Ephemera

Theory and politics in organization

ephemera - theory and politics in organization -  is an electronic forum for developing and extending discussions of critical perspectives on organization.It is is transdisciplinary and encourages contributions from a broad spectrum of academics, researchers, activists, practitioners, employees and other members of organizations.

The latest issue of ephemera "Web of Capturing the Moving Mind: X", has been produced in cooperation between Framework: The Finnish Art Review and

ephemera: theory & politics in organization. It aims to weave a connection between art and politics, between art as an act of resistance and economy as biopolitical production.

Authors: Brian Holmes, Elly Clarke, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter (with Bernardo Giorgi and Helen Grace), etc.

*Issue volume 5, number 4 (november 2005)*  Inscribing Organzied Resistance: http://ephemeraweb.org/journal/5-4/5-4index.htm

Thoughts, antagonisms, innovations, demonstrations, elaborations, expectations and refutations. It is its conditions of impossibility that emphasize the necessity of a worthy task.This is all to say, field-notes, from an array of politically engaged, non-objectifying theoretical work projects. Behold, the current issue of ephemera! Foolish is s/he who would seek to encapsulate a supposedly complete or somehow representative spectrum of such concerns within this, or indeed any format. Foolish also are those who would hope to find herein a necessary 'image of thought' (Deleuze 1995). It is its conditions of impossibility that emphasize the necessity of a worthy task. A task guided by a certain futility then. Yet it is precisely continuation and openness that constitutes the materially valuable. '[T]he hypothesis understood as provocation (knowledge)' (Tronti-Panzieri 1962), not understood through itself, but as a relation to an other which destabilizes and recomposes and a self which is dispersed and paradoxically reformed. To formulate without hoping to formalize, to formulate the to-be-de-formed. Our task, attempted here through this medium.

The concern(s) at hand are the ways in which social research (re-) creates the distance between the researcher (as subject) and researched (as object), in so doing silencing the voices, needs, concerns, knowledges, and practices of the researched. Critical scholarship, by creating fixed and stable positions, becomes complicit within the very practices it seeks to avoid. To point this out is not to say that any critical scholarly endeavor is not worthwhile, destined to failure from the outset. It is to point out that 'critical' endeavors must take the paradox of their existence seriously if the claim towards criticality is not to be sneered at.