Critical complicity: The feel of difference at work in home and field

Difference at work is a constitutive sensate activity

To claim difference as an activity is to recognize that the social identities we often take as stable traits or categories of affiliation are made real only in relation to one another and through ongoing material practices like working. I mark the relationality of difference to stress that its vectors are not separate strands of being that add up in a body but, rather, practices accomplished in light of each other and with multiple participants. Race, for example, is co-produced along gendered, classed, and regionalized (among other) lines. I call out materiality to acknowledge that the social construction of difference is not purely or primarily social but always caught up in concrete worlds. Although we often treat social construction as a discursive activity, it could not be an activity at all were it not materializing through and as something(s). Social construction cannot come to “matter” without all sorts of stuff participating: objects and devices that orient and imprint, bodies marked and moving in certain ways, built environments that open and close pathways, and economies that regulate value. The list of elements could grow, but the point is that they are bound up in hives of activity, and that they are constantly produced as elements of a certain kind by the very action they take together. Difference in this view is not so much socially constructed as it is sociomaterially produced (Ashcraft and Kuhn, 2017). ¹

Ordinary forces of encounter are what galvanize hives of activity, says affect theory, determining the twists and turns difference might take (Stewart, 2007). Put otherwise, the energetic currents that “make a difference” in the world—abridged as “affect” because they affect—arise from mundane contact. To appreciate difference as a sensate activity, it may be useful to think of contact as colliding, bumping, magnetizing and repelling, surging and dissipating, and other forms by which encounters are felt. Difference manifests, or constantly becomes, in affective currents that are transpersonal; that is, they slice through and glide across bodies, objects, and spaces. These currents are simultaneously prepersonal, in that their flow activates the identity or thingness of bodies, objects, and spaces, precisely by constituting them as elements in relation, such that they “make a scene” together.

This is what I meant in calling difference at work a constitutive sensate activity: ² Relations like race and gender course through us; make over our bodies, labor, habits, and worlds; serve up heaping portions of pain and pleasure, comfort, and fear; and snap us to attention or lull us into oblivious complicity. Sometimes difference passes through; other times it sticks around and occupies, just as we inhabit the world through its force. Difference, in other words, is a moving relation—roving, affecting, motivating, and modulating. It is a relation only real-ized by encounter, through acts of dwelling in and living through it (if we are so lucky). In short, difference is effectively agentic when, and because, it is affective. Bodies do not so much possess difference, like traits they have, as they are possessed by difference, caught in its grip.

From this vantage point, racism, sexism, and the like are neither colossal structures nor personal dispositions but blazes of energy, stoked by iteration and ignited by contact. They are streams that arrive from somewhere, move through a scene, and saturate its contents. Repetitive surges of any -ism can leave traces that fester in a body, but this need not occur for the -ism to be felt. It is not a question of whether or to what extent one is sexist or racist. The question is how we find ourselves embroiled in relational currents of difference and power, what we do with (not to) them, and what else can be done. ³

Joan Acker (1990) famously theorized gender as a constitutive principle of bureaucratic organizations, which are “patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine” (p. 146). An affective lens fine-tunes this vital insight. Gender constitutes organizing, but not so much by furnishing a binary blueprint that programs inequitable relations into a system. Rather, gender is one vector in a moving cyclone of difference—a hybrid storm of intensities, the quality and force of which depends on this moment of contact. What happens when various and entwining streams of history, riding along on momentum rallied through repetition, get mobilized and arrive once again, hurtling into the practices of this shop floor or that kitchen, their cubicle or your conference room? What tangible forms of collision and collusion arise among flows of difference, and where do they appear to be going from here? As this suggests, affective currents of difference are thoroughly concrete and indeterminate, deeply intimate and impersonal. They make Us and Them real as such in here and now, but also exceed this moment in ways that cannot be fully known. Returning to Acker’s insight (see also Acker, 2006), we might say that difference constitutes, or organizes, by delivering power-full sensate waves that make work “work.”

Our “senses” of difference at home haunt our studies of power in the field

This leads to my second claim: Our encounters with these waves of difference at home, in our own work, trouble our knowledge of power in other fields. I need not belabor the point that academic labor is of the world, despite customary contrast between The Real World and Ivory Towers. Nor does it require much digging to verify that the “diversity” problems we study elsewhere plague intellectual work and institutions. For those preferring the assurance of scholarly literature, evidence and analyses abound (e.g. Ahmed, 2012; Maher and Thompson Tetreault, 2007). Another option is to notice how difference inflects labor practices all around us. Observe the glaring gendering and racialization of disciplines and specializations, theorizing versus empirical tasks, methodologies, citation practices, the faculty–staff divide, adjunct and permanent labor, tenure tracks and clocks, faculty rank and upper administration, service loads and affordances for research, and even birth rates among faculty (at least in the United States, as documented by Mason et al., 2013). Pay attention to such routine configurations of practice, and the tip of our own diversity iceberg comes into view (see Ashcraft and Simonson, 2016). Or for a visceral shortcut, tune in to the sensate waves of white heteromasculine professionalism that animate the intellectual sparring at this panel or that colloquium (e.g. Ashcraft, 2016). Feel for yourself the electricity of delight and wince of humiliation that spreads through another hall when the cool spank of exclusion is dealt, when that trump card known as Best Obscure Philosophical Quip is played, when awkward silence deflates the Other and aloof one-upmanship wins the pissing contest. You really can “sense” how difference constitutes, even the very act of critique.

Increasingly, I experience the practice of ignoring, or at least minimizing, these dynamics in our midst while exposing them in the field as not only bizarre and contradictory but disquieting and untenable. How do we illuminate politics at work by eclipsing how they bloom in our own backyard? No wonder we often feel uneasy or clumsy when it comes to facilitating change. We assert our expertise in power except for that which hits home. It is here that a connection emerges between twin struggles: to change and to feel relations of power.

Periodically, of course, we do acknowledge power at home. Confessional tales abound in print and private conversation, and many critical projects address the academy as a neoliberal workplace (e.g. see the “Speaking Out” series in the journal Organization). However, work beyond the academy is generally regarded as a more legitimate, commendable, and exciting object of study. Bridgman (2007) observes how rising mandates for “engaged” and “relevant” scholarship emphasize public relevance in ways that diminish critical orientations. Recent formulations of critical performativity echo Bridgman’s call for engaged scholarship to reclaim the critical, yet simultaneously intensify the imperative to address external organizations, treating interest in academic power dynamics as a petty and self-absorbed distraction (e.g. Spicer et al., 2009, 2016). The predilection for facing outward presents with more subtlety too. For example, research on “critical management education,” which investigates the work of teaching and learning, proceeds as a pedagogical subfield at some remove from the central conversations about power in critical management studies.

Even confessional tales, which ostensibly turn inward, tend to serve an outward focus, in that they operate more like release valves than sustainable inquiry. Reasonably established critical scholars air some dirty laundry, inciting others to vent in thankful applause or hushed recognition. But at some near point, these timeouts run out, for we must get back to (real) work. In this way, we shrug off incipient awareness of how power moves through our midst, disciplining our bodies to suppress that feeling and resume focus on the proper frontstage: conducting inquiry that informs power elsewhere.

But what if we refused to cast our own dynamics as a matter best left backstage, a diversion prone to vanity if it lasts too long? What if, instead, we held the valve open and lingered in order to feel power at home as fully as possible? We could trace how difference constitutes the material practices of knowledge production and approach power elsewhere through this deliberate attunement to our own situation. We could treat academic labor as real work, and coming to grips with our own power problems as indispensable to that work, precisely because these problems are relevant to real worlds of work, including our own. Imagine if we approached home as a vibrant field, if we toggled between home and other fields, sensors alert to waves of difference that bind and distinguish varied scenes. How might it be useful, rather than shameful, to own up to the fact that critical knowledge is produced through the very inequities it seeks to challenge? How might it be fruitful to register the ways our “diversity” troubles imprint the knowledge we produce? Perhaps such critical practice could help us to discern ghosts in common, those felt flickers that keep unraveling designs to enhance diversity and justice?

This is what I meant in claiming that the feel of difference at home haunts our studies of power in other fields: We tend to suppress our senses of/at home and sever home from field, as if these scenes are unrelated and we can only sniff out one at a time. Disembodied critique of power elsewhere is the main show, supported by occasional release of our embodied frustrations with power in the wings. Missing is a feel for the relation between front and backstage, feature and sideshow. Are they not both tales of difference at work amid late capitalist forces? We know our labor shares with many fields the intensification of work, time, individualization, anxiety, and inequality endemic to neoliberal times. Reedy (2008), for example, suggests exploring symmetries between critical management scholars and the managers they study, since “both identity projects have offered solutions, albeit problematically, to the difficulties and opportunities of living in the 21st century,” and both “involve being complicit in the reproduction of current social structures” (p. 68). Put succinctly, are we not in the business of doing the politics we seek to know about, in the very act of producing knowledge?

The question is not a plea to secure our own oxygen mask before helping others. Such a sequence, which confirms expertise by cleaning our own house first, is neither realistic nor sufficiently humble. The struggles to change and to feel power are entwined and ongoing. The point is that we already have at hand what we need to engage both struggles, for we are already doing power at work as we produce scholarship about it. It is by vigilantly tuning in to this production—our own enactments of power in the act of critiquing power elsewhere—that we become better equipped to recognize how flashes of other futures can arise.

We could be better change agents if we tuned in to the relation of home and field

Affect theorists variously characterize tuning in to ordinary flows of power. Stewart (2007), for example, calls for “a speculative and concrete attunement” that is sensitive to “moving forces … immanent in scenes, subjects, and encounters,” and that “takes off with the potential trajectories in which it finds itself in the middle” (p. 128). Beyes and Steyaert (2012) urge embodied apprehensions that exchange “a vocabulary of stasis, representation, reification and closure with one of intensities, capacities and forces” (p. 47). Seigworth and Gregg (2010) suggest “a critical practice … that must seek to imaginatively/generatively nudge … or sometimes smash” relations already in bloom (p. 21), whereas Wetherell (2013) advocates attention to “embodiment, entanglement, the middle ranges of agency, patterns that organize but cannot necessarily be articulated … action complexes as the main units of analysis” (p. 359).

It might help to distill these descriptions into three tangible habits we can practice at home: (1) inhabiting, (2) discerning, and (3) cultivating difference at work. ⁴ Inhabiting asks us to “slow the quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique” (Stewart, 2007: 4) in order to register how difference is happening in our own habitat. What does it feel like to dwell there without running for the familiar exits of disembodied analysis? The idea is to ignite dormant feeling capacities, numbed by the relentless mandate of knowledge work: stifle the senses. Inhabiting is more than observing and it exceeds participation, too. It is a slow-motion, fine-grained, full-bodied endeavor that enlists any radars at our disposal for catching routine forces of contact—say, the variable flows of a hectic day on campus or a weekend slogging through email. Unlike confessional tales, inhabiting decenters subjectivity in order to sense the sociomaterial hives of activity (in a word, relations) through which a self becomes and collapses. In this way, inhabiting invites relational modes of reflection beyond self-reflexivity, as I elaborate below. In particular, we might be attentive to the shifting textures of work events; the arrival of discomfort, stress, anxiety, insecurity, irony, laughter, passivity, and so forth, as well as the material forms they take in a room; signs of disengaging, dreaming, joyriding, and other acts of escape; moments when order somehow snaps into place or a rupture occurs. Some may find it useful to think of inhabiting as a practice akin to thick description (Geertz, 1973) but more affectively attuned, a mode of attending to density that I call “pulse detection.”

Discerning is a tentative, provisional analytic move akin to squinting at something out of focus or touching viscosity. Shapes shift as activity pulsates, so certainty is impractical. Admit the fuzzy edges, yet try to make out what is emerging nonetheless. Discerning, in other words, is a practice of perception within perpetual becoming. It recognizes the imminent nature of difference at work and resists closure because we are always in the middle and can only know from there (Stewart, 2007). Whereas inhabiting is primarily concerned with how things are going, discerning begins to chew on what is happening and how well, although it is never sure of the answer. What relations of difference appear to be budding and maturing, and is this a promise and/or a threat in bloom (see Seigworth and Gregg, 2010)? As this question suggests, discerning is a mode of ontological politics: “Not a politics of who (who gets to speak; act; etc.) but a politics of what (what is the reality that takes shape and that various people come to live with?)” (Mol, 2014, March 19: n.p., original emphasis). Discerning thus moves beyond self-reflexivity, which situates the knower in relation to the known (e.g. researcher–participant subjectivities), and toward post-human reflexivity, which considers the relations made real through acts of knowing (e.g. what worlds are emerging; see Beyes and Steyaert, 2012).

Finally, cultivating is a mode of nurturing change that grows out of inhabiting and discerning; indeed, it can only be done from within them. Echoing Seigworth and Gregg’s (2010) terms, cultivating entails creatively “nudging” promises and “smashing” threats, cautiously recognized as such, in the moments of their emergence. Cultivation does not occur in the lab of abstraction; it does not follow from holding an object still and at bay for analysis. Rather, it is the embodied, engrossed practice of tending subtle signs that things might be otherwise. Cultivating means noticing and supporting flickers that gleam with potential but remain out of reach or stuck in the throat, gestures of possibility that materialize organically but vaporize quickly. Such glimmers of hope “do not arise in order to be deciphered or decoded or delineated but, rather, must be nurtured … into lived practices of the everyday as perpetually finer-grained postures for collective inhabitation” (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 21). As this suggests, cultivating does not drive change with grand plans of action. More modestly, it tries to spot and seize opportunities arising in relations already unfolding. It riffs on songs now playing, sneaks through windows newly cracked. As Stewart (2007) says, “Practices that stage the jump from ideal to matter and back again can fuse a dream world to the world of ordinary things” (p. 56). Cultivating is about finding and promoting such practices within hives of activity already buzzing with as-yet-thwarted potential.

Those seeking examples of all three habits may refer to my recent attempt at “inhabited criticism” (Ashcraft, 2017), which is only to say it is one imperfect demonstration. There, I try to approach home, which I call “Neoliberal U/You,” from a bearing beyond disembodied critique or confessional tale, one that sinks into the ordinary affects of producing scholarship in search of post-human reflexivity. Ultimately, developing these habits in our own midst is more than a self-help exercise, for it builds capacity to cultivate change elsewhere too. To underscore, mine is not a call to get lost in our own reflection but, rather, to attend to the relation of home and field—to appreciate how inward implicates outward and vice versa.

Additional examples further illustrate how we can toggle between home and field, as well as the potential dividends of doing so. As noted earlier, Reedy (2008) questions the tendency of critical management scholars to construct managers as fools in dire need of our expertise:

Despite the positioning of managers as dupes or victims, they are probably no more these things than those of us who pursue a contradictory, complicit and precarious existence as CMS academics. It could be asked “what then are CMS academics meant to do if they cannot aim at changing management and managers?” My response is that I do not argue against such a project per se, however, I do suggest that it is more likely to be achieved with a clearer view of the interlinked identity projects of academics and managers (p. 68).

His analysis reveals not only that academic and managerial identities are interdependent, but also that critique which acts on this insight to explore our common condition could enhance engaged scholarship aimed at progressive social change. As long we claim to show managers the light by constructing our separation, immunity, and expertise at their expense, we are in no position to help them at all. We are, instead, practicing the politics we critique, perpetrating the very dynamics for which we shake our heads at managers, in the act of shaking our heads.

Others enact the home–field toggle beyond scholarly writing and publication, examining relations with students and research participants as relevant sites for critical impact. In a move that resonates with Reedy’s (2008) critique, Iszatt-White et al. (2017) propose that critical management scholars loosen their attachment to expertise-based identities in order to enact with students the kind of criticality and reflexivity they teach to students. Likewise, Tomkins and Nicholds’ (2017) auto-ethnographic examination of MBA instruction finds, “Authentic leadership will only flourish in the business school if academics muster the courage to acknowledge its relevance for our own role as teacher-leaders, rather than simply teaching or writing to its abstract, ideological appeal” (p. 253). Rather than separate critical management education from critical management studies focused on power elsewhere, such analyses bring them into relation, casting home as a worthwhile field of critical practice, which can reach beyond home as students move into other fields of work. In a similar vein, a recent special issue in Management Learning redirects fervor for relevance and impact away from research outcomes and toward research processes, including design and fieldwork (see Scaratti et al., 2017). Here, relations with participants become a site of critical engagement through the co-generation of knowledge (e.g. Sannino and Engeström, 2017). Such works demonstrate a range of ways to sustain the kind of back-and-forth between home and field that illuminates their relation; they also show how critical scholarship can better face outward by turning inward to appreciate its own practices as part of, not apart from, the so-called public.

Returning to the specific affective habits proposed above, Sara Muhr and I attempt to merge these with home–field exchange in our recent work on “promiscuous coding” (Ashcraft and Muhr, 2017). Drawing on respective encounters with military practice, we demonstrate how tuning in to the relation of home and field throughout qualitative research, from fieldwork to analysis to writing, can assist scholars and practitioners alike in unsettling and queering the gender binaries of leadership. In sum, training the affective “sense-abilities” proposed here can enrich our ability not only to feel but also to make a difference at work in multiple fields, home included. Equipped with new bodily routines, we are more responsive to what happens in the middle of practice, where we all find (and lose) ourselves.

Conclusion: critical performativity or critical vulnerability?

I understand that some may find this call uncomfortable (as I do). It is not easy to confront power in our own midst, much less our participation in it. The fabric of a workplace hangs together, however tenuously, when we look away just this once more. What I have tried to capture is how this impulse—to avert our eyes from our own bleeding and go on—is a knowledge opportunity. It is a chance to know by feel, through the experience of uneasiness welling up in our own bodies, the heavy demand critique drops on its objects, amid their generous participation in its formation. Namely, it asks them (us) to disturb normal life, to disrupt how things work, and to make themselves vulnerable, when real attachments and investments lie on the line, and when what would come next is unknown. Funny that we mourn a lack of resistance among managers and workers encountered in the field, when we are not so different (Ashcraft, 2008; Parker, 2014; Reedy, 2008). Transforming difference at work is a matter of contagious anxiety, and we feel it too.

Others may insist that my call fuels scholarly vanities. That this is not my intention does not prevent it from becoming an effect, I know. I sympathize with the stance on critical performativity reiterated by Spicer et al. (2016): that meaningful intervention is outward-facing, and that critique mired in internal academic politics is misguided and trivial. Charges of academic narcissism can be necessary and productive, and I look forward to learning how they may well apply to my argument. But I do not share the view that any time we orient inward, we slide into the navel. There are more and less self-absorbed ways to self-reflect, and I have tried to promote a way of turning inward that simultaneously enhances our skill at turning outward. As signaled earlier, this mode of reflexivity is not so much about the self as it is about enactments of difference and power that reverberate across scenes of work.

Speaking of such enactments, there was something about Spicer et al.’s (2016) recent defense of critical performativity that nearly undid me as a reader. I was struck by, as in physically squirming at, the way in which charges of academic narcissism became weaponized to eviscerate the biting criticism that Cabantous et al. (2016) levied against them in the same issue. Readers learn, for example, that the Cabantous et al. piece suffers “from an undue focus on intra-academic debates” and epitomizes the sins of author-fixated “theoretical policing” and “symbolic radicalism that feigns relevance”—this is in stark contrast with critical performativity’s focus on matters of genuine “public importance” to “non-academic groups” (Spicer et al., 2016, p. 225). As I sat wincing uncomfortably, and tried to link this moment to others when I have flung or met similar charges, I wondered how the threat of academic narcissism gets mobilized as part of a “disciplined” arsenal of defenses. It can help us perform all manner of intellectual smackdown—bristle against felt attacks or shut down political feeling and introspection, for example—in the name of Duty to Relevance. In these moments, it becomes a powerful shield that keeps us from detecting difference dynamics afoot in the act of smackdown.

For example, two details flew to mind and spiked my pulse. One, Spicer et al.’s (2009: 546) original formulation of critical performativity asserted an “ethic of care” that does not expressly build on the abundant wealth of feminist (organizational) literatures on that very subject (beyond the oblique reference to Jacques, 1992 in the quotation below), suggesting how the novelty of concepts can be premised on the exclusivity of canons (Prasad et al., 2016). Two, I vaguely recalled that their caring ethic required altering the usual oppositional tone of debate. I went back to the original version and found this:

Minimally, the ethic of attack, destruction, demolition, and explosion needs to be complemented with an ethic that emphasizes care, preservation, and nurturing (Jacques, 1992). Infusing this ethic of care throughout CMS might lead to minor changes such as the standards and protocol of debate and collective work within the field. This would recognize that the kind of intellectual engagement that we want to foster and indeed preserve is one that recognizes an ethic of care toward our partners in debate … what Karl Jaspers (1932) calls a “loving struggle.” (548)

Given Spicer et al.’s (2009) outward focus, this passage addresses debate between scholars and practitioners. Read alongside the authors’ hostile takedown of those criticizing their concept years later, however, it provides a stunning demonstration of the consequences of ignoring our own politics while attending to those elsewhere. It also offers a subtle illustration of how our own “diversity” troubles pile on. Overlooking how modes of intellectual debate, such as demolition or care, materialize gender inequality translates down the line into a contentious journal exchange that painfully enacts such gendering (among other power dynamics) but cannot recognize it as such in motion. If critical performativity is a practice reserved for the field yet abandoned at home, only one thing is certain: We know not what we do.

I want, and need, to be cautious here—cautious as in stepping lightly, provisionally, because I am not and cannot be certain of what I seek to discern here. Just as crucially, I must underscore that I do not mean to isolate certain articles, authors, or exchanges for criticism. Rather, I am interested in the relational practices of scholarly knowledge production that such an example can bring to light. The energetic defense of critical performativity as an obligatory turn outward to avoid the piddling impotence of internal squabbles is an especially important example to sift through, given the argument here. But my own work is thoroughly embroiled in these practices too, and surely bears their mark. So I offer the observations above with humility, culpability, curiosity, invitation, and, above all, respect and gratitude to the scholars involved, some of whom I have known and loved for years, and who have inspired my thinking and enabled my path. This is not a game of one-upmanship, which I am content to lose in any case.

Instead, it is a yearning for new ways we might play together—not only on the page with editors, reviewers, and readers; in the classroom with students; in the field with research participants; or in the public with external audiences; but also in hallways and meeting rooms, online and at conferences and after hours, with each other. It is an appeal for attention to our collegial relations, the ways we make and inhabit a world together by doing power and difference. Indeed, in treading carefully here, I seek to both enact and invite an ethic of care more in keeping with the affective sense-abilities characterized above. This might be described as living attention to the sociomaterial relations radiating out from our practice or, put simply, concern for how care gets done (Brennan, 2004; Gherardi and Rodeschini, 2016). My general position is that the more we feel what we do, the better we know what we do; and the more we know by feeling what we do, the more we have to offer. From this position, we are not so much agents of change as carriers of difference, increasingly aware of our participation in those felt flows of power whereby working worlds are made and, precisely for that reason, uncertain of our ability to do more than share practices of attunement with others in the hopes of joint cultivation. Such a stance not only cedes the expertise claimed by critical performativity but it also stands to render us more effective and impactful for this modesty.

Ahmed (2012) observes that “the presumption of our own criticality can be a way of protecting ourselves from complicity” (p. 5). Contending with that complicity, and beginning to integrate it with criticality, has been my purpose here. I have proposed that we approach power by sensing flows of difference at work in home and field. Revisiting the opening metaphor, we might call it strength training to sustain the heaviest lift of all: critical vulnerability.