The gathering of the Gurus: spiritual capital and the Shambhala institute for authentic leadership

Theatre Research in Canada, Spring-Fall, 2005 by David Fancy

Cet article suggere que la notion de Jon McKenzie selon laquelle la << performance >> est une nouvelle formation de pouvoir onto-histotique peut nous aider a comprendre pourquoi les activites qui font appel a la spiritualite, a la performance culturelle et aux pratiques administratives a rendement eleve sont a l'avant-garde de modes de controle social en emergence. L'exemple du programme dete du Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership de Halifax (Nouvelle-Ecosse) sert a illustrer l'integration de composantes qui font appel a la spiritualite, a la performance et au capital. L'auteur montre comment des modes de performance orientalises qui ont ete appropries par l'Institute fonctionnent en conjonction avec des formes avancees de << gestion de la performance >> pour justifier la presence d'un corps astral corporatif et la suppression concomitante des contradictions du capital au sein des corps situes sur des maillons inferieurs de la grande chaine d'une entite sociale donnee.

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.

Edward Thurlow (Lord Chancellor of Britain from 1778 to 1792)

We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. Gilles Deleuze, in 1990

This brief inquiry begins with a riddle in the form of a double question: what does Tibetan Tantric dance have to do with selling property in Halifax County, Nova Scotia; and why, we might also ask, does such a question fit within the context of a collection of papers on theatre in Atlantic Canada? The following pages are intended as the beginnings of an answer.

In a recent study entitled Perform or Else: from Discipline to Performance, Jon McKenzie explores the emergence of "performance" as an "onto-historic formation of power and knowledge" (194) that operates across a broad range of academic disciplines and other sites of knowledge production:

   From congressional attacks on performance artists to
   high performance managers to the performativity of
   everyday speech, performance so permeates US society
   that it evokes that mysterious circle of mist which
   Nietzsche said envelops any living thing and without
   which lire becomes 'withered, hard, and barren.' 'Every
   people; the philosopher wrote, 'even every man, who
   wants to become ripe needs such an enveloping madness,
   such a protective and veiling cloud" (3)

McKenzie's provocative re-mobilization of a spiritually evocative phrase such as "mysterious circle of mist" can be understood to wryly foreground the quasi-ontological import of the newly-pervasive term "performance." This invocation can also serve to index another, perhaps less wry, and, if less pervasive, increasingly common use of spiritually loaded terminology within the broader performance matrix. Terms such as "spirit" "soul," and "God" have recently found increased currency in a specific institutional context with heavy investments in the enveloping madness gestured towards by McKenzie: the corporation. This structure/ institution, analogous to others such as "the public" or "the nation" in their complex and irreducible possibilities of definition and association, operates in the social imaginary at a level that Charles Taylor has articulated as being between the embodied knowledge of habitus and explicit doctrine (42). Indeed, as a site of intersection for a host of performative manifestations--from the performance of achievement of organizational goals to the technological performance fueling the expansion of such institutions--the corporation in post-industrial societies is an integral component of what Herbert Marcuse described in 1955 as a society organized around the "performance principle," an "historical reality principle founded on economic alienation and repressive desublimation" (qtd. in McKenzie 3).

In an ongoing effort to apply a discursive salve to the corporations sharp effects on workers, managers, investors, and the various environments in which it operates, over the past twenty-five years management theorists have increasingly pursued an ontologizing drive of their own, namely that of constructing the corporation as an organism, complete with not only body, but also soul or spirit (Novak; Sandelands). This actuality is in close accordance with Gilles Deleuze's argument that capitalism has metastasized away from reproducing societies of discipline. No longer is contemporary capitalist production to be largely characterized by carceral factory spaces and fixed financial referents in the form of "minted money that locks gold as a numerical standard" (Deleuze). Rather we in the economic North find ourselves living in societies tending towards control characterized by sophisticated methods of"ultrarapid forms of free-floating control" that transform the ever-undulating corporation into "a spirit, a gas" that operates in a matrix of "free floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies" (Deleuze).

In a recent article entitled "Irreconcilable Foes? The Discourse of Spirituality and the Discourse of Organizational Science" Margaret Benefiel notes that dozens of books, articles and websites encouraging the integration of spirituality into the workplace have appeared in North America in the past ten years. The claims of the authors, she notes, "range from stating that spirituality in business will increase profits and improve morale to explaining that spirituality ensures stability and security in a changing economy" (383). It only follows that the individual human beings working within the corporate environment should also be "spiritualized" further ushering notions of the corporate divine into the social imaginary, accelerating allegiance to the corporate metaphysical, as well as allowing various projects of control to be pursued to their fullest possible logical extent.