Before proceeding, a few remarks are necessary about the nature of creating concepts. Stressing its ability to create concepts, Deleuze and Guattari assign a major responsibility to philosophy for being able to invent events that facilitate alternative modes of existence (1991/1994: 28). However, the aim of this thesis is not to produce ground-breaking concepts that revolutionize our way of thinking. If the merit of philosophy were judged by its ability to create new paradigmatic concepts such as Descartes’s notion of cogito or Plato’s concept of Idea, this thesis would obviously fall short. Yet, even though Deleuze and Guattari stress philosophy’s function to create new concepts, their own concepts often originate from other thinkers or other disciplines. Deleuze’s concept of multiplicity, for instance, stems from Riemann’s differential mathematics while his concept of simulacrum emerges from of his reading of Plato.
Instead of trying to invent totally new concepts, I will make use of three philosophical concepts developed by others. These are Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon, Deleuze’s concept of the simulacrum and Zizek’s concept of fantasy. These concepts all have a history that extends beyond Derrida, Deleuze and Zizek. Although they are different concepts developed in response to different problems, I will show that they share a common feature of being paradoxical in the sense of going beyond common sense. Deleuze develops a paradoxical understanding of the concept of simulacrum in order to challenge the Platonic duality between true and false claimants. Rather than a false pretender, the simulacrum, following Deleuze’s reversed Platonism, is a system of internalized difference that must be evaluated on its own merits.
WHAT IS CALLED THINKING?
For Derrida, however, pharmakon should perhaps more accurately be described as a ‘quasi-concept’, since the very idea of the ‘concept’ itself suggests a binary opposotion between concept and experience. But from Deleuze’s viewpoint, pharmakon is a philosophical concept because it attempts to break with common sense. At the level of common sense understanding, experience is organized into binary oppositions. These binary oppositions, in turn, confine experience to a set of predetermined categories. Based upon his reading of Plato, Derrida develops the parasensical concept of the pharmakon to destabilize such foreclosing structures by inventing a concept that denotes something that is simultaneously a ‘poison’ and a ‘cure’, overthrowing the common sense distinction between these two qualities. Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon throws together ‘poison’ and ‘remedy’, which are commonly considered opposing elements.
The paradoxical nature of fantasy, according to Zizek, has two sides. For one thing, Zizek’s (1989/2008) concept of fantasy challenges the conventional distinction between fantasy and reality. At the level of common sense, fantasy is often opposed to reality. While reality denotes the actual state of affairs, fantasy refers to a fictional realm that is detached from the factual ground of our existence. To counter this common sense view, Zizek argues that ‘fantasy is on the side of reality’ (1989/2008: 44). For Zizek, fantasy is not opposed to reality, but is instead the ‘support that gives consistency to what we call “reality”.’ (1989/2008: 44).
In addition, Zizek’s concept of fantasy challenges the conventional distinction between fantasy and desire. From a common sense perspective, a fantasy is an imagined scenario in which we attain the things we desire that are unattainable in real life. For example, I want to be a famous entrepreneur but I am unable to do so in my actual life, so
WHAT IS CALLED THINKING?
therefore I dream of enjoying a life of luxury and fame. For Zizek, however, fantasy has precisely the opposite function. Rather than realizing desire, fantasy ‘constitutes our desire, provides its co-ordinates – it literally teaches us how to desire’ (Zizek, 2014: 14, original italics). Thus, we can see that it is fantasy that first creates the desire to become a famous entrepreneur who enjoys a life of luxury and fame.
For Deleuze, concepts are not transhistorical categories to be applied to concrete observations, but rather concrete singularities that have to be continuously reinvented into new contexts (Gane, 2009). As Gane (2009) points out, Deleuze offers a ‘new empiricism’ that circumvents the traditional distinction between purely experiential and conceptual knowledge. For Deleuze, experience is always conceptually constituted (Linstead and Thanem, 2007). But for precisely this reason, creating new concepts may allow the emergence of new modes of experience. Deleuze’s philosophy may be characterized as an empiricism of the concept that pays active attention to the nature of concepts in order to experiment with different ways of experiencing the world. As Massumi explains, for Deleuze and Guattari, concepts are ‘neither descriptive nor prescriptive’ (2010: 3) but instead, constructive and performative, because they intervene in our habitual way of reasoning. While remaining sensitive to the particular contexts in which the concepts of simulacrum, pharmakon and fantasy were created by Derrida, Deleuze and Zizek, I carefully import these concepts to the context of post-bureaucratic management thinking as a way to engage with the figures of the creative manager, the authentic leader and the entrepreneur.
Echoing Nietzsche, Deleuze (1968/2011: xv) compares a concept to an arrow that is picked up from past thinkers, trimmed on our bows to be shot in a new direction. This is what I want to do with the concepts of simulacrum, pharmakon and fantasy, even if, as Deleuze remarks, ‘the
WHAT IS CALLED THINKING?
distance covered is not astronomical but relatively small’ (1968/2001: xv). Borrowing from Derrida, Deleuze and Zizek, I will mobilize the concepts of simulacrum, pharmakon and fantasy in order to engage with the figures of the creative manager, the authentic leader and the entrepreneur. I will attempt to show how the concepts of pharmakon, simulacrum and fantasy allow us to move beyond a common sense conception of the figures of the creative manager, the authentic leader and the entrepreneur to experiment with alternative ways of conceptualizing them. In this way, the concepts of pharmakon, simulacrum and fantasy will allow us to crystalize and expose the paradoxes that we encounter in Hamel’s popular management handbook The Future of Management, George’s semi-autobiographic self-help tome Authentic Leadership and Branson’s autobiography Losing My Virginity.