Business Ethics, Accounting and the Fear of Melancholy

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2003 10: 267OrganizationRené ten Bos

Business Ethics, Accounting and the Fear of Melancholy

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Business Ethics, Accounting andthe Fear of Melancholy

Rene ten BosSchouten & Nelissen/ Nijmegen School of Management, The Netherlands

Abstract. In the article, I address the strained relationship betweenbusiness, the ethics of business and working life, on the one hand, andwhat is sometimes referred to as melancholy, on the other. I take issuewith the age-old claim that one should keep to the books if one is toprevent melancholy. I argue that this claim, half-forgotten as it may be, isstill implicit in many texts on business ethics. Much of what I have to sayis grounded in a different, explicitly ‘anti-bourgeois’ understanding ofmelancholy. To pave the way for such a different understanding, I willbring in ideas stemming from a wide and rather unusual range of sources(for example, Aristotle, Ficino, Defoe, Lepenies, Tarkowskij and, perhapsmost importantly, Benjamin). The point is that these sources allow us tounderstand that one objective of business ethics is to help managementand organizations to block off certain experiences that are, for variousreasons, deemed to be unwelcome. Key words. bookkeeping; businessethics; experience; gothic; melancholy; ruins

IntroductionRobinson Crusoe was the first business ethicist. Soon after Defoe’sprotagonist arrives on his ‘island of despair’, he understands that ‘amelancholy relation’ with the silent life in his new habitat is a gravedanger to his very survival. In order to combat the danger of melan-choly, he meticulously starts doing the accounts of all events in hisnew life. However, rather than becoming an ordinary bookkeeper who

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systematically records business transactions, he becomes, for want ofsomething better, a sort of moral bookkeeper keen on recording the goodand the evil:

I began to comfort myself as well as I could, and to set the good against theevil, that I might have something to distinguish my case from worse, andstated it very impartially, like debtor and creditor, the comforts I enjoyedand the miseries I suffered. (Defoe, 1985: 50)

Robinson understands that moral bookkeeping has its psychotherapeuticeffects. Departing from the proto-utilitarian assumption that ‘good’ iswhatever decreases the risk of melancholy and ‘bad’ whatever increasesit, all events in his new life are now listed under the simple headings ofgood and bad. Crucially, the use of this rational technique is in a senseneutral or, as Robinson himself has it, ‘impartial’ with respect to theevents that occur. It is this ‘freedom’ that allows him to articulate orinterpret events in such a way that the good will always, even in the mostdesperate circumstances, outweigh the bad (Lepenies, 1998: xi).

The use of this moral technique provides Robinson with an immunityagainst the island on which he has to spend the next years of his life. Theobsessive way in which he does his moral accounts exemplifies anuncompromising unwillingness to engage with the island as it is. Basi-cally, Robinson sees his new world as a focus of infection, which shouldbe kept at bay at all costs. He cannot succumb to melancholic musingbecause in his view this would show that the new world has taken holdof him. It is therefore battled against with a technique that he has alreadymastered in the old world. The new ‘asocial’ conditions in whichRobinson finds himself can be counteracted only by relying on certainsocial practices that he acquired in the world he left. What other optionsare available to him?

Those who are condemned to spend their miserable lives in solitudeshould start keeping the books on a very regular basis if they wish tosurvive. Daniel Defoe believed that a rigid system of bookkeeping mightbe helpful in surviving even the most catastrophic of conditions. Any-thing that might defeat Defoe’s protagonist—despair, ecstasy, solitude,desire—is repressed by a thoroughly organized life. Those who are tosurvive catastrophes should prevent melancholic self-absorption at allcosts. Hence we find Robinson systematically refusing to engage with hisemotions, fears and desires. He externalizes himself ad absurdum inorder to survive. That is, he understands himself to be a machine that hasto carry out the task of survival.

Robinson’s plan for survival has fascinating analogies in the world ofbusiness ethics. There is, first of all, a vague sense of catastrophe:something is, at least from a moral perspective, fishy about business andorganization. Such an awareness, however, should not tempt us todispense melancholically with business and organization altogetherbecause we have techniques to cope with fishiness. We learn from cases,

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we analyse our stakeholders, we map moral competencies, we assesssocial and moral performance, we engage in benchmarking to see whatcompetitors are doing, and so on. Gloominess is by no means the onlyanswer. If we are willing to take on moral matters with a ‘decidedlytechnological bent’ (Kingwell, 1998: 24), we will preserve the ‘robinson-esque’ illusion that catastrophes can be handled, that something can bedone, that we need not become overly pessimistic or unhappy withbusiness organizations, in short, that redemption is available.

It is the reliance on moral technologies in business ethics that I want totake issue with. Such technologies are considered to be helpful becausethey prevent melancholy among those who work in business and organi-zation. Melancholy, nostalgia, displeasure and unhappiness, rather thanthe moral catastrophes caused by business and organization, are deemedto be the most serious ‘signs of failure’ (Burrell, 1996: 93). But are they? Iwill argue that any serious moral criticism of business and organizationcannot do without a certain measure of melancholy. The argument isbased on an understanding that melancholy need not be pathological atall. To elucidate this important point, I will start with a historical detourthat allows us to understand the contested nature of the concept ofmelancholy. Then I will turn to Benjamin’s double-edged assessment ofmelancholy and argue that his musings alert us to melancholic experi-ences that moral technologies block off. I will end by suggesting thatbusiness ethics presupposes a conformity of experience that the criticalmelancholic intends to subvert.

A Very Brief History of MelancholyBlack Bile

Melancholia was Saturn’s daughter. In Durer’s famous picture MelencoliaI, produced in 1514, her face is dark and gloomy. Yet, somewhere in thisshadowy darkness, we perceive two burning eyes penetrating into thedistance. This is concentration at its limits: an intellectual effort withoutany visible or useful result. All sorts of utensils, particularly those thatare likely to be used by scientists (compass, hourglass, and so on), liescattered around her or in her lap, downgraded to a state of uselessness.Melancholia has clearly lost her desire for usefulness or relevance and isstrangely affected by some imminent yet mysterious catastrophe that onlyshe seems to be able to anticipate. She is willing to accept that humanknowledge is useless in face of this catastrophe, but this willingness toadmit defeat overwhelms her with vague feelings of pride (Gijsberts,1987: 293).

In an ambiguous way, Durer’s heroine represents catastrophe, defeat,vanity, intellect, pride and solitude. His picture speaks of the ambiva-lence with which not only artists but also scientists or philosophers havetreated melancholy. A long time before Durer, however, melancholy wasbelieved to be a disease. The oldest mention of melancholy is in the

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Corpus Hippocraticum, a collection of medical writings produced around425 BC. The authors of these writings, who can be seen as the firstgeneration of Greek medical scholars, assumed that the body strives tomaintain a balance between two humours: phlegm and bile (chole).Sickness occurs when this delicate balance gets disrupted. As a con-sequence of this disruption, bile is likely to turn black (melan, melaina),which is to say that black bile is not an independent humour but apathological deviation. The oldest texts on melancholy thus refer to it assickness (van der Eijk, 2001: 7). The next generations of medical scholars(who lived around 400 BC) would, however, refer to black bile as anindependent humour existing in the body next to yellow bile, blood andphlegm. Although they maintained the assumption of the first generationthat health depended strongly on a balance between the four humours,they also argued that a perfect balance was an impossibility and that,depending on factors such as climate or season, one humour woulddominate the others without necessarily causing illnesses. The domina-tion of, say, black bile would tend to occur during autumn and wasmerely believed to make the body more susceptible to certain disordersthan others.

Nowhere in the Corpus Hippocraticum do we find a reference to thefour humours in terms of characters or temperaments. Choleric, sanguine,phlegmatic or melancholic people were merely described in terms oftheir susceptibility to particular physical disorders. It is in only a fewtexts that we find suggestions that certain disorders degenerate into a‘second nature’ that is passed on from one generation to the other (vander Eijk, 2001: 10–11). In this sense some people might be argued to havemelancholic, phlegmatic, choleric or sanguine inclinations. Melancholicpeople, for example, are believed to ‘suffer’ from hallucinations, fear, lackof concentration, uncontrollable emotions, lechery, insomnia and so on.Even though melancholy is clearly seen in pathological terms, some ofthe authors acknowledge that in particular circumstances melancholicpeople can be excellent performers. In a famous text that is oftenattributed to Aristotle (2001) but that was probably written byTheophrastus, it is pointed out that people afflicted by melancholy areextraordinary not only because they deviate from norms with respect tohealth but also because they are highly gifted (euphuia). Their intellec-tual talent allows them to combine irreverence and indifference withrespect to societal norms. Yet it is this very talent that makes themelancholic person inherently unstable and hence untrustworthy.

Tristitia SaeculiIt was only in the early Middle Ages that the close relationship betweenmelancholy and disease was somewhat loosened. Building on the famouswork of Galenus (AD 129–210) on the relationship between the humoursand temperaments, many medical scholars started to redefine melan-


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choly in terms of (what we would now call) character rather thanpathology. This, however, did not lead to the sort of ambiguous apprecia-tion of melancholy exemplified by Durer. On the contrary, the patriarchsof the Church would condemn it as one of the seven mortal sins basicallybecause the ‘tristitia saeculi’ or ‘sadness caused by the world’, as ThomasAquinas (1966: 20–35) would have it, refuses to accept the divine order.

Melancholy was understood to be a grave danger to the order withinmonasteries since monks were considered to be particularly liable towhat became known as ‘acedia’ or ‘accidie’ (from the Greek a-kedia: non-commitment, without concern). Boredom, indifference, numbness andespecially sloth indicated a failure to experience God and hence unbelief(Pynchon, 1999). It was clear to people such as Thomas that such amental constitution was a token not only of sickness but also of amor-ality. For the first time in history, morality becomes a weapon in the battleagainst the melancholic temperament, which was now reduced to ‘purenegativity’ (Kesenne, 2000: 10).

Those who use moral reasons to reject something, however, should notbe surprised to find moral defences of it. Marsilio Ficino, who lived from1433 to 1499, is reputed to be the first author to defend melancholy(Bohme, 1985a). In a piece called ‘Dietetics of a Saturnine Person’, he setsout to ennoble melancholy. Although admitting that melancholy canindeed be related to pain and madness, he also points out that themelancholic person is creative, enthusiastic and intellectual. FromFicino onwards, a cult of inspiration and genius stands firmly on themoral battleground of melancholy. Ficino defends melancholic artists orphilosophers by pointing out that their unhappiness, self-disgust andsplit personality are merely tokens of extreme sensitivity and intellectualsuperiority (Miller, 1997: 29). In the cult of inspiration and genius, thetedium vitae, or disgust for life, becomes a hallmark of the intellectual.Happiness is merely a consequence of a despicable form of thoughtless-ness. Melancholy and intellectualism presuppose each other.

Normalizing the Abnormal

The contours of the battle became hardly any clearer in the years tofollow. Once melancholy was defended, however ambiguously, byrenowned intellectuals such as Ficino or artists such as Durer (who allseemed to flirt with uselessness, boredom, unhappiness and disorder), itbecame a serious moral rather than medical problem. As both Bohme(1985a) and Lepenies (1998) point out, the discussion about melancholyincreasingly narrowed down to a (moral) discussion about order as anecessary condition of society. Melancholic intellectuals were attackednot any longer by the clergy who suspected them of unbelief andcontempt for the divine order but by those members of the new bourgeoiselite who believed in societal and scientific order.


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For authors such as Robert Burton, who published his The Anatomy ofMelancholy in 1621 and, as we have already seen, Daniel Defoe, melan-choly was the arch-enemy of social order. A new work ethic was seen asa decisive cure against the melancholic anomaly:

I writ [sic] of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is nogreater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business.(Burton, cited in Lepenies, 1998: 22)

For Burton, melancholy was indeed an anomaly, ‘a disregard of law,lawlessness’, a dangerous ‘irregularity’ and, as such, ‘a disease of thecivilized, not of the simpler people’ (cited in Lepenies, 1998: 17). Onlyintellectuals, not the rabble, were a serious menace to social order.Without such order, society would cease to exist. Therefore, conformitywas a moral demand: only by abiding by the order of society could onecontribute to its well-being. Lepenies argues that calculation and meas-urement are crucial to this concept of order. Whatever happens in societyis not intrinsically judged or assessed but systematically measured interms of its contribution to the social order. Moral behaviour is bydefinition measured (‘angemessen’) and hence becomes, in terms I usedearlier to describe Robinson’s conduct, a matter of externalization. Whatis measured in the new moral order is not related to emotion or someother sense of ‘interiority’, but to the now all-important question ofwhether it conforms to the system or not.

Implicit in Burton’s ideas about melancholy is the intuition thatdisease is, if anything, disorder. In the pathology of humours, health wasalready defined as the proportionate and orderly distribution of humoursaround the body. Analogously, a society that was not able to handle itstendencies to disorder was also considered to be struck by disease. Thisis an important move away from the Middle Ages, when the divine orderwas taken for granted and the melancholic individual could indeed beregarded as an anomaly, that is, as an exception to an otherwise flawlessorder. In this sense, Burton might be argued to normalize the abnormal,for he considers almost everybody and everything to be melancholic, notjust a few artists and intellectuals but also other people, animals, plants,minerals and even entire kingdoms or political organizations. For Burton,melancholy is not so much something peculiar to intellectuals but an all-pervading symptom of his time. This is what makes melancholic intellec-tuals and artists so extremely dangerous: their constitution of the mindmight very well contaminate other members of society.

The Utopian MethodBurton is thus the prototypical intellectual who warns society of thebaleful influence of intellectuals. It is this paradox that I would suggestlies at the heart of the utopian experiments that were conducted in the16th and 17th centuries by intellectuals such as More, Campanello andBurton himself. Utopia, Lepenies (1998: 33) argues, can best be seen as an


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imaginary terrain that is free from melancholia and other afflictions andthat is ordered in such a way as to encourage productive human activity.Melancholy is thus considered to be non-existent in a utopian orderinvented by melancholiacs. That is, melancholic critics create an imagi-nary world in which they themselves can only be regarded as undesirablealiens (Bohme, 1985a). To put it even more clearly, melancholic criticsban themselves from the world they invented. They are aware that theythemselves cannot stop provoking the new order. This self-loathingencourages them to declare war upon all forms of melancholic imagina-tion and enthusiasm that lie at the root of all utopian efforts. As utopians,they must exclude themselves from the ideal world because they knowthey are the diabolic force that might undo the newly created harmony.

This is also why melancholic intellectuals know about the futility oftheir endeavours to criticize and to escape from their society. The sadnessof the world arouses the melancholic enthusiasm needed to constructescape routes; the utopian world order to which these routes are sup-posed to lead cannot help but be bleak and abhorrent. After all, it doesnot allow for the kind of sad enthusiasm and self-loathing on whichmelancholiacs paradoxically base their own claims of moral superiority(Miller, 1997: 29–30). The utopian world order is one that does not allowfor sadness simply because nothing happens that would justify such agloomy mood. This is merely to say, once more, that melancholy orunhappiness are morally wrong and should be banned. This is whatLepenies (1998: 35) suggests constitutes the utopian method: rules andregulations should be internalized to such an extent that the minds ofthose who inhabit utopia develop a profound aversion to unhappiness assuch. Unhappiness is deemed to be unproductive. An entire technologyof happiness (Kingwell, 1998: 24, 345) is thus set in motion in order tocounteract melancholic brooding and boredom and to stimulate an unre-lenting desire for action.

Escapism and Romanticism: Living in RuinsEntangled in paradoxes, intellectuals consider themselves to be reason’sdiabolus (Bohme, 1985a), sinners who resist the coming order of whichthey themselves are the creators. Utopianism is thus simultaneouslyinspired by a melancholic experience and by the desire to exclude suchexperiences. This merely shows the impossibility of a sharp distinctionbetween melancholy on the one hand and reason and order on the other.This became particularly clear during the Enlightenment, when thebourgeoisie came to understand that, for all its dedication to a highlyordered vita activa, melancholy could not be expelled so easily. On thecontrary, the industrious life that was defended by the bourgeoisieengendered, as we will see later, its own forms of melancholy.

The nobility, to mention one other class that readily fell prey tomelancholy, despised any form of labour. This is not to say that the


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nobility did not develop an entire range of activities to combat melan-choly, boredom and so on: etiquette, courtship, table manners, letterwriting, etc. These activities, however, were, at least from an economicpoint of view, entirely useless. Had they been otherwise, they would havecounted as labour and, in the eyes of the nobility, lost their legitimacy.Bourgeois ethics, on the other hand, stressed that only by means of itsusefulness would an activity be able to chase away melancholy effec-tively. A laborious life and the economic success that would be itsinevitable result were seen as the most important medicines againstmelancholy, to the extent that any proclivity towards a vita contempla-tiva became suspect. In bourgeois society, melancholy thus became asubdued presence, which manifested itself not as a form of intellectualsuperiority but as an individual neurosis that needed to be controlled. Itwas therefore a matter not so much of annihilating this presence as ofmanaging it. Escapism and romanticism were, at least to a certain extent,allowed as melancholic expressions of individual autonomy that neededto be accepted because they would allow each member of society toescape occasionally from the daily rut and to find repose withoutdefinitively cutting the ties that bind.

This Romantic period is characterized by a melancholic fascinationwith ‘gothic’ elements such as ruins, morasses, mountain peaks and othergloomy and sublime places where nature seems to have become sooverwhelming as to render futile the achievements of human reason.1

Ruins were of especial importance because they symbolized, if anything,the failure of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Bohme(1985b) has analysed the films of the Russian director Andrej Tarkowskijto underscore this point. In Stalker, one of Tarkowskij’s most famousfilms, the principal characters enter the ‘Zone’, a forbidden landscapewhere the remaining vestiges of industrial activity are overgrown byweeds and plants. The ruins that we see in this film symbolize thatnature will always defeat human artefact. This may be saddening, butTarkowskij wants us to consider how inhuman human artefacts canbecome. Perhaps we will not lose anything at all if we simply sacrificeour industries to nature (Bohme, 1985b: 7). To put it in plain language,the industrial constructions that we have created may not be ruins in theliteral sense of the word but they have definitely ruined many lives.

Nature may ruin human artefact, it is true, but human artefact defi-nitely ruins nature as well. With the industrial revolution came theprofoundly melancholic understanding that industrial production equalsdestruction. The more we try to form and plan life, the more we ruin it.The quintessential melancholic understanding of industrial activity is:Wer macht, macht kaputt. No matter how systematically you try to buildsomething, there is always a tendency towards ruination. And as somecontemporary philosophers, often of the poststructuralist variety, wouldhave it, this ruination can best be understood as a process in whichdifference claims its rights with respect to the same. When production is


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destruction and when nature is just as liable to ruination as humanartefact, there is only one conclusion possible: nothing is what it seems.

Melancholy’s TenacityIn spite of all this melancholic wisdom and a certain acceptance of whatLepenies has described as ‘endogenous melancholy’ (Lepenies, 1998:204), we should not be tempted to think that the battle against thesaturnine temper was fought only half-heartedly. On the contrary, theassault on melancholy was merciless and took place on two fronts: (a)imagination, fancy, originality and enthusiasm were discredited; (b)philosophical or artistic movements that allowed for or defended suchqualities were opposed and, if possible, eliminated. An aggressive and‘remorseless assault on all that is sensuous, playful, and . . . musical’(Nussbaum, 1995: 40) was the result. However, the pre-eminent repre-sentatives of the Enlightenment, the bourgeois and the scientist, werethemselves, in spite of their profound belief in rationality and calcula-tion, often struck by overwhelming feelings of melancholia. The highlystructured life in the new cities, the work needed to maintain the order,in short, order itself seemed to produce forms of disorder. The demandsthat came with this new, rationalized and laborious life, it was found,could easily cause a variety of ‘anomalous dispositions’ (Bohme,1985a).

The smug and over-rationalized battle against fancy, which was wide-spread during the 18th and 19th centuries, helped to create what wasmeant to be avoided. That is, reason and melancholy were not necessarilymutually exclusive, or, more precisely, the Enlightenment had a deeplymelancholic core. As we saw earlier, this was not at all the melancholyonce described and defended by Ficino as a superior displeasure with theworld. It was rather the petty kind of melancholy exemplified by theDickensian miser who, unable to put to rest inner feelings of displeasure,escaped into opportunistic bigotry, to ever more labour and, of course, topolitical scheming rather than to literature and art. Petty melancholiacsrefused to face the black nothing lying at the heart of reality and indeedexcluded the artists and philosophers who would do so from theirordered world. The sensitive and artistic melancholiac Ficino had inmind became the absinthe-addicted dandy on the seamy side of 19th-century society.

Nowadays, under so-called postmodern conditions, art is not asperipheral as it used to be. Bohme (1985a), however, suggests that thecentral place of art in contemporary society is related to our inability torecognize the intellectual melancholiac as a different kind of person.That is, we have all—artist, philosopher, scientist, and business man orwoman alike—become neurotic and petty melancholiacs who do notseriously believe in grand narratives, who refuse to engage politically andsocially, and who find refuge on the therapist’s couch or in the shoppingmall. There is, in other words, no essential antagonism between, say, the


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world of art and the world of business. By pathologizing melancholy, aprocess that really gained momentum when Freud published his Trauerund Melancholie, we have eliminated the possibility of melancholicoutsiders understanding their displeasure with the world as a form ofintellectual nobility and accepting that there are situations in our worldthat ask for blunt repudiation and subversion rather than for the sort ofunderstanding, promulgated by business ethics, that enables more mana-gerial action. Melancholy, in other words, can become legitimate onlywhen it accepts its profoundly subversive and critical role.

Contemplating ExperienceWhat should we think of this melancholic subversion? We may find sometentative answers in the works of Walter Benjamin, a philosopher whowas, according to Kingwell (2001: 137), ‘melancholy and enthusiastic inalmost equal measure’. Benjamin’s central aim is to rethink humanexperience. Such a rethinking is deemed to be necessary, because theEnlightenment is believed to have reduced human experience to anentirely mechanistic form of observation. In particular, two of the mostoutstanding representatives of the Enlightenment, Kant and Newton,seem to depart from what Benjamin refers to as ‘the nadir of experience’,a point where the meaning of experience is reduced to an absoluteminimum (1989, II: 159). The heritage of both thinkers has deeplyinfluenced the way in which modernity (Neuzeit) thinks about theconcept of experience as well as the way in which it actually doesexperience. The philosophy of the subject that underlies the modernexperience assumes that there is an ‘I’ who by dint of sensorial experi-ence receives impressions and who is capable of transforming theseimpressions into full-blown ideas. For Benjamin, this philosophy isessentially mythological if not insane. Those who would really experi-ence the world in the way proposed by Kant and Newton are in a senselike psychopaths standing outside the world yet vaguely able to registerit. There is, in other words, a rather unexpected relationship betweenrational knowledge and irrational experience (de Cauter, 1999: 163). Away out of this impasse can be found only if we are willing to abandonthe dichotomy between a scientific type of experience and a vulgar one.To achieve this, Benjamin tries to conceptualize ‘a purely, systematiccontinuum of experience’ (1989, II: 164) in which he allows room for a‘metaphysical’ or ‘absolute’ type of experience that he relates to ‘con-templation’.

The thinkers of modernity distinguish experience (impressions, Emp-findungen) from knowledge (ideas, concepts). Benjamin argues againstthis and contends that contemplation allows for the kind of experiencethat is identical to knowledge. For him, contemplation is a knowledgeengendering experience. He urges us to reconsider this premodern,archaic concept of experience because we need it if we are to overcome


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the sinful and godless dichotomy between subjectivity/experience andobjectivity/knowledge that we inherited from the Enlightenment (deCauter, 1999: 168). In Goethe’s soft empiricism (zarte Empirie) or in theRomantic notion of observation (Beobachting) he finds some useful ideasthat allow us to evade the impoverished, almost laboratory-like notion ofexperience that characterizes modernity. For this modern experience, thetruth is always disentangled from the object. As a consequence, truth isalways the truth about something and our experience allows us to checkwhether this truth holds or not. Benjamin hopes for a non-intentionaltruth that places truth at the heart of what the modern subject used todescribe as an ‘object’. Such a non-intentional truth is not to be under-stood as resulting from a subjective empathizing with the object, sincethis would merely amount to violent and fanatical annexation of theworld; neither is it the result of an aloof or neutral description of it, sincethis would be a very narrowly defined use of the word ‘experience’.Rather than being based on the infallible certainties of either animisticforms of mystique or scientific observation, contemplative experiencerests on irredeemably fallible authority and tradition. That is, Benjaminthinks of a kind of experience that is irreconcilable with any form ofcertainty or objectivity. He assumes that any experience that has becomecalculable and certain immediately loses all authority (de Cauter, 1999:168). This insight, I would suggest, lies at the heart of melancholiccriticism. It is based on an understanding that infallible certainties aredelusory.

For Benjamin, the promise of contemplation is related to an ancient,literally paradisaical understanding (Urvernehmen) in which words pre-serve their denominative nobility as well as their epistemological sense.Contemplation is thus primarily understood as an acoustic, non-visualunderstanding of the world that is deeply religious and has nothing to dowith the utilitarian or rational modes of understanding that dominatemodernity. Indeed, modernity is no longer able to contemplate in thissense: it refuses experiences that might relate its thinking to the worlditself. That is, modernity’s language has lost its symbolic value. Moder-nity puts its faith, not in symbols that bespeak the items of a stillparadisaical world that was once well known to Adam, but in allegories,which merely increase the gap between word and world because theyreplace the concrete items in the world by requisites, hieroglyphs andwords. The instrumentalization of language is closely linked to thesubjugation of the world (de Cauter, 1999: 247). Allegories are, however,desperately needed by an enlightened people who, in a rather melan-cholic vein, understand their world to be godforsaken and who nonethe-less want it to be imbued with meaning. No wonder then that, after themarginalization of God by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, meaningsproliferate, in the sense that in our modern world everything can meaneverything. Meaning has thus become totally dependent on the arbitrari-ness of the subject and it is in this arbitrariness that the allegory finds a


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shelter (1989, I: 351). The tragedy of modernity, Benjamin claims, is thatthe destitute condition of its language is mirrored by a similar conditionof society. Allegories are characteristic of an era that can only profane theworld, or, in the words of Benjamin himself, ‘allegories are, in the realmof thought, what ruins are in the realm of things’ (cited in Kingwell, 2001:148).

Allegoric MelancholyContemplation thus opens the possibility of a non-allegoric, acousticunderstanding of the world in which words still have a denominativeforce. Benjamin’s appreciation of this contemplation is, however, essen-tially ambivalent. On the one hand, he muses about an alternative to thescientific or vulgar experience typical of modernity; on the other hand, heremains profoundly pessimistic and melancholic about the possibility ofan experience that might escape from this. Not only does he think thatcontemplation is quite difficult under modern conditions, but in acharacteristically melancholic turn he also warns against the dangers ofcontemplation because it might easily lead to certain unacceptable formsof melancholy (1989, I: 319).

This pessimism, however, is closely related to Benjamin’s vision of thebourgeois melancholy I discussed earlier. That is, Benjamin’s flirtationwith melancholy is not related to the inertia, rigidity and stupidity of theaverage citizen, whose melancholy is more pathological than intellectual.This bourgeois melancholy is, Benjamin argues, one that can only rejoicein the creation of an endless series of allegories. This labyrinthineendlessness is the abode of allegoric melancholiacs: they ceaselessly lookfor new images, even when the ones that presented themselves during anearlier stage were not fully developed or understood. Melancholiacs inthis sense are eternal worriers, forever keen on finding comparisons,analogies, metaphors and images without elaborating on them. Theyknow that each person, each thing, each relationship might indiscrimi-nately mean something different and it is this bewildering variety ofmeaning that, for Benjamin at least, implies a scathing judgement about amodern world in which profanation is so intense that the details are notat all important anymore. That is, the melancholiacs’ proclivity to ‘alle-goresis’ prevents the things in the world from finding expression, radiat-ing meaning, coming to life (Hoeks, 1987: 254–5). To them, the world is asorry spectacle of demolition and misery and allegoric melancholiacs sitamong the ruins. They are inspired by Satan, the ultimate ‘allegorist’,living in dark and hidden places where there is no light to see into theworld and fully aware that he sold out the world in the name ofknowledge.

Sothein ta PhainomenaiBenjamin’s relationship to melancholy is, however, also related to that ofFicino. Admittedly, melancholy can become groundless, unstable and


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indeed dangerous, but a sad sort of pleasure need not necessarily befound in the labyrinthine creation of allegories. It might also be based ona deep understanding of things in the world, one that nonetheless startsfrom the assumption that no knowledge whatsoever can be definitive ordecisive and that one therefore should embrace the incomprehensibleemptiness at the heart of the world. Melancholiacs, as Benjamin prefersto see them, are disloyal to people but they compensate for this by acontemplative loyalty to ‘things’. This is, I suggest, a rephrasing of thenon-commitment or accidie already described in the Middle Ages. Thedifference between the kind of non-commitment that once hauntedmonasteries and the one that is described by Benjamin is that during theMiddle Ages this non-commitment implied not only disloyalty to fellowhuman beings but also, as we saw, a rejection of the divine order of theworld itself. The melancholiac who Benjamin wants to rehabilitate (deCauter, 1999: 183), at least to a certain extent, understands the danger ofendless, allegoric brooding, and plunges into a contemplative loyalty tothings. But what is meant by this ‘loyalty to things’?

People who are loyal to things resist their humiliation by allegory andnever forget about their ‘thing-like’ quality (Benjamin, 1989, I: 398). Inother words, they are, like 17th-century still-life painters, willing tounderstand each thing, no matter how futile, as a token of enigmaticwisdom. Such an understanding is conditioned by a certain kind of self-mortification: the world is lost and the melancholiac, who accepts this,ruefully tries to extract some meaning or wisdom out of the silentphenomena.

His disloyalty to people is matched by such a loyalty to things that he isfully absorbed by a contemplative devotion to them. Clumsily and evenunjustly, this loyalty speaks in its own way about a truth for the sake ofwhich it of course betrays the world. Melancholy betrays the world for thesake of knowledge. But its persistent concentration takes inanimate objectsinto its contemplation in order to save them. (Benjamin, 1989, I: 333; mytranslation)

Loyalty, Benjamin believes, applies to things and not to human beings,where other and higher principles are important.

We need to save the phenomena because the Enlightenment merelyobjectifies the world. This is why Benjamin links the melancholic con-templation to what he refers to as ‘aura’: the things that are observed areby no means passive but are somehow capable of storing the con-templative gaze. Perceptibility equals attentiveness and it is only thenon-allegoric melancholiac who is able to appreciate this attentiveness ofthings. As de Cauter (1999: 188) formulates it, the brilliance of melancho-liacs is that they not only observe the things in the world but also allowthem to look back. This is in essence the morality of melancholy: we needto give the things around us a cult status if we are to penetrate into theparticularity of a phenomenon (de Cauter, 1999: 198). Again, this hasnothing to do with empathy or Einfuhlung, simply because this would


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amount to an appropriation that forces the thing to total passivity.According to Benjamin, it is our moral duty to let the things around usspeak and radiate for themselves even though only extremely perceptiveminds are able to pick up whatever they have to say. The point is thatonly melancholiacs, provided that they do not succumb to the seductionsof allegories, might be able to hear the barely audible murmur of things.

ShockThus is melancholy rehabilitated as an alternative to the impoverishedmodern experience, which Benjamin (1989, I: 615, 653) describes as aChockerlebnis. This oxymoron expresses the paradoxical nature of themodern ‘experience’: ‘Chock’ refers to a person’s defence mechanismagainst stimuli, or, more precisely, to the ability of the modern mind to‘allocate the event to an exactly determined time-place in the mind at theexpense of the integrity of its content’ (1989: 615; my translation and myemphasis); ‘Erlebnis’ refers to a desire for experience, emotion or evenadventure. As de Cauter puts it, modern experience ‘does not absorb butwards off, . . . does not dream but registers, . . . does not muse but is alert’(de Cauter, 1999: 202). Chockerlebnis, de Cauter comments, is ‘a responseto industrialization, debilitating work, newspapers, traffic, speed, inshort to the velocity and “technologization” of modern life’ (1999: 202).People living under such conditions have a strong, even relentless desirefor emotions, adventures and so on, but are rarely able to undergo suchmoments as experience in the sense of ‘collective sensibility’. ForBenjamin, Erfahrung is always shared in a tradition; Erlebnis, on theother hand, is what remains after the erosion of tradition. The Dutchphilosopher Gerard Visser (1998: 352) comments on this with acerbity:

If we are not able to store [an experience, an observation, etc.] and arestruck by it or think that we have been affected, or if we desire to have astriking comment on it, we make an emotion or adventure out of it.

The modern isolated individual is under constant pressure to have such‘adventurous emotions’ rather than ‘experiences’. In a footnote, Visseradds that this pressure has a temporal aspect, which is exemplified in awell-known cigarette advertisement:

‘Emotions are moments. No moments, no life.’

It is, Visser (1998: 353) comments, as if the pull on a cigarette is the onlymoment in life that really matters. Indeed, life should be nothing elsethan a sequence of such delightful moments. But an endless series ofstimuli is hardly what you might call an experience in the full-fledgedsense Benjamin bestows on this term.

Adventures or intense moments, in short, endless kinds of divertisse-ment, are not the only aspect of the modern experience highlighted byBenjamin. The totalizing character of Erlebnis becomes particularly clearwhen it is related to the shock that occurs when, for example, individualscome to understand their destiny (Benjamin, 1989, V: 962; see also Visser,


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1998: 362). Such an understanding might enable them to ward offdifferent kinds of experiences. The idea, for example, that as a businessmanager you are destined to take tough measures if necessary, canprevent you from finding any alternative course of action. The event thatis taking place, or the integrity with which a person treats it, is easilysacrificed on the altars of professional vocation, national identity, goalorientation, gender or whatever fundamentalism might be available atthat time. The modern experience is a Chockerlebnis. It does not allowintegrity with respect to the events taking place. It excludes the individ-ual from what Zwicky (1992: 124) has described as ‘an ecology ofexperiences’. It transforms people into registering machines and autom-atons. It transforms them into Robinson Crusoes.

DiscussionThe subversion of the kind of noble melancholy that I defend here (incontrast to the petty melancholy discussed earlier) lies in its refusal toaccept the modern experience. Melancholiacs are outsiders who refuse toexperience the world in an objective or neutral way that is free fromdoubts. In other words, they refuse to distance the self from the world.

Business ethics, it is often argued, is rooted in the Enlightenmenttradition and relies strongly on rationalism (ten Bos and Willmott, 2001).It uses technologies that are directed against instability, against unpre-dictability and, most importantly, against the sense of despair or fear thatmight come over you if, for example, catastrophes take hold. Businessethics is inexorably linked to the idea of catastrophe: the massive moralfailure of businesses all around the world is its raison d’etre and, as Ihave tried to show, its utopian and melancholic impulse. Yet the technol-ogies used by the business ethicist—benchmarking, stakeholder analysis,moral competency mapping, ethical codes, and so on—are directed nottowards the prevention of more corporate misdemeanours, even thoughthis is often argued in defence of business ethics, but against feelings ofself-disgust, melancholia or downright despair. As such these technolo-gies are as crucial for survival within the business world as they were forthe man who got stuck on his island. These technologies prevent theupsurge of often unhappy and unstable experiences that are perhapsmore adequate responses to the environment. This is Robinson Crusoe’slesson for contemporary managers, consultants and business ethicists.

Let me say something more about these technologies. As I argued at thevery beginning of this paper, Crusoe uses accounting techniques in orderto survive. Such techniques are particularly promising for a man whorefuses to change or adapt to new circumstances, who refuses any form ofintrospection, and who considers himself to be a survival machine. It isinteresting to note that in our contemporary business world, which isoften characterized in terms of turbulence, instability and unpredict-ability, the very same accounting techniques increasingly function as


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ethical instruments because they allegedly bring ‘discipline’, ‘order’ and‘objectivity’. Munro (1998: 202),2 following Power (1992: 487), speaks of a‘procedural fairness’ that is linked not so much to ‘truth or realism of anymetaphysical variety’ but to lofty items such as transparency and equal-ity. The idea that everybody faces the same rules or receives the samekind of attention is more important than an understanding of the com-plexities surrounding all these people. This illustrates why Benjamin’sideas about a melancholic disloyalty to others are so subversive anddangerous: they defy the experienced conformity (Chockerlebnis) that isrequired to install procedural fairness in a particular organization orinstitution.

Now I am aware that my argument relies strongly on the idea that thetechniques used by business ethics are similar to accounting techniques.Business ethicists will no doubt point to the usefulness of their tech-niques and claim that it is not the technique that counts but thediscussion among managers that follows after, say, an interesting sessionon benchmarking or ethical codes. This may all be true, but one (melan-cholic) point against this would be that, from a moral point of view, it isnot at all clear what these techniques deliver. All the mumbo-jumboabout procedural fairness, transparency and objectivity notwithstanding,neither the business ethicist nor the accountant offers us a clear pictureof what a good and/or healthy organization might look like. The onlypiece of advice to be obtained is related not to a reflection abouthappiness or morality but to the incentive to use certain techniques andto keep using them because, more than any form of reflection, theyprevent you from throwing in the towel. In other words, business ethicsin its very own way endorses the vita activa.

Power (1997: 28–33) argues that auditing techniques have a weakknowledge base in the sense that the relation between the procedures andthe desired result is entirely unclear and that as a result practitioners willalways have to rely on their own judgement. Paradoxically, however, thisobscurity works, as Munro (1998: 202) puts it, as a ‘socializing force’.Ambivalence, after all, undermines intellectual antagonism and the per-son who resists compliance with what the majority of people believe istrue or good will be accused of, for example, undermining group cohe-sion. Such an accusation is all the more dangerous since it mightjeopardize the chances of survival in a dangerous and volatile world. So,the melancholiac appears as a spoilsport in a world where nobody reallyknows what all these ethical or audit techniques are for or are supposedto produce.

Another paradoxical consequence of this performance obscurity is thatthese techniques are invulnerable to criticism. If it is impossible or verydifficult to know what they produce, it is also difficult to know whetheror when they fail. Discussing financial audit techniques, Power arguesthat, as a consequence,


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programmatic confidence in regulation must be maintained and generalexpectations of the efficacy . . . must be preserved. Accordingly systemicdoubt about the capabilities of audit, such as radical questioning of what itreally produces, is not a regulator option. Audits sits near the bottom of aregulatory structure which attempts to reach into the internal workings oforganizations. Particular audits may go wrong but not audit as such. (1997:33; emphasis added)

Business ethics is determined by a regulatory rationality that allows it tobe very close to the ‘internal workings of an organization’. This is exactlywhat makes business ethics what it is. Small wonder then that themelancholic experience is the hidden foe of business ethics. But it is thisexperience that allows us to resist the conformity presupposed by thosewho want to use the techniques I have discussed. I think that this is thekind of non-commitment a melancholic critique would alert us to.

What people like Ficino and Benjamin teach us is that there may begood reasons to redeem the melancholic state of mind. Anyone who is indoubt about this should wonder whether they would really survive in thewilderness by resorting to ethical accounting.

NotesThanks are due to Juliette Helmer, Ruud Kaulingfreks, Martin Parker, Peter Pelzerand two anonymous reviewers.

1 It is rather strange that this fascination for the gothic has not been prob-lematized by many organizational theorists, not only because in some sense itseems to be a response to the industrial revolution but also because it can belinked to images that allow us forcefully to describe what is going on in atleast some industrial places. The French philosopher Michel Onfray (1999:185–92) has offered us what I would call a ‘gothic’ description of the life ofworkers amidst the blast furnaces of the Societe Metallurgique de Normandienear the city of Caen. His prose is replete with images from another world: theworkers are portrayed as knights who have an almost atavistic understandingof fire and who seem to have escaped from an Eisenstein film; they arelabourers working on ‘the first few seconds of the world’; they spend theirtime in poisonous and heated labyrinths where not even the Minotaur wouldsurvive; in short, they live in places that are more hellish than Dante’s Inferno.And yet the molten steel engenders special forms of togetherness and sol-idarity that are, as Onfray observes, absent in the computerized offices on theperiphery of the Societe. In the field of organizational theory, gothic elementsare hardly ever used in this way. Kociatkiewicz and Koster (1999) are anexception to the rule and claim that a gothic perspective on organizations andother social phenomena may enhance self-awareness and self-reflectionamongst scholars. Pelzer and Pelzer (1996: 13) claim that a gothic perspectiveallows one to see that ‘organization is a threatening fact taking away ourpersonalities, sucking life out of our bodies and brains’ and even go so far as tosuggest that Dracula-type motives—seduction, manipulation, coercion and the‘indirect approval of the victims’—might be usefully exploited for the analysisof organization.


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2 Munro’s comments on the widespread use of these techniques in Britishpublic organizations are very much to the point here. Accounting, he argues,is assumed to ‘bring “discipline” and “order” to areas like the health service,previously branded (tautologically) as chaotic from its lack of accountingprocedures. . . [T]he general shift is one of public organizations moving frommanagers using “management accounting” (as a support service) to a newhegemony of “management by accounting”. The main legacy from theThatcher years may come less from her Victorian values, and more from theserendipity of her consort being Dennis Thatcher, someone with an unblink-ing reliance on running businesses through balance sheets’ (Munro, 1998:202).

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Rene ten Bos works for Schouten & Nelissen, a Dutch consultancy organization, and isprofessor of philosophy and organizational theory at Nijmegen School of Manage-ment. He is the author of Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking (2000)and has published many other books and articles on business ethics, philosophyand organizational theory. Address: Lankforst 21-02, 6538 GG Nijmegen, TheNetherlands. [email: [email protected]]


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Documents

Business Ethics, Accounting and the Fear of Melancholy