Project People
Anders Fogh Jensen
www.filosoffen.net
Seminar: What are we
today and what are we becoming?
Dispuk
10 of June 2010
Crete
During
the 20th century the western world went through a transformation of
basic ways of dealing with time, space, activity and relations. These
transformations led to a life with temporary projects and permanent
feelings of passage, which we experience in our everyday life today. The
resistance towards hierarchy, planning ways of production and
reproduction – the factory and the family, for instance – is often
associated with the so-called revolt of 68 directed against authorities.
But as a matter of fact the disintegration of the system of routines and
repetitions, which is occasionally referred to as ‘discipline’,
began much earlier. In his novel The Process from 1925 Franz
Kafka described the difficulties and frustrations of Josef K who was
accused for something he didn’t know what was. Josef K was faced with
a system that was no longer capable of judging – and as such he was in
a permanent and involuntary state of postponement. Now we can see that
this blurry state of things and state of mind was only the beginning of
a long dissolution of a stable system and its transformation into
another system, the projective organisation of activities.
During the late sixties and seventies revolts
against and challenges to the disciplinary organisation of the world
took place. The disciplinary system was founded as and in institutions
from 1650 to 1800. Discipline ruled the world into squares, planned
every action and movement, and scaled people in hierarchies. The
disciplinary system was a respond to the freedom that followed from the
decline of the feudal world.
The revolt against and challenge to discipline took
place in all disciplinary institutions trying to eliminate hierarchies
and transcend disciplinary arrangements and orders. And it took place
more or less synchronic, breaking out in the sixties and seventies. It
was an antithesis to discipline within such different areas as education,
production, warfare, architecture, administration, sexuality and
coupling. Also in sport disciplines, the arranging of the football teams
and ways of dancing underwent these changes. Discipline was good at
repetition and planning, but it was challenged on its ability to change,
to move fast, to adjust to customer needs and to integrate and make use
of chance instead of trying to eliminate the unpredictable. For instance,
new flexible ways of arranging the football team emerged with the libero
and the Dutch Totaalvoetbal in the seventies at the same time as
the dance floors witnessed a de-codification of the old couple dances.
However, the dream of the sixties and seventies did
not become reality. Instead we were faced with silence, economic crisis
and despair of the youth in the 80ies. The revolt and challenge of the
60’es and 70ies did not end as it was intended – it did not end as
anarchy or flat organization structure. Instead of the disciplinary
calculated structure from above, we got the project evolving from
below in all kind of what we used to call institutions: School,
administration, work, sexual interchange, warfare, architecture, sports,
friendships and so on. And so, the partial dissolution of the old family
came out as a culture of single life. The social projective structure
transgresses the old institutions making plateaus of projects as
interdisciplinary activities. This social structure overlying the old
disciplinary structure, I call The Project Society.
Now the project society as a social condition
of temporary projects is the condition in which one has to live today.
Becoming project people is adjusting to these projective conditions,
where every one is looking for the next project while the present ones
are running out. The project is a ‘toss forward’ where no one knows
the exact chances of the project becoming reality. What one knows is
that every project is temporary and that it is not repeated. The
condition is thus a condition of permanent transition. Organizing
activities in projects calls for the necessity of a network that can
facilitate the passage into the next project. It is thus required of
project people to be extremely extrovert and capable of communicating
confidence. It brings forward an aesthetisation of the personal
relations since the impression becomes still more important and since
the relations are temporary. It is not the time for long term promises
– and where long term promises occur they are often invaded by a
feeling of getting stuck or of sinking after some time, as it is the
case in the work field and sometimes in the marriage.
In the light of this, discipline becomes something
new. It becomes the old fashioned way of living and organising
activities. Discipline is surrounded with nostalgia, hopes and dreams.
It is what we try to achieve but always must show that we can transgress.
Becoming project people is becoming post-disciplinary people. And this
implies adjusting to the condition of always becoming something else.
Becoming project people is becoming passage people, or it is quite
simple becoming becoming.
