Affected

On Becoming Undone and Potentiation

verfasst von: Rick Iedema

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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This book explores the implications and relevancies of personal affect and organisational complexity for navigating organisational processes, relationships, changes and aspirations. In today’s climate, worker roles, relations and responsibilities are becoming increasingly complex and variable. Using personal experiences of organisational conflict as a point of departure, this book reflects on organisational change, complexity and research.

It moves from experiential towards theoretical and methodological issues, exploring the question of how to confront and intervene in organisational complexity. Among others, the main theories brought to bear on this question include complexity theory, affect theory and sphere theory (or ‘spherology’). The research approaches and methodologies discussed include anthropology/ethnography, discourse studies, visual research and (the turn to) participatory enquiry.

The book’s main message is to advocate for a collaborative, affective, visualised and future-oriented research agenda that rejects the conventional objectivist break and ‘division of learning’ characterising researcher-researched relationships. It will appeal to students and academics working in the fields of alternative research methods, the social sciences, organisational studies and management theory.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Transgressions

Abstract

This first chapter starts with a description of organisational transgression and dysfunction that affected many people and that became publicised through a number of governmental inquiries, research into organisational ‘incidents’, media reports of scandals, and the like. The chapter then shifts gear to question whether framing these dysfunctions as individuals’ or groups’ transgressions of particular moral codes does justice to what is at issue here. Does the morality that trades in judgements of (dys)functionality still apply to what some now refer to as a ‘third modernity’ where rules are becoming more contested (de Vulpian in Towards a third modernity: How ordinary people are transforming the world. Triarchy Press, Axminster, UK, 2008)? In attempting to answer this question, the chapter refracts the problem of organisational dysfunction through the prism of affect and the notion ‘monstrosity’.

Rick Iedema

Chapter 2. Affects

Abstract

This chapter delves more deeply into affect as descriptor of specific aspects of life. In doing so, I address Wetherell’s concept of ‘affective practice’ and rehearse Martin’s, Leys’ and Mazzarella’s critiques of affect as unqualified, autonomous energy. I next pose, the following question: if some scholars (like Wetherell, Leys, Martin and Mazzarella) insist on life as meaningful ‘all the way down’, and others (Grosz, Deleuze, Massumi, Colebrook and others) prioritise (politically, analytically) the undifferentiated force that is life before it gets entangled with secular agendas, everyday meanings and individual identities, what route is best to make sense of situations that don’t make sense; ones where we experience a loss of meaning?

Rick Iedema

Chapter 3. Undoings

Abstract

This chapter describes the impact of becoming undone and explores its consequences for the theorisation of meaninglessness. The discussion touches on the effacement of self and moves on from there to address the significance of passivity and of ‘passivity competence’. Bypassing narratives that privilege self-reinvention of self after loss, the chapter invokes two of Simondon’s concepts with which to frame the self as delicate precarity: transindividuation and transduction. These concepts underscore that, insofar as the self is able to find immunity in meaning, all meaning is destined sooner or later to fail. But thanks to this precarity, life gains on another front: the intensifying sense of affective immediacy, of life opening up to a “resonance of being in relation to itself”. This resonance reconnects to the issue of passivity and to how passivity opens up the possibility of our ‘participation in unfamiliar others’ movement/expression competence’.

Rick Iedema

Chapter 4. Prosociality

Abstract

This chapter explores the various ways in which being affected may enhance our capacity to act. This involves reviewing claims regarding human’s primordial prosociality, their empathy and sympathy, and the apparent intensification over time in human foresight and affective constraint. Effectively a thesis about human self-domestication, this intensification of foresight and constraint involved geospatial (as the ‘clearing’), evolutionary (as neoteny or the persistence of youthful experimentality), interactive (as behavioural complicatedness) and anthropotechnic changes that were/are unique to the human species. The crux of this intensification, the chapter concludes, is ‘being affected’. Being affected is not so much a personalised capacity as a species-level affordance, and is ‘metabolic’ in character insofar as it transforms all dimensions of life.

Rick Iedema

Chapter 5. Potentiation

Abstract

This chapter discusses how being moved may engender ecstasis, or ‘standing outside’. It reviews the evolutionary anthropotechnics that made possible such ecstasis. The chapter then asks the question: if becoming is inscribed into life, and if this renders becoming undone likely if not inevitable (before or as death), how are we to understand the connection between becoming and learning? In answering this question, the chapter explores learning and showback as means to engendering deliberations through which people may come to simulate and experience ecstasis.

Rick Iedema

Chapter 6. Conclusion

Abstract

This last chapter offers a brief conclusion to the book, emphasising that becoming undone comes about through submitting to that which is bigger than us. COVID-19 and the Australian bush fires are events that are bigger than us, and that will have the effect of engendering a more widespread realisation of becoming undone and a greater sense of life as precarious dynamic. This brings the book full circle: COVID-19 and the megafires have been attributed to environmental degradation due to industrial and urban expansion. It is not just that these crises have already brought about (through the immobilisation of populations), but they also necessitate (given these crises don’t appear to be tameable), another radical ecstasis, one potentially comparable to the impact of our original creation of the human clearing.

Rick Iedema

Backmatter

Titel: Affected
verfasst von: Rick Iedema
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-62736-2
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62735-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62736-2

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Über dieses Buch

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Transgressions

Chapter 2. Affects

Chapter 3. Undoings

Chapter 4. Prosociality

Chapter 5. Potentiation

Chapter 6. Conclusion

Backmatter

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