(Re)turning to body : Joseph Beuys,alternative organizing,and management education

Introduction

With this article, we introduce the largely unrealized organizational potential in the work of German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986). Among the most consequential artists of the 20th century, Beuys has inspired and has been (mis)interpreted in innumerable ways. Here, we focus on the mobilization – that is, instrumentalization, politicization, and exhibition – of his own body as raw material in the making of art. We argue that, by mobilizing his own body, conceived as relational and unknowable in performance artmaking, the artist is embodying, or prefiguring, alternativity in terms of both organizing and pedagogy, which lends to extant literature on alternative organizing and management education, respectively.

Beuys’ body mobilization echoes growing attention to the significance of body in alternative organizing scholarship (Fotaki and Daskalaki, 2021; Jones et al., 2021; Skoglund and Böhm, 2020). Here, body enables the sensory, somatic carriage of alternative commitments in ordinary practices and mundane experiences, bringing the texture of quotidianity, and thus persistence, to extant accounts that are criticized as typically extraordinary and ephemeral (Reinecke, 2018). The relational and unfinished qualities of Beuys’ work expand extant accounts even further by making visible freedom – the very essence of alternativity (Dahlman et al., 2022) – as immanent to collective artistic existence and maintained by continuous self-negating, self-reinventive inquiries. Accordingly, Beuys embodies freedom as a collectively generated affect, rather than as a political telos defined in absolute terms. Moreover, Beuys exemplifies prefigurative politics (Schiller- Merkens, 2022), in which envisioned moral values and affective relations are (re)produced right now/here by embodied (inter)actions, rather than projected into a distant future/there through disembodied choices. The artist further enriches the literature by empirically illustrating that prefigurative politics features upsetting institutions from within rather than decontextualized resistance, as well as an aspiration to communication, given a relational, affective conception of body (Schiller- Merkens, 2022).

We argue that the bodily mobilization that characterizes Beuys’ live performances (he refers to these as Aktionen) foregrounds the underexplored significance of embodiment to management teaching (Aroles and Küpers, 2022; Tomkins and Ulus, 2016). Through Aktionen, Beuys illustrates how – by (re)turning to body – the educator can reconstitute the affective conditions within which education unfolds. With this affective reorientation, the socio-organizational impacts of management educators can extend to ritualistic shamanism and emancipatory activism that incarnate and inspire more politically and ecologically conscious forms of organizing. As shamans, educators can reorganize the classroom into a therapeutic, transformative space-time that subverts the power differentials between the educated and the educator and transfigures both simultaneously (Griffith, 1999). Relying on art’s expressivity, educators can weaken education while empowering intersubjective encounter and exchange in the shamanistic space-time of education (Biesta, 2015; Rogoff, 2008). As activists, educators can steer their privileged power to organize prefigurative politics, unsettling epistemic hegemony and opening fissures for alternative ways of relating and knowing (Faria, 2025). In so doing, educators also cohere their ontological claims with their epistemological commitments, closing the theory–praxis gaps that perplex education research (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021).

In this article, we begin by presenting Beuys’ conception of body to which his artmaking (re)turns, with the illustrative examples of How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) and Action in the Moor (1968), and its atemporal resonance with several growing interests emergent in organization studies. We continue, by drawing upon the work I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), to discuss how Beuys’ prefigured alternativity echoes, then exceeds, existing research on alternative organizing. We then explain, borrowing from the work Information Action (1972), why the artist’s prefigured pedagogy enriches management education by informing an expansive reimagination of the role of educators and a deontological rethinking of the purposes of education. We close the article by summarily illustrating Beuys’ prefiguration of alternativity in both organizational and pedagogical senses with an analysis of Democracy as Merry (1973) and the Free International University (FIU), as representative of how organization/organizing can be done, thought, and felt differently.

Body: To which Beuys (re)turns

Body, with its flesh and bones, sweat and blood, and deeds and words, is “a sensory organization” (Beuys, 1974a), capable of being affected and of affecting others, of being aestheticized and of anesthetizing the worlds it inhabits (Harding et al., 2021). Body mobilization is an inherent quality of performance art (Aktion, if using Beuys’ own term), with Beuys serving as “a genesis figure in the art historical narrative” since the 20th century (Wear, 2024: 13). Despite his (albeit idiosyncratic) masculinity, the conscious, intentional, and often vulnerable mobilization of his own body resonated with the thema of second-wave of feminism (Cixous, 1976) and influenced later-generation (performance) artists, including (but not exclusive to) Marina Abramović, Chris Burden, Carolee Schneemann, and Adrian Piper. Beuys inspired them to ground their works in their own bodies as sites of vulnerability and endurance, confrontation and communication, and trauma and healing. He would call this Social Sculpture.

Social Sculpture is the central thesis of Beuys’ artmaking – a system, a process by which the social can be transformed creatively: “. . . we mold and shape the world in which we live: SCULPTURE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS; EVERYONE AN ARTIST” (Beuys, 1979b, emphasis in original). This oft-quoted phrase is repeatedly misused to present Beuys as suggesting some universally accessible artistry. Instead, Beuys’ desire was to highlight emancipation as presupposing equality and, in the meantime, the means to and ends of emancipation as residing in artistic imagination and expression that all human beings are born with and entitled to; ultimately, these are presocial and prepolitical. Thus, at the core of Social Sculpture is a redefinition of body as the locus for the arising of energy and agency and, accordingly, where Beuys’ artmaking (re)turns to. Such an energetic conception of body resonates with organization studies’ growing feminism-informed attention to the mutually constitutive notions of relationality, affectivity, and process (Fotaki et al., 2017), as well as the associated discussions of ethics grounded in intercorporeal care (Pullen and Rhodes, 2025). This research stream and Beuys’ artmaking both demonstrate how, through ontologically (re)turning to body, epistemological concerns are automatically directed to affective relations and embodied (inter)actions underpinning organizational processes.

Among the earliest examples of this in Beuys’ career is How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). In this work, Beuys entered Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf with his face covered in honey and gold leaf while cradling a dead hare in his arms. The hare – “an eternal symbol of renewal and rebirth” (Rosenthal, 2004: 28) – is a recurring motif in Beuys’ Aktionen (i.e. performance art). So, what do we make of its inert state in this context? What role is Beuys playing in reconstituting preconceived ideas of what teaching is, of what art is, and of what the politico-aesthetic fate of rebirth and renewal is? For 3 hours, he navigated the gallery, whispering explanations of artworks to the hare while the public watched through the gallery window. His face was swathed in honey and matted with gold leaf, the former symbolizing the warmth of community and the latter the conductivity of energy. Stroking the hare with his fingers, his voice murmuring gently in its lifeless ears, Beuys mobilized his own body as an affective medium, building a relational system between the hare, the artworks, and the audience to establish a liminal creative space and spectacle. Here, the institutional status of the gallery itself is upended. The organizational rupture is a pedagogical formation of Social Sculpture in which sorrow and tenderness, and mourning and healing are expressed. Amid it all, Beuys’ body is the formative vessel, the centerpiece of the relational and affective processes.

Beuys’ mythic conception of body also resonates with an emerging stream of organization research approaching the tensions and contradictions of organizing “not as a gap that must be filled with knowledge . . . nor as a cognitive ambiguity blurring opposing demands, but as a mystery that cannot ultimately be known . . . but can be enacted through ritualized practices of inquiry to inspire imagination and pragmatic action” (Giovannoni and Quattrone, 2025: 1). This conception of body and the social as unknowable defies modernity’s obsession with filling gaps with scientific rationality and resolving problems with once-and-for-all solutions. It simultaneously rejects the discounting of subjectivity – of the other or of the self – by appreciating it as irreducibly, inexhaustibly agentic. Thus, it is to recognize sociopolitical being as, before all, creative being and redistributing the determination of the self into everyone’s hands by decentralizing the rights and responsibilities of determining history into everyday activities. For example, in a lesser-known work, Aktion im Moor (Action in the Moor) (1968), Beuys walked, knelt, touched, and lay in a moor near his hometown of Kleve, in the northwest of Germany. In this Aktion, he intimately interacted with the grass, mud, peat, and stones through slow, small, ritualistic gestures representing a return to the land as the premodern, prehistorical womb of all ecological creatures. While Beuys’ body transforms the moor into a symbol representing a liminal transition between water and land, the moor activates Beuys’ body into an archaic matter of possibilities and regeneration.

A brief examination of Beuys’ biography goes a long way toward explaining his determined embodiedness. Born in nearby Krefeld and raised in Kleve during the rise of National Socialism, Beuys joined the Hitler Youth (which was both common and expected at that time) before entering adulthood and serving as a pilot during World War II. It was during this period that he survived serious injuries after his plane crashed in Crimea:

[He] was hurled from the cockpit on impact and pinned under the tail . . . Beuys had suffered a double fracture at the base of his skull; he had shrapnel all over, only a portion of which could later be removed. He had broken his ribs, legs and arms. His hair was singed to the roots, his nose smashed. (Stachelhaus, 1991: 22)

This experience was later mythologized by the artist as a semiotic rebirth after his claim of being saved by Tatars who wrapped him in fat and felt, materials that subsequently became two he used repeatedly in his artmaking. His childhood under Nazism and near-fatal crash during the war also explain his persistent thematic focus on healing from violent, traumatic memories through relational warmth and intercorporeal care, expressed through aestheticizing his own body as an affective hub. Indeed, in his poetic autobiographic timeline titled Lebenslauf/Werklauf (Life Course/Work Course), he begins with his birth year as “Kleve: Exhibition of a wound drawn together with plaster” (Beuys, 1964–1975). This description of his birth as an “exhibition” marked the artist’s deliberate conflation of life and art via his own body and lifelong commitment to experimenting with art’s potential, especially vis-à-vis organizing and education.

Between 1947 and 1952, Beuys studied sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, becoming the “master pupil” of sculptor Ewald Matare until 1954, when he started to exhibit his own work. These formative years of exhibiting coincided with deep, traumatic depression resulting from both the physical and emotional damage of the war. Beuys’ early sculptural work functioned as thinly veiled religious studies, drawing on a distinctive syncretism of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, Eurasian shamanism, and elements of primitive Christianity. This cosmology would later find its most explicit articulation in the early 1960s, when Beuys began to mobilize his own body, voice, and ritualized action as artistic material. In 1963, in the Aktion, Eurasia Siberian Symphony (recognized as his first foray into performance art), Beuys enacted a performative cosmology in which Eurasia figured not merely as a geopolitical space but as a mythic zone of spiritual mediation, healing, and transformation. It was through this turn to embodied, shamanic action that Beuys himself became the medium of the work, planting the seeds of Social Sculpture and marking “the conspicuous beginning of the second half of a four-decade career” (Temkin, 1993: 17).

We contend that the potential of Beuys’ body-based artmaking goes beyond simply echoing extant organizational scholarship. In particular, we believe it can enrich the research streams of alternative organizing and management education. To alternative organizing, Beuys’ body mobilization brings the texture of quotidianity (and thus persistence) to extant accounts of alternative commitments, which are typically criticized as extraordinary and ephemeral. To management education, Beuys’ body mobilization sheds light on the significance of embodiment to teaching, revealing how the exclusion of body and affect has left management educators ill-equipped to engage with the moral, emotional, and existential demands of the present polycrisis. The following two sections expand on this position.

Beuys and alternative organizing

By mobilizing his own body, Beuys’ artmaking substantiates what alternativity is – that is, “not a question of adhering to certain principles or applying certain practices, but rather a question of freedom” (Dahlman et al., 2022: 1961). Freedom, although never absolute but always contextually limited, comes from the “constant struggle to transcend existing boundaries” (Dahlman et al., 2022: 1962). Accordingly, alternative organizing is the organizational effort to pursue alternativity, or freedom, as a principle (Daskalaki et al., 2019). However, alternative commitments depicted in extant literature tend to be fringe, fleeting, and movement-based (Reinecke, 2018). A cluster of recent studies helps address this limitation by attending to, implicitly or explicitly, the significance of body to alternative organizing by foregrounding its relational and affective potential. Fotaki and Daskalaki (2021) reveal female protesters’ embodied affectivity and its effects on generating the politics of visibility and erasing public–private distinctions when defending their rights against extractive mining. We note that, by taking body as a resource for situated resistance and the locus of empirical examination, Fotaki and Daskalaki (2021) are able to lay bare how spatial relations are altered by the female body’s day-to-day involvement in a variety of social actions, ranging from emotive communication online to physical appearance in the public sphere. In the same vein, Skoglund and Böhm (2020) draw upon Rancière’s accounts on partaking in explaining how environmental activists’ corporeal performativity transcends insider–outsider dualism and repositions our understanding of people’s pursuit of political actions in the everyday mundane, processual life. Elsewhere, informed by Butler’s writing on shared vulnerability, Jones et al. (2021: 917) propose the concept of “embodied agonism, where difference and contest are experienced and negotiated through the body,” to highlight body as a site of local resistance and feminist solidarity.

These studies help explain how alternativity can be organized at the level of social actors’ mundane struggles, day in and day out. Body, as a sensory, somatic organization, can illuminate the texture of radical quotidianity that alternative organizing research is demanding. That is, alternative commitments can be embodied in ordinary practices and mundane experiences, and enfleshed in the acting, thinking, and feeling that constitute everyday life. This radical quotidianity renders alternativity neither heroic nor trivial, neither spectacular nor unremarkable; it is ordinary yet potent, mundane yet delicate. Beuys performs this thesis through his (post-1963) artmaking that engages the deliberate mobilization of his body. He extends the voluntary instrumentalization of his own body as the “protesting body” (Fotaki and Daskalaki, 2021: 1266) beyond his artmaking to encompass his day-to-day activities. His embodiment of alternativity shows us that everyday life (as art) has potentiality as a deeply political and transformative force. While Beuys’ art and artmaking can appear strange and otherworldly, we contend that the strangeness and otherworldliness are aesthetic byproducts of Beuys’ affective pursuit of (re)turning to body while enacting alternative commitments. It is also an aesthetic manifestation of the unknown and the unknowable that body contains, which are surfaced by artmaking and requested by alternativity. It is this ongoing mobilization of his own body, rather than the aesthetic appearance of Beuys or his artworks, that makes this alternativity so radically quotidian.

Beuys also exceeds the aforementioned accounts on body’s significance to alternativity in two respects. First, Beuys’ conception of body as unknowable, mythic, and agentic contributes to the unfinishedness, openness, and self-critique that define his Aktionen. This quality empirically illustrates that alternative organizations must “remain unfinished, always deferred, in a perpetual process of becoming” while “serv[ing] liberating purposes,” since they “must constantly reinvent themselves to remain alternative and thus keep offering potential freedom from (their own) domination” (Dahlman et al., 2022: 1966, 1967, 1981). Beuys’ performance also shows that art, at large, has the unique potential – given its self-reinventive and self-negating expressivity – to actualize alternativity as a continuous process of self-metamorphosis (Holt, 2020). This perpetual self-critique also implies art’s other-inviting, other-validating capability, thereby loosening the boundaries between the self and the other. Art, especially performance art, offers a way of (un)knowing and (re)thinking (Beyes et al., 2019), harboring “possibilities for different ways of seeing and feeling” (Holt, 2020: 19) and the potentialities of radical critique (Cinque and Nyberg, 2021).

Beuys embodying prefigurative politics

The second respect in which Beuys goes beyond extant accounts lies in his embodiment of prefigurative politics (Maeckelbergh, 2009). What differentiates prefigurative politics from other propositions of alternative organizing is the means–ends and here–there equivalence (Schiller-Merkens, 2022). In prefigurative politics, envisioned moral values and social relations are, rather than projected into a distant future/there, produced and reproduced right now/here (Monticelli, 2018). As Beuys’ body mobilization empirically illustrates, once alternativity is enacted in flesh, materialized in thought, and communicated in affect, the means substantiate the ends, and the future/there instantiates the present/here. Once alternativity is prefigured in its perpetual dialogue with contextualized precarities and privileges, the distinctions between process and product, principle and practice, and form and content are dissolved accordingly. As such, “human being is aesthetics [and] aesthetics is the human being in itself” (Beuys, 1980).

Among the most striking examples of this is the ironically titled work I Like America and America Likes Me (1974). Ironic, because Beuys had a difficult relationship with “America,” something acknowledged in the journey to the René Block Gallery in New York. He was collected from JFK airport, immediately wrapped in felt, and transported by ambulance to the gallery without ever touching American soil: “I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of the of America other than the coyote” (Beuys, 1974b: 141). Upon arrival, Beuys enveloped himself in a felt cloak and spent 3 days with the coyote in an enclosed gallery room, under the public’s observation. During the 3 days, the coyote transitioned from circling, barking, tugging, and biting at Beuys’ felt cloak to playing with, or nuzzling against, the artist from time to time. They came to rest together on a bed of straw and sheets of the Wall Street Journal – the “rigor mortis afflicting thinking about CAPITAL . . . embodied unequivocally in a financial newspaper” (Beuys, 1974b: 143, emphasis in original). By instrumentalizing his own body into a vulnerable medium of mutual encounter, Beuys prefigures the continuity of negotiation, reconciliation, and cohabitation alongside trust and its fragility, through softening a wounded psyche hardened by violent experiences and traumatic memories. While multifaceted in this representation of “the psychological trauma point of the United States energy constellation,” Beuys (1974b: 141) made one thing clear: the intra- and inter-corporeal energy arose from embodied co-presence and (inter)actions. In this Aktion, its making is its artwork made, and its political critique is in its aesthetic execution. To the then-audience standing in front of the gallery window, or to the now-audience reenacting the performance through a retrospective narrative (like ours), the mysterious and provocative texture of Beuys’ art summons our authenticity and innocence, reconnecting us with our own bodies without the hegemonic mediation of dominant ideologies. Freedom, the defining feature of alternativity (Dahlman et al., 2022), is thus revealed to be fundamentally affective. It is the immanence of collective artistic existence rather than a political telos defined in absolute terms. Affect, the signature characteristic of body, is empirically shown to contain resistive potential (Fotaki et al., 2017). In the meantime, freedom as affect does not come from once-and-for-all efforts but from continuous self-reinventive, self-negating inquiries, which explain the mysterious and provocative texture of Beuys’ artworks, such as I Like America and America Likes Me, that open up endless room for different interpretations. Here, we are witness to Beuys mobilizing audiences’ bodies for prefigurative politics by mobilizing his own first and foremost.

Beuys also illustrates two other qualities of prefigurative politics that distinguish it from alternativity in other forms (Schiller-Merkens, 2022; Yates, 2015). First, Beuys acknowledges working with(in) the very institutions he strives to fight and be rid of (e.g. performing within an established gallery or museum), while considering decontextualized resistance (i.e. prefiguration organized outside institutional spheres) not only utopian but also meaningless (Monticelli, 2018). This resonates with organization scholarship’s increasing recognition of the politics of the mundane (Fernández et al., 2017) and situated resilience (Siltaloppi et al., 2022) as achievable, sustainable engagement capable of unsettling institutions from within. Beyond surfacing the mundane in alternativity, prefiguration also helps dismantle resistance studies’ dualistic conceptualizations of counter-hegemonic efforts as either “decaf or real,” or covert or overt, rendering obsolete their mutual exclusivity that is only productive in perpetuating inequalities and inertia in action (McCabe, 2023).

Second, Beuys’ performative prefiguration, in addition to its intrinsic value, aspires to inspire others. This ambition of diffusion is another distinguishing feature of prefigurative organizing (Chertkovskaya et al., 2024; Yates, 2015). Embodied co-presence and (inter)actions are leveraged by Beuys to communicate aspirations of alternativity beyond the boundaries of his own body. While engaging and affecting himself, Beuys’ prefiguration affects and engages others at the very same time (e.g. the coyote within the gallery room as well as the audience observing through the gallery window). In keeping with his conception of body as relational and affective, the performative, communicative desire of embodied politics further unifies the self with the other (Juris, 2008), extending (in the example of I Like America and America Likes Me) into the ecosystemic realm of more-than-human beings. In the meantime, the artist’s prefigurative politics foregrounds the wholeness between thinking, saying, and doing, and between corporeality, communication, and materiality, while defying modernity’s obsession with their demarcation (Cooren, 2020). The art being prefigured is something that leads to “a concept of sculpture that originates in speech and in thought, that learns through speech to form concepts that can and will give form to emotion and to desire” (Beuys, 1985).

Beuys and alternative (management) education

Given its communicative desire, Beuys’ body mobilization also has the potential to re-energize and “re-humanize” pedagogy (Faria, 2025). Growing studies in management education reveal the significance of embodiment in sensorially enhancing learning experiences by drawing upon practice-based theories (Valtonen et al., 2017) or phenomenological perspectives (Steyaert, 2022; Vesala, 2024; Willems, 2018). It is shown that embodiment helps activate spontaneous learning (Snoeren et al., 2015) and collective creativity (Satama et al., 2022) through opening up intercorporeal dialogues between students (Steyaert, 2022; Vesala, 2024) and with more-than-human bodies (Li et al., 2025). Embodied learning also enables students to unlearn pervasive institutions (Pérezts, 2022) and educators to appreciate “aesthetic ways of knowing” (Mack, 2013: 286), such as walking (Beyes and Steyaert, 2021) and even silencing (de Vaujany and Aroles, 2019).

By contrast, Aroles and Küpers’ (2022) and Tomkins and Ulus’ (2016) studies investigate the importance of embodiment to teaching activities. Aroles and Küpers (2022) reveal the irreplaceability of embodied co-presence between teachers and students, which was brought out by the COVID disruption, distorting teaching activities into two-dimensional images. Only after teachers’ presentational performance is deprived, the similarity between teaching and performing strikes, and the bodily engagement of lecturers – from nonverbal, spontaneous cues to tacit, atmospheric exchanges – starts to surface (Aroles and Küpers, 2022). Tomkins and Ulus (2016: 158) unpack the intimate relationships between students and teachers, where embodied feelings and thoughts bounce around, leading to “a blurring of experiential agency.” To do so, teachers must affectively endanger themselves by letting their guard down first and foremost; they must holistically invest themselves in the here-and-now, “risking corporeal and intellectual exposure” in terms of “admitting to mistakes and exposing [themselves] to rejection” (Tomkins and Ulus, 2016: 158, 168). However, unlike embodied learning, embodied teaching remains largely unexamined in the management education literature, leaving the understanding of embodiment still “student-centered” rather than “relationship-centered” (Tomkins and Ulus, 2016). We argue that this imbalance risks treating educators as affectively independent from and/or intellectually superior to the rest of the classroom. Accordingly, without turning to pedagogical relations, the relational turn within management education scholarship remains partial.

Embodied teaching is a particular lesson we can draw from Beuys’ artmaking, which often involves the entanglement between performing and lecturing (Aroles and Küpers, 2022) and self-endangering yet transformative pedagogical practices (Tomkins and Ulus, 2016). Consider, for example, Beuys’ six-and-a-half-hour marathon Aktion-lecture, Information Action (1972), at the Tate Gallery. There, the artist continuously prompted (and was prompted with) questions while roaming between microphone, audience, and blackboards that later became relics (i.e. Four Blackboards (1972)), condensing the there-and-then for art-goers in the here-and-now (Gardiner, 2017). The audience did not passively listen but actively debated with Beuys (and among themselves) in pursuit of mutual understanding. Here, the monologue was replaced by polylogue, transforming an “artist’s talk” into a civic classroom and a public agora at once. Nevertheless, the very precondition for transforming the audience from passive listeners to autonomous agents is that Beuys puts himself, along with his premise of art, under the crowd’s scrutiny. He must unconditionally throw his own body into the here-and-now, sharing it with the present others before energizing them to join.

With Information Action, Beuys demonstrates the potential for educators to (re)turn to their own bodies in extending their socio-organizational impacts. We contend that it is this (re)turn that distinguishes Beuys’ contribution to management education: his reconstitution of the affective conditions within which education unfolds – something that even Tomkins and Ulus’ (2016) and Aroles and Küpers’ (2022) landmark accounts on embodied teaching do not touch on. Across Aktionen, he transforms pedagogical methods into a wholly embodied, relational encounter in which freedom is experienced rather than prescribed, collectively generated rather than individually produced. This is consequential for management education. By foregrounding body and affect as the medium through which knowledge, ethics, and action co-emerge, Beuys opens space for educators to refigure a discipline increasingly bound to managerialist logic and its consequent political, social, and ecosystemic damages (Colombo, 2023). In the Beuysian register, the educator’s task is not only to critique such tendencies but also to prefigure alternatives through their own embodied presence, cultivating pedagogical spaces grounded in sensitivity, interdependence, and mutual responsibility. It is through this affective reorientation that management education can move toward more caring, relational, and ecologically attuned forms of organizing. Pushed to its limits, this pedagogy invites a reconfiguration of the educator as a liminal figure, one who operates at the thresholds of knowledge.

Management educator as shaman

In Information Action, Beuys analogizes the role of an educator to that of a shaman: to both cure traumatic wounds (shaman as a healer) and pass on spirits and wisdom (shaman as a ferryman) by constantly going back and forth between past and future, ascent and descent, and conscious and unconscious (shaman as a time-space traveler). Along with this refiguring, management educators are called upon to rethink education’s purposes. First, education can be therapeutic and transformative vis-à-vis both the educated and the educator. Second, it can be endangering rather than always safeguarding vis-à-vis what is sociopolitically given. Last but not least, education ought to be, rather than merely self-reinforcing, self-weakening by empowering intersubjective encounter and exchange in its name.

First of all, this pedagogical shamanism is therapeutic, functioning as a “self-cure” that “enable[s] the individual to gain control of his unconscious imagery” (Ulmer, 1984: 232). Note that “the self” or “the individual” here is an expansive conceptualization that includes everyone bathed in the irreplicable atmosphere. Meanwhile, inherent to this shamanistic way of teaching is its self-transformative, otherworldly-seeking potency vis-à-vis not only the educated but also the educator themselves, given the unknowable, mythic, and agentic conception of body. The lecture-as-Aktion constitutes a liminal (as per Turner), heterotopic (as per Foucault), and carnivalesque (as per Bakhtin) space-time, in which teacher–student power differentials are subverted (as per Freire). Within such a subversive space-time, knowledge transmission becomes multidirectional, and the seeking and resolving of problems become one and the same (Griffith, 1999). This is precisely what distinguishes education from propaganda: the former invites criticality, embraces chaos, and devotes loyalty to intersubjective dialogue that can transcend ideologies (Biesta, 1994), whereas the latter demands intellectual subservience in the name of order. This is also why Beuys alternatively names his body-based live performances Aktionen – to highlight his understanding of performance art as more than merely sociopolitical representation, but as an alternative organizing of space-time. In this shamanistic space-time, the educated and the educator are confronted with unsettling questions that prompt them to doubt and disrupt what is unjustly given.

Conceiving educators as therapeutic, transformative “shamans” also unsettles existing research on management education that predominantly deploys art as a sensory tool for achieving predetermined extrinsic motives (e.g. evoking vulnerability, enhancing creativity) and realizing the ideal type of knowing/knowledge already fixated in mind (e.g. Gabriel and Connell, 2010; Satama et al., 2022). In other words, extant scholarship typically instrumentalizes art’s educational and representational regimes for organizational intervention or conceptual illustration (e.g. Beirne and Knight, 2007). However, art’s expressive regime is left unexamined (Beyes et al., 2019). Art’s expressive regime entails unpredictability, that is, the unpredictability of not having in mind a predetermined ideal of knowing/knowledge (Beyes et al., 2019). This unpredictability suggests danger, that is, the danger of artists or educators themselves not knowing what spontaneous dialogues art is hinting at or leading toward. Instead, the only known is that art has the potential of sparking body’s creative, artistic autonomy (e.g. Pérezts, 2022); that art can “bring [body] to the possible without delivering what it is the possibility of” (Steyaert et al., 2006: 98). However, such danger is precisely what education calls for. It is “a sensitivity that acknowledges the struggle of becoming and re-becoming a subject in places,” thereby “refusing the attempts of the powerful to settle themselves into private arrangements that allow for exclusion, marginalisation, and exploitation” (Holt, 2020: 20).

The danger underlying art’s expressivity enables education to be not merely an instrument of social reproduction but also a rare process by which actors become agents, capable of and willing to exercise their prepolitical, presocial autonomy. Instead of simply interpellating actors into available options of ideation and identification, “education signals rich possibilities of coming together and participating in an arena not yet signalled” (Rogoff, 2008: 4). To do so, education must be, at least to some degree, dangerous or “weak” (Biesta, 2015: x). Art’s expressive regime helps weaken education yet empower intersubjectivity by demanding room for the autonomy of both those being educated and those who dare to teach in this way. Our intention here is not to overgeneralize the applicability of this “art-weakened” education, but to call for tolerance toward those who dare to endanger education (including, and primarily, themselves as educators) with art. Our intention is to foreground the particular importance of such art-weakened, art-endangered education in management, since reimagining sociality calls for a pedagogy that is self-critical and self-metamorphic (Giroux, 2005).

Refiguring the educator as activist

In Information Action, Beuys also renders the lecture-as-Aktion a rally of prefigurative politics where bodies assemble to embark on a collective journey of becoming differently. Through the artist’s embodied teaching, the room is politicized into a space-time of alternativity that celebrates the encounter between science, art, and spirit, and the unification of concept and form (Wear, 2010). Thus, Beuys extends the educator’s role to incorporate social activism.

In this paradigm, we are alerted to the educator’s privileged power to organize, with body (of students and their own) as the ultimate resource of organizational force. This mobilization has the potential to awaken autonomy by reconnecting body with the mind, thereby disrupting institutional asphyxiation of creativity. It also has the potential to challenge the hegemonic imposition of universalist knowing/knowledge and to nurture possibilities for pluriversality (Faria, 2025). By mobilizing their own body, educators are, on the one hand, rendering their pedagogical practices organizationally significant. On the other hand, they are closing the gaps, caused by disembodied choices, between education theory and mundane activities, and between the ontological claims and epistemological commitments of pedagogy. Hence, we argue that central to realizing the “praxistical epistemology” that transcends the classic theory–praxis binary is an educator’s brave choice of engaging their own body, thereby “moving into the realm of affect and embodied, other-oriented reflexive, communicative praxis” (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021: 717, 720).

We thus consider Aktionen prefigurative pedagogy, a mode of prefigurative politics. Prefigurative pedagogy involves the educator’s relentless self-interrogation concerning what it means to be an educator and what the axiology (or deontology) of education is. It epitomizes the educator’s social intervention through rethinking teaching vis-à-vis sociality while enfleshing such rethinking in their everyday pedagogical practices. With activism at its core, our proposition of prefigurative pedagogy echoes extant literature on management education regarding the significance of embodiment to “enactivism,” which is to “continually and actively re-orientate and rearrange their mental and their bodily and experiential structures to maintain these in relation to their world” (Snoeren et al., 2015: 150). Prefigurative pedagogy, at the same time, extends this identified significance from the learning side to the teaching side. In the meantime, Beuys’ prefigurative pedagogy also illustrates that such enactivism has nothing to do with radicalism. For example, while enacting equality through eliminating hierarchies, Beuys respects authority, driven by an appreciation of experience and expertise as a critical pedagogical foundation (Giroux, 2005). After all, despite Beuys’ constant efforts to upset creativity-asphyxiant institutions through prefiguring alternativity, he does acknowledge the indispensability and inescapability of institutions (as sites of organizing).

In sum, Beuys illustrates to management educators that (re)turning to their own bodies can reconstitute the affective conditions within which education unfolds. With this affective reorientation, educators can extend their sociopolitical impacts to encompass what shamans and activists can do. As therapeutic, transformative shamans, they can rely on the expressivity of art to weaken education while empowering intersubjective dialogue. As social activists, they can leverage their privileged power to organize their own bodies and those of their students for prefigurative politics while bridging theory and praxis in pedagogy. Next, we turn to his “making” of Democracy as Merry (1973) and to his organizing of the FIU to illustrate Beuys’ prefigurative politics and prefigurative pedagogy.

Synthesizing Beuys’ prefigured alternativity

Considering his 1963 shift to performance art, it is not without irony that we note that, in that same year, Beuys became Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Over the course of his tenure, calls for his dismissal grew as his nonconformity with academy policy intensified, particularly his overt disrespect for the policy on student admissions, which he deemed undemocratic. In (performative) response to this policy, he consistently overenrolled his class in protest, accepting students whom other faculty members had rejected. Ongoing disputes with Kunstakademie authorities and mounting complaints from peers about Beuys’ artistic provocations eventually led to his dismissal in 1972. Following this, Beuys extended his prefigurative action to use the incident as another occasion to reconceptualize organization, education, and art altogether and to turn the institutional oppression of ideological disobedience and his embodied resistance against it into subject matter. Beuys staged a lengthy sit-in with his students until he was finally escorted out of the building by state police. The photograph (1973) that captured this moment of resistance later became one of the most (in)famous images of Beuys. Dressed in his signature outfit (dark greatcoat, pocket vest, and felt hat), beaming with satisfaction, he can be seen exiting the Kunstakademie with his students, under the bemused watch of uniformed police – representing the ever-present institutional discipline and punishment. Almost naturally, the protest, as Aktion and an archival record at once, became art, culminating in Beuys scrawling the phrase “Demokratie ist lustig” (democracy is merry) in ink.

Despite his disruptive activism, Beuys had returned to the Kunstakademie within the year, where, with writer Heinrich Böll, he founded the FIU in his studio. The FIU embodies the aforementioned affective relations that the artist upholds for alternativity – that is, relationality-grounded freedom and emancipation-based equality. Alternative to the Kunstakademie’s limited admission, the FIU adopts a curiosity-based policy: “Everybody has a completely equal right, equal say, and there is no privilege. Everybody helps everybody as much as he can” (Beuys, 1979a). In so doing, the FIU challenges the ruling ideology of meritocracy, whose “competitiveness and success-aggression” are hindering the creative potential of everyone, and where “political creativity is being reduced to the mere delegation of decision and power” (Beuys and Böll, 1973). By summoning the “creativity of a child” that remains untapped within us, Beuys attempts to draw parallels between one’s future and an innocent, authentic past, and to meditate on traumatizing collective memories and unsettling prospects for the human species. He also encourages dialogue across disciplines to bridge “the sciences” with “the arts” by calling upon their veiled inseparability. The FIU thus emerges as another example of how Beuys prefigures alternativity in terms of both organization (i.e. prefigurative politics) and pedagogy (i.e. prefigurative pedagogy). That is, it involves doing the saying, walking the talking, and demonstrating (through body) how education can be organized differently; in this instance, demonstrating how the making of art can be radically democratized and the allocation of educational resources can be decentralized.

From within the FIU, we observe a series of self-reflexive acts of balancing underlying the “radical” prefiguration of alternativity. In generating this movement, Beuys remains alert to the risk of the counter-canonical becoming the next canonical monolith. This is why he repeatedly emphasizes the distinction of “unity” in opposition to hegemony and the importance of “manifoldness” within the unity. Beuys also leaves the organizing of the FIU very much undefined and unfinalized, thereby preserving its openness to all and continuity for the better. With this organizing condition, Beuys seeks to break boundaries, as opposed to inflating institutional boundaries along with their cruelly optimistic discourses of diversity or inclusivity:

This perhaps is a real other methodology because the whole movement can’t be a conformity in itself. It has to be in a very manifold way, because what the system fears is manifoldness of people’s intentions and inventions against the system. If you work with an ideology, for instance, a Marxist ideology, you will never succeed against the system. They take it over to their own things, yes, every system in the capitalistic system is already working inside with a kind of capitalistic sort. So the only methodology is the colour, the manifoldness in the unity. The unity means the liberation of the people from the dependency of money and state in a given structure. (Beuys, 1979a)

Recall that hierarchy is negated in the FIU, whereas authority is validated. While Beuys proclaimed that everyone is an artist, expertise, craftsmanship, and wisdom are to be respected. Similarly, while artistry cannot be discounted, any associated superiority or subordination is to be disdained. After all, both emancipation and emancipation-based equality are presupposed by the ethics of relationality. As highlighted in the manifesto that Beuys and Böll (1973) drafted for the foundation of FIU,

The school does not discount the specialist, nor does it adopt an anti-technological stance. It does however reject the idea of experts and technicians being the sole arbiters in their respective fields. In a spirit of democratic creativity, without regressing to merely mechanical defensive or aggressive clichés, we shall discover the inherent reason in things. In a new definition of creativity the terms professional and dilettante are surpassed, and the fallacy of the unworldly artist and the art-alienated non-artist is abandoned.

While reiterating the adjective “radical,” Beuys was constantly aware of and cautious about the radicalization of alternativity. He remained sensitive and reflexive vis-à-vis obsessive struggles for a sense of purity or zeal in the rebellion against institutions or oppressive systems that impede human creativity. In line with the pursuit of wholeness in his other work, Beuys attempted to achieve a synthesis between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, a harmony between order and chaos, and a unification of the respect for individuality and a search for mutuality. Underlying his prefigured alternativity is a stubborn rejection of institutional reformism and aesthetic conservatism and, more importantly, a celebration of revolutionary action that is critically conscious of the risk of ideological violence or political horror anew in the revolution’s name. His prefigured alternativity is a choice of commitment to lifelong criticality – that is, “a state of duality in which one is at one and the same time, both empowered and disempowered, knowing and unknowing” (Rogoff, 2006; 2).

Accordingly, neither the FIU nor Democracy as Merry (1973) has as their ambition the determining or terminating of debates on alternativity vis-à-vis art, education, or sociality. Rather, they make possible, make visceral, and potentialize the mundane occurrence of co-existence. Throughout this co-existence, collective learning, participatory politics, and public art take place all at once; bodies gather not out of identity but instead are compelled by curiosity and criticality. The privatization and centralization of education are necessarily ridiculed and dissolved. These occurrences of co-existence are themselves alternative organizations of space-time leveraged by Beuys, prefiguring the relational, unknowable texture of the alternativity he envisions.

The radical quotidianity that Beuys’ prefiguration brings to the FIU or Democracy as Merry (1973) is pedagogical inasmuch as it organizes alternativity amid the everyday struggles of everyone living with different precarities and privileges. A proliferation of organizational projects, such as (but not exclusive to) the Social Sculpture Research Unit, the University of the Trees, and the Social Sculpture Lab, has emerged under the inspiration of the FIU’s vision of emancipation and emancipation-based equality and/or its design of open admission and a transdisciplinary atmosphere. Projects such as these counter the mainstreaming of ideas of what organizations must feel like and what education must do (Hayes, 2024). Moreover, performance art appears to be standalone and ephemeral. However, the aestheticized objects (e.g. those produced from Democracy as Merry and Four Blackboards) and audiences’ memories paradoxically render Beuys’ body-enabled Aktionen transcending temporality – something we have tried to reflect in our determined shift from past to present tense when describing what Beuys did, and what he continues to do, through the phantom traces of his body in his work. As foregrounded at the beginning of this article, an ontological (re)turn to body raises epistemological concerns that are automatically directed to affective relations and embodied (inter)actions underpinning the perpetual, ongoing organizational processes. As Beuys prefigures, “this process of entering deeply into the proposals, which is also a process of co-operative enquiry, of negotiation and exchange, is what Beuys describes as the ‘permanent conference.’ It is also what safeguards against top-down utopianism” (Sack, 2007: 42). Beuys’ prefigured alternativity remains alive also through the plethora of variously themed exhibitions, conceptual derivatives (e.g. relational aesthetics, participatory art, community-based art, art-based education), and myriad initiatives in artistic, educational, or broader social realms (Hayes, 2019). Many of them take place in established institutions, continuously incarnating the Beuysian desire to upset institutions from within by rekindling intercorporeal dialogue from the ground up. This myriad of remembering and celebrating of Beuys illustrates the persistence that radical quotidianity entails, defying the ephemerality that predominantly defines alternative projects.

Discussion

By (re)turning his own body, Beuys prefigured alternativity in both organizational and pedagogical terms, lending to the alternative organizing literature and to management education.

To alternative organizing, the artist’s body mobilization brings a sense of radical quotidianity and longevity to extant accounts of alternative commitments often problematized as overall extraordinary and ephemeral (Reinecke, 2018). Beuys’ body-based artmaking resonates with the emerging recognition of the significance of body to alternativity (Fotaki and Daskalaki, 2021; Jones et al., 2021; Skoglund and Böhm, 2020; Wear, 2024). Beuys also adds to it by indicating two layers constituting the affectivity of freedom: one resides in the “constant struggle to transcend existing boundaries,” and the other involves the constant critique of oneself “to remain alternative and thus keep offering potential freedom from (their own) domination” (Dahlman et al., 2022: 1962, 1981). Moreover, Beuys’ work enriches this bodily attention also by empirically illustrating prefigurative politics (Maeckelbergh, 2009; Schiller-Merkens, 2022). The artist shows us that, once alternativity is enacted in flesh, materialized in thought, and communicated in affect, the means substantiate the ends, and the future/there instantiates the present/here, which explains why the making of Beuys’ performance artwork is this artwork, and its political critique is in its aesthetic execution. In addition, Beuys’ bodily illustration of prefigurative politics lays bare its two other features: first, it is about upsetting institutions from within, and second, it entails a desire to communicate, which aligns with a relational, affective conception of body (Schiller-Merkens, 2022; Yates, 2015).

To management education, Beuys’ Aktionen echoes the highlighting of embodiment’s significance for teaching (Aroles and Küpers, 2022; Tomkins and Ulus, 2016), challenging the literature’s status quo of disproportionately focusing on its effects on learning. Meanwhile, Beuys exceeds the existing understanding of embodied teaching by demonstrating the pedagogical potency of (re)turning to body in reconstituting the affective conditions within which education unfolds. With such an affective reorientation, educators can nudge management education to incarnate and inspire more caring, relational, and ecologically attuned forms of organizing. On the one hand, educators can reorganize the classroom into a shamanistic space-time that subverts student–teacher power differentials and metamorphoses both parties at once (Griffith, 1999). Here, art is no longer employed (in organizing and pedagogy) for its educational or representational regimes in the service of achieving predetermined extrinsic motives. Instead, it is relied on for its expressivity (Beyes et al., 2019) that entails the possibility of weakening education while empowering intersubjective dialogue and transgressing the boundaries of the known and the unknown, and the possible and the impossible (Biesta, 2015; Rogoff, 2008). On the other hand, educators can reorganize the classroom into an activist assembly that unleashes autonomy and liberates plural ways of knowing (Faria, 2025). In the meantime, educators are also aligning their beliefs with their practices, dissolving the stubborn dualism between theory and praxis with their body mobilization (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021). We thus conclude that prefigurative pedagogy, as a mode of prefigurative politics, involves educators walking the talking, and acting the thinking. This means not only a bodily prefiguring of how education can be organized differently, but also a perpetually unsettling of oneself regarding the deontological underpinnings of one’s pedagogical activities, day in and day out.

All in all, Beuys’ prefiguration of alternativity – through the instrumentalization, politicalization, and exhibition of himself – is intrinsically pedagogical for prefiguring an ultimate form of social responsibility and political engagement. Interestingly, Beuys’ prefiguration has been dividedly received. For example, Buchloh (2007: 110, 122, 123) criticizes Beuys for perpetuating Fascist practices of “compulsive self-exposure as the messianic artist” and for cultivating “private and public mythology” and “curious sectarianism,” which, he argues, only “grows out of the experiences of severe [postwar] deficiency.” Likewise, Frenkel (2007: 130) denounces Beuys’ performance work as “the use of people’s need of others as containers for the impulses of the forbidden self.” With his technique of mystification, the artist only “maintain[s] a person (or a culture) in a double-bind” (Frenkel, 2007: 131).

We defend Beuys against these criticisms; rather than creating another god or cult (or religion, or tribe), we envision Beuys as encouraging people to recognize the ego-crushing existence of the unknown and the unknowable (e.g. body of oneself and others). In so doing, the artist seeks to help emancipate ourselves from what is socio-organizationally definable and determined. This is because the death of the self-righteousness and self-seriousness that haunts modernity concurs with the birth of self-emancipation; the end of enlightenment-informed obsession with scientific explanation and once-and-for-all solutions marks the beginning of inhabiting the tensions and contradictions of organizing. Throughout this nirvana-like process, self-mystification is a byproduct of prefiguration aiming at demystifying alternativity – that is, dissolving form and content, practice and principles, and means and ends with the very body of one’s own. The mysterious appearance of body is the epiphenomenon of (often ephemeral) engagement with what is usually unattainable and the manifestation of its conception as mythic, unknowable, and thus agentic. In this sense, the distance between Cartesian dualities is merely one’s own body, and “compulsive self-exposure” is instead a compliment of those who dare to endanger themselves for alternativity. To reiterate what Beuys says, “[a]esthetic is the human being in itself.”

Concluding remarks

With this article, we call on management educators to (re)turn to body as Beuys prefigures, to mobilize ourselves – before mobilizing others – in the evocation of relationality and the emancipation of creativity that are indispensable in this time of polycrisis. We argue that, in this setting, confining our deontological duties as (management) educators to simply “lecturing” would be an axiological failure. Instead, we contend that shamanistic transformation and organizational activism are needed to confront the polycrisis on its moral, emotional, and existential fronts. The radical quotidianity and unknowability that (re)turning to body brings will help (management) educators reorganize classrooms into a space-time of prefigurative politics, in which alternativity is simultaneously reimagined and instantiated.

This article has emerged from a desire to surface the unexamined possibilities that Beuys’ prefigured alternativity – in its ontological anchor in body – can bring to organization scholarship. However, we are aware of this offering’s limitations. First, Beuys’ body mobilization does not confine itself to his own but extends to include other human and, particularly, more-than-human bodies, substantiating his challenge to the Anthropocene and the environmentalist advocacies that characterized his later career. His projects, such as 7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration (1982–1987), Capri-Battery (1985), and Honey Pump at the Workplace (1977), may serve as sources of inspiration for future studies on organizational sustainability and political ecology. Second, the examples discussed in this article represent only a small fraction of Beuys’ artmaking, which – given its radical quotidianity – was infused into the ordinary moments of his life, a life sadly cut short by exhaustion brought on by his trauma-weakened body and compulsive, ceaseless work. These moments can be recorded or not, retrievable or not, giving us a further glimpse into a life living and breathing alternativity. Last but not least, although we have defended Beuys against criticism, we have no intention to deify the artist, which would go precisely against his wish to disenchant people from a canonized understanding of creativity and democratize the ability to make a difference into everyone’s hands. We also recognize our personal preferences and political favor for Beuys and what he bodily stands for, which, again, is the original motor for our writing.

Writing this article in a conventional journal format and through the traditional publishing process might have constituted a betrayal of Beuysian spirits of alternativity. However, as argued, communicating alternativity from within institutions and contextualizing it among the privileges and precarities that one inhabits – that is, do whatever one can possibly do – is also an academic prefiguration of the radical quotidianity of alternativity that Beuys bodily articulates. We thus justify this contravention with our humble intention and effort in positioning Beuys more deeply into organization studies and management education, as materialized in this article. All in all, what matters to Beuysian alternativity is not the radicalization of the artist’s or anyone else’s spirits, but the day-to-day prefiguration of spirits by and in the self. To close, we suspend the reading of Beuys here, leaving it as an unfinished yet open invitation for like-minded bodies to further unleash the unknow(able) potential of artistic practice for imagining what organization/organizing should – or could – be.