Just coasting/terminal man in flight at airport-organization
Damian O’Doherty, Manchester Business School
In a certain light it will be possible for organization studies to see the outline of a story that is being told of Mehran Karimi Nasseri: Nietzsche’s last man of organization theory. In a certain tone it will be possible to hear the ‘telling’ of the tale in organization studies of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, a man who has spent the last twenty years stuck inside terminal 1 in Paris, Charles de Gaulle. In many tellings Nasseri is a Kurdish refugee from Iran, an illegal immigrant in Europe without official documentation; but he has written ‘I’m not from Iran … my point of origin has yet to be decided’ (Mehran and Donkin, 2004). Nasseri or Lord Alfred as the UK immigration authorities have decided to call him, can be seen outside the ‘Bye Bye’ bar on the lower floor of terminal 1 sitting on a red bench given to him by the manager of the old Burger King airport franchise. He is surrounded by a wardrobe of Lufthansa boxes in which he keeps his personal possessions and pages and pages of his voluminous hand-written diaries. On some days he wears around his neck colourful garlands made of plastic lid-tops from soda drinks strung together on an intricate chain of plastic-straws. He tells us he is waiting either for a British passport or green card so that he can go to America. If he leaves the airport and tries to enter the streets of Paris, he will be arrested as an illegal immigrant. If he tries to take a flight to London or New York, he will be deported back to Charles de Gaulle, a routine he has suffered on many occasions.
It is perhaps not surprising that we find Nasseri inside an international airport. The airport has become an archetypal site of organization and transmission in an emerging global network of capital, labour, and information flows. For Castells (1996) the airport is a ‘space of flows’, a privileged node in a network that gives insight into future organization. A more critical reading sees the airport as a site of an emerging political epistemology and pedagogy, a ‘loci of reassurance and security against submergence of identities and against disruptions in the vital flows. They signify the sovereignty and security of the imagined worldwide political community’ (Aaltola, 2005:275). For Augé (1995) they are ‘non-places’, and for Serres (1995) the space in which we will see the birth of angels. There can be no doubt that airports promise to take you elsewhere. The airport that opens up for us in this telling helps dispel many illusions about organization as a bounded object of formal-administrative rationality and forces us to think of organization as a ‘state of emergency’ (Benjamin, 1968:248). Airport-organization speaks of a permanent crisis whose lines of struggle and contestation are played out across an assemblage of manifold media increasingly composed of advanced information and communications technologies. In our passage through the airport, organization is revealed as an unstable concoction of multi-media and mixed-realities whose volatility compel forms of learning whose address can identify and explore a series of charged or combustible artefacts, moments and episodes that resemble what Laclau and Mouffe (1985) have called the ‘nodal’ or privileged discursive points that bind what we have become used to telling as ‘structure’ in organization. A project that can trace out the cartography of these ‘quilting points’ (cf.: Lacan 1977:335) might provide ways of mapping organization as a constellation of hidden, congealed forces, whose release might trigger panic, shock, and even trauma (see Taussig, 1999). Organization would surely teeter on the brink subject to a co-ordination or alignment of these forces, a constellation that might precede forms of epiphany and metamorphosis.
In ‘The “World” of Enlightenment to Come’ Derrida (2003) quotes (through translation) Kant’s “The Interest of Reason in these Conflicts” from the Critique of Pure Reason in which Kant writes ‘human reason is by nature architectonic’ (Kant, 1965:A474/B502). From its location in Nice, France, Derrida’s essay traces a difference between two what he calls ‘maritime’ eschatologies in reason, between ‘running aground’, and ‘grounding’, where he writes ‘With the coast in view, in mind, and, in keeping with the maritime metaphor that interests us here, in view of or far from shore, without any assured arrival, between earth and sea’. Between arrivals and departure Nasseri might be ‘just coasting’, a terminal man suspended in space and time in an emerging inter-national or transnational diaspora – as if here in Ljubljana, awaiting Jason with his golden fleece to slay the dragon of his aporetic condition so that like Phrixus he might take flight again and escape.
On our trip to meet Nasseri we will see the airport architectonic bend in ways that allow the telling of tales about the limits of contemporary organization and its augurs of a future to come. We will come across strange rabbit-like creatures such as ‘Miffy’ who have of recent times been let loose in international airports. The airport is experienced as a site of délire and desire (Lecercle, 1985) as it begins to take on features that remind us of a film-set or theatre-stage, but one that becomes progressively abyssal or Pirandellian, surreal, and hyper-real. We will hear told that in recent years Nasseri seems to have spawned a cult of copy-cat ‘terminations; Sanji Shah, for example, a Kenyan-born British man spent more than a year in Nairobi international. We will read of guidebooks and self-help manuals that are being published in an apparent response to this contagion and clamour for airport citizenship, including Stuck at the Airport: A Traveller’s Survival Guide by Harriet Baskas (2001). A vast community of subscribers has also emerged in recent years around Donna McSherry’s website ‘sleeping in airports’. In our quest to understand Nasseri this paper takes flight through future organization. We will first meet agents of surveillance and subterfuge, and individuals and cult-like communities living in apparent permanent exile inside the airport complex, before coming to terms with an uncanny and surreal machine-like automatism taking over organization, complete with all manner of strange tales and hearings of shamanic talismen, body-bags, cyborgs, and alien becomings. Finally, a strange sense of disorientation and emptiness follows this prolificacy and excess offering a strange impression of estrangement but astonishment at the mundane-everyday that seems to prefigure a sense of epiphany and possible transformation. At the centre of this maelstrom sits Nasseri. He is silent, staring our into the middle-distance, making his notes, answering his fan mail, and keeping his diaries, ‘just coasting/terminal man in flight at airport-organization’: a strange mutation in organization studies of the homo sacer and of messianicity without messianism.
References
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Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London, Verso.
Baskas, H. (2001) Stuck at the Airport: A Traveler’s Survival Guide. New York: Fireside.
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Castells, Manuel (1996) The Information Age: Economy Society and Culture Vol I. Oxford, Blackwell.
Derrida, J. (2003) The “World” of Enlightenment to Come (Exception, Calculation, Sovereignty’, Research in Phenomenology 33: 9-52
Kant, I (1965) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
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