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Affect in Organization & Management
Edited by
Carolyn Hunter ORCID ID 0000-0001-7010-0291
Nina Kivinen ORCID ID 0000-0001-6023-3680
Table of contents:
Series note
List of contributors
1. Introduction: Affect in Organization and Management
Carolyn Hunter and Nina Kivinen
2. Sara Ahmed: A Return to Emotions
Bontu Lucie Guschke, Jannick Friis Christensen and Thomas Burø
3. In the worlding of Kathleen Stewart: Daydreaming a conversation with ‘SHE’
Silvia Gherardi
4. In the web of the spider-woman: Towards a new cosmopolitics of familiarity and kinship
in organization (Donna Haraway)
Lindsay Hamilton
5. Jane Bennett: Marvelling at a world of vibrant matter
Justine Grønbæk Pors
6. Becoming with Barad: A material-discursive-affective conversation
Noortje van Amsterdam, Katrine Meldgaard Kjær and Dide van Eck
7. Corporeal ethics in the more-than-human world (Rosalyn Diprose)
Veera Kinnunen
Index
1
Introduction: Affect in Organization & Management
Carolyn Hunter, ORCID ID 0000-0001-7010-0291
Nina Kivinen, ORCID ID 0000-0001-6023-3680
Scholars of organizations are increasingly interested in everyday experiences through the study
of embodiment and the lived body (see e.g. Hancock and Tyler, 2009, Pullen and Rhodes,
2015; Fotaki and Daskalaki, 2021; Harding et al., 2021). Many have turned to the recent work
on affect to understand the multiplicity of our identities at work, as employees, managers, co-
workers and consumers, are entangled with the world around us. Organizations may shape or
move us, impacting upon our bodies and our sense of self (Shilling, 2012). When you walk
into a workplace, you can gain a sense of this space of work, the people who work there and
the artefacts and objects of that organization (Dale and Burrell, 2008). Entering a room, there
are expectations and histories; multiple different ways of sensing the atmosphere of the room,
the intensities between bodies and non-human objects. Take for example an organization with
a fun culture: those objects we encounter may encourage us to have fun, to tell jokes, to feel
and demonstrate emotions such as happiness (Hunter, 2022). There may be expectations to
experience organizational life in prescribed ways, although of course, the expected and the
actual experience of employees may widely differ. To study the world of organizations,
therefore, is to appreciate the connectedness with the world and to recognise the entanglements
of the human, non-human and more-than-human in organizational life. It is this focus on affect
being located in situated relationships with others, both human, non-human, and more-than
human that this book explores.
Why affect, and what is it anyway?
Affect occurs in the encounters and relationships between objects and persons, where the
encounter impacts and shapes bodies, surfaces and subjectivities. Affect is frequently
introduced through a Spinozian perspective, where one is simultaneously affected and affecting
(Massumi, 2015). An example could be an encounter with an object strongly associated with a
memory, where the touch, sight, smell or taste of the object may draw out sensations. Our
favourite childhood food, the sound of sirens in the middle of the night, the colours of a
painting, the smell of an old book. The body is both materially and socially constructed through
these interactions, just as its presence constructs other meanings (Turner, 1992). Consider an
illustrative example of an organizational encounter: a moment of conflict with another staff
member while having a break in the staff kitchen. Even though employees ought to be positive
and happy in this organization, and the kitchen is decorated to reflect this attitude, an argument
occurs with raised voices. At that moment, the heart beats a little faster, and breathing increases.
There is a tense atmosphere in the kitchen (Michels & Steyaert, 2017; Marsh, & Śliwa, 2022).
In this encounter, there is an entanglement of bodies, objects, feelings and atmosphere, and it
is this moment of affect where decisions are made, politics are played out and identities like
leader, manager and employees are enacted (Kenny, 2012).
2
Another way to understand affect is as an intensity, the sense of movement that occurs in an
interaction. Intensities are embodied feelings, sensed through an impact that we may struggle
to articulate or express (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). Writers on affect may attempt to express
the situated, relational and embodied through various methodologies including art-based
methods, ethnographies or situated interviews (Kahl, 2020). Returning to the encounter in the
kitchen, entering the space after the argument draws out a new but similar intensity: the sense
of smell, sound and sight of the space bringing back a sense of tension. Affect also involves
crossing a threshold, engaging with an object and memories associated with the object alters
as an intensity is experienced (Massumi, 2015). The moment moves us, and then the intensity
may drop or change, even though the moment of the argument has passed. It may still affect
our future behaviour, for example, refraining from using the kitchen to avoid the person. As
such, affect helps us understand the moment but also our understanding of the past and the
future expectations of organizational life (see e.g. Kenny & Fotaki, 2014 for an overview of
affect at work from a psychosocial perspective, and Fotaki et al., 2017 on how affect has in
general been approached in management and organization studies).
Affect expands our understanding of organizations and work through the ways that moments
shape our experiences, relationships and corporeality. Studying affect presents a shift to the
emotive, unknowable and beyond-rational, however, it also asks us to question the very
distinction between emotional and rational to recognise their entanglement (Khan, 2020). In
the example of the conflict with a co-worker discussed above, affect is at once emotional,
embodied and cognitive, all in the moment of the interaction. There is some debate about the
difference between affect and emotion (see chapter 2 on Sara Ahmed by Bontu Guschke,
Jannick Christensen & Thomas Burø in this book), where affect involves a way of knowing
and being part of the world. Those authors interested in emotions from this perspective, such
as Sara Ahmed, argue that emotions do not derive just from an inner state, but instead are part
of our engagement with the world around us. Other writers on affect focus more on our
entanglement with the world and objects, such as Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett, asking us
to recognise the importance of non-human objects and bodies in these relationships. Finally,
writers on affect like Rosalyn Diprose also suggest that viewing the world as interconnected
and inter-relational, opens up new questions around how these relationships fix us into certain
places or free us to see the world in different ways.
Affect focuses on our relations with the world around us, and of specific interest for this book,
organizations. Organizations shape all types of encounters: they create expectations of how
employees will feel, think, act, dress and speak. Organizations have a wide range of intended
and unintended consequences for society and the environment. Reflecting a range of
dimensions and perspectives on affect (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010), this book explores how
subjects and agency are formed through their connections and entanglements with others, both
human, and the non- or more-than-human. To study affect, therefore, calls on researchers in
management and organization studies to explore a range of bodies in and around
organizations. Non-human bodies, organizational spaces and objects can all play equally as
3
important roles in affect as human bodies, a viewpoint that questions the anthropocentric
tendencies of much of organizational scholarship.
Affect in management and organization studies
Affect has entered management and organization studies through some powerful papers
published over the last few years (Vachhani, 2012; Kenny, 2012; Thanem & Wallenberg, 2015;
Ashcraft, 2017; Fotaki et al., 2017; Pullen et al., 2017). These papers draw in particular on
feminist thinking and for these authors affect enables the acknowledgement of a destabilised
subject and the entanglement of the human, non-human and more-than-human, in particular
drawing upon the work of thinkers such as Haraway and Bennett. Affect allows for a different
subjectivity to emerge and through this an embodied and lived ethics (Dale and Latham, 2014).
Since the publication of the first papers, a small but growing interest can be seen.
Within the field of organization and management affect is acknowledged as being political
(Pullen et al., 2017). Empirically affect has been studied in particular in the creative industries
and the arts, politically offering different ways of inhabiting organizations (see e.g. Bell &
Vachhani, 2020; Hoedemaekers, 2018; Leclair, 2022; Michaels & Steyaert, 2017). Affect
allows for new ways to understand creativity and the creative process not as the work of an
individual creative genius but as encounters that create unique and new constellations in the
everyday which allows ideas to emerge. Affect has also provided new insights into studies of
the dark sides of organizations, as well as resistance, where affect can be politically used to
restrain, control and manage (see e.g. March & Sliwa, 2021; Vachhani & Pullen, 2019). For
example, Ashcrafts (2017) critique of excellence and resistance in organization studies
advocated for an inhabited criticism that acknowledges affective experience and presents an
alternative posture of resistance. Here affect can help us understand the engagements of power,
and the profound impact destructive organizational practices have on our understanding of self
and others (see e.g. van Amsterdam, et al., 2022; Pouthier & Sondak, 2021). Affect works as a
force to create collective solidarity and resistance, shifting the focus from individual
experiences to affective solidarity through feminist activism (Vachhani & Pullen, 2019; also
Baxter, 2021).
Most importantly perhaps, questions around affect have empowered researchers to rethink their
practices of doing research and of academic writing (see e.g. Gherardi, 2019; Otto & Strauß,
2019; Beyes & Steyaert, 2019). Affect encourages us to ask new questions, and to approach
research in an embodied, ethical way that aims to capture ephemeral encounters and
entanglements of human, non-human and more-than-human. For this, we need new practices
that allow for affect to emerge. Writing differently is a crucial form of doing affect that allows
for vulnerabilities to be visible, destabilising the writing subject and revealing the entanglement
in which we are bound (see e.g. Pullen, 2018; Kivinen, 2021) and as such stands against a
masculine rationale that still prevails in academia.
4
Women writers on affect
Many of the women writers selected for this collection focus their writing on affect, with an
interest to develop a specific area that addresses our understanding of lived experience and our
connections to others, such as race, feminism, the everyday and ethics. Other writers in this
collection tend to discuss affect as a background concept, as a conceptual tool within which
they can explore embodiment, non-human objects and materiality. The chapters present new
ways of discussing organizational life: Sara Ahmed, through emotions and race, Kathleen
Stewart on affective moments and atmospheres, Jane Bennett on new materialism, Karen Barad
on entanglement, Donna Haraway on more-than-human affect and Rosalyn Diprose on
corporeal ethics. Feminism is a core feature of all their work, highlighting feminist writing with
affective, connected and intersubjective possibilities. Focusing on publications by women
writers on affect over the last 30 years, this book highlights ongoing debates about how
organizations and work are constituted through everyday interactions which shape subjects,
materials and the more-than-human.
We felt that a collection on women writers on affect was timely in this series, as affect offers a
multiplicity of new perspectives and methodologies for researchers to explore, drawing on
feminist critique and extending the discussion of affect as political. The debates discussed
above often tie into other themes explored in the first five books in this series. The first
connection is that of questioning our taken for granted normative approaches to studying
organizations. This includes the work of writers like Hochschild (Ward, 2019), Höpfl
(Karayiannis and Kostera, 2019), Douglas (Simpson and Hughes, 2020) and Irigaray
(Vachhani, 2020) who question in various ways the view of organizations as neutral, de-
political, and separate from emotion. This collection on affect also breaks down the binary of
rationality and emotion through the analysis of affect as a way of knowing. The second theme
which connects the series is an analysis of power. Examples of previous chapters include
writing about activists such as the suffragette Garrud to explore embodied power (Kelly, 2019)
and theorists such as bell hooks who challenge notions of power and race (Liu, 2019).
Importantly Haraway also raises critiques of ethnocentricisim in organization studies, through
the assumptions of universality which benefit the powerful while ignoring others (Prasad,
Segarra and Villanueva 2020). We return to the work of Haraway in this book to explore power
relations between the more-than-human. The series also opens up issues around ethics, where
Butler (Harding, 2020) contributes towards understanding ethics as relationality and Berlant
(Kenny, 2022) discusses cruel optimism as a way that affect becomes structured into inequality.
We develop these themes by discussing how affects can empower and exclude, as well as
provoke ethical questions of our interconnectedness with others. The third connection is that
of feminism. An especially relevant connection is the writer Sedgwick (Taalas, 2019) who
draws heavily on affect theory in her writing about queering and productive shame as a way to
challenge normativity. This collection extends these debates on shame, queering and feminism
through Ahmeds work on normativity in affective demands and also on queering writing as a
form of writing differently (Taalas, 2019). This presents questions about how we can
understand difference through experiences such as affect.
5
This collection on women writers on affect is the sixth book in the series and adds to the
discussion in the other five texts in this series by understanding how power, gender and ethics
present themselves through complex connections formed around workers and organizations.
Critically it adds to the commentary on other women writers in organization studies at the level
of everyday moments, understanding the contribution that relatively recent female writers on
affect are having on management and organization studies. Following the aim of this series aim
to explore and celebrate women writers, this book draws together different perspectives on
affect as an emerging discussion. The writers selected for this collection make an important
contribution to the field of affect: many of them were early thinkers whose use of affect inspired
academics across not only the social sciences but also humanities and the sciences. In addition,
many of them make profound insights related to feminist, queer, more-than-human and anti-
racist approaches to the study of organizations.
The researchers and scholars who write in this collection are experts on affect and we are so
grateful for their wonderful contributions. The collection opens with Bontu Guschke, Jannick
Christensen & Thomas Burøs discussion of Sara Ahmeds work on affect. As the authors point
out, Ahmeds work questions the very distinction between emotions and affects, and indeed is
critical of how hierarchies emerged between emotions and affect. Ahmed asks what do
emotions do or how are we affected by emotions in our interactions with others. Emotions
are seen as sticky, in that, as affect is experienced and described through emotions, these
emotions become connected to various people and objects. Bontu Guschke, Jannick
Christensen & Thomas Burø draw out the importance of normativity in Ahmeds work,
exploring how power relations in organization set up the expectation of emotions and affect.
One of Ahmeds contributions is analysing societal patterns of privilege through affect,
especially in the fields of feminist, anti-racist, and queer studies. Her work demonstrates how
affects shape us, open up or close down possibilities to us and reproduce patterns of privilege
through opportunities and disadvantages. Within organization studies, Ahmeds work has been
critical to the study of whiteness, exclusion, diversity and difference and queering. The chapter
concludes with a reflection of what her work could mean for academia in questioning
normativity and providing new ways of thinking about resistance and activism.
In Chapter 3, Silvia Gherardi shifts the discussion of affect back to the personal, through a
fictional conversation dreamt with Kathleen Stewart. Stewarts work introduces affect through
an exploration of the everyday, played out in several observations of being in the world. The
writing in this chapter intertwines affect as theory and affect as experience, using collage as an
approach to writing differently, writing with the text as opposed to writing about it. Gherardi
explores how affect through troubling the reader as they engage with the daydream as a
performative text. In entering a conversation with Stewarts work, this explores affect in the
relations between human and non-humans, as both material and also more than the physical
characteristics. It also comments on affect within ethnographic work, as part of the daily
rhythms of everyday life. In doing so, affect emerges as an important way in which we are
shaped as subjects. In organization studies, exploring ordinary affects can open up powerful
ways of understanding, or attunement to the qualities of organizational life, of being sensitive
to fieldwork research and of writing about organizations.
6
Moving from the personal to the material, Lindsay Hamilton introduces Donna Haraways
writing on the more-than-human. In her cyborg manifesto, Haraway sets out a radical
approach to understanding human interactions with non-human machines and non-human
animals. Enacting a feminist critique, her work presents a cyborg as a fictional hybrid of
machine and organisms that form our social reality. Her later work has also been influential in
critical animal studies and the decentring of the human subject. For organization studies,
Haraways work highlights in particular the complex relationships between people and
technology and provides tools for understanding the agency of hybrid forms of working
subjects (see also Prasad et al., 2020 on the notion of passionate detachment). Lindsay
Hamilton draws on Haraways concept of blasphemy as category deviance to ask how we
organise ourselves, animals and matter to privilege certain forms of knowledge. To open up
other possibilities, Haraway returns to kinship as an alternative way to relate through the
concept of becomings. The affectual connections of kinship enable us to relate to others,
human and non-human, in a form of non-optional reciprocity. For organizational scholars,
realizing our connectedness, we can consider feeling out these boundaries and connections to
explore how they sustain different social relations, and where we may want to challenge or
compost them into new ways of relating.
Also drawing on our connections to the world around us, Jane Bennetts work is then
considered by Justine Pors, who asks how affective states of wonder and enchantment can be
explored through the vibrancy of matter. Justine Pors demonstrates how in Bennetts work
everyday encounters can be experienced through an enchanting affect, where through our
relationships with others and objects we are moved into a state which can hold both joy and
pain, through rhythms and a sense of suspension. This being in the world focuses on our
embodied presence which connects to materials and others, which are assembled into
sometimes unexpected combinations. Bennett would describe this as vibrant matter, or the
ways in which materiality can be part of an assemblage that may move us. Folding back onto
the previous chapters in this series, Bennetts work and other contributions to new materialism
may offer a way for organization scholars to understand affect, embodiment and materiality,
opening up questions around intersubjectivity and ethics of organised being.
Chapter 6 also put into practice the concept of writing differently, entangling Karen Barads
theory on connectedness with the Noortje van Amsterdam, Katrine Kjaer and Dide van Ecks
personal reflection on writing about and living through enacting affect theory. Human and non-
human bodies and discourses come together in what Barad would refer to as inter-action: of
entanglement of words, theory, emotions, animals, technology, objects and affects. In
particular, the chapter draws out the importance of relationality in Barads work, especially in
relation to feminist community. Shifting between a personal and academic tone, the chapter
explores what it means to be an academic writing on organizations. Through this, it extends
what may be possible in our study of organizations and ethical responsibility that comes from
always / already being entangled. Organization in this chapter is not separate from the
7
everyday but embedded in affect explored through travel, pets, academia, and sensations of
shame.
Ethics draws together the work of many of the women writers in this collection, and as a result
the final chapter in this collection focuses on how we can revisit our concept of ethics in
organizations. Rosalyn Diproses work, discussed in Chapter 7 by Veera Kinnunen, elaborates
on this link, exploring how ethics can be formed through our interactions with others rather
than as a universal moral code. Women writers explored in this series such as Ahmed, Bennett
and Stewart argue that experiencing affect is important because it locates us within the world,
connecting us to others, both human and non-human (see also the chapters on Barad and
Haraway). Through these experiences, we can be unsettled, disrupted and become exposed to
alternative ways of being. For example, Ahmed uses this principle to explore affect and race;
Bennett to explore how wonder might shake us from predictable paths, and Stewart to elaborate
on how everyday moments unsettle us. Diprose argues that this interconnectedness and
unsettling affect opens us to new experiences, and in doing so can present an opportunity for
generosity towards those who are different to ourselves, which challenges many mainstream
notions of business ethics and ethics in the workplace.
These chapters present not only an introduction to the six women writers on affect and their
current impact on organizational studies, but also the potential unmapped routes on affect
theory which could be taken. Many of the chapters present thought-provoking potential
directions to be explored. The need for new ideas and research is acute in organization studies,
where viewing the world in different ways may help to address issues of global environmental
crises, organizational ethics and inequality, fair treatment, and new ways to lead and manage
organizations. Underpinned by feminism, the work of these women writers on affect brings a
more inclusive view of how we can relate to others in a more than human world. Rather than
being a definitive answer on what is affect or what is important in the field, we hope that this
collection acts to provoke new possibilities and ways of enacting organizations.
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1
Sara Ahmed: A Return to Emotions
Bontu Lucie Guschke, ORCID ID: 0000-0002-8810-5207
Jannick Friis Christensen, ORCID ID: 0000-0003-4387-793X
Thomas Burø, ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7076-3853
Abstract
Sara Ahmeds work on affect and emotion is gaining growing attention from organization
scholars. This chapter considers some of Ahmeds main concepts as analytical tools for
engaging with affect and emotion in organization studies. Looking backward as well as
forward, it discusses the theoretical influences that have inspired her work on affect and asks
what Ahmeds conceptual work allows us to do within organization studies. The chapter
concludes with an invitation, or demand even, to question our own orientations, attunements,
and affective commitments as scholars and members of organizations, namely academic
institutions. Two main points are put forth: First, the authors highlight Ahmeds contribution
in the fields of feminist, anti-racist, and queer studies to argue that her scholarship links
normativity and emotion, which makes it possible to investigate affect in relation to
organizational norms and power structures. Second, her work is discussed as a (re)turn to
emotion rather than part of an affective turn, critically emphasizing a potential implication of
the affective turn, namely that it creates a distinction that privileges affect at the expense of
emotion. To assume their separation, and then claim novelty in a turn toward affect, would
imply a problematic mindbody dichotomy, which Ahmeds work avoids by understanding
affect and emotion as mutually implicated. The chapter accordingly highlights Ahmeds focus
on how emotions circulate socially: what they do rather than what they are.
Introduction, or There are happy babies all over my Instagram feed
Imagine you have a friend who wants a happy baby. Eventually, your friend manages to have
a baby, presumably a happy one. You have seen countless pictures of her happy baby on
Instagram. When you meet your friend, her baby is crying in the stroller. Your friend says, He
is not usually like this. Usually he is happy. She comments on his being unhappy: He is out
of character. According to Sara Ahmed, who uses the happy baby example in Willful Parts:
Problem Characters or the Problem of Characters (2011), this raises at least three problems.
First, what does it mean to be happy? Second, what does it mean that the baby is usually happy?
Third, what does it mean to be out of character? We start this chapter, in which we introduce
some of Ahmeds work, by exploring these questions, which we consider to be heuristic in
illuminating her contribution to affect and organization. We examine some of her main
concepts, specifically will and willfulness, as well as those of affect community, mood and
moodwork, attunement, and alignment. Functioning as a conceptual basis, they allow us to
answer the above questions by explaining how happiness works as a demand. Moreover,
unpacking these concepts enables us to identify their precursors by presenting the conceptual
influences that have inspired Ahmeds work.
2
The remainder of the chapter dives deeper into Ahmeds conceptualizations around affect and
emotion, putting forth two main points. We present Ahmeds conception of diversity work as
moodwork to illustrate how emotions circulate in organizations. This illustration allows us to
highlight how her scholarship links emotion with normativity, which, in turn, makes it possible
to investigate affect in relation to organizational norms and power structures. Further, we
suggest that her work can be understood as a (re)turn to emotion rather than part of an affective
turn per se, as, according to Ahmed (2014b, 208), emotion and affect are inextricably linked:
Emotions, in other words, involve bodily processes of affecting and being affected, or to use
my own terms, emotions are a matter of how we come into contact with objects and others.
In the way we structure the chapterworking our way through the different concepts she
develops in relation to emotions and affect rather than starting with one clear definition or
conceptualizationwe aim to do justice to Ahmeds focus on how emotions circulate socially:
what they do more than what they are (Gorton, 2007). Finally, we introduce a few recent
examples of how Ahmeds work has been taken up and put to use by organization scholars,
before ending the chapter with our own reflections on where (else) Ahmeds authorship may
take us.
Happy people are good peoplehappiness as a demand
Ahmed claims that happiness is a normative state of being (Ahmed, 2011). To be happy is a
demand. Happiness is something everyone, babies included, ought to be and try to become if
they happen not to be happy. Happiness is thus considered a state of being that one can choose,
an act of volition. It is, moreover, a state of being that one is expected to inhabit commonly;
usually one ought to be happy. Ahmeds conception of happiness as a state of being to which
one can set ones mind is coupled with the concept of the willful subject. Conceptually, will
relates both to the individual persons ability to be someone who willsor, more precisely,
who is willing to wantwhat one ought to will and want, and to the individual who is strong
or stubborn enough to will otherwise, thus willful (Ahmed, 2014c, 133). Willingness is the
product of subjectification, the processes through which someone (a baby) becomes an
individual person (this baby) equipped with ideas, practices, standards, norms, and a relation
to self. We learn to will certain objects that are desirablesuch as good looks, a big house,
decent payand, at the same time, we learn to think for ourselves. Character is the ascribed
property of a person who wills as everybody (the imagined norm) wills, that is, someone who
has used their faculty for volition to direct their orientation toward what they are expected to
willin this case, happiness. To be out of character, then, simply means that one does not will
what everybody wills.
Happiness functions as a penultimate positive feeling. It is emblematic of the good life, and it
is difficult to imagine that it is not worth striving for. Why would anyone not choose at least to
try to be happy? If someone told you that they wanted to be happy, it would, nowadays, be
seen as odd if you asked to know why or to doubt their ambition. Etymologically, happy is
an adjective constructed from hap, which means chance. In earlier times happy meant
good fortuneand not only in English. The same holds true across many other languages,
including German, in which the word for happy (glücklich) relates to Glück, which means
luck. The Danish lykke comes from the Low German lucke and gelucke, referring to fate and,
literally, ones lot (lod in Danish) in life. In pre-modernity, therefore, happiness is a chance
operation (Brinkmann, 2020). It happens. Happiness is the emotional state of being of those
3
who are, fortunately, smiled upon by fate. But in neoliberal postmodernity, happiness is not
considered random or a result of good fortune; it is seen as a choice, a matter of will (Ahmed,
2009, 2; 2010b: 29/ch.1). The idea is that if you work hard enough, anything can be made to
happen; consequently, if you put in the labor, you can even conquer your own happiness.
Happy becomes another word for successful and successful another word for good.
Happy people, it seems, are good people. The notable point is that, when we think of happiness
as a norm, we are invited to ask: What happens when you are not happy, and how is happiness
enforced?
Affect community, mood, attunement, and alignment
There is a general point to take away from the example of happiness as a normative state of
being. Ahmed claims that happiness is not the only demanded emotion, as any given emotion
can become normative insofar as a context, such as an organization, requires that its members
attune their being to align with certain emotions (Ahmed, 2014a; 2014b). That some emotions
are more contextually proper than others is perhaps well known to most people who have
worked in an organized setting; with Ahmed, we can claim that part of an organizational
structure is the emotional architecture, those states of being that dominate and are promoted as
desirable. Some organizations are even defined by their emotions. The UK parliament, for
example, would not be the same without MPs loudly expressing their immediate feelings about
each others speeches. Soldiers would be of little use for warfare if they did not learn how to
hate (or at the very least not love) their enemies. And even rational algorithms used for
trading at the worlds stock exchanges may behave like hysterical bitches (Borch, 2020).
Generally, if we examine any organization critically, we will most likely find that part of its
informal power relations, if not part of its formal structure, is a set of emotions that
organizational members are supposed to embody and express.
To conceptualize how the normativity of emotionsand, in particular, the happiness
demandfunctions, Ahmed offers four interrelated concepts: affect community, mood,
attunement, and alignment. Imagine an organizational context in which a certain set of
emotions is considered to be the norm. For simplicity and for the sake of argument we will
stick with happiness. Group members connect and relate to each other through a shared
affective state of being happy, and the community expresses itself in the form of a collective
happy mood. As we become part of an affect community, we share its happy mood; we get
caught up in feelings that are not our own[m]oods become almost like companions (Ahmed,
2014a, 15). We attune to the mood of the community; we adjust our affective state of being to
align with the communitys normative affects. Attunement is a concept for thinking how, at
the level of being, we come to resonate with the general mood of the affect community. At the
same time, attunement describes a requirement for community membership. For you to pass as
part of a communityor organizational memberyour manner of being affected has to be
aligned with the right way of being affected. Aligning in the right way, not only as being with,
but being with in a similar way (Ahmed, 2014a, 16), requires affective labor (see also
Hochschild, 1983).
Performing affective labor, or moodwork, is demanded especially of those who are deemed as
late arrivals to the scene. Think of the new organizational member, still a stranger, who is meant
4
to integrate into the workplace. They are expected to align with the general happy mood. If
they are unhappy, they are not attuned. Being estranged from happiness renders them a stranger
(Ahmed, 2021). Affectively non-aligned individuals, such as the sulky or somber musician in
the orchestra at your big happy wedding, stand out. To be in the mood is a requirement for
fitting in and passing as a member. Ahmed suggests that a shared mood functions as an
affective lens that makes the world appear to us and affect us in certain ways (Ahmed, 2014a,
14). To illustrate this point, think of a married same-sex couple at the big happy heterosexual
wedding, spoiling the good mood (Ahmed, 2008b, 6) and being seen as troublemakers when
alienated by the neat male-female seating arrangement (see e.g., Basner et al., 2018). Affect in
this case is not an empirical object as much as a matter of investigating the actions that emotions
perform, including what effects follow from them (Ahmed, 2004). Breaking with the shared
affective lens threatens the ability to be part of, and easily becomes an enforcement
mechanism for aligning to, the affect community.
Conceptual lineages
Ahmeds conceptual landscape is inhabited by a multiplicity of intersecting philosophical
lineages. To begin with, the Dutch seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza was the
first to describe the concept of affect in the sense used by many contemporary scholars. To
Spinoza, the world is made up of bodies. Spinozas body is more than a human body; it may
be an idea, a weather phenomenon, a poison. Any such body has the capacity to affect or be
affected by other bodies (Spinoza, 2006, 3-4), the point being that to be affected means to be
changed somehow. This sense is retained in the idea that emotions change us, but, to Spinoza,
affect transcends emotions. Bodies often need the affect of other bodies to be able to function
(we need only think of coffee!). This simple conceptualization has profound implications
because it leads to an ontology in which bodies are contingent upon their affective relations
with other bodies. For Ahmed, the bodily ability to be touched physically and emotionally is
that which makes it possible to be for others (Ahmed, 2002, 563). Even the boundaries
between bodies exist only through being traversed and contested when one body affects the
other (Ahmed, 2000, 49). This ontology of bodies being (for others) through their affective
relations, for example, becomes visible in Ahmeds conception of the stranger, a body that
becomes othered through the relations of touch between bodies recognizable as friendly or [in
this case] strange (Ahmed, 2000, 49).
The second conceptual influence comes from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, for
whom consciousness is always intentional (Husserl, 1970). The mind is always orientated
toward something in the world that it perceives through its senses, as some objects move to the
perceptual foreground and into proximity while others are pushed to the background or left out.
This approach enables an analysis of how a life world customarily orientates consciousness
toward certain objects. Ahmed uses orientation in relation to affect to describe how bodies
inhabit and extend into space. How we are orientated in the world implicates which objects we
turn toward, which bodies we face, and hence how we are touched (Ahmed, 2006b). We are
touched by what comes near us; in other words, by enabling touchability, proximity allows us
to be affected. Think again of the stranger; the body that is othered remains distant, while
those recognized as friendly are those we turn toward. It is, then, easier to be touched by the
fate of a friendly colleague than the suffering of a stranger. Following Husserl, Martin
Heidegger developed a phenomenology of being, conceiving being as attuned to different
5
modes (e.g., dwelling, working) and analyzing the being of bodies according to how they
appear to humans (e.g., the hammer as a tool) (Heidegger, 1970/1927). In other words, being
is always being as something. No one simply is. We see this influence in how Ahmed derives
her understanding of, for example, mood or attunement from Heideggers Stimmung as being
in relation to others (Ahmed, 2014a).
Postcolonial theory, insofar as it is one theoretical standpoint, is an important source of ideas
informing Sara Ahmeds work. Most important is the concept of the subaltern other, the
colonial subject. To understand and conceive what it means to be a person in a colonial situation
requires attention to the myriad ways in which the situation tells the colonized person of their
status as a colonized subject. Fanona scholar whose work Ahmed has travelled with [...] for
many years (Ahmed, 2021, 15)inquired how a person with black skin desires and learns
to wear a white mask (Fanon, 2008) and, in the process, created the prototypical concept for
colonial subjectification: the process through which a person suffering colonization becomes
an other to the colonizer, no matter the degree to which they succeed in emulating the
colonizers morals and values. To provide an example to which we shall return at the end of
the chapter, we see this influence in what Ahmed terms a phenomenology of whiteness, in
which whiteness becomes [a] social and bodily orientation given that some bodies will be
more at home in a world that is orientated around whiteness (Ahmed, 2007, 160). A double
line of inquiry thus runs through postcolonial theory since, to understand who and what the
other is, one also needs to understand to whom and what they are imagined to be other. By
exploring the concept of the third world woman we learn a great deal about how so-called first
world women imagine themselves: as different from those women in third world countries
who are religious, oppressed, revolutionary, and so on (Mohanty, 1988).
At the core of this conceptual work lies a troubling epistemological dilemma. On the one hand,
it requires an anti-essentialist stance to oppose the colonial knowledge system that determines
the essential nature of the subaltern (e.g., the African is lazy, the Arab is cunning, etc.) as
an integral part of the system of colonial domination and occupation. On the other, it recognizes
the political utility of strategic essentialism (we, the women, the native) as a foundation for
solidarity and struggle for rights and self-determination (Spivak, 1985). In other words,
invoking a collective identity always involves aligning the political struggle with the system
of colonial power-knowledge, which works by fixing identity to render it other. Ahmed
works with a variety of different figures, such as the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the
melancholic migrant, and the angry black women (e.g., Ahmed, 2010b), who bridge this
tension. She describes how they become affect aliens as they are deemed other, affectively
unaligned, while simultaneously using them to herald their political potential and energy
(Ahmed, 2014a, 224) in resisting domination.
Finally, a certain line of inquiry in feminist epistemology is a necessary condition for Ahmeds
work (Ahmed, 1996). Here, the traditional form of the epistemological question what can we
know, and how do we know what we know? is replaced with how and what do we know as
women? Part of the feminist struggle has been to render legitimate knowledges that deviate
from a dominant male norm, politically as well as scientifically. At the risk of reduction, then,
feminist epistemology asks what kind of knowledge claims women can produce, given their
situation, and inevitably troubles the idea that epistemology and knowledge are gender neutral.
6
Ahmed (2017) refers to her Pakistani aunt, Gulzar Bano, as her first feminist inspiration. It is
important to mention this because it matters from whom and where we find or get our feminism.
In Ahmeds (2017, 4) own words, It is important that I learned this feminist lesson from my
auntie in Lahore, Pakistan, a Muslim woman, a Muslim feminist, a brown woman. It might be
assumed that feminism travels from West to East [...] That is not my story. [...] Feminism
travelled to me, growing up in the West, from the East. While we have highlighted four
different conceptual lineages that are central to the apparatus that Ahmed has developed, we
hope the reader can appreciate that her sources are multiple. There are, of course, other points
of inspiration, for example queer studies (Ahmed, 2006b; 2019), which should remind us that
her position is not easily reduced to being just that of phenomenology, philosophy,
postcolonialism, or feminism. Nor should it be.
Emotions and affect
Ahmeds work has contributed substantially to a scholarly understanding of affect and the
development of affect theory. Interestingly, however, Ahmed frequently uses emotions to refer
to what is commonly understood as affect. For her, emotions are inseparable from bodily
sensations (Ahmed, 2014b) while much of her work is orientated toward text. Her scholarship
is ripe with metaphors and (linguistic) figures, through which text, according to her, performs
different emotions and becomes thick with affect. Thus, emotion is not to be found in text per
se, but as an effect of the naming of emotion. A recurring metaphor in Ahmeds authorship is
the brick wall (e.g., Ahmed, 2006a; 2012; 2017; 2019). She makes use of the brick wall
metaphor, for instance, to describe how diversity work is emotional work: You get tired,
frustrated, if not depressed, from banging your head against a brick wall (Ahmed, 2017, 135),
which is what institutional resistance to diversity and change feels like. For that reason, she
often also refers to her metaphorical wall as institutional, by which she means that it appears
only to those who are misaligned or out of tune simply because of how they are in the world.
If, for example, heterosexuality is the solidified mode of being and doing, to inhabit that world
as heterosexual would be to go with the flow, whereas if one is not heterosexual and thus
differently orientated, the flow acquires the density of a thing, something solid (Ahmed,
2017, 146). The flow does not feel flowy anymore but like an obstacle that requires active
resistance. The materialization of the symbolic wall therefore renders real the way in which
some bodies become out of place and, as a possible result, disorient others (Ahmed, 2006b).
Ahmed subscribes to a dual definition of diversity work as both the work of changing existing
institutions and the work done by nonconforming bodies to fit in or not stick out, to be less
out of tune (Ahmed, 2017, 135). Here, emotion clearly connects to affect: Diversity work is a
matter of navigating affective atmospheres of, for example, racially charged interactions, sexist
encounters, or homophobic abuse. Diversity work is moodwork. Here, we see connections to
the scholarship of Hochschild (1983), specifically the notion of emotional labor as the work of
aligning ones feelings (or the expression thereof) to meet the emotional requirements of an
organization. Ahmed would say that the emotional labor of closing the gap between how you
feel and how you should feel operates as a form of feeling fetishism (Ahmed, 2014b, 149),
since the comfort of those who already feel at home depends on the work of others (diversity
subjects) to minimize the discrepancy between how they might actually be feeling and how
they ought to, thereby downplaying their difference or otherness. Perhaps for that reason, she
appears to be especially fond of the feminist killjoy and its variant, the angry Black woman
7
(explored by Lorde, 1984 and hooks, 2000) killing feminist joy, as moody figures (e.g., Ahmed,
2010a; 2014b; 2017; 2019)moody because they are not attuned and might even deliberately
get in the way of attunement (Ahmed, 2014a). To be willing to become a killjoy, then, is to
be willing to get in the way of any happiness that does not have your agreement (Ahmed,
2014b, 225). The killjoy figure, however, is also illustrative of how one may become alienated
affectively, not necessarily because one wills it, but because one affects others the wrong way.
One becomes an affect alien, for example, if not happily affected by an object (say, the
unhappy, usually happy baby) that supposedly should make one happy, or if one is unable to
feel happy on the day of ones own wedding (supposedly the happiest day of ones life). This
failure to feel happy is taken by others as sabotaging their happiness too, in which case one
inadvertently becomes a killjoy (Ahmed, 2010a).
Because a killjoy is someone who wills other than what one ought to will, we may think of the
killjoy figure as one of Ahmeds willful subjects. As outlined, the concepts of will and
willfulness play a vital role in her conceptualization of affect and emotions, since they explain
how emotions can get anchored upon a normative foundation. Social and organizational norms
become social goods, for instance, through the promise of happiness. This mechanism leads to
the condition that a subject who is willing to follow the general will does not become a willful
subject but a good and happy subject. In other words, what is willed for you is considered good,
whereas your own willfulness against such a norm is seen as bad or even dangerous. Willful
subjects, such as the feminist killjoy, are those who resist the general will, resist an orientation
toward happiness; To claim to be willful or to describe oneself or ones stance as willful is to
claim the very word that has historically been used as a technique for dismissal (Ahmed,
2014c ,133).
The affective turn as a (re)turn to emotion
Both the brick wall and feminist killjoy say something about how Ahmed conceptualizes
emotion in relation to affective intensity. Her analytical focus is not on what emotions are per
se, but how they circulate socially and what emotions do (Gorton, 2007). In the seminal work
The Cultural Politics of Emotion (first published in 2004), Ahmed (2014b) examines the
circulation of the objects that emotions are directed toward and how different emotions involve
different orientations toward those objects. In brief, we may sense we share the same emotion,
but that does not mean we have the same relationship to a given object. Orientation toward
something means that, when affected by the object, we may move toward or away from it,
thereby establishing a relation of either proximity or distanceas for example with the
attachment in the feeling of love for the familiar (family, fellow-Christian) or the detachment
of fearing the stranger (the other, refugees). Simply put, merely to think of a given object can
bring up certain emotions, and vice versa, because objects become sticky in the sense that
they accumulate affective value, which is another way of saying that they, the objects, maintain
certain associations over time (Ahmed, 2021).
Importantly, however, it cannot be deduced from this that a feeling resides in an object or a
body, even though it might be ascribed to one. Nor is a feeling just there in a room. As
Ahmed writes, objects and bodies might become sticky, saturated with affects, but only by
being understood retrospectively as the cause of feeling (2008b, 3-4), a causality which,
8
according to her, we must rethink. Instead, feelings are an effect of our orientation. Different
orientations toward objects implicate different emotions by being affected differently. To be
affected in a good way thus involves an orientation toward something as being good
(Ahmed, 2008b, 4). Happiness, for instance, becomes an orientation toward objects that are
supposed to make you happy: a wedding, a baby. It becomes a promise: something that results
from following a social norm of orientating oneself in the right way. In contrast, think back
to the position of the affect alien. She might be the one who refuses to share an orientation
toward certain things as being good, because she does not find the objects that promise
happiness to be quite so promising (Ahmed, 2008b, 6).
In summary, we may say that emotions are inseparable from the dual capacity to affect and to
be affected, and they are therefore a matter of how we come into contact with objects and
others (Ahmed, 2014b, 208). Rather than as a turn to affect, it is therefore more fitting to treat
Ahmeds work as a re-turn to emotion (Ahmed, 2014b, 209). This claim brings to the fore a
potential implication of the affective turn: that it creates a distinction between affect and
emotion, privileging the former over the latter (Ahmed, 2008a). To assume their separation,
and then claim novelty in a turn toward affect, is to imply a problematic mindbody dichotomy,
which we avoid if affect and emotion are understood as mutually implicated (Ahmed, 2014b,
206).
Ahmed, affect, and organization
Refocusing on organization studies, we can continue our line of questioning by asking what
Ahmeds conceptual work in relation to affect allows us to do to/with organizations. This
question is perhaps best explored by examining how Ahmeds work has been taken up by
researchers in the field of organization studies. What kind of questions have her concepts
prompted us to pose? What knowledge claims become possible by working and thinking with
her concepts? We are, for obvious reasons, unable to provide an exhaustive overview of
Ahmeds reception within organization studies. Instead, we outline five recent examples that
we believe show how her work has opened new theoretical as well as empirical avenues in this
research area. Affect is not necessarily the primary analytical category in all five examples, but
affect (and emotion) canas we will showbe teased out in their relationship with other
categories (Schmitz and Ahmed, 2014), an effect we have achieved with the categories of will
and happiness. We conclude by suggesting an additional contribution of Ahmeds scholarship:
that it invites, or even demands, us to question our own orientations, attunements, and affective
commitments.
Christensen, Muhr, and Just (2020) use Ahmeds phenomenology of whiteness as an ongoing
history that orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how the bodies (can) take up space
(Ahmed, 2007) or, in the case of this study, voice their opinion. The authors use this particular
part of Ahmeds authorship to analyze how racialized (and also white) opinion leaders are
organized in Danish public debate to be orientated around whiteness as an unseen backdrop.
Consequently, opinion leaders whose bodies merge into this backdrop do not have to face their
whiteness, meaning they are not oriented toward it. The opposite is true for opinion leaders in
non-white bodies; they become noticeable as deviant from the constructed norm of whiteness.
As such, they are positioned to speak from a minority point of view but with white voice, a
9
way of speaking that is recognizable to the majority, and often also ending up representing
racialized subjects as a group. An alternative effect of whiteness that can be observed in the
study, however, is the outright silencing of racialized subjects by majority voices that speak on
their behalf. It is Ahmeds work that enables the analytical sensitivity for understanding how
whiteness functions as a form of public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that
have already taken their shape (Ahmed, 2007, 158)white bodies, that is.
Another piece that focuses on the functioning of whiteness in organizations is an article by Dar
and Ibrahim (2019) which conceptualizes the production of shame as a mechanism of White
governmentality over the Blackened body in UK academia. The authors argue that
producing shame in the Blackened body is a tool to silence, alienate, and degrade women of
color. It works both to dispossess and discipline them, as it leads to women of color
understanding themselves as lacking, for instance, networks, motivation, and likeability:
Generating shame in her and making her co-produce it so that she also owns it (through her
deteriorating self-image) serves to shift the gross levels of lack in the institution towards
residing in her flesh (Dar and Ibrahim, 2019, 1248). At the same time, it reaffirms whiteness
as a norm that legitimizes the exclusion of women of color from the academy. Drawing on
Ahmeds (2014b) work on the sociality of emotion, the authors analyze how emotionshere,
shameshape and modify what bodies can do, conceptualizing the production of shame as a
form of affective management. On this basis, they urge organizational scholars to pay closer
attention to this affective regime to tame, discipline and eke compliance from the Blackened
body (Dar and Ibrahim, 2019, 1243).
Ahmeds work has exercised significant influence upon critical scholarship on diversity and
difference in organizations. Tyler (2019, 54) draws upon Ahmeds conceptualization of the
stranger to emphasize that it is the mode of encounter with the Other rather than the latters
ontological status that can open up the possibility of recognizing rather than containing or
assimilating the Others difference. Tyler (2019, 54) uses this to argue that critical diversity
scholars investigating organizational practices need to inquire not how difference can be made
to fit into an organizational norm, but rather how difference has the potential to rupture the
normative conditions and corporate imperatives governing its organization. By showing how
the Other is created through affective processes of inclusion and exclusion, Ahmed encourages
diversity scholars to relate difference to potentiality for norm-transgression rather than to
something to be contained, thereby offering another critical contribution to the field of
organizational scholarship. As another example, while not a central concept in Christensens
(2021) study of alternative organization within the context of Denmarks Roskilde Festival,
affect here works as a conceptual tool, enabling Christensen to analyze an LGBT+
communitys staging of a spontaneous pride parade in the festivals camping area as a queer
use (Ahmed, 2019) of the festival space. The parade released potential by putting the
camping sites to a use different from what was intended (Christensen, 2021, 165), the point
being that this particular use of the camping area is queer only because the festival space is not,
and the affect of being othered and feeling alien brings this to the fore.
Ahmeds influence on queer(ing) organization studies becomes most visible in her suggestion
of a queer phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006c). Vitry (2020) mobilizes this suggestion by
exploring the queering of bodies, spaces, and organizing in capitalist as well as alternative
10
modes of organizing. Investigating the norms that persist in organizational spaces, Vitry not
only reveals their straightening effects and how they make non-conforming bodies feel out of
place; she also proposes strategies of resistance based upon queerer forms of organizing
(ibid., 12). Ahmeds (2006b) Queer Phenomenology provided a useful theoretical tool to
examine the ways capitalist and other normative spaces queer bodies (Vitry, 2020, 12) and
enabled the critical reading of including queered subjects as another extension of
heteronormativity. A core contribution of Ahmeds work thus lies in providing a focal avenue
for organization studies to explore and conceptualize queer(ing) practices from an affective
perspective. That is to say, more broadly, that it allows for critical engagement with the norms
permeating organizational settings. Such critical engagement has been linked to organizational
heteronormativity as much as to norms of whiteness in organizations, highlighting once more
Ahmeds contributions in the fields of feminist, anti-racist, and queer studies, and the potential
of linking insights from these fields to research in organizational studies through her work.
Future orientations
As a final comment, we wish to suggest that Ahmeds work challenges each of us working in
the organization fieldand, in a broader sense, in the organizational contexts of the academy
to think about our own affective commitments. We need to question to which affect
communities we belong and to whom we are attuned. What moodwork do we engage in to
create affective alignment? What does the general will orientate us toward and who becomes
willful by orientating themselves differently? We might come to recognize and criticize who
becomes an affect alien in our organizational settings and how to react if someone disrupts the
good mood.
As Bell and de Gama (2018) suggest in their reflection on the responsibilities of critical
scholars, particularly in uncritical (Willmott, 2013) academic organizations, academic
scholarship as well as organizational membership cannot be separated from ethical or political
concerns. Reflecting on the possibility of critical futures, they propose a critical practice that
involves feeling for yourself and for others, taking accountability for ones actions, and being
aware of ones own positionality (Bell and de Gama, 2018, 943). Becoming aware of ones
own positionality might be rephrased to inquiring and questioning ones own orientation. What
bodies are we oriented toward within the organizational context of academic work and with
whom does this bring us into proximity? Ahmeds work leaves no doubt that an orientation
toward whiteness as the norm in academiaseen, for instance, in the fact that our curricula
almost exclusively teach the opinions of white American and European men (Dar et al.,
2020)influences not only the knowledge we accept as legitimate but the bodies we encounter
and the lives we acknowledge as valuable. As we have outlined, our orientation implicates our
way of inhabiting and extending into space, thus bringing certain objects and bodies into
proximity. Our orientation might thus inhibit our ability of feeling for others, or at least
position some others outside the realm of bodies we can touch and be touched by (i.e., have
the capacity to affect and to be affected by us). To be more specific, a lack of Black and brown
bodies and knowledges in the academy might come to affect our ability to feel for anyone who
is other to a white, male norm of being and knowing.
11
How, then, can we also feel for those other others? Ashcraft (2017, 44) proposes the notion
of inhabited criticism in the form of ordinary resistances, micropractices, or
microemancipation through mundane, covert, informal and emergent, individual and
interactional, localized and fleeting practices such as cynicism, bitching, irony, parody and so
on. Bell and de Gama (2018, 943) pick up on these ideas to call for practices of taking a
stand in uncritical academic organizations. As they suggest, To take a stand is to make a
determined effort to resist or fight for something. It implies embodied, enacted presence in a
specific place or space holding ones ground against opposing forces. In taking a stand, the
body acts as a physical obstruction which disrupts established norms and provides a means of
resistance (Bell and de Gama, 2018, 940). We suggest that taking a stand in this embodied,
enacted way can provide a form of resistance that builds upon the questioning of ones
normative orientations and actively orientating differently. It thereby allows us to be affected
differently, to be (in) touch(ed) not only with those who fit existing organizational norms.
We believe the journal Organizations recommitment to racial justice in response to the
#BlackLivesMatter movement to be a good and illustrative example of taking a stand against
white superiority, including everyday and institutional racism (Mir and Zanoni, 2020). More
concretely, the editors commitment to taking a stance means that the journal will actively
solicit submissions of articles that deal explicitly with anti-Black racism and invite researchers
to develop special issues on the matter, in addition to recruiting Black academics to the editorial
board and supporting junior Black scholars through the offices of the journal. Adopting
Ahmeds concepts, we might claim: To take a stand implies willfully accepting the assignment
of becoming affect aliensas editors, reviewers, authors, supervisors, teachers, and
colleaguesas a form of embodied, enacted presence in the organizational settings we inhabit.
It implies being willfully orientated differently, or at least stopping ourselves from using our
orientation as a straightening device toward queer moments when objects slip (Ahmed,
2006c, 566). The body becomes a means of resistance by refusing to become a happy object
for the organization (Ahmed, 2008b). Be it in academia or in other organizational contexts, one
might instead turn to queer use (Ahmed, 2019) to do otherwise than what is intended,
required, or demanded; one may become a killjoy, a subject who certainly excels at cynicism,
bitching, irony, parody and so on (Ashcraft, 2017, 44).
Recommended reading
Original text by Sara Ahmed
Ahmed, S. (2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2nd ed.). Edinburgh, UK: Durham
University Press.
Key academic text
Special issue on Sara Ahmeds work: Meeting Again: Reflections on Strange Encounters 20
years on in Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2021, ed., V. Marotta, 42(1).
Accessible resource
feministkilljoys Research blog by Sara Ahmed. Available at https://feministkilljoys.com/
12
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1
In the worlding of Kathleen Stewart: Daydreaming a conversation with SHE.
Silvia Gherardi, ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7026-2418
Abstract
This chapter presents an imaginary conversation between the author and Kathleen Stewart around
their common passions and doubts. It is an experiment with a creative writing aimed at performing
affect rather than writing about affect. The conversation takes place during an encounter in a
daydream and the text that follows is a collage, a literary work that imitates the style and the rhythm
of previous works by sticking them onto a surface. It imitates the interactions between two people in
flesh and blood while performing the intra-actions between texts and interrogating other texts that are
present in their absence.
Introduction
From the Latin introducere, composed of intro - to the inside and ducere to lead, the term
introduction means to bring a person into a place or group. This is the aim of this short introduction:
to introduce you - readers - into a conversation taking place, in an imaginary time and space, between
a speaking subject (called ME), who is also the writer and the author of this chapter, and another
subject (called SHE) who is the textual representation of a writer who signs her writings with the
name Kathleen Stewart and who is going to explain herself with the use of the pronoun SHE.
Readers need to be patient because introducing a new person to a group is a delicate matter. They
should understand that the group is talking about affect and organization studies, and debating what
the latter can bring to the former. Maybe it is useful to know beforehand that the pairs conversation
is focused on a specific formulation of affect as ordinary affect, meaning that ordinary affects are
the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected, and this means giving to everyday life the
quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. Therefore,
ordinary affect may become a powerful lens for becoming able to look for the everyday in
organizational life, its ephemeral qualities, its aesthetics, its sensory textures of connections and
subtle movements of change. To become able to see and sense a compositional node. This capacity
takes the form of a sharply impassive attunement to the ways in which an assemblage of organizing
elements comes to hang together as a thing that has qualities, sensory aesthetics and lines of force:
a worlding. Worlding is a way of approaching wholes, systems, networks or culture in ways that
account for emergence, the assemblage of disparate entities, and the experience or situation of being
in something.
In case I have been able to introduce the readers to the context of the conversation in which they are
going to be conducted, now they need some warnings. First, they are introduced to a daydreaming,
thus accepting the rules of the blurred line between dream and reality. Secondly, the daydreaming of
a conversation between two masquerade authors (SHE and ME) that they are going to read is a
performative text: it looks like it has affect as an object of conversation, in reality it has the hidden
aim of troubling the readers by performing affect.
2
Daydreaming a conversation
ME: Since I agreed to contribute to this book with a chapter focused on Kathleen Stewart, I suffer (or
better I enjoy) daydreaming. Apparently, it is not a worrying symptom. I looked for its definition and
found that a daydream is when your mind wanders and your attention shifts from the task at hand to
a place that is entirely your own and that daydreams consist of little videos. I confess that, in reading
Kathleen Stewarts writings, I always find myself daydreaming about a conversation with her, often
an intimate conversation in which we exchange memories. So often in reading her small cases,
especially those forming the book, Ordinary Affect, they resonate with some of my souvenirs from
my fieldwork in organizations. In my daydreaming I feel at a visceral level the transmission of affect
from the material paper that I am reading and have in my hands, to imagination, to the words that
flow inside my closed lips and I tell her how important her work has been in my understanding and
theorizing affective ethnography (Gherardi, 2019), as a style of being in the field and becoming-with
others. I have so many conversations with her and I tell her a lot of stories that are prompted by her
scenes resonating within my experience and my emotionsand daydreaming just happens..
SHEi I write not as a trusted guide carefully laying out the links between theoretical categories and
the real world, but as a point of impact, curiosity, and encounter. I call myself she to mark the
difference between this writerly identity and the kind of subject that arises as a daydream of simple
presence. She is not so much a subject position or an agent in hot pursuit of something definitive
as a point of contact; instead, she gazes, imagines, senses, takes on, performs, and asserts not a flat
and finished truth but some possibilities (and threats) that have come into view in the effort to become
attuned to what a particular scene might offer.
ME: Was this how affect came into your life?
SHEii: For me, affect came into view through a slowed ethnographic practice attuned to the forms
and forces unfolding in scenes and encounters. This practice pulled the apparatus of conceptualization
itself into a tricky alignment with slow ethnographys immanent concerns and with the concerns of
the worlds it was trying to trace. Anthropological objects became things that shimmered out of molten
states or lay nascent in an atmosphere. They had to be walked around, approached from precise
angles, and seen as states of being; they were emergent, or suspended in potentiality, or collapsing,
or residual, roosting on live matter as if it were their resting point. The cultural became a resonant
and magnetizing field that registered in people and things living through events and conditions.
Ethnographic writing began, again, to try to describe collective states and sensibilities hitting people
and traversing otherwise incommensurate things: bodies of thought, assemblages of infrastructures
and institutions, new ecologies, the rhythms of a daily living, and the strangely connective tissue
produced by handheld devices and social media. In the world affect brought into view, the point of
analysis was not to track the predetermined effects of abstractable logics and structures but, rather, to
compose a register of the lived affects of the things that took place in a social-aesthetic-material-
political worlding.
ME: Here, you are talking of a worlding form of knowing! Your mention of a slow ethnographic
practice has an echo in my effort to resist the closure of data and keep open the question of what is
cut out from, what does not fit in data, what happens in not-yet data beyond the closure in data,
3
how data can be otherwise. The conversations with my friend Angelo, and his voice come vividly to
me when I think about when we were writing together and how we were doing it together and
wondering around how data became data (Benozzo, Gherardi, 2020; Gherardi, Benozzo, 2021). In
daydreaming I relive the aesthetic experience of the intonation of his voice, his gaze and his presence
in our collaboration through the e-mails that went back and forth and carried our thoughts materialized
into words. During that process we were reading and engaging with Luglis (2006) concept of
Wunderkammern and with Maggie MacLures (2013, p. 228) emphasis on wonder as an untapped
potential in qualitative research. This pastime of gathering very different objects and materials
together started in the sixteenth century, and marked the beginning of the phenomenon of
Wunderkammern or cabinets of curiosities which brought together various pieces from the world
around us, a world deemed wonderful and full of amazing surprises. These are places where things
were accumulated and piled up without any clear order and where connections came into being
without there having to be a logical reason for them. These connections obey their own laws, and
belong to the realm of dreams and wonderment. And only recently I stumbled upon a sentence of
yours that recalls the cabinets of curiosities, one that I had not noticed the first time I read Cultural
Poesis. Isn't it amazing how the aesthetic experience of a collaboration disappears from the written
text (Strati, 1992)? And how surprising it is the way certain images of thought chase each other like
in a refrain (Stewart, 2010)? Or are they present in the written text, but not visible? Are they just a
trace below the surface of the text?
SHEiii: Ordinary Affects tries to slow the quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative
critique long enough to find ways of approaching the complex and uncertain objects that fascinate
because they literally hit us or exert a pull on us. My storyiv, then, is not an exercise in representation
or a critique of representation; rather it is a cabinet of curiosities designed to incite curiosity. Far from
trying to present a final, or good enough, story of something we might call U.S. culture, it tries to
deflect attention away from the obsessive desire to characterize things once and for all long enough
to register the myriad strands of shifting influence that remain uncaptured by representational
thinking.
ME: Yes, you have been able to perform stories that are not a good enough story of whats going
on and I have the feeling of having spent all my career in learning how to write articles and chapters
which could tell a good story. I wonder what I left out, what I silenced, what I excluded from
mattering in my construction of a good story. Are you insinuating that in order to craft an extra-
ordinary story I downplay the ordinary? But I have always been fascinated by the ordinary!
SHEv: Yes, I do, the ordinary can turn on you!
The ordinary can turn on you.
Lodged in habits, conceits, and the loving and deadly contacts
of everyday sociality, it can catch you up in something bad. Or
good.
Or it can start out as one thing and then flip into something
else altogether.
4
One thing leads to another. An expectation is dashed or fulfilled.
An ordinary floating state of things goes sour or takes off
into something amazing and good. Either way, things turn out to
be not what you thought they were.
ME: In listening to things that turn out to be not what I thought they were, I have vivid images that
now, in my memory, make me laugh but when it took place it made my cheeks blush. What opens in
my mind is the image of the eyes of one of my interlocutors when both, at the same time, we realized
we had signed a contract for a consultancy project for the development of competences but with the
term competence we meant diametrically opposed things implying divergent purposes. We were
staring at each other as if we were from planets light years apart. It was a fleeting moment that lasted
forever.
SHEvi: The ordinary registers intensitiesregularly, intermittently, urgently, or as a slight shudder.
The ordinaryvii is a circuit thats always tuned in to some little something somewhere. Ordinary
scenesviii can tempt the passer by with the promise of a story let out of the bag.
ME: Very often you write something and, by italicizing the word some, you cut the word in two parts
and you raise a wall of mystery around what this something can be and how it is connected to ordinary
affect. I am fascinated by the atmosphere that this something creates.
SHEix: Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give
everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences.
Theyre things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams,
encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion,
and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of
all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something.
ME: When you say something that feels like something I understand that you point to the moment
of emergence, what you name poesis (Stewart, 2005) or creativity. I was writing, and I continue to
be fascinated, by the something that exceeds the speaking subject (Gherardi and Strati, 2017).
Maybe it is a different something? In the chapter I just mentioned, we assumed (following Deleuze,
1988), that there is always something in excess to being, a something in excess to language and to
the speaking subject. We were problematizing how language constructs competence as a research
object, and were asking what happens when we no longer believe in the language/reality binary
relation. We were posing the question of how a more-than-representational approach changes our
way of talking about competence. We had experimented with a written/visual text, where a traditional
written text, based on the illustration of competence in two episodes, was interrupted by a visual
language based on three photographic interludes. The aim of the three interludes was to interrupt the
smooth discourse on competence in different practices and to invite empathy in reading. The
challenge was to interrupt the rhythm of reading with an invitation to feel the poetry of a visual
language. In so doing, we intended to produce the effect of troubling the static, rational, and written
5
representation of competence. Your writings follow a similar attention, both to the emergence of
something in time, and in meaning, and in affect, but also beyond language?
SHEx: This is an ethnographic attention, but it is one that is loosened from any certain prefabricated
knowledge of its object. Instead, it tracks a moving object in an effort (a) to somehow record the state
of emergence that animates things cultural and (b) to track some of the effects of this state of things
the proliferation of everyday practices that arise in the effort to know what is happening or to be part
of it, for instance, or the haunting or exciting presence of traces, remainders, and excesses uncaptured
by claimed meanings. It talksxi to the reader not as a trusted guide carefully laying out the perfect
links between theoretical categories and the real world but rather as a subject caught in the powerful
tension between what can be known and told and what remains obscure or unspeakable but is
nonetheless real. Its thoughts are speculative, and its questions are the most basic. What is going on?
What floating influences now travel through public routes of circulation and come to roost in the
seemingly private domains of hearts, homes, and dreams? What forces are becoming sensate as forms,
styles, desires, and practices? What does it mean to say that particular events and strands of affect
generate impacts? How are impacts registered in lines of intensity? How are people quite literally
charged up by the sheer surge of things in the making? What does cultural poesis look like?
ME: I have the feeling that if I want to catch and to describe what ordinary affect does, I need to
train myself into a sort of atmospheric attunement to a world that is not, or is not only, my world.
SHExii: Attending to atmospheric attunements and trying to figure their significance incites forms of
writing and critique that detour into descriptive eddies and attach to trajectories. This is writing and
theorizing that tries to stick with something becoming atmospheric, to itself resonate or tweak the
force of material-sensory somethings forming up. The effort requires a clearing - a space in which to
clear the opposition between representation and reality, or the mind-numbing summary evaluations
of objects as essentially good or bad, or the effort to pin something to a social construction as if this
were an end in itself. Attending to atmospheric attunements means, instead, chronicling how
incommensurate elements hang together in a scene that bodies labor to be in or to get through. In the
expressivity of something coming into existence, bodies labor to literally fall into step with the pacing,
the habits, the lines of attachment, the responsibilities shouldered, the sentience, of a worlding.
ME: I am wondering how I can create this space intentionally, this space which is an inner clearing
in which I suspend judgment, slow down the way I look and feel and actively try to enter another
worlding. I am unable to explain it, I know it happens and I know when I have the feeling that it has
happened. But to write it in words I have to go back to a form of representation or re-presentation, or
.....???
SHExiii: This is a writing and thinking experiment aligned with forms of nonrepresentational theory
(Thrift, 2007) including `weak theory' (Sedgwick, 1997), `fictocriticism' (Muecke, 2008), and the
material semiotics of actor-network theory (Latour, 2007). In the spirit of experiment, these
approaches attempt to create new spaces for thinking about and imagining what might be going on.
They do this first by trying to dedramatize theory, to loosen the formal narrative binds of a hyperactive
story shored by banks of moralism and the heavy presumptions of a proper and automatic relationship
6
between thinking subject, concept, and world. Instead, they might propose a pause, or to try to write
theory through stories, or try, through descriptive detours, to pull academic attunements into tricky
alignment with the amazing, sometimes eventful, sometimes buoyant, sometimes endured, sometimes
so sad, always commonplace labor of becoming sentient to a world's work, bodies, rhythms, and ways
of being in noise and light and space (Nancy, 1997). Often they create digressions around quick
reductionist claims and explanations into the cul de sac of situations in which elements of all kinds
assemble into something that feels like something (Berlant, 2010). These things require a kind of
haptic description in which the analyst discovers her object of analysis by writing out its inhabited
elements in a space and time.
ME: What you say resonates with my experience of writing during the forty days of the first lockdown
for COVID-19 when, together with a group of women we engaged in a collective writing experiment
(Cozza et al. 2021) about the pandemic as a breakdown in the texture of social practices. Writing then
was a practice of solidarity for coping with the trauma, for creating a thinking community and for
resisting the social distancing created by the physical distance imposed by the pandemic. I resonate
with the words of Laureen Berlant (2010: 5) that you quote: one moves around with a sense that the
world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a
wandering absorptive awareness and hypervigilance that collects the material that might help to ...
maintain one's sea legs ...'' (Stewart, 2011: 447). Being a sailor, my body knows very well the physical
meaning of sea legs and how this feeling is ordinary once on a boat and can be distressing in other
places when it is out of place. During the lockdown my sense of the ordinary was upset and in
tension in between absorptive awareness and hypervigilance. I wonder if the heart of an ordinary
affect lies in this tension?
SHExiv: Ordinary affects, then, are an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections,
routes, and disjunctures. They are a kind of contact zone where the overdeterminations of circulations,
events, conditions, technologies, and flows of power literally take place. To attend to ordinary affects
is to trace how the potency of forces lies in their immanence to things that are both flighty and
hardwired, shifty and unsteady but palpable too. At once abstract and concrete, ordinary affects are
more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable
than symbolic meanings. They are not the kind of analytic object that can be laid out on a single,
static plane of analysis, and they dont lend themselves to a perfect, three-tiered parallelism between
analytic subject, concept, and world. They are, instead, a problem or question emergent in disparate
scenes and incommensurate forms and registers; a tangle of potential connections. Literally moving
thingsthings that are in motion and that are defined by their capacity to affect and to be affected
they have to be mapped through different, coexisting forms of composition, habituation, and event.
They can be seen, obtusely, in circuits and failed relays, in jumpy moves and the layered textures
of a scene. They surge or become submerged. They point to the jump of something coming together
for a minute and to the spreading lines of resonance and connection that become possible and might
snap into sense in some sharp or vague way.
ME: Once again, your words create a line of resonance in my mind and I can vividly see the faces of
the students who were attending the last PhD course I gave, when one of them asked me: how can I
analyse an emerging object, which appears and disappears in the blink of an eye? A doctoral
commission will ask me where is my object of study? I had a hard time in introducing your idea of
7
the generativity of emergent things and went away with the feeling that they would prefer the quiet
and reassuring certainty of statistical analysis. What could I have said to convince them?
SHExv: A long line of thought from Nietzsche to Foucault, to Spinoza to Deleuze, and contemporary
theorists such as Haraway, Taussig, Thrift, Stengers, DeLanda, and Berlant has turned and returned
attention to forms emergent in the conduct of life. In this line of thought, the forms and forces
immanent to ordinary ways of living are taken as intimate registers of knowledge and power.
ME: Is this what you call a compositional node? As an example of a compositional node you mention
New England Red (Stewart, 2015), or the road (Stewart, 2014a), or the beach as a thing (Stewart,
2014b), but why is compositional theory (Stewart, 2013) provocative?
SHExvi Compositional theory takes the form of a sharply impassive attunement to the ways in which
an assemblage of elements comes to hang together as a thing that has qualities, sensory aesthetics and
lines of force and how such things come into sense already composed and generative and pulling
matter and mind into a making: a worlding. My provocationxvii is to draw theory, through writing,
into the compositional attunement through which people and things venture out into reals. Reals are
not the kind of thing that an order of representation simply organizes as truth and dominates but
transversal arrays of qualities or activities which, like musical refrains, give order to materials and
situations, human bodies and brains included, as actions undertaken act-back to shape muscles and
hone senses (Anderson and Harrison, 2010, 8). This is not the work of imagination on dead matter
but a mattering (that) is about the (contingent and temporary) becoming-determinate (and becoming-
indeterminate) of matter and meaning (Barad, 2010, 254). Compositional writingxviii as a non-
representational method, then, has to stay nimble in the effort to keep up with the distributed agencies
of whats throwing together and falling apart. It is in this practice of trying to follow where things
(might) go that habits of attunement become an associational logic.
ME: I understand that a composition is more than just an assemblage. If I take as an example of
composition how the flowers and vase are arranged in Van Gogh's painting Sunflowers, my attention
is turned to the aesthetic quality of those assembled elements, not to their being thrown together.
When you present the beach as a thing, and as a compelling thing, you point to Singularities of water,
sand, sun, cold, shells, breasts, mold, blue herons, lifeguards, turtles, sharks, swimmers in suits, or a
fleet of Portuguese men of war blown into contact with human skin throw worlds into form (Stewart,
2014b: 122). Your wording makes me consider how thinking often arises out of surprising encounters,
not an object of recognition but of a fundamental encounter, a worlding that is the effect of differences
making a difference.
SHExix: Models of thinking that slide over the live surface of difference at work in the ordinary to
bottom-line arguments about bigger structures and underlying causes obscure the ways in which a
reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and noncoherent singularities. They miss how
someones ordinary can endure or can sag defeated; how it can shift in the face of events like a shift
in the kids school schedule or the police at the door. Such a worldxx is not already laid out on the
8
table, with the only task left being an evaluative one. The turn to affect worried the mantras of
structure, mediation, representation, and code that had come to operate as a good-enough shorthand
for culture and power. In place of the sheer critique of representation, affect added an affirmative
critique that registers surprise at what and how things happen. It waits to see as things unfold in a
moment, notes points of contact, recognizes the weight or smell of an atmosphere, or traces the spread
of intensities across subjects, objects, institutions, laws, materialities, and species.
ME: A phrase by Donna Haraway that I really like comes to my mind: "Reality is an active verb, and
the nouns all seem to be gerunds with more appendages than an octopus" (Haraway, 2003, p. 6). The
figure of the octopus and the tentacularity of worlding is for Haraway an active mode of thought.
Both of you make explicit use of the noun-as-gerund, thus active worlding is informed by our active
engagement with the materiality and context in which events and interactions occur. The simple
addition of the suffix ing shifts the world from a being to a doing and using the italics in worlding
stresses how wording is worlding. When we, as researchers, are in the field and my fieldwork takes
place within organizing, my ethnographic wording is above all an embodied and enacted process a
way of being in the world an act of attending to the world. You give the example of the beach as a
thing, as an assemblage of affects, effects, conditions, sensibilities and practices, I envisage my
encounter with an organizational situation like a beach whose worlding comes about through the
situatedness of the social practices shaping the form of organizing.
SHExxi: In his essay The Thing Martin Heidegger (1971) asks what it might mean to meet the world
not as representation, interpretation or raw material for exploitation but as a nearing, a gathering of
the ringing between subjects and objects into something that feels like something. To thing is to
world. An object that has become a thing is not flat and inert before a voraciously dominant subject
but an enigma, a provocation. It is matter already configured (Grosz 2001).
ME: In my intellectual trajectory, feminist new materialism has been very formative and in particular
Barads concept of matter/mattering gave me the words for talking and writing about the materiality
in organizational life not as inert and non-living stuff but as an encounter between the vitality and the
obduracy of matter/mattering and human beings. When I write about the everyday mess of organizing,
I produce a thing, a text whose destiny is to leave me and travel alone in the world before meeting
a reader to come alive again through this new encounter. In writing I hope to be able to touch the
world of this reader and to resonate in her/his world what I have experienced and have shaped in
words. Several times (Gherardi, 2017a; 2017b) I have directly asked my potential readers to indulge
in reading, to be passive and open to my voice. I had in mind Kurt Wolffs invitation to surrender
and catch (Gherardi, 2015). To surrender to the world implies that the researcher is not a
dispassionate scientist but rather an engaged being that does not remain a detached, outside observer.
In fact, the surrender perspective captures an epistemological position in opposition to the official
Western consciousness, in which the relationship to the world is not surrender but mastery, control,
efficiency, handling, manipulation. Surrender is unforeseeable, unpredictable, it happens, it befalls
whereas catch is the object (a concept, a decision, a poem), and the practice of surrendering-to
involves a conscious effort to promote a relation with a specific phenomenon. I have in mind a rather
passive positioning, a surrendering to reading, while I have the feeling that instead, you ask for an
active reading.
9
SHExxii: I ask the reader to read activelyto follow along, read into, imagine, digress, establish
independent trajectories and connections, disagree. My own voice is particular and partial, tending in
this case to be a surreal, dream-like description of ordinary spaces and events. The subject I am in
the stories I tell is a point of impact meandering through scenes in search of linkages, surges, and
signs of intensity. I suppose that the writing gropes toward embodied affective experience.
ME: Therefore, the reader can be both active and passive. I dare to say actively passive. This
reminds me of the exploration of the authors voice in the work by Lisa Mazzei and Alecia Jackson
(2016). They move toward positioning voice in qualitative research as a thing that is entangled with
other things in an assemblage. They reconfigure voice by refusing the primacy of voice as simply
spoken words emanating from a conscious subject and instead place voice within the material and
discursive knots and intensities of the assemblage. In this way it becomes possible to de-centre the
humanist voice attached to an individual and to account for voice as a material-discursive practice
that is inseparable from all human and non-human elements in an assemblage. The researcher is thus
inside the research practice as one, among other elements of the assemblage, or how I prefer to write,
the agencement of elements (Gherardi, 2016). Deleuze and Guattaris (1987) concept of agencement,
translated in English as assemblage, has been very influential both in your and in my work, not to
mention the influence it has had had on post-qualitative research (Coleman and Ringrose, 2013).
SHExxiii: Deleuze and Guattari (1987) polemicized the conflict between meaning-based models of
culture and models that track actual events, conjunctures, and articulations of forces to see what they
do. In the wake of their critique, they outlined a theory of the affective as a state of potential, intensity,
and vitality (see also Guattari, 1995). Contemporary feminist theorists, notably Haraway, Strathern,
and Sedgwick, have carefullyand with enormous creative energy of their ownworked to theorize
the generativity in things cultural and to make room for ways of thinking and writing it, as has
Taussig.
ME: I think that one of the reasons for paying attention to ordinary affects and for not defining affect
as an it, is to avoid meaning and instead to look for the intensities they build as they move though
bodies and potentialities.
SHExxiv: Yes, the potential.
The potential stored in ordinary things is a network of transfers
and relays.
Fleeting and amorphous, it lives as a residue or resonance in an
emergent assemblage of disparate forms and realms of life.
Yet it can be as palpable as a physical trace.
Potentiality is a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience
and dreams of presence. A layer, or layering to the ordinary,
it engenders attachments or systems of investment in the
unfolding of things.
10
ME: Is the potential lurking behind the reals?
Coda
In music, the Italian word coda (tail) names a passage that brings a piece or a movement to an end.
The reason for a coda is that, after the climax of the main body of a piece, a coda is required to look
back on the main body and allow listeners to reflect. This conversation with Kathleen Stewart is a
collage that imitates an interactive exchange of thoughts that not only incorporates stylistic elements
of her anthropological work, but also her own words abstracted from the original writing context (a
violence operated on the integrity of a text). As a style of writing, my collage is a mechanism of
intertextuality in which I stage the intra-actions of a text coming in contact with another text, imitating
the interactions between masquerade authors and enlarging the participation in the conversation to
other absent-present authors. It is a tool for evoking the debate that characterizes the contemporary
era in which we live and in which we world the world.
Notes
iStewart K (2007) Ordinary Affects, p. 5
ii Stewart K (2017) In the world that affect proposed, p. 192
iii Stewart K (2007) Ordinary Affects, p. 4-5.
iv Stewart K (2005) Cultural poesis: The generativity of emergent things, p. 1029.
vStewart K (2007) Ordinary Affects, p. 106.
vi Stewart K (2007) Ordinary Affects, p. 10.
vii Stewart K (2007) Ordinary Affects, p. 12.
viii Stewart K (2007) Ordinary Affects, p. 23.
ix Stewart K (2007) Ordinary Affects, p. 2.
xStewart K (2005) Cultural poesis: The generativity of emergent things, p. 1015.
xi Stewart K (2005) Cultural poesis: The generativity of emergent things, p. 1016.
xii Stewart K (2011) Atmospheric attunements, p. 452.
xiii Stewart K (2011) Atmospheric attunements, p. 445.
xiv Stewart K (2007) Ordinary Affects, p. 3-4.
xv Stewart K (2014) Road registers, p. 549.
xvi Stewart K (2014) Tactile compositions, p. 119.
xvii Stewart K (2013) Studying unformed objects: The provocation of a compositional mode.
Cultural Anthropology website, June 30, 2013. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/350-studying-
unformed-objects-the-provocation-of-a-compositional-mode.
11
xviii Stewart K (2015) New England red, p. 21.
xix Stewart K (2007) Ordinary Affects, p. 4.
xx Stewart K (2017) In the world that affect proposed, p. 193.
xxi Stewart K (2014) Tactile compositions, p. 119.
xxii Stewart K (2005) Cultural poesis: The generativity of emergent things, p. 1015.
xxiii Stewart K (2005) Cultural poesis: The generativity of emergent things, p. 1016.
xxiv Stewart K (2007) Ordinary Affects, p. 21.
Acknowledgements: I wish to thank my colleagues Antonio Strati and Marie Manidis who had the
patience to read and comment on a first draft of this chapter. It is understood that the responsibility
for the final paper is mine alone.
Recommended reading
Original text by Kathleen Stewart
Stewart K (2007) Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Key academic text
Stewart K (2011) Atmospheric attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society and space 29(3):
445-453.
Accessible resource
Romero A and Locke TA (2017) Words in Worlds: An Interview with Kathleen Stewart. Cultural
Anthropology Website, July 20. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/words-in-worlds-an-interview-with-
kathleen-stewart
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1
In the web of the spider-woman: Towards a new cosmopolitics of
familiarity and kinship in organization (Donna Haraway)
Lindsay Hamilton, ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5363-2509
Abstract
The instrumental rationality of business has long underpinned human aspirations to strategic
progress and growth; a view that has derived strength from historic narratives of human
domination and prowess such that a tradition of the typical business school has been to
perpetuate, usually implicitly, a view of humans as exceptional; as powerful managers,
strategists, decisionmakers. While not labelling herself as an organization theorist,
throughout her many essays, articles and books, Donna Haraway has sought to challenge the
anthropocentrism of business mastery and its capacity to shore up exploitation, corruption and
environmental damage. By taking that important stance, Haraway draws particular focus to the
significance of kinship which refers (in part) to the affective ties between human and nonhuman
beings despite their embodied differences. In calling for humans to cultivate kinship ties across
species borderlines, Haraways impactful conceptualisation of affect as a form of mutual
belonging paves new routes for thinking about our place and our responsibilities as humans in
the multispecies world.
Introduction
Social theorist Donna Haraway has pioneered path-breaking lines of enquiry in
poststructuralist, postmodernist, postcolonialist and ecofeminist thought. Although not an
organization scholar, per se, her conceptual arguments speak to important and topical
organizational themes, not least of which is the case for seeking out the meaningful inclusion
of nonhumans in the theorisation of commercial activity. These themes are important for those
interested in the concept of affect within organizations for they help develop a less human-
centric way of viewing relationships and co-dependencies. Her work supports new attention to
previously overlooked actors and objects of concern within organizations and in the wider
environment: algorithms, cloud data stores, cats, fungi, trees, military drones, plutonium,
graphene, robots, soil and water to name but a few (ODoherty, 2016). Highlighting the
contiguous and relational rather than oppositional nature of differently embodied actors in
social life, Haraways work advocates kinship ties between humans and these others. Scholars
engaging with her work call for the inclusion of nonhumans in business school outputs (Labatut
et al., 2016), research methods (Hamilton and Taylor, 2017) and pedagogical approaches
(Tallberg et al., 2020).
Haraways theorisation of the connections between humans and other actors supports new
thinking on the meaning and social expression of affect, as a connection, a mutual relationship
akin to family or natureculture; a move which re-members humans as temporary expressions
of, and as made-up of, the same stuff of the worlds they study (Latimer, 2017, 246; Donaldson
and Kymlicka, 2011). Decentring humans as all-powerful prime movers, her principal
argument is that actors of all kinds be they human or otherwise exist in entanglement,
2
enmeshed and affectively connected across time and space. It is our responsibility, she argues,
to see these connections as family ties and apply the same principles of care and reciprocity to
commercial activity lay out a template for sustainability.
Human perceptions of the world around them, their ideas about what holds true, are always
historically specific, Haraway argues, and so can shift as the body and mind moves through
different embodied, geographically and historically specific terrains, relationships or
situations. Thus, eschewing both the mythology of human exceptionalism as well as related
claims to eternal and exclusively human truths and knowledge systems, her vivid and radical
writing critiques the potency of human efforts to dominate and exploit natural resources in
damaging extraction and consumption practices. She berates the lack of value placed upon
humananimal companionship and affective ties, calling for humans to care for actors of all
species rather than reproduce, to consume less and to seek out ways to extract value without
violence. Haraways literary style draws focus to the transhumanity of affect as kinship. Affect
can exceed of humanistic borders, if kinship is embraced. Several organic metaphors emerge
throughout her work such as compost, coral reefs, roots and tentacles; vivid descriptions that
empower connections, minglings and tethers rather than divisions. Her approach speaks to
contemporary discourses in green accounting, corporate social responsibility, and business
ethics.
This chapter illuminates a small selection of Haraways thinking to show how she has
implicitly and explicitly influenced a morethanhuman strand of organizational scholarship
over four decades. The chapter does not seek to mine the technical details of Haraways many
books and articles, nor does it track developments, inconsistencies, or paradoxes in her thinking
over time. Instead, the aim is to explore Haraways particular style of thought to better highlight
its value for organizational studies. With that aim in mind, the next section sets out some of the
basic principles which undergird Haraways outlook, then turns to the literary tools through
which they are depicted. The chapter concludes with possible future moves that each unfold
a glimpse of a future Harawavian way of seeing affect as kinship within organization studies.
Constructing nature: Managed difference and blasphemous thinking
At the outset of Primate Visions, Haraway (1989) provokes readers to think, In what specific
places, out of which social and intellectual histories, and with what tools is nature constructed
as an object of erotic and intellectual desire? (p.1) Her aim in challenging the reader thus, is
to inspect the social and political nature of nature and, in doing so, set new terms for the traffic
between what we have come to know historically as nature and culture (p.15). This early
provocation problematises assumptions and labels that have perpetuated the symbolic chasms
between human culture and the earthy wildness of nature, a state she names managed
difference (p.69). Such differences emerge culturally, for example, in the way natural history
museums display the evolutionary narrative with man uppermost in the hierarchy of life. For
Haraway, whose (1988) concept of situated knowledge posits the transience and
impermanence of even seemingly embedded and perpetual value-systems, there is always hope
that what is known, held as normative and embedded in culture, can also shift and change as
new situations emerge.
3
Tentacular is a word Haraway uses (2016) to highlight the potential for new knowledge.
Tentacular emerges from the Latin tentaculum, meaning feeler, and tentare, meaning to
feel and to try. If the tentacular is concerned with tentative acts of trying and feeling rather
than instrumental control, such a metaphor commits an act of intellectual blasphemy in that
it runs contra to accepted wisdom about humanitys powerful place within the world
(something many business schools pay little or no attention to, even in their most critical
scholarship). In Haraways view, the organism is an object of knowledge as a system of the
production and partition of energy, or as a system of division of labour with executive
functions. Importantly, here, the organism as an object of knowledge only comes into being
through being known; that is, within a context of resource managements, the tracking of
energies through trophic layers.
Knowledge objects (nouns) and knowledge acts (verbs) work through classificatory practices
which perpetuate a false dichotomy between observer and observed. Haraway argues an act of
blasphemy is needed if we are to unpick the culturally and politically settled state of artificial
separation. Blasphemy is a term used here not in the sense of religious dissent, but category
deviance, a form of radical questioning of the taxonomies and classificatory practises that have
sought to keep politics, science and technology separate. Haraway desires a traffic between
human knowledge and the world out there which involves taking note of organisms,
technologies, spaces and organizations and working out what they do, how they relate, how
they are coded and changed. She considers closeup scrutiny to have the potential to helpfully
unmanage the managed difference that shores up humannature hierarchies and actively
supports the exploitation of nonhumans as resources (Hamilton and Taylor, 2013). It is the
precursor to embracing the values and implications of affective connections and entangled
agencies thriving across boundaries.
Haraway takes the practice of questioning difference into the domain of technologies too. In
The Cyborg Manifesto (1991a) she brings together the flesh and machine that increasingly
underpins human life and radically opens out the debate on categories warning of the dangers
of deifying boundaries, borderlines and typological definitions. Perhaps, she states, we are
inhabiting an intersectional world wherein we inhabit multiple categories simultaneously.
This does not imply the dissolving of meaningful labels (male and female, for example, see
1995) but rather the radical questioning of their social torque or driving power. Labels hold
the power to take us somewhere. In the process of being driven by categories and their names,
humans become components within a system architecture whose basic modes of operation
are probabilistic (Haraway, 1991a, 212): a state of affairs she aims to challenge. In other
words, torque is the power that turns the label of humanity into a social force; a potency that
carries reallife effects.
Returning to the notion of kinship as a form of affect gives us a way of unroving the driving
practices of categorisation. In Haraways (1994) perspective, kinship is a form of intense,
inherited, sometimes temporary (or difficult) attachment: a mode of existence with others in
the world. Striving for affective connections with others can also function as a motivating goal
for unmaking traditional norms, fixed categories and thereby de-sanctifying their power; their
social torque. Although aiming to unmake and unbind categories, Haraway (2004a, 2004b) is
4
not seeking destruction but in fact a more accurate recognition of the messy overlapping
agencies that co-constitute social life and form connections between people, animals and other
forms of agency. As recent events have unfolded during the covid 19 pandemic, for example,
many who have traditionally worked in human-centred office spaces have transitioned to online
meetings, thereby witnessing the important role that domestic companion animals play in
providing emotional warmth and comfort as well as breaking down communicative barriers
between colleagues. Here, animal actors always present in the backstage region of the
work self emerge from the shadows as integral, closely connected and enmeshed in the daily
patterns of the home.
Haraways (1991b) focus upon the political materialities of information, organization and
category maintenance asks questions of the material of the world rather than moving beyond it
in some sort of utopian beyonding or reworlding. Hence Haraways view of kinship is not
about proposing a state of futuristic posthumanism in which we are indistinguishable from
robots, cats or soil and she is reticent about the common use of the prefix, post in her critical
theory on humanity. She perceives a danger in that label too (1994, 1995, 2004a and b) The
Companion Species Manifesto (2003) interrogates relationalities where the absolute meanings
attached to the label of species are in question. She considers how emotional or affective
relations with nonhuman others such as those observed by colleagues during a video
conference embrace new becomings.
More accurate than adopting a pretence of strict humanism that excludes different animals from
everyday processes, including work, becomings accept and highlight the value of affect
through kinship. Kinship, for Haraway is a binding, formed through the unbinding of
difference. As Haraway explains (2003, 34), if you have a kin member, a family member, they
have you: you can make claims on each other. Kinship is about a kind of nonoptional
reciprocity. Kinship relations are a state of living or dying in solidarity with other beings
(human or nonhuman) where they have stakes in each other. If one has a dog, her argument
goes, care must be provided; as failure to offer basic care needs would be deemed a failing as
the domestic world as to function in togetherness.
The way Haraway presents humanmaterial, humantechnology and human animal relations
is blasphemous in the sense that her work unravels the cleanly purified categories that hold up
the world (and the business world in particular). Far beyond a simple story of man and tool
through history, but rather her work is concerned with challenging and eroding the very
categories that constitute self and other the definitional work that makes primitive labels
such as man and tool understandable but which problematises an ethos of connected
community. She wants us to pay attention to how all the boundaries in place that hide our
connectivity, our interdependency and our relationality are themselves webbed. The boundaries
her work challenges are between the literary and the scientific, affect and effect for Haraways
writing makes possible a vision in which every move we make, every step we take, everything
we create is underpinned by the historicity of how these divisions are enacted (Latimer, 2017,
249).
5
All the meanings that become attached to different social and cultural categories have roots as
well as tentacles, in the sense that they have a source and provenance as well as relational
connectivity and reach. This is named an affirmatory biopolitics after Esposito (2008), a
condition that downplays otherness and division, and that produces a vision of earthy
materiality (which she terms compost) rather than confusing free-floating relativism. For
Haraway, human is not the same as dog or robot but it is important to think carefully about
what the labels dog, human and robot enact, how they function to bring together or repel.
Other use different names and terms, each name emerging from different ways of seeing the
same concept; cosmopolitics (Stengers, 1997), actor networks (Alcadipani and Hassard,
2010), Gaia (Waddock, 2011), a life with new entities (Latour, 2004a).
Organic metaphors of roots, tentacles and compost present a literary but powerful challenge to
the thinking style that supports theories of human progress, strategy and change management.
Many critical scholars have drawn on the language of entanglement, affect, or actor network
theory, for example, to express how heterogeneous sets of actants perform in organizations
without normative assumptions of mastery or managerial efficacy (Alcadipani and Hassard,
2010; ODoherty, 2016; Plumwood, 1993). A good case in point is the science laboratory
(Latour and Woolgar, 1992) in which mundane work functions, materials and objects get
enlisted in the powerful performance of an ostensibly valuefree science that seeks to
obscure the creative hand of humans in managing the scholarly publication of results in high
ranking journals. Here workplace assemblies enact objects to give voice and potency to them:
a petri dish can be an actor, as can white coats and mould cultures. This lateral view of the
organization and its relational experiences is extended by Haraways powerful writing. For
Haraway, voice and potency are not necessarily human.
Welcoming demons, familiars and mysterious entities
For those working in organizational studies, such an approach to relationships and actors could
be used to incorporate a cosmos of others in political accounts of work and organizing
(Alcadipani and Hassard, 2010; Latour, 2004b), to give rise to inclusive treatment of new
entities that they may be detected, welcomed and given a shelter (Latour, 2004b, 224) in
organizational theory and practice. Such an ethos is emboldened by Haraways work which
frequently draws focus to a mysterious or important nonhuman actor to perform such acts of
welcoming. Across the spectrum of her collected work the characters of cyborg, spider
woman, vampire, modest witness, FemaleMan, and OncoMouse gather up the ways that
movements, techniques and systems of knowledge have rewired many of our apprehensions
and experiences of our bodies and true selves. Haraways metaphoric demons or familiars
are often borrowed from folklore, iconography, culture, myth and fable. She remakes her
metaphors to suit her purpose.
In setting out her tentacular agenda (2016), for example, Haraway draws our gaze to the
invented character of a spider that she names, Pimoa Cthulhu, who dwells in the redwood
forests of North Central California. Cthulhu emerges from the word chthonic (a classical
Greek word meaning, "of the earth") which echoes Haraways preference for organic, earthy
metaphors but also plays on tropes found in earlier science fiction stories about tentacular
monsters interacting with humans. The imagery and location of the spider is analytically
6
valuable for it embodies, quite literally, the idea of the roaming tentacular suggestive of
tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones. This imagery
stresses that seeking and forming affective networks and types of kin leads to a rich social
experience; of life lived along lines and such a wealth of lines not at points, not in spheres
but instead, a series of interlaced trails made up of wayfarers, characters, beings.
Through the imagery of the leggy, woodland dwelling spider, Haraway quests into the very
nature of being human and human being. Affect generated by and within kinship ties not
at points, not in spheres but extending in interlaced trails is essential to reconfiguring
even the most apparently immutable elements of humanity; bodies, bones, blood, genomes.
All of these labels can be rethought, repurposed, reworked. The things we often see as signs of
our own species distinction and otherness, she proposes, can be reconsidered emblems of a
symbiotic system that connects rather than disconnects us from nature. We are also feeling,
probing and trying just like the woodland spiders leg. Should we embrace a life on the
forest floor, perhaps, and eschew the sanitised trappings of the executive lounge (ODoherty,
2017), the call centre or the open plan office? These are spaces which traditionally demarcate
human from animal through sanitized lines of sight that offer protection from soil, spiders and
interlaced trails that lead us away from the familiar. Haraway wants us to consider ourselves
in an entangled web through which other beings are connected.
The visual and literary nature of Haraways writing develops through the metaphor of compost.
Compost is, of course, a material whereby matter has broken down and reformed as a new type
of matter. It is an image that applies well to academic work, for instance, a process by which
new ideas are always indebted to the painstaking review and critique of the manifold writings
and readings that have come before; their breaking down and disintegration allowing for new
forms and styles to emerge (Helmreich, 2021). Haraway is not in search of linear progress,
here, but rather using compost to underline what she perceives as a more accurate reading of
the messy enmeshing or layering of ideas, bodies, labels new upon old as an organic and
earthy process (Haraway, 2000). In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
(2016) she writes, Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; we require each other in
unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other
or not at all (p.4). Although it is not stipulated whether in the metaphor the notion of hot
compost piles may be made of leaf matter or coffee grounds, pieces of newspaper, potato
peelings or anything else, the purpose is to emphasise the mingling that eventually produces a
rich soil. Rich soil, in turn, can be used to fertilize and reproduce goodness. This idea resonates
strongly with critical management approaches to the messy realities of acts of organising
which are seldom arrived at ex nihilo. It also frames her contribution to the theorisation of
affect.
The sentiment of mingling and mutuality is what matters here and returns us to the important
anchoring framework of affective kinship bonds. Indeed, oddkin infers relationships with
nonhumans, others who are not like us; spiders, leaves and fungi. Haraway frames such
relationships and our becoming with each other as staying with the trouble. The nature of
staying with is difficult to combine practically with the physical decline involved in the
process of decomposition but the idea is a call for us to recognise that if we become-with each
other, fruitful new kinship links may be formed. In her collection of investigations touching
on primates, companion species and technologies, Haraway sets out a (feminine) vision that
7
seeks to question the how and the why of the categories that divide flesh from circuit-boards,
animals from humans, genomes from whole bodies (Latimer, 2017). Throughout the broad
catalogue of work, her aim is to ask by what means such categories get their power and in doing
that, to search out new templates of interaction, mutual mindedness, affective relationships
with whatever and whoever we desire.
Haraways concerns relate to how organic and fleshy realities are enacted: she recognises that
things could be otherwise and that realities are not destiny (Law, 2007). The overarching
project is to return us to the fleshy dwellings so long eschewed by Aristotelian and Cartesian
precepts; to reunite humans with other actors along a continuum of being that embraces
proximity and affect and, in so doing, rejects old tenets of exceptionalism, hierarchy and
progress. Dwelling in new kinship bonds, accepting that affect is important, she presents
humans as the fusty leaves and mouldering lives of the forest floor: as humus, by which
bodies, ideas and paradigms mingle and turn to compost.
The dank and musty imagery of humus and warm compost on the forest floor will be, for many
organizational thinkers, a strange and witchy metaphor to work with. Yet, the concept has
resonance for those interested in developing ideas about affect at work; it prompts thought
about connections and relations at a local and a global level. In describing her forest spider
womans dwelling place, for example, Haraway (2016) notes that, Nobody lives everywhere;
everybody lives somewhere. (p.345) This spider is in place, has a place, and yet is named for
intriguing travels elsewhere. Just as many organizational theorists embrace the locatedness
of the organization as the empirical mainstay of their enquiries the office, the callcentre,
the clinic Haraways embraces both the forestfloor as well as the broader possibilities of
travels elsewhere: a useful and beautiful metaphor to work with. These travels, unfolding like
the arachnidian limbs of Pimoa Cthulhu, empower a linguistic, theoretical, methodological
extension of thinking on intimacies, connections and impacts and at a broader travelling
level provoke deeper enquiries (and blasphemies) into the dominant, global norms of human
exceptionalism and organizational mastery.
Harawavian thinking has become more relevant in subject areas such as corporate social
responsibility, business ethics and green accounting (among other disciplines) as we live
through the visible impact of climate change, extinctions and zoonotic disease pandemics.
There is increasing pragmatic as well as philosophical acceptance that humanist bias in
business and management scholarship (Heikkurinen et al., 2019; Hoffman & Jennings, 2021),
is integral to make genuine and positive differences to the future security of nonhuman
ecosystems.
As Tallberg et al. state, (2021, 2) If we agree that the ecological challenges affecting
organizations are the result of anthropocentric value-creation models based on profit
maximisation, then it may not only be short-sighted but also unethical to limit managerial
practice and decision-making exclusively to humans. Working with the concept that humans
exist on a continuum or as Haraway puts it, a weblike mesh in which a vibration in one
segment will have reverberation throughout, choices such as consumption patterns, our
behaviours and decision making could lead to a radical reconfiguration of what we should eat,
8
where we should travel and how we should conduct ourselves more generally in the world.
Taking inspiration from such arguments, in the next and concluding section I extend spidery
legs out across a couple of lines of travel. The aim is to set out ways for organization studies
to apply Haraways ethos in practical endeavours.
Unfolding spiderlegs and intriguing travels
Haraways conceptualisation of affect as kinship works contra to the takenforgranted
nature of realworld definitions, labels and taxonomies. For Haraway, many definitions and
labels perpetuate the destructive unbinding of potential kinship ties, working against the
benefits of affective connection. Indeed, she goes further. Labels can imbue a sort of violence
that allows exploitative practices and power imbalances to remain unchallenged. Haraway
expresses rage at the ways that myths have perpetuated humannature division and, thereby,
commercial exploitation. Haraway is vocal and explicit about what this means in her words,
the scale of burning ambitions of fossil-making man with all the other accelerating
extractions of minerals, plant and animal flesh, human homelands, and so on she terms, quite
bluntly, madness.
Hers is not a philosophical agenda, then, but an emotive and deeply personal quest to advocate
for new language practises that build alternatives to the historic ways that humans have defined
(and prioritised) their economic activity and gain over other actors, subjugated as food,
vermin and resources. Knowledge of the world, Haraway argues, is always an engaged
material practice and never a disembodied set of ideas (Haraway, 2004, 199200). Words
carry power. Hence, her writing demands a focus on the roots and the potency of labels, the
embodied source of the meanings they confer and the sociopolitical actions they support. It
is difficult to accept affective ties, let alone the prospect of kinship with an actor labelled as
vermin, after all.
If what humans know is embedded in a situation, and empowered through language, then
organizational scholarship should not leave labels and categories unscrutinised. For example,
the concept of Personal Assistant works with, and implies knowledge of, the distinct category
of executive and the category of leader instates the separate and subordinate characteristics
of follower. These are just a few of the meaningladen categories which could be
questioned, unmade and which are never a fixed destiny (Law, 2007).
Haraway invites us to see how all human techno-scientific invention and creativity is enrolled
in acts of power that can include or exclude various actors and, all the while, remakes the myth
of human exceptionality. Any claims to categorical purity (be they racial, gendered, human)
need to be held up for inspection. There is importance in applying this style of thought to such
familiar terms as leader, executive and manager but there is a broader urgency as recent
events have underlined the need to preserve and cherish the stuff of our planet; what Eduardo
Kohn (2013) calls ecologies of selves, meshworks and overlaps between all creatures, materials
and forms. Scrutinising the use of language, labelling particularly, is vital to unmake the
categories that perpetuate the species distinction and entrap organizational scholarship in a
paradigm that sees nonhumans as objects.
9
Millions of humans and animals work side-by-side and many empirical investigations already
show that animals are not beyond human organising but are rather a constituent part of such
organising (Hannah and Robertson, 2017; Sage et al., 2016). For organization studies, this
necessitates a consideration of the interactions and interests of nonhumans (Wünderlich et al.,
2021) as well as the possibilities for what Coulter (2016) helpfully terms interspecies solidarity
an ethos for exploring the contiguous and messy connections rather than disconnections
that work to disempower both humans and other creatures. Calarco (2015) calls for an ethic
of cohabitation whereby assisting animals and learning from them is set against efforts to
manage or extract value from them. The ideas of collaboration, cohabitation and coproduction
open out new ontological possibilities for understanding other critters (Helmreich, 2021) and
our relationships to them through organizational settings.
In positive organizational scholarship (or POS), for instance, the emphasis upon understanding
human thriving through acts of empathy and noticing suffering could be extended by the
development of models for encouraging noticing, empathising and acting for nonhumans. The
notion of thriving is readily reconfigured by reference to Haraways contributions as a
morethanhuman state to which we should orientate. Nonhuman inclusivity in stakeholder
theory is another potential line of theorisation, currently tethered to a worldview in which
nonhumans are considered only insofar as they have a direct instrumental value to humans
(Heikkurinen et al., 2019; Waddock, 2011) but which is being reconfigured through an
ecofeminist lens (Tallberg et al., 2021) inspired by Haraways thinking. Theoretical travel
beyond the human is possible for organizational theorists and Haraway provides the template
for doing so.
Her work offers an alternative to managerial, technocratic, market-and-profit besotted,
modernizing, and human-exceptionalist business-as-usual commitments of so much
Anthropocene discourse (2016, 320), a form of thinking that she depicts as wrong-headed
and wrong-hearted. The aim is to promote a powerful caring for other worlds. It is time,
Haraway states, to rid ourselves of the enslavement to Progress and its evil twin,
Modernization. If capitalism was relationally made, and empowered through acts of labelling,
it can be unmade. We must reworld, reimagine, relive, and reconnect with each other, in
multispecies well-being. These points provide a cornerstone for critical organization studies
to go further in its attempts to feel, sense and explore new possibilities. Haraway stresses
the importance of limiting human reproductive potential, limiting our numbers and scaling
back our activities in the hope of a higher, more inclusive freedom and quality of life. This
speaks to and against normative business constructs such as growth, progress, innovation.
If all knowledgemaking is political and embedded, we need enquiries and experiments in
organization studies that counter the silencing of certain actors and forms of action (Gane and
Haraway, 2006). The aim should therefore be to recognise, describe and understand the
affective links that make new forms of kinship bonds rather than reproducing the neat
taxonomic categories that differentiate and divide actors (Tallberg et al., 2020). While some
might say that we should eschew attempts to know the unknowable and that questions about
kinship and affect between humans and nonhumans are woolly, indeterminate and hard to
measure, even a basic reappraisal of categorical labels could foster the kind of new thinking
10
that Haraway proposes in searching out overlaps, entanglements and connections. Accepting
that there are uncertainties and forms of knowledge that are mysterious, in the interests of
recognising affect and kinship bonds Haraway is eager for us to challenge the limitation of
what and how we learn.
Her unique contribution is, I consider, built upon a way of seeing the world as a cosmopolitics
in which actors of various types might be perceived to be a part of a contingent system
(ODoherty, 2016; Stengers, 2010) that does not seek to perpetuate long-standing distinctions
on the basis of what has hitherto been treated as an irreducible essence but instead considers
organization as an ecology of practices that takes into account the political and tentacular
nature of human interactions, the constraints and obligations such practices impose, and the
impact they have on commercial and social lives. Specifically, then, Haraways contribution
offers the opportunity to think deeply about the way that arbitrary, cultural acts of partition,
definition and division support oppression and calls for a close eye to the social torque by
which categories and labels are produced and reproduced.
Haraway shows that in the nexus of entanglements between how division and labelling is done
are possibilities for reproduction of asymmetrical power relations, including capitalisms worst
excesses of war and oppression as well as the myriad injustices that pepper organization life;
prejudice, discrimination, dominance. When we read the breadth of her manifestos, interviews,
essays, conversations and articles together, she offers us a different way of doing organization
and a different way of theorising affect: not as something akin to emotional connection between
humans, but as a deeply ingrained value of tentacular feeling across actors who may form
kinship bonds irrespective of their denoted labels. This agenda urges us to see organizational
and resource hierarchies differently.
The whole point is to feel, reach out and find different ways of thinking, writing and doing as
at the same time connecting things up that are usually held apart. Of course, critiques of
instrumental capitalism and simple dualisms have always been present in critical business and
management scholarship and many theoretical perspectives (for example, Marxism,
ecofeminism, critical theory, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, posthumanism among others)
have honed important critiques of, for instance, financial systems and greed, climate and
sustainability crisis, and continuing wicked injustices in society (Grint, 1991), all of which
carry serious ethical implications for the way that business schools in particular (Parker, 2002)
have invested in and promoted rational and instrumental ideals of leadership and
scientific management in their pedagogies and outputs. Such work has questioned the
embedded narratives of progress and development that perceive every problem to be solvable
given the right technology (Strathern, 1991); a view predicated on historic discourses of
mastery, dominance and reason. Enthusiasm for Haraways thinking does not detract from the
strength of these different endeavours, rather her ideas compliment, scaffold and extend
attempts to see management and organization in terms of the kinship bonds that may tether its
actors together.
11
Haraways more recent work has not been without harsh critique. Lewis (2017), for example,
sees Haraways latter work as worrying in its tendency towards antimaternalism and
antihumanism rather than antiexceptionalism:
As she repeatedly drums home, dont make babies as much as make kin becomes
the take-home injunction for the reader of Donna Haraway. The vision of trans-species
Gemeinschaft that emerges is not so much post- as anti-human.
The charge of antihumanism is of course a philosophical one (Esposito, 2008), but other
critics undermine her writing as weird and psychedelic, hard to read, understand or work with.
They have also questioned what, precisely, is so valuable about a tentacular approach to
humans as naturecultures. Yet Haraways entire argument is not to get hung up on words but
to embrace feelings, affective resonance and to take materials, technologies and other species
into kinship bonds. Whether Haraways lucid, literary style is a help or a hindrance for those
in the business school, at the very least her powerful questioning of traditional distinctions
between human and animal, natural and social, modern and archaic, the scientific and the
irrational holds emancipatory potential for enveloping actors of various types and species into
new forms of organizational scholarship on affect. To realise the potential of these provocative
thoughts, perhaps we should imagine ourselves on the forest floor as humus, as a mouse or
a spider: the point is to question accepted wisdom and think like kin.
Recommended reading
Original text by Donna Haraway
Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham:
North Carolina: Duke University Press.
Key academic text
Schneider, J. (2005). Donna Haraway: Live theory. London: A&C Black (Bloomsbury
Publishing).
Accessible resource
Gane N. (2006) When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done?: Interview with
Donna Haraway. Theory, Culture & Society. 23(7-8):135-158.
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Jane Bennett: Marvelling at a world of vibrant matter
Justine Grønbæk Pors, ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7063-0786
Abstract
This chapter explores the possibilities for thinking and analysing that Jane Bennetts theorising
offers. The chapter shows how Bennetts work with affect and what she calls vibrant matter
allows Bennett to reconsider concepts about individuality and agency. I discuss the possibilities
that are thereby opened for organizational analysis. Moreover, the chapter explores the
characteristics of Bennetts ways of thinking and writing and unpacks the methodological
inspiration that these offer to organizational analysis.
Introduction
This chapter begins with breathing. Inhale. Exhale. Breathing as the coming and going of air,
molecules, ideas, scents, affects, and tiny little drops of liquid. Influx. Efflux.1 While breathing
is sometimes used in self-technologies such as, e.g., mindfulness to stabilize a sense of self,
thinking about who one is while breathing may also inspire wonderings about the dependence
of the human body on its environment. Inhale. Exhale. What comes in when you inhale? How
are you affected by the environment in which you live and breathe? What is a self? Our bodies
are inhabited by millions of bacteria. Human cells make up only 43% of the bodys total cell
count (Sender, Fuchs and Milo, 2016). The rest is microbes. Bacteria enter our bodies from the
outside and make a home in us. When we digest our lunch or when our immune systems fight
a threat, these are processes in which bacteria play a leading role. Inhale. Exhale. What do you
notice? Even our moods are not just our own or strictly human as bacteria also play a role in
regulating them. As Jane Bennett (2020, xi) puts it: A swarm of non-humans are at work inside
and as us; we are powered by a host of inner aliens, including ingested plants, animals,
pharmaceuticals and the microbiomes upon which thinking itself relies. Inhale. Exhale. Now,
where did that urge for chocolate come from? Who decided to end this breathing exercise and
run down to the street vender to fetch some chocolate? Influx. Efflux.
1
This strange feeling that emerges when we begin to notice how we are not confined, coherent
subjects perfectly in control of our intentions, will, and actions is one of Bennetts most
powerful analytical resources. If something comes out strongly throughout Bennetts writing,
it is an ability to notice, marvel, to be enchanted, and channel this enchantment into thinking
and theorizing.
Throughout her work, Bennett strives to de-centre the human and recognize the agency of the
other-than-human bodies with which we humans share the world. She carefully deconstructs
the idea that human beings differ from all other creatures in their interpreting and self-
interpreting capabilities. Bennetts insistent deconstruction of the idea of a confined, human
being whose intentional actions causally effect the world can help organization studies to
challenge the story of a sovereign self that continue to do its work in many debates in
organization studies despite the fact that it has been subject of critique for quite some years
(Harding, Gilmore and Ford, 2021; Pullen and Vachhani, 2013; Kenny and Fotaki, 2015; Ford
et al., 2017; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015). Bennetts writing is an invitation to rework concepts
such as will, intention, agency, (managerial) control and causality, seeing them not as the
properties of individual bodies but as post-personal events in emerging confederations.
Moreover, scholars of organization may find methodological inspiration not only in Bennetts
original curiosity, but also in her careful manner of choosing words and creating languages
better suited to theorise a world of vibrant matter and affective influences.
In this chapter, first, I introduce Bennetts seminal thinking on vibrant matter. Second, I present
Bennetts ideas about affect and affective influences. Next, I describe the concepts of
subjectivity and agency that comes out of Bennetts theorizing and discuss the possibilities these
hold for organization theory and analysis. Finally, I unpack the methodological inspiration that
Bennetts work offers and discuss how this may enrich organization studies.
Vibrant matter
With the concept of vibrant matter Bennett offers a decisive move away from thinking things
as dead, dumb, brute, and passive matter that wait for humans to come along, notice and make
2
use of them. She explores how edibles, commodities, storms, and metals sometime act as quasi
agents with their own trajectories, potentialities, and tendencies (Bennett, 2010, viii). Such
things, Bennett argues, are lively. The project is not to deny human agency nor to release
humans of their responsibility for how the world is developing. Rather, it is to discuss how the
modern habit of parsing the world into passive matter and vibrant life has the effect that we
often understate the power of things. What would happen if we think through the liveliness of
matter, e.g. how landfills generate lively streams of chemicals or the way a diet infiltrates brain
chemistry and moods (Bennett, 2010a)? How can our analysis of organizations be enriched if
we also direct our analytical attention to the creative self-organization of matter and its lively,
inconsistent nature?
By dismissing the assumption that things or matter always behave in simple, mechanistic, or
predictable manners, Bennett offers theoretical and analytical sensitivity to how things
sometimes demonstrate a curious ability to animate, to act, and to produce dramatic and subtle
effects (Bennett, 2010, 6). She is not arguing that the table I sit at while writing this chapter
has intentions or a will. Rather, it is to explore what it would mean to admit that it has
propensities and insistences. Bennett asks how different kinds of waste, chemicals, winds of
methane, or iron have certain tendencies, capacities and propulsions that sometime come to
conjoin with other human and non-human bodies and thereby become powerful actants. The
concept of actant comes from Bruno Latour and Bennett uses it to replace the concept of an
actor. An actant is defined as an entity or a process that makes a difference to the direction of
a larger assemblage without that difference being reducible to an efficient cause; actants
collaborate, divert, vitalize, gum up, twist, or turn the groupings in which they participate.
(Bennett in Watson, 2013, 149) This recast of things is not only a shift of focus from thinking
things as passive entities waiting for humans to give them purpose, value and use, but also from
thinking things in and of themselves (as e.g., the part of new materialism working under the
umbrella term object oriented ontology (Harman, 2011). Bennetts theory of vibrant matter is
not about things as entities. Bennetts particular term, thing power, is not a concept for things
in their individuality, stability, and separateness. Rather, it is a concept that draws attention to
the forces and intensities of things often in congregation with other human and non-human
bodies. Of crucial importance here, is the concept of assemblage. Imported primarily from the
work of Deleuze and Guattari, Bennett uses this concept to stress how a phenomenon such as
for example a breakdown of an electric power grid is in fact a network, a coming together, of
3
many different things and forces that together have the capacity to disrupt as well as to generate
actions and effects. Assemblages for Bennett mean:
ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are
living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence
of energies that confound them from within. They have uneven topographies, because
some of the points at which the various affects and bodies cross paths are move heavily
trafficked than others, and so power is not distributed equally across its surface. (Bennett,
2010, 23-24)
Assemblages are constantly changing and can be unpredictable and ungovernable. As Bennett
writes:
Assemblages are not governed by any central head: no one materiality or type of material
has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group.
The effects generated by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that
their ability to make something happen (a newly inflected materialism, a blackout, a
hurricane, a war on terror) is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality
considered alone. Each member and proto-member of the assemblage has a certain vital
force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency of the
assemblage. (Bennett, 2010: 24)
Thus, against a tendency in scholarship and public discourses alike to often assume by default
that the most potent actant in a group is a human being, Bennett draws attention to how complex
networks escape human control and that inanimate things, like electronics or wind, can set off
unintended consequences. This is important for attempts of organization scholars to discuss
environmental issues: How are organizations part and parcel of large, complex and
fundamentally ungovernable assemblages that often do harm to people, animals, and
ecosystems around the planet? Bennetts work resists any understanding of nature as passive
and humans as the all-powerful actor that can bring nature to use. Instead, she offers
possibilities to unpack how ideas about nature as inert resources fortifies organizations
exploitation of the planet.
New materialisms have already inspired organizational scholars to rethink concepts such as
actor, identity, and communication as well as relationships between the discursive and the
material (Harding, 2020; Orlikowski, 2007; Orlikowski and Scott, 2015). Particularly, scholars
have drawn on Karen Barads agential realism to study the material dimensions of organising
4
and subjectivity (Dale and Latham, 2015; Harding, Ford, and Lee, 2017; Dille and Plotnikof,
2020). However, references to Bennetts work are scarcer. Corvellec (2019) has drawn on
Bennetts notion of thing-power to develop an analytical approach to waste that allows scholars
to read and question waste by letting themselves be interpellated by waste as a means to get to
know it better. Moreover, Valtonen and Pullen (2021) take inspiration from Bennett (as well
as other new materialist literature) to explore how stones affect thinking, being, and writing
and how they may provoke new forms of responsibility towards the planet. Considering how
rocks are lively, how they evolve, change, and move, how they bring us in to contact with much
larger temporalities, and how human bodies depend on minerals, Valtonen and Pullen develop
an ethico-politics capable of recognising that humans cannot be separated out from vital
materiality and that harming one member in the network, is also to harm others (Bennett, 2010,
13).
In times in which it is becoming more and more evident that plants, animals, ecosystems,
minerals, fossil fuel and gases are not inert resources for organizational and private production
and consumption, Bennetts work can push organization studies towards less human centred
thinking and a greater sensitivity to how all bodieshuman and more‐than human are kin
in inextricably enmeshed networks of relations. Ignorance of the lively powers of material
formations is part and parcel of how harmful utilisation and destruction of the planet continue.
Recognizing that agency is not solely the province of humans, might instead spur the
cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics (Bennett, 2010, 14; Valtonen and
Pullen, 2021).
Affect
Ideas about affect are omnipresent, indeed, a main influx and tonality in Bennetts work. The
world she theorises is one of constant movement, a world of ebbs and flows of affect. A world,
where moving around is to constantly affect and be affected by human and non-human forces.
One example of how Bennett allows contemporary ideas of affect to bring about new
appreciations of traditional concepts or phenomena is her reshaping of the notion of sympathy.
In Influx and efflux (Bennett, 2020), by thinking with the writing of Whitman, Bennett stretches
notions of influence, affection, and sympathy beyond a human-centred, sentimental frame to
include apersonal, underdetermined vital forces that course through selves without being
5
reducible to them. (Bennett, 2020, xix) Bennett takes the notion of sympathy beyond a moral,
social, and psychological experience of a confined subject, and towards a more material and
trans-subjective affective force. Sympathy here, is not a psychological process whereby a
subject projects her own pain or suffering on others, neither is it some form of imaginative
identification. Instead, it is a more-than-human atmospheric force. (Bennett, 2020, 27)
Sympathy is processes through which certain forces or allures come to feel heavy on the skin
of a subject and pass through her pores to alter her in some ways, or more precisely alter what
she is capable of doing (Bennett, 2020, 93). Sympathy comes to mean an affective tendency
toward affiliation which is broader or more material than imaginative constructs. It is no longer
an act or gesture of an individual that observes another human or animal, but a term that
describes how bodies sometimes physically bend towards each other and a force by which one
is affected or even possessed (Whitmans term) by the circuits of pain, suffering, enthusiasm,
or excitement that one encounters and is enveloped by (Bennett, 2020, 31).
One of the potentials of thinking with Bennetts concept of sympathy is that it can allow us to
transgress the hierarchies that often sneak their way into discourses and practices of diversity,
charity, or corporate ethics. In such discourses and practices, often, the sympathizer (the
organization, the benefactor, the CEO, etc.) is installed as the active subject that faces a passive
object of pity (victims, minorities). Despite appealing ambitions of doing something good to
help a minority, it can be difficult to escape this already established and powerful hierarchy as
long as sympathy and aid are thought through individualistic repertoires. As a consequence,
powers of inequality may continue to flow through efforts to enhance equality (Ahmed, 2007;
Benschop, 2001). As Blackmore (2006) has argued, when discourses of inclusion and diversity
are framed through individualistic imperatives, the possibilities of delivering the promise of
more inclusion and equality is quickly compromised as the source of agency and ethicality
remains with the majority. The voices of minorities may be silenced or compromised with the
same measures that were meant to give them a voice. Bennetts thinking open possibilities of
asking questions about diversity and organizational ethics with less dependence upon
hierarchical relations between an active subject and the passive object of pity.
6
Leadership, agency, and responsibility
Bennetts work with affect also offers an enrichment to discussions of leadership more broadly.
Organizational scholars have criticised mainstream leadership theory for assuming leadership
to be an individual, disembodied practice performed in cognitive and rational registers (Pullen
and Vachhani, 2013; Kenny and Fotaki, 2015; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015; Ford et al., 2017;
Ashcraft, 2021), noting that such narratives and theories rarely account for the collective,
embodied, material, and practical aspects of leadership (Orr and Vince, 2009; Sinclair, 2013;
Orr and Bennett, 2017). The concept of the individual that Bennett offers may help to bring
such debates even further. The individual in Bennetts theoretical universe is not the one often
found in management research and discourses, the one that is contained, rational and clearly
separated from his environment: The centre from which agency and decision-making springs.
Instead, the individual is a porous body capable of being affected by the environment in which
she moves as well as of affecting that environment in direct and often not so direct manners. It
is also an individual, which is thought via post-human theories. An individual which is not only
human but composed of human and non-human life and things, and always entangled to
different human and non-human bodies and forces. Critical debates on management are offered
a concept of the individual, not as an origin of initiatives and intentions. Bennett writes:
No one body owns its supposedly own initiatives, for initiatives instantly conjoins with
an impersonal swarm of contemporaneous endeavours, each with its own duration and
intensity, with endeavours that are losing or gaining, rippling into and recombining with
others. (Bennett 2010, 101)
In Influx and efflux Bennett finds in Whitmans writing a distinctive way of thinking about the
individual. The term dividual is used to emphasize that persons should not be thought to be
individual, that is indivisible, bounded units. Bennett draws on Marriott (1976, iii) to think
what it means to be a person: A dividual absorb heterogenous material influences and give
out themselves particles of their own substances that may then reproduce in others something
of the nature of the persons in whom they have originated (Bennett, 2020, xii-xiii). Influx and
Efflux is one long meditation on what it means to be an I as the experience of being
continuously subject to influence and still managing to add something to the mix. (xiii). Thus,
the subject we find is a porous and susceptible shape that rides and imbibes waves of influx
and efflux, but also contributes an influence of its own. (Bennett, 2020, xi)
For management and organization scholars striving to give yet another punch at the stubborn
assumptions about individuality and individual agency in our discipline, this thinking offers a
7
well-developed notion of the individual as something that is porous and entangled. It becomes
possible to think about the leader as a someone that does not pre-exist a range of different
practices but emerges through entanglements to assemblages of things, objects, forces, bodies,
norms, and histories.
In organization studies, Ford et al. (2017) have built on ideas about matter as agentic and lively
to unpack leadership as an emergent interplay between human and non-human bodies and
forces. They argue that the leader cannot be understood separately and distinctively from her
material presence, physical location, technology, clothes, accessories, etc. This means that
there is no leader who pre-exists leadership practices, as the long history of leadership theory
has presumed. There is no simple notion of the leader to separate out as a single source of
agency. Thus, the figure of a leader we find here lacks the assured autonomy and singular
agency he often has in traditional management literature, yet this does not mean that a leader
cannot make a difference. It is just not, as many leaders on the ground will recognize, with any
direct causality, but better thought of as non-causal, and indirect manners of influencing.
Bennett offers the concept of partaking, a notion that can emphasise how leadership is to be
part of processes rather than in control of them. Change, then, is conceived as pluralised and
distributed processes rather than being a matter of individual minds or agency (Taylor, 2017,
319).
Thus, against, ideas often found in traditional management literature about leadership as
something that springs from the intentionality, and autonomy of individuals, Bennetts thinking
offers an idea of leadership as the participation in assemblages where individuals participate
but cannot initiate or direct. It offers attention to how leader subjectivity is the outcome of
practices of partaking rather than something that can be isolated out and addressed as the source
of change. Against mainstream leadership theories fascination with how leaders can design
and direct change, Bennetts thinking can help broaden considerably the analytical sensitivity
to domains of unintended and unanticipated effects of leadership practices. This may help build
more humble concepts of leadership, capable of appreciating the emergent, unpredictable and
non-causal dimensions of leadership and organizational change (Ford, et al. 2017; Pors, 2020).
8
Responsibility
It is important to discuss whether this deconstruction of the individual risks compromising
accountability and responsibility. When we think about the leader as entangled to and emerging
from complex assemblages what happens to the possibilities of holding people and
organizations responsible and accountable to the harm they may produce? To acknowledge that
it is not possible for one actor to control, oversee or manage the assemblages it is part of, should
not serve as a tool for weakening and blurring discourses and devices working to hold human
beings and organizations accountable for the damage production, they take active parts in.
Bennett is very clear here: Recognizing that agency is distributed across mosaic assemblages
does not and should not make it impossible to say something about the actions exercised by an
organization within the assemblages it is part of, relies on and accelerates. Bennett writes:
The notion of confederate agency does attenuate the blame game, but it does not thereby
abandon the project of identifying (what Arendt called) the sources of harmful effects.
To the contrary, such a notion broadens the range of places to look for sources. (Bennett,
2010, 37)
It remains important to make specific people and organizations accountable for their unjust,
wrong, and illegal actions, and Bennett insists that her theorizing should be seen as a
supplement to rather than a replacement of such efforts. The point is that we also need concepts
of responsibility that does not fail in the face of complex assemblages. Contemporary
organizations are part of very widespread and complex assemblages. Often, harm production
is carefully outsourced. Because it is difficult to place responsibility in a complex world, we
need a theory that focuses on entanglements and assemblages rather on the boundaries that
separate individuals and organizations from their relations and networks (Visser and Davies,
2021). The concept of assemblage might help scholars of organization to problematize the
boundaries contemporary organizations are so skilled at drawing between what is their
responsibility and what they believe they cannot be held accountable for.
What to do in organizational analysis
Bennetts work can also be a source of methodological inspiration. Her work is an invitation
to practice a form of research willing to linger in moments that seem strangely charged with
affect or atmosphere although one may not at first be entirely sure what is at stake or what one
might learn from such moments. It is an invitation to slow down time and let oneself be
enchanted by the richness of even mundane settings or events. Bennett asks those interested in
9
vibrant matters to linger in those moments during which they find themselves fascinated by
objects (2010, 17) so that the affective force of what is apprehended can be felt.
There is a rich methodological tradition of dwelling in small moments or encounters in an
extensive data collection/production process in organization studies. Moving beyond
methodological norms of representation scholars have argued for a manner of working with
data where the researcher dwells in what may at first seem like a minor or fleeting occurrence
(Kociatkiewicz & Kostera, 1999; Gherardi, 2019; Pors, 2016). Deleuze and Guattari writes
about the power of the little detail that starts to swell and carries you off. (1986, 292, cited in
Bennett, 2020, 68) To dwell in one particular encounter or moment involves work to carefully
unpack the affective qualities of the moment, consider its textures, multiplicity and layers, as
well as to thoroughly and creatively assemble the forces, lines, vibrant agencies and histories
that seem to encounter each other in such a moment (Bell and Vachhani, 2020; Edensor, 2020).
The methodological question then becomes: When doing fieldwork, how do we take in and
allow ourselves to be profoundly influenced by the moments, forces, people, and things we
encounter? What are our methodological strategies for dwelling in and concern ourselves with
particular, perhaps minor, moments that seem saturated with meaning and intensity, although,
the researcher is at first not exactly sure why? Following the impetus in Bennetts work, a
central methodological skill becomes the ability of the researcher to be surprised, perhaps even
enchanted, or spooked (Pors, 2021), by the things she may meet in the world around her
(Bennett, 2001). In her reading of Whitman, Bennett returns several times to this phrase: The
scene and all its belongings, how they seize and affect me (Whitman in Bennett, 2020, e.g.,
67). When we enter organizations, when we encounter certain moments, events, people, things,
and assemblages how do we allow ourselves to be seized and affected? How do we notice and
become influenced by the different forces, bodies, relations, things, ideas, and discourses that
belong to a scene?
10
Although, this form of thinking and writing rests upon the ability of the researcher to dwell in,
feel, and let herself be enchanted by the affective forces encountered, the idea is not that the
researcher can never be a neutral, or passive medium in which certain truths about the field can
be imprinted. The researcher is present in certain settings with specific theoretical interests,
disciplinary training, capacities, histories, and inclinations for noticing certain things. There is
always something that guides us when we encounter an empirical setting. How can Bennetts
analytical strategy guiding her interests and attentions be described?
To sharpen her ability to be surprised, Bennett finds inspirations in Henry David Thoreaus
notion of the wild and how this incites a noticing of the surprise, excess or errancy simmering
within ordinary objects capable of disrupting our habits of perception and derail trains of
thoughts (Bennett, 2020, 90). More specifically, perhaps, Bennett lets her attentions be guided
by an interest in things that might be left out of certain dominant narratives (for example of
disenchantment, Bennett, 2001, or of matter as inert, Bennett, 2010). Bennett calls this strategy
trash collection:
I am less its [disenchantments] critic than its trash collector. I dust off and shine up
what it discards, that is, experiences of wonder and surprise that endure alongside a
cynical world of business as usual, nature as manmade and affects as the effects of
commercial strategy. The experiences that I recycle, are not invaders of the major
tale but underground and background of it. (Bennett, 2001, 8)
To be a trash collector is a particular analytical strategy involving efforts to identify the ideas,
assumptions, possibilities, phenomena, things, ways of being that are left out or rubbished by
the narratives and discourses that dominate certain sites, organizations, or fields. The project
is not necessarily to prove wrong and replace particular powerful narratives, but rather to add
to them other and alternative stories. It is to pick up those things that (no longer) holds a place
in contemporary thinking and make small spaces, where one can stay with them, allow them to
grow and mature until alter stories can emerge. This is an analytical strategy that works by
amplifying and putting in motion that what is already there in different scenes or accounts, but
which is normally not granted attention or considered as agentic (Blackman, 2019). In the
context of organizational analysis: If we usually assume that resistance to organizational
change is done by people what might we learn by also considering the influence of material,
non-sentient actors or of uncanny affective atmospheres (Harding, Ford and Lee, 2017; Pors,
2016)? It also means that the researcher directs her attention to those things that escape or do
11
not fit our usual categories to those things that exceeds present languages and assumptions
(Pors, Olaison and Otto, 2019). What kinds of forces and agencies are not considered with
established concepts of leadership and what interesting and important stories could be told by
picking up what is expelled and rubbished from these concepts?
The strategy of trach collection involves careful consideration of how to write. As Bennett
(2020, xxi) notes, the challenge is how to place affects and vibrant matter in a language and
normative scientific milieu that is not their home. Sometimes, Bennett suggests, the researcher
needs to be willing to appear to be a bit naïve. To consider and make space for affect or vibrant
matter in academic texts, it may be fruitful to get a little bit closer to animism,
anthropomorphism, vitalism, and superstition than what may feel comfortable in a world where
such things are now associated with premodernity (Bennett, 2010, 18). It is difficult, but also
promising to constantly and carefully notice how languages accommodate and give a further
life to certain assumptions, for example assumptions about autonomous individuality or
differences between human beings and all other creatures and things in the world. Bennetts
work generously offers a number of workarounds to the grammar of subjects and object
(Bennett, 2020, xxiv). Bennett calls this craft writing up and explains this as efforts to
amplify, inflect, or tilt what is already underway although it may not be the most obvious story
of an empirical setting or event (Bennett, 2020, 112). For organization scholars, this is as
invitation to consider whether we have the right words and concepts for the complexities we
are studying. If we believe leadership is not only performed by individuals but also achieved
by practices, assemblages, and materiality, which words and concepts become difficult because
they sneak back in assumptions about individuality? And which words and concepts may better
capture the multiple processes and assemblages that together produces agency?
Bennetts discussion about writing up is an important reminder that we might not be able to
genuinely foster new, more eco-sensitive and responsible thinking and research without
critically considering the languages, concepts, methodologies and styles of writing we are
trained to work with and within. There is work to be done in terms of experimenting with and
inventing new forms of thinking and writing. This includes the collective work of challenging
and changing a scientific milieu where clear findings, unambivalent conclusions and a distinct
and unmistakable contribution to the literature often equals quality.
12
Conclusion
Breath in the wonders of the world in which you find yourselves and to which you are
entangled. Reflect for a moment upon the different epistemological constructions at work
around you that stubbornly assumes that the confined human individual is the only source of
agency, and that plants, minerals, plastic, woods, and electricity are objects of human
interventions. Breath out. What manners of thinking differently about subject-object relations
and causality may be available to you?
Thinking with Bennett is not only about understanding her original definitions of concepts. It
is about breathing wonder into the things, relations, and forms of organising you thought you
knew so that once again they seem curious and mysterious. So that they once again ask you to
think carefully about organising, identity, leadership, and organizational ethics. In his
engagement with Freud, Derrida (1995, 26) calls this a process that allows and make possible
that texts, figures, or images - through efforts to get to know them - become secret, young and
still to come. The aim of Bennetts explorative endeavour is not to resolve or settle certain
doubts or ambivalences, but be able to accommodate, even amplify the complexity and
uncertainty of the material one is working with. Her concepts and writing are meant to carefully
twist things around so that the individual is no longer as autonomous and confined as we
sometimes tend to think. They are meant to help us open our eyes to how the things we have
been taught are passive inert things, actually have tendencies, propensities and inclinations of
their own.
Doing organizational analysis in the company of Bennetts ideas requires an attention to how
there are always more forces, agencies, and relations at work than what we first assume. It also
requires us to consider whether our concepts, analytical approaches and conclusions are roomy
enough to accommodate a heterogeneous swirl of agents, some human (Bennett, 2020, xxiv).
Her thinking begins with the strange experience that we are not confined, coherent subjects
perfectly in control of our intentions, will, and actions. It takes us on a journey to discover the
liveliness, agencies and forces of things we thought were inert and dead. And, possibly, if we
13
allow it to, it leaves us transformed by the realisation that we are connected to the world around
us in profound and existential ways. Inhale. Exhale. Let yourself be enchanted!
Notes
1Influx and efflux is the title of Jane Bennetts book from 2020 that seeks and finds in Walter Whitmans
writing a distinctive idea of the subject, of what it means to be a person. The book invites and invokes a
thinking that is embodied and in flux. The ideas of the book, and, perhaps, of Bennetts other important work
too, is best understood if one allows thinking and breathing to accompany each other.
Recommended reading
Original text by Jane Bennett
Bennett, Jane (2010) Vibrant matter. A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Key academic text
Taylor, Carol A. (2017). Rethinking the empirical in higher education: Post-qualitative inquiry
as a less comfortable social science. International Journal of Research & Method in
Education,40(3), 311-324.
Accessible resource
Watson, J. (2013). Eco-sensibilities: an interview with Jane Bennett. the minnesota
review,2013(81), 147-158. Available at
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/526431/pdf?casa_token=fpzrJmkAZI8AAAAA:Om57rRFheP2I
GDAuUL-F2nyWdUErphrOCkvtDcVPLfRNYaFIARTOeCRKz0ZyyDHtyNF5e9Ojhds
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16
Becoming with Barad: A material-discursive-affective conversation
Noortje van Amsterdam, ORCID ID 0000-0003-4758-1298
Katrine Meldgaard Kjær, ORCID ID 0000-0001-7994-5186
Dide van Eck, ORCID ID 0000-0002-4150-0664
Abstract
This chapter engages with the question the relationship between Karen Barads work, affect and
management and organizational studies (MOS). While Barads work has gained increasingly
popularity in MOS in recent years, the affective dimensions of their work remain underarticulated
in this context. To unpack this, the chapter draws on novel methodologies of writing, as the authors
write not only about, but with and through affect. In a conversational format, the chapter considers
how Barads work can be used to engage with the affective dimensions of central topics in MOS
scholarship. The chapter also provides introductions to Barads key concepts and outlines how
they have been applied in MOS scholarship.
Dear Reader,
In this chapter, we discuss the relationship between Karen Barads works and the theme of affect
in Management and Organization Studies (MOS). Providing new opportunities to understand
material agencies, Barads feminist new materialist ideas have been first adopted in MOS to
understand the use of technology in organizations (e.g. Dale & Lathem, 2015; Nyberg, 2009;
Orlikowski, 2007; Orlikowski & Scott, 2015a, 2015b; Symon & Pritchard, 2015). More recently,
MOS scholars have been using Barads work to come to a relational understanding of the
sociomateriality of for example leadership (Ford et al., 2017), gendered embodiment (Harding et
al. 2017; 2021), craft (Bell & Vachhani, 2020), disability (Dale & Lathem, 2015; Bend & Priola,
2021), sexual violence (Harris et al., 2020), digital healthcare (Visser et al., 2021), the co-existence
of people with animals (Huopalainen, 2020) and the natural environment (Valtonen & Pullen,
2020).
The turn to affect in MOS can be considered part of a larger shift in ontological orientations that
is marked by a movement away from anthropocentrism, focusing instead on relationality
(Gherardi, 2017: 2019). Although Barads work centralizes relationality, the relationship between
their theorizing and affect is not straightforward. As Ringrose et al. (2020) write ... affect is given
hardly any attention in some posthuman accounts such as Barad (p. 12). This leaves open the
1
obvious question of why Barads work belongs in a volume on affect in organization studies, as
well as the challenge of bringing into view this relationship. Nonetheless, we enthusiastically
accepted the invitation to write this chapter, not because we consider ourselves authorities on
Barads work, but because we are intrigued by the question of affect in relation to it and want to
learn more. We were also excited to work collaboratively on this: over the past years we have
created a supportive feminist community in which we publish and related to each other through
care and vulnerability (e.g. Meldgaard-Kjær & van Amsterdam, 2020; van Eck, van Amsterdam
and van den Brink, 2021). Some of this work also engages with Barads theorizing (van
Amsterdam, Meldgaard Kjær and van Eck, forthcoming). In this chapter, we build on our previous
engagements by offering not an authoritative account of the complex relationship between Barad,
affect and MOS, but instead showing how these may come together in the practice of writing this
chapter collaboratively. We will offer our insights through a conversation between us - Noortje,
Katrine and Dide - combined with three textboxes that explain some of Barads most important
concepts. These concepts are marked with a * in the text, so you know where you are reading a
concept from Barad that is defined and unpacked in a textbox. The conversation unfolds through
the intra-action* between the authors, Barads texts, computer screens, warm tea, pets, the
publication process, the COVID-19 pandemic, google scholar, our work/home spaces, other
writings on new materialism within MOS and much more. In this chapter, we engage with the idea
of affect as the felt intensities produced by the encounter of us writers with the world around us.
We illustrate the relationship between affect and Barads work diffractively*, as we are reading it
through our experiences and the material realities these are wrapped up with, showcasing the
affective flows that are produced. Each email evokes a response and we come to know ourselves
and each other differently/anew through this process.
Barad coins the concept intra-action as the constitution of entangled agencies (2007, p. 31)
referring to the inextricability of discourses and human and non-human materialities that together co-
produce realities in particular times and spaces: [a]ll bodies, not merely human bodies, come to
matter through the worlds iterative intra-activity. (2003, p.82). Agency here is thus not the exclusive
property of a singular actor, but rather arises in intra-actions between discourses and materialities,
including human and non-human bodies. This is fundamental to Barads larger framework of agential
realism (1999, 2003, 2007) that posits that human actors are not singular or autonomous subjects, but
entangled with (non-)human materialities such as objects, nature, and spaces. Affect, however, is rarely
mentioned explicitly by Barad. According to Ashcraft (2020: p. 3), affect, a potentiality or agency in
motion, is produced through intra-actions, but at the same time, affect by definition, repels definition
(ibid.). The link between affect and Barad's theory on materiality in MOS surfaces mostly in work
drawing on practice theory (e.g. Bell & Vachhani, 2020; Gherardi, 2017; 2019; Gherardi et al., 2018).
***
Hi both,
2
How are you? Surviving the increasing craziness of the pandemic OK? It seems like we are in a
partial lockdown here again due to rapidly rising COVID cases. Pfff, luckily we can still go
outside.
I have been thinking about our chapter on Barad for the collection on affect in MOS. I was
wondering if we could do this in the format of a conversation where we not only discuss the theory
but also relate our understanding of it to each other, the situation of the pandemic that we are
currently facing and the human and non-human materialities that are structuring our work at the
moment (such as kids/partners/pets at home, online interfaces, laptops, food, drinks, literature, a
VIRUS, home office struggles etc). I thought it might be a nice way of showing the 'becoming' of
the chapter while adhering to the theoretical principles of intra-action*, diffraction*, and ethics*.
I would love to hear what you think!
Hugs
***
Hi both,
At the moment I am also slowly digesting yesterdays news of the partial lockdown and the fact
that we are now one of the hardest hit countries in terms of COVID-19 infections I feel like my
brain is blocking me from understanding this situation fully. At the same time I feel lucky that I
can continue working from home. Also, I am constantly checking my email for any responses on
my application for a tenure-track position and feel tense every time I hear the new-email ping of
my computer no response so far.
I like your idea. This format of a conversation would, I think, better allow us to do justice to
Barads ethico-onto-epistemology (2007, p. 90); rather than writing our chapter as a linear and
static set of ideas we can show through our conversation how producing academic knowledge is a
situated and relational practice that carries the ethical imperative of being accountable to the world
itself and its human and non-human inhabitants. The only thing I worry about, I have to admit, is
that my voice will not sound as smart as your voices. In this format it becomes more visible who
says what compared to a conventional collaborative format.
In practical terms: shall we create a google docs which allow us all to contribute or do you want
to keep it as an email conversation?
Hugs
3
***
Barad (2007, p.30) proposes diffraction as an alternative to reflection that does not fix what is object
and what is subject in advance but instead involves reading insights through one another in ways
that help illuminate differences as they emerge: how different differences get made, what gets
excluded, and how these exclusions matter. Barad explains this using the metaphor of waves (2014):
If you drop a stone in water, it creates a particular rippling effect. If you then drop another stone in
the water (or a twig for that matter) the rippling effects of both plunges meet up and form an
interference pattern that brings new details into view (2007, p.71). Diffraction is thus a relational
process that destabilizes seemingly fixed boundaries and produces new realities through intra-action,
including affective intensities. Harris et al. (2020) provide an example of how diffraction may be used
in MOS. They show how the concept helps to expose the systemic nature of sexual harassment and
the deflection of responsibility by organizations. Rather than looking at high-profile incidents of
sexual harassment separately, as if they were stones, they drew the impact of these incidents
together diffractively, at the point where these concentric circles of ripples meet (Harris et al., 2020,
pp. 664-445).
Dear both,
I think it sounds like a wonderful idea, Im in!
I find it interesting that the issue of (academic) shame and exposure comes up right away
especially in a piece about affect and organization. Of course you are every bit as qualified and
smart as us and I would relish the opportunity to write with you! Shame as an affect seems so
ingrained in academic practice I certainly often feel it. Why is shame so central still? Is it
produced through the intra-action* of neoliberalization and discourses on competition in
academia? What/who else is involved? Whose service is it in?
I hope we can do something with this piece that tries to counteract the shame often involved in
academic work which is an ethical imperative indeed! Can we start by doing away with the
individualization in our writing? If we take Barads (2003, 2007) ideas around entanglements*
seriously, I would say that our individuality as authors is untenable. Barad acknowledges this when
they write about the others such as friends, academic disciplines and beaches that were entangled*
in writing Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007, p.x). Maybe we should not portray ourselves as
Noortje, Dide or Katrine, but as a flow of voices and thinking that diffractively* develop ideas.
As for COVID, I am sorry to hear about the lockdown. I saw yesterday that France was also closing
down again. In contrast, as I was getting on the train this morning, I forgot to put on a mask. Masks
are mandatory in public transportation here and have been for a while. But I was thinking about
something else and simply... forgot. How freeing and privileged. At the same time, restaurants and
4
bars, cafes, and places of gathering are now mandated to close at 10 pm, and I have been working
from home for the last month due to restrictions that just seem to continue indefinitely. Teaching
still goes on partially on campus. To me, everything is a mess of openings and closings. Of
moments of forgetting and fretting, of worry and apathy. With Barad, I would say that these
experiences emerge through the entanglement* of all agencies described above. Change feels
imminent.
Hugs!
***
Hi both,
I am super excited that you are both happy with the idea of diffractive* writing apart-together for
the chapter on Barad. I am very much looking forward to collaborating with you on this!! I feel
lucky to be in the company of such amazingly smart and supportive women. I understand and
relate to your feelings of shame and fear of exposure (hello imposter syndrome) but from my
perspective they are not warranted at all. Lets indeed see how we can try to undo them in this
writing. I am all for your suggestion of de-individualizing the conversation, and showcasing the
unfolding of this book chapter.
I think these issues very much intra-act* with ideas and practices around authorship. Indeed, if we
are true to Barads theorizing, and see everything as entangled*, then claiming authorship on
writing that is always already informed by previous conversations, experiences and readings (to
name but a few) does not make any sense, does it? Other collective writings have argued this as
well (e.g. Davies and Gannon, 2012)
Yet within academia the metrics system is entangled* with authorship and authority claims. The
affect (in terms of what this produces) is shameful subjects. As Jones et al. (2020, p. 369) write,
the quantification of academic research reduces human subjects to objects, leads to competition
among academics and creates a closed, anxious and defensive working climate. And since this
phenomenon also includes gendered elements, shame is more heavily felt for women in academia.
Indeed, research supports this (e.g. Breeze, 2018; Moore, 2018).
Hugs!
***
5
Reading your emails is a nice start of the week ☺. I will take some days off this week - to walk,
read, be outside, and do other stuff than work (within what is allowed in our partial lockdown).
Thank you for your reflections and understanding of my insecurities in individualizing our
contributions to the chapter. It is really helpful to 'explain' how this affect/feeling is produced as
you mentioned, through the intra-action* of gender construction, the neoliberalization of the
university, metrics etc. Yet although I can somewhat rationally explain how this is produced - I
still cannot get rid of the feelings of shame and insecurity. I feel I need to re-engage with the ideas
of Karen Barad on affect to be able to contribute to this conversation. I therefore re-read an article
by Bell & Vachhani (2020) who, building on Barad (2007), propose an affective ethics* of
mattering that acknowledges the vitality of matter and its affective capacities, and shows how
matter comes to matter through embodied organizational practice (p. 18).
The emphasis on ethics and responsibility is crucial in Barads work. According to Barad (2010,
p.265) entanglements are relations of obligation and because we, as people and as researchers, co-
produce these entanglements we cannot position ourselves as innocent bystanders but instead are
ethically obliged to respond to human and non-human others. The methodology of diffraction, for
Barad (in Juelskaer & Schwennessen, 2012, p.16), makes this ethical response-ability possible
because it entails an ethico-onto-epistemological engagement, attending to differences and matters
of care in all their detail in order to creatively re-pattern world-making practices with an eye to our
indebtedness to the past and the future. Although Barad does not mention affect explicitly here,
their concern for the capacity to affect and be affected by the world comes through in the way they
conceptualized ethics, responsibility, and care. They write that there is no getting away from ethics
and emphasize the need to take responsibility for the role that we play in the world's differential
becoming (2007, p.396). As such, Barad is concerned with entanglements, and, as Bell and Vachhani
(2020) add, their affective capacities we co-produce in organizational practice and research.
While trying to write to you about Barads ideas on the affective capacities of nonhuman matter,
my cat jumped on my lap to stop me from typing or using the computer mouse (see attachments,
and yes I am wearing my chill-pants and a soft blanket). His comforting presence while struggling
to understand Barads ideas reminds me of humananimal relatedness that Huopalainen (2020)
argues has the capability to engage differently with the sensate, more-than-human life-worlds that
humancentred accounts of organizational life have typically sentimentalised, trivialised or
overlooked (p. 1).
[CHAPTER 6 IMAGE 1 HERE in left column. CAPTION: E-mail attachment 1/2]
[CHAPTER 6 IMAGE 2 HERE in right column. CAPTION: E-mail attachment 2/2]
6
It also made me think of the vitality of the matter of a computer and e-mail that is co-constituting
our conversation. On the one hand, through this conversation we try to better account[ing] for our
part of the entangled* webs we weave (Barad, 2008, p. 335) by showing how 'knowledge'
emerges through our conversations during the pandemic. At the same time, our online exchange
forestalls embodied encounters, being able to feel each other's presence. And, in terms of
temporality, the conversation is asynchronous. I like how it allows us some time to think before
responding to what others are saying (I often get blocked when I have to respond immediately in
academic debates), and engage with the ideas during a moment that suits us best. Yet we also have
to be careful about feeling pressured to respond quickly.
What do you think about our particular writing style and format in drawing out the affective
intensities of reading/discussing/writing Barad's work collaboratively?
Hugs!
***
I think we should make your cat co-author!
***
I also like having this conversation in my inbox, it feels like it becomes a more natural part of my
day and as though we are having an actual conversation, somehow. Thinking about materiality,
its like I have you both with me when you pop up in my mailbox - maybe because I have a habit
of checking and writing email on my phone (as I am doing now), and thus bring you with me in
this way to my morning coffee on the couch, on my trips to the supermarket, on my commute (as
long as we are still allowed to commute), to the office, and now to my living room once again. I
often think its a bad habit to do this phone-emailing, but theres a special kind of intimacy in it
which I quite like and which brings it into intra-action* with something else than the regular office.
Things come out of that I cant quite account for but which feel joyful.
Theres also something about the temporality of answering email that seems like something I can
actually DO. Im noticing my mood swings a lot right now and that I feel easily defeated and
overwhelmed - I guess I am affectively produced as such by the entangled* agencies of the
pandemic and everything/everyone else in my life. Opening a document can feel like opening
another project that I feel overwhelmed by. No doubt this is because I am preoccupied by
everything thats going on. In the midst of COVID, we are also experiencing another wave here:
7
what people are calling a second wave of #metoo, with major press attention being directed
towards sexism in all kinds of businesses, and currently culminating in two prominent politicians
stepping down in the space of not very many days due to harassment issues previously kept silent.
Its making me wonder what other kinds of action COVID is participating in making space for,
and why. Maybe its something about being pushed to the edge by all matter of things - and then
finally reacting and becoming fed up.
***
Hi both,
Thanks for your messages. I love how we have become part of your morning coffee and other
everyday activities with this conversation! It really feels joyful to work together on the chapter in
this way. Yesterday I was trying to formulate a more in-depth response about Barad's (2008) work
on queer causation. I started to read the text, but I got super frustrated. I felt like I was ploughing
through pages and pages of ideas about biology, brittlestars, mimicry and cloning and all I could
think was 'Get to the point, Karen! I have 5 more papers to write, 2 courses to teach, 4 reviews to
complete, 2 PhDs to supervise, 2 online meetings with colleagues to prepare, 2 papers to revise, 1
master theses student to uplift, who seems to have gotten stuck in a depressive episode partly due
to COVID, there is a total lockdown looming, my daughter keeps shouting from her room that she
needs help with her homework, and the laundry is threatening to overtake my workspace/bedroom.
I DON'T HAVE TIME TO READ THESE ENDLESS EPISTLES THAT I DON'T READILY
UNDERSTAND'. So then I felt ashamed (there we are again) for apparently not understanding
what other people do seem to grasp. Why did I think I could write a chapter on Barads theorizing??
And I also felt guilty for not engaging with this text more, or others who use Barads work. So that
is me at the moment, feeling a bit overwhelmed and anxious.
I know there are different becomings possible than this frustrated and anxious one - for example,
when I feel intrigued by Barads theorizing and this makes me eager to understand, when I read her
interviews (e.g. Juelskjær & Schwennesen, 2012), and when we relate to their theorizing together
in ways that are characterized by care, kindness and generosity. Although Barad writes about
ethics* I don't always feel cared for as a reader of their work. I just had to get that off my chest.
Does that resonate at all?
Hugs!
***
8
Dear both,
I recognize what you are saying about only understanding theoretical ideas in a rational/intellectual
way, and not feeling it in an embodied way. This is perhaps also what we sometimes run up against
when reading Barad's work? That it is too much oriented on the mind and not connecting to the
body, caring for the reader to help understand/feel/experience their agential realist* framework?
How could we engage the reader affectively and in an embodied way in this chapter?
***
Thank you for your reflections on Barad and embodiment. Its interesting because their focus on
materiality to me very much calls for a focus on the body, in particular its non-verbal agencies; as
Barad argues in a critique of poststructural analysis in her article Posthumanist Performativity
(2003), it is hard to deny that the power of language has been substantial (...) too substantial (p.
802) and that the material now needs to have more focus. This also opens the door for using their
work to think about the experiences you describe, as not only personal reactions but as co-
constructive elements of a process of things becoming. Barad would argue that there is an ethical
obligation to be respons-able*, a term I would argue they use to draw our attention to the obligation
to be attentive and respond to what is already there in our analyses, to the embodied and how our
bodies react.
***
Hello awesome women,
How are you doing? Are you able to cope with the anxieties brought on by the second pandemic
wave and related measures? I long for the physical proximity of friends, just to be able to hug and
touch them/you and be near them/you without thinking of the health risks involved. Last week, I
hit a rough patch too and had to take a few days off work. As you know, the mouth mask
regulations are a problem for me and after two weeks of trying to manage/ignore increased
flashbacks and hypervigilance, it felt like my body just sort of started to break down I was a mess
of nausea, headaches, stomach cramps, shaking hands and hyperventilation. Talk about how the
intra-action* between non-human materialities (a virus, mouth masks) and human materiality (my
traumatized body) performs me in particular ways!! Taking a few days off helped to get back to
tolerable levels of stress, but I need a long-term strategy to deal with this. Its work in progress, I
guess. But I have to say, conversations like the one we are having here keep me afloat. They make
me feel connected and cared for. So thank you!! Caring collaborations are indeed a (feminist)
strategy for survival.
9
I have been reading a great article today by Staunæs and Brøgger (2020). They write about metrics
and the ways in which these are used in academia as mechanisms for monitoring and self-
governance. They use a feminist new materialist lens to show how metric data through their
entanglement* with other human and non-human agencies in academia - produce particular
affective economies related to shame and envy. It showcases how Barads theorizing informs
thinking about affect, for example when they write about the performativity of data:
Data may affect us in different ways, and the affects resulting from this may vary.
An analytical approach towards the thing-power of data must, therefore, enable us
to grasp the affective energy as flowing activity, as well as a pattern in which affects
are composed, figured, entangled*, mobilised and recruited (p. 5)
Last thing I really like about this paper is that it writes about affirmative critique. With a group of
30 PhD students they experimented with the idea of reconceptualizing academic value otherwise.
Staunæs and Brøgger employ the concepts of care and collaboration as response-able ethics*, and
I think this is at the core of the feminist supportive writing practices we have going here as well.
They reference Barad (2012: 7) too: Each of us is constituted as responsible for the other, as being
in touch with the other in order to argue that their practices of imagining academic value
differently enable another set of senses than the visual, and how they succeed in bringing home
affective energy to the academics rather than producing malign affects. (p. 11).
I am curious to hear your thoughts on this. How can this help us to move toward other (more
caring) academic practices and value systems? Does this only work in/from the margins or do you
see possibilities for wider applications? How can we escape the push and pull of the metrics that
produce us in these undesirable ways?
Hugs!!!
***
Hi both,
Thanks for sharing Staunæs and Brøggers recent work. Surely, a change in mentality towards
response-able ethics* would require a complete reworking of academic practice and academic
writing; writing differently and collaboratively and with vulnerability, as we are in the midst of
right here, is a radical step in that direction. I think what we write and how we write is inherently
material and relational too. We cannot separate the ways words materialize and are structured - the
writing style and format - from their content; there is a discursive-material entanglement* in
that. Indeed, the materiality of the structure of traditional academic writing co-constructs the
performance of scholarship. The often very emotionally charged reactions and disapproval you
can encounter when challenging this format is indicative of how affect is a part of this
entanglement*: the specific material-discursive performance of scholarship here also involves a
10
sense of security and a disruption of that provokes uncertainty and unease; can this really be
scholarship if it doesnt take the material form we know?
Hugs!
***
Hi both,
How are you both holding up with the general pressures of life on top of all the COVID measures
and related insecurities? Shall we do a skype meeting soon? Although I really love this
asynchronous conversation, I miss seeing you both!!!
I think what you write about the material-discursive performance of scholarship is very on point.
The pushback against other forms of writing/thinking/doing in academia can be fierce and indeed
shows how affect is wrapped up in these entanglements* as we have all experienced with some of
our publications. There can be resentment, anger even (which I often read as based on fear) in
response to these different academic practices, but also encouragement and solidarity (see also
Mandalaki & Peretz, 2021). I wonder what allows us to become differently here, in spite of the
traditional structures typically favored in academia. Is it the way we build upon scholars such as
Barad who have provided new openings for scholarly practices? Or is it because we know this
different performance of scholarship is often welcomed in the sub-field were writing for?
Hope to talk soon!
***
Dear reader,
A few notes to end the chapter. Our process of writing this chapter was sparked by an initial
question: how can we think about the relationship between Barads work and affect? This question
does not have a straight-forward answer. Although Barads work has been embraced within MOS
generally, the affective dimensions of her framework remain underarticulated (Ringrose et al.,
2020) and therefore also challenging to tease out and apply in our field. To unpack the affective
11
dimensions of Barads work, we decided to organize our writing in a way so that we not only wrote
about affect, but in and through affect. Through this affective writing process, we became able to
relate Barads framework to issues of shame, performance, frustration, joy, care and collectivity.
Or, in Barads terminology, we became response-able* within the complex entanglements* we
inhabit. In the writing of this chapter, we have thus become-with Barads thinking, as we collapsed
the separation between our affective community and a distanced overview of a theory or
theorist. This is at the core of Barads idea of intra-activity* as the process by which things come
to matter, namely as relational. This relationality was also an affective becoming, as our
conversation foregrounded the collective experience of otherwise often individualized emotions,
feelings or atmospheres, particularly as these played out in the organization of academic writing
in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, this work is never finished. It continues
to be open to change, to becoming anew. Through this writing we hope to invite you into the
conversation, to be affected by it and produce new affect in turn.
While Barads work on intra-action* has become an important framework within MOS in recent
years, we encourage future work to reflect on how we as researchers, and the way we organize
research, come to matter in relation, and are thus affected by this work. One route we see is through
the engagement with ethics* as a relational practice of being/becoming response-able* to the world
around us. In this chapter, we provide an example of one way to approach this: Our collective
writing in this chapter has aimed to collapse the binaries between the theoretical and the personal,
the individual and the collective, and the human and the non-human by reading Barads works
through our experiences. It hereby aims to destabilize conventional academic knowledge practices
and the boundaries that define these, and instead offers the potential for different affective intra-
actions to emerge. This is a political move that aims to open up space for thinking differently about
the ethical premises that underpin common academic practices. We take our cue here from Thiele
(2014, p. 213) who draws on Barads idea of the always/already entangled* nature of our being
when she writes: The different ethicality envisioned here then no longer aspires to an (always
failing) responsibility for the other, with the subsequent question of which responsibility to choose
in order not to either appropriate otherness into sameness or patronize others via protectionism. It
instead suggests response-ability with others that transforms the ethical problem itself. We thus
hope to contribute to academic practices based on collectivity, care and joy.
Hugs!
Recommended reading
Original text by Karen Barad
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter
and meaning. Duke University Press.
12
Key academic text
van Amsterdam, N., van Eck, D., & Meldgaard Kjær, K. (2022). On (not) fitting in. Fat
embodiment, affect and organizational materials as differentiating agents. Organization Studies,
01708406221074162.
Accessible resource
Juelskjær, M., & Schwennesen, N. (2012). Intra-active entanglementsAn interview with Karen
Barad. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1-2).
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1
Corporeal ethics in the more-than-human world (Rosalyn Diprose)
Veera Kinnunen, ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5640-101X
Abstract
Feminist ethics may draw together different threads of discussion on affects and corporeality.
However, some of the discussions on feminist ethics, such as embodied ethics and posthuman ethics,
have evolved largely separately, despite their apparent overlap. This chapter brings together
embodied ethics and more-than-human ethics by drawing from Rosalyn Diproses notion of corporeal
generosity. Diprose suggests that unsettling, affective encounters open us to new experiences, and in
doing so present an opportunity for generosity towards those who are different to ourselves. By
attending to such unsettling encounters within the authors experience of a bokashi compost, the
chapter attempts to put more-than-human corporeal ethics in practice. The author seeks to open
herself to the alterity of the non-human others, such as the microbial presence of decaying organic
matter, and listen to their teachings, by engaging with her own compost. She calls this ethical exercise
corporeal generosity beyond human exceptionalism.
Introduction
The other affects me, gets under my skin, and that is why I am made to think (Diprose, 2002, p.126)
An almost impenetrable stench is lingering in our backyard. Things like excrement to vomit come to
mind. It sure does s-t-i-n-k! The smell reminds me of pig manure on my great aunts farm. I go to the
nearby forest, start digging holes in the ground and bury the matter there. I fill the holes with dirt
and decaying leaves, hoping that the cover is enough to seal the smell in. Having done it, I do not feel
particularly elated. I have to ask myself whether inhaling such air welcoming this stinking cloud of
microbial life into my body is even healthy. Might it even be dangerous? Once again, I am ready to
give up, to quit trying.
The incident described above is a quote from my autoethnographic field diary about my bokashi
composting experiments that I have been conducting since 2016. In the excerpt, I describe one of my
most disruptive experiences with bokashi composting. In the course of the past five years, I have
developed a well-functioning bokashi routine, but I still regularly face difficulties like the incident
described above. I keep falling in and out of love with my bokashi bucket. So far, we have had some
lengthy break-ups, but we have always resumed our relationship. Fortunately, the unsettling events
are outnumbered by countless satisfying moments in which I have witnessed the transformation of
waste matter into rich, sour smelling soil.
Although I cannot say that I have enjoyed those experiences, they are in many ways at the core of my
research. The disgusting smell has affective power to make me retch and, hence, it forces me to act.
The smell even makes me think, as breathing in the smelly air makes me painfully aware of the
possibly dangerous microbial presence and the porousness of my bodily tissues. My experiments with
bokashi have taught me a great deal about the ethical importance of remaining open to difference
whilst respecting the difference of the other. In my early musings about bokashi composting, I was
interested in ethics of waste and I was inspired by feminist philosopher Rosalyn Diproses thoughts
on embodied ethics. In her book Corporeal Generosity (2002), Diprose develops radical generosity
2
by stressing the role of sentient bodies relating to other bodies as a prerequisite for thinking and acting
differently. Thinking with my bokashi compost, and following in the footsteps of cultural theorist
Hawkins (2005), it made sense to propose that unsettling, affective encounters with matter are ethical
moments from which new habits and relations can emerge.
Since those early days, I have continued to experiment and think with my bokashi compost, and my
thinking has been nourished with a range of more-than-human theorists, such as Haraway, Barad,
Hamilton, Neimanis, Shotwell, Tsing, Swanson, and Mol, to name but a few. As it often happens, the
works of some foundational thinkers become so thoroughly incorporated in the theory, that they
become, if not completely erased, at least diluted and unidentified. As a result, the names of those
thinkers disappear from literature reviews and reference lists. Browsing through my recent texts, it
seems that this has indeed happened to Diprose. The underlying idea of corporeal generosity has been
mulched into my own thinking up to the point that, at present, it is almost impossible to tease out
Diproses influence. This should not come as a surprise. First of all, as the number of theorists and
publications keeps growing exponentially, naming every piece of writing that one has been influenced
by during ones academic career would be an impossible task and would result in incomprehensible
and unengaging texts. Second, it has been noted that female authors1 experience this dilution more
frequently than their male colleagues.
Although Diproses early phenomenological work on corporeal generosity may have influenced the
work of some major contemporary thinkers within more-than-human theorizing addressing the issue
of ethics, a quick browse through the reference lists of seminal texts by thinkers such as Alaimo
(2010); Bennett (2010); Zylinska (2014); Shotwell (2016); Haraway (2014); Latimer & Puig de la
Bellacasa (2013); Puig de la Bellacasa (2017; 2019); Fournier (2020) reveals that reference to Diprose
has been omitted from these contributions.2
Haraway, among others, has called for a feminist citational practice which would be precise about
the history of ideas and the particular creativity and originality and importance of other womens
thinking (Haraway in Terranova documentary, quoted in Hamilton and Neimanis, 2018, p.517).
Hamilton and Neimanis (2018, p.503) have proposed composting as a feminist metaphor and strategy
for acknowledging concepts and commitments that have been foundational to the emergence of a
scholarly approach. Taking a lead from Hamilton and Neimanis, I understand composting as a
feminist exercise to make politics of citation. Rather than aiming for a genealogical review tracing
the development of embodied ethics as a concept, composting has a more modest aim of
acknowledging how phenomenological, corporeal generosity has fed my current more-than-human
approach. Moreover, I seek to trace the lineage from Diproses embodied phenomenological ethics
to feminist organizational ethics, and more-than-human formulations on ethics in organizations.
In preparation for this chapter, I have delved into my intellectual compost pile and returned to
Diproses writings in an attempt to acknowledge how more-than-human theorization has been (and
could further be) nourished with the feminist concept of corporeal ethics. I begin with a close reading
of Diproses Corporeal Generosity and her conceptualization of embodied ethics. I continue to map
how the notion has sparked ethical imagination in the field of feminist organization studies. I then
bring the notion into dialogue with more recent writings on more-than-human ethics. By doing so, I
hope to illustrate that feminist theorization on corporeal generosity has not only sparked
anthropocentric feminist ethics in organization studies but has also had implications for feminist
naturecultural thought, although these two threads of feminist theorization have developed largely as
parallel strands. I conclude by returning to my bokashi bucket.
3
Inspired by the feminist idea of inseparability of theory and praxis, I follow Diproses urge to write
with blood or perhaps even more descriptive of my work with soil stained fingers, as Hamilton
and Neimanis (2019, p.524) have put it. In this text, to write with blood means that I will illustrate
the fleshiness of corporeal ethics through my personal, embodied encounters with decaying and
transforming waste matter.
Embodying ethics
Ethics as a historical field of thought can be roughly understood as a system intended to guide
individuals in their decision-making (Sherwin, 2008, p.11), that is, to enable assessing rights and
wrongs in a quest to obtain a good life or happiness, whatever those may be. In short, ethics is
about being positioned and taking a position in relation to others (Diprose, 2002, p.238). Feminist
thinkers, Diprose among them, have criticized canonical Western theories of ethics for placing an
individual capable of moral judgement at the center of ethical thought. Western social imaginaries
have been dominated by the masculine idea of rational contract and exchange between autonomous
individuals, at the expense of relational, embodied and affective aspects of sociality (Diprose, 2002,
p.171). Although historical theories of ethics have assessed moral formation in the context of
collectives, they nevertheless typically (if not always) assume an individual moral actor, a person
who knows, wills and acts (Shotwell, 2016, p.108). Canonical articulations from Aristotles virtue
ethics to Mills utilitarianism centre around this individual moral agent. Whereas Aristotle suggested
that ethics was based on individual virtues of man, Kant defined the moral agent as capable of
making rational decisions in accordance with the universal moral laws. Even Mills utilitarian
theory aiming for the greatest possible good was intended to enable the individual to ensure that he
does not violate rights of the others while seeking his own benefit. (Shotwell, 2016, p.1089.) In an
attempt to defy the universalizing ethical canon, feminist scholars have situated bodies at the center
of their ethical theorizing (Bergoffen & Weiss, 2011, p.453; Hypatia, 26:3).
In Corporeal Generosity. On giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (Diprose, 2002),
Diprose develops a social imaginary of radical generosity as an alternative to logics of rational
exchange between individuals. Diprose builds her revised formulation of ethics on phenomenological
ontology, which gives primacy to the body and intersubjectivity. I will next elaborate the mode of
ethics that follows from these two assumptions.
First, Diprose builds from embodiment as a fundamental grounding of human existence and a
prerequisite for community formation. This move implies downplaying rational calculation as a
central feature of ethics, and emphasising the pre-reflective, affective aspects of knowing and being.
Following Merleau-Ponty, Diprose contents that it is the affective enjoyment experienced when
thinking, reading, sleeping and warming oneself in the sun, which nourishes all human activity, and
explains why we bother at all. Embodied ways of being become routinized into corporeal habits
cultural-historical sediments that provide a familiar, unquestioned atmosphere which, in turn,
informs my ways of being and relating with others. Personal perceptions as well as moral judgements
and decisions are filtered through the sediments of lived experiences and encounters, which is why
I will tend to perceive and respond to my world in a similar way to how I have before (Diprose,
2013, p.196). This subtle sedimentation of corporeal styles results in a tendency to treat the objects
of the world as fixed facts, which closes off possibilities for other ways of existing for oneself and
with the others (Diprose, 2002, p.120).
Second, Diprose begins her theorising from the fundamental intersubjectivity of human bodies.
Rather than embracing the notion of individual autonomy as an ethical ideal, she insists that
community formation rests on intercorporeality. That is, my sensing, perceiving body is never just
4
mine, but always constituted in relation to other bodies, and informed by social imaginaries that
come before my own (Diprose, 2002, p.193-4). Therefore, cultural-historical sedimentations that
govern my perception, are always accumulated in intersubjective experiences (Diprose, 2002,
p.39). Actions or thoughts that affectively feel familiar and right, are a result of cultural-historical
sedimentation accumulated in intersubjective experiences, through embodied gestures that non-
verbally affirm or judge, such as a warm smile, an appreciative tap in the back or a frown (Diprose,
2002, p.38-9). Judgements are made first through intercorporeal, sedimented cultural-historical social
imaginaries that make sense, and rationalisation is added afterwards. Even institutional values,
cemented in laws, policies and principles, are filtered through these sediments, as the makers and
guardians of laws and policies are informed by the intercorporeally transmitted social imaginaries
that is in them through perception, which is pre-reflective, affective, and thoroughly corporeal
(Diprose, 2002, p.174-5).
If our perceptions are filtered through intercorporeal sedimentations, which shape our modes of being
together, the question remains: What possibilities for change exist? Diprose reminds us that despite
our tendency to treat the objects that we perceive in our everyday lives as unquestioned and finished,
their character is constantly open and contested. Perceptions, values and meanings are being
actualised by and through the bodies every time they are being expressed. Therefore, change is always
possible as soon as this unfinished and reciprocally produced character of things becomes exposed.
In order to expose the unfinished nature of things and set us on the path of thinking differently, the
convenience of the domain of familiarity characterized by sedimented habits needs to be somehow
shaken.
To theorize the possibility for change, Diprose turns to Levinasian ethics of generosity. Ethics arises
when one lets oneself to be affected by the alterity of others, which opens up a possibility for being
otherwise (Diprose