Abstract
All words are tricky, but the word ‘monster’ particularly so. If a fluffy kitten were the size of an elephant, it would be a monster, but so would a normal sized woman with hands like a lobster or wings on her back. Monsters are usually large, or rare, or conjoin things that we assume belong in different places. But this sort of categorical definition captures too little, because the word is usually used normatively, as a way of expressing some sort of surprise—which could include horror, disgust, glee or delight. Frankenstein’s monster and a monster truck do not have any very obvious similarities after all, which rather suggests that ‘monster’ is an arbitrary category, and not one given by the nature of the world. This is the problem that stalks this book, because moving from an ontology or epistemology of monsters to a politics or ethics is by no means a simple matter. Hume’s caution in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) is always helpful in this regard. He expresses surprise when noticing how seamlessly an author moves from ‘is, and is not’ to ‘ought, and ought not’, and notes how it ‘seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it’. So, what is a monster, and what ought we do with them?
If we begin with the presupposition that one person’s monster is another’s person’s angel, and note that some people keep lizards as pets, then we must begin with matters of value, and not of fact. Here, we can make some useful distinctions. Terming something a monster usually implies a negative evaluation. For example, many people might think of transgender people (such as the author of this book) as breaking certain taboos and hence being classified as monstrous. The monster falls on the wrong side of some sort of classification of what counts as normal, in this case being one sex or another, and is hence the subject of moral condemnation. Such hostility could be due to a physical structure which lies outside the norm, certain kinds of action deemed immoral or criminal, the statement of particular attitudes, or even membership of certain categories of human. The only similarity here is stigmatization. Tall people, rioters, those who refuse to condemn sex with people under 16, and Jews can all be monsters, as can a ‘man’ who dresses as a ‘woman’. In this sense, the word monster only makes sense as a normative category, since the world itself does not identify monsters for us. And by extension, what we judge to be monstrous is also a way of judging ourselves, of deciding what is normal because the moralizing majority are clearly not monsters.
But if we want to dispose of such moral majoritarianism, then the answer appears to be that either we stop calling people monstrous names, or that we embrace the idea that we are all monsters. Both have the same effect, because the power of the category diminishes, but Torkild Thanem (like others who have written on this topic—Asma, 2009; Leroi, 2003) appears to favour the latter strategy. In his case, following Deleuzoguattarian principles, he suggests that we are all always becoming, all always the results of conjoining this impurity and that hybrid. To worry about the probity of boundaries and to express disgust concerning less frequent conjoinings is hence to prevent things from becoming, and to deny life. Instead, being friendly to monsters is a way of placing ourselves on the side of the creative transgressor, siding with the sparkling freaks against the dull complacency of the pinks (Dobbs, 1987).
Organizations are a problem here though. As critical organization theorists have been suggesting for a few decades, organizations exclude, classify, separate and tidy. They seem to dislike ‘impurity, heterogeneity, disorder and confusion’ (p. 3). So Thanem’s set up seems to be pitting the emergent monsters against the classifiers—which includes both organizations and their theorists.
Organizations kill the monstrous by demarcating themselves as bounded entities from their outside environment and by imposing divisions of labour that separate and regulate the interaction of the different levels, groups and departments that make up organizations. (p. 11)
This is the impulse of The Monstrous Organization—to set modern organizing against the viral multiplicities of difference—and at its heart is a claim about the author being a monster because he is trans. He cites evidence of ‘transphobia’ from surveys, and celebrates a politics of identity which values difference, and forces organizations to bend, and not exclude. ‘I am creating knowledge that can go back to the transgender and LGBT community, towards changing working life for transgender people and enhancing the freedom of gender expression at work’ (p.113). And along the way he accuses organization theorists (including those practising Critical Management Studies) of being too rational, cognitivist and ignoring the material and corporeal ‘acts of cruelty committed by organizations’ (p. 101).
So far so good, because the monster metaphor appears to have allowed Thanem to contest certain sorts of repressive normativity, and insist that there are many things that bodies can do. Dropping splendid words like monstruct, monstructing, teratogen, teratology into the argument has made it easier to embrace, since we remember how misunderstood the Hunchback of Notre Dame was, and the radical readers of Organization will be nodding Sagely by this point. But the monster has smuggled in some problems for Thanem too. If we value becomings, in all their rhizomic (nomadic, deterritorialized, wasp-orchid) possibility, then it is unclear how we distinguish between the monsters we like and the monsters we don’t. Yet Thanem does wish to moralize, and often enough uses the monster metaphor just as normatively as others. So various organizations are accused of being hostile to monsters, or exploiting labour, or producing tasteless tomatoes, getting farmers hooked on GM crops or marketing energy drinks which improperly claim to be Monster. And these are accusations rhetorically justified by a word which slips from is to ought and back again all the way through the book. Well, perhaps, but sometimes your theory can bite you on the ass.
I am not arguing that we should stop trying to organize our social relations and involvement with the world around us. It would be ridiculous to deny that I need a sense of order and organization to cope with life and work, with the people, organisms and artefacts around me. (p. 27)
Just so. As an organization theorist Thanem can hardly throw away organizing, which in turn means that a set up which opposes organization and monsters isn’t going to work. As he knows—because he has read Deleuze and Cooper and DeLanda and Haraway and Law (1991)—the world is made from assemblages of different bits and pieces that last for different spans of time. What we call ‘organizations’ are examples of this, and hence also examples of what John Law delightfully termed ‘a pool of order’ which will evaporate soon enough. The tension between the Thanem who wishes to intervene in the identity politics of trangender people at work, and this philosophy of monsters is written all over the double negatives in the text. It results in a book which is itself an assemblage of assertions, citations, bits of radical common sense and the occasional reflexive turn as researchers need to ‘write their own stigmas and marginalities into their research accounts’ (p. 127). This is a book which stutters and lurches—‘I am not … I am also not … Nor am I … However … ’ (p. 33). In order to make the claims required for a certain sort of progressive humanism Thanem has needed to construct a boundary between vitalist monsters and repressive organizations. But in order to rehabilitate the monsters, he has chosen to argue that social ontology is always a messy assemblage, and that presumably includes organizations too. As he puts it himself, ‘despite at least a partial obsession with order and boundaries, organizations are monstrous … ’ (p. 125). Or again, ‘organizations and monsters are not binary opposites’ (p. 126). In which case, this monster asks, are organizations monsters too? And if they are, then how do we justify moving them from is to ought? Who decides which monsters we like and which we don’t?
I am not (note my own stutter) denying the importance of the discrimination towards transgender people which Thanem raises, but I wonder whether the strategy he adopts is the best way to confront it. In the end, his recommendations sound rather communitarian, echoing contemporary discourses of self management, diversity and servant leadership.
This is not merely an issue of more women, disabled people, ethnic minorities and transgender people becoming managers and executives. It would involve people changing the ways in which they become managers and executives, and changing the ways in which they relate to themselves and others, taking responsibility to enhance not just their own capacities but doing so in ways that enhance the capacities of other people. (p. 124)
The monster demands a voice, just like the rest of us, but managers, executives and their organizations appear to endure. Radical philosophical premises appear to mutate into proposals which aren’t likely to frighten anyone very much. Like so many of us who try to make heterodox ideas live within the Business School, what we produce after all our grave digging, chemistry and lightening is not a very frightening monster, often more like liberal humanism in new clothes.