Organizing Color: Toward a Chromatics of the Social

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 color'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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Mar 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781503638624

Book preview

ORGANIZING COLOR

Toward a Chromatics of the Social

TIMON BEYES

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2024 by Timon Beyes. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

ISBN 9781503638303 (cloth)

ISBN 9781503638617 (paper)

ISBN 9781503638624 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023025431

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Cover design: Michele Wetherbee

Cover art: Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 201 x 150 cm; Photo: Jens Ziehe, Courtesy: Private Collection and König Galerie. © Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2023

· · · Sensing Media

Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Cultures of Media

EDITED BY WENDY HUI KYONG CHUN AND SHANE DENSON

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

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited

Index

One

· · ·

SOMETHING WINGED

Color as Organizational Force

FIGURE 1. Alighiero Boetti, Ordine e Disordine (Order and disorder), 1973. Ricamo su tessuto, 100 elementi, cm 17.5 × 17.5 cad. Photo: Mimmo Capone. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023

· · · On September 9, 1919, the first German Color Day (1. Deutscher Farbentag) took place in Stuttgart. It was part of the convention of the Deutscher Werkbund, the first after the outbreak of the First World War forced an early ending of the last meeting in 1914. The Farbentag’s two main speakers were the chemist and Nobel Prize winner Wilhelm Ostwald and Adolf Hölzel, an influential painter of nonrepresentational works and teacher at Stuttgart’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. The Werkbund, founded in 1907, brought together artists, architects, designers, and social reformers with entrepreneurs and corporate executives. Somewhat similar to the British Arts and Crafts movement yet more strongly connected to business and trade, the Werkbund sought to improve the German economy’s prospects through means of art, aesthetics, and design.

Ostwald, who had already arranged an opulent color-show of industrial paints and dyes at the Werkbund convention in Cologne in 1914, was considered to be the Werkbund’s expert on organization and color research (Organisation und Farbkunde).¹ Ostwald, an outspoken socialist (of a recently acquired nationalist bent), fervent believer in technology, and advocate of Ordnungswissenschaft (the science of order), studied both the ordering of colors into reliable and replicable schemata and the ordering of the social through forms and processes of organization. He believed that the age of individualism would give way to the age of organization.² As he claimed in 1915, it is the understanding and utilization of the concept of organization upon which this new great age of our cultural development is based.³ After prewar attempts at improving the organization of the world (the title of a lecture he gave in 1910) by means of the medium of a world auxiliary language, through the medium of money in the shape of a world currency, and by way of the medium of printed paper in the form of a world format—all of which assumed European colonial and imperial superiority—Ostwald turned to the elemental medium of color. The messy and ubiquitous realm of artificially produced hues and their manifold shades, tints, and tones would be a prime mover to effectuate the age and the society of organization.

Yet to fully live up to its potential of organizing life, color was itself in need of ordering. Notoriously unruly and on the move, it had to be classified, systematized, and standardized and thus made routinely administrable. And this was the rub. In the case of color, the science and practice of Ordnungswissenschaft had found a prime aesthetic force of ordering, of shaping collective sense experience. At the same time, color presented itself as notoriously unreliable matter, as something winged that flits from one form to the next as the young Walter Benjamin enigmatically noted in Berlin around the same time that Ostwald embarked on his quest to clip its wings.⁴ More than just producing a differently ordered and standardized color chart, Ostwald spent the last two decades of his life developing a new and, he claimed, properly scientific color theory.⁵ With the aim of finally and comprehensively ordering the world of color, he established a systematic approach to organizing color based on (tonal) value that would, he hoped, enable the reliable reproduction of a standardized and measurable range of colors, beneficial for mass production and mass media just as much as for aesthetic education and the design of habitats and environments, beneficial for even the practice of art itself.

· · ·

What better organizational context than the Werkbund and its alliance of artists, designers, entrepreneurs, and social reformers to develop a strict classification of colors and once and for all solve the vexed problems of color systematicity and terminology? In his speech at the Farbentag, Ostwald extolled the assumptions, applicability, and virtues of his color theory. Yet the talk did not go down well with most artists and art historians in the audience, a feeling perhaps exacerbated by the experience of the recent war and its destructive forces enabled by an organizational complex of industry, technology, and science. In what would retrospectively be called the beginning of a bitter debate,⁶ in his follow-up speech, the painter and educator Hölzel was pushed (perhaps against his will) into the role of antagonist. Harking back to the premises of Goethe’s foundational Theory of Colours, Hölzel emphasized how the movements and relativity of color’s simultaneous contrasts interfere with and scramble the cleanliness of color ordering and its calculated harmonies, leading to deviations from assumed laws of color stability.⁷ In the dynamic world of color, qualities like artistic sensibility and imagination could neither be fully captured nor modeled through a scientific standardization of hues, tints, tones, and shades. In short, art and science could never be equal partners in the study of colour.⁸ In the ensuing discussion, Ostwald was admonished for trying to box artistic practice into a scientific ordering regime. The chemist’s colors would lack soul, and having to work with paintboxes made up of calculated color harmonies—like a barrack yard drill—would be a crime to the young.⁹ Or as Johannes Itten, a pupil of Hölzel who would be one of the first teachers appointed to the newly established Bauhaus art school in Weimar in 1919, put it elsewhere, teaching color composition would need to free the study of colour effects of associations of form.¹⁰

Ostwald and Hölzel shared a basic premise, however: Color is a primary aesthetic and social force of utmost importance in its capacity (what color can do) and in its agency (what color does). The difference was how to understand and work with such capacity and agency. Schematically put, and oversimplifying a more complex entanglement of science, art, and industry, color understood as technology of social organization, mapped out and boxed in through standardized grids, charts, and manuals, clashed with an emphasis of color’s relativity, processualism, and shiftiness, even its magic. In one corner, then, there was a scientific quest for making color manageable, reliable, exchangeable. In the other corner, there was an artistic or poetic Goethean belief in the instability of color, its unmanageability, fused with a worry about the impoverishment of sense experience provoked by attempts at ordering and stilling it.

With Itten, Ostwald, architect Walter Gropius, and the painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, among others, the tension between a color science dedicated to rational order and a color expressionism presumed to be beyond or before form and in perpetual motion would come to shape the early years of the Bauhaus. Itten, embodying what has been called the Bauhaus’s early Romantic or Expressionist phase, soon left, apparently because his Expressionism and mysticism came to clash with a turn toward a Constructivist phase marked by a shift toward fusing art and technology, much in the spirit of Ostwald, who also came to teach at the Bauhaus. Paul Klee scoffed that here we are neither a paint industry nor a chemical dye-house.¹¹ Chromatics, understood as the study of perception and the practice of painting attuned to the protean and unruly force of color, stayed on at the Bauhaus, too, where tensions between objective principles and subjective experiences, natural laws and arbitrary conventions, were worked over, if not resolved.¹²

· · ·

How to administer and control the wonders of artificial hues that swept Western countries after the rise of the chemical industries? The little introductory scene of Stuttgart’s Farbentag presents color as elemental medium of the social. Oscillating between order and disorder, color promises to become an organizational force of standardization, commercialization, and education. Yet it seems to retain a recalcitrant ephemerality, slipperiness, and volatility. The scene thus foregrounds a contested and perhaps uneasy relation between color and social organization.

Historically, the Farbentag was just one event in the wide and sometimes fierce debates about the promise of controlling color that raged in the Western world in early twentieth century. These arguments have a deep prehistory. Starting in antiquity, there has been a polemic between the clarity and strength of line and form (invoking reason and representation) and the messiness, unreliability, and offensiveness of color (and connotations such as emotion, conceit, and poison). In the mid-sixteenth century, at the height of the Renaissance, it famously took on the form of the artistic and conceptual struggle between Florentine disegno and Venetian colore, pitting a mimetic, narrative, and representational mode of pictorialism against an insurrection of color.¹³ Beyond a merely artistic quibble, what was (and kept returning to be) at stake was to purify and still color’s fleetingness and manifoldness by way of the lines and contours of disegno—where color is secondary and gains its function, necessity, and duration through form—and the campaign for its liberation as primary aesthetic force.¹⁴

Yet in early twentieth century, the ubiquitous presence and availability of ready-made hues and the glow of luminous urban environments turned the control of color into a concern for the ordering of society. With regard to the US context, historian of science Michael Rossi has spoken of a republic of color (a notion already affirmatively employed by Goethe at the beginning of the nineteenth century), denoting an ideological, administrative, and political apparatus for ensuring that all those who could experience color would do so with the moral and aesthetic cohesion required of a rapidly expanding and self-consciously modernizing American nation.¹⁵ On the other side of the Atlantic, the public figure of Ostwald, simultaneously organization man and color man, thus embodied the quest for negotiating and shaping color as paradigmatic aesthetic medium of modernity.

Remarkably, then, these debates almost invariably ran into questions and concerns of social organization. In Rossi’s words, the medium of color expresses itself through techniques and technologies which themselves shape human societies.¹⁶ And color experience, generically understood as the color sense—the capacity to feel and understand hues, tints, tones, and shades—was and is organized by these techniques and technologies: the chromatic infrastructures, apparatuses, and material practices of organized life.¹⁷ In terms both aesthetic and organizational, color intervenes in and alters the sensible fabric of experience and the everyday distribution of the sensible, its material conditions, modes of perception, and regimes of emotion that shape how human bodies perceive, feel, think, and communicate.¹⁸ Color shapes what can be felt and known, desired and expressed. It reveals and conceals, seduces and unsettles, dominates and fades, is affirmative and subversive, gives itself to and escapes representational strategies. Color standardizes, stigmatizes, and scandalizes. In a world saturated with ever more luminous and variegated shine and twinkle, color is a primary organizational force.

· · ·

Echoing Bruce Smith’s reflections on the historical phenomenology of green, why turn color into the object (if object it is) of an inquiry into the organized and disorganized world, when there are so many more compelling objects of study in view, proper organizational concerns perhaps, like . . . political revolutions . . . , the consolidation of capitalism, the institutionalization of science, the expansion of empire, the reification of ‘race’ as a way of classifying people, shifts in the ways sexuality was aligned with gender?¹⁹ In short, because all these concerns are in some way affected by color as organizational force. Beyond the usual and compelling reasons that have propelled chromatic thought—that color helps explore the limits of language and thought, that color’s unthinkable scandal poses perennial ontological, epistemological, and methodological problems of locating where it is and what it means to perceive it, that the history of art is shaped by the quest for and bitter debates about color—there is an equally compelling if perhaps more prosaic argument to be made, and it is one of social organization.²⁰ Color is actually at work in political revolutions, in the consolidation and expansion of capitalism, in the institutionalization of science, in the workings of colonial empires, in all sorts of ways of classifying people, bodies, and habits. It is an organizational force that helps shape all these developments by providing a primary, elemental matter for calibrating and reconstituting how the world is perceived, felt, and lived.²¹ As such, it was at the heart of industrial modernity and of the forms and processes of organization it engendered, just as it shapes contemporary digital or postdigital societies. For instance, the rise of commodity capitalism was predicated on the artificial production and standardization of color, on what business historians have called the color revolution. As Michael Taussig has written, color is the commodity’s commodity: a commodity and industry in its own right, yet one that provides goods with an aesthetic and profitable surplus value.²²

What this calls for is a chromatics of the social: to re-situate color, locate it firmly in the social, historical, political, economic, and material contexts of the organized world, and trace what it does or can do. Color becomes a question of social organization in a double sense: as erstwhile technology of order and as disorderly, uncontrollable aesthetic substance (if substance it is). Seen with Benjamin’s distinction of Medium and Apparatur, color has long been part and parcel of and refracted through apparatuses of production, management, automatization, and control; yet all of this seems to be predicated on something winged: on color’s instability, fleetingness, and evanescence as medium of experience.²³ Axiomatically put: Color affects social organization, and social organization affects color. In more processual terms, color organizes, and color is organized. Color organizes the social by way of its capacity to mediate, shape, and alter what is given to sense perception, how bodies sense, feel, and think. Yet color is itself a matter of organization, becomes social technology and color management. How to come to terms with color as force of organization is the question that propelled the writing of this text and that the following chapters seek to respond to. Through interrelated color scenes, this book presents an investigation of color as elemental medium of the social.

· · ·

To relate color to organization and organizing, to indeed posit a relation of interdependence between the two fields, requires a little unpacking. Borrowing Reinhold Martin’s reflections on architecture, technological media, and what he has called the organizational complex, one can tentatively approach color and organization as partial and uneven functions of one another.²⁴ While organization is of course not just an offshoot of unleashing color unto the world, color affects organization and is affected by organization. As organizational force and medium of transformation, color provokes, conditions, disrupts, and alters how organization takes place and unfolds.

The emphasis on color’s relational and transformative mediality situates this endeavor in a tradition of thought and experiment—a (counter-)history of chromatics for which Goethe’s Theory of Colours is regarded as foundational text—dedicated to chromatic effects, to what color does rather than what color is. In this sense, this book offers interrogations of the fundamentally social efficacy of color as force of ordering and disordering. This includes the disordering of ways of knowing, or the very divisions of mind and body, self and world that underwrite the entwined histories of capitalism and colonialism.²⁵ Adopting a sensibility and vocabulary of organization and organizing in order to investigate and discuss color’s capacities and relevance implies refraining from the perennially contested color-scientific quest to locate and define what color is, for instance, physically, chemically, neuroscientifically, or philosophically. However, such debates influence understandings and enactments of what color can(not) do, as embodied by Ostwald’s quest to fuse color science and social organization and as demonstrated by the very material and political consequences of color science for modulating and administrating the color sense.²⁶

Color science in this sense is a symptom of color as medium of ordering and disordering. As Benjamin’s notion of medium suggests and as John Durham Peters has recently developed in more detail, media can be understood as the habitats and materials through which we act and are. They are not mere means of communication but its condition of possibility. They cannot be equated with, yet are refracted and ordered by technological media (Benjamin’s apparatus). They are vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible. As civilizational ordering devices, they need to be apprehended in their capacities to organize life. Color is an elemental medium in Peters’s sense (like air, earth and water), a taken-for-granted milieu and background of organized life that fills and forms the world, relating and engendering subjects and objects, enabling sensation, perception, and exchange.²⁷

In filling and forming the world, color flits from one form to the next, as Benjamin had it, marked by instability and fleetingness and thus varying degrees of uncontrollability. This amounts to a dialectics of control and randomness, to use Sean Cubitt’s term, if dialectics is not understood as a tidy operation of mopping up contradictions but as a continuous interplay of forces.²⁸ This is precisely why color is endlessly capable of effecting events and transformations, as Natasha Eaton has written.²⁹ Such is its elemental, organizational force. Embracing what color does implies an attunement to what is fleeting, moving, alive—and thus endlessly ordered. And while there are a number of remarkable studies that trace the vagrant histories and unstable presences of specific colors such as red, white, black, blue, yellow, and green,³⁰ writing a chromatics of the social that is attuned to (dis)organization implies a focus on color in general. Hues, after all, are but one of the dimensions of color, themselves endlessly organized into tableaus and charts. Yet color’s medial capacity to effect events and transformations is also predicated on intensity and saturation, on color’s relationality, variability, and its sheer associationism. Different colors are then to be understood as nuances or degrees of color that cannot be subsumed under an ontological claim of what color (in general) is or how it works but that participate in its play of differentiation and stabilization, of disordering and ordering.³¹

· · ·

How does the quest for colors establish organizational practices and forms? How does color become and is employed as a tool or technology of organizing? And how does color intervene in and change organized life? Adopting a sensibility and vocabulary of color’s mediality in order to investigate social organization implies that color is not merely a secondary symptom of primary organizational structures or forms. It directly provokes, intervenes in, and conditions processes of organizing. Such thinking of organization in processual terms implies recognizing a more general force which includes us in its perpetual movement between order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. Attempts at organizing are bound up in, depend on, and can effect disorganization.³² The study of organization is here framed as an interest in the happening and interplay of social ordering and disordering, perhaps a more general Ordnungswissenschaft in Ostwald’s sense. This comparably loose notion of organization is echoed in older anthropological and culture-theoretical notions of social organization, and it has more recently been updated in a turn toward process theories of organizing.³³ Bruno Latour, for instance, has advocated the deployment of adverbial forms in order to understand organization as a mode of existence.³⁴ Thinking organizationally refrains from presupposing the existence of formal organizations (bureaucracies, parties, corporations, etc.) as static and object-like containers into which colors are placed, while acknowledging that—and tracing how—color can become a technology of organizing within the organizational scripts of formal organizations. Thinking organizationally therefore becomes a preposition that propels one to follow and trace processes of organizing.³⁵ Latour suggests attending to the circulation of multiple scripts of organizing, understood as performative narratives that engage actors and in whose scripting actors participate. Replacing the language of scripts and narratives with an aesthetic and medial vocabulary of forces, affects, and atmospheres, color in this book is recognized and apprehended as a primary aesthetic power of organizing.

Studying color in terms of organizing and organizing in terms of color therefore encounters color in social ordering and control and in the ways it escapes these processes, in the aesthetic distribution and redistribution of what can be sensed and how (thus organizing the human sensorium), in the dressage, discrimination, and liberation of human bodies, in commodity capitalism, in the affective glue of political hues, and in the lure of countless digital colors. All of this is predicated on color as medium through which ordering and disordering take place and thus on its processual force: its permanent and endless capacity for chromatic differentiation.³⁶ Color is flitting between managerial technology and unmanageable thing. To paraphrase Nicholas Gaskill, an attunement to color requires a mind for processes of organizing.³⁷

· · ·

The notion of chromatics denotes a field of inquiry into how color behaves in everyday settings. Goethe’s influential Theory of Colours (first published in 1810 in German, first English translation published in 1840) heralded a turn away from inscribing the study of color into the science of optics, away from modeling the objective properties of light and the orderly ways in which colors physically harmonize, mix, or clash.³⁸ In tune with the etymological roots of chromatics, denoting phenomena that are caused by color and relate to color sensations, the study of chromatics began foregrounding human perception and the responsiveness and irritability of human bodies affected by color.³⁹ This entailed, in Jonathan Crary’s account of the nineteenth-century recalibration of vision, a groundbreaking move away from the camera obscura model of human perception and its assumed separation of observer and observed. It helped usher in a host of techniques of the observer invested in the empirical study of vision and the irritability of the eye and the development of new techniques of disciplinary control and regulation (or surveillance and punishment) precisely because human sense perception became unmoored from assumptions of comparably stable modes of cognition and the more inflexible representational system of the camera obscura.⁴⁰ To think chromatically therefore calls for a focus on the modulation and administration of perception through color and how this is organized.

Emphasizing how color behaves, acts, and is acted upon organizationally, a chromatics of the social seeks to pull this conceptual and empirical imaginary into the study of the social. In assuming that color is an elemental medium, this endeavor is thus part of a more general reconsideration of the aesthetic in contemporary cultural, medial, and social thought on aesthetic or emotional capitalism. Here, the aesthetic is not conceived as a property of objects or experiencing subjects but as force that underpins and transforms social and socio-technical relations, returning the fate of the human senses into a political question of utmost urgency.⁴¹ Yet a chromatics of the social foregrounds the manifold and mundane processes and struggles through which color acts upon organized life and is itself organized. A larger argument implicitly runs through the following pages, and it is this: For aesthetic forces to impress themselves on social practices, they need to be understood as organizational, as provoking and inflecting processes of organizing, and as invariably part of organizational apparatuses of power and control. Loosely related to what I would call a media theory of organization, this echoes John Durham Peters’s and Reinhold Martin’s points alluded to above: to trace how media become operational, they need to be thought of in organizational terms and as part of organizational constellations.⁴²

In terms of social and organizational theory, the focus on color’s agency and relationality chimes well with the recent interest in the material, affective, mediated, and infrastructural constitution of organized life. Yet there is precious little on color in aesthetic approaches, embodied and affective approaches, neo-material approaches, spatial and atmospheric approaches, or even in visual approaches to organizational and social theory.⁴³ Perhaps this book can help redress the somewhat color-blind or perhaps chromophobic constitution of socio-organizational thought, to refer to the artist and writer David Batchelor’s provocative, sweeping diagnosis of Western cultural and scholarly spheres’ long-standing fear, loathing, and degradation of color.⁴⁴

However, a chromatics of the social can draw inspiration and courage from a broader renaissance of chromatic investigations, from a rekindled interest in color’s effects and affects across different fields of inquiry. Color (as ever) trespasses the epistemological and methodological boundaries between cultural and social theories. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is a long-established engagement with color’s behavior in art theory and cultural history, also reflecting that color’s constitutive ambiguity—as force of ordering and disordering—has been explored most attentively on the terrain of visual art, film, photography, and literature (as the following scenes show).⁴⁵ Yet beyond these strongholds of chromatic thought and to refer only to the main interlocutors of the present study, color has more recently surfaced as a major issue in anthropology, media theory, business and economic history, architectural theory, postcolonial studies, semiotics, film studies, affect theory, literary studies, cultural studies, and the history of science.⁴⁶ To varying degrees, these and related writings touch upon color as organizational force and are thus woven into the following scenes.⁴⁷ There is perhaps a return of chromatics as an interdisciplinary or a-disciplinary field of inquiry—epistemologically and methodologically diverse in being open to and problematizing what color does, a republic in color theory in Goethe’s sense—to which a chromatics of how the social is organized belongs.

· · ·

The following chapters are structured into color scenes. As starting points for each investigation (akin to