Notes from the Conference Circuit: Desire and Breakfast

In L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet presses Deleuze to explain his and Guattari’s concept of desire; challenging him to explain it in clearer terms. He says “you don’t desire someone or something, you always desire an aggregate. It’s not complicated.” This formulation of desiring-production has always stuck with me and I often think about it in the course of everyday life. Desire is not about lacking or wanting an object or a person, desire desires an assemblage. I had cause to reflect on this when I was in Edinburgh for EGOS and got sick of eating breakfast at the hotel. Having had to travel more than I’d have liked to over the past few weeks, I was quite literally fed up with eating Premier Inn buffet breakfasts and wanted something better.

Pictures with Penny near the outside of the Quick and Plenty Cafe.

I chose the Quick and Plenty cafe, precisely because it looked like a tiny hole in the wall on Google Maps. It was the best breakfast that I’ve had in a long time. I couldn’t have made it better myself (which anyone who knows my fondness for things done my way would know is high praise). Friends will know that I like simple food done competently, which is precisely what this was. I reflect that I enjoyed the meal, because I didn’t just desire an “authentic” Scottish breakfast (or some hyperreal simulacra in construction of authenticity) and I didn’t just want to get out of the hotel. It was the assemblage that was important. The desire was for sitting somewhere with dingy yellow lighting, on a cushion that had become so worn from use that it had to be covered over by a blanket which itself looked to be as old as I am. The desire was to order a Scottish breakfast off of a speckled, laminated menu while staring at the tangle of power cables and wires that was supporting their payment/online order/music system. The desire was to come in out of the light Scottish drizzle and feel awash with the warmth of a running stove. The desire was for watching the chef cook my breakfast in cheap looking pans on a small kitchen hob while bantering with his assistant in a thick Scottish accent, occasionally taking a phone call in which he would yell at someone (perhaps a mother, wife, or a girlfriend) that he was too busy to talk and needed to be left alone. The desire was for listening to the great care that he had for the food and to speak to him in exceptional detail about the long-standing local bakery that the rolls came from or the history of the company from which he sourced the haggis. The desire was for the glass-eyed sterility of the polished customer service interaction in my hotel to be completely upended by a space dominated by a kind of professional-unprofessional, an intermingling of diligent, conscientious care and that special kind of not giving a shit that is an artefact of Scottish dourness. This disconnect from a multinational semiocapitalist machine and reconnect to a smaller capitalist machine, one not yet alienated from itself, is a key part of this assemblage and its remobilization of consumer/tourist discourses. The desire was for reflecting on all of this while drinking instant coffee and thinking about how desire was being machined in that moment. I did not know how much I needed the food until it arrived, served in a rambunctious and unpretentious space. But this “I” invites further consideration.

Definitely not day drinking at The Bow Bar.

As Deleuze and Guattari say in Anti-Oedipus:

“Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it. Hence the product is something removed or deducted from the process of producing: between the act of producing and the product, something becomes detached, thus giving the vagabond, nomad subject a residuum.” (p.26)

What is important to say is not only that this desire did not pre-exist the assemblage, I did not preexist the assemblage, the subject was machined along with everything else as a by-product or residuum of the machinations of desire. Subjectivity is here not that from which desire emerges, but a residuum, a by-product made in the small pub assemblage or the used-bookshop assemblage.

Edinburgh had several used bookshops that we visited because they had books and I am a simple man.

In most readings, Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of desire is thought in a way focuses on the affirmative and the joyous connections that desire brings about. Recent work (like Culp’s Dark Deleuze) has, however, begun to popularize an alternative reading to which I am partial, the darker understandings of desire, not productive and prudent, but destructive and apocalyptic; desire tearing itself apart. Desire for annihilation, for destruction, for even death. Perhaps that’s why desire was producing a person with high cholesterol and mild liver damage…

Breakfast at Quick and Plenty was the start to the best morning that I’ve had (outside of my house) in a long time. I want to go back to Edinburgh as soon as I can, and I know where I’m having breakfast when I do.

Notes from the Conference Circuit

Notes from the Conference Circuit: Is well ethical, innit bro?

Perhaps one of the hardest things in the world to accept is that other people might consider the same information as we do and arrive at different conclusions. Most of us are so sure of the efficacy of our thought processes that it may not ever occur to us that they may be flawed or problematic. This is a less lucid and self-aware reflection than it seems to be, because I am here simply trying to think about how it is possible for anyone to still believe that “ethical capitalism” is possible. I have taken to openly saying to students and colleagues that “anyone who seriously believes in the possibility of a contemporary corporation acting with genuine ethical concern is either dangerously delusional or an irretrievable idiot; I don’t know which is worse.” This never fails to be a divisive comment – not only because it is very heavy-handed but also because it plays fast and loose with the term “ethics”, so I wanted to offer a clarification. Without a digression into contemporary moral philosophy (which I am not well-read enough to sustain), an “ethical capitalism” – as most would understand it – would be a form of capitalism that seeks not only the increase of private wealth but also places value on human and social well-being. This is an impossibility. Here’s Peter Bisanz writing for the World Economic Forum, which I quote at length because it is important:

“Call it what you like: conscious capitalism, responsible capitalism, ethical capitalism – the better way to practice capitalism is to move the needle towards creating long-term socio-economic and environmental value: a business model with a higher purpose, where businesses build deep, trust-based relationships with their customers, employees, suppliers, investors and society. The bottom line benefits too from this kind of ethical, values-driven capitalism. Businesses adopting this model attract more customers, reduce operating costs through energy efficiency and lower waste, boost employee loyalty and enjoy engaged workforces that share the corporate vision, aspirations and goals.”

The paradox here should be obvious but isn’t is this is a popular refrain within many academic circles – “being ethical is profitable”. The logic of wanting a business model with “a higher purpose” and wanting a business to continue to maximize the benefits to their bottom line is never considered as mutually contradictory or fundamentally in conflict. The axioms of contemporary capitalism – perpetual growth, assimilation of paradox, market sovereignty and so on – make it impossible to even conceptualize a reality wherein a business may have to make a loss to serve a higher purpose (as an aside, this is why I’ve been so fascinated by the reaction to Jeremy Hunt’s comments about a no-deal Brexit, precisely because they break this taboo and blaspheme against the market). In this sense capitalism has an “ethic”: accumulation. Capital seeks only to grow, through whatever combinations and conjunctions it can make.

On the train to Edinburgh

I read about my new favourite examples of this on the train to EGOS in Edinburgh. Here’s Bloomberg’s Peter Robinson reporting on the Boeing 737 debacle:

“The Max software — plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw — was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.”

What recent reporting has brought to light is that increasingly, the iconic American plane-maker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace development. While the entire story of the 737’s development, reads like an attempt to prove that only economic interests, as they pertain to wealth accumulation, are represented in decision making, it is this outsourcing – the kind of story that seems too moronic not to be true – that highlights what happens when the profit motive clashes with any other concern (in this case valuing human life). Profitability wins, every time. This case doesn’t really tell us anything about the blood-soaked calculus of economic rationality that the Ford Pinto case didn’t tell us in the 1970’s; laying off your experienced software engineers, and outsourcing their work to a cheaper organization in the global South and possibly directly contributing to the deaths of hundreds of people, was very likely the most profitable option, even considering the $100m payout that is supposed to go to the families of the 346 people killed by the 737 crashes. Yet one can go to Boeing’s websites and read about their social responsibility policies and how much they invest in “communities”. And if I asked my undergraduate management students, “Is Boeing an ethical company?” it is from this very page that they would quote in order to tell me that it is.

Yet, since the 1990’s, public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky have been commenting on the ways that companies like Boeing are gaming the system and using military investment to further their interests. We have long known that companies like these represent a perfection of the capitalist logic of perfidious accumulation, using any means necessary to grow and agglomerate wealth, while an entire social and political apparatus convinces us that this is merely the disembodied will of “the market”. Here “management” as a practice is itself unveiled as entangled – the decision taken on a microlevel to cut costs through layoffs and outsourcing is inextricable from the regarding of “the market” as sovereign and the profit motive as the only true and legitimate impetus to action – producing the predictable effect of people dying. This is to say nothing of the fact that we know how damaging flying is to the environment, meaning that Boeing’s profitability as a company fundamentally relies on us continuing to disregard the dangers of anthropogenic climate change.

I imagine that defenders of capitalism would say that its current predicament is the price that Boeing pays for not acting “towards creating long-term socio-economic and environmental value”. Yet we have to ask which of the axioms of capitalism Boeing is in breach of here? Is the shift in employment relations towards precarity and temporary working as evidenced by the much praised gig-economy not symptomatic of precisely the decision to seek out cheaper labour internationally? When we collectively know that we need to recycle to keep plastic out of our oceans but multiple journalistic exposes tell us that often plastic now goes unrecycled (destined for landfills or incinerators) because there’s no demand for recycling “due to poor market conditions” is this not the same logic of economic valuation privileged over everything else?

Getting reading to present a paper or desire, death, capitalism and the Anthropocene

I thought about this while attending a stream on Critical Organizational Anthropocene Studies. As I heard about the very ethical and environmental things that different organizations were doing, I thought about the character Waj, from Chris Morris’s incredible film Four Lions. Waj is characterized as a well-meaning but simple man whose defining character trait is perhaps that he consistently defers decision making (and thus ethical responsibility) to his presumably more ethical and intelligent friends. The deferral of ethical judgement to an other, allowing for a reality in which one could do or condone the doing of potentially horrible things is encapsulated in what I might stylize as a refrain of the question: “Is well ethical, innit bro?”. Perhaps it evidences that I have watched the film too many times but I can hear actor Kayvan Novak saying it in Waj’s accent and could hear it at times during colleagues’ presentations at EGOS.

Indeed, though I was participating in a stream on “Critical Organizational Anthropocene Studies” not many of the presentations treated seriously the question of what a “critical” study of organizational responses to the Anthropocene might be. Many of the presentations had a hopeful tenor, or one that we might recognize as a kind of business-as-usual for capitalism – turning any form of critique or revolutionary action into something in the service of its own end – and could thus be read as complicit in mobilizing environmentalism as a vehicle by which to “save” and preserve the mores of capitalism itself. Here’s a company in the circular economy that’s recycling concrete or turning fish scales into bioplastics, or here’s one that is taking seriously the “slow food” movement and building up a community concerned with sustainable, local, everyday practices, or here’s a co-operative volunteering to sort and recycle other people’s waste, or here are some people in the global-South involved in a recycling cooperative. Is well ethical, innit bro? I at times found myself envying the optimism of my colleagues – as well as admiring their passion for their work – but I find myself to be too cynical to be hopeful that these kinds of engagements as they seek to preserve the essential logics of capitalism by merely wrapping them in a “green” casing. Indeed, in the cruellest reading these organizations and their ethical/sustainable/circular economy moves merely function to allow capitalism to continue. But one can’t observe this, it’s too bleak, too uncomfortable a thought because of how roughly it grates against our fondness for the world that capitalism has built for us and how much it jars with the accepted mores of neoliberal subjectivity. “By trying to help you and champion those who you see as trying to bring about a better way, you may be making things worse; the main thing that you’re doing is making yourself feel better. There is nothing else that you can do.” I have to keep thinking about this, not just because it’s important but because it speaks to one of the defining features of contemporary capitalism, the assimilation of critique or its absolute reliance upon those who hate it.

Enjoying the view from near Arthur’s Seat

What troubles me is that these kinds of arguments have been around for a while. Based on a decade long case study Wright and Nyberg’s (2016) An Inconvenient Truth: How Organizations Translate Climate Change into Business as Usual basically points out all of the same critiques that I might. That organizations’ short-term focus, focus and preoccupation with growth and revenue maximization make them ill-equipped to lead the fight against climate change. Most often we see organizations viewing the Anthropocene as an opportunity, seeking to profiteer off of it by providing the next new “sustainable” innovation. This was clearly put across by Andrew Hoffman in the context of a sub-plenary discussion on the Anthropocene when he said simply: “this is a great opportunity.” It was not immediately clear whether he meant that it was a great opportunity to further one’s academic career by publishing on the newest fad or whether he meant that it was a great opportunity for businesses to capitalize on a fast growing and profitable new sector but he later clarified by saying (overtly seeking to contradict Naomi Klein), and I quote:

“The market is the most powerful force on the planet. If business does not solve it [the problems of the Anthropocene], it will not be solved.”

The only way that we’ll see change in how organizations respond to the Anthropocene, according to a leading commentator, is via the logics of the market in a kind of eco-modernist optimism (presumably a demand for there not to be an ecological crisis will eventually be matched by a supply of “not an ecological crisis” once the time-lag is over). The role of an organizational scholar is therefore supposedly to show businesses how much money they stand to make if they start taking the Anthropocene seriously. It’s hard not to hear a simple abdication of responsibility to the other of “the market”. Is well ethical, innit bro?

Notes from the Conference Circuit

Notes from the Conference Circuit: An Introduction

Over the last few weeks I’ve been attending academic conferences. While never the easiest thing to do and not entirely unproblematic, conferences are a core part of being an academic as they allow you to catch up with colleagues (who are really the only other people who understand what the hell it is that you do) and get a handle on what research is going on in the field – a sneak peak of what will end up being published in the next few years. It’s also a great way to “network” and get a reputation for doing a particular kind of work, which if your colleagues value, they’ll consistently come to you for.

Watching presentations at ICMS 2019 in Milton Keynes

I had a lot to think about at this year’s conferences and so I’m going to put my notes from them into a series of articles/essays here which I’m titling Notes from the Conference Circuit. I fully intend to populate these notes with my usual array of pictures of a Penumbra the travelling wolf because, as this research log has likely already established, I’m most likely an idiot (and I perhaps mean this only slightly in the Socratic sense).

The notion of “circuits” appeals to me as the word connotes going around, undertaking a circular journey, and finding your way home the long way ’round, all of which reflects something fundamental to the logic of conferences. Revolutionary. We go somewhere “exotic” and then spend most of our time in a hotel or university building that looks almost indistinguishable from the one that we just left, we spend time with the same group of friends that we regularly correspond with, and present our work to a hungover audience who can’t follow what we’re trying to say because we’re saying it too fast, and sketching in strokes that are too broad to stand up to scrutiny. However, conferences remain the best places to pick up the random off-shoot, the snippet or fragment of an idea that turns into something substantial a few years down the line. Most likely it will be something that you already knew or were thinking about, but you needed to hear it phrased differently, of come from a different source. You had to go around a long way to come back to where you were.

Reflections

Reflections on the Management Identity in Film

Over the last term I ran a series of film screenings for students on my final year undergraduate module. Contemporary Management Challenges, as it is called, was basically an introduction to Critical Management Studies, showcasing important concepts via which students might think about organizations and their operations, the main one being “identity”. I ran the film screenings as a way to both help the students get immersed in the module’s content and think about identity in a more relatable way, and to make myself more accessible to them. Management of Identity in Film poster.png

We looked at three films: Wall Street, Up in the Air, American Psycho and after each one I spoke for about an hour on what we could learn about managerial/organizational life based on the depictions of it in the film. There were some really enjoyable moments in the film series including saying the sentence “Gordon Gekko is who Kent Business School trains students to be” and seeing the penny drop for everyone in the room, or introducing students to the Bechdel test and seeing it click for many of them that these films which were “all about management and managing” either didn’t have that many speaking roles for women or that when the women spoke, they only seemed to speak to men…

In aggregate, I had a lot of fun with it and so have decided to share the slides for anyone who might want to think about these films critically. They’re not very detailed because that’s not really my style, but the captions might offer some useful provocation.

Reflections

Another year in Higher Education: Subversion, Silence, Scepticism, and Self-destruction

I haven’t really had time to update this blog over the last few months. Contemporary academia being what it is means that the reason for my hiatus is fairly predictable: three new modules. The first-year undergraduate, Introduction to Management module, was easy enough because I had other staff to help me manage the 450 students that I was trying to teach, and the final-year undergraduate Contemporary Management Challenges module was basically a Critical Management Studies module so I was (for once) teaching content that was close to my own work. I even spoke about Deleuze and Guattari in a few lectures which I enjoyed more than I should have. We will not speak about how my Msc Employment Relations module went because it’s over now and I still feel like I don’t know enough to teach it…

My rather crowded whiteboard.

Three modules isn’t really a huge workload; other colleagues have similar teaching responsibilities, but my research-intensive teaching style meant that I was easily working (teaching seminars, replying to emails, attending meetings, writing lectures, reading and annotating papers for classes, marking assignments etc.) for 12-13 hours every day, seven days a week, since the start of 2019. I am well aware that that is both absurd and double the number of hours that I get paid to work. Now that it’s over, I wanted to take some time to reflect on the experience. I picked out four themes that I think characterize the last few months: subversion, silence, scepticism, and self-destruction.

Subversion

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari tell us that “everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics.” (p.213) They suggest that the politics of the state and the politics that we produce in relating to each other in the everyday are inextricably related. A fascistic state apparatus, for example, is inseparable from the ways in which we speak to, think about, and engage with each other in the course of everyday life (and vice versa). Despite this, I have never significantly invested in what might be termed “micropolitical acts of resistance”. The term is currently popular in Organization Studies and speaks to little things that we might do in the course of everyday life to disrupt, disorder, or destroy systems of control, discipline, and organization. For example, cause trouble by screwing up a performance appraisal form (and wasting organizational time in the process) that you don’t think that you should have to fill in because the contemporary obsession with maximizing performance is toxic and dangerous. There are many better explanations and examples of this because it fills organizational scholars with some odd sense of hope to know that while we they might not be able to effect large scale change in organizations, they can encourage, highlight, and give a platform to small acts of resistance. I am unsurprisingly cynical about this, not because micropolitical acts do not effect change (because they might do so eventually) but because I believe in earnest that hope for change is a dangerous self-delusion that blunts our ability to think critically. To put it in the pithiest way possible: “my friend, hope is a prison”.

I have, however, been involved in a micropolitical subversion of a kind on my final year module. The module is set up to have an assessed group presentation for 20% of the overall grade and for complex institutional and political reasons within the school, I can’t change that. As no one will be surprised to learn of a person who swears by the statement “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself,” I greatly disliked group projects as a student. As an educator, I absolutely loathe them, not just for the predictable reason of resenting having to deal with the emotional labour that accompanies groupwork drama (e.g. students complaining that a member of their group has been missing meetings/not contributing equally, bickering, a group that gets stuck with the one student who has been missing lectures and so on), and not even for the ideological reason of finding business interference in the university to be morally problematic (groupwork falls into a category of things that the Business School does because it wants to give students “transferable job skills” or enhance “employability”). No, my objection is that they are not pedagogically useful, or perhaps not as useful as other methods, as students don’t learn skills that I think are important. I value mastery of a body of academic literature, critical or radically subversive thinking, extensive independent reading, and a group presentation doesn’t facilitate this. To be sure, students might learn about teamworking and interpersonal skills but a) if my life is in any way indicative, such skills are largely optional and b) me trying to impart or facilitate the development of such skills is the best example of the blind leading the blind that I can think of.

So here’s what I ended up doing: I tasked the groups to give a largely token 10 minute presentation that showcased a basic understanding of the topic and then made them sit down and earn the rest of their marks by leading a discussion of an academic journal article during which I kept interrupting, asking questions, requesting clarification, offering provocation, providing context that I didn’t think that it would be reasonable to expect them to know and so on. While I originally intended these “presentations” to be discussions that involved the entire class, in practice the sessions quickly devolved or evolved into the presenters having a four-on-one discussion with me about the paper that they’d chosen to present. A firing squad analogy would not be inappropriate, though I tried to keep things more pedagogical and collegiate. A close textual analysis of the kind that the “presentation” was designed to encourage has become all too rare in certain parts of the contemporary university, particularly the Business School, where we are often content to read the abstract, findings and conclusion of a paper to get the gist of it so that we can cite it. Indeed, many of us are content to look at no more than the paper’s the key words so that we can correctly drop it tactically into a paragraph of circle-jerking and tactical referencing. I wanted my students to be capable of more than that.

Reflecting on the sessions, many of the students rose to the challenge and held their own. I was genuinely impressed that some of them were able to not only answer my questions, but fire back interesting questions of their own. While I confess that the weaker students struggled and if a group didn’t have at least one strong student who could carry the conversation, then the hour was quite painful, but through all of this I realized that I could subvert the mores of assessment at the school because presentations aren’t subject to moderation. I gave grades based on what I thought was valuable, not what was on someone else’s marking criteria. The student’s seemed to enjoy it and valued that I clearly and honestly told them what I wanted. Reflecting on the past few months, there are many such small subversions that I am tempted to be proud of, even if they fair to challenge the conditions of the contemporary university.

Silence

The most stark juxtaposition that I experienced in the last few months has, of course been lecturing to a room of perhaps 250 students (it should be 450, but you can’t make people attend lectures) on a Monday afternoon and then spending all day Tuesday in silence because I didn’t have any classes. This was also possible because I moved to a different building this year which meant that I rarely saw anyone from my department. This juxtaposition reached its peak in my working week on a Thursday where I would have to teach Introduction to Management seminars, then have to go to my two hour Employment Relations lecture, then had to do two hours on Contemporary Management Challenges all before going to my Scout meeting where I somehow managed to volunteer to take lead on the Astronomy and Astronautics badges this term (50+ loud pre-teens are as much of a challenge as 250 undergraduates). It might not seem like much, but for me it was a lot of talking, juxtaposed against the fact that I’d then spend Friday to Sunday in silence, mostly reading and trying to prepare for the next week’s worth of lectures, without time to do much else. I ended up getting into a routine of doing vocal exercises on Monday mornings to make sure that my voice didn’t have that raspy quality of disuse for the first classes of the new week.

Particularly in January, once I got into the classroom it was almost as though I was trying to make up for the silences by filling every second with speaking. I recognize in retrospect that this was an artifacting of my own insecurity – me trying to make sure that I covered all of the content so that students would be able to do well on their exams. As the term wore on, I became more comfortable with the silences in the lecture theatre and was able to pause and think or let a point sit for a while so that it could have impact. This didn’t make the silences in my office any less of a juxtaposition, it just meant that I got used to all of them.

Scepticism

“This is where we like to talk about brain usage.” This humorous refrain became a core part of my pedagogic practice on my Introduction to Management course. I know that it’s patronizing and frankly derogatory to all of the other modules that students on that course are taking (because it implies that they aren’t using or don’t have to use their brains elsewhere), but to me it was important to keep saying it and much to my delight students started doing it by the end of the course.

A real Introduction to Management lecture slide.

For me “brain usage” is one of the key things that students can learn from me, and me in particular. There are so many morally bankrupt things that are taught or thought in the contemporary Business School that just a little bit of “brain usage” might undermine. My students take courses on “Ethical Business” that tell them that they should be ethical, not because contemporary capitalism is currently doing irreparable damage to the planet or because it consistently exploits and disadvantages the most vulnerable members of our society, but because being “ethical” is profitable. My students sincerely believe that organizations view “people as their greatest asset”, even in the context of #MeToo and increasing attention to long hours culture (as in 996) or that “transformational leaders” are the sole cause of organizational success. This is the true terror of contemporary capitalism, not pollution or exploitation, in its focus on profitability-at-any-cost it quashes all other forms of value, and subordinates all reason to economic imperatives to the point the point where “reality” becomes an exaggerated fiction of itself. I like to believe that I did something to undermine that over the course of that module, but perhaps I am deluding myself.

Self-destruction

The fourth “S” that I was going to add to this entry was going to be “success” because the feedback from my students about the last term has been quite positive (i.e. at least all of my hard-work has been worth it). Indeed, I was particularly moved by one student’s comments, and I hope that they can forgive me for the hubris of reproducing them here:

I would like to take this opportunity to explain my journey on this module. Firstly, it is no coincidence that for the second year running that Sideeq’s module has been by far and away the most enjoyable/rewarding that I have experienced this year. I started the module apprehensive about the difficulty in which I went to see Sideeq with the mindset that I may be ‘out of my depth’. However, thankfully after seeing Sideeq I left with the mindset that I can do it and feel that I haven’t looked back since and for that I can’t thank Sideeq enough. I have been aware throughout the course that Sideeq’s door has been open in which I have utilised and enjoyed some in depth discussions regarding the course. I think the best compliment that I can pay Sideeq is that he is a lecturer that is clearly passionate about the courses he teaches which I feel has rubbed off on me, keeping me intrigued throughout as well as fully engaged. Whilst I come to an end of my 3rd year studies at the university and reflecting back, I can’t help but think of how different my overall university grade will be if I had access to the same standard of teaching throughout the 3 years, showing how much of credit he is to this university.

These are deeply stirring comments, and I am exceptionally grateful to the student who gave them and am very glad to have had the opportunity to make someone’s time at university better. However, I don’t quite feel successful, I feel exhausted and the “victory” here is pyrrhic. When the term ended, I spent a few days mostly lying in bed and trying to do nothing (surprising no one, I ended up reading) because I was too tired to think about doing anything else. Perhaps the last “s” should have been “Stupidity” to reflect how moronic it was to accept the job of teaching three new modules in the same semester. Indeed, the ultimate hypocrisy of the last few months has been lecturing on the way that organizations cultivate workaholic behaviours and long-hours culture while working 70-80 hours a week or speaking about the importance of having some kind of work-life balance and not allowing oneself to be amenable to corporate control while not having any work-life balance and being exactly that. If I was being charitable, however, I might suggest that“stupidity” might refer to me actually having fun on some of my modules, the following is a real slide from a lecture where I was giving essay writing advice and was accompanied by the line “Look how sad he is, that’s how your bad introductions make my heart feel,” but if stupidity is the right word then I would argue that this is a positive and healthy form of stupidity.

Another very real lecture slide that demonstrates that I might be an idiot.

I’m not ashamed, however, to admit that there were less positive and more self-destructive forms of stupidity at work: it took quite a scotch, sleeplessness, and nicotine to get me through the last few months. The isolation and the silence also took their own tolls that I am still trying to make sense of. A certain degree of self-destruction is perhaps also healthy, to quote Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus:

“What does it mean to disarticulate, to cease to be an organism? How can we convey how easy it is, and the extent to which we do it every day? And how necessary caution is, the art of dosages, since overdose is a danger. You don’t do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file. You invent self-destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive. Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor” (p.159- 160)

I definitely destroyed too much of it over the last few months. Too much, too fast. I’d like to say that I’ve learned and that I won’t do it again, but I know myself better than that.

However, the last few months have been self-destructive in other ways. In a number of recent conversations with more established academics I’ve been given instructions to the tune of “Play the game”, “Be a good boy and don’t rock the boat”, “Toe/walk the line”, “You have to conform to expectations”, “This is just how things are, you can’t be so critical all the time”. And the last potential “S” thus becomes “shame” because to my own embarrassment I’ve actually started to heed this advice, not even in the sense of looking for opportunities to “play the game” and advance my career, consolidate my position, accrue power, etc. but often in the sense of keeping my mouth shut and not causing trouble (e.g. not mass emailing a paper critiquing accreditation-obsession to other members of staff while the school was recently obsessed with getting a prestigious accreditation). Drawing on it’s feminist legacy, I’ve always seen being a critical management scholar as being implicated in a politics of “causing trouble”, and it is curious to me that I feel the need to keep causing trouble. Perhaps, as I often do, I am overthinking this but I often think that if more people over-thought their actions, the world would be a better place.

Alas that most of us, to quote the eminent Thomas Harris, “can only learn so much and live.”

Reflections

Management Gurus at Turner Contemporary and the Call of the Void

I had one of the most amazing and surreal experiences of my adult life this week.

Through a set of circumstance that I can’t quite explain, I somehow volunteered/was volunteered to present my work on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of microfascism (and how this is mobilized, preyed upon, and has a role in legitimating management gurus) to a mostly business practitioner audience at the beautiful Turner Contemporary. I’ve posted about this work before in this research log and hopefully it will be formally published soon.

Presenting at Turner Contemporary – Photo Credit: Felicity Heathcote Marcz

The full presentation is available here. It conflates terms like guru, consultant, and over-includes or over-reads the history of management ideas (and various fads and fashions which have come and gone) around “involvement” but I think it worked for the audience; cultivating a scepticism towards the idea that perhaps the proposition that employees should be involved in decision making/creativity.

I don’t know how much the audience took away – and I say this not as a critique of their intelligence so much as a commentary on my inability to explain well enough. While I think that some definitely engaged with the premise of critical scepticism towards the ideas that might be sold by a management guru, I think that many in the audience balked from the first sentence: “My name is Dr. Sideeq Mohammed and I’m a critical management scholar; what that means is (among other things) that I have no interest in making your organizations more profitable, efficient, creative, innovative, or productive.” I think that that definitely got their attention. I may also have described myself as a “professional rain-cloud” during the Q&A – I think that that was imprudent but I’m not sure why.

The truly surreal part of the presentation came when immediately after, a management consultant stood up and did exactly what I just described, i.e. attempted to sell the audience the idea that making their employees more curious was a potentially magical cure for their organization’s ills. It was hard not to stare open-mouthed. A good friend and colleague who attended the presentation kept looking at me as if to say “Behave yourself” but it was too strange an encounter. O my prophetic soul! In a way I was slightly envious of his confidence, because I don’t think that I’d have been able to present in his position, particularly not able to laugh it off with a joke like “Well, I guess its my turn to speak; the embodiment of fascism in the room.” Perhaps I am overestimating how much critique I was able to vocalize.

Afterwards, however, I was not reflecting on the well-established literature on the management guru’s charisma or the presentations of demagoguery. Rather, I was thinking about l’appel du vide., the call of the void. There’s interesting research on this strange phenomenon, often described as the high place phenomenon or “intrusive thoughts”. It’s the feeling of wanting to jump when on a high place. I relate it to Kierkegaard’s definition of “anxiety” and think about it in those terms, a primal fear of the freedom to die.

I was thinking about it because the Turner was also hosting an exhibition of the work of Patrick Heron at the time. I spent some time before the presentation staring at the enormous Cadmium with Violet, Scarlet, Emerald, Lemon and Venetian.

I really was quite awestruck by it, the yawning maw of the violet blob (An umbrella seen from above? A plum on a table? Cancer cell in the blood?, it is crude to speculate…) seeming to become a gaping hole into which I might slip and fall forever. A black hole eating time and space. An unrelated piece from outside the Turner, depicting the figure of a man, stoic and still, facing the roiling tide also put the call of the void in my brain.

There’s a passage from Hamlet that I often reflect on in this regard, a line from Horatio in Act 1:

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.

The toys of desperation thrown into the brain, that’s the call of the void. I thought about this passage on the train ride home. I wondered if I could connect this experience of the yearning to fall into a purple abyss or be washed away by the waves to the question of the desire for fascism and the tendency of people to act against their interests but I’m not sure how it might be done. I’ll keep thinking about it.

Reflections

“Excuse me but your organizational dysfunction is showing”

I wanted to write about two recent encounters that I had with “organization” because both were interesting enough to give me a kind of wide-eyed pause- as though “organization” itself had dropped its trousers and flashed me- leaving me blinking and confused, not entirely sure what I had just seen. There was a sense of absurdity to them both like things were not quite real and people were performing roles in a sketch show like A Bit of Fry and Laurie, or some sort of satirical comedy like Yes Minister or The Thick of it.

Exploring the perversity of bureaucracy

X is a letting agent in Canterbury who I rented from over the last year. During my tenancy, the company was bought out/merged (I am not sure which) with another letting agent Y. Observing both organizations over that time, I watched as what can only be described as the abject dysfunction of bureaucracy became a key feature of my encounters with them.

Let me try to illustrate. The following seems like a basic consideration for organizational design. In the lettings ‘industry’, clients have highly idiosyncratic problems. Different properties have different layouts, different white goods, landlords and tenants can all have different personalities, competencies, and tolerance for failure etc. etc.. It seems obvious to me that such a set of demands necessitates the kind of structure where agents are a) assigned to particular properties so that they can develop a relationship with tenants/landlords and b) empowered to make decisions and take care of problems within the predetermined remit of an office. This is fairly basic “Introduction to Management” level thinking about organization (I know, because I teach Introduction to Management).

However, if this basic approach of accounting for the unique contingencies of an organizational context, was the case at Y/X it was not clear to me. Instead, what I saw was the creation of clear bureaucratic offices (a person in charge of “maintenance”, a person in charge of handling moving out, another in charge of overseeing lettings and viewings etc.). Offices, as understood via Weber, are not a source of dysfunction, but their proliferation to the point of excess is. The most simple way that this manifested was never being sure of who I was supposed to be speaking to and often discovering that the person who I was speaking to lived in another town. That is to say, there was a lack of clarity of role, who had responsibility or who was accountable for a given concern that I, a tenant might have. As an example, on the same day, I had cause to speak to three different employees. The first regarding my arrangements for moving out, the second (at the Margate office) regarding an outstanding maintenance issue that they forgot that they had not yet resolved, and the third (from the Canterbury office) who called me because they saw that the maintenance issue had not been resolved and wanted to ask about it!

Perhaps I am guilty of over-simplification; everyone “knows how” to fix an organization from the outside when they don’t have to deal with the messy nuance of the particulars of organization. It was, however, exceedingly easy to forget this while on hold or being bounced around between people who weren’t familiar with me or my case. Moving home is stressful for anyone but it was interesting for me to reflect on how a lack of organization, or a failure of organization could make it a more stressful process – one that could have been easily alleviated by having a single point of contact in the organization.

Cultivating good neoliberal subjects

Kent Business School is a great place to work. I say that honestly and not as a prefatory statement for what I am about to say. It’s a low stress environment that deals with a great body of students. However, at a recent teaching event, I was interested enough in the discourse that was being used to keep a running tally of various “buzzwords” that kept coming up.

Learning experience- |

Student experience- |||||

Engaged/engagement- ||||||||

Independent learning- ||

Student as consumer- |

Employability- |

Gamify/gamification- ||

Each of these might be the subject of their own write up and speak to a broader concern with the marketization of the university. The organization of the university, it’s willingness to prostrate itself before the alter of “employability”, “skills development” and “enhancing the student experience” seemed to me to be on display and I could not avert my eyes. I think that the effects of this discourse struck brutally home when a member of the university’s professional staff came out to introduce the 7 Kent Graduate Attributes.

Confidence
Creativity and Innovation
Critical Reflection
Global/Cultural Awareness
Integrity and Accountability
Intellectual Curiosity
Resilience

I could not help but reflect that this fine example of “business bullshit” was someone’s job. Someone spent their time coming up with this: words that mean nothing and are read by no one. They are discussed to be sure, extensively so by the school’s management or recruiters and they are seen, on posters, websites etc. as various forms of propaganda but I do not think that they are never really understood or thought about in a meaningful way. Otherwise critical considerations of what building “confidence” might mean to an arrogant student who has been handed everything throughout his life, or “intellectual curiosity” leading one to question what “creativity” is and how one might measure it. Indeed, any critical reflection would lead Business School students to laugh at the idea that organizations can be be “accountable”. I began to anxiously look forward to the start of the teaching term so that I could help my student to develop the critical thinking skills necessary to “critically reflect” on these attributes, their purpose and why they have come about.

In aggregate the entirety of the Welcome Week activities became an exercise in counting buzzwords and being amazed by transparent corporate “Newspeak” exercises like the re-branding of “Reading Week” as “Enhancement Week”. I do often wonder whether my colleagues throughout the university are really the “innocent dupes” that they seem to be, taken in by a failed neoliberal ideology that suggests that even our smallest actions, all of our behaviours, need to be performatively geared towards being better workers so that an organization will want to hire us, or whether they perform this role cynically aware that what they do an say is problematic but unable to effect change.

All of this speaks invariably to the way in which the neoliberal subject is conceptualized as a site of “work”, the career as a project of the self. Indeed, in 1994 Grey was already charting what we are seeing now, that we self-manage and self-discipline in order to conform to the normative and disciplinary expectations of career. I continue to be troubled by being complicit in this and not doing more to undermine it.

Papers and Ongoing Research

A review of [insert book title here]

Forward

In Winter 2016, I took up a rather interesting challenge. A student walked into my classroom carrying a copy of a rather large book. I took one look at it and guessed that it was an “airport bookshop” style management guru book, feeding cheap advice on what to do in organizations in order to placate anxious managers and students. He saw the look on my face and started to defend the books quality. Beyond making a face and shamefully judging a book by its cover, however, I couldn’t articulate why I was so apprehensive about this book.

Anyone who knows me will be able to predict how I reacted to not knowing what to say about something. I bought the book, read it, and wrote a review of it.What follows is that review, one where I try to play with giving and withholding details in order to comment on this book specifically and this type of book in general. I was also quite jaded at the end of my PhD and so I took the review as an opportunity to take potshots at academic writing. I ended up reworking this review into a paper titled ‘Understanding microfascism: Reading Deleuze and Guattari alongside management guru texts’ which hopefully will be published soon, and while digging on my hard-drive I found the following short piece and decided to post it here rather than letting it gather digital dust in obscurity elsewhere.

[insert book title here]

With the resurgence of authoritarian “strong man leadership” and the cult of personality around leaders themselves in our collective popular culture, it is perhaps no surprise that [insert book title here] is at the top of many “Bestselling Books about Leadership” at the close of 2016. [insert author’s name here] is well known for their image as a successful investor and entrepreneur, with their previous titles like [insert other book title here] trading upon this in order to sell a rhetoric of increasing efficiency and optimizing everyday life. With their newest book [insert author’s name here] broadens their scope, offering lessons from the nearly two hundred “world-class performers” that the author interviewed over the last few years. While critical scholars might argue that such a text has little of value to offer to rigorous, critical, academic analysis, being, at best, no more than a representation of the £6 billion management consultancy industry in the UK, a cheap “guru guide” [insert names of important professors here] to “managing” which tells the audience what they already know in pithy and quasi-inspirational tones and at worst, a blatant cash grab that builds off of the publicity for a highly successful podcast, which features [insert author’s name here], in order to bolster sales. However, following the precedent set by other CMS researchers like [insert reference to work of PhD supervisor here] and [insert reference to work of PhD supervisor’s conference drinking buddy here] this review aims to take the work of [insert author’s name here] seriously and understand it on its own terms, placing it into dialogue with the logic of [insert CMS buzzword here] and [insert half-understood concept from obscure philosopher] in order to suggest that rather than dismissal or readers of [insert journal name here] might find a truly “transformational” understanding of leadership in the writing of [insert author’s name here].

As such, let us begin from the proposition that there is more complexity to [insert book title here] than one would first assume. Though it seems to trade a crude kind of macho, [insert superfluous adjectives] bravado that speaks not only to the image of the leader as a great hero or messiah, but to the deep-seated anxiety and insecurity that underpins much of the popular literature on leadership and leads to the production of texts like this in the first place, [insert commentary cribbed from whoever is popular right now in critical leadership studies here]. There is, to be fair, no shortage of this and the Forward to the text, written by [insert name of popular celebrity here], speaks about how he is not a “self-made man” but rather is one who “stood on the shoulders of giants”. This is the logic by which the book operates, guiding the reader through, over the course of 674 pages, a wealth of stories about the habits of strong leaders who [insert leadership buzzwords here].

Divided into parts with labels like “Healthy”, “Wealthy” and “Wise”, [insert book title here] seems to flaunt itself before the critical gaze, unconcerned in the face of chastisement because it is lightheaded at the thought of the sheer volume of money that it will make in sales.

Indeed, while [insert book title here] can be read as the climax of a society-wide and Business School cultivated masturbatory obsession around the strong leader (the book contains some 101 “profile chapters”, each focusing on a different “transformational leader”, one whose characteristics, qualities and successes are extolled as the [insert pithy catchphrase from book’s blurb here]) this is inadequate to the sheer magnitude of the project of [insert book title here]. The star studded list of giants whose shoulders the reader might stand on include Olympic gymnastics coaches, Professors and PhD’s in everything from Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology to Neuroscience, doctors who were once endurance athletes, CrossFit trainers, professional wrestlers, high profile investors off of the cover of Forbes magazine, politicians, developers and founders of some of the mainstay websites of the contemporary internet, Oscar nominated film-makers, billionaires, hedge fund managers, professional snowboarders, CEO’s, master chefs, Navy SEALs, Grammy nominated musicians and popular actors; all of whom have a small space in [insert book title here] to share their wisdom and insights on life and being successful at living. However, the constant emphasis on adopting the life habits of “great men” [insert feminist critique here] and various health and wellness routines evokes the image of the transformation of a man into some manner of drug-enhanced, low-bodyfat, business-savvy guru who speaks only in maxims about “success” and “motivation” rather than any of the above. A Gregor Samsa for the modern age. [insert witticism based on Kafka’s original German here].

However, despite what nightmarish imagery can be conjured about its content, what is perhaps noteworthy about [insert book title here] is its boldfaced simplicity. It wants to be nothing other than an instruction manual for how to be a great leader. There are no footnotes, no references to previous work done in the field, no “obligatory references”, no “positioning of the work”, no “theory” bandied about and yet, even if one might critique the rigour of the “200 interviews” that form the books basis, [insert book title here] is a qualitative study underpinned by a philosophical project of holistic wellness, mastery and development of the kind more common to ancient Greece than contemporary academia. All of this, one might contend, is in the writing, or, more apropos, in the ineffable ways in the writing constructs its reader – an eager young millennial struggling for a sense of purpose or direction, likely to be enchanted by stories of “great men” who were successful through a series of habits or qualities that you too can cultivate. Such a reader might peruse this book and be expected to learn everything from where to meet high profile people, how to exercise more effectively, what books to read, habits to adopt to deal with ennui. [insert book title here] is thus, in its coverage of topics as diverse as investment strategy in relation to [insert new business trend here] to why MBA programs are a 2-year vacation that look good on one’s CV, from work-out tips from people who’ve climbed Mount Everest to many other instances of what philosopher Daniel Dennett termed “deepity” (“The basics are the basics, and you can’t beat the basics” or “Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are”), a startling caricature of the life of its target audience, insofar as it seems to suggest a group so fatigued by the trials, tribulations and anxieties of modern life that they need advice with [insert list that will shock a CMS reader, like the mattress buying checklist or the constant array of “healthy living” tips, here]. One could almost be duped into believing that one were reading a “modernization” of classic philosophical aphorisms, like those of Nietzsche or Seneca for [insert book title here] has as much life affirming and positive insight in its “deepity” to help one cope with modern life as any of the dusty volumes that organizational scholars dredge from the library in order to make themselves “sound smarter than everyone else” [insert reference to anyone within CMS who has moaned about “academic writing” here]. Indeed, [insert author’s name here] shares this concern and [insert reference to story about author’s rejection of MBA programs based upon his dislike for academics who use too many big words and PowerPoint slides here] seems to suggest that one might find a more thorough and grounded education outside of the academic university. Though recent scholarship within CMS [insert a number of references to publications by members of the jorunal’s editorial board in order to mask a prayer to Dvalin, the Norse rune-god, asking both that this review be published and that the entire edifice of “academic writing” which supports a sentence like this one could burn ingloriously to the ground, here] has done much to address concerns around writing and pedagogy, what we might see in [insert book title here] is an unparalleled knowledge of audience. Such a tailored approach enables it to speak directly and prescriptively about how they may “transform”.

Like so many of these train station bookshop “leadership guides” [insert book title here] will like fade fast, into the discount bin; its status as a transformative bible for a 21-year old, final year Bsc Management student from a small British town with dreams of becoming a successful entrepreneur dwindling into the aether of memory as the book that he spent two weeks swearing to live his life by gathers dust on a shelf or is used to elevate a computer monitor. However, one wonders whether the critical scholars who number amongst [insert journal name here] audience might find the text as transient, or whether they might find something of value in the way that [insert author’s name here] writes, in the way that he draws in and captures the same audience that we would want to in order to ensure the future of our discipline. These are no doubt our students and it is worth speaking to them.

In the least, the readers of [insert journal name here] might find a reference point for critique in [insert book title here]. All too often CMS caricatures “the mainstream”, to the degree where this reviewer wonders if the readers of [insert journal name here] can remember the last time that they read a book that was on a list of “Best Sellers in Business”…

Reflections

EGOS 2018:

EGOS 2018 is over. The conference was held in Tallinn, Estonia and I had a great time exploring the city while taking my usual absurd pictures with a tiny stuffed wolf called, Penumbra.

During the conference, I followed the stream titled Ethnography: Surprises, Stories, Speaking Out and wanted to chronicle a few thoughts on the presentations while they were still fresh in my memory.

How short can fieldwork be?

There have been several reflections that ask questions of the now intractable myth of Malinowskian fieldwork as this lengthy and labyrinthine project of extensive, immobile and detail focused study. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography or even ethnographic work that tracks organization across different sites and spaces has done much to challenge some of the presuppositions around what ethnography is “supposed to be”. However, quite often (at EGOS and elsewhere) I find myself viewing presentations on work that describes itself as “ethnographic” where the fieldwork is based upon a few interviews conducted on site or a few days at a site. I have perhaps no grounds to challenge other people’s attempt to experiment or test the limits of ethnography but I find myself wondering whether we are able to generate the depth of insight necessary for work to meaningfully understand the dynamics of a site, to become attuned to its mores, to be sensitive to its practices, or to be able to trace its conceptual lines and unique forms of thought. I also struggle with the idea that my scepticism towards the projects in which these colleagues are involved is a form of disciplinary conservativism on my part – some form of desire to keep things controlled, predictable, and as expected.

On encroaching positivism and the possibility of surprise

During the stream I watched with no small degree of concern as a colleague presented a piece of ethnographic work that had some undeniably positivistic undertones to its design – there was talk of “theory building” and “theory testing” and a conclusion of a similar type to “men demonstrate behaviour X more than women”. My concern was primarily ideological and relates to what I mentioned earlier regarding disciplinary conservativism. I have trouble finding grounds to say that “this is not ethnography” and pontificate that it should be about exploration, understanding the lives of interlocutors or the site where they live – a confrontation with an Other that represents an analytical, metaphysical, and existential shock that confronts oneself and the academy with radical alterity. The best I can do is to appeal to authority and quote someone like Judith Oakley saying “anthropology is also an artistic and creative engagement, not scientific mimicry.” What Oakley sketches is the fundamental uncertainty about the outcomes and activities of fieldwork; one never knows what might happen. But who am I to say that ethnography cannot be about theory testing and design – that this experiment must be abandoned. I also reflected on the fact that I might be jealous because, while a journal like Organization Science will never publish the kind of Deleuze-inspired ethnographic work that I want to write, it might very well publish this attempt to make ethnography more “scientific”.

At the end of the colleague’s presentation, I made an intervention on the order of asking whether they thought that this method of theorizing beforehand and then testing precluded the possibility of “surprise” (reflecting not only on the conference theme but my supervisor’s invocation that good ethnography means opening yourself up to be surprised by the field) but I’m not sure that this was something that they were able to work with.

On silences

One of the themes that emerged from the panels was “silence”, the things that we do not say or speak about that emerge in the course of ethnographic work. This related to questions of whether ethnography should be necessarily activist, particularly when it deals with the stories of exploited, at risk or suffering groups are well established.

One paper presented at the stream clearly dealt with a sensitive subject that was quite personally important to the presenter. Their paper explicitly listed the ambition of advocating and making salient the very important cause that the author had first-hand experience of and on which they were now reporting. The paper, however, stopped short in its theorization around the work of Marquis de Sade because it wanted to (very understandably) present the people upon whose behalf it sought to advocate in a positive light. I couldn’t help but reflect on the choice that this colleague was confronted with, to either focus on their advocacy to give voice to those who were suffering or to develop a theoretical position – via Deleuze or Bataille- which might suggest that desire could become so perverse and distorted by social coding that their interlocutors could be said to desire their suffering. As I made a comment which suggested the latter, I wondered if I should have kept silent because the colleague was likely aware of this struggle between theorizing and advocating and if pressed would, unlike me, probably choose the latter.

The question of when to intervene or inject question or commentary is one that I think that I obsess over. I try to keep to a rule at conferences that I won’t say anything unless: a) I think that it will help the discussion
b) I think that the presenter will be able to meaningfully use/work with the question and c) I can do it without talking about my own research.
I’ve evolved this rule-set over years of watching with embarrassment as other conference attendees fail to adhere to them. We’ve all been in a room where someone derails an interesting conversation to ask their own narrow question, where someone tries to shame a presenter with a difficult question, or where an older professor goes on about their own work until the whole room forgets what the presentation was about. I sometimes reflect that this silence makes me guilty of not sufficiently advocating for my own expertise and whether facing silence after a presentation would be worse than breaking one of the above guidelines. I kept thinking about this colleagues paper for some time, wondering how I would write it and if in so doing, I might be complicit in trying to silence those who the presenter was trying to speak for.

Reflections

Andrea Gibson: Affect(ing)Words

Andrea Gibson is perhaps my favourite human being.

Andrea Gibson

On some days I think that I’d like to loudly confess my love and beg Andrea to live with me forever. Friends and colleagues may well balk at such a statement, not only because of my general misanthropic demeanour, but because Andrea Gibson’s affecting, queer, and emotional poetry represents a neat antithesis to my stoic, detached, and cerebral public persona.

But Andrea’s work is so mesmerizing as to be worth memorizing. Occasionally, with a full heart, I will replay the poem Ashes in my mind, walking through the spaces where it lives and falling in love with it and its author all over again. There is so much feel, so much body, so much light and life, so much hurt, so much feel, so much poetry in everything that Andrea writes that for a long time I have felt that it could only ever be cheapened by analysis. I say that as someone who lets nothing slip by unanalyzed; Andrea Gibson’s work is better if you try to open yourself up to feeling it.

In this regard, whenever I encounter reviews of Andrea’s work I often find them to be either merely observational or a poor reflection of something that Andrea does better than poet that I know: affect.

Thinking about affect, perhaps we do not have to let the work pass by unanalyzed but rather we need to invoke the necessity of developing a different kind of sense to analyze it. I’ve always loved this quote from Felicity Coleman on how Deleuze considers affect:

Watch me: affection is the intensity of colour in a sunset on a dry and cold autumn evening. Kiss me: affect is that indescribable moment before the registration of the audible, visual, and tactile transformations produced in reaction to a certain situation, event, or thing. Run away from me: affected are the bodies of spectres when their space is disturbed. In all these situations, affect is an independent thing; sometimes described in terms of the expression of an emotion or physiological effect, but according to Deleuze, the affect is a transitory thought or thing that occurs prior to an idea or perception. Affect is the change, or variation, that occurs when bodies collide, or come into contact.

What changes when bodies collide… I saw Andrea perform in Manchester this month and can certainly say that my heart left with bruises from a quite brutal crash. Thinking in terms of affect, (as an aside, “to impress the mind or move the feelings of” might number among my favourite definitions), renders thinking available to the dense cacophony of emotion and feeling in each of Andrea’s poems.

As a challenge to any readers I might suggest the following: listen to these three poems:

I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power’s Out (Text)

Angels of the get through (Text)

Radio (Text)

A page from “Take me with you” showing the opening lines of the poem “Orlando”

Pay attention neither to what is said, nor to the captivating array of imagery and partial-objects which constitute these poems, and instead try to feel your way into the affective spaces that the poems are carving out. Those heavy-hearted feelings that come before you can think through what they are about. I picked those three at random but all are entwined with the theme of a pedagogy of love: of self, of a friend, of a partner. This is perhaps too cerebral a version of the analysis. To think in terms of affect is simply to be rendered open by the lightness and weight of what is being said, thus rendering a life vulnerable to the possibility of compassion; of suffering with someone else.

Andrea’s work batters down the well-practiced apathy of everyday life and joyously invites the listener to suffer with them (recall the etymology of compassion), to smile, laugh, hope, dream, and weep with them. This audacious act of compassion is a collision of bodies of a kind, words used as weapons, catapulted against the walls of stoic detachment and disengagement.

But, there are cynical and critical voices who live in my head. As such, I sometimes find myself thinking that even this preoccupation with affect is limited, following from some comments by Claire Colebrook on the subject of affect:

There is nothing radical per se about affect, but the thought of affect–the power of philosophy or true thinking to pass beyond affects and images to the thought of differential imaging, the thought of life in its power to differ–is desire, and is always and necessarily radical. The power of art not just to present this or that affect, but to bring us to an experience of any affect whatever or “affectuality”–or that there is affect–is ethical: not a judgment upon life so much as an affirmation of life.

Art- not as the presentation of liberatory affect- but as an affirmation of life. Even if Andrea’s affect(ing) writing can’t save us, the affirmation of life doesn’t seem like such a bad consolation prize. We all need that sometimes.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to Andrea’s new book being released in November.