The bulk of management and organization studies draw on cybernetics and control-oriented views of time. Management is expected to follow a goal-oriented temporality, and activities keep correcting or adjusting both goals and patterns of organizing. In this chapter, the authors defend a more paradoxical view of temporality. By means of a detour towards the works of Guy Debord and John Dewey, both dérive and flânerie on the one hand, and inquiry and determination on the other hand, are jointly conceptualized as key organizing processes. From that perspective, collective activity and its politics appear as the productive differences in-between an infinitude of events oriented either towards activity or passivity, horizontality or verticality.

Within a general modernist discourse of the phantasmagoria of the city, Le paysan de Paris stands out as a characteristic case of surrealist urban mythology. The book is seen as exemplary of the surrealists’ dedication to Paris, both as an urban reality and as a condition of possibility for their movement, in large part because of Walter Benjamin’s early focus on it. Benjamin’s reading of surrealism has largely oriented contemporary critical discourses, and one result of this is the invocation of an unbreakable association between surrealism and the city. However, in the middle of the ’movable feast’ that designated 1920s Paris as the Cosmopolis par excellence, it is to a ’peasant’, a non-urban figure, that Aragon gives Paris, and through whom Paris is given to us. This surrealist representation of the city breaks away from prevalent modernist accounts that pitch the ’city’ vs. ’country’ and ’urban’ vs. ’natural’. This chapter argues that the surrealist narratives which focus on the city undo prevalent tropes associated with the representation of the urban in modernity to ultimately subvert the genre of the novel as it was formed in the realist tradition.