The Emergence of a Surrealist Movement and its Vital `Estrangement-Effect' in Organization Studies

Abstract

Beginning as a subversive and anti-establishment movement in France in the 1920s, surrealism was primarily a movement whose `voice' came through the written word. Later the movement extended into the visual arts, with which it is more generally associated. Surrealism was always intended as a way of thinking, a way of feeling and, indeed, a philosophy of life. This way of thinking now appears to have permeated the discourse of organization theory in both the orientation and `techniques' that are advocated by a group of writers who claim, or invoke, the insights of postmodernists (/poststructuralists). Drawing on recently published work by the critical theorists Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse, we argue that the field needs to consider carefully `its' response to oil `surrealist movements'. We argue that the surrealist movement is an essential part of a healthy ongoing dialectic for the field and needs to be recognized in exactly that context.