Inaugural Lecture with Professor Timon Beyes

Inaugural Lecture by Professor Timon Beyes,
Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy:

Organization in the Age of Aesthetic Innovation

Across the social and cultural sciences, there is a resurgent interest in the aesthetical. At its core lies the expansion of processes of aestheticization, of aesthetic practices and episodes, or perhaps of an aesthetic mobilisation at work in contemporary life. This development is clearly visible in the design and governance of contemporary urban space, in “experience economy”, “culturepreneurship” and “creative industries” (or what has been called “aesthetic capitalism”), in “immaterial” and “affective labour” and the activation and modelling of the “creative self”, in the paradigmatic status of art, artists and “artistic critique” as well as in the explosion of forms of audio-visual expression through digital media and the corresponding affective circuits of imitation.

In his inaugural lecture, Timon Beyes will explore the potential of a renewed theorizing of aesthetics for understanding contemporary processes of organization. Drawing upon current debates around the force of the aesthetic as well as his work on urban and artistic interventions, he will outline a research agenda for an organizational aesthetics that seeks to add to well-established forms of aestheticization critique (as mere appearance, or manipulative disguise for political or economic power, or contamination of the proper realms of rationality and ethics) – an agenda which aspires to contribute to MPP’s unique history and present of engaging with the potential of art and aesthetics. Tracing alternative or innovative organizational spaces and forms is invariably confronted with the question of the aesthetic: with attempts to reconfigure what can be perceived and expressed and to reorganize the terms, images and affects of matters of concern.

Timon has joined CBS as a professor of design, innovation and aesthetics earlier this year. He is a visiting professor at the Institute for the Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany, where he directed a large-scale, EU-funded research and development project on digital cultures before moving to Copenhagen. He has a background in Sociology and Management Studies and has done his doctoral and post-doctoral research at the Institute of Sociology and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. His work has been published in a range of monographs, edited collections and international journals. Timon and Chris Steyaert’s article “Strangely familiar: The uncanny and unsiting organizational analysis” has just come out in Organization Studies.

Programme
15.00-15.05 – Welcome by Head of Department Lotte Jensen
15.05-15.15 – Welcome by Alan Irwin, Dean of Research at CBS
15.15-16.00 – Inaugural Lecture by Timon Beyes
16.00-17.00 – MPP hosts a reception