Abstract
To engage Organizing Color: Toward a Chromatics of the Social by Timon Beyes, we were inspired to create personal frames of reference by scanning a small sample of texts that put forward potentially relevant philosophies of the visual: Derrida on television technologies (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002), work on filmmaker and theorist Pier Paolo Pasolini (Viano, 1993), and Deleuze on cinema (Deleuze, 1986).
In these texts, notions of an object-image emerge and there is agreement that no object-image in general exists. Deleuze emphasizes the ways in which aspects of the image convey feeling or a vision that exceeds any narrative. Crucially, however, these sources revealed scant discussion of color. One exception: Pasolini explored theoretical permutations through color and mobilized color to manifest expansive aspects of cinematic language. Pasolini used cinema to explore “the image” and to capture distinctions between naturalism wherein sound and word displace “essential humanity” and realism founded upon physical presence and “essential humanity of an action” (Viano, 1993: 162, 164–165). In these contexts, color worked for Pasolini and helped organize his cinematic universe.
This initial preparatory orienting presented a surprising colorlessness and sparked recognition of a theoretical lack that organization studies and sociologists of organization, such as Timon Beyes, appear well-positioned to address. We might think of it this way: the organizing object-image when manifesting and expressing color, or being manifested by color, surely offers something other than when color is overlooked. We journeyed then into Beyes’ dazzling examples and discussion.
The book’s chapters form discreet “scenes” staged according to a chromatically impactful geographic location and year. Between the “Something Winged: Color as Organizational Force” introduction and the “Broken Tones: Towards a Chromatics of the Social” conclusion, the reader travels to a variety of places and times, including “Weimar, ca. 1800,” “Lower Bengal, 1859,” and “Houston, 1971.” This novel organizational choice cues color as a global narrative (even if the whole story cannot be told within the covers of this book). Beyes blends analysis of color production—including indigo and chemical color—painting, and experimental film. He further demonstrates color’s role in managing perception, labor, and environment, and highlights color’s shifting meaning potentials in world-making contexts: drawing the eye and altering mood, emotion, understanding and action.
Beyes calls out the “color experience.” By this he means “what color does or can do” and “its capacity to affect and be affected” (p. 37). He points to Goethe’s “manifoldness” of color and, in reference to Albers and Benjamin, color becoming “a medium and color-space a site of irreducible transformation” (p. 38). Beyes marks Derrida’s sense of color as “transgression,” whereas line has “come to govern the organization of color” (p. 38). (Here one thinks of coloring books and certain education philosophies’ call for resistance, or coloring “outside the lines.”)
And, yet, color is adopted and organized to help provide a “world order,” in which color works “as atmospheric and affective force,” adapted and manifested to “affect human bodies without their awareness” (p. 39). Color takes on a potentially insidious role, including human resource management, generating calls to resist such management through critical investigations of, and varied disruptions of, controlled, mobilized, and managed color.
Intersections of skin color and racism in chapter 8, “Houston, 1971: Two Kinds of Colorism,” provide instances of color’s organizing power. We are familiar with the importance of these insights. For example, as theorist Franz Fanon has pointed out, the epidermal schema works by concentrating attention on skin, and especially skin color, as the foundational basis of identity and possibility (Fanon, 1967). Skin, as a condition of appearance and as the epidermal schema’s displaying organ, becomes in racist contexts the focus of objectifying looks that deny subjectivity and humanity and organize inclusions and exclusions (e.g. Borgerson and Schroeder, 2018).
As Beyes elucidated an understanding wherein color becomes “itself a determining force of distributing and ‘fixing’ the sensible, and how it might transgress these distributions” (p. 213), Janet, one of this review’s authors, thought of her 94 year old father losing varying aspects of his memory, specific memories, and the ability to remember. He requires and waits for more and more specific direction to guide his daily movements and actions. “What should I do now?” he asks. “Dad, go to the dresser and open the hearing aids box. Dad, head to the big chair by the window.” If distinguishing an object or picking something out includes a description of color, her father’s own experience of the color must be accurately articulated. He has colorblindness, and without a particular description, he often simply does not recognize an object. In the past, his awareness of his own colorblindness could guide him if Janet said, “Grab that red towel for me.” To her father, the towel would look brown, but he realized that that was the “red” towel Janet meant. Now, if she wants him to choose the red towel, Janet needs to adjust her own description of it, calling it brown.
Beyes writes, “After all, letting ourselves be affected by color can bring about a displacement of our angle of vision and our mundane ways of being in the world, thus injecting contingency into our usual forms of experience and their interpretations and opening them up for different possibilities” (p. 214). Color’s potential to “fix” the sensible for Janet and her father, to organize their social world, has shifted. This chromatic shift has invigorated her reactions and responses to her father’s altering relation to, and retention of, the world. In other words, she might say that color has offered her a glimpse into, and an opportunity to act with, her father’s evolving experience of memory loss.
In Chapter 10, “Broken Tones,” Beyes highlights the gathering insights toward the book’s conclusion. He calls upon and explicates artist Hito Steyerl’s video installation Adorno’s Grey, carrying the reader through multiple understandings of monochrome – from an enveloping organizational repression supporting “scholarly chromophobia” to an unrecoverable spectrum in process, an “atmospheric color-space,” wherein what we were taught to “fix” exceeds our limit as “equally managed substance and unmanageable force” (p. 205). Beyes writes, “This is how color becomes organizational force and elemental medium of the social: through the affective lure of chromatics, by way of its destabilizing force and its oscillation between control and liberation, and in terms of the intertwinement of color and thought and its resistance to the dichotomy of the gray of thinking and the colors of life” (p. 205). These insights potentially intersect with color’s significance in a number of disciplines, including interior design (Eiseman and Eiseman, 2011), industrial production (Blaszczyk, 2012), food marketing (Hisano, 2019), and visual culture (Falcinelli, 2022).
Beyes writes that color’s “relational power to animate matter and affect bodies turns it into both powerful managerial tool and enabler of alternative experiences and perceptions” (p. 209). And one realizes that organizational desires to manipulate and mobilize “alternative experiences and perceptions” takes this power further. The scenes presented in the book’s chapters address concerns, such as, “poisonous modes of production and consumption” and color’s “political heft, where the symbolic and affective charge of color flits from one political movement and uprising to the next; its power to abet and make manageable–and scramble–racist, colorist, and gendered prejudices; and its opaque power as behind-the-scenes organizational player in the apparatuses of chromatic algorithms at work in discrimination, ordering, and exploitation of data” (pp. 210–211). Thus, color’s organizing chromogenesis resists becoming a rainbow-maned unicorn, and Beyes plays out a chromatics of the social that is “particularly attuned to the processual mediality, materiality, performativity and affectivity of color” (p. 208).
In a “systematic” moment, Beyes creates a useful summary list for mobilizing “color’s atmospheric relationality.” He sets out “color as material force,” “color’s affective capacity,” “color’s semiotic and symbolic performance,” and “color as medium of transformation” (p. 208), expressing possibility. Organizing Color itself displays colorful theory. Not as a rebuke to Adorno’s attempt to demonstrate gray’s power to encourage calming focus and scholarly thought (that must block out life), nor as a call for a sedimenting belief in disruptive revolutionary color, but to enliven our comprehension of color’s organizing potential in all aspects of life. Thus inspired to be more fully aware of the powers of color, we would welcome perhaps an edited volume to expand the insights put forward here. We imagine a broad range of global researchers whose illustrative examples and approaches to color might be expected to differ from the more Eurocentric vision authored here and also integrate critical decolonial openings into the disciplinary boundaries of organization (Prasad et al., 2015).
