workshop

Organizers: Sine Nørholm Just, Sara Dahlman, Erik Mygind du Plessis & Emil Husted

This session is part of the ephemera special issue on Standby as Mode of Organizing

Standby. On sociomaterial modes of organizing

Survival itself has something nonsensical about it today, like dreams in which, having experienced the end of the world, one afterwards crawls from the basement.

T.W. Adorno, Minimal Moralia.

Critique is always a critique of some instituted practice, discourse, episteme, institution, and it loses its character the moment in which it is abstracted from its operation and made to stand alone as a purely generalizable practice. 

Judith Butler, What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue.

A video from this event is now available here.

Information

Join us, if you dare, at the Royal Cast Collection.

No need for complicated seances to evoke the ghost.

Stay still. Listen. Breathe in.

The ghost will find you.

This workshop explores the relation between whistleblowing and forms of organizational power, and with critique. With the shocking revelations of Snowden and Wikileaks, and news of Manning’s mistreatment in custody, whistleblowing is a ‘hot topic’ in news debates. Even so, public perceptions of whistleblowers are rife with ambivalence; for some they represent ‘traitorous violators’ of a code of fidelity to their organization, suspicious figures who reject their obligations of loyalty to the employer, and dangerous tellers of secrets.

This ephemera workshop aims to discuss how the study of ghosts and ghostly matters in organizations can contribute to an understanding of what organization and organizing is. It will explore the disorderly, the unexplainable, the uncanny qualities of organizational life and attends to all the different sorts of ‘absent-presences’ that haunt, disrupt, distort, trouble, and bother the smooth functioning of work life. Additionally, it aims to learn about fissures between shiny futures and inadequate pasts and entanglements of hopes and fears in organizational life.

Outline

… each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine – with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermodynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies. (Deleuze, Control and becoming)

Business as usual can no longer proceed without networked media. The work of organization is incessantly enmeshed with media systems and the grammar of code. Digital data has become the new empirical ground upon which reality is verified and acted upon. The governance of data is now a key managerial function in the organization of workplace operations.