2017 Singh Becoming A Commoner Nov17
2017 Singh Becoming A Commoner Nov17
theory
ephemera encourages contributions that explicitly engage with theoretical and
conceptual understandings of organizational issues, organizational processes and
organizational life. This does not preclude empirical studies or commentaries on
contemporary issues, but such contributions consider how theory and practice
intersect in these cases. We especially publish articles that apply or develop
theoretical insights that are not part of the established canon of organization
studies. ephemera counters the current hegemonization of social theory and
operates at the borders of organization studies in that it continuously seeks to
question what organization studies is and what it can become.
politics
ephemera encourages the amplification of the political problematics of
organization within academic debate, which today is being actively de-politized by
the current organization of thought within and without universities and business
schools. We welcome papers that engage the political in a variety of ways as
required by the organizational forms being interrogated in a given instance.
organization
Articles published in ephemera are concerned with theoretical and political aspects
of organizations, organization and organizing. We refrain from imposing a narrow
definition of organization, which would unnecessarily halt debate. Eager to avoid
the charge of ‘anything goes’ however, we do invite our authors to state how their
contributions connect to questions of organization and organizing, both
theoretical and practical.
ephemera 17(4), Nov 2017
Whither emergence?
Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Christian
Garmann Johnsen and Konstantin
Stoborod
in association with:
may f l y
www.mayflybooks.org
Published by the ephemera editorial collective: Bent Meier Sørensen, Bernadette Loacker, Birke
Otto, Christian Garmann Johnsen, Christos Giotitsas, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Emil Husted,
Helen Delaney, Justine Grønbæk Pors, Katie Sullivan, Kenneth Weir, Konstantin Stoborod, Lena
Olaison, Márton Rácz, Martyna Śliwa, Matthew Allen, Nick Butler, Ozan Nadir Alakavuklar, Randi
Heinrichs, Rowland Curtis, Sara Louise Muhr, Stephen Dunne.
First published for free online at www.ephemerajournal.org and in print in association with
MayFlyBooks (www.mayflybooks.org) in 2017.
Articles
Notes
Political art without words: Art’s threat of emergence, and its capture
within signification and commodification 877-894
Autonomous Artists Anonymous
Play
Comic
Reviews
Resistance in vulnerability
with an eye to the vulnerability of power 925-931
Marco Checchi
Introduction
This special issue follows from the location of our 2015 conference, which took
place in Moscow, the capital of a country that is often referred to as ‘emerging’.
What does it mean to be ‘emerging’, we thought, and (how) can this concept be
mobilised to mean something else? When we speak of an ‘emerging’
country/market/economy, ‘emerging’ – a politically correct version of what was
previously called ‘lesser developed’ – refers to an entity that has supposedly opened
its doors to growth-oriented capitalism and is catching up with the ‘developed’
countries of this world. In our view, this conception of ‘emergence’ is problematic
in at least two ways.
‘multiple crisis’ rooted in the capitalist system itself (Brand and Wissen, 2012), the
‘vanguard’ countries have lost sight of their telos. The recent US elections and the
Brexit referendum, as well as the rise of the far right in Europe and the US are all
harbingers of a dramatic change in the perspective. Alongside this, the ultimate
goal of capitalist growth is becoming increasingly unclear. Vitality is being
squeezed out of human lives, while austerity, precarity (Standing, 2011) and
inequality (Piketty, 2014) are increasingly on offer. The countries that have stepped
onto the path of ‘emergence’ by adopting some form of neoliberalism are not
necessarily in bloom either (e.g. Dale, 2011). Furthermore, it is no secret that such
emergence takes place at the expense of certain localities and groups of people
(Escobar, 1995; Badiou, 2008).
Ironically, one crucial concern is whether there are any alternatives to the world
that has ‘emerged’ in this way. With its publication on the 100-year anniversary of
the Russian Revolution, this special issue offers an occasion for reflection. This
remarkable event created room for radical alternatives and progressive change to
arise, such as the Soviet environmentalism of the 1920s (Gare, 1993) and the
implementation of women’s rights in the Soviet Union, including equal pay and
abortion rights, much earlier than in the ‘Western’ countries. At the same time,
with growth dominating the economic and social agenda, combined with
authoritarianism, it ‘emerged’ into a social, economic and environmental disaster.
As such, even though ‘anti-emergence’ seems to be the only response to
‘emergence’ in terms of capitalism and economic growth, we do not want to
dismiss the word itself. Instead, we argue that a different understanding of the
notion of ‘emergence’ can help us to (re-)imagine alternatives and open a myriad
of mutually enriching ways of thinking – the focus of this issue.
The rest of this editorial unfolds as follows. First, we outline the different
conceptualisations of the notion of emergence. Second, based on the approach
adopted in this special issue, we follow Derrida in offering to rethink emergence
with hospitality. Third, we ponder over the contributions that have come out of
adopting this approach in practice and the contradictions of the process. Finally,
we outline the contributions.
‘Emergence’ comes from the Latin e-, which means ‘out, forth’, and mergere, which
means ‘to dip’. As such, the term suggests openness, undecidedness and multiple
potentialities. For example, it may be defined as ‘the process of becoming visible
after being concealed’, with emergere in Latin also meaning ‘bring to light’ (Oxford
dictionary, online). This suggests multiple ways to think about emergence, which
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Ekaterina Chertkovskaya et al. Hosting emergence with hospitality
The British ethologist and psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan initially coined the
concept in 1923, although it can be traced to earlier philosophers like Leibniz and
Shelling (Gare, 2002). Emergence has been conceptualised through either a
diachronic or a synchronic understanding. A diachronic understanding of
emergence refers to the appearance or development of a phenomenon, while a
synchronic understanding focuses on the relationship between the properties and
powers of the whole and its parts (Elder-Vass, 2005). Thus, in the ‘emerging’
economies/markets/countries discourse, a diachronic emergence takes place, with
countries that were not previously part of the global market entering it, i.e.
establishing market-oriented systems and experiencing fast economic growth via
economic liberalisation (Hoskisson et al., 2009). However, it is emergence in the
synchronic sense that has received most attention in the conceptual literature
(Elder-Vass, 2005; Sawyer, 2001).
In sharp contrast, the ‘collectivist emergentists’ insist that the whole cannot be
explained by the properties of its parts (see Sawyer, 2001). A common example is
water, which consists of hydrogen and oxygen but has properties that are different
from both of these elements (Elder-Vass, 2005). Sawyer (2006: 148) uses the
examples of collective music creation, especially jazz, and improvisational theatre
to demonstrate how the outcomes of each of these activities are unpredictable,
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contingent and not fully explainable by the group’s components. For him,
emergence is a collective phenomenon. In their own unique ways, the
contributions to this issue offer different approaches to exploring emergence
beyond an individualistic mode of reasoning.
This point echoes Protevi (2006), who notes that scholars have been too
preoccupied with the synchronic understanding of emergence. In contrast, he uses
Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy to zoom in on a diachronic understanding, and
he speaks of emergence as the ‘novelty’ that is located outside of the existing
system. For us the point here is not to call for a prioritisation of understanding
emergence in the diachronic sense. As noted earlier, diachronic emergence might
as well denote a shift to capitalism, as experienced by ‘emerging economies’.
However, the connection of emergence to going outside the existing system
resonates with us and, in fact, points to where our interest in the concept lies. This
connection can be found in some scholarship, where emergence has been mainly
associated with going outside the dominant systems of thought. It has helped
highlight the inseparability of the physical and the mental, of nature and society,
and of nature and culture – in other words, it has been used to problematise the
many schisms by which today’s societies, as well as sciences, are divided, and
recognise the wholeness of the world (e.g. Gare, 2002; Pueyo, 2014).
Gunnarsson (2013) pushes this discussion even further and uses the concept of
emergence to understand nature and culture as inseparable, but without one being
subsumed by the other (see also Soper, 1995; Malm, forthcoming). In so doing,
she not only critiques the tendency to conflate nature and culture when arguing
for their connection, but also voices the ambition for feminist research to
*
This is what the whole journal Emergence: Complexity and Organization is devoted to,
the first issue of which we are referring to here.
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Ekaterina Chertkovskaya et al. Hosting emergence with hospitality
understand the political and, consequently, drive social change (see Gunnarsson,
2013: 18). The attempt to mobilise the notion of emergence to address the
problems and possible transformations of our troubled world is exactly what unites
the contributions to this issue. However, to be able to unpack the various views on
emergence driven by these intentions, the concept needs to be met with
‘hospitality’. Hence, we must remain open to new understandings of emergence
and think creatively about how it can be conceptualised. Next, we explore the very
possibility of remaining open by drawing on Derrida’s discussion of hospitality.
Along these lines, we wanted to seek out other ways of exploring the concept of
emergence, which offers fertile soil for grappling with alternatives due to its
polysemy. Nevertheless, this endeavour entails a certain impossibility. While we
intend to introduce alternative perspectives on emergence in organisation studies
and academia more generally, we might simultaneously be laying the premises for
how such a conversation would take place. In other words, we want to remain open
to new ways of thinking about emergence, but we might have already presupposed
what those ways of thinking entail. Such an approach would proceed on the basis
of having unconsciously prepared for the unpreparable, expected the unexpected
and foreseen the unforeseeable. However, in order to truly remain open to new
ways of thinking, we must receive the unexpected, tolerate the unforeseeable and
accept the fact that we might be taken by surprise.
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The absolute arrivant must not be merely an invited guest, someone I’m prepared
to welcome, whom I have the ability to welcome. It must be someone whose
unexpected, unforeseeable arrival, whose visitation—and here I’m opposing
visitation to invitation—is such an irruption that I’m not prepared to receive the
person. I must not even be prepared to receive the person, for there to be genuine
hospitality: not only have no prior notice of the arrival but no prior definition of the
newcomer, and no way of asking, as is done at a border, “Name? Nationality? Place
of origin? Purpose of visit? Will you be working here?” The absolute guest [hôte] is
this arrivant for whom there is not even a horizon of expectation, who bursts onto
my horizon of expectations when I am not even prepared to receive the one who I’ll
be receiving. That’s hospitality. Hospitality is not merely receiving that which we are
able to receive. (Derrida, 2007a: 451)
Here, Derrida reflects upon the impossibility of remaining open to the other. If
our horizon of expectation has certain preconfigured expectations of who the guest
will be, or what he or she will say or do, then no genuine hospitality can take place,
as we are only able to recognise the guest on the basis of those expectations. Hence,
we are neither open to what the other represents nor able to receive the unexpected.
For this reason, genuine hospitality, according to Derrida, can only take place when
we are confronted with someone whom we are unprepared to receive. Derrida
further remarks:
The arrival of the arrivant will constitute an event only if I’m not capable of receiving
him or her, only if I receive the coming of the newcomer precisely when I’m not
capable of doing so. (2007a: 451)
For Derrida, an event entails the emergence of the new. However, what does it
mean to invent the new? Invention of the new, Derrida emphasises, involves
embracing the ‘new, original, unique’, which requires us to ‘[break] with
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Ekaterina Chertkovskaya et al. Hosting emergence with hospitality
convention’ (2007b: 1). Moreover, invention ‘inserts a disorder into the peaceful
ordering of things’ (ibid.). At the same time, Derrida notes that in order for an
invention to be acknowledged as new, it has to be ‘evaluated, recognized, and
legitimized by someone else’ (ibid.: 5). Any new insights must comply with
expectations about what is considered original, unique and inventive. Herein lies
a paradox. On the one hand, any invention has to transcend established social
conventions in order to avoid merely repeating the old. On the other hand, any
invention has to appeal to the established order insofar as it is recognised as
inventive. In other words, an invention has to simultaneously transcend and
conform to a system of conventions. In turn, any attempt to invent the new must
confront a paradox: the new is possible insofar as it is impossible.
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In line with Derrida, we posit that our task in not only this special issue but also
the field of organisation studies and academia in general is to ‘destabiliz[e]
foreclusionary structures’ (Derrida, 2007b: 45). This allows for the release of new
modes of experience and new ways of looking at the world – in short, that which
is yet to come. The challenge is driving a wedge between the oppositions that
inevitably define the field. This is not a dialectical pursuit of arriving at synthesis.
Quite the opposite – we must learn to live with aporias. On the one hand, the
understanding of emergence that we offer here is about openness, undecidedness
and multiple potentialities. On the other, for this understanding to assume a
comfortable position within organisation studies, it has to be brushed against what
we know to be conventions of the discipline. To put it differently, we face the
impossible task of being a good host to emergence.
The self-engendered paradox that Derrida identifies is common for both scientific
and social-scientific epistemologies. Yet, while the paradox is somewhat accounted
for in such fields as quantum physics, the social sciences, including organisation
studies, lack a coping strategy. The radical twist that we dare to introduce here is
to let emergence, so to speak, host itself. Indeed, when offering his metaphorical
language of hospitality, Derrida makes it tempting to further indulge in musing
with it. One cannot help but notice that the setup to which Derrida alludes in his
analogy is very specific, arguably of a petit bourgeois kind. Imagine, instead, that
you have a guest who does not expect much and brings their own booze, and that
you do not suffer from any philistine qualms. That is the kind of guest we expected
when wondering ‘Whither emergence?’.
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Ekaterina Chertkovskaya et al. Hosting emergence with hospitality
earlier by thinking beyond the dualisms between developed and developing, core
and periphery, First World and (ex-)Second/Third World, North and South, and
West and East. In this way, the issue is performative. This being noted, the marker
of ‘emergence’ inevitably opens up spatial contexts to non-Western areas of
interests. Albeit some scholars might not be domiciled in these respective
geographies, which highlights the futility of any attempt to demarcate between
‘here’ and ‘there’. As a result, when we task ourselves with creating the basis for
new ways of thinking about emergence, it is vital to avoid traps of exotifying,
romanticising or othering. Although this special issue covers contexts that are
conventionally referred to as ‘emerging’, we insist on engaging with them as parts
that make up a whole.
A more explicit approach to becoming a good host that would satisfy Derrida’s
criteria for genuine hospitality to some extent would be to adhere to an ‘open-door’
policy. Contributions could channel through, but we would not know their take on
emergence. ephemera has always been open to submissions that are ‘experimental
modes of representation’. Yet, it is important to remain aware of the challenge of
thinking beyond established formats and conventions. In preparing this issue,
while keeping the doors open and remaining open to surprises, we witnessed
apprehensions of the theme of emergence that made themselves comfortable
within the offered space: a play, a comic and unconventional polemic. At the same
time, it is crucial that openness is not confined to a particular special issue.
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order. Instead, we are going to waltz between them, as they rather naturally share
topics relevant for conversation, like good guests would at a drinks reception.
We move first to the buzz of legitimate discontent over the totalising liberal
conceptions of ‘emergence’. The article by Maitrayee Deka takes us geographically
to the ‘I’ in a praised BRICS quintet and goes straight to the heart of the problem
with economistic grand narratives of emergence, which always overlook the finer
details. On the basis of her rich fieldwork material gathered from the ‘labyrinth
like bazaars’ of Delhi, the author critically evaluates the nature and impact of the
‘Make in India’ programme. This top-down governmental programme designed
to bolster India’s manufacturing sector and attract foreign investments completely
disregarded the knowledge and skills of the actors in the informal economy, who
nurtured an ethos of turning obstacles inherent to Indian economy and society
into opportunities. This was achieved through what Deka calls practices of
‘tinkering’ or ‘improvisation’ – the sort of grass-roots ingenuity reflective of a
much more heterogeneous social world than the state pundits were willing to
recognise. Their vision, instead, was that of an imposing lion (the logo of the ‘Make
in India’ programme) that safeguards formalisation of the economy according to
a particular imperative of neoliberal globalisation.
Thus far we have got two very poignant accounts of how distinctively jejune,
reductive and yet very potent narratives of emergence dictate the terms on which
peoples and entire geographies have to advance. In fact, they even colonised the
language with which we could tell different stories, articulate different
understandings and conceive of an alternative world. Journalists, politicians, lay
public, as well as academics have been so taken with this only existing way of
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Ekaterina Chertkovskaya et al. Hosting emergence with hospitality
telling the stories of catching up with the developed world that any attempt to
escape them is bound to face difficulties.
The grand narratives of growth and emergence that Deka and Lakshminarayan
bring to our attention are extremely strong. In fact, they are so strong that they
tend to become omnipresent, making it very difficult to build narratives that are
not centred around them, regardless of whether those narratives aim to praise or
critique. This is demonstrated in Matilda Dahl’s contribution, which zooms in on
the phenomenon of M-pesa mobile money in Kenya – a way to exchange money
using mobile phones that existed even before Swish. Dahl experienced the
technology first-hand while working in one of the mobile money booths, where
she engaged with people within and around M-pesa. However, she does not wish
to offer insights into the business’s success nor provide a counter-narrative to it.
Instead, she tells a different story, a story that is difficult to tell due to predefined
ways of thinking and writing. In telling this story, she shares her thoughts and
frustrations, but actively chooses not to make a knowledge claim, thereby leaving
the story incomplete. This allows for the story to unfold in readers’ minds in a
myriad of ways. This introspective piece, which is infused with personal affect,
testifies to the difficulties anyone willing to escape a well-rehearsed emergence
narrative would encounter.
We read the approaches of Akomolafe and Ladha, and Dahl not as surrender or
recognition of the futility of efforts to enact change, but as a call to keep our eyes
open, regardless of whether we are trying to organise alternatives, undertake
research or engage in other praxes. At the same time, it is as important to open
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our eyes to and make sense of existing phenomena that may help to engender a
better world.
Neera Singh brings to our attention the community forestry initiatives in Odisha,
India, where affects, emotions and subjectivities shape up the practices of
commoning. Being key to forest protection, they make commons a lot more than
just an organisational form. She argues for thinking of the commons as ‘affective
socio-nature relations’ and practices of commoning as a means of nurturing this
relationship. Thus, if we open our eyes, it is actually possible to see manifestations
of emergence that are already happening. Emergence, in Singh’s study, can be
found in the ‘lived practices of dwelling in the environment and making it home’,
with human beings, too, being seen as ‘emergent rather than fixed and
immutable’.
Nicolas Bencherki uses the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s concept of the
pre-individual to rethink the relationship between organisations and their
members. Traditionally, social sciences in general and organisation studies in
particular have either considered organisations as the aggregation of individual
actions (individualism) or systems that constitute their members (holism). With
the concept of the pre-individual, Bencherki circumvents the dualism between
holism and individualism, and suggests that we should pay attention to the pre-
individual processes that constitute actions. To illustrate this approach, Bencherki
offers an analysis of the documentary Nomad’s land, focusing on the relationship
between the army and a group of military wives. His analysis suggests that we
should remain sensitive to the politics involved in individualisation processes and
look at how actions are always configured by pre-individual forces.
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Ekaterina Chertkovskaya et al. Hosting emergence with hospitality
The contributors to this issue have different takes on emergence, and trying to
pinpoint the ‘right’ one is not our task. This openness, we suggest, hints in the
direction of active politics. This can be best demonstrated by art, as art does not
necessarily posit where or what the ‘truth’ is, but creates affect and invites people
to think and feel. This issue offers a whole set of contributions devoted to art and
artistic interventions, highlighting the centrality of art in imagining and acting for
a different world. However, the art world itself is not without problems, with
precarity, marketisation and, as Autonomous Artists Anonymous vividly
demonstrate, the vicious circles of signification and commodification at the
forefront from an early point in one’s life as an artist. According to this collective,
even explicit political statements on art always run the risk of being captured
within them, feeding into capitalism’s value creation. Emergence instead arises
from the engagement with art itself and is seen as ‘new forms, sensations and
affects which operate outside and beyond signification and cognition, and which
can provoke change, within us, between us and in how we live together, in and of
the world’. As such, there is hope in art’s radical potential via the refusal to
commodify it or the affects it creates. This has clear political implications without
screaming about politics.
We think this is exactly what the artistic contributions to this special issue do. In
order to avoid overburdening them with our interpretations and in line with the
understanding of emergence in this issue, we keep their descriptions brief. Brian
Showalter Matlock’s play on hierarchy and cooperation brings together thinkers
and strands of thought from different times in dialogues on these themes or the
lack thereof. Eileen Laurie’s comic takes us to an academic conference in Rio (what
an emergent destination!), with climate change happening in the background and
jellyfish paying a visit. Both the play and the comic drive our attention toward
particular themes – hierarchy and cooperation, and climate change – and are
political in this sense. However, they do not point fingers in overly obvious ways,
leaving the space for thinking and imagination, as well as emotional and affective
responses from the readers.
We have not been fully able to stick to our promises, however, adding some
interpretations and pointing some fingers. More broadly, despite claiming
openness when introducing the contributions, we have still said quite a lot. After
highlighting undecidedness and multiple potentialities, we have insisted on taking
stances and acting politically. This speaks to the topic of Andrei Botez and Joel
Hietanen’s note, which reflects on the paradox associated with following Gilles
Deleuze and explores the possibilities of enabling new thought to emerge. While
Deleuze explicitly takes issue with the idea of one final truth and embraces the idea
of thinking differently, the reception of his philosophy has turned him into what
the authors call ‘the “official philosopher”, the oracle that speaks the non-truth’.
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This poses a fundamental challenge for those who choose to draw inspiration from
Deleuze’s philosophy in their own scholarship, as one can only remain loyal to
Deleuze’s legacy by betraying it. These authors emphasise that thinking requires
violence, and that without this violence new thought cannot emerge.
This point resonates with us. We are willing to open up the concept of emergence
and host its different interpretations while also trying to think and make our voices
heard. Violence has certainly been committed, but it is up to our readers to decide
whether the sacrifice was worthwhile.
This special issue is rounded off by reviews of recent books that have been carefully
tailored to the subject of the issue. They offer additional forays into a multifaceted
understanding of emergence and augment the view presented in the issue’s
original contributions. Think of them as a book stall that you happen to notice
while leaving a post-conference discussion.
Beata Sirowy’s review of Santiago Zabala’s Why only art can save us is another
contribution highlighting art’s key importance for social change. Drawing on
Heidegger’s thought and, to some extent, on critical social theory, it argues that art
can foster a return to Being, which is currently dominated by technology and
instrumental rationality. This Being would be in a non-reductionist perception of
the world and human existence. Empty aestheticisation of art will not awaken it,
but there is much more hope in art that creates a sense of emergency and an
awareness that a different world is possible.
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Ekaterina Chertkovskaya et al. Hosting emergence with hospitality
references
Böhm, S., C. Jones and C. Land (2001) ‘Castles made of sand’, ephemera, 1(1): 1-11.
Brand, U. and M. Wissen (2012) ‘Global environmental politics and the imperial
mode of living: Articulations of state-capital relations in the multiple crisis’,
Globalizations, 9(4): 547-560.
Butler, N., H. Delaney and M. Śliwa (eds.) (2017) ‘The labour of academia’,
ephemera, 17(3).
Dale, G. (ed.) (2011) First the transition, then the crash: Eastern Europe in the 2000s.
London: Pluto Press.
Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third
World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gare, A. (1993) ‘Soviet environmentalism: The path not taken’, Capitalism Nature
Socialism, 4(4): 69-88.
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Gare, A. (2002) ‘Process philosophy and the emergent theory of mind: Whitehead,
Lloyd Morgan and Schelling’, Concrescence, 3: 1-12.
Hoskisson, R.E., L. Eden, C.M. Lau and M. Wright (2010) ‘Strategy in emerging
economies’, Academy of Management Journal, 43(3): 249-267.
Malm, A. (forthcoming) The progress of this storm: Nature and society in a warming
world. London: Verso.
Norris, C. (2002) Deconstruction: Theory and practice. London & New York:
Routledge.
Standing, G. (2011) The precariat: The new dangerous class. London: Bloomsbury
Academic.
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the editors
Ekaterina Chertkovskaya is a member of the editorial collective of ephemera.
Email: [email protected]
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the author(s) 2017
ISSN 1473-2866 (Online)
ISSN 2052-1499 (Print)
www.ephemerajournal.org
volume 17(4): 751-776
abstract
This paper draws attention to the somewhat neglected domains of affects, emotions, and
subjectivity in the study of the commons. The paper argues that a focus on affective and
communicative relations among humans and between humans and more-than-humans
can enrich our understanding of the practices of commoning and the processes of becoming
a commoner. Using the case of community forestry initiatives in Odisha, India, it
illustrates how rural people become commoners through the embodied practices of caring
for the forests as a shared common. The paper uses this empirical example and conceptual
resources from affect theory and relational ontology to think about the commons as
affective socio-nature entanglements and as a nurturing ground for subjectivity. It
discusses the implications of attention on the commons and the practices of commoning
for enabling the emergence of other-than-capitalist subjectivities.
Introduction
Let us begin with the story of a pasture ‘open to all’ and the herdsman and his herd
of sheep that Garrett Hardin uses to illustrate his prediction of the ‘tragedy of the
commons’. Hardin’s herdsman, as a ‘rational being’, strives to maximize his gains
by adding sheep to his herd until his actions inevitably lead to the degradation of
the common grazing pasture (Hardin, 1968). In this ‘mini-maxi’ model of
humans, where humans are seen to minimize efforts or inputs and maximize
returns (Graeber, 2001: 6), the affective life of the shepherd is muted. In the
picture that Hardin invites us to imagine, the pursuit of self-interest by all actors
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leads to ‘ruin for all’. This caricature does not take into account the possibility that
the shepherd might grieve the loss of his green valley when it degrades, or that
grief might galvanize him into action to avert the tragedy. The affective and
communicative relations between the pasture and the shepherd and amongst the
shepherds and their power to bring both the commoner and the commons into
1
being remain invisible in this picture.
The uses of the term commons, as McCarthy (2009: 498) points out, are manifold,
and the term can be thought of as a ‘keyword’ in Raymond Williams’ sense of the
word. While CPR theorists predominantly focus on small-scale natural resources
as shared commons, autonomous Marxists talk about ‘the common’ in the
singular as a principle of organizing production and as the shared commonwealth
of humanity. As enclosure of the commons intensifies, and all realms of life are
increasingly commodified, the calls for reclaiming commons or inventing new
commons are growing strong. These calls are coming from diverse sources that do
not necessarily share similar theoretical foundations (McCarthy, 2006). On the
1
Peter Linebaugh (2010) observes Hardin’s ‘rational’ herdsman is likely to be a selfish
or lonely herdsman. He says that in history, the commons have mostly been governed,
and the greedy shepherd is likely to be punished by some community governance
system.
2
Hardin also admitted, in an article written in 1998 (p. 682), that ‘the weightiest
mistake’ in the paper was the omission of the modifying adjective ‘unmanaged’.
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one hand, there are activists involved in struggles to ‘reclaim’ the historically
enclosed commons, or reassert local rights over land, forests, and water bodies as
part of the struggles against extractive capitalism; on the other hand, there are
emerging practices of creating new commons, especially in the global North in
spheres such as open-source software, urban gardens, and the reclamation of
cities. Traditionally, CPR theory has engaged with shared natural resources, such
as forests, land, and water bodies that need collectively respected rules to manage
them. It has expanded its ambit to include non-material social and cultural
resources such as information and intellectual property or even shared culture
itself as the ‘new commons’ (for a review see Hess, 2012). In contrast to the work
of CPR scholars, a growing number of commons activists suggest that diverse
commoning projects represent ‘an alternative form of production in the make’
(Caffentzis and Federici, 2014: i95) and are reminders that ‘alternative social
relations are entirely thinkable’ (McCarthy 2005: 16). Summing up this
perspective, Federici and Caffentzis (2014) emphasize that the commons are not
only the practices for sharing in an egalitarian manner the resources we produce
but are also a commitment to the fostering of common interest in every aspect of
our lives and political work. These activists advocate thinking about commoning
as a set of generative practices that support sustenance and enhancement of life
(Linebaugh, 2008; Bollier, 2014; Bollier and Helfrich, 2014).
As the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich, in his brief but powerful essay titled
‘Silence is a common’ (1983), reminded us that the process of ‘enclosure of the
commons’ was not merely a physical takeover of the commons by the lords in
eighteenth century England, but signified a shift in the attitudes of society towards
the environment. This shift entailed seeing the environment as a resource to be
exploited for human needs instead of as a commons to be cherished, shared, and
nourished through practices of care (Illich, 1983). Resisting this dominant shift,
indigenous peoples and other locally-rooted cultures around the world have often
continued to view the common(s) as a source of sustenance of life that needs to be
3
nurtured with relations of care (Kimmerer, 2013; Sullivan, 2009; and many
4
others). ‘Thinking and feeling with the Earth ’ (Escobar, 2016), these cultures
3
Instead of essentializing indigenous cultures, I am following scholars like Escobar and
Ingold who emphasize how indigenous onto-epistemologies emerge from lived
practices of dwelling in the environmental and making it home.
4
Escobar’s idea of ‘Thinking and feeling with the Earth’ is based on Colombian sociologist
Orlando Fals Borda (1984)’s use of sentipensar and sentipensamiento to elaborate the ‘art
of living based on thinking with both heart and mind’. The notion of sentipensamiento was
later popularized by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano as the ability found among the
popular classes to act without separating mind and body, reason and emotion (Escobar,
2016). These ideas resonate with a Spinozian perspective of affects.
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The calls for commoning emanating from this tradition highlight the
revolutionary potential of the commons in anti-capitalist struggles (Caffentzis and
Federici, 2014; de Angelis, 2013); the commons’ capacity to perform counter-
hegemonic common(s) senses (Garcia Lopez et al., 2017); and the need to include
more-than-humans in our thinking about the commons’ community (Breshninan,
2016). Building on this work, I emphasize the need to conceptualize and nurture
the commons as a site for becoming a commoner. I argue that the commons can
be conceptualized as a site of affective socio-nature encounters or as affective socio-
nature relations that can foster subjectivities of ‘being in common’ with others. I
emphasize that thinking in terms of affective relations and the work that commons
do (other than producing goods or resources) provides a helpful way of bringing
together diverse ways of thinking about the commons.
The paper engages a critical question of our times, which is how to transform our
ways of being human and relating to the rest of the world. Felix Guattari (1995:
119-20) once eloquently said that one of the most pressing questions of our times
is ‘how do we change mentalities, how do we reinvent social practices that would
give back to humanity – if it ever had it – a sense of responsibility, not only for its
own survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet?’ I bring attention
to the potential of the commons and practices of commoning to nurture this sense
of responsibility by posing the following questions: What are the conditions that
foster affective relations between the commons and commoners? How do people
become commoners and imbibe norms that foster other-regarding behavior and
support collective action to govern the commons?
With the affective turn, Western social sciences and humanities are embracing
perspectives that are remarkably similar to indigenous ontologies. Using
5
Ixofijmogen, the Mapuche concept of ‘biodiversity’, resonates with the perspective of
seeing the forest as kin or a parent amongst other indigenous peoples (de la Cadena,
2015a).
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I begin with a brief description of the empirical context of my work which, to use
Guattari’s imaginary here, is for me the ‘force to think with’. In subsequent
sections, I discuss theoretical resources on affects, affective relationality, and
subjectivity and how they lead to different ways of conceptualizing human and
human-nature relationality. These two theoretical sections are followed by a
discussion of how these conceptual resources help us to think about the
production of the commons and commoners through affective socio-nature
relations. I conclude with a discussion on practical implications of using theories
of affect to think about transformations in environmental behavior and
subjectivities.
Odisha’s case of collective action to conserve forests is the empirical context that
informs my work and the theoretical arguments in this paper. My engagement
with community forestry initiatives in Odisha spans more than twenty-five years
and the theoretical arguments in the paper emerge from this long engagement.
The state of Odisha lies on the eastern coast of India. It is one of the poorest
provinces in the country as per the traditional economic parameters of assessing
poverty. Almost 80 percent of the state’s population is rural and depends on
subsistence agriculture. Forests play an important role in the rural subsistence
economy and have been the site of acute contestations following their enclosure
by the colonial state.
As was the case elsewhere in India, the British delineated large tracts of Odisha’s
geographical area as forests and brought them under state control. This enclosure
of commons as state-owned forests disrupted local forest-people relationships and
governance arrangements similar to those described for other parts of India in the
vast literature on environmental history (among others, these include Guha, 1990;
Gadgil and Guha, 1993; Sivaramakrishnan, 1999). The post-colonial state
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continued with the colonial forest governance framework and forests were charted
into the nation-building project. Various state governments prioritized
commercial extraction of timber and pulp for paper industries over local needs. By
the late 1970s and early 1980s, the effects of extensive commercial timber
extraction combined with unrestricted local use had started becoming visible.
Many villages started experiencing serious shortages of supply of wood and forest
products due to degradation of forests. In some cases, villagers narrated that the
forests had become so degraded and the wood so scarce that they had begun
digging out the roots of trees to use as fuel. In one village, people recounted the
frustration they experienced when they could not find wood for a cremation pyre
for a homeless man. When confronted with such dire situations, villagers realized
that they needed to do something before it was too late. Triggered by such
experiences, many villages decided to devise rules and undertake patrolling
measures to protect their local state-owned forests. By the 1990s several thousand
villages were actively protecting neighboring forests through community-based
arrangements. It is estimated that as many as 10,000 villages in Odisha have
elaborate community-based forest governance arrangements (for descriptions and
details of such governance arrangements see Human and Pattanaik, 2000; Kant
et al., 1991; Singh, 2002).
6
India’s Recognition of Forest Rights Act (FRA), enacted in 2006, provides for
recognition of community rights over forests. This law is yet to be fully implemented,
and the community forestry initiatives in Odisha predate this law.
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7
underpins such actions. As I have discussed elsewhere in greater detail (Singh,
2013, 2015), villagers in Odisha have forged intimate relations with forests in the
process of taking care of them.
Through their embodied caring labour, local residents have not only grown forests
but also their sense of community and ‘being-in-common’ with the rest of nature
and with each other. In the process, they have cultivated new subjectivities of being
forest caregivers (Singh, 2013). The villagers use a local system for sharing forest
patrolling labour, called thengapalli, in which a walking stick is passed around
signaling a household’s turn to contribute labour for forest patrolling. Partaking
in thengapalli provides an opportunity for villagers to enter into an embodied
relationship with the forest. Usually two to four people go to the forest daily for
thengapalli. In Dengajhari village in Nayagarh, where I recently undertook a
participatory videography project, women described to me how their daily
patrolling work is made into an event of joyful sociality. One woman described it
thus,
Someone takes salt, someone dry fish, and someone mango kernel. …We all sit
together and eat. We watch (keep a vigil on the forest) till evening and then return
home.
Another added,
We tell our children, ‘come, let us go to the forest. Fruits or roots whatever we will
get, we will eat. We will have a feast’. The children accompany us happily. We cook
and eat inside the forest and return home in the evening.
The daily patrolling trips thus provide opportunities for affective sociality in which
intimate knowledge and ways of relating to nature emerge (Raffles, 2002), and the
forests become sites of constituting social relations (cf. Gururani, 2002). Through
the daily patrolling trips for thengapalli, villagers come to know the forest
intimately and learn to respond affectively to its needs for care. Women often
gather a variety of berries, dig tubers and root vegetables, and gather greens for
cooking while on patrolling duty in the forest, while at the same time looking out
for any instances of fresh cutting of trees in the forest. These everyday actions and
performances (cf. Garcia Lopez et al., 2017) foster or reinforce affective relations.
In view of the material dependence on the forest, local villagers had strong affective
ties to begin with, and active care of the forest as a cherished common further
strengthened these affective ties. People began to care for the forest – including
the trees, plants, and the wildlife that returned to the forest as it regenerated – in
the same way as intimate social relations are developed, by spending time together
7
For a good overview of emergence of institutions see McKay (2002).
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and paying attention to each other. Anthropologist Tim Ingold (2000: 47) argues
that hunter-gatherers in widely separate parts of the world view forests as parents,
and he suggests that ‘to speak of the forest as a parent is not to model object
relations in terms of primary intersubjectivity, but to recognize that at root, the
constitutive quality of intimate relations with non-human and human components
of the environment is one and the same’. Similarly, anthropologist Nurit Bird-
David illustrates that the Nayaka in South India develop intimate relations with the
forest ‘by spending time with them’ and by investing in the relation the same ‘care,
feeling and attention’ (1992: 29-30) that they do in social relations. Through
thengapalli, the labour of patrolling and taking care of the forests is dispersed, and
the opportunity to develop an affective relationship with the forest through active
attention is shared broadly within the community. In my research, I have found
that when villagers delegate patrolling responsibilities to a hired watchman, they
have fewer opportunities to develop affective relations with the forest, which
dramatically diminishes their overall enthusiasm for the forest. Even though other
activities, such as visiting the forest to gather wood or other forest produce, offer
opportunities for an embodied connection, thengapalli offers a different
attunement to the forest due to the labour invested in its care. This resonates with
Norton et al.’s (2012) findings about the so-called IKEA effect, which suggests that
people love what they create, especially when their labour leads to successful
completion of tasks. Still, more systematic research is needed to understand the
processes and conditions that lead to affective relations between people and
forests.
Understanding the conditions that lead to these affective relations and foster
environmental subjectivities is of central importance for fostering care of the
commons. In the following sections, I elaborate the conceptual ideas about affect
and affective relationality followed by a discussion about subjectivity and discuss
how attention on affects and subjectivity helps think about fostering the
subjectivity of being a commoner.
In recent years, the social sciences and humanities have seen an explosion of
interest in the ideas of affect and emotions. What is now labeled as the ‘affective
turn’ in cultural studies (Clough and Halley, 2007) has been animated by different
orientations to affect that range from Silvan Tomkin’s psychobiological approach
to Deleuze’s Spinozist ethology of bodily capacities (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010).
I draw upon the Spinozian theory of affects as elaborated in the work of Brian
Massumi, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Giles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari,
among others. Affect in this formulation is seen as the power to affect and be
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affected, and the relationship between these two powers (Hardt, 2007). Affect is
different from emotions as conventionally understood and denotes a relational
force that flows between bodies and which enhances or diminishes their power of
acting (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988). To affect and be affected is to be open to the
world and to the possibility of being transformed through this engagement with
the material world.
Affect is a pre-cognitive and transpersonal intensity that flows through and defines
bodies – where bodies are not limited to human bodies. Initially nameless and
potentially ‘unruly’, relational affects often consolidate and manifest as emotions
and emotion episodes are themselves specific affective dynamics, temporarily
stabilized by patterns of reflection and narration (Slaby et al., 2016). To fully
capture the entirety of human experience, it is important to focus on the
interrelated domains of feelings, emotions, and affects, and to recognize that they
are a necessary accompaniment of cognition and rationality (instead of an
8
impediment to it). Also, attention on affect does not mean an inversion of
Descartes’ proposition ‘I think, therefore I am’ into ‘I feel, therefore I am’. Rather,
it compels appreciation that thinking and feeling are inseparable. And the ‘I’ that
appears as stable and fully formed is relationally entangled in the processes of
becoming. Thus a more appropriate proposition might be ‘I feel, think, and relate
and therefore I become’. And this becoming is necessarily a process of ‘becoming
with’ the many others with whom we share this planet (Haraway, 2008). This
perspective is echoed in indigenous thought and activism around the world, for
example in this assertion by an Indigenous Elder in Guatemala, ‘I am the land that
thinks’ (Desjarlais, 2014), or in Escobar (2016)’s examples of ‘Epistemologies of
the South’ in which many different ways of understanding the world emerge from
‘Thinking and feeling with the Earth’.
Scholars associated with the affective turn have pointed out that Spinozian
philosophy and his theory of affects inspires ecological thinking (Bennett, 2009;
Smith, 2012) and enables a ‘dialectics of the positive’ (Ruddick, 2010) given its
emphasis on relations, possibilities, and emergences. Spinoza’s conception of
conatus as a striving of all bodies to continue to exist and enhance the scope of their
existence further supports an ecological perspective that decenters humans.
Instead of the striving for utility maximization that dominates economic
imagination, Spinoza offers conatus, that is, a striving for associations that
enhance our capacity to act and give us joy (Read, 2015). Spinozian theories about
affect and conatus support a relational ontological perspective that shifts attention
8
As I elaborate later, neuroscience and behavioral economics are also emphasizing this
aspect; especially notable is the work of Antonio Damasio and Dan Ariely, among
many others.
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To return to our herdsman and his herd, the herdsman’s decision to add another
sheep – or not – is not solely a rational decision but is an affective decision made
by a thinking-feeling-relational being in response to cues from her social and
biophysical environments. In addition to governance institutions, affects and
affective capacities play a central role in shaping both the shepherd’s socio-natural
environment and her responses to it. Moreover, the shepherd is not a stand-alone
actor but a relational being entangled in a complex set of relations with other
human and nonhuman actors. The process of ‘dwelling in the environment’
(Ingold, 2000) entails not simply the most efficient extraction of ‘resources’ from
one’s environment but the forging of relations of care and reciprocity with nature
and other species in the process. The self that emerges through these affective
socio-natural interactions differs from the atomized individual subject of Western
thought. This self includes a sensibility and concern for the well-being of others
with whom it is relationally entangled, a point that I elaborate in greater detail in
the following section on subjectivities.
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Philosophers and activists alike have highlighted that the current ecological crisis
demands us to rethink our modes of being human (Plumwood, 2007; Klein, 2015).
As feminist eco-philosopher Val Plumwood (2007: 1, cited in Roelvink, 2013) puts
it:
If our species does not survive the ecological crisis, it will probably be due to our
failure…to work out new ways to live with the earth, to rework ourselves…We will go
onwards in a different mode of humanity, or not at all.
Reinventing a different mode of being human is thus one of the most critical
challenges of our time, which compels attention to the conditions of subjectivity
formation.
Here, I deepen this analysis by arguing that we need to analyze how collective
subjectivities emerge from the entangled affective ecologies of nature, society, and
the self. Thinking in terms of ‘affective ecologies’ allows us to think transversally
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across the three ecologies of ‘nature, society, and the self’ that Felix Guattari (1989)
encourages us to do. Affect theory presents analytical tools for such transversal
thinking that unravels the conditions for our subjectification.
The commons, as autonomous Marxist Antonio Negri tells us, are not just
resources for supporting material existence but are sources for nurturance of our
subjectivity. Enclosure of the commons, thus, is not just a physical enclosure and
‘primitive accumulation of wealth’ by the elite but is fundamentally a process of
‘primitive accumulation of the conatus’ (Read, 2015, citing Albiac, 1996: 15)
through homogenization of subjectivities and the creation of a ‘one-world world’
while limiting other worlds and ‘anthropos-not-seen’ (de la Cadena, 2015a). It
denotes a loss of control over the conditions for the production of subjectivity. As
Read (2011) puts it, Marx’s concept of alienation denotes ‘not a loss of what is most
unique and personal but a loss of connection to what is most generic and shared,
i.e., it is a separation from the conditions of the production of subjectivity’ (124).
The current capitalist order is not only destroying the natural environment and
eroding social relations but is also engaged in a far more insidious and invisible
‘penetration of people’s attitudes, sensibility, and minds’ (Guattari and Negri,
1990: 53). Freeing up the conatus, or human striving, from the narrowly defined
striving of utility maximization, and allowing alternate ways of being and
subjectivities outside of the dominant market logic to emerge, is fundamental to
the process of revival of the commons. Revival of the commons, then, becomes
critical not simply from the perspective of restoration of access and control over
physical resources, but from the perspective of countering this alienation and
finding a way to produce alternate subjectivities and alternate worlds. From this
perspective, we need to reclaim the commons as material resources not only for
subsistence and livelihood but also as the grounds for the production of
subjectivity. As Read (2011) emphasizes, the struggle over the commons, including
the knowledge commons and the digital commons, is as much a struggle over the
forces and relations that produce subjectivity as it is a struggle over wealth and
value (Read, 2011).
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of understanding and making sense of the world, but also as a major force shaping
the world that we live in.
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smoldering heat as one gathers and touches the flower are all affects that depend
on senses that are part of a generic biological endowment (Singh, 2013).
Simondon’s second thesis states that the collective, or the collective experience, is
not the sphere within which the salient traits of a singular individual diminish or
disappear; ‘on the contrary, it is the terrain of a new and more radical
individuation’ (Virno, 2004: 78). This thesis leads Simondon to conclude that
‘within the collective we endeavor to refine our singularity, to bring it to its climax’
(ibid.: 79). Simondon thus insists that we ‘seek to know the individual through
individuation rather than individuation through the individual’ and that we focus
on the process of individuation rather than look for a principle of individuation
(Combes, 2013: 2). In doing so, he calls for a radical understanding of the process
wherein a principle is not only put to work but is also constituted through the
process. Such a processual understanding of subjectivity has important
implications for rethinking the notion of the subject in political thought and
practice.
These ways of conceptualizing the self and subjectivity resonate strongly with
indigenous views of thinking about the self as entangled with the rest of the world
(de Castro, 2015; Kohn, 2015; Ingold, 2000; Suchet-Pearson et al., 2013, Escobar,
2016, among others) and also with emerging insights in biology and physical
sciences (Barad, 2007; Escobar, 2007; Weber, 2016). Indigenous cultures around
the world give primacy to relations and relational existence that emerge from their
stance of connectedness, gratitude, and solidarity with the rest of the world. In this
view, the self is not seen as an autonomous subject acting on the world, but as a
relational emergence responding to the world. In the recent academic turn to the
ideas of affect, materiality, and relationality, the connections and intellectual debt
to indigenous thought are not acknowledged adequately (Escobar, 2016; Todd,
2016) and there are calls for seeking connections between Indigenous thinkers
and Western scholars driving the ‘affective’ or ‘new materialist’ turn in social
sciences in ways that are not colonizing.
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of caring for the forest lead to subjectivities of ‘forest caregivers’, whose sense of
the self includes thinking about forest conservation. Through the process of taking
care of their local forests and creating conditions for the forest’s enrichment,
villagers have not only regenerated forests but have cultivated or strengthened
subjectivities of being conservation-oriented and of being commoners. The
subjectivity of being forest caregivers emerges from their everyday actions of
caring for the forest. These caring practices include patrolling the forest, picking
up dead and dried wood, removing weeds, picking berries, and so on and so forth
to support the conditions for forests’ regeneration and enrichment. These activities
draw people into affective relations with their local forests, its vegetation, and its
wildlife and generate a sense of ‘being-in-common’ with the forest and with the
other members of human community. Affects play an important role in the
process and are the medium by which intersubjective relations with their social
and natural environment are strengthened, as a growing body of literature is now
beginning to appreciate (Anderson, 2009; Sultana, 2011; Nightingale, 2013;
Milton, 2002; Dallman et al., 2012, among many others). These affective relations
are similar to the relations of care and affection that people are likely to develop
with pets as ‘companion species’ (Haraway, 2008) or relations of love with plants
in one’s garden (Archambault, 2016). In this case, affective relations with forests
are also shaped by the materiality of the forest and local subsistence dependence
on it. These affective relations are further strengthened through conservation care
practices and play an important role in strengthening subjectivities of being a
commoner in active relationship with the forest and with other villagers who share
these landscapes. This subjectivity of ‘being-in-common with’ is eloquently
summed up in this proclamation by one of the community leaders: Samaste
samaston ko bandhi ke achanti, which implies that ‘all [bodies] are holding everyone
else together’ – a sentiment that resonates with the idea of affective relations tying
everyone together into a collectivity. Although he was referring to social relations
and relations of accountability within a social setting, he could have been
espousing relational ontology and echoing a Spinozan conception of collective
bodies.
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political project as it can help us understand, as Read (2011: 114) puts it, ‘how
subjectivity might be produced otherwise, ultimately transforming itself, turning
a passive condition into an active process’. The multitudes of examples of collective
action for reclaiming or creating new commons are appropriate sites to explore
processes contributing to the production of subjectivity.
In recent years, the concept of the commons has become central to anti-capitalist
struggles. Diverse projects for commoning that include community gardens, local
currencies, community supported agriculture, bio-cultural restoration efforts,
peer-to-peer production initiatives, and so on (see Bollier and Heinrich, 2015, for
several dozen examples). A wide range of activists and practitioners are invoking
the vocabulary of the commons to defend the disappearing material commons as
well as to expand non-material commons as practices for building communities,
solidarity, and alternate subjectivities (De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford, 2010, De
Angelis, 2013). In so doing, commoning is seen as a world-making practice that
leads the creation of ‘a collective subject or multiple collective subjects’ who foster
the common interest in every aspect of our lives and political work (Federici and
Caffentizis, 2014). Commoning is seen as a way to reclaim control over our lives
and over the conditions of our reproduction (ibid.).
In contrast to the CPR scholars who focus on the commons as shared natural
resources, autonomous Marxists refer to ‘the common’ as a singular and following
Hardt and Negri’s lead maintain that ‘the common’ is not only the earth that we
share but also the ‘languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes
of sociality that define our relationships, and so forth’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009:
139). In this invoking of humanity’s commonwealth they emphasize that instead
of seeing humanity as separate from nature, as either its exploiter or its custodian,
such a notion of ‘the common’ focuses on ‘the practices of interaction, care, and
cohabitation in a common world’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: viii). While natural
resource commons in the CPR theories are defined in terms of rivalry and
possibilities of exclusion, the cultural and intellectual commons are not subject to
a similar logic of scarcity and exclusionary use (McCarthy, 2006) and are rather
seen as abundant. The cultural common, Hardt and Negri (2009: 139) write, ‘is
dynamic, involving both the product of labor and the means of future production’.
While this diversity in talking about the commons creates analytical challenges, it
also offers productive openings, by drawing attention to the world-making
possibilities of commoning practices to create the pluriverse, that is, the Zapatista
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vision of a ‘world where many worlds fit’ (Escobar, 2016). The analytical lens of
affect and relational ontology helps bring to light the productive overlaps between
these diverse ways of thinking about the commons. It helps us to think of the
commons as ‘affective socio-nature relations’ and as sites of affective encounters
productive of novel subjectivities. The commons are not just shared natural
resources but are also our shared affective capacities to act and respond, and these
affective capacities shape encounters, driven by conatus or striving as a force for
becoming. The commons are thus sites for affective encounters between humans
and the more-than-human material world, as well as practices that nurture these
relations. Thinking in relational terms about affective encounters helps us
appreciate the important role of the more-than-human actors in the production of
the commons and commoners. The commons, both as material resources and as
conditions for subjectivity, get produced due to the coming together of the labour
and creative energies of humans and more-than-human actors. And value emerges
from this coming together, and thus what we need to cherish, value, and advance
are opportunities for such coming together and for co-flourishing. Seeing
commons as spaces for affective encounters between humans and more-than-
humans helps us appreciate that they are the nurturing grounds for fostering what
Haraway terms ‘response-ability’ – that is, our ability to respond ethically to the
demands of the many others with whom we share this world. Commons are
nurtured through commoning practices that, in turn, enable us to think, feel, and
act as a commoner.
Such a perspective helps us to think about the commons not just as lived-in
landscapes but as living landscapes that are alive with dynamic social and ecological
relations. The Western social sciences are now engaging with renewed interests in
the material world and are insisting that this ‘new materialism’ take the vitality of
all matter and agency of the more-than-human world more seriously and inspire
an environmentalism that is driven by a deeper love for the material world
(Bennett, 2009). Instead of using the God’s eye perspective of seeing the world as
fully knowable from the outside, and largely as dead matter, the ontological
revisioning ushered in by the ideas of vibrant materiality helps see us the world as
alive and things and beings always in the process of making – a process, moreover,
that can only be experienced and explained from partial, situated perspectives. The
latest developments in the sciences, especially within quantum physics and new
biology, also lend support to these perspectives of connectedness, emergence, and
contingency.
While these ideas may be new, or newly rediscovered, in the social sciences, they
form the bedrock of Indigenous worldviews, where the world is seen as alive and
as an active participant in the unfolding of human drama instead of being merely
an inert backdrop for it. The current time of environmental crisis demands that
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While it is now commonplace to talk about socio-natures, the conditions for the
production of socio-nature relations are typically not critically examined. We need
to develop analytical tools that help unravel the process of emergence of socio-
nature entanglements and the production of socio-natures. The conceptual
resources and insights emerging from the recent affective and ontological turn
provide openings for more of this kind of robust theorizing about the commons
and about the processes of becoming a commoner. The methodological challenge
for us is to find tools to explore affective dimensions. Our traditional tools of
analysis that are rooted in an ontological perspective are focused on signification
and representational politics; non-representational theory, on the other hand,
requires tools that call attention to the ‘onflow’ of everyday life, focus on practices,
explore the pre-cognitive realm, and draw from performing arts to reintroduce a
‘sense of wonder’ into the social sciences (Thrift, 2008).
Conclusions
Reflecting on the future of the commons, David Harvey (2011) notes that our
thinking about the commons has been enclosed in a far-too-narrow set of
assumptions and caught in the debate about private-property versus state
interventions. Ugo Mattei (2012) has similarly emphasized the need to think
beyond the state-market duopoly and see the commons and practices of
commoning as not only a property rights arrangement but as articulating an
alternate set of values. Instead of seeing the commons as a third-way or as an
alternative to the state or the market, seeing the commons as affective socio-nature
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relations helps to rethink what value is and focus on what value we want any
governance or property rights arrangement to deliver. In addition to exchange
value and use value, it helps to think in terms of what Haraway (2008) terms as
‘encounter value’ of human and more-than-human encounters. Thinking about
the commons in terms of affective relationality, as sites or space of affective
encounters and as a set of practices that nurture the subjectivity opens space for
other-than-capitalist subjectivities and post-capitalist futures.
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the author
Neera M. Singh is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography and Planning,
University of Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include the affective dimensions of
human and more-than-human relations, environmental behaviour and subjectivity, the
commons and participatory visual ethnography. She continues to be actively associated
with the issues of community forest rights and governance in India through Vasundhara,
a Bhubaneswar-based NGO, in her role as founding member and president.
Email: [email protected]
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the author(s) 2017
ISSN 1473-2866 (Online)
ISSN 2052-1499 (Print)
www.ephemerajournal.org
volume 17(4): 777-799
abstract
While organization studies and sociology have put considerable effort in attempting to
explicate the way individual and organizational action are related, this paper proposes to
borrow from the insights of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, and to begin with
action first by thinking of it as pre-individual, i.e. logically prior to any individual. This
recognition turns the spotlight to the processes by which action, at once, contributes to the
individuation of both people and organizations, thus constituting them. Affect plays a
central role in the continuation of personal individuation processes into collective ones.
The theory is illustrated through the analysis of segments of a documentary, Nomad’s land
(Corriveau, 2007), which tells the story of the tumultuous relationship between the
Canadian army and the spouses of military members. The analysis will show how thinking
of action as pre-individual reveals co-individuation’s political implications.
Introduction
A newspaper headline reads ‘Canadian army heading for Africa’, but the
photograph that accompanies it shows that it is men and women who are being
deployed, leaving their families behind. The slip from individual to organizational
action is common, and has preoccupied organization studies and sociology alike.
Both disciplines have kept busy attempting to connect the two levels and
understand the passage from individual to organizational action ‒ and the other
way around (Eisenhardt, 1989; Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). The prevalence of
Durkheimian sociology has led to a framing of the problem following an ontology
of being, i.e., thinking of organizations and their members as distinct entities
whose relation needs to be understood (Bencherki and Snack, 2016). For
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Durkheim, indeed, ‘Collective tendencies have an existence of their own […] they
too affect the individual from without’ (1951: 309).
Attempts to connect the collective and the individual have ranged from the
principal-agent model (e.g. Grossman and Hart, 1983) to Giddens’s structuration
theory (Giddens, 1984; McPhee and Zaug, 2000; Scott et al., 1998), and to studies
of institutional work (Phillips and Lawrence, 2012; Zundel et al., 2013).
Individuals, it has been suggested, carry out actions on behalf of the organization,
enact the structures that constrain them, or alter these structures. In all cases, the
assumption remains that there are, on the one hand, organizations, and on the
other, people. The theoretical problem here consists of understanding how
communication can take place between these two autonomous levels.
Rather than inferring the sort of relation that would allow the passage of action
between already-constituted people and organizations, I propose to turn the
investigation on its head. Following the ideas of French philosopher Gilbert
Simondon, I will suggest acknowledging that action is pre-individual, i.e. logically
prior to any individual. This recognition turns the spotlight to the processes by
which action, at once, contributes to the individuation of both people and
organizations, thus constituting them. In this process, affect plays a central role in
the continuation of personal individuation processes into collective ones. Through
the illustrative case of a documentary about the wives of Canadian military
members, I will show how thinking of action as pre-individual reveals the political
implications of co-individuation.
The various perspectives seeking to reconcile individual and collective action have,
in fact, remained vague on their definition of action. Similarly, while they each
suggest some form of communication between the two levels, they provide no clear
definition of communication. For instance, the principal-agent model suggests
that organizations delegate actions to their stewards, but does not provide concrete
accounts of how delegation takes place (Vickers, 1985). Structuration theory, for its
part, has a richer discussion of action (Giddens, 1984: 3), but provides few
empirical descriptions of the collective–individual relationship, and Giddens
himself offers no clear definition of communication (McPhee and Iverson, 2009).
As for the institutional work approach, it paradoxically alternates between the
stable ‘it-ness’ of structure, and the agentic capabilities of people who, it turns out,
can alter it (Zundel et al., 2013). Current approaches, in summary, presuppose the
substantial existence of beings, and each one ‘stands for itself, by itself, and has to
be (causally) re-linked, which takes a major theoretical effort’ (Weik, 2011: 658).
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Nicolas Bencherki A pre-individual perspective to organizational action
Said otherwise, collectives and individuals are two banks that need to be bridged,
and it seems that the bridge is harder to build than expected.
The difficulty comes in part from the presumption that only the organization’s
non-problematic members are worthy of study, thus ignoring those whose
belonging is not so clear. For instance, consultants’ membership in client
organizations is ambiguous (Wright, 2009), and new forms of work blur
conventional employment relations (Barley, 1996; Barley and Kunda, 2004), while
people with fringe socioeconomic conditions ‘dwell and work in the periphery’ of
organization studies (Imas and Weston, 2012: 206). Literature finds only specific
kinds of workers to be relevant, although organizations become increasingly post-
bureaucratic (Hodgson, 2004; Kellogg et al., 2006), and precarious work is
normalized. The need to redefine the organization–person link is even more
obvious when studying alternative organizations – for instance criminal
organizations (Dobusch and Schoeneborn, 2015; Scott, 2013; Zundel et al., 2013).
These works, however, still tend to distinguish between different types of entities
ahead of any empirical investigation. For instance, they often assume that
organizations are ever-changing, but humans are not. Bergson, for example, takes
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Action as pre-individual
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Nicolas Bencherki A pre-individual perspective to organizational action
an individuated life is neither the unfolding of what it has been originally, nor a
journey towards its ultimate term, which it would be preparing. […] The present of
being is its problematic as it is resolving. (Simondon, 2005: 322)
Action, for Simondon, is not the deed of any agent – indeed, such thinking would
grant ‘an ontological privilege to the constituted individual’ (2005: 23) – but rather
a difference that tilts the stability of a being and provokes change. Whether a
particular action makes a difference for a human being, a collective, or something
else is an empirical question. Several individuation processes take place at once,
and as an individual is constituted, so is its ‘associated milieu’. For instance, the
body is thought’s associated milieu (Simondon, 2005: 132), but the body’s
individuation is contemporaneous to that of thought, and whether one of them is
the focal point and others are considered the milieu is a matter of perspective.
Action is therefore pre-individual to beings, but it is not chronologically prior to
them. A being does not participate in the individuation of others only once it has
completed its own; individuations continue into each other ceaselessly. It is as I
learn more, as I get older, as I accrue lived experiences, that I am contributing to
my department, to my field of research, or to my students’ individuation.
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the pre-individual before the new step forward, towards (psycho) social
individuation’ (Barthélémy, 2014: 67). In Simondon’s own words:
the relation to the milieu […] is accomplished, in the case of individuation, through
emotion, which indicates that the principles of existence of the individual being are
questioned. […] This state implicates forces that put on trial the individual’s
existence as an individuated being. (Simondon, 1989: 130)
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Finally, individuation processes are never final. Organizations, people and things
continue, perpetually, their individuation. While there is clearly a challenge in
attempting to account for one being’s individuation when everything else is
moving, recourse to seemingly stable beings is but an analytical shortcut that
already implies the outcome of the individuation process. Fully embracing a pre-
individual approach, in summary, contributes to organizational studies in at least
three ways:
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what actions matter. For instance, postulating structural influences would amount
to granting an ontological privilege to structures.
For the purpose of this article and given the illustrative status of this data, the
documentary serves as a form of second-hand ethnography. Cunliffe and
Coupland (2012), for example, have drawn from a documentary about a rugby
team to illustrate the embodied nature of sense making. Zundel, Holt and
Cornelissen’s (2013) study of institutional work rests on excerpts from the popular
TV series The wire. In each case, researchers are careful to only make claims their
data affords. Corriveau’s film being a documentary and somewhat reflexive about
her own process allows confidence in this data source for the humble, illustrative
purpose for which it is intended. Furthermore, Corriveau’s account is consistent
with research on the hardships and stress of military families, and spouses in
particular (c.f. Asbury and Martin, 2012).
Yet, the documentary has limitations. First, it provides imperfect access to male
military members’ voices or to those of army representatives. Also, critiques
accused Corriveau of describing a reality that was true decades prior to the film’s
release – and it is now another decade later. Second, it fails to grasp the diversity
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Nicolas Bencherki A pre-individual perspective to organizational action
My analysis will focus on the women who testify in the documentary, as they are
attempting to continue their personal individuation process through the collective
individuation of the army. I may suppose that OSSOM, the organization they
created to defend their rights, serves as an alternative outlet for their frustrated
individuation. Had the documentary provided more data, I could study the way
OSSOM’s individuation is continued as it captures and channels the available
affectivo-emotive loads of the women, as there are clues to the effect that many
volunteer organizations may operate similarly (McAllum, 2014). The women’s
families also take charge of the brimful pre-individual load they carry. The
documentary, however, in what may appear as a somewhat conservative move,
appears to associate the women with their children, thus conflating the family’s
individuation with that of the women – not being able to school their children
becomes the women’s own problem. The husbands are extraordinarily absent
from the documentary, an exception being Lucie Laliberté’s retired spouse, whose
intervention is limited to laconically praising his wife’s determination. This may
have to do with military regulations on their speech. I may speculate, of course,
that the men’s individuation is very much affected by the situation of their spouses:
there is no reason to suppose that they are not also continuing their individuation
processes as members of their family, as fathers of their children, as participants
to their communities and as contributors to many other collectives besides the
army. For instance, in the analysis below, I will be making the assumption that
officer Saint-Laurent speaks on behalf of the military organization – but of course
I have no knowledge of his own family situation, his opinion about the women’s
situation, or whether he has suffered himself from the throes of deployment. In
other words, the pre-individual actions that I study do not only concern the women
and their relation to the army. They could contribute to many different
individuation processes, and the limited conversation offered below is an artifact
of the analysis of the documentary’s own partial depiction of the women’s reality.
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Nicolas Bencherki A pre-individual perspective to organizational action
(3) Usurpation of
Prevented
The first excerpt consists of a comment by Lucie Laliberté, an advocate, lawyer, and
spouse of a military member. She explains the beginning of the Organization of
Spouses of Military Members (OSOMM):
A possible reading of this excerpt consists in recognizing that the women are
individuals, but their individuality is an ongoing process that includes preserving
their teeth, caring for their offspring, and planning for their old age. As they realize
that their personal individuation may only continue through the army’s, they
experience affective-emotivity when they are prevented from doing so. Their
existence as mothers, as bodies in need of healthcare, and as persons who will age,
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is at stake. That is why they view their requests for daycare, dental plans and
pension, as legitimate.
To negotiate the integration of their pre-individual loads – their teeth, their health,
their children – into the collective, they wished to publish a newsletter and
organize a meeting among themselves. However, Lucie explains, the base
commander needed to approve the newsletter. He described their demands as
political activities, which are forbidden on the base. If they insisted on publishing
the newsletter, he would accuse them of trespassing – into their very own homes.
Figure 1: Lucie Laliberté founded OSOMM to defend the rights of military spouses
(screen capture, reproduced with permission from the National Film Board of
Canada).
The base commander does acknowledge that the women’s concerns are also the
army’s, but not in the way Lucie expected: these actions are the army’s because
they are political activity – such a label seems to be the only organ available to the
army’s body to capture these actions. The army channels the women’s
individuation process: if they wish to participate in the military collective, they will
do so as trespassers. Lucie describes this situation quite clearly: the army
acknowledges them as members whenever it wishes to control them. The women
are therefore partial members – Lucie agrees that the women are civilians living
on a military base – but the way various pre-individual loads are allowed to
participate in collective individuation is the object of disagreement. The
commander’s refusal puts at stake not only the particular concerns they raised, but
all aspects of their existence as individuals and participants to the army collective.
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Nicolas Bencherki A pre-individual perspective to organizational action
If they are deemed to be trespassing, then the army is denying their ownership of
their very homes, their belonging to their churches, their children’s schools.
One of the major services we offer here in Valcartier is called ‘Operation Oasis.’
Here’s an example of concrete help. This is what we call ‘The Checklist.’ It’s a little
exercise we ask families to do before the husband or wife leaves on a mission abroad.
For example, the car. The Mrs. doesn’t know mechanics, or even where the
husband’s garage is located. They identify all that together. What must be done to
have the fewest crises possible while our spouse is away on a mission. The beauty
of this is that it wasn’t family-center employees who created this, it was community
members. That’s how we support families undergoing deployment.
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Again, the analysis must presume that St-Laurent’s voice is also the army’s, which
the documentary takes for granted. The way the officer skillfully presents the
‘checklist’, and gives the example of a practical problem ‘the Mrs.’ may face
following her spouse’s departure: figuring out how to get the family car repaired.
While the example builds on a gender stereotype, it reveals that St-Laurent is aware
of the affectivo-emotional potential of the spouse’s absence.
There are at least two ways in which the checklist helps continue the women’s
individuation into that of the army collective. First, St-Laurent presents the
checklist as a service offered by the military to take over the individuating role of
the missing spouse, i.e. it is a service ‘we offer’. The army, thanks to the checklist,
acts as a surrogate husband, and permits the women to reroute their individuation
process towards the collective. Second, St-Laurent presents the checklist (which
consists in a brochure) as an exercise ‘we ask families to do’, and as one of the ways
‘we support families’. Through the use of personal pronouns, St-Laurent
appropriates these actions (creating of the checklist, offering support) for the army,
but also acknowledges the women’s participation in the collective: the tool was
created by the ‘community’. The army is able to offer that service because the
women (and possibly the men) created it; action is shared between the two, which
corresponds again to the first cell of Table 1. However, this time, it is presented as
a positive co-individuation process: that contribution is not used to control people;
rather, it is described as being ‘the beauty of this’.
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Nicolas Bencherki A pre-individual perspective to organizational action
In this third excerpt, the narrator explains how it is possible for the military to
provide many services, including daycare:
Many of the activities and services offered in the resource centres rely on volunteers.
For this, the army depends on the abundant workforce of women, who in many
cases have been forced into unemployment. The paradox is that most of the services
women are being offered are being donated by the women themselves. [...] The
invisible work of the military wives contributes directly to army logistics. It’s a
military expense we each cover personally. It goes unacknowledged, unrecorded,
and unpaid.
Figure 3: The women have to volunteer their time in order to be offered free daycare
(screen capture).
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Discussion
Nomad’s land emphasizes the way that women’s actions, in fact, do not necessarily
belong to them. Each action may or may not participate in either their own
individuation or to the continuation of their individuation into the army collective.
The distribution of action to various individuation processes is achieved, among
others, through the speech acts of interviewees (and the documentary itself is a set
of speech acts). Still, the women’s authorship of their actions is not always denied.
But when it is recognized, it may be to channel their individuation process and
make them ‘trespassers’, or to highlight their positive contribution to family
center’s activities. In the case of the daycare, however, women’s actions were
entirely usurped by the army, which constituted itself as a caring organization at
their expense. Therefore, individuation processes are always at play. Even when an
action is not acknowledged as contributing to the women’s individuation, it is
because other individuation processes – for instance, the army as a male
organization – are privileged.
A humanist perspective may refuse to accept the separation between women (and
people more generally) and their actions. After all, they invested time and toil in
activities that were, then, denied to them. Yet, while the documentary sheds a grim
look on that separation, my point is that it is central to the pre-individual character
of action. In turn, it allows us to acknowledge the political and constitutive nature
of individuation processes. It is precisely because military spouses need those
actions to continue their individuation that the army’s denial of their contribution
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Nicolas Bencherki A pre-individual perspective to organizational action
affects them and leads to affectivo-emotivity. What is at stake is the possibility for
these women to continue their personal individuation into a collective
individuation. If their actions intrinsically belonged to them, then officer St-
Laurent would have done little more than misrepresent reality, with little
consequence on the women’s individuation. Relatedly, the army’s efforts to
appropriate the women’s actions would make little sense, if it did not need to
integrate those actions into its own ongoing individuation, whether as a male
organization or as a caring one. When action’s pre-individual character is
acknowledged, then the interplay of concurrent individuation processes becomes
salient and offers an analytical lens to understand the relationship between
identity, organizational membership and power.
In particular, the excerpts show that communication does not only represent prior
actions; communication is itself a set of actions – including speech acts – through
which other actions transductively circulate from one entity to the next, and in
doing so, constitutes relational configurations that allows them to exist and to act.
Each voice, including the documentary itself, is an attempt to offer an alternative
relational configuration. As participants seek to continue their respective
individuations through communication that they exist via the relation.
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Conclusion
The excerpts from Corriveau’s Nomad’s land show the potential of recasting
organizational action through a pre-individual lens. Reducing action to its alleged
author would render the intricate situation of military spouses, but also more
broadly the relationship between persons and collectives, senseless. Instead, a
Simondonian view draws attention to action itself, whose contribution to a
person’s and/or an organization’s individuation process is discovered through
affectivo-emotivity and the risk of disindividuation. People do matter and make a
difference, but an exclusive focus on them would fail to explain why some actions
matter to their personal existence, and what makes those same actions
organizational.
The idea that relevant social actors could be other than humans or organizations
(understood as groupings of humans) may appear counter-intuitive. Yet, a pre-
individual perspective shows that what scholars commonly call individuals are the
outcome of ontogenetic processes whose units are not persons, but actions. It is
only at the price of this step back from personhood that, in fact, a person’s quality
may be understood. If people or organizations were already given, then why worry
that their actions may be usurped from them? When it is understood that
individuals are delicate, instable coalitions of actions, then the importance of
caring for our relations with them takes on its full meaning.
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Nicolas Bencherki A pre-individual perspective to organizational action
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the author
Nicolas Bencherki is an assistant professor of organizational communication at TÉLUQ
Montréal, in Canada. He holds a PhD in communication from the Université de Montréal
and in sociology of action from Sciences Po Paris. His research focuses on the intersecting
roles of organizational communication and materiality in the interactional constitution of
membership, strategy and other conventional organizational issues in the setting of non-
profit and community-based organizations, with a special interest for the concept of
property. His work has been published, among others, in Human Relations, Management
Communication Quarterly, and the Journal of Communication.
Email: [email protected]
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the author(s) 2017
ISSN 1473-2866 (Online)
ISSN 2052-1499 (Print)
www.ephemerajournal.org
volume 17(4): 801-817
abstract
The paper discusses the future of Delhi’s electronic bazaars in the wake of the ‘Make in
India’ (MiI) program. MiI aims to develop a home-grown manufacturing base that, among
its many goals, also targets the same popular market sector that the bazaars currently
operate in. However, there is virtually no consideration of the role of bazaars and the
informal economy within the MiI program. Rather, this initiative, along with similar efforts
to render the economy formal and transparent, sees the bazaars with their reliance on cash
transactions and their scant respect for intellectual property rights as part of a regressive
grey economy. This paper initiates a discussion on what could be the consequences of
following the present route of disregarding the informal economy that, in fact, has hosted
the most industrious model of production in the country.
Introduction
There has been much enthusiasm associated with the ‘Make in India’ (MiI)
program that was launched in September 2014 (Kala, 2015; Khedekar, 2014). The
program targets 25 core sectors to make India a manufacturing powerhouse. In a
country that did not develop a robust manufacturing base post-independence,
(Roy, 2012; Sanders, 1977), the MiI wants to make a significant contribution in
that direction. Growth in manufacturing is expected to garner revenue and create
employment opportunities for a large section of the population. The program was
seen as particularly timely in relation to the slowdown of the Chinese economy.
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Resource-rich India with low labour costs could compete with the Chinese
1
hegemony in world manufacturing (Zhong and Kala, 2015) .
I want to issue a caveat early on, namely that this paper does not discuss MiI in its
totality, nor does it go into an in-depth discussion on the various schemes
undertaken so far. Instead, the paper focuses more on the discourses surrounding
MiI in relation to the electronics industry. The paper is a speculation on the future
of local cultures of tinkering, as large-scale programs make headway into the
informal economy that has characterised much of the Indian market for low-cost
consumer electronics.
As a manufacturing plan, with its eye on the domestic market and local innovation
cultures, MiI could collaborate with bazaar actors. However, to the extent that
bazaars are considered in MiI, they are expected to wither away and their
participants become a reservoir of cheap labour for the formal economy
(Bhattacharyya and Verma, 2016; Green 2014; Karnik, 2016). Other aspects of the
bazaars such as their understanding of the local consumers, their practices of
market-friendly technical fixes, and their industrious nature are ignored.
The rest of the paper analyses the foreseeable links that MiI could have with the
informal economy, and how its present agenda of limiting its interaction with
1
ASSOCHAM (The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India) and EY
(Ernst and Young) report (2016) states that as of 2014, the average manufacturing
labour cost per hour in India was US$0.92 as compared to US$3.52 in China.
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Maitrayee Deka Street level tinkering in the times of ‘Make in India’
formal actors and institutions could play out in the larger context. To this end, I
describe the role that bazaars have played historically as an important place for
disruptive improvisation, and how the bazaars have always experimented with
electronic products. Through empirical examples, I analyse the everyday
improvisation that makes the bazaar an important player in the domestic market
of electronics in India. I further depict the type of consumers that are dependent
on the bazaars for their purchases of cheap electronics. In the final section, I show
how, historically, the bazaar-like mode of transactions and the accompanying
survival instinct has been part of the manufacturing process in India, and how the
hasty and one-dimensional approach that MiI seems to be undertaking, is
foolhardy when it comes to dealing with the informal economy. A large part of the
population became involved in state-led modernising programs by semi-legal
routes. In order for MiI to truly reach the bulk of the people, first there needs to be
an understanding of bazaar level conditions and then a willingness to make real
changes in the MiI agenda to involve people who do not have elite privileges.
Traditionally, the bazaars have played a crucial role in the domestic market for
electronics. They are places for selling products, and for tinkering with them,
creating new kinds of cheap and accessible products. The bazaars are part of a
transnational network of ‘globalization from below’, where semi-legal goods and
crisscrossing trade networks have made electronics accessible to growing sections
of the urban underclass, whether in original (often recycled) or in counterfeit
versions. Gordon Mathews and his colleagues contrast this to the
While speaking about Delhi’s bazaars, Lajpat Rai market, Palika Bazaar and Nehru
Place, Ravi Sundaram (2010) sees them as part of a ‘Pirate Kingdom’, which
describes the other side of India’s postcolonial existence. Sundaram maps out
2 The terms ‘improvising’ and ‘tinkering’ are used interchangeably to contrast bazaar
level technological fixes with the top down ‘innovation’ models that are more respectful
of intellectual property laws as well as institutional training and research.
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 801-817
Delhi’s Masterplan of 1962 that privileges the vision for the future from the elites’
perspective (politicians, technocrats and the burgeoning section of bureaucrats).
The modernist plan laid the grounds for the zoning of the city into residential,
commercial and industrial zones.
As the process of ordering the city along the lines of the Delhi’s Masterplan began,
the bazaar became one of the few places where a less disciplined life existed and
flourished. In the Mughal era and in colonial times, bazaars were open places, a
meeting ground for merchants and tradesmen from villages and towns (Bayly,
1998; Fanselow, 1990; Yang, 1998). Sundaram (2010) argues that Delhi’s Lajpat
Rai market, Palika Bazaar and Nehru Place are an extension of the ‘secret’ life of
the bazaars of the eighteenth and nineteenth century – a diverse range of
commodities sold face-to-face via messy networks of people, products and power
alliances.
Lajpat Rai market, Palika Bazaar and Nehru Place were built in the early decades
of the country’s independence to largely rehabilitate Sikh and Hindu partition
refugees. Lajpat Rai market in the old Delhi area, overlooking the Historic Red
Fort was developed in the 1960s as a wholesale electronics market. Over the years,
the market has sold a host of products: transistors, switchboards, wires, TVs, music
cassettes, bulbs, and video games to name a few. Palika Bazaar located in the
central district of Delhi was the first underground air-conditioned market in Delhi.
Established in the 1970s, it came to host a number of traders from the
neighbouring areas. The dome-shaped building with a number of concentric
circles is a retail market selling clothes, electronics, food, toys, and books, among
other things. In the 1970s, town planner Jagmohan imagined Nehru Place as a
kind of European ‘piazza’ where cultural and intellectual life would mix with
commerce. By the 1990s, Nehru Place had become one of the important markets
in Asia, selling computer hardware, assembled computers, and pirated
software/video games. The market also has a number of corporate offices,
computer showrooms and repair centres.
Sundaram (2010) and Liang (2010) described the urban bazaars as vibrant places
that throw light on ordinary lives and their politics. The chaotic physical landscape
3
‘Gwalas’ means ‘herdsmen’ in Hindi. The urbanization schemes made them marginal
and many of them gave up their traditional trade in favour of pursuits more suitable
for an urban context.
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and commercial exchanges paved the way for the presence of media goods in forms
unanticipated by their original creators. In his analysis of counterfeited brands in
Tamil Nadu, Constantin Nakassis (2013) used the words ‘surfeits’ to include the
grey domain in which products circulate outside of authorised consumption.
Nakassis places the discourses and practices of ‘surfeits’ in the world of fake
brands and copies that has opened up a whole world of negotiation for the non-
elites to legitimise global brands.
Pointing out the relation that bazaar-like places develop with commerce and
legality, Liang (2010) uses Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between a civic and
political society to show how the non-elites’ relation to state laws and policies is
different to how ‘citizens’ perceive it. As he puts it:
In India, for instance, the creation of the category of the citizen subject demanded
a move away from the oversignified body of the individual marked by religion,
gender, caste, and so on to an unmarked subject position, ‘the citizen’, a category
based on equality and access and guaranteed rights within the constitutional
framework. But the majority of the people in India are only precarious who often do
not have the ability to claim rights in the same manner as the Indian elites do.
Instead, the manner in which they access the institutions of democracy and ‘welfare’
is often through complex negotiations and networks and often is marketed by their
illegal status. (Liang, 2010: 360)
Gulshan Kumar, a fruit seller in the Daryaganj market established the T-Series
Music and Film production company by recording popular Hindi film songs with
lesser-known artists. Taking advantage of the ‘fair use’ clause of the Indian
copyright Act, Kumar was able to circulate his cassettes to every nook and cranny
of the country. His story represents how ordinary people use loopholes in the legal
systems and form lucrative alliances to get past their own limitations of wealth, or
education (Liang 2005).
In Liang and Sundaram’s work, ‘piracy’ is synonymous with the bazaar way of life.
The different practices of ‘counterfeiting, copying, smuggling, and trafficking’
create sources of livelihood for people who could not take part in the modernising
project in India through official channels (Dent, 2012: 29). With its decrepit
infrastructure and open networks of traders, distributors and importers, Delhi’s
bazaars create new media forms testing the legal and aesthetic limits of urban
existence.
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In this section, I use empirical examples to describe how the traders tinker with
the hardware of video games. Street level tinkering is significantly different from
the systematic way in which innovation is imagined in formal spaces such as
corporations and public institutions. While many of these innovations anticipate
profits through patents, it is the lack of a proprietary regime that gives the bazaars
the opportunity for tinkering. Needless to say, these disparate approaches to
intellectual property laws come from completely different motives. While for
formal actors, they communicate with an existing market, in most cases for the
informal actors the pressure is to constantly create a market for ‘small profits’,
which suit the needs of low level consumers.
I first visited Delhi’s bazaars towards the end of 2012 and conducted a year-long
ethnographic study that lasted from September 2012 to September 2013. I spent
time interacting with the traders. I had structured interviews with them and casual
conversations on a day-to-day basis. At times, I also interviewed consumers and
distributors who came to the shops. I went back to the markets in January 2015
and later in the months of March and April 2016. I focused mainly on the traders
of video games, seen by some scholars as an information product per excellence
(Dyer-Witheford and Sharman, 2005; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009). I was
interested in finding out what happens when a sophisticated video game enters
the culture of backyard innovation in the bazaars.
In Lajpat Rai market, I spoke to close to 18 traders of video games. Most of the
shops were small, having enough space to accommodate a trader and his assistant.
A few of the shops were more spacious with organized displays on the walls. While
makeshift shops kept appearing and disappearing at regular intervals, by the time
I was well into my fieldwork, I had established good contacts with five shops that
I regularly visited, at least once a week. With other shops, my visits were contingent
on the trader’s willingness to talk to me on a given day. During the time that I
spent in Lajpat Rai, I saw the shops not just as places for selling products, but also
as places where a single product could be broken down into different parts based
on the needs of the market. A shop would have a ‘Made in China’ handheld video
game, but also circuit boards, parts of which were sold loosely or used for
repairing. There would be cartridges, original and pirated DVDs, knock-off and
original consoles. On top of that were the abandoned consoles, parts of which were
used for repair. The possibility of a product to be a finished good and a raw material
at the same time created the spirit of tinkering. As long as the assemblage or
dismantling of a product created new consumer bases, it was worth exploring in
the markets. To quote from field notes:
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Harish is a distributor who comes every other day to Lajpat Rai. He acquires TV
games from local manufacturers and sells them to the traders at a wholesale rate.
The local manufacturers import component parts such as circuit boards from China
and package the final product in India. In this way they are able to save custom
duties and can also provide a novelty to the product (by way of packaging and
attractive covers). In July 2013, I was at Bharat’s shop when Harish approached him
with new TV games. While dealing with locally assembled consoles, they started
talking about the skills that bazaar actors have. Both were in agreement; putting
together different parts produced in China needed one to have basic knowledge
about electronics. However, the skill and knowledge of Chinese workers were much
higher than Indians. Their analysis attributed the gap in Indian workers’ knowledge
to a lack of opportunity and resources. Bazaar actors do not get to work on
sophisticated machines, unlike their Chinese counterparts. They also pointed out
that any innovation, even grey ones, received appreciation from the Chinese
government. In contrast, the Indian government did not support bazaar level
solutions.
The shops at Palika have original DVDs and consoles, second-hand and pirated
DVDs, refurbished consoles and gaming accessories. The second-hand economy
of games attracted a range of consumers to the market. With an ingenious trader
buying a used DVD from a consumer, it opened up the market for used games.
Simply by packing old DVDs with transparent paper and putting price tags on the
back (to give the impression of a new DVD), many traders found ways to
resuscitate their trade, foraying into areas the formal economy did not take into
account. The repairing and modding of gaming consoles are among the activities
that create a niche market.
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The market picked up in the 1990s, and along with it, the trade of pirated software
and computer games. What was at that time seen as a luxury product, a single
DVD of Adobe, sold for close to ₹5000, but the pirated versions of them were
available for ₹500. The street vendors sold only pirated computer games and none
of the console games. A reason quoted for this was that their consumers did not
have enough money to buy a console. Most of them did not even own a personal
computer. The consumers that the street vendors encountered were likely to buy
an assembled computer and they bought gaming DVDs/CDs as an additional
purchase. The traders mentioned the consumers’ first interest was to download
4
The Delhi Development Authority relocated the residents from slums in Nehru Place,
Nizamuddin, Sarojini Nagar, Hauz Khas, Chanakyapuri, and Kalkaji to the Madanpur
Khadar Resettlement colony (Batra and Mehra, 2008).
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the pirated version of Microsoft word. If the gaming DVDs piqued their interest,
they also bought them.
The rise of a consumer society in India has received attention. The early 1990s
were the watershed years, when the country embarked on an era of economic
liberalization. Since then scholars have noticed marked changes in consumer
behaviour. Leela Fernandes (2006), for instance, argues that in the decades
following the country’s independence, frugality was a dominant trait of
consumers. However, she argues that the attitude changed dramatically following
the1990s:
In the 60s and 70s this whole bit of accumulation of wealth was still suffering from
a Gandhian hangover. Even though there were a whole lot of families who were
wealthy all over India in the north and south, if you notice, all their lifestyles were
very low key. They were not exhibitionists or they were into the whole consumer
culture. Now I see that changed completely… You want to spend on your lifestyle.
You want your cell phone. You want your second holiday home, and earlier, as I
said, people would feel a sense of guilt – that in a nation like this, a kind of vulgar
exhibition of wealth is contradictory to Indian values. I think now consumerism has
become an Indian value. (Fernandes, 2006: 29)
The changes in consumer habits are tied to the celebration of the middle class.
Even within the amorphous middle class, it is the urban English educated
professionals, the so-called ‘new middle class’ that has been the harbinger of the
consumer economy in India. Seen by some as the poster children of India’s
neoliberal ambition, this class of upwardly mobile professionals spends
substantially on clothes, gadgets and cars, placing them on a par with a global
consumer class (Butalia, 2013).
Although the middle class and the new middle class have directed the consumer
economy, the number of people who purchase consumer goods is difficult to
measure. One of the problems is the gap between people’s perception of belonging
to middle class and their actual income level (Bhattacharya and Unnikrishnan,
2016). Studies have noted that a large number of people think that they belong to
the middle class, although their income level is much lower to that of the median
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group. The 2011-12 India Human Development Survey (IHDS) jointly conducted
by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the
University of Maryland suggests that the Indian middle class composes 6% of the
total population. An annual income of 2.7-13.4 lakh was taken as the benchmark.
The same survey found out that about 49% of the population perceived themselves
as belonging to the middle class, although their monthly income was close to
₹5000, much lower than the average income of ₹22,000 (Kundu and Rathore,
2016). A Pew Research Centre Study puts the global middle class estimation at
$10-20 per capita daily income and defines a lower income group as earning
between $2-10 dollars daily. According to these estimates, only 2% of the
population in Indian fall into the middle class category. Most people are in the low-
income category: they rank much closer to the lower limit of $2 dollars rather than
$10 (Venkataramakrishnan, 2015).
If we take into account consumer behaviour per se, the IHDS study shows that
90% of the time, people had only one of the following consumer durables: a motor
vehicle, a computer or laptop, a TV set, a cooler or an air conditioner, and a
refrigerator. In most cases, people owned a TV set and not the others. Moreover, a
household having all of the five assets belonged to the top 2.75% of the entire
population (Kundu and Rathore, 2016). These studies highlight that the rich and
the new middle class constitute only a small part of the entire population (Anand
and Thampi, 2016). Most people are in the low-income group or poor, surviving
with a daily income of $2 or less.
The bazaars remain places that cater primarily to people who have consumer
desires but might not have the resources to translate them into reality. Many
people who came to the markets in 2013 were from low-income group and the
diverse middle class. In Palika Bazaar, a category of consumers was urban
professionals, people working in the corporate sector as either technological or
managerial professionals. Another popular category was school students who
came accompanied by their parents and guardians. A third category was buyers
who made home deliveries of games to individual customers. Finally, there were
gamers from lower and middle-income groups that came to repair consoles.
Being primarily a wholesale market, the main type of buyer in Lajpat Rai market
was the distributor who made deliveries to shops in the urban periphery, or to
other cities, small towns and villages in India. The individual consumers who came
to the market were mostly parents who wanted to give their children affordable
handheld games. The consumers coming to the Nehru Place were mostly young
men who bought pirated computer games. Much like the street vendors, the
consumers were immersed in the informal economy. Some of them worked as
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delivery boys or as shop assistants in parts of Delhi and in the national capital
region.
I encountered many young gamers in Nehru Place who were unemployed or were
in odd jobs. They liked to play combat games such as Mustapha on their cell
phones. The gamers downloaded pirated versions of different games on their
phones and approached their friend networks to acquire cheap DVDs. The markets
were attractive to people who could have the experience of playing games like
Counter-Strike on the assembled PCs they had bought in the market. Many of them
came to know of games by playing them in popular gaming cafés.
This section described the role of the bazaars in the contemporary consumer
economy particularly with respect to the outreach of the bazaar to mid- and low-
level income consumers. The next section analyses how bazaar practices have
historically resulted in a particular model of capitalism. Within this model,
manufacturing did not develop into a full-blown industry, but was characterised
by small ventures. The small and medium level enterprises were an outcome of
capital being diverted from industrial investments to speculative practices in the
bazaars.
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production. It was the physical bazaars, where credit operators worked that were
the centers of commerce. In an economy characterized by high credit risks at the
base, the bazaars represented a set of financial methods, which effectively exploited
the poverty of population and the uncertain seasonal agricultural conditions
(Tyabji, 2015: 9).
In India, we have seen a move from merchant to speculative capital without full-
fledged development of industrial capital (Arrighi, 1994). The bazaars, combining
the ethos of semi-legal transactions and a physical market place had an important
role in the growth of a unique culture of manufacturing.
The closest that the MiI has come to considering the informal economy is by
foraying into the start-up economy. In fact, the ASSOCHAM and E&Y (2016:20)
report identifies start-ups as possible partners ‘to bring out the real spirit of the
“Make in India” initiative’. In order to ‘mix local production and assembly of parts’,
the report states the ‘focus needs to be on indigenous product conceptualizing to
manufacturing’. Start-ups are considered as agents that are able to build lucrative
enterprises amenable to the prevailing environment.
However, starts-ups have a completely different ecosystem from the bazaar and
the only way they can incorporate the informal economy is by transforming its
participants into a new kind of ‘platform labour’ (Srnicek, 2017). Start-ups have a
more systematic approach to intellectual property laws and innovation in general
and their ethics do not necessarily fit into the flexible improvising that bazaars are
known for. Aggregators, such as Ola and Uber, have an institutional culture that
uses algorithms to manage their business models and at the same time have a
traditional hiring process in which people are recruited by word of mouth
(Sakthivel and Joddar, 2006; Padmanabhan, 2016).
Conclusion
Bazaar actors are now caught in an environment where the only real form of
collaboration they see is through meeting the labour requirements of the
burgeoning start-up economy (Chakravarty, 2015; Crabtree, 2016; Lerche, 2015;
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However, the loss is not one-sided. Outside of the corrupt networks, bazaars
embody an industrious way of life that is unique to India. The difficulty in building
a homogenous manufacturing base cannot be blamed only on self-interested
corrupt industrialists. The fact that India is a country with many small and
medium level enterprises shows that the problem is much wider than corruption
alone.
If it were not for the bazaar-like places, different knowledge systems, and obsolete
products, the spirit to turn constraints into opportunities would not exist. This is
where MiI falters: it is unable to understand its own population and their everyday
struggles. It is constructing a completely new infrastructure of factories and shop
floors. Probably a more fulfilling exercise would be to continue conversations on
both sides: create new infrastructure and alliances with formal actors as well as
reach out to informal actors, include their popular knowledge and creative spirit.
5
Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique-identity number that is tied to an Indian citizen based on
his or her biometric and demographic data. This scheme has been criticized on privacy
grounds as it permits greater control over individual movements.
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The bazaars have always included more people and products, most of which are
otherwise rejected as excess as in the case of the urban poor or obsolete goods.
Most importantly, bazaars have an ecosystem, which allows the gainful
employment of a large number of people with a heterogeneous set of technical
skills and limitations.
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the author
Maitrayee Deka is a lecturer in Media and Social Theory the Department of Sociology,
University of Essex.
Email: [email protected]
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the author(s) 2017
ISSN 1473-2866 (Online)
ISSN 2052-1499 (Print)
www.ephemerajournal.org
volume 17(4): 819-839
abstract
In contrast to the relative equilibrium and mechanical conservativism at the heart of
mainstream articulations of emergence, we ‘see’ emergence as errant, monstrous, ironical,
nonlinear and indeterminate. Progress is not emergence. And emergence is not an arrow.
There is a spontaneity at work that undermines the fundamental tenets of Calvinian
teleology – one of which is the story that the world is captive in an unending progression
towards grander sophistication, a process ineluctably steered by men (or to be more
precise, ‘educated’ white men). In this playful interdisciplinary analysis of emergence,
using ‘new’ insights into the ‘perverseness’ of the quantum world, and drawing from
psychedelic research, popular culture, and Indigenous wisdoms, we reimagine emergence
as a radical indeterminacy that unsettles the grounds upon which the exclusionary
discourse/practices of neoliberal expansionism as emergence are built. In doing this, we
point to other spaces of power, where new embodied forms of justice (in form of different
ethico-epistemo-political imaginaries) might thrive.
Introduction
1
We mischievously coined this word, pace Karen Barad’s neologism of ‘intra-action’ to
undermine the notion that we speak from a vantage, exterior point. In her book,
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tugging at our frames of the present. Jumping playfully from charged visions of
queer, self-birthing particles and ubiquitous, psychedelic compounds that
destabilize the primacy of a local, three-dimensional reality to considerations about
complex adaptive systems, climate justice, shamans and unwieldy sentences and
footnotes, we write to wrestle with the stabilized visions and fantasies of emergence
held by corporate hegemonies. We suggest that emergence is not the inevitable
march of Western progress denoted by trivialities such as GDP growth, corporate
revenue expansion, technological innovation or any other form of ‘achievement’.
If one were interested in linearity, this essay proceeds from the context of the
climate change struggle to the root causes of this struggle – the deadening ideology
of late-stage capitalism and its corollaries of patriarchy, rationalism, white
supremacy and anthropocentrism. We draw on the concept of entanglement as a
primary metaphor for emergence, and an unfurling of the ‘other’ as a mirror into
our own souls, abandoning the fixity of any theoretical outside or of monsters
under the bed. We invoke quantum physics, neuroscience, behavioural psychology
and complexity economics as haptic heirs to their dualist counterparts, pointing to
a new direction of messiness, intra-action, and symbiotic evolution with Nature
and the universe itself. We pose paradoxes in order to challenge our notions of
agency and causality, to re/discover the potency of liminal edges, and of other
places of power where meaning and matter are intra-twined.
Meeting the universe halfway (2007), Barad writes about intra-action (not interaction) to
illustrate how entanglement precedes thingness. In other words, there are no things,
just relationships, and these ongoing relational dynamics are responsible for how
things emerge. Similarly, an intra-vention is how we posit our complicity in
perpetuating the very circumstances we strive to disrupt.
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Dancing flags, firm handshakes, sturdy lecterns, bold speeches and cut-away shots
to an ‘appropriate’ audience are all featured. ‘We have been presented with two
options and we need to choose’, the Prime Minister of Saint Lucia announces to
150 other heads of state; ‘[w]e either condemn our planet to further destruction…
or we save it’ (Hamilton, 2016). Commentators juggle the hefty consequences of
a successful summit, envisioning an international climate deal that ensures
nation-states move towards reducing carbon emissions, and eradicating
dependence on fossil fuels.
And yet, the very nature of the COP talks (which started in 1995 in Berlin) are the
site for the reproduction of the normative values, anthropocentric assumptions,
Western hegemony and phallic patriarchy that have contributed to ecological
destruction and necessitated climate action in the first place.
2
See an earlier issue of ephemera 17(1), February 2017 for a detailed discussion of the
post-growth economy (Johnsen et al., 2017).
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Even if the highest ambitions of the talks are achieved, and reticent nations (which
directly correlate with the largest carbon emissions, as in the case of the US) strike
an unprecedented deal to drastically reduce carbon emissions (while providing
funding for ‘emerging’ nations like India), it most likely would not acknowledge
the marginalised and excluded among us, who are indeed the vast majority of
humanity. And of course, these talks and their ‘outcomes’ will reinforce the
dominance of one-way-of-knowing, leaving the capitalist trajectory intact.
The materiality of the talks contain an inner momentum towards replication, not
radical difference. The historical ‘phallogocentrism’ (Derrida, 1978: 20) of the COP
talks exemplify just how resolute its anthropocentric concerns are – how
resoundingly the discourse on emergence derives from capitalism, and excludes
other political modalities that do not coincide with the creed of commodity
production.
In a nutshell (not that we presume anything could ever be resolved or spoken about
so conclusively!), to make space for a more ravishing climate justice, to ‘redeem’
emergence from a stultifying hall of mirrors, a deadening capitalist linearity, is to
contemplate the nature of Nature. And nothing short of a reconfiguring of our
familiar understandings of causality, locality, agency, intentionality, individuality,
choice, and subjectivity will constitute a potent ethical intra-vention.
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It is to say the world unfurls not according to the predetermined logic of growth or
progress, not according to the marketplace, and certainly not around ‘us’. Such
geocentric and anthropocentric assumptions are caving in and hollowing out
giving birth to queer, troublesome visions that disturb our confident humanism,
make room for the perverse and return the gaze of the ‘other’ back upon ourselves.
There’s nothing more toxic or deadly than a human child. A single touch could kill
you. Leave a door open, and one can walk right into this factory; right into the
monster world.
The tragedy of the monster is a recurring trope and energetic motif in modern
cinematic history. Whether it is the time-travelling cyborg in The Terminator
(1984), whose flesh (or living tissue) cleaves to metal, or the endearing animated
story about extra-dimensional creatures learning to exploit the fear of human
3 Karen Barad coined this term (2007). Onto-epistemology means what is in the world
(ontology) and how we know what is in the world (epistemology) are not separate, but
emerge materially in an ongoing dynamic. That is, the nature of reality and the nature
of knowledge are entangled, not fixed or final or determinate. In a fuller sense, none
of these can be divorced from power and what we find valuable or just, so to write about
an ‘onto-ethico-politico-epistemology’ is probably more appropriate, but no less
infuriating.
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children to power their own economy (in Monsters Inc., 2001), or the gripping
narrative of a psychopathic serial killer’s vicissitudes with emotions and a normal
suburban American existence (in the television series Dexter), our fascination with
monsters seems everlasting.
Invading aliens, melancholy moons that turn accursed persons into werewolves,
Frankensteinian contrivances (like bio-engineered super-dinosaurs or artificial
intelligence) whose ‘unnatural’ ferocity quickly teaches an audience that one
should not ‘play God’. These monsters touch tensions about the safe divides
between the essential and the adulterated, between what is natural and unnatural.
The image of a giant King Kong perched precariously on a New York skyscraper,
holding on to the object of his barbaric affections, Ann Darrow, as if she is his
shibboleth to a more humane existence. His cure from his gargantuan rage is a
poignant testament to our own collective quests for purity, for stable grounds.
Politically, and more contemporarily, the monster manifests as the teeming
population of Syrian refugees lingering at the barb-wired borders of nation-states
– inspiring anxious legislation and whispered questions about ‘who to let in’. Or a
transsexual showing up in a hyper-evangelistic Christian community.
The monster is Outside. That is his Luciferian place. To indwell the festering
swamplands outside all that is actually ordained. To melt through Cartesian
categories. To inhabit the unthought and the unthinkable. To sin. However, the
reserved area we allocated to monsters is shrinking, and we are coming to terms
with just how absent an ‘outside’ really is (Barad, 2007). The ‘world out there’ –
the eminent subject of representationalist scholarship – no longer lies at a distance
from us. We are very much in touch with the world, and produce it via techno-
scientific, cultural and political practices. The world is performed (ibid.); ‘our
understanding of phenomena is inseparable from the instruments we use to
measure them’ (Doyle, 2015: online), which means we do not have the luxury of
indifference or victimhood when we encounter monsters. We are entangled with
them.
Ten percent of our dry weight is bacteria, but there are ten of ‘their’ cells in our body
for every one of ‘ours,’ and we cannot make vitamin K or B12 without them.
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Just before we turn our attention away, he adds, driving the knife into the body of
essentialism even further:
[B]efore leaving this point of the pointillist composition that is our Being made of
beings, please notice that even those cells that do not swarm in our guts, on our
skin, coming and going, invading pathogenically or aiding probiotically – please
notice that even these very central animal cells, the differentiated masses of lung,
skin, brain, pancreas, placental and other would be strictly human tissues that
belong to our body proper – even they are infiltrated, adulterated, and packed with
Lilliputian others. The mitochondria, for example, that reproduce in your muscles
when you work out, come from bacteria. We come messily from a motley. Indeed
we literally come from messmates and morphed diseases, organisms that ate and
did not digest one another, and organisms that infected one another and killed each
other and formed biochemical truces and merged.
Sagan’s point is that the human body or even ‘human nature’ is not some distinct
Platonic category, but an ongoing admixture of weird becomings – an inter-
speciated emerging deconstruction with no denominating logic or principle. There
is no golden rope through the mush, no guiding hand, no Promethean agenda.
Not even Darwinian teleology – and its presumed internal mechanism of natural
selection by slow mutation – touches on the radical ‘hospitality’ and strangeness
of being/becoming human/nonhuman.
However, the trouble we are encountering is not cosmetic. It is not merely bone-
deep or cell-deep; it strikes at the ‘heart of things’ – undoing the haughty distance
modern man supposed he had achieved by harnessing the power of the electron.
Particulate matter, like T800, is ‘back!’; it is more monstrous than anything we
can imagine. And it may be us.
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consistent with or without an observer) was imploding. There are many ways to
map the historical uncoupling of classical physics – its inadequacy in the face of
black-body spectral emittance, for instance. However the site of our concern is
simultaneously the smallest and the largest space in our modern mattering: the
quantum.
At one end of the discourse was Einstein, who maintained the ‘thingness’ of
things, insisting that there was a spatial discretization of systems. It was necessary
to Einstein for a separation principle to exist. Physics – the entire enterprise of
science – was otherwise unintelligible. Bohr however adhered to an understanding
of entanglement and, drawing ideas from Chinese philosophy, articulated the
4
principle of complementarity and ontic indeterminacy .
For Bohr, there were no things (Howard, 2009). Identity is not inherent or
mutually independent, but entangled with the experimental circumstance or the
specific measuring apparatus. Thingness, the quality of being a ‘thing’, emerges as
a feature of indeterminate entanglement. Whether an electron behaves like a wave
or a particle – whatever value ‘it’ may take – is inseparable from (and/or
complementary to) the specificity of the measuring ‘paradigm’, and not an
intrinsic, predetermined feature.
The site of this contest about the nature of particulate matter (and therefore the
‘nature’ of emergence) was the dual slit experiment or two-slit apparatus.
4 The central question of ontology is what a thing really is – independent of opinion,
outside of interaction, in a neutral state. The matter behind the matter, if you will. Bohr
fashioned the concept of ontic indeterminacy, in effect rejecting the idea that things
have properties in themselves ‘outside’ of the myriad relationships and complex web
that grant them being. Ontic indeterminacy evokes the provisionality of the world and
the vagueness of boundaries (Barad, 2007). Karen Barad’s concept of ‘intra-action’ is
premised on ontic indeterminacy, which is the understanding that the identity of a
thing, its properties, the features that grant it its ‘thingness’, are not fixed or inherent,
and only emerge in the context of relationship. Light is not inherently a wave or a
particle; what it ‘is’ depends on how it is performed in concert with other agencies
(ibid.).
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Bohr and Einstein agreed that entities would exhibit wave-like patterns once
diffracted through the double holes of the initial barrier: the experiment had been
performed many times before, and the results always showed an interference
pattern on the final screen. Their contentious disagreement arose from a thought
experiment, a Gedanken: what would happen if the experiment were modified so
that the particular entity, say, a photon (a quantum of light) traveling through the
slit, could be determined? What if we knew which slit allowed the entity to pass –
that is, what if we could observe the entity pass through the slits? Would the final
screen still measure a diffraction pattern, showing conclusively that the real nature
of light is wave-like?
Einstein felt that the results would be the same – that a diffraction pattern would
be recorded on the screen, and that if the passing entity could be detected, it would
be caught behaving like a particle at the slits – thus exposing the deficiencies of
quantum theory. Bohr took a radically different path, rejecting his colleague’s
classical ontology, insisting that the nature of an entity is not fixed or inherent, but
‘emergent’ – changing with the apparatus in place to determine its nature, and
intra-acting with meaning. Light is not inherently a wave or a particle. There are
no inherent objects with predetermined properties. Instead of a diffraction pattern,
Bohr predicted, a hypothetical ‘which-slit’ experiment would show the ‘solid-
looking, bam-bam-bam hits behind the individual slits on the final barrier that
measures the impacts’ (Lanza, 2010: 211).
[W]hen a which-slit detector is introduced, the pattern does indeed change from a
diffraction pattern to a scatter pattern, from wave behaviour to particle behaviour…
this finding goes against both Heisenberg and Einstein’s understandings, and
strongly confirms Bohr’s point of view, for it can be shown that the shift in pattern
is the result of the entanglement of the ‘object’ and the ‘agencies of observation’.
That is, there is empirical evidence for Bohr’s performative understanding of
identity: Identity is not inherent (e.g. entities are not inherently either a wave or a
particle), but rather ‘it’ is performed differently given different experimental
circumstances. (Barad, 2010: 259)
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together the outside and inside, the monstrous and the proper, King Kong and
Ann.
We are no longer bounded ‘I’s whose task it is to study natural ‘laws’; we are inside
the frenzied equation. ‘We’ are an entanglement – always emerging. The very
materiality of the world is inescapably entangled with epistemology and justice (or
‘justice-to-come’). Karen Barad explains entanglement in terms of intra-activity, or
the ongoing dynamic of emergence that reconfigures everything:
Since there are no dividing lines, there are no fixed exterior positions, except that
which has been excluded or cut out due to the specificity of a circumstance or
practice/performance. In Barad’s reckoning what gives an object its ‘specificity’,
5
its properties, is an entanglement ‘between’ things. Entanglement implies that
the ontic unit of reality is not a ‘thing’, but a congealed configuration of
cacophonous agencies. Nature is wild, precarious and exploratory, lacking the sort
of firmness and phallic permanence upon which an immutable grounding of
capitalist teleology can take place, and undercutting the foundational assumptions
that seems so central to the Western project. The Cartesian assumptions that
undergird the binary givenness of the world are undone. Even with an appreciation
of the notion that there are no individual things with fundamentally discrete and
pre-relational properties, it is easy to miss the quantum weirdness and profound
preposterousness of matter.
Dominant rationalist thought tells us, for instance, that cause always precedes
effect; that ‘things’ – boundaried and ‘featured’ and separate – are local (that is,
they cannot be situated in two places at the very same time); that what a thing ‘is’
– its fundamental nature – is fixed; that time flows ‘forward’, so that the distinction
between ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ is rigid; and that reality is composed of
infinitesimally small individual bits of ‘matter’.
5 Barad’s theoretical stance can be described as ‘agential realism’ – a non-
representationalist, post-humanist account of how the world materializes.
6 According to agential realism, the binary distinction between micro-reality and macro-
reality is intra-actively co-constituted, not ‘given’. So the usual retort that reality is
essentially weird at more basic levels, but adheres to a classical trope at macro-,
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‘other’ and ‘this’ and ‘that’ are already threaded through with ‘interferences’ and
infinite alterities, so that an entity is ‘an infinite sum over all possible histories’.
What we are talking about here is not that an electron, for instance, is a gradual
product of reverberating moments already past, but that an electron straddles the
fuzzy lines that distinguish past and future, playing with im/possible possibilities,
touching itself and perverting order.
It is this ardent spontaneity at the ‘heart’ of matter that, queerly enough, is the
condition for all forms of materialization and all forms of bodies. The classical idea
that nothing really comes to touch anything else – that what we feel in our hands
when we hold a book is not the ‘book’ but electromagnetic activity (similarly
charged particles repelling each other) – is replaced by quantum theory’s
submission that electrons are not tiny billiard balls hoisted in a vast space of no-
thing-ness, but inseparable wanderings of the void. We learn that:
the electron not only exchanges a virtual photon with itself, it is possible for that
virtual photon to enjoy other intra-actions with itself – for example, it can vanish,
turning itself into a virtual electron and positron which subsequently annihilate
each other before turning back into a virtual photon – before it is absorbed by the
electron. And so on. This ‘and so on’ is shorthand for an infinite set of possibilities
involving every possible kind of interaction with every possible kind of virtual
particle it can interact with. (Barad, 2012: 9)
everyday levels is ‘itself’ a practice of denying the significance of entanglements
between the ‘two’.
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There are no colors, sounds, or smells out there in the world. They are things we
experience. This does not mean that there is no world, for indeed there is: the world
just is. It has no properties until it is experienced. At any rate, not properties like
color, smell, and sound. I see a panorama, a field of visions, but it is not identical
with what arrives at my senses. It is a reconstruction, a simulation, a presentation
of what my senses receive. An interpretation, a hypothesis. (Nørretranders, 1998:
293)
Neuroscience is revealing the primary metaphor for the brain to be the elephant
and the rider. Our conscious mind is simply a passenger sitting upon a greater
essence that is directing the elephant/rider complex, or more aptly, the
elephant/rider entanglement, while allowing the rider to hold onto its illusion of
control, mastery, directionality and fixity.
The social sciences are revealing that human beings are highly contextual, indeed,
intra-contextual. From the famous Stanley Milgram experiments of the 1960s
where subjects would torture strangers with an electric shock, simply because an
authority figure made the request (Romm, 2015), to the Good Samaritan studies
(Darley and Batson, 1973) where theologians and moral philosophers would walk
past bleeding subjects on the street if they were late for a sermon, we are being
shown that the ‘fundamental attribution error’, the belief that character traits are
fixed (as if such fixity could exist!), is giving way to the primacy of circumstance.
Or, queerly put, the primacy of non-primacy. Context comes before reality. And
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In the realms of economics, almost every tenet of neo-classical economics has been
falsified. Complexity economics, the branch of economics that finally incorporated
the second law of thermodynamics, has shown that there cannot be a perfect
equilibrium in a world of entropy. The self-evidence of wealth concentration,
regulatory capture and the arbitrage of high-velocity trading, have shown us that
‘perfect information’, the Cartesian dualists ex deus machina, is as elusive as a
theory of everything. Behavioral economics, in many ways one of the few ‘credible’
branches of modern economics, has shown that human beings are highly
irrational, prone to all sorts of biases from information framing to temporal
ordering.
How does one enter the plateaus of radical possibility rather than deadening
winnows of scientific reductionism or 3D banality? Our ancestors had many
avenues into the infinite, to non-ordinary states, from trance-induced dancing to
pack-hunting to the ingestion of hallucinogenic plants. They understood that there
was no ‘other’, no ‘outside’. In practice, they understood that we are Nature and
plants are Nature (whether psychedelic or not). They understood that communing
with teacher plants, as they are still known, allows us to create new neural synapses
and activate latent cells of potentiality.
Even the pagan traditions of Western Europe, the Indigenous Peoples of the ‘Old
World’, were deeply immersed in ritual and honoured sacraments to achieve these
states before the Crusades of Christianity forced the monoculture of the mind
upon all who survived their ‘rationalistic’ cleansing (Lash, 2006). Every complex
civilization has had a symbiotic relationship with plant medicines of some form:
the Mayans and Aztecs worked with psilocybin, the Incas with ayahuasca, the
Ancient Egyptians with blue lotus, the Vedic Indians with ganja and the elusive
soma, the Ancient Greeks with ergot and other plants in the mystery schools of
Eleusis (Hancock, 1995).
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During a 1998 workshop entitled the Valley of novelty, McKenna (2006: online)
explains:
Psilocybin and DMT invoke the Logos, although DMT is more intense and more
brief in its action. This means that they work directly on the language centers, so
that an important aspect of the experience is the interior dialogue. As soon as one
discovers this about psilocybin and about tryptamines in general, one must decide
whether or not to enter into the dialogue and to try and make sense of the incoming
signal.
7 A psychonaut is someone who utilizes altered states of consciousness to explore a wide
range of activities.
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Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the
species involved. Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of
higher animals have been established many times and in many places throughout
the long ages of my development. (McKenna, 2006: online)
Now what is one to believe? Did mushrooms teach us to speak? Do they interact
with other species? Are they extra-terrestrial spores that we have been in symbiotic
relationship since the dawn of our ape ancestors? Are there parallel realities
occurring simultaneously that can be accessed through chemicals that exist in our
own bodies?
We do not ask these questions to simply invoke the Heyokah spirit – the sacred
8
clown that Indigenous cultures like the Lakota people of the Turtle Island actively
conjure, in order to interject humor and disrupt the pathos of hubris. We pose
these riddles in order to challenge our reconfigurations of agency. To re-direct our
gaze towards the excluded edges and other places of power, where story and
meaning are created and uncreated.
Whither emergence?
God is ridiculous – but if you’re going to have one, make a good one.
To see what is emerging, one must ask what has emerged to date. The very same
logic that has produced our climate crisis appears to be the logic that claims the
ability to solve what it has begotten. On what grounds then do we situate and
legitimize the capitalist meta-narrative of emergence? What is emerging? Surely
8 Turtle Island is now known as the North America.
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China, India, Nigeria, South Africa are not emerging, in any meaningful sense.
Just as they are not ‘developing’ in any sense outside of the economic relativity of
richer nations. If Nature withholds her sceptre, and cannot endorse the imperative
of growth, the typography of emerging markets and Comtean trajectories, what
does that augur for the sanctity of neoliberalism? Even more pressingly, what
socio-politico-economic imaginaries have we lost to allow the foreground of
frenzied commercialism and social hierarchy to matter?
We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and the winding
streams with tangled growth as ‘wild’. Only to the White man was nature a
‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land infested by ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’
people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the
blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with
brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it ‘wild’ for
us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing; from his approach, then it
was that for us the ‘wild west’ began. (Standing Bear, 2006: 22-23)
Perhaps we have permanently forgotten our other ways of knowing. Yet there seem
to be entangled possibilities in the idea of ancient futures; one can hear their
comforting murmurings on a quiet day. One may wonder whether the act of
invoking the plurality of tongues and myths may itself lead to emerging pathways
to different political imaginaries, without the fixity of linear time.
How can we recast our gaze, as the Russian Cosmists did when they described
humans not as earthlings, but as ‘heaven dwellers’ (Young, 2013)? The emerging
onto-epistemology from quantum physics to evolutionary psychology is showing
us the severe limitations of our rationalistic, dualistic, Enlightenment model.
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Even among the intra-actions, the decision is not between action and non-action,
the vehement activist or the passive Buddhist. These dualities no longer serve us.
We can simultaneously recognize the pain of the world in non-amputation and full
feeling, while delegitimizing the capitalist system and overthrowing the
imperialist tendencies of in/humanity that is within us all. Action is the movement
of multitudes and multiple realities; it is not a solitary act. We can reclaim the
colonized notion of emergence and engage in an autopoietic dance of creation and
surrender, action and reflection, intra-action and observation.
Pyotr Kropotkin, the formative anarchist philosopher, reminds us that just as our
crisis is not simply a political crisis, but a metaphysical crisis, the coming shifts
and desire for radical change will not be one-dimensional, but rather intra-
relational:
One feels the inevitability of a revolution, vast, implacable, whose role will be not
merely to throw down the political ladder that sustains the rule of the few through
cunning, intrigue and lies, but also to stir up the intellectual and moral life of
society, shake it out of its torpor, reshape our moral life and set blowing in the midst
of the low and paltry passions that occupy us now the livening wind of noble
passions, great impulses and generous dedications. (Kropotkin, 1992/1879-1882: 7)
This brings us back to the deafening banality of COP. Although the negotiators in
Paris do not represent the best interests of the planet in any meaningful sense
(how could they when they are intoxicated with the memetic virus of growth-at-all-
costs?), we are still entangled with their cosmologies and their pathologies. We are
enmeshed in a system of late-stage capitalism based on profit-maximization,
detached individualism, and deadly consumerist logic. Yet there is no ‘solution’ in
the tidy activist sense. No final answers.
As the great anarchist mystic and trickster spirit, Hakim Bey, boldly claims:
In one sense, the sons and daughters of Gaia have never left the Paleolithic; in
another sense, all the perfections of the future are already ours. Only insurrection
will ‘solve’ this paradox – only the uprising against false consciousness in both
ourselves and others will sweep away the technology of oppression and the poverty
of the Spectacle. In this battle a painted mask or shaman’s rattle may prove as vital
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The Biblical text tells the story of a famous ziggurat, the so-called Tower of Babel
(Genesis 11:9), as a mythical insurgency of men against the feminine profligacy of
Nature. In the wake of an Earth-shattering deluge, with men still trembling from
the echoes of such a devastation, it was decided that a tower was to be built – to
mitigate (a favourite word of climate change proceedings!) the impact of unsavoury
weather:
Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly’; then they said, ‘Come, let us
build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make
a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.
(Genesis 11:4)
Their hopes for ascendancy were summarily dashed when God introduced
confusion and turbulence to their project:
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech… [But the Lord said]
Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each
other. (ibid. 11: 7)
The escape from telluric grounds, the attempt to instigate a less than radical
openness to the world and enclose the modern self away from its spontaneous
entanglement with the outside, was thus halted by confused speech. By trouble.
In a time when moral lessons are eschewed with postmodern cynicism, perhaps
there is something ethically vital to note here: it is that Nature resists fixity or the
foundational stability of emergence-by-commercialization. No matter how much
we try to escape it, we are part of a cacophonous parliament of things.
836 | article
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references
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Barad, K. (2012) ‘On touching – The inhuman that therefore I am’, in S. Witzgall
(ed.) Power of material/Politics of materiality. Zurich: Diaphenes Press.
Bard, A. and J. Söderqvist (2014) Syntheism: Creating God in the internet age. Tyresö:
Stockholm Text.
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Hamilton, K. (2016) ‘Two degrees of climate change and a triple bottom line’.
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Lanza, R. (2010) Biocentrism: How life and consciousness are the keys to understanding
the true nature of the universe. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books.
Lash, J. (2006) Not in His image: Gnostic vision, sacred ecology, and the future of belief.
Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing.
McKenna, T. (2006) ‘Podcast 027 – “In the valley of novelty” (Part 1)’.
[https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-027-in-the-valley-of-novelty-part-1/]
[http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinking-one-of-
psychologys-most-infamous-experiments/384913/]
Sagan, D. (2011) ‘The human is more than human: Interspecies communities and
the new “facts of life”’, Cultural Anthropology, 24 April.
[https://culanth.org/fieldsights/228-the-human-is-more-than-human-
interspecies-communities-and-the-new-facts-of-life]
Shotter, J. (2014) ‘Agential realism, social constructionism, and our living relations
to our surroundings: Sensing similarities rather than seeing patterns’, Theory
and Psychology, 24(3): 305-325.
Standing Bear, L. (2006) Land of the spotted eagle. Canada: Bison Books.
Strassman, R. (2001) DMT: The spirit molecule. New York: Park Street Press.
Young, G.M. (2013) ‘Navigating spaceship Earth: Four Russian cosmists’, Quest,
101(3): 105-108, 120.
the authors
Bayo Akomolafe holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Covenant University in Nigeria.
He is author and editor of We will tell our own story with Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine
Nwoye and These wilds beyond our fences: Letters to my daughter on humanity’s search for home
838 | article
Bayo Akomolafe and Alnoor Ladha Perverse particles, entangled monsters and psychedelic pilgrimages
(in press; North Atlantic Books, 2017). He sits on the boards of the Mutual Aid Network
(USA) and the Real Economy Lab (UK).
Bayo lives in Chennai India with his wife EJ and their two children Alethea and Kyah.
Email: [email protected]
Alnoor Ladha’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking,
storytelling, technology and the decentralization of power. He is a founding member and
the Executive Director of The rules (/TR), a global network of activists, organizers,
designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that
create inequality, poverty and climate change around the world.
He is a Board Member of Greenpeace International USA and the P2P Foundation, a
leading think-tank for commons-based alternatives. Alnoor holds an MSc in Philosophy
and Public Policy from the London School of Economics.
Email: [email protected]
article| 839
the author(s) 2017
ISSN 1473-2866 (Online)
ISSN 2052-1499 (Print)
www.ephemerajournal.org
volume 17(4): 841-847
As I am to walk out the door of our apartment in central Nairobi where we have
been living for a few months, in order to go to the grocery store, the cleaning lady,
Imma, who has become almost like a family member, stops me and asks:
‘Matilda, while you are going out, could you please tell Fred at the gates to send me
1
20 shillings , because I need to make a call?’
‘Of course’, I tell her. And as Fred – who is keeping big gates which are the only way
to get out of the gated community where my apartment is – opens the gates to me,
I ask him to send over 20 shillings to Imma.
I recall I was a bit confused after this conversation, sensing that the simplicity in
which Imma and Fred transferred small sums of money to each other was quite
amazing. How did they do it? What was this?
‘This’ is called M-pesa, by now a world-famous system for small money transfers
by phone, developed by the Kenyan Telecom company Safaricom. Unheard of by
me, and many others in Europe, back then.
1
Corresponds to approximately 10 Eurocents
note | 841
ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 841-847
Few around the table have heard of this thing called ‘Swish’ and no one has it –
except for Jenny, the banker. So we have to split the bill the usual way, handing
over several credit cards to the waiter and a bunch of crumpled bills. Apparently, a
crowd of middle-aged women-economists in Sweden, one of the richest and most
technologically advanced countries in the world, were in 2013 quite far from using
the mobile banking technologies that have since long been commonplace even
among the relatively poor in Kenya, East Africa.
To say that this is surprising (thus worth telling) is in a sense confirming a post-
colonial normality. A normality where a northern European country is more
advanced than an African country, and as soon as we find a proof of the opposite
we are to exclaim: ‘wow, look at that, they transfer money in a more modern way
than we do in Sweden – I would never have expected that’. This is a normality that
I am raised in, which is transferred to me by almost any research paper or course
book within my field (Business Administration). My normality is constructed from
a western point of view. And I continue constructing it as I tell the story of the
Kenyan mobile money miracle.
So I went back to Kenya, and stayed for seven months in Nairobi, studying M-pesa.
But not by doing elite-interviews with people working as managers at Safaricom,
842 | note
Matilda Dahl A chronology of fragments
even though I did meet with one such manager. What I ended up doing was a
participative study in an M-pesa booth in a dusty and busy street in Nairobi.
Together with James, who worked in the booth 12 hours a day at least 6 days a
week, and who told me everything he knew about M-pesa. But we also talked about
many other things. I told him about snow and the Swedish welfare system. He told
me about Kenya. But those things were sort of on the side. My research notes were
mainly about M-pesa, and the customers that came to buy cash or to buy ‘float’
(SMS correspondence to cash).
People come to the shop either with cash in their hand that they want to transform
into SMS, or the other way around, they want to withdraw cash from their M-pesa
account (which is not really an account in the proper sense but a sort of SMS-
balance). The whole transaction is wordless and smooth. I feel like a human cash
machine. And if I am to translate the function of M-pesa into something I have
experienced it would be a combination of a cash machine and a bank transfer
system. Except that there is no bank involved. Just a phone company. And a lot of
small M-pesa booths all over town with people like James sitting inside them, with
a small phone in their hand, receiving or handing out cash. All booths are painted
in green, the ‘Safaricom-green’, a special nuance. Safaricom is the Kenyan partly
state-owned telecommunications company that launched M-pesa and is now world
famous within the telecom, mobile money sector. It was the first company that
succeeded in making people use their phones to transfer money to each other on
large scale.
An elderly man comes into the booth crossing the dusty street; he has 3000 shillings
in his hand. James explains that he is a carpenter selling chairs and tables he has
made on the other side of the big Ngong street. He has probably just sold some
furniture and wants to put the cash into his M-pesa rather than carry it in his pocket.
He hands the 3000 shillings to me and I send an M-pesa SMS to him, putting the
bills under the cashier. As soon as he has gotten the confirmation he continues
tapping on his small phone. I ask him what he did with the money? He explains he
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 841-847
sent part of the sum to his daughter who lives 600 km from Nairobi and he pays
his electricity bill. 3000 is a big transfer. Many customers come and hand in 50, 100
or 200 shillings.
This is a busy street corner, and most people hand in cash rather than withdrawing.
The bills pile up under the counter. We have to inscribe every transfer in a big
notebook and the customer needs to sign it. According to the rules of Safaricom,
each person making a transfer needs to show ID. This seldom happens in this
corner. I ask why. ‘Well, I know all these people’ – says James – ‘I have been sitting
here for several years and almost all of them I know. They work here close by’. There
comes an SMS to the phone. It says ‘Sebastian, 2500 shillings’. What am I supposed
to do? No one is there in front of the booth? A little while later an older lady shows
up. She is there to get the 2500 for Sebastian. He has a business further up the
corner, explains James, who knows both the lady and Sebastian. She comes every
day, it is explained to me.
So what is it that we do there inside the booth? On the surface, we take or give away
cash, and check that an SMS is being sent and received. I am trying to understand
the system. My interpretation is that what we actually do here is that we sell and buy
what is called ‘e-float’ (James just says ‘float’). Float can be seen as an ‘SMS
currency’. Cash is transformed into float, and float is transformed into cash with M-
pesa as the intermediator. Safaricom takes a share from each transaction. The
business model is thus that of a phone company: the more transfers (SMSs being
sent and received) the better. It builds on the logic of ‘many small transactions’ –
quite contrary to the banking logic. To set up an M-pesa account is free. This has
little to do with what I know as banking. It is not banking and it is not regulated as
such. It is seen as mobile service and thus avoids financial regulation.
The M-pesa booths are run by independent agents. These are entrepreneurs that
invest their own capital to start up an M-pesa booth. Tony has three booths. This
one is really profitable, it yields a profit of 100 000 shillings a month. 30% of that
goes to Safaricom….
I could go on here. I have pages and pages of notes like this. Photos. A Swedish
researcher in business is taught how to M-pesa by a Kenyan agent. Probably not
many have the kind of empirical material I have. Some colleagues might call it ‘low
hanging fruit’. But how am I to frame it beyond the business emergence story,
which I do not want to tell the usual, sort of ‘low hanging fruit’ (and somehow
easy, uninteresting) way: Kenya is considered an ‘emerging’ economy, so
everything that emerges and can be evaluated and appreciated by an eye of global
capital gets written about. I keep thinking about all the alternative stories that are
not told. And the performative role of the ‘success against all odds’ story that is
being re-told to me in the kiosques in Kenya. It keeps on circulating, from the
global to the local. There are so many other stories to be told, but they end up being
too painful, too emotional. So far from any ‘objectiveness’ one could ever have.
How to tell them, is it even to be called ‘research’?
844 | note
Matilda Dahl A chronology of fragments
One such story is about James and me, and how he saves me from going into
custody. It is about my last day in the field, two days later I was going back to
Sweden. A few times a week James walks alone from his M-pesa booth with four
big piles of cash (one in each pocket in his jeans) a few blocks to the bank in order
to ‘balance’ the cash (change it to ‘e-float’). This day I walk with him to the bank
and ask whether I can take a picture of him with my iPhone. He agrees. But as I
lift my phone and take a photo of him, from behind, a military car comes around
the corner. So I happen to catch the car on my photo.
After that everything happens very fast. An officer yells angrily at me, jumps out
of the car and snatches my phone from my hand. I react with anger and tell him
to give back my phone. It all happens fast. I am surrounded by yelling militaries.
A mob starts gathering on the street. Voices get agitated. The officer says I have
committed a serious crime. My first reaction, anger over my phone and over this
attempt to get a bribe from a westerner is replaced with fear after some time. James
explains that they are saying to the people on the street that if we were in the US I
would have been ‘shot on the spot’ since I look like ‘Al-Qaeda’. James manages to
get me out of the mob and stops the officers from pushing me into their van. James
tells me to go into a small shelter a few meters from the van. The officer says I am
not going back to Sweden on Monday, because then I will be going to trial, and
now I need to get into the van. I ask them to give me my phone so I can call my
lawyer.
My lawyer talks to the officer through my phone. Nothing happens, still agitation.
James tells me we need to bribe the officers before this gets dangerous. We do. Or
I do, with his intermediary help. I am not seen handling the money, nor is the
officer in charge. Suddenly everything calms down. The officer in charge comes
towards me, shakes my hand and wishes me a pleasant stay in Kenya. It is almost
surreal. I go and fetch my son from school and decide to forget about it all. Because
how am I to make sense of it? How can I include this in my field study, how can I
not? It affected me deeply. Suddenly a story about mobile money became a story
about life and death and bribes and many other things. At least from my
perspective. And any research I do will of course be affected by me.
Is this to be seen as the ‘backside’ of the miraculous emergence story we are used
to hear? I’m not convinced at all. However it was not what I was studying really, it
just happened. And I cannot pretend it didn’t happen. Nor would I slide into
concluding that a ‘real’ catching up with the ‘advanced’ West will not happen as
long as incidents like this take place – this again would be an inadequate
interpretation, undermining the importance of this new technology or casting a
shadow on it, which it does not deserve. Maybe it can be a reminder of the fact that
economic or business success stories do not automatically lead to political change.
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 841-847
However, I am not taught how to write about it, how to make sense of this at all as
a business scholar, which in itself can be seen as part of the problem. Is my whole
academic discipline so naïve? The answer is most probably yes.
Just landed in Nairobi! I’m here to meet with entrepreneurs and developers, and to
learn about mobile money – where Kenya is the world leader. I’m starting at a place
called iHub, where entrepreneurs can build and prototype their ideas. Two of the
engineers I met – Fausto and Mark – designed a system to help people use mobile
payments to buy small amounts of cooking gas, which is a lot safer and better for
the environment than charcoal or kerosene. It’s inspiring to see how engineers here
are using mobile money to build businesses and help their community. (1
2
September 2016)
There is of course not one grand narrative, one story to be told. The global economy
is full of success stories that travel fast. Some are told many times and get a life of
their own. Companies have great resources to form grand narratives. Some people
in the global economy, Mark Zuckerberg for instance, will be listened to when
telling a story. And it is difficult not to be drawn into this type of ‘success narrative’
in ‘unexpected places’ – wow look what is just emerging here, I could never have
guessed! But the surprise is in the eye of the beholder. And in the global economy,
some people are looking and writing and ‘analyzing’, while others are under the
gaze, often voice-less. Then there are those stories in between, and beyond, which
don’t fit, which we do not know what to make of, that we might be scared or too
puzzled to write about. Because they are complex and emotional, and as
management scholars we have been told to leave emotions outside, to keep our
sight clear. But our sight might perhaps then risk to get deprived of its humanity.
And maybe, starting with empathy and engagement, even if its Western and not
fully informed, could be a way to put together the fragments in order for new –
perhaps more unexpected – stories to emerge?
2
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook account, 1 September 2016
[https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103073829862111].
846 | note
Matilda Dahl A chronology of fragments
the author
Matilda Dahl holds a PhD in Business Administration and works at Uppsala University
Campus Gotland in Sweden. Her research interests concern issues of governance,
organization and regulation.
Email: [email protected]
note | 847
the author(s) 2017
ISSN 1473-2866 (Online)
ISSN 2052-1499 (Print)
www.ephemerajournal.org
volume 17(4): 849-865
abstract
The rise of the Emerging Market is a remarkable exemplar of an idea that originated and
was socialized in Western financial markets during the 1980s. It has since gained rapid,
wider normative status with respect to a particular set of beliefs that motivate policy choices
on macroeconomic management, economic development and financial sector reforms in
developing and less developed countries. I draw on the Polanyian notion of
commodification and recent extensions to his scholarship in the realm of ideas that seek
to explicate processes through which the dominant ideal of the self-regulating market is
justified as fundamental to the organization of society. Against the backdrop of globally
mobile capital, I critique the prevalence of a particular ideology of emergence in which
commodified geography and commodified finance interact to shape policy. In this process,
evaluative talk plays a key role in legitimizing the expectations of global capital and
overcoming inherent contradictions through the rhetoric of non-crises. I thus highlight the
ascendance of a narrow and instrumentally economic understanding of emergence in
contemporary, post reform India as is asserted in conventional policy discourse. I conclude
by remarking on the significant constriction of ideational space for the consideration of
alternative, historically informed approaches to social and economic development. The
legacy of Karl Polanyi serves as a prophetic reminder for the consequences of such
constriction.
note | 849
ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 849-865
Introduction
Karl Polanyi (1944-2001) attributed the early nineteenth century rise of market
society and its integrative economic logic based on the institution of the self-
regulating market to the conjunctive rise of a universal economic motive (personal
gain) and the fictitious commodification of land, labour and money. It is arguable
whether Polanyi could have foreseen the extent of fictitious commodification in
contemporary market society, in particular the commodification of entire
geographies. Kaur (2012) emphasizes the ascendancy of the superficial project of
corporatized nation branding over development-tethered nation building in the
competitive race to emerge as the desired destination for global capital. Against the
backdrop of nation states increasingly seeing themselves primarily as managers of
capital, she identifies:
a defining aspect of neoliberal economic restructuring over the past few decades has
been the re-making of the nation-form in the image of the corporation —
Nationality, Inc — complete with its own trademark and a brand image. The shift
marks the move from the ideas and practices of nation building to those of nation
branding, which is often suggested as the attainment of a higher and more complete
form of nationhood appropriate to the era of globalization. (2012: 605-606)
Notions of emerging, emergence and emerging markets are central to this exercise of
competitive nationalized brand building (Kaur and Hansen, 2016: 269),
particularly in the international market for finance. The term emerging market
represents an idea that originated in the IFC (a leading World Bank member
financial institution focused on private sector initiatives in developing economies)
over three decades ago to elevate a potential but fledgling asset class (investment
category comprising securities with similar characteristics) to a new standard
worthy of attention from international banks, fund managers and capital
providers. Emergence now transcends economic, political and public policy spheres
and is pervasive in the lexicon of economists, academics, analysts, businessmen,
executives, fund managers as well as the print and electronic media in India today.
The notion of an emerging India interacts deeply with collective construction of
national identity. In particular, the idea of emergence increasingly demands
adherence to a set of standardized expectations in the domains of macroeconomic
policy, financial markets and indeed, the political economy, as repeatedly
articulated and enforced by key internal and external actors.
Such expectations are usually enacted through evaluative talk that define red lines
of acceptable behavior. In so doing they seek to establish norms that de-legitimize
alternate notions of development (including the vehement rejection of the policies
of a previous generation) that cannot be accommodated by the immediate needs
of globally mobile capital. In the process of establishing such norms through the
850 | note
Srivatsan Lakshminarayan Market fundamentalism in the age of ‘haute finance’
Particularly in the last three decades, Karl Polanyi’s classic oeuvre, The Great
transformation, 1944 has been the subject of analysis and interpretation across the
disciplines of economic sociology, economic anthropology, historical sociology
and critical political economy. Institutional theories of change describe Polanyi’s
work as a remarkable example of macro-social analysis based on the use of ‘history
as an analytical tool’, consider Polanyi as one of the founding fathers of classical
historical institutionalism (Steinmo, 2008: 122) and acknowledge him as one of
the original contributors to the institutionalist approach of the study of political
economy alongside Thorstein Veblen and Max Weber (Dunlavy, 1998: 114;
Steinmo and Thelen, 1998: 3). Economic and historical sociologists and political
historians have been at the forefront in debating, theoretically extending and
empirically examining Polanyian constructs and methods (Block, 1979, 2001,
2003; Block and Somers 2005, 2014; Dale 2010; Gemici, 2008; Hann and Hart,
2009).
note | 851
ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 849-865
852 | note
Srivatsan Lakshminarayan Market fundamentalism in the age of ‘haute finance’
Thus, ideas are contested within ideational regimes and, regime changes in a given
society are rare. Ideas that are in tune with the given regime are epistemically
privileged. The broader regime prevalent in the contemporary global context is one
of historically persistent market fundamentalism. Block and Somers (2014: 166-173)
attribute its ascendance and persistence since nineteenth century Western society
to three underlying principles. The first is social naturalism - the claim that the
laws of nature govern society and that the laws of the market represent the natural
order of things. The second is theoretical realism constituting apparently inductive
but substantively deductive causal claims that argue from observable effects to the
true unobserved reality, e.g. that unemployment and low wages are invariably
observed in a welfare society not despite welfare support but because of welfare
support. The third principle is that of the conversion narrative, i.e. conversion of
actors or groups from one ideational regime to another through the neutralization
of the prevailing narrative and the depiction of an alternate story by moving back
and forth between ‘a more harmonious past before the onset of the crisis’ and
‘forward again to the problematic present’ (ibid.: 172). The operationalization of
the current regime is sustained through processes that seize crisis opportunities
by seeking to problematize the crisis, argue counterfactually so as to delegitimize
the original intellectual sponsors as architects of the current crisis and seek to alter
the narrative by promising a utopian alternative for the future through a powerful
counter-narrative. Thus market fundamentalism:
note | 853
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854 | note
Srivatsan Lakshminarayan Market fundamentalism in the age of ‘haute finance’
note | 855
ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 849-865
The process of establishing new destinations for financial capital through the
creation and re-categorization of emerging and frontier territories aids the widening
of portfolio opportunities through the emergence of alternate investable asset
856 | note
Srivatsan Lakshminarayan Market fundamentalism in the age of ‘haute finance’
Ironically, in every instance of an (imported) crisis, emergent states like India are
constrained to implement policy measures designed to speedily attract and retain
foreign exchange reserves by incentivizing global capital inflow in its most
transient form — foreign portfolio investment. Thus, we observe two pairs of
incongruous dynamics. One pertains to the emerging contradictions within
portfolio management techniques affecting portfolio investors of foreign capital
and, the other to rising dependability on tenuous foreign currency flows while
seeking to guard exchange rate stability and also financing growth. These
represent classic Polanyian illustrations of the internal contradictions arising from
the sophisticated reproduction of commoditized self-regulating finance in the
global market that emerging countries such as India face.
note | 857
ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 849-865
emerges as the last resort. Policies, thus lose connect with the developmental
dimension of stated ideology and are increasingly hostage to the immediate verdict
of financial markets.
Evaluative talk
The process of capital switching does not occur passively but is accompanied and
often determined by a strong sub-text of ‘evaluative talk’ (Lee, 2003: 67). Evaluative
talk aims to continuously (re)create conditions appropriate for (re)switching
through the discursive constitution of fitness for investment purpose. Such
evaluative talk in the context of emerging markets is often comparative,
juxtaposing nation states as lead-lag players so as to project them as examples of
successes or failures on neoliberal parameters of economic reform. This is often
accomplished by establishing expectations of reform implementation (in the
public domain) from the elected head of the sovereign emergent in the process.
Kaur (2012: 605) highlights the reversal from the earlier situation of ‘the
corporation seeking patronage as purveyor to the sovereign’ to the prevailing
regime where the state acts as purveyor to global capital through the display of
abundant ‘raw material, cheap skilled labour and unfettered access to markets’. It
is no surprise, therefore, that the prospective customer is constantly evaluating the
vendor’s wares and publicly setting terms for their merchantability.
858 | note
Srivatsan Lakshminarayan Market fundamentalism in the age of ‘haute finance’
Highlighting the dialectical nature of the problem, is the irony, that if fulfilled,
these crisis events would constrain options for India’s monetary policy (interest
rate reduction), investment reform process (attracting foreign investment inflows)
and foreign exchange management (stable exchange rate and robust foreign
exchange reserve maintenance) at precisely the moment of the articulated need to
implement these measures, thereby diminishing prospects for reform as judged
by the same neoliberal standards on which these expectations are articulated.
Evaluative talks by internal actors include allusions to the shameful legacy of India’s
economic performance prior to the introduction of liberalization and
commencement of global integration (1991), the externally anchored nature of the
vision of what India must or must not do – the imperative of measuring up to
international expectations, the separation of the social sphere from the economic
and, the articulation of a business case for future financing of the social sector
contingent upon economic growth. In the context of emergence, evaluative talk
thus seeks to further the logic of commodified finance in two very distinct and
related ways. First, it seeks to achieve and sustain the completion of the Polanyian
triad, namely the commodification of land and labour. Second, in the domain of
performance accounting, it demands on-going spatial (across emerging markets)
and temporal (fiscal quarter or year) policy accountability echoing the earlier
reversal of roles between state and corporation.
note | 859
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This paves the way for the situational negotiation of morals predicated on the
economic imperatives of substantively non-economistic contexts that is
simultaneously pervasive (by its reproduction throughout the hierarchy of society)
and regressive (by its relentless shaping of individual and collective
consciousness). The dialectical abasement of wholesome collective histories and
geographies, their diversities and inherited human-ness, through the verbalized
elevation of synthetic boundaries formalized in grand narratives of growth is thus
achieved. Simultaneously, the reinforcement of conformity to the instrumental
epistemology underlying such narratives through the continual emphasis on the
precariousness of growth is on display, resulting in the non-reflexive advancement
of performative growth over its subjective and substantial alternatives. The
fierceness of calls for safeguards to growth arising from unavoidable imperatives
to nurture the reified concept persists, in the course of which, the real subjective
constituent is often, collateral damage. The latent negation of human-ness in the
pursuit of metricized outcomes eventually, by its reproduction, constitutes a
conscious abnegation of stated intent. Finally, the anticipatory rhetoric of deep and
impending crisis, simultaneously serves preparatory and cautionary purposes
(highlighting the inevitable consequences of failing to fall in line) in the age of
market fundamentalism.
Burden of proof
860 | note
Srivatsan Lakshminarayan Market fundamentalism in the age of ‘haute finance’
development with the same brush. These arguments fail to adequately introspect,
in several ways.
note | 861
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Conclusion
Conversely, those having influence, providing inputs into or responsible for policy
choices (‘the conceptually sophisticated’) are far more circumspect with respect to
the structural adjustments and the tariff involved in emergence as a desideratum,
almost dispassionately so. This dispassion is often a function of the
disproportionate effects of such adjustments on the governors and the governed
but more fundamentally reflective of the lack of space for alternative ideas and an
inadequate critical appreciation of the zeitgeist. In either case, however, the
discourse is overwhelmingly about methods, efficiency and narrowly instrumental
aspects. The ideological mooring of India’s emergence at this time is remarkably
reflective of Polanyi’s prescient characterization of the rise of the market economy
in early nineteenth century England in the wake of the Industrial Revolution:
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Srivatsan Lakshminarayan Market fundamentalism in the age of ‘haute finance’
references
Bianconi, M., J.A. Yoshino and M.O.M. De Sousa (2013) ‘BRIC and the US
financial crisis: An empirical investigation of stock and bond
markets’, Emerging Markets Review, 14: 76-109.
Block, F. (1979) ‘Beyond the economistic fallacy: Karl Polanyi’, in T. Skocpol (ed.)
Vision and method in historical sociology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Block, F. (2003) ‘Karl Polanyi and the writing of the great transformation’, Theory
and Society, 32(3): 275-306.
Block, F.L. and M.R. Somers (2014) The power of market fundamentalism: Karl
Polanyi’s critique. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Dale, G. (2010) Karl Polanyi: The limits of the market. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press
Dimitriou, D., D. Kenourgios and T. Simos (2013) ‘Global financial crisis and
emerging stock market contagion: A multivariate FIAPARCH–DCC
approach’, International Review of Financial Analysis, 30: 46-56.
Dunlavy, C.A. (1998) ‘Political structure, state policy, and industrial change: Early
railroad policy in the United States and Prussia’, in S. Steinmo, K. Thelen and
F. Longstreth (eds.) Structuring politics: Historical institutionalism in comparative
analysis. Cambridge studies in comparative politics. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Geuss, R. (1981) The idea of a critical theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hann, C. and K. Hart (2009) Market and society: The great transformation today.
Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ilmanen, A. and J. Kizer (2012) ‘The death of diversification has been greatly
exaggerated’, Journal of Portfolio Management, 38(3): 15-27.
International Monetary Fund (2016) ‘Staff note for the G20 - A guiding framework
for structural reforms’.
[https://www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2016/033116.pdf]
note | 863
ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 849-865
Kaur, R. (2012) ‘Nation's two bodies: Rethinking the idea of “new” India and its
other’, Third World Quarterly, 33(4): 603-618.
Levitt, K.P. (2013) From the great transformation to the great financialization: On Karl
Polanyi and other essays. New York: Zed Books.
Polanyi, K. (1944/2001) The great transformation: The political and economic origins
of our time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Polanyi, K. (1953) Lecture – ‘The tool box of institutional analysis’ in File 31-01,
Columbia University, New York – Outline and report, 1947-1953. Karl Polanyi
Digital Archive, Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy.
Sidaway, J.D. (2012) ‘Geographies of development: new maps, new visions?’, The
Professional Geographer, 64(1): 49-62.
Somers, M.R. and F. Block (2005) ‘From poverty to perversity: Ideas, markets, and
institutions over 200 years of welfare debate’, American Sociological Review,
70(2): 260-287.
Soros, G. (1998) The crisis of global capitalism: Open society endangered. New York:
PublicAffairs.
864 | note
Srivatsan Lakshminarayan Market fundamentalism in the age of ‘haute finance’
Williamson, O.E. (2000) ‘The new institutional economics: Taking stock, looking
ahead’, Journal of Economic Literature, 38(3): 595-613.
[http://iab.worldbank.org/~/media/FPDKM/IAB/Documents/IAB-report.pdf]
the author
Srivatsan Lakshminarayan is a Lecturer in Accounting at the School of Finance and
Management, SOAS University of London. He acknowledges the support provided by SP
Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai, India, in the writing of this
paper. Srivatsan studied accounting in India and holds an MSc in Finance from the
University of London. He previously worked in the financial services industry for over a
decade. His areas of research interest include accounting history and theory, business and
economic history, the political philosophy of Karl Polanyi and the analysis of rhetoric and
discourse.
Email: [email protected]
note | 865
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volume 17(4): 867-876
What, asked the philosopher Bruce Benson, do the philosophers Nietzsche and
Derrida have in common? They were both concerned about idolatry (Benson,
2002), or the act of creating images, indeed objects of substitution, stand-ins in
place of the one that is to be understood as beyond the realm of humanity;
simulations of the Real beyond reality. With ease, we could add Gilles Deleuze’s
philosophical oeuvre to Benson’s list, for he, in his insistence on the immanent
and the emergent, never attempted to conceal his disdain for idolatry. Indeed, the
idolaters are people of ‘artificial lives’, the ones who make essences, stable
representations to mask the emergent flow of forces and intensities. It is they, not
the artful, who are the true mystics, the fanatics, and the superstitious (Deleuze,
1991b: 74). They who so desperately have faith in their ‘stable representations’ are
the ones who have truly come to privilege hallucinations and fantasies (Deleuze
and Guattari, 2000: 25).
In contrast to what one might have learned to assume, being radical is conceptually
founded on staying close to the roots (Lat: rad-ixes): you shall not make for yourself
an essence, an idol (εἴ δωλον). Do not become a false god. To be radical means
giving up on hallucinations, and fantasies, on mysticism and superstitions. To be
radical means: do not bow down, do not worship. This carves us a fold in academia
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where the question of what finds stability becomes apparent: what is it that is
worshipped here, that which maintains positions of power and triumphantly
parades the Idols of truthfulness? In the words of Nietzsche, it is the truthful man
who seeks to condemn the expression that is life, s/he who sees life as an evil and
a sin to be atoned for; truth’s terrorizing inclination to judge (Deleuze, 1989).
What has the ability to stay so it can be recognized as a means with which to judge?
As the theologian Richard Neuhaus, the founder and editor of the highly
influential journal First Things, noted, it was André Malraux who said – shortly
before he died in 1976 – ‘The twenty-first century will be religious or it will not be
at all’ (Neuhaus, 1997). A few years earlier, in 1970, Michel Foucault published a
short essay entitled ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’. In it, he declared, perhaps
somewhat flippantly: ‘one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian’
(Foucault, 1977: 165).
Was Malraux right in his assertion? How could he say such a thing after
Nietzsche’s madman had shouted ‘God is dead!’ a century earlier? Additionally,
how could Foucault say such a thing after he himself declared, in his 1966 book
‘The order of things’, that, by analogy with Nietzsche, man is dead? True, while
st th
Malraux was pointing to the 21 century, Foucault was reimagining the 20 .
However, the temporal distance was only apparent as Deleuze, the man of
emergence himself, became increasingly popular throughout the Anglophone
st
world after the turn of the 21 century, his presence manifesting in fields such as
organization theory (e.g., Linstead and Thanem, 2007; Thanem, 2006, Sørensen,
2005) and, more recently, consumer research as well (e.g., Hietanen et al., 2014;
Kozinets et al., 2016; Hietanen and Andéhn, 2017).
God is dead, man is dead: how then can there be a century of anything?
And yet there is. One of persistent habit and custom. Besides fanaticism and
superstition, there is another element that directly defines the idolaters, the
essence-makers or, worse, the essence-discoverers, and that is dogmatism. As
Hegel (out of all thinkers!) wrote, ‘dogmatism as a way of thinking [...] is nothing
else but the opinion that the true consists in a proposition which is a fixed result’
(as quoted in Deleuze, 1994: 211). Hegel was right, but his claim was also
incomplete. Dogmatism is not related to fixed essences only, but also to everything
that tends to be expressed through absolutes. Therefore, dogmatism can readily
infuse a Deleuzian non-fixed, non-truth / multiple truths within its circuitry.
The main weapon against idolatry, essentialism, and dogmatism is criticism, but
only the kind that can envisage a pure outside that refuses to rebound back to its
origin. As Deleuze noted, Kant is the first philosopher who understood critique as
868 | note
Andrei Botez and Joel Hietanen The rise of stagnancy and emergent possibilities for young radicals
having to be total. Total because ‘nothing must escape it’ (Deleuze, 1983: 89).
Nothing. For theorizing to keep emerging and the thought-machine of academia
to keep humming, the critical vector is the fuel for problematizing. This is where
the young radical in academia finds pure potential, only to then be repeatedly
reeled back in for lack of faith in the iconic register.
A few years ago, Daniel Zamora published a piece in the leftist magazine Jacobin
titled Can we criticize Foucault? (Zamora, 2014). What seemed a rather innocent
question, created a storm of gargantuan proportions (Elden, 2014). When it comes
to Deleuze and most notably his collaborations with Guattari, with the very notable
st
exceptions of, for instance, Badiou’s (1997, so close to the 21 century) book
Deleuze: The clamor of being (see Žižek, 2012), he seems to have largely escaped
criticism. And where there is no criticism, there is idolatry. As his presence
increases within organization theory, consumer research and even marketing, he’s
become something akin to an untouchable figure – the mystic too impenetrable to
touch. Is this surprising? Maybe yes, maybe no. Paraphrasing Zamora (2014),
Deleuze always took pains to inquire into theoretical corpuses of widely differing
horizons and to constantly question his own ideas. Unfortunately, the intellectual
process-oriented Left has often remained trapped in a ‘school’ attitude, i.e. the
‘little Deleuzians’ (Blake, 2016), often keenly refusing to consider or debate ideas
that start to question his premises.
Within this particular journal [ephemera], his name (alone, or together with
Guattari) appears an impressive number of times (e.g., Helle, 2008; Pedersen,
2011; Sørensen, 2003; Yue and Peters, 2015), akin to à la mode, a hype. It is
essential (pun intended). And being so, means it’s uncriticizable: dogmatism is
there, although in a decidedly more elusive way. Truth consisting of fixed, certain
results is replaced by its equally unquestionable negation. There is no truth except
in the fragments of a deception and a disaster; there is no truth except a betrayed
truth; there is no truth, but orders of truth (Deleuze, 2008: 73). There is no truth,
there are only evaluations (Deleuze, 2015: 18). The truth of non-truth, and nothing
beyond.
In this sense being a Deleuzian has never been easier. His name is uttered with
almost sacred reverence at organization theory conferences and now also
increasingly in gatherings of consumer research and marketing scholars. Those
who follow his views are sometimes self-proclaiming themselves ‘heretics’.
Strange, were they not supposed to be radicals? You cannot be both: you’re either
close to the roots (radicals), or away from them (heretics). Business people – what
a sobering thought! – have found in Deleuze a new friend, an ally that can and
should be trusted. In an increasing number of academic circles, Deleuze, the
monstrous and the blasphemer, has become the ‘official philosopher’, the oracle
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The irony here is that you don’t need to be a positivist to oppose Deleuze. You only
need to be a Deleuzian. Was he right or correct in his approaches? Of course he was,
and this is exactly the reason we have to destroy him.
870 | note
Andrei Botez and Joel Hietanen The rise of stagnancy and emergent possibilities for young radicals
for Deleuzian scholarship! Open the floodgates then and breach the palisade. This
is an academic culture moribund, where the image of thought is regimented and
disciplined. Let’s meet in a bar and spend the evening graphically discussing
publishable ‘hot topics’, ‘preferred’ reviewers and sellable ‘insights’. This is
thought that refuses to think itself, and here and now, naïve as ever, we call for
more thinking thinking thinking itself. A Deleuzian should thus be wary of a most
pressing formula:
The hammer: the tool that smashes the idols becomes an idol in itself. Who has
the courage to crush it? The blasphemer becomes a no-truth teller. Who has the
courage to curse him? Once dreamt, the island should be easily forgotten. Not only
because of the pressure the status quo and the heretics puts on those radicals
‘desiring’ to fly, but because the island should not be remembered long enough to
become covered over by signification – as Adorno wrote (Adorno, 1981: 249). The
idolaters remember too much. An island, a gesture covered by signification
note | 871
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becomes a totality, a limit, a horizontal wall. Indeed, only the ‘great Amnesiac’
(Deleuze, 2004: 11) can inhabit an island. However, because ‘sometimes you forget
to forget’, as the Polish painter Stefan Czerkinsky noted in his dialogue with
Deleuze (Deleuze, 2004: 283), that’s where the trouble starts.
Move!
Thus we, the ‘radical youth’, search for crystals (see Deleuze, 1989: 274), but not
for crystals themselves, but for them as movements: upon their rotation, endless
spectrums of color are created. There are no crystals, don’t bow. The crystalline
regime refuses to explain because it simply flashes with affect and then disappears
before it can explain (ibid.). In its continuous ignorance, its furious momentary
affectivity, it keeps forgetting its point.
Dream (never discover) new places, institutions, for there never were any. There is
nothing that precedes the now. If there is, then don’t listen to its siren’s call.
Destroy it. Do not believe in words, we have learned to trust them too much. They
are convincing, because they come bearing gifts, i.e. nouns, essences: promises of
subjectivity, identity, and memory. A noun attached to an object is terrifying, for it
creates an image of thought that controls the exterior; a mastery of the universe.
But the world does not need delusional heretics. We cannot tolerate them
anymore. Burn them, then burn your ‘self’ with them. Do not wish to be
remembered: why becoming another false idol, a ‘where’? Simply make a fold
where there was none (and there’s never one), be the seed of an origami (see
Deleuze, 1993) that will vanish long before its creation. Emergence has no
tomorrow, but let it too wither before the new.
872 | note
Andrei Botez and Joel Hietanen The rise of stagnancy and emergent possibilities for young radicals
references
Baudrillard, J. (2007) Symbolic exchange and death. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Blake, T. (2016) ‘Against the little Deleuzians: Schizoanalysis is all around us’.
[https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2016/06/14/against-the-little-
deleuzians-schizoanalysis-is-all-around-us/]
Deleuze, G. (1983) Nietzsche and philosophy. New York, NY: Columbia University
Press.
1
A fax sent to Le Monde by Jean-François Lyotard upon Deleuze’s death (Misère de la
philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 2000: 194).
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Deleuze, G. (1993) The fold: Leibniz and the baroque. Minnesota, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and repetition. New York, NY: Columbia University
Press.
Deleuze, G. (2004) Desert islands: And other texts, 1953-1974. Los Angeles, CA:
Semiotext(e).
Hietanen, J. and M. Andéhn (2017) ‘More than meets the eye: Videography and
production of desire in semiocapitalism’, Journal of Marketing Management,
forthcoming.
874 | note
Andrei Botez and Joel Hietanen The rise of stagnancy and emergent possibilities for young radicals
Latour, B. (2004) ‘Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to
matters of concern’ [http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-
CRITICAL-INQUIRY-GB.pdf].
Pedersen, M. (2011) ‘“A career is nothing without a personal life”: On the social
machine in the call for authentic employees’, ephemera, 11(1): 63-77.
Žižek, S. (2012) Organs without bodies: On Deleuze and consequences. New York, NY:
Routledge.
the authors
Joel Hietanen is visiting assistant professor at Aalto University School of Business and an
associate professor (docent) at Stockholm Business School. His interests include
videographic methodologies, philosophies of immanence and emergence and consumer
culture theory.
Email: [email protected]
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Andrei Botez is post doc at Aalto University School of Business. His research is focused
on uncovering the theological underpinnings of transhumanism.
Email: [email protected]
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volume 17(4): 877-894
On hearing the phrase ‘political art’ most people nowadays will think of art which
is trying to make a statement or art enlisted for a specific cause. It is seen as art
whose politics is largely overt and explicit. But is this the only way art can be
political? Does art need to be legible and meaningful to be political? Or can art be
political through its affective sensations? As an artist, currently studying fine art
and making untutored forays into philosophy, these questions have dominated my
making and thinking. This note, and the accompanying artworks woven through
it, are attempts to interrogate how art can operate politically beyond meaning,
language and representation. Guided by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, I will argue that there is an often-neglected political potency stemming
from art’s affective abilities to engender what I will call ‘emergence’: that is new
forms, sensations and affects which operate outside and beyond signification and
cognition, and which can provoke change, within us, between us and in how we
live together, in and of the world.
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878 | note
Autonomous Artists Anonymous Political art without words
Art’s political power is both celebrated and contained under capitalism. While
relying upon our creativity, capitalism actively ensnares and commodifies it. While
this occurs across arenas, it is clearly exemplified in relation to ‘political art’, where
capitalism serves to marginalise and suppress the affective power and politics of
sensation.
While linguistic signifiers and coded referents have always been present in art,
their role changed as, in tandem with the expansion of capitalism, art began to be
conceived as the result of autonomous, individual expression, rather than servicing
community rituals, high priests or powerful patrons. Marcel Duchamp famously
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880 | note
Autonomous Artists Anonymous Political art without words
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either refusing to produce artworks or dissolving the artwork into life. Lazzarato
interprets Duchamp’s ready-mades as a refusal to work and a repudiation of the
‘hand and virtuosity of the artist’ (2014a: 13) while the Situationists and more
recently proponents of ‘relational aesthetics’, amongst many others, designate
political and social interventions as art. Both strategies have been inspiring, radical
and powerful, but they also relinquish the production of art as affectively and
sensorily powerful objects. Moreover, designating interventions as art can render
them politically safe: incorporated into the state capitalist machinery they are
reduced to equivalent of their market or social value, occluding at least some of
their political power. In Zepke’s damning critique, ‘art becomes life (but life stays
as it is)’ (2011: 74).
Art’s subsumption under the logic and mechanisms of late capitalism carries a
wider significance in terms of effecting our subjectification – that is how we are
made as subjects. The putatively autonomous artist is now the archetype for all
post-Fordist workers (Lazzarato, 2011; Lorey, 2011), exemplifying the selling of
one’s self, via one’s creativity and becoming what Lazzarato has called an
‘entrepreneur of her/himself’ (ibid.: 47). While seeming to embody freedom,
autonomy and radicalism – society’s outspoken outsider – today’s artist can only
succeed if they are able and willing to ‘choose’ to be the flexible, precarious,
itinerant ‘creative’ whose income is predicated on never-ending and never-
sufficient game of self-promotion and self-commodification. In order to construct
and express one’s ‘true’ self, one must be prepared to sell one’s creativity: all
workers must be like ‘artists’ who create, commodify and market themselves in
order to be themselves, whose subjectivity becomes based on becoming an
individualistic, neoliberal hustler required to safeguard and express a coherence,
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Left in this desolate landscape are hordes of ‘emerging’ artists toiling away,
accumulating academic qualifications and pop-up exhibitions to adorn their CVs,
often making ends meet in some other job(s), desperate to be discovered and
secure the patronage of the cultural gatekeepers all tied to state or corporate
capitalist institutions. Their ‘emergence’ in the art world is defined as the
profitability of their art, and those who do ‘emerge’ and become ‘established’ are
those whose subsumption within the capitalist logic is complete. This exemplifies
the suppression of emergence that arises through the art itself, that resists the
market-driven means of understanding and valuation, and in particular that which
arise through affective sensations. Of course artworks can still act politically
through the affective responses they engender, but they will be combating forces
of signification and commodification. We need therefore a mode of creativity that
operates, is viewed and is valued outside the constrictions of capitalism, that is free
to be incoherent, arational and unorganised, untethered to linguistic signifiers or
commodity-form, which exceeds representation in order to speak with sensations.
For how can we imagine or build alternative practices and ways of life outside
capitalism and its systems of signification, if our most basic tool – our creativity –
is ensnared within them?
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886 | note
Autonomous Artists Anonymous Political art without words
Encounters with affective sensations can thus provide a route towards a realm of
perception outside of or beneath language, meaning and interpretation. Affective
responses bypass our intellectual, rational senses as they are not based on what we
know or understand, nor on any system of logic, representation or signification.
Sensations affect us directly, bodily, and singularly – that is differently each time
– in ways which though autonomous of conscious thought and feeling, may still
provoke new and changed conscious thoughts and feelings.
Affect can be understood beyond the phenomenological framework with its focus
on the material, individual and embodied experience, and as a portal into an
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 877-894
888 | note
Autonomous Artists Anonymous Political art without words
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 877-894
viewer/participant. Affects attune us to the world of the virtual, in ways which can
help and inspire us to reconfigure the actual.
This affective political potency unique to art can help us get both deeper within
and out of ourselves, our subjectivation and representation. As Guattari writes, art
can operate politically when it ‘engenders unprecedented, unforeseen and
unthinkable qualities of being’ (Guattari, 1995: 106). It does so through a fidelity
to experiment and to break out of spoken or unspoken diktats or fashions, and to
operate outside regimes of meaning. Indeed, as John Rajchman has written, it is
only via encountering the outside that one can break out of consensus and act and
think creatively: we are forced to think, he writes, ‘by something we cannot
recognise, given through a violent aesthetic element, a sensory or affective contact
with something that doesn’t fit, which shakes up how we are accustomed to think’
(Rajchman, 2008: 87). However, as we have seen, our capacities and desires to
break out of the known are being restricted and dampened through a co-opted and
desensitised conception of art acting within the regimes of commodification and
signification. We need to conceive of art, its politics and its context differently.
I have argued that speaking with affective sensations is a neglected but necessary
part of art’s potential politics and can aid our attempts to exit and resist capitalist
norms, modes and behaviours. However, there is an additional way in which this
kind of art can operate politically: it is an instructive model for how we should all
be able to conduct our lives, and create our worlds. Taking a cue from this
conception of art’s power to activate emergence through sensation and affect,
Guattari instructs us to conceive of the world and our selves to be in a permanent
state of creative and experimental flux: for everything to be subject to forces of
890 | note
Autonomous Artists Anonymous Political art without words
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 877-894
At a more individual level it can lead to a more intensive, attuned and sympathetic
reading of one another – without always expecting logicality or reasonableness,
and attending to how we will always also be in thrall to imperceptible and affective
forces and intensities which are not subject to the laws of rationality, logicality and
legibility. Rolnik characterises this as being vulnerable to the other, arguing that
this is a ‘precondition for the other to cease being a simple object for the projection
of pre-established images, in order to become a living presence, with whom we can
construct the territories of our existence and the changing contours of our
subjectivity’ (Rolnik, 2011: 25). This vulnerability is precisely what is activated by
‘a specific capacity of the sensible’ by which she means the body’s capacities to
respond beyond cognition and consciousness, attuned to imperceptible forces and
intensities, capacities which are exercised by art’s powers of affect and sensation.
This connection with the virtual that hovers within and outside us, the excess that
escapes any system of codification or subjectification and remains ever in flux, is
what enables change and creation.
892 | note
Autonomous Artists Anonymous Political art without words
references
Buchanan, I. (2007) ‘Deleuze and the internet’, Australian Humanities Review, 43:
1-19. Deleuze, G. (2006) ‘The brain is the screen’, in G. Deleuze, Two regimes
of madness. London: Semiotext(e).
Grosz, E. (2008) Chaos, territory, art. Deleuze and the framing of the earth. New York,
Columbia University Press.
Lazzarato, M. (2014) Marcel Duchamp and the refusal of work, trans. J.D. Jordan. Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e).
O’Sullivan, S. and S. Zepke (eds.) (2010) Deleuze and contemporary art. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 877-894
Zepke, S. (2006) ‘The concept or art when art is not a concept’, Angelaki, 11(1): 157-
167.
Zepke, S. (2008) ‘The readymade: Art as the refrain of life’, in S. O’Sullivan and
S. Zepke (eds.) Deleuze, Guattari and the production of the new. London:
Continuum International Publishing Group.
Zepke, S. (2009) ‘Deleuze, Guattari and contemporary art’, in E.W. Holland, D.W.
Smith and C.J. Stivale (eds.) Image and text. London: Continuum International
Publishing Group.
the author
This note has been written anonymously in the name of a collective – Autonomous Artists
Anonymous – in an admittedly limited attempt to resist marketing a ‘self’ as an entity to
produce capital (financial or social).
894 | note
the author(s) 2017
ISSN 1473-2866 (Online)
ISSN 2052-1499 (Print)
www.ephemerajournal.org
volume 17(4): 895-905
abstract
When people work together, who decides how their collective efforts are allocated and who
receives the benefits from their collective product? This short one-person play contrasts
several influential organization theories to explore these central questions of collective
action. As personified mystical characters, theories of Hobbes, Marx, Anarchists, statists,
and neoliberals present themselves in verse as forms of analysis. I have three primary
goals exploring these questions in theatrical form. First, I aim to denaturalize the
mundane systems and theories of organization by anthropomorphizing them into strange
characters to which audiences can freshly react. Secondly, I widen the timescale so the
present systems, which can feel inevitable and unchangeable, can be seen as a mere
moment within a long history of change, poised for new developments. Finally, I aim to
shape current efforts which strive toward cooperation and mutualism; by embracing the
complexity of the task before us and sparking the imagination and creativity needed to
renegotiate the way we organize ourselves to accomplish tasks and share the benefits.
Introduction
Even for those who consider the costs of capitalism and hierarchy to be
unacceptable, a viable alternative remains elusive. Elements of cooperative
ownership and leadership hold promise, but are currently a peripheral microcosm
within the global capitalist system. Aside from formal institutions of ownership
and management, organizational patterns are heavily embedded in culture,
intuition, and habit. The task ahead is a drastic re-negotiation of the personal,
social, and material fabric of our society.
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 895-905
To approach this task I use a tool that seldom finds itself in the hands of an
economist – a play. This short one-person play explores several major
organizational theories of the modern era. The theories generally agree that there
are benefits when people work together. They diverge, however, on the questions
of ‘who decides?’ and ‘who benefits?’ What tasks are worth doing, who does them,
and how is the collective product distributed? The play engages with these
questions by using one of the most basic building blocks of change – our
imagination.
This play is inspired by Ben Halm’s work Theatre and ideology (1995), in which he
writes about the Ghana National Theatre Movement. The Movement aimed to
build a new identity for Ghana beyond the self-and-world consciousness which had
been so deeply scarred through the era of colonialism. Similarly, we can create new
stories and images of who we are and what our society can look like. We can engage
in mental rehearsals of how to navigate that world with its problems and
possibilities. In this play, I personify the organizational theories as characters that
interact through a condensed history. These characters are alive and well in
contemporary debates and their personification is intended to give those debates a
fresh perspective.
Finally, a word on how to read this play. You will notice an extensive collection of
footnotes; I advise that you ignore them in your first encounter. The main body of
the play is intended to be read as it would be performed – as a work in and of itself.
The allusions and imagery which the footnotes elaborate are intended to reward
re-reads and further contemplation, and allow further research for those
interested.
Leviathan:
1
I am Leviathan – great dragon of the sea ,
I’m told I’m scheduled for extinction but nothing yet has been able to defeat
me.
1
Leviathan is a sea creature mentioned several places in the Hebrew Scriptures,
described in Isaiah Ch. 27:1 as ‘dragon of the sea’. This image of a great sea monster
was appropriated by Hobbes to represent the commonwealth in his book Leviathan
(Hobbes and MacPherson, 1982/1651).
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Brian Showalter Matlock Leviathan lives
2
I am the uber-dragon foretold of by my sycophantic prophet Nietzsche;
3
who in his syphillactic madness received a vision concerning me.
My defining characteristic, besides my countenance so dour,
4
is certainly my ever all-consuming will to power .
5
My stature is composed of all the straining, striving people
whose efforts are woven together by control – my knitting needle.
6
Qoheleth :
[giggles, clapping] Well done!
7
I apologize for Leviathan, waiting his turn is not his revealed preference .
I am not his companion, though by now I am accustomed to his presence
and must admit that I admire his delectable irreverence.
Ah yes, how rude of me! Just because we’ve met before doesn’t mean you
recognize me.
8
I am Qoheleth, Wisdom, the One who destroys , the One who dances!
2
Related to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch (overman/superman) from Thus
spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 2012/1883). After the death of god, who was the source
of otherworldly values and meaning, the Übermensch creates new meaning and values
based on the present, and imposes these created values on others who passively accept
the world and values as given.
3
There was a popular rumor that Nietzsche had syphilis, and this brought about his
madness and death. This is contested, and other theories of his apparent dementia are
given by those such as Schain in The legend of Nietzsche’s syphilis (Schain, 2001).
4
‘The will to power’, or Wille zur Macht is something Nietzsche dealt with as a basic part
of life – beings have the impulse to use their power and potential, and to expand it even
at risk of death (Nietzsche, 2014/1886).
5
Hobbes uses the metaphor of Leviathan’s body to describe the commonwealth – the
various parts of the body are unified in action by the direction of a single head,
representing the power of the state. The state maintains unity by imposing the will of
the ruler(s) to direct, punish, and protect the rest of society (Hobbes and MacPherson,
1982/1651).
6
Qoheleth is the original Hebrew name of the book/author of the Greek ‘Ecclesiastes’.
The word means ‘assembler’, or ‘gatherer’. In the book of Ecclesiastes, the author
famously tries to find meaning and satisfaction in various activities, both virtuous and
illicit, and one by one concludes that these pursuits are ‘meaningless, a chasing after
the wind’ (Ecclesiastes 1:14, New International Version).
7
A reference to Paul Samuelson’s (1938) theory of revealed preference in his consumer
choice theory whereby the consumers ‘reveal’ their preferences for goods by their
purchase.
8
This is imagery of the God Shiva, who is an amalgam of various traditions. Shiva is
widely regarded in Hinduism as one of the three primary aspects of the divine – the
one who destroys or ends all things. In the process of Samsara (the reincarnation life
cycle of birth, life, and death) there is Brahma who created the world and begins life,
Vishnu who sustains life, and Shiva, who ends life. Life is then begun again. Shiva is
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 895-905
9
I am gifted with many hands; my most famous one invisible .
I am your narrator and promethean guide throughout this dragon’s tale.
‘Everything is meaningless!’ is the moral of this story as I expect it to be;
[giggles]
but the authors are not yet finished, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
Hobbes:
I am Sir Thomas Hobbes, the foremost Leviathanologist.
Look merely at his handiwork – who doesn’t stand in awe at all he hath
accomplished?
Who can complain? Who suffers injustice?
13
Does not a runner beat her own body to cross the finish line first ?
Does anyone care of the aches and pain suffered by the ankles and lungs
That they should take the victor’s glory when the race is won?
depicted as dancing in many traditional renderings, and is sometimes known as
Nataraja, ‘Lord of dance’.
9
‘Invisible hand’ is taken from Adam Smith specifically in his Theory of moral sentiments.
Smith attempts to show how people seeking only their personal betterment are fooled
into hard work, the fruits of which are primarily distributed through society, not
attained by the self-interested (Smith et al., 1987/1759).
10
The ‘neo-Hobbesian view’ described by Sam Bowles (1985) includes those who see
hierarchy as the necessary and natural organizational form. An important example of
this is Alchian and Demsetz’s Hobbesian-style explanation for the persistence of
hierarchy in capitalist firms. They argue that workers willingly agree to be monitored
and cede profits to the capitalist in order to keep everyone from shirking (Alchian and
Demsetz, 1972).
11
An allusion to the apocalyptic imagery from book of Revelation, the last book of the
Bible.
12
‘You cannot serve both God and Mammon [the god of money]’ (Mathew 6:24, King
James Version).
13
Imagery drawn from 1 Corinthians Ch.9 and Ch.11.
898 | play
Brian Showalter Matlock Leviathan lives
14
This would be far worse than the dragon who… devours a few.
15
And takes the cream for himself and lets the milk trickle down through.
16
For it is fear that binds us to him , of one another’s actions.
In his auspices alone we can work under the safety of his lashes.
Qoheleth:
As with all academic conferences, during the question and answer session
there was one who acted on the Oedipal urge to unfound and upend the
expert’s mastery
with eloquent condescension and self-righteous blow-hardery! [giggles]
Karl Marx everyone! [golf-clapping]
Marx:
Pardon me dear Hobbes,
whose handiwork did you say? Leviathan’s only ‘work’ is to take out credit.
The feats are accomplished by the many, to whom he is indebted.
He is the heir to the product of their duty,
17
along with all the other sharers in the stolen booty .
18
Great feats have been accomplished by virtue of our synthesis -
14
Hobbes argued that the injustices and indulgences of the leader(s) of the
commonwealth do not compare to the problems that would exist without the
commonwealth. Hobbes concludes that people thus have no grounds to question the
sovereign even in the face of injustice or malfeasance (Hobbes and MacPherson,
1982/1651: ch.17-18).
15
This is a reference to supply-side or ‘trickle-down’ economics. This theory puts policy
focus on increasing profitability for the capitalist class in order to entice them to invest.
The logic is that this investment would then provide jobs and growth which would
benefit the rest of society.
16
In chapter 18 of Leviathan, Hobbes argues that whether people cede power to a
democratic government or submit to a foreign conqueror, they do so out of fear of the
alternative.
17
In Capital: Vol. 1 ch. 24, Marx refers to classes that receive a distribution of the surplus
from the capitalists (such as land lords, politicians, managers, etc.) as the ‘sharers in
the booty’.
18
Capital: Vol. 1 ch. 13: Co-operation (Marx and Mandel, 1992/1867)
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 895-905
Qoheleth:
And as with all academic conferences, their words were immediately put into
action!
The people appear to be gathering at the Red Square,
Let us see what it is they are up to there!
19
Leviathanovna :
I am Leviathanovna, and I serve only as the head of this collective of equals
the true Marxian vision of surplus shared with all the working people.
20
But as one more equal than others , to question or defy me is henceforth
illegal.
Do as I say, your surplus I’ll take, but don’t worry, I represent you!
19
Leviathanovna: Russian patronymic meaning ‘daughter of Leviathan’.
20
‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’ (Orwell and
Hitchens, 2003/1945: 134).
21
From Bakunin’s letter about his excommunication from the First International: ‘Who
would dare flatter themselves that they could even encompass and comprehend the
infinite multitude of diverse interests, tendencies, and actions in every country, every
province, every locality, every trade, the vast array of which, united, but not made
uniform, by a great shared aspiration and by a few fundamental principles which have
already penetrated the consciousness of the masses, will constitute the coming social
revolution’ (Bakunin, 2001/1872: 193-194)?
22
Braverman (1998/1974) argued that increased technology does not result in increased
skill and pay of workers, but a separation of those who conceive of work and those who
execute work. The result would be a deskilled and poorly paid production labor force.
23
The other influence to this line was Adam Smith’s famous use of a pin factory as a
praiseworthy example of the division of labor, but later in The wealth of nations he writes
that those who spend their lives in factories doing a few simple and mindless tasks,
900 | play
Brian Showalter Matlock Leviathan lives
Leviathanovna:
How cute, you are a unique little snowflake.
Well, welcome to the snowstorm, you want my crown? Come and take it!
I have accomplished already with force what you hope to do by magic.
Your faith in human nature so naïve and stupidly tragic.
While your spirit is admirable and your dancing so ‘effective’,
please accept my apologies on behalf of the collective.
For the people!
[Pantomimes dangling the anarchist above her mouth, dropping him in, and
swallows him whole]
Qoheleth:
Meanwhile, in the Fordist factories of Yankeedom,
picketing Marxies poised to storm the Dragon’s inner sanctum.
Leviathan:
Though oft accused of being dense and hard of hearing,
I have taken notice of the crowds of peasants, torches in hand, approaching.
[picks up list of demands]
Um… on an unrelated note out of my own goodness and patent generosity
I grant, uh, potty breaks for all and [looks more closely at list of demands] a
40-hour work week!?
[quickly regains composure and a smile]
This of course applies only to the sovereign state;
the colonies remain with their current fate.
26
After all, we must allow them to be free to choose ,
for all we know they may prefer lose!
‘become as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become’
(Smith, 1994/1776: 302).
24
A quote-turned slogan from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Solution of the social problem
(Proudhon, 1927/1849).
25
This anarchist slogan is a paraphrase of the response Emma Goldman gave to a
young boy who told her that ‘it did not behoove an agitator to dance… with such
reckless abandon’ (Goldman, 2006/1931: 42).
26
Free to choose (Friedman, 1979)
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[brief pause]
So what then is the moral?
The virtue of contentment?
The injustice inherent in the system?
The social beneficence of self-delusion?
Yes! Yes! Yes!
[giggles]
Leviathan:
28
Yes, my human capital ! Listen to Qoheleth, listen to Wisdom!
As her story plainly showed, the pursuit of wealth is a prison.
Be content to labor under my paternalism so fatherly.
Submit to my direction and I will ensure you blissful poverty!
Let us return to the former glory before the socialistic lies,
we will be neo-liberated when you tax incentivize!
27
This story is from Adam Smith’s Theory of moral sentiments (Smith et al., 1987/1759).
28
Human capital (Becker, 1994/1964)
902 | play
Brian Showalter Matlock Leviathan lives
Qoheleth:
And so it was in those days that the length of the workweek increased;
productivity rose while wage growth appeared to decease.
Ah, please don’t lose hope, for I’m an equal opportunity destroyer.
You see; threads of aspiration and absurdity make up the same embroider.
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 895-905
references
Becker, G.S. (1994/1964) Human capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis, with
special reference to education, 3rd Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Friedman, M. and R. Friedman (1979) Free to choose. New York: Harcourt Brace
and Company.
Halm, B.B. (1995) Theatre and ideology. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University
Press.
29
‘Propaganda of the deed’ is the practice of certain anarchist groups who use bombings,
assassinations, or destruction of property to inspire further insurrection and expose
the weakness of dominant power structures.
904 | play
Brian Showalter Matlock Leviathan lives
Proudhon, P.J. (1927/1849) Proudhon’s solution of the social problem. New York:
Vanguard.
Schain, R. (2001) The legend of Nietzsche’s syphilis, 1st edition. Oxford, UK / New
York, NY: BIOS Scientific Publishers.
Smith, A. (1994/1776) The wealth of nations, 6th Printing edition. New York:
Modern Library.
Smith, A., R.L. Heilbroner and L.J. Malone (1987/1759) ‘Theory of moral
sentiments’ from The essential Adam Smith. New York: W.W. Norton.
the author
Brian Showalter Matlock is an I.PhD student in economics and social sciences at
University of Missouri-Kansas City. His research is focused on Marxian and Institutionalist
Political Economy, the theory and practice of community development, and the
relationship between performing arts and science. He participates in the EconAvenue
economic development initiative in his hometown of Kansas City, KS.
Email: [email protected]
play | 905
the author(s) 2017
ISSN 1473-2866 (Online)
ISSN 2052-1499 (Print)
www.ephemerajournal.org
volume 17(4): 907-918
I draw comics, also known as graphic storytelling, also known as sequential art,
1
also known as the ninth art, also known as low culture. The English-speaking
world came a fair bit later to the party than the Francophones, but today this genre
2
is being taken seriously as never before.
3
Killer jellyfish rock Rio is the second in my Killer jellyfish series, which humbly
follows in the satirical tradition of Jonathan Swift and Rake’s progress by Hogarth,
viewed by some as ‘the father of the modern cartoon – and the modern comic,
4
too’.
Before I drew comics, I made other kinds of art. In 2007, I made an installation of
a two-metre-long whale and was reading a lot about the oceans. This article caught
my eye:
1
Seago, K. (2014) ‘The ninth art: A review of comics in French. The European bande
dessinée in context’, The Comics Grid, 4(1): 1-2. [http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/cg.a]
2
Barnicoat, B. (2012) ‘The graphic novel’s spectacular rise: From kids’ comics to the
Costa prize’, The Guardian, 23 November.
[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/23/graphic-novel-spectacular-rise-
costa-prize]
3
www.eileenlaurie.se
4
Mount, H. (2014) ‘Hogarth, the father of the modern cartoon’, The Telegraph, 1
November. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-
view/11202643/Hogarth-the-father-of-the-modern-cartoon.html]
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 907-918
A second pack comprising millions of juvenile mauve stinger jellyfish has been
spotted off the coast of Scotland, less than a week after an overwhelming attack by
5
Pelagia noctiluca killed 100,000 salmon at a Northern Ireland fish farm.
The more I read, the more surreal it became: headlines like ‘Jellyfish take on US
6 7
warship’ , ‘Spineless attacks on nuclear power plants could increase’ or
8
‘Jellymageddon: Can we stop the rise of the jellyfish?’ were classic ‘low art’ comic
tales. This was truth being a whole lot weirder than fiction. So when I started
drawing comics, the jellyfish were a perfect subject.
Rock Rio was created for this ephemera special issue. I couldn’t resist the temptation
of drawing the jellyfish visiting (and trashing) an academic conference. Yet the
9
state of the oceans is no laughing matter: it is a state of emergency. The jellyfish
10
family members of the subphylum Medusozoa have been around a long time
and may well outlive us all, flourishing as they do in places where vertebrates and
shellfish cannot. Dr Lisa-Ann Gershwin, renowned jellyfish expert and author of
11
Stung! On jellyfish blooms and the future of the ocean does not mince her words:
Our impacts are creating tipping points, and once ecosystems have passed those
tipping points, they become really stable in their new normal. Once jellyfish take
over an ecosystem – or any pest for that matter – it’s hard to undo that. Pest
controlled ecosystems are some of the most incredibly resilient ecosystems around:
think of cockroaches in your kitchen or dandelions in your garden, pests are
5
Haines, L. (2007) ‘Second jellyfish pack moves on UK 27 November’, The Register, 26
November. [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/26/second_jellyfish_pack]
6
Flannery, T. (2013) ‘They’re taking over!’, The New York Review of Books, 26 September.
[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/09/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over]
7
Kopytko, N. (2015) ‘Spineless attacks on nuclear power plants could Increase’, Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, 19 February. [http://thebulletin.org/spineless-attacks-nuclear-
power-plants-could-increase8001]
8
Stelling, T. (2013) ‘Jellymageddon: Can we stop the rise of the jellyfish?’, The New
Scientist, 13 July. [https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23130821-500-march-of-
the-jellies]
9
UN (2013) ‘United Nations world ocean assessment. Regular process for global
reporting and assessment of the state of the marine environment including
socioeconomic aspects’. [http://www.worldoceanassessment.org]
10
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (2016) ‘Jellyfish and comb jellies’.
[http://ocean.si.edu/jellyfish-and-comb-jellies]
11
Gershwin, L.-A. (2013) Stung! On jellyfish blooms and the future of the ocean. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
908 | comic
Eileen Laurie Killer jellyfish rock Rio
tenacious by their very nature. The best way to fix this is to not let it happen in the
12
first place.
As jellyfish come ever more into prominence, can they help the hominid
13
subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, understand anything other than our own
hubris?
12
Nexus Media (2016) ‘Are jellyfish going to take over the ocean? An interview with
jellyfish expert Lisa-Ann Gershwin’, Popsci.com, 8 December.
[http://www.popsci.com/built-for-survival-jellyfish-are-quickly-becoming-pests]
13
Encyclopædia Britannica (2017) ‘Homo sapiens sapiens, hominid subspecies’.
[https://www.britannica.com/topic/Homo-sapiens-sapiens]
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910 | comic
Eileen Laurie Killer jellyfish rock Rio
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 907-918
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Eileen Laurie Killer jellyfish rock Rio
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Eileen Laurie Killer jellyfish rock Rio
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Eileen Laurie Killer jellyfish rock Rio
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the author
Eileen Laurie was born in Scotland and studied fine art in Northern Ireland. She has lived
in several countries and is now based in Malmö: the ‘comicville’ of Sweden. A voracious
14
reader from a young age, she also read comics, from 2000 AD to various Scottish
15
classics . A French friend gave her Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi around 2004, a work of
graphic storytelling that makes very clear that we can use comics to tell any kind of story,
not just about guns and men in tights.
Email: [email protected]
14
https://2000ad.com
15
McCall, C. (2016) ‘Five classic Scottish cartoon characters’, The Scotsman, 23 March.
[http://www.scotsman.com/heritage/five-classic-scottish-cartoon-characters-1-
4080587]
918 | comic
the author(s) 2017
ISSN 1473-2866 (Online)
ISSN 2052-1499 (Print)
www.ephemerajournal.org
volume 17(4): 919-924
review of
Zabala, S. (2017) Why only art can save us: Aesthetics and the absence of emergency.
New York: Columbia University Press. (HB, pp. 216, £49.95, ISBN
9780231183482)
In his recent book, Why only art can save us, Santiago Zabala makes an important
contribution to the socially engaged art discourse, building upon phenomenology
and critical theory. It is a text about demands by art, to use Michael Kelly’s
formulation [9], i.e. art’s call for action on behalf of the weak, discarded and
forgotten – the remains of Being on the margins of contemporary democracies.
The title of the book is a paraphrase of Heidegger’s famous statement ‘only a God
can still save us’, indicating a path beyond the world overpowered by technology,
where everything is calculable, nature is treated as a standing reserve, and we aim
to exploit and control the world. As Zabala argues, Heidegger’s declaration should
not be read in a literal sense, but rather as alluding to a forgotten realm of Being
in our technological reality. Aiming to dominate and categorize the world, we
replaced Being (existence) with enumerable beings (objects), bringing about ‘the
endlessly self-expanding emptiness and devastation’ [2], related to the primacy of
things over human relationships and nature.
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 919-924
sense of emergency – an awareness that our dominating way of framing the world
is not the only option.
The book is divided into three chapters. The first chapter, ‘The emergency of
aesthetic’, situates the problem of art in a wider context and discusses how
contemporary aesthetics contributes to the concealment of Being, framing it
within the parameters of the dominating worldview. Here the author aims to
confront and overcome the metaphysical framework of modern aesthetics, and
demonstrate that problem of art extends far beyond this domain.
Following Heidegger, who is the major reference for this chapter, Zabala sees the
loss of a sense of emergency as the main problem of our times. There are of course
emergencies, like military conflicts, terrorism, or refugee crisis. However, they are
framed in terms of our globalized system and its dominant paradigms that include
democracy (political), neoliberalism (financial), and NATO (military). Within this
system we are offered readily applicable solutions preserving the status quo. There
is little space for questioning the established ways of addressing the crises we face,
and our role in them. Furthermore, the dominant impression of citizens in the
developed countries is that reality is stable and fixed. We believe that everything is
functioning correctly, and the current order will bring about the solution of our
problems and provide conditions for a meaningful life.
The major problem of this framework is not only its objectifying character, but also
how it reduces the world to a predictable ‘picture’, which is constantly being
justified politically, ethically, and also aesthetically. Everything that does not fit into
this picture is ignored and marginalized. Emergency, on the other hand, suggests
openness, undecidedness, and a variety of options. It is an interruption of the
reality we are accustomed to. We have to suspend our ordinary ways of perceiving
the world – to use Heidegger’s terms, ‘the lucidity through which we constantly
see’ [17] – in order to experience it.
The absence of emergency reflects our epoch’s metaphysical condition. Social and
political crises we face are, according to Zabala, derivative of this condition. Art
can help us to disclose this absence of emergency by turning our attention to the
remains of Being – people and ideas forced to the margins of the dominant
discourses and striving for change. As the author argues, we need not only political
and ethical discourses, but also aesthetic forces to shake us out of the tendency to
ignore paradoxes and injustices generated by the dominant paradigms and their
instrumental rationality.
920 | review
Beata Sirowy Art at the margins of contemporary democracies
Art speaks to us more directly than rational discourses – it has an ability to address
us on the existential level, to transform our way of looking at the world, and to
mobilize us to action. In this perspective, works of art are far more than objects of
contemplation, providing us with sensuous enjoyment – as viewed by modern
aesthetics. Following Heidegger, Zabala claims that what makes art is not the
quality of what is created, but its ontological appeal [19]. Accordingly, he responds
to Heidegger’s call for the overcoming of aesthetics, which similarly to technology
frames and organizes beings, in this case to make them conform to the ideal of an
indifferent beauty. In doing so, modern aesthetics preserves the lack of sense of
emergency and becomes a means of preserving status quo. In order to overcome
this condition we need to restore the critical, discursive potential of art.
Three artists are selected for each of these categories. The works of
kennardphillipps, Jota Castro and Filippo Minelli thrust us into the political,
financial, and technological paradoxes that shape our social lives. Hema Upadhyay,
Wang Zhiyuan, and Peter McFarlane deal with the problem of surplus products
emerging on the verge of capitalism and urbanization. Nele Azvedo, Mandy
Barker, and Michael Sailstorfer direct our attention to environmental calls caused
by global warming, ocean pollution and deforestation. The artworks of Jennifer
Kardy, Alfredo Jaar, and Jane Frere offer alternative readings of history and draw
our attention to overlooked events.
This part of the book gives a solid insight into how arts existential and ontological
alterations work in specific contexts, revealing fundamental problems of our times
and mobilizing for action. Their creators, as Zabala argues, have retreated from
culture’s indifferent beauty in order to disclose the lack of emergencies in
contemporary world, and to draw attention to the remains of Being. This type of
art calls for action on behalf of the weak and excluded – art appears here as
transformative, critical practice.
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 919-924
The final chapter of the book, ‘Emergency aesthetics’, delineates a theory of art
focused on art’s ontological appeal. Zabala’s aim is neither to criticize previous
aesthetic theories, nor to propose a new one, but to outline a philosophical stance
capable of interpreting existential disclosures of contemporary art. Hence, the art
theory outlined in the book is clearly not aesthetic (i.e. focused on a non-cognitive
experience of art, as emerging from the perspective of Baumgarten and Kant), but
ontological – it addresses art against the background of human existence and the
world. Zabala follows here pre-Enlightenment understanding of art, in which the
cognitive dimension was central – art’s role was to reveal truth about the reality.
This understanding can be dated back at least to the ancient Greeks, for whom
th
beauty and truth were two sides of the same coin, and was in the 20 century
revived by phenomenological and hermeneutic thinkers. It stands in a stark
contrast to the mainstream aesthetic discourse, inclined to exclude art’s claim to
truth, and accordingly to dismiss its theoretical and practical dimensions. As
Heidegger points out, modern aesthetics presupposes a particular conception of
beings – as objects of representation framed within the dominant worldview.
Within this horizon art loses its relation to culture and follows the path of
technology. In this context he speaks about ‘the absence of art’ (Heidegger in
Zabala, 2017: 6), a state of being corresponding to the lack of a sense of emergency.
In order to overcome this condition, we need not only to put aside aesthetic
representationalism, but also to disclose and interpret the forgotten, existential
appeal of Being. Following Gadamer, Zabala considers art not an object on which
we look and contemplate, but an event that appropriates us into itself and reveals
the world. It invites us into a conversation that does not aim for a disengaged
exchange of different interpretations, but addresses us in a direct way and changes
our ways of perceiving the world. Further, building upon Danto, Ranciere, and
Vattimo, Zabala claims that the truth of art no longer rests in representation of
reality, but rather in an existential project of transformation. Today, artists and
their audiences are called to intervene on behalf of humanity.
Art can respond to the absence of the sense of emergency in different ways. For
Heidegger artworks disclose truth about the world by expressing it in its fullness
and uniqueness in a non-reductive manner. As he demonstrates on the famous
example of peasant’s shoes depicted by Van Gogh, art can offer an in-depth
glimpse into human reality. Critical thinkers on the other hand adapt a more
subversive strategy, altering the reality we are accustomed to rather than
representing it. In this perspective art confronts us with unexpected, strange,
surprising, and provokes us to search reasons for that oddness. This in turn
motivates us to take an ethical stance – to become existentially involved for the
922 | review
Beata Sirowy Art at the margins of contemporary democracies
sake of the weak and marginalized. Zabala follows the latter perspective, arguing
that the lack of a sense of emergency in our contemporary realities demands a new
aesthetic shock. What produces shock in art are not its formal qualities, but its
refusal to situate itself within established perspectives.
Final reflections
Having said that, it must be noted that Zabala’s work is not an easy lecture.
Although Chapter 2, presenting selected artists and their responses to the lack of
the sense of emergency, is generally accessible, philosophical discussions in
Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 may be difficult to follow for readers completely
unfamiliar with Heidegger’s phenomenology.
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 919-924
the author
Beata Sirowy (PhD 2010, The Oslo School of Architecture) is Senior Research Fellow at
the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the Norwegian University of Life
Sciences. Her educational background consists of both philosophy and architecture, and
her research interests lie at the intersection of these disciplines. She is particularly
interested in phenomenology and hermenutics and their implications for architecture and
spatial planning, and in broadly understood ethical aspects of urban development. Her
publications deal also with phenomenological theory of art. She is a section editor of the
Nordic research journal Formakademisk.
Email: [email protected]
1
Heidegger, M. (2006/1938-1939) Mindfulness (Besinnung), trans. E. Parvis and T.
Kalary. London and New York: Continuum.
924 | review
the author(s) 2017
ISSN 1473-2866 (Online)
ISSN 2052-1499 (Print)
www.ephemerajournal.org
volume 17(4): 925-931
review of
The general aim of this volume is to rethink vulnerability both at the ontological
and political level and in its multifaceted relations with resistance. It features a
series of essays that engage with the topic from a variety of geopolitical contexts
and theoretical perspectives. This variety is also reflected in the different polemical
targets that range from the patriarchical coupling of vulnerability and passivity to
the neoliberal understanding of resilience and the humanitarian discourse. This is
definitely a brilliant experiment that brings together a variety of heterogenous
reflections, ‘a polyphonic mode of making sense of the shifting problematic before
us’ (7). Yet, it is a polyphony of reflections and conceptual explorations, rather than
a polyphony of authors. Because among the contributors, Judith Butler is clearly
the cornerstone of the volume. In the general polyphony, her voice is absolutely
dominant. But, far from being a defect, this constitutes the actual strength of the
volume. Butler’s thought on vulnerability, gender, public appearance and
resistance is deployed, explored and applied from a variety of angles and
perspectives. In this book, we see the results of what Butler’s concept of
vulnerability can do or how it can be used. In this sense, the volume is not only an
interesting nomadic exploration of the potentialities of a concept (hence it draws
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 925-931
The starting point for Butler’s reconceptualization is the idea of human body as
relational and interdependent. The body is exposed to and depends on
‘infrastructure, understood complexly as environment, social relations, and
networks of support and sustenance’ (ibid., 21). But the idea of interdependence
does not imply the lack of acting. This radical interdependency constitutes the
ground to affirm vulnerability as ontological and existential condition.
Vulnerability affirms both the capacity of the body to act and to be acted upon, to
affect and to be affected. However, vulnerability is also a socially induced
condition. Vulnerable populations or vulnerable subjects are indeed the result and
effect of a history of power relations and systems of domination. There is a
differential distribution of vulnerability and this, in turn, can be and is politically
mobilised.
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Marco Checchi Resistance in vulnerability
but also vulnerability manifests itself in the face of police violence. ‘Vulnerability,
understood as a deliberate exposure to power, is part of the very meaning of
political resistance as an embodied enactment’ (ibid., 22).
The other essays in the collection experiment with Butler’s concept through
original and often not reciprocally aligned trajectories. It is very refreshing to find
attempts to engage with philosophy from unorthodox perspectives that are often
disqualified from academic and scientific discourse. Elena Loizidou starts with her
grandmother’s dream to fly back to her village in Cyprus in a call for including
dreams and their recounting into Arendt’s conception of the political subject.
Marianne Hirsch offers her personal recollections as a German Jew girl migrating
to US and reflects on postmemorial aesthetic strategies to practice vulnerability as
a form of attunement and responsibility. Elsa Dorlin gives a critical reading of
masking from the veil wars in France to Wonder woman and then discusses ‘Hey
Baby!’ a first-person-shooter video game where a woman indefinitely kills her
harassers that questions, although problematically, the coupling of vulnerability
and passivity. Other authors privilege art and aesthetics as a way of problematising
vulnerability. The work of Palestinian artist and activist Mona Hatoum is
presented by Elena Tzelepis as a political representation and enactment of
vulnerable corporalities at the intersection of struggles over citizenship and
gender. Başak Ertür proposes a brilliant analysis of barricades at Gezi Park, which
he frames through Lefebvre as artefacts of counter-monumentalisation of
resistance.
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 925-931
provide a vivid account of the social and material fabric of the practices of
resistance that took place during those weeks. On the one hand, the materiality of
the barricades in the continuous process of dismantling and rebuilding recounted
by Ertür. On the other hand, the internal agonism and transformations among the
protesters representing the transversal composition of resistance, as described by
the essay by Zeynep Gambetti.
928 | review
Marco Checchi Resistance in vulnerability
Nevertheless, this relation with resistance, not only in Bracke’s essay but
throughout the volume, remains quite problematic. Whereas vulnerability is
treated through a thorough conceptual analysis, resistance is discussed through its
manifestations: public squares, barricades, demonstrations, but also resistant
existences as in the example of Palestinians [Hammani] and Kurdish [Sirman].
The lack of a conceptual understanding of resistance leave several potential
avenues implicit and unexplored. Howard Caygill’s On resistance, Costas Douzinas’
Philosophy and resistance in the crisis or Foucault’s first volume of the History of
sexuality might have been valuable theoretical frameworks to problematise
resistance also from a theoretical perspective. This absence determines the
emergence of a series of interrogatives that remain unfortunately unanswered. For
instance, while several contributions depict resistance as the sudden outburst of
the event, others rightly sustain an idea of resistance as continuous and
uninterrupted process. Hammani eloquently summarises this perspective in
reference to Palestinian resistance in the community of Masafer Yatta: ‘to exist is
to resist. […] The everyday constant work of just “being” is made up of the
multitude of acts of making life possible in and through the everyday’ (Hammani,
172). This implicit tension in the understanding of the concept of resistance
certainly reflects the polyphony, but in a sense the volume somehow misses the
opportunity to offer a more radical intervention in the debate on the concept of
resistance.
In fact, we might dare to ask what eventually this conception of vulnerability adds
either to our understanding of resistance or to contemporary struggles in general.
There are definitely some successful operations in this sense. For instance, it
unmasks top-down hegemonic political mobilisation of vulnerability as in the case
of those discourses that use the threat of terrorism or of an invasion of migrants
to assert the right of the ‘vulnerable’ white man of the global North to fight back
(or, indeed, to strike first). The volume also helps to oppose a certain masculine
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references
Douzinas, C. (2013) Philosophy and resistance in the crisis: Greece and the future of
Europe. Cambridge: Polity.
930 | review
Marco Checchi Resistance in vulnerability
the author
Marco Checchi is a Lecturer in Business and Management at the Department of Strategic
Management & Marketing, De Montfort University. Marco’s research interests focus upon
a postmodern conceptualisation of the primacy of resistance. He is also interested in
alternative forms of organisation and social and community based entrepreneurship.
Email: [email protected]
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the author(s) 2017
ISSN 1473-2866 (Online)
ISSN 2052-1499 (Print)
www.ephemerajournal.org
volume 17(4): 933-936
review of
Bell, D.M. (2017) Rethinking utopia: Place, power, affect. New York: Routledge.
(HB, pp. 188, £88, ISBN 9781138891333)
Introduction
Towards the end of this intriguing book (157), David Bell tells us how he fell in love
with free jazz, of the improvised and generally impenetrable kind, when he was
17. It took him a while, but when he got it, it was music that opened up onto a
world in which form was always being made at every moment, and the players slid
and bopped off each other, making something new each time that they played. The
musicians augmented each other’s capacities and creativities when they played
attentively and sympathetically together. Together, because this was not a question
of one solo diva elevating themselves on everyone else’s back, one boss with one
vision, or one set of dutifully repeated clichés. This was music as collective making,
and (in this book) an opening to utopianism, to the making of utopias.
It’s a lovely metaphor, and I wish he had told me that at the start of the book. I
wish that the practice of music making that holds so much promise for what he
wanted to say was a theme introduced strongly at the beginning, and that then was
used as a counter-point to the incessant beat of theory and academic reference. The
hammering of not-this, and obviously not-that, of corrections to certain readings
of Deleuze, or Bloch, or Negri, or Mouffe. There was a lightness and flexibility to
the central argument here that I felt was largely trammelled by the genre
conventions of writing ‘politically engaged social theory for academic publishers’.
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For myself, I wanted more jazz, more of David Bell’s evident care and wit, and less
academic bell ringing.
So what is the central argument? It’s a smart one, that most radical understandings
of utopianism throw away ‘place’ far too quickly. (I’m going to leave the right wing
and market utopians out of this review, though he does have some nice things to
say about their microfascist ‘sad joys’ too.) Using a range of writings from utopian
studies (Moylan, Levitas, Kumar and so on), as well as extended readings of two
novels – Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921) and Ursula le Guin’s The dispossessed
(1974) – Bell suggests that the dominant radical narrative is of the other place and
other time, utopia as a kind of longing for that which is not now. Utopia is often
framed as a desire, an impulse or method to expose the insufficiency of the present
and the possibility of elsewhere and elsewhen. Utopia is exodus, escape, hope.
His problem, summarising very quickly, is that this defers and depoliticises so
much, pushing utopianism into fiction, dream, desire, rather than thinking and
doing it as a noisy and improvised prefigurative present. Utopia is instead co-opted
as a ‘nice idea’.
Half an hour on the radio. Forty-five minutes in an art gallery. An article in the
weekend supplement. A lifestyle book. A quirky module at an elite university. (136)
The anger and joy stripped out, all that is left is a postcard from somewhere we
might want to visit but not live, and also the endlessly repeated warning against
the dangers of blueprints, means that become ends in themselves. (Yes, yes – we
know. And as Bell shows, such cautions can so easily become a dully pragmatic
post-utopianism, or even a strident principled anti-utopianism.) Instead, he says,
let’s make utopia a co-produced place here and now.
Now I might quite possibly be simplifying far too much here, but I think that Bell’s
argument works best when he (nodding to Spinoza) frames utopianism as a
practice which enhances the powers of acting of bodies, self, other and collective
(38). We play together and produce joy, individuals only possible because of others,
their affect a function of how they are themselves affected, our freedoms made
collectively, our collective being the precondition for our freedom. This means an
insistence that utopianism can be here and now, not just there and then. This is
what Valerie Fournier (2002), quoted approvingly by Bell, has called ‘utopianism’,
the practical cultivation of contemporary possibilities. Bell’s utopianism is not a
nostalgia for the future, but a practice that aims at producing new forms of affect
in the present. Never mind the future, as a Novara media slogan has it, let’s have
utopia now!
934 | review
Martin Parker No future. Utopia now!
I like the way that Bell tilts at some of the comfortable reading lists of ‘utopian
studies’, particularly when it becomes no more than a variety of literary studies,
and I very much like his suggestions that this version of utopianism is about
making a place together, with anger and joy, against capitalism and the pale, male
and stale (always acknowledging that he is part of the problem too). What saddened
me was the way that this book, which could have been a carnival, an explosion, a
joyful improvisation with a reader, felt too much like a text for a quirky module at
an elite university. (Around a quarter of it is endnotes and references.) There are
moments in which kittens dance across keyboards, the author lets his ideas and
words spin and sway, and Ornette Coleman says mysterious things, but the
backbeat is the sound of academic posts being staked.
Showing readers what this practice of utopianism might do is a really timely task,
and one that chimes well with writing on prefiguration, Occupy, organizing
without organizations, immediatist organizing, anarchist, green and feminist
organization theory and so on. I want to know how Bell’s version of utopianism
might feel, sound, smell – not as blueprints (yes, yes – we know) but as an
invitation to a different way of being. It seems to me, as a reader concerned with
alternative organizing (Parker et al., 2014) that we now have a lot of thinkers
converging on a different sort of organization theory. How can we do things
together without trapping each other? How can we organize without building
institutions that do our thinking for us? How can we continually remind ourselves
that organizing is politics? These are questions that don’t throw away organizing
but rather, as Bell does, try to take it much more seriously than the business school
ever does.
I’m very happy to call this utopianism, but I’m sure that very well referenced
hardback Routledge books written with this kind of density aren’t going to help
that much. Instead, rather than annotating the score, I want David Bell to be
showing me what sort of collective improvisations might help make a future that
I would like to play in. He is clearly capable of such a task, and clearly recognises
that it needs to be done. I want to join him there, in this place, though he can keep
the free jazz.
references
Parker, M., G. Cheney, V. Fournier and C. Land (eds.) (2014) The companion to
alternative organization. New York: Routledge.
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ephemera: theory & politics in organization 17(4): 933-936
the author
Martin Parker is at the Business School, University of Leicester. His next book is called
Shut down the business school (Pluto Press, 2018).
Email: [email protected]
936 | review