An aesthetics of displacement : Thomas Pynchon's symptomatology of organization
Journal
Journal of Organizational Change Management
Type
journal article
Date Issued
2009-06-01
Author(s)
Beyes, Timon
Abstract
The paper inquires into what might happen when a monstrous novel like Thomas Pynchon's latest offering Against the Day collides with the study of organization. Since the shifting and unstable position of a Pynchon reader provokes reflections on the imposing of analytical grids, I will briefly inquire into the (un)easy relationship between the novel and organization. Placing novels at the service of the existing delineations and conceptual orderings of management and organization theory, or so I will argue, risks missing out on literature's unique power of recomposing what is visible and sayable. After problematizing the reader's performative entanglements in the numerous threads, layers and allusions that make up Against the Day, I suggest to approach this novel as a symptomatology of organization by way of three interrelated readings. First, the novel's concern with what comes across as the gruesome nature of capitalist ordering is accentuated. Second, I discuss if the novel`s textual strategies resemble reflections on its co-implication and thus its knotting into the very logic of organization it abhors. The third reading is concerned with the novelistic hunt for other spaces that haunt the broken machine of capitalist organizing. There is a brief conclusion.
Language
English
Keywords
Capitalist systems
English literature
Fiction
Organizations
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
Yes
Publisher
Emerald
Volume
22
Number
4
Start page
421
End page
436
Pages
16
Subject(s)
Eprints ID
54404