Critical Management Workshop Series with Dr Antonia Pont

Please join us for the next instalment of the Critical Management Studies Seminar.

Monday 5 June, 4pm-5pm
William MacMahon Ball Theatre, Old Arts (Room 107)

To Lose Interest in Self-Improvement—or Organisation on Other Terms
Dr Antonia Pont (Deakin)

Abstract:
This discussion takes up the contemporary trend of “wellness” vocabularies deployed in management, including the speaker’s experience of it in Higher Education contexts. It will consider “wellness” and its sibling focus of mental health, as companion notions which appear alongside neoliberal norms of transactionality, competition and productivity. It offers a preliminary critique of why ‘wellness” appears in the discourse repertoire of an achievement society, Leistungsgesellschaft. The tendency to use a description of “productivity” (or its lack) as a barometer for self-assessment is a conspicuous feature of the reach of neoliberal organisation and our inability to doubt or set aside its “obviousness”. The paper will open the question of whether it is possible to think aslant to, or subtractively from, the apparent finite binary of productive/lazy, or neoliberally-organised/unwell. Reacting to valid suspicion of the vocabularies of wellness (mindfulness, presence, the ubiquitous invitations to “reach out” etc.), a person may be caught in the slippage wherein all organisation seems to amount to neoliberal organisation, therefore marooning themselves in the option of no organisation at all. This could affirm the logics of the moment rather than divesting from them. Bolstered by Badiou’s equation in Logics of Worlds, I propose not that one forego organisation altogether, since this is simply another mode of compliance. The paper asks instead how one might approach discerningly the underlying logics of the terms of organisation per se. Considering Badiou’s statement,The only thing the dispossessed have is their discipline, and if we read ‘discipline’ here to mean one’s ability to intelligently self-organise together, the paper hopes to open a space of thought and serious irreverence wherein we might subtract ourselves from allegiances to a productivity regime and from the contours of wellness, without giving up on experimental modes of organisation, their temporalities and commitments.

Speaker bio:
Antonia Pont is a long-term practitioner of sitting meditation practice/yoga and reading/writing. She works at Deakin University as Associate Professor in Writing, Literature and Culture. She publishes across theoretical, critical and creative platforms. Relevant works include: A Philosophy of Practising with Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (EUP, 2021) and Practising with Deleuze (co-authored, EUP, 2017), You Will Not Know in Advance What You’ll Feel (Rabbit Poets Series, 2019).