-​dialectic resistance? Is he afraid of a possible lack of balance and generativity between passivity (more and more located in simulation) and activity (more and more dreamed in life)? Is he criticizing 24  Another

chapter of our edited book returns to this fascinating intersection (see Chapter 23 by Andrew Kirkpatrick in Part III). 25  Zoom meetings epitomize this trend. We have an ‘I’ on Zoom that is not (yet) our subjectivity but looks like it, and that makes it tempting to stop here. When we join a meeting, we immediately reach a box, with our name (possibly) appearing below. But we did not make any effort to be there. With Zoom, our face is at the centre of the world (as with most software, locating us as the centre of the screen or in a privileged part of it). Our ‘I’ is pre-​assigned. To gain and develop our subjectivity, we need to play with the software, explore its settings, understand its inviable hypothesis, and express ourselves beyond the place and space pre-​assigned. From this material that is already in place and with a history, we may set up and expand our subjectivity.

Phenomenology to Metaphysics of History    109 the invisible automata produced (invisibly) by our experience of the world, placing us in disembodied relationships with the world? Maybe. These criticisms are largely extended a couple of decades later by Hayles (1999) in her description of how we became posthuman. Posthumanism appears here as much more than an episteme or a neutral techne. It becomes an ontogenesis, the primary ontogenesis of our world. For Merleau-​Ponty, in its process of becoming, Nature obviously has always been interwoven with various cultural artefacts, materialities, and techniques. Nonetheless, Merleau-​Ponty suggests a major shift occurring in the 20th century or something happening at an unprecedented scale. Something is now likely to simulate sensibility itself—​the mode of responsiveness to our world—​and to pre-​assign the ‘I’. This process of simulation, which is not fully new, does not appear as such phenomenologically. Obviously, Merleau-​Ponty does not think here about beings such as robots or animals (although he mentions Werner’s turtles). He explores something less obtrusive, much more discrete, something so wrapped in our activities that he seems to dread as a new ontogenesis. His book The Visible and the Invisible was expected to be his masterpiece, his opportunity to assemble and make his new ontology more explicit. What remains of this attempt are drafts of the manuscript (150 pages at an early stage of writing) and his working notes about it. This sketch of his ontological project gives us ideas of what he was hankering for. On the way to his indirect ontology, Merleau-​Ponty repeats and extends the core chiasms at the heart of his thought: passivity-​activity, continuity-​discontinuity, sense-​ non-​sense, and visibility-​invisibility. Each is the reverse of the other but is more than its opposite. In the process of becoming, they make the other possible. Passivity makes an activity possible, and an activity requires a form of passivity. The continuity of our becoming (beyond a continuous state of death or life as a succession of state) requires discontinuities, and discontinuity is only possible with continuities inside of it, making sense of and enabling it. Sense requires numerous passivities producing non-​sense in the scope of our perceptions, whereas non-​sense is often the driver of sense-​giving, which is part of the embodied directionality at stake in it. As I already stressed before, visibility requires numerous moments of invisibility to reach the focus that will make things visible for ourselves. All the chiasms probably contribute to the indirect experience of the world. The passive, invisible, non-​sense, and continuous side of our experience nurtures the active, visible, meaningful, and discontinuous dimensions of it. All our world becomes chiasmatic in the process of becoming. Why did he label his new philosophy as an indirect ontology? This is probably because there is no longer perception or consciousness in this new world. Everything is a question of (indirect and decentred) mediations, producing the world and sensing it (or not) in the flow of everyday activities. Humans are no longer the centre of a perceptive universe.26 Everything happens pre-​reflexively and pre-​subjectively. Subjects

26 

Except if they are pre-​assigned a central location (see previous comments about digitality).

110   François-Xavier de Vaujany are themselves the production of all events. Interestingly, mediation is not a thing. It is much more an extension—​something happening that is likely to generate what will become subjects and objects. It is the distance that happens between things and making them occur. The metaphysics of history elaborated by Merleau-​Ponty from the mid-​1950s helped him articulate his new ontology in the context of a more general metaphysics. This move (which I started to depict with the concept of institution) needs to be seen as his will to renew the status of philosophy itself. For Merleau-​Ponty, philosophy is a thought that could neither be kept outside or above society, nor located in an overhanging position with the social sciences. As a political exercise, philosophy had to stem from ordinariness practices, lived problems, and everyday conversations. Instead of a separation or a discontinuous conversation, Merleau-​Ponty expects a philosophy from within. This view, in direct continuation with his ontology, has resulted in his metaphysical approach to history and temporality, which I will now detail.

5.3  Towards a New Metaphysics of History: Merleau-​Ponty Opening the Way for the Late Foucault The indirect ontology of Merleau-​Ponty is increasingly linked to a systematic project developed in several writings of the philosopher—​the building of a metaphysics of history27 (Revel, 2015; Terzi, 2017; de Vaujany, 2021). This project is that of a ‘wild history’ (histoire sauvage). The French philosopher has always looked for conversations with social scientists (Bonan, 2010; Vibert, 2018). He believed in a philosophy from the inside of each field (another common point with Foucault). With his metaphysics of history, he wanted to contribute to the renewal of the field of history from within. From 1953 onwards, Merleau-​Ponty sought to depart from purely causalist, teleological, and dualist views of history. He wanted to avoid two extreme situations: a mechanist (linear) history that would link a set of events from an ordinary point to its successive consequences towards a final event, and an insular history that would be made only of isolated events stuck into local, instantaneous, and purely subjective eventfulness. His wild historiography aims to overcome this polarization. In this direction, and more than two decades before Foucault (Revel, 2015; de Vaujany, 2021), he paved the way for a new historiography. The continuous genesis at stake in historical experience needs to be understood as given and transformative, structured and opening. Merleau-​Ponty (2003: 178–​9) explains,

27 This

notion appears in the summary of his lecture about institution and passivity (Merleau-​ Ponty, 2003).

Phenomenology to Metaphysics of History    111 Here, too, genesis has a double meaning: something given to us and also the move from us to the given [ . . . ] Or rather, not two opposite movements but what is given at their intersection, the articulation of one upon another perspective. The truth of the past that needs to be conceived neither by itself as if I flied it over, nor for my present only [ . . . ] the truth as what judges and the past lived by men of the past and my venture, but as their belonging to a single history.

Thus, we need to ‘wake up the wild history (beyond the objective history, which does not care about consciousness and is beyond history as an appendix of my personal history)’28 (pp. 178–​9). This new historiography corresponds to a more political Merleau-​ Ponty—​ the Merleau-​Ponty involved in a radical controversy with Sartre in 1953 on the topics of events and the modes of reactions to ongoing events (Revel, 2015). This second (ontological and metaphysical) Merleau-​Ponty is probably more explicitly political than the first one was.29 This presence (and the controversy with Sartre) is obvious in his book Adventures of the Dialectic, published in 1955 (Bonan, 2010; Revel, 2015; Vibert, 2018). It mainly focuses on history as already present (the determination of history) and history as opening (the becoming of history, its creative and reconfigurative nature). Freedom and agentivity are at the heart of the discussion. In the book, Merleau-​Ponty continues the discussion he started in his first period in the Phenomenology of Perception.30 In 1945, he explained, Birth means both to be born in the world and to come to the world. The world is always already constituted but also never fully constituted.31 Under the first relationship, we are called; under the second, we are open to an infinity of possibilities [ . . . ]. 28 

Original quote in French: ‘Ici aussi la genèse a un double sens: du donné à nous, et aussi de nous au donné [ . . . ] Ou plutôt, non pas deux mouvements contraires [ . . . ] ce qui est donné c’est leur croisement, l’articulation l’une sur l’autre des perspectives. La “vérité” du passé [à concevoir] ni en soi comme si je le survolais, ni pour mon présent seulement [ . . . ] la vérité, comme ce qui juge et le passé vécu par les hommes du passé et mon entreprise: comme leur appartenance à une seule histoire. Donc réveiller l’histoire sauvage (par-​delà l’histoire “objective,” qui ne s’occupe pas des consciences, et par-​delà l’histoire comme appendice de mon aventure personnelle).’ 29  Nonetheless, politics was not absent from his first writings. For me, the most profound chapter of Phenomenology of Perception is that about freedom. 30   For this section, I will rely heavily on the insightful and original thesis of Revel (2015). She stresses the renewal in the thought of the second Merleau-​Ponty and how close this renewal is to the thought of Foucault about history and subjectivity (emerging more than twenty years later). Nonetheless (and I want to stress it with the next quote), I do not share her vision of a radical discontinuity between the first and the second Merleau-​Ponty, which she defended. Many aspects of the political thought of Merleau-​Ponty already appeared in his first writings before his lectures at the Collège de France and the final unfinished book, The Visible and the Invisible. The ontological project of Merleau-​Ponty can also be seen as a way to radicalize and deepen his seminal vision of perception and experience, as well as to set up a bifurcation and reconfiguration in the phenomenological project itself (resulting in a post-​phenomenology). 31  But I notice here the important use of the notion of constitution. Ten years later, Merleau-​Ponty will take some distance from it and will position it compared with the notion of institution.

112   François-Xavier de Vaujany We exist under the two relationships. Thus, there is never an absolute choice; never am I a thing, and never am I a naked consciousness.32 (Merleau-​Ponty, 1945: 517)

In these seminal writings, Merleau-​Ponty insisted on the dangers of a philosophy outside politics (p. 521). Let us move to a couple of years later. In the last stage of his thought (the building of his ethics), Foucault (1984a) distinguished between the present and actuality. If the present is the frame, the shared temporality of the ongoing activities of the same world—​actuality—​is what keeps opening and reopening the present. Foucault invites us to explore attitudes instead of historical periods (i.e. ‘modes of relationships with actuality’, ‘a voluntary choice made by some’, and also a ‘manner to think and feel, to act and to conduct, which indicates belonging and shows itself as a task’33 (p. 568). This relationship is part of what the Greeks call an ethos. What mattered to Foucault was the idea of a difference, a possible discontinuity within the present, inside of it, and from it. From the inside of history, experimentation is continuous. This process keeps (re) inventing subjectivity and new ways of living (modes de vie) (Revel, 2015: 51). After the archeological and genealogical phases, the ethical Foucault of the late 1970s and 1980s thus explored modes of subjectivation and truth plays or truth regimes as wrapped within historical movement. Subjectivity is not the teleology of history. By contrast, subjectivity and freedom are qualities of history and historical events themselves. There are no ahistorical subjects. Each subject lives in a present, prefiguring them. Subjectivity becomes a process here. Subjective work needs to expand a subjective space. Subjectivity requires courage, determination, and will. More than an intent (which, in a way, does not allow any thickness and processuality for subjectivity), Foucault emphasizes that a subjectivation interwoven with objectivation (e.g. of dispositifs) and regimes of truth at stake is a shared present. A couple of decades later, Hartmut Rosa showed the radical importance of the process of subjectivation and its event. The German sociologist described the world we live in as missing ‘resonance’ (Rosa, 2019).34 For him, our contemporary experience is becoming a non-​resonating world close to depression. The past and the future no longer stretch our relationships with the world. Lived Nature has no depth anymore. It is not resonant. Flesh is drying up, and intereventfulness as an experience is vanishing. Everything 32  Original

quote in French: “Naître, c’est à la fois naître du monde et naître au monde. Le monde est déjà constitué, mais aussi jamais complètement constitué. Sous le premier rapport, nous sommes sollicités, sous le second nous sommes ouverts à une infinité de possibilité. ( . . . ) Nous existons sous les deux rapports à la fois. Il n’y a donc jamais choix absolu, jamais je ne suis chose et jamais conscience nue.” 33  Original quote in French: “Sur la modernité, en me référant au texte de Kant, je me demande si on ne peut pas envisager la modernité plutôt comme une attitude que comme une période de l’histoire. Par attitude, je veux dire un mode de relation à l’égard de l’actualité: un choix volontaire qui est fait par certains; enfin, une manière de penser et de sentir, une manière aussi d’agir et de se conduire qui, tout à la fois, marque une appartenance et se présente comme une tâche.” 34  A book relying deeply on the work of Maurice Merleau-​Ponty.

Phenomenology to Metaphysics of History    113 becomes a pure event prehending all the world. And more and more, remote pasts and distant futures are disconnected from the numerous and evanescent melodies expressed in our common worlds. Today, productive differences between signs do not result in empathic subjects. This is perhaps what is happening in our digital world. We all have a pre-​assigned ‘I’ at the centre of a screen. We all live in the world of decentred ‘I’s desperately in search of collaboration. The ‘we’, as a possibility of events, is pushed to the periphery of experience. And digital institutions keep ordering an invisible solid space, the new digital cage of our pre-​assigned subjectivities. After 1976, this processual and historical view of history departs gradually from that of Deleuze. For Foucault, subjectivation as the ‘process through which men and women, from the within of the mesh of history, invent and reinvent themselves is a twofold process of critique and inauguration’ (Rosa, 2019: 73). Without this process of subjectivation, no resistance and no freedom would be possible for Foucault. It is from the within of this history—​from the inside of the materiality of relationships and dispositives, institutions and epistemic configurations, of the bodies and ways of living—​that the shift of the lines, the folding of all that is given as a historical ‘already here’, the torsion of determination, takes the name of ethics. (Revel, 2015: 73)

Beyond logos, life itself (the bios), with its full materiality and processuality, is the process of differences as the pure power of affirmation (Foucault, 1984). Indeed, ‘where identity never ceases to reabsorb what diverges from it, oppositely, life never ceases to set differences’ (Revel, 2015: 74). Foucault invites us to explore a history of differences (and not a history of identity) within its unitary frame to grasp the production or invention that is at stake in history. By contrast, Deleuze (1985) emphasizes primarily the pre-​subjective or asubjective world of images. Their event, relative speed, intensity, and duration, the world they fold and unfold, are at the heart of Deleuzian metaphysics. Sense is the very process of the images themselves. Subjectivities can happen in the folds of iconography, but they are not the primary concern of Deleuze. Ontologically, resistance, and counterpowers make sense for Deleuze. In a way, Deleuzian metaphysics goes beyond (or before) subjectivation and objectification processes.35 Very surprisingly, the metaphysics of history elaborated by Merleau-​Ponty and his political views are very close to those of the late Foucault (twenty years earlier than the well-​known thesis of Foucault about history and subjectivation).36 But obviously, this ‘political thought of Merleau-​Ponty has never received the attention it deserves’ (Revel, 2015: 113). 35 

This move away from subjectivity is very Bergsonian (see Deleuze, 1966). And, surprisingly, this view of signs as ontologically producing meaning through differences is also very Deleuzian. But the lines followed by Merleau-​Ponty go until they meet possible subjectivations. 36 

114   François-Xavier de Vaujany For Merleau-​Ponty (1964, 2003), political activity can be defined as a ‘productive difference, i.e. a creative matrix’ (Revel, 2015: 114). This reading enables a new interpretation of Marx, which is more aligned with the vision of history as a bifurcation, a non-​teleological process, as it appears in his early philosophical writings. The dialectical vision of the Marx of that time (the 1950s), defended by Sartre, is opposed by Merleau-​ Ponty using a hyper-​dialectical approach and a vision of history focused on different historical presents and their subjectivation processes. As highlighted by Revel (2015), the controversy between Merleau-​Ponty and Sartre in 195337 particularly makes visible this opposition and the exploration of what will appear later as major Foucauldian topics: historicity (of the presents), freedom (at stake in the opening of the present), and their relationships of determination and productive differences. For Merleau-​Ponty, the concept of expression is absolutely central. He offers a thought of invention and inauguration, played in the mesh of what is already here. Expression is an outside reconfiguring the inside, a process of creating and staring in the same movement. The existing determinations of history, their inflections, their weight, and the ‘materiality of its already being there’ involve the ‘possibility of a prose, of an opening, of an invention of the world’ (Revel, 2015: 123). Interestingly, Merleau-​Ponty uses notions such as actuality and present with different meanings than those given later by Foucault (see Revel, 2015) but with exactly the same implications for his wider analysis. For Merleau-​Ponty, actuality is ‘a relationship of excessive proximity with what happens, a non-​problematized report of facts, a kind of “journalism” blinded by the continuous flow of information as delivered daily, whereas the present implies a critical distance enabling both a diagnosis and a letting go’ (Revel, 2015: 148). Instead of the continuous engagement of Sartre, Merleau-​Ponty ([1955] 2000, 2001) invites us to a discontinuous engagement and to a deep exploration of the present revealed in actuality (Merleau-​Ponty, 2000: 148). Understanding events, developing what Merleau-​Ponty (2003: 3) calls an eventfulness of principle, means exploring the being inside the becoming and understanding the ‘accumulation of things already done’, with this historicity giving a possibility and consistency with the historical process. Likewise, ‘each event cannot but ( . . . ) reopen

37  The key aspects of this controversy are about the relationship between historical events and intellectual engagements (see Bonan, 2010: 91; Revel, 2015; Vibert, 2018: 157). Sartre defends the idea that silence is a betrayal. An intellectual needs to continuously react upon actuality. By itself, non-​reaction can be problematic. Sartre defends a vision of intellectuals both as embodiments of consciousness in the city and as necessary spokespersons for the dominated class. At the time of the controversy, he sees in history a predefined dialectics and a predefined set of problems (this is due to his interpretation of Marxist thought). By contrast, Merleau-​Ponty defends a more distanced relationship with actuality. Intellectuals should always be in the in-​betweenness of actuality and the present time; they should explore the opening of history (see Merleau-​Ponty, 2001). Engagement is an active construction and experimentation from the inside of the present. It should always take place from the within of history (not a predefined set of values and problems). I see in this position something very close to a pragmatic view.

Phenomenology to Metaphysics of History    115 the history in which it is situated’ (Revel, 2015: 150). As a singular new point of departure, the possible locus of a new balance of forces, of a new causal line, of new political consequences, each event potentially questions the whole history as a present that configures past and future events. History is the becoming of events in the present, their possible ruptures and reconfigurations. Merleau-​Ponty thus stresses both the extraordinary fragility and the power of any event. All the things happening in the universe can be or become nothing or be or become everything.38 As he rejects any teleological view of history, Merleau-​Ponty gives deep value to the present, the consequence of a history already done. But the present is also inscribed into a larger dimension. Something is bigger than the present in the present. This prose or prosaic mesh or frame is a repetition, an accumulation, the verticality of historical processes kept in the present. But different presents (past or future) can inhabit historical processes. Each new present reconfigures the layers, the verticalization of memory and perception inside the lived experience. It is also continuously (re)opened to ‘possible differences’ (Revel, 2015: 155) exactly as any linguistic process. Very surprisingly, Merleau-​Ponty ([1955] 2000, 1964, 2001) uses his reflection about linguistics, language, and speech39 to elaborate his more general metaphysics of history. His reading of historical processes is based on the ideas of Saussure (Revel, 2015; Terzi, 2017). For Saussure, the differences among signs, their in-​betweenness, and what they lack in their (joint) occurrence produce meaning. Thus, differences are productive. Indeed, only differences are productive. Isolated signs or a mere sum of signs never produces meaning by itself. The whole process of meaning is differential. In the context of a structured, shared set of signs, a continuous process of opening keeps feeding signs and their in-​betweenness for Merleau-​Ponty (Revel, 2015: 164–​5). Saussure stresses a paradox: ‘a relationship exists because the elements its puts into contact will never be reducible to one another; conversely, the heterogeneity of each element is recognizable only because it has been measured one day in comparison to the other ones’40 (p. 165). As a meaningful process, history is also a more general differential process. Only the in-​between of past, present, and future events, put into relationship with the broader prose of the present, produces meaning. From within, the history of a society is always produced according to this model of production. Importantly, this differential process is always an opening, an inauguration for the whole set of signs accumulated both memorially and materially. ‘History already done’ (l’histoire déjà faite) and ‘history in the making’ (l’histoire se faisant) are part of the same chiasms; they are two facets of the same historical process. 38  This

theorization is influenced by subtle interpretations of Machiavel (Revel, 2015; Vibert, 2018). There is a complex logic at stake in conflicts (not only in the strategies or interests of actors but also in the strategic flows and forces in conflicts themselves). 39  And as fields of applications, literature, and arts. 40  Original quote in French: ‘ce qui s’impose avec les théorisations saussuriennes, c’est bien cette vérité en forme de paradoxe: un rapport n’existe que parce que les éléments qu’il met en contact ne seront jamais réductibles l’un à l’autre; et inversement, l’hétérogénéité de chacun des éléments n’est reconnaissable que parce qu’elle s’est un jour mesuré à celle de l’autre.’

116   François-Xavier de Vaujany In the thickness of this chiasm, subjectivation can occur to explore the interlacing of history. Freedom, responsibility, and political agency are then possible in the mesh of this complex process. Radical novelty and bifurcation are always possible but within and from the edge of our determinations.41 Events do not actualize the potentialities or possibilities of history. They modify and support history as much as they are carried by it. Thus, ‘determinations produce configurations in which events are necessarily inscribed; conversely, events—​as processes opening these determinations to what they do not already include—​move them and modify their constituted balance. In sum, difference is produced by history; in turn, it modifies history itself ’42 (Revel, 2015: 183; see also Terzi, 2017). To think of this process of coming and going, Merleau-​Ponty suggests the concept of in between43 (‘milieu’). We never escape history; we are always in between historical processes, in between events as part of a broader institution connecting them, a creative matrix that is by itself the power of history. This milieu is a constitutive relationship, the chiasm that characterizes us. As I already mentioned, Foucault ([1982] 2001, 1984a) was very close to this view. In his book The Subject and Power, Foucault (1984a) evokes the necessity to conceptualize agonism (instead of antagonism) between the two interrelated terms of history. Thus, Foucault ([1982] 2001: 183) explains that agonism means ‘a relationship that is both a reciprocal incitation and a struggle, which is less of a term-​to-​term opposition in which one is blocked, rather than a permanent provocation’.44 No activity escapes history, but at the same time, only people’s activities build history by continuously opening and inaugurating it (Revel, 2015). Thus, for Merleau-​Ponty ([1955] 2000, 1961, 2001), what prevents ‘the compossibility of history and event (or that of power and freedom) from being simply a state of balance between two opposite terms is the dimension of inauguration, of creation and production, as said a couple of years later by Foucault’ (Revel, 2015: 186). This corresponds to the specific vision of negativity in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, something that always produces a difference ahead of itself. An ontology is the ‘recording of this power to intervene from the inside itself of the historical world already installed’ (p. 187). Institution, both as a 41 

I wonder if a reexploration of Marx’s (1841) PhD dissertation, particularly his chapters about time and meteors, could be interesting to analyse further the link with Marxist thought (and its forgetting) about history, accidents, and revolutions. 42 Original quote in French: “Les déterminations produisent des configurations dans lesquelles s’inscrivent nécessairement les évènements; inversement, les événements, en ce qu’ils ouvrent ces déterminations à ce qu’elles ne comprennent pas déjà, les déplacent et en modifient l’équilibre constitué. En somme, la différence est produite par l’histoire; en retour, elle modifie l’histoire elle-​même.” 43  Translating the concept of milieu in English is difficult. ‘Environment’ is not really an adequate translation. Milieu is much more the texture of the present into which differentiation can occur, the connected momentum towards differentiation. During the same decade of Merleau-​Ponty’s lecture at the Collège de France and the elaboration of his indirect ontology, Simondon ([1958] 2012) also extensively relies on this notion (see Guchet, 2001, about the relationship between the thought of Merleau-​Ponty and that of Simondon). 44  Original quote in French: ‘Plutôt que d’un “antagonisme” essentiel, il faudrait mieux parler d’un “agonisme”—​d’un rapport qui est à la fois incitation réciproque et de lutte; moins d’une opposition terme à terme qui les bloque l’un en face de l’autre que d’une provocation permanente.’

Phenomenology to Metaphysics of History    117 process and a state, epitomizes this ontological move. Instituting processes happen only from the inside of an institution itself, with the correspondence of events being wrapped into the experience. Events continuously repeat and reconfigure institutions. They establish new lines projected on the past and open new perspectives for the future. They open new possible configurations of past, present, and future (expected) events. This metaphysics of history appears clearly in Adventures of Dialectics (Merleau-​ Ponty, 2003). In this book, Merleau-​Ponty explains that history is not teleological. It does not lead to something, to an expected state. It never results in a synthesis closing or ending history (as suggested by some interpretations of Marx). Merleau-​Ponty explains that ‘History is a multiple-​entry system’ (p. 35). Thus, ‘dialectic always gives itself [ . . . ] a global cohesion, which is primordial, of a field of experience in which all elements open themselves to the other’ (pp. 281–​2). History is about openness and not at all about achievement, actualization, teleology, suspension, interruption, or closure. The very idea of a revolution is redefined by Merleau-​Ponty. From the inside of a history already done, a revolution corresponds to the bifurcation and experimentation of history. The continuity of discontinuities, as an opening, inaugural process, is the very movement of history. Indeed, dialectics need to be fully rethought from this conceptual move. Thus, Merleau-​Ponty ([1955] 2000: 147) makes a distinction between good and bad dialectics. If bad dialectic ‘solves its own becoming in a synthesis’, good dialectic ‘maintains an openness in the movement and lets its ambiguity persist’ (p. 147). There is no overcoming of conflicts. Events and differences between them just stack and take part in a vertical history (see also the concept of hyper-​dialectic in Merleau-​Ponty’s 1964 final and unfinished manuscript). In short, the metaphysics of history elaborated by Merleau-​Ponty opens the way to a complex process of subjectivation, which is also primarily and paradoxically a process of objectivation. History matters. The being of history matters. History as expressed, materialized, and stratified continuously gives a surface to the process of opening, which is at the heart of our possible freedom. Merleau-​Ponty (and, after him, the ethical Foucault) thus invites us to a ‘history of problems and not doctrines, a history of thought in the making and of weaving ceaselessly, from the stacking of its already formulated interrogations and the conditions of the possibility of a new interrogation’ (Revel, 2015: 214). Beyond the history of solutions, the late Merleau-​Ponty invites us to explore the history of problems, the event of the problems, and their instituting and instituted facets.

5.4  The Opportunity of Merleau-​Ponty for MOS: Experience, Institution and Openess In the context of MOS, the work of Merleau-​Ponty is already well-​known, in particular the first Merleau-​Ponty. But the political thought, the aforementioned ‘metaphysics of history’, remains largely neglected and absent in top-​tier MOS journals and beyond.

118   François-Xavier de Vaujany Numerous studies have stressed the importance of Merleau-​Ponty in understanding issues of corporeality, embodiment and intercoporeity in management, managerial practices, organizations and organizing (see Slutskaya & De Cock, 2008; Küpers, 2014; Paring, Huault, & Pezé, 2017; de Vaujany & Aroles, 2019). Merleau-​Ponty is used here to explore the relationship between organizing and embodiment (Küpers, 2014). Basically, collective activity requires a common body conceptualized by the French philosopher. The first works of Merleau-​Ponty are also used to theorize experience, should it be managers’ or consumers’ experience (Yahklef, 2014). Sense-​making, in particular strategic sense-​making processes, their relationships with sense and non-​sense, have also been analysed through Merleau-​Pontian lenses (Küpers, Mantere, & Statler, 2013). Early concepts have also been used to analyse practice-​based learning (Yakhlef, 2010; Willems, 2018), organizational cognition (Gärtner, 2013), embodied narratives (Cunliffe & Coupland, 2012; Ropo & Höykinpuro, 2017), managerial ethics (Dale & Latham, 2015; Küpers, 2015), embodied generosity (Hancock, 2008), new ways of organizing (de Vaujany & Aroles, 2021), managerial control (Paring & Pezé, 2021), senses and organizing (Riach & Warren, 2015), sense of space or place in organizations and organizing (Guthey, Whiteman, & Elmes, 2014), organizational atmospheres (Thøgersen, 2014; de Vaujany et al., 2019) or knowledge management (McDermott, 1999). If MOS, as a field, is made of ‘turns’, the thought of Merleau-​Ponty (1942, 1945) has contributed to the practice turn (see Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015), the materiality turn (see Dale & Latham, 2015), the process turn (see Letiche, 2013; Küpers, 2014, 2015, 2020; de Vaujany & Aroles, 2019, 2021), and the critical turn (see Küpers, 2017; Korchagina, 2018). The late work of Merleau-​Ponty, in particular the dimensions at stake in his major chiasms, have been used for research about ‘inter-​practices’ (Küpers, 2014) or ‘organizational memorialization’ (de Vaujany et al., 2020). But if some research draws explicitly on his indirect ontology, e.g. the concept of ‘institution’ (see de Vaujany & Aroles, 2019), I did not really identify works dealing with the political work of Merleau-​Ponty and drawing the radical implications of his thought about a ‘metaphysics of history’, implementing the concept of ‘hyper-​dialectics’, elaborating a comparative analysis of the late Merleau-​Ponty ([1955] 2000, 1995, 2003, 2001) and the ethical Foucault ([1982] 2001, 1984a) or reexploring Saussurian, Bergsonian, Whitedian, or Machiavelan themes and their role in the late metaphysical move of Merleau-​Ponty. In a world in which management and organizing are more and more central in historical processes, understanding how managers, managerial techniques, and managerial activites open (or not) history, contribute to the already here of history, are events inside the experience of new institutions, produce the world we live in, make possible or impossible freedom as an agonistic movement interwoven with managerial reporting, control, and surveillance is becoming crucial for the MOS field. The metaphysics of history, its view of a generative tension and a process (possibly opening the way to different subjectivations), could feed numerous avenues for research in MOS. It could be an interesting contribution to the debates of the growing community discussing paradoxes and dialectics in organizing processes (see Clegg, da Cunha, & e Cunha, 2002; Smith et al., 2017; de Vaujany, Leclercq-​Vandelannoitte, & Holt, 2020;

Phenomenology to Metaphysics of History    119 Berti & Simpson, 2021). The chiasm conceptualized by Merleau-​Ponty (1953, [1955] 2000, 1961, 1964) and Foucault ([1982] 2001, 1984a) could also be useful to thinking differently about organizational history. Ongoing debates about temporality and time in the context of historical MOS (see Maclean et al., 2021) could benefit from the debates stressed here, in particular institutional approaches of history. More broadly, this conceptualization move could be very interesting for processual approaches of organizizing (see, e.g., Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Langley et al., 2013; Helin et al., 2014; Hernes, 2014) and the development of an explicit conversation between process philosophy and (post-​) phenomenologies, in particular about the topic of ‘modes of subjectivation’. The thought of the late Merleau-​Ponty about Nature (fed, e.g., by Whitehead, [1920] 2013, [1929] 2010), the conceptualization of institution, history, and events grounded in Saussurian thought (see Revel, 2015), or his Machiavelian conceptualization of politics and power, could be very useful for process studies in MOS. To conclude, I would like to give the final word to Michel Foucault. In his last interview, he stated: ‘Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do’ (Foucault, 1984b). What a great political invitation to our time . . .

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Chapter 6

Phe nomenol o g y a nd t h e M ultidim ensi ona l i t y of the B ody Erol Čopelj and Jack Reynolds

6.1  Introduction The modern era has witnessed an unprecedented growth in our empirical knowledge of the human body. The signs are that this empirical knowledge will continue to accumulate, probably at an exponential rate. Finding ourselves in a situation where the empirical sciences have more to teach us about the body than anybody could possibly fully understand in a lifetime, it makes sense to ask: why should we look towards phenomenology for further knowledge about the nature of the body? What, if anything, can phenomenology teach us about this subject that the empirical sciences cannot? To answer these questions, it is important to appreciate that, in an important sense, empirical scientific research is an extension of common sense. Taken literally, the expression ‘common sense’ designates the kind of understanding that is common to a society, civilization, or tradition. According to the common understanding of the modern, Western world, the external senses offer us the original and primordial access to the way things are. And one thing that we see and experience through the senses is the body, with which each one of us is peculiarly bound up and which enters into our very identity as human beings. This is the most obvious of all facts. The ordinary person would not think of questioning it. And while the empirical sciences tell us many unusual and complex things about the body and its material constitution, it is taken for granted that there is a body here in the midst of the world, existing amongst and in interaction with other things, and which offers the possibility of being studied by our instruments. Everything begins from there. In its approach to this subject matter, phenomenology can be said to ‘pause’ experience at this being-​there of the body. Phenomenology’s first gesture is to put into question

124    Erol Čopelj and Jack Reynolds all the conceptual strata that have been built upon this basic fact that a body appears, and thereby to allow the fact itself to surface, just as it is. In this sense, phenomenology goes against this tendency of the ordinary way of thinking and seeing, against the ‘natural attitude’. Whereas common sense and empirical science begin from the body as straightforwardly and obviously given and go on from there to think about what this thing is, what it is made up of and how it originated, phenomenology steps back from the straightforward fact in order to ask: what is the intrinsic structure of the body’s appearance? Does the body involve a unique mode of manifestation? If so, how does it differ from other forms of manifestations, such as mathematical objects and pictures, for example? Even to grasp the sense of these questions, and their difference from those asked by common sense and empirical science, is already to have understood something of what phenomenology has to teach. As well as facilitating a perspective from which it is possible to focus on the body as a phenomenon, the phenomenological approach then seeks to understand the essence of this appearance: to describe its invariant structures and in virtue of which it is distinguished from all other appearances. This involves staying with the phenomenon at all times, preventing oneself from drifting off into speculative and ungrounded thinking, and discerning the subtle and interwoven structures that constitute this essence—​which is not to say that a form of reasoning cannot assist the phenomenologists in their endeavour. This means that, as to its method, phenomenology is not involved in precisely the same game as either the metaphysics of contemporary philosophy of mind, or the empirical research involved in cognitive science. Rather, phenomenology is primarily concerned with description of essential structures, and only secondarily or implicitly with argument and explanation. Over a century has passed since Husserl wrote the Logical Investigation and thereby (unknowingly) inaugurated the phenomenological movement. As we will see below, the body was not treated as an explicit theme in the Investigations. But this work does describe certain more formal structures that are presupposed by and that enter into the very constitution of the body as a phenomenon. This general framework provides a blueprint for subsequent investigations of the body by later phenomenologists, including the later Husserl himself. In this chapter we will try to shed some light on the following questions: What were these initial discoveries? How did they influence the reflections on the phenomenon of embodiment by later phenomenologists? And what precisely has phenomenology taught us about the body’s mode of manifestation over this last century of its existence? The fact cannot be bypassed that, like all philosophers, phenomenologists disagree about many things, including the nature and philosophical significance of the body,1 and that there are a variety of complicated terminological, methodological, and sometimes 1  That includes the two authors of this chapter! The second author of this chapter thinks that although the method(s) of phenomenology help to disclose aspects of embodiment that were not previously fully thematized (whether by philosophy or by the life sciences of the body), the body also serves as a lacunae of sorts for the phenomenological method, and raises a variety of epistemic and metaphysical questions, notwithstanding the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ that is heuristically invaluable but always incompletely achieved (see Reynolds, 2018, 2020). The other author agrees that the body, in its most

Multidimensionality of the Body    125 metaphysical differences between the major authors associated with phenomenology (cf. Heinämaa, 2021). Putting aside those disagreements for the moment, which we will take into account as we progress, let us ask: is there any universal agreement between the phenomenologists regarding the theme of the body? Phenomenologists would agree that the body involves what we will describe as a multidimensional mode of manifestation. What this means will become clearer shortly, but for now we can say the body exists in and across a number of distinct, irreducible, but functionally interrelated dimensions and layers, the description of which is vital for an understanding of the body as a phenomenon. Another likely point of agreement between the phenomenologists is that in order to make sense and describe these dimensions and layers, it is necessary to take note of the ‘horizonal’ references that obtain between them and to work out their ontological ordering. An overview of this chapter is now in order. Our first task will be to consider two foundational works of phenomenology, Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Heidegger’s Being and Time. We will show how these works set the stage for the subsequent phenomenology of the body, by describing the phenomena of multidimensionality and horizonality (Section 6.2). We will then present some key aspects of Husserl’s positive descriptions of embodiment in Ideas II (1989; see Section 6.3). Next we will examine some of the main phenomenological descriptions of the noematic and noetic dimensions of embodiment, as they are articulated in the works of Sartre (Section 6.4) and Merleau-​Ponty (Section 6.5), and also detail some of their differences from Husserl, both substantively and methodologically. In the Conclusion (Section 6.6), we will turn to consider some critical questions that might be posed regarding a phenomenological focus on the body and its multidimensionality.

6.2  Multidimensionality and Horizonality in the Logical Investigations and Being and Time In Husserl’s (2001: 3) own words, the Logical Investigations represent the initial ‘breakthrough’ into phenomenology, ‘not an end but rather a beginning’. What was so revolutionary about this text that it set into motion an entirely new movement in philosophy, ordinary forms of manifestation and especially in its demands upon the mind, is a kind of lacunae for phenomenology. He would go so far as to describe the fact of embodiment as an obstacle to the seeing of things as they are. With Plato and Socrates, the first author thinks that phenomenology only comes into its own when the mind succeeds in distancing itself from the body, which is not to deny that the body has more profound dimensions than those that are ordinary accessible. In Čopelj (2022), the first author attempts to show on phenomenological grounds that this distancing of the mind (which is not to be understood in the Cartesian sense) from the body is an essential part of contemplative practices which aims at the direct understanding of things as they are.

126    Erol Čopelj and Jack Reynolds whose vitality we continue to feel today, well over a century after this work was written? How might one sum up this ‘breakthrough’? One way is to say that it involved the discovery of the multidimensionality of the phenomenal field. Allow us to illustrate. Pre-​ phenomenologically, this cup sitting on my table is straightforwardly experienced as something that can hold my coffee, which has a specific shape and weight and a unique history in the world. From the phenomenological standpoint, this very same entity discloses itself as being constituted of a number of distinct, irreducible, and interconnected phenomenological dimensions and layers. These dimensions are peculiarly merged into the straightforward and simple experience of the object. In being so merged, this multidimensionality tends to be forgotten. This means that when we straightforwardly interact with the object, when we relate to it from the ‘natural’ attitude, we are not explicitly aware of its phenomenal multidimensionality. In order to remember its inner depth and complexity, it is necessary to step back from the object, allowing this phenomenological complexity to surface. Now, it is true that empirical sciences teach us something like this too: that what at first appear to be uniform objects are in fact made up of macroscopic parts and layers. The difference is in fact radical. In principle at least, phenomenological multidimensionality is immediately and experientially accessible, even if the means of access are difficult, i.e. via the ‘unnatural’ techniques of phenomenology, and in some cases at least partially hidden, i.e. in embodied habits which is the focus of some of Merleau-​Ponty’s work. Phenomenological multidimensionality is not behind experience. It is experience itself. The constituents of the objects that the scientists tell us about are themselves objects of sorts. In some of the paradigmatic scientific ways of looking at the world, every object is made up of smaller objects, and so on ad infinitum. This is sometimes called a principle of decomposition that involves a commitment to ‘smallism’ (cf. Wilson, 2004), wherein that which is real/​exists gets associated with micro-​physical parts, which is also where the real causal action lies. Phenomenology teaches us that every object (whether macro or micro) always and necessarily arises from something like a multidimensional fabric of phenomenal being, a fabric that does not itself have the nature of an object, although it can assume that form. In principle at least, this fabric can be described and its description can be said to constitute the work of phenomenology. By contrast, both science and common sense only work with one limited portion of this multidimensional fabric, where it assumes the form of an external, straightforward object that opposes itself as something external to the subject observing it. To apply this to our theme, the body is not just an object that manifests within this fabric and which can be focused upon and decomposed into parts; it is an essential quality of the phenomenal field itself, as we shall see. For reasons that have to do with making intelligible the fundamental categories of logical thinking and into which we cannot go here, in the fifth and the sixth Logical Investigations Husserl’s primary focus was on the sensuous and the categorical dimensions of the phenomenal field, and their relationship. To illustrate by example, consider the cup again. When we tune in to the cup phenomenologically, we can discern a sensuous layer, in which such qualities as colour, shape, weight, etc., have their

Multidimensionality of the Body    127 being. It is also possible to discern a layer from which spring such structures as the fact that the cup is white, that it has a handle, that it is on the table, and so on. This is the categorial layer. In the vocabulary of Ideas I (Husserl, 2014), the sensuous and the categorial layers pertain to the noematic dimension of the phenomenal field, designating the way that objects that are not us manifest. But the noematic is not the only dimension that can be discerned here. The sensuous noematic layer is essentially correlated to sense experience, such as visible perception. The categorial noematic layer is essentially correlated to such events as judgements, thoughts, and so on. The sense perception, the judgement and other such phenomena pertain to a dimension that is described in the Ideas I as ‘noetic’. While the noetic dimension is essentially bound up with noematic, they are nevertheless distinct and irreducible and each must be described in a way that is true to it. This may strike one as an unnecessarily complex. But that is the inherently rich nature of the phenomenal field; while thought can always simplify things in order to make the handling of them easier, it does so at the cost of losing its grip on how things are in and of themselves. As Merleau-​Ponty observes in the Phenomenology of Perception, many mistakes that we make in thinking about our experience come from attributing that which truly belongs to the sensuous noematic layer to its noetic correlate (sense perception). This is what he calls the ‘experience error’, in which we read our knowledge of things perceived (noematic) back into the nature of our perceptual experience (noetic). Put differently, we believe our experience presents us with what our putative knowledge (including scientific) has subsequently revealed to us. This discovery of this multidimensional and multilayered nature of the phenomenal field opened up the task of attempting to discern the different layers that exist in each dimension and to spell out their phenomenological relationships. This is also the task that the phenomenologists take up in the specific investigation of embodiment. In other words, the body spreads across and manifests in different dimensions and layers of the phenomenal field, and the phenomenology of embodiment gives itself the task of describing these dimensions and their relationships. But, one may wonder, how is it possible to describe these dimensions at all? This brings us to another key albeit implicit discovery of the Logical Investigations. This is the notion of ‘horizons’. The basic idea is that each of the dimensions and layers is made up of referential relations that point to other dimensions and layers. The whiteness of the cup pertains to the sensuous, noematic layer. This quality points or refers to the possibility of seeing that the cup is white. When I actually see that the cup is white, the categorial layer can be said to emerge from the sensuous, on which it is, according to Husserl, founded. This reference can thus be said to bind the sensuous and the categorial layers. The description of these referential structures becomes a major theme of phenomenological investigations. In the writings of the phenomenologists we find many descriptions of the horizonal referential relations that run through and bind together the different dimensions in which the body participates. Before turning to that specific theme, however, we will now consider how Heidegger developed these Husserlian ideas in Being and Time ([1927] 1962).

128    Erol Čopelj and Jack Reynolds

6.2.1 Heidegger’s Being and Time In brief and very generally, Heidegger’s contribution can be said to consist in disclosing certain novel dimensions of the phenomenal field, of describing their horizonal interrelationships and foundational relations. And, in fact, some of Heidegger’s findings challenge Husserl’s descriptions, although we do not wish to get into that question here. What we do wish to focus upon here is those Heideggerian discoveries that will play a vital role in the description of the body that we find in later phenomenologists, and Jean-​Paul Sartre and Merleau-​Ponty in particular.2 Let us begin on a terminological point. Heidegger and his followers would most likely object to our use of such Husserlian terms as ‘noematic’ and ‘noetic’, as well as to such notions as ‘layers’ and ‘dimensions’, in the endeavour to give an account of his philosophy (perhaps it is part of what he comes to call his ‘topology’ in later work, however). In any case, we believe that this way of speaking, while perhaps not being entirely true to his thought, can help present his basic ideas in a clear way that enables comparison with those of the other phenomenologists. The reason for which Heidegger would probably reject a term such as ‘layer’ is found in the fact that such terms usually designate objective categories, a mode of being that Heidegger calls ‘present-​at-​hand’. According to Heidegger, however, there are ways of being (i.e. the ready-​to-​hand and being-​in-​the-​ world) that cannot be thought of in terms of objective categories at all. Let the reader note, then, that we are not using these terms in a restricted, objective sense, but give them a much wider significance, which we will allow to articulate itself as the discussion unfolds. Heidegger’s concept of being-​in-​the-​world is central to the French phenomenologists ‘of the body’, who attempted to develop Heidegger’s account in a direction not taken in Being and Time and to demonstrate that the body is a central, constitutive moment of being-​in-​the-​world itself.3 What, though, is meant by ‘being-​in-​the-​world’? Again, it is perhaps best to illustrate this with a concrete example. When I look at this coffee cup in a detached way and where it appears as an object in space partaking in casual interactions, the cup exists as present-​at-​hand. This noematic layer refers to a more fundamental one in which the cup exists as ready-​to-​hand: as an instrument intrinsically bound up with other instruments (e.g. the table, coffee, etc.) and through which I can realize my projects (e.g. being caffeinated). The ready-​to-​hand dimension itself refers to the world, the all-​encompassing context that conditions the possibility of the ready-​at-​hand and the present-​at-​hand. The world itself is a dependent moment of being-​in-​the-​world, which is the mode of being of the entities that we ourselves are. Thus, in Heidegger’s account and if we abstract from the complex phenomenon of temporality, being-​in-​ the-​world can be said to constitute the very foundation of the phenomenal field. This 2 

For further reflections on this, see Levin (1990). Andy Clark (1997) plays on this theme, albeit without much Heidegger scholarship, in his influential book Being There. More Heidegger inflected efforts to do this include Clark’s sometime co-​author, Mike Wheeler (see Wheeler, 2005). 3 

Multidimensionality of the Body    129 foundational dimension is itself multilayered; being in the world is divided into three interpenetrating and co-​founding dimensions: understanding, attunement, and discourse. For the purpose of describing the phenomenon of the body, understanding and attunement are crucial. Very briefly, understanding represents the futural layer of being-​ in-​the-​world: it is responsible for projecting possibilities and thereby directly opening up the instrumental dimension. Attunement is the ontological ground of moods and it is responsible for the disclosure of the raw fact of being there; it is the sense that we always find ourselves in some specific situation, in the midst of a particular and limited range of possibilities, which determine of how we can project ourselves into the future. As we have said, neither Logical Investigations nor Being and Time treat the body as an explicit theme. But the dimensions, layers, and horizons outlined above set the stage for a proper understanding of the phenomenology of embodiment that takes place after the two foundational texts were written.

6.3  The Body in Ideas II Not having treated the body in his earlier work, its description becomes one of the main preoccupations of the later Husserl, with various rich accounts of kinaesthetic and tactile sensings. Although it is discussed in Cartesian Meditations (1960; especially in the fifth meditation and in relation to the constitution of another subject) and the Crisis, arguably Husserl’s treatment of embodiment is set out most clearly in Ideas II. In this section, we will briefly summarize what it says about the multidimensionality of the body. From a limited point of view, the body appears as just another thing in the world. But Husserl draws our attention to a distinct layer of corporeality in which ‘external’ and inanimate things do not participate at all. Broadly, this dimension is referred to as Leib: the living or animate dimension of embodiment. In this dimension of its being, the body appears as the bearer of ‘localized sensations’, which are essentially bound up with the sense of touch, and one of Husserl’s main aims in this text is to illustrate the primacy of touch relative to the other senses (e.g. the visual sense) in the constitution of the animate body. Let us try and discern this unique phenomenon of localized sensations. As my right hand rests on the table, I scratch it with my left hand. From one angle, the right hand manifests essentially in the same way that the table does: as an inanimate thing with a certain material makeup, with a soft skin and hard bones, as something coloured, and so on., and which participate in causal interactions with other inanimate things. This is the dimension of Körper. Through a shift of focus, however, I come to notice that underneath the fingertips of my left hand, certain impressions appear in the right hand and as localized within it. These impressions are clearly not properties of the hand in the same sense as its weight and colour are. The table, for example, exhibits nothing like these ‘sensings’. And as I move the fingers of the left hand across the right, the localized sensations alter accordingly and in a regular manner. And the same is obviously true

130    Erol Čopelj and Jack Reynolds of the whole body, including the left hand itself: all over, the localized sensations are present as that which helps constitute and differentiate the animate body from inanimate objects. These localized sensations also partake in a kind of spatiality, spreading throughout the hand in a peculiar and sui generis way. But this is a distinct manifestation of space than the one in which external, inanimate things participate: ‘localizations of sensings is in fact something in principle different from the extension of all material determinations of a thing’ (Husserl, 1989: 157). It is in virtue of this layer that is filled in by localized sensations that the body is not simply a richer and more complex material thing but precisely my body, a living and animate ‘thing’. Besides the sensations of touch, the layer now in question also offers the possibility of manifesting practically infinite kinds of feeling sensations. As Husserl writes, they appear as localized: ‘is also true of sensations belonging to totally different groups, e.g. the “sensuous” feelings, the sensations of pleasure and pain, the sense of well-​being that permeates and fills the whole Body, the general malaise of “corporeal indisposition,” etc.’ (Husserl, 1989: 160). These feeling sensations serve as the basis of intentional feelings that constitute the world as having certain ‘values’. If Husserl is right about this, then the animated body plays a key role in Heidegger’s attunements and moods, although as we saw Heidegger did not describe this connection in Being and Time. Matthew Ratcliffe’s (2008) notion of ‘feeling of being’ can be interpreted as an interesting attempt to combine the Husserlian and Heideggerian insights in this way, and others working in what might be called phenomenological psychopathology also pay attention to this embodied dimension of our moods and similar states of mind (see, for example, the work of Thomas Fuchs). Husserl also observes that the layer of localized sensations also serves as a foundation for another layer of the body, where it manifests as the ‘the organ of the will’ ( Husserl, 1989: 159). Here the body exhibits the quality of being the only immediately movable thing; all other things can only be moved mediately through the body. We will see in due course how the French phenomenologists extended this description of the instrumental dimension of embodiment and tried to describe the unique mode of manifestation of this condition of possibility of all instrumentality that is not itself an instrument. As already mentioned, Körper refers to the noematic dimension of the body and where the body appears as an inanimate object in space. But the body’s existence in space is sui generis; even when the body’s manifests as an object space it does so in a manner different from phenomena that are inanimate things and nothing more. First of all, all external things appear in a certain orientation: this thing is to the left, this one to the right, this one above, and that one below. But the body is not itself just another thing within this arrangement; as the zero-​point of orientation it is that which makes the orientation and arrangement of external things possible. The body is the ‘here’ that can never become a ‘there’. Moreover, while I can always establish a distance between myself and all external things, I can never establish a distance between myself and my body. Husserl also notes how some parts of the body (e.g. the face) are in principle invisible to me, which also contributes to the body’s sui generis mode of manifestation.

Multidimensionality of the Body    131 Some key features of our embodied life depend on this differentiation between Leib and Körper, and perhaps constitutively or necessarily so, in that it is hard to conceive of the experience and the perception of depth, for example, without this ‘zero point’ as Husserl puts it, the lived perspective of a given body-​subject.4 This can also be described as the difference between that dimension where the body appears as a subjectivity and the body as a material object, and also as the contrast between being a body and having a body (existing and possessing), and between first-​person and third-​person perspectives. These are all not exactly the same, of course, but for a good effort at parsing them, see Heinämaa (2021). What is the modal and metaphysical status of the difference between Leib and Körper? It is not meant to be a standard metaphysical distinction since it is about the mode of appearance of the body ‘for us’. At the same time, some of the modal contrasts (between subjectivity and objectivity, say) appear to have metaphysical implications. In addition, phenomenologists often claim a certain kind of priority for Leib, both as the genetic condition for any subsequent analysis of Körper and also concerning the irreducibility of Leib. We have an asymmetry posited here, and one which is not transitive. To put the point succinctly, we might say that noetic dimension enables an empirical inquiry into the living body, but what is revealed qua Körper (e.g. by sciences of the body) cannot adequately explain Leib.5 We will come back to this in the Conclusion (Section 6.6), but it is perhaps fair to also note that there is a danger of becoming attached to this distinction in a way that reifies and ignores other dimensions and/​or layers of embodiment. That includes important phenomena that are ‘in between’ any bifurcation of the body as subject and as an object, commencing with the habits of embodiment for a start, which are only partly available to consciousness and often in situation of breakdown or the ‘un-​ ready-​to-​hand’, as we will see.

6.4  French Phenomenology of the Body: Jean-​Paul Sartre In French existentialist phenomenology, the body became a more explicit theme than had previously been the case, even if the ground was prepared for it by that earlier phenomenological work. There are several reasons we can adduce for this more thematic focus on the body. First, Ideas II had a major influence on the thought of Merleau-​Ponty, who was one of the first outside readers of the book (and indeed visitors) in the newly 4  We would need to consider the details of various pathological and anomalous cases of embodiment too, but, see Gallagher (2005) for a nice treatment of the issues in regard to Molyneux cases, phantom limbs, and some of the injuries that afflict Ian Waterman, in particular his almost total lack of proprioception. 5  For exposition of this point in regard to Husserl and the neglected phenomenologist, Helmuth Plessner, see Wehrle (2020).

132    Erol Čopelj and Jack Reynolds established Husserl archives in Leuven, in preparation for what was to be his magnum opus, Phenomenology of Perception. In addition, there was already an existing French tradition of philosophy of the body, commencing with Malebranche and Descartes, and which in the early 20th century also included Bergson, as well as Sartre and Merleau-​ Ponty’s contemporary, Gabriel Marcel.6 Although it is difficult to generalize about national receptions of phenomenology, there were arguably also some differing ambitions for the phenomenological project, which partly derive from the particular philosophical scene in France within which phenomenology was both developed and encountered. Without being able to do the history of ideas justice here, we can simply note the existing French philosophical scene was bifurcated between the idealism of Brunschvicg and Bergson’s vitalist philosophy, and that played a significant role in Sartre’s encounter with phenomenology, for one. Sartre famously discovered phenomenology in the winter of 1932/​3 over an Apricot cocktail. At that time (and indeed afterwards) Sartre had an existing dialectical concern with overcoming idealism and realism. In addition, he saw phenomenology as providing resources to further enable his own distinctive non-​naturalist ‘realism’ regarding the contingency of being. Addressing Sartre’s metaphysical picture is not something we can do in any detail here, except to note that he distanced himself from Husserl’s later idealism but arguably remains true to some parts of Logical Investigations, and his phenomenology of embodiment complements the account of Ideas II (see Moran, 2010), although Sartre did not seem to have access to that particular Husserlian text. Sartre’s important early essay, Transcendence of the Ego, involves a critique of Husserl’s transcendental ego and its roles ‘within’ or as constituting experience, along with the phenomenological role of the ‘I’. Drawing from a Humean critique of the substantive self, as Husserl also did, for Sartre there is an anonymity of the person chasing the tram or ‘street car’. In this more anonymous or non-​egocentric conception of phenomenology, the body remains largely an implicit background rather than something warranting direct phenomenological attention. With Being and Nothingness, however, this changes. Sartre devotes a long chapter to the body in part three of the book. Moreover, in Sartre’s literary works the body is an ongoing, even perennial focus of his attention. He and de Beauvoir were both concerned with the ‘Look’, in both their literary and philosophical works.7 But the philosophical and phenomenological foundation is found in Being and Nothingness. In general, there is some justification for describing Sartre’s phenomenology as articulated in Being and Nothingness as a hybrid of Husserl and Heidegger’s. Like 6 

Explicitly or implicitly there is also perhaps a tacit Catholicism operative here, as Derrida argues in On Touching (2005), where he critically engages with this tradition, including the work of Merleau-​Ponty. 7  For Sartre, the look of another person has the power to decentre or nihilate us from our surrounds. Sartre evocatively describes this scenario in the infamous key-​ hole scenario where someone is caught peeping. Another interesting example is his description of an individual who is immersed in appreciating the natural world, say bird-​watching, but is disrupted by the presence of another person even if they do not look at them. Sartre thinks there is an ontological (not physical) reorientation of the world that ensues.

Multidimensionality of the Body    133 Husserl, Sartre’s phenomenological investigations can be extremely focused and detailed, and he pays close attention to the multidimensionality of the phenomenal field, as it plays out in different areas of our existence. In relation to the body in particular, Sartre is keen to stress that the noetic dimension of embodiment (body-​for-​itself) and the noematic (body-​for-​other) are on different and incommunicable levels—​in other words, they cannot be reduced to one another and neither is satisfactory in isolation (Sartre, 1995: 304−5). Nor does Sartre think that there is a third dimension to which these two dimensions may be traced back and where the duality of this level may be harmonized. Nevertheless, there are connections between these dimensions, and Sartre thinks it is essential to understand their proper ontological ordering. As a general approach to describing phenomena, this is very much in line with Husserl’s discovery of the multiplicity and irreducibility of the phenomenal field in the Logical Investigations that we discussed above. Insofar as the overall schema of Sartre’s philosophical project is concerned, he is very much in agreement with Heidegger’s notion of being-​in-​ the-​world, which he tries to develop in a specific direction. Indeed, at the start of his study of embodiment, Sartre says that we must start from our being-​in-​the-​world. As for Heidegger, for Sartre being-​in-​the-​world contains two essential dimensions: facticity and freedom which are closely related to Heidegger’s attunements and projective understanding, respectively. Sartre’s description of the noetic body (in its being-​for-​itself) is a description of the way that the body participates in our facticity and freedom.

6.4.1 Being-​for-​itself As a general principle, it can be said that in whatever dimension or layer the body manifests, it assumes the essential and defining qualities of that dimension or layer. For example, when the body manifests in the sensuous layer, it appears as something coloured, extended, shaped, and so on. Now, for both Heidegger and Sartre’, ‘facticity’ designates the raw fact of existence, of being here, as a human being, in the midst of these particular things and within these limitations. While, as Heidegger has shown, facticity can disclose itself in different ways through moods or attunements, there is something intrinsically enigmatic and unintelligible about the fact that we are at all. For Sartre, the factic body partakes in this enigmatic quality of our facticity. It is contingent that I exist. But given that I exist, it is necessary that I exist in a determinate place and in the midst of objects that are ordered in a particular way. This necessity is a part of my facticity. On the basis of these observations, Sartre focuses on the fact that every such ordering of things in the midst of the world refers to and sketches out a peculiar object that is not itself just another object in the midst of the world. This should make us recall Husserl’s description of how Leib makes the ordering of things possible without itself being just another thing in that order. This ‘inapprehensible given’ is the body with its senses, not as it appears to someone observing it, but as it is lived by each one of us in our pursuit of projects. Everything refers to the senses through which the world is given. In that sense, the body is everywhere. Nevertheless, the senses are elusive

134    Erol Čopelj and Jack Reynolds and inapprehensible: they cannot be grasped in the way that the objects can but only as the ungraspable condition of possibility of our experience of objects. This description of the body as ungraspable and invisible does not refer to some kind of a lack but rather to a positive phenomenological description of the body as it is, in the factic dimension of being-​in-​the-​world. To illustrate this, Sartre uses the example of somebody surveying their surroundings from upon the top of a hill. While they can survey all that is around them, they nevertheless do not and cannot—​without annihilating the body as for-​itself—​have a perspective on their own body; the body is the point of view on whatever is actually being surveyed but it cannot itself be seen. Even if there were some Archimedean spot outside the world from which we could see everything, it would nevertheless still be the case that we wouldn’t be able to see ourselves seeing. The fact of being there is an omni-​ present dimension of the phenomenal field but it is not one that can ever be grasped or known; rather it is the point of departure for all grasping and knowledge. His literature explores the contingency of embodiment. In Nausea, his chief protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, is concerned not just with the chestnut tree, but with the contingency of his own appearance. Indeed, for Sartre, the factic body is originally disclosed in the experience of nausea. As we have seen, in the context of being-​in-​the-​world, facticity is necessarily co-​ joined with a dimension that is responsible for instrumental sense-​making, vis-​à-​vis the futural projection of possibilities. For Sartre, the projection of possibilities into the future (e.g. of finishing writing this chapter) necessarily involves a surpassing of the factic body. The factic body is there as our anchor in the midst of the world but it is constantly and necessarily surpassed through our projections into the future. This surpassing and projecting creates an instrumental field with which we are engaged practically. The body plays an essential role in the constitution of this instrumental field. For Sartre, the disclosure of the instrumental field presupposes a hand, or a body, that ends the chain of references and instrumental associations. In other words, the instrumental body is not itself another instrument within the field of instruments but the non-​utilizable limit that allows any such field to appear in the first place. As Sartre says, the hand is the ‘unknowable and not utilisable term that the last instrument of the series indicates’ (Sartre, 1995, 323). Sartre argues that if our general project is one of fixing a door, then the nail that we are looking at will, in turn, pre-​reflectively refer us to the hammer that is needed to make use of that nail. Moreover, that hammer also refers to the bit of wood that needs to be stabilized, and this in turn refers to the arm and hand that will hold the hammer. But the arm itself exists differently from these instruments; it pertains to the invisible and elusive dimension that the other instruments refer to and sketch out but which itself never appears as just another instrument. In other words, our perception of objects is structured according to their probable use for us and by an implicit (horizonal) reference to our own, invisible body. From the start, ordinary human experience teaches us that perception is meaningful and organized in terms of possible projects in the world, and in this regard perception solicits us toward action. This idea would be explored in detail by Merleau-​Ponty, and subsequently ‘enactivism’, which was partly inspired by his

Multidimensionality of the Body    135 work (e.g. in Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and others).8 It is also important to appreciate that while they are closely related and inseparable phenomena, the elusiveness and inapprehensibility of the facticity body is not the same as the hiddenness of the instrumental body. As Sartre says ‘Either it is the centre of reference that is emptily aimed at by the world’s implement-​objects, or it is the contingency that the for-​itself exists; more accurately, these two modes of being are complimentary’ (Sartre, 1995: 453). In other words, both are distinct dimensions of our embodied being-​in-​the-​world and, as such, help constitute the infinite richness of the phenomenal field that phenomenology must always respect and try to do justice to descriptively.

6.4.2 Being for-​the-​other Like Husserl, Sartre recognizes that in addition to its noetic dimension—​its being for-​ itself—​the body also exists noematically. Sartre describes this as the body’s being for-​ the-​Other, referring to the way that the body manifests within the world of another subject (for what Sartre takes to be contingent reasons, both roles can be played by the same human individual). Sartre’s description of this dimension of embodiment is based on his complicated and involved phenomenology of intersubjectivity, into which we cannot go here. Let it suffice to briefly state that the body as it is for-​the-​Other belongs to the objectifying possibility of intersubjective encounters, where the Other is transcended as a being-​in-​the-​world and apprehended as a peculiar kind of object within-​the-​world. This objectification is inseparable from the apprehension of the other as an embodied being, where the body expresses the other’s being-​in-​the-​world. This apprehension of the body as something within the world is moreover sui generis. Not only is the perception of the other’s body radically distinct from the perception of inanimate things, this perception itself exhibits different forms. First, the other’s body is sketched out in the instrumental field with which I am directly engaged, just as my body is. But, as we saw, whereas it is impossible to take a point of view on the body as it is for-​itself, it is possible to objectify the other’s body and bring it into view. Such objectification involves either apprehending the body in its raw facticity (in which case it appears as the flash of the other, which plays a key role in Sartre’s long description of sexual desire) or as an instrument that I can utilize (through salaries, threats, etc). The other’s body is also always apprehended on the background of being-​in-​the-​world and therefore as possessing a meaningful structure that has to be interpreted in terms of the other’s projects and instrumental relations. In other words, it is never given as a merely inanimate thing but as a body of another in a situation. It is possible, however, to abstract the body from this background. Through such an act of abstraction, the body almost manifests as a pure inanimate object, as a corpse (we say ‘almost’ because even in this apprehension there 8  Enactivism is usually split into three main types: radical (Hutto and Myin), autopoietic (Varela, Thompson, etc.) and sensori-​motor (O’Regan, Noë, and others). The last two are significantly indebted to Merleau-​Ponty.

136    Erol Čopelj and Jack Reynolds is a sense that this object existed as a structure of some being-​in-​the-​world). The corpse body is the phenomenological source of physiological and anatomical categories, which have no place, according to Sartre, in the more fundamental and original dimension of embodiment. Finally, Sartre describes a dimension of embodiment that can be described as a kind of hybrid between the body for-​itself and for-​the-​Other. In this dimension, the body appears to the subject as it is for the Other. The infinite actual and possible perspectives that the body could exhibit to Others are here given as empty profiles of my body, as apprehended and objectified in psychological reflection. I cannot know these absent profiles directly but must learn about them through communication with others, who have the perspective of my body that I cannot possibly have (according to Sartre, language plays a key role here). This is the phenomenological dimension wherein the phenomenon of alienation finds its roots: I am alienated from my body because the body partially is what Others take it to be. According to Sartre, the three dimensions that we have discussed—​for-​itself, for-​the-​Other, and for-​itself-​as-​for-​the-​Other—​exhaust the dimensions of corporeality. Sartre’s account has been influential. With Merleau-​Ponty and Levinas, he introduced the French terms ‘corps vécu’ and ‘corps vivant’, meant as equivalents or translations of the German Leib and translated into English as lived-​body (but see Heinämaa, 2021, for discussion). At the same time, his work also leaves several questions unanswered, most notably in explaining why there often appears to be a unity between these different ‘aspects’ of embodiment that he describes, as well as the reversible relationship that seems to obtain between them. Dualistic style subject-​object conceptions of the body may be significant in our experience, but perhaps they are not exhaustive of the modalities of embodied experience. As Evan Thompson (2007: 235) suggests, there is a risk that if we reify this distinction between Leib and Körper into two metaphysically irreducible properties or aspects, then we create problems reminiscent of those that face the classical mind-​body problem. Perhaps the best way to think of this is to emphasize, as we have, the multidimensionality of the body.

6.5  Maurice Merleau-​Ponty: Embodied Habits and Tactility In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-​Ponty’s overall focus is on embodiment as much as it is on perception, and that is for structural reasons: they form a structural ‘couple’ and many of the problems he diagnoses in regard to the history of philosophy ramify across both perception and the body. In short, Merleau-​Ponty argues that neither are adequately comprehended by empiricism and intellectualism, an antimony that he contends has characterized large parts of the history of Western philosophy. Empiricism treats the body as an aggregation of parts causally interacting (a mechanistic model that

Multidimensionality of the Body    137 he calls partes extra partes). Intellectualism bestows power upon conscious judgement and reflection. In itself the body has no special significance or meaning for intellectualist views, no intentional mode of comportment or attunement that needs to be understood on its own terms, which he sometimes characterizes in terms of the ‘I can’ rather than the ‘I think’. Merleau-​Ponty ultimately contends that motor intentionality, which continues the description of the instrumental dimension of embodiment, has far-​ reaching consequences, and is the ground for reflective intentionality (including any reflective philosophical understanding). Given our interest in methodology, it is worth noting from the outset that Merleau-​ Ponty is much more consistently dialectical in his approach than Husserl. For him, the role given to the body (and perception) in the empiricist and intellectualist traditions is found wanting, both descriptively and explanatorily, thus motivating a rethinking of it. This differs from the way in which Husserl usually motivates his own phenomenology of embodiment, which is not via explanatory inadequacies in other philosophical and scientific treatments of embodiment (cf. Carman, 1999). Although Husserl agrees with Merleau-​Ponty that our embodiment gives us a worldly structure, the body is also ultimately constituted within the field of consciousness by the ‘transcendental ego’, which Husserl argues is required to understand both the empirical ego and the unity of the body-​subject we have described (cf. Staiti, 2016: 131). The body is not identical with the transcendental ego; rather, the latter is the ground and condition of possibility of the former. For Merleau-​Ponty, by contrast, embodiment is paradoxically both involved in the fundamental constituting activity of the subject while itself being something constituted. What he calls the body-​subject is the most basic enabling condition, albeit situated within what he calls a phenomenal or transcendental field (this includes the socio-​historical, and it is not a field of pure consciousness). To try to make this difference a little more concrete, it is worth noticing that in Phenomenology of Perception the case study of Schneider is quite pivotal, as are experiences of ‘phantom limbs’, which are situations where someone who has lost a limb nonetheless experiences pains or aches that are ostensibly ‘in’ the absent limb. In regard to Schneider, who suffered an injury in World War I, Merleau-​Ponty derives the details of this case study ‘second-​hand’ from the work of the Gestalt psychologists Adhémar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein. In short, while Schneider can blow his nose if he feels that need, or grasp his nose if it has been bitten by a mosquitoe, he cannot perform equivalent actions if his eyes are shut and he also cannot smoothly point to his nose if asked to. If he watches his hand, eventually he can guide it to his nose, but it is a laborious process. When confronted with a practical task such as cutting paper, however, Schneider doesn’t have to first locate his hands before moving them; the scissors on the table and the task of cutting paper immediately and unreflectively mobilize potential actions and solicit him to react to them in certain ways. Concrete movements and acts of grasping, such as the blowing of his nose, enjoy a privileged position for him and, Merleau-​Ponty will argue, for all of us; it is the main example of what he calls ‘motor intentionality’. It is worth highlighting that this idea is a development of Sartre’s description of the instrumental body as opening up a field of instruments and enabling interaction with

138    Erol Čopelj and Jack Reynolds that field without needing meditation by the body as it is for-​the-​Other (i.e. as something represented within-​the-​world). It is also in harmony with Husserl’s observation that the body is immediately movable, without first needing to be represented in some way. The grasping movement is from the outset at its end and involves anticipation, and the understanding of space involved in grasping is basic, even though it largely resists our explicit thematization and understanding. On the other hand, when Schneider is asked to accomplish some abstract activity like pointing to his nose, these kinds of reflective activity go through the intermediary of noematic body and Schneider cannot perform movements that are not a response to an actual, present situation. Merleau-​ Ponty suggests that Schneider either has an ideal formula for a particular movement that he works out in his head before acting, or he launches blindly into movement. There is no feedback between these two very different attitudes, whereas for most of us active movement is indissolubly both movement and consciousness of movement and we presuppose a mutual presence of body and object in our pointing. To put it in the terms we have been using in this chapter, we could say that in Schneider’s case the connection between the noetic and noematic dimensions of embodiment has broken down in some way, while for most of us this connection remains operational. It is instructive to contemplate how contrasting different forms of the same phenomenon (i.e. the ‘intact’ and the ‘broken’ forms of the connection now in question) can serve as a helpful aid in phenomenological descriptions of the multidimensionality of the phenomenal field. While this example serves to reaffirm Merleau-​Ponty’s distinction between the instrumental body (the ‘I can’) and objectified body (which admits of an ‘I think’), Merleau-​ Ponty is also keen to point out that Schneider’s difficulties cannot be readily accounted for on the basis of either empiricism or intellectualism, as he understands them. As Martin Dillon summarizes this: ‘The patient cannot be understood as suffering from a purely physical disability (as empiricism would have it) because he can perform the physical movements; but neither can he be incapacitated in a purely psychical way (as intellectualism claims) because he can understand the goals to be achieved’ (Dillon, 1998: 138). The central role of the lived-​body in Merleau-​Ponty’s work (rather than the transcendental ego) also complicates his view of the phenomenological method. Arguably he ends up with a weak or liberal naturalism that engages with and criticizes reductive construals of embodiment (see Reynolds, 2018, 2022), in contrast to Sartre’s avowed non-​naturalism. This difference between Sartre and Merleau-​Ponty pervades their respective accounts of freedom and racism too, despite the two philosophers often being united under the ‘existentialist’ umbrella. For Sartre, famously, we are radically free in any circumstances, notwithstanding the necessity of embodiment we have enumerated and the significant role of facticity more generally in his philosophy. And although Sartre aligns himself with Frantz Fanon and the ‘negritude’ movement of his time in essays written after World War II, the point remains that consciousness is not identical with embodiment, for Sartre. As such, race and gender are not in the ‘for-​itself ’/​ consciousness in any deep sense. There hence arguably remains a sort of dualism in his treatment of embodiment, even if his dialogues with de Beauvoir and Fanon changed

Multidimensionality of the Body    139 his perspective on this over time, enabling greater recognition of the way in which race and gender are in the lived-​body and structures how we occupy space in a world, as shown by Fanon in Black Skin, Whites Masks (cf. also Ngo, 2017). There is another idea that some contemporary phenomenologists have drawn on that should be considered and introduced: the body-​schema, which Merleau-​Ponty discusses at length in Phenomenology of Perception. What he calls the body-​image refers to perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs about our body, and which therefore help constitute the noematic body, the body as it is for-​the-​Other. The body-​schema is tied to a pre-​reflective sense of where our bodies are in space and the affordances presented for action (cf. Gallagher et al., 1998: 54), which is largely not directly phenomenologically attended to, but shapes and constrains us through motor skills and habits and which help constitute the noetic, instrumental dimension of embodiment. Nonetheless, there is some sense of being with our bodies that is phenomenologically manifest and might lend plausibility to the idea of the body-​schema, even if it is not usually a thematic object of focus for us. And there is a reason for that, which we began to indicate in the Introduction to this chapter (Section 6.1) and our remarks around science and ‘common sense’. In one sense, of course, it is no surprise to anyone that we don’t typically need to reflect on the location of our limbs in space in order to deploy them to grasp a mug, or to type the thoughts that we are having. But we also don’t often reflect on that very fact, and if we do, we can consider what it means to experience our bodies in the world in that way and attend to it more closely. Sometimes that phenomenological attention will help to reveal structures and dimensions of that usually implicit experience. Moreover, if we are stressed, injured, or suffering any of a variety of psycho-​pathological conditions, the body can come to display itself in dimensions quite differently from this, but it is still the case that the anomalous nature of these experiences is then comprehensible against these ways of being-​with our bodies that we often typically take for granted. Merleau-​Ponty is also a philosopher for whom habit plays a significant role, much more so than for Sartre. Many philosophers and scientists who have treated habits have done so from what Merleau-​Ponty calls an empiricist perspective, and the habits are rendered mechanistically as chains of rigid association or causation. But he seeks to give them a positive and productive role in the body’s instrumental dimension: a kind of flexibility and ‘know-​how’ of a non-​propositional and non-​reflective sort. Habits are not mere habits, unintelligent and rigid, but forms of skilful adjustment to our world, a position that Hubert Dreyfus draws heavily on in his phenomenology of skill acquisition (cf. 2002). As with Heidegger’s conception of the unready-​to-​hand (cf. Wheeler, 2005), however, these are often made phenomenologically manifest and conspicuous in situations of breakdown. While Schneider’s injuries present a very unusual case, there are also more mundane scenarios we can describe, like one of the authors of this chapter not managing to smoothly accomplish a task that is usually almost semi-​automatic, like setting up a zoom link or a video-​conference. This experience reveals something that casts a new light on our usual modes of being-​in-​the-​world. Again, this reflects Merleau-​Ponty’s quite different view of the phenomenological reduction than Husserl’s. As defended by Husserl, phenomenological reduction when

140    Erol Čopelj and Jack Reynolds coupled with the eidetic reduction can reach a level of clarity and distinctness befitting a first philosophy, bracketing away the successes of our various sciences, as well as culture, history, and metaphysics, in order to return to our experience of the things themselves, without presupposition. On Merleau-​Ponty’s view, however, this is a heuristic that can bring certain phenomena to light that were previously neglected (or can help to compensate where theory has overdetermined the observation or experience), but it is not a move that facilitates access to a presuppositionless starting point for a rigorous science of consciousness. Likewise, any reduction that aimed to bracket away our own embodiment would, on this view, be a Cartesian residue, and Merleau-​Ponty argues that some of the key phenomena of interest to Husserl in his later work are presupposed by, rather than accessed through, the phenomenological reduction.9 This is also the essence of the ‘existential’ rejoinder that Sartre and Merleau-​Ponty have against Husserl, whether it is fair or not. They think that Husserlian phenomenology remained concerned with the ‘I think’ and thus remains a form of intellectualism. There is a bodily encounter with the world, or the contingency of being for Sartre, that is not about knowledge or phenomenological judgement. It is an ontological rather than an epistemic relation, we might say, and the body is important to this, whereas they contend that for Husserl the body remains an object of an ‘I think’ or representation for consciousness. The question that separates them, then, concerns the viability or otherwise of any move to bracket embodiment itself (not just a particular scientific view of the body, say), to place it in parentheses, and examine its genetic constitution. There is certainly an interest in Merleau-​Ponty’s writings on the genesis of the body as the object par excellence, but the lived body functions as both an enabling and disabling condition. Situated within a phenomenal field, it becomes a quasi-​transcendental condition for the constitution of meaning and the like, rather than consciousness. As such, the issue concerns whether or not Husserl’s self-​proclaimed Cartesian Meditations reflects a Cartesian conception of mind and body, not simply methodologically but also minimally substantively, as Claude Romano (2015) contends. We cannot settle that issue here, other than to reaffirm the first footnote of the chapter and recognize that the co-​authors of this chapter diverge on this question. It is important to note, however, that there are also norms characteristic of motor intentionality, as we saw in the discussion of Schneider above. According to Merleau-​ Ponty, the key point is that ‘whether a system of motor or perceptual powers, our body is not an object for an “I think”, it is a grouping of lived-​through meanings which moves towards its equilibrium’ (Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 1995: 153). Merleau-​Ponty hence explores a more basic motivation for human action than is usually taken to be the case: rather than focusing upon our desire to attain certain pleasures or achieve certain goals, his analysis reveals the body’s more primordial tendency to form what he calls ‘intentional arcs’, and to try and achieve an equilibrium with the world. 9  Merleau-​Ponty has in mind motor-​intentionality, temporality, the life-​world, and intersubjectivity. Rather than directly criticize Husserl, Merleau-​Ponty appeals to Husserl’s ‘unthought’ to support his own views.

Multidimensionality of the Body    141 By understanding perception as tightly bound up with action affordances in this way, Merleau-​Ponty anticipates subsequent ‘enactivist’ views that explicitly understand perception as a doing, an action, or an enaction (Gallagher, 2017). How does perception involve a doing, exactly? Is that always the case? We cannot here address the various debates about ‘motionless perception’, or ‘locked in syndrome’ as potential counterexamples, but it is clear that the general enactivist view fits neatly with Merleau-​ Ponty’s ongoing efforts to complicate dualistic ways of thinking. On this view, experience and physical events are not radically separate, but rather co-​implicated because of the tight relationship between perception and embodied motility. We are ‘thrown’ into this world moving when we are born, of course, and in relation to perceptual experience the claim would be that we perceive what is salient for us, attractive or repulsive for us, useful or not. In addition, we perceive the apple, not one dimensionally but with its sides in some sense present to us (Husserl suggests apperceptively) and which anticipate our ability to adopt another perspective on that object, whether we seek to use it practically or to gain knowledge of it. Like Sartre, Merleau-​ Ponty also gives the body a transcendental significance. Although there is cultural variability concerning the embodied expressions of emotions, for example, there is also a role for the body as enabling all such differences. The body is always there and its absence (and to a certain degree also its variation) is inconceivable (Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 1995: 91). It means that we cannot treat the body as nothing but an object available for perusal, which can or cannot be part of our world, since it is not something that we can possibly do without. It is the mistake of classical psychology, and the empiricism of many sciences, that it treats the body as an object, when for Merleau-​ Ponty, an object ‘is an object only insofar as it can be moved away from me [ . . . ] Its presence is such that it entails a possible absence. Now the permanence of my body is entirely different in kind’ (Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 1995: 90). As we saw, this is a development of insights already explicated by Husserl and Sartre. While there are sciences of say, proprioception, which explain our sense of being-​with our bodies and their role in facilitating something like access to a world that is teeming with possibilities, Merleau-​Ponty argues that we cannot adequately explain this, or the way the body-​schema functions, through empiricist construals of the body as just causally interacting parts. In more recent times Evan Thompson has prosecuted a related argument, arguing that it is this intrinsic bodily awareness (which he insists is not equivalent to awareness of the body as an object) that must be explained by any scientific account of consciousness that is functionalist and/​or neurologically oriented: ‘it must account for the ways in which one’s body is intentionally directed towards the world, and it must account for a form of self-​awareness that does not imply identification of one’s body as an object’ (Thompson, 2007: 252). Both Thompson and Merleau-​Ponty thus provide resources for a dialectical version of phenomenology of the body, which not only offers phenomenological analyses in their own right, but also exhibits the problems and lacunae within other programs, particularly of a reductive orientation, and infers that this or that part of the phenomenological picture should be accepted (see Reynolds, 2018: Chapter 6).

142    Erol Čopelj and Jack Reynolds

6.5.1 Intertwining/​Double Sensation Merleau-​ Ponty is also well-​ known for his reflections on tactility and sensibility. Various reflections on touch feature in the Phenomenology (where he drew on Husserl’s discussions in Ideas II) and in his later unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, where he emphasizes the reversibility of the touching-​touched relation and proposes an ‘indirect ontology’ of the chiasm and the flesh. The more ontological picture cannot concern us here (for a summary, see Reynolds & Roffe, 2018), but he argues that the experiences of touching and being touched are not simply separate orders of being in the world, as Sartre had claimed in Being and Nothingness. Sartre contends that: To touch and to be touched, to feel that one is touching and to feel that one is touched—​these are two species of phenomena which it is useless to try and reconcile by the term ‘double sensation’. In fact, they are radically distinct and exist on two incommunicable levels.

While Merleau-​Ponty agrees with Sartre that these two dimensions cannot be united by the term ‘double sensation’ ([1945] 1995: 93), he nevertheless insists upon the thoroughly communicative and interdependent relationship that obtains between the sentient and the sensible. As Merleau-​Ponty puts it: ‘when I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but an ambiguous set-​up in which both hands can alternate the role of “touching” and being “touched” ’ ([1945] 1995: 93). He elaborates further: I can identify the hand touched in the same one which will in a moment be touching [ . . . ] In this bundle of bones and muscles which my right hand presents to my left, I can anticipate for an instant the incarnation of that other right hand, alive and mobile, which I thrust towards things in order to explore them. The body tries [ . . . ] to touch itself while being touched and initiates a kind of reversible reflection. (Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 1995: 93)

In his later work, he puts the point as follows: ‘a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment [ . . . ] things pass into us, as well as we into the things’ (Merleau-​Ponty, 1964: 123). Here we get a kind of ontological rendering of his earlier philosophy of ambiguity, one that in some sense aims to establish the ground of distinctions like subject and object as they pertain to touch and sensation but also more generally. It seems fair to say that Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology gives us a more complex picture of embodiment than that which Sartre presents. Any absolute distinction between being in the world as touching, and being in the world as touched (such as Sartre’s), deprives the existential phenomena of their complexity. Perceptual experience, likewise, is not adequately understood as pure consciousness, being tightly linked with action in the world and

Multidimensionality of the Body    143 with habits playing a significant role made possible by the motor intentionality of the lived-​body.

6.6  Conclusion We have introduced some key phenomenological ideas about the multidimensionality of embodiment, and used some methodological distinctions from phenomenology to attempt an overview of some of the major phenomenological themes and authors. We should note that this summary is partial and might well be extended. We have mentioned Helmuth Plessner only in passing. In Totality and Infinity (1969), Levinas has written about the phenomenology of eros, with an embodied dimension to his discussions concerning the caress and voluptuousity. In Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body (1975), Michel Henry has tried to show that the body primarily manifests in an invisible auto-​affective dimension that precedes and conditions the possibility of every kind of horizon, such as Husserl’s transcendental horizon and Heidegger’s being-​ in-​the-​world. In works such as Body, Community, Language and World, Jan Patočka’s (1998) has argued that the body is inseparably implied in our instinctual life that is rooted in the Earth, and which precedes and provides the foundation for being-​in-​ the-​world, thereby opening up certain novel avenues for the phenomenology of embodiment. What we have provided is thus far from an exhaustive account of what the phenomenological tradition has said about the body, but we hope it traces some of the overlap and the diversity in the major figures, and is useful for understanding the work of other phenomenological authors. Critical questions might still be posed, of course. We have not talked at much length about the sexed body, for example, a criticism which many feminist authors (often with phenomenological background) have made (Grosz, 1994), and which de Beauvoir brought to the fore as well as anyone in The Second Sex. We have only briefly alluded to race and its enculturation in the lived-​body. We have not considered at all the aged body, which all of us are increasingly inhabiting. But it is not only a question of what has been left out, and hence what further additions might supplement the analyses offered here. Perhaps the more radical question concerns the singularity of the idea of the (lived) body. Perhaps there are many bodies, with any invariant or universal structures difficult to discern within the putative unity that we assume qua lived or living, or a volatility about them (Grosz, 1994). Without settling these questions, which in our view leave intact the need for phenomenological clarification of the sense of ownership or unity we at least sometimes have in embodied life (even if it is ultimately epiphenomenal), we hope that the itinerary we have sketched is illuminative. These clarifications concerning embodiment are too readily forgotten about in many discussions concerning the body that are reductive in orientation. Although there is a risk of dualism in any reified contrast of Leib and Körper, as well as in the idea of the lived-​body which presupposes a contrast with mere bodies and is expressed in the past tense, the multidimensionality

144    Erol Čopelj and Jack Reynolds of embodiment remains phenomenology’s key contribution. It is a contribution that remains important for research in cognitive science concerning embodied agency, as well as in the health sciences, psychopathology, and beyond.

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Multidimensionality of the Body    145 Ngo, H. (2017). The habits of racism: A phenomenology of racism and racialised embodiment. New York: Lexington. Patočka, J. (1998). Body, community, language and world, trans. E. Kohák. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court. Ratcliffe, M. (2008). Feelings of being: Phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reynolds, J. (2018). Phenomenology, naturalism and science: A hybrid and heretical proposal. London: Routledge. Reynolds, J. (2020). Embodiment and emergence: Navigating an epistemic and metaphysical and dilemma. Journal of Transcendental Philosophy, 1(1), 1–​25. Reynolds, J. (2022). Merleau-​Ponty and liberal naturalism. In M. De Caro and D. Macarthur (eds.), Routledge handbook to liberal naturalism (pp. 70–​82). London: Routledge. Reynolds, J., & Roffe, J. (2018). Neither/​nor: Merleau-​Ponty’s ontology in the ‘the intertwining /​the chiasm. In A. Mildenberg (ed.), Understanding Merleau-​ Ponty, Understanding Modernism (pp. 100–​14). London: Bloomsbury. Romano, C. (2015). At the heart of reason, trans. M. Smith. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sartre, J-​P. (1962). Transcendence of the ego, trans. Forrest Williams & Robert Kirkpatrick. New York: Noonday Press. Sartre, J-​P. (1995). Being and nothingness, trans. H. Barnes. London: Routledge.Staiti, A. (2016). The relative right of naturalism: Reassessing Husserl on the mind/​body problem. In B. Centi (ed.), Tra corpo e mente. Questioni di Confine (pp. 125–​150). Florence: Le Lettere. Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wehrle, M. (2020). Being a body and having a body. Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences, 19, 499–​521. Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the cognitive world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilson, R. (2004). Boundaries of the mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 7

T he Self in th e Worl d The Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur Paul Savage and Henrika Franck

7.1  Introduction Paul Ricoeur’s rich thinking and production on narrative, time, identity, selfhood, and ethics has inspired many Management and Organization Studies (MOS) scholars to draw on his work (Boje, 2014; Rowlinson, Hassard, & Decker, 2014; Mena, Rintamäki, Fleming, & Spicer, 2016; Luhman, 2019; Cunliffe & Ivaldi, 2020). We think that one reason for Ricoeur’s ‘usefulness’ in understanding phenomena in management and organization is his refusal to apply strict yardsticks, measures, or standards to life, and in extension to organizational life. Ricoeur allows us, at least to some extent, to get a handle on that which is within, that which comes from beneath, and allows us to make sense of the problems we are experiencing. Throughout his life, he worked with the subjective self as it is in ongoing tension with others and with institutions. In MOS we are by default embedded in an institutional setting, and at the same time disrupted by, and disrupting, that setting. As scholars, we often need to abstract from individual experiences in order to make general conclusions. However, this might overlook an awareness of experience, particularly when we talk about identities or ethics, where personal and subjective expressions become concretized in institutional settings. Ricoeur gives us a means to interpret the abstract and the concrete in the constant interaction between the particular and the general. Prior to World War II, Paul Ricoeur studied philosophy at the University of Rennes and then at the Sorbonne, both in France. He was drafted into the French army at the beginning of the war, was captured, and remained a prisoner of the Germans from 1940 to the end of the war in 1945. While in the various prison camps, he began translating Husserl’s Ideas I from German into French, and this then led him, after the war, to his doctorate and professorship at the University of Strasbourg up to 1956. Starting in 1954 he began regularly lecturing in North America, and was a professor of theological

Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur    147 philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1970 to 1992. In 2005, he passed away at the age of 92.

7.2  Ricoeur and Phenomenology Paul Ricoeur’s first major project after World War II was to explore a philosophy of the will, laid out in three volumes, of which the third was never written. The first volume, his doctoral dissertation published in French in 1950, was entitled Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1966). As the title suggests, it focused on our experiences within a world that we can affect, and which can affect us. In this opening work, Ricoeur begins to articulate the approach we see repeated over and over in his writing, namely, ‘to integrate legitimate antagonisms and to make them bring about their own surpassing’ (Ricoeur, 2013: 3). He keeps returning to the dialectic between the particular and the general, as well as ideas of the self, subjectivity, and the world, built as they are upon complementarity rather than opposition. Understanding is the goal of philosophy, in his view, and presupposes that philosophy arises out of the real world of experience. The second and third volumes, if they can be called that, are understood to be, Fallible Man (1965) and The Symbolism of Evil (1967), published ten years later in his native French. (There is some confusion over whether these two books together encompass what was originally outlined to be the second volume of Freedom and Nature; and, if so, Ricoeur had moved on before a third volume was written.) In Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, Ricoeur explores phenomenology built in part upon the proposal that ‘all consciousness is a consciousness of ’ an object (Ricoeur, 1966: 6). This connection between consciousness and the object that is being thought of, is labelled as ‘intentionality’, a term familiar to students of Husserl and, prior to him, Brentano (2012). There is always intentionality in our experiences of the world because those experiences arise in our consciousness as a relationship between perception and perceived—​it is in this sense that perception intends the perceived. Clearly, this meaning of the word ‘intention’ is different from how we normally use it in daily life, as it does not refer to motivation, aim, or purpose. Instead, it is the connection between, for example, loving and that which is loved, or thinking and the thought. Ricoeur goes on by examining claims to knowledge, particularly objects of knowledge, or, in other terms, objective knowledge. How do we know that we can make those claims? He begins by way of Descartes’ ‘Cogito ergo sum’. Here, we recognize that we are able to make knowledge claims because we know that we exist, but in this case, perception intends a perceived object that is the self. Does knowledge become subjective when the object and subject are one and the same? While this is an epistemological exercise, it is also a metaphysical one due to the inclusion of a subject that knows it exists in reality. If it is not reality, then it is not existence and cannot be thinking. This duality of the self as subject and object comes up again in regard to

148    Paul Savage and Henrika Franck other people as they are both objects of our perception and subjects in their own right, perceiving and having being. This exercise is the opening to his work on the will and a foundation upon which he constructs his view of the capable human, able to act and to understand the world. The nature of the will is important in our experience of reality, and certainly for understanding ourselves and others, as it is within and upon nature that we freely act as we will. The will has the possibility for antagonisms that Ricoeur instead turns into a complementing of one another—​the voluntary and the involuntary. However, this entails a certain tension between the two. On the one side, the voluntary is expressed in our choices. On the other side, the involuntary is expressed as that which is acted upon, most clearly illustrated by our own body. If phenomena are purely objective, then where is the subject to/​through whom things occur? Or, if experience is purely subjective is there anything outside the self acting upon the subject or being acted upon? In response to this polarization, Ricoeur outlines the threefold nature of the voluntary as: deciding to act, choosing what act, and consenting to the world as that which is acted with and upon. The third step, consenting, helps us see the voluntary in relation to the involuntary, by affirming that we decide through our being in the world, we choose and ultimately act through the body, and we choose to act upon the world which is also regulated outside of our voluntary control. In this way, we can see that the voluntary only has meaning because of the involuntary, as the former consents to the latter, and the latter is only involuntary in the light of voluntary action. We see the limitations of freedom as we are free to decide and to choose, yet only able to act through the body and in a world beyond our total control. As Ricoeur offers, ‘[t]‌here is no phenomenology of the purely involuntary, but rather a reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary’ (Ricoeur, 2016: 62). Phenomenology entails thus an incarnate, embodied self, acting within reality wherein we cannot fully separate the phenomenon from the self who experiences. (Here, too, we see a type of intentionality as discussed previously, in the relationship between choosing to act and consenting to the world. One intends the other.) In this way, it becomes apparent that experience is not the only component of a phenomenon. Analysis is also present, as we analyze how we experienced something (I felt, I heard, I saw, etc.), situating events in categories (feelings, sounds, sights, etc.). Furthermore, this analysis distinguishes the components of experience—​the thinker, the act of thinking, and the thought—​arising naturally from the previously mentioned ‘intentionality’, as experience requires a subject; experience happens to someone. Having thus positioned phenomenology with its complementary parts of experience and analysis, Ricoeur leans towards language even more than previously. ‘Applied to the current in philosophy from which I came, this linguistic turn signified the passage from a phenomenology [ . . . ] to a hermeneutics with a focus on language’ (Ricoeur, 1981: 8). Thus began an arc that would bring Ricoeur to an approach that would help us interpret both the particular and the general experience of the world.

Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur    149

7.3  Hermeneutic Phenomenology Hermeneutics is not a reflection on the human sciences, but an explication of the ontological ground upon which these sciences can be constructed. (Ricoeur, 1981: 15)

In the 1960s, Ricoeur’s focus shifted from a hermeneutical phenomenology to hermeneutics and discourse. Perhaps as a response to the academic environment in France at the time, populated as it was by psychoanalysis and the emerging structuralism and post-​modernism, he wrote Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970). This stage of his work focused on Freud’s ideas from the perspective of discourse—​not from the practice of psychoanalysis. Briefly, as Ricoeur had already been looking at decentring the subject in phenomenology, he saw that Freud was also decentring the subject. The difference here was Freud’s limitation (in Ricoeur’s view) that the subject we first encounter is probably a false self, which leads to uncertainty in terms of who is seeing the self. Pointing out the weakness in Freud’s discourse of approaching the self with the suspicion that there is another deeper, hidden self, requires nonetheless a type of faith, a hermeneutics of faith or truth. If nothing is the way it appears, it requires an assumption that there is a pre-​existing structure that we can reference for truth. Here, Ricoeur points to a hermeneutics of suspicion in Freud’s work of uncovering the hidden. In contrast, he offers an accompanying hermeneutics of faith that seeks to give back meaning to the self we encounter. In closing, Ricoeur suggests that Freud’s discourse on instincts, habits, and norms can, in a roundabout way, lead us back to self-​consciousness again through a hermeneutics of suspicion that challenges us to understand what lies behind. With the introduction of language as a system of interrelated signs apart from any external meaning, structuralism began to make headway in other fields of the social sciences during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly through the work of Lévi-​Strauss. In response to structuralist claims to being a scientific method, Ricoeur elaborated on the need to include traditions and, perhaps more importantly, time, in how meaning changes. Structuralism, as Ricoeur understood its early explications, is not able to fully grasp symbols and signs, in part, because symbols have origins in time through discourse. By the same token, Ricoeur pointed to a pre-​existing language that must exist before we can structure a system of interrelated signs—​much like the box image that guides a person to assemble a table-​top puzzle with the individual pieces fitting together. However, where this metaphor of the puzzle fails is that each symbol, sign, or word can mean more than any one thing—​they are polysemic. Discourse is not simply language or speech, but both of those within time and infused with potential meaning beyond the structure. He will come back to the aporias that time presents. Ricoeur continued exploring structure and being—​encompassing the subject-​object pair in relation to the world—​as textual beings. He describes textuality as how language

150    Paul Savage and Henrika Franck is made real in a structured way, encompassing speech and text to project a world, a representation of our world, and how this in turn helps us understand ourselves (1981). Clearly, then, written text is a small part of what he labels textual. Discourse is textual in that it carries meaning beyond the words themselves. Interpretation presupposes language as the means to explain (to ourselves and to others) and to understand experience. Speaking and writing are subjective acts that project or refer to a world outside of the speaker or writer, but nonetheless help us by means of reference to objectivity. Discourse has at its core a distanciation—​the distance between the event (in time) and its meaning, but also between the sense and reference of the words and sentences. The sense is simply what the individual words mean on their own, in a constant relationship of definition with other words as structuralism offers in part; while reference is that object or intention to which the words are directed through discourse—​the world of the text with its abundance of meaning that is the catalyst to interpretation.

7.4  Metaphor, Time, and Narrative How Ricoeur sees human beings as textual beings informs much of his work. It is through text that we can express how we see the world and ourselves in that world, but also that text influences the world. The text informs us also on how to understand the world in this dialectic of the Self as Same and Other, which we will come to in a moment. Moving away from the practice of bracketing, frequently associated with Husserl’s work, Ricoeur challenges transcendental phenomenology with its ideal subject—​a subject that is not enmeshed in the world—​an isolated ego. Rather, his hermeneutic phenomenology positions the subject in relation to the object, within the complexity of the world. To interpret phenomena requires the ability to express what is happening, at least to oneself, which leads Ricoeur to see hermeneutic phenomenology as presupposing a fullness of language. Because language is received from others, insofar as we do not create our language as children—​we are given and develop our language by/​through family, culture, education—​then our interpretations and explanations are dependent upon others and interwoven in relation to others. Understanding requires explanation which moves us from understanding somewhat, through the pre-​requirements of language, to understanding more, which then also adds to and informs our language. Having previously articulated two types of hermeneutics, of suspicion and of faith/​ truth, Ricoeur demonstrates how these are revealed in figurative discourse—​a type of discourse that expresses more than the literal meaning of the words. Ricoeur points out that ‘it is the very excess of meaning in comparison to the literal expression that puts the interpretation in motion’ (1970: 19). An ideal type of figurative discourse is metaphor, which compares two objects for the purpose of saying more than what the individual parts are saying. Here, as language begins to meet its own limitations with literal descriptions of the world as it is, metaphor offers possibilities to express truths of reality as it could or should be, through new combinations (Ricoeur, 2004). For example,

Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur    151 while it is not literally true that a marriage is on its last legs (because it has no legs), the truth about the state of the relationship arises in the comparison between a relationship and a biological body with legs. The comparison assumes an understanding of the separate parts (marriage and legs) but offers an innovation in meaning—​a semantic innovation—​‘to bring to light new aspects of reality’ (Ricoeur, 2004: 344). In this way, we can understand metaphorical discourse as causing interpretation due to an excess of meaning, not a lack of meaning, within language. This too requires us to bring both suspicion and faith to bear on discourse as we suspect the lack of similarity but have faith in the comparison. Although not something we will explore deeply, metaphor as a heuristic fiction—​using what is not real to interpret reality (marriages with legs?)—​ redefines reality through a deviation from the purely literal meaning. Literal (or historical) narratives and fictional narratives guide our interpretations of reality in two ways. The former refers to what is possible today due to our understanding of what can and cannot be done within the framework of past human experience. On the other hand, fictional narratives propose another world that offers insight and truth about our real world including possible futures—​and in this respect, ‘our existential time is shaped by the temporal configurations that history and fiction together establish’ (Ricoeur, 1984: 158). Insofar as existential time—​the time of phenomena—​incorporates experience and analysis, as previously discussed, we invoke the past to understand ‘what is’, and we invoke the future (as fiction) to explain how ‘what is’ could be different. Ricoeur approaches time through both the particular and the general, reflecting Augustine’s subjective and Aristotle’s objective positioning that reveals a puzzle about time that, in his view, ultimately cannot be solved. Time is general as cosmic time gathers all phenomena, regardless of meaning, within its boundaries. Time is particular as lived time positions phenomena, with varying meanings, in a constant now that becomes past. What brings cosmic time and lived time together is narrative as discourse—​as having a plot that references both the particular and the general. Time becomes the present location of narrative because discourse is a present act, and narrative becomes the location of time as past, present, and future are explained and understood. Ricoeur’s process of constructing narrative encompasses what he refers to as a mimetic cycle (1984: 54), a process that leads from ‘imperfect knowledge to anagnorisis, or recognition’ (Dowling, 2011: 16). The first stage is prefigured time (Mimesis 1), that collection of meanings, stories, fragments of stories, and events that are as yet unarranged. However, this stage assumes a pre-​understanding of language, of action as symbolically mediated, and of temporal states, as we are unable to recall and to assemble these fragments later for our own use without some type of refencing to a pre-​existing structure. Configured time (Mimesis 2) is a temporal bridge, concerned with emplotment, a phase in which stories, fragments, symbols, references, metaphors, etc., are selected, collected, and ordered with purposeful agency. It is here that narratives are constructed in a present time in reference to the past, present, and future. Cosmic time, in which all actions occur equally, becomes human time as it occurs to me, to us, to the narrator. (We will return to cosmic time in a later section.) Historical and fictional narrative have these two preceding steps in common. Where they diverge is in refiguration (Mimesis 3), that

152    Paul Savage and Henrika Franck moment when a narrative constructed from the mass of experiences and stories, having been ordered through emplotment, is then communicated to another (or oneself) for the purpose of understanding the present world. Historical narratives make explicit claims to truth about this world (Ricoeur, 1985: 3) while ‘every work of fiction, whether verbal or plastic, narrative or lyric, projects a world outside of itself ’ (Ricoeur, 1984: 5). As such, fictional narratives can project similitudes to truth, or may be assemblages of truth, but are so as ‘referential illusions’ (Ricoeur, 1984: 79). They do not refer, as do historical narratives, to actual things past, but rather to possible things of an outside, non-​real world, and thereby construct an illusion of transferability across the horizon of reality and fiction. Refiguration, whether historical or fictional, is a refiguration of the self through narrative as we experience recognition. This is not the simple recognition of oneself as a person able to act, but rather of oneself ‘indirectly by way of the detour through the cultural signs of all sorts that make us say that action is symbolically mediated’ (Ricoeur, 2016: 240). I am refigured, or changed, as I recognize the world with greater understanding and recognize myself as other than I was prior to this greater understanding. In a very banal way, this is clear when we say, ‘I wish I knew then what I know now’. Table 7.1 summarizes the action inherent in each of the three stages of the mimetic cycle—​prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration. In addition, we have articulated an assumption that each stage makes, in an attempt to balance the subject-​ object within the plane of the personal and the general. This narrative mimetic cycle is also foundational to understanding how we build our identity, in relation to time and to others. As mentioned, time becomes human time through narrative that references past living stories—​fragments told to us and constructed on language given to us. However, time and narrative lead Ricoeur to move further into an understanding of the self through his prior work on hermeneutical phenomenology. Table 7.1 The mimetic cycle Stage

Actions

Assumptions

Prefiguration

Collecting stories and fragments of stories in one’s memory, consciously or unconsciously.

Living story or fragments require a pre-​ understanding of language but might not have a temporal nature.

Configuration

Constructing a story from fragments and full memory through emplotment—​a deliberate structure to say something about the self and the world.

Emplotment situates the story in reference to human time—​with a subject in the present of experience.

Refiguration

Telling a story to oneself or another that leads to recognition of why the story is told and what it may say about reality.

The story must have sufficient reference to reality to be understood as a statement about life that subsequently can be added to the prefigured collection of stories one has in one’s memory.

Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur    153

7.5  Identity and Ethics If another were not counting on me, would I be capable of keeping my word, of maintaining myself? (Ricoeur, 1994: 341)

In his book Oneself as Another (1994), Ricoeur reflects on the concept of personal identity and develops a hermeneutics of the self. He introduces a key distinction between two kinds of identity in relation to selfhood. Idem identity is the identity of something that is always the same which never changes; ipse identity is oneself as a reflexive structure, as a self that exists by relating to/​through change. Individual identity is formed and re-​formed in a constant interplay between idem and ipse, and selfhood is sustained over time through a constant iteration between idem (sameness) and ipse (otherness). Sameness makes an individual remain the same over time and space: it is the traits that are unique, reidentifiable, and continuous over time (Ricoeur, 1994). Otherness gives the ability to divert and break off; to initiate something new. In selfhood, there is always an overlap between idem and ipse. For example, when there are changes in an individual’s life, both voluntary or otherwise, something in the identity changes but other things stay the same. Sameness could be explained as ‘what we are’ (characteristics, history, traits), whereas otherness expresses ‘who we are’. Otherness is the sense of self that individuals become aware of in interaction with others over time, but also within individuals over time so that change is possible without losing the sense of self. Ricoeur takes promises as an example of the integration between sameness and otherness. When someone makes a promise, they affirm that despite future changes in life, i.e. disruptions of sameness, they will stay firm. Promises are founded on permanence in time, not grounded in sameness, but rather in otherness, because the individual and the world around him/​her have changed over time. This brings out the ethical dimension of the self and invites us to question how we value and prefer one kind of otherness and devalue another; it cannot be ethically neutral. When life around us changes rapidly, otherness rules over sameness, because we need to attest to ourselves that despite changes, something in me will stay the same, and other things will change. This is why the self is always contested, and there is a constant suspicion and doubt. Identity is thus formed through the question: Who am I in relation to my former and future self and others? There is a narrative in identity that needs a continuity of self through time, a reflexivity of the self to others and a treatment of the self as other, which includes, inevitably, a moral evaluation of the self. This reflexivity is triggered by otherness, the potentiality for change. Ricoeur stipulates that ethics are not just a part of social reality, but are integrally related to the power of society and the integration of a collective good life. He argues that an ethical life, ‘the good life’ is anterior to law and is in fact the basis upon which institutional and societal norms are revised. He calls norms morality, whereas ethics is the transcendental basis for identity. Ethics is the way in which the self relates to others

154    Paul Savage and Henrika Franck and otherness, and this is why identity is inherently ethical. It is ethical because it is constituted in the choices we make in each situation and experiencing what is other than, or beyond, ourselves.

7.5.1 Conscience: Otherness within Ourselves The most intimate otherness is that relative to one’s own conscience. Ricoeur finds the idea of conscience as not merely a religious or moral, but also an ontological phenomenon. Conscience can be found in the presence of other people as social values, it can also be found in history and memory, both one’s own and one’s ancestors. For Ricoeur, conscience is not a mere moral phenomenon, as in duties and norms: the demand of our conscience is a profoundly ethical demand, something we live by day to day. Normally, conscience is related to norms; ‘I feel bad because I broke the rule’. But in Ricoeur’s view, this is not the ethical aim—​the reality of conscience goes beyond the norms and the rules; conscience is related to the choices made in each situation. The otherness of conscience is experienced as a demand, a call to do something that is disrupting the current sameness of the self. Conscience is seldom a clear voice—​there is a multiplicity of voices present in conscience, as well as among the others around us. The otherness of conscience balances between listening to external otherness and to one’s own conscience, and judging which voices to consider. Ricoeur can be criticized for being too optimistic. It is hard not to see in this the idea of an ontological regeneration through forgiveness or, indeed, the Christian idea of redemption through forgiveness. But when conscience is regarded not as a moral phenomenon, but first and foremost as an ethical demand from the other, something every action is mirrored through, it becomes a process. There is no endpoint or final answer, but our conscience wants us constantly to be able to look back on ourselves as having lived a good life. This understanding of the self is valuable to better understand how the good life can be created and recreated, as Ricoeur allows us to make sense of the day-​to-​ day problems we are experiencing. In Ricoeur’s view, ethics is distinct from the moral, and this is where we experience tension. Here Ricoeur offers his notion of practical wisdom: ‘Practical wisdom consists of inventing conduct that will best satisfy the exception required by solicitude, by betraying the rule to the smallest extent possible’ (1994: 269). Where otherness is a part of the ethical dimension in all human collaboration, practical wisdom is the ability to understand the distinctive nature of the other. In his last work, Reflections on the Just (2007), Ricoeur extends the idea of ethics and practical wisdom into justice. He sees a dichotomy between the consistent emphasis on the Aristotelian virtue phronesis (practical wisdom) in specific situations and the Kantian model of ethics defined in terms of impartiality. Ricoeur makes this discussion between teleological and deontological ethics interesting by mediating them through categories of the self, the good life, and the just institution. He finds ethics as an individual’s ongoing experience of choosing how to act in particular situations in the institutional context. So, ethics is not a study of moral

Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur    155 norms, but rather a transcendental basis for identity. It is constituted in experiencing the other—​what is beyond oneself—​and it is this that is inherent in the identity of a human being.

7.6  Memory, History, Forgetting It is even said, unkindly, that the old have more memories than the young, but less memory! (Ricoeur, 2004: 22)

Ricoeur’s approach to the phenomenology of memory begins with the nature of memory—​a reflection on memory as capacity and memories as past experiences. His use of the mental image to describe a memory also helps us understand the difference between imagination and memory. The former is a mental image that does not have the representational ontology of ‘having-​been’, but rather as a fiction it expresses what ‘could-​be’, as discussed earlier regarding narrative fiction. The mental images of memories have an ontological status of being in the past, but with an implicit connection to the present, which is being that is about to become past. The experience of a memory, regardless of whether it is spontaneous or sought after (‘Oh that reminds me of x!’ vs. ‘Oh no. Where did I put my keys?’), speaks to our own being as much as it speaks to past events. The division between memory as a capacity and memory as an object leads us to differentiate between the subject who remembers and the object that is remembered. However, the nature of a memory is that we remember in the present—​drawing the memory out of its old context. Much like distanciation within hermeneutics, the context, author, and reader of the original event are other than us, in the present. Surely, we do not change dramatically overnight trying to remember where we put our keys; but the person we were decades ago, the memories ‘inscribed’ in our mind, and the interpreter we were then—​these are other than they are today. Ricoeur then lifts this distance between the past event and the present remembering to discuss collective memory. Ricoeur suggests two positions regarding collective memory and outlines the strengths and shortcomings of each (Leichter, 2012). On the one hand, only individuals have memories, and it is not possible to fully ‘remember’ another’s experience. Therefore, collective memory can be seen as simply the totality of individuals’ memories regarding this or that phenomenon. Ricoeur points out that this ignores the need for social institutions in both understanding and expressing memories. On the other hand, memories occur within frameworks that are intrinsically social—​language being perhaps the primary one—​and therefore collective in that we have inherited language, symbols, myths, and institutions from others. Here is where our memories take on meaning. Collective memory, however, cannot exist without the individual as this would lead to extreme cases in which memories have no subject to whom the phenomenon occurred.

156    Paul Savage and Henrika Franck Historians engage with memory as both the individual and the collective past. Ricoeur explores a threefold practice of history, or historiographical operation, but understands that the phases do not occur one after the other: archiving, evaluating, and writing. History recognizes through its practice the intersubjectivity of our memory, as individual accounts are archived and then evaluated in relation to other accounts, but also in the light of time and ages, and written, rewritten, and edited, as our understanding of the past deepens. The difference between historical and fictional narratives (including efforts to abuse history for political ends) is that the former seeks to produce a faithfully objective account, while the latter does not. That being said, when historians are collecting accounts for archiving, evaluating and critiquing material, and writing history (properly ‘histories’), they do not escape the same dialectic of individual and collective that we see in memory, because it is testimony that grounds history. Here, testimony is purporting to say, ‘I know what happened because I was there’. This brings us back to Ricoeur’s beginnings in hermeneutic phenomenology—​experience as an experience of some ‘thing’, but also of some ‘one’, both of which are situated in social institutions, time, place, and memory. The other side of memory is forgetting. It gives rise to another instance of hermeneutics of suspicion, in that we question the accuracy of memory in light of forgetting—​ and question what it is that is being forgotten. Is the forgotten an event of the past, or is it an incomplete, fuzzy, fading image presently in our mind? The fragility of memory is made apparent as it can be lost as records of the past are not found, as we see in the disappearance of heritage as elders pass away without passing on their histories and language to the next generations. The fragility is also made apparent in choosing not to remember the unnecessary and the painful. As memory cannot be all-​encompassing of every detail of every moment, it means that we are already selecting what to remember and therefore what we recount narratively to ourselves, as we remember. Having chosen parts of an experience to remember, this means choosing what to forget. This is natural to our process of remembering—​that we unconsciously forget many (seemingly) irrelevant details and give meaning and priority to that which we do remember. However, we see Ricoeur raise three types of forgetting that are abuses of natural memory: blocked, manipulated, and controlled. Blocked memories are those that are suppressed due to trauma or shock of some kind, and may require therapy to remember. Manipulated memories, however, are attempts to change memories through recounting other aspects of an experience for ideological purposes, as we see so often in reference to Afghanistan and the reasons given for military intervention by the USA and their allies. Anecdotally, a relative of one of the authors told us about their military service in Afghanistan, saying, ‘I went to build schools for girls. The military was just the company I chose to do that with’. This was in response to the question, ‘Do you think the Canadian military should be fighting in Afghanistan?’. As we discussed in the Mimetic Cycle, by choosing different components in living memory (M1) we are able to change the plot of a narrative (M2), including a memory, and thereby present a ‘historical’ event with a new meaning (M3). One way to counteract this abuse is through the critique of the ideology leading to the selection and emplotment of the story components. Lastly, controlled forgetting has its correlation in controlled memory, in the form of sanctioned commemoration—​for

Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur    157 example, that we commemorate the end of a war, or the role of fathers on Father’s Day. In the same way, controlled forgetting, as Ricoeur points out, is the sanctioned lack of remembering. His example is instances of amnesty or pardon. Here, governments, councils, tribunals, or peace negotiators state that the past may not be brought up—​ past injuries, insults, and atrocities. This is done to maintain peace after war. It is also to maintain peace where remembering might lead to the overthrow of current powers. History echoes the mimetic cycle in that it first collects prefigured stories (oral or written content) that are archived. These prefigured components refer to past objects or phenomena that are made present through memory and forgetting. In the evaluating stage of the historiographical operation, a configuring takes place under the guidance of a plot or an intention (for example, to give an objective account of the past) and some of the archive is discarded or ignored as irrelevant to this current intention. In the final stage of this operation, history is written and read, refiguring the past in the present—​a step that incorporates the original past reference into the living story of the reader—​ creating a new memory and a new reference to anchor explanation and understanding.

7.7  Ricoeur in Management and Organization Studies As we wrote in the Introduction (Section 7.1), Ricoeur has inspired many MOS scholars in our endeavour to understand organizational life and its tensions between particular, subjective experiences and generalizable institutional understandings. His work inspires and helps us to understand, for instance, the temporality of identity work in entrepreneurship, something that Ericson & Kjellander (2018) explore through the story of Olle Andersson. They follow Olle Andersson’s path through his life from when he was a young adult to his retirement, with his development through social relationships in different roles towards different people. Ericson & Kjellander avoid generalizations and manage to tease out Olle’s becoming through time, through the Ricoeurian tensions between idem and ipse, between self and other, between the particular and the general. Mallett & Wapshott (2011) also take on the challenges of identity through developing a Ricoeurian approach to identity work in organizations. They explore the threefold mimetic process of pre-​, con-​, and refiguration of self-​reflexive mediating within an organizational context, and demonstrate how this idea of Ricoeur’s can help people deal with various occupational roles. Cunliffe & Ivaldi (2020) use a hermeneutic narrative methodology to explore embedded ethics within a non-​profit organization. They use Ricoeur’s work on the capable human in order to illustrate embedded ethics, and to demonstrate how ethics is ‘lived’ through enacted values in specific contexts. In her earlier work, Cunliffe (2009) has drawn on Ricoeur’s idea of individual responsibility and the hermeneutic emphasis on the self in relation to others in order to reframe leadership and leadership training. She introduces phenomenological philosophy to leadership, and demonstrates how a

158    Paul Savage and Henrika Franck leader can learn to mediate between self and the other, not just the world or another person, but also the other who is an integral part of who we are ourselves. Rhodes, Pullen, & Clegg (2010) draw on Ricoeur’s narrative and ethics in relation to organizational downsizing. Using a Ricoeurian lens, they problematize the presence of dominant narratives, as they tend to diminish ethical deliberation and responsibility. They bring light to the problematic connections between dominant narratives and open ethical questioning, and offer ways to avoid narrative closure. In their work on organizational memory, Rowlinson et al. (2010) use Ricoeur’s work on memory, history, and forgetting in an attempt to reorient historical and sociological studies within MOS to appreciate specific historical conditions and particularities. Spee & Jarzbkowski (2011) use Ricoeur’s concepts of decontextualization and recontextualization, and explicate strategic planning activities as being constituted through the hermeneutic, i.e. iterative and recursive relationship of talk and text. Cunliffe, Luhman, & Boje (2004) explore narrative temporality and how alternative presuppositions about time can lead to different narrative ways of researching and theorizing organizational life. Based on Ricoeur’s work in Time and Narrative, they restory narrative research in organizations as Narrative Temporality. Boje (2014) takes narrative temporality further by introducing concepts from quantum physics to change management theories, particularly with his work on ante-​narrative and quantum storytelling. Ricoeur’s ideas on narrative and temporality are also put into play by our own work on organizations as fictions (Savage et al., 2018), where we tease out new coordinates to approach organizations as fictions. In terms of the historical turn in organizational studies, Rowlinson et al. (2014) apply Ricoeur’s work to diminish the divide between MOS and historical theory, offering several alternatives to current approaches that limit both historical theory and organizational history. This is reiterated in Godfrey et al. (2016) when they encourage MOS scholars ‘to engage with history as historiography, and as a sense of the past’ (p. 606), as historical beings. In addition to these examples, in response to narratives surrounding corporate social responsibility (CSR), Mena et al. (2016) refer to Ricoeur’s work on organizational memory and forgetting in light of what must be forgotten when legitimizing CSR. These are only a few of the examples of how Ricoeur’s work is used in MOS. His value to organizational studies is that he reveals an inherent tension in the human condition in the institutional setting. He helps us configure the organization in its ordinariness, and allows us to resist the push for objectivity or predictability. Ricoeur’s ideas help us to understand organizations in a way that is neither collective nor individual, but rather as a tension between the self and the other, between the particular and the general.

7.8  Summary Ricoeur’s early work started from an attempt to clarify the phenomenology of the will so as to understand subjectivity and the self. Bringing the subject back into the object

Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur    159 of the event led him to propose his hermeneutic phenomenology, adding to our understanding of phenomenology as both experience and analysis. This analysis presupposes language as the means to interpret what is happening around us. Also, to have experience we must have a particular self to whom it transpires. Language and being become enmeshed. With the rise of structuralism and its application to a broad range of human sciences, Ricoeur shifted to his most famous work related to time and to narrative, namely, from subjective and objective time to narrative time, and ultimately human time. This continuation of his work into the self and the world, as both subject and object, brought him to reflect on identity and the ethical self. Again, avoiding the bracketed self of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Ricoeur recognized the role institutions play in our lives. Lastly, memory speaks to the recurring theme of the particular and the general again. Individuals have memories, but only through others, through given culture and language, do we interpret those memories for our own understanding. Paul Ricoeur was a prolific writer from the 1940s until his passing in 2005. His lectures and over 500 published essays continue to be translated and republished in collections, and we have only touched on his major themes in this chapter. There is still much about management and organization that we do not fully understand, and in this Ricoeur’s work could be of benefit. Particularly, we see several areas for future research in technology-​driven fields such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), education and personal development, government and civil institutions, and virtual work and worlds, to name but a few. In each of these and many more, we need to understand what is needed to create an experience of ‘the good life with and for others in just institutions’ (Ricoeur, 1994: 180).

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160    Paul Savage and Henrika Franck Luhman, J. T. (2019). Reimagining organizational storytelling research as archeological story analysis. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, 14(1), 43–​54. Mallett, O., & Wapshott, R. (2011). The challenges of identity work: Developing Ricoeurian narrative identity in organisations. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 11(3), 271–​288. Mena, S., Rintamäki, J., Fleming, P., & Spicer, A. (2016). On the forgetting of corporate irresponsibility. Academy of Management Review, 41(4), 720–​738. Rhodes, C., Pullen, A., & Clegg, S. R. (2010). ‘If I should fall from grace . . .’: Stories of change and organizational ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 91(4), 535–​551. Ricoeur, P. (1965). Fallible man. Chicago: Henry Regnery. Ricoeur, P. (1966). Freedom and nature: The voluntary and the involuntary (Vol. 1). Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1967). The symbolism of evil. Boston: Beacon Press. Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the human sciences: Essays on language, action and interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative (Vol. 1). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1985). Time and narrative (Vol. 2). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1994). Oneself as another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (2004). The rule of metaphor: The creation of meaning in language. London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (2007). Reflections on the just. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (2013). Hermeneutics: Writings and lectures. Cambridge: Polity. Ricoeur, P. (2016). Philosophical Anthropology. Cambridge: Polity. Rowlinson, M., Booth, C., Clark, P., Delahaye, A., & Procter, S. (2010). Social remembering and organizational memory. Organization Studies, 31(1), 69–​87. Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J., & Decker, S. (2014). Research strategies for organizational history: A dialogue between historical theory and organization theory. Academy of Management Review, 39(3), 250–​274. Savage, P., Cornelissen, J. P., & Franck, H. (2018). Fiction and organization studies. Organization Studies, 39(7), 975–​994. Spee, A. P., & Jarzabkowski, P. (2011). Strategic planning as communicative process. Organization Studies, 32(9), 1217–​1245.

Chapter 8

Phe nomenol o g y a nd t h e P ol itical Phil o s oph y of Hannah A re ndt Lucie Chartouny

8.1  Introduction To quote Arendt at a conference or to include her in the footnotes of an essay seems to be a rather provocative choice when working in management and organization studies. It is as if her work—​which cannot be understood without taking into account the rise of fascism in her native Germany and the Holocaust that followed—​is not totally relevant for our concerns, or that it is misunderstood. It can indeed seem surprising, at first glance, to quote in management someone who seems so critical about labour; it is also very tempting to see the banality of evil around every corner in companies, and by doing so making it lose all its revelatory power. Also, to refer to Arendt is to take the risk of always being brought back to her relationship with Heidegger. However, these ‘risks’ are worth taking, so important to us is Arendt’s political philosophy and its capacity to enlighten management and organization studies today. We believe that this acuity of her political philosophy for our time and our studies lies in its phenomenological character. Indeed, her use of phenomenology elevates her political philosophy to a status far above that of a simple tool with which to create practical policy. Arendt’s theory is above all an imagination of politics (Revault d’Allones, 2001), with the brilliance and contradictions that go with it. Her phenomenological method is that of a journalist-​detective (Tassin, 2018) whose quest is for freedom, or rather the conditions for the appearance of it: conditions not fulfilled in our modern societies. She chose to describe how freedom can appear. This description is phenomenological as it is not a prelude to which she will add explanations, even though she refers a lot to phenomena of the past, to history. We think that her phenomenological description is more

162   Lucie Chartouny effective than any explanation to prompt her readers to wake up and make them want to be free again. Arendt wrote before 1975 and the economic, social, technical, and organizational upheavals that mark our present. However, when reading Between Past and Future or The Human Condition, we get the impression that not only is it our society that Arendt is commenting on, but that her insights are essential for confronting our current crises. A crisis, she says, forces us to create something new, in order to be able to understand and think again, because we can no longer move forward using our usual tools and paths. It therefore consists of a break with tradition; we can only remain linked to the past through ‘pearls’ or ‘fragments’ of it (Benjamin et al., 2007: 51). Only through this recomposition of the world from fragments of the past can we enlighten our present, and that includes management and organization theory. Our belief is that it is because Arendt’s political philosophy is phenomenological that it is so relevant to us: we will detail this through an elaboration of the key aspects of her political philosophy. Our work connects with the study of management and organizations on various level. Arendt’ phe­nomenological disclosure of humanity is of great help to us as we rethink our social identities, which are today still defined by our employment while we are simultaneously evolving into a ‘society of laborers without labor’ (Arendt, 198: 5). Second, the centrality of beginnings and plurality in her philosophy can be of great help to clarify the overused expression ‘living together’—​and perhaps even allowing us to replace it by ‘beginning together’. Lastly, the connection she describes between truth, events, and time is of interest to us as we urgently feel the need to create new narratives—​inside and outside the enterprise—​in order to deal with societal and environmental issues. Arendt cannot be fully understood without situating her thoughts in history. She was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, into a German Jewish family. She studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers and completed her thesis under the direction of the latter. Her doctoral thesis was on the concept of love according to St Augustine (1928). She fled Germany for France in 1933, where she became secretary to the Baroness of Rothschild. After an internment in the Gurs camp, she left Europe with her second husband and went into exile in America in 1941 on an ‘emergency visa’. She arrived in the United States with only US$25 and learned English while staying with an American family in Massachusetts. She was then able to write directly in English and translated some of her writings into German herself. During the war, she wrote political texts in a German Jewish magazine; in New York, she taught at Princeton and became a professor at the New School in 1968. Her major publications include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and her articles in The New Yorker on the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Political and historical events are at the heart of her writings and thoughts, making her philosophy political. To begin with, we will describe how the phenomenological revelation of individuals gives them their humanity (Section 8.2). Then, we will present how political experience is the experience of a plurality of beginnings (Section 8.3). Eventually, we will study how Arendt creates a method for dealing collectively with events through storytelling, so that we can continue to begin (Section 8.4).

Phenomenology and the Political Philosophy    163

8.2  Phenomenological Revelation Gives Individuals Their Individuality Arendt’s political philosophy finds its roots in the need to act and think again after totalitarianism and to prevent it from coming back. To do so, she addressed philosophy and politics through phenomenology. Individuals reveals their humanity through appearing in front of others through speech. The public realm is that of the disclosure of people.

8.2.1 Addressing Philosophy and Politics through Phenomenology Arendt called herself a political theorist rather than a philosopher. This ambivalence illustrates her questioning of the relationship between politics and philosophy. She questioned politics throughout her life: rather than trying to determine and describe what politics means, she wondered if politics still has a meaning (Arendt, 2005). But she also questioned philosophy and distanced herself from it because she understood the anti-​political aim of it (Revault d’Allones, 2001: 16:43). Arendt accused philosophy of being out of the world: Essentially, philosophy from Plato to Hegel was ‘not of this world,’ whether it was Plato describing the philosopher as the man whose body only inhabits the city of his fellow men, or Hegel admitting that, from the point of view of common sense, philosophy is a world stood on its head. (Arendt, 1961: 23)

For her, thinking required a ‘withdrawal from the world as it appears and a bending back [ . . . ] where are we when we think?’ (Arendt, 1998:109−10). This creates a disconnection between politics and philosophy, which she illustrated through the trial of Socrates. According to her, this trial is based on a misunderstanding: judged by the citizens of Athens with the traditional tools of politics, Socrates had actually wanted to put philosophy at the service of the city. It is this reconciliation between this withdrawal from the world and political action that interested Arendt: indeed, without it, we risk reproducing our incapacity to ally thinking and acting. It is through phenomenology that this reunification can happen. Indeed, Arendt once said to her students: ‘I am a sort of phenomenologist. But, ach, not in Hegel’s way—​or Husserl’s’ (Young Bruehl, 1982: 405). By focusing on describing what happens, the phenomenological angle allowed her to deal with phenomena via another angle than psychology, faced as she was by real horrors that were (and are) so difficult to explain. To us, Arendt’s phenomenology is existential, and can be related to Ricoeur’s (1957) definition of it based around three

164   Lucie Chartouny ‘melodic cells’: one’s proper body, freedom, and the other. Through this research, we will focus as much as possible on Arendt, without always comparing her to other thinkers. It is however necessary to briefly resituate her works, notably in relation to Heidegger and Husserl, and to Greek and Roman antiquity, in order to understand her phenomenology. From Heidegger’s philosophy, Arendt selected the idea of the existence of a plurality of perspectives but refused to think of human existence based around the question of mortality, organizing her phenomenology instead around natality, the idea of births. Heidegger made the individual ‘not only product but producer of the world’ (Allen, 1982: 176), an idea that we find in Arendt’s phenomenology where humans create our common world through our deeds, words, and durable works. In her description of a world made of a plurality of perspectives, Arendt was inspired by ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935) which presents for each thing that appears in front of us the object of use (a basket of fruit), the product of consumption (the apple), and the work of art (the painting representing the basket) (Mattéi, 2019: 1:36). However, for Heidegger, beginning is an extraordinary event that takes place in the History of Being. By contrast, Arendt made births political; people are beginners who should begin something new and, ‘natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political’ (Arendt, 1998: 9). As Husserl’s phenomenology, Arendt used in various aspects the phenomenological idea of the epoché—​the suspension of the world. For Husserl, the epoché related to trust in the objectivity of the world and is theoretical. For Arendt, this epoché was political. It can indeed be a suspension of the existence of the common world between humans, and at the same time about the humanity of the individual, if there is no action. If we chose to mention at the very beginning of our study Arendt’s relationship to a certain ideal in Roman and Greek antiquity, it is because her phenomenology of beginnings is a reply to the crisis of a political tradition that is not valid anymore. This political tradition, strongly related to history, began with Plato and ended with Marx. For her, still, ‘It is [ . . . ] misleading to talk about politics [ . . . ] without drawing to some extent upon the experiences of Greek and Roman antiquity’; for her, no one ever ‘thought so highly of political activity and bestowed so much dignity upon its realm’ (Arendt, 1961: 154). This crisis of the political tradition is at the starting point of Arendt’s political philosophy.

8.2.2 The Revelation of the Individual through Action In order to describe the crisis that affects human’s capacity to act politically, Arendt detailed three stages of the vita activa, or life that is not dedicated to the pure spirit (1998). Life on earth is given to humans in these three non-​exclusive modes, all of which we should be concerned with: labour, work, and action. Arendt described these modes phenomenologically because she seeks to describe the common experience of

Phenomenology and the Political Philosophy    165 those who experience each mode. Each activity represents a facet of humans, although only action allows us to be fully human. Through labour, the human is animal laborans who repeats the biological cycle; through work, he/​she is a homo faber who produces durable things; and through action, a zoon politikon (civic animal). Arendt pointed out that: ‘From the viewpoint of animal laborans, it is like a miracle that it is also a being which knows of and inhabits a world; from the viewpoint of homo faber, it is like a miracle [ . . . ] that meaning should have a place in this world’ (Arendt, 1998: 236). This idea of miracle is phenomenological, because miracles cannot be explained: the description of the phenomenon can tell us more than any attempts to explain why things are as they are. The first activity—​labour—​is that of the biological cycle, which brings us back to mortality. It is a necessary activity aiming at the production of vital necessities linked to the growth and the reproduction of forces. Labour involves endless repetition: ‘laboring always moves in the same circle, which is prescribed by the biological process of the living organism and the end of its “toil and trouble” comes only with the death of its organism’ (Arendt, 1998: 98). It means that humans cannot assume freedom, and our entire humanity, through it, as we are under pressure to meet our basic needs. The realm of labour is nature: labour leaves nothing behind as what is produced is consumed and destroyed. For Arendt, humans must seek to free ourselves from labour, which constrains us and binds us to our bodies. The second activity—​work—​is shaped by humans; it lasts. The homo faber is a craftsman who produces durable objects outside his body, who creates a world where expertise and efficiency reign. ‘Fabrication, the work of the homo faber, consists in reification. [ . . . ] only homo faber conducts himself as lord and master of the whole earth’ (Arendt, 1998: 139). His/her work enables the creation of a common world by establishing a world of things, but one cannot find a phenomenological transcendence through it. A craftsman can produce in his workshop but will then have to go to the market to exchange his goods; the realm of work is social and economic activity. We must clarify that the durability of the manufactured works does not necessarily mean production of solid goods such as furniture: certain works, in particular of art, are fragile but allow us to tell stories and create memories. These stories often take for their object action, the third activity. The third and most important activity of the vita activa—​action—​Arendt’s idea of action can be linked to her vision of citizen’s engagement in Roman and Greek antiquity: to act means to act as a citizen. A person appears in front of others through acting and speaking, through beginning something that was not there before. Speech is crucial because it allows the revelation of unique individual identities. ‘Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?” ’ (Arendt, 1998: 178). Action is a phenomenon of disclosure of the humanity of the individual, who now exists publicly in front of others as a ‘who’ and not a ‘what’ made of various characteristics.

166   Lucie Chartouny Acting is both irreversible and unpredictable as ‘To act [ . . . ] means [ . . . ] to set something into motion’ (Arendt, 1998: 177). One person does not know what will happen, only that there was a ‘before’ and that there will be an ‘after’ his/​her beginning. At the source of humans’ action does not lie the will but what Arendt called principles. Principles can be ‘honor or glory, love of equality, which Montesquieu called virtue, or distinction or excellence [ . . . ], but also fear or distrust or hatred’ (Arendt, 1961: 152). Arendt lamented that modernity has seen the coronation of the animal laborans over everything else: ‘Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of “making a living”; such is the verdict of society’ (Arendt, 1998: 126−8). In doing so, we cannot take the risk to begin something anew, to reveal our humanity through action. Remembering that Arendt was a phenomenologist allows us to avoid taking her categorizations as fixed and to remember the place of experience in them, of what is felt by individuals in practising them. The distinctions made by Arendt seem to us all the more useful when we consider, for example, that some people can experience action within their jobs.

8.2.3 Two Realms between Light and Darkness One person needs other people in front of whom he/​she acts. Arendt’s political philosophy cannot be understood without taking into account its collective aspect, but through a collective that does not control but instead reveals the individual. Arendt described two realms that must be distinct: public and private. Far from being fixed and pre-​defined, these are realms of a moment that exist because the relations and actions of humans have created them.

8.2.3.1 The Public Realm Because people appear in front of other people by beginning and speaking, the public realm, which is the one of the political collective, exists. Arendt’s theory is clearly phenomenological as she described the term public through two related but distinct phenomena. The first phenomenon is that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by all; in the public realm, appearance constitutes reality (Arendt, 1998). Because one can communicate one’s experience, this will be seen and heard by others, the world, and oneself, finds a new reality. The second phenomenon makes the common world, which as we have said is made up of durable things produced by the homo faber, truly common: ‘a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-​between, relates and separates men at the same time’ (Arendt, 1998: 52). For Arendt, things and people find a new reality in the public realm: but the disclosure of things and people is also dependent on the possibility for homo faber to create durable things and stories about the things and the deeds of people of action. We

Phenomenology and the Political Philosophy    167 will see that Arendt’s paradox is solved through humans’ connection to the idea of beginning, and that this is what counts.

8.2.3.2 The Private Realm, the Condition of the Existence of Politics As with the three activities of the vita activa, the different realms are dependent on each other. ‘A life spent entirely in public [ . . . ] becomes [ . . . ] shallow. The only efficient way to guarantee the darkness of what needs to be hidden against the light of publicity is [ . . . ] a privately owned place to hide in’ (Arendt, 1998: 71). Arendt defined the private realm in relation to the idea of private property, of a home where one could be born and die. Contrary to Marx, Arendt insists that the economy remains linked to the oikia, i.e. the household, the private realm.

8.2.3.3 A ‘Naked’ Person Is Not a Person: There Is No Humanity without a Political Community If Arendt wanted some things to remain in the private realm, it was to protect the individual’s humanity. Arendt was critical of the fact that in the modern age, the boundaries between public and private realms have been blurred within the social. In the social, people gather as animal laborans, having lost their capacity for action, and behave like economic agents. What made political life valuable has been lost: this ‘lost treasure’ is ‘public happiness’ (Arendt, 1961: 5). That is, the happiness of being seen speaking and acting with other people. It is the ‘aspiration of the citizen to be the best in any situation’ that found an example in the fight between Hector and Achilles, where each appears and finds full reality there, regardless of the outcome of the fight. (Esposito, 2001). By insisting on the importance of separating the public and private realms, Arendt rejected the integration of pain, which is not communicable, into the private realm. She refused a political-​biopolitics that takes as its object the naked life, the life of those who suffer (Butler, 2012). Arendt did not believe in the rights of a ‘naked’ human being who does not have access to a proper private realm. The camps revealed that a person is not a person when his/​her nature is confined to that of simple, repetitive labour: a person who simply rolls a stone up a hill like Sisyphus is not a person. ‘A man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-​man’ and cannot have access to the political community (Arendt, 1994: 300). The (re)construction of humanity can only happen through a political community, through acting in relationship with others, once liberated from necessity. Today, unemployment can show in some respects the fragility of our humanity. When people cannot be defined through their employment, their wage, and their supposed utility for society, they can easily feel pushed out of the web of human relationships (Lecerf, 2001). We have shown how the phenomenology of Arendt is an attempt to explain how people can achieve a new humanity through acting with others conditioned on their access to a private realm. Let us describe now how Arendt’s political philosophy is composed around a phenomenology in which what is absolute is not the things nor the individual consciousness, but the idea of beginning.

168   Lucie Chartouny

8.3  A Political Experience that Is the Experience of a Plurality of Beginnings For Arendt, it is through the idea of beginning that a phenomenological transcendence can be found. We will show that there is not one but many beginnings through various births, which are conditioned on the existence of plurality.

8.3.1 A Phenomenology of Births Arendt had been referring to the theme of the beginning and natality ever since her thesis on St Augustine (1929). Her political philosophy could be described as a politics made of multiple births intertwined, the appearance of each conditioning the existence of others. These multiple births are conditions of the possibility of a non-​totalitarian world. The totalitarian world is a world in which there can be no spontaneous births. ‘Isolated against others by his force’ (Arendt, 1998: 189), the ruler monopolizes all beginnings.

8.3.1.1 The Biological Birth: The Human’s Connection to the Beginning The first birth, the biological one, takes place, like death, in the intimacy of the household. ‘Such appearing is not an act, [ . . . ] it lies absolutely outside the sphere of our conscious control, [ . . . ] simultaneously disturbing and escaping the subject’s sphere of representation’ (Marder, 201: 303). This birth escapes our consciousness but connects us with the idea of beginning. Arendt wrote a lot about childhood, about the education of children, from a perspective that takes up this idea of natality (Arendt, 1961). She urged us to make education a space preserved from labour and work; we should, instead of being focused on ‘knowledge’, revisit the question of the ‘meaning’ of what we teach young people (Holt, 2020: 588). This vision of education is phenomenological: Arendt wanted us to suspend the existence of labour and work through an epoché, in order to enable a student’s capacity to act towards becoming fully effective. The role of the teacher is to amplify the possibilities of the student, to increase his/​her capacities. Arendt’s phenomenological definition of authority is that it is the act of increasing the power of those who are subjected to it, of helping them increase their possibilities to perceive and to appear. The relationship at stake is also phenomenological as it does not require argumentation: ‘the authoritarian order [ . . . ] is always hierarchical. If authority is to be defined at all, then, it must be in contradistinction to both coercion by force and persuasion through arguments’ (Arendt, 1961: 93). Students and teachers are related to each other in an immediate relationship, in which roles are clear; the teacher is not fictive, but someone paving the students’ way to their second birth.

Phenomenology and the Political Philosophy    169

8.3.1.2 The Second Birth of the Individual It is through action in the public realm that one is born a second time: ‘With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance’ (Arendt, 1998: 176−7). We have shown that one gains one’s humanity through action, but this second birth is also how one becomes free: ‘Men are free [ . . . ] as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same’ (Arendt, 1961: 153). In Arendt’s thought, freedom is temporal. It cannot be pre-​defined by ceremonies or spaces, or even thought out in advance. (Benhabib, 1993). This second birth is existential. Arendt rejected the idea of an essence of the human: ‘nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things’ (Arendt, 1998: 10). We are not conditioned in our acts; acting is a reply to our first birth, which we do by beginning ourselves. But neither are we the masters of the results of our beginning, which often differs from our intentionality.

8.3.1.3 The Birth of a Web of Human Relationships Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships. (Arendt, 2005: 95)

The establishment of a political community equals a collective birth. We think that this collective birth can be described as a proper political body, made of various ‘who’ revealed in front of the others, as an interpretation of the idea of a proper body claimed by Ricoeur (1957) for existential phenomenology. However, this collective birth is fragile. Action can only take place, ‘Where people are with others and neither for nor against them, that is, in sheer human togetherness’ (Arendt, 1998: 180). This togetherness also excludes. In the Greek city-​state, only free men could appear in public as equals, women and slaves being excluded from their community. We have seen how a person who is nothing but a person, who does not have access to his/​her own proper private realm, is excluded from political life (Section 8.2.3.3). Then can we really, based on Arendt’s philosophy, think of a web of human relationships that is emancipatory for all? In our opinion, Arendt’s intention is not to ontologize the difference between the sexes on the basis of the division between private and public realm. She recognized the dependence of public on private. If some matters must remain private, ‘it is by no means true that only the necessary, the futile, and the shameful have their proper place in the private realm’ (Arendt, 1998: 73). It is rather that some issues are too precious and we should not take the risk of their being taken over by totalitarian governments by appearing in public. In the footsteps of Benhabib (1993), we can connect the birth of a new political community to feminism by revindicating a connection between Arendt’s idea of private realm and Virginia Woolf ’s vision of a ‘room of one’s own’ (2004), which would mean that one needs time and money to be able to act politically and join the web of human relationships.

170   Lucie Chartouny Arendt recognized the fragility of human affairs. The phenomenality of politics is incompatible with an idea of control in politics (Revault d’Allones, 2001). Knowing this, totalitarian systems destroyed the conditions of possibility of a beginning: totalitarianism ‘undercuts the very possibility of possibility’ (Marder, 2013: 314). Even out of totalitarian systems, we may fear that appearances in front of others are not always sincere. Arendt can be seen as overconfident about the fact that people will truly appear in front of others. Let us remember that in phenomenology, people are not perceiving each other through their cultures or pre-​defined categories. Relationships are possible through a primitive and sincere perception of the other; our speech reveals who we are, sometimes against our intentions. If she did not offer any practical solution to this risk related to people’s insincerity, she also thought that the insincere cohabits with the sincere, as political experience lies in plurality.

8.3.2 Phenomenal Plurality against Domination For Arendt, plurality is inherently related to natality, ‘through which the human world is constantly invaded by strangers, newcomers whose actions and reactions cannot be foreseen by those who are already there and are going to leave in a short while’ (Arendt, 1961: 61). By writing about the difference between those who are already there and those who are newcomers, while saying that newcomers should still be able to begin something, Arendt introduced the two main characteristics of plurality: equality and distinction between humans. Equality, because ‘If men were not equal, they could neither understand each other and those who came before them nor plan for the future and foresee the needs of those who will come after them’ (Arendt, 1998: 175). Equality should happen, as we have seen, in the public realm. Her description of equality is temporal: we should also be equal to those who act before and after us. If we should be distinct from them, it is because without distinction, speech and action would not be necessary for people to understand each other (Arendt, 1998). If Arendt was so critical of labour, it is precisely because its collective nature demands the erasure of all consciousness of individuality, and so of distinction. Political experience is this experience of phenomenal plurality. Through it, Arendt managed to ‘give depth back to politics’, the depth which was previously that of philosophy (Revault d’Allones, 2001: 30:00) and that she first had to give up (see Section 8.2.1.1). First, this plurality is the plurality of agents able to begin something and who are distinct. This plurality can be frustrating, uneasy and uncomfortable: ‘It has always been a great temptation [ . . . ] to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents’ (Arendt, 1998: 220). We cannot control the action of the agents, linked as they are to the web of human relationships. In a totalitarian system, isolation thus takes place through the destruction of spontaneous social relations (friendships, love affairs, etc.).

Phenomenology and the Political Philosophy    171 Plurality, however, is also a phenomenal plurality of standpoints that can be experienced by one person. It is the plurality of perspectives from which a thing or a person is seen (Arendt, 1998). The common world arises only because there are different perspectives from which a thing or phenomenon can be apprehended (Cerny, 2012). This philosophy of plurality is thus protective of the singularity of the people. The more perspectives there are, the bigger and more open nations will be; this also means that even those who are the cause of the world’s destruction are its victims, losing a ‘power to be affected’ by destroying a singular perspective (Revault d’Allones, 2001: 40:00). It is on this plurality that Arendt based her most concrete descriptions of what a democracy might look like: ‘if only ten of us are sitting around a table, each expressing his opinion, each hearing the opinions of others, then a rational formation of opinion can take place through the exchange of opinions’ (Arendt, 1972: 233). What is important is the possibility of understanding the other, of grasping his/​her perspective in order to be able to continue to dialogue with him/​her. It is our capacity to ‘experience with’ that is at stake, the capacity of each of us to develop our own opinion by taking into account those of others (Allen, 1982). This ‘enlarged mentality’ made of having in mind a plurality of standpoints when making a decision enriches our capacity to act and is at the heart of the building of informed judgements and opinions (Arendt, 1967: 302). It does not have the same definition as empathy, as the latter is too passive (Arendt, 1992) when we should be actively engaged through our perceptions. We’ve shown that at the heart of Arendt’s phenomenology lies the idea that humans can be born a second time through beginning something new, and that the political community is conditioned on the existence of plurality. However, it is only at the heart of revolutions that the appeal for beginnings directly aims at creating the possibilities of freedom: ‘freedom, which only seldom—​in times of crisis or revolution—​becomes the direct aim of political action, is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all’ (Arendt, 1961: 146). We will show that to achieve a full existence, phenomena—​even the most difficult to describe, as revolutions that start with violence—​must be spoken out loud.

8.4  From the Event to the Storyteller: Narrating Phenomena so that We Can Continue to Begin We cannot understand Arendt’s political philosophy without studying the crisis, the unexpected, the event. There is indeed an interesting tension in her political theory that we will try to reveal, between the need for acting in the vita activa, and the fact that as we cannot control our beginnings, we also need to find ways to cope with what happened before by creating stories from it out of political life. We will first show that events happened, and some events, such as revolutions, can be violent, but they are beginnings.

172   Lucie Chartouny The problem is that beginners today are wandering between past and future. Eventually, Arendt described how events should be told to reconcile reality and a plurality of truths through the role of the storyteller.

8.4.1 Revolution as a Beginning Arendt’s mother took her to a demonstration when she was a child and told her that she was living a historical moment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, the historical moments studied by her are most often insurrectional events, and often violent—​La commune, May 1968, or the French and American Revolutions. How did she reconcile this thinking of revolution with her defence of the principles of birth and plurality? She did so by referring back to her principal investigation—​that of the conditions of freedom—​and by asking if ‘every revolution is a process of freedom’ in its means, its purpose, and its intentions (Mosna Savoye, 2019: 2:03).

8.4.1.1 A Revolution to Found Freedom Arendt characterized revolution as an event that serves to found freedom: ‘the central idea of revolution, [ . . . ] is the foundation of freedom, that is, the foundation of a body politic which guarantees the space where freedom can appear’ (Arendt, 1963: 125). What matters in revolutionary action is the idea of unfolding into history a beginning, a new story that had never existed before and that even its actors had no idea of a moment before. Here we can better understand Arendt’s criticism of unions: they would never have been revolutionary enough to transform both society and at the same time the political institutions that represented it. They failed to create a new public space with new political norms. How does a revolution take place? There is no destiny, absolute or will of one behind revolutions, contrary to Heidegger’s thesis that history is what happens to us, what is destined for us. ‘in revolutions there is no place for a noumenal, metaphysical entity or will, which would determine from a hidden standpoint [ . . . ] the fateful events surrounding a new beginning’ (Marder, 2013: 317). On the contrary, as with every beginning, it is simply the act of beginning a revolution that makes it a reality: let us recall that for Arendt, the ‘absolute lies in the very act of beginning itself ’ (Arendt, 1963: 204). However, all revolutions cannot achieve the same kind of results. To begin can at first reveal the invisible: for example, Arendt noted that the greatest merit of the French Revolution had been to make visible people who had hitherto been little visible socially, by bringing them to the streets. By saying so, Arendt did not deny her phenomenology: this revolution is a revelation of the diversity of agents. The problem, however, is that the agents were not equal between them. The French Revolution mixed the political—​trying to change the regime—​with social questions—​of inequalities, of poverty—​and it was according to Arendt this mix that was at the source of the terror that followed it: ‘violence pitted against social conditions has always led to terror’ (Arendt, 2017: 58). For political freedom to exist, the social question would have had to have been solved beforehand; here again, those who did not have a proper private realm—​the poorest—​cannot begin; they did not have the freedom to be free.

Phenomenology and the Political Philosophy    173 To be able to make a revolution, one must ‘be free not only from fear but also from want’ (Arendt, 2018: 53). A revolution must first be a liberation from necessity before hoping to achieve freedom; it is only after this that there can be hope for the creation of a new government.

8.4.1.2 What Place for Violence in Revolutions? For Arendt, violence is anti-​political, it is a counterphenomenon. Yet it is at the same time at the very foundations of politics and beginnings. Arendt wrote it in a very transparent way: ‘violence was the beginning and, by the same token, no beginning could be made without using violence, without violating’ (Arendt, 1963: 20). She justified it by recalling how Cain killed Abel or Romulus killed Remus. But for her, violence, by interrupting the flow of life as it was before, also allows another phenomenon to be born, through the emergence of a collective acting together: the public realm. Here is another paradox in Arendt’s philosophy: the idea that ‘politics is essentially contained in the event that constitutes its absolute opposite’ (Esposito, 2001: 167). As we have seen by detailing the various births free people go through, we can assume that what saves political life from violence is that if people can begin, they are also, at the same time, born as beginners, which gives the possibility to newcomers who are not there yet to begin in their turn.

8.4.1.3 Councils to Preserve the Public Freedom Contained in Revolutions We have said that Arendt’s political theory, as a phenomenology, is not practical or explanatory in terms of how to create a functional political system. However, after the violence of the revolution, we can legitimately wonder: what happens? Arendt adopted Tocqueville’s question: once the moment has passed, how to maintain a sense of public freedom among the citizens of a democracy, and prevent them from returning to their private lives, to their former routines (Rolland, 2001)? As detailed above (Section 8.3.1.3), one of the most concrete results of Arendt’s political phenomenology is her idea to put ten people around a table and make them exchange opinions: Arendt described councils. She referred in particular to the councils of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and presented them as a possible solution to the crisis of representation (Arendt, 1963). The councils also allow us to grasp the concrete functioning of plurality against totalitarianism: it is because there will be disagreements within the councils that they are interesting. Arendt called for a recognition of this type of structure in our democracies.

8.4.2 Replacing the Event in Time: A Beginner Wandering between Past and Future We have seen that in revolutions, a person acts by beginning something that interrupts the circular movement of daily life. But beginnings are not disconnected from the past: many revolutions started as attempts to restore a lost political situation or tradition. A person who begins tries to connect the past and the future, as he/​she ‘always

174   Lucie Chartouny lives in the interval’; for him/​her, ‘time [ . . . ] is broken in the middle, at the point where “he” stands; and “his” standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time’ (Arendt, 1961: 11). In describing this, Arendt’s theory is an existential phenomenology organized around a certain vision of a rooting in the instant, but also a temporal epoché. In our modern society, though, an acting person is not sufficient to connect the past and the future. Where beginnings should be enlightened by his/​her understanding of our history, he/​she does not have any ‘testament’ to refer to. Arendt lamented that ‘Notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament’ (Arendt quoting René Char, 1961: 3). Where a will should ensure a continuity between the past and the future, its absence breaks this possibility. ‘Since the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity’ (Arendt quoting Tocqueville, 1961: 7). The events are no longer legible; the acting person lacks a vision of what has happened and of what will happen. However, people can draw their beginnings based on the possibility of forgiveness of the past, and on the possibility to make promises for the future (Arendt, 1998)—​promises which are a way to recreate intentionality without presuming any results. This crisis of our understanding interests us, as it is where the complexity of the relationships between events and truth lies. This lack of will worried Arendt, who wanted to understand how to love a world where events have taken place that should not have done (Coquio, 2020) and to describe a path to doing good even after the worst has happened.

8.4.3 Reconciling Reality and Truth Arendt herself wrote: ‘truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other’ (Arendt, 1967: 295). On the one hand, philosophy seeks to define a truth; on the other, humans face a plurality of perspectives by appearing in front of each other in the breach between past and future (Strauss, 1992, quoted by Revault d’Allones, 2001). It is not surprising that in a political philosophy marked by phenomenology a tension exists. Arendt’s analysis of the myth of the cave (1961) revealed this tension between truth, humans, and political philosophy. The philosopher begins by leaving the cave to search for the true essence of being, without worrying about the applicability of this truth to human affairs; only later, facing the hostility of other humans, does he/​she try to bring his/​her truth closer to ‘standards applicable to the behavior of other people’ (Arendt, 1961: 112).

8.4.3.1 A Truth Made of Plurality To reconcile the vita activa of those in the public realm and its unpredictable events with the idea of a truth that preserves the possibility of beginnings, Arendt again relied on the plurality. This plurality of truths can be experienced by one person: even between the three activities of vita activa, truth differs. According to Marder (2013: 303),

Phenomenology and the Political Philosophy    175 when person’s standpoint is labour, the truth lies in what happens in ‘the ‘now’ of perception’; when it is work, it lies in the encounter between ‘the cognizing intention and its cognized object, as well as of intentionality and lived experience’; as for the truth of action, it is a matter of an existential conception of truth based on those who begin and those who think. But truth must also be connected to plurality because, as we have seen with the idea of enlarged mentality, ‘no one can adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because the world always shows and reveals itself to him from one perspective which corresponds to his standpoint in the world and is determined by it’ (Arendt, 2005: 128). We need the other’s experience and standpoints to enlarge our opinion and truth. This plurality of truth is also to be constructed in our own mind: our capacity to think should allow us to always have truths and their opposites discussed. Arendt blamed modern education for deteriorating our conscientiousness, which has become lazy and too accustomed to evaluation (Holt, 2020). Totalitarian systems play on these limitations: Arendt pointed out that bureaucracy faces citizens with a total loss of factual truth. Several services do the same thing, so that one does not know who to contact; sometimes the person who can provide the service does not even know that he or she can do so (Demont, 2002).

8.4.3.2 Civil Disobedience as a Guarantee of the Truth of the Minority One of the manifestations of the plurality of truths that should exist in political life is civil disobedience. While civil disobedience has often been thought in the literature to be the answer to an individual moral question, Arendt described it as a concerted collective choice (Di Croce, 2018). Like revolutionaries, those who disobey wish to change the world, and so civil disobedience must take place publicly. Those who disobey make up minorities who organize collectively, conscious of opposing the government majority. The fact that they have agreed to act together makes their views convincing (Arendt, 1972). Arendt wanted to institutionalize civil disobedience through a deliberative activity against parliamentary modalities. She insisted on the extra-​legal character of it: civil disobedience is necessary to bring change to laws, and yet this can only take place from outside the legal framework (Di Croce, 2018). Arendt’s political theory is once again about beginnings and how they can emerge without fixed frameworks.

8.4.3.3 The Role of the Truth Teller Thus, when taking into account the plurality of truths, it is not easy for people to tell and access truth. As we have said, some phenomena are complicated to recount; even when we know the factual truth, we can still fail to convey it to others because facts lack transcendence (Arendt, 1967). We are more likely to listen to liars, who want to transform the world through their lies, and thus appeal to our desire for changing reality (Arendt, 1967).

176   Lucie Chartouny In order to solve the crisis of understanding of the acting person, Arendt wrote that for action and speech, the homo faber should always be able to create a story with enough coherence to be told ‘no matter how accidental or haphazard the single events and their causation may appear to be’(Arendt, 1998: 97). The homo faber becomes a truth teller in the figure of an historian or a poet. Acting men are dependent on the homo faber: ‘acting and speaking men need the help of homo faber in his highest capacity, that is, the help of the artist, of poets and historiographers, of monument-​builders or writers, because without them the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not survive at all’ (Arendt, 1998: 173). If he manages to be at the same time ‘teller of factual truth’ and ‘storyteller’, the truth-​ teller brings about the needed ‘reconciliation with reality’ (Arendt, 1967: 311), which allows individuals to accept events as they are, to immortalize their acts and achieve transcendence collectively. Arendt transcended the beginning by immortalizing it through a story that can be told. This transcendence is at risk according to Arendt. If scientists sought to conquer space, it was because they went in search of a ‘true reality’ that would allow them to go beyond appearances (Arendt, 2007: 48), in other words to surpass phenomenology. Arendt regretted that their actions, more and more predominant in our society, can no longer be told in the same way. As they are connected to the universe instead of being connected to the web of human relationships, they do not act with the same revealing force (Arendt, 2007). We have showed that Arendt was seeking to guarantee the pursuit of the possibility to begin, to begin again even in the midst of the crisis of political tradition and the indescribable events that had taken place. To do so, she described a truth made up of plurality, in which one person should be active in trying to understand another’s standpoints. The reconciliation between events and truth can only happen through a new facet of the relationship of the zoon politikon with the homo faber, which enables a collective immortalization.

8.5  Conclusion: A Political Philosophy whose Phenomenology Enlightens Management and Organization Studies We have described the place of phenomenology within Arendt’s political philosophy. We are convinced that Arendt’s political philosophy is full of resources for management and organization theory. First, the phenomenological revelation of individuals who appear in front of others gives them their humanity; to do so, we need to protect both private and public realms. Obviously, her concern with separating the public and private realm can be of great help in coping with the disappearance of the boundaries between the office and

Phenomenology and the Political Philosophy    177 home that goes with digitalization and remote working. It might be time to redefine for ourselves what should be, at all costs, preserved as separate from work. In a more positive way, the blurring of the boundaries can also be an opportunity to change work by bringing our principles and ethical questioning to the heart of it. The good news is that acting can be achieved through small steps and beginnings, in the innocence of who we are. Arendt thought of a public realm that can be built everywhere—​in a meeting room, a cafeteria, or the streets—​as long as we have the possibility to appear as both equal and distinct. Within organizations—​and using their spaces and facilities—​we can easily begin concerted action with others in order to resist in a way that is convincing. This collective action can even be achieved against the truth of the majority, based upon Arendt’s writings on civil disobediences and as shown by many social or environmental grassroots communities within companies that try every day to put action at the heart of labour. Her vision of beginnings as an absolute can be seen as an invitation to promote meaningful beginnings at work. First, about the welcoming of newcomers. One cannot begin alone; by not being present, and working remotely, we prevent others—​new employees, for example—​from being fully part of our community and being able to begin. In order to preserve our collective creativity, we need to regularly appear in front of others, and not only behind a computer screen. Arendt’s vision of an authority that enables the ‘augere’, the increase of the newcomer’s capacity to perceive, is interesting when welcoming a new colleague at work. In terms of soft skills, the promotion of empathy at work in our professional relationships and decisions could be also enriched by her vision of an active enlarged mentality which really enables a true plurality. Second, it is also about building a meaningful vision of innovation, in which we will understand that in order to innovate, one must have achieved one’s freedom to be free, which means, at least, having time. In this vision, it is not the business result of the innovation—​which will always be too unpredictable—​that will be celebrated, but the capacity to begin something new, and to do it collectively. We know that most of our organizations are not built on a model of equality between people and that by putting ten people around a table, they could not express their own opinions easily. Plurality, at the centre of her philosophy, make us feel the urgent need to reconsider some aspects of the governance of our organizations, in order to give to those who are not yet part of the world the possibility to begin in turn. In this aspect, Arendt’s phenomenology of beginning can sound environmentally engaged. Redefining what should be the object of democratic discussion within an organization, and how to accompany it, in order to give back meaning to politics on topics that we no longer even realize make up our common world. Finally, the reconciliation she effectuated between truth and reality is interesting because she found a way to reunite what happened during a crisis with a truth that can be told. Words should not only be those of the management, or those of the people who have acted. The person of action needs the poet or the historian to transform and complete his/​her beginning. We can wonder who the poets are at work, and allow them

178   Lucie Chartouny to throw light on what happened in an original way in order to immortalize it. Our capacity to invent new collective narratives—​and narratives that we can enjoy telling—​ seems key to keeping on beginning despite the crises we are living through. This, in turn, allows us to have a chance of dealing with them, a chance that can only be realized if we stop using the tools of the past.

References Allen, W. F. (1982). Hannah Arendt: Existential phenomenology and political freedom. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 9(2), 170–​190. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​019​1453​7820​0900​203 Arendt, H. (1998). The human condition (2nd edn). Chicago: University of Chicago Press Arendt, H. (1961). Between Past and Future. New York: The Viking Press. Arendt, H. (1963). On revolution. London: Penguin Books. Arendt, H. (1967). Truth and politics. The New Yorker. https://​ida​nlan​dau.files.wordpr​ess.com/​ 2014/​12/​are​ndt-​truth-​and-​polit​ics.pdf. Arendt, H. (1972). Crises of the republic: Lying in politics, civil disobedience, on violence, thoughts on politics and revolution. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company. Arendt, H. (1994). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Books. Arendt, H. (2005). The promises of politics. New York: Schocken books. Arendt, H. (2007). The conquest of space and the stature of man. New York: The New Atlantis. Arendt, H. (2017). The freedom to be free. London: Penguin Books. Benhabib, S. (1993). Feminist theory and Hannah Arendt’s concept of public space. History of the Human Sciences, 6(2), 97–​114. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​095​2695​1930​0600​205. Benjamin, W., Zohn, H., Arendt, H., & Wieseltier, L. (2007). Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940. Introduction to Walter Benjamin. In Illuminations (pp. 1– 51). Schocken Books. Butler, J. (2012). Can one lead a good life in a bad life? Adorno Prize Lecture. Radical Philosophy, 176, 9. Cerny, J. (2012). L’individu comme problème phénoménologique chez Hannah Arendt et Michel Henry. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 20(2), 19–​41. https://​doi.org/​ 10.5195/​jffp.2012.536. Coquio, C. (2020, 23 April). Hannah Arendt. Amor mundi /​Croire au monde /​Odysseum, https://​edus​col.educat​ion.fr/​odyss​eum/​han​nah-​are​ndt-​amor-​mundi-​cro​ire-​au-​monde. Demont. (2002). Hannah Arendt et la philosophie politique grecque, Proceedings of the 12th colloquium of the Villa Kérylos in Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the 19th & 20th October 2001, Publications de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles lettres, Persée, 13/​21–​41 https://​www. per​see.fr/​docAs​PDF/​ker​yl_​1​275-​6229​_​200​2_​ac​t_​13​_​1_​1​047.pdf. Di Croce, M. (2018). Hannah Arendt et Antigone. Perspectives sur la désobéissance civile. Recherches Féministes, Université Laval, 31(2), 125–​140. https://​doi.org/​10.7202/​105624​5ar. Esposito, R. (2001). Le feu. In M. Narcy & É. Tassin (eds.), Les catégories de l’universel: Hannah Arendt et Simone Weil (pp. 137–​165). Paris: L’Harmattan. Holt, R. (2020). Hannah Arendt and the raising of conscience in business schools. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 19(4), 584–​599. https://​doi.org/​10.5465/​amle.2020.0147. Lecerf, E. (2001). L’arc de philoctète. In M. Narcy & É. Tassin (eds.), Les catégories de l’universel: Hannah Arendt et Simone Weil (pp. 255–​279). Paris: L’Harmattan.

Phenomenology and the Political Philosophy    179 Marder, M. (2013). Natality, event, revolution: The political phenomenology of Hannah Arendt. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 44, 3. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​ 00071​773.2013.11006​808. Mattéi, J. F. (2019, January 4). Œuvre de culture inutile et permanente, La crise de la culture expliquée par Jean-François Mattei [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=c9Dpyen992Y (accessed on 11 August 2022). Mosna-Savoye, G. (2019, May 7). La liberté d’être libre : Un inédit d’Hannah Arendt, Le Journal de la philosophie. [Radio broadcast] France Culture, Radio France. https://www.radiofrance. fr/franceculture/podcasts/le-journal-de-la-philo/la-liberte-d-etre-libre-un-inedit-dhannah-arendt-8942110 (accessed on 11 August 2022). Revault d’Allones, M. (2001, November 14). Phénoménologie et politique : Arendt et MerleauPonty, ENS de Lyon [Video]. Canal-U. https://www.canal-u.tv/44447 (accessed on 11 August 2022). Ricoeur, P. (1957). Phénoménologie existentielle. In Encyclopédie française. Paris: Larousse. 19. 10–​18; 19. 10–​12. Rolland, P. (2001). Simone Weil et Hannah Arendt. La politique entre malheur et bonheur. In M. Narcy & É. Tassin (eds.), Les catégories de l’universel: Hannah Arendt et Simone Weil (pp. 211–​253). Paris: L’Harmatta. https://​hal​shs.archi​ves-​ouver​tes.fr/​hal​shs-​00097​776. Tassin, É. (2018). Pour quoi agissons-​nous? Questionner la politique en compagnie de Hannah Arendt. Le Bord de l’eau. Woolf, V. (2004). A room of one’s own. Penguin Books. Young-​ Bruehl, E. (1982). Hannah Arendt: For love of the world. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press.

Chapter 9

E x perience as a n E xc e s s of Givenne s s The Post-​Metaphysical Phenomenology of Jean-​Luc Marion Sara Mandray

Presenting Jean-​Luc Marion’s thought in 2021 is both a tricky and a pleasant exercise, and dare I say it, an essential one. A tricky one first, because talking about the philosopher before the eyes of the philosopher himself requires an extreme accuracy not to betray his thought. A pleasant one, above all, considering that we are addressing those who suggested that phenomenology is a thing of the past. And finally, surely an essential one, in a time when a series of crises have revealed the limits and inappropriateness of rational tools in contemplating the world and the challenges that we are facing nowadays. What does a crisis truly reveal? Crisis is the irruption of the possible in an era of predictability, characterized by the unforeseeable event. But why is it so disrupting, so significant? Crisis actually emphasizes present nihilism. Nihilism attempts to rationalize the world. It ‘accomplishes the objectification of the world by the imposition of calculability as the criterion of being’ (Marion, 2017: 166) and states with Nietzsche that ‘the human is the evaluating animal par excellence’. This rationality impacts also the anticipation of the future, which is reduced to the foreseeable: ‘The entire future henceforth will result from an evaluation [ . . . ] We can plan the future as an outgrowth of the present because we know through the will to power that it will obey the rules of evaluation’ (Marion, 2017: 166) However, in the perfection of the metaphysical rationality, the possible vanishes, the future ‘is exhausted in its foreseeability’ (p. 166). Then appears the crisis, irruption of the possible in the era of predictability. Why is it that the crisis is so disrupting? Because it ultimately belies rationality in its predictability. Why is it so significant? Because ‘in the situation of nihilism every event becomes a crisis for nihilism itself ’ (p. 166). The event, this impossibility which has become effective, is not only undermining nihilism, but metaphysical rationality as a whole.

Experience as an Excess of Givenness    181 In eventness (événementialité), ‘the impossible and the real are reversed’ (Marion, 2017: 170). The effective event is still ‘impossible’, that is incomprehensible. The event is taking place without ever having been possible, that is foreseeable. Hence it opens the door to a brand new possible, to a new era of possibilities. Therefore the event is a landmark, ‘not only the real but the possible will be different’ (p. 169). The event belies all the principles of metaphysical rationality and calls us for a change of view: The event contradicts the principle of identity because it differs from the state of affairs that preceded it. It contradicts the principle of sufficient reason because there is no conceivable reason that triggers it: The event is not foreseeable, it has no a priori, it is not repeatable, in contrast to the technical object, which in principle always is all of those things. It is also no longer measurable but immeasurable, incomprehensible, and irreducible to metaphysics in general as to its final form of nihilism. What philosophy can thus have some sort of hold on the event? In either case, not one that would wonder for instance about the reasons we have for acting, as many moral philosophies do today, for the event does not result from a more or less rational calculus or deliberation: The event comes without reason and, as concerns our action, without our reasons for acting. If it holds onto the principle that everything that shows itself first gives itself, and if it manages to think this given, phenomenology can find itself in a position where it obviously does not foresee the event but is able to make it out when it arrives, to face up to it and to receive it, in short to see it, to go see it. (Marion, 2017: 170–​1)

Phenomenology, and especially the post-​metaphysical phenomenology of Jean-​Luc Marion, invites us to leave the comforting safety of the world of rational objects in order to face things as they are: evential (événementielles), paradoxical, saturated, gifted. Presenting Jean-​Luc Marion’s phenomenological thought is also and more importantly about presenting the thought of a historian of philosophy, always engaged in dialogue. Marion first engaged with Descartes, who understandably led him to Husserl (Marion, 2021: v). But Marion truly embraced phenomenology when engaging with Heidegger or maybe even against Heidegger. The first books that Marion published outside the field of Cartesian studies, namely The Idol and Distance ([1977] 2001) and God without Being ([1982] 1991), were two thunderclaps in the Heideggerian sky. Beginning with the paradox of the ‘death of God’ (who by definition is immortal), Marion first gets on with a vast undertaking: deconstructing the question of God. In The Idol and Distance, then, he opens three ways of understanding the words of Nietzsche, ‘God is dead’: the via negativa, the via affirmativa, and the via eminentiae. The first way, in the negative, is the destruction of an idol: if God dies, it means that he is not and never really was a god. The via negativa attests to the destruction of the metaphysical idol of God and prepares the way for the coming of the true God. The second way, in the affirmative, can be understood as the Christian Revelation: God is dead and risen, defeating death. It deeply means the death of death itself. Lastly, the third way, and the most remarkable one, is based on the first two viae. It is characterized as the encounter

182   Sara Mandray of the human with ‘a nonmediated divine’. ‘The twilight of the idol causes the sun of God to rise and requires managing the distance between the divine and the human’ (Marion, 2017: 108). In the wake of the discussions raised by The Idol and Distance, Heidegger et la question de Dieu (‘Heidegger and the question of God’) was published (Kearney & O’Leary, 1979) in which Marion criticized Heidegger’s ‘double idolatry’, asserting that ‘the question of Being not only is not identified with the question of God but that this very question of God evades the a priori of being’ (Marion, 2017: 109). In Heidegger, the question of being, namely the question of the ontological difference between Being (l’être) and being (l’étant) (Seinsfrage) prevails over the question of God because it decides the conditions of its possibility (conditions of the manifestation of being). However, the choice of metaphysics is that the question of Being is more essential than the question of God, meaning that the horizon of Being (de l’être) decides the horizon of the sacred and the divine. With that in mind, we can say that Heidegger’s phenomenology has not yet completely exited the metaphysical enclosure even if it breached the wall and already sees beyond it. In God without Being, Marion tries to remove the question of God from the metaphysical horizon. To that end, he introduces the concept of idol: both the maximal range of a gaze and the maximum of visibility that it can bear. According to metaphysics, the widest horizon is that of the Being, which is the maximal range of the transcendental gaze. Nothing but the horizon of Being, namely the maximal range of my gaze, provides dimensions for all beings. God, as a being, would then be constrained, limited by the limits of my personal gaze. This unbearable affirmation leads Marion to conclude that: ‘it is possible that God does not allow himself to be included in the idolatrous horizon of Being, that God not only is not the supreme being but that he does not have to be, that he reveals himself as without being’ (Marion, 2017: 112). God without Being is first of all an indictment against the idolatrous position which consists in allocating a horizon to God. Affirmatively it means that the question of God belongs to another order. Marion here goes back to Pascal and the thematic of the three orders: the order of the body, the order of the mind (to which metaphysics and the question of Being belong), and the order of charity. The third order is specific in that it strikes with vanity everything that is not a matter of charity, comprising the Being and metaphysics. The question of love, at the end of God without Being, demotes the metaphysical questioning about Being. The order of charity, which is reachable only for the saints, stands outside of metaphysics. Pascal is suggesting here that something is existing beyond the metaphysical horizon and even beyond rational theology (special metaphysics), and this would be the theology of Revelation. From here on, the question that channels the works of Jean-​Luc Marion could be said to be, from this beginning, to figure out ‘whether there is a philosophy beyond metaphysics’ (Marion, 2017: 59). In his research, his first step has been to question the Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenologies, and in particular their relation to metaphysics.

Experience as an Excess of Givenness    183

9.1  Beyond the Metaphysical Phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger: The Third Reduction Marion published Reduction and Givenness ([1989] 1998), a collection of essays on the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. The book investigates the initial operation of phenomenology, which is also its method: reduction. The immediacy only appears—​if I can put it like that—​if one suspends its already implicit mediations or those used in a given moment for producing it. Also, the return to the things themselves indicates that the things themselves are not given immediately. Their immediacy hence must be gained via mediation, to the extent to which one must precisely go back to it via a leading back, a reduction. It is an illusion to think one can do without philosophy because immediacy is never given and the given is never immediately available. One must search for it. Otherwise, why should it be necessary to go back to ‘the things themselves’? Where would they have gone? Where would we be? What distance would separate us from them? It is in order to resolve these questions that I was interested in phenomenology and its operations, especially that of the reduction. (Marion, 2017: 73)

Marion distinguishes then three types of reduction: the first (the Husserlian one) is reduction to objectness, the second (the Heideggerian one) is reduction to beingness, the third and last, introduced in Reduction and Givenness, is the reduction to givenness. Husserl is the first to suspect givenness (Gegenbenheit) and to see that the road to givenness is reduction. Marion translates Husserl’s words ‘as much appearing, so much being’ into ‘as more reduction, so more givenness’. Husserl indeed paves the way while recognizing the ‘dignity of the given—​no showing up without appearing, no appearing without being given’ (Marion, 2017: 76). However, he remains within the horizon of Being and follows the Kantian logic while ‘spontaneously thinking or formulating any phenomenon in the horizon of objectness’ (p. 76). He upholds the language of metaphysics spoken by all of his contemporaries, which prevents him from truly stepping into givenness. In Husserl, reduction ends up with the reconstituting of the object as object which allows itself to be seen in the manifestation of the phenomenon. Reduction to objectness sets up the first type of reduction. Heidegger, in the wake of Husserl, proposes a second type of reduction, namely reduction to beingness. Heidegger’s phenomenology is indeed centred on the question of Being (l’être) as a being (un étant). But the being is not immediately accessible itself in the sensible world. Our senses only provide us access to essences trapped in the world’s existence. Thereupon, the road to being passes through a reduction of essence to what it is not, that is, to a pure being without existence. The being as being (l’étant en tant qu’étant)

184   Sara Mandray results from a reduction of the given to the being, that is, a reduction of the given to what it is not (given its essential and existential dimensions). The second reduction, then, as the first one did, raises the question of knowing why the given ‘would find itself reduced to a different authority than to the given itself ’ (Marion, 2017: 75). ‘Why is beingness or objectness arbitrarily and without specific justification privileged for characterizing the given [le donné], givability [la donnéité], or givenness [la donation]?’ (Marion, 2017: 75). Marion’s thesis when he proposes the third reduction is to connect reduction directly to givenness itself. It allows us, then, to exit the noesis-​noema pair and to step out of metaphysics. Thereupon, reduction would aim at ‘determining the degrees of givenness and nothing else’ (p. 78). In that respect, reduction regains its initial meaning, that is, to ‘distinguish between what is given as such and what is given only indirectly’ (p. 74) The work of the post-​metaphysical phenomenology centres thus on a single purpose, which is classifying the appearing in a hierarchy according to its different degrees of givenness. This is the work that Marion’s phenomenology establishes for itself as a purpose. The first step of this work is the constitution of the Marionian ‘subject’.

9.2  Beyond the Transcendental Subject: The Marionian Gifted In Being Given ([1997] 2002), Marion lays the foundation of its phenomenology as characterized by a phenomenology of the gift. What is at stake, then, is to find a way for the gift to be freed from the metaphysical logic. After thematizing the three reductions presented in Reduction and Givenness, he investigates the links between gift and givenness. The question of the gift as it’s presented at that time, then dominated by Derrida’s criticism of Mauss in Given Time ([1991] 1992), may be summarized as follows: ‘There is only a gift if there is no phenomenon of the gift’ (Marion, 2017: 80). The answer that Marion gives in Being Given is to submit the gift to a reduction in order to tear it loose from exchange. He shows that the gift remains even when deprived of any of the three constitutive elements of exchange, namely the thing given, the recipient, and the giver. Inheritance shows an example of gift without giver. Second, the gift without recipient is typical of gifts given via the intermediary of a third (an association or a non-​governmental organization). Lastly, the gift without thing given comprises all the non-​things (one’s word, love, loyalty) that can only be given symbolically via a different thing (a ring, an electronic code, a signature). While reducing the gift to givenness, Marion thus shows that the gift does not belong to the order of exchange but falls under a different phenomenality. And this other phenomenality, characterized by the non-​ reciprocity, by the radical asymmetry of the gift, unveils an essential characteristic of the given in general. The given, distinguished from the object and from being, is based on a fundamental feature which is anamorphosis.

Experience as an Excess of Givenness    185 There is only one place and one moment where I can see the given as such, and I cannot fix or change this place, repeat it or reproduce it by projections like the subject in the transcendental position. Only the event of the phenomenon that gives itself is able to do this. From this results the fundamental character of the given, namely that it is given starting from itself. (Marion, 2017: 82)

The concept of anamorphosis applied to the given directly implies withdrawing any initiative from the transcendental subject. The ego is no more the one who constitutes the phenomenon, rather, the phenomenon is constituting me, it gives me to myself. I leave the world of metaphysical rationality, of foreseeability, and enter the world of eventness (événementialité): A whole range of situations is possible. When the phenomenon is given [or gives itself], I can say that it is an accident. It can even be a matter of an illusion where I believe that the phenomenon gives itself while in reality nothing is given. It can remain intentional from my side, if I am exposed in such a way that what I really very much want will happen to me. And then, maybe someone had the intention that such or such a thing would happen. One can imagine anything, and there are all the gradations, from complete illusion to perfect election. Between the two: an accident, an encounter, a stroke of luck, misfortune, good reflexes, the pure unforeseeable, the unheard of, the call. In short, the event. (Marion, 2017: 85)

In this context, subjectivity as such is disrupted as it receives itself from what it receives. This Marionian form of subjectivity is called the gifted (l’adonné) (Marion, [1997] 2002: 268–​7 1). The gifted has the special feature of being phenomenologically instituted by the given, which here takes the form of the call. In order to better understand this particular form of institution, we need to investigate each of the four characteristics of the manifestation of the call and its impact on the gifted. Those four characteristics are summons, surprise, interlocution, and facticity or individualization. Summons first constitutes an interloqué. The interloqué is summoned by a call that transforms the I into a me ‘to whom’. I find myself identified as an interloqué by a summons of which even the origin remains unknown to me. The so-​called ontic perfection, the autarchic subject, gives way to an interloqué, a me ‘to whom’ a call is made. We are switching from a thought of the nominative subject (I) to a thought of the dative interloqué (me ‘to whom’). In this case, relation precedes individuality. ‘Subjectivity or subjectness is submitted to an originally altered, called identity’ (Marion, [1997] 2002: 268). Surprise, second, results directly from the summons of the interloqué. Surprise comes from the unknown origin of the call which freezes in place the gifted, as he/​she was subdued to this indeterminate sway. ‘The gifted gives all his attention to an essentially lacking object; he is open to an empty gap’ (p. 268). In this case, which precedes the metaphysical

186   Sara Mandray subjectivity or subjectness, ‘the I transformed into a self/​me is overwhelmed by the unknowable claim’ (p. 269). We have moved a long way from an all powerful intentionality demonstrating its power through constituting objects. The third characteristic of the call then is interlocution. The circumstances of interlocution (which is in no way a dialogical situation) are typical of the switch from a nominative/​subject case (I) to an oblique/​dative case (myself/​me ‘to whom’). Once again it would be vain here to look for the origin of the call. ‘As surprise opens even onto the unknown or failing object, interlocution opens onto the indeterminate or anonymous Other’ (Marion, [1997] 2002: 269). ‘I receive my self from the call that gives me to myself before giving me anything whatsoever’ (p. 269). This exit from the original solipsism paves the way to the fourth characteristic of the call, namely facticity. The paradigm which allows us to understand the best facticity (or individualization) is that of the speech: For every mortal, the first word was always already heard before he could utter it. To speak always and first amounts to passively hearing a word coming from the Other, a word first and always incomprehensible, which announces no meaning or signification, other than the very alterity of the initiative, by which the pure fact gives (itself) (to be thought) for the first time. Not only is the first word never said by the I, which can only undergo it by receiving it; not only does it not give us any objective or rational knowledge; but it opens only onto this very fact that some gift happens to me because it precedes me originarily in such a way that I must recognize that I proceed from it. Man deserves the title mortal (or, what is equivalent, animal) endowed with speech on condition that we understand ‘endowed with speech’ in the strictest sense: having received the gift of the heard word, heard insofar as given. Whence a decisive paradox: the call gives me to and as myself, in short, individualizes me. (Marion, [1997] 2002: 270)

The speech replaces the interloqué in the original situation of every mortal: that of finding oneself first called, which is always preceded by a call, by a given word. While constituting me as a myself/​me interloqué, that is to say, called, the call leads to the inauthenticity of the I. Indeed, ‘the facticity of the call renders the called’s access to itself as a myself/​me (therefore its selfhood) equal to its originary difference with itself as an I, therefore its inauthenticity’ (p. 270). We are moving way here from a transcendental I which would constitute itself by itself, and we find another I, always inferred from a myself/​me which receives itself from an originary call. ‘The result of this is the birth of the gifted, a subjectivity or subjectness entirely in conformity with givenness—​one that is entirely received from what it receives, given by the given, given to the given’ (pp. 270–​1). A few years later, Marion published an essay which is the outcome of his works on the gifted (l’adonné). In this book called The Erotic Phenomenon ([2003] 2007), he investigates the link of one adonné to another adonné, namely the erotic phenomenon.

Experience as an Excess of Givenness    187

9.3  Between Intention and Intuition: The Degrees of Givenness After replacing the transcendental subject by the gifted, which is instituted by the given, Marion’s phenomenology intends to rank within the given the different degrees of givenness, in other words, to rank phenomena according to their degree of phenomenality. The metaphysical tradition since Kant and Husserl used the image of Plato’s chariot to define the phenomenon. It presents the phenomenon as an encounter of a messy intuition received with one or several rational concepts. Concepts here operate as the keystone which allows us to organize the manifold of intuition in opening reality to intelligibility. With this representation in mind as its own analytical tool, metaphysical tradition first focused on phenomena poor in intuition while mostly studying intention, namely the will to signification. Poor phenomena typically include logical statements or mathematical idealitites. They are characterized by a unique signification and a precise definition. In the case of geometric figures, we can take the example of a square or a circle. Those phenomena only require a formal intuition of space. Indeed, the perfect square or circle does not exist in the sense that it cannot appear in real world, in other words, it cannot take shape in time and space. Another type of phenomena adds to space formal intuition of time, namely common law phenomena. Those phenomena typically belong to physical or natural sciences, characterized by mechanics and dynamics. Once again they only have a unique signification. They can be for instance buildings or technical products (a plane, a rocket). The two first types of phenomena (poor phenomena and common law phenomena) follow the primacy of a priori intention over intuition. They provide intuitive confirmation to concepts. In metaphysics, ‘existence contributes only a mere “complement to the possibility”, therefore to essence. For the product never gives itself first, but by contrast always after and following its “concept”, which is previously shown and demonstrated’ (Marion, [1997] 2002: 224). The question that Jean-​Luc Marion proposes to himself, as a successor of this phenomenological tradition, is the following: ‘Do we always have a priori concepts available to us, and can we always get to the bottom of every intuitive given with these a priori concepts and manage to organize them in order to constitute them into objects?’ (Marion, 2017: 87). We can go back here to the example of the event, of the crisis, mentioned in the introduction. When a crisis emerges, ‘this invalidates the metaphysical principle according to which only what is first possible becomes real’ (p. 88). Crisis sets the perfect example of a phenomenon that gives itself a posteriori. It is by definition unforeseeable, and even inconceivable; it is a matter of impossibility. Crisis, this impossibility which has become effective, requires us to exit the metaphysical paradigm of an intentional a priori phenomenon. Instead, crisis gives itself intuitively as ‘in excess’, without any possibility for me to find a concept which could organize it rationally. ‘Once this impossible becomes real, it continues to be impossible to conceive its

188   Sara Mandray possibility’ (Marion, 2017: 88). Crisis is too enormous, abnormal, and measureless. The phenomenon which gives itself through crisis, gives itself in so much excess that it overflows our capacity to organize such an overflowing intuition thanks to concepts. This particular type of phenomena ‘saturates’, so to speak, our intelligibility. It does not mean that those phenomena give themselves lacking intuition, but rather that their manifestation highlights a lack of concept. ‘When an imbalance arises and I find myself lacking concepts, something else happens, something that decides, that I cannot directly comprehend and in regard to which I must make up my mind in response’ (Marion, 2017: 89). This manifestation is first that of an a posteriori which imposes itself on me. Saturated phenomenon is ‘the supreme a posteriori’ (p. 89). The whole of Marion’s work is subverting the intentional, a priori approach to phenomenon in metaphysics. It falls to metaphysics alone to consider the paradox an exceptional (indeed eccentric) case of phenomenality, whose common law it organizes according to the paradigm of the poor phenomenon. With notable exceptions (Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Husserl), metaphysics always thinks the common-​law phenomenon (shortage of intuition) on the basis of the intuitively poor phenomenon (certain, but of little or nothing). My entire project, by contrast, aims to think the common-​law phenomenon, and through it the poor phenomenon, on the basis of the paradigm of the saturated phenomenon, of which the former two offer only weakened variants, and from which they derive by progressive extenuation. For the saturated phenomenon does not give itself abnormally, making an exception to the definition of phenomenality; to the contrary, its own most property is to render thinkable the measure of manifestation in terms of givenness and to recover it in its common-​law variety, indeed in the poor phenomenon. What metaphysics rules out as an exception (the saturated phenomenon), phenomenology here takes for its norm—​every phenomenon shows itself in the measure (or the lack of measure) to which it gives itself. To be sure, not all phenomena get classified as saturated phenomena, but all saturated phenomena accomplish the one and only paradigm of phenomenality. (Marion, [1997] 2002: 226–​7)

Saturated phenomena, which appear to be the archetype of phenomenality, give themselves through the four dimensions which identify the phenomenon as a given in general: quantity, quality, relation, and modality. Marion dedicates to those phenomena a whole essay, entitled In Excess ([2001] 2002).

9.4  Saturated Phenomena: The Metaphysical Exception or the Paradigm of Phenomenality According to quantity, saturation manifests itself as an event, namely a historical phenomenon. The historical phenomenon is specific in that it is not limited to ‘an instant,

Experience as an Excess of Givenness    189 a place, or an empirical individual’ (Marion, [1997] 2002: 228). It happens in a non-​ mappable place like a battlefield, in contrast with the mappable ‘theater of operations’. It encompasses a population such that none of those who belong to it could measure the extent of it. There is no individual point of view which would permit us to quantify the event, in other words to constitute it as an object. Marion takes the example of the battle of Waterloo which indeed no one has ever seen in the sense that no gaze could ever encompass it completely with one sweep. It is plain that Fabrice saw only the fire of his own confused erring and barely the fire of the hail of bullets, barely the emperor passing, his horse in flight, or the barmaid in a flutter; but the emperor himself saw hardly more: he saw neither the advance of the enemy reinforcements nor the delay of his own, neither the ditch where his cavalry got bogged down nor the dying among the already dead. In fact, nobody will see more, not Wellington, any of the officers, or any of the men on the field—​each will furnish confused and partial reports from an angle of vision taken in by panic or rage. (Marion, [1997] 2002: 228)

The particularity of history making itself is maybe first that it has no need of the interpretation of the transcendental subject to happen. It does not wait to be raised (or reduced) to the rank of metaphysical object in order to unfold and, most of the time, to overwhelm participants themselves who strive to ‘make history’. ‘The battle passes and passes away on its own, without anybody making it or deciding it. It passes, and each watches it pass, fade into the distance, and then disappear, disappear like it had come—​that is to say, of itself ’ (Marion, [1997] 2002: 228). The talent of generations of historians (military, political, economic) will be needed in order to outline the face of the event which gave itself to be seen in all its excessiveness. The talent of an artist like Stendhal will even be needed to make sensible in the eyes of the young Fabrice, at the beginning of The Charterhouse of Parma, the saturation of the event which gives itself. The event and his plurality of horizons makes history an endless narration, always repeated, namely a hermeneutic. The event first opens a new era in which grows a community of historians who will be as many interobjectivities reconstituting the event. We may notice here the distance from the poor and common-​law phenomena characterized by a unique and unequivocal definition. According to relation then, saturation occurs in the form of the flesh. The phenomenon of the flesh is based on my own capacity to be affected, or ‘attuned’, to be under attunement. ‘I am never neutral, without state of mind. [ . . . ] I am not only affected by the exterior world but also by an internal attunement’ (Marion, 2017: 89). Most of all, only this intrinsic capacity to be affected allows the external world to affect me. ‘Not only can we not sense anything without sensing ourselves, but this sensing of the self alone makes possible the sensing of other things, and not the reverse’ (p. 90). Marion takes the example of the sense of touch: I touch the armchair on which I am seated, and my hand touches its armrest. One could always say that my hand and the chair fall under the same materiality, that they

190   Sara Mandray share the same space and thus that I am one thing in the world among others. Yes, but a huge difference remains: When I touch the armchair, the chair does not sense my hand that touches it; it senses nothing, but although my hand remains a part of the world like the chair it touches, it senses the chair, and it alone does so. Indeed, it only senses the chair because it senses itself. Or rather, I sense myself when I touch the chair and therefore in touching this chair I sense two things: the chair and especially myself as the one sensing. (Marion, 2017: 90)

The opposite example is also possible. In the case of anesthesia, I artificially do away with self-​affection in order to remove the pain. Therefore, I also remove all external affections; in fact, I put an end to affectivity as a whole. The two go hand in hand. In the case of general anesthesia, I even put an end to my very awareness of the world around. The external and the internal are merged in the flesh and establish it as a paradox. ‘The flesh consists of this part of materiality that is the jurisdiction of the mind or the soul. That’s the paradox’ (Marion, 2017: 90). The two last types of saturated phenomena (idol and icon) are based on a capital distinction in the works of Jean-​Luc Marion, which is already to be found in The Idol and Distance. They open, to a certain extent, his phenomenology to a theological horizon.

9.5  Towards Revelation: The Theological Horizon of Marion’s Phenomenology The two last types of saturated phenomena, idol and icon, propose two figures of visibility. The saturation of the category of quality causes the unbearable bedazzlement called idol. ‘The idol is determined as the first indisputable visible because its splendor stops intentionality for the first time; and this first visible fills it, stops it, and even blocks it, to the point of returning it toward itself, after the fashion of an invisible obstacle—​ or mirror’ (Marion, [1997] 2002: 229). In order to understand this phenomenon, we may consider the typical example of it, which is the painting (or the work of art in general). When I look at a painting, I am never able to comprehend the total signification of this painting. ‘In it, intuition always surpasses the concept or the concepts proposed to welcome it’ (p. 230). It will take me several times, several attempts at definition, just to outline, through multiple beams, the silhouette which gives itself, in negative, in the bedazzlement of the idol. I will have to come back several times and look at the painting repeatedly in order to add, as through successive brushstrokes, some details to this outline. The unbearable bedazzlement caused by the idol imposes on me to endlessly change my gaze, to renew my gaze. I will have to come back and look at the painting, but

Experience as an Excess of Givenness    191 with a different gaze. Only this renewed gaze could allow me to grasp an additional detail, to further distinguish this silhouette which gives itself under the modality of dazzlement. Therefore, the idol does not appear to me unequivocally, and the definition that I outline of it draws the idol’s silhouette as well as my own figure at the time when I receive the idol’s intuition. The changes indeed of my own gaze lead one or another part of the idol to be highlighted. The history of my relation to the idol, in this succession of visits, of renewed gazes, is also the history of my own changing gaze, which evolves, the history of my ipseity, of the idol which gives me to myself. In this sense the idol acts as a mirror, or more precisely a succession of mirrors. ‘The sequence of gazes that I continually pose on the idol establish so many invisible mirrors of myself; it therefore describes or conceptualizes it less than it designates a temporality where it is first an issue of my ipseity’ (Marion, [1997] 2002: 230). The second form of saturation in visibility operates in the category of modality, which is the fourth dimension of the given. It takes the form of the icon, characterized both as irregardable and irreducible. ‘It no longer offers any spectacle to the gaze and tolerates no gaze from any spectator, but rather exerts its own gaze over that which meets it’ (p. 232). Icon is properly the reversal of the gaze. The gazer takes the place of the gazed upon. Icon is par excellence the gaze of the Other, these black pupils which express nothing else than a gaze imposed on me. Icon ‘provides no spectacle, therefore no immediately visible or assignable intuition’ (p. 232). The gaze of the Other does not give itself to be seen (there is nothing to be seen in those black pupils), instead it gives itself only to be endured. And in this act of appearing and weighing on me, the gaze of the Other constitutes me as a witness, and once again gives me to myself. We can notice here that the icon gathers the characteristics of the three other types of saturated phenomena. As the event does, it requires a succession of narrations and points of view to be defined. Indeed we cannot give an unequivocal definition of the gaze of the Other or of a person, which is eminently too rich to be appreciated in a single sentence and at a glance. As the idol then, the icon needs to be seen again and again. Only this way can one hope to further penetrate its understanding, which each time gives me to myself offering a different mirror. In the gaze exchanged day after day with a person, there grows an intimacy which not only helps me to further penetrate the understanding of this person but also sends me back to my own person in a move of auto-​reflexivity towards myself. As the flesh, lastly, the icon gives me to myself so significantly that I nearly feel myself internally in the gaze of the Other. Idol and icon operate like the two opposite sides of visibility. Idol is defined as the maximum of visibility that can be borne by my gaze. Icon, on the contrary, is a turning around of things. We are shifting from being a gazer who is fully focused on the gazed given, to a gazer who lowers his/​her gaze in front of the icon, who lowers his/​her head as an expression of veneration. I do not look at the icon, the icon instead is looking at me. We are facing here the two polar opposites of visibility, which happen to be to some extent interchangeable. The statue of a god standing in a temple operates as an icon. On the other hand, it moves into being an idol as soon as it is to be seen in a museum. But a

192   Sara Mandray simple group of believers would nevertheless enable it to recover its former icon status. Therefore, the question of idolatry and veneration opens up Marion’s phenomenology to a theological horizon. While criticizing the idolatrous position of a metaphysics which pretends to be corseting God in the constructed world of beings and concepts, Marion opens phenomenology wide so as to include the phenomenon of God. If the divine no longer belongs to the horizon of Being, where is it then to be placed within the given? To which degree of givenness is the divine phenomenon to be ranked? This is what Marion tries to perceive while investigating the phenomenon of revelation (Marion, [1997] 2002: 234ff.). The key point about the phenomenon of revelation is to question to what degree givenness can unfold. Saturation already opened the phenomenon to a squared phenomenality. What is at stake here is to unfold the era of givenness towards a cubed phenomenality. The phenomenon of revelation represents the maximum of phenomenality. In that respect, it needs to fulfill two conditions: to still be a phenomenon and to still be possible. Therefore, the phenomenon of revelation constitutes itself as the phenomenon which ‘concentrates the four types of saturated phenomena and is given at once as historic event, idol, flesh, and icon (face)’ (Marion, [1997] 2002: 235). This ‘fifth type of saturation’ ‘saturates phenomenality to the second degree, by saturation of saturation’ (p. 235). However, the phenomenon of revelation remains a ‘mere possibility’: ‘I will say only: if an actual revelation must, can, or could have been given in phenomenal apparition, it could have, can, or will be able to do so only by giving itself according to the type of the paradox par excellence’ (Marion, [1997] 2002: 235). While opening philosophy to theology, the phenomenon of revelation appears to be the climax of the post-​metaphysical phenomenology of Jean-​Luc Marion.

References Derrida, J. ([1991] 1992). Given time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Translated from Donner le temps. Paris: Galilée.) Kearney, R., & O’Leary, J. S. (eds.) (1979). Heidegger et la question de Dieu. Paris: Grasset. Marion, J.-​L. ([1977] 2001). The idol and distance: Five studies. New York: Fordham University Press. (Translated from L’idole et la distance. Cinq études. Paris: Grasset.) Marion, J.-​ L. ([1982] 1991). God without being. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Translated from Dieu sans l’être. Paris: Fayard.) Marion, J.-​L. ([1989] 1998). Reduction and givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Translated from Réduction et donation. Recherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phénoménologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.) Marion, J.-​L. ([1997] 2002). Being given: Toward a phenomenology of givenness. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Translated from Étant donné. Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Experience as an Excess of Givenness    193 Marion, J.-​L. ([2001] 2002). In excess: Studies of saturated phenomena. New York: Fordham University Press. (Translated from De surcroît. Études sur les phénomènes saturés. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.) Marion, J.-​L. ([2003] 2007). The erotic phenomenon. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (Translated from Le phénomène érotique. Six méditations. Paris: Grasset.) Marion, J.-​L. (2017). The rigor of things: Conversations with Dan Arbib. New York: Fordham University Press. Marion, J.-​L. (2021). Questions cartésiennes (Vol. 3). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Chapter 10

Extendi ng a nd Disc onti nu i ng Ph enom enol o g y w i t h Michel H e nry Eric Faÿ and Ghislain Deslandes

As we have already said, human beings begin to feel before they see and know. (de Biran, [1807] 2020) I call ‘Western philosophy’ that whose logos is the phenomenality of the world and rests on it. (Henry, [1990] 2008)   

Michel Henry, a French philosopher born in 1922 and who died in 2002, stands apart from his generation of philosophers in almost every respect. A Resistance fighter (as part of ‘Pericles’, the maquis of the Haut Jura region during World War II) and yet opposed to the conception of the human as a ‘political animal’; a great admirer of Marx, to whom he devoted two large volumes, but as far from Marxism as one can be; a philosopher of the body with no taste for dialectical materialism, Michel Henry is notable for his refusal to fit into the usual categories of continental philosophy. It is far from Paris, in Montpellier, that he developed his philosophy based on his foundational experience in the Resistance: The essence of true life manifested itself to me, even though it is invisible. In the darkest hours, amid the worst atrocities the world has ever known, I could feel it in

Extending and Discontinuing Phenomenology    195 me, like a secret that I had to protect and which in turn protected me. A manifestation deeper and older than that of the world itself shaped our human condition. (Quoted in Audi, 2001: 292)

In constant opposition to the philosophical currents of his time, he considered himself a phenomenologist. Indeed, his critical reading of Husserl and Heidegger is central to his work. By interpreting Husserl’s principle ‘so much appearance, so much being’, he found the structuring principle that was to guide the body of his work: ‘so much appearing, so much being’ (Henry, [2000] 2015: ch. 1). This means that we can only be aware of being if we are aware of the ways it appears to us: when appearing manifests itself, so does being, as the above quotation illustrates, not through speculation. This methodological principle served as a structure for redefining the ‘task of phenomenology’; its ‘object’, which is not ‘the totality of phenomena, which the sciences deal with, but: that which allows them to be such each time, the mode of their donation, subjectivity. With phenomenology, philosophy conquers its own object, it is the philosophy of subjectivity and in this way distinguishes itself from all the other sciences, particularly from psychology, which also believes it speaks of subjectivity but, treating it as something that is (and which, consequently, is linked to the rest of being, with the organism, the external world, the social environment, etc.), and not as the condition of all possible being, it misses it in principle. (Henry, 2011: 26)

In this chapter, and with this definition of phenomenology in mind, we will first look at how Henry extends and discontinues the arguments of traditional phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger) where subjectivity makes phenomena appear in the world. He does so by introducing the appearing in the light of life he first discovered as a member of the Resistance and conceptualized a few years after in his masterpiece, The Essence of Manifestation ([1963] 1973). We will thus gain some insights into the groundbreaking nature of Henry’s contribution to the ontological question of subjectivity. Then, in the third section, we will show how such discontinuation in ontology brings a radical discontinuation in the concept of management or organization of praxis, in particular by taking advantage of the increasing number of works in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) that have given pride of place to Henryian phenomenology.

10.1  The Appearing of the World and Appearing of Life 10.1.1 The Appearing of the World The method of phenomenology is to explore how phenomena appear to us, their ‘appearing’ (Faÿ & Riot, 2007). For Husserl, phenomenological effort starts with

196    Eric Faÿ and Ghislain Deslandes ‘epoché’—​phenomenological reduction—​an introspective move of our consciousness bracketing an interesting phenomenon to look carefully at the operations by which interest in the phenomenon is raised. Through several reductions, we may discover their commonality, the essence of our consciousness, which is to establish an intentional link between our ego and objects. Shaped by certain intentionalities, our consciousness focuses on certain selected objects, leaving others in the shadow. Furthermore, following Husserl ([1929] 1960), we are invited to elicit the operations our consciousness makes to constitute the reality and certainty of the phenomena appearing to us through intentionality: by contextualizing, adding intuitive data, looking for confirmation, etc. Therefore, Riot, from a Husserlian perspective (Faÿ & Riot, 2007: 147) points out how strategic textbooks teach specific operations of consciousness, emphasizing what is abstract, calculable, in a future, distant from ourselves (such as objectives), and disconnected from lived experience. In short, Husserl invites us to explore how, through their intentional consciousness, members of organizations, subjectively and intersubjectively, make their objects appear and, therefore, constitute their world. Heidegger ([1927] 1962) discusses such a view of the world appearing through intentional consciousness, depicting the human subject as a Dasein (being there) thrown into a world in pre-​conscious ways (for instance, through the intermediation of one’s language). Thus, a world, a horizon of visibility, is given before anything appears. Following Heil & Whittaker (2008: 147) organization studies may in turn pay attention to ‘specific worlds’—​e.g. the world of fishing, the world of education—​to understand the appearing of phenomena in the light of such worlds. We may also observe how talking of a ‘global world’ implies a network of capitalistic interdependencies where phenomena will appear and be given meaning or be left in the shadows. Furthermore, Heidegger underlines that what makes a phenomenon appear is the difference which distinguishes the thing from a world horizon. For example, Winograd (1986) and Introna & Ilharco (2004) have shown how technology—​spreadsheets, group-​wares, reporting tools, etc.—​ is one of the main ways managers, like Dasein thrown into their corporate world, pay attention to it by transposing it into data in order to throw light on certain events and information (difference-​making) by comparing them to expectations or forecasts (their world horizon). With such a Heideggerian perspective, researchers in MOS make explicit the processes by which differences between a world and an object are developed in various worlds: i.e. how, in the finance world, forecasts are made which make an event occur when actual results differ from forecasts; how, in academia, a relevant literature review will help prove the contribution—​difference—​of a research paper in a given field. In each case, the appearing of the thing or event, its reality and truth, requires a world horizon and the phenomenological ability to establish differences. What is noticeable is that, in any of these different approaches of traditional phenomenology, the appearing of phenomena is always linked to a world: these worlds being constituted by the sum of the objects appearing through our intentional consciousness, in Husserl’s view; an already-​there world is the horizon where difference highlights a phenomenon in Heidegger’s conceptualization. What we would like to stress here is

Extending and Discontinuing Phenomenology    197 that, in traditional phenomenology, the real and subjectivity are always constituted in relation to the world.

10.1.2 The Appearing in the Light of Life Henry extends traditional phenomenology by searching for novel ways in which phenomena appear to us. His groundbreaking approach lies in the way he challenges the links between the appearing of phenomena and a world ([1963] 1973, 2019). This therefore enables him, as we will see, to rethink radically the appearing of subjectivity. Then, what kind of appearing could lead us to phenomena which do not need a world to appear or which will not contribute to the appearing of a world? To answer such a question, we will start with some observations. When moving our arm, we feel it moving even if we don’t grasp an object or even if we don’t look at it moving in a given space (world); we do not need our arm to touch another part of our body to be aware of our arm, of its movement, and of ourselves moving our arm. The observation of cosmonauts able to move in weightlessness confirms that they do not need a world out there, the Earth’s attraction, to experience their bodies moving. Here, we may get a sense of the epoché made by Henry. Without needing an outside or embodied world, our body appears to itself while moving, resting, etc. The reduction we have described with the moving body is extended by Henry to our affectivity. Of course, we may have serious doubts about the reality of the ghosts in our nightmares, but there is no doubt that we experienced being frightened and its appearing to us. Henry calls such appearing of ourselves to ourselves auto-​affection. It occurs in the materiality of our affective flesh; in auto-​affection, the object/​phenomena (our self) appearing to our self (subject) are one. Auto-​affection is a way of appearing different and heterogeneous to all ways of appearing connected one way or another to a world. Furthermore, we may notice that the experience/​feeling of our moves or our affects through auto-​affection is always an experience of ourselves being alive. Therefore Henry, taking his phenomenological reduction further, stresses that the core of auto-​ affection is the appearing of one’s life to oneself. Indeed, while experiencing ourselves being in life, we experience both ourselves and our life as one. Furthermore, in the materiality of our affective flesh, our life appears to us (Henry, [1985] 1993: ch. 1). Such a phenomenological approach extends the philosophy of life which started with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and which transpires for instance in Zola’s literature. In the following excerpt from Zola, we may see how the character stops thinking in order to pay attention to her auto-​affection: her delight of experiencing herself as healthy and, therefore, her joy of experiencing herself as alive: ‘Caroline could no longer think straight. Exhausted, the philosopher, poet and scientist in her gave up on that fruitless quest for reasons. She was nothing more than a happy creature standing under a clear sky and breathing the sweet air as she

198    Eric Faÿ and Ghislain Deslandes experienced the singular delight of being healthy [ . . . ] Ah, the joy of being alive, could anything ever rival that? (Zola, [1890] 2008: 376)1

Paying attention to the appearing of phenomena such as our efforts, affects, and, ultimately, of our life in the auto-​affection of our flesh does not mean cancelling the appearing of the world as it has been conceptualized by traditional phenomenology. Another dimension is also offered: when perceiving the world, and/​or the objects in our world, we can obtain specific affects through auto-​affection, in the light of life. In organizational life, our excitement at reaching targets may, for example, be tempered by our experience of a deeper affect, that of the sadness caused by our life experiencing itself as hurt by the exhausting (or fraudulent) ways the results were achieved (Faÿ, Puyou, & Introna, 2010). Henry therefore establishes a duality in the modes of appearing, two heterogeneous, complementary, and radically different perspectives: the appearing of auto-​affection, the manifestation of our life to our self (immanence); the appearing of exteriority making objects and a world ours (transcendence). Taking this reflection on modes of appearing further, we will now explore the kind of discontinuity we may experience in the approach of being (ontological level), from our being located in the appearing of the world (phenomenological tradition) to our being located in the appearing of life.

10.2  Extending and Discontinuing Ontology 10.2.1 From the Appearing of the World to Ontology While practising Husserl’s epoché—​bracketing the world—​we may discover the pure operations of our consciousness constituting world realities. Hence we may distinguish our reflexive ego practising epoché (transcendental ego, in Husserlian vocabulary) and our ego intentionally focused on dealing with objects in the world. Of the various operations of our consciousness that our reflexive (transcendental) ego observes, some are designed to achieve unity among our various experiences. Thus, from a Husserlian perspective, our transcendental ego may be intuitively understood as reflexive consciousness making our lived experiences ours and constituting the unity of those lived experiences. Thus, the other may appear to us as another intentional ego with whom we constitute the probability or certainty of realities, the objects and objectives of a common world. Hence, bracketing such constitution, the other may become another reflexive/​transcendental ego with whom, through interpersonal spirit, we share and 1 

We can assume Zola was here responding to Nietzsche’s criticism of the darkness of the naturalism.

Extending and Discontinuing Phenomenology    199 debate about the ways we formulate such constitution of a world and its realities. In The Crisis of European Sciences ([1936] 1970), Husserl criticizes the modern constitution of realities through mathematical models that lead to the abstraction of the world of life, the world where we live our daily life. Following Heidegger’s path towards ontology opens a new perspective. Indeed, Dasein—​human existence, a specific way of inhabiting a world and/​or language—​is not the ontological being, but is, according to Heidegger, its only possible manifestation. It is therefore through a hermeneutical effort that we may observe the openness of our existence to ontological being or our ‘forgetfulness’ of it. Forgetting being manifests itself in worrying about everything and nothing, hiding behind readymade thoughts, technical thinking, and false securities. Restraint, in turn, facilitates openness to being, then manifested through recovering a sense of unity and authenticity. We may then experience either the dispersion of our Dasein in worries about the world we are thrown into, and its endless measures and calculations of the real, or, the unity of our Dasein by exercising restraint, by abandoning the goal of mastering everything and being present in the event of the manifestation of the real: the unexpected, unformulated difference on the horizon of a world (Heil & Whittaker, 2008: 143−64). Thus, the other may appear as the one with whom we share a world, be it by sharing worries or by attending the unveiling of the real in the horizon of a world.

10.2.2 Ontology in the Appearing of Life: Henry’s Contribution Michel Henry departs from traditional phenomenologies and the ontological developments introduced above. From his elaboration of the duality of appearing he argues ([1963] 1973, 2003, 2005, [1990] 2008) that we cannot get the full experience of our being with the same appearing modes as those dedicated to world appearing (phenomenological monism). Indeed, when following Husserl, we discover our reflexive, transcendental ego, we ‘see’ such an ego operating and we ‘understand’ the core of the life of our consciousness. We may notice, however, that these fruitful ‘insights’ are always fragile re-​presentations and not the certain experience of our conscious life by itself. Similarly, Heideggerian phenomenology may help us to observe the ways we inhabit our world, and, through a hermeneutical process, get glimpses of our authentic connection with ontological being or else, of our forgetting it, in the mediocrity of inhabiting the world as one can do. Hence, our being appears through the interpretations of our contingent way of being in the world. This highlights the enormous difficulties the phenomenologies of the world have in accounting for the appearing of an indubitable sense of ‘I’ (2011). On the other hand, as previously shown, through the auto-​affection of our moves, impressions, affects, without a specific world, we may have simultaneously the immediate, immanent, experience of our Self, ‘I’ and the experience of us alive, of our being in

200    Eric Faÿ and Ghislain Deslandes life. Here, Henry’s groundbreaking contribution is to stress that the ontological path to ‘I’ is to be found in the materiality of our affective flesh where the auto-​affection of our life occurs. Hence affectivity, understood this way, ultimately signifies the very essence of our humanity, our subjectivity, and in a way, our dignity. The affectivity here—​our intimate experience of our life—​is to be distinguished from sensibility in world experience. Therefore our affective life, our ‘I’, is independent of the world, but constitutes the primary reality of our relationship to it because ‘I’ appearing to itself is always inherent in ‘I see’, ‘I feel’, ‘I think’ (Berlanda, 2017). Henry follows such an argument by adding that: ‘Man is indeed this living fleshly Self that has nothing to do with the definitions that make up, in various forms, this compound of spirit and matter, soul and body, “subject” and “object,” which is impossible to understand, either today or in its early stages in Greece or elsewhere’ (Henry, 2003: 176). Moreover, in response to the vitalism trend, Henry stresses that life is always someone’s life and not an anonymous, powerful romantic flow of life, nor a vital impetus we may experience being thrown into. In addition, simultaneously with the appearing of our singular life through auto-​ affection, we may experience it as a gift, and therefore experience it connecting us, beyond our singular ontological ego, to the strength of the foundation of life. Indeed, Henry suggests that we may experience, in the auto-​affection of our life, our Self given to itself by greater than itself: ‘I am given to myself without this giveness being derived from myself in any way’ (2019: 39), hence the foundational affect of what he calls ‘absolute life’. And, furthermore, we may simultaneously experience that any other subjective life is founded, rooted, in this foundational affect of giveness of life. In Material Phenomenology, Henry ([1990] 2008) uses the metaphors of well and groundwater to depict the foundation of any community: our experience of our self ‘I’ as a well ‘re-​ sourced’ in the same groundwater as other wells /​living selves are, drinking in the same groundwater as others do. We may thus feel that our experience of the foundation of life founds, strengthens, and regenerates our being with the other, and thus, intersubjectivity and community. Although we may have some difficulties in making conscious such experience in our Western individualistic modernity, it may help us to acknowledge that it is shared by some traditions in Eastern cultures (see authors connecting Henry’s work with Zen Buddhism: Yoneyama, 2007; Vaschalde, 2014). Letiche (2006) pioneered the analysis of Henry in the context of MOS by stressing how affectivity is the essence of Henry’s unique relational ontology. In Seing the Invisible ([1988] 2009), Henry illustrates this rather difficult ontological perspective with the singular moment of recollection just before a group of people lifts an extremely heavy load. In that moment, each singular life, while reconnecting to the foundation of life, is simultaneously finding its energizing strength and connectedness with others: ‘I can, while altogether we can’. What we may also note here is that the moment of recollection/​ concentration reconnects every single one of our powers to our ontological ‘I’—​which is given to ourselves, which is disposable to ourselves—​so that we may seize ourselves (note the French reflexive form, ‘je me lève’—​literally, ‘I raise myself up’, which is less apparent in the English ‘I stand up’, for instance). Hence Henry underlines that the

Extending and Discontinuing Phenomenology    201 power of our auto-​affected life, our living Self, becomes the power of seizing—​or not—​ all of our powers and abilities. Fundamentally, our experienced life, being the origin of our Self, is also the very origin of our power (Deslandes, 2013, 2017). Such Henryian ontology unifies our immanent subjective and intersubjective life (being) with our subjective and intersubjective experience of effort (praxis) by expanding Henry’s reading of Maine de Biran (Henry, [1965] 1975) and Marx (Henry, [1976] 1983, [1990] 2014). But here, Henry’s major departure from Western philosophy is in his locating the real in the immanent subjective and intersubjective affective and active life. Hence Henry’s relentless philosophical struggle against the unreal: the illusion of attributing ontological value to representations of the world. Indeed, the illusion is precisely to make real that which is ‘set before’ us, which appears in the light of the world, is calculable, measurable, thinkable—​in other words, ‘objectifiable’. By stressing the ontological truth of our life, he revives the philosophical tradition, which, since Plato, has distinguished the real from the illusory, by which we generally set such great store. Identifying what is real can thus have immense consequences for political economy. Kühn, a Henryian philosopher, develops the illusion of political economy as follows: Political economy is nothing more than the ideological discourse that passes off empty entities of abstract equivalence (wages, capital, interest, market, etc.) as primary ontological realities [ . . . ] without however being able to form a true world-​of-​ life (Lebenswelt), which is the only immediately concrete correlate of our sensitive and affective experiences. (Kühn, 2006: 126)

In fact, in the political economy of Western society, what we tend to feel intimately, the invisible manifestations of our life to itself, do not exist as such because they cannot be measured, nor can they be experienced by anyone but ourselves. However, in Henry’s view, the criterion of the visible cannot be the criterion of the real, and, in a way, the two must be dissociated. Nothing is ever as real as the ‘I’—​our subjective life—​which is hungry and thirsty, which experiences suffering and joy, and from which no one can separate themselves. Such an ‘I’ is not our social identity as it appears in the eyes of society through parametric modalities or through the image we often like to display. In short, Henry introduces us to a phenomenology of life which paves the way for an ontology which owes nothing to the experience of the world but makes it possible (Henry, 2004). It is therefore now possible to return to the ontological issues we raised earlier. First, we may experience the foundation of our communities, in the ‘groundwater’ of life, which is both different from and intertwined with experiencing our communities by sharing a common life-​world (Husserl), a common world (Heidegger). Furthermore, beyond paying attention to our reflexive transcendental ego (Husserlian perspective), we may be receptive to the appearing of our life to itself.2 Instead of paying attention to the forgetfulness of ontological being by our inauthentic being-​in-​the-​world 2 

Then, we may experience our life strengthening reflexive thinking.

202    Eric Faÿ and Ghislain Deslandes in the Heideggerian sense, we could pay attention to the malaise of our life when forgetting the foundational affect of being given to itself by greater than itself (the experience of absolute life as introduced above) and, simultaneously, forgetting its connectedness with others through the groundwater of life.

10.3  Extending and Discontinuing Praxeology and MOS Phenomenology allows us to question the way praxis, work, or production appear to us. In The Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl ([1936] 1970) strongly criticizes modern thinking which deduces praxis from abstract models and calculated anticipations and, therefore, ignores our life-​world as genuinely perceived by the life of our consciousness. Heidegger’s (1977) critique underlines how technology and reason, when reduced to calculation, induce a specific framework (German Gestell) for production, whereby the real (nature, humans) becomes limitless resources (Rappin, 2015). Such a framework implies the inextricable and pervasive intertwining of humans with technology and devices (i.e. information systems) to order and regulate disposable resources (Ciborra, 2002). By focusing on exploiting resources, we increasingly forget being, whereas if we exercise restraint and pay attention to the manifestation of the real—​i.e. the unexpected emergence of difference in a world—​being will manifest itself to us. Henry extends and discontinues these critiques of the modern connection between rational thinking and praxis. His critique is based on a radical reversal of the notion of real from objective descriptions to the real subjective and intersubjective life (Seyler, 2021). As suggested by the quotation from Zola above, we may experience our subjective life, the gift of its coming to itself endowed with the overabundant energy for maintaining itself, flourishing and bonding with others. Here is the living interiority of our praxis, hitherto ignored by Western philosophy and MOS. What Henry names praxis is not the visible behaviour one can reflexively think about, but our invisible experience of the recollection of the energy of our life strengthening our ontological subjective and intersubjective power (I can /​we can), and, enabling us to seize, expand, and cultivate our powers, abilities, and talents. But, instead of freeing such given energy of life in praxis, we may drive it back and turn it into regression while encountering its inner or exterior resistances. Hence Henry’s major discontinuation in Western philosophy: being (our invisible life) expands in invisible praxis (the real). This implies the immanent intrigue of our consent or refusal—​of the transition from suffering—​that of absolute life disturbing and helping our self—​to joy (Puyou & Faÿ, 2015: 874). Here lies the foundation of Henry’s ethics and criticism of barbarism,3 of abstraction, objectivity alone, rationalism, which 3 Davidson

(2012), translator of Barbarism, introduces what Henry ([1987] 2012) means by barbarism: ‘a culture of death [ . . . ] social and political practices that carry out this annihilation of life

Extending and Discontinuing Phenomenology    203 hinder not only the life of our consciousness, but furthermore our affectivity where our life reveals to itself and thus represses its given energy, generating a malaise if not violence (Henry, [1987] 2012). Deriving action from rational calculations is therefore a barbaric move and an ontological illusion which represses the real, the ontological locus of action: the subjective and intersubjective life, its coming to itself endowed with the energy to maintain and flourish by cultivating its ties, abilities, and talents (Faÿ, 2011). In recent years, several research teams and authors have begun to rethink MOS in the light of Henry’s work. Three main closely linked topics have emerged: his critical reading of contemporary political economy, the question of intersubjectivity in collaborative processes between ‘subjective bodies’ fulfilling social roles (and the conditions of the possibility of ethical practice in organizations thanks to concepts such as affectio societatis), and the way in which Henryian phenomenology participates in its own way in the affective turn of MOS.

10.3.1 Henryian Contributions to Critical Theory: Critiques of Processes without Subjects Henry developed a critical analysis of political economy. Reinterpreting Marx ([1976] 1983, [1990] 2014), he sees economic production as all activities dedicated to the fulfilment of human needs, producing goods because of their use-​value. But this production should not be limited, as it usually is, to its visible, objective characteristics, measurable inputs and outputs, in other words, as processes without subjects. Production should be situated in the place where it is real: the immanent, pathic, subjective, and intersubjective praxis as described above. The solution to exchange goods with use-​value is the creation of objective and measurable representations of invisible praxis, of the pathic experience of active and affective life, human ‘resources’ assessments, money, etc. But representations are not the incommensurable experience of real praxis. It is from this discrepancy between what we experience as the reality of our working praxis and the objectified representations and measures of our work that a number of difficulties arise. And this is where Henry’s phenomenology of affective and active life makes such a significant contribution to critical economy and critical MOS: the possibility to found the critique of the representation which, instead of being a mere mediation of exchanges, becomes the starting point and the end point of political economy managerial science and/​or practices as argued by Seyler (2010: 197): To manage ‘human resources’ as one manages natural resources is to accentuate the substitution of the objectification of social praxis for the common test of a shared life.

[ . . . ] This ideology, which presents scientific method as the sole source of truth, pits against all other possible sources of truth, including the life which it eliminates from its analysis’ (2012: viii−ix). Hence, hegemony of abstraction through science and technology by stifling the culture of life, in the sense of the knowledge of the living praxis, ruins our humanity.

204    Eric Faÿ and Ghislain Deslandes In other words, the knowledge of life is also knowledge that concerns social praxis as a place where the powers of subjectivity are intensified [ . . . ] Objectifying knowledge that focuses exclusively on the exteriority of measurable objectives and imposes itself externally on living individuals runs counter to the culture of life.

Similarly, one may stress the managerial illusion of ‘bringing to light’ the invisible subjective active life by objectifying and measuring skills, appearances, attitudes, etc. This is the fundamental error of any management system that attempts to ‘manage human resources’ as though they were ‘natural’ resources (Deslandes, 2016). In Souffrance en France, Dejours (1998), drawing on Henry’s perspective of active and affective life and its praxis, harshly criticizes management that focuses on targets set by financial elites and their practices which contribute to what Arendt (1963) identified as the banality of evil. Following Dejours, Deranty (2008) shows how the structuring role of work in subjective life renews critical theory by offering a novel critical standpoint to the precarious nature of existence as a result of the transformations of work and employment. Deslandes argues that working in such contexts at a cynical distance (Fleming & Spicer, 2003) is a delusion: The belief that a person can behave like an automaton in the context of his or her social function, precisely to avoid alienation, is a delusion. In a phenomenology of life, it is precisely because the person is not fundamentally able to separate herself from herself, from her affectivity, that she can never really behave like an automated machine; this is the very reason for her suffering in the case of alienation, or her joy when his social function allows her to intensify her power to act. (Deslandes, 2016: 122)

Faÿ et al., in Living with Numbers (2010), also describe, in a Henryian perspective, a case study, where management accountants experience their affective life, the tension of acting as an interface between people from Finance—​and their quantified, abstract requirements—​and managers on the shop floor whose praxis they can barely acknowledge: ‘Managers know that [ . . . ] these figures are entangled with the everyday praxis of being a manager and its various related affects [ . . . ] Nevertheless, they also feel simultaneously that these figures do not, and cannot, reflect the singularity of the life they are living when they do what they do’ (2010: 36). Management accountants have several ways of dealing with this tension with managers. Objectivity—​looking for an objective view of business—​is one affective way to smooth the tension and help solve the conflicts between the perceived pessimistic/​optimistic bonus-​driven managers and profit-​driven senior managers. Another approach is to share incarnated praxis, team efforts in intense circumstances, which offers plenty of room for being realistic by being aware that ‘representation renders present again what praxis immediately presents’ (Adler, 1985: 156). Alternatively, listening intently to the living praxis and giving a precise description of how the forecast is made is a way of ensuring that forecasts are consistent with this

Extending and Discontinuing Phenomenology    205 living praxis. It is also a way to ensure that the management accountant’s living praxis is intertwined with that of the managers.

10.3.2 Returning to Subjective and Intersubjective Phenomenological Life and Praxis in MOS Abandoning abstraction, which denies the truth and the strength of life (De Woot, 2013: 16; Jean, 2014), in favour of phenomenological life offers new potential for research in MOS. Such a perspective does, however, raise the difficulty of finding ways to effect a transition from rational, instrumental, managerial thinking to living praxis. In the next paragraphs, we will outline ways in which this question has been addressed by various MOS researchers. A first way, following Gély (2007), entails the designing of roles to enable the flourishing of subjective and intersubjective praxis.

10.3.2.1 Rethinking Roles and Their Design In his seminal work, Rôles, action sociale et vie subjective, Raphael Gély (2007) shows various possible connections between Henry’s phenomenology of life and social life through discussion of the central Sartrean concept of role. His main thesis is that the functional design and practice of role leads to the atrophying of life while by contrast a living interpretations of interconnected roles strengthens subjective and intersubjective praxis, allowing each singular life to grow and interconnect with others. As Gély puts it: ‘no one has ever seen a representation of a waiter serving coffee. The role only exists and is experienced in the very lives of those who perform it. (p. 45) [ . . . ]: the barista experiences a shared life with the customers they serve’ (Gély, 2007: 98). Thus, according to Deslandes (2016), the aim of a managerial ethic should be to establish the conditions to enable every living being to have not a ‘function’ but a role that a living being may have (Ducharme, 2012). Thus, collective action can never really be measured objectively (Supiot, 2017) but involves activating and reinforcing, through inner resonance and first-​person intersubjectivity, the powers of life. This is not to deny the importance of social and professional determinations (manager/​employee, customer/​supplier, shareholder/​employee, etc.) as such, but to inscribe these social roles according to the principle of an original affectivity that constitutes each of these subjective bodies as ‘acting living selves’. Puyou (2013) gives an empirical illustration of how roles may contribute to the intensification of lives. He observes that there is a margin of freedom in which management accountants may invest their role as characters (an encounter between the role and the singular living subject). There is therefore no absolute determinism leading them to instrumental rationality and surveillance for the sake of increasing shareholders value. As characters, however, they may act as business partners or advisors, engaging not only in Habermassian discursive rationality with their counterparts, but also in exercising

206    Eric Faÿ and Ghislain Deslandes their powers in strong connection with others exercising their own powers. Hence, a collective and joyful living praxis may occur as a form of cooperation, which satisfies life’s basic needs and increases the individual’s powers to act. Therefore, future research may develop such insights into managers’ roles and characters, examining experiences whereby managers play their role as coaches or mentors, while consenting to be living subjects, and observe the possible intensification of praxis it may enable.

10.3.2.2 ‘Affectio Societatis’: A Henryian Foundation of Ethical Praxis in Organizations For Henry, ethics is concerned with doing, with action, with praxis, not with knowledge. Ethical doctrines are therefore often ineffective according to him because they imagine they can control the will from the standpoint of objective knowledge. However, for Henry, praxis is ultimately a knowledge of life that refers to the acting subjectivity of a person. Without this reference to subjective and intersubjective life, in instrumental relationships, there is never action but only, as Gély writes, ‘a third-​person process which is a natural, sensitive, objective movement and as such has nothing to do with an action, and this is because the essence of action does not dwell in it’ (Gély, 2007: 37). In a lifeless third-​person process there can be no ethical action. Conversely, from the intimate connection of each life with the ‘groundwater’ or absolute life the relation to others is characterized by the possibility of a reciprocal phenomenological interiority of the living beings, an immediate presence of one to the other’s experience of life. This excludes any will to connect through what we represent or imagine of the other. As suggested by Deslandes (2016, 2017, 2020), the term affectio societatis makes it possible to locate this reciprocal interiority of living beings that fundamentally determines their relationship with others. Deslandes philosophically establishes the possibility of organized bodies or contracts being founded on affectio societatis, a legal term meaning that which escapes the strict terms of the contract, to qualify the feeling of a form of co-​ownership, a shared, common feeling. Conversely, when life withdraws from work, a desaffectio societatis takes place. Furthermore, after Henry, we understand that the notion of affectio poses the principle of individuation, and therefore of heterogeneity (contrary to the hypothesis, generally accepted in economics, of the homogeneity of the human experience of work), but it cannot be dissociated from the relation to the community (societatis). Consequently, basing organization or contracts on affectio societatis allows one to experience the fundamental living unity of differences among living beings (Faÿ, 2008a: 836−7). Therefore, acting with others is not just a matter of visualizing objectives and thus measurable criteria, but implies first and foremost activating together the self-​affecting powers of life. All cooperation is therefore driven by a desire to share between living people, an affectio societatis as a place in which the same absolute life strives to be fulfilled and flourish. Affectio societatis is what takes us away from social determinations and brings us back to the experience of the self as the actualization, with others, of the living praxis. Yet this implies, as Deslandes (2016: 127) states:

Extending and Discontinuing Phenomenology    207 This is an abandonment of the theories commonly used in management of the cogeneration of the self by the other, the other without whom I would be nothing (coming from empiricist and behaviorist approaches, but also from phenomenological approaches, such as those of the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricœur, for whom our ideas and affects are always mediated by models that come from others). Worldly selves are not at the origin of living selves but, on the contrary, come from them.

10.3.2.3 Esprit de Corps: Affectio Societatis in Adverse Settings In ‘Ethics, Embodied Life and Esprit de Corps: An Ethnographic Study with Anti-​ Money Laundering Analysts’, Pérezts et al. (2015) interpret the first author’s ethnographic study through the prism of Henry’s phenomenology. The role of a bank’s anti-​money-​laundering analysts is to trace the source of customers’ deposits and, in some cases, refuse certain transactions, often against the will of the front office, whose priority is to maximize their earnings. The authors show how embodied subjects fulfil their role by intensifying their sensitivity and affectivity. In fact, they show the immediate interrelationships between anti-​ money-​ laundering analysts sensing and ‘smelling’ the customers’ files with their ‘I’, their subjective auto-​affection of life. They point out how these interrelationships between sensitivity and affectivity forges both the anti-​money-​laundering analysts’ ethical judgement and their strength for ethical praxis, i.e. their ability to stand up to the front office’s aggressiveness. Interestingly, ethical judgement is chiefly attributed to these analysts not through rational arguments but through actual quasi-​sensorial and affective experiences: feeling ‘black or grey’ files, files which ‘smell bad or good’, ‘clean or dirty’ files, files that make them ‘feel comfortable or uncomfortable’. These findings corroborate Henry’s ([1963] 1973) view by suggesting that such sensitivity shows that it is already inhabited by the ethical judgement of the analysts’ affective life. Put differently, the ‘I’ (auto-​affection of life) at the core of the ‘I feel, I sense’ (sensitive link with a world) enables the ethical judgement (clean/​dirty, bad/​good) of what is felt, smelt, sensed. Furthermore, the authors show how resisting pressure from the front office or convincing management to refuse substantial customer deposits result not from isolated but from collective praxis, invested with what they call ‘esprit de corps’. They describe the conditions which foster this: daily interactions in the bullpen, weekly meetings with open discussion of each others’ cases, support with no pressure from the team leader. Here, esprit de corps is for a group facing adverse conditions, the equivalent of Deslandes’ affectio societatis. After Henry’s ontology of life as presented above, both concepts suggest the possible connection with the underground resourcing layer of life when sharing difficulties and joys in corporate life. From this connection springs both a sense of community and the strength to actualize ethical praxis. This suggests that sharing the feelings of our affected lives with others can be a phenomenological path to connect with the ‘groundwater’ of life and its regenerating and strengthening energy.

208    Eric Faÿ and Ghislain Deslandes As subsequent research will show, we may experience this through an unexpected event escaping the framework of our intentional conscious will.

10.3.2.4 Silence, Open-​Deliberation, and Praxis Here, following the Henryian conceptual framework introduced in this chapter, we propose a novel interpretation of a key moment of silence which occurred during an action research led by this chapter’s first author (Faÿ, 2004, 2005, 2008b, 2017). The focus of this action research was to study how a well-​contained open space for discussion could facilitate participants’ embodied subjective voice and intersubjective dialogue whilst simultaneously exchanging views about improving their organization. This particular case concerned a network of actors managing documentation processes and software for launching new products, involving around fifteen to twenty-​five people from different departments (e.g. Lab, Manufacturing, Purchasing, etc.) and different hierarchical levels (engineers, PAs, etc.). The meetings were held on a regular basis (every six weeks), and, rather than a top-​down approach, the agenda was based on the experience, requirements, or difficulties of the people involved. The researcher’s role was to point out at each meeting any difficulties in speaking or, conversely, any notable achievements. The difficulty of using the pronoun ‘I’ was particularly revealing, highlighting the anonymous position of people subjected to rationally organized instrumental processes. During the sixth meeting, a noteworthy event occurred. At the project manager’s behest, the researcher (this chapter’s first author) took the floor and apologized for singling out certain participants by name during the previous meeting, thereby making them uncomfortable. At that moment, I, the researcher, felt as though the ice was breaking: I had to pause between sentences and speak more slowly: people were listening intently, something was happening throughout the silence in the group. Such an intense silence could be interpreted as phenomenological restraint or epoché—​not as a result of some conscious intentional will—​but an affective move, that of the underground common layer of life reconnecting with the employees, regenerating their ‘I’, their living subjectivity, performing their social role, and, through this reconnection, regenerating affectio societatis, a shared affect of unity in difference, beyond the roles and images displayed. But what followed in the meeting enabled us to suggest this interpretation. Some participants voiced their concerns from their own embodied difficulties (‘I’m tearing my hair out with the suppliers’), whilst others apologized for faulty reasoning or for not understanding the complex situation when they were supposed to have the answers; others were calmly explaining their point or suggesting solutions. More than an open dialogue (Senge, 1990) it was an open deliberation (Faÿ, 2005) because it led to decision-​ making. Not only did they reach an agreement on how to organize the complex process but, more importantly, the division of roles required to implement that decision occurred in an agile, realistic way. Hence, we propose that in the event of such a silence, the ‘groundwater’ of life regenerates living subjects, their affectio societatis, and their cooperation, thus intensifying their lives as living interconnected praxis through their social role. Similar examples of action research inspired by Henryian concepts are

Extending and Discontinuing Phenomenology    209 provided by Uchiyama (2003, 2008) who revisited Chekland’s Soft System Methodology. Uchiyama allows change process to start from what he calls ‘actuality-​level’ subjective and intersubjective praxis, as shown above, which will challenge what he calls the ‘reality level’, the level of figures, process, structures, etc.

10.3.3 A New Take on the ‘Affective Turn’ in MOS: Stakeholder Theory from a Henryian Perspective In recent years, research in MOS has focused on describing the conditions that are conducive to an ‘affective turn’ in organizations (Clough, 2007). The word ‘affect’ in management is used in the context of a theory that has become increasingly prevalent in managerial practices. Painter et al. (2020), in an article entitled ‘Understanding the Human in Stakeholder Theory: A Phenomenological Approach to Values-​ Driven Leadership’, point out that the definition of stakeholder theory, in which an organization’s stakeholders are simply those who are ‘affected’ by its activity is usually instrumental and ignores the meaning of the Latin word affectus—​here a noun not a verb—​which is close to Henry’s understanding of the concept. Hence, stakeholder theory is blind to the possibility of intersubjective encounters between different stakeholder positions. However, in the conventional definition of the theory, the anthropological question, i.e. what is the concept of the ‘stakeholder man/​woman’, is never really posed (and the term ‘affect’ is not used for this purpose). The concept expressed here, without further clarification, is that of the rational subject, primarily concerned with its own interests, the subject defined and described on the basis of exclusively economic criteria. The term ‘affect’ is thus understood here in a minor way, as that which is destined for a specific use, as one would say: ‘to allocate resources to a specific operation’. To affect can just as easily be translated here as ‘to fuel’ or ‘to act’, i.e. verbs that are exclusively concerned with action and performance. At no point, however, is the question of ‘who’ actually asked, of a stakeholder theory of the person, as it seems to have already been answered. The term ‘affect’ is ultimately used to describe observable phenomena, namely that there are relationships between the organization and some other group or entity, and refers to the multiple modes of existence of the stakeholder function. But nothing seems to shed light on the profound nature of this relationship, the main properties, the substantive reality, the substratum, which essentially connects the organization to its stakeholders: indeed, there is no theoretical development of affect in the traditional definition of the term ‘stakeholder theory’. It is precisely here that it seems important to cite the work proposed by Painter et al. (2020), which uses the concept of affect in the Henryian sense to rediscover stakeholder theory. In this sense, a stakeholder theory of the person would pave the way for a structural deverticalization of organizations. This would imply putting stakeholders on the same level of ontological dignity. In their field study, they draw up a map of values that

210    Eric Faÿ and Ghislain Deslandes reveals clues to deeper affective movements in which stakeholders can find themselves and act together. As the authors state here: This ethics of affectivity (Seyler, 2010) should make us sensitive to what is ‘real’ in the analysis of stakeholders, to what seems precisely elusive: the subjective praxis, which is the constituent part of effective action. Such ethics should acknowledge what, in SHT, is likely to provide individuals with the experience of connecting their own powers in an affective and ontologically effective fashion. Or, put differently, if institutions prevent individuals from accessing their affective life by means of an insistence on abstract representation and distancing, they have no capacity for ethics (Puyou and Faÿ, 2015). (Painter et al., 2020: 15−16)

10.4  Conclusion: Paths for Extending Henryan Phenomenology in Future MOS Research In this chapter, we have tried to show the limits of MOS approaches in which the real is still missing—​the real being here regenerated or stifled, affective and active, subjective and intersubjective life, bringing to light ignored phenomena. Moreover, it seems important to us—​as it is to Henry—​to stress again the fundamental distinction between the feelings and emotions that may be ours in an/​the organizational world (ontic level) and the deeper manifestation of our affective life to itself (auto-​affection), affect such as affectio societatis (ontological level), when experiencing these feelings and emotions. Indeed, by introducing Henry’s unique ontology of affective, active, and intersubjective life, we highlight the reality of the subjective body, as a place for our dignity, which has not been recognized as such by structuralism and post-​structuralism’s scepticism. In short, by pointing out the reality of our subjective life, we have advocated that MOS researchers should not consider organizational phenomena in the exclusive light of the world, as is too often currently the case (Deslandes, 2016). In this chapter, we have introduced a distinctive Henryian contribution to the affective turn in MOS by relating affect to the innermost incarnated subjective life which enables an immediate encounter with other living beings (humans, animals, plants), without the primary necessity to share the same world. From there, we also introduce a distinctive contribution to the affective turn in MOS by stressing that making sense in organizations should not be restricted to lived experience but should ultimately open up to the subject’s life, its facilitated or impeded growth dynamism and its praxis. Taking this further, we suggest that an understanding of the Henryian notion of praxis may provide an original

Extending and Discontinuing Phenomenology    211 contribution to the practice turn in MOS. Indeed, we stress how one’s life, the ‘I’ always interior to any ‘I do’, ‘I work’, etc., offers an immediate, pre-​reflexive, affective knowledge and assessment of praxis. As we have also seen, Henry’s phenomenology may reveal a very useful, enlightening, and novel basis for critical or clinical approaches. It will also offer a renewed sense of what happens, new insights in the light of life, in any field or case study, including ethnography. When MOS studies focus on individual and collective action, they will derive fundamental benefits thanks to the novel approach to subjective and intersubjective praxis we have tried to develop here while designing, through action research, new models for organizing or managing. A phenomenology of life could, for example, be very fruitful in current debates on artificial intelligence or climate change. The critical point is that such ‘intelligence’ is not embodied or connected with any phenomenological life; therefore, research may inquire about what the quest for the unreal that artificial intelligence represents and the possible increase in users’ loneliness and powerlessness this could lead to. Similarly, ethnographic studies of remote working, virtual organization (Faÿ, 2009), could focus on the difficulty—​or ease—​of finding affectio societatis. Where climate change is concerned, we could also agree that such an issue can’t be solved by technological changes alone and that following a Husserlian phenomenological path, as Scharmer (2016) does, may yield interesting results in terms of consciousness change and action. A Henryian approach would suggest that epoché of ongoing representation and objectives may dismiss the human/​nature distinction and lead to the experience of our incarnated connectedness with all—​past, present, and future—​living beings throughout our common background in life and therefore experience strong bonds with the Earth in which living beings dwell. Such expanded relationality would enhance our concerns about environmental destruction, pollution, and pandemics, the importance of which is often grasped far too late, with devastating consequences—​something the Covid-​19 crisis has made abundantly clear. We hypothesize that a sense of life being under threat would lead to change in our affective flesh, that is, where we, living beings, connect to Life, the ‘groundwater’ of life, in Henryian terms. Denial as a defence against anxiety could be overcome with the experience, following Henry, that when the world becomes terrifying we may experience life as a secret to protect and which protects us and, therefore, empowers our praxis. Thus, in an organizational context, manifestations of affectio societatis such as camaraderie, solidarity, and unity in difference would be strengthened among stakeholders expanded to all living beings. This would facilitate open deliberations strengthening praxis, and, roles would be performed in a much more living way developing cooperation or esprit de corps in conflictual situations. This brief phenomenological outline of an eco-​ontology of life, its praxis and culture, may bring about a way to avoid nihilism. All in all, this requires agreeing to affect—​the coming to itself of life in our flesh as living beings—​and to its powerful force that stimulates and sustains action. This in turn leads to a great potential for more humane and meaningful workplaces and worlds of life.

212    Eric Faÿ and Ghislain Deslandes

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Chapter 11

Foucau lt a nd Ph enomenol o g y, a T ense and C ompl e x Rel ationsh i p From Anti-​Phenomenology to Post-​Phenomenology Aurélie Leclercq-​Vandelannoitte

11.1  Introduction: Foucault, an Anti-​P henomenologist? The relationship between Foucault and phenomenology is seemingly a clear, simple, and resolved question (Legrand, 2008; Monod, 2013a). Foucault (1966a) not only took some distance from phenomenology, which he took to be the dominant philosophical trend (along with Marxism, or Hegelian-​Marxism) after World War II (the time of his intellectual formation), but he also expressly built his thought against it, addressing very strong and radical criticisms of it (Monod, 2013a), from the beginning if his oeuvre. In a relationship with phenomenologists often described as negative and polemical, which reached its climax during the controversy with Sartre (1962) at the time of Les Mots et les Choses (1966), where the real philosophical target was actually Merleau-​Ponty more than Sartre (Lebrun, 1989: 33), Foucault (1966a, [1967] 1994, 1968) denounced the register of consciousness and the supremacy of the perceiving, judging, and active subject characterizing of phenomenology. The object of Foucault’s criticisms was classic—​or Cartesian—​phenomenology, found in Husserl’s developments, revolving around the concept of internal, subjective experience, known as a ‘lived’ or ‘vécu’ experience. Foucault shared with postmodern philosophers, notably Deleuze, Derrida, and Lyotard, strong criticisms regarding the role and foundational status attached to the

216   Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte phenomenological subject, which they denounced as a ‘substitute for the “dead God” in our modern épistémè’ (Legrand, 2008: 282). He criticized the role of the singular subject as the decisive lever of phenomenology in its different variations, be it Husserlian (the subject as a concrete monad), Heideggerian (the Dasein as being in the world), Levinassian (the vulnerable self), Ricoeurian (the intimate subject-​ipse), Sartrian (the transcendent ego), Merleau-​Pontian (the body-​subject), or Henryian (the self-​affected self) (Depraz, 2013). Rejecting the idea of a ‘too subjective subject’, and seemingly leaving no room for the latter (Depraz, 2013), Foucault (1966a) privileged instead the notions of ‘systems’ (e.g. systems of thought, épistémès) and structures (e.g. institutions). He focused in particular on the history of systems, their genesis and evolution, as revealed by the name of the ‘Chaire d’Histoire des systèmess de pensée’ he created at the Collège de France, far from the founding function of the subject, reigning in a sovereign manner over experience and meaning. In this regard, Foucault’s approach must be located in the philosophical debate of the 1950s opposing existentialism to structuralism. Inspired by the critique of Husserlian phenomenology developed by Cavaillès (Pradelle, 2013), Canguilhem (1967) (who supervised Foucault’s doctoral thesis and largely inspired postmodern philosophy) drew a clear and definitive border separating, on the one hand, a humanist and existentialist philosophy of phenomenological orientation (that of Sartre and Merleau-​Ponty); and, on the other hand, a philosophy oriented towards knowledge (whose Cavaillès was the representative)—​and of which Foucault, in line with this French epistemological tradition, was considered as the culmination point (Monod, 2013b). In this vein, in the redesign of the preface to the American translation of Canguilhem’s master book, Le Normal et le Pathologique, Foucault (1978) himself made a well-​known distinction between a ‘philosophy of experience, meaning, subject’ of Cartesian and phenomenological inspiration (represented by Sartre and Merleau-​Ponty, following Bergson), and a ‘philosophy of knowledge, rationality and concept’ (represented by Cavailles, Bachelard, and Canguilhem). Foucault explains that, while the former, known as existentialism, tries to describe lived experiences so that they can be understood in psychological and conscious forms, the second approach, known as structuralism, aims to explore unconscious and logical structures. Doing so, he drew a structuring opposition in the field of French modern philosophy between representatives of phenomenology on the one hand, and representatives of structuralism, to which he has long been associated on the other. Foucault is known in particular as a philosopher inscribed in ‘anti-​phenomenologist structuralism’ (Monod, 2013a: 312). In his early writings, Foucault indeed develops an ‘anti-​phenomenological manner’ to write history, as a way to assert his rejection of phenomenology, as both theory and method (Legrand, 2008). He develops a novel approach to philosophy which aims to open the subject to a ‘thought of the outside’, to heterogeneous archives, and an analytics of power. In particular, his archeological method, which constitutes the first axis of Foucault’s thought (Burrell, 1988), explicitly aims to ‘free history from the grip of phenomenology’ (Foucault, 1969a). Complementing archeology, the genealogical approach, known as Foucault’s second axis (Burrell, 1988), is defined by the idea that

Foucault and Phenomenology    217 ‘one has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that is to say, to arrive to an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework’ (Foucault, 1980: 117). Through his novel perspective, as explained by Legrand (2008: 282), Foucault emphasizes that objects and the world are not constituted by a transcendental subject—​a pure consciousness or an incarnated body—​conveying to them meaning and structure; on the contrary, the subject itself is shaped through an external process, by its surroundings, by the material practices investing the surface of the body (surveillance, discipline, punishment, confession and so on) and producing thereby the illusion that this illusion constitutes ideally the very things, practices, structures, and constraints that in fact constitute it materially.

Foucault is thus, at first sight, very far from the conceptual foundations of phenomenology as an investigation of ‘lived experience’. Foucault notably contests the historic and epistemic conditions of possibilities of phenomenology (Lebrun, 1989), considering the latter as a discourse inscribed in the history of epistemic changes (Foucault, 1966a). In line with his rejection of the transcendental subject, he situates the discourse, the ‘enunciated’, beyond the phenomenological notion of the ‘lived experience’ (Depraz, 2013). Through his novel and original approach, Foucault seems to break with the existentialism and philosophy of consciousness found in orthodox phenomenology (Husserl, 1982). However, the relationship between Foucault and phenomenology is far more complex, tense, and subtle than a mere situation of opposition, defiance, and rejection. While, at first sight, Foucault’s thought is strictly opposed to phenomenology, specialists of phenomenology and of Foucault have explored the possible tensions existing between them, and have recognized parallels, linkages, and similitudes that can be established between them (Dreyfyus, 1983; Visker, 1999; Han, 2002; Legrand, 2008; Depraz, 2013; Heidenreich, 2013; Le Blanc, 2013; Monod, 2013a, 2013b; Sabot, 2013). Referring to the above-​mentioned structuring opposition dominating the French philosophical landscape after World War II (i.e. existentialism and structuralism), some observers notably argue that Foucault was not active only on the second side of the opposition (indeed, Foucault rejected the view that positioned him as a structuralist) (Monod, 2013a). Furthermore, he was not entirely wary of, resistant to, or exterior to phenomenology, and his relationship with phenomenology (Husserl’s) and its followers (Merleau-​Ponty and Heidegger in particular) was not limited to that of hostility and rejection . . . Quite the contrary. In many regards, phenomenology actually appears to be underlying Foucault’s thought, the fertile soil on which he built his analytics. Foucault (1985: 764) himself recognized that the two types of philosophies that were dominant in the 1950s in France (i.e. existentialism and structuralism) themselves could be traced back to Husserl’s lectures in the Sorbonne in 1929 that led to his Cartesian Meditations1 (Husserl, 1986), 1 

Husserl’s title Cartesian Meditations is an allusion to Descartes’ Metaphysical Meditations, the latter being seen by Husserl as the precursor of transcendental philosophy.

218   Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte such that Husserlian phenomenology can be considered as constitutive of the ‘historical a priori’ of contemporary French philosophy (Legrand, 2008: 285). As explained by Foucault himself, these polar opposites in the philosophical debate actually both stem from a common phenomenological root. Furthermore, the phenomenological approaches developed by Merleau-​Ponty and Sartre obviously played a strong role in Foucault’s thinking, as demonstrated by Sabot (2013). It ought to be noted that, despite strong criticism against phenomenology, Foucault was literally fascinated by Merleau-​ Ponty, who was Foucault’s professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure, and who would soon become for him a thought leader, as reported by Mauriac (1976: 492, quoted in Eribon, 1994). Indeed, Foucault found in the courses and first writings of Merleau-​Ponty the motivation to develop a criticism of certain objectivist tendencies in psychology, which claimed to constitute itself as a science (Sabot, 2013), as seen in Foucault’s (1954) introduction to the translation of Traum und Existenz (Rêve et Existence) by Binswanger, a psychiatrist seeking to build a phenomenological psychiatry inspired by Husserl and Heidegger. As insightfully noted by Sabot (2013), it is through Merleau-​Ponty’s (1945) Phenomenology of Perception that Foucault came to know Binswanger’s work, which inspired Foucault’s development of the History of Madness (1961). Furthermore, while he had strived to detach himself from a philosophy of subject and consciousness, Foucault, at the end of his oeuvre, revisited the question of the subject in ways that show rather more continuities than discontinuities with Merleau-​Ponty (Levin, 2008; Revel, 2015), as well as with Heidegger’s consideration of the hermeneutics of the subject (Monod, 2013b). At the end of his life, Foucault (1982) himself confessed a strong admiration for Heidegger, whose influence on his oeuvre remained particularly important. Thus, while his opposition to phenomenology surely played an important role in Foucault’s approach, his alliance with and reliance on phenomenology have played a no less important role in the construction and evolution of Foucault’s thought through the course of his oeuvre. From Foucault’s writings on human sciences and madness, to his courses at Collège de France on the subject (notably The Hermeneutics of the Subject in 1981−2; Foucault, 2001) and conferences at the beginning of 1980s, Foucault’s thought contains a subtle entanglement with the concepts developed by the most important representatives of phenomenology. From the first Foucault (on history and archeology), the second Foucault (on genealogy and power), to the late Foucault (on the ethics of the subject), we contend in this chapter that a large part of Foucault’s main axes (Burrell, 1988) is inspired, animated, and nourished, to some extent, by phenomenology. Foucault’s approach thus oscillates between criticisms and reappropriation of phenomenology, relies on convergences and divergences, continuities and discontinuities with the latter, and translates to a mix of proximity and distance with it (Sabot, 2013), made up of both complicity and tenderness (Monod, 2013a). In line with observers that have recently reconsidered the relationship between Foucault and phenomenology, we argue in this chapter that Foucault’s philosophy inevitably falls within the scope of phenomenology, by rediscovering and extending its potentialities (Legrand, 2008). To do justice to the real nature of the relationship between Foucault and phenomenology, this chapter aims to highlight the possible affiliation

Foucault and Phenomenology    219 and peculiar significance that phenomenology has taken in Foucault’s approach, and to show how Foucault extended the potentialities and richness of phenomenology towards a new approach of phenomenology—​that of ‘post-​phenomenology’. To that end, we consider Foucault’s three main themes (Burrell, 1988) through the prism of phenomenology: first, we consider the relationship between the young Foucault and the phenomenology developed by Husserl, about historicity and archaeology; we then analyse Foucault’s relationship with phenomenology through the prism of the historicization of the transcendental, expressed in Foucault’s genealogy of the subject, revealing unexpected similarities between Foucault’s and Merleau-​Ponty’s work; last, we explore Foucault’s reconsideration of the subject, through his development of the hermeneutics and ethics of the self, revealing an active mode of experimentation largely influenced by Heidegger’s approach, and further aligning him with the work of Ricoeur and Merleau-​Ponty.

11.2  Historicity and an Archeology of the Surface: Making Visible the Invisible The first main topic where a parallel can be drawn between Foucault and phenomenology is that of historicity and archeology, where Foucault appears as both close and distant from the father of phenomenology, Husserl. In a 1967 interview, entitled ‘Who are you Professor Foucault?’, phenomenology is described by Foucault ([1967] 1999) as one of the most popular philosophical discourses of the 1950s, from which he aims to free himself (Le Blanc, 2013). In this interview, he describes phenomenology as relying on four main characteristics: an analysis of the immanent meanings of lived experience; a transcendental philosophy bringing together all meanings to a transcendent subject; a philosophy of totalization; and a philosophy of the cogito. Foucault’s method, i.e. archeology, in the analysis of discursive traces and orders left by the past, in order to write a history of the present (O’Farrell, 2005), explicitly positions itself against these four dimensions, and is even presented by Foucault as an ‘anti-​phenomenology’ (Le Blanc, 2013). Yet, beyond Foucault’s strong criticisms and despite his explicit position against the orthodox (1966a), Husserlian phenomenology in Les Mots et les Choses, it is well-​known that he had a strong admiration for Husserl and his Meditations Cartésiennes (1986), which, as Foucault explained, largely fed the whole French philosophical tradition in the 20th century (Monod, 2013a). It is striking to observe that Foucault’s oeuvre both opens and closes on Husserl’s Recherches Logiques (published in 1900−1 and considered to be the founding work of phenomenology), revealing, according to Le Blanc (2013: 373), the persistence of ‘the phenomenological motive’ in Foucault’s thought, despite his claim to have abandoned it. Arguing that Foucault borrows a lot from the language of

220   Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte phenomenology, some observers have thus established a bridge between Foucauldian thought and Husserlian phenomenology, around the theme of history (Depraz, 2013) and historicization. The latter is conceptualized by Husserl ([1954] 1989) in the Krisis2 (La Crise des sciences européennes et la phénoménologie transcendentale; 1954), and defined as a reverse questioning method on science, which implies reactivating the meaning of a phenomenon, known as ‘archeology’—​a term that is also fundamental in Foucault’s oeuvre. Actually, ‘archeology’ was central and decisive for both philosophers. And it is important to remember that, when Foucault developed his archeological method, he was well-​aware that the concept of ‘archeology’ had first been used by Husserl and his disciple Fink (Legrand, 2008: 283). (Husserl’s interest in archeology must be placed in the context of 19th century, when archeology was considered to be a heroic and revolutionary science, leading to important discoveries for humanity. Fascination for archeology at the turn of 20th century explains why this metaphor was directly transposed to the philosophical and intellectual field; see Heidenreich, 2013.) Foucault actually borrowed many key expressions from Husserl himself, such as the notion of a ‘historical a priori’, and the whole metaphor of ‘archeology’: ‘strata’, ‘sedimentations’, ‘architecture’, and ‘soil’ (the latter being a term also used by Merleau-​ Ponty, 1995, in his lecture about Nature; Heidenreich, 2013), revealing common points of thinking and writing between these two philosophers (Monod, 2013a). The presentation of a text by Husserl devoted to the possibility of a ‘phenomenological archeology’ (Husserl & Monod, [1932] 2013), unpublished in French, further enriches and supports this ‘metaphorological’ confrontation (Monod, 2013a) and the parallels that can be established between both philosophers. Heidenreich (2013) indeed suggests an insightful comparison between archeology and phenomenology, and explores the intimate and complex relationship between Husserl and the young Foucault. Emphasizing the power of metaphors, in that they help us to understand the structure and perspective of a given thought, Heidenreich (2013) perceives in this similitude more than a simple commonality in writing style or rhetoric kinship between Husserl and Foucault. Heidenreich argues that it represents an expression of a partially convergent and partially divergent mission, a ‘work’ of paradoxical identification of ‘surface structures’. A similarity indeed exists between these philosophers in the way they use the central metaphor of archeology to build their conception of philosophy as a manner of ‘dig[ging] the soil’ (Heidenreich, 2013: 364), and that is that they both seek to develop an ‘archeology of the surface’ (Le Blanc, 2013). For Husserl, the images of the soil and sedimentation are omnipresent, in a phenomenology that is aiming to construct a new soil. The objective of Husserl’s phenomenological archeology is indeed to dig the soil in a vertical manner, in order to discover the origins, the archi-​foundations of a phenomenon. For Foucault, in contrast, the goal of his archeological method is instead to scratch the surface, working in a more lateral manner, in order to make visible what is invisible at the surface: a horizontal archeology that produces an archive of things and of

2 

More precisely: Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendantale Phänomenologie.

Foucault and Phenomenology    221 discourses, as they are, without trying to interpret them (Heidenreich, 2013). Foucault’s mission in his archeological method is indeed to grasp in words, images, and symbols, ‘the significant act’ unfolding itself on the surface (Le Blanc, 2013: 374): What I am looking for are not relationships that are secret, hidden, quieter or deeper than men’s consciousness. On the contrary, I try to define relationships which are on the very surface of speeches; I try to make visible what is only invisible by being too on the surface of things.3 (Foucault, 1969b: 23)

Doing so, Foucault subscribes to the phenomenological tradition to the extent that he appropriates the rhetoric of archeology, while reversing it and transposing it. He does so by moving from a vertical logic targeting the deepest layers, to a lateral or horizontal logic avoiding any hierarchy and prioritization. There is therefore a strong similitude within this central metaphor, while it is simultaneously transposed and transformed by Foucault. As suggested by Heidenreich (2013), this convergence reveals a deeper, more fundamental kinship than realized between Husserl and Foucault, the latter appearing, contradictory to traditional expectations, to be a true heir of Husserl. Although in a different manner, both share indeed the common gesture of taking perspective, of observing distance (Depraz, 2013). They do so through ‘archaeological practice’ for Foucault, through which history is viewed as an analysis of the processes that have led to what we are today; and the ‘neutralization of the epochè’ for Husserl (Depraz, 2013), through which he opens Descartes’ notion of universal doubt to highlight that ‘modifications’ of the believing consciousness are always possible (Brainard, 2002). In that regard, Les Mots et les Choses (Foucault, 1966a) and Krisis (Husserl, [1954] 1989) can both be seen as a diagnosis of the mutations of subjective rationality in modern societies (Depraz, 2013). Foucault describes the situation of a discourse in the épistémè of an era and its registration within a lineage, a specific system of thought, which appears as an effort to historicize the transcendent; as for Husserl, he stages a concrete, historical a priori and describes the meaning of the origin according to an approach that questions backwards (Depraz, 2013). Yet, beyond these similitudes, both articulate historicity and transcendentalism in very different manners, explains Depraz (2013). Husserl describes a history of real facts, develops a retrocessive questing for the origins of a meaning and considers historicity as an a priori; while Foucault avoids any reference to the transcendental as a condition of possibility, and does not consider the depth of the transcendent gesture but a historical and contingent experience (Depraz, 2013). Thus, while Husserl’s phenomenological method seeks to ‘dig up’ and to reactivate the intentional acts in which the formal systems of science once originated (Legrand, 3  Version in French: ‘Ce que je cherche, ce ne sont pas des relations qui seraient secrètes, cachées, plus silencieuses ou plus profondes que la conscience des hommes. J’essaie au contraire de définir des relations qui sont à la surface même des discours; je tente de rendre visible ce qui n’est invisible que d’être trop à la surface des choses’.

222   Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte 2008), in contrast, Foucault (1969a) aims, with his archeological method, to get rid of this appeal to the subjective and conscious acts of meaning. He wishes to reestablish archeology in its proper space, i.e. the discursive formations in all their anonymity (Legrand, 2008). To that end, it is necessary for Foucault to abandon the phenomenology of consciousness, on which Husserl’s conception of history is founded, as well as the vision of history as a linear process, implying instead the recognition of a new sort of history recognizing discontinuity (Legrand, 2008: 283). Thus, Foucault does not totally abandon the idea of phenomenological meaning, but he reorients it, from representing a bifurcation to providing the conditions for the appearance of meaning which should not refer to a transcendental subject or to a pre-​ reflexive cogito, but to an inquiry bearing on ‘the formal conditions for the appearance of meaning’ incorporating considerations on the transformations of meaning produced within the history of discourse (Le Blanc, 2013: 288). Foucault thus circumscribes the functions of archeology to the identification of transformations in meaning of discourse within an archive; and, to that end, he relies only on the units immanent to the discourses themselves. Doing so, he does not reject the descriptive method of phenomenology, as a phenomenology of significations, but modifies its significance, by making it rely on entire systems of relations that can only be accessed by getting rid of some specific phenomenological hypothesis (Le Blanc, 2013). For Le Blanc (2013), Foucault’s archeology thus uses the phenomenological motive to define itself as ‘archeology’, such that the phenomenological cannot be entirely placed in a position of exteriority in relation to archeology. Interestingly, Foucault’s approach, inspired by phenomenology, contributes to a historicization of the transcendental (Sabot, 2013) and of the subject, as further explained in the following section.

11.3  Historicizing the Transcendental and Consciousness Foucault’s relationship with phenomenology can be further analysed through the prism of the historicization of the transcendental, expressed in Foucault’s genealogy of the subject (extending his archeological approach), revealing unexpected links and ‘family resemblances’ between Foucaut’s and Merleau-​Ponty’s thoughts (Monod, 2013a; Sabot, 2013). Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology and approach to empirical psychology indeed contributed to orient Foucault towards a practice of philosophy that considered the contributions and limitations of ‘human sciences’ (and first of all psychology), while looking for another horizon of thought (Monod, 2013a), emphasizing the historically and socially conditioned character of consciousness (Foucault, 1980a). The connections between both philosophers can be traced back to Foucault’s ([1961] 1972) Histoire de la Folie, where he broadly criticized Descartes for his exclusion of madness from the space constituting truth and knowledge. According to Foucault,

Foucault and Phenomenology    223 Descartes drew a dividing line between mad and normal people and, in doing so, he installed a new ratio. For Foucault, the goal of his criticism of Descartes was not only to develop a history of the discourses and practices surrounding madness, constituting it as a mental illness—​it was above all a philosophical criticism of the constitution of the subject, produced on a metaphysical level in Descartes’s philosophy, and arising by excluding madness from the field of thought. In this regard, Foucault (1980b: 58) explained the importance, in the development of his thought, of Binswanger’s descriptions of madness as a fundamental experience, which relied on the existential analysis of Heidegger’s approach to madness as a way of being (Dasein) (Monod, 2013a), and were developed in Merleau-​Ponty’s courses and first writings and Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Observers see a certain proximity between Foucault and phenomenology—​Merleau-​Ponty’s approach in particular—​ regarding the possible contributions of the latter in formulating a counterargument to the objectifying and reifying tendency of psychiatry (Sabot, 2013). The consideration of madness, illness, and dream as plenary manners of being to the world found a strong echo in Foucault’s thought, explaining his growing interest in Merleau-​Ponty’s approach to empirical psychology and phenomenology (Monod, 2013a). To understand how the thought of Merleau-​Ponty so influenced Foucault on these aspects, it is important to go back, according to Sabot (2013), to the way Foucault (1978) confronted the approaches developed by Merleau-​Ponty and Canguilhem, the representatives of the two main philosophical trends in the 1950s. According to Foucault, Merleau-​Ponty and Canguilhem take symmetrical and inversed positions to phenomenology. In his questioning on life, Merleau-​Ponty’s approach develops an ‘inside’ view of phenomenology, privileging the notion of experience (the lived experience) against an objectivist approach of a science that distorts meaning. Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology can be considered a kind of ‘archeology’ (Merleau-​Ponty himself uses this term to define his own approach to a phenomenology of perception), which goes back to the lived experience aiming to reveal the perceived world, a phenomenal world, purified of everything that proceeds from an objectifying attitude, and brought ‘to the pure expression of its own meaning’. In contrast, Foucault explains that Canguilhem develops an ‘outside’ view of phenomenology, in that he proposes to overflow phenomenology through epistemology, to pass outside, by placing at the heart of his concerns the relationship between living things and the knowledge of living (Sabot, 2013). Canguilhem develops a critical investigation questioning the conditions of possibilities of a ‘knowledge on life’, which is seen as an alternative to the phenomenological analysis of the world of life. Thus, the notion of the lived experience developed by Merleau-​Ponty and of the biological science developed by Canguilhem constitute the two main paths towards questioning life. The confrontation of these two approaches broadly nourished Foucault’s thought, who developed a renewed approach towards questioning life. We know how Foucault (1966a), in Les Mots et les Choses, criticized Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology, notably his phenomenological archeology of human sciences. Merleau-​Ponty explored the crisis in the human sciences announced by Husserl, where humans are constituted as a consequence of the effects of knowledge that prescribe

224   Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte their existence. For Merleau-​Ponty, this raises a problem as humans are simultaneously conditioned subjects and the constitutive core of their development. Foucault (1966a) attempted to go beyond this phenomenological understanding of the crisis of human sciences, and, to that end, he directly referred to Merleau-​Ponty’s diagnosis of the crisis of human sciences. Notably, he agreed with the analysis proposed by Merleau-​Ponty, according to which the subject appears as an ambiguous figure (Sabot, 2013). And Foucault concurs with Merleau-​Ponty on the idea that the subject, who is at the centre of modern thought, appears as ‘a strange empirico-​transcendental double’, which presents itself as both the object and the subject of its own knowledge. Furthermore, Merleau-​ Ponty’s developments of a third dimension, as he was departing from the philosophy of consciousness, beyond the pure subject and object, where activity and passivity, autonomy and dependence would cease to be contradictory, through the phenomenological analysis of the lived experience, largely inspired Foucault’s subsequent theory of the subject. Such a theory ‘would take root both the experience of the body and that of culture’. The two philosophers thus share the same view of the empirico-​transcendental duality of the human condition, despite their divergences regarding the solutions that can be brought to address this dilemma (Sabot, 2013; Cormick, 2016). However, as explained by Sabot (2013: 324), the relationship between them remains complex, as Foucault further criticized the ambiguous nature of this mixed discourse, centred on the lived experience. Foucault (1963) has long maintained, with the Phenomenology of Perception, an unclear relationship, difficult to disentangle in any case. Foucault indeed continued to distance himself from the question of the self and the subject (Monod, 2013a, b). He disagreed with the way the subject was considered in the ‘philosophy of the subject’, viewed as the dominant trend in European Western philosophy in the 1950s. The subject appeared as the foundation of all knowledge, the principle of all meaning, as emanating from the signifying subject. Foucault denounced such a predominance and centrality for the meaningful subject, which was, as he explained, largely due to Husserl’s influence from his Meditations Cartesiennes (1986) and Krisis ([1954] 1989), and reinforced by phenomenologists who advocated the domination of Descartes in French philosophy and the transcendence of ‘ego’. Instead, Foucault started to describe his work as an attempt to build a ‘genealogy of the subject’, to question and historicize its condition of possibilities, while considering relations and mechanisms of power. ‘I have tried to get out of the philosophy of the subject through a genealogy of the subject, by studying the constitution of the subject across history, which has led us to the modern concept of the self ’, explains Foucault in his courses at Collège de France ([1981−2] 2001: 506). Such a genealogy is particularly difficult, he explained , as ‘most historians prefer a history of social processes, while most philosophers prefer a subject without history’ (1981−2] 2001: 506). Foucault’s genealogy of the subject accounts ‘for the constitution of knowledge, discourses, domains of objects, and so on, without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events, or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history’ (Foucault, 2003: 306). In view of these developments, Sabot (2013: 326) notes, a possible ‘convergence zone’ between Foucault and Merleau-​Ponty, ‘which does not exclude certain overlaps or even a certain “play” between these thoughts’. For example, it is possible

Foucault and Phenomenology    225 to consider Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology in concert with Foucault’s approach by emphasizing their similitudes and complementarities, more than their differences and contradictions. Both philosophers present theories of subjectivities as fundamentally embodied and contextualized (Levin, 2008), with different emphases and foci, that are all necessary for a full understanding of the subject. Levin (2008) notably explains that, while Merleau-​Ponty (especially in his first period with his Phenomenology of Perception; 1945) highlights ‘the experiential, material aspects of embodied being in his discussions of habits, body images, and the “I can” ’, Foucault provides a complementary approach by emphasizing ‘the power relationships and the discursive and historical forces that contribute to body-​subjects’ construction’. Both contribute, in Levin’s (2008) view, to a broader ‘theory of embodiment as discursive yet still material, and as historically and culturally situated, yet still capable of agentic, liberatory transformation’. In this vein, Sabot (2013) similarly highlights how Foucault developed a more phenomenological presentation of the body (notably during a conference on the ‘utopian body’ in 1966a) where Foucault situates himself as close as possible to Merleau-​Ponty: the body is considered here, not as a uniform and homogeneous space presented to us by objective knowledge, but from the point of view of experience as a multidimensional space, both penetrable and opaque, open and closed, visible and invisible, irreducible to its objective dimension (Sabot, 2013). In the end, if, for Merleau-​Ponty, knowledge (e.g. medical knowledge, taking the body for object) deserves to be related to a ‘perceptual field’ from which it can be articulated, Foucault adds that this perceptual field is itself structured by a ‘historical a priori’, which defines the ‘world of perception’ (Sabot, 2013: 328). Foucault thus complements phenomenology by highlighting the historically and socially conditioned character of consciousness, suggesting, then, an ‘account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework’ (Foucault, 1980a: 117). According to Sabot (2013) Foucault thus paves the way to a ‘historicization of the transcendental’, which ‘takes the way of phenomenology to make it bifurcate sharply towards history’. Doing so, Foucault seemingly opts for the second path in the above-​mentioned polar opposites, that of the history of science and knowledge, more than the axis of the subject. At that time, Foucault therefore appeared to many as an ‘anti-​humanist’, which he himself even claimed to be (Foucault, 1966b). But this question is largely complicated by the fact that, at the end of his oeuvre, Foucault decided to revisit the question of subjectivity.

11.4  A Reconsideration of Subjectivity: From Foucault’s Cartesian Mediations to an Active Mode of Experimentation As mentioned above, Foucault situates his genealogy of the subject in direct opposition to the approach developed by Descartes, Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-​Ponty, which privileges the transcendence of a subject outside history. However, in line with

226   Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte his approach of historicity, and the historicization of the transcendental, Foucault developed an alternative approach to the subject and ‘subjectivation’ at the end of his life, which, paradoxically again, found inspiration in the phenomenological approach. The conceptualization of modern subjectivity developed by Descartes, which had received strong criticism in The History of Madness (for its exclusion of madness from the space of the constitution of truth and knowledge), is indeed reexamined by Foucault in the 1980s, relaunching what may appear to be a long ‘Cartesian meditation’ in Foucault’s thought (Monod, 2013b: 345). The last Foucault, especially his research programme entitled ‘L’Herméneutique du Sujet’ (Foucault, 2001), shows many resemblances with Heidegger (1999, 2001), considered an important figure in phenomenology. It is there that Foucault’s debt to phenomenology is the most obvious and explicit, in particular through its reconstruction of the history of metaphysics and redeployment of the figure of subjectivity, inspiring Foucault ([1981−2] 2001) to consider the question of the ‘subjectivation’ mode of the self and the practice of the self as an ethical subject (Depraz, 2013). It ought to be noted that, at the beginning of his oeuvre, Foucault had already dealt with the question of the subject to a certain extent. But he had done so from the ‘outside’, an outside constituted of history, the history of psychiatric knowledge, the history of prisons and medical institutions, and as the object of power mechanisms. Such a conceptualization is a priori very different from the idea of pure a Cartesian meditation of the ‘philosophying subject’, but Foucault was certainly inspired by Descartes in his last period of work focused on the self (Monod, 2013b: 346). Descartes, who also studied the question of madness in his Meditations Métaphysiques, was indeed cited in Foucault’s ([1961] 1972) Histoire de la Folie. This aspect is considered as a starting point in the ‘Cartesian meditation’ further developed by Foucault (Monod, 2013b), who developed, at the end of this work, the question of the subject and the notion of meditations as ‘technologies of the self ’ (Depraz, 2013; Monod, 2013b), making him appear to be representative of a certain phenomenological tradition, one of Heideggerian deconstruction. Of course, explains Monod (2013b: 347), Foucault retains his distance from any Husserlian repetition of Descartes’ meditations in a phenomenological frame, but the new interpretation he suggests in his Herméneutique du Sujet (Foucault, 2001) (what Monod, 2013b calls ‘le moment cartésien de Foucault’) is nonetheless constitutive of a continuous dialogue with Husserl and Heidegger. Foucault develops there the ideas of ‘a knowing subject’, of ‘the practices of the self ’, and of the ‘Cartesian turn of phenomenology’ (Monod, 2013b: 351). In this regard, according to Foucault, Descartes replaced the knowing, founding subject with a subject constituted of practices of the self (Monod, 2013b). However, in Descartes’s thought, the subject is above all a subject able to produce the truth, and only accessorily an ethical subject, a subject able to produce a right action, far from what the late Foucault designates by the ‘ethics of the subject’, conducted through a ‘subjectivation’ process. As discussed by Monod (2013b), Foucault instead develops, from his reading of ancient philosophy, diverse techniques of subjectivation, a work ‘on the self ’, which enables him to develop his views on the ‘ethics of the subject’. He emphasizes, rather

Foucault and Phenomenology    227 than the ‘certitude’ and unity of the subject found in phenomenology, the displacement of the subject, the path of the meditating subject, the work made by the subject on him/​ herself. To that end, Foucault referred to the Christian practice of hermeneutics (Heidegger, 1999, 2001) and the long history of self-​techniques in the Western world. This approach is, assuredly, different from the traditional phenomenological perspective (notably Heidegger’s), but Foucault emphasizes that the problematization of the relationhips he developed between ‘technique’, ‘truth’, and ‘subjectivity’ are largely inspired by Heidegger. It is from him, indeed, that Foucault started to reflect on the relationship between the subject and truth, known as Foucault’s Cartesian meditation (Monod, 2013b). In particular, Foucault’s interest in the history of techniques of the self is inspired by the Heideggerian approach with the historicization of objectivity and its relationship to the history of technique. Foucault follows Heidegger in his willingness to historicize the metaphysics of the modern subject, and, in his course on the ‘Herméneutique du Sujet’, echoes Heidegger by considering Descartes as the central figure of a transformation of the modern subject. Depraz (2013) sees in this late Foucault the development of a new kind of phenomenology, a ‘phenomenology of attention’ that Foucault does not develop in the traditional phenomenological ‘egological’ mode, but in the mode of a fine restitution of ‘practices of attention’ found in ancient, Stoic, skeptical, or Epicurean philosophy. For Depraz (2013: 336), this conception of the self, developed notably in Foucault’s (1976−84) Histoire de la Sexualité, can be interpreted as a ‘practical restitution of phenomenology’. Foucault also shares with phenomenology the willingness to describe the experiences of consciousness and their modifications through ‘practices’, by developing exercises of the thought, which phenomenology uses in the present tense, while Foucault evokes past forms (Monod, 2013a). The late Foucault thus reveals the development of what Depraz (2013) considers a ‘phenomenological practice’, articulated practically in the ‘care of the self ’, the ‘practice of the self ’, and ‘techniques’ of the self, where the common ground is the notion of attention. Attention is for phenomenology the concrete, experiential, practical name of the epochè, i.e. the relationship of the self to the self, as a presence of the self, suggests Depraz (2013). Furthermore, Foucault identifies different ways of practicing this attention: the care of the self, as a relationship with the self (a general attitude in life); a ‘technique of the self ’ (implying a more active relationship with the self); an ‘internal mobilization’ (as a conversion to the self); and an exercise of the self, mobilizing awareness. In this way, the notion of attention is seen to be very important in the late Foucault, which implies an understanding of the practice of the self in very concrete terms, as ‘a reversal towards oneself ’ through a ‘diversion of what is external’. For Depraz (2013), this conversion to the self, to the ‘inside’, is a ‘subjectivation’ process, in order ‘to fix oneself as an objective, to establish a relationship full of oneself to oneself ’ (Foucault, 2001: 206). For Depraz (2013: 339), this process requires what she calls an ‘ethics of attention’, implying an assuming of a double attention: i.e. an attention to the thing itself on the one hand and, on the other, to the way the subject perceives (sees or listens to) the thing; it is an ‘attention of attention’. Doing so, Depraz (2013) draws

228   Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte a parallel with the conception of attention in Husserl’s work, conceived of as a relational presence to the self (where attention is there, an activity that has the dynamic of an internal gesture, in a bodily, relational, semantic, and expressive manner, enabling a modulation of actions and an augmentation of the being). A parallel can thus be drawn on this point between Husserl and Foucault, around the notion of praxis, as the access to the truth is not a simple affair of theory, but can only be experienced in a practice of the self. These developments show the extent to which Foucault reappropriates and alters the phenomenological notion of ‘experience’, despite his initial rejection of it, in order to ‘to unveil, to “objectivate”, and thus transform through acts of knowledge this specific and unconscious dimension of our experience’ (Legrand, 2008: 289). He develops a more active mode of experimentation on our knowledge and mode of existence, such that it may transform the subject (‘an experiment is something that transforms you’, explained Foucault; 1994b: 41; quoted in Legrand, 2008: 289). Through experiments, the subject learns to perceive otherwise what he/​she already perceives (Legrand, 2008: 290), and aims to transform him/​herself. ‘The theoretical experimentations Foucault offers are the effort of the thought applied to the historical a priori, to the structures of what I called experience [ . . . ] in the hope of transforming it’ (Legrand, 2008: 290). Foucault is convinced indeed, that, in order to get a reflective perception of what we are and how we think, we need to use the mediation of history, of another knowledge, another experience (Legrand, 2008). Foucault wishes to make us conscious of the way we are related to the objects of our knowledge, and to that end, he explains that there must be a transformation in our experience of those objects. Legrand (2008: 288) thus notes here a different goal in Foucault’s philosophy from classic phenomenology: if the subject is encouraged by Foucault to clarify the configuration of their knowledge and perception of things, this is not ‘merely to attain [a]‌transcendental and constitutive, hence invariant structures, and thereby to give a solid foundation to the sciences’ as posited by phenomenology; ‘it is on the contrary in order to get rid of them, change and transform them—​or, to be more specific: to conquer a certain freedom in our very relationship with the rules that constrain us’. This is notably the goal of what Foucault calls the ‘limit-​experience’, which aims to reach the deepest structures of our experience-​knowledge (Legrand, 2008), not in order to describe them as the ultimate foundations of science or of our relationship with ourselves and the world (Legrand, 2008), but rather to ‘make an experience of what we are, of that which is not only our past but also our present, an experience of our modernity such as we wind up transformed by it’ (Foucault, 1994b: 43). Paradoxically, as noted by Depraz (2013), Foucault’s concern to be situated outside of phenomenology, finally leads him back to the heart of it. While refusing what in phenomenology appeared to Foucault as a ‘totalizing method’ and considering that not everything can be described, Foucault eventually shared with Husserl this taste for extreme experiences, which provide a maximum of intensity, tearing the subject away from him/​herself, leading to a transformation of the subject, by the subject, according to a practice of the self. By revisiting phenomenology, Foucault ([1981−2] 2001, [1982−3] 2001) develops the parrhesiastic function of philosophy, emphasizing the way a free subject is related to

Foucault and Phenomenology    229 him/​herself in what he/​she’s thinking, doing, and living. By doing so, he shares with phenomenologists a common ethic of asceticism: according to Ricoeur (1985: XV), the large phenomenological problems and their solution are never posed ‘in the air’, rather they are conquered by the asceticism of the phenomenological method. ‘Ascese’ is an exercise of the self by the self, an ethical practice within the relationship to the self, which relies on experiential sincerity. As mentioned by Depraz (2013), Foucault thus paves the way for a form of spirituality that has long been neglected by modern philosophy, attempting to reinstate it. While this move may have been interpreted as a real inflection, and even a contradiction, in Foucault’s thought, from politics to ethics, and from power to the subject (Gros, 2005), this ethical turn does not necessarily imply a renouncement to the analytics of power and its inscription in history advocated earlier by Foucault. For Revel (2015), this turn addresses the political question of the present, inscribes it in what until then was a work on the historicity of systems of thought, and tries to develop a perspective that weaves together the genealogy of the determinations that cross us and the experimentation of a possible difference, which has been developed by both Foucault and Merleau-​Ponty. As explained by Revel (2015), Foucault suggests a political, historical, and immanent ontology, which can be understood in the wake of Merleau-​ Ponty’s (late) work (1953, 1955, 1964, 2003) on the permanent reopening of history to what overflows it and on the production of a difference, inspired by Saussure’s structuralism. Merleau-​Ponty indeed built, two decades before Foucault, a thought of the historic event, inscribed in the notion of a ‘productive difference’ which prefigures Foucault’s approach (de Vaujany, 2021; Revel, 2015). As he moved towards an ‘indirect ontology’, where the subject increasingly becomes secondary, and where consciousness becomes an event among others (de Vaujany, 2021), Merleau-​Ponty, in the second period of his oeuvre, develops a ‘metaphysics of history’ and temporality that opens the way to Foucault’s late approach of historicity and subjectivity (de Vaujany, 2021). There is thus, an unexpected but strong kinship, a resemblance, a continuity, between the late Foucault and the second period of Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, in the way they enable us to think jointly of the notions of historicity and freedom, reconciling a consideration of historic determinations and the opening of possible differences (de Vaujany, 2021; Revel, 2015). In the end, in his last period (Burell, 1998), as he reinvests himself in the figures of subjectivity and hermeneutics (Monod, 2013a), Foucault paradoxically appears as very close to the main representatives of phenomenology. He himself recognizes in them attempts to constitute a new analytical rigour in addressing the ‘permanent and perpetually renewed question “what are we today?” ’ (Foucault, 1982). In that regard, Foucault (1982: 814) explained that he himself was enrolled in the tradition of ‘historical reflection on ourselves’ illustrated by Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber . . . but also Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-​Ponty. What I refused is precisely that we first give ourselves a theory of the subject. [ . . . ] I had to reject a certain a-​priori theory of the subject in order to be able to analyze

230   Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte the relationships that there may be between the constitution of the subject or the different forms of the subject and the games of truth and practices of power.4

11.5  Conclusion: Foucault, a Post-​P henomenologist Foucault has long been known as—​and even claimed to be—​an anti-​phenomenologist. However, a complex and tense relationship exists between Foucault and phenomenology, in particular with Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, etc., in the French phenomenological heritage, especially through the developments Merleau-​Ponty (Monod, 2013a; Sabot, 2013). Despite claims to reject it, phenomenology actually played a crucial role and significance in Foucault’s three periods (archeology, genealogy, and the ethical subject), as if Foucault had rejected phenomenology to appreciate it better, without saying it explicitly. Thus, ‘understanding Foucault’s background in phenomenology, and relating his work to it, is important for understanding his philosophical position’, explains Oksala (2005: 9). While the relationship between the work of Foucault and phenomenology is crystal clear (Legrand, 2008), taking the form of an initially violent rejection of phenomenology by Foucault, this chapter demonstrates that Foucault’s philosophy cannot be understood without phenomenology and that, in turn, phenomenology would not be complete, and could not be fully grasped, without Foucault. By resisting the main phenomenological concepts, Foucault paradoxically appropriated them, reversed them, transposed them, and transformed them. He gave to phenomenology a new signification, a new meaning, a new orientation. It is in this vein that we can make sense of Dreyfus & Rabinow’s (1982) consideration that Foucault’s approach is ‘a phenomenology to put an end to phenomenology’. Foucault, indeed, invites us to think of phenomenology differently, in a perhaps complementary manner to its classic conceptualization, paving the way to his ‘post-​phenomenology’ (in much the same way that Merleau-​Ponty moved to a ‘post-​ phenomenology’: Revel, 2015). A post-​phenomenology to transform a certain vision of phenomenology . . . A phenomenology opened to the outside, which aims to make visible the invisible at the surface; a phenomenology historicizing the transcendental, highlighting the historically and socially conditioned character of consciousness; a phenomenology oriented towards a more active, ascetic mode of experimentation with the hope to transform and, in the end, to free the subject.

4  ‘Ce que j’ai refusé, c’est précisément que l’on se donne au préalable une théorie du sujet. [ . . . ] Il fallait que je refuse une certaine théorie a-​priori du sujet pour pouvoir faire cette analyse des rapports qu’il peut y avoir entre la constitution du sujet ou des différentes formes de sujet et les jeux de vérité et les pratiques de pouvoir’ (Foucault, 1984: 718).

Foucault and Phenomenology    231

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Pa rt I I

T H E E X P E R I E N C E OF ORG A N I Z I N G Embodiment, Robots, and Affects in a Digital World

Chapter 12

On the Way to E x perience w i t h t h e Phenom enol o g i c a l Venture of M a nag e me nt a nd Organ i z at i on A Literature Review Leo Bancou, François-​X avier de Vaujany, Mar Pérezts, and Jeremy Aroles

Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-​mode—​a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground. (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988: 62)   

A growing interest in experiences (and its associated lexicon) will not have failed to attract the attention of Management and Organization Studies (MOS) scholars. Managerial and organizational activities are often intuitively described as ‘experiences’, in particular ‘lived experiences’. Students are increasingly on the look-​out for ever more compelling learning experiences—​a hunger fuelled by the forced diffusion of remote teaching during the recent pandemic—​pushing us, as scholars, to develop experiential learning (EL) techniques. Through our fieldwork accounts, we attempt to convey what workers experience on an everyday basis, trying to give a sense of what it is like to be there. And in the area of marketing, managers keep exploring the expectations and experience of their customers. It is thus not surprising to see phenomenology appearing

238    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles explicitly or implicitly in the past and present of many theoretical streams of the MOS field, revealing it to be profoundly phenomenological. In this chapter, we want to explore the presence and history of phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies (see the general introduction to this Handbook) within MOS. We want to understand how phenomenological concepts, theories, and views have been imported (and translated) in the context of MOS. This comprehensive overview of recent trends and ongoing conversations—​which cannot and is not meant to be exhaustive—​will also pave the way for the three thematic blocks that structure Parts II, III, and IV of this volume, which are devoted to exploring phenomenological issues in MOS from a variety of perspectives.

12.1  Searching for the Phenomenological Voice(s) in MOS 12.1.1 The Voice(s) of Phenomenology When considering phenomenology on the one hand and the field of MOS since its inception on the other, one could picture an old and enduring conversation, sometimes explicit, loud, and noisy, but very often more discretely (and sometimes almost imperceptibly) interwoven with other streams of thought. While phenomenology has long occupied a relatively minor position in MOS research,1 it seems that the voice(s) of phenomenology (in a plurality of forms) are becoming clearer and more distinct in many debates within MOS. This is notably the case for the aesthetic school of thought, business ethics, or process organization studies, but this trend is also found in more surprising contexts, including institutionalism and neo-​institutional theory, pragmatist approaches, and critical theory to name a few. In addition, more and more organizational scholars appear to be increasingly keen to listen and to take this conversation to new levels (see e.g. Yanow & Tsoukas, 2009; Holt & Sandberg, 2011; Gill, 2014; Helin et al., 2014; Küpers, 2014, 2017; Dale & Latham 2015; de Vaujany & Aroles, 2019; Meyer, 2019). Yet, what remains troubling—​but also exceedingly rich and interesting—​is that phenomenology is itself constituted by a plurality of many divergent voices, making themselves heard in ways ranging from existential to hermeneutic, feminist, and post-​ phenomenological approaches. The canonical works of Husserl (1913, [1936] 1970, [1952] 1989, 1963) or Heidegger ([1927] 1962, 1977), the existentialist tradition of Merleau-​Ponty (1942, [1945] 2013), Sartre (1943), or de Beauvoir ([1949] 1986), each carry voices that are distinct from post-​phenomenological authors such as Arendt ([1959] 1998), Levinas ([1961] 1991), the later works of Merleau-​Ponty (1964, 1995, 2003), Henry ([1965] 1987), 1 

It was probably more visible at the beginning of the history of MOS, e.g. with Berger & Luckman (1966), as alternatives to the dominant positivist paradigm of that time.

Phenomenological Venture of Management    239 or Ricoeur (1983). So how can we lend an ear while still orienting ourselves amidst these phenomenological or post-​phenomenological choruses? What could be done to make these voices—​and the resonances across and between them—​not only more audible but also more intelligible in the vast, ever-​continuing MOS conversations? In the review of the literature conducted for this chapter, we acknowledge that phenomenologists and phenomenological themes have received intermittent attention in the MOS literature. Phenomenology appears to be both in a distant vicinity (or in an intimate distance, as the reader prefers) from MOS. This chapter endeavours to highlight how phenomenology can further enlighten our exploration of the ephemeral, fragmented, and transient nature of organizational worlds. In that sense, one of our intentions with this chapter is to provide readers with a comprehensive view and guide them through the many avenues of phenomenology but also to signpost the crossroads with different theories, themes, and dimensions that are central to the study of work, organizations, and management. This seems like a timely and relevant endeavour for three main reasons, as detailed next.

12.1.2 Three Reasons to Explore the Presence of Phenomenology in MOS First, we believe that exploring different phenomenologies is crucial to understanding the broad history of what we can tentatively call ‘organizational thought’. A variety of streams currently being developed and discussed in our field—​such as Institutional and Neo-​institutional Theory, Pragmatism, or Process Organization Studies—​share strong and resonant commonalities with phenomenological thinking. At times, their trajectories are largely intertwined, even though the phenomenological voices sometimes only seem to appear in between the lines. Examining these intersections can not only help us to understand the specificities, originalities, or limitations of many contemporary MOS research streams, but can also provide promising future research avenues. In particular, this exploration may be a way to overcome some common misunderstandings about phenomenology, which portray phenomenology as too dualistic, too idealistic, too humanistic, or not enough ​instrumental or material for the scope of MOS. Yet, many seminal thoughts in phenomenology which are difficult to position and are, in fact, much closer to neo-​materialist, posthumanist, critical, aesthetic, or processual perspectives than many scholars believe (or would probably be prepared to acknowledge). The remaining chapters of this volume are intended as an important step in bringing into the light a largely invisible community2 in the MOS field, and that this chapter will provide an overarching view of it.

2  Very few conferences, standing groups, workshops, or even special issues in academic journals have offered an opportunity to make visible the groups, individuals, and streams of thought exploring MOS phenomenologically.

240    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles Second, recent scholarly discussions in MOS point to the need to address the fractures and discontinuities in phenomenological thought, and in particular push towards ontological explorations and metaphysical projects (Sandberg & Dall’Alba, 2009; Thompson, 2011; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015, 2020; Reinecke & Ansari, 2017; Meyer & Vaara, 2020). Many phenomenologists have apparently, at some point, departed from the terminology of phenomenology (see, e.g., Heidegger, Merleau-​Ponty, Ricoeur, or Levinas) in favour of a more ‘ontological’, ‘cosmological’, or ‘metaphysical’ stance, thus far beyond issues of ‘perceptions’, ‘appearances’, and pure ‘experience’. For some of them (e.g. Heidegger, Merleau-​Ponty, and Marion), this ontological move was not argued as a departure from the phenomenological project but more a deepening or reorientation (kehre) of it, stemming from its core.3 Understanding these discontinuities or deepening in the phenomenological project is pivotal for MOS scholars who are often at the heart of this tension, or oscillation, between appearance, ontology, and onto-​ epistemology in their own work. In addition, some key figures behind ‘postmodern thought’ are often (self-​)defined as either post-​or anti-​phenomenology. For instance, although Foucault and Deleuze (both strongly influential in MOS) extensively criticized what they saw as ‘phenomenology’ and departed radically from its vocabulary and logic, some continuities (e.g. around subjectivity and subjectivation processes) may still be present in their work (Reynolds & Roffe, 2014; Revel, 2015; see also Chapters 13, 20, and 21). Thus, our intention is to expose how the continuities and discontinuities of phenomenological thought bear an interesting relevance in the context of MOS. In addition, some anti-​or non-​phenomenological traditions (see the general introduction to this volume) can be interpreted as reactions to phenomenological constructs, making an in-​depth understanding of the latter a key step for understanding and pursuing the former as well. Gaining such a deep understanding of these traditions requires carefully navigating of the labyrinth of phenomenological thought. Third, we contend that exploring phenomenology can enable MOS scholars to develop new ways of becoming that are sensible and receptive to the roles of bodies, relations, sensations, affects, emotions, and instruments in the everyday life of organizations. In a context of increasing digitalization, flexibilization, and fragmented spatial-​temporal frameworks (Nicolini, 2007; Aroles et al., 2019; Fayard, 2021; Carroll & Conboy, 2020), it seems inescapably crucial to consider the benefit of phenomenological approaches when rethinking the conduct of organizing and managing activities. In line with the above-​mentioned objectives, this chapter seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the presence of phenomenology within the MOS literature. Through an in-​depth survey of how phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies intersect with other philosophical streams and key debates in MOS, we also intend to address the fractures and discontinuities in phenomenological thought. In addition, this

3  Some

philosophers even state the presence of an ontology in the Husserlian project itself (see Chernyakov, 2002; or Caminada, 2015).

Phenomenological Venture of Management    241 chapter aims to introduce the realized and potential contribution of phenomenology to explore contemporary trends and practices in work and management. We thus illustrate how phenomenological thinking can help us to imagine new ways of becoming that are more sensible and more relevant to these organizational and managerial trends.

12.2  The Presence of Phenomenology in the MOS Literature 12.2.1 A Detailed Literature Review In our attempt to show the presence of phenomenological thought in the MOS literature, we conducted a literature review, which we have tried to make as exhaustive and comprehensive as possible. While it constitutes an honorable task, it is legitimate to ask whether doing a systematic literature review of the presence of phenomenology or phenomenology-​inspired works in MOS is actually feasible. Instead, we followed Kuhn’s (1962) sociology of ‘scientific communities’ and Crane’s (1972) notion of ‘invisible colleges’, which can be broadly defined as ‘communication networks among scholars who share an interest an interest in a particular area of research’ (Vogel, 2012: 1017). Vogel also notes that ‘the high mobility of researchers between invisible colleges, which is enabled by permeable boundaries and fairly unrestricted access, increases membership fluctuations, particularly among peripheral members’ (Vogel, 2012: 1020). Using a range of bibliometric methods, we tried to reveal or make visible the invisible, i.e. the various phenomenologies, post-​phenomenologies, or phenomenological approaches in MOS. Beyond their deep, historic embedding, phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies present themselves with a striking contemporaneity in MOS research. The review was conducted in 2021 and so, we decided to limit our bibliometric analysis to the last two decades, from 2000 to 2020. We selected twenty academic journals, which we divided into two circles of analysis. Following other journal lists compiled for review purposes (e.g. Murphy & Zhu, 2012), the first circle is constituted by twelve ‘core’ or ‘top-​tier’ publications: Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), Academy of Management Review (AMR), Accounting, Organizations & Society (AOS), Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), Human Relations (HR), Journal of Business Ethics (JBE), Journal of Management (JOM), Journal of Management Studies (JMS), Organization Science (Org. Sci.), Organization Studies (OS), Organizational Research Methods (ORM) and Organization (Org.). These ‘first circle’ journals were picked based on different criteria. The selection followed the Financial Times (FT)’s ‘Top 50 Journals List’ (2021), which is widely recognized as a strong reference in the ranking of academic journals. First, we picked the top six peer-​reviewed journals featured in the ‘Management’ subject area, namely AMJ, AMR, AOS, ASQ, JOM, JMS. After removing Journal of Applied Psychology, which focuses

242    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles on behavioural psychology rather than the study of managerial and organizational phenomena, we picked the top two peer-​reviewed journals in the ‘Organizational Behaviour’ subject area of the FT’s ‘Top 50 Journals List’: Org. Sci. and OS. We added HR (ranked eleventh) and JBE (ranked seventeenth) which both speak directly to MOS scholars. To justify and complement this selection, we used the chartered ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide (2021), resulting in the addition of Org. (ABS3) and ORM (ABS4). Except for JBE (ABS3) and Org., which are widely recognized as leading publications in the field of MOS, all selected journals in this first circle were ranked fourth in the AJG 2021 ranking. Considering the differences between North American and European scholarly traditions and publication models (Battiliana et al., 2010), we tried to make our journals database somewhat balanced regarding the journals’ geographical location, as we selected seven US-​based (AMJ, AMR, ASQ, JBE, JOM, Org. Sci., ORM) and five European-​based (AOS, HR, JMS, Org., OS) journals. While this selection of top-​tier journals may be deemed incomplete or unfair, it is important to remind ourselves that the rationale behind it was not to cover the entire field, but to focus on publications which represent leading scholarship in MOS. The second circle of selected publications corresponds to eight other journals, including seven that are not featured in the FT’s ‘Top 50 Journals List’ (2021) but that are rated third or fourth in the AJG 2021 ranking: British Journal of Management (BJM), Business Ethics Quarterly (BEQ), Gender, Work & Organization (GWO), Academy of Management Learning & Education (AMLE), Management Learning (ML) and Work, Employment and Society (WES). Among the eighteen ABS subject categories, we chose three relevant subject fields for this literature review’s focus before selecting journals that were interesting to show the presence of phenomenology in MOS: ‘General Management, Ethics, CSR & Management’ (BJM, BEQ, GWO), ‘Management Development and Education’ (AMLE, ML), and ‘Human Resource Management and Employment Studies’ (WES). These peer-​reviewed journals also presented more of a chance of yielding interesting and insightful results given their central themes, ambivalent leadership positions, and history. We completed this second circle of journals with the addition of two more: Culture & Organization (C&O) and Philosophy of Management (POM). While it is ranked second in the ABS system, C&O is interesting in that many recent phenomenology-​inspired articles have been published in it (Biehl & Volkmann, 2019; Dahl et al., 2021). POM is neither referenced in the ABS ranking system nor does it have high recognition in MOS, yet its focus on philosophical approaches to management theory and practice makes it very relevant to our literature review’s objective. Based on this selection of twenty academic journals, divided into two distinct circles, we examined the presence of phenomenologies, post-​phenomenologies, and phenomenology-​inspired works in the MOS literature using a range of methods that we will now introduce. This literature review’s methodology is rooted in bibliometrics and combines citation analysis, cluster analysis, networks mapping, and comparative tables. We mainly used the search and advanced search functions for the terms that we deemed were the most relevant to our literature review’s objective.

Phenomenological Venture of Management    243 We classified those terms into five categories: main words, canonical phenomenologists, phenomenologists, post-​ phenomenologists,4 phenomenological themes and expressions. The ‘main words’ category consists in searching the term ‘phenomenology’ but also ‘phenomenologies’, ‘phenomenological’, or ‘phenomenologist’. The ‘canonical phenomenologists’ category refers to two canonical, founding figures in the phenomenological tradition: Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. While it may be argued that other authors are as important, we join other scholars in considering them as particularly influential in the development of phenomenology (Moran, 2005). Thus, we searched for ‘Husserl’, ‘Heidegger’, but also adjectival variants, e.g. ‘Husserlian’ and ‘Heideggerian’. The ‘phenomenologists and post-​phenomenologists’ category concerns a selection of authors and theorists who are important figures in the phenomenological and post-​ phenomenological thought (see the general introduction of this volume), namely Max Scheler, Henri Bergson, Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Alfred Schütz, Paul Ricoeur, Michel Henry, Hermann Schmitz, Hubert Dreyfus, and Peter Sloterdijk. While this selection is neither exhaustive nor representative, our objective was to represent authors from the late 19th century until today who could help the reader understand the scope of the phenomenological movement. We also paid attention to the nationality of authors and sought to achieve a kind of balance, proportional to the places where phenomenology had developed most. Hence, seven authors are French (Bergson, Bachelard, Merleau-​Ponty, Sartre, Levinas, Ricoeur, Henry), four are German (Scheler, Arendt, Schmitz, Sloterdjik), and two are from the Unites States (Schütz, Dreyfus). Yet, given the bi-​nationality of authors such as Arendt (German-U.S.), Schütz (Austrian-U.S.), and Levinas (Lituanian naturalized French), we also understand that phenomenology is a fundamentally international movement of thought and inherits from the displacements of its members. When having trouble finding relevant results within journals given the popularity of a name (e.g. Henry or Schütz) we added the author’s first name in order to refine the scope. Lastly, the category, ‘phenomenological themes and expressions’, corresponds to our objective to highlight the presence of phenomenological thought in MOS. More specifically, we seek to understand how MOS researchers harness and reframe concepts and terms from phenomenology such as ‘embodiment’, ‘being-​in-​the-​world’, ‘flesh’, and ‘affect’. In that sense, our literature review focused on analysing both the presence of phenomenology and phenomenologists but also the influence of phenomenological ideas and orientations in the context of MOS. As we looked for occurrences of ‘phenomenology’ in the first circle of MOS journals, we paid attention to the number of publications per year, e.g. the number of articles published each year based on publications where the word ‘phenomenology’ is mentioned at least one time in the text. After having excluded editorials, book reviews,

4 We

excluded at this stage the categories of anti-​phenomenologies and non-​phenomenologies described in our general introduction to focus on the phenomenological corpus itself.

244    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles Publications in each year (criteria: see below) 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Publications (total)

Figure 12.1  Research articles with ‘phenomenology’ published each year in first circle of MOS journals

and other texts that did not identify as peer-​reviewed academic journal articles, we obtained a total of 629 articles. Among the journals with the highest number of publications were JBE with 132 articles (Chikudate, 2000; Pullen & Vachhani, 2021; Puyou & Faÿ, 2015), HR with 104 articles (Riach & Warren, 2014; Adamson & Johansson, 2016), and OS which totaled eighty-​three articles (Sandberg & Dall’Alba, 2010; Yakhlef, 2010; Cunliffe & Locke, 2020. Hence, those three publications represent more than half of all articles from this first circle of journals. We also noticed an upward trend by looking at the number of articles published each year within the 2000 to 2020 period, including a peak of forty-​seven articles published in 2019 (see Figure 12.1). The search for the word ‘phenomenological’ yielded 544 articles while ‘phenomenologist’ resulted in only thirty-​six articles. Second, we searched for occurrences of ‘phenomenology’ in the second circle of journals, which led to the identification of 365 articles. Journals with the highest number of articles included ML with seventy-​eight articles (Cunliffe, 2009; Holt & Cornelissen, 2014; Tomkins & Ulus, 2015), POM with sixty-​five articles (Betta, 2017; de Vaujany et al., 2018), and GWO, which published sixty-​four articles (Pullen, 2006; Hancock & Tyler, 2007; Cutcher et al., 2020). The publications graph for the second circle of journals also showed an upward trend but on a different scale. In 2020, thirty-​four articles mentioning the word ‘phenomenology’ were published in those journals (see Figure 12.2).

Phenomenological Venture of Management    245

36 34 32 30 28 26 24 22 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0

Publications in each year (criteria: see below)

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Publications (total)

Figure 12.2  Research articles with ‘phenomenology’ published each year in second circle of MOS journals

Figure 12.3  Network mapping of ‘phenomenology’ related scholars (citations) in first circle of MOS journals

As the above-​mentioned references are used purely as examples and do not represent the extent of MOS scholars using phenomenological orientations, we applied citation analysis and networks mapping in order to make visible the researchers’ interrelations, i.e. how much they cite each other in articles from the first and second circles of journals (see Figures 12.3 and 12.4).

246    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles

Figure 12.4  Network mapping of ‘phenomenology’ related scholars (citations) in second circle of MOS journals

While this chapter is not the place to analyse those relations, this allows for detecting networks and clusters of scholars who share an interest in phenomenology in MOS, thus further revealing the existence of an invisible college by means of bibliometric methods (Crane, 1972; Vogel, 2012). We then looked at the presence of ‘canonical phenomenologists’, i.e. Heidegger and Husserl in the two circles of MOS journals. For the first circle, searching for articles that mentioned ‘Heidegger’ and ‘Heideggerian’ yielded 263 publications. We scrubbed the results to remove reviews, editorials, proceedings, as well as duplicates of the same work. Although many articles only mention Heidegger in the reference list or in a liminal way, we were able to identify the MOS journals where Heidegger’s concepts had most impact, e.g. through researchers’ articles that use them as a central part of their theoretical framing. This includes OS (Chia & Holt, 2006; Tomkins & Simpson, 2015; Lamprou, 2017), Org. (Yakhlef & Essen, 2012), and JBE (Ladkin, 2006; Segal, 2011). We applied the same approach while looking for mentions of ‘Husserl’ and ‘Husserlian’, resulting in sixty-​eight publications. The most ‘serious’ articles in terms of their connection to Husserl’s phenomenology were found in OS (Sandberg & Dall’Alba, 2010) and Org. (Jones, 2003). Thus, it clearly showed the dominance of Heideggerian views compared to Husserlian approaches as well as the importance of journals such as OS and Org. in disseminating these ‘canonical phenomenologists’ in MOS. Then, we repeated the same search within the second circle of MOS journals. The words ‘Heidegger’ and ‘Heideggerian’ yielded 216 publications, most of which were cited in POM (Helms & Dobson, 2016; Blok, 2020), ML (Holt & Cornelissen, 2014 Willems, 2017), and C&O

Phenomenological Venture of Management    247 (Tomkins & Ulus, 2015). We identified eighty-​two publications for ‘Husserl’ and ‘Husserlian’, which were also found in POM (Sheard, 2009; Rolfe & Segal, 2011), ML (Edenius & Yakhlef, 2007), and C&O (Letiche, 2009). Results for Heidegger and Husserl seemed to be somewhat proportional across the first and second circles, thus confirming the dominance of Heideggerian views and exposing POM, ML, and C&O as important journals for their diffusion in MOS. In line with our objective to investigate the presence of phenomenologies in MOS, we turned to our third category of search words, e.g. ‘phenomenologists and post-​ phenomenologists’. One of our methodological assumptions for this inquiry was that the presence of the author’s name, e.g. ‘Levinas’ or ‘Arendt’, within an article does not necessarily imply the centrality of the philosopher for this article’s theoretical framing. Moreover, we assumed that scholars do not always refer to the phenomenological orientation—​translated in concepts or theoretical views—​of these philosophers and may well be using another aspect of their work which has less to do with phenomenology or whose link is less evident. As we searched for the most relevant articles, we also put the word ‘phenomenology’ next to the author’s name, e.g. ‘Arendt’ plus ‘phenomenology’. Our interpretations of results were also guided by other criteria such as relevance, number of occurrences, date of publication, and loading times, which, combined, enabled us to identify the most representative articles for each journal within the publication period. After filtering out editorials, book reviews, and duplicates of the same work, our final database consisted of 1,913 research articles for the 2000 to 2020 period, including 1,243 articles for the first circle and 670 articles for the second circle of MOS journals. We compiled comparative tables showing the number of articles in which an author is cited at least once for the first circle and second circle of MOS journals (see Tables 12.1 and 12.2). Although those figures might include works that use the author’s theories in a liminal or secondary way, we believe that it provides a clearer picture of which journals each author is most cited in. More specifically, it enables us to identify how certain phenomenologists and post-​phenomenologists have been cited either heavily or poorly in specific MOS journals. For example, in the first circle of publications (Table 12.1) both Levinas and Arendt are heavily cited in JBE with respectively seventy-​five articles (Baker & Roberts, 2011; Hietanen & Sihvonen, 2020) and 102 articles (Cunningham, 2003; Henning, 2011). On the other hand, Schütz (Nilsson, 2015; Cardon et al., 2017) and Dreyfus (Nayak et al., 2020) seem to have received more attention in AMR than other phenomenologists. Finally, the comparative table for the second circle of MOS journals (Table 12.2) provides other insights. For example, it highlights the presence of Merleau-​ Ponty in articles from journals such as ML (Cunliffe, 2018; de Vaujany & Aroles, 2019), C&O (Küpers & Statler, 2008), and GWO (Vitry, 2020). While we cannot analyse those results further in this chapter, it raises the question of whether the logic of journals or the logic of cited authors is most prevalent in conducting this type of investigation. Focusing on the last category, ‘phenomenological themes and expressions’, we identified how MOS scholars from our article database incorporated and exploited

248    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles Table 12.1 Number of articles per phenomenologist (mentions) in first circle of MOS journals Author /​ Journals

AMJ

AMR

AOS

ASQ

HR

JBE JOM JMS OrgS

OS

ORM Org. Total

Max Scheler

0

1

0

2

0

6

0

0

0

3

0

3

15

Henri Bergson

3

9

2

0

11

8

0

5

6

31

1

22

98

Gaston Bachelard

0

0

0

0

5

3

0

0

2

3

0

9

22

Maurice Merleau-​ Ponty

1

5

0

2

18

22

0

5

2

25

4

20

104

Jean-​Paul Sartre

0

0

1

0

9

43

0

6

0

26

2

16

103

Emmanuel Levinas

10

4

8

0

16

75

4

10

27

29

9

28

220

Hannah Arendt

4

4

8

3

22 102

7

7

4

24

0

24

209

Alfred Schutz

3

12

6

3

9

5

8

18

1

14

2

4

85

Paul Ricoeur

2

13

4

1

32

42

0

17

7

31

8

17

174

Michel Henry

0

0

0

0

0

20

0

1

0

0

0

2

23

Hermann Schmitz

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

2

2

Hubert Dreyfus

5

16

9

4

34

8

2

16

8

40

3

11

156

Peter Sloterdijk

0

1

0

0

6

0

0

2

0

5

1

17

32

Total (per journal)

28

65

38

15

162 334

21

87

57

231

30

175 1243

typically phenomenological concepts such as ‘embodiment’, ‘being-​in-​the-​world’, ‘flesh’, or ‘affect’. After finding that there was no significant difference in treatment between the two circles of MOS journals, we looked for research articles that explored these themes regardless of their sources’ assigned circle. For example, searching for ‘embodiment’ within our database led us to identify articles that use a phenomenological perspective to develop arguments on ‘embodied ethics’ (Dale & Latham, 2014; Perezts et al., 2014; Tyler, 2019) or ‘gendered embodiment’ (Haynes, 2008). This is highly related to a sub-​group of feminist-​oriented scholarly work in MOS that refer to Ahmed’s (2006) ‘Queer Phenomenology’ (Jack et al., 2019; Vitry, 2020) or to Diprose’s (2002) notion

Phenomenological Venture of Management    249 Table 12.2 Number of articles per phenomenologist (mentions) in second circle of MOS journals Author /​Journals

BJM

BEQ GWO

AMLE

ML

WES

C&O

POM Total

Max Scheler

0

1

0

1

0

0

0

1

3

Henri Bergson

3

1

4

1

12

0

30

25

76

Gaston Bachelard

0

0

1

0

2

1

14

0

18

Maurice Merleau-​Ponty

2

2

20

5

29

2

23

6

89

Jean-​Paul Sartre

0

9

12

3

10

4

15

23

76

Emmanuel Levinas

6

13

23

8

14

1

18

26

109

Hannah Arendt

2

19

16

6

10

7

16

21

97

Alfred Schutz

1

0

3

4

4

1

4

1

18

Paul Ricoeur

9

3

4

4

18

5

19

17

79

Michel Henry

1

4

9

0

5

0

17

7

43

Hermann Schmitz

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Hubert Dreyfus

1

0

3

13

8

2

5

5

37

Peter Sloterdijk

0

0

0

1

2

0

17

5

25

25

52

95

46

114

23

178

137

670

Total (per journal)

of ‘corporeal generosity’ (Hancock, 2008; Pullen & Rhodes, 2014). In searching for articles focused on ‘corporeality’ or ‘inter-​corporeality’, we also found several MOS publications that employed a phenomenological lens to explore new materialities (Dale & Latham, 2014; Bell & Vacchani, 2019) or to address organizational experiences as relational, situated, and intersubjectively lived (Adamson & Johansson, 2016; Mandalaki & Perezts, 2020). We have also looked for concepts specific to certain phenomenologists including Merleau-​Ponty’s ([1945] 2013) notions of ‘flesh’ and ‘flesh-​of-​the-​world’. This enabled us to understand how MOS researchers could harness and reframe a phenomenological concept for different purposes, e.g. to highlight the ‘transcendence of flesh’ in organizations (Ford et al., 2017: 14), to study empirical phenomena through a ‘fleshy ontology’ (McConn-​Palfreymann et al., 2019: 254), or to understand care relationships as ‘flesh work’ (Cluley, 2020). Moreover, we explored the MOS literature for articles using expressions of Heideggerian terminology, in particular ‘being-​in-​the-​world’, ‘dwelling’, and ‘life-​world’. We discovered such expressions in methodological debates in MOS through articles on interpretative and hermeneutic methods of analysis (Gill, 2014) or on ‘phenomenology-​ based’ ethnography (Vom Lehn, 2018). This has also enlightened us concerning the role of Heideggerian perspective and terminology in the development of ‘strategy-​as-​ practice’ (Chia & Holt, 2006; Chia & MacKay, 2007) or practice-​based views in MOS (Schatzki, 2005; Sandberg & Dall’ Alba, 2009; Yakhlef & Essen, 2012). On the other hand, as we searched for terms such as ‘becoming’ and ‘intuition’ in the literature, it

250    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles became clear that process-​oriented works in MOS drew on phenomenology, especially Bergson and Bachelard, to approach organizational phenomena in a processual manner (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Clegg et al., 2005; Nayak, 2008). This is especially the case in recent studies that draw on processual approaches to explore temporal and spatial dimensions of organizations, thus also revealing the centrality of phenomenological views in such streams of research (Petani & Mengis, 2016; Shortt, 2015; Helin, 2020). Finally, the notion of ‘affect’ is central to the phenomenologies of Henry or Schmitz, for example. Searching for this notion within our database enabled us to highlight phenomenology-​inspired articles that focused on the writer’s reflexivity (Letiche, 2009), on ‘affect-​based’ learning (Painter et al., 2020), or that explored ‘affective atmospheres’ in the context of organizational life (Michels & Steyaert, 2017; Jørgensen & Holt, 2019). To conclude, we have attempted to reveal the presence of phenomenological thought in MOS through looking at occurrences of keywords—​authors’ names, terms, and expressions—​in a selection of journals and within a specific time frame. While we do not claim that this literature review is systematic or exhaustive, our assumption is that it introduces the reader to this volume’s topic in a detailed and original way. More specifically, we believe that our attempt at mapping the ‘invisible college’ of phenomenologies in MOS will help scholars appreciate the diversity of phenomenological approaches and encourage them to engage in these debates. It also informs the reader with regards to the editorial policies of certain MOS journals as well as their impact on the emergence and diffusion of this invisible college. Yet, we acknowledge the shortcomings of our literature review, especially its circumscription in terms of historical period, the geographic location of the selected academic journals, and that some analysis decisions were biased and arbitrary. We would also like to point out the limitations of the bibliometric methods we have used for identifying scholarly work in MOS that are related to phenomenological approaches. It is obvious that an academic article’s author may have been influenced by the ideas of phenomenologists or may have unwittingly used phenomenological rhetoric. On the other hand, we noticed in many articles that researchers adopted phenomenological views to study empirical phenomena without citing a specific author or reference that would allow us to label them as ‘phenomenologically inspired’. Thus, it reduced our ability to study the literature through bibliometric methods and led us to use primarily our interpretive capacity. In addition, we join Vogel in observing that since such methods ‘focus on the formal and tend to neglect informal communication’ (Vogel, 2012: 1021), our literature review misses out on members’ informal communications although considering social actors’ relations and institutional environments seems necessary to understand the depth and extent of invisible colleges (Zuccala, 2005). That would have required us to complement our bibliometric analysis through conducting ethnographic fieldwork, which was not possible in the frame of this chapter. Finally, while results from citation analysis and other bibliometric methods provides us with information relative to historical trends and collective behaviours, our interpretation of them may lack objectivity. For example, the resurgence of certain terms in the literature does not necessarily imply a revival of interest. It could have something to do with a change of institutional barriers or the

Phenomenological Venture of Management    251 switching of editorial teams, which are not directly related to the emergence or popularity of phenomenologies in MOS. Nevertheless, we consider the above-​mentioned research articles, both in terms of quantity and contents, as signs of the discipline’s opening up to phenomenological views.

12.2.2 Exploring the Relations between Phenomenology and other Philosophical Streams in the Context of MOS To continue our exploration, it is important to recall that phenomenology holds a particular place in the MOS landscape because of its strong and differential ontological positioning. In their now-​famous piece, Holt & Sandberg remind us that: ‘As a movement, it has been peculiarly influential precisely because of this vivid variety, particularly its persistent refusal to reduce understanding of ourselves and our world to representations of isolated things through definitive methods governed by generalized theories’ (2011: 216). Having mapped an overarching view of the presence of phenomenology in the MOS literature, we would now like to focus more on the existing relationship between phenomenology and other philosophical currents or schools of thought commonly found within MOS. In fact, there are a number of overlaps between phenomenological thinking and other theoretical approaches. We shall briefly focus on four of them: Neo-​ institutionalism, pragmatism, process philosophy and Marxism, and critical theory. By investigating those overlaps and their emergence in MOS, we aim to identify the intersections and cross-​fertilizations between phenomenologies and other streams, thus highlighting how phenomenology has permeated the field of MOS research in less explicit, but no less important, ways. While presented separately for clarity, it must be noted that sometimes the separations are not as clear-​cut in practice, and that other possible overlaps between and across the four theoretical approaches presented are also infused with phenomenological insights and sensibilities.

12.2.2.1 The Influence of Phenomenology on Institutionalism and Neo-​Institutional Theory In his development of an interpretive approach in sociology, Alfred Schütz ([1932] 1972) heavily relied on Husserl’s phenomenology and more specifically the Husserlian concept of ‘life-​world’ to consider the meaning of everyday interactions that constitute social reality. This laid the phenomenological foundations for interpretive sociology, which had a major role in Berger & Luckmann’s elaboration of the social constructionist interpretive (SCI) perspective (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; see also Searle & Willis, 1995). Building on Schütz and thus on Husserl’s phenomenology, their theory of social construction formed a centerpiece in the development of institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Zucker, 1977), which is frequently used in MOS (Barley &

252    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles Tolbert, 1997; Deetz, 2000). In their article, Meyer & Vaara further present this phenomenological foundation of institutional theory as the ontological basis for placing ‘communicative (inter-​) action at the heart of the social construction of reality in the dialectical processes of externalization, objectivation, and internalization’ (2020: 899). The authors thus argue that the communicative essence of institutionalism stems from the co-​constitution and co-​construction of social actorhood and agency. The social phenomenology of Alfred Schütz was also very influential in Neo-​ Institutional Theory although this phenomenological heritage was rarely recognized (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; see also Greenwood et al., 2008). Yet, scholars have recently returned to phenomenology to question traditional conceptions of actorhood in (neo-​) institutional theory. For example, Voronov & Weber have encouraged ‘a turn to people in institutional analysis’ to account for the ‘non-​institutional part of everyday life’, which includes a human being’s sense of self and capacity for self-​reflection (2020: 874). Coming back to Schütz’ social phenomenology, they refer to the Husserlian concept of ‘life-​world’ to recentre ‘institutional analysis in people and their life-​world, rather than in institutional spheres and fields’ thus bringing back to the forefront the interrelation between person-​centric experiences and institutions, especially through the process of ‘personnification’ (Voronov & Weber, 2020: 876). In a similar vein, but drawing on the works of Cornelius Castoriadis (e.g. 1997), scholars are also seeking to ‘re-​inhabit institutions’ by showing how institutions are rooted in the radical and dynamic force of the imaginary (Klein, 2014; Bouilloud et al., 2020). This provides the standpoint for countering the tendency to analyse institutions and the dynamics therein, by separating the static or functionalist elements from the legitimation and institutionalization processes. By conceiving of institutions as the joint result of a dialectic process between permanent instituting processes and temporally fixed instituted forms, scholars are reinterpreting the importance of indeterminacy (apeiron) when accounting for organizational phenomena. This is crucial when we consider the role of values in institutions, as shown by Klein (2014), who draws on dialectical phenomenology to discuss the limitations of institutional logics perspective (Thornton, Lounsbury, & Ocasio, 2012). This dialectical approach with strong phenomenological underpinnings is also what drives the clinical approach of institutional analysis (Bouilloud et al., 2020) to bridge the ontological divide between structure and agency, and reembedding theories of institutions with a neglected critical dimension, rooted in the social imaginary. Thus, it offers useful insight to see how organizational scholars rely on phenomenological thinking to put forward novel, more experiential approaches to institutions and institutional dimensions such as ideals, ethos, and values (Pratt et al., 2006; Fotaki, 2013; Klein, 2014), identity (Ashorth et al., 2020; Patriotta, 2020), institutionalization as a process (de Vaujany & Aroles, 2018), the imaginary as a dialectical and critical force (Bouilloud et al., 2020), or aesthetics (Creed et al., 2020). This helps to show us how the phenomenological roots of institutionalism and neo-​institutional theories in MOS can be reemployed by scholars to question traditional conceptions and to advance contemporary debates about institutions and legacy or institutionalization and legitimation.

Phenomenological Venture of Management    253

12.2.2.2 Phenomenology and Pragmatism in MOS Historically, Phenomenology and Pragmatism appear to have developed as entirely independent philosophical traditions. Pragmatism, whose origins can be traced back to Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, as well as to Heraclitan and Aristotelian thought, proposes an epistemology based on common sense and scientific experimentation. The movement, which emerged around 1870 in the United States of America, was initiated by thinkers such as Charles Sanders Pierce, George Herbert Mead, William James, and John Dewey. For them, authentic knowledge can only come from inquiry and science while philosophical objects of study—​such as language, reality, and truth—​must always be considered in terms of their practical uses and how they influence habits. As Bourgeois (2002: 569) points out, this emphasis on science has ‘led phenomenologists to view pragmatism as reductionistic, psychologistic, and naively realistic in its interpretation’. At the other end, pragmatists have, in some cases, rejected the phenomenological approaches of experience and intuition as ‘leading to idealism, to subjectivism, or to mysticism’ (Bourgeois, 2002: 569; see also Rosenthal, 1980). Nonetheless, more and more scholars point to the strong convergences between the two streams of research. In the context of MOS, both phenomenology and pragmatism have had a real success in terms of how scholars used their authors and concepts in their theoretical frameworks to study various aspects of organizational life. Yet, to this day, the success of Pragmatism has been more obvious. In contrast to Phenomenology, Pragmatism was ‘never completely absent’ from the field of MOS (Wicks & Freeman, 1998). Farjoun and colleagues also explain that ideas from the classical pragmatists ‘have had a profound if sometimes unrecognized influence on institutional theory, the behavioral theory of the firm, practice theory, sense-​making theory, and competence-​based strategy models, to name but a few’ (Farjoun et al., 2015: 12). Pragmatist focus on experience, habit, trans-​action, and inquiry has inspired Karl Weick’s sense-​making theory (Weick & Roberts, 1993; Weick et al., 2005) as well as Michael Cohen’s work on routine action (Cohen, 2007, 2012). The interplay between these four pragmatist themes informs their ‘temporal view of social practice in which selves and situations are continuously constructed and reconstructed through experimental and reflexive engagement’ (Elkajer & Simpson, 2011: 55). In a similar way, the phenomenologists’ original intention of returning to the lived, embodied experience of everyday life fosters a view of organizations as ‘life-​worlds’ in which activities take place through essentially shared, experiential processes (Husserl, [1936] 1970; Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 2013). Therefore, phenomenological approaches share with pragmatists a view of experience and organizations that is fundamentally anti-​dualist, relational, process-​ oriented, and focused on action and activities. Indeed, while their approaches may differ, it seems that the pragmatist emphasis on action echoes Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenological conception of the gesture: Our view of man will remain superficial as long as we fail to return to the source, to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not

254    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles describe the gesture which breaks this silence. The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world. (Merleau-​Ponty, 2010: 871)

In his book, Lorino thus argues that Pragmatist thought is inherently and radically tied to action in that, for pragmatists, ‘meaningful action is the only way for human beings to be present in the world’ (Lorino, 2018: 58). The pragmatist rejection of thought/​action dualism has influenced organizational scholars to further consider the role of (social) action in human work and management (Simpson, 2009; Llewellyn & Hindmarsh, 2010) while phenomenological conceptions of gesture also formed the basis of recent studies (Bazin, 2013; Reinhold et al., 2018). In their article, Yanow & Tsoukas (2009) build on Donald Schön’s phenomenology and pragmatist inclinations to develop a theory of ‘reflection in action’ in which reflection and practices are intermingled. Although there haven’t been many opportunities for Phenomenology and Pragmatism to converge in the context of MOS, it seems that the study of practices constitutes a potential bridge between these two traditions. This can be exemplified by Küpers’ study of creative practices in organizations analysed through a hybridization of phenomenology and pragmatic inquiry—​a ‘pheno-​pragmatic approach’—​to reconsider practice ‘as an always already embodied and experiential event’ (Küpers, 2011: 122). The compatibility between phenomenological and pragmatist approaches to practice primarily stems from their shared orientation towards process and relationality. Recently, organizational scholars have made visible this ontological proximity between phenomenology and Pragmatism through articles that reconsidered specific themes in MOS. For example, Sandberg & Tsoukas (2020) build on existential phenomenology to question sense-​making’s prevailing ontology, thus showing the possibility for taking a phenomenological approach to pragmatist-​inspired topics in research on management and organizations. To conclude, we find it relevant to point out that one of the characteristics shared by Pragmatism and Phenomenology is that they both developed as changing movements, each proposing a method of inquiry rather than unbreakable doctrines. In that sense, the Pragmatist tradition, like Phenomenology, constitutes ‘a living, evolving philosophy that is still very much a work in progress’ (Elkjaer & Simpson, 2011: 58), thus helping us to further understand their peculiar relationship and its development in the frame of MOS.

12.2.2.3 Moving in between Phenomenology and Process Philosophy: Issues of Temporality and Events in MOS Of all the different philosophical streams in the field of MOS, process philosophy qualifies in many ways as being closest to the phenomenological movement, since it regroups thinkers that appeal to processes rather than substance. We have, to name a few, Alfred North Whitehead, Samuel Alexander, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze,

Phenomenological Venture of Management    255 Nicolas Rescher, Tim Ingold, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Hartmut Rosa, and Peter Sloterdijk. Not tied to a specific method of philosophical inquiry, process studies scholars rely on a wide range of approaches to build their arguments, from conceptual analysis to scientific intuitions, and phenomenological investigations often relying on in-​depth longitudinal studies, but also semiotic analysis, or ethnographic approaches. In short, process organization scholars are inspired, to a certain extent, by phenomenology, in particular by Heideggerian hermeneutics, by Bergsonian conceptions of time and becoming or by Merleau-​Ponty’s indirect ontology and metaphysics of history. So much so that process organization studies are interwoven with phenomenologies, either as key constituents or as key responses to limitations appearing in Cartesian, subjectivist, or analytical philosophies (Helin et al., 2014). Building on the works of Bergson, Whitehead, Bohm, and Deleuze, MOS process theorists such as Chia (2002), Shotter (2005), and Hernes (2014) insist on the constitutive nature of temporality, and advocate for an ontology of becoming. Likewise, most phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies invite us to think of individuals and organizations in terms of representing constant change, situated in a continually evolving temporality. The processual view of a past immanent in the present described by Whitehead is found in Merleau-​Ponty when he considers that ‘each present reaffirms the presence of the whole past [ . . . ] and anticipates that of the whole future’ ([1945] 2013: 495; see also Chapter 6 of this volume). Thus, Merleau-​Ponty’s conception of time echoes with Hernes’ when he describes the ‘living present’ perspective as ‘what distinguishes a living present from an event is that, whereas a living present is defined by the process that takes place, an event is a temporal experience marked by closure’ (Hernes, 2014: 89). This definition informs a view of organizations as inscribed within a continuous agency of interrelated processes across past, present, and future. In that sense, processual and phenomenological approaches in MOS both focus on understanding lived experiences as flows of relationships, allowing for ‘everyday acts of practical adaptation, interpretation, and meaning-​making’ (Nayak & Chia, 2011: 289). Departing from substantialist views, process-​oriented studies thus recognize the changing, unfolding nature of organizations, which is very much in line with the phenomenological approach (Chia, 2002; Nayak, 2008; Langley et al., 2013). This is reflected through the key processual concepts of ‘becoming’ (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), ‘fluidity’ (Cunliffe & Locke, 2020), and ‘relationality’ (Cooper, 2005), which are highly phenomenological themselves. In the frame of MOS, the interrelation of phenomenology and process philosophy is also present in institutional and neo-​institutional theories. As Meyer points out, the phenomenological understanding of institutions is inherently linked to the role of processes: ‘Processes are built irremovably into its framework. Hence, on a conceptual level, phenomenological institutional theory already is highly processual’ (Meyer, 2019: 33). Following a phenomenological logic, institutions and processes are inherently intertwined in the happening of organizational life. For Meyer, ‘institutions are “alive” in their enactment, that is the performance of the scripted

256    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles activity; they are literally “in action” ’, thus leading the internalization of institutions by actors to turn into a process of meaning-​making across past, present, and future dimensions (Meyer, 2019: 36). This type of overlap (or harmonization) between different theoretical approaches seem to fall under what Cloutier & Langley (2020) call ‘conjunctive style of process theorizing’ based on Tsoukas’s (2017) terminology. According to the authors, papers in that category ‘deliberately break down pre-​established distinctions and dualism inherent to the mainstream literature [ . . . ] in order to formulate explicit strong process theoretical contributions’ in organization studies (Cloutier & Langley, 2020: 14). For example, Introna (2019b; see also Mousavi Baygi et al., 2021) proposes a reconception of sense-​making based on Bergson’s and Heidegger’s works on temporal flow as well as Ingold’s (2011) idea of ‘meshwork’. Other ‘conjunctive style of process theorizing’ papers include other attempts by scholars to merge process philosophy with phenomenology or post-​ phenomenologies (Yakhlef, 2010; Tomkins & Simpson, 2015; Lamprou, 2017; see also in this volume Chapters 16, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28), thus providing more opportunities to move in between the two streams across MOS.

12.2.2.4 Phenomenology, Critical Theories, and Post-​Marxism in MOS First of all, it is important to notice that some phenomenologists have been influenced themselves by Marxist thought. For example, the ‘metaphysics of history’ of Merleau-​ Ponty (see Revel, 2015) is partly inspired (among other sources) by the early Marx and Marxist philosophy. The views of dialectics, history, conflicts are undoubtedly rooted within a Marxist heritage, such as in Adventures of Dialectic (Merleau-​Ponty, 1955) and the lectures about Institutions and Passivity (Merleau-​Ponty, 2003). This is hardly surprising since traces of Marxist thought, were ‘in the air’ of the hallways of the École Normale Supérieure d’Ulm in Paris where many phenomenologists and post-​ phenomenologists roamed as students or as professors. Some post-​Marxist streams as the philosophy of space elaborated by Lefebvre (1990) have been in conversation and sometimes, in reaction to (Heideggerian) phenomenology. The critique of space, the domination processes inside urban lived and perceived spaces are obvious experiences for Lefebvre. More recently, Rosa5 (2019) has elaborated a theory of resonance which also draws on phenomenological constructs, in particular the indirect ontology of the late Merleau-​Ponty. Lack of resonance appears as an embodied problem, a broken spatial and temporal reversibility with dramatical societal implications on the macro level, but also deep affective implications at the subjective level. In the field of MOS, both Lefebvre (see Kingma et al., 2018) and Rosa (see Küpers, 2021) have had an influence on ongoing discussions. Likewise, discussions about performativity, gender, embodiment, feminism, posthumanism are also influenced by phenomenological and, most of all, post-​phenomenological thought

5 

Often seen as the third generation of the Frankfurt school. For this chapter, we linked Rosa both to the critical school and to process philosophy.

Phenomenological Venture of Management    257 (further detailed in the next section; see, e.g., Forester, 1992; Faÿ & Riot, 2007; Cunliffe, 2009; Gill, 2015). More recently, the field of phenomenology itself has become explicitly critical with the development of the stream called ‘Critical Phenomenology’ (see, e.g., Childester, 1994; Salamon, 2018; Kinkaid, 2020). This new sub-​ stream represents a cross-​ conversation between phenomenology and post-​Marxist thought. This intersection tends to appear in the field of MOS itself (see Vitry, 2021) both as an invitation for more criticism in organizational phenomenology and as a call for more discussions between Critical Management Studies and organizational phenomenology (Vitry, 2021; see also Chapters 27, 28, and 31 of this volume). Thus, through this exploration we have been able to analyse the presence and absence of phenomenology within the MOS field as well as its points of connection with other equally influential philosophical currents. Far from being incompatible, these theoretical currents share important commonalities with phenomenological thought, so much so that their trajectories are somehow interwoven. More surprisingly, we noticed through this literature review that the ontologies on which these streams rely on are often, in essence, continuities and discontinuities of phenomenological thought. If such associations show anything, it is the strong permeability of phenomenological thinking. Consequently, in addition to developing our understanding of the history of organizational thought, examining further the literature has the potential to prevent potential misunderstandings of phenomenology. Therefore, contrary to a circumscribed and immediately sizeable doctrine, phenomenology seems to show an unexpected philosophical and ontological openness. In the context of MOS, this allows us to examine new objects of study or to approach old topics with a novel, alternative perspective, including by considering phenomenological traditions outside of the Western canonical contributions mentioned above (see for instance in this volume the fruitful links that tie phenomenology to African thought in Chapter 28).

12.3  The Presence of Phenomenology in Key Debates in MOS As we analysed how phenomenology intersects with other streams of thought in MOS, it became clear to us that phenomenologists and phenomenological concepts are at the heart of many debates and major topics shaping the field of MOS. While it is not often used as a stand-​alone framework, phenomenology seems to have had a considerable influence over some of the key theoretical issues and debates in the field, among which theories of knowledge, business ethics, socio-​materiality, and practice-​based views. In that sense, exploring the presence of phenomenology and how it appears in those themes enables us to further describe the interrelation between the different phenomenologies and organizations studies.

258    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles

12.3.1 Contributions of Phenomenological Views to Theories of ‘Embodied Knowledge’ and ‘Embodied Learning’ Many theories of knowledge creation and management used by management scholars, in particular those stressing the importance of ‘embodied knowledge’, borrow key concepts from phenomenologists. Nonaka & Toyama’s (2005) theory of ‘knowledge-​creating firm’ thus refers to Merleau-​Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception ([1945] 2013) to recognize the dialectical nature of human beings who ‘interact with each other to transcend their own boundaries, and as a result, change themselves, others, the organization and the environment’ (Nonaka & Toyama, 2005: 421). Organizational scholars have also called on phenomenological views of the body to ground the knowledge-​construction process within embodied, material life (Pullen & Rhodes, 2015; Prasad, 2016). For example, Segarra & Prasad (2018) draw on posthumanists such as Grosz ([1994] 2020), Barad (2003), and Diprose (2012)—​who themselves build to some extent on Heidegger and Merleau-​Ponty—​to describe theorizing as an outcome of corporeality. According to them, ‘theorizing is very much situated within the province of corporeality’, thus acknowledging the ‘influence of corporeality on all matters of the social’ (Segarra & Prasad, 2018: 560). More recently, scholars have considered how the nakedness of bodies shapes the development of ‘embodied knowledge’ that stems from essentially phenomenological experiences of the field understood through the lens of relationality and eros (Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2020). They largely draw on the knowledge of the flesh, in both a perceptual Merleau-​Pontian sense and in the sense of a phenomenology of life following Henry’s notion of corpropriation or the embodied subjective appropriation of one’s body as traversed by the immanent flow of life. Recently, scholars have also shown the potential contributions of phenomenology in approaches to learning and pedagogy as highly relational, situated, and embodied practices. In line with the practice-​based view that learning is fundamentally a ‘social and precipitative activity rather than merely a cognitive activity’ (Gherardi, 2000: 251; see also Yakhlef, 2010), Tomkins & Ulus (2016) reframe EL as fundamentally relational. They draw on Husserl and his notion of ‘phenomenological attitude’ in their framework to build a novel approach to EL ‘as a space where bodies, feelings and ideas move and develop in intimate relationship with one another; where expertise and experience are not antithetical but complementary’ (Tomkins & Ulus, 2016: 172). In line with a phenomenologically inspired approach to pedagogic activities and management education, Michels et al. (2020) have described the students’ on-​campus experiences as learning atmospheres. Building on embodied and imaginative approaches to learning (Cunliffe & Coupland, 2012), the authors—​in the frame of their experiment—​encouraged students to explore their campus by way of ‘dérive’ in the sense of paying close attention to how their bodies ‘affect and are affected by organizational spaces and their atmospheres’ (Michels et al., 2020: 560; see also Beyes et al., 2017). Moreover, organizational scholars have explored ways in which affective-​based methodologies can be a fruitful

Phenomenological Venture of Management    259 phenomenological path to relearning differently. In that sense, Painter et al. (2020) revisit Stakeholder Theory (SHT) through drawing on Michel Henry’s ([1965] 1987) phenomenological views of ethics and praxis as being rooted in affective subjectivity. Doing so, they show that ‘weaving a phenomenological approach to affect into an experiential pedagogy of SHT can foster affective relationality and normative engagement at the individual, relational and systemic levels’ (Painter et al., 2020: 218). Finally, the increasing digitalization of educational practices through distance learning, online degrees, and MOOCs (massive open online courses) has led organizational scholars to reconsider the role of embodied experiences in ‘post-​digital education’ (Jandrić et al., 2018) and new collaborative spaces (de Vaujany & Aroles, 2018). To investigate the interconnected challenges posed by digitally mediated and remote education formats, Aroles & Küpers (2021) harnessed the Heideggerian concepts of enframing (Gestell) and releasement (Gelassenheit). They show how a phenomenological lens is ‘helpful for exploring how digitalized technologies alter and reconfigure relations and experiences of (embodied) place’ before encouraging a move towards (re)embodied or integral pedagogic and learning activities (Aroles & Küpers, 2021: 2). Therefore, it seems that phenomenology-​ inspired approaches are relevant to reimagining student and faculty experiences given the ongoing shift in higher education and business school to non-​physical and blended learning environments.

12.3.2 Phenomenological Theories in Business Ethics In MOS, past and present debates about ethics, values, norms, and morality have drawn on phenomenological theories from Heidegger (after Kehre), the later Merleau-​Ponty, Levinas, Jonas, Henry, or Diprose. This is especially true for Levinas ([1961] 1991) whose philosophy of alterity has been progressively used by organizational scholars over the past decade, in particular to renew their approach to business ethics (Bevan & Corvellec, 2007; Painter-​Morland, 2010; Dale & Latham, 2014; Rhodes & Badham, 2018; Rhodes, 2019). As explained by Bruna & Bazin (2018: 2), the ‘emergent mobilization of Levinas’ philosophy in management studies constitutes an invitation to practice an ethics of otherness at work’. While business ethics has been traditionally framed as a set of actions that can be judged in light of certain moral criteria and external factors, the Levinasian approach favours a ‘benevolent management’ as well as an ‘ethics of managers’ rooted in ‘the recognition of alterity and trust’. More broadly, phenomenological perspectives and insights have allowed scholars to conceive ethics as practice, i.e. more as ongoing organizational phenomena (Clegg, Kornberger & Rhodes, 2007; Painter-​Morland, 2008; Pérezts, 2012; Pérezts et al., 2015; Rhodes & Badham, 2018). Moreover, organizational studies on ethics have also tapped into Diprose’s (1994) idea of corporeal generosity (Hancok, 2008; Küpers, 2014) or Michel Henry’s phenomenology on ethics as being ‘co-​extensive with life’ (Henry, [1987] 2012: 96) to renew their understanding of ‘endogenous embodied ethics’ as organizational phenomena, which are experienced in the constitution of a collective esprit de

260    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles corps (Pérezts et al., 2015: 219) or in the difficulties of financial controllers to make sense of the demands of their work (Puyou & Faÿ, 2015). Finally, key management theories linking organizing with broader political and societal productions also rely on Arendt ([1959] 1998) and her view of public spaces, freedom, agora, work, action, or politics (Segarra & Prasad, 2018; Gardiner, 2018; Shymko & Frémaux, 2021).

12.3.3 The Influence of Phenomenology on Spatial, Temporal, and Material Approaches in MOS Socio-​materialism is best known for considering the social and the material as being inherently entangled in everyday life (Barad, 2003; Orlikowski, 2007). According to Barad (2003), all artefacts, tools, and technologies result from complex and continuous processes and practices that are socially and historically constructed on the one hand and ‘entangled’ on the other. She defines ‘performativity’ as the process happening through the actual inter-​(or intra-​)actions of these heterogeneous assemblages, thus making it a central theme for scholarly works that embrace an ontology of becoming. Also, we have found that many studies, in line with socio-​materialist views, refer to phenomenological conceptions (mainly Heideggerian and Merleau-​Pontyan) of the embodied subject to approach issues of politics and control (Dale, 2005) or to examine the material dimensions of learning and working (Edenius & Yakhlef, 2007; Hindmarsh & Pilnick, 2007; Yahlef, 2010). Indeed, to go beyond dualistic pre-​conceptions and to consider socio-​materiality in organizational control, Dale asserts the necessity of ‘developing a sociological and phenomenological understanding of ‘embodiment’ [ . . . ] it is the social-​and-​material embodied actor who enacts social control’ (Dale, 2005: 655). Socio-​material approaches to organizational spaces and the spatial dimensions of organizing also have some roots in the phenomenological tradition (Dale & Burrell, 2007; de Vaujany & Vaast, 2014; Bell & Vacchani, 2019; Crevani, 2019; Newlands, 2021). Many spatial theories mobilized in MOS (e.g. Lefebvre, 1990, or de Certeau, 1988) have been influenced, one way or another, by phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies and their view of space and spacing as experience (see Kingma, Dale, & Wasserman, 2018). Therefore, the aforementioned studies constitute an important body of socio-​ materialist works that claim a more or less direct association with phenomenology to inspect the spatial, material, and more mundane aspects of organizational life. Likewise, the temporal turn of MOS has also been fed by phenomenological research about time and temporality and their relationships with instruments, materiality, and embodiment. In this direction, organization scholars have explored topics such as narrative temporality and its relationship with experience (Cunliffe, Luhman, & Boje, 2004), transduction and instruments (Styhre, 2010), entrepreneurial events and their material becoming (see Chapter 22), managing and temporality (Hernes, Simpson, & Soderlund, 2013), temporality and playfulness at stake in organizing processes (Bakken, Holt, & Zundel, 2013), silences as events ordering socially and materially the life of makers (de Vaujany & Aroles, 2018), time as a force beyond organization (Holt & Johnsen, 2019), temporality and subjectivation from the materiality of the present (see Chapters 6, 12, and 23).

Phenomenological Venture of Management    261 Yet, temporal concepts offered by phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies seem to have been rarely imported till now in MOS to study instruments or materiality, but more frequently to explore issues of bodies and embodiment. Notions such as Ereigniss in Heidegger’s thought (see Chapter 4), openness (of the present) and depth in Merleau-​Ponty’s work (see Chapters 6 and 23), or Romano’s (2009) event could be promising ways to explore the instrumental and material expression of organizational experience in relationship with subjectivation. Lastly, in recent years, academic papers that take new-​ materialist or feminist orientations have explicitly relied on phenomenologists like Merleau-​ Ponty and Heidegger to tackle issues of identity building or identity work (Knights, 2006; Alvesson et al., 2008; Tomkins & Nicholds, 2017; Knights et al., 2021) and gender performativity (Tyler & Cohen, 2010; Harding et al., 2021). For example, in their article, Ford et al. (2017) challenge the dominant discursive approaches to leadership. Instead, they advocate taking leadership as a fundamentally ‘corporeal practice’ where leaders materialize themselves as leaders through their bodily presence. Ford and colleagues build on Bollas’ phenomenological conception of ‘character’ and ‘personality’ as ‘woven into one’s physical presence’, which includes their voice, speech, and gestures but also the ‘texture added when occupying spaces and the shape of their absence after they leave’ (Ford et al., 2017: 1564). They also refer to Barad’s posthumanism (2003) and Ladkin’s (2013) phenomenological account of experience to present a view of the leader as emerging as a material presence through ‘inter-​actions between the subject and non-​ sentient actors such as the business suit and the mirror’ (Ford et al., 2017: 1564). In a socio-​materialist perspective, the embodied subject is irreducibly corporeal and social but also ‘in relation to self and others, social representations, psychological projections and cultural images’ (Dale, 2005: 655). In that sense, key debates on the socio-​materialist approach to visual affordances and aesthetic aspects of organizations are also still very connected to their phenomenological roots (Bell et al., 2013; Boxenbaum et al., 2018). For us, debates in MOS about socio-​materiality (or new materialities), posthumanism, and feminist studies would gain from the perspective of phenomenology in order to highlight their central added values, as certain chapters in this volume seek to advance (see for instance Chapter 16).

12.3.4 Phenomenology and Practice-​Based Views in Management and Organizational Research Practice-​based approaches are a distinct yet very pervasive stream of thought in MOS, as what ties them together is the grounding of knowledge in concrete, practical situations (Gherardi, 2000; Suchman, 1987; Strati, 2007). In what has been considered a ‘re-​turn to practice’ (Miettinen et al., 2009), practice-​based views have permeated the field of MOS through different areas of research including Strategy-​as-​Practice (SAP), studies on organizational learning, knowledge management or ethics, as mentioned earlier (see also Gherardi & Laasch, 2021, for a recent incorporation of a posthumanist approach to responsible management as practice). For the phenomenological tradition, practice,

262    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles taken as one’s interaction with the environment, constitutes a key aspect of Heidegger’s ‘being-​in-​the-​world’ or Husserl’s ‘life-​world’ perspective, which has inspired many features of practice theory (see also Schatzki, 2002; Cetina et al., 2005; Holt, 2020). As pointed out by Willems (2018), a phenomenological approach ‘urges us to “turn to the things themselves”, thereby offering opportunities to understand the temporality of knowing and how it emerges through our practical and embodied engagement with the world’ (Willems, 2018: 24). Therefore, we find many studies that draw on both phenomenological and practice-​based approaches to examine how organizational practices are constituted and performed (Sandberg & Dall’Alba, 2010; Yanow & Tsoukas, 2009; Gherardi, 2016; see also Schatzki, 2005, 2006), to adopt a relational view on human agency in everyday life (Chia & Holt, 2006), or to study knowledge through the lens of practice-​based learning (Yakhlef, 2010; Küpers, 2017; Willems, 2018; de Vaujany & Aroles, 2018). As one will notice, many of these approaches are far from being incompatible. On the contrary, numerous studies in MOS are associated with both socio-​materialism and practice-​based views, or they claim to be grounded in processual ontology and practice theory or pragmatism. Because many of these studies have a more or less direct link with phenomenological thinking, we can see how—​through those approaches—​ phenomenology is either clearly visible or more discretely appearing in the field of MOS. Through the exploration of the presence of phenomenology in key debates and topics in MOS, our objective was to highlight the fractures and discontinuities in current phenomenological thought in MOS. More specifically, it allows us to consider how MOS scholars, who rely in one way or another on phenomenological tools, concepts, or perspectives, contribute to a push towards onto-​epistemological debates and ontologies of organizing. Understanding these continuities is particularly interesting for the scholarly community, being at the heart of this tension or oscillation between appearance and ontology, as it may even be a way to keep affects, emotions, and sensibilities while exploring new materialities and posthuman stances.

12.4  The Realized and Future Potential Contributions of Phenomenology in the Exploration of Contemporary Trends and Practices in Management and Organizing 12.4.1 Remote Work, Decentered Management, and the Flow of Work Practices To present the realized and potential contribution of phenomenology in the frame of MOS, we must first introduce some of the main trends and transformations happening in the world of work and management.

Phenomenological Venture of Management    263 One of the most visible trends consists in the normalization of remote and telework with the Covid-​19 pandemic forcing hundreds of millions of workers into teleworking. This has encouraged organizations to embrace even more new hybrid ways of working, enabled by digital technology, and this has multiple consequences on autonomy, control, social relations, separation of work and private lives, and the sense workers and people struggle to make of all these changes while trying to keep some form of connection (Cozza et al., 2021; Vartianien, 2021). In that sense, the world of work has become increasingly remote and decentered (Leonardi, 2020; Aroles et al., 2021), a long-​term trend that emerged with mobile technologies and networked societies, which has accelerated with the pandemic. In that context, the notion of work as being inscribed in a specific time and space is more and more irrelevant for numerous work practices. Instead, while work is becoming a set or bundle of micro-​activities mediated by digital and artificial-​ intelligence-​driven platforms, individuals seem to be all the more captured in a ‘transformative flow of agentic possibilities’ (Hultin et al., 2021: 595). These evolutions may have led certain MOS scholars to move beyond actor-​centric views of work and organizing. Instead, many have started to adopt more posthumanist approaches decentering the human as mentioned earlier, or processual and relational ontologies that enable them to account for the indivisible flow of time and the possibility of multiple agencies in the happening of organizational life (Manning, 2016; Introna, 2019a). For example, Hultin and colleagues (2021) draw on Ingold’s (2015, 2017) notions of flow and ‘meshwork’, i.e. a multiplicity of practices, to conceive a decentered view of work and organizing: ‘By attending to this conditioning flow—​as we go about our daily work practices—​we also undergo our work as we respond to this conditioning flow—​in the way our feet and body attentionally respond to the terrain, when we walk’ (Hultin et al., 2021: 595). This trend of decentered management is inherently linked to how most aspects of contemporary societies have become increasingly mediated by digital technologies, making our personal and work lives even more fluid and dynamic (Mousavi-​Baygi et al., 2021). Therefore, in a world that is obviously becoming more liquid (Bauman, 2013), object and subject of surveillance (Zuboff, 2019), more connected (Catells, 2011), and ever more techne-​grounded (Heidegger, 1977), everything is explicitly, visibly, and sensibly in flow. Phenomenology, which was originally the particular event of a consciousness activated by the idea of an intention towards something, becomes the surface of our entire world, a continuous enactment central to our process of becoming. Appearance surfaces eventfulness. Consciousness then is just the consequence of events, a possibility sometimes opened by events more than its constituent.

12.4.2 Centrality of Time, Space, Instruments, Embodiment, Meaning, and Sense-​Making Given that this Handbook focuses on contemporary trends and practices in work and management, we believe it is important to associate it with the emergence of new ways of working, which we define as ‘a wide range of practices placed on a continuum of work flexibilization and diversification, from remote work to collaborative entrepreneurship and digital nomadism’ (Aroles et al., 2019: 286). In that context, issues such

264    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles as time, space, instruments, embodiment, meaning, and sense-​making are central to new ways of working; while questions of governance, management, and organizing are interwoven with them. Describing these issues as an experience, understanding what they express and their historicity, and exploring these new modes of relationship with the world is key to showing us the realized and potential contribution of phenomenology to MOS. In the following paragraphs, we aim to present some of these main issues in new ways of working and organizing while highlighting the benefits of applying phenomenological thinking to explore them. As mentioned previously, one of the main consequences of Covid-​19 on the world of work has been the accelerated adoption of more flexible modes of working, especially remote, tele-​, and hybrid work. Thanks to the increasing use of virtual networks, mobile devices, and other information-​communication technologies (ICTs), many types of occupations—​especially those referred to as ‘knowledge work’—​seem to be no longer bound to a specific place or time, enabling collaborators to work across geographical contexts and time zones (Felstead et al., 2003; Sewell & Taskin, 2015). And while it was already underway, the pandemic has intensified the ‘virtualization of business information in order to enable a space-​and time-​independent mode of working’ (Kingma, 2019: 391). As the times and spaces of work are less clearly defined, flexibility, asynchronicity, and blurred boundaries between professional and private lives are increasingly becoming defining features of this ‘new world of work’ (Fayard, 2021; Aroles et al., 2021; Leclercq-​Vandelannoitte, 2021; de Vaujany et al., 2021). As with new ways of working, issues of time and space are central in phenomenology or post-​phenomenology, where a conception of experience requires a renewed awareness and reflexivity regarding these dimensions. In that context, many studies in MOS about the transformation or explosion of the spatial-​temporal unity of work and management activities draw on phenomenological or post-​phenomenological analysis to analyse consequences on organizational and individual experiences or practices (Introna & Ilharco, 2004; Hafermalz, 2020). For example, Jørgensen & Holt (2019) use the term ‘atmosphere’ to describe the organization as a ‘technologically mediated spatial struggle to reconcile interior coherent with outward exposure’ (Jørgensen & Holt, 2019: 2). To frame their conceptualization, they rely on phenomenologists Böhme & Schmittz’s approach of space as an existential experience that ‘concerns a sensory-​ affective attunement to moods’ (Jørgensen & Holt, 2019: 4). More generally, all work experience tends to become ‘atmospheric’ in its enactment by managers (de Vaujany et al., 2019). Increasingly, this atmospheric move tends to be part of new managerial practices and new business models valorizing the general atmosphere of a ‘place’ more than a ‘space’ and clear-​cut services linked to a fair paid by stable customers (de Vaujany et al., 2019). Here, phenomenology is particularly relevant to approach complex spatial-​ temporal phenomena in today’s new digitalized, porous, liquid, unbounded forms of organizations and modes of organizing (see Chapter 26 in this volume). Another consequence of the flexibilization of work and management concerns how people in organizations relate to their colleagues, managers, and work communities. During the pandemic, many remote workers experienced feelings of social isolation or

Phenomenological Venture of Management    265 a loss of psychological proximity with their colleagues due to the lack of shared space (Whittle & Mueller, 2009; Waizenegger et al., 2020), leading to a ‘breakdown in the texture of social practices’ including in academia (Plotnikov et al., 2020; Cozza et al., 2021). Despite being hyper-​connected through digital tools, collaborators in distributed settings may struggle in their efforts to maintain informal connections, which may result in a reducing ‘commitment to, and the social cohesion of, the organization’ (Kingma, 2019: 402; see also Aroles et al., 2021). In many ways, digital technologies have changed the fabric of organizations in that ‘value production in the digital age is no longer carried out only by organizational members but increasingly among loose social collectives and flexible networks that are mediated by technology’ (Endrissat & Islam, 2021: 2). In response to the issue of rebuilding a sense of communalization and community among dispersed social collectives, management and organization scholars have recently called for a reimagining of ways of being together and relating to each other from a phenomenological or post-​phenomenological perspective (Cunliffe & Locke, 2020; Cunliffe et al., 2020) and reconnecting with the relational and embodied ethics of the commons despite or beyond its inherent difficulties (Greco & Floridi, 2004; Fournier, 2013; Federici, 2019; Mandalaki & Fotaki, 2020). Beyond the historical moment we are currently experiencing, which could be interpreted by many as an existential crisis of our contemporary societies, the very logic of communalization and togetherness of our ‘organic’ or ‘post-​organic’ societies (following a Durkheimian logic) is in movement. Consequently, this opens a range of possibilities to ‘imagine or even recreate shared existence through phenomenological explorations of what togetherness might mean or become, intellectually but also practically’ (Cunliffe et al., 2020: 1). At a time when digitality immerses our ways of living, working, and theorizing, we believe that phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies can enable scholars and practitioners to formulate and experience new forms of shared existence in finding new ways to relate to others, to researching the field and writing of organizations (Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2020). If, in a dualistic approach, management consists of organizing passive objects integrated into activities and managerial instruments, a phenomenological perspective would instead need to escape the age of ‘excarnation’ that we currently live in and that ‘makes us lose touch with our senses as our experience becomes ever more mediated’ (Kearney, 2021: 2). Phenomenology on the contrary helps us to consider management as organizing reversibilities that could transform each gesture into a solidary and responsible action for the shared future. In this sense, phenomenology’s attention to the flesh is of particular metaphorical importance, because of all the senses, touch is particularly reversible and reciprocal: one cannot touch without being tangible/​touched in return (Kearney, 2021). To conclude, the exploration of phenomenology and phenomenological thinking enables us to develop new ways of becoming that are more sensible and receptive to the roles of bodies, relations, sensations, and emotions in the everyday life of organizations and the conduct of organizing and managing activities. In that sense, phenomenological perspectives resonate more and more with the concerns and issues of our times. The development of artificial intelligence raises issues of perception and cognition that

266    Bancou, de Vaujany, Pérezts, and Aroles are explored in some phenomenological works. The ecological crisis requires a radically new conceptualization of nature, which is also a key topic for phenomenologists. Emotions, efforts, affects, and embodiment are increasingly at stake in work and managerial practices, and also represent key topics for phenomenological and post-​ phenomenological perspectives. Technology and the ways it enacts presence and existence are also at the crossroads of phenomenological and socio-​material theories. Likewise, important contemporary topics such as communities, space, time, materiality, meaning, aesthetics, and sensibility are also strong phenomenological topics. Ultimately, our capacities to engage in, resist, and deploy organizational life are experienced phenomenally.

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Chapter 13

‘In the Fu tu re, as Rob ots Be c ome More Wi de spre a d ’ A Phenomenological Approach to Imaginary Technologies in Healthcare Organizations Jaana Parviainen and Anne Koski

13.1  Introduction Temporality is an essential element in the functioning of all organizations and their institutional environments (Butler, 1995; Fleischer, 2013). In phenomenological approaches to time in organizations, temporality is frequently understood as the medium and the conditions of organizational practices (Chia, 2002; Langley & Tsoukas, 2010). Adopting a processual lens of temporality, organizational phenomenologists have explored the flow, fluidity, repetition, rhythms, cycles, and long-​and short-​term temporal activities in organizations related to the character of changes (e.g. Langley et al., 2013). Inspired by Husserl’s (1991), Heidegger’s (1996), and Merleau-​Ponty’s (1989) views of time, phenomenological discussions on organizational time have stressed the embodied and experiential qualities of organizational life, addressing differences between subjective and objective time spans. So far, the politics of organizational time have attracted little interest among organizational phenomenologists, although the time window created by crisis situations, for example, is often used effectively in the implementation of managerial reforms in organizations (Fleischer, 2013). A politically oriented phenomenological perspective on organizational time is needed to illuminate the dynamics of temporal relationships, interdependencies, and embeddedness that concern anticipation in organizations. In Husserl’s phenomenology, anticipation is called ‘protention’ and refers

278    Jaana Parviainen and Anne Koski to ‘immediate anticipation’ of what will be perceived ‘soon’.1 Applying Husserl’s concept in the institutional and political context, we use the term ‘protentional anticipation’. When protentional anticipation, such as reaching out into the future, becomes a normalized condition, it can be understood as forming a new layer of the unconscious organizational structure and its politics. When protentional anticipation dominates the functions of postmodern organizations, most people do not necessarily notice how managerial acts are primarily intended to control the future. From the managerial perspective, the central aspect of organizational time is future orientation that includes strategies of risk assessment, investments in emerging technologies, and other actions to reduce external uncertainty and move towards an enhanced capacity to cope with potential challenges. Adopting emerging technologies at an early stage and participating in their development have been seen as key solutions to handling an uncertain future in public organizations as well. The future horizon set by emerging technologies is not just a random factor in the operation of organizations; rather, the promise of a ‘better future’ is largely a built-​in feature in all new technologies. We assume that protentional anticipation has become a common state when it comes to the regimes of technology politics that are shaping innovation and technological investments in public organization. Discussing temporal modalities, Barbara Adam (2009) suggests that the domain of the ‘not yet’, which she calls ‘futurity’, has become the main capacity to create and control modern politics. If we consider Adam’s argument from a technology perspective in healthcare organizations, the regime of futurity is strongly linked to imaginary technologies and technological visions in medicine and nursing. Piloting artificial intelligence (AI)-​based tools and care robots have been used extensively in healthcare in recent years. According to Accenture’s (2020) report, 69% of healthcare payers and providers have been involved in experiments. Still, only a few solutions are implemented in healthcare practices. Thus, it can be argued that AI and care robotics in healthcare are still, in large part, extended ‘imaginary technologies’. From the historical perspective, novel technological solutions have often followed the imaginary technologies of science fiction, materializing authorial imagination decades later (or longer; Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). In Mary Shelley’s novel, published in 1818, Dr Frankenstein famously reanimates dead flesh by manipulating muscles with electricity. The defibrillator that sends a high-​energy electric shock through the heart was invented by electrical engineer William Kouwenhoven in 1930. Admittedly, not all imaginary technologies in science-​fiction stories have materialized successfully, despite many attempts. The Jetsons, an animated TV programme from the 1960s, included a robot

1 

Husserl’s (1991) discussion of temporality includes two key concepts—​‘retention’ and ‘protention’—​ that describe the fluidity of past, present, and future in intentional acts. While retention is the process whereby a phase of a perceptual act is retained in our memory, protention is our anticipation of the next moment. Retention is a presentation of that which is no longer before us and is distinct from immediate experience. Thus, the present is registered in a short moment of sense perception between retention and protention. Husserl’s original analysis focuses on retention, and his discussion of protention is less developed (Gallagher, 2017).

Phenomenological Approach in Healthcare    279 maid named Rosie who completed regular household tasks, such as cleaning, cooking, and selecting clothes for the family members. Rosie served as a role model for the Wakamaru domestic robot, which was launched by Mitsubishi in 2005. Unfortunately, the Mitsubishi company failed to sell even one of its robots. Still, the visions of new technologies created by science-​fiction literature and film are reflected in the ways in which innovation and research activities in new technologies are developed (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). Imaginary technologies are related to ‘sociotechnical imaginary’, the concept made famous by Sheila Jasanoff. Socio-​technical imaginary refers to imaginary futures that states or unions of states hope to achieve with technological development. Jasanoff & Kim posit: ‘As an analytic concept, “sociotechnical imaginary” cuts through the binary of structure and agency: it combines some of the subjective and psychological dimensions of agency with the structured hardness of technological systems, policy styles, organizational behaviors, and political cultures’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015: 35). Policy programmes based on socio-​technical visions influence technological design, channel public budgeting, and justify the needs of citizens in terms of technology. They are national or transnational strategies and visions for the future that guide massive technology and science programmes. The recent national and multinational strategies for robotics and AI, so-​called ‘white papers’ or roadmaps, are recent examples of the socio-​technical imagination formulated. Langdon Winner reminds us that equipment and technologies should be assessed not only for their efficiency and productivity, but also for how they are constructed through power and authority. While technological innovations are understood as a key governing force in society, ‘what matters is not the technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded’ (Winner, [1980] 2010, 20). This chapter discusses the kinds of challenges that imaginary technologies place on healthcare organizations related to care robotics and automated decision-​making (ADM). We use the term ‘imaginary technologies’ to consider how strategies for robotics and AI guide expectations of how medical assessments and nursing work will be performed in the future. It is essential to recognize that existing technologies cannot yet achieve the goals set out in the visions. Instead, imaginary futures based on robotics and AI will help justify new investment in research and development (R&D) projects and the digitization of the public sector, which in turn is believed to strengthen the state’s ability to responsibly provide public goods. Despite the expectation that robots will revolutionize human care, the role of robots in care has, so far, remained marginal. One of the indications of this limited role is the very small figures for the world trade of service robots. According to the International Federation of Robotics’s (IFR) recent report, the worldwide sales of assistance robots for elderly or handicapped persons was only US$91 million in 2019 (IFR, 2020). Since the most promising care robots are still in the prototype stage, it is justified to call care robots imaginary technologies. In this discussion, we suggest that this imagination is not neutral but puts pressure on healthcare professionals, organizations, and their development.

280    Jaana Parviainen and Anne Koski Many healthcare professionals and experts agree that AI has the potential to transform the healthcare industry, but AI-​based ADM systems are not seen as mature enough to technically diagnose patient conditions or replace healthcare professionals’ judgements (Palanica et al., 2019). IBM introduced its AI platform (Watson) into the healthcare industry in 2011 with high expectations, but very few collaborations between IBM and healthcare institutions around the world have led to commercial products (Strickland, 2019). One of the reasons is that complex AI systems do not fit the messy reality of today’s healthcare system (Wachter, 2015). However, the emergence of the Covid-​19 pandemic has significantly advanced collaboration between healthcare organizations and the technology industry to scale up solutions based on complex algorithms used in chatbots (Parviainen & Rantala, 2021). Medical experts have been concerned about the situation, identifying many risks with the use of AI-​based tools in healthcare, including patient safety, trust, transparency among participants, data use, privacy, and integration problems with technological systems in other healthcare institutions (McGreevey et al., 2020). One of the biggest threats is that the large-​scale deployment of AI-​based applications could push healthcare into systemic change in which a domino effect brings about massive changes across the system. Central to the politics of protentional anticipation in organizations is the possibility of moving away from current problems within an organization by shifting rhetoric towards the positive promises and manageable risks of emerging technologies. Typically, managerial rhetoric emphasizes ‘known unknowns’ in terms of risks, which refers to the ability to identify and control the unknown. However, researchers have begun to recognize that potentially harmful consequences of emerging technologies cannot be established reliably in advance by investigation, experiments, and risk assessments (cf. Böschen et al., 2010; Gross, 2019). This applies in particular to the deployment of technologies with significant potential for systemic change. In the literature on ignorance, this type of situation is characterized as ‘unknown unknowns’, or nescience, and has traditionally been considered outside the scope of risk management, only to become known in retrospect (Kerwin, 1993; Gross, 2019; Parviainen, Koski, & Alanen, 2022). In this sense, the real benefits or serious problems of large-​scale deployment of AI can become apparent when or if these systems have been implemented in socio-​ technological practices. The chapter is organized as follows. Focusing on ADM and care robots as imaginary technologies in healthcare, we shed light on how phenomenological conceptualizations in organizational contexts can be useful in understanding the complexity of unknowns that emerging technologies bring to organizations. First, we introduce a phenomenological notion of information infrastructure and discuss how technological devices are employed in work. Challenging neutral and external perspectives on technology we consider bodily dimensions within technological systems. In the next section, we consider how AI-​based systems are believed to be able to automate the complex judgement of physicians and what kind of pressure this puts on physicians’ work. Then, we discuss how the repetitive and difficult labour tasks of nurses are to be replaced by care robots.

Phenomenological Approach in Healthcare    281 Through the examples provided, we concretize how the line between imaginary and existing technologies becomes increasingly volatile in healthcare organizations.

13.2  The Phenomenological View of Embodied Information Infrastructures in Organizations In traditional engineering, technology is frequently treated as neutral instruments and tools not dependent on human goals, intentions, interests, or power relations. The phenomenological discussions on technology, including those offered by Winograd & Flores (1986); Dreyfus & Dreyfus (1986); Introna, Ilharco, & Faÿ (2008); and Viscusi et al. (2012), have challenged the many conceptualizations of information technology as formal systems and external, neutral tools in organizations. Technology shapes society and its institutions, not only on the macro level but also on the micro level, modifying embodied practice and relationships with other beings. Winograd & Flores’s seminal perspective on computers in the work context before the internet era indicated how the implementation of equipment produces new social embodied practices in organizations. They stated, The computer, like any other medium, must be understood in the context of communication and the larger network of equipment and practice in which it is situated. A person who sits down at a word processor is not just creating a document, but is writing a letter or a memo or a book. There is a complex social network in which these activities make sense. It includes institutions (such as post offices and publishing companies), equipment (including word processors and computer networks, but also all of the older technologies with which they may coexist), practices (such as buying books and reading the daily mail), and conventions (such as the legal status of written documents). (Winograd & Flores, 1986: 5–​6)

Applying Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, Winograd & Flores recognized the revolutionary impact of computers on work and interpersonal relationships in organizations. Using Heidegger’s concept of being-​ in-​ the-​ world highlights how humans are always already immersed within specific socio-​material worlds and their practices, namely, within relational ensembles involving people, objects, and tools, which give meaning to what they do and who they are (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015). After Winograd & Flores, many phenomenologists have criticized the ways in which management systems and leadership are implemented through information systems so that both management and technology appear as a neutral system (Ciborra, 2004; Viscusi, Campagnolo, & Curzi, 2012; Tomkins, 2020; Aroles, Vaujany,

282    Jaana Parviainen and Anne Koski & Dale, 2021). Ciborra (2004) criticized the strategies of information and communication technology (ICT) in organizations whose main principles are to accelerate data and to redesign business processes at the expense of meaningful work and the well-​ being of employees. He shows how taking a phenomenological approach in considering ICT in organizations allows us to challenge reified notions in technological systems (Ciborra, 2004). The adoption of a ‘phenomenological stance’ allows us to go beyond the traditional idea where ‘neutral’ ICT tools (computers, mobiles, social media platforms, etc.), work tasks, managerial acts, and professionals are seen as different but intersecting phenomena. A post-​phenomenological discussion of technology, inspired by Don Ihde’s philosophy, has emphasized the mediating role of technological artefacts in the sense that the interplay between humans and the world grants things the degree of independence that artefacts deserve (Verbeek, 2005). Technical mediation is localized precisely in these relationships. However, one of the challenges posed to this post-​phenomenological stance is the current forms of digitalization—​complex algorithms and data are rooted in the information-​intensive work where data are produced in the practice, during the practice, and for the practice itself. Data as both technical mediation and artefacts are increasingly controlling the ways in which relationships between people and objects are shaped. As digital devices and the complex algorithms of applications and their data collection dominate people’s daily lives, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify what artefacts are and what the technical mediation is between them and people. It seems that embodied practices and digital devices form a complex ‘messy’ living system without any clear borderlines. Since the current environment of information technologies is constructed as a complex comprehensive living and knowing habitat in work organizations, it makes sense to discuss ‘information infrastructure’. Changing the perspective from networks, relationships, and systems to infrastructure allows for a global and emergent perspective on technologies and information systems in organizations. Ciborra & Hanseth define information infrastructures in organizations in the following way: ‘Information infrastructures can, as formative contexts, shape not only the work routines, but also the ways people look at practices, consider them “natural” and give them their overarching character of necessity. Infrastructure becomes an essential factor shaping the taken-​ for-​grantedness of organizational practices’ (Ciborra & Hanseth, 1998: 321–​2). For this reason, it makes sense to talk about ‘embodied information infrastructures’ in which corporeality is inherent in part of the formation of infrastructures (Parviainen & Ridell, 2021). This also means that information infrastructure not only concerns material artefacts but also embodied habitual practices and routines. Lived bodies, intentionally and unwittingly, individually and jointly, are shaped by and contribute to information infrastructures in work spaces. Thus, for instance, embodied practices formed through computer-​aided desk jobs cannot be detached from the power of global information infrastructure (Parviainen & Ridell, 2021). This posthumanist stance in information infrastructure faces the dilemma that has been central in the (classical) post-​phenomenology, namely, the human-​centred idea that the lived body is the centre

Phenomenological Approach in Healthcare    283 of the world of perception (e.g. Merleau-​Ponty, 1962). Some phenomenologists might find uncomfortable the idea that artefacts are not treated as the environment for lived bodies but that they have been seen to have agency when, for example, algorithm-​driven social media platforms influence users’ voting decisions in elections. In an information-​infrastructure-​based approach, we explore how these particular technologies embed a view of interaction, society, and organization that may challenge core assumptions of human-​centred notions of technology. Thus, current information technology is characterized, as Kallinikos (2012: 69) puts it, ‘by its remarkable ability to deeply penetrate the social fabric and increasingly induce the framing of life issues in terms of data availability, and sensemaking based on data, assembled into meaningful categories and structures by machines’. Furthermore, we aim to identify and exhibit the generic attributes of a work environment, including healthcare organizations, that cut across specific contexts of social and institutional life, namely, the prominence of cognition over perception and the preponderance of information and computational principles in defining reality, as in the case of ADM. The computational principles define the unedited role of representations as outcomes of technological advances of complex algorithmic systems far beyond any human capacity. While non-​human agents play a key role in information infrastructure, this does not mean that human experiences, feelings, or corporeality have become irrelevant. One of the key aspects of the phenomenological approach to information infrastructure is that it highlights unique relations with space, temporality, embodiment, and materiality. Thus, it differs from Latour’s (2005) and his colleagues’ principal idea of Actor-​ Network Theory (ANT). ANT grants human and non-​human actants equal amounts of agency within webs or actor networks. The core of this theory is the principle of radical symmetry between human and non-​human actors, which dissolves modernist demarcations between, on the one hand, living, consciously acting subjects and, on the other, merely instrumental deaf-​mute objects (Müller & Schur, 2016). In the phenomenological approaches, material things become meaningful to us within an intelligible ensemble of other meaningful things (Spinosa et al., 1997; Küpers, 2017). Orlikowski (2007) has stated that ‘bodily-​mediated socio-​materialities’ play a key role in how human agents, objects, and practices come together. For a surgeon in an operating room, instruments, equipment, and specialized colleagues are not a set of externally related objects, but a meaningful, cohesive entity whose joint efforts can lead to a successful operation. In post-​bureaucratic organizations, labour processes have been thought to depend upon a ‘collaborative community’, which is a new kind of social bonding emerging between collaborating actors, for example, in teamwork and in co-​creating activities enabling innovation (Adler, 2015: 452). While demanding cognitive work tasks, such as surgery, are facilitated by support arising from ensembles of meaningful agents, a specific ‘tuning-​up’ effect is needed. From the vitalist, ontology collaboration can be understood as an intercorporeal and intersubjective between-​ space where pre-​cognitive, somatic, and affective attractions and aversions between the collaborators guide the co-​acting (Coole, 2007, 2013). Thus, the socio-​material environment can also be understood as an affective space in the sense that a special kind

284    Jaana Parviainen and Anne Koski of atmosphere, concentration, or affective tuning are required to perform demanding work tasks, such as brain surgeries. Emotions and atmospheres between members of an organization allow them to perform work tasks (or not), to be gatekeepers to knowledge, or to respond (or not) in a certain way. A further specific aspect of global information infrastructure is that our experience of the here and now in dealing with them has increasingly lost its immediate spatio-​ temporal referents and has become tied to and contingent on actors and actions at a distance. We are not just talking about remote connection; in terms of temporality, the development of healthcare technologies is determined by many visions of the future and different aspirations about what the technologies are intended to do. Understanding spatio-​temporal referents as rooted in emerging technologies provides a way to overcome the above-​mentioned ‘neutral view’ of technology and recognize how embodied practices are shaped by the future visions of information technologies at work. Taking these issues into account, we next consider how the deployment of imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations modify working conditions.

13.3  Rationality Drives AI-​Based Imaginaries in Healthcare Organizations Hospitals and healthcare institutions have faced turbulence caused by New Public Management and New Public Governance, bringing managerialism and the notion of patient-​centred care forward. Both doctors and nurses have adopted managerial responsibilities besides their medical duties (Martin et al., 2021). Doctors have often resisted the professional hybridization more persistently, while nurses have adopted more easily micro-​manageable and various information systems integrated into work processes, which has also increased the power of nurses in healthcare organizations (Rivard, Lapointe, & Kappos, 2012; Carvalho, 2014). Various clinical information systems and electronic medical records (EMRs), which transform the division of work between the medical, nursing, and managing professions, have often first been introduced into organizations under the pretext of economic savings or as a solution for the lack of staffing. Though the line organization model, hierarchically organized and governed by formal procedures in the healthcare sector, has changed in recent years, the rational core of clinical practices has hardly diminished in medicine. In medical diagnosis and clinical work, one of the main goals has been to develop mathematical and statistical probabilities to achieve optimal medical triage and treatment outcomes. Since the 1950s, there have been efforts to make models for physicians’ diagnostic problem-​solving and to systematize physicians’ medical knowledge (Fischer & Lam, 2016: 24). In the 21st century, AI is expected to improve diagnostics

Phenomenological Approach in Healthcare    285 and treatment by developing systems that could automate clinical work. The design principles of statistical probabilities are based on the idea that AI technologies should mimic human decision-​making by improving data processing and inconsistencies. These systems are computer programs that are ‘programmed to try and mimic a human expert’s decision-​making ability’ (Fischer & Lam, 2016: 23). In the guidelines, provided by the European Parliament, ADM refers to the process without any human involvement by making a final decision based on the data it receives (Article 29 Working Party (A29WP): 20). Although automated systems in healthcare, such as consulting chatbots, are not reliable enough to be left to operate independently, the pursuit of automation in physicians’ diagnostics and treatment can be seen as one form of imaginary technology in the health sector. The European Union (EU) has signalled its willingness to invest heavily in the adoption of AI technologies in the healthcare sector (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, 2017). In a resolution on ADM, the European Parliament noted that it: welcomes the potential of automated decision-​ making to deliver innovative and improved services to consumers, including new digital services such as virtual assistants and chatbots; [it also] believes, however, that when consumers are interacting with a system that automates decision-​making, they should be properly informed about how it functions, about how to reach a human with decision-​making powers, and about how the system’s decisions can be checked and corrected. (European Parliament, 2020: 3)

The usefulness and problems of AI technologies are usually viewed from the perspective of citizens and services, whereas, for example, the effects of AI on the work of professionals are ignored. The AlgorithmWatch Association (2020: 19) criticizes this resolution in its report by saying that, ‘throughout the whole document, risks associated with AI-​based technologies were more generally labelled as “potential”, while the benefits are portrayed as very real and immediate’. The emergence of the Covid-​19 pandemic has significantly advanced the development of telehealth and the use of existing health-​oriented chatbots in the diagnosis and treatment of the Covid-​19 (AlgorithmWatch, 2020; McGreevey, Hanson, & Koppel, 2020). Before the Covid-​19 crisis, discussion about the benefits of ADM in healthcare in general concerned the efficiency that novel emerging technologies could potentially achieve. For instance, in the case of a digital health tool called Buoy or the chatbot platform Omaolo, users enter their symptoms and receive recommendations for care options. Both chatbots have algorithms to calculate input data and become smarter when people use these platforms; they are currently still being developed. More advanced ADM systems in healthcare are promoted by arguments that algorithm-​driven systems can free up time for overworked professionals (Topol, 2019), reduce the risk of errors (Paredes, 2018), provide predictive analysis based on historical and real-​time data (Pryce et al., 2018), and increase overall efficiency in the public sector (Accenture, 2018). Algorithms are said to make more objective, robust, and evidence-​ based

286    Jaana Parviainen and Anne Koski clinical decisions (in terms of diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment recommendations) than humans can ever provide (Morley et al., 2019). There are practices of logical reasoning and formal modelling, such as playing chess, that are relatively easy to turn into algorithmic forms. Medical diagnosis is not one of those practices since decision-​making requires ‘prudence’, which is regarded as ‘a mode of reasoning about contingent matters in order to select the best course of action’ (Hariman, 2003: 5). Clinicians make diagnoses in a complex manner that they are rarely able to logically analyse (Banerjee, Jadhav, & Bhawalkar, 2009). Phronesis, prudence, and practical wisdom refer to the flexible, interpretive capacity that enables physicians to determine the best course of action when knowledge depends on circumstances (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2005; Montgomery, 2006). Experienced doctors as prudential actors are capable of working under the pressure of the complex medical information infrastructure that requires them to follow precise embodied routines and strict ethical standards and to apply the wide pool of scientific knowledge. Powell (2019: 2) explains this by saying that ‘what doctors often need is wisdom rather than intelligence, and we are a long way away from a science of artificial wisdom’. As the information infrastructure of healthcare is becoming increasingly complex due to AI, presumably physicians are concerned with the rise of ethical issues in patient care, worried about the additional burden of emerging technology, and dissatisfied with the limited respect for their work. The Physician’s Charter on Medical Professionalism, launched in 2002 for the new millennium, identified several threats to physician professionalism, including technology, market forces, healthcare system strain, and broader sociological shifts in the role of physicians in society (ABIM Foundation, 2002). When physicians anticipate the future regarding the potential effects of AI tools on their decision-​making, they consider the information system as a whole (i.e. information infrastructure and its potential changes) as part of their work. It is not easy for them, or even for specialists, to assess how the implementation of new technologies into existing technological infrastructure will transform its dynamics and their work conditions; the mere lack of knowledge of the upcoming changes can increase their stress levels. In a recent study, Dzeng & Wachter (2020) found evidence of insidious moral distress resulting from physicians’ inability to act in accordance with their individual and professional ethical values due to institutional and societal constraints. One of the reasons for the causes of healthcare professionals’ burnout is the rapid adoption of EMRs. These constraints have been exacerbated by changes in healthcare and society. This discontent amplifies a growing rift between the profession’s ethical ideals and reality, and possibly also regarding an imaginary future with more complex technologies. When it comes to AI technologies and their increasingly rational standards and automation that are being implemented in healthcare organizations, it is easy to conclude that new solutions fit perfectly into existing ideals of rationality and information technologies in hospitals. Belief in the superiority of AI and technological solutions produced using ADM systems, including many semi-​automated chatbots, can amplify the project of rationality and automation in clinical practices and alter traditional decision-​making practices based on epistemic probability and prudence.

Phenomenological Approach in Healthcare    287 AI and complex algorithmic systems represent a growing resource of interactive, autonomous, and often self-​learning (in the machine-​learning sense) agency, potentially transforming cooperation between machines and professionals by emphasizing the agency of machines (Morley et al., 2019). Since AI systems are involved in cognitive-​discursive-​oriented technological systems, embodied practices remain less prominent. Decision-​making in medical practices is a partly embodied and partly cognitive process. It is an embodied process insofar as the body forms a sensorimotor loop with patients, colleagues, and objects with which the agent interacts in the unfolding situation at hand (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015). Expertise, in general, requires intersubjective circulation of knowledge, that is, a pool of dynamic knowledge as well as intersubjective criticism of the data, knowledge, and processes. The deployment of chatbots in healthcare, such as consultation, may impoverish the performance of work routines and diminish face-​to-​face interaction between clinicians and patients. Insofar as routine activities have been sufficiently bodily practiced, people have come across enough cases and, thus, their body schemas and shared organizational understandings are likely to have been well-​developed. Insufficient consideration regarding the implementation of ADM in healthcare can lead to poor professional practices, creating long-​term side effects and harm for professionals and their patients.

13.4  Care Robots as Imaginary Technologies in Nursing When AI-​based systems are believed to be able to automate the complex judgement of physicians, care robots will likely replace the repetitive and hard-​labour tasks of nursing, either autonomously or semi-​autonomously, while also growing emotional interactions with patients. Over twenty years ago, robotics guru Joseph Engelberger (1997) forecasted that a multitasking care robot for replacing nursing work tasks and assisting older people at home could soon be developed and manufactured (Engelberger, 2000). Despite the vast amounts of effort and money invested in the development of and research on care robotics over the last twenty years, no such robots have been created that could supersede nursing labour in assisting disabled or older people in their everyday activities. One of the main bottlenecks in developing useful care robots is the lack of sophisticated robotic limbs that could help people with, for example, dressing, bathing, and toileting (Van Aerschot & Parviainen, 2020). One barrier is related to the safety criteria established for health technology in which all kinds of moving or lifting robotic limbs are inspected from the perspective of the risk of injury to vulnerable patients. The problems in developing the robot’s kinematic capabilities to meet the safety standards of multitasking robots have led designers to simplify their goals. Social robots are designed to elicit human emotions and perform emotional reactions to bond with human users (Turkle, 2011), applying the principles of affective computing (Picard, 2015). Examples

288    Jaana Parviainen and Anne Koski of such robots used in care sectors are the pet-​like robot, Paro, and the humanoid robot, Pepper. When a Pepper robot was placed in the lobby to guide customers in Kalasatama, a new health centre opened in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018, the director of Health and Substance Abuse Services of the City of Helsinki reminded visitors that the acquisition of a robot was related to Helsinki’s strategy on improving the quality of public services for residents and visitors (Helsinki City, 2017). The director stressed that renewable services should be produced digitally with the support of AI and robotics (Nelskylä, 2018). The purpose of using a Pepper robot was to discover what kind of value the robot can bring to customer service in healthcare and social work. Pepper was programmed to guide customers to use check-​in machines, direct customers to the correct waiting area, receive feedback, and hint at the location of the nearest restroom. The director defended its high price (€50,0000 plus €1,000 per month), though its benefits for customers remained obscure in the opening ceremony: ‘In the future, as robots become more widespread, prices will certainly fall. You have to start somewhere if you want to be on the crest of digitalization and take it forward’ (Nelskylä, 2018). The director’s utterance exposes how protention and futurity have become a common state when it comes to robots or AI-​driven technological investments in healthcare organizations. The domain of the ‘not yet, but soon’ has become the main way to justify the rationality and functionality of equipment that is constantly being developed as part of the operations of organizations. In other words, the devices do not need to be ready-​made or their intended use entirely clear at the time of purchase, but with sufficient experimentation and development, the devices will take on their final shape and become embedded in the organizational environment (Parviainen & Coeckelbergh, 2021). This is convenient for the technology industry, as it can produce ‘semi-​finished’ devices in the sense that embodied practices around these devices are developed by professionals and customers through a so-​called ‘culture of experimentation’ (Lindgren & Münch, 2016). However, such an experiment can become very costly if it erodes existing (good) work practices but does not build new ones, especially if robots are ultimately not profitable to deploy. Social robots like Pepper can hardly provide significant help in automating or supporting the physical work of nursing. Instead, they seek a place and way of operating within customer interfaces of health organizations. Still, for instance, the Guardian reported in 2016 that ‘a robot could be grandma’s new carer’, using the Pepper robot as the illustrative photo. This type of robot does not have a motor ability that is fine enough to assist elderly people in their daily activities. Using the Pepper robot to illustrate helping the old creates a false impression of the care robot’s abilities. Another example of providing fallacious views on the capabilities of today’s care robots is to illustrate news stories using images of robot prototypes, as was the case in another Guardian story published in 2018. They stated, ‘Japan lays groundwork for boom in robot carers’, and used—​perhaps accidentally—​the photo of a suspended robot project, a Japanese prototype known as ‘Robear’, which was depicted lifting a woman for a demonstration at RIKEN-​TRI in Nagoya. The robot prototype was developed to transfer frail patients from a wheelchair to a bed. However, the newspaper did not state that RIKEN-​TRI and

Phenomenological Approach in Healthcare    289 its Center for Human-​Interactive Robot Research (RTC) finished its scheduled research term and was dissolved at the end of March 2015.2 Thus, the development of the robot had already been suspended three years before the Guardian story was published, and it was clear when the photo was run that the lifting robot would never be launched on the market. The challenges caused by the small number of care robots are clearly visible in experiments and the research design of care robots for the elderly. It is likely that research teams will acquire robots for experiments if affordable and functional equipment become available. Instead of physical robots, they use ‘imaginary robots’ in inquiring about nurses’ and patients’ attitudes towards robotics, known as robot-​acceptance surveys. Most researchers utilize pictures of robots, narratives, audio-​video material of robots, and robot prototypes to elicit respondents’ opinions of care robots (e.g. Pino et al., 2015; Hall et al., 2017; Khosla et al., 2017; Pew Research Center, 2017; Coco et al., 2018; D’Onofrio et al., 2018). For instance, a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center (2017) shows how the narratives used in the questionnaire lean on Engelberger’s futuristic vision without providing concrete examples of care-​robot solutions. In this case, respondents were asked to read and reply to the following scenario: Today, many older adults move into assisted living facilities when they can no longer live independently. In the future, people could be provided with a robot caregiver that would allow them to continue living in their own home as they age. This robot would be available 24 hours a day to help with household chores, test vital signs and dispense medication, or call for assistance in an emergency. It would also have conversational skills and could serve as a companion for people who live alone.

This narrative of imaginary care robots shows that there is a vast gulf between the visions of future robotics and the existing complex and hectic environment in which nurses do their work. The complexity of social, emotional, and physical human needs and processes seem to be somewhat distant or difficult to capture in the design of robots. The neediness, frailty, and vulnerability that come with decreasing physical and cognitive capacity are not easy, or perhaps not at all possible, to meet with care robots. Professionals who have learned from experience how to respond to patients in vulnerable conditions have developed embodied and affective capacity and tacit knowledge to estimate how to use their bodily skills in collaboration with patients. When they need to learn bodily practices while using equipment, bodily inscribed tacit knowledge sometimes makes it harder to switch off or unlearn these skills compared to cognitive skills (Hindmarsh & Pilnick, 2007; Wright, 2019). In addition, nurses suffer from ethics stress when they have been challenged by value-​laden decisions related to technology, such as, the limits of interventions, patient autonomy, and quality-​of-​life issues (Raines, 2000). Ulrich et al. (2007) found that nurses encounter difficult ethical issues in patient care and feel frustrated or angry when they cannot resolve an ethical issue due to the 2 

For more information, see http://​rtc.nag​oya.riken.jp/​index-​e.html.

290    Jaana Parviainen and Anne Koski bureaucratic system in healthcare organizations. It is likely that the potential entry of new devices, such as care robots, will not reduce but rather increase ethics stress.

13.5  Conclusion This chapter has used a phenomenologically informed approach to show that the implementation of new technologies in an organization is a complex process in which—​ particularly during crises—​new technologies are introduced into professional work. Based on phenomenological insights, the constitutive roles of situated embodiment and interrelational connections for performance have been outlined. Such extended understanding offers new perspectives on bodily as well as pre-​conscious expectations that are relevant to imaginary technologies. When professionals are engaged in performing their work, their bodies are always actively involved, no matter how demanding the cognitive effort is. Healthcare professionals conduct their work tasks from within the framework of ‘practical rationality’; they seek to grasp how sense-​making is accomplished by situating it within the ‘unfolding relational whole’ of the primary purpose of the organization (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011: 352). The phenomenological view of embodied information infrastructure allows us to consider the complex technologies that are intertwined with clinical practices in healthcare professionals’ work. Such an approach can help to clarify questions such: how justified is the rhetoric of the cost-​effectiveness and high-​quality requirements associated with AI technologies if existing healthcare technology systems are burdening staff? Paradoxically, potential consequences of emerging technologies cannot be reliably confirmed by research or risk analysis, thus, they remain in the category of the unknowable. We have argued that protentional anticipation dominates the functions of public healthcare organizations, but not all people necessarily recognize how managerial acts are primarily intended to control the future. Using the concept of imaginary technologies, we suggested, first, that existing technological infrastructure shapes professionals’ work; and, second, that the strategies of future technologies reconfigure our conceptions of the consequences that the use of emerging technology in health organizations may have in the future. Professionals do their work under the pressure of different visions and expectations for the future, feeling ethics stress regarding these potential changes. To offer a more coherent and integrative conceptualization of what defines this implication process and how it is connected with professional work, we used two examples: ADM systems and care robotics. Their potential impact on reconfiguring the information infrastructure helps us to more effectively recognize and understand the multiple, emergent, and shifting socio-​material assemblages entailed in contemporary organizing. National governments, the EU, and other international actors are important players in building the socio-​technical imagination of robotics and AI, but they need other actors to steer funding in the desired way and to shape citizens’ perceptions in favour

Phenomenological Approach in Healthcare    291 of their visions. The media has an important role to play in this task, as it presents to the public the astonishing possibilities of the technology of the future. The ‘hype’ and ‘hope’ built around new technologies, with their potential and their horrific images, have a significant performative dimension in shaping citizens’ perceptions. We argued that, in the media, the presentation of care robots as the saviour of care for the elderly is common even though no devices are available that would bring significant benefits to care. When the media frequently report on individual care-​robot experiments or uncertain prototypes under development, the purely speculative possibility that robots may eventually be of some use in the care of the elderly begins to be understood by the public as fact. The presentations of imaginary technologies based on prototypes and real technologies in use are easily confused in people’s minds. Socio-​technical imagination has proven particularly useful for decision-​makers who believe that technologies solve societal problems. Where appropriate, it serves both as a policy objective and as a tool to build its legitimacy. It is difficult to oppose this prediction because, based on socio-​technical imagination, one cannot prove it to be false. Visions of alternative futures in human care without the support of emerging technologies are rarely provided in white papers or roadmaps. Given the political attractiveness of socio-​technical imagination and the risks and instabilities that inevitably accompany it, an understanding of socio-​technical imagination is an essential part of R&D initiatives in robotics and AI. The discussion of imaginary technologies in the context of healthcare organizations thereby sharpens the focus and extends the scope of the emerging-​technologies perspective, helping us to clarify conceptual ambiguities and to better locate the visions of roadmaps and white papers on public healthcare and our expectations for it. It is hoped that the phenomenological approach proposed in this chapter will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding and critically oriented research on robotics and AI in healthcare organizations.

Acknowledgements This work forms part of the ‘Struggling with Ignorance: Negative Expertise and the Erosion of the Finnish Information Society at the Turn of 2020ʹ (NEGATE) research project, which is funded by the Academy of Finland (Grant No. 316112).

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Chapter 14

M ax Schel e r’ s Ph enomenol o g y of Per sonalism and Pa ra d ox Implications for Leadership Relations Leah Tomkins

14.1  Introduction: Max Scheler in the History of Phenomenology Max Scheler (1874−1928) is not always included in anthologies of phenomenology, but he was once considered one of the most brilliant phenomenological thinkers in Europe. Husserl appointed him as one of the founding editors of his Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), although the relationship between Scheler and Husserl proved to be a complex one (Staude, 1967; Zahavi, 2013). Heidegger reputedly considered Scheler one of the very few who really appreciated the radical reformulation of metaphysics in his analysis of Dasein (Gorevan, 1993). Scheler also had significant influence on later phenomenologists, notably Stein, Schütz, Merleau-​Ponty, and Sartre. Sartre (1983: 88) credits Scheler for having introduced him to the significance of values and the ‘given-​ness’ of morality: Reading Scheler made me understand that there existed values. Basically, until then, quite absorbed by the metaphysical doctrine of salvation, I’d never really understood the specific problem of morality. The ‘ought-​to-​be’ seemed to me to be represented by the categorical imperative; and since I rejected the latter, it seemed to me that I rejected the former with it. But when I’d understood that there existed specific natures, equipped with an existence as of right, and called values; when I’d understood that these values, whether proclaimed or not, regulated each of my acts and

298   Leah Tomkins judgements, and that by their nature they ‘ought to be’: then the problem became enormously more complex. . . The only thing left was to begin everything over again.

Sartre’s beginning over again chimes with Glendinning’s (2007) view of the phenomenological tradition as a whole. Glendinning suggests that what unifies the various strands of phenomenology is a concern for the question of where and how to begin. The leading phenomenologists were all addressing the issue of what had been lost with the modern Western preoccupation with the methods and achievements of the natural sciences, and the resultant alienation of human beings from themselves. As Glendinning (2007: 2) puts it, ‘the question of how, in our time, even to begin in philosophy is one which phenomenology is particularly alive to, particularly shaped by’. Phenomenologists are thus searching for the entry point to a philosophical analysis of what we in some sense already know, minus the baggage of theoretical frames and explanations. Husserl’s ‘back to the things themselves’ is frequently cited as the rallying cry for this movement. Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein shifts the philosophical gaze towards the being of Being, that is, towards the originary conditions for human beings being encountered in the first place. The question of where and how to begin is thus a grounding concern in the phenomenological tradition. For Scheler, it is with ethics, values, and feelings that our philosophical inquiry begins. These are not an adornment or an afterthought of human experience; they have a priori status. As he explains: The emotive elements of spirit, such as feeling, preferring, loving, hating, and willing, also possess original a-​priori contents which are not borrowed from ‘thinking’, and which ethics must show to be independent of logic. There is an a-​priori ordre du coeur (system of the heart) or logique du coeur (logic of the heart). (Scheler, 1973: 63)

With Scheler, phenomenology becomes focused on the bearer of ethics and the experiencer of feelings, namely the person. This is a move which is indicated in the subtitle of his most ambitious work, Formalism in Ethics and Non-​Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism (Scheler, 1973). It highlights one of the key axes of tension between Scheler and Husserl; whereas Husserl was inspired to investigate ‘pure’ consciousness, Scheler argued that consciousness has no life other than that bestowed by and through the person. Underpinning much of Scheler’s work is a ranking of human values, ranging from holiness through values of the mind and the spirit (geistige Werte), vitality, utility, and finally sensibility. Each of these values has a corresponding set of feelings. In modern society, the lowest values of utility and sensibility dominate, with their corresponding motivational dimensions of success-​failure and comfort-​discomfort. Indeed, Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, drew extensively on Scheler’s system of values to highlight what is lost when society defines what is good solely in relation to what is either useful or pleasurable (Colosi, 2008). This is not to say that utility and sensibility are bad; rather,

Phenomenology of Personalism and Paradox    299 that they offer much more transient fulfilment than the higher values. Moreover, the lower values tend to work against human togetherness which, for Scheler, is the human race’s highest hope and orientation (1973). In short, in Schelerian phenomenology: ‘It is the ranks of values that are the polar star of mankind’ (1987: 142). Scheler is a philosopher of considerable breadth and vitality, and he is therefore not always easy to pin down. His work can be classified as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, ethics, theology, political theory, inter alia. This resistance to easy categorization may help to explain why Scheler has not featured very prominently in organization studies, despite the fact that his work is relatively accessible and lends itself well to application.1 Scheler seems to have lived his life embodying, not just theorizing, phenomenology’s emphasis on what is given to us in intuition. Drawing on accounts from Scheler’s own students, Staude (1967: 255) suggests that ‘what Scheler lacked in consistency he had in immediacy, and herein lay his appeal’. In this chapter, I take a more complimentary view of Schelerian ‘inconsistency’, suggesting that it provides a powerful framing for the phenomena of organization when understood as paradox. Zucker (1927) relates that much of Scheler’s teaching approach was based on an explicit engagement with paradox, and the ways in which the tensions of paradox might (or might not) be relieved through the different mechanisms of intellect and intuition. In this chapter, I use an understanding of paradox as an either/​and (as opposed to either/​or and both/​and) approach (Jing & Van de Ven, 2014). I thereby point to a potentially fruitful relationship between Scheler and organization studies, especially in light of the success of ‘paradox theory’ (Cunha & Putnam, 2019). I explore three Schelerian themes: The phenomenon of ressentiment; the connection(s) between exemplars and leaders; and the relationship(s) between self and others. I propose that Scheler offers valuable insights for the intersection of ‘pure’ phenomenological philosophy and the more ‘applied’ discipline(s) of organization and leadership studies. I endeavour to orientate these insights towards some of the key themes of phenomenology, principally those of Husserl and Heidegger.

14.2  The Dynamics of Ressentiment Ressentiment is more intense and more enduring than its closest English equivalent, resentment; and the use of this French word is deliberately designed to conjure up something slightly dubious because it is foreign. Ressentiment hinges on a bitter and malevolent impotence, fuelled by a sense that one is on the receiving end of life and that others are in some way to blame for this. Scheler was greatly influenced by Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), in which ressentiment is a key feature of slave morality.

1  Scheler’s

manuscripts have also not attracted the same scholarly editorial attention as those of his more famous phenomenological colleagues. See Frings (1997).

300   Leah Tomkins This is not related to the physical slavery of antiquity, but a more contemporary slavery which involves having one’s values, instincts, and urge for self-​expression repressed, i.e. the Nietzschean slave is not free to truly be himself/​herself. Whilst those who fare well in the world are able to say ‘yes!’ to themselves, to others, and to life itself, the Nietzschean slave ‘says “no” on principle to everything that is “outside”, “other”, “non-​self ”: and this “no” is its creative deed’ (Nietzsche, 1887: 20). The bile of ressentiment is directed not just against concrete others, but against everything that can be constructed and denigrated as Other. Its ‘no!’ involves an inversion of values in which everything that is Other is reconstructed as bad in order for the self to be experienced as good in comparison. In this way, the slave’s ‘creative deed’ converts impotence and self-​sacrifice into virtue and accomplishment. Paradoxically, the identity that results may feel liberating and empowering even whilst it locks the enslaved self in a permanent incarceration. Scheler’s ressentiment both develops and challenges a number of Nietzsche’s themes, not least because he insists that Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity for fostering slave morality represents a fundamental misreading of the Christian Gospel. Scheler’s own take contains a number of interesting ideas for organization studies, including his insistence that ressentiment is not just something experienced by those who are socially and/​ or institutionally disadvantaged, but something that can and does afflict the supposedly powerful, too. Scheler’s ressentiment directs our attention not just to conflicts between overtly powerful and powerless people (as, for instance, in a genealogical reading of Nietzschean nobles and slaves), but also to other forms of conflict and discrepancy, including those between prevailing and receding ideas and between rhetoric and reality.2 As Scheler (1915: 28) explains, ressentiment operates according to an: ‘Important sociological law that this psychological dynamite will spread with the discrepancy between the political, constitutional, or traditional status of a group and its factual power’. Thus, Scheler urges us to be alert to discrepancy between actual and assumed power, because any such discrepancy lends itself to a vindictive comparison—​the ‘creative deed’—​which both reflects and fosters ressentiment. This is especially the case if the discrepancy is unmentionable, i.e. if it goes against dominant discourses of what is right and proper to say. This is because ressentiment can burn itself out if it finds a healthy outlet, but it festers within if it cannot. Interestingly, Scheler’s ressentiment presages the contemporary ‘cancel culture’. Of particular importance for his status as a phenomenologist is Scheler’s view of how ressentiment is fuelled when there is no direct experience of the world. In a sense, he inserts the notion of ressentiment in between the Husserlian phenomenological and natural attitudes. This is one way in which the morality of our emotions addresses the question of where and how to begin. As he explains (1915: 41):

2 

In passing, it is worth noting Scheler’s foreshadowing of Foucault’s power/​knowledge.

Phenomenology of Personalism and Paradox    301 Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of ‘criteria’ for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no ‘object’ that has not stood the test of criticism.

Of all of Scheler’s main themes, ressentiment seems to have attracted the greatest interest in organization studies, especially in relation to leadership. For instance, Ciulla (2020) suggests that former US President Donald Trump nurtured ressentiment strategically in his followers, directing its passions against Trump’s denigrated Other, particularly liberals, the educated, and the Washington elite. Capriles (2012) draws on Scheler to explore how former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez systematically cultivated ressentiment in his people, resulting in Venezuelans voluntarily engaging in a values-​inversion in which they supported policies that seriously disadvantaged and disenfranchised them in exchange for the comforting fantasy that Chávez really cared about them. Turning from followers to leaders, I myself have used Schelerian ressentiment to explore the impotence of leaders, suggesting that it is precisely with the pleasant-​ and progressive-​sounding leadership approaches that the risk of ressentiment is at its greatest, especially those which emphasize the significance of relationship (Tomkins, 2021). I argue, for instance, that caring leadership, based on the appealing ideology of ‘care ethics’, makes leaders especially vulnerable to ressentiment. This is because the qualities associated with care, namely, attentiveness and responsiveness to other people’s needs and desires can be seen as a values-​inversion which transforms self-​sacrifice into virtue and allows one to be dictated to by the needs of others. Those leadership models that emphasize ‘doing unto others as they themselves would want to be treated’, rather than ‘doing unto others as you would have them do unto you’, risk ceding control over, and responsibility for, the self to forces beyond the self. For Scheler, this is a profound threat to the ethics of personalism, because the individual human being: Turns away from his [sic] personal quest for the good and seeks support in the question: What do you think? What do all people think? What is the ‘general’ tendency of man as a species? Or what is the trend of ‘evolution’ so that I may recognize it and place myself in its ‘current’? (Scheler, 1915: 104)3

3  There is a strong connection here between Scheler, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Nietzsche (1908) argues that slave morality involves a critical threat to a person’s centre of gravity and an enslavement to the will of others. Heidegger (1962) warns against the suppression of self in favour of ‘the one’ or ‘the They’ (das Man), and a concomitant threat to the possibility of authenticity. For Scheler, the discrepancies between real and assumed power, and between rhetoric and reality, fuel the conditions for the loss of one’s sense of self.

302   Leah Tomkins The discrepancies between actual and assumed power that foster ressentiment therefore affect leaders just as much as followers. As one of the modern classics in leadership studies suggests, we should not suppose that leaders’ actual power equals their reputed power, for ‘power wielders are not free agents. They are subject—​even slaves—​to pressures working on them and in them’ (Burns, 1978: 15). Highlighting the impotence of leaders goes against the grain of ‘common sense’ assumptions, and against much of the critical as well as the mainstream business literature on leadership. More than a century ago, Scheler warned that just such a paradox of either empowerment and enslavement might be a breeding ground for ressentiment.

14.3  Exemplars and Leaders In his essay on Exemplars of Person and Leaders, Scheler (1987) elaborates the dynamics of exemplarity, providing possibly the most overt connection between Schelerian philosophy and the key concerns of organizational studies. Alongside his ranking of human values (holiness; values of the mind and the spirit (geistige Werte); vitality; utility; sensibility), Scheler offers a corresponding ranking of exemplars (saint; genius; hero; leading mind of civilization; and master in the art of living, or bon viveur). Each represents a particular version of personalism and the values that inspire and animate it. As Scheler (1987: 140) suggests: If it is the case that the soul of all history is not to be seen in actual history but in the history of ideals, systems of values, norms and forms of ethos by which human beings measure their practical actions—​so that this soul of history brings to full understanding all actual history—​then the history of exemplars, their origins and transformation, makes up the very centre of this soul of history.

Exemplars touch us in an a priori way, moving us both individually and collectively.4 We are attracted and drawn to them before there is any sense of us actively choosing them. Thus, exemplarity is an important component of Scheler’s answer to the question of where and how to begin (Glendinning, 2007), for: ‘What has a forming and grafting effect on our souls is not an abstract, universal moral rule, but always, and only, a clear and intuitive grasp of the exemplarity of the person’ (Scheler, 1987: 134). Crucially, the power of exemplars relates to a person’s self-​development, for being touched by an exemplar is a free following, not a form of imitation or blind obedience. Experiencing oneself in relation to an exemplar is thus not the same as ceding control over, and responsibility for the self to forces beyond the self, i.e. Scheler’s exemplarity is not a form of the slave morality which can foster ressentiment. With exemplars, the person’s aim is not to replicate, 4  I

do not have space to do justice to it here, but there are striking connections between Scheler’s taxonomies of values and exemplars and Jung’s work on archetypes and psychological types.

Phenomenology of Personalism and Paradox    303 but rather, to achieve an equivalent relationship with the value embodied therein. In a sense, Scheler’s exemplars provide boundary conditions for a Heideggerian search for authenticity, i.e. for that which is own-​most (eigentlich). Moreover, whereas imitation and obedience tend to be orientated towards specific actions, exemplarity moves and inspires the whole person (a key Schelerian theme to which we will return). For Scheler, there are important differences between exemplars and leaders. The leadership relationship is concrete and conscious; leaders are real people, and they know and accept that they are leaders. The exemplarity relationship operates more in the realm of the imaginary, the intuitional, and the ideal. A personal exemplar may not realize that he/​she is performing this function for others; and indeed, exemplars need not be real people at all. Whereas leaders direct and inspire action and achievement, exemplars direct and inspire our being. And whereas a Schelerian leadership has nothing much to do with values, exemplarity is a primary mechanism through which values are embodied, activated, and communicated. Despite (and because of) these differences between leaders and exemplars, there are crucial points of intersection and interrelationship between these two forms of authority. On the one hand, exemplars provide the value-​structures that motivate our own self-​development as human beings (whether we are leading or led or, as we shall touch on later, both), and our hopes and expectations within society and institution. On the other hand, exemplars are realized in and through personal and social experience. Exemplars alone provide mere schemata, which: ‘Are, by themselves, completely insufficient to nurture our minds and moral lives in a vivid and powerful manner. These tender and shadowy casts must drink the appropriate blood from the wells of the experience of history’ (Scheler, 1987: 142). We should not, therefore, mistake an actual leader for a saint, for instance (and then cut him/​her down when he/​she inevitably disappoints us); but neither should we ignore the interrelationship between leaders and saints. For Scheler, the sources of power that emanate from leaders and exemplars are paradoxically either different and closely interrelated. They represent a coming together of ‘both a being and an ought’ (Scheler, 1987: 134) in the space between phenomenological and natural experience. Exemplars exercise their effect on us because of a combination of pure and experiential power, and their corresponding temporal hues (Scheler, 1987). Pure power is orientated towards the future and, as such, prevents the exemplar from merely inspiring imitation. The future orientation is thus in Scheler, as in Heidegger, a vital component of developing one’s own path through life, and using exemplars as equivalent, not direct, inspiration. Experiential power, on the other hand, points towards the past and to the ways in which our present world is created and infused with what has come before. For Scheler (1987), it is this experiential power of the having-​been that guards against the risks of both emptiness and utopia. Exemplarity is thus one of the ways in which Scheler engages in dialogue with Heidegger’s Dasein (Heidegger, 1962). For Dasein, the components of existence are Verstehen (understanding), Befindlichkeit (attunement), and Verfallen (absorption), and they have corresponding temporal emphases of future, past (the having-​been)

304   Leah Tomkins and present. Only for a creature who understands and is forward focused; who is attuned to the world which he/​she inherits; and who is absorbed and immersed in the affairs of the world, can the possibilities of life fully unfold. Like Heidegger’s ontology, Scheler’s ethics uses temporality not as chronology but as a core structure and dynamic of personalism. Without the future orientation of pure exemplarity and the having-​been of experiential exemplarity, our lives in the present are merely swept along in the ‘current of evolution’ (Scheler, 1915) and, in Heideggerian terms, doomed to inauthenticity. Given its explicit connection with leadership and obvious implications for the notion of role modelling, it is somewhat surprising that Scheler’s exemplarity has received so little attention in organization studies. A notable exception is Harter (2006), who uses Scheler to help unpack what it might mean to ‘lead by example’. This involves understanding the interdependencies between real leaders and exemplars to surface some of the ethical tensions of leadership, such as those that arise when leaders think of themselves as exempt from normal behaviour and develop an exceptionalist sense of self in which the rules that apply to others are simply irrelevant to them. Such unethical behaviour reflects the dangers of discrepancy between ‘a being and an ought’ (Scheler, 1987: 134) that are either different and intimately interrelated. Furthermore, the interplay between exemplarity and leadership emphasizes that followers’ experiences of the power dynamics of organization are not homogenous. Role models (and, for that matter, anti-​role models) come from the realms of either concrete and intuitive experience, exercising either pure and experiential power. This, in turn, reminds us that the power relations of leadership say as much about us (members of society and institution, and both real and potential followers/​stakeholders) as they do about those individuals in overtly leaderly roles. As the discrepancy between the being and the ought of organizational authority grows, we become more affected by the projections of leadership. Scheler is thereby in dialogue not just with other phenomenologists, but also with a rich seam of literature on the projections of leadership from a broadly psychoanalytic perspective (for notable examples, see Gabriel, 1997; Hoggett, 2006).

14.4  Relations between Self and Other People The final theme of this chapter is Scheler’s take on sociality and intersubjectivity. This connects back to the previous sections via a central concern for the phenomenon of social comparison. As Frings (1997: 75−6) explains, ‘the act of spontaneous interpersonal comparing is one of the central acts in Scheler’s phenomenology’. A negative manifestation of such a comparison is the ‘creative deed’ of ressentiment; and a potentially more positive manifestation is exemplarity.

Phenomenology of Personalism and Paradox    305 Sociality is given many different hues in Scheler, including different aspects of the emotions we might cluster together under the heading of ‘empathy’ (Zahavi, 2010, 2013). For Scheler, sociality is an essential feature of our emotional life and hence fundamental to human ethics. In relation to the phenomenological question of where and how to begin (Glendinning, 2007), one aspect of Scheler’s answer to this question relates to the givenness of others. As we shall see, however, such Otherness can take many forms, each with their own implications for ethics, feelings, and what Scheler calls (in a very Heideggerian-​style framing) ‘the person of persons’ (Scheler, 1973: 534). Scheler (1973) traces four main forms of human togetherness—​the mass; the life community; society; and, finally, Gesamtperson (usually translated as ‘collective person’ or ‘encompassing person’). These four forms have different implications for the relationship between self and others, and for the ethical and emotional quality and potential of these relations. Thus, in the mass, the feeling state is often one of emotional contagion. The individuality of the person (whether self or other) becomes negligible, and there is neither self-​responsibility nor co-​responsibility. In the life community, all persons are fellow members of the collective. There is a moral co-​responsibility with others, but only limited self-​responsibility. In the society, the relationship between self and others becomes contractual; the other person is recognized as different from self, but also controllable. Here there is self-​responsibility but little co-​responsibility. In relation to the ranking of values, society is where the lower values of utility and sensibility tend to reign. Finally, the Gesamtperson is the highest form of human togetherness, which involves an instinct towards unification of the other three. As Frings (1997) highlights, Scheler’s Gesamtperson is nigh on impossible to translate; and this is by no means accidental, for he is reaching towards something that we can probably only glimpse rather than fully grasp. Whilst the conventional translations are ‘collective person’ or ‘encompassing person’, I suggest that Gesamtperson also has undertones of ‘whole person’.5 Such wholeness refers to a unity and intensity of experience in both person and relationship. Whilst the person in the life community has co-​responsibility but little self-​responsibility, and the person of society has self-​responsibility but little co-​ responsibility, the Gesamtperson instates and embodies both self-​and co-​responsibility. Connecting with the motif of paradox, therefore, Gesamtperson is Scheler’s attempt to explore personalism as either independent and dependent, orientated towards either the self and the collective. In short, self and other are either different and same.6 Zahavi sees Scheler as having made a significant contribution to the phenomenological debate about the relationship between self and others via the experiences of fellow-​feeling, and in particular, the question of whether one can have a direct experience of another person’s state of mind. Reflecting on the similarities and differences between Scheler, Husserl, and Stein, Zahavi (2010: 295) suggests that all three reflect the

5 

Moran & Mooney (2002) also point in this direction. the purposes of this discussion, I am not focusing on Scheler’s institutionalized forms of Gesamtperson, namely church, culture, and nation. See Frings (1997: esp. pp. 114−19) on this aspect. 6 For

306   Leah Tomkins possibility of an intersubjectivity which recognizes and requires both similarity and difference, for: The fact that my experiential access to the minds of others differs from my experiential access to my own mind is not an imperfection or shortcoming. On the contrary, it is a difference that is constitutional. It is precisely because of this difference, precisely because of this asymmetry, that we can claim that the minds we experience are other minds. (Zahavi, 2010: 295)

Zahavi’s choice of the word asymmetry is highly pertinent to the possibilities of a Schelerian contribution to organization studies. Often, the notion of asymmetry is used to flag an inequitable relationship between leaders and followers—​one which privileges leaders and disadvantages followers (Collinson, 2005; Tomkins et al., 2020). Scheler’s elaborations of intersubjectivity point to a more nuanced and more constitutive understanding of asymmetry in organizational life. They signal the possibility of an asymmetry qua difference as the very basis of ethical understanding and as a commitment to collective enterprise amongst persons. A Schelerian paradox of intersubjectivity requires an engagement with others who are either the same and different to me. Despite these possibilities, Scheler’s work on sociality appears to have had little impact on organization studies. This is a shame, since his explorations of the different modes of togetherness, and his attempts to integrate a non-​individualist self into these, might provide an interesting framing for the various strands of what Denis et al. (2012: 211) call ‘leadership in the plural’. A range of models have been proposed for a leadership which does not rely on an individual person, but distributes the processes of leading more broadly amongst organizational members. Well-​ known approaches include ‘distributed’ (Gronn, 2002) and ‘relational’ (Uhl-​Bien, 2006) leadership, and a move towards organizations which are ‘leaderful’ (Raelin, 2014). In their various ways, these approaches argue that leadership involves something other than what an individual leader does (or is), directing our attention towards ‘leadership, not leaders’ (Crevani et al., 2010: 77). Across this family of collective leadership approaches, there is a tendency to downplay or even deny the person of the leader. As Grint (2010: 89) suggests, ‘in attempting to escape from the clutches of heroic leadership we now seem enthralled by its apparent opposite—​distributed leadership: in this post-​heroic era we will all be leaders so that none are’. Elsewhere, I have argued that theorizations of leadership that seem to do away with leaders in favour of some sort of undifferentiated collective are problematic, for ‘abandoning leaders because we do not want to understand them as bundles of traits, or as heroic figures in sole control of events, is akin to throwing the baby of both responsibility and experience out with the bath-​water of individualism and essentialism’ (Tomkins, 2019: 69). Whilst not offering easy solutions for retaining the personalism of ‘the baby’ without lapsing into individualism, Scheler’s intersubjectivity offers a potential way to at least frame the problem.

Phenomenology of Personalism and Paradox    307 Furthermore, the issues thrown up by Scheler’s Gesamtperson foreshadow one of the most interesting developments in recent leadership theorizing, namely the construct of ‘the connecting leader’ (Jaser, 2020). This revisits the assumption that leaders and followers are different people, and instead explores the ways in which leadership and followership (and, for that matter, many other ‘-​ships’) combine to make up the ‘whole person’ of organizational experience. This person is defined as one who ‘co-​enacts both roles, behaviors, identities of a leader and a follower, as he/​she is embedded in a multitude of leadership relationships across the organization’ (Jaser, 2020: 21). Like the Gesamtperson, the ‘connecting leader’ carries connotations of being both whole and encompassing—​both integrated and integrative. The ‘connecting leader’ thus has quite a Schelerian feel, for it engages seriously and holistically with issues of personhood, not in order to reinforce romantic and/​or heroic notions of the self, but rather, to explore the significance of the various, and often conflicting, dynamics of togetherness. Interestingly, the concept of the ‘connecting leader’ has recently been explored within the explicit context of paradox theory, with Pradies et al. (2020) highlighting the paradox of either leadership and followership as a potentially generative and empowering space for organizational ethics. In short, Scheler’s explorations of togetherness offer considerable potential for leadership studies. They highlight that the sociality which discourses of ‘leadership, not leaders’ attempt to articulate is not a homogenous phenomenon, but rather, a range of different modes of interrelating, each with different implications for self, relationship, ethics, and feelings. They add nuance to discussions of the asymmetry of organizational relations for, if leaders are either the same (i.e. fellow followers) and different (i.e. leaders, not followers) from those they lead, then notions of an asymmetry that necessarily privileges leaders and disadvantages followers no longer form a constructive basis for understanding organizational power (Tomkins et al., 2020). The dynamics of organizational power and authority thereby revolve around a recognition of either self-​ responsibility and co-​responsibility—​either self-​identity and collective identity—​either difference and sameness—​without subordinating one to the other. Scheler’s (1973: 534) ‘person of persons’ thereby offers a constructive starting point for the inquiry into the ethics of togetherness.

14.5  Final Reflections In this chapter, I have introduced some of the key themes of Max Scheler’s work, and intimated his untapped potential for the phenomenology of organization. I have proposed that his focus on social comparison, grounded in experiences of discrepancy, paints organizational experience as deeply paradoxical, with either/​and qualities. In particular, I have proposed that his ressentiment can reflect and create impotence in either leaders and followers, and involve feelings of either empowerment and incarceration. I have explored exemplarity as a paradox of either ‘is’ and ‘ought’, in which leaders and

308   Leah Tomkins exemplars are either separate and interrelated. I have also introduced Scheler’s highest form of togetherness, the Gesamtperson, to frame the dynamics of power where leaders are either the same and different to those whom they lead, based on an ethics which is either deeply personal and deeply together. This gives the concept of asymmetry an affective hue which is missing in much of the organizational and leadership literature on this topic. Within the history of phenomenology, it is tempting to consolidate philosophical brilliance and originality in the few ‘great men’, namely Husserl, Heidegger, and more cautiously, Merleau-​Ponty and Sartre. This diminishes phenomenology as a movement, fuelled by influences and counterinfluences, clashes and convergences, endorsements and disappointments. It inadvertently nurtures a ‘great man’ fantasy, in which we overattribute agency and exceptionalism to individuals whom we can hero-​worship or decry in a primal black-​vs.-​white simplification of the world (Gabriel, 1997). As we wrestle with the complexities of life both in and beyond organization, Scheler offers us a phenomenological framing for some of the key issues which continue to exercise and befuddle both scholarship and practice, namely ethics, emotions, and the status and potential of the person-​in-​relationship.

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Phenomenology of Personalism and Paradox    309 Gronn, P. (2002). Distributed leadership as a unit of analysis. The Leadership Quarterly, 13(4), 423–​451. Harter, N. (2006). Recovering the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler for leadership studies. Journal of Leadership Education, 5(3), 15–​30. Heidegger, M. (1962). Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Hoggett, P. (2006). Conflict, ambivalence and the contested purpose of public organizations. Human Relations, 59(2), 175–​194. Jaser, Z. (ed.). (2020). The connecting leader: Serving concurrently as a leader and a follower. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Jing, R., & Van de Ven, A. H. (2014). A yin-​yang model of organizational change. Management and Organization Review, 10(1), 29–​54. Moran, D., & Mooney, T. (2002). The phenomenology reader. Abingdon: Routledge. Nietzsche, F. (1887). Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morality), trans. C. Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1908). Ecce homo. Wie man wird, was man ist. (Ecce homo: How one becomes what one is), trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pradies, C., Delanghe, M., & Lewis, M. W. (2020). Paradox, leadership and the connecting leader. In Z. Jaser (ed.), The connecting leader: Serving concurrently as a leader and a follower (pp. 99–​129). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Raelin, J. A. (2014). The ethical essence of leaderful practice. Journal of Leadership, Accountability and Ethics, 11(1), 64–​72. Sartre, J. P. (1983). War diaries: Notebooks from a phoney war (Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre). London: Verso. Scheler, M. (1915). Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (The role of ressentiment in the constitution of morals), trans. L. B. Coser & W. W. Holdheim. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette. Scheler, M. (1973). Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus (Formalism in ethics and non-​formal ethics of values: A new attempt toward the foundation of an ethical personalism), trans. M. S. Frings & R. L. Funk. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Scheler, M. (1987). Exemplars of person and leaders. In Person and self-​value: Three essays (pp. 125–​198). Dordrecht: Springer. Staude, J.R. (1967). Max Scheler: An intellectual portrait. New York: The Free Press. Tomkins, L. (2019). Leadership and the art of the invisible. In G. Abreu Pederzini (ed.), Considering leadership anew: A handbook on alternative leadership theory (pp. 59–​72). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Tomkins, L. (2021). Caring leadership as Nietzschean slave morality. Leadership, 17(3), 278–​295. Tomkins, L., Hartley, J., & Bristow, A. (2020). Asymmetries of leadership: Agency, response and reason. Leadership, 16(1), 87–​106. Uhl-​Bien, M. (2006). Relational leadership theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership and organizing. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(6), 654–​676. Zahavi, D. (2010). Empathy, embodiment and interpersonal understanding: From Lipps to Schutz. Inquiry, 53(3), 285–​306. Zahavi, D. (2013). Max Scheler. In A. D. Schrift (ed.), The history of continental philosophy (pp. 867–​882). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zucker, W. (1927). Max Scheler in Berlin. Die Weltbühne, 23(7), 843–​844.

Chapter 15

At the Cros sroa d of Phenomenol o g y a nd F em inist New Mat e ria l i sm A Diffractive Reading of Embodiment Silvia Gherardi

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (Donna Haraway, 2011: 4)   

15.1  Introduction Phenomenology has been one of the main streams of philosophy of the 20th century and, together with pragmatism, it has paved the way for theorizing the non-​ distinction between subject and object which in posthumanisms (Braidotti, 2013) and feminist new materialisms (Barad, 2007; Cole & Frost, 2010; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012) becomes an essential predicament for the decentring of ‘Man’ as the subject of reason. Thus, a post-​anthropocentric subjectivity, a relational onto-​epistemology, and a post-​qualitative inquiry is grounded. The already wide movement that, is recognized under the so-​called post-​qualitative inquiry (Lather & St Pierre, 2013; St Pierre, 2011), questions what qualitative inquiry would be possible if we cease to privilege knowing over being and refuse positivist and phenomenological assumptions about the nature of lived experience and the

Phenomenology and Feminist New Materialism    311 world. This strand of research opens a debate on what can be done once the ‘post’ ontologies are put to work, recognizing the limits of Enlightened humanism and phenomenology. In this debate several authors are influenced by Deleuze ([1970] 1988; Deleuze & Guattari, [1980] 1987), and by feminist new materialisms (Lenz Taguchi, 2012; MacLure, 2013; Mazzei, 2016). The ‘post’ critique of epistemology and phenomenology are targeted towards the representational logic that pervades humanist, modernist, ontological thought. Foucault’s ([1966] 1970) and Derrida’s ([1972] 1981) critical thoughts on phenomenology are assumed, both authors being suspicious of its ontology and of any such givenness, essence, and phenomenology’s lived experience expressed in presence. What they critique is the idea that there is a brute reality out there, with an essence that can be immediately perceived, disclosed, and expressed in language. Post-​qualitative inquiry is fascinated by Deleuze’s nomadic empiricism—​his way out of phenomenology. Deleuzian concepts like assemblage and rhizome enable thinking in terms of connections rather than oppositions, movement rather than categorization, and becoming rather than being. This chapter follows those principles and in particular the idea of downplaying critique and oppositional thought and looks for a diffractive reading of texts and authors that will enhance multiplicity. The Deleuzian lesson implies that a binary logic is rejected in favour of a logic of connection, of becoming, a logic of the and: this and this and this and . . . I shall follow Latour’s (2004: 246) remark that critique has run out of steam and that ‘the critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather’. His invitation to move ‘from matter of fact’ to ‘matter of concern’ and Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2011) invitation to move further towards ‘matter of care’ declares the end of critique as ethos and practice. As others have stressed (Cutcher et al., 2020), in organization studies there is an urgent need for new forms of knowledge where respect and generosity are evident. A diffractive approach, which I will introduce later in more details, ‘opens an onto-​ epistemological space of encounter where a researcher’s task is not to tell of something that exists independently of the encounter (producing the appearance of truth), but to open up an immanent subjective truth—​that which becomes true, ontologically and epistemologically, in the moment of the encounter’ (Davies, 2014: 734). My intention is to open—​through my writing—​an experimental encounter at the crossroad of phenomenology and feminist new materialism in which neither the reader nor the author knows in advance what onto-​epistemological knowledge will emerge from the mix of concepts, bodies, images, and affects, thus following a line that belongs neither to the initiator nor to the reader but happens ‘between them’. The chapter proposes to readers to immerse themselves in several short stories, coming from different sources, and to consider them as resources to think with. The readers are asked to follow the narratives along the logic of the and and and, suspending analytical thought, until they reach the subsequent section in which the process of diffractive reading is illustrated. Only in the subsequent section will the chapter present the interferences generated by the

312   Silvia Gherardi diffractive reading of previous narratives, illustrated through concepts from feminist new materialism. To give a first image of diffraction as a physical phenomenon (Barad, 2007), we can think of the the rolling, pushing, and transformation of waves in the sea, and this image of the interference of waves is that of their combining and amplifying effect when they overlap. The diffraction of narratives, like the movement of the waves, produces six interferences in between the concept of embodiment with ordinary affect, corpomateriality, transcorporeality, virtual embodiment, becoming-​animal, and affective pedagogy. The chapter ends with a discussion of the methodology of reading diffractively one text through another, leaving to the readers a judgement of the richness of positioning embodiment at the crossroad of two philosophical bodies of thought.

15.2  Narratives Without an Evident Order In this section, I offer the reader a selection of short stories that I chose because they hold some kind of affective force that may resonate in between ‘us’: a writer and a reader. The reason is that everyday, practical examples are what animate, resonate, and make possible a theoretical discussion grounded on shared or imagined similar experiences. Narratives, in fact, have a special agentic force to reach out and connect with the reader, for opening up questions and wonderings, thus communicating more than what can be said in so many words. My anecdotical narratives come from disparate sources: retold stories, personal experience, somebody else’s research ‘data’, quotes from well-​known authors. They do not follow any particular logical order, rather they are texts prepared to be later read diffractively with other texts. My rhetorical style has well-​known antecedents in Science and Technology Studies’s use of case studies (Law, 2017); in Stewart’s (2007, 2011) description of fleeting ordinary affects and also in my own writing about affect (Gherardi, 2017); and not-​yet data (Benozzo & Gherardi, 2020; Gherardi & Benozzo, 2021).

15.2.1 Au Café Bec de Gaz We are in 1933, in Paris, rue Montparnasse, on the terrace of the café Bec de Gaz.1 Around the table are Jean-​Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Raymond Aron. The latter is returning from a long stay in Berlin where, as Nazism prepares to seize political

1 I translate here the anecdote that Philippe Cabestan uses in presenting Qu’est-​ ce que la phénoménologie?, a basic text of Ecole Française de Daseinanalyse, attached to archives Husserl in Paris. It is online here: (accessed 25 October 2020).

Phenomenology and Feminist New Materialism    313 power, he discovered a new philosophy which still remains in France very little known. He tries to explain to Sartre what it is and says to him: ‘You see, my little comrade, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail, and it is philosophy’. Whether the cocktail was an apricot cocktail or a simple beer mug remains unknown. According to Simone de Beauvoir, who tells us about the scene in La force de l’âge (De Beauvoir, 1960: 156−7), Sartre turned pale with emotion, or almost. He discovered, suddenly, what he himself had been looking for years and which would prove to be decisive in his own course: phenomenology. Philippe Cabestan, who retells this anecdote, writes that it was rather naïve, since it recalled those fables from the history of science in which Archimedes found his theorem by taking a bath and Newton formulated the universal law of gravity by seeing an apple falling. It is no less convenient insofar as it enables Cabestan to propose a first definition of phenomenology which overlaps with its etymology: from the Greek phainomenon, what appears, and logos, discourse, science, phenomenology is the science of phenomena. My retelling the same anecdote, as a refrain, allows me to state that we, as researchers, we are all phenomenologists! But then we are in trouble: where/​ what is a phenomenon?

15.2.2 The Mielleux: Where Is the Phenomenon? Jean-​Paul Sartre is acknowledged by Maurice Merleau-​Ponty (2004: 47−9) for having inspired one of the most beautiful images of the inseparability between subject and object: the ‘quality of being honeyed’ (mielleux). In introducing organizational theory and aesthetic philosophies, Strati (2019: 137−8) quotes the following description of mielleux: Honey is a slow-​moving liquid; while it undoubtedly has a certain consistency and allows itself to be grasped, it soon creeps slyly from the fingers and returns to where it started from. It comes apart as soon as it has been given a particular shape and, what is more, it reverses the roles by grasping the hands of whoever would take hold of it. The living, exploring, hand which thought it could master this thing instead discovers that it is embroiled in a sticky external object. (Merleau-​Ponty, 2004: 46–​7)

The ‘quality of being honeyed’, following Strati, is central in Merleau-​Ponty’s aesthetic phenomenology in which the relationship between human beings and artefacts is no longer one of distance and mastery, and, most importantly, it is less clear-​cut. In fact, I touch my left hand while it is touching my right, and this speaks to the fundamental intersubjectivity that characterizes in Merleau-​Ponty the aesthetic materiality of the relationships between living beings and artefacts. Therefore, when we extend the ‘quality of being honeyed’ to everyday organizational life phenomena, we cannot limit ourselves to inquire into how organizations are inscribed upon the bodies, but should go deeper to

314   Silvia Gherardi explore the flesh in/​of the organization. ‘The flesh is both visible and invisible, it is carnal intersubjectivity’ (Strati, 2019: 140). The concept of flesh (Merleau-​Ponty, 1968) is relevant not only for a carnal sociology (Crossley, 1995), but also for an affect and posthumanist practice approach, since it foregrounds the human’s pre-​discursive experience, which is prior to the schema of rationality and language. With this concept Merleau-​Ponty describes the intermingling of subject and world as embodiment and the interrelationship of inner and outer, the mutual mingling of touching and the tangible, the seer and the seen, the toucher and the touched. Flesh points to the circulating capacity of affecting and being affected by the sensorial.

15.2.3 The Fleshy Body: What Is a Phenomenon? The following story is set at a rugby club in the United Kingdom and is told to exemplify what a player means by ‘sacrifice’ in the context of professional players that freely acknowledge that the sport they play professionally will ‘fuck up’ their bodies physically but, despite this knowledge, they are still willing participants in such physical practices. Séan is talking about his team mate Calum: I suppose sacrifice is a visual thing more than a verbal one but Calum, even when he is injured he gets up and tries to make tackles again. That is probably a good example for me . . . he did one and it was last season and he broke his thumb. And the bone was sticking out and he looked down and he thought somebody had bitten him and his tooth had come out in his hand but it was his bone sticking out. But he just thought it was somebody’s tooth and he held his hand and got back in the line. And he got up . . . just stuff like that, bloody hell, that’s very impressive. (McConn-​Palfreyman, McInnes, & Mangan, 2019: 263)

Not only Séan valorizes the near total sacrifice of his mate’s finger, but also the club gave the feat a place of honour in their ‘Courage Board’, an organizational artefact that lists similar episodes of courage and sacrifice. Communal expressions of sacrifice—​that legitimize the brutal, and physical, nature of their sport—​will reassure those involved that they are delivering ‘good rugby’. Merleau-​Ponty’s (1968) fleshy ontology is mobilized by McConn-​Palfreyman, McInnes, & Mangan to illustrate how the world around us does not contain discernible, self-​creating entities, but bodies and objects that continually co-​construct each other, not in a net way of being, rather this process is ‘veiled with shadows’ as being much more complex.

15.2.4 Lipstick in Time of Covid-​19: Virtual Embodiment I only wear lipstick when I go online! Ever since I was in high school, I had worn makeup in the morning before leaving home. When I went to work I always wore makeup and I don’t remember ever showing

Phenomenology and Feminist New Materialism    315 up in public without makeup and especially without lipstick. Then came the fifty-​seven days of total lockdown that I spent locked in a mountain cottage where I could rarely see one of the five people who lived within 500 metres of my home. There were many inveterate habits that changed in those days. Putting on my makeup, was one of them, a little one compared to the breakdowns of many other daily routines. Why put on my makeup, since I didn’t have a public presence to perform? And then came the obligatory facemask to wear everywhere in public when we did leave home. But lipstick and facemasks appear to be artefacts that don’t get along well. With the facemask I may leave home, but only without lipstick. In the elevator I look at myself before putting on the facemask, but that face doesn’t look like mine. Then the period of the Zoom meetings started and I began to talk to colleagues and finally I could put on the lipstick again. My face in the small Zoom box tells me that I look like me again and the lipstick tells me that I’m back in public, my virtual embodiment reassures me. Body-​identity-​lipstick are entangled to form that agencement (assemblage) called ‘me’.

15.2.5 Nonhuman Animal: Que le Cheval Vive en Moi In Paris, at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Museum of Hunting and Nature) I saw the exhibition that Sophie Calle set in the rooms of a museum where the permanent collection consists of objects and symbols of hunting activity: taxidermied animals, weapons, paintings, and drawings, an eccentric kunstkamera, an apt space for Calle’s work, which explores the dichotomy between personal experience and objective reality. For someone unfamiliar with the museum’s holdings, it was difficult to distinguish between the permanent collection and Calle’s additions. There, I found, arranged in a suggestive niche all the instruments that were used to stage the performance Que le cheval vive en moi (‘May the horse live in me’), a bold self-​experiment aimed at blurring the boundaries between species. I had read about this outstanding performance and was very moved by seeing the materiality of the instruments that were used by the French duo Art Orienté objet. The artist Marion Laval-​Jeante allowed herself to be injected over the course of several months with horse immunoglobulins, thus developing a progressive tolerance to this foreign animal body fluid. In February 2011, the work culminated in a public performance-​exhibition at the Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia. As video footage from the earlier transfusion procedures was projected on a screen, a horse was led into the gallery and Laval-​Jeantet, wearing specially built stilts resembling horse hooves performed a ‘communication ritual’ with the live animal, leading it on a tour through the gallery space, petting its neck, gazing into its eyes. Then her hybrid blood was extracted and freeze-​dried. Here, as the artists maintain, ‘the animal becomes the future of the human’, questioning the anthropocentric attitude inherent to our technological understanding. Instead of trying to attain ‘homeostasis’, a state of physiological balance, with this performance, the artists sought to initiate a process of ‘synthetic transi-​stasis’ in which the only constant is continual transformation and adaptation.

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15.2.6 A Ball of Yarn: Fleshy, Embodied, and Sensuous Pedagogy A ball of yarn unravels in rolls above desks, humming laptops, paper coffee cups, and human bodies. The yarn finds a hand amidst cheers and hoots. The yellow spool swiftly winds around a cookbook and then flies overhead to a new outreached hand. Next, it circles around a lipstick, a tampon, an iPhone and then is thrown again. It ducks under the buzzing ceiling projector and finds its way around a set of colorful beads, a flag, a plastic pack of birth control. Soon the room is a tangle of multi-​colour thread, animated bodies, machines, and materialities. (Niccolini, Zarabadi, & Ringrose, 2018: 324; italics in original)

With these poetic words that offer an intuitive image of an assemblage of humans and nonhumans, the article by Niccolini et al. begins. The stage is a gender classroom including students from different socio-​cultural locations across five continents who explore issues of gender contexts, hegemonic masculinities, sexual violence, feminist and queer activism. It is an example of how art-​based practices are engaged in different ways of recognizing subjectivity and difference. At the beginning of the course, students brought meaningful ‘affective-​material’ objects relating to gender to share with the class, and on the last day, these shared objects were ‘storied’ and then ‘threaded’ to one another through a collective string figuration created with multicoloured yarn. Building on Haraway’s (1994) game of ‘cat’s cradle’ that invites a sense of collective work and her model of ‘making kin’ by drawing out the affective dimensions of the threading together of experience, this spinning yarn pedagogy aims to collectively cultivate practices of intimacy, activism, thinking, and caring. Yarning is a tactile and embodied form of connectivity that seeks to take seriously the affective-​material life of the spaces in which we teach and conduct research. It is inscribed in feminist new materialism and posthuman philosophies.

15.3  Diffraction as Methodology and Pedagogy Haraway proposes diffraction as a feminist metaphor to think of difference beyond binary definitions, as ‘a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear’ (1992: 300). Barad (2007, 2010, 2014) refers to diffraction as a method and a practice which engages affirmatively with difference. Difference is understood as ‘differencing: differences-​in-​the-​(re)making. Differences are within (emphasis in original); differences are formed through intra-​activity, in the

Phenomenology and Feminist New Materialism    317 making of ‘this’ and ‘that’ within the phenomenon that is constituted in their inseparability (entanglement)’ (Barad, 2014: 175). Diffraction is thus an ongoing process in which matter and meaning are co-​ constituted, highlighting the entanglement of material-​discursive phenomena in the world. In linking ontology, epistemology, and ethics (in the neologism ethico-​onto-​ epistemology) Barad acknowledges the influential role of the knower in knowledge production and in the material configurations of the world’s becoming. In an interview Barad explains how intrinsic to a diffractive methodology is an ethics that is not predicated on externality but rather on entanglement: ‘diffractive readings bring inventive provocations; they are good to think with. They are respectful, detailed, ethical engagements’ (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012: 50). Engagement replaces critique and opposition to other ideas or texts, since diffractive methodology means reading a text through another, building new insights, and carefully reading for differences that matter in their fine details and for what is excluded from mattering. In the same interview Barad insists on the fact that there is not knowing from a distance, rather knowing is a direct material engagement, a cutting together-​apart (as a single move), where agential cuts do violence but also rework the agential conditions of possibility. In underlining the difference with critical methods of reading one text or set of ideas against another where one set serves as a fixed frame of reference, Bozalek & Zembylas (2017) define diffractive methodology as a way of troubling dualisms: me and not me, discourse and matter, words and things. Diffractive methodology involves a reading that illuminates differences as they emerge, what gets excluded, and how these exclusions matter. In other words, diffraction is a process of producing difference affirmatively. Post-​qualitative inquiry offers several examples of diffractive methodology, since it challenges the orthodoxy of humanist conventional qualitative research placing the human subject at the centre of knowledge production (Lather & St Pierre, 2013). For example, Jackson & Mazzei (2013) used diffractive methodology to examine the same set of data by different post-​structural concepts from Derrida, Spivak, Foucault, Butler, Deleuze, and Barad. For the analysis of interview data, Lenz Taguchi (2012) created a diffractive and Deleuzian methodology, Levy et al. (2016) read diffractively ‘resistant’ data in interviews, Mazzei (2014) employed a rhizomatic reading, while Nordstrom (2015) threw into radical doubt the material-​discursive practices of recording devices (tape or video) used in qualitative interviews, among other examples. In organization studies diffractive methodology has been rarely used, exceptions are Harding, Ford, & Lee (2017) who analysed resistance to a talent management strategy; Harris, McFarlane, & Wieskamp (2020) who analysed sexual violence in the military and at university, Harding, Gilmore, & Ford (2021) who read diffractively Butler and Barad, and Nicolini & Roe (2014) who, in studying midwives’ professional knowledge, found useful a diffractive methodology to draw attention to differences in what might be otherwise conceived to be a homogeneous practice. In summing up this brief presentation about diffraction as methodology what we can keep in mind is its main proposition (not prescribed framework) that is to read sets of data, texts, authors, and philosophies through one another, since this practice offers

318   Silvia Gherardi potentialities of affecting those who experience them by breaking with the distance between the researcher and the world (Murris & Bozalek, 2019a). In the next section, I shall read diffractively the previous narratives through some concepts grounded in feminist new materialism in order to highlight the interferences produced by their encounter and how these interferences work in understanding embodiment. With the process of interfering and interference as its effect I recall the diffraction of the waves that, when they overlap, their amplitudes combine. The small texts that I presented are the waves whose amplitudes combine in describing the possible ways of writing about embodiment.

15.4  Interference I: Ordinary Affect Can you imagine Kathleen Stewart joining the conversation at the café Bec de Gaz? She would feel at home, recognizing that Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Aron are talking of the everyday-​ness of life, what she calls ‘ordinary affects’: The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveliness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life. Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies and emergences. They’re things that happen.2

Stewart agrees with Aron, Sartre can talk about his cocktail, and it is philosophy. Maybe Aron brought to the conversation Heidegger’s conviction that the extraordinariness of the ordinary has to do with forces in play, beyond the grasp of what constitutes our habitual world. And if so, she would have added: What happens if we approach worlds not as the dead or reeling effects of distant systems but as lived affects with tempos, sensory knowledges, orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force fields? What might we do with the proliferation of little worlds of all kinds that form up around conditions, practices, manias, pacings, scenes of absorption, styles of living, forms of attachment (or detachment), identities, and imaginaries, or some publicly circulating strategy for self-​transformation?3

In leaving the café Bec de Gaz not only Sartre but also Stewart and myself (as the invisible writer), we all are convinced that we are /​have been phenomenologist, since Sartre’s cocktail and Kathleen’s ordinary affects are philosophy. The interference of Heidegger’s worlding with affect theory amplifies the concept of embodiment to embrace our being of the world as lived affects and not only in our being-​in-​the word (and the world-​in-​us). 2  3 

Stewart (2007: 4−5). Stewart (2011: 445−6).

Phenomenology and Feminist New Materialism    319

15.5  Interference II: Corpomateriality Another interference is produced by diffracting the concept of mielleux by Maurice Merleau-​Ponty with the concept of air-​and-​breathing-​bodies by Irma Allen (2020). While honey is outside the human body and its quality of being honeyed is realized in the relation of being at the same time toucher and touched, ‘bodies and air cannot fall out into discrete distinguishable entities but are fused through embodied breath’ (Allen, 2020: 88). Allen follows Irigaray’s conception of air and breathing as the practice which connects us to an ontology of ‘vegetal being’ (Irigaray & Marder, 2016)—​a bodily co-​dependency on respiring plant life, skies, and seasons. She points to how attention to air-​and-​breathing-​bodies constitutes a feminist reordering of the processual, relational unfolding of life. Her use of ‘the hyphenations mark the always-​already situatedness and embeddedness of bodies-​in-​air performed through the ongoing process of explicit breath, attending to the politics inscribed in air, and articulating the politics implied in air’s material-​discursive intra-​action with human-​ more-​than-​human bodies’ (Allen, 2020: 87). In this quote we may note the implicit reference to Barad’s (2007) concept of intra-​action to stress how humans, nonhumans, more-​than-​humans, discourses (all bodies) are entangled rather than self-​contained elements. Air is co-​constituted with ‘breathers’, who experience air’s elemental materiality. Thus, breath and the breathing body are collaboratively and continually made and remade, and breath is both human and becoming nonhuman, an aspect of the body but extending beyond it. Allen argues in favour of a Feminist Political Ecology that gives ‘attention to intimate scales, the previously considered immaterial and invisible, the intersectional aspects of corporeality and the relational, emotional and affective dimensions of lived experience and embodiment of airs and breath’ (Allen, 2020: 80). In the time of the so-​called Anthropocene, whose ecological effects are unequally distributed with profound effects on embodiment (both human and more-​than-​human), the engagement with critical political ecology brings the possibility for discerning and disentangling some of the politicized processes that have gone ‘under the skin’. Allen’s revitalized ‘corpomateriality’ posits breathing as one kind of experimental method (a feminist method not forgetful of life) that can reveal subtle and subtending insights about the politics of our ecological embodied relations with air as a nonhuman, agentic entity. A wave of interference hits Merleau-​Ponty’s sticky external object and his talk of the fundamental intersubjectivity that characterizes the aesthetic materiality of the relationships between living beings and artefacts. In Bennett’s (2010) words things vibrate, bodies of every kind are seen to be capable of affect: they move us and move in us, combining and recomposing as they encounter other bodies, revealing a vitality that is present at every imaginable spatial and temporal scale. Allen’s air-​ and-​ breathing-​ bodies brings previously considered immaterialities (lungs, dust,

320   Silvia Gherardi emotions, affects, atmospheres, and breath itself) into sharp focus and redefine embodiment through intra-​action (not inter-​action) with implications for how environmental subjectivities and politics come into being. Similarly based on feminist new materialism, Neimanis & Walker (2014) reimagine our relationship to climate change as one of ‘weathering’, and propose the temporal frame of ‘thick time’—​a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past—​in order to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible. We are now going to see how the interference of inter-​corporeality and trans-​corporeality jointly diffract another story.

15.6  Interference III: Trans-​c orporeality Another interference is generated with the story that concerns how affect circulates as a transindividual force of organizing at the rugby club. I diffract this story through the concept of trans-​corporeality (Alaimo, 2010). The attention to the transindividual is at the same time directed to the materiality of all bodies, human, nonhuman, and more-​than-​human and to whatever passes from one body to another thus envisioning the body porosity and the contagious transmission of affect. Stacy Alaimo (2010) uses the term trans-​corporeality to name the space-​ time in which the human opens out into a more-​than-​human world, underlining the extent to which the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’. In fact, the conception of the human is profoundly altered by the recognition that ‘the environment’ is not located somewhere out there, but is always ‘the very substance of ourselves’ (Alaimo, 2010: 4). Her argument relies on the recognition that the invisible material forces, the flows of substances between people, places, and economic/​political systems necessitate more capacious scientific, sociological, and textual knowledge practices. She promotes trans-​corporeal feminisms that encourage us to imagine ourselves in constant interchange with the ‘environment’ and to imagine an ‘epistemological space’ that allows for both the unpredictable becomings of other creatures and the limits of human knowledge. The material interconnections between the human and the more-​than-​human world can best be understood from the theoretical site of trans-​corporeality where corporeal theories, environmental theories, and science studies meet and mingle in productive ways. From this theoretical positioning Alaimo theorizes the body, both human and nonhuman, as a trans-​ corporeal agency, intra-​acting with the social, ecological, political, cultural, and material forces. In Alaimo’s account trans-​corporeality resituates the body in the material world from which it had been removed by the late 20th-​century theories of constructivism with their cultivation of disembodied and transcendent subjects.

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15.7  Interference IV:Virtual Embodiment Another interference is generated by the diffractive reading of the lipstick-​online situation with texts where the virtual embodiment is illustrated in relation to digital corporeal culture. For example, Deleuze & Guattari ([1980] 1987)’s concept of assemblage has inspired the view of sexuality as an impersonal affective flow within assemblages of bodies, things, ideas, and social institutions, which produces sexual (and other) capacities in bodies (Fox & Alldred, 2013). New materialism has been highly influential in shifting the conceptualization of the process of sexualizing from the centrality of human bodies to sexuality-​assemblage (Fox & Bale, 2018). The components of an assemblage are not things or bodies or ideas, rather their relations and their intra-​acting dynamics. Therefore, we can move from the anthropocentric or interactive view of sexuality as an intimate human activity to sexualizing as a social practice, technologically mediated. The case of young people’s sexualization shows how technological social mediation is entangled in everyday life and intertwined with a digital corporeal culture. In particular mobile digital technologies cannot be treated like some add-​on to young people’s lives, we are now dealing with what has been called a posthuman, digitally mediated cyborg body (Haraway 1991; Braidotti, 2013; Ringrose & Harvey, 2017). The idea of mediation is not to be thought of in its literal sense as something in the middle of two (or more) pre-​existing entities. Rather, following Sarah Kember & Joanna Zylinska (2012), mediation constitutes the intermeshing of the human and the nonhuman. It is not simply the case that we live in a complex technological environment that we can manage, control, and use; rather, ‘we are—​physically and ontologically—​ part of the technological environment, and it makes no more sense to talk of us using it, than it does of it using us’ (Kember & Zylinska, 2012: 13). Within a similar digitally mediated context, ‘bodies need to be considered in terms of their thick materiality as much as textual depictions, images, or surfaces encountered on the screen while also conceptualizing the traffic in-​between bodies’ (Paasonen et al., 2015: 9). Thus, networked affect can be conceived as a mediating and mobilizing force that has the capacity to stir social action and constitute a potential channel for political agency. Teenagers’ immersion in a digital corporeal culture has been studied mainly by educational (feminist) materialist scholars who have also widely experimented with forms of activism in secondary school, as Ringrose & Renold (2014) who have focused on the affective intensities generated by the term ‘slut’ or Ringrose & Mendes (2018) have analysed how teens use Twitter to contrast rape culture and create affective solidarity. In fact, within the framework of feminist new materialisms and posthumanisms, the virtual is not separated from the actual, rather the virtual is understood as that which orients the actual as it unfolds (Braidotti, 2010).

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15.8  Interference V: Becoming-​Animal Another interference arises in between the narrative about the performance ‘Que le cheval vive en moi’ and the concept of our ‘companion species’ (Haraway, 2008; Tsing, 2012) in relation to an idea of embodiment where nonhuman animals are entangled with humans. The strength of the performance derives from the extreme intra-​ corporeality between a woman and a horse. However, this intimacy in between species is less extreme when we consider Haraway’s (2008: 3) description of the community of human bodies: I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm. I am vastly out-​numbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many.

The encounter with nonhuman animals has enriched organization studies as well (Labatut, Munro, & Desmond, 2016), and prompted a methodological reflection on how to study multispecies work (Tallberg, Huopalainen, & Hamilton, 2020) and how to write about communicative intra-​corporeality between species going beyond spoken language and including sensory-​based cues (Game, 2001; Satama & Huopalainen, 2019). These works mobilize animality as an ethics which expresses respect of the nonhuman animal alterity and a friendliness towards life. In the performance by Marion Laval-​Jeante, we witness an enactment of becoming-​ horse and I want to stress the difference between a performance and a text and the differencing effect that it produces. To attend a performance and to read about a performance are very different things, because what is missing in the second case is the power of the aesthetic experience. In fact, as Strati (2006: 27) writes: ‘A performance “evokes” by means of complex action in which corporeality goes beyond the logical-​ rational intelligibility of the semantic content of the heard sound, of the observed gesture, and of the artifacts that interact with the body—​beginning with the organizational space in which the process takes place’. This fifth interference brings us into the realm of a particular form of embodiment, since in performing arts the artists’ bodily work and the embodied knowledge and know-​how that such work simultaneously reproduces and requires are linked to body-​in-​motion and to body-​in-​intra-​action. The performing act is a collective achievement in the sense that the audience and the performer do not exchange propositional knowledge, what they share is knowledge in an embodied format, it is an affective resonance across bodies. A performance takes place in the affective space in between the artists and their audience, and in this case in the transmission of affect (Brennan, 2004) between the artist, the horse, the horse-​in-​the-​artist,

Phenomenology and Feminist New Materialism    323 the audience who was present at the performance in Ljubljana, Sophie Calle the artist who incorporated the instruments of the performance in her exhibition, I who write this story, and you who read it.

15.9  Interference VI: Affective Pedagogy The last interference is produced by reading diffractively the story of the ball of yarn with Satama, Blomberg, & Warren’s (2021) idea of collaborative creativity and how this idea links embodiment to art-​based pedagogies in organizational learning. There has been a growing interest in organization studies for bringing art-​based experimentation into business education (see Flamand, Perret, & Picq, 2021, for an overview) with the aim of developing empathy and creativity, innovation competence and skills, non-​competitive mind-​sets or critical reflection. However, it is rare to find a fine grained attunement with artistic experience and art as aesthetic experience based on knowing through the senses. Arts have a unique affective power, they affect us by creating aesthetic compositions and sensations, a process which highlights the connections between the construction of organizational discourse and the construction of aesthetic discourse in organizational practices (Guillet de Montoux, 2000). For this reason, I take Satama, Blomberg, & Warren’s text for diffracting art and collective embodiment and in particular their notion that ‘collaborative creativity is a collective social phenomenon that emerges from the constant negotiation of meanings, ideas and interpretations of one another in bodily ways [..] that is, in ways that highlight sensuous, empathetic and reflexive ways of being in the world in relation to others’ (Satama et al., 2021: 2). Their sensory ethnography of two dance productions highlight how embodiment is relevant for thinking in movement and how bodies do not pre-​exist their comings together but are materialized in and through intra-​action. In experimenting with art-​based methodologies and pedagogies we start from the fact that our relation to others is fundamentally corporeal and embodiment is a way of knowing that involves sensuous sources of knowledge (Strati, 2007; Küpers, 2015; Willems, 2018) and bodily movements (Springgay & Truman, 2017; Biehl & Volkmann, 2019). In art practices the relation between thinking and being has been theorized as affective pedagogy, that is the idea of being changed by art and seeing this change as a kind of learning (Hickey-​Moody, 2016). This feminist, new materialist, and posthumanist way of focusing on matter as pedagogical since the resistance of matter teaches the maker how he/​she might make differently and therefore ‘the materiality of making must be always already acknowledged as a political act’ (Hickey-​Moody & Page, 2015: 10). An affective pedagogy calls for a political investment in new imaginaries and new understandings of imaginings in its materiality.

324   Silvia Gherardi Through this interference we have seen the vitality and agency of matter, the entanglement of humans, nonhumans, discourses, and affect, and the necessity of acknowledging ethical and political responsibility. Feminist posthumanities ‘weave scholarly kinship relations with art and imagination as their engine of discovery and “alter-​worlding” device’ (Åsberg & Braidotti, 2018: 3).

15.10  Conclusion In this chapter, I have put in practice the feminist methodology of diffraction that is part of response-​able methodologies involving ‘careful attentiveness, responsibility/​ accountability, rendering each other capable and the ability to respond’ (Murris & Bozalek, 2019b: 882). The concept of response-​ability, which stresses the ethical dimension of doing research and reading/​writing, is grounded in the thought of Despret (2004), Barad (2010), and Haraway (2016)—​among others—​as a significant move away from the care-​less habit of critique that is negative and destructive. My chapter takes as a departure point the concept of embodiment that is so central in phenomenology and particularly in Merleau-​Ponty’s (1968, 2007) philosophy, with the concept of lived body that highlights our bodily engagement with the world. I have avoided a direct reference to his work through feminist new materialism for minimizing the risk of falling back in an oppositional attitude, and I have opted for being the author of a series of short stories on different forms of embodiment. Through this choice I have highlighted how the writer is neither inside nor outside the text, instead, how I—​as a Western, white, female, and aged subject—​am entangled in a becoming-​with the text and in a becoming-​with the reader as well. The method of diffractive reading of my short stories through other texts and concepts from feminist new materialism offers insights by attentively and carefully reading for differences that matter. What emerges from this diffractive reading is a new diffraction pattern that does not reduce phenomenology to new materialism, nor privileges one over the other, rather it produces interferences instead of oppositions. The chapter thus proposes an ethical practice of writing and reading, since the researcher is part of the phenomenon under study and is part of the apparatus that creates knowledge and separates what matters and what is excluded from mattering. In looking for super-​positions my reading/​writing of diffractive waves creates interferences with processes of embodiment rather than with ‘THE’ body, and I used six concepts for producing interferences: ordinary affect, corpomateriality, transcorporeality, virtual embodiment, becoming-​animal, and affective pedagogy. These interferences are both the effect of blurring the boundaries of subject and object and of a research apparatus based on ethico-​onto-​epistemology. They enrich the concept of embodiment illustrating it as a process that gives to bodies of all kinds their place in everyday life through corporeal practices that produce the becoming of ‘a body’. Embodiment thus is about the sensual, affective, and aesthetic experience that is not individual but transcorporeal,

Phenomenology and Feminist New Materialism    325 resonating with other bodies in the entanglement of ordinary affects, transcorporeality, material corporeality, and corporeality in becoming with other nonhuman animals and other material technologies. I conclude the chapter by mentioning art-​based methodologies because they may be taken as an example of practices in which knowledge is gained through the senses (and this is the case of working practices as well) and practicing is fleshy, creative, and sensuous. Art practices can teach something to organization studies that privilege ‘scientific rationality’. Art practice is a doing not a thing and research practice is also a doing that can be learnt and taught as an affective pedagogy in which the researcher learns to abandon him/​herself to becoming-​with others thus learning to affect and to be affected in doing affective ethnography (Gherardi, 2019), or art-​based workshops (Taylor & Ladkin, 2009), or artistic performances (Springgay & Zaliwska, 2017). To bring an affective pedagogy in organization studies is possible and worth the effort of pursuing a politics of attunement to matter without erasing the attuned differences (Massumi, 2015).

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Chapter 16

Bachel ard’s Bac k d o or to Happ y Busi ne s s S c h o ol Phenom e nol o g y Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Matilda Dahl, and Jenny Helin

16.1  Gaston Bachelard: Phenomenology for Poetics or Science? This is the story of our path to phenomenology. We, three researchers in organization and management studies, stumbled on it and sneaked in through a poetic backdoor left open by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884−1962). Had we begun with Kant, Hegel, Husserl, or Merleau-​Ponty (Rockmore, 2011), we would maybe have acceded to phenomenology through its main entrance. But Bachelard directly tackled the poetic and art issues important to our research agenda as well as openly addressing phenomenology, thus making us wonder if he offered a missing link between science and art relevant to a social science approaches to management and organization. At the start, we three researchers were engaged in field studies, interviewing agricultural entrepreneurs, when stumbling on Bachelard’s two books Earth and Reveries of Will (2002) and Earth and Reveries of Repose (2011), both of which fit our work incredibly well. This crossing of the road initiated an almost whimsical ‘turn’ in our work. After close readings, our sense of this providing an inspiring fit deepened when we returned to the conversations with the farmers in our field study. Before we had felt flooded by studies of how institutional logics of agricultural regulations had an often-​hampering impact on farming action and this certainly placed us in the mood for something different than the usual templates of institutional theory of organization.

Happy Business School Phenomenology    331 Organization studies felt dusty and uncool. We dared to make a research application that would allow Bachelard to meet our farmers. As a funding body boldly supported this adventure, we suspected that they too were pretty bored by traditional organization studies. The entire project rested on how unexpectedly Bachelard’s texts would resonate with the voices from our fieldwork and, in turn, how this would inspire us to render previously unnoticed impressions of our interviews in poetic form. Our new companion Gaston Bachelard encouraged us to play with our data in ways we never imagined before. With the melodies of our interviews still ringing in our ears, we soon picked up more of Bachelard’s books. In The Poetics of Reverie (1969), he supported the initial fascination for the imagery that our voices from the field evoked for us. Bachelard began to gently guide us on this new track, where we now navigated by listening to the voices in a spirit he indicated: ‘the phenomenological requirement with respect to poetic images is simple: it returns to putting the accent on their original quality, grasping the very essence of their originality, and thus taking advantage of the remarkable psychic productivity of imagination’ (Bachelard, 1969: 3). As researchers, we had longed to go in a different direction to those apparently indicated by ‘organization theory’, this fuzzy mental object that basically told us what not to do. We, and we guess other authors in this volume, simply felt something was lacking. Then suddenly, this guy Bachelard gently supported us to explore what our farmers told us, and to turn research into a merry adventure! Of course, we could not be entirely certain of what he might have meant, but when he wrote that ‘in poetry, wonder is coupled with the joy of speech’ (1969: 3), we felt he captured something central to our data too. This fascination seemed connected to the poetics emerging from our field conversations. And when we encountered claims such as: ‘phenomenology, at least, is set up to consider the poetic image in its own being, distinct and independent from any antecedent being, as a positive conquest of the word’ (p. 3), we were hooked without yet really knowing on what and how. Like most other social scientists, we were not well-​read philosophy scholars, and so we offer here our story of how we, hand in hand with this fascinating white bearded bard, so nicely portrayed in Chapter 4 of the present volume by Michele Charbonneau, slipped into the domain of ‘phenomenology’. To understand this domain, we had to explore what kind of philosopher Bachelard was. Usually, he is presented as a philosopher whose work is split between two main bodies: the first devoted to the philosophy of science and the second to the poetics of imagination. This frequent view is reflected in Michele Charbonneau’s chapter who dwells much more on the ‘soft’ poetic than on the ‘hard’ scientific Bachelard. Zbigniew Kotowicz, Bachelard’s biographer, also sees his work on poetics and imagination as a definite ‘turn’ (Kotowicz, 2018: 82−6) away from his treatises on the epistemology of natural sciences. Other biographers like Cristina Chimisso (2001) are however more hesitant to judge Bachelard’s work in a duality of concrete either/​or siloes. In a recent thesis on Bachelard, however, Julien Lamy (2018) tentatively suggests his entire work as being written in the spirit of a ‘coherent pluralism’. He notes, although he doesn’t really exploreit, the puzzling parallel between Bachelard’s works on science and those on poetics. The idea of this split into two Bachelards remains an inviting approach to his

332    Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Matilda Dahl, and Jenny Helin work, especially as Gaston himself offers little assistance in helping us to pin-​point the possible bridging interfaces between his works. But we found attempts to do this from other theorists. Thanks to her background in the philosophy of mathematics, Mary Tiles (1991) has, in one of the first English treatises on Bachelard (Tiles, 1984), proposed a more unifying approach. Tiles indicates the key role of using a phenomenological interface for such a project. Is it forgetfulness of Bachelard’s sometimes vague and tentative phenomenological ambitions that upholds the common view of one poetic and another distinctly different scientific Bachelard? This leads us to more general questions. Is it this lack of desire to grasp and explore phenomenology that widens the gap between art and science? Is it this chiasm to blame for our boredom with mainstream organization studies what we first hoped to remedy with Gaston Bachelard’s work? In the text that follows, we want to see if our friend Bachelard actually helps us to understand how science and the poetic may intertwine. And if he can help us to do this, can we apply it to our work by adapting a phenomenological perspective? We will therefore follow Lamy’s intuition and Tiles’s hypothesis in our attempt to unearth Bachelard’s own kind of phenomenology. If there is phenomenology in Bachelard, which as Charbonneau honestly remarks still is an unsettled question, how then could Mary Tiles’s rather compact philosophic reading of Gaston Bachelard help us to see the poetic, not only as a nicely humanist holiday stroll into ‘subjective’ imagination, but as providing an equally important methodology in our scientific quests for objective knowledge? As the first step in this exercise, we will go back to a perspective that seems to block all attempts to apply phenomenology to the social sciences. We subsequently wonder precisely what kind of Bachelardian phenomenology this filters out. Then we try see how Bachelard’s phenomenology might provide a missing link between science and art. Finally, we make some preliminary remarks on how Bachelard might help us to apply phenomenology in business schools. We start inviting by you on a tour to Davos, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago to see how mainstream social science blocked phenomenology by going for analytical philosophy. .

16.2  Analytical Philosophy: Blocking Phenomenology 16.2.1 Logics in Davos Michael Friedman (2000) situates the modern parting of the ways of continental and analytic philosophy to a conference in Davos in 1929. He reports how neo-​Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer asked Rudolf Carnap how he, as a logical positivist, would summarize in the ‘language of mathematical logic’ a lecture delivered by Martin Heidegger earlier that same day. Carnap, to whom Heidegger was logical non-​sense, quickly

Happy Business School Phenomenology    333 retorted ‘Quite simple: Bi-​ba-​bum’ (Gordon, 2010: 327). In Davos, a large audience of philosophers had gathered, amongst them was Leon Brunschvicg, Gaston Bachelard’s thesis supervisor. Keynote speakers were Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, the newly appointed successor to phenomenologist Edmund Husserl in Freiburg. The established Hamburg ordinarius Cassirer was challenged by rising academic star Heidegger. Following the current habits of German-​speaking philosophy, the main focus of the fight was Kant’s system. Neo-​Kantians were engaged in updating the system to fit modern science. Husserl had proposed ‘transcendental phenomenology’ to counter an increasingly popular use of psychology for transforming philosophy into a scientific exploration of ‘inner’ subjectivities. In Davos, Kantian architecture was again on the agenda (Gordon, 2010: 136−214; Heidegger, 1975: 246−68). To Heidegger ‘the question arises what still remains of philosophy if the totality of beings has been divided up under the sciences? It remains just knowledge of science not of beings. And it is from this perspective that the return to Kant is then determined’ (Heidegger in Gordon, 2010: 139). In his bold new Kantian interpretation, Heidegger drops his Davos bomb claiming, ‘theory of science was nonessential for Kant’ (Gordon, 2010: 142). Heidegger subsequently insists that the starting point for his own existentialism rests on his reinterpretation schema of transcendental imagination being central to Kant (Heidegger, 1975: 167−89). Cassirer disagrees, and we know that he shared this view with Husserl who saw existentialism as not only the sheer betrayal of phenomenology but also a relapse into psychologization reducing philosophy to a subjective introspection he was constantly struggling to overcome. To Husserl, existentialism was rather some sort of anthropology. Heidegger’s reappropriation of Kant soon became his Kant-​Kanone in his Blitzkrieg against especially the Bolshevist logical empiricists from the Vienna Circle, of which Rudolf Carnap had been part at the Davos conference. Heideggerian metaphysicians also attacked those who, like Carnap, limited philosophy to questions of science, language, and logics. After immigrating to the US in 1935, Rudolf Carnap finally experienced freedom from an old and murky continental philosophy. In the new world, Carnap would, in his passionate Leibnizian spirit, totally focus on doing away with the continental deadwood acts of translating language into universal logic. He argued that the time had come to eradicate continental metaphysics. Let analytic philosophy shape a brave new international world, where poetry, like Goethe’s plays, would be democratically performed in the universal and artificial language of Esperanto (Friedman, 2000: 153). And who cares for old-​fashioned art in such a scientific utopia?

16.2.2 Rationality in Cambridge, Massachusetts In 1939−40, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a series of Harvard University seminars was hosted by another European immigrant, economist Joseph Schumpeter, who considerably alienated social science from the continental tradition. Schumpeter had for the occasion teamed up with Yankee sociologist Talcott Parsons who was especially well-​ acquainted with the German social philosopher Max Weber. If the logical positivism

334    Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Matilda Dahl, and Jenny Helin developed by Carnap hardly welcomed poetic phenomenology à la Bachelard (Lecourt, 1971, 1972, 1974), the seminars at Harvard University distanced it even further. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, an idea of rationality was forged and further rooted in an Anglo-​Saxon utilitarianism that marginalized the question of reason so central to phenomenology. The seminar’s proceedings (Staubmann & Lidz, 2018) retrace the emergence and construction of the concept of ‘rationality’ that soon turned into a mantra for subsequent social sciences’ postulates for organization theory. The Austrian Joseph Schumpeter was rewriting the history of political economy as a glorious highway to analytical economics. He opened the seminar arguing that ‘scientific procedures must necessarily reject all forms of thought that are in conflict with the rules of logic or cannot, in principle at least, be tested by these rules’ (Schumpeter, in Staubmann & Lidz, 2018: 30). Anyone familiar with natural sciences knew that the calm era of Newtonian hegemony had long been replaced by different disciplines that experienced differing scientific developments. If we follow the modern history of sciences, we will discover a multifaceted scientific evolution. It was this precisely this awareness what was fascinating in Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy of science. Still, the utilitarian economist Schumpeter stubbornly maintained that science remained Newtonian, saying that the definition of mechanics shall define science in general as the endeavour to describe phenomena we happen to be interested in, in the way most economical with reference to assigned degree of accuracy. The element of rationality enters by means of that minimum condition which may, I think, be so interpreted as to also include, to some extent at least, the element of predictability of future phenomena. (Staubmann & Lidz, 2018: 29)

Two decades later, the same analytic autism was voiced by Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, now the home of Rudolf Carnap, and was successfully marketed as ‘positive economics’. Once again, half a century later, Donald MacKenzie (2008: 208) borrowed Friedman’s slogan for economics as ‘An engine, not a camera’ for the catchy title of his detailed empirical decoding of how economic models became blueprints for digitally programming behaviour on financial markets. In 1939, such glorious socio-​economic engineering still however was the stuff of economists’ fantasies. At that time, ‘rationality’ was, as Schumpeter makes clear at Harvard, only an idea in the head of the observer of markets and organizations. In his opening address at the conference, one could spot Schumpeter’s familiarity with the classical queries about reason in continental Kantian philosophy. It might have been this familiarity with Kant and new-​Kantianism that explains his successful effort to avoid the scrutiny of continental philosophy by circumnavigating the complex question of reason, and instead inventing the analytic term rationality. Not much of Kant remains when Schumpeter states that ‘rational quality is by nature relative to the information and mental equipment we ideally happen to possess or, if I may venture that far, which we could possess if we availed ourselves of all facilities at our disposal as seen by a self-​ appointed judge of higher rank’ (Staubmann & Lidz, 2018: 30−1).

Happy Business School Phenomenology    335

16.2.3 Decisions in Chicago In 1937 at Chicago University, Rudolf Carnap gained a devoted student, Herbert Simon, who was soon going to flood business schools with his analytic philosophy. Carnap fuelled young Simon’s life-​long interest in connecting logic with social science (Simon, 1991: 53), first resulting in his 1947 dissertation Administrative Behaviour, a study of decision-​making processes in administrative organizations. Simon’s incredible impact on modern social science and its studies of both public organization and private management was crowned in 1978 by his Nobel Prize in Economics. By cleverly mixing utilitarian rationality and logical empiricism with a considerable dose of American pragmatism (Statler & Guillet de Monthoux 2015), Simon made social sciences definitively cut loose from continental philosophy, establishing what his biographer Crowther-​Heyck (2005) calls the technological Age of System (2015). If earlier political economy focused on the broad phenomenon of human action (Guillet de Monthoux, 1993) Simon narrowed it down to the analysis of decisions and choice (Guillet de Monthoux, 2017). The overall task of social science became the matching of Logics with the Empirical. Simon originally had the intention to paraphrase Carnap’s 1928 treatise Logische Aufbau der Welt by calling his own dissertation on administrative behaviour the ‘Logical Structure of Administrative Science’ (Crowther-​ Heyck, 2005: 73). It was Carnap’s effort to construct a perfect analytic language that fascinated Simon and made him opt for a use of simulations by computer programming. With impressive political astuteness, Simon thus set out to clone the US business school milieu after what he imagined was a Vienna-​circle atmosphere. Herbert Simon’s pragmatism set the tone for US business education and research after World War II and also that of the widely analytically drilled Europeans, who had enjoyed Ford Foundation doctoral scholarships before becoming business school professors on the ‘old continent’. Simon’s thesis ‘Administrative Behaviour’ soon became a standard text in most management curricula. Simon, in good American pragmatist style, added some ‘realism’ to Carnap’s orthodoxy by arrogantly postulating that the ‘ought to be’ ‘is’. Simon became an ingrained abuser of Moore’s naturalistic fallacy. In that respect, he departed from Rudolf Carnap who, although he strived to make the ‘out there’ come ‘in there’, cautiously refrained from any truth claims outside his logical systems. In fact, when Simon without hesitation referred to the ‘out there’, he was performing a street-​smart marketing trick, selling his models of human kind as truths. He would certainly not let his grand social visions be blocked by trivial reality. One of his collaborators, for instance, told us that he had detected serious data flaws in a dissertation said to be recording actual behaviour of a stock dealer whose actions would then subsequently be modelled by Simon. Here, Simon’s claim was that he could successfully program computers to ape the behaviour of a living successful stock dealer. His erstwhile collaborator, told us that having demonstrated to Simon that the dealer data was flawed, this did however not seem to bother him. There was no retraction. The collaborator was utterly shocked by the master’s cynicism. He reluctantly realized that Professor Herbert Simon simply did not seem to care, as long as no one else did!

336    Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Matilda Dahl, and Jenny Helin

16.3  Phenomenology Bachelard Brought Back? 16.3.1 Returning to Bachelard’s Continental Humanism Analytical philosophy impregnates the very walls of our business school workplaces, so much so that any phenomenologization is indeed difficult to envisage other than as an ephemeral extra-​curricular turn. The idea of ‘Phenomenologization’ is inspired by the organizational sociologist Antonio Strati who, in his recent book Organization Theory and Aesthetic Philosophy (2019) uses the term ‘phenomenological doubt’. Strati’s passage into phenomenology goes through a use of photography for studying organizations. Strati notes how photography sometimes was ‘occulted by the reduction of the photograph, as it happens in organizational theories when organizational life is reduced to the organization as an ontological entity’ (Strati, 2019: 56). Strati’s reference to ‘organizational life’ no doubt signals his fascination with the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz’s (1899−1959) work on the ‘social world’. Through the paper Alfred Schütz (Staubmann & Lidz, 2018: 85−102) contributed to the proceedings of the Cambridge seminar on rationality, we possess a unique criticism of the analytical social science concept of ‘rationality’ from a disciple of Edmund Husserl and rooted in continental philosophy. After congratulating Professor Talcott Parsons on his latest book, Schütz diplomatically drops the names of two indigenous US philosophers, William James and John Dewey, who one suspect might both loath the Harvard idea of rationality. Then he delivers his devastating phenomenological verdict on this kind of analytical social science by explaining why ‘rationality’ cannot help us to grasp what people do in everyday life. The social world is complex and social scientists should always keep in mind that although they ‘contemplate with the same detachment as the physicists contemplate their experiments, they still always remain human beings in [ . . . ] daily life [ . . . ] men among fellow men with whom we are interrelated in very many ways’ (Schütz, in Staubmann & Lidz, 2018: 89). He then points out that scientific work is a social phenomenon too. Never forget that most of the rules, habits, and principles used in everyday life are cookbook rules of thumb. Everyday knowledge of such handy recipes is about likelihood and not ‘certainty, nor even probability in a mathematical sense’ (Staubmann & Lidz, 2018: 91). Referring to Husserl, Schütz states that scientists have no grounds to discard a-​utilitarian acts as non-​rational. We must keep in mind that [o]‌n the level of everyday experience [ . . . ] logic in its traditional form cannot render the services we need and expect. Traditional logic is a logic of concepts based on certain idealization. In enforcing the postulate of clearness and distinction of the concepts, for instance, traditional logic disregards all the fringes surrounding the nucleus within the stream of thought [ . . . ] This clearly [ . . . ] explains why Husserl classifies the greater parts of our propositions in daily thought as ‘occasional

Happy Business School Phenomenology    337 propositions’ [ . . . ] valid and understandable only relative to the speaker’s situation and their place in his stream of thought. (Staubmann & Lidz, 2018: 94)

At the end of his statement, Schütz reminds us of the fundamental role for methodology is to stop the social scientist from losing contact with the world of daily life. Thus, a teacher must always listen to his/​her students and accept that humans live in several very different realities. With a glance towards technical optimism, Alfred Schütz emphasizes that great human achievements mainly take place in the realm of ‘culture’. He ends by quoting the composer Arnold Schoenberg, most probably the only artist mentioned in the Harvard seminar, as someone who always tuned in to his pupils. Schütz warns against the scientistic seduction of socially constructing societies as perfect models that we mistakenly think we can understand through some ‘universal transformation formula such as Einstein’s has succeeded in establishing for translating propositions in terms of the Newtonian System of Mechanics into those of the theory of Relativity’ (Staubmann & Lidz, 2018: 97). Two decades before Herbert Simon began marketing his early models of artificial intelligence, phenomenologist Alfred Schütz had spotted an eminent danger of analytic philosophy putting an end to American freedom by creating a situation where ‘the social scientist replaces human beings he observes as actors on the social stage by puppets created by himself and manipulated by himself ’ (Staubmann & Lidz, 2018: 97). Schütz’s phenomenological sociology of ‘everyday life’ has little in common with Carnap, Schumpeter, or Simon. As a professor at the New School in New York City, Schütz mainly took inspiration from his master Edmund Husserl (1859−1938), father of the so-​called ‘transcendental phenomenology’, who had searched for ‘clarity’ and ‘certainty’ inside neo-​Kantianism, the philosophical platform for the Davos conference. When turning to Husserl and his phenomenology, we inevitably encounter Immanuel Kant’s Copernican ambition to offer an autonomous philosophy that will wage war on all forms of dogmatism and scepticism. Husserl was fighting for the position of philosophy in modernity. We are maybe today facing similar challenges when questioning the analytic philosophy nurtured by states and corporations. Listen to how Kant in 1781 presented his reasons for philosophizing, what he calls doing metaphysics, in the preface of the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason: The first the rule of Metaphysics, under the dominion of the dogmatists, was despotic. But as the laws still bore the traces of an old barbarism, internal wars and complete anarchy broke out, and the sceptics, a kind of nomads, despising all settled culture of the land, broke up from time to time all civil society. Fortunately, their number was small, and they could not prevent the old settlers from returning to cultivate the ground afresh, though without any fixed plan or agreement. (Kant, [1781] 1999: xviii)

Kant’s proposal for such a ‘plan’ was to consider a new kind of critical philosophy whereby he meant not ‘a criticism of books and systems, but of the faculty of reason in

338    Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Matilda Dahl, and Jenny Helin general, touching that whole class of knowledge which it may strive after, unassisted by experience’ (p. xx). Kant’s claim to the ‘unassisted-​ness of experience’ is a particularly hard pill to swallow for organization scholars fostered in an empiricism where excursions away from collected data and research observations imply risking tenured academic careers. Phenomenology however does not necessarily see us leaving the objective world of assumed facts as our turning to introspection of only inner subjectivity. This becomes clearer when we now reconnect with Gaston Bachelard, our research buddy.

16.3.2 Bachelard and Teleology of Modern Sciences Befriending Bachelard made us suspect that he was less split than some of his interpreters thought. Besides Bachelard the philosopher of science and Bachelard the poetics philosopher, we now discerned a third Bachelard. Our third Bachelard is a phenomenologist. Our detour to Davos, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago illustrated how the analytic tradition considerably shrinks the field of organization research to logic, rationality, and decisions. We, who are not model-​building programming technicians, no doubt found this small world of analytic philosophy terribly boring. That was probably why, in our case, we were struck by Strati’s phenomenological doubt and teamed up with Gaston Bachelard in the first place. Once we sneaked in through his backdoor, we however found ourselves in a much more complex, fascinating, and enigmatic world than that offered by analytical philosophy, for which we were probably not really meant. Counter to Schumpeter or Simon, the phenomenologist Bachelard urges us to stop fantasizing about some methodologically defined, general ‘scienticity’. Based on detailed case studies of then recent advancements in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, Bachelard challenged those who assumed that there was a smooth cumulative development in scientific knowledge. He dared to oppose famous French masterminds of his time such as Henri Bergson (1859−1941), famous for his concept of continuous durée-​ flow time, and Emile Meyerson (1859−1933), who made considerable and intricate efforts to shoehorn the new physics of Einstein (1879−1955) and de Broglie (1892−1987) into the old Newtonian paradigm. Bachelard maintained that modern scientific developments occur by sudden ‘jumps’ and ‘ruptures’ rather than through steady, smooth progressions that might be easily mapped by any single method. In other words, contrary to what analytical philosophy seems to suggest, science is no simple matter. It might even be as complex as art and poetry! Why then pretend art and science are necessarily different? They might be creatively blurred. It was actually in returning to his oeuvre that we discovered our third Bachelard. There were works that were neither science nor art. Books like Le pluralisme coherent de la chimie moderne (1932), L’activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine (1951), Le rationalisme appliqué (1949), and Le materialisme rationel (1953) bear witness to his struggles to do reasonable justice to a puzzling diversity of modern sciences. What Bachelard discovered was an experimental tinkering in laboratories that although

Happy Business School Phenomenology    339 largely non-​predictable was constantly ‘rectified’ by scientists not according to some rational plan but nonetheless by a very reasonable teleology, which was the object of phenomenological studies. Such quests were, for instance, at the core of Husserl’s entire project. This kind of phenomenology makes Bachelard wonder over what happened to physics after Einstein and Heisenberg or how mathematics was affected by Riemann and Lobatchevski. How could one understand the development of modern science when it takes years to construct experiments that might support theories, such as when for instance Arthur Eddington in 1919 provided empirical proof for Albert Einstein’s 1916 theory? Or when Wolfgang Pauli’s idea of a neutrino particle became experimentally ‘discovered’ twenty-​five years later by Martin Perl and Frederick Reines in 1956? Half a century before sociotechnical system theory and actor-network theory, Bachelard minted the concept of ‘phenomenotechnique’ for the complex technical craft needed to design scientific instruments for the experiments that would eventually allow reality to catch up with theory. Instruments had to embody the spirit’s ideas of the phenomena under study. What you for instance see in a microscope is to a large extent pre-​programmed by what is thought and read about previously. So, when complex experimentation replaces simple ocular observation, it becomes increasingly hard to tell the scientist from his/​ her field. No doubt, such philosophizing is far from the analytical ideas of ‘positive economics’. The kind of social science modelling Crowther-​Heyck (2015) sees as the ideal of contemporary social science seems rather a matter of conceiving a closed system. It was his empirical investigations of various natural sciences that conditioned Bachelard’s humble approach to phenomenology. It was precisely the fact that he adamantly opposed the seen images as defining the content of modern scientific work that was phenomenological. Actual images might have mattered for the pre-​scientific alchemist, but for modern scientists, it is the act of the creative imagination that matters. To Bachelard, art and science therefore do not exchange images, but they might share imagination.

16.3.3 Mathematics as Poetic Thought So, did his phenomenology in any way connect his poetic work with his studies of science? Or were the two completely separate? Charbonneau tells us how he gladly befriended avant-​garde artists, freethinkers, and outsider characters, making him quite unfit for the rigid Harvard and Chicago University seminars. What phenomenological purpose could there be, for instance, in his writings in a surrealist magazine or his book on the strange poet Count Lautréamont, alias Isidore Ducasse, published in 1939? Could there be signs of how a phenomenological interest connects poetics with science in the third Bachelard? Although he mostly denies this relationship, the more we became familiarized with his work, the more intensely we felt that his two sides were sometimes converging. When Cristina Chimisso noticed a passage in the book on the cult-​author of the gothic poem Les Chants de Maldoror (Bachelard, 1939), she also discovers that Ducasse had studied at both École Polytechnique and École des Mines, two eminent grandes écoles of French Republican Reason. Evidently, this bizarre artist that so fascinates

340    Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Matilda Dahl, and Jenny Helin Bachelard also had a science background. Chimisso notes that Bachelard in the poem exceptionally spots an interface between poetry and science. When Bachelard reads Ducasse he thus spontaneously senses that he [Ducasse] recalled the times when impulses were arrested, when life was overcome in him and he could think, when he loved abstraction and lovely solitude [ . . . ] The soft, poetic exertion of a heart in some fashion non-​Euclidean, intoxicated with non-​love, joyous in refusing of living abstractly in a non-​life, of moving beyond the obligations of desire, of braking up the parallelism of will and happiness. (Bachelard, in Chimisso, 2001: 237)

To Bachelard, there was little doubt. When Ducasse transcends narrative reproductive imagination, when he leaves habitual and logical language, he hits a poetic quality that becomes ‘a hymn to mathematics’. It seems that for Bachelard this vertical poetic element in an otherwise epic and horizontal narration suddenly flings open a backdoor to phenomenology. Reproductive imagination, language serving to communicate something already existing just waiting to be captured, here we mysteriously flip over into the creative imagination that Bachelard so cherished. How could poetic art become a backdoor to phenomenology, connecting to mathematics and, through analytical philosophers, those disenchanted that there seems to be only a technical language for calculus? This phenomenological opening seems to depend on our seeing logics as separate from maths. Bachelard scholar Mary Tiles tries to explain this in her work on Mathematics and the Image of Reason (1991). We have seen how Rudolf Carnap tried to delete continental metaphysics by an appeal to logics in his analytic philosophy. Digging deeper into the genealogy of that obsession brings us to the German logician Gottlob Frege (1848−1925). Frege’s grand project was to provide science with unwavering foundations and clear standards for what constitutes a proof (Tiles, 1991: 25). Tiles notes that in the times when Frege operated, proof was ‘demanded of many things that formerly passed as self-​evident’ (p. 25). She sees it as a return to pre-​Cartesian scholastic ways of proving truth. Why would we rely on the subjective ‘cogito’ for objective knowledge when people are so different and changing? Before the Enlightenment, individual judgement was mistrusted in terms of providing a stable foundation for universal knowledge. What during the Enlightenment counted as scientific knowledge had, as stated by the so-​called Port Royal Logic, to reflect ‘the natural order of human thought [ . . . ] by which the mind will be led to an intuitive understanding’ (Tiles, 1991: 17). It was indeed an important part of the Enlightenment to entrust to human intuition the foundation for science. Nevertheless, Frege and his followers attempted to put an end to that. Now the art of thinking and an assumed reliance on human ‘Godly’ intuition was put in question. The more one learnt about humans and our differing psychological, sociological, and cultural ways of being, the less secure seemed references to human intuition. Some even claimed God, the divine creator of human reason, was dead. Mathematics now too had to find support outside humans, which prompted Frege (in Tiles, 1991: 29−31) to postulate the following three

Happy Business School Phenomenology    341 principles by which mathematics was transformed into logics to secure truth untouched by humans. 1. Always to separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective. 2. Never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition. 3. Never to lose sight of the distinction between concept and object. Frege’s rules, which became the credo for analytical philosophy, were simply negations of some fundamental questions for phenomenology namely, first how the subjective is entangled in the objective; second how poetical meaning emerges when words are liberated from proposition; and, third, how concepts are shaped in interaction with objects. When logics reigned, phenomenology was no longer needed. Much later, postmodernity similarly seemed to skip over phenomenology when meta-​narratives were scrapped as unimportant and even mystifying. The complexity of modern sciences also supported postmodernism; science was nothing but a pragmatic anything-​goes game! It is by reference to the phenomenologist Bachelard that Tiles however opposes postmodernism for [a]‌s Bachelard had already noted in 1928 [ . . . ] the rational spirit of contemporary mathematics [ . . . ] does not have the closed [ . . . ] character. Bachelard’s observation was based on the study of ‘revolutionary’ developments which marked the transition from nineteenth-​to twentieth-​century physics—​the advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics—​and the prior development of non-​Euclidian geometries, tensor calculus, Fourier analysis etc. These developments displaced the rational framework of classical Newtonian science, whose stability has seemed to underwrite the supposition that its form was uniquely required by reason. (Tiles, 1991: 166)

In the same vein, she adds that there might well be bridges between art and science provided machines mingle with humans making creative mathematics whereby, for instance ‘computers make possible a much more concrete, because rapidly manipulable, representation of mathematical entities, illustrating the respects in which mathematical reasoning is a form of rational poiesis’ (p. 170).

16.3.4 Bachelard’s Imaginational Reverie Charbonneau rightly stresses Gaston Bachelard’s focus on poetic dreaming as being at the core of creative imagination. Only this poetic imagination renders the oneiric power lacking in reproductive imagination. Richard Kearney (1991) hails this as Bachelard’s special contribution of phenomenology. To Kearney this is Bachelard’s

342    Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Matilda Dahl, and Jenny Helin version of an ‘imagination’ which Kant located in the human faculty of making knowledge by producing a miraculous synthesis of reason, from inside ourselves, and from the empirical surrounding us: ‘Kant resolved to rehabilitate the validity of the objective knowledge by establishing the validity of the subjective imagination—​as a “transcendental synthesis” of our sensible and intelligible experience’ (Kearney, 1988: 169). To Kearney, Bachelard’s ‘poetic imagination’ is also very close to Husserl’s idea of teleology. Bachelard takes much trouble singling out ‘creative imagination’ from what he calls ‘reproductive imagination’ (Lamy, 2018: 295−345). As Charbonneau notes, not all images refer to the creative imagination. He actually sees most images as obstacles to synthetical knowledge, and they do not generate any of this oneiric power creating the movement that takes us upward to consciousness and reason. This happy state is what Bachelard also calls ‘Surrationalism’ in his 1936 article published at the invitation of two Parisian surrealists Tristan Tzara and Roger Caillois (Chimisso, 2001: 190−1). Bachelard is indeed a passionate bookworm constantly hunting for what might trigger oneiric imagination. His contemporary philosopher colleagues were struck by his enthusiastic appetite for reading far beyond the limits of connoisseurship, cultural snobbery, or even literary scholarship. In 1919, whilst still writing his dissertation, and making a living for himself and his daughter Suzanne, he euphorically voices his creative imagination in a letter to a childhood friend: I seem to have conjured an intimate bliss. The kind of happiness one must conquer by constant work. I have found the happiness that lets me socialize with others in a constant good mood. My friends hardly suspect my little philosophical secret. That the key to my happiness is made up of intellectual work during every minute of my 15-​hour workday. (Filloux, 2013: 494; author’s translation)

And in this happy mood, he was miraculously to remain for the rest of his life! His books, and also his radio-​lectures, charmed a broad, French, postwar audience, thirsty for hope and comfort after the horror and the despair of World War II. The pitch and rhythm of his voice, far beyond the content of the read text, transports us into his enlightened state of lucid clarity. Even today, it seems that Bachelard’s positive and hopeful enthusiasm has not lost its original glow. Back then his enthusiasm stood in sharp contrast to many of his contemporary existentialists like, for instance, Jean-​Paul Sartre who seemed caught in a black claustrophobia and angst (Lamy, 2018: 375−91). Poetry to Bachelard, wherever it can be appropriated, offers a surprising escape to the Surrational out of Plato’s cave. The poetic conveys Bachelard’s vision of consciousness and clarity high on the cosmic summit that Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology strived to climb. High up there, we are far from the laming despair of Heidegger’s ‘Geworfenheit’. Our philosophical sensitivity, to use the words of Antonio Strati, attracts us to Bachelard work as to a homecoming. His phenomenology is one of warmth and hospitality. Had Bachelard summed it up, as Heidegger did in Sein und Zeit, an appropriate title for his unwritten treatise on phenomenology might have been Reverie und Raum. Instead of another weighty philosophical volume, in 1957 he wrote the lively and gracious little piece called The Poetics of Space. This book has been a well-​known guide to a welcoming philosophy

Happy Business School Phenomenology    343 of the intimate atmosphere of happy existence. It is an ode to the cosiness of a sheltering small world. It is situated on a completely different planet than the compressions of time and space offered by the closed black box models of analytical philosophy. A happiness tipping over into euphoria is conveyed when Bachelard’s sudden reverie propelled by poetry converges towards reason! The reverie he recommended was a daydreaming of consciousness, something far from either the night-​dreams Freudians decoded or the dreams Kant ridiculed as fantasies of clever ‘artists of reason’ (Beiser, 1992: 45). Positioning Bachelard in proximity to other phenomenologists is a complex hermeneutic matter, as he constantly rectified and refined his own idea of phenomenology even dispatching his dear daughter Suzanne to the Husserl archives in Leuven to write, assisted by Jacques Derrida, a philosophy dissertation on La conscience de rationalité (S. Bachelard, 1957), which she subsequently dedicated to her father. He was uninterested in a philosophy that would offer nothing more than reflections on given themes or a simple meta-​theory of existing grassroots thinking (Barsotti, 2002: 168). So, what then is phenomenology? To a phenomenologist, it seems indeed a grand enterprise, far too important to entrust to either church or castle. Is it the essence of philosophy? Our white-​bearded philosopher buddy certainly was more of a continental bon-​vivant sage than an anaemic analytic philosopher.

16.4  Applying Phenomenology in Bachelard’s Business School One day our research buddy Bachelard looked at us seriously as if he was a bit worried. He said he could not understand all this fuss about research. He told us that he had nothing against reading and writing. Nothing against publishing books and writing reviews. However, he wanted now to address what he found the most important thing, to teach and educate. We realized that Gaston Bachelard had remained an engaged schoolmaster his whole life. He was a young schoolmaster who had spotted significant flaws in the French schooling system and he fought an on-​going battle against what he saw as pedagogical obstacles on all levels of education. The main problem, he thought, was how national education adhered to an archaic idea of science, a set frame of reference rooted in Newtonian rationalism (Chimisso, 2001: 52−106). When we told him of the criteria required for winning the Nobel Economy Prize in Economics no wonder he laughed loudly and poured us another round of Burgundy! We then asked him to cast his eye on our business school curriculum and that made him mumble something in his white beard, Psychology all fine. You might think it might perhaps be simpler if we follow the tried-​and-​true methods of the psychologists who describes what he observes, measures levels, and classifies types. But honestly can a philosopher become a psychologist? Can he bend his pride to the point of contenting himself with the notation of facts? (Bachelard, 1969: 2)

344    Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Matilda Dahl, and Jenny Helin Instead, we brought up organization theory, our interest in sociology, and the importance of addressing issues of power in the workplaces. This made him read aloud from one of his books on farming: Between the warrior chief and the master blacksmith, I have chosen the labourer, whose battle is with matter. The will to power inspired by the quest for social domination is not my area of concern. Those who study the will to power tend to regard first the signs of majesty. In so doing, philosophy of the will to power tend to fall subject to the hypnotism of appearances; they are seduced by the paranoia of social utopias. (Bachelard, 2002: 23)

We knew Bachelard advocated solitude, but we also knew he was aware of how work was organized, especially how science necessitates precise communication and cooperation in the laboratories. So, what did he mean by his remarks? Was it that the ethos of such work should not unnecessarily be reduced to power games? Was it that what really mattered was something above interpersonal quarrels and/​or political conflicts, and that it was the ‘higher’ values that really mattered? This certainly seemed to be the mission of philosophy that he was trying to highlight. We knew our buddy Bachelard well enough not to suspect him of being the least asocial. But the collective dreaming he seemed to take an interest in was not to be decided either by social or by subjective processes (Cassou-​ Nougés, 2017: 188). We came to think of Jean Francois Lyotard’s (1954) positioning of the phenomenology of the social sciences as anti-​social and anti-​psychological. Later, something reminded us of how Kant’s conditional concepts were necessary for founding any system that will be applied in philosophizing (Beiser, 1992: 49). And indeed, that take on philosophizing seemed dear to Bachelard. And philosophizing to him we understood was primarily what happened when education really worked. What mattered to Bachelard was neither the construction of beautiful, hermetic systems nor the drilling disciples in the rules of discourse but rather to attempt to practice philosophy in the classroom and as a way of life (Hadot, 2002). Gaston’s daughter Suzanne once hinted at this challenge when warning against overemphasizing methods (so dear to business schools). She wrote, ‘As a matter of fact, the methodologies of various sciences often appear as hypertrophies of positivism. In quite a number of sciences methods has become a kind of training by means of which one economizes thought in one way or another’ (Suzanne Bachelard, 1970; 414). So how could we shape an atmosphere hospitable to such work? How could we live up to Bachelard’s motto: Cogitamus ergo sumus! Let us try to make the abstract concrete by experimenting with inviting poetry and art into our schools. That’s how we tackled the challenge of making education something that ‘you cannot Google’. In our case, the Stockholm School of Economics supported an Art Initiative and a Literary Agenda to invite our students to phenomenologize. Could a coming generation of managers find it fruitful to experience what Bachelard called ‘poetic imagination’? To be specific, we try to practice phenomenology by showing art and inviting artists (Dahl, Guillet de Monthoux, & Helin, 2020, 2021; Guillet de Monthoux, 2022) and letting conversation take flight in the poetics of concrete artwork (Nilson & Wikberg, 2021) and have this economic ekphrasis, our way of having art come alive, inspire more conversations and

Happy Business School Phenomenology    345 more exercises (Guillet de Monthoux & Wikberg, 2021). What we do is inspired by our dear buddy Bachelard; he even foresaw the poetic imagination as something that is also needed in businesses and factories. Managers need it as well as workers—​as well as the farmer-​entrepreneurs we were investigating! Bubbling with his irresistible joy, Bachelard offers us another round of Burgundy and bursts out with his vision of a dream department securing better business schools by applying artful phenomenology. Ah! The time will come when every profession will have its appointed dreamer, its oneiric guide, every factory its Bureau of Poetics. The will that cannot dream is handicapped and blind. Without reveries of will, the will is not a human force in the true sense but mere brutality. (Bachelard 2002, p. 70)

Acknowledgements The chapter draws on the research project ‘Dream and Entrepreneurship’ supported by the Jan Erik Lundberg Foundation for Research and Education.

References Bachelard, Gaston. (1939). Lautréamont. Paris: José Corti. Bachelard, Gaston. (1957). La poétique de l’espace. Paris: PUF. Bachelard, Gaston. (1969). The poetics of reverie, childhood, language and the cosmos. Boston: Beacon Press. Bachelard, Gaston. (2002). Earth and reveries of will, an essay of the imagination of matter. Dallas, TX: The Dallas Institute Publications. Bachelard, Gaston. (2011). Earth and reveries of repose: an essay on images of interiority. Dallas, TX: The Dallas Institute Publications. Bachelard, Suzanne. (1957). La logique de Husserl. Paris: PUF. Bachelard, Suzanne. (1959). La conscience de rationalité. Paris: PUF. Bachelard, Suzanne. (1970). Phenomenology and mathematical physics. In Joseph Kockelmans & Theodore Kisiel (eds.), Phenomenology and the natural sciences, essays and translations (pp. 411−426). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Barsotti, Bernard. (2002). Bachelard critique de Husserl. Paris: L’Harmattan. Beiser, Frederick. (1992). Kant’s intellectual development: 1746−1781. In Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Kant (pp. 26−59). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassou-​Nougés, Pierre. (2017). Un laboratoire philosophique, Cavailles et l’épistémologie en France. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin Chimisso, Cristina. (2001). Gaston Bachelard, critique of science and imagination. London: Routledge. Crowther-​Heyck, Hunter. (2005). Herbert A. Simon, the bound of reason in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Crowther-​Heyck, Hunter. (2015). Age of system, understanding the development of modern social science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

346    Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Matilda Dahl, and Jenny Helin Dahl, M., Guillet de Monthoux, P., & Helin, J. (2020) . Writing, dreams and imagination. In M. Kostera C. Woźniak (eds.), Art & Organzing. Routledge. Dahl, M., Guillet de Monthoux, P., Helin, J. (2021). The poetic teaching space: Gaston Bachelard and a third realm in management education, Culture and Organization. DOI: 10.1080/​ 14759551.2021.2007917. Filloux, Jean-​ Claude. (2013). Temoinage sur la vie de Gaston Bachelard. In Jean-​ Jacques Wunenburger (ed.), Gaston Bachelard, science et poétique, une nouvelle étique. Paris: Hermann. Friedman, Michael. (2000). A parting of the ways, Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger. Chicago: Open Court. Gordon, Peter. (2010). Continental divide. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Guillet de Monthoux, Pierre. (1993). The moral philosophy of management, from Quesnay to Keynes. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Guillet de Monthoux, Pierre. (2017). Actions and decisions, pragmatism as gateway to artful analytic. Journal Philosophy of Management, 16(3), 277–​290. Guillet de Monthoux, Pierre. (2022). Curating capitalism. Berlin: Sternberg MIT Press. Guillet de Monthoux, Pierre, & Erik Wikberg. (2021). Economic ekphrasis, Golding +​Senneby and Aart for business education. Berlin: Sternberg MIT Press. Hadot, Pierre. (2002). What is ancient philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin. (1975). Kant und das Problem de Metaphysik, vierte erweiterte Auflage. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Helin, J., Dahl, M., Guillet de Monthoux, P. (2020). Caravan poetry: An inquiry on four wheels. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(6): 633–​638. Kant, Immanuel. ([1781] 1999). A critique of pure reason. Cambridge: CUP. Kearney, Richard. (1988). The wake of imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Kearney, Richard. (1991). Poetics of imagination, from Husserl to Lyotard. London: HarperCollins. Kotowicz, Zbigniew. (2018). Gaston Bachelard, a philosophy of the surreal. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lamy, Julien. (2018). Le pluralisme cohérent de la philosophie de Gaston Bachelard. Lyon: Université Lyon. Lecourt, Dominique. (1971). Bachelard épistémologie. Paris: PUF. Lecourt, Dominique. (1972). Pour une critique de l’épistémologie (Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault). Paris: Francois Maspero. Lecourt, Dominique. (1974). L’épistémologie historique de Gaston Bachelard. Paris: J. Vrin. Lyotard, Jean Francois. (1954). La phenomenologie. Paris: PUF. MacKenzie, Donald. (2008). An engine not a camera, how financial models shape markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rockmore, Tom. (2011). Kant and phenomenology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simon, Herbert. (1947). Administrative behavior, a study of decision-​making processes in administrative organizations. New York: MacMillan Company. Simon, Herbert. (1991). Models of my life. New York: Basic Books. Statler, Matt, & Guillet de Monthoux, Pierre. (2015). Humanities and arts in management education: The emerging Carnegie paradigm. Journal of Management Education, 39(1), 3–​15. Staubmann, Helmut, & Lidz, Victor. (2018). Rationality in the social sciences, the Schumpeter-​ Parsons Seminar 1939−40 and current perspectives. Berlin: Springer. Strati, Antonio. (2019). Organization theory and aesthetic philosophies. New York: Routledge. Tiles, Mary. (1984). Bachelard: Science and objectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tiles. Mary. (1991). Mathematics and the image of reason. London: Routledge.

Chapter 17

E x pl oring th e Rol e of B odies and G e st u re s in M anagem e nt w i t h Merleau-​P ont y Albane Grandazzi

We [therefore] say that our body is a being with two sides, on the one hand, a thing among things and, on the other, the one that sees and touches them. (Merleau-​Ponty, 1964: 178)1 Management does not seem concerned with physical gestures, as if the discipline has totally forgotten that the word ‘hand’ (mano, maneggiare) constitutes it. (Reinhold et al., 2018: 163)   

17.1  Introduction Gestures, as Reinhold and colleagues’ quote above stresses, are not a topic of interest in management, either for their practitioners or for our academic discipline. In a dematerialized economy, with digital and multisited work practices, gestures and movements at work seem, at first sight, to be of less significance or importance. Indeed,

1 

All quotes from Merleau-​Ponty in this chapter have been translated from French by the author of this chapter.

348   Albane Grandazzi why should we talk about gestures at all in a digital economy? Similarly, why should we talk about movement in a period so marked by the spread of teleworking, when we are stuck behind our screen all day long? At best, movement and gestures are mentioned by professionals dealing with ergonomics or occupational health. However, some studies in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) have highlighted the performative function of movement and gestures by exploring leardership (Bathurst & Cain, 2013; Küpers, 2013) and culture (Flores-​Pereira et al., 2008), or by studying their aesthetic (Bazin, 2013) or political dimensions (Fotaki & Daskalaki, 2020). From this perspective, gestures can have an organizing function, all the more so in service professions (Best & Hindmarsh, 2019). If we consider the role of the digital tools that have become prevalent, there is no doubt that our gestures have become central, as they are increasingly connected to the machines that power our everyday work (de Vaujany et al., 2018; Reinhold et al., 2018). So, how do we think about, observe, and conceptualize gestures and movements in organization studies? New working practices and spaces are bringing this question to the fore, and I aim to provide some answers in this chapter, using Merleau-​Ponty’s work as basis. Merleau-​Ponty was a prolific philosopher, exploring in particular the notion of ‘sensorial experience’ as a way of being, and a means of perceiving the world (Merleau-​Ponty, 1945, 1964). Phenomenology has not yet acquired its rightful place in organizational theory as a philosophical foundation (see the general introduction to this book). Our discipline relies more on (post-​)Marxist theories such as those propounded by Michel Foucault (Foucault, [1967] 2004, 1975) or Henri Lefebvre (Lefebvre, 1991, 2004), who are renowned among Anglo-​Saxon scholars for conceptualizing space and spatial practices. The aforementioned lack of recognition of phenomenology in MOS is particularly noticeable with Merleau-​Ponty who remains largely unknown in the field of MOS. Styhre (2004: 106) noted that phenomenological perspectives in organizational theory have privileged Husserl over Merleau-​Ponty, thereby setting aside the body as the central structure of perception: ‘All these studies follow Husserlian epistemology or the theory of knowledge path rather than Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology of perception—​ Husserl’s intellectualist phenomenology does not emphasize the notion of the body as Merleau-​Ponty’s thinking does.’ However, in recent years, we have witnessed a growth in research from this phenomenological perspective, sometimes drawing on the work of Merleau-​Ponty. Authors such as Yakhlef (2010), Dale (Dale & Burrell, 2014; Dale & Latham, 2015), Küpers (2015, 2016, 2013), de Vaujany (De Vaujany & Aroles, 2019; de Vaujany et al., 2019), and Sandberg & Tsoukas (2020), in particular, have drawn on his work, giving his thinking a new relevance and visibility in our discipline. This chapter is targeted at researchers in organizational theory in particular, and aims to show Merleau-​Ponty’s major contribution to the study of gestures and movements, which requires a rethinking of existing ontological and epistemological frameworks. The chapter aims on the one hand to support learning on concepts that remain complex for the uninitiated and, on the other hand, to provide sufficient material for future theoretical developments of Merleau-​Ponty’s contribution to organizational theories. Merleau-​Ponty’s writings highlight the importance of

Role of Bodies and Gestures in Management    349 the body, gestures, and movement in our perceptions and knowledge of the world. Yet, according to the philosopher, these perceiving mediums are at the same time also part of the perceived world. For example, I perceive through my body, but I can also imagine something different. Bodies, gestures, and movements are both indispensable and insufficient in our perceptual experience. Such is the apparent contradiction of the perceptual exercise according to Merleau-​Ponty. However, if movements and gestures seem to be part of a kind of sensory evidence, they must be reinterpreted here in the light of new ontological categories. Starting from this fundamental question of perception, Merleau-​Ponty elaborates a unique ontology of the body. This will be the focus of this chapter, as the emphasis on embodiment is at the heart of a great deal of research in organizational theory, including some which already claim to be phenomenological in nature but remaining widely dispersed among epistemological and ontological foundations (Dale, 2005; Tomkins & Eatough, 2013; Riach & Warren, 2015). The body, gestures, and movement are at the heart of everyday working practices, but this now raises questions in an increasingly remote and digitalized world. What place does my body have in the world that I perceive? What power do my gestures have, even when I am at a distance? How can I ‘feel’ this movement as a researcher who is investigating the field? These are some of the common questions we face in our fieldwork and writing in organizational theory. This ontology of perception is developed in particular in Merleau-​Ponty’s final, unfinished work, Visible and Invisible, and the related ‘Working Notes’, on which I rely in this chapter. The work on which Visible and Invisible is based was still in progress at the time of Merleau-​Ponty’s sudden death in 1961, and represents the high point of his thinking. Visible and Invisible is thus a posthumous publication. It is comprised of a collection of notes that Merleau-​Ponty had put together for a book, of which only one part had been completed.2 Merleau-​Ponty sheds light on ontological questions that are fundamental to our discipline, if we are interested in the observation of everyday practices, especially in the context of ethnographic methods. Merleau-​Ponty’s conception of the experience of one’s body, gestures, and movement is central to this ontology of perception. He develops several key notions such as those of ‘touch’, ‘flesh’, and ‘intercorporeality’, to which we will return in detail. In this chapter, I aim to look at the notions presented in Merleau-​Ponty’s work Visible and Invisible, and the related ‘Working Notes’. This chapter begins by (1) explaining the notion of ‘perception’ in relation to the body and thought, before (2) delving into the detail of gestures, movement, and intercorporeality that constitute this state in between of perceiving and being perceived. I offer some key extracts to illustrate these concepts, and I show through vignettes (Boxes 17.1−17.3) how Merleau-​Ponty’s ideas have been used in organizational theory.

2 

The philosopher Claude Lefort, a friend of Merleau-​Ponty, prepared a first edition in French in 1964, and this was subsequently translated into English in 1969.

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17.2  Body and Mind in Perception: Theoretical Foundations of a Phenomenology of the ‘Visible’ and ‘Invisible’ From the time of the ancient philosophers onwards, body and mind have been regarded as inseparable. However, our modern conception of the body has been strongly influenced by Descartes’ work in the 17th century. Based on the experience of metaphysical doubt, he theorized the ‘I’ (the cogito) as the origin of all knowledge. This Western intellectual tradition constructed the idea that the body was a sum of passions, which one had to master through the exercise of one’s thought. Many studies underline the role of Cartesianism in our representation of the body in relation to discourse (Lefebvre, 1991). Merleau-​Ponty, in particular, situates his philosophy in this tradition. Unlike Cartesianism, he aims to locate the body as a means of accessing the world, without excluding thought, and by understanding the ‘sensory world’ as a pre-​reflective stage. For Merleau-​Ponty, it is my body that first allows me to perceive, but this same body can also limit my perception. I perceive the sensory world through my body, in terms of what I feel, see, or breathe: in this way, the body is a means of accessing the world. At the same time, I cannot see, hear, or feel everything: the body thus limits my perception of the world. If such a statement seems obvious, how do we consider the mind, which for Descartes, as we saw earlier, was the prerequisite for accessing knowledge? Does the body have the primacy of perception? And if it is the body that allows me to perceive, what place does thought have in this process?

17.2.1 The Body as the Access to and Limit of My Sensorial Experience Merleau-​Ponty (1964) introduces his book The Visible and the Invisible by emphasizing the challenge of telling, seeing, and being in the world. For Merleau-​Ponty, the body is both a condition for accessing the world and its main limiting factor. Indeed, the body, through my sight, smell, and touch, allows me to access the sensory world. However, this is not enough to understand what perception is. Perception is situated in an in-​ between space, between what I see—​the sensory, understood as ‘the visible’—​and what I feel—​my emotions, the meaning I give it, understood as ‘the invisible’. It is important to emphasize at the outset how the body is at the heart of a dialectic, as the condition for perception, but also as the limitation of my perception. To account for this dialectic, let us consider Merleau-​Ponty’s example of the table, described at the beginning of the chapter ‘Reflection and Interrogation’ in Visible and Invisible: I see a table in front of me, and at the same time, I think of the Concorde

Role of Bodies and Gestures in Management    351 Bridge in Paris. In my experience, I am at the Concorde Bridge. Importantly though, this thought does not correspond to the sensory world that I perceive (i.e. the table). Merleau-​Ponty expounds on this example over several pages to show that my perception of a true world is conditional to my body. The body allows the perception of the table, and is also its main limiting factor: I must note that the table in front of me maintains a singular relationship with my eyes and my body: I see it only if it is within a radius of action; above it, is the the dark mass of my forehead, below it, the less distinct contour of my cheeks [ . . . ]. More than that: my movements and those of my eyes that make the world vibrant [ . . . ]. (Merleau-​Ponty, 1964: 21–​2)

My body thus allows me to go to things, and sometimes prevents me from doing so. With this example, Merleau-​Ponty denounces the first pitfall of perception: to be attached only to one’s thoughts and one’s imagination, at the risk of forgetting about one’s sensorial body. At the same time as he posits the body as the essential condition of perception, Merleau-​Ponty introduces the notion of thought as coexisting with the sensitive experience I have of the world. In fact, one cannot function without the other: I cannot think without perceiving (in this sense, the sensory world precedes my reflection, as we detail below); but I also cannot perceive without thinking. To illustrate this paradoxical relationship in perception, Merleau-​Ponty explains that, without the evidence of the sensory world, what I think can only remain an illusion. This thinking, according to the sensory world I perceive, is constitutive of a ‘perceptual faith’—​that is, as Merleau-​Ponty noted in his manuscript, an ‘animal’ faith (p. 17) that precedes any reflection or decision. This perceptual faith is the foundation of what I consider to be true.

17.2.2 Perception beyond the Visible Body It is this same dialectical experience that Merleau-​Ponty emphasizes in the perception of others around me, when others amplify the apparent contradictions of my own perception. Indeed, if my own perception does not necessarily lead me to the real world (through the limits of my own body, and/​or through a detachment of thought from my sensorial experience), the same is true for the bodies of others (as will be explored in more detail in the following section on intercorporeality). This coexistence of the sensory world and internal thought allows us to make explicit what Merleau-​Ponty understands by the ‘visible’ (i.e. the sensory world), and the ‘invisible’ (i.e. my thoughts). This visible and invisible together constitute my perceiving body. This sensory, visible world is what I perceive the truth of the world through: while ideas, which are invisible, appear in the form of an ‘emotional and almost carnal experience’ (p. 28). Visible and invisible are therefore not opposed, but coexist in the same experience, one being always included in the other. Merleau-​Ponty takes up this intermingling

352   Albane Grandazzi in one of his working notes, stating the following: ‘Sense is invisible, but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has a membrane of invisibility, and the in-​visible is the secret counterpart of the visible’ (‘Working Notes’, 1964: 265). The aim is to understand the relationship between the visible and the invisible, as we shall see later when dealing with the body and the body of others. Through these explanations, we understand perception as being constituted by the visible and the invisible. It is in this sense that we can understand that for Merleau-​Ponty, perception takes place ‘beyond one’s body’ (p. 23). He further explains: ‘Undoubtedly, it is not quite my body that perceives: I only know that it can prevent me from perceiving, that I cannot perceive without its permission’ (p. 24). Reflection goes beyond the experience of the sensory world, giving it meaning, as we shall see below.

17.2.3 Reflexive Power in Perceptual Experience Openness to the sensory world constitutes a pre-​reflexive stage of our perception. This perception, which goes beyond the body, mobilizes the meaning I give to what I perceive and what Merleau-​Ponty calls the invisible. Perception does not happen without imagination, and thus the apparent opposition between what I perceive and what I think no longer has any place. Merleau-​Ponty (1964: 49) states: Thus, the antinomies of perceptive faith seem to no longer apply; it is indeed true that we perceive the thing itself, since the thing is nothing but what we see [ . . . ], and what is called vision comes from the power of thinking which attests that the appearance here has responded, according to a rule, to the movements of our eyes.

In seeing, for example, the table in front of me, the table passes as a thing seen through the exercise of my thinking which categorizes the object as such. Perception, by integrating this ‘thought of perceiving’ (p. 49) with sensibility, is thus ours and specific to us. Thus, Merleau-​Ponty considers that the perception of events or persons is always a subjective process: far from being a supposedly objective or duplicable perception, the perceiver always limits him-​/​herself to what he/​she perceives of the world. This reflection enriches our experience of the sensory world. It provides the basis of our ‘perceptive faith’, as seen above, which should be understood as pre-​reflective faith, and offers adherence to the world and possible access to the real, to the truth This ‘reflexive conversion’ (p. 51) to which Merleau-​Ponty refers entails the risk of transposing the embodied subject into a transcendental subject. This is the second pitfall that Merleau-​Ponty warns of: that thought would thus become autonomous, as it were, from the sensorial experience. The following quote shows this temptation of the reflexive movement, which clearly echoes Descartes’ first metaphysical meditation: ‘I, who am in the world, from whom can I learn what it is to be in the world, if not from myself, and how can I say that I am in the world if I did not know it?’ (p. 52). Thus,

Role of Bodies and Gestures in Management    353 Merleau-​Ponty recognizes the importance of the cogito, without endowing it with all-​ powerful autonomy. Merleau-​Ponty focuses in this thinking subject a continuous dialogue with oneself when one is in contact with the world: indeed, one always questions the meaning of what one perceives, within the context of one’s past experiences, and thus understands any phenomenon ‘from within’ (p. 52). On the contrary, the reflective philosophy conceives the world as ideal, and erases the disparities of perception between one person and another, because meanings are brought together by thought. This philosophy also rejects the body and understands the ‘other’ as an object being: ‘from this perspective too, there is no question of taking seriously the mixture of mind with body’ (p. 72). Merleau-​Ponty recognizes the importance of this thought and reflection, albeit at the risk of falling back into pure empiricism: ‘It is not a question of putting perceptive faith in the place of reflection, but, on the contrary, of making a statement about the total situation, which entails the referral of the one to the other’ (p. 56). For him, it is not a question of putting aside reflection when he discusses the central and primary role of bodily experience. Thus, when I perceive the world, I cannot only base myself on my sensorial experience of the world, but, at the same time, I cannot limit my thinking, as the centre of my being, to the world. For Merleau-​Ponty, perception is indeed the act that constitutes as a complete entity of the subject and the object: ‘for Merleau-​Ponty, contrarily, perception is an opening-​out to and engagement with otherness, a dialectical relationship of the body and its environment, which simultaneously constitutes both subject and object’ (Simonsen, 2007: 169). Based on the foregoing discussion on the relation between the sensorial experience and reflection, the first vignette (Box 17.1) highlights Merleau-​Ponty’s contribution to practice-​based studies.

17.2.4 Perception, beyond the Sensorial Body and Reflexive Power Merleau-​ Ponty thus criticizes, on the one hand, pure empiricism (i.e. that only sensations are to be taken into account) and, on the other hand, Cartesian rationalism (i.e. that only thought, the cogito, is to be taken into account). It is these two pitfalls in our consideration of perception that Merleau-​Ponty denounces, as described by Simonsen (2007: 169): ‘Merleau-​Ponty’s discussion of perception starts from a critique of two opposing strands of thought: empiricism and intellectualism. The former sees perception as a mere physical sensation and as a reflection of a pre-​given [ . . . ]. The other tradition, intellectualism, consider perception to be a conscious judgement.’ For Merleau-​Ponty, these two opposing currents are linked to the same flaw, in that they both imply a separation between subject and object. As we have seen so far, it is indeed in the experience of perception that body and mind come together in a dialectical relationship, where one does not exist without the other. The sensory precedes the

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Box 17.1 Perception, the body and reflexivity in practice-​based studies: The contribution of Merleau-​Ponty Merleau-​Ponty’s approach to perception and the body has been particularly taken up in organizational theory to enrich the notion of practice. Here, we will consider the approaches of Yakhlef (2010) and Dale & Burrell (2014). The body is understood as the medium between my own perception and the world as the point of primary focus of experience. Yakhlef (2010) thus draws on Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology to enrich the notion of practice, widely used in MOS (Gherardi, 2009, 2019a). Yakhlef takes up Merleau-​Ponty’s definition of perception, making explicit its creative power: ‘Perception is not passive receptivity, but a creative, skilful capacity to respond and accommodate to circumstances beyond one’s’ (Yakhlef, 2010: 416). Thus, there is no dichotomy between a cognitive and a more bodily approach. In other words, it is incorrect to think that the body is only concerned with sensation, or feeling, which would free it from what has been previously defined for it. Yakhef makes this clear in this definition of the body as an in-​between being: ‘The human body (including the mind) is regarded as the medium for experiencing and having access to (the practical and social) world’ (pp. 410–​11). Returning to Merleau-​Ponty’s text allows us to understand what lies behind this notion of in between—​that is, flesh, gestures, movements. In order to make explicit what experience means, Dale & Burrell (2014) also take up the contribution of Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology. They highlight the observation of contradictory experiences within our sensorial experiences, and seek to go beyond the mere physiological and psychological explanation by integrating reflexivity. Merleau-​Ponty makes it possible to link the sensory dimensions with the cognitive dimensions, and to enrich organizational studies by drawing on the inherent link between body and mind in our daily practices.

reflexive without limiting itself to this sensory, or giving primacy and transcendence to thought. This way of being in the world even negates the basic understanding of temporality, because even if time has passed, when I remember something, this thing exists again in the present time. It is thus through the body that we have access to the world, but in a sense that goes beyond the idea of the body as simply ‘lived’: indeed, the body is both ‘sensing and sensible, consciousness and object’ (Bonan, 2010: 236). This sensorial experience is therefore situated in a present temporality, which includes past and future at the same time in the same continuum, and the visible does not so much acquire ‘an absolute prestige because of this immense latent content of past, future and elsewhere, which it both announces and hides’ (Merleau-​ Ponty, 1969: 151). The present thus includes the invisible dimensions of the past, the future, and the distant. Merleau-​Ponty’s notion of perception is thus situated in this in-​between space (Barbaras, 2001) and breaks down recognized boundaries between subject and object. Merleau-​Ponty thus calls for a new ontology, going beyond the categorization of subject and object as two entities external to one another. The body is thus understood as a

Role of Bodies and Gestures in Management    355 means of perceiving the sensory world, but the body also integrates the reflexive power that gives meaning to this reality. Perception is situated in this constant and simultaneous back and forth. It is through the notion of ‘intercorporeality’ that Merleau-​Ponty understands the overcoming of the categories of subject and object, as we will see in the next section.

17.3  Gestures and Movements in Perception: Both Touched and Touching Thus, perception, as we have seen, is in between my body and the world, between the visible and the invisible. Between this body and this world that I perceive, Merleau-​Ponty details the heart of his thinking with the notions of gestures, movements, and reversibility, as considered in the following section. What are these ‘joints’, these membrures’ of which Merleau-Ponty speaks? In addition, we will explore Merleau-​Ponty’s concepts of flesh and intercorporeality, ontological notions that help to overcome the distinction between subject and object. This section will allow us to explore these notions further by showing the contribution of a phenomenological perspective in organizational studies.

17.3.1 Accessing Others through the Body: Intercorporeality Merleau-​Ponty reminds us that even though one comes into contact with this ‘private world of the Other’ (1964: 27), one will never have access to this world as one has access to one’s own: ‘The life of the Other, such as he lives it, [ . . . ] is a forbidden experience, it is an impossibility’ (p. 108). It is because the experience of another is impossible for me that I cannot access the consciousness of an Other. However, how can we reconcile the idea of a sensorial experience (based on the body) with an encounter with the Other? If we think of this debate in terms of organizational theories, how can we think of the body as an organized whole? How can I account for the experience of others (e.g. the people I observe in an ethnographic study) through a research exercise? Merleau-​Ponty does not stop at this seemingly obvious paradox—​I perceive the Other in my sensorial experience, but I cannot give an account of it—​but goes on to show us that it is through the shared bodily experience—​what he calls ‘intercorporeality’—​that intersubjectivity can be conceived. My perception of others is first shown through their bodies, just as the reality shows itself to me in its perceptual evidence. As Merleau-​Ponty states: ‘While it may make no sense to me to say that my perception and the thing it is aimed at are “in my head” (it is only certain that they are “not elsewhere”), I cannot help but put others, and the

356   Albane Grandazzi perception they have, behind their bodies’ (p. 25). Thus, I reach others only through a sensory world that is common to me and to them. For example, if I hear the same sound, if I see the same thing, and I can access ‘the private world of another’ (p. 27). This common sensory world is, however, the sine qua non of truth. The sensory world, common between me and others, pre-​exists my thoughts. Thus Merleau-​Ponty does not deny the existence of a sensory world outside my thoughts, as a condition of the possibility for truth. And it is through this sensorial experience, through my body, that intersubjectivity with others can be considered. The Other appears to me through his/​her visible body, and yet the meanings conveyed by this body go beyond the body. Merleau-​ Ponty sums up this tension between visible and invisible bodies very well in one of his working notes as follows: ‘The Other, not as “consciousness”, but as the inhabitant of a body, and through it, of the world’ (p. 259). Similarly, my body is always seen at the same time as it sees, with the presence of Others not being possible in the visibility of my own body. Merleau-​Ponty speaks in one of his working notes of the ‘halo of visibility’ that surrounds every body, and without which the Other could not exist. The consideration of bodily expression in perception leads me into a new relationship with the Other, whose existence can only be manifested through his or her body, but whose meanings, conveyed by this body, go far beyond that. This gives us some basis for exploring a relational ethics based on bodies, and on this co-​presence of bodies, without which intersubjectivity is no longer possible. Merleau-​Ponty sums up this status of the Other in one of his working notes: ‘Where is the Other in this body that I see? He is [ . . . ] immanent to this body [ . . . ] and yet, more than the sum of the signs or significations conveyed by it’ (p. 259). The second vignette (Box 17.2) allows us to illuminate through a case study how bodily practices are constitutive of organizational atmospheres, precisely through shared experience.

17.3.2 The Reversibility of My Experience: Touching and Being Touched More precisely, Merleau-​Ponty does not conceive of the duplication of another’s experience in one’s own body. It is by feeling, by touching, that I touch the Other at the same time. It is thus through the reversibility of touch that this intercorporeality is conceived. To explain this idea, Merleau-​Ponty takes up Husserl’s example of a hand that touches another hand. Touching my hand with another hand makes me feel both touch and touched. It is the same with the body of another: ‘Another appears by extension of this understanding: he and I are the organs of a single intercorporeality’ (Husserl, 1960, Signs, pp. 212–​13, quoted in Bonan, 2010). My bodily experience is thus necessarily open: ‘in the appearance of the figure of the Other within the sensing there is thus “neither comparison, nor analogy, nor projection”, but rather “co-​perception” ’ (Signs, p. 215, quoted in Bonan, 2010: 148). I am touching and touched at the same time in my bodily experience, and it is indeed this idea of the reversibility of perception that underpins this

Role of Bodies and Gestures in Management    357

Box 17.2 Atmosphere and bodily practices: The case of tour visits in collaborative spaces For Merleau-​Ponty, atmosphere is at the heart of what we live and do. He states that ‘Our life has, in the astronomical sense of the word, an atmosphere: it is constantly enveloped in those mists which are called the sensory world or history, the one of bodily life and the other of human life, the present and the past, as a jumble of bodies and minds’ (p. 115). This definition enriches what organisational theories understand as an organisational atmosphere, as discussed by Beyes (2016, p. 115): ‘Organization invariably is an atmospheric phenomenon. It takes shape as a swirl of affect, constructed from constellations of objects, stories, technologies, texts, human bodies and their affective capacities’. While both definitions recognise the role of bodies in the construction of these atmospheres, Merleau-​Ponty emphasises the role of temporality, where the past and future are contained within the present of our experience. These hidden dimensions of the atmosphere are indeed present and observable for the philosopher in our acting bodies. In this sense, our bodies, gestures, and movements are inscribed in an atmosphere that recalls past events, or anticipates future ones. This is precisely how we have understood bodily experience as expressions of atmospheres, in a research project conducted in collaborative spaces. The purpose of our research (2019) was to show how the practices of guided tours are embodied experiences shared between participants and managers of collaborative spaces, producing specific atmospheres. Indeed, such tours offer the opportunity for a sensorial experience (i.e. Merleau-​Ponty’s visibilities), seeing, feeling, and touching the ‘devices’ in the space (objects, tools, etc). This sensorial experience is linked to a reflexivity, induced by the storytelling of the guide, along with the history of the space, the values of the community, and current and future events and projects (i.e. the invisibilities in Merleau-​Ponty’s work). This research reveals four emotional registers that constitute these atmospheres: initiation (i.e. ‘the tour is a first step towards the ‘community’; it makes explicit particular rules, values and practices’); commodification (i.e. ‘the tour is a means of showing, materializing, and experiencing key services offered by the place, its employees, and its community’); selection (i.e. ‘the tour is part of a process that can lead to a ‘club’, an elite group, or a set of ‘happy few’); and gamification (i.e. ‘the tour is a first opportunity to learn something, to have fun together’) (De Vaujany et al., 2019 p. 10). Source: De Vaujany et al. (2019).

shared experience with others. This reversibility constitutes the true ‘touch of touched’ for Merleau-​Ponty (1964: 174), who goes on to say ‘between my movements and what I touch, there exists some relationship of principle, some kinship, according to which they are not only [ . . . ] vague and ephemeral deformations of bodily space, but also the initiation and opening to a tactile world’ (p. 174). My hand thus touches that of which it is also a part. If this intersubjective experience is possible, it is by going beyond the categories of subject and object. The body of another does indeed appear to me as a body, and not as an object, as recalled at the beginning of this section. ‘The body of another is not an

358   Albane Grandazzi object for me, nor mine for him, if they are behaviours, the position of another does not reduce me to the condition of an object in my field’ (Merleau-​Ponty, 1945: 405). I can enter into a relationship between touching and being touched precisely because we share the same corporeality. If the body of the Other were an object, I would not have access to it, and I myself would be reduced to the state of an object to the Other. There is no ‘abyss’ between my body and that of another (p. 178), and Merleau-​Ponty concludes here that the body is indeed both subject and object. If we understand gestures and movements as emanating from one’s own body, and touching the body of another, these gestures and movements are no longer just sensorial, carnal experiences—​or pure empiricism, in other words. These gestures and movements become part of a common perception. This changes the way in which organizational theories conceive of gestures and movements, which are often considered exclusively through their bodily expressions, precisely to counterbalance discursive approaches. What I do with my hands, my legs, my voice, is obviously constitutive of gestures (Reinhold et al., 2018). These gestures are constitutive of ‘habitual’ practices, in the sense of being linked to a ‘habitus’, to a history; thus, Bazin (2013: 378) argues that ‘consequently, gestures are recurrences that are embedded in a collective context in which actors will alternately be copying and be copied’. Merleau-​Ponty allows us to renew our understanding of gestures in MOS by showing us how these gestures touch and are touched, how they allow me to enter into an intersubjective relationship with the Other and with the world.

17.3.3 The Flesh as a New Ontology of the Body Flesh is central to this ontology of reversibility and the ‘chiasm’ between my perception and that of the Other. This notion may seem difficult to approach or to understand. In fact, the notion of flesh comprises two distinct elements: the fact that I see from my body, and the fact that this visibility is seen from outside. In Merleau-​Ponty’s words, this vision results from my body being an ‘extension, within the enclosure of my body, that is part of its being’ (‘Working Notes’, 1964: 319). Rather than stopping at the body that connects me to my own and others’ sensorial experiences, the flesh emerges as ‘expression’ (p. 188), incorporating touch and thought, ‘that I think must be able to accompany all our experiences’ (p. 189). For Merleau-​Ponty, it is absurd to consider that touch is only a tactile experience, even if it cannot be considered without it. The flesh does indeed include these visible elements (i.e. I touch, and at the same time, I feel, I see, and I am seen), but it also includes invisible elements (i.e. the meaning I give, but also how I anticipate my gesture as a result of my past experience). Flesh allows me to go beyond the notion of the body to integrate my body into the world of which it is a part. Flesh is not ‘matter’, ‘spirit’, or ‘substance’. Flesh is ‘an element [ . . . ], halfway between the spatio-​temporal individual and the idea [ . . . ], an element of the Being’ (p. 182). How then can we distinguish the notions of gesture and movement from that of flesh? This is the question we can ask ourselves when reading

Role of Bodies and Gestures in Management    359 Merleau-​Ponty’s writings. Merleau-​Ponty speaks more of the flesh as ‘the element capable of being affected, which makes visible a part of being while retaining a latency, a part of invisibility which is the reserve of meaning’ (Bonan, 2010: 236). This flesh is embodied in a way of being that one must be able to capture. Flesh is not body or spirit but a ‘general way of being’ (p. 194). The flesh thus comprises a mode of existence of its own (i.e. a visibility that I can see and feel), endowed with meaning. It is in this way that the body, through its gestures and speech, is the basis of ‘natural expression’ (Merleau-​ Ponty, 1945: 211). The flesh is situated in this in-​between space and allows us to go beyond the notion of the body as my own body with my own sensibility, by integrating it with what is visible and invisible. The flesh unfolds when I touch and am touched, when I see and am seen, in an expression that incorporates these visible elements.

17.3.4 How to Think about the Unity of the Perceiver? Depth of the Visible and the Temporality of Gestures We understand, through the notions of intercorporeality and flesh, that the experience of our body is part of a larger body. How then can we think of common perception, given the diversity of each perception, without falling into a kind of perceptual universalism that would neutralize one’s own perception? In an attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction, Merleau-​Ponty explains it simply as the relationhip of one’s bodily organs to each other, transposing this unity to different bodies. My body is not an object, and gathers various consciousnesses from each touch and movement. Thus, Merleau-​Ponty asks: ‘Now, this generality that makes the unity of my body, why should it not be open to other bodies?’ (p. 184). This allows Merleau-​Ponty to suggest that this bodily experience, that is specific to me, is part of a certain universality—​and this is not someting that is often emphasized in organizational studies exploring the body. It is not universality of the sensory, but of the flesh, that allows us to understand as a single entity what I see and what the Other sees. To explain this, Merleau-​Ponty uses the image of a circle including the touched and the touching, similar to the hand example developed above. The visible has a ‘surface of inexhaustible depth: this is what makes it open to visions other than our own’ (p. 186). By understanding perception through the notion of flesh constructing the unity of a visible world, we can better link bodily experience with temporal experience. Indeed, when we use the term ‘depth’ in the paragraph above, this depth of the visible is actually constituted of temporality. The visible shows and hides the past and future. Indeed, my body is there, in the present, here and now. And yet, the gestures and movements of this body anticipate or prefigure past or future events. This affirms the ontological reality of the body, which is not comparable to an object. Merleau-​Ponty says ‘one can say of my body that it is not elsewhere, but one cannot say that it is here or now, in the sense of

360   Albane Grandazzi an object’ (p. 191). He repeatedly uses the example of language to show how we project meaning onto what we hear, as is the case when we hear a foreign language. This is why the meaning of language is compared to perception, which requires contact with this sensory reality: ‘And in the same way as I have to be there to speak, I have to be there to perceive’ (‘Working Notes’, 1964: 241). In our projection onto a gesture, a movement, or even its anticipation, there can be this precise collective construction based on a habitus, or on pre-​existing rules. The third vignette (Box 17.3) highlights how Merleau-​Ponty’s work has been understood, and how it could contribute to the study of habitus in bodily experience. The notions of time and space are thus inseparable from the visibility I perceive: ‘for the visible present is not in time and space, nor, of course, outside them: there is nothing before it, after it, around it, that can compete with its visibility’ (Merleau-​Ponty,

Box 17.3 Embodied and cultural experience: The contribution of Merleau-​Ponty to the theorization of habitus Merleau-​Ponty advances the enrichment of embodied experience with a kind of cultural approach. Embodied experience expresses a ‘habitual’ reality, i.e. one based on a habitus, in which the experience does not ‘wipe out’ history and culture (Dale, 2014: 165). Bodily experience expresses an organizational reality, but does not oppose or emancipate itself from it. Dale notes that ‘by providing a sensitivity to the individual level of phenomenology and to how this is socially and culturally mediated, Merleau-​Ponty would imply that there is rarely a corporeal tabula rasa for humans upon which organizations “later” inscribe themselves’ (p. 165). Indeed, the phenomenological approach reveals how experience is both cognitive and cultural, with Dale & Burrell (2014: 165) commenting as follows: ‘Our phenomenologically experienced embodiment (the entanglement of body and mind, biology and culture) is much more multifaceted than we often allow for in conventional discussions of organizational life.’ This notion of the ‘embodied body’ allows Dale to link the individual dimensions of experience to its collective dimensions, which are often neglected in theorizations of the body, and to argue that: ‘the individual experience of embodiment must be analysed within the collective dimensions of organization and occupation’ (p. 160). We are not here referring to a caricature of phenomenology which would be a philosophy based only on sensations. The body is not only a result of sensory capacities, it is also a sum of reflexive thoughts, allowing for the enrichment of critical studies on the conceptualization of embodiment. Indeed, Dale & Burrell (2014: 165) say that ‘in our view, Merleau-​Ponty’s approach suggests the existing critical literature pays insufficient attention to the ongoing organization of embodiment’. Thus, this view of Merleau-​Ponty’s work in organizational theories allows us to highlight his possible contribution to critical theorizations of the body. However, we could quite easily go into this question of collective perception in greater depth, starting from the myriad individual perceptions, as the question of bodily experience remains one that focuses on the individual in organizational theories. The depth of the visible that can be sensed by me allows us to understand the habitus in a more gestural relationship (i.e. how the gesture is anticipated, or understood, just as I understand the meaning of a foreign word).

Role of Bodies and Gestures in Management    361 1979: 173). In this regard, space and time are not external or transcendent categories. My perception is necessary to give space and time their existence (i.e their visibility) in the world. Gestures and movements are therefore not an experience in space or time, but a spatial and temporal experience simultaneously. Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenological stance allows for an understanding of the notion of experience both in time (continuity vs. discontinuity) and in space (visibility vs. invisibility). This intertwining of space and time in the study of everyday gestures and movements is quite original in organizational theories, and has received very little attention before now. Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophy allows us to give depth to gestures and movements by showing their importance in the experience of the world, and by showing how they are both a sensitive and a mental experience, a singular experience, but one that connects each of us to a larger collective body.

17.4  Conclusion A phenomenological approach could be widely mobilized as a theoretical foundation that allows us to go beyond exclusively cognitive or discursive approaches in practice-​ based theories. But in Merleau-​Ponty’s view, thought does not exclude the mind and reflexivity. We are therefore far away from the pure essentialism that is often criticized by the detractors of phenomenology. Merleau-​Ponty’s thinking is in dialogue with the Cartesian tradition, but he aims to go beyond that, without falling into the trap of essentialism that he denounces. Indeed, for Merleau-​Ponty, the world does not exist for me only through the perception I have of it: ‘We realise that the order of the phenomenal must be considered as autonomous and that, if we do not recognize this autonomy, it is definitively impenetrable’ (‘Working Notes’, 1964: 259). Sensoriality, which allows me to access the perceived world, is ‘transcendence, or a mirror of transcendence’ in this phenomenological perspective. Bodies, gestures, and movements are all ‘membranes’ that join the visible and the invisible. These writings could, in the researcher’s own experience, also greatly enrich methodological debates, regarding auto-​ethnography in particular (Bryman & Buchanan, 2009; Rouleau et al., 2014; Pérezts et al., 2015; Gherardi, 2019b; Beyes & Steyaert, 2020) . Indeed, if my body perceives and is, at the same time, part of the whole that I perceive, how can I claim any objectivity as a researcher? By reading Merleau-​Ponty’s work, we understand how it is indeed the sensory, emotional, and even carnal experience that places us in an encounter with the Other, and offers a premise for the formation of a possible community. This is why we believe that the notions of body, bodily experience, and perception are at the same time a prerequisite of ethics, and of the joint debates in our discipline—​ideas that we have not had the time to develop here. The temporal experience of gestures and movements opens up an interesting research perspective on a kind of ‘gestural management’ that could be developed and even criticized in some ways. In this way, Merleau-​Ponty sheds a great deal of light on the construction of meaning at

362   Albane Grandazzi work, where we are engaged with the sensory world, and the ‘invisible’ of perception, which is nonetheless fundamental in giving it meaning.

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Chapter 18

Que ering Org a ni z at i ona l Appearances t h rou g h Recl aim ing t h e E rot i c Mar Pérezts and Emmanouela Mandalaki

18.1  Introduction: Reclaiming Unworthy Appearances While reading Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, Michel Henry, or Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, it is always there. Like a splinter in the back of the mind, like a faint voice in the distance, but always inevitably present: each one of these authors thinks and writes from a particular embodied locus of enunciation—​white male bodies—​that confer to them an implicit and often unconscious orientation (Ahmed, 2006a, b). This is a minor detail, some would say, irrelevant to the depth of their thinking. Yet, this orientation carries an underlying pretence of universality in the way Western minds are trained to think. These thinkers’ writings are assumed to be just generic and default writings, applicable to all. Beyond their differences and subtleties of thought, beyond their rich contributions to phenomenological thinking and to phenomenological explorations of organizational experiences within Management and Organization Studies (MOS), as vastly explored in this volume, we nevertheless tend to forget this small but nonetheless crucial detail that these philosophers have in common—​their locus of enunciation as white males in Europe. We argue that this influences their contributions, on the one hand, and relegates a myriad other phenomenal possibilities to an inferior, if not invisible place, on the other—​as appearances unworthy of attention, unworthy of consideration, unworthy of study. But phenomenology is not only related to academic thoughts about phenomenality. It is phenomenal in itself. Posing this meta-​theoretical question is the purpose of our chapter. When we think about phenomenology (or about philosophy or/​of organizations

Queering Organizational Appearances    365 more broadly for that matter) our thoughts are always embodied thoughts. It seems obvious to say this; however, these thoughts are seldom considered in their full embodied dimension, or only to a certain extent, even—​and there lies a conundrum—​when considering explicitly issues of being-​in-​the-​world, of embodiment, of the flesh, of lived subjective experience. This paradox is our starting point. How is it that despite being so attentive to such embodied issues, most perspectives on phenomenology actually remain often profoundly unaware of key aspects of the multifaceted processes of (its own) embodiment? More specifically, how can they remain blind and deaf to their gendered, male, female, queer, or just different, other, sweating, bleeding, and desiring locus of enunciation? In its stead, stands the cisgender, supposedly universal male body (whose maleness or whiteness is also forgotten, by the way) that while focusing on some aspects (such as sensorial perception, assumed to be generic) remains largely abstracted away from other fundamental dimensions of its embodiedness, with few notable exceptions in feminist phenomenology. Namely, it remains bereft from its erotic dimension, and what this implies in terms of relating to others and to the world. Likewise, it underestimates what this implies in terms of the kind of thoughts and thinking, but also knowledge and knowing potentialities, this can render possible. Ultimately, we argue that the body that most phenomenologists speak of is in fact, paradoxically and rather tragically we might add, a ‘disembodied’ body, whose very material, situated, and embodied (or even ‘embloodied’; cf. Pérezts, 2022) dimensions remain largely unattended to. This is a bold claim to make, which we shall unpack in Section 18.2 of the chapter, as well as highlighting its implications for phenomenal relationality, for phenomenally thinking about organizations, and for organizing more broadly. As a possible answer to this, in Section 18.3 we shall propose to reclaim those appearances that most phenomenologists have remained unaware of, are ‘afraid’ of, or simply consider to be unworthy. To do so, we draw on feminism-​inspired phenomenology, and in particular insights from Sara Ahmed’s (2006a) queer phenomenology, to discuss relationships between bodies and spaces and to problematize how certain bodies remain excluded from certain spaces (spaces of thought, to begin with), calling for a transformation of normative spaces through queering actions. We will also discuss the queer(ed) body, which, for not abiding by normative social and epistemic expectations, is vastly neglected in public and academic discourse and in organizational spaces developed to welcome those bodies abiding by the universal normative standards, including academia (Fotaki, 2013). Such insights provide a way forward through finding different manners of orienting ourselves. To explore the full potential of this proposition, we shall particularly discuss here the erotic body, which for being attentive to its affective and desiring feeling (beyond thinking) is normatively constructed as impure, obscene, hysterical, and opposed to reason (Cixous, [1976] 1996; Lorde, 2017; Mandalaki and Pérezts, 2021). We put this into poetic dialogue with Audre Lorde’s perspectives on the erotic, as a source of power, and its potential for knowledge development and phenomenological thinking in particular. By combining these perspectives, we wish to make space for problematizing taken-​for-​granted assumptions rooted in conventional (i.e. straight, Ahmed would

366    Mar Pérezts and Emmanouela Mandalaki say) phenomenological thought. We rather call for deeper explorations of how considering different bodies’ experiences in the everyday can help creatively reframe phenomenological explorations in MOS. Building on phenomenology’s consideration of bodies not as abstract existences, but as agentic and relational in and with the world through ‘flesh’, we propose to further situate this within a non-​sexualized erotic approach, focusing on desiring subjectivities in their nakedness, diversity, and gendered characters. We problematize the sexual gaze that traditionally associates nakedness with inferior representations linked to shame and objectified vulnerability, and we identify perspectives for writing phenomenally about organizations through embodied knowledge stripped of the traits of the dominant masculine academic order (Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2022). By queering organizational appearances, the erotic then becomes a source of power, and unveils a myriad unseen and therefore unproblematized questions for phenomenological approaches to MOS.

18.2  The Paradox of Disembodied Phenomenology In the philosophy classrooms of the Sorbonne or of the Ecole Normale Supérieure d’Ulm, you read men, you listen to men, and you are taught to write, in fine, as a man. Your credibility as a philosophy student depends on it. The part of my brain that had value was that supposedly non-​gendered part, i.e. the masculine part. A man’s brain. [ . . . ] Women thinkers are introduced through the ‘paternity of their genius’: ‘the lover, the friend, the advisor or the admired, their “male thinking” ’ (Slama, 1981:51). Thus, Simone the Beauvoir is introduced in relation to Jean-​Paul Sartre, Simone Weil in regards to Alain, and Hannah Arendt in regards to Martin Heidegger. These associations almost disregard these women’s embodied existences as autonomous subjects implying that a woman’s pen, name or voice needs to be upheld by the male, which becomes the universal. (Pérezts, forthcoming: 14)

Indeed, in our experience, this is how women are trained in the masculine academic classroom, this is how philosophers are introduced, and how women writers’ presence becomes sensible in the academic text. Later, as PhD students (and namely female ones), we need to devote our intellectual and emotional resources to male theorists to be recognized and legitimized for the work that we do. ‘Are you a Derridean; no, so are you a Lacanian [ . . . ] if not then what?’ (Ahmed, 2016: 15). Our rather late discovery of authors such as Kristeva, Irigaray, or Cixous again speaks to the relative academic marginality surrounding them, at least in the ‘major’ intellectual and academic circles. As Sara Ahmed reminds us, ‘in a world, in which human is still defined by man, we have to fight for women’ to reclaim their embodied existences as autonomous subjects,

Queering Organizational Appearances    367 both in social and in epistemic terms (Ahmed, 2016: 15). Yet, it is also important, Ahmed continues, to define what we mean by women; who enters this category? This socially constructed category that expects female bodies to behave in certain ways, because of the physical attributes they acquire, just to be recognizable as women, even when they do not fit this social order. Other. Ot-​her. M-​other. I is another. or rather the other. No, I is a man. who is I? And my body doesn’t speak. Is not allowed to speak. Silenced. Unspeakable and unspoken is woman. The woman. Not even asking which woman.

How to appear, when the means for our phenomenality are denied? How to exist as a full subject when our deeply feeling embodied selves and desires are denied and censured? Can we have another kind of reception for our intentionality and our beings? A phenomenology of the female body, which is lived irrevocably as sweating, damp, sexed, desiring, affective and affected, powerful, dirty, objectified, structured, normed, suffering, glorified, castrated, liberated and liberating. A body that wants to make itself heard, that begs to be actually seen. A body for which sweat, odors, blood and flesh are means of expression, of speaking, of shouting, of crying, of dreaming. (Pérezts, forthcoming: 2)

Beyond being globally underrepresented in scientific thought as a ‘category’ (i.e. woman), differences between women, within the ‘category’ of woman also remain largely absent from current theorizing and from phenomenological perspectives. We might say that when they appear, women but also a variety of Others do so only insofar as they are the negative, the echo, the reverse of the ideal (supposedly) disembodied masculine (supposedly and pretentiously) universal, and are lumped under unifying categories that gloss over their subjective beings and embodied gendered and racialized experiences. In their own right, in their own words, in their own embodied singular truths, they remain unspeakable abject subjects (Kristeva, 1982); an ontological second, relation, complement, passive, unworthy of phenomenal attention, and even more so of intellectual attention. They remain an ot-​her seldom considered (Mandalaki, 2021). But existence relies on the capacity to enunciate the world (Ribeiro, 2018), to name it, the capacity to represent the world’s predicative order (Wolff, 1997). The body, in going unnamed in its actual bodyliness—​i.e. not as an abstract concept, but as a temporally and spatially situated material, carnal, sweating, aging, bleeding entity constitutive of subjects—​remains absent. Even in phenomenological perspectives, despite their explicit interest in embodiment and in embodied relations to the world. Indeed, at first glance, there is nothing particularly gendered about phenomenology books and ideas. They present themselves simply as books, as compounds of thought and knowledge, available

368    Mar Pérezts and Emmanouela Mandalaki to whoever wishes to spend time reading them. Although they provide fascinating analyses of issues of embodiment, of lived subjective experience, of time passing, and/​ or their elevation of the ‘flesh’ to a complex concept such as in the works of Merleau-​ Ponty or Henry, we are still faced with a conundrum that puzzles us, to say the least. This relates to the fact that despite such emphasis on the body, and even when discussing differences between bodies and their agentic qualities with(in) the world, such bodies remain often emptied of their gendered structuration and erotic relationality. It is implicitly a ‘generic’ flesh instead of a situated one (Haraway, 1991). A sensing flesh, but not a desiring one. Furthermore, talking about something is placing it before oneself, as an ob-​ject. This is crucially apparent, Ahmed (2006a) notes, when Husserl discusses the table on which he writes—​a privileged object of phenomenological consideration for various philosophers, in that it is within immediate reach while they are philosophizing. But the material circumstances and tools to which we have access when conducting the exercise of writing or thinking (about) our phenomenality are not neutral in terms of gendered power structures. If Husserl and others can enjoy the comfort and the leisure time to consider the banality of their mundane writing tables, it is also because someone else is taking care of the children, or preparing lunch in the meantime. They are thus oriented to consider certain phenomenal objects and not others, which then recede into the background. Conversely, Audre Lorde and even ourselves, have to struggle with childcare and other care responsibilities to find time to write. A queer phenomenology, as proposed by Ahmed (2006a) helps us to unveil how embodied phenomenal experience (such as writing) is never neutral, or ‘generic’ (Heinämaa, 2011). This is insidiously subtler when considering not the objects around us, but the body itself. For instance, Maurice Merleau-​Ponty ([1964] 1968) developed the notion of flesh to denote the subject’s interconnectedness with the surrounding world, stressing the embodied elements of such interaction and the body’s active participation in cognitive processes of perceiving the world and reflecting around it. As he states: ‘Insofar as I have hands, feet, a body, I sustain around me intentions which are not dependent on my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way that I do not choose’ (Merleau-​ Ponty, [1945] 2006: 440). By considering the body as an anchoring element in the way we experience the surrounding environment, Merleau-​Ponty proposes an understanding of the world as an inherent aspect of one’s existence and one’s body as an inseparable part for the world. ‘The world is entirely on the inside, and I am entirely outside of myself ’ writes Merleau-​Ponty ([1964] 1968: 430−1), accounting also for all these elements that (might) become sensible through their absence. In this reading, the flesh does not just denote the material body or the mind alone. It is that which bridges the distance between the contextual realities of the embodied subject and abstract ideas, stressing how the two converge as inherent aspects of living, perceiving, reflecting, and relating. Merleau-​Ponty’s ideas creatively destabilize the abstractionist powers of the philosophical mind that thinks, emphasizing rather the relational aspects of living and interacting with others, thereby helping to overcome the mind-​body dualism that had marked many philosophers before him and the move towards phenomenology.

Queering Organizational Appearances    369 His ideas demand that philosophy pay attention to the context, and have invited MOS researchers to, in turn, pay attention to the field, to explore the very specificities of this context/​field and uncover the roots and meanings of the surrounding dynamics (Merleau-​Ponty, [1964] 1968). Merleau-​Ponty’s ideas have indeed been widely discussed by organizational researchers for their potential to counter dichotomous conceptions between mind and body—​a prolific interest that many authors of this volume testify and contribute to. For the purpose of this chapter, we find particularly inspiring how his works have been drawn upon to reflect on the doing and writing of research, to propose a reflexive understanding of the researcher and the writer: ‘a body-​subject’ driven by a relational ontology (Diprose, 2002; Hancock, 2008; Ladkin, 2013; Küpers, 2014; Mandalaki, 2019; Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2022; Jääskeläinen & Helin, 2021), which considers fluid interconnections between spaces, localities, and bodies (Daskalaki et al., 2016). These discussions propose a rethinking of research and writing as relational processes of co-​subjective development and ‘inter-​becoming, where consciousness and corporeality co-​exist’ (Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2022: 601). Likewise, Michel Henry’s notion of the flesh and the radical conceptualization of immanent affective life (Henry, 1973, 1975; Letiche, 2006, 2009) has increasingly attracted attention in MOS, rooting the possibility or impossibility of ethical subjectivity and collective practice in embodied affective life (see Chapter 10 by Faÿ and Deslandes in this volume for an overview). However, here too, the focus on the affective immanence of a generic ‘flow of Life’ overlooks significant dimensions of what being ‘in the light of Life’, to use the Henryan terminology, actually means when one is not a white male body. For instance, the first author recalls how she was explicitly advised in the reviewing process of a paper (Pérezts et al., 2015) to omit the gender and the racialized characteristics of one of her main informants in her ethnographic study of compliance analysts in an investment bank, using a Henryan phenomenological lens. By not mentioning these embodied ‘details’ (and omitting their implications in the everyday work of the analysts), most readers are not even given access to any form of imagining that particular informant or any other in the study as being anything other than a white male. The non-​specification makes readers easily assume each informant is a white male, given the European context of the study and the banking sector. The excuse was to protect the informant, who would otherwise be too easily identifiable in an all-​white, predominantly male environment, but also it conveniently avoided the problematizing issue of bringing in the gendered and racialized dimensions. These are traditionally thought to ‘pollute’ the analysis and ‘distract’ from the main focus of the study on the (dis)embodied experience of dealing with sensitive files—​a deep contradiction that has yet to be brought to the fore. As illustrated by the few examples above, despite these kinds of incursions into the body’s relation with(in) the world and to embodied existence and Dasein, the ‘body’ as an abstract generic phenomenological notion falls short in many respects (Heinämaa, 2011), since it is considered as male (cisgender) and often white per default (Ahmed, 2006a). This echoes the discriminatory dimension in some languages, for instance, where the plural articulations appear in masculine form even when non-​male subjects

370    Mar Pérezts and Emmanouela Mandalaki are involved. It is also reflected in scientific representations in other disciplines (such as anatomy). This male representation is considered ‘normal’, inspired by the experience of the male scientist, writer, and thinker that shapes this thought. In this context, the woman’s body appears, even to herself, as she appears to man, as his negative; not a mere ‘variation’, but imperfect, deviant, and suffering—​a critique already made by de Beauvoir of philosophy and phenomenology in particular (Heinämaa, 2003: 73; Young, 1990). A woman’s body is, to begin with, a sick, bleeding body, subject to disease and to chronic pain, hence ‘abnormal’ (Pine, 2018).1 It is a body that needs to restrict how it inhabits its surrounding space and its own embodied capacity to satisfy social expectations, learning to suppress its potential to embody its subjectivity fully (Young, 1990). In light of this, we feel that there is an urgent need to problematize such lack of female and other non-​conforming bodies’ consideration in conventional phenomenological thought, in order to address any paradoxes of (dis)embodiment (or incomplete embodiment) that often plague phenomenological perspectives and potentially their application in MOS as a result. This is not to make essentialist claims about women’s experiences (or any others’ for that matter), but to remark upon how phenomenology has usually remained surprisingly blind to them. To do so, below, we emphasize the importance of attempting to queer traditional phenomenological perspectives by rendering visible embodied experiences that remain traditionally veiled and invisible. Specifically, we turn towards perspectives on queer phenomenology to consider the very specificities of different bodies and the differing power structures that condition these bodies’ experiences. This allows us to discuss how spaces and times might be differently inhabited by those whose life circumstances or choices, including their gender identities and sexual orientations, do not sit comfortably within expected and accepted social orders, and whose lives have been subjected to unequal systems of power informed by ‘white’, ‘male’, cis-​gender, heteronormative standards, of which phenomenology is not exempt.

1 

An old discussion, dating at least as far back as Aristotle’s mention that the female is but a ‘mutilated and imperfect male’ (1961: II, 3, 737a), still permeating medical and scientific discourse in a variety of subtle ways (see for instance Duraro, 2018) particularly surrounding women’s ‘leaky’ experiences of menstruation, miscarriage, pregnancy, menopause, or lactation (see examples in our field: Fotaki, 2013; van Amsterdam, 2015; Sayers and Jones, 2015; Beck et al., 2021; Pérezts, 2022; among others), which characterize femininity as ‘slimmy’ and the ‘baseness’ of human experience, as Sartre put it, and who together with Simone de Beauvoir has been criticized (Sartre, [1943] 2003; de Beauvoir, [1949] 2014; see Heinämaa, 2006). Similar gendered or racialized conceptualizations of psychiatric disorders and mental disabilities abound, such as in defining hysteria as a ‘feminine affliction’, in pathologizing same-​ sex orientations (e.g. Drescher, 2015), or in how Black people have long been considered deviant and psychotic, with diagnosis ranging from drapetomania (a ‘disorder’ afflicting those who attempted to escape slavery by running away, and ‘cured’ by amputation of toes among other things), to schizophrenia during the civil rights movement (e.g. Cartwright, 1851; Metzl, 2010).

Queering Organizational Appearances    371

18.3  Is Phenomenology Straight? Queering Phenomenological Approaches to MOS In the previous section, we pointed out provocatively that for the most part, phenomenology seems to (implicitly or explicitly) deny the status of phenomenal appearance to some aspects of embodiment, in particular its gendered or racialized aspects. Notable exceptions do exist, which have deepened the phenomenological consideration of embodied difference, of the link between experiences of in-​/e​ x-​corporation, normativity, alienation, embodied agency, freedom and unfreedom, birth and death, and have also been mobilized to challenge sexism, racism, and ableism (see Young, 1990; Diprose, 1994; Heinämaa, 2003, 2011, 2014; Ahmed 2006a; Schott, 2010; Zeiler, 2013; Weiss, 2015; Sharp & Taylor, 2016; Brancazio, 2019). Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to extensively review these philosophical contributions in detail (and the list above includes only indicative examples), here we shall focus on some feminism-​ inspired phenomenological works to further unpack the relatively timid intersections such thinking has had within MOS and its potential contributions for the study of organizational phenomena. The point of these works is to build on the rich phenomenological tradition to consider situated embodied experience (Haraway, 1991) and to further refine it with feminist theory, in order ‘to investigate how ideology, power and language affect lived experience’ (Gardiner, 2018: 295), within and around organizations. In the field of MOS, marginal attention has been given to ‘feminist phenomenology’, a broad appellation referring to considerations of ‘gendered experience and sexual difference’ (Simms & Stawarska, 2013: 6; see also Fielding & Olkowski, 2017). In the field of leadership, Gardiner (2018: 294) recently discussed how the influence of gender in our being in the world is largely absent from phenomenology and also existentialism. She refers to four women thinkers, who would probably not identify as ‘feminist phenomenologists’, each for different reasons, but that arguably inform her point: Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt (who actually preferred to call herself a political scientist, not even a philosopher), Iris Marion Young, and Sara Ahmed. Building on their diverse perspectives, Gardiner approaches leadership as a collective, relational action by bringing to the fore the issues of gender hierarchy and socialization in daily leadership practices. Particularly noteworthy here, is how she takes up Young’s (1990) critique of Merleau-​Ponty, arguing that he takes the male body as the norm. Indeed, Young’s situational approach to women’s lived experiences highlights the constraining structural circumstances shaping their subjective embodied experiences and what they can feel or not to be capable of doing. While invited to be transcendental subjects, the experience of being in the world is contradictory for many women because of the frequent experience of being objectified (including by themselves at times, as this is how they learn that their bodies ‘should be’ treated). Woman ‘remains rooted in immanence,

372    Mar Pérezts and Emmanouela Mandalaki is inhibited and retains a distance from her body as transcending movement and from engaging in the world’s possibilities’, Young posits (1990: 153, in Gardiner, 2018: 299). Although Merleau-​Ponty has been fruitfully drawn upon to consider the ‘fleshy’ dimension of leadership (see for example Ladkin, 2013), Gardiner builds on Young’s critique to argue for a so-​far neglected gendered perspective. Considering Sara Ahmed’s (2006a, b, 2014) queer phenomenology may help us to pave the way forward here by accounting for this neglected dimension. Specifically, queer phenomenology is ‘another way of thinking about orientation, which points to how spatial distinctions and awareness are implicated in how bodies get directed in specific ways. In other words, orientation for me is about how the bodily, the spatial and the social are entangled.’ (Ahmed 2006a: 133, footnote 1; italics in original). Orientation (as in ‘sexual orientation’) becomes a phenomenological question that reverses the way we consider our being-​in-​the-​world. Or to reprise a Heideggerian term, to explore how bodies ‘dwell’. Not only is it about how we are ourselves oriented within the world, but how the world’s normative orders are orientating our embodied beings and encounters with others. This has several implications. First, Ahmed allows us to consider bodies that are queered (made to feel othered in regards to the norm), how space and bodies orient each other, as recently discussed by Vitry (2021: 938, 940) in regards to queering organizational space and how some bodies are made to feel racialized, for instance. Spaces ‘queer’ non-​conforming bodies who are ‘out of line’ (Ahmed, 2006a: 66), thereby reinforcing their marginalization. Experiencing their misalignment, misaligned bodies are disoriented. This connects to recent calls to ‘queer’ MOS (Parker, 2001, 2002; Pullen, Thanem, Tyler, & Wallenberg, 2016). They build on the subversive power of queer theory to go beyond its usual use in the study of heteronormativity in the workplace, and instead expand its analytical reach to other objects such as the experience of heterosexuality in organizing (Rumens, de Souza, & Brewis, 2019), organizational spaces (Vitry, 2021), and other discursive regimes around capitalism (Gibson-​Graham, 1996), leadership (Harding, Lee, Ford, & Learmonth, 2011; Gardiner, 2018), or temporal organizing (Freeman, 2010). Second, conversely, if ‘spaces extend bodies, then we could say that spaces also extend the shape of bodies that ‘tend’ to inhabit them’ (Ahmed, 2006a: 58), hence privileging the kind of bodies that usually occupy them and by whose standards they are created (i.e. able, white men in organizations). Some things in the world will be more readily available to some bodies and less so to others, thereby profoundly impacting the being and becoming of each in the world. Indeed, this conduces ‘how bodies take shape through tending toward objects that are reachable, which are available within the bodily horizon’ (Ahmed 2006b: 543). But not just ‘any bodies’, in a generic and abstract way. It is always particular bodies. So what happens to other bodies? How do they dwell in these spaces or confront them? Riach & Wilson (2014) use this line of questioning to analyse the sexual orientations in a pub: how this workspace is experienced and negotiated from a bodily perspective. They adopt Ahmed’s idea of ‘bodyspaces’ (a term already used by Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 2006, and Young, 1990, among others) to bring the political

Queering Organizational Appearances    373 project of gendered geographies to the fore, in organization studies, where ‘space is not a container, but created in the process of experience: it is bodies that make spaces’ (Riach & Wilson, 2014: 332). Third, Ahmed also conceives of the collective within these dynamics. A ‘we’ is formed by how a group of particular bodies share the same orientation towards an object for instance. To some extent, this could then be understood as a path dependency, in that it polarizes attention and resources towards its gravitational pull, which is collectively reinforced. Often, it is our own embodied habituation that makes it difficult for reorientation to happen. She provides an example that most of us can relate to in order to illustrate the difficulty of reorientation: once we become accustomed to writing with one hand, writing with the other becomes increasingly difficult. Each time we write with our regular hand, we reinforce this habituation. The same applies to heteronormativity for instance, which is constantly reaffirmed by ‘straightening’ practices on the one hand, and queering practices of its ‘others’ on the other. Indeed, without having to consciously exclude this or that, our orientation is bounded, already pre-​excluding some things for us, in favour of (normative) others (Ahmed, 2006a). Nevertheless, queering emerges (if only) as a possibility to turn in a different direction, to avoid the presumption of having to follow a certain direction, possibly also as a tentative resisting force (Ahmed, 2010) by actively misaligning to create other collectives that turn in other directions (Rumens et al., 2019; Vitry, 2021). Fourth, queer phenomenology is inherently practical, and Ahmed herself qualifies her work as a ‘practical phenomenology’ (Ahmed, 2014). By this, she means that it carries a transformational purpose on practices, institutions, and norms by the very way in which we inhabit them and reflect upon them. Therefore ‘rather than suggesting [that] knowledge leads (or should lead) to transformation, I offered a reversal that in my view preserves the point or aim of the argument: transformation, as a form of practical labour, leads to knowledge’ (Ahmed, 2014). Knowledge and embodied praxis therefore go hand-​in-​hand, by bringing other objects into the realm of the ‘reachable’ (both conceptually and practically) it offers a way of broadening our ‘field of action’ (Ahmed, 2006a). Both the ‘background’ and the ‘reachable’ leave a profound bodily imprint that will in turn affect lived experience and our capacity to act or do things with our bodies. Queering decentres the masculine approach to being-​in-​the-​world, and makes visible the habituation our bodies have integrated and no longer ‘see’. It changes how ‘at home’ we feel in the world, and this affects how we move, what we do, how we relate: ‘For those who feel marginalized by their surroundings, there is a double bind in that we are not only silenced by the discomfort we feel, we may also silence ourselves’ Gardiner, 2018: 300−1). Such silence also haunts scholarship. The same applies to phenomenology itself. The more it is genderblind and supposedly neutral, the harder it is for it to consider reorienting itself, or queering itself. Drawing inspiration for the aforementioned exceptions that we have only briefly delineated, we ask, how can we queer organizational phenomenology scholarship in order to question its orientations, which, despite their diversity, are greatly infused with heteronormative, white, and male assumptions that

374    Mar Pérezts and Emmanouela Mandalaki they remain largely unaware of? How do we collectively organize phenomenological scholarship to build communities, to develop ‘queer modes of organizing politically’ (Rumens et al., 2019: 595) promising for change? In the final section of this chapter we propose a poetic detour through Audre Lorde’s perspectives on the erotic in order to envision an erotic reorientation as a way forward and a meaningful attempt to unleash queer phenomenology’s transformational potential.

18.4  An Erotic Reorientation for Phenomenology in MOS 18.4.1 Away from Sexualization and into Eros Naming (let alone writing) embodied feeling, leakiness, and erotic desires is hushed. We simply ignore these parts of our bodies, as if they didn’t exist: as if we had internalized a sort of shame in regards to the body that pushes us to find euphemisms, paraphrases and metonymies. And when we finally do manage to pronounce it, we do it in a low voice, as if to downplay its dirtying and taboo character. Or else, we mention it attached to a suffocated laugh, we whisper it as a secret, with the little perverse pleasure of a childhood transgression. (Pérezts, forthcoming: 5)

With few exceptions, the erotic body is largely absent from phenomenological discussions while lying at the beating heart of living, desiring subjects (Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2022); or else it is often reduced to the sexual and to a sexualized understanding of the erotic. Within ‘classic’ phenomenology, neither Husserl nor Heidegger engage with sexuality or sexual difference explicitly as part of their definition of phenomenology, with Sartre noting that sexuality is cast as a mere factuality in his analysis of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. We have to look to Sartre, de Beauvoir, Levinas, or Merleau-​ Ponty for such discussions to explicitly start to surface, each in specific ways, but even these often understand the erotic as sexual desire. Heinämaa (2003: esp. ­chapter 3, 2006) reminds us that, for instance, Sartre, ([1943] 2003) largely discusses the instrumentality of the body (mine and others’) that seeks to ‘appropriate the other consciousness’ (Heinämaa, 2003: 65). Merleau-​Ponty ([1945] 2006) devotes ­chapter 5 of part I in his Phenomenology of Perception to ‘the body in its sexual being’. But he quickly glosses over affectivity to focus on sexuality, discussing several pathological cases of sexual dysfunctions (such as the case of a war veteran who could no longer experience sexual desire) and sexual behaviours by going back to Freudian perspectives, where sexuality is ‘interfused’ with the whole of existence. Though asserting that ‘existence realizes itself in the body [as] incarnate significance’ ([1945] 2006: 192), ‘ultimately, maleness and

Queering Organizational Appearances    375 femaleness are, in Merleau-​Ponty’s analysis, two variations of our basic way of relating to the world’ (Heinämaa, 2003: 68), where they experience each other in sexual desire as both separate and connected. Furthermore, the erotic experience is seemingly reduced to a master/​slave, shame/​shamelessness dialectic between the self and the other: in so far as I have a body, I may be reduced to the status of an object beneath the gaze of another person, I no longer count as a person for him, or else I may become his master and in my turn, look at him. But this mastery is self-​defeating, since, precisely when my value is recognized through the other’s desire, he is no longer the person by whom I wish to be recognized, but a being fascinated, deprived of his freedom, and who therefore no longer counts in my eyes [ . . . ] Taken in this way, as an ambiguous atmosphere, sexuality is co-​extensive with life. (Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 2006: 193; italics in original)

A poetic detour through Audre Lorde’s perspectives on the erotic, we suggest, can help us reimagine the embodied potentials of phenomenology through the power of eros understood in a non-​ sexualized way, non-​ possessive, non-​ objectifying, and shameless (Bell & Sinclair, 2014; Lund & Tienari, 2019). In particular, moving away from the identification of subjectivity to him and therefore denying subjectivity to its others, the erotic as love, relationality, and co-​constitution of subjectivities promises to make space for conceptualizing her potential and that of the queer other, beyond him, in relation to eros, as noted above. In her essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, the black feminist philosopher, Audre Lorde (2017) criticizes societal conventions and dominant systems of power, informed by masculine heteronormative ideologies, that teach women to distance themselves from their erotic desire and its potentialities, and to only bring these elements forward as sources of lust and sexualization. Indeed, the only phenomenality of the female body brought forward is through the sexualized gaze. As already noted by Young (1990), this restricts the way this body moves in space and is encouraged to explore its full capacity in carrying out certain actions. The phenomenological capacity to act, the ‘I can’ too often becomes the ‘I cannot’ that Gardiner, following Young, stresses is opposed to Merleau-​Ponty’s contention that our bodies encounter the world in a fluid open and unifying manner. For some, society’s constraining social structures are simply too orienting and incapacitating (Ahmed, 2006a, b), while others remain oblivious to this fact. Women’s life experiences bear an inherent lived contradiction between ‘transcendence and immanence, between subjectivity and being a mere object’ (Young, 1990: 144). This triggers an irrevocable dissonance, or what Young calls an ‘inhibited intentionality’, whereas, contrary to what Merleau-​Ponty and others suggest through their neglect of gender, bodies do not equally encounter the world, they are not equally free to be open to the world. Women in particular are taught reservation, silence, and subjection, instead of subjectification. In their case, expressing outwardness towards the world is not received in the same relational ‘open’ way, but ‘invites sexual objectification’ (Young, 1990: 155).

376    Mar Pérezts and Emmanouela Mandalaki In our recent work (Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2022), we discussed the unavoidable ‘nakedness’ of being in the field as researchers, and the transformational potentials of writing about it in our academic texts. In doing so, we sought to challenge the sexual gaze that traditionally associates nakedness with sexualized objectification, obscenity, and shame (see Cover, 2003; Beavan, 2019). These inferior representations of the erotic as pornographic or obscene are widely used to trivialize women and objectify their bodies as well as their embodied potential for becoming and knowing (Bell & Sinclair, 2014; Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2021, 2022). They eventually serve to uphold masculine models of power, which fear the transformative powers that can be unleashed from women’s embodied potential for eros and thus reduce it down to the impure, hysterical, and opposed to reason (Cixous, [1976] 1996; Lorde, 2017). Similarly to Riach & Wilson (2014), we are not so much concerned with sexualization per se, but with the ways bodies’ sexualization is oriented as acceptable or degrading. Our perspectives on sexualization operate as foreclosing other possibilities. Instead, stemming from the erotic is the possibility of developing theorizing, writing, thinking, and knowing differently directly from the ‘phenomenological parameters of corporeality’ (Segarra & Prasad, 2018: 1; Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2022: 601; cf. Grosz, 1994), lived as an immanent form of self-​affection in a Henryan (1973) sense. As even Latour reminds us, the opposite of ‘body’ is ‘unnaffected’ and ‘death’, so ‘to have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning “effectuated”, moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-​humans. If you are not engaged in this learning you become insensitive, dumb, you drop dead’ (2004: 205; Pérezts, 2022). We can thus pursue the erotic as another possible orientation in phenomenological scholarship, one that enables genuine affective openness to the other and becomingness in being affected, all key if we want to work for livable organizations.

18.4.2 Dropping the Mask: Towards an Erotic Phenomenology of Organizations and MOS Scholarship Taking up the example of the writing table mentioned in the Introduction (Section 18.1), Ahmed notes how this is what is nearest to the body of the philosopher while writing. But ‘even if it is not surprising that the object on which writing happens appears in writing, we might also point to how such writing turns its back on the table’ (Ahmed, 2006a: 80), i.e. the writing relegates it to a ‘background’ feature of the landscape of the world. And, like the table, our writing also turns its back on the gendered experience of being, something that we sought to write against, despite being attacked for it (Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2021, 2022). This ‘turning our back’ is specifically true in the common practice of conducting research in MOS. While researching organizations, particularly with immersive qualitative methodologies such as ethnography, we are catapulted in medias res. Our bodies are sometimes at the forefront of the organizational situation under study, ‘taking close

Queering Organizational Appearances    377 to the same shit others take day-​in and day-​out (or, if not taking it directly, hanging out with others who do)’ (Van Maanen, 2011: 219−20). Our researchers’ masks inevitably fall in light of the breathing, sensorial, and sensuous experience we are studying but also sharing, if only we let ourselves be immersed in it (Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2022). What is nearest is not the table we are writing on, but the violence, the affect, the stench, and the desires that infuse the field, that we later write out under the pressure of an imposed shame (Beavan, 2019) and a ‘cleansing’ of our research and writing practices (Pullen & Rhodes, 2008; Pullen, 2018). Writing in the way of an erotic phenomenology is a way of not turning our backs on our gendered breathing corporeal existence in its inter-​corporeal relations to the field and organizational phenomena. Instead, following Ahmed (2016), it is about resisting being considered as ‘failed subjectivities’, about resisting a disembodied, imposed discourse, and about embracing our feeling, affective, desirous bodies understood as a locus for knowledge generation through, and not against, our embodied and relational forms of knowing (Grosz, 1994; Lund & Tienari, 2019; Thanem & Knights 2019). It unveils a writing of possibilities through unmasked and uncontained interconnections (Cixous, [1976] 1996; Pullen & Rhodes, 2008; Pullen, 2018) of empowered eroticized bodies with(in) and through their vulnerability (hooks, 2001; Dorion, 2018; Kiriakos & Tienari, 2018) that is finally allowed to appear. Exploring inter-​corporeality in an erotic (non-​sexualized) way, attentive to the openness and playfulness of embodied interconnections, is a way of problematizing taken-​for-​granted assumptions rooted in ‘straight’ phenomenological traditions. Eros enables us to deepen explorations of phenomenological inquiry into organizational experiences in the field of MOS, if only stripped of these ‘masked’ appearances. Only then can the phenomenological ‘body’ be actually inhabited by an affective, particular being—​however it is particularized in terms of gender, race, age, abilities, or desires, and without neglecting any of these dimensions in its capacity for relating and knowing. Only through this approach can we behold not an abstract phenomenological concept of ‘the body’, but the nakedness, vulnerability, and beauty of singular bodies in all their materiality. Queering then becomes a key methodological tool to further pursue this goal. It does so by teaching our eye to be open to queer and be queered, allowing for the erotic to unleash its relational power, and unveil a myriad unseen, unacknowledged, and therefore unproblematized and unknown questions for phenomenological approaches that can be fruitfully put to work in MOS (Letiche, 2006; Pérezts et al., 2015; Gardiner, 2018; Vitry, 2021). Lorde is particularly strong in discussing the erotic, as a source of power that lies in women’s deeply suppressed, unrecognized feeling. As she reminds us, only by delving deep into our erotic selves and recognizing our ability to feel strongly can we (women but also non-​conforming, queer others) reorient, as Ahmed would put it, and replenish our energies and reclaim our embodied existences, both socially and epistemically. Because ‘the erotic is not a question of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing’ (Lorde, 2017: 24). Recognizing eros as a regenerative force and integrating this attitude in our lives is about celebrating our potential to

378    Mar Pérezts and Emmanouela Mandalaki live, think, work, relate, know but also write fully and relationally (Bell & Sinclair, 2014; Kiriakos & Tienari, 2018; Dorion, 2018; Lund & Tienari, 2019; Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2022). This is a conception of eros as longing for knowledge, sense-​making, and pleasurable connections with others, which disrupts normative orders and are therefore inherently open to reorientation. These processes are not then just centred around normative rational, ‘sanitized’ masculine thought, which objectifies women and the knowledge potential of their leaky bodies as abject and impure (Kristeva, 1982; Cixous, 1993; Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2021; Pérezts, forthcoming). They rather emerge from the deepest of our hearts, the recognition of our embodied desires and phantasies, beyond sex, of what has the potential to reframe social and epistemic structures, to reconnect us with our capacity to feel strongly (instead of just thinking strongly) (hooks, 2001; Lorde, 2017). Once we become aware of the power of eros for living and writing, we cannot settle for less, Lorde argues (2017). At this moment, using it to reorient our positionality in the world and relations with others becomes a necessity, not only in social but also in epistemic terms. Because, it is in the acknowledgement of our erotic potential that we become aware of what we are capable of, not only as independent individuals but also as relational subjects able to enter into pleasurable, honest connections with and towards others, in social life and academia. Philosopher Hélène Cixous also discusses the potential of women’s erotic impulse for knowing and writing. Women’s erotic force, Cixous argues ([1976] 1996), does not fit into theoretical definitions and simplistic representations. In its levitating passage, it rather renders other writing avenues and explorations possible. This calls for reframing normative writing and thinking traditions in ways that do justice to the very erotic potential of our bodies and their recognition as sites of knowing (Lorde, 2017). This is necessary for overturning the normative conventions that constrain bodies from appearing and moving freely, in social life and in the academic text (Beavan et al., 2021, Mandalaki, 2021; Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2021). The hand of a woman writer, who is connected to and spills on the paper her erotic side courageously, is thus a hand that recognizes the erotic as source of knowledge (Lorde, 2017). This creates possibilities for sharing with others, emotionally, physically, and intellectually to reclaim our presences in the accounts we write. Recognizing the erotic as a source of power in our writing is also about writing with attention and sensitivity to the embodied vulnerabilities of all that appears, as well as the researcher and the researched. It is about using our feeling potential to challenge simplistic conceptions that reduce eros down to sex and the naked body to an objectified, sexualized, irrational, and obscene object of desire. It is about making space for the female (invisible) naked body to exist in the text, to expose vulnerability, weakness, and embodied affects (Ahmed, 2016). By reclaiming our bodies in our texts, we are empowered to turn our vulnerabilities into courage and restore strength through recognition (Kiriakos & Tienari, 2018; Helin, 2019). We can then create caring communities of healing that can enable us to grow emotionally with one another (hooks, 2001). Using this transformational force of eros in our writing is about refusing to write with a cisgender man’s brain or man’s pen. It is about resisting becoming passive witnesses

Queering Organizational Appearances    379 before the mutilation to our texts (Höpfl, 2000; Fotaki, 2013; Bell & Sinclair, 2014; Pullen, 2018; Pullen et al., 2020; Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2022; Mandalaki, 2021) to rather unveil all that is traditionally reduced as deviant from this order (Beavan, 2019); this cleansed, dried, and sterilized order which has been elevated to the rank of ‘universal’. In so doing, we take active part in reorienting phenomenology itself (Ahmed, 2006a). Recognizing our erotic power, and using it to inform all aspects of our lives, is empowering and has also an ethical potential. It becomes ‘a grave responsibility, projected from within, each of us, not to settle for the convenient [. . . and] conventionally accepted’, as Lorde justly puts it (2017: 27). This emancipates us to regain the steers of our phenomenal lives and to become active agents of resistance and change against injustice and oppression, in their various appearances (Ahmed, 2016). And we can share this energy with others, engaging together to ‘join concerted action not possible before [ . . . ] instead of merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama’ (Lorde, 2017: 29−30). Life is given to us, is a given, Michel Henry argues. But our subjectification is never given to us, it must be conquered, taken back, written in the text and shouted about. Rebecoming a body—​in all its visceral, erotic, and naked bodilyness—​is a key step in becoming a phenomenal subject, but also a key step in going beyond subject-​ centredness in a posthuman way, and in reorienting it. Otherwise the phenomenological flesh remains cold unfeeling skin—​and ultimately numbs us. But trapped underneath lies the erotic pulse that our words can help set free by undressing it from such conventions (Mandalaki, 2021a,b; Pérezts, forthcoming). Naked writing appears, we suggest, as the only way to speak our situated bodies as living bodies (Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 2006), their affects, and naked materiality (Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2022). Then, our words become flesh and our flesh becomes words; carnal, gendered, contextual, situated, eroticized, queered, and deeply, lively, living...

Acknowledgements The authors would like to warmly thank Pauliina Jääskeläinen for her helpful comments on an earlier version.

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Chapter 19

Anim al Ontol o g i e s Phenomenological Insights for Posthumanist Research Géraldine Paring

19.1  Introduction: On the Way to Ontologies of Animals Can one, even in the name of fiction, think of a world without animals, or at the very least a world poor in animals? [ . . . ] Is being-​with-​the-​animal a fundamental and irreducible structure of being-​in-​the-​world, so much that the idea of a world without animals could not even function as a methodological fiction? (Derrida, 2008: 80)

These words from Derrida seem to challenge us as citizens and researchers in organization studies about what is going on now, before our eyes, with other living beings. A future without animals is well under way, as shown by the 68% drop in the average size of the world’s wild vertebrate populations between 1970 and 2016.1 This ongoing sixth mass extinction of species, together with climate change are now known to be mutually reinforcing and inseparable phenomena,2 but only the latter issue has attracted interest within management education and organizational scholarship. Not only does a world poor in animals threaten the possibilities for a good life on Earth, but many of us have already been experiencing a ‘loss of world’—​to take Hannah Arendt’s (2013) description of our modern condition—​with more ‘silent springs’ (Carson, 1962) and increasingly fewer chances to come across species that have not been instrumentally diverted to become pure means for humans, as tools, toys, workers, or beings for experimentation. 1 

2020 WWF Living Planet Report. co-​sponsored workshop on ‘Biodiversity and Climate Change, Scientific Outcome’, https://​doi.org/​10.5281/​zen​odo.4659​158. 2  IPBES-​ IPCC

Animal Ontologies   385 If the chapter opens on this grim prospect, it is to stress that the organizational research agenda has recently started to endorse the new responsibilities arising from the epoch we are living (Sayers et al., 2021; Gherardi & Laasch, 2021). To again take up the opening citation from Derrida (2008), there has been a longstanding ‘methodological fiction’ in organizational research of a world only constructed by humans and their techniques as if without the involvement of other living beings (Labatut et al., 2016). Anthropocentrism, as a product of Western dualistic thinking, opposing nature to culture, mind to body, person to object, and humanity to animality, has been designated the cause of the exclusion of animals from our epistemological and moral spheres (Clarke & Knights, 2021). As a response to this political, ethical, and epistemological shortfall, a posthumanist strand of research, rejecting the centrality of humans as the site of intentional action (Gherardi & Laasch, 2021), has stretched its interest beyond technologies’ agency to include that of other living creatures. Within this new ‘turn to species’ (Hamilton & Taylor, 2017), researchers have sought to make animals more visible actors in organizing processes (Doré & Michalon, 2017). To get rid of dualism, posthumanist research has drawn on non-​substantialist ontological frameworks of organizations and of human subjectivity to highlight the meaningful and significant connections of humans with other living creatures. Organizations have been conceptualized as networks and entanglements of enacted human, animal, and technical agencies (Hamilton & Taylor, 2012;Sage et al., 2016, Doré & Michalon, 2017; Clarke & Knights, 2022) and human and animal relations as embodied and affective (Tallberg et al., Forthcoming; Sayers et al., 2021). While this has helped to attribute agency to animals and make them more organizational, animal ontology has, in contrast, aroused little interest. Hence, animals have remained invisibilized subjectivities and non-​beings for which agency is not very different from materiality. As Ingold has suggested, ontologies should not be understood as mere relatively anthropological, cultural ways of composing beings and things (Descola, 2005), but rather as performative processes of ‘ontogenesis’ imbued with power relations (Descola & Ingold, 2014). In a political nature-​culture posthumanist project—​a ‘post-​posthumanist’ one so to speak—​it is crucial to take responsibility from the ontological regimes in which beings have been put, to play with them, and to change them into political resources for progress (Haraway, 1991, 2005). With regards to animals, it is thus crucial to examine the specific historical, metaphysical work which has aimed at depriving them of ontological existence and ways of being in order to legitimize their sacrifice and limitless exploitation (Derrida, 2008; Burgat, 1997). Doing away with humanist dichotomies requires the additional gesture of reinventing animal ontologies, to open up new ways to research ‘humanimal’ organizing processes and contribute to a better coexistence on Earth. The purpose of the chapter is thus twofold. It highlights the specificities of the metaphysical construction of ‘the animal’ and ‘animality’ to suggest sources of inspiration for revised and richer animal ontologies which are currently burgeoning within a new philosophical biology and naturalism literature. Phenomenology of animal life and existence has a significant role to play in providing important resources towards understanding animals as embodied subjectivities and species as life-​worlds (Burgat & Ciocan, 2016),

386   Géraldine Paring and thus to make animals researchable, that is, interpretable in themselves, and to create new relational multispecies ontologies. This exploration, which is necessarily heuristic and partial, makes a tour through the animal ontologies of thinkers like Derrida, Heidegger, Merleau-​Ponty, Buytendijk, Uexküll, and Morizot. It shows how phenomenology has been and continues to be a central resource—​ambivalent at times—​when dealing with the animal question. This tour is also an opportunity for organizational scholarship interested in phenomenology in general to increase its awareness of the fact that ethology, biology, and phenomenology have always been deeply interpenetrated disciplines. There would not be Heidegger’s Dasein and Merleau-​Ponty’s embodied phenomenology without the works of the ethologists von Uëxkull and Byutendijk (Burgat, 2007). As stressed by Haraway (1991), social sciences and natural sciences have always been connected sciences, providing each other with concepts, figures, and models. Hence, organizational research may dare to venture into ethological phenomenological thinking because it has always been implicitly doing so. My argument is, to a large extent, inspired by my own experience, in 2019 and 2020, as a volunteer for a non-​governmental organization (NGO) defending the possibility for wolves and sheep breeders to coexist in the French Alps. I acted as a spokesperson for the wolves with the Alps’ inhabitants and as an assistant herder in the valley of Haute Bléone to protect sheep herds from wolf attacks. I could experience the ontological-​ political stakes which undergird the possibilities to organize a sustained coexistence between involved actors: sheep, breeders, herders, wolves, volunteers, dogs, to name just a few. As an illustration of some of the chapter’s arguments, a short vignette is provided (Box 19.1). The chapter is otherwise structured as follows. In Section 19.2, I examine the positions of knowledge about animals that have been taken so far in organizational research, to make the case for the necessity to venture into new animal ontologies. In Section 19.3, I draw on Jacques Derrida to highlight some of the humanist philosophical discourses which have served to build predominant poor-​animal ontologies. In the final section (Section 19.4), I explore richer and thickened alternatives drawn from phenomenological biologists and naturalists.

19.2  Animality in Organization Studies Many organizational scholars have recently become critical of the anthropocentric segregation of humans and animals (Clarke & Knight, 2022). There has been a growing awareness that human-​animal studies are needed in the context of the Anthropocene (Sayers et al., 2021) but also in their own right (Connolly & Cullen, 2018). Using an ethics of care framework to make a literature review about animals and understand how the topic is addressed in the discipline, Connolly & Cullen (2018) found that only 185 papers addressed an animal-​related issue. Moreover, only a minority of them ‘cared about’ or ‘cared for’ other species in the research; most papers were distantly and instrumentally concerned with animals, as food commodities, for example; or they only considered ties between humans and animals through public and consumer perceptions and activism.

Box 19.1 Coexisting with wolves in the French Alps: The political stakes of animal ontologies After their eradication in the 19th century as pests, wild wolves have naturally returned to France in the 1990s, crossing its border with Italy, following a progressive abandonment of agricultural land in the Alps. Since then, their presence in France has given rise to many unsettled political conflicts, opposing wolves, their defenders, the State and breeders (who have been suffering from wolves’ attacks on herds). Under the pressure of anti-​wolf syndicates of breeders and hunters, the State’s response has mainly been to regulate the wolf population by authorizing the shooting of up to 20% of them each year, despite their being an endangered and protected species in Europe. Ecological-​political conflicts often reveal divergences in ontological interpretations (Descola & Ingold, 2014) and the links between ontologies, action, and practice in human-​animal organizing are generally underestimated (Morizot, 2021). In the case in point, European and French biodiversity policies in terms of preservation cannot work without changing our perspective on wolves as representing ontological machines of predation, which automatically attack sheep when they are in the presence of herds, and making co-​habitation with pastoralist practices an absurd and illusory endeavour. The attacks are undeniable, but the French naturalist philosopher Baptiste Morizot (2021, 2022) has observed, especially at night, how the relationships between wolves, sheep, and guard dogs are richer and more complex than previously thought: wolves can be seen to play with guard dogs, to share with them the remains of a sheep, and they can also move peacefully through a herd of sheep, which in turn observes them closely without fear. This phenomenological approach, which dwells in the perceived world to understand how animals live, and which grasps the meaning of their embodied conduct, shows how animals are situated, embodied subjectivities with a non-​mechanistic but dialectical relationship with their environment (Merleau-​Ponty, 1963). With this perspective in mind, the NGO that I worked for seeks to organize with willing breeders the conditions for a possible coexistence, trying to build local and situated knowledge of how wolves, humans, and sheep understand each other in concrete spatial and temporal circumstances. For example, I was responsible for planting around the contended net, which gathered sheep for the night, four ‘foxlights’. These lights flash intermittently and randomly to make wolves think there is a night guard there. It is an example of how herd protection measures need not function as insurmountable obstacles for wolves. They are better understood as phenomenological manifestation devices, modes of communication between species that produce effects which, with wolves (and sheep) seen as subjects of their own experience, the wolves and sheep can interpret and find meaningful for themselves. Hence, coexistence organizing processes become a system of embodied manifestations and meaning-​making between species. Morizot draws on the ontology of Uexküll (see Section 19.4.2 in this chapter) to build a notion of animal diplomacy for a possible sustained co-​habitation between wolves, humans, and sheep. As species’ life-​worlds can become interspecific, the task is to search for connections, interpenetrations of shared signifiers. This co-​habitation, which is not necessarily always peaceful, symmetric, and stable, is based on a ‘heterophenomenology’ (Morizot, 2016) which views animals’ embodied behaviours as a language and a perspective. He thus suggests drawing on zoosemiotics to decode species’ ‘ethograms’, that is: ‘stable forms of behaviours identified for a species’ (2016: 52; my translation). This ontological mapping of species offers the possibility for us to approach organizing processes from a multispecies perspective, without resorting to ontologies based on the nature of beings, or notions of difference and/​or continuity between human beings and wolves.

388   Géraldine Paring This gap also relates to management in practice, because workers and managers, embedded in the concrete world of practice, have always had to include animals in organizing processes and negotiate with them, as in, for example, construction project management (Sage et al., 2016). A critical ‘posthuman’ research agenda drawing attention to animals has recently been emerging, either as an ethical response to the currently grim fate of other species or as a recognition that organizational theory has been lacking in exploring how animals play a fundamental role in business and organizations (Labatut et al., 2016; Tallberg et al., Forthcoming; Jammaers, Forthcoming): ‘Animals appear to be inextricably intertwined in the organizational processes and technologies of industrial capitalism’ (Labatut et al., 2016: 371). Recent research has further suggested that human-​animal interaction studies can extend organizational theory and ethics, being the next indicator of organizational diversity (Cunha et al., 2019; see also Jammaers, Forthcoming). Clarke & Knights (2022) suggest that posthumanist research seeks to challenge the epistemological and ontological binaries that elevate culture over nature, mind over body, and humans over animals. To do so, it sees humans and animals as mutually constituted through entangled relations and everyday practical enactments of living (Hamilton & Taylor, 2012). With this lens of organizations as hybrid networks, animals can be described as actors or enacted agencies in organizing processes, showing how the social necessarily includes other species, making a real difference in the spatial, temporal, and agential processes of management (Sage et al., 2016; O’Doherty, 2016). Actor-​Network-​ Theory (ANT) approaches (Latour, 2005) are viewed as privileged frameworks for the analysis of ‘biosocialities’ (Labatut et al., 2016; Hamilton & Taylor, 2017). Another position of knowledge to better assess the reality of human-​animal relationships with organizations has been embodied research, seen as disruptive of anthropocentrism to redefine the human subject in relation to animals to show the multiple embodied and affective connections (Labatut et al., 2016; Connolly & Cullen, 2018; Cunha et al., 2019; Sayers et al., 2022). Through a corporeal framing of organizational ethics (Pullen & Rhodes, 2015), it has been possible to extend stakeholder theory—​so significant in business ethics literature—​to animals (Tallberg et al., Forthcoming). Despite these organizational ontologies blurring the boundaries between humans, objects, and animals, there remains a dissatisfaction about the daunting finding that human perspective remains privileged to the detriment of animals’ own interests within traditional anthropocentric and logocentric methods (Cunha, et al., 2019; Tallberg et al., Forthcoming). Questions about how to listen to the voices of animals (Hamilton & Taylor; 2017) and situate them as subjects (Tito, 2008) have emerged. Hamilton & Taylor (2017) have suggested that we use experimental ethnographic methods such as visual and filmed data, and sensory and motion-​based methods to get closer to animals’ perspective, as well as arguing for a need to draw on other literatures, such as natural sciences, geography, cultural studies, and sociology. I hold that, in addition and maybe prior to methodologies, it is important for critical and responsible posthuman research to reflect on the new ‘invisibilizations’ that our theories and frameworks necessarily create. As pointed by Doré & Michalon (2017), ANT-​based approaches have historically

Animal Ontologies   389 tended to focus on materiality, leaving animals with a ‘minor and ambiguous place [ . . . ] relegated to the single category of “non-​human” ’ (2016: 762). Hence, without an ontological debate about animals, posthumanist research may reconduct, on different terms, the ontological indistinction between life and materiality, to the detriment of the former (Jonas, 1966). In addition, while ontological neutrality or agnosticism through the symetrization of agencies which often characterizes entangled ontologies of organizations has shown itself to be fruitful in including animals as actors, it may not be, as such, able to decolonize our modes of thinking about animals as infra-​humans or radical others, leaving them ontologically as mere enacted agencies through the use of techniques and metaphysically unworthy and impossible subjects of research. The disembodiment of such approaches relegates the potential originalities and varieties of live animals’ ways of beings, as well as their dialectical and affective relationships with the organized environment (Burgat, 1997). As regards corporeal ethics approaches to organizations (Pullen & Rhodes, 2015), they have usefully highlighted how human subjectivities are affectively constructed through relationships with other species (Tallberg et al., Forthcoming). Yet, research has focused on human embodiment in relation to animals, not paying the same attention to animals’ experiences and animals’ bodies as sentient, affective, and perceptive subjectivities, manifesting meaningful conduct within organizations. It is thus necessary to reflect on how posthumanist organizational research frameworks may paradoxically make animals more visible while keeping intact the underground ontological machinery—​ that is, animality. Following Haraway, I suggest that the task before us may not be in methodologies that would be minimally contaminated with our human perspective (1991)—​a gesture which is probably both necessary and impossible (Hamilton & Taylor, 2017)—​but rather to take responsibility for how animals are made knowable. I take up from her the idea that there is no nude nature that can be discovered without the mediation of our techniques, stories, ideologies; hence, we need to examine and play with ontologies. I thus challenge the view that organizational scholars should avoid ‘the insoluble question of the prior definition of the nature (human, animal, or technical) of the entities considered’ (Doré & Michalon, 2017: 775). Without such an examination, organizational research may inadvertently reproduce humanist gestures and remain intimidated by the scarecrow of anthropomorphism, an ambiguous concept imbued with humanism, as we shall discuss below.

19.3  The Ontological War on Species This war is probably ageless, but here is my hypothesis, it is passing through a critical phase. We are passing that phase and it is passing through us. To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity, a constraint that, like

390   Géraldine Paring it or not, directly or indirectly, no one can escape [ . . . ] and I say ‘to think’ this war, because I believe it concerns what we call ‘thinking’. (Derrida, 2008: 29)

Animals and animality held central stage in the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida, so much so that his entire work can be read as a continuous thought about life and animals (Llored, 2012), an interpretation Derrida himself admitted. In his oral lectures gathered in his The Animal that therefore I am (2008) and The Beast and the Sovereign (2009), he breaks down the philosophical and legal construction of the normative single category ‘the animal’ as a human ‘war’ against species to deprive them of any proper ontological existence and reserve it for humanity to establish a limitless right to appropriate their bodies. This is the reason why he redefines anthropocentrism and logocentrism as carnophallogocentrism (2006). He thereby stresses that those concepts do not merely reflect lines of thinking but are pieces of a political project which aims to decriminalize the violence against and sacrifice of those relegated to the categories of mere bodies: animals, children, women, the disabled, fools, and so on. He supports the view that zoophobia is constitutive of philosophy, and that zooanthropolitics is a more relevant horizon than biopolitics (2009). His deconstruction of the way philosophy, law and politics have dealt with the animal is not only directed to the usual humanist suspects like Kant and Descartes, when the first only grants dignity to humanity and the second one develops the animal-​machine thesis. He also regrets that phenomenological thinkers like Heidegger and Levinas have also reproduced, with regards to the animal question, the Cartesian gesture they purported to disrupt (Ramond, 2016). He demonstrates that Heidegger, in Being and Time (2010), has continued to essentialize humanity and animality through positing that only the (human) Dasein is ‘world-​forming’, whereas the animal is ‘poor in world’ and has no Dasein. This means that if a deer appears to a wolf, it does not appear ‘as such’. Heidegger makes animals immanent to nature—​ with no freedom, culture, project, decision-​making self—​that is, programmed and fixed beings that cannot experience the absence of things and thus temporality. For Derrida, Heidegger has thus contributed to carnophallogocentrism in holding that the animal, lacking in world, does not die, but just stops to live (Verenden as opposed to Sterben). Even if Derrida is an inescapable author in relation to the animal question, his approach has still rarely been taken up (Desmond, 2010; Sayers, 2016). The interest of Derrida’s work for posthumanist organizational research lies in the understanding that the binarism humanity/​animality does not represent a single divide; it is rather constituted of multiple and heterogenous discursive borders which process the difference—​the differance—​between humans and animals in order to deprive animals from ontological existence and impoverish the variety of their ways of being. Without this awareness, these underground naturalized affluents converging to divide animality/​humanity may continue to affect the way we research animals in the field and the question we ask if no attention is being paid: ‘everything I’ll say will consist, certainly not in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply’ (Derrida, 2008: 29). Although these lines are difficult to summarize, the following key ontological notions can be retained. One of the main differances that Derrida analyses

Animal Ontologies   391 is the fundamental distinction made between reacting and answering. The animal has been declared as merely reacting to stimuli, but never answering meaningfully a question, a question that we ask, or to a situation, incapable of any dialectical relationship with the environment. Being deprived of logos, it has also been consequently deprived of language, that is of the capacity to address us and manifesting its experience. A Heideggerian monkey ‘takes, grasps, but he will not give, and or greet’ (2008: 37). Derrida does not offer to exchange our ontological glasses to put new ready-​made ones but provides some resources which together can form the basis for a new ontological map. One of these is the awareness of how language is supported by the humanist ontological architecture: gregarious/​social, semiotics/​language, reaction/​answer, give birth/​ calve, etc. Second, the animal should be given back its plural, because the first initial violence made to living creatures is the generality of the word animal. Hence, wolves (Doré & Michalon, 2017), dogs (Cunha et al., 2019), badgers (Sage et al., 2016), or scallops (Callon, 1986) cannot all be studied using the same concepts, questions, and methods. Third, we need stop thinking about animals as ‘lacking’ (in something), notably lacking in speech; the question is not whether they can speak, but how their embodied conduct manifest themselves. Derrida states that certain animals show themselves capable of undeniably guilty behaviors, hiding or putting its tail between its legs after committing a fault, indeed, in times of sickness or at the point of death, both of which would be felt as faults, as what must not be shown (so many animals hide when they are ill or feel they are dying) [ . . . ] does one not have the right to infer from that animal debt, memory of a fault, shame, and hence modesty?’ (2008: 61)

Instead of ‘speech’, ‘sign’, and ‘signifier’, he prefers the concepts ‘mark’, ‘trace’, ‘manifestation’ (2008: 127). He also points to the necessary ethological studies that very few philosophers, as custodians of the ‘proper’ of man, actually read. As a matter of fact, over the last decades, ethology has indeed made a ‘Copernican revolution’ (Despret, [2012] 2016), gathering evidence that animals, from mammals to birds and fishes, are subjects who attribute meanings, have specific cultures, emotions, complex cognitive capacities and moral behaviours (de Waal, 2016).

19.4  Phenomenological Insights for Alternative Animal Ontologies 19.4.1 Animals’ Bodies as Expressive Embodied Conduct and Manifestations Merleau-​Ponty (2020) asserts that classical thought has either seen animals as machines or as prototypes of human beings. Classical thinkers and researchers have projected onto animals the characteristics of human existence, and, as such, have asked of them, in

392   Géraldine Paring laboratories, questions that are only meaningful to human beings, making little attempt to understand the way they themselves live: ‘the originality of the animal world will remain hidden to us as long as we continue (as in many classical experiments) to set it tasks that are not its own’ (Merleau-​Ponty, 2020: 54). Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology of corporeality suggests that an organism is a living corporeal subjectivity, in as much as it is a centre of perception which gives shape to the world and of which movements must be understood as an embodied conduct: living beings proceed to trace in their environment, by the way they act or behave, their very vision of things. We will only see this if we lend our attention to the spectacle of the animal world, if we are prepared to live alongside the world of animals instead of rashly denying it any kind of interiority. (2004: 39)

The work of Merleau-​Ponty is a remarkable example of the cross-​fertilization between biology and philosophy (Burgat & Sommer, 2016). Merleau-​Ponty’s book The Structure of Behaviour (1963) borrows from the work of the Dutch psycho-​ethologist Frederik Buytendijk (1887–​1974), who has himself drawn on Husserl to use phenomenological methods to step away from classical causal psychology and better understand animals as the subjects of their own conduct. Buytendijk has in turn been inspired by Merleau-​ Ponty to work on his comparative psychology between human beings and animals. Buytendijk (1968) explains that objective psychology has posited that we can only observe animals’ movements and not their interior life, entailing that nothing can be said about them. He holds that is also impossible to decipher, even in human conduct, the relationship between a behaviour and reflexive consciousness. Human subjectivity is embodied, and this embodiment, when carefully interpreted and observed, can form a solid basis to access embodied animal subjectivity. He considers that it is through phenomenological methods that both the pitfalls of the mechanistic approach and anthropomorphism can be avoided: our human embodied existence, through our own perceptual experiences, elementary conduct, and affective dispositions, are certainly specifically human, but they also reveal our primordial coexistence with the world. Hence, with the ontology of animals as embodied subjects, any affirmation of the meaningfulness of their behaviours cannot be an assimilation to human behaviour (Burgat & Sommer, 2016). The phenomenological approach thus reveals animals as being capable of signs, language, and styles through their embodied conduct. Merleau-​Ponty’s animal ontology also rejects the view that animals are discrete entities; he uses the term ‘interanimality’ ([1956–​60] 1995) to show that animals exist intercorporeally and interspecifically ‘within a circuit of expression’ (Ramirez Barreto, 2010: 83) Many of their activities are not ‘doings’ but expressive of ‘being seen’ through ceremonials, parades, and manifestations of presence. For example, many mammals mark their presence to others, whether members of the same species or of others, through faeces. It is thus possible to think ontologically of the animal body as a system of manifestation, of figuration, which is interspecific (de Fontenay, 1998).

Animal Ontologies   393

19.4.2 Species’ Life-​Worlds The work of Estonian biologist Jacob von Uëxkull (1864−1944) is recognized as the precursor of a methodological thinking applied to animals (Burgat & Sommer, 2016). He established a theory of species’ life-​worlds which was then taken up by Heidegger (although in a reductionist way), Buytendijk, and Merleau-​Ponty. In contemporary posthumanities writings about animals, his theory has remained highly influential (Morizot, 2022). Von Uëxkull has studied the subjective worlds of a great variety of animals: ticks, flies, dogs, birds, and human beings, adults, and children. Introducing into ethology the Husserlian notion of intentionality, he brought the concept that each species has a distinct specific perceptual universe (Umwelt) which is structured by its specific sensory apparatus. As an example, Von Uexküll ([1934] 2010) describes how the scallop only perceives its enemy, the starfish, when the latter moves. The starfish may be very close to the scallop, but only its movements will make the latter swim away. The form, colours, or proximity of the starfish do not ‘matter’ for the scallop. Species have therefore various subjective worlds (Umwelten) where things are perceived and attributed activity meanings (the meaning for the scallop to swim, for instance). Objects or beings have thus different meanings for different species and individuals within species: a tree lends itself to different meanings and activities depending on whether it is perceived by a forestry worker, a little girl, an ant, or a fox. In addition, Umwelten are not fixed structures but evolve and change through animals’ experience and affective dispositions as well as through intra-​and interspecific interactions. Uexküll explains for instance how a guide dog learns to incorporate in its Umwelt the objects that are meaningful to its blind human owner (a street mailbox having the meaning of ‘stopping by’ for instance). Hence, agents from different species have cognitive, sensory, and cultural skills that are not ‘superimposable’ (Lestel et al., 2006: 158) which ‘puts the interpretative interactions at the heart of the behaviours of each of the agents concerned’ (p. 160). Organizing processes can thus be understood as an imbrication of Umwelten where species and animals manifest to each other. An organizational researcher can thus attend to the fact that a field is not to be described as a unique Cartesian space, or as his/​her own subjective world, but as a multiplicity of worlds. The identification and investigation of those Umwelten are therefore important tasks. They enable us to theorize organizing processes as various subjective ‘worlds’ which coexist, conflict, combine, and co-​constitute each other. In this ontology, animals’ behaviour and situations, perceptions (conditioned by the sensory apparatus) and movements are meaningfully interrelated.

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Chapter 20

‘H ow ab ou t a Hu g ?’ Aesthetic of Organizational Experience and Phenomenologies Antonio Strati

20.1  Introduction The first thing I did when I started writing this chapter was to make the photograph, Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace (Figure 20.1). It responded to a desire, that of ‘making strange’ something familiar. It is not the first time that photography has accompanied my writings. Sometimes I’ve done it as a counterpoint to the written text, as in the book by Ian King & Jonathan Vickery (2013) on the aesthetic perspectives of studying organizational experience. On other occasions, instead of being a counterpoint to the written word, the visual language of photography has been the basis of the overall architecture of the essay. Starting with the work written together with Silvia Gherardi on that ‘something’ which exceeds the speaking subject (Gherardi & Strati, 2017a). This essay in fact constituted the proposal of our less conventional style of writing in the sociology of organization, organizational theories, and management studies precisely because it makes use of different languages of expression and communication. To ‘making strange’ something familiar, therefore, I have preferred using photography, because I am fascinated by being able to explore its artistic and communicative possibilities. But it can also be done by resorting to other forms of visual language, such as film or drawing and painting, as well as by exploring the language of music. All the more so since digital technology makes combining different languages ever easier. Playing with the plurality of forms of languages of expression has great relevance for aesthetic research on organizational experience because the aesthetic quality of the discourse on organizing is enriched by the evocative process of knowledge.

Figure 20.1  Antonio Strati, Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace (2021) (Files Hasselblad cfv-​50c and Leica C, software Hasselblad Phocus and Adobe Photoshop)

398   Antonio Strati Thus, I made the photograph Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace. My intention was to give visual form through photographic art to ‘resonances’ concerning my aesthetic approach to the study of organizational life as well as some characteristic aspects of phenomenological, neo-​ phenomenological, and post-​ phenomenological philosophies. Resonance is ‘an extremely beautiful word’, notes the Italian composer of classical music Alessandro Solbiati (2017: 98), which is capable of evoking very different sensations, interpretations, and meanings, ‘up to the most intangible dimensions of metaphor and emotional and expressive evocation’. The resonances I will discuss in this chapter do not represent, therefore, a reasoned and linear way to immediately lead the reader to the heart of the topics under discussion. On the contrary, these resonances will constitute an invitation to the reader to make use of the evocative process of knowledge stimulated by the allusions taking place between the photopoetic homage, organizational aesthetics, and phenomenological philosophies. But, the reader will ask, what does the Italian metaphysical art of a century ago have to do with the resonances between organizational aesthetics and phenomenological philosophies? This is what I will illustrate and discuss in this chapter. The sections that follow focus on the aesthetic feelings of joy, amazement, and desire in the exploration of the aesthetic qualities of the materiality of organizational experience, and on the philosophical sensibilities that characterize different approaches to the study of the aesthetic of organizational experience. The chapter closes with the intertwining of these philosophical sensibilities with phenomenological aesthetics, thus highlighting the theme of the seductive capacity of organizational aesthetics research with regard to phenomenology and philosophical aesthetics. The whole chapter will be characterized by the aesthetic dimension of play. This is a long-​neglected dimension in organizational theory, but one that is gaining more attention from organizational scholars (Organization Studies, 2018). The play takes place above all with philosophy, because philosophical practice is nothing if not a fascinated playing with the topics we deal with in a dialogical way, which we face with enthusiasm, surprise, and passion, as observed by the Italian philosopher, Ermanno Bencivenga (1988). Playing is also what occurs through the resonances between the poetics of the visual arts and that of the written word to aesthetically understand organizational experience.

20.2  Playing with Phenomenology and Aesthetic Philosophies To answer our hypothetical reader’s question as to why a visual homage to metaphysical art will be a leitmotif in this chapter, I need to explain what happened at the beginning of drafting this chapter. Some time after accepting the invitation from the editors of this

Aesthetic of Phenomenologies    399 volume to write a chapter on the aesthetic of organizational experience, I noticed in the bookshop of the Musée de l’Orangerie, in Paris, a small volume that attracted me precisely for how it was made. These two moments—​the invitation received and accepted via email; the book noticed in the museum bookstore—​were fundamental to the subsequent architecture of the chapter and show different aesthetic characteristics due to their specific organizational materiality. The email invitation reveals how organizational communication creates an aesthetic materiality of the organizational experience. The latter is based on information and telecommunication technologies that the ‘virtual body’ of the emails exchanged with editors highlights. The materiality of the written words that appear on the screen of my MacBook Pro—​which then has the same ‘nature’ as the photopoetic homage seen on the computer screen instead of the printed book—​has the particular characteristic of being a symbolic artefact (Gagliardi, 1990) very recent in the history of writing and to take shape only when looked at. It is during the interaction with the user-​consumer that the ‘self-​phenomenalization’ of the algorithms in binary format takes place (Diodato, 2005), which constitutes the digital technological foundation of the ‘virtual body’ of the exchanged messages. Now, it is curious to note that a plurality of heterogeneous subjects forms the aesthetic materiality of this organizational experience. We move from the intangibility of the ‘virtual body’ algorithm to the full body of the repeaters of waves and frequencies for the transmission of messages, from the human corporeality of those who wrote them to the non-​human corporeity of computers, mobile phones, and servers, up to the organizational materiality of the academic institutions involved. For each message, however brief—​which, among other things, escapes our senses of taste and smell, while privileging, on the contrary, that of sight and, sometimes, even those of hearing and touch—​we can perceive the work of a ‘collective auteur’ (Strati, 2019a) made up of heterogeneous and fragmented corporealities that reveal aesthetic choices that are in turn heterogeneous and fragmented. We are becoming more and more accustomed to these aesthetic choices that stimulate our perceptive-​ sensorial faculties with varying intensity (Simmel, 1908). We are no longer surprised by the aesthetics of the repeaters on top of the mountains and hills around, nor that of the texts of the emails, nor of the mystery of the self-​ phenomenalization of algorithms in the written word or in the photopoetic homage. We are no longer even surprised by the aesthetic materiality of the ‘collective auteur’ of the email, just as we are no longer surprised by the grotesque pastiche of legless bodies, of swollen nostrils and lips, of faces clumsily framed in photos, videos, and webinars. That is, of images that depict us according to the new digital aesthetics of our corporealities. This is an aesthetic materiality very different from that to which I was attracted to by the small book exhibited in the bookshop of the Musée de l’Orangerie. Again, there is a habit regarding the aesthetic choices dominant in the cultural industry. Also in this second moment, therefore, there is negotiation between our perceptive-​sensorial faculties and the aesthetics of the books, the room in which they are exhibited, as well as the scenographic composition of the bookshop itself. In the bookshop, however,

400   Antonio Strati the bodies of visitors and those who work there are whole, as are those of the statue and the mannequin in my photopoetic homage to de Chirico’s art. Books, CD-​ROMs, posters, postcards, paper bags, and plastic bags, and all the various gadgets meet the needs of our touch and smell, as well as sight and hearing. If we also take into account the refreshment corner of the open space where the Orangerie bookshop is located, our perceptive-​sensorial faculty of taste can also be involved in the aesthetic of this organizational experience. There is a difference in the aesthetic quality of the materiality of these two moments—​ email and book—​even as regards the stimulated proprioceptive performance. In the case of email, one is usually sitting, with eyes and fingers at work. In the case of the book, the whole body moves between one shelf and another in the bookstore. The proprioceptive sensory faculties are affected in both cases, of course, but in a different and specific way, and with different intensity. Let us now pass, in the next section, to the play between resonance and desire that the book, or rather that some annotations written in it, have aroused in me so that I began the drafting of this chapter with a photograph.

20.2.1 Resonance and Desire Picking up that small volume in the museum bookstore, and leafing through it, it seemed to me that I was looking at a book from another time, rather than in a recent letterpress printing. Green cover, opaque white, soft touch paper, pages that must be separated with a letter opener in order to read them, and harmoniously proportioned dimensions had seduced both my gaze and my sense of touch. The book was written by the French art critic Serge Fauchereau and dealt with a topic that still intrigued me because I had never fully explored it: the artistic and intellectual, as well as emotional, relationship between Giorgio de Chirico and his younger brother Andrea—​otherwise known as Alberto Savinio—​in the context of the intense but also contrasted relationships between Mediterranean metaphysical art and the artistic movement of surrealism in the first decades of the last century. Flicking through the book—​after having dutifully separated the pages with the letter opener—​it was the following notes that prompted me to begin the drafting of this chapter by producing Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace: Savinio, however, will exploit in his painting creatures where humans, animals and minerals mingle [ . . . ] But de Chirico still admitted a deeper motive: these statues, he tells us, are ‘to dehumanize you a little, you who, in spite of your childish devils, are still too human’. Thus, statues and human beings are linked. [ . . . ] his statue can become living flesh again, metamorphoses common in painting. (Fauchereau, 2009: 63−5)

Aesthetic of Phenomenologies    401 These notes reminded me of the issues of authorship, carnality, and the posthuman that have been increasingly intensely debated in recent decades both in organizational aesthetics research and in the sociology of organization and organizational theory generally. I wanted to see more precisely, then, both their context and their meaning in metaphysical art, to better understand the aesthetic sensation of amazement felt in response to the words: ‘de Chirico wants to free himself from anthropomorphism and, therefore to see everything, even man [sic!], as a thing’ (Fauchereau, 2009: 51, quoting Giorgio de Chirico himself)—​because the image these words evoked gave me joy. Indeed, Italian metaphysical art had an important place in all pictorial, sculptural, and literary arts of a century ago, that of the overwhelming importance attributed to the human subject and of the domination of anthropomorphism in the arts. This metaphysical issue, in fact, resonated with the questioning of anthropomorphism in organization studies in general—​thanks, among others, to posthumanist theory (Braidotti, 2013), non-​ representational theory (Thrift, 2007), and Actor-​ Network-​ Theory (Latour, 2005)—​and, in the context of organizational aesthetics research, with the aesthetic approach to the study of organizational life in particular. In fact, there are four main research styles that are intertwined with each other in organizational aesthetics research, because the aesthetic of organizational experience is studied to understand: • the symbolism and cultures of the organization in the ‘archaeological approach’ (Berg & Kreiner, 1990); • the playfulness, the experiential flow, and how art can contribute to the management of the organization in the ‘artistic approach’ (Guillet de Monthoux, 2004); • the pathos of the organizational artefacts that surround us and their organizational control at a pre-​cognitive level in the ‘empathic-​logical approach’ (Gagliardi, 2006); • the dynamics of organizational negotiation grounded on the aesthetic dimension of organizational life in the ‘aesthetic approach’ (Strati, 1999). The distinction between these approaches also concerns the importance assigned to philosophy as we will see later, although the aesthetic approach will remain at the centre of the arguments presented in this chapter since it is with this approach in particular that Fauchereau’s notations resonated. The aesthetic approach, in fact, is characterized by a posthumanist awareness, as well as by a phenomenological awareness based on ‘sensorial knowing’, ‘aesthetic judging’, and ‘poetic performing’ (Strati, 2019a: 97−9). In this approach, the ‘human subject is de-​centered’ and represents ‘only a component among the various authors’ of the organizational experience; the ‘sensible knowing is not only of human beings, but also of other living beings’; and the ‘artefact too acts aesthetically on the pre-​cognitive assumptions of the human beings’ (Strati, 2019a: 106−7). The point is, however, that I already knew these theses of the Mediterranean metaphysical art of the two de Chirico brothers. What amazed me, then, if not the fact that

402   Antonio Strati I had never seen them in this light and had never experienced them in the way that I did during my quick reading of Fauchereau? The feeling of joy at the question of liberation from anthropomorphism posed by metaphysical art, and the feeling of amazement at having seen what I had not seen before—​despite having had it ‘always’ under my eyes—​was followed by the desire to begin the chapter with a photopoetic homage to de Chirico. The desire was therefore to create a photograph in the style that distinguishes my photopoetic research (Belli, 1982; Hitchcock, 2005) to be added to the others in the photographic series ‘Homage’ to art photographers like Robert Doisneau,1 to artists such as Umberto Boccioni (Gherardi & Strati, 2012), Niki de Saint Phalle, and Gaspare Traversi (Strati, 2019a), and to designers like Giò Ponti (Strati, 2019b). A tribute from which to start and return to reflect on the aesthetic of organizational experience through the evocative process of knowledge and learning, as well as—​ça va sans dire—​the illustration and discussion of the topics presented in this chapter. We can now move on to the topics of the next section which focuses on my photographic practice and the metaphysical embrace of organizational aesthetics research and philosophy. But, first, I want to invite the reader to stop for a moment and take a look at Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace (Figure 20.1). In this way, I suggest we do not abandon too soon the poetics and semantics of the visual language of photography in our urgency to that of the poetics and semantics of the written wor(l)d.

20.2.2 The Metaphysical Embrace To create Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace, I chose a photograph I had taken during a visit to the Museo del Novecento in Milan which reproduces the painting Il figliol prodigo (The Prodigal Son). This is a well-​known work, so much so that it was the image chosen for the poster announcing de Chirico’s great exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in 1970. I, therefore, chose an iconic representation of de Chirico’s art. But this was not the main reason for my choice. The main reason for my choice was that with the 87 x 59cm egg tempera on canvas that the artist painted a century ago, in 1922 de Chirico transformed the metaphysical art invented and created in the previous decade in the ‘return to the traditions of pictorial art. The ancient masters descend from their pedestals and welcome their lost son in the avant-​garde with open arms’ represented by a mannequin that evokes today’s robots—​as writes the Austrian art historian Wieland Schmied (2000: 42)—​and that ‘cannot deny its

1 See http://​www.muf​oco.org/​col​lezi​oni/​racco​lta-​ant​olog​ica.

Aesthetic of Phenomenologies    403 artificial nature’, but which already has an arm and a hand that ‘can tenderly rest on the father’s shoulder’. What else, if not just this, could have constituted the principal topic of a chapter on the aesthetic of organizational experience reflecting on the intertwining between organizational theory and phenomenological philosophies? I found that there was a resonance between de Chirico’s theme of the return to the study of the classics of Italian Renaissance painting and the connections-​in-​action between, on the one hand, the corpus of phenomenological, neo-​ phenomenological, and post-​ phenomenological philosophies—​represented by the marble of the statue—​and, on the other hand, the corpus of organizational aesthetics research represented by the wood and the drapery of the mannequin. A resonance that also can be felt in the recent return to the study of philosophy by organizational theory. After all, de Chirico was certainly not the only Italian artist to theorize, in the postwar period, a return to the classics of Italian art (there was, for example, the Italian modernist painter and designer Mario Sironi, who in the same years not only replaced people with mannequins—​as did de Chirico—​but ‘almost renounces easel painting, which he contemptuously refers to as living room painting’ (Bonfand, 1995: 96) to return to the mural fresco that had characterized the art of public buildings in the Italian Quattrocento (14th century).) To photographically portray the intensity of the gesture of embracing two different corporealities, I decided to exclude colour from the photopoem I was creating. In black and white, the accent is placed on the embrace; the colour would have distracted, by drawing attention to itself—​to the colours of the statue, the mannequin, the arches, and the other elements making up the image, ranging from water to shadows—​diverting the attention of the beholder. With this aesthetic choice, moreover, I have also emphasized the theme of return that was inherent in the embrace. In returning to a study of the art of the classics, Giorgio de Chirico also returned to a use of the Renaissance painting medium, painting Il figliol prodigo using egg tempera, while also composing the scene of the picture and using shades of colour so that the painting of the classics would resonate in his own artistic work. With the decision to realize my photopoetic homage through the aesthetics of black and white, I too went back to the classics of the medium of photography—​even if not to in the technique of analogue photography—​and tried my hand at using the photographic language, which, par excellence, succeeded in translating, reproducing, and documenting in black and white our world of colour. What aesthetic of Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace did I underline, then, with in using these shades of gray, black, and white in terms of the gesture of hugging? I suggest, for example, it draws attention to the carnality of the hands and fingers, as well as to the firm and sure gesture with which the hands rest on the shoulders of the statue and the mannequin. As did de Chirico, I wanted to recall to the viewer the fact that the embrace is also sensually felt in the marble materiality of the statue and in the materiality of the wood and the drapery of the mannequin. If, in fact, in order to free himself from anthropomorphism,

404   Antonio Strati de Chirico transforms the human into marble and wood, and tries to see the human in its thingness, at the same time the artist mysteriously manages to transform those ‘inanimate statues into flesh and blood’ (Noel-​Johnson, 2019: 19). Sensory sensation that reverberates through my photopoetic homage and that resonates in the embrace between the ‘statue-phenomenological-​philosophy’ and the ‘mannequin-​organizational aesthetics research’. That embrace does not happen only on an intellectual level, therefore, because it is not a merely mental organizational experience. It must be observed, however, that this organizational experience does not concern the entire corpus of organizational aesthetics research. If it is true, in fact, that the literature of organizational aesthetics research often refers to philosophical aesthetics and phenomenology, it is equally true that much of the research and study conducted in the field of organizational aesthetics research does not assign great importance to this embrace, as we will see in the next section.

20.3  ‘Originarietà’, ‘Pastiche’, and the Relevance of Philosophy I concluded the previous section by observing that several important writings on the aesthetics of organization show neither interest nor passion for philosophical reflections. This is a feature that does not concern only the literature on the aesthetic dimension of the organization. It is also about organizational theories as a whole, as pointed out by Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott, & Michelle Greenwood (2016) in their introduction to the volume devoted to the relevance of philosophy and social theory in organizational studies. Nonetheless, in organizational aesthetics research, there are numerous essays that assign importance to philosophy. Although in several writings the reference to philosophy sounds like a ritual of placement in the epistemological and philosophical debate. The connections-​in-​action between the investigated organizational aesthetics and the philosophical perspectives mentioned are in fact often poorly illustrated and discussed. In other words, the essay on organizational aesthetics often mentions philosophy but does not play with it (Strati, 2022). In any case, the fact remains that the literature in the area of research on organizational aesthetics that has explored philosophical issues, as well as philosophical issues that characterize phenomenology, neo-​phenomenology, and post-​phenomenology, is not scarce. Also because the four approaches—​‘archaeological’, ‘artistic’, ‘empathic-​ logical’, and ‘aesthetic’—​to the study of the aesthetic dimension of the organization were formed during the epistemological querelle as a result of which the domination of the rationalist and positivist paradigm went into crisis in organizational theories. Indeed, during this paradigm crisis, new theoretical perspectives have flourished in the study

Aesthetic of Phenomenologies    405 of organization, including that of the aesthetic discourse on organization (Academy of Management Review, 1992). All four approaches, thus, have roots in phenomenological philosophies, beginning with the influence that the latter had on the epistemological debate and the methodological conflict between qualitative and quantitative research in organizational analysis. Phenomenological philosophies have been widely echoed in organizational theory and management studies (Holt & Sandberg, 2011; de Vaujany, Aroles, & Pérezts, introductory chapter in this volume) also because, on closer inspection, substantially in the last century there has been no disciplinary field or philosophical approach that, directly or indirectly, has not been confronted, at least in some of its salient moments, with phenomenology, or better, with the methodological and thematic issues advanced by the various philosophies that can be classified or have defined themselves as ‘phenomenological’. (Cimino & Costa, 2019: 17)

Let’s see, then, some main connections-​in-​action between phenomenology and organizational aesthetics research. Let’s begin with the importance of philosophy in the four approaches. The organizational aesthetics research is characterized by three main philosophical sensibilities, ‘aesthetic sensibility’, ‘hermeneutic sensibility’, and ‘performative sensibility’ (Strati 2016, 2019a: 152−8). I prefer the concept of ‘philosophical sensibility’ over that of a ‘philosophical perspective’ because it represents a ‘soft’ concept that can depict the hybridization between the area of organizational aesthetics and that of philosophical aesthetics. The ‘aesthetic philosophical sensibility’ has given specific form to organizational aesthetics research by rooting it in the metaphorical imagination and in sensible knowledge. The ‘hermeneutic philosophical sensibility’ has strengthened the qualitative study of the organization and refined its interpretation. The ‘performative philosophical sensibility’ has kept the aesthetic discourse on organization closely connected to the experiential flow and the theorization based on the study of social practice in the organization. In all three philosophical sensibilities resonate the themes and problems debated in phenomenology in general and in phenomenological aesthetics in particular, from the corporeality of knowledge to the flow of the creation of meaning and its interpretations, up to the capacity for symbolic action of organizational artefacts. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that however important these three philosophical sensibilities are in all four approaches of organizational aesthetics research, only for the artistic approach and the aesthetic approach does philosophy play precisely in ‘giving form’ (Gherardi & Strati, 2017b) to the approach itself. This is documented, among other writings, by the book on art and management by Pierre Guillet de Monthoux (2004) for the artistic approach; and, for the aesthetic approach, by two of my books, the first on the aesthetic dimension of organizational life (Strati, 1999) and the second on organizational theory and aesthetic philosophies (Strati, 2019a). In these writings, organizational

406   Antonio Strati theory plays with philosophy—​as well as with sociology, semiotics, and various other social theories—​for the configuration of the theoretical framework of the approach to the study of organizational life. In this way, de Chirico’s metaphysical art plays with the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The artist himself gives an account of this in the article ‘Noi metafisici’ (‘We Metaphysicians’) written for the newspaper Cronache d’attualità on 15 February 1919: ‘Art was liberated by modern philosophers and poets. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the first to teach of the profound non-​sense of life and how such non-​ sense can be transmuted into art, in fact, how such non-​sense should form the intimate skeleton of an art that is truly new, free and profound’ (de Chirico, [1919] 2019: 207). Schopenhauer’s philosophy is intertwined with de Chirico’s search for ‘a painting motif ’ (Benzi, 2019: 446) of tradition to express the sense of temporal suspension that makes time immobile in the pictorial image. Thus de Chirico can be considered a Nietzschean artist capable of ‘interpreting and translating Nietzsche’s ideas onto canvas’, observes Victoria Noel-​Johnson (2019: 7), and of giving shape to the ‘triple alliance of surprise-​ discovery-​revelation’ in the philosophies of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Weininger who had studied ‘whilst living in Munich, Milan and Florence’ between 1908 and 1910. Nietzschean, then, is this very theme of the return to the study of the classics. Always deepening the philosophy of Nietzsche, de Chirico sets an interesting distinction between originarietà (origins) and originality that leads us to the following section, in which we will see more specifically some connections-​in-​action between one of the four approaches of organizational aesthetics research, the ‘aesthetic approach’, and phenomenological, post-​phenomenological, and neo-​phenomenological philosophies.

20.3.1 Aesthetic Approach and the Relevance of Phenomenological Aesthetics The distinction that de Chirico makes between originarietà and originality has the merit of giving a particular light to the themes that I will deal with in this section. In line ‘with Nietzsche’s definition of “original” (“Not that one is the first to see something new, but that one sees as new what is old, long familiar, seen and overlooked by everybody, is what distinguishes truly original minds”)’ (Noel-​Johnson, 2019: 24), this distinction is essential for de Chirico in his return to the study of the classics. Likewise, this distinction is essential for the aesthetic approach to go back to studying that ‘long familiar’ of originarietà—​consisting of philosophy, phenomenologies, and philosophical aesthetics—​as if it were, in fact, entirely new, and thus to do so with originality. It is indeed all the more new in making the aesthetic approach play with phenomenology and phenomenological aesthetics; in its consideration of the three philosophical sensibilities—​‘aesthetic’, ‘hermeneutic’, and ‘performative’—​which characterize it; and in the phenomenological and posthumanist awareness that qualifies it. The play, however, does not concern just phenomenology. Other aesthetic philosophies

Aesthetic of Phenomenologies    407 and other social theories on aesthetics are equally important, such as those of the founders of philosophical aesthetics, aesthetic hermeneutics and existentialist hermeneutics, semiotic aesthetics and post-​structuralist semiotics, the philosophy of post-​criticism. Still other philosophies are involved in the ‘philosophical playing’, such as those of the posthuman, of Italian Thought, of symbolist philosophy, of pragmatist philosophy, of the recent philosophical current of ‘everyday philosophical aesthetics’, without forgetting aesthetic sociology. The aesthetic approach hence ‘plays’ with a pastiche of philosophical details more than with the entire theoretical corpus of phenomenology and aesthetic philosophies. The main reason for this lies in the fact that the play with philosophy originates in empirical organizational research. From it arise the specific questions posed to the corpus of philosophical theories and debates in order to enrich and refine ‘aesthetically’ the understanding of social practice in organizational life. The play takes place, accordingly, between fragments of aesthetic understanding of the organizational experience and the ‘philosophical pastiche’ made up of details cut out from philosophy. As writes the Italian semiologist Omar Calabrese (1987: 75−6), the detail comes from the Renaissance French (and in turn obviously from the Latin) ‘de-​ tail’, that is ‘to cut from’. It therefore presupposes a subject who ‘cuts’ an object. The fact is further confirmed [ . . . ] by the term of the same lexical family ‘re-​cut’, which indicates the existence of a cut from a set previously done by someone. We can therefore say that [ . . . ] the relevance of the cutting action underlines the fact that the detail is made such by the subject: thus, its configuration depends on the point of view of the ‘retailer’.

The point of view of the retailer is that—​inevitably—​of the aesthetic approach, because it is from this that the playing with philosophy starts. If, then, we restrict the playing to phenomenological, post-​phenomenological, and neo-​phenomenological philosophies, we cannot fail to notice the importance of phenomenological aesthetics, first of all for • the fact that the aesthetic approach considers aesthetics in terms of sensible knowing, rather than the philosophy of art, and this finds resonance in the aesthetics and phenomenology of Edmund Husserl ([1907] 1968), which is rooted ‘in acts of experience of the subjects’ and in which ‘the theme of art is marginal and occasional’ (Franzini, 2019: 346−7); • the reflections on the chair (flesh) by Maurice Merleau-​Ponty which claim that the centrality and priority of the perceiving body have been fundamental both in terms of research methodology and in terms of theorization starting from the study of the practice in the quotidian life of work in organizations (Gherardi & Strati, 2012); • Alfred Schütz’s sociological and philosophical reflections on the theme of rationality (Staubmann & Lidz, 2018);

408   Antonio Strati • the attention to the ‘I don’t know what’ of the socio-​material phenomena that have always characterized phenomenological aesthetics, no matter which philosopher was called into play; • the enigma of the human in the posthuman—​de Chirico uses the term ‘enigma’ to entitle many of his works of art (Benzi, 2019: 257)—​which remains unsolved even for the ‘collective auteur’ in the aesthetic approach. I want to close this section by observing that if we return now to look at the photopoem Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace we can see how the philosophical pastiche of the aesthetic approach resonates with that of the photographic image. In the photopoem we see that the gesture of embracing takes place in the context of the arches—​a pictorial theme dear to de Chirico—​of the Venice Arsenal, between drawing tools and parts of easel positioned without logic. On the left side of the image, there are the Hector and Andromache mannequins reproduced photographically from a book. On the right, to add a touch of mysterious atmosphere, the shadow of a small girl running with a hoop can be seen, a detail from the famous 1914 painting by de Chirico Mystère et mélancolie d’une rue (Mystery and Melancholy of a Street) published in the catalogue of James Thrall Soby (1955) from which it has been reproduced photographically. At the centre of the photopoem, the statue and the mannequin—​the photograph of the 1922 painting at the museum in Milan—​standing upright and showing an aesthetic of corporeality seen in its entirety in the middle of a photographic pastiche made up of details of cut-​out photographs. Giorgio de Chirico, on the other hand, spent several years producing pastiches of ancient and Old Master works shortly after arriving in Rome in 1919 [ . . . ], after which he dedicated the last decade of his life (the Neometaphysical period of 1968−78) to the reworking of popular themes found in his work of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s [ . . . ]. He now chose to rework details or include particular motifs extracted from great master paintings reproduced in secondary sources (art books, prints, postcards, and newspaper and magazines cuttings) rather than work directly from the original; a copy of a copy of an original. (Noel-​Johnson, 2019: 21−2)

20.3.2 A Matter of Seduction Looking at the photopoem Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace the reader can grasp how with the shades of black and white I sought to emphasize the atmosphere of affection and suspension of time in the reclining faces of the statue and the mannequin, faces that almost touch each other with a gesture that is both tender and intense. The aesthetic beauty of the gesture underlines the beauty of the ethical dimension of the gesture they are making.

Aesthetic of Phenomenologies    409 The visual language of photography is accompanied by the verbal language of the title that completes it. We learn from the title that this photopoem is a tribute and that its subject is the metaphysical embrace. The adjective ‘metaphysical’ recalls metaphysical art and, moreover, the first part of the title—​Homage to Giorgio de Chirico—​further clarifies this reference by placing it specifically in that artistic movement. This is an important point since metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that has a long tradition dating back to Aristotle and which also includes Husserl’s phenomenology. Furthermore, the adjective ‘metaphysical’ evokes something unattainable in current language: ‘it is metaphysical’ is a phrase used to indicate something that remains impossible for human beings. There is indeed a serious irony in the title of the photograph in highlighting the dilemma expressed by the dynamics between, on the one hand, the theme of the embrace between philosophy and organizational aesthetics research; and, on the other, the theme of the return of organizational aesthetics research into the arms of philosophy. Looking at Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace we can see how this dilemma has been underlined, albeit with delicacy. On the small pedestal, at the bottom of the photograph, there are only three feet. The foot on the ground belongs to the mannequin: that is, to the organizational aesthetics research that returns to the classics of philosophy, phenomenological philosophies, and philosophical aesthetics. It is a mere detail in the whole of this photopoetic homage. But no ‘detail is insignificant’, observes the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-​Ponty (2004: 74), because meanings ‘arise out of all the “details” which embody its present mode of being’. The foot resting on the ground, instead of on the small pedestal, indicates an inequality whereby, while organizational aesthetics research may return to a study of the classics in philosophy, philosophy rarely studies organizational aesthetics research. There have been only sporadic philosophical studies relating to the aesthetic discourse on organization, although they have certainly not been lacking, and this raises the aesthetic question of seduction. Organizational aesthetics research has little capacity for seduction in regards to philosophy, phenomenology, and aesthetic philosophy, as I have argued elsewhere (Strati, 2019a, b, 2022). However, although scarce, the seductive capacity of organizational aesthetics research is found in some philosophical essays. While there isn’t the space to review them here, overall there are: articles that have examined the research area on the aesthetic dimension of organizational life as a whole (White, 1996; Chytry, 2008; Ratiu, 2017); edited books that have explored the aesthetics of ordinary beauty (Przychodzen, Boucher, & David 2010) and the relationship between philosophy and applied aesthetic philosophy (Palmer & Torevell, 2008); and a special issue of the philosophical journal Studi di Estetica (2019) aimed at reconceptualizing the relationship between aesthetics, economy, and organization. But the disparity—​ expressed by the detail of the foot resting on the ground—​remains overwhelming between the philosophical references in the literature on the aesthetic dimension of organization and the references to organizational aesthetics cited in philosophical and phenomenological writings. With this critical reflection on the metaphysical embrace between the research in the aesthetics of organizational experience with phenomenology and the aesthetic

410   Antonio Strati philosophies, we can move on to a general summary of the main arguments of this chapter.

20.4  Conclusions To conclude this chapter, I want to go back to its title, since it reveals the main topic treated. ‘How about a hug?’ This is a metaphorically addressed invitation to phenomenological, post-​phenomenological, and neo-​phenomenological philosophy on the part of the aesthetic study of organizational experience. This invitation resonates on multiple levels of understanding, and the notion of resonance keeps continuous conceptual references intertwined with each other throughout. Along with these two principal levels of understanding activated by this invitation are the visual language and the language of the written word, both from a semantic and from a poetic point of view. Visual language is explored in a photograph inspired by the resonance between metaphysical art, an aesthetic approach to the study of organizational experience, and phenomenological and aesthetic philosophy. At the core of this image are the themes of a liberation from anthropomorphism, the aesthetic quality of organizational materiality, and a return to the study of philosophical theories and their great masters. The continuous references between the visual language of art photography and that of the written word are grounded in the evocative process of organizational knowledge and underline the relevance of ‘playing with philosophy’ on the basis of the organizational knowledge acquired through study. The second part of the chapter deals with the ‘philosophical sensibilities’—​a soft concept used to understand the connections-​in-​action between organizational aesthetics research and philosophy—​which characterize the different approaches to the study of the aesthetic dimension of organizational life. In this context, the chapter highlights the relevance of phenomenologies with respect to the aesthetic approach. Some controversial nuances permeate the chapter. The first controversy is against ‘textolatry’—​to quote the Czech neo-​phenomenologist philosopher Vilém Flusser (2000: 18)—​which characterizes organizational literature, often also in the case of studies on the aesthetic of organizational experience. The use of the two languages, the visual and the written, implicitly highlights this criticism of the ritualistic faithfulness towards the ‘text’—​both oral and written—​made by organization scholars even when they illustrate and discuss organizational aesthetics. This polemic is further reinforced by the use, in the chapter, of the evocative—​rather than merely analytical—​process of knowing within organizational theory. The other controversy consists in a critical reflection on the recent growing interest of organizational scholars in philosophy and underlines two issues. The first issue is seduction. ‘How about a hug?’ in fact, it reveals the scarce capacity for philosophical appeal that the study of the aesthetics of organizational experience has for phenomenological

Aesthetic of Phenomenologies    411 and philosophical aesthetics. This critical consideration is even more bitter if one takes into account that the study of organizational aesthetics involves—​as emphasized by Jean-​François Chanlat (2004: xi)—​various social sciences ranging from sociology to phenomenology, history of art, symbolic anthropology, semiotics, and the other main theories of the social. The other equally important issue of critical reflection—​also in light of de Chirico’s distinction between originarietà (origins) and originality—​concerns instead playing with philosophy. That is to say that embracing phenomenology through organizational aesthetics research often comes down to mere philosophical quotation, instead of a playing with philosophy to better grasp the aesthetics of organizational experience that emerge in the course of empirical research conducted in organizational contexts.

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Pa rt I I I

EVENTS AND ORG A N I Z I N G Acceleration, Disruptions, and Decentring of Management

chapter 21

Is the Phen ome na l Difference of t h e Entreprene u ria l Event Openi ng on I ts Repetiti on? Xavier Deroy

21.1  Introduction 21.1.1 The Event as a Founding Phenomenon for Organization Studies Entrepreneurial events deserve to be treated to a phenomenological approach, as they are part of the temporal, spatial, and sensitive subjective experience that makes the history of organizing. Observed in retrospect through the lenses of historians and organization scholars they are often simplified, the resulting model failing to express how (inter)subjectivities composed their structuration. Complexity that emerges from interrelated events is conventionally, and perhaps compulsorily, synthetized in meaningful blocs of temporality. That conventional distant analysis of organized blocs of past times can erase the differentiating eventful moments that formed the perceived real present-​past experiences of socialized individuals (Koselleck, 2004). Even when the organization studies literature elaborates frameworks about the event, it empties its living substance to model its form, therefore ensuring its paradoxical ability to be replicated. Consequently, organizations can produce serialized events. Such a standardized production of events (annual congress, meetings of board members,

418   Xavier Deroy introduction of a new item of software) would also show their ability to master time and space encrypted in the phenomenon of what is yet allegedly called an ‘event’. Beyond organizational borders events are also institutionalizing when they celebrate themes that gather society under the banner of sport or causes involving moral responsibility. Organizations ordinarily depicted by scholars as organizing events would have thus forgotten the experience of differentiated unexpected events, those that made them emerge and still evolve. Repeating attempts for erasing events seen in conventional approaches could inaugurate a time qualified under the label ‘after History’, to the extent that History is characterized by unexpected conflicts and contingency rather than by a routinization devoted to suppressing the very perception of events (for the relation between History and events, see Koselleck, 1989). Events, indeed, display conflict. They represent conflict between repetition and difference, between norms and strangeness, routine and unexpectedness. Events put history at the forefront. Substantially conflictual they are not simple dualisms. Events are conflicts whose opposite sides are related by the flux of temporality, which alternatively unfolds one of them. Events display history. It is therefore not surprising that an event theory is fairly lacking in organization studies. There are of course important contributions defining events (Hoffman& Ocasio, 2001), stressing their sense-​making (Nigam & Ocasio, 2010; Deroy& Clegg, 2011; Lord et al., 2015) or attempting to model it (Christianson et al., 2009; Morgeson et al., 2015). Most of these attempts fail to build a complete paradigm for organizations-​relied-​on-​ the-​event as a founding phenomenon and founding paradigm. Entrepreneurial events are phenomena that contest more or less radically existing organized forms and strategies. Entrepreneurs have immanent perceptions that observers can only perceive retrospectively. Entrepreneurial events are phenomena where present and past are imbricated. As phenomena entrepreneurial events then participate in the making of organizational history. Entrepreneurial events are phenomena which cannot be reduced to their causes. Causes of events are found retrospectively but they fail to explain their occurrence at any given moment. How to explain the founding of the now worldwide famous firm Tesla? Is that entrepreneurial event which has brought about Tesla only related with the climate issue? These causal factors were present well before that and nothing seemingly occurred. An entrepreneurial event occurs at some precise historical momentum; however its roots are also connected with ‘previous’ occurred events that were including its possibility (results of researches, patents for battery cells, ) The unfolding of the entrepreneurial event intrinsically includes unexpected perceptions from those that make this phenomenon happen. In other words, entrepreneurial events are phenomena that give a different meaning for building an ‘unexpected future’ as suggested by Merleau-​Ponty (2003). Their very occurrence needs an ‘ontic assignation’ (Romano, 1998) for a subject (the entrepreneur and his team). Entrepreneurial events are phenomena that institutionalize a different meaning from within a historical context. They offer a matrix for subsequent organizational events and meaning-​drivers for the historiography of institutions. Through the lenses of phenomenology, they

Phenomenal Difference of Event Opening    419 appear to be a founding paradigm to understand organizations as phenomena of the social world. The contingency characterizing events cannot be easily accommodated with the quest of ensuring the success of entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial undertaking is unfolding an event whose complex facticity escapes any reductionist modelling, while being best suited for a hermeneutics inspired by phenomenology. This chapter advances the argument that entrepreneurial events are social episodes whose work is structuring organizational time and space while opening up possibilities for other events. The definition of the event used in what follows is first derived from Deleuze (1968, 1988) himself inspired by Whitehead (1978). The Deleuzian definition has proved to be useful in the study of organizations, as noted by Linstead & Thanem (2007). Phenomenologically oriented for constantly taking into account the singularity of perceptions, the Deleuzian approach considers that the construction of events is actualized by a relentless flux. However, is the event not circumscribed by a specific context whose features offer some kind of permanency (Badiou, 1988), which, again, reactivates, in Badiou’s specific theory, the tension between subjectivation and structuration when the event managers have to cope with history? Is the event not different from facts as suggested by Romano (1998)? Flux advocated by Deleuze suggests a pure openness of the event, an event-​processual approach deprived of any structuration. Its only frontier is the relentless flux where any form is absent. Besides, framing the event as a form of organized plan could wipe it out and reduces it to an operation of communication as alluded above. Nonetheless, that an organization could nonetheless emerge from within a purely opened flux of events deprived of any form of closure that make them distinguishable is hardly conceivable. Events need at least some loose structure, a necessary minimal form to construct the unfolding of their public meaning issued from their originally private constituency. An event is an institutionalizing phenomenon. It institutes from open possibilities in selecting a creative and structuring difference. It does so from the track left by existing institutions along a process of subjectivation that constructs history from its own perception of temporality (Merleau-​Ponty, 2003: 113). The event is that phenomenon that lies at the cornerstone between a process of subjectivation and structuration. The event is then that phenomenon deeply rooted into the temporality of the historical process (Merleau-​Ponty, 2003; Revel, 2015; Serban, 2017; Terzi, 2017; Alcalá, 2018; Panéro, 2018). In what follows, as suggested above, I will mainly refer to the works by Heidegger after the so-​called Kehre. I will also rely on the approaches of the event by Deleuze, Romano, Badiou, and Merleau-​Ponty. Hence the chapter adopts a non-​ orthodox approach to phenomenology fairly distinct from Husserl’s orthodox one founded on a transcendental logics. I contend that going beyond a derived Deleuzian approach is necessary to allow a phenomenological approach of the entrepreneurial event. Subjectivation, ontic assignation, and structuration of the process from which phenomenal events occur are required. Encrypted in a flux of time, events are recursively intertwined. How entrepreneurs can manage the events that they experience and organize their contingent flux into a shared

420   Xavier Deroy social structure (Deroy & Clegg, 2015; Luhmann, 2018a)? Entrepreneurs have necessarily to connect their private phenomenological approach of the event with its manageability, within a socially organized form (Sewell, 1992). The chapter is structured as follows. First, we study to what extent the phenomenological framework can be relevant to consider events in referring to Heidegger and his use of hermeneutics and also the approaches by, Romano, Badiou, and Merleau-​Ponty. Second, we show that the Deleuzian definition of the event includes a phenomenological dimension whose foundations have been largely inspired by Whitehead. For Deleuze, there is some permanence in the phenomenon of event and an intrinsic difference attached to its very peculiar experience. The influence of vitalism is very noticeable in the Deleuzian phenomenological approach. Individual experience remains at the very core of the event and located everywhere in daily life, as a pure openness belonging to flux deprived of any borders. Replacing this approach with the spectrum of other non-​orthodox philosophers about phenomenology is then needed in order to consider the collective phenomenon that entrepreneurship organizes. Third, we will focus on the phenomenon of the entrepreneurial event. I will argue that it gets its meaning thanks to a loose structuration that allows us to bridge the gap between the privacy of the phenomenal event and the public side of the entrepreneurial event in an organizing process. Finally, a non-​orthodox phenomenological approach can help us gain understanding of entrepreneurial events, going beyond the laws of repetition and taking into account the very differentiation that form the closure of events, thus their uniqueness.

21.2  Hermeneutics of a Phenomenological Approach of Event Enlightening the deepness of a phenomenon per se requires hermeneutics. Successive discursive depictions of a phenomenon underline a hermeneutical quest with its limit rooted in language. Hermeneutics, which is at the core of Heidegger’s framework, can be applied to better understand the phenomenon of Event (Serban, 2012; Steiner, 2021). A phenomenon is an event. The event can thus be considered as the very phenomenon; then to some extent the phenomenon par excellence. Indeed, a hermeneutics that questions the ontological occurrence of each phenomenon is necessarily related to the event that is making the phenomenon occur. In this intertwined relation, the concept of Event cannot therefore be dissociated from the concept of phenomenon. In other words a phenomenon has to be thought of with the event of that phenomenon, which necessarily includes a discourse about the experience of this phenomenon. Displaying what is a phenomenon is uttering the Event.

Phenomenal Difference of Event Opening    421 In his search for renewing the metaphysical foundations of philosophy, Heidegger posits that Sein is ontologically linked with Da-​Sein in a phenomenological relation whose interpretation relies on hermeneutics (Steiner, 2021). Every phenomenological expression of Sein is eventful. Romano (1998) notes that an outstanding specificity of Heidegger’s phenomenological approach is that ‘the source of any meaning (is) the pure displaying of the event’1 (p. 70). When Merleau-​Ponty (2003) stresses the link between the event and the institution, he also suggests that kind of universality attached to the event as an institutionalizing phenomenon during its unfolding. The event cannot be reduced to a simple fact. Its phenomenal occurrence leverages a rich potential of phenomena. ‘Beyond being the advent of a ‘new world’, the event is a universum of possibilities’ (Romano, 1998,p.54). For Romano the event is a phenomenon, which cannot be tracked by retrospectively examining the causes that would elucidate it. Badiou agrees when he mentions that the causes of French Revolution can surely be found but adds that an approach only relied on a causal analysis remains unable to explain why a revolution is not occurring during other periods when the same causes were met. However surrounding facts are necessary conditions for the event to occur. An entrepreneurial event like the founding of Tesla can be observed in a historical context where climate issues are overwhelming. However first reports on climate issued on the beginning of the 70’s were already very gloomy. Nothing happened. Events are self-​ sufficient phenomena, which, following Romano (1998) or Badiou (1988) own somehow a ‘independent way of occurring’. As a concept event exceeds its factual occurrences and meanings. Through their different successive actualizations and meanings events are constructing history. To this extent, there is no pure donation and hitherto no space for Husserl’s phenomenological reduction as far as the event is concerned. That transcendental dimension could mean the end of history. There is no room for that kind of logics that would negate the self-​sufficiency of the event asserted by Romano. Events are not phenomena occurring because of necessary transcendental causes. Events happen for the world and are received by those who are making them within a context described by facts (Romano1998; Badiou 2007). Events are institutionalizing and instituted phenomena that participate to a metaphysics of history (Merleau-​Ponty, 2003). Reductionism of Cartesian and dualistic approaches of the event prevails in Organizations Studies. They set typologies and causes of rare, unique, critical, small events (Donahue & O’Keefe, 2007; Farkas et al., 2009; Runde& de Rond, 2010; Morgeson et al., 2015; Francisconi Chaerki & Souza Matitz, 2018). Defining a typology indeed involves the rationality of an external observer whose outside position means they fail to know the specific experience that is being had in a separated context. Only considering this approach of the event leads to its annihilation or at best its reduction in neglecting the experienced phenomenon in the past when it occurred (for an extensive discussion on this point, see Garfinkel, 1967). More sensitive approaches oriented towards the multifaceted meanings of events should be privileged as a reference for a 1 

Our italics.

422   Xavier Deroy phenomenological present-​past-​based view of the event (Hoffman & Ocasio, 2001; Munir, 2005; Sewell, 2009; Nigam & Ocasio, 2010). The event is at the very start of experience and cannot be untied from perceptions experienced during its occurrence. The relation between the event and its unfolding requires hermeneutics as a methodology, as shown by Heidegger. Hermeneutics allows for a discussion of the meanings of this multifaceted phenomenon. Moreover, while at the beginning of any phenomenon, the event overlaps in its present depiction since it opens on events to come. As a phenomenon, the event is always to be discovered in its contingency. The concept of a phenomenal event is experienced in its successive and different actualizations whose unfolding constructs the history of organizations. Hermeneutics discusses the phenomenon of the event in its singleness and also as imbricated in an intertwined chain of occurring events. Experiencing event is more than simply designing an event with a given label. In the experience of its facticity it is more than that event which is displayed. Related perceptions of events, other associations of events are also recursively meant simultaneously, with references to past events and expectations of future events. In fact, that is the ‘present’ perception of that timeline expressing the chain of the events, which achieves the actualization of the ‘present’ event. The phenomenon of an event, in its occurrence, echoes beyond the actualization of that event per se to be subsumed in the Event as a concept. The Event as a concept is projected into phenomenological actualizations of (experienced) events. Every actualization of an event is singular in the perceptions of its meanings. Considering event as the very phenomenon that Heidegger defines involves its overarching presence as a concept and its peculiarity as a specific advent whose plurality of meanings is given by participants and observers or philosophers considering it as a concept. At this point it is important to note again the imbrication between the event as a concept and its institutionalizing dimension. It is also worth noticing that the event carries a heritage because events are themselves related in the recursive network of past events. In the following section we will see to what extent the Deleuzian definition of the event echoes such a phenomenological approach and if it could be a potential frame for a definition of the entrepreneurial event.

21.3  The Deleuzian Definition of the Phenomenal Event 21.3.1 The Meanings of the Event In this section, we explain the concept of the event according to Deleuze (1968, 1969, 1988, 2003, 2005) as inspired by phenomenology. We will underline that Deleuze has borrowed from phenomenology but yet more obviously from vitalism in a reaction

Hermeneutics

His system is an original synthesis of phenomenological orientations by Saussure, Heidegger, Bergson, and Whitehead. Event is a core concept in his Metaphysics of history.

Vitalism

Logics

Starting from Heidegger to elaborate his own system relying on the ontic depository of the event.

Heiddeger

Merleau-​Ponty

Deleuze

Badiou

Romano

The universum of events makes possible the advent of events when they are ontologically deposited onto subjects. Distinction between facts (instituted and past events) and events. Subjectivation of the event which needs an ontic self to be expressed. Structuration between events and mundane facts.

The event is rare. Its site can be defined by its structure. Structuration is dominant in the process of making events.

The event as an immanent actualization from within a flux of virtualities. Flux and process are put at the forefront, as well as movement and chaos. Low degree of subjectivation and structuration.

The event is institutionalizing and instituted. The process of actualization is both a subjectivation and an objectification. Events express temporality connected to being alive.

The event* (as an Ereignis) is the phenomenon itself.

Concept of the Event

Note: * Heidegger uses the word Ereignis to mean the event. In his work, ‘advent’ is preferred to ‘event’.

Major Orientations

Authors

Table 21.1 Non-​orthodox phenomenological approaches of the event

Entrepreneurs are the ontic depository of the events. Their specific perceptions participate to the experience of the event. Events must be distinguished from facts. This distinction is mainly about temporality (present progressive /​past) and their recognition (private and subjective perceptions /​shared knowledge of mundane common dimensions).

History matters. Structure matters Entrepreneurial events can have political consequences.

Orients us towards an extended approach of the entrepreneurial event. Sets the issue of organizational coordination. Considers that chaotic move issued from undertaking events is the rule. Entrepreneurial events are materializations of temporality.

The entrepreneurial event introduces new paradigms issued from existing ones that they recompose. Underscores the proactive difference of the event. Some events are a matrix that open the possibility for future events to occur. Sets history as a necessary condition for the occurrence of entrepreneurial event.

Orients us towards an extended approach of the event (entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial event)

Application to the Phenomenon of the Entrepreneurial Event

424   Xavier Deroy against orthodox phenomenology. We will then examine to what extent it needs some revisions to be applied to organizations. In his work, Deleuze considers in depth the event, refining his conception about it in several major books and also during interwie many developments to the event (Deleuze, 1968, 1969, 1983, 1985, 1988; Deleuze & Parnet, 2003). He stresses much more on the difference that the event represents than on the more common view in which its unexpectedness is its major feature. He underlines the virtualities of its diverse potential meanings, and its successively differentiated actualizations according to each self-​perception, a feature that obviously echoes with phenomenology. The ontological dimension of the event also turns out to be key in terms of the attention that Deleuze gives to the concept. The concept of event is dominated by a processual flux of differences and repetitions. Along the successive actualizations of that process individuals are empirically organizing their selves throughout their perception. This heuristics presents some similarities with Heidegger’s phenomenological approach, even though Deleuze’s thought is definitely much more anchored in a strong vitalism derived from Bergson. The actualizations of the event as a flux depend on people’ perceptions. According to Deleuze, an actualization is a realization of latent virtualities; actualizations are not repetitions; they represent something new (Deleuze, 1968; Noel, 2007). The diversity of the experiences that they have on these occasions is owed to an ontological dimension. Indeed, every experience logically involves the becoming of the self (Deleuze, 1969). Deleuze refined his definition of the event many times. He underlines that this concept is inscribed in a philosophical tradition inherited at least from Leibniz. More recently, in the 20th century, Whitehead wholly reappraised the concept of the event. He brought a more comprehensive view where time and the self-​experience of agents were central. As Deleuze recognizes it, his approach to the event is then largely derived from Whitehead (Deroy, 2010; Deroy & Clegg, 2011). Whitehead, distinguishes between objects and events: The essence of an object does not depend on its relations, which are external to its being [ . . . ] but it might (being the same object) have had either relations. In other words, its self-​identity is not wholly dependent on its relations. But an event is just what it is, and is just how it is related; and it is nothing else. (Whitehead, 2007; see also Mesle, 2008)

Whitehead adds that the term ‘event’ is used sometimes in the sense of a nexus of actual entities, and sometimes in the sense of a nexus as objectified by universals (see Whitehead, 1985: 230). Since Deleuze’s conception of event is strongly derived from Whitehead’s, it is interesting to note that the mathematician and philosopher clearly suggests a bridge between a theological phenomenology and his definition of event: ‘Nature remains veiled’, for Whitehead (1998: 33) in a transcendental conception of Nature noticed by Merleau-​Ponty (1995). Indeed Whitehead2 considers that the event 2 

Heidegger shares a similar approach with his notion of Ereignis.

Phenomenal Difference of Event Opening    425 should be related with Nature, which remains hidden even after events whose successive occurrences always leave something yet to be unveiled. Events are an unceasing attempt to unveil nature. Whitehead paves the way for Deleuze’s view as he argues that events are located at the interface between a structure made of potentialities (what Whitehead labels universals) and agentic actualizations giving events their facticity and agents their experiences. It is still from Whitehead’s perspective of the event that the Deleuzian’s development starts in the chapter entitled ‘What Is Event?’ (Deleuze, 1988: 103). Using ellipses and analogies that ubiquitously characterize his style, Deleuze shows that events are singular and, yet, always occurring as part of a series. Referring to Whitehead’s terminology, he stresses that event gets its meanings from individuals when they select one eventful expression the many potentially available ones, among the virtualities. At this stage, on this occasion, he distinguishes public and private events. The former constitute an objectified basis from which the latter are extracted and individually meant (Deleuze, 1988: 109). The event is at the heart of what is often considered his most important book: Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1968). The event is also key in Logics of Sense (Deleuze, 1969), and again in the Fold (Deleuze, 1988), a work in which his heritage from Leibniz and Whitehead is underlined. While in these three books Deleuze considers the concept of the event explicitly, in his following books or interventions he uses it more implicitly and in a less structured way. For instance, his depictions of the sequences of images in movies as so many intertwined events strongly suggest a very impressionistic conception of the event, as a phenomenon floating in the gaze of vanished collective references and triumphing isolated impressions (Deleuze, 1983, 1985). His Bergsonian vitalism could explain this accentuated trend towards a nearly complete destructuration, the progressive salience of which can be observed in his writings about cinema, alluded to above. On the contrary in the first of his major books, a (slight) loosely structured conception of the event seems to have still been prevailing.

21.3.2 The Event as a Pure Openness on to the Flux of Virtualities In his book entitled the Fold, Deleuze (1988) shows the differences in the representation of event between Leibniz and Whitehead, which, unsurprisingly, result from the major differences between their philosophical systems. Relying alternatively on the structure of their frameworks, Deleuze was able to advance his phenomenological representation of the fold. The fold offers an image the representation of which allows the polysemy of meanings characterizing the form of the event. It is noticeable that the ideas of fold and unfold will be later used by Romano (1998) in his own conception of the event to underline that as a fold it can be known only retrospectively by those who had been inserted in that

426   Xavier Deroy occurrence of the fold (they only perceive that something is happening without being able to name it precisely, in most of the cases), which underlines the intrinsic difficulty to recognize and label an event as an event at the very moment where it occurs. Events are expressed in the repeated differences linked with the experiences of the events. The diversity of these experiences is referred to in a framework figuring the Event. Ontologically the event is repeating its form, but each repetition is also necessarily to structure a difference in order to produce the event. Therefore, repetition and difference are inextricably linked in the private phenomenon of the event and supposedly related in its public discursive representation. Deleuze firmly rejects a unique definition for a given event. Since the event is an actualization of multiple virtualities, a plurality of different meanings can unveil it. Events are individual, then private, experiences whose repeated intensive presence bridges the past and future of a given person. Each event expresses intensive and different phenomena according to the self who is concerned. They gather dispersed parts of the self to give the person some intensive and extensive sense. Like Whitehead, Deleuze contends that for the same public representation of an event, there are different private perceptions coupled with their distinct durations. Then for Deleuze, inspired by Leibniz and mainly Whitehead, the three attributes of the event are extension, intensity, and self. Extension means that events are encrypted in a series that is relentlessly achieving the junction between past and future. Intensity designs the degree to which an individual experiences phenomenologically the series of events. For individuals, events intensify bodies and construct their selves over time, as Badiou observes in his critical comment about the Deleuzian conception of the event (Badiou, 2007). In any case, whatever the attribute of the event considered, the singularity of its appearance predominates in its experience. In his famous book entitled Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze has adopted what could be considered a (slightly) loosely structured conception of event. As mentioned above this loose conception of the event is progressively replaced by a much more immanent and destructured version of the event, an event as pure openness, so repeated that it is hardly distinct from the movement of the flux from which it is supposed to emerge. In Difference and Repetition his approach anchors the event in some flexible, since recursively changing, structuring frame of repeated differences that is also a narrative of History. He stresses that events are differences between two repetitions and that repetition lies also in the relentless process of differentiations (Deleuze, 1968; 104). Nevertheless the organization of the structure remains extremely loose. There is no opposition between structure and event since he argues that ‘structure’ is formally made of repeated virtualities of events that determine the real experiences of differentiated events (Deleuze, 1968: 247−8). In the flux of events, circularity has replaced dualistic oppositions. The circularity between structure constructed from events and events emerging from some structure eventually cancels differences in the repetition and requires the repetition of differences.

Phenomenal Difference of Event Opening    427 Limits of a Deleuzian epistemological stance regarding the event need therefore to be considered, especially when applied to an organizational phenomenon. The reductionism of his approach on the singularity and the serialization of the event paradoxically excludes any shared discourse and collective debate about the concept of the event, which Deleuze is precisely elaborating. The attributes of the event logically need a referential (Deleuze, 1988: 105), whose structural form is at least linguistically their opposite, which makes the events composing the public discussion of the concept possible. The concept of the event, as only opened on its repeated experience and closed on selves it could, even needs, to be opened on public discourse to be closed by its different definitions. The definition of the concept of the event itself needs some closure to be meaningful and to make its distinction. Furthermore, such a closure is required to identify events belonging to history, an aspect strongly underlined by the approaches of Badiou (1988, 2007) and Merleau-​Ponty (2003). How this loose structure of the event, whose openness and closure are necessary components for its phenomenal experience, can be considered from an organizational and entrepreneurial point of view will be examined below.

21.3.3 The Agency of Phenomenal Events against Social Institutions A phenomenological approach derived from Deleuze considering organizations as composed of a flux of events has to cope with the issues involved by its loosely structured framework. Beyond the mere abstraction of the term ‘structure’, a first issue lies in the possibility for a shared collectivity in a world dominated by an apparent exclusive focus on individuals, a result from a phenomenological approach inspired by Deleuze in our case. If individuals recurrently develop only a peculiar perception of events, rooted in an exclusively phenomenal one, then the organization, as a collective social entity is threatened and can become an archipelago of phenomenal events, whose intensive actualizations of virtualities would be supposed to be surreptitiously endowed with organizing properties. Using exclusively a phenomenologist stance for studying organizations also entails recognizing that (the flux of) phenomenal events have constructed the facticity of their social structures (for instance, the location of their offices or the address of their website, their collective symbolic representations and brand names) and can continue to do so. Organizations could then be abstracted, as an analytic form, as an event owning a collective meaning issued from different singular phenomenal events. When considered with an entrepreneurship outlook, organizations must then be abstracted as some founding entrepreneurial event, itself issued from intertwined phenomenal entrepreneurial events that are generating social institutions. Mechanisms leading from a phenomenal view of the event to the facticity of social institutions relies on some shared

428   Xavier Deroy public structures remaining, however, unexplained, especially in the vitalist version of phenomenology described by Deleuze. As issuing and constituted from events, organizations are historical socially constructed objects over time and space. Consequently, organizations as events can design their collective representation, be it material, architectural, legal, social, or political. Organizations as events are relevant from a phenomenological approach based on a plurality of meanings carried by individually constructed events. However individual phenomenal events need a collectively shared structure. Foucault underlined the need for a structure as a compulsory dimension of the event. In his definition the representation of an existing organized structure is postulated for the utterance of an event: ‘Event: it means a relation of power which is set upside down, a confiscated power, a vocabulary reconsidered and used against his users, a domination that weakens’ (1994: Vol. 2, p. 148). In short, for a phenomenological approach of the event founded on its pure openness towards the move, such as that suggested by a Deleuzian conception, to be applied to organizations, it needs to be in reference to a definition where structure is easier to share collectively. Beyond the mere necessity for a referential, logically needed for semantic reasons, organization as an enterprise substantively organized by events is the needed collective referential for phenomenal individual event to unfold. Conversely, organization is made of unexpected entrepreneurial events, whose phenomenal landmarks construct the contingent history of its organizational becoming. That necessary distinction can be found in the etymology of the event. Eventum is the other side of eventus. Eventus designates events when they are considered retrospectively and included into the narrative of organizational history. Eventus is a factually achieved event represented as an abstract. In that case, eventus is similar to a datum. It is endowed with some unity. Eventus are collected and organized by a causal rationality that legitimates a discourse legitimating that order rather than this one. Eventum stresses the intrinsic contingency of the event as it is occurring. Eventum suggests the unexpected unfolding of a process, while eventus distinguishes the decisive historical momentum to record it. These two sides of the event are in a relationship of mutual necessity. The public narrative about the collectively designed events that constitute the inherited institutionalized social time and space is necessarily related to the contingency of phenomenal individual experiences of events that can contest it. When creation is at stake, the definition of the event by Deleuze seems insufficient. Indeed it neglects the insertion of the event within the mundanity of the daily life. Furthermore, creative achievements that define entrepreneurship rely on some accumulated knowledge that structures them. Such an actualization needs collectively shared abstractions to unveil (some shared social structure) or reconfigure for individuals to give events a specific and creative meaning, through which they can participate in the becoming and the history of organizations. On the contrary, an exclusively immanent and individually centred topology of society would create an astructured conception of event, in contradiction with the socially recognized facticity of the event needed to connect a discourse, albeit vitalist.

Phenomenal Difference of Event Opening    429 Only, reduced to its individual immanence and its liquidity the phenomenon of the event cannot be communicated and this leads to the deconstruction of the very notions of history and socially organized institutions. Social institutions suppose at least a (not slightly) loosely coupled structuration of events to allow for the expression of a phenomenology of events, excluding the only individual impressionist perception of events and the exclusivity of self-​perceived images increasingly advanced by Deleuze in his work (1983, 1985). Entrepreneurs, like stage directors make events in creating the images that constitute their movies. To refer again to Romano, events are autonomous phenomena structurally contrasting with mundane facts, which need to be ontologically assigned to people (the stage directors in that case) who can only know them in retrospective depictions, as underlined above in discussing the Fold (1988) by Deleuze. Following a Deleuzian approach, their events are actualizations among multiple virtualities of a process. However it is obvious that virtualities are made possible by already instituted events (Merleau-​Ponty, 1955, 2003), designed as facts by Romano (1998), that structure and circumscribe their surrounding world, as argued by Badiou (1988, 2007). The actualization of events does need the history of previous events whose tracks surround their occurrence. The entrepreneurial event gets its phenomenal dimension in its peculiarity of grasping the ‘facts’ to actualize them in a different way. Issued from a historical context made of instituted events, movies are then institutionalizing events at the very moment of their creation by their stage directors (and also possibly for spectators when they are watching them). Following this interpretation entrepreneurship is an event allowed by a certain context, but the context by itself can be reproduced without the event appears. That a movies contains world famous actors does not guarantee that its directors will make an outstanding creation retrospectively depicted as an event. A phenomenal approach of the entrepreneurial event is not compatible with its causally oriented modelling. A purely immanent3 conception, often observed in the work of Deleuze, is also not convincing as it could suggest that history does not matter while orienting us towards a heroic conception of the entrepreneur. Directors necessarily refer to a shared history and are participating in the making of a (collective) history, what an only immanent and subject-​centred conception of the event would neglect. Though the phenomenal dimension of an entrepreneurial event requires that the instituted context of facts not be transformed in a causal explanation that would erase the contingency linked with the unfolding of the event. A phenomenal approach of entrepreneurship needs a social structure of knowledge and materiality to rely on. Structure allows change founded on a historically shared heritage. An inherited basis is necessary for that creative event to occur and be institutionally meaningful. 3  The

notion of immanence that was much used by Deleuze was very much inspired by Spinoza. However, Spinoza developed his arguments within the permanence of a natural world created by God. In his work immanence remains firmly anchored within a historical context as his Ethics demonstrates.

430   Xavier Deroy A second issue lies consequently in the absence of a structural closure between difference and repetition. No closure can be considered between difference and repetition according Deleuze, since they are subsumed by the flux. Deleuze argues exhaustively about the absence of a closure between repetition and difference in his book entitled Difference and Repetition. The presence of a flux of events defined as a variation of degrees is conditioned by the absence of a closure that otherwise would prevent it. However it falls short of denying the linguistic opposition between these two terms. Even a deconstructing of that opposition would need to oppose it, as previously alluded. For instance the emergence of differences needs some closures within and between organizations, a requirement that is strongly underlined, though in a different theoretical context, by Luhmann’s theory of events of communication applied to organizations (Luhmann, 2018b). The Deleuzian distinction between some ‘structure’ and differences, between something and something different from something, is prevented by a flux deprived of meaningful oppositions. Such a statement recalls the words of Hegel about the paintings of Dutch masters representing the allure of a peaceful world after the war from which the opposition of violence has been falsely wiped out: ‘It is the Sunday of life which evens everything and lets far away any idea of evil’ (for more developments, see also Muray, 2000). The absence of closure conditions the phenomenology of a (circular) time and relied on a fluidity between events, uninterrupted by any lagging intra-​ or interorganizational decision-​making. By abolishing closure linked with any kind of structure replaced by the continuity of degrees, the Deleuzian theory of the event has to cope with language, which is utterly framed by the distinction between contraries. Even labelled as a ‘variation’, a difference between degrees involves a distinction, which itself relies on an opposition. From at least this point of view, the Deleuzian approach of events is obviously at odds with the Hegelian conception of the event advocated by Badiou who stresses the singularity of events circumscribed by a precise context that he labels a ‘site’ (Badiou, 2007) or with the history attached to events argued by Merleau-​ Ponty (2003) or Romano (1998). Despite his overall argument, Deleuze desperately needs somehow to maintain at least a loosely structured organizing system. A loosely structured organizing system includes the referential semantics that allows the meaning of differentiated events to be expressed and organized into a flux to be thought. A third issue concerns the ability of management to decide from within the flux of events. The notion of a flux the unfolding of which remains far out of reach of any manageable grasp is at odds with the unfolding of a strategic agenda that relies on a rationalized planning to decide events. Moreover the phenomenal feature of events understood as the ability for individuals to give events their meanings undermines the potential achievement of a strategic agenda since its implementation relies on a collective shared meaning and hierarchy. The event of a strategic decision founded on a legitimate power recognized by an organization’s ‘members’ is abolished. The flat unfolding network of phenomenal events, which are as many singular manifestoes of the exclusivity of individual power would have replaced it. An organization dominated by the recursivity of networks of

Phenomenal Difference of Event Opening    431 events deeply questions the ideology of managerialism that stresses the soft power that imposes its perception on the collectivity (Clegg, 2014). In other words, a phenomenal approach combined with a processual view of the organization made of a flux of events, such as the one inspired by Deleuze, contests the idea of an overarching power. Organizations, and also entrepreneurs, lose the power to influence in any way the recursive contingency of events. They can only expect to communicate ex-​post marketed narratives about the unfolding of events that they have attended. According to his most radical version, a phenomenological approach to events combined with a processual view of the organization hinders entrepreneurship since those events appear to be only ludicrous moves in a Deleuzian philosophy (Lapoujade, 2014). Deleuze’s definition of the event as a phenomenon then clearly shows important limits when it is used as a basis for a theoretical framework applied to organizations and entrepreneurship. His phenomenological conception of the event focused on individual experiences remains underdeveloped to explain how events are collectively brought about. He also remains silent about how the history of collectively constructed networks of events stimulated the immanent occurrence of phenomenal ‘individual’ events. A theory of the event, which achieves the concatenation of individual experiences of events to enlighten our understanding of the making of a collective history, is still missing. In what follows we go further regarding non-​orthodox views of phenomenology of the event and theories of the event in organization studies and study how their combination could contribute to a better understanding of the entrepreneurial event.

21.4  Phenomenology of the Event and Entrepreneurship Inspired by non-​orthodox phenomenological approaches we now consider the concept of a phenomenological event intertwined with entrepreneurial organizing, which could turn out to question in depth not only dominant organizational theories of the event but also management practices ordering its repetition.

21.4.1 Dominant Theories of the Event and Entrepreneurship in Organization Studies The definition of events remains a matter of controversy. For a stream of researchers, events occur outside the organization, in its environment. Here events occurring in the environment are separated from the organizations themselves, as many researchers observe (Hoffman & Ocasio, 2001; Christianson et al., 2009a). However, there are noticeable exceptions to this view, as seen for example in the seminal work by Allport (1940; see also, Navak & Chia, 2011; Morgeson et al., 2015). Here the approach orients towards

432   Xavier Deroy viewing an organization without events and characterized by internal stability (see Hussenot & Missonier, 2015). Obviously, this approach considering the event as an external phenomenon for the organization does not explain the event of entrepreneurship. It is especially not compatible with a phenomenological orientation which considers the entrepreneurial event as stemming from within an organization, be it an enterprise or society as a whole. The hermetic closure set by organizational structure leaves unexplained how entrepreneurs create events occurring in the social environment. With the notion of enactment, Weick’s (1988; Weick et al., 2005) seminal work establishes a link between organizations and the external world opening the possibility for individuals, as organization members, and entrepreneurs to participate in the enacting of events from within organizations. Psycho-​social elements are present in Weick’s notion of enactment of events. These include individual approaches in space and time. Weick’s work could then be related to a framework setting a phenomenological approach of the event at the heart of organizing. The processual approach (Tsoukas & Hatch, 2001; Cooper, 2005; Bakken & Hernes, 2006; Blaschke et al., 2012; Chia, 2013) requires organizational stability to be recursively reasserted because of the potential occurrence of events. Uncertainty and internal shocks threaten routinized order and can occur unexpectedly. Successive institutionalizing events to be instituted in the modification of routines (Aroles & McLean, 2016) could open up the possibility of an unexpected amplification of the contestation of established institutions, or not (Deroy & Clegg, 2015). Taking into account history and institutions, a non-​orthodox phenomenal approach contributes to a better understanding of the event in stressing the importance of perceptions in actualizing the virtuality of the event. Applied to entrepreneurial events such an approach focuses on a dimension neglected by the vast majority in event research.

21.4.2 The Phenomenon of the Entrepreneurial Event Methodologically, a flux of phenomenal events remains problematic to observe. As mentioned above, actors in an event can only describe it afterwards. This retrospective view from participants, unable to exactly understand the phenomenon at the exact moment of its occurrence is a very important feature of the event. It is especially decisive for entrepreneurial events. It could explain some of the answers given regarding the reasons for the success of an enterprise when the entrepreneurs involved are regularly quoting ‘chance’. Moreover the phenomenal observation by researchers of an entrepreneurial event is obviously different from the perceptions experienced by organizational members as they actualize the events in which they participate. This super-​position of folds makes the capture of events defined in retrospect unsuccessful. At best it is possible for researchers to understand the context of the events and some remembered perceptions of their actors through their discourses.

Phenomenal Difference of Event Opening    433 While recognizing the facticity of the phenomenal experiences that compose organizational life and justify considering organizations as basically made up of a flux of events, there is still a lot to do for researchers to find a methodology capable of seizing the distinct phenomenological perceptions involved. Such a methodology could even be considered as definitely out of reach for the epistemological reasons mentioned previously. Theoretically an organization composed of a flux of events where entrepreneurial events are figuring is conceivable. One needs nevertheless to define how some structuration is operated to give events an organized form and organization a substantial meaning. Distinct phenomenal perceptions experienced by the different members could indeed jeopardize the possibility of a shared collective representation. Thus, the work of considering time and space from the individual and collective standpoint is neglected even though it constitutes the very basis for a socio-​phenomenological approach (Schaefer, 2019). It makes the event of a deliberate enterprise structure difficult to think. Then, applying a phenomenological frame to the entrepreneurial event requires us to cope with the issue of aggregating differentiating individual perceptions within an organizing collectivity (for more developments, see Chapter 29 by Wendelin Küpers in this book). The notion of a flux of events involving the complete deconstruction of any structure has to be given up. Entrepreneurial events are deeply inserted into history. The storytelling about Elon Musk that includes PayPal, Tesla, and Space X implicitly recognizes that the successive institutionalization of these entrepreneurial events has been made possible by institutions and innovations within a given historical context. Entrepreneurs are the ontic depository of the events. Their self-​perceptions support the subjective and structuring process, which gives the event its creative meaning and its necessary insertion into history. Entrepreneurial events are emerging and imposing their perceived experience onto other’s perceptions allowing a nascent organizing move. Entrepreneurs who founded the start-​up Phenix in the recycling industry or the Fintech Company Lydia have swiftly structured the collectivity issued from ‘the’ founding institutionalizing event to allow the flux of events to occur into a (provisory) instituted form. Phenomenal entrepreneurial events, as they unfold, go on structuring the organization which recursively entails successive events connected to entrepreneurship such as financing or recruitment of new talents. Entrepreneurial events impose their originally private perceptions. They make these public and in so doing transform the events into something on a collective shared basis for private perceptions. If we admit that difference characterizes events, then we should recognize that some events can equally be different in their ability to impose their perception and regulation. The phenomenon of the entrepreneurial event is characterized by the communication of a perception, the institutionalization of which generates perceptions. These perceptions have to be positioned with regards to the entrepreneurial event previously communicated to generate private and public events. That aggregation of different events ‘around’ the phenomenal entrepreneurial event displays a

434   Xavier Deroy loose structuration at work, one that can support the evolution of an organizing process made up of phenomenal events. Having considered the interest in a phenomenal approach to the entrepreneurial event, I briefly discuss in what follows to what extent this could turn out to be a sharp criticism of dominant organizational theories of the event and to what extent phenomenal entrepreneurial events, largely open to society thanks to a global communication, could politically influence the governability of society.

21.4.2 The Entrepreneurial Event and Politics 21.4.2.1 Event Management: An Anti-​Event Politics Research into the event in organization studies quite paradoxically strives to offer a representation of events. Such a modelling can relate to the occurrence itself or to its development and effects. Intrinsically considered as a risk for the organization, the conditions of the occurrence of an event are especially scrutinized and explicitly related to the greatness of the consequences that ensue (Morgeson et al., 2015). Even though these descriptions can remain cautious, such attempts to serialize events clearly contradict the initial assumptions supporting the concept of the event and its core features, especially the unexpectedness of its occurrence. Explanations of past events and their consequences are as much understandable as necessary. However, they still rely on some phenomenologically selective perception of time and space. Events analysed in retrospect construct and communicate history without being able to tape accurately the whole network of past phenomenal perceptions of events that made them. Contingency attached to events also clearly limits any modelling of future events, which remains largely unknown, precisely because of the unexpectedness intrinsically attached to events. Moreover, the abstract generalization involved in a modelling of events does not take into account the phenomenology of the events, the differentiated perceptions that construct empirical contexts. As noted above, there is no recipe for the repetition of Elon’s Musk phenomenal success by somebody else or even for its continuation. Firms specializing in the organization of events also illustrate a kind of a modelling of the event. Event managers organize events without contingency. Far from remaining singular distinct phenomenon, events gets industrialized and replicated: the event of the launch of a product, the event organized for commercial staff at the end of the year to celebrate their fulfilling of annual objectives, the event to celebrate an organization’s new headquarters, all are opportunities to commoditize events in planning and controlling their unfolding carefully. Everything is foreseen. Nothing is unexpected. Instituting the management of an event is supposed to suppress its institutionalizing dimension. Contingency is denied. When the firm management is organizing a special event to communicate about their institution, they transform the unexpected into the expected and routinized. Even though it is designed as an event, the essence of an event has vanished. In those occasions, as a matter of course, event managers will organize and then celebrate the end of entrepreneurial events.

Phenomenal Difference of Event Opening    435

21.4.2.2 The Intrinsic Closure of a Phenomenological Approach of the Event and Organizational Politics The disruption involved by a phenomenological approach applied to events results from its intrinsic features. It also stresses its political dimension as underlined by Foucault and Merleau-​Ponty and neglected by Deleuze. Repeated differences in the perception of time or space are decisive components of phenomenology because they condition meaning. Events are concerned with phenomenology, in their construction and in the perception that they powerfully communicate thereafter. In organization studies, Luhmann’s theoretical contribution offers an interesting illustration (Luhmann, 2018; Deroy, 2019). In referring to Husserl to explain the differences in perception between distinct social groups, Luhmann considers events of communication as the foundation of the complexity of modern societies and organizations. Therefore, distinct, empowered social institutions and observers can attribute different meanings to the same event. Therefore, events could institute dominant logics encoding different social groups inserted within a (loosely) organizing structure. Differences in meaning given to events also reflect, on the other hand, the paradoxical repeated closedness of a communication society where distinct perceptions of events cannot be communicated. When combined with the absence of a centre of command, as in complex modern societies, an inability to coordinate the organization of the whole society is seen. Entrepreneurial events hopefully could help us to federate a more open basis for events to come. They could fulfil a political role in reducing social fragmentation, as in the case of recycling postulated by Phenix, which allows nearly out-​of-​date products to be sold at low prizes. That political dimension of reducing social fragmentation could be suggested by the works by Romano and Merleau-​Ponty, as they connect the occurrence of events, as change-​drivers, to the history of mundane institutions. An opposite version would consider that phenomenal entrepreneurial events are unable to change anything. Indeed, a phenomenological view could lead us to decide that private differences in perception prevail, and consequently structure the closure magnified by social fragmentation; a view suggested by the phenomenal vitalism of Deleuze. Here lies the politics of phenomenal entrepreneurial events, of what they are instituting and communicating when they unfold. Politics of the event play a decisive role in orienting us towards a specific meaning for its institutionalization. That is not the least role for the entrepreneurial event.

21.5  Conclusion and Future Researches An event is singular. Perceptions of the event are phenomenologically differentiated. They make up a plurality of narratives that give accounts of organizational history. Since events involve distinct perceptions and personal experiences, a phenomenological approach is suited to offering us a better understanding of their unfolding in space and time. The entrepreneurial event, which remains a singular experience, is obviously

436   Xavier Deroy concerned. It is instituting and instituted in the flux of historical events. Perceived as socially instituted it can influence the organization of society beyond the specific organization that gathers together the entrepreneurs who have made it emerge. We have explained why a non-​orthodox phenomenological approach would be especially suited to the purpose of taking into account the plural dimensions of the entrepreneurial event. Referring to Deleuze, it can be described as an actualization within a flux of virtualities. On the contrary Badiou considers that the context of the event has to be firmly delineated because the phenomenon of the event is seldom perceived. The event is later recognized for its occurrence in a particular context. Romano also underscores that the event cannot be recognized at the very moment of its occurrence. An event is a fold, whose meaning is understood after it has occurred by those who are its ontic depositaries. After it has happened, an event can be considered as mundane fact. This distinction recalls Merleau-​Ponty’s description where he explains the double dimension of the event, as instituting and instituted. Interestingly common features about the conception of the event can then be observed between these distinct approaches. Future research could explore in greater depth these connections, working to further the development of a non-​orthodox phenomenological approach to the event. Structuring forms of communication define the discursive borders that allow the singularity of the event to be shared by the organizational collectivity. The pure openness of the event included in the notion of a flux leads us to abolish the distinction between contingency as a difference and routine as a repetition. It could threaten the singular experience of the event and explain its serialization in pre-​formed and modelled events whose only remaining goal is communication for itself. Serialization of events also suppresses the political dimension of events transformed into routines. Entrepreneurial events are political. They assert power by using and assembling perceptions in a distinct manner. They provide support to the contention that history cannot be assimilated into the flatness of a flux in which everything is event (or routinized event). Events are historical phenomena and landmarks that orient, contest, or approve existing organization. This is, of course, especially relevant to entrepreneurial events. Future research could be used to investigate this neglected side of the entrepreneurial event. Even though researchers have implicitly mentioned the political dimension of the event, as in the case of cooperatives, much remains to be done in analysing the phenomenon of the entrepreneurial event and politics.

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Chapter 22

The Pro cess of De p t h Temporality as Organization in Cinematographic Experience François-​X avier de Vaujany

22.1  Introduction: From Depth in Perception to Depth in Experience Perception is a central concern for phenomenology in general (Zahavi, 2018) and for Merleau-​Ponty (1945, 1964) in particular. Throughout his work, from his doctoral research to his elaboration of ‘indirect ontology’, the French philosopher returned repeatedly to this process. However, he gradually moved away from the idea of a perceptual process centred on depth as the condition of a seeing and acting subject in favour of a more ontological account, in which depth is understood as the in-​betweenness of the world and its becoming. In this chapter, I will compare and contrast Merleau-​Ponty’s and Deleuze’s philosophies of depth to show how they converge and diverge around a vision of temporality as organization. To begin, I want to explore the concept of depth in the writings of Merleau-​Ponty (1945, 1961, 1964). As a decentred, non-​representational perception produced by the very ‘incompossibility’ of the world, depth is for him the emergent, processual condition of any agency, the in-​betweenness of the whole sensible world. It is the ‘when’ and the ‘where’ of happening, co-​producing objects and subjects and the very space-​ time, volumetry, and texture of their relationships. The process of organizing the world appears here as a sensible becoming that always involves an underlying pre-​subjective, passive, dormant capability producing both subjects and objects (the ‘flesh’ of the world). I go on to explore Deleuze’s metaphysical view. At once continuing and discontinuing the Merleau-​Pontian endeavour, Deleuze (1969, [1983] 2014, [1985] 2014) explored the issue of depth through its relationship with ‘images’ (Wambacq, 2011; de Vaujany, 2022).

Cinematographic Experience   441 In line with the radically immanent power of his assemblage and his search for a pre-​ subjectivist (movement-​images) or asubjectivist (time-​images) stance, Deleuze (1983, [1985] 2014) elaborated a complex concept of depth that does not involve ‘seeing’ or ‘natural perception’. Here, light rays, their encounters in images, and differences in the intensity or speed of events between and inside images produce the texture of experience: a landscape, a horizon, an enveloping process. This view appears more radically temporal but also more regionally poetic and imaginative1 than Merleau-​Ponty’s indirect ontology.2 By developing an auto-​ethnography of the movie The Name of the Rose (directed by Jean-​Jacques Annaud), I identify three processes of relevance to the depth of experience. In so doing, I seek to emphasize the continuities and discontinuities between Merleau-​ Ponty and Deleuze regarding an experience that paradoxically emerges without any centre or direction and ultimately produces a set of images that are also without centre or direction. The temporal organization of both movie direction and movie images contribute to a powerful in-​betweenness that is generative of experience itself. This exploration of The Name of the Rose makes three contributions to the literature on organizing processes. First, I describe the process of how the movie discontinues continuously around its present as a way of temporally building a ‘common world’. Annaud and his team continuously link the presence of the future and the past to the present of the movie’s production and build time-​images in the same spirit. This ongoing collective work to create a reverberation between past and future in the present fosters a deep communalization of all human and non-​human entities performed by the movie process. This epitomizes a primordial process inherent in the depth of organizing—​a temporal organization made of holes, cuts, false connections, and folds. My auto-​ethnography also makes visible a general logic of ‘reduction’ that departs dramatically from most modern (progressive) modes of organizing. The movie’s time-​ images and internal narrative return repeatedly to seminal theological, historical, or personal moments. Paradoxically, this temporal organization constantly erases what happened—​the becoming of events inside the movie—​to return to what was folded and invisible in the movement of the narrative. In the same movement, visual reduction also makes visible all the (hypocritical, Machiavellian, calculated) movements that hide the truth. These first and second contributions have a strong Deleuzian resonance, epitomizing depth as directly produced by images themselves—​a set of primordial relations that foster self-​creativity from within the movie experience, revealing the set of aberrant 1 As

an area indiscernible from reality, imagination more often appears in time-​images than in movement-​images (see Deleuze, [1985] 2014: 15). In contrast, for Merleau-​Ponty, poetry and imagination underlie our entire relationship with the world (Mazis, 2016) while Deleuze does not conceptualize the past as a lasting and enduring institution likely to be opened by events. 2 Merleau-​ Ponty’s larger project of a ‘metaphysics of history’ shares strong commonalities with Deleuze and in particular with his views about the productive differences of signs themselves (see my chapter (Chapter 5) in Part I). Again, Deleuze does not conceptualize the present as a lasting institution likely to be opened by events.

442   François-Xavier de Vaujany movements (Lapoujade, 2017) at stake in the movie’s organization as temporality. Finally, depth also appears as a process preceding and beyond movie direction: a logic of sense infused vertically, gradually, and in a dispersed way in a world of signs, continuously inhabiting the past, the future, and the present. This visual infusion (especially of the labyrinth3) keeps changing the sense and logic of what happened, placing vertical image-​peripety at the heart of another complex biographical process: a subjectivation that re-​orders and questions the movie for spectators equipped with these images, folded by them. As subjectivation, this last process (in contrast to the two previous ones) is more likely to make sense from Merleau-​Ponty’s perspective on depth.

22.2  Merleau-​Ponty: Seeing and Sensing in Depth For Merleau-​Ponty, our experience of the world is constituted by volumes, textures, strata, and forces. It happens, contracting and expanding continuously, and agency is part of this process. How is this possible? Merleau-​Ponty offers a very interesting intuition; this is made possible by the ontological depth of the world itself (Merleau-​Ponty, 1945; Mazis, 2016). Indeed, depth refers both to an exploratory process and to its emergent possibilities; as such, the phenomenon is the opposite of a purely imaginary experience. As Merleau-​Ponty (1945: 380) explained, ‘The imaginary is without depth, it does not respond to our efforts to vary our points of view, it does not lend itself to our observation’. As an exploration—​a playful exploration—​perception is possible because of the depth of our experience, in which the simultaneous co-​existence of events frames the time-​space of any ongoing multidimensional activity.4 This vision requires us to abandon a dualist account of experience. As Mazis (2016: xvi) explains, Depth as understood traditionally is derived from an objectified version of space and time. Both are taken atomistically as comprised from measurable units that are either associated or synthetized by the subject. Depth becomes the sum of this units and is a projective phenomenon of the subjects. In a Cartesian perspective, depth is merely a subjective phenomenon.

According to Descartes, depth is a secondary dimension. In contrast, for Merleau-​Ponty (1945, 1964), temporality and spacing are inseparable in our experience of depth as co-​ constitutive of its own time-​space, clustering of events, and the emergent objects and

3  An increasingly obvious presence from the beginning of the movie, far beyond the walls of the aedificius. 4  But imagination can be a dimension of this process.

Cinematographic Experience   443 subjects it enfolds. Emergent subjects are inseparable from depth as process; there is no subject before depth, exploring it from the outside; there is only a possible subject after, inside and from the experience of depth. As the temporality of being is co-​existent with the time-​space of depth, that depth is not a subjective projection into the objective space of the world or a dimension ‘after’ length, height, and width but the ontological experience of the world itself. Beyond the positive, visible side of this experience, there is its negativity—​the invisible, discontinuous, and passive side. This negativity is not the opposite or the antithesis of positivity; it is its other side, that which calls for a future and self-​creates the virtuality required to build forthcoming actualities. Negativity is part of the process of becoming and its infinity (see Revel, 2015; Mazis, 2016; de Saint-​Aubert, 2018). To that extent, it is tempting to define depth as the invisibilities produced by movement itself—​what becomes the past and calls for a future5 to make visible the present possibly experienced by a subject (de Vaujany, 2022). Like any sensible activity, perceptual and agentic activities require depth, a temporal thickness. Indeed, Merleau-​Ponty insists on the fact that ‘we do not see depth, but we see in depth [ . . . ] Unobjectifiable, depth requires that we abandon ourselves, so that it might be delivered itself as such’ (Saint-​Aubert, 2018: 393). Depth is never in front of us or ahead of our activities. but envelops us as the present of our becoming; it ‘overflows us and takes us within its vertiginous being which becomes our own vertigo—​so that its power of development is doubled by a capacity to invest us’ (Saint-​Aubert, 2018: 394). According to Mazis (2016), depth involves openness, in that the process of becoming is a continuous opening and reopening of the present. Indeed, our experience of the world is a ‘system with several entries’ (Merleau-​Ponty, 1955: 157), as the world is both plural and unique. Because of its depth as part of the ‘hyperdialectic’ of the world (1964), the world’s infinitude of interwoven dialectics is never-​ending and always ambiguous for the emergent subjectivities enfolded within it (see my chapter (Chapter 5) in Part I on the metaphysics of history in Merleau-​Ponty’s writings). On this view, depth is ‘the going together of incompossible’ (Mazis, 2016). In his late work, Merleau-​Ponty (1953, 1955, 1964) explored the generative tensions between necessity and possibilities, compatibilities, and events (as opening possibilities): ‘This coming together of identity and difference is the felt sense and the meaning of depth. Its differing logic, which might be called inclusive difference, explains how we are drawn into the field of perception and into many other dimensions with an increasing sense and no closure’ (Mazis, 2016: xvi). Depth is what makes possible the differential process that constitutes the world we live in and the continuous reopening and inauguration of experience. Ontologically, depth is the in-​betweenness of distinct possibilities, distinct events, and the creative matrix of which they are part and which they continuously reconfigure.

5 

A past that is no longer visible or so enfolded in the present that it is not a past as such; a future that is just a call for something and as such is not yet visible.

444   François-Xavier de Vaujany Our becoming is endless. The passage of Nature never ends, moving continuously in between. If the world were a monolithic space-​time, depth would not be a possibility, and the world would have no volumes, no textures, and no playfulness.

22.3  Immanence, ‘Machinic Assemblage’, and Depth with Deleuze In his own work, Deleuze (1959, 1976, 1983, [1985] 2014) has also extensively drawn on an idea of depth (see Lilley, 2009; Wamback, 2012; de Vaujany, 2022). Like Merleau-​Ponty, Deleuze (1983, [1985] 2014) questioned any predefined view of subjects and objects. He also wanted to explore cinematographic experience from within. Most of all, and again like Merleau-​Ponty, he sought to understand the immanent conditions of movement in depth (see Wamback, 2012; de Vaujany, 2021). However, in contrast to Merleau-​Ponty, for whom depth subsists more in the invisibilities produced by movement itself, Deleuze’s metaphysical approach to depth emphasizes holes, false connections, and most importantly folds. Depth is what is folded and unfolded by movement itself—​the temporalities and spaces folded by a movement that does not (yet) require any viewer or viewed (Wamback, 2012; de Vaujany, 2022). Folds engender images as ‘all of what appears’6 in conversation with depth, which becomes the spatium7 of past events and the impulsion of future events. In this regard, Deleuze departs radically from Merleau-​Ponty and what he views as a phenomenological stance on the issue of subjectivity and subjectivation.8 For Deleuze, ‘What phenomenology sets up as a norm are the existential coordinates which define an “anchoring” of the subject perceiving the world, a being to the world, an openness to the world which will be expressed in the famous “all consciousness is consciousness of something” ’ (1983: 84). Cinema primarily designs an experience that is beyond subjectivity or rather stretches and distributes it. Deleuze continues: ‘The cinema may approach or move us away from things and turn around them, it removes the anchoring of the subject as much as the horizon of the world, so much so that it substitutes an implicit knowledge and a secondary intentionality for the conditions of the natural perception’ (p. 84). Cinema produces an infinite landscape of images, and this process, although

6 

See Deleuze (1983: 86). Deleuze (1983) borrows the concept from Bergson (1896). Spatium is the memory of all past events; it is kept from the movement of the present and hosts past events with a specific topology, clustering events according to aberrant movements, contracting, expanding, and reinventing them in the context of ongoing conversations with the surface of experience. 8  Here, rather than questioning this view (which seems to be close to the phenomenologies of Husserl and the early Merleau-​Ponty), I will follow Deleuze’s argument. For an analysis of the convergences between Deleuze and Merleau-​Ponty and a more qualified thesis beyond the argument offered by Deleuze himself in his treatise on cinema, see Lawlor (1988), Wamback (2012), or de Vaujany (2022). 7 

Cinematographic Experience   445 designed, is self-​creative. Images indirectly constitute a temporality (as ‘movement-​ images’9) or temporalize directly (as ‘time-​images’10). As this organizing temporality lacks any central ordering, it becomes relevant to ‘show how centers can emerge, at any points which would impose instantaneous fixed views’ (p. 84). On this view, there are two possible ontological options. The first would involve making visible the ‘conscious, natural or cinematographic perception’ (p. 84) that embodies this centre. In this regard, Merleau-​Ponty and Deleuze converge; if subjects are possible consequences of events rather than primary intentional constituents, the indirect ontology of Merleau-​Ponty can contribute to the Deleuzian project. The second option is more radical. Exploring time as an organizing principle may also bring us closer to the process of openness itself: ‘Instead of going from the acentric state of affairs to the centered perception’, a relevant inquiry ‘could ascend to the acentric state of affairs, and come closer to it’ (p. 84). Here, subjectivity and subjectivation are not the issue; what matters is the acentring process itself and the continuities within this heterogeneity in the cinematographic experience. What are the processes, events, and temporalizations that enable this heterogeneity while sharing the same present? Here, researchers must surely focus on the surface of cinematographic imagery to understand its ‘machinic process’.11 Drawing on a major Bergsonian intuition, Deleuze goes on to explain that ‘it is not consciousness that is light. It is the set of images, or light, which is consciousness, immanent in matter. As for our consciousness of fact, it will only be the opacity without which the lights always spreading would have never been revealed’ (Deleuze, 1983: 90). Subjectivity (as a possible consequence of event) may even become ‘subtractive’ (p. 93); far from being a creative force that constitutes the world, it is a mere substrate of that infinitely creative experience. In his exploration of the second modality of cinematographic experience (time-​images), Deleuze dispenses even more radically with subjective experience and the very category of subjectivity. Instead, he says, only hybrid experiences exist, as the distinction ‘between the subjective and the objective tends to lose its importance as the optical situation or visual description replace the action of death. [ . . . ] It is as if the real and the imaginary are running behind each other, reflecting on each other, around an indistinguishable point’ (Deleuze, [1985] 2014: 15). For Deleuze, far beyond and before subjectivity and subjectivation,12 all events within the same world are temporally connected. Attracted by their immediate neighbourhood,

9 

For Deleuze (1983: 291), a movement-​image is ‘a set of acentered variable elements that act and react to each other’. 10  Here, ‘time does not depend any more on movement; it is the aberrant movement that depends on time’ (Deleuze, [1985] 2014: 58–​9). 11  In French: ‘agencement machinique’ (Deleuze, 1983: 88). 12  Our own human image and individuality are just a possible consequence of this event in between. According to Bergson (1896: 17), matter is ‘the whole set of images, and perception of matter those images put in relationship with possible actions of some determinate image, my body’.

446   François-Xavier de Vaujany images are merely juxtaposed, and the Riemannian spaces13 that they share are not at all geometric:14 ‘What characterizes these spaces is that their nature cannot be explained in any simple spatial way. They imply non-​ localizable relations. They are direct presentations of time’ (Deleuze, [1985] 2014: 129). He goes on to assert that ‘The primary feature of image is not space and movement, but topology and time’ (p. 164). Images are signs with no locations. They happen as rays of light, sounds, forces, and interwoven lines producing and reproducing ephemeral entities, always in a process of becoming. In developing this topological view, Deleuze (1969) stressed the importance of ‘depth’ in our experience of the world and the relationship between the virtual (all that is) and the actual (all that happens and becomes). For Deleuze, [i]‌ncessantly expanding and differentiating virtualities communicate with each other, take their shape and determine their boundaries always in relation to other virtualities, through which they alone differentiate themselves. Virtualities differ in terms of which of them are directly connected to most others and which of them are directly connected only to a few. (Eriksson, 2005: 605)

Indeed, ‘the actualities own virtualities form a sort of small circuit, he claims, whereas the formations of expanding virtualities create deep loops that communicate with each other’ (Eriksson, 2005: 605). For Deleuze, then, depth is the circuit of creative correspondences or the mediation between virtual and actual worlds as a structured conversation between surface and memory, events surfacing, how these surface creatively, and the conversation endogenous to the spatium (among ‘virtual images’). This conversation is constituted by holes and folds visualized at the surface, and depth is the thickness of this conversational process between events. For Deleuze, most past events are more or less intense moments plugged into the spatium of memory (Deleuze 1969, [1985] 2014). The closer the past is to the present, the more contracted the past is within it (Deleuze, 1966).15 As experience’s inside and outside share the same movement, the past and the future are also enveloped in the same process of becoming. The past is immediately part of the present; it is not ‘below’, unconscious, or purely inactive, waiting for the right time to surface. All pasts and their broader spatium are coextensive with the surface. Events are not superimposed, and they do not follow each other; instead, all coexist in experience and become coextensive in the spatium and at the surface as both things that happen(ed) and things that become (Whitehead, [1929] 1978; Deleuze, 1969; Hernes, 2014: 87–​98). 13  Riemannian

geometry preceded relativity theory and post-​Newtonian visions of time and space. According to this new topology, there is no absolute centre and no fixed point. Space is mainly the ‘differential geometry of surfaces’ that fascinated Deleuze (see Burchill, 2007). 14 The space is more the spatium below, this pure space hosting memory and projected (as a movement) on the actual experience of the world. 15  ‘The present is only the most contracted degree of the past, and matter the most stretched degree of the present’ (Deleuze, 1966: 74).

Cinematographic Experience   447 However, as with the memory of experience, the spatium of past events has its own topology. According to Lapoujade (2017), past events are linked by ‘aberrant movements’ inside and between images more than through ‘fields’ or ‘structures’. The whole topology of the spatium does not follow a purely spatial logic but is more a set of temporal relations—​differences of degree, speed, and intensity among movements themselves in the space they expand or contract. Any remote event can simply become or re-​become a ‘now’, a contracted past in the present. At the surface, materiality is a dilatation (Bergson, 1896; Deleuze, 1966); from there, memory is only a set of virtualities (Deleuze, 1966). What about the relationships between all events, especially those hosted by the memory of our body and, beyond that, the whole universe? What about the event component of the spatium and its conversation with the becoming of the surface of experience—​this present that moves to become a past, and this present that is always called by and for a future (see Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Hernes, 2014: 8716)? All events are novelties for Deleuze, but some may be more reconfigurative than others, bringing novelty beyond themselves and beyond their immediate happening. They can foresee a new topology for part of the spatium in a local conversation between past events or between past and future events in the present and in their process of becoming. As Deleuze (1969: 67) put it, ‘They are turning points, inflection points, etc.; collars, knots, foci, centres; melting, condensation, boiling points, etc.’ As such, they continuously produce new senses and logics of sense. In this way, the spatium is covered and opened by numerous bifurcations in a labyrinth of interwoven lines. Reliving memories means navigating along the topography of our mnesic world—​taking shortcuts, making connections, bumping into holes, surfing on strange folds. In addition, the in-​between of events and their conversation is habilitated and constrained by this strange topology, which (like dreams) may follow its own rules, far from the world as immediately experienced in ordinary active life. Depth is both exogenous (as a conversation between the spatium and the surface) and endogenous (as the continuous reconfiguration of memory in the spatium and the eternity of the universe). From a Deleuzian perspective, events have different intensities that stretch them horizontally (or not) to prehend other events (see also Bergson, 1896: 158). Similarly, some cuts can happen (Deleuze, [1985] 2014); each event is a novelty that reconfigures its neighbourhood, but some events can be radically reconfigurative. This upturn or ‘revolution’ has topological consequences for the spatium and the assemblage of memory and virtual images in the depth of the present. New relations and movements, new origins, can be identified from that point. Interestingly, Deleuze also seems to allow that the most decisive momentum of this revolution surfaces experience for the linguistic world. 16  . To characterize this process through which the event is more than what happened, Deleuze refers to the Aiôn. In becoming continuously, this process takes place in a time without duration. Similarly, Foucault (2011: 187) contended that ‘an event is always a dispersion; a multiplicity. It is what happens here and there, it is polysepalous’.

448   François-Xavier de Vaujany For Deleuze, a movie and its production also aim to build a world that incorporates all the senses, perceptions, and feelings typical of ordinary experience. However, as a discontinuous, bounded experience, a movie must paradoxically build images that open possibilities without any immediate conversation with the present surface of the process of watching the movie. Accordingly, depth must form part of the totality of time-​images and movement-​images that constitute the movie’s unity (Deleuze, [1985] 2014). If surface is the world as it happens continuously in the present, depth is the world as it happens discontinuously in the past and future to make it happen continuously in the present. While actual images surface experience and even exceed it, virtual images remain on the other side of it (Bergson 1896)17 as the being of becoming. At this stage, I could define18 the Deleuzian conception of depth as mediating between the discontinuities of ordinary experience (what keeps happening in the present) and the continuities of the world as they happen in the past (contracted) and the future (projected) to make it happen in the present (first deep movement).19 In this way, depth fosters agentivity in the world; as Bergson puts it, ‘our action [in the present] will dispose of the future in the exact proportion thatour perception, magnified by memory, will have contracted the past’ (1896: 236). These movements in between the present and the past-​future also involve the spatium itself—​the world as it is. Memory keeps filling the holes of experience, lending it matter and form. In this way, the spatium also continues to reconfigure itself around its pure entities, either indirectly through movements at the surface or directly through dreams and imagination (second deep movement). The spatium is the non-​time before experience; it is pure ‘being’ (see Deleuze’s 1966 Bergsonian analysis of memory and the present).20 All events conserved ‘there’ are suspended, waiting to differentiate events within experience. They are the continuous mirror of discontinuities at the surface, reflected as continuous discontinuities. Moreover, the whole surface—​the plane of immanence—​is just a cut in the ‘universal becoming’ of the world (Bergson, 1896: 165, 168). Once actualized, images and events follow the rules of the lived experience that they become part of. Building on this view, managing and organizing (as engaged, active processes) should not be viewed ‘as the task of separating and analysing along 17  Bergson explained it as follows: ‘Our needs are so many beams of light which, focused on the continuity of sensitive qualities, draw distinct bodies in them. They can only be satisfied on the condition of carving out a body for themselves in this continuity, then delimiting other bodies with it entering into a relationship the same way it would do with people’ (1896: 222). 18  In a manner likely to integrate my previous Deleuzian definitions of depth. 19  Bergson (1896: 234–​5) explained this in a beautiful way: ‘Change is everywhere, but in depth; We localize it here and there, but at the surface; and we thus constitute bodies both stable with regard to their qualities and mobile about their positions, a mere change of place contracting for itself, in our eyes, the universal transformation’. Continuous discontinuities at the surface require the discontinuous continuities of the spatium that will help to build identities as the surface. 20  According to Bergson ‘The question is precisely whether the past has ceased to exist, or whether it has simply ceased to be useful. You arbitrarily define the present by what is, while the present is simply what is happening. Nothing is less than the present moment, if by that you mean the indivisible limit which separates the past and the future’ (1896: 166). For Bergson, the past is what is; it is being.

Cinematographic Experience   449 predefined functional and conceptual lines’ but as processes that seek to ‘bring in more and more depth to things’ (Nayak & Chia, 2013: 304).21 By these means, we ‘find the “secret depth or complication” [Grosz, 2005: 8] that acts as the primary force of organizing’ (2013: 305). If Deleuze’s thinking offers a way to integrate the continuities and discontinuities of organizing (Nayak & Chia, 2013; Aroles & McLean, 2016) with the concept of depth, he also opens the possibility of describing the multiple and creative modalities of that encounter. Ultimately, there are interesting convergences and divergences between Merleau-​ Ponty and Deleuze in their accounts of depth (see Lilley, 2009; Wamback, 2012; de Vaujany, 2022). For both, depth is neither an absolute space below (formed by a dead past) nor an unconscious layer (de Vaujany, 2022). Rather, it is a habitual temporality constituted by the thickness, folds, and holes (for Deleuze) or the invisibilities (for Merleau-​Ponty) that characterize the conversation and differentiation between past and future events, with and in the present. It is also the radical movements in between the surface and things on the other face of experience—​in particular, the upturn between the past and the becoming ‘below’ and the present at the surface (Wamback, 2012; de Vaujany, 2022).

22.4  The Depth of The Name of the Rose: Description of a Movie Experience According to Merleau-​ Ponty’s and Deleuze’s Views of Depth Turning now to explore the depth of The Name of the Rose as a cinematographic experience, I will rely on an auto-​ethnography of my experiences of reading the book and watching the movie in the 1980s and again in the 2000s. Public interviews with Annaud and his team (see this chapter’s Appendix) will help me to further explore the process, with particular reference to the movie’s inception.

22.4.1 The Project: Translating ‘Literary Plans’ into a Film Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose) is a bestselling novel published in 1980 by Umberto Eco. It is part detective story, part historical narrative, and part theological analysis. According to Annaud, it is a novel of ‘drawers and mirrors’ and ‘a tangle of things’.22 The story can be summarized as follows. In 1327, Franciscan friar William of 21 

22 

In a way, management cultivates continuities in the discontinuities of organizational activities. All references to Annaud relate to the interviews detailed in this chapter’s Appendix.

450   François-Xavier de Vaujany Baskerville and his apprentice Adso of Melk arrive at an isolated Benedictine monastery in Liguria (northern Italy), which is being used as neutral ground in a theological dispute between the Franciscans (who are suspected of heresy) and representatives of Pope John XXII. However, a secular event disturbs the abbey’s serenity: the death of Adelmo of Otranto, a revered illuminator. William of Baskerville is asked by the monastery’s abbot, Abo of Fossanova, to investigate the death. The story provides a context for an intense process of inquiry and a chaotic affective process in which actors become lost in the labyrinth of their fears, superstitions, passions, and faith as monks are successively killed as a book passes from one to another. The novel contains a map of the abbey—​a device that projects the reader into the space and topography of the place, locking them inside it—​and a map of the library, which is situated in the aedificius, a fortified tower. The building’s three floors house the kitchen and refectory (ground floor), the scriptorium (first floor), and the mysterious library (second floor). In his longest interview (about two hours), Annaud explained that the movie is a ‘palimpsest’—​a book based on the pages, structure, and texture of a previous book—​as was commonplace in the Middle Ages. In such volumes, the pages have been erased, but some traces remain. The new book extends the structure (number and form of the pages) and texture; depth, then, is the old manuscript ‘below’,23 and past and future movements remain as vestiges of previous manuscripts and anticipations of its becoming, respectively. Beyond exploring the liminality between the book and the movie, my research process is partly auto-​ethnographic. Based on my own experience of the movie, I tried to describe as explicitly as possible the process of subjectivation that seemed to be happening from the within of the movie. Long before, in the 1980s, I had read the book and watched the movie. For the purposes of this research, I watched the movie again (twice in English and once in French). I also reread the book just before analysing the data. These auto-​ethnographic accounts formed part of a seventy-​page memo documenting my successive experiences of watching the movie and reading the book between 1989 and 2020.

22.4.2 Depth as Process: The Becoming of Images in The Name of the Rose Based on my auto-​ethnography of the movie and the associated research, I was able to identify three main features of depth as process: (1) the key role of the logic of reduction; (2) the process of discontinuation; and (3) a playing with vertical peripety-​images. All three contribute to temporality as an organizing principle. Reduction in the pre-​modern sense of the term (see Hamann, 2016) is an important aspect of how depth mediates 23 

Topologically, it is not below but forms part of the surface itself.

Cinematographic Experience   451 between memory and the movie’s surface. In the Middle Ages, reduction was the key dimension of temporal structure and orientation (Hamann, 2016). People did not believe in the idea of ‘progress’ but rather viewed history as a continuous return to the origin and historical experience as an uprooting, purifying process. In the imaginary space of the creative process, however linear, the movie director keeps returning to his youth, the seminal book and its progenitor, and significant encounters that reconfigured his direction of the movie. Within the process of translation from the book to the movie, depth is a reductive process. In his interviews, Annaud repeatedly linked the movie to his childhood and youth24 and to the pervading imaginary he felt part of at that time. The discovery of the movie looks like love at first sight: a strong, powerful young love opening the way to true life. After reading an article in Le Monde, Annaud quickly contacted the Italian company RAI, which had bought the rights to turn the book into a movie. As they had not yet found a director, he told them he was the one they were looking for! Preparations for shooting were lengthy. Obsessed with perfection, Annaud pursued an authentic return to the Middle Ages by employing a process similar to reduction to direct the movie. He wanted to get as close as possible to the atmosphere of the book and the historical period, and every detail mattered. Paradoxically, the true mobile elements of the movie were the site and all the artefacts within it. The actors and their parsimonious or meditative movements became the mere immobile decor of the changing site. Depending on the time of the day, the lights, colours, atmosphere wrapped in it, the monastery, although unique, kept becoming different. But at the end, actors themselves are the continuous repetition of these differences. In my attempts to describe the movie as a process, I was also surprised by a pattern that accompanied this idea of reduction; although he stresses that he had in mind a precise idea and goal for what the movie ‘should look like’, Annaud never described it as something that went through phases or progressed towards something. Instead, his descriptions were often labyrinthine, comprising numerous anecdotes and intuitions. This can be explained, of course, by the logic of an interview, but even in very long uncut sequences or answers, there was rarely any broad narrative or zooming-​out. Very often, Annaud returned to bifurcations or turning points that occurred early in the directing process. In later anecdotes (like the story of the German producer who had almost no money left to finance the end of shooting), bifurcations seemed like the beginning of something else. Any incident (e.g. an actor could not join the cast) was seen as an opportunity for novelty that was closer to the seminal events of the book and the movie. In the interviews, Annaud’s answers seemed to return continuously to points of renewal, constantly realigning his narrative around the seminal moments of the book, his encounter with Eco, or key events from his youth and early career. 24  He mentioned how, as a child, he was impressed by the imagery and statuary of the monasteries he had visited. He also took courses on Aristotle and the Greek language during his graduate studies at Paris University.

452   François-Xavier de Vaujany The selection and construction of the setting was also an extended reductive process. Eco’s monastery was inspired by the Sacra di San Michele in northern Italy. Annaud and his team visited about 300 potential locations across Europe, but he was not satisfied with any of them. He wanted the place and its imagery to embody a true return to the Middle Ages, and he rejected sites that had been renovated or that were too sanitized. He was obsessed with returning to the book and the historical period and reducing them authentically. In the end, Annaud decided to use Kloster Eberbach, a real monastery in Germany, for the indoor scenes and to shoot the outdoor scenes at Cinecittà Studios near Rome. At the time, it was the ‘biggest movie set ever’ (after Cleopatra). Music formed part of this scenery and aesthetic, and Annaud worked with James Horner to design a highly innovative synthesizer. With a budget of 2.5 million francs, they created a hypnotic two-​layered soundtrack that combined authentic instruments of the Middle Ages with a very contemporary sound. This obsessive approach produced a set of movement-​images and time-​images that were themselves reductive. In the finished production, the monastery site is immersed within an indeterminate horizon, appearing and reappearing out of nowhere like a gaseous atmospheric event. What is framed by the camera regularly gathers images of seminal moments. The voice of the older Adso reminds us that we are returning to the past, where everything began. The image of the labyrinth both hinders and accompanies a return to the seminal evil. In recurring images, light and darkness appear and detach themselves from the world. The discovery of books and the images of old Greek philosophy texts mark a return to seminal debates about comedy, laughter, fear, divinity, and authority. The movie set and soundtrack epitomize another trend that I uncovered in my auto-​ ethnography: a process of discontinuation. The movie and the process of assembly created a sense of discontinuity by introducing cuts, moving between past and future events at the surface of the production process and the movie’s images. Enacted in the present, the music resonated with the sounds of past and future as another strange mediating cut in the present of watching the movie. Strangely, on rewatching the movie recently, I still felt this depth; as mediation, depth becomes a past and/​or a future mediating the present of lived experience. Beyond that, the force of the past was captured in multiple ways. As in almost all of his movies since 1976, Annaud relied on an internationally best-​selling book and assembled an advisory team of leading historians like Jacques Le Goff to make the film as authentic as possible. In this way, Annaud hoped that details within the depth of the movie would ensure its authenticity for scholars of the Middle Ages as well for as other viewers. At several points in the narrative of the movie’s production and direction, the future was also invited to inhabit, bound, or stretch the present, summoning the future audience in multiple ways. In the interviews, Annaud made observations about his team and their reactions, and a line from the future seemed to intersect with the movie through their faces, their laughter, their admiration, and their smiles. On the big movie set at Cinecittà, hundreds of extras watched the shooting whenever they were not actively involved. As they waited for their scene, Annaud and his core team kept talking with

Cinematographic Experience   453 them, and the future resides in the depth of these processes of self-​creation and sense-​ making. I am reminded here of the well-​known TV series Friends. Because the directors were used to filming episodes in the presence of a real audience, they could experiment with certain scenes and remove them if the audience reaction was inadequate. By the same logic, authentic laughter was incorporated as sound-​image in the post-​production phase, making the future part of the present or creating discontinuities as required. In the continuous line and becoming of Annaud’s movie, these discontinuities appear as folds, holes, and thicknesses at the surface of watching and becoming as past and future events that do not seem part of the movie’s present but clearly strengthen it. Casting actors and gathering ‘affection-​images’ (Deleuze, 1983) of their faces was also part of this process of discontinuation. While some were already successful and well-​known, new faces introduced novel possibilities. Preparations for final casting took almost three years, as Annaud met famous stage actors and movie stars as well as unknowns whose faces fitted his Bruegelian imaginary, helping to bring the force of the future to the movie. One of the key casting decisions concerned the role of William of Baskerville. Sean Connery’s agent was harassing Annaud, and at some point he agreed to meet the actor in Los Angeles. Annaud thought this would enable him to finally say no on the basis that it was difficult to find someone who combined the Victorian ethos of a Sherlock Holmes with the Middle Ages presence of a Franciscan monk. As Annaud put it, ‘James Bond just added a layer of complexity to all of that!’. Once in front of Annaud, Sean Connery simply asked him ‘May I read you a few pages, boy?’. Annaud found this a little arrogant, but as soon as Connery started to read the script, Annaud heard the voice he had ‘already heard’ when he first imagined the character. It was exactly the deep expression and solemn presence he had projected from the book. Striving for a balance between the forces of past and future, Annaud recruited an astonishing team of actors. Some like Sean Connery, Michael Lonsdale, and Murray Abraham were well-​known; others like Ron Perlman were not faring well at the time, and some like Christian Slater, Valentina Vargas, and Feodor Chaliapin were largely unknown. Chaliapin is an interesting case because, like many of Annaud’s paradoxical bets on the future, he had a past in another context, which the director mentioned several times during the interviews. Chaliapin’s father was a ‘very famous Russian opera singer’ in the early 20th century, and the son had a previous career in the silent movie industry. This old man was the kind of unknown Annaud was looking for—​a ‘new’ face that also brought the force of the past to the narrative beyond the screen. In other words, Chaliapin was a good story about the story, contributing to the depth of the world-​ making process. Annaud could play with this during and after the movie (as in the interviews) to further cultivate its atmosphere. Very subtly, these past and future images contribute as levers, cuts, and amplifiers to the movie’s seminal narrative structure and to its depth. The exchanges between William, a man nearing the end of his life, and the younger Adso, who is encountering things like death, love, and doubt for the first time, create a temporal arc that reverberates between past and future within the narrative flow, constituting an interesting time-​image (Deleuze, 1983). While the Franciscan detective William is the man that Adso might

454   François-Xavier de Vaujany become, Adso is the man that William might have been, embodying the primordial space of early life choices. This layered arc incorporates several strata of intellectuality and sensibility that resonate both with one another and with the reader or spectator in their becoming. If I first followed Adso in the 1990s, I feel closer now to William as I approach my 50s, and in re-​exploring The Name of the Rose, I sense the subtle depth that Eco and Annaud introduced. My own future has become part of my past, and this reversibility makes visible the process of becoming—​the movie’s and my own. Adso and William speak inside me; their sound-​images speak inside of me; they are me. In its scale, cost, and artistic ambition, Annaud’s venture was complete nonsense; this world of images was out of reach. However, as a key set of time-​images, the storyboard embodied this future already there: a temporality that could not but be there, an iron line coming from ahead and, for sure, leading somewhere. In pursuing discontinuities and creative disruptions from the past and future, the storyboard was a crucial ally. If depth mediates between the continuities of the present and the discontinuities of the past and future in conversation with the present, the storyboard embodies the present coming over the horizon—​Aiôn (see Deleuze, 1967) and the events diverging around it: ‘the whole Aiôn line is traversed by the instant, which keeps moving on it and always misses in its own place’ (p. 195). In this forward process, my own experience of the movie illuminates a third key element. Part of the imagery is intended to reside between virtuality (what is) and actuality (what happens) as a poetic mediation beyond the flow of watching the movie. We are close here to Merleau-​Ponty’s poetic view of depth (Mazis, 2016) and to Deleuze’s ([1985] 2014) time-​images—​something for later, on returning to the book or the movie at a different age and life stage. Following Aristotle, this remaining in the event of the movie as it becomes for me now is what I call a peripety-​image. Aristotle (2008: 36) defined a ‘peripety’ (in Greek, peripeteia) as ‘a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity’. In short, a peripety is a dramatization, and it seems clear that the very process of world-​making can stretch this revolution as new past events follow the line of the present through the event and its becoming. The world is reconfigured, and correspondences between events are radically transformed. As a new seminal past event is touched by the new narrative line, we can dream or despair of a completely new set of future events, and this naked mediation of depth becomes the visible revolution of the world. As an admirer of Aristotle (2008), Annaud clearly knew the importance of peripety. Some movies stretch this revolutionary episode; peripety happens obviously and brutally at some point in the narrative, and implications are slowly drawn in the next steps of the story. For instance, The Usual Suspects offers a fantastic horizontal peripety-​image. Superimposed with the names on the wall, the famous mug broken on the floor led the inspector to realize that he was in front of the so-​called ‘Keyser Söze’. With the wisdom of hindsight, he realizes that the suspect invented everything in front of him. Images here are typical ‘time-​images’ (Deleuze, [1985] 2014): the face of the inspector and the gradual impression on it; the mug falling to the ground; the zoomed-​in names on the wall and on the back of the broken mug, the intercut reactions between the colleagues;

Cinematographic Experience   455 the suspect’s simultaneous slow and calm departure from the building; the acceleration of images immediately after this turning point (and their slowing before)—​all of these elements contribute directly to the movie’s temporality, explicitly reversing the movie at a certain point. That radical turning point is the image of the mug. Watching the movie again, it becomes a radically different experience, with different agentive entities, a different meaning, and a different relationship with memory. In The Name of the Rose, the labyrinth and William and Adso’s first encounter with it are also peripety-​images, but in this case, they are vertical.25 Eco and Annaud introduce peripety to the narrative as something stacked from one reading or viewing onto another. When first seen, the image of the labyrinth flows before gradually overflowing across the whole movie and transforming its meaning. This is not an immediate reversal with accelerated duration as in The Usual Suspects; what matters is the process of watching it further, watching it again, and remembering it later as a more atmospheric image and set of images that gradually locate the movie in the past, the present, and the future. The gradual movement of the present into the past becomes a gradual process of reversing temporality and meaning. The image of the mysterious aedificius (and especially its library) also echoes Deleuze’s ([1985] 2014) ‘aberrant movements’. From the first model delivered by his team, Annaud realized that the library tower could not be located as on the map in Eco’s book. Annaud had to make the site much more compact, mainly because his intention was to film people entering the site from the main gate, and the tower had to be visible and impressive from this entry point. As the narrative’s focal point, this was the depth to be penetrated vertically and horizontally—​the depth that needed to be purified by fire at the end of the story as the dark, self-​generative space of the narrative. While writing, Eco could rely on ‘literary plans’ and did not have to think about these spatio-​temporal issues, but Annaud had to. For Eco, the labyrinth is a pure spatium; as a memory—​the surface of all these dead books—​it is in itself a temporal void, aiding the process of becoming at the surface in all its continuity. As a lived experience, however, the inner labyrinth could not be flat. To give the viewer a sense of vertigo, to cultivate an atmosphere of mystery, and even to reproduce the complexity of the library categorization system as an experience, Annaud had to stretch the entire place to build a vast time-​image or play with the volumes determined by the movement of his own narrative. In doing so, he was inspired by the work of the renowned graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher, such as the famous stairs. Interestingly, to translate the depth of the book and to produce the authentic experience he desired, Annaud had to devise a paradoxical time-​space. The movement-​images produce neither duration nor height, nor a set of strata to move through. Stairs do not go up or down, and walking inside 25 I refer here to Bergson’s vision of verticality. Regarding the process of perception, Bergson (1896: 158) draws a distinction between horizontality (‘containing all objects simultaneously in space’) and verticality (‘on which successive memories are distributed over time’). However, Bergson did not explore verticality as a metaphysical and creative concern.

456   François-Xavier de Vaujany the labyrinth does not seem to lead to any final destination or exit. Monks walk along the surface of an experience of knowledge that is wholly decentred. Because books are classified and archived by time of entry, their precise location is known only by the two librarians, and so the complex classification scheme for books inside the labyrinth corresponds to the pure aberrant movements of the past. The past of the personal reception of books is projected into the organizational space of the labyrinth. Of course, this projection also reflects the librarians’ expectations regarding the library’s potential expansion—​its horizon—​and their work and the spacing of the past are always in conversation with the future below the surface of this nonsensical coding scheme. This tension is explicitly set on the other side of the experience of the labyrinth as a space that can be reconstituted only from the outside. Interestingly, the library’s atmosphere also overflows gradually across the experience of the movie as a time-​image full of invisibilities, fuzzy shapes, unbounded objects, and quasi-​materialities. In the candlelight, one knows only where one is in the instant—​ from inside the labyrinth, there is no window and no outside, only a discontinuous set of small rooms organized around a dark space, with neither upward or downward orientation nor a clear or stable neighbourhood. One is always just there, in the ephemeral exploration of a section. Indeed, the labyrinth epitomizes the whole experience of the book and the movie; more than an inquiry, it is the authentic experience of a depth that does not lead anywhere. It is not the absolute space of a ‘below’, and the surface has no true direction. Events at the surface of experience and on its other face do not ‘follow’ each other, and temporality is not a movement towards something. The topology of the labyrinth is full of aberrant movements, similar for example to those between the events of our memory when explored through dreams, which appear much more active than passive. At the end of the book, William tells Adso, ‘Your dream did not know anymore where was the up or the down, where was death and life. Your dream settles doubts about all the teaching you received’ (Eco, [1980] 1982: 548).

22.5  Discussion: Depth and Temporality as Organization in Cinematographic Experience Table 22.1 summarizes the three features of depth identified in my experience of the movie—​reduction, discontinuation, and vertical peripety—​in terms of the Merleau-​ Pontian and Deleuzian accounts of depth. Returning now to the Merleau-​Pontian and Deleuzian accounts of depth, each seems to illuminate different but complementary views of the movie experience and the process of movie direction. From a Merleau-​Pontian perspective, reduction, discontinuation, and vertical peripety constitute the process of enfleshment that ultimately

Cinematographic Experience   457 Table 22.1 Three features of depth in The Name of the Rose Experience of the movie

Reduction

Discontinuation

Vertical peripety

Merleau-​Pontian topology

Continuous reorientation towards a point of origin and continuous self-​re-​ invention in the process. Chiasm between event and its becoming, involving the reduction and visibilization of subjects themselves uprooted in the movie.

The dimension of dimensions. Depth folds, links, separates, and puts other dimensions in tension. Through this negative process, it cultivates its own generative power to expand the viewer’s subjectivity and sense of togetherness or co-​presence.

This poetic experience opens the way to both past and future events and reconfiguration of a new present or new relationship with the present. Infused in the present is an embodied memory that reconfigures all experience.

Deleuzian topology

Movement-​images form a circular loop around seminal events. Seminal images re-​initiate the entire cinematographic process.

The spatium and the Aiôn become active in the process as the reservoir of discontinuities.

Major aberrant movements at the surface and below reconfigure the topology of past and future events. Vertical and horizontal peripety-​ images reconfigure images, the frame, and the relationships between images.

Relationship with the experience of the movie

A seminal past is the continuous pivot of narrative (re) configuration.

Past and future events introduce cuts or fill holes in the present. The past and the future are active in the present, punctuating, bounding, and expanding it.

Present events gradually and radically reconfigure past and future events. A new line from further ahead restructures the narrative.

Relationship with the process of movie direction

Depth is an accentuated repetition of the past.

Depth becomes assemblage (‘agencement’) as an active assembling and bounding force on the surface of the movie.

Depth is a revolution —​a massive force that reverses the process of becoming.

contributes to the depth of the experience of watching and living the movie, opening the way to subjectivation, togetherness, and co-​presence. On the other side, Annaud offers a rhythm, a poetry, an instituting distance between his subjects and/​or objects that constitutes his movie’s depth. Time as organization is a subjectivation; organizing

458   François-Xavier de Vaujany processes involving depth find correspondences in organizing processes involving subjectivation. From a Deleuzian perspective, Annaud and his team have assembled a range of devices that shape how images react to each other and install several temporalities directly or indirectly through holes, folds, and false connections. The movie itself relies on its own depth, constituted by differences of intensity and speed between events. Ultimately, no spectator or critique is needed; like all images in a given world, it is a force in itself. Temporality as organization is a force constituted by rays of light and their encounters, which surely also applies to the digital world we now live in. At the end of his second opus on cinema, Deleuze ([1985] 2014) offers some fascinating concluding thoughts about digitality and seems to see in digital images a real rupture and reconfiguration of experience itself: ‘The new images no longer have any exteriority (off-​screen), nor do they become interiorized in a whole: rather they have a place and a back, reversible and non-​superimposable, like a power to turn around on themselves’ (p. 393). Here, Deleuze conceptualizes digital images as more granular and fluid than the pre-​experience of cinema. Clearly, these images are not separable from the process of navigation; as we now use our smartphone cameras front and rear to take pictures and selfies, electronic images have an obvious reversibility. There is something behind which is always an infinity of other images. Deleuze added: They are the object of a perpetual reorganization where a new image can arise from any point of the previous image. The organization of space loses its privileged directions, and first of all the privilege of the vertical shown by the position of the screen, in favor of an omnidirectional space which constantly varies its angles and coordinates, to exchange the vertical and the horizontal. ([1985] 2014: 393)

Interestingly, the phenomenon of silence may contribute to another depth: the invisible continuities and discontinuities between two major thinkers of the last century. In Eyes and the Mind (1961), based on his lectures about Nature, Merleau-​Ponty voices some interesting thoughts about cybernetics and the birth of the electronic brain but remains within the confines of a techne and its calculus (i.e. simulating rather than experiencing). In referring to an imagery26 based on invisible performative algorithms and calculus Deleuze is obviously closer to the world we now live in—​a digital world in which Merleau-​Ponty might be considered part of Deleuze’s essential spatium. Both Merleau-​Ponty and Deleuze point to a vision of experience that contributes to a necessary ontology of expression, in which images are events, and differences in their intensity, speed, and duration generate worlds as experiences of the world. Cinematographic experience epitomizes how signs and their productive differences 26 According to Deleuze, ‘with cinema, the world becomes its own image, instead of an image becoming the world’ (1983: 84). We are perhaps witnessing a cosmological change that makes this comment relevant for the full range of our experience.

Cinematographic Experience   459 produce a world. For Deleuze and Merleau-​Ponty, what ultimately matters is the temporal and spatial openness of cinematographic experience itself. A key dimension of temporality as organization is the opening of experience and its modalities. Images overflow the screen; in many ways, the screen does not matter—​only the images themselves matter. There are no borders around the field or the frame; the image as event is radically open, as past and future events are invited into the flow of the movie. This processual metaphysics is of great interest to Management and Organization scholars; on this view, organizations are not pre-​defined entities but visual and sonic processes and events, continuously becoming and organizing the world. Organizations are consequences of pure organizing, and openness is what matters. In the flow of his unfinished odyssey, Merleau-​Ponty continued to stress the importance of subjectivation as a mere possibility of events, opening for him a crucial political space as in the late Foucault (see my chapter (Chapter 5) in Part I). This also led him to conceptualize a passivity inside the realm of events. A pre-​subjectivity is dormant in events (Lawlor, 1988). In contrast, Deleuze (while not denying the possibility of subjectivation) wanted to explore the folds, junctions, and aberrant movements of organizing itself, which sometimes renders subjectivity and objectivity indistinguishable in time-​images. In my own future research, I want to investigate the visual and narrative assemblages of management and their consequences. Following Wylie (2006), I expect Deleuze’s topological approach to prove helpful in exploring the ‘landscapes’, ‘folds’, and ‘distributed selves’ of our connected world.

Appendix Table 22.A Interviews with Jean-​Jacques Annaud about The Name of the Rose Date and Title

Duration

Source

Description

2014 long interview at the musée de Cluny about making the movie

1h 54mins

https://​www.youtube. com/​watch?v=​ xz1mKczvyCk

Jean-​Jacques Annaud details the long genealogy of the movie The Name of the Rose, from the book to the movie and its reception.

1986 interview for RTS

10mins 17secs

https://​www.youtube. com/​watch?v=​ fBwbBnZlkEk

Long interview about the process of elaboration of the movie.

1986 ‘Le nom de la Rose: Sherlock Holmes au Moyen Age’

1min 41secs

https://​www.ina.fr/​ contenus-​editoriaux/​ articles-​editoriaux/​ le-​nom-​de-​la-​rose-​ sherlock-​holmes-​au-​ moyen-​age/​

Extract of an interview with Annaud.

(continued)

460   François-Xavier de Vaujany Table 22.A  Continued Date and Title

Duration

Source

Description

1986 ‘Le nom de la rose: à propos des décors’

1min 30secs

https://​www.ina.fr/​ video/​R16343616

Interview about the movie set.

1986 interview for clap 3mins 14secs 3 about the general concept

https://​www.ina.fr/​ video/​R16343615

General interview.

1986 sequence of clap 3 about the music

https://​www.ina.fr/​ video/​R16343618

Specific interview about the soundtrack.

2014 gallery of pictures 43mins commented on by Annaud

Inside the new version of the DVD

Jean-​Jacques Annaud comments on a set of pictures that epitomize important moments for him in the creation of his movie.

2018 Sean Connery was not Annaud’s first choice

43mins 58secs

https://​www.youtube. com/​watch?v=​ oSoFoRxecM0

Long recent interview with Jean-​Jacques Annaud (for his book Une vie pour le cinema). Comes back to the genesis and story of The Name of the Rose.

2019 masterclass at Cannes

1h

https://​www.youtube. com/​watch?v=​ 3pRNBnVGMsE

The techniques and approaches to cinema used by Annaud. Long extracts about The Name of the Rose.

2019 ‘L’art de la négociation avec Sean Connery’

2mins 26secs

https://​www.youtube. com/​watch?v=​ AA5t5L-​3BoQ

Annaud’s story concerning socks and Sean Connery.

2018 ‘Jean-​Jacques Annaud invité de l’émission histoire de sur France 3’

23mins

https://​www.youtube. com/​watch?v=​ szZV2smclmE

Annaud’s move from advertising to the movie industry.

2019 ‘Toute ma vie pour le cinéma’. Interview sur TV 5

43mins

https://​www.youtube. com/​watch?v=​ PuNltSx_​AKc

Interview about Annaud’s life, career, and passion for cinema.

1min 56secs

Note: Archived by INA or other sources.

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Cinematographic Experience   461 Bergson, H. (1896). Matières et mémoire. Paris: PUF. Burchill, L. (2007). The topology of Deleuze’s spatium. Philosophy Today, 51(Supplement), 154–​160. de Saint Aubert, E. (2018). Rereading the later Merleau-​Ponty in the light of his unpublished work. In D. Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford handbook of the history of phenomenology (pp. 380–​ 395). Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Vaujany, F. X. (2022). Apocalypse managériale. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Deleuze, G. (1969). Logique du sens. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Deleuze, G. ([1983] 2014). Cinéma 2 –​L’image-​mouvement, Paris: Minuit. Deleuze, G. ([1985] 2014). Cinéma 2. L’image-​temps. Paris: Minuit. Eco, U. ([1980] 1982). Le nom de la rose (Il nome de la rosa). Paris: Grasset. Eriksson, K. (2005). Foucault, Deleuze, and the ontology of networks. The European Legacy, 10(6), 595–​610. Foucault, M. (2011). Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, ‘Hautes Études’. Paris: Seuil/​Gallimard. Grosz, E. (2005). Bergson, Deleuze and the becoming of unbecoming. Parallax, 11, 4–​13. Hamann, B. E. (2016). How to chronologize with a hammer, or, The myth of homogeneous, empty time’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(1), 261–​292. Hernes, T. (2014). A process theory of organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lapoujade, D. (2017). Aberrant movements: The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Boston; LIT Press. Lilley, S. (2009). Organising time: Contraction, synthesis, contemplation. Culture and Organization, 15(2), 135–​150. Mazis, G. A. (2016). Merleau-​Ponty and the face of the world. New York: Suny Press. Merleau-​Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-​Ponty, M. ([1955] 2014). Les aventures de la dialectique. Paris: Folio. Merleau-​Ponty, M. (1961). L’œil et l’esprit. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-​Ponty, M. (1964). Le visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard. Revel, J. (2015). Foucault avec Merleau-​Ponty: Ontologie politique, présentisme et histoire. Paris: Vrin. Tsoukas, H., & Chia, R. 2002. On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13(5), 567–​582. Wambacq, J. (2011). Depth and time in Merleau-​Ponty and Deleuze. Chiasmi International, 13, 327–​348. Whitehead, A. N. ([1929] 1978). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology. New York: The Free Press. Wylie, J. (2006). Depths and folds: On landscape and the gazing subject. Environment and Planning: Society and Space, 24(4), 519–​535.

Chapter 23

Organiz at i on as Au top oi et i c ‘Understa ndi ng ’ ? Whitehead, Merleau-​Ponty, and the Speculative Promise of a Process Phenomenology for MOS Andrew Kirkpatrick

23.1  Process Thought and Phenomenology: Two Traditions Intertwined? The present chapter seeks to outline the latent promise that a synthesis of Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics and Maurice Merleau-​Ponty’s embodied phenomenology might hold for Management and Organization Studies (MOS) when construed in terms of a ‘process phenomenology’. This reflects a synthesis between two key philosophical traditions to emerge and crystalize in the 20th century: phenomenology and process metaphysics. At first glance, and in terms of both style and impact, these traditions appear to be diametrically opposed. On the one hand, phenomenology—​ which, at least in its original, Husserlian formulation, is nominally concerned with the study of appearances at the expense of ontological or metaphysical concerns—​is one of the most influential philosophical movements of the 20th century. Despite deeper philosophical roots—​and internal divisions that would question the very possibility of such presuppositionless modes of inquiry—​there is a very clearly defined phenomenological canon. Beginning with Edmund Husserl, this is a tradition that is inclusive of such philosophical giants as Martin Heidegger, Jean-​Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-​ Ponty. Although its dominance would certainly wane by the late 1960s, this is a tradition

Autopoietic ‘Understanding’   463 that has nevertheless been transformative of—​and transformed by—​virtually all subsequent trends in continental philosophy.1 By contrast, ‘process philosophy’ is an umbrella term that is applied to a ‘submerged tradition’ of disparate and often ‘marginalized’ thinkers whose concerns are fundamentally, if not exclusively, metaphysical (see Robinson, 2009a: 6, 2009b: 47; Latour, 2011: ix). Broadly speaking, process thinkers are united in their fundamental opposition to ‘substance’ metaphysics. In this respect, the basic insights of process metaphysics are well-​ summarized by Nicholas Rescher: ‘Process metaphysics as a general line of approach holds that physical existence is at bottom processual; that processes rather than things best represent the phenomena that we encounter in the natural world about us’ (1996: 2). This reflects the affordance of ontological primacy to becoming over being and is a mode of thought that Rescher, and others, trace back to pre-​Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (c.535–​475 bce). Hailing from the Milesian School of Ionian Naturalists, and invoking fire as ‘the most changeable and ephemeral of [ . . . ] elemental forces’, Heraclitus’s doctrine of flux depicts the world as ‘a manifold of opposed forces joined in mutual rivalry, [and] interlocked in constant strife and conflict’ (Rescher, 1996: 9). This stands in direct contrast to the static system of Parmenides (c.475 bce) for whom ultimate reality—​the One—​is understood to be ‘ungenerated, imperishable, indivisible, perfect and motionless’ (Blackburn, 1996: 278). As Anthony Kenny notes, according to this stance: Whatever there is, whatever can be thought of, is for Parmenides nothing other than Being. Being is one and indivisible: it has no beginning and no end, and it is not subject to temporal change [ . . . ] Being is everlastingly the same, and time is unreal because past, present, and future are all one. (2010: 20–​1)

While Plato’s two-​ world system attempts to reconcile Parmenidean Being and Heraclitean Becoming, Parmenidean Being nevertheless maintains ontological primacy for Plato. In this regard, and although Heraclitus and Parmenides both share something insofar as each is a monist, it is the qualitative, rather than quantitative, nature of their respective ‘one’ that provides the clearest distinction between process thought and substance metaphysics. While Rescher notes that Heraclitus is almost ‘universally recognised as the founder of the process approach’ (1996: 9), as Arran Gare points out, the foundations for process thought can be traced back further to Anaximander (c.610–​ 546 bce), who speculated that fundamental reality consists of a ‘boundless’, ‘unlimited’, or ‘undefined’ apeiron. According to this view, the becoming of the world is said to consist of a process of ‘limiting of the unlimited’ (Gare, 1996: 310, 2007, 2016: 40). In the 20th century, Henri Bergson (1859–​1941) and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–​ 1947) became the dominant figures in process thought. Insofar as he is largely responsible 1  Even if—​as in the post-​structuralist thought of Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault—​this involved a reaction against or indeed ‘radicalization of ’ phenomenology (see Descombes, 1980: 136−7; Carman & Hansen, 2005: 20; Dorfman, 2009, 294).

464   Andrew Kirkpatrick for reviving the language of ‘becoming’ in the 20th century, Bergson may reasonably be considered the ‘progenitor of modern process philosophy’ (Linstead, 2014: 218). This certainly seems plausible given that Whitehead, from whom we get the first explicit process metaphysical scheme in the 20th century, emphasizes his own indebtedness to Bergson in the preface of his major work Process and Reality (1929). Alongside the relatively modern thought of Bergson and Whitehead, we can also situate the American Pragmatists C. S. Peirce (1839–​1914), William James (1842–​1910), John Dewey (1859–​ 1952), and George Herbert Mead (1863–​1931).2 Of course, this is a far from exhaustive list, and we might also include thinkers as diverse as Aristotle (384–​322 bce), Baruch Spinoza (1632–​77), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–​1716), Georg Whilhem Friedrich Hegel (1770–​1831), Friedrich von Schelling (1775–​1854), Samuel Alexander (1859–​1938), Martin Heidegger (1889–​1976), Gilles Deleuze (1925–​95), and Maurice Merleau-​Ponty (1908–​61) among the ranks of major process thinkers—​or as major thinkers who exhibit varying degrees of ‘process’ thought. Thus, and although the antecedents for modern process thought can be found in the ancient philosophies of Anaximander and Heraclitus, it also remains a strikingly modern—​or ‘constructively postmodern’ (Griffin, 1993)—​worldview; one that has a grounding in, and has positively influenced, major advances in post-​Newtonian science. In this regard, and as Gare notes: ‘In general, process philosophers present themselves as the successors of scientific materialism and are concerned to show that for all its achievements, scientific materialism has foundered intellectually and practically’ (2008: 26). Take Whitehead. Originally trained as a mathematician, Whitehead’s turn to metaphysics was prompted by the need to reinterpret the world based on developments in modern physics (see Gare, 1995: 116–​18, 2017: 133; McLaren, 2008: 72; Stengers, 2011: 119). Beyond simply being influenced by scientific advances, however, Whitehead’s work has also had a profound impact on scientific thinkers and fields. As Jorge Luis Nobo notes, Charles Birch, David Bohm, Karl Pribram, Ilya Prigogine, Henry Pierce Stapp, and W. H. Thorpe are just a handful of eminent scientists who have found Whitehead’s metaphysical ideas ‘significantly relevant to their own specialized investigations, or whose own philosophical speculations exhibit remarkably Whiteheadian overtones’ (1986: xiii). While Whitehead had the benefit of an already burgeoning scientific movement to help prompt his process cosmology, it would be remiss of us to discount the insights afforded to us by the ancients. As theoretical physicist, and pioneering figure in quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg puts it: ‘Modern physics is in some way extremely near to the doctrines of Heraclitus. If we replace the word “fire” by the word “energy” we can almost repeat his statements word for word from our modern point of view’ (1958: 62–​3). But it is not just Heraclitus who accords with the insights of modern physics. Indeed, Heisenberg argues that, in light of this new science, the ‘correct’ view of nature essentially ‘corresponds to the doctrine of Anaximander’ (Heisenberg, 1958: 62–​3; Spariosu, 1989: 278). In this regard, and whether we take Anaximander or Heraclitus—​or even Bergson or Whitehead—​as ‘the’ founding

2 

With both James and Dewey acknowledged by Whitehead in the preface of Process and Reality.

Autopoietic ‘Understanding’   465 figure of modern process thought, it is clear that there are advantages in adopting a process perspective when seeking to understand not only the quantum minutiae of the natural world, but also the macroscopic phenomena we encounter in our day-​to-​day life. It is this latter aspect of understanding that a ‘process phenomenology’ largely concerns itself with, and it is this latter aspect that both Whitehead and Merleau-​Ponty strove to articulate in their respective ‘process’ philosophies.

23.2  Against Objective Thought: Whitehead, Merleau-​Ponty, and the Bifurcation of Nature While by no means the only process metaphysician of the 20th century, Whitehead has certainly become ‘the dominant figure’ of process thought (Rescher, 1996: 20).3 Partially explaining this dominance is the fact that Whitehead’s work is in many ways representative of the most ‘complete’ culmination—​and indeed articulation—​of all preceding process thought as a genuine metaphysical system of process thought. For this reason, Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme will be taken as the background against which a ‘process phenomenology’ can stand out. Likewise, and although a process phenomenology may not be an exclusively Merleau-​Pontian style of phenomenology, Merleau-​Ponty arguably provides us with a reasonably ‘complete’, if implicit, process phenomenology in both his early and late works. This is despite—​or indeed perhaps because of—​the thoroughly ‘incomplete’—​and subsequently open-​ended—​nature of his philosophical œuvre.4 Such a statement is not without controversy, and largely turns on whether or not we trace a fundamental continuity between the early and the late Merleau-​Ponty—​the latter of whom, as noted below, provides us with a far more explicit ‘process’ ontology.5 Whether or not we accept such a continuity in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought—​or are willing to recognize the early Merleau-​Ponty as a ‘process’ phenomenologist per se—​it is nevertheless through a synthesis of Whitehead and Merleau-​Ponty’s respective thought that we may hope to arrive at an explicit, and importantly workable, ‘process phenomenology’ from which we may then derive speculative insights for MOS. 3 

At least in the Anglosphere. As noted above, however, Whitehead expresses his own indebtedness to Bergson. 4 Which itself may be seen as emblematic of Merleau-​ Ponty’s own ‘hyper-​dialectic’. Described by Sartre as Merleau-​Ponty’s ‘decapitated’ dialectic, this is a dialectic that rejects the finality of any formal synthesis and which, in doing so, bears similarities with Whitehead’s own, synthesis deferring, approach to the Hegelian dialectic (see Merleau-​Ponty, [1964] 1968: 94−5; Sartre, [1964] 1998: 614; Kirkpatrick, 2018: 72−4). 5 For more on debates regarding Merleau-​ Ponty’s movement from phenomenology to ontology, see François-​Xavier de Vaujany’s chapter ‘From Phenomenology to a Metaphysics of History: The Unfinished Odyssey of Merleau-​Ponty’ (Chapter 5 of this volume).

466   Andrew Kirkpatrick At its most basic level, Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme is concerned with the becoming of ‘actual entities’, or those ‘real’ facts of nature that make up the actual world (Whitehead, [1929] 1978: 18). However, this appeal to ‘realness’ is only ‘provisional’ insofar as the actual entities described by Whitehead are understood as processes of becoming rather than eternal, unchanging substances (Whitehead, [1925] 1967: 91). For this reason, actual entities are interchangeably referred to as ‘actual occasions’ or ‘units of experience’, whereby ‘to experience’ simply means being subject to happenings or undergoing a process of change. As Whitehead puts it: ‘[E]‌xperience involves a becoming [. . . which] means that something becomes’, with that which becomes involving ‘repetition transformed into novel immediacy’ (Whitehead, [1929] 1978: 18, 136–​7). If we understand actual entities as units of experience, as processes of becoming, and as the events that constitute nature, then we can begin to think about the ‘life’, as it were, of actual occasions. This is understood as a process of attaining ‘satisfactions’ or ‘achievements’, with ‘concrescence’ the word used to describe the phase of growth that entities undergo in achieving their ‘satisfaction’ (Whitehead, [1929] 1978: 40). This involves the growing together of ‘many’ actual entities into the unity of ‘one’ actual world through acts of positive and negative prehension. Coming from the Latin prehensio meaning ‘to seize’, this involves the seizing of data from the past actual world, internalizing it, and transforming it into a novel iteration of nature. Such positive prehensions are termed ‘feelings’, whereby feeling is understood to be analogous to perception.6 For this reason, Whitehead also refers to actual entities as ‘acts of perceptivity’ ([1929] 1978: 295). Thus we can understand that when an actual entity, as an experiencing subject, prehends an external object, it is perceiving, experiencing, and feeling that object (Kirkpatrick, 2017a: 185). In this respect, and as Wiehl notes, Whitehead’s metaphysics can thus be understood as a ‘cosmology of feeling’ whereby ‘feeling’ and ‘sensation’ are taken as ‘the basic behavior patterns of concrete subjects’ (Wiehl, 1990: 127). However, this mode of prehension—​referred to as the ‘physical pole’—​only makes up one side of concrescence. The second half of prehension is a self-​directed component called the ‘mental’ or ‘conceptual’ pole of prehension. That it is termed ‘mental’ is not meant to imply an act of consciousness, but rather to indicate the prehension of what Whitehead terms ‘eternal objects’ ([1929] 1978: 301). Referred to as ‘pure potentials’—​ and finding their classical equivalence in the Platonic Form—​eternal objects are said to reflect the ‘subjective aim’ or ‘lure’ of an actual entity (pp. 23, 44, 85, 149). However, it is important to note that, rather than the static Platonic form, Whitehead’s characterization of ‘eternal objects’ qua ‘pure potentials’ has more in common with that of a dialectical Gestalt form.7 In this respect, and as Weber notes, eternal objects are really only ‘quasi-​Platonic’ in function (2006, 9). While perhaps poorly named, Whitehead 6 

As Whitehead puts it: ‘a simple physical feeling is the most primitive type of an act of perception’ ([1929] 1978: 236). 7  Whitehead himself would even go on to praise the ‘great merit of the ‘Gestalt’ people’ in order to correct Charles Hartshorne’s misinterpretation of his doctrine of eternal objects (Whitehead, [1936] 1989: 199; Kirkpatrick, 2022: 332−333).

Autopoietic ‘Understanding’   467 emphasizes that eternal objects serve to overcome, rather than simply replace, the problematic category of universals (Whitehead, [1936] 1989: 199; Kirkpatrick, 2022: 332). Nevertheless, we can understand that while concrescence involves the seizing of objective data from the past actual world, it also involves the taking up of future possible worlds by way of a subjective aim qua final cause.8 Echoing the Heraclitean claim that ‘each form of matter makes its appearance by the death of another’ (Guthrie, 1993: 206), for Whitehead, the ‘relatedness of actualities’ is understood as ‘the appropriation of the dead by the living’ ([1929] 1978: xiii). In this regard, the becoming of an actual occasion is effectively understood as a synthesis between the entire actual past and all possible futures as gathered up in one momentary ‘satisfaction’ of nature. Such satisfactions then serve as the objective data of the past actual world that is available for positive prehension in the becoming of new entities. This attainment of satisfaction signifies both the birth and death of a given actual occasion, whereby upon perishing, an actual entity will achieve its ‘immortality’ as objective data available for prehension in new acts of concrescence (Whitehead, [1929] 1978: 29). It is in this sense that each occasion is understood as both a subject and object insofar as it is a product/​producer of nature as a whole. In this regard, and in order to overcome the problematic language of subject/​object, Whitehead introduces the term ‘subject-​superject’. He writes: ‘An actual entity is at once the subject experiencing and the superject of its experiences. It is subject-​superject and neither half of this description can for a moment be lost sight of ’ ([1929] 1978: 29). This reflects a difference between ‘publicity’ and ‘privacy’. As Whitehead notes, an ‘actual entity considered in reference to the publicity of things is a “superject” ’, while an ‘actual entity considered in reference to the privacy of things is a “subject’ ” ’ (p. 289). However, and although ‘[t]‌he term “subject” will mostly be employed when the actual entity is considered in respect to its own real internal constitution [. . . it must] always be construed as an abbreviation of “subject-​superject” ’ (p. 29). As Whitehead puts it, according to ‘the doctrine of the emergent unity of the superject’: An actual entity is to be conceived both as a subject presiding over its own [private] immediacy of becoming, and a superject which is the atomic creature exercising its [public] function of objective immortality. It has become a ‘being’; and it belongs to the nature of every ‘being’ that is a [real] potential for every ‘becoming’. ([1929] 1978: 45)

It is in this sense that ‘the many become one’ and in doing so ‘are increased by one’ (p. 21). However, and although ‘the many become one’, it is also by virtue of the plurality of actual entities that ‘the one’ is simultaneously understood as a society of actual entities. As Whitehead puts it, a ‘society’ is ‘a nexus with a social order’ while an ‘enduring object’

8 For

a more complete introduction to Whitehead’s philosophy, see C. Robert Mesle’s Process Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (2008).

468   Andrew Kirkpatrick or ‘enduring creature’ is ‘a society whose social order has taken on the special form of “personal order” ’ ([1929] 1978: 34). Just as the private, subjective becoming of an actual occasion will involve ‘a moment of passage from decided public facts to a novel public fact’, Whitehead notes that ‘societies of enduring objects’ including ‘material bodies [ . . . ] are, at the same time, public fact and private experience’ (pp. 289, 326). This can be understood in terms of a human body, whose public manifestation is the consequence of a society of cells and organelles, each of which undergo ‘private’ experiences of metabolization to generate not only their own individuality as public fact, but also that of the whole body of which they are a constituent part.9 In this instance, both the macroscopic unity of the lived body and the microscopic unity of the individual cell may be regarded as ‘actual occasions’ insofar as both are real processes that are simultaneously abstracted from, while contributing to, the passage of nature. Thus, and for Whitehead, the temporal and spatial world is not understood to consist of a collection of substances, but rather a plurality of processes or events.10 While actual entities are in a sense atomistic, in that they are the smallest conceivable units of reality, they are not simple, isolated, or closed; rather, they are complex, relational, and interdependent (Whitehead, [1929] 1978: 18). In this respect, and insofar as the becoming of nature involves, at bottom, a fundamentally subjective process of becoming, it is true that Whitehead’s metaphysics is also a philosophy of subjective experience—​one in which the problem of perception is central (Lango, 2008: 229). As noted above, although Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme was prompted by scientific advances that served to break down the classical worldview of Newtonian physics, his work was also a response to a thoroughly philosophical problem; the bifurcation of nature. Involving a fundamental split between ‘mind’ on the one hand and ‘matter’ on the other (Whitehead, [1925] 1967: 57), the bifurcation of nature arises through what Whitehead terms ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’, or the ‘the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete’ (p. 51). This is a mode of thought that finds expression in both Cartesian dualism and Locke’s similarly dualistic theory of primary and secondary qualities (Kirkpatrick, 2022: 309). Whereas a doctrine of primary and secondary qualities would separate so-​called ‘secondary qualities’, such as colour, taste, and sound, from ‘real’ and measurable qualities such as size, shape, and motion—​and designate these secondary qualities as a lesser form of reality qua ‘appearance’—​Whitehead’s position is that nature must be accepted in total (Balz, 1934: 281; Kirkpatrick, 2022: 308−309). Put simply, and for Whitehead: ‘Nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process. It is nonsense to ask if the colour red is real. The colour red is an ingredient in the process of realisation. The realities of nature are the prehensions in nature, that is to say, the events in nature’ ([1925] 9  In

this respect, and as Mesle notes: ‘Your body is a structured society including many levels of subordinate societies—​bodily organs, cells, molecules, atoms, etc. Societies that endure over time and may be said to have a personal order’ (2008: 106). 10  As Mesle notes, for Whitehead: ‘The world is composed of events and processes [ . . . ] What is are events and [the] relationships that constitute the process of becoming and perishing’ (2008: 8, 50).

Autopoietic ‘Understanding’   469 1967: 72). While Whitehead’s is an explicitly metaphysical approach to this problem—​ whereby a more generalized notion of ‘subjective experience’ may also be applied to (if not derived from) the subjective experience of the lived body11—​we find an allied, albeit primarily phenomenological, approach to the bifurcation of nature in the works of Merleau-​Ponty. Although not named as such, this finds expression in Merleau-​Ponty’s efforts to overcome the dualisms—​and indeed bifurcations—​associated with an ‘objective’ mode of thought (Kirkpatrick, 2022: 310−314). As he puts it in Phenomenology of Perception: ‘Objective thought [ . . . ] knows only dichotomies [ . . . ] it defines pure concepts that are mutually exclusive: the notion of extension [ . . . ] and the notion of thought’ ([1945] 2012: 50). While such an approach is clearly evident in Descartes’s dualistic philosophy, rather than belonging exclusively to such ‘intellectualist’ modes of thought, Merleau-​Ponty maintains that it is a mode of thought that also underpins ‘empiricist’ accounts of perception. As Lawrence Hass notes, according to Merleau-​Ponty: Intellectualists [ . . . ] and empiricists alike have held essentially the same theory, that is, Descartes’s theory: the view that external material objects activate one’s sense organs, which cause sensations in one’s mind or brain [ . . . ] Locke assumes Descartes’s dualistic theory of perception [ . . . ] as the bedrock for his own empiricist theory of knowledge. (2008: 28)

As Dillon notes, more than just accepting of Cartesian mind/​body dualism, objective thought also carries with it the ‘Cartesian prejudice of determinate being’. Associated with Descartes’s quest for certainty, this itself presupposes a more general Parmenidean metaphysics of static being whereby only that which is can be known, while ‘that which genuinely is’ excludes both ‘coming into being and passing away’ (Dillon, 1997: 49, 71; Kirkpatrick, 2022: 310−311). It is here that Merleau-​Ponty’s adoption of Gestalt theories of perception take on increased significance in his rejection of objective thought. Coming from the German word for ‘form’ or ‘shape’, a Gestalt is an ‘organized entity’ or perceptual whole that is understood to be something other than the sum of its parts (Köhler, [1947] 1992: 177). Contra empiricist accounts of perception—​in which perceptual objects are understood to be nothing other than the sum of atomistic parts—​for Gestalt theorists, the most basic unit of perception is the contrasting, figure-​on-​a-​background structure of the Gestalt (Dillon, 1997: 60; Hass, 2008: 30). In this respect, and rather than reflecting a quantitative summation of parts—​for instance, an assemblage of primary and secondary qualities—​perception is understood to involve the discernment of qualitative differences, such as might occur when perceiving the figure of a black dot over and against a white background. However, more than simply distinguishing a figure from its 11 As Lango notes, although Whitehead’s metaphysics ‘stemmed primarily from concepts of mathematics and natural science’, there is also a ‘subjectively experiential facet, which stemmed primarily from a phenomenology of human experience’ (2008: 229; emphasis added).

470   Andrew Kirkpatrick background, Gestalt theories of perception also serve to unite figure and background insofar as each are seen to function as two necessary ‘sides’ of a perceptual whole. That is to say, the perceived figure necessarily requires the background against which it stands out as a discernible whole. Conversely, and in order for something to be a background, we require a contrasting Gestalt figure. Once we have such a contrast, we can then undertake a Gestalt shift by, for instance, shifting our attention to the perceived background and bringing it to the fore; by focusing on, for instance, a white piece of paper that has been marked by a black spot of ink.12 Indeed, and according to Merleau-​Ponty, it is this double-​sided nature of the Gestalt form that provides the very conditions for the possibility of perception at all. As Merleau-​Ponty himself puts it: ‘Gestalt theory tells us that a figure on the background is the most basic sensible given we can have’ whereby a ‘truly homogeneous area, offering nothing to perceive, cannot be given to any perception’ ([1945] 2012: 4). However, more than just applying to instances of visual perception, Gestalt theories of perception also apply to hearing—​and to time (Kirkpatrick, 2022: 311). As Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler puts it: ‘forms in time behave just like shapes in space: a melody, for instance, may be given in different keys, and yet remains the same qua melody’ ([1947] 1992: 198). Likewise, and as Merleau-​Ponty notes in Phenomenology of Perception: ‘What we have just said about spatial perspective could also be said about temporal perspective’ (p. 71). We find this further expressed in his essay ‘The Film and the New Psychology’, wherein he writes, in relation to Gestalt theories of perception: The same type of analysis can be applied to hearing: it will simply be a matter of temporal forms rather than spatial ones. A melody [ . . . ] is a figure of sound and does not mingle with the background noises (such as the siren one hears in the distance during a concert) which may accompany it. The melody is not a sum of notes, since each note only counts by virtue of the function it serves in the whole which is why the melody does not perceptibly change when transposed, that is, when all its notes are changed while their interrelationships and the structure of the whole remain the same. On the other hand, just one single change in these interrelationships will be enough to modify the entire make-​up of the melody. (1964b: 49).

That is to say, a melody is not just an assemblage of notes, but rather a sequence of qualitative contrasts. In this respect, and as Käufer & Chemero note, ‘the melody must be something other than the notes that make it up. This something else is the Gestalt or form quality, which can remain constant despite changes in the parts’ (2015: 82–​3). In light of this, and as Ted Toadvine notes, rather than merely maintaining a ‘spatial’ structure, the Gestalt form, as adopted by Merleau-​Ponty, must also be understood as a fundamentally temporal whole (2009: 46). 12 Whereby

perceptual act.

perhaps the room in which we stand becomes the contrasting ‘background’ for this

Autopoietic ‘Understanding’   471 Grounded in his adoption of Gestalt theories of perception, Merleau-​Ponty’s opposition to objective thought also finds expression in his transformed understandings of both Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenological methodologies. First, and in terms of Husserlian methodology, Merleau-​Ponty notably retains the phenomenological reduction, or epoché, which serves as the starting point for Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Whereas Husserl’s original formulation involved a complete, quasi-​Cartesian retreat from the world of the ‘natural attitude’ (Husserl, [1931] 1982: 30–​ 1) Merleau-​Ponty instead emphasizes the impossibility of a ‘complete’ reduction. In this sense—​and unlike a ‘complete’ reduction—​Merleau-​Ponty’s ‘incomplete’ reduction does not seek to ‘cut’ our ties to the world of the natural attitude. Rather, it seeks to simply loosen those threads so as to ‘rupture our familiarity’ with the world (Merleau-​ Ponty, [1945] 2012: xxvii; Kirkpatrick, 2018: 74; Kirkpatrick, 2022: 323−324). Thus, and unlike in Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenological methodology does not entail a wholesale rejection of the phenomenological reduction. Rather, and in conformation with Gestalt theories of perception, Merleau-​Ponty maintains that it is only against the background of the reduction that our sense of être-​au-​ monde, or being-​at-​the-​world,13 is able to ‘appear’. As Merleau-​Ponty puts it: ‘Far from being [ . . . ] the formula for an idealist philosophy, the phenomenological reduction is in fact the formula for an existential philosophy: Heidegger’s “In-​der-​Welt-​Sein” [being-​ in-​the-​world] only appears against the background of the phenomenological reduction’ ([1945] 2012: lxxviii). Alongside the phenomenological reduction, Merleau-​Ponty also adopts, and modifies, Husserl’s notion of intentionality. Drawing on Husserl’s own distinction between ‘act intentionality’ and ‘operative intentionality’—​which Merleau-​ Ponty claims amounts to a difference between pointing and grasping—​Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology prioritizes the latter as a more basic mode of intentionality. Associated with the phenomenological ‘I can’—​as opposed to the Cartesian ‘I think’ that underpins both intellectualist and empiricist modes of objective thought—​such a mode of intentionality finds expression in Merleau-​Ponty’s characterization of the body-​subject as a primarily grasping—​rather than thinking—​being. In this respect, and while an act intentionality that is ‘of or about’ points at its object, the operative intentionality of the phenomenological ‘I can’ instead grasps at its object. Such a mode of intentionality is thus understood as ‘projective’ in the Heideggerian sense of the word; rather than maintaining a detached, and primarily intellectual, relation to its object, a ‘grasping’ operative intentionality instead implies a bodily intentionality that moves towards

13 

As Landes notes, although ‘the original translation of Heidegger’s In-​der-​Welt-​sein into French was être dans le monde [ . . . ] Merleau-​Ponty recognized that the French dans (“in”) perhaps covered over some of the important richness of Heidegger’s insights. His shift of the phrase to à (in the contraction au) introduces a rich set of relations since this preposition can be translated variously as “in”, “to”, “of ”, “at”, “toward”, and “belonging to” ’. Thus, rather than simply being ‘in’ the world, as Hamrick & Van der Veken note, the ‘au’ in être-​au-​monde is perhaps best understood in terms of being-​at-​the-​world (see Hamrick & Van der Veken, 2011: 18−19; Landes, 2012: xlix; Kirkpatrick, 2022: 324−325).

472   Andrew Kirkpatrick its object—​and towards its world (Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 2012: lxxxii; Kirkpatrick, 2017b: 328; Kirkpatrick, 2022: 323).14 Thus, and whereas ‘the act of pointing presupposes that the object, rather than being approached, grasped, and engulfed by the body, be maintained at a distance’ (Merleau-​ Ponty, [1945] 2012: 122–​3), an operative intentionality that grasps at its object effectively bridges this gap. Insofar as it serves to bridge this gap, it is this ‘enlarged notion of intentionality’ that is said to distinguish ‘phenomenological understanding’ from ‘classical intellection’, and it is this enlarged notion of intentionality that enables an otherwise static phenomenology to become ‘a phenomenology of genesis’ (Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 2012: lxxxii; emphasis added). Insofar as it results in a productive and co-​constituting (hyper-​)dialectical movement between self and world, we can understand the phenomenological reduction not as an end in itself, but as an ongoing process of stepping back from the world in order to plunge in (Kirkpatrick, 2018: 75; Kirkpatrick, 2022: 324). As per Gestalt theories of perception, it is only against the background of this process that the intentional objects of the world are able to ‘appear’ for us as graspable objects in themselves. That is, as ‘limited’ objects that are abstracted from an otherwise ‘unlimited’ background sea of flux.

23.3  Henri Bergson: A Bridge between Traditions? Thus, and despite their seemingly opposed philosophical starting points, we find some shared concerns at the heart of both Whiteheadian and Merleau-​Pontian thought. Both argue against the bifurcation of nature15 and stand united in their opposition to an ‘objective’ mode of thought that is grounded, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the static thought of Parmenidean metaphysics. Partially explaining these shared concerns is the positive influence of Henri Bergson on each. In order to appreciate Bergson’s philosophy,

14 

However, there is an important difference to note here. Whereas for Merleau-​Ponty our bodies are said to provide us with a primordial access to the world, for Heidegger it is our projective sense of ‘being-​ in-​the-​world’ that takes on ontological primacy (Low, 2009: 273). 15 Albeit in different ways. Although not recognized as such by Merleau-​ Ponty, and as Dillon points out, much of Merleau-​Ponty’s early work, particularly his rejection of ‘objective thought’, can be characterized as pushing back against the ‘fallacy of reifying abstractions’—​or of mistaking the abstract for the concrete (Dillon, 1997: 49, 156). In this respect, what Merleau-​Ponty terms ‘objective thought’ effectively coincides with what Whitehead terms ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. Thus, and although he employs a different method and terminology, Merleau-​Ponty nevertheless appears to be in fundamental agreement with Whitehead when it comes to the causes—​and problems—​associated with the bifurcation of nature. It is here that the positive influence of Schelling on both Whitehead and Merleau-​Ponty, as identified by Hamrick and Van der Veken, becomes an important link alongside their shared indebtedness to Bergson (see Hamrick & Van der Veken, 2011: 123−52).

Autopoietic ‘Understanding’   473 and the influence it had on both Whitehead and Merleau-​Ponty, we need to understand it against the background of Zeno of Elea’s paradoxes. A student of Parmenides, Zeno’s paradoxes primarily served to undermine the possibility of movement, and thus change, by reducing time to a series of isolated instants. Perhaps the clearest example of this, and the paradox that Bergson argues most directly against, is the Achilles paradox. In this paradox, Achilles is said to be in a footrace with a tortoise. Because Achilles is faster, the tortoise is given a head start. Though he may halve the distance between himself and the tortoise at each instant, by the time Achilles reaches a halfway point, the tortoise will have moved on, if only by a little bit. This leads to an infinite regress in which Achilles can never catch or overtake the tortoise.16 However, and as critics such as Aristotle have noted, Zeno’s argument relies upon the assumption that time is made up of a series of isolated, discrete, and self-​contained ‘nows’—​what Heidegger refers to as ‘the vulgar conception of time’ ([1927] 2010: 403)—​ and that ‘if this assumption is not granted, the argument fails’ (1996: 161–​2). Arguing that it is the spatialization of time—​or the habit of ‘converting time into space’ (2014: 258)—​that leads to its atomization into discrete instants, Bergson challenges Zeno’s assumption by recasting time as la durée—​duration. As Bergson puts it: ‘real duration is what we have always called time, but time perceived as indivisible’ (2007: 160). Understood as ‘real time’ as it is experienced rather than measured (Linstead, 2014: 222), unlike the homogeneity of Zeno’s abstracted, spatialized time—​which treats time as though it were a series of instants like beads on a necklace (Bergson, [1907] 1998: 3)—​ duration is understood as inherently heterogenous insofar as it can only be experienced through the perception of qualitative differences between past, present, and future. Such qualitative differences are reflected in the inherently temporal experience of listening to a melody. As Merleau-​Ponty reminds us, this involves the perception of a Gestalt whole. As he puts it: ‘While the notes taken separately have an equivocal signification [ . . . ] in the melody each one is demanded by the context and contributes its part in expressing something which is not contained in any one of them and which binds them together internally’ ([1942] 1963: 87). This is an insight that is almost certainly derived from Bergson who, in regard to temporal succession, likewise claims: When we listen to a melody we have the purest impression of succession we could possibly have—​an impression as far removed as possible from that of simultaneity—​ and yet it is the very continuity of the melody and the impossibility of breaking it up which makes that impression upon us. (2007: 160)

That is to say, a melody is not—​and simply cannot be—​given ‘in an instant’. Nor can Achilles’ movement. Zeno’s problem, according to Bergson, is that his paradox confuses

16 For

more on a process phenomenological interpretation of this paradox, see Kirkpatrick (2022: 315−329).

474   Andrew Kirkpatrick movement with space; it destroys the melodic unity of Achilles’s movement, resulting in a paradox whereby ‘movement and immobility coincide’ (2007: 155). In fact, and as a durational act of becoming, Achilles’ movement can only be abstracted as a series of standalone instants after the fact—​that is to say, after we invoke a spatialized conception of time. Contra Zeno, rather than understanding each of Achilles’s steps as composed of a series of isolated instants, Bergson maintains that we must instead understand these as ‘accomplishments’ of a ‘simple indivisible act’ ([1889] 2001: 113, 2007: 154–​5)—​a movement that, like a melodic Gestalt whole, is inherently temporal by virtue of the fact that it occurs through space and through time.17 Unlike duration, a spatialized instant does not endure. It simply ‘is’ in the Parmenidean sense of the word. As in atomistic accounts of perception, the spatialization of time sees movement—​and indeed time itself—​become a collection of thoroughly atemporal instants. We thus arrive at a concept of time that makes movement, change, and indeed time itself an impossibility. As Whitehead notes, to spatialize time in this way is to place the cart before the horse. Following Bergson, and extending his argument, Whitehead maintains that ‘an instant of time, without duration, is an imaginative logical construction’ ([1925] 1967: 65) and that to mistake such an abstraction for concrete reality is to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness—​or more accurately the fallacy of ‘simple location’. Referring equally to a ‘simple location’ in both space and time, this reflects a belief in a world composed of a ‘succession of instantaneous configurations of matter [ . . . ] or of material’ (Whitehead, [1925] 1967: 49–​50). Unlike simply located ‘matter’ or ‘material’, a real ‘thing’—​what Whitehead terms an ‘actual occasion’—​is understood to endure throughout a certain period of time; it is a duration in and of itself (Whitehead, [1920] 2004: 53–​5, 166). Likewise, Merleau-​Ponty adopts Bergson’s language of duration in his phenomenological descriptions of our own embodied becoming ([1945] 2012: 43, 71, 72, 293). Echoing Bergson’s critique of Zeno, Merleau-​Ponty’s ‘existential analyses’ of the body confirms that the lived body is not an object occupying a location in space and time, but rather an embodied, durational subject that inhabits space and time. As Merleau-​ Ponty puts it: ‘I am not in space and time, nor do I think space and time; rather, I am of space and time’ ([1945] 2012: 141; emphasis added). Most striking, however, is his claim that time itself ‘must be understood as a subject, and the subject must be understood as time’ (pp. 445, 452). That is to say, a duration must be understood as a subject while our subjective being must be understood as inherently durational. On this reading, our subjective becoming, and indeed that of the world, is not only temporal in a Bergsonian sense, it is also processual in the Whiteheadian sense. This processual becoming in and of the world is further reflected in what Toadvine, and others, identify as Merleau-​Ponty’s ‘gestalt ontology’ (Dillon, 1997; Toadvine, 2009). As Dillon notes, the ‘ontological implications’ of Merleau-​Ponty’s adoption of Gestalt theories of perception results in an ‘implicit ontology’ that ‘recognizes the Gestalt as a

17 

Rather than, for instance, being given ‘in an instant’—​or even in a series of instants.

Autopoietic ‘Understanding’   475 dynamic and emergent (rather than static) unity’ (1997: 67). Similarly, Toadvine argues that, for Merleau-​Ponty, the Gestalt is an integrative process that ‘proceeds historically [ . . . ] [enfolding] within itself the entire history of its becoming and the field against which it stands out’ (2009: 46). Rather than occupying a spatial—​although we may say ‘simple’—​location, the unity of the Gestalt is instead taken ‘to be diachronic, unfolding through time’ (Dillon, 1997: 67; emphasis added). In this sense, Toadvine maintains that, insofar as it is analogous to a fundamentally temporal and melodic Gestalt whole, it is no exaggeration to say that, for Merleau-​Ponty, nature itself is inherently musical or indeed symphonic (Merleau-​Ponty, [1942] 1963: 132; Toadvine, 2009: 23; Kirkpatrick, 2022: 340−343). In this respect, Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology is representative of a dynamic, double-​sided, Gestalt whole of both continuity and difference. On the one hand, and insofar as it unites a version of the Husserlian epoché with a Heideggerian mode of ‘being-​at-​the-​world’,18 Merleau-​Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is in many ways a synthesis between Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. However, it also bears the stigmata of a ‘process’ intervention in the phenomenological tradition—​one that ultimately provides the conditions for Merleau-​Ponty to move ‘beyond’—​and indeed depart from—​the phenomenologies of both Husserl and Heidegger. This is achieved through Merleau-​Ponty’s Bergson-​inspired—​and fundamentally durational—​account of embodied experience, which provides the temporal foundations through which his ‘indirect’, Gestalt ontology may find a later, more ‘direct’ expression as an explicit process ontology of flesh. In this sense, where Whitehead provides a metaphysical account of a durational, process philosophy, Merleau-​Ponty can be understood to provide us with an embodied, phenomenological account of process thought; one which already relies upon, and expresses, a fundamentally temporal—​and indeed ‘melodic’—​Gestalt ontology (Kirkpatrick, 2022).

23.4  Merleau-​Ponty’s Late Ontology: The Flesh as Process Although a fundamentally ‘process’ mode of thought can already be identified in Merleau-​Ponty’s earlier works, it is in his late, unfinished works that we catch a glimpse of a more explicit ‘process’ ontology. Here, and as Lingis notes, it is La chair du monde—​ the flesh of the world—​that ‘emerges as the ultimate notion of Merleau-​Ponty’s thought’ (Lingis, 1968: liv; Merleau-​Ponty, [1964] 1968: 140). But what is the flesh? If we were looking for a definitive account of the flesh in the primary literature, it would make sense to begin with Merleau-​Ponty’s latest finished work, the essay ‘Eye and Mind’.

18 

Although we might more accurately describe this as a ‘becoming-​at-​the-​world’.

476   Andrew Kirkpatrick While we get a fairly reasonable indication of what the ‘flesh’ of the world encompasses here, we nevertheless find it only indirectly broached. For instance, in his first reference to la chair in ‘Eye and Mind’, Merleau-​Ponty writes: My body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world [ . . . ] But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the same stuff as the body. (1964a: 163)

He goes on to repeat that ‘things and my body are made of the same stuff ’—​la même étoffe—​and uses flesh to describe not only the body, but also the flesh ‘of the world’ (Merleau-​Ponty, 1964a: 163–​4, 170). Worth noting is that the French étoffe translates to English as both ‘stuff ’ and ‘fabric’ (Johnson, 2010: 32). Consequently, when Merleau-​ Ponty says that we are ‘made from the same stuff ’, this also implies being made from the same fabric—​or perhaps the same event. In this regard, La chair du monde is also L’étoffe du monde—​the fabric of the world (Kirkpatrick, 2017a: 182). Despite its centrality to the late works—​and reflecting what Renaud Barbaras (2002) identifies as its inherent ‘ambiguity’—​the flesh nevertheless remains fairly elusive as a concept. In the absence of a definitive account in the primary literature, how are we to understand the flesh? One way is through a patchwork of interpretations against which some general notions of the flesh can stand out. We can then put these general notions into dialogue with Merleau-​Ponty’s own working notes in order to develop a more ‘complete’ idea of the flesh in all its guises. For instance, and as described by David Abram, we can understand the flesh as ‘the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both perceiver and perceived’ (1997: 66). Similarly, Galen Johnson identifies ‘flesh’ as the term ‘which Merleau-​Ponty arrived at to replace Substance, Matter, or Life as the name of Being’ (2010: xvii; emphasis added). Given this sense of generality—​and in order to navigate the flesh without effacing its ambiguity—​we can also follow Lawrence Hass and his identification of the three key ‘senses’ of flesh. That is, flesh as ‘carnality’, as ‘reversibility’, and as an ‘element of being’ (Hass, 2008: 201–​2; Kirkpatrick, 2017a: 177–​8). Beyond this, however, we also find references to the flesh as ‘mother’, as ‘Gestalt’, and indeed as temporality, in the manuscript and working notes of The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-​Ponty, [1964] 1968: 111).19 While Merleau-​Ponty is not exactly forthcoming when it comes to a positive description of the flesh, a process interpretation is neither radical nor entirely new (see Johnson, 2010: 33; Hamrick & Van der Veken, 2011; Bannon, 2014; Lau, 2016: 25–​44; Morris, 2018: 29–​30). This is especially true if ‘process’ is held in opposition to ‘substance’ or 19 Although, and as Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (2018) notes, the posthumous works produced by Claude Lefort can only take us so far—​access to a large number of unpublished manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France has allowed scholars, such as Saint Aubert, to effectively trace the development of Merleau-​Ponty’s late thought in relation to his published and unpublished works.

Autopoietic ‘Understanding’   477 ‘matter’. In this respect, Merleau-​Ponty is fairly explicit in identifying what the flesh is not—​i.e. it ‘is not matter, is not mind, is not substance’ ([1964] 1968: 139, 146, 274). However, and beyond Merleau-​Ponty’s negative descriptions, the most obvious point of departure when considering a positive account of the flesh can be found in Merleau-​ Ponty’s claims regarding the flesh as an ‘element’ of general being (Muller, 2017: 187). As Merleau-​Ponty writes: ‘To designate [the flesh], we should need the old term “element,” in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-​temporal individual and the idea’ ([1964] 1968: 139). This is representative of Merleau-​Ponty’s desire to return—​through the new category of flesh—​to an essentially pre-​Socratic mode of thought that existed prior to eidetic or ‘objective’ thought (Madison, 1981: 176, 244–​6). In this regard, and insofar as Thales identified general being with water, Anaximines with air, and Heraclitus with fire (Bostock, 1996: xi–​xii), we can understand that Merleau-​Ponty’s invocation of ‘element’ is inspired by the thought of the Ionian Naturalists and Milesian schools of philosophy. Such a ‘pre-​Socratic’ approach certainly makes sense if, as Hamrick & Van der Veken suggest, we consider Merleau-​Ponty’s project in terms of a ‘search for what is ontologically prior to [both] consciousness and the subject-​object relation’ (Hamrick & Van der Veken, 2011: 73). As Hamrick & Van der Veken note, this requires a principle of unity and difference in the flesh through which Merleau-​Ponty can successfully account for both ‘the one’ and ‘the many’. Such a principle can be found in Anaximander’s process thought. Justification for such a reading can be found in Merleau-​Ponty’s claim that although the flesh must be understood as an ‘element’, he also explicitly distinguishes this particular element from ‘water, air, earth and fire’ ([1964] 1968: 139). For this reason, we may understand the flesh as something akin to Heraclitean ‘flux’, or Anaximander’s ‘boundless’, ‘unlimited’, or ‘undefined’ apeiron—​according to which the becoming of the world is said to consist of a process of ‘limiting of the unlimited’. That we should characterize ‘flesh’ as ‘flux’, ‘the boundless’, or ‘the unlimited’ over other pre-​Socratic elements, such as ‘earth’, ‘air’, ‘fire’, or ‘water’, is down to Merleau-​Ponty’s claim that although ‘what we are calling flesh [ . . . ] has no name in philosophy’, we ‘must not think the flesh starting from substances’ ([1964] 1968: 147). Likewise, as Simon Blackburn notes, for Anaximander: ‘[The] one kind of matter, out of which everything else in all its variety is made, must not end with water or fire or some other particular kind of matter, but with something independent of both structure and form: something about which nothing can be said’ (1996: 16). In this regard, both ‘flesh’ and ‘apeiron’ are employed to denote an element so primordial that it previously had no name in philosophy. Nevertheless, to grasp it, we require a name; or better yet, we require a metaphor. For Anaximander this metaphor involved not so much a thing as it did an act or a process; a limiting. For Merleau-​Ponty the metaphor was flesh—​not as a substance but as an immaterial element. But can Anaximander’s apeiron account for the required principles of both unity and difference? That is, can it account for a productive dialectic between the one and the many? As Madison (1981) notes, for Anaximander ‘what is’ is both one and many.

478   Andrew Kirkpatrick Indeed: ‘To differentiate itself, [the apeiron] must contain within itself something like a principle of difference; while being undifferentiated and indeterminate, it must include incipient oppositions within itself ’ (p. 244). It is in this sense that, through a process of limiting the unlimited, competing opposites are able to arise, resulting in situations whereby sometimes ‘one of a pair of opposites is dominant’, and ‘sometimes the other’ (Kenny, 2010: 12). Such a process is mirrored in Merleau-​Ponty’s reversibility thesis and his descriptions of double-​sensation (Merleau-​Ponty, [1964] 1968: 248–​9). Just as, in the experience of two hands touching, sometimes my left hand is touching and dominant, while at other times it is touched and subordinate, Anaximander’s opposites ‘encroach upon one another and then withdraw’ through an interchange that is ‘governed by a principle of reciprocity’ (Kenny, 2010: 12, emphasis added). In this regard, we can understand that it is in the very act of perceiving—​or touching—​that each hand is able to emerge as a ‘limited’ fold from a previously ‘unlimited’, experiential, and indeed elemental whole; my body as flesh and as Gestalt. It is in this sense that Anaximander’s apeiron—​as both a general principle and an element of being—​is capable of spanning both carnal and reversible senses of the flesh. In doing so, it simultaneously reflects the principles of both unity and difference. However, more than just a principle of unity and difference, the flesh—​as process—​essentially reflects a Gestalt principle of unity-​in-​and-​of-​difference.

23.5  Becoming as Co-​P rehension and Co-​Naissance: Organization as Autopoietic Understanding? However, it is not enough to simply understand the flesh as process or apeiron; we must also be able to account for how the flesh becomes in Merleau-​Pontian terms. In this regard, and beyond affinities with ‘carnal’, ‘reversible’, or ‘elemental’ flesh, we also find a sense of pregnancy in the apeiron (Serres, 1993: 266) that aligns with Merleau-​Ponty’s descriptions of the flesh as mother. How, might such ‘visible’ flesh be born? As Merleau-​Ponty notes, ‘the world becomes visible’ through ‘the flesh wherein the object is born’ ([1964] 1968: 248). However, just as ‘this massive corporeity [is not] all there is to the body’, the flesh ‘that one sees and touches is not all there is to flesh’ (p. 144). If not its ‘massive corporeity’, then what is the body? As Merleau-​Ponty—​ quoting Antoine de Saint-​Exupéry—​puts it in the concluding lines of Phenomenology of Perception: ‘Man is a knot of relations, and relations alone count for man’ ([1945] 2012: 483). In this regard, our body is understood as more than the sum of its objective parts; it is also its intentional threads, projects, hopes, desires, and so on. However, and in the same way that ‘relations alone count for man’, Merleau-​Ponty also writes that ‘the real’—​which we can understand in terms of the flesh of the world—​amounts to ‘a tightly woven fabric’ ([1945] 2012: lxxiv; emphasis added). But woven of what? It is here

Autopoietic ‘Understanding’   479 that the curious italicization of ‘ob-​’ in ‘object’ takes on increased significance. If, like our bodies, the world is understood to be more than the sum of its ‘visible’ or objective parts, it follows that—​rather than ob-​jective—​the flesh of the world is fundamentally pro-​jective. If we understand that the flesh of the world is projective in the same sense that the human body is projective, then it follows that the flesh of the world must also be woven from a network of latent intentional threads that exist between the ‘visible’ objects of the world’s flesh. In this regard, and insofar as Merleau-​Ponty’s late ontology is said to constitute an ontologie de la naissance et de la co-​naissance—​or ‘an ontology of birth and co-​birth’ (Hamrick & Van der Veken, 2011: 26, 62)—​we can understand the ‘intentional’ becoming of the world’s flesh in terms of a relational co-​naissance. A term derived from Paul Claudel, the notion of co-​naissance carries an important double meaning for Merleau-​Ponty. Naissance is French for ‘birth’, while connaissance comes from the verb connaître, meaning ‘to know’ or ‘to understand’. Hence, to have ‘co-​ naissance’ is, in a sense, to have an experience or event involving both a form of ‘understanding’ and ‘co-​birth’ (Hamrick & Van der Veken, 2011: 26; Kirkpatrick, 2022: 347). However, connaître has a subtle but important difference to the verb savoir, which also means ‘to know’. Savoir is used for knowledge of facts,20 while connaître is used for knowledge of people and places. As a noun, savoir refers to a shared body of knowledge, while connaissance typically refers to an individual’s understanding of something. For instance, to intimately know a place or person—​such as a hometown or a sibling—​in terms of connaître is very different from knowing the facts about a place or person in terms of savoir. We can understand this difference through reference to Merleau-​Ponty’s distinction between act and operative intentionality. In this regard, to know in terms of savoir is to know ‘of ’ or ‘about’ something—​it is the knowledge of pointing. By contrast, to know in terms of connaissance is have a more comfortable familiarity with something. This in turn raises notions of famille, or family.21 In this way, to have an ‘understanding’ is to have a familial bond, a genetic relationship, or to be of the same flesh. Rather than an objective tool, this is a knowledge that spans and constitutes both the knower and the known—​or the toucher and the touched—​as two folds of the same reversible flesh. Unlike a knowledge of pointing, however, this is a knowledge of grasping—​of operative intentionality qua phenomenological understanding (Merleau-​ Ponty, [1945] 2012: lxxxii). More than a unidirectional movement, however, Merleau-​Ponty’s theory of operative intentionality also emphasizes the role that the world plays in grasping us; in arresting our attention by way of an encounter that demands or elicits a response.22

20  Such

as knowledge that, or knowledge where. However, it is also used for knowledge how (i.e. savoir-​faire). 21  With the French ‘famille’ and ‘familiarité’ having the same Latin root ‘familia’. This finds expression in the Old French ‘famelier’, meaning ‘related’ or ‘friendly’. 22  And which, in doing so, functions to co-​constitute the self as a possibility that has been settled, or perhaps affirmed, at and by an intersection of events (I owe this characterization of the self as a ‘possibility settled by events’ to François-​Xavier de Vaujany).

480   Andrew Kirkpatrick This is a mutual co-​grasping that is only made possible through a dialectic of proximity and distance—​the conditions for which are provided by the emergence of ‘gaps’ (écarts) in the world’s flesh (Merleau-​Ponty, [1964] 1968: 272). While such gaps certainly ‘limit’ an otherwise ‘unlimited’ flesh23—​insofar as they gather it up and objectify it—​they do not atomize or cleave the flesh. Rather, they provide the space in which co-​naissance, as a mutual ‘co-​grasping’ and indeed ‘co-​prehension’, can take place.24 This effectively transforms the flesh from a flesh of static monism—​being—​to a flesh of movement and dynamic emergence—​becoming (Kirkpatrick, 2017b: 327). On this interpretation, the flesh is not a being but a becoming, and the way in which the flesh actively becomes is through acts of ‘co-​naissance’ qua ‘co-​prehension’. Although in not so many words, such an ontologie de la naissance et de la co-​naissance—​to which might add ‘co-​prehension’—​ is seemingly put forward by Whitehead when he claims that: We can be content with a provisional realism in which nature is conceived as a complex of prehensive unifications. Space and time exhibit the general scheme of interlocked relations of [ . . . ] prehensions [. . . which are processes] of unifying. Accordingly, nature is a process of expansive development, necessarily transitioning from prehension to prehension [ . . . ] It is necessary to understand that space-​time is nothing else than a system of pulling together [. . . these] assemblages into unities. ([1925] 1967: 72)

Through such an interpretation, we arrive at a concept of flesh that is essentially autopoietic in the sense that Maturana & Varela use the word. That is, as self-​creating or self-​forming. As Maturana & Varela note: ‘An autopoietic system is defined as a unity by its autopoietic organization. The realization of this organization in a physical system requires components which are defined by their role in the autopoiesis and which can only be described in relation to this’ (1980: 88). The ‘unity’ of an autopoietic system is reflected in the fact that autopoietic organizations constitute a ‘closed domain of relations’, with such relations ‘specified only with respect to the autopoietic organization that [ . . . ] [they] constitute’. They thus define a ‘space’ in which a given autopoietic system ‘can be realized as a concrete system’. Notably, such a ‘space’ finds its dimensions in the ‘relations of production of the components that realize it’ (Maturana & Varela, 1980: 88). Alongside affinities with the relational unity of the flesh, this notion of ‘autopoietic space’ can also find a metaphysical expression in a process ontology of flesh. That is to say, we can understand that ‘gaps’ in the flesh of the world effectively function to ‘open up’ the autopoietic space in which co-​naissance and co-​prehension can take place—​or in which the latent intentional threads of the world can be realized.

23 

As Merleau-​Ponty notes, the flesh constitutes an ‘unlimited’ domain involving the ‘coiling over of the visible upon the visible’ ([1964] 1968: 140; emphasis added). 24  In this respect, the gaps between folds in the world’s flesh are not representative of the empty space that might exist between atomistic entities. Rather, they are thick with possibilities—​thick with latent intentional threads that call for and elicit acts of co-​naissance.

Autopoietic ‘Understanding’   481 If we understand that the unlimited fabric of the world is composed of latent and relational intentional threads—​in which objects or occasions are realized through acts of co-​naissance—​we also find consistency with contemporary approaches to ecology and biosemiotics. We can understand this link in terms of what Gare, following biosemiotician Kalevi Kull, refers to as ‘semiotic bonds’ (Kull, 2010; Gare, 2017: 179). As Kull notes: ‘Life processes are capable of establishing regular bonds between things of almost any nature. The bonds of life are the relations that living systems first make coincidentally, and may then re-​establish and transmit [ . . . ] via semiosis. These relations—​ if regular—​can be described as codes, or habits, or rules’ (2010: 348–​9). Consisting of ‘repeated relations’, such habits, codes, and bonds ‘require work in order to be maintained and repeatedly formed’. Importantly, the development of such bonds is said to be ‘dependent on the distinctions the organisms can make’ (Kull, 2010: 348–​9), which is to say, on the organism’s ability to perceive contrasts as per Gestalt theories of perception. Thus, and while the links between Whiteheadian process thought and ecology are well-​documented, we can also find a real ecological value in an embodied, process phenomenology of perception. Moreover, and in the same way that it may account for both ontological generalities and embodied becoming, we find that the category of flesh is able to account for both our natural and our cultural worlds. This is true insofar as we can speak of not only natural worlds and cultural worlds but also of a social fabric. This can be understood through reference to the Hegelian notion of Sittlichkeit, or ‘ethical life’, which, as D. E. Rose notes, reflects ‘the cultural and moral fabric of a society coupled with its institutional structure’ (2017: 120). The notion of a social flesh qua social fabric can also be understood in reference to Anaximander’s principle of ‘limiting the unlimited’. Indeed, such an approach is not foreign to Anaximander. As Cherniss notes: ‘Anaximander’s purpose was to give a description of the inhabited earth, geographical, ethnological, and cultural, and the way in which it had come to be what it was’ (1951: 323; emphasis added). In this sense, we can understand that maintaining or developing the ‘social fabric’—​or a social ‘flesh’ that spans, encompasses, and gives rise to individuals—​requires a certain ‘limiting’, with such a limiting to be achieved through the establishment of cultural institutions, customs, habits, and norms.25 However, such institutions are not necessarily static. As Kwok-​ying Lau notes when writing on the possibilities of conceptualizing an ‘intercultural flesh’, it is also possible for us to

25  In this regard, the notion of a cultural flesh qua social fabric bears a similarity to Pierre Bourdieu’s associated notions of social fields and habitus. As Carman (2008) notes, ‘Bourdieu’s account of social reality as an interconnection of the bodily habitus and social field is indebted to Merleau-​Ponty’s notions of the body schema, motor intentionality, and the phenomenal field’ (pp. 229−30). However, we might also widen this influence out and consider its relationship to the flesh of the world, considered here as the ‘social fabric’. The notion of ‘cultural flesh’ as a ‘cultural field’ is further hinted at in Merleau-​Ponty’s lecture course notes on ‘Institution and Passivity’ where, invoking similar imagery used to describe the flesh of the world, he asks: ‘But where is this truth of societies? The truth is not in the individuals, it is not in the sum of individuals—​it is in the field of social gravitation. This field is capable of posing and resolving “problems”. It is the real seat of the dialectic. Philosophy of the Gestalt’ (Merleau-​Ponty, 2010: 73).

482   Andrew Kirkpatrick ‘enter the cultural world of [ . . . ] others’ in order to ‘cultivate [ . . . ] a new cultural flesh’ (2016: 43). Thus, and along with the body and the natural world, we find that there is scope for cultural and political processes to find adequate expression through Merleau-​ Ponty’s ontological category of ‘flesh’. This is especially true if we understand the flesh itself as a productive—​and differential—​process of limiting the unlimited. While Maturana & Varela’s (1987) work on autopoiesis primarily reflects the biological roots of human understanding, what we arrive at in a process ontology of flesh is an autopoietic flesh in which the generalized notion of ‘understanding’—​as co-​prehension and co-​naissance—​can be said to reflect the reflexive, autopoietic becoming of both self and world in both a natural and cultural sense. Moreover, and if semiotic bonds are understood to constitute whole ecosystems, we can understand that—​more than just self-​creation—​the forging of intentional threads qua semiotic bonds in truth amounts to a kind of eco-​poiesis, or home-​making (Gare, 2017: 179, 183). What benefits might such an approach hold for MOS more broadly? As Ismaël Al-​ Amoudi & Joe O’Mahoney note, the application of process ontologies to organization studies can help to emphasize the temporal and ‘becoming’ aspect of organizations (2015: 27). For instance, and by drawing on the work of Whitehead and Bergson, Nayak & Chia have shown how individuals and organizations may be construed ‘as temporarily stabilized event clusters abstracted from a sea of constant flux and change’ (2011: 281). Similarly, Wendelin Kuepers has shown how the application of Merleau-​Ponty’s process phenomenology to organization studies can lead to an understanding of the interdependent ‘co-​becoming’ that takes place within organizations (2014: 427). As Rodrigo Magalhães & Ron Sanchez note, there has also been a considerable amount of literature on autopoiesis in organization studies which they see as having the potential to provide a unifying framework for the discipline in the 21st century (2009: 3–​21). John Brocklesby has likewise shown how autopoietic theory can contribute to process-​based organizational research by, in part, examining the relationship between the individual and the social or what, in light of the preceding discussion, we might term the one and the many—​or perhaps social and carnal flesh. As Brocklesby puts it: Although the individual and the social domains are separate and independent [ . . . ] they are nonetheless inextricably intertwined as components of a larger totality [ . . . ] people’s experiences, explanations, and their behavior more generally ‘belong’ to the social domain [ . . . ] what happens in that domain is made possible by an individual bodyhood which also delimits the range of social possibilities. (2009: 162; emphasis added)

This is entirely consistent with the general insights of the process ontology outlined above. By putting these approaches into dialogue with a ‘process’ phenomenology, we find that we are provided with a wider metaphysical and phenomenological vocabulary through which we might practically describe our individual and organizational becoming-​in-​the-​world. From this vantage point, which is equal parts macroscopic and microscopic, we can see how instances of organizational becoming may more generally

Autopoietic ‘Understanding’   483 be described as an open-​ended, ‘hyper-​dialectical’26 process of ‘limiting the unlimited’. Insofar as the ontological category of ‘flesh’ is understood to span both bodily and cultural life, a process phenomenology then opens up the possibility of considering the ontological status of a social flesh qua ‘social fabric’ of an organization. Understood in terms of the customs, habits, and norms that partially condition, and give rise to, both individual and collective behaviour, the very act of maintaining a social fabric can be understood as an important aspect of self-​creation on the part of not only organisms, but indeed organizations. Thus, the promise of a ‘process phenomenology’ when it comes to MOS lies in its nascent potential to reveal the autopoietic, co-​constituting nature of both organizations—​as organizing processes and collective activities—​and individuals, which, insofar as they function to ‘limit’ one another, also serve to in-​form one another as two heterogenous aspects of a unified, durational, and ‘melodic’ Gestalt whole.

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Autopoietic ‘Understanding’   487 Whitehead, Alfred North. ([1925] 1967). Science and the modern world. New York: The Free Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. ([1929] 1978). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology. (corrected edn), ed. David Ray Griffin & Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. ([1936] 1989). Unpublished letter from Whitehead to Hartshorne (1936). In George L. Kline (ed.), Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on his philosophy (pp. 196–​ 199). Lanham: University Press of America. Wiehl, Reiner. (1990). Whitehead’s cosmology of feeling between ontology and anthropology. In Friedrich Rapp & Reiner Wiehl (eds.), Whitehead’s metaphysics of creativity (pp. 127–​151). Albany: SUNY Press.

Chapter 24

What Silenc e D oe s An Arendtian Analysis of Quaker Meeting Practices Lucas Introna, Donncha Kavanagh, and Martin Brigham

When we approached and entered, I was struck by the simplicity and somewhat austere feel of the meeting house. The chairs (again very plain in aesthetics) were organised in a circle. After a presentation on the Quakers (and their meeting practices) we were told that we were going to experience what such practices do (or feel like) by enacting a meeting. It felt a bit ‘manufactured’ but I kept an open mind. As the rhythm of speaking followed by silence started to flow, my scepticism was transformed into profound appreciation of what was happening communally and ‘in my head.’ I was struck by the way a simple practice transformed argumentative managers into participants in a communal dialogue where the contributions were progressively being woven into each other to produce a complex but entwined tapestry of thought. As the tapestry evolved, through the ongoing rhythm of speaking and silence, my own mind became transformed. Slowly, a palpable sense of agreement emerged even though it was not articulated until the clerk of the meeting read what he had written up as the ‘sense of the meeting.’ It captured the sense, not by distilling all the different views into one but by keeping it as an interwoven tapestry of many colours but one picture. I remember leaving with such a strong sense of the power of seemingly simple practices to transform what had seemed self-​evident. My mind was suddenly alive with reflections of all the rather mundane practices that produce daily life and how transformative they might be, quietly doing their work . . . much to reflect on, I thought. (One of the authors reflecting on their experience of a Quaker business meeting)   

Analysis of Quaker Meeting Practices    489

24.1  Introduction Organization studies has a substantial literature on why employees stay silent when confronted by dysfunctional, unsatisfactory, unethical, or illegal behaviour (Morrison & Milliken, 2000; Pinder & Harlos, 2001; Milliken et al., 2003; Van Dyne et al., 2003; Brinsfield, 2013; Morrison, 2014; Sherf et al., 2021). Individuals might remain silent for many reasons. They might: fear the consequences of speaking out; believe that speaking out will not make a difference; be reluctant to transmit bad news (Tesser & Rosen, 1975); mistakenly believe that all other group members accept the behaviour (Katz et al., 1931); hope that others will take action (Darley & Latané, 1968); succumb to groupthink and fail to critically assess the situation (Janis, 1971); stay loyal and suffer in silence, rather than exit or voice their objections (Kolarska & Aldrich, 1980); consciously accept the situation because of a collective inability to manage agreement (Harvey, 1974); or be unable to speak out because of organizational norms and practices (Peirce et al. 1998; Brown & Coupland, 2005; Costas & Grey, 2014). Within this research tradition, organizational silence is typically seen as having negative effects, causing less effective organizational change processes, less effective decision-​making, lower internal motivation, lower satisfaction, with attendant increases in employee turnover, withdrawal, sabotage, deviance, and stress (Morrison & Milliken, 2000). Outside of the literature on employee voice, silence is only a sporadic topic of inquiry in organization studies. For instance, Grint (2000) argues that—​since silence in the presence of the divine is a feature of the sacred—​leadership is partly about silencing the anxiety and resistance of followers. Blackman & Sadler-​Smith (2009) see silence as intrinsic to tacit knowledge, not least because the word ‘tacit’ is the past particle of tacere, meaning ‘to be silent’. They present a typology of silence based on a distinction between ‘silent’ (that which cannot speak or cannot yet speak) and ‘silenced’ (that which could speak but which does not). Within this wider literature, silence continues to be depicted, in the main, negatively. This chapter contributes to an emerging literature in organization studies that sees silence more positively and productively (Kuhling et al., 2003). In particular, we build on writings that draw on the phenomenological tradition (Bigo, 2018; de Vaujany & Aroles, 2018) as well as texts outside of organization studies that emphasize how silence can be a generative force (Jensen, 1973; Covarrubias, 2007, 2015; Valle, 2019). Intellectually, we draw on the writings of Hannah Arendt and we begin the chapter by outlining the main ideas from her work that inform our study. We argue that Quaker practices provide an excellent illustration of her ideas and demonstrate how silence can be a powerful part of thinking and political action. What we will highlight is how those following these practices recognize, enact, and celebrate the plurality of the meeting, constituted by equal but distinctive individuals who think, stay silent, listen, and speak, faithful to the ‘plurality that Socrates experienced within himself when he thought, just as he did in others when he stopped thinking with himself to converse with them’ (Kohn,

490    Lucas Introna, Donncha Kavanagh, and Martin Brigham 2005: xxvii). We conclude the chapter by discussing the implications for how we think about and study organizational practices.

24.2  Arendt on Thinking, Friendship, and Silence 24.2.1 Thinking and Reasoning/​Knowing Thinking is for Arendt a basic autonomous human activity. It is not an activity of the privileged few, the educated, the clever, or the wise. Rather, it is something all humans do normally and instinctively, not because of some externally imposed reason or necessity but rather as an ever-​present, fundamental, existential need. Nevertheless, not all humans live their lives thinkingly. It is possible to become thoughtless. Indeed, the ‘inability to think is not stupidity; it can be found in highly intelligent people’ (Arendt, 1971: 423). According to Arendt, non-​thinking is indeed very prevalent in our modern times. Our political and moral institutions shield us from considering our lives critically through thoughtful examination. Rather than encouraging thinking ‘it teaches [us] to hold fast to whatever the prescribed rules of conduct may be at a given time in a given society’ (pp. 435–​6). By holding fast to these rules and often-​repeated taken-​for-​granted truths, without submitting them to close examination, we ‘get used to never making up [our own] minds’ (p. 436). As we repeat these taken-​for-​granted truths, we ‘sleepwalk’ into a thoughtless existence. But what is it that thinking does that is so important? For Arendt, thinking is an internal dialogue with oneself that searches, if it searches at all, not for truth but rather for meaning (what Arendt also calls understanding). It is a process by which we give meaning to what we are doing and to the diversity of worlds we live in. For Arendt, ‘to expect truth from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know [. . . We must draw] a distinguishing line between truth and meaning, between knowing and thinking’ (Arendt, 1978: 61; emphasis added). She follows Heidegger (1968: 159) who suggested that: ‘Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom. Thinking does not solve the riddles of the universe. Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act’. Thinking does not produce knowledge like the sciences and is different from opining, representing, reasoning, and conceiving (Glenn Gray, 1968). What then is this thinking (or internal dialogue with oneself) good for, or, why does Arendt draw our attention to it? This is a very significant question, but we will limit ourselves to two of her concerns. First, her biggest concern is that the practices and institutions of the political (which she understands in a particular manner) have become confused in believing that they are grounded in and enacted through the search for rational truth. That is, the belief that rational truth, insofar as it presents a pure and unambiguous, mirrored version of reality, provides a clear and effective logic for political action. She argues that this attitude and approach to political action risks distorting or,

Analysis of Quaker Meeting Practices    491 more seriously, destroying the fundamental existential basis of human plurality—​a plurality that constitutes the very condition of the possibility of politics and also its ultimate meaning. Reason, she reminds us, does not think, it reasons. Second, and relatedly, thinking (as an internal dialogue) is essential to individuation. I become a unique and meaningful person in thinking. But this meaning finds its expression in the political, in dialogue with others. We will consider this in more detail below. Before we do that let us consider further what she means by the practice of thinking. How do we think? To answer this question, Arendt turns to Socrates as an exemplar. The first thing to note is that for Socrates thinking is inherently dialogical. But not any dialogue. It is an aporetic dialogue, one that asks questions that lead nowhere as such. Questions that open us up to further questions, and so forth. What thinking does, Arendt suggests, is to unfreeze our taken-​for-​granted thoughts, ideas, and notions. This unfreezing does not lead to answers; it leads rather to perplexity. It is not the case that Socrates knew the answers to the questions of his interlocutors. It was rather that he wanted to wake them up to the perplexity he himself faced (and felt) and which he believed is normally exchanged for the easy, taken-​for-​granted answers that we tend to tell ourselves when faced with perplexity. Through asking these difficult questions we discover the meaning of things. It transforms the questioning from a search for a single answer or truth to a search for meaning, specifically the meaning for oneself, the one that thinks. For Arendt this existential need to find meaning(s) is what drives thinking forward and is constitutive of oneself as a unique self. As Berkowitz (2009: 240) expresses it succinctly: ‘[t]‌hinking separates individuals from the mass and inoculates the thinker from the contagion of conformity’. In this separation, thinking (as an internal aporetic dialogue) is first a foremostly silent activity, practiced in solitude. This private space of thinking is what makes participation in the political (common world) possible and meaningful. As a thinking being, I can contribute in dialogue with others—​that is, share my thoughts rather than the already taken-​for-​granted truths. In other words, for Arendt there is an intimate and necessary connection between the private space of thinking and the public space of the political world of common action. This is what we want to turn to now.

24.2.2 Thinking, Friendship, and Plurality Politics for Hannah Arendt is not what we normally take it to be or at least what we encounter in our everyday lives. For her, politics is the realm in which we exchange our thinking (born out of solitary thought) as equals, and together, in our plurality, we come to a common set of ideas of what we think or want to do. Thus, thinking, for Arendt, is ‘the two-​in-​one of the soundless dialogue’ (Arendt, 1971: 446). It is the open-​ended, dialogical process of thinking together that discloses or discovers our common world. It is not the common enactment of what we already know or what we have already decided—​ that, for her, is administration, not politics. What we see, in Arendt’s work, is a necessary co-​constitutive relationship between private thinking (a dialogue with oneself done in

492    Lucas Introna, Donncha Kavanagh, and Martin Brigham solitude) and the public thinking (a dialogue with others done in the open) where equal participants discover their communality, yet do not become unified as one but retain their plurality. She uses the notion of friendship to describe the entwinement of private and public thinking—​that is, the political. What we see in friendship is a certain openness to the other’s ideas and viewpoints. It is a genuine dialogue between people who think differently. This dialogue opens up a space that both separates and unites the participants in the exchange of ideas, thus producing a common world. She uses the metaphor of the table that unites and separates: ‘To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world like every in-​between, relates and separates men at the same time’ (Arendt, 1998: 52; emphasis added). Friendship relates but also separates. To produce the in-between we need to engage in open-​ended disclosive dialogue as equals. If the individual is lost or merged into the common, we have thoughtlessness (the mere repetition of taken-​for-​granted truths). If the common is ignored by the individual then we have the withdrawal from the world and a form of self-​referential thinking that only confirms itself (what she calls the professional thinker, of which professional philosophers are the exemplar)—​hence her reluctance to be called a philosopher. For Arendt, the mutual enhancement of selfhood and the common is what defines friendship: ‘I first talk with others before I talk with myself, examining whatever the joint talk may have been about, and then discover that I can conduct a dialogue not only with others but with myself as well [. . . This] dialogue of thought can be carried out only among friends’ (Arendt, 1978: 189). In my dialogue with myself there are reverberations of dialogues with others, which in turn feeds into my dialogue with others. In this sense the thinking (as with friendship) always turns simultaneously inward towards solitary reflection (the development of my world) and outward towards public dialogue (to produce a common in-​between world). Nixon (2015: 165) summarizes this well: ‘It is because friends are equal and different—​and their equality and difference are defined in and through their friendship—​that they are able to achieve greater understanding of one another and of the world within which their “two-​in-​one” is a constitutive element’. But one might ask what does this ‘in between’ produce? She would respond that it produces the capacity to make judgements.

24.2.3 Thinking Together and Judging Thinking with others enlarges the collective mind (Arendt, 1978: 257). As these conversations reverberate through our thinking, we are more able to take or imagine another’s point of view and as such become more confident of our judgements, to tell right from wrong and beautiful from ugly (Arendt, 1971: 446). Central to judgement is the idea that it can be challenged. It is not knowledge that is claimed to be true, it has a certain standing as claims that are always open to be challenged as our dialogue

Analysis of Quaker Meeting Practices    493 (common understanding) develops. For her, judgement was necessarily reflective. It is not the application of some general rule under which a certain particular case could be categorized with any degree of certainty. Rather it is an imaginative grasp of the particular projected against an imagined whole of the enlarged mind. In this sense judging is political ‘in so far as it presupposes the fundamental human condition of plurality, and requires a diverse community of equals who develop, exchange, share and critique each other’s claims and opinions’ (Hayden, 2014: 167). If thinking ‘deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging always concerns particulars and things close at hand’ (Arendt, 1971: 446). Judging in pursuit of what? What is the relationship between thoughtful judgement and action? What does it produce?

24.2.4 Thinking, Action, and the Political While many would see Arendt as a philosopher of the highest standing, she never considered herself a ‘professional thinker’; one that withdraws from the world of others into the world of ideas, which encouraged solipsistic thinking that privileges the self over others, and contemplation over action. Instead, what we should be doing is ‘worrying about what thinking means for the activity of acting’ (Arendt, 1979: 303). Acting, or what Arendt terms the vita activa, is deeply entwined with silent contemplation: The term vita activa, comprehending all human activities and defined from the viewpoint of the absolute quiet of contemplation, therefore corresponds more closely to the Greek askholia (‘unquiet’), with which Aristotle designated all activity, than to the Greek bios politikos [. . . E]very kind of activity, even the processes of mere thought, must culminate in the absolute quiet of contemplation. (Arendt, 1998: 15)

With the term vita activa, Arendt designates three fundamental human transformational processes in an ascending hierarchy of importance: labour, work, and action. Labour is the set of activities associated with the biological processes and the necessities of human existence, while work ‘provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings’ (Arendt, 1998: 7). If labour sees humanity as animal laborans, then work is centred on homo faber fabricating the enduring, common world of human existence. At the highest rung on the vita activa hierarchy is ‘action’, inspired by Aristotle’s characterization of humanity as a distinctly political animal—​ zoon politikon. Unlike work, which is an essentially instrumental activity, action has no sense of a pre-​defined end. Unburdened by an external teleology, action is defined by its ineliminable freedom, subordinate to nothing outside of itself. Where work involves executing a plan and producing a lasting result, action is open and unpredictable, a form of new beginning that is experimental in character:

494    Lucas Introna, Donncha Kavanagh, and Martin Brigham To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, ‘to begin,’ ‘to lead,’ and eventually ‘to rule,’ indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere). Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action. (Arendt, 1998: 177)

Action like thinking ‘almost never achieves its purpose’ (p. 184) and is thus defined around notions of freedom, novelty, uniqueness, birth, and beginning. As such, it is also fundamentally public and political. For Arendt, the plurality produced in the co-​ constitutive relations between action and thinking is ‘not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—​of all political life’ (Arendt, 1998: 7; original emphasis). Politics arises precisely because of this plurality: ‘Politics is based on the fact of human plurality. God created man, but men are a human, earthly product, the product of human nature. [ . . . ] Politics deals with the coexistence and association of different men’ (Arendt, 2005: 93; original emphasis). And by political life, Arendt is not referring to the politics of government, but rather any space of collective public deliberation where individuals disclose their unique identities to consider matters of common concern—​ civic associations, demonstrations, sit-​ins are all instances of political bodies. It is in the polis, which is ‘the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be’ (Arendt, 1998: 198). Below we want to show how the political space and action is produced in the Quaker business meeting with specific reference to the role of silence. Before we do that let us briefly review Quakerism and its meeting practices.

24.3  Quakers and Corporate Business Meetings Quakers (also known as ‘Friends’) are a non-​conformist Christian denomination formed in Britain during the civil and political tumult of the mid-​1600s. George Fox (1624−91) is considered to be the founder of Quakerism. Like other seekers at that time, Fox travelled around the country preaching a new way of seeking divine presence. His intention was to recover a lost form of Christianity that emphasized God’s direct relationship with each person without the need for hierarchical church organization. Against the prevailing Christian doctrine of the 1640s, Quakers understood their religious conviction as coming from the immediate and felt presence of Christ—​‘that of God in everyone’ that established a mystical and human-​centred worldview. Like Puritans, Fox and followers such as Margaret Fell (1614−1702) and William Penn (1644−1718) believed Christians were not living up to their espoused values. Quakers

Analysis of Quaker Meeting Practices    495 circulated pamphlets and books encouraging individuals to read, write, and think for themselves in ways that had been impossible previously. Quakers similarly thought for themselves by dissenting from traditional Christian worship; they rejected outward sacraments and instead gathered in makeshift meeting houses for communal silent worship waiting for divine inner experience. Living out their faith in the world meant taking a patient approach and adhering to testimonies of equality, simplicity, peace, and truth. Quakers became engaged in public affairs from the late 19th century along with other non-​conformist churches, playing an important role in the Anti-​Slavery Society, prison and poor reform, national education and schooling. Central to all the political action (in Arendt’s sense) of the Quakers was, and still is, the meeting practice—​and specifically the role of silence.

24.3.1 Quaker Meetings and Silence The individual relationship and direct experience of the divine arose out of communal and prophetic worship based on attentive inner listening and spoken ministry. For Quakers, silence is an active and creative hush and is at the heart of their values and practices—​in the way meetings are organized, sustained, and led. Silence creates the experience of corporate contemplation and unity while individuals remain themselves, experiencing the meaning of individual and shared lives in new ways. Quakers developed their own distinctive self-​organizing administrative practices from the mid-​1650s. Then, as now, Meeting for Worship is the central spiritual practice for Quakers around the world. In addition, there are monthly Meetings for Business (for making corporate decisions) which are convened by a Meeting Clerk, Clearness Meetings (to gain clarity on a difficult issue), Threshing Meetings (to provide different perspectives), and Meetings for Sufferings (to report and record injustices). ‘Spiritual hospitality’ includes pastoral care by Elders and community responsibilities by Overseers as well as different types of meeting practices, all conceived as meetings for worship and discernment. Settling down into a focused silence is termed ‘centring down’ and a ‘gathered’ or ‘covered’ meeting is one in which there is a palpable sense of the divine at the meeting. Although we will focus on the meeting for business, silence plays an important role in all forms of meeting. The socio-​material configuration of a Quaker meeting house architecture and design is an integral part of enacting silent contemplation. Meetings take place in simple and plain buildings—​Meeting Houses—​with seating arranged often in a circular shape so that members of the meeting encounter each other (see Figure 24.1). The meeting room will have numerous copies of Quaker Faith and Practice, which is composed of ‘Advices and Queries’, questions for Quakers to reflect on. These specific organizational arrangements produce the conditions for the active silence of a Quaker meeting. The constitutive silence beyond the individuals at the meeting in part relies on the particular socio-​material arrangements of participants, paper, chairs, books, etc.

496    Lucas Introna, Donncha Kavanagh, and Martin Brigham

Figure 24.1  Quaker Meeting House in Epping (Photograph by John Hall, used with permission)

Although Quaker meetings for business are different from typical meetings, it is the silence that is ever-​present. Law (1998: 20) writes about the character of this silence: It is not heavy and preoccupied, like the desperate hush of the exam room. Nor is it disciplinary and repressive, like the pressure that expands to fill the space of the parade ground where you hardly dare breathe. It is not the silence of the graveyard, with its imagined echoes and distant memories. Nor is it the silence you hear when you lie in the sun . . . It is none of these, though perhaps the last of these comes closest to it. Instead it is, as they say a ‘centred’ silence.

Many things have to be in place and arranged for a Quaker meeting to constitute an active silence. The distribution of silence takes a number of forms—​at the beginning and end of the meeting, as well as during a meeting between speakers. This distribution is in part coordinated by the clerk of a business meeting, in part by the way seats are arranged, in part by the lack of religious symbols, which invokes a particular version of community.

24.3.2 Inclusion, Thinking, and Experience In the Quaker meeting, spoken ‘ministry’ and silent waiting are bound together in a unity of difference, of speaking and listening. The discernment that comes out of silence

Analysis of Quaker Meeting Practices    497 can give rise to a sense of being ill-​equipped for its implications. It can also cause pause for thought, which can be understood as a signal that something is coming from outside of oneself. In this discernment of silence comes the possibility to ‘discern the right time to undertake or relinquish responsibilities’ and ‘to attend to what love requires’ for each of individual (Quaker Faith and Practice §1.02). Since they see everyone as equal before God, Quakers have a longstanding belief in equality, which is why they ask that people speak in a simple and direct way regardless of social status or background. This belief has led Quakers to challenge and reject traditional social distinctions and institutions, which is why they have been persecuted, imprisoned, and excluded from the professions, and from civil and political society into the latter part of the 19th century. The focus on the individual in a community emphasizes the interdependence of the arc of inner and outer dialogues—​of one and many in the meeting. Ambler (2012: 49−51) writes on the intersubjective and socio-​materiality of this encounter: The Meeting of Friends was always important, right from the beginning, especially the Meeting for Worship. Early Friends met together even if they had to travel great distances [ . . . ] Others can help us in this by reflecting back how they see us, and by accepting us as we are [ . . . ] This is given practical expression in the way we sit together in Meeting. We sit facing one another. We do not face an altar or pulpit or image, as if what connected us spiritually was something outside of us.

The presence of others may comfort or challenge us to look at ourselves in new ways by disclosing our own limited understanding and how we need one another to share insights. It also means that defending the possibility of one’s own voice must simultaneously mean creating and upholding the right conditions for everyone else’s voice, though it is not a unity of common interests. It is a unity of the sense of the meeting.

24.4  Silence, Dialogue, and Judgement in Quaker Meetings for Business Above we have outlined the manner in which silence functions both in Arendt’s thought and in the Quaker tradition. In this section we want to take a closer look at the practices of the meeting for business, drawing on the conceptual framework offered by Hannah Arendt, to show how silence, dialogue, and judgement are entangled in these meetings and to disclose what such entanglement enacts or produces. Sheeran (1983) and Wick (1998) have undertaken studies of Quaker decision-​making to highlight some of the distinctive features or principles of their political action (in Arendt’s sense; see also Chase, 1951). Quakers organize monthly business meetings in addition to weekly meetings for worship, to decide on everything from what colour to

498    Lucas Introna, Donncha Kavanagh, and Martin Brigham paint the meeting house to whether to provide active support and campaign for the right to same-​sex marriage. Ambler (2012) observes that the Quaker way of making corporate decisions, in and through the business meeting, has survived for over 350 years, which suggests that it is one of the Quakers’ unique contributions to the modern world as a form of communal enlightenment. A Quaker meeting for business is a meeting for spiritual discernment as much as for worship. Each meeting follows a previously specified agenda. The clerk opens the meeting with a short period of silence, and there is also silence between individual contributions. . A key feature of a meeting for business is that contributions are not debated but instead ‘discerned’ in a context of worship that also works to retain minority views. The role of meeting participants is to speak if moved to speak and otherwise to listen to others. Even if one disagrees with what is being said, the practice is to listen patiently, trusting that everyone will be listened to in the same way. The clerk—​who is a combination of chair and secretary—​is responsible for preparing the agenda and coordinating the meeting preparations. The clerk’s special role is to discern ‘the sense of the meeting’—​the outcome of each item on the agenda—​and to prepare a draft minute for the members of the meeting to agree on. Although the clerk writes the minute—​the written record of the sense of the meeting—​it is ‘axiomatic that the clerk clerks best when everyone is clerking together’ (Loring, 1997: 91 in Mace, 2012: 44). Thus, while the clerk has specific responsibilities, it is the meeting practices that are in charge. This focus on the business meeting as a collective and shared endeavour, in which the clerk is a conduit for discernment, comes out of periods of spoken ministry and silent listening. Individuals may not be speaking but they are listening, in silence. Mace (2012: 50) continues: The clerks bowed over the table together, working on the minute [ . . . ] The assembled Friends still. After a few minutes, the clerk rose to her feet, stood holding her large notebook and read out of the draft. She then sat down again. During the next 15 minutes, some half dozen Friends from different parts of the gathering stood waiting to be called, to offer still more amendments.

The first thing we should note is that, in Arendt’s terms, the meeting for business enacts a political space: that is, a space where participants share their thoughts as equals. The acceptance of equality is central to the constitutive conditions for a meeting to be classed as a Quaker meeting but also, in Arendt’s understanding of a true political space, a polis. It is indeed a meeting of friends; friends who accept each other as different but equal. This notion of different but equal is fundamental for Arendt and at the heart of her idea of politics, as it produces the conditions to create the possibility for a dialogue to be a maieutic dialogue. That is, a dialogue that does not aim to persuade but rather one which aims to bring the latent ideas of the other participating interlocutors into view—​to bring to communion what was given birth to in solitude (Arendt, 2005: 16). To be equal but also different, nonetheless, requires something else. This something else is one’s own private truly individual thoughts which come into existence in

Analysis of Quaker Meeting Practices    499 silence—​in one’s dialogue with oneself. We want to suggest that in the Quaker meeting the silence after every contribution does exactly this. It produces the conditions creating the possibility for thought, as a ‘centred silence’, rather than just the absence of sound/​ talking. What is centred on, in the centred silence, is one’s own unique experience, one’s own unique thoughts. In the centred silence the friends do not think so much about the truth value of what has just been said as much as they allow prior contributions to unfreeze (or arouse) in them their thoughts and allow such thoughts to enter into dialogue with the echoes left by the prior contributions. In this ongoing co-​constitutive inner dialogue, one’s silent thoughts and the contributions of others become entangled in a manner that allows for some collective sense to emerge (or not). Moved by this silent internal dialogue, a Quaker friend might rise to their feet to speak (or not). In her speaking she does not merely express her own private thoughts, as such. Rather what is spoken is her thinking in dialogue with the echoes of prior contributions. She speaks, not to convince (erode plurality) but to bring these thoughts to the common, where it might reverberate, or not. That is, to enlarge and experience the common mind and enhance the communal plurality. In considering this ongoing dialogical movement, and the emergent communal plurality it produces, Quakers tend to distinguish between the ‘sense of a meeting’ and consensus—​which is often what normal political dialogue strives for. Consensual forms of decision-​making often involve the attempt to integrate differing positions within a group into a majority view or will—​as is the case in a democracy. Quakers do not vote at meetings so as to foreclose the conditions for individuals or groups to build alliances and dominate others (Sheeran, 1983), nor do they strive for some form of consensus. Instead, they discern the sense of the meeting: agreement is ‘sensed’. Morley (1993: 5) writes: ‘Through consensus we decide it; through sense of the meeting we turn it over, allowing it to be decided’ (quoted in Mace, 2012: 43; emphasis added). The sense of the meeting is not the commonly agreed view. It is about a collectively held plurality. That is, an agreement that is both plural and always open to being revisited. As such, any action or decision going forward must take into account this plurality. For this reason, those at the meeting do not end the meeting by saying they agree with the minute; instead, they say ‘hope so’. In Hannah Arendt’s words, what emerges is the judgement of the meeting. Thinking with others enlarges—​or one might say pluralizes—​the mind. Through the commonly held plurality the meeting becomes more confident of the emerging sense of the meeting. Uttering ‘hope so’ points to an experimental rather than final conclusion, and to a statement that is not yet agreed upon nor closed to future contestation. It suggests that the group has come to a sense of what is at stake, what they believe, and what reflects their common but diverse experience—​it is their pluralistic but commonly shared political view that informs action. The Quaker meeting for business draws on the experience of those gathered at the meeting both through their contributions (speaking) and through their silence. Sitting in silence, Friends experience something beyond themselves. It is the primacy of the experience of the event of the meeting which is central to Quakers’ business meetings.

500    Lucas Introna, Donncha Kavanagh, and Martin Brigham Silence produces this thoughtful decision-​making event; it dominates the conduct of those at the meeting, as they meet to make a decision. Sheeran (1983: 81–​2) writes that: No matter how they explain the experience to themselves, the event which they share is paramount [ . . . ] Because Friends differ in their understanding of experience, the devices used in the meetings are subtle invitations to re-​enter the experience rather than formal reminders of Quaker belief. The opening and closing silences and the moments of special reflection at times of impasse or conflict all recall those present to the experience, each remaining free to enter the experience through his or her own understanding.

When asked to recall a business meeting decision that meant the most, Quakers often describe how it is the experience of a ‘gathered condition’ of unity that counts most (Sheeran, 1983: 87). Sitting in silence, listening, and waiting create the conditions for a gathered condition of individuals and community—​of felt differences within a felt unity. What we see in the Quaker business meeting practices are friends engaged in communal political action in which the dialogue with oneself (in silence) is a powerful constitutive element. Indeed, Hannah Arendt would suggest that thinking is the beating heart of the political as the necessary condition for plurality to be exactly that. And for her, a society without plurality is a form of totalitarianism (Arendt, 2005).

24.5  Silence and Arendt’s Contribution to Organization Studies How then can an Arendtian interpretation of the role of silence in Quaker practices contribute to how we think about silence in our study of organizations and organizing? In addressing this question, we begin by setting our contribution in the context of prior research that has also explored silence as generative rather than merely negative. We then present an understanding of organizing centred on politics and judgement rather than truth and reason. Bigo (2018), in her study of the relationship between silence, creativity, and ethics, draws on Heidegger’s statement that ‘Being remains inclined toward concealment, whether in great veiling and silence, or in the most superficial distorting and obscuring’ (Heidegger, 2000: 121, Bigo’s emphasis; see also Heidegger, 1985: 267). She also cites Cooper (2005) who uses the term ‘unfinished inbetweenness’ to describe how nothing is complete in itself but only exists in relation with others through a ‘labour of division’. For Cooper, this ‘unfinished inbetweenness’ is exemplified in the background silences between words in speech that withdraw when speech expresses itself but are yet ‘always present as a supportive absence’ (Cooper, 2005: 1692). Silence has no purpose, direction, or form, but is still ‘the source or re-​serve of all our ideas, objects and forms; it is like an infinite womb which can receive and generate the multiple seeds of human agency

Analysis of Quaker Meeting Practices    501 as well as accommodating their complex developments and perpetual movement’ (p. 1692). This ‘infinite womb’ is what Arendt refers to as ‘natality’, the capacity to begin something anew, ‘in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted’ (Arendt, 1998: 247). Silence, then, is the space from which the as-​yet-​unknown emerges, where original ideas find their source, or, as Cooper puts it, ‘What we do not and cannot know speaks to us through its silence’ (2005: 1705). In this way, (pregnant) silence facilitates creativity, which Bigo sees as a ‘process of giving form or expression to abstractions waiting to be uncovered in spaces of silence’ (2018: 125). Silence also requires a ‘quiet self ’ or a ‘state of receptivity that corresponds to the most unimpeded level of availability to others’ (p. 123), which is what the Quaker practices seek to achieve. De Vaujany & Aroles (2018) also focus on silence’s role in the relationship between individuals, in the interstices of collective learning. Drawing on the writings of Merleau-​ Ponty, they depict silence as a temporal, paradoxical infrastructure that underlies, orders, scaffolds, and gives direction and visibility to workers’ embodied and collaborative learning processes. Far from being passive, invisible, and continuous, silence is generative, but it also must be actively produced and maintained. While their research site—​a makerspace community—​is quite different from a Quaker meeting, both settings exhibit collective practices that work to create silence and to put silence to work. Both Bigo (2018) and de Vaujany & Aroles (2018) highlight silence’s generative role in creativity and learning. Their ideas are very much in harmony with Arendt’s concept of ‘natality’ even though they do not cite her. Indeed, Arendt is largely absent from organization studies, which is surprising because much of her work is on topics relevant to the field and she is widely considered one of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century. In the remainder of our discussion, we focus on some of the political aspects of her writing, how they are illustrated in Quaker practices, and how they can present a novel understanding of organizing. In particular, we draw on the distinction she makes between reasoning and thinking. Most famously, Arendt analysed reason without thought—​thoughtlessness—​in her study of the trial of one of the main architects of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. For Arendt, Eichmann was neither an evil monster nor a psychotic Jew-​hater but rather was just an innocuous individual who simply followed rules without thinking. Crucially, she argues, Eichmann lacked the internal dialogue with himself that is the prerequisite for imagination, judgement, and ethical action. His primary characteristic was his ‘inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else’ (Arendt, 2006: 49; original emphasis). She sees this particularly in his use of stock phrases and clichés, and in the judges’ conclusion that all Eichmann ‘had said was “empty talk” ’ (p. 49). This echoes Heidegger’s notion of ‘idle talk’, which, while it is a necessary part of life in that we inherit language, largely unwittingly, and take up common ways of speaking based on repetition and reproduction, it is also a fallen or inauthentic form of discourse. Idle talk with others is, for Heidegger, an act of ‘closing off ’ that ‘discourages any new inquiry and any disputation’ (Heidegger, 1996: §35.H.169). This is part of what he terms ‘fallenness’, which might be interpreted as inauthenticity or a ‘nonawareness of what it means to be’ (Gelven, 1989: 106). But fallenness is at once countered by Dasein’s parallel search for

502    Lucas Introna, Donncha Kavanagh, and Martin Brigham authenticity, using language in its internal interpretation of the world. In other words, thinking. Arendt’s study of Eichmann brings to mind Weber’s writing on how bureaucracy, with its emphasis on formal rationality, can overpower value-​based substantive rationality. By design, Weberian bureaucracy marginalizes thinking, imprisoning individuals in an iron cage of formal rationality wherein repetitive procedure reproduces sameness and hollows out any sense of what might be. In this sense, the formal rationality of bureaucracy, centred on instrumental, planned action, is a manifestation of ‘work’ in Arendt’s tripartite scheme of viva activa. And just as Arendt positions the political domain of ‘action’ at the top of her scheme, Weber observes that ‘at the top of a bureaucratic organization, there is necessarily an element which is at least not purely bureaucratic’ (Weber, 1921: 222). In public bureaucracies, politicians occupy this non-​bureaucratic position, and Weber stresses that they ‘must be the countervailing force against bureaucratic domination’ (p. 1417). Thus, for both Weber and Arendt, politics is the domain of substantive rationality, values, ethics, imagination, and thinking, and is always entangled and in tension with the instrumentalism of formal rationality. Here, Arendt reflects Heidegger’s observation that formal rationality threatens to obliterate the possibility of thinking, and also, because thinking and being are ontologically linked, of being. The salient distinction is thus between reasoning as a technological, calculative device and thinking as ‘thoughtful dwelling’. If reasoning without thinking is a form of pathology, its direct opposite—​thinking without reasoning—​is equally dysfunctional. This is the domain of the ‘professional thinker’, the contemplative philosophers who have disengaged from society, public life, and politics. Arendt traces the gulf between philosophy and politics to Plato’s rejection of the life of the polis after Socrates’ trial and execution (Arendt, 1990). Socrates was unable to persuade his judges of his innocence, which led Plato to turn his back on the city and to elevate the sphere of solitary contemplation above the sphere of action. But for Arendt, this is a fatal mistake as contemplation on its own, disentangled from action, is a form of pathology. One can speculate that Arendt saw Heidegger as having committed this mistake, as she wrote in a 1949 letter to Karl Jaspers: This living in Todtnauberg [where Heidegger had a chalet], grumbling about civilization and writing Sein with a ‘y,’ is really a kind of mouse hole he has crawled back into1 [ . . . ] He probably thought he could buy himself loose from the world this way at the lowest possible price, fast-​talk himself out of everything unpleasant, and do nothing but philosophize. (Köhler & Saner, 1992: 142).

Arendt’s writings on and relationship with her former mentor and lover are ambivalent, but it is perhaps telling that two Nazi men epitomize the extremes that she, a Jewish

1 

Arendt later developed this allegory in her short essay, Heidegger the Fox (Arendt, 2000).

Analysis of Quaker Meeting Practices    503 woman, decries: Eichmann for not thinking and Heidegger for confusing solitary contemplation with thinking. The unthinking Eichmann provides a trope for management and organizational scholars to inquire into the distinctions between thoughtlessness, stupidity, bullshit, and malevolence, and the associated cultures and practices that make wrongdoing so prevalent in contemporary organizations. And there is also scope for scholars to inquire into how business schools have fostered a particular form of thoughtlessness through their dominant pedagogic and administrative practices that prepare students for labour and work rather than politics and action (Holt, 2020). In contrast, Arendt’s depiction of Heidegger shows how academics can too easily decamp from the messy world of political life in the self-​serving pursuit of pure theory. And she has a distinctive and relevant take on theorizing: theorizing is not about knowing or about reducing uncertainty but is centrally an instantiation of the human ability to fashion new categories, to imagine, to make meaning, to begin anew. Arendt’s celebration of plurality makes her hostile to the social sciences, which, she argues, work performatively to obliterate individual difference (Arendt, 1998: 41–​5; Baehr 2002). She was particularly dismissive of economics which ‘could achieve a scientific character only when men had become social beings and unanimously followed certain patterns of behavior, so that those who did not keep the rules could be considered to be asocial or abnormal’ (Arendt, 1998: 42). Statistics was equally to blame for creating homogenous and homogenizing notions like ‘society’ and ‘class’, for encouraging an understanding of the world based on large populations, and for pushing the notion that human action is driven by social ‘laws’ (Arendt, 1998: 43). Arendt argues that while theorizing as a form of generalizing may be acceptable in studying the natural world, it is no basis for understanding humans. For her, theorizing the social is totalizing: a flawed, conceited, and dangerous endeavour that works to eradicate the essence of humanity—​ plurality. Moreover, in valorizing knowing, organization theory works to devalue thinking. In contrast, an Arendtian take on organization theory would probably describe the practices that groups, sharing a common world, use to create and maintain public spaces, thinking, and political dialogue, and how they collectively deliberate, judge, and act.

24.6  Conclusion In this chapter, we have argued that some of Hannah Arendt’s ideas on thinking, reasoning, and judging are well-​illustrated in Quaker meetings, where silence is invoked generatively to enlarge the mind, first individually and then collectively, producing both meaning and a basis for action. Quaker meetings are a very deliberate set of socio-​material practices that might appear to be simple and informal but are actually a highly choreographed performance. In these well-​honed practices, silence is skilfully mobilized as a generative force that works to intertwine and co-​constitute thought and

504    Lucas Introna, Donncha Kavanagh, and Martin Brigham judgement in a particular setting, as friends partake in a communal rhythm of private thinking and public dialogue. Our inquiry into Arendt, silence, and Quaker meetings introduces new insights into the study of organizations and organizing. In particular, it spurs us to reflect on the concrete practices that exist in other contexts that might enable the enlargement of mind and a collective sense-​making. Where, precisely, are those practices in our organizations, and how and where are sense and judgement developed? If the political—​the entwinement of private and public thinking—​relies on friendship, how are friendships fostered and maintained in organizational settings? How are silences curated and cared for so that their generative potentials are released? We have argued that the union of thought and judgement is produced through silence, but might this be done in different ways? What are the organizational practices that might make action, both individual and collective, more thoughtful? What the Quaker meetings illustrate is that such practices do not just happen; they must be thought through and cared for in a shared context that is larger than the individual, while participants must also be socialized into a particular set of underpinning sensibilities. It would be naïve to presume that these Quaker meeting practices can be easily transplanted from one context to another, since they are evocative of a way of being rather than a technology prescribing the conduct of meetings. It is worth noting that even though the Quaker practices are well-​known, they have not spread, in any significant way, beyond the Quaker community. Indeed, we found no evidence that the Quakers had implemented them even within their own family businesses, which indicates the degree of socialization required to reproduce and maintain such practices and the difficulty in transplanting them into a new context. Equally pertinent may be Arendt’s view, in line with the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, that the agora (the public space of freedom and political life) and the oikos (the household and space of necessity) should be kept separate (Arendt, 1998: 24–​8). Politics, for her, requires freedom, ‘understood negatively as not being ruled or ruling, and positively as a space which can be created only by men and in which each man moves among his peers’ (Arendt, 2005: 117; our emphasis). Framed in this way, Quaker family businesses are hierarchical, patriarchal, and part of the private realm, while Quaker meetings are part of the public realm where participants engage with one another as equals. For Arendt, political spaces and practices are neither natural nor easy to put in place: ‘politics is not self-​evident and most certainly is not found everywhere men live in community’ (Arendt, 2005: 116). She is also resolutely elitist: ‘the political way of life has never been and will never be the way of life of the many’ (Arendt, 1963: 275). That might feel uncomfortable, but it speaks to the difficulties in implementing the type of sustainable, self-​reproducing practices that the Quakers have carefully reproduced for centuries. It also speaks to the care and thought that must go into creating enduring political practices in new contexts. The potential difficulties are many, but the meld of Arendt and the Quakers shows that the former’s ideal type of politics can be realized, as evidenced by the latter’s concrete practices. Arendt’s conceptual carapace, allied to the Quakers’ mix of social practices and material configurations, provides a rich template

Analysis of Quaker Meeting Practices    505 for thinking about thinking, reasoning, and judgement, and for experimenting with different practices and rhythms that, over time, will morph into something distinctive. One might suggest that universities, in particular, should be a good setting to experiment with Arendt’s ideas and versions of Quaker practices, given their not-​quite-​ forgotten tradition of deliberative decision-​making by peers. However, the wholesale adoption of neo-​liberal technologies of organizing is working against such a move. Experimenting with the ideas and practices, in perhaps modest initiatives, is probably the prudent way forward. We should not idealize Arendt nor romanticize the Quakers, as both are products of particular conditions and traditions. In particular, Arendt is sometimes criticized for her almost unqualified admiration of the politics of the ancient Greek city-​state, or her ‘polis envy’ as Wolin (1995: 36) dryly observed. Nonetheless, her eclectic writings on power, organization, judgement, politics, morality, revolution, friendship, bureaucracy, and modernity can contribute much to organization studies. The fact that she has been largely overlooked thus far is noteworthy, and perhaps indicates that the current paradigm cannot accommodate her antagonism towards social theorizing, which she sees as an insidious practice that works to obliterate plurality. Maybe the key lesson is that our theorizing needs to be more thoughtful and that we should not be mesmerized by the search for abstract generalities that efface history, geography, and particularity. We have emphasized the aporetic and creative dialogue between private and public thinking in Quaker corporate business meetings. Creating the conditions for thoughtful organizational practice should hopefully enable yet to be discerned messages from the future to be heard in the present.

Acknowledgements The authors want to acknowledge the generous contributions of the following individuals and groups to the development our understanding and insights into Quaker practices: Denise Gabuzda and Richard Harrison of the Cork Quaker Meeting, Nicholas Burton, and David Boulton.

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Chapter 25

Tu ning into T h i ng s Sensing the Role of Place in an Emerging Alternative Urban Community Boukje Cnossen

25.1  Introduction It is tempting to start any introduction to a specific place, case, or site, with a concrete description. Ethnographic writing, and customs of reporting in general, require us to start with the essentials of who, what, where, and when. But when entering something like the Place Project (this name being a direct translation from its original, German name, Platzprojekt), one immediately senses the importance of both an elsewhere and a not-​yet-​there, or a to-​become. The site, located in an industrial area on the outskirts of Hanover, Germany, is a terrain full of trailers and self-​built structures. These are used by artists, craftspeople, social enterprises, and activists. On the one hand, the use of these terms or categories puts this place in a category with other revitalized industrial areas in other cities. There is a lot to be said for that, as this site indeed resembles those places. Many former wharfs, factories, and warehouses have become the stage for groups that need room to play, experiment, and, at least for some, be off the grid. These comparisons make sense. Local governments have borrowed each other’s strategies for revitalizing deserted industrial areas, and, with the help of social media and international tourism, a certain hipster aesthetic—​its main ingredients being independent coffee shops, vintage furniture, and street art—​has travelled fast. On the other hand, many of the places that provide a comparison for the Place Project look fancier, more ‘put together’ than this one. Here, rather than having bearded baristas on site, unpretentious filter coffee is served in exchange for voluntary donations. Here, rather than adhering to the now worldwide codes of post-​industrial chic, the trailers, containers, and tiny houses seem assembled according to people’s individual visions, executed in their spare time.

Sensing the Role of Place    509 So, rather than starting with what is there, in the sense of what can be seen, I would like to start with an observation of what is not there, or at least not there yet. As you walk around the Place Project, everything looks like a work in progress, an unfinished artwork, or a construction project. Some of these in the midst of being worked on, other things perhaps have been left aside for a while but with people hopeful enough to get back to it. In that sense, it seems almost the opposite of what US anthropologist Kathleen Stewart wrote on the impoverished and precarious mining communities in southern West Virginia, in the United States: [A]‌place that has given itself over to such ‘abandonment to the currents of existence.’ A place, as people would say, ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’—​a home place hardened into a protective cocoon from the threatening life beyond the hills and yet always emptying out as people leave in search of work. A place mired in the abject decay of things left behind, yet vibrant with re-​membered [sic] presence. (1996b: 144)

If Stewart’s observations dealt with a place in decline, this chapter is about a place on its way up. Drawing on her work about places (Stewart 1996a, b), as well as on her later work on everyday affects (Stewart, 2007, 2017), I start from the idea that a place is about more than what meets the eye. It refers to concrete, lived practice in a specific location (Merrifield, 1993), accumulated over time and condensed into a sense of what is specific about these geographical coordinates. Inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (Stewart, 2017, 1996a), Stewart’s work has been qualified as (post-​)phenomenological (Clough & İşsevenler, 2016; Hunter, 2016; McCormack, 2017; Meloncon, 2018; Kozel, 2020). She herself stresses the need of the ethnographer’s precise and creative tuning in to a specific event, situation, moment, or place, more than any philosophical genealogies behind these terms. Any type of cultural, ethnographic inquiry should take as its objects ‘textures and rhythms, trajectories, and modes of attunement, attachment, and composition’ (Stewart, 2008: 71). In line with Stewart’s insistence on what she calls ‘weak theory’ (2008), a term she in turn had borrowed from queer studies scholar Eve Sedgwick (1997), this chapter is not organized according to the classic division between theory and findings. Rather, it engages with the larger question of how a phenomenological attention to place can help us make sense of the role of practices of prefiguration in organizing. It does so by drawing on a field visit to the alternative urban community of the Place Project, which took place during the Covid-​19 pandemic in October 2020. Whilst my interest in organizational spaces pre-​dates this particular field visit (Cnossen & Bencherki, 2019; Cnossen et al., 2020; Brakel-​Ahmed et al., 2021), the focus of this chapter also resulted from tracing the eponymous character of the case at hand. In other words, instead of starting from comparison or category, the very name Place Project, combined with what can be sensed while tuning in to this place, invited me to take seriously its visceral ‘placeness’ (Saives et al., 2016; Sergot & Saives, 2016). Rather than using the empirical material to demonstrate a point, I aim to make sense of what

510   Boukje Cnossen I observed—​or better yet: sensed (Warren, 2008; Willems, 2018)—​through current thinking on place, ethnography, and future in the field of management and organization studies (MOS). Stewart wrote that: the point of theory now is not to judge the value of analytical objects or to somehow get their representation ‘right’ but to wonder where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them as a potential or a resonance. (2008: 73; emphasis added)

The ‘now’ in the citation refers to her argument of what is needed in an ‘unfinished world’. In my reading of Stewart, I take this unfinishedness to be ontological in nature, rather than a material feature or state. What is needed then, is not to pile explanatory theories or models on top of an already sensorialy and discursively saturated world, but to grasp how things are temporarily thrown together, and how they are made to make sense as such. I recognize this type of unfinishedness in the Place Project, which is not to say that I empirically identify it, but rather that it makes sense to me to approach this place in terms of its unfinishedness. Hence, and in the spirit of Stewart’s weak theory, I aim not to represent the Place Project, but rather ask what ways of knowing, relating, and attending are somehow present in it. In what follows, recent organizational research on place as well as a broader discussion of Stewart’s work will be weaved through a limited, situated, and subjective account of my visit to the Place Project. Examples from the field visit to the Place Project are given to suggest that place and future-​making played a role in the emergence of this community. I will conclude with several suggestions for how phenomenological approaches, and in particular Stewart’s work, can help MOS scholars attend to the role of place and future-​making in informal organizational contexts.

25.2  A Failed Attempt at Fieldwork I had wanted to visit the Place Project for a long time. Some of my colleagues had introduced this setting to me, and had asked me to join them as a co-​author on a working paper. I had heard their stories, as well as anecdotes from other people who had visited it. Since I had joined in the writing of the paper, I had had a file on my computer of transcripts of interviews conducted with Place Project tenants, pictures, students’ reports, policy documents, media coverage, and my colleagues’ previous publications based on their research there (Weisenfeld & Hauerwaas, 2018; Kagan et al., 2019; Hauerwaas & Weisenfeld, 2020; Mitra et al., 2020). I had gone through this material several times, on the screen of my laptop, hundreds of kilometres away from the actual geographical location of these data (to use the terminology common to our academic discipline) referred to. I thought of this as preparation for a new stint of fieldwork that

Sensing the Role of Place    511 I would hopefully be able to conduct myself, in between teaching and administrative duties. The irony of not having seen the Place Project myself whilst trying to contribute to a paper that focused on the importance of place, in response to the increasing demand for context-​specific accounts of entrepreneurship (e.g., Welter, 2011; Welter & Gardner, 2016a, b; Welter et al., 2019), was not lost on me. At the same time, it seemed very obvious that I would go to the Place Project as soon as possible to conduct additional ‘fieldwork’—​another common term in my corner of academic practice, which could mean so many different things and bring up so many different questions, with ‘where is the field?’ and ‘what is the work?’ being only two of them. An initial site visit had to be postponed, and then the Covid-​19 pandemic hit. As the travel restrictions endured for several months, the aforementioned paper was written so it could at least be presented at a virtual conference. Presenting a paper about the importance of place, written without having seen the place that is deemed of importance: irony slapped on top of irony. As soon as a small window of opportunity opened, in between two periods of partial lockdown, I planned to finally visit the Place Project together with a colleague. The material, I decided, was ‘background knowledge’ about the Place Project, its history and context. Although I was aware of the importance of actually visiting the place, and hopefully even spending longer periods of time there, I still thought of the data I would collect as somehow supplementing or complementing what I already had. As if the formalization of things seen through entirely different sets of eyes, filtered through completely different minds, and written down by different sets of hands was somehow all material placed on an equal ontological footing, and where triangulation of different sources is generally thought to increase reliability. This is a very common perception in the field of MOS, where studies are often composed from different data sets (e.g., Bechky & Ockhuysen, 2011; Vásquez et al., 2016). While epistemic positionings among ethnographers in MOS research differ drastically (Yanow, 2010), even when separately collected sets of empirical material are combined, the idea is often to arrive at an analysis that has gone from emic to etic, or from an understanding of locally used knowledge and language, to more generalized concepts and categories (Bechky & Chung, 2018). While discussions among MOS scholars have for decades focused on whether to be an in-​or an outsider when observing and studying social contexts (Weick, 1999: 799), my eventual visit to the Place Project provided a different insight. This insight was evidently triggered by the fact that there simply was no chance of developing an insider’s perspective, which made me question what could be grasped in such a short time. And although the background information gathered was very useful, as were the parallels that could be drawn to other places, what was most vivid about entering this place was not what was going on at that precise moment, but rather what was hanging in the air: a sense of hopefulness, of things being in a state of becoming, of a place that is all about where it might be going. Of course, specific material and discursive indications could be offered for this. For example, when entering the location, I saw that there was a small gathering going on. People were sitting on chairs arranged in somewhat of a circle, outside on the terrain, in

512   Boukje Cnossen between the trailers. I made eye contact with a few attendants, but I registered immediately that they were in the middle of not just any conversation, but a particular conversation that had been scheduled and prepared. I looked at my colleague, who had been to the Place Project once before, and we decided to walk around so as not to disturb this activity. We drifted towards the centre of the terrain, where we found a group of women chatting. Here, it somehow was immediately clear that these women were not part of any programme, that this was their regular habitat. It could be the way they were positioned, with one person sitting on the steps of a caravan, the others on a pulled-​up crate or a chair that just happened to be there. A perfect visual illustration of what it means to be ‘hanging out’, which is both slightly and significantly different from the practice of sitting around that Stewart describes so vividly (1996b: 148). The hanging out, a description emphasizing a giving in to gravity, a relaxation, describes people who are here just to be. Looking around, there were unfinished DIY projects and hand-​made signs. This impression was not gained from what people were saying. It was more a sensing, a tuning in, a type of ‘noticing that gropes from a haptic space in the middle of things’ (Stewart, 2008: 71).

25.3  From Wasteland to Place: Considering the Trees Once the women who were hanging out had noticed us, one of them quickly got up and walked towards my colleague and I. As she came closer, I was able to recognize her from an online video meeting in preparation for this visit. She was expecting our visit that day, although we had not been quite sure to what extent she would have time for us. But now it seemed that whatever activity was going on at that moment was running on its own, and she was indeed just ‘hanging out’. She offered to take us around the Place Project and we gladly accepted. We followed her back towards the entrance of the terrain to the skatepark, which is located immediately next to the area where the trailers are standing. Our host started with a short timeline, with the start of the skatepark dating ten years back. She mentioned how the skatepark had actually been built illegally, without any permits, but how this was OK given that no other plans had existed for the plot. Local young people came to use the skatepark, but also to hang out, probably in the same fashion as our host had been doing just a little earlier, because they enjoyed the atmosphere. Our host herself had spent a lot of time here at that early stage, not because she enjoyed skating, but because she enjoyed being here: ‘I don’t care about skating but find the DIY culture and the other subcultures around it very interesting. There is a lot of solidarity’. Trained as an artist, she mentioned her experience with street art and added that ‘Skaters and people who do graffiti have the same way of looking at a city: they look

Sensing the Role of Place    513 for what they can use. They make unused spots and corners their own, they see the use it can have’. Then, the skaters and others who had been using the illegally built skating structures, noticed the regular cutting down of trees. Under local legislation, trees older than four years could not be cut down and since the plot needed to be kept available for potential developers, the trees had always been cut down before reaching that age. Annoyed with this, the idea emerged to found an association that would legally rent the skatepark. From this, our host explained, the idea started to take root that ‘the place could be more’, and a plan for an alternative community of artists and entrepreneurs was developed. From a phenomenological perspective, people are in a place and sense the place. They get immersed and are influenced by the characteristics of the place. This is exactly what seemed to have happened in those early days of the skatepark. People, even those who could not skate and had no interest in learning how to do so, were drawn to the place because of its atmosphere, the ways in which it related to alternative values and subcultures—​not very explicitly but affectively—​and the worlds that could be discovered and built through its specific way of being. Indeed, the notion of ‘worlding’, a central concept in phenomenological and non-​representation theory (Hunter, 2016; McCormack, 2017), is about making place. If space is considered a neutral void, place is the concrete, the lived practice in a specific location (Merrifield, 1993). Places have value for persons and they provide context: ‘Place is about situatedness in relation to identity and action’ (Tilley, 1994: 18). A place can foster a sense of community (Garrett et al., 2017) and belonging (Drake, 2003). In organization studies, place is increasingly approached within a relational ontology. For example, Pierce & Martin (2015) propose the lens of ‘relational place’ as a methodological framework to capture multiplicity. Drawing on the work of Doreen Massey (Thrift, 1999; Saives et al., 2016; Sergot & Saives, 2016) and partly led by the apparent importance of place for certain areas of the creative industries (Pratt 2002; Clare 2013; Saives et al., 2016), Saives and colleagues suggest the term ‘placeness’ (Saives et al., 2016; Sergot & Saives, 2016) in order to capture place as a quality to be established and maintained in everyday practice. Other organizational research on spatiality and relationality has drawn inspiration from Heidegger’s notion of dwelling and spatiality, and his suggestion to poetically inhabit the world (Chia & Holt, 2006; Küpers, 2011; Hydle, 2015). Stewart’s focus on marginalized communities and left-​behind places adds to existing phenomenological research in organization studies the understanding that a poetic inhabiting of the world is not done in the same way by all. Her focus on ‘worlding’ and the continuous making of the everyday brings attention that not everyone dwells in the same way. It is Stewart’s dedicated and profound ethnographic practice, with years spent in certain communities, that makes her phenomenological approach of specific interest to organizational researchers. According to Stewart, ‘the problem of considering such placeness, or the senses of a place, is a problem of tracking the force of cultural practices subject to social use and thus filled with moments of tension, digression, displacement, deferral, excess, arrest, contradiction, immanence, and desire’ (1996b: 139). In other

514   Boukje Cnossen words, and first of all, this means that ethnographers should not aim to describe what a place is, or is like, but rather what it impresses upon them, what it might feel like, remind them of, connect to, or hint towards. This requires a style of writing that is both personal and poetic, and yet is able to move beyond the particular and the descriptive. This connecting is done not through establishing lines of causation or structural resemblance, but rather by focusing on how things seem to hang together. This is exactly what the anecdote about the impending cutting down of trees did. Even when it remained an anecdote spoken by one person, and thus by no means adhering to the standards of ‘empirical evidence’, the relaying of the story gave the impression of a founding story. People were there anyway, trees were about to be cut down, and making the practices at this specific place legally valid could prevent the trees from disappearing as well as giving the community a chance to grow, although it was not clear into what. This did not matter either, what was crucial was the chance of a process of becoming.

25.4  Kitchen Duty, a Library of Things, and a Rainbow-​C oloured Ramp: The Materializing of Values As we continued our tour and walked back towards the centre of the terrain, a woman came out of the kitchen trailer and a conversation between her and our host unfolded. They hugged each other, something which was, at the time of visiting, not in accordance with the greeting rules of the pandemic, yet it gave off even more of a sense of affection because of that. Our host had mentioned earlier that the kitchen trailer is intensely used by different self-​run initiatives, some of which are very responsibly run and do not need to be checked upon, whilst others needed some more guidance. For example, one group who had recently broken something asked whether they could replace it, which was answered with a clear ‘yes, of course!’. The woman running the kitchen remembered this story and she and our hosts were laughing because of the lack of initiative this showed. This willingness to deal with the material, to make things happen yourself, to not ask about rules but simply do instead, seemed to characterize the Place Project. My colleague asked about a trailer she had heard of and our host explained that this was now being turned into a ‘library of things’, a place where tools and equipment could be borrowed. The choice of ‘things’ (Dinge in German) rather than ‘tools’ invoked Heidegger (1967), perhaps inadvertently, and gave me the impression that there was an appreciation of the role such things played in shaping this place. Rather than emphasizing their functionality, both the more poetic ‘things’ and the choice for the word ‘library’, a place of conservation and collection, gave a sense of the sacredness of the tools that would eventually live there.

Sensing the Role of Place    515 Towards the back of the terrain, quite far removed from the street entrance and the skatepark, we were introduced to the communal space used for meetings, concerts, and other events. In front of it was a ramp painted in bright rainbow-​like colours, making the space accessible to wheelchair users. Our host explained that it was made from concrete, and so easy to build that the people who installed it had even had time left to make it look beautiful, even if that had not been part of their assignment. All in all, the addition to the structure had been cheap and easy to make and had a great effect. Here again, this tinkering with material in a way that goes beyond official requirements (i.e. painting the ramp in rainbow colours), is a way of showing respect for the place and its values.

25.5  How to Mobilize Stewart’s Post-​P henomenology for MOS Research: Three Suggestions Given her focus on space (1996a) and place (1996b), the work of Kathleen Stewart has mainly entered the organizational space literature (e.g., Beyes & Holt, 2020). While MOS researchers have started to pick up on the notion of affect (Stewart, 2007) in order to account for the atmospheres and sensations permeating organizational spaces and contexts (Beyes & Steyeart 2012; Beyes & De Cock, 2017; Katila et al., 2019), it has also been noted that affect’s potential in researching organizational context has yet to have been fully explored (Fotaki et al., 2017). Although Stewart’s (2017, 2007) work on affect is only one approach among many, I believe that her detailed anthropological accounts of sites and situations can help lend vocabulary to help us understand the affective aspects of flexible organizational spaces or ‘workscapes’ (Brakel-​Ahmed et al., 2020), of which the Place Project is an example. Specifically, in places and organizational spaces that do not allow for classic fieldwork, simply because activities and events take place in bursts, an attention to affectively charged moments can help the organizational scholar ‘tune in’ to what is made to matter. This can include a delay in the jump to framing empirical material as ‘data’, and instead thinking in terms of ‘not-​yet’ data (Benozzo & Gherardi, 2019), thereby moving away from the here and now that is so determining in most ethnographic approaches. In particular, I see three ways in which Stewart’s phenomenology can contribute to MOS research in that particular vein. The first is through a further refinement of existing recommendations for ‘sensing’ approaches (e.g., Bispo & Gherardi, 2019). If places can be ‘at once tactile and imaginary’ (Stewart, 1996b: 144), this poses a serious threat for those scholars who are inclined to follow what they can see. A short reading of abstracts and paper introductions in the field of MOS shows the ubiquity of the verb to look, used for instance in the phrasing ‘we look at’, as a shorthand to indicate their object of inquiry (Bardon et al., 2020). Although

516   Boukje Cnossen MOS scholars have been arguing for a sensing approach (Warren, 2008; Willems, 2018; Bispo & Gherardi, 2019), as well as for a deeper inquiry into the ‘taken-​for-​granted’ view of observation (Bardon et al., 2020), the field’s tendency to focus on what can be seen and heard prevails. Although the impressions at the Place Project shared above were certainly derived through conversation and observation, it was a sensing of the place which was crucial in order to gain a first understanding of its emergent organizing. This meant relying on all senses, but also a going beyond the realist positioning underpinning much of the fieldwork in our field. In the case of the Place Project, sensing the importance of things to be tinkered with in the shaping of the community, came from seeing how things were cared for, how they were named, placed, and discussed. This resulted in an intuitive and affective grasping of the importance for people contributing to the Place Project to simply spend time there, taking initiative and caring for things spontaneously, and developing the community as a result. Such ‘sensings’ need to be verified through conversation, further observation, or other sources of material. As the work of Stewart (1996a) shows, a phenomenological approach is no replacement for any long-​term fieldwork. In my case, the prolonged period in which visiting was not allowed, and the lack of possibility to conduct fieldwork were far from ideal. Nevertheless, much like the traveller so vividly gaining their first impressions of a country upon setting foot in it for the first time, these constraints brought the sensory and affective aspects of the Place Project to the fore. Different from common understandings of (organizational) ethnography, which focus on the ability to read and describe social contexts (Neyland, 2008; Yanow, 2010; Ybema et al., 2009), Stewart’s particular phenomenological (McCormack, 2017) approach is to focus on specific moments in which things are thrown together. These moments, which are intense but also part of the everyday, have also been described as ordinary affects (Stewart, 2007). They ‘burst through the constant motion of experience’ (Linstead, 2018: 325), and offer a chance to account for potentiality, for the not-​yet, or the to-​be. Moments of realizing the importance of the trees, the colourful presence of the ramp, and the joyful encounters between active members of the Place Project are examples of these. Hence, a first suggestion is to train one’s ability to sense, by allowing room for intuition and inklings. By focusing on such affectively charged moments, Stewart proposes ‘an escape from the “you are there” realism of ethnographic description into a surreal space of intensification’ (1996b: 143). Indeed, Stewart’s work has tried to account for those things outside of language but still collectively (2017), referring to sensory and bodily impressions that escape usual categories but nevertheless make up the distinct atmospheres of the places we find ourselves in (2007). At the same time, she warns against a hyper-​intense attention to the minutest detail, especially given the restrictions of academic publishing, both in terms of word limits and of writing conventions. Its result—​or perhaps rather, its cause—​is a poetic writing style which also acts as a method of inquiry. As such, the distinction between finding and representing is dissolved entirely. In line with phenomenological theory that takes lived experience as the primary material to understand

Sensing the Role of Place    517 the world (Meloncon, 2018: 100), the clear-​cut division between subject and object is challenged as well. This focus on writing as a way to pay attention to world-​making resulted in her latest book, The Hundreds, which is co-​authored with literary scholar Laurent Berlant and contains poetic vignettes written in one hundred words or multiples thereof, embracing and amplifying the constraints of writing (Berlant & Stewart, 2019). Stewart’s (2008; Berlant & Stewart, 2019) focus on writing has inspired scholars in different sub-​fields of the social sciences and humanities (Luck, 2012; McCormack, 2017; Meloncon, 2018) towards methodological and epistemological renewal by considering the role of writing in knowledge production. Most recently, in the field of MOS research, Stewart’s work has been discussed as one potential way to shape what Stephen Linstead has termed ‘play-​ ful research’: ‘[T]‌he world as the context of action is increasingly recognized as being in play, neither being nor becoming in any specific directional way, and the practice of research attempts to respond to this relative fluidity’ (2018: 322). This need to consider writing as a part of knowledge production is also echoed in recent arguments in MOS research regarding the need to ‘write differently’ (Gilmore et al., 2019; Pullen et al., 2020), and to treat writing as more than representation. What Stewart’s work can contribute to this debate is to treat constraints to writing as opportunities for creativity and renewal, as exemplified in The Hundreds. Finally, the recognition of the practice of research, and particularly writing, as complicit in the production of the objects we describe also resonates with a broader move towards process research in MOS. Both organizational actors and their observers imagine things that then become real, and mobilize futures in our present (Hernes, 2015). To understand how this enacting of potential futures is present, physically and spatially, in the nooks and crannies and everyday goings on, we need phenomenological and affective approaches. As Stewart argues: ‘The affective subject is a person who waits in the company of others for things to arrive, one who learn to sense out what’s coming and what forms it might take, one who aims to notice what crystallizes and how things ricochet and rebound’ (2017: 194). In MOS research, where place is sometimes seen as a canvas upon which the future can be projected (Warren, 2014), or a holding environment, providing safety during challenging times of professional and entrepreneurial change (Petriglieri et al., 2019), the work of Stewart documents the intimate links between place and an orientation towards what may come (1996b, 2007). She describes a place characterized by ‘a perpetually deferred desire to return to what was always already lost or still ahead, just beyond reach’ (Stewart, 2007: 146). Although organizational and entrepreneurial forms of orienting oneself to the future may be secular, I would argue that they require just as much faith. Phenomenological approaches, with their focus on lived experience, potentiality, events, and the coming together of elements previously thought of as separate might provide conceptual tools to further connect world-​and place-​making with practices of future-​ making, which are essential in emergent organizations, as well as in different forms of entrepreneurship.

518   Boukje Cnossen

25.6  Conclusion This chapter has discussed the work of anthropologist Kathleen Stewart in order to suggest the value of a phenomenological and affective awareness in studying the role of places in the emergence of new organizational initiatives. I have aimed to show how Stewart’s work provides conceptual tools and vocabulary to move away from a focus on seeing and hearing in fieldwork, as well as the ‘here and now’ in MOS research of spaces and places. The chapter has suggested that a focus on what can be seen only goes so far, and that MOS research of early-​stage organizations, especially those which are informal and precarious, needs tools to tune into the role of those things that need to be sensed. The case presented, based on a field visit to an alternative urban community in the midst of the Covid-​19 pandemic, offers insights into how moments can provide insights into the values and orientations of such communities.

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Chapter 26

Em b odied Perc e p t i on a nd t he Schemed Worl d Merleau-​Ponty and John Dewey Sun Ning

26.1  Introduction It is now widely accepted that a mind that is saturated with bodily experience is necessary for the dual constitution of the self and of the perceptual field, and that the deployment of perception is always associated with a double reafferent flow—​a tactile flow and a proprioceptive flow. In this chapter, I will discuss this issue in a pragmatically orientated way (following John Dewey), with a possible rejoinder from the phenomenological tradition (specifically Merleau-​Ponty). Indeed, one must be very careful in making such a comparison, but we must not let such a cautious attitude, which is of course necessary, close off the possibilities of mutual interpretation between different traditions. In a sense, to philosophize is to be aware of the range of such possibilities. Merleau-​Ponty takes the living body as the interface of one’s self and the world, or as an immanent topography of the experiential field. He thinks that the origin of our undertakings of the world can be traced to our bodily capacities, and that there is a deep reversibility of the I-​world relation in the sense that the world is a ‘prolongation’ of the body, and consciousness is an ‘internal double’ of the world. We cross-​reference those ideas with Dewey’s, believing that many insights can be drawn via such comparison. Bringing pragmatic insights into the picture—​that there is a primitive intelligence on the organism level which might be called the physical intelligence with regard to habit formation, and that there is a continuity from physical intelligence to social intelligence—​ we can place Dewey’s pragmatic way of thinking about the embodied mind in a different light. For Dewey, perceptual learning is essentially social learning, and the personal body is at once the social mind. Different though they might seem, we further argue that there is a deep sympathy between the phenomenological and pragmatic perspectives

Embodied Perception and Schemed World    523 of these two thinkers, especially when we take Dewey’s existential ontology into consideration. The following comparison is only an introduction, but we hope to stimulate further discussion of the personal and social dimensions of experience, drawing on different sources and traditions.

26.2  Merleau-​Ponty’s Unfinished Project In a letter to Addison Webster Moore dated 14 November 1911, Dewey says, ‘Me and the World is, when you get clear of it, the queerest of the many queer things that have come down the philosophical pike’ (Dewey, n.d.: CJD 03273). Some thirty years later, in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-​Ponty too presents the ultimate dilemma encountered by the mind when facing the world. On the one hand, Merleau-​Ponty says that ‘The structure of actual perception alone can teach us what perception is’ (2002: 4), and ‘we shall never, using the world as our starting-​point, understand what a field of vision is’ (p. 6). On the other hand, regardless of the primacy of the mind, ‘we are caught up in the world and we do not succeed in extricating ourselves from it in order to achieve consciousness of the world. If we did we should see that the quality is never experienced immediately, and that all consciousness is consciousness of something’ (pp. 5–​6). The key to this Gordian knot, as Merleau-​Ponty sees it, is our body: ‘Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system’ (p. 235). And the thing, and the world, are given to me along with the parts of my body, not by any ‘natural geometry,’ but in a living connection comparable, or rather identical, with that existing between the parts of my body itself. External perception and the perception of one’s own body vary in conjunction because they are the two facets of one and the same act. (p 237)

The picture is quite clear: it is by our body that we delve into the thickness of the world and construct the experiential structure—​spatial and temporal—​with meanings around us. A quick reflection on our experience can easily tell us that this is true: if the words ‘enclose’ and ‘between’ have a meaning for us, it is because they derive it from our experience as embodied subjects. Similarly we use bodily metaphors to think about time: we talk about how ‘time flies’, ‘the day drags by’, or ‘the hours crawl’. Merleau-​Ponty uses Aristotle’s illusion to prove that the disturbance of the body image may even be directly translated into the external world without the intervention of any stimulus (p. 238). To truly grasp this picture, Merleau-​Ponty suggests, we need to abandon the understanding of ‘the body as an object, partes extra partes’; instead, we should go

524   Sun Ning back to the body which I experience at this moment, in the manner, for example, in which my hand moves round the object it touches, anticipating the stimuli and itself tracing out the form which I am about to perceive. I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises towards the world. (p. 87)

However, being primarily a psychological interpretation of human perception, the project of Phenomenology of Perception is only starting the development of an ontological project which fully discloses the impossibility of the point of view of consciousness. Indeed, we find Merleau-​Ponty writing in the preface: ‘It is a question of recognizing consciousness itself as a project of the world, meant for a world which it neither embraces nor possesses, but towards which it is perpetually directed—​and the world as this pre-​objective individual whose imperious unity decrees what knowledge shall take as its goal’ (p. xx). Yet we have to wait until The Visible and the Invisible to find the mature configuration of this world-​oriented ontology. The Visible and the Invisible is unfinished due to Merleau-​Ponty’s unfortunate death, but the essential point and basic structure had already, fortunately, been systematically presented in the finished parts. Merleau-​Ponty tells us that there are the visible and the invisible. The visible is what we see. However, what we see is not what we see in the here and now, but what we can see in degrees, in distance, in depth, and in difference—​meaning that the visible is essentially about explorability. Thus the visible is a field of being, an openness. We should notice that although this openness transcends the here and now, it is not atemporal and aspatial. To make of openness a ‘lake of nothingness’, says Merleau-​Ponty, is to overpositivize the visible (Merleau-​Ponty, 1968: 67–​8, 76–​7). The visible is sign. As sign it is always pointing to something else, and that something else is the invisible. As Merleau-​Ponty sees it, ‘What we call a visible is, we said, a quality pregnant with a texture, the surface of a depth, a cross-​section upon a massive being, a grain or corpuscle borne by a wave of Being’ (p. 136). Thus ‘perception is not first perception of things, but perception of elements, of rays of the world, things which are dimensions, which are world’ (p. 218). The world is not constituted of opacity, but of dimensionality; in other words, the world already has its own pattern or style, and this pattern or style is the invisible that the visible as sign points to. The invisible therefore is not a de facto invisible, like something hidden behind another thing, or an absolute invisible that has nothing to do with the visible. In this dual structure, to see is to see with, according to invisible axes and pivots serving as guides. A seeing, in a word, is the co-​functioning of the visible and the invisible. Merleau-​Ponty writes, ‘to comprehend is not to constitute in intellectual immanence, [...] to comprehend is to apprehend by coexistence, laterally, by the style, and thereby to attain at once the far-​off reaches of this style’ (p. 188). This co-​functioning picture is essential to the ontological project that Merleau-​Ponty is aiming at. The idea evoked by this picture is that ‘the relation between what I see and I who see is not one of immediate or frontal contradiction; the things attract my look, my gaze caresses the things, it espouses their contours and their reliefs, between it and them we catch sight of a complicity’ (Merleau-​Ponty, 1968: 76). Merleau-​Ponty sees in it

Embodied Perception and Schemed World    525 a possibility of opening up a new horizon: ‘he who sees is of it and is in it’ (p. 100). In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-​Ponty calls such a horizon ‘Chiasm’. Chiasm is not just an intersecting and intertwining structure, but a deep reversibility of the I-​world relation. In his working notes on The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-​Ponty ponders: By reason of this mediation through reversal, this chiasm, there is not simply a for-​ Oneself for-​the-​Other antithesis, there is Being as containing all that, first as sensible Being and then as Being without restriction—​Chiasm, instead of the For the Other: that means that there is not only a me-​other rivalry, but a co-​functioning. We function as one unique body. (p. 215)

Here we find the important notion: the chiasm is functioning as one unique body. Two aspects of our functioning body are distinguished: first as sensible Being and then as Being without restriction. As sensible Being, our body captures the force and texture of the world, and by so doing ‘feels that he is the sensible itself coming to itself and that in return the sensible is in his eyes as it were his double or an extension of his own flesh’ (p. 114). A sensible body that can be impacted and solicited by the world is indeed a ‘flesh’ in the world; it grows into and with the world, and the world can be its own flesh and it can be the world’s flesh. We are not to forget the second aspect of our functioning body: as Being without restriction. A flesh, as described above, is indeed boundless: it can be the world in the broadest sense. However, Merleau-​Ponty’s ontological project is one of reversibility, not of intertranslatability. That is to say, the flesh and the world can be in fundamental agreement without absorbing each other. As Merleau-​Ponty says, in a sense, as Valéry said, language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the thing, the waves, and the forests. And what we have to understand is that there is no dialectical reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to reassemble them into a synthesis; they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth. (p. 155)

The task of philosophy is to keep the field between the flesh and the world as open as possible. Philosophy, thus construed, is interrogation that ‘neither expects nor receives an answer in the ordinary sense, because it is not the disclosing of a variable or of an unknown invariant that will satisfy this question, and because the existing world existing in the interrogative mode’ (p. 103). In a very sketchy way, we have traced Merleau-​Ponty’s project in illuminating our mind and the I-​world relation from a body-​infused and body-​centered perspective. We sense that, since The Visible and the Invisible is unfinished, there is much to be said and that can be said regarding this project. For Merleau-​Ponty, our body is never an object or material entity in the world; rather, it is the key for our overcoming the dualistic viewpoint and stepping into the dimension of reversibility which he takes as primary.

526   Sun Ning

26.3  Dewey’s Bio-​S ocial Approach and Existential Ontology Dewey, unlike Merleau-​Ponty, does not treat our body as an ontological category; rather, under the Darwinian influence, he tries to understand body functioning in the process of biological evolution. Three points are particularly worth noting. First of all, Dewey suggests that the coupling of proprioception to action is very primitive, and that the role we propose for it in the co-​constitution of an exteriority and self is probably already at work in the simplest living organism. Think of those people who have no sensation of touch or of the movements of their body parts below the face and neck: they live a very interesting and unusual life in which the only way they can know about their bodies is by vision. They need for example to sleep with the light on, because if they are to wake up in the night and need to get out of bed, they need to know where their legs and arms are, so that they can move their legs and arms into the appropriate position to get up. They have, if you like, bodies which are almost like external objects that they can only experience by looking at them, and they do not have the sort of intimate sense of immediately knowing exactly where their body parts are and how to make them all work together. This is a powerful demonstration of how important proprioception really is for our actions. Second, Dewey suggests that the blooming and buzz of experience is the essential qualitative pattern of potency, activity, and goodness (e.g. edibility) of the things that fall within the concomitant domain of proprioception and action, and that it is likely that the domain of corporeal experience is used everywhere to filter and clarify all personal experience. All the information coming into and going out from the brain is filtered via the body. The brain evolves because it improves our chances of survival—​because it allows us to have much more flexible, much more functional, much more successful interactions with our environment—​but the first way in which infants engage with the world is to move, to experiment with kicking and reaching and grasping. Dewey calls the domain of the functioning body the qualitative situation, and what a functioning body does, qualitative thinking. He writes in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, It is to be remarked that a situation is a whole in virtue of its immediately pervasive quality. When we describe it from the psychological side, we have to say that the situation as a qualitative whole is sensed or felt. Such an expression is, however, valuable only as it is taken negatively to indicate that it is not, as such, an object in discourse. Stating that it is felt is wholly misleading if it gives the impression that the situation is a feeling or an emotion or anything mentalistic. On the contrary, feeling, sensation and emotion have themselves to be identified and described in terms of the immediate presence of a total qualitative situation. (1969–​91, vol. 12: 73–​4)

Third, since the succession of bodily sensations is also a sequence of social experiences which arise to accommodate and control them, the extension of social experiences into

Embodied Perception and Schemed World    527 the domain of corporeality and vice versa is also universal; moreover, the interpenetration of corporeal and social experiences co-​construct a memory or mind that is both personal and social. That the ultimate continuity is pervasive in the universe is the essential lesson the pragmatists learned from Darwin. Dewey writes in Art as Experience that Experience is the result, the sign, and the reward of that interaction of organism and environment which, when it is carried to the full, is a transformation of interaction into participation and communication. Since sense-​organs with their connected motor apparatus are the means of this participation, any and every derogation of them, whether practical or theoretical, is at once effect and cause of a narrowed and dulled life-​experience. (1969–​91, vol. 10: 28)

But it is not only this. As Dewey sees it, as the body is thinking through acting, minding is also actually bodily action. Dewey tells us, Mind is primarily a verb. It denotes all the ways in which we deal consciously and expressly with the situations in which we find ourselves [ . . . ] In making mind purely immaterial (isolated from the organ of doing and undergoing), the body ceases to be living and becomes a dead lump. (1969–​91, vol. 10: 268)

All those points, as they derive from a bio-​social approach to understanding the embodied mind, are a bit remote from the phenomenological context. However, in Experience and Nature, Dewey’s magnum opus on metaphysics, we find Dewey saying that different solutions to body-​mind problem ‘have primarily nothing to do with mind-​ body; they have to do with underlying metaphysical issues:—​the denial of quality in general to natural events; the ignoring in particular of temporal quality and the dogma of the superior reality of “causes” ’ (1969–​91, vol. 1: 194). Indeed, it is in this book that Dewey tries to establish an existential ontology using the so-​called empirical denotative method. We find here similar concerns and even similar expressions, sufficient for viewing Experience and Nature as an American twin of Merleau-​Ponty’s ontological project. For example, Dewey writes, The world is subject-​matter for knowledge, because mind has developed in that world; a body-​mind, whose structures have developed according to the structures of the world in which it exists, will naturally find some of its structures to be concordant and congenial with nature, and some phases of nature with itself. (1969–​91, vol. 1: 211)

If we are truly conceiving mind as in the world, as flesh in the world, a sort of ‘connectedness and unity’ can be attained: To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt

528   Sun Ning philosophy. And when thus seen they will be seen to be in, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in history, in a moving, growing never finished process. (1969–​91, vol. 1: 224)

Needless to say, Merleau-​Ponty has exactly the same picture in mind when he is talking about the second aspect of our functioning body, as Being without restriction. Moreover, Dewey, not unlike Merleau-​Ponty, sees a deep conformity or uniformity between the embodied mind and the world. Dewey says that a consciousness which is set on the outside over and against the course of nature and which is not a partaker in its moving changes would have to conform to one of two schemes: In one alternative, the consciousness of such a being would be gifted with an infallible spectatorship conjoined with perfect innocency of impartial recordership; it would see and report the world exactly as if it were itself knowingly engaged in producing what it saw and reported. Or, in the other alternative, all consciousness would be so completely irrelevant to the world of which it is outside and beyond, that there would be no common denominator or common multiple. (1969–​91, vol. 1: 259)

But, as Dewey sees it, ‘obviously facts do not agree with either of these suppositions’ (p. 259). Then, in a quite phenomenological way, Dewey talks about perceiving as partaking: ‘To par-​take and to per-​ceive are allied performances. To perceive is a mode of partaking which occurs only under complex conditions and with its own defining traits. Everything of importance hangs upon what particular one of the many possible ways of partaking is employed in a given situation’ (p. 259). For Dewey, as for Merleau-​ Ponty, minding is essentially partaking the world through our body. This is not only a bio-​social fact but also an ontological structure that enables us to finally abandon the dualistic perspective that separates I from the world and makes their relation ‘the queerest of the many queer things’.

26.4  Flesh in the World and Flesh among Fleshes We think through our body. Consider the possibility of athletes and dancers being able to mentally train when they cannot physically train through injury. They could mentally rehearse just by watching. One interesting possibility is that simply by regular observation of particular actions they can somehow fix and maintain the motor skill needed to perform those actions until their bodies get better. The neuroscientific point would be that they would be using the same areas of their brain in watching as when they are actually moving. And thinking is always thinking in schemes. Merleau-​Ponty and Dewey

Embodied Perception and Schemed World    529 try to explain that the fundamental thinking schemes are bodily schemes that extend their own bounds and communicate with the world’s patterns, and bodily schemes are presented in our every encountering with the world. As Dewey says, ‘Something of the rhythm of vital natural expression, something as it were of dancing and pantomime, must go into carving, painting, and making statues, planning buildings, and writing stories’ (1969–​91, vol. 10: 232). Lakoff and Johnson try to define a broad range of co-​functioning structures and patterns as image schemas, and acknowledge Merleau-​Ponty and Dewey as being among the first to try to undertake the project (see Lakoff, 1980, 1999; Johnson, 2007). According to Johnson, there are three features of image schemas: first, ‘image schemas are an important part of what makes it possible for our bodily experience to have meaning for us. The meaning is that of the recurring structures and patterns of our sensorimotor experience’; second, ‘there is a logic of image-​schematic structure’; third, ‘image schemas are not to be understand as either merely ‘mental’ or merely ‘bodily’, but rather as contours of what Dewey called the body-​mind’ (Johnson, 2007: 139). As for the third feature, we find support from Dewey: But body-​mind simply designates what actually takes place when a living body is implicated in situations of discourse, communication and participation. In the hyphenated phrase body-​mind, ‘body’ designates the continued and conserved, the registered and cumulative operation of factors continuous with the rest of nature, inanimate as well as animate; while ‘mind’ designates the characters and consequences which are differential, indicative of features which emerge when ‘body’ is engaged in a wider, more complex and interdependent situation. (1969–​91, vol. 1: 217)

But there is another feature to be mentioned, which I think is lacking in Johnson’s rephrasing. For both Merleau-​Ponty and Dewey, image schemas do not stay within the body; they are also the world’s schemas. It is true that pragmatists’ radical rejection of any perpetual stability enables them to view the world as a radically open process. But, as Dewey consistently argues throughout his works, an organism seeks to be at equilibrium within its environment. Inquiry occurs when this equilibrium is ‘disintegrated’ in such a way that response becomes necessary to reestablish equilibrium. When the equilibrium of an organism is disintegrated, the intellect mediates and analyses the situation in an attempt to reconstruct the situation in terms of the relations among numerous functioning factors. Dewey, with other pragmatists, further defines this ‘moving equilibrium of action’ as habits (1969–​91, vol. 3: 125). Habits, as Peirce sees it, are laws, or, as in Dewey’s context, might be termed the generic traits of existence. On the one hand, habits are formed in and through the process of human activities; on the other hand, habits as the textures and patterns of the world greatly extend the domain of individual minds. We find a quite unusual passage in Art as Experience:

530   Sun Ning The undefined pervasive quality of an experience is that which binds together all the defined elements, the objects of which we are focally aware, making them a whole [ . . . ]. A work of art elicits and accentuates this quality of being a whole and of belonging to the larger, all-​inclusive, whole which is the universe in which we live. This fact, I think, is the explanation of that feeling of exquisite intelligibility and clarity we have in the presence of an object that is experienced with esthetic intensity. It explains also the religious feeling that accompanies intense esthetic perception. We are, as it were, introduced into a world beyond this world which is nevertheless the deeper reality of the world in which we live in our ordinary experiences. We are carried out beyond ourselves to find ourselves [ . . . ]. This whole is then felt as an expansion of ourselves. (1969–​91, vol. 10: 198–​9)

Dewey is talking about how the individual mind, in aesthetic experience, is located in the all-​inclusive whole and somehow connects with the deeper reality of the world. Indeed, this whole is finally felt as an expansion of ourselves. We can easily detect the influence of transcendentalism here by referring the ever-​expanding self to the Emersonian transparent eyeball. And Merleau-​Ponty is apparently with Dewey on this point. But this mystical sentiment, if there is any, is soon to be balanced by the pragmatic recognition of the importance of communication. For Dewey, there is no individual meaning that is not shared, and this is not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all individuals have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of being. As Dewey puts it, ‘An individual cannot be opposed to the association of which he is an integral part nor can the association be set against its integrated members’ (1969–​91, vol. 2: 354). The meaning of the world is the shared meaning, and the embodied mind is socially situated. Dewey proposes that a dimension of sociality is to be added to Merleau-​Ponty’s ontological project. There is no Being of Being as Merleau-​Ponty proposes, but only a community of Beings. It is true that our experience has deeper layers other than those that fit sense reports in the first place, and it is also true that, as Merleau-​Ponty sees it, philosophy should relentlessly interrogate the unknown beyond the reach of ordinary sense. But such insights only mean that we should conceive our reflectivity as a communal experiment, and that we should boldly take risks together to transform the conventional horizon we have already constructed. To see deeper, then, is not only to see that we are flesh in the world, but also to see that we are flesh among fleshes.

References Dewey, John. (1969–​91). The collected works of John Dewey, 1882–​1953 (Vols. 1–​3, 10, 12), ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John. (n.d.) [CJD 03273]. The correspondence of John Dewey, 1871–​1952, ed. Larry Hickman. The Center for Dewey Studies at SIUC (electronic edition).

Embodied Perception and Schemed World    531 Johnson, Mark. (2007). The meaning of the body: Aesthetics of human understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George, & Mark Johnson. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George, & Mark Johnson. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books. Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. (1968). The visible and the invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. (2002). The phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge.

Chapter 27

Enfram ing a nd Transformat i on Serequeberhan’s African Phenomenological Approach Abraham Olivier

27.1  Introduction In the closing paragraph of his recent paper ‘Philosophy in the Present Context of Africa’, Tsenay Serequeberhan writes: ‘at the end of the day, what really matters in the practice of African philosophy, is the character of the lived existence we strive towards and help bring about. We, too, in other words, are concerned with “a whole way of living” ’ (2021: 39). Serequeberhan is probably best known for his designation of African philosophy as African hermeneutics in his book The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse (1994). It seems fair to say that the above citation brings to the fore that at the core of Serequeberhan’s hermeneutic philosophy is the phenomenological concern for the ‘character of lived existence’. His focus is specifically on an interpretation of lived existence in the post-​colonial African context. The aim of this chapter is to introduce the phenomenological underpinnings of Serequeberhans’s hermeneutic project. In particular, my focus is on his use of Heidegger’s concept ‘enframing’ (Ge-​stell) to characterize the organization of ‘lived existence’ in the post-​colonial context. Recall, enframing refers to the ensnarement of phenomena through their reduction to entities for industrial use within the framework of technocratic modernism. I attempt to show that Serequeberhan uses this concept to argue that enframing manifests in the hierarchical structures of neo-​colonial global capitalism used to organize social, political, and economic life within but also beyond the post-​colonial African context. To further introduce Serequeberhan’s work, it is in order to first give some background to the practice of and contributors to phenomenology in the African context. The phenomenological method, with its various approaches to studying the seminal structures of lived human experience, has been a cornerstone in the thought of

African Phenomenological Approach    533 several African philosophers such as Paulin Hountondji, Dismas A. Masolo, Tsenay Serequeberhan, Achille Mbembe, Mabogo More, Noel Chabani Manganyi, Magobo Ramose, M. John Lamola, Rozena Maart, and proponents of Africana Philosophy (those within the African diaspora)1 such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Lucius Outlaw, Lewis Gordon, George Yancy, and Linda Martin Alcoff.2 Their theoretical focus on the critical analysis of the lived experience of the prevalent workings of the colonial regime and its intersectional modalities of exclusion in race, gender, nationality, culture, class, and religion actually penetrates and permeates the writings of many other African and Africana philosophers. This includes African philosophers from the analytical tradition such as Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye, and Kwame Appiah; and Africana philosophers like Paul Taylor, Charles Mill, and Naomi Zack. This does not imply that all African and Africana philosophers are phenomenologists. Rather, it means that many African and Africana philosophers, regardless of whether they are from the continental or analytical tradition of philosophy, reflect in their writings what one can call a common phenomenological concern with the lived experience, particularly of black people under conditions of colonial or neo-​colonial oppression. The specific contributions of African phenomenologists to phenomenology are often neglected in the larger discursive terrain of African and Africana philosophy, post-​colonialism, and decolonization, and the global phenomenology movement. This may be in part because the designation ‘African phenomenology’ is not used as widely or systematically used or introduced as European or Africana phenomenology by, for instance, Lewis Gordon, Lucius Outlaw, or Paget Henry.3 Part of my aim is to address this lack by introducing Serequeberhan’s African phenomenology. This brings me back to Serequeberhan. Let me resume with some biographical background.4 Tsenay Serequeberhan is professor of philosophy at Morgan State University. Originally from Eritrea, he is, in Anglophone African philosophy, known to be a pioneer of African philosophical hermeneutics. His research is focused on social-​political philosophy, broadly conceived, and is aimed at exploring thematic confluences in the discourses of African/​Africana and Continental philosophy. In his main works, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse (1994) and Existence and 1  According to Gordon, the African diaspora includes ‘African cultures and their hybrid and creolized forms in Europe, North America, Central and South America, and the Caribbean’ (Gordon, 2000: 1) (see also Outlaw, 2017). 2  The uninitiated reader may like to know that Serequeberhan was the first to publish an anthology on African philosophy, titled African Philosophy: The Essential Readings (1991). Other more recent introductory anthologies which include texts of most of the above-​mentioned African philosophers include Coetzee & Roux’s (2002) The African Philosophy Reader, Wiredu’s (2004) A Companion to African Philosophy (2004), and, more recently, Etieyibo’s (2018) Method, Substance, and the Future of African Philosophy. For an introduction to Africana Philosophy, see Gordon’s (2008) An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. 3 See Gordon (1997, 2000, 2008); Henry (2006); and Outlaw (2017). Note, I attempt to give a systematic introduction to African phenomenology in ‘African Phenomenology: Introductory Perspectives’ (Olivier, 2022). 4  I draw this biographical profile from Serequeberhan (2021).

534   Abraham Olivier Heritage (2015), Serequeberhan is focused on exploring the possibilities for ameliorating the character of human existence in view of our contemporary post-​colonial world situation. Serequeberhan does not that explicitly ascribe phenomenology to his hermeneutics. Technically, the term phenomenology occurs only twice in his two main works. This does not mean that Serequeberhan’s main work has no pertinent phenomenological underpinnings. Again, its aim is a hermeneutic examination of the meaning of lived experience in a post-​colonial African context. Therefore, as I try to make clear in Section 27.2.1, his work can be designated as an African hermeneutic phenomenology. My focus is specifically on his critical adoption of Heidegger’s work in his main books The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy (1994) and Existence and Heritage (2015). As above, I deal mainly with Serequeberhan’s approach to the problem of what Heidegger (1977: 301) calls ‘enframing’ (Ge-​stell). Serequeberhan argues that the situation of enframing is mediated, instituted, and imposed through the persistence of neo-​colonial global capitalism within and outside the post-​colonial African context. Enframing warrants transformation. This means, as I show in Sections 27.2.4 and 27.3.3, the snare of neo-​colonial global capitalism demands what Serequeberhan calls effective political liberation. Thus, ultimately, this chapter explores what Serequeberhan calls ‘a transformed abode of man in the world’ (Heidegger, 1977: 301). Section 27.2 of this chapter discusses Serequeberhan’s approach to the problem of enframing in The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy; and Section 27.3 explores the shift of focus in his approach to this problem in Existence and Heritage. In the Conclusion (Section 27.4), I point out some implications of his view for studies of the organization of societies in the post-​colonial context.

27.2  African Hermeneutic Phenomenology This section starts with a brief discussion of Serequeberhan’s phenomenological programme, and then zooms in on his view of enframing.

27.2.1 Serequeberhan’s Programme Serequeberhan starts The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse by explaining its title. The book is, first, about ascribing to philosophy, specifically African philosophy, an interpretative (hermeneutical) character. Second, it is about the ‘horizon’ and ‘discourse’ within which African philosophy is situated. Serequeberhan follows Heidegger—​and for that matter Gadamer—​in developing the notion that African philosophy, like any philosophy, is at its core hermeneutical: it is ‘inherently

African Phenomenological Approach    535 an interpretative undertaking’ (1994: 2). This is grounded in ‘lived finitude’: the limited existence of a mortal human being. Curiously, Serequeberhan does not mention the term ‘phenomenology’ here, but this interpretative undertaking clearly has a phenomenological underpinning. The task is to establish methods to understand, in Husserl’s terminology, the experience of the ‘life-​world’, and in Heidegger’s phrasing ‘our being-​in-​the world’. Following Serequeberhan, human existence is situated in a ‘lived historico-​cultural and political milieu—​a specific horizon’ (1994: 2, 6). The discourse of philosophy presupposes and is founded on this lived milieu, the life-​world.5 Its focus is on interpreting limits and possibilities of the life-​world. ‘Thus, from within the limits of this lived finitude, philosophical hermeneutics explores the possibilities of mortal existence’ (1994: 1). In this sense, the book is about hermeneutic phenomenology: interpreting the ‘life-​world’ of mortal existence, its essential structures, limits, and possibilities. African philosophy is, according to Serequeberhan, like all contemporary philosophy, at the core, hermeneutics. I would add, a hermeneutic phenomenology, as it is an interpretative study of life-​world experience. However, the ‘horizon’ of African philosophy is narrower. It is focused on the ‘horizon and discourse’ of post-​colonial Africa. Serequeberhan makes it clear that his book is about the philosophical discourse within this post-​colonial horizon. In this specific sense, one can call its theme African phenomenological hermeneutics, or, more precisely perhaps, African hermeneutic phenomenology. I shall use these terminologies interchangeably. Although African hermeneutic phenomenology is focused on the African context, it is clearly not confined to this context. Rather, it is about a phenomenological interpretation of the concrete life-​world in which every philosophy is situated. Heidegger introduced this enterprise as a ‘phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity’.6 Serequeberhan thus adopts Heidegger’s ‘existentially aware’ phenomenology for his own purposes—​both in this book and in his more recent book Existence and Heritage. As he says: ‘To organically appropriate and indigenize this existentially aware philosophic thesis from within the concrete historicity of post-​colonial Africa is the basic task of this study’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 1). Notably, Serequeberhan extends his approach to African philosophy in general: ‘In this study, my efforts are mainly directed at doing precisely this: showing how, in progressively more concrete terms, African philosophy—​even when its protagonists are 5 

Serequeberhan is one of the first philosophers to critically explore the increasingly popular but also controversial philosophy of place. See, for instance, the writings of Malpas (2004, 2006) and Janz (2009, 2017). See also my own paper on a philosophy of place in Janz (Olivier, 2017) and Olivier (2016, 2019). In Serequeberhan’s view, philosophy, no matter how neutral and universal it appears to be, is always situated in a lived context. Thus, both The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy (1994) and Existence and Heritage (2015) explore in an exemplary way different perspectives on why philosophy is always placed in a lived context; and, in particular, how to do philosophy in an African place. This has seminal political ramifications, and not only for those living in an African context, as I hope to demonstrate. 6  This was the theme of Heidegger’s lecture courses from 1921 to 1924, which was an analysis of the facticity of human existence (Dasein), anticipating the analysis of Dasein in Being and Time (1927).

536   Abraham Olivier not aware of it—​ is inherently, and cannot but be, a hermeneutic undertaking’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 2). Serequeberhan does not claim that all African philosophers are committed to, or even aware of, doing African phenomenological hermeneutics, but he works to show that they do so at least unwittingly. Hence, he sets out to explore how philosophical discourse establishes itself as hermeneutic undertaking within the present horizon of post-​colonial Africa (Serequeberhan, 1994: 2). His focus is on ‘lived hermeneuticity’: the interpretation of life-​world experience in the present African context. His book is divided into four chapters.7 My focus will be on the first chapter where Serequeberhan analyses some of Heidegger’s work, and which deals with the ‘grounding relation that philosophic thought has with the actuality out of which it is articulated’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 12).

27.2.2 Why Heidegger? It seems fair to say that Heidegger offers an analysis of our human being-​in-​the-​world that pertains to all possible worlds, post-​colonial Africa included. However, this is not how Serequeberhan reads Heidegger. Instead, Serequeberhan’s approach is to take seriously Heidegger’s claim that ‘world’ (Welt) always, in the first place, refers to our closest environment (Umwelt) and the immediate context of our presently lived experience, of our ‘being here and now’ (Dasein).8 In this line of reading, Heidegger prioritizes the particularity of the context of the lived present of our everyday dealings, albeit without taking away its possible reference to other contexts. In any case, reading Heidegger within the context of the post-​colonial Africa of the 1990s and that of right now is different. The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy specifically deals with the concrete, existential actuality of contemporary African philosophic discourse in the last quarter of the 20th century: ‘a discursive actuality that originates in European efforts to better and more properly colonize Africa, both physically and spiritually’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 2). Serequeberhan makes clear the actual concreteness of his focus: ‘Thus I will articulate, not only a theoretic position but also and necessarily the political and practical implications of this position. For political “neutrality” in philosophy, as in most other things, is at best a “harmless” naivety, and at worst a pernicious subterfuge for hidden Agendas’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 4). African philosophical discourse generally has had a strong political commitment. There is a strong ‘hermeneutic suspicion’ of any 7 For

the uninitiated reader: c­hapter 2 substantiates the theme of the first chapter by exploring the thematic connection of discussions of the discourse of the African liberation struggle to what Serequeberhan calls the ‘lived hermeneuticity of the contemporary discourse of African philosophy’. Chapters 3 and 4 are ‘hermeneutic elucidations of the possibility of African freedom that take their point of departure from positive aspects of the African liberation struggle’. For this purpose these chapters explore the ‘hermeneutically insightful’ works of Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral (Serequeberhan, 1994: 12) 8  Note, in ‘Heidegger in the Township’ (Olivier, 2015), I argued extensively for such a reading.

African Phenomenological Approach    537 philosophy that pretends to be politically neutral. Consequently, Serequeberhan argues that where Western philosophy demands political neutrality—​particularly with regard to the universal and necessary validity of its claims—​it actually entertains a hidden neo-​ colonial agenda. As he points out, much has been written about this agenda. The key point for him seems that the neo-​colonial agenda is not just about a political power-​ game. It goes much deeper. What makes the post-​colonial situation particularly critical is not only that some colonial institutions still exist. What is worse is what Ngugi (1981) calls the practice of ‘colonising minds’: undermining and destroying colonized Africans’ very being human. At its basis, African philosophical discourse has been, and still is, ‘aimed at redeeming the humanity of the human colonized’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 3).9 Serequeberhan thus calls for what one can say is a hermeneutics of suspicion that has the courage to question the presuppositions of philosophical discourse and the context in which it was or is currently situated. He turns to Heidegger in order to perform this hermeneutic task: ‘As Heidegger puts it: reflection [i.e., philosophy] is the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 3). This prompts the question: Why Heidegger? Was not Heidegger himself very much an example of how philosophy can go wrong by not questioning its own political presuppositions? Bluntly put, how can one ask, of all people, a Nazi, to address the problem of the undoing of the humanity of humans and its redemption? Serequeberhan is of course aware of this problem and raises this question himself. Referring to Heidegger’s own statement that the philosopher must have the courage to call in question the truth of their own presuppositions and the realm of their own goals, he says that ‘Heidegger himself—​one of the pillars, of twentieth-​century European thought—​failed to actualize the veracity of the above statement’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 4). Nevertheless, Heidegger’s own actions and political involvements do not, according to Serequeberhan, in any way detract from the truth of the statement itself. ‘Rather, it says something quite odious of the political persona of Heidegger and of the political and historico-​cultural horizon of the Europe within and out of which he philosophized’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 4). Heidegger failed. And Serequeberhan does not pardon him at all. As he clearly states: ‘we are not in any way implicated or connected with Heidegger’s Eurocentric and Ger-​manic political horizon and, in fact, are vehemently opposed to it by the very nature of our hermeneutic project’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 4). Consequently, he emphasizes that we should keep in mind the central difference between rejecting Heidegger’s political position and the appropriation of his hermeneutics of suspicion. What deserves most to be called into question, according to Heidegger, is our presuppositions of our thinking of the meaning of Being, and consequently, the meaning of our being human. Ironically, it was in his political actions concerning what it means to be human that he particularly failed. However, 9  For further discussions on neo-​ colonization in organizational studies, see, for example, Ibarra-​ Colado (2006); Nkomo (2011); and Alcadipani et al. (2012). I return to these in the Conclusion (Section 27.4).

538   Abraham Olivier according to Serequeberhan, this does not take away from the ‘veracity’ of his phenomenological interpretation of being human, of Dasein. This is why Serequeberhan can still take Heidegger as point of departure for his own analysis of being human.

27.2.3 The Question of Being Human The central focus for a phenomenological interpretation of being human, Serequeberhan asserts, is a concern with a critical understanding of our lived situation (Serequeberhan, 1994: 13). Thus, again, he concentrates on the post-​colonial condition. His analysis begins with what he calls hermeneutic suspicion—​a questioning of the presuppositions of the conditions of post-​colonial independence. More specifically, he suggests that it means to ‘concretely query the contradictions of our post-​colonial and “independent” Africa’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 8). The main contradiction of the ‘postcolonial situation is that the political independence fought for has remained a formal affair—​both politically and philosophically. Politically this is the case because colonial forces still maintain their power through the rule of African elites’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 15). Notably, in both of Serequeberhan’s books, colonial forces are now specifically the market forces of US capitalism under the ‘guise of the United Nations’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 14). Philosophically the contradiction of the post-​colonial condition is that colonial independence suffers from a misunderstanding of liberation by replacing one form of oppression with another (Serequeberhan, 1994: 15). Consequently, independence failed to accomplish real liberation: freeing human minds from the colonial denial of their being human. Independence failed to generate a liberated self-​understanding. To analyse this failure and the concomitant need for liberation, Serequeberhan refers to Heidegger—​then Gadamer, Fanon, and Cabral. Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics thus sets off negatively, with the suspicion of a negative post-​colonial situation, one of misunderstanding liberation. This is an important methodological move. Referring to Gadamer, Serequeberhan argues that the ‘originative moment of hermeneutics as a particular philosophic orientation’ emanates paradoxically in a ‘negative situation of misunderstanding and the estrangement of meaning within the lived context of a tradition (i.e., a specific historicalness)’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 15). Understanding thus becomes a ‘special task’ when misunderstanding arises. In the post-​colonial situation, again, what is at stake is the failure of those made independent to understand the meaning of their independence. Once more, this is the failure to liberate human minds from the colonial denial of them being human. This failure manifests as a crisis that calls for a fundamental critical reflection on what it means to be human (Serequeberhan, 1994: 19). So Serequeberhan critically revisits a classic philosophical question: What does it mean to be human? (Serequeberhan, 1994: 20) In answering this question, he takes his cue from Heidegger’s ‘ontological and phenomenological formulation’ that ‘the substance of man [the human being] is existence’, or, put differently, ‘The “essence” [Wesen] of this entity lies in its “to be’ ” [Zu-​sein]’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 21).

African Phenomenological Approach    539 To be clear, citing from Heidegger’s Being and Time, Serequeberhan repeats his reservations concerning Heidegger’s moral and political failures. Nevertheless, he confirms the validity of Heidegger’s philosophical analysis of ‘the temporalizing ecstatic phenomenality of human existence’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 20). Serequeberhan analyses Heidegger’s formulation of human existence as encapsulated by the notion of Dasein, literally ‘there being’. More precisely, Dasein means being temporally here and now, with the possibility to be ‘then and there’. In this sense, Dasein means to be (Zu-​sein) what is possible. Human existence is temporal and tuned in to what it is possible to be (Serequeberhan, 1994: 21).10 Its being is a movement in which every moment of time, called ‘ecstase’, is carried away to the next possible moment by the ‘ecstatic’ (exceeding) flux of time.11 The fact that human existence consists in the possibility to be (being possible) makes it characteristically temporal. To be means to become the possibilities of one’s choice or whatever possibilities one’s ‘being’ offers one to choose from. This then is the ‘ontological specificity’ of being human: not to be confined to one’s present reality, whether it is racist or Eurocentric, but to exceed the confines of the present and to reach for the possibilities of one’s choice. Serequeberhan argues that Heidegger’s ontology applies to every ontic cultural context of all humans (Serequeberhan, 1994: 20). Nevertheless, only by understanding the living reality of a concrete historical and cultural context does one understand the bigger question as to what it means to be and therefore to become what one chooses to be.

27.2.4  The Snare of Post-​C olonial Technocracy The historical context that Heidegger addresses is European modernity in the early 20th century. What Serequeberhan deals with is modernity of another sort, that of neo-​ colonial Africa. Colonialism, as he says, is itself a product of technocratic European modernism and black Africans are still trapped in its ‘snare’. Consequently, he discusses Heidegger’s critique of the technocratic snare of modernism, and in response, he offers a critique of its neo-​colonial manifestation (Serequeberhan, 1994: 20). What is meant by the technocratic snare of European modernity and technology? In his essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, Heidegger famously refers to modern technology as the working of the Ge-​stell (Heidegger, 1977: 301). Gestell means framework, and Ge-​stell, ‘enframing’. To frame phenomena (natural objects or animals or persons) means to give them a place to unfold their possibilities. In technology this is understood as the art of framing. To enframe means to challenge and subjugate 10 

See Heidegger (1962: 58). Inwood’s dictionary for a discussion of the translation of ecstase and ecstatic (Inwood, 1999: 221ff.). 11 See

540   Abraham Olivier phenomena. Modern technology in its technocratic sense manifests as the workings of a Ge-​stell. These workings include the enframing of humans. The consequence is their disposal as entities for industrial use. In his Existence and Heritage Serequeberhan calls such transformation of humans into entities a process of ‘thingification’, as discussed later. Human subjects using technology to free themselves for their possibilities ‘to be’ are themselves turned into objects ensnared by what becomes technocracy—​the reign of technology. Now, according to Serequeberhan, ‘We have seen too the colonial subjects of this ensnared and ensnaring Europe suffer from this Ge-​stell. But for us this situation of enframing is mediated, instituted, and imposed through the persistence of neocolonialism as the continued intrusion of European hegemony in present-​day Africa’ (Serequeberhan, 1994, pp. 20−1). Serequeberhan thus views the post-​colonial context as an extension of the snare of European technocratic modernism, with the effect of what he calls neo-​colonial subjugation under ‘indigenous guise’. Consequently, he argues that for Africans to ‘appropriate the “to be” of our historicalness’ means to be confronted by European neo-​colonial subjugation (p. 21). This includes the politics of economic, cultural, and scientific subordination. What was technically—​economically, culturally, and scientifically—​imposed by ‘the exclusive and explicit use of violence’ in the colonial past is now replicated by indigenous substitutes of European colonizers (p. 21). The snare of colonial modernism thus has the effect of double subjugation: subjects are turned into objects disposed to technocratic industrial use; and, in addition, some of these subjects are subordinated to political domination, specifically to neo-​colonial technocratic supremacy. Serequeberhan concludes: ‘It is in this manner that the Ge-​stell of modern technology shows itself, and is rendered in the form of political domination’ (p. 21). Serequeberhan consequently argues that, ‘unlike Heidegger, for us, the question of our existence, of our “to be”, is an inherently political question’ (p. 21). To ignore the fact that the question of our existence or our ‘to be’ is a political question means to disregard the question itself (p. 21). Serequeberhan makes a decisive point. ‘To be’ means to be here and now in a particular socio-​political context. To ignore this situatedness, means to disregard what makes—​or unmakes—​one’s very Dasein. The neo-​colonial situation is one which could be said to unmake the Dasein of the colonized by denying it. This means to disregard both their present here and now together with the past and the future possibilities that define their human existence. Fanon succinctly calls this disregard a submission to the ‘zone of non-​being’ (Fanon, 1967: 8). A zone of non-​being: this is what the duplicated snare of neo-​colonialism amounts to.

27.2.5 Technology and History Serequeberhan calls the duplication of modern technocratic Europe in post-​colonial Africa a historical tragicomedy: ‘This tragicomic obscene duplication of Europe—​in

African Phenomenological Approach    541 Africa and as Africa—​is the actual and concrete duplicity which negatively constitutes and positively structures the nonhistoricity of neo-​ colonialism—​ its historico-​ existential inertness’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 21). To understand this important citation, one needs to consider more closely what Serequeberhan means with (non-​)historicity and ‘historico-​existential inertness’ compared to Heidegger’s concept of historicality (Geschichtlichkeit) and temporality (Zeitlichkeit) (Heidegger, 1962: 424ff.). Recall that temporality defines the ‘ecstatic’ structure of human existence as a movement in which every moment of time (‘ecstase’) is exceeded towards the next possible moment by the ‘ecstatic’ flux of time. This does not mean that in every moment to come, a past moment, or all the moments that have passed, are left behind in the passage of time. Rather, the unitary movement remains a whole and every moment that was is retrieved (wiederholt) in what is to come. Without the ability to retrieve the past, one would be like someone with complete loss of memory. One would not be able to remember what and who one has ever related to, thus one would not recall how to relate to anything or anyone in the present or future. Without such ability to relate to things and others, one could not inhabit a place as being-​in-​the-​world. Only through the possible retrieval of one’s past relations in a particular context can one be situated in such a context in the present and future. Therefore, without a sense of history, Dasein would be uprooted, a pure possibility, completely displaced. Heidegger emphasizes the way the past is retrieved by speaking of ‘historizing’ the past in the flow of time towards the future (Heidegger, 1962: 437). The significance of the past in the ecstatic flow of time is expressed by the concept of historicality. Thus, in every moment to come the past is a defining feature, it is our structural heritage. The notion of heritage is decisive for Serequeberhan’s work and part of the title of his later book Existence and Heritage. The point now is that to recognize one’s heritage is at its core a recognition of one’s historic existence as being-​in-​the-​world, of one’s possibility to retrieve the past and inhabit, or better, inherit, a place in the world, as Dasein. Heritage thus refers to the retrieval of one’s past relations in a particular context as a condition of the possibility to inhabit such a context in the present and future; in short, heritage means inheriting a place in the world. The denial of one’s heritage means in this sense to be displaced. Africans have witnessed a colonial denial of their heritage. This manifests, according to Serequeberhan, in the form of the imposed duplication of European technical modernity—​scientifically, culturally, and economically—​as universally valid, while actually hiding away the specificity of its origin. In the persistent domination of the colony through duplication, Europe has become the standard of what is worth living for and what is not; whose life matters and whose does not; who has a place in society and who does not. Such duplicity, says Serequeberhan, is ‘obscenely tragic’. Perhaps obscene can also be described as banal, to borrow from Arendt’s view of Nazi behaviour as the ‘banality of evil’ (Arendt, 1963). The duplication is banal because it is such an everyday business. ‘We are thus afflicted by proxy’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 21). One copies the colonial power, its culture, language, science, so persistently in everyday life, that one does not even notice it anymore. It is specifically tragic

542   Abraham Olivier because, as Serequeberhan says, it leads to ‘historico-​existential inertness’. Once one’s mind is colonized, once one learns that Africans are condemned historically to be mere duplicates at best, thus inferior, the result is a pathologically negative sense of self-​ awareness, in short ‘inertness’ (p. 23). In the zone of non-​being one’s life does not matter, not even the struggle against it.

27.2.6  Liberation The post-​colonial context calls anew for a struggle for liberation. There are numerous ongoing struggles for an autonomous Africa. As Serequeberhan says, these struggles are not homogenous in their ideological or theoretic orientation: ‘Along with the Africanist existentialism of Senghor, we have Nkrumah’s Marxism-​Leninism, as well as the historically and hermeneutically astute theoretic perspectives articulated by Fanon and Cabral’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 23). This ‘melange’ of struggles ‘constitutes the lived reality of post-​colonial Africa!’ (p. 23). Serequeberhan attributes to philosophy a specific critical and explorative task in the struggle for liberation. It is to ‘reclaim the African experience of Being—​the historicality of the various modes of African existence—​from within the world-​historical context of the present, i.e., the implosion of European modernity’ (p. 24). The task clearly has a phenomenological character. It is about reclaiming the African experience of Being. As such it is in the first place critical. It calls for a moment of hermeneutic suspicion. The suspicion is about the crises of duplicating modern, neo-​colonial, European technocracy. And it is about questioning the ‘obscenely tragic’ denial of the experience of being African, of the very existence and self-​understanding of African Dasein. But again, the task is also explorative. It is about bringing to the fore ‘the lived life concerns of a culture, a history, a tradition’ and ‘effective enunciation—​the bringing to utterance—​of the historicity of existence’ (p. 24). Serequeberhan cautions us that this does not mean to passively return to an indigenous tradition. Rather, the task is to call for an ‘open-​ended’ encounter with African historicity—​‘out of the need of historical being-​there’ (p. 25). The task is to rediscover a place in which black African Dasein is recognized, one in which everyone understands that black African lives matter and what in African Dasein really matters. Using Fanon’s designation of ‘black’ includes, for Serequeberhan, people who are ‘checked by census, divided up, classified, labeled, conscripted, administrated’ according to ‘brown, yellow, and black multitudes’ in a colonial context (pp. 65, 69). What really matters is the freedom ‘to be’ what black Africans have been denied to be: to be one’s possibilities as a black African. In short, the task is the ‘effective enunciation’ that black African being-​there really matters. This task, so Serequeberhan stresses, is not simply theoretical but also of practical concern. It is about an effective political liberation from the neo-​colonial snare, and a transformation of the post-​colonial context. This will also be the task he sets out in Existence and Heritage, but as I show, with a shift of focus.

African Phenomenological Approach    543

27.3  Existence and Heritage Serequeberhan demonstrates in both his books, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy and Existence and Heritage, what one may call a critical phenomenological hermeneutics of the lived context. The two books deal with lived experience in two different post-​colonial African settings, one is of the 1990s, the other of the present day. Section 27.3.1 starts with what I call his programmatic shift of focus, and then deals with his elaboration on the problem of ensnarement, now termed ‘thingification’, and the call for transformation.

27.3.1 Serequeberhan’s Shift of Focus Right from the beginning, on the first page also of Existence and Heritage, Serequeberhan makes clear that his philosophical focus is on what he calls experiences of a lived situation, and once more he begins with Heidegger (Serequeberhan, 2015: 1). After dedicating chapters to Gadamer and Heidegger, he ends, as in his previous book, with Fanon. Curiously, Serequeberhan does not explicitly use the concept ‘phenomenology’ in Existence and Heritage. He instead describes his theoretical framework as hermeneutics—​African hermeneutics. However, it seems fair to say that his hermeneutics is once again phenomenological as it is based on an analysis of a life-​world experience, particularly that of the post-​colonial African situation. As he says, this work is ‘an interpretative stance focused on, and arising from within, the exigencies of this lived situation’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 97).12 Serequeberhan again starts with a reflection on Heidegger’s analysis of the concept of existence—​and its relation to heritage (Serequeberhan, 2015: 2). This analysis stems from Being and Time (1962), but Serequeberhan relates it here to a theme in Heidegger’s late works Introduction to Metaphysics (1977) and A Letter on Humanism (1999): existence is a ‘clearing’ or ‘opening’ of meaning—​the meaning of being.13 He introduces the concept in some dense lines as follows: As Martin Heidegger has emphatically noted, the root meaning of the word existence—​or, as he puts it, ek-​sistence—​is a process of standing out. It is in an

12  Notably,

he takes Cabral and Césaire as forerunners of such an interpretative stance: ‘Fanon and Cabral—​and also Césaire—​as I have noted in the introduction to The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy (1994), are forerunners of the practice of contemporary African philosophical hermeneutics precisely because each negotiates and articulates—​from within the chiaroscuro of Africa’s “familiarity and strangeness”—​an interpretative stance focused on, and arising from within, the exigencies of this lived situation’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 97). 13  See Heidegger (1977: 152, 1999: 228).

544   Abraham Olivier ambient—​an expanse cleared, as in a forest clearing, by a concrete historical standing out—​that encounters occur. Encounters thus always happen in a space, or a clearing, already established by the standing out of a concrete historical ek-​sistence in which Otherness has been nullified or its encounter has been made possible. (Serequeberhan, 2015: 1−2)

Serequeberhan reminds us that Heidegger takes existence from its etymology to mean ‘out-​standing’, exceeding what is standing still, and that he characterizes human being (to be Dasein) as one always exceeding oneself towards one’s possibilities. In the cited passage, existence is described in terms of the metaphor of a forest clearing, and means to ‘stand out’ like a glade, an open space, in a forest. Imagine one is lost in a dense, dark forest and then one runs into a cleared expanse. Such a space can offer a view and orientation in possible pathways to take. It is like a light in the darkness. Recall Heidegger takes the German for clearing (Lichtung) to convey a reference to light (Licht). This reference to light is also found in other etymologies, for instance, in the English ‘clearing’, the Italian and Spanish ‘clara’, and the French ‘clarté’. A glade in a forest does not take one out of the forest—​not in this example where being is symbolized as forest—​but it does help one to find one’s way within that forest. Serequeberhan seems to take the forest to symbolize our human existence in the greater realm of being—​capitalized as ‘Being’ by Heidegger. This is where we have always been and will remain. Everyone has a place in the forest of being. This place is, as he would say, our heritage. However, to exist means to stand out by being more than a thing among other things; rather it means ‘clearing’ one’s possibilities. Clearing has both a spatial and temporal meaning. It refers to a process of lighting up a space or making room, like when one moves into a new place or prepares it to receive guests. In such a lit up space one is still in the darkness of the forest but one can see. Serequeberhan takes this process of clearing to be historical. To cast light in the darkness of facticity means to stand out as ‘a concrete historical ek-​sistence’. Recall, Heidegger emphasizes the way the past is retrieved by speaking of ‘historizing’ it in the flow of time towards the future (Serequeberhan, 2015: 437). In every moment to come, the past is a defining feature; it is as Serequeberhan says, our structural heritage. In every moment we clear space and take our place in the world. We do so on the basis of places already established. Otherwise, without relations to things and others in a place, we would be completely lost, unable to take our place in the world or to relate to new possibilities. Again, one would be in a state of memory disorder, forgetting one’s relations to things and others in a place, forgetful of how to relate to them any further. We need to retrieve our past time in established places to live in such places or to be able to clear future spaces to be. In terms of the metaphors, forgetting the past is like ignoring the clearance of the forest, from where to find light in the darkness. Importantly, according to Serequeberhan, our historicity does not only refer to the significance of our encounters with our own most personal (‘own-​most’) heritage and its retrieval in the future. Rather than an encounter with one’s own possibilities, historicity essentially refers to an encounter with the possibilities of others. In this sense,

African Phenomenological Approach    545 ‘historicity’ refers to the space ‘in which Otherness has been nullified or its encounter has been made possible’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 1−2). As Serequeberhan consequently says about such otherness: This is an Otherness that has not been leveled off, or not completely, into the sameness of what could otherwise possibly be a risky affront to our lived ek-​sistence, our Otherness. Thus, being open to encounters, or to an encounter of Otherness, is risky, but could it also be the true, or root, sense of the ‘authentically human’? Could it be that this openness to what is dicey is a core aspect of what it means to exist, that is, to stand out—​to be human? (Serequeberhan, 2015: 2)

These questions are rhetorical. Serequeberhan asks them to make a point, a significant one, rather than to seek answers. The main point is that a core aspect of what it means to exist is to encounter the other. One’s historicity is not merely a retrieval of one’s own possibilities in a place but foremost it is an ‘open encounter’ with the possibilities of others in a shared world. Later in his book, as I show more extensively in the next section, Serequeberhan details how exactly at the core of one’s own existence an encounter with others is implied, how ‘Being-​with is thus a co-​primordial structure of Dasein’s being’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 108). The point now is that I take Serequeberhan’s emphasis of otherness from the very opening passage of his book to announce a shift of focus in his work. In The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy, it seems that his emphasis is still on Heidegger’s analysis of existence towards one’s ‘own-​most possibilities’. Existence and Heritage on the other hand, seems to announce in its opening a shift of emphasis from the self to the other. Others are always implied in whatever position one takes and their otherness will always be part of what one becomes in taking one’s place in the world. This shift of emphasis in the opening paragraphs of Existence and Heritage sets the tone for Serequeberhan’s consecutive analysis of the lived post-​colonial situation. The situation he thinks one should focus on now is Africa as embedded in ‘the actuality of our lived word-​historical situation’. As he puts it: Here, it is imperative to start with the actuality of our lived world-​historical situation. At present, the earth is not constituted by differing ‘polarities of radical Otherness.’ In fact, we inhabit a commingled globe hybridized to the core by European colonial expansion, which started, in full force, in the fifteenth century. (Serequeberhan, 2015: 3)

Serequeberhan’s analysis of post-​colonial Africa thus seems to shift from focusing on the historical situation of Africa to our ‘hybridized’ world-​historical situation. He still analyses the post-​colonial situation in Africa in extensive detail. But where his focus was on the retrieval of what one can call the ‘own-​most’ possibilities of African Dasein, it seems that he now concentrates on the hybrid world of possibilities Africa shares with others, thus with our ‘hybrid heritage’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 26ff.).

546   Abraham Olivier This shift is apparent not only in his critical analysis of the ensnarement of post-​ colonialism, as we shall see in the following section, but also in his discussion of the relation between contemporary African and continental philosophy (­chapter 2), and more specifically of Kant, Gadamer, Marx, and Heidegger in the remaining chapters. One might ask, as Serequeberhan does himself, why focus on these thinkers and not others? One reason for using these thinkers, he says, is that they prove to be ‘helpful in thinking about the situation of postcolonial Africa’. Helpful is meant in a critical way. Serequeberan does not spare his criticism in his discussion of Eurocentrism and racism in Kant, Heidegger, Gadamer, or, for that matter, Levinas. Each in his own way shows how philosophers can go wrong. Nevertheless, he still thinks, as he did in The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy, that these thinkers also provide helpful tools and ‘can be gainfully employed to think about the situation of our shared present’. One can perhaps say, Serequeberhan turns the work of these thinkers against themselves and their own parochial assumptions. He believes that the present is a good time to take this line of thought. His research, he states, is an expression of ‘developments in Continental philosophy, as I see them, that are favourable inclined toward the claim to humanity—​ on an equal footing—​of the formerly colonized world’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 42, 48). Recently, he points out, a number of continental philosophers, e.g. Taylor, Vattimo, and Derrida, have shown a strong critical attitude towards neo-​colonialism and the importance of recognizing the hybridity of our existence. Thus, he explains his focus on and use of more or less controversial thinkers in the continental tradition to advocate the idea of the ‘variegated multiplicity of our shared existence’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 48). This includes his use of Heidegger to criticize the ‘thingification’ of neo-​ colonial ensnarement.

27.3.2  Thingification Serequeberhan turns to Heidegger’s analysis of everyday life in Being and Time to examine the notion of thingification. The everyday life Heidegger analyses, says Serequeberhan, pertains to the modern 20th-​century capitalist world (Serequeberhan, 2015: 107). This is, once more, a contestation of the view that Heidegger’s concept of ‘world’ exclusively has an abstract, universal meaning. Again, I think Serequeberhan is right to say that for Heidegger ‘world’ pertains both to the fact that principally we cannot help but be in a world and to the kind of lived environment with which we are concretely engaged. This environment compares well in part with what Marx calls the capitalist world, as it extends itself to post-​colonial Africa. But then Serequeberhan strikingly points out the multiplicity that the concept of world entails and how it is divided into various intersecting environs of existence, for instance, the world of academia, the world of the family, mechanical work (e.g. car repair), etc. ‘We always live in one or another or in some intersecting pasticcio thereof, but never without a world’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 108).

African Phenomenological Approach    547 Human existence, Serequeberhan argues, is not confined to one world but rather unfolds within different worlds concurrently (Serequeberhan, 2015: 108). As we exist in and move between different environments, we live and unfold our being in multiple ways. This is in line with the idea in the opening passage of the book that existence means at the core to encounter otherness and the possibility of becoming another. Consequently, Serequeberhan puts emphasis on the fact that at its core the world is essentially one shared with others: ‘Human existence—​ always situated—​ unfolds out of the sense of the world it is situated in and institutes and which is always, in its very core, a being-​with. Being-​with is thus a co-​primordial structure of Dasein’s being’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 108). Serequeberhan thus brings to the fore emphatically Heidegger’s concept of being human (‘Dasein’) as being with other humans (‘Mitdasein’) (Serequeberhan, 2015: 108). Serequeberhan follows Heidegger closely by taking the other to be always co-​present in the way we encounter things as equipment on an everyday level. We engage in ‘like activities, intermeshed and intertwined in the daily routine of life made possible by the inlaid maze of gear and equipment; the taken-​for-​granted environ of our concerns’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 108). Hence our encounter with things mediates our interactions with others, constituting our quotidian life as one not only being-​with-​others but also being-​like-​others. Serequeberhan consequently speaks of the ‘interconnected system of life (i.e., work, travel, communications, leisure, etc.) in and out of which the modern world in all of its complexity unfolds’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 109). Although we share an interconnected system of life with others, and although our being-​with-​others is also a being-​like-​others, usually we do not pay attention to who they are, but rather to what ‘they do’. In the interhuman world of the instrumental complex, what matters is that we get the job done routinely rather than noticing who those doing the job really are. As Serequeberhan confirms Heidegger’s view, we take what people do for granted in the ‘routine incantations’ of quotidian life and notice them only when something ‘gets jammed’, and then only until we can fix it and go on again as usual. The amorphous and anonymous quotidian self ends up being conceived not as another self but as a cog in the wheel, a functioning entity among other entities in the instrumental complex, a thing among other things (Serequeberhan, 2015: 109−10). Serequeberhan helpfully compares the way Heidegger’s understanding of how the instrumental complex reduces human being to things with Marx’s analysis of alienation in the modern 20th-​century capitalist world (Serequeberhan, 2015: 110). He refers specifically to the concern of Karl Marx’s (1844) Manuscripts to offer a critique of the impact of capitalist relations of production on human existence (Marx, 1959). Capitalism promises a wealthy life by forcing humans—​both the working and the owning class—​to render service by making their lives instruments, i.e., ‘things’, useful to the logic of capital. Therefore, ‘economic activity is not for the sustenance of life but for the expansion of capital’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 104). Thus Serequeberhan concludes that: ‘Heidegger’s analysis of the “they self ” parallels Marx’s critique of alienation because both focus on the way, the character of lived-​life under modern conditions undermines, from within,

548   Abraham Olivier the very life it actualizes’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 110). Marx and Heidegger do have different concerns, but about the same thing: ‘thingification’. Marx is concerned with political economy, and focuses on the reduction of human life to the level of a thing within economic interactions (Serequeberhan, 2015: 110). Heidegger, analogously, is concerned with interactions, in the instrumental complex of everyday life, which likewise reduce human beings to things serving a system. The critical question is, finally, how does one fight thingification? Heidegger focuses on, as Serequeberhan points out, ‘the possibility of a transformed abode of man in the world’. However, as he objects, ‘Heidegger does not give us an inkling as to how we are to “prepare” [ . . . ] a transformed abode of man in the world’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 110). He sets out to give such ‘inkling’ himself in the last chapter, following his comparison of Heidegger and Marx.

27.3.3 Transforming Our Abode Serequeberhan finishes his book by returning to his analysis of the post-​colonial condition in his first chapter. He summarizes why ‘Africa’s postcolonial condition is not one in which independence has resulted in Africa reclaiming itself ’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 110). More emphatically than in The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy, he argues that under the rule of a replicated elite, colonialism endures as before. Importantly, he follows Aimé Césaire (1972: 21) in comparing colonialism with thingification: ‘Aimé Césaire’s rather acerbic formulation regarding colonialism: “My turn to pose an equation: colonization =​thingification”, is still pertinent and applicable’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 111). Colonizers have treated Africans like things. Using force and violence, colonizers reduced the colonized to the status of ‘instruments of production’ (p. 110). Serequeberhan argues that the same happens in post-​colonial Africa. In most cases, he says, independence provided a replacement of ‘the white man’ by ‘indigenous’ substitutes, ‘replicant elites’, so that locals took the positions of colonizers in governing institutions or leading industries. However, these replacement elites simply secured power and perpetuated colonial conditions (p. 111). This is not to say, independence was all for nothing. It was a necessary stage in the reclaiming of Africa. Africans are colonial subjects no more, rather, officially, they are citizens of sovereign states (p. 112). However, while this official status is a necessary it is not a sufficient condition for independence. Citizens who are ruled by replacement elites are in fact segregated from participation in the state. Like colonial subjects they have simply been conceded a ‘place’ in society; this does not mean that they can play a ‘role’ as free citizens do. They are still as ‘segregated’ from such participation as they were when their country was a colony. The ‘segregated’ are held in place by brute force and unmitigated violence. In colonial times, citizens were kept in their place and could not fulfill the role of free citizens in public life in a democratic society (p. 112). It is still the same in post-​colonial Africa: ‘In like manner, the officially free citizens of postcolonial Africa, like the segregated—​or better still, the colonized—​are held in “place” by the violence of the replicant elite: their submission

African Phenomenological Approach    549 is the source of its power’ (p. 112). Serequeberhan’s observation strongly connects to the analyses of scholars such as Césaire, Fanon, Ngugi, and, more recently, Mbembe.14 Serequeberhan refers in general to the fact that ‘scholars have noted that the colonial state was centralized and endowed with a well-​organized, modern military, police, and administrative apparatus’ and that the ‘colonial powers gave only minor attention to an infrastructure of participation through the development of representative institutions’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 112). A native class of civil servants and soldiers was established to serve the colonial state, culminating in a ‘well-​developed military bureaucratic superstructure’ (p. 112). The post-​colonial state has continued this military bureaucratic super-​structure of power within a colonial infrastructure in which local citizens cannot participate democratically. As a result, the formally independent state is in fact an ongoing extension of the colonial state. Independence thus just has offered a democratic façade of what is in fact a neo-​colonial state, ruling by segregation and coercion. As Serequeberhan puts it: ‘Attempts to claim the “role” of citizen—​no matter how timid—​ are thus brutally squashed; ferocity is proportionate to feebleness. This is the actuality of independence’ (p. 113). The upshot is that with independence, as Serequeberhan puts it, ‘Politics came to an end’. Politics was replaced by the ‘mere administration of things’. Colonial autocracy has thus been reproduced with the new beneficiaries taking the place of the old governors (p. 113). The neo-​colonial state does not facilitate the ‘role’ of citizenship as it is supposed to in a democratic society, but instead it disciplines its citizens, forcing them to obey the state, and insists that ‘the people’, at all times, must know their ‘place’ (p. 113). In this way the very people who were at the ‘forefront of the struggle’ against colonialism have now banished their fellow citizens and themselves treat them as once the colonized were treated, not as citizens but as if they are simply things to be kept in their place. As Serequeberhan puts it: ‘A thing, like a colonial subject, is something that does not control itself. It has no will of its own. It is utilized and at the disposal of another. It has no power over itself ’ (p. 114). Thus, he concludes, ‘the formely colonized are thingified’ (p. 114). Serequeberhan relates this process of thingification through neo-​colonial control with the way the ‘capitalist controls the worker, and reduces him to the status of a laboring thing’ (p. 114). The capitalist controls the ‘cost of existence and reproduction of the worker’. Much as in the capitalist manner, he argues, ‘the replicant elite—​which has under its command “the wealth of the country” and the power of the state—​controls the resources and the very life of the formerly colonized’ (p. 114). The fact that the neo-​colonial state takes coercive control of the resources and lives of the formerly colonized has several devastating consequences. One is that when people live in fear, they are too afraid to act. Another is that they are left in poverty and ‘an infinite totality of scrounging’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 114). This leads to criminality of all sorts. An example is the ‘wholesale prostitution of the female population’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 114). Thus, one of the most disturbing consequences of

14 

See Mbembe (2016).

550   Abraham Olivier neo-​colonialism is the violent thingification of women: their coercive control and treatment as objects. More than others, they are forced to resigning themselves ‘to being a nonperson’ (p. 114). In this setup it is not only that the replicant elite objectifies citizens, but rather, where they are struggling with poverty and scrounging, ‘each becomes for the Other a tool, a means of survival (i.e., of “getting by”)—​a thing, an entity present-​at-​ hand’ (p. 114). Thus, essentially, the colonial past is replicated. Notably, Serequeberhan points out that recolonization is not only a problem Africa is facing, but rather ‘the West is directly implicated in this snaring of life to survival, by the financial-​military and political assistance it extends to “our partners” ’ (p. 114). This assessment goes back to his analysis in The Hermeneutics of Africa in which he views post-​colonialism as an extension of the snare of European technocratic modernism. Again, what was technically—​economically, culturally, and scientifically—​imposed by ‘the exclusive and explicit use of violence’ in the colonial past is now replicated in an ‘indigenous guise’ (Serequeberhan, 1994: 21). Neo-​colonialism and its thingification calls for what Serequeberhan dubs in recourse of Heidegger a ‘transformed abode’. Again, he does not think that Heidegger himself analysed in any detail what such transformation entails, neither does he offer in any detail prospects of what such transformation amounts to. But he does indicate two important points. First, transformation requires that a majority of Africans who suffer from neo-​ colonialism, reclaim the ‘role’ of citizen and thus substantiate their independence (Serequeberhan, 2015: 116). Serequeberhan strikingly observes that the replicant strata and its elite, ‘counterpoises itself to the vast majority’, who are ‘neither Western-​educated nor contemptuous of their own heritage’ (p. 116). This elitist ‘negativity’ is something that Africa has to overcome. Such negative self-​assessment leads to inertness, to an impotent thing-​like existence in which one does not take control of one’s own life. As he says: ‘We have to overcome this thingification. We have to reclaim the initiative of history. This is the core exigency of postcolonial Africa. Our impotent thing-​like inert existence: ensnared between the promise of independence and its deplorable actuality’ (p. 116). Serequeberhan thus appeals to Africans to confront the ‘negativity’ and reclaim their citizenship against thingification. Overcoming thingification ‘we can hope for a new Africa’. But this is not a task that should simply be left to Africans alone. The second point Serequeberhan makes regarding achieving this transformation returns to his view of our globally shared heritage. This means, first, that Africa’s colonial heritage concerns its previous colonizers as much as today’s neo-​colonizers. Neo-​colonialism is not simply Africa’s fault; it is a situation in which the West—​and other global capitalist forces—​are implicated through their continuous financial-​military and political assistance that they extend to their neo-​colonial partners. Colonial heritage shows what Gadamer calls ‘effective history’: the significance of the actuality of history in the present. Second, this history of colonization and thingification does not only concern the relationship between the Western colonizer and the African colonized. As Serequeberhan points out, it also concerns the increasing neo-​colonizing control of natural resources and trade by

African Phenomenological Approach    551 Eastern countries such as China and corporate giants which, for instance, cause disastrous disturbances of the environment through their exploration and extraction of oil all over the world (Serequeberhan, 2015: 31). If we humans have a globally shared heritage, if the other is always part of what constitutes our own being as humans, then the history of colonization and thingification concerns every human being as representing part of our own heritage. It is in this sense that Serequeberhan says: ‘All we have to rely on, in this daring project, is our hybrid intermixed heritage’ (Serequeberhan, 2015: 116). This calls for a ‘resolute questioning’ of the prevailing workings of the neo-​colonial and neo-​liberal forces that globally deny people our shared heritage, of the fact that we all share being-​on-​our-​planet. With this resolute questioning thus comes a task, a challenge, to make room for ‘tout le particulier, instanced in differing, varied, multiple, and intermingled heritages, which constitute our shared being’ (p. 116). Our shared being on the planet is our heritage and granting everyone a place is the ultimate task of transforming our abode.

27.4  Conclusion In this chapter, I have explored central aspects of Serequeberhan’s special contribution to what I call his African hermeneutic phenomenology. He does not explicitly ascribe to phenomenology in his African hermeneutics, however, I have attempted to make explicit the inherent phenomenological nature of his work. I have concentrated on two of his main works, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse (1994) and Existence and Heritage (2015). My focus has been on his adoption of Heidegger’s work, more precisely, his approach to the problem of ‘enframing’—​the ensnarement of persons through their reduction to entities for industrial use within the framework of neo-​colonial capitalist institutions in the post-​colonial African context. This has seminal political ramifications not only for those living in an African context. In Existence and Heritage (2015), Serequeberhan stresses in a refreshing way that, regardless of our specific place of abode, humans have a globally shared heritage. This demands a recognition of the subaltern other and the political need for transformation; in short, our shared heritage calls for us to make place for all, thus, as he says, ‘to prepare the possibility of a transformed abode of man in the world’. Serequeberhan’s call ‘to prepare the possibility of a transformed abode of man in the world’ holds some important implications for studies of the way societies are organized (organization studies), not only within the African context but on a global scale. I close by briefly pointing out one such implication concerning the decolonization of knowledge. In Serequeberhan’s terms one can say this is about ‘transforming our abode’ in the academy. For the sake of brevity, I confine myself to suggesting for further exploration some examples of connections between Serequeberhans’s argument for transformation and the way organization studies have engaged with both post-​colonial thinking and African philosophies on how to break with epistemic colonialism.

552   Abraham Olivier A first example of a connection with Serequeberhan’s work is found in the special issue of Alcadipani, Khan, Gantman, & Nkomo (2012) titled Southern Voices in Management and Organization Knowledge. This special issue aims to open a space for reflection about management and organizational knowledge as it is practiced and constructed in the Global South (Alcadipani, Khan, Gantman, & Nkomo 2012: 131). Notably, the editors write that organizational scholars working outside the West rarely appear on the radar of the most prestigious scholarly journals of the field. This special issue draws attention to the fact that ‘there is life beyond Northern academia’ and aims to make these other voices heard. In Serequeberhan’s terms, the aim of this special issue is to demand a recognition of the subaltern academic other and our shared academic heritage. In other words, the demand is to transform the way Northern societies organize higher education so as to be inclusive of the diversity in Southern societies. This appeal to transform the home of higher education thus serves as an example of a link for further exploration between Serequeberhan’s work and post-​colonial thinking in organization studies. There are also similar examples of other scholars whose works show connections with Serequeberhan’s demand for transformation. One of them is the Latin American organization studies scholar Ibarra-​Colado (2006) who addresses problems of organizing societies under neo-​liberal regimes and the need to reform or dismantle the state and other social and educational institutions. Another example, which I discuss briefly in conclusion, is the African philosopher Achille Mbembe. Mbembe is well-​known for addressing problems of epistemic coloniality within the context of global neo-​liberal capitalism.15 I focus here on his recent paper titled ‘Decolonising the University: New Directions’ (2016). Here Mbembe argues that ‘global elites’ are invested in changing education, especially the university, into ‘a new form of institution suited to privileged groups who are able to use aspects of globalization to reproduce, and fence off power and privilege’ (Mbembe 2016: 37). The upshot is that those who are not privileged enough to be able to compete will be ‘zoned’ out. The losers in the unfolding global academic competition are in many respects condemned to a ‘zone of non-​being’, ignored and underresourced. As Mbembe says, global Apartheid in higher education, is unfolding as market competition has forced some countries and universities into marginalized zones (p. 38). Mbembe makes an argument for epistemic inclusivity and diversity, thus endorsing the view of Boaventura de Sousa and Enrique Dussel ‘that knowledge can only be thought of as universal if it is pluriversal’ (Mbembe 2016: 36). Consequently, he endorses the concept of the ‘pluriversity’ instead of ‘university’. The pluriversity should not be mistaken for an extension of a Eurocentric model reproduced globally through ‘commercial internationalism’. Its focus rather is on epistemic diversity through the endorsement of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions and in a way that transcends disciplinary divisions and classist zones. Ultimately, Mbembe argues for a transformation of our academic abode that strongly links with Serequeberhan’s

15  See

Nkomo’s references to Mbembe with regard to post-​colonial issues in organization studies (2011: 3−6, 14)

African Phenomenological Approach    553 argument for transformation—​and for that matter, with the respective works of Ibarra-​ Colado (2006), Nkomo (2011), and Alcadipani et al. (2012). I confine myself here to simply pointing out some of these links,16 whose work and the implications of whose work call for further exploration.

References Alcadipani, R., Khan, F., Gantman, E., & Nkomo, S. (2012). Southern voices in management and organization knowledge. Organization, 19(2), 131–​143. Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: The Viking Press. Bouilloud, J. P. et al. (2019). Beyond the stable image of institutions: Using institutional analysis to tackle classic questions in institutional theory. Organization Studies, 41(2), 153–​174. https://​doi.org/​10.1177%2F0​1708​4061​8815​519. Césaire, A. (1972). Discourse on colonialism, trans. J. Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press. Coetzee, P. H., & Roux, A. P. J. (eds.) (2002). The African philosophy reader (2nd edn). New York: Routledge. Etieyibo, E. (ed.) (2018). Method, substance, and the future of African philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Fanon, F. (1967). Black skins white masks. London: Pluto Press. Gordon, L. (2008). An introduction to Africana philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Heidegger, M. (1977). An introduction to metaphysics, trans. R. Manheim. London: Yale University Press. Heidegger, M. (1993). Letter on humanism. In D. F. Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger basic writings. New York: Routledge. Ibarra-​ Colado, E. (2006). Organization studies and epistemic coloni-​ ality in Latin America: Thinking otherness from the margins. Organization, 13(4), 463–​488. Inwood, N. (1999). A Heidegger dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Janz, B. B. (2009). Philosophy in an African place. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Janz, B. B. (ed.) (2017). Place, space and hermeneutics. Cham: Springer. Komporozos-​Athanasiou, A., & Fotaki, M. (2015). A theory of imagination for organization studies using the work of Cornelius Castoriadis. Organization Studies, 36, 321–​342. Malpas, J. (2004). Place and experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malpas, J. (2006). Heidegger’s topology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marx, K. (1959). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Mbembe, A. (2016). Decolonising the university: New directions. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 15(1), 29–​45. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. (1981). Decolonising the mind. London: James Currey Ltd.

16  There are other links. Serequeberhan himself refers, for instance, to Cornelius Castoriadis, an author attracting growing interest in the field of organization studies (Serequeberhan, 2021: 35). Further links for exploration in future research include, for instance, Komporozos-​Athanasiou & Fotaki (2015), Bouilloud et al. (2019), and Pérezts, Russon, & Painter (2019).

554   Abraham Olivier Nkomo, S. M. (2011). A postcolonial and anti-​colonial reading of ‘African’ leadership and management in organization studies: Tensions, contradictions and possibilities. Organization, 18(3), 365–​386. Olivier, A. (2015). Heidegger in the Township. South African Journal of Philosophy, 34, 2, 240–​254. Olivier, A. (2016). The place of philosophy in Africa. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 54(4), 502–​520. Olivier, A. (2017). Understanding place. In B. B. Janz (ed.), Hermeneutics, Place and Space (pp. 9–​22). New York: Springer. Olivier, A. (2019). Place and displacement: Towards a distopological approach. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 27(1), 31–​56. Olivier, A. (2022). African phenomenology: Introductory perspectives. In E. Imafidon (ed.), Handbook of African philosophy (forthcoming). London: Springer. Outlaw, Jr, Lucius T. (2017). Africana philosophy. In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (summer edn). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. https://​ plato.stanf​ord.edu/​archi​ves/​sum2​017/​entr​ies/​afric​ana/​. Pérezts, M., Russon, J., & Painter, M. (2019). This time from Africa: developing a relational approach to values-​driven leadership. Journal of Business Ethics. 161, 731–​748, DOI: 10.1007/​ s10551-​019-​04343-​0. Serequeberhan, T. (ed). (1991). African philosophy: The essential eeadings. Salt Lake City: Paragon House. Serequeberhan, T. (1994). The hermeneutics of African philosophy: Horizon and discourse. Oxford: Routledge. Serequeberhan, T. (2015). Existence and heritage. Albany: SUNY Press. Serequeberhan, T. (2021). Philosophy in the present context of Africa. Theoria, 68(168/​3), 30–​ 41. Doi:10.3167/​th.2021.6816803. Wiredu, K. (ed.) (2004). A companion to African philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Chapter 28

Phenomenol o g y i n Ja pa n A Brief History with a Focus on Its Reception in Applied Areas Genki Uemura

28.1  Introduction Japan has a relatively long tradition of phenomenology being over a hundred years old. This tradition continues to the present day, with an interruption due to World War II. This chapter outlines the development of phenomenology in Japan from its beginning up until the early 21st century. Given the limited space, my historical reconstruction in what follows will be quite short and selective. Focusing on the reception of phenomenology in some applied areas (i.e. areas outside of philosophy, narrowly construed), I shall show how Japanese scholars have read, and reacted to, European phenomenologists. In other words, I will deal with discussions of phenomenology by Japanese philosophers (narrowly construed) only to the extent to which that would help my principal aim: Contextualizing and making better sense of the reception of phenomenology in applied areas.1 The present chapter is structured as follows. The next three sections reconstruct phenomenology in prewar Japan in three phases. Section 28.2 focuses on the initial phase of the reception of phenomenology in Japan in the 1910s. A remarkable feature common to discussions in this period is that Japanese philosophers interpreted Husserl with reference to Neo-​Kantianism. This perspective would persist to some extent in the reception of phenomenology in Japan into the 1920s, and Section 28.3 focuses on this. This period is striking because, for one thing, Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology had made an impact even before the publication of his Being and Time in 1927. Even 1 For

overviews of the reception of phenonemology in Japan, see also: Nitta, Tatematsu, & Shimomisse, 1978; Tani, 2013, 2020; Noe, 2017; Taguchi & Altobrando, 2019 (editors’ introduction).

556   Genki Uemura more importantly, it was in this same period that researchers from applied areas began to show an interest in phenomenology. For this reason, I call the 1920s the spreading phase for phenomenology in Japan. Section 28.4 deals with how phenomenology in prewar Japan came into full maturity between the latter half of the 1920s and the middle 1930s. As I will argue in this section, phenomenological research in applied areas also reached a high point in this phase of maturation. Section 28.5 touches on selected episodes from phenomenology in postwar Japan, emphasizing discussions over its application.

28.2  The Initial Phase The reception of phenomenology in Japan began around 1911. In this year, Kitaro Nishida, a prominent figure in the so-​called Kyoto School, published ‘On the Claim of Pure Logicism in Epistemology’ (Nishida, [1911] 2003). This article briefly dealt with Husserl’s view on logic in his Logical Investigations (1st edn, 1900/​1). As is often the case with early reactions, Nishida’s exposition of the founder of phenomenology involved some oversimplification and misunderstanding. Under the heading pure logicism, he conceived of Husserl as sharing essentially the same position as that of the South-​West Neo-​Kantians, Heinrich Rickert in particular (Nishida, [1911] 2003: 169, 175, 179). Nishida grounded such an interpretation in the similarity between the two philosophers: In discussing the condition of possibility of knowledge, both Husserl and Rickert posit the transcendent realm of ideal meaning or sense, which is neither physical nor mental (that is why the position Nishida attributed to them was called pure logicism). Nishida was indeed correct in finding this similarity. However, he failed to notice a significant difference between the two philosophers. Unlike (and virtually opposite to) Rickert, Husserl refuses to understand the ideality of meaning or sense in terms of normativity (see Husserl, 1900/​1] 2001: vol. 1, 231). Interestingly, Nishida’s (misconceived) conflation of Husserl’s position with Rickert’s might have had an origin in a work of his later successor at Kyoto, Hajime Tanabe. In 1910, one year earlier than Nishida’s pure logicism paper, Tanabe ([1910] 1963) published a survey article on Wilhelm Jerusalem’s Critical Idealism and Pure Logic (Jerusalem, 1905). In this book, Jerusalem attempted to argue against the anti-​psychologism in logic, a position undoubtedly shared by Husserl and Rickert. Given that Nishida, around 1910, was in correspondences with Tanabe, it is not implausible to assume that Jerusalem’s view of Husserl and Rickert as anti-​psychologists influenced Nishida via Tanabe (cf. Fujita 2015: 10–​11). There is yet another example that supports the Neo-​Kantian background of Husserl’s early reception in Japan. In 1915, Kichinosuke Itō published the first Japanese translation of Husserl’s ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’, which was published in 1911. Itō, who would study under Husserl in 1920, maintained that Husserl’s position is largely the same as that of Neo-​Kantianism. In his translator’s note, he claimed that the phenomenologist

Phenomenology in Japan    557 represented one of the three major branches of logicism, the other two of which were the Baden (i.e. South-​West) and the Marburg schools (cf. Ito, 1915: 102). Unlike Nishida in 1911, Itō succeeded in differentiating Husserl’s position, which he calls the ‘Göttingen phenomenological school’, from the Baden school of Neo-​Kantianism (and indeed, from that of the Marburg school too). However, it is not entirely clear whether Itō, in his short note, counted Husserl also as Neo-​Kantian in a broader sense. Be that as it may, his note also testifies that Neo-​Kantianism served as a frame of reference, as it were, in discussions on Husserl in the initial phase of his reception. In his paper, ‘Contemporary Philosophy’ (Nishida, [1917] 2003), Nishida discussed Husserl once again and in a more detailed way. Distinguishing Husserl’s position from Rickert’s, he came to a picture similar to Itō’s in 1915. Now he took the founder of phenomenology as a representative of one of the three outstanding positions in Germany, the other two being the South-​West and the Marburg schools of Neo-​Kantianism (Nishida, [1917] 2003: 267). Among many points he made in this paper, what strikes readers in the 21st century is that he mentioned Bernard Bolzano and Franz Brentano as two important sources for Husserl. Drawing on Kazimierz Twardowski’s integration of Bolzanian themes into Brentanian psychology (Twardowski, 1977; originally published in 1894), Nishida presented Husserl’s phenomenology as an attempt to elucidate the relationship of the triad Twardowski introduced: Mental acts, their contents, and their objects (Nishida, [1917] 2003: 283–​5). In this way, Nishida’s 1917 paper held a view that has come to the fore in recent scholarship, namely that Husserl was a philosopher from the Austro-​German tradition.2 At the same time, however, Nishida continued to locate Husserl in the Kantian tradition that concerned quid juris questions on the possibility of knowledge. Nishida’s interpretation of Husserl was not without grounds. Since the publication of Ideas I in 1913, Husserl had declared himself a proponent of transcendental phenomenology, which Nishida regarded as a variant of Kant’s transcendental psychology in the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason (Nishida, [1917] 2003: 286–​287). Instead of examining this interpretation any further, I shall note that the way in which Nishida argued for it shows a limit of his understanding of Husserl at this moment. According to him, ‘Husserl, who grounds his position in Bolzano, comes to Kantian transcendental psychology by accepting Brentano’s ideas’ (Nishida, [1917] 2003: 288; my translation). This picture looks idiosyncratic to present readers of Husserl for at least two reasons. First, Nishida was simply mistaken if he, as this passage suggests, thought that Brentano influenced Husserl after the latter received some ideas from Bolzano. Second, it is highly controversial whether and to what extent the combination of Bolzano and Brentano led Husserl to his alliance with Kantianism.3

2 

For a brief exposition of Husserl as an heir of Austro-​German philosophy, see, Fréchette, 2019. For a more extensive discussion on this issue, see Rollinger, 1999. Interestingly, Nishida also used the term ‘German-​Austrian School’ in discussing Husserl and others in his 1911 paper. 3  For an overview of Nishida’s intellectual development, see Fujita, 2020. For Nishida’s relation to phenomenology, see, for instance, Taguchi, 2018; Cheung, 2019; Ishihara, 2019; and Taguchi, 2019.

558   Genki Uemura In this way, the earliest reception of phenomenology in Japan in the 1910s was predominantly influenced by Neo-​Kantianism. In this decade, Nishida’s discussions of Husserl evolved around the idea that a theory of (scientific) knowledge plays central role in philosophy. Tanabe and Ito, who focused on the problem of logic would both agree with Nishida on this point. In such a situation, it is remarkable that the first book-​length works on phenomenology in Japan, Kyôson Tsuchida’s Philosophy of Symbols (Tsuchida, [1919] 1948), included a half-​finished attempt at applying Husserl’s theory of intentionality to topics beyond epistemology: Aesthetic and religious experiences of symbols. According to Tsuchida, symbols are nothing other than intentional experiences, which he also calls ‘meaning-​experiences’ (imiteki taiken), and vice versa (Tsuchida, [1919] 1948: 270–​1). In other words, he contended that symbols are not objects we apprehend but something we live through. However, his phenomenological analysis of symbols was half-​finished if we take it as an attempt at applied phenomenology. Instead of dealing with varieties of symbols as intentional experiences, he developed his discussion in a different direction which is interesting but not relevant here. Illustrating the structure of intentional experiences in terms of upside-​down cone diagrams (probably inspired by Henry Bergson), he presents a phenomenological interpretation of Kegon Buddhism (Tsuchida, [1919] 1948): 271–​85).4

28.3  The Spreading Phase Phenomenological research in Japan advanced significantly in the 1920s. In this decade, we find many articles and books on phenomenology. As a glance at those works will show, many of them dealt with Husserl’s position in greater detail and more appropriately. Japanese philosophers began to conceive of phenomenology as a movement, which had not been exhausted by the ideas of its founder alone. Correspondingly, in the 1920s Japan, phenomenology came to be featured, albeit only occasionally, in disciplines outside of philosophy in a narrow sense. For such advancement, we can give two explanations. First, the expansion of phenomenology in Japan resulted from that of Europe in this and previous decades. In 1913, Husserl, together with four fellow phenomenologists—​ Max Scheler, 4  Without going deeper into the details of his idea, we shall only see what it was supposed to amount to: ‘An object sees itself and, at the same time, it sees other objects. In other words, when I see a desk in front of me, this means not that I am seeing the desk but that the desk sees itself and, at the same time, it sees everything else that is not the desk. The world, insofar as it is dynamic, is a living curve to which no tangent line can be drawn and which, if one tries to draw a tangent line to it, would slip away endlessly. Furthermore, it is an eternal stillness that never produces or creates anything. Nothing is identical in nature, but, at the same time, nothing is non-​identical in nature. Nothing does not appear in a certain time in the past/​present/​future, but, at the same time, nothing is not included in the eternal now’ (pp. 284–​5).

Phenomenology in Japan    559 Alexander Pfänder, Moritz Geiger, and Adolf Reinach—​ launched Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Reserach (Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung), which was intended to serve as a forum for their new discipline.5 The first volume of the yearbook already showed the potential of applied phenomenology. Indeed, the primary editor almost entirely confined himself to issues arising from the theory of (scientific) knowledge in his contribution, namely in the first volume of Ideas (Husserl, 2014). However, the contributions of the others showed how phenomenology could deal with various topics outside of epistemology. Scheler’s (1973) work on material value ethics included, among other things, analyses of how we feel values and how we affectively respond to them. Pfänder (1913) also focused on affective experiences called ‘sentiments’ (Gesinnungen), such as love, hate, and so on. Geiger (1913) proposed a phenomenological analysis of aesthetic enjoyment. Last but not least, Reinach’s (2012) discussion of social acts (promising, ordering, communicating, etc.) presented a programme for a phenomenological study of sociality. By packaging various topics under the heading of phenomenology, Husserl and his fellows succeeded in spreading their ideas outside their circle.6 It is not difficult to imagine that these developments in Germany stimulated the Japanese scholars mentioned below. Second, in this decade, many scholars from Japan began to study in Freiburg, where Husserl had been teaching since 1916. After coming back to Japan, some of them published articles and books informed by their first-​hand experiences of the philosophical scenes in the Black Forest city. They undoubtedly brought a great deal of local information to their colleagues in their home country, even though little of it has been recorded in documents available to us now. As we will soon see, the works and, presumably, private communications from those scholars seemed to play some role in the reception of phenomenology in sociology and, possibly, in pedagogy. Among the numerous works on phenomenology published in Japan in the 1920s, the most important were probably two papers Tanabe published after his return from Freiburg. These papers—​‘A New Turn in Phenomenology’ ([1924] 1962) and ‘Epistemology and Phenomenology’ ([1925] 1962)—​represented a new phase for phenomenology in Japan in three respects. First, Tanabe succeeded in placing phenomenology in the broader context of contemporary European philosophy at his time. Second, within the phenomenology thus contextualized, Tanabe contrasted Husserl’s epistemology-​ oriented phenomenology with Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology. The contrast Tanabe outlined in those articles, without any doubt, represented the then cutting edge of phenomenology that he must have witnessed in Germany. In 1924 and 1925, Being and Time (Heidegger, [1927] 1962) was yet to be published. Third, Tanabe also mentioned early phenomenologists (Tanabe, [1924] 1962: 27, [1925] 1962: 42). As he observed, they applied the analysis of the relationship between consciousness and its object to various topics. Remarkably, Tanabe did not fail to 5 

For a history of the Yearbook, see Schuhmann (1990). For the early phenomenological movement, see Spiegelberg (1982). For a concise and yet up-​to-​date overview, see Salice (2020). 6 

560   Genki Uemura notice their attempts to apply phenomenology to social sciences. The literature he cited included Reinach (jurisprudence) and Gerda Walther (sociology). We will shortly discuss the influence this might have had on phenomenological studies in Japan.7 Tanabe introduced phenomenology as being positioned between what he calls philosophy of science and philosophy of life (cf. Tanabe, [1924] 1962: 19–​20, [1925] 1962: 37–​ 40). In his view, philosophy of science, represented by Neo-​Kantianianism, had failed to gain popularity. He argued that it was too far removed from our concrete lives. Thus he took philosophy of life, which he associated with Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, and Bergson, to be a more predominant movement in Europe. However, such an evaluation did not imply that philosophy of life was without any problems. Being a form of philosophy, philosophy of life faced the same demands as did a scientific discipline to which, Tanabe contended, it hardly responded. Understanding the situation in this way, Tanabe held that phenomenology was relatively promising in that it connected the two currents of philosophy.8 It is true that Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, advocates what Tanabe called philosophy of science. However, Husserl’s phenomenology also responds to the demands of the philosophy of life in that it tries to elucidate intuitively the structure of consciousness that we directly experience. Tanabe evaluated Husserl’s phenomenology somewhat critically. According to him, Husserl did not fully grasp the concrete form of consciousness. Relatedly, he also pointed out that Husserl had a static take on consciousness and thus made it into a fixed object. It is in this context that Tanabe favoured Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology. In his brief commentary on Heidegger’s lectures in the summer semester of 1923, we shall focus on the following passage, where he contrasted Husserl with Heidegger. The world is the object, generally construed, of encountering ([die] Welt ist was begegnet). The nature which objects possesses as those of encountering can be expressed by the term ‘meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit)’. This means that the actual world is encountered as something cared about. In other words, the world (Welt) means the surrounding world (Umwelt). The world is characterized by care (Sorge). It is not the case that, as in Husserl’s constructive [sic] phenomenology, the natural world without caring and meanings is conceived first, and then the world of meaningful mental life is established based on this world by the so-​called meaning-​ bestowing act. It is only through meaningfulness in encountering that existence is established. (Tanabe, [1924] 1962: 31–​2; the German terms in the parentheses are Tanabe’s)

7 

It should be noted that Tanabe was not the first to introduce such movements. In 1923, Kenzo Honda published ‘Ontology of Money’ ([1923] 1938) in which he outlined the phenomenological study of money with reference to Husserl, Winkler, and Reinach. As Honda wrote at the end of the paper, it was Kyōson Tsuchida (see Section 28.2) who introduced phenomenology to him. 8  Tanabe is not entirely committed to phenomenology in these articles. In fact, towards the end of the 1920s, Tanabe developed the Hegelian dialectic in his own way, at least superficially, and adopted a different policy from the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger.

Phenomenology in Japan    561 While characterizing phenomenology as an investigation into meaning or meaningfulness, Tanabe claimed that Husserl failed to notice how we experience the world with meaning on a fundamental level, namely that of everyday life in which caring plays a central role. This contrast Tanabe made between Husserl and Heidegger still finds some supporters today (see, for instance, Dreyfus, 1991). However, Tanabe’s preference for Heidegger over Husserl did not seem to affect the reception of phenomenology in applied areas in prewar Japan. As we will see, Husserlian phenomenology was expected to be helpful in fields outside of philosophy from the 1920s to the end of the war. Tanabe’s return from Germany seems to have had a significant impact on people around him. We can find a trace of his influence in a series of articles published between 1925 and 1926 by Shotarō Yoneda, a sociologist and colleague of Tanabe’s (Yoneda, 1925a–​ f, 1926). In the first of these articles, Yoneda, referring to Alfred Vierkandt, pointed out that there had been a recent attempt to renew sociology through phenomenology (cf. Yoneda, 1925a: 324–​5). According to him, the philosophers belonging to this trend included Scherer, Pfänder, Geiger, Reinach, Stein, Walther, and Siegfried Krakauer, because they broadly shared the same approach to the social; they tried to clarify the nature of society in terms of the interaction or interrelationship of the minds of individuals. To examine such an attempt, Yoneda held, one had to understand Husserl’s ideas of phenomenology (cf. Yoneda, 1925a: 325–​6). Thus, in most of his eight papers, he presented a thorough and careful summary of Husserl’s works, which we do not discuss here. Instead, we shall focus on the closing part of the eighth and final article, where Yoneda gave an overview of his book in preparation, titled Phenomenology and Sociology. According to the proposed plan, this book would include a reconstruction of Husserl’s views on sociology based not only on relevant, brief remarks scattered throughout his then published works but also on his unpublished lectures ‘Spirit and Nature’ in 1919 (cf. Yoneda, 1926: 484). The lectures he had in mind were likely Husserl’s Nature and Spirit (Husserl, 2002). It is not clear how Yoneda could have accessed those lectures. The best explanation for this is probably that he had read (or at least heard about) a typescript of them, which Tanabe owned and which remains in Tanabe archives in Kyoto. Yoneda’s series of papers left another hint of his relationship with Tanabe. Yoneda, as early as 1925, briefly remarked on a new direction in phenomenology advocated by Heidegger (Yoneda, 1925a: 316; see also Yoneda, 1925b: 516). However, he did not offer any specific citation to corroborate this piece of information, which he had very likely gleaned from his colleague Tanabe, either via the latter’s 1924 and 1925 papers or through personal communication. Unfortunately, Yoneda did not complete his project. His planned book on phenomenology and sociology was never published. However, even if only sketchily, Yoneda anticipated research that a student of his, Tomoo Otaka, would later develop further. As we will see in the next section, Otaka, in his works in the 1930s, went on to provide a detailed phenomenological account of social relations, social groups, and their connection. In the 1920s, phenomenology was widely discussed among Japanese pedagogues. As far as we know, this trend started in 1923 with the publication of Recent Trends in

562   Genki Uemura Pedagogical Thoughts by Kumaji Yoshida (1923). This book, making a general survey of the philosophy of education in Europe (in Germany in particular), included a short chapter on Husserl’s phenomenology and its significance for phenomenology (Yoshida, 1923: 178–​85). However, as he confessed, he did not have first-​hand knowledge of Husserl’s phenomenology (p. 185). The chapter summarized Wilhelm Reyer’s paper on phenomenology and education (1921). Putting aside the numerous works on the relation between phenomenology and pedagogy in the years that followed, I shall focus only on Masamori Watanabe’s (1928) Phenomenology and Pedagogy. This book is worth mentioning for two reasons. First, unlike Yoshida, Watanabe outlined Husserl’s thought by drawing not only on secondary literature but also on primary sources from the philosopher. Second, he followed the lines that Nishida and Tanabe had developed. Like Tanabe, Watanabe also situated Husserl’s phenomenology between philosophy of science and philosophy of life (Watanabe, 1928: 13–​23); and he identified Brentano and Bolzano as Husserl’s most important sources (pp. 26, 63–​7 1). Even more remarkably, Watanabe reconstructed Husserl’s account of intentionality, focusing on the notion of meaning. According to Watanabe, Husserl’s theory of intentionality explicates the relationship between intentional experience and its intentional correlates—​in Husserl’s terminology, noesis and noema—​independently of the real world (Watanabe, 1928: 81–​2); he interpreted noema as meaning rather than an object. Thus he claimed that for phenomenology, objects themselves are just ideas in the (Neo-​)Kantian sense (Watanabe, 1928: 93–​4), but that Husserl did not fully articulate his idea of the ‘immanent transcendence’ of objects (cf. Watanabe, 1928: 234–​6). From Husserl’s phenomenology thus outlined, Watanabe drew an idea of a process-​centred education in which experiences matter (cf. pp. 149–​53). In 1929, Tokuryū Yamauchi published Discourse on Phenomenology. This book, which was more than 400 page long, was written by the philosopher after he had studied in Freiburg in 1920 and 1924, and was probably the first full-​fledged introduction to Husserl’s phenomenology published in Japan. I shall briefly mention his discussion in the introduction that follows because it offers a background for the further development of phenomenology in Japan in the 1930s. While acknowledging that Heidegger had proposed a philosophy-​of-​life-​oriented version of phenomenology, Yamauchi confined himself to the epistemology-​oriented one advocated by Husserl (Yamauchi, 1929: 5–​ 6). No matter what phenomenology would amount to, he continued, it certainly was a prominent school to which only Neo-​Kantianism could compare (p. 6). Thus he aimed to clarify the originality of phenomenology by contrasting it with the epistemological ideas from Neo-​Kantianism. It is beyond our present aim to examine the details of his lengthy comparison between phenomenology and Neo-​Kantianism, which continuously referred to figures such as Kant, Hume, Leibnitz, Aristotle, Plato, and others. What matters for us is Yamauchi’s observation that phenomenology is closer to ontology than to epistemology because it tries to describe phenomena without assuming the Kantian subjectivity or ‘consciousness in general’ that supposedly precedes the phenomena and forms them (Yamauchi, 1929: 9–​10). As we will see, Otaka would take over this contrast in favour of the phenomenological method.

Phenomenology in Japan    563

28.4  The Phase of Maturation From the later 1920s to the middle 1930s, phenomenology in Japan continued to develop, producing significant works. In what follows, I shall deal with some of the works that fit particularly well with the aim of this chapter. In this period, the reception of Husserl in prewar Japan reached its peak with the publication of some of the works of Satomi Takahashi. Having studied in Freiburg from 1926 to 1927, Takahashi published several papers on Husserl, which he soon collected as the book Husserl’s Phenomenology (Takahashi, 1931). Even though Yamauchi’s 1929 book had already served as an introduction to Husserlian phenomenology with scholarly rigour, Takahashi went further than Yamauchi had. While Yamauchi drew on Husserl’s then published works, Takahashi reconstructed the phenomenologist’s ideas as expressed in his lectures.9 Most remarkably for us, he emphasized the importance of the lived-​body (Leib as opposed to Körper) for the phenomenological analysis of intersubjectivity. His discussion of this issue was short and might not be particularly acute by today’s standards. However, we should note that when Takahashi was working on the papers to be collected in his book, Husserl’s theory of empathy was yet to be published; the French translation of Cartesian Meditations, in which Husserl outlined the theory, was published in 1931 and the German version later still, in 1950 (Husserl, 1931, 1950). Unfortunately, Takahashi’s insight seems to have had no impact on the development of phenomenological research in Japan in the years that followed. Heidegger’s phenomenology also flourished in prewar Japan from around 1930. Focusing here on some of the more remarkable works that followed after Tanabe’s pioneering paper in 1924. From 1926 to 1927, Kiyoshi Miki, a Marxist philosopher from the Kyoto School, published two articles on hermeneutical phenomenology based on Heidegger’s lectures at Marburg, which he had attended (Miki, [1926/​7] 1966, [1927] 1966). Since Miki did not make explicit the source of his discussions in the articles, the ideas he took from Heidegger were initially understood as his own (Mine, 2021: 199). In the same period, Miki published A Study on Humans according to Pascal (Miki, [1926] 1966), which also shows traces of the influence from Heidegger.10 Shuzo Kuki’s ([1930] 2004) Structure of Iki also reflects the impact of his encounter with Heidegger in his eight-​years stay in Europe in the 1920s. In 1926, he started his project on iki, a kind of stylishness favoured in the pre-​ modern Edo culture, drafting a manuscript entitled ‘The Essence of Iki’. This title suggests a reason for why Kuki moved to Freiburg in 1927. The phenomenologist had advocated phenomenology for a study on essences. In the same year, however, Kuki moved again

9 For more on his reconstruction of Husserl’s idea, which seems adequate, see Uemura (2021: section 2). 10  For the young Miki’s days in Europe in the first half of the 1920s, see Yusa (1998). For Miki as a Marxist philosopher, see Curley (2020).

564   Genki Uemura to Marburg to attend Heidegger’s lectures, which seems to have led him to a hermeneutical approach to iki.11 Last but not least, Tetsuro Watsuji’s ([1930] 1988) book Climate and Culture also shows the flourishing of Heidegger’s thought in prewar Japan. Although Watsuji did not study with Heidegger in person, he obtained a copy of Being and Time in 1927 in Berlin. The care with which Watsuji read the book can be seen particularly, for example, in his observation that Heidegger’s analysis of being-​in-​the-​world barely touched on spatiality. To make up for this shortcoming was one of Watsuji aims in his book. Even this brief summary suffices for us to see that Kuki’s and Watsuji’s works were, in a sense, attempts at applying Heidegger’s phenomenology. These scholars tried to shed light on aspects of concrete life (supposedly) embedded in cultural contexts. It was almost certainly Tomoo Otaka who marked the high point in the reception of phenomenology in the social sciences of prewar Japan. Although he characterized himself as a philosopher-​of-​law as opposed to a philosopher (Otaka, 1935: 133), he was trained not only in jurisprudence but also in sociology and philosophy. Having graduated from the faculty of law at the Imperial University of Tokyo, he studied in the faculty of letters in Kyoto under Yoneda and Nishida in the mid-​1920s. Otaka must have been acquainted with Tanabe in his student days in Kyoto. When he visited Europe for his two-​year research stay, he took Tanabe’s letter of recommendation addressed to Husserl (Otaka, 1935: 133). Even though Husserl had already retired from the university, he agreed to hold private seminars with Otaka and other Japanese scholars at his house. During his stay in Freiburg, Otaka also attended Heidegger’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, but his works appearing in subsequent years show fewer traces of influence from the author of Being and Time. Rather, he proposed a Husserl-​inspired account of social reality. Here, I shall point to two salient features of his discussions. In The Theory of the Structure of States, his dissertation published in 1936 in Japanese, Otaka put Husserl in sharp contrast with Neo-​Kantianism, favouring the former. Otaka’s aim in this book was to give foundation to the theory of states philosophically to deal with states such as Japan and Germany as actually existing social groups. In other words, he attempted to vindicate the realist view that those groups exist prior to our knowledge of them. As he observed, Neo-​Kantianism could not achieve this aim because it held that the methods of sciences generate the object of knowledge (Otaka, 1936: 31). At the same time, however, it would also be problematic for him to adopt a simple-​minded or ‘naïve’ realism about social groups. It is in this context that Otaka appealed to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. According to Otaka, Husserl admitted that objects precede our knowledge of them, but he elucidated the nature of their existence in terms of the constitutive function of subjectivity. In other words, Otaka interpreted Husserl’s idealism as a form of non-​dogmatic realism. Importantly, Otaka did not take over the whole package of Husserl’s position thus outlined. Instead, he applied his teacher’s idea only to the realm of social entities, including social groups. As he claimed, it does not

11 

For an exposition of Kuki as a phenomenologist, see Mayeda, 2020.

Phenomenology in Japan    565 sound controversial to say that social entities exist prior to our knowledge, but they are constituted in transcendental subjectivity or intersubjectivity (Otaka, 1936: 33).12 Otaka proposed his account of social groups most extensively in Foundation of the Theory of Social Group published in German (Otaka, 1932).13 According to him, social groups actually exist on the upper stratum of the two-​layered structure of social reality called the ‘world of spirit’ (Welt des Geistes). Being an entity on the upper stratum, a social group exists dependently on what is going on at the lower stratum, namely, social interactions between the members of that group. In short, the social group exists only insofar as its members behave in a certain way. Notably, the notion of meaning plays a crucial role in Otaka’s explanation of such dependency. On the one hand, he holds that units of social interactions, namely social actions are the relevant agents’ bodily behaviours endowed with meanings (Otaka, 1932: 101). If they are meaningless, they would not be human actions in the first place. On the other hand, in order for social actions to ground the existence of a social group, they must receive their meanings from the group. In other words, their meanings must be determined by the social group in question (Otaka, 1932: 147). To illustrate Otaka’s idea, let us consider how, according to him, the actuality of a business company depends on the social (inter)actions of its members. Obviously, the company exists dependently on its members and their activities. It is also beyond dispute that those activities are social actions and that some of them make up social interactions. While those actions come in great variety, they must fulfill certain conditions to ground the company’s existence. Suppose that two company employees happen to cooperate in telling some people the direction to the nearby station. Suppose further that those people have nothing to do with the company’s business (the employees are just kind enough to help the strangers lost in the city). Then, no matter how nice, the social interaction between the employees would be irrelevant to the sustained existence of the company. Why is this the case? A good answer would be that one could not make sense of the social interaction in light of the company’s purpose. In other words, a social (inter)action grounds the company’s existence only if its meaning conforms to the company’s purpose.

28.5  A Short Glance at Phenomenology in Postwar Japan Phenomenology in postwar Japan, i.e. after August 1945, is difficult to reconstruct historically. Just like postwar phenomenology in general, one could characterize it, at best,

12  For Otaka’s appropriation of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, see Uemura & Yaegashi (2016). Uemura (2021) deals with Otaka’s realist interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenological idealism. 13 For a more comprehensive reconstruction of Otaka’s account of social reality, see Uemura & Yaegashi (2016) and Yaegashi & Uemura (2019).

566   Genki Uemura as being represented by ramification of many different ideas of phenomenologies. Here, I shall mention phenomenologists and phenomenologically minded researchers even more selectively than in the previous sections. There are two main criteria for selection. First, I shall prioritize works with features distinctive to phenomenology in Japan after 1945. In other words, I will not deal with those that we could read as a continuation of the prewar debates. Second, I shall focus on discussions over the application of phenomenology in fields outside of philosophy. However, note that what follows will be far from comprehensive. A distinctive feature of phenomenology in postwar Japan is its renewed take on Husserl. Rather than contrasting Husserl’s phenomenology with Heidegger’s (as Tanabe did in the 1920s—​see Section 28.3), Japanese scholars came to see the two philosophers as engaged in a common project: Analysis of concrete lives situated in history. Accordingly, they tended to emphasize Husserl’s later works in which he discusses issues such as intersubjectivity, embodiment, and historicity.14 From this perspective, Yoshihiro Nitta presented a detailed reconstruction of Husserl’s phenomenology in his What Is Phenomenology? (Nitta, [1968] 1992). Drawing on Husserl’s Nachlass as well as his published works, Nitta interpreted the phenomenologist’s later discussions as a diversion from his earlier foundationalist project. According to him, Husserl’s Descartes-​inspired phenomenology in Ideas I fails because its alleged first principle, namely the absolute certainty of the ‘I am’ (sum), could come only after preceding reflections on the totality of subjectivity (Nitta, [1968] 1992: 65–​7 1). Such reflection, he further argued, consists in the elucidation of the universal correlation between subjectivity and the pre-​given world (pp. 71–​3). Instead of focusing on subjectivity detached from the world, Husserl’s new method of reflection starts from the world in its totality given prior to the reflection. Since the world is pre-​ given in this way, it could be taken phenomenologically as the intentional correlate of subjectivity. Then, by explicating this correlation as a nexus of intentional references, one could approach the I am in its totality step by step.15 With this interpretation at hand, Nitta also proposed that the later Husserl’s phenomenology is compatible with and even complementary to Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein as being-​in-​the-​world (Nitta, [1968] 1992: 155–​60). According to Nitta, Husserl’s idea would amount to the claim that the I am in its totality is nothing other than my factual existence in the world. Two years later, Gen Kida published Phenomenology (Kida, 1970), in which he also emphasized the importance of Husserl’s later thought. While Nitta concentrated almost exclusively on Husserl, Kida situated the phenomenologist in a broader context. Having overviewed the early, middle, and later periods of Husserl’s work in the first three chapters, he gave brief expositions of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-​Ponty with reference to their attempts to deepen insights from the later Husserl. Thanks to its lucidity, Kida’s book became a best-​seller. Since its publication, it has long served as a concise introduction to 14 

For an overview of those topics, see, for instance, Zahavi (2003: ­chapter 3). This method is also known as the ontological way to the phenomenological reduction. For a brief account of Husserl’s ways to the reduction, see Zahavi (2003: 47–​53). 15 

Phenomenology in Japan    567 mainstream phenomenology. For our purpose, however, what he gave for the future of phenomenology is more remarkable. Drawing on Merleau-​Ponty, he expected phenomenology to become an interdisciplinary science of humans open to empirical findings (Kida, 1970: 202).16 As a pioneering study, Kida referred to phenomenological psychiatry as advocated by Minkowski, Binswanger, and Bos (Kida, 1970: 203).17 Possibly independently of Kida’s remark, the phenomenological approach to psychiatry gained attention from Japanese researchers. Among them, Bin Kimura particularly merits attention. As a translator, he introduced Germanophone psychiatrists such as Binswanger, Weizsäcker, Blankenburg, Tellenbach, and others to Japan. Based on his expertise as a working psychiatrist, he also gave his original discussions of various mental disorders. For instance, he famously proposed a phenomenological analysis of schizophrenic and depressive experiences (Kimura, 1982). According to him, while schizophrenic patients live in the ante-​festum temporality, anticipating the future, depressive patients inhabit the post-​festum one, looking back to the past. It is also noteworthy that Kimura adopts Watsuji’s notion of ‘betweenness’ (aidagara). As Krueger (2019) argues, Kimura’s contribution to phenomenological psychiatry in this context is still significant given the recent development in this field.18 In postwar Japan, while phenomenological psychiatry was developed by incorporating the legacy of the country’s phenomenological tradition, the reception of phenomenology in other applied fields seems to have generally followed international trends. For example, in nursing, the translations of works from Paricia Benner and Judith Wrubel seem to have dramatically improved the status of the phenomenological approach (see, for instance, Benner & Wrubel, [1989] 1999; Benner, [2001] 2005, [2004] 2006). Also, the introduction of the phenomenological approach in Management and Organization Studies has only just begun in Japan.19 It remains to be seen how such research will transform the tradition of phenomenology in Japan and what remarkable results will emerge.

28.6  Conclusion In the present chapter, I have presented a short history of the reception of phenomenology in Japan, focusing on the application of phenomenology. In Sections 28.2−28.4, I have reconstructed phenomenology in prewar Japan in three phases: the initial phase, the spreading phase, and the maturation phase. The reception process could be

16  I owe this point to Ikeda (2014). At the same time, Kida did not fail to notice phenomenologists’ critical attitude towards scientism. On this aspect of Kida’s book, see Noe (2017: 29–​30). 17  For the relationship between phenomenology and psychiatry, see Spiegelberg (1972). 18  For Kimura as a phenomenological psychiatrist, see also Phillips (2019). 19 On this subject, we seem to have only two books, both co-​ authored by Ichiro Yamaguchi, a phenomenological philosopher (see Nonaka & Yamaguchi, 2019; Tsuyuki & Yamaguchi, 2020).

568   Genki Uemura understood as a retreat of the Neo-​Kantian approach and the rise of Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology as an alternative to Husserl’s epistemology-​oriented phenomenology. As I have pointed out in Section 28.5, postwar phenomenology in Japan did not always rest on such a simplistic opposition between the two philosophers. Some Japanese scholars interpreted Husserl’s phenomenology more continuously with Heideggerian and post-​Heideggerian phenomenology. Further, the reception of phenomenology in Japan has been accompanied by discussions about the application.

Acknowledgement I am grateful to Alessandro Salice for his helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. The author’s research is supported by the grant-​in-​aid for scientific research from the JSPS (KAKENHI, project no.: 20H01177).

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Pa rt I V

TO G E T H E R N E S S , M E M ORY, A N D I N ST RUM E N T S Algorithms, Gestures, and Marginality in Organizing

Chapter 29

Organ-​i zing Emb odied Practices of Common(-​i ng) and Enfleshed Con-​v ivialities Perspectives on the Tragicomedy of the Commons Wendelin Küpers

vivre convivial, buen vivir, кампанейскі, samvær sumak kawsay, suma qamaña,    gut zusammenleben, ‘living well together’

29.1  Introduction Following a (post-​)phenomenological orientation, this chapter explores possibilities and limitations for integrating embodied commons, extended to practices of ‘commoning’ and enfleshed con-​viviality in relation to organization. The need for such a reorientation of the commons as well as enacting the commoning and conviviality is related to the multiple crisis and its predicament that causing moves into precarious futures. Living on Earth means facing increasing and intensifying ecological threats, including species extinction, loss of biodiversity due to pervasive habitat destruction, rampant pollution, and global warming/​heating as well as various manifestations of individual and social suffering and inequalities. Correspondingly, we are facing a multifaceted

576   Wendelin Küpers eco-​socio-​cultural calamity partly caused by the impacts of irresponsible and unsustainable actions in relation to contemporary socio-​political, societal, economic, organizational, and managerial practices. Globalized economic systems, but also local and regional practices, with their life-​ threatening dysfunctionalities and failures or lack of responsibilities, are among the many manifestations of unwise practices and non-​integral ways of living in the so-​called Anthropocene (Küpers, 2020). In this age certain practices of specific anthropos are devastating the Earth at an ever-​increasing pace, degrading of arable land, water, and air by emissions that cause the climate and ecologies to lurch out of control and affecting all. The deepening of the crisis with far-​reaching challenges, implications, and detrimental effects on the natural and social ecologies are calling for an envisioning of (re)embodied, alternative forms of practice. Correspondingly there exists a reclaiming interest in studying the the commons and ‘commoning’ and new ways of living together in theory and practice. Considering how organizing matters for ecological and societal grand challenges (Gümüsay et al., 2022) and with regard to current conflicts between unethically practicing corporations and civil society scandalizing them, have led to greater demands for scrutinizing corporate behaviour critically and in a processual way (Scherer & Palazoo, 2011). Considering the powerful, global, and ‘glocal’ (global and local) roles and impacts of organizations as intermediary agents or agencies that make decisions and operate collectively with significant impacts on society and ecologies, the problematic status of corporate social (ir)responsibility and sustainability have been critically discussed (Barth & Wolff, 2009; Küpers, 2012). What becomes evident is that a further development of CSR and ethics requires considering the broader cultural and overarching institutional contexts (Matten & Moon, 2008) and seeing the business-​society interface beyond the functionalist trap (Gond & Matten, 2007). The given situation of an encroaching dominance of neo-​liberalism (Küpers, 2019b) calls even more for a radical rethinking and reimagining not just of the status of common practices (Baden & Higgs, 2015). Moreover, there have been voices reclaiming or reestablishing ‘the commons’ for the common good (Gardner, 2013; Menzies, 2014), respectively arguing for new ways of ‘commoning’. Responding to the given challenges and calls for reclamation, the following suggests a ‘return forward’ to an embodied common and a conviviality of enfleshed beings in common and its integrative role for a more responsible, wiser, and more sustainable organ-​izing and living. For this forwarding turning phenomenological and post-​phenomenological perspectives offers specific contributions. The ‘enfleshedness’ of a commons-​oriented viviality and its interconnection with embodied practices of commoning will be qualified using Merleau-​Ponty’s (1995, 2003, 2012) advanced post-​phenomenology and ontology of flesh as polyvalent, variegated, open-​ended concept and his metaphor of flesh as part of what he calls ‘inter-​being’ (2003: 208). Highlighting the intertwining and reversibility of pre-​personal, personal, inter-​, and transpersonal dimensions, Merleau-​Ponty’s ontology of flesh as common carnality allows us a more relational, participatory, and integral understanding of embodied organizing (Küpers, 2015) of the commons and convivialities, and thereby to a more

Perspectives on Tragicomedy of Commons    577 sustainable development of them. These qualities and contributions are possible as flesh is interpreted processually as an event that interrelates natural and cultural, physical (material) and mental (immaterial) as well as so called ‘non/​other-​human’ and human beings. All of them are seen as an interconnected nexus in which all dimensions are part of a matrix-​like continuum as co-​belonging and co-​creating. From this perspective, different enfleshed elements that are relevant for living and organizing ‘commoningly’, sustainably and convivially, are all mutually affecting and crossing into one another. Even more, they can be interpreted as ongoing movements and interrelationship, of convergent sameness of joint identity and diverging difference and alterity. Furthermore, understanding flesh as the original intertwining of perceiver/​perceiving and perceived, sensing and being sensible via an interinvolving reciprocity and kinship allows a critique of alienating, unsustainable practices that are often based on anthropocentrism and irresponsible, non-​integrative and excluding orientation. Unsustainable practices can thereby be understood as being less-​than-​fully-​adequately participating in and lacking an openness to engagement with a ‘more-​than-​human’ ‘fleshly’ world (Hailwood, 2014). Moreover, in turn, flesh can serve developing and enacting more sustainable practices in organizations in relation to stakeholders, society and ecologies of life. Developing and enacting embodied, ways of practicing and enfleshed common-​viviality in and beyond organizational life-​worlds carries potential not only for utopian movements (Johnson, 2003). Rather, it can also make it possible to understand, mediate and realize the incarnation and unfoldment of ‘alter-​native’, that is, ‘other-​birthly’ approaches of commoning and conviviality. Accordingly, conviviality-​oriented practices are not only a collection of purposeful activities of self-​contained individual actors and material things. Rather, as embodied and relational forms of doing and undergoing, thus being both active and passive processes, they are pre-​personal, (inter)personal and transpersonal. As such, these practices are individual, (inter)subjective and systemic events of a dynamic, emergent ‘be(com)ing’, thus revealing and meaning-​providing transformative events. Embodied practitioners, their own practices, and the practicing of others as well as the enfleshed co(mmon)viviality, integrating all of them together, are all inseparable and mutually implicated in organ-​ising and organ-​izations. Therefore, what organizational and commoning practices are, can be understood only by pointing to the tendencies, doings, undergoings and be(com)ings of interrelated practicing among interacting practitioners and specifics of their situated conditions and dynamic involvements. The outbreak, spread, and impact of the Covid-​19 outbreak and other disasters show that during uncertain times of crisis, what we called for and lacked is a sense of community and new forms of social integration. But those approaches of the commons provide such forms of coming together and acting. Facing the acute Covid-​19 situation, we realize how important it will be to see vaccines and other health infrastructures as global health commons that need to be made available to all. This calls for a reshaping of the economic, medical, and other research and practices, with political implications to meet the need for an embodied, critical understanding of the commons and commoning as well as enfleshed con-​vivialities.

578   Wendelin Küpers For developing such an understanding and in terms of structure, the chapter will start by defining the commons and commoning and then outline the need for a critical understanding of an embodied commons and conviviality, respectively ‘co(mmon) viviality’. Afterwards, I will discuss embodied practices of the commons in relation to a commonviviality-​oriented approach. In order to elucidate these dimensions, Merleau-​ Ponty’s phenomenology of the body and perception and his ontology of ‘flesh’ will be introduced as offering an elemental ‘carnality’ and formative reversible and chiasmic medium. To complement this and offer some discussion of some of the implications, the subsection will conclude with some perspectives on the tragicomedy of the commons.

29.2  The Commons and Commoning Conventionally, the so called ‘commons’ have been defined as natural and cultural resources that are accessible to and shared by all members of a society. These resources include soil, air/​atmosphere, water/​fisheries, forest/​wildlife, and a habitable Earth/​ climate, but also sites of heritage, arts (design, literature, music, film, video, television, radio) as well as digital commons, like information, knowledge, software, and platforming with its possibilities and problems,1 thus covering natural and cultural domains. The term commons as it is used in this chapter means ‘a complex word with a wide range of active meanings, involving ideas and values, with which we attempt to understand, represent and influence the practices and relationships central to contemporary culture and society’ (McCarthy, 2009: 498). We will explore this term in relation to various historical developments, from investigating the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968) with its conflicts, overuse, and free-​riding, causing pollution, deterioration, and destruction to forms of governing the commons (Ostrom, 2015). These forms of governance are connected to reciprocity in

1 

One of the possibilities is to develop areas of the internet that are neither commodities nor built by the market but offer different ways of production, including ‘non-​market production’, ‘social production’, and ‘commons-​based peer production’. Generating a ‘Wealth of Networks’ by economically productive commoners who provide free labour (Benkler, 2006). However, the technologically mediated practice of digital commons has been critised as an illusion or myth that foster non-​emancipatory practices and disillusioned or even cynic commoners (Ossewaar de & Reijers, 2017; Ossewaar de, 2019) and has its own tragedy (Greco & Floridi, 2004) and various further problems. For example, instead of a digital commons, phenomena, like Googlization and Uberization have transformed the Internet into a set of digital enclosures (Andrejevic, 2007). Ambivalently the digital transformation has both ethos-​ reversing and ethos-​renewing dimensions (Hensmans, 2021). For instance the “economizing” effect of Internet platforms demonstrates the instrumentalizing of the public good for profit-​making purposes (Ossewaarde, 2019) or to reproduce historical, ethnic, and cultural biases (Trittin-​Ulbrich et al., 2021), all calling for specific ethics of the digital commons (Fuchs, 2020).

Perspectives on Tragicomedy of Commons    579 presence of specific requisites, institutional arrangements, and design principles2 that are often more efficient than state or market, and then to the comedy of the commons (McCay, 1995; Rose, 1986). Based on all these interpretations the chapter will try to demonstrate how important it will be to move beyond tragedy and comedy towards a tragicomedy of the commons in the Anthropocene. Much of the so-​called common sense of the commons is a resource-​based and human-​centred sense. However, ‘to speak of the commons as if it were a natural resource is misleading at best and dangerous at worst—​the commons is an activity and, if anything, it expresses relationships in society that are inseparable from relations to nature’ (Linebaugh, 2008: 279). Increasingly, commons are understood not just as resource systems that need to be sustained, but as possible sources of other forms of production or creation, both of shared goods and social arrangements and of live forms deemed worthwhile (Peredo et al. 2018, 2020: 663). Recognizing that an ‘understanding’ of commons as a common-​property resource is limited, calls have been raised for ‘moving beyond the goods-​based definition’ (Euler, 2018). For developing a post-​dichotomist understanding that is also aimed at overcoming dichotomies of state/​market or public/​ private, it would be important to understand that commons are not ‘goods’. Accordingly, what commons are cannot be reduced to a question of ownership, but expresses a qualitative ecological relationship and refers to a shared responsibility. We do not ‘have’ commons, but are ‘common’ and do the ‘commoning’. ‘Common ings’ refers to practices in common. In this vein, Meretz (2012: 28) argues that commons are not merely ‘goods’, but a social practice that generates uses and preserves common resources and products. Hence, as commons are not things in the sense of commodities, but eco-​social ways of practicing and living together and one in the other it is more a process: commoning. Thus, the commons ‘is less a noun than a verb, because it is primarily about the social practices of commoning—​acts of mutual support, conflict, negotiation, communication and experimentation that are needed to create systems to manage shared resources’ (Bollier, 2015: 2). In addition, beyond organizing ownership and usage of resources, commoning is a process that promotes rules, norms, cultures, ethics, and the legal mechanisms that enable commoners to commonly co-create, re-​produce, govern, redistribute, and share what they do in common and how. Accordingly, commoning is the practice of doing something in common (Bollier & Helfrich, 2015; Federici, 2018). This

2 The ‘design principles’ (which do not in any case constitute a ‘model’ and which are not prescriptive, but represent only those items most frequently found by Elinor Ostrom, 2005, 2015, in cases of successful community management of common goods) are respectively: (1) the setting of clearly defined boundaries within which a common good and the group of its users can be circumscribed; (2) the adaptability of the rules of use of the commons, stipulated at community level, to local needs and local conditions; (3) the participation of the individuals on which the rules fall as to their possible modification; (4) the respect by the external authorities of the right of community members to design the rules governing the commons; (5) the creation of a system of monitoring the behaviour of users of the commons; (6) the availability of a graduated system of sanctions; (7) the availability of inexpensive mechanisms for conflict resolution; (8) the assembly of all activities of governance of common goods in a single institutional architecture with multiple, but coordinated levels of activities.

580   Wendelin Küpers common practice refers in particular to the creation of use value for a plurality, which becomes a community, ‘claiming and sustaining the ownership of the common good’ through the creation of relational values (De Angelis, 2017: 30). Like solidarity, which is also a verb commoning entails, an interpretation of being, an inventive practice that can shape unexplored ways of relating and expand the boundaries of a community within which its members stand and move, including imagining new ways of negotiating distance and proximity. As part of a social commons ethos (Meyer & Hudon, 2019) and praxis of inaugural sharing, a meshing of being with a plurality of singularities (Nancy, 2000) via a commoning of the political a non-​totalizing politics should only enable an indefinite multiplicity of creative activities in common, without subsuming their diversity in an all-​encompassing figure or an pre-​defined, overarching end (Nancy, 2010). In the community of ‘being-​in-​common’ subjects as self-​being ‘with-​the’ can open themselves to the otherness also in its being. Furthermore, what is needed are ‘inessential commonalities’, in which differences can be acted on in concert and in solidarity without a fusing together (Agamben, 1993: 86–​ 7). These commonalities are forming a community constituted by reciprocal obligation, gift, and care in a non-​invasive way (Esposito, 2013).3 A critical commoning of the political and, as a supplement, politicizing of the common can lead to a more interlateral and horizontalist ‘common’ politics (Kioupkiolis, 2018). Commoning the political, for Kioupkiolis means to ‘reconsider politics in light of a fundamental sense of co-​existence which clears the ground for social openness, solidarity, plurality and autonomy’ (p. 284), while relating concrete political logics to actual political practices. Commoning practices are experimental, joint action to co-​create solutions, common products, and services, including ‘a cooperating approach to meet shared goals’ for long-​term sustainability (Bollier & Helfrich, 2015: 1). Accordingly, commons organizing can be defined ‘as the processes by which communities of people work in common, including experimenting with new organizational designs that promote common goods production, distribution, governance and ownership in the pursuit of the common good’ (Albareda et al., 2020: 728).

3 As community, communitas (communitas: cum +​munus) carries ‘munus’, that is reciprocal obligation and gift and care in a non-​invasive way (Esposito, 2013: 14, 18, 25–​6, 48–​9, 2010: 2–​6, 97). It destabilizes thus the boundaries of the person, exposing them to contagion by others. This exposure engenders risks and fears, and it thus stimulates a counterprocesses of immunization. ‘Whereas communitas opens, exposes, and turns individuals inside out, freeing them to their exteriority, immunitas returns individuals to themselves, encloses them once again in their own skin’ (Esposito, 2013: 49). Through immunity, individual or collective entities close in upon themselves and seek to relieve themselves of obligations towards others, conserving their ‘essence’ as owners of their own selves (Esposito, 2013: 38–​43, 48–​9, 2010: 13, 2011: 2–​5, 44, 154–​5). Immunization in its diverse manifestations defines the historical moment we live (Esposito, 2013: 58). The logic of immunity fuels political fundamentalism, nationalism, racism, and fascism.

Perspectives on Tragicomedy of Commons    581 Furthermore, ‘commons create the conditions for the long-​term resilience of community self-​organization while transforming the all-​encompassing systems: the capital, state, commons and ecological systems’ (Albareda et al., 2020: 731). Moreover, by integrating interrelational perspectives, commons represent a transformative vision (Bollier & Helfrich, 2012; Bollier, 2015) and provide support for ‘proto-​transformative’ movements. The commons movements have the potential to make an important contribution to the achievement of commons-​based social transformation by ecologically reconstructing local communities, expanding users’ participation, and realizing self-​governing norms, for example the revitalizing of villages through ecotourism (Young, 2018). ‘Commonism’ is an organizing civilizational project that can help create common platforms for collaborative learning across post-​capital projects, critical self-​reflection on endogenous limitations through interaction with contrasting or oppositional perspectives, and finally for transcending their internal limitations and external structural impediments through synergistic projects. This means that the primary goal of a commonist project is to help transformative initiatives to overcome a fear of descending to the depths of multilayered collective beings in order to explore the contradictions that prevent them achieving inner harmony and outward cooperativeness (Hosseini, 2021) while cultivating ‘well-​living’ (Hosseini, 2018).

29.3  Human and ‘More-​than-​Human’, Not In ‘Paradise Lost/​R efound’, in the Anthropocene Who has something in common and for what, was and is related to human interests and benefits that become problematic when taking precedence over non-​or more-​ than-​human beings thus manifesting a human chauvinism and speciesism. Thus, the conventional common sense of the common(s) needs to be problematized as enclosed in too narrow a set of problematic assumptions and limited human(ist)-​centred aggregation(al) scope as well as entrapped in a private/​public, property/​steward market/​ state, and resource-​bound frame. Furthermore, attempts to return and revive the common sense are in danger of falling into a ‘proto-​romantic-​regressive mode’ or a reified interpretation of the ‘Paradise lost/​refound’ orientation that merely continue confirms a need to move on, progressively. The idea of recreating a lost paradise implies conceptualizing the commons as representing a state of equilibrium, with commoners serving as defending guardians of the past and making commoning a practice in producing this. However, the underlying understanding of an equilibrated commons and a linear, or dialectic, vision of progress

582   Wendelin Küpers which seems restrictive and static, and does not allow for forms of ‘comminzings’ (Holloway, 2014: 220). Accordingly, what is needed is an overcoming of the dichotomist, binary positioning such as inside-​outside, activity-​passivity, positivity-​negativity, resistance-​submission, production-​reproduction, etc. This overcoming is important if we are to develop proto-​ integral, symbiotic, meta-​commonal, boundary-​commoning, and liminal perspectives (e.g. Mattei & Mancall, 2019; Varvarousis, 2020) and a more emergentist and activity-​ oriented approach (e.g. Linebaugh, 2008; Dardot & Laval, 2019). One way of reinterpreting the commons is seeing it as something embodied and (as discussed later) as a ‘conviviality’ respectively enfleshed’ co(mmon)viviality. Commoning is constitutively related to living vulnerable bodies and an embodiment leading to an engagement in relational and reciprocal interactions for the eco-​social organizing in, of, and for the common(s) (Mandalaki & Fotaki, 2020). Furthermore, it is calling for further extending and opening to the eco-​collective and its posthuman qualification as an enfleshed commonviviality. Such understanding of embodied commoning implies a corporeal recognition of the vulnerabilities of ‘actors’: ‘we cannot understand how commoning initiatives work without examining how their participants interact and relate to each other through their living bodies’ (Mandalaki & Fotaki, 2020). Besides the drives and an ethical awareness of shared human needs, this also entails an engagement in relational and reciprocal interactions for a social and ecological organizing in, of, and for the common(s), such as: • Organizing in common i.e. users’ responsibilities for a collective, equal allocation of common resources; • Organizing for the common i.e. shared consumption and use of the commons (resources); and • Organizing of the common, i.e. how the commons are constantly reproduced through collective regenerative use and reciprocal exchanges.

29.4  Embodied Practice and Enfleshed Commonviviality Following a relational process perspective, Merleau-​ Ponty’s post-​ phenomenology interprets commoning as a form of prActicing an event in and through organizations as resonant ‘inter-​practices’ (Küpers, 2009), themselves part of an enfleshed praxis and emerging ‘inter-​ being’ (Merleau-​ Ponty, 2003: 208). Post-​ phenomenologically, this interpracticing is always co-​constituted and continuously influenced by embodied pre-​ subjective and pre-​objective capacities of experiential processes within what Merleau-​ Ponty calls chair (‘flesh’; Merleau-​Ponty, 1995: 131). Moving from his phenomenology of perception based on a subjective consciousness to an ontology of flesh, for him this elemental, mediating medium refers to an

Perspectives on Tragicomedy of Commons    583 incorporated intertwining and a reversibility of the pre-​and non-​personal with personal and interpersonal dimensions. Related to a philosophy of the commons, serving as a common connective tissue, this flesh ‘enables’ phenomena to appear in the first place and provides a meaning woven through all levels of experience, making possible all particular horizons. The ontological concept and metaphor of flesh expresses and allows associations to the sensible, bodily commonality of beings and to the generative capacity of being as becoming. As a dynamic medium, this flesh interrelates the sentient and sensible body through which the inside and outside, passivity and activity are enmeshed, while ‘permeating all interrelated, interwoven things’ (Cataldi, 1993: 60).

29.5  Flesh as Element and Formative Medium Not being localizable, factual, or of material substance, a collection of facts, or simply a mental representation, the texture of flesh is more a ‘concrete emblem of a general manner of being’ (Merleau-​Ponty, 1995: 147). In its ‘elemental’ sense, flesh can be conceived of as a surface of sensibility, a skin or fabric into which ‘en-​fleshed’ sensitivities—​the sight of our eyes, the sound in our ears, the scent in our nose, the depth of taste on and the languages of our tongues, the touch on our skins—​are indivisibly interwoven or enmeshed. And there is a coherence of these particular fleshly beings with the general flesh of the sensible world. As body and world are inscribed in one another, the ‘individual’ flesh and that of the world are intertwined. This ‘flesh’ refers to both a particular, sensible, and bodily being and a more general elemental commonality that all entities and the world share, a generative capacity of a difference-​enabling being-​as-​becoming. With its intertwining of pre-​personal, personal, inter-​, and transpersonal dimensions, Merleau-​Ponty’s ontology of flesh also contributes to a profound and relational understanding of sustainable be(com)ing. Based on a profound criticism of dualistic separations and by developing a post-​ dualistic orientation or oppositional bifurcations including of subject-​object (Merleau-​ Ponty, 1995: 250), the formative concept of ‘flesh’ mediates the rehabilitation of a pre-​reflective present or ‘tissue’ that underlies all subject-​object relations, all explicit differentiations, and otherness as well as carnal emergentism as, part of an extended approach towards sustainability. In particular, we can sense and make sense, hear and be heard, speak and be spoken to sustainably, as well as having an affective and/​or imaginative relationship to sustainable phenomena, because we share the same common condition that is the same fleshly reality. Flesh and objects share thickness, worldly depth, weight, and surface; we come together in sensual contact, with firm resistance and mutual influence, as we are—​in these and other forms—​co-​habitants of the same world. This co-​relating involve a sense of empathy and even compassion; as an example, to feel

584   Wendelin Küpers pain entails a feeling of how others feel pain, and to be affected by ‘unsustainabilty’ in relation to others who are suffering from it, because we are all enveloped in such flesh (Merleau-​Ponty, 1995: 234). Moreover, for Merleau-​Ponty, the sensible world of the flesh is the sustaining, nourishing, and mediating ‘ground-​work’ not only for affective and empathic relationships, but also for thinking, abstraction, and language or other forms of expressions. Such a carnal ensemble of selves, creatures, and sensible things is central to what Merleau-​Ponty means when he speaks of the flesh of the world as being that of a shared corporeality. Furthermore, flesh is processed through a dynamic reversibility and sensible-​sentient chiasm just as are the ‘interinvolvements’ that are part of a transformational becoming, relevant for an integral understanding and organizing of embodied commoning and enfleshed commonviviality in relation to the organization. Critically, considering asymmetries, non-​reciprocities, and irreversibilities, as well as extended possibilities for a corporeal plasticity (Sparrow, 2015), the ‘co-​fleshing’ with others and the ‘fleshing-​ of-​the-​world’ imply radically heterogeneous cohesions of different senses, corporeal operations, and carnal densities that also represent a fissured, non-​continuous, not overlapping, and non-​harmonious divergence. In the ‘inter-​world’ of diverging flesh, sparks of sensing/​sensible affection are lit and the fire starts to burn (Merleau-​Ponty, 1964: 163, 168). Once ignited, any amplifying tensions, resonances, metamorphoses, and ambiguities emerge. Even beyond ‘local’ organizational bodies, the ‘interbe(com)ing’ of flesh rehabilitates and mediates planetary relationships that are sensing and making sense as part of entwined ‘Earth-​bodies’ (Mazis, 2002). With Brook (2005), the notions and interpretation of ‘flesh’ and ‘Earth’, in the ontology of Merleau-​Ponty, can help in the transformation of more than just our environmental thinking. In addition to dissolving the residual division in our thinking of the relationship between subject and object, it also offers possibilities for reconfiguring the relationship between embodied beings and sustainable forms of living. Such reconfiguring implies rearranging and reorganizing how enfleshed beings relate to the constitutive flesh they are part of. Complementing the acknowledgement of our own ‘thingness’, our own taking part in the flesh of the world, flesh articulates our style of engagement. It shows our constitutive involvement in the world that is, and when working with material substance, for us to engage with it in contemplative wonder and in sensitive experimental investigations. A flesh account suggests a view of perceptual adequacy in terms of retaining a primordial awareness of our actual situation of inherence (primordial situatedness) within a wider, ‘more-​than-​human’ world. This is because flesh is the primordial intertwining of perceiver and perceived, a relationship involving kinship and reciprocity. But this relationship, especially in the context of (un)sustainabilty, appears to be an alienated one. If ‘nature’ entwined with culture is understood essentially as the ‘fleshly’ intertwined with the ‘perceptual world’, then our estrangement from it is a manifestation of a disconnection (Ives et al., 2018) and an ‘inadequate participation’ praxis

Perspectives on Tragicomedy of Commons    585 within it. This detached connection concerns ‘primordial’ perceptual relations due to a domineering instrumentalizing approach towards ‘nature’ (Hailwood, 2014). A modernistic, singular, compartmentalized appropriation of ‘nature’ as a resource-​ providing system is part of an attitude that is continuously working to separate itself and humans from the biophysical environment in favour of a conditional, instrumental link to an economic imperative, rejecting a relational approach and the understanding of ourselves as part of an enfleshed nature, as developed by Merleau-​Ponty (2003; Faugstad, 2010). In turn, for Hailwood, an ‘adequate participation’ ‘is a praxis of relative openness to the kinship and reciprocity of the “more-​than-​human” flesh and so relatively “undistorted” by egoism, instrumentalism, obsession with the virtual and abstract and by misrecognition of the more than human’ (2014: 78). Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophy of non-​dual and non-​anthropocentric flesh as elemental, reversible chiasmic ‘Ineinander’ calls for an inclusive understanding of nature-​and-​ culture that accommodates both human and ‘other-​than-​human’ components. This then could lead to an inclusivity of a ‘natureculture’ (Haraway, 2003) that would avoid the dualistic split of biocentrism vs. anthropocentrism or ego-​vs. eco-​centrism. Accordingly, the concept of a flesh-​ mediated ‘interpractice’ of commoning and enfleshed praxis helps to reveal and interpret the relationships in and beyond organizations among beings, experiencing (i.e. erleben), feeling, knowing, doing, structuring, and effectuating, in and through action, both individually and collectively and ecologically, as they are implicated in everyday organizational life, with its changes and embedded transformations. Accordingly, Merleau-​Ponty’s concept of flesh represents an interrogative process of endless creative differentiation that, in encountering and exchanging with alterities, generates relational excess and finds richness and depth in the fullness of the present (McCann, 2011: 506) or new compresence the quality or state of being present together. For organizing the commoning sustainably, Merleau-​ Ponty’s concept of flesh represents a generative capacity and generous source (Diprose, 2002) of giving and being given, and the primordial participation of all beings. As such, it can enact a corporeal generosity of embodied mutual recognition of ‘sameness’ and difference of the other within organizational life-​worlds (Hancock, 2008) and for a politics of difference and of resistance against unsustainable practices as well as for dealing with ambiguities, conflicts, paradoxes, and dilemmas.

29.6  Embodied Interpractices and Enfleshed Commonviviality What makes this account of embodied ‘interpractices’ and the enfleshed praxis of commonviviality significant for accomplishing sustainable forms of commoning and

586   Wendelin Küpers convivial living is that it allows for an understanding and an enacting of behaviours integral to affective, cognitive, and actionable relationships with Others (including non-​ or other-​than-​human ones) as part of a ‘be(com)ing-​in-​and-​towards-​the-​world’, rather than those where we see ourselves as separate physical and mental qualities that bear no relation to those Others. This perspective thereby recognizes and highlights the fact that organizations and their members or stakeholders, as well as economies, societies, and the planet, are all part of a living nexus of multiple enfleshed interconnections. Merleau-​Ponty’s concept of flesh offers possibilities for regained a view of our sensibilities as reversible capacities to feel and be felt; that is, to sense and make sense even of the nonsense of unsustainable and sustainable phenomena by members of an organization and its stakeholders. Accordingly, human involvement with the biosphere, as representing a ‘more-​ than-​human’ fleshed sphere, in more sustainable ways is not simply a mental one, but an engagement of body-​in-​mind and mind-​in-​body. Thus, ‘it is not enough to know sustainability, we have to literally be able to feel it’ (Carolan, 2014: 317) and affectively dwelling in the ‘flesh-​sphere’, bodily and resiliently, as part of an ongoing interactivity of mind, body, and environment through time (Cooke et al., 2016). The relational understanding of flesh in sensu Merleau-​Ponty can be connected to issues of uncommon unsustainability and convivial sustainability on different levels, affectively and imaginatively. The former is related to experiences of being ‘en-​ fleshedly’ affected by non-​sustainable realities and problems, caused by anthrogenetic, rational, logos-​driven, instrumental regimes and corresponding economic modes of appropriating exploration and of inappropriate exploitation. In turn, the ‘en-​fleshed’ affects can serve to enact a passion for sustainability and engaged sustainable practices, including education (Shrivastava, 2010). The other level or modus of linking the concept of flesh to sustainability refers to the potential of ‘en-​fleshed’ imagination for co-​constituting, triggering and mediating, and ‘instituting’, orientations and movements towards more sustainable, convivial, and wiser ways of living in and through organizations. The role of ‘enfleshed affects or inter-​affection’ (Küpers, 2014) and ‘caring imagination’ (Hamington, 2008), ‘ecological imaginaries (Perey, 2016), and imaginary worlds of sustainability (Bendor et al., 2017) supports development of a commoning-​oriented and convivial sustainability stance based on or mediated by the concept of flesh. Affection and imagination in flesh, can not only facilitate an integrative re-​membering and rediscovery of an elemental philosophy, but also that of embodied ‘planetary senses’ and their role in a revived dancing of entwined ‘Earth-​bodies’ (Mazis, 2002); a dance that is expressing a poetic interplay between perception and imagination, and between silence and solidarity of bodied and embodying being that are spiralling and un-​folding in ‘human-​non-​human matrix’ (Mazis, 2016). Here affective and imaginative Earth creatures (Earthlings) in flesh are dancing convivially with fluxes of matter and mind, body and soul, nature and culture, opening up specific implications.

Perspectives on Tragicomedy of Commons    587

29.7  Implications 29.7.1 Practical Implications An embodied interpractice and enfleshed orientation can raise various practical, political, as well as theoretical and methodological implications. One form in which embodied organizational interpractices are organized, experienced, processed, and ‘effective’ includes those which involve ‘bodies at work’ (Wolkowitz, 2006: 183) in relation to commoning. These practices involve working bodies or bodily organizing work that are effected in particular on other bodies and modes of somatic work as well as affective, emotional, and aesthetic labour involving engagements on appearances of movements, placings, timings, and rhythms, caring but also disciplined performances, tensions, stresses, fatigues, and sufferings (Küpers, 2015). With its experiential and dynamic status, the described forms and transformational qualities of affect and senses, forms of embodied interpractices do defy control and elude any straight way of ‘manageability’. Because they do not exist as definite, stable, fixed entities or objects, they cannot be simply organized, managed, or manipulated. The reductionism of a short-​sighted ‘practicalism’ as technocratic or managerial ideology, with its outcome fixation and utilitarian course, collapses practical instrumentalism with practicality. As such, it loses access to emergent, indeterminable qualities and possible meanings of unfolding flesh. Moreover, the preponderance of instrumentalist preoccupations can lead to a preconception of all phenomena as intrinsically meaningless resources, which impoverishes and undermines the creative engagement and the potential for ethical and aesthetic approaches necessary to sustainability. In the same way, and in order to counter the danger of falling into a ‘practicalist over-​doing’, it will be important to explore the experiences and practices of ‘Doing Nothing’, understood as infraordinary ‘non-​events’ (Ehn & Löfgren, 2010: 5). These often subversive, embodied events and acts may manifest in occurrences such as waiting or daydreaming, which are powerful undercurrents of the daily life of organizations. Instead of being designed directly, embodied and enfleshed practice can only be designed for, that is allowed and encouraged to unfold. Part of this challenge is to prepare and offer supportive conditions and relationships that engender targeted facilitations or circumstances on a situation-​specific basis by which embodied sustainable interpractices can flourish in everyday work-​life. Enfleshed practices of sustainable development can bring to the fore, for example, concrete forms of energy consumption, recycling, transport, and food practices in relation to natural and social ecology, in particular to environmental workplace behaviours. Such behaviours are realized by ‘green employers’ (with environmental identities)—​intrinsic motivations to protect the environment through work, consistent with private behaviours (Ciocirlan, 2017) and what are part of what has been overarchingly called workplace commons (Korczynski & Wittel, 2020).

588   Wendelin Küpers Resonating with an enfleshed understanding are life-​affirming, inclusive approaches towards biomimicry (Mathews, 2011) and the rise of the biophilic organization (Jones, 2016). Following an affective eco-​ phenomenological (Brown & Toadvine, 2003; Toadvine, 2009; Cataldi & Hamrick, 2007; Wood, 2019) and integral perspective on embodied responsibilities and practices within an enfleshed praxis of commonviviality can be qualified as proto-​ sustainable. This orientation is helpful for cultivating and enacting sustainable development in and through organizations as embodied realizations. Such embodied practices and enfleshed praxis of commonviviality can use ‘leverage points’ for reconnecting with nature for facilitating deep changes towards sustainability (Ives et al., 2018). In this context, Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophy contributes to and invites engagement in and enactment of an ‘enlivening’ that situates human beings in an entangled biopoetic web of dynamic, sensual, unfolding, and creative relationships as well as in the practice of ‘commoning’ (Weber, 2016). Enlivening enfleshment means to profoundly rethink our relationship between ourselves, the other, and ‘the world’, and to begin to overcome the dualistic alienation that prevents us from coming into more enlightened contact with ‘reality’ and moving towards being wholly integrated with(in) flesh. Practically speaking, these ideas of flesh can be fleshed out by concrete examples, like ‘Common(s)Labs’. A ‘Common(s)Lab’ is a social infrastructure for mutual care, built on relationships within urban spaces which are sustained through its collaborators and participants, voluntary soli-​donations, and occasional external funds for materials and project costs integrating embodied spatial and design practices of caring for and in the common (Moebus & Harrison, 2019, 2021). As part of a push towards cooperating on an ‘ecommony’ there exist many inspiring attempts and valuable experiments by all kinds of alternative-​seeking self-​organizing groups and autonomous networks for creating spaces (Baldauf et al., 2017) and (autonomist) practices of commoning (Ruivencamp & Hilton, 2017), using often uncommon knowledge (Tan, 2014). The social process of ‘becoming in common’ as an ‘instituting practice’ for the creation of common spaces is using tools of empowerment and self-​learning, teaching, acting, research, reclaiming alternative urban space, social media, urban farming [ . . . ] and the reclaiming of city centres threatened by aggressive real estate development plans. Additionally, they undertake daily activities, collaborating with temporary workers, the homeless and disenfranchised communities to create support structures for these groups. (Tan, 2014)

29.7.2 Political Implications Enfleshed enlivening and enacting interpractice commoning and convivial sustainability in relation to organizations (and beyond) can be envisaged as a political project.

Perspectives on Tragicomedy of Commons    589 As such, it is one that is concerned not solely with individual and communal agencies, but also with various structures and systems of organization in their political embedment. Accordingly, enfleshed practice often necessitates ethico-​political restructuring of contemporary organizational life to support employees and groups in engendering proper ways to negotiate and to respond to these pressures. Critically, a body-​integrating ethical approach calls for an analysing and recreating of ways in which politically bound, embodied practices in organizations and enfleshed praxis of commonviviality are exercised to achieve and maintain power or control. This means that certain forms of practicing need to be excluded or superimposed. Such a critical stance would speak to how specific embodied experiences, meanings, and practices are discriminated, marginalized, degraded, and ignored; or dominated, subordinated, and disciplined. Correspondingly, a critical approach towards a corporeal, enfleshed politics can be used for studying the ordering and normalizing of disciplinary techniques and processes for the forcing or imposing of practices. Furthermore, such an approach would explore how existing dynamics of power and distress increase insensitivity to the pain of others (van Kleef et al., 2008). Embodied practices and enfleshed praxis not only refer to purposive actions, but also to non-​purposive, arational, and especially silencing actions in organizational life. Thus, in relation to flesh, it is important to explore what is not practised or not said, including unrecorded actions, unseen actors, and omissions. Additionally, such a political stance would mean considering, for example in decision-​making, what may seem to be strategically unthinkable, supposedly un-​doable, or taboo, or perhaps simply excluded as possible practices. Following Rancière’s (2010) post-​foundational and post-​liberal democratic understanding of disruptive politics of dissensus, this includes a rearrangement of political order and different regimes of perceptual part-​taking. These regimes determine what can count as perception, experience, or sense, individually but also collectively. Reconfiguring these would modify a sensory framework that distinguishes differently the visible from the invisible, the sayable from the unsayable, the audible from the inaudible, the possible from the impossible with regards to practical and ethical issues. Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophy of flesh is not only applicable to all these sensual dimensions, but also to institutions and practices, from the body to language as well as from the arts of expression to the very essence of society and political world. Moreover, the ethico-​politics of resistance can be seen as representing a web of emancipatory practices operated pragmatically through localized and concrete ethical gestures and political activities. An affective, environmental politics of the flesh is an ecological one of everyday life as well as of corporeal poetics. We can only know nature as ‘bodies-​in-​the-​world’, as bodies doing nature, from somewhere, in a particular way. Thus the implications of a radical embodied and enfleshed politics must not end with a mere tidying up at the surface but reach to the very roots of how we live. Yet to reach those roots requires that we begin ‘digging’ somewhere (Carolan, 2009: 12), to experiment with alternatives to corporeal sensing and doing, with reembodied, more sensuously engaged forms of interactions and transactions. Correspondingly,

590   Wendelin Küpers alternative organizational forms (Cheney et al., 2014; Parker et al., 2014) and the imaginary and praxis of alternative economies are post-​capitalistic politics in the making (Zanoni et al., 2017), which also calls for a transformative post-​capitalist education (Hall, 2020). Specifically it calls for people to be brought back into a sensuous kinship with the natural world that involves seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, etc., into an interconnectivity and reciprocity, with subtle distinctions, instead of the existing isolation and immutability of fixed boundaries (p. 14). The interface of nature-​culture can be seen as a place where experiences, practices, policies, ideas, and knowledge can meet, to be negotiated, discussed, and resolved (Birkeland et al. 2018). However, in such approach we would need to consider the ambivalence, tensions, and problems involved in such undertaking so as to avoid falling into a regressive retro-​romantic orientation (Küpers, 2015: 86). While it is understandable for us to yearn for a return to a pre-​reflective unity for us as disembodied, alienated humans in late modernity, in what seems a fragmented, relativistic postmodernism consciousness, there is no nostalgic way back to a retro-​regressive coinciding with nature or to supposedly pre-​existing, given ‘Truths’. This is because the reversibility of being is always imminent and never realized, indeed, ‘the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realisation’ (Merleau-​Ponty, 1995: 147); relations to nature and to the body are always-​already culturally mediated, as much as culture is ‘natural’ and embodied as well as a politics after anti-​humanism (Coole, 2007). However, (post-​ )phenomenology offer some of the steps towards a critical posthuman orientation, including a post-​ Promethean anthro-​ politics (Howard & Küpers, 2021). A post-​Promethean cultivation of life and a post-​anthropocentric turn (Arias-​Maldonado, 2016) involve enlivening, sustainable cyclic successions towards an eco-​ or zoë-​cene, ’zoë’ standing for a holistic meaning of life, in its experienced and ecological sense, including the whole animated/​animating Earth. Such a move towards zoë integrates the proto-​wisdom of plants and animals in the sense of an eco-​sophy as an enacted ecological wisdom. Enacting such eco-​wisdom involves embracing a more prudent, non-​hubristic relationship of ‘inter-​corporeity’ with the biosphere and all animal life (Merleau-​Ponty 2003: 334–​5) thus a multinatural conviviality in and beyond the Anthropocene towards an ‘ecocene’ (Küpers, 2020).

29.7.3 Theoretical and Methodological Implications as well as for Phenomenology Regarding future research, the proposed approach provides the foundations for theory building and empirical research towards understanding the intricate nature of the processes and patterns of flesh and embodied interpractices in organ-​iing the commons. As reminders of the multidimensionality and complexity of flesh, and the intricacies of ‘living’ interpractices of commoning, an advanced or post-​phenomenological approach may serve as a helpful antidotes to reductionist methods.

Perspectives on Tragicomedy of Commons    591 In order to investigate flesh with its divergent reversibilities and its various bodies and embodiments, whether they be organic or biological, technological, virtual, or otherwise, in their corporeal situatedness a processual approach is required. Such an approach enacts the literal meaning of method as ‘following along a way’, i.e. ‘meta ton hodon’. By disclosing descriptions and interpretations of actual experiences and phenomena of flesh as they appear, organizational researchers could develop a much-​needed acausal, non-​ reductionistic, and non-​ reifying approach towards a post-​ Cartesian understanding of the underlying intertwining. In particular, longitudinal studies and multiple case studies as well as sensually oriented and art-​based methods would be suitable for a pheno-​pragmatic research practice (Küpers, 2009, 2015: 253). Such an approach ‘offer[s]‌ an alternative to managerial, instrumental, and technological ways of understanding knowledge, and they lead to more ethically-​and experientially-​sensitive epistemologies and ontologies of practice’ (Adams & van Manen, 2008: 615) and multilevel action-​ inquiries (Torbert et al., 2004). Researching and putting into practice an embodied, chiasmic, and enfleshed processual understanding opens up possibilities for a critique and a practical approach towards organizing as an interpracticing of sustainable development. On the one hand, such an approach would help us to critique disembodied and non-​creative orientations that neglect individual and collective bodies and embodiments or that merely view them as instrumentalized or objectified resources for utilitarian exploitative ‘practicalism’. On the other hand, focusing research on relational practices of commoning may contribute to the emergence and realization of alternative, ingenious forms of organizational practices for sustainability. Such enactment becomes even more relevant as these are placed in increasingly complex and often paradoxical or dilemmatic settings.

29.8  Conclusion The need for, the difficulties, and the challenges of integrating the commons, and developing forms of commoning and co(mmon)vivialities have been discussed, which call for a reconsideration of the status of institutions and institutionalization. One resource-​oriented response on a global level are international and institutionalized consultations (e.g. the United Nations Committee and Conventions) as well as laws (declarations, strategies, treaties, protocols, judicial decisions) and innovative regulations that have been developed, enforced, and practised as regimes for the global commons. For the latter, examples are obligations to, for instance, properly manage fish stocks and prevent their overexploitation through the setting of quotas for fisheries. There are various, sometimes-​path-​breaking innovations in regulation that have been practised, most notably moratoria for whaling or the imposition of a ban on whaling, but also penalties on the production and use of ozone-​depleting substances and the freezing of claims to sovereignty over Antarctica. Or specific certifications and limitations, for example related to tropical timber wood or the initiating and declaring

592   Wendelin Küpers of new principles such as common heritage and commons concern of humankind, for example with regard to biodiversity or climate systems. But as the commons are not merely resources that are owned or accessed by the collective, but also form the nexus of place, intricate social relations, and collectively defined norms and interests, what needs to be considered for an enfleshed perspective is how it is ‘socio-​ecological adhesive’, in relation to constituting communities, e.g. of commoning in the periphery, and how it is transformative (Sandström et al., 2017). Developing the alternative relations of commons, commoning, and commonviviality requires a situatedness and a moving between sedimented and new meanings, forms of practices that will thus need to be both instituted and instituting (Merleau-​Ponty, 2010). They are ‘instituted’ in the sense of being habituated by the past and dependent upon being exposed to an already meaningful world. At the same time, there exists the possibility for reinstituting that involves an initiation of the new, the opening of a future as an opening of the new within the existing, familiar institutional arrangements. While including elements of receptivity and indeterminacy, this would represent a divergence or differentiating interval in relation to a norm of sense or a splitting off from what is already, which characterizes this entangled ‘institution-​instituting’. Out of this circulating and dialectical relation between historical sedimentation and originating establishment an embodied agency can emerge that can move us on to new pathways of creative thinking, acting, and living that will break with determinism (Merleau-​Ponty, 2010: 11). Institutionalizing the commons is and will be one of the key modalities (and civilizational modes) for us to respond to current and future (systemic) crises of economy and society in the form of cooperation in the mutualization of what is shared in projects of commoning. To realize this undertaking, we will need transition pathways and narratives for the interrogation and negotiation of what a life membership in ‘eco-​culturalogical’ communities of kindred beings, including ‘other-​than-​human beings’, would mean. As long as we remain highly ‘anthrocentric’ and ‘anthroparchal’—​which is characterized by systematic forms of human domination, exploitation, and marginalization of others—​ flesh cannot unfold fully. Furthermore, such a human-​ centric approach endangers and indeed negates the diversity of flesh, especially concerning singularities of ‘other-​than-​human-​beings’. Dwelling in flesh requires a biocultural inclusivity that makes space on Earth for the ‘domiciling’ of ‘other-​kind’s, while we transition to a new eco-​cultural-​logical civilization. Such a transition would be informed by a recognition and affirmation that we are all at the same time fleshly immersed in circular ecological relationships, a deep, non-​ linear, poly-​causal interpenetration with a mutual implicatedness as well as ‘more-​than-​ humanize-​activities’. All these enfleshed, interdependent relations and processes are mediated by living bodily and in embodied dimensions. We live our bodies through the world, and we live the world through our bodies, while we are fundamentally connected to all Earth creatures through our shared carnality. Flesh is a kind of embodied force and a medium of endless creative differentiation, integration, and redifferentiation that finds richness and depth in the fullness of the

Perspectives on Tragicomedy of Commons    593 present (McCann, 2011: 506). Our bodies are not only what makes a ‘being-​enfleshed-​ in-​the-​world’ possible, enacting biosociality and ‘nature-​culture’, we carry it with and live through our bodies in flesh as potentialities (Merleau-​Ponty, 2012: 126), that is a potential of the not yet embodied. For Merleau-​Ponty, flesh ‘is [ . . . ] a pregnancy of possible “Weltmöglichkeit”, the possible world variants of this world, the world beneath the singular and the plural’ (1995: 250). With the notion of pregnancy and the ‘world-​flesh’ as ‘pregnant’ Merleau-​Ponty is referring to a reciprocal enshrouding, co-​implication, and unfolding as an imminent being (Merleau-​Ponty, 1995: 245). Such being is always (virtually) ready, but never fully deployed, thus it is a coming to be of that which is not yet present, but full of ambiguities. As we have seen, calling flesh pregnant and suggesting that the movement inherent between the sensation and the thing sensed is highly relevant for organization studies and practices that reflect and realize commoning and convivial sustainable developments. The ontological situation of an organization, its members, and its stakeholders and its embedding nexus is as an enfleshed ‘whole that does not reduce itself to the sum of its parts’ (Merleau-​Ponty, 1995: 149). Rather it is one in which the reversible, chiasmic relation of the perceiver and the perceived is a ‘pregnant whole’ or ‘Gestalt’. This metaphor and concept of world-​fleshly pregnancy as ‘Gestalt’, helps our understanding and realizing of ‘eco-​bio-​socio-​cultural’ being and becoming towards ‘birthing’ a more convivial sustainable practice of commoning and commonvivial praxis. The living interbetween of flesh has tremendous potential for alternative meanings and new ways to interrelate. Enacting this bodied, embodied interpracticing and enfleshed praxis of commonviviality in and beyond organizational life-​ worlds, carries potential for utopian movements towards different practices (Johnson, 2003) of commoning and commonvivialities, qualified as sustainable and practically wise (Küpers, 2019b). Thus, the embodied practices of commoning and enfleshed praxis of commonviviality mediate and realize incarnations and enacted unfoldings of ‘alter-​natives’ that is ‘other-​ birthly’ approaches and differently oriented economic, societal, socio-​cultural, thus political, and ethical ‘inter-​ests’ and interrelationships for a more sustainable world to be-​come. Embodied practices of commoning in flesh indicate and invite us to enter an in(ter-​) between space, opening up more sustainable forms and processes of organizing. They represent an innovative and intensified approach and medium whereby integrating attuning bodies, things, social, and relational dimensions in space and time also enhances entangled professional learning and partnership-​based practices. Such an orientation can help practitioners prepare and qualify themselves for the challenges they will have to face and deal with in work and life. In addition to practitioners in organizations, an enfleshed opening and enactment would contribute towards the creation of more sustainable presences in economies, societies, and the planet overall. It is hoped that the outlined propositions and discussions will support a transformative (re)creation of bodies and embodiment as part of a more comprehensive understanding and interpracticing, within and through flesh, for commoning and

594   Wendelin Küpers commonviviality of the sustainable development of organizations and civilizations. Through these processes, the unfoldment of a genuinely embodied practice of commoning and enfleshed praxis of conviviality towards a coevolving symbiogentic ‘Ecozoic Era’ (Swimme & Berry, 1992) can emerge.

29.8.1 The tragicomedy of the Commons Overall, this play or drama of the commons (Dietz et al., 2002) and commonings are neither a comedy (Rose, 1986; McCay, 1995) nor a tragedy (Hardin, 1968), although it has features of both, blending aspects of both tragic and comic forms. Just as a tragicomedy allows for works of literature or art to explore depths and paradoxes of human experience unavailable to strict comedies or tragedies, the drama of a tragicomic commons is revealing. Specifically, as part of the modernist turn, and questioning the convention of the theatre itself, this tragicomedy is a drama which is short, frail, explosive, and bewildering, balancing comic repetition against tragic downfall while demonstrating the coexistence of amusement and pity, terror and laughter. The admixture of tragic and comic elements allows for a sudden switch from darkness to laughter, and vice versa, confronting those experiencing it with a world in which there appears to be little continuity in character or action as things and events unfold (Orr, 1991). Will the tragicomedy of the commons (Brigham, 2014) be a very serious play with a surprise happy ending—​not possible with a straightforward tragedy—​or a tragic play only interspersed with moments of humour simply to ease the overall mood of despair? Not considering enfleshed qualities as being integral to our existence may mean that humankind and our Anthropocene will end tragically, providing a story only of despair. Or is there still a chance for the tragedy to gain a happier/​comic twist . . .? Just playing cynically with the possibilities of entertaining a commons approach in non-​serious forms may be comic, but it does not transform. Instead there might still be a chance for a serious turn in this ‘play’ that does not simply fall prey to a nihilistic relativism and a kind of resigned futilism in relating to our possible futures. As life itself and the lives and futures of the commons and commoning contain or carry complex multitudes, persistent ambivalences, irreconcilable contradictions, and unsolvable dilemma, they are tragic and comic as well as simultaneously full of scarcity and fulfilling. In the material spirit of the tragicomedy of the commoning we are somewhat situated between and situated in a meta-​modern realization of a ‘co-​arising of hope and despair, credulity and incredulity, progress and peril, agency and apathy, life and death’ (Rowson, 2021). Such orientation activates a disposition of what could be called the post-​tragic (Perspectiva, 2020), which lies beyond the naïve optimism of the pre-​tragic and the debilitating despair of the tragic in relation to the commons. Such a post-​tragic sensibility and stance includes a recognition that any future ‘success’ of the communing depends on our also encountering the tragedy of our current failures, thus offering a

Perspectives on Tragicomedy of Commons    595 response to personal and societal hardship that may become critical as the interlocking crises of our times continue to bite. Tragicomically, commonings are called for to open up ‘creactive’ socio-​culural-​ politico-​economic processes, linking perception and imagination with, possibly vain, attempts at enactments towards developing and designing a global commons that will be in service to life. Calling for a settling into our deep interbeing, sensually and affectively, in the context of the Covid-​19 pandemic, Roy (2020) argues that such global commons would mean universal access to information, communication, and citizen currency flows, which would be integrated with interdependent channels of production, transportation, and distribution, respectively consumption around the world, for instance of food. This would not function for (capital based in-​)vested interests, but would instead serving on the basis of a deep interconnectedness of enfleshed convivialities. Such serving commoning would offer a post-​Pandoran hope for moving forwards more wisely (Küpers, 2019a), and this would be done with meaningful participation in and mindful processing of essential goods and services, surpluses, and a localized satisfaction of needs. All of these processes would contribute to a collaborative livability within ‘more-​ than-​ human-​ entanglements’ that would include a sustainably inhabitable, life-​ affirming collaboration between species. Being part of such commoning would allow for experiencing deeper sources of inter-connections and expanded, uplifting circles of trust and concern. Moreover, it would call for an ‘inter-​evolution’ and interspecies conviviality of all co-​creative partners in a move towards a planetary odyssey leading us towards a sustainable flourishing. Then, perhaps, a genuine ‘coming’ can happen, this being a movement whereby something would be in the process of occurring while also reaching its jouissance (excessive ‘pleasure’) and mediating jouir (‘enjoy’), as something that remains irreducible either to a fixed state or to a resource-​oriented acquisition, to an accomplishment or an appropriation or ​possession (Nancy & van Reeth, 2017). Just as with this jouissance of coming there is no formula to be followed, also in a relationship of commons and commoning as well as conviviality there are no accepted pre-​defined forms. Instead, organ-​izing embodied practices of common(-​ing) and enfleshed con-​ vivialities implies ongoing processes of unfolding, of trans-​formative, creative power, swinging in the rhythm of a coming-​and-​going . . .

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Chapter 30

It’s All M et h od Schmitz and Neo-​Phenomenology Lydia Jørgensen

30.1  Introduction Years back Sanders (1982) noted that phenomenology provides a new way of viewing organizational research. Phenomenology questions how we perceive organization and how we grasp what organization is or does. Most would agree that organization is more than a diagram uploaded on a webpage or its legal definition. Just consider how Google merges its employees and organization by framing the (self)-​perception of employees as Googler’s, Noogler’s (new employees), or Xoogler’s (former employees). Phenomenology allows us to question and study how everyday experiences, encounters, and practices take part in making organizational phenomena or how organization as a phenomenon appears as more than a simple representation. As Holt & Sandberg (2011) state, organization studies need phenomenology, while simultaneously having been significantly influenced by this philosophical tradition. Understanding organization and the world as more than blunt representations is a promise that phenomenology holds for organization studies by opening up new areas of inquiry (Holt & Sandberg, 2011: 239). However, this requires that phenomenology must not be mistaken as being subjective, but instead calls for acknowledging that phenomenology rejects the Cartesian split of subject-​object. Precisely by engaging with phenomenology as a non-​dualist approach, new areas of inquiry and new ways of investigating organizations are made possible. Acknowledging the intertwinement of subject and object, the human and the world, as key to phenomenology pinpoints how the idea of representation becomes problematic. As an example, the review article ‘The Concept of Atmosphere in Management and Organization Studies’ (Julmi, 2017) shows how the concept of atmosphere in organization studies has typically been treated as an object that can be instrumentalized although atmosphere par excellence constitutes an in-​ between, non-​ dualist phenomenon.

Schmitz and Neo-Phenomenology    603 Accordingly, empirical studies treating atmosphere as an object miss out on the central qualities and dynamics of the phenomenon. Additionally, as others have stressed, a notion like atmosphere has often not even been considered a legitimate subject for research due to its fluid quality (Böhme, 1995: 33). Yet, a growing interest in atmosphere as an organizational phenomenon (Borch, 2010; Michels, 2015; Beyes, 2016; Julmi, 2017; Michels & Steyaert, 2017; Jørgensen, 2020), as well as other ‘fluid’ phenomena like the ghostly (Pors, 2016) and the uncanny (Beyes & Steyaert, 2013) are emerging, hence the call for phenomenological thinking in organization studies, and, in particular, how studying phenomena is inherently tied to a (relational) ontological understanding. Following Heidegger, the fundamental link between phenomenology and ontology implies that phenomenology is also always about method (Gadamer, 1993; Heidegger, 1993; Giorgi, 2007: 65; Holt & Sandberg, 2011; Fernandez & Crowell, 2021). This means that how we understand organization and organizational phenomena is inherently linked to how we experience, approach, and account for organizational phenomena, but also what kind of phenomena becomes of interest. Accordingly, this chapter seeks to examine and explore how phenomenology seen as method is relevant to organizational inquiries and how it relates to onto-​epistemological views expressed in the phenomenological tradition. While phenomenology is about method, how to investigate phenomena and lived experiences still constitutes a major discussion in the field of phenomenology both philosophically and practically (see Lopez & Willis, 2004; Crowell, 2005; Giorgi, 2007; Finlay, 2009; Zahavi, 2012, 2021; Gill, 2014; Fernandez & Crowell, 2021). In fact, Fernandez & Crowell (2021) argue that literature on how to do phenomenology is scarce, while Gill (2014) points out that the full scope and value for organization researchers remains unrealized. Variations in the understanding of phenomenological method often echo key phenomenological discussions between Husserl and Heidegger. An overall distinction is generally made between Husserl’s descriptive and Heidegger’s interpretative phenomenological methodology (Lopez & Willis, 2004; Crowell, 2005; Giorgi, 2007; Gill, 2014). In brief, Husserl wanted to leave aside previous knowledge when describing a phenomenon by using bracketing (epoché) and reduction, while Heidegger argued for describing a phenomenon as an interpretative, hermeneutic endeavour due to his ontological claim of always already being involved in the world. Without going further into this philosophical debate, the methodological variation holds implications for how to do research in practice. For example, the researcher’s position alters as either (able to) bracket(ing) out previous knowledge or not. Further, the research focus would typically shift from the perception of a phenomenon to a more contextualized interpretation (see Lopez & Willis, 2004: 729). Sanders (1982) pioneered a phenomenological approach to organization by following Husserl’s descriptive approach. This chapter and its phenomenological trajectory, however, leans towards Heidegger and will further align with post-​phenomenological1 1  It should be noted that ‘post-​phenomenology’ in this chapter primarily refers to the term as used inside contemporary (non-​representational) human geography (see McCormack, 2017; Ash & Simpson, 2019) unless mentioned otherwise.

604   Lydia Jørgensen discussions (see Ash & Simpson, 2019). Specifically, the chapter engages with the philosophical arguments of neo-​phenomenological thinking developed by the German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz to explore the implications of phenomenology as method in organization studies. Embarking on this route not only opens up alternative ways of doing phenomenological research on/​in organization but also offers an argument for expanding the range of phenomena and themes of interest in organization studies. The chapter assumes that phenomenological method can take various forms, thereby reflecting Finlay’s argument that phenomenological method is considered sound if it draws on phenomenological philosophy or theory (2009: 9). Hermann Schmitz (see 1969, 2005, 2014b) situates himself within the phenomenological tradition by naming his philosophy neo-​ phenomenology (Neue Phänomenologie), while at the same time stressing a difference from Husserl and Heidegger. Although the self-​acclaimed newness may at times be overrated, Schmitz’s neo-​phenomenology is of interest in several ways. First, he proposes phenomenological revision as ‘neo’-​phenomenological’ method, thereby rethinking phenomenological methodology and phenomena that echoes current post-​phenomenological discussions. Second, Schmitz (2014a) specifically seeks to articulate fluid phenomena, like atmosphere, that may otherwise be overlooked in research inquiries, which poses interesting questions regarding the ontological foundation of method. Third, neo-​phenomenology reflects an embodied phenomenology with a strong emphasis on pre-​reflective, affective experiences as the grounds for knowing. This reflects knowledge as more than something retrieved cognitively, like riding a bike is based on embodied sensitivity and command. Accordingly, neo-​phenomenology raises onto-​epistemological questions on how we can know and create accounts of the world, which relates to ongoing conversations in areas like affect theory and non-​representational thinking (see Stewart, 2008a; Beyes & Steyaert, 2012; McCormack, 2017; Ash & Simpson, 2019; Gherardi, 2019). The chapter contributes to an unfolding of the potential variety and relevance of phenomenological method in organization studies. Given the emerging interest in organization studies towards fluid phenomena and affectivity, engaging with Schmitz’s neo-​phenomenology offers a pertinent contribution to key methodological discussions. Specifically, the chapter investigates the methodological implications of the neo-​ phenomenological approach and how they may suggest practical ways of doing organizational research. Schmitz’s neo-​phenomenology epitomizes how ontological thinking is inherent in his phenomenological method by presenting a methodological path that articulates an affective, relational configuration of knowledge (in organizations). Paraphrasing Gadamer, this means expanding (and challenging) our understanding of method to something more than creating knowledge by following strict procedures building on the principle of verification (Gadamer, 1993: 48). Consequently, this offers a foundation for discussing how to engage with ‘fluid’ phenomena and their ‘non-​ representational’ nature as well as expanding the range of phenomena to research in organization studies. Finally, by problematizing our understanding of method as more than formal procedures to represent the world, the chapter extends into epistemological discussions on how we can know and create accounts of fluid phenomena.

Schmitz and Neo-Phenomenology    605 The chapter is structured as follows: first, it introduces Hermann Schmitz’s neo-​ phenomenology and his felt body concept. Second, the chapter explores his suggestion for phenomenological revision as a new phenomenological method which is closely related to rethinking phenomena as proposition and the (poetic) explication of phenomena. Third, by using the notion of organizational atmosphere, the chapter discusses the ontological foundation of method and its implications. Finally, the chapter illustratively reflects upon how poetically explicating organizational atmospheres might provide an alternative way of researching organization and organizational phenomena beyond that of a dualist approach.

30.2  The Neo-​P henomenological Approach That phenomenology comes in different versions and (re)interpretations is clearly signalled when Hermann Schmitz named his phenomenological vision a new phenomenology (Neue Phänomenologie)2 wanting to reinvigorate Husserl’s and Heidegger’s approaches. Central to Schmitz is a rethinking of Husserl’s phenomenological principle of getting ‘to the thing’s themselves’ by expanding our understanding of phenomena. Concomitantly, Schmitz developed the notion of felt body (Leib) to acknowledge the immediate affective experience as key to engaging with and knowing about the world. While the concept of the felt body is key to understanding the neo-​phenomenological project, it is also considered one of Schmitz’s major contributions (Böhme, 1995: 28; Lagemann, 2015: 150; Gugutzer, 2017: 148). Further, neo-​phenomenology addresses new areas of research such as atmosphere, situations, and affect (Schmitz, 2014a and b, 1998), which are also emerging research themes in organization studies (see Borch, 2010; Beyes, 2016; Fotaki et al. , 2017; Julmi, 2017; Jørgensen & Holt, 2019; Gherardi, 2019). Although Schmitz’s approach is mainly engaged with the philosophical underpinnings, his neo-​phenomenological methodology outlines alternative avenues for discussing practical research methods by engaging with embodied and affective approaches. It will be argued that Schmitz’s neo-​phenomenology aligns with current methodological discussions and empirical research in areas like non-​representational thinking and affective ethnography, where fluid phenomena and affective relationality are of interest. Schmitz’s neo-​phenomenology develops from the fundamental criticism that many concepts and constructs stem from dualist thinking used in natural science. This criticism resonates with Gadamer’s point that the term ‘method’ generally reflects a certain ideal of knowledge and way of thinking. Basically, Schmitz argues, many concepts, 2 The term ‘new phenomenology’ has elsewhere been used to refer to French philosophers like Levinas, Derrida, Henry, Marion, etc. (Simmons & Benson, 2013). To avoid confusion the phenomenological approach by Hermann Schmitz is here termed neo-​phenomenology.

606   Lydia Jørgensen constructs, and conventions of modern living have restricted the attention to and value of spontaneous experience (2014b). Consequently, the acknowledgement of everyday experiences as a valuable source of knowledge has been limited and neglected. In particular, immediate and spontaneous experiences have been overlooked, although they provide central phenomenological insights according to Schmitz (2014a and b). In line with Husserl, Schmitz considers phenomenology as providing a central epistemic foundation for science, where experience plays a key role. Accordingly, a central question in phenomenology is not what we can know, but how we can know something. Reality no longer is something out there waiting to be discovered, but something that is questioned and engaged with. Focus is not the object of knowledge, but rather the experiential relation. In that sense phenomenology is all method because it articulates how we can know. Methodologically speaking, a central question is how knowledge is possible, which, for both Heidegger and Schmitz, is tied to their ontological understanding.

30.2.1 Introducing the Felt Body (Leib) Key to understanding Schmitz’s neo-​phenomenology is his twofold body concept (Leib/​Körper) (1969, 2014b, 2015). By introducing the felt body notion (Leib), Schmitz seeks to supplement an understanding of the body as more than just the physical body (Körper). The twofold body concept stems from Schmitz’s criticism of what he calls the psychologist-​reductionist-​introjectionist-​objectification, which reflects a body/​mind dualism (Schmitz et al., 2011: 247; Schmitz, 2015: 15). This dualism has caused spontaneous and embodied experiences to have been neglected in favour of cognitive reasoning (Schmitz et al., 2011: 247). Schmitz’s criticism is echoed by others, as seen in the increasing interest in the body in organization research on affect, organizational aesthetics, and embodiment (see Dale, 2001; Warren, 2008; Strati, 2010; Fotaki et al., 2017), which critically addresses the body as more than a passive container for the mind. The felt body is defined as what a human in the vicinity of other physical bodies can sense without referring to the five senses (sight, hearing, etc.) (Schmitz, 2014b: 35, 2015: 15f.). It is the condition where the sensation of ‘feeling alive’ happens and which allows humans to experience presence as something existential. The basic dynamic of feeling alive, following Schmitz, is formed by an embodied spatial experience of the oscillation between expansion and contraction (Schmitz, 2014b: 35f., 2015: 16ff.). Breathing is the most banal example of this rhythmic oscillation. Being ‘in flow’ at work or in sports is another example. This distinguishing of the embodied spatial experience from the five senses is precisely what distinguishes neo-​phenomenological thinking from, e.g., psychology or analytical philosophy of the mind (Schmitz et al., 2011: 244). The felt body experience constitutes a holistic experience, which Schmitz describes as an impulse or rhythm. Indeed, this holistic experience is how the felt body moves beyond the point where the dualist split in subject/​object would typically occur (Kluck, 2014: 83). Describing the embodied experience as an impulse or rhythm relates to affective involvement (Schmitz, 1969: 93). Affective involvement is when it becomes evident to a

Schmitz and Neo-Phenomenology    607 person that something concerns only them, such as feeling pain. For Schmitz, affective involvement links to his understanding of subjectivity, in which by definition only one person can be concerned (Schmitz, 2014b: 31). Feeling pain is a fact only to the person feeling the pain. Accordingly, affective involvement creates self-​awareness due to sensory experiences that are immediate and pre-​reflective (Schmitz, 2014b: 31). Subjectivity however is not to be confused with a radical singularity of experience but concerns a corporeal involvement in something. Like Barad’s posthumanist notion of intra-​action, individuals take form in an ongoing reconfiguration. Schmitz’s understanding of affective involvement also reverberates with discussions on affect as an embodied pre-​ reflective sensation or intensity (see, e.g., Thrift, 2008; Stewart 2008a and b). As Schmitz states himself, he considers his understanding of affective involvement an interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of attunement (Befindlichkeit) (Schmitz, 1969: 259). It is precisely by liberating of the spontaneous experience that Schmitz seeks to uncover new ways of experiencing life and to ultimately offer a free way of thinking (Gesinnungsfreiheit) (Schmitz, 2014b: 128). Yet, although Schmitz adheres to Heidegger’s phenomenological thinking on the simultaneity of world and self, he (and others) argue that his focus on the felt body constitutes an embodied development of Heidegger’s idea of approaching life in its vitality (see Schmitz, 1969: 259; Lagemann, 2015). Further, the felt body experience and its relation to subjectivity and affective involvement is at the core of Schmitz’s critique of Husserl’s intentional conscious subject (Schmitz, 1969: 91ff., 2014b: 29ff.), since consciousness is exchanged for pre-​reflective, embodied experience. Hence, the twofold body concept underlines how the prefix ‘neo’ in Schmitz’s phenomenology involves a critical rethinking of the transcendental logics in Husserl and Heidegger by creating an ‘empiricist’ foundation based on embodied experience. By introducing the felt body an alternative perspective on subjectivity, causality, and phenomena emerges that is constitutive for neo-​phenomenological methodology. Schmitz’s acknowledgement of the body as an essential part of our experience evidently also links Schmitz’s thinking with the embodied phenomenology of Merleau-​Ponty.

30.3  Proposing a Neo-​P henomenological Revision By introducing the felt body and the twofold body concept, the neo-​phenomenological approach argues for perceiving the world and everyday phenomena through affective involvement. Reflecting the aim of (re)invigorating phenomenology, Schmitz proposes ‘phenomenological revision’ as his key methodological principle (2014b). By using the term phenomenological revision Schmitz makes a direct reference to and, yet also marks his distance from, Husserl’s ‘phenomenological reduction’. First, by arguing for phenomenological revision rather than reduction, Schmitz reiterates his criticism of the cognitive dominance in Husserl’s transcendentalism as losing sight of embodied, spontaneous

608   Lydia Jørgensen experiences (see also Gugutzer, 2020: 186). Second, the term ‘revision’ stresses method as a continuous process of questioning and reframing by acknowledging the impossibility of bracketing out the historical, cultural, and embodied context, which reflects the underlying alliance with Heidegger’s interpretative phenomenology. Schmitz describes phenomenological revision as an explorative engagement (Erkun dungsunternehmen),3 which requires a continuous self-​critical approach to the claims made (2014b: 11). Phenomenology constitutes a continuous learning process with the aim of refining attentiveness to broaden the horizon of possible assumptions (Schmitz, 2014b: 14). This happens through felt body experience and by acknowledging that everyday experiences form the horizon for understanding our world. In contrast to Husserl, Schmitz argues that things must always be understood in relation to something else, thereby dismissing Husserl’s claim that it is possible to get to the things themselves, their essence. Accordingly, ambiguity is ever-​present, and Husserl’s apodictic certainty is no longer the aim, or even considered possible. Similar approaches presenting an explorative engagement with the world, where ambiguity is an epistemic partner, can be found in ideas like anthropological wayfaring (Ingold, 2011), and the making of post-​ phenomenological accounts (McCormack, 2017). That Schmitz’s phenomenological revision aligns with post-​phenomenological thinking is justified insofar as Ash & Simpson delineate something as post-​phenomenology when it does not follow the method of phenomenological reduction (Ash & Simpson, 2019: 145). Further, Ash & Simpson outline post-​phenomenological method as representing a style of analysis that is ‘a matter of learning to explicitly attend to the various shifting expressions of objects and how those expressions contribute to how a situation works’ (2019: 144), which resonates with Schmitz’s idea of phenomenological revision as an attentive explorative engagement. Although Schmitz’s thinking aligns with post-​phenomenological thinking, a key difference lies in his mainly indirect attention given to the non-​human compared to the human, while post-​phenomenological thinking specifically emphasizes the non-​ human. Accordingly, Schmitz may be criticized for being too human-​centric, still neo-​ phenomenology is open to non-​human thinking by addressing our pre-​reflective and affective involvement with non-​human objects and phenomena. Acknowledging ambiguity in phenomenological revision should not be confused with relativity or an anything-​goes approach. As Merleau-​Ponty also argued, ambiguity is part of the depth of our experience. Thus, for Schmitz, the felt body and spontaneous experience becomes central, since the spontaneous embodied experience is precisely what counts as the final grounds (Letztbegründung) for justifying all claims (Schmitz, 2014b: 13). Evidence in the neo-​phenomenological approach is ‘evidence of the moment’, which is that ‘which cannot earnestly be denied as a fact by the person experiencing something in that specific moment’ (Schmitz et al., 2011: 243). Evidence becomes an affective matter. This is parallel to discussions on affective methodology, where focus is

3 

A term used and elaborated by Hermann Schmitz to explain the way of doing phenomenological revision (at the annual GNP Conference in 2018; Werkstattgespräch, Rostock).

Schmitz and Neo-Phenomenology    609 not on a ‘matter of fact’ but on a ‘matter of concern’ (Gherardi, 2019), which stresses the relationality of the researcher and the researched. Accordingly, this supports Holt & Sandberg’s (2011) argument that the potential of phenomenology lies in surpassing the subject-​object distinction—​here seen from a methodological point. Paying attention to the experience of the moment, where facticity is based on affective involvement means that focus is not on the appearance of specific things, but on a holistic exchange where: ‘the world shows up not as a neutral realm of already separate entities but as the atmospheric fields of significant situations, opportunities or quasi-​corporeal forces or ‘opponent’ that in the first instance become manifest to the conscious person in form of the ‘internally diffuse meaningfulness’ of holistic corporeal impressions’ (Schmitz et al., 2011: 244). Perceiving phenomena constitutes an experience of diffuse meaningfulness. A meaningfulness that stems from corporeally and affectively engaging with a world consisting of atmospheric fields and forces. Consequently, Schmitz makes the situation his ontological concept (1998).4 Situations build the grounds for all experiences and provide a totality for action by sustaining a horizon for significance. Acknowledging situations as the ontological focus in neo-​phenomenology means recognizing the interwovenness of the individual and world (Gugutzer, 2017: 157). Situations constitute the basis for knowledge and reflect that knowledge develops out of a chaotic plurality (Schmitz, 1999: 168), which resonates with the late Heidegger’s notion of the event (Ereignis)5 (Heidegger, 1995) or what Stewart more recently has termed ‘scenes of ordinary affects’, which are situations where things happen as impulses and sensations catching people ‘in something that feels like something’ (2008a: 2). Engaging with the notion of situations constitutes knowledge as constantly moving and offers a processual conception of ‘evidence’ as well as a relativization of the understanding of phenomena, as will be shown in the coming section.

30.3.1 Phenomena as Proposition Schmitz develops his understanding of phenomena from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s views. As Schmitz argues, phenomena became of philosophical interest as it became evident that the abstractions and methods used in natural sciences where not sufficient in grasping everyday experiences (2005: 16). However, in his critique of Husserl and Heidegger, Schmitz argues that approaching phenomena as a factual term (Sachbegriff) reduces phenomenological thinking to focusing only on the given, thereby missing the double-​headedness of every factual description (2005: 18). Such facticity of phenomena articulates a central methodological assumption that reflects an ontological conception 4  Schmitz’s notion of the situation differs from a classical sociological understanding of situations, which are often defined by space-​time and require a co-​presence of two persons (Gugutzer, 2017: 155). 5  Heidegger (1995) used ‘Ereignis’ as insight concerning the experiences of momentary openings, which parallels Schmitz’s emphasis on the instant experience as the ‘evidence of the moment’.

610   Lydia Jørgensen stemming from a descriptive epistemology that is generally language dependent. Instead, neo-​phenomenology offers a way to articulate phenomena that would otherwise be overlooked due to the lack of onto-​sensitive conceptualization and methodology. The notion of atmosphere is just one example of this (Schmitz, 2014a). Schmitz (2005) proposes that we understand phenomena as a proposition (Sachverhaltsbegriff).6 Whilst understanding phenomena as matter (Sache) would emphasize the singular, understanding phenomena as a proposition would emphasize the genus, which is the prerequisite for something becoming singular. Since language builds on the singular, Schmitz sees propositions as pre-​linguistic, in the sense that they exist by the general questionability of the world, thereby indicating a fundamental possibility and openness. As such phenomena are characterized by their undefinedness, which Schmitz describes as the ‘logic of the undefined’ (Logik der Unentschiedenheit) (Schmitz, 1999: 84ff., 2014b: 67ff.). This reiterates the centrality of ambiguity and plurality in neo-​phenomenological methodology, since it enables a consistent discussion of phenomena, like atmosphere, that within a dualist apprehension would become invisible or rejected (Böhme 2000: 43); or, as highlighted by Julmi (2017), would lead to instrumentalization. Due to their inherent ambiguity, phenomena are characterized by relationality and affectivity, since as Schmitz puts it, a phenomenon emerges when ‘something concerns or touches me, where I’m biased (befangen) in that it touches my heart or I take it to heart’ (Schmitz, 1969: 91). A phenomenon is constituted by its moving qualities rather than its essence. It is by its way of suggesting or offering an engagement that the phenomenon becomes a ‘matter of concern’. Clearly, this understanding of a phenomenon aligns with doing affective ethnography as a ‘matter of concern’ (Gherardi, 2019). Likewise, neo-​ phenomenological methodology is not about seeking to make universal claims, but rather about considering claims as stemming from a particular conceptual, cultural, or historical framework (Schmitz et al., 2011: 243f.). As such any neo-​phenomenological research seeks to address the richness of a phenomenon in its embeddedness and affective relations. Perceiving a phenomenon implies that it manifests itself as something affectively happening rather than something explicitly defined, because it is embedded in the significance of a situation (Schmitz, 2005: 23). Understanding phenomena as proposition resembles McCormack’s (2017) argument for a circumstantial sense of the world as a worlding of excessive force to the subject. The circumstantial also reflects ambiguity, affective involvement, and the undefined as the neo-​phenomenological phenomena while dismissing the constitutive subject. And as Stewart & Lewis (2015: 238) argue, it is by attending to affective questions of intensity and movement, that research is opened to new analytical objects, such as atmospheres.

6  According

to Schmitz, ‘Sachverhalt’ is best termed ‘proposition’ in an Anglo-​American context (Schmitz, 2005: 20).

Schmitz and Neo-Phenomenology    611 Schmitz’s view on phenomena has been subject to criticism. Following Böhme, Schmitz confuses phenomenon with types of phenomenality, since he does not address the formal condition of appearance (Böhme 2000: 45). This leads Böhme to question if Schmitz’s phenomenon exists at all. In a direct response, Schmitz argues that phenomenological revision itself provides a consistent methodological approach by requiring a continuous explorative engagement and self-​critical assessment (Schmitz, 2014b, 2005). This self-​criticism happens, for example, through dialogue with others to jointly examine and agree upon the potential of the ‘revision’ (Umdenkversuch) (Schmitz, 2015: 20). This resonates with doing affective and non-​representational research, where approaching social worlds and lived experience is seen as part of an ongoing process (Stewart & Lewis, 2015: 239; Ash & Simpson, 2019), which however tends to focus less on reaching an agreement. With neo-​ phenomenology’s emphasis on the embodied experience as key to perceiving phenomena like atmospheres, another epistemic route for obtaining knowledge is presented. Within the neo-​phenomenological methodology, knowledge of phenomena is gained in the moment by an affective engagement that makes it impossible to deny its existence. The claim to knowledge, or ‘truth’, becomes relational, affective, and explorative, building on the ‘evidence of the moment’ as a sensed validation of a phenomenon. As such alternative answers to the question of validity are suggested that involve different configurations, methods, and approaches to account for a phenomenon.

30.3.2 Poetic Explication Reframing phenomena as a proposition that is evidenced in the moment by being affectively experienced, automatically poses the methodological question of how such evidence can be explicated. Schmitz’s ‘evidence of the moment’ can be understood as a sensed validation, which forms the basis of intersubjectivity (Gugutzer, 2006: 4542). Yet, the question remains of how phenomena can be accounted for and contribute to academic and organizational knowledge production. Schmitz presents two forms of explication called prosaic and poetic explication (2010). Prosaic explications consist in drawing out specific elements and then putting them in relation to each other, which minimizes the complexity and significance of a phenomenon and the situation as a whole. Schmitz characterizes this approach as constellational thinking, which is aimed at problem-​solving and typically found in areas like natural science and technology. Prosaic explication, in Schmitz’s use, addresses the signification (Bedeutung) rather than the significance in its wholeness (Bedeutsamkeit) (Demmerling, 2018: 66). Accordingly, prosaic explication contributes to drawing out the singular by defining objects and accounting for their relations, like in a city map or a plan drawing of a physical space. Such explications are drawing on ‘structured’ language, concepts, and conventions to explicate and make a representation to prove the existence of something.

612   Lydia Jørgensen Recalling Schmitz’s approach to phenomena and acknowledging its undefinedness implies that prosaic explication will not be able to grasp or explicate the significance of the wholeness. Therefore, poetic explication is another option, which Schmitz describes as providing a ‘thin and sparingly woven veil letting the totality of the situation shine through unscathed’ (Schmitz, 2010: 45). This form of explication aims at bringing out the wholeness with typical examples found in poetry and fictional literature that work with evocative and affective experience. As such the poetic explication seeks to provide a sensed experience that is ambiguous in its wholeness drawing on pre-​reflective, embodied resonances. The distinction between prosaic and poetic explication represents two forms of making accounts of the world, which reflects Schmitz’s points of what constitutes evidence and how it can be accounted for. Overall, the two forms echo a methodological distinction made between proving (beweisen) and exemplary perseverance (bewähren) (see Rauh, 2012) as to how and what we can know. As Schmitz argues, phenomena, like atmospheres, are not things or objects that can be validated (and proven) in the traditional, scientific sense. As Rauh stresses, accounting for atmospheres does not mean proving (beweisen) their existence through verification (nachprüfen) (Rauh, 2012: 10f.). Rather, phenomena like atmosphere are accounted for by exemplary perseverance (bewähren), which relies on ways of reenactment (nachvollziehen) as validation criteria (Rauh, 2012: 220). This reflects the affective relationality at play and Schmitz’s call for phenomenological revision as a continuous questioning and exploration of potentiality. Seeking to explicate phenomena, hence resembles processual conceptions on ‘truth’ (see Heidegger, 1995: 33, 57; Kirkeby, 2007: 49) and making non-​representational accounts of the world (Thrift, 2008; Beyes & Steyaert, 2012; McCormack, 2013, 2017). Poetic explication aligns with, and contributes to, contemporary discussions in social science and organizations studies arguing for the need to engage with alternative modes of making research and producing accounts by engaging with aesthetic practices (Taylor & Hansen, 2005), new ways of writing (Gilmore et al., 2019), or doing performative research (Thrift & Dewsbury 2000; Stewart 2008a and b, Beyes & Steyaert, 2012; McCormack, 2013). As Beyes & Steyaert (2012) argue, doing performative research means taking part in enacting social realities, whereby research becomes a poetics of social inquiry intertwined with the politics of the social. Although, Schmitz himself does not discuss performative research, his neo-​phenomenological thinking resonates with non-​representational methods and the creation of post-​phenomenological accounts of the world (Anderson & Ash, 2015; McCormack, 2017; Ash & Simpson, 2019). In particular, it pinpoints how ontological-​methodological understanding is present in the creation of research accounts, as when Stewart’s talks of weak ontologies, where the aim is not to represent analytical objects or phenomena, but to wonder about their potential and becoming (Stewart, 2008b: 73). The wish to rethink phenomenology—​as post-​ or neo-​phenomenology—​accordingly calls for a discussion on which methodological approaches are useful to empirically investigate fluid phenomena and making up research accounts accordingly (see Ash & Simpson, 2019).

Schmitz and Neo-Phenomenology    613

30.4  Organizational Atmosphere: The Ontological Condition of Method How are these discussions on methodology and poetic explications important—​in organization studies as well as other areas? As Beyes & Holt argue, a poetic twist is emerging in organization theory, and This poetic twist is not simply a call for affective research, or for leaving the calm domesticity of safe places to take to the streets (Petani, 2019), though indeed both can be implicated. It is, rather, a call for an ontological recalibration of the very relationship between subject and object. (2020: 17)

Schmitz’s neo-​phenomenology responds to this call by considering phenomena as relational and affectively involving, which involves an ontological recalibration. Further, this articulates the ontological condition of method, meaning that the phenomena we study form our method and our methodological approach as method shapes our understanding of phenomena. Method is turned inside out since the explorative process preempts the adherence to standard procedures. This becomes particularly evident with a phenomenon like (organizational) atmosphere, which provides a way to discuss the ontological condition of the method. Further, it reflects how Schmitz (2014a and b) is one of the first scholars to engage with the notion of atmosphere, which has significantly influenced Böhme’s atmospheric aesthetics and Sloterdijk’s sphere project. Acknowledging organizational atmosphere as an ambiguous phenomenon, as stated by Julmi, calls for a non-​dualist conception to embrace the dynamic qualities of the phenomenon (Julmi, 2017). This involves acknowledging that subject and object form a coherent whole in the human experience, which makes atmosphere an in-​between or intermediate phenomenon. It also involves addressing atmosphere at an organizational level, thereby assuming a certain consistency across organization. What is particular to a phenomenon like atmosphere is that it dissolves the classical understanding of causality as a linear relation between cause and effect. Rather, the fundamental constitution of atmosphere lies the simultaneity of cause and effect, which is essential to understanding how atmospheres work and affect (Schmitz, 2014a: 84; Anderson & Ash, 2015: 44). An atmosphere is both the condition and being conditioned at the same time, which means that they emerge and are shaped in the encounter. Following Anderson & Ash (2015), it is precisely this emergent causality of atmospheres that enables participants to collectively sense them. This implies that atmospheres cannot be defined as a singular object and, therefore, it is hard to grasp them with methods building on a dualist framing. Understood as a non-​dualist notion, atmosphere accordingly addresses the ‘non-​ representational’, hence, if defined as a typical object of investigation it will risk becoming instrumentalized (Julmi, 2017). However, as noted by Böhme, exactly the

614   Lydia Jørgensen ‘non-​representational’ and relational character of atmosphere has challenged its scientific legitimacy (Böhme, 1995: 32) and has constituted what Strati calls an epistemological provocation (Strati, 2009: 239). Although Schmitz builds on relationality as being a core element in phenomenology rather than subjective impressions, he further critically addresses the ontological constitution of method and how we can know about phenomena. It is precisely the affective relationality that stresses why phenomenology is all method, since subject and object merge in a co-​constituting experience. As such, studying (organizational) atmospheres, rather than being a ‘study of ’ atmosphere, it is a ‘study with’ atmosphere (to paraphrase Ingold, 2011). This brings the everyday and embodied experiences to the fore by focusing on the action in the moment. In addition, it denotes a shift away from semantic thinking and grand narratives towards embodied and pre-​linguistic thinking (Taylor & Hansen, 2005: 1213; Stewart, 2008b; Demmerling, 2018: 372). As such researching atmospheres presents not only a shift from what we know to how we know, but also how we affectively know that we know. Atmospheric explorations of organizing and organizing itself become atmospheric. This means that we know atmospheres when we are moved and touched by them. Who hasn’t entered a room or a meeting and sensed the atmosphere even without it being mentioned? Even without the atmosphere being mentioned it tunes the experience of the situation, possibly altering the mood and movements. The atmosphere organizes and is (re)organized at the same time. What are then the methodological implications? First, the position of the researcher changes from being distanced to becoming involved, since her apprehension of the world is intertwined with her own knowledge and position (see Heidegger, 1993: 27; Schmitz, 2014a: 9ff.). As such, doing atmospheric research often implies situating the researcher in a position of embodied involvement (Michels, 2015). The researcher needs to grapple with the ‘evidence in the moment’ by getting affectively involved herself. Similar discussions are found in organization studies concerning affective ethnography (Gherardi, 2019) or organizational aesthetics, considering the researcher as a sensory-​ aesthetic participant (Warren, 2008; Strati, 2010). Further, apprehending atmosphere as an in-​between phenomenon, methodologically speaking, can be understood as researching from the middle (Michels & Steyaert, 2017: 10), which means neither taking a first-​person perspective nor an objective position. For research accounts to move beyond either/​or ‘requires that we be reflexive about how our research emerges from and depends upon our own affective capacities as researchers’ (Michels & Steyaert, 2017: 10), which is akin to Schmitz’s phenomenological argument that insights are achieved through constant fine-​tuning, dialogue, and participation in an ongoing learning process (Schmitz, 2014b: 14). A second key methodological issue stemming from the ontological foundation of method concerns the nature of data. While data in a dualist framing would typically be understood as something to be discovered and collected from the world outside, considering phenomena as a proposition blurs the distinction between outside and inside. Instead, the relational or circumstantial makes the phenomenon present.

Schmitz and Neo-Phenomenology    615 Relationality as inherent to phenomena extends the traditional understanding of data as something given to something ambiguous, which underlines the ontological foundation. Although Schmitz rarely engages with the practical implications, discussions among other researchers has led to the suggestion that it would be more appropriate to talk about empirical material than data (see, e.g., Zahavi, 2012: 22; Brinkman, 2014) or what McCormack calls co-​produced affective materials, when doing atmospheric fieldwork (McCormack, 2013: 11). Thus, acknowledging the ontological foundation of method calls for reconsidering and extending our understanding of data into, e.g., empirical material. Recalling Gadamer’s critique of ‘method’ as an ideal of knowledge based on scientific verification (Gadamer, 1993: 48) underlines why researching a phenomenon like (organizational) atmosphere calls for a different approach to method such as that envisioned by Schmitz. Where the ideal of verification is typically based on formal procedures, Schmitz’s phenomenological revision proposes an explorative investigation as a continuous learning process and participating dialogue. This offers new ways to make research accounts that reflect different forms of ‘validation’ shifting from proving and verifying towards perseverance and enactment. Taking a neo-​phenomenological approach therefore not only offers a conceptual framework to address fluid phenomena, but it further articulates how the ontological condition also shapes the ways we write organizational research. While the ontological condition of phenomenological methodology has often caused epistemological difficulties due to an (unjust) criticism of the first-​person perspective (see Holt & Sandberg, 2011; Zahavi, 2012;), acknowledging the relational constitution readdresses the methodological potential of phenomenology, yet it also challenges traditional comprehensions of method such as researcher position, procedure, and data. Although Schmitz sticks with the word method (see Schmitz, 2014b: 12), scholars engaged with affective and atmospheric matters in both organization studies and more broadly have argued that ‘style’ rather than method might be more appropriate (Gherardi, 2019; Ash & Simpson, 2019). As Ash & Simpson (2019: 143) state ‘style is the performance of a particular practice or activity that is not repetitive or mechanical but imbued with a creative spark that brings something new into the world’.

30.5  Poetically Explicating Organizational Atmospheres Engaging with neo-​phenomenological methodology addresses the ontological foundation of method by questioning key elements of how we research fluid phenomena. This opens up new ways of accounting for research, where representing and proving are no longer the aim. To grasp phenomena, like atmosphere, we are to stay with ambiguity and diffuse meanings to move beyond the distinction between subject and object. Following

616   Lydia Jørgensen Schmitz, poetic explication presents a way to explicate diffuse meaningfulness and significance, thereby reflecting phenomena as proposition. This implies that the ocular and semantic are exchanged for the embodied and co-​produced, which opens the way for poetically informed research accounts that are validated by enactment and exemplary perseverance. Within phenomenological research, others have also considered phenomenology as a project involving the art of writing and the need for creativity and imagination (see, e.g., Giorgi, 2007). Then how might such poetic explications turn out? Based on own previous work on organizational atmospheres I will give a few illustrative examples, which are only meant as a reflection on how neo-​phenomenology may offer alternative and relevant insights on organization and atmospheric organizing (Jørgensen, 2019). The two vignettes ‘Organizing Work’ and ‘Acceleration’ are taken from an assemblage of written and visual vignettes that seek to map atmospheric organizing happening in everyday workspaces and organizations. The vignettes seek to provide an evocative account of organizational atmosphere based on extensive fieldwork. The first vignette is a poetic transcription of formal (public) workplace regulations prescribing how to organize workspace, aiming to explore the affective tone of formal documents. The second vignette presents a spatio-​affective scene in a specific workspace, where materiality, bodies, sound, space, and movement intertwine and modulate the organizational atmosphere. Organizing Work A natural order of business activities, work processes must be created. Applies to the company, the single divisions, production sections. Individual work rooms departments must naturally be in relation.

(Jørgensen, 2019: 196)

Acceleration Each floor of the Loop has kitchenettes. As transparent, glassed-​in spaces adjoining an open office, they are meant to provide a venue for a quick chat, a small retreat, and a fresh coffee. The coffee machine, sink, dishwasher and fridge are all at one end, illuminated with harsh, artificial ceiling light. The dishwasher is on, sounding like rolling surf on a windy beach. She pushes the button for an espresso brew, and the coffee beans automatically begin grinding.

Schmitz and Neo-Phenomenology    617 Although the kitchenette is a place to pause with a coffee, she notices employees enter and often leave as quickly. On the high-​rise café table lies a sign with an emoji and the text ‘Be considerate of your neighbors, be silent!’ The glass-​walled kitchenettes have proved to serve as ‘loudspeakers’. Instead of being somewhere to slow down, they have become a place of sound acceleration, a space with centrifugal power. (Jørgensen, 2019: 241)

Following Schmitz’s idea of phenomenon as proposition and understanding validation as ‘exemplary perseverance’, the vignettes do not seek to give one final answer, but rather to evoke an affective experience and to pose questions. How does movement, materiality, and space modulate everyday organizational performance, like when a kitchenette becomes a social centrifuge? What organizational atmospheres emanate, when regulations conceive space instrumentally and ‘overlook’ everyday movements, the sound of the coffee grinder? How do these everyday experiences form a horizon for understanding and questioning organization? As Stewart points out, acknowledging the undefined and uncertain as a premise means that the focus is not on getting the right answer but pondering the paths that knowledge can take (Stewart, 2008b: 73). While the two vignettes seek to offer scenes of atmospheric experience, they also reflect an explorative engagement with research as an ongoing process. As a researcher, reviewing the text therefore also becomes a reflective learning process and a way to critically assess the ‘exemplary perseverance’, for example by posing new analytical question or addressing yet other ways of writing. While showing an unfolding of the intensities and potentialities of the scenes and seeking to avoid the mechanical and repetitive, other readers and time will also take part in the telling—​if the vignettes provide a ‘creative spark that brings something new into the world’. Poetic explication opens a path for creating affective compositions of organizational atmospheres by tracing spatio-​material modulations and engineering as they form in the affective, emotional, and material everyday of organizations. Neo-​phenomenological thinking in that respect may contribute to the growing interest in studying organizational affect, atmosphere, and space (Beyes, 2016; Michels & Steyaert, 2017; Gherardi, 2019) which draws attention to the (affective) processuality of organizing as well as contributing to the articulation of organization as an atmospheric phenomenon (Beyes, 2016). Researching organization and organizational phenomena as a poetically inspired form further aligns with current discussions on writing organization differently (see Beyes & Steyaert, 2012; Gilmore et al., 2019) As Beyes & Holt (2020: 17) point out in their explorations on space as a poetic twist, different forms of writing allow for the apprehension of organizational phenomena by using ‘atmospheric productions that combine perception, calculation and affect into an analytic sensorium’.

618   Lydia Jørgensen

30.6  Conclusion This chapter has presented Schmitz’s neo-​ phenomenology which explores phenomenology as a non-​dualist approach of relevance to organization studies. Neo-​ phenomenology addresses the intertwinement of subject and object by rethinking phenomena as a proposition and as affectively constituted. The chapter shows how this rethinking articulates ontology as fundamentally linked to phenomenology, thereby being also all about method. Presenting Schmitz’s neo-​phenomenological method of phenomenological revision not only offers an (alternative) way to carry out phenomenological research in organization studies, but it also critically questions how the ontological foundation of method impacts on the phenomenon being researched and the way research accounts are made. Schmitz’s neo-​phenomenology outlines an embodied research approach building on his felt body concept and affective involvement towards reinstalling the spontaneous experience as a key epistemic partner. While this approach has radical implications for our traditional understanding of method, it simultaneously opens up an alternative path for engaging with phenomena, like atmosphere, that otherwise may tend to be excluded or instrumentalized. As such, neo-​phenomenological methodology articulates how the ontological foundation of method is central for researching new (fluid) organizational phenomena, which additionally calls for different kinds of research accounts. Especially, with a rising interest in affect, atmosphere, space, and aesthetics in organization studies, the questions on how to handle and account for fluid phenomena have become increasingly pertinent. Accordingly, the chapter discusses and reflects upon how working with poetic explication offers alternative ways of thinking and writing organization which seek to stay with significance as a whole by tracing spatio-​material compositions and affective organizing. Such research accounts are not meant for verification but rather are ‘validated’ by enactment and their exemplary perseverance. As such, atmospheric explorations of organizing and writing organization itself becomes atmospheric. Hence, engaging with organization (neo-​)phenomenologically suggests addressing the ontological condition of method to be able to acknowledge fluid phenomena and adopt knowledge production as an ongoing explorative process which opens up new areas of organizational research and critically addresses how we think (phenomenological) method.

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Chapter 31

Squat ters a nd t h e Willing Suspe nsi on of Disbel i e f Tales from the Occupied Theatre Mickael Peiro

The only reality for me is my feelings.   

(Fernando Pessoa)

31.1 Introduction: Setting the Scene This chapter tells the stories of the Occupied Theatre (name has been changed), the occupation of a former cinema by activists, which serves as a counterplace that represents ‘a kind of contestation of space that is both mythical and real’ (Foucault, 1984: 4) and allows ‘perception in the present of the unknown possible’ (Busquet, 2012: 6). Once inside the doors of the Occupied Theatre, the concepts of space and time become blurred; the costumes of the inhabitants, the projection of films, the staging of plays, and the historical courses transport the inhabitants from one night to another space, another temporality. When the place is not used for spectacular ends, it (re)becomes a living space in which occupants sleep, eat, talk, cook and play. It is during these daily moments that it is possible to observe the multiplicity of the inhabitants’ lives as well as the diversity of their temporality. This chapter focuses on phenomenological approaches by mobilizing the concept of the willing suspension of disbelief (Coleridge, 1817) to demonstrate the capacity of the occupants to produce their own reality and the capacity of the researcher,

Squatters and Suspension of Disbelief    623 embedded in an ethnographic methodology, to accept the need to put aside his beliefs for the duration of the story in order to experience the characters’ emotions and to grasp aspects of their ‘real’ world. After highlighting the relevance of the willing suspension of disbelief to a discussion of phenomenological approaches and organizational studies, as well as the potential of an ethnographic methodology to apply to alternative organizations, this chapter presents the case of the occupation of the former theatre and cinema in south of France by activists and the data acquired during fieldwork. The chapter is structured in three parts: first, the chapter considers the capacity of the actors to produce new social relations; then it addresses the possibility for the ethnographer to observe those relations; and, finally, it focuses on the co-​construction of new imaginaries.

31.2  Theoretical Framework: The Willing Suspension of Disbelief The concept of ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’ was first discussed in 1817 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a British poet and literary critic, in his Biographia Literaria: my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. (Coleridge, 1817: 302)

In this sense, the willing suspension of disbelief refers to the fact that spectators admit the happenings of unlikely or even impossible things that are nonetheless necessary for the story to unfold. This concept is a major pillar of narratology and essentially allows audiences to watch and enjoy superhero movies and to believe in extraordinary love stories, but it also enables them to follow horrific tales and pirate adventures, and to believe in most alternative methods of organization, as discussed in this chapter. The concept pertains just as much to the capacity of the narrative to appear possible as to the ability of the spectator to believe in this alternative imaginary. Thus, the willing suspension of disbelief must be understood as less of a rupture than a sidestep that permits us to welcome confidently the narrative that unfolds before our eyes (Campion, 2001). However, to gain consent, this suspension of incredulity must itself satisfy the requirements of coherence and verisimilitude. By these means, spectators are no longer passive within their narrative, installed comfortably in an armchair, but become actors within what they observe, making the narrative a ‘shared, revocable and provisional ludic craftiness, which remains under the control of its actors’ (Rabaté, 2021: 13). This tacit contract, produced between a realization and its perception, is finally addressed by

624   Mickael Peiro Octave Mannoni in his ‘‘Keys to the Imagination or the Other Scene’’ (1969), mainly in the text entitled ‘I know well but nevertheless’, which founds a paradigm of knowledge that is not reducible to cognitive theories and which thereby focuses on the ambiguous adhesion that we can give to myths, superstitions, or even beliefs that unfold before our eyes. Thus, through this process, spectators know well that actors are playing a role and are not truly victims or benefiting from their adventures, but the spectators decide to believe in the reality of that role temporarily and so enlarge the perimeter not only of the imaginary, but also of the possible.

31.2.1 The Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Phenomenology, and Organizational Studies It seems appropriate to legitimize the introduction of a concept in narratology to inspire reflection in the context of management and organizational studies from a phenomenological perspective. Cinema and fictions, by projecting a parallel universe onto a screen, participate in the democratization of society in two ways: the first way is that of representation, which allows any person to see and identify themselves on the screen; the second way, which is more important, results from the heterogeneous frequentation of movie theatres, ‘where all the social classes mix in the same ritual and take part in the same emotions’ (Bimbenet, 2007: 3). As such, phenomenology seeks to make ‘explicit the implicit structure and meaning of human experience’ (Sanders, 1982: 354), operating at the point where ‘being and consciousness meet’ (Edie, 1962: 19). Following this line of thinking, the researcher and the spectator, each facing a new phenomenon, are not so far apart because they both use their own personal experience and various data sources to understand what is happening in front of their eyes (Van Manen, 1990). Thus, a newly produced source of knowledge, whether it is a book to be read, a film to be observed, or a social relationship to be analysed, remains a clever mixture of certain and imaginary knowledge (Leyvraz, 1970). Indeed, the scientist cannot apprehend reality without investing into it certain points of view (Weber, 1946) that pertain to the cultural significance attributed by the scientist to these same phenomena. Thus, the specificity of a phenomenon is not reducible to its intrinsic qualities but is also constituted by the interest that scientific knowledge has in it (Gonthier, 2004). This presupposition is developed by Bourdieu in his chapter ‘Understand’ (1993), in which he insisted on the need for combining study of the investigation with study of the investigator: ‘At the risk of shocking both rigorist methodologists and inspired hermeneutics, I would willingly say that the interview can be considered as a form of spiritual exercise, aiming to obtain, through self-​forgetfulness, a real conversion of the way we look at others in the ordinary circumstances of life’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 1406). Phenomenological approaches then appear particularly appropriate for satisfying a comprehension of the world as it is encountered in everyday life because this world is characterized by several forms of the experience of reality: ‘the world of the dream, that of the art, the madness, or the scientific theory’ (De Queiroz & Ziolkowski, 1997: 71), which is a world that never exhausts the knowledge of everyday life because it

Squatters and Suspension of Disbelief    625 is known or interpreted only through the subjectivity of the individuals living in society. Schütz’s work, then, advances the notion of ‘multiple realities, each deploying a limited province of meanings bearing an accent of reality’ (cited in Le Breton, 2016: 96). Thus, it could be said that the sociological understanding of reality and knowledge lies somewhere between that of the naïve spectator and that of the organizational researcher. By mobilizing Coleridge’s concept to understand an alternative and temporary organization, we engage with the perspective opened by Lefebvre in his ‘Critique of Everyday Life’ (1991) and, more precisely, in the sixth chapter of that work, which is titled ‘The Possibles’, in which he states that everyday life is not immutable and that critique is possible, subsequently sketching the programme for such a critique: (a) it will involve a methodical confrontation of the so-​called modern life, (b) it presents itself as opposition and contrast of a certain number of terms: everydayness and festivals, masses and exceptional moments, banality and splendor, seriousness and games, realities and dreams, (c) it involves a confrontation of actual human reality with its moral expressions, psychology, philosophy, religion, literature, (d) the relations of groups and individuals interfere in everyday life in a way that partially escapes specialized pliers. (Lefebvre, 1991: 258)

By criticizing the everyday, actors and narratives challenge the organization of existing content and thus help to change the way in which a given culture views the world. Therefore, the willing suspension of disbelief indicates that the organization of the world to which we are accustomed is not definitive, whereas the phenomenology used in organizational research ‘does not present a new view of observable data. Rather, it presents a new way of viewing what is genuinely discoverable and potentially there but often is not seen’ (Sanders, 1982: 357). To conclude, by questioning the production of other narrative possibilities and their perception by the spectator/​researcher, social scientists involved in phenomenological methodology, in an effort to understand phenomena and to enlarge the world of possibilities, propose to the spectator/​researcher the opportunity to voluntarily remove the weight of their own scepticism and thus, by this desire to believe, to better understand the story that is unfolding before their eyes. From this perspective, the adoption of an ethnographic methodology in fields that are still relatively unexplored in organizational studies could inspire methodological and praxeological perspectives related to management studies.

31.2.2 Ethnographies, Utopias, and Critical Perspectives as Ways to Enlarge Possibilities It seems that the ethnographic methodology, used with a comprehensive approach, could satisfy the injunction of the willing suspension of disbelief, ‘producing a thick description’ (Geertz, 1973: 27) of what is experienced but also, through the effects of

626   Mickael Peiro experimentation, learning, and embodiment, allowing us truly to understand the social relationships that are experienced (Goffman, 1968; Wacquant, 2005; Courpasson & Monties, 2017; Farias, 2019). The ethnographic journey is all the more surprising when it brings together two foreign worlds. This is why Richard Shweder calls ethnographers ‘merchants of astonishment’ (Shweder, 1991: 23) in that they reflect both the capacity to surprise and to be surprised. Field studies may seem romantic and adventurous from the outside, given that cultural oversights, misunderstandings, embarrassments, surprises, and instances of ineptitude are common in research that uses ethnographic methods. The researcher, like the reader or spectator, must deal with the evidence that they do not possess from the outset ‘all the elements necessary for an operative representation of the world, physical or imaginary, that they have undertaken to explore, for the time of a book or a research’ (Picholle, 2016: 4). It is then necessary for the observer to suspend for a moment the impression that they already know all the workings of the situation they are observing to map the empty spaces of these new representations, which makes scientific activity possible. Schütz (1972) then conceives of the world solely in terms of subjective consciousness, as a place in which the social scientist must identify with the other because they share the same world of meaning (intersubjectivity) and the need for consciousness to be directed towards something (intentionality). Gazi Islam (reported in Jaumier et al., 2019), in an introductory lecture on critical perspectives in management, explores three possible ways for qualitative research to understand the notion of ‘field’: as a boundary (researchers seek to reduce the distance between their concepts and their fields), as political (researchers employ their concepts to express different voices from their fields), and as imaginary (researchers invent their fields and thus make way for new possibilities). ‘In this last perspective, the imaginaries constructed in utopia and epistemological relativism can then be seen as realistic alternatives, opened up by new voices and new identities, and which critical perspectives in management could seize upon, in order to face the great contemporary challenges’ (p. 104). The researcher then becomes capable of opening up new possibilities in the same manner as the field. As such, it is important to note that Coleridge’s formula assumes the position of disbelief to be unnatural, so that we must suspend it to access another form of reality. Ironically, the confidence that we confer without hesitation on objects in which we wish to believe (money, technology, etc.) is much greater than the suspicion that we retain towards more or less realistic alternatives. Following this logic, although it is fanciful to think that the researcher is devoid of frames of reference, hypotheses, and objectives when beginning an investigation, the ethnographic approach to a foreign field remains exploratory and subject to the vagaries of encounters and situations. The researcher’s progress is iterative and dialectical, while the field remains enigmatic, in a way that constantly leaves room for surprise, discovery, and the unexpected. The ethnographic method is therefore relevant not only to produce an in-​depth study of the daily lives of the actors but also because it breaks down the barriers that separate the researcher from the actors and those that separate the researcher from their own research perspectives. In this respect, and following phenomenological approaches, ‘the

Squatters and Suspension of Disbelief    627 researcher suspends his or her usual participation in the social world in order to take a distance that is conducive to the understanding of the behaviours he or she wishes to report on’ (Le Breton, 2016: 96). Research in the field of critical perspectives thus symbolically assumes a non-​performative character (Fournier & Grey, 2000), which ‘makes players assume responsibility not only for the statements they propose, but also for the rules to which they subject them in order to make them acceptable’ (Lyotard, 1979: 88). In conclusion, it is just as important to question the distance that separates the researcher from the field actors as it is to question the distance that separates them from their own presuppositions. The knowledge produced cannot be discussed independently of the conditions of its discovery (Garfinkel, 1967). This chapter therefore seeks to answer the two following questions: (i) How do marginalized individuals, grouped together in organizations, manage to experiment with other modes of social relations? How does the researcher manage to voluntarily suspend his disbelief to report on such a narrative? To answer these questions, after presenting the ethnographic study of the ten-​month occupation of the cinema that supports the research, this chapter will first present the daily life of the occupants, their organization, and their experimentation with a critique of everyday life; followed by a presentation of the ethnographic steps that allow the researcher to understand such phenomena; and finally a discussion of the implications of this research for phenomenological approaches and the sciences of management.

31.3  Methodology: Once Upon a Time in France At the end of the 18th century, the term squatting referred to the act of ‘settling without legal title on unoccupied land’ (Péchu, 2010: 7). Squatting then appeared in France when anarchists, protesting against ownership, left without paying their rent (Péchu, 2006). Over time, different types of squatting emerged depending on whether they were intended to provide housing for the poor, a desire to set up an establishment, the preservation of a cultural and historical heritage, or to serve political purposes (Pruijt, 2004). Squats developed with greater political ambitions through the influence of occupied social centres in Italy during the 1970s, where young people from working-​class districts and activists occupied social centres that had been abandoned by the municipality. However, there have always been artistic squats that have been built under political foundations. Cécile Péchu (2010) categorized two forms of squatting: the first, ‘classist’ squat is essentially oriented towards obtaining the right to housing. Classist squatting is a practice that gained momentum in Europe in the postwar period. Second, there is the ‘countercultural’ logic of squatting, which aims to change the lives of the inhabitants of the occupied place or neighbourhood. Otherwise, artistic squats or squarts (Dorlin-​ Oberland, 2002) have occurred in Paris since the late 1980s as a result of shortages

628   Mickael Peiro within the capital of access to workshops by artists who often lacked money. At the same time, squats grant access to recognition through marginalization.

31.3.1 Tales of the (Occupied) Theatre The Occupied Theatre used to be a theatre in 1881 and a cinema in 1923 and is located in the heart of the city. It was closed in 2014 for financial reasons and intended to be transformed into luxury housing. Occupation of the cinema in 2016 was a result of the Standing Night movement against Labour Law. Activists, students, unemployed individuals, musicians, painters, workers, and artists of all kinds decided to occupy the place, with the aim of providing a roof in the city centre to those who do not have access to it, to provide a space for social movements, and to produce a place founded by non-​market countercultures and struggles against capitalism. The occupation of a historical place downtown embodied the fight against property and the local public or private authorities. The Occupied Theatre became a place of social and political life for students and precarious people who occasionally encountered the misery of an urban heart that tended towards gentrification. Squatters create a place where walls are painted by one-​night inhabitants, where decoration is composed of recovered objects and, especially, a great deal of imagination. In summary, a cultural squat is free and accessible to all in the heart of the city. The place, occupied for ten months, embodied the vision of another possibility. The possibility for some to acquire housing and the possibility of creating what is, for some, a place of counterculture and, for others, a place of struggles converged. The squatters managed the programming of the place and hosted associations and individuals for the purpose of producing documentary films, free lectures, popular ballets, rap parties, music recordings, film shootings, boxing courses, games of chess, and courses in Marxism . . . all of which were accessible for all in order to reclaim urban space. Squatting is in itself a strong and ephemeral protest. It is strong because it attacks one of the foundations of our modern societies, and it is ephemeral since squatters stand under the influence of justice. The mediatization of a place against institutions makes it possible to increase visibility not only of local struggles but also of local public decisions concerning precarious people. Even if the outcome of the fight is known (the squatters will be expelled and the squats emptied), the members of the collective view the fight as a subversive means of effective protest. The daily management of the site, which covers almost 2,000 square metres, the organization of events, and growing media coverage of the occupation raise questions for occupants concerning their ability to perpetuate the place (to purchase tools or pay electrical bills) or to continue to promote activist actions.

31.3.2 Tales from the (Occupied) Theatre I adopted an ethnographic method based on an in-​depth study of daily life within activist communities and spaces. I started a ten-​month ethnographic study, which

Squatters and Suspension of Disbelief    629 Table 31.1 Data collection and number of participations Number Hours of observation

400+​

Meetings with the collective and events

79

Interviews/​collective meetings

12

Ethnography notes and reports

197 pages

Press articles

54

Events organization

205 reports

Photographs

325

followed activists involved in the occupation who intended to produce a place that fought against property rights and cultural hegemony. I engaged in more than 400 hours of direct observation, participated in seventy-​nine meetings and events in line with the occupation, and collected many press articles and internal documents (see Table 31.1). I recorded my observations on a daily basis in an ethnographic notebook, both digitally and on paper. Both the factual verbal and non-​verbal elements of analysis were annotated in the journal as well my feelings as a researcher in the field. To complete this ethnographic study, I had the opportunity to interview some activists involved in this initiative, i.e. twelve non-​directive interviews, which enabled me to understand the aims of their movement as well as the daily functioning of the community. I also chose to write about myself during this chapter so that the reader can see the starting point and the path taken throughout the research work. Thus, the ethnographic methodology developed during this research does not stem from a deep activism but illustrates and represents my will to inscribe management research within the concrete and daily practices of the actors. I have a strong belief that actors can only be understood if one evolves with them and that theories are only developed after long and deep study of the field. The chapter is thus based on three main materials: the organizational ethnography of the occupation, several interviews with members, and various secondary data collected during fieldwork. Inspired by auto-​ethnography, the chapter attempts to show how the methodological approach, in some cases, not only allows for the description of particular phenomena but also raises questions of universality, dominant reality, and universalism. The chapter is structured around three periods of time: the first period is very intuitive and emotional, having been inscribed in my ethnography notebook (from 22 June 2016 to 15 May 2017); the second period is more analytical as it pertains to my doctoral course (from 2015 to 2019) on alternative organizations; and the final period attempts to be critical and reflexive, corresponding to my proposal to write a book chapter on phenomenological approaches in management sciences (2020−1). These three time periods are articulated by reference to two main outcomes: first, the construction of an alternative initiative by the squatters, challenging any organization

630   Mickael Peiro focused on capital, hierarchy, and hegemony; and, second, the particular moments allowing the apprentice ethnographer to seize another fragment of reality.

31.4  Results: Doing and Observing (I)rreality Squatting is criticizing a system that wants the rich to continue to get rich on the backs of the poor. It is also a means of survival when some can not /​ no longer pay rent (a means that can lead to questioning ways of life, work, family, collective life, the daily routine, or the possibilities of living ideas in such a society).1

The new occupants of the Occupied Theatre are looking for a genuinely other space, a living space where they can be who they are and where everyone is accepted regardless of their social background, politics, gender, or sexual orientation. A group of people aspire to recreate a place when the dominant system pushes them towards marginalization. This chapter aims to produce a reading of the Occupied Theatre as an other space both within and in confrontation with the contested dominant institutions and norms, a place ‘where individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed’ (Foucault, 1984: 6).

31.4.1  Setting What We Could Not Set The Occupied Theatre is a living place where people come from everywhere, every land. It is a place where it is possible to meet radical activists, precarious people, parents, children, animals, musicians, students, artists, and even a bearded doctoral student in management, simultaneously. It is a place where all projects are accepted, as long as they are non-​commercial and respectful. It is a place where all lifestyles coexist, from the lifestyle of downtown bobos prone to curiosity to that of homeless individuals in search of proximity. However, the strength of the Occupied Theatre is to offer a space of acceptance and, above all, a space of reflection.2 However, occupants do not occupy for the same reasons: some occupy the place for political reasons, others for artistic reasons, and still others by necessity. Occupants fight for the right to housing, but they also fight for a meeting place for countercultures. These two objectives raise questions for the occupants concerning their ends. Those who adhere to the former objective encourage 1 

Extract from the collective work, Squat from A to Z (2019). examples, on September 2016, an evening event was organized with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. On April 2017 a screening of a feminist film ‘too much pussy’. In addition, on May 2017, a night of projection on squats and occupations. 2  As

Squatters and Suspension of Disbelief    631 a symbolic and ephemeral occupation of the cinema to promote every struggle against capitalism. They see the occupation as a symbol of the struggle against property, which makes it possible to increase visibility of other similar initiatives at local and national levels. Those who adhere to the latter objective encourage a real creation of value with a longer-​term focus, encouraging the promotion of all forms of cultures to break down ideological barriers. On the one hand, there is the willingness of some to occupy the cinema temporarily to make it a symbol of struggle and on the other hand, there are those who want to make a genuine place of counterculture to promote every alternative. These tensions also lead the collective to take up positions regarding the type of events to be developed. To have the ability to perpetuate the place (to purchase tools or pay electrical bills) or to continue to promote activist actions, occupants run the risk of limiting the scope and visibility of the place. In the same way, the Occupied Theatre is not a place where projects are proposed and authorizations requested. It becomes a place in which people come and do things. The citizens are invited to propose films, theatre plays, music, workshops, courses, and awareness raising without asking anything in setting up these events. The place is open to all but, above all, it is the responsibility of all. If occupants do not occupy the place at the same time and for the same reasons, they nevertheless share principles that facilitate the place’s operation. First, they all promote self-​management. Everywhere, whether written on a large sign or written on the wall, we can read a great deal about the notion of Do-​It-​Yourself, a true pillar around which squats are based. This notion represents the desire to self-​manage that led occupants first to rehabilitate the old cinema, which was left unused for two years, clean the whole place, perform electrical work, address plumbing issues, and set up an internet system. Residents also manage to meet their needs and those of the place by organizing recovery rounds, which involve citizen participation and donations. The second principle stems from this desire for self-​organization as a means of reaching one-​night occupants. The Occupied Theatre becomes a place to all and for all, in which responsibility for managing and animating the place is a collective responsibility. Nobody is in the service of anybody so be careful, throw away your trash. And if you have a great project, lead it well. (Writings on the Occupied Theatre) The Occupied Theatre, above all, is a place where norms and dominant orders are broken. Occupants fight for the right to housing, but they also fight for a meeting place for countercultures. There is no question of creating a counterhegemony, but rather a place both outside the system and within the system for the deconstruction of social relations and institutions. However, during daily moments it is also possible to observe the multiplicity of the lives of the inhabitants as well as the diversity of their temporality. The students prepare to go to school, while the activists prepare for various demonstrations and the lawsuit, while some occupants continue their evenings, and others decide to start a new construction in the building. All these temporalities collide

632   Mickael Peiro daily, without anyone ever agreeing on a collective norm. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime are everyone’s business and their freedom. We are no messiahs, we are nobody. We just want to live and if by living, we shit the system, so much better. If, by chance, we inspire people, that’s cool. But our first vocation is to live among ourselves because we love each other. We are a collective and we aspire to nothing other than living. (Interview with an occupant) The opening of a squat is a political act, even more so when it involves occupying a cultural place in the city centre. Nevertheless, once inside, the political claim and fight is only the business of some; for others, all that matters is living. Occupants, by appropriating the place and causing it to be alive and accessible to the whole population, not only produce a critique of everyday life in action but also show that, in fact, an alternative is possible. It is possible to develop an otherness in which occupants have disregarded the security of a job and sometimes the opulence of a meal but benefit from togetherness and complex social relationships devoid of preconceived thoughts. By offering a place to live and perform that is accessible to all, occupants not only attempt to counterbalance a world in which personalities, like flats and screens, are becoming smaller and more individualized, but they also experiment, in the very heart of the city and in the eyes of all, with a totally different way of life, in which everydayness and festivals merge. It is ultimately important to remember that the place has existed for over 150 years. It was first used as a theatre, then as a cinema, and we have studied it here as a cultural squat, while it is now intended to become luxury housing. Thus, the place existed, exists, and will continue to exist, offering occupants the possibility of appropriating the place. The squatters showed the potential of a free and non-​discriminatory cultural space in the heart of the city, but they also demonstrated the capacity of everyone to reappropriate both the space and its organization. The actors of the Occupied Theatre are committed to experimenting with a place of emancipation while claiming the possibility of another way of living and organizing. If, for some people, occupants are restricted to illegal activities, theft of the fundamental right of property, exacerbated by anarchism and precarious living conditions, for others the squat is a reappropriation of private space, an ode to freedom and multiple cultures, a critique of everyday life. If today the entrance is closed, barricaded by a concrete wall, the squatters have forever filled the memory of the citizens present and opened up perspectives of future alternatives.

31.4.2  Seeing What We Could Not See The paradox of the Occupied Theatre, like other spaces, is that it is open to the public, such that every inhabitant of or visitor to the city can participate in the activities of the place. However, this openness is only an illusion because like a curtain that separates the theatre from the backstage, it still takes a great deal of effort to get to know the

Squatters and Suspension of Disbelief    633 actors. The ethnographic method therefore proved to be relevant (even indispensable) for producing an in-​depth study of actors’ daily lives, allowing me to cross the various borders that separated me from the actors. Thus, my knowledge of the world of activism, hackers, and squatters allowed me to be accepted by the collective before personally taking part in food collection activities, cleaning the building, cooking, preparing for the lawsuit, and especially by providing my vehicle and financial resources. Michel Foucault, in a conference conducted by the Circle of Architectural Studies on 14 March 1967, explains that other spaces always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place [ . . . ] There are others, on the contrary that seem to be pure and simple openings but that generally hide curious exclusions. Everyone can enter into these heterotopic sites, but in fact is only an illusion: we think we enter there we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded. (Foucault, 1984: 26)

Extending Foucault’s quotation, getting inside the collective does not necessarily mean staying there, being accepted, and understanding the collective, which is a more difficult task. Getting to know the place—​22 June 2016. This is the first time that I am going to a squat. One of the occupants calls me and tells me to join him at 2 p.m. to go to ‘Versailles’, a 2000 sq squat located in the centre. We walk a few hundred metres before we end up in front of a metallic door, while a small camera points at us. We enter the squat; at the same time, five or six people leave the place to join the local TAZ. The one opening the door, with his British accent, leads us to the entrance hall, while other occupants clean all the projection rooms and take care of the wiring. The emotion becomes inexhaustible; I suddenly understand that I just entered the legendary old cinema. (Ethnographic notes) I decided from day one not to hide my path and intentions, so that the people I was working with would never have to suffer feelings of having been deceived. I have always presented myself as a doctoral student in management sciences, initially being subjected to suspicion and mockery before I came to appreciate the complex relationship between researchers and actors. When I entered the occupied cinema for the first time, I was in the second year of my thesis with a doctoral contract that provided 1,500 euros/​ month. I taught management sciences at the university and rented with my girlfriend a rather expensive flat in a rather middle-​class area. My previous experience in an association against discrimination and my involvement in two research fields concerning alternative currencies and hackerspaces were beginning to shape my sensitivity to local alternative initiatives and issues of marginalization, yet I still was not an exemplar of

634   Mickael Peiro this ethos; my lifestyle and consumption habits in 2015 were far from those of an anti-​ globalization activist or even a squatter. Nevertheless, being aware of all these facts, the many days and evenings that I have spent with the relatively temporary inhabitants of the Occupied Theatre have gradually challenged my assumptions about people, social relations, and space and its possibilities, while also inspiring my reflections on alternative organizations and more responsible organizational methods. Getting a feel for the place—​28 July 2016 It’s 10:56 p.m. I’m sitting on the steps of the Occupied Theatre to tell the story of that first screening, which was fantastic. It was a pretty rough day. Everybody is giving their all to clean the place, to decorate it, and to make it smell good, while others are preparing room 1 for the screening of two films on the occupy movement and consumer society. The screening is scheduled for 7.30 pm, and beginning at 7 pm the whole team meets in the hall. Everyone is stressed. The occupants give information about security. Who’s in charge of the bar? Who stays down there? Who’s in the hall? Everybody goes to shower and get ready to look handsome. I feel like I’m getting ready for a gala. The occupants come downstairs shortly before 7:30 pm; some are dressed in the clothes found at the cinema (colourful leggings, makeup, nail polish) and some even wear the cinema’s jackets as an act of resurrection. The doors open and the first people begin to arrive. I am really impressed by people’s amazement; I didn’t think the cinema was so deeply rooted in the memories. Of course, there are activists, but there are also artists, students, French, Belgian, English, Czech, Italian, German, teenagers and parents who have come with their children after eating a pizza. The faces of the squatters, they literally have the biggest smile! ‘Let’s do it! We don’t realise it but we do it’. One occupant took possession of the stairs going to the hall, one distributes cinema tickets at an entrance, another exclaims ‘the session starts in 10 minutes!’ and at the bar is free beer. In room 1, we can count perhaps 80 people watching a movie about squatting. The room is calm, attentive and simultaneously filled with wonder; some can’t help taking pictures, including me. As I leave the session, I say to myself, ‘They did it’. What the cinema did a million times, they did once, but this time differently. (Ethnographic notes) ‘Same but different’—​This is the expression that spread through all the visitors to the Occupied Theatre in the summer of 2016. The same city but a different way of life, the same cinema but a different way of organizing, the same rooms but different projections, the same costumes but different actors. By handing out real movie tickets at the entrance to the cinema and asking the audience to sit down, the occupants made us believe, for a moment, that we had gone back in time, when the film reeled and 35 millimetre projectors made the cinema function. The occupants of the Occupied Theatre thus managed to produce both nostalgia and hope, a confusion between present, past, and future. They also succeeded in projecting us into another world, where admission to the cinema was free, where food and drink were free, where different cultures mixed. In

Squatters and Suspension of Disbelief    635 doing so, in a way that calls to mind Bimbenet’s (2007) work, the occupants produced cinema twice, first by projecting onto a canvas another world for spectators to look at and enjoy; and second by shaping the place into an object of contemplation and reflection in its own right. Understanding the place—​22 September 2016 The occupants are planning the next events at the Occupied Theatre. Mid-​October, an event by the feminist collective on anti-​sexism with non-​gendered arcade terminals and a more political LGBT evening. In early November, an event with a local association of asylum seekers intended to show the social usefulness of the place. Beginning next week, the occupants will work on setting up a sleeping room and a shower to welcome the homeless. At the same time, someone looks at an independent website concerning the TAZ at Notre Dame des Landes, in which some occupants are involved. One of the occupants is also pissed off about the noise after 1 am because he gets up early and can’t sleep due to the loud music. Another occupant replies that he sleeps at 9 am and doesn’t give a shit about those who make noise. Everyone lives at their own pace. At the same time, in the kitchen, an occupant also suggests that we should have convivial moments—​‘why not on mondays when everyone eats together?’—​To which some replied that it is not necessary to set up convivial moments, everything is done naturally. (Ethnographic notes) My successive visits then allowed me to get a better feel for the space in which I was evolving as well as its many elements of strangeness and curiosities. When I managed to visit the floor where the occupants lived, many strange objects adorned the living room, while canvases of paintings, organization tables (things to do, absences, projects, etc.), and tags lined the walls. The place itself, from floor to ceiling, became a space for expression and organization. A reflection by one of the occupants on 8 August 2016 was revealing: ‘Squatting is about fully occupying the place, sublimating it. It is more difficult to occupy a squat than a flat’. It was then possible to feel the symbolic and practical dimension of such a statement. All of the Occupied Theatre’s furniture was salvaged or created. The kitchen worktop was made from an old lawyer’s table, while an entire team was in charge of finding food for the occupants, going around to shops and restaurants to collect unsold goods. In the evenings, occupant volunteers then set about the task of cooking for several dozen people using a single cooking plate and a great deal of imagination, and while some enjoyed a screening of a Miyazaki film in a random room, others organized social movements in the dining room or engaged in deep philosophical discussions on the roof of the cinema. Finally, as we have seen throughout this chapter, the occupants wished to emancipate themselves from the norms by which they were occasionally marginalized. They also questioned the standards that constitute everyday life: sleeping hours, daily activities, education, work, and shared meals were not subject to particular rules or common sense but were constantly an object for negotiation between inhabitants and subject to reappropriation.

636   Mickael Peiro

31.5  Conclusion: Co-​C onstructing (Dis)belief Thus ends, for the moment, the reading of a particular place, which could be described as alternative, in a city which is sometimes governed by a capitalistic orientation. The squatters manage to create a place for all and by all, a place in which each culture is accepted and claimed. They reject a single moral order, whatever it may be, and reestablish the actors’ capacity to (re)imagine new organizational modes. This mode of contestation claims the legitimacy of a community in various political systems and is based on local autonomy by restoring the actors’ capacity to control their own resources. Thus, their democracy is deeply rooted in local sovereignty and the rejection of global authority. Unlike forms of resistance that tend to produce a reforming of the dominant order or to propose another world, these local alternative organizations are part of the paradigm of a ‘world in which many worlds fit’ (Starr & Adams, 2003: 20). In this context, the squatters follow the anarchist perspective opened by Graeber, namely, the intention ‘to stop thinking of revolution as the great rupture. We might then suggest revolutionary action as collective action that rejects and thus confronts a form of power or domination and in so doing reconstitutes social relations within the community from that perspective’ (Graeber, 2004: 45). However, to understand this experimentation with new social relations, it is also necessary to open one’s eyes to other possibilities and to suspend one’s disbelief for a moment to cultivate new imaginaries (Godelier, 2015). Thus, many authors, sociologists, geographers, and anthropologists have highlighted proposals for alternative societies throughout history, whether in the context of intentional community (Farias, 2017; Lallement, 2019), hacker groups (Coleman, 2013: 2011), circuses and zoological parks (Parker, 2011, 2020) or even ships hosting pirate societies (Rediker, 1981; Lapouge, 2012). The main entrance, which states ‘We are not there to empty our heads, nor to take it, but to fill it’, shows the will of its protagonists to produce more than a one-​night stand or a single new thought and counterhegemony but rather to offer an invitation to take part in a play and to contribute a verse. In this chapter, I have argued that phenomenology, as a research philosophy and method (Anosike et al., 2012), allows us to take the complexity of organizations into account, to understand emerging social phenomena on the margins, and even to encourage actors to develop their own margins, by making explicit the researcher’s presuppositions and seeking to explore the meaning of participants’ experiences. Phenomenologists, by choosing to engage with as intimately and describe as precisely as possible the presence of otherness and other spaces, are able not to feign the imaginary but to make it the centre of their thinking (Leyvraz, 1970). Thus, by inscribing the willing suspension of disbelief into the narratives of management, I have tried to articulate here two views: first, a sociological view that attempts to understand the squatters who bring the place to life; but, second, and equally importantly, one that focuses on the possible organizational imaginary that is created before our eyes. Inspired by critical poets and

Squatters and Suspension of Disbelief    637 committed ethnographers, I have aimed in this chapter at ‘exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination’ (Coleridge, 1817: 301). It may well be that the willing suspension of disbelief goes beyond the subtraction that it carries out, developing from its negative form into a methodology in its own right, which allows for the construction of other possibilities: a construction of disbelief (Gerrig & Pillow, 1998).

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Chapter 32

Listening to t h e S ou nd s of the Al g ori t h m Some Remarks on Phenomenology and the Social Studies of Finance Marc Lenglet

32.1  Introduction I would like to open this short chapter on some kind of confession—​that of a partial renunciation to make serious use of phenomenology in my work on algorithmic trading. This might, or might not be, a pity: undoubtedly, phenomenology nourished my years of study; yet it is honest to say that I have never been able, nor have I had the courage, to develop a thorough phenomenology of contemporary financial markets. There are at least two reasons for this partial renunciation. The first is technical. Classical phenomenology, as developed by Husserl, but also by Heidegger, Lévinas, Merleau-​Ponty, and, more recently, Henry and Marion might seem very far away, in its interests and modes of questioning, from the subject study of financial markets and organizations. Not that there is no possible overlap between a metaphysical questioning (what it means to ‘be’ in the world, how phenomena manifest themselves) on the one hand, and on the other hand a questioning of the ways in which this world is organized (through objects, things, actants, relations, or whatever concept makes sense, for that matter). The fact remains that crossing the gap from metaphysics to organization theory is never easy. And this, even though the most eminent phenomenologists have produced detailed, complex, and often fascinating accounts of how intra-​mundane beings appear to the Dasein (Heidegger), of the primacy of intersubjectivity which makes us present in a world that always precedes us (Merleau-​Ponty), or of the subjective life understood in its pathetic reality (Henry).

Listening to the Sounds of Algorithm    641 The second reason for my inability to make good use of phenomenology is because of the intellectual struggle in which I’ve been stuck for a long time, between continental philosophy and other streams of thought, among which and most relevantly maybe, pragmatism. This is specifically salient in the social studies of finance tradition (see Box 32.1): the field developed twenty years ago at the crossroads of science and technology studies and Actor-​Network-​Theory (Preda, 2008; Chambost et al., 2019)—​two traditions that might on occasion echo phenomenological concerns and share phenomenological practices, but that are more interested with the pragmatic tradition (see, e.g., MacKenzie et al., 2007; Muniesa, 2007, 2014). One of the main critiques that I have usually encountered against phenomenology is that of its supposed inability to get rid of the dualism of subject and object on the one hand, and the conceptual toolbox that goes with this dichotomic understanding of the world on the other. The paragon of intentionality, for instance, looks very suspicious to those who criticize phenomenology, in that it presupposes other dangerous concepts such as ‘consciousness’ or the idea of ‘solipsism’, both leading to an idealism that in today’s light seems rather unacceptable. Despite these issues, and the critiques of post-​phenomenologists and French theorists alike, such as Deleuze and Serres, I remain of the opinion that phenomenology shouldn’t

Box 32.1 What do we mean by ‘social studies of finance’? The ‘social studies of finance’ is a research programme that emerged more than twenty years ago with the aim of addressing financial fieldwork through a diversity of perspectives mostly drawn from the social sciences. Drawing inspiration from a few seminal essays on stock markets by Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon (1857) and Max Weber ([1894] 1999) on stock markets, in the 1980s scholars started providing analysis of financial markets as social structures (Adler & Adler, 1984; Baker, 1984; Abolafia & Kilduff, 1988). It then developed more consistently with a series of studies of financial market mechanisms by MacKenzie in the UK (MacKenzie & Millo, 2003; MacKenzie, 2004), together with works on market practices such as arbitrage (MacKenzie, 2003; Beunza & Stark, 2004) or financial analysis (Beunza & Garud, 2007). Science and technology studies and Actor-​Network-​Theory are two major influences of this first leg of the social studies of finance tradition, which also developed a discussion on performativity with Michel Callon (Callon & Muniesa, 2005). A second leg of the social studies of finance tradition appeared in France in 1998, thanks to the Social Studies of Finance Association: a group of (at the time) doctoral students holding a monthly seminar and promoting an interdisciplinary view on financial markets (see Chambost et al., 2019: 5−10). While sharing many views with the ‘Edinburgh group’ working around Donald MacKenzie, the perspectives developed in Paris were broader in scope: the seminar gathered, for the most part, sociologists (Martin, 2002; Montagne, 2005; Muniesa, 2007; Godechot, 2016, 2017), heterodox economists (Tadjeddine, 2000), anthropologists (Ortiz, 2021), and political scientists (Grossman, 2006). Theoretical and disciplinary diversity played a fundamental role in the success of the association, whose members shared a common interest in financial markets, and more generally in the diverse worlds of finance.

642   Marc Lenglet be reduced to the caricatured representation of a transcendental ego ‘bracketing’ the world to access phenomena while being desperately unable to make sense of lived experience. And that through its already long history, phenomenology has offered enough progress and alternatives to escape from repeated mockery. For instance, Bruno Latour has been very consistent in arguing against phenomenology (for obvious, and sometimes good, reasons): ‘My experience is that, when cornered, most observers, especially those trained to believe that phenomenology has done away with the old dichotomy [of Nature/​Culture], are still never going beyond two. And this is generous, since, most of the time, this “two” means actually “one” ’ (Latour, 2013: 562). This is understandable for a thinker whose philosophical ideas chime with those of Serres, and a lineage that has more to do with Bergson, Tarde, Nietzsche—​not to mention Whitehead, James, and Dewey, rather than Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle. It however remains that there is a strange proximity between the Latourian method for making sense of networks of actants, and the type of referrals that are made to the network of things in the analyses developed by Heidegger, notably (but not only) in Sein und Zeit.1 Surely, phenomenology has its limits, like any serious form of thinking. So what? Can we really do nothing with phenomenology—​a stream of thought that has for long let go of the idealism that still is one of the main arguments used to criticize it? Or else, should we take a step back and make it clear that there are in fact many points of overlap between pragmatism and phenomenology and that both schools of thought carry important views for what we do in the social studies of finance tradition? In what follows, I will advocate for the need to further develop the phenomenological gaze in the social studies of finance tradition. I will do so by taking the example of financial algorithms—​software, or lines of IT code, from which financial markets have been running for approximately forty years; but which still remain enigmatic and veiled by ignorance. In particular, I shall focus on the noise of the market, and how algorithms have changed the type of sounds that one can experience on the trading floor.

32.2 Experiencing Financial Algorithms Financial algorithms develop in some ‘background dimension’ (Thrift, 2005) like many of the mundane objects that we routinely use. And indeed, the fact that algorithms are most often hidden, that is, inaccessible, because of their very nature (an algorithm being usually described as a computer script embedded in a computer system that we cannot access), undoubtedly contributes to their naturalizing. This makes them invisible in the social, organizational, and moral environments in which we evolve. Trying 1 

For a discussion of the ‘idea of a philosophical kinship between the mismatched couple Heidegger and Latour’ (Schiølin, 2012: 776); see also Harman (2009), Kochan (2010), and Conty (2013).

Listening to the Sounds of Algorithm    643 to describe these inaccessible things therefore creates a challenge: not only in terms of accessing algorithms which are often jealously guarded by passwords, IT language, procedures, and IT specialists, but also in terms of making sense of their nature (Lange et al., 2019). Rather than ‘matters of facts’, algorithms provide a wonderful expression of the ‘matters of concern’ brilliantly described by Latour (2005: 114): ‘while highly uncertain and loudly disputed, these real, objective, atypical and, above all, interesting agencies are taken not exactly as object but rather as gatherings’. How, indeed, could or should we make sense of the financial algorithm? As an object or as a thing (Heidegger, [1962] 1977; Marion, 2017)? Can it be objectified, that is, known with a form of certainty that would not leave room for discussion? Or should we on the contrary accept the idea that algorithms remain highly disputed things, developing their own kind of agencies that users certainly cannot master, and that they can at best participate in such agencies opening interpretive struggles?2 Given the importance of financial markets in today’s societies—​and here we should even say in our ordinary lives (van der Zwan, 2014; Field, 2016; Ossandón et al., 2021); and given that contemporary financial markets are literally governed ‘through, with and by’ algorithms (Campbell-​Verduyn et al., 2017), trying to make sense of the concealed operatives of financial transactions seems a relevant endeavour. Living with financial operators (traders, IT specialists, back-​office clerks, compliance officers, etc.) in an algorithmic environment, then observing how market operators develop their individual and collective practices (Pérezts et al., 2015), but also listening to their small talk or longer stories (Beunza, 2019), shows how market participants co-​construct relations with algorithmic devices and systems of abstraction (Faÿ et al., 2010). These relations are made of routines, misunderstandings, successes, and failures—​all of which allow for going beyond the naturalized perspective that I mentioned earlier. Based on a three-​year participant-​observation at Shibboleth Securities, a pan-​ European brokerage company, I have already provided descriptions of how algorithms manifest themselves, for instance how they appear on a number of devices such as computer screens (Lenglet, 2014), procedures (Lenglet & Mol, 2016), and financial advertising (Lagna & Lenglet, 2020). Here, I’d like to focus on a slightly different experience: that of the ‘noise’ of the market and how algorithmic systems have altered the sounds that one can experience on the trading floor.3 Of particular interest here, the idea that the series of changes that financial markets witnessed over the past forty years, specifically the spatial shift from open-​outcries to trading floors populated by algorithmic systems has had an impact on the sound environment of markets. Building on a study discussing the correlation between sound levels and price volatility on the Chicago Board of Trade (Coval & Shumway, 2001), Arnoldi (2006: 389) discusses this 2  We

could certainly think of further links with socio-​materiality studies here: see, e.g., Millo et al. (2005) and Orlikowski & Scott (2008). 3  Usually, when noise in finance is discussed, it has more to do with financial theory and the ability to distinguish ‘information’ from ‘noise’. For an in-​depth discussion of financial noise in electronic trading, see Preda (2017, 2021).

644   Marc Lenglet environmental change and mentions traders who lost their feel for the market and were therefore relying on ‘software that simulates sounds of a virtual open outcry floor based on the information from the electronic system [to allow] traders to react to the roar of the market’. While such practices might be limited, as noted by Arnoldi, it remains that electronic trading, at least when it was introduced, contributed to the ‘detaching’ of traders from the market. I am not in a position to provide an in-​depth study of the sound of contemporary financial markets—​as I left the floor more than ten years ago and my auditory experience is now only a retrospective memory. However, I would like to elaborate with a few remarks based on interviews I recently conducted with former colleagues that are still active on the floor. I conducted these interviews to validate some older observations, and my initial focus was not on sounds and noises; however, and on occasion, the discussions slept away in the direction of this very phenomenological topic. I will therefore not develop a first-​hand phenomenological inquiry, but just add descriptive elements offering a complementary glimpse into the everyday lives of markets operators working on the trading floor. Let us transport ourselves into the heart of algorithmic markets for a brief moment.

32.3  Listening to the Algorithm It is 21 May 2020; Covid times. I have decided to take advantage of the first lockdown to do some validation interviews with former colleagues. I’m developing a paper on conflicts of interests with a friend, and I want to make sure that several of the elements on which our paper is based are still correct—​as our data are getting a bit old. I manage to reach Georges and we begin discussing over the phone. While about to retire, Georges is still active on the trading floor of the Paris-​based brokerage house that took over Shibboleth Securities, where we met fifteen years ago, and where he was working as a corporate brokerage trader. His trading experience is extensive: he began working on the floor of the Paris Bourse in the early 1980s, when he was in his early 20s, and he lived through the different algorithmic revolutions that the market witnessed: first, the replacing of market mechanisms by an algorithmic solution (Muniesa, 2007): followed by the advent of algorithmic trading practices (MacKenzie, 2018, 2019; Lenglet, 2021); and finally the rise of high-​frequency trading (Arnoldi, 2015; Borch & Lange, 2017). After a couple of minutes, and although I had prepared a series of questions in relation to conflicts of interests, the interview goes off piste with Georges becoming very talkative about how the new algorithmic environment is making his life more difficult than ever. Specifically, we have been discussing the importance of sitting on the main floor, very close to the action, when Georges says: As for the flow resulting from a specific market event, for instance a ‘fat finger’ [an erroneous order submission resulting from a ‘heavy’ finger on the keyboard] in the

Listening to the Sounds of Algorithm    645 room—​when this happens, you will immediately know while the others outside of the room will just face their screens and will look for interpretation [ . . . ]. Whatever happens, you need to understand that what happens in the market does not result from the company anymore [he refers to the listed company that issued the financial instrument], but from the market. Like the other day when one guy used a third-​ volume [an algorithm designed to buy or sell a third of the volume of securities available in the market] and had Parkinson’s disease . . . and sent it 40 times . . . If you’re in the aquarium [a dedicated space with glass-​walls where Georges’ colleagues sit], you can’t feel this, you just don’t feel the market.

Even in an environment where approximately 70% of trading is now conducted by algorithms, ‘being there’ and listening to the market remains a crucial capability—​one that an unexperienced observer would not necessarily notice, as trading is not done in person and in the flesh, but essentially through machines. It somehow was always the case in financial markets—​one only has to read the ethnographic accounts provided by Hertz (1998) or Zaloom (2006) to be convinced of this—​but the emergence and, now, the prevalence of algorithms in markets could have suggested otherwise. Georges goes on: You know if we go back as late as in 1987−88, I remember we had the TIL system [the type of computer he used to trade at the time], and it was connected to a printer. Every time you sent an order it got printed on paper. Well as soon as somebody did a ‘fat finger’, you would see it right away, you could hear the printer going ‘clac, clac, clac,…’ You could literally hear the bullshit. Then we had the graphs and you could see the holes in the graphs. But the printer was much easier.

Early computer systems were linked to the printer because transactions were acknowledged by way of a paper confirmation (later sent through the fax). This is not the case anymore, as confirmation instructions are sometimes embedded within the algorithm suite: as soon as the order has been executed, an electronic message acknowledges the trade. While this confirmation leaves a series of auditable traces in the IT system, it does not ‘exit’ the system to take a more mundane type of materiality—​specifically a list of executions printed on paper. And indeed, as Beunza et al. (2006: 729) remind us in their study of arbitrage: The forms of embodiment of prices are various—​the sound waves that constitute speech; pen or pencil marks on paper; the electrical impulses that represent binary digits in a computerised system or encode sound over a telephone line; hand signals in ‘open-​outcry’ trading pits that are too noisy for voices to be heard; and so on—​but are always material. If a price is to be communicated from one human being to another, or from one computerised trading system to another, it must take a physical form.

However, in light of increasing dematerialization, listening the market has become even more difficult nowadays, and ‘feeling the market’ similarly a bigger challenge, one that nevertheless remains crucial.

646   Marc Lenglet Of course, there are exceptions to this situation, as Denis, the former head of programme trading at Shibboleth recalls: When I was in charge of Programme Trading, we had an issue with ORS [the Order Routing System]. But I was told we did not have the money to develop something relevant for our customers. And you know, when you have 2,000 orders to monitor at once, it’s impossible to give the customer a good vision of the market, unless the machine helps you. Thanks to the Head of Quants, we began redeveloping our tool in 2006−2007: we added volume alerts, volatility alerts, distortions alerts, etc. And we had the pre-​analysis that we could send to the client before trading. Like, in less than two minutes the client received info on how his order would be executed together with the expected result based on historical data and regressions. Then this tool, which was renamed STORM [Sales Trading Order Routing Monitoring] would flash in real time, for instance when there was one stock falling sharply, or something else was happening in the market. It would also generate a beep that allowed to develop a quick and elegant speech with the client.

While Denis mentions a beep and nothing else in relation with noise, except maybe a name suggesting a lot of noise (STORM), he provides us with an example of how market operators try to materialize algorithmic activity: specifically, by modifying the invisible in something audible, such as with alerts and beeps. In line with this example, my friend Robert Seyfert told me that while doing fieldwork in a high-​frequency trading boutique a few years ago (Seyfert, 2018), he could literally hear the algorithms working, because the traders had set up a system where different types of honks would make some noise every time an order was executed. And the bigger the order, the louder the honk. Interestingly, the type of noise that is briefly mentioned in these different examples is still rarely the subject of finance studies. If noise is present in some descriptions—​ for instance, Donald MacKenzie (2021: 6) recently mentioned a firm that ‘plays white noise between the rows [of traders and administrative staff] to reduce the chance of members of one team overhearing what is said by members of another’4—​its consistency continues to change because of innovation (specifically the introduction of algorithmic high-​frequency trading more than ten years ago). In ultra-​fast trading, the noise of the market is muffled: the sound of algorithms fades away, and the offices sheltering traders is often described as offering a quieter environment in comparison with more traditional trading floors. This change in the sound environment is not neutral, as Denis reminds me towards the end of our discussion: Remember, those guys, they used to trade on the floor with cards. Then one day they were told: ‘You need to go upstairs in the office’, then the next day it’s the machine . . . Some of those guys had a very good sense of the market, a very good sense of 4  MacKenzie (2021: 47) notes: ‘Open-​ outcry trading was a demanding but familiar business, and much of its embodied skill—​“you traded off of visceral reaction, noise, smell, [a]‌look on someone’s face,” says interviewee MC—​could not be transferred to the computer screen.’

Listening to the Sounds of Algorithm    647 hearing: they could hear something happening at 15 metres and they would be able to participate in the trade, they had ears everywhere. When they moved in quieter rooms, they were completely lost. Some never recovered.

32.4  Back to Phenomenology—​or Where to Head from Now on The few situations that I have recounted here do not make for an orthodox phenomenological approach of financial markets. They do however insist on one aspect (noise) of the specific materiality that algorithms shape in contemporary financial markets: one that is still in the making and that is of a particularly phenomenological nature. This materiality acquires its meaningfulness when related to the bodies of the financial operators and the ethnographer, which brings us back to phenomenology. Indeed, can we try to reconcile the pragmatist approach informing Actor-​Network-​Theory and the social studies of finance, with a phenomenological perspective? And if so, what would be the costs but also the opportunities of such a reconciliation? Below I elaborate briefly on some remarks to address these questions, outlined as directions for future inquiry. First, a better integration of a phenomenological gaze within the social studies of finance would require us to go back to the actants, once again. Of course, I am not suggesting that we should depart from what Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, or Donald MacKenzie have taught us (that descriptions should follow all the actants when trying to make sense of a given phenomenon): descriptions can certainly not be restricted to human beings alone. Going back to the actants means that we have to pay attention to what emerges from the relationships between humans and non-​humans, but also to the ways in which we manage to create a space for what we can observe during ethnographic fieldwork. Specifically, I’m referring to what the anthropologist Chauvier (2011) calls ‘disinterlocution’ or, the denial of the position of interlocutor to the observed. When resituating our ethnographic descriptions, we should be careful to make space for the voice-​less, whether humans or non-​humans. Not only by acknowledging their existence, but maybe, first and foremost, by keeping in mind that in the ordinariness of our inquiries ‘nothing is given in advance, [and that] each interlocutor (observer and observed) must constantly question its representativeness’ (Chauvier, 2012: 212). Second, and as a follow-​up, it is the ordinariness of the inquiry that we should describe: too often, and sometimes because of the pressing requirement of reviewers calling for us to theorize (that is, to create a meta-​discourse), we make the reality of the lived experience hostage to a meta-​language (Prigent, 2021: 47) while often neglecting its mundane and deeply phenomenological, perceptual, and sensorial dimensions. On the contrary, it is precisely what must prevail—​for instance by making space for elements that might appear insignificant: stories about noise, sounds, or silence (see, for instance, Styhre, 2013; Michael, 2018; and de Vaujany and Aroles, 2019). In the cases mentioned

648   Marc Lenglet here, how noise used to be an important component of markets, and how it is now troubled by algorithmic technologies themselves developing their own types of sounds. Third, and in relation with the description of financial objects, we should also renew attention to their malfunctioning moments: while this idea brings us back to the Heideggerian tool-​analysis where dysfunction acts as a revelatory struggle, it also resonates with a genuine concern for dissonance which, as ethnomethodology (Garfinkel) and microhistory (Ginzburg) have taught us, creates breaches in the Lebenswelt of involved actors.5 This, to me, seems very relevant in the case of financial algorithms: not only because their access has always been and remains quite difficult, but also because the consequences of algorithmic malfunctioning are sometimes catastrophic for financial markets and their participants. Lending an attentive ear to these concerns seems particularly relevant. To conclude, I would like to suggest that reconciling the social studies of finance with phenomenology should generate interesting, and coherent, outcomes. Not only because of its methods, which have permeated anthropology and sociology for some time now, but also because phenomenology can help us in focusing our efforts on embodied description—​in my opinion the most powerful tool for understanding the many struggles that structure what we call the world.

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I owe this line of argument to Prigent (2021: 50−2).

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Chapter 33

Produ ci ng t h e Organiz ationa l Spac e Buddhist Temples as Co-​Working Spaces Tadashi Uda

33.1  Introduction This chapter explores how the organizational space of Japanese Buddhist temples as co-​working spaces was bodily produced, drawing on a phenomenological qualitative approach. Phenomenology has attracted the attention of scholars in management and organization studies, especially since the turn of the millennium (Mingers, 2001; Küpers, 2002; Gibson & Hanes, 2003; Dale, 2005; Dale & Burrell, 2008; Holt & Sandberg, 2011). These scholars have sought to describe and interpret meanings and experiences in organizational life based on phenomenological perspectives (Gill, 2014; vom Lehn, 2019). Among different themes, such as practice, ethics, body, and space (Taylor & Spicer, 2007; Tomkins & Eatough, 2013), space is recognized as a highly promising viewpoint to gain a better understanding of organizations and organizing (Dale, 2005; Cnossen et al., 2021). In particular, many studies have been influenced by the Lefebvrian approach (e.g. Lefebvre, [1974] 1991). However, these studies have some limitations related to research perspective, theoretical foundation, and research subject. First, there is still less research detailing the history and context of space production (Kingma et al., 2018b) and taking a holistic approach to illuminate the interaction between various aspects such as organization, organizing, and society (Zhang, 2018). Second, the body is essential to space production, but previous studies tend to mainly focus on the literature of the body and embodiment in the Western world; we can find some significant studies related to the phenomenological body in the non-​Western world. For example, some Japanese studies such as Nishida (1937) and Watsuji (1942) are close to the works of Merleau-​Ponty ([1961] 1964) in their conception of the body

Producing Organizational Space    653 (Yokoyama, 2005; Johnson, 2019). However, there are still some notable differences between them (Yuasa, 1987). We need to take notice of these studies in the non-​Western world, especially when we explore the historical and contextual production of Eastern organizational space. Finally, while the presence of flexible workspaces such as co-​working spaces and makerspaces has steadily increased in the contemporary digital society (de Vaujany et al., 2019), few studies have examined these spaces using the Lefebvrian approach. To address these research gaps, we examine the dynamic space production of ‘tera-​ co-​working’. Tera is ‘Buddhist temple’ in Japanese. Tera-​co-​working is a term coined by the practitioners whom this study focuses on, and means ‘co-​working conducted in Buddhist temples’ (for the details, see Section 33.3 on methods). Tera-​co-​working is an attempt to combine traditional Buddhist temples and contemporary co-​working spaces. Buddhism was introduced to Japan over 1,400 years ago. Temples as places for religious activities and as a symbol of Buddhism had gradually become established in our society. The connection between temples and the Japanese people became stronger in the 17th century (Inoue, 2010; Rowe, 2011). Although the presence of temples has declined in modern society, they are still significant spaces involving various aspects, such as social, economic, political, and cultural features. In contrast, co-​working spaces, which aim to provide an alternative to conventional corporate offices, have been recently spreading worldwide (Spinuzzi, 2012; Uda, 2013). Tera-​co-​working is a collaborative project between a manager who operates a co-​ working business primarily for women raising children and a priest who works to preserve temples and Buddhism. This study illuminates how the tera-​co-​working spaces were produced by the embodied spatial practices of the priest, the manager and staff, and the users, drawing on the Lefebvrian approach. This research reveals the detailed process of organizational space production based on a historical, situational, and holistic description; it empirically uncovers non-​Western experiences of the spatial body, as well as a mode of behaviour and artefact, which constitute space production. Finally, it offers practitioners insights into the new spatial design of flexible workspaces and religious buildings.

33.2  Literature Review 33.2.1 Phenomenology and Organizational Space Phenomenology provides a useful perspective to describe and interpret meanings and experiences that are important in organizational studies but are often overlooked (Gill, 2014; vom Lehn, 2019). In the management and organizational literature, some studies based on de Certeau ([1980] 1984) focus on the practice of everyday life (Hjorth, 2004; Courpasson, 2017). However, Lefebvre is one of the most influential scholars in the

654   Tadashi Uda study of organizational space (Beyes, 2018; Kingma et al., 2018a). While he wrote over sixty books and 300 articles in a wide range of areas during his lifetime, he was deeply interested in everyday life and lived experiences of space (Kingma et al., 2018a). In particular, he proposed the spatial triad, consisting of the space we perceive (perceived space), the space conceived by experts (conceived space), and the space lived by inhabitants and users (lived space) (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991), which has attracted many researchers and provided them with an important theoretical foundation for organizational spatial research (Tyler & Cohen, 2010; Kingma et al., 2018a). He emphasized that the triad is not an abstract model and should be concretely described, paying attention to dynamic interrelationships within these three spaces. As a clue to this, he cited the significance of the body as a premise in space production. Moreover, he pointed out that the term ‘lived’, which is a theoretical basis for his critical investigation of everyday life, relies on Signes published by Merleau-​Ponty (Lefebvre, [1961] 2014, [1970] 1974).1

33.2.2 Exploration of Organizational Space from Lived Experiences Empirical studies of organizational space in terms of Lefebvre’s perspectives are steadily accumulating. For example, Dale (2005) demonstrated how an organizational space is socially and materially produced, based on a case study of European large-​scale utility. The organization constructed a building with spaces, systems, and equipment that were markedly different from those of the privatized era. However, this study showed that employees produced a new layout of space, a new communication style, and a new attitude towards work that were unexpected by the organization. Tyler & Cohen (2010) qualitatively studied female employees working in a university to examine how gender and lived experiences were linked. They indicated that these women were spatially constrained, contained, and invaded in their workspaces. These employees attempted to shape their personal workspaces, but adopted a restricted, gender-​specific manner to reflect and follow the social and organizational norms. Hirst (2011) used an ethnographical approach to show how the organizational space was produced in a hot-​desking environment. She found that a new hierarchical relationship between settlers and mobile workers emerged in the office. This study showed that the settler secured a permanent place, while the mobile workers became vagrants who lost ownership of their place and were relegated to relatively low positions. Zhang & Spicer (2014) examined the day-​to-​day regeneration of power relations in a large public organization in China based on long-​ term, elaborate, qualitative research. They identified the process by which employees formed a hierarchical 1 

In addition, Lefebvre was influenced by Heidegger in forming the concept of dwelling or inhabiting as lived experience (Elden, 2004; Kingma et al., 2018a).

Producing Organizational Space    655 organization: proliferation (employees brought hierarchical symbols, such as the positioning of the leader’s room in the building, into the evaluation of non-​hierarchical spaces (the room of an ordinary employee), familiarization (employees created narratives about every artefact in the building, including the leader-​first elevator buttons), and ritualization (daily practices of respect for leaders reinforced the hierarchy). Shortt (2015) examined how liminal spaces were produced by lived experiences of hairdressers and what these spaces meant to them. She found that liminal spaces, such as the toilet and doorway into the salon, were not merely liminal, but significant. This is because hairdressers use these spaces to take a break, hold small meetings, and get inspired. This study argued that liminal space is a transitory dwelling space. Wasserman & Frenkel (2015) investigated how the organizational space is related to gender and class based on an in-​depth qualitative study of Israeli governmental organizations. They discovered that the organizational space was produced not only by the top-​down spatial practices of architects and managers who follow Western thinking and progress, but also by the practices of female members who accepted or resisted the masculine bureaucracy. Petani & Mengis (2016) explored the relationship between collective memory and spatial planning. They found that organizational (positive) memory of lost space led to a ‘non-​linear’ planning process for new space, analysing the ethnographic data from a cultural centre in Switzerland. Warnes (2018) examined how employees bodily managed the tension generated in an English cathedral with a commercial focus. She demonstrated that employees strove to influence organizational values through embodied spatial practices, such as resisting commercialization, and eroding sacredness. Peltonen & Salovaara (2018) studied how organizational life is shaped, paying attention to the social, economic, and cultural aspects of space production. They focused on the rise of the lunch-​beat movement in Scandinavia and connected bodily practices of dancing during lunch breaks to the organizational space. They showed that everyday emancipatory activities as lived experiences at the disco are carried out during the official corporate break and controlled towards organizational productivity and well-​being. Kingma (2019) explored how a new organizational space was produced under the New Way of Working (NWW) policy. In his case study of a Dutch company, he found that NWW consisted of three dimensions: flexibilization of work practices; virtualization of organizations; and interfacialization of organizational life. Moreover, he indicated that the concept of NWW, which advocated freedom and flexibility, required knowledge workers to follow new disciplines and management systems to achieve productivity in the contemporary sharing economy. Best & Hindmarsh (2019) examined how participants performed embodied practices in a workspace, how they interacted and produced an organizational space moment to moment. Focusing on tours of UK museums, they showed the organizational space was dynamically produced through varied guiding practices that matched the form

656   Tadashi Uda and features of the space and the artefacts, and through improvisational audience participation.

33.2.3 Research Gap These insightful studies helped us to understand various spatial practices and the process of space production, highlighting the significance and potential of phenomenological approaches in organizational studies. However, they have some limitations. Studies on organizational spaces based on phenomenological perspectives are limited (Tomkins & Eatough, 2013; Kingma et al., 2018b). Lefebvrian studies can be enriched by describing a detailed history and the situation deeply related to the space production (Kingma et al., 2018b) and by adopting a holistic approach focusing on the interaction between various aspects, such as organizational life, work, city, and society (Peltonen & Salovaara, 2018; Warnes, 2018; Zhang, 2018). Moreover, the body is essential to space (production), but previous studies have tended to mainly focus on the Western literature of the body and embodiment. However, there are some non-​Western significant studies related to them, such as Nishida (1937) and Watsuji (1942). We can find differences among them, for example, as Johnson (2019) showed that self as aidagara (being-​in-​relation-​to-​others) (Watsuji, 1942) is interpersonal, unlike Heidegger’s self as being-​in-​the-​world. On the other hand, incarnated subject (Merleau-​Ponty, [1945] 1962) as the unity of body and subjectivity is close to the conception of the body and mind in the works of Nishida and Watsuji (Yokoyama, 2005; Johnson, 2019). However, for example, Yuasa (1987) pointed out the notable difference among them. Merleau-​Ponty stated that the body sees and is seen at the same time (Merleau-​Ponty, [1961] 1964). This body being seen is experienced as the body being seen by ‘oneself ’. However, Nishida (1937) pointed out that the body is ‘seen not by oneself but from outside’, that is, the existence of others in the space is assumed. Moreover, Watsuji (1942) believed that the body was the basis of spatial and situational relationships with ‘social’ others. A different conception of the body leads to different spatial practices and different lived spaces. Thus, we need to pay attention to these studies in the non-​Western world, especially when we explore the historical and contextual production of the Eastern organizational space. Finally, contemporary flexible workplaces have emerged under new economic systems supported by digital technologies, such as the sharing economy (Gerwe & Silva, 2020), the collaborative economy (de Vaujany et al., 2020), and the gig economy (Newlands, 2021). In particular, co-​ working spaces and makerspaces cannot be overlooked. Several studies examined collaborative spaces from a phenomenological perspective, including de Vaujany et al. (2019), who focused on the atmosphere of collaborative spaces, de Vaujany & Aroles (2019), who discussed the meaning of silence in a makerspace, and Uda (2021), who described embodied user experiences based on Twitter posts. However, few studies have explored lived experiences of the emerging spaces in detail, using Lefebvre’s spatial triad.

Producing Organizational Space    657

33.3 Methods Drawing on a qualitative analysis of tera-​co-​working in Japan, we focus on the process that co-​working spaces are produced by embodied spatial practices of priests, operational staff of a small business, and users. The reason for targeting tera-​co-​working is that temples are socially, politically, and economically structured organizational spaces in the non-​Western world. Therefore, they are suitable to fill the gaps. In addition, co-​working space is a significant space for the study of contemporary organizational spaces, but there is little literature that adopts a phenomenological approach. The ethnographic data for this study were obtained from the following sources: offline and online intensive interviews, fieldnotes, photographs, and publicly available material. Tera-​co-​working was organized from June 2019 to February 2020 in Yamanashi, which is located in central Japan and surrounded by mountains, including Mount Fuji, until it was stopped due to Covid-​19. The organizer is a small company, LINKwith&Co (hereinafter referred to as LINKwith), which runs a telework intermediary business. The author conducted intensive interviews with four operators (a chief priest, the representative of LINKwith, and two staff members) and three users, from October 2020 to March 2021. The representative and two staff members were not only operators of tera-​ co-​working but they were also users who were not familiar with the temples. The total time for the formal interviews was about eleven hours. The author took fieldnotes while visiting eight of the eleven temples that practiced tera-​co-​working in October 2020. The tera-​co-​working project had already been interrupted at the start of this research. However, to better understand the details of the spatial practices of the people involved, it is essential to thoroughly experience the space and atmosphere of the temples actually in use.2 In addition, we conducted informal interviews with the chief priests and staff of the temples where tera-​co-​working frequently had been taken place. The author took over 500 photographs during his visits to the temples. These helped with the interviews and the interpretation of the data. 2   The space of the temples was completely different from that of contemporary buildings in the city where the author spends time every day. The ceilings were high and the space were open. Glittering ritual ornaments and equipment coloured in gold and red leapt to the eye. Wooden pillars, shoji screens, and fusumas (sliding doors) formed the space quietly but surely. The scent of incense and tatami mats filled the space. After visiting each temple, I felt that I was in an unusual space every time I had breathed its air for a while. Unlike wooden or concrete floors, the tatami mats were elastic and gentle on my feet and legs. Every space was quiet, but I was satisfied without background music. Rather, it made me calm down. The air on my cheeks was wonderfully cool and refreshing. My posture was corrected naturally. I became more sensitive than usual to each and every one of my actions, but I did not feel any annoyance. Rather, it was comfortable to behave properly. I was terribly disappointed that the tera-​co-​working had been interrupted by Covid-​19, and strongly felt that I would definitely like to use these spaces after the project could be resumed.

658   Tadashi Uda Furthermore, LINKwith actively disseminated business information through blogs and social networking sites, and there were some articles reported in media such as magazines. In particular, the description on a blog offers auto-​ethnographic material. The representative and staff members introduced themselves, posted their feelings and thoughts about the company, detailed business information and activities, and photos and videos since its establishment. Organizing and understanding the detailed description before the interviews enabled the restriction of retrospective and reactive narratives and immediate confirmation of any errors in the interviewees’ memories (Kimura, 2018). These materials, such as fieldnotes, photographs, and the descriptive information supplemented the lack of observational research of the tera co-​working.

33.4  Production of Tera-​C o-​Working Spaces 33.4.1 Perceived Temple and Buddhism in Japan The oldest temple was built in the late 6th century. Since then, Japanese Buddhism has developed its own style. The basic management system of Japanese temples, which continues to this day, was institutionalized in the early 17th century (Inoue, 2010; Rowe, 2011). The Edo Shogunate introduced the system of danka (檀家), which means temple parishioner, to stabilize the administration and ban Christianity. The government forced the people to prove that they were not Christians and that they belonged to a temple somewhere. People were urged to become the danka of the particular temple that guaranteed their identity, and to establish long-​term relationships with the temple. Under this system, the temple was responsible for ancestral commemoration, funeral, and management of the danka’s graves, while the danka financially supported the construction and maintenance of temple buildings and other expenses. The danka system strengthened ties between the temple and the people and promoted the spread of Buddhism. This local historical system began fluctuating greatly due to various social changes after World War II, especially after the period of high economic growth (1960s) (Shimada, 2015; Ukai, 2015). With the change in industrial structure, the migration of the population from rural areas to cities became notable, and urbanization expanded. Many people left their parental home to work as businesspeople in the city, and the number of one-​person households and nuclear families increased. The basis of their livelihood was not the farmland inherited from their ancestors, but the companies that hired them, and their gratitude to their parents and ancestors came to diminish. Some of them began living in Western-​style single-​family houses or apartments that were smaller than traditional Japanese-​style houses in rural areas. It is not easy to find space for ancestral tablets and Buddhist altars in urban dwellings. With the progress of Westernization, the status of Japanese-​style rooms in which Buddhist altars are placed

Producing Organizational Space    659 has declined year by year in terms of room design. The loss of artefacts that remind us of our ancestors in our daily living space means that we have fewer opportunities to recognize and worship our ancestors, and the custom is disappearing. As a result, the relationship with the temples, connected by ancestors and graves, have become weak, and people have come to visit them to attend at most funerals and commemorations of their relatives. Naturally, they have correspondingly little interest in and knowledge of temples. In addition, with the recent spread of simplified rituals in urban areas, the number of people following this orientation has increased rapidly. In the Kanto region, which includes Tokyo, about a quarter of all funerals are chokuso (直葬), in which the body is cremated without the performance of conventional rituals. These social transformations threaten the temples’ survival. Since the main source of income for temples is funerals and memorial services based on the danka system, the simplification of these ceremonies could seriously threaten their source of income. However, it is extremely difficult to attract new danka members because the conventional relationship between the people and the temple is diminishing. There are only a handful of temples that have a large number of danka or make huge profits from tourism. Japanese temples are religious corporations, and chief priests are hired to serve as managers (not owners). The number of priests working to restore the status of temples and Buddhism and to create new profitable businesses has increased nationwide, especially since the 2000s (Otani, 2019). They strive to enhance the presence of temples and Buddhism in society through social activities. They have also launched various businesses, such as cafes, rental rooms, and care facilities. There are about 77,000 temples in Japan (the number of churches in France, where there are many Catholics, is about 45,0003). In the future, Japan will become a super-​ aging society, and the depopulation of the rural regions will become serious. It is said that in 2040, about half of the local governments and 30−40% of the temples may disappear (Ukai, 2015). While central and local governments have been working to find a solution to depopulation as a social issue since the 1970s, they have not provided noticeable support for temples as religious corporations. Therefore, the temples and the people voluntarily involved are attempting to survive through an accumulation of spatial practices that will affect people’s lived experiences. Tera-​co-​working, which we focus on in this study, represents one such attempt.

33.4.2 Co-​Conceived Temple: Spatially Transformed and Networked Temples ‘Grabbing both living and working’, this is the slogan of LINKwith, which was established in Yamanashi in August 2018. Ms Miyashita (hereinafter called Miyashita), 3 .

660   Tadashi Uda the representative, Ms Ushida (hereinafter called Ushida), and another founding member, respectively faced a stark choice between staying at home or taking up employment prior to the establishment of LINKwith. In Japan, the percentage of full-​time housewives remains high. The wage gap between men and women is large, and men’s participation in housework and childcare is low. These have been considered social, economic, and political problems for over thirty years at least. Miyashita and Ushida tried to resolve the conflicting goals of living and working by creating a co-​working space for adults and children. It is easy to open the space, but if there is no work, it will only be a social gathering space. Therefore, they recruited women from the surrounding areas who could not work for various reasons, such as raising children and caring for elderly family members. LINKwith started to receive orders from the surrounding companies etc., such as data entry and product monitoring, and began allocating these jobs to the registered women workers. They also made preparations to open a co-​working space and started ‘kozure-​co-​working’ (co-​working with children) in October 2018. Their business activities went well, and the number of registered workers increased to sixty-​five within four months. However, the residence of the workers began to spread throughout Yamanashi. Accessing their co-​working space was time-​consuming and difficult for those living in far-​flung areas. LINKwith tried to rent facilities for kozure-​co-​ working in several areas because they wanted to build a telecommuting business that directly understood the registered workers, but their funds were tight. Miyashita and Ushida were concerned about the cost of securing facilities for the co-​working. Miyashita confided in her acquaintance, Mr Wakatsuki (hereinafter referred to as Wakatsuki) about the situation. He suggested using his temple. Wakatsuki is the nineteenth head priest of the Saigenji Temple, which was founded in 1190. After graduating from university, he trained and became a priest. However, because his temple is located in a depopulated area, the number of danka is 170. To run a temple and earn a living, at least 300 danka are generally required. For that reason, he had been working as both a city hall staff member and as a priest for twenty years. However, in due course he retired from the city hall because he wanted to concentrate on his activity as a priest. At that time, a temple run by his relative had no successor and he decided to take it over. Consequently, as the total number of danka increased, he managed to earn a living. At a time when the social status of the temple was declining, Wakatsuki began rebuilding the relationship between the temple and the local community. He held camps and work sessions at the temple and established the ‘Social Temple’, an organization that developed social activities with other priests. For example, in cooperation with local residents, students, and various experts, he organizes the project ‘tera-​gohan (寺Go飯4)’, which they enjoy meals with neighbourhood children at the temple. These activities have not immediately and directly increased the number of his danka. However, he believes that in the medium to long term, these activities for children and 4  Tera-​gohan (寺Go飯) is a coined word by Social Temple. It has double meaning, that is, to ‘go’ to the tera (temple) and to have ‘go’han (ご飯, which means a meal in Japanese) at the temple.

Producing Organizational Space    661 adults who are not familiar with temples and Buddhism will benefit not only the temples in his areas but also the Buddhist world generally. Although Wakatsuki recommended using the temple as a co-​working space, the temple was not part of the staff ’s daily spatial experience. For them, the temple was a place used at most for ceremonies and funerals. Moreover, Miyashita did not want to preferably add any religious atmosphere to her company, because it could give a negative or shady impression on the neighbours and the potential registrants. She had no intention of changing the concept of kozure-​co-​working. She was more concerned about whether the children could feel relaxed in a temple room, where valuable artefacts were kept, and whether the parents, too, could feel at ease. Miyashita and other members visited the Saigenji with their children as a trial of kozure-​co-​working before starting the project. The children were excited to see the temple’s huge tatami room, which they had never experienced before. Miyashita and others were surprised by the children’s reaction. However, although Miyashita could not rid herself of her anxiety about the children’s behaviour in the temple, she decided to start the project; her intention was to stop the project if it did not go well. Wakatsuki began preparations to hold tera-​co-​working. He asked relatives and acquaintances who ran temples to rent the space for free. However, in lending temple space, there are expenses to be incurred, such as utility bills. In addition, if valuables such as Buddhist altar fittings and shoji screens were damaged, the cost of repairing them would not be cheap. Some chief priests demanded a usage fee, but LINKwith could not afford it. Moreover, due to the nature of telecommuting, a Wi-​Fi environment was also essential. Wakatsuki looked for available temples. Three months later, he finally received the support of fifteen temples across the prefecture, including a historic temple established in the early 8th century. Operationally networked, fifteen temples enabled Wakatsuki and LINKwith to regularly open tera-​co-​working. This is because they could select or flexibly change the venue of co-​working depending on each temple’s business schedule, such as a memorial service. This case of networked temples providing co-​working spaces is believed to be the first effort of its kind in Japan. For LINKwith, this is a spatial (re)organization of their business, and for Wakatsuki, it is a (re)organization of the local religious world. The tera-​co-​working project, co-​conceived by operators who were unfamiliar with the temple and the chief priests who supported them, began in June 2019. It was held every Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Registered workers could use the space for free; and drop-​in users could use it for 500 yen (with free drinks).

33.4.3 Lived Temple: Embodied Spatial Experiences Seen by Others Users who participated in tera-​co-​working for the first time usually visited the venue gingerly: they would often call the organizers’ mobile due to having no idea of where

662   Tadashi Uda to find the entrance to the temple. The operators did not expect that this has happened so often. Therefore, they put up a pink flag and a location map to mark the place for the tera-​co-​working. Even then some users were hesitant to enter the temple and rang to ask permission on their smartphones. When they arrived at the co-​working venue, some users felt there was a major gap between the traditional temple building and contemporary high-​tech products such as PCs and tablets, which were placed on the table. Most users would first look around and check for other participants. According to one user, once she had confirmed to herself that there were indeed many users of her age, she immediately relaxed and felt it would be okay for her (she was not in the minority, and, therefore, did not need to be so sensitive about the other participants). She sat down with formal words such as Hajimemashite (Nice to meet you). Although initially she was unable to communicate directly with other participants and mostly talked to the staff, as she visited more frequently, she got to know the other participants and felt able to discuss work as well as personal things. The temple is an everyday, normal space for the priest, Wakatsuki, but not for the users, who were unfamiliar with it. For that reason, they would sensitively perceive the temple space through their sight, smell, hearing, and touch, and would feel strongly positive emotions for the space, such as freshness, comfort, and tranquility. Unlike ordinary houses and office buildings, the ceilings here were high, the huge space that consisted of wooden pillars, tatami mats, and large windows conveyed a sense of openness. Through the windows, users could see the beautiful Japanese garden where trees, ponds, rocks, and gravel were elaborately arranged. The scent of the tatami mats and incense floating in the room were fresh and made them feel at peace. The temple had no background music and was separated from the surrounding buildings and streets, so it was enveloped in tranquility. The temple was cleansed and well-​ventilated every day. In addition, the artefact in the space called ‘tatami’ influenced the embodied practices of the users, and promoted relaxation and friendly communication. Historically, tatami mats have been at the foundation of Japanese lived spaces and life, described as okite hanjo, nete ichijo (起きて半畳, 寝て一畳), which is an idiom, expressing Japanese personal space size: waking in half tatami mat, and sleeping in a single tatami mat. From here, this idiom means knowing contentment. The yukaza (床坐) means sitting directly on the tatami mats or floor. This is a traditional Japanese behavioural style; it had been a common scene in ordinary households until the 1970s and 1980s. Later, the chances of touching tatami mats in daily life decreased and the practice of sitting in chairs increased.5

5  Compared to tatami mats, wooden/​concrete flooring is harder and does not have the function of controlling temperature and humidity. As a result of the gradual loss of the habit of sitting or lying down directly on the floor, the younger generation especially has less experience with the yukaza (床坐) and less flexibility for it in their hip joints and ankles (Yatabe, 2011).

Producing Organizational Space    663 Therefore, many users had fresh feelings for tatami mats. On the tatami mats, they spatially practiced various sitting styles, depending on the situation and relationships that arose in the temple. They sat on their heels in a formal situation, and stretched their legs or leaned back or raised their knees up when they got a little tired or lost their concentration. They sometimes even lay down. They sat with their legs bent sideways when communicating with a close person. When they talked to a person some distance away, they simply moved closer. In this way, they could flexibly adjust their postures and spatial distances from others. Each user behaved freely on the tatami mats, and these behaviours produced a relaxed and cozy atmosphere that allowed them to communicate harmoniously. Adults were not the only users of tera-​co-​working. As LINKwith advocates co-​ working with children, often there were several children. The children too were users and produced lived spaces. Today, Japanese children live farther from temples than do adults. The children were able to run around in these unusually large rooms with tatami mats, shouting, making noises with other children, and touching Buddhist equipment, such as fish-​shaped wooden drums. They saw the unfamiliar space of the temple as a playground. These embodied spatial practices of the children also allowed adult users to have positive attitudes towards tera-​co-​working. When a child runs around or makes noise at home, adults usually scold them, wishing to avoid causing inconvenience to their neighbours. In these tera-​co-​working spaces, however, the children’s behaviour was received kindly by the participants. Miyashita and the staff took care of the children while the parent used the space. The children’s lively behaviour, which was different from when they were at home, gave their parents a sense of comfort. As a result, they in turn felt able to be tolerant of other users. Moreover, they felt able to focus on their work and communication with the other participants instead of the children, which gave them a good break. Thus, the interrelationships between the children and the adults produced a fun, cozy, and relaxed atmosphere. Through tera-​co-​working, users gradually became familiar with the space of the temple. Consequently, they had very positive feelings about the vastness of the temples, tatami mats, and gardens, and bodily found the potential of the temple as a social and workspace. The users here included Miyashita, Ushida, and another staff member. Although they were the operators of the project, they produced the lived spaces as participants as with the users. However, the number of users was still much lower than they had expected. On average, there were several users, including children, but on some occasions there were only one to two participants. In August 2019, the number of workers registering with LINKwith was approximately 200: they could not neglect the problem of the number of the users, considering not only the management of their company, but also the temples that provided the rooms for free. The operators offered various workshops and events, such as transcription, design, zazen, and yoga. They also changed the day of the week. Moreover, they undertook the media coverage such as television and newspaper, and tried to disseminate

664   Tadashi Uda tera-​co-​working. However, the number of users increased only slightly, and not as they had expected. Registered workers and local residents of each tera-​co-​working spaces gave the following reasons for not regularly attending co-​working. • First, it was not uncommon to be suspicious about religious activities—​for example, one user said she was initially suspicious about the possibility of a solicitation or a donation request when she saw the advert about tera-​co-​working. • Similarly, people were sceptical of home-​based work and of the small company LINKwith that had no corporate office. At that time, the concept of telecommuting was even less well-​known in Yamanashi than in big cities. Moreover, Yamanashi was originally a closed region, and the locals tended to be very cautious about accepting new things. When they heard that LINKwith was arranging home-​based work, they suspected that it was a scam related to either gaining membership registration or selling information products. • Most users had no interest in or knowledge about the temple. It was not uncommon for users not to remember the names and exact locations of the temples they had visited. • Many registered workers were hesitant to take their children to the temples, which were full of valuables and fragile items. • Many of the venues where Wakatsuki negotiated and rented for free were remote and difficult to reach. This issue was unexpected for Miyashita and the staff. There was a perception gap between Miyashita, who had not known very much about temples and their locations, and Wakatsuki, who had been a priest for over twenty years and so taken the locations of the temples for granted. Compared to big cities such as Tokyo, Yamanashi has a less well-​developed railroad network and is a motorized society. As a result, traffic jams are frequent. The roads around the temples in the suburbs are narrow, and it is not easy for the users who are not good drivers to visit them. • The opening hours from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. were not sufficiently broad for the users. They asked operators to move the time schedule up or back, but it was difficult for the operators to handle tasks such as securing on-​site staff and coordinating their activities with temple events with the current number of staff. • In addition, most users were hesitant about relaxing in the sacred spaces, even though they were positive about the temples, which consisted of very large open spaces, tatami mats, and beautiful gardens. Although the operators made users feel comfortable and relaxed, users were still aware of the atmosphere of the temples and consciously and unconsciously controlled their spatial practices. According to one user, she was hesitant to eat and drink anything served in the temple. She had ambivalent feelings about this: ‘Adults should not eat and drink in the sacred space’; ‘It would be okay if I eat in secret (if it is not seen by others)’, even though her child was innocently eating sweets. In addition, she became strict about time. Although the staff members and the temple did not require the users to be punctual, she

Producing Organizational Space    665 made sure that she visited the temple a little after the starting time and left before the closing time. For her, these were spatial experiences unique to tera-​co-​working. These points demonstrate how difficult it was for the registered workers to enter the temples (as co-​working spaces), with the tera-​co-​working project highlighting the interrelated social, political, and economic issues. Miyashita, Wakatsuki, and other staff members tried to find practical solutions to these problems, but, with Covid-​19, they had to stop tera-​co-​working altogether in February 2020. They had still not resumed the project as of October 2021.

33.5  Discussion and Conclusion In tera-​co-​working, which took place in the non-​Western world, we find various interrelated aspects such as organization, economy, society, culture, and politics. The combination of the temples and the co-​working project has revealed several significant conflicting issues: work and family, men and women, online and offline, isolation and inclusion, regions and cities, conventional and contemporary, and sacred and secular. The holistic and historically detailed description (Kingma et al., 2018b) presented in this study is an attempt to fill this research gap in the literature. This study has theoretical significance in relation to the perspective presented by Lefebvre. First, this case study depicted the ‘co-​conceived space’. Wakatsuki, chief priest, had never heard of co-​working before he met Miyashita. On the other hand, Miyashita and others working for LINKwith, hardly knew about temples. However, they shared the knowledge and experience about temples and co-​working, and co-​conceived the space of tera-​co-​ working. For example, Dale (2005) and Zhang & Spicer (2014) mentioned that it tends to be individuals with strong authority and technical knowledge, or a highly homogeneous group who plan organizational spaces or buildings. This is consistent with Lefebvre’s assumptions and framework, which were influenced by Marxism. However, in some cases like this study, there are also differences in power and knowledge among planners. Therefore, we need to consider the detailed personal and group characteristics of such planners. In this regard, Lefebvre ([1974] 1991) assumed conflicts, divides, and separations between the planners of the conceived space and the users of the lived space. Accordingly, these studies basically considered the lived experiences of the users as presenting an undesirable resistance for the planners and tended to focus on the negative discrepancy between the users’ lived experiences and the planner’s space design. However, some of the discrepancies were positive. This study has demonstrated that co-​working users, who were not familiar with the temple, bodily found that the temple space was extremely suitable for working and social activities, because it had a large, open, refreshing space. In fact, providing the neighbours with the space for working and social interaction is part of the traditional and essential roles of the temple as a hub of the local community, which were widely recognized, especially in the Edo Period. Users bodily perceived the

666   Tadashi Uda direction to redefine the temple in current local society. This provided a positive shock, especially for Wakatsuki. Therefore, it would be meaningful to consider these unexpected positive aspects of the lived spaces. Regarding lived spaces, the existence of others as an enactment of visible-​invisible was highlighted (Merleau-​Ponty, [1964] 1968). The Buddhist objects that constitute the tera-​co-​working space glitter and stand out from a distance. People have fewer opportunities to see them in everyday life. Still, most users, with the exception of a few temple enthusiasts, were not interested in the artefacts, and basically made them invisible. However, when they interacted with the children in the rooms or saw the children moving around the place, this immediately made the artefacts visible. The reason for this is that the user, as a parent, was considering the artefacts as objects that could cause trouble in the surroundings as a result of the child’s inappropriate behaviour, such as through damaging or breaking tools and facilities. Namely, it would be useful to examine in detail not only the (in)visibility from the individual’s perspective, but also the (in)visibility that can arise from the situational togetherness with others. One of the directions to explore is how a user’s (in)visibility changes dynamically depending on relative relationships with (neighbouring) users in the same space. In addition, we have gained meaningful insights into the embodied spatial practices in the non-​Western world and the production of space based on them. Historically, Japan has not been rooted in monotheistic religions, such as Christianity. Thus, in a society where there is no absolute standard of value such as one God, one’s position is determined by relative relationships (Ueno, 2015). In fact, since ancient times, Japanese people have used the first person properly (e.g. watakushi (わたくし), watashi (わたし), boku (僕), ore (俺), and washi (儂), and even omitted it in some cases, depending on the position and circumstances (public or private, classy or vulgar). In the case of tera-​co-​working, at the beginning of her participation in the field, a user tried to find her appropriate position and attitude (not for herself, but for the situation) by using the formal greeting, Hajimemashite (Nice to meet you). In such a society, the body, which is the basis of space, is not only what can be seen ‘by me’ (Merleau-​Ponty, [1961] 1964), but also, as Nishida (1937) pointed out, what can be seen ‘by others’ (Yuasa, 1987). In addition, drawing on the conception of aidagara (being-​in-​relation-​to-​others) (Watsuji, 1942), the others can be others with sociality. The tera-​co-​working users in this study are keenly aware of ‘self ’ seen by collective eyes of social others in the space. This feature of the conception of the body is manifested as an extremely situational, detailed, and delicate use of words and behaviours according to a person’s position in their relationships. Based on these (un)conscious, embodied attitudes and behaviours, an atmosphere of a field is produced, and lived spaces are formed. One user of tera-​co-​working was a bit relieved when she realized after arriving at the space that there were participants of the same age as her. In her case, there was no information about the status and position of the other participants, and it was difficult to immediately find her relative position. Although she was unable to speak directly to other participants, by collecting fragments of the other participants’ personalities, she was able to gradually position herself and to communicate better with them.

Producing Organizational Space    667 Thus, in the process of producing atmosphere and lived spaces, the starting point is the recognition and judgement of one’s relative (social) relationship in the field and one’s position in it. This kind of incorporation of cognition and judgement can be said to be one of the major features of space production in this study, unlike in previous studies (de Vaujany et al., 2019) that presuppose ‘independent individual active participation’ in the field. In addition, the tatami mats as artefacts and yukaza (direct sitting on the floor) as a mode of sitting have mainly constituted the Japanese-​style space production for a long time. The kanji 坐 (za) represents the ‘shape’ or ‘movement’ of a sitting person. When 广 (madare) meaning house or roof had been added to 坐, 座 (za) came to mean a ‘place’ to sit on. The linguistic interpretation of 座 had been expanded from here to space and community where people gather, such as (trade) association 座 (za) and theatre, such as 歌舞伎‘座’ (kabuki-​za). Subsequently, 座 came to include the meaning of ‘texture/​feel of air’ and ‘atmosphere’. We have idioms, 座が和む (za ga nagomu), meaning the atmosphere of a field gets to be calm and mild. Namely, 座 also refers to the (produced) atmosphere floating through a field (Yatabe, 2011).6 In this way, we can find the characteristics of space production in Japanese culture from the symbols of characters and idioms. In fact, as confirmed in the case of tera-​co-​working, Japanese people have kept the way of thinking that the atmosphere of a field is produced through the synthesis of the embodied sitting style (determined by one’s position in the relative relationship), cognition, and feelings. Yatabe (2011) pointed out that this showed the uniqueness of the Japanese notion of body. As a result of the tera-​co-​working project, the psychological distance between the local population, including registered workers, and the temple became evident. In the process of social transformation, people lose their knowledge and interest in the temple’s space, and consider the temple as a space that is difficult to step into. However, some priests in Japan, like Wakatsuki, strive to preserve the temple and Buddhism by making efforts to build closer relationships with local people and by participating in solving social problems, although such activities may result in a loss of sacredness that the temple has historically cultivated. This study showed the lived experiences of a co-​working user, who was unfamiliar with the temple, based on her perception of the atmosphere of the space (and also based on her awareness of her body seen by others), and because of this perception she abstained from what she considered to be secular or impolite acts (e.g. eating/​drinking something and being unpunctual). Therefore, it can be said that the psychological distance between the people and the temple helps to maintain the sanctity of the temple. Although most users viewed the temples as inaccessible and unfamiliar places and spaces, they simultaneously perceived the space as extraordinary and evaluated it positively. If the temple became too familiar to people, the historical and spatial superiority 6  Therefore, it can be said that when we translate the term ‘space’ and ‘place’ from Japanese to English, the meaning of ‘atmosphere’, which is produced by situational and relative (social) relationships on the spot, is lost.

668   Tadashi Uda of the temple may be compromised. In recent years, some priests especially in big cities have tried to gain a competitive advantage by disclosing the prices offered by temples, such as for ceremonies and funerals, and thus exposing the hidden side of the sacred veil. Therefore, Japanese priests and temple organizations would need to find a way to overcome the trade-​off between creating a field where people can gather, and continuously producing a sacred veil (space). The future directions of this research are as follows. First, a more detailed understanding of the literature of the body and embodiment, not only in the Western world but also in the non-​Western world is required. In addition, empirical research focusing on the non-​Western embodied spatial practices is still scarce. We need to particularly draw on significant philosophical studies related to the body and spatiality (e.g. Nishida, 1927; Watsuji, 1935; Yamanouchi, 1974; Izutsu, 1983), when we explore the historical and contextual production of Eastern organizational space.

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Chapter 34

Organizing Re se a rc h Excell e nc e A Pheno-​Ethnomethodological Approach to Studying Organizational Identity at Research Centres in the Global South Juan Felipe Espinosa-​C ristia and Nicolás Trujillo-​O sorio

34.1  Introduction In the Global South, excellence research centres are an increasingly relevant organizational model for the promotion and development of advanced knowledge production and human capital formation. Thanks to the recent development of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation (MCTCI; its acronym in Spanish), Chile has decided to invest in the creation of Centres of Excellence, both to connect the country with international contexts and to advance towards a model of a knowledge society that can effectively integrate strategic knowledge in the public and private sector. Although these centres are autonomous organizations, their performance depends directly on the university institutions that operate as their sponsors, as well as on academic evaluation criteria defined by the competitive state funds that finance their implementation. In this sense, it is no coincidence that excellence research centres’ relative autonomy may go hand in hand with a lack of strategic management and administrative support processes that allow them to define and develop their organizational identity. Such identity production allows a centre to strategically and adequately articulate its resources and capabilities to generate services and products of scientific and social relevance. However, the centres’ scientific activities are guided by an academic notion of excellence, which requires high degrees of control, management, and the administration

Organizing Research Excellence    673 of many material and human resources. How can we understand the configuration of organizational identities in these centres without subsuming what appears in the scientific work processes to the normative expectations imposed by this notion of excellence? How can it be possible to transform the appearance of unexpected and heterogeneous events into an input to define the organizational identity of these centres? Or, in short, how can we understand these organizations from the inside out? These questions were central to a process of cultural change in a highly productive biomedical neuroscience research centre in Chile, from which we were able to examine their organizational identity through an ethnomethodological research method informed by phenomenological approaches. We began by thinking that our qualitative research would allow us to analyse how scientists make sense of their work and work identity, thus contributing to the understanding and management of the centre’s own organizational identity. The purpose of this chapter is to describe how we analysed the organizational identity of the Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI) using an ethnomethodological methodology that was informed by a phenomenological-​ hermeneutic approach. From this case study, we argue that the joint use of both methodologies allowed us to explore a central aspect of organizational identity in a systematic and qualitative way, namely, the relationship between the normative prescriptions of Centres of Excellence and the lived experiences of its members. Addressing organizational identity from the lived experiences of the organization’s members is a relevant topic for contemporary Management and Organizational Studies (MOS) (Czarniawska, 2016), because it makes it possible to understand how the organization informs and influences the sense-​making processes of its members (Garfinkel, 1967; Rawls, 2008; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020). This sense-​making process takes place in participants’ daily practices as a crucial part of their subjective processes of understanding their own ways of being scientists. It is in the very encounter between the organization and the lived experiences of the participants that identity formation processes take place, which are necessary both for the members to feel part of the institution and for the organization to realize its mission. We will show that taking into consideration the participants’ perceptions, feelings, moods, and general ‘disposedness’ (Befindlichkeit) was relevant to feel the organization in its process of organizing itself as an institutional entity. The plan of this chapter is as follows. In Section 34.2, we present the research context through a description of the Centres of Excellence in Chile and their relationship with the problem of organizational identity. In Section 34.3, we explain the relationship between phenomenological approaches and ethnomethodology in the context of MOS. In Section 34.4 we present a description of the phenomenological-​ethnomethodological methodology we employed to approach and analyse a Centre of Excellence in biomedical neuroscience. In Section 34.5, we present an interpretation of the organizational identity of the centre based on analysing the organization members’ discourses. Our interpretation describes how members’ moods and disposedness allows us to understand their openness to the relevant context of meanings that sustains their meaning-​making processes within the organization. Finally, in Section 34.6 we explain two contributions

674    Juan Felipe Espinosa-Cristia and Nicolás Trujillo-Osorio of our interpretation to the understanding and organizational management of the Centre of Excellence.

34.2  Excellence Research Centres in Chile Science, technology, knowledge, and innovation centres are knowledge-​production institutions financed by the state through competitive funds. Since the emergence of the first state programme for centres in 1994, ten new centre programmes have emerged, five of which belong to the MCTCI and another five to the Chilean Economic Development Agency (CORFO; its acronym in Spanish). Chile’s first science policy, leading the current administration of the MCTCI, defines these institutions as a pillar of the country’s future (MCTCI, 2020). For this reason, a sub-​directorate of centres has been created, and a National Excellence Research Centre Plan has been elaborated (MCTCI, 2021). The main objective of these ten state subsidy programmes is to build a science and technology ecosystem throughout the country, which can allow for the decentralization of knowledge production, the use of the natural comparative advantages of the country’s regions, the establishment of international cooperation networks to promote the exchange of professionals and knowledge circulation, and finally the construction of new institutions for the development of scientific careers. The objective, as can be seen, is ambitious, long-​term, and highly complex, considering the country’s low investment in research and development. The Millennium Science Initiative (MSI) has been the most successful programme for research centres in the last twenty years. The MSI project was created by the Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton in 1997. Its main goal was to build scientific and technological capacities in developing countries through cutting-​edge research centres (Science Initiative Group, 2019). After an initial conference held in Santiago de Chile in 1998, an international group of advisors recommended the creation of Chile’s first ‘action agenda’, to be developed in conjunction with the government of Chile and the World Bank’s Learning and Innovation Loan (Guimón, 2013). In 2000, the first MSI was launched as a public competitive instrument, which funded three MSI Institutes and five Nuclei Centres. Institutes receive four times more funding than Nuclei Centres and for twice as long. Also, they allocate double the number of associate researchers, four times more early-​career researchers, and five years of funding instead of the three for Nuclei Centres. The Chilean government created MSI with the specific objective of promoting and developing blue-​sky research in contemporary scientific disciplines. Such an objective was aligned with global institutions like the World Bank and its science for the knowledge economy project (World Bank, 2007). Since the beginning, the institutional pillars of MSI were academic excellence, the generation of networks, the training of advanced

Organizing Research Excellence    675 human capital, and outreach activities through science popularization and industry-​ oriented knowledge transfer. Millennium research institutes can receive financing for a period of ten years, plus three years of renewal. In natural and exact sciences, MSI is currently responsible for ten institutes, while in social sciences it is responsible for four. Those institutions make a total of forty-​five excellence research centres, which are concentrated mainly in the central regions of the country. Unlike its implementation in other countries, the Chilean implementation became a success story. At present, MSI represents 27% of the total number of centres in the country, and MSI is the best evaluated government programme in the country, ranking thirty-​fifth in Latin America (SCIMAGO, 2021). One of the main organizational challenges of the Millennium Institutes is to manage and control working environments that foster creativity and associativity among their members, as well as ensuring the quality of the processes, so that the results can be evaluated and valued in the current global system of the scientific community (Garrido et al., 2020). Those objectives are shared by other research centres of excellence around the world, as seen, for example, in Iranian Centres of Excellence in medical sciences (Damari et al., 2020). Since the Chilean Millennium Institutes are autonomous organizations, but housed in universities, a fundamental aspect of their work is to design and generate an organizational identity that is coherent with both their disciplinary mission and the local context. To this purpose, Millennium Institutes must build an organizational identity based on five evaluation criteria, as the application form of the last call for proposals clearly states (Bases de Presentación de Proyectos, 2020). The first two criteria concern the academic excellence of principal investigators and their research grant proposal. These two criteria are equivalent to 70% of the total value of the evaluation. The remaining 30% is divided equally into advanced human capital formation plans (10%), cooperation network plans (10%), and, finally, the management and organization plan (10%). Although the evaluation is consistent with the academic nature of the programme, it is necessary to acknowledge that the Millennium Initiative is not oriented towards financing individual research projects, but rather those of autonomous and administratively complex institutions. Consequently, every MSI centre must be able to manage its resources to satisfy different demands associated with frontier research, from the training of human capital, to the transfer of knowledge, and the eventual generation of scientific or technology-​based innovations. Each Millennium Institute must meet a strictly academic notion of excellence. Furthermore, justifying and managing centres from an academic notion of excellence has direct consequences on the organizational identity of these knowledge institutions. Like contemporary universities across the world, research practices of Millennium Institutes are affected by the new public management logic associated with the current idea of excellence (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Arthur, 2016). To this purpose, the current management model privileges the production of one type of product, namely, the publication of scientific papers in high-​impact journals, over other services or products that may be derived from scientific work. In this regard, it has been shown that

676    Juan Felipe Espinosa-Cristia and Nicolás Trujillo-Osorio this management model can affect the organizational identity of knowledge institutions, included the Millennium Institutes, in at least three ways. These three ways are, among other things, the sense of belonging of the members, as it subjects them to unstable, uncertain, and demotivating working conditions and environments (Gill, 2009; Clarke et al., 2012; Knights & Clarke, 2014). Thus, taken together, these organizational challenges hinder the design and management of work atmospheres (Jørgensen & Holt, 2019) conducive to the development of creativity, associativity, and care for production processes and tasks in this kind of excellence research centres. In this sense, the organizational identity of institutions like Millennium Institutes suffers today from a paradoxical situation. Faced with the duty to produce high-​impact and quality scientific results, workers are compelled to show excellence although their work evolves in a vulnerable work environment, where uncertainty and job instability can often generate self-​doubt in scientific staff, ranging from experiencing a difficulty in feeling part of the organization to an ultimate abandonment of their scientific career (Vayreda et al., 2019), which is a particularly salient outcome in the case of early-​and middle-​career scholars (}; Herschberg et al., 2018). In this respect, international organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD) have pointed out that academic excellence is a central factor for research organizations, but it certainly cannot be their only organizational model or guide (OECD, 2021). As recent phenomenological and ethnomethodological literature in MOS has suggested, a relevant alternative to understanding how these organizational challenges affect the identity of knowledge institutions is to study the forms in which different members make sense of their scientific being and practices in these contexts (Von Lehn, 2018; Gill, 2020). Given that organizational identity depends directly on the practices, actions, and daily contributions of its members, observing how they live and experience the organization may allow us to analyse the ways in which they make sense of their situation. From such analysis we look to describe how such institutions organize their own identities under the current rules of the academic game. This requires methodological approaches and qualitative analysis techniques for describing in detail the ways in which the members of these organizations respond to normative demands, while making sense of their own place and function as scientists.

34.3  From Phenomenology to Ethnomethodology and Back Phenomenological perspectives have been of great interest in the social sciences (psychology, health education, anthropology) because they provide conceptual frameworks to help us focus, describe, and specify structural or essential aspects of our conscious

Organizing Research Excellence    677 experience. These perspectives enable us to characterize in detail the different kinds of conscious experiences that shape and organize subjective and intersubjective processes of sense-​making in a particular context. In other words, the application of phenomenology contributes towards understanding how diverse agents inhabit, understand, and nurture their contexts of meaningfulness and action. In this sense, it has been argued that the conceptual richness and systematic nature of phenomenological perspectives can also be useful for MOS, as they provide methodological access to a broad spectrum of topics that are of interest for the analysis of organizations, and which have traditionally been less well-​addressed in the tradition of this literature (Sanders, 1982; Gill, 2014, Roelsgaard, 2020). Some examples of inquiries using phenomenology that can be found in MOS relate to temporality (Biesenthal et al., 2015); atmospheres and their aesthetic understanding of organizations (Julmi, 2017); embodiment and cognition processes (Gärtner, 2013); creativity management (Schaefer, 2019); and even ways of fearfully inhabiting organizations (Gill & Burrow, 2018). Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology has also been helpful to understanding organizations and describing how participants maintain order and make sense of their actions in specific contexts, and even in situations in which norms are or may be violated (Von Lehn, 2016). As Eberle (2012: 141) has commented, Garfinkel’s question of order, meaning, and sense-​making is thus central to understanding organizations, for it allows us to explain ‘social order not by normative but by constitutive rules and by sense-​making’. In his well-​known Studies (1967), Garfinkel demonstrates how participants design and make sense of their actions by using rules and several background expectancies. Garfinkel understands rules and background expectations as ‘the socially standardized and standardizing, “seen but unnoticed”, expected, background features of everyday scenes’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 36). Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological project makes use of two underlying studies to approach the terrain of actions and practices (Lynch, 1993; Von Lehn, 2016): the ethnomethodological studies of workplaces and conversation analysis. Both workplace studies (Luff et al., 2000; Heath et al., 2000; Rawls, 2008) and conversation analysis (Nielsen, 2009; Llewellyn & Hindmarsh, 2010; Greatbatch & Clark, 2017) are well-​ known approaches in MOS. The former took its starting point from several ethnographic investigations, and it uses the resource of indexical linguistic expressions (Hughes & Tracy, 2015) to analyse actions and practices. This has been particularly useful in understanding specific and traditionally neglected situations, such as how a transgender person struggles to produce her membership in the female category in medical or forensic organizations (Garfinkel, 1967), or how the ordinary and everyday production of scientific methods in laboratories affect and determine narratives about what is and is not valid science (Doing, 2008). Thus, based on the conversations and observations that took place in laboratories, ethnomethodological studies have produced influential results about the daily functioning of organizations, especially in knowledge-​ production organizations, because they show among other things the importance of worldly competences in realizing goals or solving processes that can determine the

678    Juan Felipe Espinosa-Cristia and Nicolás Trujillo-Osorio success or failure of scientific agendas (Garfinkel et al., 1981; Lynch, 1985, 1997; Doing, 2008; Sormani, 2016). These studies of knowledge-​producing organizations will be an important precursor to what we present in this chapter. The latter programme, known as conversation analysis, has been developed from Garfinkel’s work with his colleague Harvey Sacks and it exploited the capabilities of audiotape recording to study in detail the ‘natural’ or ‘spontaneous’ social activities of people, using indexical expression as a basis. While the focus on language and modes of speech has been useful in MOS, it has recently been argued that the focus on indexical expressions has motivated various scholars to presuppose that ‘logos’ is nothing more than a linguistic way of representing the world. In effect, by focusing solely on language, scholars doing workplace studies wish to move towards a grammar, in the hope of someday characterizing, systematically and abstractly, how speakers coordinate and generate with logical coherence during conversations (Lynch, 1993: 25). This intensity and focus on language and the order that emanates from it has led to what Shapin & Schaffer (2011) define as a mechanic for the construction of facts (cited in Lynch, 1993: 254). In this sense, recalling the phenomenological foundations of ethnomethodology allows us to confront this positivist view, which reduces the logos to an analytical problem, ignoring thus its holistic and meaning-​producing character. In this respect, Liberman (2011) has suggested that, to study the common life of organizations, we must again take refuge in the ‘principle of all principles’, whose formulation, however, he does not take from Husserl (1983: 44), but from Heidegger: to make the life of an organization appear ‘from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself ’ (Heidegger, 1996; Liberman, 2011: 68). In other words, it is from the reencounter with phenomenology and with its various contemporary developments, that ethnomethodology will be able to go beyond the syntactic structures of language, to find the space of meanings and the contexts of meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit) that different organizations configure to recognize and define their members in the light of their own interests and identity.

34.4  Feeling the Organization Organizational identity has recently become a central topic in MOS with a high potential for the application of phenomenological approaches (Gill 2014, 2020, Roelsgaard 2020; Sanders, 1982, Von Lehn, 2018). Following this recent suggestion from scholars in MOS, in this chapter we will study a case in which organizational identity is particularly challenging, namely, the case of excellence research centres in Chile (Section 34.2). This way of proceeding allows us to approach our data produced using ethnomethodology in greater depth, as the focus is not only on the indexical elements, but also on the way of flowing of the conversations and discourses of the actors that make up the organization. Our pheno-​ethnomethodological approach looks in detail at one aspect of organizational identity of BNI, namely, the relationship between the normative framework of

Organizing Research Excellence    679 the organization and the ways in which their scientists make sense and produced their identity based on their own practices, expectations, and concrete work opportunities therein. This aspect is relevant because it allows us to understand organizational identity beyond its abstract or ideal character (Von Lehn, 2019). As we shall see, organizational identity appears as a task to be accomplished in and through the encounter and working contact between the members of the organization. In this sense, we argue that organizational identity depends on the unceasing task of realizing a work environment on the base of the practices, actions, and eventual proposals of its members. This process of retrospective and prospective accounting (Garfinkel, 1967) is centrally related with the stories that persons working at the research centre tell each other (Clegg et al. 2007). Those stories are embedded in the practices and actions of the centre members. Thus, rather than being an empty signifier, organizational identity is constantly nourished by processes of self-​knowledge and self-​questioning, which are informed by the lived experiences and the sense-​making processes of the members who, day by day, must re-​present the organization in different circumstances (Gill, 2014; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020). This methodological approach leads to a result where the scientist identity emerges in identity work perspectives, where selves are reflexive, and identities are created in social interaction and are a fundamental aspect of any organizing process (Brown, 2021). As our literature review section suggests (Section 34.3), phenomenological approaches serve primarily to inform, guide, and analyse the ethnomethodological data (Gill 2014, 2020; Von Lehn 2019). In Section 34.3, we show that this is possible thanks to the common orientation of phenomenology and ethnomethodology towards facticity and everyday experiences that shape our ways of inhabiting, understanding, and making sense of the meanings inherent in each environment. To analyse the organizational identity of BNI, we employ a phenomenological-​hermeneutic perspective based on the concepts of disposedness, misplacedness, mood, complex of relevance, dwelling, and discourse. These Heideggerian concepts describe fundamental hermeneutic conditions of sense-​making in significant contexts impregnated with socio-​cultural traditions and ways of representing the environment (Heidegger 1969; Gill 2020). Thus, these concepts afford the possibility of specifying the problem of organizational identity in view of the relationship between the institution and the ways its members make sense of their own being as scientists. The first step in our methodology was to hold immersion meetings with the Culture and Communication (C&C) unit of BNI. These meetings were relevant as a starting point, as they allowed us to present our interests as researchers, as well as to get to know the interests of the organization itself. Specifically, during these sessions we not only gained relevant support in terms of access to specific spaces, but we also managed to generate a context of mutual collaboration. In this sense, and from the very beginning, our approach allowed us to generate a more empathetic and closer disposition to the organizational environment, without assuming our own prejudices about the research field beforehand. Such is the approach that ethnomethodology suggests, trying to understand the actor’s point of view. Such an approach was crucial to highlight relevant issues

680    Juan Felipe Espinosa-Cristia and Nicolás Trujillo-Osorio about organizational identity, such as the organization’s difficulties and the feelings of its members. Our second step consisted in participant observations and semi-​structured interviews, which took place between March 2019 and November 2020. We observed the daily functioning of the organization in two kinds of space: research communication events for the members and laboratory work. When possible, we established open conversations with different members to learn by hearing any interests, expectations, and perceptions that they chose to make available to us. We proceeded by recording most of the conversations and taking detailed notes of our observations, as any detail can be of importance when one is trying to understand the mechanics of sense-​making of those that participate, in this case, in the research centre. We based our analytic process on two dimensions, the organizational and personal identity—​as the subjective experience of the members. These two dimensions led us to delve deeper into emerging concepts or topics of interest that arose in view of our methodological approach and to conduct preliminary analyses of our data. We used these analyses to design semi-​ structured interviews to delve into specific aspects about organizational identity. This was particularly important at the research centre, because the effort required was particularly great, with the practices of scientists and technicians being decidedly complex, full of tricks of the experimental trade. For the data analysis, we paid attention to three aspects. First, we decided to recognize that the researcher’s viewpoint should not put in suspension (epoché) the set of presuppositions and meaning contexts that frame the discourse and actions of the members (Husserl, 1983: 60; Gill, 2014, 2020). Instead of seeking to isolate the essence of scientific practice and the scientific through imaginative variations informed by data comparison, we instead adopted a reflexive position to focus on how participants’ discourses bring to the fore the contexts that give meaning to their ways of being scientists. As we have pointed out, ethnomethodology allows us to approach the practices and actions of an organization through the conversations and discourses of its members. Through the phenomenological-​interpretative approach, we sought to reconstruct, from these same discourses, the ways in which members make sense of the organization and its identity as an excellence research space of knowledge production. To this end, we analysed various discourses based on the sense-​making structure proposed by Heidegger (1996). For Heidegger, to ‘make-​sense’ of one’s own being requires an action or movement that is gestated in the daily encounter with a context of meaningfulness. This approach to ‘make-​sense’ is remarkably analogous to Garfinkel’s members’ sense-​ making in any organization (Garfinkel, 1967). In our case, the context was provided by the research centre through its various activities and facilities. At the research centre, members were used to recognizing complexes of relevance that could affect their disposedness in the institution, whenever they felt challenged, involved, or invited to open themselves to the space afforded by the organization. In the very flow of these members’ discourses, we found experiences, memories, feelings, and other subjective dispositions that articulated a dynamic and diverse level of reflection. It is in those subjective dispositions and reflection that their own being-​a-​scientist can make sense and resonate in different ways. To be more precise, we focused on the positive and negative

Organizing Research Excellence    681 intentionality of the discourses. By turning our gaze to the positive and negative intentionality of members’ discourses, we identified how speakers’ disposedness and mood were disclosed in the complexes of relevance afforded by the organization. Further, and in parallel, we analysed the appearance of feelings, perceptions, expectations, and ways of feeling comfort or discomfort in the organizational environment of the centre.

34.5  Making Sense of Scientists at Work From our pheno-​ ethnomethodological approach we distinguish three relevant moments to characterize, and describe how the relationship between the organization and its members was meant and enacted at BNI: our entry into the organization; our dwelling in relevant spaces to understand its organizational identity; and, finally, our own way of feeling and interpreting speakers’ discourses regarding their sense-​making processes about scientific work and practices. In doing so, we propose to show how an organization dedicated to blue-​sky research has frameworks of meaningfulness that nourish their members’ sense-​making processes. In the flow of discourses, we listen, empathize, and distinguish the disposedness, openness, and dwelling of the members in the organization. To do so, we selected discourses that reveal the lived experience of being a scientist in the organization. Thus, the following interpretation suggests that members’ felt and understood the centre’s organizational identity as having a plural horizon, which suggested possible paths to be explored out of the singular encounter between members.

34.5.1  Entering BNI is a research centre of excellence with eleven years of experience (2010−21). Thanks to its high productivity rates (Synthesis, 2019; Análisis de Centros, 2021), BNI was positioned in the local context as representing a frontier research space in the field of neuroscience. During its second term (2015−20), BNI’s board invested part of its budget in a C&C area. The aim of the board was to move the centre towards a more situated and diverse understanding of its organizational identity. Such an identity would lead the centre to generate new products or services and to explore potential areas of scientific work. As we have pointed out, this was a double challenge for the centre. On the one hand, local scientific cultures maintain a considerable distance from other non-​ academic institutions. On the other hand, the centre is composed of seventeen different laboratories and, in turn, must hold an institutional relationship with its host—​a public university. For these reasons, during our first immersion meeting the director of the C&C area described the task of developing this area as in the following terms:

682    Juan Felipe Espinosa-Cristia and Nicolás Trujillo-Osorio Emm, no, [the director] told me ‘do create a culture area’, and I said ‘ah and how do you do that’, ‘no, I don’t know’, ‘ah cool’, what a fun challenge, and then there were some conversations about what motivated me or what projects were available and what could be done that motivated me in this area of culture and communications. (Director C&C)

Here, the director of the C&C area understands the task as representing a difficult yet stimulating challenge. Although she did not have any clear idea about what or how to accomplish this mission, she experienced it as a way of intervening in the organization’s entire culture. Nonetheless, at another point during our conversation she described the notion of ‘culture’ as follows: What I had, I believe we had one, that is, when we talk about creating culture, for me, culture is basically everything, it’s the relationships, it’s the norms that . . . how one feels, how one thinks, how one lives, for me it’s everything, so in the whole of how one lives . . . ehm . . . science is there too. (Director C&C)

Here, the C&C area director describes the notion of culture as a broad and encompassing concept—​that is the way members ‘live’ among themselves and in view of the institutional norms settled by the board. She describes culture as a pervasive ‘whole’, feeling that her challenge is relevant and represents a potentially radical experience for the entire organization. Indeed, since the director understood culture as the set of expectations, values, norms, and rights of the research community, it seemed to us that she wished to extend the question about the centre’s organizational identity beyond the academic framework of excellence. To better understand the role of the C&C area, she recommended us to regularly attend two of their activities. Those activities were redesigned in view of her new challenge, therefore, in attending those meetings we could know and generate possible strategies to understand and characterize the culture she was trying to change. The first activity consisted of weekly talks on general skills for scientific practice and career development. These skills ranged from project formulation to effective communication techniques to explain scientific results for different audiences in different contexts. In the activity, members listened to an invited speaker and then participated in a question-​and-​answer session. The second activity consisted in weekly talks on members’ current research projects. Here, a researcher presents her investigation based on four general questions, orienting the presentation towards a broad and general audience. After the presentation, members shared foods and drinks, which turned the session into a more relaxed conversation. Initially, she told us, both activities were meant to present the research of principal investigators in an academic and very formal style. However, she decided to transform these contexts into meeting spaces, that is, instances in which the focus was not on the specific researchers’ topics, but on what she called the ‘whole’ behind scientific work. In other words, the director envisioned both spaces as offering a platform to let the scientific ‘life’ of members appear in all its significant yet traditionally silenced diversity.

Organizing Research Excellence    683 As the director pointed out during our first immersion meeting, she believed that generating more human contact between the members would allow her to see and ‘feel’ what was happening at the centre, but which was not easily visible. Thus, from our place as observers, it seemed to us that these spaces were useful in terms of understanding how BNI affords and unfolds contexts of meaningfulness for their members and how they got involved with the organization itself from their own interests and daily practices.

34.5.2  Dwelling During the discussions and conversations among members that took place during the C&C activities, we observed that members presented their relationship with the organization as an institutional extension enabled by their academic affiliation to one of the seventeen BNI-​affiliated laboratories. Instead of describing with an abstract designation, members seemed to acknowledge it as a symbolic extension of themselves, for it authorizes them to inhabit a context of potential benefits and facilities to pursue their individual lines of work. For example, many members mentioned to us how BNI gives them the possibility to use equipment and seminar rooms; and how BNI offers opportunities to attend exclusive academic events such as talks and national or international conferences. In return, they didn’t question the fact that belonging to BNI meant a duty to declare this affiliation in any of their academic results, whether in scientific or non-​scientific publications. Although the designation of excellence emerged in members’ discourses as a quality stamp or seal, they also recognized this designation as being somewhat restrictive, for it does not seem to go beyond a tacit, unrestricted respect for the formal evaluation, monitoring, and assessment criteria that usually appear in grant application forms, such as that of MSI or of other national and international research funds. Similar experiences were commented on regarding the area of neuroscience. During a conversation we had with a group of members in a C&C’s talk, a researcher working on cell mechanics exclaimed that at BNI ‘they assume that neuroscience is like the glue for everyone and everything, but it’s not like that’. Although the centre promotes a biomedical approach to neuroscience that was oriented towards the generation of basic and applied research, members emphasized that the number of laboratories allocated to this field did not allow them to speak nor feel a common or shared context in practice. The same researcher also commented that studies in neuroscience sometimes seemed to him to be seen as a general commodity existing to respond to the personal interests of the board, who were certainly doing neuroscience yet from different angles and ways of understanding the discipline. Other members characterized this situation as an unsurmountable gap between two worlds—​a ‘macro’ neuroscientific world, concerned with systemic questions related to the study of cognition and the brain, and a ‘micro’ neuroscientific world, mainly concerned with many highly specific cellular mechanisms and biological processes related to behaviour and the brain. As one group of researchers indicated in a focus group organized by the C&C area, once you have BNI’s affiliation ‘you feel that

684    Juan Felipe Espinosa-Cristia and Nicolás Trujillo-Osorio you are part of BNI, but you are not relevant. You need to feel a sense of stability by joining BNI, to feel that you really matter’. As this researcher’s point suggests, members expected that this ‘sense of stability’ in the organization should come from practices that concerned them all, and not solely from the formal prescriptions established by contracts, research projects, grants, or any other specific yet transient service members may offer to individual experimental procedures or research activities. The more we listened to members, the more they began to see that academic belonging at BNI could become a blurry experience, even to the point of individual members sometimes losing their sense of reference, meaning, or value. As the previous extract shows, the lack of a shared orientation did affect the sense of ‘stability’ in the organization. Certainly, what members designated as stability in the context of the focus group did not relate to the value of the products or service they may offer. Rather, it related to a sense of being valued, in order to then value the opportunity and necessity of fostering a way of being-​in and feeling-​part-​of the organization itself. In this respect, another group of researchers stressed that ‘there is a lack of a sense of belonging because people do not feel contained by BNI, which leads to stress and lower productivity’. What does it mean then to belong to an organization made up of seventeen different laboratories? How do members dwell in a space that apparently exists in between these individual laboratories? As it is well-​known, a sense of belonging is not a homogeneous property in research organizations such as BNI. In fact, belonging depends on the long-​standing tradition of academic hierarchies, which was passed on to BNI due to its relationship with the host university. Traditional academic hierarchies influence the way members inhabit and make sense of their place in an organization, as it motivates them to perform different actions, to pursue different goals, and to approach matters of interest from different angles. In this respect, we could observe that academic hierarchies had a major impact on members’ disposedness towards BNI. Laboratory managers, for example, described their belonging in view of concrete and immediate matters of interest, such as registering the daily use of technological equipment, coordinating internal laboratory activities, or controlling the stock of supplies. Postdoctoral researchers described their belonging to BNI in view of medium-​or long-​term professional projections. Therefore, they were disposed towards BNI as to a transit zone in which they might or might not find the opportunity to continue, somehow, their scientific careers. Undergraduate and postgraduate students, whose belonging was particularly related to formative activities such as seminars, lab meetings, and experimental procedures evaluated by different supervisors, experienced BNI as from with a more ‘vertical’ relationship, which a group of graduate students emphasized during a conversation that took place at one of the C&C’s events: ‘what we don’t like is the verticality between principal investigators and students. The students’ opinions are not considered by the boards’. As the passage shows, students may feel that dwelling in BNI is far more difficult for them, since they are traditionally identified as the latest representatives of a long and old line of people who share a scientific vocation.

Organizing Research Excellence    685 Now, the spaces designed by the C&C area did not only enable us to distinguish, catalogue, and compare the ways in which academic hierarchies habitually influence members’ sense of belonging at BNI. Here, we also could listen and observe how the dynamic flow of unusual discourses about scientific work and scientific identities orchestrated silently yet shared representations of BNI’s institutional identity. In the flow and exchange of discourses among members, lapses of encounter and recognition emerged, which seemed to interpret and make sense of BNI’s affiliation beyond the presupposed frameworks of traditional academic hierarchies. In this respect, a postdoctoral researcher described the C&C area’s activities in the following terms: Logically, [the space for C&C activities] is much more than scientific, because if you want to know about science you can, I don’t know, you can read the articles of each researcher and that’s it. This thing has more to do with getting to know each other, being in contact [ . . . ]. That is, it goes beyond in the sense of developing that we interact as . . . as beings, let’s say, do you understand me, and not, and not to become idiotic in the laboratory work, which is very solitary in general, scientific work, sometimes it becomes very lonely . . .

Here, the participant described the space afforded by the C&C area as an instance that transcends ‘the scientific’. Certainly, she refers to just one part of the scientific work—​the individual work at the laboratory bench, in which the researcher is mainly driven by the task of conducting finely grained experimental practices, to reach results worthy of publication and appreciation in the scientific community. Without neglecting the unquestionable value of this practice in the lives of scientists, the participant valued interactions that transcended academic hierarchies, as they enable members to appear as ‘beings’ to be known. Furthermore, interacting from shared and embedded experiences seems to be necessary for the speaker to cope with the common risk of becoming ‘idiotized’, that is, the spontaneous disposition of losing oneself in the solitude of everyday individual work. In this respect, the researcher explains his words as follows: There are laboratories that have mathematicians, physicists, but within them, the mathematician is going to sit at the computer and generate . . . he is going to work on his program, do you understand me, and he is not going to talk to anyone else all day, then later they will have a scientific meeting where the guy will say yes, yes I analyzed it and I got 2, perfect, then the biologist will take the 2 and will say then I have to add 2, do you understand me? So, they are like islands at the end, you know, and that’s not so good, because you start to lose a little bit of connection.

As the participant points out, solving scientific problems always demands teamwork between different scholars and scientists. However, this does not mean that scientific practices may not become routine tasks that end up closing off the possibility of having more horizontal, shared, and creative dialogues between teammates. No matter how inter-​or multidisciplinary practices are, they can be equally disconnected. In this sense,

686    Juan Felipe Espinosa-Cristia and Nicolás Trujillo-Osorio the speaker emphasizes the fact that ‘losing a bit of connection’ is an essential aspect of scientific work. Therefore, it should be considered with greater care and attention. If this is the case for excellence research organizations such as BNI, how can ‘interactions with connection’ between members be safeguarded and encouraged? The same researcher characterized this kind of interactions as follows: ‘There will be teachers or other students who will challenge you with scientific questions and that is quite good, beyond reading the papers, the articles of the scientists here, but it is how you develop critical thinking . . . and I think it is useful for us’. Here, the scientist describes the experience of ‘interactions with connection’ being a kind of ‘challenge’. The value of this challenge coincides with the possibility of opening oneself up to dialogues that may call into question the ways in which science is done, but also the ways in which members presuppose what is and what is not worthy of scientific attention. Thus, the researcher speaks of the emergence of a space for ‘critical thinking’, the usefulness of which radically transcends the routine tasks and the achievements of scientific work. Just as this researcher characterized the challenge of ‘interactions with connection’ with the example of questions, other members characterized it in view of other lived experiences. Further, a postdoctoral researcher in computational neuroscience emphasized that C&C activities opened him up to the challenge of creating cross-​cutting vocabularies between scholars from different branches of neuroscience, to learn to identify specific problems, the resolution of which yet might be mutually beneficial. For him, noisy data was a good example of ‘connection’, because neuroscientists rely on data produced by algorithms to build visualizations of neural activity that allow them to interpret cognitive or behavioural phenomena of interest. Finally, graduate students saw the challenge as the task of strengthening the excellence standards of products and services that have traditionally been considered secondary or of less relevance in academia—​for example, science communication, knowledge-​transfer services, educational services, and teaching. Thus, by dwelling in the spaces afforded by the C&C area, we found different forms of disposedness towards the meaning of scientific work and BNI’s organizational identity as an excellence research centre. A relevant finding was that members’ disposedness did not necessarily presuppose a renouncing of academic canons. Rather, by reflecting on their lived experiences, members emphasized the need to update and diversify these canons. Such academic diversification could serve to help us ponder and effectively assess the many possibilities afforded by their own skills, work, and interests. Furthermore, when members talked about how to face the challenge of doing more ‘interactions with connection’, BNI appeared in their discourses as a sympathetic organization, willing to strengthen the heterogeneity of the scientific work. But just as the space orchestrated by these activities encouraged the translation of an academic affiliation into a complex set of new experiences of contact, recognition, and encounter, the very same space in C&C activities put into question the ways in which members imagined ‘the common’ to all of them. In certain a way, the area director’s initial concern to understand the ‘whole’—​the organizational ‘culture’ and identity of the centre—​is now also shared by the members. So, how did members receive and feel this concern? How did they suggest approaching and moving towards an organization that

Organizing Research Excellence    687 values and integrates ‘interactions with contact’, in accordance with its own frameworks of excellence?

34.5.3 (Common) Feeling Once members became accustomed to inhabiting the spaces of the C&C area, they seemed increasingly willing to feel and see their own work beyond the symbolic and material limits of their respective laboratories. In a certain sense, their actions no longer seemed to be conducted in and from an individual space, but in and from a complex of relevance that enabled them to value the heterogeneity of the scientific life within BNI. In this respect, members’ discourses began to describe their encounters and weekly meetings in the C&C activities in terms of a new work atmosphere. In such an atmosphere, members did not experience the distance between their laboratories anymore. Rather, the distance they once felt increasingly gave way to a sense of a place of their own—​an institutionally legitimized space that invites members to meet each other with a shared feeling of something in ‘common’. In this respect, in one of the C&C activities, a group of adjunct researchers highlighted the following reflection: It is necessary to maintain the differentiating elements of our institute towards the scientific community and society, that is, impact on education, development of technologies, high-​level science, and projection of capabilities. In addition, we consider the establishment of a leadership project that endorses (vise) the collective good over personal interests as a fundamental aspect.

As the quote reveals, members felt the atmosphere of commonality as representing a sense of concern or a ‘need’ to secure and take care of the institutional connection among the whole spectrum of laboratory cultures at BNI. Since they described the atmosphere as a necessity, they seemed to assert that the organization must move towards building organizational practices that have not yet been designed, let alone made visible before. However, and perhaps for this very reason, they also suggested that it is ‘fundamental’ that the centre’s board becomes aware of this atmosphere as ‘legal’ matter—​by using words such a ‘leadership’, ‘endorses’,1 and ‘collective good’, the speakers certainly expressed the need to legitimize, authorize, and promote the ‘common’ as representing an encompassing dimension of scientific concern, above any ‘personal interests’. Promoting this commonality, a group of lab managers characterized this shared feeling as follows: ‘BNI must function as a whole and NOT as the sum of laboratories. A support network is needed’. Creating a common work atmosphere cannot be understood as a merely ‘sum[ming]’ of parts. By using the metaphor of the ‘support network’, 1  The speaker used the Spanish verb ‘visar’, which literally means to authorize a document to be valid. In Chile, this verb is usually employed to refer to the act of checking and authorizing passports at national borders.

688    Juan Felipe Espinosa-Cristia and Nicolás Trujillo-Osorio they instead claimed that BNI should gather its laboratories with a prioritization of common well-​being. In fact, unlike the idea of a sum, the idea of a ‘support network’ refers to a system dynamic, adaptable, and with emergent interconnections based on the possibilities offered by the environment itself. In the absence of specific organizational referents or models for imagining ‘the common’, C&C activities members shared different ways of imagining and valuing the working conditions that such a ‘support network’ should guarantee. Adjunct researchers and lab managers, on the other hand, emphasized the need to create new organizational arrangements, such as software to store and manage the use of technical equipment, or software to catalogue the entire archives of the institution, so that all members can learn from what has been done or what can be done at BNI. Finally, junior and senior researchers appealed directly for joint discussions on any new and different work contract conditions that might exist in excellence research centres like BNI, emphasizing that more than half of the staff were taken on with fee-​based contracts or in part-​time positions that prevented them from enjoying common benefits and rights with those who had better and more stable work contracts. C&C orchestrates their activities with a minimal context for essaying, motivating, encouraging, and valuing a situated and collaborative creation of new complexes of relevance. C&C precisely recognized the many ways in which scientists may come together. Thus, if scientists traditionally understood their ways of being a scientist from preconceptions inherited from their working laboratories and their academic training, they found at C&C new spaces of possibility to learn from the heterogeneity that appears when connecting with others. Certainly, in this space of free and open meaningful engagement, members have the chance to appreciate the atmosphere that emerges from their encounters and contacts. In such an atmosphere, they could feel the importance of having shared experiences. They found spaces to share those experiences about which they used to kept silent and now learned were common to many of them. Thus, in the face of individuality, in the routine solitude of the laboratory bench, or the scheduled lab meeting with peers or students, members could now recognize that belonging to BNI may be a way to experiment in forms of being-​with-​others. Here, the encounter with others was not experienced as the absolute loss of one’s own identity. On the contrary, what they felt in these spaces of mutual encounter was the emergence of a common thought—​that the centre’s framework of ‘excellence’ could be expanded, organized, and localized through contact between plural beings. In these ‘interactions with contact’, the ways of being a scientist are resignified towards a form of shared plurality that allows each member’s singularity to be recognized. Thus, it is no longer the individuality but the singularity of their own being a scientist that resonates in the atmosphere afforded by the C&C area.2

2  For a phenomenological analysis of the experience of the ‘common’ based on Heidegger’s ontology of sense-​making, we would like to recommend Jean-​Luc Nancy’s ontology of being-​with and his analysis of sense as a space of shared meaningfulness (Nancy, 2020: 2−3).

Organizing Research Excellence    689

34.6  The Organization from Inside Out In this chapter, we have argued that the disposedness of members, which we could unfold and describe through our interpretative-​phenomenological approach, is an essential aspect for the organization. As we have pointed out, it is a way to access the organization from the inside out. This point resonates strongly with what has long been established by the ethnomethodological tradition and its current development (Von Lehn, 2019), especially regarding questions about the ways in which organizations may encourage and nurture their members’ sense-​making processes (Brown, 2021). As our interpretation has shown, the activities of the C&C area had an unexpected yet valuable impact on the members’ sense-​making processes. By listening to and empathizing with members’ discourses, we could observe that these activities afforded an institutionally legitimized space to experiment with new ways of being a scientist. These spaces interrupted the solitude of routine work and the frequent risk of ‘idiotization’ referred to by one of the members who we had the opportunity to listen to. The distance between laboratories was also interrupted and transformed into a chance of learning from and with others. Thus, it seemed to us that those spaces, such as those designed by the C&C, are especially useful to manage an aspect of an organization of excellence such as BNI, namely the constant need to generate conditions of excellence for all areas of scientific creativity and practice. As the lived experience of members taught us, in knowledge-​production organizations such as BNI, ‘excellence’ cannot solely be about meeting formal evaluation criteria of productivity. Excellence must also be pursued in view of the care, well-​being, and dispositions of the different ways of being a scientist. This point led to an appreciation of the organizational identity of an excellence research institution such as BNI. Such a view of excellence allowed us to see that critiques of the academic model of knowledge production do not necessarily lead to a rejecting of academic tradition. Rather, it means that complex organizations such as BNI should avoid standardizing scientific cultures under any canon of the current academic system. Although BNI did not go so far as to elaborate organizational strategies to safeguard this shared learning, the space designed by the C&C did manage to create a clearer path towards the task of generating an organizational culture and identity from the common feeling of its different members. Finally, we consider that the case study provided us with two lessons which contribute to MOS in two distinct yet complementary domains. On the one hand, listening and attending to the lived experience of the members afforded us the opportunity to empathize and understand how organizational identity itself appears and unfolds during the emotional and creative life of its members. We learned that spaces such as those provided by the C&C area engaged members in forging new ways of meeting with each other, through the common challenge of generating ‘interactions with contact’, in which members could encounter each other through their questions, reflections, and feelings about their ways of being scientists and doing science. Furthermore, the relevance of

690    Juan Felipe Espinosa-Cristia and Nicolás Trujillo-Osorio contact in research organizations such as BNI also put us in tune with another current phenomenological interest in MOS, namely, the relationship between embodiment and organizations. Although we did not explicitly analyse this point, as it is beyond the scope of our interpretation, it would not be unreasonable to state that what we found in our fieldwork under the notion of an ‘interaction with contact’ may well serve to penetrate further on the question about embodied knowledges and learnings (Gärtner, 2013). In this sense, we think that C&C actions and activities at BNI offer an exemplary case in order to visualize what Ord & Nuttall (2016) call ‘bodies of knowledge’, because scientists’ ways of belonging to the scientific centre also took place through relevant corporeal ways of being and doing science beyond the benchwork of their laboratories. Undoubtedly, the phenomenological tradition, and especially Heidegger’s phenomenology of sense-​making, offers conceptual tools to further our research results. The intervention at the C&C area invited the centre’s participants to reflect on the institutional conditions that are necessary to enable singular scientific practices, i.e. practices that emerge from the contact and recognition of the very plurality that BNI convenes. From there, members proposed new ways of being-​doing (Gill, 2020). In this sense, our interpretation, based on what members of the centre told us, teaches us that the organizational identity of a centre like BNI consists in the virtuous deployment of unusual opportunities, which invite us to open the seal of excellence beyond its academic image. In this respect, however, it is important to insist that it is not a matter of moving towards the negation of the article as a desired product of the organization’s overall science production chain. The academic article, like any other product associated with science and knowledge-​production practices, is also a way of communicating and sharing what we have built and what we believe with others. The result of our research does not deny, then, the traditions and aims of the scientific community. Rather, it affirms the need to broaden and diversify them. As our case study shows, paying attention to the very relationship between members and organization allows us to identify relevant inputs for experimenting with strategies for diversifying and complexifying the potential services and products of a centre that is formally and normatively understood as a space of excellence-​knowledge-​production practices. On the other hand, and from an applied point of view, the pheno-​ethnomethodological approach made it possible to articulate a situated and organizational recommendation for the organization, aimed at improving its governance strategies (Cádiz et al., 2021). This recommendation consisted in the use of an organizational instrument of ‘strong participation’ (McCall, 2001; Del Valle, 2010), which allows us to know and value members’ perceptions, expectations, and feelings regarding their scientific work. This instrument made it possible to systematize the perceptions of the different members, identify the normative effects of the institution, and motivate members’ participation and involvement in actions to build, safeguard, and diversify BNI’s organizational identity. During the process, the C&C area also discovered that this instrument is an effective, dynamic, and replicable mechanism to improving the working environment, defining an integral organizational structure, and strengthening relevant aspects of the scientific career for nascent organizations such as BNI (Clegg et al., 2007; Gioia et al.,

Organizing Research Excellence    691 2013). In this way, by using a qualitative and interdisciplinary perspective we could identify and justify a qualitative and organizationally relevant instrument, which proved to be an effective strategy to broaden and diversify the centre’s notion of excellence. From our fieldwork at BNI, we understood that the new spaces of the C&C area configure a third party that enables productive organizational practices to encourage new ways of being-​in-​the-​organization (Serres, 2013). The new spaces designed by the C&C area are intended to turn scientists’ reflections on scientific work into something productive yet sympathetic to their peers—​the very reflections that have traditionally taken place in transient and informal circumstances, without a frame of reference or any particular significance, and that generally amount to a passing comment. In such spaces, this comment may become an opinion, which in turn might prompt a shared reflection, since the space where the comment occurs fosters collaborative thinking among scientists with respect to already known and yet to be known beings.

Acknowledgements Funding: ANID-​PIA SOC 180039 /​Fondecyt 1190543 (Government of Chile).

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Further Reading Dreyfus, Hubert. (1991). Being-​in-​the-​world: A commentary on Heidegger’s being and time, division (Vol. I). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haugeland, John. (2013). Dasein disclosed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maso, Ilja. (2007). Phenomenology and ethnography. In Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland and Lyn Lofland (eds.), Handbook of ethnography (pp. 136–​144). London: Sage. Nancy, Jean-​Luc. (2000). Being singular plural. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Paley, John. (2017). Phenomenology as qualitative research: A critical analysis of meaning attribution. London: Routledge. Schütz, Alfred. (1967). The phenomenology of the social world. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Smith, Jonathan, Flowers, Paul, & Larkin, Michael. (2009). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method and research. London: Sage. Spiegelberg, Herbert. (1982). The phenomenological movement: A historical introduction. London: Martinus Nijhoff. Van Manen, Max. (2014). Phenomenology of practice: Meaning-​giving methods in phenomenological research and writing. Developing qualitative inquiry. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Von Lehn, Dirk, & Hitzler, Ronald. (2015). Phenomenology-​based ethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 44(5), 539–​543. Doi: 10.1177/​0891241615595436 Zahavi, Dan. (2012). The Oxford handbook of contemporary phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pa rt V

C ON C LU SION

Chapter 35

B et ween Bei ng a nd Bec omi ng Appearances and Subjectivities of Organizing François-​X avier de Vaujany, Jeremy Aroles, and Mar Pérezts

After the inspiring and provocative intellectual adventure provided by the variety of contributions presented here—​we cannot thank the authors enough for joining us on this journey—​the time has now come to offer a humble conclusion to this Handbook. We first open with a conversation between phenomenologies, process philosophy, pragmatism, and critical thoughts. In this direction, two topics seem to be particularly promising for Management and Organization Studies (MOS): the issue of appearances and the phenomenon of subjectivity. We throw these two topics from a low angle, like stones into a pond, hoping that they ricochet in readers’ minds, inspiring new connections and a resetting of potential horizons. We will then end, without closing, with a wider reflection on the relationship between phenomenologies and organization studies, by imagining possible intersecting futures.

35.1  In and Beyond the Appearances of Organizing Appearance is a key, foundational topic in phenomenologies (see our introductory chapter). How things appear and how they are experienced are central questions for phenomenologists and for those more broadly engaging in phenomenological thinking, who endeavour to unravel the intricacies between (in)visibility and experiences. Importantly, as seen in the chapters of this Handbook, three different relationships emerge between appearances and ‘reality’: (i) the appearance of reality (drawing

700    François-Xavier de Vaujany, Jeremy Aroles, and Mar Pérezts mostly from ‘orthodox’ phenomenology); (ii) its appearance within the world (post-​ phenomenology I); (iii) and its appearance from the world (post-​phenomenology II and non-​phenomenologies). With the first relationship, appearance of reality maintains the premise of intentionality and intentional subjects. They are included in a recursive process (no subjects without intended objects and no world intended without a subject) but obviously, there is a powerful subject and pre-​subjective matter likely to be ‘intended’. This has been addressed as problematic or at least intriguing in some of the contributions in this volume, and certainly leaves the path open for challenges to come on the way to decentring this stance. In contrast, with the second relationship, Heidegger ([1927] 1962) and Merleau-​Ponty (1945) (even in their early phenomenological works) both described and proposed a more projective subjectivation process. We are always thrown in(to) the world, a ‘world already there’, that appears as a given to our immanence and radical ontological passivity whereby we are ‘in the flow of life’ (Henry, 1946, [1963] 2011). We emerge from the movements of the world, and this movement is enmeshed with the world. Yet this dynamic crucially omits, forgets, or belittles the genesis, seemingly ‘out of nowhere’, of ‘Dasein’s thrownness into the world, thrown from no specific location or person’ where in Merleau-​Ponty’s (1995) words at the Collège de France, ‘birth [ . . . ] rises from nothing’ (see Verhage, 2013: 3, see n. 11) and also calls for further reflections. In the direction of these interrogations, the late Merleau-​Monty (1955, 1964) emphasized the opening of events from an ontological present (see Revel, 2015; de Vaujany, 2021); and Heidegger ([1938] 2012) after his Kehre, stressed the importance of an ‘appropriative event’ (appropriating being and beings), the ‘abyssal grund’. Both move the answer of the ‘from where’ to a temporal ontology. Surprisingly, these evolutions overlap with a metaphysics, a path close to the third relationship. Lastly, with the third relationship, we have, notably with the Bergsonian (1896) heritage (and with post-​phenomenologies drawing on his work), the idea that duration prevails. All objects of the world are of durations more or less intersecting, encountering and prehending one another. Appearances (and consciousness) are epiphenomena emerging sometimes from the infinitude of events that expand the world. The piece of sugar melting is a representation of the whole world.1 It contains the possibility of appearance itself. It contains the possibility of consciousness and its own duration, which is part of sugar’s duration. This third view of appearances radicalizes the second while remaining compatible with it in various ways. The second relationship is simply more focused; its concepts are focused on a key phenomenon that remains a central expectation for researchers. Events offer the possibility of reserve, resistance, and emancipation. There is a strong link here with our second argument as explained in the next sub-​section.

1 

An example given by Merleau-​Ponty (1964).

Between Being and Becoming    701 In continuation of this discussion, the organizing process can become an intentional act or set of acts. Roles, programmes, and models are continuously intended and adjusted in the flow of conscious activities. Managers intend their tools, products, and markets as much as tools, products, and markets are intentional for managers. The world is in many ways at our disposal, but it is already entangled with us. It needs to be understood as an experience. The possibilities of this experience need to be identified, repeated and explored further and further. The flow of managerial consciousness needs to meet the flow of perceptions at stake in the world. Organizing is part of what we might tentatively call pure appearances. Organizing can also become a projection. Far beyond bodies, organizations, and tools as ‘containers’, management is projected. All managers are in the world ahead of them, this future which will soon become a past, is the ground of our present. Reality is the flow itself, and its appearing is not an outside touched by or from an inside. There is no divide between subjects and objects. What is real (or maybe it would be more accurate to say, what is realised) is just the set of relations at stake in the process of becoming. Yet, embodiment, emotions, and affects remain the key focus of the process of appearing as it is both described and lived. What matters ultimately remains the lived present, what is expressed in and from it, the affects that lump some events together, the practices produced and reproduced. Organizing here is simply a flow. Organizing and management, as actors, instruments, or agentivities, happen and appear at the same time, in a contemporaneous becoming. They are always in between expectations of people and techniques, the projections, and the habits of the past. Organizing always happens in the thickness of this momentum, between the future and the past where we carve out the depth of our present. Managing is all about articulating and linking past and future events more or less openly and fluidly in the flow of collective activities.2 Lastly, organizing can also be understood first and most of all as the entire process of becoming. The world is not made of ‘substances’; it is mostly an infinitude of self-​ creations, all of which contain the becoming of the world. We move here primarily and definitively to a process metaphysics (see Helin et al., 2014). Organizing is made of the assemblages and (affective) materialities happening in the world. The present is continuously open through events (as also stressed above). Yet, both from and beyond events layered in a present, in a relevant duration, everything in the word is self-​creative. The world ontologically experiences its newness in each moment of its becoming. Beyond bodies, flesh, and instruments, the whole metaphysical world is at stake in organizing. Sensibilities, affects, emotions, all can be events or consequences of some events, subjects, or superjects (Whitehead, [1929] 2010). Even for human endeavours, the world is mainly made up of productive differences between signs. The difference in their duration, speed, and folds produces the possibilities of management and organizing, which then become highly differential. Organizing is not after or below appearances. It is, in

2 See,

volume.

e.g. the ‘process phenomenology’ described by Andrew Kirkpatrick in Chapter 23 of this

702    François-Xavier de Vaujany, Jeremy Aroles, and Mar Pérezts many ways, beyond them, or largely, immensely before them. The consequences of this radical viewpoint are yet to be fully unfolded.

35.2  The Issue of Subjectivity and Subjectivation in Organizing In continuation of the previous section, subjectivity appears as a very important topic for phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies. Here it seems that phenomenologies can be processual, critical, or pragmatic depending on the space given for phenomenology inside these philosophical streams of thought. On this issue, the distinction between Deleuze and Foucault is particularly illuminating. From the late 1970s onwards, subjectivity appeared as a key source of differences between the two philosophers (Revel, 2015; de Vaujany, 2021). For Deleuze, in particular in his exploration of folds and cinema, what matters is a pre-​subjective or asubjective world. Signs and images interact ontologically with each other (no distinction between what happens and how it appears). The event of images, their relative duration, speed, and intensity make the world. In the folds of this process, subjectivation processes can occur. Importantly though, they are not the main concern for Deleuze who is more interested in agencement and ‘aberrant movements’ happening through the flat world of his plane of immanence. Deleuze does not claim that subjectivation does not happen at some point, but he wants to cover primarily the surface of experience, its holes, depth, and folds. In slight contrast, although he shares the view of a processuality of the world, Foucault insists (in particular in the last ‘ethical’ phase of his intellectual life) on subjectivation (Deslandes, 2013; Revel, 2015; Raffnsøe, 2020; de Vaujany, 2021; see also Chapter 5). Subjectivation (in chiasm with objectivation) needs to be covered by philosophical exploration. It needs to be part of it. Why? Because subjectivation opens the way to resistance and emancipation. It is the ethical way towards a better world. For Foucault ([1982] 2001), problematization and experimentation cannot truly happen if they do not (even in the simple space of their performative descriptions) open the way to a subjectivation melded with the objectification of ‘knowledge regimes’ and ‘attitudes’ at stake in our present (Revel, 2015; de Vaujany, 2021). Interestingly, this Foucauldian vision is also one of the possible points of junction between process philosophy, pragmatism, and critical theory. Subjectivity and subjectivation, as part of a non-​ orthodox phenomenology, a ‘phenomenological ontology’ or a ‘process metaphysics’ opening the way to a ‘processual phenomenology’, are extensively discussed in the temporal (Heidegger, [1927] 1962; Gély, 2000), affective (Scheler, 1992, 2009), technical (Simondon, [1958] 2012), and even, material (Merleau-​Ponty, 1955; Henry, 1990; Revel, 2015) dimensions by phenomenologists and post-​phenomenologists.

Between Being and Becoming    703 What are the space and time of subjectivity and subjectivation opened ontologically today by managerial instruments and new modes of organizing (e.g. platforms, freelancing practices, and the gig economy, to name but a few)? How, following for instance Merleau-​Ponty, Foucault, or Ahmed (see Chapter 18), could we fight for our own subjective space? How can we cultivate and expand it in a world that puts us immediately at the centre of a screen? In the spotlight of a ‘show’, at the centre of a world enacted and manipulated by an invisible periphery? How to experiment collectively, to co-​produce ‘I’s and ‘we’s moving to a different relationship, co-​productive of commonalities or harmony through differences (and not in spite of them), in symbiosis with the earth and all that’s in it? How to organize fewer things instead of disposing of them, affectively feeling more in symbiosis with them? How to seize the opportunity in this great connected world to feel a subjectively shared world? In this direction, for sure, phenomenologies, process philosophies, pragmatism and critical theories, and relational ontologies have a lot to share. A more resonant and sensible process of organizing the world would benefit from the lessons of their joint encounter (see, e.g. Rosa’s 2013 and 2019 theories of acceleration and resonance). This begs the eminent question of where to go from here, which we discuss in our next and final section.

35.3  What Futures can we envision for Phenomenologies and MOS? The field of MOS is relatively neoteric when compared to other more longstanding academic disciplines, such as theology, philosophy, or sociology. This partly accounts for why, as a field, MOS has been borrowing, rather heavily, from neighbouring disciplines. The influence of sociology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and economics is clearly evident across the landscape of MOS publications and particularly in the more critical spheres of this field. This does not, in any way, undermine the intellectual contributions emanating from our field, but rather it testifies to a sort of unilateral relation whereby MOS has been on the receiving end and has perhaps failed to reciprocate (see Johnsen et al., 2021; Thanem & Wallenberg, 2021). Indeed, there have, in MOS, been countless creative borrowings of concepts and methods (see, as an example, the flourishing literature on ethnography in MOS), but there is little evidence on the fruits of these borrowings having had an impact on those respective fields of origin. As shown throughout this Handbook, and in particular in Parts II, III, and IV, the mobilization of phenomenological and post-​phenomenological concepts, lenses, and ways of thinking have had a significant impact on our field, not only in terms of conceptual contributions but also in allowing us to shed new insight into longstanding organizational and managerial issues, and the avenues and potentialities for cross-​fertilizations are still at a burgeoning stage.

704    François-Xavier de Vaujany, Jeremy Aroles, and Mar Pérezts Now, the last question on which we would like to reflect as we bring this volume to a close is the following: is there a future for phenomenology in the field of MOS? We realize the slightly hubristic nature of this question. Yet, if only for the pleasure of provocative speculation, what, if anything, can a predominantly empirical field of research bring to a discipline of philosophy solely concerned, if we are to believe Deleuze, in the creation of concepts? Organizational and managerial worlds have recently experienced tremendous changes, some of which have been exacerbated and accelerated by the on-​ going pandemic and other global transformations. As such, and perhaps more than ever, though it may sound clichéd to say so, it seems to us that MOS might be in an ideal position to comment on and make sense of some of these transformations, and to shed light on ‘our times’. The rise of artificial intelligence, big data, digitalization, and so on are all happening within, across, and because of organizations and organizing processes. The emotional and affective problems encountered by managers, workers, and more broadly (non-​)human inhabitants, but also more existential and experiential issues (e.g. climate change and Anthropocene) about the becoming of our world, provide empirical contexts through which to theorize societal developments,3 and to imagine or dream potential futures. Inasmuch as philosophy provides (abstract/​theoretical) reflections over its (contemporaneous) world, one may contend that our field might be in a position to speak to, and perhaps set up a dialogue with, phenomenologies and post-​ phenomenologies in such a way that we might challenge the unilateral relation in which MOS is mostly caught in. Or perhaps philosophy itself can and should be redefined, following Merleau-​Ponty’s and Foucault’s views: i.e. instead of being the queen of all disciplines, maybe the time has come for a philosophy from the inside, from the depths? Models of collective activity, managerial practices, organizational dispositifs: instead of these being the outside targets of exogenous philosophers, they could provide for the very impetus and flow of a renewed philosophy, decentred from its habitual locus of enunciation (Droit, 2009) and immersed in a deep actuality. In this direction, far beyond traditional pre-​ categorizations and hand-​ in-​ hand with pragmatism, critical thought, and process philosophy, managerial and organizational phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies could go beyond a unilateral relationship with philosophy as a field. They could become the new ontological or metaphysical ground of organizing. They could contribute to a new philosophical practice. The floor is open.

References Bergson, H. (1896). Matière et mémoire. Paris: PUF. de Vaujany, F. X. (2021). L’histoire du management entre présent et actualité. De Foucault à Merleau-​Ponty (4th inaugural lesson of TTN), October. https://​hal​shs.archi​ves-​ouver​tes.fr/​ hal​shs-​03362​830.

3  On

which phenomenologies and post-​phenomenologies obviously do have something to say, as shown in Parts II, III and IV of this Handbook.

Between Being and Becoming    705 Deslandes, G. (2013). Essai sur les données philosophiques du management. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Droit, R.-​P. (2009). Introduction. Les autres aussi. In R.-​P. Droit (ed.), Philosophies d’ailleurs (Vol. 1, pp. 13–​46). Paris: Hermann Editeurs. Foucault, M. ([1982] 2001). Le sujet et le pouvoir text reproduced in Dits et écrits II, 1976–​1988 (pp. 1041–​1062). Paris: Gallimard. Gély, R. (2000). La question de l’événement dans la phénoménologie de Merleau-​Ponty. Laval Théologique et Philosophique, 56(2), 353–​366. Heidegger, M. ([1927] 1962). Being and time. NY: Harperennial Modernthought. Heidegger, M. ([1938] 2012). The contribution of philosophy (of event). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Helin, J., Hernes, T., Hjorth, D., & Holt, R. (eds.) (2014). The Oxford handbook of process philosophy and organization studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henry, M. (1946). Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps. Paris: PUF. Henry, M. ([1963] 2011). L’essence de la manifestation (4th edn). Paris: PUF Epiméthée. Henry, M. (1990). Phénoménologie matérielle. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Johnsen, R., Skoglund, A., Statler, M., & Sullivan, W. M. (2021). Management learning and the unsettled humanities: Introduction to the special issue. Management Learning, 52(2), 135–​143. Merleau-​Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-​Ponty, M. (1955). Les aventures de la dialectique. Paris: Folio. Merleau-​Ponty, M. (1964). Le visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-​Ponty, M. (1995). La nature. Notes de cours du Collège de France. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Raffnsøe, S. (2020). Book review: Sverre Raffnsøe. The formation of a new relationship to oneself: The confessions of the flesh. Organization Studies, 41(9), 1333–​1338. Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration. New York: Columbia University Press. Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance: A sociology of our relationship to the world. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Scheler, M. (1992). On feeling, knowing, and valuing: Selected writings, ed. and partially trans. Harold J. Bershady. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scheler, M. (2009). The human place in the cosmos, trans. Manfred Frings. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Simondon, G. ([1958] 2012). Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Paris: Aubier. Thanem, T., & Wallenberg, L. (2021). The humanities are not our patient. Management Learning, 52(3), 364–​373. Revel, J. (2015). Foucault avec Merleau-​Ponty. Ontologie politique, présentisme et histoire. Paris: Vrin. Verhage, F. (2013). The vision of the artist/​mother, the strange creativity of painting and pregnancy. In S. Lachance Adams & C. R. Lundquist (eds.), Coming to life: Philosophies of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. London: Fordham Scholarship. DOI: 10.5422/​fordham/​ 9780823244607.003.0015. Whitehead, A. N. ([1929] 2010). Process and reality. New York: Free Press.

Afterword Why and How Phenomenology Matters to Organizational Research Haridimos Tsoukas

The very publication of this brilliant Handbook speaks to an important meta-​theoretical development that has taken place in the field of Management and Organization Studies (MOS): the turn to phenomenology as a source of onto-​epistemological inspiration (Holt & Sandberg, 2011). Why is it important? Because it provides philosophical support and methodological sophistication to an anti-​dualist understanding of organizational phenomena (Tsoukas, 2017, 2019). Organizational scholars, increasingly, feel uncomfortable with dualisms, such as the individual vs. the community, mind vs. body, cognition vs. emotion, stability vs. change, routine vs. novelty, or ideality vs. materiality, seeing the poles of each pair as intertwined. The challenge, of course, is to elucidate how the intertwinement is accomplished, and studying it will thankfully keep us busy for a long time. But why phenomenology? What problems in MOS does it help address? In their introductory chapter to this volume, de Vaujany, Aroles, & Pérezts have provided an informative overview of both the different strands of phenomenology and their broad application in MOS, especially by authors of the Handbook chapters (see also Bancou et al., Chapter 12). Here, I want to expand on their argument by focusing, in some detail, on the particular problems phenomenology helps elucidate, in MOS research; and, moreover, to argue that phenomenology not only helps us address theoretical problems but, also, provides practitioners with a more enlightened understanding of their organizational experiences. Throughout, I will illustrate my argument by drawing on Suarez & Montes’s (2019) longitudinal study of the Kangshung expedition in Mount Everest. I chose this study because it deals with a fascinating topic, is empirically well-​supported, and its non-​phenomenological theorizing helps us understand the problems dualistic thinking creates.

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Looking at Agency in Depth: Insights from Phenomenology Suarez & Montes (2019) explored non-​routine responses when routines break down in the face of increasing uncertainty, in the context of a challenging climbing expedition. A key construct they use is that of a ‘focal context’. The latter is defined as ‘a combination of objective and subjective elements’ (p. 597), that is ‘objective traits of the environment’ (p. 573) (i.e. avalanches, weather, technical difficulties, hypoxia) and the ‘subjective perceptions that organizational members had of that reality’ (p. 573) (i.e. narratives and interpretations). For example, the weather and technical challenges of very high altitude (objective traits) are combined with the perception of the irreversibility of actions taken (subjective traits) to create a threatening focal context. Focal context matters, note Suarez & Montes, because it creates perceived demands that occasionally lead to the breakdown of routines, thus prompting the use of heuristics and improvisations. Three things are noteworthy. First, although how the ‘combination of objective and subjective elements’ is accomplished is not explicitly specified, the authors imply that the combinatorial relationship is additive—​the objective traits of the environment are first experienced and then interpreted by agents. Second, perception is primarily seen as interpretation—​to be precise, as ‘cognitive searching’ (p. 592). Third, although the body is centrally implicated in the process of climbing, it remains analytically in the background. A phenomenological lens would invite us to problematize, think deeper about, and enrich Suarez & Montes’ insights. Let me explain. To experience extreme physical hardship and risk, as the climbers did in their expedition, is to have experiences with a certain quality—​a quality of ‘what it feels like’ to have them (Gallagher, 2012). That quality includes but goes beyond sensory states to include feelings and abstract beliefs. There is a difference, for example, between being determined to reach the mountain top and weighing the chances of successfully doing so. Moreover, whereas the object of perceptual experience (e.g. the mountain terrain) is intersubjectively available to the team of climbers, the perceptual experience per se is directly (i.e. non-​inferentially, non-​reflectively) and uniquely given to each of its individual members. All team members can see the ‘benign and fairly predictable’ nature of the base camp (‘a flat plateau over the ice with no technical difficulties’; p. 580) or the Kangshung’s ‘vertical wall of 4000 feet’ and the ‘extreme technical difficulties’ it poses (p. 582), but each one has a distinct and direct perception of them. There is a first personal giveness and immediacy—​a phenomenal quality—​in agents’ perceptions that makes them truly subjective (Parnas & Zahavi, 2002). For example, while descending, and having experienced significant challenges posed by falling rocks and ice that made the ropes prone to damage, one climber (Bernal) stopped to repair them, an unplanned action that went beyond the traditional routine of rope maintenance. It was the danger felt by Bernal personally that made him take this action. Like his awareness of physical exhaustion, his distinct perception of the state

Afterword   709 of the ropes was directly and uniquely available to him—​it was his, he did not have to infer it. The objects around him were given through his particular experience. From Bernal’s perspective, it was not the objects’ physical traits first and then his experience of them, but the objects appearing to him through experience. This kind of self-​awareness is foundational—​it is pre-​reflective, and is necessarily presupposed by subsequent reflective self-​awareness (Parnas & Zahavi, 2002; Gallagher, 2012). It takes training for climbers to assess the risk of an expedition environment. Their trained sense of climbing provides them not only with a certain consciousness of the objects around them but, critically, with an understanding as what kinds of objects they are. As Parnas & Zahavi (2002: 150) note, ‘one is never simply conscious of an object, one is always conscious of an object in a particular way; to be intentionally directed at something is to intend something as something’, i.e. under a certain description (italics in the original). Climbers saw others and the physical environment pragmatically: not as objects of reflection but as how-​climbers-​can-​meaningfully-​interact-​with-​them. Experiencing agents are intentionally oriented to the world—​they are conscious of something. They form goals in the context of projects and undertake pragmatic action that is not reducible to individual mental states but involves bodily intentionality. We engage with others and the world in terms of what we can do—​what actions they afford us (Gallagher, 2002). Affordances, that is possibilities of action, are not objective properties of the world and others but properties that become apparent and actionable to suitably capable and skilled agents (Chemero, 2011; Gibson, 2015). From the latter’s perspective, agents and the world form a pragmatic unity. When, however, we try to explain or predict other agents’ behaviour, we resort to reflective judgement, thus highlighting the mental content of their actions. For example, climbers at the base camp who noticed that Bernal had stopped his descent ‘got worried’ (p. 583), thinking that he may have been in danger and was trying to get out of it. In their reflective account, they attributed mental content to Bernal. In Bernal’s action, however, repairing ropes is part of what it means to experience descent as dangerous and the ropes as untrustworthy. While the spectator makes a reflective judgement, the experiencing agent engages with the world in terms of can-​do possibilities (Gallagher, 2012: 77). Suarez & Montes (2019)’s empirical account conveys the flow of the expedition as it moved on—​the climbers’ routine expectations, the obstacles encountered, and the non-​ routine ways they were overcome. Phenomenologically viewed, more can be said. Flow is no mere temporal succession of past (‘retention’), present (‘primal impression’), and future (‘protention’) (Husserl, 1977), but, for the experiencing agent, the simultaneous presence of all of them. Just like when listening to a melody, I am listening to the sound of a note in the present that has been shaped by preceding notes and am anticipating the next one, what a climber perceives in the present has been shaped by what came before it and is directed forward as part of an anticipated trajectory. Experiencing agents do not experience the world as succeeding isolated snapshots but as a continuous stream (Blattner, 2020). Outside its temporal horizon, the present cannot be comprehended. Tacitly, retention makes the primal impression possible while protention (anticipation) gives it direction. In short, primal impression is not self-​sufficient; it is rather

710   Afterword constituted by retention and protention. Thus, climbing routines make climbers non-​ reflectively (tacitly) anticipate certain outcomes. When anticipations are frustrated, agents are surprised and prompted to take non-​routine action. It is anticipated, for example, that ascent coordination is to be managed centrally and managing ropes to be handled by designated individuals regularly. The climbers faced the surprises they did (the ‘breakdowns’ reported by Suarez & Montes) precisely because their horizons of anticipation were disrupted. The experiencing agent is not a passive recipient of the present but enacts the present, that is, he or she creates its meaning in light of what has been experienced and what is anticipated. Routines structure both: they train the body and provide agents with experience that enables them to become non-​reflectively aware of what the present is built on and where the present leads to (Blanche & Feldman, 2021; Tsoukas, 2021). Embodied, temporally structured experience is enactive: anticipation, shaped by what has gone before, impacts on the immediacy of the present (Gallagher, 2012: 120). The enactive entanglement of retention, primal impression, and protention highlights the temporality of affordances: if present moments were merely succeeding snapshots, without protentional anticipations, nothing would be afforded, since possibilities of action (i.e. affordances) presuppose continuity of experience. The body is the silent protagonist in Suarez & Montes’ account. References to physical exhaustion, threatening conditions, and bodily movements abound, as do references to materials, from rocks and ice to ropes and equipment at large. However, although descriptively present, the body and materiality are analytically subdued in their account—​ they are not considered explanatorily significant. Perception is not seen as an embodied activity but as a cognitive-​interpretive one. However, a phenomenological perspective would make embodied perception central. Experiencing agents are incarnated in a fundamental way. Perceptual objects are partially constituted by sensorimotor knowledge, that is, by agents’ tacit understanding that sensorimotor movements generate perceptual experience (Noë, 2004). I get a glimpse of only the tail of a cat outside my window but have no problem in perceptually sensing the whole cat. I tacitly understand that by moving my body closer to the window, I can bring more bits of the cat into my view. Our relation to the unseen parts of an object ‘is mediated by patterns of sensorimotor knowledge’ (Noë, 2004: 63). An object is never given to an embodied agent in its totality—​it always appears from a certain perspective (Parnas & Zahavi, 2002: 151−2). What matters is that we learn to take objects to be perceptually accessible. As Noë (2004: 73) notes with respect to visual perception, ‘as in touch, the content of visual experience is not given all at once. We gain content by looking around just as we gain tactile content by moving our hands. You enact your perceptual content, through the activity of skilful looking’. Embodied agents tacitly know that sensorimotor movements will reveal further aspects of the objects available to experience. In that sense, as Noë (2004: 63) remarks, perceptual objects are ‘virtually present’. Suarez & Montes’ account bears out the above. The climbers perceive the terrain as sometimes highly dangerous not because they have surveyed it all but because they

Afterword   711 know they have perceptual access to it—​by moving their bodies, they can bring into view more aspects of the objects at hand. It is the skilful looking at the ropes and the harsh environment in which they were used that enabled climbers to enact their perception that the ropes were worn out and they had to be repaired more frequently and quickly than normal. As Hutchins (2010: 433) notes, ‘what is seen is not simply what is visible. What is seen is something that is there only by virtue of the activity of seeing being conducted in a particular way. That is, what is seen is what is enacted’. Paradoxically, although the body enables perceptual experience, it itself is not perceived. ‘My original body-​awareness’, note Parnas & Zahavi (2002: 153), ‘is not a type of object-​consciousness, is not a perception of the body as an object. [ . . . ]. The lived body precedes the perceived body-​object’ (italics in the original). The body has an ambiguous status: it is originally a subject, that is, the ‘zero-​point of reference’ (p. 153) to which every other perceptual object is related; it is also an object, available for inspection and reflection. Although Suarez & Montes’ account does not convey the primordial bodily awareness of the climbers studied, phenomenologically oriented accounts do. In their enactive ethnography of rowing on the Amazon river, de Rond et al. (2019) highlight the centrality of the body for sense-​making. Rowing was dangerous, presenting rowers with distinct challenges, ranging from rowing in tidal waters to struggling with a whirlpool, coping with physical injury, etc. The authors’ exploration of embodied sense-​making makes the body and the associated skills the key analytical category. Accordingly, their account richly conveys the rowers’ embodied experience. ‘The experience of rhythm in rowing’, they write, ‘is almost entirely visceral, yet does not rely on any specific sensory perception. It relies on neither cognition nor speech acts—​it is not an intellectual accomplishment—​nor is it clear where in the body the feeling is located. Rather, rhythm is felt throughout the body’ (de Rond et al., 2019: 1975). Suarez & Montes (2019) suggest that non-​routine responses to the breakdown of routines emerge as a result, in part, of ‘social convergence’ (p. 592), that is, through conversation. However, a condition of possibility for social convergence is for embodied agents to have already tacitly coordinated their emerging understandings in such a way as to achieve a common orientation to the situation at hand. Each agent grasps each other’s sense of the situation and skilfully modulates his or her own. Coordinated responses (such as giving and receiving instructions, conducting a meeting, etc.) embody a tacit understanding, which is manifested in agents’ actions (Hindmarsh & Pilnick, 2007). De Rond et al.’s account conveys this richly. Writing about an impromptu rowing competition while in the Amazon, they account for coordination in bodily terms: ‘our bodies knew how to coordinate so as to feel, and adjust, their way into a powerful rhythm. We coordinated through felt experience, meaning that our bodies sensed, rather than thought or talked, their way into action. [ . . . ] sensemaking proceeded from the body’ (de Rond et al., 2019: 1975; italics in the original). It can similarly be pointed out that Suarez & Montes’ ‘social convergence’ is secondarily mediated by language but, primarily, it becomes jointly constructed when an already tacitly held, bodily mediated common orientation subsequently enables interactants to conversationally converge to a joint understanding (Fuchs & De Jaegher, 2009).

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Capturing the Logic of Practice through Phenomenology I hope it is clear by now what a phenomenological perspective accomplishes: it makes it possible for researchers to offer a holistic, first-​person-​experience-​based, and processual understanding of organizational phenomena by placing embodied agents in, rather than seeing them merely contingently linked with, the world. Phenomenology highlights what intellectualist perspectives miss: when we view organizational phenomena through scientific rationality, the primary way of being-​ in-​ the-​ world is overlooked. To put it differently, the subject-​object relation is not the most basic way of agents relating to the world, as scientific rationality would have it. Rather, it is derivative of a more fundamental way of existence—​that of being-​in-​the-​world (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011). The world we encounter is not primarily an object of reflection but of pragmatic engagement. Agents do not encounter objects, tools, and others as stand-​ alone entities to which they, subsequently, attach meaning. Rather, bundles of materials and other humans become meaningful to agents only within a practice world—​‘an intelligible ensemble of other meaningful things’ (Sheehan, 2015: 117–​18; see Spinosa et al., 1997). To be involved in a practice world is to be immersed in a relational totality that is structured by tacit understandings, explicit rules, and teleo-​ affective structures (Schatzki, 2002: 87). To enter a practice world—​to become, say, a climber, a rower, a nurse, or retail employee, etc.—​is to experience one’s situation in terms of already constituted ends, meanings, and acceptable emotions, articulated through the discourse that defines the practice world (Taylor, 1985: 54–​5). Members of a practice world engage in activities through which ‘internal goods’ (MacIntyre, 1985: 187) are realized, while aiming to achieve certain ‘standards of excellence’ (p. 187). The already constituted distinctions of a practice world make up the ‘inherited background’ (Wittgenstein, 1979: §94), against which practitioners make focal sense of their particular tasks (Tsoukas 2009: 943). Through their participation in a practice world, agents learn to relate to their tasks ‘spontaneously’ (Wittgenstein, 1979: §699): to merchandise a store (Sonenshein, 2016), to pack and dispatch packages (Dittrich et al., 2016), to collect waste (Turner & Rindova, 2012), to treat patients (Buchner & Langley, 2016), to climb a mountain (Suarez & Montes, 2019), or row in a river (de Rond et al., 2019). Thus, the world appears to agents as ‘ready-​to-​hand’, in which the most fundamental way of engaging with it is ‘absorbed coping’ (Dreyfus, 1991: 69; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011: 344). In absorbed coping, actors spontaneously respond to an evolving situation they are facing through using objects, artefacts, and tools, interacting with others, and responding to situations. Suarez & Montes’ climbers, for example, do not pause to reflect what climbing gear is—​they just go ahead with climbing. Through their immersion in a practice world and repeated acts of engagement with relevant tasks, agents acquire familiarity with it. This is important because familiarity

Afterword   713 provides agents with ‘subsidiary particulars’ (Polanyi, 1962: 55) that are necessary for skilled action to be accomplished. Once the use of objects and tools (including language) and the roles of others for carrying out a task has become familiar, the subsidiary particulars have been assimilated (or black-​boxed, interiorized) by the agent, namely they have become tacit knowledge in which the agent dwells in order to focus on the task at hand. For example, climbers do not ordinarily need to think about what subsidiary particulars, such as ropes, are for. Unless they have interiorized what this tool is for and how it should be used in the context of their climbing practice world, they will not be able to re-​view how rope maintenance may be conducted. Thus, through their repeated performance of the climbing routine, agents have learned to tacitly draw on subsidiary particulars in order to focally attend to the task at hand (Ribeiro, 2014). It is the tacit link of subsidiary and focal awareness that makes a competent agent relate to their task spontaneously (i.e. non-​reflectively) (Polanyi, 1962; Tsoukas, 2011), or, in Polanyi’s (1962: 60) term ‘uncritically’ (in the climbing routine, to smoothly handle the relevant gear, to move around the terrain, to coordinate with others, to sense danger). When absorbed in the execution of a task, agents may be interrupted by a disturbance, anomaly, or breakdown (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011). Then, they seek to reflect on their tacit knowledge—​the interiorized pattern of subsidiary particulars—​in order to resume smooth action. If this happens while agents are still involved in a practical activity, the world becomes ‘unready-​to-​hand’ (Heidegger, [1927] 1962), whereby agents shift from absorbed coping to ‘involved thematic deliberation’ (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011: 344; see Yanow & Tsoukas, 2009). But when the breakdown is severe so that actors become detached from the practical situation at hand, viewing it from the ‘outside’, namely as an array of discrete objects with causally related properties, agents have then entered a situation of ‘abstract detachment’ (Tsoukas, 2015: 65). When in it, agents move from practical to quasi-​theoretical understanding. In both cases, following a breakdown, actors engage in deliberative thinking—​reflecting on action. This is what Suarez & Montes’ climbers did when they encountered breakdowns—​ they engaged in heuristics or improvisation. Thus, social convergence was brought about once climbers shifted from absorbed coping to involved thematic deliberation. Their reflective talk was conducted in the context of pragmatically addressing the breakdowns encountered, not as abstract reflection (Dreyfus, 1991: 74). Although reflecting on action, the language used was still mostly performative—​it pointed at certain features of the situation at hand in order to get things done. Reflective talk enacts the beginning of detached intentionality and, thus, differs from the performative language used during reflection-​in-​action: although practically involved in the practice world, agents begin to form representations of the task at hand. Whereas in absorbed coping, the materials were immediately available to routine participants (the world was ready-​to-​hand), in involved thematic deliberation, the same materials become unavailable (the world is unready-​to-​hand). In light of the above, key phenomenological insights that are relevant to organizational research may be summarized as follows.

714   Afterword First, human consciousness is not an object like any other. It is the point of reference for anything that matters in the world. Studying first person experience—​i.e. how the world manifests itself to embodied-​cum-​sentient beings—​is of paramount importance (Fisher & Barrett, 2019: 149). Agents are directly (i.e. pre-​reflectively, non-​inferentially) aware of their experiences. Self-​awareness has an irreducibly subjective—​phenomenal—​ character (i.e. there is a unique ‘what-​it-​feels-​like’ to experience available to agents). Pre-​reflective awareness is the bedrock of reflective, socially structured consciousness. Second, agency takes place in a temporal horizon. Action is always situated in the present and made possible by what preceded it. It is, also, necessarily going forward towards the future: it transcends the present situation for the sake of pursuing a possibility opened up by the ends of a practice world. Temporality has enactive structure: retention and anticipation shape the immediacy of the present. Third, agency is embodied in a non-​trivial sense—​the body is the site of being-​in-​ the-​world (Merleau-​Ponty, 2012). Skilful action is possible by the transformation of the objective body to a living (phenomenal) body—​that is, a body that has developed a can-​ do structure through developing sensory-​motor capacities, which agents normally use without self-​awareness (Gallagher, 2005: 24). In the carrying out of skilful activity, the living body withdraws from focal attention: agents attend to their tasks by being subsidiarily aware of their bodies. Bodily capacities are brought to attention when they no longer function transparently, i.e. without the agents’ awareness. Fourth, agency takes place in and is constituted by practice worlds. Agents are always already immersed in practice worlds—​in meaning-​full and purposive ways of being, relating, and acting. Agents do not encounter objects, tools, and others as freestanding entities to which they subsequently attach meanings. On the contrary, something has meaning by virtue of being entwined with other things in a practice world. Entwinement is the logic of practice (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011). Different ways of engaging—​ coping—​with the world, give rise to different forms of agency, ranging from absorbed coping, through involved thematic deliberation, to abstract detachment. Phenomenologically oriented organizational research, by taking on board first person experience, embodiment, direct perception, enactment, non-​successive temporality of action, and entwinement, adds considerable depth to our understanding of agency in organizations—​how agents accomplish what they take for granted. Such an approach is staunchly anti-​dualist; it stresses the condition of possibility for reflective knowledge (i.e. for the world to be present to reflective consciousness, the world must be non-​ reflectively inhabited by agents); and, critically, through interrogating the ‘natural attitude’ (i.e. the metaphysical assumptions that take the world to consist of independent, causally connected entities) (Gallagher, 2012: 41), it brings out the co-​constitutive role of agency in the world as experienced (Zahavi & Martiny, 2019: 161). In particular, the core notion of enactment (or enaction) that permeates the phenomenological approach, draws both researchers’ and practitioners’ attention to what practitioners already do (i.e. how they create their experiences through their spontaneous actions; see Weick, 2009: 193−204; Hutchins, 2010: 428), when, for example, making sense, making strategy, making an organization highly reliable, or making

Afterword   715 organizational identity. Theory, in that sense, is elucidative—​it helps practitioners re-​ orient or re-​relate to crucial aspects of the spontaneous (unreflective) ways that are constitutive of their practices (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011: 354). Phenomenologically informed theory serves the function of reminding practitioners of their fundamental involvement—​in one way or another, and in various degrees—​in bringing about the phenomena they experience, so that they may become more reflective theorists of their actions. By being reminded of what they already do, practitioners are offered a clearer picture of their grammar of action and the possibility of rearticulating their actions (Shotter & Tsoukas, 2011).

Epilogue Phenomenologically informed organizational research seeks to capture in depth the logic of practice in what organizational agents do. By offering a more complex ontological understanding of agency (embodied, temporally structured, and embedded), it enables us to see the multiple ways in which agents relate to the world. By according priority to being-​in-​the-​world, as the primordial way of being, it offers a holistic ontological framework that focuses on relationality. By emphasizing enaction, it underlines the partly self-​constitutive character of knowing through action. By bringing out the non-​successive character of temporality, it highlights the incessantly processual character of experience. Several relevant insights have been conveyed by Handbook chapters. As one might have expected, embodiment, perception, temporality, and materiality are crucial in making sense of first person experience in organizational contexts, and, accordingly, have been key themes in this volume (Bancou et al., Chapter 12; Gherardi, Chapter 15; Grandazzi, Chapter 17). However, our enthusiasm for phenomenology must be tempered by a word of caution. Phenomenology provides an onto-​ epistemological platform, not a theory. As Zahavi & Martiny (2019: 161) aptly note, when applying phenomenology, ‘hyper-​philosophizing’ should be avoided. As an empirical science, MOS should use phenomenology as a meta-​theoretical resource that affords a particular style of theorizing rather than as a substitute for it. Seeking to phenomenologically understand organizational phenomena, be they entrepreneurship (Deroy, Chapter 21), algorithms and technology at work (Parviainen & Koski, Chapter 13; Lenglet, Chapter 32), space and temporality in organizational action (de Vaujany, Chapter 22; Cnossen, Chapter 25; Tadashi, Chapter 33), social movements (Peiro, Chapter 31), and so on, remains our core business, as several chapters in this Handbook have refreshingly shown. Phenomenology enables us to draw fresh onto-​ epistemological distinctions in our organizational research, making it possible to overcome sterile dualistic and scientistic understandings. What, however, such distinctions will disclose is up to us to theoretically work out through painstaking research.

716   Afterword

Acknowledgement Note: The chapter partly draws on Tsoukas (2021). Permission by Cambridge University Press acknowledged. My thanks to the editors of the Handbook, especially Mar Pérezts, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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718   Afterword Weick, K. E. (2009) Making sense of the organization: The impermanent organization. Chichester: Wiley. Wittgenstein, L. (1979). On certainty. In G. E. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright (eds.), trans. D. Paul & E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Zahavi, D., & Martiny, K. M. M. (2019). Phenomenology in nursing studies: New perspectives. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 93, 155–​162.

P ostscri p t An Anthropologist Lands in Phenomenology Tim Ingold

Students of anthropology, about to embark on their first major project of research, have often approached me with questions along the following lines. I have been reading your work, and really sympathize with your phenomenological approach. I would like to apply it in my own research. But tell me, what would adopting such an approach mean for my practice? What difference would it make for the way I should do my fieldwork, or write up my findings?

I have always found these questions hard to answer; nor are answers easy to come by in existing literature. We all know that in studying among people whose background and experiences are very different from ours, the task is not to interrogate them with pre-​ prepared questions, answering to our personal agendas, but rather to observe what they do and listen to what they have to say, and to learn—​as far as is practicably possible—​ to perceive things in ways that correspond with theirs. It is not, then, by directing our questions at people that we gather our material, but by joining with them, such that their questions become ours as well. In this, we willingly forego the comfort and security of established positions, leaving us exposed and vulnerable. But by the same token, we render ourselves open and attentive to life as it comes. Now much the same advice might be offered to any aspiring phenomenologist. It would be to treat the world itself as a milieu of study—​not to confront it from a position of objectivity and detachment, but rather to embrace it as the very matrix of one’s thought and practice, and to place one’s trust in experience. We could indeed be forgiven for concluding that what anthropologists call ‘participant observation’, or its textual rendering as ‘ethnography’, is no less than a method of phenomenological research. Have we anthropologists, then, been doing phenomenology all along? Some have, of course, and have explicitly self-​identified as students of phenomenological anthropology. But most have not. And I would have to count myself initially among the latter! As a student, I had never even heard of phenomenology. I cannot exactly recall when I first encountered the term, but at the time it meant nothing to me. It struck me as just another instance of scholarly obscurantism. My own interests, stemming from a background in the

720   Postscript natural sciences, were in ecological anthropology, in which a key question was to relate the meanings and values people assign to constituents of the world around them to the configuration of facts on the ground. Dissatisfied with the conventional idea that human environments are culturally constructed, I was looking for an alternative. At first, I found this in the ecological approach to perception that had been pioneered, in the field of psychology, by James Gibson. For Gibson, meaning lies in the discovery of what an environment affords for living beings in the course of their current activity. It has its source not in the mind, in any capacity to organize sensory inputs from the exterior world in terms of the concepts and categories of a received tradition, but in the relations set up by virtue of the presence and activity of the being, indivisibly mind and body, in its environment. One of the attractions of this approach, for me, was that culture could be taken out of the human ecological equation, allowing us to understand how even non-​human animals can inhabit meaningful worlds, even if they are not endowed with the imaginative capacities that enable humans to represent and reflect on what they perceive. Yet something was still missing. For Gibson had put all the movement on the side of perceivers, as they actively seek out the affordances of the environment, while treating the environment itself as a domain of insensible objects that have, as it were, ‘precipitated out’ from the currents of their formation, and are already laid out like the scenery and properties of a stage set, waiting for perceivers to make their entry. I wanted to find a way to think about the perception of the environment that would situate perceivers, whether human or non-​human, in a world that was not yet fixed, but continually coming into being around them. For any inhabited environment, it seemed to me, is always work in progress. If that is so, I wondered, then what’s the difference between the ways humans and other animals make themselves at home in the world? It cannot be that animal constructions are dictated by instinct, and human ones by designs of the intellect, when in practice, the forms of these constructions are not transferred readymade but emerge from ways of working with environmental materials in the labours of building. Construction arises within inhabitation, I thought, or building within dwelling, not the other way around. Someone suggested I should read an essay by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, entitled ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in which he had made precisely this point. I read the essay, and while I found much of it incomprehensible, his remarks on building and dwelling struck a chord. Not for the first time, I found I had blundered into an immense field of philosophical inquiry of which I had previously known nothing, not by design, but simply because it had already wormed its way into my thinking without my really noticing it. Imagine my dismay, then, on discovering that this was the field known to philosophers as ‘phenomenology’! This word, which had once seemed so abstruse, suddenly took on new meaning. I had never set out to be a phenomenologist, let alone to apply a phenomenological approach, but now I had unintentionally landed in the thick of it. What’s more, the problem that had taken me there, of understanding how form and meaning arise from the practical and perceptual engagement of living beings within a dynamic and sensate environment, turned out to be the centrepiece of one of the most important texts ever written in the field, namely Maurice Merleau-​Ponty’s Phenomenology of

Postscript   721 Perception. Belatedly, I would dip into it, coming away with inspiration every time I did. My phenomenology is nevertheless home-​grown. It doubtless takes untold liberties with canonical works. Textual exegesis is a task for trained philosophers, not for amateurs like me. One of peculiarities of these philosophical discourses is that even as they extol the existential condition of being in a world, they absolve their authors of ever having to dirty their hands with it, or to put their thinking at risk of contamination by any visceral contact with real life. Phenomenological writing, indeed, often seems so wrapped up in itself as to evade all commerce with the world whereof it speaks. That’s why, after all, I remain an anthropologist and not a philosopher. I still believe that the best way to fathom the depths of human experience is to attend to the world, and to learn directly from what it has to tell us. This, of course, is what inhabitants do all the time, in their daily lives, and they have much to teach us. Even to begin to resolve the crisis in our relations with what we used to call ‘the natural world’, but increasingly today ‘the planet’, we need to listen to the wisdom of its inhabitants, both human and non-​ human, rather than taking shelter in the closeted self-​referentiality of philosophical texts. And this takes me back to where I left off, a few paragraphs ago, as a novice anthropologist, knowing nothing of phenomenology, yet immersed in the everyday life of the people among whom I was carrying out ethnographic fieldwork, carried out as part of my doctoral studies in social anthropology. I was living in a remote corner of northeast Finland, among Sámi people who drew a living from herding reindeer, fishing, berrying, and occasional wage labour. In the copious fieldnotes I compiled at the time, I did as I had been instructed, and wrote down everything I could remember that people had told me, and what I had observed. Even after the lapse of fifty years, these notes remain a treasure trove of information. Yet you will search them in vain for anything of my own personal experience. It had not occurred to me to describe what it felt like to walk the paths through the forest in summer, to ride a sledge in winter, to handle a lasso, to fish through the ice, to stuff my reindeer-​skin boots with hay, to inhale the smoke of a log-​fire, to share in the pool of light cast by a paraffin lamp, or to witness the full moon of an arctic night. These things left an impression, and I would tell of them in letters home. But they never made it into my notes. I had been taught to treat fieldnotes as a repository of objective data for future analysis. What was not in the notes, then, would fall through the cracks. If, in the fieldwork practice of participant observation, I may have unwittingly followed a phenomenological approach, then it was in the simple activity of note-​taking that I began to diverge from it. Nor was I alone in this. Many anthropologists have told, albeit informally, of how the experiences that left the greatest impression, that proved the most eye-​ opening, and that transformed them personally, happened in between, while they were gathering information on other things. The importance of fieldnotes cannot be overemphasized, but not for the reasons set out in formal protocols of academic research. According to these protocols, as I had been taught, notes are to be deposited or archived as data, from which I would go on to build my analysis. They differ from the kinds of data handled by other sciences only insofar as they are primarily qualitative rather than quantitative. In practice, however, as

722   Postscript I found for myself, fieldnotes serve a quite different purpose. They work, in effect, not as an archive but as a time-​machine. Or more precisely, they allow us to inhabit two times simultaneously, allowing them literally to bleed into one another. Memories fade, and events that seemed unforgettable at the time all too soon dissolve into a haze, never to be recovered. Rereading one’s notes, however, even after a lapse of years and in an environment far removed from that in which they were first written, it is as if it all happened only yesterday. Even the bare facts serve as mnemonics, bringing people and places, sounds and smells vividly to mind. Every fact turns out to be less a record of the past than a door that opens to it, making it possible to relive past experience in the here and now. Notes are the seeds of memory. Returning, then, to the question with which I began: what difference would it make to adopt a phenomenological stance? In the field, you would remain a participant observer, and you would still write notes. There would still be information you need to collect. But you might choose to dwell more on your own experience, what it felt like, and on all the things that went on in between. You might write an altogether more personal account, closer to what might otherwise go into letters home. For many contemporary anthropologists, indeed, this is already accepted practice. Much has changed in the discipline since I was a doctoral student, none more significant than the so-​called ‘reflexive turn’, which demanded explicit recognition of the complicity of fieldworkers in the situations they study. With this, the objectivity born of detachment was no longer an option. It was an important step to acknowledge that the visceral involvement of the researcher, as a knowing and feeling subject, in the social world of those among whom they study, is not a weakness but the singular strength of anthropological research, in that it opens observation to a truth beyond the facts, in experience. Yet despite this turn towards self-​reflection, anthropology has not entirely escaped the straitjacket of formal protocols. It is not until after fieldwork, however, that this constraint really shows. Just as a mountain only looks like a mountain when you observe it from afar, so what anthropologists call ‘the field’ only appears as such when you are not there anymore. While you are there, it is simply life, in and around someplace. For ‘there’ to become the field, you have to wrap it up, retrospectively, into an account. Then the lines along which life is lived, including the lines of writing in your notes, become boundaries within which it is enclosed. This is what happens when notes are turned into texts, in the production of what is called ‘ethnography’. It is above all at this moment, when you forsake the immediacy of ‘being there’ for the security of the study, that anthropology tends to part company with phenomenology. It is a moment that heralds an abrupt change of key—​so abrupt, indeed, that it can take months for the researcher to adjust to it. It is often remarked that a researcher, recently returned from fieldwork, is ‘too close to the material’ to be able to write about it. They have to achieve a certain distance, to put all they have been through into perspective. What had once been vividly present is now recalled in its absence, and the openness and exposure of participant observation give way to the work of consolidation. With that, fieldnotes become data for analysis. They were not data to begin with. I have always written notes by hand, and would advise anyone to do the same. I would also

Postscript   723 advise them to draw. Both handwriting and drawing answer, in the gestural movements of their accomplishment, to the generative movements of the phenomena that capture one’s attention, in a way that cannot be achieved with the punctuality of the keyboard. To write, as to draw, is to unite questioning, observing, remembering, and imagining with the sensuous engagement of the hand with pen and paper. What remains is the trace of a gesture. But the datum is something else. Where the trace is made in movement, the datum is a stoppage. Thus, to treat one’s fieldnotes as a repository of ‘qualitative data’ means reading them in a way contrary to their nature. Indeed, the very idea of a qualitative datum enshrines a profound contradiction. Surely, the quality of phenomena can be judged only by opening them to immediate, sensory experience. In a word, it is a function of presence. And it is with the qualia of presence that phenomenology is primarily concerned. But for precisely this reason, it does not deal in data. For to render phenomena as data, they must be absented, closed off, severed from the relational matrix of their generation. This contradiction lies at the heart of ethnography. For in turning notes into text, prospect becomes retrospect. To describe one’s encounters in the field as ‘ethnographic’ is to imagine that even then, in the course of going forward with others, in activity and conversation, one is already in the future, looking back. Why else should so much emphasis be placed on the establishment of rapport? The word carries a double meaning, of friendship and report. And it construes the fieldworker as a double-​agent, sidling up to the people in a spirit of conviviality, only to convert what they learn from the encounter into intelligence on which to base an account. Even today, now that the ethnographer is no longer expected to hide behind a cloak of objectivity but required, rather, to position their own presence and experience centre-​stage, the ethnographic imperative remains. Many have taken to describing their practice as ‘auto-​ethnography’. It is a bizarre idea. There is a well-​established genre of writing in which an author reflects on their life and times. It is known an autobiography. By what ruse, then, does bios—​the life that can be told as story—​become ethnos? It amounts, in effect, to a presentation of the ethnographic self as not just a subject but a super-​subject, who has taken on the mantle of an entire people. In truth, super-​ subjectivity and hyper-​ objectivity are two sides of the same coin: heads, all you see is the ethnographer; tails, all you see are the people. The reflexive turn may have flipped the coin, heads up, but it does nothing to resolve the opposition between the two sides. A phenomenological approach promises to do just this. It does so by acknowledging the inescapable condition of our existence in a world which binds us into a matrix of relations even before any questions of objectivity or subjectivity can arise. Life can be transformative, but as beings in a world, the transformations we undergo are part and parcel of the world’s transformation of itself, of its worlding. The way to get at this is to think of ourselves not as nouns (subjects, objects) nor as pronouns (we, you, they) but as verbs. As a verb, what you do is also what you undergo. Consider what happens, for example, when you go for a walk. Initially, it is something you intend to do. But once having set out, you and your walking become one and the same: even as you walk; your walking walks you. You are inside it; with every step you are a slightly

724   Postscript different person from whom you were before. And if this is true of walking, then it is equally true of writing. What is the purpose of writing, after all, if not to allow readers to join in your deliberations; to open a path that they too can follow? This, at the end of the day, distinguishes truly phenomenological writing from the more conventionally ethnographic. Ethnography is writing about; it draws on what the people in your study have told you for what it tells about them. Here, lessons learned in the field become data for analysis; what readers encounter is the final outcome. Phenomenology calls for a different way of writing. It is a writing with, which welcomes others into the space of our deliberations as the hand, holding the pen, scours the mind for every next word. This is to join our own lines with the writing of the world, whether with the paths of human inhabitants as they find their ways around, or the tracks of animals, or the meandering vegetation. And just as our minds mingle with the world in writing, so the minds of readers mingle in turn with ours. All these lines, of living, thinking, writing, and reading, are braided in a meshwork which ravels and unravels as it goes along. In this way, life—​as scholarship—​does not progress towards a conclusion but carries on. And phenomenological inquiry, as I understand it, is dedicated thus, to the continuity of life.

Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Tables, figures, and boxes are indicated by t, f, and b following the page number A aberrant movements  9n.9, 455, 702 ableism 371 Abraham, M.  453 Abram, D.  476 absolute life  200 absorbed coping  712, 713, 714 absorption  303–​4 abstract detachment  713, 714 acceleration  616–​17 Achilles paradox  473 action affordances  141 activism see willing suspension of disbelief: Occupied Theatre squatters activity  5, 45, 106–​7, 109 meanings 393 Actor-​Network Theory (ANT)  13–​14, 283, 388–​89, 401, 641, 641b, 647 actuality  114, 454 actualizations  424, 425, 429 Adam, B.  278 adumbration 30 aesthetic approach through Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace  396–​411 aesthetic feelings of joy, amazement and desire 398 aesthetic materiality  399–​400 desire 400 metaphysical embrace  402–​4 ‘originarietà, ‘pastiche’ and relevance of philosophy  404–​11 aesthetic approach and relevance of phenomenological aesthetics  406–​8

photography 396 play  398–​404 resonance  398, 400, 403, 410 seduction  408–​11 virtual body  399 aesthetic enjoyment  558–​59 aesthetic judging  401 aesthetic phenomenology  313–​14 aesthetics  5–​6, 10–​11, 16, 252, 265–​66, 606, 613, 614, 618 aesthetic sensibility  406–​7 affect  8, 12, 13–​14 appearances and subjectivity/​ subjectivation  701–​2 feminist new materialism and embodiment 314 ordinary  311–​12, 318, 324–​25, 516, 609 sensing approach and role of place  515–​16, 517 affection-​images  453 affectio societatis  203, 206–​9, 210, 211 affective and active life  203, 204–​5 affective approach  605 affective experiences  604 affective flesh  197 affective involvement  606–​8, 609, 610, 613, 618 affective methodology  608–​9 affective pedagogy  311–​12, 323–​25 affective relationality  612 affective turn: stakeholder theory  209–​10 affectivity  200–​1, 204, 205, 207, 604, 610 affordances  71–​72, 141, 709, 710 African phenomenology see Serequeberhan, T. -​African phenomenology: enframing and transformation

726   Index Agamben, G.  72 agencement  311, 314–​15, 321, 702 agency  283, 308, 385, 708–​11, 715 political  115–​16, 321 agentivity 111 agonism 116 Ahmed, S.  247–​49, 365, 366–​67, 368, 371–​73, 376, 377–​78 air-​and-​breathing bodies  319–​20 Alaimo, S.  320 Al-​Amoudi, I.  482 Alcadipani, R.  552–​53 Alexander, S.  11, 106 algorithms see social studies of finance and algorithms alienation  136, 547–​48 Allen, I.K.  319–​20 Allport, F.H.  431–​32 alter ego 33 ambiguity  142–​43, 610 Ambler  497–​98 analytical philosophy  36 see also under Bachelard, G. -​poetic and scientific anamorphosis  184, 185 Anaximander  463–​65, 476–​78, 481–​82 Anaximines  476–​77 Anderson, B.  613 Andersson, O.  157 animal faith  351 animalia 33 animal ontologies  384–​93 animal diplomacy  387b animality  386–​89, 390–​91 animals’ bodies as expressive embodied conduct and manifestations  391–​92 coexisting with wolves  387b interanimality 392 ontological war on species  389–​91 species’ life-​worlds  393 Annaud, J.-​J.  441, 449–​50, 451–​54, 455–​58, 459 ante-​phenomenology  2, 9, 12, 13f Anthropocene  319, 386–​88, 576, 578–​79, 581–​82, 594 anthropocentrism 390 anthropology  719–​24 fieldnotes  721–​23

anthropomorphism, freedom from  401, 402, 403–​4, 410 anticipation immediate  51, 277–​78 protentional  277–​78, 280, 290 anti-​phenomenology  28–​29, 215–​19, 230, 240 anxiety  35, 71–​73, 74–​75 apeiron  463, 477–​78 appearance as reversibility  3 appearances and subjectivity/​ subjectivation  699–​704 appearance of reality  700 in and beyond appearances of organizing  699–​702 Foucault, M.  702, 704 futures  703–​4 pure appearances  701 subjectivity/​subjectivation  702–​3 appearing, duality in the modes of  198 a priori sciences  42–​43 archaeology  401, 404–​5 of knowledge  9–​10 see also under Foucault, M. Arendt, H.  7–​8, 204, 384, 541–​42 Between Past and Future 162 experience and MOS  238–​39, 243, 247, 248t, 249t, 259–​60 Human Condition, The 162 Origins of Totalitarianism, The 162 queer phenomenology and erotic approach  366, 371–​72 Arendt, H. -​political philosophy  161–​78 labour  164–​65, 168 MOS  176–​78 plurality 177 plurality against domination  170–​7 1 plurality of beginnings  168–​7 1, 172 biological birth: human’s connection to the beginning  168 births  168–​70, 172 birth of a web of human relationships  169–​70 collective birth  169 second birth of the individual  169 plurality of perspectives  164 revelation and individuality  163–​67

Index   727 addressing philosophy through phenomenology  163–​64 labour 165 ‘naked’ person is not a person: no humanity without political community 167 private realm  167, 169, 176–​77 public realm  166–​67, 169, 176–​77 revelation of individual through action  164–​66 vita activa (action)  165–​66, 167, 174–​75 work  164–​65, 168 social 167 storyteller: narrating phenomena  171–​76 civil disobedience as guarantee of truth of minority 175 councils to preserve public freedom contained in revolutions  173 reality and truth  174–​76, 177–​78 replacing event in time: wandering between past and future  173–​74 revolution as a beginning  172–​73 revolution to found freedom  172–​73 truth made of plurality  175 truth teller, role of  175–​76 violence in revolutions  173 totalitarian systems  170, 175 Arendt, H. -​silence in Quaker business meetings  488–​505 active silence  495, 496 Arendt’s contribution to organization studies  500–​3 centred silence  498–​99 clerks 498 communal plurality  499 consensus 499 constitutive silence  495 different but equal  498–​99 gathered or covered meetings  495 generative silence  489–​90, 501, 503–​4 inclusion, thinking and experience  496–​97 natality  500–​1 plurality  490–​93, 494, 503 private thinking  491–​92, 503–​4 public thinking  491–​92 reasoning and thinking distinction  501–​2 sense of the meeting  499

silence  495–​96 silence, dialogue and judgement  497–​500 silent and silenced distinction  489 silent waiting  496–​97 spoken ministry  496–​97 thinking, friendship and silence  490–​94, 504 action and the political  493–​94 judgement  94, 492–​93 plurality  490–​93, 494 reasoning and judgement  503–​5 reasoning/​knowing  490–​91 viva activa  493, 502 Aristotle  41, 42, 43, 53, 151, 370n.1, 409, 454, 473, 493, 523 Armitage, A.  91–​92 Arnoldi, J.  643–​44 Aroles, J.  501, 656, 707 Aron, R.  312–​13, 318 art-​based methodologies  325 artificial intelligence (AI) see under imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations arts  323, 401, 404–​6, 578 literary 401 performing  322–​23 photography 410 visual  41–​42, 398 Ash, J.  608, 613, 615 Asian philosophies  9, 12 assemblage (agencement)  311, 314–​15, 321, 702 asymmetry  306, 307 atmosphere co-​working spaces in Buddhist temples (Japan) 667 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations  283–​84 organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI)  676–​77, 687–​88 and quasi-​objects  8 Schmitz, H.: methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  602–​3, 604, 605, 610, 611, 612, 613–​17, 618 sensing approach and role of place  515–​16 attention  50, 227–​28 attunement  68–​69, 128–​29, 130, 132–​33, 303–​4, 607

728   Index Augustine  150–​51 authenticity  302–​3 auto-​affection  197, 198, 199–​201, 207, 210 auto-​ethnography  361–​62, 441, 449, 450–​51, 452, 629–​30, 723 automated decision-​making (ADM) see under imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations autopoietic process of understanding  462–​83 becoming as co-​prehension and co-​naissance  478–​83 Bergson, H.  463, 465n.3, 472–​75, 482 flesh  478, 481–​83 Gestalt theories of perception  469–​72, 474–​ 75, 481–​82 Merleau-​Ponty’s late ontology: flesh as process  475–​78 prehension  466–​67 process thought  462–​65 Whitehead, Merleau-​Ponty and bifurcation of nature  465–​73 averageness  70–​7 1 Awakening Conscience, The (Hunt)  62–​67 B Bachelard, G.  216 activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine, L’  338–​39 Administrative Behaviour 335 air et les songes, L’ 82 Earth and Reveries of Response  82, 330–​31 Earth and Reveries of Will  82, 330–​31 eau et les rêves, L’ 82 ‘Essai sur la connaissance approchée’  81 experience and MOS  243, 248t, 249–​50, 249t Flamme d’une chandelle, La  82–​83 Fragments d’une poétique du feu  82–​83 materialisme rationel, Le  338–​39 pluralisme coherent de la chimie moderne, Le  338–​39 Poetics of Reverie, The  82–​83, 330–​31 Poetics of Space, The  82–​83, 87–​88, 342–​43 psychoanalyse du feu, La 82 rationalism appliqué, Le  338–​39 Bachelard, G. -​imagination  79–​93 creative imagination  90–​91, 93

dynamic imagination  85, 87, 90 elements (air, water and fire)  85 epistemology  81, 82–​83 extraverted or introverted reveries  85 formal imagination  87, 90 imagination  83–​86, 87, 93 imagination and perception intertwined  90 industrial imagination  90–​91 instants  81–​82 material imagination  83, 85, 87, 90–​91, 92 metaphysics of time  81–​82 MOS  89–​92 poetic images  83–​84, 85, 86–​89 poetic imagination  79–​80 poetic reveries  86–​87, 88–​89, 92 poetics of space  88–​89 reverberation of an image  84, 85, 86, 90 rhythmanalysis  86, 88 rhythms  81–​82, 85 science and poetry, philosopher of  80–​83 Bachelard, G. -​poetic and scientific  330–​45 analytical philosophy: blocking phenomenology  332–​35 decisions in Chicago  335 logics in Davos  332–​33 rationality in Cambridge, Massachusetts  333–​34 application of phenomenology in Bachelard’s business school  343–​45 continental humanism  336–​38 imaginational reverie  341–​43 mathematics as poetic thought  339–​41 phenomenology for poetics or science?  330–​32 teleology of modern sciences  338–​39 Bachelard, S.  40, 343, 344–​45 Baden School  556–​57 Badiou, A.  419, 420, 421, 423t, 426, 427, 429, 430, 436 banality of evil  204, 541–​42 Barad, K.  258, 260, 261, 316–​17, 319, 324, 606–​7 Barbaras, R.  476 Baudelaire, C.  76–​77, 88 Baxter, R.  92 Beauvoir, S. de  7–​8, 238–​39 feminist new materialism and embodiment  312–​13, 318

Index   729 multidimensionality of the body  132, 138–​39, 143–​4 4 queer phenomenology and erotic approach  366, 369–​70, 371–​72, 374–​75 becoming  11, 463–​65 as co-​prehension and co-​naissance  478–​83 becoming-​animal  311–​12, 322–​23, 324–​25 Being  58, 61–​62, 182, 183–​84 African phenomenology: enframing and transformation  537–​38, 542, 544 and an ought  304 autopoietic process of understanding  463 being of  298 forms of  70 being-​for-​itself  132–​36 being-​for-​the-​other  135–​36 being here  133 being-​in-​itself  61 being-​in-​relation-​to-​others (aidagara) 656, 666 being-​in-​the-​world  128–​29, 132–​36, 142–​43, 715 autopoietic process of understanding  471–​ 72, 472n.14, 475 co-​working spaces in Buddhist temples (Japan) 656 feminist new materialism and embodiment 318 Henry, M.  201–​2 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations  281–​82 Japanese phenomenology  566 logic of practice  712, 714 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies, gestures and movement 350 queer phenomenology and the erotic  364–​65 Serequeberhan, T.: African phenomenology  534–​36 being-​like-​others  547 being-​of-​the-​world  318 being-​with  7–​8, 403, 547 being-​with-​others  547 being without restriction  525, 528 belonging, sense of  676, 684–​85 Bencivenga, E.  398 Benhabib, S.  169

Benner, P.  567 Bennett, J.  319–​20 Benoist, J.  12–​13, 28–​29, 32–​33 Bergerac, C. de  85 Berger, P.L.  251–​52 Bergson, H.  11, 81–​82, 98, 100, 104n.16, 106, 131–​32, 216, 338 autopoietic process of understanding  463, 465n.3, 472–​75, 482 depth and temporality in cinematic experience  444n.7, 445n.12, 448, 455n.25 entrepreneurial event  423t, 424 experience and MOS  243, 248t, 249t, 249–​50, 255–​56 Japanese phenomenology  558, 560 Berhouma, M.-​A.  90–​91 Berkowitz, R.  491 Berlant, L.  517 Best, K.  655–​56 betweenness 567 see also in-​betweenness Beunza, D.  645 Beyer, C.  51 Beyes, T.  90–​91, 357b, 612–​13, 617 bifurcation of nature  465–​73 Bigo, V.  500–​1 Binswanger, L.  217–​18, 223, 566–​67 biodiversity policies  387b Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI) see organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI) bio-​social approach  526–​28 Biran, M. de  194, 200–​1 birth see under Arendt, H. -​political philosophy Blackburn, S.  477 Blackman, D.  489 Blomberg, A.  323 bodies see Merleau-​Ponty, M. -​bodies, gestures and movement body see co-​working spaces in Buddhist temples (Japan); embodied perception and the schemed world; embodied practices of commoning and enfleshed convivialities; multidimensionality of the body

730   Index body-​image  139 body-​mind  527, 529, 606 body-​schema  139, 141 bodyspaces  372–​73 body-​subject  137 Bohm, D.  255 Böhme, G.  264, 611, 613–​14 Boje, D.M.  158 Bollas, C.  261 Bolzano, B.  557, 562 Bontems, V.  92–​93 Bos, G.  566–​67 Bosco, H.  88 Bourdieu, P.  481n.25, 624–​25 Bourgeois, P.L.  253 Boyce, W.R.  66 Bozalek, V.  317 Brentano, F.  6, 39, 49, 147–​48, 557, 562 Brocklesby, J.  482 Brook, I.  584 Broome, J.  49 Brunschvicg, L.  131–​32, 332–​33 Buddhist temples see co-​working spaces in Buddhist temples (Japan) bureaucracy  5–​6, 175, 502, 505, 655 Burrell, G.  354b, 360b business ethics  259–​60 Butler, J.  317 Buytendijk, F.  385–​86, 392–​93 C Cabestan, P.  312n.1, 313 Cabral, A.  538, 542, 543n.12 Caillos, R.  341–​42 Calabrese, O.  407 call  185–​86 Calle, S.  315, 322–​23 Callon, M.  641b, 647 Canguilhelm, G.  216, 223 canonical phenomenology  246–​47 Capriles, R.  301 care see Heidegger, M. -​conscience and care care ethics  301 care robotics see imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations care of the self  227–​28 Carman, T.  71, 481n.25

carnality  401, 403, 476, 576–​77, 578, 592 Carnap, R.  28–​29, 332–​34, 335, 340–​41 Cartesianism  4, 9, 15t, 81, 350, 361 Cartesian mind-​body dualism  468–​69 Cassirer, E.  332–​33 Castoriadis, C.  252 categorical dimensions of the phenomenal field  126–​27 categorical intuition  36–​37 Cavaillès, J.  216 centrality of time, space, instruments, embodiment, meaning and sense-​making  263–​66 Certeau, M. de  653–​54 Césaire, A.  543n.12, 548–​49 Chaliapin, F.  453 Chanlat, J.-​F.  410–​11 Charbonneau, M.  331–​32, 339, 341–​42 Chauvier, É.  647 Chávez, H.  301 Chekland, P.  208–​9 Chemero, A.  470 Cherniss, H.  481–​82 Chia, R.  255, 482 chiasm  9, 12, 13, 142, 331–​32, 358, 459t, 524–​25 embodied practices of commoning and enfleshed convivialities  578, 584, 585, 591, 593 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  98, 106–​7, 109, 115–​16, 118–​19 Chimisso, C.  331–​32, 339–​40 Chirico, G. de  399–​400, 401–​4, 406, 408, 410–​11 Chun, W.  70n.1 Ciborra, C.  281–​83 Cimino, A.  405 cinema  9–​11, 702 see also depth and temporality in cinematographic experience Ciulla, J.B.  301 Cixous, H.  378 Clark, A.  128n.2 Clarke, C.  388 classical phenomenology  640 Claudel, P.  479 clearing 544

Index   731 Clegg, S.R.  157–​58 climate change  38–​39, 50, 211, 319–​20, 384, 418, 421, 576, 704 Cloutier, C.  255–​56 Coetzee, P.H.  533n.2 co-​existence  351–​52, 385, 386, 387b, 392, 442, 494, 524, 582, 594 Cohen, L.  654 Cohen, M.  253 Coleridge, S.T.  623, 625, 626 collaborative creativity  323 collective auteur  399, 408 collective embodiment  323 collective identity  307 collective memories  50–​51 collective psychology  41 collectivity 12 colonialism  532–​33, 548–​49 commodification 357b, 434 commoning see embodied practices of commoning and enfleshed convivialities common law phenomena  187, 188, 189 common life-​world  201–​2 common world  201–​2 companion species  322 complex of objects  34 co-​naissance  478–​83 concrescence  466–​67 conditional concepts  344–​45 configuration  151–​52, 152t, 157 Connery, S.  453 Connolly, L.  386–​88 conscience otherness within ourselves  154–​55 see also Heidegger, M. -​conscience and care consciousness  4, 6, 8, 11 appearances and subjectivity/​ subjectivation 700 Bachelard, G.: imagination  89–​90 embodied perception and the schemed world 528 Foucault, M.  222–​25 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  39, 40, 43–​44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51 intentional  60, 102, 105, 195–​97 Japanese phenomenology  560

and object connection  147–​48 phenomenological sensibilities  32–​33, 36 pure  44, 48, 137, 142–​43, 217, 298 Schmitz, H.: methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  607 social studies of finance and algorithms  641 subjective  582–​83, 625–​26 consensus 499 consenting 148 constitution  105–​6, 111n.31 of knowledge  44–​45 continental humanism  336–​38 continental philosophy  2f, 10–​11, 18t, 97–​98, 194, 462–​63, 641 Bachelard, G.: poetic and scientific  332–​35 Serequeberhan, T.: African phenomenology  532–​34, 546 continuity-​discontinuity  109, 360–​61 convivialities see embodied practices of commoning and enfleshed convivialities Cooper, R.  500–​1 co-​prehension  478–​83 corpomateriality  311–​12, 319–​20, 324–​25 corporate social responsibility (CSR)  158, 576 corporeality aesthetic approach  399, 408 animal ontologies  391–​92 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations  282–​83 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history 118 multidimensionality of the body  129–​30 corporeal scheme  100 corporeity  9–​10 correlationism 36 cosmic time  151–​52 cosmopoetics 91 Costa, V.  405 co-​working spaces in Buddhist temples (Japan)  652–​68 Buddhism 653 co-​conceived temple: spatially transformed and networked  659–​61, 665 collaborative economy  656 conceived space  654 danka system  658, 659, 660–​61

732   Index co-​working spaces in Buddhist temples (Japan) (cont.) gig economy  656 hot-​desking  654 liminal spaces  655 LINKwith  657, 658, 659–​60, 661, 663, 664, 665 literature review  653–​56 lived experiences  654–​56 organizational space  653–​54 research gap  656 lived space  654 lived temple: embodied spatial experiences seen by others  661–​65 makerspaces  653, 656 methods  657–​58 Miyashita  659–​60, 661, 663, 664, 665 opening hours  664 perceived space  654 perceived temple and Buddhism  658–​59 sharing economy  656 silence 656 space production  652 tatami mats  662–​63, 664–​65, 667 Ushida  659–​60, 663 Wakatsuki  659, 661, 662, 664, 665–​66, 667 Crane, D.  241 creative imagination  341–​42 creativity  49, 90, 323, 500–​1, 517, 615–​16 collaborative 323 collective 177 organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI)  675, 676–​77, 689 self-​  441–​42 workplace  80, 92–​93 crisis  42–​43 critical phenomenology  257, 702 critical reflection  323, 409–​11, 538 critical theories  203–​5, 238, 251, 256–​57, 360b, 702–​3 critical turn  112 Crowell, S.  603 Crowther-​Heyck, H.  335, 338–​39 Cullen, J.G.  386–​88 culture  107–​8, 672–​73, 682 Cunliffe, A.L.  157–​58

D Dahl, M.  90–​92, 93 Dale, K.  260, 348–​49, 354b, 360b, 654, 665 Darwin, C.  11, 526–​27 Dasein  3, 7 animal ontologies  385–​86, 390 appearances and subjectivity/​ subjectivation 700 Arendt, H.: silence in Quaker business meetings  501–​2 entrepreneurial event  421 Foucault, M.  223 Henry, M.  196, 199 Japanese phenomenology  566 phenomenological sensibilities  34–​35 queer phenomenology and the erotic  369–​70 Scheler, M.: personalism and paradox in leadership relations  297, 298, 303–​4 Serequeberhan, T.: African phenomenology  536–​38, 540–​42, 544, 545, 547 social studies of finance the algorithms  640 see also under Heidegger, M. -​conscience and care Daseinsanalyse  34, 35 Davidson, S.  202–​3n.3 daydreaming  90–​91, 92 de Broglie, L.  338 decentered management  262–​63 decomposition principle  126 decontextualization 158 defence of reason against sceptics  48–​49 De Gandt, F.  41 Dejours, C.  204 Deleuze, G.  9–​10, 17–​20, 100n.8, 113, 215–​16 appearances and subjectivities  702, 704 autopoietic process of understanding 463n.1 depth and temporality in cinematic experience  440–​41, 449–​59, 457t Difference and Repetition  425, 426, 430 entrepreneurial event  419, 423t, 426, 427–​29, 430–​31, 435, 436 experience and MOS  255 feminist new materialism and embodiment  310–​11, 317, 321 Fold  425, 429

Index   733 immanence, machinic assemblage and depth  444–​49, 457t literature review  240 Logics of Sense 425 sensing approach and the role of place  509 theory of cinema  10–​11 Denis, J.L.  306 Depraz, N.  221–​22, 227–​29 depth  100, 702 depth and temporality in cinematographic experience  440–​59 actuality 454 affection-​images  453 Deleuze, G.: immanence, machinic assemblage and depth  444–​49, 457t depth in perception and depth in experience  440–​42 discontinuation  450–​51, 452, 453, 456–​58, 457t first deep movement  448 folds  444, 446, 449, 452–​53, 458, 459 holes  441, 444, 446, 447, 448, 449, 452–​53, 458, 702 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: seeing and sensing in depth  442–​44, 457t movement-​images  440–​41, 444–​45, 448, 452, 455–​56 openness  443, 458–​59 perception 442 reduction  441, 450–​51, 456–​58, 457t resonance  441–​42 reversibility 454 second deep movement  448 spacing  442–​43 spatium  444, 446–​47, 448, 455, 458 subjectivity and subjectivation  444–​46, 450, 456–​58, 459 temporality  441–​43, 444–​45, 449, 450–​51, 454–​55, 458–​59 thickness  449, 452–​53 time-​images  440–​41, 444–​45, 448, 452, 454–​55, 459 time-​space  455–​56 vertical peripety  450–​51, 454–​55, 456–​58, 457t virtuality 454 see also Name of the Rose, The Deranty, J.-​P.  204

Derrida, J.  9, 132n.6, 215–​16, 343 animal ontologies in posthumanist research  384, 385–​86, 390–​91 Animal that therefore I am, The 390 autopoietic process of understanding 463n.1 Beast and the Sovereign, The 390 feminist new materialism and embodiment  310–​11, 317 Given Time 184 Desanti, J.-​T.  36–​37, 42–​43, 44, 46, 49 Descartes, R.  5–​6 animal ontologies in posthumanist research 390 autopoietic process of understanding  468–​69 depth and temporality in cinematic experience  442–​43 Discourse on method 43 experience and MOS  253 Foucault, M.  221–​23, 224, 225–​27 Husserl, E.: reason and emotions  49 Marion, J.-​L.: post-​metaphysical phenomenology  181–​82 Meditations Métaphysiques 226 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies, gestures and movement  350, 352–​53 Metaphysical Meditations 217n.1 orthodoxy and heresies  35–​36 Ricoeur, P.: hermeneutic phenomenology  147–​48 Sartre, J.-​P.: phenomenology of the body  131–​32 descriptive approach  603–​4 desire 400 Despret, V.  324 Dewey, J.  253, 336, 463–​65 Art as Experience  526–​27, 529–​30 bio-​social approach and existential ontology  526–​28 embodied perception and the schemed world  522–​23, 528–​29, 530 Experience and Nature 527 experimental pragmatism  10–​11 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry 526 dialectical phenomenology  252 dialectics, good and bad  117 Didi-​Huberman, G.  52–​53

734   Index difference animal ontologies  390–​91 autopoietic process of understanding  477–​78 depth and temporality  443 entrepreneurial event  418, 424, 426, 430, 435–​36 feminist new materialism and embodiment  316–​17 Henry, M.  196 productivity 229 Scheler, M.  305–​6, 307–​8 diffraction as methodology and pedagogy  311–​12, 316–​18, 323, 324 Dillon, M.C.  138, 469, 472n.15, 474–​75 Dilthey, W.  560 Diprose, R.  247–​49, 258, 259–​60 discontinuation  450–​51, 452, 453, 456–​58, 457t discontinuing phenomenology see Henry, M. -​extending and discontinuing phenomenology discontinuous engagement  114 disembodied phenomenology paradox  366–​70 disembodiment  16, 388–​89 disinterlocution 647 disposedness  680–​81, 686, 689 distanciation  149–​50 domains of objects  33, 224, 482, 578 domination  9, 170–​7 1, 256–​57, 344, 401, 502, 540, 541–​42, 592, 636 Doré, A.  388–​89 double idolatry  182 double sensation  477–​78 Dreyfus, H.  139, 230, 243, 247, 248t, 249t, 281 dualistic theory of primary and secondary qualities  468–​69 Ducasse, I.  82, 339–​40 Dufrenne, M.  10 Dumas, M.  74 duration  11, 473, 474, 700 Dussel, E.  552–​53 Dzeng, E.  286 E Eberle, T.  677 ecology  106–​7, 319, 481–​82, 587

eco-​ontology of life  211 Eco, U.  449–​50, 451, 453–​54, 455 ecstatic presence  68 Eddington, A.  338–​39 ego  33, 46, 47, 50, 53, 185, 224 empirical 137 transcendental  132, 137, 198–​99, 201–​2, 224 Eichmann, A.  162, 501–​3 eidetic intentionality  50 eidetic reduction or epoché  6, 8, 46, 48, 139–​40 eidetic variation  30–​31 Einstein, A.  338–​39 emancipation, communication and systems  9 embodied conduct  387b embodied existence  17–​20 embodied experience  136, 475, 588–​89, 711 literature review  253, 258–​59 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies and gestures 357b, 360b Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  99, 101, 107–​8 queer phenomenology and the erotic  369, 370, 371–​72 Schmitz, H.: methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  606–​7, 608–​9, 611, 614 embodied habits and tactility  136–​43 embodied information infrastructures  281–​84 embodied involvement  614 embodied knowledge and embodied learning  258–​59 embodied motility  141 embodied perception and the schemed world  522–​30 Dewey, J.: bio-​social approach and existential ontology  526–​28 flesh in the world and flesh among fleshes  528–​30 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: The Visible and the Invisible  523–​25 embodied phenomenology  385–​86, 462–​63, 604, 607 embodied practices  281, 282–​83, 284, 287, 288 embodied practices of commoning and enfleshed convivialities  575–​95 Anthropocene  576, 578–​79, 594 carnality 578

Index   735 co-​fleshing  584 commoning 587 common politics  580 commons and commoning  578–​81 Common(s)Lab 588 corporate social responsibility (CSR)  576 Covid-​19  577, 595 enfleshed commonviviality  582–​83, 585–​86 ethics 576 flesh  577, 582 flesh as element and formative medium  583–​85 fleshing-​of-​the-​world  584 human and more-​than-​human, not in ‘paradise lost/​refound’ in Anthropocene  581–​82 inessential commonalities  580 institutionalizing the commons  592 ontology of flesh  576–​77, 578, 582–​83 organizing in common  582 organizing for the common  582 organizing of the common  582 political implications  588–​90 post-​tragic sensibility  596 practical implications  587–​88 shared responsibility  579 sustainability  576, 577, 583–​85, 586, 587–​88, 593–​94 theoretical and methodological implications  590–​91 tragedy of the commons  578–​79 tragicomedy of the commons  594–​95 workplace commons  587 world-​fleshly pregnancy  592–​93 embodied qualities  277 embodied routines  282–​83, 286 embodied social practices  666 embodiment  8–​10, 12, 13–​14, 715 animal ontologies  392 appearances and subjectivity/​ subjectivation 701 centrality of  263–​66 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations 283 logic of practice  714 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies, gestures and movement 349

Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  98, 118 multidimensionality of the body  127, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135–​36, 142–​43 organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI)  689–​90 queer phenomenology and the erotic  364–​65 Schmitz, H.: methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  605 situated 290 willing suspension of disbelief: Occupied Theatre squatters  625–​26 see also feminist new materialism and embodiment Emerson, R.W.  10–​11 emotional contagion  305 emotions  8, 12, 13–​14, 51–​53, 210, 283–​84, 701–​2 see also Husserl, E. -​reasons and emotions empathy  90, 171, 177, 305, 323, 401, 404–​5, 563, 583–​84 empiricism  136–​37, 138, 139 logical 335 pure 353 empowerment  302, 307–​8, 588 enactivism  134–​35, 141 enactment  714–​15 enframing see Serequeberhan, T. -​African phenomenology: enframing and transformation Engelberger, J.  287–​88, 289 Engel, P.  48 Enlightenment  34, 340–​41 entanglement  316–​17 entrepreneurial event  417–​36 actualizations  424, 425, 429 closure 427 collective representation  428, 433 commodification 434 definition  419, 420 Deleuzian definition of phenomenal event  422–​31 agency of events against social institutions  427–​31 meanings of event  422–​25 pure openness on to flux of virtualities  425–​27, 436

736   Index entrepreneurial event (cont.) difference  418, 424, 426, 430, 435–​36 dominant theories  431–​32 event as founding phenomenon  417–​20 eventum and eventus 428 experiences 426 extension, intensity and self attributes  426 flux  418, 419–​20, 424, 425–​28, 430–​31, 432–​ 33, 435–​36 fold  425–​26, 432, 436 future research  435–​36 hermeneutics  420–​22 history  418–​19, 429, 430, 432, 433, 434, 435–​36 individual experience  420, 431 industrialization and replication  434 institutionalization  419, 422, 432, 434, 435 intersubjectivities 417 modelling of event  434 non-​orthodox approaches  423t norms and strangeness  418 objects and events distinction  424 past events  434 phenomenon  432–​34 politics  434–​35, 436 anti-​event politics  434 intrinsic closure and organizational politics 435 private phenomenon  426 public and private events  425 public representation  426 repetition  418, 424, 426, 430, 436 routine  418–​19, 436 serialization  427, 436 singularity  427, 430, 435–​36 structuration  419–​20, 427, 428, 429, 430, 433–​34 subjectivation  419–​20 temporality  417, 419 time and space  428, 434, 435–​36 unexpectedness  418–​19 virtualities  424, 429, 432, 436 vitalism  420, 424, 425, 435 entrepreneurship  157, 263–​64, 420, 427–​28, 429, 431–​35, 511, 517, 715 epistem 7 epistemology  81, 82–​83, 310–​11, 317

epistemology-​oriented phenomenology  559–​60, 567–​68 epoché  29, 30, 31 Arendt, H.  164, 168, 173–​74 autopoietic process of understanding  471–​72, 475 eidetic  6, 8, 46, 48 Foucault, M.  227–​28 Henry, M.  195–​96, 197, 198–​99, 208, 211 Husserl, E.  44 Ericson, M.  157 Eriksson, K.  446 eros see under queer phenomenology and the erotic erotic see queer phenomenology and the erotic Escher, M.C.  455–​56 esprit de corps  207–​8, 211 essence(s)  30–​31, 33, 43, 44, 48 eternal objects  466–​67 ethics of asceticism  228–​29 ethics of attention  227–​28 ethics of care framework  386–​88 ethics/​ethical  7 animal ontologies  388 business  259–​60 care 301 corporeal  388–​89 embedded  157–​58 embodied practices of commoning and enfleshed convivialities  576 feminist new materialism and embodiment 317 Foucault, M.  218–​19, 229 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  47–​48, 53 Kantian model of  154–​55 praxis  207–​8 Ricoeur, P.: self in the world  153–​55, 157–​58 Scheler, M.: personalism and paradox in leadership relations  298, 303–​4, 305, 307–​8 self  158–​59 standards 286 stress  289–​90 teleological and deontological  154–​55 tensions 304 understanding 306 values 286

Index   737 ethics of personalism  301 ethnography  211, 376–​77, 509–​10, 516, 629t, 654, 719–​20, 722, 724 affective  325, 605, 610, 614 enactive 711 phenomenology-​based  249–​50 sensory 323 see also auto-​ethnography; sensing approach and role of place (Place Project); willing suspension of disbelief: Occupied Theatre squatters ethnomethodological methodology  672–​74, 676, 677–​79, 681, 689, 690–​91 ethnomethodology  648, 673–​74, 676–​78, 679 Etieyibo, E.  533n.2 European romanticism  10–​11 event  7, 251, 254–​56 actual 11 literature review  251, 254–​56 Marion, J.-​L.  185, 188–​89, 192 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  118–​19 Schmitz, H.: methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  609 see also entrepreneurial event eventfulness of principle  114–​15 eventness  181, 185 excellence research centres see organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI) exceptionalism 308 exemplarity  304, 307–​8 experiential  303–​4 and leaders  302–​4 pure, future orientation of  303–​4 existence  7, 8, 13–​14, 17–​20, 712, 723–​24 animal ontologies  385–​86, 391–​92 Arendt, H.: political philosophy  164, 171 Arendt, H.: silence in Quaker business meetings  490, 493 autopoietic process of understanding  463 Bachelard, G.: imagination  84 Bachelard, G.: poetic and scientific  342–​43 co-​working spaces in Buddhist temples (Japan)  656, 666

embodied perception and the schemed world 529 embodied practices of commoning and enfleshed convivialities  594 Foucault, M.  228 Heidegger, M.: conscience and care  57–​58, 59, 76 Henry, M.: extending and discontinuing phenomenology 204 Japanese phenomenology  560, 564–​65, 566 literature review  265–​66 lived 532 Marion, J.-​L.: experience as an excess of giveness 187 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies, gestures and movement  356, 358–​59, 360–​61 multidimensionality of the body  130, 132–​33 queer phenomenology and the erotic  366–​ 68, 369–​70, 374–​75, 377–​78 Schmitz, H.: methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  611, 612 sensing approach and role of place (Place Project) 509 Serequeberhan, T.: African phenomenology  532, 533–​35, 538–​39, 540–​41, 542, 544, 546–​48, 549, 550 social studies of finance and algorithms 647 see also co-​existence; Dasein existentialism  53, 216, 217–​18, 332–​33, 371–​72, 542 existential objects  34 existential ontology  526–​28 existential phenomenology  169, 173–​74, 254, 281–​82, 471–​72 experience  5–​6, 7, 8, 11 affective 604 Arendt, H.: silence in Quaker business meetings  496–​97 depth in  440–​42 embodied and cultural  360b entrepreneurial event  426 error 127 Foucault, M.  228 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations 283

738   Index experience (cont.) individual  420, 431 internal, subjective  215–​16 intersubjective  47, 200–​1, 357–​58 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  102, 117–​19 of the moment  608–​9 perceptual  352–​53, 354–​55 Schmitz, H.: methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  605–​6 sensorial  348, 350–​51, 353, 357b shared 688 spontaneous  605–​6, 607, 608–​9, 618 subjective  157, 215–​16, 364–​65, 367–​68, 417, 445, 468–​69, 679–​80 see also lived experience; Marion, J.-​L.: experience as an excess of giveness; self-​experience experiential qualities  277 experimentalist pragmatism  10–​11 extending phenomenology see Henry, M. -​extending and discontinuing phenomenology F facticity 7 entrepreneurial event  419, 422, 425, 427–​28, 433 Heidegger, M.: conscience and care  58, 60, 71–​73, 76–​77 Marion, J.-​L.: experience as an excess of giveness  185–​86 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  104–​5 multidimensionality of the body  134–​36, 138–​39 organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI)  679 Schmitz, H.: methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  609–​10 Serequeberhan, T.: African phenomenology  535, 544 fallenness  70, 501–​2 false connections  458 Fanon, F.  138–​39, 538, 540, 542, 543, 543n.12, 548–49 Farjoun 253

Fauchereau, S.  400, 401–​2 Fay, E.  281 feeling of being  130 feeling the organization  678–​81 feelings agency 708 autopoietic process of understanding  466 Henry, M.: extending and discontinuing phenomenology 210 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations 283 organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI)  680–​81 Scheler, M.: personalism and paradox in leadership relations  298–​99, 305, 307 feeling sensations  130 Fell, M.  494–​95 felt body (Leib)  129–​30, 131, 133–​34, 136, 143–​ 44, 605, 606–​9, 618 feminist new materialism and embodiment  310–​25 affect 314 collective embodiment  323 diffracting art  323 diffraction as methodology and pedagogy  311–​12, 316–​18, 324 diffractive reading  324 embodiment  311–​12, 314, 318, 322–​23, 324–​25 interference 318 affective pedagogy  311–​12, 323–​25 becoming-​animal  311–​12, 322–​23, 324–​25 corpomateriality  311–​12, 319–​20, 324–​25 ordinary affect  311–​12, 318, 324–​25 trans-​corporeality  311–​12, 320, 324–​25 virtual embodiment  311–​12, 314–​15, 321, 324–​25 intra-​corporeality  322 narratives without evident order  312–​16 au café de Bec de Gaz  312–​13 ball of yarn: fleshy, embodied and sensuous pedagogy  316, 323 fleshy body: what is phenomenon?  314 mielleux (quality of being honeyed): where is the phenomenon?  313–​14, 319 non-​human animal: Que le cheval vive en moi performance  315, 322

Index   739 feminist phenomenology see queer phenomenology and the erotic Fernandez, A.V.  603 fieldnotes  657, 658, 721–​23 fields of presence or phenomenal fields  11 fieldwork  510–​12 Filloux, J.-​C.  342 finance see social studies of finance and algorithms Fink  219–​20 Finlay, L.  603–​4 first person experience  714 flaneur  76–​77 flesh 9 aesthetic approach  407 affective 197 autopoietic process of understanding  478, 481–​83 gaps  479–​80 generic  367–​68 Marion, J.-​L.: experience as an excess of giveness  189, 192 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies, gestures and movement  349, 355, 359–​60 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  103, 106 as new ontology of the body  358–​59 ontology of  102, 314 as process  475–​78 queer phenomenology and the erotic  364–​ 65, 367–​68, 369 sensing  367–​68 in the world and flesh among fleshes  528–​30 see also embodied practices of commoning and enfleshed convivialities Flores, F.  281–​82 fluid phenomena  602–​3, 604, 605, 618 Flusser, V.  410 flux  463, 472, 477, 482, 539, 540–​41, 586 flux, see also under entrepreneurial event folds 702 depth and temporality in cinematographic experience  444, 446, 449, 452–​53, 458, 459 entrepreneurial event  425–​26, 432, 436 followers  307–​8

Ford, J.  261, 317 forgetting  155–​57, 158, 199 formal logic  40 for-​the-​Other  137–​38, 139 Foucault, M.  9–​10, 13–​14, 49, 215–​30, 300n.2 anti-​phenomenology  215–​19 appearances and subjectivities  702, 704 archaeology  216–​17, 223, 230 autopoietic process of understanding 463n.1 depth and temporality in cinematic experience  447n.16, 459 entrepreneurial event  428, 435 ethics of the subject  218 feminist new materialism and embodiment  310–​11, 317 first Foucault  218 genealogy  216–​17, 218, 224, 230 hermeneutics and ethics of the self  218–​19 Hermeneutics of the Subject  218, 226, 227 historicity and archaeology  218–​19, 229 historicizing the transcendental and consciousness  218–​19, 222–​25, 229–​30 History of Madness  217–​18, 222–​23, 225–​26 History of Sexuality  227–​28 late Foucault  98, 113, 218, 226–​28, 229, 459 literature review  240 madness  222–​23, 225–​26 making visible the invisible  219–​22 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies, gestures and movement 348 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  98, 102, 118–​19 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: opening the way for late Foucault  110–​17 Mots et les Choses, Les  215–​16, 219–​20, 221–​ 22, 223–​24 post-​phenomenology  230 power  218, 225 second Foucault  218 subjectivity: Cartesian meditations and experimentation  225–​30 Subject and Power, The 116 suspension of disbelief in Occupied Theatre (France)  632–​33 transcendentalism  221–​22 ‘Who are you Professor Foucault?’  219

740   Index Fox, G.  494–​95 Frankfurt School  9 freedom Arendt, H.: political philosophy  161–​62, 163–​64, 165, 169, 171, 172–​73, 177 Arendt, H.: silence in Quaker business meetings  493, 494, 504–​5 Bachelard, G.: imagination  80 co-​working spaces in Buddhist temples (Japan) 655 Foucault, M.  228, 229 Heidegger, M.: conscience and care  74 Henry, M.: extending and discontinuing phenomenology  205–​6 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  48, 50 literature review  259–​60 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  111, 112, 114, 115–​17, 118 multidimensionality of the body  132–​33, 138–​39 queer phenomenology and the erotic  371, 375 Ricoeur, P.: self in the world  148 Serequeberhan, T.: African phenomenology 542 willing suspension of disbelief: Occupied Theatre squatters  631–​32 Frege, G.  340–​41 Frenkel, M.  655 Freud, S.  82, 149 Friedman, Michael  332–​33 Friedman, Milton  334 friendship see under Arendt, H. -​silence in Quaker business meetings Frings, M.S.  304, 305 Fuchs, T.  130 fulfilment  30–​31, 36, 46, 203, 298–​99 future-​making  510, 517 futures  699–​704 futurity  278, 288 G Gadamer, H.G.  534–​35, 538, 543, 546, 550–​51, 604, 605–​6, 615 Gagey, J.  82 Gagliardi, P.  90–​91 gamification 357b

Gantman, E.  552–​53 gaps in the flesh  479–​80 Gardiner, R.A.  371–​72, 375 Gare, A.  463–​65, 481–​82 Garfinkel, H.  677, 680–​81 Geiger, M.  558–​59 Gelb, A.  137–​38 Gély, R.  205, 206 gender see queer phenomenology and the erotic genealogy  5–​6, 7, 13–​14, 340–​41 Foucault, M.  216–​17, 218–​19, 222, 224, 225–​ 26, 229, 230 Gesamtperson  305, 307–​8 Gestalt theories of perception  101, 469–​72, 474–​75, 481–​82, 593 Gestalt whole  473–​74, 475, 482–​83 Gestell 539 gestures  101, 261, 389, 408, 589–​90 see also Merleau-​Ponty, M. -​bodies, gestures and movement Gherardi, S.  396 Gibson, J. J.  71–​72 Gibson, J.  720 Giddens, A.  98–​99 gifted  181, 184–​86, 187 Gill, M.J.  603 Gilmore, S.  317 giveness  200, 305, 708 see also Marion, J.-​L. -​experience as an excess of giveness Glendinning, S.  298 global capitalism  532, 534 gnoseology (theory of knowledge)  42 Godfrey, P.C.  158 Goldstein, K.  137–​38 Golub, S.  71 Gordon, L.  532–​33 Göttingen phenomenological school  556–​57 Graeber, D.  636 grand challenges  38–​39, 48, 49, 576 Greenwood, M.  404 Grint, K.  306, 489 Grosz, E.  258 grounds  60, 61–​62, 67–​68, 69, 71–​73, 74–​76 see also under Heidegger, M. -​conscience and care

Index   741 Guattari, F.  9n.9, 310–​11, 509 Guillet de Monthoux, P.  90–​92, 93, 405–​6 Gurwitsch, A.  7–​8 H habits  1, 59, 75–​76, 149, 224–​25, 253, 314–​15, 318, 336, 481–​83, 529 multidimensionality of the body  126, 131–​32, 136–​41, 142–​43 habitus  358, 359–​60, 360b Hahn, R.  84 Hailwood, S.  585 Hamilton, L.  388–​89 Hamrick, W.S.  471n.13, 472n.15, 476–​77 Hanseth, O.  282–​83 Haraway, D..  310, 316–​17, 322, 324, 385–​86, 389 Harding, N.  317 Harris, K.L.  317 Harter, N.  304 Hartshorne, C.  466n.7 Hass, L.  468–​69, 476 Hayles, K.  109 healthcare organizations see imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations Hegel, G.W.F.  5–​6, 39, 163, 253, 430 Hegelian-​Marxism  215 Heidegger, M.  1, 4, 6, 7–​8, 34 animal ontologies in posthumanist research  385–​86, 393 appearances and subjectivities  700 Arendt, H.: political philosophy  161–​62, 163–​64, 172 autopoietic process of understanding  462–​ 63, 471–​72, 473 Awakening Conscience, The (Hunt)  62–​67 Bachelard, G.: poetic and scientific  332–​33 Being and Time  125, 127–​29, 130, 390, 539, 543, 546, 555–​56, 559–​60, 563–​64 Buddhist temples as co-​working spaces  654n.1, 656 ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’  720 Dasein 3 enframing and transformation in African hermeneutic phenomenology  532, 534–​35, 536–​38, 539, 540–​41, 543–​44, 545, 546, 547–​48, 550, 551

entrepreneurial event  419, 420, 421, 422, 423t, 424, 424n.2 experience and MOS  238–​39, 240, 243, 246, 255–​56, 258, 259, 261–​62 feminist new materialism and embodiment 318 finance and algorithms  640 Foucault  217–​19, 223, 227, 230 ‘Geworfenheit’  342–​43 Henry, M.: extending and discontinuing phenomenology  195, 196–​97, 199, 201–​2 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  42, 47 Husserl’s concept of phenomenology  29 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations  277, 281–​82 Introduction to Metaphysics 543 Japanese phenomenology  560, 561, 562, 566–​68 Kehre 700 lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 564 Letter on Humanism, A 543 Marion, J.L.: post-​metaphysical phenomenology  181–​82, 183–​84 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: embodied habits and tactility 139 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  98, 101–​2 multidimensionality of the body  143 organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI)  678, 680–​81, 688n.2, 689–​90 and phenomenology  34–​35 phenomenology on instruments  5 queer phenomenology and erotic approach 364–65 ‘Question Concerning Technology, The’  539–​40 Sartre, J.-​P.: phenomenology of the body  132–​33 Scheler, M.: personalism and paradox  297, 298, 301n.3, 303–​4, 308 Schmitz, H.: neo-​phenomenology and method  603–​4, 605–​6, 607, 609–​10 Sein und Zeit  47, 342–​43, 374–​75, 641–​42 sensing approach and the role of place  513, 514 silence and Quaker business meetings  490, 500–​3

742   Index Heidegger, M. -​conscience and care  57–​77 call of conscience  71–​75 care  61–​62, 71–​73, 74, 76–​77 care: future, past and present  66–​7 1 Dasein  58–​61, 62, 67, 68–​70, 71–​74, 75–​76 future  67–​68 making organization present  57–​62 norms and grounds  60, 61–​62, 67–​68, 69, 71–​73, 74–​76 past  68–​69 present  70–​7 1 temporality  75–​77 Heidenreich, F.  220–​21 Heil, D.  196 Heinämaa, S.  374–​75 Heisenberg, W.  463–​65 Helin, H.  90–​92, 93 Henry, M.  4, 5, 7–​8 Essence of Manifestation, The 195 experience and MOS  238–​39, 243, 248t, 249–​50, 249t, 258–​60 finance and algorithms  640 ipseity 3 Material Phenomenology 200 orthodoxy and heresies  35–​36 Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body 143 queering phenomenology and erotic approach  369, 379 Seeing the Invisible  200–​1 Henry, M. -​extending and discontinuing phenomenology  194–​211 affectio societatis  203, 208–​9, 210, 211 affective turn: stakeholder theory  209–​10 appearing in the light of life  197–​98 appearing of the world  195–​97 critical theory: critiques of processes without subjects  203–​5 ethical praxis  207–​8 ontology  198–​202 praxis and MOS  194, 202–​10 subjective and intersubjective phenomenological life and praxis  196, 202, 205–​9, 210–​11 affectio societatis: ethical praxis  206–​7 esprit de corps: affectio societatis in adverse settings  207–​8

roles and their design  205–​6 silence, open-​deliberation and praxis  208–​9 subjectivity 195 Henry, P.  532–​33 Heraclitus  463–​65, 467, 476–​77 heresies  4, 35–​37 heretics 8 hermeneutic phenomenology  149–​50, 555–​56, 559–​60, 563–​64, 567–​68 see also Serequeberhan, T. -​African phenomenology: enframing and transformation  532–​53 hermeneutic philosophy  17–​20 hermeneutics entrepreneurial event  420–​22 of faith/​truth  150–​51 Foucault, M.  218–​19, 227, 229 of the self  153 of suspicion  150–​51 hermeneutic sensibility  405, 406–​7 Hernes, T.  255 Hertz, E.  645 heterophenomenology 387b heuristics or improvisation  713 Hieronimus, G.  90 Hindmarsh, J.  655–​56 Hirst, A.  654 historicity  114, 188–​89 and archaeology of the surface: making visible the invisible  219–​22 Serequeberhan, T.: African phenomenology  540–​41, 544–​45 see also under Foucault, M. historicization of objectivity  227 of the transcendental and consciousness  222–​25 history  5–​6 already done  115–​16 entrepreneurial event  418–​19, 429, 430, 432, 433, 434, 435–​36 insular 110 in the making  115–​16 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  118–​19 of phenomenology  297–​99

Index   743 Ricoeur, P.: on self in the world  155–​57, 158 holes see under depth and temporality in cinematographic experience Holt, R.  51–​52, 90–​91, 251, 264, 602, 608–​9, 613, 617 Honda, K.  560n.7 horizon  494, 699, 709–​10, 714 depth and temporality in cinematographic experience  440–​41, 444–​45, 452, 454 embodied perception and the schemed world  524–​25, 530 Heidegger, M.: conscience and care  69, 72–​73 Henry, M.: extending and discontinuing phenomenology  196–​97, 199 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  51, 52 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations  277–​78 Marion, J.-​L.: experience as an excess of giveness  182, 183, 189, 190–​92 multidimensionality of the body  127, 129, 143 queer phenomenology and the erotic  372–​73 Serequeberhan, T.: African phenomenology  534–​36, 537–​38 horizontality  124–​29, 455n.25 referential relations  127–​28 Horner, J.  452 Huang, K.-​M.  91 Hultin, L.  263 humanism, continental  336–​38 human time  151–​52, 158t–​59 Hume, D.  49 Hunt, W.H.  62–​64, 63f, 65, 72–​73, 74, 75–​76 Husserl, E.  4, 6–​8, 9–​11 aesthetic approach through Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace  407, 409 animal ontologies in posthumanist research 392 Arendt, H.: political philosophy  163–​64 autopoietic process of understanding  462–​63 Bachelard, G.: poetic and scientific  336, 337, 338–​39, 341–​43

Cartesian Meditations  129, 140, 217–​18, 219–​20, 224, 563 concept of phenomenology  29–​34 Crisis of European Sciences, The  38, 41, 42, 52, 53, 129, 198–​99, 202 depth and temporality in cinematic experience 444n.8 entrepreneurial event  419, 421, 435 experience and MOS  238–​39, 243, 246, 251–​52, 258–​59, 261–​62 finance and algorithms  640 Foucault, M.  215–​16, 217, 218–​19, 221–​22, 223–​24, 225–​26, 227–​28, 230 Heidegger, M.: organization and care  59–​60 Heidegger’s Being and Time 128 Henry, M.  195–​97, 198–​99, 201–​2 Ideas I  126–​27, 146–​47, 557, 558–​59, 566 Ideas II  31, 32, 33, 44, 125, 129–​32, 142 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations 277 Japanese phenomenology  555–​56, 558–​60, 561–​62, 563, 564–​65, 566, 567–​68 Krisis  42–​43, 219–​20, 221–​22, 224 lived experience  9 Logical Investigations  124, 125–​27, 132–​33, 556 Marion, J.-​L: post-​metaphysical phenomenology  181–​82, 183–​84, 187 Merleau-​Ponty, M.  98, 101–​2, 105n.18 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies, gestures and movement  348, 356–​57 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: embodied habits and tactility  137–​38, 139–​40, 141 multidimensionality of the body  143 Nature and Spirit 561 notion of phenomenon  27 orthodoxy and heresies  35–​37 Phenomenology of Perception  131–​32 ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’  556–​57 queer phenomenology and erotic approach 368 Recherches Logiques  219–​20 reversibility 3 Ricoeur, P.: hermeneutic phenomenology  150, 158–​59 Sartre, J.-​P.: phenomenology of the body  131–​34, 135–​36

744   Index Husserl, E. (cont.) Scheler, M.: personalism and paradox  298, 305–​6, 308 Schmitz, H.: neo-​phenomenology and method  603–​4, 605–​6, 607–​8, 609–​10 Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 297 Husserl, E. -​reasons and emotions  38–​53 constitution of knowledge  44–​45 defence of reason against sceptics  48–​49 emotions and sensations  51–​53 logic and psychology  39–​40 no absolute moral duty above knowledge  46–​48 perceptions and sensations at the heart of reason  45–​46 second nature in age of climate change  50 suspension of knowledge  43–​44 time and collective memories  50–​51 universal knowledge  40–​42 Hutchins, E.  710–​11 hyper-​objectivity  723–​24 I ‘I’  199–​201, 207, 208, 210–​11, 350, 352–​53 Ibarra-​Colado, E.  552–​53 icon  190–​92 idealism  131–​32 transcendental 44 idealization 33 ideas Husserl, E.  6, 8, 38, 41–​42, 48, 53, 127, 258–​ 59, 561, 562, 563 Ricoeur, P.  147, 158, 207 identity  33, 70n.1, 113, 123, 300, 443, 513, 658, 714–​15 body  314–​15 collective 307 depth and temporality  443 and ethics  153–​55 idem (sameness)  153, 157 ipse (otherness)  153, 157 joint  576–​77 literature review  252, 261 Marion, J.-​L.: experience as an excess of giveness  181, 185–​86 personal  153, 679–​80

Ricoeur, P.: self in the world  146, 152, 157, 158–​59 see also organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI); self-​identity idle talk  501–​2 idol  181–​82, 190–​92 Ihde, D.  282 Ikeda, T.  567n.16 Ilharco, F.M.  196, 281 image schemas  529 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations  277–​91 artificial intelligence (AI)  278, 280–​81, 284–​85, 286–​88 assistance robots  279 automated decision-​making (ADM)  279, 280, 283, 285–​87, 290 Buoy digital health tool  285–​86 burnout 286 care robots in nursing  278, 280–​81, 287–​90 chatbots  280, 285–​87 electronic medical records (EMRs)  284, 286 embodied information infrastructures  281–​84 embodied practices  281, 282–​83, 284, 287, 288 embodied routines  282–​83, 286 embodiment 283 ethical standards  286 ethical values  286 ethics stress  289–​90 experimentation culture and semi-​finished devices 288 futurity 278 imagination  279, 290–​91 information and communication technology (ICT)  281–​82 known unknowns  280 materiality 283 moral distress  286 Omaolo chatbot platform  285–​86 Paro (pet robot)  287–​88 patient-​centred care  284 Pepper (humanoid robot)  287–​89 phronesis, prudence and practical wisdom 286

Index   745 practical rationality  290 protential anticipation  277–​78, 280, 290 rationality  284–​87 retention 278n.1 Robear  288–​89 robot-​acceptance surveys  289 situated embodiment  290 social robots  287–​89 socio-​materialities  283–​84 socio-​technical imagination  279, 291 temporality  277–​78, 283, 284 unknowns  280–​81 unknown unknowns  280 Wakamaru domestic robot (Mitsubishi)  278–​79 Watson (IBM)  280 imagination  30–​31, 155, 161–​62, 324, 405, 448, 615–​16, 623 Arendt, H.: silence in Quaker business meetings  501–​2 Bachelard, G.: poetic and scientific  330–​33, 338–​39, 340, 344–​45 embodied practices of commoning and enfleshed convivialities  586, 595 Husserl, E. -​reasons and emotions imagination  51–​53 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies, gestures and movement  351, 352 reproductive  341–​42 transcendental  332–​33 see also Bachelard, G.: imagination; imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations imaginational reverie  341–​43 immanence  3, 51–​52, 198, 513–​14, 524 appearances and subjectivity/​ subjectivation  700, 702 depth and temporality in cinematographic experience  444–​253 entrepreneurial event  429, 429n.3 queer phenomenology and the erotic  369, 371–​72, 375 immersion meetings  679–​80, 681, 683 in-​betweenness  103, 115, 116, 440, 441, 443 indirect ontology  142, 229, 254–​55, 256–​57, 440–​41, 445 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  97–​98, 102–​10, 116n.43, 118

individuality  12, 31, 185–​86, 305, 445n.12, 467–​ 68, 688 see also revelation and individuality under Arendt, H. -​political philosophy Ingold, T.  255–​56, 263, 385 ingression 11 initiation  356–​57, 357b, 592 inside view of phenomenology  223 instants  81–​82, 86, 473–​74 instincts  16, 149, 299–​300 institution  104–​5, 106, 107, 108, 111n.31, 117–​19, 158–​59 just  154–​55, 159 institutionalism and neo-​institutional theory  251–​52, 255–​56 institutionalization  106, 419, 422, 432, 434, 435 institutional understandings  157 instrumental body  134–​35, 137–​38, 139 insular history  110 intellectualism  68, 136–​37, 138, 140, 353 intellectualist phenomenology  348 intention 30 intentional consciousness  60, 102, 105, 195–​97 intentionality  6, 8 act  471–​72, 479–​80 animal ontologies  393 appearances and subjectivity/​ subjectivation 701 autopoietic process of understanding  472 Bachelard, G.: imagination  84 detached 713 eidetic 50 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  40, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51–​52, 53 inhibited 375 Japanese phenomenology  558, 562 motor  136–​38, 140 operative  471–​72, 479–​80 organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI)  680–​81 phenomenological sensibilities  35–​37 reflective  136–​37 Ricoeur, P.: self in the world  147–​48 social studies of finance and algorithms  641 interagentivity 101 interanimality 392 intercorporeality  377, 392

746   Index intercorporeality, Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies, gestures and movement  349, 351, 354–​57, 359 intercorporeity  8, 101, 118 interference see under feminist new materialism and embodiment interiority  39, 202, 206, 392 interlocution  185–​86 interloqué  185–​86 interpretative phenomenology  603, 689 intersubjective experience  47, 200–​1, 357–​58 intersubjectivity  7–​8, 33–​34 entrepreneurial event  417 feminist new materialism and embodiment  313–​14, 319–​20 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  41 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies, gestures and movement  355–​56, 357–​58 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history 101 multidimensionality of the body  135–​36 Scheler, M.  304, 305–​6 Schmitz, H.: methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  611 social studies of finance and algorithms  640 transcendental 47 see also under Henry, M. -​extending and discontinuing phenomenology intertwining/​double sensation  140–​43 intra-​action  319–​20, 322–​23, 606–​7 intra-​corporeality  322 Introna, L.D.  196, 255–​56, 281 intuition  16, 43, 51–​52, 190–​91, 249–​50, 253, 298–​99, 340–​41, 516 categorical  36–​37 of essences  44, 46, 48 and intention, between  187–​88 originary presentive  31, 32 scientific  254–​55 invariant  30–​31, 124, 143–​44, 228, 525 invisibilities 357b, 443, 444, 449, 456 invisibility  3, 109, 351–​52, 358–​59, 361 invisibilizations  388–​89 invisible  1, 7, 52, 172, 190–​91, 241, 524, 589, 610, 653 co-​working spaces in Buddhist temples (Japan) 666

depth and temporality in cinematographic experience  441, 443 feminist new materialism and embodiment  313–​14, 319, 320 Foucault, M.  219–​22, 230 Henry, M.: extending and discontinuing phenomenology  194–​95, 201, 202–​3, 204 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  100, 103, 107–​9, 113 multidimensionality of the body  130, 133–​ 35, 143 queer phenomenology and the erotic  370, 378 social studies of finance and algorithms  642–​43, 646 see also under Merleau-​Ponty, M. -​bodies, gestures and movement invisible colleges  241, 246, 250–​51 ipseity 3 Irigaray, L.  319 Islam, G.  626 Itō, K.  556–​58 Ivaldi, S.  157–​58 J Jackson, A.Y.  317 James, W.  10–​11, 253, 336, 463–​65 Janand, A.  91–​92 Japanese phenomenology  555–​68 initial phase  555–​58, 567–​68 maturation phase  555–​56, 563–​65 postwar Japan  565–​68 spreading phase  555–​56, 558–​62, 567–​68 Jarzbkowski, P.  158 Jasanoff, S.  279 Jaspers, K.  162, 502 Jean, G.  4 Jerusalem, W.  556 Johnson, D.W.  656 Johnson, G.  476 Johnson, M.  529 Jonas, H.  259 Jørgensen, L.  264, 616, 617 judgement  492–​93, 497–​500, 503–​5 reflective 709 Julmi, C.  613

Index   747 Jung, C.G.  82, 85 just institution  154–​55, 159 K Kallinikos, J.  283 Kant, I.  5–​6 African hermeneutic phenomenology  546 animal ontologies in posthumanist research 390 Bachelard, G.: poetic and scientific  332–​33, 337–​38, 341–​42, 343, 344–​45 care: future  68 Copernican revolution  32–​33 Critique of Pure Reason  27–​28, 337, 557 experience and MOS  253 Husserl, E.: reason and emotions  48, 49 Marion, J.-​L: post-​metaphysical phenomenology 187 notion of phenomenon  28 things in themselves  29 Kantianism  334, 557 see also neo-​Kantianism; new Kantianism Käufer, S.  470 Kearney, R.  341–​42 Kegon Buddhism  558 Kember, S.  321 Kenny, A.  463 Khan, F.  552–​53 Kida, G.  566–​67 Kim, S.-​H.  279 Kimura, B.  567 King, I.  396 Kingma, S.F.  655 Kioupkiolis, A.  580 Kjellander, B.  157 Klein, V.H. Jr.  252 Knights, D.  388 knowledge archaeology of  9–​10 constitution of  44–​45 embodied  258–​59 Heidegger, M.: conscience and care  67 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  48, 144 idealism 49 on life  223 onto-​epistemological  311–​12 orders of  44–​45

scientific 53 self-​knowledge  678–​79 sharing 49 suspension of  43–​44 tacit  289–​90, 489, 712–​13 universal  40–​42 see also objective knowledge Köhler, L.  502 Köhler, W.  470 Körper (material body)  33, 35–​36, 129–​30, 136, 143–​44, 563, 606 Kostera, M.  90–​91 Kotowicz, Z.  331–​32 Kouwenhoven, W.  278–​79 Krueger, J.  567 Kuepers, W.  482 Kühn, R.  201 Kuhn, T.  241 Kuki, S.  563–​64 Kull, K.  481–​82 Küpers, W.  90–​91, 254, 258–​59, 348–​49 Kwok-​ying Lau  481–​82 Kyoto School  556, 563–​64 L labour (Arendt)  164–​65, 168 Ladkin, D.  261 Lakoff, G.  529 Lambert, J.H.  5–​6 Lamy, J.  331–​32 Landes, D.A.  471n.13 Langley, A.  255–​56 Lango, J.W.  469n.11 language (Ricoeur)  148, 149–​52, 152t, 155, 156–​ 57, 158–​59 Lapoujade, D.  447 late ontology: flesh as process  475–​78 late sensible ontology  9 Latour, B.  13–​14, 283, 311, 376, 641–​43, 647 Laval-​Jeante, M.  315, 322–​23 Law, J.  496 layers  124–​25, 126–​27, 128, 129, 131 leadership see Scheler, M. -​personalism and paradox in leadership relations Lear, E.  64 learning, embodied  258–​59 Le Blanc, G.  219–​20, 222

748   Index Lee, H.  317 Lefebvre, H.  256–​57, 348, 625, 652, 653–​54, 656, 665–​66 Lefort, C.  349n.2, 476n.19 Le Goff, J.  452 Legrand, S.  216–​17, 228 Leib (felt body)  33, 35–​36, 129–​30, 131, 133–​34, 136, 143–​44, 563, 605, 606–​9, 618 Leibniz, G.W.  424, 425, 426 Lescure, J.  82 Letiche, H.  200–​1 Lévi-​Bruhl, L.  41 Levinas, E.  136, 143, 207, 374–​75, 390, 546, 640 experience and MOS  238–​39, 243, 247, 248t, 249t, 259 Levin, J.  224–​25 Lèvi-​Strauss, C.  149 Levy, G.  317 Lewis, E.  610 Liberman, K.  678 Lidz, V.  334, 337 life see under Henry, M. -​extending and discontinuing phenomenology life-​world  35–​36, 39, 60, 140n.9, 201–​2 animal ontologies  385–​86, 387b, 393 common  201–​2 embodied practices of commoning and enfleshed convivialities  389–​90, 395, 593 literature review  249–​50, 251–​52, 253, 261–​62 Serequeberhan, T.: African phenomenology  353, 535–​36 limit experience  228 line organization model  284 Lingis, A.  475 Linstead, S.  419, 517 literature review  237–​66 business ethics  259–​60 centrality of time, space, instruments, embodiment, meaning and sense-​making  263–​66 core or top-​tier publications  241–​42 critical theories and post-​Marxism  251, 256–​57 detailed literature review  241–​51 embodied knowledge and embodied learning  258–​59 first circle journals  241–​42, 243–​44, 245, 245f, 246–​47, 248t

institutionalism and neo-​institutional theory  251–​52, 255–​56 invisible colleges  241, 246, 250–​51 phenomenological themes and expressions 243 practice-​based views  261–​62 pragmatism  251, 253–​54 process philosophy and Marxism: temporality and events  251, 254–​56 reasons to explore presence of phenomenology in MOS  239–​41 remote work, decentered management and flow of work practices  262–​63 scientific communities  241 second circle of selected publications  242, 244–​45, 245f, 246f, 246–​47, 249t spatial, temporal and material approaches  260–​61 voice(s) of phenomenology  238–​39 lived-​body  136, 138–​39, 142–​44, 563 lived existence  532 lived experience  9, 36, 223–​24, 237–​38, 532–​33, 534, 654–​56 organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI)  678–​79, 681, 686, 689–​90 Serequeberhan, T.: African phenomenology  532–​33, 534, 543 subjective  364–​65 lived hermeneuticity  535–​36 lived present  100, 536–​37, 539, 701 lived situation  538, 543 living somewhere or inhabiting  34 living subjectivity  208 localized sensations  129–​30 Locke, J.  468–​69 logic of practice  712–​15 and psychology  39–​40 pure  40, 556 transcendental  40, 419 logicism  556–​57, 558 logocentrism 390 Lonsdale, M.  453 Lorde, A.  365, 368, 373–​74, 375, 377–​78, 379 Lorino, P.  254 Luckmann, T.  251–​52

Index   749 Luhmann, J.T.  158, 430, 435 Lyotard, F.  215–​16, 344–​45 M McConn-​Palfreyman, W.  314 McCormack, D.  610, 614–​15 McCumber, J.  5, 12–​13 Mace, J.  498 McFarlane, M.  317 Machiavel, N.  98, 115n.38 McInnes, P.  314 MacKenzie, D.  334, 641b, 646, 647 McLuhan, E.  237 McLuhan, M.  237 Madison, G.B.  477–​78 madness  218, 222–​23, 225–​26, 624–​25 Magakian, J.-​L.  90 Magalhães, R.  482 Maizeray, L.  91–​92 making organization present  57–​62 Malebranche, N.  50, 131–​32 Mallett, O.  157 management  14–​20, 80, 90–​92, 93 decentred  262–​63 managerialism  284, 430–​31 Mangan, A.  314 Mannoni, O.  623–​24 Marburg School  556–​57 Marcel, G.  108, 131–​32 Marder, M.  174–​75 Marion, J.-​L.  8, 240, 640 Being Given 184 Erotic Phenomenon 186 Excess 188 God without Being  181–​82 Heidegger and the question of God 182 Idol and Distance, The  181–​82, 190 Reduction and Giveness  183, 184 Marion, J.-​L. -​experience as an excess of giveness  180–​92 crisis 180 gift 184 gifted  184–​86, 187 givability  183–​84 given  183–​84, 185–​86, 187 giveness  183–​84, 187–​88, 191–​92 giver 184

‘God is dead’  181–​82 icon  190–​92 idol  182, 190–​92 recipient 184 revelation  190–​92 saturated phenomena  187–​91, 192 thing given  184 third reduction (beyond Husserl and Heidegger)  183–​84 via affirmativa  181–​82 via eminentiae  181–​82 via negativa  181–​82 Martin, D.G.  513 Martiny, K.M.M.  715 Marxism  215, 251, 254–​56, 665 see also post-​Marxism Marxism-​Leninism  542 Marx, K.  114, 115–​16, 117, 164, 167, 194, 200–​1, 203, 256, 546, 547–​48 Masse, D.  513 material approach  260–​61 material body see Körper (material body) materialism see feminist new materialism and embodiment materiality  1–​2, 12, 57–​58, 283, 429, 447, 707, 710, 715 aesthetic approach through Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace  203, 398–​400, 410 animal ontologies  385, 388–​89 Bachelard, G.: imagination  79, 83, 85, 89, 90, 93 Henry, M.: extending and discontinuing phenomenology  197, 199–​200 literature review  260–​61, 265–​66 Marion, J.-​L.: experience as an excess of giveness  189–​90 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  100, 106, 108, 112, 113, 114, 118 organizational  398–​99, 410 queer phenomenology and the erotic  377, 379 Schmitz, H.: methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  616, 617 social studies of finance and algorithms  645, 647 turn 112 see also corpomateriality; socio-​materiality

750   Index mathematical idealities  36–​37 mathematics as poetic thought  339–​41 Maturana, H.R.  480 Mauriac, C.  217–​18 Mauss, M.  184 Mazis, G.A.  442, 443 Mazzei, L.A.  317 Mbembe, A.  548–​49, 552–​53 Mead, G.H.  253, 463–​65 meaning, centrality of  263–​66 mechanist (linear) history  110 meetings see Arendt, H. -​silence in Quaker business meetings Meillassoux, Q.  36 Meinong, A.  49 memory (Ricoeur)  155–​57, 158–​59 Mena, S.  158 Mendes, K.  321 Mengis, J.  655 Meretz, S.  579 ‘mere words’  29 Merleau-​Ponty, M.  6–​8, 9–​10, 9n.9, 14n.18 Adventures of the Dialectic  111, 117, 256 aesthetic approach through Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace  407, 409 animal ontologies in posthumanist research  385–​86, 391–​92, 393 appearances and subjectivities  700, 704 Arendt, H.: silence and Quaker business meetings 501 autopoietic process of understanding  462–​63, 473, 474–​75, 478, 479–​80, 481–​82 Bachelard, G.: imagination  90 bifurcation of nature  465–​72 Buddhist temples as co-​working spaces  652–​53, 656 commons and enfleshed convivialities  576–​77, 578, 582, 583, 584, 585, 586, 588, 589, 592–​93 depth and temporality in cinematic experience  440–​42, 444–​45, 449–​59, 457t embodied habits and tactility  136–​43 embodied perception and the schemed world  522–​23, 527, 528–​29, 530

entrepreneurial event  418–​19, 420, 421, 423t, 424–​25, 427, 430, 435, 436 être au monde 3 experience and MOS  238–​39, 240, 243, 247–​49, 248t, 249t, 253–​55, 256–​57, 258, 259, 261 Eye and the Mind, The  97–​98, 108–​9, 458, 475–​76 feminist new materialism and embodiment  313–​14, 319–​20, 324 ‘Film and the New Psychology, The’  470 finance and algorithms  640 flesh as process  475–​78 Foucault, M.  215–​16, 217, 218–​19, 222, 223–​ 26, 229, 230 Heidegger’s Being and Time 128 Husserl, E.: reason and emotions  52–​53 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations 277 Institutions and Passivity  256, 481n.25 Japanese phenomenology  566–​67 multidimensionality of the body  125, 126 Nature lectures  220–​21, 458 orthodoxy and heresies  35–​36 Phenomenology of Perception  258, 374–​75, 523, 524, 720–​21 autopoietic process of understanding  468–​69, 470, 475, 478–​79 Foucault, M.  217–​18, 223, 224–​25 metaphysics of history  101, 111–​12 multidimensionality of the body  127, 131–​32, 136–​38, 139, 142 post-​phenomenology  11 queer phenomenology and erotic approach  367–​68, 371–​72, 375, 396–​69 reversibility 3 embodiment and flesh  9 Sartre, J.-​P.: phenomenology of the body  131–​32, 134–​35, 136 Scheler, M.: personalism and paradox  297, 308 Schmitz, H.: neo-​phenomenology and method  607, 608–​9 seeing and sensing in depth  442–​44 Signes 654 Structure and Behaviour, The  97–​98, 101–​2, 392

Index   751 Visible and the Invisible, The  97, 102–​3, 109, 111n.30, 142, 349, 350–​51, 476, 523–​25 Visible and the Invisible, The ‘Working Notes’ 349 Merleau-​Ponty, M. -​bodies, gestures and movement  347–​62 atmosphere and bodily practices: tour visits in collaborative spaces  357b body and mind in perception: visible and invisible  350–​55 body as access to and limit of sensorial experience  350–​51 perception beyond sensorial body and reflexive power  353–​55 perception beyond the visible body  351–​52 reflexive power in perceptual experience  352–​53, 354–​55 embodied and cultural experience: habitus 360b flesh  349, 355, 359–​60 gestures and movements in perception: touched and touching  355–​61 accessing others through the body: intercorporeality  355–​56 depth of the visible and temporality of gestures  359–​61 flesh as new ontology of the body  358–​59 reversibility of experience: touching and being touched  356–​58 habitus  359–​60 intercorporeality  349, 351, 354–​55, 356–​57, 359 intersubjectivity  355–​56, 357–​58 invisible  350–​56, 357b, 358–​59, 361–​62 Other  355–​58, 359, 361–​62 perception  348–​49, 361–​62 reflection  353, 357b reversibility 355 sensorial experience  348, 353, 357b sensoriality 361 spatiality  348, 360–​61 temporality  354, 357b, 360–​62 touch 349 visible  350, 351–​52, 355–​56, 357b, 358–​59, 360–​61, 360b Merleau-​Ponty, M. -​metaphysics of history  97–​119

corporeal scheme  100 embodiment 98 experience, institution and openness  117–​19 first Merleau-​Ponty  98–​103, 117 flesh  103, 106 indirect ontology  102–​10, 118 institution  104–​5, 106, 107, 108, 111n.31, 118–​19 late Merleau-​Ponty  97, 98, 104, 117, 118–​19, 256–​57, 465, 700 Nature  104–​5, 106, 107–​8, 109, 118–​19 objective body  99 ontology of flesh  102 opening the way for the late Foucault  110–​17 perception  98–​103 phenomenological body  99 proper body  99 second Merleau-​Ponty  98, 100n.7, 102–​10, 111, 118 sensible ontology  102 Mesle, C.  468n.9 metaphor, time and narrative  150–​52 metaphysical embrace  402–​4 metaphysics of history see Merleau-​Ponty, M. -​metaphysics of history metaphysics of time  81–​82 methodological implications  590–​91 methodological perspective see Schmitz, H. -​methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology Meyer, R.E.  251–​52, 255–​56 Meyerson, E.  338 Michalon, J.  388–​89 Michels, C.  258–​59 Miki, K.  563–​64 Miller, A.  66–​69, 72–​73, 74, 75–​77 mimetic cycle  151–​52, 152t, 156–​57 mineness  58, 71 Minkowski, E.  84, 566–​67 Mir, R.  404 Misak, C.  12–​13 misplaced concreteness fallacy  468–​69, 472n.15 modality  188, 190–​91, 445 modernism  539–​40, 550

752   Index Monod, J.  226–​27 Montes, J.S.  707–​8, 709–​11, 712, 713 Montesquieu 166 moods  71, 72–​73, 128–​29, 130, 133, 264, 673–​74 Mooney, T.  305n.5 Moore, G.E.  335 Moore, A.W.  523 Moore, T.  63–​64, 69 moral distress  286 moral history  41–​42 morality  153–​54, 259, 297–​98, 300, 505 see also slave morality Moran, D.  305n.5 Morizot, B.  387b Morley, B.  499 movement aberrant  9n.9, 455, 702 see also Merleau-​Ponty, M. -​bodies, gestures and movement movement-​images  9–​10, 440–​41, 444–​45, 448, 452, 455–​56 multidimensionality of the body  123–​44 being-​for-​itself  132–​35 being-​for-​the-​other  135–​36 Being and Time (Heidegger)  125, 127–​29, 130 horizontality  124–​29 referential relations  127–​28 Ideas I (Husserl)  126–​27 Ideas II and the body (Husserl)  125, 129–​32 intertwining/​double sensation  140–​43 layers  124–​25, 126–​27, 128, 129, 131 Logical Investigations (Husserl)  124, 125–​27, 132–​33 Merleau-​Ponty: embodied habits and tactility  136–​43 Sartre, J.-​P.: French phenomenology of the body  131–​36 Musk, E.  433, 434 N nakedness  258, 365–​66, 376, 377 Name of the Rose, The 441 Abo of Fossanova (character)  449–​50 Adelmo of Otranto (character)  449–​50 Adso of Melk (character)  449–​50, 453–​54, 455, 456

depth according to Merleau-​Ponty and Deleuze  441, 449–​56 depth as process: becoming of images  450–​56 reduction, discontinuation and vertical peripety 457t translating literary plans into film  449–​50 Eco, U. (author)  449–​50, 451, 453–​54, 455 interviews with Annaud  459–​60 William of Baskerville (character)  449–​50, 453 see also Annaud, J.-​J. Nancy, J.-​L.  688n.2 narrative see under Arendt, H. -​political philosophy; feminist new materialism and embodiment natality  500–​1 naturalism  30–​42, 138–​39, 385–​86 naturalistic fallacy  335 Nature  104–​5, 106, 107–​8, 109, 118–​19 see also bifurcation of nature nature of being  57–​58 nature of the will  148 Nayak, A.  482 negativity  107, 116–​17, 443, 550, 582 Neimanis, A.  319–​20 neo-​colonialism see under Serequeberhan, T. -​African phenomenology: enframing and transformation neo-​institutional theory  51, 238, 251–​52, 255–​56 neo-​Kantianism  332–​33, 337, 555–​58, 560, 562, 564–​65 neo-​phenomenology  8, 398, 403, 404–​5, 407, 410 see also Schmitz, H. -​methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology networked affect  321 new-​Kantianism  334 new materialism see feminist new materialism and embodiment new phenomenology  8, 605 New Public Governance  284 New Public Management  284 Ngugi wa Thiongo  536–​37, 548–​49 Niccolini, A.D.  316, 317 Nietzsche, F.C.  5–​6, 180, 197, 299–​300, 301n.3, 406

Index   753 nihilism  180, 181, 211 Nishida, K.  556, 557–​58, 562, 652–​53, 656, 666 Nitta, Y.  566–​67 Nixon, J.  492 Nkomo, S.  552–​53 Nkrumah, K.  542 no absolute moral duty above knowledge  46–​48 Nobo, J.L.  463–​65 Noë, A.  710 Noel-​Johnson, V.  406, 408 noema  36, 49, 184, 562 noematic dimension of embodiment  44–​45, 125, 126–​27, 128–​29, 130, 132–​33, 135–​36, 137–​38, 139 noesis  36, 44–​45, 50, 184, 562 noetic dimension of embodiment  125, 126–​27, 128, 131, 132–​33, 135–​36, 137–​38, 139 noise  642, 643–​44, 646, 647–​48 nomadic empiricism  311 Nonaka, I.  258 non-​naturalism  138–​39 non-​phenomenology  10–​11, 12, 240, 699–​700 non-​representational thinking  401, 604, 605 Nordstrom, S.N.  317 norms  48–​49, 50, 71 entrepreneurial event  418 Freud, S.  149 ground 51 hierarchy of  53 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  51 organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI)  682 of reason  49 Ricoeur, P.  154 see also under Heidegger, M. -​conscience and care Nuttall, J.  689–​90 O objectification  3, 113, 135–​36, 180, 204, 375–​76, 606, 702 objectified body  138 objectivation  106, 112, 117, 251–​52, 702 objective elements  708 objective knowledge  41, 147–​48, 206, 224–​25, 331–​32, 340–​42

objective structures  33 objective thought  465–​72, 476–​77 objective time  47, 158–​59, 277 objectivity  12, 30 anthropology  723–​24 autopoietic process of understanding  472–​73 Bachelard, G.: imagination  90 depth and temporality  459 Henry, M.  204–​5 historicization of  227 multidimensionality of the body  131 phenomenological sensibilities  32 Ricoeur, P.  149–​50 obviousness  3, 5, 101–​2 Oetinger, C.F.  5–​6 Oksala, J.  230 O’Mahoney, J.  482 oneiric experience  106–​7, 341–​42, 345 ontic perfection  185–​86 onto-​epistemological knowledge  311–​12 ontological issues  5, 7 ontological passivity  3 ontological type, elucidation of  33 ontological war on species  389–​91 ontology 6 existential  526–​28 extending and discontinuing  198–​202 flesh as new ontology of the body  358–​59 Henry, M.: extending and discontinuing phenomenology  198–​202 indirect (Merleau-​Ponty)  102–​10 late ontology (Merleau-​Ponty)  475–​78 ontological condition of method  613–​15 relational  200–​1, 263, 368–​69, 513, 602–​3, 703 see also animal ontologies open deliberation  208–​9, 211 openness depth and temporality in cinematographic experience  443, 458–​59 embodied perception and the schemed world 524 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  117–​19 on to flux of virtualities  425–​27, 436 willing suspension of disbelief: Occupied Theatre squatters  632–​33

754   Index order of the body  182 order of charity  182 order of the mind  182 orders of knowledge and truth  44–​45 ordinary affect  311–​12, 318, 324–​25, 516, 609 Ord, K.  689–​90 organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI)  672–​91 action agenda  674 atmosphere  676–​77, 687–​88 being-​in-​the-​organization  691 belonging, sense of  676, 684–​85 blue-​sky research  674–​75, 681 Centres of Excellence  672–​76, 678 Chilean Economic Development Agency (CORFO) 674 conversation analysis  677–​78 culture  672–​73, 682 Culture and Communication (C&C) unit  679–​80, 682, 683–​85, 686–​88, 689–​91 data analysis  680–​81 disposedness  680–​81, 686, 689 embodiment  689–​90 ethnomethodology  676–​78 evaluation criteria  675 feeling the organization  678–​81 immersion meetings  679–​80, 681, 683 indexical linguistic expressions  677–​78 Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton 674 intentionality  680–​81 interactions with contact  686–​87, 688, 689–​90 lived experience  678–​79, 681, 686, 689–​90 making sense of actions  677 making sense of situation  676 methodological approach  676, 678–​80 Millennium Science Initiative (MSI)  674–​75 Millennium Science Initiative (MSI) Institutes  674–​76 Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation (MCTCI)  672–​73, 674 mutual collaboration  679–​80 National Excellence Research Centre Plan 674

new public management  675–​76 Nuclei Centres  674 organization from inside out  689–​91 participant observations  679–​80 personal identity  679–​80 phenomenological-​interpretative approach  680–​81 place, sense of  687 qualitative analysis techniques  676 reflexive position  680–​81 retrospective and prospective accounting  678–​79 self-​knowledge and self-​questioning  678–​79 semi-​structured interviews  679–​80 sense-​making  673, 676–​77, 678–​79–​, 681–​90 common feeling  681, 687–​88 dwelling  681, 683–​87 entering  681–​83 shared experiences  688 subjective dispositions  680–​81 support network  687–​88 workplace studies  677–​78 World Bank  674–​75 Learning and Innovation Loan  674 organizational materiality  398–​99, 410 organizational space see co-​working spaces in Buddhist temples (Japan) organizational time  277–​78, 419 ‘originarietà see under aesthetic approach through Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace originarity 32 Orlikowski, W.J.  283 orthodox phenomenology  5, 8, 13, 217, 422–​24, 699–​700 orthodoxy  35–​37 Ostrom, E.  579n.2 Otaka, T.  561, 562, 564–​65 Other embodied practices of commoning and enfleshed convivialities  585–​86 gaze of  191 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  46 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies, gestures and movement  355–​58, 359, 361–​62

Index   755 Ricoeur, P.  150 Scheler, M.  300, 301 otherness Ricoeur, P.  153–​55, 157 Scheler, M.  305 Serequeberhan, T.  544–​45, 547 Outlaw, L.  532–​33 outside view of phenomenology  223 P Painter, M.  209–​10, 258–​59 paradox of disembodied phenomenology  366–​70 see also Scheler, M. -​personalism and paradox in leadership relations Parfit, D.  49 Parinaud, A.  81 Parmenides 463 Parnas, J.  711 Parsons, T.  333–​34, 336 participant observation  643–​44, 679–​80, 719–​ 20, 721, 722 particular and the general dialectic  147 Pascal, B.  182 passivity  3, 5, 45, 223–​24, 459, 582, 583, 700 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  106–​7, 109 pastiche see under aesthetic approach through Homage to Giorgio de Chirico: The Metaphysical Embrace Patočka, J.  143 Pauli, W.  338–​39 Péchu, C.  627–​28 pedagogy  258–​59, 559, 562 affective  311–​12, 323–​25 diffraction as methodology and  316–​18 fleshy, embodied and sensuous  316 Peirce, C.S.  10–​11, 253, 463–​65, 529 Peltonen, T.  655 Penn, W.  494–​95 perception  9, 12, 715 agency 710 autopoietic process of understanding  468–​69 Bachelard, G.: imagination  90 depth and temporality in cinematographic experience  440–​42 entrepreneurial event  432, 435–​36

Heidegger, M.: conscience and care  59 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  43, 45–​ 46, 51–​52 and imagination intertwined  90 logic of practice  714 Merleau-​Ponty: metaphysics of history  98–​103 multidimensionality of the body  141 organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI)  680–​81 phenomenological sensibilities  35–​37 private  426, 433–​34, 435 Ricoeur, P.  147–​48 time 48 visual  470, 710 see also embodied perception and the schemed world; Gestalt theories of perception; Merleau-​Ponty, M. -​bodies, gestures and movement; self-​perception perceptive faith  9, 352–​53 perceptivity acts  466 perceptual universe  393 Pérezts, M.  207, 707 performative sensibility  405, 406–​7 performativity  256–​57, 260, 261, 641b Perl, M.  338–​39 Perlman, R.  453 personal identity  153, 679–​80 personalism see Scheler, M. -​personalism and paradox in leadership relations person of persons  305, 307 Pessoa, F.  622 Petani, F.J.  655 Pfander, M.  558–​59 phantom limbs  137–​38 pheno-​ethnomethodological methodology  676, 681, 690–​91 phenomenological archipelago  4–​14 phenomenological moment  4, 5–​6, 7–​8, 11, 13–​14 phenomenological revelation  162, 163–​67, 176–​77 phenomenological sensibilities in continental and post-​continental philosophies  27–​36 Heidegger’s phenomenology  34–​35 Husserl’s phenomenology  29–​34 orthodoxy and heresies  35–​37

756   Index phenomenological stance  282 phenomenologization 336 phenomenology of instruments  14n.18 phenomenology of techniques  8, 338–​39 philosophy of the will  147 photography  336, 396, 402, 403, 409, 410 phronesis (practical reason)  53, 154–​55, 286 Pierce, J.  513 Pierron, J.-​P.  90, 91 place see sensing approach and role of place (Place Project) Plato  41, 43, 53, 124–​25n.1, 163, 164, 463, 502 Platonism 49 playing with phenomenology  398–​404 metaphysical embrace  402–​4 resonance and desire  316–​17 playing with philosophy  410–​11 Plessner, H.  143 plurality of beginnings  168–​7 1 truth made of  174–​75 see also under Arendt, H. -​political philosophy Poe, E.A.  86 poetic see Bachelard, G. -​poetic and scientific poetic explication  615–​17, 618 poetic images  83–​84, 85, 86–​89 poetic performing  401 poetics of space  88–​89 poetic twist  613 pointing and grasping  471–​72, 479–​80 political agency  115–​16, 321 political economy  201, 203, 333–​34, 335, 547–​48 political philosophy see Arendt, H. -​political philosophy poor phenomena  187, 188, 189 positivist science  42–​43 post-​colonialism see under Serequeberhan, T. -​African phenomenology: enframing and transformation post-​humanism  4 aesthetic approach  401, 406–​7 feminist new materialism and embodiment  310, 314, 321, 323 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations  282–​83

literature review  256–​57, 258, 261, 263 Merleau-​Ponty, M: metaphysics of history 109 see also animal ontologies post-​Marxism  251, 256–​57 post-​modernism  339 post-​phenomenology  3, 5, 7–​10, 11, 12, 14–​15, 15t, 17 aesthetic approach  398, 403, 404–​5, 407, 410 appearances and subjectivity/​ subjectivation  699–​700, 702, 703, 704 embodied practices of commoning and enfleshed convivialities  576, 582, 590 Foucault, M.  230 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations  282–​83 literature review  238–​39, 240–​41, 242, 243, 247, 255–​57, 261, 264, 265 Schmitz, H.: methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  603–​4, 608, 612 sensing approach and role of place (Place Project) 509 social studies of finance and algorithms  641–​42 post-​qualitative inquiry  310–​11, 317 Powell, J.  283 power actual and assumed  300, 301n.3, 302 Foucault, M.  218, 225, 229 Heidegger, M.: conscience and care  67 pure and experiential  303, 304 reflexive  352–​55 Scheler, M.: personalism and paradox in leadership relations  307 practical wisdom  154–​55 practice-​based views  261–​62 practice of the self  226, 227–​28 practices, embodied  281, 282–​83, 284, 287, 288 practice turn  112 practice worlds  712–​13, 714 Pradele, D.  32–​33, 36–​37, 48 Pradies, C.  307 pragmatic phenomenology  702 pragmatism  10–​11, 14–​15 appearances and subjectivity/​ subjectivation  699, 702–​3

Index   757 Bachelard, G.: poetic and scientific  335 experimentalist  10–​11 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  53 literature review  251, 253–​54 social studies of finance and algorithms  641–​42, 647 Prasad, A.  258 praxis see under Henry, M. -​extending and discontinuing phenomenology Préclaire, M.  93 prefiguration  151–​52, 152t, 157 prehension  11, 466–​67 preoccupation, care or concern  35 pre-​phenomenology  5–​6, 13f, 14–​15, 15t Pre-​Raphaelite Brotherhood  62, 66, 73, 76–​77 pre-​reflective awareness  714 present and actuality distinction  112, 114 present-​at-​hand  128–​29 ‘principle of all principles’  31–​32, 35, 678 private perception  426, 433–​34, 435 private phenomenon  426 private realm (Arendt)  167, 169, 176–​77 process metaphysics  11–​12, 462–​63, 701–​2 process phenomenology  462–​65, 481–​83 process philosophy  9, 11, 12, 14–​15, 17–​20, 108, 463 appearances and subjectivity/​ subjectivation  699, 702–​3 literature review  251, 254–​56 process thought  12, 462–​65, 475, 476–​77, 481–​82 process turn  112 productive differences  114 projected future  70 projective understanding  132–​33 protention  51, 277–​78, 280, 288, 290, 709–​10 protentional anticipation  277–​78, 280, 290 Proudhon, P.-​J.  641b psychoanalytical methods  82 publicity and privacy difference  467 public realm (Arendt)  166–​67, 169, 176–​77 Puig de la Bellacasa, M.  311 Pullen, A.  157–​58 pure consciousness  44, 48, 137, 142–​43, 217, 298 pure events  12, 112–​13 pure experience  53

pure lived experiences  32 pure logic  40, 556 pure phenomena  32 pure phenomenology  6, 8, 44 pure potentials  466–​67 Puyou, F.-​R.  205 Q Quaker business meetings see Arendt, H. -​ silence in Quaker business meetings qualitative data  722–​23 queer phenomenology and the erotic  247–​49, 364–​79 disembodied phenomenology paradox  366–​70 erotic  373–​74 erotic body  365–​66 erotic reorientation  374–​79 away from sexualization and into eros  374–​76 erotic phenomenology of organizations  376–​79 flesh  364–​65, 367–​68, 369 gendered experience and sexual difference  371–​72 gendered and racialized dimensions  369, 371 gender hierarchy and socialization  371–​72 gender identities and sexual orientation  370, 372–​73 generic flesh  367–​68 heteronormativity 373 nakedness  365–​66, 376, 377 obscenity 376 queering phenomenological approaches to MOS  371–​74 sensing flesh  367–​68 sexuality  374–​75 sexualization 376 sexual objectification  375–​76 sexual/​sexualized gaze  365–​66, 375–​76 R Rabinow, P.  230 race  138–​39, 143–​44, 377, 532–​33 racialized dimension  367, 369, 371, 372 racism  138–​39, 371, 546

758   Index radicality of phenomenology  34, 463n.1 Rancière, J.  589 Ratcliffe, M.  130 rationality/​rationalism  83 aesthetic approach  407 applied  82–​83 Bachelard, G. : poetic and scientific  333–​34, 336 Cartesian 353 entrepreneurial event  421–​22 formal 502 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  50 Marion, J.-​L.  180 Newtonian 343 practical 290 substantive 502 utilitarian 335 rational materialism  82–​83 Rauh, A.  612 ready-​to-​hand  128–​29 real (Henry, M.)  201, 202–​3, 210 reality and truth, reconciling  174–​76 real time  473 reasoning (Arendt, H.)  490–​91 reasons see Husserl, E. -​reasons and emotions reasons for phenomenologies and why now  1–​4 recontextualization 158 reduction autopoietic process of understanding  471–​72 to beingness  183–​84 depth and temporality in cinematographic experience  441, 450–​51, 456–​58, 457t eidetic  6, 8, 46, 48, 139–​40 entrepreneurial event  421–​22 of existence  57–​58 to giveness  183 incomplete  471–​72 to objectness  183 phenomenological  139–​40 referential relations  127 refiguration  151–​52, 152t, 157 reflection see critical reflection; self-​reflection reflection-​in-​action  713 reflection-​on-​action  713 reflective judgement  709

reflective talk  713 reflexive position  680–​81 reflexive turn  722, 723–​24 Reinach, A.  36, 558–​60 Reines, F.  338–​39 Reinhold, E.  347–​48 relational ensembles  281–​82 relationality  3, 513, 582, 715 Schmitz, H.: methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  610, 612, 613–​15 relational ontologies  200–​1, 263, 368–​69, 513, 602–​3, 703 remote work, decentered management and flow of work practices  262–​63 Renaudi, P.J.  5, 12–​13 Renold, E.  321 repetition (entrepreneurial event)  418, 424, 426, 430, 436 reproductive imagination  341–​42 Rescher, N.  463 resonance (aesthetic approach)  398, 400, 403, 410 ressentiment  299–​302, 304, 307–​8 retention  51, 278n.1, 709–​10 revelation  190–​92 phenomenological  162, 163–​67, 176–​77 see also under Arendt, H. -​political philosophy Revel, J.  111n.30, 114, 229 reverberation of an image  84, 85, 86, 90 reverie extraverted or introverted  85 imaginational  341–​43 poetic  86–​87, 88–​89, 92 reversibility  3–​4, 6–​7, 9 appearance as  3 autopoietic process of understanding  477–​78 depth and temporality in cinematographic experience  453–​54, 459 embodied perception and the schemed world 525 of experience: touching and being touched  356–​58 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies, gestures and movement 355

Index   759 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history 103 Reyer, W.  561–​62 Rhodes, C.  157–​58 rhythms and rhythmanalysis  81–​82, 85, 86, 88 Riach, K.  372–​73, 376 Rickert, H.  556, 557 Ricoeur, P.  4–​5, 8, 12–​13 Arendt, H.: political philosophy  163–​64, 169 experience and MOS  238–​39, 243, 248t, 249t Fallible Man 147 Foucault, M.  218–​19, 228–​29 Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary  147–​48 Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation 149 Henry, M.  207 Oneself as Another 153 Reflections on the Just  154–​55 Symbolism of Evil, The 147 Ricoeur, P. -​self in the world  146–​59 configuration 152t conscience: otherness within ourselves  154–​55 hermeneutic phenomenology  149–​50 identity and ethics  153–​55 memory, history and forgetting  155–​57 metaphor, time and narrative  150–​52 mimetic cycle  152t MOS 158 phenomenology  147–​48 prefiguration 152t refiguration 152t Ringrose, J.  316, 321 Riot, P.  195–​96 Roe, B.  317 role modelling  304 Romano, C.  32–​33, 140, 419, 420, 421, 423t, 425–​26, 429, 435, 436 Romanticism 90 Rond, M. de  711 Rosa, H.  9, 112–​13, 256–​57 Rose, D.E.  481–​82 Rossetti, D. G.  66 Roupnel, G.  82

routines  173, 314–​15, 432, 436, 643, 708, 709–​10, 711 embodied  282–​83, 286, 287 entrepreneurial event  418–​19, 432, 436 Heidegger, M.: conscience and care  58–​59, 62, 71 Roux, A.P.J.  533n.2 Rowlinson, M.  158 Roy, B.  595 Ruskin, J.  65, 66–​67, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75–​76 S Sabot, P.  217–​18, 223, 224–​25 Sacks, H.  677–​78 sacrifice, communal expressions of  314 Sadler-​Smith, E.  489 Saint Aubert, E. de  476n.19 Saint-​Exupéry, A. de  478–​79 Saint-​Pol-​Roux, P.  88 Saives, A.-​L.  513 Salovaara, P.  655 Sanchez, R.  482 Sandberg, J.  251, 254, 348–​49, 602, 608–​9 Sanders, P.  602, 603–​4 Saner, H.  502 Sartre, J.-​P.  7–​8, 89–​90, 342–​43 autopoietic process of understanding  462–​63, 465n.4 Being and Nothingness  132–​33, 142 experience and MOS  238–​39, 248t, 249t feminist new materialism and embodiment  312–​13, 318 Foucault, M.  215–​16, 217–​18, 225–​26 French phenomenology of the body  131–​36 Heidegger’s Being and Time 128 Japanese phenomenology  566–​67 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: embodied habits and tactility  137–​38, 140, 141, 142–​43 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  98, 111, 114 multidimensionality of the body  125 Nausea 134 phenomenology of the body  131–​36 queer phenomenology and erotic approach  366, 370n.1, 374–​75 Scheler, M.: personalism and paradox  297, 298, 308 Transcendence of the Ego 132

760   Index Satama, S.  323 saturated phenomena  187–​91, 192 Saussure, F. de  98, 115, 229, 423t Savinio, A.  400, 401–​2 Schaffer, S.  678 Scharmer, C.O.  211 Scheler, M.  7–​8, 9–​10, 243, 248t, 249t, 558–​59 Exemplars of Person and Leaders 302 Formalism in Ethics and Non-​Formal Ethics of Values 298 Scheler, M. -​personalism and paradox in leadership relations  297–​308 a being and an ought  304 care ethics  301 co-​responsibility  305, 307 empathy 305 empowerment 302 ethical tensions  304 ethical understanding  306 ethics  298, 303–​4, 305, 307–​8 ethics, of personalism  301 exemplarity  304, 307–​8 experiential  303–​4 and leaders  302–​4 pure, future orientation of  303–​4 feelings  298–​99, 305, 307 followers  307–​8 Gesamtperson  305, 307–​8 history of phenomenology  297–​99 leaderful organizations  306 leaders/​leadership  297–​98, 301, 302, 307 by example  304 collective 306 connecting 307 distributed 306 in the plural  306 relational 306 morality  297–​98 paradox as an either/​and  299 paradox theory  305, 307 personalism  302, 303–​4, 305, 306 power 307 actual and assumed  300, 301n.3, 302 pure and experiential  303, 304 ressentiment  299–​302, 304, 307–​8 self and other people, relations between  304–​7 self-​responsibility  305, 307 slave morality  299–​300, 301n.3

sociality  304–​5, 306, 307 togetherness  305, 306, 307 values  297–​99, 300, 302, 305 values-​inversion  301 where and how to begin question  298, 300, 302–​3, 305 Schelling, F.  472n.15 schemed world see embodied perception and the schemed world Schmied, W.  402–​3 Schmitz, H.  7–​8, 243, 248t, 249–​50, 249t, 264 Schmitz, H. -​methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  602–​18 acceleration  616–​17 affective experiences  604 affective involvement  606–​8, 609, 610, 613, 618 affective methodology  608–​9 affective relationality  612 affectivity  604, 605, 610 atmosphere/​organizational atmosphere  602–​3, 604, 605, 610, 611, 612, 613–​17, 618 experience of the moment  608–​9 felt body (Leib)  605, 606–​9, 618 fluid phenomena  602–​3, 604, 605, 618 neo-​phenomenological revision  607–​12 phenomena as proposition  609–​11 poetic explication  611–​13 neo-​phenomenology  603–​7 ontology 604 ordinary affects  612 organizing work  616 poetic explication  615–​17, 618 poetic twist  613 prosaic explication  611–​12 situations  605, 609, 610 twofold body  607–​8 Schneider (phantom limbs case study)  137–​38, 139, 140 Schnell, A.  36 Schoenberg, A.  337 Schön, D.  254 Schopenhauer, A.  197, 406 Schrift, A.D.  5, 12–​13 Schumpeter, J.  333–​34, 338 Schütz, A.  297, 336, 337, 407 experience  243, 247, 248t, 249t, 251–​52 scientific see Bachelard, G. -​poetic and scientific

Index   761 scientific knowledge  53 scientific truth and reason  47 second nature in age of climate change  50 Sedgwick, E.  509 Segarra, P.  258 Sein  66–​67, 73–​74, 421, 502 self-​awareness  49, 61–​62, 72–​73, 141, 606–​7, 708–​9, 714 self-​experience  35, 424 self-​identity  307, 424 self-​perception  424, 433 self-​reflection (self-​reflexivity)  43, 157, 252, 581, 722 self-​repossession  39 self-​responsibility  305, 307 self (Ricoeur)  153–​55, 157–​59 self as same  150 self as subject and object duality  147–​48 self-​techniques  227 self in the world see Ricoeur, P. -​self in the world Senghor, L. S.  542 sensations  35–​36, 129–​30, 515–​16 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  43, 45–​46, 48, 50, 51–​53 sense experience  126–​27 sense-​making  711 centrality of  263–​66 see also under organizational identity at Biomedical Neuroscience Institute (BNI) sense-​non-​sense  109 sensibility  12, 13–​14, 142, 701–​2 aesthetic  406–​7 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  48 performative  405, 406–​7 post-​tragic  596 Scheler, M.  298–​99, 305 sensible Being  525 sensible knowing  407 sensing approach and role of place (Place Project)  508–​18 DIY culture  512–​13 fieldwork  510–​12 hanging out  512 materializing of values  514–​15 placeness  509–​10, 513–​14 relational place  513 solidarity  512–​13 spatiality and relationality  513

subcultures  512–​13 tuning in  509–​10, 512, 515–​16 worlding 513 sensorial experience  348, 350–​51, 353, 357b, 361 sensorial knowing  401 sensuous dimensions of the phenomenal field  126–​27 sensuous layer  133 Serequeberhan, T. Existence and Heritage  533–​34, 535, 535n.5, 539–​40, 541–​51 Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse, The  532, 533–​35, 536–​37, 543, 543n.12, 545, 546, 550, 551 ‘Philosophy in the Present Context of Africa’ 532 Serequeberhan, T. -​African phenomenology: enframing and transformation  532–​53 African hermeneutic phenomenology  534–​ 39, 543 Heidegger, M.  536–​38 question of being human  538–​39 Serequeberhan’s programme  534–​36 Being  537–​38 being-​in-​the-​world  534–​36 colonialism  532–​33, 548–​49 decolonization  532–​33, 551 Existence and Heritage  543–​51 shift of focus  543–​46 thingification  539–​40, 543, 546–​49–​, 550–​51 transforming our abode  534, 548–​50, 551 Ge-​stell (enframing)  539–​40 global capitalism  534 hermeneutic examination  534 hermeneutics of suspicion  537–​38, 542 life-​world  534–​36 lived existence  532 lived experience  532–​33, 534 lived hermeneuticity  535–​36 lived present  536–​37, 539 lived situation  538 modernism  539–​40, 550 neo-​colonialism  532–​33, 534, 551 existence and heritage neo-​ colonialism  546, 549–​51 hermeneutic phenomenology  536–​37 post-​colonial technocracy  539, 540–​41, 542

762   Index Serequeberhan, T. -​African phenomenology: enframing and transformation (cont.) political liberation  534 post-​colonialism  532–​33, 534, 543, 551–​52 existence and heritage  545–​46, 548–​49, 550 hermeneutic phenomenology  535–​37, 538 post-​colonial technocracy  539–​42 liberation 542 technology and history  540–​42 recolonization 550 specific historicalness  538 serialization  427, 436 sexed body  143–​44 sexism 371 sexuality  321, 374–​75, 631–​32 sexual see under queer phenomenology and the erotic Seyfert, R.  646 Seyler, F.  203 shape and colour constancy  46 Shapin, S.  678 Shaw, G.B.  66 Sheeran, M.J.  497, 499–​500 Shelley, M.  278–​79 Shortt, H.  655 Shotter, J.  255 Shweder, R.  625–​26 signs and images  702 silence co-​working spaces in Buddhist temples (Japan) 656 Henry, M. -​extending and discontinuing phenomenology  208–​9 see also Arendt, H. -​silence in Quaker business meetings similarity (Scheler, M.)  305–​6, 307–​8 Simmel, G.  560 Simondon, G.  8, 14n.18, 116n.43 Simon, H.  335, 338 Simonsen, K.  353 Simpson, P.  608, 615 singularity  99, 101, 104, 143–​44, 171, 204–​5, 606–​7, 688 entrepreneurial event  419, 426, 427, 430, 435–​36 Sironi, M.  403 Slater, C.  453 slave morality  299–​300, 301n.3, 302–​3

Sloterdijk, P.  243, 248t, 249t, 613 smallism 126 social groups  564–​65 sociality  7–​8, 59, 70, 530, 558–​59, 666 Scheler, M.: personalism and paradox in leadership relations  304–​5, 306, 307 social phenomenology  252 social studies of finance and algorithms  640–​48 definition 641b experiencing algorithms  642–​44 listening to the algorithm  644–​47 noise  646, 647–​48 socio-​materiality  257, 260, 261, 281–​82, 497, 643n.2 Socrates  124–​25n.1, 163, 489–​90, 491, 502 Solbiati, A.  398 solipsism 641 soul-​body relationships  5 Sousa, B. de  552–​53 space centrality of  263–​66 see also time and space spaces of thought  365 see also co-​working spaces in Buddhist temples (Japan) spatiality  260–​61, 348–​61 spatialization of time  473, 474 spatial practices  348, 656, 657, 659, 664–​65 embodied  653, 655, 657, 663, 666, 668 top-​down  655 spatial schemes  33 spatium  444, 446–​47, 448, 455, 458 speculative realism  12 Spee, A.P.  158 Spicer, A.  654–​55, 665 Spinoza, B.  429n.3 spirituality  10–​11, 228–​29 spiritual objects  33 Spivak, G.C.  317 spontaneous experience  605–​6, 607, 608–​9, 618 stakeholder theory  209–​10, 258–​59, 388 Staubmann, H.  334, 337 Staude, J.R.  298–​99 Stein, E.  297, 305–​6 Stevenson, J.  63–​64 Stewart, K.  609, 610, 612, 617 feminist new materialism  312, 318 Hundreds, The 517

Index   763 sensing approach and role of place  509–​10, 512, 513–​14, 515–​18 Steyaert, C.  612 storyteller see under Arendt, H. -​political philosophy Strati, A.  90–​91, 313–​14, 322–​23, 336, 338, 342–​ 43, 397f structuralism  9, 149–​50, 158–​59, 210–​11, 216, 217–​18, 229 structuration (entrepreneurial event)  419–​20, 427, 428, 429, 430, 433–​34 Styhre, A.  348 Suarez, F.F.  707–​8, 709–​11, 712, 713 subcultures  512–​13 subjectivation depth and temporality in cinematographic experience  444–​46, 450, 456–​58, 459 entrepreneurial event  419–​20 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  106, 112–​13, 115–​16, 117, 118–​19 see also appearances and subjectivity/​ subjectivation subjective consciousness  582–​83, 625–​26 subjective experience  157, 215–​16, 364–​65, 367–​68, 417, 445, 468–​69, 679–​80 subjective self  146 subjective structures  33 subjective time  158–​59, 277 subjective worlds  393, 702 subjectivity  5–​6, 8, 9–​10, 11, 12 agency 708 Bachelard, G.: imagination  84, 90, 92 Cartesian meditations and experimentation  225–​30 depth and temporality in cinematographic experience  444–​46, 450, 456–​58, 459 feminist new materialism and embodiment  316 Foucault, M.  224–​30, 702, 704 Henry, M.  196, 197, 202, 210–​11 Japanese phenomenology  566 literature review  240 living 208 Marion, J.-​L.  185 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  102, 106, 108–​9, 112, 113 multidimensionality of the body  131 phenomenological sensibilities  30, 37 Ricoeur, P.  147, 158–​59

Schmitz, H.: methodological perspective and neo-​phenomenology  606–​7 see also appearances and subjectivity/​ subjectivation; and under Henry, M. -​extending and discontinuing phenomenology subject-​superject  467 subsidiary particulars  712–​13 substantive self  132 success-​failure  298–​99 super-​subjectivity  723–​24 Surrationalism  341–​42 suspension of knowledge  43–​44 sustainability  576, 577, 583–​85, 586, 587–​88, 593–​94 symbols  149, 151–​52, 155, 220–​21, 496, 558 systems of thought  229 T tacit knowledge  289–​90, 489, 712–​13 tactility  3, 136–​43 Taguchi, L.  317 Takahashi, S.  563 Tanabe, H.  556, 558, 559–​61, 562, 563–​64, 566 Tan, P.  588 Taylor, N.  388–​89 teleology of modern sciences  338–​39, 341–​42 temporality  7, 11, 12, 13–​14, 715 of action, non-​successive  714 entrepreneurial event  417, 419 of gestures  359–​61 Heidegger, M.: conscience and care  75–​77 imaginary technologies in healthcare organizations  277–​78, 283, 284 literature review  251, 254–​56, 260–​61 logic of practice  714 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: bodies, gestures and movement  354, 357b, 360–​62 Merleau-​Ponty, M.: metaphysics of history  105, 118–​19 phenomenological sensibilities  36 Ricoeur, P.  157 Scheler, M.  303–​4 Serequeberhan, T.: African phenomenology: enframing and transformation  540–​41 willing suspension of disbelief: Occupied Theatre squatters  622–​23 see also depth and temporality in cinematographic experience

764   Index Tennyson, A.  64 Terzi, R.  104–​5 textuality  149–​50 Thales  476–​77 Thanem, T.  419 thematic deliberation  713, 714 theoretical experimentations  228 theoretical streams  237–​38 Therrien, Y.  86 the they (das Man)  70, 71, 72–​73, 74, 76 thickness (depth and temporality in cinematographic experience)  449, 452–​53 thingification  539–​40, 543, 546–​51 thing itself  32–​33 things in themselves  27–​28, 29–​30 things as we perceive them  27–​28 thinking see under Arendt, H. -​silence in Quaker business meetings Thompson, E.  136, 141 Thompson, N.A.  90 Thrall Soby, J.  408 throwness  68–​69 thrown past  70 Tiles, M.  331–​32, 340–​41 time centrality of  263–​66 and collective memories  50–​51 and cultural representations  52 human  151–​52, 158t–​59 Husserl, E.: reasons and emotions  43, 46–​47 metaphysics of  81–​82 see also temporality; time and space time-​images  9–​10, 440–​41, 444–​45, 448, 452, 454–​55, 459 time and space  47, 153, 187, 263, 264, 342–​43, 360–​61, 417–​18, 453, 455–​56 entrepreneurial event  419, 428, 433, 434, 435–​36 Toadvine, T.  470, 474–​75 to be  540 Tocqueville, A. de  173 togetherness  16–​17, 108–​9, 169, 265, 456–​58, 632, 666 Scheler, M.: personalism and paradox in leadership relations  298–​99, 305, 306, 307

Tomkins, L.  258–​59 topo-​analytical method  87 topology  128, 428, 445–​46, 447, 456, 457t totalitarian systems  170, 175 touch sense of  189–​90 see also under Merleau-​Ponty, M. -​bodies, gestures and movement Toyama, R.  258 transcendence  10–​11, 176, 198, 225–​26, 353–​54 of flesh  247–​49 Foucault, M.  218–​19, 222–​25, 229–​30 and immanence contradiction  375 immanent 562 phenomenological 168 and sensoriality  361 of the world  47 transcendental ego  132, 137, 198–​99, 201–​2, 224 transcendental horizon  143 transcendental idealism  44 transcendental imagination  332–​33 transcendental intersubjectivity  47 transcendentalism  10–​11, 12, 221–​22, 530, 607–​8 transcendental logic or logical theory  40, 419 transcendental phenomenology  36, 40, 332–​33, 337, 471–​72, 557, 564–​65 transcendental psychology  557 transcendental turn  36 transcorporeality  311–​12, 320, 324–​25 transformation see Serequeberhan, T. -​ African phenomenology: enframing and transformation transforming our abode  534, 548–​50, 551 transparency  2–​3, 4, 7 transsubjectivity  84, 90 true phenomena  28 Trump, D.  301 truth plays or truth regimes  112 Tsoukas, H.  254, 255–​56, 348–​49 Tsuchida, K.  558, 560n.7 tuning in  509–​10, 512, 515–​16 see also attunement Tuomivaara, S.  90 Twardowski, K.  557 twofold body  607–​8 Tyler, M.  654 Tzara, T.  341–​42

Index   765 U Uchiyama, K.  208–​9 Uda, T.  656 Uemura, G.  565n.12 Ulrich, C.  289–​90 Ulus, E.  258–​59 understanding see autopoietic process of understanding unexpectedness  418–​19 unity-​in-​and-​of-​difference  477–​78 universal knowledge  40–​42 unmeaning 58 unready-​to-​hand  139 use-​value  203 Usual Suspects, The  454–​55 V Vaara, E.  251–​52 Valéry, P.  525 values 682 materializing of  514–​15 Scheler, M.: personalism and paradox in leadership relations  297–​99, 300, 302, 305 values-​inversion  301 Van der Veken, J.  471n.13, 472n.15, 476–​77 Varela, F.J.  480 Vargas, V.  453 Vaujany, F.-​X. de  348–​49, 479n.22, 501, 656, 707 Verlaine, P.  84 verticality  13–​14, 85, 107–​8, 115, 455n.25, 684 vertical peripety  450–​51, 454–​55, 456–​58, 457t Vesala, H.  90 Vickery, J  396 Vienna Circle  332–​33 Vierkandt, A.  561 virtual body  399 virtual embodiment  311–​12, 314–​15, 321, 324–​25 virtualities 454 entrepreneurial event  424, 429, 432, 436 pure openness on to flux of  425–​27, 436 Viscusi, G.  281 visibility  52, 103, 109, 196, 666, 699–​700 Marion, J.-​L.: experience as an excess of giveness  182, 190–​92 Merleau-​Ponty, M. -​bodies, gestures and movement  355–​56, 358, 359, 360–​61 visibility-​invisibility  109

visible  5, 13, 126–​27, 172, 190–​91, 201, 241, 313–​14, 478–​79, 589, 666 depth and temporality in cinematographic experience  441, 445, 453–​54 embodied perception and the schemed world  523, 524 Foucault, M.  224–​25, 230 Husserl, E. -​reasons and emotions  52 making visible the invisible  219–​22 Merleau-​Ponty, M. -​metaphysics of history  99, 100, 101–​2, 103, 108, 109 queer phenomenology and the erotic  370, 373 see also under Merleau-​Ponty, M. -​bodies, gestures and movement visual language  410 visual perception  470, 710 vita activa (action)  165–​66, 167, 174–​75 vitalism  131–​32, 420, 424, 425, 435 Vitry, C.  372 viva activa  493, 502 Vogel, R.  241, 250–​51 Von Foerster, H.  75–​76 von Uexküll, J.  385–​86, 387b, 393 Voronov, M.  252 W Wachter, R.M.  286 Wahl, J.  104n.16, 108 Walker, R.L.  319–​20 Walther, G.  7–​8, 559–​60 Wapshott, R.  157 Warnes, S.  655 Warren, S.  323 Wasserman, V.  655 Watanabe, M.  561–​62 Watsuji, T.  563–​64, 567, 652–​53, 656 Wavelet, J.-​M.  82 weak theory  509, 510 Weber, K.  252 Weber, M.  333–​34, 466–​67, 502, 641b Weick, K.  253, 432 Weil, S.  366 Whitehead, A.N.  255 autopoietic process of understanding  462–​63, 474, 475, 479–​80, 482 bifurcation of nature  465–​72

766   Index Whitehead, A.N. (cont.) entrepreneurial event  419, 420, 423t, 424–​ 25, 426 Merleau-​Ponty, M.  98, 104–​5, 104n.16, 106, 108 Whittaker, L.  196 Wick, N.  497 Wiehl, R.  466 Wieskamp, V.  317 wild history  111 Willems, T.  261–​62 willing suspension of disbelief: Occupied Theatre squatters  622–​37 artistic squats (squarts)  627–​28 classist squatting  627–​28 co-​constructing (dis)belief  636–​37 collective responsibility  631 countercultures  627–​28, 630–​32 cultural squat  628, 632 ethnographies, utopias and critical perspectives as ways to enlarge possibilities  625–​27 fields as a boundary  626 fields as imaginary  626 fields as political  626 getting a feel for the place  634, 635 getting to know the place  633–​34 marginalization  627–​28 methodology  627–​30 data collection and number of participants 629t tales from the Occupied Theatre  628–​30 tales of the Occupied Theatre  628 openness  632–​33 phenomenology and organizational studies  624–​25 results  630–​35 seeing what we could not see  632–​35 setting what could not be set  630–​32 same but different  634–​35 self-​management  631 setting the scene  622–​23 space  622–​23 Standing Night movement against Labour Law 628 symbolic and ephemeral occupation  630–​31

temporality  622–​23 theoretical framework  623–​27 thick description  625–​26 understanding the place  635 Willmott, H.  404 Wilson, F.  372–​73, 376 Winkler, K.  560n.7 Winner, L.  279 Winograd, T.  196, 281–​82 Wiredu, K.  533n.2 within-​the-​world  135–​36 Wojtyla, K. (Pope John Paul II)  298–​99 Wolin, R.  505 Woolf, V.  169 work (Arendt)  164–​65, 168 world-​historical situation  545 worlding 513 world of life  39, 40, 41–​42, 44–​45, 46, 47, 50, 198–​99, 223 world’s schemas  529 written word, language of  410 Wrubel, J.  567 Wunenburger, J.-​J.  79–​80, 85, 89–​91 Wylie, J.  459 Y Yakhlef, A.  348–​49, 354b Yamaguchi, I.  567n.19 Yamauchi, T.  562, 563 Yanow, D.  254 Yatabe, H.  667 Yoneda, S.  561 Yoshida, K.  561–​62 Young, I.M.  371–​72, 375 Yuasa, Y.  656 Z Zahavi, D.  4–​5, 12–​13, 305–​6, 711, 715 Zaloom, C.  645 Zarabadi, S.  316 Zembylas, M.  317 Zeno of Elea  472–​74 Zhang, Z.  654–​55, 665 Zola, E.  197–​98, 202 zone of non-​being  540, 541–​42, 552–​53 Zucker, W.  299 Zylinska, J.  321