Guattari, organisation and future potential

Scott Lawley, Nottingham Trent University

For Robert Chia (1999), organisation is that which sufficiently stabilises the ephemeral nature of reality so that we may engage with it and act upon it. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome and root-tree concepts, the organisation is the root-tree, but beneath such seemingly stable structures lies the movement of the rhizome, a movement which contains a latent potential to create novel and unexpected configurations.

In Guattari’s work separate from Deleuze, this issue of future potential is addressed at a number of different yet connected levels, whether this be the individual and their mental health or the future of the planet and its environment. In this paper I would like to address individual potential and its relationship with the organisation, whether this be stifled or encouraged. Guattari’s concept of ‘health’ is one where the individual is open to potential flows and connections, rather than being stifled, segmented and territorialized. The nature of organisation and its ordering structures is often to bring about such stifling and segmentation, in other words to close off potential futures and future potential for the individual.

Guattari’s suggestion, with Negri (1990), is that whilst there are modes of organisation that condemn people to ‘emotionally blocked rhythms of constraint,’ there are also ‘organisations in which the individual is valuable rather than functional.’ Such forms of organisation thus facilitate rather than stifle the latent potential and creativity of the individual, promoting a rhizomatic connectivity such that the ‘collective potential’ of the organisation or community is realised.

In the paper, I would like to explore this Guattarian perspective on future potential as a possible means for promoting and realising the potential that Chia suggests resides beneath organisation structures. Three types of organisation will be examined: collaborative work and support mediated by the Internet; community-level organisations and organisation based in protest and resistance. In all three cases, a level of organisation is observed that orders reality in a way that makes action possible, but which also does this by promoting rather than stifling the realisation of individual and collective potential. But to what extent do they sustain this, or do they, as Guattari (1996) suggests, fall back into ‘old forms of organisational power’ where the stifling effects of root-tree structures take hold?

In other words, the paper questions the value of such a Guattarian perspective on organisation in realising the future potential of individuals and organisations. Is this a viable ethical prescription for future organisations, or is it merely a description of a few ethically-desirable yet ultimately spontaneous and ephemeral instances of organisational activity?