The Judge

The judge is the singular source of authority, the figure in whose action judgment is embodied. Using Georges Rouault’s painting, The Judges, this chapter discusses the relationship between law, spectating, and feeling. Taking up a refrain from Walt Whitman, a poetic form of judging is argued for. Poetic judgment brings about a world framed by the creation of forms by which we can educate ourselves in the collective business of living. Strategy, understood as the presentation of an organization to itself and others, becomes a judgmental condition of bringing together general sensibility and particular experience to re-frame the places in which we live and work. This chapter introduces a reversal of visionary forms of strategy. With poetic judgment, strategy becomes an aesthetic process of creating organizational forms and we become increasingly and collectively aware of the vulnerable ordinary and its panoply of elusive and sometimes strange occurrences.