Conclusion: Representations

Conclusion: Representations

As Stablein (Chapter 9) reminds us, it was John Van Maanen (1979) who stressed that the map is not the territory. As Magritte implied in much of his art (see, for instance, La Représentation, 1937), there remains a fundamental difference between the means of representation and the represented image.

A painter ‘maps’ onto a canvas, quite self-consciously painting a lifelike representation of a familiar object, such as a pipe. Yet, of course, the object represented in the painting is not ‘the pipe’: it always remains a representation of a pipe. A painter paints a painting of a map, perfect in every detail. It is not ‘the map’: it always remains a representation of a map that is itself a representation of something else: not just any terrain, any territory, but the landscape outside. Looking through the gallery window, we compare the painting to the landscape. We notice that it resembles neither the painting of the map, nor the map itself. As we step through the gallery door, the landscape is even less like the two-dimensional picture as we hear the traffic and smell the fresh breeze coming off the harbour, mingled with the scent of the bush, eucalyptus and wattle, as well as the Gitanes and perfume of the nearby French tourists.

How beautiful this scene, how quintessentially Australian, we say to each other. ‘C'est un cliché,’ we hear. One of us understands: ‘Pardon?’ ‘Cet endroit, ce panorama nous rappeile des films de Godard, de Truffaut. C'estel$eAgant, c'est chic. Il y a un milieu étranger ici, une ambiance française transposée dans un autre hémisphère comme une scène cadrée par Sydney Harbour.’ A conversation begins: someone translates; old Warner Brothers movies are mentioned; ‘des hommages’ of Godard and Truffaut are discussed; we argue movies; we speak ‘franglais’; we move to a cafe and compare it, contrast it, to Le Café de Paris, Le Café de Flore, ‘non, aucune ressemblance’. Thus this mixture of French, English, Canadian, Australian translates, interprets, converses, learns and fills the spaces that the map ‘represents’.

So, when we map we miss. We miss the gap between representation and image represented. We miss the contrivance of the representational practices that produce the effect of representation. We miss the point if we think that what we see is what we see. What we see is a representation of a phenomenon, with technical, aesthetic, experiential presence and absence. What we miss is what we don't see. We don't see the history that produces this structuring of space and time, this representational mismatch of spaces, environments, activities, sounds, symbols, scents and sights. But, to draw on the other metaphor framing this book, conversations help us understand what we don't see. Conversations help us see the figures in the landscape, moving through it, retreating to its margins, filling it with their voices, their anxieties, their emotions, their feelings, their beauty and the ghosts that haunt them: their ancestors, both literal and real.

Organization theory is no exception. It, like any other representational practice, is nothing less, nothing more, nothing other than its practices of representation. No objective grounds exist from which to criticize any one genre of representation from another. In the art of life (as well as the life of art) we can relate to any representation, even if only in recoil. Any representation can be related to other, earlier, later, alternative representations, especially when ostensibly the same thing.

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