Janet Sayers a & Nanette Monin a a School of Management (Albany Campus), Massey University

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1 This article was downloaded by: [Massey University Library] On: 06 December 2012, At: 15:06 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: Registered office: Mortimer House, Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Culture and Organization Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: Blake's London : Diabolical reading and poetic place in organisational theorising Janet Sayers a & Nanette Monin a a School of Management (Albany Campus), Massey University (Auckland), Auckland, New Zealand Version of record first published: 17 Jan To cite this article: Janet Sayers & Nanette Monin (2012): Blake's London : Diabolical reading and poetic place in organisational theorising, Culture and Organization, 18:1, 1-13 To link to this article: PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

2 Culture and Organization Vol. 18, No. 1, January 2012, 1 13 Blake s London : Diabolical reading and poetic place in organisational theorising Janet Sayers and Nanette Monin School of Management (Albany Campus), Massey University (Auckland), Auckland, New Zealand (Received 18 May 2009; final version received 24 March 2011) We read Blake s poem London aimed at sensitising readers to the early nineteenth century plight of London s most vulnerable citizens. Our reading surfaces several issues relevant to organisational theorising: the role of diabolical reading strategies in creating mental flux through textual flux; the use of visual and poetic symbolism to contest the language systems implicated in the psychic effects of institutional domination; and Blake s narrative voice as wandering Bard, which places the poetic body at the centre of responding to spatial practices of the city. We argue Blake s art still inspires because it haunts the reader as it continually renews itself in re-reading and so both inscribes and incorporates, making the word, flesh. Blake s philosophy also highlights the creative poetic subject placed in their city-landscape and so provides a pathway through inscription and incorporation. Implications for organisational theory are explained. Keywords: text analysis; poetry; aesthetics; visual studies; organisational analysis; labour relations; William Blake; London Introduction This paper s central concern is with organized experience and with the psychic effects of power. Its theoretical antecedents and influences include narrative analysis (e.g. Jameson 1981; Czarniawska 1998; Monin 2004), and readings of cultural artefacts aimed at invigorating and synthesising organisational theorising with wider cultural systems (e.g. Rhodes and Westwood 2008). Although influenced by these antecedents in organisational theory, this paper s main contribution is to supplement writings about power discourses and the self (Knights and Willmott 1989; Sewell and Wilkinson 1992; Thompson and Ackroyd 1995; Ackroyd and Thompson 1999; Gabriel 1999), and especially with contributions to this debate which draw on post-structural analysis (e.g. O Doherty and Willmott 2001; Fleming and Sewell 2002; Fleming and Spicer 2002; Fleming 2008). The present paper shares the concern debated and addressed in these papers that the modern working subject is often overly portrayed as psychically manacled by the effects of discourse and language, and therefore ineffectual at contesting them. In response to this tendency, researchers are seeking other ways to explain resistance (as overviewed in Fleming and Spicer 2002; Fleming 2008) and advancing Corresponding author. j.g.sayers@massey.ac.nz ISSN print/issn online # 2012 Taylor & Francis

3 2 J. Sayers and N. Monin innovative strategies for navigating through labour process theory for instance (O Doherty 2009). How could an analysis of William Blake s poetry help illuminate aspects of this long-running debate? William Blake in many ways exemplified in his art and works a post-modern approach to meta-narratives (Williams 1998). He was deeply suspicious of Systems (Ackroyd 1999) and yet strived in his life to create his own symbolic system ( I must Create a System, or be enslav d by another Mans ( Jerusalem, 10:20)) and to alleviate the suffering of others ( Striving with Systems to deliver individuals from those Systems ( Jerusalem, 11:5)) and was centrally concerned with the problem of individual freedom. The expression mind-forg d manacles which occurs at the fulcrum of Blake s poem London still resonates as a metaphor for the psychic effects of institutionalising discourses. Blake provides a unique perspective on this subject object tension, as he seeks to interrupt modernity s tendency to overstate objective materiality through his method of presenting historical and political subjectivity though imagery and poetic text. For Blake language itself was deeply implicated in structuration of the social and his use of poetry and imagery was aimed at disrupting, even transcending, language s limitations as he constantly inverted and mirrored meaning in his poetry and created tensions in the way he arranged words and images on the same illuminated page. This paper shows how Blake achieved these effects by providing a close reading of one poem London and then discussing its implications for theorising about organisational resistance. We begin by briefly describing Blake s life and art. William Blake and The Songs of Innocence and Experience William Blake s (b. 1757, d. 1827) life and art has been well documented and discussed and an excellent discussion is given in Ackroyd (1999). He was a poet, painter and print-maker and was also a Londoner who lived through the massive social and economic upheavals of the industrial revolution as experienced in the UK and the international political tensions caused by the French revolution. He often subsisted in poverty, and was a first-hand witness to the social degradations caused by rapid industrialisation in London. His work had political and humanitarian purposes as he was concerned to alleviate suffering in his community of souls. Blake s life work has attracted a huge scholarship and has been influential on a large number of later artists, philosophers and writers. For instance he has been credited with the birth of the illustrated children s novel (see Cech 1995 for Blake s influence on Maurice Sendak) and the graphic novel (for his influence on Alan Moore see Witson 2007). It is impossible to do justice to William Blake s vast contribution in this paper, or to adequately reflect the often vigorous debates about the contributions and significance of this art. Northrop Frye (1947) and David Erdman (1970) are two influential texts in Blake scholarship and provide excellent entry points for anyone interested in learning more about Blake. Rather, and at the risk of over-simplifying his philosophy, which evolved over time, we say simply that Blake championed the imagination and the creative instinct over all else. His texts both visually and verbally were designed to work against abstraction from the particularity of individuals, and to celebrate the instinctive imagination against abstract and linear reason as personified by scientific geniuses such as Newton. He developed a full artistic mythology to communicate his themes (Damon 1965). His sincere life work was to confront the system of the world (and all its agents) with the authentic individual.

4 Culture and Organization 3 His most popular, enduring and certainly accessible book has been the Songs of Innocence and Experience. Songs of Innocence was published first, early in Blake s career (1789) and mainly consists of poems describing the innocence and joy of the natural world, advocating free love and a closer relationship with God. Its poems have a generally light, upbeat and pastoral feel and are typically written from the perspective of children or written about them. Songs of Innocence was then mainly published in conjunction with Experience from 1794 at a time Blake was becoming increasingly preoccupied with the problem of Good and Evil, and the political milieu of his time in London (Keynes 1967; Townsend 2003) as well as his general feelings of indignation and pity for the sufferings of mankind as he saw them in the streets of London (Keynes 1967, 12). During this time Blake developed a philosophical system expressed in symbols of increasing complexity based on classical and Biblical mythologies at the same time as he was inventing a method of printing his plates in colours, using pigments. His method of printing involved etching his plates backwards, or mirror-writing, a process important to his philosophy as it also involved inversion through parody and irony (Williams 1998). In direct contrast to the Songs of Innocence, the Songs of Experience deals with the loss of innocence after exposure to the material world and its mortal sins during adult life, and includes work that is more political and with serious themes. Throughout both books, many poems fall into pairs, so that a similar situation or theme can be seen in both Innocence and Experience. London, however, has no obvious pair in the Songs of Innocence, although it clearly gives a strong counterpoint to the prevailing trend of poetry to celebrate and romanticise the British landscape at this time (Lutwack 1984; Fitter 1995). In the following section we present the original poem London and our reading of it. We recommend the reader views the actual illuminated page of London which was reproduced at different times by Blake, and so various versions of the colouring can be appreciated. The pages can be seen and compared at A reading of London I wander thro each charter d street, Near where the charter d Thames does flow And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear In every voice; in every ban, The mind-forg d manacles I hear How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning Church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls. But most thro midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

5 4 J. Sayers and N. Monin The city of London, as portrayed in Blake s poem London, imprisons the soul and energies of all the wretched citizens who are condemned to serve out a life sentence there (Blake 1988). For the span of their anguished lives, London s inhabitants are physically trapped by the bleak boundaries of their city s charter d streets and river: and they are mentally bound by the mind-forg d manacles of a corrupt morality hammered into place by the despotic institutions of industry, church and government. The poet, who still freely wanders the city that has always been his home much as the river Thames, before it was charter d, controlled and put to work, used to meander about highlights his freedom by alliteratively and antithetically yoking his wandering to the structures and control that seem to be imposed on all other Londoners. They are passive victims of material powers, and their weakness and woe are all around him. Every Man (soldier), woman ( youthful Harlot ) and child ( Infant ) lacks the strength and vision of the freely wandering and rebellious poet, because everywhere they look in their city, in every place that they try to live or work, they are subjected to institutional domination and control. The mighty Thames is a charter d river and like the charter d streets of London, has been mapped out, taken over, by the powerful. City and river are under contract ( charter d ) beneath the threatening walls of the city s rulers (the Palace ), wealthy industrialists (enslavers of child Chimney-sweepers ), and the materialistic Church ( blackened by its disregard of human suffering). Playing on the endless ambiguity of the word charter, Blake shows us that there is no charter (bill of rights) for workers ( hapless soldiers ), vulnerable women ( youthful harlot ) or the innocent ( new-born children), all of whom are doomed from birth ( Infants tear ) through blighted marriage ( plagues ) and until death ( hearse ). The marks (repeated three times ll.3 4) of abuse and despair in every (repeated four times ll.3 7) voice, are seen on every face and echo throughout the city: in the death ( sigh ) of the soldier, the fear in the cry of the infant, and the curse that issues from the harlot, the agonised cry of every human sound in the city, blights the place and its people. Even as the city is mapped (marked out) by its destructive burghers and simultaneously scarred (marked) by their machinations, so too its lowly inhabitants are all repeatedly marked, visually branded and damaged by the lives they are condemned to live there. Their marked (scarred) faces are the outward, visual display of the corrupted inner spirits their tortured voices express. In this poem reason is as much the enslaver as the abusing institutions. Every restriction ( ban ), every imprisonment and depressing law, has been established and finally even accepted, by minds that are manacled by iron. Mind-forged manacles imprisoning the spirits and bodies of Londoners (l.8) suggest the fires of huge nineteenth century factories and their filthy chimneys; the industrial power of a city that has been blackened not just by the smoke of industry but also by the corrupt morality of the owners and managers whose wealth is built on the backs of abused workers. Reason tells the abusers they are entitled to torture and enslave in their pursuit of wealth; reason is the basis of their morally destitute laws; and reason insists that their corruptions should be seared into the lives and activities of their victims. By the time we reach stanza 3, just eight lines into the poem, we are well-prepared for the depiction of individual suffering that Blake sets against institutional indifference. The Church is both blackened by the distress ( cry ) of the voice of the sootfilthy boy-sweeper in the chimney; and at the same time blackens the moral environment of the city it appals with its shocking disregard of human misery. Children, the chimney sweepers whose work is dirty and dangerous, the youthful harlot who

6 Culture and Organization 5 sells her body and the newborn infant born to the curse of an abused young woman, are profiled as examples of the Church s disregard. In the midst of this spiritually and physically black city run streaks of red. The red blood of the soldier, running down palace walls (l.12) symbolises the physical destruction of London s citizens in the wealth and power pursuit of government (palace) and parallels the black destruction wrought by the Church. The blackness of so much corruption is emphasised by the midnight streets that are the harlot s workplace, merges with the plagues, that her curse brings upon it, and is, finally, the colour of the hearse. The last word in the poem carries the city s blackness on into the next generation. The imagery that is integral to the poem s text calls all the senses into play but is consistently visual and prompts a turn to the dynamic interplay of poem and illustration. As noted above Blake s engravings are an inextricable combination of texts and images. Text and illustration work in apposition: each comments on the other, and each part of the page, print and illustration is an artfully arranged composite of individual images, that engages in dialogic play between language and pictorial representation. A child leads an old man across the top of the page. The old man s long white hair and knee-length long white beard suggest ancient years, and the biblical image of the god of the Old Testament, in Blake s mythology, Urizen. Urizen, whose name is a play on enunciation of reason, is also sometimes a representation of blind reason. This figure leans heavily on a thick staff, decrepit with years, and is also in need of guidance as he finds his way along the city street. The shaft of light into which the child is persuading him blazes down the page to another small child seeming to warm himself at the curling smoke-laden flames of a fire that burns up and across the cobblestoned street. Black clouds billow up to obliterate the light and yet the child kneels before its fierce heat with no alternative but to seek survival in the threats to life itself, as well as the historic more people-centred city, here being consumed by the fires of industry. If the ancient figure is Urizen then he is depicted here as having to confront, in the words of the poem, the dangerous, deprived and dirty life to which the homeless little street vagabond has been condemned by the economic and political power of rationality s reign, for he is being led into a broad shaft of blinding light that comes from above and lights a path down the page, to the urchin child of London trying to warm itself before the industrial fire. Obliterating smoke from the fire blackens the text of the poem, and the environs of the child s city streets home. The child who leads Urizen reaches one hand back and up with guiding care, its other hand held out in graceful balance toward the way ahead. The bricks of the wall along which they have walked fade into the mystic suggestion of the door that the light reveals. But the child has its back to the door, and it gestures down towards the street urchin. There is fluid grace in the movements of the figures that the hard brick of the back-grounding wall cannot restrain. Movement dominates: it controls the shape of the whole page so it seems that the chartered streets and river, even the mind-forged manacles, the hard forges of reason, will not ultimately bind the citizens of London, for in the scrolled engravings of the page the forms of nature, the energy and passion of Urizon s antithesis, Orc, break through. Like the ancient poets, Blake imbues his figures with the forms, draperies and entwining movements of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever [his] enlarged and numerous senses could perceive (Wallace 2005, 231). In this organic synthesis lies his challenge to the urbanised chains of city living for his illustration takes us back to a time when the mind, body and spirit, were not separated

7 6 J. Sayers and N. Monin out and when passion, energy and spirituality were celebrated. In the elaborate mythology that Blake developed both established church doctrine and the rational basis of enlightenment thinking were mocked. The god-figures that represent them were travesties of pompous and ignorant, life-denying entities; whereas energy and rebellion against the chains of authority were always forces for good. Even the Satan of Milton s epic poem Paradise Lost, fired by the passion of his ambition radiates, in Blake s reading, an inspiring bid for freedom from bondage. In London illustration and text become one endless symbolic image that for more than 200 years has been suggesting meaning beyond what we have ever said about it. It is a cry of protest against scientific rationality and the industrial power that it engendered. It accuses rational men the political rulers (of the bloodied palace), wealthy industrialists (of polluting chimneys) and spiritual leaders (of the blackened Church) who manacled the minds and enslaved the bodies of men (to gory blood-spilling) women (to early prostitution) and children (to blackened chimney sweeps) of building a city that is one long cry of suffering. The image of its blackness, moral, aesthetic and spiritual, endlessly accuses its makers; and yet an-other way glimmers through its engraving. The next discussion highlights how Blake s political art provides a pathway out from under the immense weight of repressive institutional discourse. Implications: diabolical reading and poetic place The following discussion draws out implications of our reading of Blake s London by highlighting two inter-related themes; diabolical reading and poetic place, which both suggest ways forward out of the impasse of restrictive symbolic structures and the possibility of freedom. Diabolical reading As our reading above demonstrates, Blake s symbolic language drew on Biblical and classical mythology which he used in his visual art and his poetic language to accentuate the synaesthesic and visceral involvement of the reader in the act of reading. As well as drawing the reader into the page Blake attempted to deeply trouble language s inescapable complicity in the structuration of social interaction through a variety of narrative techniques. He constantly inverted and mirrored meaning in his poetic language and visual artwork, using irony, parody, humour and prophecy, in order to transcend the limitations of language systems and challenge the psychic effects of institutional domination. Blake vigorously challenged orthodoxy through the radical and diabolical reading of sacred texts. Blake s own use of the Bible in his texts demonstrates his challenge to any sacred orthodoxy and he radically challenged the notion that the Bible was a stable and formally unified text and an embodiment of the Law. This is reflected in his more general tendency to challenge the notion that reading and writing as creative acts are bound by formal and institutional laws and conventions. Blake considered that the allegory of the elite priests and classical poets was an oppressive form of poetry which serviced those in power to maintain the ideological hegemony. Allegory pre-supposed a stable relationship between sign and signification so that allegorical poetry was the poetry of moral virtue, which to Blake was simply wrong. The meaning of the Bible was hidden beneath the text and could only be revealed through a process of critical and active reading. So, he saw in Jesus a version of an anti-christ, a role model, who mirrored his own beliefs about instinct and imagination: I tell you, no virtue

8 Culture and Organization 7 can exist without breaking these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from rules ( The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 23 4). Narratives are placed in the past and were used prophetically to bring the past to bear upon a situation located in the present. History is ever-present in Blake s philosophy in the continual re-reading of past events in the light of the present day, so that the past could enlighten the present, into the future. So, Blake s radical aesthetic sees a paradigm for lawless or diabolical reading and writing and in opposition to institutionalised forms of reading and writing he promoted the active role of the reader at a time when such opinions were treasonous. Although this idea of the reader as the meaning-maker of a text is now well known in organisational studies (see Monin 2004 for a discussion) Blake promotes active reading that is also political and ethical in its action and consequences, and the prophetic nature of Blake s dystopian imagery means he moves history with him, an important aspect of politicising narratives which can function as social criticism (Jameson 1981; Booker 1994). Blake challenged the reader to critically and imaginatively engage with texts through the well-known strategies of inversion irony and parody. London is a parody as it pillories an earlier song written for the moral instruction of children, Isaac Watts Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children, first published in 1715 (Phillips 2000). The text of Watt s poem goes: Whene er I take my walks abroad How many poor I see! What shall I render to my God For all his gifts to me? Not more than others I deserve, Yet God hath given me more: For I have food, while others starve, Or beg from door to door. How many children in the street Half naked I behold! While I am clothed from head to feet, And cover d from the cold. While some poor wretches scarce can tell Where they may lay their head, I have a home wherein to dwell, And rest upon my bed. While others early learn to swear, And curse, and lie, and steal, Lord, I am taught thy name to fear, And do thy holy will. Are these thy favours, day by day, To me above the rest? Then let me love thee more than they, And try to serve thee best. Blake parodies this original by inverting its pompous and patronising tone and beginning London by mimicking the first line s cadences, I wander thro each charter d street.

9 8 J. Sayers and N. Monin London also ironically refers to two cornerstone written works with which Blake was familiar: Milton s Paradise Lost, and the Bible, both the New and the Old Testaments. According to Phillips (2000) the opening line of London I wander thro each charter d street also alludes to the closing lines of Paradise Lost (as does Watts song), specifically to Milton s description of Adam and Eve after the Fall as they make their solitary way, with wandering steps and slow, to the subjected plain (Phillips 2000, 56). Phillips argues that Blake chose to very specifically call on Milton s reading of Adam and Eve in his illustration for the title page of Songs of Experience, and it is this same reading that he evokes in the first lines of London. These allusions enrich reading with moral resonances. London also historicises through this double process of parodying and ironising. Parody always draws attention to the original text and consequently to the ideological consequences that derive from both continuity and difference (Hutcheon 1985). Furthermore, because the narrator s voice is left ambiguous through this process of parodying the reader must themselves step into the poem and experience more directly the streets of London as Blake sees them. The reader must choose between seeing London s benighted children through the eyes of Watts, or through Blake s eyes. This dynamic choice means that the reader, as well as text, is always treated as being capable of becoming something else; something more enlightened. So far we have drawn attention to Blake s challenge to orthodoxy through diabolical and courageous re-reading, and his fearless use of humour, irony and parody. But we also need to draw attention to Blake s illuminated page which implicates a different, more challenging, contemplative and unconstrained method of reading. Blake s art was a radical form of mixed art, using image and text (and also sound as the Songs were songs). Langer (1957) has argued that the juxtaposition of two art forms always results in the absorption of one form into the other. However Blake exceeds this rule as in his art the relationship between text and image is more like an energetic rivalry, a dialogue or dialectic between vigorously independent modes of expression (Mitchell 1978, 4). Blake gives text and images in London roughly equal weight; one mode does not dominate the other and the interwoven text and image confounds the reader. The natural progression of reading is from one line to another in one direction only, in order, through the time and space encouraged by the story on the page. But everything is in flux on Blake s page, but this fluidity is not chaotic. It has a very specific purpose at the same time as it revels in the fertile proliferation of possibilities. The text and the images multiply meaning as they do not correspond to each other. The child could be the chimney sweep featured in poem, or perhaps Christ-as-a-child. The old man is presumably Urizen, but why is he crippled? Why is the young child warming his hands in front of the fire? The images do not merely illustrate the text. Blake was too thoughtful an artist to allow readers to simply toggle back and forwards from text to image within one page for meaning. His narrative art aims to politicise the reader, not only through the creation of pity and fear in the Aristotelian sense of the tragic narrative, but to literally move the audience to feel guilty and therefore to act. This effect can be elicited when considering two of Blake s key characters, Urizen and Orc. Orc is generally a positive figure in Blake s work; he is the embodiment of creative passion, energy, rebellion and freedom. Orc usually stands opposed to Urizen, who as mentioned previously, represents reason. In London the old man is Urizen, and the child is Orc. This same child can be seen in The book of Urizen (on page 26) directly before the well-known image of Urizen holding his people down with nets. On this page the child is praying, looking outward towards the

10 Culture and Organization 9 reader, while a nearby dog howls and bays in fear next to him. The iconography of this child is most disturbing, according to Mitchell, because we cannot blame the child s condition solely on the rational Urizenic carpentry which structures his world. This is because The Imagination (Los) has helped to build this world, and has in this world abandoned the child to it. The picture is designed, in other words, to address us with embarrassing directness and to make us feel guilty (1978, 162 3). The child s appeal is not directed towards his counterparts in the poems but outward to the reader. This same child is again figured in London, with the falling stream of light falling over both Urizen and the child. He is the same child that is led into the fallen world by the protective adult in the prelude to The book of Urizen, and in London, this child is now ready to protectively lead the adult out of that same world through the door of perception. So, the inter-related pages, viewed in their textual image combinations, multiply yet again the ironic contradictions available in the textual parodying. Mitchell states The independence of the text and design allows Blake to introduce independent symbolic statements, to suggest ironic contracts and transformations, and to multiply metaphorical complexities (1978, 11 12). Consequently the text and images brim with vitality and dynamic tension. There is no easy resolution, but rather the active and deliberate contestation of all allegorical poetry of moral virtue, including its own premises. To read a page requires an active engagement on the part of the reader who must become one with the page. To read is to feel Others suffering, for their flesh to be made the reader s flesh through the Word. Welch and Eaves have argued that Blake s contribution is to call to the reader to awaken from the grave of himself to possibilities other than the mere projection of his own identity (1981, 274). How does this metaphorical complexity relate to organisational theorising and especially theorising about resistance? The uses of irony and parody as methods of inverting and therefore resisting meta-narratives have been explored in-depth and influentially by Hutcheon (1985, 1994) who expresses some doubt as to the impact these postmodern strategies of resistance and inversion might have in real terms politically. Irony, parody and other interventions in discourse by humour strategies have also been discussed in the literature on organisational resistance, which is also often unimpressed with parody, irony and/or humour s ability to materially assist employees (e.g. Ackroyd and Thompson 1999; Collinson 2002; Fleming and Spicer 2002). Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that literature, and art, is significant to social and political criticism, and that narratives, through the way they work, can disrupt and contest meta-narratives and potentially politicise readers (Rosenblatt 1978/1994; Booker 1994). Organisational theories need to incorporate the notion that text influences subjectivity in meaningful political and material ways and also that images and text can work appositely. Blake provides a master class for understanding how the Word becomes Flesh; how text becomes embodied in action; how parody and irony are not just intellectual strategies, but are capable of literally moving the reader emotionally, spiritually and physically to political awareness and action. The active, critical, imaginative reading that Blake s method and philosophy offer us highlights the need to bodily query texts of authority and moral allegorical institutional tales. The next section of our discussion delves into the method by which the body is directly addressed. Poetic place We have discussed in the previous section how Blake used irony and parody as inversion tactics, and how they were implicated in a full-blown artistic mythology that

11 10 J. Sayers and N. Monin arched over his lifetime. Blake was committed to engaging all the human senses in the activity of reading; text (poetic imagery and parody); visual (ambiguous and complex figurative allegory); and the aural sound-scape evoked on the page (through song). This multi-faceted physical and visceral experience draws the reader into meaning-making that reaches far beyond the simple text-based communications to which readers of organisation studies are customarily exposed. In particular Blake uses his art to literally move the reader. Evoking the sensual experience of London and then walking through it is a central way of contesting the spatial practices of the city and its effects that he criticised so strongly. London joins an archive of literature about the idea of the city, as does Blake s later and longer prophetic book Jerusalem (Williams 1998). From their first inceptions cities, and the utopias they inspired, have been affected by mechanical rigidity, including Plato s republic (Mumford 1961, 1965). So, utopias carry with them a spectrous reflection which darkly shadows the hopes of city builders: isolation, stratification, fixation, regimentation, standardisation, militarisation (Williams 1998, 170). Joyce (2003) argues that the abstract space of the city was achieved largely through mapping practices, so that the abstract and also gendered gaze of the map gave a superior detached view from above. And London s spatial mapping, as London shows, has had effects: it has marked its citizens so that every person and material thing is over-written with language so that it is encrusted upon the living (Bergson cited in Fink 1995, 12). How can this spatial practice of marking and chartering be countermanded? Blake answers this question by providing a view of the city from the ground up. Blake s concern is for the mirror dystopia under the utopian city-scape: for the miserable conditions of the working poor under the new industrial system and for the problems of the rationalisation and mechanisation of the city for its poorest inhabitants. For Blake the city of London is built entirely on the stubborn structure of...language (Williams 1998, 173), and so his dismantling and challenge to the city of language must occur within the same system of language. As emerged in our reading of London, Blake uses words and images to undo the nets of physically affective abstraction of discourse; he also uses the power of prophetic language, image and song to affect bodies over and against the power of interpellation found in the law (Broglio 2007, 2). Blake s voice is that of a prophetic bard. One of the bard s roles was to voice ancient tales and thereby assist in remembering. By walking through the city of London as he performs his bardish role Blake provides an alternative vision of the city system. The city resonates through Blake s poetic voice whose vigorous incantations invite the reader onto the page to sense London, to smell, feel, hear, touch and taste it: to invite the reader in to feel the alterity of suffering Others through Blake himself as a prophetic intermediary. Blake s prophetic Bardish voice still echoes in the poem because he voiced injustice, so that the dead and dishonoured continue to participate in a present conversation about the city of London. Blake invokes the voice of the prophetic wandering Bard and thus we hear not only people s cries, but also echoes from the devastated landmarks he passes; the great river Thames, the streets, churches and the palace. Blake countermarks abstract space by using an ancient cultural practice for way-finding; the songline (Chatwin 1987/2005). The most well-known culture of songlines, or dreaming tracks, is that of the indigenous peoples of Australia. Song-lines are an intricate series of song cycles, also reproduced in painting and dancing, whose purpose is to identify landmarks and remember key events to aid navigation in a land that is both sacred and alive through the songs that

12 Culture and Organization 11 are sung. By singing the inhabitants preserve the land, the story and the dreaming of their ancestors, and recreate in it their oneness of past, present and future. Blake uses a similar technique for recall and navigation in London. Blake was a champion of the physical visceral energy of creativity and it was from the body that he challenged the imposition of abstract spatial practices on the city and the body. The Songs are songs and like lines, poetry and art have pathways of movement, and fully involve the body (Ingold 2007). The Bard walks, sings and listens and so the spectral sense of hearing the historicised London as well as seeing it and reading it occurs. The mind forg d manacles clank. Blake haunts London as a spectral presence: he is an intermediary to the past world and thus the poem literally haunts the reader. Within contemporary writing in social and cultural geography there is a recognition of the embodied and becoming elements of the cityscape and space more generally (e.g. Pred 1984; Ingold 2010) and the that a city is as much an imaginary place as a real place where time and space is disjointed (e.g. see Crang and Travlou 2001 on Athens). This recognition is still limited in articulations of resistance s relation to the spatial practices of organising (e.g. Taylor and Spicer 2007) and needs to be recognised in the nascent organisational scholarship interested in space, place, movement and transience. Blake provides a useful point of entry for understanding the inter-sections of the complex abstract spatial practices of organising, and its worst negative effects, as well as practices of resistance which have long involved activities of movement like the protest march, taking to the streets, long walks to freedom and other highly symbolically charged activities involving the re-appropriation of place from the ground up. Conclusion From our above discussion of Blake s work and its implications for organisational theorising we have made several inter-related points. Our first point is straightforward: Blake s work provides a philosophy that is worthy of further study for those interested in methods of disrupting meta-narrative for political and ethical purposes. Our second point is that Blake s poems provide an ironic system of thinking that illustrates how to unmanacle perception from the limits imposed by language, while at the same time reconnecting the individual to a more humane and reconstructed (through language) re-envisioning of systems in time and space. Blake rescues from the Real crucial historical moments and turns them into actualizations of the virtual, providing an untold story of a future yet to come, which haunts the reader s present. The consequence of his visionary poetry is that it enables ontological shifts in the reader that seem impossible in traditional representational narratives. Such work actualises its virtuality for and in the reader who opens the doors of perception into the larger world to which the reader returns after closing the illuminated poems. Our third point is that Blake fused song, line, text and image, and referenced space and time through poetic strategies, and his fusion of word, image and sound underlines the importance of understanding how the senses work together to create experience, including the experience of reading itself. The rivalry that Blake created on the page through his reading seeing strategy, and the use of parody and irony, creates a flux in reading that is constantly disruptive but is not without meaning. Blake personified an aesthetics in which any provisional presentation always looks back into itself in overcoming the next bound form by means of a trans-historical exchange. Finally, we argue it is necessary to insert the idea of poetic place into theorising about the

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