Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Deleuze and the Social: Is there a D-function?
- I Order and Organisation
- II Subjectivity and Transformation
- 4 In the Mean Time: Vitalism, Affects and Metamorphosis in Organisational Change
- 5 I Knew there were Kisses in the Air
- 6 Becoming-Cyborg: Changing the Subject of the Social?
- III Art and the Outside
- IV Capitalism and Resistance
- V Social Constitution and Ontology
- Notes on contributors
- Index
4 - In the Mean Time: Vitalism, Affects and Metamorphosis in Organisational Change
from II - Subjectivity and Transformation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Deleuze and the Social: Is there a D-function?
- I Order and Organisation
- II Subjectivity and Transformation
- 4 In the Mean Time: Vitalism, Affects and Metamorphosis in Organisational Change
- 5 I Knew there were Kisses in the Air
- 6 Becoming-Cyborg: Changing the Subject of the Social?
- III Art and the Outside
- IV Capitalism and Resistance
- V Social Constitution and Ontology
- Notes on contributors
- Index
Summary
Affects are the nonhuman becomings of man.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?Demand the Impossible
We begin within a specific social field constituted by a process of organisational change, which was initiated by the current policy of deregulating the electricity industry in Europe. As we join the story, the quiet days of monopoly are coming to an end at ELEC, a Danish utilities provider. We focus on how employees are produced as subjects in such a context, how they become subjects. We have followed developments at ELEC during a three-year period; we have approached them from the perspective of the emotions, frustrations and struggles, the comments and hesitations of its casualties, which crowd the really affective movements of the change process. To address and analyse this social field, we want to produce an exploratory politics of change. Such a venture, as Brian Massumi has noted, is not without risk.
[A]n exploratory politics of change is philosophy pursued by other means – a radical politics equal to the ‘radicality’ of the expanded empirical field itself. Radical politics is an inherently risky undertaking because it cannot predict the outcome of its actions with certainty. If it could, it wouldn't be radical but reactive, a movement dedicated to capture and containment, operating entirely in the realm of the already possible, in a priori refusal of the new. Radical politics must tweak and wait: for the coming, collective determination of the community. Its role is to catalyze or induce a global self-reorganization: tweak locally to induce globally (to modulate a slogan). Speaking of slogans, repeat this one: ‘be realistic, demand the impossible.’ Under what conditions could that be a formula for a political empiricism? (2002: 243-4)
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- Information
- Deleuze and the Social , pp. 77 - 95Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006