Jerzy Kociatkiewicz

Monika Kostera
email: monika@kostera.pl

e Speed of Experience: e conarrative method in experience economy education

Keywords: experience economy, ethnography, management education, speed, storytelling

In this text we propose a management learning technique we name the co-narrative method. We see in this approach a useful means for capturing the subtler nuances of experience economy interactions, as well as learning ethics and CSR by nurturing empathy and compassion. We present a method based on the example of the idea of slow as fast side of organizational and festival experiences, which we explored through autoethnographic studies of participation in experience economy events. It builds upon the insights on improving management education through the use of the humanistic approach.

e co-narrative method, as we call it, is based on a syzygic mode uniting the two oppositions (while preserving their inherent contradictions). It encourages its users to exercise understanding for the experience of the Other while teaching about concrete cases and events.

Introduction

is paper analyses the notion of speed as a factor in organizational experience. It also presents a research method and learning technique, the co-narrative method, developed to capture varieties of individual experience of shared events. Our contribution is thus two-fold: rstly, we examine the notions of speed and slowness in management and experience economy, based on a eld study conducted through the conarrative method. e study comprises of researching seven diff erent festivals, and its results are presented in the form of a conversation between characters of FAST and SLOW: epitomes of diff erent attitudes towards the speed of experience created to aid our eld research.

Secondly, we identify some of the de ciencies of current management education practice and, building upon insights on the possible contribution of the humanistic approach [START_REF] Gagliardi | Management Education and Humanities[END_REF], we utilize our speci c focus on the fast and the slow side of organizational and festival experiences to propose the co-narrative method as a management learning technique enabling managers and management students to explore the theatricality of such events without losing their enthralling complexity. We begin by exploring the positive and negative interpretations of speed in social theory and management literature, and the organizations presented as exemplars of speed or slowness. Yet in our reading, this double valuation should not be seen as evidence of two mutually exclusive paradigms, but of two modes of experience, is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in British Journal of Management focusing on diff erent aspects of organizational life. In order to highlight this, we examine the notion of the speed of experience in the light of the idea of experience economy-a new type of market orientation, or perhaps a changed perspective on retail transactions proposed by [START_REF] Pine | e Experience Economy: Work is eater and Every Business a Stage[END_REF]. In experience economy, businesses strive to simultaneously achieve a high degree of product diff erentiation and mass customization. e resulting transactions are viewed as theatrical spectacles, aiming at providing clients with unique experiences.

ey are o en de ned by their transience, with their most important eff ects enduring only in the minds of the participants [START_REF] Johansson | Artisans of the Spectacle[END_REF]. Studying such events, understood as stagings [START_REF] Pine | e Experience Economy: Work is eater and Every Business a Stage[END_REF] that can be of prolonged nature, such as in emerging entrepreneurial events [START_REF] Johannisson | Entreprenörskapets väsen ( e essence of entrepreneurship)[END_REF], demands the development of methodological approaches and research methods capable of encapsulating the subtler nuances of experience economy interactions such as continuity captured through momentary events or repetition de ned through diff erence [START_REF] Bill | Experiencing the Dairy: Unlocking the Value of Peripheral Traditions[END_REF]. Such methods would be useful both for research aimed at understanding transformations of contemporary organizations and marketplaces, and for management education, helping to promote understanding of organizational and event experience. e nding of such methods is the main aim of our paper. We chose the experience of speed as the thematic framing for our study, because it is one of the important management ideas and has emerged as one of the de ning axes for describing contemporary culture, appearing in descriptors ranging from Fast Food, Fast Talk (combined in a title of Leidner's 1993 ethnographic study) and Fast Company (a business magazine already in its eenth year of circulation) to its opposites in Slow Food (a celebrated movement that "brings together pleasure and responsibility"), slow architecture (a manifesto and accompanying website issued by a group of Dutch architects), and just general Slowness (proclaimed in Kundera's 1995 novel). Relatedness of these issues can be examined in a variety of ways, but what we nd particularly interesting is the ambiguous valuation given to speed by diff erent theorists and thinkers, o en in very similar contexts.

is is by no means a new phenomenon: the pensive âneur of Baudelaire and Benjamin, strolling through the city at the dawn of the last century was bound to have collided with Marinetti's futurists attempting to run by with "the racer's stride" or drive by in "a racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath." [START_REF] Marinetti | e Futurist Manifesto[END_REF].

Speedup

Marinetti, the Italian futurist poet believed in the gospel of speed. In his Manifesto of Futurism (1909) he exalts in its beauty and energy:

We affi rm that the world's magni cence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath-a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace (ibid.).

More contemporarily, authors such as Virilio (1997) or [START_REF] Baudrillard | e illusion of the End[END_REF] proclaim the near in nite speedup of the social, of which they are both deeply wary. Virilio considers speed one of the main characteristics of and a major problem to contemporary society. Speed disorientates people and deprives them of history, as history happens in time. Instantaneity globalizes time, distorts it and removes space for things to happen in local spaces and frames. Existence, on the other hand, is situated here and now, and the pace of virtualization poses a threat it, as it disconnects communication from the here and now. Its speed disintegrates human beings and the way they work in a society. For [START_REF] Baudrillard | e illusion of the End[END_REF], the modern speed of information has annihilated time, denying delay, creating constant instantaneity. Such time happens outside of the human frames of existence, heading for an apocalypse where several moments co-exist and produce a kind of arti cial immortality. Both Virilio and Baudrillard consider speed something typical of our age, inevitable and rather sinister. And yet, much of managerial discourse remains thrilled by the idea of ever-accelerating speed. [START_REF] Jones | High-Speed Management: Timebased Strategies for Managers and Organizations[END_REF] and Cushman and Sanderson (1996) promote high speed management (HSM) as a response to the ever-changing environment. Time based management strategies are aimed at working faster than the competition, knowing that time is money and using time as a most valuable resource. All processes, including managers' work and the culture of the companies, should be sped up, making way for rapid innovation, speed to market, and instant adaptation processes. [START_REF] Mourier | Velocity management: creating organizational instinct[END_REF] proposes to complement this by velocity management, based on "decision making at lightning speed" (p. 24). e popular business press emphatically echoes this fascination with speed. Speed bene ts the team spirit in so ware rms and slowing down can cause losses of clients and brings down morale [START_REF] Dahl | Fast, exible, and full of team spirit: how to work more like a start-up[END_REF].

is approach to management is seen as allencompassing: not only organizations pro t from high speed. For [START_REF] Kozminski | Flexibility-based competition: skills and competencies in the new Europe[END_REF], high-speed management, coupled with exibility, forms a suitable template for systemic transformation of the European economy, allowing the fastest-reacting performers win the competition game in the changing world. Such strategies demand exible labour markets to which people and companies need to adjust. is calls for management education programmes geared to train niche nders, able to identify and exploit transient opportunities in the market. Such programmes should promote speed and exibility through the ability to adapt instantaneously and cope with radical change. [START_REF] Child | Organizations unfettered: organizational form in an information-intensive economy[END_REF] see speedup as embedded in the ongoing transition from a materials-based economy to one based on ows. Organizations have broken free of physical constraints and velocity has become one of the main challenges facing them, together with interdependence, disembodiment and power.

e altered conditions promote organizational forms better suited to the speed at which the environments in information-intensive economies work, and call for managerial ability to withstand and exploit constant change [START_REF] Doyle | Selecting managers for transformational change[END_REF][START_REF] Kozminski | Flexibility-based competition: skills and competencies in the new Europe[END_REF].

ings as well as people should be managed as fast as possible -methods such as Just-in-Time delivery aim at speeding up operations, ideally to the level of instantaneity, via perfect coordination (e.g. [START_REF] Zimmer | Supply chain coordination with uncertain just-in-time delivery[END_REF].

eir scope encompasses all organizations, including those from outside the material production sphere, such as knowledge intensive rms [START_REF] Davenport | Just-in-time delivery comes to knowledge management[END_REF]. Slowdown is a condition to be abhorred, whether it applies to market growth [START_REF] Dawson | Japanese Retailing rough the 1990s: Retailer Performance in a Decade of Slow Growth[END_REF] or theory generation [START_REF] Burton | Marketing theory matters[END_REF].

Slowdown

However, not all students of contemporary organizations are as enthusiastic towards speed. [START_REF] Purser | Contested presents: critical perspectives on "real-time" management[END_REF] argues that management decisions should not be made impulsively or on demand as important issues need time to be thought through. Decision making should take the future and the past into consideration, something that the current trends to speed up, creating "prolonged present" (p. 156), do not allow for. Enron, as described by [START_REF] Roberts | From organization to hypermodern organization: on the accelerated appearance and disappearance of Enron[END_REF], can be seen as a pertinent illustration of what can happen if speed takes precedence over re ection. e company, ultra-fast in its appearance as well as disappearance, still caused gigantic problems in its wake. e authors describe Enron as an impermanent organization and an organization that is almost wholly determined by its relationship to the excessive speed at which it operates in relation to its environment (ibid., p. 564). [START_REF] Holmqvist | Complicating the organization: a new prescription for the learning organization?[END_REF] notes another pathological side of organizational speed: it can limit the ability of organizations to learn, as learning is invariably based on interpreting experience. Hurrying that process upsets the balance between exploring and exploiting experiences, leading to learned solutions that turn out to be ineff ective or just plainly wrong. To circumvent this the author suggests a slowing down of organizations by "complicating" them, i.e. making their learning processes more involved through interorganizational collaborations. [START_REF] Hensel | Diagnoza Organizacji: Uczyń Pierwszy Krok do Doskonalenia Swojej Firmy[END_REF] argues that management consulting should take time, too, as good consulting practices bene t from a prolonged contact with the organization, metaphorical thinking and re ection -shortcuts are a sure way to make mistakes [START_REF] Hensel | Diagnoza Organizacji: Uczyń Pierwszy Krok do Doskonalenia Swojej Firmy[END_REF]. [START_REF] Davis | Need speed? Slow down[END_REF], writing in Harvard Business Review, similarly propose that space for re ection is needed in order for companies to achieve high performance. Indeed, strategic speed is diff erent from operational speed and depends on allowing for slowness.

[P]erformance suff ered at rms that moved fast all the time, focused too much on maximizing effi ciency, stuck to tested methods, didn't foster employee collaboration, and weren't overly concerned about alignment (ibid., p. 30).

Other authors go even further. In two related interventions, [START_REF] Case | Organising speed: a quick introduction[END_REF]Case et al. ( , 2006) ) radically criticize not only the assumption that speed is good for organizations, but, indeed, that it is necessary. Other authors, most notably Honore (2004), not only present a critical stance towards speed but unequivocally praise slowness as simply better. Humanity, Honore argues, has been trapped in a self-proclaimed dogma of incessant acceleration, with speed becoming an addiction, and every day turning into a race. is constant living in the fast lane makes our experiences super cial, takes a toll on our relationships, and drives us towards a kind is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in British Journal of Management of existential stalemate. Slowness is an essential feature and condition of enjoyment.

Fast or slow organization?

Numerous examples of fast organizations, and some description of slow ones, can be found throughout organization studies literature. We brie y present a few better known ones, in order to sketch the framing of organizational realities which we wish to contrast to our approach. [START_REF] Strannegård | Already Elsewhere: Om Lek, Identitet och Hastighet i Aff ärslivet[END_REF] tell the story of the aptly named uickompany, a rapidly developing IT rm where play and work intermingle and in equal measures contribute to the company's success. Its employees are all relatively young and dedicated to their job. ey do not feel comfortable in traditional, structured professions, preferring the challenge of chaotic, high-speed environments. e constant creative change is, however, not regarded as exceptional by the employees; it is "business is not as usual" (p. 40). is can be explained by the industry that uickompany operates in: IT. Computer games and playing with technology are part of the everyday routine, just like writing programs. Slowness: lengthy decision-making processes, protracted pondering, and pure idleness are the cardinal sins in this company. e employees say that they love uickcompany while the authors believe that the organization is a foretaste of what management might look like in years to come. YalaYala (fast fast in arabic), described by [START_REF] Boutaiba | A moment in time[END_REF] is another small start-up company from the same industry. Its headquarters sport a poster saying "Speed is God and Time is the Devil". Its employees, a group of very creative people, are consciously trying to create a non-traditional company where they can all do the sort of work they really like. ey insist on remaining the same persons at work and outside of it, and being fast is one of their distinguishing traits, closely linked to their entrepreneurial spirit. ey are always ready to let go, to begin anew, and on the whole "YalaYala's way might be referred to as the way of the moment" (ibid., p. 33), and its culture as "a world of suddenly (ibid., p. 34).

e extraordinary level of diversity within the company, as well as the strength of the tolerance for diff erences is equalled only by the pace at which the rm operates; speed is seen to bring the freedom that the founders value so much. [START_REF] Leidner | Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life[END_REF] depicts two much more traditional fast organizations. McDonald's, the fast food company, demands fast, highly routinized work and sets out to control its employees' behaviour. Combined Insurance wants to instil a commitment and motivation into its employees that could be then "carried home" to create a connection to work even in their free time. ey both do so through introducing routinized, energetic ways of talking and interacting with potential clients. Routinization, including high speed, is not necessarily opposed by the employees. At McDonald's, it gives them space for personal thoughts and interactions, and makes their job easier; at Combined Insurance it boosts their con dence and off ers psychic protection from the burnout that the job may bring. Similarly, in Burawoy's (1979Burawoy's ( /1982) ) factory study, the workers work at a high pace, without resisting managerial pressures to speed up, because they create a game of meeting quotas and trying to avoid monotony at work. ey abstain from working too fast, because that would cause a rise in quotas and result in a need to work harder for the same amount of money. But within the limits of the current quotas the workers put in eff ort that cannot be suffi ciently explained by the purely nancial motives that Frederick [START_REF] Taylor | e Principles of Scienti c Management[END_REF] ascribed to them. On the opposing side of organizational experience, [START_REF] Miele | e practical aesthetics of traditional cuisines: slow food in Tuscany[END_REF] present a case study of a Slow Food restaurant. Sardo, the director of Slow Food International, an umbrella organization created to promote the idea of slow eating, is quoted to say that Slow Food can both be seen as a way of protesting against standardization, and as a way of bringing the pleasure of food to the public. McDonald's fast food restaurants are seen as a threat mainly to popular food establishments. erefore, Slow Food establishments focus on promoting local food culture. Currently the movement embraces restaurants in several dozen countries. e authors describe the Bagnoli restaurant as an example of the movement, as it "embodies the principle of 'slowness' in its adherence to typical cuisine, in its use of local materials and products, and in its ambience of relaxed conviviality" (ibid., p. 318).

e restaurant operates since the mid-60s and is a local business located on the coast on Tuscany. e current owner and chef joined the Slow Food movement with the ambition to do something diff erent, "less intensive and more interesting, more creative" ibid., p. 320).

e restaurant has traditionally based its cuisine on products from the local forest and continues to do so. It has grown more sophisticated since the joining of the movement but remains a local restaurant, accessible to e Speed of Experience: e co-narrative method in rxperience economy education is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in British Journal of Management all classes. It off ers its guests an experience, which is an eff ect of and an element in a rich social network. Seen in this context, it operates in a slow way indeed, even if the end process consisting of serving the food to customers does not necessarily last very long. Speed of organization, is thus not an independent characteristic, but one de ned by the frames of reference [START_REF] Goff Man | Frame Analysis[END_REF], or modes of experience of its participants and observers. And the notion of speed of experience is always relative, discernible only in relation to other, slower or faster experiences [START_REF] Lefebvre | Rhythmanalysis[END_REF] describes this in terms of relativity of rhythms).

is is particularly evident in the forms of organizing that foreground individual experiences, such as festivals to which we turn in the next section. Paul Ricoeur (1985Ricoeur ( /1988) ) proposed that narrative has an ability to represent the experience of time. Time can be experienced in two ways: the cosmological, which is linear, as a progression of events and moments, and the phenomenological time, which we make sense of in terms of the past, present and future. Human time combines and embraces both these ways Ricoeur argues that narratives are able to use this complex character of human time, because of they are based on con guration and interpretation, where tension is a plus, not a lack. In fact, narratives create a "concordant discordance" or a dialectic based on simultaneous individuality and unity with others of the character and his or her experiences, where life is seen as a temporal totality. Ricoeur argues for an active involvement of the reader in the process of creating a linkage between the narrated and experienced reality.

Experiencing festivals -fast or slow?

Experience economy is a catchphrase associated with a type of traditional organized event, o en recurrent [START_REF] Marling | e experience city: planning of hybrid cultural projects[END_REF] that is becoming increasingly popular as a template for management in a wide variety of settings [START_REF] Pine | e Experience Economy: Work is eater and Every Business a Stage[END_REF]. . [START_REF] Gilmore | Authenticity: What Customers Really Want[END_REF] emphasize that not only rms and management canons change with the introduction of the experience economy, but so do popular expectations. Customers now seek products that t their way of interacting with the world and which they can incorporate as a signi cant part of their lives. e product is staged in a performance that strives to engage both parties: the customer and the employee. Festivals, as always potentially (though not necessarily) recurrent events, expressly created, staged, and marketed as memorable [START_REF] Johansson | Artisans of the Spectacle[END_REF] are o en touted as exemplars of the experience economy approach [START_REF] Lorentzen | Cities in the experience economy[END_REF][START_REF] Johansson | City festivals: Creativity and control in staging urban experiences[END_REF]. [START_REF] Hjorth | Introduction[END_REF] argue that experience economy is based on four principles: immediacy, subjectivity, playfulness, and performativity. Experiences are always embodied and contextualized, never abstract, and so the experience economy product needs to be immediate, situated in concrete time and space. is includes individual modes of experiencing, such as fast and slow, which need to be taken into consideration. Subjectivity means that experiences always have an active subject, engaging with the process and transforming it, while being transformed him-or herself. e speed of experience is thus crucial in de ning the product in its double life of immediate perception and potentially treasured memory. Authenticity of experience does not mean earnestness; experience economy performances are playful, thriving on the ironic distancing towards the activities. e customers are ideally aware of the staging and do not take it utterly seriously. e whole interaction is about having fun. Finally, performativity of the economy means that the products are being created "on the spot", they are realized as they are experienced, which may mean fast or slow depending on the consumer's preferences. It is impossible to store experiences or to recycle them. ey come and are they are consumed fresh. Hjorth and Kostera also point out that there are diff erent scales of experience production, from unique through mediated to mass-produced.

e products are in all cases equally subjective, immediate, and performative, but they may be presented as belonging to diff erent experiential scopes. e unique product is one of its kind, such as for example in art production.

e mediated product is an experience of one kind transformed into another, as in design the ordinary is changing into the aesthetically sophisticated. Finally, mass-produced experiences are shared with many others, as in the case of e.g. sports spectacles. Depending on the type of practice, customers are invited to be introspective or extroverted in their experiences. Yet in all types consumption takes the form of a quest -for adventure as well as for identity. Experience economy operates in a variety of rhythms, and its events can be understood as slow or fast depending on the inclinations of the participants rather than any de nite features of the events themselves. us, is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in British Journal of Management a Volkswagen factory in Dresden has been described as a clear example of experience economy approach [START_REF] Hjorth | e fate of Phaeton: baroque art for management's sake?[END_REF]: this Transparent Factory (its offi cial name) allows prospective customers as well as tourists to watch the entire manufacturing process, and gives the buyer the possibility to follow one's ordered car from its inception right to the handover of the nished product.

e process embodies both a speedy creation of a fast vehicle and a slow process of familiarization with one's automobile-to-be.

ese insights form an additional incentive towards developing methods of management education suitable for experience economy events. We believe that the dialectic of speed, while crucial for the operation of the experience economy, is neither commonly understood nor taught. To conceptualize it, we set out on a mini-ethnographic journey of our own, focusing on the rhythms of experience and subsequently on the possibility of expressing them through storytelling.

Co-narrative study

For the eld study of the themes of speed and slowness, we chose to use the co-narrative method, the development of which forms one of the contributions of this paper. Situated rmly in the ethnographic tradition in which understanding is arrived through immersion in the studied culture, allowing the researchers to study phenomena in their living context [START_REF] Agar | Speaking of Ethnography[END_REF], the co-narrative method is a form of hybrid approach to observation [START_REF] Leidner | Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life[END_REF], also involving multiple researchers and building upon the awareness that research results an reported understandings cannot be divorced from the subjectivity of the ethnographer which provides the only means for perceiving, interpreting, and reporting the studied culture [START_REF] Behar | Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story[END_REF]. In the co-narrative method, hybrid observation means a mixture of participant and non-participant observation, where the former implies the taking upon oneself of roles from within the studied eld, and the latter means not taking upon oneself any such roles and thus remaining an outsider [START_REF] Kostera | Organizational Ethnography[END_REF]. Embracing this paradox, co-narrative researchers consciously take upon experiential roles, or modes of experience prede ned outside the eld, and use them to steer and enhance their observation. In our study, we adopted for the duration of the observations the antonymic personages of Fast and Slow, created speci cally for this study but representing, in only slightly abstracted form, the temperaments of the authors. is is a kind of re exive ethnography [START_REF] Davies | Re exive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Self and Others[END_REF], undertaken with the purpose of method development through (inter-) subjective experience. Study of other phenomena would require adopting diff erent experiential roles. We carried out a narrative study of seven diff erent festivals based on hybrid observation [START_REF] Kociatkiewicz | Experiencing the shadow: organizational exclusion and denial within experience economy[END_REF]. In most ethnographic studies, directly experienced situations, interactions, personally made observations and interviews, as well as jotted down eld notes are collected and created. When the researcher leaves the eld, they are subjected to theoretical interpretations [START_REF] Rosen | Turning Words, Spinning Worlds: Chapters in Organizational Ethnography[END_REF]. Co-narrative study focuses on collecting experiences and while other forms of assembling evidence (notes, photography, video recording) are encouraged, care should be taken so that the latter do not interfere with the former. We took only sparse and sporadic notes during the events. Taking cues from the narrative tradition of organization studies [START_REF] Gabriel | Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies[END_REF][START_REF] Boje | Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research[END_REF], the co-narrative approach centres on allowing researchers to re ect on their experiences, and to present them as a more structured narrative of the entire study experience. We believe, as does [START_REF] Czarniawska | Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity[END_REF], that organizing may, with advantage, be seen as a kind of storytelling; e result of the study of organizing may also be fruitfully presented in the story form. e stories of our report are personalized and told in rst person singular in order to emphasize the subjective quality of experience [START_REF] Hjorth | Introduction[END_REF], but the choice of the narrative form should re ect the particular focus of the speci c co-narrative study. Such stories are a form of interpretation and theorizing, and simultaneously a means of capturing the personally experienced dimension of our study. [START_REF] Van Maanen | Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography[END_REF] labels them the impressionist tales, that is, tales that "evoke and open, participatory sense in the viewer [...], startle complacent viewers" (p. 101) and engage the reader with the eld. ey consist of "words, metaphors, phrasings, imagery, and most critically, the expansive recall of eldwork experience" (ibid., p. 102). e aim of the author is to produce a feeling of "having been there" in the reader. For this reason, they can facilitate the sharing of organizational experiences that is the central aim of the co-narrative approach. During this research project, we have observed seven festivals in three diff erent countries, taking place during one year (2010). We collected impressions and documented our observations through photography used as sensual note taking [START_REF] Warren | Empirical challenges in organizational aesthetic research: Towards a sensual methodology[END_REF], simultaneously promoting careful observation and enabling re-experiencing of past moments (Berger, 1980). In this paper, we present our narratives from a single festival, chosen to illustrate our experiences in the eld as well as the co-narrative method we propose for experience economy-based management education. Our narratives of the studied events, written down a erwards, re ecting on and retracing our experiences of the studied festivals, are inspired Baudelaire's and Benjamin's meandering re ections on urban strolling, as well as the research techniques of Michel de Certeau (1984/1988). ey are the end result of our research rather than eld notes in need of explication. e characters FAST is shooting from the hip, catching moments that lack dimensions, taking photos that are perhaps attempts at puncturing the fabric of reality. Whatever will emerge from the holes? Lacking time, they are not really passing moments, rather glimpses of instantaneous eternity. Not pausing to evaluate or compare, she is already elsewhere [START_REF] Strannegård | Already Elsewhere: Om Lek, Identitet och Hastighet i Aff ärslivet[END_REF], dislocating the experience from the frame, exposing the subliminal messages under the blink, always one step ahead of herself. SLOW embraces patience, deliberation, and re ection. It is to live through each moment as it comes, savouring time in its sequence and succession. It is to allow oneself the leisure of coming to grips with one's sensations and feelings. It is to pause, choosing the exact words that can capture all the hues of the described situation. Slow is analytical, and careful in his observations. He sees experience economy as a further opportunity to explore minute facets of existence, taking delight in the details of each performance. He is aware that re ection is no defence against cliché.

Medieval fair: e stories FAST. e sounds blend and fuse together: human voices, the shrieks of children, sounds of various instruments, and something like repetitive tapping of wood against wood. A er the relative orderliness of the queue at the entrance, the streams of people mingle and shi . Everyone is on their way somewhere, around the tents placed all around the green area around the castle. A woman dressed in a long black velour dress and a hat. A man in a long off -white shirt and brown trousers, a small child in a dress, holding its rim to her breast. Birds of prey -they keep still, watchful. Oh, they are attached to poles by the foot... Poor things... A puppet dragon gaping at a group of kids sitting down in front of the puppeteers' stage, screaming with delight. A man drinking mead. A child falling on its bum. A woman in a long green skirt playing the violin while a group of men in velvet hats sing. A young woman driving her baby carriage right into the crowd. A man squatting down, pausing to deliberate over some bottles of liquor; I look over his shoulder. e labels say these are elixirs. A spirited storyteller draws applause from an enchanted audience. Here I linger a little while longer, he glimmers in front of me, shapeshi ing, magnetic, carrying us away into world of his stories. Barefooted drummers stomping and shouting, while tapping their drums. Smells of woollen cloaks and smells of roasted meat, sweet smelling buns and bitter of the metallic surfaces where they are served. Everything moves, even the stands seem to icker in the powerful sunlight. I oat, I skip, I swirl, with and against the others, around the stands, around the performers. e place and people betwixt and between: past and present, distant and close, fairytale and reality all overlapping and pulling apart, inde nite, neither-nor, and-or. e sounds of ute and of human voices so ly pour through the space, curling around the trees, stalls, tents, towards the centre. SLOW. It is high spring, and the weather is glorious: the sun is bright, the air is warm, all the vegetation lusciously green. e festival, organized in a park in the middle of the town, seems a natural t with the surrounding greenery. It is an annual event, and this is the fourth time I attend this festival. Almost all of the stalls and performer tents look enticing, but I take my time walking around, familiarizing myself with the layout and breathing in the general atmosphere before approaching any of the sellers or artists. ere is a fairly large and varied crowd milling about: a lot of families with children, quite a few childless couples and small groups of adults. Not too many solitary visitors, it appears. Most of the guests are dressed in everyday clothes, but a few wear pseudo-medieval clothes: tunics, gowns, dresses, and peasant shirts. As each year, I am enthused by the peacefulness of the presentation: there is a display of sword-ghting and an archery competition, but the vision of middle ages re-enacted here is not military at its core: there are many more is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in British Journal of Management musicians, storytellers, shopkeepers and food vendors than knights and archers. I like that a lot.

ere appears to be no centralized timetable of performances available, but by walking around I begin to assemble a timetable for the few hours we might spend here: a storyteller, my very favourite entertainer of the show, performs every hour, then there is a musical show every 45 minutes, a puppet theatre play, and a live action play I would like to see. Putting them together creates a leisurely rhythm for moving about the festival space, with periods of focused attention interspersed by aimless wandering and browsing through the displayed wares.

e quality of performances, and of the products on off er, is quite varied. One group of musicians seems quite skilled and well-rehearsed, while others sound rather amateurish. e diff erence in skill between two storytellers is also quite noticeable. Products sold range from tacky plastic swords and shields to elaborately presented potions boasting tongue-in-cheek miraculous eff ects. ere is a falconry display bringing together twelve diff erent birds of prey, but they are tied to their posts and appear much more pitiful than awe-inspiring. FAST convinces me to have a go at 'Splat the Rat' a game of skill where the punter tries to hit a plush rat with a wooden mallet. Inevitably, I am too slow to win.

Telling intertwined stories: To explore and to learn What do we make of those tales? How do they relate to organizing and organizations? Below, we present our individual re ections on and common interpretation of the stories, and argue why we believe the dialogue can be important to others interested in experience economy events.

roughout the study we assumed the characters of FAST and SLOW to guide our experience of the eld. e choice was inspired by [START_REF] Jung | e archetypes and the collective unconscious[END_REF] notion of archetypes: patterns located in the collective unconscious and containing images related to human motivations and inspirations [START_REF] Jung | e archetypes and the collective unconscious[END_REF]. Jungian archetypes are used in studies of organizations to depict and interpret hidden and dark sides of organizations (e.g. [START_REF] Bowles | e organization shadow[END_REF][START_REF] Carr | Jung, archetypes and mirroring in organizational change management: lessons from a longitudinal case study[END_REF][START_REF] Kociatkiewicz | Experiencing the shadow: organizational exclusion and denial within experience economy[END_REF], to explore the inspirational potential of images of heroes, heroines and villains (e.g. [START_REF] Bowles | e gods and goddesses: personifying social life in the age of organization[END_REF][START_REF] Aaltio | Louhi, the Mistress of Northland: the power of the loner[END_REF], to narrate mythologized aspects and qualities of organizations (e.g. [START_REF] Kociatkiewicz | e cosmogonic duel[END_REF][START_REF] Parker | Heroic villains: e badlands of economy and organization[END_REF], and to seek inspiration for motivation and engagement in change processes (e.g. Matthews, 2002;[START_REF] Hatch | ree Faces of Leadership: Manager, Artist[END_REF]. e archetype can serve as plot, character, place or time of action. Tales containing, or based upon, archetypes, have the potential to profoundly move the listener or reader, inspire and explain important aspects of reality [START_REF] Kostera | Organizacje i Archetypy[END_REF][START_REF] Kostera | Holding up the Aegis: on the construction of social roles by Polish IT professionals and the change in agency[END_REF].

In the context of this study, our aim is to allow us to focus on the diff erences, rather than commonalities, of our experience, and to re ect on the role of speed in focusing our attention.

Re ections

FAST. To me, the festivals where rst and foremost about ows and streams: of people, smells, sounds, impressions, moving about at a rapid pace, diff ering from festival to festival, both as to their contents and feelings that the following of them evoked. Festivals diff er: some are playful, melodic, some chaotic, hectic, intense. Experiencing them meant for me moving along their characteristic streams, getting involved with their rhythms and letting myself co-oscillate in synch with their vibes. e experience was a melange of impressions taken in by all senses at the level of some common denominator that they have, a stratospheric and ultrafast which sets the nerves alight, which only brushes against the matter they are made of and electri es it like trance, like music, like a dream of nding a hidden way. e fast speed at which I experienced the festivals made it possible for me to catch the moment, immerse myself in the in nitesimal now which then expanded into something my own size, whatever that means, a bubble of time and space where I could encounter the others and witness others' encounters. Experiencing fast, so fast that it transcends human capabilities of sensing, breaking the barriers of matter makes it possible to li , to take ight -like ducks do, when they alight from an ultra fast run on the surface of a lake. ese were immensely enjoyable and powerful experiences. Yet even more enjoyable and perhaps somehow enlightening was the encounter with SLOW's mode of experiencing, the clash between our visions and the unlikely synergy of them on a level that was new to me, fresh, making me feel as curious and lively as a child. Learning about his way of seeing them was like gaining an extra dimension to the time that passed, as if discovering the undercurrent e Speed of Experience: e co-narrative method in rxperience economy education is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in British Journal of Management negating its linearity, revealing the hints of its many regions and depths. SLOW. Festivals of any kind are, for the visitor, the embodiment of the Bakhtinian (1941Bakhtinian ( /1984) ) carnivalesque: a time and space separated from the everyday routine, accessible only on speci c, and relatively rare, occasions. But they are also cyclical, repetitive events that repeat, with only slight variance, patterns from their previous incarnations. e experience of the festival is thus intimately connected to the patterns of the quotidian life, and to the memories of previous fairs. But at the heart of each repetition, as Deleuze (1968Deleuze ( /1994) ) famously pointed out, lies diff erence: the unexpected disruption of the status quo. And much of the enjoyment lies in being able to appreciate such novelties, the variations from the norm that form diff erent, and more complex rhythms. e diffi culty, as [START_REF] Lefebvre | Rhythmanalysis[END_REF] noted in his Rhythmanalysis, lies in aligning the diff erent rhythms structuring out life into a coherent, isorhythmic harmonies. is is the dialectic between SLOW and FAST experience, between catching the moment and re ecting upon its context. is is wisdom which come, if ever, with age. And ageing is a slow process.

Interpretation

Festivals are not just gratifying on the individual plane, but may bring something quite valuable when shared.

Here again, the archetype-based framework can help in nding a way to connect disparate experiences, as archetypes, providing links between the individual and collective domains, have the capacity of facilitating the turning of individuals into groups. An archetype of the joining of opposites is the syzygy, or the alchemical wedding. Usually it is the eff ect of uniting the archetypes of the male and female aspects of the soul: animus and anima [START_REF] Jung | e archetypes and the collective unconscious[END_REF]. Such uni cation is a source of great power, and it also symbolizes communication and completion. It brings together the conscious and unconscious minds and domains and thus produces an enormous amount of inspiring energy.

rough syzygy, diff erent individualities are joined but without the loss of identities. It has the power of transformation and ful lment and is enormously inspiring and creative. We regard the coming together of FAST and SLOW experiences as a syzygy, though we would not like to link them to genders or associate them with the qualities of Anima or Animus. To achieve syzygy, more than just a variety of experience is needed. It requires a conscious and purposeful act of sharing.

is resonates strongly with Emmanuel Levinas' (1969/1999) notion of responsibility for the Other. Encountering the Other brings forward a responsibility that is central to our being. It is through the relationship that an idea of in nity is produces. e other is separate from the self and is everything other than the same. Encountering the Other is a transcendent experience, from which language and the notion of truth spring. Our humanity begins with responsibility for the Other; encountering the face of another makes it possible to transcend our identity and embrace a responsibility which is in nite. us it works as the archetype of syzygy, where the moment of encounter of two disparate beings gives rise to transcendence of the limitation of the "I". Like for Levinas, this is a kind of movement outside of the boundary of the "I" that precedes reciprocity, a movement towards the Other that can be experienced as profound compassion. For Levinas moral feeling is more important than moral theory. Likewise, embracing the archetype of syzygy means encounter before reasoning, experience prior to any re ection or self-re ection. Recognition can only take place a er the fact, which changes the presence, as it becomes extended by the awareness of the Other, and also the past, setting free meanings of events of the past and thus changing the past itself. is temporality of responsibility also describes syzygy -the alchemical union which transmutes time in all directions. Everyday life, [START_REF] Lefebvre | Rhythmanalysis[END_REF] noted, is simultaneously governed by the homogeneous and desacralised clock time, used to organise work and leisure and to push for ever greater effi ciency, but it also remains shot through and traversed by great cosmic and vital rhythms; day and night, the months and the seasons, and still more precisely biological rhythms. In the everyday, this results in the perpetual interaction of these rhythms with repetitive processes linked to homogeneous time (p. 73).

Correspondingly, festivals, albeit speci cally set out from everyday experience, are shot through with fast and slow rhythms, and organizational events lending themselves to diff erent speeds of experience. is means not only that it is possible to see them as simultaneously fast and slow, depending on one's frame of reference, but also that sharing the divergent experiences through exchanging stories provides a richer, and o en unexpected, knowledge. is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in British Journal of Management

Management education

Recent criticisms of current management education practice and its role in promoting genuine knowledge can be roughly divided into three general threads.

e rst is the identi cation of a moral lack. us, [START_REF] Höp | Indiff erence[END_REF] points out that the current management education almost completely lacks attention to attributes such as compassion, moral judgment or the ability to deal with a complex reality. [START_REF] Hendry | Educating managers for postbureaucracy: the role of the humanities[END_REF] holds a similar opinion, claiming that such qualities as belief and conscience are not developed in the course of education. Other authors focus on the questionable value of the knowledge provided by the prevalent modes of education. D [START_REF] Czarniawska | Good Novels, Better Management: Reading Organizational Realities in Fiction[END_REF] enumerates lacks such as: no scienti c method, excessive focus on knowledge rather than skills, questionable relevance of knowledge. [START_REF] Czarniawska | Forbidden knowledge: Organization theory in times of transition[END_REF] argues that current management education in the eld not only has nothing to do with the current state of research in this area, but o en it is clearly inconsistent with it.

Students are taught about a non-existent world which may improve their mood, but does not help deal with problems a er graduation. MBA programmes have been criticized as unrealistic from the point of view of the business world, detached from reality and context, and imbued with the ideology of control, decision making, individualistic heroism and hierarchies. ey are too specialized and fail to learn to develop sensitivity to other people [START_REF] Mintzberg | Managers, not MBAs: A hard look at the so practice of management and management development[END_REF]. e third problem is the relationship between outcome and method, for example O'Doherty and [START_REF] Jones | Manifestos for the Business School of Tomorrow[END_REF] argue that education has become a machine for producing sick and irrelevant detritus, justi ed as 'practical' and glossed up as 'business relevant'" (p. 1). [START_REF] Grey | Reinventing business schools: the contribution of critical management education[END_REF] points to the irrelevance of management studies for the work they perform a er graduation, while it is very important for most people that they physician holds a degree in medicine, it is completely uninteresting if their superior has a diploma in management. At the same time, management education institutions emphasize the importance of what they see as "practicality" of their programmes. While the fundamental core values in medicine (life, health) are almost universal, in the eld of management they are at best debatable (productivity? pro t?). e techniques in management are not as broadly recognized and accepted as in medicine and patterns to follow are few. Meanwhile, teaching methods in management seem to be based on the erroneous assumption that these foundations are similar in management and medicine. us they prove to be inadequate, even the most realistic of them, the case study, is based on the idea of repeatable solutions and that what is eff ective in one situation will also work in another. Management education does not make students better managers.

ese shortcomings combine and overlap, and we share the view that they are all prominent lacks of contemporary management education. In particular, when teaching experience economy, we experience problems that can be connected to two of these de ciencies: the moral and the methodical. e mainstream teaching material (such as: textbooks and lectures, [START_REF] Czarniawska | Forbidden knowledge: Organization theory in times of transition[END_REF]; case studies, [START_REF] Grey | Reinventing business schools: the contribution of critical management education[END_REF]classroom discussion, Böhm, 2005) fails to engage the students in a holistic moral way and there we experienced a serious lack of methods which would enable our students not only to develop ideas relevant for the experience economy but also to empathize and endeavour to see the events from the perspective of the Other. In order to address these issues, we would like to propose the co-narrative approach as a method for management education within the experience economy area which would make syzygy more likely. [START_REF] Hjorth | In the tribe of Sisyphus: Rethinking management education from an "entrepreneurial" perspective[END_REF] proposes a narrative approach to learning entrepreneurship, based on Camus' reading of Sisyphus, but focuses on issues speci c for the entrepreneurial development such as revolt and transgression from managerial and academic framing. [START_REF] Gagliardi | Management Education and Humanities[END_REF] and [START_REF] Jones | Manifestos for the Business School of Tomorrow[END_REF] address many of the de ciencies of current management teaching practices but are not focused on the speci cs of experience economy. [START_REF] Czarniawska | Good Novels, Better Management: Reading Organizational Realities in Fiction[END_REF] and [START_REF] Banks | Fiction and Social Research: By Ice of Fire[END_REF] propose the use of narratives, focusing on appropriating pre-existing stories for management. However, a number of authors have concentrated how to use more open ended and emerging narratives in the management education context (e.g. Down and King, 1999;[START_REF] Gold | Let me tell you a story: an evaluation of the use of storytelling and argument in management education[END_REF][START_REF] Morgan | Using stories to reframe the social construction of reality: a trio of activities[END_REF]. It is within this emerging tradition that we position our proposed educational method. It embraces shared storytelling, based on [START_REF] Boje | Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research[END_REF] antenarratives, or short dynamic stories, o en lacking plot, collectively created and exchanged by students or researchers in order to invoke and to perform rather than just tell what happened, where and when. is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in British Journal of Management While narratives in general can facilitate more contextualized understanding of organized settings [START_REF] Czarniawska | Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity[END_REF], co-narratives can inspire their authors as well as their audience to experience unexpected and new modes of learning. e syzygy archetype brings not just mind-opening possibilities, but has the power to transform and revive those that embrace it. People o en consciously embrace selected aspects of their psyche, banishing "un tting" ones, for example, a man may wish to get rid of his feminine aspects. ese unconscious parts of the self [START_REF] Jung | Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self[END_REF] identi es as the shadow. People then project all they do not like in their own shadow on others, resulting in animosity rather than empathy, which prevents them from fully living as themselves as well as from truly meeting others. Syzygy makes it possible to encounter oneself and others and to achieve wholeness. is meeting has enlightening and saving powers, which can be seen in religious images, where syzygy expresses the encounter between God and Israel or Christ and his Church [START_REF] Jung | Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self[END_REF]. e syzygy can be seen as a connecting bridge, not just between people but also between their conscious and unconscious aspects, an encounter that mobilizes communication, imagination, dreams and a sense of profound connection and understanding (E. [START_REF] Jung | Animus and Anima[END_REF]. It is thus both highly inspiring and has a great potential for communication.

e central role within the method is played by antenarratives [START_REF] Boje | Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research[END_REF] which direct people's attention and are experienced and not just cognized. Antenarratives thrive on ambivalence and ambiguity, they are powerful sensemaking devices and can be used a means for sharing and organizing [START_REF] Magala | e Management of Meaning in Organizations[END_REF]. Festival stories, expressing bursts of experience rather than re exive ruminations, are antenarratives about diff erent festival experiences: fast and slow, brought together in a short learning event instead of traditional "cases". ey could be actively collected by students working in groups based on the diversity of experience.

e students would attend speci c events and write short fragmentary stories, of the kind that we have presented in this paper. e stories need not have an exclusively written form; they can be told orally and accompanied with images and lms in the classroom. Instead of seeking for traditional solutions to these "cases" the students could instead try to co-author archetypical stories, like we did in this paper, exploring diff erences in experience, possibly focusing on speed, and concentrate on the syzygic eff ects these tales have on the readers, listeners, and authors themselves. us the students would have a possibility to explore, discuss and learn about experience economy events such as festivals without simplifying them or depriving them of their contradictions and paradoxes. Experience economy described as diff erent from mass production in that it is "mass customized" and thus individual experience is what lies at its very heart [START_REF] Pine | e Experience Economy: Work is eater and Every Business a Stage[END_REF]. Attempts to simplify and streamline such events fail, resulting in feelings of alienation, impatience, and frustration [START_REF] Kociatkiewicz | Experiencing the shadow: organizational exclusion and denial within experience economy[END_REF]. A method of education that attempts at embracing the whole complicated experience as an enactment of the syzygy archetype may be particularly useful for the learning of the staging and coordinating of such activity.

Syzygy makes people open to diversity and gives them an impulse to reach out to the Other. It also makes them sensitive to an understanding of diff erent kinds of experience -an understanding which is not just of an intellectual, but also sensual and emotional kind. Teaching through syzygy is like listening to music as compared to having it explained in words. Syzygic teaching can be done through an attention to time, dialogue, rhythm, to be learned from the humanities, Ricoeur argues that narratives present the moments when action is taken, and so they actually place agency within the story. e plot is where narrativity and temporarily meet, enabling immersion and also providing the space for a considerable complexity. us streamlining can be avoided without the loss of enjoyment or, indeed, a sense of meaning of the whole. We do not propose to replace more traditional classes but to complement them, and particularly in the area of experience economy management. Such sharing can not only teach us more about experience economy settings, but about ourselves and throw new inspiring light on the bene ts of diversity.

Concluding remarks

What have we learned from exploring the diff erent ways of experiencing festival participation? Having explored the diff erent ways of experiencing festival participation, and having shared our impressions of the exploration, we are still unable to compare the strengths and weaknesses of our two approaches. But such comparison was never our goal. As much as slowness has been celebrated as more artful, and as much as speed has been hailed as more modern is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in British Journal of Management and progressive, without the normative frames, they are just two ways of engaging with the world. Perhaps alternative ways: like two parallel lines they mark diff erent experiential paths that cross in in nity. Or in the syzygy of ethnographic conversation, like the one in this paper.

e co-narrative method, aimed at encouraging syzygy, off ers a means of helping to further and inspire processes of contextualized learning. According to Ricoeur (1985Ricoeur ( /1988)), an active collaboration between the narrative and the reader is important in the interpretive process, a story has to be integrated into one's experience of life and self. Stories can be re-interpreted with time and can help readers redescribe their experiences. But the co-narrative method, juxtaposing diff erent modes of experiencing the same event, makes it possible to bring in the experiences of co-narrators into the process of redescription, extending one's understanding beyond the solitary viewpoint. It is thus a Ricoeurian interpretive process on fast forward, or a simultaneous process of learning from mutual re-interpretation.

e understanding off ered is not only intellectual, as redescription of the past may bring hope and thus a new imagining of the future. Syzygy can bring participants closer to Levinas' (1969Levinas' ( /1999) ) ideal of responsibility for the other. Shared, though o en radically divergent vision promises more empathy and compassion; this in itself would be a most desirable eff ect of a humanistically oriented learning process.

e co-narrative method off ers a means of classroom learning that is not just suited for learning about experience economy events but has a moral eff ect as well. It addresses all the three main lines of criticism directed toward management education that we presented earlier. Firstly, it puts moral issues such as compassion and moral judgement into focus. Secondly, it enables teaching of knowledge relevant to one current area of management (experience economy). irdly, it is not based on the assumption of a universality of values and techniques, but quite the opposite, on the recognition of the value of diversity. In all, it is a realistic teaching method which does not presume that solutions can be transplanted into diff erent situations but where the solution is secondary and based on the ability to empathize with the Other.

e co-narrative method can be used in experience economy education for practical reasons (its closeness to experience), but also for teaching CSR and business ethics in accordance with [START_REF] Bauman | Postmodern Ethics[END_REF] idea of morality as responsibility to others rather than obedience to rules. Such a morality can only be grounded in the "moral impulse", which precedes rationality and reason. We believe that a syzygic approach to education can encourage the use of this impulse. It will not reverse the division of labour, which diminishes responsibility, but it may defeat some of its eff ects by making students sensitive and positive towards diversity of experience. To summarize, the theme of this paper is speed, and how experience is both slow and fast. is insight is important for event organization and management, as experience economy is primarily about facilitating experience. We have shown how narratives are suitable for the expression of temporal experience and our key insight concerns the value added by simultaneous narrating in class.

is co-narrative method enables a dynamic learning process, open towards otherness and thus suitable for learning of experience economy management. In order to reach its full potential, it needs to be immersed in the context of humanities, where it derives from, as such a context makes it possible to make space for compassion as one of the key learning eff ects.

e Speed of Experience: e co-narrative method in rxperience economy education is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in British Journal of Management


Jerzy Kociatkiewicz

Monika Kostera
email: monika@kostera.pl

Keywords: anthropology, space, feelings, stories, sensemaking

published or not. The documents may come

Anthropology as a State of Mind

e familiar spaces we are used to moving through teem with domesticated meanings. Other, exotic spaces carry abstract meanings unconnected to our everyday ones. And in between lies the unnoticed, the empty spaces unworthy of consideration. is paper speaks about such unclaimed areas we encounter in our roles of organizational anthropologists as we try to make sense of the spatiality of the eld. We do it through narration. e space we perceive through our own feelings and the stories we write become a kind of "thick descriptions" [START_REF] Geertz | e interpretation of cultures[END_REF] of ourselves in the eld. us, this text is an attempt of a self-re ective ethnography of organizational space.

ere are many ways of writing ethnographies (see e.g. [START_REF] Van Maanen | Tales of the eld: On writing ethnography[END_REF]1995).

ere are di erent approaches to organizational anthropology (e.g. Burszta, 1996;[START_REF] Czarniawska-Joerges | Exploring complex organizations: A cultural perspective[END_REF], Wright, 1994). Traditionally, they aim at experiencing and describing places that already exist, that belong to someone, presumably to someone other than the anthropologist studying them -explorations of the Other's space. 1 is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in Qualitative Sociology.

Our explorations concern a di erent idea of space. Space, we understand similarly as Michel de Certeau (1984/ 1988) does. While "place" indicates stability, is an instantaneous con guration of positions -"space" is mobile, it is a "practiced place" (p. 117), it "exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables" (p. 116). Our idea of space is also close to that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986) when they speak of "smooth space," or a space "marked only by 'traits' that are e aced and displaced with the trajectory" (p. 51) -the space held by the nomad. We aim at investigating the not belonging to anyone. While "anthropologically" moving around di erent organizations, we suddenly realized that we are able to see invisible things. We encountered many places that were empty, boundaries of the socially useful reality, borders of the domains of the everyday world that normally remain beyond the interest of both the people inhabiting the neighboring realities, and of the researchers.

e anthropologic frame of mind is a certain openness of the mind of the researcher/ observer of social reality [START_REF] Czarniawska-Joerges | Exploring complex organizations: A cultural perspective[END_REF]). On the one hand, it means the openness to new realities and meanings, and on the other -a constant need to problematize, a refusal to take anything for granted, to treat things as obvious and familiar. e researcher makes use of her or his curiosity, the ability to be surprised by what she or he observes, even if it is "just" the everyday world.

e anthropologist looks at the mundane and sees things that are engaging, that constitute an intellectual challenge. is is also how Bruno [START_REF] Latour | Technology is society made durable[END_REF]Steve Woolgar (1979/1986) see anthropology when they write about the importance of bracketing our familiarity with the object of our studies. By this we mean that we regard it as instructive to apprehend as strange those aspects [of the studied phenomenon] which we are readily taken for granted (p.: 29).

Anthropology in the social constructivist version rejects the belief in episteme in science and admits that the only thing available to us is doxa, which positivists classify as the inferior knowledge. Episteme (gr. knowledge, understanding) is traditionally seen as "superior knowledge," i.e. the knowledge about reality "as it really is," its mirror image. Doxa, meaning opinion, was perceived as less valuable, being by de nition just biased knowledge, and consequently not deserving the exalted title of "science." Constructivists, not insisting on the necessity to "mirror" the outside reality [START_REF] Rorty | Filozo a a zwierciadło natury[END_REF][START_REF] Rorty | Filozo a a zwierciadło natury[END_REF], point out that science is always based on opinions on what reality is like. e opinions of the scientists were traditionally seen as privileged, according to the grand narratives of modernity [START_REF] Lyotard | e postmodern condition: A report on knowledge[END_REF][START_REF] Lyotard | e postmodern condition: A report on knowledge[END_REF]) -the scientists were believed to be able to, thanks to the adoption of an adequate methodology, "mirror" reality accurately, without the distortions characteristic of "common opinion." Recently, among the many interesting tendencies within ethnography, there is a growing predisposition to self-re exivity, the "ethnography of ethnography" [START_REF] Van Maanen | An end to innocence: e ethnography of ethnography[END_REF]. In this vein, we re ect in this paper on our role as anthropologists out in the eld, and the emotional dimension of our experience -"the anthropologic state of mind." is is a text about feelings. We attempt at crossing the boundary between objectivism and subjectivism in science -a dichotomy which we perceive as restraining. It is clear to us that it is we who speak, and we use our own voices. By doing it we wish to construct a scope of communication, call it intersubjectivity if you like, about something that we see as being "out there" even if we do not reject solipsism (as other interpretivist anthropologists often do, see e.g. [START_REF] Van Maanen | Tales of the eld: On writing ethnography[END_REF]. However, as we are not trying to distance ourselves from the studied eld, we believe that through the screen of ourselves we also see the places we are in. We thus sketch an impressionist landscape of our experiences, our private reading of reality. We believe that our experiences would not be the same if we chose to stay at the desktop computer, perhaps only imagining the change of surroundings, or maybe trying to alter our state of mind. Our study is thus narrative about the re exive anthropology of the eld outside of ourselves as a medium for communication between the two of us.

e Field e anthropologist is a character with a special inclination to be in the Field [START_REF] Van Maanen | Tales of the eld: On writing ethnography[END_REF].

e eld attracts the anthropologist just as the sea charms the seaman of the romantic archetype. e researcher cannot resist the temptation, leaves his or her comfortable corner by the computer and wanders o into the unknown. e unknown does not necessarily have to be the Samoa islands, because the researcher adopting an anthropologic frame of mind is able to is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in Qualitative Sociology.

experience the same exoticism visiting the water supply plant in their own city as in some far away alien land. While staying in the eld, the anthropologist loses her or his identity, and becomes an immigrant by own wish [START_REF] Czarniawska-Joerges | Exploring complex organizations: A cultural perspective[END_REF]. Simultaneously it is not to be disregarded that it is through her or his own identity, experiences, and imaginations that the anthropologist sees the eld: she or he cannot turn into a tabula rasa. e non-participation in the orders of the eld allows the researcher to question and problematize the "obvious," to take notice of the implicit assumptions on which the orders are founded. However, we do not claim that not accepting the assumptions of the studied eld makes the observer "objective," or "more objective" than the insiders. We do not see it as possible, or desirable.

Narrating Space

Our method is based on the assumption that space has a story (or perhaps is a story), but it takes some "work" to tell it. "Every story is a travel story -a spatial practice" writes Michel de Certeau (1984/ 1988, p. 115), explaining that all sayings and stories organize places. According to Bruno [START_REF] Latour | Technology is society made durable[END_REF], narration is based on association, i.e. a narrative adds episodes sequentially and chronologically ( rst this happened, and then happened that), and it operates on the sense of how things hang together. Jerome [START_REF] Bruner | Acts of meaning[END_REF] remarks that the temporal order of events is more important in a story than the truth or falsity (which is important in texts based on formal logic). us, constructing a narrative is about spatial and temporal contextualization of experience and/or events. In our understanding (as in de Certeau's), space and time are linked together within the narrative. Barbara [START_REF] Czarniawska | Narrating the organization: Dramas of institutional identity[END_REF] lets her eld speak in her narrative (she uses drama as an umbrella metaphor). Narration enables her to capture more about the complex and unpredictable (whereas formal logic eradicates and streamlines texts to devoid them of these paradoxical features). rough the narrative composition of our "data," we hope to achieve a similar end, even though our "umbrella metaphor" (or what we would prefer to talk of as "umbrella genre") is poetics.

e narrative approach is mainly used either as a genre for academic writing (e.g [START_REF] Corvellec | Stories of achievements: Narrative features of organizational performance[END_REF][START_REF] Czarniawska | Narrating the organization: Dramas of institutional identity[END_REF], or as a method for the collection of "data" (e.g [START_REF] Kostera | Personal performatives: Collecting poetical de nitions of management[END_REF]). In the rst sense, the researcher tells a story about the reality she or he explores. In the second sense, the reality explored, is asked to tell stories (or poems) about itself. Both senses utilize stories in order to capture the context, the sublime, the implied, the emotional. In this text, we use the narrative approach in the both senses, i.e. we try to "evoke" the stories from the eld (method) and compose the material in the form of stories (genre). We were studying "ordinary" organizational elds, and during such observations, we encountered, by accident, a place outside of our "ordinary" anthropologic interest, but one that we found fascinating in itself.

en the same kind of accidental encounters occurred several more times and after that, we found ourselves deliberately, but not in any planned or ordered fashion, looking for other spaces of the same type. We tried to keep an openness of mind while observing those spaces. We kept eld notes -about the spaces as such and about the feelings they evoked in us. en we wrote short stories on the basis of these notes, trying to embrace both the realistically observed and the sublime, which was not so easily expressed.

e result are poetic stories, some of which we cite in this paper. All of them are co-authored, that is, we wrote them together, which brought up not just our subjective perceptions, but also the dimension of our shared perception. All the stories concern us moving around in the eld; thus, they can be seen as space stories [START_REF] De Certeau | e practice of everyday life[END_REF][START_REF] De Certeau | e practice of everyday life[END_REF], perhaps an instance of nomadic storytelling, in the Deleuzian tradition (Delezue and[START_REF] Deleuze | A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia[END_REF] involving both a deterritorialization of the empty spaces through our explorations and a reterritorialization of ourselves within these spaces.

e Empty Spaces

Our idea of space is close to that of poetics as compared with rhetorics. Heather [START_REF] Höp | Organizational rhetoric and the threat of ambivalence[END_REF] reminds of the Aristotelian distinction between rhetorics and poetics in the context of organization studies. Poetics is based on ambivalence which is concealed by the mask of words and regulated by the text. Rhetorics is the open sketch of the text, the Leitmotif, consisting of the attempt at controlling the ambivalence, the limiting of it. Rhetorics is persuasion, argumentation, throwing bridges over chaos. Poetics lends voice to chaos, it is always ambivalent. It exists through the resonance with the elusiveness and inde niteness of experience. is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in Qualitative Sociology.

In the struggle over meaning in organizations the dominant voice is given to rhetorics. Poetics symbolizes everything that is subversive, rebellious, that cannot be managed entirely. We believe, though, that this distinction is not quite as functionalrhetorics can also be used for overthrowing existing structures, negating the embraced assumptions, and not necessarily proposing new meanings in the place of the ones questioned. Poetics can exist by the side of the de ned concepts, ambivalent but not always demolishing the order -social order is based upon the ignoring and marginalizing of chaos, not on the elimination of it. Poetics displays the ambivalent chaos not by forcing the reader to perceive it -the persuasive role remains within rhetorics, while poetics aims at inviting the reader toward reading, interpreting and co-authroring the text. According to Heather Höp , poetics brings into the rst plan what is traditionally seen as the background: the silence, the emptiness. In poetry, the silence speaks through metaphors, through the inde niteness of the statements, also through the construction itself of the poem, consisting both of the words and of the exposed blanks. e obsessive lling in of the blanks, the blotting out of white pages witnesses of the lack of tolerance to ambivalence, of the greed to order impressions and reality. Actually, we see the process of elimination of the blanks more as that of erasing than of lling -lling implies gain, while what we often witness is actually the loss of emptiness. In the same vein, by lling in the white spots on maps, people not only gained valuable information about the previously unknown lands, but also destroyed a whole host of legends that could exist only because of the white spots.

e emptiness which cannot be erased can simply be ignored, thrown outside the brackets of the perceived reality, made invisible, and safely forgotten. If something is meaningless, it is imperceptible. Yet reality is intransparent [START_REF] Schütz | e phenomenology of the social world[END_REF], meaningless in itself. It is people who endow it with a meaning. In order to make some sense of the reality we live in, we have to be able to recognize things. In the process of socialization people are being o ered symbols telling them what they see, what they should see, and what it means when they do. Symbols are something like frozen layers of experience, made of people's biographies, through which they perceive what they encounter in their lives and move on in their private histories. Symbolization is the de nition of ambivalence. Every time people choose (consciously or not) one interpretation -which is also one of the possible versions of memory -over other ones, they give up many other potential realities. Symbolization is then something of a renderning to a few dimensions of an in nitely multidimensional reality, the projecting of reality onto a map that can reasonably be made sense of. According to Schütz memory does not comprise of occurrences but of symbols (reconstructed every time they are evoked). Pure perception does not exist, because the internal being (or becoming) is assigned a memory. People always see the world through their memory. Meaning is the tension between what becomes and what is passing [START_REF] Schütz | e phenomenology of the social world[END_REF][START_REF] Schütz | e phenomenology of the social world[END_REF]. Reality is socially constructed on chaos, the order is frail and uncertain, the fear of ambivalence is understandable and a mighty motive behind many human attempts at limiting it: science is such an attempt, but so is totalitarianism. Ordering shuts our eyes on what is dazzlingly surprising and may be beautiful, it protects us from fear but maybe also from happiness. Feelings are chaotic. e lack of order is a necessary requisite for creation and expression. e pseudo-order mimics a nal state, where change can only worsen the situation, whereas emptiness allows for creativity, for including the own visions and existing views, and for the construction of entirely new approaches. Ordering is a continuous process, and not a singular event of arranging the perceived reality into an easily understandable construct. Social orders are constructed as palimpsests -people add further fragments of text to existing discourses, they make small corrections and amendments. In the end, the chaos of reality, while not eliminated, is su ciently buried under the discourses accumulated through generations as to be non-obvious, and therefore easily dismissed as non-existent. Science is an instance of such a socially legitimized ordering of knowledge, constructed upon chaos (cf. Bauman, 1995). It does not make a complete whole if we believe in what T.S. [START_REF] Kuhn | e structure of scienti c revolutions[END_REF] said about its development (and we like this idea). e united theory of everything still remains only within the domain of pompous declarations and super cial popular science [START_REF] Feyerabend | Against method[END_REF](Feyerabend, / 1994)). Change is achieved not because some people have "better eyesight" than others, and "discover" what has been hidden before. Radical change is created through a more and more widespread writing down of a new e Anthropology of Empty Spaces is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in Qualitative Sociology.

discourse beside existing discourses, not necessarily by the use of a new language. However, if the language stays the same or is a deviate of the old ones, the use of the language is new and so is the context [START_REF] Feyerabend | Against method[END_REF](Feyerabend, / 1994;;1987/ 1994). Change in science, then, is possible rather thanks to emptiness, more than through the use or the perfection of already existing constructs. Of course, this emptiness has rst to be perceived, in some relation to what has been perceived by the person before. But the inscribing of it is more of a creative than re-creative process. At the boundaries of di erent scienti c theories there often remain areas of discoherence, empty spaces that can be approached and entered. Similar areas of emptiness can be experienced, often in the physical sense, on the boundaries and inside of organizations. ey are in places to which no meaning is ascribed. ey do not have to be physically cut o by fences or barriers. ese are not prohibited places, but empty spaces, inaccessible because of their invisibility. In the case of science and organizations -which are di erent aspects of the process of social ordering, or di erent versions of symbolization -the experience of emptiness was similar. Nevertheless, the empty spaces vary at least as much as the domesticated constructs. e following stories are not supposed to represent all the aspects of the empty spaces that can be experienced, nor even a cross-section of the ones we have encountered, but just one possible ethnography.

Field Study

A huge, looming building, punctured by a network of winding corridors, laid out according to the intention of some visionary architect, completely ba ing to the profane. e walls radiate the glamour of classical serenity, it is obvious that everything is arranged according to some higher order that is just not easy to gure out -this building is de nitely a carefully planned and designed work of some educated follower of reason, and not a materialized dream of a madman. Similarly, the organization nesting in these halls is calm, stately, stern, conscious of its traditions, and de nitely not prone to abandoning them in favour of any avant-garde ideas. A steady glow embodying the concepts of "logic" and "rationality" seems to emanate from every door, every wall, every corridor and room. STRUCTURE. We do not, however, try to understand the nature of the order contained in this building. Wandering through the corridors, lost and seemingly aimless, we ourselves do not know what we are looking for. And suddenly there it is, a staircase that, at a rst glance, looks just like all the ones we have seen here before. Here, however, the stairs lead not only upwards, but also downwards, where everything, the whole reality that surrounds us, changes quite abruptly, transforms, mutates. After a short while, we nd ourselves no more in the basement, but in some sort of a dungeon with aking walls and rows of heavy doors guarding the entrances to dark, damp cells. Most of the doors are closed, only a few allow us to enter the dark and empty rooms beyond them. Faint, yellowish light serves only to emphasize the darkness and gloom of these corridors. Rusting pipes and assorted cables crawl along the walls, unpredictable, chaotic, intensifying the already everpresent impression of alienness and otherworldliness. Most of the time these dungeons are empty, only rarely do we encounter any people, mostly workers, who ask what we are doing here, yet readily accept the explanation that we are just looking for an exit. We realize that such an underground does not belong in this building, that it derives from some entirely di erent reality. Indeed, for the ordinary participants of this organization it does not exist, there is nothing below the ground level. e basement is not a restricted area, and neither is it an ugly underside of the otherwise awless structure. It simply does not exist. Only the visiting outsiders and the people who are not involved in the organizational order stand any chance if discovering it. An oddity, architectonic curiosity? None of the kind. We know only what we see, but we see only what we know as well. A change of setting. e Palace of Culture, 2 the highest oor accessible to the visitors. Shabby panorama terrace; the grayish clouds hanging over the dirty, run-down townscape. Beside the important-looking tourist lift entrance, an inconspicuous door leads to a staircase. It is open. On our descent, we pass over thirty oors worth of doors leading to various organizations -rms, foundations, scienti c institutes. e stairs, however, remain unchanged all this time, seemingly unheeding of all the surrounding, organizationsimposed realities. e doors alone reveal the individual nature of each oor we pass. ere is nobody but us around, all the people keep to their safe, domesticated areas and to the lifts leading there, antiseptically delivering their passengers through the realities they is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in Qualitative Sociology. consider indi erent or hostile. Nevertheless, this is no simple emergency stairway, its monumentality and the aura of grandeur rules out the exclusiveness of such a trivial and auxiliary function. What are they, then? A bridge over the gap between the realities? Possibly, and yet, as all the bridges of this kind, they remain outside the area perceived by the participants and co-creators of these realities. Another set of stairs, this one ends abruptly by running into a ceiling. A low-set landing, home to an assortment of miscellaneous objects of mysterious shapes and uses. Dusty chests containing absurd items. A collection of metal tools suggesting the work of a mad constructivist. Shreds of paper, scraps of unidenti ed materials. Grayish-brown dust melding into the deep, creeping shadows. e steps above the landing are covered with a layer of whitish grime. is is a dead end of a corridor connecting the o ces of the institution's employees. Behind the doors, a hum of voices witnesses of the existence of another reality -the one where objects have clearly de ned uses, where the stairs actually lead somewhere. is recess is groundless, devoid of reason; perhaps nobody has been here since long, and even if they have, it was by accident, or just to leave another useless object that did not even meet the criteria of a piece of garbage.

ere is no passage nor perspective; space is standing still here. A fragment of being for its own sake -with no depth.

e next scene nds us in a classroom at the university, at the lecture in the Anthropology of the processes of organizing. is is the surrounding we know by heart, we have been here innumerable times. is time, however, it is di erent. We talk about exploring the empty spaces: one of us standing on a table, the other one sitting on the oor beside a chair. Out of the wellknown room we have torn the fragments of space that allow us to change our usual perspective. From the oor one can see mostly the legs of the people and the grayness clinging to the oor. It is hard to make one's voice sound important from down here. It is hard to gesture. Up on the table, the situation is reversedthis is the perfect place for gesturing, for raising one's voice, for the depersonalized preaching of the grand truths. We do not, however, have any grand truths to proclaim, only our perceptions, impressions, feelings. Our message con icts with the space, rede ned from above and below, showing emptiness, allowing for at least a momentary glimpse of the reality outside the organization, outside the usual boundaries of the classroom. e lecture comes to an end, the people leave the room, and the empty space once again turns into nothingness, even if a few more people realize its existence. At a di erent point of our explorations, our quest for the empty space has led us to a suburbian fragment of the city. ere are no real streets out there, only large asphalt roads and passages between almost identical apartment buildings. In the light of the setting sun this part of town becomes for us a space beyond the social paths, a place to lose oneself in. We consciously forfeit the sense of direction and let ourselves be claimed by the emergent area of unknowability and meaninglessness, where whole fragments reappear at the least expected moment, and looking back does not guarantee seeing the place we have recently passed. At rst slowly and uncertainly, the neighborhood transcends into a strange sphere where the streets remain nameless, then the process of transformation accelerates and outpaces the awareness of authorshipwe truly do not know where we are. Time changes, too; like space it ceases to carry the meaning we are used to.

is is not an empty space in the sense the ones we have encountered before were -it exists rooted solidly in the material realities of all the people living here; it is explored, tamed, safe. For us, however, it remains the wondrous source of otherworldly amazement, ever changing, ever ambiguous. What does, then set us apart from all these other people? e passage into this other time-space is a state of mind -the abandonment of purpose, the willingness of stepping into irrationality, outside the bonds of "normal" space, into emptiness.

A Passage in Space

e empty space is a part of reality, including organizational reality; it is, however, reality intentionally misread. e empty space is a deconstruction of social space: empowering the silence to speak for itself, concentration on the marginalized elements. Instead of reading the written text, we read the blank background. is change of perspective is similar to the well known picture showing alternately a young or an old woman -depending on how one looks at it. e space we explored lies beyond the familiar orders, it does not belong to anyone. In our reading we construct a space out of the anti-space -a re ection e Anthropology of Empty Spaces is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in Qualitative Sociology.

of our own state of mind. We became conscious of the existence of the empty spaces and the ambiguity they carry, and we accepted the chaos -the poetic -as the integral part of our reality, not trying to eradicate it in the obsessed chase after the grand, total, univocal, mystical, and unattainable Order.

A Study in Emptiness

e social space one inhabits is a collection of aims and roads, a map of everyday reality. One's own everyday life world is always the most boring. Alien worlds that people visit once in a while (foreign countries, unfamiliar organizations, etc.) can be interesting and exotic, but nonetheless for most people come down to a collection of aims and roads -only touristic ones. Between the everyday reality and boredom, and tourism and exoticism there is an empty space, not belonging to anyone in particular. It is imperceptible for the inhabitants and the visitors alike, it lies beyond the sphere of interest of people who do not actively look for the unconventional in ordinary places. Emptiness remains, however, the integral part of every ordered space, the invisible conjunction between its di erent aspects. It is in these empty spaces that possibilities for change are hidden, beyond the rational designs for development and transformation. An inhabited space is anonymous, especially a crowded one, such as big cities and companies. People have their paths of passage between the "villages" of sensible life among others. ese others function similarily. People can avoid anonymity by moving around the space unclaimed by themselves in groups, surrounded by a movable village. It is also possible to construct something of a tunnel of passage -a tunnel waiting: in the bus, in the car, in the elevator. ese tunnels are tight spheres of spaces where most people concentrate on some other, already tamed slices of space and time, or construct own slices of this kind by reading a newspaper, listening to music. e space without the villages becomes an entirely di erent environment, devoid of sense, as if the person were suddenly dislocated into a void, pulled out of the context of the known reality, familiar interpretations, forced to rede ne one's surroundings by every step he or she takes, because of an excessive multitude of new impressions demanding interpretation. Our explorations have led us into such an unknown territory, outside of the order associated with the villages of sense.

e emptiness we have experienced there, and the lack of predetermined choices or results it seems to carry, as well as its setting outside the structures of power, makes us think of freedom. According to Zygmunt Bauman (1995), freedom through privacy is expensive: it costs money to buy a private space where one is free from the intrusion of other people; it also costs in terms of resigning from social needs, it is paid for through loneliness. Our empty spaces are freedom beyond these expenses. In nancial terms they cost nothing: we were experiencing them for free. Even if they asked for some experience of loneliness, in our case it could be shared loneliness; we had a very strong feeling of separation from the usual social reality, yet we both felt we shared the same experience of emptiness. We agree with Bauman (1995) when he claims that the desire for freedom is tied to ambivalence: people long for freedom, but fear loneliness. e kind of loneliness we have experienced in the empty spaces was not unpleasant. Empty spaces can be a kind of meditative freedom. is is not to say that experiencing them does not cost absolutely anything -in order to see them, we had to abandon the illusion of order usually imposed on the perceived realities. We do not mourn the loss, however, as it o ers the possibility of altering the perception, as the ensuing chaos allows the freedom of creation, or the freedom of wonder.

is takes us back to our re ection on poetics, rhetorics, and the experience of emptiness. Karl [START_REF] Weick | Sensemaking in organizations[END_REF] writes about the substance of sensemaking: words and vocabularies. "Sense is generated by words that are combined into the sentences of conversation to convey something about our ongoing experience" (p. 106). People pull from di erent vocabularies: these of society, of organizations, of occupations and professions, of coping, of predecessors, of sequence and experience. However, all of these words that matter invariably come up short. ey impose discrete labels on subject matter that is continuous. ere is always slippage between words and what they refer to. Words apporximate the territory; they never map it perfectly (p. 107).

In our process of sensemaking of the empty spaces we refrained from using any of the rhetorical vocabularies, relying on a poetical one, not aiming at exclusion of ambiguity or the slippage between words and what they refer to. If we agree with Weick that sensemaking is an act of patterning, comprehending, redressing is copy does not follow journal layout or page numbers. Originally published in Qualitative Sociology.

surprise, and creating meaning, our experience of the empty spaces does not include sensemaking. If, on the other hand, we concentrate on his suggestion that sensemaking is about authoring and reading the text, our explorations are that, although of a di erent kind. What we were doing can perhaps be seen as misreading and misauthoring. We were not looking for one sense but for a multitude of them. We can be seen as constructing and subsequently reading a text, albeit a poetical one, where no single meaning needs to (or should) emerge in the process of creation or interpretation.

Emptiness does not exist. It is an anti-frame of reference, becoming pertinent only in some scienti c theories, such as the theory of black holes, or in some legends, such as the story about the Bermuda Triangle. In philosophy and theology it symbolizes the speculation about what happens when the subject is no more, a version of hell for the less folkloristically minded thinkers about death. Emptiness is generally associated with death or non-existence. us it serves the role of the other side, the contradiction of life, or its only meaningsful form -social life. Emptiness as such does not exist, it can only be de ned negatively, as the opposition to what it is not. rough its inde niteness and undescribability it gains supernatural aspects, becomes like God, who, according to some, can be described through the use of words like: void, loneliness, silence, absence (Eco, 1986/87), expressions which refer to emptiness in the rst place. Emptiness is in nite, as a form of time and as a form of space. It is not de ned by any target points, any cognitive structures, habits, expectations. It is everywhere and nowhere.

e Palace of Culture and Science, originally the Palace of Joseph Stalin, is a giant construction in pompous social-realist style, o ered to the city of Warsaw by the Soviet Union in the early 50.