There should be an affirmative philosophy of organisation that rejects the negative tendency characterising organisation studies, and its failure to grasp the fundamental function of organisation as the oblique means to express and satisfy desires. Organisation and organisation studies should be joyful practices. This book offers a deep and detailed analysis of the problem and its solution. It opens with a definition of the human being as an impossible animal, ill-equipped to survive in any ecological niche, and traces the development of culture, it describes how communities have been built upon metaphors of the body, drawing upon extended examples from the history of pathological anatomy, medical institutions and medical technology.
The central problem is to understand how our thinking, feeling and acting bodies relate to the processes and phenomena of social organisation. The argument then applies Gilles Deleuze's influential early works in the history of philosophy to the problem of organisation. Developing Michael Hardt's groundbreaking work, an extraordinary and rigorous intellectual adventure unfolds into a world of bodies and organisations. Here there are no abstractions and nothing held in reserve. Abstract conceptions of power, dialectics and consciousness are rejected: What matters is the body/organisation and what it can do.
For readers interested in the problems of human bodies and social organisations, including organisational scholars, sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists and human geographers.
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