Videographic profanations: A companion to the videography “Pride: Alternative Entrepreneurship Enjoyed”

Abstract

This article is a companion to “Pride: Alternative Entrepreneurship Enjoyed,” a videography about the company Prezi’s engagement in the Budapest Pride parade. The aim is to advance video ethnographic methods within Organization and Management Studies (OMS) based on Agamben’s profanatory philosophical method, which puts into focus abstract “sacred” concepts and returns them to the sphere of the profane—of the everyday. A profanatory approach of use for OMS accounts for organizations, brands, and management in a way that do not reproduce their “sacredness”—entrepreneurial myths and management clichés. Instead, by opening them up to critical exposure, they can be moved from a “religious canon” of communication strategies, press releases, and policy documents, to everyday profane work. Through a methodological discussion of the videography, we show three ways in which profanation re-positions the myth of alternative entrepreneurship: by engaging in the logic of the sacred, by playing with notions of inside and outside, and by using musical soundtrack as an expressive tool. We suggest that these methodological strategies advance the analytical possibilities within video ethnography, also useful for other organizational phenomena, especially when economic interests are combined with ambitions of social change and ideals of self-realization.

This article is a companion to “Pride: Alternative Entrepreneurship Enjoyed,” our videography focusing on how the company Prezi engages in the Budapest Pride parade. The aim of this paper is to advance video ethnographic methods within Organization and Management Studies (OMS) based on Agamben’s profanatory approach (Agamben, 2007), with focus on how profanation brings forth another form of critical analysis (Prozorov, 2014; Śliwa et al., 2013). By providing both a videography and an article, we complement the burgeoning genre of combined videography-articles within the field (see Endrissat et al., 2019; Hietanen and Rokka, 2018; van Laer et al., 2018) and engage with wider methodological discussions about video ethnography, to move beyond both realist and interpretivist approaches (see e.g. Hietanen, 2012; Hietanen and Andehn, 2018; Hietanen and Rokka, 2018). Scholarly “[v]ideography does not begin with the recording, nor does it end with it,” but future fieldwork and analyses should be advanced in academic discussions (Knoblauch et al., 2014: 24). Through an exposé of our methodological choices during the film-making, we thus extend the videography to its theoretical implications. We recommend that you view it before reading this companion piece, but a videography can also be viewed independently.

Agamben’s (2007) profanatory philosophical method puts into focus abstract “sacred” concepts and returns them to the sphere of the profane—of the everyday (Śliwa et al., 2013). A profanatory approach of use for OMS accounts for organizations, brands, and management in a way that do not reproduce their “sacredness”—entrepreneurial myths and management clichés. Instead, by opening them up to critical exposure, they can be moved from a “religious canon” consisting of communication strategies, press releases, and policy documents, to everyday “profane” work (Śliwa et al., 2013). Such re-positioning is anti-reductionist, based on the assumption that there is not one core logic or ideology that explains all variations in a studied case. Neither does a profanatory approach add an analytical superstructure, nor a hidden layer of dubious intentions behind the discursive surface. As Prozorov (2014: 775) suggests, a profanation “does not seek to deactivate the force of a practice by making it less serious but, on the contrary, wrest this force away, amplify it and thereby ensure that it is not in vain.” As a form of critical analysis, profanation stays with the logic of the sacred and uses it to re-position our attention to narratives and characters that are not accommodated in the mythology that is subject to the profanation. Consequently, a profanatory videographic approach generates narratives rather than outrightly criticizing or deconstructing them. This specific quality, we argue, can strengthen the “expressive” potential of the film medium (Hietanen et al., 2014).

In focus of the videography is Prezi, a technology company founded in Budapest in 2009, with around 300 employees when the current video ethnographic study was conducted. Their largest office where most software developers work is based in Budapest, with additional offices in San Francisco and Riga. Prezi’s main offer has since the start been geared toward problems with democracy in Hungary, with ideas about free speech built into their digital presentation tool. Strategically creating their own NGO spin-offs, Prezi has changed the organizational landscape for “doing good” in Hungary, which underpins their “alternative entrepreneurship” (Skoglund and Berglund 2018a; Skoglund et al., 2020). Over time, Prezi has engaged in an abundance of more or less disruptive social interventions, such as being the first official LGBTQ+ supportive company participating in the Pride parade in 2009. Less disruptive, but still contentious considering the Hungarian context, is their refurbishing of buildings every year in a Roma neighborhood (Skoglund and Berglund, 2018b). Prezi also offers programming courses for young women to stimulate gender equality in tech, and one of the company’s continuously updated core values is “We care,” which means that they support their “local communities by organizing events and resources that help them learn and succeed” (Our values at work, 2021). Notably, with a growth of both the organization and its ambitions to facilitate social change, management has become increasingly professionalized within Prezi, which has had an effect on their original transformative agenda.

Alternative entrepreneurship is used in the videography to indicate that Prezi’s deployment of disruptive organizational means to reach more-than-economic ends has a specific edge (compare Dey and Mason, 2018; Dodd, 2014), including struggles of ethical self-realization among employees at different levels (Dey and Steyaert, 2016; Endrissat et al., 2017), especially considering the Hungarian context (Skoglund et al., 2020). Critical approaches to similar cases of “doing good” exist within entrepreneurship studies and has spurred a debate about undecidability and nuance (see e.g. Dey, 2007), calling for more attentiveness to the combination of positive and negative effects (Dempsey and Sanders, 2010; Vasi, 2009), for example in the current trend of being “woke” (Opatrny-Yazell et al., 2021). The debate about “woke” is also represented within OMS (Rhodes, 2022) where some applaud corporate engagement in social and political issues and welcome the fact that “being ‘woke’ has become ‘cool’” (Middleton and Turnbull, 2021: 574). Others warn that profit-generating extension outward is essentially a “corporate extraction of value from the struggles for recognition led by historically oppressed populations” (Kanai and Gill, 2020: 11, italics removed) that risks undermining civil society (see further Rhodes and Fleming, 2020). Although we share these concerns there is a need to take critical analyses beyond a dichotomization of good and bad, pro-capitalism and anti-capitalism, inside and outside, that erases the excess emerging from the tension between these polarities and results in a reductionist approach (Rehn and O’Doherty, 2007). Instead, we wish to hold on to nuance, and thereby explore the multiple implications of Prezi’s transformative agenda in Hungary. It is difficult to criticize alternative entrepreneurship for being strategically “woke” in Hungary where LGBTQ+ people are facing discrimination and marginalization (Rédai, 2012), where the Pride parade has been subjected to repeated violent attacks (Renkin, 2015), where the heterosexual norm has been written into the constitution (Korkut, 2012: 176), and where fundamental democratic values are under urgent threat (Wilkin, 2016). Hence, there are reasons for being methodologically vigilant, as dilemmas particularly emerge in the Hungarian context when companies extend their operations to the social and political sphere.

A profanatory approach does not lend itself to predetermined dichotomization, and does not attempt to disclose the true motives behind social interventions. In contrast, it aims to bypass some of the elevated language of social entrepreneurship (Dey and Steyaert, 2012), by directing focus “beyond the utilitarian imaginary” (Dean, 2017: 201), through an active re-positioning of our attention, sensitive to the mundane messiness of organizational disruption and social transformations (Clarke and Holt, 2010). Organizational social engagement adhering to a capitalist logic do “not merely reflect values,” Kanai and Gill (2020: 21, original emphasis) write, but produce “a particular imaginary through the disarticulation and rearticulation of social struggle and emancipatory utopias.” With a video ethnographic approach (see e.g. Hietanen, 2012; Pink, 2006), we explore this imaginary with our profanatory videography attentive to how people in various positions and organizational contexts handle countervailing processes differently during the Budapest Pride parade.

We begin with a thorough account of Agamben’s concept of profanation, followed by a section on how a profanatory analytical approach can be coupled to video ethnographic methodology. This is followed by an account of both methodological considerations and our fieldwork during the Pride parade of 2015 and 2017. Pointing to episodes in the videography, we then “profane” Prezi’s alternative entrepreneurship, with focus on the idea of self-realization, to uncover the reliance on a play between an organizational inside and outside. We also introduce the use of music as a fecund profanatory videographic tool, which contributes to the final conclusions about “expressive” videographic profanations.

Agamben’s concept of profanation

Agamben (2007) defines profanation as the opposite of sacrifice. To sacrifice is to give something to divine beings—a gift that now no longer can be consumed by humans. But if the gift is polluted by human touch, it is brought back into profane existence, “the sphere of human law” (Agamben, 2007: 73). Taking something from divine beings would in most religions be considered a blasphemous crime, but used as a philosophical method, to profane means to neutralize language and disarm it of its objectifying power. The method of profanation also has a liberating potential as it “returns to common use the spaces that power had seized” (Agamben, 2007: 77). In short and more concretely, to profane a practice or concept is to move that practice or concept to a sphere where it does not usually belong. Through such re-positioning, the practice or concept loses the power with which it was imbued in its former context. A profanation is therefore a method that provokingly raises questions about the foundations for established practices and concepts without reinserting a new mythology in their place.

Agamben (2007: 39–40) refers to profanation as a kind of “serious parody.” This notion is different from what we typically think of as parody—a comically distorted repetition of a concept or practice (Pullen and Rhodes, 2013). Agamben traces the etymological roots of “parody” to Ancient Greek, referring to the separation of speech and melody. Originally, the melody followed the rhythm of speech in Greek music, but once speech was shifted to a place beside the song (para tēn ōidēn), the resulting dissonance between voice and melody opened for excessive experimentation, generative of new forms of prose and more complex musical compositions. In a similar way, serious parody, or profanation, moves a set of practices or concepts beside the sphere where they previously were given a special or sacred meaning. Prozorov (2014) suggests that although parody has a subversive potential in an oppressive normative or political context, parodies often remain within the sphere of the humorous without creating a dissonant profanatory shift (see further Agamben, 2007: 76f; Redmalm, 2014). In contrast, a profanation is not necessarily humorous, but similar to parody, it re-positions a concept or a phenomenon by moving these to a new context which disarms them of their conventionally attributed power or impact.

Profanation can also be contrasted against a strategy of “demystification” relying on critical analyses (Śliwa et al., 2013). Agamben (2007: 41) states “that life can be presented in literature only in terms of a mystery.” Incapable of capturing the multifaceted nature of lived life, literature can only observe life from the side with a sort of parodic simplification that is illuminating exactly because it accepts life’s inherent unnarratability. While demystification can be a powerful tactic in order to disclose corrupt forms of power and oppressive structures, Śliwa et al. (2013) argue that it is less apt when challenging the notion of power as such. For the field of leadership studies, they suggest that even a critical study of corrupt leadership tend to rely on an idea of a fair leader that may one day take the place of the “false” sacralized leader. A profanation of the notion of leadership, in contrast, aims to move the term beyond established presuppositions around leadership, staying with the “mystery” of leadership mythology, thus “unravelling and undermining the undesired effects of the unequal hierarchical power relations that leadership produces through its sacralizations” (Śliwa et al., 2013: 876). Śliwa et al.’s (2013) re-positioning aims to leave us vigilant, not of a specific leader, nor a certain category of leaders, but leadership as such.

Agamben’s philosophical oeuvre could be seen as a series of profanations through which he addresses theological assumptions connected to concepts central to a western modern worldview and returns these concepts to “proper use.” A key example is the notion of the citizen that Agamben (1998) argues can only be fully understood through the “side characters” excluded from citizenship: the outlaw, the werewolf, the camp detainee, the homo sacer. The idea of citizenship relies on “an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside” (Agamben, 1998: 18). Similarly, Agamben has desacralized the rule of law in relation to its suspension in the state of exception (Agamben, 2005), the idea of humanity in relation to an excluded animality (Agamben, 2004), and subjectivity in relation to desubjectification (Agamben, 1999b). These, and other distinctions, tend to take the shape of a Möbius strip, a geometrical figure in which the outside is turned into an inside and back again in a loop. A profanation directs analytical attention toward the looping mechanism that makes a concept operative, thereby putting the relationship between a conceptual inside and outside at play. Entering the loop like a bug in the machinery, profanation renders the machinery “inoperative,” at least momentarily (see Agamben, 2007: 86; 2011: 285). The analysis does not empty concepts of their meaning, but re-positions them by inserting them anew into a social, historical, and political context.

One of Agamben’s (2011) projects is to profane the notion of the godlike invisible hand of the market by contrasting it to the Ancient Greek concept of oikonomia, a purely profane administrative matter managed by mortals, which served the household or the wider society (Agamben, 2011: 1f; see further Beltramini, 2020; Deslandes, 2020). What used to be a mere administrative political tool has become an end in itself, safeguarded by a sacred status rooted in medieval theology and still maintained in secular liberal societies. A “machine” has been engineered that prioritizes administrative economic operations over existential political questions—the “outside” of the market that needs to be justified in relation to an inside of calculations and profit maximizations. As a consequence, it has become practically impossible to comprehend the “free use” or “common use” of concepts beyond a capitalist teleology (Agamben, 2011: 276). When Agamben writes the history of economic liberalism as a juxtaposition of economy and politics, it is itself a simplification, but as such it can be understood as a “serious parody”—a way to retell the history of the free, secular, liberal society in theological terms to force the “invisible hand” to materialize.

Mobilized for OMS, Śliwa et al. (2013) suggest that a profanatory approach should focus on teasing out the inner logic of organizational myths to identify how these myths affect organizations and their members. Rather than dismissing myths as inherently paradoxical social constructions by comparing them to a claimed objective reality (see further Alvesson and Spicer, 2012), a profanatory approach sheds light on the managerial ambivalence emerging when the “excess of power” spill out into “worldly conditions” (Deslandes, 2020: 131). Analogous to how Śliwa et al. (2013) profane leadership, thus “unravelling and undermining the undesired effects of the unequal hierarchical power relations that leadership produces through its sacralizations” (Śliwa et al., 2013: 876), we seek to profane the concept of alternative entrepreneurship by going beyond the rhetoric of “making a difference” (Feldner and Fyke, 2016) in response to crises and grand challenges (Dey, 2014). Alternative entrepreneurial ventures can be seen as “paradigmatic” examples (Agamben, 2009: 17) of the Möbius relationship between monetary and existential values. Thus, a play with the norms and hierarchies of alternative entrepreneurship enables an investigation into its mythology and the dilemmas that emerge from it. We will now discuss how video ethnographic method can be used in such a research approach.

Profanation, expressive videography, and organizational excess

Few have engaged with Agambenite analyses within entrepreneurship and organization studies (see e.g. Banerjee, 2008; Beltramini, 2020; Deslandes, 2020; Jagannathan and Rajnish, 2015; Sørensen et al., 2012), and has left his approach to the moving picture absent within the field (see e.g. Agamben, 1993b, 2007). OMS has overall stayed comfortably with the polarization of audio-visual epistemology, either treating ethnographic film as “evidence,” reflecting reality (Gylfe et al., 2016; Slutskaya et al., 2018), or as “construction,” offering an interpretation of the world (Toraldo et al., 2018; see Hassard et al., 2018 for further discussion). A profanatory perspective follows a third way, drawing attention to the problematic over-reliance on the film medium as either mirroring or interpreting a reality “out there” (Hietanen and Rokka, 2018).

Hietanen et al. (2014) point out that not only realist videographies but also constructionist and reflexive video ethnographic studies in the anthropological tradition rely on an idea of a reality that can be more or less accurately represented in a film through the claim of “authenticity.” Accordingly, Hassard et al. (2018: 1409) suggest that constructionist videographies can generate representations “via systems of elucidation and justification” (Hassard et al., 2018: 1409). Schembri and Boyle, 2013: 1251) clarify such a position, suggesting that if a filmmaker only is “reflexive enough,” the videography can give a more or less accurate representation of the investigated context in the form of a “visual text” (see further Hietanen et al., 2014). Gylfe et al.’s (2016) approach can be placed in the interpretative tradition but nevertheless seeks to use videographic material as “longitudinal evidence” (p. 144) for “powerful explanations” (p. 145) that they generate “in a methodologically rigorous way” (p. 137).

To counter this position, Hietanen and colleagues (Hietanen, 2012; Hietanen et al., 2014; Hietanen and Andehn, 2018; Hietanen and Rokka, 2018), have used Deleuze to argue that video ethnography and videographic composition are most fruitful when it puts aside questions of objectivity and authenticity, and becomes “epistemologically emancipatory rather than reductive” (Hietanen et al., 2014: 2020). Hietanen (2012: 5) regards videography as a “methodology of the production of an expression via moving image.” If this expressive potential is brought to the fore in video ethnographic research it can enable “emergent theorizing” (Rokka and Hietanen, 2018: 115)—a way to approach theorizing as an anti-reductionist “practical craft” (O’Doherty, 2007: 842). Thus, in contrast to mirroring reality, a videography can work as a crystal through which light is defracted, forcing us to see a seemingly coherent social reality as a collection of partly incongruent perspectives, provoking the viewer into reflection (Hietanen and Rokka, 2018; see further Hietanen, 2012; Pink, 2006). An expressive approach to video ethnography promotes honesty over objectivity and authenticity—an “ethical, immersive and embodied undertaking” that recognizes “the impossibility of delivering reality” (Rokka and Hietanen, 2018: 166).

This view of video ethnography aligns with OMS scholars who call for different and patient ways of writing, animated by frictions between academic and non-academic genres (Gilmore et al., 2019; Pullen et al., 2020; Rhodes, 2015), artistic “playful” methods (Linstead, 2018), creative modes of presentation and even fiction (Śliwa et al., 2013). An audio-visual turn in academic writing can guide thinking through “invention and trial, risk and experiment” (O’Doherty, 2007: 849), challenge the way OMS scholars are “normalised into particular writing practices” (Gilmore et al., 2019: 4) and, as Rhodes (2015: 291) puts it, open up room “for extravagance, mystery, the fantastical, beauty and intoxication.” Video ethnography’s profanatory challenge against the sacredness of theoretical language, disciplinary boundaries, and academic titles (Śliwa et al., 2013: 875) is therefore a method well-suited for allowing organizational excess to emerge—accelerated hyperactivity and aimless dawdle, waste and invaluability, decadence and “bling” (Rehn and O’Doherty, 2007: 103). Rehn and O’Doherty (2007: 105) point out that “organization is not the other of excess, but rather better thought as synonymous with the very production and exacerbation of excess.” The moving image with its independency from the written narrative is an invaluable tool when exploring the excesses of organization.

A videography can aesthetically craft nuanced accounts out of partially countervailing narratives and generate a crystal effect (Hietanen and Rokka, 2018: 322f) accentuating and preserving the “mystery” (Agamben, 2007: 41) and “empirical heterogeneity” (Rehn and O’Doherty, 2007). Such nuance can be secured videographically by changing the pace, rearranging narrative structures, and putting characters’ monologs in dialog with each other. While videographic profanation shares with expressive videography an emphasis on movement and emergence, this approach additionally affirms a narrative stroke through its profane use of established stories and concepts. We suggest that videographic profanations share a certain sentiment with nouvelle vague cinema’s parodying play with iconoclastic stereotypes and Western cultural tropes (Neupert, 2007). Jean-Luc Godard’s self-conscious aspiring gangsters in films such as Band of Outsiders and Breathless have inspired the depictions of the self-reflexive socially conscious entrepreneurs of our videography. Godard’s characters want to “do evil” and engage in a performance of the gangster myth to the point of pastiche—failing miserably—thus profaning the cinematic gangster myth (Neupert, 2007: 215). They can be seen as inverted mirror images of two central persons in the videography, CEO Peter Arvai and graphic designer Igor Lacerdino, who want to “do good” and embody the tech company visionary with a conscience. Arvai’s frustration over the situation of LGBTQ+ people in Hungary is the excess that spurs organizational change, leading to a new frustration in Lacerdino’s account. The second account does not completely contradict the first; instead, Lacerdino’s narrative becomes the excess that accentuates the impossibility of the alternative entrepreneurial ideal. Our focus on these specific persons aimed to develop their characters persuasively throughout the plot (Jarzabkowski et al., 2014) to create a “crystal effect” when the ideals expressed in their respective accounts both align and clash with each other.

Another advantage of the expressive moving image is that it can capture “affect, embodiment and polyvocality” (Hassard et al., 2018: 1404; see also Toraldo et al., 2018; Miko-Schefzig et al., 2022) by “putting being and feeling at the centre stage” (Rhodes, 2015: 298). Because language as such is tainted by a sacred form of economic teleology (Ten Bos, 2005) a possible profanatory strategy is to rely on the non-semantic gesture, “humankind’s very capacity for language” (Agamben, 1999a: 78), a form of life without external ends. When power-laden linguistic categories are put aside in favor of gestures, the inclusive exclusion is brought to a halt, in a “coming community,” a society “without presuppositions and without subjects” (Agamben, 1993a: 70). Agamben (1993b: 139) has discussed the role of the moving picture in such re-positionings, expanding on a Deleuzian conception of “image,” and argues that cinema makes possible “the freeing of the gesture in the image.” It is this flow of gestures, refusing static categorization and polarization, that is the profaning human “touch” (Agamben, 2007: 74) that enables narratives beyond a mythical and utilitarian teleology.

One way of conveying this gestural dimension is through expressive “time-images” (Hietanen and Rokka, 2018: 328) that breaks up the comfortable pace of the narrative—here exemplified by the amiable yet tentative interaction at Prezi’s diversity workshop, informal encounters in the office, the waving and dancing during the parade, and the contrasting violent imagery in RTL’s (Radio-Télé-Luxembourg) archival footage from previous years’ parades. Attention to detail and non-verbal aspects is not an attempt to give a more objective representation of the parade, but to seek truth through “unfathomable” images (Hietanen et al., 2014: 2021) and accentuate the sensorial excess of Prezi’s activities and the Pride parade, itself a playfully subversive and profanatory practice (cf. Prozorov, 2014; Shepard, 2009). In doing so we regard the collection of this multimodal material as “an aesthetic practice in itself” (Endrissat et al., 2019: 316) used to build “a possible world that can set our thoughts into new motion” (Hietanen et al., 2014: 2021). To profane is to engage in the gestures of rituals without embracing their surrounding sacred shimmer (Agamben, 2007: 75f; Śliwa et al., 2013: 867). A scholarly attempt to turn the myth into an abstract generalization would risk reproducing the sacralized figures in the story—the founder, the entrepreneur, the activist. Accordingly, the profanatory retelling of the myth is itself the method, the analysis and the conclusion. We will now go into further detail about the practical challenges of composing our profanatory videography.

Fieldwork and script writing

The current videography is the third part of a trilogy of videographies about Prezi’s alternative entrepreneurship, made between 2015 and 2018. The first two focused on Prezi’s yearly renovation project in a Roma neighborhood: Persuasion: Alternative Entrepreneurship Executed (Skoglund and Berglund, 2018b) and Prejudice: Alternative Entrepreneurship Institutionalized (Skoglund et al., 2020). Whilst these videographies explored how alternative entrepreneurship went from being disruptive, to become more professionalized and institutionalized, our third videography, Pride: Alternative Entrepreneurship Enjoyed, focuses on another type of disruptive intervention, yet increasingly institutionalized. The making of the present videography began in 2015, when we participated in the Budapest Pride parade to shadow Prezi employees, the general activists in the parade as well as the counterdemonstrators (moving in parallel to the cordoned-off parade). Based on the insights and contacts acquired then, we returned a week before the parade in 2017, together with our film editor, Helena Fredriksson. We conducted 15 video recorded semi-structured in-depth interviews at the Prezi office, lasting between 30 minutes and 1 hour. We additionally recorded unstructured conversations and gatherings, as well as an LGBTQ+ workshop, and interactions before, during and after the parade. Employing professional camerapersons and sound technicians, we directed the video recordings, whilst they sometimes made suggestions about locations and camera positions. Hungarian legal advice and guidelines from a Swedish regional research ethics committee’s review of our research design were followed regarding release forms and research consent.

The recordings encompassed over 26 hours, in addition to the recordings in 2015 and Hungarian RTL’s archival material. Inductive thematization through in-vivo coding was used to create blocks of narratives that could be combined, compared, and contrasted with each other to generate a chronological process narrative (Jarzabkowski et al., 2014; see also Miko-Schefzig et al., 2022, on editing as a visual research method). This resulted in a first script of 14 categories and around 25,000 words, which were condensed by erasing repetitions and editing interview excerpts. The final script was around 7,500 words, ordered into seven categories used as headlines in the videography. In line with a non-disclosure agreement allowing representatives at Prezi to comment on the videography, minor changes were made. These revisions did not alter the main narrative of the videography. One of the excluded sequences showed Arvai discussing talking points with the communications lead before an interview with RTL [44:42]. The sequence could have given an insight into their work with rhetoric; at the same time, it could also fallaciously have implied that Prezi’s alternative entrepreneurship is mere rhetoric.

In the previous section we discussed how honesty can be a guiding criterion in video ethnographic work, in contrast to both objectivity and authenticity (Rokka and Hietanen, 2018). The issue of honesty is especially salient in studies of marginalized groups that raise questions concerning ethnography’s heritage and the postcolonial problem of representation (see Spivak, 1999: 6; Mbembe, 2001: 8f). Descriptive videographies may attempt to even out the power inequality between the filmmaker and those filmed through collaborative videography (Chatzidakis and Maclaran, 2018; Slutskaya et al., 2018) or videographic co-production with informants (Varkarolis and King, 2017). These strategies nevertheless risk leading to a situation where the videographer speaks for the participants, who in turn become tokens justifying the project. In contrast, profanatory videography recognizes that “it is precisely expressive power that one wields” (Hietanen et al., 2014: 2020), instead of claiming to have found one unilateral, sacralized narrative “out there,” which excludes other understandings of the world. To be honest about our own power as videographers, a power generative of narratives, we positioned ourselves in the videography as two ethnographic “characters,” observable in the messiness of the fieldwork. In this way we also avoided to rely on an anonymous authorial voice creating the illusion of a “realist tale” (Jarzabkowski et al., 2014: 283). Videographic profanation does not necessarily oppose descriptive ethnographic work, which still has a role to play even in contested social contexts (Spivak, 1999: 191; Mbembe, 2001: 7f). However, an exclusively descriptive video ethnographic method with no room for experimentation, excess and “mystery” reproduces the sacralized idea of a neutral, objective and morally superior videographer who channels reality.

The problem of representation was made acute in the article “We are not your case study” by the Budapest-based queer-feminist activist group the Gender Ideologists (2017) published only a month before our fieldwork. The group underlined the importance of movements being described from within those movements, to secure an in-depth understanding of the complexities of the movements’ local environments. There is indeed a tendency among scholars to stereotype the LGBTQ+ movement in Eastern Europe and problematically polarizing an inherently homophobic East against an allegedly tolerant West (Renkin, 2016). The Gender Ideologists’ protest also aligns with a wider critique against social movement research for reducing struggles for equality and basic human rights to psychological processes, group dynamics or social structures, which ultimately risks reducing social movements to “blind social mobs” (Hamed Hosseini, 2010: 343; see also Benford, 1997). A profanatory approach is especially fruitful here in its refusal to reduce life to a symptom of underlying social structures or dynamics, or to provide singular explanations that erase the excess emerging from contentious social processes. Our videography actively turns the focus away from the activists—the “usual suspects” in social movement research—to the commercialization of Pride in the making, widely criticized by activists (see e.g. Browne, 2007). We accentuate the problem of visibility, raised by a Pride spokesperson during the videography, by constructing time-images from the parade, for example when contrasting the do-it-yourself vibe of the Pride organization’s truck with the company sponsored metallic truck equipped with a gigantic video screen showing a reel of logotypes throughout the parade. However, we simultaneously avoid reducing Prezi’s participation in the Pride parade to a mere market strategy, and allow for partly countervailing narratives to emerge, discussed in the next section.

Three features of videographic profanations

Three features were central to our method of videographic profanation, which needs further clarification. First, profanations favor the literal before the mythological, following the logic of the sacred to its ultimate end. Second, profanations engage with Möbius strip concepts and bereave them of their sacred shimmer by putting the relationship between a categorical inside and outside into play. Third, expressive videographic elements, or non-semantic gestures with Agamben (1999a), can work as a “human touch” highlighting the profane in the context of the sacred.

Following the logic of the sacred

The videography is polyvocal (Hassard et al., 2018)—we give voice to central figures at Prezi, as well as employees and other persons engaged in different ways in the Budapest Pride parade—but we focus especially on two persons: CEO Peter Arvai, one of Prezi’s founders, and Igor Lacerdino, a newly employed graphic designer. At first glance, such a person-oriented film goes against “expressive” videographic methodology (Hietanen and Rokka, 2018) to work persuasively with ethnographic narratives (Jarzabkowski et al., 2014). However, from a profanatory perspective, if we want to return the alternative entrepreneur from the mythic sphere of the sacred to the mundane and profane, we need to focus on the myth itself. This profanatory strategy of re-positioning is a way of drawing on and accentuating organizational excess by “pushing its logic to an extremity of possibility to illuminate a more complex modus vivendi of organization” (O’Doherty, 2007: 856).

In interviews with the three founders of the company, Peter Arvai, Péter Halácsy, and Ádám Somlai-Fischer, they explain their shared ambition to build a company that would have a positive impact on society. According to Halácsy, Prezi’s main product, a digital communication tool that uses a zooming interface and allows you to share presentations, was designed to enable communication and a means of “changing society by changing how people interact with each other, and how people communicate ideas” [1′52″]. But the employees have also been increasingly encouraged to engage in their own causes, foremost by using the infrastructure of the company or Prezi’s non-profit NGO spin-offs. Employees voluntarily choose to take part in initiatives they find meaningful and urgent by juggling their work/life balance, with unclear distinctions between the personal and the professional. This testifies to how ambitions of social change often are combined with a goal of self-realization (Dey, 2014). The videography retells such a success story—that of Arvai’s self-realization, from being an insecure start-up entrepreneur, unsure of whether he should tell his founding partners about his boyfriend, to a successful businessman and an openly gay public person and spokesperson for diversity. Yet, the imperative of alternative entrepreneurship—to initiate new organizational forms that spur social change—can be difficult to live up to for others within the organization.

To explore this issue, we shadow and converse with Lacerdino, who moved from Brazil to Hungary to work for Prezi and is in the process of figuring out his role within the organization, while at the same time coming to terms with the status of LGBTQ+ people in Hungary. Like Arvai, Lacerdino had initial concerns about being marginalized by his colleagues if coming out as gay—especially as some of his colleagues sometimes made sexist and homophobic jokes. He explains that when he eventually came out, he received the support that he needed, but he also suggests that some of his straight and cis-gendered colleagues still do not really understand the situation that many LGBTQ+ persons face. While many appreciate the Pride parade, some approach it more like a party and less like a political intervention. When Lacerdino hears a colleague saying, “What are we doing, we’re just walking?” [21′23″] during the 2016 Budapest Pride parade, he realizes he must do something to change the attitude at his workplace. In conversation with Arvai over dinner, Lacerdino is asked: “Why can’t you go in front and help to create this better environment that you’re expecting?” [21′45″].

Lacerdino’s story, albeit far from a failure, is an incomplete success story of self-realization. Lacerdino’s choice stands between accepting the status quo or trying to change his workplace from within, with the tools provided by the human resource department: a staff training workshop in combination with rainbow decorations in the office, pride-themed t-shirts, and glitter tattoos. On the day of the 2017 parade Lacerdino is happy with his colleagues’ engagement. Nevertheless, he adds: “but we’re still not at the point where people will prefer going to the march, instead of going to a party” [39′55″]. While loud and provocative carnivalesque expressions are central to the “tactical frivolity” (Shepard, 2009: 2) of the Pride parades in Western Europe and the United States, the Budapest Pride parade is characterized by a political solemnity because of the political context and repeated violent attacks (Renkin, 2015; see also Lacerdino’s comment [37′17″]). Lacerdino thus expresses a dilemma: he wants his employer to participate in the Pride parade but realizes that corporate participation may also take some of the edge off the provocative power of the parade. As shown in the videography, the 2017 parade is both a celebratory and politically charged event, which can be seen on the hand-made placards that some carry. For example, one sign reads “More feminists in parliament!” [45:42] and another one calls for a ratification of the Istanbul Convention against domestic violence [55:11]. People in the parade who wear t-shirts with company logotypes and represent their employers do not carry politically charged signs; instead, numerous balloons and flags with corporate brands wave in the air. None of the Prezi employees carry hand-made signs, with the exception of a Prezi sign that is used to gather the employees—in spite of Lacerdino’s efforts to arrange a placard making workshop (“the workshop was something that didn’t really work out” [40′19″]).

By following Lacerdino, we show the difficulty in realizing the ideal of connecting the organizing of social change to self-realization. Arvai has been part of creating an organization that he claims to truly believe in. He encourages his employees to create their own social initiatives—and Lacerdino to “go in front” and positively affect Prezi’s diversity endeavors. However, there is already a structure in place that is meant to harness diversity, without the need for subversion. In Prezi’s alternative entrepreneurship, all organizational members are positioned as potential pioneers. Simultaneously, the entrepreneurial process presupposes that many organizational members adhere to and maintain the goals and values of the organization. This is not to say that creativity and subversion stand in opposition to stability and consistency; rather, there is a Möbius mechanism at play in alternative entrepreneurship that ensures that stability and subversion pass in and out of each other. What remains is a sort of profanatory melancholy; Lacerdino becomes in some respect a shadow of Arvai, expressing similar utopian ideas about making the world better, all the while coming to terms with the fact that there is only so much he can do within the frames of the company. Lacerdino’s story becomes a profanation of Arvai’s: the alternative entrepreneurial ideal is concerned with society, yet it is also an individualist ideal that is impossible to replicate fully for all people involved.

A play with inside and outside

Personal convictions and organizational values are two sides of the same Möbius strip at Prezi—enfolded into each other, yet separated—as individual engagement is incorporated as an immanent part of organizational initiatives. Prezi encourages social engagement among employees; at the same time, there is a limit to Prezi’s engagement, as the company has “totally different goals” [35:55] than the Budapest Pride organizers, and Prezi avoids taking a stand on specific LGBTQ+-related issues [35:37]. Our profanatory videography does not aim to expose an absolute truth behind this ambiguity—that the social engagement is either the result of a savvy marketing strategy, or rooted in the authentic individual beliefs of Prezi’s founders and employees. Instead, the aim is to show the harmonization of the personal, the economic, and the political as sacralized myth, by recontextualizing it within the sphere of the mundane. To be able to explain the dynamics of inside and outside at play in Prezi’s engagement in the Pride parade, some background is nonetheless needed.

One of the reasons Arvai mentions in the videography for taking Prezi to the Pride parade, was his experiences of changing attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people in Sweden in the early 2000s. Arvai says that he wanted to see the same positive development of the Pride parade in Hungary [12:25–13:43]. This ambition stands in sharp contrast to the agenda of the nationalist-conservative party Fidezs, ruling in Hungary since 2010. In 2012, the party made a revision to the constitution so that marriage is defined as a union between a man and a woman, thus inhibiting the legalization of same-sex marriages (Korkut, 2012: 176). Fidezs leader and Prime Minister Victor Orbán has made the heterosexual nuclear family a central feature of the nationalist rhetoric (Wilkin, 2016: 167f). The Budapest Pride parade is met every year by counterdemonstrations connected to both established and extremist groups within the conservative spectrum of which some have engaged in violent attacks (Rédai, 2012; Renkin, 2009, 2015: 414). Conservative politicians have also aimed harsh critique against the parade. In 2015, Orbán implied that he preferred a toned-down parade by claiming that he was “grateful to the Hungarian homosexual community for not exhibiting the provocative behavior against which numerous European nations are struggling” (Tamás and Tamás, 2015; translation by Hungarian Spectrum, 2015). The same year, István Tarlós, Mayor of Budapest, described the parade as “repulsive” in an interview (Budapest Pride, 2015a), prompting the Budapest Pride organization to publish a statement, proclaiming their aim to “provoke and achieve that homophobic and transphobic statements made by the prime minister of the country, the mayor of Budapest and other political elite do not go without consequences” (Budapest Pride, 2015b).

Despite the severe political context the counterdemonstrations have receded with growth of the Pride parade. Only a few counterdemonstrators can be seen in our recordings from 2017: five to ten people wearing shirts with the logotype of the far-right Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement are expelled from the parade area by a couple of police officers, and are forced to view the parade at a safe distance by the Széchenyi Chain Bridge [49′29″]. WeAreOpen is one factor in this normalizing process—a non-governmental organization supporting workplace diversity that Prezi initiated by joining forces with Google and Espell (a Budapest-based translation company). Melinda Miklós, CEO of WeAreOpen, explains that the organization strives to attract business leaders to the parade to increase acceptance for “LGBTQ inclusion” and “diversity in general” [55′59″]. WeAreOpen has their own logotype and truck in the parade, stressing the value of openness, rather than the politically charged concept of “pride.” Prezi’s communications lead points out that Prezi “are not activists” and that they participate in the parade with other companies to “give visibility for these companies and for these initiatives” [35′59″]. Here we can speak of “an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside” (Agamben, 1998: 18) as the companies’ engagement in the Pride parade gains its full meaning because they are also to some extent separated from the parade. Miklós summarizes: “If you are an activist, you act like an activist; if you are a company, you act like a company” [56′15″] .

In Prezi’s form of alternative entrepreneurship, employees’ personal engagement do not stand in opposition to an organizational agenda. Instead, the two pass in and out of eachother, legitimizing and reinforcing one another, according to a Möbius logic. Just before the parade, we interview a recruitment specialist who describes her participation in the Pride parade as “personal” [40:48]. However, she also participates wearing the official Prezi-Pride t-shirt, together with her other colleagues. She is included in the Pride parade by means of her exclusion: as an employee who supports the parade, rather than an activist engaged in political struggle. The Möbius strip conflation of personal and organizational values implies that actions that could have been conceived of in terms of “micro-emancipation” instead are framed as free individual choices (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992). Therefore, the software engineer Adam Perezstegi can wear his private shirt to the parade in 2017 [43:11] without being side-eyed. Yet, he says in an interview (not included in the videography) that he has worn the official Prezi t-shirt in the past: “I don’t feel that it’s an either-or situation.” In addition, infrastructure engineer Júlia Biró mentions that she is now volunteering as a Pride parade steward for the Budapest Pride organization after having participated as an ally [25:37]. Based on the interview we do not regard her change of roles as a critical distancing from her employer; instead, it can be understood as an extension of her engagement that took shape before her time at Prezi, and continues to evolve in concert with her professional identity.

Our videography profanes alternative entrepreneurship by accentuating the paradoxical Möbius mechanism allowing companies and their employees a position at once inside and outside the Pride parade. This ambiguous positioning enables companies to draw on the thrust of individual engagement and activist environments while keeping their organization strictly separated from activist organizations. Arvai, Miklós, and Daniel Holländer, international spokesperson of Budapest Pride, all suggest that the companies’ involvement in the parade have helped the parade to grow. However, Holländer also points out that if too much focus is put on the companies in the parade, there is a risk “[t]hat the message won’t get through” [56;27] and parts of the LGBTQ+ community become invisible. In that sense, openness and individual expression can also work as a closure, marginalizing certain voices or collectives. To accentuate this dilemma, we mobilize time-images: the oscillating between the Pride décor in the office and company branded flags, balloons and t-shirts in the street. We also show members of the Budapest Pride organization committee working side by side in their crammed office without a salary [29:41] that stands in sharp contrast to Prezi’s airy office spaces and competitive terms of employment. They all intermingle during the Pride event, yet work under different conditions.

“I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy,” the character Patricia Franchini (played by Jean Seberg) says in Godard’s (2010) Breathless from 1960. Our videography offers a paraphrase to describe the confusing position of the alternative entrepreneur: “I don’t know if I am socially conscious because I’m an alternative entrepreneur, or if I’m an alternative entrepreneur because I’m socially conscious.” The Google employee’s euphoric exclamation epitomizes the paradox: “It’s important to be ourselves. Like, our t-shirts say, ‘Just be yourself.’ Be yourself as a person, be yourself as, I guess, a company” [47′10″]. While Godard’s film explores the difficulty in embodying the abstract and perhaps “sacred” concepts of existentialist philosophy, our videography returns the sacred concepts of alternative entrepreneurship to practical, mundane activity, hence highlighting the limits of alternative entrepreneurship’s harmonization of individual engagement and organizational initiative. Takács (2016: 250) praises WeAreOpen’s engagement as “a great example of solidarity with LGBT people” that highlights “the advantages of providing equal opportunities at the workplace from the business case perspective.” However, although the parade made a record with 22,000 participants in 2017, the situation for many LGBTQ+ persons in Hungary is becoming increasingly sinister. In 2020, the Hungarian parliament passed a bill that treats gender as synonymous with one’s chromosomes at birth, and prohibits transgender people from changing their name on official documents (Walker, 2020). The question concerning how to institutionalize Prezi’s wanted transformations in Hungary thus remains unanswered.

Expressive profanation

Agamben’s connection between profanation and music is useful for expressive videography since it underlines how dissonance and polyrhythm put countervailing narratives into dialog, allowing for an excess to emerge from a profaned mythology. Amplifying profanatory play, music additionally underlines that a videography is about composition and not reality (cf. Hietanen and Rokka, 2018). During the fieldwork we were also reminded of everyday soundtracks: in the company “bistro” where people meet for coffee and snacks has a multi-speaker system, and at the Pride parade, where music is central, from the meet-up party and onward. By allowing some of that soundscape to seep into the videography, and contrasting it by adding Hungarian composer Franz Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3, we augment the tension between the cheerful surface of the parade and its underlying challenges.

The climbing and falling notes of the Liebestraum add a surreal character to the otherwise immediately accessible romantic piece. Walker (1989: 222) suggests that Liszt was preoccupied with “an ineffable longing for the female ideal, placed ever and always just beyond his reach.” The unreachable ideal is also a central theme of the videography: the alternative entrepreneur Arvai who tries to make a positive impact on society, the employee Lacerdino striving to enlighten his peers, and the activists in the Pride organization striving for equality and justice. Pianist Love Persson’s interpretation of the piece, recorded especially for our videography, is played softly and slightly slower than what is common, to emphasize the song’s languorous character. It cuts through the festive techno music of the Pride parade to remind the viewer of the “more political and more quiet” [37′32″] Pride parades in countries where these are still controversial, that Lacerdino mentions (cf. Renkin, 2015).

There is yet another reason for this particular choice. Liszt, a national treasure in Hungary, had a tension-filled relationship with Frédéric Chopin, who he saw as both his peer and his rival. Liszt was perceived as loud and masculine, always capable to capture an audience, although some, including Chopin, contended that Liszt lacked subtlety (Hilmes, 2016: 66f). Chopin has in contrast been described by both contemporaries and later commentaries as quiet and feminine—a view shared by Liszt (Ballstaedt, 1994: 26f). The choice to soundtrack a videography about the Budapest Pride parade with Liszt’s musical interpretation of masculine heterosexual desire is therefore intended to be a profanation: the idealized heterosexual love dream brought back to the politics and controversies that in reality often frame love relationships and sexual desire of different kinds.

Liszt’s piano piece creates non-verbal, expressive time-images that break off from the videography’s literal narrative, opening for moments of emergent theorizing. One such occasion is the workshop that Lacerdino arranges, to which Prezi employees are invited to make their own placards for the parade, and to make balloon figures [20:29]. The squeaks made when balloons are bent and turned create a friction against the slow piano music—the squeaking sounds could with a stretch of the imagination be heard as one of Anthony Braxton’s or Peter Brötzmann’s chromatic free-form saxophone solos. Noise is put beside the song (para tēn ōidēn) to open for excessive dissonances. The sequence appears between the interview with Melinda Miklós, CEO of WeAreOpen [17′47″], where she talks about the benefits of companies’ engagement in the Pride parade, and an interview excerpt with Lacerdino [21′02″], in which he expresses disappointment with some of his colleagues’ superficial understanding of the Pride event. Two views overlap that are not necessarily mutually exclusive, yet dissonant, just as the atonal balloon “solos” are rubbed up against Liszt’s composition. In this time-image, the grand stories of alternative entrepreneurship, the history of struggle in the Pride parade, and the melancholic reflections of the organizational member intersect in one short sequence to create a profanatory tension.

Conclusion

Agamben (1993b: 139) points out that cinema challenges “the mythical fixity of the image.” The image conjures an illusion of immutability, a static archetype, or a memory, constructed in retrospect. The moving image, in contrast, animates the gesture that “always refers beyond itself” (Agamben, 1993b: 139). Cinema sets the gesture free that is latent in the image—something artists before the invention of the moving image could never achieve. Cinema can thus enable a thinking that is not dependent on static images, structures, and matrices, but cinema’s “dreams” of movements and gestures as medium to craft an “awakening” reaching out beyond the frames of the screen (Agamben, 1993b: 139). In this companion article to a videography, we have argued that the method of profanation can create such an awakening by bringing back abstract concepts from the static sphere of the mythological to the realm of the practical and mundane.

A profanation is not necessarily destructive, and our videography is not a unilateral argument against corporate engagement in social issues. Prezi has together with WeAreOpen attracted an increasing number of participants in the Pride parade, in tandem with a decrease in violent attacks—although the event still encounters resistance. It is difficult to dismiss Prezi’s engagement as “a defensive response to corporate anxiety” (Rhodes and Fleming, 2020: 947) when LGBTQ+ people in Hungary have good reasons to be anxious, even at work. Our videographic profanations strive to reach beyond criticism and defense to render the myth of alternative entrepreneurship inoperative by analytic confrontation with emerging dilemmas (cf. Śliwa et al., 2013), and the interactions and affects of everyday organizing life that enables companies’ entry into moral discussions and social issues (Kanai and Gill, 2020).

The profanatory videographic approach that we have developed makes use of expressive videography (Hietanen, 2012; Hietanen and Rokka, 2018), while at the same time embracing the filmic narrative as a tool (compare Śliwa et al., 2013; van Laer et al., 2018) to engender at once a persuasive videographic profanation and honest ethnographic account (Jarzabkowski et al., 2014). We have shown how this is accomplished through three analytical moves. First, profanations follow the logic of that which is being accounted for to its ultimate end. We therefore followed the newly employed Lacerdino and his attempt to advance Prezi’s engagement in the Pride parade while facing both the myths surrounding alternative entrepreneurship (compare Dey and Steyaert, 2016) and the prevailing perceptions of Pride among his colleagues and in Hungarian society (cf. Renkin, 2015; Takács, 2016). Implicit in Lacerdino’s narrative is the melancholic insight that also alternative entrepreneurship looses its edge, and becomes institutionalized, sooner or later (Skoglund et al., 2020) and that it consequently becomes increasingly difficult for organizational members to be “disruptive” (Dey and Mason, 2018) or “punk” (Dodd, 2014). Lacerdino’s struggle to find common ground with his colleagues suggests that Prezi’s original transformative agenda may be aligning with a broader “systematic reformulation of social injustice in individual terms” (Kanai and Gill, 2020: 22).

Second, a play with inside and outside, or the Möbius strip structure of abstract distinctions (Agamben, 1998; Bernstein, 2004), is central to profanatory videography, here used as a tool to understand how entrepreneurial initiative and personal convictions are conflated in the myth of alternative entrepreneurship (see further e.g. Dey and Steyaert, 2016). A myth is always external to the realm of the mundane, so to return it “to the free use of men [sic]” (Agamben, 2007: 73), the profanation must pay attention to how the abstract conflation of inside and outside is played out in the here-and-now of everyday activity. The Möbius strip is a useful figure when approaching Prezi’s organization of social change, as personal engagement is treated as an immanent part of such. Through our profanatory videographic depiction, we showed how social engagement is enabled among organizational members, but also the limitations of that engagement—there is still distinctions between corporate affirmations and activist provocations.

Last, we advanced the use of music methodologically, emphasizing how it can augment organizational tensions through amplification of contrast. As a profanatory device, music can design gaps and compose moments of reflection in an otherwise chronological narrative. This refines an expressive approach to videography (Hietanen, 2012; Hietanen and Rokka, 2018), at the same time as a soundtrack can accentuate a narrative structure central to profanatory analysis (Śliwa et al., 2013). Although the theatrical and carnivalesque character of the Pride parade, and the LGBTQ+ movement in general, have informed advances of feminist theory (Shepard, 2009), there is a risk that an analysis that reduces the parade to an example of generalized social movement mechanisms also obscures its specific political goals and by extension reduces its momentum (see Gender Ideologists, 2017). A videographic presentation of the Pride parade that makes use of non-linguistic tools such as music and movement, in combination with narratives that subverts a Möbius logic, can make room for nuance through the gestural (Agamben, 1993b). It also challenges conventions for academic writing and refuses “the existing relationship between academic writing, being an academic and the anaemic outcomes of knowledge production within the academy” (Gilmore et al., 2019: 9; see also Rehn and O’Doherty, 2007; Rhodes, 2015).

Śliwa et al. (2013: 875) suggest that profanatory scholarly work can itself also work as an “act of profanation of scientific borders,” challenging “the separation between practitioner-oriented outlets and scientific journals.” In this sense, our profanatory videographic approach offers a way to literally see, on screen, the alternative entrepreneurial mythology through a novel critical lens. This lens has three features of particular interest for future profanatory analyses within OMS: to follow the logic of the sacred, to put inside and outside at play, and to employ the expressivity of music and sound. As a contribution to the scholarly discussion about video ethnography, most important is still the aesthetic crafting of nuance in the videography itself.