Remote Work as Deleuzian Cinematography: Organizationality Beyond the Frame

Abstract

Increasingly, work and management happen in remote and decentered ways. The Covid-19 crisis has both made visible and amplified this trend. While they are in front of their computers, trapped between the frames of their screens, workers are more and more part of a cinematographic experience they cannot act upon (yet). They become mere activities in a broader assemblage of images. Work and management become signs, flows, activities at the surface of screens. How to describe this cinematographic experience? Here, we propose to come back to the philosophy of cinema offered by Merleau-Ponty and most of all, Deleuze. We stress their differences and complementarities while introducing cinematography as a key dimension of organizing remote work. In the context of remote work, we show how the concept of depth (in particular in Deleuze’s philosophy) can be particularly helpful to understand the temporalities and spatialities at stake in decentered new work imageries. In the world of images, subjectivities are not really at stake yet. A new organizationality that makes it even more difficult than ever to reach a true, agentive self at work.