Aesthetics: What for in Organization Studies

1
Aesthetics What for in Organization Studies?
2

• Sensible knowledge concerns what is perceived
  through the senses, judged through the senses,
  and produced and reproduced through the senses.

3

• It resides in the visual, the auditory, the
  olfactory, the gustatory, the touchable, and in
  the sensitive-aesthetic judgment.

4

• It generates action con/fused with the emotion
• It is the pathos dimension of organizational
  life
• It is in dialogical relations with the ethos
  and the logos

5

• sensible knowledge is directed towards sensible
  worlds (from the ancient Greek tà aisthetà).
• It is a form of knowing and acting
  profoundly diverse from the knowledge gathered
  and produced through the logical and
  ratiocinative cognitive faculty directed towards
  intelligible worlds (tà noetà).

6

• People in workplaces all differ because they
  interpret and act according to different
  capabilities and abilities

7

• some are clear-sighted, others have fine
  noses, others are sharp-eared, have taste or
  manual dexterity, while there are others who do
  not possess these capacities

8

• But at the same time they constantly interact
  with the Other because they are born corporally
  with the Other, albeit with their own différance
  (Derrida, 1967) and personal knowledge (Polanyi,
  1962).

9

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• the Other is knowable through a persons gaze,
  gestures and looking, that is through his/her
  body. To be stressed is that this body acts it
  is not just the container of the Others mind.

10

• It is also the sensible representations of
  absent objects, which are the fruit of the
  imaginative faculty

11

• Sensible knowledge is not solely the modification
  induced in the subject by the actual presence of
  objects, that is, sensation stricto sensu. It
  is also the sensible representations of absent
  objects, which are the fruit of the imaginative
  faculty.

12

• In other words, sensory perception is not based
  on terminal sensors, more or less veridical, able
  to grasp the external world as modes, for the
  subject, of being sensible to the world.
• Nor are they instruments of a sovereign
  consciousness, of a subject constituent and
  autonomous with respect to an object rather,
  they are places of the flesh where the flesh of
  the world becomes visible

13

• What for, thus, aesthetics in organization
  studies ?
• To highlight

14

• the practices of knowing and learning in
  organizations as processes which are not only
  mental and logical-analytical but also corporeal
  and multi-sensorial

15

• the materiality of organizational life and the
  constant interaction between the individual and
  non-human elements like the technologies
  (beautiful or ugly) that they use, the
  organizational spaces (cramped, well-lit or
  grotesque) in which they work, and the artifacts
  (elegant or repellent) that they produce

16

• the USE of aesthetic categories the ugly, the
  beautiful, the comical, the tragic, the sublime,
  the sacred, the rhythmic in discursive
  practices on organization
• for which philosophical aesthetics provides a
  theoretical grounding that emphasises the
  plurality rather than the univocity of the
  meanings that attach to each of them