Oleg Genisaretsky. Abstracts of the speech

Abstracts of the speech
at the joint seminar on September 18

Oleg Genisaretsky

Publication date: November 21, 2000

Two words about the task that I see before me.
Last year, my activity here was explained by the conviction that thinking is not something that is given to you by nature. Thinking is not a subject for study. Thinking can be done like voice, and this is a special job. The experience of last year convinced me that this is possible at HSE, and it is worth continuing to work here in this direction, which is what I am doing now. My thesis is that without special thinking skills it is impossible to talk about the thought and conceivability of something.

My intuition tells me that we live in a very repressive communication environment. We live in an environment that is extremely built up with various kinds of structures. In this environment there is almost no room left for deep immersion in oneself, for self-sufficient thinking.
I'm not looking for your understanding. What I am trying to achieve is that you do not need to understand me, otherwise there will be no thought process. Thought requires not only others, but also “I” as another. Thought is not psychologically subjective.

I believe that one of the main inhibitors for corporate management tools is the party-type communication mindset, in which any responsibility for the quality and effectiveness of thought is dissolved.

Therefore, next we will talk about the design and pedagogical strategy. The subject of my work can be designated as “Humanitarian problems of strategy and technology”. To the extent that we inherit old management practices, in many areas the problems as such simply do not exist. Recognizing that the world consists of problems is a special philosophical attitude. Think in units such as “problem”, identify and formulate them. The first problem is to construct a classification and classify a certain part of the problems as humanitarian. The second problem is to distinguish between problems and objects, and to identify the relationships between them. The assertion that problematicity is an ontological quality means that we part with the intuition of naturalness. The natural becomes a problem.

Along with communicative repressiveness, there is a doom for “project-innovative pathos.” In those areas in which there was no project culture, the project culture must be rehabilitated. The problem of modernity is the synchronization of which processes we evaluate it by. Project-innovative pathos is one-sided, it is inadequate for slow processes, it is inadequate for completing asymptotic processes, it is inadequate for thinking in terms of constants of reproduction. Therefore, one of the humanitarian problems is the need to develop a mental apparatus that works with processes of a different class.

I want to draw your attention to the problem of understanding a corporation as a legal body, contrasting it with the understanding of a legal entity. I see a contradiction in the fact that the corporeal and material nurtures within itself various kinds of virtual, light reflexive entities. One is nested within the other. It is necessary to develop a typology of relationships between those entities that we call corporations.