The social theorists Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari had one core complaint about Freud, saying that he saw Oedipus in everything, which interfered with his ability to truly understand the rich complexities of human beings and their systems and interactions; and that Marx was similar, in a way, because everything human had become part of a drama around a dialectic of economies.
Though Deleuze and Guattari were both influenced and inspired by the French student and worker uprisings of 1968, and were motivated along social justice and had socialist themes, they did however acknowledge that capitalism had a special talent for decoding the flows of desire and and in doing so actually engage with particular complexities that Freudian and Marxist thought would overlook. To Deleuze and Guattari, Freudian and Marxist thinking was arborescent, or tree-like, because everything group from the central trunk and roots.
On the other hand, capitalism was developing qualities that made it more rhizomatic, or grass-like, since it sprung up everywhere, had no center, and was therefore, at least in its most simple, ideal form, more democratic and anarchic, and in some ways resembles early anthropologic economic forms, such as barter.
This problem, as we know, is that captialism doesn’t end there. As it grows it begins to congeal. The spread of wealth begins to collect in specific pockets of leverage and power. It loses its rhizomatic qualities and becomes its opposite. It also begins to lose its ability to engage with complexity through its chief weakness – a tendency to simplify everything, all human value, to a single variable: capital.
And its arguable that this simplication has engendered something like a univeral language and system of evaluation, which has allowed for the profluence of great expanses of wealth. The problem is that we begin to measure things along that single variable, and compare things that have different qualities, as if they were the same, but of different relative values. When discussing Bergson in a previous post, I pointed out that we do not want to judge apples for being poorer oranges, and vice versa, but Capitalism, as it has manifested in our lives, has us doing just that.
One of the problems with the whole trend toward certification is that the entire business world has begun to convince itself that there are core skill-sets that can be taught to anyone so that human beings can be used as replaceable parts, or be replaced by a fairly simple set of computer code, without taking the whole of people’s education and experience into account. We talk of “throwing another body” on a problem, if someone with a certain level of expertise is no longer available.
And although this kind of thinking makes management seem a simpler and more fluid process, like the directing of liquids or grains of sand toward one goal or another, it’s up to us, on a perhaps different levels of our organizations, to keep an eye on and appreciate those differences, think against the trend of uniformity, not only because it’s smarter and more humane, but because it’s in our own interest, both on a large scale in regard to the economy as a whole, but also because we, as individuals, are best to maintain the resouces we have that cannot be replaced by automation and artificial intelligence.