Book Reviews

145

It is then the subversiveness of the artist that becomes seductive and offers a line of flight, a
bridge, a connector, an AND, as ‘[i]t is the AND that involutes, that contaminates and generates
movement, newness’ (2017: 45). The line of flight becomes a bridge and has the potency to dis-
mantle the positions. It might even make the sausage desirable. This is what I have read in the
intriguing book by Anke Strauß, and that allowed my thoughts to get carried away and move along
a line of flight.

Luc Peters
Independent Scholar

References
Heidegger, M. (1954). Bauen Wohnen Denken, in: Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Neske
Loacker, B. & L. Peters (2015). ‘Come on get happy!’: Exploring absurdity and sites of alternate ordering in
Twin Peaks, in: Ephemera, 15(3): 621-649.

We have a situation here …

Dialogues between Art and Business: Collaborations, Cooptations, and Autonomy in a Knowledge Society. Anke
Strauß. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. ISBN 1443898651 (hbk)

Reading the reviews of Laura Mitchel and Luc Peters, I was glad to see the different, nearly oppos-
ing positions. Just like in the various positions in Dialogues between art and business, it produces
a situation. Lauren Berlant (2011) describes a situation as a ‘genre of social time and practice in
which a relation of persons and worlds is sensed to be changing but the rules for habitation and the
genres of storytelling about it are unstable’ (p. 6). It is not necessarily an event, a shock, a world-
changing incident, but it demands engaging with the own position, negotiating relations and think-
ing about how to respond.
We have a situation here that entails the difficulty to respond to arguments that on one hand are
situated in models of thinking aimed at addressing ‘bigger structures’ or generalizable categories
and on the other to engage with a reading that is very close to the way this book is methodologically
crafted.
Having a situation necessitates trying to figure out what is going on, responding and navigating.
It is a notion of unforeclosed experience.
Hence, situating my response in-between, this response tries to highlight on one hand what this
study ‘does instead’ and on the other what it ‘does also’ – without claiming to be comprehensive.
The book is not set out to deal with totalised systems – like neoliberalism or capitalism. Being
highly sceptic of such broad notions, it instead deals with situations that show particular tendencies
or undercurrent shifts that affect and restructure the relationships – or better the possibilities for
relationships – between the realms of art and of business in a particular way. As such, the study is
radically situated in that it addresses the relational dynamics that were present during a particular
time – early 2000 – and a particular place that is, Berlin. While today, the relationship to the artistic
sphere has been re-territorialised by the business sphere in notions like creativity, in early 2000
Berlin, there was no protocol for this collaboration between business organisation members and
146 Organization 26(1)

artists, only a desire for experimenting that artists shared with public funding bodies and corporate
leaders alike. Whatever their very different motivations, agendas and hopes, it was this atmos-
phere, this sense of possibility that also entailed a chance for dialogic encounters.
Dialogues between art and business shifts the focus from entities to relations; assuming that it
is relations that are potent, not entities themselves. This basic assumption is not necessarily
Deleuze-Guattarian only but can be found in the work of a wide variety of writers across diverse
fields, such as Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, writers using Actor-Network-Theory and so on.
Although more implicitly addressed, relations do not only become powerful among human
actors. As Luc Peters notices, also (absent) sausages have agency but what I find even more worth
noting is that they do so, because they were part of a particular situation – a rejected plan to occupy
an organisational space.
Hence, the power discrepancies between artists and business organisation members that Laura
Mitchell has identified throughout the book were less pre-defined and fixed but constantly shifting.
Similar to what Herbert Blumer has realised (although for a different setting), power was ‘the result
of the situation rather than the situation being the result of their respective power positions’ (quoted
by Hall, 1997: 405). And both, artists and business organisation members were, unconsciously or
not, constantly engaged in such situational strategies.
Using the terms art and business has a tendency to think in binaries. Yet, as Luc Peters rightly
remarked, both are already and probably have always been entangled. A bridge connects, but the
problem is that once it is installed, it shapes not only the way we connect but also what kinds of
connection could be possible besides the ones so ready at hand. Having a bridge set in place makes
it difficult not to cross it – in a particular way – but to think about other ways of negotiating the
in-between. A bridge institutionalises relations and practices of crossing. It possesses gravitating
force. This creates the challenge of addressing different ways of bridging as it always territorialises
these processes and tends to lock them up. (For instance, it makes thinking about cable cars seem
to be unnecessary).
Using Deleuze and Parnet’s notion of dialogue as a sensitisit that direct one’s engagement
with practises of bridging without pre-defining its path allows for a particular kind of fluidity
while preserving a notion of the structural that is so embedded in social science research. It thus
works, as Marcus and Saka (2006) note with regards to the related concept of assemblage, in that
it ‘seems structural, an object with the materiality and stability of the classic metaphors of struc-
ture, but the intent in its aesthetic uses is precisely to undermine such ideas of structure’ (p. 102).
In contrast to assemblage, the notion of dialogue emphasises the operative level of relating.
Attending to the in-between is one albeit crucial focus of the book. The other side is showing the
multiple moments of re-territorialisation – for instance, by attempting to ensure relevancy across
disciplines before the start of the experiment – that create but also cut or prevent particular con-
nections. In all that language is not neutral, as well as space is not innocent. To name something
by using particular corporate terms to build bridges into the business sphere, performs a particu-
lar reality of that very something. In the same way, meeting in an art space creates a very differ-
ent situation to meeting in the premises of a business organisation. Similarly, method, too, is
performative. Trying to refrain from territorialising the flow of becoming by fixing or fitting it
onto pre-existing categories, two rather poetic figures – the dancing witch and the happy amateur
– are introduced to point towards positions that cannot be considered subjectivities. They might
be considered half-subjectivities, temporary subjectivities without fixing them but emphasising
their fragility and ephemeral character. They are not as visible or forceful as the monstrous sug-
gests but powerful in a much more humble way, a power that lies in its invisibility and tempo-
rariness, a power to make space, to de-territorialise within a highly territorialised, highly
stratified context.
Book Reviews 147

‘It was never beautiful’, stated one of the organising artists – and with beautiful, he meant the
clarity of a concept or an idea of a Modernist artwork. But what seems to me more problematic
than the messiness of a project is the desire for clarity, for purity, for reconciliation that need prac-
tices of sanitising – of distinguishing and separating. This desire also fuels so many arguments
within the research community that, as Steve Linstead remarks with regards to Kathleen Stewart
(2007), prefer to kill the liveliness of a reeling present with immobilising typifications, instead of
engaging with the messiness of it.
We have a situation here: it seems that over the increasingly refined sanitising practises, which
we have developed, we are losing our capacity to engage with the mess and this is what causes
problems. The constant need to re-negotiate and re-locate one’s position to be with, to think with
one another is everything but efficient. The messiness of the in-between is difficult. But it is lively.
Dialogue – this messy, lively encounter – never happens in the spotlight of clear-cut categories
and means of justification. Today’s world needs more (back-)spaces for messiness. And we should
nurture them to counter the hegemony of knowledge, of designation, of judgement. We should
relate to these spaces of messineess in ways that values them more openly instead of hiding our
needs to engage in practices of not-knowing, of experimenting, of suspending as the dirty part of
our work that apparently needs some cleaning up.

References
Berlant, L. G. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hall, P. M. (1997) ‘Meta-Power, Social Organization and the Shaping of Social Action’, Symbolic Interaction
20(4): 397–418.
Marcus, G. E. and Saka, E. (2006) ‘Assemblage’, Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3): 101–6.
Stewart, K. (2007) Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Anke Strauß
Zeppelin Universität, Germany