Entrepreneurship and the Creation of Organization

Daniel Hjorth, Robin Holt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781138886971
• eBook ISBN: 9781317501046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

When re-imagining, re-thinking, and re-writing entrepreneurship in this book, the authors have come to the conclusion that the concept that describes it most precisely is one that signifies a process that includes imagining, seductively describing, playfully organizing, political agility in navigating common sense, and business sensibility before possible commerce.

This book develops a process theory of entrepreneurship by exploring how key concepts in such a theory – affect, desire, assemblage – allow us to think about entrepreneurship differently. This makes a significant contribution to bridging the fields of entrepreneurship and organization studies. Using literature and literary characters and their stories as main sources, entrepreneurship research is here revitalized, and the result provides students of entrepreneurship processes with new conceptual opportunities. The book is also a contribution to a multi-disciplinary research tradition in social sciences more broadly where humanities is a key "conversation partner".

Undergraduates in entrepreneurship, PhD students, and entrepreneurship and organization scholars will find this to be a refreshing renewal of research into entrepreneurship and the creation of organization.

Part 1

1Romanticism and wonder

DOI: 10.4324/9781315714455-3

Spinoza and “the self”

For Baruch Spinoza human beings are distinct from all other sentient beings in one basic way: they feel the urge to be elsewhere. Humans are defined, he suggested, by the passion to become rather than be; as partial modifications of a whole they strive to reach towards what is beyond and possibly more than them. Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze would later emphasize that this urge is the result of imaginative capacity – “elsewhere” is imagined in an intense, attractive way, thus the urge to move, and in this move to then sense the self.¹ Self-awareness, Spinoza stresses, is woven from attempts at self-creation, the mind and body entwined in the mobile and active enquiry into possibility driven by what he calls conatus: a striving to do and become more and to overcome.²

As if to empirically embody this essential restlessness Spinoza was himself always on the move, not just physically – and he certainly got about – but also intellectually. Born in Amsterdam into a family of Spanish-Jewish traders who had found themselves in the commercially primed, republican city they had escaped what they felt as the religious intolerance of their native Portugal. Reared in the exposed enclosure of Jewish tradition, but exposed to a vibrant array of religious dissenters and freethinkers, Spinoza flirted with, and then committed, to a brand of rational thinking whose questioning nature found him cursed and excommunicated from his tightly knit community; it was an exodus from religious belief into open enquiry. As rational beings he believed humans needed to commune with their environment continually, learn from it through exposure, transparently and without fear, and always with a collective sense of its being an unending experience of continual modification.

His radicalism, which was embodied in the plain sight of enquiry, attracted the attention of Europe’s intellects and intelligentsia, but he refused the offer of endowments from patrons who kept coming his way: to work for someone was to limit the range of intellectual reach. Instead of patronage he ground out a living making optical lenses, the glassy equipment polished with rough sand through which emerged dim passageways into a wider world, whether out into the heavens or inward into myriad tiny detail. To expound his project he conceived a book on everything: The Ethics. It would address both the realm of God and nature, and ultimately it argued these were indistinguishable, a unity held fast by the transforming momentum of endless modification. The Ethics aimed to make humans more fully human (always perfecting, but never perfect) by having them realize the profoundly non-anthropological conditions that went by the names God and nature – forget God’s representation in human form, forget the idea of a vengeful or loving spirit, forget chains of being and prelapsarian, or uniquely blessed landscapes. Nature (and god) were nothing more than pure structure – the “there-being” that was the world and so everything, the empirically “there” world of things and the spiritually “there” world of feelings were woven into one and the same fabric – and it was with and within this fabric that humans found ourselves folded and from which they might be re-folded anew. Such a being-in-the-world always meant an involved becoming, related to others, and shaped by a mood or affect. Spinoza’s was an entire world away from the enjoined, ordained, and familial commitments of a biblical metaphysics that had the world once an Eden and thence Fallen. It was also an entire world away from an utterly determined, mute world of particles moving in hit and miss patterns. Rather, the entirety of the world was to be found within the universal reason found in each human being and which, were it thought about passionately and clearly, is part of a self-explanatory natural order immanent in all things. Being fallible our comprehension of such an order is always partial, but we might remain nevertheless, with disciplined thought, become aware of its being there in its potentiality, not least because it is the only way of freeing life from the arbitrariness of accident and determinism.

The experience of throwing oneself into the world and striving to know what cannot be fully known is, suggested Spinoza, a grounding paradox of human enquiry that should be relished. It was a paradox that Spinoza felt was especially apparent when humans tried to understand themselves. We humans might, for example, believe ourselves essentially free beings because we make conscious choices, and from this think ourselves into a world whose apparently mute and mutable state renders it subservient, a world for us. Yet close, reflexive rational enquiry yields the precarious nature of such self-assurance. Each of us is affecting and affected by others, and as each of us is placed with the other we find we are bound collectively somehow: we are in communities, cultures and species, groups who abide amid a wider nature that we often experience not as being there for us, but a bundle of forces to which we invariably buckle.

Gilles Deleuze, in his discussion of Spinoza, uses this language of rhythm and force as he describes the mapping of a body (a body can be a human body, an animal body, a body of sounds such as created by birdsong, a mind, an idea) as constitutive of nature:

We call longitude of a body the set of relations of speed and slowness, of motion and rest, between particles that compose it from this point of view, that is, between unformed elements. We call latitude the set of affects that occupy a body at each moment, that is, the intensive states of an anonymous force (force of existing, capacity for being affected). In this way we construct a map of a body. The longitudes and latitudes together constitute Nature […], which is always variable and is constantly being altered, composed and recomposed, by individuals and collectivities.³

Examined from the outside, as it were, Spinoza found we are all of us humans constituted and guided by rhythms, movements, and rests, not our own and by which we are influenced, and rather than resent these affects, or try and compensate for them, we ought to relish their disturbing constraint. Why? Well: it is because nature/God are so different from us, and so indifferent, and yet so compelling in being the only place we have in which to live, that our unfinished nature (our felt urge to be elsewhere, our conatus, which empirically, if we are honest, we all feel) becomes our own; it is immanent to us, as all things in nature are immanent, an ordering in which each is to find its space and to expand or diminish this space by acting and thinking in ways that always resolve to look beyond the place of present settlement. In our “with-ness,” in being always already related to others, we are moved/affected and move/affect through habit, and these habits of socially sanctioned and relationally instituted activity and thought are for many enough of a comfort not to look any further. Their conatus is concealed by an orthodox pursuit of possessions, status, and temporary sensual pleasure. If all we do is comply with tradition and expectation (fix ourselves habitually to the actual) we never expand to reveal the edges of our condition to ourselves, and so become incapable of seeing ourselves anew. The Ethics was a book to teach us otherwise, to bring us elsewhere.

In the book, Spinoza was careful not to associate such an expansion with a kind of “colonial” spread of one’s own inner world. To touch the edges meant keeping them in place. The ethical condition arose when we were thrown into the order of things without the comforts of habit and possession. Instead we were to rely on a more universal passion for encountering and absorbing differences (or otherness) in ways that fused mind, body, and nature into an immanent unity of similarity and difference. An expansion of awareness is created when we learn to treat immediate and everyday passions and experiences as the source of ideas about how to live. In thinking imaginatively the everyday becomes a scene of possible transformation as we look beyond what we are.⁴ And through this capacity to create experiences of the unusual by imaginatively looking beyond comforts and norms we begin to build from the restlessness that most closely embodies the distinctiveness of human beings. Conatus is thus also about one’s capacity to be affected and to affect, which also means one’s capacity to joyfully speculate, to assemble, to put together, and to move beyond.⁵ There is a striving to increase one’s power to act, to do things beyond (what Joseph Schumpeter called) the “pale of routine.” Spinoza’s thinking, so we suggest, is thus bringing us into an intimate relationship with things entrepreneurial.

Spinoza’s thinking was a lure, it shone and twisted in a glassy and opaque world, like his lenses, it opened up new views, new worlds to imagine, pulling the reader on, but to where? For the German Romantics of the late eighteenth century, who were madly filtering his thinking through experiment in literary form, the answer was “nowhere” and this was the point. The writer Novalis was especially enthusiastic. In taking up Spinoza’s refrain of committing oneself to an expansive life of continual modification, he found himself most at home when experiencing unhomeliness, and many of his settings and characters attest to a charged upswell of personal disorientation that emerged from sustained enquiry into one’s own condition. To feel unhomely was a condition of self-awareness grounded in strangely unsettling mirror play: we are closest to understanding what we are when we struggle imaginatively to distance ourselves from what we are. We are both removed from ourselves and, yet, exercising faculties that remain integral to us. In spectating on ourselves we are remaining ourselves, yet are still unable to understand the totality of who we are because we cannot get out of the sphere that is “us” to then spectate fully on our spectating self.

Novalis – whose real name was Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, having adopted his nom de plume from his ancestors who had called themselves de Novali, meaning “clearers of new land” – revelled in such paradoxical curlicues. For here, in this irresolvable clearing between our inexhaustible will to know and our limited knowledge, lay a form of romantic possibility. We cannot know who we are with any certainty because we can only account for the feeling of being alive from the distance of imaginative contemplation and this distance does not get us closer to our essence, but closer to the limits, to the other. So, in striving to know who we are we constitute ourselves in a condition of unhomeliness in which we struggle to represent what resists representation, and it is the struggle itself that best defines us and by which we realize a touching unity with nature: us in the world and the world in us.⁶

With Spinoza the human becomes a figure partaking of the rich multiplicity of the world, encountering the potential of an inseparable body and mind as it wends and wrestles a way through life, without end, and Novalis distils this morphing sensibility by attempting to show how such a protean figure, fully thrown into the world, also puts the world entirely in itself. The sense of “self” emerges both inwardly and outwardly; in encountering something else it encounters also itself, and is affected in one way or the other. If we look for this in ourselves, as Novalis did continually, we sense that we are not wholly what we once were, and we endure a tension between what we were before this spectating experience and what we are now, between what we could only then imagine to what we can now signify.⁷ We are drawn in, affected this way or that, and this tension itself becomes a subject of interest. This restlessness of the unknowable consciousness is what marks us: it is our distinction to be searching and striving; we will never be complete, and are always moving in relation to what is not us, including ourselves. Becoming is how we “are” in the world, the only being is the being of becoming.⁸

Spinoza’s questioning brought the virtual to the fore, and in doing so the distinctions made in the actual world between part and whole, or self and the world, were obliterated in a convergence of self, nature, and God. For Novalis this questioning was embodied in the passionate figure of the poet and philosopher. Through thinking, writing, and imagery this figure becomes aware of its limits, yet strives regardless to realize a ground or “home” or, as is crucial to Spinoza, strives to assemble forces to act beyond the necessities she experiences. This is done without resentment, indeed the poet and philosopher delights in and is curious about the inherent sense of lack that pervades all attempts to know life as such: “All that is visible clings to the invisible. That which can be heard to that which cannot, that which can be felt to that which cannot. Perhaps the thinkable to the unthinkable.”⁹ It is on the liminal and limitless edge where representations stop, but action and feeling continue, that the self discovers itself, but only ever as an enigma, not a unit.¹⁰ Again, it is here, beyond the Schumpeterian “pale of routine,” that entrepreneurial imagination has such strong appeal on the body (mind, of thought, physical) that it is lured into acting such that the virtual is given a way into the actual. Life is extended by creating the organizational “handles” that incipient newness uses to move beyond the limits of the present.

Fictions, fragments

Where Spinoza dealt in concepts and philosophical, political, and legal enquiry, Novalis also dealt in fiction. Whilst fiction need not refer to a person or events in the actual world – the author and words intrude – it does refer to the general sense being made of the world, it shares the same descriptive and propositional forms, and commonly creates eidetic similarities – a person taking similar form to the narrator’s own and experiencing similar events. These characters and events bear the structure of truthfulness – in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, for example, the wind howls, and the moor over whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part II
• Part III
• Index