Abstract
This article has the intention to build bridges between art, politics, and organizational work, by scrutinizing the process of identity construction (with its stages of selecting, compiling, and re-presenting) between the author and the artist in a recent movie project. Exploring a co-constructed biography as a film collage, we introduce a practice of coexistence that goes beyond the discourse of essence and establishes a surface zone where the self is transcending its narrowing borders of self-assessment and gets in touch with the other.
This brings us to a second layer, where the article is about the aesthetics of mediation and how this detour of mediation helps us to talk and reflect about ourselves in new ways—also and especially in organizational contexts—protecting participants from becoming vulnerable targets in the dominant discourse when the workshop is over and the drive of the intervention fades out. The common ground of this practice is called externalization, focusing on inspiring relations instead of the core content, subject, and problem and embracing the irritation when witnessing ourselves performed by others.
Taking serious the constructiveness of life, we learn to decipher even the treasures we find in the opaque rooms of our biographies as invitations to open new windows into the commonly owned possibility land and raising the question how this playful and dynamic approach to personal identification can also transform the way we deal with corporate identity in a world of permanent change.
A story isn’t about a moment in time, a story is the moment in time.
W. D. Wetherell
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Notes
- 1.
The movie “The order of the past/The sun is still in my eyes/A collage by Wilhelm Singer,” can be watched under the following link: https://vimeo.com/225214681.
- 2.
In rethinking and enriching this text, I accidentally stumbled upon a quote by Kathy Weingarten (1991, p. 29) who also uses the term “reciprocal” when describing the social constructionist view as follows: “the experience of self exists in the ongoing interchange with others … the self continually creates itself through narratives that include other people who are reciprocally woven into these narratives.”
- 3.
Thanks to David Epston who set the track to Kirsten Hastrup in Bordeaux 2015, introducing a narrative format called “Insider Witnessing.” He compared the “aha moment” when you see yourself through the eyes of a well-informed other—and this other is not talking to you directly but to someone else—with witnessing a performance of yourself in the leading role.
- 4.
The distinction between life as lived (reality), life as experienced (experience), and life as told (expression) is fundamental (Bruner 1984)—not just for ethnographers or anthropologists but also for systemic versed facilitators who work in the organizational field. Because any change is fueled by reflection, and it is kind of common sense that there are inevitable gaps between reality, experience, and expression where reflection can enter the room and we turn back upon ourselves to start telling stories about our stories.
- 5.
Worth additional reading are the thoughts from William James (1925, pp. 128–129) about the character: “We may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his ‘tough’ young friends. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends.”
- 6.
It is important to point out with Freedman and Combs (1996, p. 1) that this metaphorical dimension is less about poetics than politics: “The metaphors through which we organize our work have a powerful influence on both what we perceive and what we do.”
- 7.
After all, these choices about one’s personal contribution every employee in the organizational context also has to make. For bringing in the whole person is less an option than a management myth.
- 8.
Slightly exaggerating what Michael White (1988, p. 10) said about the construction of the self, this theatrical approach makes it may be a bit more perceptible what “putting into circulation” means: “As ‘self’ is a performed self, the survival of alternative knowledges is enhanced if the new ideas and new meanings that they bring forth are put into circulation.”
- 9.
A paragraph that could be written equally for the organizational context: Companies often get stuck in their belief systems and miss alternatives when the one and true and only story is challenged. Paralyzed that a story doesn’t work anymore, they initiate the blaming process instead of moving the pillars of the story in a playful way.
- 10.
I replace the “discarded object” and talk about a “discarded moment” which suddenly starts to sparkle on the background of a tension proposed by the artist and gains an aesthetic value.
- 11.
For a quick overview, I recommend Edgar Schein’s (2015) foreword to the book Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change.
- 12.
Like a dieter experiences a long-term backlash called yo-yo effect.
- 13.
A concept first shared independently by Paolo Freire and Victor Turner.
- 14.
It is not a mere coincidence that Barbara Myerhoff and Jay Ruby (1982, p. 2) use the same metaphor of the crack in the mirror when writing about the essential role of reflexivity—pointing out that holding up a mirror is not enough: “Reflexive, as we use it, describes the capacity of any system of signification to turn back upon itself, to make itself its own object by referring to itself: subject and object fuse … Within the self, detachment occurs between self and experience, self and other, witness and actor, hero and hero’s story. We become at once both subject and object. Reflexive knowledge, then, contains not only messages, but also information as to how it came into being, the process by which it was obtained.”
- 15.
In the movie collage project, the tension field was between a revolutionary and a bourgeoisie approach to the world with a book as a missing link, The Aesthetics of Resistance in which the author Peter Weiss invented himself as part of a revolutionary becoming. In business context this tension field can be everything, which helps to define certain crossings from which we can reflect our positioning and decide where to go.
- 16.
In reference to Jorgé Luis Borges’ (1998) image of a “forking in time, rather than in space”.
- 17.
That is also a process from mere telling to writing things down and polishing meanings—from feeling it, to rethinking it, to showing it, to seeing it, to hearing it, to mixing it. Similar to the seven steps process from Joe Lambert (2018, p. 89).
- 18.
Instead of producing these kinds of well-known and lifeless vision statements, we let “preferred stories” enter the stage. And instead of talking about resources, which are fixed inside of someone, we talk about knowledges, as something that “develops and circulates among people” Freedman and Combs (1996, p. 17).
- 19.
The artist Wilhelm Singer and the author of this text.
- 20.
Now, line-editing this text, I was reading the input-quotation by W. D. Wetherell again and was shocked that I deleted one essential word: “A story isn’t about a moment in time. A story is about the moment in time.” Suddenly this chosen intro quote I have stolen from Joe Lambert (2018) has a different meaning, but I decided to leave both versions. Also, because it seems significant that I was reading what I wanted to see.
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Tonninger, W. (2019). The Sun Is Still in My Eyes. Reflecting on the Constructiveness of Life. In: Chlopczyk, J., Erlach, C. (eds) Transforming Organizations. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17851-2_2
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