Showing papers by "John Law published in 2016"

Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque

Abstract: How might we think differently? This book is an attempt to respond to this question. Its contributors are all interested in non-standard modes of knowing. They are all more or less uneasy with the restrictions or the agendas implied by academic modes of knowing, and they have chosen to do this by working with, through, or against one important Western alternative – that of the baroque. Why the baroque? One answer is that the baroque made space for and fostered many forms of otherness. It involved knowing things differently, extravagantly, excessively, and in materially heterogeneous ways, and it apprehended that which is other and could not be caught in a cognitive or symbolic net. It also involved knowing in ways that did not gather into a single point, and knew itself to be performative. A part of a great Western division between rationalist and non-rationalist modes of knowing, the baroque is therefore a possible resource for creating ways of knowing differently, a storehouse of possible alternative techniques. To say this is not to say that it is the right mode of knowing. The book’s authors do not seek to create a ‘baroque social science’ whatever that might be, but instead work in a range of ways to explore how drawing on the ‘resources of the baroque’ can help us to think differently.

Organization, narrative and strategy

Abstract: Over the last two decades we have witnessed the decentring of the subject in social theory. Often this has been painful. In par­ ticular, it has been painful for the generation of sociologists who thought that they could build social theory on the foundations of a relatively stable humanist subject. Now, however, with the humanist theory of the subject overturned, we are in the process of witnessing the analogous deconstruction of the rational/strategic theory of the organization.2 Though it has been slower to get under way, this has been accompanied by a similar gnashing of theoretical teeth. For like the decentring of the subject, the process of the decentring of the organization may be character­ ized as a process of unlearning. It is, in other words, in large measure a question of coming to terms with the idea that what was previously taken for granted can no longer be safely assumed - something which is perhaps exciting and unnerving in roughly equal measure.