(Re)writing woman: Unshaming shame with Cixous

Abstract

shame. shamed. shameful. body. my body.

practitioner’s body. scholar’s body. female body.

affect. embodied affects.

blushing. shrinking. averting my gaze.

feeling shame. writing shame.

féminine writing. feminist writing shame.

ruptured by Cixous.

blood. blood staining page. blood flows.

unpleasant. unruly. uncontained.

performing writing. writing performing.

performative. performing shame.

ethical moment. ethical resistance.

resisting agency. my agency.

movement through shame to the other.

(re)finding you, my body, our bodies, love,

loving, cor-po-real gen-er-os-ity, feeling joy,

feeling scholarship, leaky bodies, our bodies,

not knowing, not ever knowing,

Cixous,

feeling scholarship,

féminine writing, joy,

JOUISSANCE,living differently in organizations,

our organizations,

nourishing milk,

uncontained, connected, connecting,

féminine, feminist, flowing

Keywords

Cixous embodiment féminine writing organizations performative writing shame

‘something pure about shame as a feeling, even as it publicly twists the very sense of self… shame always plays on the doubledness of the public and the private, the extraordinary and the mundane… everyday stories of shame may allow us to develop a wider notion of the everyday – of what is personal and what is social… the body is key here: it generates and carries much more meaning than we have tended to see.’ (Probyn, 2004: 330–331)

‘The world is mistaken. It imagines that the other takes something from us whereas the other only brings to us, all the time. The other is complex. He can be our enemy and our friend.’ (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 13)

‘Corporeal generosity is writing passionately in blood, writing in a manner that defies the culturally informed habits of perception and judgement that would perpetuate injustice… writing in blood and love that is just as literal as metaphoric.’ (Diprose, 2002: 190–191)

Preface

This is a feminine text written from my sensory body, presenting my embodied and affectual experiences as an executive woman. The aim is to allow others (readers) apprehend and make sense of my (and their own) lived experiences (Gilmore et al., 2017). I adopt the role of interpretive and theoretical bricoleur (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000) to create a montage of my own and Hélène Cixous’s poetry; rendering problematic representation of organizations as models, abstractions or textual matrices (Hopfl, 2003). In this act of writing differently, I form a composite, imbricated creation; a performance text (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000). The work is also intended to be a political bricolage, aimed at narrating affect and isolation in organizations, presenting feminist communitarian hopes for living differently (Denzin, 2014), and aiming to trouble the phallogocentric writing norms of the Organizational Studies Academy. The text flows from my body and my pulsions. It is a text made of my flesh. I hope readers receive it as such – feeling the rhythm of my body, my breathing (Cixous, 1990) in theirs, while arriving at their own embodied understandings.

First act

Unmentionable

shame. Taboo subject. Nasty and embodied. Uncontrollable. We blush, publicly stained by redness flooding our faces; we avert our eyes and bow our heads. We remember shaming episodes and (re)blush again decades later. We ignore shame in our white, pale, male, western, masculine hegemonies; too unpleasant, too distasteful and too contagious, flooding our classrooms, our organizations, our nations.

I didn’t plan to write about shame in this paper.

When shamed, we want to disappear, be swallowed up, hiding our mortified selves from the world. What trickery of evolution is it, that just at this intense moment of craving effacement, our skin does the opposite, betraying us, and signalling our shame before others, our faces flooding a blotchy red?

I began

writing my paper

with my head

more engaged

than my body

sketching

a hotel, a train, my executive self

struggling

to be good

data

illuminating

how ‘ethics

plays out in the lived and

practical realms of experience

and engaged politics

(Rhodes et al., 2016: 2)

with clever lofty intellectual

looking good

explications

but

I work in places

where there are scarlet-blots-of-shame, white-papered-over, and just when we feel the stains fading, perhaps gone, after all our hard work, something happens, and red-blood-shame floods our public faces, re-staining us. There are always more shame making stories; even as I write two European banks have just settled new billions of dollars in official punishment, and ‘US regulators’ fines for the mis-selling of mortgage backed securities have reached almost $60 billion (Tett, 2016)

and a strange

spectral

shame

crosses over

from these stories

(about other banks)

seeping through

my skin

and

I picture Rodin’s sculpture, Eve after the Fall, Eve’s head bowed in shame, and feel a connected abjectness. My feminine shame multiplying generatively into her cousins; humiliation, embarrassment, worthlessness, rejection, fear.¹ One affect beckoning another, resonating, folding into each other, interfering with and intensifying unpredictably (Massumi, 2002).

Feminine shame, an affinity growing out of our plurality of ‘unwanted identities’, trapped in a sticky spider’s web with ‘unattainable expectations or multiple conflicting expectations that [can]not be met’ (Brown, 2006: 46).

Sedimented hermeneutically, reawakened in our adult bodies with exquisite painfulness, this lack of sparkling-eyed pleasure in the maternal gaze (Schore, 1998 in Herman, 2007) triggering the shame-humiliation reaction of infancy; hanging head, averting eyes, the inability to arouse the m/other’s positive reaction, felt as a threat to life itself.

Not guilt, the feeling of having done something bad to another; no, shame is felt as a sickness of self and as a rejection by my m/others of me, those I crave to be in relationship with and then, by some catastrophizing leap of terrifying imagination, becoming a total human rejection ‘in the moment of shame we feel shorn not just from the other but from all possible others’ (Nathanson, 1987: 9).

Embracing shame as a topic would seem a risky strategy for an academic author, especially as I’m using autobiographic and auto/ethnographic methods. I harbour a strong desire to look good in my paper, visualizing a neat, contained, scholarly, erudite, writerly self-in-action. I am struggling, with guttural tensions.

I fear accusing whispers about confessional tales (Van Maanen, 1988) and self-absorption (Delamont, 2007). This move isn’t a rational decision. But, I’m using writing as a method of inquiry, and where I end up, isn’t necessarily where I set out to go (Richardson and St Pierre, 2005).

My unfolding body

is my field of play (Richardson, 1997) for this paper; a period of approximately twenty-four hours when I travel to the Kennedy School of Management in Boston, staying overnight at The Charles Hotel. An intense period when, completely aside from the purpose of my visit, I am embroiled in a short-lived and intense emotional brouhaha

regarding two of six change projects, launched six weeks earlier with employee volunteers from across the globe; their passionate ideas suddenly meeting with hot concern

mundane two-way resistances which are enacted via non-reflective, fast paced e-mail some of it in the dread of night.

My body unfolds-refolds-unfolds again and again as a site of affects; concrete and corporeal in the right here and right now (Pullen et al., 2017).

I’m embroiled in a visceral effort to protect the work of the teams and do what I believe to be the right thing.

The vignette continues the next morning when I take the 5: 05 am Acela (express) train from Boston to Manhattan, offering an opportunity to do a deep dive into my various subjectivities and my lived and embodied experiences of shame; in the physical settings of the hotel and the train.

Drinking blood, rupturing

me. My intellectual journeying

comes by

Lilithian

encounters

eating

drinking

and

introjecting post-structural theories into my material body

embracing Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine

(Sellers, 1996; Jenson, 1991) as an embodied

way of thinking, and creating texts,

opening up places without coherent language,

subverting rational, dominant binaries:

Writing as a wo/man with ‘[a] nonclosure

that is not submission but

confidence and comprehension;

that is not the opportunity for destruction

but a wonderful expansion’

(Cixous and Clément, 1986: 86, adapted² format).

It is Hélène Cixous who ruptures me and my unfolding écriture féminine

as I am busy (ascending), happily crafting ethico-political poetic stanzas portraying my nocturnal organizational brave resistances, when she elbows me sharply and painfully in the ribs, with a hint about a self-righteous tonality, suggesting these descriptions might be less noble, and a striving to look good to my readers? Red blood stains my face. I am paralyzed at my laptop for some minutes…

Shame has arrived into my paper

I slip out of

my (arm)chair and onto the attic floor, facing an oak bookcase, to the right hand of my desk, my head bowed low. The bookcase has travelled with me to many homes during my adult life, and is home to my collection of inspiring feminist writers and theorists. I look up and intuitively reach for and pull out an old, acid discoloured, paperback copy of Angst (Cixous, 1985, 1993) and a white covered, pristine copy of Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing into my lap. Angst, where Cixous (1985) finds language to explore her guttural fears and shameful feelings about her absent lover, her feelings merging with embodied memories of being separated for an hour or two, from her mother as a child, ‘Your mother: he-who-loves-you’ (p. 17) capturing the conflation of pastpresentfuture visceral fears of abandonment. I sit rereading The School of Roots where she tells us we must descend, that writing ‘does not happen out there, it does not come from the outside, it comes from the deep inside’ (Cixous, 1993: 118)

and thus, I turn around, going

downwards

in my text;

des

cen

ding

into the

sticky

muck,

mud,

and

darkness

of my own imund [sic]

(adapted from Cixous, 1993: 117,118)

imund³ – the impure, the profane, forbidden:

I must climb down

much more physically difficult

than climbing up.

My imund book is the book

without an author.

It is a book

of dying,

that kills the

myself,

the speculating myself,

the speculating,

clever ‘me’.

I must go study in

The School of Roots.

Humble work.

School is indeterminable.

(adapted from Cixous, 1993: 116, 117, 156)

and my paper shape-shifts into a (somewhat) different paper with the sharp shock that my descriptions are actually tales of my imund, small shames of my mundane work experiences. Yet, as I unpick them

I am ruptured again:

Joy is imund,

it is not unclean.

Writing happens from our

nether realms.

Deep in my body,

a place further down,

a place without thoughts

flowers on the inside

white lilies clasped against

the nudity of my bosom

I bless the warmth of my living body

the scent of lilacs in the sun

flowers on the inside.

(adapted from Cixous, 1993: 118, 154, 156)

Might, magically, shame be a discovery of an (organizational) place where we can emerge out of the underworld to greet our m/others with empathy? For in shame, despite its despair, it is the m/others we hold in the front of our mind; m/others are not lost to us; we desire reconnection. Perhaps, looked at through a refracting lens, shame might have generative potentialities (Probyn, 2004, 2005; Uebel, 2016)? And I’m back gazing at Rosalyn Diprose, considering that if the m/other is not lost to me, is there a chance for a disruption to my moral judgements (of others, of myself), and a resistance through my life-force, my affective body, with political agency (Pullen and Rhodes, 2014, 2015). Part of me is doubting. Then again a passage from Cixous (1997) floats through the penumbra of my consciousness:

it is on the occasion of the other

that I catch sight of me;

or that I catch me at:

reacting, choosing, refusing accepting.

It is the other who makes my portrait.

Always. And luckily.

The other of all sorts, is also of all

diverse richness…

It’s the other who makes my portrait.

(1997: 13 bold emphasis in original)

Called back into my affective breathing body in my vignette, I feel something happens; the other in me of my shame mysteriously draws me through an astral wormhole, into (re)imagining the mind of m/others and facilitating more generous and political agency; somewhere, from the deep within, from my self-conscious relation with m/others, springs an unanticipated creative agency (McNay, 2000).

And, I wonder, if this is what Cixous is getting at with her constant invocations for us to steal away, take secret passageways into our own ‘outlawed subjectivity’ (Cixous, 1993: 119) with her hopes to discover more radiant agencies, ‘[i]n one another we will never be lacking’ (Cixous, 1976: 893).

Performing bodies, performing texts

‘As best described by Tomkins, shame effaces itself; shame points and projects; shame turns itself skin side out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display, shame and exhibitionism are different interlinings of the same glove…Shame…transformational shame, is performance. I mean theatrical performance’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 38 emphasis in original).

We are arriving at the heart of my paper; an auto/ethnographic poetic text I aim to ‘show not tell’ (Denzin, 2014: 78) with a concrete and fragile picture of my contesting selves, in a time and place where coherent language fails me. A fall one night into the abyss of everyday shames and her attendant cousins, and a contested emerging the following morning. A method and a text, situated in the borderlands between autobiography and ethnography, a narration, a discursive act, an emerging from within, facilitating a representation of lived experience and fluctuating identities. Opening up, unspoken and unknown ethical everyday practices. I write with hope that we can live differently in organizations. It isn’t a comfortable performance

You my readers

must deal with

histories of my body

(and my shames)

with

histories

of your bodies

(and your shames)

***

Second act

‘The state of my feelings today is merciless, it’s merciless to everybody including myself, but it’s not without hope…I believe women don’t know total despair. They know about despair that brings us back to hope’ (Cixous, 1990: 25 emphasis in original).

Scene one: descending

train speeding up the shoreline

my gaze neither on my phone or on

my book but on the afternoon water

of Long Island Sound

last of the fall leaves red purple gold

tuning in to pleasant anticipatory feelings

drifting pleasantly along

spiked with a little nervousness

into the not known

women’s public policy program

women’s leadership board

Harvard!

YankedBack

SickFeeling

PitStomach

Series of Messages

NEWBOSS

In Europe – mid evening

Coldsweaty

Do you know?

Free Fresh Fruit arriving?

Weekly, for juniors?

‘Done Something Wrong’

echoes through internal hallways

SHOCKED

can’t find taxi rank

find taxi rank

‘Charles Hotel, Cambridge’

thanks

pay taxi

check in brightly

collapsing inside snivelling

under heaviness

of my travel competence

armour

SickFeeling

i’m sweating inside my down coat, hood up as it’s drizzling, too warm for a november night. bag clutched under my arm in a vain attempt to protect its leather from the rain. okaymaybe looks like the right place from photo on-line. hard to see in the dark. peer. ornate railings. erect white columns. goforit quickwalk up long forecourt. narrow heels sink into the rain sodden red carpet, digging into unsteadying shafts between the cobbles. slowupgirl, don’t want to trip. shocked by red carpet, (oh my god – neverbeenononeinmylife – it feels very weird). up steep steps. grasp the bevelled brass handle. push at heavy white door. scan eyes around lobby. breathoutrelief as i chat with greeters. heart plumetbeats as i enter drawing room. i’m too early. i always arrive early when i’m anxious. ornateness, crystal chandeliers and vases of hot house pungent lilies. polished wood and large portraits of serious men. women start arriving. shit, i’m underdressed. keep wondering about work emails. now it’s a crowd. i mean seriously underdressed. fuschiapink work jacket amongst all the black and gold. why hadn’t i rung to ask about dress code? idiot girl. keep wondering about emails. keep smiling brightly. fine cocktail and evening dresses, large diamonds. good god. should have realized it was a special night, changing of the board chair. shit. way underdressed. stomach in, buttocks tight, shoulders back, stand as tall as i can in my heels. struggling to fake talk with these high-powered women. craning up at entrepreneurs. government advisors. movie makers. who am I to them? keep wondering about emails. keep smiling brightly. feel small. queasy inside. christ. never been in a room with so many women. feel the FORCE. awesome. god – mid-way through dinner realize i’m to make a public spectacleintroduction of myself to this vast room of august women. no to wine. feel very small. shrunk. short to begin with. shrunken. no to wine. isolated at dinner table. outofplaceness seeping from every single pore of my skin raw keep wondering about emails. keep smiling. queasy inside. yes to wine.

Scene two: in the mire

Punch in password

Wrong

Punch again

Wrong

Punch again

Careful, go slow,

XXXXXX

In!

Series of messages

Do you know about this?

100 Rotations for juniors to

other parts of the bank?

It’s impossible. Maybe 50.

Where’s HR?

Shit, not another team?

I feel deep inside of me

angry desires

protect my, I mean,

THE change teams

all volunteers

my responsibility

isolation

stab of physical loss thatmy husband’s safe body

is missing beside mine

I feel

retrickling cold sweat

senseseeing before

I hear

the buzzing

of my phone

again

buzz, open, read

tap, tap, tap

quick send

buzz, open, read

tap, tap, tap

quick send

verbal shots

flung forwards

and backwards

through the

Cloud

‘Yes, I understand’

‘The sponsor signed off’

‘Did you

know the team were

executing?’

Bleeding wrongness.

Slapped all over me

Scarlet Handprints of Shame.

Accusations undress me.

Private flesh exposed.

buzz, open, read

tap, tap, tap

quick send

buzz, open, read

tap, tap, tap

quick send

wakeup. 11.45pm. sickfeeling. lighton. sit-up.

phone. nothing new lie-back down.

light off. close eyes.

Fuschiapink.

‘shouted at your.

NEWBOSS’

‘i know’.

‘you shouted’.

‘i know’.

pull at bedclothes. hate bedclothes in American hotels. haven’t they heard of duvets? feel cold. nose sniffs the sweet faux floweriness of the room. perfumed by what? weird carpet cleaning powder? One of those peculiar deodorized plug-ins. yuk. shut eyes. pull at bedclothes. need to pee. no you don’t. yes I do.

search for light. which side of the bed? reach fingers searching up and down the textured wallpaper desperately. found it. blink. pad to bathroom. struggle to find bathroom light. slip slightly on marble tiled floor. pad back. hit my knee on sharp edge of so chic wooden platform frame. oouch – that hurts. climb into bed. lightoff. pull at bedclothes. close eyes. hear far off shriek of police siren. someone else’s crisis. shiver. close eyes. drift. feels like the room’s moving in on me. hear express checkout a sharp razor grazing my skin sliding under the door. light from the corridor filters through. eyes keep finding creepy shadow on wall. sounds from street become louder. room’s closing in on me.

‘you shouted at

your NEWBOSS’.

‘i know’.

‘you shouted’.

‘i know’.

look at clock. midnight. christ – only a quarter of an hour has passed. the endlessnesses of fifteen minutes. several career lifetimes in this bed. thoughts wander. look again.

Lighton. sit-up. phone. nothing new. lie-back down. Light off. close eyes. sit-up. phone. switch back to buzz at message mode. lie-back down. light off. close eyes. wonder if I should get up and go to the gym? but it’s in another part of the building and a bit of a scary walking there even at 6 am. no best stay here. imagine treadmill. imagine running. elevated heartbeat. calming endorphins flowing through bloodstream.

Shiver. Desire-

to-disappear.

‘you shouted

at your NEWBOSS

‘i know’.

want my

motherhusband.

buzzing. what’s buzzed? wake-up sweaty. acid in throat.

where am i? breathe. the charles hotel. harvard. light-on. 1.30 am. think. 6.30 am london. 7.30 am paris. good brain working.

breathe. sip water. glasseson.

Phone. e-mail.

string of messages.

women in power

copied in.

start to reply.

hit save.

phone down. crazy writing

e-mails in the middle

of the night.

pick phone up.

try to write calmly. slowly

YES TO PUT

CONTROLS

ON TEAMS.

talk in morning.

did i YELL?

shit. lie-back

down.

hatethis.loveteams.

lovejob.

Mortgage

We haveto payMortgage.

College fees.Medical School. Alife’s savings inthis country.Summer Camps.needjob.needmoney.

kidslove mykids.

lovejob.

loveteams.

goodwork. light off.

close eyes.sickfeeling.

skin raw.curl thumb

into my palm.

Desire-to-disappear.

Perhaps I can stay

in this room

forever?

Should I call myboss? No. Yes.it’s breakfast timein Paris. No.Maybe.

You are too tired.Calling is toocrazy.

Call husband.No. Too late.

He’s sleeping.

Hold thumb.

Feel the prick of hot tearsat the corners of myeyelids.

Want mymotherhusband.

Lying in the bed. tug at bedclothes watching the crack of red lights

filter through a gap in the curtains.

left deliberately a little unclosed

for fear of oversleeping. pull pj bottoms over my toes.

curl my toes against the soft brushed cotton.

pull hated scratchy bedclothes

high up over my chin.

Scene three: jolted

head’s resting uncomfortably on the edge of cold window, seat’s scratchy against my stockinged hamstrings. feet tight in shoes. wish I could kick them off. dozing fantasizing about one of those nice sensible trolleys they have on UK trains with coffee, tea, digestive biscuits and fresh fruit. I conjure up a cheery attendant hearing the ‘coffee or tea madam? biscuits with that?’ here in stupid US I’ll have to find the dreary refreshment car bitter coffee. terrible packaged food. gotta find the energy to move…back bay…route 128…why so many stops for a frickin express train…people getting on. good no one by me. get up, find café car buy coffee and an inedible danish. keep nibbling at its soft tasteless waxiness…peckpeck doze Providence…dozing…shake head…lean forehead back against cold window. train speeding along. sick feeling fading. suddenly aware we’ve stopped. rub left side of my neck. rock head side to side. sip coffee. stopped some time. where are we? still dark. looks like rhode island. westerly maybe? tannoy. LISTEN.

Frickin Hard to Hear.

LISTEN.

Are you going deaf?

LISTEN.

‘I am very sorry for

the inconvenience

we are delayed’.

Look at watch. No!

heart beating,

breath high in chest

– We’ve lost 30 MINUTES.

HELL

means we’ll get to Penn Station

let’s see, 9.30am,

PHEW still okay,

meeting isn’t until 10. Breathe. Don’t panic.

what are they saying, can’t hear. LISTEN.

‘I am afraid I don’t know

when we’ll be moving again,

there has been an incident

on the line up ahead’

that’s code for some idiot threw

himself on the tracks

40 MINUTES LATE NOW!

WHOAGIRL!

STOP.

Flush a bit Pink. Redder.

Head bowed. Eyes averted.

Collapse into my seat.

Desire-to-fall-through-floor.

Whoever Nojerk

was had a Mother,

Father, Partner, Son, Daughter,

people who loved Him or Her

horrible way to die

what desperation

jumping under

a high-speed train

feel hot, cold

sweat drips

down my back

sit still

feel seconds

ticking past

oddly feel my skin stretching tight

over small

swellings

tiny rebellions

pasts-nows-tomorrows

red blood flowing

into

heart and

my womb

a-stirring

a-fluttering

a-movement

awake now.

sipping coffee

dawn’s breaking over Long Island Sound

shoreline rising up from fading shadows

train’s rolling along

mmm

calm things down?

bosses. teams. women this morning.

pink light glistening on grey water.

body weight shifting

as train starts speeding along.

Think.

Think.

send message one

Sorry–on train but there’s been an accident

should still get to New York on time

possible may be a bit late

don’t worry – you’re prepared

you have Great Points.

Way to go Ladies!

Lots of Luck

okay next. NewBoss.

message two

Sorry. Understand. Know there’s pressure. Sawyou messaged in night. Long night for both of us.

Will prepare powerpoint deck!

Stuck outside Providence, train delayed

heading to the women’s meeting in NYC

with S

let’s catch-up later

now the triumvirate. women. it isn’t about issues really. Not fresh fruit or junior rotations. don’t think so. worry about teams, or me, being off piste? control yes control. angst has grown. humour need humour. idea. mac air out. log in. great wi-fi working. good enough connection. surf. waitrose. no not it. not posh enough. selfridges. no don’t like that either. fortnum, try Fortnum and Masons. that’s it. like those. fruit baskets. lots of thick cellophane and that lovely aqua ribbon. they look the business. price. hmm. smallest will still work. sixty pounds each plus delivery. Yikes! uk credit card out. buy before i rethink it. worth every poundpenny if they work. need some laughter. shit katie did you just do that? too late done now. sip coffee. smile to myself a little proudly. my husband will think i have gone crazy.

train’s speeding along

south of New Haven

flashing past

Bridgeport

Fairfield

Southport – a quick flash of my littleblackcar in the parking lot

the ugly metal towers of Green’s Farm’s sub-station

a great blue heron swooping low

over Westport’s Mill Pond

eyeing breakfast

our sewage plant’s swirling muddy-frothy-soups

white freezer packaged yachts

in the marinas.

tuck, duck and roll.

I just

tuck, duck and roll

****

Ongoing acts

‘There are thirty ways into a text. Reading together in this way we bring the text into play. We take a page and everyone comes individually towards it. The text begins to radiate from these approaches. Slowly we penetrate towards its heart…this movement is like a voyage…Texts are the witnessing of our proceedings. The text opens up a path which is already ours and yet not altogether ours’ (Cixous, 1988: 148, 146).

Collaborative voyaging

my body and my text are inseparable. My researcher body rotating, deviating and gyrating performing critical self-reflexive analyses of dissonance and discovery

embodying work generated in liminal spaces between known and unknown, experience and language, somatic and semantic (Spry, 2001) both in the writing of my text, ‘reforming my body, the body of my text, the text of my body’ (Spry, 2011: 29)

your bodies and my poetictext are inseparable. Our bodies rotating, deviating, gyrating performing critical self-reflexive analyses of dissonance and discovery

facilitating an uncovering of an abundance of heterogeneous interpretations, reading with our whole bodies, taking an open, deep listening position embarking us on a féminine reading voyage, generating further interpretations, bringing ‘the ten thousand pages of every page’ (Cixous, 1991: 24) to light with jouissance and our shared vulnerabilities

adopting a non-judgemental, non-competitive approach where we open ourselves as widely as we can to what may have motivated my writing and performance, and with what kind of lifework experiences my emplyrical work deals

breaking down distinctions between ‘critical’ and ‘creative’ writings

Knowledge is made in our doing together. A temporal and spatially decentred experience sensing meanings rather than conceiving them (Spry, 2010).

We body forth: a collaborative act of working together, pooling our resources in textualized bodies, feeling scholarship, letting it seep into our skin and melt our bones, move in our blood, our borders bleeding (Spry, 2011)

Flesh-to-flesh theorizing: poetry-politics and praxis

‘theory is bodily, and theory is literal’ (Haraway, 1992: 299)

‘It is an uneasy task, this writing shame…The body of the writer becomes the battleground where ideas and experiences collide, sometimes to produce new visions of life…Ideas and writing about shame seek to generate new ways of thinking about how we are related to history and how we wish to live in the present’ (Probyn, 2010: 89–90)

We are not using theory to fit my poetictexts to any predetermined grids or structures but to hear and feel meanings, a way of advancing our understandings

theory is not an end in itself but an aid

to prompt us into more informed action in organizations. I am a practitioner and an activist seeking to facilitate better organizations with in-the-field-dailymundane-practical applications supported (covertly) by ‘[p]oetry-politics’ (Cixous, 1988: 152) and generative-of-action in-the-field academic theories.

The Law of the Journal Manuscript constrains my fecundity and the whitespacing of my poetic texts is expansive and expensive in paginal terms, and so I must contain myself to interpretive beginnings positioned as lambent lights

an assemblage where theorist folds into theorist of our unfolding interpretations

there are no singular hard penetrations to be made; no conquests of data by the conceptual constructs of one rationally selected philosopher. We move forward together with a flowing corporeal generosity (Diprose, 2002), ‘Loving not knowing. Loving: not knowing’ (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 17).

My inter-rogations

are of the nowtoday. My vignette is a living story web (Boje, 2008), morphing as others’ diverse perspectives emerge unbidden on stage and in response to reading my writing performing. It’s a fluid porous text; moving I know not quite where.

These are my interpretive reflections as I sit in the temporal space of a February 2017 US bank holiday Monday, on a hard cedar spindle chair, at my oval oak kitchen table, soft golden sunlight slanting through the kitchen window, casting misty shadows over my computer screen, (re)reading (re)critically my critically reflexive poem. A piece written last month, then and now, anxious quivers in my belly, asking myself does the piece illuminate the embodied nature of shame in the workplace and its positive and negative valences in my executive female body? Procrastination is tempting.

I dip my pen into red ink. I write in blood and love. It is a blood donation. (Diprose, 2002). Red ink stains white page.

Bodies matter; bodies bridge

my shames and ethical resistings. The ‘very stuff’ (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008) of my shamed physical body is central in my poetictext.

Embodied powerful affects resonate, amplify, intensify and deintensify over the twenty-four-hour period. It is in my body, sitting on the train, that I first feel shame. The shame intensifies over evening and night hours becoming a white-hot continuum of shame-humiliation and shame-injustice (Probyn, 2005). It is in my material body that these affects are felt as I toss and turn in bed and dream wildly. It is my body that smiles after buying the fruit basket gifts.

My vignette is a tale of mundane work experiences, yet the shame affects felt were significant and I could viscerally recall them as I crafted the poem; resonant echoes had lived on in my flesh responsive to summoning

my ethical turning points felt somatically

It is my body which feels self-revulsion about the quickthought that the suicide was a jerk who was inconveniencing me. Personal ethics kick-in; I do not want to be this person and this internal shaming throws my body into action

resistance

resistance to authority

my body is a

bridge

between my shameful affective everyday experiences

and

my embracing affirmative ethical political action (Pullen et al., 2017).

Creative torsions between my mind and my body

facilitate subversive agency. My auto/ethnographic poetictext emerging as a Möbius strip on the page

the inflection

of my mind

into my body

into my mind

a twisting

an inversion

one side

becomes

another

(adapted from Grosz, 1994: xii).

My psyche is projected into the social; a mutual inherence of contesting meanings, not ‘a frozen domain of phallocentric signification’; my unconscious isn’t lack, but has ‘an originary capacity for figuration’ (McNay, 2000: 20)

defining woman

is she lacks lack

…

she doesn’t miss the lack of lack

…

Culturally speaking,

women have wept a great deal,

but once tears are shed

…

endless laughter breaks out,

overflows

(Cixous, 1981: 46, 55, adapted format)

the possibility of a ‘transgressive libidinal force’;

jouissance

exploding the limits of the Law of the Father

‘an ecstatic flash of new meaning[s]’

speed and subversion

(adapted from Bray, 2004: 146)

jouissance

joy

‘the place where truth falters’

(adapted from Benstock, 1991: 16)

j’oui sens

‘I hear meaning’

(Ang,1999: 4)

Woman’s imaginary is inexhaustible,

like music,

like painting,

writing:

their stream of

phantasms is

incredible

(Cixous, 1976: 876, adapted format)

Giving gifts

and in a moment of jouissance I buy gifts of fruit baskets. A giving without taking, without profit. A gift which does not expect a return and is an opening up of the space in which the other can exist autonomously, in their strangeness to me

I write: milk.

Strong nourishment.

The gift without return

…

And like all those who nourish,

I am nourished.

A smile nourishes me

…

Goodnesses of good exchanges

…

if you give, you receive.

What you don’t give, the antigift

turns back against you and rots you.

The more you give,

the more you take pleasure

(Cixous, 1991: 49, adapted format)

and there is a fragile possibility of

An opening of a third body

which erases our differences, cancelling out the otherness of the other, a creation of a new way of being, where standing outside of myself I am aware that I too am other. And in this awakened awareness opens up another way of being, not anchored in the flesh, but which is nomadic, moving beyond our bodies and yet part of our bodies, a silence and a shroud, a gift and a gestation, a place outside the patriarchal Law

We go out through the top,

without using force, at noon and vertically.

Between the opaque pillar

and the luminous pillar

which commemorate

the dancers who are gone,

the sky stretches out

eternally and lawlessly (Cixous, 1999: 161, adapted format)

a moment of jouissance

a becoming

as I rehear the language of the other on the train

our third body stretches

out there amid

silky red lands…

amid

lands of silk.

knowledge made up of a beatitude

of all [our] senses and

has no language, no name

over –there is but a reflection of here,

the intersecting gleams

of our eyes.

(Cixous, 1999: 155 adapted format)

Affect intensifies, spreads

wildly and with others through e-mail. Attendant affects including embarrassment (wrongly dressed), excitement (Loeb House, the women); and fear (what will happen to the projects, will I get fired?) crowd in, flooding me as ‘and/and/and/and’ (Probyn, 2005: 21). Angry, fearful, shaming e-mails are received and sent in the dread of night. Shame intensifies and spreads. It’s contagious through the Cloud.

The amplification is complex, stimulated by concerns of rupture with a number of relationships: my new boss and other senior leaders; the women I am meeting for the first time at the Harvard’s Women’s Leadership Board; team; team leaders of change projects. The newness of all these relationships increasing their felt fragility and evoking deeply-life-long-sedimented and visceral bodily fears of abandonment. My body is grappling with interests (pastpresentfuture) hoping with increasing desperation through the night to (re)engage with positive in-mutual-high-regard-relationships (Probyn, 2005). The deep longing for the sparkling-eyed gaze of my m/other.

A visceral window into how affect permeates organizations profoundly, influencing our motivations, our political behaviour, our decision-making and relationships with our leaders and followers (Fotaki et al., 2017).

Magical potential of alterity

is absent in the night. Sunk in the swamps of shame and her attendant cousins in the Charles Hotel, I have no ability to open myself to the other. The other is to be blamed, repudiated – especially the other in me. I lie in bed in self-despair and self-disappointment.

I am shaken on the train through shame back to the other, the other in me, and actual m/others (my boss, other senior leaders, the team leaders). I am so disturbed by my selfish reaction to an inconvenient suicide that I am shot instantly through an astral wormhole back into a kinder, ethical self:

In response to the disturbing experience of these others, my body said to my ego ‘Feel pain here!’ and my ego suffered and wondered how it might suffer no more. And that is why I was ‘made to think’’ (Diprose, 2002: 143).

I am jolted into thinking

a slowing down

and in this

sudden

instant

stilling

hearing

seconds

ticking

opens anew a pathway to the contemplation of the other and their pains

from my ego pain to their ego pain.

It is a moment of ‘profound ethical importance…within the slow stillness of an open contemplation of the other there is movement of thinking’ (Bray, 2004: 62) an opening to the difference, the strangeness of the other. I am shifted to the plight of the other. This is the beating red heart of Cixous’s oeuvre:

To understand theother, it isnecessary to go totheir language, tomake the journeythrough theother’s imaginary.For you arestrange to me.

In the effort tounderstand,

I bring you back tome,

compare you tome,

I translate you inme.

And what I note isyour difference,your strangeness.

At thatmoment,

perhaps, throughrecognition ofmy owndifferences,

I might perceivesomething of

you

(Cixous, 1988: 146 adapted format).

I get out my MacAir, connect via my i-phone to the Internet. Shame is translated into moment of unanticipated creative agency (McNay, 2000). (Re)hearing the language of the other, I buy smiling, with jouissance, fruit baskets cellophanewrapped with silky aquablue ribbon, a gift

embracing

magical belief

that

‘differences are our connective tissues’

(Spry, 2011: 212, bold emphasis added)

that ‘it’s the other who makes my portrait’

(Cixous, 1997: 13, bold emphasis in original).

A blood donation. Féminine writing, my paper, this coupling with you, my readers, sharing a multiplicity of embodied and reflexive experiences, is pregnant with vulnerable-not-knowings. Then, I hear rustlings, new-born cries, for within this manuscript’s soft folds, we have birthed (with difficulty) new learnings about living more expansive, joyous, and connected lives at work and at home; touched flesh-to-flesh the fragile possibilities of lives of jouissance, caught on our nervous inhalations, the scent of strong nourishment; breast milk flowing…

***

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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