Throughout this chapter I have demonstrated how affect prompts self-production through unsettling the technologies through which we produce ourselves as ethical subjects. I have also elaborated that in or-der to capture the interplay between affect and ethics at the level of our subjectivity as embodied and a felt sense, a judgement of the conditions of possibility and value within our organisational settings as unfair, is required (Hemmings, 2012). That moment of affect – astonishment,
frustration, confusion – itself constitutes that judgment. The affec-tive dissonance, that ‘judgment arising from the distinction between experience and the world’ (p. 157), may be suppressed, employed to manipulate others or harnessed to change our organisational settings.
I have also elaborated how the struggles ignited by affective disso-nance turn the ethical power of difference towards an ethic of virtue rather than towards an ethic of recognition. The inability to recognise and to tolerate or even embrace the experience of difference results in ‘familiar dualisms’ (Ashcraft, 2017: 43) such as macro-micro, col-lective-individual and structure-agency. For example in our case, this dualism produces a trap of managerialism and professionalism; we dis-miss not only the expertise of others but also managers’ decisions and their capacity to manage. Due to this trap, the regime of managerialism intensifies the power effects of the existing rationality rather than the efforts to transgress it (Field notes, 1/2015):
Consultant: ‘If I were you, I’d be worried. Is it true that this is all you have? You should be able to analyse your situation profoundly and after that move forward.’
Middle Manager: ‘But is the analysis a result of what we are? May-be we should just face it and start operating differently as managers.’
Consultant: ‘Your strategy is modern and enabling as well as your organisational structure. The most important question is whether you have the ability to operate in this structure with this strategy.’
Although this excerpt might be interpreted as a typical consultant jar-gon, the suspicion of ‘whether you have to ability to operate in this struc-ture with this strategy’ points directly to the struggle between strucstruc-ture and agency (Ashcraft, 2017). Diprose (2002) discusses on how ‘the embodied self is produced by social concepts and norms that discour-age difference, inconsistency, nonconformity and change’ and how the
‘body relies on the operation of memory and forgetting’ (p. 22). The conventional discourse operates through our memory, and makes us
‘constant and apparently unchanging through time by projecting the same body into the future’. The struggles ignited by profiling triggers
re-sistance by ‘using the prevailing moral norms and the concept of cause’
(p. 22). Because of this, the intended change of Futuria is unwelcomed.
At times, it is almost impossible to have a constructive dialogue, be-cause decisions on how to do things differently are questioned through comments like ‘professionals cannot be managed like this’ (Field notes, 2/2016) or ‘I have been working here for a long time. I know how to do this’ (Field notes, 12/2016). What is meant as an encouragement to change our places through transgression and forgetting ourselves, turns into a critique that operates as a trap (O’Sullivan, 2014) – or as a source of sustenance. We ‘retreat into a taciturn non-acceptance’ (Hemmings, 2012: 157), because different ways of being are not welcomed. The technologies of the self we employ in self-production, divide us into different categories, regulate us and build hierarchies between us. These technologies mark us in a particular way and prioritise the production of a self-constitutive subject (Hancock, 2008). They legislate ‘against change in one self over time but also against difference between selves or, rather, against transgression of borders of identity and difference’
(Diprose, 2002: 62).
As Foucault (1998) points out ‘transformation that remains within the same mode of thought, a transformation that is only a way of adjust-ing the same thought more closely to the reality of thadjust-ings, can merely be a superficial transformation’ (p. 155). Foucault reassures that ‘as soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transfor-mation becomes both very urgent, very difficult, and quite possible. It is not therefore a question of there being a time for criticism and a time for transformation, nor people who do the criticism and others who do the transforming, those who are enclosed in an inaccessible radicalism and those who are forced to make the necessary concessions to reality’
(p. 155). However, our inability to rewrite the ways in which we think about ourselves and the way we act towards the other relates to our inability to reflect our self-production.
The following excerpt is from one of the numerous debates I was involved in throughout the curricula renewal (Middle Manager, field notes, 9/2017): ‘The matrix robbed the pedagogical development from the degree programmes. We should be given the goals and the resources,
and then the management would say ‘do it as you please’. These guidelines and procedures have become a burden’. Although I lent an ear for this manager, I sensed a difference. I realised that I was disagreeing with this manager. Pedagogical development has not been robbed from anyone;
it has been exposed to new knowledge, which is shared throughout the organisation and implemented through new working practices in order to ensure the transformation. I caught myself thinking ‘Tell me, what it is that you cannot do?’ But since I was tired of arguing about the curricula renewal, I simply changed the subject.
In that moment, I felt that it was the most generous way to affirm the judgement towards the efforts to promote strategic profiling through the curricula renewal. I also felt that it was the most generous way to ac-knowledge that the top-down orchestrated renewal has been perceived as a violation against the values, practices and modes of comportment through which this manager produced the ethics of his subjectivity. As I reflected on our discussion, I also understood how another rationality is produced through a counter-discourse: it forms when one recognises an imperative which contests the conditions perceived as normal but rather, problematic or unjust. Clifford (2001) asserts that each axis, i.e. knowledge, power and ethics – is a kind of problematisation. The experience of subjectivity, then, ‘consists in a series of interrelated prob-lematisations in their concrete forms: systems of representations, insti-tutions, practices’. The relation of these axes is so intimate, that each axis is ‘affected by transformations in the other two’ (p. 103).
However, breaking through, fracturing the limitations of the existing rationality are mostly welcomed with hostile remarks and judgements, claiming that those who dislodge themselves from the prevailing modes of subjection are ‘the cronies of the matrix’ (Field notes, 3/2017) whereas grievances such as ‘everyone develops, not just the matrix’ (Unit manager, a management training session, 5/2016) are judged as acts of resistance rather than as efforts to foster ‘mutual recognition and co-operation of individuals’ (Hancock, 2008: 1364). Because of these judgments, we do not reveal our ‘shifting and multiple facets’ (Kondo, 1990: 307); we prefer seeking solace and freedom through securing our sense of continuity.
Diprose (2002) points out that ‘the possibility of transforming social imaginaries rests with the potential of these bodies who benefit from the ideas and values that structure the civil body to be open to dif-ferent ways of being’ (p. 172). Although for some of us ‘becoming the northern forerunner’ has offered a possibility to reanimate ourselves and our organisation, we have not able to practise this in a generous and an affirmative way. In each of the discourses, the technologies of the self produce a self-constitutive subject, who takes care of oneself by knowing oneself. The possibilities to reanimate ourselves through mu-tual recognition (Hancock, 2008) are not welcomed; on the contrary, reproducing ourselves as particular kind of ethical subjects is employed as a form of resistance, and to sustain hierarchies.
Nevertheless, although my writing suggests that moving towards an ethic of recognition is difficult, it is important to bring these difficulties out in the open. Foucault (1988) encourages us to escape from the di-lemma of being either for or against, but rather to make these tensions more visible; ‘of making them more essential than mere confrontations of interests or mere institutional immobility’ (p. 155). As Clifford (2001) points out, ‘the possibilities for subjectivity are a direct reflec-tion of what the social network allows’ (p. 132). Without elaborating these struggles, we end up passing judgments towards the demands of the other without realising how various mechanisms of power anyhow infiltrate in our social networks and attach to us (Clifford, 2001; Fou-cault, 1980). Because of this, we fail to harness these difficulties as a means to move away from the disturbing sense of being othered to a struggle for alternative values and mutual recognition. We are merely able to reproduce familiar dualisms between those who govern and those who are governed, between professionalism and managerialism – and between continuity and transgression.
VII
Picture 6 In the dust cloud by Jacek Malczewski
VII Discussion and conclusions
‘Them things you don’t show, I can see Them things you don’t say, speak to me Them things you hide ain’t hiding No firm ground but we ain’t sliding Them things that haunt you, let them be That thing you weep for, leave it, All life is forwards, you will see It’s yours when you’re ready to receive it’
The Beigeness, Kate Tempest In part VII I piece together my thesis. In chapter 1, I discuss how the findings address the research questions. In chapter 2, I present the main conclusions and the limitations of the study. I also present possible avenues for future research.