Changing The Memory of Suffering: An Organizational Aesthetics of The Dark Side

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Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Abstract
This paper addresses processes of subjection and abjection as expressed in organizational and collective
memory. It complements recent developments in organizational memory studies by demonstrating how
the dark side of organization has been subjected to what Susan Sontag calls a ‘collective instruction’
process that normalizes how this dark side is understood, or marginalized. The paper argues that history
today is often represented as kitsch and offers a method of aesthetic ‘juxtaposition’ of visual artefacts that
together with a detailed reading enables researchers to critically challenge this organization of memory
and reintegrate abjected material. The method is exemplified by juxtaposing the iconic World War II
photo of a little Jewish boy leaving his home with his hands in the air during the Nazi clearances of the
Warsaw Ghetto and Paul Klee’s iconic painting of an angel in terror, Angelus Novus, painted in 1920 just
after World War I. The analysis demonstrates how history tends to be organized by a majoritarian system
– in this case what has been termed ‘the Holocaust industry’ – through collective instruction in how to
interpret events, and outlines alternative ways for exposing and resisting this process, resulting in the
creation of counter-narratives. This analytical strategy confirms that organizational aesthetics resides at
the heart of what is political.
Keywords
abject, abjection, art, kitsch, Nazi holocaust, organizational aesthetics, subjection, witnessing
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see
the children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved,
together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the
second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. The brotherhood of man on earth will be
possible only on a basis of kitsch.
(Kundera, 1984, p. 251)
Corresponding author:
Bent Meier Sørensen, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School,
Porcelænshaven 18B, Frederiksberg, Copenhagen, Denmark DK-2000.
Email: bem.lpf@cbs.dk

280 Organization Studies 35(2)
Introduction
The way that the dark side of organization is construed and understood is dependent on the multi-
ple ways in which it has been subjected to what Susan Sontag (2003, p. 73) calls ‘collective instruc-
tion’. Via collective instruction, memory has been informed and disciplined to perceive organization
in terms of a distinction between a bad, dark side and a light or benevolent side. Such a clear
demarcation, of course, rarely applies in real life. The world of organization remains an ambiguous
mixture of light and dark, which compels us to examine even the most pathological organizational
processes and interrogate their intricacies and effects.
A striking example of an event that reveals collective instruction can be found in the documen-
tary film American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein (Ridgen & Rossier, 2009).1 After Dr
Finkelstein had given a lecture at the University of Waterloo in Canada, a young woman asks a
question pertaining to Finkelstein’s controversial thesis that the Holocaust (with a capital H) is a
construct produced by ‘the Holocaust industry’ consisting of influential Jewish intellectuals, aca-
demics, businessmen, religious leaders and politicians. This ‘industry’ has reduced the Nazi holo-
caust (which is the way Finkelstein prefers to refer to the event) to a concern of Jews and only
Jews, a view which effectively ignores the murders of large numbers of Roma, homosexuals, com-
munists, disabled and others before and during World War II. Bursting into tears, the young woman
says that she found Finkelstein’s lecture ‘extremely offensive [to those] who actually suffered
under Nazi war’.
But Finkelstein will not accept her display of emotions: ‘I don’t respect that any more, I really
don’t. I don’t like and I don’t respect the crocodile tears,’ he retorts. The woman is taken even
further aback, and Finkelstein ‘now feel[s] compelled to play the holocaust card’ revealing that
‘every single member of my family on both sides were exterminated, both my parents were in the
Warsaw Ghetto.’ Finkelstein’s point here is not to deny the suffering of the Jews during the Nazi
holocaust, as this would be to deny his own personal history. His point here is that the tears shed
by the young woman over this suffering are conventional, fabricated, organized and strategic. They
are instructed. This combination of criticizing what the Nazi holocaust has been turned into and his
own family being a victim of it has afforded Finkelstein a unique speaking position which he has
leveraged to further his very articulate, but also contested, views (Goldhagen, 1997).
To Finkelstein, the crying woman at the University of Waterloo is not simply shedding tears for
the victims of the Nazi holocaust. Adopting the line of thought set out by Kundera (1984, p. 251)
in the epigraph above, she can be said to shed two distinctly different tears (a ‘tear’ being symbolic
of a broader wave of emotion): the first tear is occasioned by her being genuinely moved by what
she hears. The second tear is occasioned by her own emotions and the fact that she is being moved
‘together with all mankind’; it is, as Kundera puts it, ‘the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch’, i.e.
validating and setting conditions for the reception of the first tear. In the scene from the University
of Waterloo, the woman’s second feeling is attacked by Finkelstein as sentimental and artificial:
her feeling is seen as formulaic and automatic rather than spontaneous, natural, as intrinsically
human (Linstead, 2002; see also Kostera, 1997). The human social need for kitsch that Kundera
and others have identified – the need to validate one’s membership in a collectivity – eventually
displaces the authenticity that would be expressed in the first tear. Even the initial reaction can
become a learned and conditioned response, reinforced by the responses of being observed and
observing others. This type of performed spontaneous reaction, therefore, is not reducible to the
level of particular human beings – it must be seen as collective, social and, moreover, imposed and
learned. It is what Sontag (2003) calls ‘collective instruction’. There is no reason to think that the
crying woman in the video is any more sentimental than any one of the rest of us: collective
instruction is a mass phenomenon.

Sørensen 281
In scholarship about the Nazi holocaust, such sentimentality is frequently connected to the
debate over whether ‘the Holocaust’ can be represented at all. Just after World War II, Theodor
Adorno famously asserted that ‘writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (Adorno, 1981, p. 34).
Adorno’s remark marked the beginning of a close to hegemonic intellectual discourse that asserted
that the Nazi holocaust could not be adequately represented. The most distinguished proponent of
this standpoint is without doubt Primo Levi who, having survived Auschwitz, argued that the
camps could not be witnessed, since the real witnesses to the full extent of the horror were dead: ‘I
must repeat: we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses’ (Levi, 1989, p. 83). The true witnesses,
continues Levi, are the Muselmänner, a derogatory, untranslatable German term probably stem-
ming from the word Muslim (for a discussion see Agamben, 2002) and referring to the living dead
of the camps, inmates who had given up on sociality, personal hygiene and, in the end, language;
they had ‘seen the Gorgon’ and were resigned, waiting silently for death to arrive in isolation, since
witnessing the horror had robbed them of their humanity. Because the real witnesses are dead, we
are left with no witnesses to attest to the truth of the event, and the only posture one can assume is
that of sentimentality. It is not, then, the atrocities (which, allegedly, have no witnesses) that come
into focus, but rather one’s own feelings about one’s (imagined and shared) reaction to the atroci-
ties: one’s feelings about one’s feelings. There is a learned ignorance operating here which inter-
feres with perception. As Nazi holocaust scholar Susan A. Crane observes: ‘Seeing atrocity images
in ignorance only shocks the senses; it does not teach meaning-making or historical truthfulness,
and it risks kitsch’ (Crane, 2008, p. 316). This is the kind of kitsch we see in Finkelstein’s accusa-
tion of ‘crocodile tears’. Its effect is not to enlighten us about the suffering of the camps but to cast
that suffering into a far deeper black box of darkness, while steering the light to shine on our own
compassionate sentimentality.
Introducing the Images

The aim of this paper is to show how a sentimental organization of memory can be challenged,
since sentimentality obscures what the political implications of such memory is, and which actions
these implications call for. Organizations play a central role in the instruction of memory and its
production of kitsch and are vehicles of what I term a politics of circulation: in the case of the Nazi
holocaust, Finkelstein argues that this process is carried out by a ‘Holocaust industry’ (Finkelstein,
2000). This industry has used the photo of the boy in various, sentimental ways in order to usurp
the event as ‘Jewish’ and ‘unrepresentable’. With a very different aim, but in forms comparable to
this strategy, (West) Germany has also used the photo in its sentimental (and stunning) attempts to
avoid guilt and justice (Keilbach, 2009).
This paper seeks to challenge such sentimental readings of history through an aesthetic
adaptation of the critical anthropological method of juxtaposition (Marcus & Fischer, 1986), a
defamiliarizing strategy, in which the famous photograph of a boy being forced out of the
Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in 1943 with his hands in the air, flanked by SS guards, is juxtaposed
with Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus from 1920. While there exist myriad reproductions
of these images, the two of them remain closely related: this paper only draws them a bit closer
together. Angelus Novus is owned and displayed by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, not far
from the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum, where the original photo of the little boy is
exhibited. Hence, this paper juxtaposes two images that are already geographically juxta-
posed, divided only by the Boulevard Sderot Menachim Begin, a south-bound road to Sderot,
a small Israeli city located in one of the most brutal zones of struggle between Israel and the
Palestinians.

The equally war-torn Jewish philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin wrote the ninth of his Theses
on the Philosophy of History (Benjamin, 1999, p. 245ff) on Angelus Novus. The essay opens as
follows:
Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something that he is fixedly
contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. (Benjamin, 1999, p. 249)
Benjamin saw in the painting an ‘Angel of history’, by which he meant a figure which could tell
and retell history in a new way (see also Stewart, 1996, p. 91). However modestly, this paper will
seek to follow Benjamin’s inclination, and its juxtaposition will situate the boy, who is facing death
in a manner that literally defies description, against the angel in order to again retell history.
The two images have become iconic for many people, the Warsaw boy to a greater extent than
Klee’s angel. The two images each play a significant part in the ‘social imaginary’ of twentieth-
century Europe (Taylor, 2004). Forms of ‘image management’ have been identified as far back as
the early Renaissance in Italy (Schroeder & Borgerson, 2002), and paintings were used actively
during the counter-Reformation to shape the subjectivity of churchgoers/labourers (Sørensen, 2010).
Yet it was in the twentieth century that the image came to reign supreme, not least, as with the angel
and the boy, in the images of catastrophes, atrocities and horror (Chouliaraki, 2006). The angel and
the boy, each in their own way, have become ‘icons’ in the (non-Peircean) sense adopted by visual
critics like Hariman and Lucaites (2002): ‘culturally potent image[s]’ (Jenkins, 2008, p. 468). The
photograph of the boy, in particular, falls into the same iconic category as photographer Nick Ut’s
Vietnam War photo of Kim Phuc, the little girl burned by napalm, running naked on a road after a
South Vietnamese/US attack. Ut’s photo won the Pulitzer Prize and, more importantly, is widely
regarded as being responsible for turning the tide of US public opinion about the Vietnam War.
Here I will discuss how the juxtaposition and its interpretation may open these iconic images to
a form of representation which enables the viewer to become a witness in Sontag’s (2003, p. 118)
sense: namely, by ‘standing back and thinking’. In line with Rancière’s (2004) insight that aesthet-
ics resides at the heart of what is political, I contend that this argument is applicable to a much
wider context than just these two specific artefacts. Collective instruction makes the dark side of
organization appear to defy representation, which is why particular interventions like this Special
Issue are needed to bring it to the foreground. In the case of the Nazi holocaust, such instruction is
carried out by the ‘Holocaust industry’ that Finkelstein has identified; in other cases, instruction
may occur through mechanisms such as corporate branding (see Muhr and Rehn, 2014, in this
issue), mass education, entertainment or direct propaganda. How organizations, in particular, are
involved in this constant configuration of memory is being explored by researchers in organiza-
tional memory studies (OMS). However, the OMS approach focuses on individualism and psy-
chologism (Rowlinson, Booth, Clark, Delahaye & Procter, 2010), a tendency that needs to be
critiqued using the concept of collective instruction. Such critical analysis highlights the organiza-
tional, social and historical forces shaping memory rather than referring to particular individuals
and their mental states.
Against this background, the paper introduces the (limited) contributions made by organization
studies to understanding the Nazi holocaust and genocide more generally. It explicates collective
instruction as a viable concept for critiquing the notion of ‘collective memory’ as used in social
memory studies (Halbwachs, 1992). While organizational memory studies has been developed to
correct social memory studies’ lack of interest in organizations, OMS still suffers from its own
individualism and psychologism. Methodologically, the paper elaborates the ‘method of juxtaposi-
tion’, discussing its origin in the ethnographic method of ‘cross-cultural juxtaposition’ developed
by Marcus and Fischer (1986). Having outlined the paper’s problematic and its conceptual and

Sørensen 283
methodological implications, the second part carries out an actual juxtaposition of the images of
the boy and the angel, showing how such a juxtaposition and its detailed interpretation may conjure
up, paradoxically, an ‘unrepresentable’ reality to witness, at a time when the social sciences have
been viewed as suffering a crisis of representation (Marcus & Fischer, 1986). The conclusion
fleshes out the implications of juxtaposition analyses for scholarship within organization studies
and for the possibilities of engaging with the dark side of organizing.
Organization Studies, Genocides and Collective Memory

The (capitalized) Holocaust has become the very paradigm of the dark side of modernity (Adorno,
1981; Agamben, 2002; Bauman, 1989; Stokes & Gabriel, 2010). Considering the meticulous
organization of the historical event itself (Clegg, 2009; Grey, 2009; Spoelstra, 2007), one could
have expected this to have been more extensively explored by organization researchers. However,
neither the Nazi holocaust nor other genocidal events have received much attention, save in a select
number of works like Armbrüster (2002), Burrell (1997), Clegg, Courpasson and Phillips (2006),
Clegg (2009), Fleming and Spicer (2007), Grey and Willmott (2005), Long, Grant, Mills,
Rudderham-Gaudet and Warren (2009), Long and Mills (2008), Martí and Fernández (2013),
Parker (2010), Spoelstra (2007) and ten Bos (1998).
These studies range from brief mentions en passant to exploring it extensively. Finkelstein’s
(2000) controversial breakthrough book on the ‘Holocaust industry’ is not referenced in the organi-
zation studies literature dealing with the Nazi holocaust, with Stokes and Gabriel’s (2010) paper
being a noteworthy exception. Clegg (2009, p. 329) provides a thorough and incisive discussion of
the neglect of the Nazi holocaust and of genocides by organization studies, declaring that ‘the
sounds of silence and the need for absolution are overwhelming’. These sins of omissions may
according to Clegg stem from considerations of one’s professional business school career. Stokes
and Gabriel (2010, p. 462) also wonder how this apparently systematic neglect can have been sus-
tained when genocides generally ‘raise questions that go to the heart of organization and manage-
ment studies’. Likewise, organization studies is only slowly beginning to confront the role
organizations play in creating and maintaining the memory of the darker sides of organization.
Social memory studies can be credited with having actively pointed to a broader neglect and
repression of the historical past and its memory (Olick, 2008; Olick & Robbins, 1998). The past is
indeed a nightmare that weighs on the minds of the living, as Marx (1992/1885) put it. However,
the past can also be seen as an active part of and positive force in the present. One may identify
Benjamin as an early exponent of social memory studies when he analysed
the material world as accumulated history, … emphasizing not only the manifold traces of the past in the
artifacts of commodity culture, but the relations between commodity culture and particular forms of
historicity as well. (Olick & Robbins, 1998, p. 106)
It is exactly the ways in which historicity partakes in shaping our contemporary world that the
method of juxtaposition challenges. Notwithstanding its important contributions, social memory
studies ‘has overlooked the significance of organizations for social remembering, focusing instead
on the family, ethnicity and national identity’ (Rowlinson et al., 2010, p. 69). Organizational mem-
ory studies has emerged as an ostensible corrective to this shortcoming. Yet as Rowlinson et al.
(2010) point out, OMS is fatally bound to methodological individualism and psychologism, as
represented by influential scholars such as Walsh and Ungson (1991), and from a more positivist
position, Kyriakopoulos and de Ruyter (2004) as well as, within information systems literature,
Hackbarth and Grover (1999). In an attempt to amend this shortcoming, Rowlinson et al. (2010),

supported to some degree by Nissley and Casey (2002), offer a specifically organizational reading
of Halbwachs (1992) and Zerubavel (1996) and give us some empirical cases showing how organi-
zation needs to be placed at the heart of social memory studies. From this perspective, organiza-
tions embody, produce and protect what Zerubavel (1996, p. 96, drawing on Halbwachs, 1992)
calls the world’s ‘impersonal “sites”’ of memory, serving to crystallize the ‘collective memory of
a mnemonic community’. Such sites are ‘quite different from the sum total of the personal recol-
lections of its various individual members’. Iconic images like the photo of the boy from Warsaw,
or of the burned Kim Phuc from Vietnam, represent organizational efforts at collective instruction,
maintained as such ‘sites’.
Here it is helpful to use Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between two types of memory, a
‘majoritarian system’ connected to dominance (not necessarily by a quantitative majority) and a
‘minoritarian’ marginalized memory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, 1988; Parr, 2006). Finkelstein’s
argument is that in the years after the Six-Day War in 1967 between Israel and its Arab neighbours,
the ‘Jewish elites’, primarily in New York and Washington, created ‘the Holocaust’ as a majoritar-
ian system, as such elites know ‘how to win or obtain a majority’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p.
292) even though they remain a quantitative minority. Until then, the Nazi holocaust had played a
very limited role in the international Jewish community. In order, then, to recreate the minoritarian
character of history one must approach it as a field of experimentation (Deleuze, 1994). In the
terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, we must continue to experiment with such ways of changing
the majoritarian notion of ‘the Holocaust’ into a number of minoritarian events that recreate the
memory of the actual historical Nazi holocaust, the voices of those suppressed by the majoritarian
account, for instance the voices of the communists and the Roma victims. This is a strategy that is
applicable to all events, historical as well as present. Majoritarian narratives must be broken up and
opened up through the construction of what Barthes (1977) terms ‘counter-narratives’. Similar to
Barthes, Rowlinson and Carter (2002, p. 524) refer to the Foucauldian notion counter-memory, and
for them, counter-memory becomes ‘a way of explicating the possibilities of the present’; it
emerges, in Godfrey and Lilley’s (2009, p. 279) phrasing, as ‘a force against dominant representa-
tions of the past. Counter-memories are the memories of the marginalized, the repressed, the unheard.’
As Colwell (1997) argues, such minoritarian memory is realized through the re-composition of the
same elements that comprise the verkitsched, majoritarian history, but are now repeated and
arranged in a different manner, juxtaposed as it were, in new ways so as to witness (see also
Borgerson, 2010). It is to such processes of collective instruction and such sites supporting the
majoritarian memory that we now turn.
The Historical Context of the Boy and the Angel: Between Icon
and Kitsch
According to Linfield (2010, p. 73, see also Sontag, 2003), the picture of a frightened Jewish boy
being forced from his home (Figure 1) might be ‘the most iconic image of the Holocaust’. It shows
a group of residents, in 1943, is being driven out of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw by Nazi
stormtroopers.
The identity of the boy has not been established by war historians. In all likelihood, he was on
his way to be murdered in a concentration camp, and it is worth noting that the Nazi regime itself
produced the photo in its attempt to document, not obscure, its own atrocities. This particular
image appears in the so-called Stroop Report (Stroop, 1943), originally assembled as a souvenir
album for SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who was responsible for the organization of concentration
camps. The only person who is identified beyond any doubt in the picture is the stormtrooper to the

Sørensen 285
Figure 1. Jews being evicted by force. Warsaw, April/May 1943.

Photo courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
right with a machine-gun pointing in the boy’s direction. He is Josef Blösche from the SS
Sicherheitsdienst, and a recipient of the Nazi Crosses of War Merit, Second Class with Swords.
Blösche confirmed he was the soldier in the picture, adding in 1969 that ‘The picture shows how I,
as a member of the Gestapo office in the Warsaw Ghetto, together with a group of SS members, am
driving a large number of Jewish citizens out of a house’ (Blösche quoted in Raskin, 2004, p. 95).
In principle, the boy could have survived the war. Indeed, when the Nazi holocaust scholar Dan
Porat came to the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem (also sometimes referred
to as ‘The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority’) to view the original picture,
he overheard a guide explaining its content to a Slovenian government minister and his
entourage:
‘Do you know that this picture tells a good story of the Holocaust?’ The surprised men’s faces turned
toward her. She continued unequivocally: ‘This boy survived. After the Holocaust, he studied medicine,
became a doctor, and settled in New York. A year ago, he immigrated to Israel.’ The men nodded in
approval, and the delegation disappeared down the dark museum hall. (Porat, 2010, p. 3)
This ‘good story of the Holocaust’ is of course entirely fictional, but it shows how a photo may gain
and maintain iconic status through a particular politics of circulation, and how the ‘collective
memory’ (Halbwachs, 1992) of a period in history is in practice ‘collectively instructed’ (Sontag,
2003). The guide literally instructs the (surprised) visitors in what the museum, also called the
‘Remembrance Authority’, considers to be the correct reading of the photo. While such instruction
may serve to make the museum more bearable to the visitors, the narrative of the boy surviving the
Nazi holocaust, achieving social status through academic and professional success and, eventually,
arriving in (or returning to) the Promised Land is an example of the collective instruction that the
‘Holocaust industry’ (Finkelstein, 2000) has been producing in order to achieve a hegemonic
understanding of this particular crime of war, i.e. as a unique, Jewish event only perceivable within
an certain understanding of Jewish history, including the collective return from the diaspora. Based

Figure 2. Paul Klee: Angelus Novus, 1920.

Courtesy of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
on ignorance (and, as here, fantasy), the image only ‘shocks the senses’ and eventually ‘risks
kitsch’ as it loses its connection with the complex problems of the historical event and also with
how this historical event may become relevant to our present (Crane, 2008, p. 316).
Paul Klee’s masterpiece from 1920, Angelus Novus (Figure 2), depicts an angel lifted off the
ground. Its eyes are wide open, its wings are raised and the birdlike body is fighting to maintain its
posture: Klee painted the picture after the devastation of World War I, and the angel is clearly
shocked by what it sees. Benjamin (1999), who owned the picture for a time, called it the ‘Angel
of History’.
Iconic images like the boy’s photo and Klee’s painting have been deployed in ‘collective instruc-
tion’ to such an extent that they have ceased to make any distinct sense or impression (Crane,
2008). Over time, they risk becoming kitsch, demonstrating their ability to satisfy our immediate
expectations and provide temporary relief from tensions, without placing demands on us as audi-
ence (Linstead, 2002, p. 660). Such icons organize our memory, but they are also exploited by
organizations to restructure such memory, as is discussed in the OMS literature (Rowlinson et al.,
2010). While specific images are appropriated or replaced in this role as time passes – depending
on how industriously their status is being maintained – by new iconic images, organizational

Sørensen 287
scholars should remember Benjamin’s warning: ‘every image of the past that is not recognized by
the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’ (Benjamin, 1999, p.
247). All images remain to some extent relevant for our present as a concern for us, but when they
become kitsch they ‘disappear irretrievably’. Kitsch is but an aesthetic artefact that is deliberately
‘designed to move us, by presenting a well-selected and perhaps much-edited version of some
particularly and predictably moving aspect of our shared experience’ (Solomon, 1991, p. 454).
We may now specify why the picture of the raid of the Warsaw Ghetto has been so easily
verkitsched: we are able to ‘consume’ the image as an image of the atrocities because it still parades
familiar ‘modes of thought’ (Montgomery, 1991, quoted in Linstead, 2002, p. 660): we can still
perceive the Jews in the picture in a manner disconnected from their (almost certain) fatal destiny
in a Nazi concentration camp. They are still in a group (the camp will split the group into ordinary
prisoners and kapos, prison functionaries, and turn the two against each other), the children are still
being taken care of by their relatives (the camp will tear the families apart), they still have the
posture, movement and solidarity of humans (the camp will arrest this free movement, and break
their physical posture). But the way the image has been championed as a ‘story of survival’ (as
described above) still allows the ‘ignorance’ of history that Crane (2008, p. 316) warns against.
Also West Germany has (had) its ‘politics of circulation’ of the boy. In this case, the photo has
often been cropped so as to focus attention on the (isolated) boy: this produces, argues Keilbach
(2009, p. 72), an impression of childish defencelessness and innocence, what is here referred to as
kitsch, since the visual as well as historical context implies resistance from the community in the
Ghetto, while the photo as icon at the same time comprises a ‘significant reduction of the victims’
diversity’. The cropped version
especially favours the way (West) Germany dealt with its National Socialist past. In this symbolic image,
stripped of any political and social context, the Holocaust becomes an accident without any actors or,
rather, with the Gestapo and the SS as the only actors. (Keilbach, 2009, p. 72)
In this sense, the ‘historical’ documentation threatens to become kitsch, and, continues Keilbach
(ibid.) ‘the opportunity to feel guilty without having to reflect upon one’s own involvement in
the incidents or to take any ameliorative steps explains the picture’s success in West Germany in
particular.’
Still, the survivors, both of the camps and of the Second World War, needed icons to stabilize
their traumatized identity in a devastated Europe and a fragile world, and it is precisely kitsch’s
ability to swiftly stabilize ‘particular institutional structures’ (Montgomery, 1991, quoted in
Linstead, 2002, p. 660) that makes it such a useful aesthetic artefact in the social organization of
memory and the creation of a memorial collective. The construction of a ‘we’ in ‘we as viewers’ is
a central part of collective instruction of memory. The instruction creates a feeling of being
‘together with all mankind’, points out Kundera (1984, p. 251), and continues with the less quoted
but equally significant sentence: ‘The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a basis
of kitsch.’ However, since each of us is situated within concrete, hermeneutical horizons, in differ-
ent contexts and different significant collectives and with different values, it takes huge organiza-
tional efforts, as Finkelstein argues with respect to the ‘Holocaust industry’ case, for a given
artefact to become an icon and for making a ‘brotherhood’ possible. Through such efforts, Sontag
argues (2003, p. 119), the boy has become one of the world’s dominant ‘emblems of suffering’: his
image, in her view, has become one of the ‘secular icons’ of our era.
But how iconic does this picture remain today? Yiannis Gabriel of the University of Bath, UK,
recently carried out an experiment with the photo of the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto in order to
test its current, iconic status, with surprising results. The Warsaw photo was shown to a group of

15 doctoral students from 12 different countries, and they were asked to answer a number of writ-
ten questions about it. Only two remembered having seen it before, and few were able to relate it
to Nazi Germany or to the suffering of the Jews. One student’s response – ‘Unfortunately I am not
shocked’ – gives support to the idea that we are drowning in, and consequently numbed by, images
of suffering. This confirms the view expressed earlier that the most diligent attempts to consecrate
icons may lead to them being overtaken by ever new icons. Hence, icons of the twenty-first century
differ from those of the twentieth century, just as the twenty-first century’s abjects differ from those
of the twentieth century.
Analysing Collective Instruction through Photographs

Awareness of the risk of kitsch that Crane (2008) mentions leads us to a critique of the idea of col-
lective memory. Rowlinson et al.’s (2010) critique of OMS can be strengthened by deploying
Sontag’s thesis regarding memory’s organization: not only is memory a collective practice, as
argued by social memory studies (Halbwachs, 1992; Zerubavel, 1996), but memory is continu-
ously subjected to Sontag’s (2003) normalizing ‘collective instruction’ (an argument in line with
Connerton, 1989). In fact, Sontag (2003) categorically rejects the notion of ‘collective memory’,
grouping it together with other normalizing concepts such as ‘collective guilt’. Her argument is
that ‘collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the
story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds’ (Sontag, 2003, p.
76). It is the iconicity of certain pictures that gives them the power to ‘lock’ our minds into a certain
version of history, in this case a version championed by the ‘Holocaust industry’ to picture the Nazi
holocaust as an unrepresentable event which only concerned Jews.
As Sontag (2003, p. 85) emphasizes, collective instruction creates of an open situation a singu-
lar, dominant interpretation: photographs that ‘everyone recognizes’ become ‘a constituent part of
what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about’ (Sontag, 2003,
p. 85). At the institutional level, as Crane (2008, p. 309) argues, ‘certain recirculated images’ have
created ‘a sense of familiarity with the Holocaust’, a process which Cadava and Cortés-Rocca
(2009, p. 119) refer to as ‘dehistoricization’:
To naturalize a political use of photographic technology and to convert this reading of the photograph into
‘the’ reading of it is, like any ideological operation, the result of a dehistoricization of the multiple modes
in which the photographic image is circulated and read.
Collective instruction is inscribed in what I have termed the ‘politics of circulation’, a practice that
at the same moment as it dehistoricizes an event also stipulates what the acceptable, majoritarian
memory of it can and should be. The point that memory is collectively instructed rather than natu-
ralistically understood as a ‘collective memory’ is clearly in line with Finkelstein’s emphasis on the
‘industrial’ nature of mainstream holocaust understanding. The Holocaust industry, following
Finkelstein, is a mass collective instruction – an organized or managed understanding – of the
(capitalized) Holocaust. Such organization is maintained through a particular politics of circula-
tion, including the work of particular Jewish interest organizations, prominent intellectuals, influ-
ential universities and political lobbyists who wanted to strengthen in particular the US ties to the
(new) state of Israel (Finkelstein, 2000).
This instructional force of a photograph, its significance, its theatricality but also mythic poten-
tial, is particularly explored in Roland Barthes’ (1981) Camera Lucida, in which any assumed
referentiality is progressively eschewed in favour of ‘a theory of photographic becoming in which
the photograph is a force of transformation’ (Cadava and Cortés-Rocca, 2009, p. 109). In Camera

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Lucida, Barthes (1981) develops a systematic analysis of photographs, uncovering two heteroge-
neous elements whose co-presence establishes the significance of an image: the analytical doublet
studium and punctum. The studium characterizes the engagement of the viewer in ‘the figures, the
faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions’ of the photograph by means of a ‘classical body of
information’ that activates familiar cultural codes (Barthes, 1981, p. 26). By mobilizing culture as
a set of shared assumptions between creators and viewers, the studium participates in the reproduc-
tion of myths that reconcile ‘the Photograph with society’ (p. 28).
The punctum is a poignant detail, a ‘partial object’ that traverses, cuts across, lashes or stripes
the picture, in a way that pricks the spectator, attracting and holding their gaze (p. 40). Barthes
(1981, pp. 26–27) refers to this elusive concept as a ‘sting’, ‘speck’, ‘cut’, a little hole which is
marked out in the photograph and which breaks (or punct-uates) the cultural interests of the
studium. This element rises from the scene, shouts out like an arrow and pierces the spectator; in
effect, it is an ‘accident’ that bruises, distresses or wounds them; a telling detail that works meto-
nymically at an affective level to touch them. Less a matter of shining light on a subject than mark-
ing a process of emanation, the image is ‘revealed’, ‘extracted’, ‘mounted’ or ‘expressed’ (Barthes,
1981, p. 81), releasing light from the subject. As a flash of illumination, the punctum, therefore, is
not traumatic and numbing. Rather, it creates a connection with the human condition, intimates our
mortality and moves us in this recognition. It has an instantaneous aspect, but also a longer one
related to this passage of time – the recorded presence and preservation in the image of a moment
lost, reminding us inevitably of death, of the past and future of the subject and ourselves.
Cadava and Cortés-Rocca’s acute reading of these central analytical concepts is considerably
less structuralist than is often seen in the reception of Barthes (e.g. Haverkamp, 1993), and they
avoid placing the studium and the punctum in simple opposition. Although it is ‘not possible to
posit a rule of connection between the studium and the punctum’ (Barthes, 1981, p. 42), the punc-
tum ‘emerges in relation to elements of the studium’ (Cadava & Cortés-Rocca, 2009, p. 117, italics
added to ‘relation’). While the studium is developed mostly in Barthes’ early work and in connec-
tion to a general semiology favouring the determination of meaning (see Oxman, 2010, p. 76), the
punctum is, although related to the studium, a result of the later Barthes’ engagement with elements
that elude meaning, elements which ‘can be seen but not described, sensed but not linguistically
signified’ (Oxman, 2010, p. 71). While the studium comes close to what Sontag sees as the instruc-
tional force of photographs by the very fact that it mobilizes widespread cultural codes, the punc-
tum escapes this instruction and opens the dominant cultural reading of a photograph to a plethora
of interpretations and affects, a post-semiological and even bodily encounter with the image
(Barthes, 1981, p. 57). The punctum instantiates a ‘semantic drift’ in the reading, a drift which is
the very contribution of Barthes’ analytical strategy (Cadava & Cortés-Rocca, 2009, p. 109). It is
the presence of such an encounter that
takes the spectator outside [the photograph’s] frame, and it is there that [the spectator] animate[s] this
photograph and it animates [the spectator]. The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond – as if the image
launched desire beyond what it permits us to see. (Barthes, 1981, p. 59)
The punctum is active in creating what Barthes (1977) refers to as ‘the obtuse meaning’ in contrast
to the ‘obvious meaning’, the meaning that is beyond the informational (denotative) level and the
symbolic (connotative) level, with a fleeting and transitory, yet significant, status:
It is clear that the obtuse meaning is the epitome of a counter-narrative; disseminated, reversible, set to its
own temporality, it inevitably determines (if one follows it) a quite different analytical segmentation … an
extraordinary segmentation: counter-logical and yet ‘true’. (Barthes, 1977, p. 63)

This counter-narrative (analogous to ‘counter-memory’ and ‘anti-memory’ also discussed in this

paper) of the obtuse meaning is additional. Being ‘in excess’, it opens up to ‘the infinity of lan-
guage’, just as the punctum launches unexpected desires. Such a perspective, asserts Barthes (1977,
p. 63), is ‘limited in the eyes of analytical reason’ and opens up in a ‘fold’ that is not directly acces-
sible. Barthes also terms this obtuse meaning ‘significance’, and adds that ‘it is meaning, insofar as
it is sensually produced’ (1975, p. 61; original italics). This ‘sensually produced’ meaning is pre-
cisely what the method of juxtaposition aims for, the type of insight that Strati (2000, pp. 13–14)
refers to when he talks about ‘knowledge that is not entirely verbal, nor entirely sayable’. Collective
instruction, which works through a politics of circulation that reinforces the reading that the studium
of the image foreshadows, obfuscates such ‘obtuse meaning’, and partakes in the very construction
of icons and dominant signs. Although the studium does not necessarily have instructional effects, it
remains an important element in the politics of circulation of which Sontag’s collective instruction
is a part. Barthes (1977) readily acknowledges that a photograph also instructs and naturalizes what
is de facto a constructed meaning. Yet, when the punctum produces a third, obtuse meaning it may
result in a Barthesian ‘counter-narrative’ to this naturalizing and instructional dominance. In regard
to traumatic images, Sontag sees in such a paradoxical counter-narrative ‘the miracle of survival’
(Sontag, 2003, p. 73), echoing Barthes’ idea of the photograph’s madness (which is simultaneously
the madness of love), a madness that evokes survival. How does madness evoke survival? Barthes
explains: ‘Photography has something to do with resurrection’ (Barthes, 1981, p. 82), and it is, then,
this ghostly survival – as a metonym for all survivals – that defines the madness of the photograph, since
it is there, within the medium of photography, that we simultaneously experience the absence of the
‘observed subject’ and the fact of ‘having been there’, the relation between life and death, between
testimony and its impossibility, between the self and another, and among the past, the present and the
future. (Cadava & Cortés-Rocca, 2009, p. 107)
With ‘testimony and its impossibility’, Barthes’ punctum expresses the paradoxical nature of
traumatic images that helps us manage the representation of the Nazi holocaust through various
counter-narratives. The photograph, namely, ‘establishes not a consciousness of the being-there
of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there … the
always stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from
which we are sheltered’ (Barthes 1977, p. 44). This ‘reality’, to which we do not have direct or
unmediated access, is, I want to argue in the next section, what Julia Kristeva (1982) refers to as
the abject.
The Dark Side of Organization as Abjection and Kitsch

Collective instruction is a strategy often used to defer and render abject the inconvenient dark side
of organization, keeping it away from view, be it by way of corporate forces, totalitarian state
agencies, but also by the ‘Holocaust industry’ and by post-war West Germany: collective instruc-
tion is the process by which an acceptable, unified meaning is created. The collective instruction
of memory both identifies and attempts to control the abject as it becomes ejected from each
individual memory, from the memory of the organization, and even social life as such. The abject
is that which is displaced through a social process of ‘othering’ (Stokes & Gabriel, 2010; Cohen
et al., 2006). Othering is a part of the organization of the collective instruction of memory insofar
as it denies voice to that which is abject: the colleague who becomes isolated at the workplace
could be labelled ‘hysterical’ or ‘redundant’, but the colleague’s version of the story will never
surface. The rejected Other is safely kept in its displaced position although, being abject, it can

Sørensen 291
never be fully banished or shed completely: ‘in denying them voice, othering turns its targets,
whether they are children bullied in the schoolyard or victims of genocide, into “abjects”’ (Stokes
& Gabriel, 2010, p. 469). The dying Muselmänner of the camps are such abjects, as Levi demon-
strates (see also Lyotard, 1993). Kristeva identifies a particular violence in the construction of
abjects, as if they represent a monstrous threat:
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that
seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the
tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. (Kristeva, 1982, p. 1)
While abjection seeks to establish a boundary between the subject and the abject, it does so only
partially. It does not entirely cut off the abject from that which the abject threatens, and the pro-
cess leaves the subject in continual danger. Research into corporate scandals often reveals pro-
cesses of abjection – potential whistleblowers being sidelined, transferred, threatened with loss
of pension rights, or placed under investigation on trumped-up charges such as expenses fraud,
for example. Booth, Clark, Delahaye, Procter and Rowlinson (2007, p. 640) argue that many
companies
have a darker side to their history that they would prefer not to know about or to be able to forget. Such
history often reveals their unsavoury involvement in war, racism, slavery, and repression, or a disregard
for human health and welfare.
Although corporations’ suppression of unpleasant activities does not always produce abjects, they
often rely on collective instruction to cover them up: a circulation of photos of successful employ-
ees of the month may dominate the organization’s indoor decor, and games and intense all-night
activities may establish a noisy and colourful ‘culture of fun’, a strategy which in turn renders
abject the real experience of a bleak and alienated work environment (Fleming & Sturdy, 2009).
The architecture, the atmosphere and the invitations to select parties serve as ‘instructions’ to the
employees regarding which narrative of the organization is allowed and which is not. This process
creates employee subjects while also creating abjecting parts of their experience of work. When
collective instruction has become the dominant force in an organizational culture, the manifesta-
tions of this culture risk becoming kitsch. The only role remaining for these expressions is to
confirm the instructed version of the organization’s history and identity and, hence, render abject
all conflicting experiences and voices. Such representations of kitsch in the organization – empty
rituals, conventionalized ways of speaking, heroic pictures of smiling employees – are in turn
characterized by
a) their ability to turn thought and feeling into formula, and hence, into ‘products’ for con-
sumption;
b) their resulting power to help ingrain and recycle existing modes of thought about the hu-
man and natural worlds; and thus
c) their multiform contribution to stabilizing particular institutional structures (which both
employ and are the object of kitsch representations, often in subtle ways) (adapted from
Montgomery, 1991, quoted in Linstead, 2002, p. 660).
These means, which I have exemplified above from the organizational shopfloor, are also operative
in Finkelstein’s industrial organization of Holocaust memory. At both levels of analysis, photo-
graphs play an important role. As Sontag argues, they invite sentimentality:

As the fascination that photographs exercise is a reminder of death, it is also an invitation to sentimentality.
Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming
historical judgements by the generalized pathos of looking at times past. (Sontag, 1979, p. 71)
It is the ‘disarming [of] historical judgements by … pathos’ that allows for the traumatic event, the
abject, to become ‘an object of tender regard’, that is, something that moves the subject ‘together
with all mankind’ as Kundera put it, towards kitsch (Crane, 2008). In some cases, as with the little
Jewish boy from Warsaw, this sentimentalized object suppresses and displaces the original, trau-
matic event and becomes an icon for a whole era of western civilization. In this sense, we may
define kitsch as what is produced when one dwells on the icon as if it were the abject.
Here art has an active role to play. I will argue here that art is able to reintegrate the abject that
has become iconic into a new organization of memory. As argued by Solomon (1991), much art
today has itself become iconic: in the case of Klee’s Angelus Novus, Werckmeister (1999) has
pointed out that it is precisely Benjamin’s remarkable interpretation of the painting that has led it
to become ‘an icon of the left’. Yet even when elevated into the realm of icons, a true work of art
(to borrow Calinescu’s (1987, p. 240) distinction between genuine art and mass culture) remains
iconoclastic, that is, in a perpetual antagonism to the collective instruction that kitsch performs. Art
creates experiences that are imperceptible: art creates resistant blocs of sensation (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1994, p. 164) that take us out of the majoritarian memory we collectively have been
instructed to accept. This is existence as guided by icons, logos and brands (Klein, 2000). The
encounter with art may (and, at times, may not) relate in new ways to experiences and collective
relations, bits of memories and sensations, thereby reorganizing memory. Deleuze and Guattari
(1988) argue that the aim of countering majoritarian memory is to liberate minorities – children,
the elderly, women, Roma, anonymous victims, our own captivated communities and even
ourselves – who have been integrated into majoritarian systems. Experimentation that stretches
into what Deleuze and Guattari (1988, p. 294) refer to as ‘anti-memory’, what Barthes (1977) calls
‘counter-narrative’ and Foucault (1996) ‘counter-memory’, is therefore necessary. The method of
juxtaposition, as practised by Marcus and Fischer (1986) and as presented here, aims at producing
such anti-memory and counter-narratives.
The Method of Juxtaposition

Any juxtaposition is an aesthetic artefact in its own right and is able to create new knowledge. A
wide range of organizational items and artefacts, from the architecture of firms, their decor, their
rules and company games, to brands and commercials, both produce sensory experiences in those
who are subjected to them, and discipline those subjects regarding how they, in turn, may perceive
and interpret the world (Gagliardi, 1996; Warren, 2008). The method of juxtaposition that is sug-
gested here as a way of analysing visual material in organizations utilizes this double feature of
aesthetics, simply placing two visual artefacts side by side (for a complete discussion of the method,
see Sørensen, 2013). The method may produce counter-narratives to the dominant politics of cir-
culation, as when Sørensen (2010) juxtaposes Caravaggio’s second version of the painting The
Conversion of Saint Paul (from 1601) with Mintzberg’s (1983) chart of ‘The Six Basic Parts of the
Organization’. Mintzberg’s idea of the organization emerges together with the painting as part of
a long tradition of naturalizing certain divisions of labour and of resources as well as of subjuga-
tion and suffering. Caravaggio’s painting emerges as a masterfully crafted actor in the counter-
Reformation, able to shape the subjectivities of the churchgoers in the image of the Catholic
Church itself. The similarities and differences between the images and the timespan of four centu-
ries ‘defamiliarize’ through the juxtaposition of both artefacts, producing new ways of perceiving

Sørensen 293
and re-circulating them. Two different sensory experiences and two different disciplinary and
habitual, that is, instructional, processes collide. It is this collision that domesticates the dark side
of organization, requiring us to recreate disturbance and to defamiliarize the spuriously familiar, in
order to return it to itself.
Here organization studies and the social sciences more generally may learn from modern art,
especially the Fluxus2 movement. According to art historian Roger Shattuck, the twentieth century
addressed itself to ‘arts of juxtaposition’ as opposed to earlier ‘arts of transition’, in which art medi-
ated between the perceiving subject and the displayed object. In contrast, the ‘arts of juxtaposition
offer difficult, disconcerting, fragmented works whose disjointed sequence has neither beginning
nor end’ (Shattuck quoted in Broughton, 1981, p. 48), as when Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys juxta-
poses engines, felt, wood, fat, and electric cables in his art. This strategy is jointly developed in
avant garde art in the twentieth century, such as the Russian futurists and the Surrealist Movement
until at least Andy Warhol. Long before it became a general practice in post-war (West) Germany,
Beuys’ experiments took up the precarious relationship between the difficulties connected to rep-
resenting the Nazi holocaust, the necessity for the German people to confront their memories of it
(see Biro, 2003), and the need for them to defamiliarize these memories from the immediate post-
war collective instruction which involved repressing their recent past (Keilbach, 2009).
The anthropologists Marcus and Fischer (1986), who in this context are the source of the con-
cept of defamiliarization, address such instructional tendencies in western culture by mapping out
how a new type of critique can be accomplished through juxtaposition, a method clearly inspired
by Fluxus art. Partly following Marcus and Fisher, we can distinguish between defamiliarization
by cross-cultural juxtaposition (technical and organizational), defamiliarization by epistemological
critique (juxtaposing forms of knowledge formation) and defamiliarization by ontological intro-
spection (before added by Banerjee and Linstead, 2004, p. 236). Specifically, Marcus and Fischer’s
(1986, p. 137) method of cross-cultural juxtaposition defamiliarizes the familiar through the ‘dis-
ruption of common sense, doing the unexpected, placing familiar objects in unfamiliar, or even
shocking, contexts’ in order ‘to make the reader conscious of difference’. Ian King (2003, p. 197)
brilliantly deploys the method3 when he juxtaposes a painting by Mondrian with an organization
chart taken from Mary Jo Hatch: ‘In placing these two figures together,’ King writes, ‘we should
not be entirely surprised by their bond.’ While the two images formally belong to two distinctly
different domains, they both stand in debt to the wave of scientific management and modernist
ways of thinking about the abstract at the turn of the century.
A successful juxtaposition must make visible what is not already visible in the material itself. In
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988, p. 342) reading of Paul Klee, this is also the role of art:
The visual material must capture nonvisible forces. Render visible, Klee said; not render or reproduce the
visible.
Organizational researchers are not artists. However, they may become craftspeople and deploy the
force of art – its ability to create ‘new sensations’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994) that stem from
what is neither entirely visible nor entirely sayable – to invoke other ways to understand a given
artefact.
Juxtaposition struggles with rendering the unrepresentable comprehensible. Marcus and Fischer
discuss this with reference to the ‘crisis of representation’ as it has emerged in in the social sci-
ences. Barthes, for his part, links this crisis directly to photography, as photography focuses on
‘what is at the heart of modern representation’, which is ‘the putting into crisis of a temporal order
in which first there is an object and then later representation’ (Cadava & Cortés-Rocca, 2009,
p. 109). Yet Barthes argues, in line with Deleuze, that one must nevertheless keep experimenting

with representation: as trace (Sontag), wound (Barthes), opposition (Nancy) or virtuality (Deleuze).
Nancy (2005, p. 46) discusses how Beuys took issue with the alleged unrepresentability of
Auschwitz. Beuys argues that Auschwitz is
that which cannot be represented, that awful image, that which cannot be represented as an image but
which could only be presented in the actual process of its happening, while it happened, which cannot be
translated into an image. This can only be remembered as it were via a positive opposite image… (Beuys
quoted in Nancy, 2005, p. 46)
Here Beuys is pointing to a strategy of juxtaposition that works as a paradoxical execution of rep-
resentation, in which a ‘positive opposite image’ qualifies the failing representation of the original
image (text, verbal account, fragment, material, and so on). In Nancy’s words: ‘All one could really
do in this case is to oppose that execution to another actual deed in the opposite direction’ (ibid.).
Organizational researchers may learn from the audacity of avant garde artists, yet the pressing
and more mundane methodological question remains: what material should be juxtaposed? In the
juxtaposition carried through here, between a photo of a genocide victim and a piece of art, Beuys’
‘positive, opposite image’ is Klee’s angel. The same is the case when a painting by Caravaggio is
juxtaposed with Mintzberg’s basic model of the organization (Sørensen, 2010). With Fluxus art,
the basic rule is experimentation. One creative constraint to observe here is that both images must
belong to the same ‘archive’ (Deleuze, 1988), in the sense that it must be possible to construct or
envisage an archive, a group, a set to which both images/artefacts can be said to belong. In the
present case, the two images are both from an archive we might term ‘children close to death’:
angels are, in some religious folklore, dead children. They could also both be said to belong to the
archive ‘the horror of war’. While they must belong to the same archive, they must also at the same
time be different in some important sense: the one has to be able to defamiliarize the other in a
reciprocal and ultimately circular process. Hence, one important part of the method is, as physi-
cally and materially as possible, to take the artefact in question and to experiment with juxtaposing
it with various images. Here internet searches can be of great value, as it is recalled that Barthes’
third, obtuse meaning is sensually produced.
The field of this experimentation, as indicated, is not limitless. Great art is not chaotic nor hap-
hazard: neither is a strong and compelling empirical analysis. One cannot, in other words, just
juxtapose any given item with anything else and assume this to be productive. Marcus and Fischer
(1986, p. 138) are aware of the dangers of their juxtaposition method, pointing out that it may
produce ‘off-balance, even unwieldy texts, by conventional standards’ and may end up ‘as merely
fanciful, cute, or eccentric, rather than really consequential, persuasive, or biting’ (ibid.). A persua-
sive juxtaposition must defamiliarize the instructed memory that has dominated an event, and open
it up for possible counter-narratives.
Analysis of the Boy and the Angel

Consider the juxtaposition in Figure 3, where the boy has been cut out of the original photo and put
side by side with the painting of the angel. The first move in challenging the iconicity of the photo
is to break it up and isolate (the photo of) the boy from his family, his neighbours and his other
social relations. This move indeed resembles what the Nazis did to the historical boy. They would
classify him as ‘Jewish’, juxtapose him infamously with ‘lice’ and deem him unworthy of living.
One of the strategies of the Holocaust industry, according to Finkelstein (2000), has also been to
isolate the boy from the other humans with whom he would be together in the camps – the Roma,
the homosexuals, the communists, the disabled, the rest. This strategy only juxtaposes him with

Sørensen 295
Figure 3. Detail from the uprising in Warsaw. Paul Klee: Angelus Novus, 1920.
Jews, hence first producing ‘the Jews’ as an essentially homogenous group and then making ‘the
Holocaust’ into an exclusively Jewish tragedy. This particularly aesthetic politics of circulation has
worked as a collective instruction in how the Nazi holocaust should be understood. At the same
time, however, it has emptied the concrete situation in Warsaw in 1943 of real emotions, apart from
those emotions connected with the sentimental parading of familiar ‘modes of thought’
(Montgomery, 1991, quoted in Linstead, 2002, p. 660). It is these latter types of emotions which
are characteristic of kitsch. The Holocaust industry, in its effort to fashion an icon, has come to
circulate kitsch. Incidentally, this strategy of isolation and verkitschen was also, as we have seen,
central to West Germany’s attempt to avoid taking responsibility. It is then the removal of the boy
from the original context of the picture that instantiates what Barthes refers to as a ‘semantic drift’
in relation to meaning (Cadava & Cortés-Rocca, 2009, p. 109).
The juxtaposition with the angel now defamiliarizes the boy from both the Nazi narrative,4 the
‘Holocaust industry’ narrative, as well as from West Germany’s guilt-avoiding narrative. Visually,
the juxtaposition accentuates the likeness between the figure of the boy and that of the angel: they
are similar in the way they hold their arms, their relation to the ground, the uprightness of their
figure and their composition, the debris in the gutter beneath them, the uncanny yet open expres-
sion of their faces. When Klee’s angel looks back (on the world and at us), he ‘sees one single
catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet’ (Benjamin
1999, p. 249). The little boy, who like the angel is surrounded by debris, is also, like the angel,
‘about to move away’ (namely, out of the frame, into our world), yet he is caught in the very catas-
trophe that the angel sees (the two catastrophes, World War I and World War II).
We may now appreciate why Klee’s art would eventually appear in the Nazis’ ‘Entartete Kunst’
exhibitions: what fascism had singled out as the abject of humanity, the Untermenschen, the sub-
humans, all that is fragile and weak, become in Klee depicted as this humanity’s only hope: a

vicarious solidarity with the meek and the marginalized, the shocked. The juxtaposition with the
angel suggests that if any animal should be thought of in connection to the boy, it is not lice but an
agile bird, a bird of prey perhaps, with claws and sturdy wings, or indeed a mythical, celestial
creature with fire in its eyes. In the midst of the apocalyptic catastrophe of world war and atrocities,
Benjamin (1999, p. 249) goes on to argue that ‘the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and
make whole what has been smashed’. This, however, will not happen. The angel – so ends
Benjamin’s ‘Ninth Thesis’ – cannot stay, because
a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no
longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the
pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin, 1999, p. 249)
The angel would like to stay and the boy would like to run, we may speculate, but both are engulfed
in a greater force which ‘irresistibly’ propels them into an unsettling future: this force is what
Benjamin calls ‘progress’. The conjunction of the two figures questions this particular modern
notion of progress, as they open each other up for an ‘obtuse meaning’ or ‘counter-narrative’: the
progress with which the angel struggles has become the fate of the boy, yet the boy also come to
partake in the angel’s protest. It is at the same time a progress which through collective instruction
has become a universal standard. Here the angel inscribes and invites a way out of the extreme set
of premises under which the boy (and the rest of humanity) struggle, invoking in the midst of death
‘the miracle of survival’ (Sontag, 2003, p. 73),5 a Barthesian ‘ghostly survival’ (Cadava & Cortés-
Rocca, 2009, p. 107).
In the original photo, before the image turned into kitsch, the punctum or trauma (Barthes, 1981)
of the photograph is the triangle formed by the gaze of the woman, the gaze of the guard and the
gaze of the boy into nowhere – three gazes that never meet. As the spectator is drawn into the pic-
ture, attention then focuses on the expression of the boy – the fear, angst and wistfulness – and
along with the gesture of his raised hands this was turned into kitsch and drew generations into its
spell. Extracting him out from the original context, as I have done, and placing him practically and
materially next to the Angelus Novus attempts to reinvigorate this punctum of the photo: now,
however, not in relation to the original photo’s context of a particular war, ghetto or social group
(the ‘Jews’), but a punctum in another image assemblage which creates an opening for another
meaning or message. This is not a message regarding a Jewish boy being evicted from the Warsaw
ghetto – we have heard that message industriously repeated (Finkelstein, 2000) – but as a boy that
becomes an angel (from Greek αγγελοσ, messenger), that is, a boy with a message for everyone on
a global and timeless scale. The juxtaposition may now even be said to partake in a ‘photographic
becoming in which the photograph is a force of transformation’ (Cadava & Cortés-Rocca, 2009, p.
109).
This is to be understood in a practical, rather than Romantic sense. The boy becomes a mes-
senger who ‘takes the spectator outside [the original photograph’s] frame’ and, in conjunction with
the angel, launches a ‘desire beyond what it permits us to see’ (Barthes, 1981, p. 59). As an angel,
his – or, indeed, her – message is not related to kinship, nation or ‘the Holocaust’: the message goes
counter to these dominant memories. This does not annul the abject nature of the original trauma.
It only retells it, as its counter-narrative, in a different way. The message becomes both exemplary
of the camps to which the boy will certainly be sent and also of our present, crisis-ridden day: a
universal narrative of flight, suffering and at times resurrection, in which each and every one of us
inevitably becomes a witness to violence, like the angel, if not always a victim of violence, like the
boy. The juxtaposition then helps us in understanding Agamben’s (2005) rather demanding thesis
that the camps are still with us today. We are still suffering numerous crisis-provoked states of
exception, in which the maintenance of camps (Agamben’s examples include Auschwitz,
Sørensen 297
Guantanamo Bay and Bari Immigration Detention Centre in Italy) becomes a preferred way of
containing and steering people, by reducing them to their bare life, which was what happened to
the Muselmänner of the Nazi extermination camps.6 Life becomes controlled through death, and
Banerjee’s (2008, p. 1541) theory of necrocapitalism, from a post-colonial perspective, shows the
relevance of Agamben’s thesis in pointing out how contemporary forms of organizational practices
entail the ‘dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death’.
The angel, then, makes of the boy not an abstract, universal icon. Rather, in our reading of
Agamben, the angel makes the boy recognizable to our near surroundings and in our political real-
ity. By taking the boy out of ‘the Holocaust’ and making of him a part of a contemporary, abjected
reality, he enters ‘a reality from which we are sheltered’ (Barthes 1977, p. 44). Yet it is a reality that
touches on our current conditions and especially the conditions of the marginalized and the unheard.
The desire that it launches may be a desire for solidarity and resistance against such forces. An
experimental juxtaposition, in other words, is a continuous engagement with creating relations
through defamiliarization between different elements in order to allow us living in the present to
recognize the present’s current concerns with the problematic in question. The process must be
continued, and the series of the boy and the angel may be juxtaposed, that is, extended, with the
image of the Abu Ghraib prisoner who became iconic by his standing with his arms extended,
dressed in a Ku Klux Klan outfit, with electric wires attached to his body. The victim, like the boy,
was photographed by his US perpetrators; he was later identified as Iraqi citizen Satar Jabar. In
Abu Ghraib, Jabar became abjected from human existence. By being juxtaposed with the boy and
the angel, however, he may become integrated into a more resilient community. It would be a com-
munity of sufferers, of victims, and of us viewers who could constitute a counter-narrative. By
‘standing back and thinking’, we would become witnesses.
We may finally contemplate, in a way that Strati (2000, pp. 13–14) could have had in mind
when he gestures towards ‘knowledge that is not entirely verbal, nor entirely sayable’, whether
there is an abject that is common to the boy, the angel and Satar Jabar, an abject which is their com-
mon unmentionable and repressed reality. Inspired by Lyotard’s (1993) suggestion that the
repressed reality of the camps is the Muselmann, I will suggest that the Muselmann is also the
abject of the juxtaposition developed here: the abject is ‘lying quite close, but … cannot be assimi-
lated’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 1). The boy most probably turned into a Muselmann in the camp he was
heading towards, Satar Jabar barely escaped that fate, and the angel, in its earthly life, may have
been just that, a Muselmann caught between life and death. What ‘ferocious irony’, comments
Agamben (2002, p. 45), that the Jews – and, we may add, the Christians, the agnostics, the newborn
infants and everyone else – in the camps should eventually die as Muselmänner, that is, die as the
mythical ‘Muslim’ that the word Muselmann refers to, a figure belonging to a quite different faith
from the one that got the Jews into the camps in the first place.
The juxtaposition of the boy and the angel also influences our understanding of ‘the left’s’ tra-
ditional reading of the angel (Werckmeister, 1999). One cannot continue to be content with
Benjamin’s catastrophic and somewhat defeatist reading of the angel as a passive, if shocked,
observer. Faced with atrocity, the angel, here meant to be the intellectual or the critic, must actively
create spaces for counter-narratives. This is in line with Agamben’s (1999, p. 145) argument that
the angel in Klee’s painting ‘cannot be the melancholic and Luciferian figure of a shipwreck’, but
should instead be understood as a ‘bright figure’ expressing a ‘strict solidarity of happiness and
historical redemption’. The angel, in other words, is not just melancholically observing the crush-
ing of hope in the world – which is the same as the crushing of the boy. The angel is also, in
Agamben’s view, communicating a joyful resistance which in our interpretation of the juxtaposi-
tion produces a series of events that includes the boy. A detailed reading of such a juxtaposition, in
other words, may produce counter-narratives to both the iconic boy as well as to the iconic angel,
and connect them to our present concerns, of which Satar Jabar is one.
Conclusion
This paper has sought to develop organizational aesthetics as an explicitly ethical and political
practice through the method of juxtaposition. By engaging as in our case with genocide and death,
as well as survival, we follow Stokes and Gabriel’s (2010, p. 477) injunction that organizational
theorist ‘shake off their squeamishness about engaging a terrifying and tragic phenomenon that
stretches sense-making capacities and tests emotional responses to breaking point’. This especially
accounts for organizational aesthetics, as it has often been preoccupied with aesthetics in what
Danto (2003) terms a ‘beautificatory’, sensuous form. Hence, as Hancock (2005, p. 35) argues,
organizational aesthetics often harbours a ‘somewhat romanticized envisioning of the aesthetic’ as
though beautiful organizations will automatically do beautiful things. Yet organizational aesthetics
is at the heart of what is political: it can collectively instruct the memory of the viewers, it can
‘other’ its abjects, and it can defamiliarize us with our own experience. Organizational aesthetics
is politics (Rancière, 2004). In this spirit, this paper’s juxtaposition has attempted to demonstrate
how dark elements of organization – in casu the Nazi holocaust – can be integrated into a new
organization of memory, a minoritarian memory that can come to concern everyone and everyone’s
relation to violence, suffering and the repression of memory.
Whether or not a concrete juxtaposition actually is productive of a counter-memory is an open
question. When experimenting, one must retain the experimenter’s voice, rather than the voice of
the judge. Here the strength of juxtaposition lies in its simplicity: it is open to critique, amendments
and new configurations – the semantic drift must not become fixated again, but remain open for
new counter-narratives. Such counter-narratives should be discussed as a central part of the agen-
das of critical management studies and organizational memory studies, since organizations increas-
ingly provide and sustain icons of contemporary societal phenomena, while, through discipline and
myth (Munro, 2005), creating abjects out of what is deemed to be politically inconvenient.
Moreover, the analysis contributes to the discussion in organization studies about atrocities and
memory by radicalizing the prevailing OMS perspective with Sontag’s thesis that construes mem-
ory as collectively instructed while at the same time developing an organizational aesthetic that is
able to deal with abjected dark aspects of organization, to find its trauma or ‘obtuse meaning’. It is
through counter-narratives that we, as viewers, can become witnesses.
Acknowledgements
This paper, the result of several presentations over the last decade, has gained tremendously in quality from
numerous suggestions and reactions from students and colleagues. I am very grateful for these contributions.
Invaluable advice and suggestions were also given by three anonymous reviewers and the very engaged Guest
Editors for this Special Issue, not least Garance Maréchal. They all went a very long way, as did Thomas
Basbøll and Yannis Gabriel, so thanks. Finally, if one can thank one’s father, who was a member of the
Danish resistance movement, for not turning suffering into kitsch, this would be the place.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.
Notes
1. The scene in question is also available through YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNQS
V3BBtZ4, accessed 17 September 2012.
2. The ‘art network’ Fluxus emerged in the 1960s as a disparate movement, perhaps more anti-art than
artistic in any traditional sense. The name is Latin and means ‘to flow’. The events connected to Fluxus

Sørensen 299
could often not be contained in traditional art institutions and would flow out into the streets, where hap-
penings and events sought a direct political and popular appeal. This was also true of the works of art
themselves, which combined material with no apparent connections into radically new artistic expres-
sions: modern art as such could never go back to its pre-Fluxus conditions. Apart from Joseph Beuys,
other experimental artists such as Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik became associated with the movement
(see Smith, 1998).
3. Organization studies has actually produced a number of more or less programmed juxtapositions in
addition to those already mentioned. Matilal and Höpfl (2009) use Kristeva’s notions of the body and
the law to juxtapose images of the Bhopal disaster with the ‘dry’ accounts of the disaster. Although this
paper is less programmed in its juxtaposition, it tries to ‘find the relationship’ between the two represen-
tations of disaster and ‘set [them] against each other’ (Matilal & Höpfl, 2009, p. 953). Burrell’s (1997)
Pandemonium also and more radically seeks to explode traditional inquiry and in its very layout pursues
a juxtaposed form where the upper and lower part of the pages must be read in different directions, the
book becoming, according to the author, ‘a divided highway in which the meridian or central reservation
separates reading which is moving in one direction from reading which is moving in the other’ (Burrell,
1997, p. 30).
4. At the same time as it has become impossible to juxtapose Jews with lice, it has become increasingly
possible to juxtapose Muslims with a number of undesirable creatures. This is why Finkelstein urges the
young crying woman at the lecture to instead cry her tears over the Palestinians (although they of course
remain a religiously diverse group [Ridgen and Rossier, 2009], just as there were a considerable number
of Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto [see Dembowski, 2005, a book that carries the telling subtitle regard-
ing these Christians: An epitaph for the unremembered]).
5. Caution, however, needs to be observed here, as fascism itself remains preoccupied with resurrection and
immortality, as convincingly argued by Neocleous (2005). However, fascism never juxtaposes anything
with ‘a positive, opposite image’, but only with death. Sontag, commenting on Nazi aesthetics, observes
that ‘The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the
aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death’ (Sontag, 1980, p. 105).
6. The shock of being confronted with the images of inmates from the Bosnian Serbian concentration
camps during the Yugoslav war – for instance the Omarska death camp, set up in 1992 containing
Bosnian and Croat Muslims – lay in the striking resemblance to photos of the dying Muselmänner from
the Nazi camps. The United Nations prosecutors would later make the same comparison, lending support
to Agamben’s (2005) thesis that the camps are still with us.
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Author biography
Bent Meier Sørensen is Professor in Organizational Philosophy at the Department of Management, Politics
and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He is interested in how one might develop philoso-
phies of organization inspired by continental philosophy, art and theology. His writing on entrepreneurship,
modern work–life, aesthetics, ethics and theology has appeared in journals including Organization Studies,
Organization, Scandinavian Journal of Management, Management Learning and ephemera. He is a member
of the editorial collective of the journal ephemera: theory and politics in organization as well as of Deleuze
Studies.
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Introducing the Images

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Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on February 17, 2014

Organization Studies, Genocides and Collective Memory

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Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on February 17, 2014

Figure 1. Jews being evicted by force. Warsaw, April/May 1943.

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Figure 2. Paul Klee: Angelus Novus, 1920.

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Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on February 17, 2014

Analysing Collective Instruction through Photographs

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Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on February 17, 2014

This counter-narrative (analogous to ‘counter-memory’ and ‘anti-memory’ also discussed in this

The Dark Side of Organization as Abjection and Kitsch

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Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on February 17, 2014

The Method of Juxtaposition

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Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on February 17, 2014

Analysis of the Boy and the Angel

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Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on February 17, 2014

Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on February 17, 2014

Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on February 17, 2014

Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on February 17, 2014

Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on February 17, 2014

Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on February 17, 2014

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