Immaculate Defecation: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Organization Theory

Abstract

This chapter opens by situating the reception of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in organization theory, but does so by conceiving this reception as a instance of ‘abstract machines’ that territorialize ‘reception’ as a function that defines and confines a field of study to a territory, here a limited number of universities in the English-speaking world. The chapter further expresses the (anti-)method of Deleuze and Guattari by trying to deploy the method itself: defocusing the problem in order to ‘produce the problematic’, straining to reach a language that stutters and breaks down, an affective writing, a ‘line of flight’ with infinite speed, and abstaining (perhaps specifically) from suicide by always experimenting not with the ultimate but with the ‘penultimate limit’. Despite rumours to the contrary, the writings of Deleuze and Guattari are most adequately characterized by the word sobriety. Language as such, however, is a slang, a machine that works by breaking down, moving intensely through dynamic states of crisis and equilibrium. This calls for a sober yet bloody style: ‘Write with blood,’ says Nietzsche, ‘and thou wilt find that blood is spirit’ (1969: 43). Right into the heart of Organization Theory (and one wonders which way into the heart: the bowels, the veins? Through a taste for camp or really by way of an Outside?), Deleuze and Guattari release the dynamic double concept of the Plane of Organization and the Plane of Immanence. The organization – now construed as an ‘assemblage’ – is situated between these limits. As such, the assemblage is a multiplicity, but it is habitually botched or stratified, that is, reduced and simplified by the three great ‘strata’: the Organism, the Sign and the Subject. This brings the chapter to the concept itself, as it is composed as a multiplicity with the ability of counteractualizing our present, an often lamentable state of affairs. The concept also features the ability to produce the problematic of a given problem, instead of just solving it. The concept is, in particular, an event, and as such calls for an ethics by which one becomes worthy of the event. Becomes worthy of being present at the dawn of the world (Deleuze and Guattari, 1998: 280).