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Organizing Color

by Timon Beyes

We live in a world that is saturated with color, but how should we make sense of color's force and capacities? This book develops a theory of color as fundamental medium of the social. Constructed as a montage of scenes from the past two hundred years, Organizing Color demonstrates how the interests of capital, management, governance, science, and the arts have wrestled with colour's allure and flux. Beyes takes readers from Goethe's chocolate experiments in search of chromatic transformation to nineteenth-century Scottish cotton mills designed to modulate workers' moods and productivity, from the colonial production of Indigo in India to globalized categories of skin colorism and their disavowal. Tracing the consumption, control and excess of industrial and digital color, other chapters stage encounters with the literary chromatics of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow processing the machinery of the chemical industries, the red of political revolt in Godard's films, and the blur of education and critique in Steyerl's Adorno's Grey.Contributing to a more general reconsideration of aesthetic capitalism and the role of sensory media, this book seeks to pioneer a theory of social organization-a "chromatics of organizing"-that is attuned to the protean and world-making capacity of color.

FORMAT
Paperback
CONDITION
Brand New


Author Biography

Timon Beyes is Professor of Sociology of Organisation and Culture at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

Table of Contents

1. Something Winged: Color as Organizational Force
2. Weimar, ca. 1800: Cooking Chocolate
3. New Lanark, 1816: Working the Silent Monitor
4. Lower Bengal, 1859: The Coke of Empire
5. Berlin, 1924: Consuming the Color Chart
6. The Zone, 1945: Unleashing the Synthetic Rainbow
7. Paris, 1967: The Revolution Will Be Colorized
8. Houston, 1971: Two Kinds of Colorism
9. Cologne, 2007: The Distribution of the Insensible
10. Broken Tones: Toward a Chromatics of the Social

Review

"The immanent critique and 'tender empiricism' of this book, its eloquence and capacity to move from detailed grounding to exciting passages of speculative thought, ensures that Organizing Color escapes 'the archaic stillness of the book.' Impressively researched and written."—Seán Cubitt, University of Melbourne
"Inventive, brilliantly written, and very readable, Organizing Color recovers and explicates the relevance of color to social form—be that chromatic or racialized color."—Esther Leslie, Birkbeck, University of London
"Organizing is often imagined as a functional concept that belongs in business schools. In this beautifully written and illustrated book, Timon Beyes sprinkles aesthetics and politics over this black and white picture. The result is a breathtaking work that will change the way we understand how to 'see' organization."—Martin Parker, University of Bristol

Details

ISBN1503638618
Author Timon Beyes
Publisher Stanford University Press
Series Sensing Media: Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Cultures of Media
Year 2024
ISBN-13 9781503638617
Format Paperback
Publication Date 2024-03-12
Imprint Stanford University Press
Subtitle Toward a Chromatics of the Social
Place of Publication Palo Alto
Country of Publication United States
Audience Professional & Vocational
US Release Date 2024-03-12
Pages 292
DEWEY 304.2
Alternative 9781503638303

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