Abstract
In an unusually direct style of address, the article moves toward a novel critical practice stimulated by affect theory: inhabited criticism. This more-than-representational approach enacts vigilant attunement to the lively scenes, bodies, and trajectories of ordinary affects. I cultivate the practice by staging successive encounters with the contemporary labor of scholarship and, specifically, with an assemblage condensed as The Rule of Excellence. The first half of the article addresses The Rule through reigning critical practices in organization studies, which are recast as vacated criticism (disembodied analysis), humanized criticism (confessional tale), and reciprocated criticism (dialogue across dualisms) in order to sift their affective postures and implications for resistance. The second half then calls on affect theory to address The Rule anew, as an agentic, transpersonal current that animates academic landscapes and figures in troubling yet indeterminate ways. By performing, not only theorizing, inhabited criticism, I demonstrate how it can transcend stubborn dualisms and nourish relational enactments difficult to accomplish within the current critical practices of organization and management studies. Ultimately, I argue that inhabited criticism can (a) help us come to terms with the affective demands and limitations of all modes of criticism and (b) enact an alternative posture of resistance rooted in ‘sense-abilities’ of home, field, and their relation.
Keywords
Introduction
Our own labor draws increasing appraisal. Forgive me for presuming the ‘we’ there. I refer to academic labor, with a particular focus on the relations of a distributed field known as organization and management studies. This article especially hails those in a position, or seeking a position, whose tasks include the publication of scholarship. The fortunate few, some say. But I get ahead of myself.
A starting point for mutual recognition: If you too are caught up in this we, you bustle among the tenants and habitats of a Neoliberal U whose projects include an increasingly neoliberal you. You aspire to the intellectual middle class, lost neither to the adjunct precariat nor to upper administration (yet), perched on or near relative security, in hopeful sight if not in reach, fingers crossed for manuscripts accepted while you brace against the perpetual squeeze. If you lean critical, you harbor a special ambivalence and irony about participating in this ever-enterprising enterprise. You know better but may not know how to do better (be sardonic while working harder?). Like me, you may long for more.
Through immersion in the current context of scholarly labor, this article considers how developments in affect theory (e.g. Gregg and Seigworth, 2010) open new possibilities for critical practice in organization studies. The turn toward our own labor is not simply expedient. I am not saying, for instance, that the same case could be made through other labor settings but why not ours, since our own relations of ruling also beg for critique. Instead, the focus homeward is integral to my case; I go so far as to say that it could not be made otherwise. For it is in the reluctance to digest our own plate, and the shared heartburn of trying to do so, that we bump up against the affective limits of available modes of criticism. I contend that a novel critical practice, one I call inhabited criticism, can both appreciate what our current critical habits do (as in, what sort of relations they enact) and nudge them otherwise.
Stimulated by affect theory, inhabited criticism is a more-than-representational 1 approach that seeks vulnerable, transpersonal discernment through vigilant attunement to the trajectories of ‘ordinary affects’ (Stewart, 2007). It involves dwelling in and up close with—even becoming possessed by—objects of critique, as a way to understand how they move through and around us while detecting subtle flickers of other possibilities. The article conceptualizes and performs inhabited criticism relative to reigning critical practices in organization studies, which I replay as vacated criticism (disembodied analysis), humanized criticism (personal confession), and reciprocated criticism (dualistic dialogue), in order to reveal their affective postures.
I hasten to stress what my claim is not: that inhabited criticism is the next redemption or enlightened way forward. More modestly, I suggest that it can (a) help us come to terms with the affective demands and limitations of all modes of criticism and (b) enact an alternative posture of resistance rooted in ‘sense-abilities’ of home, field, and their relation. The article is not so much a plea for the doctor to heal thyself as it is a pathway for tuning in to concrete inhabitations of labor and power whereby ‘in here’ and ‘out there’ become one. It is an aid to forming new habits of organizational criticism that perceive-by-performing the sensory tendrils which dis/organize and connect diverse scenes of work in so-called neoliberal times.
You will find here three tales of a particular academic assemblage abridged as The Rule of Excellence. 2 These begin with a disembodied analysis of Neoliberal U, a birds-eye critique offset by the confessional tale that follows (Van Maanen, 1988). Each narration ends with a pause to consider its affective disposition and implications for resistance. Affect theory then motivates a third tale, one that animates The Rule as an agentic current that ‘moves’ academic landscapes and figures in troubling yet indeterminate ways. The aim is to show, not just tell, how inhabited criticism can transcend stubborn dualisms and promote radical relational enactments difficult to accomplish within reigning modes of critique.
Tale 1—Welcome to The Rule of Excellence: a disembodied analysis of Neoliberal U (you?)
These days, few would dispute the corporatization of universities (Castree and Sparke, 2000; Newson et al., 2012), a trend associated with the rise of neoliberalism in the late 1970s and 1980s. ‘Neoliberalism’ refers to a form of government premised on the universalization of ‘free’ market-based social relations 3 (Ball, 2012; Shamir, 2008). Nestled in the evolution of capitalism, neoliberalism marks significant turns in its expansion (Hartman and Darab, 2012; Sparke, 2006), especially those wrought by the interlaced arms of privatization, deregulation, financialization, and globalization (Radice, 2013). Circulating through university life, neoliberalism has spawned a distinctive paradigm of higher education that now dominates much of Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand and is quickly finding traction around the world (Walker, 2009). Indeed, some identify academia as one of the most visible sites of neoliberalism’s global reach (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997). Abbreviated here as ‘Neoliberal U’, this new paradigm has drawn abundant critique across four streams of scholarship: analyses of (a) neoliberalism (especially Foucaultian), (b) transformations in work under advanced capitalism, (c) transformations in higher education, and (d) academic micro-politics, often feminist in orientation (Gill, 2009). Among these converging circles, the defining features of Neoliberal U barely need review. However, I condense them here in order to render ‘it’ a tangible object of critique marked by recognizable features that morph throughout the article.
First and foremost, Neoliberal U takes the university as a business enterprise. Not only does it welcome alliance with private institutions and reconstruct the aims, forms, and content of higher education in their service; it takes ‘the corporation’ as a model for university operations, such that ‘cognitive’ or ‘academic capitalism’ becomes the norm (Boutang, 2011; Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). In this model, market logic dominates virtually all activity. Scholarly outcomes transform into ‘products’ packaged around their exchange value and driven by a quest for the constant sharpening of competitive edge (Davies and Bansel, 2010). The current branding craze defining relations between and within universities as well as among scholars exemplifies the commodification of intellectual life and academics themselves (e.g. Hemsley-Brown and Goonawardana, 2007; Hemsley-Brown and Oplatka, 2006; Lair et al., 2005). A generalized principle of competition (Lazzarato, 2009) has come to saturate the scene.
As a competitive enterprise, higher education demands extensive ‘technologies of measurement, audit and surveillance’ that ‘assume and generate stable uniform entities that can be compared and evaluated through the application’ of said devices (Davies and Bansel, 2010: 14, emphasis added). The spike of regulatory systems is commonly known as audit culture, an institutionalized preoccupation with relentless accounting (Ball, 2003; Morley, 2003). Audit culture transforms faculty into resource units whose performance must be continuously measured and improved (Ball, 2012; Ozga, 1998, 2008; Shore and Wright, 1999). Attending audit culture is a rising managerialism, witnessed in the explosion of university administration (Meyerhoff et al., 2011; Newson et al., 2012) and other ‘parasite’ industries (e.g. those generating journal rankings and impact factors or selling tools to enhance marketability) that are increasingly influential in shaping circuits of knowledge and that turn a profit on the business of monitoring, enhancing, and representing academic performance (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). The imperative for accounting infrastructure has justified a massive surge over the last 30 years in administrative jobs and salaries, as well as an accompanying decline in, and stagnating wages for, secure faculty positions. 4
Pressure for incessant improvement collides with the decline of permanent faculty to yield mounting work intensification: fewer faculty bodies with more to do, including the added task of packaging one’s ‘product-ivity’ while doing research, teaching, and service better and faster all the time (Butterwick and Dawson, 2005; Gill, 2009; Mountz et al., 2015). Work intensification thus yields work extensification, the movement of labor into realms once deemed beyond the site of production (see Jarvis and Pratt, 2006). Like the social factory of autonomist Marxism, the ‘university without walls’ materializes in eroded spatial and temporal boundaries between work and home, labor and leisure (Gill and Pratt, 2008). A mandate to outsmart time haunts the impossible collision of temporalities, such as to-do lists that defy clock-time, a globalized academia online around the clock, and an ever-accelerating speed of production (e.g. faster journal review cycles), such that all are pushed to ‘make time’ amid its chronic deficit (Hartman and Darab, 2012; Meyerhoff et al., 2011; Mountz et al., 2015). In Walker’s (2009) words, ‘Being efficient means managing one’s time well: it means doing more with less’ (p. 498), or as Gill (2009) laments, ‘Welcome to fast academia’ (p. 238). As this hints, Neoliberal U runs on an entrepreneurial imperative, a spirit of relentless innovation impelled ‘downward’ (Lynch, 2006). Hailed as the source of renewable ingenuity amid ‘streamlined’ (shrinking) resources, it stokes the insatiable urgency to do more with less, faster and better, again.
Crucial to this constellation is an intensified individualization of responsibility and failure, which closes the time-honored gap between liberal subject and government (Davies and Bansel, 2010). In essence, Neoliberal U incites, then consumes as its very fuel, apprehension and guilt regarding personal performance and privatized tactics for managing these feelings (Gill, 2009). Pyke’s (2011) analysis of gendered academic service illustrates the point. Mentoring messages remind women faculty that ‘saying no’ and honing time management skills are their responsibilities. Yet, gender disparities in service loads are all but ensured by institutional inequalities. Feelings of personal failure thereby obscure systemic origins and deflect attention from the unremitting pressure to shoulder swelling service ‘requests’.
Overall, Neoliberal U minimizes faculty governance in favor of government through performance-based management, yielding a governmentality whereby faculty align identities and conduct in anticipation of such controls (McKinlay et al., 2012). Individualized accountability thereby induces the ironic effect of de-individualization, homogenizing faculty into the measurable ‘stable uniform entities’ noted earlier (Davies and Bansel, 2010). The upshot is that once secure faculty positions entail increasing insecurity (Knights and Clarke, 2014). Gill (2009) laments, ‘You are only as good as your last paper, and that now has a half life that is shorter than ever’ (p. 238); while Ball (2012) mourns, ‘Last year’s efforts are a benchmark for improvement’ (p. 19).
But the ever-lean business of Neoliberal U is not possible without the rise of another form of precarious employment: ‘flexible’ (temporary) teaching positions without institutional security, filled by those with advanced degrees and few options (American Association of University Professors, 2014). As Ross (2008) observes of the US context, 50–75% of university teaching ‘has been casualized, leaving a minority in the tenure-stream to exercise the security and the academic freedoms that are the signature of the profession’ (p. 44). Stable faculty employment is not only shrinking; what security remains is enabled by a growing majority of marginalized academic citizens (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2000).
One kind of precarity is thus perched upon another: Increasingly insecure (but comparatively secure) long-term faculty share hallways with vulnerable adjuncts, living divergent social and material worlds with deeply entwined futures. It is those with the rare fortune of holding, or aspiring to, ‘secure’ positions who are the direct subjects of, and subject to, The Rule of Excellence. Yet they could not play its game without the proximate adjunct class. Concisely, they are the primary beneficiaries, but not the only casualties, of The Rule.
The Rule of Excellence: ‘publish or perish’ meets Neoliberal U
The Rule of Excellence is a specific assemblage emanating directly from Neoliberal U. It refers to relations constituted by the progressively competitive application of managerial and auditing technologies to assess research productivity and quality (e.g. performance reviews, journal rankings, citation indexes). Although some of these technologies are not new, it is their recent proliferation, amplification, and deployment to reinvent faculty as uniform resource units, ‘calculable rather than memorable’ (Ball, 2012: 17), that distinguish The Rule as a vital organ of Neoliberal U. 5 ‘Rule’ is thus meant in a dual sense here: both standard of measurement (i.e. ruler, norm) and governing regime (i.e. reign) (see Butler and Spoelstra, 2012, 2014).
While many scholars have critiqued specific research audit technologies of Neoliberal U, 6 a robust dialogue about The Rule of Excellence as a relational configuration has emerged in critical organization studies, much of it published in this very journal (e.g. Baum, 2011; Butler and Spoelstra, 2012; Parker, 2014; Prasad, 2013; Prichard, 2012; Prichard and Thomas, 2014; Willmott, 2011). Critical management scholars bring a certain edge to this conversation, perhaps due to the uneasy mix of our specialization in the critique of management systems and practices amid our (often tacit) complicity with The Rule. One conclusion seems to be that The Rule gathers ‘Us’ into a research ‘monoculture’ (Willmott, 2011) marked by ‘intellectual inertia’ (Prasad, 2013) and ‘performance-based Taylorism’ (Parker, 2014) and ‘Them’ into the extraneous body of the research unproductive. Specifically, The Rule is indicted for constitutive dynamics such as the following, many of which are elaborated by Willmott (2011):
Reliance on journal rankings minimizes other forms of scholarly representation and judgment in favor of a one-size-fits-all list, which becomes a universal proxy for quality through repetitive use over time (thus eroding complex assessment of quality).
Journal prestige becomes more important than substantive content and tends toward self-maintenance regardless of content (e.g. rejection rates spike as submissions increase).
The expectation that all should aim for top-tier journals ends up swelling the total journal workload as papers trickle down the hierarchy.
This workload is continually intensified as (a) universities raise the bar for faculty research productivity and (b) journals reduce decision timelines—both to improve their respective performance in ‘the rankings’.
The expectation for submitting to the top tier first breeds intellectual risk aversion and, ultimately, homogenization, blunting a radical edge across the journal spectrum. Even works eventually published in lower tier and/or alternative venues carry the conservative residue of emulating top-tier preferences.
Top-tier journals privilege native English speakers and favor traditions heavily tilted toward a hegemonic version of North American (US-centric) social science.
Research is reduced to playing the publication game, and we become preoccupied by our internal politics rather than engagement with ideas and their broader relevance.
The publication game corrodes collegiality and cultivates demoralization with an ‘academic star’ economy (Solomon, 2008). ‘No surprise that one of the predominant emotions of the neoliberal university is resentment …’ framed as character flaw rather than structure of feeling (Meyerhoff et al., 2011: 492).
The publication game affords new personal pleasures (e.g. besting the review process, improving one’s marketability). Earlier pleasures, like fulfillment through meaningful projects, now mostly sustain self-defeating attachment to playing by The Rule. 7
Needless to say, critical management scholars see little cause for optimism as The Rule of Excellence marches across intellectual and national borders.
Taking stock: disembodied critique as affective disposition
This first tale is meant to do two things at once: (a) specify Neoliberal U and its Rule of Excellence as a tangible object for critique and, in the act of object-ifying, (b) demonstrate the dominant mode of criticism in organization studies, the disembodied realist tale (Van Maanen, 1988). I pause here to consider what the latter can and cannot do.
Eyeing The Rule from a safe distance, this familiar critical practice can detect alarming systemic patterns. It can capture, represent, interpret, and evaluate them through aloof analysis; it demands resistance. It cannot, however, access intimate territories of investment that complicate resistance to The Rule. Consider just this irony: Heavy citation of Willmott’s (2011) indictment of journal ‘list fetishism’, which forcefully articulates many of the critiques outlined above, ironically raised the impact factor of the present venue, Organization. Butler and Spoelstra (2012) offer a grim summary of our own implication: We argue that the question … how might critically inclined scholars respond to the increasing marketization of higher education and academic research?—may be misguided. The critical management researcher is so profoundly entangled within systems of excellence in the university that it may no longer be possible … to ‘respond’ to this encroaching commercialization. We are already up to our necks in it. (p. 892)
Disembodied critique answers this daunting charge, primarily, by seeking relief through a rational mind emancipated from embattled bodies and their concrete scenes of struggle. Detachment and dispassion, however, are also affective, embodied dispositions, which throw up a defensive shield against The Rule of Excellence, between the removed or receded author and the object of criticism. The Rule becomes an exterior enemy encroaching on our bounded selves, rather than an animating force already fused with our flesh, circulating under the skin and sticking between the ribs. In this sense, realist critical tales deny that we are up to our necks in The Rule, or strive to save us from the neck up, by retreating to a safe-room of abstraction and quasi-objectivity where we can breathe easier and prosecute power as it lies dormant. In terms of resistant posture, this mode can be called vacated criticism, a term intended to stress the act of vacating or fleeing the scene of power’s embodiment. Recognizing this limitation, some turn to confessional tales that explore our subjectification to and through The Rule. I join them next.
Tale 2—Courting The Rule of Excellence: a confessional tale of Neoliberal U and me
Up to our necks in it, indeed. I came of scholarly age alongside The Rule. I entered graduate school in the United States in the early 1990s, as ‘pubs, not promise’ was becoming a mantra of academic employability. As a PhD student, I targeted journals strategically, diligently avoiding lower tier venues—a habit that led me to disregard those most pertinent to my research: journals devoted to gender, difference, and feminisms. Afraid of being trapped in an intellectual cul-de-sac, I chose the voice of translator or liaison (see Prasad, 2013), bringing feminist perspectives to the organizational mainstream, qualitative to quantitative analysis, communication to management studies. I sought to partake in the ‘real’ action while pushing against its borders.
I have performed all manner of conceptual and representational gymnastics to publish in top-tier management journals. Twice, reviewers assumed that I was an ‘ESL’ (English as second language) author—and recommended language assistance—due to my ‘Euro-leaning’ theoretical lingo. As a US-born and US-trained scholar, I take this feedback both as a humorous marker of my ‘foreign’ background in the field of communication studies (a hybrid of social-scientific, humanistic, and critical approaches) and as a telling sign of The Rule’s disturbing global politics. Routinely, I have bent over backwards to make critical work intelligible and palatable to unfamiliar readers, reducing and reifying radical notions in simplified charts, squeezing inductive analysis into deductive forms, and smuggling challenge in benign wrapping.
Although I have not (yet) lost passion for the play of ideas, and I do see value in expanding reach through accessibility, I admit that I also savor the translation dance itself, especially the neoliberal thrill of a successful dance. Willmott’s (2011) auto-erotic asphyxiation analogy resonates, ‘We take pleasure from the self-bondage and self-torture of wrestling with a manuscript to render it compliant with the form of scholarship required by a targeted journal … following the lashing of referee reports’ (p. 438). I crave the ‘hit’ indeed.
And its rush can pay handsomely. In local institutional worlds, it has elevated my salary relative to many in the humanities and social sciences (again, I work in a department of communication, not a school of business). My record has been used by administrators as a benchmark and paddle; accordingly, it has drawn admiration and emulation from some colleagues, loathing from others. The gender-sexual slant of related commentary gestures toward lucky ease as well as womanly sacrifice and cost: ‘single’, ‘no kids’, ‘no family’ = ‘no wonder’. Similar whispers about figures like me circulate in larger professional fields. It took years for me to recognize a part I still play on the circuit of academic talk: the comparatively privileged woman speaker by whom organizers stave off diversity criticisms; whose presence tacitly disciplines Others less able to play by the White, North American, English-fluent, heterosexual, masculinist norms of intellectual culture; who acts as a carrier of those norms through the physically exhausting, resource consuming, environmentally destructive yet nonetheless seductive globalized economy of academic travel; and who provides safely contained provocations on such matters—in brief, a disarming handmaiden to The Rule.
Other germane confessions: I feel a chronic, crushing anxiety that I am lagging behind, that I have not written or read enough lately. I feel the fleeting elation of potency borne on the backs of the less productive and resilient. I coach striving authors on how to access top-tier outlets; I join editorial teams plotting to scale the list. I usher nervous graduate students into this world. I direct an academic program populated by precarious faculty who thank me for improving their morale, if not material circumstances. Through humor and personal warmth, I help to numb the skin as the neoliberal knife cuts, and people express gratitude.
I write this while serving on my department’s merit committee, which ranks individual faculty performance based on the ‘FRPA’ (Faculty Report of Professional Activities) of each. We value publications by number, length, type, and journal status, with no time to actually read them. I write this upon learning that the number of Vice-Chancellors on my campus has tripled in the last few years. I write under the banner of a new and startlingly expensive company brand. I write as the university announces a dedicated Office for Performance Improvement to enhance the business operations of all units. I write this in the late evening hours and on weekends. I critique the hamster wheel of overwork by pedaling faster. My FRPA looked marvelous last year, but what about now? This article might help.
I serve The Rule of Excellence. I am up to my neck and drowning in it. I pull others under with me.
The first time I recall being struck by this ambivalent dawning, I was writing a response for a special forum, ironically, on resistance. A few days before the deadline, I received a dreaded call from a dear colleague with late-stage breast cancer. Less than 2 weeks left, she said. I still shudder with shame at my first reflex: Can I afford to experience my friend’s death? Is there time? A muted version of this horror snuck into my forum response (Ashcraft, 2008), which pondered a lack of resistance among academics.
Taking stock: the affective disposition(s) of personal confession
Returning to the charge that we are already up to our necks in it, I pause again, this time to ask how the confessional tale contends with our complicity and yields postures of resistance.
In contrast to disembodied critique, personal confession explicitly re-embodies power. As it swings toward the personal case and local micropractices in which the I/eye is embroiled, this critical practice achieves emotional authenticity and intimacy through auto-ethnographic self-reflexivity, which peels back and pores over the layers of ‘my’ subjective experience, pitched as a vivid illustration of how The Rule ‘hits home’. The confessional tale thus reconstructs the scene, putting identity front and center. Rather than deny submersion in The Rule or seek rescue from the neck up, it freely admits that I am up to my neck and drowning in the Rule. This practice seeks relief not through negation but concession, with a lonely, intrepid cry for help in the hopes of mutual recognition and rescue. In affective terms, we can call this humanized criticism, in that the subject becomes vulnerable but not displaced, still a viable self and central character that wields and yields ‘her’ agency, still on a romantic quest for intersubjectivity, while bounded human bodies remain the primary players (pawns) of political structures.
If we consider vacated and humanized criticism in relation, familiar dualisms emerge: macro-micro, object/ive-subject/ive, public-private, rational-emotional, collective-individual, global-local, and structure-agency, to name a few. My initial ‘macro’ account objectified Neoliberal U and its Rule toward a rational, abstract analysis of sweeping institutional constraint; the ensuing ‘micro’ confession countered with a subjective critique steeped in localized experience and personal, emotional floundering. Read together, the tales imply that there is a nefarious public system out there demanding collective resistance, yet we are too trapped in its private webs to rise up and join the fight. In this battle of structure versus agency, the right side of the dualism may rouse human empathy, but the left side is trending toward victory.
Several scholars challenge this pessimistic, dualistic frame, eroding binaries by toggling between them. Taking academics’ personal narratives as indicative of larger trends—‘not as universal, but ubiquitous’ (Mountz et al., 2015: 1239; see also Brewis, 2004; Prasad, 2013; Raineri, 2015)—this approach locates The Rule’s impact through humanized criticism while also drawing on vacated criticism to inform experience. Inspired by institutional ethnography, for instance, Butterwick and Dawson (2005) tack back and forth between emotional conversation about their own work lives and dispassionate criticism to ‘proceed from identification of local conditions to analysis of the relations of ruling’ (p. 54). Knights and Clarke (2014) likewise span public and private, macro and micro, by ‘linking the “personal troubles” of academics to the “public issues” … of Higher Education against the background of regimes of new public management’ (p. 336). Rather than explore their own narratives, however, these authors seek autobiographical awareness by interviewing faculty colleagues. Hawkins et al. (2014) follows a similar path by compiling accounts from fellow graduate students. Fotaki (2011) combines these practices, merging colleague interviews with personal diary. Others use collaborative writing to examine links between individual and collective formations (e.g. Mountz et al., 2015).
Detectable here is a hybrid strain of criticism that takes several forms, such as alternating intimacy and distance, studying self and/or other at ‘home’ yet also at the arm’s (elbow’s?) length afforded by method, or sifting common threads from personal tales or through reflexive, multi-vocal composition. While such hybrid critique certainly traverses binary divides, it also leaves them mostly intact. Entities arrive pre-bounded: Persons are discrete actors (individuals); emotions ‘belong’ to people (feelings); private moments reflect the structure of public worlds (and vice-versa); and society remains ‘leveled’ in a depth or hierarchical sense (micro, meso, macro). Modes of criticism also retain their oppositions, although now in fruitful conversation. Object/ive and subject/ive play off of one another, for example, but are not dismantled.
I refer to this development as reciprocated criticism, in that it strives for give-and-take between distinct forms and critical practices. Gill (2009) models such a dialogic ethos in her call to consider the major social transformations racking academia alongside the everyday encounters of academics. For now, she advises, reciprocity necessitates prioritizing the latter, because the customary disembodiment of critique has muffled the voice of ‘psychosocial’ 8 experience that ‘insistently asserts itself in our aching backs, tired eyes, difficulties in sleeping and in our multiple experiences of stress, anxiety, and overload’ (p. 232). As it moves from cog to machine and back, reciprocated criticism fosters a posture of resistance that alternates between body and mind. It confesses feeling, then abstracts those confessions (again, vacating embodiment) for the sake of analysis: We are up to our necks in it, but we still hope our heads can throw us a lifeline. As Butterwick and Dawson (2005) express it, ‘There is a feeling of clarity, perhaps even hopefulness when these personal experiences are conceptualized’ (p. 57).
This affective disposition has much to teach us about the matter with which I ended my own confessional tale above: why academics, even the critically inclined, tend not to resist. In a recent example of reciprocated criticism, Parker (2014) mourns that our own behavior reiterates that of many knowledge workers: Professional identification regulates not only our conduct but also the felt ‘interiority’ of minds, hearts, and selves. Faculty subjectivity bears the mark of such disciplinary controls, and avenues for resistance are narrowed by the neoliberal relations that constitute us as atomized brands. 9 Captured in Davies and Bansel’s (2010) pithy opening line, ‘The single most important feature of neoliberal government is that it systematically dismantles the will to critique’ (p. 5). Or as Butler and Spoelstra (2012) poignantly declare, even masters of The Rule are mastered by The Rule: ‘the game of excellence exerts its own logic and momentum on the players to the extent that it changes their relation to research and to themselves’ (p. 892). Collective struggle is thus unlikely to find traction, although some try valiantly (e.g. adjunct labor organizing), and many offer individual and group tactics with optimism that these could scale up into collective recalcitrance (e.g. Mountz et al., 2015). But most agree: Faculty resistance, when it happens, is prone to be isolated and ephemeral—in a word, ordinary.
Re-presenting ordinary resistance through affect theory
Critical management scholars have long debated whether ordinary resistance is inevitably compromised and ineffectual. Ordinary here refers to ‘micropractices’ (Thomas and Davies, 2005) or ‘microemancipation’ projects (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992)—mundane, covert, informal and emergent, individual and interactional, localized and fleeting practices such as cynicism, bitching, irony, parody, and so on (Fleming and Spicer, 2007). Invariably, organization studies of ordinary resistance alight upon some version of the following question: How can one distinguish between those instances that might make capitalists quake in their boots and those which are indices … of capitalism’s penetration of workers’ very souls? By what kinds of principled criteria might we differentiate between the radically different meanings of apparently similar practices? (Gill and Pratt, 2008: 19)
Simply put, can ordinary resistance transform, or is it doomed to consent, and how can we know the difference? Some critics argue that it is already defeated by its ‘decaf’ character (Contu, 2008), but most seem to have reached the stalemate conclusion that is both/and—something, albeit compromised (Mumby, 2005).
Latent in the question is a benchmark for ‘real’ resistance that aspires to the opposite of ordinary as sketched above: grand, overt, formal and strategized, collective and structural, sweeping and enduring. Although often regarded as fatally utopian, such sustained, large-scale projects evoke a longing for authentic action that decisively casts out The Rule from within to refashion the world without—an imaginary by which we continue to suspect ordinary resistance of banality and impotence. Echoed in our fear of its bleak, or at least sluggish, prospects, then, are the very dualisms that reciprocated criticism aims to transcend but tends to traverse instead (macro-micro, object/ive subject/ive, rational-emotional, structure-agency, and so on). Critical management scholars have tried to escape this dualist trap in varied and useful ways, most of which abandon the ordinary in search of more fruitful ground for resistance. 10
My quest here is different: Instead of pursuing more than (to move beyond) the ordinary, I draw on affect theory in search of more to (complexity within) the ordinary. I seek an appreciation of ordinary resistance that not only refuses its alignment with the micro but also rejects the divide of micro-macro 11 altogether, surrendering a priori levels of reality in favor of a ‘leveled’, as in flattened, ontology. In this view, the ordinary is a contact point among potentialities arriving from elsewhere. It is the ‘live surface of difference at work’ (Stewart, 2007: 4), the ‘weighted and reeling present’, ‘a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion’ (p. 1). But I get ahead of myself again. Re-reading the ordinary in this way requires fuller appreciation of new materialisms and, specifically, affect theory.
New materialisms
Common across so-called new materialisms is a close investigation of ‘the social’, ‘the material’, and ‘the real’ (see Coole and Frost, 2010). Generally speaking, new materialisms challenge the conventional substantialist assumption that bounded entities such as individuals, objects, and organizations precede interactions among them. An assertion of relationality follows: namely, self-evident things and the boundaries between them are effects rather than causes of ongoing relational enactments (Emirbayer, 1997). 12 ‘The real’ is constantly emerging, performed into being—hence the associated term, the ontological turn. Unlike earlier social constructionist versions of this claim, however, discursive realities no longer assume primary focus, nor are they discrete from physical realities. New materialisms hold that social and material realities are staged together such that they are indivisible in the abstract, punctuated only in and by particular relations. Sociomaterial enmeshment has profound implications for the human subject: Hybrid and material agencies gain recognition; humans lose exclusive rights to agentic performance; and the human–nonhuman distinction itself becomes an enacted effect.
A major upshot of the new materialist challenge is that things which appear to be stable over time and place are, in fact, ever-evolving. Mol (2014) offers a pithy summary of the claim and its implication for critical scholarship: The idea was that there are not just many ways of knowing ‘an object’, but rather many ways of practising it. Each way of practising stages—performs, does, enacts—a different version of ‘the’ object. Hence, it is not ‘an object’, but more than one. An object multiple … If ontology is not singular and given, the question arises about which reality to ‘do’. Ontology does not precede or escape politics, but has a politics of its own. Not a politics of who (who gets to speak; act; etc.) but a politics of what (what is the reality that takes shape and that various people come to live with?). (Original emphasis)
The turn toward ontological politics thereby implicates scholarly practice, among other quotidian forms of knowing, for it holds that efforts to know reality are relational performances of that which they seek to comprehend (see also Latour, 2005; Law, 2009; Mol, 1999). A new practice of post-human reflexivity follows, less concerned with researcher subjectivity and more with the sociomaterial relations made real by certain acts of knowing (i.e. how ‘we’, broadly speaking, are made to be and do in connection; see Beyes and Steyaert, 2012).
As this suggests, the flatland turn is more than a theoretical means to transcend old dualisms; it follows an ethico-political impulse toward new potentials for action. To underscore, the point is not simply that knowledge claims emanate from certain relations but, also, that they enact said relations, and these enactments gather steam and radiate consequence over time and space. This is a significant nuance because it calls on critical practice to shift from a mode of ‘exacting representations of the world from the world’ to ‘embodied apprehensions’ of everyday performance that locate novel relational possibilities by actually inhabiting them and, thereby, enabling them down the line (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012: 47).
Affect theory and ordinary affects
Such is the concern of affect theory, 13 which seeks to nourish arcs of ordinary resistance that can ‘jump’ from one scene to another, even as they morph and elude capture. Affect theory ‘calls for a critical practice … that must seek to imaginatively/generatively nudge … or sometimes smash’ moments that are deeply if fleetingly felt, like ghostly fingers pointing to futures not yet within sight or available to expression (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 21). Like this evasive promise, affect, by definition, resists definition—a feature that frustrates as much as it entices. But a range of impressions can help.
Affect is described as that ineffable ‘stuff that goes on beneath, beyond, even parallel to signification’ (O’Sullivan, 2001: 126); as ‘bodily meaning that pierces social interpretation, confounding its logic, and scrambling its expectations’ (Hemmings, 2005: 552); as ‘forces of encounter’, including ‘all the miniscule or molecular events of the unnoticed’, ‘the ordinary and its extra-’ (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 2); as ‘pre-individual forces that escape and exceed the human body … an intensity of relations that are always in excess … a transpersonal capacity taking place before thought kicks in’ (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012: 52); or as ‘the capacity of interaction that is akin to a natural force of emergence’ (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012: 46). Seigworth and Gregg’s (2010) attempt at definition is especially revealing of continuity with new materialist thinking: Affect can be understood then as a gradient of bodily capacity—a supple incrementalism of ever-modulating force-relations—that rises and falls not only along various rhythms and modalities of encounter but also through the troughs and sieves of sensation and sensibility, an incrementalism that coincides with belonging to comportments of matter of virtually any and every sort (p. 2).
Affect theory thus engages with the sociomateriality of feeling. It follows ebbs and flows of sensation and embodiment while decentering the corporeal as a stable origin of experience.
In this context, Kathleen Stewart (2007) advances a post-dualistic conception of ordinary affects—felt forces that are living and non-organic, non-human and human, at once public, widely circulated, and intimately encountered. Invoking the flatland view introduced earlier, she recasts the ordinary as contact point rather than microland. In keeping with the notion of meeting or interface, ordinary affects involve ‘a surging, a rubbing, a connection of some kind that has an impact’; they are ‘transpersonal or prepersonal’ (p. 128). Ordinary affects are what ‘give things the quality of a something to inhabit and animate. Politics starts in the animated inhabitation of things, not way downstream in the various dreamboats and horror shows that get moving’ (p. 15; original italics, bold added).
Stewart’s (2007) concern for the ontological politics of ordinary affect interrupts two persistent tendencies evident in all three modes of critical practice considered thus far: (a) to focus critique on the sediment that gathers ‘downstream’ (structures, consequences) and (b) to feature human consciousness and will as the agentic center (of hope). For Stewart, power is ‘a thing of the senses’ instead, a felt whirlpool of meaning and material that ‘lives as a capacity, or a yearning, or a festering resentment’, that manifests in ‘palpable pleasures and acid stomachs’ (p. 84). Agency, in turn, is ‘strange, twisted, caught up in things, passive, or exhausted. Not the way we like to think about it. Not usually a simple projection toward a future’ (p. 86).
Power exists, in other words, as it inhabits or is inhabited; power is effective when affective. Inhabitations of power thus demand attention even more than the residue they may send downstream. And if agency is more like a hybrid heaving—will meeting energy and flinging toward potential, derailed by shiny objects or mutating into something else—the task is neither to settle on an evaluation of the state of affairs nor to plan revolutions, but, more humbly, to sense the trajectories of possibility already evolving.
This is precisely the challenge that Stewart (2007) confronts: how to ‘slow the quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique’ (p. 4) in order to address the ordinary affective texture of neoliberalism missed by most modes of criticism. How might such a form of address proceed in writing, she wonders? It begins with alternative grammars, ‘exchanging a vocabulary of stasis, representation, reification and closure with one of intensities, capacities and forces’ (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012: 47). It requires new habits of ‘speculative and concrete attunement’, that is, dwelling in the middle of potentials and pathways, suspending judgment with perpetual vigilance and curiosity, probing how things are going without settling on how well (Stewart, 2007: 128). The aim of such writing is to open space for possibilities of being that flicker beyond words—a lively aspirational spirit that can be distilled in the perpetual question: Is that a promise or a threat blooming (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010)? Or perhaps, in a (non-conformist) re-appropriation of the advice, ‘Go with the flow’.
In this sense, criticism attuned to ordinary affects is not so much non-representational as it is more-than-representational, exceeding signification without entirely leaving it—a position outlined by Beyes and Steyaert (2012) in their provocative work on spacing organization. Stewart’s (2007) opening position can be read sympathetically, but what distinguishes her effort is its devotion to extensive experimentation with writing-enacting neoliberal relations of power and agency through (more than) re-presentations of ordinary affect. With its orientation to anthropology and cultural studies, Stewart’s work holds particular promise for critical organization scholars prone to ethnographic inquiry and/or concerned with relations of difference (e.g. gender, race). Yet few if any emerging affect studies in our field yet consider the rich potential of her writing for radical enactments of organization and management.
To open such a portal, I revisit The Rule of Excellence through a mode of critical practice motivated by Stewart’s work, one I call inhabited criticism. It reverberates with all of the afflictions of Neoliberal U observed in the two preceding tales, but these woes are (re)written-enacted as concrete inhabitations of power. The so-called structures become animated as heady anguish, and my own encounters are at once evoked and decentered. In an effort to disperse agency and squirm toward post-human reflexivity, I mimic the ways in which Stewart (2007) performs author, participant, bystander, audience, vessel, and ever-disrupted actor, caught up in and possessed by the currents ‘she’ writes-enacts. As The Rule of Excellence becomes an agentic figure and transpersonal force that travels through scholarly spaces, artifacts, and characters, I invite you to muse with me: How might inhabited criticism make a difference?
Tale 3—Going with the flow of The Rule: practicing inhabited criticism
If only the Rule of Excellence were a king we could strip of his crown, or a regime we could map, target, and overthrow. But somehow along the way, The Rule slipped off its robes and armor, slipped into our bed, and refused to leave in the morning. Now it stays on like a persistent wind that gusts in spurts and seasons. When it blows, managers inhale metrics and exhale value through our account-abilities. Who can keep up with the latest performance drill endorsed by the new Vice-Deputies of This and That? Watch us pretend to try, with backflips and cartwheels.
The Rule of Excellence is a productive force, they say. It yields things, or compels us to. Words and numbers, most of all. It produces that delicious hit, their killer impact factor, my unparalleled marketability, our bloated ego, bylines and pipelines and long lines for jobs, pressure cookers overflowing with expectations and temps to take on more tasks, more students, I mean ‘credit hours’, I said ‘clients’, with better ratios and wider bandwidth … [wheezing pause] … one institution parroting the next in clammy, panting pursuit of the exact same, totally distinctive brand.
Yes, with The Rule of Excellence by your side, you too can weather the unrelenting squeeze. Bursts of hope trail the perfect call for papers, an enviable new faculty line or revamped Center, our pick of top recruits. Word to the wise: It helps to forget about the byproducts, like anxiety, stress, and distress congealing into depression, chronic ulcers and headaches, and a virtual Olympics of scholarly cynicism. The Rule applauds those magic tricks by which we meet its measure, like representing reality from arm’s length and through god’s eye. Like nervous irony and one more glass. Like making it all appear sane.
The Rule of Excellence hurls itself onto the moment. Sometimes we believe it unstintingly; sometimes we thrash around in its grip; sometimes we brandish it against others. Briefly we get the best of it, ride its crest, and teach others how. We get tossed aside, slip under, gasp for breath; we learn. We are seduced by—sucked right up into—the void of More. More rigor, to the point of rigor mortis: the most satisfying trick of all, said the Top-Tier Journals. Oh, but to steal into their inner sanctum! As The Rule crept into ours.
The Rule of Excellence unites us in twisted camaraderie: three parts superior disdain, two parts sarcasm, a dash of excitement. It divides us in competition thrilling and debilitating, provokes tears and laughter so muzzled by professional discipline they look the same. Fantasies of celebrity thud into fears of failure. She loves and hates her work on this article, over and over again. He hasn’t read enough, done enough, finished the book. Things will look up in six months if you just bear down this one more time. That they ever clasp hands in flashes of empathy is a minor miracle.
Then come those merciful moments—or for some of us, a sweet spell longer—when we lose ourselves in the euphoric sensation of simply Not. Giving. A shit.
We feel The Rule of Excellence swirl around us, pass through us, in scenes of swelling energy, striving, exhilaration, collapse. It lives on the opaque and curt surface of closed office doors. It glides along on so much paper, literal and virtual: CVs, drafts, reviews and editorial letters, evaluation forms, procedures, meetings, reports, vocabularies … Texts and tongues of all kinds. It stirs in the familiar aesthetics of academic hallways, drifts by on the stale smell of professional neutrality and the clicking, tapping sound of scholarship allegedly happening. It is carried by dreams and panics that visit us beyond the ivory tower, lurking around our intimate fields. The Rule knows how to invite itself into our homes and families, follow us to the market and the gym, make us sweat that much more, make us hate the clock that forever cheats us of the time we need. I dare not wonder aloud: Is it only me?
The Rule of Excellence is ravenous. It knows nothing of being still, sated, accepting, enough. Of multiplicity. Like Freddy Taylor, the Rule does it one way: the best way. It is this Rule that haunts those veering off the narrow path well beaten by the Top-Tier List, or worse, venturing off the tenure track. It is this Rule that pulses through a heart reeling from the news of Her imminent death. I wince as it whispers in my ear: Excuse me, but do we have time for this?
No, we do not have time for this! Says The Rule, as it basks in my empty womb, and another, and contemplates yours: 70% of tenured faculty men with children, 44% of women. 14 Her personal choice, they say, while the tide of gender-sexual labor-life history, not to mention diversity service, engulfs her. Well, at least she follows the norm for once in this damned profession. Wait, for once? What about her ease with the ways of whiteness, her knack for academic pissing contests under that compulsory straight-girl sheen, a disability masked by fitness, a clever class dexterity—how the dizzying vectors of advantage and sorrow add up to a working life. The Rule of Excellence adores how she is made, and painstakingly remakes herself, in its partial image. The Rule cries ‘English only!’ and she shrugs with privilege.
The Rule of Excellence soothes me with the lure of achievement and status blooming, with the pleasure of another unlikely hit, which—evidently—I deserve. The very same apparatus of merit with which it will soon kick me. But here I go, dusting myself off for another round and avoiding eye contact with the poor, disfigured players who take a regular beating. Then all of us—that precious, breakable ‘we’ again—salve our wounds with merit once more as we mourn the plight of the truly Precarious, those adjunct victims of a game they were not allowed to join, or could not play … or is it would not play? Wherever the fault, better to condemn their misfortune with quiet gratitude for our lucky lot.
I mean, really, ‘Who are we to complain?’ A chant coined by The Rule itself, to keep Us indebted, to maintain Our silence in the name of sympathy, as if even these desperate circumstances that smother her chest, bother your back, and plague another’s belly do not depend on Them and their precarity. As if the output The Rule prizes the most is not this very inequality, and the neoliberal guilt that keeps Us from screaming out loud and for All. What if ‘Enough!’ were our common refrain?
The Rule of Excellence is with us in the room right now. In yours. In mine. But just as soon as we try to grip and wrestle, it surely slithers away.
Conclusion: inhabited criticism and organization studies
If you find this attempt at inhabited criticism to be flawed—too vague or specific, pretentious or unartful, unfaithful to affect theory—you are likely in good company, and I do not disagree. 15 I intend it as a starting point, an example to stimulate visceral response, given that the bulk of the article works to contextualize, motivate, and debrief this mode of criticism. I yearn for encounters that hone and multiply its practice; for most certainly, it can be improved. But before we ask how it can be done better, the more pressing question is, What does, and can, it do?
This question is neither a functionalist inquiry nor an interrogation of interests (as in, what end, or whose welfare, is served?). It is not first a matter of whether inhabited criticism makes a difference in the sense of doing something important or useful. Rather, the inquiry opens into ontological politics, wherein ‘doing something’ is also ‘making some thing’. In this sense, the query asks what difference is made, and may well be remade, through the performance of inhabited criticism—or, for that matter, through any critical practice (i.e. what ‘we’ is born of this performance, what sociomaterial worlds are ‘we’ left to live with?).
In sum, the question with which I launched the preceding effort—How might inhabited criticism make a difference?—is not so much asking if or for whom a mode of criticism accomplishes something worthwhile but, rather, what it accomplishes by cultivating which relational enactments? I begin to address this question by returning to the charge that we are already up to our necks in The Rule, pausing one last time to see whether and how inhabited criticism answers this charge differently from reigning modes of criticism.
Taking stock: what is different about inhabited criticism?
Like humanized and reciprocated criticism, inhabited criticism renders the human vulnerable, but in a strikingly different way. To begin with, it decenters human subjects and bodies, destabilizing the bounded self with intense and sustained curiosity for the multiple bodies animated by power in its ordinary habitats and, especially, for the collisions, fusions, and dissolutions among them. Inhabited criticism is not bound to (inter)subjectivity; it is ‘not about one person’s feelings becoming another’s but about bodies literally affecting one another and generating intensities: human bodies, discursive bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of water’ (Stewart, 2007: 128).
At least three entailed shifts are noteworthy here. First, ‘bodies’ are expanded beyond those presumed human. Although conceptually reassuring, a priori distinctions among bodies do not whet discernment of how they arrive on a landscape, come to feel and matter, how they accumulate in pools, surge and dissipate, where they go. Distinctions among bodies that are fixed in advance or presumed in the abstract ignore the vibrant interdependencies that continually enact their ‘obvious’ boundaries. A priori distinctions eclipse the flow of ordinary affects, as it skips and jumps from one thing to the next, bogged down in one room and lighting up another.
Second, matters of signification are not erased, but their ontological mattering is significantly reframed. As Stewart (2007) elaborates, ordinary affect works not through ‘meanings’ per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds. The question they beg is not what they might mean in an order of representations, or whether they are good or bad in an overarching scheme of things, but where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance. (p. 3)
MacLure (2013) explains, ‘the critique of representation does not deny that it does indeed happen’ (p. 559) or that representational logic affords a maneuverable world of steady meaning and meaning-makers but, rather, insists that ‘words collide and connect with things on the same ontological level, and therefore language cannot achieve the distance and externality that would allow it to represent—i.e., to stand over, stand for and stand in for—the world’ (p. 660).
Third, subjectivity does not disappear, but the transpersonal (crossing apparently discrete bodies and experiences), or prepersonal (‘prior’ to the constitution of subjectivities), flow of feeling and embodiment become the central interest. The idea is to stay within the flow in order to sense what it is allowing and blocking. As agency slips from the sole grasp of the human, inhabited criticism beckons a post-human reflexivity curious about the politics of evolving things-in-relation. Human subjectivity becomes vulnerable not so much because it is emotionally exposed (as with humanized and reciprocated criticism), but because it is disjointed and dispersed, crossbred and ‘caught up in things’ (Stewart, 2007: 86). Notice, for example, how the I/eye of humanized criticism becomes objectified and thrown toward ‘she’, not a third-person she but a sensing, knowing, and ever-interrupted self only ‘known’ in and through the flow: ‘She’ is not so much a subject position or an agent in hot pursuit of something definitive as a point of contact; instead, she gazes, imagines, senses, takes on, performs, and asserts not a flat and finished truth but some possibilities (and threats) that have come into view in the effort to become attuned to what a particular scene might offer. (p. 5)
Neither deflated nor inflated, respectively, by structural inevitability or humanist fantasies of the autonomous self, subjectivity here is relationally precarious, in the sociomaterial sense (see especially Judith Butler’s comments in Puar, 2012; see also Roberts, 2005).
These shifts radically alter the guiding ethico-political question: from the familiar ‘What can I/we do to resist?’ or ‘How are my/our hands tied?’ of vacated, humanized, and reciprocal criticism to ‘What is being done, and what (else) can be done’? Again, I hasten to stress that doing something means making some thing. That is, the italics redirect us from human agency or its immobilization toward the question of ontological politics, to which we turn next.
Taking stock: what difference does/can inhabited criticism make?
You may recall these earlier characterizations: (a) that vacated criticism is a modified realist tale that denies its implication in the object of critique in a quest to save us from the neck up, (b) that humanized criticism confesses to drowning through narrations of vulnerable (inter)subjective experience, (c) and that reciprocated criticism toggles between confessing (inter)subjective feeling and abstracting it for cognitive inspection, harboring hope that the head remains above water and, so, can still come to our rescue. From the perspective of affect theory, especially ordinary affects, we might say that the first flees the scene of power’s inhabitation in search of an epic battle. The second revisits the scene in a plea for recognition and help. And the third recreates the scene for detectives to work their magic upon it.
These critical practices ‘do’ many vital things, but they do not engage with sociomaterial inhabitations of power and resistance, nor do they practice criticism from within these ongoing inhabitations—that is, by writing-enacting rather than writing about them. Therein lies a major difference that inhabited criticism can make. It cultivates a more-than-representational approach that generates ‘embodied apprehensions’ instead of ‘exacting representations’ of work and organizing in neoliberal times (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012: 47).
To grasp why this is an important, not merely trendy, difference for organization studies, we can return to the prevalent question about ordinary resistance, condensed earlier: Can it transform, or is it doomed to consent, and how would we know the difference? As Gill and Pratt (2008) ask, ‘By what kinds of principled criteria might we differentiate between the radically different meanings of apparently similar practices?’ (p. 19). According to affect theory, there are no such criteria impending, no reasoned benchmarks to help us settle the fate of ordinary resistance: The difference between the two sides is only found at the level of lived experience … can only be sensed and felt, and it is these sensations and feelings that actually create the conditions required for the expression of experience as alienating and estranging, or else releasing and escapist. (Wood and Brown, 2011: 520)
Simply put, inhabited criticism is indispensable because, like it or not, the ordinary is the only battleground, and playground, there is. Ordinary affect is where the epic system crusades desired by vacated criticism, the self struggles exposed by humanized criticism, and the search for enlightened embodiment undertaken by reciprocated criticism are temporarily waged, won, and lost and, also, continuously deferred. By neglecting ordinary affect, we desert the possibility of the very politics for which we yearn. Or so say (some of) the new materialisms.
This is why Stewart (2007: 128) calls for ‘a speculative and concrete attunement’ that stays sensitive to ‘moving forces immanent in scenes, subjects, and encounters’ and ‘takes off with the potential trajectories in which it finds itself in the middle’. Inhabited criticism seeks to enact and thereby cultivate this commitment. It promotes thinking-feeling from the middle—new critical habits, or sense-abilities, such as suspending analytical defenses and attending to their affective textures; riding and reading the flow while dwelling in it and becoming possessed by it; knowing presently and provisionally, always staving off conclusion; and spying, without certainty or closure, tendrils that link one thing or moment to another.
Such practices of attunement made ordinary encounters in the course of this project glow with intensity. 16 See, for example, the handful of faculty sharing a meal after a talk, and the chatter turns toward painful run-ins with The Rule. The spirited trade accelerates and the drinks flow, but it can only get so lively before complaint begins to catch in our throats: ‘I don’t mean to complain’ … ‘when we have it so much better than the rest’. She is struck by the moral threat of whining that looms whenever the relatively privileged share their duress. She blurts this out without knowing why, embarrassed by the tongue-tied pause that follows. All of us, seasoned professionals, riled up yet choking on attachment to The Rule, at once our bully and badge of honor. What to do but show appreciation and leave struggle to those who really need it.
But what does our choking accomplish besides deflating a rising will until it crumples in grateful surrender? Is it not in the moments before this repetitive hitch—that corrective buzzkill called complaint—that we are starting to feel, acutely and together, The Rule’s ruthless inequalities and their differential impact on bodies? Of course thorny sensations stir in the chest and stick in the throat, but somehow they veer toward in-group gratitude instead of staying on the road to common outrage. Is this when we sever Us from Them in the name of respect? Is this how we cut and hide the ties that bind and enable our differential lives? It may be here, in the act of muffling so-called personal complaint, that we deflect how diverse faculty ‘fortunes’ are linked to the differently marked bodies among us and built on the backs of abject Others. Thereby, we routinely abdicate the possibility (responsibility?) that we might do otherwise, like wield our relative influence toward a common ‘no more’! Neoliberal guilt (guilty pleasure?) keeps pooling into a dead end, when it could be channeled toward fertile grounds of alliance. If we, the primary beneficiaries of The Rule, don’t complain, how do we suppose its banished subjects will?
Here, ethico-political awareness emerges from within inhabitations of power, rooted in flesh and things, passing instants and fading scenes. It is perceived by performing habitually missed connections between this and that. It is halting and uncertain yet moves anyway, with humility amid constraint. It is not achieved by removal from and reflection upon ‘captured’ experience; it is not self-assured, backed by procedure. Precisely for these reasons, inhabited criticism may be better equipped to grow embodied habits of resistance that can skip among scenes and sniff out their relation.
The vigilant sense-abilities of inhabited criticism thus go with the flow without compliance, curiously tending to promises and threats in bloom along the ride. Instead of denying or confessing that we are sinking under The Rule, instead of denouncing our condition and counting on cognitive relief, inhabited criticism tunes in to the lively scenes of our imminent drowning and momentary rescue. Stretching the metaphor, an ontological politics of inhabited criticism holds that as long as we are part of the sentient flow, we are not surrendered to the sea.
Crucially, all critical practice is part of the sentient flow, another lively scene to be probed through sense-abilities. Through inhabited criticism, then, vacated, humanized, and reciprocated criticism can be discerned as varied ways of inhabiting power and resistance and concocting reprieves, with different limitations attending these affective dispositions (e.g. disembodiment, self-reflexivity). This is precisely what I have endeavored to say and show here: not that inhabited criticism is the next wave of the future but, rather, that it explores the inhabitations (including a refusal to dwell, or leaving the scene) required by diverse modes of critical practice while also cultivating—through doing—new relational enactments that appear, for the moment anyway, to be a promise in bloom. 17
In sum, inhabited criticism can nurture resistance in organization studies by offering an alternative posture and pathway that grows our critical sense-abilities, and by helping us acknowledge and grapple with the affective demands and limitations of all critical practices. It stands to illuminate the tendrils that bind ‘in here’ and ‘out there’. By this, I mean both the felt ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ of selves, which new materialisms reveal as one, and the relation of ‘home’ and ‘field’, or how the flows of illness and flashes of healing with which we are most intimate are continuous with those among seemingly removed bodies and scenes of labor.
‘Practices that stage the jump from ideal to matter and back again can fuse a dream world to the world of ordinary things’, Stewart (2007: 56) muses. The modest suggestion of this article is that inhabited criticism may be one such performance which can foster new habits of organizational recalcitrance steeped in relational attunement. As with any critical practice emanating from affect theory, the performance offered in this article and those that moved its writing do not arise in order to be deciphered or decoded or delineated but, rather, must be nurtured (often smuggled in or, at other times, through the direct application of pressure) into lived practices of the everyday as perpetually finer-grained postures for collective inhabitation. (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 21)
The collective for whom I ache is a ‘we’ that embraces its fragility by sensing more fully a defining condition of Neoliberal U/you: namely, deep immersion in a worlding of vigorous (and, sometimes, invigorating) inequality that radiates out from The Rule of Excellence. This ‘we’ bears a common possession but abandons the quest for redemption through exorcism. ‘We’ are bound not by an unwavering mass march toward shared oppositional interests, but by tuning in to and amplifying our diverse and nonetheless mutual entanglements with the people and things around, and beyond, us. ‘We’ need each other to carry on like this, in every sense of the phrase. All the more so to spot and look after hints and gestures at other worlds to be made—at home, in the field, and of their relation.