Abstract
Those reading this text without a liking of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) A Thousand Plateaus will find few rocks to cling to in the author’s analysis of the negotiated meanings and contested values exposed in an attempt at a collaborative project between business and artists. Applying their framework to a meeting between two organizational worlds, this text aims to explore and recognize the practical difficulties of engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue between business and the arts, manifesting not only in a resistance to engagement that disrupts business-as-usual but also art-as-usual. These difficulties are as embedded in language and repeated interactions as they are in the funding relationships and power discrepancies that continuously haunt the project that forms the empirical focus of the book.
Much of the book examines conflicting notions of knowledge and the location of expertise in stratified organizational fields (‘art’ and ‘business’). Outlining the relationships and negotiations between organizations’ managers, management consultants and artists in realizing a collaborative project, continual struggles to engage in dialogue with ‘the Other’ are the focus of the text. Drawing from Actor-Network-Theory, this is characterized as an ongoing struggle of translation not only of the objectives of the project, but also the values (and the status of those values) inhabiting the everyday practice of managers and artists. In this, the author contends that participants are not only challenged to compromise on outputs, but also on the role they inhabit as a part of their community.
In chapter 2, for example, the uncertainty over whether consultants are part of the project as learners or as mediators between organization and artists informs whether these participants are paying or paid to contribute their expertise. The artists, too, struggle to establish their relationship with an organization they are neither permitted to disturb nor contracted to work for. This practical difficulty is analysed as symptomatic of trying to bridge a perceived gulf between the values of the art world and the commercial one. Such symptoms are not new, but reiterate a history of periodic transformations in the way in which the art world has engaged with business activity, with this narrative highlighting the ongoing tension between the need of artists to secure an independent livelihood and the need to protect the potential of art as social critique. In all participants, the reader can sense a fear of compromising their valued status as a given subject through association in activity where the outcomes and values are highly ambiguous.
Characterized as an example of stratification, these subjects of different worlds primarily produce disengagement through conflict over signifiers. Attempts to progress through interactions using the language and norms of one organizational domain immediately produces conflict in another. To keep the project going requires the marked-out territory of a demilitarized zone; the company keeps artists at a distance through constituting the artist as independent expert, while the artists respond with characterizations of the organization as a fortress of capitalist ideology to be attacked or infiltrated. Such symbols become represented in the very spaces where meetings are held, and the language which participants use to communicate. This combative opposition supports a Deleuzian conception of the territorial nature of organizational arrangements, whereby territorialization and deterritorialization occur simultaneously, but the book does little to highlight this theoretical area. The simultaneous production of difference by participants engaged in attempts to identify spaces of commonality (such as the virtual space of the ‘model’ business that forms the focus of much of the initial project) could be read as a challenge to organization. Rather, the concern of the book is the processual production of disengagement through performances that attempt to produce relationships of control (business) or subversion (artists), supporting the existing strata and contradicting possibilities of dialogue despite stated commitments to doing so.
The focus on disengagement highlights a question regarding contemporary capitalist forms of organizing and the rejection of value pluralism. Despite the desire to produce these new relationships while also maintaining existing segments and develop a wholly novel source of creation with the potential to lead to transformed values or new forms of recognition, such relationships require distasteful or monstrous approaches. By maintaining the existing stratified conceptions of value (as capitalist-vale or aesthetic-value), the legitimacy of the other’s knowledge is confined to their own sphere and neither can provide meaningful and engaged critique as they are not recognized as qualified subjects to do so.
The examples of ‘happy amateurs’ and ‘dancing witches’ who escape such stratifying forces emphasize either a self-managed ambiguity in terms of making identity commitments or an organizational ambiguity which allows for movement between roles. These promising areas for dialogue may circumvent or outwit stratification but reliance on such monstrous actors indicates a critique of the proposition that artists can engage in dialogue with business. Instead, it appears that only in the suspension of values associated with individual and collective stratified organizing can dialogue occur. However, it is interesting to note that both amateurs and witches appear to be in insecure and unstable roles. Is a ‘happy amateur’ one who compromises on current success in their field in the hope of future transformation? Is a ‘dancing witch’ a necessary and yet disposable scapegoat by which such multidisciplinary projects may succeed yet in inhabiting this space of dialogue also inhabits a position which is valued by neither organizational domain?
These and other questions are left tantalizingly open by the book, particularly with regard to the extent to which contradictory logics of value embedded in organizational practices can be reconciled. A Deleuzian interest in stratification or the ‘monsterous’ in organization is not necessary to appreciate this question, given that a range of research highlights how the entrepreneur, migrant worker, parent or any contemporary organizational inhabitant experiences individual demands to reconcile contradictory logics, whether experienced through discourse or material agency. What is notable about the case featured in this text is the oppositional force of the art world’s value of unique authenticity versus the market-oriented efficiency logic of the capitalist corporation. The policing of the art logic is haunted by the spectre of the prostitute (p. 135), yet similar compromise forms do not seem to equally haunt the corporation, despite fears of unmasking or piercing of the shield of success and dynamism (pp. 101–105). This is evident to such an extent that organizational participants deny or forget their involvement with the project; to explore dialogue must we concentrate more fully on the organizational desire to hide and forget compromise or collaboration which cannot be translated into market value?