Abstract
This is a review of Timon Beyes’ Organizing Color: Toward a Chromatics of the Social. In it, I show how Beyes’ ideas and illustrations connect matters which might be thought cultural to capitalist and imperialist economics. Culture, in other words, is always also organization.
In the Venezuelan pavilion at the 2024 60th Venice Biennale, the artist Juvenal Ravelo presented his ‘Chromatic Activation Environment’. It was a beautiful maze of brightly painted wooden slats with mirrors behind them, within a pavilion titled ‘Participatory Experience’. As you move through and around the installation, your shadow, the sunlight and shade, the reflection and adjacency of different colours produces an effect which is claimed (in the commentary on the exhibit) to foreground the uniqueness of each individual’s perspectives. The colour you see depends on your height, where you stand, how you move, what the weather is like, the time of day. Ravelo’s arrangement of the space allows for the generation of particular effects, the varied activation of colour by human beings, with the eye as the conduit between the material outside and the mind within. This imagined eye seems to be a transparent thing – pre-social, without history, identity and politics. It seems to be a naïve eye, which inhabits a world in which paint is not manufactured by large companies to particular formulae following the US Munsell Color System, the German RAL system or the British Standard BS4800. So how naïve is the eye? It might be that colour is organized before you even step into the pavilion, before the eye gets to work.
The book under review here is about colour, how it is organized, organizes, and is written about by someone who has spent part of his career working in a business school. But what does the concept ‘organization’ allow us to see that we might otherwise miss? The human sciences quite often get interested in a particular word for a while – ‘structure’, ‘discourse’, ‘symbolism’, ‘culture’, ‘identity’, ‘historical’, and so on. Such ‘turns’ are embraced, criticized, and eventually surpassed as the relentless academic fashion cycle spirals on. The terms that get welcomed have to be general and vague, signifiers that need to carry a lot of weight and do so by being rather difficult to define with any precision. We might think of these, following Laclau (2005), as ‘floating signifiers’, concepts that are undefined enough to carry a variety of connotations and are hence helpful to build alliances and distinctions with. They are a bit less specific than some of the more urgent words that we use – queer, decolonization, populism – being instead a sort of framing apparatus or plane which allows for inter or trans disciplinary work (Osborne, 2015). Not a paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, but more than a perspective. Perhaps as Bal (2002) puts it, these are ‘travelling concepts’, ideas that allow for exchange between disciplinary fields, that allow us to believe that some sort of translation is happening, and that might reflect a social movement of ideas.
For some time now, the concept ‘organization’ has been on the rise in certain circles. It certainly qualifies in terms of its vague generality, but its disadvantage is that it is usually imagined as having roots in business and is hence often assumed to mean something formal and commercial. For most people interested in theory, culture and society, the business school is a problem. It might generate the funds that keep the marketized university from going bankrupt, and keep the sociology department open, but it is rarely imagined to be a site that generates theory which is worthy of wider dissemination. For many in the social sciences and humanities, the business school is an example of the virus which has injected neoliberalism, managerialism, and financialization into the contemporary academy. Concepts like ‘organization’ which are shaped by such origins might be interesting as a topic for critical analysis but will probably not be useful as a resource. The master’s tools are unlikely to be able to demolish this particular house.
But look beyond the glass atrium and consider the term ‘organization’. For a start, it has clear noun and verb meanings, allowing it to be used to connote the process of making an institution as well as the institution itself, the means and the end. Organizations are made by organizing, which is another way of saying that structures are made by agents, the formal is made informally, that the macro and the micro are entangled, and so on. The solidity of ‘an organization’ then dissolves into practices and processes, endless moments of repetition and repair that produce impressions of continuity and presence. More generally, humans can be described as organizing creatures, arranging their worlds so that food, shelter, symbols and stories emerge. The patterning that produces constellations of stars and the Large Hadron Collider, or the rules for eating a meal and the global standards for the design of shipping containers, are all examples of organizing. It seems to me that organizing is a generous concept and a timely one, given that organizations are remaking the planet.
Timon Beyes’ book on colour (I’m using the English spelling here because I can’t bring myself to use the Stanford University Press preferred spelling as ‘color’, or indeed their spelling of ‘grey’ as ‘gray’) is a wonderful example of the fecundity of organization as a concept. Beyes is a hybrid academic, having spent time in both business schools and media or cultural studies. In much of his work he has been intentionally and accidentally interdisciplinary, playing around with technology, philosophy, the humanities, art, media and so on. This is undisciplined work, messy labour, with the concept ‘organization’ being very often used to suture these fields together, to be the medium that mediates. Beyes wants us to understand colour as a ‘primary organizational force’ (p. 8), that is to say, as a medium which simultaneously underpins and undermines social relations, whether in the industrialization of paint or the walls of a gallery.
There is something particularly distinctive about the northwestern European business schools which have grown up over the last 40 years or so and which Beyes has inhabited. In northwestern Europe, they have sometimes been rather interdisciplinary spaces, with a small but noisy cohort of employees with training in the social sciences and humanities because there simply weren’t enough business school PhDs in the 1980s and 1990s, when they started to grow fast. The travelling theory baggage was piled high around these people in the early days, geographers rubbing shoulders with political theorists, ideas from cultural studies and philosophy being traded in newly established journals of ‘organization studies’. Copenhagen Business School, where Beyes used to work, even used to have a standalone philosophy department. Since the early 1990s, something called ‘Critical Management Studies’ has acted as an umbrella for all sorts of intersections between Marx and Foucault, or Levinas and Butler. It’s all a bit odd, for those human scientists who imagine the business school as a place of smug utilitarians, but it is out of this context that Beyes’ book comes, and from which I think it needs to be understood.
His central idea is to show, in a series of vignettes, how ideas about colour organize social relations, but also how colour itself (whether social fact, the thing itself, or the relation) always escapes such classifications. The first point is a fairly obvious one:
Axiomatically put: Color affects social organization, and social organization affects color. In more processual terms, color organizes, and color is organized. Color organizes the social by way of its capacity to mediate, shape and alter what is given to sense perception, how bodies sense, feel and think. Yet color is itself a matter of organization, becomes social technology and ‘color management’. (p. 9)
But Beyes never stops at Social Constructionism 101 with matters of epistemology, because he is fascinated by the relational and evasive ontology of colour which refuses to be reduced to a question of how the human eye perceives its world. This is a book in which colour leaks, fades and splashes whilst industrialists, social reformers and scientists try to place it in boxes, and then hammer the lid down. The nine ‘scenes’ which order the book each begin with a story about an attempt to control the world with colour, or control colour, and always end with colour taking flight. ‘Oscillating between order and disorder, color promises to become an organizational force of standardization, commercialization and education. Yet it seems to retain a recalcitrant empherality, slipperiness and volatility’ (p. 6)
These are stories about a science of order – Ordnungswissenschaft – manifested in colour classifications and charts, the manufacture of dyes and paints, and the chromatics of control in the factory. We move from Goethe observing a pot of boiling chocolate, to Robert Owen’s colour coded ‘silent monitor’ in New Lanark, to the production of indigo dye in lower Bengal. We also have chapters on the colour chart or wheel, IG Farben and the German chemical industry, the politics of red in a Godard film, and an art show in a ‘black’ neighbourhood of Houston in 1971. It’s a fascinating ‘scenography’, one that allows the reader to think with Gerhard Richter’s ‘colour chart’ window in Cologne cathedral, the colours on the laptop screen you might be reading this on, and the grey walls of Adorno’s old lecture theatre at Goethe University in Frankfurt. All these ‘surfaces’ are historically located and enable particular ways of seeing and organizing our attention (Coleman and Oakley-Brown, 2017).
There’s a lot of ‘theory’ in this book, but the most consistent companions are Goethe and Benjamin. Both are authors who insist on the flightiness of colour, who want to understand it as both medium and apparatus, shaping and shaped, and hence (in Beyes’ terms) as ‘utterly relational’ (p. 34), both to itself and to the socially constructed eye. As well as its intellectual ancestry, many of Beyes’ illustrations are German too. If Britain gained its dyes from its sprawling empire, then Germany’s relatively small empire meant that dyes had to be produced from chemistry. This connection between imperialism and capitalism meant that the German chemical industry became the biggest in the world – ‘a chromo-organizational complex’ (p. 125) which produced dye, paint, manmade fibres, film stock, medicine and plastic as well as Zyklon B for the concentration camps. In all Beyes’ scenes, the horror is rarely far from the surface, violence and beauty shading into one another, blood into flags, fireworks into missiles, the colours of skin into the abuses of racist classification.
It’s a fascinating read, densely written and with some great colour images which accompany and amplify the words. (Indeed, I could imagine a big coffee table version of this book, with lusciously illustrated heavy glossy paper. The ‘academic text’ does privilege the black and white word, and usually only allows us to see the buzzing blooming world of colour when we look up from our reading. Perhaps the next edition should be an ‘art book’.) For those interested in colour, in aesthetics and culture, it will probably be useful in terms of the insistence that the organization of capitalism involves the organization of colour. There are many books on colour, both popular and academic and somewhere in between (Ball, 2009; Batchelor, 2000; Kastan and Farthing, 2018), but they rarely focus so tightly on the construction of colour’s lifeworld. This is true both in terms of the capitalist organizations that synthesise, classify and market colours but also the production of an industrial aesthetic in which colour is employed to shape experience. One element of Beyes’ argument is that the aesthetic questions are always organizational, not reducible to a universal human phenomenology – or a naïve eye – but already and always social, historical, economic. This is all laudable, and I don’t disagree, but I’m just as interested in what this book might do for those of us who are interested in ‘organization’ and whether this book might amplify its status as a travelling concept.
There is a huge amount of writing within organizational behaviour, organization studies and organizational theory that uses the word, but much less that questions the ontology or epistemology of the concept. In much of this writing, including that styled as institutional theory, the existence of organizations is assumed, as if they were objects in the world with certain properties that could be studied with versions of social scientific method. Of course there are social constructionist and process theory accounts of organizing as something like prefigurative speech which talks the social world into existence (Helin et al., 2014), and more materialist accounts which attempt to incorporate the non-human (Czarniawska and Hernes, 2005), but I think it’s fair to say that the central concerns of business school theory assume their object of enquiry. They tend to assume that organizations, as a noun, are containers for human activity, and hence that they know where, how and when organizing is.
But how do we see an organization? We see buildings, computer screens, human beings, but none of these are the organization. They are instead components of the assemblage, evidence of presence, ghosts that we take to be real. And how might we understand the effects of organizing, the arrangements and classifications of humans and non-humans that give humans the impressions of order? How do we know when organizing is happening, and when it is happening to us? Presumably the answer to these questions rests on the assumption that there is some sort of process, or experience, which escapes organization, which disorganizes. This is the trick that Beyes wants to play with colour. First, to insist that colour is a relation, not an entity or a property. We cannot conceive of a world without colour, but it does not belong to the thing because its qualities depend on cultural historical coding. Yet, running this argument in reverse, such cultural historical coding is never complete, never final because light, shade, air, water, saturation, interference, time all result in the disorganization of any colour classification. Industrial organization seeks to capture and classify, but colour runs, leaks, stains, splashes.
In terms of a theory of organizing, this book might be compared to a few others. The social theory of Robert Cooper (Burrell and Parker, 2016), Burrell’s (2013) Styles of Organizing, Hancock’s (2023) book on Organizing Christmas, my Organization of Things (2024) and a fair amount of writing in journals like Organization and Organization Studies (particularly the ‘Organization and X’ series in the latter). I’m not sure that little list is enough to inaugurate a transdisciplinary ‘turn’, but it does allow us to consider the usefulness of organizing as a concept. For a start, it’s a vague term, a floating and generous signifier which can be employed to conjoin forms of classification with the arrangement of institutions generally and economic life more specifically. Its verb and noun slippages nod usefully towards micro and macro, agency and structure, process and repetition.
However, the implication that fascinates me most is the poststructuralist insistence that any concept relies on its other, in this case, on disorganization. In order to ‘see’ organization we need to have some conception of what disorganization looks like, some sort of opposition between disorder and order, chance and pattern. Policing this boundary requires labour, both intellectual and practical. Whether this is a question of constructing the boundaries of acceptable intellectual activity or the walls keeping migrants out, disorganization always haunts organization. As Beyes notes, to keep something white requires constant work, because dirt, stains and mould cause polychromy. In a move that reminds me of Bauman’s (1989) writing about the Holocaust, and Scott’s (1998) work on the state, purity and wholeness has to be manufactured by classifying the other as dirty, immoral, dangerous and so on. Organization is always bordered by disorganization.
It would be easy enough to side with the disorganizers, to revel in the romance of transgression and revolution. To some extent this is what Beyes does, with his dialectic in each of the scenes tending to begin with the ordering moment, which is then undermined by colour’s refusal to stay within the lines. But if we were to ask ‘which side is Beyes on?’, the answer becomes more complicated because, though he is fascinated by ‘color’s recalcitrance, its uncanny capacity to evade the efforts to be systematically captured and coded’ (p. 16), he understands that ‘to be romantic about disorganization requires organization’ (p. 39). Let’s pause a minute there, because this is a hesitation that requires some attention.
If organization is parasitic on disorganization, then the reverse is probably also true. In order to be able to see disorder, the apparatus of order is required in both material and conceptual terms. It helps to have a warm office at the Collège de France and a decent salary if you want to write books in which madness erupts from civilization, and transgression becomes a repeated political statement. But this isn’t just a practical point about central heating and paying the bills, because conceptually there is a problem here too. How would we be able to classify something as disorganized if we didn’t have some strong sense of the rhythms of organization, of the sequences and distributions of human and non-human that allow us to claim that ants are organized but your hair is messy, that a forest is an ecosystem but a particular football team is disorganized?
As Bauman and Scott show, to claim that something is disordered, anarchic, disorganized, is almost always to claim that it needs to be tidied up. It is a political claim in the sense that it demands a different and better form of organization in order to ensure that people and things are placed in more predictable relations. Both from the authoritarian right and left we see such claims being aimed at groups that are deemed to be untidy or – worse – that threaten order by doing or saying things that challenge common sense. In the extreme, the train timetables lead to the death camp and the forest becomes a monoculture of straight trees. No wonder that those in the arts and humanities see the business school as a problem and tend to understand ‘organization’ as a hierarchical demand to fall into line. Those who care about prefiguration, localism, horizontalism and the beauty of the small also push against any demand for coordination, for top-down control (Nunes, 2021). ‘Organization’ is a concept that seems to demand obedience, and one might expect that a resolutely interdisciplinary thinker like Beyes would show us how colour was a rainbow weapon against domination.
Let me ask again, then, which side is Beyes on? When writing about the politics of colour, of flags and emblems, teams and signs, his answer is messy:
In simplified terms, this is a double politics. It provides affective and symbolic glue to any political movement, cause, or party whatsoever. Yet it is unstable, unreliable, and continuously mixed up with other hues and shades, flitting from one form (movement, cause, party) to the next, making existing chromatic loyalties fragile and ambivalent. (p. 155)
It sounds like Beyes isn’t really asking us to choose sides but instead to insist that dis/organization is one of those fundamental travelling concepts. Colour is the scene on which he chooses to stage this demonstration, but presumably other fundamental ‘primary organizational forces’, can be thought too – sound, smell, perhaps touch and taste? All might be imagined as relations which are organized by capitalism, and also which organize our bodies and experience. There is no pre-social eye, and hence no pre-social tongue, ear, skin and nose. They are all media which organize and are organized. This is not a representational politics, in the sense that a particular colour connotes or signifies, but rather a book about the limits of representation, of the refusal of the material to be contained by the social.
And so back to the Venice Biennale, and Juvenal Ravelo’s ‘Chromatic Activation Environment’. After you have read Beyes’ book, the entire world becomes an environment for the activation of colour, but a world in which aesthetics and economics are inseparable. The phenomenology of colour is the element that Ravelo and most of the philosophers and social theorists of art have focused on, as if the human eye was the fulcrum for meaning, but Beyes insists that we consider how colour is organized, and how it organizes us. This thoroughly social view of industrial aesthetics is not hard to see, when you are standing in the Giardini, the home of the national pavilions, land laboriously reclaimed from the mud and salt, as the gleaming super-yachts murmur past. The art world presented at the Biennale is always tinted with financial interests, a condensation of the marketing of states, the aggrandizement of big corporations, and the spending of the international tourist classes. The superstar artist, the hotel guest and the badly paid migrant worker are all in Venice because of art/money (Parker, 2019).
Beyes tells us that in 16th-century Venice there were specialist colour merchants, the ‘vendecolori’ (p. 76). They traded in ground powders produced from animals, plants and the earth which were used to give colour to other things – fabric, paint and glass. The raw materials were sourced from across the world – from America to Asia – and relied on trade routes which generated massive wealth in the Venetian Republic. Crushed cochineal beetles, lapis lazuli, gold, and white lead produced lavish silks, elaborate glass vases and the paintings of Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto. It is only in the last century that ‘business’ has been imagined to be separate from art, to deserve its own separate school within the university, and to be the owner of ideas about organization. In this book Beyes shows us why we should refuse to let organizing be captured by the business school, and perhaps that it is a travelling concept that deserves to be traded more widely.
