ABSTRACT
A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘it’ is the condition of the ‘think’…Even the ‘it’ contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit: ‘thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently…”
(Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1990)
Introduction
In order to delimit the fields of perception, discursive reason has to focus itself upon ‘central’ figures (Lyotard, 1971). Thus, for instance, there can be no economics without such figures as exchange, value, redistribution, and the like; there can be no organizational perspective on human action without, clearly, the figure of organization. These figures, as Lyotard emphasizes, direct attention, centre and unify the bulk of possible utterances and delineate the range of perception. Such figures, ecstatically apparent in any such discourse, usually point to the referent of a field. They constitute matters of interpellation, reflection and understanding. Yet, they are sometimes taken for granted. Although present as implicit referents they remain concealed and are therefore seldom the target of questioning. The discourse on organizing, as it has developed in organization studies, encompasses such a veiled figure, namely: that of the organizational subject.
