The Knight Errant's Ideology
of Adventure
David M. Boje and John T. Luhman, New Mexico State University
Presentation to the August, 1999 Academy of Management session on "Reclaiming Indigenous Knowledge"
The new historicism of business is an ideology of adventurous CEOs in their "heroic" conquest of the planet through colonization and global empire building. Through the career training of the MBA, future managers and CEO's find legitimation in their role of global empire builders as the anthropocentric knight-errant. In contrast, Lyotard (1997) tells us a postmodern fable, a heroic journey in which entropic energy, not knight-errant is the hero. In this presentation, we examine the anthropocentric knight's journey as told by Nerlich (1987a, 1987b) and its reflection on the legitimated behavior of contemporary capitalists adventurers. See related paper summarizing the Characters of Merchant of Venice and their representations (Boje, 1999).
Knight-Errant's Heroic Journey. Nerlich traces the ideology of adventure from the high Middle Ages through its transformations into the middle of the eighteenth century. It is the story of our "unknown history of modernity." It is the ideology of adventure that makes the industrial revolution and enlightenment possible as a project of capitalism. Telling the story of modernity through the lens of ideology is an act of criticism of the telos of progress and its legitimation practices in such cultural artifacts as news reports, textbooks, and popular books on business leaders. Knightly tournament and battle stories, poems, and plays of the Middle Ages glorify an "adventure-mentality" (Nerlich, 1987a, p. xix-xxi). It is this "adventure-mentality" that becomes appropriated in capitalistic commerce and production as adventure-practices. Integration of chivalric adventure-ideology into bourgeois consciousness and its use in denoting capitalist activity meant an extension of adventure-desire, adventure-thought, and adventure-mentality ultimately to all domains of social practice (p. xxi).
In adventure, the hero leaves known reality for the unknown; disorder and chaos are embraced to produce new mobile orders and transitory systems; chance and risk are rationally-calculated to secure innovation; other races are integrated by transformation or destruction into new realities. Here Nerlich applies the postmodern science of Prigogine and Stengers (1984). Best and Kellner (1997: 195) summarize the postmodern turn in science:
In science, the postmodern turn emerged as a break from the mechanistic, reductionist, naïve realist, and deterministic worldview of Newtonian physics. Advocates of postmodern science claim that the modern scientific paradigm is giving way in the 20th century to a new mode of scientific thinking based on concepts such as entropy, evolution, organism, indeterminacy, probability, relativity, complementarity, interpretation, chaos, complexity, and self-organization" (Best & Kellner, 1997: 195)
It is the ideology of modern adventure with its rational-rules-mentality, telos of time-progress, denial of nature's entropy that is being questioned by postmodern science. It is the modern adventure, on a quest for capital accumulation that is glorified in our profession as management educators.
The more romantic ideology of adventure developed in stories of knighthood at the end of the 12th century in France and with stories of King Arthur and his Round Table and Lancelot. Here courtly and knightly ideology combined its medieval expression to make the life of adventure purposeful. The Knight-errant's dangerous exploits and defense of the king gave meaning to the courtly life of nobility. Knighthood began in the 9th century as a "rude material necessity," since only first-born had property inheritance, the younger sons were made knights. The goal of the adventure was to flee starvation, lessen the burden on courtly economy, by accumulating wealth elsewhere and searching for a rich heiress through itinerant knighthood. "Crowds of knights also traveled along in this army of wandering populace, and probably - in anticipation of the later robber barons - had many small occasional adventures or picked up some booty under way" (Nerlich, 1987a, p. 9). Until the romantic knight-courtly ideology of the 12th century, Knights were anarchic, wandering gangs. It was also in the 12th century that kings and princes centralized political and economic power by employing knightly armies to establish territorial claims.
During the same time the bourgeoisie rose into economic power and, together with the clergy, sought to render knighthood a noble institution. The bourgeoisie and monarchy combined to neutralize the violence of the knightly institution, transforming the real adventure into fiction, with fairies, magicians, enchanted forests, giants and dragons. This is what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call a "white wall," a screen to project fairy-tale reality in order the mask the social reality surrounding the knight-errant, the centralization of the feudal state by martial activity forced knights to give up adventure journeys as their means of income. The 12th century life of the court was knightly tournament and regular military service, rather than the plunder of the knight-errant. Individual adventure, grasping individual plunder is forbidden. In addition, the Crusades offered knights an opportunity to earn a living and acquire property through collective adventure, the looting, pillage, rape, and extermination of infidels. At the close of the Middle Ages, knights rented themselves as mercenaries. Knight-errant became knight-soldier until knightly-forms of battle became obsolete in the 14th century. The knight was not welcomed back into nobility and either fell back into the non-noble class or persisted as robber baron (Nerlich, 1987a, p. 14). "Directly or indirectly, therefore, adventure had to be eliminated from courtly ideology in order for it to function as the courtiers' ideology" (p. 14).
From 6th to 13th centuries knights fought the Moors throughout Spain. As in France, when the Monarchy centralized power, the pillaging adventure, as a means of livelihood, was no longer feasible. "The existence of impoverished, unemployed masses of hidalgos thus became one of the most aggravating social problems of Spain in the late fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries" (Nerlich, 1987a, p. 27). Even the conquest of America did not ease the knight's poverty problem, though it did continue medieval Spanish knightly ideology and pillage-practice abroad until 1560. At home, the hidalgos who could not become civil servants or priests had no livelihood. As in France, "the loss of the real meaning of knighthood corresponds to the mass propagation of the fairy-tale-like ideal of the adventurer knight" (p. 29). Don Quixote is an example of this genre.
Capitalist's Non-Heroic Adventure. The presenters are persuaded by Nerlich's studies of the ideology of adventure, that we have concocted a hero's adventure that in its conquests of the world and the human soul is not terribly heroic. Modernist organizational theory is an ideology that legitimates conquest, colonization, and empire building on a global stage. The ideology legitimates power of one group over another. Making the recipients of adventure into sub-human creatures, and the capitalist as the morally superior exploiter, legitimates enslavement and exploitation of "natives" and the laborious poor by the master. The ideology makes this adventure a natural right of the stronger over the weaker, for the good of the human race (Nerlich, 1987b, p. 207). This was the thesis of Hobbes' Leviathan (1651). When Hobbes looked into the abyss he saw the war of every man against every man, which for Marx was the anarchic-war of every capitalist against every capitalist. The ideology of adventure for over five centuries has justified economic wars of imperialism, colonialism, and global empire. And legitimated the mechanistic division of labor in the workshop as the way to control the biological tendencies of society toward war, thereby keeping us from falling into the abyss of chaos. The ideology of adventure gives legitimacy to the praxis of the industrial capitalist by combining a theory of mechanistic materialism (geometric-mathematical thinking) with organic survival of the fittest materialism (those who exploit nature and the weak are the fittest).
Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) worldview built up Bacon's view of New Atlantis (1623, as cited in Nerlich, 1987). Bacon saw the importance of artisan technology to the emergence of industrial (manufacturing) capitalism and connected it to the merchant adventure ideology of those (commercial capitalists) that financed (risking money, but staying home) or actually made sea voyages. Max Weber's critique of capitalism viewed the resituated ideology of adventure as a rational-asceticism born of Protestantism and Calvinism which legitimated bureaucracy over the feudal heritage of rapacious "adventure capitalism" of the Middle Ages.
Of contemporary relevance are the current varieties of adventure ideology that give power and legitimacy to the managers of global change. Biologic, psychological, and spiritual reasons are given to justify the dominance over nature and human exploitation as ethical, lawful, and scientific. Our current equations of freedom with free trade are rooted in Bacon. The merchant adventurers in Bacon's "body politic" are "the large vein which conveys blood to the liver: nourishing the limbs of the kingdom with trade. People are planted on foreign soils to be gardeners, ploughmen, laborers, smiths, carpenters, jointers, fisherman, fowlers, with some few apothecaries, surgeons, cooks and bakers" (Bacon as cited and summarized in Nerlich, 1987a: 192-3).:
Plantations [i.e., colonies-R.C.] are amongst ancient, primitive, and heroical works. When the world was young it begat more children' but now it is old it begets fewer, for I may justly account new plan plantations to be the children of former kingdoms. I like a plantation in a pure soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to plant in others. For else it is rather an extirpation than a plantation. Planting of countries is like planting of woods, for you must make account to leese almost twenty years profit, and expect your recompense in the end. For the principal thing that hath been the destruction of most plantations hath been the base and hasty drawing of profit in the first years. It is true, speedy profit is not to be neglected (Bacon, as cited in Nerlich, 1987a: 192).
In this quote the organic metaphor locates the conqueror and conquered in biological science and links this blend to the ideology of global adventure. This is an act of "ideologizing of the praxis of adventure," which began even before Bacon and continues to legitimate contemporary global theatrics. The legitimacy comes in the form of ethical qualities associated with the adventure and adventurer (bravery, willingness to take capital risks, discovery, conquest, and wealth accumulation) through global production and free trade networks.
The presenters have located the characters of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice as theatric exemplars of the clash of Feudal and Bourgeoisie world-views of feudalism and capitalism, and their respective adventure ideologies. Shakespeare's play plots the historical victory of bourgeoisie over Medieval ideologies of adventure.
1. Knightly adventure: Knight-errant adventure
2. Feudal Nobility System of Courtly-knightly adventure
Great Nobility adventure (e.g. Prince of Morocco & Prince of Arragon)
Petty Nobility adventure (e.g. Shylock, usurer's capital and holding a mirror to Antonio's atrocities of the world of commercial capital and plantation-colonialism, plus his retreat behind pseudo-Christian polemics, p. 159, 160)
3. Bourgeoisie adventures
Revolutionary bourgeoisie adventure (e.g. Portia = Fortuna, "liberated, emancipated, in full equality, free of all religious or racial delusions", p. 179 to create a brighter, better world, p. 162).
Commercial bourgeoisie adventure (e.g. Antonio, capitalist mode of production in its bloody, ravenous subjugation of the New World in colonial exploitation and indigenous genocide, p. 159-160, 162)
Merchant adventure (e.g. Bessanio, the scholar, soldier, merchant)
What is missing from the play is the modern adventure of the industrial and financial capitalist adventurer. As we move into late global capitalism, there is a postmodern adventure being written. It is a journey with capital import. We are beginning to design our body and mind; we are already designing our environment; there are postmodern organizations everywhere. We have two problems: (1) the postmodern organizations that are most obvious are hybrids with modern and pre-modern forms; and, (2) there are mostly dark postmodern organizational forms. Rather than a split between modern and postmodern, hybrids of each strand appropriates the other. Disney's story factory produces a postmodern pastiche of spectacle while selling clothing and toys made on the backs of Haitian and Asian women. Nike is a postmodern temple of spectacle, a master of spin control with a global virtual organization built on a network of Asian sweatshops. Monsanto is walking us straight into the high-tech biological 21st century. The postmodern ideology of adventure, like the modern ideology of adventure, has its promises of Nirvana and its human and ecological exploitation.
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