The Sine of the end of all things: Reflecting on the future of organisations from an analysis of Grendel, Poko-poko Te-Herehere-A-Taniwha and J.M Coetzee’s magistrate as reflection and repetition.

Wayne Pihema, Victoria University of Wellington

Like those crumbling empires before us, we believe we are approaching the perigee of our wave despite widespread and intense social, environmental and spiritual degradation of life. Where might we, interested in organisations and their symbols, look to divine signs of the future? – if not of the end of all things perhaps at least for organisations and the societies they exist within.

Similar to other great but fallen empires we are in effect waiting for the ‘barbarians’ (Coetzee,1980). But why wait? I draw on those outside the ring of usual consultation for organisational sustainability (longevity) by looking at the lives and actions of firstly, Grendel, the Scandinavian ‘monster’ of the epic poem Beowulf who constantly reflected on himself and his actions in terms of the humans he slew (Gardiner, 1985). Secondly I look at Poko-poko Te Herehere-A-Taniwha a man who saw himself so well reflected in the ‘monsters’ he hunted and killed around the waterways of the Kaipara Harbour that he discarded his own humanity to become taniwha, a supernatural demigod-like serpentine water-creature. The name broadly translated means Pokopoko The Binder of Taniwha, eluding to his method of entrapment by enchanted snare and the ritual of enchanted binding before decapitation.. He moves from being their prime enemy, killing hundreds of the powerful and magical taniwha in the Kaipara region, making it safe and habitable for human occupation to the most powerful of taniwha. The ‘myth’ is drawn from the oral traditions of my own people Ngatua Whatua of New Zealand.
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Finally I explore the fate of ‘the magistrate’ - in J.M Coeztee’s Waiting for the barbarians a story of an administrator at the fringes of an empire whose comfort and routines are disrupted and finally destroyed by his close liaison with a barbarian woman.
He shifts from magistrate to imprisoned enemy of the people and back to community member and then its’ leader once more, as the community also shifts in its’ relation to the empire and in so doing he is reflected in different aspects of the town he is part of.

I examine and draw conclusions from these dangerous and incalculable ‘monsters’ as portrayed in various written and oral sources using the concept of reflection from Latin American political, social and environmental commentator Eduardo Galeano. His concerns for the widespread political, social and environmental degradation of Latin America by western capitalism during the 1960’s and earlier centred on a collective rather than an individual moral/ethic response (Galeano,1973). Reflection, similar to Merleau-Pontyian concepts of intersubjectivity1 starts with an individual intention, that of ‘becoming’ within the world (Merleau-Ponty,1962;64).

That becoming is intensified and resolved through an unending series of reflective acts where the person seeks to ‘see’ themselves reflected in the social, physical and spiritual life of the community to which they belong. I argue that the lives and actions of Grendel, Poko-poko Te-Herehere-A-Taniwha and the magistrate can be made sense of through a series of ‘reflections’.

Furthermore I relate that reflective process to the notion of the scientific sine – or wave-function and develop discussion relating Grendel, Poko-poko Te Herehere-A-Taniwha and the magistrate. I broaden the notion of the sine to incorporate Deleuzean repetition and difference (Deleuze,1993 ; Patton, 1994 ) Proustian recursive movements through time (Proust; 1981; Deleuze, 1972; Beckett, 1931) Leibniz’s (Deleuze, 1993) conception of the fold and the metaphysical underpinnings of the sine element as recursive in almost all Maori traditional arts design.

I then consider where such rich and varied interpolations of the powerful sine symbol might be utilised to reflect the possible futures for organisations and the implications for extant theories of organisation.


References
Beckett, Samuel (1931) Proust, London: Evergreen Books Ltd:
Coetzee, John Maxwell (1980) Waiting for the barbarians, London: Secker and Warburg
Deleuze, Gilles (1972) Proust and Signs [Translated by Richard Howard] New York: G. Braziller
Deleuze, Gilles (1993) The fold :Leibniz and the Baroque [Translated by Tom Conley] Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press
Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition [Translated by Paul Patton] New York: Columbia University Press
Galeano, Eduardo (1973) The Open Veins of Latin America: five centuries of pillage of a continent [translated by Cedric Belfrage], New York: Monthly Review Press
Gardner, John (1985) Grendel New York: Vintage Books
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception, [Translated by Colin Smith] London: Routledge and Keegan Paul
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice(1964) Signs [Translated by Richard C McCleary], Evanston, Ill, Northwestern University Press
Patton Paul (1996) Deleuze: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers
Proust, Marcel (1981) Remembrance of Things Past [Translated by C.K Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin], London: Chatto and Windus


1 While Merleau-Ponty rejected the Cartesian notion of subject/object he did insist on the subjectivity of an individuated and embodied presence of the subject within the world. There was no specific hierarchy of the senses but a blending where everything seeks to encroach on everything else.