FOR DEFINITION OF RHYTHMS

How Does Rhythm apply to Enron?

The Enron partnership rhythms are on the move, in a self-organizing complexity since 1997, only unraveling in August, after Skilling resigns as Enron’s CEO, and becoming public scandal in November, when the Big Three stock rating agencies, downgrade Enron to junk bond status.

How Does Rhythm apply to Enron?

Enrononomics has its own unique rhythms. Enron has some quite radical blocks emerge to their historical narrative and their facade theatric performances. To do an analysis of Enron, you need to follow the inter-rhythm strands between Enron and the wider embedded context of capitalism.

Enron's projects are set into context by their deregulation spokespersons, jus as "something is set to music, or orchestrated" (Latour, 1996: 142). Irwin Jacobs had is finger on the button, he could have blown Enron into the void of liquidated companies, were it not for greenmail paid just after Enron became Enron. But just then a fortuitous historical character, Michael Milken saved Enron from early extinction. And the Valhalla Rogue Traders scandal of 1985-1987 could have liquidated all confidence in Enron, were it not for the stock market crash of October 1987. "It will never happen again" said Kenneth Lay, on the steps of Enron HQ in October of 1987. Yet the rhythm kept recurring (an eternal return in Nietzsche's terms), and there was an irreversibility to all. Enron's feet of clay did not become public-discovery until bankruptcy was immanent in November-December 2001.

Enron is, in Metatheatre terms, a dramaturgically realized fiction. Enron is a theatrical construction, that morphed and adapted, but failed to resolved its fusing and blocked historical events. Enron changed its causal texture environment, by championing a deregulated economics, while keeping markets regulated through trades of cash for political favors. The role of a critical dramaturgy analysis of rhythms is to demystify Enron's Poetics. The transformation of markets and economy by Enron is accomplished by (ante) narrative and Metatheatrics. Antenarrative ensembles are rhizomatic rhythms that morph Enron from scandal to scandal since 1987 (Valhalla Rogue Traders & Greenmail) to 2001, when the megaspectacle could not be contained by facade and masquerade.

Enron used its theatre and antenarrating to change the dynamics of capitalism. Then the ground moved, and Enron tipped into the abyss of megaspectacle of scandal and bankruptcy. The Enron partnership rhythms are on the move, in a self-organizing complexity since 1997, their fusion only unraveling in August 2001, after Skilling resigns as Enron’s CEO, and after the October Wall Street Journal article triggered a public mega-scandal, and the reality hit home in November of 2001 when the Big Three stock rating agencies, downgraded Enron to junk bond status. Yet, the strands of historical and theatrical event rhythms extend back to 1985 when Houston Natural Gas merged with InterNorth Inc, but did not not know (apparently) that they also merged with the Valhalla Rouge Traders of New York. Before that trilogy was named Enron, it was called Enteron; Enron continues to try to realize, but is simultaneously derealizing at each historical event. The fiction overtook the economy, fused with it, then became megaspectacle, as the size, scale and intensity (Best & Kellner, 2001 dimensions of megaspectacle) --- of Enron rhythms vibrated out of its theatrical control.

Enron is beating out rhythms of predation while the resistance rhythms of India villagers and California energy users come into dialectic opposition.

The rise of Enron was an experimentation of alternative rhythms for the merged Houston Natural Gas Company with the InterNorth Pipeline Company, that for a while was called Enteron, then Enron. And there was a good deal of improvisation by Enron, Andersen, and entities such as LJM, Raptor and Condor. Enron can be said to possess a rhythmic profile, a hybridity of repetitive, complex, and emergent chaotic rhythms. There is also rhythmic succession, moving from simple to more complex rhythmic profiles (morphing from utility company to energy trader, to 7th largest U.S. corporation, then into megaspectacle collapse). My proposition, then, is rhythm, then, in contemporary times is much more important than fifth place in Aristotle’s hierarchy of importance. There is a rhythmic construction to organizations, organizing, emergence, and change that is difficult to manage.

The rise, collapse, and aftermath of Enron spectacles has its own rhythm. Enron and Arthur Andersen shook the reputation of Wall Street, the accounting profession, deregulation in the energy industry, Whitehouse and Congress, if not the entire discourse of American capitalism. On January 10, when Bush officials revealed that Enron had sought its help, Philip M. Schiliro, top aide to Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-CA, is quoted as saying, "This is the perfect storm," something the democrats need to counter Bush administration popularity (Cohen, Victor, & Baumann, 2002).

The rhythm of capitalism relies on the covering rhetoric of self-regulation. However, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), for example, seldom expels members for malpractice or incompetence. “For years, the independent Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has been deliberating changes that would have disallowed some of Enron's more controversial practices” (McTague, 2002: 16). The SEC is too under-budget and under staffed to regulate complex Raptor, Condor, and JEDI I and II transactions.

In sum, Enron is a tangling weave that is Tamara-esque theatre, with a self-organizing rhythm expressed in all the Septet elements.

Date: September 21, 2002

Authored by David M. Boje, Ph.D. - copyright 2002