Adorno’s grey,Taussig’s blue: Colour,organization and critical affect

The colourless world of organizational scholarship (even on affect)

Broadly put, affect can be used ‘as a general term that defines relations among all kinds of bodies’ (Seyfert, 2012: 31), that is, both human and non-human bodies. It is invoked as a ‘relational organizing power’ (Angerer, 2015: 115) that takes place below and before human cognition and that thus escapes the ‘speaking subject’. Affect studies therefore engage with what Clough (2010) calls the ‘infra-empirical’ or ‘an empiricism of sensation’; it attends to how bodies are organized in and through the transmission of forces or ‘intensities’ that move across them (p. 224). Reflections on the state of affect theory tend to agree that it entails two broad vectors (Angerer, 2015; Hemmings, 2005; Leys, 2011; Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). The psychobiological vector, usually traced to Tomkin’s psychology of affect and its reconsideration by Sedgwick, assumes affects to be sources of in-built, yet non-cognitive responses. They are impersonal in the sense of not being at the disposal of, or of being irreducible to, conventional notions of subjectivity, belief and desire. This has, for instance, led to the diagnosis of ‘basic affects’ and the study of ‘affect programs’ that trigger innate emotions and shape bodily drives (Wetherell, 2015). The second vector puts a stronger emphasis on affect’s incessant movement between states and bodies. Affects are here theorized as formless and unqualified, impersonal and non-signifying forces, becomings or intensities that are located in in-between relations and resonances. Informed by ‘Massumi’s reading of Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’, as Pile (2010: 5) somewhat sardonically puts it, these force-relations and shifting intensities are seen to ‘prefigure encounters, […] set up encounters, and […] have to be worked on in these encounters’ (Thrift, 2000: 219). They take hold of human bodies and condition what they can do.

While the psychobiological vector and its potential to rethink psychological and psychoanalytical theorems has been picked up in the study of organization (Kenny, 2012; Kenny and Fotaki, 2014), the ‘Deleuzian vector’ seems more readily to lend itself to exploring relational processes of organizing. As we discuss below, it also engages with the conundrum of colour as an in-between phenomenon that animates matter and works on human bodies. It is thus this kind of approach to, and sensibility for, organizational affect – where affect is immanently located in the midst of organizational life, conditioning organizational relations – that we seek to put into conversation with the affective force of colour. We can base this conversation on recent work that seems to instigate what can perhaps be called organization theory’s minor affective turn. For one, there is an interest in thinking economic production and labour through the lens of affectivity (e.g. Dowling et al., 2007; Gregg, 2011; Hardt, 1999). Paving the way for our attempt at attending to colour as affective force, a number of studies have been dedicated to the affective constitution and destabilization of organized settings, paying particular attention ‘to phenomena that ordinarily and routinely get suppressed or marginalized in studies of organization’ (O’Doherty, 2008: 542). These studies have touched upon the atmospheric constitution of organization (Borch, 2010), where affective blurring continuously takes place (O’Doherty, 2008), where affect works through the organization and ‘queering’ of time (Steyaert, 2015), where ‘dark’ affects mess up the everyday organization of public space (Beyes, 2010) and where the uncanny disturbs and reconfigures organizational settings (Beyes and Steyaert, 2013) just as much as the absent presence of love invites reconsiderations of gendered organizational experience (Vachhani, 2015). Methodologically, such work has been connected to affective cartographies of organizational change (Lohmann and Steyaert, 2006), psycho-geographies of city-organization (Beyes and Steyaert, 2013; O’Doherty, 2013) and organizational geographies in slow motion (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012). Notably and important for our endeavour, this body of work pays close attention to, and experiments with, the forms and styles of writing. These are often attempts at presenting affect in such a way that the presentation itself performs its connection to affect’s processuality, relationality and resonance (Clough, 2010). They can thus be read as experiments with a new or different ‘poetics of organization’ (Vachhani, 2015: 149) and, correspondingly, as disengagements from ‘the masculine form of linearity and abstraction, and of coming quickly to the point – what can be called the genre of molar text and royal science’ (Steyaert, 2015: 164). ²

While this kind of work aims to ‘give […] colour to the various affects, intensities and rhythms’ (Steyaert, 2015: 164; our emphasis) of organization, the ubiquitous world of colour itself is strangely absent from studies of organizational affect. But then, perhaps this neglect is less strange than it might appear. Broadly put, the world of colour has frustrated scholarly attempts at order, overview and representation (Batchelor, 2008). This is indicative of an inability of systematic inquiry and scholarly terminology to come to terms with hues and tones and their affective capture; of ‘a more fundamental disarray […] that baffles the usual procedures of language’ (Lichtenstein, 1993: 4). According to Lichtenstein, moving from deciphering colour as if it would be a text towards acknowledging and seeking to apprehend the force of colour means risking ‘philosophical suicide’.

And yet, it is not that thought would not be open to such suicidal tendencies when spellbound by colour (Riley, 1995). Indeed, colour’s affective agency is beginning to affect the study of the social. For instance, Taussig’s (2009) remarkable What Color is the Sacred? offers an anthropological tour de-force through colour as ‘polymorphous magical substance’, exploring how it shapes what we feel, perceive and express (De Cock, 2012). Eaton (2013) shows how visual culture and colonial representation, as well as its counter-movements, feed off the affective power of hues and tones. Thrift (2008) connects the material practices of glamour to colour’s affective spell. Lavin (2004) discusses how architectural colour is a matter of mood, atmosphere and affect. And in legal studies, colour-as-affect and its ‘nondiscursive, asignifying qualities’ are mobilized to unsettle and deterritorialize the chromophobic black and white of the law (Slaughter, 2007: 144).

Colour as affect: Deleuze, Manning, Massumi

Many of these recent attempts to grapple with what colour does relate to what we referred to above as the second vector of affect theory. Indeed, colour-as-affect figures quite prominently in this line of thought. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze (2005) connects what he calls the ‘hysteria of painting’ to colour’s direct influence on the nervous system (p. 37). Sensation is presented as a delivery-mechanism of affect – in Bacon, ‘there are nothing but affects’ (pp. 28–29) – and in painting, ‘colourism’ denotes this decisive relational ‘force’, ‘on which everything else depends’ (p. 97). Colourism thus means experimenting with colour’s affective potential. Neither employed as a symbolic sign for certain qualities nor as a way of identifying and referring to particular objects, colour here remains independent from or escapes figuration and representation. Its ‘spatializing energy’ (p. 93) creates affective space. Deleuze called it ‘haptic space’ or, paradoxically, ‘a haptic sense of sight’ (p. 107), denoting a body’s affectation by and through colour that works on all the senses. Such affectation is reflected in the vocabulary of painterly colourism: ‘not only hot and cold, but “touch” [touche], “vividness” [vif], “seizing hold of life” [saisir sur le vif], “achieving clarity” [tirer au clair]’ (p. 97).

Relatedly, in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze (1986) reflects on ‘the colour-space of colourism’ (p. 117) as a singular force of affect. It takes the form of uniform tints of surface-colour, of ‘atmospheric colour which pervades all the others’ and of ‘movement-colour’ and its shifting tones, but most of all works through its capacity to absorb, engulf and seize anything whatsoever. Emphatically quoting the film-maker Godard’s credo ‘it’s not blood, it’s red’, Deleuze presents it as ‘the formula of colourism’ (p. 118; emphasis in original). Again, a symbolist notion of colour – the correspondence between specific colours and particular affects (the menace of yellow, the hotness of red etc.) – is rejected. ‘Colour is on the contrary the affect itself, that is, the virtual conjunction of all the objects which it picks up’ (p. 118; emphasis added). Things might be perceived and feelings might be expressed through colours, but this is predicated on colour’s affective potential above and beyond reference. Exemplified by certain films, then, for Deleuze, colour-as-affect harbours the potential to produce what he calls ‘any-space-whatever’ (p. 120), spaces that lose their homogeneity, become uncertain and contingent, and are thus charged with the potential of becoming-other.

Massumi extended Deleuze’s colourism to further inquiries into the sphere of colour and/as affect. In Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism (2002b), he dwells on how colour in general, and blue in particular, is able to strike human bodies, an atmospheric force between objects and subjects that befalls and shapes ‘their joint situation’ (p. 211). Colour as affect is not only a personal experience, and neither does it reside in objects, although it can certainly be ascribed to them; it is ‘produced in context and eternally “insists” on itself, in pushy independence’ (p. 213; emphasis in original). There invariably is a trans-situational surplus beyond the emotions of the personalized capture of colour experience. This surplus is ‘the connecting thread of experience’ and ‘the invisible glue that holds the world together’, moving in and out of sight, or rather, haptic vision. Such is affect, and such is what colour does. If it appears as subjective emotion or as a property of an object, then affect has struck and is contained or stilled; colour’s processual charge and openness disappear from view. And yet, to Massumi, the world is always on the verge of taking on a different hue, fostering new sensations. What are usually regarded as the objective characteristics of colour – hue, saturation, brightness – can certainly be defined and measured in terms of wavelength properties, but they are not able to fully account for the vagaries of colour experience – of its capacity to affect and be affected.

Finally, Erin Manning’s (2008) reflections on ‘coloring the virtual’ seek to demonstrate the affect of colour again by way of a visual art piece. What we see or how we see, or rather ‘see-feel’ – her way of describing haptic vision – when experience is coloured by colour’s force, the ‘more-than’ what is represented, are glimpses of the virtual taking form, becoming actual. Harking back to Deleuze’s ‘movement-image’, in such cases,

[t]he how of seeing … is never a representation of movement, nor is it a projection of movement. It is a moving-with of perception in the making … This feltness of seeing is itself coloured: perception reddens, oranges, blackens. This colouring comes through virtually – we never see it as such. (p. 329)

In the vocabulary of affect theory, then, as an affective force ‘both moved and moving’ colour enacts a secular magic ‘through the establishment of human-nonhuman fields of captivation’ (Thrift, 2008: 9, 10). Colour animates matter and brings forth an ‘unconscious poetry of substance’ (p. 16), which affects or strikes the human body before cognition, emotion and the organization of reason kick in. With regard to the question of affect’s criticality, the texts discussed above share an emphasis on the unexpected and unforeseeable, or what one could call a critical focus on the singular, the unusual and a fairly unspecific ‘affective freedom’ (Hemmings, 2005). The critical potential of colour-as-affect here lies in its ‘lines of flight’ freed from constraints and normative social organization. Massumi (2002a) has indeed emphasized that affect is critically pertinent precisely because it is an autonomous force, which escapes bodies and forms of capture. In this sense, however, it must be out of reach of critical interpretation, too. In the words of Hemmings’ (2005) (broadly sympathetic) assessment, ‘we are left with a riddle-like description of affect as something scientists can detect the loss of (in the anomaly), social scientists and cultural critics cannot interpret, but philosophers can imagine’ (p. 563). While this is perhaps a refreshing stance against a comfortable position of negative critique – Massumi (2002a), for one, tends to present rather sweepingly ‘critical thinking’ as outdated and even unreflexive – our engagement with colour and/as critical affect calls for a more nuanced and careful approach. For this, we find inspiration in the genealogy of attempts to think colour as affect.

Colour’s criticality: Goethe, Benjamin

The attention granted to colour in the Deleuze-inspired vector of affect thinking not only reminds us to connect the study of organizational affect to colour; it also points towards a venerable tradition of thinking the chromatics of affect. An in-depth engagement with this conceptual lineage, which cuts across schools of thought often held to be incompatible or inimical, is beyond the scope of this article. For our purposes, we briefly focus on older ways and styles of pondering the affective medium of colour in order to coax out a distinct approach to ‘critical affect’.

In 1810, the poet and polymath Goethe published his landmark Theory of Colours. As an outcome of decades of proto-phenomenological experiments with colour’s constitution and effects, the Theory of Colours is regarded as the founding document for modern explorations of colour’s capacity to affect. Goethe, writes Deleuze (2005: 97), is the first to explore and think ‘colour-space’. Aware of the limits of language to present what ‘might rather be called powers than objects, and which are ever in movement’, Goethe (1810/1840: 300) pioneered a sensibility for colour as ‘matter-force rather than matter-form’ (Taussig, 2008: 7). In this reading of the Theory of Colours – for sure, there are others (Brusatin, 1991) – Goethe tentatively and probingly maps out the field of affective chromatics: colour is apprehended as a relational force that is ever in movement and between subject and object. It ‘strikes’ affected bodies, which become contingent and invariably specific co-producers of colour experience; in this sense, it precedes and shapes feelings and thought. Colour, then, is afforded an agency, a rhythm and life of its own. ‘Colour walks’, is alive, Taussig (2009: 26) writes. It is, says Benjamin (2011a: 211–212), ‘something winged that flits from one form to the next’ and thus the ‘medium of all changes, and not a symptom’.

Indeed, Benjamin’s fragments and snippets on colour serve as our main point of reference here, since they give a critical edge to the exploration of colour as affect. Caygill (1998) argues that Benjamin based his notion of speculative experience on colour and chromatic experience, with ‘chromatic differentiation’ taking the place of ‘linguistic signification’ as ‘paradigm of experience’ (p. xiii). ³ Colour experience therefore pushes us to the limits of thought: colour ‘is quality alone’ and in no way substance; ‘[c]olors see themselves’, they are ‘objects and organs’ of seeing at the same time (Benjamin, 2011b: 2018). Such chromatic experience enables a genuine critical mode of perception. It would come to shape Benjamin’s epistemological approach to history and culture as well as later concepts such as dialectical image, thought-image and memory-image (Weigel, 2015). In his study on Benjamin’s thought subtitled The Colour of Experience, Caygill (1998) turns to the question of organization to describe what is at stake here. As a force or medium (and not a symptom) of organization, colour becomes ‘a technology for organising experience’ (p. 80). It is at work in the ‘awkward fusions and confusions of the political and the technological forms of organisation’, which shape perception (p. 78) as well as in ‘the nuances of riotous colour’, often in neglected details, which harbour ‘the possibility […] of a reorganisation of experience through colour’ (p. 152; emphasis added).

Perhaps now more than ever, an affective machinery and its technologies of sentiment are busy manipulating collective moods by pre-cognitively cultivating mass emotions, constituting a new form of performance management (Amin and Thrift, 2013; Hjorth and Pelzer, 2007). The important ‘lesson’ to draw from Benjamin is that experiencing and thinking colour can be particularly attuned to the interplay of control and liberation, and thus to the potential of critical practice and thought. Qualifying a tendency to celebrate affect’s liberating force, then, such thinking reckons with its continuous administration, with ‘colour management’ (Blaszczyk, 2012) and colour as an agent of power and domination spreading sameness (Connellan, 2013). And yet, its sheer fluidity and contingency announce escape routes out of the organization of experience in which it finds itself, as Benjamin was so aware of (and as Deleuze celebrated with regard to the arts of painting and film). Colour thus propels thinking to deal with both the instrumental modulation of affect and its overflow, that which exceeds and possibly subverts technologies of capture and control.

Implications for the study of organizational affect

What are the implications of our somewhat hurried journey through the landscape of colour, affect and critique so far? We have broadly situated our endeavour along a vector of scholarship that approaches affect as a field of impersonal and pre-cognitive forces that take hold of and shape what human bodies can do. Following this line of thought, we have discerned a minor turn to affect in the study of organization. It engages with affects as immanent to, albeit often overlooked elements of, organizational settings and experiences, which create lines of flight that offer an escape from organizational-life-as-normal. However, colour does not show up in these accounts. Taking a closer look at how affect theorists have grappled with colour-force, we have arrived at the notion of colour-as-affect. It animates matter, strikes human bodies and is ‘stilled’ in sense experience and the ensuing feelings and thoughts.

Yet, at least with regard to colour, affect theory seems to overemphasize its non-determined, non-instrumental and liberating qualities. By way of a short detour into the history of thinking chromatics in terms of what colour does or can do, we have indicated that there is a rich critical tradition of thinking colour/space, that is, the relational movements of hues and tones that engulf the observer, affording sensations and perceptions. With Benjamin, moreover, we have argued that a speculative mode of colour experience thus opens the possibility of critically sensing and thinking organizational transformation through the interplay of colours. Importantly, this entails an awareness of the ambiguity of colour as both technology of control and ‘unmanageable thing’ (Taussig, 2009: 17).

The implications for the study of organizational affect seem both clear-cut and somewhat tricky. First and foremost, organizational scholars are asked to become aware of colour as an affective force of organizing by default, which is immanent to organizational life. Second, colour-as-affect does not operate through the structures of language, discourse and meaning. Attending to colour thus calls for a different form of knowing, a different ‘attunement’ (Stewart, 2011) to the relational interplay of hues and tones, and thus for a more speculative mode of experience. Third, such an attunement should be of interest to a critical study of organizational affect, since it directs attention towards colour’s fundamental ambiguity between instrumental organization and unmanageable reorganization of experience. In embodying and transforming organizational relations, colour thus underscores how the affective is central to the politics of organization (cf. Kenny et al., 2013). Connellan (2012) explores in this context how ‘[w]hite as a colour becomes a code for power but the code is made to seem so ubiquitous that it is no longer visible in and of itself’ (p. 66). Fourth, our (over)generous use of quotations perhaps already points to the challenge of ‘writing colour’. There is a textual colourism that can propel us to experiment with a more daring and adventurous writing ‘from within’ colour-space, ⁴ and from which the study of organizational affect can draw courage and inspiration. With these reflections, we think that it is time to enter colour/space.

Adorno’s grey

Two art conservators in lab coats scrape away paint and plaster from the walls of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s old lecture hall (Hörsaal VI) at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. They are searching for a mythical colour: Adorno’s grey. The great critical theorist, so the legend goes, had the walls of his lecture hall painted completely grey (Lemhöfer, 2008) – a prime pedagogical case of managing affect. According to the apocryphal story, the chosen monochrome was supposed to aid the students’ concentration and to minimize distraction. This story of course harks back to much older tropes that paint the difference between philosophy and life as one between greyness and colour. ‘Grey, dear friend, is all theory/And green the golden tree of life’, Mephistopheles proclaims in Goethe’s (1808/1987: 61) Faust, Part One. And Hegel (1820/1968: 13) remarks in the famous preface to his Philosophy of Right that ‘philosophy paints its grey on grey’ when forms of life ‘cannot be rejuvenated, but only known’ by means of grey. Thinking is always too late to show life how it ought to be lived, and ‘[t]he owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering’.

Steyerl’s images, shot in black and white but low in saturation and contrast, radiate an eerie, stunning grey hue. They seem to play with and problematize the age-old trope of the greyness of theory versus the chromatics of life. What emerges is a grey of uncertainty and seeking, to echo Deleuze’s (1986: 117) ruminations on ‘the affection-image’ in film, vibrating ‘with the more-than of its actual representation’ (Manning, 2008: 328; emphasis in original). Complementing the moving images’ grey vividness, the voice-over narrates an infamous event while we watch the conservators chipping away. In the turbulent months at the end of the 1960s, colour and critical affect disrupts Adorno’s lecture ‘Introduction to Dialectical Thought’ of 22 April 1969. There is heckling, unrest and confusion; the more radical wing of the student protest turns against the ‘shitty critical theoreticians’ (as Adorno’s doctoral student Hans-Jürgen Krahl put it; quoted after Pinto, 2014: 162) and particularly against the most pre-eminent thinker of what would come to be called the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. A rhyme is scribbled on the blackboard: ‘Wer nur den lieben Adorno läßt walten, der wird den Kapitalismus sein Leben lang behalten’ (‘The ones who let dear Adorno rule will preserve capitalism for the rest of their lives’; translation from Pinto, 2014: 162). After stating that he would give his students five minutes to decide on whether the lecture should take place or not, Adorno is surrounded by three female students who shower him with tulips and roses and bare their breasts, dancing around his desk. The shocked professor hastily picks up his material and leaves the room in tears. He would never teach again. The remaining lectures were called off and later that year Adorno died of a heart attack. Some 40 years later, in one of the many stories woven around the event, a journalist revisits Hörsaal VI. Entering the now purple doors to the lecture hall, walking past a flashy green advertisement for a mobile phone service provider, she stumbles upon a Professor of Management adjusting his power point slides to show the graphs and curves of a budgeting and finance lecture (Lemhöfer, 2008).

In Steyerl’s film, meanwhile, the fabled grey does not resurface, and the conservators start scratching the white walls, creating a greyish visual effect as if at work on an abstract painting. The video’s visual and auditory narratives rub against each other without being resolved. There is no black and white here; no historical settling of scores, only a fluctuating spectrum of greys. The film’s complexity seems to caution against a facile comment on scholarly chromophobia where black on white represents the cold, rational, ‘male’ and ‘Western’ analytics, whereas colour is delegated to some dangerous other or foreign body, such as the half-naked female students armed with flowers, or ‘the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological’ (Batchelor, 2000: 23). Rather than positing a glib commentary on radical theory, radical politics or radical art (or a lament on their foregone potential), the essay-film’s shades and nuances of grey produce – and draw the viewer into – colour/space, thus propelling her to think. Such is the affective force of colour. It is the chromatic experience, then, the ‘more-than-representational’ effects of its shifting greys, that enacts a dialectic of control and openness to change. The fabled grey of discipline, concentration and docile students harbours uncertainty and becoming-other; it is equally managed substance and unmanageable force, itself prone to fluctuations and to the interruptions of ‘riotous colour’ that reorganize classroom experience (Caygill, 1998: 152).

We can only note in passing that experiencing Adorno’s Grey can also summon reflections on how colour inflects critical theories; how it is intertwined with theory and thought. Adorno not only had the walls of his classroom painted grey; he also developed a Goethean sensibility for what colour does. Even the comparably bleak meditations on abstract art’s black, presented as ideal and force of resistance in Adorno’s (2004) Aesthetic Theory, show clear traces of colour’s assumed capacity to allow transformative experiences and thoughts, at least temporarily releasing us from the traps of consumer capitalism. But of course, the latter is predicated on colour’s affective charge – and it is for instance in the collection of aphorisms titled Minima Moralia that Adorno (1951) lashes out against the manipulative force of the gaudy and false hues and tones of technicolour and the bright and dazzling surfaces of the culture industry and commodity capitalism. The study of affect’s criticality and co-optation is thus asked to deal with the chromatics of social organization.

Taussig’s blue

The ‘unthinkable scandal’ of colour (Melville, 1996: 141) inevitably haunts the spaces and times of organizing. Consider indigo (Taussig, 2008, 2009: 141–158)! At the forefront of global commerce, slave trade and empire, ending up in military and police uniforms as much as in the presumed anti-uniform of Levi-Strauss jeans and the workers’ boiler suits beloved by Bauhaus artists and thinkers, indigo has quite a story to tell (Eaton, 2013; Pastoureau, 2001). A pigment of brilliant and comparably steadfast purple-bluish hue, the indigo-making process was as labour-intensive and horrific as it was miraculous to (at least Western) observers. Taussig unearths a marvellous source, from which he quotes at length. In Rural Life in Bengal, published in 1864, an Englishman named Colesworthy Grant recorded observations of everyday village life which are shot through with indigo.

There is the sheer intensity of production: the crushing of indigo plants, their placing in river water where they have to stay for 10–12 hours, the water level rising with the swelling of the plants and the tribesmen entering the vat to beat the strange liquid with paddles for 2 hours, beating the blue lined up in neat rows, which turns into a blue-bodied choreography of crushing physical labour that is simultaneously a choreography of dancing, crying and singing, advancing, retreating, to the right, to the left, changing hands, building one line to beat from end to end, forming a circle and moving towards each other ‘like the figures in a quadrille […] until the whole contents of the vat are in a whirl’ (Grant, quoted in Taussig, 2009: 150). Becoming indecipherable from the physical intensity of production, there is the force of colour. The vat metamorphoses, is alive in a composite force of human labour and chromatic excess, orange, green, olive,

so that I am puzzled to tell you what precise colour it really has […] When the beating commences […] it generally presents a light green complexion. This through a variety of beautiful changes, gradually darkens into a Prussian green, and from that, as the beating continues, and the colouring matter more perfectly develops itself […] into the intense deep blue of the ocean in stormy weather. (Grant in Taussig, 2009: 152)

Colour’s affective intensities appear here as pivotal to the organization of lives and bodies. First, the processes of labour and production, however sordid, cannot be disconnected from colour’s atmospheric whirl. Our observer Grant is pulled into colour/space, where the shifting interplay of hues animates matter and strikes human bodies. Both auspicious and horrific, there is a redemptive obscenity at work in the depiction of exhausting labour in its chromatic, choreographed beauty. Second, colour’s combustible mix of attraction and repulsion, chromophilia and chromophobia marks the colonizer’s fascination with exotic hues, dyes and pigments. Grant’s awed descriptions are testament to how indigo production and the indigo worker become the contradictory site of colonial anxiety and phantasms of the other, where true craft and true colour flourish in the idealized archaic Indian village. Third, if colour thus was ‘the coke of empire’ (Eaton, 2013: 9), then colour-as-affect was at the core of the global chains of production, labour, trade and mercantile capitalism, shaping and energizing it (Taussig, 2009). And such is colour’s ambiguity: the revered indigo ‘speaks of colonialism and bloodshed’; in this sense, it is ‘a malevolent colour’ (Eaton, 2013: 7).

How could critical organizational scholarship ever forget about colour’s affective force? Perhaps, as Taussig (2008) speculates, ‘[i]n making the magic of color itself a commodity, we effectively blinded ourselves to its magic’ (p. 12). He thus embarks on a passionate quest to ‘redeem indigo’ (Taussig, 2009: 141). In the context of our much more modest attempt to confront the critical study of organizational affect with colour, the anthropologist performs an exemplary feat of social inquiry into colour’s organizational force: from the gruesome affective labour of indigo production in the colonies, to the Western fascination with, and repulsion by, the coloured colonial other; from the ‘rush’ of colour, ‘that takes us out of ourselves’ like a drug, to the surplus value that colour’s affectual capacity brought to the commodity form (Taussig, 2009: 146); from colour’s allure that saw it attached to military uniforms, ruling class garments as well as working class jeans, to the manifold artistic and poetic attempts to both capture and transform what blue can do.

Colour, organization and critical affect

Reflecting on our two cases, we suggest that Steyerl and Taussig present approaches to critical affect that we would like to see amplified in the critical study of organization. For one, both colour/spaces affectively and reflectively present the realm of chromatics as an affective sphere par excellence. Colour here is seen as forever in movement and taking on contrasts and configurations with other colours. It animates matter and intensifies sense perception. It both renders and evades form: the organization of labouring bodies, classrooms and commodities. More than just metaphorical speech or a regime of signification, let alone a secondary veil merely attached to objects and forms, colour becomes a primary organizational force in its own right, which the thinking and apprehending of affect needs to take into account. Rather than being an ‘other’ to thought (the green of ‘life’ vs the grey of ‘theory’; the horrific beauty of indigo), thinking is imbued with colour-as-affect. ‘Colour’, affect theorists Manning and Massumi (2014; emphasis omitted) write, ‘is thinking’s affective accompaniment (p. 80). Its feeling friend’. Furthermore, the ‘feeling friend’ of hues, shades and tones is far from innocent; it is entangled with and perhaps even shapes relations of domination and control as well as forces of critique and liberation, as Steyerl’s essay-film and Taussig’s meditation on blue insinuate.

Second, both examples present us with the immanent operation of affect in conditioning organizational life. In this sense, Steyerl’s fluctuating greys and Taussig’s shifting tones of indigo production and commercialization reflect and perform a critical ‘chromatics of organizing’ (Beyes, in press). We can discern at least three layers that are interwoven in the respective ‘performances’: workspace, consumption and alternative organizing. For one, ‘Taussig’s blue’ lays out a vivid scene of how exploitative labour is shot through with colour-as-affect that shapes the process of production. Adorno’s Grey, on the other hand, is re-enacted (and subverted) as an organizational space of discipline and focused study. Both cases encapsulate and allow the exploration of colour as social technology and management tool in the workspace, which cannot be disentangled from its affective force that shapes experience and conduct. And both colour/spaces of work are presented as ambivalent sites, suppressing and uplifting at the same time (Connellan, 2013). Then there is the organizational sphere of consumption. It is through the use of colour that Steyerl’s film makes the viewer ponder or reread Adorno’s critique of the dazzling colours of commodities and how affect operates on late capitalist consumers who are held ‘interidiotically stable’ (Thrift, 2008: 12). Taussig, on the other hand, seeks to push his readers into the affective allure and seductiveness of colour that lends commodities their intoxicating force, albeit without reducing colour to a kind of affective surplus value merely employed to boost consumption. Indeed, both scenes broach the affective charge of colour as defamiliarizing and disorienting and thus as potentially resistant and politically emancipatory, at work in alternative forms of organizing, which seem so often tied to the rush of colour, its rallying force. Taussig’s description hints at the correlation of colour and independence struggle (Eaton, 2013); Steyerl’s greys reflect on the outbreak of colours that accompany and affectively shape protest movements.

Third, if colour-as-affect is immanent to organizational life, then this calls for an ‘immanent critique’, which injects contingency into and thus helps transform the forms of life and organization in which it finds itself. It should not surprise us that the notion of ‘immanent critique’ can be traced back to Benjamin and the speculative experience of colour in its fundamental ambiguity between instrumental organization and unmanageable reorganization of experience (Caygill, 1998). As such colour takes us away from generalized statements of affect’s universal capture as well as of abstract speculations about virtual intensities forever beyond our grasp, and from a simple cause-and-effect model that is still prevalent in much of the literature on organizational aesthetics, conceiving of the new empirical object as something through which theoretical knowledge might be identified or confirmed (O’Doherty, 2008). As we already indicated in the introduction, attempts to ‘still’ colours for organizational purposes tend to auto-subvert: for example, from ‘purity’ to ‘sickening discomfort’ in the case of white (Kisacky, 2012); from ‘alternative credibility’ to ‘corporate capture’ in the case of green (DeLong and Goncu-Berk, 2012). The elusive and ambiguous nature of colour thus makes it resistant as the next topic ready for colonization and subsumption for purposes long established in organization studies, as has happened with for example literature (De Cock and Land, 2006) or space (Kornberger and Clegg, 2004).

As both Benjamin and Taussig repeatedly point out, one of capitalism’s principal effects is the destruction of the conditions necessary for an adequate human experience – in this case, colour experience or ‘the colour of experience’, to re-quote Caygill. To us this is what links Taussig’s blue to Adorno’s grey: Letting ourselves be affected by colour can bring about a displacement of our angle of vision and our mundane ways of being in the world, thus injecting contingency into our usual forms of experience and their interpretations and opening them up for future possibilities. Benjamin’s wager, then, has lost none of its urgency: only through a transformation in the experience of time and space which colour facilitates can a new form of human collectivity emerge (Eiland and Jennings, 2014). ⁵ ‘When will we cough blue?’ (Taussig, 2008: 10).