Shorelines

Marsh

Marsh, mire, fen, bog, slough, morass and wetland. These are liminal landscapes. Places of making and unmaking where water cedes to land and land to water. The world here is never topographically still. Waterlands are ‘fungible’ and ‘highly motile spaces’ (Leyshon, pp.155-156). And this terrain is not to be trusted. It demands caution, respect and propitiation. Among the sedge, reed and rush, we hear the trickster’s laugh; for the ground underfoot is literally (and materially) ‘shifty’.

In the wetlands, nothing is what it seems. While investigating the Hound of the Baskervilles, Dr Watson comments that Dartmoor’s Grimpen Mire looks a rare place for a gallop. It takes the minatory Stapleton to caution that ‘a false step yonder means death to man or beast’ (Conan Doyle, p.82). For this is not a passive land. This bog is alive, infused with agency and vengeful will – it possesses a ‘tenacious grip’ wielded by a ‘malignant hand’ (p. 179). This potency is recognised by Daisy Johnson in the short story Starver where the eels caught on the draining of the fens refuse to eat: ‘it was a calling down of something upon the draining’ and some said they ‘heard words coming from the ground as the water was pumped away’ (Johnson, loc 39).

Folklore too recognises the spiteful malevolence of the wetlands. Those of the marsh tell stories of Will o’ the Wisp, Jack o’ Lantern, Spunkie, Pinket or Ignis Fatuus. This dangerous fairy takes delight in making unwary travellers lose their way – or their lives. Shifting its shape to promise beauty or riches, it tempts the foolish and gullible to flounder in the hungry, sucking bog.

The marsh is a ‘thin place’ between the natural and the supernatural. Here votive offerings are made and chthonic gods placated. Shield, sword, helmet and torc are relinquished to water. These are the links that solder the living to the dead. And darker gifts are also tendered. In Denmark, more than 500 bog bodies have been found – sacrificial victims that are remarkably intact, preserved by the peat in which they were interred. In the liminal, ritual space of the wetlands, time too is not what it seems. These bodies slip their temporal constraints. Mummified flesh and bone make the Iron Age contemporary. Feature and expression vivid, startling – as if disturbed from yesterday’s sleep. And the past inhabits the present in other ways. In a series of poems inspired by the bog people, Seamus Heaney draws connections between ‘sacrifices to the Mother Goddess of Earth and the violent history of Northern Ireland’ (Morrison, p.47).

Out there in Jutland

In the old man killing parishes

I will feel lost,

Unhappy and at home

The Tollund Man

Fluxed between the material and immaterial, the past and the present, marsh, mire and estuary are border territories. And these ‘borders do not correspond to national boundaries, and papers and documents are unrequired at them’ (Macfarlane, p.78). Caught in this betwixt and between world, it is easy to lose your sense of what is and is not. The Broomway which, like Grimpen Mire, is only navigable by remembering ‘certain complex landmarks’, heads out to sea for three miles from the Essex coast before making landfall at Foulness Island. Swept ‘clean of the trace of passage twice daily’, this is a path that is no path (Macfarlane, p.61). In walking it, Robert Macfarlane experiences a ‘strange disorder of perception’: scale and distance twist and weld as ‘sand mimicked water, water mimicked sand, and the air duplicated the textures of both’ (Macfarlane, p.75).

In this ‘unbiddable and ‘unmappable’ physical terrain’ (Roberts, p.42), the expertise of one ‘whose knowledge is ambulatory’ (Andrews and Roberts, p.9) is required. Traversing the ambiguous and potentially dangerous Broomway, Macfarlane is aided by a guide; just as those crossing the ‘uncertain and treacherous topography of Morecombe Bay’ (Andrews and Roberts, p.7) seek the help of the Sand Pilot. Like initiates in a rite of passage, they ‘put their trust in an elder or master of ceremonies who ‘can ensure safe navigation and transit(ion)’ (p.8).

And the consequences of unaided passage are severe. In 2004, twenty-three Chinese migrant workers were drowned while harvesting cockles on the sand and mud-flats of Morecombe Bay. This is the liminal compounded in on itself. For, as Roberts soberly observes, migrant workers are themselves liminal, occupying a ghostly ‘zone on the social and geographic margins of the nation; caught in the interstices of transnational space’ (Roberts, p.41).

The wetlands attract those, less innocent than the cockle pickers, but caught too in the shadows of the edgelands and margins. It is in the ‘dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates’ that Pip first encounters the escaped convict, Magwitch in Great Expectations (Dickens, p.35). Magwitch bears corporeal witness to the agency of this bleak marsh: he is ‘soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars’ (p.36). This is land that always exacts payment.

Magwitch’s crimes alert us that that this is also a place for transgression. Not far from where I write, you will find (although it may prove harder than you think) The Locks Inn in Geldeston. Marooned in the Waveney marshlands that separate Suffolk from Norfolk, this was (formerly) a site of cross-country smuggling and illegal prize-fighting.

The wetlands, like other liminal spaces, ‘fall outside of the geographic grid’ (Iedema et al). As Roberts note, the cultural and literary imaginaries of marsh, mire and estuary hold these as marginal and socially ‘empty’ spaces (Roberts, p.216). They feature the featureless which is why, in representations of the Norfolk Broads, the drainage mill and wherry have played such an important role ‘in the symbolic construction of place in a landscape otherwise characterised in terms of its flatness and lack of prominent (natural) topographic features’ (Roberts, p.217). These are the visual and cognitive equivalents of the firm sand, grass or moss that ensure confident navigation through quicksand and bog.

These spaces are also ‘empty’ in a utilitarian sense. They are ‘denuded of a rationalised function’ (Roberts, p.217). What are the wetlands for? And we see echoes of this in our own liminal, organisational spaces – the corporate shadows of marsh, mire and estuaries. In their study of how a bulge in a hospital corridor became a site of instruction and knowledge exchange, Iedema et al note that it ‘lacked functional definition’; it did not ‘embody strong indications to staff about what is to take place’ there (Iedema et al, p.53). Corridors, toilets, store-rooms, lifts, stairwells, kitchens, photocopier rooms – these are all spaces that do ‘not seem to serve a productive function’ from a rational, calculative perspective (Warnes, p.46). They embody, in a sense, ‘space out of space’ (Van Marrewijk and Yanow, p.10). Yet, like the wetlands they metaphorically reflect, these too are spaces of potency and energy – spaces for story, creativity, interaction, learning and transformation. Spaces too where we can lose ourselves but, unlike Grimpen Mire, always guarantee a safe return.

Andrews, H. and Robert, L. (2012) ‘Re-mapping liminality’, in Andrews, H. and Robert, L. (eds.) Liminal landscapes: travel, experiences and spaces in between. Routledge.

Conan Doyle, A. (1902), The hound of the Baskervilles. Pan.

Dickens, C. (1861), Great expectations. Penguin.

Heaney, S. (1980), ‘The Tollund Man’, in Selected poems: 1965-1975. Faber.

Iedema, R, Long, D and Carroll, K. (2010) ‘Corridor communication, spatial design and patient safety: enacting and managing complexities’, in van Marrewijk, A. and Yanow, D. (eds.) Organisational spaces: dematerialising the workaday world. Edward Elgar.

Leyshon, C. (2018), ‘Finding the coast: environmental governance and the characterisation of land and sea’, Area, 50(2), pp. 150-158.

Macfarlane, R. (2012), The old ways: a journey on foot. Hamish Hamilton.

Morrison, B. (1982), Seamus Heaney. Metheun.

Roberts, L. (2018), Spatial anthropology: excursions in liminal space. Rowman & Littlefield.

Van Marrewijk, A. and Yanow, D. (2010) ‘Introduction: the spatial turn in organizational studies’, in van Marrewijk, A. and Yanow, D. (eds.) Organizational spaces; rematerializing the workaday world. Edward Elgar.

Warnes, S. (2015) Exploring the lived dimension of organizational space: an ethonographic study of an English Cathedral. PhD thesis, University of Essex, UK.

Beach

Let us return, one year on, to the beach. This is a ‘place of strong magic (Preston-Whyte, p.349); a trickster margin between land and sea, eternally shifting shape as the tides contest, claim and reclaim. Perhaps it is the ‘archetypal liminal landscape’ (Thomassen, p.21) – an alchemical strand poised on multiple ambiguities. For, as Meethan notes, it is rarely inhabited but often used; a space of play and a place of work; a scene of recreation yet one where hazard and peril grimly lurk; a haunt for the solitary and a magnet for the rowdy throng (Meethan, p.70).

Beach2 And, like all liminal spaces, the beach offers promises of transformation. In Rob Shields’ fascinating analysis of Brighton’s cultural positioning, he argues how the Prince Regent, later George IV, popularised the ‘reputedly restorative powers of sea-bathing’ (Shield, p.75). For the sick and valetudinarian, this was a pilgrimage covenanting physical renewal. And the reward for the devoted traveller was the ‘Cure’: a programme of prescribed sea-dippings (the rites of the liminal phase) officiated by ‘Dippers’. These ‘priests’ carefully (or forcefully) assisted their charges from the bathing machines: ‘mediaries between two worlds, civilised land and the undisciplined waves’ (Shields, p.84).

But where there is transformation, there is often transgression. For, in the liminal, in the ‘gap between ordered worlds almost anything may happen’. (Turner, p.13). As the Regency sea-water pilgrims gave way to the mass holidaymakers of the later 19th century, Shields identifies the emergence of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque: ‘a temporary suspension…of hierarchical rank…permitting no distance between those who came in contact with each other and liberating them from the norms of etiquette and decency imposed at other times.’ (Bakhtin, p.10). Here, betwixt work and home identities, the crowds of holidaymakers were free to imbibe, flirt and play. Liberated on the seashore, the adult became child – ‘expected to fool around, build sandcastles…and perform other “childlike acts”‘ (Baldacchino, quoted in Andrews, p.153).

This ‘aliveness’ of the carnivalesque, Shields argues, was reflected in the mass market success of the comic postcards. Here, authority was inverted as policemen, vicars and colonels became the victims of innuendo, embarrassment or lewd slips of the tongue. Yet there was a limit to this transgression: for ‘if they wink at such practices they also exert a kind of governing influence by playing so much on the breaking or bending of taboo’ (Shields, p.98).

Remember though – the beach of summer becomes the beach of winter. And this brings more caliginous meanings. The borderlands and margins are ‘also places of anxiety replete with darker images of threat and danger.’ (Preston-Whyte, p.350). These ‘placeless places’ of No Man’s Land and crossroads – where the gibbet stands and the graves of suicides and witches lie – invite the liminal’s shadow (see Trubshaw, 1996). In M.R. James’ A Warning to the Curious and Oh, Whistle, and I’ll come to you, My Lad, the landscape of the beach reflects a ‘temporal instability’ where an artefact from the past has the power to exact a dreadful vengeance in the present.

wide-open sands with their wind-bent trees transport the viewer to a place out of time, where the omnipresent past is felt only in the ganglia or seen from the corner of the eye. (Easterbrook, quoted in Scovell, p.45)

And the beach’s multiple, symbolic meanings resonate in our worklives too. Historically, the seaside was the traditional locale of the works’ outing. Indeed, in my first job, an orders clerk in a Battersea warehouse, our reward for the fulfilment of a particularly onerous order was a day trip – on a coach, or charabanc if you romantically prefer – to, inevitably, Brighton. Here, our liminal day unfolded. Our dress reflected our holiday status and suggested no boundary between packer and managing director. We were liberated from the ‘normative practices and performance codes of mundane life’ (Shields, p.84) and true to liminal form, we embraced the carnivalesque: sun, drink and a somewhat frank exchange of views with senior management on the increasingly hungover return leg along the South Circular.

But these are more sophisticated times. Yet perhaps the ubiquitous awaydays, offsites, retreats and conferences we enjoy (or endure) are the beach’s close, metaphorical cousins. Rina Arya, in an investigation of the awayday involving a solicitor’s firm and a retail chain, identified the ‘opportunities it provides to have fun – to socialise, dress down and to enjoy treats courtesy of the employer’ (Arya, p.24). Indeed, as one of the interviewees commented: “it felt like a mini break”. Or, a day trip to Brighton, in all but name. With the boundaries loosened between work and family life, some experienced the away day as an opportunity to define their identity, to reflect, to ‘take stock of things’ and, on returning to the workplace, ‘felt more uplifted and fulfilled’ (Arya, p.27). Such spiritual and psychological revival mirrors the physical rejuvenation of our ancestors seeking the ‘Cure’. And perhaps we too have our contemporary ‘dippers’. Although here we call them facilitators or trainers guiding their initiates through the rites of workshop and breakout session and bearing the sacramental vessels of post-its, flip charts and PowerPoint.

We can also distinguish elements of the carnivalesque as hierarchies are relaxed and the lines between roles, functions and structures blur and coalesce. Elsewhere, transgression may come to the fore. In a study of hotels as liminal sites, Pritchard and Morgan observe how conferences and conventions ‘create opportunities for illicit sexual encounters’. They see this as a consequence of the very liminality of hotels – ‘as crossing points into the unknown, as places of transition and anonymity, hidden from familiar scrutiny’ (Pritchard and Morgan, p.769).

And, for some, the awayday will always be the ‘placeless place’: a source of anxiety or frustration where there is pressure to ‘act a part, to conform, to perform even’ (Arya, p.30). Here identity is constrained not liberated and the guiding hand of management suspected and distrusted.

So, as you plan your next awayday, reflect on the multiple meanings and symbolic resonances that your carefully scheduled event subtly invokes. Remember the dippers, the blushing vicars in McGill’s comic postcards and M.R. James’ vengeful revenants. Which ones do you wish to invite? Whose stories do you wish to hear? And, as always, be careful in your choice.

Andrews, H. (2012) ‘Another place or just another space? Liminality and Crosby Beach’, in Andrews, H. and Roberts, L. (eds.) Liminal landscapes: travel, experience and spaces in-between. Routledge.

Arya, R. (2011) ‘Transitional spaces: the phenomenology of the awayday’, Tamara Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry, 9(3/4), pp. 23–33.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1984), Rabelais and his world. Indiana University Press

Meethan, K. (2012) ‘Walking the edges: towards a visual ethnography of beachscapes’, in Andrews, H. and Roberts, L. (eds.) Liminal landscapes: travel, experience and spaces in-between. Routledge.

Preston-Whyte, R. (2004) ‘The beach as a liminal space’, in Lew, A, Hall, C.M. and Williams, A (eds.) The Blackwell’s tourism companion. Blackwell.

Pritchard, A. and Morgan, N. (2006) ‘Hotel Babylon? Exploring hotels as liminal sites of transition and transgression’, Tourism Management, 27(5), pp. 762–772.

Scovell, A. (2017), Folk horror: hours dreadful and things strange. Auteur Publishing.

Shields, R. (1991), Places on the margin: alternative geographies of modernity. Routledge.

Thomassen, B. (2012) ‘Revisiting liminality: the danger of empty space’, in Andrews, H. and Roberts, L. (eds.) Liminal landscapes: travel, experience and spaces in-between. Routledge.

Trubshaw, B. (1996). Why Christopher Robin wouldn’t walk in the cracks: an introduction to the liminality of place and space. http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/liminal.htm (accused 17 February, 2018)

Turner, V. (1974), Dramas, fields and metaphors: symbolic action in human society. Cornell University Press.

Bunker

The Barbican in London is a source of solace. Walking the grey, water-stained ramparts, I feel protected by its coarse solidity. The hard, excoriating drag of bush-hammered aggregate reassures rather than pains. This is a place – fittingly given its name – of defence, retreat and enclosure. In my more oneiric moments, I imagine a dystopian city of hand to hand fighting – a Stalingrad for a future age – with the Barbican providing the last refuge for defiance and resistance. With a morbid eye, I see the walkways and towers pitted by shellfire revealing the twisted steel rods within.

Given its genealogy, such a role is not mere fancy. In a beautiful yet unsettling book – Bunker Archeology – Paul Virilio charts through image and essay his fascination with the Atlantic Wall: 1500 World War II bunkers built to deter an Allied landing. The stark concrete of these observation posts, towers, firing slits and embrasures are progenitors for Brutalist architecture. And the setting – the French littoral of Normandy and beyond – is of, course, liminal. Beaches are a ‘perfect example of marginal, in-between spaces, zones of liminality that hold a fascination for many that few other landscape forms do’ (Meethan, p.70). Or, more disturbingly, they function as a ‘space of defamiliarization…marked by rough borders and unsolid ground.’ (Burleigh and Jung, p. 246). This unease is identified by Virilio who records:

looking out over the void, over this moving and pernicious expanse, alive with menacing presences; in front of the sea Hitler rediscovered ancient terror: water, a place of madness, of anarchy, of monsters

Bunker Several of these bunkers are themselves liminal. Slumped into the beach like fallen, hamstrung beasts, the boundary between sand and structure is in constant negotiation. With each tide, each storm surge their material identity – like those of any ruin – is simultaneously effaced and remade. The simile of beasts also suggests something further. There is a robotic anthropomorphism to many of these bunkers. The prow and aperture of a control tower juts like a jawline with an open mouth above – these are Easter Island statues recast for the modernist age.

This humanisation of military architecture is also apparent in Sophia Davis’ experiential account of a walk around the abandoned secret scientific research stations on Orford Ness in Suffolk: ‘the laboratories nestle into the shingle, crouching and hiding behind it in comfort from intruding eyes’ (Davis, p.147). Yet there is nothing, I feel, comforting in such anthropomorphic imagery. For does it not emphasise this ‘space of defamiliarization’? Using Fisher’s definition of the eerie – ‘there is nothing present where there should be something’ (Fisher, p.61) – the sentries, observers and soldiers that inhabited these bunkers are gone yet their absence is re-imagined (literally re-incorporated) into the features and posture of the structures.

And if we re-align our gaze on these bunkers – a metaphoric twist of the kaleidoscope perhaps – we gain a final perspective on their liminality. In a blog on Paul Virilio and accidental utilitarian art, A Year in the Country observes how these bunkers ‘could be artefacts from an almost science fiction-esque future that never was, a form of hauntology possibly.’ Or to put it another way: this is a zone where past, present and future elide.

Now, if we retrace our steps to the Barbican (which, if anyone familiar with the area knows, is often more difficult than it sounds), I see its inherent ‘bunkerness’ as infecting not just the immediate City but a world far beyond that. In every organisation, there are stories of the silo mentality – ascribed variously to individuals, departments, offices and divisions. But surely, ‘bunker mentality’ is a far more apt term? The buttresses of these fortresses may be material – another office, a different floor – but equally they can be spatially ethereal, signified by a turn in the corridor perhaps or a different desk alignment on an open plan floor. And just as a different style or cut of uniform alert the bunker inhabitants to the presence of an alien, so here the signifiers are equally distinct. Professional jargon, acronyms, attire (the creatives in jeans, the management in suits?) serve as the poker ‘tells’ that warn the wary observer of our origins and organisational provenance.

But what do these fortresses protect; what do our bunkers defend us from? Virilio argues that just ‘as the eighteenth-century bastion materialized the ballistic systems of rudimentary artillery’ (Virilio, p.39), the bunker’s ’rounded or flattened angles, the thickness of its walls…its armor plating, iron doors, and filters’ were designed to hold up under a new climate of ‘shelling and bombing, asphyxiating gasses and flamethrowers’. However, for us, surely change is the threat our organisational bunkers are designed to repel. That is the ‘climatic reality’ jeopardising the brightest jewel in our barbican’s strong room: namely the culture of our particular organisational tribe. What we are often mistakenly protecting is ‘how we do things around here’; that nebulous amalgam of values, beliefs, behaviours and norms. New technology, processes, ways of working are, or so we perceive, the fire, poison and artillery that assail and threaten to change us. And so we construct our metaphorical bunkers.

Yet history shows that such an approach is flawed. For Virilio, the remnants of the Atlantic Wall serve as ‘funerary monuments’ (Virilio, p.29) and the sobering reality is our own bunkers threaten to bury not preserve us. They deter, repel and beat back – they are symbols of closure. But in an increasingly complex and volatile world, survival depends on open innovation and collaboration. And just as Virilio’s bunkers were often built with no foundations, our own bunkers are similarly constructed on mere sand. So, let’s join hands and leave our chthonic shelters, ammunition stores and dressing stations to emerge, eyes blinking, by the open seas and far horizons of our progressive futures. It is the beach, not the bunker, that will save us.

A Year in the Country. (2016) ‘Paul Virgilio’s bunker archaeology and accidental utilitarian art’, A Year in the Country, 18 August 2016. Available at: http://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/week-3352-bunker-archives-4-paul-virilios-bunker-archaeology-accidental-utilitarian-art/ (Accessed: 21 October, 2017)

Burleigh, P. and Jung, S. (2010) ‘The Beach as a Space of Defamiliarisation’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 9(3), pp. 245–257.

Davis, S. (2008) ‘Military landscapes and secret science: the case of Orford Ness’, Cultural Geographies, 15, pp. 143–149.

Fisher, M. (2016), The weird and the eerie. Repeater Books.

Virilio, P. (1994), Bunker archeology. Princeton Architectural Press.

Illustrations

Day, M. (2010) Balmedie Dunes. Available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/whoisthatfreakwiththecamera/6647864153/in/photolist-b8s3pt-3ESGu-gaKgg4-qnAGZE-qE5Q3h-ajc41C-3ESG6-ahtV3F-fesFje-RJBaBy-5d97Z8-3JtukF-dVd1fP-8hFfLP-9m2ksu-4RZX85-4MrUP-3bjge-cFnkJ1-g22hse-9m2knq-6Qw1Xo-6QvUZw-UhmhgF-6UuLf-8sMzha-jvEFxN-dmfkK2-e8Pgz-9m2kpj-e8PgC-6kVBaK-hcgHU-dNVbQZ-dmfvcE-5M8yxK-5FMyw-njAqfb-e8PgA-7w7A7T-73eV6J-4vhJem-yrhYMA-bREwKD-yc5RgV-3mrzoA-FhDLD-yuifa6-xwzDis-9N7fY2 (Accessed: 21 October, 2017). Link to Creative Commons Licence.

Rodwell, I. (2017) Barbican, London

Ghost

Our organisations are haunted places. They swarm with ghosts. Maybe not ghosts in a conventional sense; but ghosts nevertheless. If you wait long enough, you may discern the ‘sense of a presence of those who are not physically there’. In offices, factories, call-centres, shops and salons, we ‘constitute a place in large measure by the ghosts we sense inhabit and possess it’ (Bell, p.813).

Ghost And, as we have intimated before, these ghosts are creatures of the liminal. For Derrida, they are this ‘non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one’ (Orr, p.1055). Immaterial themselves, their power is to make the space around them immaterial too; their liminality infects. They can ‘elide the distance between the actual and the imagined’ so that ‘frail and cherished distinctions collapse’ (Beer, quoted by Jackson, p.69).

Think of an upmarket City meeting room. Let’s call it room 148. For your guest, experiencing this space for the first time, it is like any other meeting room: neutral in its ubiquity. Subdued colours, art work on the wall, maybe coffee and pastries arranged on the table. For you, however, the experience is different. It is enhanced, tinted (or maybe tainted?) by all the other meetings you have attended there. The spectral voices and faces of those you previously met haunt the room. These presences are many. The room is a palimpsest of recalled conversations, arguments, emotions and the tone of those meetings (productive, boring, confrontational) now begins to affect your mood. You too are haunted. The room, familiar, comfortable, known, is infiltrated by the uncanny – das Unheimlich – infusing it, albeit momentarily, with the unfamiliar, the strange, the alien. You sense a ‘feeling of estrangement, of being not ‘at home’ in the world’ (Jackson, p.65).

Ghosts appear in other guises. At a business school I know, the portraits of past deans frequent a corridor. They are sombre, besuited, the ties and haircuts indicative of past decades. I wonder to what extent this ‘picture book of the dead’ (Orr, p.1047) troubles the current dean. Do these ghosts – for that is what they are – act as vengeful revenants forever comparing the shortcomings of the present to the glories of the past; or are they more comforting spirits offering inspiration, wisdom and succour.

Tivetshall Such ghosts possess other objects too. A long time ago, I asked a colleague to identify an artefact that encapsulated our then organisation. After a pause, he spoke fondly of the chair that his former boss had left behind on retirement. Each time he saw it, he took strength from the memory of his mentor, guide and protector. It had what Weber called the ‘charisma’ of the object’ and Walter Benjamin, ‘the aura of the original’ (Bell, p.817). That chair was not just any chair; it contained a ‘kind of life’.

We also talk to our organisational dead. Think of the role models, those presences from the past that you turn to in times of uncertainty. You ask what they would have done; how they would have reacted; what guidance from beyond can they proffer? In short, we are accustomed to communing with our role model spirits.

And where there are ghosts, there are ghost stories. I have heard many such narratives in every organisation I have known. Tales of role models, heroic (and tragic) leaders, tricksters and fools. This cast of ghosts is conjured again each time the story is told. They are never exorcised. And with each raising of the dead, we re-assess our current actions. We think and sense anew. These ‘inheritances of the past haunt the relations and struggles of the present’ (Orr, p.1041).

In one of the most famous ghost stories, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the ‘ghosts’ are only perceived within the liminal – the ‘tops of towers, the roof of houses, the outside of windows, the further edge of pools’ (Klapcsik, p.5). So look again at your organisation. Those corridors, meeting rooms, staircases and lifts – are they really what they seem? For if you look carefully enough, you might – beyond the posters, filing cabinets and workstations – glimpse the symbolic equivalent of shorelines, the gibbet on the cross-roads, and the decaying mansion on the hill.

Bell, M. M. (1997) ‘The Ghosts of Place’, Theory and Society, 26, pp. 813–836.

Jackson, J. (1981). Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion. Methuen.

Klapcsik, S. (2012). Liminality in Fantastic Fiction: A Poststructuralist Approach. McFarland & Company.

Orr, K. (2014) ‘Local Government Chief Executives ’ Everyday Hauntings : Towards a Theory of Organizational Ghosts’, Organization Studies, 35(7), pp. 1041–1061.

Illustrations

Cruikshank, G. (1842) ‘The Dead Drummer’. Available at: https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/dead-drummer/

Rodwell, I. (2016) St Mary’s Church, Tivetshall St Mary, Norfolk

shoreline

Story master Shawn Callahan was kind enough to comment on my first post and suggest an additional metaphor for receptions. Whereas I had riffed on the concept of a border crossing, Shawn wisely emphasised the idea of a shoreline. And it’s a metaphor I like. For receptions are places of ebb and flow, subject to a diurnal low and high tide as employees and visitors arrive and depart. And just as the tides leave a detritus of seaweed, driftwood and, in my native Norfolk, rucksacks of carefully wrapped cocaine, so the human flow leaves its own traces: a temporary imprint on a leather seat; a corporate magazine left open at a nonchalantly scanned page; a half drunk cup of earl grey.

Similarly, as deserted shorelines exude a certain melancholy, so receptions, in those late evenings or weekends, possess a lonely, even uncanny, mood. The lighting subdued, the aggregate floors and walls prone to echoes, the security guard, a lonely sentinel peering through the plate glass windows to the wild seas beyond.

These shorelines – liminal, deserted – are places for story. Each attracts the other. M.R James, probably our greater writer of the uncanny, knew it well. In Oh, Whistle, and I’ll come to You, My Lad, the antiquarian Professor Parker dreams of a terrified, exhausted man pursued by a ‘figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined’ along a ‘stretch of shore – shingle edged by sand, and intersected at short intervals with black groynes running down to the water’. As a result of his horrifying experience at the climax of the story, Parker is arguably a changed man – his ‘views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be’. Although, such enlightenment comes at a price: ‘the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night’.

As the story shows, the liminal can be a place of discomfort, of knowledge gained and innocence lost: a place of ambiguous transformation. So, next time you find yourself in a deserted reception, not only may the artefacts around you carry a greater potency (as there is less to distract you from the stories they carry), but you may find it prudent not to look behind you. Those footsteps you hear are getting closer, and closer still…

Liminal Narratives

stories in the betwixt and between