Refusing to name leaders

Sergei Eisenstein's Strike and Battleship Potemkin, both released in 1925, recreate unsuccessful Russian uprisings that preceded the 1917 revolution. Strike follows a walkout in a Tsarist factory that is provoked, divided and then crushed. Potemkin begins with sailors refusing rancid meat and ends with the massacre on the Odessa steps.

The chapter reads these alongside Billy Elliot, which shares several motifs: crowds driven downhill, descent as an image of powerlessness, small gestures of solidarity between strangers. Billy's brother runs from the police through the back lanes of the town, a door held open for him by a pensioner along the way.

The films show what a narrative looks like when the hero slot is refused rather than filled. Name one figure and the crowd behind them becomes background. Eisenstein declines to make that conversion, which is how the cost of it becomes visible, and the chapter's closing move is that refusing to name a leader is available as a choice.

Naming

1. Whose collective work in your organisation is only visible when attributed to one person?
2. What would you call this if leader and follower were unavailable?
3. Who here is neither a leader nor a follower — and how does your vocabulary handle them?
4. What would it cost to decline to name anyone?

Chapter Three: Naming — the chapter carries the evidence and the close reading this page only points at.

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