Abstract
‘Whoever goes in search of humans finds acrobats’ (p. 13)
In the prologue to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a tightrope walker has just begun to perform on the high wire when a ‘brightly-dressed fellow like a buffoon’ appears behind him, loudly mocking his slow pace and approaching him rapidly. As this clown-character is about to reach him, the poor tightrope walker falls down in the midst of the marketplace, where Zarathustra is just in time to offer him some final words of consolation: ‘You have made danger your calling, there is nothing in that to despise. Now you perish through your calling: so I will bury you with my own hands’ (Nietzsche, 1969: 48). What Sloterdijk takes from Nietzsche’s (1969) parable is that ‘what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal’ (p. 44). The point is that humans have the capacity to overcome their own possibilities, provided that they engage in the exercises that make the unlikely possible. The tightrope walker is an example of someone who climbs what Sloterdijk calls ‘Mount Improbable’; he or she makes the improbable possible by means of constant self-overcoming through exercise.
Humans’ attempt to overcome ordinary life by means of practice is the central theme in Sloterdijk’s book, a process that he also refers to as ‘secession’. Here, practice is defined as ‘repetition in the service of the unrepeatable’ (p. 207) or, less cryptically, as ‘any operation that provides or improves the actor’s qualification for the next performance of the same operation’ (p. 4). Although he doesn’t mention this explicitly, it seems to me that the subtext of the book is that Sloterdijk considers human life worth living only if it is shaped through practice, or rather ‘good practice’. The book does not spell out what the conditions of good practice are, but the overall message is clear: practice is not valued enough in our times. The high status that practice once had, in monastic life, for instance, needs to be restored, and the book seeks to do some of this needed restoration work. The result is nothing less than the proposal of a new master discipline that is concerned with ‘anthropotechnics’: the individual or collective self-shaping of humans by means of practice.
Sloterdijk’s definition of practice has some affinity with the so-called ‘turn to practice’ in social theory, associated with the work of Bourdieu and de Certeau among others, which has also become influential in organization studies under headings such as strategy-as-practice, communities-of-practice and leadership-as-practice (see Miettinen et al., 2009). In line with Sloterdijk, these approaches emphasize the importance of studying the activities that people engage in, while avoiding the pitfall of locating change in either the individual agent or some kind of superstructure. Sloterdijk, however, is not interested in what happens ‘in practice’ as opposed to what should happen according to theory. Neither is he interested in practices as such. His particular focus is models of practicing that secede from the ordinary, that is, humans’ attempt to overcome their normal lives. Practice in this sense is always also an attempt to become part of a higher form of being, which gives it an ethical quality that is rarely an explicit focus in the practice turn in organization studies. Indeed, this is Sloterdijk’s critique of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus: Bourdieu’s interest in habits excludes a concern for virtue, which for thinkers such as Aristotle and Aquinas was essential to very concept of habit.
In the book, Sloterdijk identifies two myths that prevent us from seeing humans for what they really are, that is, successful or less successful practicing animals. The first myth is that today we are witnessing a return to religion. Sloterdijk provocatively claims that only people who hold the erroneous belief that religion exists can say this. Once we cease to believe in the existence of religion (not to be confused with a belief in the existence of God), we can characterize humans more adequately: not religious and non-religious people, but ‘the practicing and the untrained’ (p. 3). An anthropotechnical interest in religion is therefore an interest in the ecstatic practices that elevate religious figures as monks, priests and gurus. These ecstatic practices, however, are equally found outside of religious realms (although they may be ‘despiritualized’, as happened to sports in the neo-Olympic movement). For this reason, Sloterdijk sees no essential difference between, say, liturgies on the one hand and sports exercises on the other. Both are essentially forms of practice and are therefore to be studied as such.
The second myth that Sloterdijk identifies in his book is the idea that our time is best understood as an age of work and production. According to Sloterdijk, since the last third of the 19th century, the practicing life has slowly started to push the ideology of work with its primary focus on the worker and their products to the background. Ever since, ‘a new ecosystem of activities has been developing in which the absolute precedence of product value is revised in favour of practice values, performance values and experiential values’ (p. 212). However, not everybody recognizes these developments, and many theorists continue to evaluate forms of practice in terms of work. For instance, some theorists insist on understanding play activity as a breeding ground for work, a perspective that has entered organization studies under the term ‘serious play’ (e.g. Roos and Victor, 1999). Sloterdijk labels these forms of theorizing ‘dull-witted sociology’ or ‘critical kitsch’ (the latter refers to its critical variant, which reduces new forms of practice to new forms of domination). Ultimately, Sloterdijk seeks to do away with the image of human being as homo faber, the human as maker of external things. This would open up a perspective of humans as practicing animals, that is, people who are in essence makers of their own state of being.
The identification of this second myth obviously resonates with debates in organization studies. In particular, the thesis that our world is no longer a world of production chimes well with much scholarship in management and organization studies concerned with the ‘post-industrial’ organization, which holds that the most interesting (worthy, hegemonic) organizations are not organized according to the products they produce, but according to their brands, their knowledge and other non-material resources they have. When actual production is outsourced to low-wage countries, the model of the ‘knowledge-intensive’ organization starts to dominate, whose ideal-type can indeed be described as an organization without workers (in the sense of people making products). Instead, the organization’s population is sub-divided in strategists, accountants, leaders, entrepreneurs, learners, changers, consumers and a few other figures that constitute most of today’s sub-disciplines of management and organization studies.
However, even if it is true that knowledge-intensive firms move away from ‘repetition in service of faster repetition’, as we may characterize the industrial model of organization, it remains to be seen whether there is a place for Sloterdijk’s acrobats in these organizations, that is, ‘repetition in service of the unrepeatable’. Of course, on a discursive level, organizational acrobats are easy to find. Much of what allegedly happens in organizations is first and foremost about secession in the sense of Sloterdijk: an attempt to overcome ordinary organizational life or ‘work’. A paradigmatic example of this is the celebration of play in organizations: the ideal knowledge worker, strictly speaking, does not work, but plays, as play is considered to be superior from both a moral and a business perspective (Sørensen and Spoelstra, in press). Of course, the question to what extent knowledge workers really secede from ordinary life is a complex one, which asks to be studied in its own right. This, then, is a question that Sloterdijk’s book raises for organizational scholars: what forms of practice contemporary organizations value and how these forms of practice are to be valued ethically. Furthermore, Sloterdijk’s book invites organizational scholars to ask this question without jumping to the conclusion that beyond the pretty rhetoric of self-leadership, authenticity and the like, we find nothing but new forms of domination, or that the turn to ‘play’ in business is nothing more than a trick to make people work harder. As already mentioned, Sloterdijk dismisses this type of argument, quite common in critical management studies, as ‘critical kitsch’.
I already mentioned that Sloterdijk’s book is not a plea for practice as such—finding acrobats in organizations does, therefore, not preclude a critical analysis. I stress this again because You Must Change Your Life could give the reader the impression that practice in itself is admirable, which is perhaps hard to avoid if the overall aim is to restore the high status of practice. The real quest is not for practice as such but for ‘good practice’. An ethics of practice, Sloterdijk explains, is ‘reformatory’ in that it ‘seeks to exchange harmful for favourable repetition’ (p. 405). This important point remains underdeveloped in the book: despite its self-declared aim of paving the way for an ethics of practice, it never becomes clear (to me at least) how one would start approaching the question how to distinguish good practice from bad practice. But this is a single critical note about a book that is brimming with ideas—many of which should be of great interest to organizational scholars.