RELACIONES CUANTITATIVAS

“To love is to struggle, beyond solitude, with everything in the world that can animate existence”

(Badiou, 2012)

One early morning about 15 years ago, I was standing on a subway platform in Park Slope, Brooklyn heading into the city for my organizational redesign project at Chase Manhattan Bank. It was before rush hour began, so it was just me and two or three other people in the station. As my train approached, a man near me jumped down onto the tracks, made his way closer to the train, lay down across the tracks, and committed suicide. At first I didn’t

understand what was happening—I thought maybe he had dropped something accidentally. I remember wishing he would hurry up and get back to the safety of the platform. I had not thought of this incident in many years, but was reminded of it as I read some books recently that addressed the effects of contemporary free-market capitalism on human life.

Some of these texts advocate for a symbolic suicide of self-identity as a response to the constraints and deadening affects of capitalist enterprise (Berardi, 2009; Cederström & Fleming, 2012). However, I believe attempts to disconnect the animating breath of life (what Nietzsche calls a “will to power”) from power/knowledge constructions of self are implausible, however symbolic and abstract. Thinking we can “start over” or symbolically kill our selves

misunderstands the art of becoming processes. Indeed, Spinoza (1996) asks, “why do humans presuppose that all things lead to a certain end?” (p. 26). There is no one, single cause for that which we perceive as imperfect in our world. There is no fixed self that we can grab and throw

in the trash. There is no way to sever the connections—the intricate webs of D/discourses and actions that make up everyday existence within power/knowledge relations. Human capacity to affect and be affected both animates and constrains life, as we are always and forever connected with other bodies (human or otherwise) that shape becoming processes of self.

The Will to Power

The power, or potentia, of human existence is that “no one has yet determined what the body can do” (Spinoza, 1996, p. 71). Spinoza elaborates:

For the perfection of things is to be judged solely from their nature and power; things are not more or less perfect because they please or offend men’s senses, or because they are of use to, or are incompatible with, human nature. (p. 31)

The capacity to act and to be acted upon neither can be determinately defined as positive or negative, nor good or evil. If the world is as it is and there is a human potentia in everyone to affect and be affected, in ways that can detract from or enhance our capacities, then this is the ethic for defining existence. Additionally, if we cannot know what a body can do, then there must be some aspect that remains beyond the disciplinary capture of human constructions of economic rationality, aesthetic labor, and work identification. Part of humanity remains free through some other connection to its originating breath of life—perhaps a Nietzschean will to power. This means that however grave social critics might get about the “soulless living death” experienced by contemporary workers, there is always the capacity for change. Judgments about the need to emancipate corporate workers are easy to make, but such criticisms neglect the life force each person has, regardless of how suffocating one finds work. Thus, it is perhaps not capitalism that needs revolutionizing, but rather our perceptions about what it means to be human (at work or otherwise).

Follett’s (1998) work on community politics in the early part of the 20th century resonates

in this regard. She writes:

As the social consciousness develops, ought will be swallowed up in will. We are some time truly to see our life as positive, not negative, as made up of continuous willing, not of restraints and prohibition. Morality is not the refraining from doing certain things—it is a constructive force. (p. 53)

She says, “the test of our morality is whether we are living not to follow but to create ideals” (p. 55). Follett emphasizes an ethic of collective action and creativity (Carter, 1992). Inherent to this understanding of human ontology is a capacity and strength for doing, seeing, and being otherwise. In each of us is this “constructive force”—a will in our very DNA to exist and affect and be affected. Indeed, Follett declares: “To claim our individuality is the one essential claim we have on the universe” (p. 82, emphasis in original). Methods that can put this philosophical ontology into practice include integration, sacred dialogue, the power of forgiveness, and the promise of the gifts of relational exchange.

Nietzsche saw philosophers and artists as exemplars of aesthetic and moral mastery. Through consciousness of power/knowledge relations and acceptance of their own will to power, philosophers and artists are affirmative forces of the world. But, Nietzsche suggests the

transformation of that which might be characterized as sacred (the reason and strength of philosophers and artists to walk to the beat of a different drummer, so to speak), only emerged through a reckoning of weakness and bad consciousness. I wonder if this is part of what we see in Foucault’s work, which resists offering solutions to determining discursive technologies and subjectivities. This type of “bad consciousness” interiorizes strength and affirmative capacities to affect as that which is different, shameful, and unfair to those without the same qualitative will to power. Organizational studies include this type of disclaimer regularly—“I must be careful not to reinscribe power relations through my solutions.” But, we do not have an all-knowing