1
6th International Critical Management Studies Conference,
University of Warwick, UK, July 13-15, 2009
Stream 10- What’s critical about information systems?
Michel Henry and Critical Theory, an Introductory Standpoint
The case of virtual organization
Eric Faÿ
Sandra Le Guyader
OCE Research Centre
EMLYON Business School
23 av. Guy de Collongue
69130 Ecully Cedex
France
Tel: 33 4 78 33 77 38
Fax: 33 4 78 33 79 28
[email protected]
2
Michel Henry and Critical Theory, an Introductory Standpoint
The case of virtual organization
Eric Faÿ
Sandra Le Guyader
OCE Research Centre
EMLYON Business School
23 av. Guy de Collongue
69130 Ecully Cedex
France
Tel: 33 4 78 33 77 38
Fax: 33 4 78 33 79 28
[email protected]
The question we wish to deal with in this paper is: how can Henry’s phenomenology, based
on a totally renewed way of understanding human being, a Self finding its dynamic in the
immanence of its affective life, help us introduce a renewed critical approach toward modern
‘e-conomy’ and the virtual organizations of human labour it structures? Relying on Michel
Henry, the difficulties will in fact not only appear as difficulties to relate to the life-world, to
interpret, to socialize, to exercise power, to face abstraction,… but they will appear as the
hindrance of one’s praxis, its real, active, individual, subjective and intersubjective life. To
support this argument we shall be studying those of Henry’s works which will enable us to
ground our critical analysis. This enables a critical and phenomenological perspective on IT
reference paradigms whereby exchanges are reduced to ‘information’ (Simon) and
‘communication’ (Wiener) such as they operate in the ‘virtual organisations’ of Davidow,
Malone, Davenport, Handy, etc. Written by one of us who has been a participant observer
during six months in a global company, a reflexive narrative is the starting point for
introducing several insights related to the experienced hindrance of one’s life dynamism and
energy. This critical approach leads to a political theory of potentialization and capacitation
which is close to Hilary Putnam’s intuitions.
3
Michel Henry and Critical Theory, an Introductory Standpoint
The case of virtual organization
Introduction
Since Taylor, the theories of the scientific organization of human labour have continuously
developed, based on calculating technologies, an abstract modelling of activity, information
processing and communication technologies. H. Simon and J. G. March (1958) saw the
organization as a co-ordinated group of information processing systems (human,
organizational or computer). For many reasons, one of which being the identification with the
system they develop, many researchers end up identifying human beings with an Information
or Communication System. The most notorious illustrations of this are Norbert’s Wiener view
of the equivalence between human beings and cybernetic devices in terms of communication,
and Herbert Simon’s claim of knowing the “Information System called Man”. Since Dreyfus,
Winograd, Gabriel (1999), to quote but a few, it has been argued that such an “Information
System called Man”, a purposeful rational actor, is disembodied, has no affect, and lives in no
context.
The tragedy of this is that this extremely limited way of conceiving human beings has become
a widespread way of organizing work, reducing it to mere information processing or
communication. A striking example of this is given in the organizational concept of “virtual
organization” where remote information processing is emphasized, to the detriment of
embodiment. Etighoffer (1992), Davidow and Malone (1992), Handy (1995), Davenport and
Pearlson (1998) to name but a few, argued that with the Internet, organizations can be
reconfigured, that the virtual organization, with its heavy reliance on information technology, is
conducive to “collaborative remote working” and can reduce “transaction costs” and “red tape”
for companies by outsourcing many of their activities. This is all part of the globalization
movement that brings with is a new set of rules for the global economy. Some fifteen years
after it was launched, this idea has become an actual form of organization in a number of
4
companies. Yet despite the well-known and well-documented difficulties of people’s
experiences of virtual organization, the concept shows no signs of being phased out. We now
hear of virtual teams, virtual worlds, virtual learning environments, and so on and so forth.
Nonetheless, several researches have seen the virtual organization in accordance with the
tradition of critical theory. Let us first address the questions of power and politics. Jackson,
Gharavi and Klobas (2006), from a Foucaldian perspective, found that the totality of the
modes of power relations operating upon virtual knowledge workers comprises a complex,
sophisticated web of integrated and overlapping control and constraints emanating from the
external and internal panopticon. Kim Thorne (2005, 2007) drawing on Gerlaach and
Hamilton, (2000) unravels the utopia of virtuality which masks a collusion between neo-liberal
and post-modern thought. Nevertheless, Sioufi and Greenhill (2007) suggested, from a
Marxist perspective, that utilizing ICT to enable cross-boundary work may subsequently bring
with it heightened levels of contested power and elements of disrupted context. Moreover,
they argue, it may also enable or even perpetuate existing discriminatory barriers between
workers. Pursiainen, (2008) referring to the work of Foucault and Merleau-Ponty, underlines
that such power over our body or from our body informs our ‘cyborg style’.
Another way of developing a critical perspective is to point out the primacy of abstraction in
the modern world. This raises the question of sense-making in contexts shaped by
abstraction. Going back to lived experience, Zuboff (1988) points out the epistemological
crisis generated by large-scale computerization whereby clerks are plunged into a world
where “bodily and spatial intelligence are reduced or sometimes eliminated” in favor of
“logical competency” (2008: 194). Boland (1991) argues in favour of face-to-face encounters
in order to grasp the meaning of information by placing it in a wider context of experience.
Dejours (2000) points out the suffering resulting from the growing discrepancy between
abstract prescriptions and the reality of work. Kagand and Chumer (2007) suggest drawing
on pragmatist philosophy, symbolic interactionism and phenomenology to illustrate how
human beings make sense and derive their identities, through interactions with others and
objects, in a life-world pervaded by technology. Isomäki (2008) studies how the designers of
information systems or infrastructures view the human beings for whom they are designing
as non-human phenomena or in terms of functional ‘software’. This points us to the ways
work may be ‘moulded’ by software or by technological networks in such a context.
5
Disconnection from the life-world is also a theme of critical approaches. Carsten Stahl (2008)
asks what the ‘becoming future of rationality’ is in today’s technological world. Drawing on
Habermas, he provides valuable insights which prompts one to ask the following crucial
question: do these technologies expand a collective and shared life-world; or alternatively, do
they lead to confusion by creating diverging life-worlds? Besson (2008), drawing on Schutz
and Luckman’s “structures of the life-world” asks similar questions but in a different direction.
He very helpfully raises the practical and moral issues of working through ‘over-extended
zones of operation’ and points to Borgmann’s notion of ‘focal practices’. Jin & Robey (2008)
applied Giddens' concept of time-space distanciation to a case study of a virtual company.
Their paper explores the tensions between disembedded abstractions and lived
organizational experience
Disembodiment and isolation are underlined from several critical perspectives which raise the
key question of collaboration and cooperation. Referring to lived experience, Zuboff (1988)
identifies the huge suffering generated by large-scale computerization in which workers are
“exiled from the interpersonal world of office routines… expelled from the managerial world of
acting-with” (1988: 125). Referring to Merleau-Ponty and his focus on the body as the very
locus and power to enact a shared world, Mingers (2001) argues in favor of the necessity of
embodying information systems, that is to say, organizing face to face encounters to get cooperation and collaboration when organizing and deciding. I Introna and Brigham, (2008)
referring to Levinas, indicate the difficulty of creating communities in the age of virtuality. Kim
Thorne (2005, 2007) describes a virtual consciousness afraid of physical relationships
The iron cage of the rational, hierarchical, authoritarian organization, representative of the
previous physicalized era of industrial capitalism, is replaced by the new, benign, boundaryless, flexible, networked, information and communication technology-driven, empowering,
virtual organization… This virtual consciousness involves an on-going fear of physical
relationships and an exaltation of technology as a replacement for human involvement in the
world (2007: 1-2)
Thorne criticizes the fiction of trust in virtual organizations and thus highlights, after Sennett
(1998), the adverse implications for “cyborg employees” facing perpetual organizational redesign: the difficulty to build mutual loyalties and ultimately to reach the sustainable self.
6
We now reach the core ontological critical standpoint arguing that the self is itself in danger in
such virtual organization of human work. Following Heidegger, Faÿ has shown (1999) that
purposeful information processing could be a serious obstacle to the very power of what
Heidegger calls ‘Difference’: the move that puts in a novel and intimate way, the being, a
world and an object. Basden (2003) argued that if we follow Habermas I.T. should be
developed and used only on a small-scale basis, in and for the lifeworld. But he suggests a
novel approach following the philosopher Dooyeweerd. According to this perspective, IT
development and use should be treated as lifeworld, and norms should be grounded on a
broader concept than lifeworld, modal aspect which is the very possibility of being, becoming,
acting, ruling. Mutch (2002) advocates through critical realism the necessity to reintroduce
the body, its affects and beyond those, the ontological emergent properties which arise.
The aim of this paper is to introduce the subjective experience of life as described in Henry’s
phenomenology of life as a foundational standpoint for a critical theory. Similar to Basden
and Mutch’s attempts, the question we wish to deal with in this paper is: how can Henry’s
phenomenology, based on a totally renewed way of understanding human being, a Self
finding its dynamic in the immanence of its affective life, help us introduce a novel critical
approach toward modern ‘e-conomy’ and the virtual organizations of human labour it
structures? The difficulties will in fact not only appear as lived difficulties to enact a world, to
interpret, to socialize, to exercise power, to face abstraction, but they will appear as the
hindrance of one’s real subjective life, its energy, dynamic and praxis . Our argument will
begin by pointing out the key advantages of virtual organizations according to mainstream
management theories. We shall then show how those modern theories of organization are
the legacy of European science as analysed by Husserl in The Crisis of European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936). We will then illustrate the difficulties created by
virtual organisation through a reflexive narrative written by one of the authors being a
participant observer during six months in a MNC. In the second part, we shall then attempt to
show, with Cartesian Meditations (1931) how such a form of organization that combines a copresence in real time, via the Internet, the telephone, and remote or electronic encounters
paradoxically only serves to reinforce an experience of absence. We will then ask the
following questions: what is the scope of this “just like” world, from a Husserlian point of
view? To what extent is the life of consciousness jeopardized? We shall then explore this
7
idea further by referring to the works of Michel Henry, and in particular, his discovery of
pathic phenomenality. To do so we shall be studying those of Henry’s works which will
enable us to ground our critical analysis of virtual organisations and in particular his Marx. A
Philosophy of Human Being (1983), the original title of which, in French - Marx I. Une
philosophie de la réalité (1976), illustrates an essential question: to what extent is virtuality
the opposite of reality? How does it obstruct subjective life? By drawing upon Henry’s La
Barbarie (1987) we will show how the virtual organisation hinders the essential subjective
energy and dynamic of living and living together. To conclude, we shall explain the
pathogenic nature of this type of organization by situating it in the broader context of
globalization and then advocate for a political theory of potentialisation and capacitation of
subjective life close to Hilary Putnam’s intuitions and similar to some Marcusian views.
I Fist approach of virtual organization, genealogy and phenomenological
perspective
Virtual organisation: a genealogical critique
From a managerial perspective, the concept of the virtual company enables companies to be
present across the globe and reduce costs by replacing physical premises with virtual offices.
Communication networks and control technologies increase both the interdependence and
the independence of the various far-flung companies. The company thereby becomes – if the
advocates of such a system are to be believed – more flexible, more agile, and able to keep
up with changing technologies and markets (Nagel, Preiss, Goldman, 1995). This in turn
results in a change in capitalism whereby income is optimised through information
technology, by creating a more disparate structure, increasing the flows of information, and
by moving from a pyramid-type organisation to a network organisation. The unity of time and
place is replaced by synchronous or asynchronous work carried out at disparate locations.
Members of virtual teams communicate via electronic networks and often never meet face-toface.
Moreover, according to the advocates of virtual work, real value-added is not only a result of
production within the company, but of the deployment of the resources outside the company
and co-ordinated via an electronic network. They claim that what we are witnessing is a
transition from an organisational form of capitalism based on the accumulation of capital to a
network capitalism based on the control of information flows (Lash and Urry, 1987). Such a
8
form of organisation is designed to give the disparate teams and individual workers greater
autonomy: this transition, we are told, brings with it another change, that of “freeing” the
worker from the constraints of traditional subordinate-superior hierarchy and affording instead
an autonomous, entrepreneurial status, consisting merely of a contractual relationship with
the company. In many ways, this seems to fulfil the aspirations of today’s professional
(Sennett, 1998). However, the worker has to contend with the pressure of deadlines, and
monitoring processes made all the more rigorous by technology. He spends most of his time
either behind a computer screen dealing with imitations of reality or on the telephone. In the
paradigm of virtual organisation, face-to-face contact is reduced to a bare minimum.
Yet this development is not merely the result of technological and economic logic; we suggest
that it is considered acceptable and desirable because it is the height of Western rationality
as analysed and criticised by Husserl in 1936 in The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology. Husserl traces, back to Galileo, the emergence of a
“theoretical logical praxis” disconnected from the feeling body, disconnected from “our bodily
(leiblich - literally living body: leib is related to leben, life) way of living” (1936: 59, parenthesis
added). Let us clarify these terms and their implications. According to Husserl, “Immediately
with Galileo, then, begins the surreptitious substitution of idealized nature for pre-scientifically
intuited nature.” (1936: 58). Knowledge is no longer bound to the uniqueness of situations,
but sees the world through a prism of idealised forms and geometric models. The real world,
the everyday life-world which we perceive subjectively through the senses is substituted by a
geometric and mathematical world which is perceived as the life-world. Now, the world of real
life is ‘dressed up’ in a “garb of symbols of the symbolic mathematical theories” (1936: 60).
Consequently, the act of knowledge is no longer aimed at the world of real life but at the
pursuit of geometric shapes and mathematical formulae; thus the development of knowledge
is effectively the pursuit of perfection embodied in pure geometric shapes (or Limit-shapes).
This theory of knowledge consequently gives rise to a theory of action. Instead of the real
praxis – one concerned with empirical reality, we are now faced with an ideal praxis, “of ‘pure
thinking’ which remains exclusively within the realm of pure Limit-shapes” (1936: 30-31).
Knowing the mathematical equation of these limit-shapes and models allows us to calculate,
and thus to predict: “if one has the formulae, one already possesses, in advance, the
practically desired prediction” (1936: 50). Thanks to this anticipation, the action can be carried
into real life. Here, the perfection of the action is justified by the exactness of the calculation.
9
Thus, as Husserl points out, with this new praxis we attain “what is denied us in empirical
praxis: ‘exactness’” (1936: 31).
This idea in the Krisis illustrates very clearly the dynamic of the modern way of seeing,
thinking and acting that drove the minds behind the scientific organisation of work and of
virtual organisations. Their intentional consciousness is based on “pure Limit-shapes”,
through the reproduction and the exactness of their calculations they can prescribe the
“optimal” organisational forms. These types of organisation are accepted when they promise,
backed up by abstract economic models, the best economic and social performance.
A few of the characteristics of working in a virtual organisation
The concept of the virtual company is the product of the praxis of people who have organised
human labour according to an ideal pattern of disparate organisation, and is objectified in the
work of teams who experience a tension between an abstract idea of work and their actual
experience of he reality of their work. Valued for the contribution of his neurones, his grey
matter, real man at work is caught up in an idealist model of the organisation. To illustrate
this idea, we shall now describe a few characteristics of the virtual organisation as one of us
researched doing a six months participatory observation in a company with branches in
several different countries: the head office was in France, and sites in the USA and Canada.
Weekly conference calls were held to discuss the various difficulties that could arise in a
project for harmonising rules and procedures in relation with the implementation of an ERP.
Throughout the project managed by this “virtual” team, in order to keep down travel
expenses, most contact was made via email or over the telephone. The participant observer
was trained at Henry’s phenomenology and Lacanian anthropology when she wrote down.
“Most of the time, these telephone conferences were difficult, in a very insidious way,
both for the project leader and for the local teams. In the analysis of these difficulties,
I will take my own point of view, as a managed person in the team and observer of
the situation, and the point of view of the managed team members in the US and
Canada. I spent some time in Canada with the teams, which helped me understand
their “side” of the project.
It’s very difficult to express the reality of a situation or a relationship with tools. It was
as if we were working whilst wearing blinkers, without taking into account the context
10
of what was said or communicated. It was very, often impossible to understand
exactly what was happening: There was communication – in that information was
passed on– but no real speech. These difficulties were further compounded by the
language barrier, which was particularly evident in humour. I used to say to myself:
why are they laughing are they laughing at us? And they must have been wondering
why we weren’t laughing?
My manager and I found it difficult to listen to what others were feeling; we tended to
objectify the other team members who were ‘on the other end of the phone’. This
inevitably raised an insidious aggressiveness between the head office and the
subsidiaries. And yet, nothing was actually said, everything was felt and supposed
and the people concerned didn’t know how to talk about this situation. As a result, I
came to dread these weekly conference calls. I didn’t even dare ask any questions
when I didn’t understand for fear of looking stupid or incompetent. The frustration
grew. The “we” never emerged. No unity was found, but differences were opposed.
No link of confidence was formed, which made cooperation in the daily tasks of the
project very difficult, and costly emotionally speaking.
We got the impression the North American teams thought we didn’t listen to their
point of view. Yet when the project co-ordinator asked their opinion, they weren’t
forthcoming and said that she was the project manager, that it was her decision and
they’d go along with whatever she decided. Instead of setting deadlines, she asked
them what they could manage. It was a vicious circle. The Americans must have
thought that we were only pretending to be open-minded, and remained defensive
and then made out we didn’t listen to them. It was very difficult for everyone…
Throughout the project the team was “virtual” ”.
This narrative shows a possible way of thinking reflexively about virtual organization for
someone trained at Henry’s phenomenology and Lacanian anthropology. It also shows us
what an insidious ordeal working in a “virtual team” can be. In the “just like”, fake presence,
people are faced with incomprehension and a withdrawal of the other, almost to the point of
absence. Husserl and Michel Henry’s phenomenology will give us a better understanding of
11
the problems this absence of the other insidiously creates when technology creates a virtual
“just like” presence.
II Phenomenological analysis and critique
Transcendence and the virtual organisation
With the help of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations we will conduct an initial analysis of working
in such a virtual organisation. In the virtual organisation subjects talk to each other and
discuss objects or situations that they imagine in their world. But given the distance and the
fact that all communication takes place over the telephone or the Internet, it is not possible to
take into account the context or experience of the other teams. Thus, in the virtual
organisation, there can be no real sharing of experience, no opening of horizons. Because
distant situations are only perceived through figures or representations, because people
communicate with people who have no face and no history, intentionality cannot fulfil its
intuitions of the perception of the other and its situations. Despite the fact that a single
language – workplace English – is used, paradoxically, these people cannot see what these
representations represent. Consequently, what emerges from the virtual organisation is a
sense of inability to associate the representations and information exchanged with realities:
“It was very, often impossible to understand exactly what was happening.” And yet Husserl
says in Cartesian Meditations: « Only an uncovering of the horizon of experience ultimately
clarifies the « actuality » and the « transcendency” of the world” (1931: 62). The novelty of
the virtual organisation is the uncertainty about the horizon which makes intelligible the
representations exchanged and, consequently, the ‘intentional consciousness’ inability to be
freed from doubt. It is now the phenomenological representation of the reality of experience
that requires confirmation and verification that is lacking « But we do know also,…, that we
can be sure something is actual only by virtue of a synthesis of evident verification, which
presents rightful or true actuality itself” (1931: 59-60).
"With these tools it is very difficult to grasp the reality of a situation" reports the participant
observer. This reality, which comes from the synthesis of evident verifications achieved by
conscious perception, this reality is lacking in the virtual organisation. As Husserl writes « it is
evidence alone by virtue of which an « actually » existing, true, rightly object or whatever
form or kind has sense for us » (1931: 60). More because “it is the fact that it is conscious
12
life alone, wherein everything transcendent becomes constituted” (1931: 62), the Husserlian
épochè enables us to notice that the virtual organisation, by no longer allowing it to realise its
intuitions that lend meaning, attacks the life of consciousness. This is because the principle
of manifestation, the principle of appearing, is failing that reality is lacking. By attacking the
life of consciousness, the virtual organisation attacks the very essence of appearance that
we can call the real (by distinguishing the real from the realities of which it is made up). But
what is disturbing about the virtual organisation is that this undermining of the real, this
stifling of the life of consciousness occurs, paradoxically, in the “real time” of the presence
published by communication networks. The virtual organisation stops realities from being
created, and creates an absence whilst the “just like” of presence is organised. Encounter is
thus derisory (Faÿ, 2009). But why is it that this is perceived as such an ordeal? There must
be, inside the phenomenality we have just seen fail another phenomenality that allows
people to experience it as an ordeal. So what is this phenomenality?
Grounding the critical approach in the immanence of life
In order to answer this question, we must extend our phenomenological thinking where
virtuality and reality are concerned. We will therefore look to Michel Henry’s Marx. A
Philosophy of Human Being (1963, tr. 1973) which centres on the theme of reality. With the
help of Michel Henry we will show that the virtual organisation undermines more than the
objective substance of reality and the life of consciousness. Indeed, Michel Henry reverses
the very notion of transcendence into one of immanence. In Marx, A Philosophy of Human
Being, Henry displays this reversal through a rather original interpretation of Marx based in
particular on the German Ideology, a posthumously published work of Marx ignored by the
Marxist tradition. In the German Ideology Marx defines the real as the real, living individual:
“The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises
from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals,
their activity and the material conditions under which they live”. This idea is, for Marx, not
arbitrary or incidental but central and fundamental. Henry stresses that Marx tried incessantly
to define reality by revealing its essence: “Defining reality is central to Marx’ thinking: it is his
one only preoccupation, in other words, his great obsession.” (1976: 280).
Henry thus shows rather shrewdly that Marx’s notion of reality evolves from the idea of an
ideal genre or universality (in line with Hegel) to a sensitive object (according to Feuerbach),
to action (in his theory on Feuerbarch). Marx then divides the concept of action as on the one
13
hand, the production of an objectivity, the intuition of real action, and actual real action “which
acts not as a seeing but a doing and the immanent, radically subjective experience of this
doing.” (1976: 369). This radical change from the transcendence of the genre or sensitive
object to the immanence of acting subjectivity, occurred when Marx, in his quest for reality,
refuted Hegel’s position regarding action. With Hegel, the essence of action is producing the
object that objectifies subjectivity and, by objectifying it, manifests it (1976: 335). Marx
maintains that there is another way in which subjectivity can manifest itself to itself by pointing
that the praxis “is subjective, and wears itself out in its inner experience of itself, in the
radically immanent feeling of effort with which it confuses itself.” (1976: 347-348). This
means, contrary to what Hegel believed, that subjectivity does not need to be perceived by
consciousness, through the process of objectification, to be so; that, on the contrary, it lies in
the immanent experience of its own effort. This experience of subjectivity precedes activity of
representing itself: “Posing does not make the subject, but the subjectivity of objective
essential forces.” (1976: 350).
The essence of reality lies not in the intuition of consciousness, in objectivity - as an obvious
composition of the objects of the world – but in the ordeal of subjectivity acting by itself,
without any discrepancy between doing and subjectivity “Action is real insofar as it is
subjective,” (1976: 370). What is deemed real is that which has this capacity to feel its praxis
in the immediateness of a presence of oneself to oneself. This reversal of the notion of reality
leads to an identical reversal to the notion of material and substantial that is quite distinct from
materialistic and idealistic philosophies: “material is linked to the praxis, that is to say the
actual life of individuals, their activity and needs, the originary subjectivity which makes up
their substantial existence.”(1976: 408). It is therefore in this other phenomenality, in the
appearance of a real, immanent, material, living and acting Self that is grounded the critical
standpoint, and that the difficulty of not understanding others in a virtual working organisation
manifests itself. And therefore that appears, through the experience of hindered living Self,
the metaphor of “wearing blinkers” the feeling described as not grasping reality, not
understanding.
Phenomenality of subjectivity and intersubjectivity
Henry therefore concurred with and rediscovered Marx who thus defined reality after
establishing a phenomenality that was different from that in which subjects perceive objects
remotely from themselves. This other phenomenality is that which comes from experience: in
14
this phenomenality there is no distance between the subject and the object, the subject
experiences its praxis in the immediateness of a presence of oneself to oneself. It cannot
escape from what it experiences and what is the very object of its perception. In 1963 Henry,
in The Essence of Manifestation, exposed the duplicity of appearance. One dimension of
appearance, in relation to distant objects – the visible – comes through intentionality, as
Husserl says, or through a difference from a horizon, as described by Heidegger. Yet Henry,
by highlighting the duplicity of appearance, showed that based on affectivity, (which becomes
a transcendental Affectivity), there is another type of phenomenality that precedes the
phenomenality of the world and makes it possible: self-affection, the experience of the self by
the self. “I” is thus the permanence of the affection of subjectivity itself. This self-affection,
which is subjective life, owes nothing to society or the world: it is life or, more precisely, the
experience of a singular life by itself. This very self-affection, in which the subject experiences
itself, experiences its “ipseity”, is what enables it to say “I experience myself, I live, I am, I
can.” Here, stresses Henry, the pathos is substantial, material “Pathos […] refers to the
phenomenological matter […] in which experiencing everything oneself finds its concrete,
phenomenological realisation (2004).”In Incarnation, une philosophie de la chair Embodiment, a philosophy of the flesh- (2000), Henry further explored the material dimension
of this pathos by calling it “flesh,” and by drawing a clear distinction between it and the
organic body. Our flesh is affective, pathic. Henry later precised the link between life,
affectivity and Self:
In the immanence of its own pathos, this reality of life is then not any life whatsoever. It is
everything except what contemporary thought will turn it into, that is, some impersonal,
anonymous, blind, mute essence. In itself, the reality of life bears necessarily this Self
generated in its pathetic self-generation, this Self which reveals itself only in Life as the
proper self-revelation of this Life – that is, as its Logos (1999: 353)
It is thus possible, by turning transcendence into immanence, to highlight another version of
the violence inherent in the virtual organisation. When the “just like” presence is organised, at
the key moment of the joint organisation of action, due to the distance, the technologicalassisted nature of the communication, and the language barrier, the worker can not only no
longer understand what is happening, but, more importantly, can no longer be affected, in his
flesh, by the Other who is affected being on the receiving end of his action. Is the lack of faceto-face contact the reason for this loss? According to Lévinas, seeing the other’s face calls for
15
responsibility towards the other, who is perceived as vulnerable : On the contrary in this type
of organisation, where there is no face-to-face encounter, there is no means to avoid
treating others like objects, human relations are in danger to be destroyed. Yet this
interpretation does not emphasise strongly enough the basis of a human organisation which
is lost in the virtual organisation.
The face-to-face contact so desperately missing is indeed a fundamental aspect of any
encounter. It is not merely a case of seeing the other person’s face: it is not just about having
an objectivising image, in the light of day: beautiful ugly, etc of the other’s organic body. It’s
about – as the popular saying goes – “putting a face to a name”, literally. For the name is the
image of nothing in the world, it indicates the singularity of an acting subjectivity. Without a
name, the other can be reduced to merely a representative of a category: man, woman or
child, an unknown being. But the other’s face, not in its mere form but through the affectivity
of flesh that brings it to life, its expressions allow one to experience, through the
manifestations of the affective life of the person encountered (joy, sadness, anger, etc), the
manifestation of life itself. It is therefore not seeing that gives access to intersubjectivity, but
the ability to experience, based on the self-affection of life as a transcendental affectivity: “It is
not a type of noematic presentation, nor a noetic that is the basic foundation for access to the
other; it’s a donation consisting in transcendental affectivity” writes Michel Henry (1990 a:
155).
This is why, as far as Henry is concerned, an intersubjectivity that is not born of a sharing of
the same world is part of a sharing by acting subjectivities. By sharing, with effort (this sharing
is a co-pathos, or suffering with), the affects of acting subjectivity, we share our common
condition of living: “The Being –with is a “doing together” and relies on it. Just like the
intersubjective being finds its essence in the praxis” (1976, II: 119). Here we experience the
originary community of living beings. It is for this reason that, by obstructing encounters, the
virtual organisation of human labour not only prevents one from grasping the objective reality
of situations in the life of an intentional consciousness, as we saw with Husserl, but also
prevents the affective life and cuts off the affective, pathic link with other living and acting
subjectivities; in other words, it cuts one off from the ties of affective life, which are the ties
where the originary community of livings is manifested. Thus isolated, the acting subjectivities
close in on their selfishness, as Marx and later Henry have shown us. The subject is not
16
aware of this loss yet it feels it in the suffering of difficult relationships. No longer able to
experience the ties of intersubjectivity, he withdraws into himself and treats other people like
objects. Thus, on the one hand, the participant observer and her manager found it difficult to
sympathise with the problems experienced by others, whilst on the other hand, they: tended
to “objectify the other team members who were ‘on the other end of the phone”’.
Paradoxically, the “virtual organisation” obstructs even the essence of any organisation, that
is to say, the emergence of an order based on the unity of differences. It is necessary to point
out here that all this occurs in the “just like” of a presence, which lends such encounters an
element of violence which, paradoxically, attacks subjective and affective life and its
dynamism: the manifestation of the originary community of livings and consequently the
development of intersubjectivity.
Transitions of acting subjectivity and virtual organisation
We saw with Husserl that the virtual organisation hampered the life of consciousness. We
then explored this theme further with Henry and discovered that the virtual organisation
obstructed, in quite another way, the dynamism of acting, affective subjectivities. Indeed, for
Henry, there is an affective life that is totally separate from the life of consciousness. It was,
after all, Henry who, in The Essence of Manifestation established that living means
experiencing oneself, and, going against the majority of Western philosophy, focused on the
central presence of the theme of subjective immanent life in Marx: “Marx called the radical
immanence of this subjectivity which now represents reality for him, life.” (1976: 370). This
subjective life has a particular power of phenomenalisation that is quite different from
consciousness but is the basis of it, argues Henry, stressing, like Marx, that representation,
seeing are based on the praxis “It is not consciousness that determines life but life that
determines consciousness.” (1976: 401). Should the discontents of forms of civilisation then
be interpreted in the light of life: “There is a discontent in a civilisation whenever the energy
of life is wasted,” (1987: 181). It is therefore in the dynamism of one’s actual life, perceived as
a subjective, affective, acting life, that, primarily, the experienced, and rather trying
pathogenic aspect of the virtual organisation is manifested. Let us now explore certain
inherent aspects of this energy of subjective life so that we may then explain exactly how it is
hindered by the virtual organisation. The synthesis of evident verifications in Husserl’s
intentional phenomenology, eliminate once and for all any traces of doubt about the object.
But what, in Henry’s phenomenology, are the transitions undergone by and in the living,
subjective life?
17
These transitions are linked to the ties between the living and the praxis, between knowledge
and life that is “its very subjectivity, its anxiety, its suffering … which precedes and is the
basis of all ‘knowledge’, all ‘consciousness’ and all ‘thought’" (1976: 413). Having established
the importance of these ties, Marx and later Henry were able to point out the perversion that
arises when “men substitute for real practice effective determinants – in other words, the life
that is within him and his needs, his own consciousness – the ideal relationship they have
with ideal representations.” (1976: 394). Desensitised to the prescriptions of life in their
affective flesh, men withdraw into a transcendental ego enslaved, in the phenomenality of the
visible, by its representations (and images). This leads to barbarity, as the dynamism of living
subjectivity is unused, or becomes lead astray from its own prescriptions. We should
emphasise here that the consequence of the perversion of a living and acting subjectivity
does not lie in the perversion of work but fundamentally affects the ties between the living and
itself. What the Self feels in this malaise is, essentially, a loss of confidence in life and in itself.
For the immanent knowledge of what occurs outside representations is precisely confidence,
assured belief. On the contrary this transition will be the changing from loss of confidence to
confidence regained.
Let us illustrate the extent of such a regenerating act with an example. In order to escape
from the uneasiness created by the virtual organisation, workers find salvation in humour. Yet
this only increases the feeling of uneasiness. How can we show this? Humour, in its wittiest
form, can be seen as the act of a living subjectivity who, when experiencing certain
difficulties, is revived by the energy of life and, moreover, utters a witticism in its
consciousness. Such a regenerating act is on no way an act of will: it simply “comes to him”, it
was beyond his control, all he did was consent to it; he sees it as a gift. At the end of Patrice
Leconte’s film Ridicule, two aristocrats – one French, one English, are walking along the cliffs
of Dover while the Revolution rages on in France. The French aristocrat’s hate is blown out to
sea by a gust of wind. The English aristocrat makes the following witty observation: “Better to
lose your hat than lose your head”. This humour is about the difficulty of the relationship with
objects, or with losing objects. There is nothing aggressive about this kind of humour; there is
none of the violence of derision which is an attack on the subject (Faÿ, 2008). Freud (1905)
notes that humour gives rise to a transformation from an unpleasant affect into a pleasant
affect and illustrates that this « arises » in us.
18
In our particular case, humour could be the gesture that saves the living from being
overwhelmed by the difficulties caused by the virtual organisation. But unfortunately, this
attempt failed, as we have seen: because of the various obstacles mentioned earlier,
compounded by the language barrier, it was impossible for the North American and French
teams to share a joke: “I used to say to myself: why are they laughing are they laughing at
us?” Consequently, these separate, distant living beings cannot share humour, one of the
regenerating act of life that could bring then together; thus it is difficult to regain their
confidence in life in such trying working conditions. If anything, the opposite happens: humour
is seen as potential mockery and only aggravates the atmosphere of mistrust between the
teams. Thus the individual is caught up in the system of visible and unreal representations.
As Henry points out, the regenerating act of life is seen as “a division of the concept of
subjectivity” (1976: 409), a division between the subject and the imaginary representations
that invade one’s consciousness and the opening to the praxis of subjective life, to the
“original subjectivity that means the radical immanence of life” (1976: 409). This opening will
enable one to feel differently, see differently, and produce other ideas. We could describe this
as de-centring (of the ego focused on these representations) and re-centring on the living,
acting subjectivity. To illustrate this regenerative dynamic of de-centring-re-centring, let us
examine the example a foreigner’s joy in meeting someone despite the limited exchange of
words. What does this tell us? In such a face-to-face encounter, affective subjectvities are
aware of the difficulties of language and culture barriers, and yet, amid these limited
exchanges of their representations of the world, the people feel, in their flesh, the strength of
this mutual desire to connect, demonstrated by the often considerable effort made by one
party to communicate with the other. Of course, hypocrisy can be used to hide a desire to
deceive, and discernment is required with respect to the desire for a connection. One way of
discerning is by paying attention to de-centring.
De-centring occurs in the encounter with the foreigner when the initial intentions – controlling
the situation, imaginary projects – prove impossible. In a situation where the imaginary
landmarks of consciousness are lost, when words fail one, people still manage somehow to
experience the emergence of an immanent link that transcends all the differences, all the and
barriers of language and culture. Thus two people, who just a moment ago were perfect
19
strangers, come together. In the sense of plenitude of this unity, joy reflects the
accomplishment, in this encounter, of the renewed presence of each person in their own
singular life, and in the other’s. This oneness and the joy it brings are not contrived (unless
they are feigned): people do not create it themselves: unity comes and joy springs forth in a
surge of self-affection of each life. Thus, as with humour, which reflects a regenerated
confidence in their life, people experience in this encounter with “strangers” a gesture within
their life that restores their living beings’ confidence in one another. They feel this connection
that brings together their different lives like a present, a gift. Being welcomed by the other is
conducive to the welcoming of this gift. Thus, for example, in the humour or joy of an
encounter, the living being, experiencing himself, also experiences the very real change that
regenerates him/her and restores his faith in life, as the trusting unity in others shows.
The lost Energy, self-centred ego and violence
The living being thus experiences the surge of an acting, intimate force (which, although it did
not bring about itself, willingly accepts it), a force which Michel Henry, in The Barbarism called
the “Energy of life”: “We call Energy that which occurs in the pathetic relationship to the being
as its phenomenological effectuation, as the irrepressible test of what grows from one and
takes one over to excess”(1987: 174). Rolf Kühn refers to as the silent “life Force”: “The only
true generation lies in this silent, invisible life which grabs us and bowls us over with its Force”
(2003:253). He stresses that “the desire-to-live, … is always a self-desire to live life,” (2006),
and which their precursor Marx had called the “active life-process”:
This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and
does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation
and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite
conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection
of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of
imagined subjects, as with the idealists. Where speculation ends – in real life – there real,
positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of
development of men. (Marx, German Ideology)
The Energy of life in, for example, humour or in the joy of an encounter, regenerates one’s
trust in life and in the other. This Energy with a capital ‘E’ means the regenerating force that is
at work within affective life and which subjectivity cannot produce. In humour, Energy affects
a transition from subjectivity that relies on the complacency of pleasant feelings (positive
20
hetero-affection) or its distress when these feelings are unpleasant (negative hetero-affection)
to the pure self-feeling (auto-affection), to confidence in oneself. The Energy of life brings
about another transition, that of the isolation, the antagonism experienced by the subject
towards the other, into the sense of unity, a unity which does not erase the differences
between them (Gely, 2007). Manifested by the joy of an encounter, the Energy of life opens
itself up to the subjective movement of life, and to faith in the other.
And yet, as we have seen, the virtual organisation creates, via emails, images of things,
abstract, numbered representations of situations, in an opaque light. If the light of the world is
opaque, what transformations could the Energy of life bring about? In the absence of face-toface encounters, or failing to make the parameter of pathic flesh, a structuring element of
means of exchange, in the absence of any means of sharing that which occurs in the light of
the experience of life, the subjective, acting praxis, it is, in the virtual organisation, a stumbling
block (Greek: skandalon), an obstacle that is out in the way of the Energy of life. The living
therefore have immense difficulty in making the transition from doubt to confidence in oneself
and in life, from mistrust to trust, in experiencing the surge of immanent unity (in the
phenomenality of life). In such a situation, the various differences between people soon
produce antagonism, unless careful monitoring and controlling systems are put in place in the
objective light of the world in order to neutralise this antagonism, however fallible such
systems inevitably are.
Forcing people to work under conditions in which, as Philippe Breton says, physical
encounters are taboo and people “meet little and communicate much” (192: 116) means
depriving them of access to the Energy of life, of the essential, inner dynamic of their life at
work (or at least, making this access extremely difficult). This is ignorance, a wilful desire to
shut out this inner dynamic to and force the ego into a situation in which it is difficult to escape
from the bubble of its own representations, and leads to what Michel Henry calls “the
transcendental illusion of the ego, the illusion that allows the ego to think of itself as the
foundation of its being” (1996: 177). Consequently, as the ego can no longer be replenished
by the Energy of life, it needs motivational stimuli from the pulsations of the world; the ego
prey to the transcendental illusion is: “an ego that is only open to the world and given in it and
is thus forgetful of its own essence.” (1996: 320). In this illusion, the subject who forgets that
he does not give life to himself is self-absorbed and completely loses the notion of the alter
21
ego “putting himself at the centre of this system; each person only worries about the other
inasmuch as it concerns him.” (1996: 320).
In a working situation in which it is particularly difficult to deploy a perception in the light of life,
of the Energy of life, and which is thus not conducive to uniting people in spite of their
differences, doubt, loss of self-confidence and mistrust take root. This lack of speech driven
by confidence both on oneself and on the other creates a tacit, repressed, insidious conflict.
“This situation was really hard because nothing was said, everything was sensed and
assumed. We sensed a tacit aggressiveness, resistance.” In this vicious circle, insecurity
reigns and any attempt to ask for clarity or explanations, any suggestions, are stifled,
repressed: “In this atmosphere of insecurity, I didn’t even dare ask any questions when I
didn’t understand for fear of looking stupid or incompetent.” These disparate teams cannot
become a real team: “it was a ‘virtual’ team”.
Truth, sense of plenitude and giveness
The phenomenology of life leads us to take a different view of action and work. Living
subjectivity is not impassive and motionless: it is open to the Energy of life that regenerates
the confident link of the Self with itself, life and others. And that is not all: all work is the effort
of subjectivity to provide for its needs (those of the biological body) and those of its loved
ones: food, clothing, a roof over ones head, medical treatment. The physical or intellectual
effort that goes into work is also felt in self-affection, in feeling this need, making the effort,
taking pleasure in accomplishment. Work is experienced in the light of life; this work, which is
above all part of objectifying economic representations, must be perceived within its context:
that of living subjectivity.
This is why in work, via effort, there is a transition from need to satisfaction. But the
motivation behind human labour cannot be reduced to the need to satisfy these basic needs
alone. Neither can it be limited to the quest for an image of oneself in the light of the world, or
for what gives an image in all circumstances: money. For work to be lively, another transition
takes place in the self-affection open to the Energy of life. The subject that accepts this
Energy when it is dispersed in images, amid its various worries finds the strength to re-centre
and be at one with the inner dynamic of its life. Thus, any truly subjective work is that of a
person who finds, after a number of errors and distractions, in the invisible dynamic of its life
a tie, that living “I” of an “I can” which can set its physical and intellectual abilities in motion
22
and expose it to higher forces to which it can aspire: an accomplishment of the desire of life
when it is combined with the satisfaction of biological needs. Michel Henry calls this meeting
of the need and desire for life a “culture of life”, a culture which is also that of Desire- a Desire
that has nothing on which to model itself in things because it is the “Desire for Life and thus
the Desire for oneself” (1987: 42). It is for this reason that the subjective effort can only be
understood in relation to what creates and increases it:
The movement by which life tirelessly comes to one in the conservation and growth of
oneself– this movement is not an act of own-will, it is not the result of any effort but comes
long before it and makes it possible; it is the totally, radically passive being with oneself in
which the being is given to itself… Thus the movement of life is the effortless effort, in which
all effort and all abandon is given to oneself at the heart of the being given to itself in the
absolute passivity of the radical immanence of life. (1987: 170-171).
Understanding that effort could cohere or not with its subjective foundation, Marx, points out
Henry, changes not only the role of truth but also its nature. And yet since Galileo, the
decisive operation is “mathematising, with the formulae it wishes to develop” (1936: 50-51).
The notion of truth is therefore reduced to the exactness of calculations. By questioning the
“absolute truth” of ideas based on such representations, Marx places truth in life: “The
absolute truth is that which lies in the reality of life, in the praxis” (1976: 470); on other words:
“it is no longer the representation of consciousness but the immanence of life that constitute
the essence of truth” (1976: 478). It is for this reason that, in the light of life, the notion of truth
must be radically revised, and this, against the grain of the majority of Western tradition which
sees truth as the correspondence between representations and the reality, in the light of the
world (notion of exactness).
It is precisely because truth was defined by the philosophical tradition based on ideal
structures and their most obvious characteristics … that the most original truth is in life has
ended up absurdly devalued and discredited compared with this rational truth which never
was and which could only ever be the representation – a simple representation. (1976: 470)
True action, the act of “I can”, is that which is consistent with the Energy of life that moves it
and gives itself to it in its own flesh: “true” is… what we need to assist, to which we need to
donate our own flesh” (1987: 124). The same applies to the act of speech, the “true speech”
is that which originates from the dynamic of a subjective life and is thus the living “I” that
articulates it. When the participant observer wrote “There was communication – in that
23
information was passed on– but no real speech,” she meant that, in the virtual organisation,
the action of speaking occurred, or at least attempted to occur in the light of the world, but this
action was disconnected, separate (Greek: diabolon) from the dynamic of life of the
interlocutors; such an effort, disconnected from its source, is “exhausting.”
And yet there is a possible truth in living work in which life “cultivates” the effort that aims to
satisfy a biological need. This effort is “cultivated”, civilised and civilising because in its
subjective essence, it refers to the prescriptions of ones life, its dynamism of development,
the Energy of life. It is this that, moved by the desire for life, human, living labour leads to the
increase of singular subjective abilities. Effort, thus liberated, contrary to thermodynamic laws,
is not exhausted: on the contrary, it is like a growth, a reinforcing of the living, acting
subjectivity: “freeing energy doesn’t mean being rid of it… The law of life and of
phenomenology is not entropy… Freeing energy means on the contrary, giving it free rein,
deploying its being, allowing it to grow.” (1987: 174-175).
But, in doing this, we are not yet fully aware of the plenitude of this praxis. Because the living
being experience the Energy of life in different forms, and receives it without giving it to
himself, experiences his life and the plenitude of its praxis like a gift (assuming he does not
fall into the transcendental illusion of the ego which consists in thinking, outside of life, of the
source of all ones powers and projects). Thus all living work carries within it the dimension of
a gift. The offerings of the first harvest made by traditional societies are an extremely
revealing example of this. And there are a number of interesting examples of this concept in
everyday language: to give advice, a lesson, a lecture, a concert, etc. A gift, for the living
being, means being at one with the Energy of life, the dynamic of ones own life. And thus, in
its own context, the self-affection of affective flesh, in the light of experienced life, and
nowhere else, that work, the living praxis, recognises itself as ethical or unethical, beneficial
or harmful for life.
III The pathogenic organization and of the sickness of working life
A catastrophic reduction
When the organisation of work no longer treats the parameter of flesh as a structural element
of encounter, the employees within an organisation feel cut off from reality, life and its Energy:
there is no self-confidence or faith in others and the work is exhausting. In the light of what we
24
have discussed thus far, it is reasonable to suggest that the feeling of loss of meaning so
frequently mentioned indicates that work and effort are not in tune with the Energy of life and
its recommendations. In such a context, the subject is tempted, in order to save its strength,
to withdraw, to cancel the movement of affective life, and adopts an attitude of indifference.
But in withdrawing thus and shutting oneself out from the inner dynamic of life, there is no
longer the living unity of differences. So there is no longer any basis for organisation, and the
ego, ill-assured, identifies itself as being “against”. In negating his feelings in indifference, the
subject becomes resentful and takes his frustration and resentment out on the other (this
theme is explored in Vasse (1999) and Faÿ (2008). Instead of saving his strength, he ends up
being forced to wasting considerable energy and effort on objecting.
We got the impression the North American teams thought we didn’t listen to their point of
view. Yet when the project co-ordinator asked their opinion, they weren’t forthcoming and
said that she was the project manager that it was her decision and they’d go along with
whatever she decided. Instead of setting deadlines, she asked them what they could
manage. It was a vicious circle. The Americans must have thought that we were only
pretending to be open-minded, and remained defensive and then made out we didn’t listen to
them. It was very difficult for everyone.
Thus, in our case, the virtual organisation leads to a dead end: the teams make efforts and
achieve nothing satisfactory, neither in the light of the world nor in that of life. Here in such a
virtual organisation, the world eludes the grasp of the living, embodied subject, and gives rise
to a feeling of apprehension describe by the participant observer and her manager: “we came
to dread these weekly conference call”. Nor was there any understanding, no way of grasping
the situation, of having control over the reality, it is “out of one’s hands”. Let’s notice that the
idea of control, of having a situation literally “in one’s hands,” is at the root of the word
“management”: it comes from the Italian “managgiare”, which in turn comes from the Latin
“manus”.
Because where there is no shared life, there is no world in common, the worlds of work
remains separated, in our situation the three units fail to find ‘unity’. Such a virtual
organisation is disorganised, which not only casts doubt on reality and creates confusion and
makes it difficult – if not impossible – to work together but, by obstructing the Energy of life,
also leads to loss of confidence in oneself, others, and life, and exhausting, fruitless efforts.
This “barbarian” solution causes genuine suffering: the confusion of the builders of the tower
25
of Babel takes root. Here, the virtual organisation makes the light of the world and of life
opaque. This type of organisation forces one to undertake actions which, deprived of the
dynamic of life, are “without reason or light, faceless and blind.” (1987: 99).
We saw with Husserl how, by using the paradigm of science pioneered by Galileo, abstraction
allows a “theoretical-logical praxis” develop. Michel Henry points out that the catastrophic
consequences of such reduction are not just the overlooking of the “world of life”, but that, by
eliminating the sensitive aspects of the realities observed – “Red or yellow, rough or smooth,
hot or cold, fragrant or malodorous,” (2000: 142) Galilean science rules out the possibility of
the pathetic self-giving of life in which the senses are felt and experienced, and thereby
eliminates our phenomenological life (2000: 146). Thus, in the scientific organisation as is
used in the Western world – a direct legacy of Galileo’s paradigm – subjective, active life, its
dynamism and Energy, are ignored and kept at a distance. People in such organisations rely
on sophisticated systems for making objective, abstract calculations to structure and regulate
human organisations (controlling and monitoring systems, IT applications). As such, the
virtual organisation is one of the last bastions of this scientific organisation, whose limitations
are all too apparent – as the following story shows.
First notes about emancipation paths
When taken to its logical conclusion, this type of organisation inflicts immeasurable suffering
upon the subjects by forcing them to work chained to a computer screen, constantly setting
deadlines, (which prevents them from being able to draw from the Energy of life and the
possibilities this offers), by spreading their efforts over various projects which go against the
dynamic of a living praxis, by subjecting them to assessment processes based purely on
objective criteria. Plunged into the depths of the suffering by having their actions and life
subjected to “hyper-technologisation,” employees’ desire to live risks turning it against itself.
(note the recent spate of suicides in the workplace in highly technological environments).
Others manage to be pulled back from the edge by the Energy of life, and, along with others,
try to hang on and develop emancipator moves by striving for a better organisation which will
be less depriving of subjective and intersubjective life dynamism. After several very difficult
months, the participant observer went to Canada and was pleasantly surprised to receive a
warm welcome and see some of the difficulties ironed out.
26
This experience suggests that there is an urgent need to review the organisation of work
based on what we have learned about the living subject. In order to do this Western
organisers should rethink the Galilean principles that form the basis of their scientific model.
This idea, supported by the phenomenology of Husserl and Michel Henry, concurs with the
following observation by Edgar Morin: “I think that the West in general and Europe in
particular have focused on the materialistic, technical aspects of civilisation, and by doing so
have neglected everything to do with the soul, the spirit, the relationship with oneself and with
others.” (Interview in Le Monde, 2 January 2008). It is therefore necessary to bear in mind
that “Life is the most immediate, most substantial form, which makes up the principle of any
cognitive appropriation of the world,” (1976: 468) and, consequently, when organizing, to
think about types of organisation in which the pathetic self-giving of life can manifest itself. In
other words, to make the parameter of flesh a fundamental element of work organisations so
that the affective life can manifest itself.
By examining this from this angle, we therefore raise the question of a humanly sustainable
development of productive activity based on another reason than argumentative reasons
(although this too is necessary). Such a development would be rooted in: “the reason of all
reasons [that] is the reason hidden in the depths of life” (1976: 418). This is why, by
questioning the abstract rationalism of the scientific organisation of work in general, and the
virtual organisation in particular, we suggest the possibility of organizing a sustainable
organisation: one that is favourable, in its form and its mechanisms, to life and living together.
There are simple, solutions to make life easier for remote workers. These mainly involve
visits, setting up “welcoming committees,” go-between roles, and holding regular face-to-face
meetings, including open spaces for lively speech on the basis of lived experience (Faÿ,
2005). Implementing such solutions imply “simply” ceasing to hold up as an ideal utopian
organisations based on the paradigm of the representation and phenomenality of the light of
the world. Makeshift solutions such as are currently implemented (coaching, peer
committees, etc) are half-baked: their short-term benefits are undoubted, but there are no
long-term advantages whilst such types of organisation are held up as an ideal. Another way
of bringing about this “un-idealising” process and challenging the idealist ‘virtualist’ managers
might be to think back to the notions of ‘profession’ and ‘role’ did and to link those notions to
the here developed understanding of immanent and shared living praxis (see Gély, 2007).
27
Finally, it could be argued seriously about the risk of destroying value posed by the
technology of virtual work organisations. In 1990, Michel Henry brilliantly illustrated and
anticipated the domination of technological thinking and its undermining of action and value
creation in From Communism to Capitalism: a Theory of Catastrophe:
Let us now project this radical change in technique onto what we have called from the
beginning of our analyses the real process of production […] subjectivity –living work –
becomes progressively removed from the real process of production […] (1990: 160-161).
This progressive elimination of living work from the real process of production means it is
increasingly unable to produce value (1990: 165). See also Mintzberg (2008).
Of course, this destruction of value can be masked by economic calculations which justify the
virtual organisation in a global economy. An idea that is often questioned by the people
directly involved as they have difficulty making themselves understood. This denial illustrates
the strength of the Galilean paradigm of abstraction and its contempt for reality, at the
expense of the economic setbacks that often occur. But, as Michel Henry points out, these
calculations are based on objective equivalents of real work and are the result of random
conventions: “The economic world is a series of objective, unreal, ideal versions of work
which have replaced living work in order to measured and counted, instead of this elusive
force”. (1990: 114).
In such calculations, money is no longer seen as a means for exchanging but as the end.
This reversal occurs when individuals or groups cut themselves off from reality, from acting
subjectivity, and replace it with a double unreality: the representation of any representation,
money. Through global exchanges, this random substitution comes into its own: what gives
the illusion of increasing value is the differential of the terms of exchange between the
different human communities, particularly in the way living work is considered and protected
by laws. This substitution consists of a reversal of the cycle of exchange: in the traditional
economy, this cycle used money as a means of exchange and could be summed up as
Merchandise-Money-Merchandise). But in a financial economy, the exchange is reversed:
money, the value of the exchange, is no longer a means to an end but the end itself. The
cycle is therefore one of Money-Merchandise-Money), money becoming the aim of production
(1990: 141-142). In this reversal, the “real element, living work, is subjected to a double
unreality, to the ideal entity whose sole mission is to allow it to be measured”. (1990: 143).
This is, says Henry, “a kind of madness. Madness is there when a reflection, an appearance,
28
becomes the only principle of an action” (1990: 143). P. Artus and M-P. Virard (2005) a few
years ago pointed out that, by dispersing “teams”, ceasing to invest and demanding big shortterm results, capitalism was destroying itself. Crisis is a good moment to question readymade thoughts and suggest novel understandings and perspectives.
In order to minimise the arbitrary nature of abstract calculation on the sole basis of economic
figures, that can be a source of violence, the living desire for sustainable development of
human life must examine the frameworks (legal, organisational, etc) which should regulate
exchanges and favour fair trade. However, the aim of this article is not to develop the
components of a political regulation of international exchanges based on a phenomenology of
life. We can find unexpected allies. Just one example, in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
argued the need for customs protection:
The second case, in which it will generally be advantageous to lay some burden upon foreign
for the encouragement of domestic industry is, when some tax is imposed at home upon the
produce of the latter. In this case, it seems reasonable that an equal tax should be imposed
upon the like produce of the former. (Book IV)
More recently, Putnam (1992) argued in favour of a democracy and democratic institutions
which, we notice, are based on life, its dynamic of growth and its energy. Thus he elaborates
a political theory of potentialisation and capacitation. Marcuse (1969), in his critical theory,
was close to this aim. Although relying on Freud’s life drive he let some ambiguities in the
conceptual approach of such drive (see Henry, ). With Henry, we have argued here that life,
which is each time a subjective and shared life, should be the foundation for a critical and
emancipating approach of organizations and institutions.
Conclusion
Our phenomenological examination of adoption of the concept of “virtual organisation” is
based on Husserl’s critique in Krisis of behaviour that follows pure Limit-shapes. The virtual
organisation is a working organisation which pushes Western metaphysics of representation
to its limit because such a type of organisation only allows for remote exchanges of
representations. One could of course cite a combination of economic, political, technological
and financial reasons to explain the increasing popularity of this type of working organisation.
But through Husserl, we can trace its origin in a way of appearing and identify this in the
idealistic habitus of an avant-garde modernist trying to implement it. By “idealistic”, we mean
29
the confusing of abstract representations with the reality of living affective life and its Energy.
By aligning with Henry, we could argue that modern organisers can no longer see “the
fundamental distinction […] between the relationship between consciousness and its
representations on the one hand, and, on the other hand, that between life and its immanent
determinations” (1976: 393), and have “substituted consciousness for life” (1976: 394).
Critical Studies of the science of organisations have clearly exposed the primacy of
abstraction and the importance of technology for the idealistic theorists of organisations and
those who relate and apply their thoughts (Alvesson and Willmott, Mintzberg (2004),
Bourguignon,(2005) to name but a few). Along with Michel Henry, we wish to stress that this
idealism is based on a refusal of life.
We have seen, with Husserl, that the virtual organisation of work hinders one’s perception of
the world of life and undermines the life of intentional consciousness. It forces its subjects to
inhabit separate worlds, linked only by technology. The subjects therefore have great difficulty
in creating a shared, common world because the means of exchange (i.e. distance, the
absence of face-to-face contact, the language barrier) prevent the worlds from being
phenomenalised. Moreover, by disregarding the living, acting subjectivities and their affective
flesh, one could say, as has Michel Henry – that this type of working organisation disregards
the reality of work: the living, subjective praxis, the effort invested by subjects. Thus the
concepts of truth and reason and their close ties with subjective life are destroyed. Worse still,
in hindering the phenomenalisation of pathic flesh, the virtual organisation hinders the Energy
of life that revives and refreshes one, and prevents the subject from being regenerated by the
silent speech of life, and therefore destroys its faith in life and others. The virtual organisation,
by preventing the Energy of life from manifesting itself, obstructs the transitions brought about
by the essential dynamic of life in work situations: the transition from anxiety to selfconfidence, faith in others and in life; the transition from passive (feeling helpless and
overwhelmed by a situation) to active. The transition from the “self-centred” ego to a
regenerated, generous, ethical ego that is open to truth, to inter-subjective, dynamism. In
doing this, the virtual organisation subjects the human body to the exhausting drive of a
technological life, to the fast-paced world of business. The aim of this article is to point out
how devious such an attack on the life of consciousness and subjective life is because is
occurs in the “just-like” of an encounter: in that very place where living subjects usually find
the path to regeneration.
30
Bibliography
Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H. (1992) ‘Critical Theory and Management Studies: an introduction’, in M.
Alvesson, and H. Willmott (eds) Critical Management Studies. London: Sage.
Artus, P., Viard, M.P. (2005), Le capitalisme est en train de s’autodétruire, Paris: La Découverte.
Beeson, I. (2008), « Technology in the Life-World: Over-extended Zones of Operation» in Introna,
Ilharco, Faÿ, Eds., Phenomenology, Organisation and Technology, Universidade Católica Editora,
Lisboa, 371-391
Basden, A. (2003),”Enriching Critical Theory”, CMS3 proceedings
Boland, R.J. (1991) “Information System Use as a Hermeneutic Process,” In Information Systems
Research: Contemporary Approaches and Emergent Traditions, H-E. Nissen, H.K. Klein, R.A.
Hirschheim (eds.), North Holland, Amsterdam, 439-464
Bourguignon, A. (2005) “Performance Management and Management Control: Evaluated Managers’
point of view”, European Accounting Review, Vol. 13 (4), 659-687
Breton, P. (1992) L’utopie de la communication, Paris: La Découverte.
Davidow, W. H., & Malone, M. S. (1992). The virtual corporation: structuring and revitalizing the
corporation of the 21st Century. New York: Harper Collins.
Davenport, T., & Pearlson, K. (1998). Two cheers for the virtual office. Sloan Management Review,
39 (3), 51–65.
Dejours, C. (2000), Travail et usure mentale, Paris: Bayard.
Ettighoffer, D. (1992), L’Entreprise Virtuelle, ou le nouveau mode de travail, Paris: Odile Jacob.
Faÿ E., (1999), Du traitement de l’information au commerce de la parole. Pour un management
délibératif des processus ouverts dotés de réseaux informatiques. PhD. Dissertation. Dir. A. C.
Martinet, Université Lyon3 Jean Moulin.
Faÿ, E. (2005), “Life, Speech and Reason. A phenomenology of Open Deliberation », Ephemera, 5
(3), 472-499.
Faÿ, E. (2008) "Derision and Management", Organization, 15 (6), 831-850.
Faÿ E., (2009), “Vivant ou dérisoire, à propos du travail à l’âge de l’information. Une contribution
basée sur la phénoménologie de Michel Henry », in Michel Henry, M. Henry, J. Leclercq, J. M.
Brohm Eds., Lausanne : Ed. L’Age d’Homme, 388-396.
Freud, Sigmund (1905) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. London:Hogarth Press.
31
Gabriel, Yiannis (1999) Organizations in Depth. London: Sage
Gely, R. (2007) Rôles, action sociale et vie subjectives. Recherches à partir de la phénoménologie de
Michel Henry, Bruxelles : PIE Peter Lang, Bruxelles.
Gerlach, N. and Hamilton, S. (2000), 'Telling the Future, Managing the Present: Business
Restructuring Literature as SF”, Science Fiction Studies, 27 (3), 461-477.
Handy, C. (1995). “Trust and the virtual corporation”. Harvard Business Review, 73 (May–June), 40–
50.
Henry, M. (1963, tr. 1973) The Essence of Manifestation. Translated by G.J.Etzkorn, The Hague:
Nijhoff.
Henry, M. (1976), Tome I, Marx, Une philosophie de la réalité, Paris: Gallimard ; translated by
Kathleen McLaughlin, (1983) Marx. A Philosophy of Human Being Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Henry, M. (1987), La Barbarie, Paris : Grasset.
Henry, M. (1990a), Phénoménologie matérielle, Paris: PUF ; (2008) Material Phenomenology
Translated by Scott Davidson, Fordham University Press.
Henry, M. (1990b), Du communisme au capitalisme. Théorie d’une catastrophe. Paris : Odile Jacob.
Henry, M. (1993), The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis . Translated by Douglas Brick. Originally
published as Genéalogie de la psychanalyse: Le commencement perdu , 1985. Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press.
Henry, M. (1996), C’est Moi la Vérité, pour une philosophie du Christianisme ; (2003), I Am the Truth:
Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. Translated by Susan Emmanuel, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press.
Henry, M. (1999) « Material Phenomenology and Language (or pathos and language) », Continental
Philosophy Review 32 (3), 343-365.
Henry, M. (2000), Incarnation, une philosophie de la chair, Paris : Seuil.
Husserl, E. (1931, tr.1999) Cartesian Meditations, tr. Dorion Cairns, Dordrech : Kluwer Academic
Publisher.
Husserl, E. (1936, tr. 1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr.
David Carr, Evanton, Northwestern University Press.
Ilharco, Introna, Faÿ, Eds. (2008) Phenomenology, Organization and Technology, Lisbon: Catholic
University Press.
32
Jackson, P., Gharavi, H. Klobas, J. (2006), “Technologies of the self: virtual work and the inner
panopticon”, Information Technology & People, 19 (3), 219-243
Jin, Robey, D. (2008), “Bridging social and technical interfaces in organizations: An interpretive
analysis of time-space distanciation”, Information and Organization 18, 177–204
Kaghan, W., Chumer, M. (2007) “Virtuality and the Generalized Other(s): Toward an Anthropology of
the Internet Age”, CMS5 proceedings.
Kühn, R. (2003), Radicalité et Passibilité, Paris : l’Harmattan.
Kühn, R. (2006) « Regard transcendental et communauté intropathique – Phénoménologie radicale
de la praxis thérapeuthique », in Michel Henry. Pensée de la vie et culture contemporaine, J.F.
Lavigne dir., Paris :Beauchêne.
Lash, S., Urry, J. (1987) The End of Organized Capitalism, Cambridge, Polity.
Mutch, A. (2002) ‘Actors and Networks or Agents and Structures: Towards a Realist View of
Information Systems’, Organization, 9 (3), 477-496
Marcuse, H. (1969), An Essay on Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press.
Marx, K. (1845), The German Ideology
Mingers, J. (2001) ‘Embodying information systems: the contribution of phenomenology’ Information
and Organization 11, 103–128
Mintzberg, H. (2004) Managers not MBAs, San Francisco: Berrett Koehler
Mintzberg, H. (2008) ‘How Productivity Killed American Enterprise’, on www.mintzberg.org
Nagel, S., Preiss, R., Goldman, K., (1995) Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations: Strategies
For Enriching the Customer, Sydney: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Pursianen, M. (2008), « Toward Cyborg-Agency? Merleau-Ponty and Foucault Technologically
Textured» in Introna, Ilharco, Faÿ, Eds., Phenomenology, Organisation and Technology,
Universidade Católica Editora, Lisboa, 371-391.
Putnam, H. (1992), Renewing Philosophy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sennett, R. (1998), The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New
Capitalism, New York: W.W. Norton.
Sioufi, R.S., Greenhill, A. (2007) “Who Crosses Boundaries? Critiquing Information Technology and
Nomadic Work Practices”, CMS5 proceedings
Simon, H., March, J.G., (1958) Organizations. New York: Wiley
33
Stahl, B. C. (2008), « Life-World and Information Technology: a Habermassian Approach» in Introna,
Ilharco, Faÿ, Eds., Phenomenology, Organisation and Technology, Universidade Católica Editora,
Lisboa, 315-330
Thorne, K., (2005) ‘Designing virtual organizations? Themes and trends in political and organizational
discourses’, The Journal of Management Development, 24, 7/8, 580-608
Thorne, K., (2007) ‘Virtual Organizations: Some Uses and Abuses in Political and OrganizationalDesign Discourses’, CMS5 proceedings.
Vasse, D. (1999) La dérision ou la joie, Paris : Seuil.