‘Thou Art a Scholar,Speak to it...’ - on Spaces of Speech: A Script

Abstract

This article argues, based on the work of Bakhtin and de Certeau, that there is no aesthetics without politics and that all academic discourse and practices are enacted through aesthetic forms with inherently political and ethical effects. The article is written in a script-form with indications on how to perform it, acting out or ‘performing’ in a direct way rather than adding to the arguments already present in organizational literature. In a prologue (which can be read after reading the script by readers who do not want to harm its open impact), we discuss aspects of this choice: through the use of a different form for telling a story, we want to focus on the political and ethical implications of an aesthetic approach to organizing and how this can influence scholarly work. The script wants to move readers through various spaces of speech where society becomes organized. Through such movements we want to contribute to the imagination of possible ways of ‘performing oneself’ as an academic citizen in society. As an imaginative experiment, this article hopes to inspire scholars to (re)consider their habitual forms of publication and public action, and to address the question of ‘how to speak to it’ including the question of aesthetic genres and societal relationships.