This essay attempts to think through the impact of what we call our "transitional age" on organizational life, specifically on organizational regulation, and thus on organizational moral life. It provides notes towards a reconceptualization of organizational moral life that may be helpful to all students and practitioners of organization and business ethics who would want to make sense of the often significant contextuality, unpredictability, and undecidability of contemporary organizational life.

The form of life which has the desire for or will to control over emergence at its core is, if not the dominant, then at least one of the more significant ones in late modern culture. To be in control over emergence requires a considerable degree of sovereignty. In this contribution I have made an attempt to outline and contrast three rather basic images or models of what might be called radical sovereignty, i.e., the vital-reflexive-transgressive one (which is referred to (...) here as Nietzsche type 1), the existential-reflective-transcendent one (Nietzsche type 2), and the ambivalent-creative-transformative one (Nietzsche type 3). The analysis of paintings by post-war artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Paul Rebeyrolle is used to illustrate how the aforementioned types of radical sovereignty may have emerged, fully-fledged, in art, in the wake of the Second World War. (shrink)

This collection will appeal to scholars and students of social and legal theory, visual culture, justice and governance studies, media studies, and criminology.

In this essay two photographs taken during the events at Dale Farm and at Meriden—both involving issues of gypsy and traveller settlement in rural areas—are analysed and interpreted in some depth. Use is thereby made of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler . This book, as is argued in this contribution, includes, in embryonic form, a whole imaginary of forms of sovereignty which, it could be said, is still to a significant extent structuring conflicts between gypsy and traveller communities on the (...) one hand, and rural residents on the other. The exploration of Walton’s imaginary in which supposed compleat contemplators are pitched against intransigent, dogmatic, pertinacious schismaticks, enables us to tease out images of nomadism and sovereignty and allows us to argue how the clash of imaginary sovereignties both at Dale Farm and at Meriden is, at the core, a clash of irreconcilable forms of life which, each, rest upon what existentialists would call an original, radical choice. We conclude with some notes on the need to acknowledge but also to interrogate, in and during conflicts between gypsies and travellers and rural residents, the radical nature of the existential choices that underpin such conflicts. Without any such acknowledgement, and without any meta-communicative interrogation of the choices that underpin imaginary forms of life, one may not hope to be able bridge the chasm between radically chosen, diametrically opposed forms of life. (shrink)

In his “non-narrative” film Koyaanisqatsi Godfrey Reggio documents the ecologically disastrous ‘imbalanced’ life in modern, industrialised mega-cities. In the film, he seems to mourn the loss of what he suggests was a more ‘balanced’ form of life, when Man was one with nature. This contribution draws on elements in Hopi culture and reads Reggio’s iconic film as part of a cultural trend in which submission, in all its guises, is no longer accepted. In this cultural trend submission always is submission (...) to code, and therefore, to wasteful destruction and to ‘life in imbalance’. This trend has, however, in the course of the decades, also spawned a void of “Luciferian” desires of absolute sovereignty, and has done this to such an extent as to undermine the conditions of possibility for anything like a non-submissive life ‘in balance’ to endure. (shrink)

Is it possible “to have done with judgment”? This might be a question pondered by victim–offender mediators. The essay at hand explores and contrasts three Nietzschean images of non-judgmentalism, i.e. Friedrich Nietzsche’s, Gilles Deleuze’s, and Marguerite Yourcenar’s. The original model, Nietzsche’s, might perhaps be termed the vital art of Dionysian affirmation. The second, Deleuze’s: the machinic art of rhizomatic deterritorialization. The third, Yourcenar’s : the stoic art of interstitial imperialism. The focus in this essay is, in particular, on one of (...) Yourcenar’s novels, Mémoires d’Hadrien. Conclusions are drawn with regard to the theory and practice of victim-offender mediation. (shrink)

The dominant imagery in current international relations seems to betray the emergence of an imperialist imaginary that differs markedly from an earlier one. This paper traces the main outlines of this emerging imaginary that has left notions of Empire as spheres of integrative production firmly behind, and is now geared towards imagining Empire as a complete, organic body of free-but-organic-and-therefore-orderly flows that however needs to be kept intact by means of epidemiological interventions aimed at excluding or neutralizing viral entities. Dealing (...) with terrorism, or invading states that allegedly breed them, in this imaginary, is first and foremost a matter of medical necessity and urgency. The legal and diplomatic 'logic' of UN resolutions, in this imaginary space, can only be imagined as being of secondary importance. Cooperation and `cosmopolitan' negotiation, as alternatives, disappear in this imaginary that projects an imperialist globalism of epidemiological purity. (shrink)

This is an essay on what happened during January 2000 on Greenwich peninsula, London. The Millennium Dome in Greenwich, London, is read here as a site of the nomadic law of the labyrinth. At the Dome, a law of hyper-nomadics is emerging. In the Dome – a nomadic home, a temporary home quickly pitched of/for/by nomads – Britishness, I argue, is being seriously played as perpetual de-invention in a labyrinthine space, somewhere in-between the Law of Lures and the Law of (...) Commands, in-between the Law of the Desert, the Law of the Game and the Law of Orderings. The Dome is being read here as an image/space through which New Britishness forces/forges itself to the fore, as well as an image/space that forces/forges New Britishness to force/forge itself to the fore. In this essay, ``Law'', as well as ``Semiotics'', are being used in a very broad sense. The ``Law of Britain'', i.e. that which keeps ``Britain'' apart/together, or, in other words, ``Britishness'', so I will argue, not only elusively occupies a labyrinthine space in-between said Laws (of Lures, of Commands, as well as those of the Desert, of the Game, and of Orderings), which it articulates while it nevertheless also weakens them, dissolves them. ``It'', the Law of Britain, Britishness, I will argue, also roams nomadically in-between ``spaces of belonging'' and ``spaces of becoming''. In and through the Dome, an interstitial, meridional space, ``it'' surfaced – it shaped surfaces – forming a labyrinth that articulates various nomadics, while not allowing any of these to fully emerge. This is ``its'' newness, this could be read as the Law of ``New Britain'' or ``New Britishness'': an ever-elusive labyrinthine mes(s)(h) of surfaces in-between belonging and becoming. This essay is part of an attempt at ``reading the figural'', to use Rodowick's words here. Rodowick reads Deleuze who reads Foucault – theorist of spatialization – who reads figures, such as Magritte('s). Figures are clusters of ``visibles'' and ``expressibles''. Their light and sound – ``light, sounds and shapes'', says the Millennium Dome leaflet – form imaginary spaces – ``spatial images'' – that allow for specific ``statements'' to be produced and to be read in them; which, in turn, allows for the (re)production of specific ``visibles'' and ``expressibles''. The specificity of the Dome, the spatial image of New Britain, of New Britishness, is that the Law of Britain whirls in there, in labyrinthine windings, on surfaces, somewhere in-between belonging and becoming, roaming elusively in-between statements, allowing and (re)producing myriads of specific statements, though none specifically. (shrink)

This essay speculates on howimageries/imaginations of peace emerge beforeand beyond the words of peace talk andpractice. Exploring the example of OperationRestore Hope (1992–1993) in Somalia, itis argued that imageries/imaginations of peace,e-merging from and into everyday socialities and tribal puissance –echoing Maffesoli – to a significant degree tostructure the outcome of (international)peacemaking operations. The essay describeshow, during Restore Hope (a test casetowards President Bush's ``new world order'')imageries/imaginations of peace as immobilitye-merged, before and beyondthe words of a medic's Law of Stabilization.This essay (...) explores the imaginary ofinternational peacekeeping operations. As such,it tries to move beyond the words and the signsof international law. It wants to explore theimages, the imageries, the imaginations thatroam – merging and dissipating – beforelaws, before the Law of the Symbolic. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 216 Seiten: 225-248.