Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

issues evolve out of social interactions, a portrait of self-organization. Especially in
chapter 3 I elaborated on that in regard of the internal branding programme. Another
of these notions within complexity is about time; a different perspective on what time
is that provokes another perception on what happened during the project.
Some reflections on time
Normally our efforts would have led to conclusions and to planned actions. But it did
not and if I had suggested that there were some sort of measurable results, I would
have concealed my feelings of indecisiveness. Moreover, I would have passed the
confusion of at least one of the participants, and maybe passed the confusion of my
readers because my narrative stops in the middle of nowhere. Conclusions and planned
actions would have suggested that we understood what we did and we could
bring a first phase of this project to an end.
We are used that there is a beginning and an end of a project which are played off
within a certain time. At the beginning we normally define a starting point, at the end
we expect to have a solution. What we mostly forget is that both the beginning and
the end are created as and create isolated moments in ongoing processes. Deeply
ingrained is that time is a measurable quantity, which is directly connected to the idea
that within a certain amount of time we are able to plan and finish things. This quantified
or productive idea of time belongs to us as a second nature, although it is ‘only’ a
specific constraint within our minds as evolved in western civilized society (Elias, 1982).
This productive idea of time is different from the experience of time as we have in our
everyday actions and is different from how the discussions around dissent actually
evolved.
One of the participants in the think-tank more than once asked me if the discussions
in the think-tank had brought me what I wanted. My answer was that I did not have
specific targets on my mind, neither regarding the subject of dissent nor the outcomes
of the discussions. A better answer would have been that my targets or outcomes
changed in due time of the discussions, even the idea that this was a useable project.
Starting with the idea of being appointed as a corporate jester or as a Corporate
Critical Friend, next to stimulate organizational reflexivity, proceeding with enabling
dissenting opinions and as yet ending with dissent shows the way my targets moved.
Somehow I had plunged into these discussions and to what they would lead became
undetermined. At the same time I struggled with this vagueness, socially conditioned
by the assumptions that efforts will have to lead to something concrete and that my
principals expect measurable results. My colleague who asked me for the results
probably acted within the same habitus, from her part even with the expectation that
I was developing a model for dissenting communication. To support me she pointed
me to a model of upward management, inspired by CMS (Hetebrij, 2006).
In due course my most important intention became to advance an open-ended discussion
concerning dissent. Partly because I understood that this was a touchy sub-
6. A case of consent about dissent | 167