Available via license: CC BY-NC-ND
Content may be subject to copyright.
Music and Arts in Action | Volume 2 | Issue 1
Witkin III
ROBERT W. WITKIN
Department of Sociology and Philosophy | University of Exeter | UK*
I am fortunate to have as my respondents two scholars who have made, and continue
to make, important contributions to what Professor Alexander terms the “strong
program” for a sociology of the aesthetic. They have responded in very different
ways. Professor Atkinson has used the occasion to present a personal commentary
on the sociological neglect of the aesthetic dimension and has explored the
implications of recent thinking and ethnographic research that responds to that
neglect by bearing upon issues that are linked to those I raise. Because Professor
Atkinson’s paper does not directly address the arguments in my paper, I have been
invited by the editors to reply specifically to the critical comments made by Professor
Alexander in his response to my work. The space allocated to me for my reply will
only permit me to focus on his central argument to the exclusion of other points he
makes.
Alexander develops a critique of my essay founded upon identifying what he holds
to be two conflicting and contradictory positions concerning the autonomy,
sensibility, and agency of the subject. What Alexander calls Witkin1 is the ‘good guy’
who “conceives of action in a non-rational way and who filters structural
determinism via the understanding that is uniquely afforded the subject”. Witkin2 is
the ‘bad guy’ who extinguishes the creative autonomy of the subject in favour of the
determining power of the organization (or of capitalism) “to prepare the subject
worker to acquiesce to organizational efficiency, to the soulless iron cage...of the
utterly bureaucratic machine”. Alexander concludes that “the invigorating sense of
actor subjectivity and the intriguing interest in the independence of the aesthetic
order fades away...If this is so then the autonomy of the subject (Witkin1) is only
apparent and the independence of the aesthetic order illusionary and
epiphenomenal”.
The tenor of my thesis is to argue — against the grain of classical sociology — that
the aesthetic dimension has been as key to the making of modern societies as it has
been to the making of pre-modern societies. I have chosen the hard case provided by
the paradigm of modern administrative systems as “rational-technical machineries”
to argue the point. The rational and instrumental character of modern business and
administration has, for many, given rise to the false conclusion that the aesthetic plays
no part in the development of these systems. My concern has been to assert the
opposite, namely that instrumental and economic forms are themselves an aesthetic
achievement. Wherever discretion, skilfulness, integral order, and response flexibility
*Department of Sociology, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter, EX4 4RJ, UK
© Music and Arts in Action/Robert W. Witkin 2009 | ISSN: 1754-7105 | Page 77
http://musicandartsinaction.net/index.php/maia/article/view/witkinreply
Music and Arts in Action | Volume 2 | Issue 1
inheres in organisational roles, the aesthetic dimension, as an intelligence of feeling,
is called into play. The aesthetic, in this wider sense, is constitutive of the sensibility
and agency required for skilful action. It represents an empowerment of the subject
and of subjective process, but this claim has nothing to do with notions of ‘freedom
of the individual’, ‘the good life’, ‘personal expression’, and so forth.
There are many aspects of organisational life that are disempowering. Classical
sociology has dwelt on these at length. Alexander is implicitly referring to them in his
designation of Witkin2. They have included the de-skilling of workers and the
maximisation of managerial control over every aspect of the labour process, with a
corresponding diminution of the control exercised by workers over performance —
the oft’ claimed reduction of workers to the status of automatons and to appendages
of the ‘machine’. Habituation, alienation, and all elements contributing to
organisational an-aesthesia are real enough, and my arguments do not amount either
to a denial of these aspects of organisational life nor to a claim that the aesthetic
dimension of organisational life is some kind of antidote for them.
However, the dystopian paradigm of organisational control, with its claims
concerning the disempowerment of lower echelon workers as subjects, (Taylorism),
only tells part of the story. The associated development of managerial and
administrative functions and the concentration of skilful agency within the higher
reaches of the organisation has meant that the organisational process is delivered in a
different way by workers who make up the ‘salaried staff’ as distinct from those who
are ‘wage labourers’. The former status presupposes a certain, albeit limited, degree
of autonomy and responsibility, or commitment and identification. At this level at
least, the aesthetic dimension of organisational life comes into play, disciplining the
‘presence’ of actors and driving organisational process in the opposite direction,
towards an empowerment of the subject (surely not identical with the
‘empowerment of the individual’ and certainly not with ‘freedom from constraint’).
The organisational process is carried in the sensibility and agency of organisational
members and is realised there, in and through a specific set of aesthetic relations (an
“aesthetic imperative”) and an aesthetic intelligence (an “intelligence of feeling”). It
is a process that I have elsewhere called “subject-reflexive” to contrast it with the
“subject-reactive” behaviour associated with the disempowerment paradigm.
It makes sense to see the organisational aesthetic as having its locus and origin in the
situated practises and understandings of members responding (subject-) reflexively
to the demand characteristics of the action situations in which they work. The fact
that the organisations individuals enter have their aesthetics already formed does not
make this less true. In any skilled performance involving creative choices, the subject
must produce the sensibility and agency with which those actions get done; if
realising the existing organisational aesthetic no longer suffices for this purpose then
the demands of practice alone should determine that the organisational aesthetic will
undergo change. The ‘presence’ cultivated in organisational subjects is what I identify
with the integrity or coherence of the organisational process. While there are aspects
of this presence that are specific to subjects working within particular sites and
specialisms within the organisation, there are some elements of organisational
presence that remain more or less invariant across the organisation. It is these
invariant elements that constitute the organisation’s underlying aesthetic code.
The concept of a society or an organization as a collective, shaping and controlling
the actions of its members, is neither incompatible nor in conflict with the idea of
© Music and Arts in Action/Robert W. Witkin 2009 | ISSN: 1754-7105 | Page 78
http://musicandartsinaction.net/index.php/maia/article/view/witkinreply
Music and Arts in Action | Volume 2 | Issue 1
reflexive subjects for whom the organisation is a domain of practice and whose
practice is an integral part of that shaping and controlling. It can be argued that
under modern conditions, organisational control over instrumental outcomes is
increasingly secured by reliance upon subject-reflexive (subject-empowerment)
controls as opposed to subject-reactive (subject-disempowerment) controls.
All this would be more or less irrelevant to Alexander's Witkin1. He appears to be a
version of the free creative spirit of the Romantic era. I am certainly in agreement
with Alexander concerning the need for a “strong program” with respect to a
sociology of the aesthetic. In pursuit of such a program I would never have
entertained Alexander’s Witkin1, who is a ‘nice guy’ but clearly has no legs to stand
upon. There is more to recommend his Witkin2 who is at least a man of business
who understands, like Andre Gide, that the aesthetic is born of constraint and dies
of freedom. Personally, however, I have elected to move beyond this polarity, pinning
all my hopes for making a contribution to Alexander’s strong program on (let’s call
him) Witkin3...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Witkin is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology & Philosophy, University of
Exeter, and Faculty Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Sociology, Yale University. He is an
Associate Editor of Sociological Theory. His main areas of research include sociology of the arts,
art, agency and social formation, the arts in education, and the aesthetic dimension of
organisational cultures. His publications include The Intelligence of Feeling (1974), Art and Social
Structure (1995), Adorno on Music (1998), and Adorno and Popular Culture (2002). He is currently
completing an historically grounded study on art, agency, and modernity, (to be published by
SAGE, TCS Book Series).
© Music and Arts in Action/Robert W. Witkin 2009 | ISSN: 1754-7105 | Page 79
http://musicandartsinaction.net/index.php/maia/article/view/witkinreply
