Culture and Organization, June 2006, Vol. 12(2), pp. 109–125 ‘Beyond the Scope of the Possible’: Art, Photography and Organisational Abjection LAURIE COHENa, PHILIP HANCOCKb and MELISSA TYLERc,* a,c b The Business School, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK Warwick Business School, University of Warwick MelissaTyler M.J.Tyler@lboro.ac.uk Taylor Culture 10.1080/14759550600682908 GSCO_A_168260.sgm 1475-9551 20Original 12 2006 000002006 and &and Article Francis (print)/1477-2760 Francis Organisation Ltd (online) This paper reflects on the potential value of art photography as a means of critically interrogating the relationship between organisation and abjection. Inspired by Adorno’s (1997) understanding of art as a non-conceptual mode of communication and Kristeva’s (1982) concept of the abject, we consider the work of several contemporary photographic artists, who have specifically chosen the subject of work organisations in their images. We do so in an attempt to illustrate our argument that art photography shares a capacity with other art forms to reveal, in an immediate and powerful manner, that which is formally excluded from traditional modes of organisational analysis and those discourses that surround and support it. Key words: Art photography; Abjection; Kristeva; Adorno; Critical theory INTRODUCTION There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries and fascinates. (Kristeva, 1982: 1). The relationship between the aesthetic and the organisational continues to be one of growing interest amongst scholars in the field of organisation studies. While several contributors have tended to focus on the relationship between organisational culture and the aesthetics of its expression (Gagliardi, 1992) as well as attempts to develop a critical appraisal of such practices (Carr and Hancock, 2003), a significant strain of thought has also focused on the ways in which a concern with art and aesthetics can assist us in coming to a deeper understanding of what it actually means to organise (Strati, 1999; De Monthoux, 2004). In this article, we endeavour to contribute to this discussion of what it means to organise by asking ‘what can the medium of art photography contribute to the development of a fuller and, in particular, critical understanding of everyday organisational relationships and practices?’ Specifically, drawing on the work of Theodor Adorno (1997) and Julia Kristeva (1982), we explore some of the ways in which the mimetic capacity of art photography is able to alert us to, and reveal, aspects of the abject dimension of organisation life; a dimension that, by its very nature, is denied, silenced and excluded, yet which remains integral to the maintenance of the boundaries of the very entity that seeks to expel it. As to the structure of the article, commencing with a broad discussion of the epistemic qualities of art and the aesthetic experience it engenders, we then present a brief discussion of *Email: M.J.Tyler@lboro.ac.uk. Tel: +44 (0)1509 222721. ISSN 1475-9551 print; ISSN 1477-2760 online © 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14759550600682908 110 LAURIE COHEN et al. the relatively limited role photography has played thus far in the portrayal of organisational life. In particular, we identify the predominantly representationalist logic that has underpinned such work, a logic that has tended to proceed largely according to an aesthetics of presence: that is, a concern with what appears or appeals to the immediacy of the senses, thereby obscuring or denying expressions of the exclusion of Otherness and the processes by which this is undertaken on a daily basis. In response to this particular absence or lacuna within the analytical spectrum of photographic research, we turn to the profoundly aesthetic field of art photography and what we suggest is its capacity to render sensible the presence of such exclusionary practices; practices which seek to render, to employ the language of Kristeva (1982), organisational Otherness abject. Specifically, we explore the work of a number of art photographers all of whom have demonstrated a concern with the aesthetic exploration of work and its organisation. In considering several of the different images of organisational life contained in this work, and discussing them with reference to the concept of abjection, we argue that not only should we understand that attempts to manage abjection must be thought of as an everyday aspect of organisation life, but also that art photography as an aesthetic medium has a particular capacity to express this important dimension of the organised world; one that tends to elide the rigid conceptuality of traditional linguistic approaches. ART, AESTHETICS AND CRITIQUE While the proposition that art represents a unique means of engaging with the world is relatively new within the confines of organisation and management studies, it is an idea that is more firmly established elsewhere. In the classical world, art was both shunned and embraced as a consequence of its offering a unique vantage point on the ways and nature of humanity. Plato (1987) decried poetry, for instance, bemoaning its corrupting influence on the ways of reason and truth which he believed must provide the cornerstones of orderly government and leadership. In contrast, his pupil Aristotle (1996) viewed art’s inflaming of the passions—which Plato considered so subversive—to present an opportunity for selfknowledge and control—a necessary pre-requisite for virtuous or ethical behaviour. While a concern with the experience of art was not entirely absent from the musings of medieval scholars (see Margolis, 2001) it was perhaps not until the dawn of the eighteenth century that such issues raised their heads once again in any systematic manner. In particular, what appears to have taxed the minds of this period was the question of what it was that could be said to constitute aesthetic experience in relation to the predominantly rational reception of art. Hutcheson (1973), Baumgarten (1961) and most notably Kant (1997) all concerned themselves with this question, each at pains to find some grounds for reconciliation between the sensuousness and the intellectual—a ‘third way between the vagaries of subjective feeling and bloodless rigour of understanding’ (Eagleton, 1990: 17)—one that while recognising the actuality of the sensual would render it ultimately subservient to the capacity of reason. Yet despite the endeavours of such early guardians of the mind, art has continually managed to elude or subvert the cult of rationality, slipping between the spaces of order and determination that have characterised the project of modernity. Admittedly, such subversions have often only been temporary and contingent. From the appropriation of Nietzsche’s ‘life as art’ into Nazi dreams of Aryan supremacy, to the reduction of the artistic avant-garde to the currency of corporate investment, the artistic vision has often promised more that it was perhaps ever capable of delivering. Nevertheless, art has also proved to be an enduring cultural resource for those who have sought to expose and explore the often hidden ways in which human societies are ordered and BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THE POSSIBLE 111 regulated. Increasingly this can perhaps be attributed to the marginal position many artists locate themselves within (although often not for long) with relation to the expectations and experiences of mainstream societies (see Bain, 2005), as well as the need in an evermore symbolically saturated culture to shock and startle prospective audiences and patrons. Yet, as Adorno (1997) observes, the historical relationship that often renders such a critical distance possible is not solely socio-cultural, but also an intrinsic feature of art itself—particularly that which he termed ‘autonomous art’. Autonomous art, for Adorno, is that which is formally divested of function (economic, decorative or indeed even political) other than that of its intrinsic aesthetic worth. Thus, if only for a limited period, such art is able to exist in an immanent realm, one external to the rigours and demands of capitalist social and economic relations. More particularly, however, autonomous art has the capacity for what Adorno considers to be a non-conceptuality in its recognition and portrayal of the world. That is, rather than succumbing to the forced identity of concept and object that characterises the instrumental logic of linguistic representation, autonomous art by virtue of its mimetic relationship to the object of its interest is capable of exploring and exposing characteristics of the external world; characteristics that are frequently obscured or obfuscated by the web of conceptual relations which mediate our everyday experience and communicative actions. It is this mimetic capacity, therefore, this ability to represent and communicate about the world in ways that diverge from the strictures established by and through dominant modes of modern rationality which, for Adorno, underpins the critical character of art. Yet having made this claim, two additional points should be recognised. First, within Adorno’s schema this communicative dimension must be understood as residing within the artwork itself, rather than necessarily within the intentions of the artist. This is due to the proposition that the meaning that arises from an artwork always exceeds that which is ascribed to it either by the artist him/herself or by the audience. This is a consequence of the artwork’s own locatedness within a particular socio-historical continuum which it is, in one form or another, forced to represent through its objective character as a product of the very rationality it has the potential to undermine. Second, while the differentiation of the cultural, economic and political spheres during the eighteenth century provided the necessary condition for the emergence of an autonomous sphere within which such art could emerge, it also sowed the seeds of its own critical negation. The mass reception and the resultant reintegration of art into the economic sphere as a commodity within the free market that accompanied its release from the spheres of political and religious patronage resulted in what Adorno (1997: 228) considered to be a ‘neutralization’ of the work of art’s ‘determinate negation of society’. That is, as quickly as art freed itself of the shackles of medieval mythology it found itself subject to a new mythologisation that reduced it to yet another exhibit in what Adorno claimed was the ‘pantheon of cultural commodities’. However, it is not our claim here that art should be looked upon as a revolutionary force in society or anything so grand; but rather, more modestly, that certain forms of art continue to offer the possibility of a radical insight into the character of organising which may well elude the logic of traditional modes of social research and investigation; a logic which ossifies experience within a conceptually ordered relationship of representation and meaning. Not that such a claim is entirely original to this paper. Authors such as Gallhofer and Haslam (1996) and Carr (2003; Carr and Zanetti, 2000), for example, have all invoked both the artistic and intellectual legacy of the surrealists in particular as providing a resource by which we might estrange or disturb observers of organisational life, encouraging them to develop different or tangential understandings of commonly understood or recognised organisational practices. What is particular about our endeavours here, however, is the attention we pay to 112 LAURIE COHEN et al. the particular medium of art photography and its capacity to represent present but otherwise excluded aspects of everyday organisational life. Of course to combine the idea of art with photography is itself to tread a sometimes difficult and treacherous path. The value of photography as a critical and indeed artistic medium sat, for instance, at the heart of a number of notable disputes between leading intellectual figures during the twentieth century in particular. So, for example, while the likes of Benjamin (1992) detected a potentially emancipatory moment in the growth of mechanical modes of artistic production, most notably cinematography, Adorno and Benjamin (1999) remained far more cautious about its democratising and liberatory possibilities. Other voices, such as that of Kracauer (1960), have called for a rejection of the idea that any film-based medium should engage with ordered or prearranged subject matter—but rather should document the transitory and dynamic experience of everyday temporality. More recently, sociologists such as Bourdieu (1996) have interrogated the socio-cultural positioning of photography, especially in relation to what he considers to be its status in some quarters as ‘middle brow art’. As always, however, time, space and indeed expertise limit our ability to engage in great depth with the nuances of such complex debates, suffice to say that we recognise the inevitably contested nature of many of the claims we make regarding the medium elsewhere in the article. Hence, as to what it is we mean by art photography in this instance, and leaving aside relatively simply institutional accounts, we offer a rather general notion of it as a visual art which combines the technological capacities of the medium with the aesthetic and intellectual intentionalities of the artist. This is not to claim, as noted above, that the meaning or significance of a piece of photographic art can be subsequently reduced to the intentionalities of the particular artist (or indeed even the structure of the technology itself). Rather it both recognises and embraces the intervention, through the artist and technology, of the art form in the world as that which both in part constitutes it and equally partially, seeks to represent it. It is this dialectic which, in part, renders it a medium that offers both a relatively accessible and yet critical optic through which we might explore the hidden and marginalized quality of organisation. One has been largely, although not exclusively, confined to the margins of organisational analysis—a point which we now consider. AESTHETICS, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ORGANISATION Despite this apparent neglect within contemporary organisation studies, the relationship between photography and the analysis and structuring of organisational life is one that can be traced back, in one form or another, to the heyday of early twentieth century industrialism and its pursuit of mass output. Early pioneers of the project of scientific management such as Frank Gilbreth (see Gilbreth and Carey, 1949), for example, deployed photographic techniques as the basis of their motion studies, while Henry Ford’s somewhat infamous attempts to produce the rational employee (see Gramsci, 1971) deployed, amongst other things, promotional films eulogising the values of family life, hard work and saving to buy that all important Ford motor car. Today, from TNT to Samsung, Marks and Spencer to McDonalds, the use of staff training videos, motivational in-house television channels, glossy photographic brochures and a range of ever-more sophisticated visual media have all become increasingly integral to the everyday management of compliance and consent among employees worldwide. Such essentially photographic media have also served an important role in the propagation of visual representations of the world of work and its organisation from a number of differing perspectives. During the inter-war years in the UK, for example, the Empire Marketing Board and later the GPO film unit produced a series of highly influential cinematic portrayals BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THE POSSIBLE 113 of the working practices of a range of British industries, the most famous of which was the 1936 production Night Mail which aimed at promoting British industry and techniques across the UK and the Empire. In addition to such ‘propagandist’ ventures, however, more commercial offerings have also featured amongst the mass cultural media of popular cinema and television. From Modern Times, Chaplin’s 1936 denunciation of the dehumanising consequences of mass production, to Terry Gilliam’s 1985 surreal parody of the irrationalities of a dystopian bureaucracy, Brazil, such work has not only been entertaining but also often deeply critical of the ways in which our working lives are subject to the demands and pressures of performance imperatives and practices. Growing interest in art and aesthetics within the field of organisation studies (Strati, 1999; Carr and Hancock, 2003; De Monthoux, 2004) and the social sciences more generally (Welsch, 1997) has also led to a range of academic contributions eager to explore the ways in which the photographic medium can provide a more critical appreciation of mainstream organisational and managerial activity. While in some instances the use of photographs within such material has been limited to acting as visual recordings of say, architectural types (Berg and Kreiner, 1990; Kersten and Gilardi, 2003), other studies have attempted to site photographic representations at the centre of their research endeavours. Alferoff and Knights (2003) for example, have deployed photographs taken within a call centre to provide visual examples of managerial attempts to establish and manipulate the aesthetic parameters of the work environment in such a way as to promote greater compliance by, and greater competition between, employees. These show, for instance, brightly coloured mobiles adorning office ceilings, each reminding employees of the targets to be achieved or the scripts they should adhere to when dealing with clients. Similarly, Dougherty and Kunda (1990: 187) have emphasised that corporate photographs ‘tell a story about the meanings and assumptions … shared among organisation members’ in their study of corporate photography as featured in annual reports. Adopting a more ethnographic approach in their mixed-method study of child workers which involved in part, issuing research participants with cameras, Bolton et al. (2001) found that the photographs the young people in their research produced ‘brought to life their working environments’, because ‘they showed in detail not only their workplaces but also their role within them. For example, photographs were taken of stockrooms, of rubbish skips and of toilets’ (Bolton et al., 2001: 511–512) which, they argue, reveal places—the material settings of young people’s workplaces—otherwise hidden from both customers and also the research process. A similar approach to Bolton et al. (2001) is adopted in Warren’s (2002) paper, ‘Show Me How It Feels to Work Here’, in which photography is employed in visual ethnography. Rather than presenting photographs of the organisational research setting that she had taken herself, or which had been taken for corporate purposes, Warren provided a sample of the employees with disposable cameras and asked them to photograph aspects of their working environment that expressed how they felt about their job and the company. As such, she sought to pursue what Strati and de Montoux (2002: 756) have defined as an ‘empathic– aesthetic’ approach to organisational research, with the emphasis on an engagement with the aesthetic experience of organisational members in such a way as to ‘merge … and share empathically in the activities of the organisational actors’. Photography in this instance provides not only the medium, but the possibility of such expression (see also Strati, 2000). Moving away from the utilisation of still photography as a research tool, another important source of insight into the ways in which photography and visual media such as cinematography can be utilised in the exploration of the organisational is the collection of essays by Hassard and Holiday (1998) entitled Organisation-Representation. Here, authors such as Aitkin (1998), Brewis (1998) and Hassard (1998), amongst others, explore cinematic 114 LAURIE COHEN et al. representations of organising. Rationality and its portrayal, for example, plays a significant role in several of the essays, an example of which is Holliday’s (1998) focus on the ways in which the 1993 film Philadelphia explores the uneasy relationship between the healthy rationality of formal organisation and the inevitable future of death and decay that AIDS so starkly represents in this particular text. Yet what this, and some of the other examples perhaps point to, however, is not simply the idea that such photographic media are capable of providing a novel or indeed popularist insight into the underlying philosophical struggles that continually afflict the rational business of organising, but rather that they have the capacity to explore a very particular aspect of organisational life, namely that of the suppressed or repulsed Other. For while it is perhaps easier to associate art with the beautiful idealisation of organisational life (in the way that say corporate culture and communications management does), what it may also provide is a more penetrating insight into the underside of that life, namely, the realm of the unrequited and reprehensible; that which, as Burrell (1997) has observed, is inevitably integral yet spurned by the edifice of rationality that each and every organisation either overtly or covertly submits itself to. The critique of ocular-centrism notwithstanding (Corbett, 2003), what we are proposing here, therefore, is that photography posseses a capacity to transcend the purely representational. That is, as art photography it opens up the possibility of evoking that which sits outside of the realm of the ordered, the identical and the conceptual. In fusing the mimetic capacity of art with the representationalism of mechanical reproduction it encourages us, as O’Neill et al. (2002: 74) argue, to explore what is ordinarily over-looked because it is outside of language—the mimetic or non-conceptual, and which ‘undercuts identity thinking … and criss-crosses binary thinking/territories and resists appropriation’. Thus, while critics such as Benjamin (1992) have warned that photography can simply turn oppression into an object of enjoyment, and Sontag (1979: 14) has argued that ‘to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed’, O’Neill et al. (2002: 79) emphasise that art photography and other visual forms have the potential ‘to pierce us and grasp reality in its otherness within the context of the image society which attempts to tame and inhibit this critical reflection’. It is this concept—of the excluded Otherness of organisation, particularly in the form of what has been termed the abject, and the possibilities art photography offers by means of exploring its perpetual presence—that provides the primary focus of the rest of this paper, both theoretically and empirically. That is, we seek to combine Adorno’s concern with the revelatory capacity of mimetic art with a material interest in that which sits at the interface of organisational order and disorder—between the accepted and the abject—as a contribution to the cultural critique of the logic of contemporary organisation. Before we pursue this endeavour any further, however, it is perhaps somewhat incumbent upon us to develop exactly what it is we mean when we refer to a state of abjection and exactly how we envision this in relation to the field of organisation studies. ORGANISATIONAL ABJECTION To paraphrase the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966), the cultural norm of ‘organisation’ is generally dependent upon the (apparent) absence of chaos, disorder, ugliness and dirt, and, as we shall suggest here, the successful management of abjection; a process which, as Kristeva (1982) notes, is fundamental to any organisation ‘constituted by exclusions and hierarchies’. Yet as much as any such organisation may attempt to deny or exclude its abject, this is an BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THE POSSIBLE 115 ‘always ever’ incomplete victory. For abjection is, by its very nature, an inchoate process, one that can never realise its own closure, but rather one that must generate a recognition of its own incompleteness and the sense of unease that this brings about. Bataille (1970: 1) defines abjection, which he sees as central to the constitution of social order, as ‘the inability to assume with sufficient strength the imperative act of excluding abject things’, a state of being that for him ‘establishes the foundations of collective existence’. His interest in the abject, in this sense, is in stripping away ideological screens or aesthetic veils to expose ‘the hypocrisy that tries to conceal or make palatable’ a ‘basically meaningless and squalid existence’. Echoing Bataille, in what is perhaps the most sustained theoretical discussion of abjection to date, namely Kristeva’s (1982) Powers of Horror, abjection ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ (1982: 1). It is that which simultaneously fascinates and repels, distresses and relieves. The abject, for her, is that which does not exist outside of the self, and yet which perpetually threatens it; it is that which emanates from the subject’s sense of order and which emerges as a threat to that order—be it biological, social or spiritual. Crucially, abjection is both a ‘universal phenomenon’ but also one that ‘assumes specific shapes and different codings according to the various symbolic systems’ (1982: 68) in which it exists. In this sense, food for instance ‘becomes abject only if it is a border between two distinct entities or territories’ (1982: 75). For Kristeva (1982: 9), abjection is an intolerable state that signifies a conscious sense of the unconscious: Abjection is above all ambiguity. Because while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger. For Kristeva, then, abjection is understood largely as a process of semiotic and symbolic ‘leakage’; it is the underside of signification, what the sign system must disguise and contain. As she puts it, ‘when one is in a state of abjection, the border between the object and the subject cannot be maintained’; it threatens lines of demarcation and containment; between what is ‘pure’ and what is ‘dangerous’ in Douglas’s terms. As Elizabeth Grosz (1990) has put it, abjection disrupts the social boundaries demanded by the semiotic and symbolic (organisational) order, ‘it respects no definite positions, or rules, boundaries or socially imposed limits’. Drawing on Lacan, Kristeva argues that as we take our (conditional) place in the symbolic and semiotic realm and begin to confront the abject, we simultaneously fear and identify with it. The self, in confronting the abject, is forced to ‘manage’ something not part of its established symbolic realm in order to assume (and be accorded) subjective status: ‘the abject has only one quality of the object and that is being opposed to “I”’ (Kristeva, 1982: 1). The relationship between the subject, the object and the abject is thus central to Kristeva’s analysis of our sense of social (symbolic and semiotic) order. Furthermore, border is clearly a central theme in Kristeva’s account of abjection. As she puts it, ‘a wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death’ rather they ‘show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live’ (Kristeva, 1982: 3, original emphasis). ‘These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands’ (ibid.). There [in abjection] ‘I am at the border of my condition as a living being … such waste drops that I might live’ (ibid.: 3). Echoing Douglas, she argues that ‘it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (Kristeva, 1982: 4). In this sense, boundaries become sites of awakenings, of transformations and of potentially critical interventions. Considering the apparent centrality of abjection to the processes by which organisation is undertaken and maintained, it is perhaps somewhat surprising that it has thus far received 116 LAURIE COHEN et al. relatively little attention amongst organisational scholars (for notable exceptions, see Brewis and Linstead, 2000; Linstead, 1997; Dale, 2001, and Longhurst, 2001). In Linstead’s (1997) analysis of men, violence and management, in which he focuses on the relationship between abjection and organisation, he draws largely on object-relations theory to argue that because bureaucratic organisations seek to deny the emotional dimension of their behaviour and decision-making, emotion is created ‘as an abject phenomenon, denied but present, ever potentially resurgent, never addressed as reality’ (1997: 1115 and 1142). Drawing on LeviStrauss he reminds us that what he terms social spacing strategies are the means by which our sense of self is manufactured and positioned, subject and object differentiated, waste defined and rejected, order inserted into the system. Yet in so doing, they also produce an in-between category, neither one nor the other, neither filth nor purity, which is not rejected yet is not acceptable either and which irritates the system (1997: 1121). Linstead notes that Levi-Strauss argued that human societies have two basic defences against Otherness—incorporation and exclusion. Echoing Burrell’s (1984) earlier work on organisation sexuality, Linstead argues that modern organisations display both in their attempts to remove and suppress emotion, as well as to nurture emotional commitment which, he concludes, serves to create emotion as an abject organisational phenomenon. In a similar move Dale (2001), reflects on the processes involved in the maintenance of a boundary between ‘organisation’ and ‘organism’ in understanding the creation of organisation studies as a discipline and its identity as a body of knowledge. In her historical account of the anatomising urge of western science (including organisation theory), the abject is demonstrated to provide a useful analytical link between the organised human body and the structuring of the body of knowledge that constitutes organisation studies. In particular she highlights the relationship between individual and collective abjection, focusing on the association of particular groups of people with the abjection of the organised body. Thus, while Linstead’s analysis points specifically to the relationship between abjection and the spaces of violence within organisations, what Dale succeeds in doing is suggesting how a range of organisational ways of being can be understood in relation to abjection; not least, the process of organisation itself. Emphasising that abjection is ‘part of the development of a coherent sense of self’ (2001: 139), this latter point is highlighted by Dale (2001: 140) when she focuses on the ways in which abjection, As with the ‘anatomizing urge’, is intrinsically bound up with the desire for the death of the other, whether that is the death of the rejected parts of body image and identity which are expelled in order to maintain the integrity of the self, or desire for the death of others who have to be rejected in order to preserve the identity of the collective, dominant group. It is this cultural logic which, therefore, so often renders the abject invisible to us despite its continuing presence. Its transgressiveness exceeds the limitations of formal rationality, which in turn forbids its entry into the realm of reasonable discourse, or indeed representation, as its very (incomplete) expulsion constitutes an integral aspect of the establishment of identity. It is, however, part of our argument here that art, by its very capacity to reveal the nonidentical in its own terms does not fear the abject; art it is not disrupted by its continued absent-presence but rather actively explores and renders it visible—even perhaps, despite its own intentions. Art photography, in particular we might suggest, demonstrates this capacity all too well; a capacity enhanced by its ability to reveal and express the abject to the immediacy of the senses, but also as a consequence of its perceived literal representaionalism, to render the grotesque, repulsive or repellent apparently safe and familiar and, in doing so, proclaim even more starkly the necessity of the abject that lives among us. In an attempt to illustrate this contention we now direct our attention to a consideration of the work of several art photographers, all of whom have, in differing ways, taken as the BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THE POSSIBLE 117 subject of their work the organisational landscape of the office. Indeed, the bulk of this work was exhibited at The Photographers’ Gallery in London between November 2003 and January 2004 as part of a series of events simply entitled The Office (see Cohen and Tyler, 2004) which explored, through the medium of photography and film as well as a series of related seminars and discussions, that working environment which has come to dominate contemporary life for so many of us in the early twenty-first century. PHOTOGRAPHIC AND VISUAL IMAGES OF ABJECTION In what follows we explore the theme of abjection through the selected works of three contemporary European art photographers: Lars Tunbjork, Nial Blankley and also the work of video artist Sofia Hulten. Lars Tunbjork Lars Tunbjork’s (Sweden, b. 1956) work on the subject of the office—undertaken in large corporations in Europe, America and Japan—focuses mainly on what the artist considers to be the struggle between organisational rigidity and the spirit of individualism. Yet what is of particular interest here are the ways in which his images succeed in offering a sense of organisation within which its own ideology of clinical order and rational efficiency is continually challenged by the perpetual presence of disorder and spontaneity: cluttered desks, unwieldy cables, and paper-strewn floors, people snoring at their desks and nibbled food on surfaces all compete with the rational integrity of constructed order. In Figure 1, for instance, there is an overwhelming sense of excess, of things spilling over, intersecting and colliding in unpredictable ways. Stationery and office equipment litter every available surface, from the empty boxes piled up in the back corner, to the tangled computer leads and strewn papers of the mid and foreground. Similarly, Tunbjork treats people in much the same way. Much like the back of the computer monitor, we see the inside of one man’s mouth and get a full view of his recumbent torso and rumpled trousers. We also see the waste that these men have left behind: used coffee cups and ashtrays. These things are abject, or ‘out of place’ in Douglas’ terms, but are also the ever-present, unmediated undersides of things which are not typically on show. They exist as an integral aspect of the messy, human dimension of organisation, but when brought to the forefront of our visual field evoke the same feelings of disgust, revulsion and at the same time fascination, to which both Douglas and Kristeva refers. While distinctly different, Figure 2 seems to convey a similar sense of that which is neither ‘of’ the organisational landscape, but at the same time is an inevitably ever-present component of it. For in contrast to the relatively ordered lines of computers and their equally ordered operators, each characterised by their almost monochromatic conformity, sits the foregrounded image of what is a brightly decorated birthday cake. Not only is this image striking in terms of the composition and the visual contrast it creates, but what it also achieves is to remind us that not only do people have birthdays, even in the orderly working environment of the computerised office, but that the emotional and personal nature of everyday organisational life is something which can never be fully excluded, even from the most regimented-looking of work environments. Rather, it remains an always possible source of resistance or, at the very least, of spontaneous and disordered a-rationality, poised to reimpose itself on the carefully crafted formality of the technocratic settlement of the organisation. Although this particular image brings this to the fore, in doing so, it also, draws our attention to the way in which, in the organisation itself, the personal dimension appears to be Figure 1. 118 LAURIE COHEN et al. Figure 1. neatly ‘contained’ within a visual frame that does not allow it to leak into the dominant rationality and so contaminate the established organisational order. Notably, while the dominant feeling is one of disorder, Tunbjork’s work, as represented here, is not in itself particularly challenging or subversive. In the first example, notwithstanding Figure 2. Figure 2. BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THE POSSIBLE 119 his sleeping colleague, the second man does appear to be getting on with his work, sitting diligently at his computer, quite untroubled by the mess which surrounds him. Indeed, there is no real sense that even the sleeping man is trying to rebel or resist, he just seems tired. Yet while these pictures neither collude with nor challenge management orthodoxy, they posses a radical and transgressive character in that they expose the limitations of its rationality, powerfully illustrating, in Kristeva’s terms, ‘the remainders’ (1982) of organizational life: that which is left over when attempts are made to manage time, space and materiality. Such images speak the unspeakable, exposing the ‘underbelly’ of organisations, and providing a vivid example of the presence of the abject through the illumination of a material and symbolic realm which, in Kristeva’s words ‘respect[s] no definite positions, or rules, boundaries or socially imposed limits’ (1982: 87). Tunbjork’s work is, therefore, inherently critical in that it represents an aesthetically efficacious exposure of that side of organisational life which is generally unacknowledged and unrevealed, but has a powerful and inevitable presence, and so which cannot be wholly contained. As Kristeva (1982: 87) explains: ‘it lies there quite close, but can not be assimilated’. Niall Blankley The notion of the abject as ‘matter out of place’ is further developed in the work of Niall Blankley (Northern Ireland, b. 1965). As noted, we experienced certain signifiers in Tunbjork’s photo (the cups, papers, body parts, cake, etc.) as ‘out of place’ in that they were aspects of organisational life which usually remain hidden. Our understanding of this point can be further developed through consideration of Blankley’s images which are more clearly and explicitly at odds with the contexts in which they are situated, both in terms of their spatial and temporal location. As Kristeva’s work on abjection is relatively decontextualised, we know very little of the settings in which the bodies, waste products, wounds and perverse practices she describes come to be constructed as abject. In the spirit of Douglas’ analysis, however, we would argue that context is very much an issue in the question of whom or what becomes abject, and the social and organisational processes that render them so. As Jackson (2003) explains: ‘Blankley builds his workstations, which he then photographs, from obsolete office equipment found outside company buildings. Brought together into a cacophonous ensemble of objects, in part the work comments on the enormous waste produced by the machine of capitalism’ (p. 9). As we noted previously, in Kristeva’s view, the abject does not exist outside of the self, yet is seen to threaten the self. In other words, although it is a product of the self, it is not accepted as such—it is what the sign system must banish and contain. In Blankley’s work we are starkly reminded of this fact in that whilst organisations have cast these bits of equipment to one side to be replaced by newer, flashier models, this is not to say that such artifacts have disappeared from view. Rather in these images, they continue to resonate and undermine our sense of organisational order, highlighting the abject in the workings of organisational life at both global and local levels. Take Figure 3 as an illustration. At first glance, the juxtaposition of domestic and corporate artifacts (the desk and chair, computer, bookshelves, files, suit jacket and button-down collar shirt) is perhaps little more than curious. Indeed, as we are all increasingly attuned to issues of work/life balance, and many of us have first-hand experience of home-based offices, simply bringing together these two meaning systems is perhaps not enough to unsettle us to any significant degree. None the less, there is something disturbing about this image, a disturbance grounded not so much in the slippage between work and home, but rather, between work activities and bodily functions (the production and consumption of food, and waste). What is at stake in this particular image, and indeed other examples of Blankley’s work, is once again the collapsing of particular sign systems which, within our existing interpretive Figure 3. 120 LAURIE COHEN et al. Figure 3. frames should most emphatically be kept apart. The cycle of consumption and excretion is brought into the organisational space—and vice versa. The fact that the toilet is the central point of the photo, and that the seat is up and the door is open, reinforces this dissonance between what we see as legitimate in a work setting, and what we see as abject: disorderly, unacceptable and disgusting. Furthermore, it is notable that Blankley does not give us a ‘stylised’ toilet or beautifully designed cooker. Rather, these are outdated cast-offs; dirty and used. Thus the scope of abjection is extended here to include matter not only of place, but also out of time. In this view, obsolete equipment, even if it remains functional, becomes abject. More generally within Blankley’s photograph there is an overall sense of decay, scruffiness and lack of order; reinforced by badly hung pictures, peeling wallpaper, clothes hanging off chairs and doors, and ripped linoleum on the floor. The connotations of these signs directly contrast with that sense of well-being that we previously argued is so fundamental to the idealised organisational aesthetic whereby concepts like wellness or cleanliness resonate with values of organisational discipline and control. In the words of Kristeva (cited earlier), ‘it is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order’ (1982: 4). That is, our interpretations of Blankley’s office environments are framed by our existing notions of organisational order, which these images challenge, or at least unsettle. From the perspective of an established aesthetic of organisation, his photographs are disturbing and disordered. Sofia Hulten Various writers on gender and organisation have considered the construction and constitution of gender and gender identities within work settings, and the ways in which gender is managed within such contexts (Calas and Smircich, 1992a, 1992b; Gherardi, 1995; Brewis BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THE POSSIBLE 121 et al., 1997). Within this literature and, we would argue, in the work of video artist Sofia Hulten (Sweden, b. 1972), the notion of woman as Other—in the organisation but not of it, necessary though excessive and in need of control and containment—emerges as a central theme. In her video Grey Area, Hulten is seen to continually hide herself within an office environment—behind a blind, beneath a desk and even under a carpet—an endeavour aided by the fact that she is wearing a grey flannel business suit. While the effect is initially comical, once again it offers some disturbing insights into the very phenomenon touched on above. That is, through a combination of her own adopted dress style—which itself seeks to conceal her femininity (see Brewis et al., 1997 for a discussion of female ‘power dressing’)—with the means by which she attempts to render herself invisible within her working environment, Hulten recognises and renders her own female body as an abject dimension of organisational life. In Figure 4, we see her attempting to conceal herself behind closed office blinds. Yet even having covered herself with the blinds, she remains unsuccessful in entirely obscuring her presence, which has merely been reduced to that of a grey shadow—a clearly present absence. Eventually, in one of the most telling sequences of the video, the artist climbs into a bin liner (Figure 5), shedding her femininity, little by little until by the final frame she has effectively rendered herself androgynous—divested of all gendered features. At that point, every vestige of her former self is gone—she has disappeared entirely. There is no spilling remainder or leakage of the subject, merely an excess in relation to organisational desire that renders what remains on show no more than simply rubbish—that which is to be excreted (but which is, of course, always with us). Hulton, in the images she presents, lays bare the irresolvable tension that sits at the heart of this relationship, however. As a woman within a rationalist setting—the office—she is never entirely able to entirely extract herself from it. Her attempts at disguise and disappearance Figure 4. Figure 5. Figure 4. 122 LAURIE COHEN et al. Figure 5. merely reinforce the sense of abjection, for she is ever at the boundary—even when reduced to the status of physical waste—while always materially present. Her body is portrayed as both integral to, and yet unrequited in its organisational role. CRITICAL REFLECTIONS In the opening to his Aesthetic Theory (1997: 1), Adorno notes how ‘artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world’. Yet this is not the empirical world of immediate experience, but rather that which is, as Kant has taught us, the world mediated through conceptual apparatuses themselves configured through time, space and culture. Art’s capacity to unnerve, to criticise and ultimately unravel our perceptions of reality is embedded in its capacity to show and tell us things that we resist in accordance with our conceptual map of the world. In this instance it is to photography as art—as a medium of provocation—that we have turned in order to explore this capacity to elucidate that which is excluded and abject in the process of organisation. We have sought to bring to ‘light’ what, borrowing from Butler (1993), we might describe as the exclusionary matrix of organisation according to which particular ways of being are accorded subjectivity, while others are denied and rendered abject. As she describes it (1993: 3), This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed … requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects’, but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject designates here precisely those ‘unliveable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject. Art photography provides, we would argue, an example of the capacity of art to reveal that which is excluded or rendered abject within organisations. It makes visible that which is rendered invisible within the conceptually ordered episteme of organisational rationality. BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THE POSSIBLE 123 Perhaps more than this, however, it offers a capacity, by virtue of its form, to contextualise abjection, the desired but always incomplete exclusion of the Other. For although we drew on Kristeva’s account of abjection as a theoretical starting point, her work is not grounded in a sustained discussion of how either the perception or lived experience of abjection is shaped by power relations or processes of organisation involving ‘exclusions and hierarchies’. Indeed, one of the many limitations of her contribution is that it tends to conflate description with explanation; why certain phenomena come to be abject and not others remains largely unaddressed in her writing. In contrast, following Grosz (1990), Dale (2001) and others, our analysis has sought to illuminate the abject as contextually situated. Tunbjork’s images highlight the abject as a relational construct, situated in spatial and interpersonal as well as global power relations. Blankley’s work depicts abjection as also situated in time: the abject is old, worn out and ugly, in contrast to what is up-to-date, clean and therefore beautiful. The images highlight that from an aesthetic perspective, for an organisation to be legitimate, acceptable or healthy, it must feel and look ‘right’. Things (like birthdays) and crucially people who do not fit (such as Hulten who eventually ends up as office waste), must be managed and contained to avoid them seeping into and contaminating the dominant organisational order a desire which in itself is an ideological imperative, doomed to partiality. The photographs considered express, at both the symbolic and aesthetic levels of meaning, the centrality of abjection in the processes and imperatives of organisation. In so doing, they make visible the role of power relations in defining who or what becomes abject as well as offering insights into how that abjection is managed. In line with O’Neill and her colleagues (2002), we would argue, therefore, that works of art are in part ciphers of the social world, for in art we are able to access the ‘sedimented stuff’ of society [and of organisations]; ‘what is normally unseen/hidden/overlooked’ (O’Neill et al., 2002: 78). Through art, we are able to get in touch with our ‘realities’, our social worlds, and to an extent the experiences of others in ways that demand critical reflection, or at the very least are unsettling. Art photography and other visual material are significant in this sense because they represent not only a way into understanding the aesthetic dimension of organisation, but also a way of thinking about its often unspoken Otherness; that which while rendered abject remains integral to the lived experience of the organisational lifeworld. Of course, such proclamations about and enthusiasms for the critical capacity of art are in many respects severely limited. The images we have considered here are, of course, static and by definition are unable to capture any sense of the process of abjection; nor are they capable of revealing in any depth the lived experience of organisational abjection. To paraphrase Warren (2002), art photography can reveal very little of what it feels like to be abject at work. None the less, art’s capacity to communicate that which is ineffable renders it a powerful tool, not only of exposure, but also of critical engagement. As Emmison and Smith (2000) have noted, photographs can inspire an emotionally charged response to complacency and to exclusion. Art photography can lead us to raise questions about the ways in which our everyday experience of presence is underpinned by a conceptual rationality that limits our understanding to that which is made apparent to our consciousness. At the same time, as we have tried to illustrate here in our discussion of the work of contemporary photographic and video artists, it can also lead us to that underside of organisational life upon which the edifice ultimately rests. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS An earlier version of this paper was presented in the ‘Photo and Visual Images’ stream at The 2nd Art of Management and Organisation Conference, Paris 2004. We would like to thank 124 LAURIE COHEN et al. the stream conveners and participants, as well as the two anonymous reviewers of this revised version, for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions. We would also like to acknowledge and thank The Photographers’ Gallery, London for kindly granting us permission to reproduce the images in Figures 1–5. References Adorno, Theodor (1997) [1970] Aesthetic Theory, R. Hullot-Kentor (trans.) (London: Athlone Press). Adorno, Theodor and Benjamin, Walter (1999) The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, H. Lonitz (Ed.); N. Walker (trans.) (Cambridge: Polity). 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