Spacing organization: non-representational theory and performing organizational space

Slow motion

Can we think of how the study of organizational space would alter if we turn from a representational logic to a non-representational modus of theorizing? For instance, can I describe in words or images how I enter each day through the door of my office from where I am now writing this sentence? Can I replay this entry in slow motion and make visible all the affects, materials, movements which are strung together at that moment? Can I connect in that description the rhythm of my steady-typing fingers, the knocking on the door just two seconds ago by two colleagues who ask whether I want to join them for lunch, the echoes of the enthusiastic phone call with the co-author of this text where we discussed the possibility of altering its style and of interrupting our writing for the upcoming, televised football match, the passing trucks which drive on and off stones, debris and building materials to the campus site across my window where they are completely refurbishing the university building, the shadow projections on the white walls and grey carpet created by the light beams the sun sends in, the sense of horizon I get when I look through the other window and get a glimpse of the lake? Can we in all this turn from a logic of representational textualism to a modus of relational materialism and perform the latter one to theorize space? Can we re-enact our envelopment in spatial becomings instead of going on to describe it through standardized procedures of knowledge creation that construct a representational distance?

One way to do so would be to perform the production of organizational space in slow motion, similar to how the American video-artist Bill Viola crafts slow motion video-projects. In a retrospective of his work many years ago at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco I became fascinated by these video art experiments, and so I returned a couple of times on the evenings the Museum offered free entry to re-watch some of them. Not so long ago I had the chance to see a different installation, entitled The Raft, during a visit at the Louisiana, another Museum of Modern Art, located on the shores of the sea north of Copenhagen. The video shows a group of people as if they were waiting at a bus stop. Suddenly they are surprised by pouring water, as if a major flood has broken out, forcing them to the ground. This is a simple plot that takes at most seventy-five seconds were it not shown in slow motion and shaped into an event of more than ten minutes.

First, people diverse in age, gender, race and social background hang out or arrive in moonwalk mode. They are waiting and waiting. Looking around or looking down. A few read. Seconds are broken up in even smaller time units. So much is happening on every face, so detailed becomes every movement of each body. Something as everyday as waiting becomes unnatural, and in this slowness a raw intensity emerges that opens up for the details and nuances of the materials, bodies and sensations. It is all very ordinary, yet it feels like the lull before the storm. All of sudden an extremely powerful gush of water emerges from the sides and pushes the crowd out of balance. In no time the whole group would have landed on the wet pavement, but in slow motion, the intensity of a million facial changes are shown: surprise, fright, anxiety, blushing, shock, disbelief, tears. Bodies are out of balance and through uncertain swings try to find a little steadiness, grasping at each other and taking each other down. With the water comes a whole palette of emotions, movements and intensities, a range of microscopic transformations, a cartography of affects. Rain, tears, storms, splashes, droplets; life waters, life flows, life waves, as Nietzsche already wrote. Viola shows us the everyday richness of affect and embodiment but through slow motion and close-up restores them to a molecular level, to an almost original step-by-step nature so that we can see them at work. Affect is here the capacity of interaction that is akin to a natural force of emergence. The force of a moment is the billions of happy and unhappy encounters that produce the multiple space of a waiting spot. Space becomes spacing, cracking open usual horizons of space and time into a chronicle of passion and pain, a story of bodies and faces, water and sounds. Then people crawl up, one by one, and leave again, looking shattered, shocked and shaken. After the deluge …

I take a deep breath when I remember the deep breath I took when this video was over. I felt stirred up, and so did the other viewers in the dark museum room who only slowly left for the next part of the exhibition. I walked out conscious of my own walking, my own mood and my own sensation of the dark room. As if I wanted to walk in slow motion. Yet my body walked me through the corridor without running into anybody else and into the garden of the museum from where you could see how calm the sea was on that day. Some of these feelings of intensity come back on this rather quiet afternoon, where my colleagues have in the meantime returned from lunch. Viola provides ‘turbulent surfaces’ in which emotional and physical shape coincide in arcs of intensity (Thrift, 2004: 73). When I reread my own text, my finger goes to the delete-key, as I think this description is too meager to suggest something of the ecstasy of the slowly turning narrative Viola produced in image and sound. Something blocks in my finger, and, with a sigh, I pass through my office door, in a hurry to get a sandwich.

In the space of this text

Inspired by the aesthetics of Viola’s event of waiting and surprise, this article proposes to enrich the theorizing and researching of organizational space with the event of spacing. As the gerundial form indicates and akin to the well-documented conceptual shift from organization to organizing (Czarniawska, 2008; Steyaert and Van Looy, 2010), this entails a rethinking of space as processual and performative, open-ended and multiple, practiced and of the everyday. Such a reframing of space as spacing implies exchanging a vocabulary of stasis, representation, reification and closure with one of intensities, capacities and forces; rhythms, cycles, encounters, events, movements and flows; instincts, affects, atmospheres and auras; relations, knots and assemblages (Foucault, 2007). But this is about more than ‘just’ a change of expression. If we consider organization to be performative and processual, we need to recognize that scholarly work itself is embedded in embodied practices of spacing and is thus itself performative (Law, 2004). The concept of space as spacing therefore has important reverberations for researching and writing organizational space: it calls for ‘the cultivation of a mode of perception that dwells in the midst of things’ (McCormack, 2007: 369); it asks ‘questions of style, form, technique and method’, and it ‘usher[s] in experimental kinds of response’ (Lorimer, 2008: 556). As our introductory vignette seeks to show, this entails a move from representational strategies of extracting representations of the world from the world to embodied apprehensions of the everyday performing of space, to different enactments of organizational geographies. The aim of this article is thus twofold: to move forward the study of organizational space by opening it up to a performative concept of space and to outline and illustrate ‘more-than-representational’ practices (Lorimer, 2005: 84) of apprehending spatial becoming.

Our article thus aligns itself with attempts to ‘bring space back in[to]’ critical organization theory (Kornberger and Clegg, 2004: 1095). In recent years a small body of work has emerged that is dedicated to the social production of space and that mainly draws inspiration from the socio-spatial perspective pioneered by Henri Lefebvre (1991). Indeed, Lefebvre’s conceptualization of space as an active force and his dialectical perspective on the unfolding of space production offer fruitful possibilities of retracing the making of organizational space, especially when read in conjunction with the posthumously published sketch on Rhythmanalysis (2004) and its emphasis on the embodied sensing of the rhythms of everyday life. However, we argue that the reception of Lefebvre in the study of organizational space tends to reify his distinction between different forms of spatial production into representations of the beings of organizational spaces—a reading of Lefebvre that stresses the more essentialist traits of his oeuvre and that shows to have difficulties to take into account everyday spatial becoming.

We therefore suggest to open up the study of organizational space to a heterogeneous set of theoretical practices recently developed by a largely UK-based group of human geographers and labelled as non-representational theory, which have so far only received marginal attention in organizational research (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Cadman, 2009; Lorimer, 2005, 2007, 2008; Thrift, 2007). While non-representational theorizing ‘is by no means the only game in town’ and while it should not ‘be lazily labelled a single game or, for that matter, “non-representationalists” as comprising an undifferentiated, tight-knit, community’ (Lorimer, 2008: 555–56), this loosely-coupled constellation of texts can be said to ‘configure geographical thought in the same way that it configures life: as a series of indefinite “ands” which add to the world rather than extract stable presentations from it’ (Cadman, 2009: 456). Non-representational theorizing thus offers conceptual inspiration for and empirical examples of a performative and open-ended concept of spacing that sees space as an excessive composition of multiple forces. In this article we tap into this literature in order to develop the notion of spacing organization and discuss its conceptual and methodological implications.

We proceed as follows. First, in order to situate what the concept of spacing can contribute to current discussions of organizational space, we point out the pivotal role of Lefebvre’s spatial analysis in the minor spatial turn in organizational studies and outline a tentatively ‘more-than-representational’ interpretation of his work. From there, we secondly turn to non-representational theorizing and discuss the scope of a performative view which sees space (and the theorizing of space) as enacted through material, embodied, affective and minor spacings. Third, we discuss and illustrate the conditions through which such theorizing can become a form of organizational geography. In a brief conclusion, we return to the idea of slow motion for future enactments of organizational geographies.

Bringing Space in

To relate a processual and performative notion of space to how space has been used in organizational analysis, we focus on a recent body of work that draws its inspirations from the socio-spatial thought that has effectuated the ‘spatial turn’ (Soja, 1989: 16, 39), and that denotes an increased attention to a social theorizing of space as both social product and generative force (Crang and Thrift, 2000; Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 2005; Soja, 1996): ‘[I]tself the outcome of past actions (…)space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 73). Importantly, space does neither denote a ‘mere’ metaphorics, nor a container having its own material reality independent of human beings, nor a Kantian transcendental a-priori of subjective perception (Lefebvre, 1991). Rather, ‘[s]ocial relations (…) have no real existence save in and through space. Their underpinning is spatial’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 404; emphasis in original).

The emergence of this spatio-ontological stance is heavily indebted to Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. The book has been hailed as ‘the event within critical human geography during the 1990s’ (Merrifield, 2006: 103; emphasis in original); its conceptualization of space ‘encompasses a great deal of what, 25 years later, has become stock-in-trade in the social sciences’ (Löw, 2008: 29). Correspondingly, Lefebvre’s spatial thought proves to also become the kernel of what one could call organization theory’s minor spatial turn (Beyes and Michels, 2011; Dale, 2005; Dale and Burrell, 2008; Dobers and Strannegård, 2004; Halford, 2005; Halford and Leonard, 2005; Hernes, 2004; Spicer, 2006; Taylor and Spicer, 2007; Tyler and Cohen, 2010; Zhang et al., 2008). The presupposition that ‘[o]rganizations are themselves configurations of multiple, distinctive, differentiated spaces’ (Halford and Leonard, 2005: 661) has been put to fruitful use in these studies. Explorations range from the spatial hybridity of workspace (Halford, 2005) to how organizational spaces are performed through embodiment (Dale, 2005; Tyler and Cohen, 2010); from the tension-laden production of spaces as depicted in novels by J. G. Ballard (Zhang et al., 2008) to the spatial transformation provoked by a design object (Dobers and Strannegård, 2004); from the organizational boundaries enacted by physical, social and mental space (Hernes, 2004) to the various spatial scales in which the phenomenon of organization is embedded (Spicer, 2006; Taylor and Spicer, 2007).

However, we detect in these appropriations of Lefebvre’s spatial thought a tendency to reify space, to turn spatial becoming into representations of the beings of organizational spaces, to prioritize the spatial products over the processes of their productions. This is most noticeable when organizational scholars draw upon Lefebvre’s (1991: 33) ‘spatial triad’ of conceived, perceived and lived spaces in order to trace three different modalities of spatial production: organizational spaces then easily come to be seen as either planned (conceived), or routinely practised (perceived), or embodied or ‘othered’ (lived). For instance, by asserting that architecture would hold ‘a privileged position’ in the social production of space (Dale and Burrell, 2008: 23) and by proposing ‘the pivotal role of architects and architecture in constructing meanings, social spaces and organisations, in both material and interpretive forms’ (Dale and Burrell, 2008: 32), Dale and Burrell’s book on The Spaces of Organisation and the Organisation of Space (2008) places an emphasis on the ‘cold calculation’ of the conceived space in colonizing and determining the organizational everyday. Conversely, embodiment is ‘reserved’ for the category of lived space (e.g. Tyler and Cohen, 2010), or lived spaces are played out as distinct spaces of contestation (e.g. Zhang et al., 2008) or creativity (e.g. Dobers and Strannegård, 2004)—thereby potentially treating lived space as a separate and somehow more authentic sphere. In short, the qualifications ascribed to the conceived, the perceived or the lived—or, for that matter, to a dichotomic distinction between abstract and concrete space (Dale and Burrell, 2008)—are translated into rather orthodox representational strategies. ‘Objects’ of inquiry are intersected orthogonally, based on a conceptual grid which potentially detaches the spatial scholar from what is being studied and thus, in the search for spatial ordering, fixes and immobilizes the processual performances of spacing (De Cock and Sharp, 2007).

Perhaps, too much is made of Lefebvre’s spatial heuristics here. For one, in line with his rethinking of dialectics he repeatedly stresses the importance of seeing the three terms of the spatial triad as simultaneously affecting each other: ‘There are always Three. There is always the Other’ (Lefebvre, 2003b: 50). Neither term can thus be thought of without recourse to the other two. Even then, however, departing from a pre-constructed typology of spaces might miss the point, ‘for the knowledge sought here [does] not construct models, typologies or prototypes of spaces; rather it offers an exposition of the production of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 404; emphasis in original). We think it should make us pause that The Production of Space ends with the claim that ‘we are concerned with nothing that even remotely resembles a system’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 423). Indeed, Lefebvre’s ‘loose, episodic and frequently prolix’ as well as ‘tantalizing vague writing style’ might pose a deliberate strategy of performing research, of dealing with the manifoldness of spatial becoming (Merrifield, 1995: 295). As Entrikin and Berdoulay (2005: 145) argue, a formulaic application of conceptual excerpts of Lefebvre’s spatial thinking might fall short on his imaginative and experimental spirit of ‘writing space’.

However, we do not claim that the representational strategies of spatio-organizational analyses cannot be based on a certain reading of Lefebvre’s problematic of coming to terms with spatial multiplicity. In order to make room for spacing, it is helpful to briefly reflect on an ambiguity at work in The Production of Space as well as, perhaps, in Lefebvre’s larger oeuvre (Elden, 2004a). On the one hand, ‘there is a strongly essentialist motif running through Lefebvre’s account, with society as an abstract principle that is actualised by expressing itself concretely in space’ (Collinge, 2008: 2615; e.g. Lefebvre, 1991: 129). In this sense, Lefebvre’s treatment of space remains committed to a totalizing approach, assimilating the contingencies of space to a framework dedicated to the necessities of dialectical reasoning—a ‘dialectical mopping-up operation’ (Doel, 1999: 118) that might compel the (spatial) scholar to see everything in terms of an unfolding of contradictions between conceived, perceived and lived spaces to be synthesized in his or her work (Doel, 2008). Thus, it seems that the question of the possibility of an adequate representation of reality does not pose itself, and that ‘contingency and the aleatory are not operative problems for Lefebvre’ (Waite, 2008: 96). In The Production of Space, this becomes most apparent in a historical narrative of space that traces the emergence of the colonizing force of capitalism’s abstract space by way of a generalized dialectics of spatial epochs and its dualistic forces (Lefebvre, 1991: 229 et seqq.). This teleological narrative is connected to the presupposition of the full, authentic nature of man buried beneath the capitalist production of space. There is an ‘anthropocentric yearning for the human body to be disclosed as the proper measure of space’ (Doel, 1999: 14), in Lefebvre’s words, a yearning for ‘the necessary and inevitable restoration of the total body’ (1991: 405). For Lefebvre, this full body is to be dialectically restored in a re-appropriated social space—the urban society yet to come (Lefebvre, 2003a).

But then again, the work of Lefebvre brings along multiple interpretations, some of which can help us to move considerably in the direction of a performative concept of spacing. If we take into account Lefebvre’s career-spanning project of exploring everyday life, arguably his most important topic (Elden, 2004a), a somewhat qualified reading of his work on space takes shape (Fraser, 2008; Kipfer et al., 2008; Simonsen, 2005; Zhang and Beyes, 2009). Lefebvre here emerges as a thinker who never tires of stressing the irreducible remainder of everyday life as the sphere where things do not add up, who denounces philosophical finalism (Lefebvre, 2003a: 67–68) and cautions against treating everyday life solely ‘as a repository of larger processes’ (Kipfer et al., 2008: 8; e.g. Lefebvre, 2008a); as a theorist whose approach is described as ‘a sort of participant observation’ of the everyday (Merrifield, 2006: 4; see Lefebvre, 2008b) and who experiments with different styles of writing in order to apprehend its experiential textures; as a researcher whose ‘understanding of space (…) must begin with the lived and the body, that is, from a space occupied by an organic, living, and thinking being’ (Lefebvre, 2009: 229; see Simonsen, 2005) and who advocates embodied methods of sensing the messy rhythms of everyday life where ‘nothing is immobile’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 20).

For the purpose of moving towards an assertively processual and performative notion of space, it is especially the posthumously published sketch on Rhythmanalysis (2004) that adds potential here. Lefebvre already announces this project towards the end of The Production of Space, again questioning a ‘spatio-analytic’ approach because the latter term’s typological look-and-feel might compromise the exploration of the various rhythms of everyday life (1991: 405). Rhythm here is not an object of analysis but a mode of exploration (Elden, 2004b) of how, for instance, organizational spaces are ‘choreographed into being’ (Simpson, 2008: 823). Consider again Bill Viola’s video installation. Through unfolding the waiting event in slow motion, the viewer is immersed in a multiplicity of rhythms—a ‘polyrhythmia’—that produce this intensive time-space. Walking, waiting, looking—bodily rhythms that ‘unite with one another (…) in normal (…) everydayness’, producing a more or less harmonious ‘eurhythmia’. The gush of water, bodies out of balance, the palette of emotions—rhythms break apart, become discordant, announcing the emergence of an ‘arrhythmia’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 16). Such is the processual performing of space. And the rhythmanalyst summons all senses to perform the space that envelops him/her: ‘[t]he ear, the eyes and the gaze and the hands are in no way passive instruments that merely register and record’, writes Lefebvre (2004: 83) in ‘more-than-representational’ mode; he/she ‘changes that which he observes: he[/she] sets it in motion, he[/she] recognises its power’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 25).

It is via and with Lefebvre, then, that we have arrived at the possibility of embodied apprehensions of the everyday performing of space and of different enactments of organizational geographies. In the following, we attempt to expand on the spirit and sensibility at work in Rhythmanalysis. For this we connect to more recent spatial imaginations that have been grouped together under the umbrella term of non-representational theory.

Spacing: a non-representational mode of theorizing

Taking issue with the complexities and openings in the readings of Lefebvre on our pathfinding through ‘the enormous, subterranean revolution in the art of spatial science’ (Doel, 1999: 2), we arrive at a re-diagramming of space that moves the thinking of organizational space towards a number of important thresholds that we approach with the help of writings that have been labelled non-representational theory (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Cadman, 2009; Lorimer 2005, 2007, 2008; Thrift, 2007). As an ‘entry’ into such a rethinking of space, we follow Derrida (1981) in leaving room for the insistence of spacing:

[S]pacing is a concept which also, but not exclusively, carries the meaning of a productive, positive, generative force (…) it carries along with it a genetic motif: it is not only the interval, the space constituted between two things (which is the usual sense of spacing), but also spacing, the operation, or in any event, the movement of setting aside (…) It marks what is set aside from itself, what interrupts every self-identity, every punctual assemblage of the self, every self-homogeneity, self-interiority. (p. 106 et seq., fn 42; emphasis in original)

Spacing is thus not understood in the sense of disassociation, of forcing distanciated positions onto space, but of generative and overflowing movements that produce space (Doel, 1999). The excess of space, then, is unrepresentable in a mimetic sense (Massey, 2005: 28); it entails irreducible movement and the impossibility to seal a ‘general theory’; it always already ‘disjoins and deforms the integrity of the previously arrayed positions’ (Doel, 1999: 120). Moreover, ‘[s]pace is therefore constitutive in the strongest possible sense and it is not a misuse of a term to call it performative’ (Thrift, 2003: 2023).

To ground the concept of spacing, then, we draw upon non-representational theorizing. Here, ‘[t]he focus falls on how life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions’ (Lorimer, 2005: 84). As this enumeration indicates, what has come to be called non-representational theory is a fairly broad church. This is reflected in the sources it draws upon for conceptual and empirical inspiration, such as Latourian Actor-Network Theory, complexity theory, the process philosophies of Whitehead and Bergson, phenomenological and feminist writings on embodiment and, prominently, performance studies and Deleuzian rhizomatics. In the following we map out a number of features that inform the practice of non-representational theorizing (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Cadman, 2009; Thrift, 2007): first, everyday practice and materiality; second, embodiment and the body; third, affect and sensation; and fourth, multiplicity and a minor politics.

First, the turn to practices as they play out in everyday life is of course a well-rehearsed one (Schatzki et al., 2001). With non-representational theory, it is however a particularly far-reaching and perhaps radical one: ‘Practices are productive concatenations that have been constructed out of all manner of resources and which provide the basic intelligibility of the world: they are not therefore the properties of actors but of the practices themselves’ (Thrift, 2007: 8). Such a notion of practice is thus pre-individual; it assumes practices to not be tied to human subjects but stabilized, material-relational bundles of ‘all manners of resources’. This anti-substantialist view implies a material imagination that is at odds with the notion of, in Foucault’s words, ‘the pure gold of things themselves’ (Foucault, 2002: 38). ‘[M]atter potentially takes place with the capacities and properties of any element (i.e. earth, wind, fire, air) and/or any state (i.e. solid, liquid, gaseous)’ (Anderson and Wylie, 2009: 319). Advocating the relevance of materiality becomes arguing for apprehending ‘different relations and durations of movement, speed and slowness rather than simply a greater consideration of objects’ (Latham and McCormack, 2004: 705). Moreover, it follows that practices are not inherently stable but need to be continuously enacted. The performativity of practice thus allows the mundane to be enacted in a repetitive manner—‘[p]ermanence is a special effect of fluidics’ (Doel, 1999: 17)—while invariably provoking unforeseen encounters and transformations. Finally, if the everyday enactments of practice come first, then we cannot identify a world accessible to mental representations beyond the practices that enact it. Theories do not represent but form practices themselves. They are practical means of going on (Thrift, 1999) and adding to the world (Massumi, 2002a).

Second, non-representational theory dwells on the emphasis on the wide spreading of things and all kinds of inhuman traffic and how these interact with the human body. The latter is not conceptualized as ‘last resort’ or as a preformed entity and origin (and it is here where the difference between non-representational theorizing and Lefebvre’s insistence on the ‘proper’ body as yardstick of space becomes apparent). Rather, it is seen as an outcome of and the setting for a play of connections and forces, a ‘volatile combination of flesh, fluids, organs, skeletal structure and dreams, desires, ideas, social conventions and habits’ (Latham et al., 2009: 108).

Third, such notions of practice and the body are interwoven with their construction out of ‘a spatial swirl of affects’ (Thrift, 2006: 143). Following Deleuze (1988) and Massumi (2002a), affects denote pre-individual forces that escape and exceed the human body, ‘producing a continually changing distribution of intensities which prefigure encounters, which set up encounters, and which have to be worked on in these encounters’ (Thrift, 2000: 219). Thinking the affective materiality that performs space thus means pondering an intensity of relations that are always in excess, of a transpersonal capacity taking place before thought kicks in (Thrift, 2004). Instead of returning to a phenomenological stance that sees the corporeal as a stable basis of human experience, affect instigates us not so much to look at representations and significations as to engage with the intensities and the forces of organizational life, an event across bodies from which sensible experience emerges (McCormack, 2007). Therefore, for non-representational theory the spaces of the everyday ‘are not just a filigree bolstering an underlying social machine but a series of pre-individual ethologies that incessantly rehearse a materialism in which matter turns into a sensed-sensing energy with multiple centres’ (Thrift, 2007: 17). This way, anti-substantialist and pre-individual matters of sensory awareness and atmosphere enter the scene of spatial thinking.

Fourth, such thinking, or sensing, of the processual performativity of space—of spacing—‘acknowledges the co-existence of a multiplicity of time-spaces’ (Cadman, 2009: 460). The excess of space, in other words, is a prerequisite for exploring difference, otherness and novelty. It is in this sense that the question of space cannot be untied from the question of the political (Massey, 2005: 99): ‘The politics of space turn on that which exceeds it’ (Wigley, 1995: 153). This can be translated into a minor politics of affirming the excess of space and thus of ‘making more room in the world for new political forms’ (Thrift, 2007: 22). For sure, this is a modest political practice. It abandons the assumed authority and putative certainties of ‘theory’ in favor of a more generous, attentive and responsive ‘witnessing’ (Dewsbury, 2003) which attempts to keep an openness to the event of spacing; which tries to stick to ‘the practical ethic of not being unworthy of what is disturbing the spaces we inhabit’; and which dares to assume ‘that at no time can we ever be quite sure what our bodies can yet do, our lives become, the shapes they might assume, the spatial arrangements into which they might enter (…)’ (Rajchman, 1998: 17, 1).

Of course, these assumptions and arguments have not remained uncontested. Before we ponder the implications of non-representational theorizing for the analysis of organizational space, we briefly point at three major criticisms. First, advocating a minor politics (of research) has attracted accusations of ‘reduced political horizons’ (Harvey, 2006: 411) that would render a radically critical stance unthinkable and could easily be inscribed into the neo-liberal ideology of refusing to acknowledge the persistence of grave social hierarchies ‘in the flat pluralist world of business class’ (Smith, 2005: 887). Second, the emphasis on pre-subjective geographies of affect has led to feminist concerns about an insensitivity to ‘power geometries’ (Tolia-Kelly, 2006) and a masculinist ‘disavowal of the feminized “personal”’ which would reproduce the ‘trope of emotion (…) as objectionably soft and implicitly feminized’ (Thien, 2005: 452). Third, the aplomb with which non-representational theory sometimes seems to bid farewell to all things representational is perhaps misplaced in a ‘modest’ theorizing that apprehends each and every act of representation as a performative ‘doing’ (Castree and MacMillan, 2004): ‘[T]here is not really a choice between representation and nonrepresentation, there are only singular presentations’ (Cadman, 2009: 462). In this sense, it has been suggested to speak of a ‘more-than-representational’ geography (Lorimer, 2005: 84).

Spacing organization: performing organizational analysis

By moving the thinking of space towards the thresholds of the material, the embodied, the affective and the minor, we have thus arrived at a performative concept of spacing. We offer the motif of performance here because it helps us to frame what we think can become a different enactment of spatio-organizational analysis, one that radicalizes thinking the process of space production and goes beyond the representational scaffold at work in the analysis of organizational space: spacing organization. Being attentive to spacing directs the organizational scholar towards embodied affects and encounters generated in the here-and-now and assembled from the manifold (im)materialities. It emphasizes the multiple registers of sensation and intensity often lost in the representational techniques of the social sciences. It sharpens our awareness of provisional spatio-temporal constellations that are in process, alive and unstable (that are in rehearsal, so to speak). It provokes openness towards everyday creativity, experimentation and the potentials of transformative spacings. We thus propose to view organizational space as performed through the simultaneous and excessive coming-together of multiple trajectories along (and exceeding) the full range of the senses.

To respond to the concept of spacing, the kind of organizational analysis we imagine would become a performative organizational geography attuned to the material, embodied, affective, and multiple sides and sites of organizing. However, the question is how such spatial cartographies can be enacted in organizational research, hereby acknowledging the spacings of organizational research itself. This is not an easy question, as non-representational theorizing does not offer any heuristics for research, yet it is ambitious enough to seek ‘to reconfigure both what it means to do research and be political’ (Cadman, 2009: 461). What Cadman has called a ‘practical poetics’ (p. 460) summarizes well the uneasy challenge to at once develop different ways of unfolding organizational processes and realizing this by being practical and engaged, i.e. by inventing and experimenting with new ways of doing research and intervening (Steyaert, 2011). In our understanding, this entails to see research itself as performative, to undertake methodological experiments or to recuperate existing methodologies in a more-than-representational logic and to attend to a politics ‘of how we are made to be/be connected’ (Thrift, 2004: 74).

First, research itself is performative, formed through social practices; in helping to enact social realities, it is productive (Law and Urry, 2004). It follows that the forms in which we conduct research and offer accounts—‘the poetics of social inquiry’—are not of secondary importance but deeply entangled with the ‘politics of social theory’ and its strategies to ‘make social life intelligible’ (Gregory, 1991: 20, 18). Reflecting the spatial practices of scholarship, then, already problematizes the image of ‘the peep hole of representation, exemplified in the egocentric apex of the cone of vision’ (Doel, 1999: 70; emphasis in original). McCormack (2008a) helpfully distinguishes between two kinds of research grammars: ‘thinking about space’ and ‘thinking-space’. In the first case, space is understood in a representative mode and researching is seen as a distanced activity, which extracts, manipulates and processes the objects to be found. In contrast, a performative notion of research as research creation relies on ‘becoming affected and inflected by encounters with and within distinctive kinds of thinking spaces—where thinking-space is both a processual movement of thought and a privileged site at which this movement is amplified and inflected by novel configurations of ideas, things and bodies’ (p. 2; emphasis in original). Performing research enacts new mappings of organizational life, strange maps, perhaps, that hardly resemble well-worn representational moves like filtering the complexity of organizational space through a pre-set three-fold dialectics of the perceived, the conceived and the lived. Rather, mapping here alludes to ‘wayfinding’ (Pile and Thrift, 1995: 1) in search of unexplored possibilities of organizational life.

Second, then, the emphasis on performance underlines and calls for experimenting with the aesthetics and embodiment of research itself. Enacting geographies of organization implies acknowledging a scholar’s irreducible entanglement and his/her own participation in transforming the texture of things, however marginally. Our aesthetical and embodied practices of writing, like those of any writer, enact space, too (Dewsbury et al., 2002), they ‘performatively contribute to the stretch of expression in the world’ (Massumi, 2002b: xxii). And of course, we are not outside ‘space’ but ‘slap bang in the middle of it’ (Thrift, 1999: 297). Therefore, research does not aim so much to diagnose, signify and represent as to describe and present, to produce assemblages of enunciation (Cadman, 2009). The task becomes attempting to perform figurations of spatial multiplicity through our accounts. Unapologetically, Thrift (2007: 12) calls for ‘pull[ing] the energy of the performing arts into the social sciences’. This is not a question of rigour—the performing arts might often be no less rigorous than a social-scientific study—but of making way for simultaneous multiplicities, for more playful and unconventional means and for regaining a sense of wonder about the spacings that surround and produce us. Cadman (2009: 461) notes that in human geography researchers have responded to this call by adopting ‘performative and experimental writing styles which seek to present either something of the ephemeral nature of everyday practice or the potential of performative writing itself’. For instance, the use of montage allows juxtaposing different research methods that inhabit different time-spaces, so that one can address the multiplicity of the non-representational world (e.g. Kraftl and Horton, 2007; Latham, 2003; Wood et al., 2007). In the context of fieldwork, Latham and McCormack (2009) suggest to work with images not as representations but as a series enabling to access everyday ecologies, engage with urban rhythms, and produce affective archives. Going beyond conventional representational strategies thus means experimenting with ‘different and as yet unformulated modes of expression (…), ones that apprehend rather than represent the world, modes that employ the full range of senses and evoke the kinaesthetic character of being in a world that is always becoming’ (Rycroft, 2005: 354; emphasis in original).

Third, research performances become a political practice. As Guattari (1995: 93) remarks, ‘affect is not a matter of representation and discursivity, but of existence’. Such existential credo finds ‘ethical and political import in thinking about methods—understood broadly—as active interventions in the taking-place of events, whether by affirming (generously, hopefully) becoming or waiting (hospitably, anxiously) for the “to come’’’ (Anderson and Harrison, 2010: 23). In response to the criticism of a reduced political purchase alluded to above, we note that, at least in Western societies, the sphere of the political itself seems to be undergoing changes. To put it broadly, spaces and times are continuously re-worked through the cultivation of atmospheres (Sloterdijk, 2004) and the modulation and engineering of affect (Thrift, 2004); they are modulated by new modes of sovereign and bio power (Anderson, 2009a). Our own involvement in an ‘immaterial capitalism’ (Lazzarato, 2004) that increasingly valorizes the expressive and the experimental thus requires an organizational theorizing that experiments with new vocabularies and ways of apprehending the everyday enactments of such formative spaces. Simultaneously, however, it is such spatial experimentation that harbours the possibility of new forms of organizing and new political imaginations. In other words, the concept of spacing reflects an ambivalence, because it proposes to ‘work with this emerging spatial grain, in the full understanding that it is both a part of a series of means of opening up new opportunities for the exercise of power and profit and a new palette of possibilities’ (Thrift, 2007: 23; emphasis in original).

Even if we cannot refer to a common heuristic to enact a performative spatial analysis of organization, we can point at a range of interesting and experimental attempts in both human geography and organization theory that echo the agenda-setting of non-representational theorizing, that draw upon a set (or selection) of its conceptual resources and that experiment with different forms and methods of research creation: event analysis (Anderson and Holden, 2008), atmospheric analysis (Anderson, 2009b; McCormack, 2008b), foam analysis (Borch, 2010), minoritarian analysis (Beyes and Steyaert, 2011), cartographic analysis and affective mappings (Kwan, 2007; Lohmann and Steyaert, 2006), rhythmanalysis (McCormack, 2002; Simpson, 2008), heterotopic analysis (Steyaert, 2010). For an exemplary case we refer to the performative study Anderson and Holden (2008) undertook of the process through which the city of Liverpool after its nomination anticipated and prepared for becoming European Capital of Culture (ECoC). Anderson and Holden subscribe to the various thresholds we pointed out, but also perform an own mixture by emphasizing the multiplicity of the event and by focusing on hope as co-constituting an affective urbanism. In their focus ‘on the heterogeneous multiplicity of the ECoC event’ (p. 143), they attend to the relation between the eventfulness of the ECoC project and the enactments of hope.

The eventfulness is described in three parallel assemblages, namely as advent, as crystallization and as a blank. The event as advent is reconstructed by attention to the pre-cognitive infrastructure folded into the affective geographies of Liverpool and its wider region, namely the circulation of promise, the stressing of newness and the seizing of opportunities. Establishing the event as advent is mostly induced through the affective labor of local state elites and contributed to the evocation of hope as hard to critique and hegemonic, ‘an affective imperative containing a normalizing and normative force’ (p. 151). Second, the event as crystallization brings along a process where certain versions of Liverpool are disposed of, as communitarian and entrepreneurial strategies are developed around the theme of creativity. Here, hope ‘has accumulated in these modes of governance and their modes of problematization and ways of governing subjects’ (p. 152). Third, the event as a blank is enacted by the various ways that the ECoC nomination engendered very different hopes than the ones inscribed in the promise of the advent or the particular institutional strategies developed through crystallization. As a consequence, there is ‘a multiplication of what could and should be hoped for and for whom hope could be given and received’ (p.153)—with contagious hopes emerging, for instance, during participatory mapping exercises. These assemblages thus alter the idea that there is a single or dominant urban register; rather there is a ‘constant qualitative differentiation (…) to foster an everyday urbanism attentive to the taking place of affects, feelings, and emotions’ (p. 145). The registers of hope are associative and collective and thus do not reside within subjects but in the circulation of signs, projects, ideas and objects. Hope becomes individuated and distributed through specific mechanisms such as induction, disposal and contagion. These three incarnations of the ECoC stand somewhere ‘between the event as quotidian happenstance and the event as rarefied change’ (p. 155).

In sum, Anderson and Holden’s study of how urban space is organized through multiple trajectories and affective registers is but one example of the manifold possibilities for spacing organization. The montage of parallel assemblages enacts spatial multiplicity and affirms a minor politics of alternative imaginations and practices, which, in this case, amounts to a politics of hope.

Towards enacting organizational geographies in slow motion

To outline and illustrate organizational analyses of spacing, we started this article by looking at how Bill Viola produces affective events and, in particular, how heterogeneous elements are assembled in visual movement by variegating focus, rhythm and detail. Second, in reflecting upon how the spatial turn has entered the study of organization in what could be called a first wave of spatio-organizational analysis inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, we have been looking for alternative interpretations. For the purpose of a processual understanding of space as spacing, we have suggested that in Lefebvre’s work, not in the least by turning to Rhythmanalysis, one can find an invitation ‘to conceive of space not as a static reality but as active, generative, to experience space as created by interaction, as something that our bodies reactivate, and that through this reactivation, in turn modifies and transforms us’ (Ross, 2008: 35). More recently, such spatial thinking has been elaborated in human geography in the form of theoretical practices that have been labelled as non- or more-than-representational theory. In a nutshell, these writings offer a performative and open-ended concept of spacing that sees space as an excessive composition of multiple forces; that is resolutely materialist in the sense of being attuned to the intensity of relations of all kind of capacities and states in which ‘physical stuff (…) is a lively participant’ (Latham et al., 2009: 62); that sees the body and embodiment as an always-already spatialized set of relations; that is struck by the spatial swirl of affective intensities and forces that sweep through the human body; and that entails a political practice, a minor politics of interventions.

In considering how a non-representational mode of theorizing can impact organizational studies, we then discussed and illustrated the conditions of organizational inquiry and analysis as enacting organizational geographies. We argued that spacing organization not only implies taking on board a conceptual awareness of the material, embodied, affective and minor configurations of space, but that it also calls for a performative practice of research and writing that takes on experiments in its attempts to perform situated, embedded and sensuous figurations and that considers its own research performances as a practice of minor politics. In reflecting upon the various conditions and possibilities of spacing organization, we might return to the idea of slow motion that features in Viola’s aesthetics and consider it as a leitmotif of what a performative approach to organizational space implies. The idea of slow motion indicates that spacing organization entails a rupture of the usual ways of researching organizational space. It stands for a turnaround of the rhythms, intensities and details through which we perform organizational analysis. At the same time, slow motion is itself a performative practice which makes us aware that such a turnaround depends on the practical inventiveness of experimenting which we infuse in methodologies of research and intervention, and practices of writing.

Inspired by the motif of slow motion, we conclude with a montage of slogans for enacting organizational geographies, slogans that we see as tactical suggestions (Condorelli, 2009; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 13; Dewsbury et al., 2002: 439; Massumi, 2002a; Thrift, 2004: 74):

Whether ‘the’ performative approach to space we developed and illustrated here can help instigating a second wave of spatio-organizational analysis is something we hope for but nothing we can foresee. However, and following Dewsbury et al. (2002: 438), we would like to think that our intervention will not be read as an attempt to nail down the whereabouts of a new theory of organizational space, but as a call for being hospitable ‘to a space left empty for encounters which may contain the potential to unfold things otherwise, each with its varied accounts and styles of expression for speaking and writing; each enacting a world, again and again’. If we may add one more slogan (Derrida, 1986: 75): Let us space.