Affirming an Art Review Section in BEQ

Abstract

BEQ opening up to publishing art reviews strikes me as something like an event in itself: the journal’s relational capacity is extended to new influences, which brings new potentialities that in turn assemble new readers and existing readers in new ways. This “eventness” indicates that it is an important move for a journal like BEQ to make. It suggests, as the editors stated in their essay (den Hond and Painter 2022, 7–8), that art can renew our vocabularies and provide inspiration for thinking anew by having us reflect on our self-formation, inviting us to empathize with the other and enhance our moral imagination (Werhane 1998; Ciulla 1998). Philosophers Bergson, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault and Deleuze, to mention some who were inclined to problematize time, force, power, affect and process, all engaged with art at some point in their careers. If I venture to summarize how the result of this engagement would be expressed, it would be with the slogan “Where to start? Start with art!” In the thick forest of thought, art brings us to a clearing where thinking is given a good reason to start anew. Canonical ethical will-formation surely points us in the direction of roads often taken, yet affected, we stand in the clearing with an increased capacity to interact, and we realize we can imagine multiple ways ahead. The experience of art can be described in many ways. What intrigues us as BEQ readers is perhaps theway it enrols us in a different conversation as business ethicists (or scholars with research interests within the realm of business ethics). It is indeed reasonable to expect that we will be able to discourse in new ways when the experience of art is invited as a source of analysis, reflection and discussion. It also seems reasonable to think that in the belonging that the experience of art opens up, theway it assembles us as an event, there is a potential becoming of thought to be had —one that might bring thinking to the fringe of the already thought. As with any potentiality, this one, too, can be negated or affirmed. Spinoza would say that to the extent we seek to relate to or connect with other bodies to enhance our capacity or power to act (our conatus), we link active forces with this will and thus affirm becomings, processes of making difference happen (Deleuze 1988, 2006; Bennett 2010). For sure, our inclination to affirm new potential becomings as a result of the experience of art is a question of howpassionate we are about art, what art does to our power to be affected and our power to affect. Process philosophy suggests that we