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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Richard Hull
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I want in this paper to discuss two aspects of the title. Firstly, the ways in which a particular philosopher, Gillian Rose, is generally excluded from ‘the canon’. Secondly, one of the reasons for that exclusion is her theology, and especially her conversion into the Anglican Church during the last weeks of her life. I will not be discussing that incident so much as using it to reflect upon the ways in which it appears to be absolutely forbidden, especially amongst radical philosophers (of both shades), to entertain the possibility of serious philosophical consideration of the spirit. This is a head-on confrontation, and I do not undertake it lightly. Whilst the first topic is clearly relevant to this Stream, it may not be clear why the second should be, so let me expand. There is an old argument, going back to Hegel and Marx, that the commodification of labour power (and prior to that the bondage of serf to master) did irrevocable damage to the completeness of any person’s self-understanding. We used to call this alienation, and it is perhaps a shame that the word has gone out of fashion, because if there is even a grain of truth in the concept of alienation, then this means that work and organisation must be a central focus for any worthwhile philosophy. Because of course ‘a person’s self-understanding’ has been at the core of philosophy since Descartes – we cannot do philosophy, let alone do anything with it, without a conceptual apparatus which places our self, as philosophising person, in some relation to other selves. Hegel’s argument, notably resurrected by Rose (1981), was that our very distinction between concept and intuition (for which read Kant’s ‘fact and value’) is founded on an alienated sense of self, a false sense of self, or what Rose (1996) calls a ‘misrecognition of self, other, and the relation between the two’. Since Hegel, a great deal of effort has one into attempting to find remedies to that alienation, both conceptually and practically. One might think of this as trying to put the spirit back into work, and one might also extrapolate somewhat, and care to see the current morality of Anglo-American neo-liberalism as attempting to put the spirit back into politics – a modernist moral majority. But the point of Hegel’s argument was that this is impossible – once torn apart, the complete sense of self is unrecoverable. Rose (1992) uses the word ‘diremption’ (tearing apart forcibly) to capture this impossibility of putting the pieces together again. What might this mean for the ways we understand organisation? Firstly, we do not have to choose between ‘radical politics and radical epistemology’, as Ashmore (1996) has dubbed the debates between realists (Critical, Pragmatic, or otherwise) and relativists (deconstructive, genealogical, ethnomethodological, or otherwise). This means one can find a space between for instance radical political economy and Actor Network Theory (Green et al, 1999), and this is one answer to the question ‘how to do things with philosophy’ – namely, use it to negotiate our way through competing perspectives and current fads (see e.g. Hull, 1999, 2000). Secondly and more positively I will attempt to outline the contours of a ‘speculative philosophy of organisation’:- one which places work at the heart of organisation but without the absolutism usually associated with such a move; which attempts to come to terms with the necessary exclusion of spirit from work, but without for instance the christian Marxism of Žižek (2000, see also Butler, Laclau & Žižek, 2000); and which understands contemporary work as increasingly requiring judgement, and hence drawing to our attention some ancient conundrums in the philosophy of judgement (Caygill, 1989; Bernstein, 1992; Fine, 2001).
Author(s): Hull R
Editor(s): Gilson, C; Grugulis, I; Willmott, H
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: 3rd International Critical Management Studies Conference: Critique and Inclusivity
Year of Conference: 2003
Pages: 22
Publisher: Lancaster University
URL: http://homepages.3-c.coop/richard/Hull%20-%20The%20Excluded%20Spirit.pdf
Notes: Paper was finished too late for inclusion in the Conference Proceedings - available at http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/research/ejrot/cmsconference/2003/default.asp So the URL points to a copy of the paper available on the author's own web-site
