ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses ‘order’, ‘stability’ and ‘differentiation’, themes which Robert Cooper’s work has introduced to the philosophy of organization. I will argue that if ‘orders’ of many kinds are to be understood as ‘constructed’, and if the study of such construction is to acknowledge that ‘orders’ are not fictional and are instead temporarily and locally realized, a new ‘sensibility’ is required. This sensibility blends themes from deconstruction and themes drawn from contemporary understandings of ‘chaos’. Just as dualisms like matter-idea and being-becoming emerge from third terms that cannot be reduced to either pole of the dualism, so ‘chaos’ is not the opposite of order, but gives rise to both order and disorder. To be considered real, an order must be marked by, among other things, a start. If all talk of starts risks being mistaken for talk about origins, then post-structuralist arguments, at first glance, would seem to rule them out and reveal all order as fictional. My aim is to counter this tendency of critique by disambiguating ‘origin’ and ‘start’. To do this I replace a conception of stabilities as the outcome of a contest of speeds with a conception of stabilities as the outcome of slowings.
