This is a long abstract sent to a seminar this summer - enjoy and comment.. hope to go the sunny side for a few days once again..
Politics is an aesthetic matter,
a reconfiguration of the way we share out or divide places and times, speech
and silence, the visible and the invisible.
(Rancière, 2003)
Challenge to what?
Following Rancière’s words above, there are a number of questions begging to be discussed. And a number of questions that need to be explored again and again in the world of organising. If organising is always political, it is surely also always aesthetic. And though much organising seeks to place its kick off point in a discourse of communicative identity entrenched in rationality, there is always a dynamism in organising which escapes the master plan.
We could speak, as Rancière, paraphrasing the elders[1], of a politics of displacement. In this displacement, there is a question: what is displaced? Is it an order of everyday organising that is being displaced, and thus, is there a democratic dialogue to run, one which should itself be inspired by the challenge of the aesthetic? Whether one way or another, we should be searching, I believe, for the points of convergence, in which the actual and the virtual join in the evental. In these points, that may be labelled poïetic, or poetic, something is brought forth in the disappearance of something that was there. This is a possible point of intuitive spark, an ignition of fire in the quiet forest of organising. But to make the difference from what the organisers call “virtual dreaming”, this point must take place within organising itself, and within work life. Though perhaps we should speak of life at work, rather than work life, to describe the force in which the intuitive spark erupts from the point of convergence.
Even if we do accept these ideas – and many would not; many would claim them to be a mere waste of time, time away from politics, away from economics, away from labour struggles. But if we do – then there are still questions to be worked with, to be explored. The paper and the research behind it treat a by no means exhaustive list of these questions. They may have to be systematized, but maybe the very movement of intuition makes this irrelevant, a symptom of mistrust in the force of organising.
So seven questions, now – for now:
Q.1 Dialectics, contradiction or just a slip of
perspective?
Are there a contradiction and a counteraction of forces at play between the aesthetic and the political? At first sight, the words of Rancière seem to open up to something which is quickly acknowledged as a central element of all political action today. What would propaganda be without the aesthetical focus that drives its seductive call? Where would organising be today without internal moves of seduction, of advertising from within, or even with the external move of constructing images for the public, that lead back to motivate employees within?
However, if we add the dimension of the intuitive spark to the aesthetics of the event, then the moment may move beyond the hedonistic self-confirmation threatening to dominating life at work. Shifting to this perspective of course also means that I am inserting a conflict where I had just disregarded it. Why insert intuition as a sixth or seventh sense, of all it does it reinsert a line of antagonism in the smug world of organising? My claim would be hardly surprising by now: it is not I inserting intuition and its spark of politics, this happens all the time. What also happens, however, is that this is precisely where the line of conflict has been placed long ago by the joint forces of communications and HR. Intuition must be blocked and directed, it must be lead from quasi-chaos to concept and strategy. In practical terms, this means that intuition must be kept at the less-than individual level, leaving the field between the individual and the collective to strategy and politics.
In as far as there may be a less-than individual moment of aesthetics between the thing and the people, and in as far as this may termed intuitive, surely this moment must work for organising?
Q.2 So what if we turned it around?
And what if we did in fact turn around that logic? If we dared to put the statement that the moment of displacement in which the intuitive and the aesthetic dwell is what organisation should work for, not the other way around. As it is, maybe we are not exactly in a situation where organising works against the ‘point of convergence’, surely we could not claim that organising works for the point, the moment?
And if it did, if we toy with the idea that this could be performed in a series of experimentation, in life at work, in life on the edge of work – we might still wonder what this would in fact perform. Does this lead, as was suggested to me once[2], to the alternative to rational order of democracy, an alternative that bears the head of a wolf and the voice of a siren, an alternative labelled fascist, irrational, terrorist, etc? or are we beyond that fear, after the critique of Deleuze & Guattari and the disclaim of fascist micro-organisation? Even within the safe haven of organising theory, the call for fascist and totalitarian tendencies has been made[3]. So then, where would it take us? And what is the difference? To take the second part of the question first, probably the difference is that the meeting between matter and time in the convergence of minds and action is not something to deal with from above. This, again, is what makes it so difficult to truly accept for the management of organisation, operating within still tighter regimes of control and commitment.
So if this is in fact a political moment, it lies perhaps in a possible meaning of ‘crisis’? Crisis could be in the body that feels a force within, in the body of minds and bodies reacting to a twist of the everyday that makes organising seem obsolete and secondary, after the announcement through their commonality of a space of doubt. And again, if this is not just a field of virtuality of dreaming, this must mean that the body of bodies acts, in more than mere reaction, so as to force a new understanding out of organising towards its own field of potentiality.
Q.3 Could organising revolve around these points?
If this means that a division is born, as the moment ignites possible new routes to be realised only in action, then the relation between intuition, ignition and organising is no longer one of antagonism. But could this be real? Could organising really turn to concentrate upon this eventality of life at work? What about control, then? This is the time of the ‘jump in the artwork’[4], in which interventions can only be recognized as they act, as they perform – but this points back to a sense of division and creation in the intervention itself.
So if we are to open up organising to such a concentric opening towards its middle, does this mean that art and anarchy must begin to de-virtualise themselves and turn responsible? This, to some extent, is what is already happening with a range of artworks at work inside organisations: rather than repeating the aesthetics of the impossible moment of revolutionary creation, they repeat the aesthetics of the innocent act of self-reflection. Could it be that a new line of art in the organisation could begin to form, one that is not ordered by management organisers? There could be an art form that creates from the unpredictable space of life at work without a strategic fence around it that does not make the organisation reflect upon it self. Instead, the movement from the moment could do something else. It might hold on to the uncolonised irreducibility of intuition, leading nowhere in advance, yet everywhere as the form of every day forces working for potentiality rather than the aestheticising of control mechanisms.
Q.4 Is it possible to keep this within organisations?
If, if, if… would this lead to a revitalisation of the sense of history in the organisation, one that has been caught up and tamed by revisionism and storytelling? Of course this leads nowhere but infertile nostalgia, or even worse, uninhabited nostalgia, a mausoleum of the organisation. But there might be a possibility to change the dictum of “Do you remember the beautiful days of which we have cut off the ugly moments?”, into a slightly less secured dictum of “let’s make another moment, which once again or for the first time will reconnect the universal into the singular, whatever the price may be”. Dreaming, some would say. But is this not the critical point itself – reconnecting universality and singularity is the moment of the event, and the moment in which every item, every space, every actor, may achieve infinity within its finitude. In every revolution, there is such a point in which multitude is total – and in every revolution in history, this moment has been silenced as quickly as possible, in order to get the organising of strategy back on the track.
We are at the heart of the crisis, then, when we make aesthetic invention the core of life at work, thus calling equally for acts of political and organising invention. And maybe this crisis is exactly what we need to play out, again and again, in the microcosms of work, of organising allowing itself not to stare at the mirror, nor glance into the future of branded horizons. Just work for the power of the moment itself. Without knowing where it takes us.
Q.5 The matter of poïesis and technè (again)
If this turns the event above and before organising, it also moves organising for eventality; but it does not point towards nostalgia, or towards romanticism, where does it place the hopes expressed by Rancière in Partage du sensible? Is this art in organising? A constant presence of the thought of the artist in residency, or the purpose of organising that becomes poïetic and poetic – making Heidegger’s dream of Techné serving Poïesis come true? Are we left with that question again? But if organising truly serves the power of the moment, truly makes way for the spark of interventions, how will technè survive, not to speak of economics?
In a sense, organising is where Heidegger has been proven right. This is where technè and poïesis are separated from one another by politics. But then politics would be the very place where they might be reconnected? Or do we have to think in terms of anti-politics, of anti-strategy? At risk of being accused of playing with words, I will suggest that organising must seek to create for itself spaces and times of ante-strategy and ante-politics – ante as before, but also ante as standing in front. The evolution of the virtual world show us how little this has succeeded in what will now be reduced to IRL, the non-virtual, the outside of future societies. So be it. The need to recognize the virtual in the actual will still be present. This calls for ante-strategic aesthetics inside the politics of organising.
Q.6 What is born between matter, sense, and time?
This is the disclaiming of organising towards all elements of allo-control; measuring of quality, TQM, accreditations, the whole panoptic of corporate communication schemes. It replaces them with a claim to presence of the evental aesthetics in every move, in every act. Not as an element that may be controlled, but as one that resist control and just faces us with the simple claim of failing better[5]. It’s a movement which begins locally, and we are not in a position to consider how the dissemination of this reinvention of aesthetics in organising could be realised. As it must obey the call of the sensible as a presence, not as a homogeneous, controllable presence, but as a completely heterogeneous, unpredictable, yet anticipatory call from the element of the thing. The thing, from which we have been so sadly torn since Kant’s mistake.
But of course, the anticipatory spark ignited in the space between the thing and our many senses will only point indirectly towards the next question and the next act. The question of what lies in the interstice between matter and time, where the sixth sense is born.
Q.7 But what is this power of the moment?
Is there a possibility of a non-local effect of the aesthetic transposing itself through a ‘plus one’ – or through what may carefully be named a collective, intuitive dialogic? A dialogic breaking the structuration of Bakhtin’s and Lotman’s cultural semiotics, moving towards a pan-semiosis inspired more by Kristeva’s reading of dialogism. In Kristeva’s world, semiosis is just as much about transgression as about systems. could the power of the moment be strong enough to perform an intervention in organising, which holds the force to break open the structures in a way that creates a permanent openness towards the more-than-sensical (rather than non-sensical as Deleuze sees it, and rather than the sensemaking of Weick and tactical organising)? A power, which bring it close to the heart of the political movement?
But of course, this is the seventh question, and not one that we will be able to approach directly. If we want to, we could not do this through careful trial and error; only through wild speculation and the materiality of experimenting. This will only be understood through local action, reversing the order of organising/event; replacing the externalisation of the aesthetic with an internalisation of the evental, in work life itself. And of course, this will leave us with another smile without a cat, but is this still not better than a cat without a smile?[6]
---
Note from the contributor
This highly speculative piece is a source of inspiration for
my work in a research program in the force of events in transformation of
organising, that I have initiated at Gravitations Centre for Action Philosophy
and Copenhagen Business School
What I plan to take to the workshop is not only the
philosophical line of questioning, but also a bagful of cases to consider in
the light of these questions and whatever others may turn up along the way.
[1]
Foucault, Blanchot, Derrida or Deleuze all wrote of displacement, of being on
the outside, of the politics of externality – but also Bataille or Heidegger
would be sources of inspiration for the philosophical thoughts behind the idea
of an initiation from an outside within. See even Zizek’s Organs Without
Bodies.
[2] Comment
to a blog post on moving communities, at http://www.mezomian.typepad.com,
august 2005.
[3]
E.g. Cheney, George, Lars Th. Christensen, Theodore E. Zorn, Jr. & Shiv
Ganesh (2004): Organizational Communication in an Age of Globalization. Issues,
Reflections, Practices. Waveland Press, Inc.
[5]
Beckett, of course.
[6] Zizek,
Slavoj: Organs Without Bodies (2003).
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