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Essai: Organization/Literature

Paper Number 03/04

Steffen G. BöhmUniversity of Essex

Christian De Cock*

University of Exeter

Chris LandUniversity of Warwick

Abstract

This paper reappraises the relationship between the organizational and the literary andconsiders what this relationship might mean for the production of knowledge withinorganization studies. Although the use of literary concepts and theories within ourdiscipline is now well established, the way in which such ideas are taken up oftenneglects debate and contestation by treating ‘literature’ as a relatively homogeneousfield. This paper argues that what organization studies has most to gain from anengagement with literature is not so much a set of answers as a set of problems anddebates. By following some of these debates relating to issues of representation, realityand literature’s disclosure of its status as fiction, we find, almost paradoxically, adiscussion of organization at the heart of contemporary literary theory. Given thisapparent dependence of the literary on the organizational, the paper argues that anyattempt to learn from literature must recognise a fundamental undecidability, or aporia,at the heart of the relationship between the two fields. By exploring this aporia,however, there is a great deal that studies of organization can gain.

Keywords: organization, literature, aporia, representation, narrative

_________________________*Corresponding author details: School of Business and Economics, Streatham Court, Rennes Drive,Exeter, EX4 4PU. Telephone number: +44 (0) 1392 264423, email: C.de-Cock@ex.ac.uk

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ISSN 1473 - 2921

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Organization/LiteratureTo set us on our way, three epigraphs:

Literature, against which a good many sociologists have… thought necessary to define

themselves in order to assert the scientificity of their discipline…, is on many points more

advanced than social science, and contains a whole trove of fundamental problems... that

sociologists should make their own and subject to critical examination instead of ostentatiously

distancing themselves from forms of expression and thinking that they deem to be

compromising. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 208)

To reflect on literariness is to keep before us... reading practices elicited by literature: the

suspension of the demand for immediate intelligibility, reflection on the implications of means

of expression, and attention to how meaning is made and pleasure produced. (Culler, 1997: 41)

... if literature is all that stands between us and suicide, then we might as well commit suicide.

(Eagleton, 2003: 170)

Introduction

It is perhaps a commonplace that organization is not the dispassionate, rational,

technical phenomenon it was once (supposedly) assumed to be. Even that most rational

of organizational models – the bureaucracy – has been refigured not only as a

dehumanising machinery, productive of huge irrationalities (Ritzer, 1996; Bauman,

1989) but also as a specifically gendered phenomenon (Ferguson, 1984) and hotbed of

desire, passion and perversity (Burrell, 1997). Rather than a consummate rational

engineer or scientist, Frederick Taylor has become a monster of the organizational

imagination, tortured and driven by nightmares where he was trapped in the workings of

a huge machine; the result, an obsessive compulsive working out of his neuroses in the

organization of work. Studies of culture and organizational symbolism have alerted us

to the centrality of meaning in the constitution of organization (Frost et al., 1991; Martin

and Frost, 1996; Parker, 2000); thoroughgoing social-constructivists have refigured

technology as a textual phenomenon (Grint and Woolgar, 1997; Joerges and

Czarniawska, 1998); issues of identity, meaning and subjectivity have revolutionized

traditionally objectivist studies of the labour process (O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001);

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and it comes as no surprise to even the most instrumental of MBA students that

metaphors are central to understanding organization (Morgan, 1986).

Given these increasing concerns within the field of organization studies for all things

literary – meaning, metaphor, textuality, desire and pleasure – it should come as no

surprise that theorists of organization are turning to studies of literature for inspiration

and insight (for example, Czarniawska, 1998, 1999, O’Connor, 1995; Golden-Biddle

and Locke, 1993; Hatch, 1996; Monin et al., 2003; Rhodes, 2000; and Watson, 1995).

But how should we understand this relationship, this engagement of the organizational

and the literary? In tackling this question this paper tries to avoid the twin traps of

equivalence and antinomy: the propensity, in light of perceived commonalities, to

simply reduce organization to another form of textuality (and all texts to forms of

literature) on the one hand, and the insistence upon an unbridgeable chasm separating

the reality of the social sciences from the frivolity of fictions on the other. Whilst

recognising the specificities of organization it seems to us that there is nevertheless

much to be gained from a productive engagement with literary theory; not by simply

pillaging the realm of the literary, driving remorselessly from one author or text to

another, raiding them for what we organizational scholars seem to need without caring

much for their specific textures, but rather as a mutual dialogue or perverse exchange of

fluids with all its associated risks and dangers: academic debate as a kind of viral

contagion through passionate exchange. Perhaps this exchange may even dispel the

sense of impasse that seems to haunt both the organisational and literary fields.

Maybe boldness is lacking because we have reached our limits. Maybe there is nothing bold left

to say either about theory or through theory. (Weick, 1999: 803, in a special issue of Academy

of Management Review on theory building)

It has been apparent for some time that literary theory is in something of a cul-de-sac... It is as

though the theory is all in place, and all that remains to be done is run yet more texts through it.

(Eagleton, 2003: 135)

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Organization and Literature

As with organization studies, studies of literature have never been unified around a

single conception of the discipline; indeed since the intellectual upheavals of the 1980s

literary studies has become an increasingly contentious and contested field (Weber,

2001). For students of organization then there can be no simple matter of exploiting a

new theoretical field and picking off its useful bits. Rather, a rigorous engagement

necessitates a fresh look at ways of proceeding; seeing and learning from how

individuals and schools within this particular discipline have coped with different

theoretical and practical challenges. Thus part of our task is to see what group of

problems literary scholars have been wrestling with, more even than the answers they

have found, because their experience in formulating problems can teach us something

valuable. We should at all times beware of treating literary theory as a stable object, as

an entity to which we must remain faithful. Like the human identities which shape and

are shaped by literature and organization, neither of these fields is stable or unified. As

such, this engagement can best be described as a becoming where neither party exists

independent of their interrelations. Here is no centred guru, enlightened and ready to

share answers, but rather an arduous set of debates and uncertainties, rather like those

that characterise our own discipline. Of course, this doesn’t mean there is nothing to be

learned.

So what can organization learn from literature? In the first (and maybe the most

obvious) instance one can see that there is a certain literariness about organizational

texts, that “good [organizational] theory requires using many of the same methods as

good literature” (Elsbach et al., 1999: 633). Literary theorists have come to insist on the

importance in non-literary texts of rhetorical devices such as metaphor, which have

been thought crucial to literature but have often been considered purely ornamental with

respect to other modes of discourse. The study of basic narrative structures is one

example of the way in which models and categories that are initially drawn from the

study of literary works turn out to have wider implications and make possible

productive investigations of the relationship between literature and other ways of

ordering and representing experience (Culler, 1981/2001). A recent case in point is the

exchange between Oswick et al. (2002, 2003a, 2003b) and their critics (Heracleous,

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2003; Marshak, 2003) around the potential of the literary tropes of metaphor,

metonymy, synecdoche, irony, and paradox to inform organizational analysis. Such a

focus helps us to explore the settings or categories of habitual ways of thinking; shows

us how to think something that our language had not previously anticipated (e.g. by

suspending or redirecting the normal referentiality of language); forces us to attend to

the categories through which we unthinkingly view the world.

An attention to the literariness of organizational texts thus points to what can be called

the ‘literature of organization’. But the traffic is not all one-way. There is also value in

‘turning the tables’ so as to question the ‘organization of literature’:

Aren’t there special ways of organizing language that tell us something is literature? Or is it the

fact that we know something is literature what leads us to give it a kind of attention we don’t

give newspapers and, as a result, to find in it special kinds of organization and implicit

meanings? (Culler, 1997: 27)

Of course, to do so is already to unsettle the conventional bounds of ‘organization’ and

move beyond the restricted notions of organizations as social entities to a more general

problematic of the activity of organization. Here organization is not primarily a noun

but a verb that indicates the processual character of organizing (Cooper and Law, 1995;

Cooper, 2001; Cooper and Burrell, 1988). With such a focus certain properties of

literary works can be distinguished - their separation from practical contexts of

utterance, their fictional relation to the world - features that mark them as literature, but

with what could also be seen as the results of a particular kind of attention or

organization of text and reader: a function that we accord language by virtue of treating

it as literature.

The literariness of literature may thus lie in the interaction between the linguistic

material and readers’ conventional expectations of what literature is: a specific mode of

social organization. The perennial question ‘what is literature?’ matters, not because we

can expect a precise answer but because of what is highlighted by the attempt to answer

this question, by the walls we run into, by the impossibilities we encounter. When

considering the question of organization we are thrown back upon representational texts

that somehow slip free of their positivist moorings to engage readers as literary rhetoric.

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When considering the question of literature we are thrown back upon a mode of social

organization which includes material artefacts and texts - comfortable armchairs,

classical canons, departments of literature, reviews and commentary - until we are

forced to recognise that the ‘literary’ is an achievement of organization (Weber, 2001).

The undecidable oscillation between the two creates a set of impossibilities: an aporia.

But it seems that these impossibilities are rarely explored in organization studies.

Instead the impossibility of the literature/organization bind seems always already

organized by the desire to incorporate everything non-organizational into narrowly pre-

defined agendas. Take, for example, Knights and Willmott’s (1999) book Management

Lives, in which they try to use novels as an ‘aid’ for students to better understand

problems of organization and management. Here, literature is organized within a frame

of restricted concerns and organization theory is the primary function to which literature

must simply be adapted. This implies a notion of literature as superfluous and

ornamental but, significantly, also implies a notion of organization theory as fixed and

self-confident. As a response to this we would like to pose the possibility of exploring

the organization of literature not as a one-way street but as impossibility. It seems to us

that this impossibility does not point so much to organization and literature per se, as if

there is something essential in these categories, but to the aporia of their relationship: a

relationship that is nevertheless constitutive of both realms of activity. In the rest of this

paper we will attempt to delineate some elements, or outcomes, of this undecidable

relationship by examining moments of antinomy and equivalence between the

organizational and the literary. Through this exploration we point to the dynamic

tensions and incongruities that come from this aporetic relationship and thereby seek to

further an engagement between the organizational and the literary that seeks neither to

reduce one to the other, nor to privilege their separation.

Antinomies?

Organizational texts normally refer to the facts of ‘objective’ reality: processes,

hierarchies, resources, strategies, managers and employees etc. What these ‘normal’

discourses seem often to conceal, however, is their own fictionality. On the contrary,

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literary texts contain a range of signals to denote that they are fictive, the most obvious

and most durable of such signals being literary genres. These signals become significant

through particular, historically varying conventions shared by author and reader. In this

regard Iser writes:

The implications of fictionality’s self-disclosure are far-reaching. It is a commonplace that the

fictive is not confined to the literary text. Fictions also play vital roles in the activities of

cognition and behavior, as in the founding of institutions, societies, and world pictures. Unlike

such nonliterary fictions, the literary text reveals its own fictionality. Because of this, its function

must be radically different from that of related activities that mask their fictional nature. The

masking, of course, need not necessarily occur with the intention to deceive; it occurs because

the fiction is meant to provide an explanation, or even a foundation, and would not do so if its

fictive nature were to be exposed. The concealment of fictionality endows an explanation with

an appearance of reality, which is vital, because fiction – as explanation – functions as the

constitutive basis of this reality […] The reality represented in the [literary] text is not meant to

represent reality; it is a pointer to something that it is not, although its function is to make that

something conceivable. (Iser, 1993: 12-13)

Of course, the majority of organizational writing is also precisely “a pointer to

something that is not”. Whether in terms of best-practice prescription or critical

analysis, the aim of much writing on organization is to point away from the messy

reality of everyday organization toward a ‘better’ (more organized or equitable) world.

Even in the most vehemently realist of texts there is a desire that gazes outside to a

better (and entirely fictional) world. The operations are nevertheless distinct. In

disclosing itself, fictionality signals that everything is only to be taken as if it were what

it seems to be, to be taken – in other words – as play (rather than as representation).

Play does not have to concern itself with what it might stand for; nor does it have to

picture anything outside itself (Iser, 1989b).

Roland Barthes’ distinction between the écrivant (writer) and the écrivain (author) helps

to elucidate this point. The writer of organizational texts, be it an academic or

practitioner, is what Roland Barthes (1982) would call an écrivant. For the écrivant the

verb ‘to write’ is transitive. He posits a goal (to give evidence, to explain), for which his

writing is merely a means. For him language supports a praxis, it does not constitute

one. His writing is an instrument of communication. The écrivant’s writing can be

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produced and consumed only in the shadow of institutions which have, originally, an

entirely different function than to focus on language: the organization, scholarly

research, politics, etc. What defines the écrivant is the fact that his project of

communication is naïve: he considers that his work resolves an ambiguity, institutes an

irreversible explanation. For the écrivain or literary author, it is the other way around:

she knows that her writing, intransitive by choice, inaugurates an ambiguity. Reality

can never be anything but a pretext for her writing. Because the verb ‘to write’ is

intransitive for her, writing can never explain the world. That is why literature is

always unrealistic. However, this is not to dismiss its significance. As Barthes argues:

its very unreality permits it to question the world, though these questions can never be direct…

what he [the écrivain] obviously gains is the power to disturb the world, to afford it the dizzying

spectacle of praxis without sanction (Barthes 1982: 187-188).

Literary texts can hold together within a single space a variety of languages, levels of

focus, points of view, which would be contradictory in other kinds of discourse

organized towards a particular end. Mutually contradictory elements of the text are

enabled to coexist through the relations that are established amongst them. It is difficult

to describe the organization of these relations because the relational process does not

follow any predictable rules. Eco, for example, outlines the difference between his

theoretical texts and novels:

When I write a theoretical text I try to reach, from a disconnected lump of experiences, a

coherent conclusion and I propose this conclusion to my readers. If they do not agree with it, or

if I have the impression that they have misinterpreted it, I react by challenging the reader’s

interpretation. When I write a novel, on the contrary, even though starting (probably) from the

same lump of experiences, I realize that I am not trying to impose a conclusion: I stage a play of

contradictions. It is not that I do not impose a conclusion because there is no conclusion; on the

contrary, there are many possible conclusions (frequently each of them being impersonated by

one or more different characters). (Eco, 1992: 140)

For organizational scholars writing is a form of inquiry: the causal relations between

events are explained explicitly, rather than being implicit in the form of the narrative

itself: they “are in the situation of a judge: ... they attempt to prove that one explanation

is better than another [...and] set up the explanation itself as a problem in order to

submit it to discussion and to the judgment of an audience” (Ricoeur 1984: 175). The

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concept of ‘explanation’ helps Iser to describe literature ex negativo: “[L]iterature is not

an explanation of origins; it is a staging of the constant deferment of explanation” (Iser,

1989a: 245).

Literature, then, is a playful journey allowing us to conceive “that which is withheld

from us” (Iser, 1989b: 338). In this sense, ‘literature’ does not refer to books or literary

studies; it allows us to think of a way of stretching language to its limits.

D o es i t [ li ter at u r e] n o t c o n ti n u a ll y a tt em p t to s a y s o m et h i n g it c an n o t s a y , s o m e th in g t h a t i t

d o es n o t k n o w , a n d th at o n e co u ld e v er k n o w ? A th i n g c an n o t b e k n o w n w h en th e w o r d s an d

co n c ep ts u s ed to s ay it an d th in k i t h av e n o t y et b e en u s ed in t h a t p o s iti o n , n o t y et ar r a n g e d in

th at o r d e r , w i th t h at m ean in g . Th e s tr u g g l e o f lit er at u r e i s i n f a ct a s tr u g g l e t o es c ap e f r o m th e

co n f in es o f la n g u a g e; i t s tr et ch e s o u t f r o m t h e u t m o s t li m i ts o f w h at c an b e s aid ; w h a t s t ir s

li te r a tu r e is th e cal l an d a tt r ac ti o n o f w h at i s n o t i n t h e d i ct io n ar y . ( Ca lv in o , 1 9 8 7 : 1 8 )

Organizational texts on the other hand, by seeking to restrict themselves to factitious

expressions of knowledge, suppress this play with the unknown, unspeakable and

impossible. By concentrating on the possible, organization draws back from exploring

the impossibilities of life, of everything that extends and goes beyond human being.

Literature does not aim to produce knowledge in the sense that it mediates between

reality and cognition. Instead it brings imagination into play to produce truly impossible

worlds which defy capture by any language. Yet, a literary work should not be seen as

an ‘invention’ in the sense of something falsified or fabricated (Miller, 2002). Instead

literature points to a more archaic need for human beings to dwell in imaginary worlds.

Literature is not so much concerned with representation of the world, as with the

expression and creation of what is not yet, not present, or other than the actual. It gives

us other worlds and becomings. It does so, not by being a copy of the actual world, but

by extending the virtual tendencies of the given world (Colebrook, 2001). In other

words, literature gives us access to unique and alternative realities, or hyper-realities, as

Miller calls these imaginary worlds. This does not mean, however,

... that literary works are not tied to the real world. They use by displacement words that refer to

social, psychological, historical, and physical reality to name the hyper-realities they invent or

discover. Reading them…is a way of being in the material world. Literary works then re-enter

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the ‘real world’ in the effects, often decisive, they have on the belief and behavior of those who

read them. (Miller, 2002: 80)

By being attentive to the production of the real - including social behaviours and

institutions - the literary actively extends the material world. In doing so however it

casts a question over more conventional modes of writing as representation. The

political, analytical and critical potentialities of this (re)organization of the real through

the literary open up another set of difficulties around the relationship between literature

and narrative however.

Symptoms of Literature Returning in the Real

One of the key arguments of Jameson’s (1981) classic, The Political Unconscious, is

that it is narrative, story-forms and plots that play a dominant role in mediating

individual experience and social totality, according to a process of what Jameson calls

transcoding – the translating into an accepted code (which consists of certain narrative

patterns and expectations) of social and historical reality to make it accessibly mediated

for the individual. For example, since the eighteenth century novels have increasingly

worked to suggest that we achieve our true identity, if at all, in love and in personal

relations, rather than in public action, thereby reinforcing the separation of the public

and the private through the idea of the ‘liberal subject’: a purely individual subjective

essence, free of social determinants. Blurring commonsense distinctions between

reality, social ontology and fantasy we find linguistic fictions masking as referential

verities.

Like organization theory, literature can thus have diametrically opposed functions.

Literary works can seduce readers into accepting the hierarchical arrangements of

society or provide the place where ideology is exposed, revealed as something that can

be questioned. For long periods of time literature appears to work in favour of the

confirmation of values, the acceptance of authority. But at a certain moment something

is triggered and literature may give birth to a movement in the opposite direction,

refusing to see things and say things the way they have been seen and said previously.

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Of course, there are many literatures and their consumption as artefacts occupies a

number of different social institutions. The literary is performed not only in the text, but

within the textual relations of reading, writing, interpretation and criticism that

constitute the organization of literature. To ask essentialist questions of what literature

is would therefore be to reify a social relation as a fetish, not unlike the commodity

(Marx, 1976). But then such an interpretation is itself not simply theoretically naïve. It

is produced within the specific social relations of late capitalism. Indeed, the production

of narrative form can be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of

inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to irresolvable social contradictions (Jameson,

1981: 64; following Lévi-Strauss’s seminal characterization of mythic narrative as the

imaginary resolution of particular determinate real contradictions). For Jameson,

narrative is a key mode of mediating not only between the individual and society, but

also between the apparent fragmentation of society and the real totality1 underlying it.

Narrative provides comprehensiveness without reducing the elements of the text to

static or idealised elements. A story will link together all the protagonists, events,

descriptions, and other textual elements, and, as such, narrative is the place in fiction

that expresses the ‘unconscious’ totality (or linked-togetherness) of life most directly.

The narratives that mediate our existences (from the myths and stories we tell ourselves,

to the plot-lines of soap operas and novels) symbolically embody our social reality.

Literature inevitably refers back to and embodies the social and economic realities

within which it was produced; this is to say that literature is historically contingent.

To recognise that literature is shaped by history means that today no literature can be

thought outside social relations of capital. In other words, the narrative of the

commodity always already makes its presence felt in even the most fragmentary world.

Eagleton points to this strange complementariness between narrative and fragment in

Joyce’s Ulysses:

1 This refers to the Hegelian/Marxist notion that there is a social totality of which cultural forms are theexpression or symptom, so that to analyse them is to relate them to the social totality from which theyderive. Thus literature can be seen to be the symptom of underlying socio-political configurations.

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This ‘neverchanging everchanging’ world, as Ulysses has it, is one in which space seems both

fragmentary and homogeneous; and this is the appropriate space for the commodity, the

fragment of matter which levels all phenomena to a common identity. (Eagleton, 1990: 318)

What Eagleton thus shows is that, although today we are fully aware of the often

comical arbitrariness of the commodity or any other signifier, reality is being shaped by

these signifiers. In other words, even though social reality is characterised by a never

ending, antinomical, fragmentation; it is important to recognise that there are chains of

equivalences that do write the narratives of our lives. The commodity is such a narrative

that seems to be always already re-producing itself.

Two types of responses to the fragment/narrative paradox seem to be in fashion today.

The first one tries to radically go against any logic of narrative. For example, we often

say that we go against Hegel or Descartes, against the barbarian middle ages, or against

fundamentalism. But with such anti-narrativism we simply invert the logic of narrative

and replace it with the image of a world that is in total flux. In organization studies such

a response has become quite popular in recent years; let us just think of the fetishes of

flux, change, chaos, transformation, process and complexity that seem to be high on the

agenda of many researchers (Chia, 1999; Cooper and Law, 1995; Morgan, 1986;

Marion, 1999). But does the simple inversion of narrative not imply that there is no

history at all and by doing so actually reproduces dominant ideologies and conceptions

of history?

The second popular response is that of a re-introduction of narrative. In other words,

narrative is offered as a resolution of antinomies. Let us think, for example, of the call

for leadership (Kotter, 1990); or take the popular talk of a return to human values and

self-knowledge (Townley, 1995), which seem to have populated quite a few discourses

in organization studies. However, should it be really our aim to organise the

disorganised fragmentation of the world into another narrative, with all the traumas of

that world properly sutured? Both of these responses to the paradoxical relationship

between fragment and narrative, then, seem not to be able to disrupt history

fundamentally; instead they affirm, either directly or indirectly, popularly consumed

narratives of history. To this _i_ek responds as follows:

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The conclusion to be drawn from this is not that there is no history, since everything was already

here from the outset, but that the historical process does not follow the logic of narration: actual

historical breaks are, in anything, more radical than mere narrative deployments, since what

changes in them is the entire constellation of emergence and loss. In other words, a true

historical break does not simply designate the ‘regressive’ loss (or ‘progressive’ gain) of

something, but the shift in the very grid which enables us to measure losses and gains. (_i_ek,

1997: 13)

In other words, change and disjuncture are quite simply impossible to reconcile to a

narrative structure as they change the very organization of value that would enable

comparison across such breaks. Literary (and historical) narration, its disruption in

modernist anti-narrative fiction, and the relationship between these literary forms and

modes of social organization are complex and interdependent. Without a changing

constellation of reader, text and author(ity) the interpretation of modern literary forms

would be impossible. As it is, the separation of these forms from the simultaneous

deconstruction and re-articulation of ideology and socio-historical organization will

always be impossible. Neither should we be tempted by a simple reduction, however,

with literature serving an essentially conservative or revolutionary role. To make such

claims of essence independent of organization would be to miss the basic point about

the organization/literature relationship we have been trying to articulate in this paper.

History cannot be described by a narrative, as if there was a causal relationship between

a historical situation and a text. Instead the task of a text is to construct equivalences, to

limit a situation, to block off or shut down a certain number of possibilities of history

and therefore determine new ones. It is not a matter of enumerating causes of a given

text or form, but rather of mapping out its objective, a priori conditions of possibility

(Jameson, 1981). Literature presents possibility: not what actually happened but what

can happen (Miller, 2002). But this is also to say that the (im)possibility of literature

does not imply a history that is in constant flux without any unitary point of reference.

Such continuous production of difference would itself be “too homogeneous, too

monotonous, too undifferentiated. Pure difference, in short, is as blank and tedious as

pure identity, or pure narrative” (Eagleton, 1990: 356). Instead the (im)possibility of

literature is its ability to interrupt the empty and homogenous histories of both narrative

and anti-narrative. Its significance resides more in the effects and disruptions it

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produces than in offering a positive system of thought. In other words, by reading and

writing we do not interpret a world that has already been given (either as narrative or

anti-narrative). Instead, pace Jameson, interpreting a text means to interrupt the world

the way we know it and, by drawing on the impossibilities of the real, construct a new

world that defies known forms of language. To explicate this notion of interpretation it

is worth quoting Jameson at some length:

Still, we need to say a little more about the status of this external reality, of which it will

otherwise be thought that it is little more than the traditional notion of ‘context’ familiar in older

social or historical criticism. The type of interpretation here proposed is more satisfactorily

grasped as the rewriting of the literary text in such a way that the latter may itself be seen as the

rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext, it being always

understood that that ‘subtext’ is not immediately present as such, not some common-sense

external reality, nor even the conventional narratives of history manuals, but rather must itself

always be (re)constructed after the fact. The literary or aesthetic act therefore always entertains

some active relationship with the Real; yet in order to do so, it cannot simply allow ‘reality’ to

persevere inertly in its own being, outside the text and at distance. It must rather draw the Real

into its own texture, and the ultimate paradoxes and false problems of linguistics, and most

notably of semantics, are to be traced back to this process, whereby language manages to carry

the Real within itself as its own intrinsic or immanent subtext. Insofar, in other words, as

symbolic action is a way of doing something to the world, to that degree what we are calling

‘world’ must inhere within it, as the content it has to take up into itself in order to submit it to the

transformations of form. The symbolic act therefore begins by generating and producing its own

context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it, taking its measure with

a view toward its own projects of transformation. (Jameson, 1981: 66-67)

For Jameson, then, interpretation does not imply a reading of history the way it ‘really’

happened, or reading a literary text to uncover the ‘real’ intentions of its author. On the

contrary, to uncover the truth of a work of art, or a text, is to read its author as our

contemporary, which implies an interruption of the way a text has been interpreted so

far. The same text can make ‘sense’ in a variety of historical situations. As the sense

itself is capable of many variations, it follows that any one meaning is merely a limited,

pragmatic construction, not an exhaustive and objective datum. Interpretation thus

becomes a performance, a creation of a new world, a reading of history the way it has

never been read before. It is a continuous struggle with expression which has to do with

breaking through a chaos of clichés, common perceptions and ready-made

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representations (Lambert, 2002). Thus, it is no longer a question of establishing some

simple one-to-one correlation between two already existing entities, literature and

organization, but rather of showing how any given text knows lines of flight out beyond

itself, being apparently autonomous yet in its very structure carrying a kind of

referentiality, a movement out of itself to something else.

Whilst language in organization studies texts has been mainly regarded as constative

(represent things as they are, name things that are already there) literary theory

sensitises us to the performative dimension of language (an active, world-making use of

language, organizing the world rather than simply representing what is). The notion of

literature as performative conceives language directly as a form of activity, as

‘expressive behaviour’ embedded in a specific life form – we ‘do things with words’. It

contributes to a defence of literature: literature is not a collection of frivolous pseudo-

statements but takes its place among the acts of language that transform the world,

bringing into being the things that they name (Culler, 1997). Interpretation does not just

interpret a pre-existing reality; rather, it stands for its objects, creating and erasing them

at the same time. Interpretation thus points to a break with the symbolic order, a break

with history, a break with things the way they have always been. In other words,

interpretation puts into question existing chains of equivalence. However, this break

with history does not imply the end of history, the end of all equivalences; instead it

aims at creating a new history, new equivalences. Interpretation, or reading, then, is like

a disfiguration, or defacement, of history, which indeed is violent, as something is done

to historical texts, to existing social relations (Taussig, 1999). Paradoxically, if we

believe Paul de Man, “reading as disfiguration, to the very extent that it resists

historicism, turns out to be historically more reliable than the products of historical

archaeology” (1984: 123). In other words, reading should not be concerned with

attempting to uncover the particular meaning of a text – this would be the

archaeological approach. Instead it should disfigure the ‘original’ text beyond

recognition, that is, it should do something to the text – this is the performative

approach.

17

Constellations: Particularity/Universality

Whereas the narrative approach seems to point to a certain overdetermination of the

logic of universality, the archaeological approach seems to imply a fetishisation of

particularity. Literature can introduce us to a very different conception of the

relationship between universals and particulars than that prevalent in organization

studies: that the particular is something ranged beneath a universal as a mere example,

and the universal as a type under which the particular are ranged. For Jameson (2002:

182-183) the universal is a conceptual construction that can never know any empirical

embodiment or realization: all of its particulars are also specific and historically unique,

and the function of the universal in analysis is not to reduce them all to identity but

rather to allow each to be perceived in its historical difference. A literary work presents

itself as in some way exemplary, but it simultaneously declines to define the range or

scope of that exemplarity. The structure of literary works is such that it is often easier to

take them as telling us about ‘the human condition’ in general than to specify what

narrower categories they describe or illuminate – hence the ease with which readers and

critics come to speak about the ‘universality’ of literature:

Is Hamlet just about princes, or men of the Renaissance, or introspective young men, or people

whose fathers have died in obscure circumstances? Since all such answers seem unsatisfactory, it

is easier for readers not to answer, thus implicitly accepting a possibility of universality. In their

particularity, novels, poems, and plays decline to explore what they are exemplary of at the same

time that they invite all readers to become involved in the predicaments and thoughts of their

narrators and characters. (Culler, 1997: 36)

Therefore, instead of fetishising the particularity or universality of a literary work, we

should, perhaps, think of the event of literature as bringing forth a constellation - a

collection of particulars, or fragments - from an array of different textual and historical

contexts. Such particulars are pulled out of their ‘original’ narrative totality and thus

deprived of their intended functions (Bürger, 1984: 69). Hence a text cannot have a

universal meaning. This is to say that within a constellation, fragments of reality are

presented which constitute a break with narrative history but do not lead to mere

arbitrariness. Instead by “destabilising reality one opens the possibility of mimesis

between these particulars” (Eagleton, 1990: 356).

18

It is this mimesis between particulars, or fragments, which describes literature’s

performative, speculative principle: it does not produce arbitrary collections of

particulars floating in a never-ending stream of empty history. It constructs new

universalities in the sense of new worlds organized out of the fragments of shattered

narrative. Within a constellation particulars are deprived of their ‘original’ symbolic

value in order to suggest “an affinity with some other range of signifiers” (ibid.). Within

literary constellations, new chains of equivalences are constructed that defy

understanding within conventional frames of narrative identities. Instead these universal

equivalences are organised, or fabricated, within a space of antinomies, things that do

not ‘originally’ belong to each other but are juxtaposed within the organization of

reading. Such conception of constellation gives no comfort to a totalising symbol, to the

meaning of a literary text. Instead the significations of literature need to be actively

organised, not within a narrative and history, but across different narratives, histories

and realities.

In Conclusion…

This paper has considered afresh the question of the relationship between organization

and literature that has recently come to preoccupy so many organizational theorists (e.g.

Czarniawska, 1999; Czarniawska-Joerges and Guillet de Monthoux, 1994; De Cock,

2000; Knights and Willmott, 1999; Rhodes, 2001). Whilst many of these authors seek to

learn from ‘literature’ or ‘literary theory’ conceived as a distinct domain or entity,

which can be mined for scarce resources that will enable us to theorise ‘organization’

more effectively, it has been our argument that this approach falls down on two points.

In the first instance it fails to recognise the ambiguity and uncertainty of debates falling

within the rubric of ‘literary theory’. In this sense we should no more hope to find

answers to our problems in this most enlightened of the humanities than we should in

the other resources of social theory, philosophy and cultural studies that have been the

target of previous raiding parties of organizational theorists (Cooper and Burrell, 1988;

Hassard and Holliday, 1998; Smith et al., 2001). If we simply see literature as the

repository of the truth of human language that organization studies tends to overlook,

19

and that therefore has to be called to mind from time to time, we assign it the task of

confirming what is already known, or maybe of titillating us in a naive and rudimentary

way. Instead we have argued that what is interesting about the literary (and we might

say the same for these other discursive fields) is their processes of problematisation -

their sticking points and blockages - rather than their proposed solutions. It is when we

start to consider some of the more problematic debates currently striating the fields of

the literary that we come across a set of difficulties revolving around the issue of

organization. The meaning of a literary text, and even its literariness, is the product of at

least two distinct organizations. On the one hand there is the organization of language

which reveals itself as literary and fictional. On the other hand there is the social

organization of the activity of reading and interpretation which is simultaneously

produced by the physical, socio-historical context of the text, and by the content of the

text as a self-proclaimed fiction which organizes both text and reader in a certain

relationship. At the same time, of course, literature has the potential to unsettle and

revolutionise, or to reinforce, those very organizations that give it meaning.

This complex of nested ‘organizations’ that arise as problems in the very moment of

trying to define the essence of ‘the literary’ point to the second main stumbling block

for attempts to marry the insights of literature to the organizational. Their interrelations

are already so well established that we find they are not as distinct as we first thought.

Seeking illumination for our profane realm of organization we begged entry to the

sacred temples of literature and found the prophets discussing - organization! It is this

impossibility of clear separation that we have characterised as ‘aporetic’. Given the

undecidability of the organization/literature relationship this paper has pointed instead

to a series of common articulations of a problematic which might paradoxically raise the

importance and estimation of studies of organization, rather than subordinating our

discipline to an older and wiser, more revered humanity. But we are certainly not

encouraging such a simple inversion. Whilst organization is doubtless at the heart of the

literary, so literature is found (albeit repressed) at the heart of the organizational. It

seems that this is a différance we will have to learn to live with.

20

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