Breaking from the Weight of the Eternal Present

Abstract

This article reflects on an attempt to encourage students to imagine alternative forms of organizing, and on the ultimate failure of this pedagogical experiment. It explores students’ reluctance to take organizational difference seriously in terms symptomatic of a broader inertia in social sciences that severs ‘difference’ from the realm of possibility, reducing difference to degrees of capitalist practices and the future to an extension of the present. Drawing on the work of Gibson-Graham, it argues that making alternative organizing conceivable requires challenging the capitalocentric reading of the economy, and developing a vocabulary of economic differences. It suggests that to address the common charge that alternatives will not be able to withstand the ‘tide of history’, we also need to work on conceptions of time and history that open the future to the possibility of difference. It draws on Foucault’s genealogy to ‘break history’ and insert points of rupture at which ‘new beginnings’ can be imagined.

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