Suchergebnisse

This paper will consider three major conceptions of desire and how they relate to the human condition. For many desire is conceived either as lack, a 'desire-for', or as some affirmative force that enables us to 'reach beyond ourselves'.This is desire reduced to a dualism in order to negate one pole in favour of the other. Georges Bataille offers a third way, where the two form a complex dialectic such that desire is both lack and affirmation. His theory demonstrates how desire reveals the sacred as a transcendental immanence rather than psychic ideal and where the profane follows rather than precedes the sacred. His desire is one that conceptualizes us as humans that occasionally catch glimpses of the sacred but these glimpses are insufficient to have and to hold it. For Bataille we cannot become God, we cannot have the sacred because we are human, all too human.

In this paper, I argue that the management and engineering literatures on new product innovation conceive it as evolving by some form of biological evolutionary mechanism: punctuated equilibrium, neo-Lamarckian genetic transfer or neo-Darwinian natural selection. These accounts hold out the possibility of `best practice' models based on particular views of time and progress that are too limiting to adequately explain radical innovation in terms of a process rather than the `final' product. I then turn to the works of Henri Bergson to consider how these may help us to consider the processual quality of innovation.