Abstract
Into Darkness
My first encounter with war happened in May 2014, when pro-Russian secessionists came to power in my home city, Donetsk, and my mother was taken hostage in her office by the separatists. My family left everything behind and flew as refugees to the nearby city of Kharkiv, which seemed safe for the time being. For eight years, the tumour of war in Donbas was slowly growing, claiming the lives of 14,000 people in the process. In the early morning of 24 February 2022, the tumour ruptured and the war burst into the rest of the country, razing cities and leaving piles of corpses behind. On the day of the invasion, all of us listened, tensely, to the address of Vladimir Putin, who decided that he was now a historical actor, creating his own reality. The rest of us would be left to fit ourselves within this new world, attempting to survive, resist and make sense of it.
As a PhD student, the unfolding trauma of war triggered a deep psychological search within me to transform my identity as a future academic. While some of my closest relatives are facing Russian artillery in Donbas, how can I be useful? Why am I doing what I am doing? What can I give to this world? Ukrainians are now calling for advanced weaponry and military aid. I’m not a weaponsmith but, perhaps, what is also needed today are theoretical tools (the word ‘guns’ might be more fitting with the spirit of the age) to better perceive the nature of our current predicament. However, for ‘theoretical guns’ to be useful, they need to be re-imagined from tools of destruction and colonization that kill to devices that enable both the ‘shooter’ and the ‘target’ to heal, to be born again, and to live. Rather than developing frameworks that seek to dominate and ‘explain things away’ (Yang, Scapens, & Humphrey, 2022, p. 31), organizational theory can be conceived as therapeutic work so that researchers can potentially become healers.
Agora is a fantastic opportunity to draw attention to things that do not get organized (as against ‘organizing for’) or just fall outside the scope of ‘normal’ academic considerations. One such big and lasting organizational and societal trend that the current conflict has highlighted is the importance of cultivating and preserving our capacity to imagine better organizations and futures. The purpose of this essay is to emphasize that imagination is one of the most powerful forces in human beings with significant implications for a variety of organizational and management problems.
Under the Shadow
In these trying times, I am fortunate enough to be far from my motherland and so I had the chance to speak to many of the refugees. Many will confirm that for Ukraine this feels like a historic moment. Rarely, can we witness the birth pains of a new European nation (and birth is painful and always traumatic). In the face of a much more powerful enemy, the national spirit has been rekindled with such vigour that some people said to me: ‘This is the first time I feel proud to be Ukrainian.’ Despite all the vicissitudes of fate that people have to endure, many Ukrainians are surprisingly hopeful about the future. Most of them are looking forward to being a part of the European family united by solidarity, democracy, and human rights. (Of course, hope is the prerogative of the survivors. The voices of those who have been fully exposed to the fury and physicality of war remain silent, searching to no avail for an expression (Quattrone, 2006).)
By contrast, for the Russian Federation, the situation is reversed. In the context of global capitalism, Russian gerontocratic leadership is unable and unwilling to imagine and articulate a positive and meaningful future for Russia beyond an authoritarian military-police state. When listening to Russian students living abroad, there is a prevailing sense that the future has been cancelled for Russia. The country is trapped in its traumatic past and so it keeps returning to old gestures and approaches, unable to wake up from the nightmare (compare, for example, the cult of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in Russia with Germany’s Erinnerungskultur). The inability to transform traumatic memory of imperialism and revolutions creates the condition where the past crimes take the properties of the undead (you can’t kill it; it keeps resurfacing and coming back). Similar trends can be observed in other countries where political and social movements mobilize anachronisms to mesmerize the population which is increasingly disillusioned with the liberal narrative of linear progress in welfare and democracy.
A whole generation of Russians has been born and died under Putin. If the scale of structural violence that Putin has unleashed on his population during the 20 years of his reign could only be described as necrocapitalism (Banerjee, 2008) then the Russian leadership itself can be best conceptualized as necromancers (from Greek nekromanteia, from nekros ‘dead body’ and manteia ‘divination, oracle’). With the emphasis on Russia’s ‘unique path and truth’, traditionalism, and rejection of ‘western values’, such as democracy, the rule of law, and universal human rights, the authorities conjure illusory images of the world straight out of the corpses of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The Necromancer flips the hourglass and so the past becomes the future.
The corrupt regime of the Necromancer subjugates life to the power of death by creating an alternative reality where war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. Those young conscripts and contract soldiers (most of them coming from the periphery regions and not from Moscow or St Petersburg) who now trample Ukrainian soil are also victims of the structural violence of the Necromancer’s regime where ethical virtues are substituted by military ones. And so the violence inevitably spills over into other countries: ‘those to whom evil is done, do evil in return’ (Auden, 1940).
The fact that a large proportion of the Russian population is living with a radically different interpretation of reality seems to be the biggest obstacle to peace so far. The conflicting images of the world cannot simply be reconciled by providing people with access to better information and ‘facts’ (Meyer & Quattrone, 2021). Something more potent is needed to break the spell of the Necromancer.
Return of the Prince
‘The Necromancer’, an epic progressive rock song by the Canadian band Rush from the 1975 album Caress of Steel, which inspired the title and headings of this essay, tells the story of the dark magician who took hold of the land and the subsequent attempts of the free people to defeat him. Rush suggest that the power of the Necromancer is derived from his prism which is capable of turning people into ‘empty mindless spectres [. . .] stripped of will and soul’. The significance of the prism as a magical artefact should not be overlooked. With their angled surfaces, prisms can break white light into its component colours as well as bring the whole spectrum back together. It is, therefore, a great metaphor for the processes of sense-making and analysis (the latter means ‘to dissect, take to pieces’). In qualitative research, the metaphor of the prism is often invoked in relation to the use of theory as a lens through which we view and understand this world. As human beings, we are able to synthesize incoherent and ambiguous messages, inscriptions, and narratives into images and concepts through the power of imagination. Hence, it could be argued that, by studying the dark arts, the Necromancer gained the ability to distort people’s perception, sense-making and imaginative faculties as such by perverting myth, history, and tradition (i.e., desecrating the dead).
At the end of the song, the Necromancer is not completely defeated. Even though the physical body of the magician is destroyed, ‘the spell has been broken [. . . ] the Dark Lands are bright’, the spirit of the Necromancer escapes – ‘another land to darken with evil prism eye [. . .]’. There will be no doubt more wars and instability in the future caused by authoritarianism as there were in the past. Moreover, climate change, pandemics, inequality, and other grand challenges can all be reconceptualized as wars in their own right since they also appear as the result of structural violence inflicted upon the planet, animals, and people. The severity of these problems is magnified since they emerge and circulate in the post-truth world where ugly myths become reality.
As a remedy, it is worth pointing out that a much more hopeful and positive image of the prism comes from another progressive rock band Pink Floyd (recently reunited after 28 years to record a new song to support Ukraine) and their iconic album cover for The Dark Side of the Moon. There, a beam of white light passes through the prism from the left side and emerges as a rainbow on the right side. Contrary to the distorted Necromancer’s prism, which is used for malign purposes, the rainbow represents human liberation as well as the complexity of the human condition as such. The album cover symbolizes what progressive rock as a musical form stands for: exploration, eclecticism, and surrealism (qualities that are well familiar to organization scholars).
The full spectrum of light introduces ambiguity and multiplicity into the monochromatic and linear world of the Necromancer. It reminds us that the visible is incomplete – only a fraction of the whole spectrum can be perceived by our sensory systems. This creates the condition of radical openness towards what the future holds, provoking a desire to build and inhibit better worlds and organizations. It is also not a coincidence that the rainbow, generated by the prism, is the symbol of the LGBTQI+ movement which is about acceptance, diversity, individuality, and equal rights (things that the Necromancer is deeply afraid of).
A strong theme in organization studies has always been the importance of sensemaking and imagining new futures and organizations, especially in light of the grand challenges and wicked problems (Kostera, 2020). We need to remember that our pragmatic solutions to these big problems always exist in relation to some sort of a standard of what a good and just society should look like. We should not be afraid to dream big and imagine things differently from what they currently are. As scholars, we cannot simply be left to judiciously studying and interpreting realities that are imposed on us. Our duty is to disturb and to distress the reality of the Necromancer, to make it stutter. This process starts by coming up with templates, blueprints, and symbols for a better world, requiring us to be more normative and bold as researchers – to lead more and to follow less. Perhaps, this is the time when more radical imagination is needed as well as disciplined one (disciplined by what exactly?). In the face of the challenges that are upon us, the role of ‘theoretical guns’ and prisms should be to enhance our critical capacity and agency as citizens and to foster our collective responsibility to look at the world afresh, to liberate and to heal.