Notes from a Room

The vastness of the campus, the Organisational Management campus. They’ll bring everything here – the rest of the university. It’s all going to be reinvented here.

The Organisational Management maw! Swallowing everything! Scooping up everything. Swallowing the humanities, in one gulp…

Soon, the rest of the university will be brought here. Relocated here. Soon, the whole university will be reborn on the Organisational Management campus! Soon it won’t just be Philosophy in Organisational Management, but History. But Geography. But Physics! But Politics! But the Fine Arts! But Mathematics!

And History will be the history of the application of Organisational Management. Geography can be about the still uneven application of Organisational Management. Politics can be about the technocratic perfection of Organisational Management. The Fine Arts can be about the décor of Organisational Management: of its glass and steel foyers. About the public spaces of its new campuses.

And Philosophy will concern Organisational Management as a philosophy. About Organisational Management not so much as a subject area, but as a way of doing things. A practice. A methodology, if you like. As a logic. As a way of approaching problems. The problem of life! The problem of everything!

*

Soon, everyone will be studying Organisational Management… Nothing but Organisational Management…

Organisational Management, becoming the all-subject. The ur-subject. All unis will essentially be Organisational Management unis, nothing else. They’ll simply be about organisation! And management!

In the beginning, there was Philosophy, and all the other disciplines split off from Philosophy. In the end, there will only be Organisational Management, as all the other disciplines will have been subsumed by Organisational Management.

Which is why the move to Organisational Management must be understood in its chiliastic dimension, we agree. In its eschatological dimension. As what is happening everywhere, but in miniature.

[…]

Helmut, performing one of his famous etymological analyses.

The essence of Organisational Management is neither organisational nor managerial, he says. Organisation – from the Greek organon, meaning organ. The term emerged in mid fifteenth century, as act of organising, which came from the medieval Latin organizationem. Sense of ‘that which is organised’ by 1807. Meaning ‘system, establishment’, from 1873.

Manage, from the Latin non manus, hand and agere, to act. To handle, train or direct a horse: that’s what the word, manage meant in the 1560s. Being shaped by physical manipulation: that’s what it means in the 1670s. Governing body of a collective: that’s what it meant in 1739. The word management to refer to the act of managing by direction is first used in the late sixteenth century.

And what happens when you combine the words? Helmut asks, rhetorically. They’re essentially saying the same thing. An organisation is managed. Management happens through organisation. That’s what changes.

*

Organisational Management! Business Studies – that was the old name… A dead name… But now, Organisational Management is naming itself as such. It’s coming out into the open as exactly what it is. It doesn’t need to disguise itself any longer.

Organisational Management can be brazen – quite open. It can walk in daylight. It can be abroad. There it is, unabashed, unashamed, nothing other than what it is.

*

And what’s the role of Philosophy in all this? The etymology of philosophy: we all know that. Unlimited desire. Infinite yearning. Eros, as Plato would say.

Does Organisational Management know that? Do they sense something missing in Organisational Management – a kind of philosophical phantom limb? Maybe they want more. Maybe they Desire. Yearn in their own way. In an Organisational Management way.

They’d like to be more than they are. They’re all about logistics. And order. They’re all about procedures. About methodology. But they want something else. They’re not sure what they want, but they think it might be us.

This merger… This mind meld… Do they want to tame us, or untame themselves? Do they want to bind us or loosen themselves? It’s about a double becoming. A becoming-organisational-management of philosophy: that’s what they want, explicitly. But won’t there also be a becoming-philosophy-of-organisational-management?

The secret of Organisational Management: Organisational Management masochism. Organisational Management self-loathing. Perhaps Organisational Management is weary of being what it is. Perhaps Organisational Management wants philosophy to decomplete it. To part-destroy it. Perhaps Organisational Management wants to be opened up, to bloom. To unfold all its dimensions. And we’re part of that…

— Spurious, via here