The abstract job and organizational alternatives

Late in the Thatcher era, there were reports that her campaign argument was There Is No Alternative--TINA. At this point I hear Thatcher in Gillian Anderson's personification on The Crown rather than a direct memory. TINA referred to .  opponents for PM--I can't remember if Labor was running Tony Benn in those days.  It also meant her policies of privatization, public sector reductions, working class privation.  It was also the era of Francis Fukuyama's End of History.  All absurd.

I run into TINA problems in thinking about alternatives to the constraints of hierarchy, rigid resource allocations, and limited, ossified strategic requirements.  Part of my task is to look for alternatives.  I don't expect to find them in a fully operative form, but expect to find the kernel of an idea, or brief moment when alternatives took form, like some higher end element.  

One reason (among many) to look at Feminist Theory, and scholars from non-hegemonic contexts, is to see what alternative forms they may have developed.  As Joan Acker put it in a 1990 article, "an important feminist project is to make large-scale organizations more democratic and more supportive of humane goals" (p 140).  The point about "large-scale" is particularly important.  Alternate forms exist for small scale organizations, but life in today's world requires the output of large-scale organizations.  I have yet to be convinced that breaking society down into small scale units which consistently result in people having basic needs provided.  

In 1990, Acker wasn't able to point to great examples: "Part of the feminist project was to create nonhierarchical, egalitarian organizations that would demonstrate the possibilities of nonpatriarchal ways of working. Although many feminist organizations survived, few retained this radical-democratic form. Others succumbed to the same sorts of pressures that have undermined other utopian experiments with alternative work forms, yet analyses of feminist efforts to create alternative organizations were not followed by debates about the feasibility of non-patriarchal, nonhierarchical organization or the relationship of organizations and gender." (p 141)  It's a reminder of the era of idealistic experiments that took place, and points to one strategy, which is to go back and revisit that history.  Duberman's Black Mountain--documenting one of those great experiments of the past--sits on my shelf staring at me--not accusingly, but more like my dog, who is perpetually asking "what are we going to do next?"

Acker's not cynical about what we can do--she cites Kathy Ferguson's The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy (1984): "Ferguson argues further that feminist discourse, rooted in women's experiences of caring and nurturing outside bureaucracy's control, provides a ground for opposition to bureaucracy and for the development of alternative ways of organizing." (p 144)  

Now I've got to get up to date on these experiments and ideas. 

One key idea for Acker is that the masculine gendered organization excises worker's private lives, which deny things like child-bearing and rearing in favor of an abstract worker.  There is something appealing to the idea of work that is embedded in communities, where people would be recognized for all aspects of their life. A co-op as a rule. The risk is that of the small town, the loss of privacy.  In the wrong hands of authority, a work place that attempts to address the "other imperatives of existence" (p 149) would heighten oppression.   

Acker envisions theory that leads to transformation of organizations "in ways that dissolve the concept of the abstract job and restore the absent female body" (p 154).  As a thought experiment, I'd like to look at that sentence if you stop before the last clause.  What if you "dissolve the abstract job" and instead build organizations around the individuals?  The abstract job is a foundation of "proper" management.  The job not the person. But of course, in the real world, organizations build jobs around people all the time, for many reasons, most of which are considered suspect.  For one example, Affirmative Action asks that organizations define jobs on the basis of objective criteria that make any job accessible to a pool of applicants who will compete based on merit.

A person-based approach to building an organization would try to find a home for particular people, say finding work for every person in a community. This is most conceivable in a smallish community.  You could make a point of crafting work for specific people who differ from the characteristics of the people currently in the organization.  This method for building organizations would entail lots of issues that probably make it unworkable, but it does suggest more tolerance for shaping jobs to people who are already within an organization, and may require very different job classification and compensation structures. 

Acker, Joan. (1990). Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations. Gender & Society, 4(2), 139–158. 

Duberman, M. B. (1972). Black Mountain: An exploration in community ([1st ed.].). Dutton.

Ferguson, K. E. (1984). The feminist case against bureaucracy. Temple University Press.   

What's so bad about Pandora's Box?

Kimberle Crenshaw's "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" from 1989 is sometimes identified as the ur-text of Critical Race Theory. Obviously people writing critically about race goes back further, but a classmate this winter made the point that one should read this.  The core idea, there in the title, is intersectionality.  Crenshaw's a legal scholar, which gives her a particular focus on how discrimination is defined when the chips are down in a legal proceeding.  And there she saw a consistent pattern of one-dimensional analysis in which one could make a claim of race discrimination or sex discrimination, but not both. Which had the effect of emphasizing the experience of the most privileged group within the discriminated group--white women and black men.  She argues that justice requires that you start from the least privileged subgroup, and build up law and social practice from there.  

A lot of analysis and problem-solving involves simplifying things, reducing the dimensions.  In my current project, developed a conceptual framework on a three dimensions, but then focused on two dimensions, making the case that these are the key dimensional relationships we want to address in this context in this project.  But the third dimension of the context remains, and truth be told, it influences how you really want to think about the two dimensions I focused on.  Crenshaw pushes against that simplification and seeks to "embrace the complexities of compoundedness" (p 166). 

One of the decisions she cites (DeGraffenreid v General Motors) explicitly raises the specter of this compoundedness: "'The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora's box'" (p 142). Pandora's Box. It is always a problem. It is an instant end to an argument.  Too much complexity, or just too much period.  What if you turn the tables.  Pandora's Box is just fine.  It represents the richness of experience.  What if the task is to live in a world overfilling with all that is released.  Well, actually not released.  It's always there.  My two-dimensional and three-dimensional axes just tame it momentarily. 

Obviously, one needs these simplifications in order to even have coherent language, let alone make a decision or take an action.  But what if one's attitude is that the fine axial dimensions of analysis are a temporary step out of the flurry of Pandoran reality, into which you need to step back in, to experience more and learn more. As I've started thinking about CRT, as you deal with the issues of justice and restoration that it entails, the exciting part is how it blows open the rigidity of any categorization and universalization.  The compounds keep permutating. 

Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989:1, 139-167

   

Harvey on Neo-Liberalism

Neo-liberalism is a term that kept coming up last year.  Often it seemed like an overly simple explanation or accusation.  The AAUP criticized PSU administrative actions as driven by neo-liberal ideology, which didn't seem like a particularly accurate explanation (some of the issues had to do with very rigid embedded financial arrangements for administration that were decidedly non-responsive to anything like a market signal), and didn't help much in identifying what should be done. I've pretty well lived through neo-liberalism, watching market-based approaches to government come in during the Carter years in the Washington bureaucracy where my father and neighbors worked, and then living through each step of its progress. Still, I figured I should spend some time to think about some more, hence a run through David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005).  

The fundamental idea is that market mechanisms are better than planning, therefore the government should turn over everything it can to the private sector, relax regulation on capital, businesses, and resource exploitation, permit frictionless capital flows between nations, and promote the freest trade possible. Its leading figures were Thatcher and Reagan, followed by many others in the US, UK and elsewhere. 

All of my working career has occurred during this period, so I take much of it for granted as just representing the system we live in. My job is typically to help institutions figure out how to do the best for themselves and their stakeholders under these conditions.  I don't see great opportunities for a single institution to decide it is going to play by different rules, although this is precisely why I want to come up with models that are not premised on resource growth. 

I have to admit, I'm soft on markets.  I think they have their place--and not a small place--and they have been with us a very long time.  The alternatives in history--say a feudal system of mutual economic obligations--are not better. 

The last 40 years have unquestionably seen government force services into market-based mechanisms where they don't work .  For example, by and large we don't set up markets for the armed forces, but where we've moved towards private contractors it moves quickly into criminality. We haven't had great success with market systems for a road system--even in the Seattle area, surge pricing for highway tolls has been a huge flop. Few of the conditions for a competitive market could be met in these area.  Healthcare sucks as market-based as we are--consumers/citizens can't effectively shop.  

Garbage pickup may work OK under a market.  When I was a kid, the sanitation crews were full-time government jobs, and you recognized the guys on the trucks jumping off to empty the cans into the truck.  Now garbage service is outsourced to private contractors with much more capital intensive operations--specialized trucks with long arms pick up standardized receptacles, humans rarely touch the cans. Let's assume it is cheaper.  While the loss of solid government jobs is harmful to the community, I'm not sure it makes sense for society to dedicate more resources than necessary to this function. 

With universities, there is a market.  No one really is interested in monolithic government provision of education--we have lots of diversity, even within the public university sector, and a valuable private non-profit sector exists and is still seen as having value. So greater market emphasis in public sector higher ed creates new challenges, but doesn't result in pure dysfunction the way it does say in prisons.  

One interesting thing this year is that we did not talk or read much about class.  Harvey talks about class, and the need for "a rejuvenated class politics," but his concept of class seems more positional than functional--he makes reference to multiple classes, who seem defined by where they fall in an income distribution.  There are also references to the "ruling class" but I did not see a definition of that.  I see class as being defined by a specific relationship to political power and the means of production and wealth generation.  In this case, the ruling class would be those people who by virtue of wealth and other factors are in a position to wield power and control the economy, and there would be a small number of other classes defined by their relationship to those factors and to the ruling class--one formulation is working class, subsumed class (or classes), and perhaps an utterly dispossessed group. One of my assignments for myself for this summer is to get to a book that has been on my shelf a long time, Resnick and Wolff's Knowledge and Class (1987), which I've always understood addresses just these sort of definitions.   

Harvey talks about Neoliberalism being a departure from Embedded Liberalism, but I don't see him treating the period pre-1976 as a golden era. These regimes were the ones that brought you nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, and were the object of Marcuse's critique.  In my sector, higher education, there does seem to be some interest in going back to an old way, in which most of the costs of public education were picked up by state appropriations, and public institutions were assigned defined geographic and programmatic areas, insulated from competition.  Some movement towards de-privatizing public higher ed funding might be possible--Biden seems to want to go there, but I'm not sure he will get anything past Congress. It doesn't seem like a clock you can turn back. So I think you go forward with competition and markets, but perhaps different configurations of the entities in the market and different regulation of the markets. 

The 2005 pub date of the book comes out a few ways.  Some of his predictions about the weakness of the neo-liberal order don't seem to have some to pass--China for one continues to be able to adapt and stay one step ahead of its structural issues.  But what is the timeline required? The problem of tech monopolies was not as visible then.  Today, in these hugely important sectors, more competition not less would be good.  And I don't think I want to see government confiscation of social networks--you could argue you've seen that in China. He actually does a good job of identifying the inclination of neo-liberalism towards authoritarianism--the tendency was visible enough in Bush and Cheney and the doctrine of the unitary executive--but now that has emerged full-formed, and like any authoritarian regime it is not married to a specific ideology or economic program. 

My biggest question about neo-liberalism is the extent to which it represents a break from what preceded.  It can represent a continuation of a strongly free-market polity that goes back a 100 years or more.  But there was a change in the regime of consumption--to use Regulation school terminology--from the Fordist period dedicated to increasing the wealth and consumption power of workers in the West, to the end of that and a regime more geared towards diminishing the living standards of workers. In terms of Skowronek's political time, there is a regime change with Reagan, raising the question of the extent to which we are dealing with political or economic changes.  Yes, they are connected, but they are different.  

Organizational Miasma

I couldn't resist an article in organization studies that has "miasma" in the title: "Organizations in a State of Darkness: Towards a Theory of Organizational Miasma" by Yiannis Gabriel, who is affiliated with the University of Bath School of Management, which also has Andrew Brown on faculty.  I wonder if I can find a way to hang out there at some point.    

Miasma is used here in terms of psychoanalysis, in which it describes "a contagious state of pollution – material, psychological and spiritual."  Gabriel's organizational miasma infects all those who work in an organization.  He bases the development of this idea on a case study of an organization that has gone through a sudden and disruptive transformation that threw out an established organization narrative, culture and people in favor of something meant to modernize the organization and make it more competitive. One thing I like about Gabriel's stated approach is that he wants to use trauma to develop observations about what might be considered more normal conditions, in tune with an approach to psychoanalysis in which normal behavior contains within it elements shared with psychotic behavior, and studying extreme behavior provides insights on understanding everyday behavior.  I believe the issues of depression and dispossession are very common, and not limited to organizations that have engaged in spectacular attacks on the previous order, or which have particularly mismanaged changes. 

It is also the case that a cult of change controls much management thinking.  Management and organization theory seem to presuppose the need for transformation of organizations, and elevate "transformative" leadership to the highest rank. I've lived with this most of my career in management, having entered business school in years dominated by anxiety over competition from Japan.  That anxiety has led to successor anxieties reliably. 

The characteristics of miasma are devaluing and objectifying the individual (employees and customers), absence of will to resist, self-criticism, devaluing the past, absence of stories and narratives about the past, feelings of inadequacy and uncleanness. (Gabriel p 1142).  He describes it as a disease that  "undermines people’s faith in their gods, their institutions and their identity" (p 1148).

Why is this happening--at the crux Gabriel draws from the work of the next person I need to add to my list to check out, Howard Stein, one of whose books is Nothing personal, just business: A guided journey into organizational darkness (Quorum 2001). He fingers the problem as misplaced faith in organizations as source of immortality, and people sacrifice themselves psychically.  "But the gods of the bottom line are implacable. They demand human sacrifices...the religion of the bottom line acknowledges no permanent authority, no human is too important to be dispensed with when his or her usefulness is over. This creates an ethos of survivalism – a constant anxiety over each individual’s and each organization’s ability to survive in what is construed as an environment of endless terrors and turbulence" (Gabriel 1143). 

Gabriel sees some origins in the neo-liberal shift of the 80s, but I think it goes back further--like Sandberg and Catlaw, I'll point to the secularization of religious values as an effective but problematic underpinning of capitalism as per Weber. I'm working on Harvey's book on neo-liberalism and will write on that soon.  I think that from a British perspective, the 80s are more clearly a watershed than in the US, where the move towards more social responsibility is something of a departure from old norms. 

One thing that is interesting is that if you are in fact a dinosaur and still engaged with traditional religion, you hardly see your organization as representing immortality.  In a denomination like Presbyterian, the existential threat is just over the horizon.  It is hard to imagine the denomination existing in 50 years, and one wonders what will happen to its values and ideas for what they are worth. Instead, it engages you a project of resistance, and asks that you commit yourself to actively build identity and institutions, and a place for God--physically, organizationally, socially, and politically. 

The description above about an environment of "endless terrors and turbulence"--that's the starting point for Marcuse, but now cast not in terms of nuclear annihilation, but a more pervasive and pernicious terror that is nearly the explicit content of the generally understood employment contract. 

The Quantified Self

In her work, my professor Billie Sandberg often raises issues around quantification and measurement in organizational context as an ideological act that merits critique, one of the key markers of a neo-liberal regime.  I need to spend some more time with her writing on it, and with theories of neo-liberalism that she draws on, because I hesitate on the points on quantification.  I think of quantification as being useful, worth doing in all sorts of contexts, and that quantification per se is ideologically neutral.  Even a radical or revolutionary initiative would want to draw on quantifiable measures for analysis, forecasting, and assessment. Knowing that I need to spend some time with this, an article she did with Thomas Catlaw on the Quantified Self rose high on my reading list.

In my experience, the most common form of this movement is in health and wellness data.  Think Fitbits, mindfulness apps like Headspace, or the Noom weight loss app. They all collect data about you, shoot it to the cloud, and repackage it in ways designed to help you achieve some goal—fitness, mindfulness, etc.  In many cases, the apps incorporate gamification—prizes and awards for achieving milestones—and a social dimension.  I tend to think of this movement as being a cult limited to coastal tech communities, but I have to admit I’ve been using an app called Strava to measure my walks and runs, and I’m connected on it with a few friends in California.  I’m not immune.

Sandberg and Catlaw analyze this movement in terms of “practices of the self, which constitute the modalities by which the self acts on the self” and as a contemporary form of historical practices of “self-care” designed to prepare elites for governing. The collection and use of information about the self to manage the self reflects a pervasive value of entrepreneurship—the individual takes themselves on a product to be developed, optimized and improved. Their research involves analyzing a number of video logs posted on the Quantified Self website (Homepage - Quantified Self) to identify the goal of the self-government activity, the ethical substance (the target of their efforts),  the means through which that subjectification occurs, and the methods.  One significant observation is that while the tools collect physical data, the purpose of the contributors is generally to gain greater control over their minds.  The vlogs also bring out that this is a very solitary pursuit, directed towards control of the self, for the self.

Sandberg and Catlaw are interested in public administration and governance, and come to this work as part of their study of the influence and ideology of technology and use of influence in government, but one of the really interesting things about the paper is that they are identifying precursors to a potential direction in governance.  “Though these highly personalized practices do not (yet) purposefully crowd-source data back into the cloud for state-driven big-data analytics, we see subjects who are beginning the process of self-governing suitable for precisely such governmental practice.”  At this stage in their work they leave open the possibility that these practices may provide opportunities for liberation, for “wresting our own mundane, biological beings from the relentlessness of the neoliberal market,” but the skepticism is apparent, and there’s some earlier work they did on the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive that I haven’t read yet that may provide more evidence of current or imminent use of these tools.  When I think of the Trump Administration, it seems more likely that that group would have delegated this work of information-control and manipulating self regulation to private sector ancillaries.  Which is consistent with privatizing trends that Billie addresses in her work.

One section of the paper makes a fascinating aside to Weber and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. One of Weber’s major arguments was that religious asceticism provided a foundation for a secular, utilitarian value that elevated labor and self-sacrifice, through which a person developed themselves into an effective economic subject.  I found it very useful to see the line drawn between that concept and Foucault’s ideas about creation of the subject and self-discipline, and then for Catlaw and Sandberg to show how these contemporary practices continue and extend these foundational Western practices. Technology it would seem keeps making our society capable of becoming more intensely what it already is.

Thomas J. Catlaw & Billie Sandberg (2018) The Quantified Self and the Evolution of Neoliberal Self-Government: An Exploratory Qualitative Study, Administrative Theory & Praxis, 40:1, 3-22, DOI: 10.1080/10841806.2017.1420743

Massy's latest

William Massy, long-time Stanford professor and administrator, has been writing and talking about the specifics of university budgeting in specific, detailed ways for my whole career.  There are just not that many scholars who talk about how budgeting is really done and what can be done with it as clearly.  He has gone at this program in innovative ways, at one point even developing a financial planning and strategy game, Virtual U.  A consulting client was talking about his latest book, Resource Management for Colleges & Universities (Hopkins 2020), so I read it over the last couple of days. 

His major argument is for building a financial and decision-support model based on Academic Resource modeling, which starts with a focus on the detailed inputs and outputs from academic activity--classes and programs.  At its core is a contribution margin analysis of courses and programs built from very detailed information on classes, students, instructional salaries, and direct instructional costs. Information on facilities and faculty activity allow the models to identify areas where more activity could occur.  I've done models like this in the past, but always in fairly clumsy Excel form. Massy has identified and worked with vendors like Gray Associates and an Australian outfit called Pilbara who have built more sophisticated tools for this.  EAB and Grant Thornton may have done some too.  

I'm familiar with Gray Associates for their work on the markets for programs, which concrete in a way I haven't seen before, although I also think places are just starting to figure out ways to work it into planning and decision processes.  One aspect of that is marrying the external view they are known for with an internal view of the program's economics--what does it take for the institution to deliver it, and what are they seeing in the form of returns from their particular revenue sources.  To that end, they've built a program economics model, but I haven't seen a presentation or demo of that yet. Still, institutions have to figure out how to absorb this information into their planning.  Certainly, it's not as simple as simply saying here's the demand, let's move resources there, we look weak here, let's cut back on that. In any university with reasonably strong shared governance, administrators have to come to an understanding with their faculty of what they want to do with information like this. There's a lot of different ways you can react. 

When I've built these kinds of models, it was as a discrete decision-support tool for provosts to support questions like where to put adjunct faculty resources.  It was not within the context of the overall budget-building process, but I think that would be the goal, and that's where Massy is heading. But I don't think he gets there.  He offers one model for rank ordering and picking between budget investments opportunities, but I found it unrealistic and unconvincing.  It doesn't line up with how most budgets are built, which have programmatic and continuous qualities, not a list of discrete binary options. And a point I keep returning to, the budget process is all about building processes for exchange between people at the institution that allows them to express and share their understandings of the environment, needs, and actions, and identify a pathway towards choosing between the options. 

He argues for a process that is driven by the academic side of the house, which I strongly support, but he does not offer much on why faculty would see this model as a tool to achieve their goals. In one critical passage he writes "This means academic officers and faculty must take ownership of the quality-cost balance.  But how? The answer lies in providing better access to data that are manifestly helpful for decisions they are making already, and that will lead them logically and inexorably in the direction of cost consciousness" (p. 25).  Massy is a much more experienced higher ed hand than me, but the phrase "logically and inexorably" is a warning flag for me. 

There needs to be a strong general sense of what the institution is trying to achieve with the Academic Resource modeling discipline he describes--is it budget cutting? This will engender nothing but resistance. Enrollment and revenue growth?  Introduced the wrong way, this just seems like exploitation. Something subtler would be necessary. 

There are other missing pieces.  He talks about the need to factor in academic quality, and says that it is purely a matter of academic judgment, but doesn't try here to factor in measures of student success like retention and graduation rates, as imperfect as they may be.  There is no discussion of diversity and equity, although these can be factored in the models he's describing.  He doesn't try to address administrative costs--maybe 40% of an institution's total cost--"the ideas are less developed in this arena. The priorities are clearly on the academic side, but success there surely will lead to nonacademic solutions in a relatively short time" (xi).  Seems unlikely--these areas work differently, with varying degrees of relationship to academic activity, and their costs have been notoriously difficult to constrain. They will require their own approach.  

Many institutions could do with revisiting the relationship between the administrative and the academic domains.  In one model, they are treated as separate, governed separately with separate somewhat dedicated pools of funds.  In others, especially in full Responsibility Center Budgeting models, the administrative side is seen as a kind of supplicant for the academic enterprise's resources.  And in many places, those tables are turned, and academic units feel like the administration parsimoniously grants allowances to the unruly children of the academic departments, while the adults on the board and in the administration make real-world decisions.  

I like seeing Massy focus attention on this kind of academic modeling.  Some version of it is needed, which is why different groups in higher education keep coming back to it. I wish I had read this book a couple of weeks ago so I could have mentioned it in my NACUBO webinar, where it fits in well with the alternatives to Responsibility Center Management we were discussing . 

One jarring thing is that this book functions to a great extent as a pitch for Gray and Pilbara--Pilbara features it on their website as marketing material. It's easy to recoil at that, but I think it's worth giving Massy the benefit of the doubt and thinking about why he has done that.  Massy is arguing that higher education needs to quickly embrace this sort of thinking about academic resources, and I don't think it is just a scholarly interest for him.  He's an advocate.  In thinking about what it will take for these ideas to take root, one way that will happen is to create communities who are developing and pursuing these tools, and vendors like these can be a powerful force in driving an idea like that.  Their profit motives add to their sense of urgency.  It is arguably the case that Huron has had a big impact on the diffusion of Responsibility Center models. 

In organizations collective action is everything, and higher ed is probably ready for new ways of engaging the community as a collective. These sorts of tools, developed even further to reflect student outcomes of all sorts, center diversity, and value contributions to the community, could help give academic communities additional common material for discussion. But the community has to arrive at these tools, not have them imposed. They have to be part of compelling and convincing vision of how this understanding this information contributes to an organization that provides more.  To me, piecing together how to lay these kinds of tools into a community-building process that would govern budget-building is the key.      

Pacified Existence

This phrase--Pacified Existence--is the major arrival point for Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man.  When this phrase first shows up in the book, it seems like it had to be a preliminary step in the argument as a demonstration of another form of false consciousness that Marcuse will eventually go past.  Given that the book was from 1964, "Pacified Existence" made me picture Robert McNamara standing around a work table with a bunch of analysts in close-cropped hair and dark frame glasses. But no, this is the arrival point, for Marcuse vision of freedom from pervasive, administrative repression of freedom, a state where existence is no longer a matter of pain and struggle. 

I'm re-reading Marcuse after many years, and reading it much more closely than before.  The first time through, years ago, I remember being alternately frustrated by it and seeing it as sort of obvious.  So many of his ideas seem to have been absorbed into the counter-culture of the 60s, that by the time I was reading, it seemed old hat.  It is also idealistic, and while it comes on hard (and on point) with its critique of modern societies, it seemed detached from concrete alternatives. I also find myself argumentatively backsliding, asking if I'm sure modern society isn't delivering benefits of comfort and ease on a wide-enough scale to convert the criticisms into idle whining.  It also has dense analyses of technical philosophy in its middle section that are not exactly my strong suit. 

But at the end, the idea is there.  That one should resist the one-dimensionality that does not allow for reason to critique the current order, and the unquestioned assumptions of the modern order that great levels of pain and fear are part of a necessary exchange for the benefits of modern technology and society.  This results in the unreason Marcuse fingered in phenomena like a complex social and political order premised on the imminent threat of global devastation through mutual nuclear annihilation, rather than applying resources to make that impossible. Utopian thinkers in ages past envisioned advanced technology allowing for a huge expansion of leisure.  The opposite has occurred, but the universal speed-up required to achieve ever higher levels of per capita productivity is established ideologically as inevitable--the lack of critique is the one-dimensionality in question.    

I still look for specifics of what form this resistance takes.  To some extent, much of the later 60s demonstrated it.  Marcuse himself stresses the goal of providing for solitude and privacy, for unmanaged time that allows consciousness to pursue its own devices.  Die Gedanken sind frei. But rolling the clock ahead 50 years to today, social media makes this much more problematic.  The continuous, pervasive signaling of social media, reflecting a cacophony of voices striving for control and influence, have the effect of polluting free thought.  Can you even trust those thoughts in private time not to reflect ideas and sentiments planted there?  Even more perniciously, for so many people the moment of solitude now leads to a reach for the cell phone and a dive into streams of messages from Twitter, Tik-Tok or the New York Times.  Or this blog post.   

One pathway to finding instances of this self-possessed thinking, of "practical freedom," might be through the idea of "self-determined incentives" which he mentions one time late in the book (page 236).  This is the sort of thing that one might be able to identify through research on Identity Work.  One can ask interview subjects to describe their incentives and look for cases that seem to depart from management and organizational demands, and from socially imposed expectations.  Alvesson and Willmott (2002) offered the idea of "micro-liberation" in the workplace.  While I did not feel like they were able to give it as concrete form as I wanted, the phrase resonates for me. In discussions of alternate identities in the Organizational Identity research I am looking for cases that really deviate from the predominant repressive consciousness--in many cases in workplace studies, resistance is in the service of another way of serving the same ideology with different means.  To put it in the words of an article by Sandberg and Catlaw (2018) that I will be getting to, "We can see these efforts to forge a personal space—a space within which living becomes a phenomenon to be experienced and, in a sense, savored rather than merely a sequence of one anonymous, ephemeral moment after another."

At the end of the day, it may be the case that in the socially constructed characteristics of consciousness, we'll find no pure freedom.  I doubt purity is necessary to validate Marcuse's logic, but I want to find cases that deviate from the one-dimensional order, and consider what gets you more of this.    

Alvesson, M., & Willmott, H. (2002). Identity Regulation as Organizational Control: Producing the Appropriate Individual. Journal of Management Studies, 39(5), 619-644

Thomas J. Catlaw & Billie Sandberg (2018) The Quantified Self and the Evolution of Neoliberal Self-Government: An Exploratory Qualitative Study, Administrative Theory & Praxis, 40:1, 3-22, DOI: 10.1080/10841806.2017.1420743

Marcuse, Herbert. (1964) One-Dimensional Man. Beacon.

Community and instiutions

This weekend David Dark preached at Downtown Presbyterian Church.  It is a pleasure for everyone to have him there, but we do this very rarely.  That needs to change.

At one point in the sermon, David distinguished between community and institutions, and made a nice comparison--a community sacrifices for people, an institution sacrifices people.  It seemed like a good solid distinction, consistent with values many of us cherish. I can picture governments as war-making and incarcerating institutions demanding people to sacrifice as cannon fodder in war and objects of punishment.  This distinction feels like it comes from good intellectual stock, reminding me of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, the distinction between community and society.  Society as captured by Gesellschaft implies rules and obligations, and bureaucracies and large organizations.  The word Gesellschaft can also refer to a company, and so it is definitely freighted with the implication of economic rationality and predominance. David is pitching into this tension, making the case for the human humane path. 

But this seemingly unassailable position brought me back to some of the more challenging and in ways mystifying ideas I encountered this year which to some extent turn the tables in the moral balance between community and institution. There is an argument that any community contains at its core an act of violence.  Here's Nidesh Lawtoo discussing this in his book (New) Fascism (2019):

"For Bataille, then, community finds in sacred experiences that generate ecstatic horror the affective source of a contradictory double movement that both unites and divides the social body: death, sacrifice, tragedy are but the most prominent sacred experiences that constitute the palpitating heart or “central core” (noyau central) of community."  Lawtoo 2019, p. 80. 

When I first read this, I thought about DPC as a community.  At first glance, this kind of violence and sacrifice seem far away.  David invited the congregation to think of themselves as a community of inquiry.  The fact is this church was built by slaves for a local ruling class with wealth built on slavery, and on ground taken over from indigenous people.  One of the things DPC sometimes does is trace its origins to its founding as a separate congregation in 1956.  This has the convenient effect of eliding the early history, of slavery and of the original encounter between Europeans and indigenous people.  (Of course DPC itself has in its shortened history managed to be on the wrong side of history during the lunch counter sit ins.)  But if you let the historical frame flow between re-organizations, you can see the original acts of violence.  What is less clear is how under this schema of community they are re-enacted to renew the community.

Leaving aside DPC, I don't know I see this same noyau central in every community.  Jean-Luc Nancy made a distinction between Operative and Inoperative Communities, with operative ones being those that depend on contagion and these Bataillian dynamics.  I'm part way through some of his writing on this. 

Then on the other side of the equation, political science defines "institutions" as basically rule sets.  From Azari and Smith : "Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor, for example, characterize institutions as 'formal or informal procedures, routines, norms and conventions embedded in the organizational structure of the polity.' Douglass North, adopting the view of rational-choice rather than historical institutionalism, defines institutions as 'humanly devised constraints that shape human intersction,' a scoiety's 'rules of the game.'" From this perspective, institutions are more accommodating of the individual than a community.  They provide a clean set of rules within which an individual can claim agency and legitimacy, and don't demand much else. 

For me, the more important tension is between the individual and any manifestation of collective human experience.  I still believe in the absolute value and beauty of that collective experience. But I see a set of intrinsic, potentially unavoidable problems within it.  One of my jobs for this summer is going deeper into some of this work, and try to see what I can do with some of this stuff that is out there in Bataille and Foucault, and Jean-Luc Nancy.    

The job demands what the job demands

Last quarter I figured out that some of the questions that interest me fall under the category of Identity Work, the process through which people define their sense of self.  A lot of it resides in the stories people tell about themselves.  Or at least that's where researchers can find the material to study. The thoughts people have about themselves are not visible until something is done to bring them to the surface. So you get people to tell stories. One distinct possibility is that those stories involve a pretty significant level of mediation between what lies beneath.  But the stories are rich, as we'll see. 

A few weeks ago Billie Sandberg forwarded me the current issue of Organization Studies and pointed out that there were a couple of articles there to add to pile of research on Identity Work.  A point she's making to all of us is that we should figure out what journals cover the kind of work that engages us and start paying attention to that.  

One of the articles in this issue was lead authored by Andrew Brown from the University of Bath, who wrote a couple of articles I worked with last term in my first pass along Identity Work research.  This one, co-authored with Michael Lewis and Nick Oliver has the title "Identity Work, Loss and Preferred Identities: A Study of UK Business School Deans."  The thing that interests them is how much the deans define themselves in their role as deans in terms of loss--of status as a scholar, of integrity, and of sense of well-being.  This is a group you would think would identify themselves in terms of successes.  

The truly remarkable thing for me was one point in particular--the stories of the loss of integrity.  One of the common identity themes Brown et al found was that the deans agonize over the ways the job requires them to be less than completely honest.  In many cases they find that they can't share all of the information behind a situation.  Also, that the institution uses them and forces them into positions they are not comfortable with. 

A quote from one of the interviews: "It’s necessary to justify decisions without being able to tell the whole story…sometimes I’m clutching at logic…I think that’s been one of the most difficult parts of the role is standing up and justifying the position without being able to justify… [it]…"

It seems to me like the research team passes over this material too easily.  It's one of three common threads they see in these interviews, but to me this is remarkable and drives at one of the biggest challenges to organizational life, the ways in which it compromises its participants.  Try as you might, when you start to take on managerial authority, you increasingly find yourself boxed in by the organization.  Some mysterious convergence of factors produces decisions and dictates courses of action seemingly out of the control of the humans taking the action and voicing the words.  This is precise testimony of this specific effect, and its fundamentally morally compromising character. For me, this single shared aspect of these stories can provide the entry point into the problem of structural moral compromise and of the collective as the effective agent.    

Discussing their findings with this survey of UK deans, they suggest North American business deans might not have the same issues--the UK deans face a great deal of institutional ambivalence in institutions that treat business education as a sort of necessary evil but not a legitimate academic program.  I'm not sure American deans experience quite that level of disregard from colleagues,  But they do mention some evidence of health problems with business deans in the U.S.  The citation they have is from the Nashville Business Journal--an article on Marty Geisel's death.  

Marty was dean at Vanderbilt when I was there.  He was very encouraging to me.  He liked that we shared connection with the University of Chicago.  I never felt as connected to Owen after his death.  Marty was perfectly capable of being frustrated with the administration at Vanderbilt, but I don't think he would have described his identity in terms of loss.  It seemed to me that he rather relished being dean.  I'm not sure his end supports the points that Brown, Lewis and Oliver want to make.  I wish they had had a chance to interview him. 

Brown, A. D., Lewis, M. A., & Oliver, N. (2021). Identity Work, Loss and Preferred Identities: A Study of UK Business School Deans. Organization Studies, 42(6), 823–844.

Organizations as Interpretation Systems

When I was in business school, I took a number of Human Resource Management classes, and one of the primary faculty there was Dick Daft, an organization theorist.  His class gave me my first exposure to classics/basics of organization theory, and Vanderbilt's MBA program is small so I felt like I knew him at the time.   He did one article on the relationship between information richness and the use of media that I found very useful and would copy for people later, and I used the syllabus from one of his higher level classes on org theory to guide my post-MBA reading. 

Move the clock forward--God help me--30 years.  I'm back in an org theory class, and my new org theory guru Billie Sandberg points me to Karl Weick's work on sensemaking.  And Weick co-authored several things with Daft and cites him a bunch.  A circle closes.  

There is a big random element to academic life.  Most people pick schools early on in their academic career based on pretty minimal information.  I went to Vanderbilt because of circumstances of my personal life, not in search of a particular scholar.  Daft's work did register with me, and some of his observations about the complexities of communication made sense to me with my humanities background engaged with complicated texts and interpretations. It does make sense that years later I gravitate back into this area. 

The article I'm looking at today is one by Daft and Weick called "Toward a Model of Organizations as Interpretation Systems."  Often, maybe too often, a title itself will catch my eye and get my mind running before I've even read a word.  In this case the idea of an organization as an interpretation system intrigues me.  I've referred to organizations as information processing systems, and used that idea as the basis for some of my consulting.  An interpretation system grabs me because of the connection with the hermeneutical work of the humanities, and to my seemingly disconnected art writing, where I interpreted visual art or music.       

In this 1984 article Daft and Weick built a 2x2 matrix of interpretation modes depending on assumptions about the environment (unanalyzable or analyzable) and the role of the organization--passive or active in shaping its environment.  So that first dimension is all about whether the organization operates in an environment it considers stable, "concrete," and predictable, or in an environment that is none of those things.  There are many org theory constructs that depend on differentiating environments, or periods, of stability from those with higher uncertainty.  Every time I run across one of those, it occurs to me that we are in a period where stability is gone--the only environment is a changeable, difficult to predict one.  When I got to business school in the 1989, we were starting to see that unravel.  We had come off the oil shocks and inflation of the 70s, the economic retrenchment of the 80s, and the emergence of global competition that put everything up for grabs.  Change and crisis seemed the order of the day, and in a business school we were scrambling to catch up with the Japanese.  Things never let up after that.  Soon it was the dot.com bubble, the WTC attacks, a huge recession, and whatever it is we have today. 

What's more, I am very suspicious of the notion of periods of stability.  Something is always in motion.  If you read enough history, you will find someone making the case for any decade you name as a period of great transformation and critical turning points.  Also, stability in the West (or maybe it was only the US) was built on power that bore down on other parts of the world.  I think any stability has been bought by violence. 

So I'm prepared to collapse Daft and Weick's 2x2 matrix in a 1x2 row.  The other dimension is whether the organization itself acts upon the environment or responds to it more passively.  Since the rise of a technology-based economy, all the attention goes to businesses and groups that act on the environment.   That "disrupt" markets.   The idea that you can sit in the environment passively, scan it and respond seems foolish.  Every market (and field of endeavor) is open to organizations who would shape it, and they will own it.    

In the current business environment, which to a great extent drags along other sectors, an analytical black hole forms and this analytical structure collapses in on itself to the point where there is only on relevant mode for these organizational interpretive systems.   Daft and Weick describe the exploratory activities of the quadrant containing active firms operating in an uncertain environment: "They gather information by trying new behaviors and seeing what happens.  They experiment, test, stimulate, and they ignore precedent, rules and traditional expectation." They "may leap before they look, perform trials in order to learn what an error is, and discover what is feasible by testing presumed constraints."  Sounds like A-B testing, Agile development, and "move fast and break things."  We seem well on the way to this being all there is.    

Restart and reintroduction

I'm returning to this blog for now as I try to embark on somewhat consistent writing.  When I started this blog, most of my writing was art criticism and a little music writing.  Fun, and something I care about a lot, but actually not that connected to the core of what I spend my time thinking about and working on.  For years I've been working with organizations in very close ways on decision-making and basic management structures, especially around resource allocation.  Money yes.  People and politics too.  And the more time I spent with it, the more I understood it tied up with fundamental questions.  Of how people experience and understand the world--phenomenology and epistemology. And of what happens when you mix those together in increasing large groups of people--organization theory. 

I have tried to work on this on my own over the years, intermittently and incompletely.  Finally last year about this time of year I got the idea to revisit the possibility of starting a doctoral program.  I was on staff at Portland State University at the time, which had promising programs and very nice employee tuition benefits.  Thanks to encouragement from Sy Adler, the interim Dean of PSU's College of Urban and Public Affairs and a person of great wisdom and generous counsel, I enrolled in the doctoral program in Public Affairs and Policy.  There are so many reasons to do this.  It simply guides you on the things you need to understand to have a comprehensive view.  It forces you to define objectives and refine them all the time.  It gives you a relationship with faculty who have mastery, and a cohort of people working on ideas that are more or less similar. 

One goal is to push my methods of organizational and resource work much further.  I have large ambitions there, I would claim radicalness for them.  I also want to get a jump start on writing about the material that I work with, where I arguably actually know something and have developed some craft. 

This summer I have a break from classes and am preparing a reading program for myself.  One thing I probably knew, but which was firmly reinforced in classes this year, is that you need a discipline of writing to go along with your reading.  So I'll do that here until I decide there is a better platform for what I'm doing.       

6 comments on Patrick DeGuira

I reviewed one of Patrick DeGuira's shows years ago. I haven't reread it, but I bet I'll say some of the same things. He's the same person and I'm the same person, in spite of intervening life experience. Seeing art by the same person has to have the effect of seeing a person from time to time--"every time I see you I'm reminded of..."  For me, because my memory is unreliable and spotty, sometimes the thing I remember is highly idiosyncratic--maybe one comment the person made in passing in a conversation that passed in seconds, not a representative sample of the truly salient details of the testimony of that person's life.

1. I do remember Patrick's long ago (2004) show at Zeitgeist. It had many images related to the difficulty in hearing. In itself, this was a neat trick, making visual the sensation of aural frustrations. The show at Zeitgeist this December contained analogous images of sensory frustration, in this case visual.  There are a couple of photos of adolescents in the 70s or 80s, enlarged to the point where the pixels take shape. It pulls you into the experience of peering closely at a photo to try to make out details that seem to slip further away the more you strain, or which evaporate as you increase the magnification on screen. You want to make out who these people are, but you can't quite remember. You look for clues on the spines of books or posters on the walls, but the letters don't quite make sense.

Several paintings have words painted on them.  Little puns, or bits of something like poetry or snippets of a narrative. The words are mostly painted in a slightly different shade of the color applied uniformly across the rest of the surface.  The words are legible, but turn the knob on tone and intensity of the color a little and they sink back into the dimensionless background.

On one of the bigger paintings, two blocks of text take up the bottom 60% of the surface--painted in tone just different enough from the background to be visible.  Above them are four black horizontal lines that correspond in the length to the fours lines of the first block of text. It's the black-out lines from a censor's redaction that have been lifted to reveal the underlying text.  What was impossible to seen has been made visible. But the revealed words didn't make sense to me.  Seeing is hard, and understanding is harder.  Much remains hidden in plain sight.

2. Patrick's art seems to function best as a suite.  I'm not sure I would have gotten this idea about the frustration of visibility from any one piece.  You see parts of it, in different ways, in different works, and you add them up to reach the observation.  I wonder whether any of these pieces work as single isolated objects--say you encountered one on a collector's wall (not as an artifact reminding you of the show). In the exhibit, the works are always organized carefully, placed asymmetrically around the room to manage the dynamic of space between them. Colors recur across pieces--the pink color of bubble gum stuck on some of the pieces matches the color of a model of a country church. The words in one painting--"die garage is meine kapelle" also point to that model of the country church.

The collection of works becomes a poem, with rhymes between portions and careful pacing of images. Maybe it's projective verse, but with meters easier to scan than in Olson.

The interdependence of the works raises one commercial question. How easy has he made it to buy a piece?  Is there a market for poems of any sort?   Or a non-commercial question.  How does this artist intend to communicate with us?  Is a bunch of staff the primary vehicle? What can we expect to get out of single pieces?

3. In a similar manner to the way that years ago show dealt with auditory phenomenon and this one deals with visual, each of these shows locates itself in a specific time of life.  2004 dealt with old age, this one deals with adolescence.  There are those pixelated photos of teenagers--one of two boys in a living room, one with his shirt off, evokes a particular point of awkward near-adulthood in high school. The photos have wads of bright pink chewing gum stuck on them, the last bite marks in the gum visible. One of the larger works features the words Model Builder, an evocation of the classic teenage hobby of building model airplanes, and the other points in life where a person might make models, including an artist like DeGuira who made models of a church and a row boat for this show and almost always has some sculptural models in the suites of work he presents. And of course the Model Builder could be a more distant and powerful figure, maybe God, setting in place the pattern to govern what follows.

4. Patrick makes extensive use of flat, uniform color, whether on paintings, collages, or sculptures. It lacks affect, and betrays no sign of the artist's hand, of the human making marks. This places him squarely into the camp of minimalism, although the objects in his work matter and hold interpretative, not just formal, significance.  This is an empirical observation that in itself does not add to understanding.

The only mark-making in the pieces is not immediately apparent--it's in the pieces of chewing gum, where you have to assume the artist chewed the stuff up and left the bite marks.

The thick layers of expressionless paint add to the quality of masking.  They dampen the sense of expressive presence, and make you look elsewhere for what turns out to be highly expressive and emotionally felt work. The paint starts to hide the objects they cover.  The rowboat and church models are not represents of specific instances of their type, but are more like the visualization of ideal types, a form of objectivity. And they are also ghosts--a specific rowboat that starts to lose its specificity--the different colors of different parts and materials, the marks and dings that come from use. You can't quite remember what the rowboat you used that summer decades ago looked like, you just remember that you had one there.

5. The hardest works are possibly some of the easiest.  There are a couple of collages with images of mineral and crystal formations reproduced in black and white and covered with a sparkly surface. These pieces are easy in the sense that as isolated objects, they might be the ones with the strongest visual appeal left on their own. But they are harder to relate to the content and style of the rest of the work. The iconography in everything else is of the human world--abstractions, words, and constructed things like the building and boat.  There are no plants, animals, or landscapes. In this context (or non-context) the mineral specimens stick out. Black and white rather than color. A sparkly surface coating rather than flat colors.

So what do you do with this? You could conclude that it's a variation that doesn't connect with the rest, a wrong move. Minerals and crystals do make some standard interpretations available. They represent self-organizing, naturally evolving structures. They repeat upon themselves. It's easy enough to relate these characteristics to human phenomena. But these are generic interpretations and Patrick's work deserves better than that.

One characteristic of these images is that their natural and naturalistic content is rendered with a more obviously artificial means--the surface treatment, laced with sparkles. The other objects are more immediately themselves, constructed objects placed in the room. The images of rocks are more mediated.  So this may come back around to the difficulties in seeing--images that at first seem to be scientific illustrations are more removed from the natural world.

At the end of the day, these remain difficult interpretive corners of this show, although someone out there no doubt has gotten to the point.

6. I mentioned the emotional content of this work.  At firs the emotions sneak up on you. The work is stripped of the things we associate with expression. Brushstrokes, bright color, sharp contrasts, dramatic representations. The artist is undoubtedly involved in formal arrangements. The color palettes are muted. But these stripped down images he gives us have references that draw down into significant human experience.  Family is always everywhere in his works. The experience of sensory strain is not a cold phenomenological observation, but deals with the emotional weight of loss, and the frustration of reaching back and what eludes the grasp of memory.

The characteristics of this emotional landscape don't adhere to common forms.  The past occupies a central place in the material, but nothing seems nostalgic.  The rowboat must be connected to a rowboat that existed and events in which it featured, but it strikes me in a more matter of fact way--there was this thing that happened, we took at rowboat. Patrick distills some features from that scene, from an episode that can remain hidden.  

Unless you're Proust, it may be pointless to try to describe what you encounter when you come into an emotional presence in a body of work. It gets to be like music, where the emotional heft is undeniable but exists in a realm distant from words.  To use a safe example, Beethoven.  Or Schumann, whose music has been on my mind a little the last few days. Passages in Kinderszenen move me deeply. I can play it for you, point to the specific measures and notes, and maybe you'll hear it too.

Jessie van der Laan

I'm a sucker for certain kinds of art objects, and it may even come down to certain effects, independent of any higher level processing. One of those things are surfaces that are tricky, ambiguous in perspective, color and form. They draw me in, and because when I get to them, they issue forms and structures that seem to combine and recombine in an insistent, quiet flow. I ran into that a couple of weeks ago with work by Jessie van der Laan in an exhibit at the Ground Floor Gallery. This is a group show of artists working with textiles, curated by Herb Rieth from Memphis. 

van der Laan's work here consists of embroidery hoops covered front and back with layers of fabric, the top layer very sheer, with stitching and appliqued fabric on and between the layers. The hoops are mounted on the wall in groups of two and three to make up the pieces.

As an example, the piece "cumulonimbus" (all the pieces are named for cloud types) consists of a large oval embroidery hoop with a smaller circular one positioned above it at a 10:00 position. A strip of wavy fabric is attached to the back panel.  Another flap of fabric folds over the top of the hoop. Fine stitching forms little waves on the top layer and connects to the back. van der Laan uses contrasting colors for the cross stitches that connect the thread, so here you have some yellow strands crossed with black to make tendrils that look like garter snakes. She also seems to have stained the back panel fabric with light washes of ink, which gives another layer of patterns deep down in the space. The space between front and back is less than inch but it still requires you to pore into it. 

The second hoop is darker, and the bottom layer features what may be a blot of ink or applied fabirc that looks like a splash.

You've got at least four or five types of events creating the shapes and structure--the base fabric front and back, places where those fabrics dimple and wrinkle, the threads weaving across and through it, pieces of fabric that look more or less solid depending on whether it's on top of the sheer layer or behind, and then those ink stains.You can't be entirely sure what's from ink or even water stains, and what is fabric with different degrees of opacity.

Each hoop has a different look. In one, fabric bunches up inside, reducing the sense of inner captured space. Some have strips of ribbon suspended in the interior space. She uses some colors consistently, like a blue thread, but others sparingly. A lemony yellow appears in one place. Dark purples in another piece. The groups in combination all have contrast, definitely between lighter and darker compositions, but the contrasts are subtle, in keeping with the inherent subtlety of all effects in this work.

In most cases the colors are muted by the layers of intervening fabric, and by the way threads are deployed as filigree across the surface and interrupted by cross stitches. It was even hard to discern the color of portions--in one piece at times my eyes played tricks with one portion that at times looked brown, but at times seemed to take on a coppery sheen.

The visible embroidery hoops make no secret of their reference to women's traditional handwork. What is more, the works all combine one larger hoop with one or two smaller ones--the phrase hens and chicks comes to mind, like with plants.

These works have an ephemeral effect. They seem to vibrate just on the edge of focus. Colors and shapes emerge diffidently. The multiple layers both enclose an interior space and produce a surface plane, spongy as it may be.

van der Laan gave each work the title of a type of cloud (cumulonimbus, stratocumulus, pyrocumulus). I could look up each word and try to match the characteristics of the works with the qualities of the clouds, but that seems uninteresting. I'll accept the general title metaphor of clouds. The pieces certainly have cloud-like qualities, but for me it makes them less enjoyable to think of them as representations. Or I think the range of reference is broader--"cumulonimbus" seems to be as much about water, and "stratocumulus" brings to mind flowers and plants.

Graphically, the works move towards being hardly anything, and work that indulges this sort of subtlety runs the risk of lacking enough graphic presence not to keep it from fading into a series of background designs or visual pads. Again, for me a big part of the pleasure comes when an artist walks you towards or up to the line where the imposed artistic order seems to run the risk of falling into pointless chaos. A artist can go too far for me, to a point where I stop enjoying the work. van der Laan's pieces have little risk of that because the organizing devices--embroidery hoops, and a range that contains variety but also adheres to some limits--gives them an inherent resonance.

Reading in reverse order

In the post on Phèdre, I mentioned Diane Arnson Svarlien's translation of Hippolytus, the play by Euripides that served as the source for Racine. Thing was, I hadn't read that play yet, but now I have. It would have been good to do it in the right order, but you can say that about a lot of things and you might never get past 500 C.E.

It's been entertaining to track the differences between the two. Much is due to the 2,000 year separation of the works, but I tend to read anachronistically. Books that appear in my reading space about the same time become part of the same conversation. I should probably work some Samuel R. Delany in here, something else I'm reading now.

Racine is interested in abstractions like virtue and honor, Euripides deals more directly in natural experience, like the nuances in the connection and rivalry between father and son across generations.

Euripides is bleaker than Racine, no surprise. At the end, Thésée is just left with grief. In Racine, there is the consolation of reconciliation with Aricie and the Pallantides.

Racine added the character of Aricie. This changed the structure in several ways. For one, in Euripides Hippolytus never succumbs to Cypris (Aphrodite) and gets punished for his resistance. In Racine, Hippolytus has lost his resistance and gets punished for his insistence on behaving honorably and not spilling the beans on Phèdre when he first had a chance. See, here's that motive force of an abstraction in Racine--he is undone by acting honorably. In Euripides it's more visceral--the goddess is jealous.

Well, really Hippolytus is punished because he's a douche. His sense of self-righteousness, and his willingness to tell people about it ("there is no man alive/whose wisdom and restraint surpass my own" 1114-1115), earn him no slack when things go wrong. His servant wanrs him early on--"those who act superior are hated" (line 110). His dad is quick to assume he's lying.

Gods exist and play an active role in Euripides. They are almost completely metaphorical in Racine.

The addition of Aricie creates a diamond structure in Racine:   Thésée-Phèdre-Hippolyte-Aricie.  Thésée loves Phèdre (or at least is connected to her), Phèdre loves Hippolyte, and Hippolyte loves Aricie. Aricie is connected to Thésée by the negative antipathy between the houses. In Euripides there are two triangles: Theseus-Pheadra-Hippolytus, and Cypris-Artemis-Poseidon.

Words don't seem to stand out as much against the backdrop of the action and the play. Some of this may be the fact that I'm reading this in translation, although Diane's verse is excellent. Even so, it seems like the characters don't wield the words the same way.

Lots of dialogue, some rapid and continued back and forth, like lines 331-374, where Phaedra reveals her desire for Hippolytus as she trades single lines of dialogue back and forth with the nurse. This really brings out the monologic quality of Phèdre.  The fact that it has monumental stature in French culture must say something about the French. The role of Phèdre was one upon which Bernhardt built her fame. These big chunks of verse would provide a showcase for an actor.

The written word plays a critical role in Hippolytus and has no presence in Phèdre that I recall. Where the critical turn in the plot in Racine comes from false oral testimony, in Euripides it takes the form of writing on a wax tablet Phaedra attaches to her wrist as she is committing suicide. (Diane's translation comes with thorough and incredibly helpful notes, such as the one explaining this wax tablet.)

Eight words on Phèdre

I saw Jack Ryan last week at the Chestnut-Houston art crawl. Seeing Jack Ryan is of course special since he's in Oregon. When he said he checks this blog from time to time it made me think maybe I should post something and try to make it not completely a waste of his time. I may disappoint Jack, because instead of posting on local shows--say his show at Seed Space--I'm going to say a few words about classical French theater. Then again, Jack seems to appreciate some such things. 

1. Alexandrine. In school I heard about the alexandrine, the classic French meter, but I don't remember seeing it too much because I much preferred more modern poets--think Rimbaud--who were freeing themselves of the tyranny of the alexandrine. The term refers to a 12-syllable line that breaks neatly into two halves, 6 and 6. It is to French verse what the iambic pentameter is to English. When I finally picked up Racine, there it was, line after line of couplets repeating the meter, on end, at length, and seemingly effortlessly.  Drama rendered with such formal rigor boggles my mind.

2. Vertu/honneur.  Oenone says "pour sauver notre honneur combattu,/il faut immoler tout, et même la vertu" (III.iii.).  Throughout the play nouns like virtue and honor drop into the play like characters--once named and spoken, they take on a life of their own. Actions and emotions bend to them. They seem to be self-evident, and characters wield them as tools against each other. Their relative weights become self-evident even if their meanings may not be. These nouns protrude from the text. The Germans go so far as to capitalize their nouns, as if each were the name of a God. Like a God, every bit of added meaning the noun brings seems to come with more mystery.

3. Silence. Much of the action revolves around silence. Oenone (again III.iii.): "Mon zèle n'a besoin que de votre silence." Phèdre gives her that silence, perhaps out of weakness, but just as easily as a form of action--to protect her son, protect her honor, revenge the insult of having fallen in love with Hippolyte. As Racine says in his preface, "Phèdre n'est ni tou à fait couplable, ni tout à fait innocente." Hippolyte himself lends motion to the drama through silence--in refusing (III.v.)  to explain to Thésée how, and by whose hands, he has suffered the offense he just learned of from Phèdre, Hippolyte makes himself an easy target of Thésée's suspicions.

4. Abstract. Not much happens in this play. The settings are indistinct and unimportant. A small number of players meet in different configurations and talk to each other, mostly in pretty big chunks of alexandrine. The action such as it us takes place well off stage.

5. Past. The key character developments have already taken place when the play opens. Phèdre has fallen in love with her husband's son. That son has lost his resistance to Venus, and fallen in love with Aricie, the daughter of his father's rivals.

6. Performatives. In this play with its sequence of dialogues and implacable nouns, the uttering of words changes the conditions of the world. Words are action. Thésée kills his son by going to Neptune's altar to ask his justice for the outrage he has declared that his son has committed (IV.iii and iv).

7. Irreversibility. Once something is said, it cannot be unsaid. Every generation tries to teach our children these lessons. Whether true or untrue. "I love you." "Your son took advantage of your wife." "Neptune, avenge me on my son."  In Act V when Thésée receives Aricie's testimony that contradicts Oenone's lies, he starts to investigate too late--he would re-question Oenone, but she has thrown herself into the sea, and as he asks for his son, he only receives the news of his death at the hands of Neptune's sea monster. "O soins tardifs et superflus!" In the end Phèdre acknowledges "un injuste silence" and would return to Hippolyte his innocence. I suppose he does end up redeemed in his father's eyes, but too late.

8. Diane. Diane Arnson Svarlien, a friend from high school who now lives in Kentucky, grew up to become a classicist, and she is known for translations of Euripides. Her Medea is superb and very well-regarded. In that same volume she translated the Euripides play that was Racine's source. It is titled Hippolytus rather than Phèdre. Racine took a hero out of the center and replacing him with someone who combines hero and anti-hero.  

Notes on Tatsuya Nakatani show

Tatsuya Nakatani played at Downtown Pres last night (thanks to Dave Caperton for use of the photo below). I've heard Tatsuya at least a couple of times now, most recently maybe a year ago, playing solo both times. I don't always get to hear people multiple times, so when I do I'm struck by how different the experience can be. That experience of difference raises a bunch of questions. How different are the performances? Am I just latching onto different aspects to listen to? I have some serious selective hearing. I will always listen to horn players in an ensemble and have to make an act of will to hear the drummer. Do I get smarter? Am I hearing more each time around?

I have had a strong experience of performance differences listening to Susan Alcorn, but I follow her music closely enough and know her well enough to know that at different times and in different performance contexts she works with very different material. My ears and brain are not playing tricks on me. Last week I was listening to a recording she's done of People Get Ready. It works so differently there as a stand-alone track than when I've heard her play it in concert as the second part of a diptych with Twin Beams, one of her compositions (I think I'm remembering that right). And each time she puts different things into the song.

As for Tatsuya's show on Friday, the first thing to note is that it was in the church's acoustically very sensitive chapel. The previous show was in Zeitgeist gallery, which is a converted retail space, not a listening room. Everything rings in the chapel. As I recall, both shows had a similar general structure, starting and ending with a large gong which he bowed on the edges and struck with a big soft mallet. At the DPC show, he ended with ever subtler strikes from the mallet, just brushing it at the end, but in that room you could hear the vibrations. At the end you heard everything--the smallest sounds from Tatsuya's instruments, then the flourescents, the building's HVAC system, who knows what from the street and buildings around. All through the show, everything seemed clear and available to the ears, so some of the difference in the concerts could come from what one was physically able to hear--maybe it was all there both times.

In this set, the presence of melody and harmony stood out. Some of this is inherent in Tatsuya's method. He doesn't use sticks too much--much more depends on bows, scraping things across drum heads, rubbing a kitchen whisk around on things. My sense is that when a percussionist uses sticks, it puts emphasis on the attacks and their sequence and timing. These other methods of drawing sound out of the kit give some sounds more sustain and draw attention to pitch and timbre. All of that is always there, but for me can get lost in the energy of rhythm.

Tatsuya uses a smaller drum, maybe a floor tom or marching band tom, in place of a bass drum. He strikes it with a pedal, but it produces a more structured sound, defined by high overtones not just a thud. Between the structure of the sound and the way he plays the foot pedal, it registers a distinct bass foundation pitch that worked like pedal point note on which other notes piled up to form harmonies. The clarity of that pedal point pitch is one of those things that maybe I just didn't pay attention to last time, or it didn't ring as clearly in Zeitgeist.

He also uses a set of pitched metal bowls to provide lots of melodic content. He bows their edge or taps them. And one of the best parts for me was a four or five note melody or scale he got by bowing the edge of a smaller gong. Harmony and melody seemed to be everywhere in this performance.

A critical dimension of a solo improvisation is to tie ideas and events together and provide connective tissue for doing so. Tatsuya starts with the mallet and bows on a large gong set up behind the rest of his kit. He works with these sounds for a while, but at some point he will want to transition over to the rest of the material he has. Musically he needs to let the material with the large gong evolve but can't stay there forever. Musically he needs a way to move on to new ideas, and technically he needs a way to move to the next thing physically. In his case this involves continuing to use one hand to make sound on the large gong, but to take his other hand and bow the smaller gong (I think) which is positioned in with his other equipment. Once he gets some sound on that going and established as a musical motive, he can shift himself physically to a position at the kit and start using a whole new set of tools to make sound.

I bring this up because these transitions are one of the hardest things about performing solo, no matter your instrument. On saxophone you work into a musical idea, but then you need to build a bridge to the next thing you want to do, and it's really easy for that transition to feel choppy or unintentionally abrupt. In some cases, you just need to be faster. John Zorn built a whole aesthetic around lightening fast quick cuts back and forth. In other cases you need to find things that can morph into something else or form a bridge that might mark a little time, like white space on a page of poetry. In the case of a percussionist, so much more of this technique is shown visually.

The other thing about Tatsuya's performance is that you can see the refutation of any argument that the sequence of sounds is random. Part of Tatsuya's task in constructing these performances is to provide himself with connective tissue--sounds that he can repeat or which ring through to give him a bridge to get ready for the next thing. He positions a bunch of cymbals on the floor to the right of his floor tom. At times he will set up a pattern that he can continue with his left hand--say running a metal bowl around the edge of the tom so it clicks and rings on the keys around the head. While he's doing that he'll reach down to the floor, and sort through the cymbals to select the one he's looking for, and pull that up and start working with it. He rarely seems to be grabbing the first thing he gets his hand on.

This point may not be necessary. It's certainly not needed for anyone who has made a commitment to this music and pays attention to it. I may still be fighting wars of 30 years ago when people would say Free Jazz guys were playing completely random notes. That seemed to be a prevalent attitude then. I'm not sure it still is today. It's not an argument I think about or have so often any more, but that may be a function of my participation in general social atomization. Maybe I'm less likely to actually talk to someone about our different aesthetic preferences and experiences.