Entrepreneurship and the Creation of Organization (for True Epub) by Hjorth Daniel

Author:Hjorth, Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Part II

5Organization-creationSeduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315714455-8

Introduction

To approach seduction we begin with the figure of Don Juan, specifically with Kierkegaard’s study of Mozart’s version, i.e. Don Giovanni.1

The backdrop of Kierkegaard’s analysis is his idea – developed in Either/Or and in Fear and Trembling – of aesthetic life.2 The person living aesthetically lives for pleasure and tries to make life a flow of diverting and stimulating experiences that might intensify in its frequency and novelty. Most of us, argued Kierkegaard, remain in this aesthetic stage, seeking pleasant and stimulating experiences so as to paper over creeping boredom, or worse, a looming void of despair.

It is against this aesthetic backdrop that we suggest entrepreneurial processes are initiated in events of seduction. Kierkegaard relates the aesthetic to a life of possibilities, though fragmentary and mobile ones, which as often as not belie their own promise as they become riddled with frustration or opposition. His is an ironic understanding of the struggles that mark human experience, one that resonates with Romanticism and which, we argue, resonates with entrepreneurial life. Entrepreneurial life is also a form of life being grasped by possibilities (or, in entrepreneurial language, opportunities). Today we would of course think opportunities can be created rather by those who set sail and leave the safety of the harbour. This is because a theory of entrepreneurship has been heavily influenced by a concept of risk (or uncertainty),3 yet it was coined at a time when pursuing the chance to survive by seeking harbour was a more pressing everyday concern. In the modern, industrial and economized society, for Hirschman at least, passions are dominated by interests and the economic dominates the social, and opportunity is framed as a concept belonging to the pursuit of economic gain, profit on a market.4 No longer is an opportunity an opening to survival, given I can reach the harbour. Rather the opposite; if I leave the harbour, I can make and take opportunities to enrich life. It becomes an aesthetic activity in which fear and anxiety are pushed aside (though never into oblivion).

The aesthetic describes a life being lived in ways that creates possibility, in order to make life interesting, diverting, less captivated by tedious rigidities. There is thus resonance between our interest in the creation of possibilities, for which seduction is an opening of the entrepreneurial process. In its more generative guise, seduction, as part of the aesthetic life, would also bear witness to a life of passion. This is the life where a power to be affected (your receptivity) is intensified. One’s openness to “what could become” sets imagination into movement and this movement makes events take shape and a pursuit of an event is also what makes it become concrete as a real virtuality that needs to become actualized.5 Aesthetic life, in Kierkegaard’s text, is a life where boredom, despair, fear and anxiety are being chased away by a welcoming of possibilities (or better, potentialities, what Deleuze would call virtualities) directing desire onto new paths.

It seems this life of passion is also consuming, has no end.

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