This article argues, based on the work of Bakhtin and de Certeau, that there is no aesthetics without politics and that all academic discourse and practices are enacted through aesthetic forms with inherently political and ethical effects. The article is written in a script-form with indications on how to perform it, acting out or ‘performing' in a direct way rather than adding to the arguments already present in organizational literature. In a prologue (which can be read after reading the script by readers who do not want to harm its open impact), we discuss aspects of this choice: through the use of a different form for telling a story, we want to focus on the political and ethical implications of an aesthetic approach to organizing and how this can influence scholarly work. The script wants to move readers through various spaces of speech where society becomes organized. Through such movements we want to contribute to the imagination of possible ways of ‘performing oneself' as an academic citizen in society. As an imaginative experiment, this article hopes to inspire scholars to (re)consider their habitual forms of publication and public action, and to address the question of ‘how to speak to it' including the question of aesthetic genres and societal relationships.
"Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use… " Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
We still believe that entrepreneurship research could be much more reflexive about the roots it says to be stemming from and the routes it prioritizes to follow. Therefore, this presentation tries to remember a few important philosophical bifurcation points which have important consequences for how we can imagine entrepreneurship research and what entrepreneurship researchers can do. Whether we play out Parmenides against Heraclitus, Kant against Arendt or Descartes against Spinoza, the conceptual options are radically different in an ontological, ethical and political sense. As we talk about where entrepreneurship comes from, we are equally attracted about ideas about where entrepreneurship is going and what it can become. While such a philosophical debate might be considered by some as a side-dish, we would like to suggest that this is a vital discussion which spices our appetite for questions of politics, ethics and aesthetics. To actualize an old slogan into a question which seeks to respond to potentialities that fuel our desire to become in the present: how can entrepreneurship research itself become entrepreneurial? Let's play.
