Organized Worlds: Essays in Technology and Organization with Robert Cooper

ORGANIZED WORLDS The modern preoccupation with rationality, technologies of organization and representation has characterized the work of many leading twentieth-century thinkers, including especially Max Weber and Michel Foucault. These social philosophers have argued that modern social institutions and organizations are underpinned by a generic logic which is intimately linked to the rise of instrumental rationality as the organizing axiom of modern social life. The contributors to this volume take up this wider concern with the organization of modernity and explore its implications in ways which throw new light on these issues. Organized Worlds, the second of a two-part series dedicated to the work of Robert Cooper on the social theory of organization and technology, explores in detail the intricate relationships that exist between technology, representation and organization from a diversity of perspectives, ranging from actor-network theory to the deconstructive analysis of such icons of modernity as stability, subjectivity and wholeness. The collection includes a chapter by Robert Cooper, as well as an interview with him. Organized Worlds relocates the study of modern organization and technology within the wider field of social theory, where the themes of modernity, rationality, information and representation are seen to provide more appropriate axes for social analysis. Contributors: John Law, Annemarie Mol, Nick Lee, Richard Sotto, Ron Day, Robert Cooper, Jannis Kallinikos. Robert C.H.Chia lectures in Organization Studies at the University of Essex. His previous publications include Organizational Analysis as Deconstructive Practice (Berlin, 1996) and In the Realm of Organization: Essays for Robert Cooper (Routledge, 1998), the first volume of this series.

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ORGANIZED WORLDS Explorations in technology and organization with Robert Cooper

Edited by Robert C.H.Chia

London and New York

First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 Robert C.H.Chia, selection and editorial matter; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-20907-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26730-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-12756-4 (Print Edition)

CONTENTS

List of contributors

vi

Preface

vii

Introduction Exploring the expanded realm of technology, organization and modernity ROBERT C.H.CHIA 1 On metrics and fluids: notes on otherness JOHN LAW AND ANNEMARIE MOL 2 Two speeds: how are real stabilities possible? NICK LEE 3 The virtualization of the organizational subject RICHARD SOTTO 4 Diagrammatic bodies RON DAY 5 Assemblage notes ROBERT COOPER Epilogue Interview with Robert Cooper ROBERT C.H.CHIA AND JANNIS KALLINIKOS Index

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18 36 62 88 100 121

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CONTRIBUTORS Robert C.H.Chia teaches Organization Studies at the University of Essex, UK. Robert Cooper is Research Professor at the Centre for Social Theory and Technology, Keele University, UK. Ron Day is the Librarian at the Athenian School in Danville, California, USA. Jannis Kallinikos was formerly Associate Professor and head of the Department of Organization Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. John Law is Professor of Sociology at Keele University, UK. Nick Lee is a Lecturer in Sociology at Keele University, UK. Annemarie Mol is Socrates Professor of Political Theory at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. Richard Sotto is an Associate Professor in Informatics at University College, Ronneby, Sweden.

PREFACE In a previous related collection of essays, the contributors to In the Realm of Organization: Essays for Robert Cooper examined the implications of the influence of Robert Cooper on the social scientific analysis of modernity, technology, representation and organization. Collectively, they explored the turn towards postmodern forms of knowing and sought to show how interlocking microtechniques of ordering, eventstructuring and representation work to legitimize the discourse of rationality, and thereby to construct the all-too-familiar organized worlds that especially characterize a late modernity. This volume follows up with an exploration of the implications of recent developments in information technology, social theory and the social studies of science and technology for our understanding of the impact of organization on contemporary social life. As with the previous collection, the essays here seek to develop a generic methodology for understanding the meaning and significance of organization in terms of systemness, stabilization and simple location. It takes up the challenge of these recent insights to articulate a social theory of organization which takes as its legitimate object of analysis the systematic technologizing of our modern lifeworlds. Organized Worlds is principally a study of the elaboration and sustenance of the organizational impulses underpinning late modernity, and its consequences for our understanding of human agency and subjectivity. I owe a special debt to Stuart Morgan and Mark Dibben for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of this manuscript. Robert C.H.Chia Boxted, Essex February 1998

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INTRODUCTION Exploring the expanded realm of technology, organization and modernity Robert Chia

The modern preoccupation, even obsession, with technologies of organization and representation in its myriad forms—‘rationality’, ‘professionalization’, ‘division of labour’, ‘disciplines’, ‘taxonomies’, ‘bureaucracy’, ‘economics of performance’—have exercised the minds of a range of leading twentieth-century thinkers, including especially the social philosopher Max Weber. For Weber, despite the rise and fall of modern institutions and the changing fortunes of their political ideologies and affiliations, the general drift of secular rationalization is indelibly marked in the sequence of sociohistorical events which took place in Europe during and after the Enlightenment. The extent and direction of this process of systematic rationalization was, for Weber, measured by the degree to which the progressive ‘disenchantment of the world’ had been accomplished. He observed that the persistence and pervasiveness of this ‘disenchantment’ is perhaps most clearly exemplified in the application of the principles of instrumental rationality to such an apparently subjective area of experience as music. Thus, ‘the fixation of clang patterns, by a more concise notation and the establishment of the well-tempered scale…the standardization of the quartet of woodwinds and string instruments as the core of the symphony orchestra’ (Gerth and Mills, 1948:51) were seen by Weber as telling instances of the inexorable process of representational abstraction and ordering occurring all around him in every sphere of human activity. It was this general burgeoning of rationality that led Weber to devote his academic career to a deeper understanding of its effects on modern social life. The widespread rationalization of virtually every aspect of (especially) nineteenthcentury life in Western societies, which Weber observed during his own lifetime, was anticipated by the strict regimes of behavioural probity that were systematically imposed during the Victorian era. As Richard Schoenwald reveals, in a fascinating unravelling of the great social reforms which took place in Victorian England, the task of the nineteenth century was to teach men that they had to change their personal habits fundamentally in order to become more acceptable to the new rationalized norms of urban life: Learning that some smells are good, and that others are bad, reenacts the great scene in man’s developmental history when he began to walk erect. He could not maintain erect posture and still yield to the array of tempting aromas at

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ground level which drew his less highly developed animal forebears…Stand up straight and act like a human being! You have to learn to live with other people, with lots of them in big cities, and you have to learn that they can’t find your smells as beguiling as you do, or everyone will be down on all fours and riot and rampage will run in the streets! Turn your nose away from the smell of lower parts, turn your eyes and your mind to higher things! (Schoenwald, 1973:672) To maintain itself, modern society must proclaim that things have their rightful and wrongful places whether within the biological organism or in the social field. The systematic spatial fixing and conceptual location of social habits and attitudes became a founding touchstone of modernity and the concept of the disciplined body in an orderly society grew to be a fundamental but largely unconscious imperative of an increasingly industrialized world. This logic of rationality propagated a familiar form of reasoning which holds even today:

Industrialized society rests on order; order means everything in its place; dirt is whatever is not where it should be; the meanings of dirt held most deeply because learned earliest relate to bodily operations; then a society bent on order should put the body into order by putting order into the body; society gains order by ‘training’ (Schoenwald, 1973:674) Nowhere is this ordering of the body more evident than in the process of excretory regulation that a child has to undergo in learning to grow up. In its first efforts towards learning to control bodily outputs—how pressing the need, how suitable the time and place—the child also gains basic conceptions of the disciplinary norms of work. In this way the rationalized control of excretory behaviour became a crucial feature of the systematic modernization of society. Society must arrange both for disciplined retention and scheduled letting go in conformity with the axioms of orderliness. Hence, ‘the water closet and the sewer as bringers of order…underscore and reinforce the restraints and controls necessary to keep an industrialized society producing and consuming’ (Schoenwald, 1973:683). Pragmatically, because of the scale of social changes required, the Victorian sanitary movement provided one of the most efficient means for ordering social habits in space—time and for instilling attitudes of orderliness on a mass basis. In a similar analysis of the development of modernity, the social philosopher Michel

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Foucault has charted the extent of this progressive rationalization of Western societies through a detailed examination of the ‘discursive regimes’ which were invented to organize and control the masses that converged on the cities, particularly during the period of the industrial revolution. Foucault (1979) noted that, before the eighteenth century, the system of governance was based upon the model of the family and administrators adopted a paternalistic view in which the common welfare of the social collectivity was a paramount consideration. With the population increases and the concentration of the masses in the cities, the system of governance radically altered. Administrators struggled to manage a large amorphous mass whose sheer magnitude could only be understood in terms of statistical representation. Statistics, the ‘science of the state’, became, therefore, the dominant means for ‘understanding’ and thus managing the inchoate masses. New conceptual terms such as ‘population densities’, ‘death rate’, ‘birth rate’, ‘cycles of scarcity’, provided the formal mechanisms through which the otherwise unwieldy masses could be re-presented and brought under administrative control. Knowledge at a glance was what administrators sought as a way of coping with the increasing problems that the otherwise indistinguishable masses created for urban management. It was this overriding concern with taming the urban masses that led Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) to recommend his approach of ‘methodization’ for the regulation and control of society. ‘Methodization’ entailed the spatial and temporal division of all categories of individuals: workers at their bench, pupils at school, prisoners in their cells, and so on. It enabled classification and counting, the rudiments of rational representation, to become key practices in the administration of society: ‘Books must be kept…Chronological entries will be made daily, methodological entries—products, population tables, stock inventories, health records, moral conduct records, requests’ (Miller 1987:19) were all to be entered for the purpose of efficient social administration. By this process of ‘methodization’ or rationalization, large numbers of people, distributed over a significant area, could be ‘captured’ in the small space of a book and made available ‘at first glance’ (Miller, 1987:26). This obsession with orderliness and the associated placing of names/things in a tabular and/or hierarchical form, was also noted by Kenner (1987) in his extended discussion of the ambitions of John Wilkins and Thomas Sprat, co-founders of the Royal Society in England, who were both committed to the idea of getting rid of the ‘slipperiness’ of everyday language through the development of a ‘rational’ language for science. As Kenner shows, for Wilkins, in particular, names are used to ‘designate the thing’s location in a taxonomic chart. The chart lays out the entire scheme of the world’ (Kenner, 1987:87) so that an exaggeratedly formal and ordered world is produced. The obsession with order and control associated with the efforts of social reformers such as Wilkins and Sprat was noted by Emile Durkheim (1933) in his celebrated study of the division of labour as the basis of modern society. Durkheim’s interest in the ‘social anthropology’ of order led him to recognize that what drove the incessant search for better contol of the social masses was the underlying belief that everyone had a proper place and that every place would serve a specific function for society. In this way efficient specialization and absolute determinacy could prevail. Just as Schoenwald’s

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(1973) analysis of the effects of the Victorian era and Foucault’s (1979) study of the rise of discursive regimes for the control of society reveal, it was this overwhelming obsession to structure a perfectly ordered and predictable world which has helped transform Western societies and created the conditions of modernity. It is this generic understanding of organization as a generalized strategy of representation and control involving the stabilizing, classifying and locating of the remote, obdurate and intractable character of the social world, which the contributors to this volume seek to re-examine, expand and update. For them, as for organizational analysts such as Weber, Foucault and Schoenwald, it is through such technologies of organization that discursive regimes of representation are produced which are then subsequently deployed in the accounting and shaping of individual identities and the control of mass behaviour. Representation, through the fixing and placing of fluid, amorphous, social phenomena in space-time, is an organizational process which works to centre, unify and render discrete what would otherwise be an indistinguishable mass of vague interactions and experiences. Such technologies of representation, however, have precipitated dramatic consequences for contemporary social life. Like their intellectual forebears, the contributors to this volume are specifically concerned with how these representational technologies, inspired by Bentham and other social reformers, have been systematically magnified by the power of modern technology to produce the specific version of modern social life that appears to us so intuitively obvious and natural. More specifically, the chapters in this volume seek to extend our understanding of the mass society of modernity by tracing the tensions, ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the ongoing structuring of human worlds. This is done in the context of new developments and insights in information technology, social theory, philosophy and the social studies of science and technology. For instance, Richard Sotto, in Chapter 3, reveals how our almost instinctive habit of attributing action to a centred and unifying individual agent (a legacy of the kind of systematic ‘methodization’ initiated by Bentham) is being threatened by recent developments in information technology that are beginning to problematize conventional conceptions of the organizational subject. On his analysis, the advent of computer technology threatens to dissolve and decentre the organizational subject into a web of intertextual relations. This has important consequences for our understanding of human agency and subjectivity. It is this surprising ‘undoing’ of the disciplined, unitary subject and the accompanying decentring of action which provides the conceptual challenge for organizational analysis in late modernity. Likewise, Robert Cooper, in Chapter 4, makes the important observation that technologies of ‘mass production’ must not be thought of simply as methods for producing functional goods but, more fundamentally, as techniques for making mass ‘appear’ to hand: technologies for ‘producing and reproducing mass’ that then lend themselves to the endless process of the collection-dispersion-recollection of parts that so distinguishes modernity. As Cooper then shows, the significance of mass production is now not so much about assembly lines producing products but the continuous movement of reproduction itself; reproduction as a form of ‘methodization’ which continuously re-

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enacts the programme of modernity. Thus, the overall concern of this volume is to extend the insights provided by writers such as Weber and Foucault and to show how organization, as a generic ordering process, can be understood in much broader terms than the traditional literature in the social science of organization normally allows. Organized Worlds brings together a diversity of approaches, with complementary interests in social theory and philosophy, to create a common platform of enquiry for understanding the significance and impact of generic institutional and organizational forces on the shape and character of late modernity. It is inspired by the singular belief that a deeper appreciation of the underlying organizational forces shaping contemporary modern life can be attained through a careful and critical reexamination of the discursive icons of modernity.

Towards a social theory of organization While writers like Weber, Foucault and other social critics of technology and modernity have concentrated their efforts on the analysis and understanding of the representational techniques for organizing social life, contemporary organization studies have tended to confine their concerns to the systematic study of the organization of productive effort and the organization of control within and without organizations. A performative imperative drives the contemporary surge of writings in organization theory and analysis. Even the more fashionable sociological account—the ‘interpretive’, ‘institutional’ and ‘critical’ versions of organizational analysis which draw attention to the plurality and diversity of socio-economic ideologies and interests informing organizational theorizing—implicitly or explicitly take ‘the formal organization’ to be the appropriate unit of analysis. It would appear that the covert appropriation of the social study of organization into these ideological enclaves has only served further to reify ‘organizations’ as discrete, bounded, economic-administrative entities and thus neglected the wider question of the organizational character of modern social life. What is specifically neglected in conventional organizational analysis is the rigorous reflection on the underlying social, cultural and historical forces that shape and organize the ways we see, think and act in the institutionalized and organized structures of the modern world. This restricted and restrictive view of the social science of organizations is, therefore, open to critical questioning. What is needed is an expanded perspective which recognizes the significance of organization as a generic process of ‘world-making’ (Goodman, 1984). Within this expanded understanding, the analyses of the organization of vision and representation, of accepted objects of knowledge, of modes of thought, of language and its effects, of meaning and social practices, of geographical space and time as well as of historical traditions and frames of reference, are recognized as being more appropriate theoretical avenues for extending our understanding of the subtle immanence of organizing in all aspects of modernity. In this regard, Rapoport and Horvath’s (1968) helpful distinction between a generalized organization theory and a theory of organizations provides a valuable starting

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point for conceptually locating these wider organizational concerns shared by the contributors to this volume. While a theory of organizations as specific economicadministrative systems is what defines the idealized sociological approach to organizational analysis, for Rapoport and Horvath organization theory is better understood as the study of the primary organizational processes underpinning any system exhibiting what they call ‘organized complexity’ (Rapoport and Horvath, 1968:74). In contrast to the theory of organizations which confines itself to the study of formal ‘organizations’ as taken-for-granted social entities with identifiable boundaries and purposes, organization theory, in this expanded understanding, addresses the question of organization as a general logic applicable to the ordering and representation of all forms of social phenomena. In distinguishing this generalized organization theory from the more traditional concerns of a theory of organizations, Rapoport and Horvath provide an approach to those questions that characterizes what we might here call a social theory of organization, and which more rigorously represent the themes and intellectual strategies of the essays in this volume. In a similar vein, Kuhn (1982) insists that ‘organization theory ought not to be relegated to the “applied” field of business administration and to such niches as happen to be vouchsafed to it by sociology, political science, economics, social-behavioural psychology, and assorted other fields’. Instead, ‘Organization theory ought to be a basic social science in its own right’ (Kuhn, 1982: xiii). Organization here must be understood in its broadest sense as denoting systemness rather than specific self-contained, purposeful social structures which are all ready (and already) presented to us for study. For Kuhn, therefore, organizational analysis should focus on the study of systemness, the logic of information, representation and organization, and the technologies they generate. These are precisely the key themes which are extensively explored both in Robert Cooper’s work in general and in the specific contributions to this volume. Cooper’s (1987, 1989, 1992, 1993) attempts to recover this expanded understanding of the study of information, systemness and representation in organizational analysis has exercised a considerable influence on the direction of contemporary organization theorizing. Our earlier related volume of essays, In the Realm of Organization (Chia, 1998), acknowledges this influence and the various ways in which it has expanded our conception of organizing as a significant feature of the modern world. In insisting upon this conceptual revision from the more limited sociological study of organizations to an emphasis on a generic theory of organization, Rapoport and Horvath, as well as Kuhn, express a position that resonates with the broader concerns that led Cooper, and the other contributors to this volume, to engage in a comprehensive analysis of the interactions between systemness, technology and organization. Cooper, in particular, is best understood as a philosopher of systemness and his concern with organization is relevant only insofar as it is understood as a feature of the modern attempt to systematize and technologize the material and social world in what appears to be an endless socio-technical process of ‘assemblage’ or ‘world-making’. As he points out in the Epilogue to this present collection, modern organizing must be understood in terms of a generic methodology which views organization as a scattered and heterogeneous social

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process as distinct from the traditional view which focuses on ‘organizations’ and their specific features. In this regard, he shares with Weber and Foucault, among others, an abiding interest in rationality, representation and organization as distinctive features of modernity. Organized Worlds reflects Cooper’s ongoing attempts to recover this expanded understanding of the meaning of technology and organization in the context of late modernity. Its essays are, therefore, devoted to the elaboration of these more comprehensive and immanent concerns and to a reformulation of the field of organizational analysis; a reformulation, incidentally, in which the diverse disciplinary fields of institutionalized study are themselves recognized to be always already representational effects of organization and symptomatic of modernity.

Vision, representation and the organization of analysis In his seminal Ways of Seeing, the art critic John Berger makes the astute observation that the act of looking is an act of choice and what we see is very much affected by what we believe. Seeing is inherently world-making. It is the abstracting of form out of fleeting, transient forms, of stabilizing such forms, and thereby forging a coherent reality out of a multiplicity of possible worlds. Yet such acts of world-making are inherently contextual. Vision and visuality are necessarily social and historical as well as physical. As Foster (1988: ix) succinctly puts it, ‘between the mechanism of sight and its historical techniques, between the datum of vision and its discursive determinations’, a scopic regime with its own rhetoric and representations is built up which organizes ‘how we see, how we are able, allowed or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein’. Such insights into the inherently organized and institutionalized nature of vision characterize the work of contemporary art theorists who have addressed the critical study of art as a socio-historical form of representation and expression. For contemporary art theory, this understanding implies that the task of any project which sets its sights on understanding the nature of modernity and the technologies of representation associated with it must seek to sensitize us to the formation of modern vision by historicizing vision, specifying its dominant techniques and critical resistances and revealing the role it plays in the production of subjectivity and its objects. This is a task well exemplified by Norman Bryson’s (1983) revealing analysis of the mutual relationship between vision and representation. In his illuminating comparative analysis of the methods and attitudes of Western and Chinese paintings, Bryson (1983) noted that Western painting is predicated on the ‘disavowal of deictic reference’ while painting in China is predicated on the ‘acknowledgement and indeed the cultivation of deictic markers’ (p. 89). By the term ‘deictic’, Bryson means a certain feature of painting in which ‘the work of production is constantly displayed in the wake of its traces; in this tradition the body of labour is on constant display’ (p. 92). This is in stark contrast to most Western paintings in which the individual history of a painting, in the course of its transformation into a completed piece of work, is largely irretrievable. For many Western paintings, although it is evident that

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the visible surface has been worked over and over again, ‘the viewer cannot ascertain the degree to which other surfaces lie concealed beneath the planar display. The image that suppresses deixis has no interest in its own genesis or past, except to bury it in a palimpsest of which only the final version shows through, above an interminable debris of revisions’ (Bryson, 1983:92). This is contrary to the techniques used in Chinese paintings where the mastery of the strokes lies in the subliminal ability to display the traces that have brought the strokes into being, while the easel paintings of the West are ‘autochthonous, self-created, parthenogeneses, virgin-births’ (Bryson 1983:95). In the one case, temporality is incorporated into the painting, while in the other the painting is placed outside duration. Bryson uses this distinction to reflect on two separate logics of presentation and representation that co-exist in the West: the Gaze which is fixing, prolonged, detached and contemplative, and the Glance which is ‘a furtive or sideways look whose attention is always elsewhere’ (Bryson 1983:94). The Glance is fleeting, non-locatable, unfocused and dispersed in orientation. It ‘addresses vision in the durational temporality of the viewing subject’ (ibid.). It does not find comfort in the ‘enduring, motionless and august logic of architectural form’ (Bryson, 1983:122). Rather, all it knows is dispersal the ‘disjointed rhythm of the retinal field’ (ibid.). It is this peripheral vision, the corner-ofthe-eye strategy of thinking and knowing, that helps us understand the ‘magical’ elements that Max Weber noted were being systematically purged by the dictates of modern rationality. The vision of the Gaze, however, attempts to arrest and extract form from fleeting process. It is a vision that is disembodied, decarnalized. In the Gaze, the observer ‘arrests the flux of the phenomena, contemplates the visual field from a vantage-point outside the mobility of duration, in an eternal moment of disclosed presence’ (Bryson, 1983:94). The Gaze is penetrating, piercing, fixing, objectifying. It is a violent act of forcibly freezing, framing, and thus ‘present-ing’ in space-time that which otherwise would be nothing more than movement in flux. It is this logic of the Gaze that Bryson reveals as the dominant strategy of modern Western thought which has shaped the development of its socio-historical practices. Bryson’s discussion of the logic of the Gaze enables us to recognize that the obsession with rationality, ‘methodization’ and the ‘division of labour’, and the forms of instrumental thinking associated with them, are intimately linked to the scopic regimes which emerged during and after the period of the Enlightenment. For in art as in social governance, the overriding concern was one of arresting, fixing and locating—in one case the visual field, in the other the inchoate urban masses—so that each feature of the phenomena being dealt with could be captured in fine detail for the purpose of definition and control. The logic of the Gaze provided the necessary justification for construing reality in discrete, stabilized and hence identifiable terms. The phenomena of the world can therefore be assumed to be self-evidently present to the observing eye and so readily lend themselves to conceptual location in a pre-established order of things. Thus, Weber’s observation regarding the rational fixing of musical notes, Schoenwald’s elaboration of the framing and regulation of the excretory functions, and Bentham’s

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vigorous advocacy of ‘methodization’ as a requirement for social regulation are all underpinned by a rationalistic attitude which postulates stability, fixity and identity as definitive features of the real, while movement, transformation, deformation and reformation are regarded as marginal and supplementary aspects of reality. The logic of the Gaze thus provides a secure ontological grounding for the cultivation of a ‘natural’ attitude in which the historical unfolding of a phenomenon is denied a legitimate place in the explanatory scheme of things and the subject-object distinction becomes taken for granted and used to justify the epistemological quest for the perfect representation of a world that is already ‘out there’. By obscuring the crucial significance of the organization of visuality, and hence our active role in the construction of social objects such as ‘individuals’, ‘organizations’ and ‘society’, and our subsequent knowledge and understanding of them, contemporary organization studies have unreflexively narrowed their intellectual focus to exclude this wider and deeper understanding of the ‘worldmaking’ capacities of modern organizing. Visual organization and representation are thereby inextricably interwoven into the cultural contexts that circumscribe and organize our fields of knowing. In other words, the human senses and organs become necessarily included as human ‘resources’ in all acts of organizing.

Organization as individuation, simple location and identity construction Human organizing creates certainty out of uncertainty. It is a continuous realityconstituting and reality-maintaining activity which enables us to act purposefully in response to a flood of competing and attention-seeking stimuli. The simplification of knowledge and the consequent economizing of effort in action are thus among the basic aims of the impulse to organize in modern mass society. Through organization, the various objects of our experience, including our knowledge of self, acquire a sense of immediate and unproblematical identity. This aspiration towards an economy of effort is not, therefore, motivated by an imperative of efficiency. Rather, it is a necessary feature of the self’s attempt to differentiate and detach from its surroundings in order to attain a measure of autonomy and independence. Human organizing, therefore, comprises an interlocking sequence of ontological acts of differentiation which are central to the self’s process of achieving a sense of stability and identity out of a field of inconstancy and flux. The object of the act of organization is, therefore, never simply a utilitarian product or service. Instead, it is the ‘preparation of objects by means of which the system can (then) distinguish itself from its primary subject and, therefore, be certain of itself’ (Cooper, 1987:408). In other words, organization works to construct legitimate objects of knowledge for a knowing subject: ‘dirt’, ‘notes of a musical score’, ‘food’, ‘pupils’, ‘population tables’, ‘individuals’, ‘organizations’ and so on. Through organization, these objects of knowledge or ‘products’ acquire distinctive identities that allow us to treat them as existing independently of our perceptions. It is in this sense that organizing as identity constructing and reality configurating is also primarily an ontological activity of ‘world-

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making’. Approaching the question of organization from this point of view opens up radically new ways of critical analysis in an expanded realm of organization studies. The social theory of organization, according to this expanded understanding, seeks critically to examine the societal and institutional strategies under pinning the modern processes of rationalization and representation that both Weber and Foucault, among others, identified as the defining features of modernity. It seeks in particular to emphasize the identity-locating and hence reality-constituting character of organization as a social practice of ordering in space—time. Hence, it displays a unique mode of theorizing that attempts to relate a particular resultant social order to those aspects of social reality marginalized through that very act of representation and reality construction and which remains, for the larger part, unconscious to the collective psyche. This ongoing contestation between conscious, formalized social order and unconscious processes is what the art theorist Anton Ehrenzweig (1967) alluded to in his discussion of The Hidden Order of Art. Drawing from Freud’s work, Ehrenzweig makes a useful distinction between two forms of knowing: the first highly focused and differentiated; the second unfocused and de-differentiated. The focused, differentiated form of knowing is that associated with the Gaze and which we have identified with the programmes of rationality proposed by Bentham and Wilkins and Sprat. Unfocused, de-differentiated knowing, on the other hand, is that knowledge of the Glance which these programmes of rationality seek to repress and eliminate. It accounts for the world’s ‘magic’, which Weber noted was being systematically purged from the modern consciousness through the progressive disenchantment of the world. It is this attempt to relate these two forms of knowing and to render more transparent the socio-historical processes that led to the privileging of one over the other which constitutes the central problematic of a social theory of organization. This it does by directing our attention to the ‘meta-level’ activity of re-presentation which works to circumscribe legitimate objects of analysis by specifying and defining our visual fields of experience. The function of this ‘meta’ organizational process of representation is, therefore, to create the singleness of the object-objective and to ascribe to it an unproblematical identity by marginalizing and conceptually suppressing the contextual circumstances from which it was necessarily abstracted. Thus, the object’s-objective’s singularity (produced by what Ehrenzweig calls ‘differentiated’ knowing) can only be realized through the suppression of its contextual Other with which it is inextricably compounded. As Cooper puts it so succinctly: The object is the result of an activity that counters or strikes out its double; in this sense, the object is that which objects, otherwise it would be so entangled with itself that it would be lost to knowledge. The subject (whether individual, group or system) is necessarily an object constructed out of the uncertainty of division in order to provide a stable identity which is lacking in the primary subject. (Cooper, 1987:408, original emphasis) It is the analysis of this endless construction and reconstruction of objects of knowledge

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(including human subjects as objects of knowledge) that a social theory of organization seeks to understand.

Differentiation and assembly At their most basic, the processes of modern organizing and rationalizing comprise a complex and dynamic web of interlocking acts of arresting, punctuating, isolating and regularizing what Bergson (1913) called ‘the undivided flow of experience’, in a general strategy of constructing a manipulable phenomenology of the world. Such a metaphysical attitude of rational analysis owes its inspiration to the still widespread CartesianNewtonian world view in which clear-cut, definite things are deemed to occupy clear-cut, definite places in space and time. In his classic study of the development of Western thought in the seventeenth century, Whitehead (1925/85) argued persuasively that Newton’s postulation of his first law of motion perpetuated a fundamental assumption which still persists in contemporary modes of theorizing: ‘I mean the concept of an ideally isolated system’ (p. 58, original emphasis). This assumption of the universal property of simple location, in which ‘things’ are believed to exist as discrete and isolatable systems in space-time, is how modern thought answered the ancient Ionian question: ‘What is the world made of?’ For Whitehead, it is precisely this unquestioned assumption of the property of simple location that has led to the widespread ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ in modern theorizing, in which social representations are mistakenly treated as reality itself. One major consequence of the belief that reality is made up of discrete, locatable ‘things’ or ‘parts’ which can be accurately represented by appropriate labels is that they can also be conceptually collected, assembled, disassembled and reassembled at will. As an intellectual imperative, the strategy of simple location inspired the systematic conceptual ‘dismemberment’ of the human body into a loose assemblage of functional organs: eyes, ears, mouth, arms, legs and so on. Through rationalization and its corollary of representational logic, the human body comes to be seen as a mere collection of parts and society as loosely coupled assemblages of bodily organs: Labourers are coupled on to the productive process only as hands that assemble on assembly lines, or as legs and backs that bear burdens, or as arms that stoke furnaces. It is only the hands and eyes of the clerks in offices that are paid for… The industrial enterprise would be the whole body upon which these part-organs would be attached. (Lingis, 1992:15, emphasis added) This ‘program’ of differentiation—of breaking up the world into usable parts for further reconstitution—is what especially characterized the explosive growth of rationality and organization during the nineteenth century. It encouraged the development of capitalism and the forms of industrialized mass production and consumption which symbolize late-

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modern culture. Of course, the original model for this strategy may be more immediately observed in the elements of language that we see in the alphabet or dictionary. Here, letters or words are first differentiated from one another and then combined and recombined in an infinitude of ways to fit changing circumstances. Rescher (1996:79) observes that even if the number of constituents of a system were small, ‘the ways in which they can be combined to yield products in space-time might yet be infinite’. In the case of the alphabet, we are able to produce, from its twenty-six characters, infinite combinations of syllables, words, sentences, paragraphs, books, genres and so on. The seemingly inexhaustible libraries of books produced in the last few centuries are testimony to the power of the alphabet to generate and regenerate information. Indeed, it might be argued that the whole system of Western culture has been built upon the incremental capacity to create representational variations through complex differentiation. The general ascendancy of the logic of differentiation and recombination in the modern world provides a convenient starting point for our enquiry into the language of representation and its discursive effects on the organization of society. What we may call the ‘organizational mentality’ of modernity is inextricably linked to the proclivity to privilege the fixed and the static, especially in intellectual analyses such as social science. We seem almost naturally disposed to thinking in terms of states, outcomes and effects, rather than process and transformation. In other words, we are not good at thinking movement in its own terms, as Bergson noted: ‘Our intellect, when it follows its natural bent, proceeds on the one hand by solid perceptions, and on the other by stable conceptions. It starts from the immobile, and only conceives and expresses movement as a function of immobility’ (Bergson, 1913:56, original emphasis). Hence, our instinctive vocabulary is one of taxonomies, hierarchies, systems, states, and structures. These are conceptual categories which intrinsically deny the primacy of movement, change and transformation. Our conditional reliance on such deeply ingrained habits of thought has meant that the dynamic and precariously complex nature of everyday reality frequently escapes attention. Our understanding of the modern world is expressed in static atemporal terms through an organizing logic that is based on the principles of representational immediacy, division, location, isolation and the foregrounding of self-identity. It is an organizing logic that generates a dichotomous vocabulary in which oppositional terms such as inside-outside, subject-object, mindmatter, order-disorder, part-whole, self-other, structure-process, nature-nurture, organization-environment and so on become the ‘natural’ conceptual categories for framing everyday discourse, including especially the discourse of the social sciences. It is a mode of conceptual ordering that relies pre-eminently on a logic of insulation in which the world is assumed to be organizable in terms of clearcut, separate fields of knowledge which must not be allowed to adulterate each other so that they may lend themselves more readily to accurate representation through the use of clear, precise terms and categories. It is this ‘strong’ view of knowledge that has dominated the field of the social sciences in general, and organization studies in particular. In subscribing to these epistemological priorities, exemplified by the use of terms such as ‘objectivity’, ‘truth’

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and ‘theory building’, social science crucially overlooks the generic nature of human organizing as primordial acts of world-making or the construction of realities through representational practices such as those described in our earlier discussion of the rise of modernity. Understood in the wider sense that we have sketched in this introductory chapter, organization takes on a vastly different meaning from the more circumscribed economic—administrative interpretation normally given to it. It is a meaning in which the emergence of organized complexity as a social-cultural process takes precedence over the preoccupation with functional aspects of organized and institutionalized forms of social action. It is the attempt to think through the lateral, diffused nature of modern organized realities that provides the intellectual agenda for the essays in this volume.

The inherent heterogeneity of organized worlds The present volume contains a loosely themed collection of essays which explore issues of heterogeneity, process, social construction and technologies of presentation and representation. In Chapter 1, John Law and Annemarie Mol compare and contrast the processes of reality construction in two vastly different social settings: a Quaker meeting and a management meeting in a government scientific research laboratory. For Law and Mol, both situations involve the ongoing performance of ‘division between metrication and narration, on the one hand, and that which cannot be counted or told on the other’. They employ what they call an ‘empirical philosophy’ to argue that the relationship between that which can be measured and that which cannot be told but only experienced have important things to tell us about organizational and institutional life. In their first situation, the Quaker meeting, we observe fluidity and the abnegation of strategy, while in the second, the management meeting, the mensurability and purposefulness of strategic decision-making are exemplified. The fluid apprehension of spirituality as against consciously planned classifying, telling or accounting: these are two opposed modes of knowing or representing. Yet in both of these situations there is the trace of an irreducible ‘otherness’. In the Quaker meeting it takes the form of graspable, mensurable ‘bits’ such as ‘Advice’ and ‘Queries’, definite arrangements of furniture, assigned tasks and so on. In the management meeting, on the other hand, it takes the form of fluid moments such as a fruitless search for a lost tool, an unanticipated visit, trouble in making figures balance, an urgent phone call, yawning and so on. The point is that each situation in its own way implicates an otherness whose very presence is crucial for the ongoing practices of these two different sets of activities. Practice generates otherness, whether this comes in the form of homogeneity and heterogeneity, consistency and inconsistency, or the fluid and the mensurable. ‘Residual’ otherness is not a consequence of failure. Rather, it is intrinsic to all practice. No form of representation is adequate for capturing and suppressing the intrinsic heterogeneity of otherness. In Chapter 2, Nick Lee makes a perceptive and persuasive claim that most of our thinking about order and disorder seems to presuppose that if we want to maintain order we must chase the changes which constantly threaten to create chaos and disorder. On

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this account, stability can only be attained if we outpace change. Following Cooper, Lee draws on the works of writers such as Heidegger and Lyotard to show that their concepts of ‘space withdrawn from representation’ and the ‘unready’ are unrepresentable because they have infinite speed. But this creates a paradox. If order is always out-distanced by the unready, how can stability ever arise? For Lee, it means that we need to think the conventional understanding of order and disorder rather differently. He therefore proposes that stabilities of representation (i.e. order) should be understood as having arisen by ‘a slowing of an infinite speed’. Order is achieved, not by chasing change, but by the slowing down and temporary stabilization of change. Order is essentially stabilized ‘bundles of time’. This implies that our search for the ‘origins’ of order should be replaced by a study of how stabilizations take place without necessarily imputing a transcendental figure to initiate the origins of order. Lee, therefore, proposes that we substitute this ‘originary’ (i.e. logocentric) social theory with a complex social theory which rejects the notion of origins and instead substitutes the notion of ‘starts’ which takes the form of the slowing of that infinite speed that other writers have called the ‘unready’. Order, for Lee, is a ‘result of a slowing in the pace of dedifferentiation’ which continuously threatens to blur the ‘significance of different linguistic signs’ and collapse ‘institutional discriminations’. It is such aggregative orderings which produce the figure of the human agent as an entity. In this way we can reconstrue the human agent, for example, as a stabilized ‘effect’ which is continuously being constructed and maintained by modern technology and the convenience it affords. Pursuing the theme of human agency with its implication of a centred subject that acts, Richard Sotto, in Chapter 3, explores the impending virtualization of the organizational subject created by the advent of computers and information technology. He points out that one of the key presuppositions in the discourse on organization and organizing is that of a centred and unifying subject who ‘acts’. Our grammatical habits place an ‘I’ at the origin of any sort of human activity, including especially that of thinking. Such simply located thinking persists even in contemporary critiques of reification, which have shifted attention from ‘organizations’ to ‘organizing’. Thus, even organizational writers such as Weick (1993), who appeal to the notion of collective mind, do so without critiquing the assumption of ‘individual actors equipped with the subjective ability to understand and intentionally enact specific representations’. Performative action remains a kind of ‘grand narrative’ in the discourse of our late-modern world. For Sotto, the rise of computers and information technology has wide-ranging ramifications for the ‘virtualization’ and ‘decentring’ of such subjectivities, including especially the organizational subject. First, the embodiment of the subject in a material body is challenged. Human actors, in their interface with computer technology, have to acquire an on-line persona and adopt a ‘terminal’ identity instead of being secured in a single physical body. Second, consciousness is redefined as the temporal and spatial ‘suspension’ of the never ending flow of worldly events, rather than as a state of mind coupled with bodily experience. Third, the source of agency is deemed to be distributed in the temporary intertext of information. The decentred subject thus becomes a kind of open-ended agency providing a topos for the exchange of discourses. Sotto concludes by speculating that, faced with

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such a prospect, organizational theorizing might better concern itself with offering, if it is to serve a human end, ‘an open-ended field of transgression…of thinking itself’, of the sort proposed especially by Heidegger and Lyotard. It must depart from the common wisdom that organizational activities are regulated by a set of predefined values and principles and that organizational competence can be translated into formal rules and streamlined understandings, all of which presuppose a centred, unitary subject. In Chapter 4, Ron Day takes up the concern in Robert Cooper’s work with the idea and logic of ‘representation’ as an aspect of ‘organizing’. Day questions the rather general usage in Cooper’s work of the term ‘representation’ and in so doing opens up other aspects of the logic of representation, for example, repetition, extension and displacement. Day’s further argument about the process of body technology is comparable to Cooper and Law’s (1995) idea of the ‘proximal’, and especially their discussion of ‘cyborganization’ as the hybridization of bodies and technologies in informational fields. Day’s essay also critiques the ‘thinking of history as will and representation’ and argues instead for ‘the thinking of historical events in terms of strategy and the opening of beings to lines of movement and flight’. Hence, one might think of ‘organization’ as strategy, movement and flight rather than as structure, state and outcome. Day’s chapter is both an exhortation to think process and a demonstration of processual logic—to go beyond structure, static states, nouns and other convenient simplicities. His language and discursive style has therefore to be understood as a deliberate attempt to develop a process-based approach to the understanding of organization. In Chapter 5, Robert Cooper critically examines the concept of ‘assemblage’ and, as with many of his other imaginative essays, offers us a deeper and more profound appreciation of such taken-for-granted social methodologies as ‘mass production’, the ‘division of labour’ and the agonistic relationships that they create between separation and joining, collection and dispersion, parts and wholes, copies and originals. Cooper traces our tendency to gloss over these fundamental terms, and hence to overlook their crucial constitutive role in shaping modernity, to an excessive diet of static thinking. We are not good at thinking movement, mutuality, otherability, simultaneity, mediation and ‘betweenness’. Instead, we are mesmerized by an inattentive conceptual principle of ‘simple location’; the tendency to believe that reality comprises ‘clear-cut definite things occupying clear-cut definite places in space and time’. Simple location reconstitutes for us a world of finished subjects and objects from ‘the flux and flow of unfinished, heteromorphic organisms’. For Cooper, one outcome of thinking in terms of simple location is that we overlook the real significance of Durkheim’s ‘division of labour’ and the related technology of ‘mass production’ as forms of a generalized process of assemblage. Drawing on the conceptual-linguistic roots of the term, Cooper shows how the fundamental process of the division of labour can be better understood in terms of the language of mutual relatedness rather than in that of simple location. In this fascinating foray into the heart of modernity, Cooper takes us on an intellectual journey in which he draws freely and creatively from writers as varied as Durkheim, Benjamin, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, Picasso, Kafka and the nineteenth-century social critic Samuel Butler to

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produce an illuminating synthesis of apparently diverse critical questions raised by the interrogation of modernity. The volume concludes with an interview with Robert Cooper who reflects on the formative influences in the development of his thinking and shares his views on the future potential directions for an expanded social theory of organization. For Cooper, the central issue for a social theory of organization is the question of the order-disorder dualism and its variants: rationalityirrationality, stability-instability, differentiation-dedifferentiation, consciousness-unconsciousness and so on. In Cooper’s view, it is through a critical examination of the contestation between conscious, formalized knowledge and more ‘primitive’ unconscious processes that we come to a better understanding of the character of social life in modernity. To do this, we need a generic methodology which eschews a too convenient reliance on dualisms and which, instead, helps to draw out a general agonistics of the complex relationships between actors, technology and organization. Through such a generic methodology Cooper identifies three enduring themes that motivate his work: the abiding concern with systemness, the insistence on the interdisciplinary character of knowledge processes, and the implications that both these themes raise for the role of the imagination in critical thought. In the context of these key concerns, Cooper returns time and again to the problem of the order-disorder dualism and provides the reader with a new conceptual lexicon: interstanding, mediatrix, becoming, ‘nowhere’, Dichtung, ‘the labour of division’ and the ‘binary act’ to produce profoundly novel insights into the fundamental nature of the organized worlds of modernity. We are left with the message that the understanding and analysis of modern organizing can only be approached through an intellectual strategy that rejects the logic of simple division, categorization and linearity for the nuances of complexity, mediation and intersecting multiplicities.

References Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin. Bergson, H. (1913) Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T.E. Hulme, London: Macmillan. Bryson, N. (1983) Vision and Painting, London: Macmillan. Chia, R. (1998) In the Realm of Organization: Essays for Robert Cooper, London: Routledge. Cooper, R. (1987) ‘Information, communication and organization: a post-structural revision’, The Journal of Mind and Behavior 8(3): 395–416. ——(1989) ‘Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis 3: the contribution of Jacques Derrida’, Organization Studies 10(4): 479–502. ——(1992) ‘Formal organization as representation: remote control, displacement and abbreviation’, in M. Reed and M. Hughes (eds) Rethinking Organization: New Directions in Organization Theory and Analysis, London: Sage, 254–272. ——(1993) ‘Technologies of representation’, in P. Ahonen (ed.) Tracing the Semiotic Boundaries of Politics, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 279–312. Cooper, R. and Law, J. (1995) ‘Organization: distal and proximal views’, Research in the

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Sociology of Organizations, vol. 13, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 237–274. Durkheim, E. (1933) The Division of Labour in Society, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Ehrenzweig, A. (1967) The Hidden Order of Art, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Fisher, P. (1991) Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums, New York: Oxford University Press. Foster, H. (1988) Vision and Visuality, Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Penguin. Gerth, H.H. and Mills, C.W. (1948) From Max Weber, London: Routledge. Goodman, N. (1984) Of Mind and Other Matters, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kenner, H. (1987) The Mechanical Muse, New York: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, A. (1982) The Logic of Organization: A System-based Social Science Framework for Organization Theory, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Lingis, A. (1992) ‘The society of dismembered body parts’ Pli 4:1–19. Miller, J-A. (1987) ‘Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic device’, October 41:3–29. Rapoport, A. and Horvath, W.J. (1968) ‘Thoughts on organization theory’, in W. Buckley (ed.) Modern Systems Research for the Behavioral Scientist, Chicago, IL.: Aldine, 71– 75. Rescher, N. (1996) Process Metaphysics, New York: State University of New York Press. Schoenwald, R. (1973) ‘Training urban man’, in H.J. Dyos and M. Wolff (eds) The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol. 2, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Weick, K.E. (1993) ‘Collective mind in organizations: heedful interrelating on flight decks’, Administrative Science Quarterly 38(2): 357–381. Whitehead, A.N. (1925/85) Science and the Modern World, London: Free Association Books.

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1 ON METRICS AND FLUIDS Notes on Otherness John Law and Annemarie Mol

Tous les moteurs presentent une topographie complexe, labyrinthe où circulent des flux. (Serres, 1989:124)

Place/performance/history/method We want to tell a story about two rooms. The first is full of people. It is modestly furnished, modestly decorated. The people are variously dressed, many of them quite informally. They are sitting on upright chairs, in a rough circle. There is a small table in the middle, with a bunch of flowers. There are a few books. But otherwise there is nothing: no furniture, no movement, no talk. For it is the silence that you are going to notice most of all. Some of the people have their eyes closed. A few are staring, in an unfocused way, at the flowers, or beyond the flowers to the people on the other side of the room, or out of the window where, if you look, you can see distant rooftops and clouds. As you listen in the silence, the loudest noise is the call of children from a nearby garden, or the sound of a car passing in the road. How to convey the character of that silence? It is not heavy and preoccupied, like the desperate hush of an exam room. Nor is it disciplinary and repressive, like the pressure that expands to fill the space of the parade ground where you hardly dare breathe. It is not the silence of a graveyard, with its imagined echoes and distant memories. Nor is it the silence you hear when you lie in the sun on the turf of the chalk downs. It is none of these, though perhaps the last comes closest to it. Instead it is, as they say, a ‘centred’ silence. It is the silence of a Quaker meeting for worship. Where did the room come from? Let us make a context. Let us tell a history, one of many that might be told. Until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the middle decades of the seventeenth century in England were a time and place for dissent, for conflict and disagreement, for free thinking. The idiom of that dissent was religious. Many sects sprang up at that time: sects of people seeking new ways to grace, to the

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promised land; ways that detached them from existing concerns with form; detached them, for instance, from the rituals of high church Anglicanism. For these were people who sought plain and undemonstrative spiritual technologies, methods that put them in direct touch with the Holy Spirit. Most of these sects have disappeared, but some have not. One which has survived is the Religious Society of Friends or—as they are more usually known—the Quakers.1 So the people sitting quietly in the room—it could be anywhere in the UK, but happens to be in Shrewsbury—are Quakers or ‘Friends’. They are, in some way or other, the spiritual descendants of the Levellers of the Civil War and the Commonwealth. They are the distant spiritual descendants of George Fox, the visionary who founded the Religious Society of Friends. And they are waiting: no robes, no altars, no hierarchy, no Pope, no ministers; just people sitting quietly, waiting to be brushed by the wings of the Holy Ghost. That is what they are doing. They are waiting in trust for the Holy Spirit. That is a story of the first room, a story and a context. And the second room? This is carpeted. There are pastel colours on the walls and curtains at the window. But when you walk in what you notice first is the desk. It is a large desk with a PC, telephone, blotter, papers and pens. It is a manager’s desk. You know this straight away, without even thinking about it. Then you look round and take in some of the other furniture: the small coffee table with glossy publications; the tastefully covered easy chairs, three or four of them, around the coffee table; a conference table of oiled wood, possibly teak, with upright chairs, again upholstered in roughened fabric. Your judgement is strengthened: this is the better style of executive office. You are witnessing a display of taste, taste without undue opulence. You sit in one of the easy chairs and the men come in, five or six of them. Most are wearing suits, or sportsjackets and ties. Perhaps one or two of them are more informally dressed. They sit at the conference table and open their papers. One of them starts to speak. The others listen. Most look at the speaker, though one is twisted in his chair, looking out of the window. He looks at the fields, the railway line that cuts through them and the distant skyline. But he is also listening. For the director, the man who is talking, says that he has been looking at the manpower booking figures and there seems to be a problem. It looks as if a big project—something called the Second Wiggler Project—is falling behind schedule. Nineteen man-years of work should have been done last year, but only nine were clocked up. They seem to be ten man-years behind, which is—or could be—serious. Where did this room come from? What kind of history might one make? Again, there are multiple stories. We might tell about the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) and its decision in the 1950s to build a small ‘big science’ facility. But let us talk of something else, about the origins of management and metrication. Where might one start this history: with the Roman census at the time of Jesus Christ, or in England, with the Domesday Book? Was it with the Restoration, as people like Samuel Pepys wrestled to rationalize the state bureaucracy, or the development of state statistics—and mapping—in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?2 Was it with the application of disciplinary techniques—and those of surveillance—that spread like a rash

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across the body of organizations and institutions from the late eighteenth century?3 Or was it with the command and control systems introduced by entrepreneurs in the middle and late nineteenth century as they learned to concern themselves with cash flow in their continental enterprises? One thing, at any rate, is certain: the celebrated ‘scientific management’ of Frederick Taylor is a late arrival. And the systems of management accounting with their hardware and their software packages—these are newborn and still very fragile.4 So this is a version of history which tells, in one way or another, that the men sitting in the director’s room at Daresbury Laboratory are the managerial descendants of those who peopled Charles II’s civil service, or reformed the administration in the nineteenth century. They are the descendants of all who have sought to collect, collate and represent the state of the world, the state of the nation, the state of the organization. They are the most recent progeny of all those responsible for the management, the ordering, the direction, the future shape of any organization and, to be sure, all those who work for it. Because hundreds of lives and thousands of experiments—not to mention the health of several branches of science—depend upon their capacity to know and to manage. This chapter is a story of two rooms. The first is the main room in the Quaker Meeting House in Shrewsbury. The second is the office of the director of Daresbury SERC Laboratory, just outside Warrington; two British rooms, less than fifty miles apart. There are many obvious differences. One has to do with spirituality and worship and the other with management and science. One has to do with facing life and being a soul and the other with the world of work and organizational control. One has to do with the abnegation of strategy and the other precisely with strategic decision-making. Such differences mean that it is possible, indeed easy, to talk of contrast. But what interests us more is comparison, a comparison of their possible similarities. For what we want to argue is that both perform what Robert Cooper has called the labour of division (Cooper, 1989:51). And that they do so in a very specific way. They perform division between metrication and narration on the one hand and that which cannot be counted or told on the other. That which can be told, that which can be seen, that which can be neither told nor seen—when we enter this territory we immediately stray into a dense, even overwhelming, theoretical undergrowth. There are poststructuralist arguments about logocentrism, and about the di-vision between what is said and seen. There are debates in art theory about the difference between centred seeing and rapid scanning and about the relationship between painting artifice and theories of vision. There are arguments from cultural studies about tension in knowing and about the link between accountable planar surfaces and body experience. And there are arguments, from theology, about silence and mystery on the one hand and words and strategy on the other.5 So how should we struggle through this undergrowth? Our preferred mode is that of empirical philosophy: to make theoretical and philosophical arguments by empirical means, by making empirical material and turning it into theoretical insight. The Quaker story grows out of observant participation: one of the authors, John Law, participated for a number of years in a Quaker Meeting for Worship.

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The data here come from attendance at a number of Quaker Meetings and in particular the Shrewsbury Meeting. The material on management derives from a more conventional study, again by John Law: a funded period of participant observation in Daresbury SERC Laboratory which involved attending many important management meetings.6 But empirical material can be made in many ways and the shape it takes depends on the question to be explored. So the material we present here is made to answer a particular question: about what can be held and what by contrast escapes the grasp. Our object is to distinguish between that which is (ac) countable and that which is fluid and to show that the one is necessarily implicated in the other in a labour of division. This means, or so we will argue, that even if the Quaker meeting and the management board have an entirely different attitude to that which is elusive, they are also similar in one important respect. They are both seeking a state of purity—but this is something which they will never attain. Yes: they distinguish between the accountable and the fluid. But no: they also, and unavoidably, straddle that divide.

Fluid technologies of the light John: When I first went to a Quaker Meeting I wrestled with the questions that happened to be bothering me. This went on for several weeks. But then I learned that this wasn’t what silent worship was about. For after a time somebody came and sat next to me. And at the end of the meeting she started a conversation which led me to ask how I should worship: A: You let the thoughts swim by you. Q: What do you mean? A: Think of it as meditation. You are being distracted by all these thoughts. Ideas keep on popping into your head. What should I cook tonight? Who do I need to phone? You can’t stop thinking these thoughts. But what you can do is to take them, just take them, like a fish, and throw them back into the river. Stop thinking. Not by forcing yourself to stop thinking. That will never work. But by embracing the thoughts and simply letting them go. This conversation indexes many themes. In particular, its central metaphor is fluid, the idea of a river. But there’s more, because everything is not fluid. For there are fish in the river: patches, as it were, of the definite, the structured, which swim in that which cannot be counted. What can you do with the fish that you catch? You might count them, measure them or weigh them, or you might throw them back in and let them go. This is, as it were, the Quaker way—to accept, to loosen and to renounce the discrete and the countable, which is, to be sure, often difficult to do. But why? Talking with experienced Quakers leads to quiet and reflective conversation and also to certain texts. For the theology (except there is no theology) tells it like this:

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Sometimes…the prayer following meditation leads to an inner silence, a stillness in the depths, which is the peace of God, passing all understanding. It cannot be commanded at will for it is the gift of God, a blessing which he gives only to those who can cease from anxious striving and desiring. Some of us, alas, have known it only on a few occasions, but these are our richest memories. (Christian Faith and Practice: 251, part)7 More metaphors. The fluid of the river with its flowing has given way to silence, stillness and depth, perhaps, who knows, the stillness of the deep pool. But there is something else. For it is also a matter of faith: faith that there is, as the Quakers say, ‘that of God in every person’; a matter of giving in, giving away, of trust, to that which is both within and without, which ignores the boundaries of the body, which flows through us all. Note the old Christian idea—one which is no doubt also Jewish (Jabès, 1989)—that the peace of God passes all understanding. For this is a form of mysticism. In the middle of England there are people—mainly middle-class people—who are trying to renounce their thoughts: to give up the habit of division and delineation; to give up the habit of talk; to give up the habits of distinction that operate to form (at any rate one version of) the discrete agent of Enlightenment humanism—the self-contained subject with a skin, a position and a calculative mind that distinguishes it from everything else.8 They seek instead to join together in communion with God by means of a special kind of silence.9 We may not issue from a gathered meeting with a single crisp sentence or judgement of capsuled knowledge, yet we are infinitely more certain of the dynamic, living, working Life, for we have experienced a touch of that persuading Power that disquiets us until we find our home in Him. (Christian Faith and Practice: 249, part) So there exists the hope or the apprehension that there is more than can possibly be put into words, or, to put it differently, the trust—and sometimes the knowledge—that there are forms of being or apprehension of Other to naming, delineating, dividing and measuring. It is possible to be out of time and space and words, for instance, in a place that lies both inside and beyond the Meeting House room, inside and beyond the texts. It is possible to participate and live forces, Spirits, Gods or Powers that cannot be told, except perhaps, fleetingly, in allegory or analogy, for instance, as light or fluid. George Fox wrote: and in this I saw the infinite love of God. I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings. (Christian Faith and Practice: 7, part) Here is the fluid metaphor again. For in the Quaker experience the Meeting House, the undistinguished brick building in a suburb of Shrewsbury, is a place of potential power: a

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place in which the person waits to be caught up and to act; no, better, to be acted upon and performed, as a vessel of the Divine—a vessel that may suddenly find that it is forced to its feet by the infinite ocean of the Holy Spirit and moved to speak. For this is how it works. There is silence in the room: the silence of attempted worship, of trying to still oneself, to renounce thought. But then, after a few minutes, someone may stand and start speaking into that silence, while everyone else quietly listens. When one rises to speak in such a meeting one has a sense of being used, of being played upon, of being spoken through. It is as amazing an experience as that of being prayed through, when we the praying ones are no longer the initiators of the supplication, but seem to be transmitters, who second an impulse welling up from the depths of the soul. In such an experience the brittle bounds of our selfhood seem softened, and instead of saying ‘I pray’ or ‘He prays’ it becomes better to say ‘Prayer is taking place’. (Christian Faith and Practice: 249, part) An impulse that wells up—perhaps this fluid metaphor catches something about the core of the practice (though it is not possible to say this, for it is a practice that recognizes no ‘core’). Fluids abnegate or dissolve the brittleness of the subject, act to dissolve human agency. This dissolution is, however, no loss, for it is the moment when the body becomes an intermediary,10 a vessel which briefly carries or performs the fluid of the immanent and the transcendental. These performances crystallize here and there: in silent worship; in the kind of spoken ministry described above; but also in a picture, in an action, in a moment of prayer, in a place of creation, in work. For the Spirit is everywhere, the Spirit can be found throughout life.

The (ac)counting technology of enlightenment We shall call the Managing Director of Daresbury Andrew.11 He’s the one who was talking in the story we told above, the one who said that there seemed to be a problem developing; that the Second Wiggler looked as if it might be six months behind schedule. But how did he know this? I’m trying to nip the problems in the bud, if there are any problems. Let’s just review the situation…. Jimmy Smith says that the Second Wiggler itself is okay. So the problem is with the experimental stations. [Six months ago it was said that] the manpower used was low [but] it was said that it would pick up. [We wanted] nineteen, not [nine]. And next year we planned to use twenty-nine. So we’ll have to use thirty-nine. So there is a big gap developing. I think that this means that we’ve got a problem. Is this right? Andrew sees that there may be a problem because he knows how the work of the

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laboratory is distributed between the different projects. He has a few figures which tell him this, figures that have been distilled onto a sheet of paper. So he has a special kind of knowledge: he apprehends something that cannot be seen by someone who walks round the laboratory. And this knowledge, these inscriptions, are an integral part of the process of managing the Laboratory, of making sure that things don’t go wrong, of making sure that the science gets done, that the Laboratory has a good reputation out there where it matters in the scientific community, that it will build up the confidence among the grantgivers and obtain future funding. So Andrew and his managers carry a heavy burden of responsibility and so, too, do the figures that they use. What, then, of the figures? Where do they come from? The answer is that they are produced by something called the ‘manpower booking system’. It’s quite new, this system and has encountered its resistances. But what it does, or perhaps more accurately what it tries to do, is to chop up, slice off, detach, encode the work of each employee each month.12 As the Quaker Meeting for Worship seeks to witness the passage of the Holy Spirit, so the manpower booking system seeks to witness the activities of hundreds of employees. We were not there when the system was being designed so we didn’t hear the discussions about the design of the system: how precise should it be? how many codes should it have? But talking to people later, we got a sense of the kinds of arguments they had made: If we go for too much precision, we’ll start to lose accuracy. And, in any case, the system will become too expensive to run. And it won’t be cost-effective. But, if there are too few codes then it won’t be precise enough. It won’t flash up the figures we need, project-by-project and month-by-month. We won’t have the early warning that we’ll need. We won’t know that there isn’t enough work being done on something like the Second Wiggler Project. That it is falling behind schedule. Though we don’t know the detail, in the end the managers settled their arguments, this trade-off between accuracy and precision, and they designed a ‘manpower booking form’. This was a sheet of paper inscribed with a set of boxes and codes. The boxes represented half-days, forty or so a month, and the codes represented projects or classes of activity: for instance, the Second Wiggler Project or laboratory management, or user support services. And the employees? Well, they were issued with these forms each month. They were told to enter the right codes into the right boxes and return them to the finance department at the end of the month. A set of codes, a set of procedures, a set of methods for detaching, delineating, rendering conformable, rendering machinic, the production of a recording/recoding: this is the core of the practice. For the object is to compare and contrast. But to compare and contrast, well, you need something with which to compare and contrast. You need components that are discrete and homogenized, that are, or so they say, ‘like’ one another, except perhaps in quantity. You need a metric, one which (as they say) ‘summarizes’ and brings together: that separates activities out into boxes; that makes them tractable to the technologies of calculation. You need to find ways of deploying the

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technologies of symbolic panopticism.13 This is what the managers attempted at Daresbury Laboratory—to grasp better what was previously unaccounted for, to solidify action, to convert it into something definite.

An Otherness: the fluid and the mensurable Notre monde se receuille en des lieux essentiels, poches, plis, sommets, fonds de cratère, portes pour un autre monde, ouverture sur les choses. (Serres, 1989:90)

It is the practice which comes first, that quiet practice in the Meeting House on Sunday morning which then extends itself through the week, into every aspect of life. But the practice includes writing and Quaker writing is full of advices, ‘Advices and Queries’. Many of the advices take the form of stories and experiences written by other Quakers. Indeed, the basic book, Christian Faith and Practice, is almost entirely composed of such snippets, mostly in the form of short paragraphs, which tell about spiritual experience for this Quaker or that. There are also excerpts from the ‘Minutes’ of the church meetings that have taken place over the last three hundred years. The effect is a little like reading Walter Benjamin.14 Bits and pieces have been artfully juxtaposed to produce something that is far more than can be told in the form of a single narrative, and different too. Sometimes the bits come in the form of ‘Advices’. Sometimes they are ‘Queries’.15 The latter are open-ended questions intended for silent reflection—for Quakers are not committed to any particular creed. There is no equivalent to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church. People do not have to believe in anything in particular, and the ‘rules’ aren’t rules: ‘Membership…we see primarily in terms of discipleship, and so impose no clear-cut tests of doctrine or outward observance’ (Church Government, 1968:831, part).16 So this is the theology: that there is no theology. The Quakers take it that a systematic theology of mysticism would be self-contradictory: the idea that one might tell of, delineate, demarcate or measure a God whose peace passeth all understanding simply makes no sense. So, people who attend Meeting for Worship do not follow rules for conjuring up the fluid. Instead they observe practices: Dearly beloved Friends, these things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by, but that all, with the measure of light which is pure and holy, may be guided; and so in the light walking and abiding, these things may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not from the letter, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life. (Advices and Queries, 1964:16)17

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So here is a difficulty—perhaps better, we should say, an irony, an irony (the irony?) of logocentrism. For the Quaker method generates a meeting for worship: an artful technology of silence that sits people in a circle, that leads them, very occasionally, to speak, or silently to read an excerpt from one of the texts; that calls upon them to wait; that asks them to cast away thought; that opens them to the fluid dissolutions of the divine. But it does so in part by Other means, by means, that is, of definite arrangements. There are definite arrangements of this and that: chairs, table, flowers, texts, advices, plans, clocks, times, queries. There are people whose job it is to close the meeting, hearing loops, space-heaters, telephones, meetings, diaries. There are those who look after the children, committees, minutes, balance-sheets, lettings. This is the Quaker technology of fluidity, a technology of bits and pieces: more or less discrete, more or less mensurable, more or less delineable—an array of bits and pieces that makes for the silence on a Sunday morning, that silence which seeks towards the fluidity of the ‘centred’ meeting.18 So this is the argument. The fluid of the Spirit cannot do without that which is mensurable, discrete and countable. The incommensurable rests within, around or through the commensurable. To make that which is unaccountable there is need of counting. To create flow there is need to delineate specific objects. If it is to be witnessed, the Spirit needs its Other, the Other of measurement.

An Otherness: the mensurable and the fluid A day in the life of a scientist at Daresbury: walking from one office to the next, from the experimental station to the stores; glancing at the mail; quick reading done in the library, reading needed to write the methods section of the article; talking with a colleague, the secretary, a technician about repairing the spectrometer; tapping the keyboard as the CAD programme grows the model and rotates through various visualizations; drinking coffee by the machine; meeting with the team, debate, discussion and much doodling; eating a hasty lunch; using the lavatory; talking on the phone to a supplier; working on the spreadsheet, trouble in making the figures balance; an urgent phone call from the experimental station; a fruitless search for a lost tool; a visit to the drawing office, an attempt to cajole the draftsperson to move the job to the top of her tray; the moment taken to fill in a form; a visit from a ‘user’ scientist, fielding questions about the timing of the shifts, the reliability of the equipment; yawning in the middle of the afternoon, a growing headache, an aspirin, and a glass of water; measuring; losing and finding; irritation; laughing; pressure to complete the writing. But what about the manpower booking forms? For the person who did these things is suddenly confronted with the need to code her time into half-day boxes. She scratches her head as the day begins to swim before her eyes. Sure she has been busy. She hasn’t stopped moving since she arrived at a quarter past eight and by now she’s exhausted. But the day wasn’t—how shall we say this?—problematic. Yes, it had flowed, shifting from one thing to another. Maybe there’d been too much to do, but the nature of the things to be done was not doubtful, whereas now, all of a sudden, with the stark, discrete and

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mutually exclusive options offered by the manpower booking form—suddenly what she has been doing all day seems problematic. Indeed, it begins to look quite formless. She sighs, scratches her head, looks at the clock, and bites the end of her biro. Then she fills in the form as best she can, because she does not want to make trouble. This morning, she will say, she worked on the Second Wiggler Project. After all, that was what the team meeting was supposed to be about and it lasted a good hour. And this afternoon? Well, the visitor came and he took up quite a bit of time. Perhaps, then, it makes sense to code it up under ‘user support services’. But this is a betrayal. Traduction, trahison. It tells about some of the things that happen and not others. It magnifies and solidifies a small part of what goes on—and omits the rest. It pins down and counts a few events—events that were originally caught up in a flow of Others, a flow on which they depended, a flow without which they would never have existed.

Making fluid, making describable Le monde n’est pas ambidextre; pour exister, il faut qu’il gauchisse un peu. L’économie bouclée sur elle-même s’effrondrerait dans la mort ou le néant, la fournaise refroidie. Il y faut un peu de dépense, un trou pour le gaspillage, un guichet pour l’acquisition. (Serres, 1989:257)

It is a Meeting for Church Affairs, a meeting for making ‘decisions’. But there is silence. For there is little difference between a Meeting for Church Affairs and an ‘ordinary’ Meeting for Worship. The only important distinction is that the Meeting for Church Affairs will try to arrive at some practical conclusions: what to do about this or that; a call for support, material and spiritual; a suggested revision in Church Government; the Meeting House building; who to send to a national meeting; the arrangements for children or the library; a military aggression; or the poverty of those who sleep in the streets. These are the kinds of matters that appear for discussion at a Quaker Meeting for Church Affairs. But how are they decided? The clerk is at a table in front of the other members of the meeting. She rises and in the silence she raises the matter to be discussed. Perhaps there is a pause. Friends rise as they are acknowledged by the clerk and they speak. Points of view are offered which may differ. There are periodic silences. After some time, in a prayerful silence, the clerk starts to write. Then she rises to read out a draft Minute which seeks to record the sense of the Meeting. There is another silence. Members offer suggestions for amendment. She notes these. Perhaps someone regrets that he cannot agree with the draft Minute. But often, perhaps usually, the Minute is revised, and the Meeting assents to it. People do not even say that they ‘agree’. Rather they say that they ‘hope’ that the Minute is agreeable to the Meeting.

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This is the Quaker way of making ‘decisions’. It has to do with the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit is at work through the bodies of the members, and the body of the Meeting, which means that the meeting is not a whole lot of things that it might seem to be on the surface. It is not, for instance, a place in which sovereign individuals express personal views: ‘It is necessary for the proper conduct of our business meetings that we should assemble in a worshipping spirit, asking that we may be used by God in our day’ (Church Government, 1968:715, part). Neither is it a place where there is debate, or lobbying. Love, understanding, and the conscious presence, the overwhelming, subject-effacing presence of the light of God: this is the practice that is sought. So it is not a place where minds, the minds of sovereign individuals, are fixed—though this is not to say that difference is not possible: It is no part of Friends’ concern for truth that any should be expected to water down a strong conviction or be silent merely for the sake of easy agreement. Nevertheless, we are called to honour our testimony that to every one is given a measure of the light, and it is in the sharing of knowledge, experience, and concern that the way towards unity will be found. (Church Government, 1968:717, part) ‘That to everyone is given a measure of the light’: this is the language of quantification and delineation. So is it a question of counting, of assessing ‘how much’? But the answer is ‘no’. There is, for instance, no question of voting: ‘It is sometimes assumed that unity can be found only by the submission of a minority to the decision of a majority. This is not so but neither should it be assumed that positive steps cannot be taken without unanimity’ (Church Government, 1968:719, part). So the Quaker meeting is not a political structure, least of all a liberal polity. It is not a matter of equal and sovereign subjects who debate, who argue, who attempt to sway with argument, who sum themselves to a decision by taking a vote. For despite its superficial resemblance to a committee meeting, it is Other to the negotiations of politics. We can make a list of negatives, things that the meeting for church affairs is not. One could add to the list that neither is it a ‘situated conversation’.19 But we can also make a list of things that it is, or at any rate that it might be: a list of specifics; technologies for allowing the Holy Spirit to flow through a meeting, which at the same time means specific technologies for eroding, effacing or displacing that which can be determined or measured—like discrete Enlightenment subjects with their views, their arguments and their rights, or definite mechanisms for voting and counting. Instead there are logocentric advices—quite definite advices—about that which cannot be defined: about achieving quietness of mind when arriving and sitting down; about briefing the clerk beforehand rather than introducing new evidence at the meeting; about standing up to speak; about speaking simply and audibly; about not repeating things that have already been said; about not speaking for effect; about listening patiently to those with different views; about not taking offence; about not thinking badly of those who think differently; about not fussing the clerk by raising several minor corrections at once; about not trying to introduce new issues when the minute is being considered. 20

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We have said that the fluid depends upon the measurable, the specific, the discrete. We have said that it cannot possess, transcend, the bodies of the persons in the Meeting House. It cannot possess and perform itself in the meeting as a whole, unless it also rests upon that which can be said, told, written down, delineated, counted and determined. We have said that these solid objects are always liable to intrude, to get in the way, which means that the search for the Light, for the fluid of the Spirit, is an endless task. It may fail in misunderstanding, in lobbying, in not being open minded, in voting, in all manner of specific dangers that hinder the flow of the fluid. Though there are practices which attempt to repair these failures: ‘When a strong division of opinion seems to be threatening the worshipful basis which should prevail in meetings for church affairs, a period of silent and prayerful waiting on the will of God may well have a calming and unifying effect’ (Church Government, 1968:726, part). Why is this? Why is there a need for such a technology? One answer is theological. For everywhere else, in the committee meetings up and down the land, one witnesses and performs the conduct of a centred and humanist politics of interest rather than the fluidity of divinity.21 But there is another point. For an Advice such as the above is a way of handling the necessary ambivalence of the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the practical organization of the meeting. The relationship is necessarily ambivalent because what we have called the fluid, that part which cannot be said, cannot be counted, cannot be delineated, necessarily rests upon that which can be, must be, said, counted, delineated, spelled out. So the mensurable is necessary to fluidity. But it is also an impediment to fluidity. It creates it. But it also stands in its way. It brings it into the light, but it also subverts it. It performs it, but it also resists it. In short, the technologies of fluidity are necessarily ambivalent. 22

Making describable, making fluid In the management meetings of Daresbury Laboratory they also make ‘decisions’. They also come to conclusions. Sometimes those decisions rest upon material like the manpower booking statistics, which means that sometimes statistical accuracy is important: ‘scrutinize the manpower bookings carefully,’ one manager urged, ‘because [it] makes a hell of a difference to costs…. Totally by mistake I found 89 man days booked to the project [that should have been allocated elsewhere]’. But there are resistances too. People don’t know how to fill them up, or they simply don’t get round to it, or they don’t like to fill them up so they make ‘protest bookings’. Peter: The manpower booking system is still not very successful. For the month of August we still had 40-plus cards outstanding at 3.00 pm today [10 September]. This is about the norm. The people vary, [though] there are one or two persistent offenders. Jim: That’s about 10 per cent. Adrian: All the cases I’ve investigated have been due to legitimate absence from the

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Lab. Brian: But that’s not an excuse. The cards are out a long time in advance, and we’ve asked supervisors to fill them in. Adrian: It’s difficult to find a way of operationalizing it.23 But the Finance Office needs to come to a conclusion. If it is to produce the statistics at all, then it has to find ways of filling in the missing returns: Nigel: I’ve discovered that if manpower booking forms are handed in later than 2.00 pm on the first day of the month [the Finance Department] allocate that manpower to any project they fancy! or it tries to put the ‘wrong’ ones ‘right’: [An administrator in Finance] phoned [someone] up and said, ‘You didn’t work there last month!’ He got a very frosty response. ‘You’re not telling me where I worked! I know where I worked.’ In the end, the question is practical: It is difficult to police the manpower bookings; the problem is to decide how much hassle it is worth. How much hassle is it worth to convert that which is different into something that is enumerated? To work on that which resists the machinic programme of the manpower booking system? Make something that resists, that cannot be grasped, by virtue of making something that can be chopped up into numbers? This is a common experience, a common problem. For everywhere, in the attempt to make mensurable, there are resistances, as it were, remainders. Bits and pieces start, in their elusiveness, to flow through the sieve, the grid, of the attempted mensuration. They refuse delineation and demarcation. So that which may be defined and specified, that which may be pinned down, always discovers its limits, always, perhaps we should say, makes its limits. It would be wrong to say that the numbers are elusive. For they are there alright and countable. But what do they stand for? What do they represent? Do the numbers represent something more than themselves? Do they adequately represent the seamless web of activity within which they are located? This is the first set of questions, the practical questions, the questions that tend to exercise the managers. But there is a second set of questions. For the relationship between that which may be counted, like the manpower booking figures and the places or events within or from which they are generated, is one of necessary ambivalence. It is necessarily ambivalent because what we have called the mensurable, that part which can be said and counted, rests upon and within that which cannot be so enumerated. For the fluid is necessary to mensurability. But it is, at the same time, also an impediment to the ability to count. It

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creates countability and it denies it. It constitutes matters within a space of calculation, but also makes the fluids that leak through the grid. Fluidity and mensurability: the two are impossibly bound together. One may be seeking the one, or the other, which is, to be sure, the difference between the Quaker Meeting for Worship and the Daresbury Management Board, but also the similarity—for one is always caught up in both.

Figure and elusive ground Practices generate that which they generate, but they also generate Otherness: homogeneity and heterogeneity;24 consistency and inconsistency; mensurability and uncountability; that which can be pinned down and delineated and that which cannot; grids and fluids. This is the argument that we have tried to make. Residues and resistances are not technical failures—though it is possible to imagine them in this way. Rather they are intrinsic to practice, to being, which is, as it were, always more complex than it says or it can know. This means that if it were ever imagined that practices were capable of generating a single order, then this is an illusion, or better, it is a partial illusion. It is a partial illusion because ordering does, indeed, create some order. But it is an illusion because to create an order is also to generate an antiorder. So with an order there is also the heterogeneity of Otherness, that which does not fit. But this means in turn that the creation of Sameness generates not only Otherness but also elusiveness. For Otherness is always there. It never moves away from the margins of vision, the corner of the eye, just unknowable, just beyond.25 The Other is elusive, but so, too, is Sameness. For sameness, homogeneity, complete calculability—we know now that these cannot be achieved either. Zygmunt Bauman (1989) writes: ‘Modernity was a long march to prison. It never arrived there (though in some places…it came quite close), albeit not for the lack of trying’. Modernity tried to generate a single order, but it failed, as it was bound to do. For Sameness was elusive in both these senses: that it generated Otherness and that it generated its own sense of incompleteness. We started with a metaphor: the fish that lives in the river, which must be set aside if the interest is in the river. The metaphor works because the fish depends upon the river. The fish is sustained by the river. On the other hand, it may be isolated from the river. Thus it is also Other to the river. But the metaphor works less well if we try to turn it round. If we wonder how it is that the river depends upon the fish. Maybe then we need another metaphor, like the tranformations captured in the pictures by Maurits Escher,26 where, in patches, day gives way to night or angels give way to devils. In those pictures both were present all along, everywhere, throughout. One thing, however, is clear. If we seek metaphors for Sameness, for Otherness and for Elusiveness, if we seek these metaphors, it is not in the hope that somehow all may be brought together. For this we have surely learned of Sameness and Otherness. No form of representation, of cognitive mapping, can reduce them to a point where we, as single-centred subjects, might imagine

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them together, simultaneously, within a single centred object.27 For we do not live in a single and homogeneous world. Rather, we live in plurality, a plurality of worlds, a plurality of heterogeneous worlds.

Acknowledgements Parts of the material discussed in this chapter are drawn from a study of Daresbury SERC Laboratory which is more fully reported in Law (1994). John Law is most grateful to the staff of Daresbury Laboratory for agreeing to the study. He also thanks the ESRC which funded the study in a grant made available under the Changing Culture of Science Research Initiative which was administered by the Science Policy Support Group. We would also like to thank the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for its fellowship support for Annemarie Mol. Finally, John Law would like to thank the following for support, encouragement and debate: Ruth Benschop, Michel Callon, Robert Cooper, the late Edith Eldridge, Rolland Munro, Leigh Star, John Staudenmaier and Marilyn Strathern.

Notes 1 For an in-house but balanced account of the history of Quakerism, see Punshon (1986). 2 For a fine Foucauldian account of the struggle to invent and perform ‘society’ in France see Rabinow (1989). For a summary description of the methods used by the French state to stabilize itself and map its territory, see Harvey (1989). 3 The classic study is that of Foucault (1979). 4 For an interesting though strongly cybernetic and Whiggish account of the development of management information methods, see Beniger (1986). 5 On logocentrism, the assumed priority of speech over writing, see Derrida (1981). On the division between that which is said and that which is seen, see Foucault (1970, 1983). On modes of seeing in art, see Ehrenzweig (1993). On Chardin’s theory of perception and its relationship to his painting, see Baxendall (1985). On experiential body-context relations of knowing, see Jameson (1991), Haraway (1991), and Law (1998). On silence, see Jabès (1989). On mystery and strategy, the light and the dark, see Staudenmaier (1994). 6 The details and acknowledgements are mentioned in the acknowledgements. 7 The numberings for Christian Faith and Practice refer to paragraphs, not pages. 8 Many authors have had their say about the development of the separate and insulated subject; see, for instance, Elias (1978), Sennett (1972) and, more recently, Dorinda Outram’s (1989) limpid study of the development of a self-contained practice of the male body in the French Revolution.

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9 Communion with the transcendental subject: this specific form of interpellation can be treated as a form of humanism too, redemption through absorption, through the wholeness of holiness. Fluids, then, might be humanist, but they do not necessarily have to be. 10 We draw the term from Michel Callon (1991) who distinguishes passive intermediaries from active agents. Barry Barnes (1988) draws a similar distinction between passive authorities and active powers. 11 In 1994 there were major personnel changes at Daresbury. All our material dates from 1990, before those changes. 12 We use words which echo the language used by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1984). They talk of the ‘machine’ as a way of defining and generating a ‘system of interruptions or breaks’. 13 The classic reference is the already mentioned Foucault (1979), but see also the very important paper by Bruno Latour (1990). 14 This is not entirely coincidental, for the possibility of a tellable master narrative is refused by both, though for very different reasons. See Benjamin (1985) and for a fine secondary discussion, Buck-Morss (1989). 15 See Questions and Counsel (1988). The numbering in this book is by paragraph, not page. 16 In Church Government the numbering refers to paragraphs, not pages. 17 In Advices and Queries the numbering refers to pages, not paragraphs. 18 We could say, like the actor-network theorists, that the Quaker technology is a network of heterogeneous materials that in part generates a region—or perhaps better a volume, with its own specific co-ordinates. For a discussion of the character of these topological metaphors, and an exploration of the character of a fluid topology, see Mol and Law (1994). 19 In part this is because it is very deliberately an attempt to view things from the point of view of a centred God. However, as mentioned above, the Quaker sense that there is ‘that of God in every person’ means that different senses of the divine are to be expected (a) in different places and at different times (as, for instance, in other faiths); (b) between different members of the same Meeting for Church Affairs. This means that the centred God cannot be known, but that aspects of the divine may express themselves through persons. There is a similarity between the ontology here being performed and that implied in realist practice (which projects a consistent ‘virtual object’ behind the screen of its measurements), though Quaker practice is more modest. For discussion in the context of management practice, see Law (1996b). On situated conversation, see Haraway (1991). 20 These are all derived from Church Government, paragraph 724. 21 This difficulty is discussed sympathetically in Sheeran (1983). 22 The importance of ambivalence, of otherness, is well developed in another idiom by Vicky Singleton and Mike Michael (1993). 23 This quotation and those that follow are taken from Law (1996). 24 For discussion of heterogeneity, see Law and Mol (1994).

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25 I am grateful to Bob Cooper for pointing to the similarity between this argument and the distinction mounted by Ehrenzweig (1993) between differentiation and dedifferentiation, and in particular his argument about ‘scanning’ by the artist. 26 See Bool et al. (1981). 27 The reference to cognitive mapping points to Fredric Jameson’s (1991) argument. See also Law in this volume.

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privilege of partial perspective’, in D. Haraway Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books, 183–201. ——(1992) ‘Otherworldly conversations; terrain topics; local terms’, Science as Culture 1:59–92. Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell. Jabès, E. (1989) The Book of Shares, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso: London. Latour, B. (1990) ‘Drawing things together’, in M. Lynch and S. Woolgar (eds) Representation in Scientific Practice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 19–68. Law, J. (1994) Organizing Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell. ——(1996) ‘Organization and semiotics: agency, technology, and representation’, in J. Mouritsen and R. Munro (eds) Accountability, Power and Ethos, London: Chapman and Hall. (1998) ‘After metanarrative: on knowing in tension’, in R.C. H. Chia (ed.) In the Realm of Organization, London: Routledge. Law, J. and Mol, A. (1994) ‘On hidden heterogeneities: the design of an aircraft’, University of Keele and University of Limburg; mimeo. Mol, A. and Law, J. (1994) ‘Regions, networks and fluids: anaemia and social topology’, Social Studies of Science 24:641–671. Outram, D. (1989) The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Punshon, J. (1986) Portrait in Grey: A Short History of the Quakers, London: Quaker Home Service. Questions and Counsel (1988) London: London Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Rabinow, P. (1989) French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sennett, R. (1972) The Fall of Public Man, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Serres, M. (1989) Statues, Paris: Flammarion. Sheeran, M.J. (1983) ‘Beyond majority rule: voteless decisions in the Religious Society of Friends’, Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Singleton, V. and Michael, M. (1993) ‘Actor-networks and ambivalence: general practitioners in the UK cervical screening programme’, Social Studies of Science 23: 227–264. Staudenmaier, J. (1994) ‘To fall in love with the world: individualism and selftranscendence in American life’, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 26:1–28.

2 TWO SPEEDS How are real stabilities possible? Nick Lee

Introduction This chapter addresses ‘order’, ‘stability’ and ‘differentiation’, themes which Robert Cooper’s work has introduced to the philosophy of organization. I will argue that if ‘orders’ of many kinds are to be understood as ‘constructed’, and if the study of such construction is to acknowledge that ‘orders’ are not fictional and are instead temporarily and locally realized, a new ‘sensibility’ is required. This sensibility blends themes from deconstruction and themes drawn from contemporary understandings of ‘chaos’. Just as dualisms like matter-idea and being-becoming emerge from third terms that cannot be reduced to either pole of the dualism, so ‘chaos’ is not the opposite of order, but gives rise to both order and disorder. To be considered real, an order must be marked by, among other things, a start. If all talk of starts risks being mistaken for talk about origins, then post-structuralist arguments, at first glance, would seem to rule them out and reveal all order as fictional. My aim is to counter this tendency of critique by disambiguating ‘origin’ and ‘start’. To do this I replace a conception of stabilities as the outcome of a contest of speeds with a conception of stabilities as the outcome of slowings. Throughout this chapter I will draw technological, institutional and significatory examples of stability and order together, treating them as variants of the same issue. For reasons that will become clear, I will treat each of these registers of order as a series of semi-stable instances of differentiation—one word from another, the human subject who profits from technology from the natural world, legitimate violence from illegitimate violence.

Speed and modernity Whether pursued through technical activity, through signification and categorization, or through the institutional activities that rely on categorization, stability and order are frequently understood as the prize humans win by running a race against an opponent. The opponent is disorder. Sometimes disorder appears in the guise of the freak flood that

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destroys the half-completed dam. Sometimes it takes the form of the difficulty of maintaining a comprehensive yet concise filing system. Sometimes it appears as the ‘slipperiness’ of language that presents a niche for dictionary-makers. In each of these cases, it seems that if we want to maintain order we must act quickly, we must chase the changes that threaten to escape us and mock our efforts. On this account, technologies, institutions and signification secure their stability by attaining enough speed to outpace un-designed change. This is the story of modernity. Constant renewal is necessary lest disorder carry the day. If we stop running we will ‘regress’. One speed that features in discussions of stability, then, is the speed of the chase. Some visions of modernity generalize from those particular instances in which we seem to win the race against un-designed change and hypothesize an ‘escape velocity’ that would allow us to outpace disorder every time we race. Given ‘escape velocity’, we will be able to organize the material and social worlds entirely around ourselves and our plans. Under this condition human design will be universal and stability will be achieved without fail. Such visions have their utopic and dystopic spokespersons, the first prophesying the attainment of this escape velocity, the second saying that we have already attained it, but that it has done us no good. These visions share the intuition that un-designed change and unpredictability have a fixed speed that can be exceeded. If stability is more normally understood as having its roots in stasis rather than in the speed of the chase, Virilio’s (1991) reading of the life of Howard Hughes can resolve the apparent contradiction. With his growing eccentricity, the life of this speed-freak millionaire appears to break in two: first, the sane self-publicist; second, the insane recluse. Virilio argues, however, that there was no break, that this self-professed ‘Master of Time’ pursued the same ambition throughout his life—to escape time and gain stability through speed. As an aviator, he flew around the world, insisting on his return that he park his ‘plane in the exact location in the hangar he had set off from, as if he had travelled so fast that he arrived at the same moment as he had departed’ Virilio, 1991:26). As a recluse, he resided in an international chain of identical darkened rooms to simulate a timeless state. ‘Suppressing all uncertainty, Hughes could believe himself everywhere and nowhere, yesterday and tomorrow, since all points of reference to astronomical space or time were eliminated’ (ibid.: 26). Another speed that often underlies discussions of stability, then, is a fixed speed of un-designed change that can be surpassed. Cooper (1993) draws on a number of authors who, at first glance, seem to endorse this approach. They seem to see order as the result of a race between the speed of designed change and the speed of undesigned change. For Heidegger (1977), modern technology and representation are an attempt to set the world in order; for example, to hold water in a reservoir so that possible future need is taken into account before it arises. For Latour (1987), the development and success of technological projects depend upon ‘knowing in advance’—space flight is simulated before it is attempted. However, while this ‘coming before events’ may be attained by representation in local circumstances, the global picture for Cooper is defined by figures like Heidegger’s (1977) ‘space withdrawn from representation’ or Lyotard’s (1989) ‘unready’. These figures, as I will later argue more

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fully, are conjured up whenever stable representation is attempted, yet they stand outside representation. They are constitutionally unrepresentable. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about them is that, like the horizon, no matter how fast you move they can never be reached, still less preceded. To place these figures within the metaphorics of speed, since representation carries such figures of the unrepresentable before it, and since representation can never reach them, in effect, they have infinite speed. Infinite speed is the first of the two speeds this chapter is centrally concerned with. This infinite speed only seems recognizable at this late date in history. But if we follow Cooper’s arguments, though the modern understanding of stability in technology and representation as the result of the speed of the chase presents itself as the primordial relationship between humans and the world, this speed was actually undercut by the infinite speed of the ‘unready’ as soon as the modern understanding of representation was born. This leaves me with a question. If design is always outdistanced by the unready, how could stability ever have arisen? Certainly not by humans chasing some figure of infinite speed—they would never catch up. The hypothesis I want to explore is that primordially, that is to say before, outside and below the frenetic modern action of the chase, stabilities of representation arose by a slowing of an infinite speed. This ‘slowing’ is the second speed of my title. Laying out this hypothesis will take me into areas best characterized as ‘mythical’. Girard (1977, 1978), my first source, takes on the task of the investigation of myth. Galam and Moscovici (1991, 1994, 1995), my second source, arguably present a creation myth as if it were a thoroughly testable scientific hypothesis. What I hope to draw from these sources is a shared account of the production of order and stability which is quite different from the modernist story and which is already informing some contributions to social and organizational theory (Chia, 1996). I will shortly present a reading of Cooper (1993) that concentrates on these themes. I will hone the question of stability through a brief discussion of Derrida (1989). Then I will describe the work of Girard (1977, 1978) and Galam and Moscovici (1991, 1994, 1995), two social scientific approaches to stability that offer accounts of how infinite speed may be slowed. Finally, I will suggest, along with Deleuze (1988) and Serres (1982), that this ‘slowing’ is an important aspect of any social theory that takes complexity seriously. First, however, I would like to establish some differences between certain critiques of the modern project and the more ambitious general account of the problems of stability that Cooper offers.

Convenience, destiny, paradox and failure Cooper (1993) argues that modern technology, in contrast to the technē of the ancient Greeks, is oriented to the design and production of convenience and reliability in an inconvenient and unreliable world of undesigned change. Cooper dramatizes ‘inconvenience’ and technology through Scarry’s (1985) account of the threat that our own fallible bodies pose to our plans. Failing eyesight, for example, which threatens the

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ability to read, is offset by spectacles. Using Latour’s (1987) description of the development of the first US manned spaceflight in 1961, Cooper describes the production of reliability as a process of ‘knowing in advance’. The first US space pilot and all those who shared the risks he took at second hand were able to place reliance on the successful completion of the mission because technologies of space flight simulation gave them some knowledge of what was to occur before the event itself took place. Cooper describes this ‘knowing in advance’ as a form of temporal reversal, arguing that when ‘the first astronaut went into space for the first time, he had already been there hundreds of times before in the space simulator at Cape Canaveral’ (Cooper, 1993:284). These two examples of spectacles and space flight might be read as simple celebrations of the achievements of ‘Man, the user of tools’. If we were to generalize from these two examples, we could all too easily find ourselves within a narrative of technology based around such a transhistorical subject. Doing this would allow us to imagine a future in which all inconvenience, unreliability and uncertainty had been pre-empted or outpaced. If the temporal reversal to which Cooper refers could be generalized to a universal scale, humans would be able to bring the whole world of undesigned change under their control, would have total knowledge through total prescience and would, as in Hughes’s fantasy, leave temporality behind them. Whether told in a utopic or dystopic register, no futurology could be simpler than this, in which matter, time and uncertainty surrender themselves to human design. In this fabulous destiny of a general techno-fix, the undesigned world takes the part of a well of disorder, waiting to be rendered orderly by humans. Cooper (1993) does examine the possibility of general techno-fix destiny, asking us: If technology is ‘convenience’, is a state of total convenience possible? At this point he departs from our most simple of futurologies. Although our ‘knowing in advance’ can be achieved on particular occasions, although on occasion we can win the race, for Cooper the universalization of knowing in advance is impossible. There is one obvious reason why this might be so. In the case of the space pilot, we could hold that not everything can be taken into account by a simulation, that some unexpectedness always remains. In the case of the spectacles, we could find the return of inconvenience in the unexpected iatrogenic causation of further deteriorations in eyesight. Each of these blocks to technological mastery depends on asserting that in each particular instance of ‘convenience making’, a fragment of inconvenience will remain and, thus, that hoovering them all up, with new plans and new forehavings, is in principle an interminable task. The argument is that the general techno-fix is impossible since it is the aggregate of many particular slightly flawed instances of design. This objection is relevant as long as we are happy to adopt a particularist perspective and to abandon the intriguing approach to particular technological achievements and scientific predictions as effective time reversals. However, this objection can be seen as a version of Zeno’s arrow paradox.1 Briefly stated, Zeno’s argument is that since the space a moving arrow must cover in order to reach its target can be infinitely divided, and since the arrow requires a finite amount of time to cover each section of its flight, it can never reach its target no matter how fast it travels. In other words, to cover any distance at all

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would require infinite speed. This ‘proves’ that motion is impossible. Much thinking today is certainly plagued and stimulated by these paradoxes of interminable processing. They crop up in social theoretical relativisms and reflexivities (Ashmore, 1989), as much as they do in attempts to mechanize creativity (Hofstadter, 1986). Final truth is withheld by the partiality of each speaker and the potentially infinite proliferation of metadiscourses, and the possibility of mechanical creativity or intelligence is withheld by the need for infinite levels of self-regard. Relativism and artificial intelligence are defined by the same problem. However, this particularist objection to the general techno-fix can be answered in the same way as Zeno’s paradox. It depends on treating each particular techno-fix as if it were one of a number of infinite line segments. While this ‘particularism’ is less obviously contentious in the case of technical achievements than it is in the case of distance, the objections are still oriented, like Zeno’s demonstration of the impossibility of movement, toward a real, if unattainable, target. The general techno-fix is a necessary predication for the particularist argument that such generality can never be attained, just as the target is a necessary predication for Zeno’s demonstration that it can never be reached. Both need the goal in order to mark off the line segments, in order to demonstrate that the goal can never be reached. Further, these objections lose touch with the interesting hypothesis that technical achievements can be considered as successful examples of time reversal or forehaving. The question of stability remains unanswered. This style of objection to the general techno-fix writes human destiny as a tragedy—so ambitious, yet so fatally flawed. Cooper certainly argues against the possibility of the general techno-fix. Thus he argues against the use of the transhistorical human subject of techno-fix narratives, and against picturing the material world simply as a source of disorder. But his argument does not proceed from particularities to generalities. It is less a reliance on a collection of empirical demonstrations of the ‘cussedness’ of the world than a direct argument that the general technofix is impossible. It is an argument, then, that need not preserve the general techno-fix as a stable target against which to measure the impossibility of reaching it. Rather than thinking of the general techno-fix as a target, Cooper thinks of it as an horizon. The horizon can never be reached, the general techno-fix is impossible, because we carry the horizon with us. Within this scheme it is possible to admit the reality of particular technical achievements, even to endorse their status as forehavings, without either consigning technical history to tragedy or heralding a future of human omnipotence. Cooper pursues this general argument by treating technology as an instance of representation. The technologies of mathematical calculation and simulated space flight are easily understood as representations of the actual circumstances of space flight. As I will shortly argue, devices like spectacles bear a relationship of representation to parts of the human body. Rather than eliding a difference between technology and representation here, Cooper rescues our understanding of representation from a conventional and premature surrender of all kinds of representation to the linguistic. He then uses arguments from Foucault (1970), Heidegger (1977) and Lyotard (1989) to establish the

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permanence of a ‘space withdrawn from representation’ which precludes the possibility of total human mastery.

Representation and security I have never put such concepts as truth, reference and the stability of interpretive contexts radically into question if ‘putting radically into question’ means contesting that there are and should be truth, reference and stable contexts of interpretation. I have—but this is something entirely different—posed questions that I hope are radical concerning the possibility of these things, of these values, of these norms, of this stability (which of its essence is always provisional and finite). (Derrida, 1989:150)

In this quotation, Derrida insists that his work is not a version of relativism, scepticism or nihilism. In debates over representation, much philosophy pits versions of realism and scepticism against each other (Hiley, 1988). The various realisms and scepticisms and the social theory which draws on them represent respectively the neurotic and paranoid aspects of a state philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: ix, 375) which arranges itself around a central question of security. State philosophy asks: ‘Are we to have security, or not?’, and we respond, as we are able, to this epistemological blackmail. One must either assert total mastery, total stability and unity, or resign oneself to the facts of historical, cultural and situational variability, becoming exposed to a gale of chance. A choice is offered between, on the one hand, treating order as the norm, guaranteed by nature or rationality, and disorder and variability as accidental aberrations and, on the other hand, treating disorder as the norm, equating it with freedom, and picturing order as artificial repression. You may already be irritated by the ease of this summary caricature of contemporary social theory and philosophy. If so, it is worth my indicating now that the bulk of this essay is not concerned with establishing that all philosophy (except Derrida) is bunk. Instead, along with Serres (1982, 1991), Cooper and Law (1995) and Guattari (1995), I am interested in what might happen to social theory if it is accepted that order and disorder are neither mutually exclusive, nor available in pure form. In other words, I want to write about social theory that is informed by ‘complexity’.

Origin When presented with a choice between two starting points of investigation—either

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asserting the absolute security of reference or the absolute insecurity of reference— Derrida prefers to investigate the conditions whereby reference, meaning and truth may be made temporarily stable. For Derrida, then, the question of representation and language and the question of order and disorder are closely linked. This link is sometimes explicated when authors refer to Derrida’s approach to ‘origins’ (e.g. Morss, 1996). When we examine conventional accounts of ‘origins’ we find that they often tell of the origin, specifically, of order. Disorder is granted. Disorder exists anyway, but it takes some special effort to put things in order. At some moment, something intervened in a primordial, undiscriminated, disorderly state, to divide it, to cut it into pieces which then remain separate. This original permanent differentiation is the source of all subsequent divisions. It gives rise to a tree-like structure of differences which Deleuze and Guattari (1988:5) call ‘bi-univocality’. The subsequent sets of divisions may be unstable and may be reworked, but if we trace division back through the time of history, the time of logical deduction or the time of religion, we will arrive at our original ordering moment. Cultures may vary but curiosity about culture pulls us back to a moment when culture and nature were first divided. The many ways of categorizing and representing the world may vary, but curiosity about representation pulls us back to a moment of division from the world. Laws may vary, but curiosity about the legitimacy of law draws us back to the moment of the institution of a division between legal and not legal. It is as if the institution’s ongoing struggle against entropy and disorder were given an initial boost or a firm basis of differentiation from which to work. We might perceive this as a’free lunch’, but in fact something paid for it. In each case the categorizations we daily work with are effects of the origin. So, being the results of an original division, culture, law and representation cannot themselves be responsible for that division. Order, in the form of culture, representation or law, in normal circumstances, is always the ‘responsible’ figure and disorder the ‘irresponsible’ figure. Yet, clearly, order cannot be held responsible at the origin. Faced with the unpalatable possibility of granting this responsibility to disorder, our bi-univocal account instead treats the moment of origin as a special circumstance. Logic compels the introduction of a transcendent entity to be held responsible for order or to pick up the bill. In the main, this leads us to a theological ‘metaphysics of presence’ or ‘ontotheology’ (Derrida, 1976:12). Unless we posit a prime mover, we find an infinite regress of cause and effect. This prime mover is necessarily a mysterious figure. Coming before differentiation, it cannot be captured in the web of temporal differentiation. It is ineffable. How did the universe begin? Cosmologists, in the main, preserve a dignified silence over the matter of the ‘moment’ before the moment of the Big Bang. Is it surprising that those who do speak out rapidly adopt a theological vocabulary? Where the scientist becomes visionary, subverting the security of our most trusted sense, we can see, perhaps most clearly, how asking the general question of origins leads us toward myth. Perhaps the ease of this passage to myth explains the contemporary appeal of the tag ‘anti-foundational’. Maybe, after all the protestation about the drawbacks of scientific world views and the critiques of science’s supposed naive realism, it is the dignified ‘scientist’ in contemporary social theorists and philosophers that is offended by questions

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of origin. This reaction against origin myths could explain the tendency, that he protests in the above quotation, to read Derrida as if he were simply opposed to the idea of origin, and thus simply opposed to the notion of order. So, if Derrida is not simply opposed to origin and order, then how is his work to be understood? One of the aims of this chapter is to explore this question through the work of Cooper (1993), who, I argue, takes on the task of linking questions of representation with questions of order and disorder to sketch out a social theory of complexity. This complex social theory will require a different account of origin, order and disorder from our conventional one. It will find a straightforward opposition of pure order and pure disorder too simple for the world and, consequently, will need to rewrite ‘origin’ as something that need not be supported by the intervention of a transcendental figure. In other words, this complex social theory, while rejecting the notion of origin, with all its connotations of originality, authorship, mystification and superiority, might yet be able to countenance the notion of ‘starts’.

Foundation When it comes to ‘starts’, can we believe, like Girard, that ‘the time has come for us to ask ourselves once again, whether something of vital importance did indeed take place initially’ (Girard, 1977:92, original emphasis)? Nothing forces us to examine questions of ‘starts’, nothing except curiosity. But what do we do now that we are all ‘antifoundationalists’? Will we never attend to beginnings, starts and foundations again? We can smirk at our own myth makers, and investigate non-Western mythologies, fun and fascinating respectively. These are the options for knowledge as long as we continue to feel that we are at fault for not making our decision over which myths finally to endorse. If we secretly maintain ontic truth (Dreyfus, 1991:20) as our objective, rather than adopt curiosity as our ethic (Rabinow, 1995), we will continue to suffer the guilty pangs of the procrastinator. So, in this chapter, I will not pretend to decide between the Big Bang and the World Egg of Dogon Mythology (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988:149), but neither will I wring my hands over my indecision. Why is myth so alarming ? An aversion to the examination of myth and beginnings might arise if we are concerned not to repeat the ‘mistakes’ of our forebears. We might, for example, start to believe the myths we examine. This would worry us, since myth often plays the role of disorder to the order of contemporary thought. Myth, it seems, lacks rules of investigation, lacks the rigours of the empirical test and the responsibilities of sense-making. It seems to be a scholarly chaos, void of the stabilities that allow for scientific investigation, legal determination and the attendant responsibilities that give us dominion over ourselves (Munro, 1995). If you are talking about myth, then you are close to mystification and you can make up whatever story you want. Perhaps, as Girard (1977) argues, this view is mistaken. We seem to be doubly distanced from myth. Enlightenment thought, so they say, bore down on myth and brought a modern mindset of new and appropriate discriminations. In

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turn, anti-foundational thought bears down on Enlightenment myths such as empiricism, the prioritizing of vision and other varieties of representational realism. When will the denunciations end? I am interested here in looking at social theories of complexity as ways of ending this escalation of denunciation (Serres, 1991). Fortunately, the alternatives of reliance on the gracious intervention of transcendentals and the complete avoidance of any questions of origin or foundation do not exhaust the possible avenues of inquiry. We do not have to choose between being either visionary or dignified scientists. A non-transcendental model of origin presents itself. In the following section, I will trace this model through Cooper (1993), Girard (1977) and Spontaneous Symmetry Breakdown (Galam and Moscovici, 1991, 1994, 1995). I will shortly propose a model of stabilities that afford them immanent ‘starts’. These starts take the form of the slowing of an infinite speed. This model is designed as an alternative to the ‘speed of the chase’ as the root metaphor of our considerations of stability. Rather than resulting from the human out-pacing of a fixed speed of un-designed change, stabilities are possible through the slowing of an infinite speed of transformation. Here ‘chaos’, normally understood as disorder, the enemy of order is rewritten as an infinitely fleeting oscillation between discrete ordered states (Guattari, 1995). First, some caveats. The model I will propose does require a certain flexibility over the matter of the boundaries between the humanities, the sciences and the ethico-political, as we will see in my account of Cooper’s (1993) essay. It certainly does not suggest any unpleasant conflation of ‘is’ and ‘ought’. I hope to make it clear that this is not an unproblematic unification of enquiry, but rather a liberation of the particular, not an imperialist dominance of ontic science over other forms of enquiry, but a bid for a science beyond ontic science (Chia, 1996). Working with such themes as origin, order and disorder, is heady and confusing, but I hope I can exercise the discrimination that my principal sources have shown.

What does representation achieve? I take Cooper (1993) to be offering a number of answers to this question. Asking this question is quite a risky business. I had to formulate the question very carefully. It seems uncomfortably close to the functionalist question ‘What is representation for?’ and the teleological ‘What is representation getting at?’. The proximity of these three questions is worrying, not only because functionalism and teleology have their own unique problems, but also because of their shared reliance on images of agency as a prime mover. Both function and teleology, at some level, imply an empirical agent of representation—a wilful representer (Lee, 1995); this figure can come in the form of humanity’s technological mastery of the world or humanity’s everincreasing knowledge of the world. If you insist, you can, of course, squeeze my question into this pattern as well. In response to this, I can only ask for a little patience. I am not repelled by the notion of agency. Although unreflexive agency talk has come to be a mark of bad taste in some circles, I am not simply ruling it all out of court.

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However, there is a distinct possibility of confusing different uses of ‘agency’. When discussing a particular representation we may treat it as the expression of an agent. Constant refusal to allow this treatment would seem rather prim. However, when discussing representation in general, this expressive model of representation requires that we endorse an agent that is simultaneously ontological and empirical, something along the lines of a God or a transhistorical human subject, which is both an ontological condition and an entity. This would return us to the onto-theology mentioned above. Cooper’s account of representation is far more interesting than a functionalism or a teleology. He pairs representation with technology and, throughout the essay, erodes the distinction between them. This, I will argue, sidesteps the conventional path that leads us to posit a necessarily inexplicable deity when we try to think about order and stability. As we have seen, this sidestep is a requirement of the complex social theory I am trying to trace here. As we will see, though it dispenses with a transcendent God, this move returns us to the space of myth.

Technologies of representation As I have suggested, the question of representation has often been limited to one of whether representation is possible or impossible, permanently secure or permanently insecure. In these instances, argument has focused on one site of representation— language. Since language is taken to be a distinctively human property, this focus has so far glued discussion of representation to discussion of the agency of the human subject, such that human uniqueness and human superiority over the non-human are at stake whenever we argue about representation (Lee and Brown, 1994). For example, when we argue that our accounts accurately map the world, we allow ourselves the property of rationality. When we argue that our accounts of the world are diverse and thus operate with a degree of independence from the world, we accord ourselves a faculty of authorship—we construct the world with our words. Cooper (1993) peels these questions of representation and agency apart from one another by decentring language in discussions of representation (Curt, 1994). Though he allows that there may be agents, he makes it clear that discussion of representation need not necessarily lead to their door. The sources he uses to approach the topic of representation attend to the human body and to ‘made objects’ rather than to language. In other words, he and his sources broaden the range of sites of representation. Thus, the range of debates about representation is also broadened. This broadening does not suggest that, in the past, we have just accidentally forgotten to consider non-linguistic representation, and that the time has come for us to bring an old set of arguments to the new territories of bodies and technology, say by discussing what a given technology ‘means’. Instead, it questions the centrality that language and signification have had and cautions us against discussing representation as if it belonged only to language. The following quotation illustrates this decentring move:

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Any made object is viewed as a re-presentation of the human body in three ways. First: the re-presentation of specifiable body parts, e.g., a bandage placed over a wound takes the place of the missing skin. Spectacles, microscopes, telescopes etc., are materialized re-presentations of the lens of the human eye. Second, the representation of bodily capacities and needs rather than the representation of a specific bodily part, e.g., printed books, writing, photographs, films, photocopiers are all embodiments of memory as a generalized faculty. (Cooper, 1993:280) So far this account of what seems to be a materialized movement of intention (linking body with technology rather than mind with phenomena) presents no obstacles to functional and teleological accounts of non-linguistic representation. The threat to the primacy of language and thus the uniqueness of humans as agents is presented thus: Third, representation transforms the division between the inside and the outside of the body, between the private and the public worlds, in such a way as ‘to deprive the external world of the privilege of being inanimate—of, in other words, its privilege of being irresponsible to its sentient inhabitants on the basis that it is itself non-sentient’ (Scarry, 1985). (Cooper, 1993:280) Representation in general is not reflection. Thus it is not to be judged by standards of accuracy. Representation is the active ‘folding’ of the ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ within one another (Deleuze, 1993; Curt, 1994). In some special circumstances, like Heidegger’s ‘ontic science’ (Dreyfus, 1991:20), the nature of the folds can- support description in terms of reflection and standards of accuracy, and thus can be connected to the valorization of humans as agents. This approach, however, is superficial. Beneath the fold of ‘language-reflection-human agency’ lies a non-human stratum of folds. It follows from this that ‘accuracy’ is only one among many questions about representation. Following Cooper, we can see that the links forged in the linguistic debate between representation and the status of humans are by no means the primordial ones. While it is possible to examine language for its function or for its goal, representation in general exceeds these questions because it exceeds the figure of the world-independent human agent which foregrounds the questions of function and goal. The structure of representation itself prevents the decision between the sentient and the non-sentient. This lack of decision, this lack of discrimination, thus always comes before any agent’s attempt to precede the world with technological or linguistic representations. As Cooper argues, this quality of indecision is shared by Foucault’s (1970) ‘space of similitude’, Heidegger’s (1977) ‘space withdrawn from representation’ and Lyotard’s (1989) ‘unready’. The chase, no matter how speedy, will never catch up with its quarry.

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Representation and convenience against a disorderly nature Above all else, Cooper understands what is achieved by modern people in relation to representation in language and in technology as ‘convenience’: ‘the modern interest in technology puts the stress on immediacy of use, constant availability and the easing of effort’ (Cooper, 1993:279). This ‘convenience’ comes in many forms; that of a match to light a cigarette; the convenience of having a measure of ‘public opinion’ available through polling; the convenience of fast food. In each of these instances we can talk of the function and purpose of representational technology. However, representation exceeds the figure of the human agent and thus exceeds this vocabulary. We have seen how, in Cooper’s account, representation sweeps below the plane on which human agents become discriminable, the plane on which we find minds, decisions and purposes. This might lead us to suspect that ‘convenience’ can never be a simple matter of successfully grasping elements of the world and making them stand ready for our use, since humans are not the beginning and end, even of representation. We might begin to suspect that human mastery of the world can never be complete since the human agent is ontologically embedded in the structure of ‘convenient’ representation. If, as Heidegger has argued, modern technological representation sets the world conveniently in order, making it stand ready for our use through forehavings, then it can be understood as a taming of the world. This taming would operate by making all events predictable. The ambition of modern technological representation, then, is to place an order on the future, to reduce the unpredictable. As Cooper puts it, Heidegger’s Ge-stell is both the ‘all ready’ and the ‘already’. For example: ‘the mechanized food industry… seeks to know and calculate in advance by converting the future and the contingent into the already and the all ready, i.e., the standing reserve’ (Cooper, 1993:299, original emphasis). Here modern technology gives us the key to understanding all representation as a sort of temporal sleight of hand whereby the ‘trompe l’oeil of representation persuades us that the objects and events of the world are already there as stable structures before we come to them’ (Cooper, 1993:299).

The un-ready However, the work of creating ‘convenience’ is never finished, because the entity that creates convenience, the entity that has purposes which convenience can serve—the human agent—is itself continuously under construction. The human agent does not precede the convenience of representational technologies in such a way that it could act on the widest, most general and historical scale as the origin of plans and the recipient of eternal boons. There is no historically permanent subject. The human agent with its

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detachment from the world of unpredictability and disorder is produced and reproduced through modern technology and the convenience it affords. In other words, the human does not transcend a plane of non-human entities. Conventionally, we think of technological convenience as a circuit that passes through the material world, arranging the material world to connect its beginning—human desires and plans—with its end, human satisfaction and plan completion. Cooper introduces a number of figures which break this circuit of self-satisfaction before the world and its unpredictability surrenders itself to order and control; Foucault’s ‘space of similitude’ (1970); Heidegger’s ‘space withdrawn from representation’ (1977); Lyotard’s ‘unready’ (1989). The appearance of these figures is inevitable given that the human agent emerges from the same plane as non-human entities. Our detachment from the world of things and the ‘will’ that elaborates this detachment are not primordial. Thus the future will not bring the universalization of human control and the final surrender of disorder, since we do not really have the position outside the world that is required fully to subdue the world.

The end So far we have traced a distinctly Heideggerian account of technologies of representation. We have seen how the modern human agent emerged along with the development of technologies oriented toward ‘convenience’. This convenience produced a pocket of detachment from the vagaries of the world, which is the human agent. Along the way, the world has been marked out as the source of all disorder and unpredictability and the human sphere has been marked out as the source of all order and predictability. This account only differs from technicist positivism insofar as it precludes an end of history in the form of an ultimate total detachment of the human agent from disorder. Since humans were not primordially separate from the world, or transcendent, and since at every turn we are indebted to the world, we only appear to ‘detach’ ourselves through technologies of representation. In fact the appearance of detachment is bought only by folding ourselves more intricately into the world. We will never achieve total detachment. The speed of the chase can never exceed the speed of the un-ready. To put this another way, total detachment from the vagaries of the world and total independence of the human will would require the total and global defeat of entropy. I am happy to follow the physicists here and aver that this is impossible. We will never escape time, no matter how successful our technoscientific wagers against it. As we move, so the horizon recedes, because we carry the horizon with us. We will never be gods and we have no destination. But, as I have suggested above, it is still possible to understand stabilities of representation as real, if temporary.

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Two speeds again But what has happened to ‘complexity’—to the refusal to purify order and disorder? We have found that the purity, the total detachment of the human agent, can never be achieved, but strangely we found this only by following a path which assumes that purity exists—that the world is the source of all disorder and that techno-scientific representation is the source of all order. Cooper (1993) follows this path to the end of time, the general techno-fix that it promises, and finds no such end. How does this help us replace the question of absolute stability with Derrida’s question of relative stability? To do this would require that we allow order and disorder both to inhabit the non-human and the human. This is the flexibility over disciplinary boundaries which I mentioned earlier. To ensure parity between the human and the non-human, that is, to remain consistent with our assertion that humans are not primordially separate from the rest of the world, it is necessary to allow for the existence of two speeds in culture, infinite speed and ‘slowing’, and the same two speeds in nature. Played on both registers, natural and cultural, one speed is the infinite speed of the unready, the speed that techno-science and social planning can never attain. The second speed is the slowing of this infinite speed that allows for temporary stability. We find examples of this temporary and local stability in the success of technological devices, the limited durations of time over which words continue to mean the same thing, the periods over which institutions remain intact and the periods over which institutional categorizations of events remain applicable. Each of these is a temporary and partial stability. Though globally the speed of entropy, de-differentiation (the collapse of, say, institutional differentiations) or disorder can never be matched, a slowing may be achieved in local pockets (Serres, 1982; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984) which gives rise to multiple, discriminable, real speeds. To borrow Serres’ phrase, stabilities are ‘bundles of times’. On this view, order does not chase disorder in an historical race that it can never win, nor is human history to be understood by identifying a trans-historical human subject with order and setting it to run the race. If, with convention, we imagine that order were procured by a figure of finite speed chasing a figure of infinite speed, small wonder that fear of the inevitable result—absolute instability, absolute insecurity— torments us. But another view of order presents itself, a view that allows order to be temporary, yet real. On this second view, order is the result of a slowing in the pace of de-differentiation. Here the term ‘de-differentiation’ covers such phenomena as the collapse of human detachment from the world in the form of technological failure, the blurring of the significance of different linguistic signs and the potential collapse of institutional discriminations such as those between legitimate and illegitimate violence. This is the ‘threat’ of the un-ready. If the state, for example, is constructed around the possession of a monopoly on legitimate violence, ‘de-differentiation’ is warded off whenever a state police force decries the activities of a vigilante patrol. This slowing, as we will see through the examples I have chosen, may have a start, but this start is not to

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be understood as a single point of origin marked and secured by the graceful intrusion of an inexplicable transcendent figure into the normal passage of events. Let us turn to beginnings. In the next section my principal question is: How is the pace of de-differentiation slowed? As exemplary answers to this question, I will describe Girard’s (1977) controversial account (Kearney, 1995; Milbank, 1995) of the beginning of social institutions, specifically ritual, and compare this with the ‘Theory of Collective Phenomena’ recently proposed by the social psychologist Moscovici and the statistical physicist Galam (Galam and Moscovici, 1991, 1994, 1995). Having identified the immanent and spontaneous account of origin that these authors share, I will return to Cooper (1993). Cooper, following Gasché (1986), writes of a movement between ‘inadvance divided unity’ and ‘in-advance unitary division’ and identifies this as the movement of representation. I will suggest that this is the same account of starts, order and disorder, the same slowing that Girard and Galam and Moscovici are working with. Hopefully, this will show how it is possible to think of representation, law, technology and culture as dependent on real, stable, yet impermanent divisions, without having to postulate a transcendent entity as the author and guarantor of a single, original, unprecedented division. As I have argued above, this avoidance of the transcendental is a necessary component of a complex social theory.

Crisis If you chase the ‘un-ready’ with techno-science, you only add to its speed. The horizon recedes forever, always faster than you can run, because you carry the horizon with you. I call the speed of this horizon ‘infinite’ because it cannot be matched. Lyotard (1989:197) argues that the un-ready is ‘a stranger to consciousness and cannot be constituted by it…it is what dismantles consciousness’. The infinite speed of the unready, then, always threatens to ‘dismantle consciousness’, to de-differentiate self from world, or, as Cooper might put it in his technological register, to destroy our ‘detachment’ from the world. The unready threatens an order. This order, in the case of modernity and technology, is the stability of the discrimination of consciousness from the world. As we have seen, the un-ready can be characterized as an infinite speed of dedifferentiation. Before we turn to Girard, it is worth emphasizing that I have drawn the technical, institutional and significatory examples of stability.and order together throughout the course of this essay by treating them all as semi-stable instances of differentiation—one word from another, the subject of modernist technology from the world, legitimate violence from illegitimate violence. Since no speed of chase can allow the capture of the un-ready or produce global order, what stabilities there are must be partial, temporary and must arise from a ‘slowing’ of the pace of de-differentiation. Girard (1977, 1978) argues that violence possesses infinite speed and that the relatively stable institutions that characterize human life and sociality are the result of a ‘slowing’ of the infinite speed of violence, rather than its capture at the end of a hunt. In the present argument, violence shares the location and function of the un-ready. If we chase a violent

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act to its source and punish the violator, the result is simply an increase in the quantity of violence. Violence cannot be abolished by revenge, no matter how appropriate the target of that revenge. This is because, under the reign of vengefulness, a differentiation is yet to be established between legitimate and illegitimate violence: ‘the only satisfactory revenge for spilt blood is spilling the blood of the killer; and in the blood feud there is no clear distinction between the act for which the killer is being punished and the punishment itself’ (Girard, 1977:14). Those taking revenge open themselves to further reprisals. Under these as yet undifferentiated circumstances, characterized by a mimesis between the blood of the victim and the blood of the murderer, ‘the slightest outbreak of violence can bring about a catastrophic escalation’ (Girard, 1977:30) because ‘vengeance…is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process’ (Girard, 1977:15). If violence is allowed to proliferate through the mechanism of vengeance, it will prevent the production of the stabilized routines that characterize culture. So how did culture and stability arise out of this turmoil? How did humans come to be differentiated from animals, and culture from nature? Girard postulates ‘a moment of violent crisis in the beginning—the plague of conflictual undifferentiation—that is then arrested by the sacrificial mechanism of the scapegoat, whose role is to institute hierarchies and to determine differences’ (Girard, 1978:204). For Girard, these differentiations, along with all those that characterize language, meaning and law in each culture, are the result of a fundamental real event—the sacrifice of a scapegoat—a start which is lost in the depths of pre-history, yet is testified to by extant myth and ritual. This real event slowed the pace of de-differentiation and thus allowed the relative stabilizations that compose us and our communities today. ‘Cultural stabilizations’ arose through the scapegoat mechanism, which are ‘not absolute but relative…not universal but local’ and which are destined ‘to last not forever, but for a time only, for the historical duration of specific institutions’ (Girard, 1978:204). In attempting to explain the existence of institutions, Girard hypothesizes that, at some point in time, competition, feud and violence, ‘the elements of dissension scattered throughout the community’ which had divided a community, were focused in the body of one victim, who was surrounded by the entire community and put to death by their united hand. Since each community member was now a murderer and no one stood to avenge the victim, the pace of violence was slowed. The vengeance was temporarily stilled. The community was now totally innocent, containing not a single blameworthy individual, since the victim carried all the blame. This produced a fundamental differentiation between guilt and innocence, between legitimate and illegitimate violence. This division was no simple matter, since the dead, guilty victim was also to be thanked for inadvertently rescuing the community from chaos. Further, the overall innocence of the murderers could only be established if each and every one could be understood to have taken part in the killing of the scapegoat. Were any individuals left out of the killing, they would stand in an innocent enough position to consider pursuing vengeance on behalf of the scapegoat. Where once the group was divided against itself arbitrarily and conflicts took place without stable structure and organization, each individual against every other, after the scapegoat’s death the group was now unified. This was a very peculiar sort of unification,

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however, since it grew from a division—the division of the totally guilty from the totally innocent. To express this matter in terms used by Cooper (1993) to describe the structure of representation, which are derived from Gasché (1986), the scapegoat’s death transforms an “‘in-advance divided unity” into an “in-advance unitary division’” (Cooper, 1993:298) in the course of which ‘the rampant process of doubling or division’, paralleled in Girard’s thought by vengeance, ‘is made subservient to a simple unity and origin’ (ibid.: 298), paralleled by the new unity of the culture and the scapegoat’s murder respectively. Paradoxically, this was simultaneously the birth of unified culture and the birth of differentiation—word distinct from word, wrong distinct from right, human distinct from animal. According to Girard, myth, ritual, religion and contemporary institutions are variants on this theme, each replaying the generative scapegoat mechanism to guard against an infinite violence that threatens us still. Concerning these variants and their original, Girard writes: ‘I want to stress that these imitations had their origin in a real event…The event should be viewed as an absolute beginning, signifying the passage from non-human to human, as well as a relative beginning for the societies in question’ (Girard, 1977:309). We should note that, in line with the requirements of a complex social theory, Girard’s hypothesis needs no transcendent hand to instigate the passage from disorder to order. Order is generated spontaneously out of the immanence of disorder. This occurs when the indiscriminability between innocent and guilty blood, the infinite speed of transformation of one into the other, is slowed. We should also note that this start, which is a slowing, is real. It needs no theology. It is a simple event occurring among other events, remarkable not in itself, but only to the extent that it interests us. Since the start is humble we need not measure other ‘starts’ against it to determine which is the original and which the copy. Further, by expressing the start as a movement between two modes of division (inadvance divided unity and in-advance unitary division), we need not stand in awe of the moments before the start, as we would before a simple, pure state of disorder. As we will see in the following section, Girard is not the only thinker of immanence in the social sciences.

Spontaneous symmetry breakdown Galam and Moscovici (1991, 1994, 1995) build a theory of collective social phenomena out of concepts drawn from statistical physics and a few social psychological assumptions. This theory is designed to account for both uniformity and diversity in group conduct. They ask how a collection of individuals could ever become uniform in their conduct, sharing behaviours with each other time after time. They address one issue in particular which concerns the present essay: How are we to account for order and stability? In their work, the social psychological phenomenon of ‘group conformity’ takes the position of the order and stability that I suggest require general explanation. Before describing their theory, I would like to issue a disclaimer. I draw your attention to their theory not because I believe it to be correct, nor even because I think it deserves

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empirical investigation to establish its veracity, but because the account of stability they propose possesses many of the characteristics of the complex social theory I am attempting to draw here. Stability starts in a slowing and needs no transcendent figure, be it a God, a powerful leader or a trans-historical human subject, to account for it. In short, I would like to set aside the question of the scientific status of their work and use it instead, like Girard’s, as an example of a fresh approach to issues of order and disorder. Galam and Moscovici (1994) argue that, conventionally, social psychologists explain the order and stability represented by group conformity and consensus, in its widest sense, as the result of the exercise of power: ‘According to many theories, power is conceived as a single mechanism which is implemented by a hierarchy so as to make individuals do what they would not have done without being constrained’ (Galam and Moscovici, 1994:483). On this view, order is held in place by mobilizing power against un-designed change. Whereas in the modernist account of the techno-fix, the locus of undesigned change is nature, in this instance the locus is the individual social actor. In many social theories that are arranged around an ‘individual/society dualism’ (Henriques et al., 1984) the individual is disorderly and ‘society’ bears the burden of producing order (Barnes, 1995). In Foucauldian (1984) terms, we might identify this view of order as a variant of the ‘repressive hypothesis’. Advanced by the mighty and the meek alike, this hypothesis poses an unanswerable question: from what position can repressive power be exerted? The mighty need to know the answer so as to order and stabilize more effectively. The meek need to know who to assassinate and which conspirators to expose in order to open the possibility of change. The question is unanswerable, since, as we have seen, if we adopt this scheme of externally imposed order, we must find an originator who stands outside the field that is ordered. Candidates mentioned so far in the present chapter have included God and a trans-historical human subject. The field of society, however, presents us with no such transcendent figures. To be in control of society one must be inside it. When pressed, this account is unable to deliver the necessary discrimination between designed change and un-designed change. Perhaps this is why social theorists have so often invoked such quasi-transcendental entities as society, Zeitgeist, structure, culture and norms. Nevertheless, according to Galam and Moscovici, the repressive hypothesis has, so far, held sway. In its terms, the powerful must outpace the meek in order to secure stability. The secret power of the meek is to be found in their lack of commitment to extant social order. Since they have few investments they can travel light and therefore quickly. In other words, social order results when the powerful win a contest of speeds. The powerful must exceed the fleet-footed meek with the speed of ideology (where reification closes off the possibility of debate before it occurs), the speed of seduction (where the outcomes of choices in life are pre-set to exclude resistance) or simply the speed of routinized police manoeuvres against a rioting crowd. The alternative account of order that Galam and Moscovici offer has little to recommend it in terms of political critique. They begin from such abstraction that it is hard to relate their work to the ‘everyday’ political issues which would appear to demand our immediate response. If Galam and Moscovici refuse the repressive hypothesis, they

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also refuse the speedy judgements of their theory that are available through it, the judgements that would demand an immediate report from them on the question of whose side they are on, the mighty or the meek. In this matter, I ask once again for your patience over the next few paragraphs. So, in the case of group conformity, what is the ‘symmetry’ that is broken and how does it relate to the infinite speed of the unready? Galam and Moscovici are attempting to solve the problem of collective action (Barnes, 1995) asking: How is it that groups of people come to share patterns of conduct? In other words, they are asking how groups themselves are possible. They begin their ‘Theory of Collective Phenomena’ in fine formalizing style by proposing a situation in which a number of individuals, who are not in contact with one another and who have no previous opinions, are presented with a choice between two courses of action, A and B. The individuals are encountering a choice which is new to them. Here, there is no group and there is no basis for consensus. Under these conditions, the probability of any single individual making choice A is 50 per cent and the probability of any single individual making choice B is also 50 per cent. The overall decision of the group can be calculated by a simple aggregation of each individual’s choice. Since A and B are equally probable in each instance, and since each individual chooses independently, the overall decision of the collective will fall exactly halfway between A and B. The matter remains undecidable for the collection of individuals as a whole. One notable feature of this situation is that each individual’s decision may fluctuate from A to B at any time without affecting the overall result for the collection of individuals. This is a state of freedom for each individual, but the freedom they have is the freedom of indifference and futility. Not having encountered the choice they make before, they have no basis for a decision. Since any fluctuation of decision they may go through is made insignificant on the collective level by the operation of probability, each individual is free to fluctuate wildly in opinion or remain entirely static. In more normal situations, where previous opinions are held, the aggregate of individual decisions will allow for a discrimination between A and B. In this unusual situation, however, since the collective makes no overall decision, the issue of the stability of any individual’s choice is quite irrelevant. The collective indecision is preserved whether an individual fluctuates wildly or remains entirely static. Because of this, it is difficult to see how terms like decision and stability can be applied to any individual, let alone the collective. If fluctuations, no matter how rapid, or even instantaneous, yield the same outcome as a complete lack of fluctuations, it seems that the question of whether the collective outcome is stable or unstable is unanswerable. The apparent contradiction between fluctuation and permanence is resolved in these circumstances. There is an ‘indifference’ at work in this stage of Galam and Moscovici’s theory. This indifference bears comparison with the mimetic relationship between Girard’s blood of the innocent and blood of the guilty. The slowing of the infinite speed of vengeful violence forms the very possibility of the discriminations that allow for culture and social order. If we can rewrite the lack of discrimination between innocent and guilty blood as the result of an infinite speed of transformation between the two—in other words an infinite speed of fluctuation between course of action A and course of action B—the

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parallels between Girard and Galam and Moscovici become apparent. Galam and Moscovici, like Girard, hypothesize circumstances in which infinite speed of transformation and zero speed of transformation are indiscriminable. Due to this indiscriminability, the dualistic pairs of terms order-disorder and decision-indecision are inapplicable and can only become applicable through a slowing. This slowing provides the grounds for stability. Galam and Moscovici describe this state of indifference as a state of ‘symmetry’. Overall, the collective is symmetrical with regard to A and B. While the term ‘symmetry’ expresses the collective indecision between A and B, it masks the sense in which a vocabulary of stability-instability and decision-indecision is quite irrelevant to the description of events at the individual level. If the speed of fluctuation of an individual’s decision can be pushed to infinity or reduced to zero, with absolute indifference, then the purest expression of instability (speed of fluctuation equals infinity) and the purest expression of stability (speed of fluctuation equals zero) mean the same thing. The terms decision and indecision also lose their pertinence. Is a decision that fluctuates at an infinite rate to be called a decision or an indecision? If zero fluctuation is the same in the end as infinite fluctuation, can we call this a decision? The terms stability-instability, order-disorder and decision-indecision can only be rendered pertinent by the production of a discrimination between infinite fluctuation and zero fluctuation. An ‘event’ must take place to slow infinite fluctuation, in order to open the range of speeds between infinity and zero. Only once this has occurred can we measure and discuss real stability and instability, real order and disorder, and a range of real speeds. Galam and Moscovici, then, begin their account of order not so much with disorder as with the unready and with a chaos of indiscriminability. The inapplicability of a vocabulary of conscious decisionmaking to this situation marks the inherence of the threat to consciousness posed by the unready. As we have seen earlier in the present chapter, where we find the unready, we know that stability can be found in slowing rather than in a chase. As Galam and Moscovici point out, previous social psychologies have addressed stability, in the form of group conformity, as if it were the result of a contest of speeds, the speed of repression against the speed of un-designed change. One difficulty with this scheme is how to locate a transcendent repressor who could conduct a race against unstable individuals to procure social stability from a vantage point outside of society. Galam and Moscovici offer us an alternative to this account and its central difficulty. Rather than search for an external, transcendent entity to force conformity on a collective from the outside, they seek a process which can discriminate between the infinite speed of fluctuation and the zero speed of fluctuation. They seek a process immanent to the collective which can start the slowing of fluctuation. This slowing in effect discriminates infinity from zero, opens up calculable speeds of tranformation and thus provides us with the grounds of applicability of the terms stable-unstable, order-disorder and decision-indecision. The discrimination between infinite and zero speeds of transformation, the formation of a stable group with shared conduct, is achieved in Galam and Moscovici’s theory by simply allowing the individuals that comprise the collective to interact with one another

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and to influence one another. Once this occurs the possibility of the recording of a decision state, no matter how fleeting, is opened. This interaction, then, is the mechanism by which infinite speed is converted into measurable speed and evanescence is converted into durability. In other words, it is the start of the slowing necessary to order. Consider a group of individuals who again have no previous opinions, but this time are in interaction with one another and are able to influence each other’s choice between A and B. Galam and Moscovici introduce a distinctly social psychological postulate to reproduce, in the social field, the spontaneous symmetry-breaking, the spontaneous selforganization, which is ‘evidenced at several levels of reality from cosmology to biology’ (Galam and Moscovici, 1994:481). They further maintain that: ‘The first postulate which we can reasonably make on the basis of our knowledge of human nature and the detailed facts of experience is that isolated individuals generally are inclined to conform with social forces from the external environment’ (Galam and Moscovici, 1991:53, original emphasis). In cosmology and biology, mechanisms of influence between entities can be specified in some detail. The interactions and mutual influence of physical particles such as neutrons and photons are, to some degree, calculable. A logic can be read in the chemical compatibility between amino acids of the same left/right handedness and the incompatibility of amino acids of different handedness. These specified mechanisms of influence are also mechanisms of recording. Even if particles flip from one state to another, since they are capable of influencing one another, they are capable of leaving a record that they have inhabited one state rather than another. Galam and Moscovici are, however, forced to rely on commonsense assumptions concerning human interaction that deliver the conclusion only that mutual influence between people is possible rather than revealing any mechanism. This is one of the reasons why I earlier withheld a judgement over the value of their theory as science. When they refer to the influence of the external on the internal, they are referring to the influence one individual may have on the decision that another individual makes. Nevertheless, if we allow Galam and Moscovici’s assumption, we can see that if the individuals are interacting, each will leave a trace on those interacted with. Once this is allowed we can see that, no matter how rapid the fluctuation of an individual’s ‘decision’ between A and B, a momentary resting on either A or B has the chance to leave a trace of its fleeting existence in the form of an influence on another individual’s decision. Where a trace of a fleeting stasis can be recorded, it can be preserved. Once it can be preserved and passed on, its rate of change is no longer infinite. Now that the infinite rate of change has been slowed, the recorded trace of one individual’s temporary state can pass through the entire collectivity. An infinite speed of transformation no longer prevents the possibility of stability. The record decelerates away from infinite speed, leaving infinite speed unchanged, while the record adopts a measurable speed. The collectivity has been rescued from a situation governed by the indiscriminability between infinite speed and zero speed. It is now to be characterized by measurable speeds. It now has stability. If, as Galam and Moscovici require, in order to deliver a full account of group formation and consensus, one trace can then reproduce itself, the collective will arrive at an overall

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decision between A and B by a process of ‘snow-balling’. The result is that the overall decision of the collective will converge on either course of action A or course of action B. The collective now has an order, an organization. It has a dissymmetry with respect to the choice between course of action A and course of action B. The collection of individuals has moved from a collective to a group. This means that a decision can be detected, the unready has been warded off and that stability has been produced. A situation of ‘divided unity’, where the individuals of the collective were divided among themselves and the fluctuations of their decisions were irrelevant to one another, has been converted through immanent processes into a situation of ‘unitary division’, where they are united in the division they draw between course of action A and course of action B, such that one course is preferable to the other.

Conclusion: slowing yields many speeds In his examination of technology and representation, Cooper (1993) declares the vanity of the general techno-fix. He achieves this by considering technology as representation. This draws visions of technocratic modernity into the same field of discussion as visions of linguistic, legal and cultural stability. He argues that the quest for total stability, order and prescience that forms the general techno-fix is in vain since, like other forms of total representational security, its achievement would require us to outpace time itself with total prescience. Total prescience requires that we know all, but the inherence of the unready, relationships of similitude and the space withdrawn from representation insists that, no matter how fast we run, the unknowable will always exceed our speed. These unknowable figures remain so since they are necessary to the very structure of representation. Representation implies the unrepresentable. Nevertheless, partial technofixes are still possible and these are apparently achieved by partial reversals of time. Latour’s (1987) astronaut benefits from such phenomena. In general, it is impossible to beat time. In particular, it is possible to beat time. How are we to square this apparent contradiction? It seems that we have retreated from the assumption that we can always win a race against un-designed change, to assert that we can only win a few races against undesigned change. While this retreat certainly delivers an account of partial temporary stability, much along the lines which Derrida marks out, it relies on the assumption that designed and un-designed change are in principle always discriminable. Here lies the significance of Cooper’s use of the distinction between ‘inadvance divided unity’ and ‘in-advance unitary division’. The discrimination between designed and un-designed change, between order and disorder, between stability and instability is possible only once a situation that is indescribable as orderly or disorderly, a situation that is unready for the dividing, categorizing operations of consciousness, has been converted into a situation in which order and disorder, designed and un-designed change are discriminable. In a ‘divided unity’ it is not as if categories do not exist, but rather that they transform into one another at infinite speed. Here we find Girard’s mimesis between

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innocent and guilty blood, and the indiscriminability of an infinite rate of fluctuation between state A and state B and the zero rate of fluctuation posited by Galam and Moscovici. In the case of both Girard and Galam and Moscovici, the possibility of a discrimination between order and disorder is vouchsafed by a slowing; the slowing of an infinite speed of de-differentiation or an infinite speed of transformation. In Girard’s case the slowing is the result of a sacrificial discrimination which abolishes the trace of innocence on which revenge relies. In Galam and Moscovici’s case, the slowing is the result of the preservation of a trace of an otherwise infinitely evanescent decision state. In both cases the slowing is an immanent process, requiring no extraordinary efforts. The start of each slowing requires no intervention on the part of a transcendent entity and thus is not marked as an origin. An origin proper must be an unique and solitary event. Only once will the transcendent entity intervene to kickstart the world. There is, however, no limit to the number of starts of slowings that are possible and no limit to the range of speeds that can result from slowing. Further, as we see most clearly in Galam and Moscovici’s case, in order to produce slowing we need not call an end to infinite speed and indiscriminability. The record, or the trace, decelerates away from the infinite speed of transformation while leaving it unchanged. If we understand stability as a slowing we can see clearly how total stability, the general representational and techno-fix are impossible, while temporary and local stability are possible. The infinite speed of transformation is inexhaustible. Once traces swerve away from it, they will change and destabilize at a variety of rates. Stability can always be replaced by new slowings, but the infinite speed of transformation is unaffected. Once infinite speed is ‘persuaded’ to slow, the possibility of stable distinction arises along with the possibility of speeds that are discriminable and variable.2 Thus in advance of the modernist race against time, beneath the contests of speed that the engineer, the judge and the dictionary-maker enter into, lie the starts of slowings that afford measurable speed. When we ask how stabilities are possible, in technology or in meaning, we should look first to slowings and to contests of speed only later. I have argued for a style of social theorizing which is based on immanence and is sensitive to complexity, to the plurality of slowings and to the particularity of measurable speeds. If such a style requires attention to the obscure issues I have raised, it would seem reasonable to suspect that it is unlikely to prosper. As the work of Galam and Moscovici and Girard suggest, however, such varieties of social theory, such approaches that allow for real, if temporary, stabilities are not only possible, but also offer an alternative to the conjuring of quasi-transcendental explanatory devices.

Acknowledgements I thank Robert Cooper, Rolland Munro, Alan Prout and Paul Stenner for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Notes 1 ‘A line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points it comes up through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived, transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988:293). Zeno is mentioned in the present essay since his argument and its refutation depend on two incompatible views of time. Zeno treats time, space and change as if they were quantized; the refutation, as if time were continuous. If, as I argue, stabilities depend upon the production of quantifiable speeds out of the indiscriminability of infinite and zero speed, the processes which allow for order and disorder must also effect a translation between continuous and quantized time; in other words, between becoming and being. The implication here is not that we must privilege becoming over being or continuous time over quantized time in a grand reversal of prejudice, but that the starts of slowings should be understood as ‘between times’, much in the way that the Derridean ‘trace’ is neither presence nor absence. When Deleuze (1990) discusses ‘sense’ as the mist rising between the ground of speechless, indiscriminable material causes and the atmosphere of events, discourse and discriminability, he draws a similar figure. I have argued that ‘relativisms’ share a problem with Zeno. To arrive at anything real (real movement or real knowledge) both perspectives consider it necessary to pass through infinite processing. Perhaps the meeting of complexity and post-structuralism that I have reported on here points the way to the recapture of a form of modest realism. This is the significance of my assertion of the reality of starts. 2 ‘Thus, the kinetic proposition tells us that a body is defined by relations of motion and rest, of slowness and speed between particles. That is, it is not defined by a form or by functions. Global form, specific form, and organic functions depend on relations of speed and slowness. Even the development of a form, depends on these relations and not the reverse. The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles. A composition of speeds and slownesses on a plane of immanence’ (Deleuze, 1988:123). If order and organization have often been read through form, structure and function, this adequation of Spinozist and Process philosophies (Whitehead, 1929) provides us with the germ of an alternative.

References Anglin, W.S. and Lambeck, J. (1995) The Heritage of Thales, New York: Springer.

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Ashmore, M. (1989) The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Barnes, B. (1995) The Elements of Social Theory, London: University College London Press. Chia, R. (1996) ‘The problem of reflexivity in organizational research: towards a postmodern science of Organization’, Organization 3(1): 31–59. Cooper, R. (1993) ‘Technologies of representation’, in P. Ahonen (ed.) Tracing the Semiotic Boundaries of Politics, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 279–312. Cooper , R. and Law, J. (1995) ‘Organization: distal and proximal views’, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, vol. 13, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 237–274. Curt, B.C. (1994) Textuality and Tectonics: Troubling Social and Psychological Science, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. ——(1990) The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press. ——(1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. T. Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London: Athlone Press. Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——(1989) Limited Inc., trans. S. Weber, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Dreyfus, H.L. (1991) Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Tavistock. ——(1984) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley, London: Penguin. Galam, S. and Moscovici, S. (1991) ‘Towards a theory of collective phenomena I: consensus and attitude change in groups’, European Journal of Social Psychology 21: 49–74. ——(1994) ‘Towards a theory of collective phenomena II: conformity and power’, European Journal of Social Psychology 24:481–496. ——(1995) ‘Towards a theory of collective phenomena III: conflicts and forms of Power’, European Journal of Social Psychology 25:217–229. Gasché, R. (1986) The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Girard, R. (1977) Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——(1978) To Double Business Bound, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Guattari, F. (1995) Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, Sydney: Power Publications. Heidegger, M. (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, New York: Harper and Row. Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C. and Walkerdine, V. (1984) Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, London: Methuen. Hiley, D.R. (1988) Philosophy in Question: Essays on a Pyrrhonian Theme, Chicago, IL:

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University of Chicago Press. Hofstadter, D.R. (1986) Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, London: Penguin. Kearney, R. (1995) ‘Myths and scapegoats: the case of René Girard’, Theory, Culture and Society 12:1–14. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Lee, N.M. (1995) ‘Judgement, responsibility and generalized constructivism’, paper presented at ‘The Labour of Division’, Centre for Social Theory and Technology, Keele University, November 1995. Lee, N.M. and Brown, S. (1994) ‘Otherness and the actor network: the undiscovered continent’, American Behavioural Scientist 37:772–790. Lyotard, J.-F. (1989), The Lyotard Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Milbank, J. (1995) ‘Stories of sacrifice: from Wellhausen to Girard’, Theory, Culture and Society 12:15–46. Morss, J. (1995) Growing Critical, London: Routledge. Munro, R. (1995) ‘Worlds apart: writing management in the space of disciplines disciplining the disciplines’, working paper, Department of Management, Keele University. Palladino, P. (1990) ‘Stereochemistry and the nature of life: mechanist, vitalist, and evolutionary perspectives’, Isis 306:44–68. Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. (1984) Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, London: HarperCollins. Rabinow, P. (1995) ‘Into the genetic matrix’, paper presented at ‘The Labour of Division’, Centre for Social Theory and Technology, Keele University, November 1995. Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York: Oxford University Press. Serres, M. (1982), Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, trans. J.V. Harari and D.F. Bell, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——(1991) Rome: The Book of Foundations, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ——(1995) Angels: A Modern Myth, Paris: Flammarion. Virilio, P. (1991) The Aesthetics of Disappearance, New York: Semiotext(e). Whitehead, A.N. (1929) Process and Reality, New York: Macmillan.

3 THE VIRTUALIZATION OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL SUBJECT Richard Sotto

Maybe history and tradition will fit smoothly into the information retrieval systems that will serve as resource for the inevitable planning needs of a cybernetically-organized mankind. The question is whether thinking, too, will end in the business of information processing. (Heidegger, Preface to Wegmarken, 1967)

A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘it’ is the condition of the ‘think’…Even the ‘it’ contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit: ‘thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently…” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1990)

Introduction In order to delimit the fields of perception, discursive reason has to focus itself upon ‘central’ figures (Lyotard, 1971). Thus, for instance, there can be no economics without such figures as exchange, value, redistribution, and the like; there can be no organizational perspective on human action without, clearly, the figure of organization. These figures, as Lyotard emphasizes, direct attention, centre and unify the bulk of possible utterances and delineate the range of perception. Such figures, ecstatically apparent in any such discourse, usually point to the referent of a field. They constitute matters of interpellation, reflection and understanding. Yet, they are sometimes taken for granted. Although present as implicit referents they remain concealed and are therefore seldom the target of questioning. The discourse on organizing, as it has developed in organization studies, encompasses such a veiled figure, namely: that of the organizational subject.

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As the above quotation from Nietzsche makes clear, the ‘grammatical habit’ which places an ‘I’ at the origin of any sort of activity, including thinking, presupposes an identifiable, specific agent. Action, according to this habit, requires a subject to which the activity performed can be attributed. The discourse on organizing does not escape this inference. Whether organizing is viewed as processes of sense-making (Smircich and Morgan, 1982), networking (Tichy et al., 1979; Latour, 1986) or enactment (Weick 1969/79; 1988), organizational action is conceived as performed by individuals. In other words, activities of an organizing character presuppose the figure of an organizational subject. To a large extent, the shift of attention from formal organizations to organizing does not cease to condone the unfolding of the project of modernity. Like the will to formalize our knowledge about organization, the will to understand the processes of organizing, because it also focuses on finalized action, equally belongs to the symbolic architecture of the modern project; a project which, as noted by Cascardi (1992), has invented and enhanced the intentional, sovereign subject. Well founded in the Cartesian cogito, the modern project, as it is now well established, is a project of mastery. In the pursuit of specific goals, it aims at the disciplining of nature, of others and of the self through discursive reason. But relating to the world and the self in this way has its necessary precondition. It requires an I, a consciousness which complies with discursive reason and enacts it. Insofar as the understanding of the process of organizing is grounded in this sort of assumption, it cannot but retain the silent presence of an organizational subject. As repeatedly stressed by contemporary thinkers, it is with the development and use of techno-science that discursive reason, as it is embedded in the modern project, has implemented its instrumental aspirations. In that sense, techno-science has constantly jostled human action. For a long period techno-science has succeeded in substituting for numerous human physical activities without meaningfully challenging the realm of human subjectivity. More recently, however, the dissemination of information technology has made it clear that techno-science has now reached the point where it could also substitute for that realm. In her review of the various ways in which the process of organizing has been approached, Czarniawska-Joerges (1994) noted that while earlier conceptions of organizing involved physical objects, including human bodies, today they involve more abstract levels of symbolic analysis. She then agreed with Cooper and Burrell’s (1988) view that in our contemporary world the production of organization is perhaps becoming more important than the organization of production. She also noted that what she calls the ‘humanization of machines’—a subject that information technology is ostensibly aiming at—opens up fascinating possibilities for reflection both for organizing and organizational analysis. Indeed, it is perhaps necessary to recall here that computerization, the enactment of information technology, is a vast organizing endeavour. In fact, the term computer in English and its French equivalent l’ordinateur together epitomize in a striking way this essential trait of information technology. While computer refers to computing, i.e. numerical reduction, ordinateur refers to ordinance, i.e. organizing. All information technological artefacts, whether they be pictures,

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symbols, sensations, writings, sounds or colours, are, on the one hand, the products of an ordering performed by numerical representations. On the other, they are made apparent by operational systems which operate with the use of strictly organized protocols. In the field of artificial intelligence, contemporary efforts to develop intelligence amplification systems also aim to substitute technological artefacts for human cognitive abilities. At this level, the junction between these information-technological efforts and the organizational subject is easily seen. The subject of organization is, among other things, supposed to comprehend the exigencies of organizational representations and to enact them in the pursuit of specific goals. Expert systems of all kinds operate in essentially the same way. When such systems are specifically designed for organizational practices, it is no exaggeration to say that there is, from the viewpoint of information technology, an attempt at appropriating the subjectivities of organizational actors. Let us immediately say that the purpose of the present essay will not be to discuss whether or not such attempts at appropriation are successful or otherwise. Nor will it be to make a stand on whether or not it is meaningful to assume the existence of the subject. Instead, it will attempt three things. First, it will try to establish in what ways organizational knowledge presupposes an organizational subject. Second, it will examine how information technology attempts to capture this presupposed subject. Finally, it will raise the central issue of agency through the encounter between information technology and the supposed organizational subject in terms of several specific features of the organizing process. This discussion will be conducted against the background of organizing as the unfolding of textures as explored by Cooper and Fox (1990) and Hoskin and Fineman (1990).

The construction of the organizational subject Human beings, enhanced by the figure of Man in the social tradition which emerged and developed from the Enlightenment period (Foucault, 1966), have been endowed with many qualities. One of the most fundamental is undoubtedly that of their individual freedom. Whether viewed as political, social or economical agents, human beings have been construed as actors who should act according to their individual predilections. Even if much of what constitutes social scientific knowledge suggests that this freedom is illusory, the entire architecture of modernity continues to perpetuate itself on this fundamental assumption. On this view, the individuals of the modern project are not to be overly constrained in the making of their choices. On the contrary, they are supposed to express a personal, sovereign power, making them entirely responsible as individuals for their engagement-disengagement with the world. It is on this assumption that the contractual view of human relations has constituted the basis of political, social and, not least, economic life. The passage from feudal to modern modes of relating to others, especially in the economic sphere, has had no other legitimation. In this latter domain, the rational organization of production, considered to be basic to modern economic activity, is exclusively anchored in this contractual view. It

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is the supposedly free individuals of modern communities who have been and still are required to agree a contract with whoever represents the organization. In this sense, to be or become a member of an organization is a particular sort of engagement. Whether such a membership stems from a voluntary act or otherwise, organizational membership presupposes a subject. This subject is a conscious, intentional individual who accepts the rules of conduct and the intentions of the group s/he joins. It is in this sense of subject that individual contractors are made responsible for their part of the deal and thus make themselves accountable for their activities.

The subject in a body An important aspect of this form of engagement as inscribed in the modern project is that it is not ontologically neutral. It appeals to and relies on a legalistic view of what constitutes the ontological status of human beings. For all contracts, legal or moral, entail lawful relations anchored in a specific conception of that status. In legal literature, this status is discussed under the heading of the subject of the law. It is not possible here to enter the long tradition of reflection that has been pursued on this issue in legal literature. One can only retain four major points which seem to characterize the ontological status of legal subjects. The first of these is that the legal view presupposes the existence of a particular entity, ‘the individual’. It does so by retaining the specific meaning inscribed in the Latin origins of that word, that is, an indivisible entity. The second point is that the legal view presupposes the existence of a unique identity attached to this entity. It is an identity that must be sufficiently specific and stable in order to be recognized as such at any particular moment of its existence. The third point is that the legal view presupposes that entity to be intentional and conscious of its activities so that it can be held responsible for them. The fourth and final point is that the legal view presupposes the existence of a body intrinsically possessing these three ontological dimensions. In this respect, and although used in a different sense in legal contexts, the meaning of the term habeas corpus—in medieval Latin ‘you should have a body’—subsumes in an outstanding manner the linkage of the legal view to the existence of a unique, identifiable and intentionally conscious body. Indeed, the subjects of the law, as exposed so remarkably by Rousseau (1974) in Les sujets de droit, are also constituted by a host of ‘moral entities’. By ‘moral’, the legal view establishes a distinction between entities which have a bodily anchorage and those which do not. While individuals are included in the first category, institutions, organizations, societies, states and peoples are covered by the second. The institutional view of organization as a web of contractual transactions, such as that proposed by Williamson (1986), for instance, relies heavily on this extension of what constitutes legal subjects. Yet, in both cases, the ‘moral entities’, whether subjects of the law or contractors in economic interactions, are always eventually identified with their representatives or, following Latour (1993), their spokespersons. Those, in the legal view, are individuals who possess a unique, identifiable body equipped with an intentional consciousness. So that to be a member of an organization or to speak on its behalf is to be

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situated in and by a relational web where one is constituted as a unique, identifiable, conscious and responsible subject.

The subject of organizational representation and technology From an organizational standpoint, membership also entails compliance to what, within a particular group, are regarded as the necessities of collective action. These necessities are entrenched in communicable representations carried by speech, writing, charts and so on. Insofar as such representations also prescribe certain modes of action, they necessarily presuppose agents who can enact them. It is in this way that the existence of actors, equipped with the capability of internalizing and actualizing the content of such representations, is implicitly postulated in organizational thought. So it transpires that organizational agents are at once posited as subjects of both verbal perception (Borel, 1978; Frazer, 1992) and of organizational representations. The appeal to the notion of collective mind made by Weick (1993), for instance, in order to understand collective action, does not impinge upon the presupposition of actors as subjects in organizational thought. For, although the expression collective mind would suggest the existence of a meta-individual consciousness, Weick does not invest the term with this meaning. For him, the collective mind is ‘a pattern of heedful interrelations of actions’ which require that actors ‘construct their actions (contributions), understanding that the system consists of connected actions by themselves and others (representation)’ (Weick, 1993:513). In other words, the notion of collective mind does not dispose of individual actors equipped with the subjective ability to understand and intentionally enact specific representations. But in positing organizational agents as subjects of representation, the discourse of organizing, by the same token, installs them as subjects of technology. As argued by Cooper (1993), an archaeology of the term technē shows that representation and technology have indeed been immemorially connected. Yet, as demonstrated by Cooper, this immemorial connection, in the contemporary glossing of technology, has taken ‘a curious twist’: ‘Instead of the concern with making present, with the art of constructing something for the apprehension of the senses, the modern interest in technology puts the stress on immediacy of use, constant availability and the easing of effort’ (Cooper 1993:279). This twist, as Cooper emphasizes, engenders a conception of technology which departs from its ancient meaning and swathes it with ars combinatoria. Following Fisher (1978), Cooper argues that technē ‘now becomes a transient aggregate given to assembly, disassembly and reassembly’ (Fisher, 1978:142). In this form, representation, as Kallinikos contends, is technology (Kallinikos, 1992). For organizational representation cannot but present itself as a schematic ordering of relations, activities and responsibilities. Organizational representation offers itself as a technical grid which has to be projected on the world according to preconceived goals, categories and modes of enactment. Organizational representation, in this way, is a technical artefact which, on this count, also constitutes organizational actors as subjects of technology. It does this by

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reducing the vast range of human idiosyncrasies through the implicit command to regulate actors’ understandings and actions according to its preconceived schemata. But limiting the range of unique ways by which individual agents relate to the world does not dissolve the subject in them. On the contrary, it urges the subject to identify itself with the schemata. It prompts the subject to use its discretionary power, precisely as a subordinated subject, in favour of a proposed organizational image and to renounce any mode of interacting which is not consistent with it. Weick’s (1993) organizational actors, for example, are not conceived differently in spite of their apparent disappearance in the ‘pattern of heedfulness’ called the collective mind. Having to understand the connectedness of their actions through the filter of an operational representation (Weick studied flight operations on aircraft carriers), organizational actors are, indeed, conceived as subjects. In effect, it is only if they are subjects that organizational actors can ‘understand’ representations not stemming from their immediate personal experience. It is only as subjects that organizational actors can ‘internalize’ such representations and consciously, willingly and purposefully actualize them.

The subject of performance By inscribing technological representation as its constitutive mode of collective action, the discourse of organizing also institutes organizational agents as subjects of performance. Any technologically conceived mode of action, because of its preconceived purposes, is a scheme of behaviour which does not respect the intrinsic features of the things of the world but imposes itself upon them. As Baudrillard (1981) expresses the matter, technologically conceived representations are blueprints which do not map territories but precede them. For abstractions of this kind, as Baudrillard puts it, are neither maps, doubles, mirrors, concepts of things nor referential beings or substances. They are the generation of models without origin or reality. The goal intrinsic to technological projections, thus, can be constantly evaluated against the explicit intentions of the represented scheme of action. Shaping action in this way, technological representation directs its operative agents as accountable units in respect of its purposes. With the ubiquitous presence of control as a sine qua non of organizational processes, the discourse of organizing coalesces with the exigencies of performative action. For every mode of enacting an organizational scheme, the discourse of organizing proposes a range of possible procedures. These procedures are designs which articulate goal-directed action. Such designs, precisely because they target specific aims, involve the use of means for evaluating action in terms of its intended outcome. Since they have to be elaborated in evaluative terms, such means can only take the shape of devices devised for the accountability of action in the terms they define. In this respect, it is perhaps worth noting, the discourse of organizing is only a privileged field of expression for performative action. As Corvellec and Sotto (1993) have argued, performative action is a contemporary epic—a kind of grand narrative—and as such pervades a vast range of endeavours in our late-modern world. In this view, utterances of performance constitute and are constituted by what they assert performatively, in the sense of the performative

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expressions examined by authors such as Austin (1962), Lyotard (1979) and Latour (1986). Performative action, then, requires that performers relate to performative statements. Performers have to comprehend, shape their behaviour to the performative statement and voluntarily submit to it. Thus, performative action cannot be undertaken without intentional acts of comprehension, judgement and compliance. This process, to use an idea put forward by Latour (1986), is an operation of translation which itself cannot be conceived without presupposing subjective operators. Although Latour speaks of this process in the context of the ‘powers of association’ (1986), translation, we contend here, is inextricably rooted in the requirement of performative action. As Latour puts it, the spread and implementation of human artefacts relies on the actions of persons, each person having the capacity to act in many different and variable ways. Organizational performativity clearly originates in the need to reduce human variability in the disciplined direction of common plans and goals. Or, in other words, it is because organizational action is not intrinsically performative that it continuously has to be made so. Thus, what Latour argues for in the case of the ‘powers of association’ is applicable to the case of performative action. The enactment of any statement on performative action cannot be the outcome of its faithful transmission in the ‘head-hand’ of an actor. Such a transmission, as ironically expressed by Latour, is a ‘rarity’ which, if it occurs, would certainly need to be explained. Translation, on the contrary, is a process in which the translator has a discretionary power. Such a power presupposes highly idiosyncratic intentions, selections and decisions. It is thus a power which implicates comprehension, judgement, intention, directness, arbitrariness—features which make it subjective. It is subjective to the extent that, in the modern discourse, all those dimensions of action constitute some of the essential attributes of the Cartesian subject. In fact, statements of what performative action is or should be also contain a standing exigency for the improvement of performance and for its potential optimization. This feature in the discourse of organizing is often thought of as a given in that it ‘naturally’ belongs to the pursuit of performative action. Yet this strain generates three important dimensions of what confines the enactment of such action into the realm of subjectivity. The first is that it delineates a domain of recognition which constitutes itself as specific knowledge on performance: ‘better, best performance’. In that way, every actor has to position her/himself towards this scaling knowledge. The second is that it calls for the elaboration of normative systems of appreciation, evaluations and measurements. This entails that all actors have to make themselves accountable in terms of those measurements. The third is that this striving requires the definition of a relation to oneself and to others as a possible agent of the improvement of performance. The establishment of such a relation is not possible without assuming the intervention of individual consciousness. Nor is it conceivable without assuming a category of mind able to consider the self as different from itself and amenable to whatever transformation is required to improve its performance. Thus, in requiring a consciousness defining the self, a self-evaluation towards standards and a disposition to be accountable, the pressure for constant improvement contained in utterances of performance reinsures the presupposition of the organizational subject.

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The moral subject In the discourse of organizing, performance and the improvement of performance are inextricable from a view of organizing as a set of co-ordinated and co-operating, as well as co-operative, activities. The referent of such a fundamental assumption is a preconceived temporal and spatial ordering. It is an ordering which is meant to direct action towards the achievement of certain goals in terms of co-operating (-ive) activities. Under this assumption organizational actors have to internalize rhythms and norms that fit their conduct to the pattern of sequences inherent to this referent. It is only on the condition that individual actors are such central units, through and around which the rhythms and norms necessary for co-ordinated activities are operated, that organizing can present itself, as it does, as a regulating and controlling process. Whatever the inclinations and shapes of organizing thoughts, this intent of calculability, predictability and control cannot be detached from them without some form of fundamental reassessment. Thus, organizing is a process which cannot be conceived without assuming its embodiment in these sets of collective norms. The conceptual idiom in which this concern is expressed varies according to the philosophical, epistemological and methodological inclinations of writers in understanding processes of organizing. The relatively recent upsurge of sense-making, culture, myths, rituals, history, narratives and styles in comprehending organizing perhaps represents those in which its normative dimension appears most clearly. In all these approaches, the participative bases upon which members are bound into an organizational collectivity are, indeed, different. Yet, by transiting through the use of language, all those approaches share a common assumption concerning what links organizational actors. This assumption is that the linkage is a linguistic performance implicating a linguistically competent agent on the one hand and communicable norms on the other. Thus, the linkage of agents into an organizational collectivity is a relation. It is a relation established by individual actors towards communicable rules of conduct. Under such views, it is the realm of individual subjectivity which is, again, implicated. It is implicated in that the establishment of a relation towards sets of norms has at least two sine qua non dimensions. The first one is the assumption that actors are equipped with internal consciousness and volition which enable them to make a choice whether to follow the collective rule or otherwise. The second is the assumption that this subjective decision engages the subject in a moral way. This is simply because withdrawal from the decision to follow the prescriptions of the collective norm is always possible in the face of interests other than those embedded in the norm. The moral dimension, to use the expression coined by Etzioni (1988), is thus always assumed in organizing thought. Whether, in organizational discourse, organizing is viewed as the cause of normative conduct or, on the contrary, as its product, does not in any way affect this basic assumption. The constant interplay, confrontation or convergence between collective and personal interests is always present in both. In that sense, the moral dimension is inherent to the organization of thought. The striving for

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calculability, prediction and control which it encompasses cannot exist without an accompanying exigency that organizational actors subordinate their individual interests to the collective. Such a subordination, even when both kinds of interests are convergent, cannot be operated without the supposition that individuals make decisions which immediately implicate a moral stand. Even when organizations, understood as outcomes of organizing, are viewed as complex and highly fragile social constructions constantly subjected to numerous temporal, spatial and situational contingencies, the assumption of the organizational agent as a moral subject does not disappear. For, within the view that organizing amounts to temporary arrangements arising from interactions which are always open to modification, revision and change, the question of choice or combination between collective versus personal interests remains just as imperative for each organizational agent. It may not be too surprising then that the practically oriented brand of organizing thought views organizational agents as the most fundamental and valuable ‘resource’ of organizing processes. When it takes an extreme form, this view clearly enhances its reliance on the assumption of organizational agents as ethical subjects. Such an extreme form, for instance, is offered by the work of Archier and Serieyx (1986) and will serve here to illustrate this mode of thinking in the discourse of organizing. In the organizational representation of these two authors, one finds that there are two fundamental features presiding over all modes of organizing. The first is a process of mobilization. According to these writers organizing is first of all the mobilization of the entire set of attributes of human subjects since it consists in the mobilization of ‘the intelligence, the imagination, the heart, the critical spirit, the taste for games, the capacity to dream, the quality, the creative talent, the ability to communicate and to observe, the richness and diversity of women and men’ (Archier and Serieyx, 1986:29, my translation). The second is a moral engagement in that it consists of the mobilization of the individual who, entering the collectivity (i.e. the organization), ‘adopts the rules of the game, accepts a morale, enacts the values which must be understood, known and recognised by all’ (Archier and Serieyx, 1986:120). If one were to pastiche this view, one could say that for Archier and Serieyx: ‘No one who puts their individual interests before the general interest may join an organization.’ Or, the pastiche could be expressed more basically as: ‘No one may be a member of an organization who does not take a moral stand.’

The organizational subject Our discussion so far indicates that the constructions of the modern subject and the organizational subject are co-extensive. It is a subject who, to use Touraine’s (1992) characterization, is at once sovereignly free and necessarily subjected (assujeti) to discursive reason. It is a subject thought to encompass both what belongs to individual consciousness and collective representations. It is a subjectus, based in its singularity while at the same time defined by collective imperatives. The discourse on organizing is thus a textual mode of subjectivation, in the Foucauldian sense (Dreyfus and Rabinow,

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1984) which establishes the manner in which actors have to transform themselves into organizational subjects. It is a discourse which, by one and the same move ment, imposes individual freedom and normative subjugation. The organizational subject constructed by this discourse thus, paradoxically, derives its apparent consciousness and ability to choose from its capacity to make itself subservient to collective discursive representations. It is in this sense a modern subject, as Deleuze has made explicit in his interpretation of Foucault’s analysis of the process of discursive subjectivation (Deleuze, 1986). In short, one could say that the formation of a subject in the discourse of organizing turns on a tension between the desires of the singular individual and the requirements of the collectivity to subject those desires in the direction of a common, instrumental mode of life. In this sense, the organizational subject coincides with the modern vision of human actors in which hierarchical distinctions established by discursive orders are incorporated within individualizing utterances. The subjects of organizing discourses, like modern subjects, are conceived as consciously allowing their will to be positioned by collective principles. In this form, the discursively constructed subjects of organizing thought do not really possess autonomous singularities. The subjugated dimension of their subjective realm is inextricably linked to general constraints, rules and regulations. We can therefore agree with Cascardi (1992) who, tracing the formation of the modern subject, noted that: ‘The principle of constraint hidden within subjective desire is named “freedom” by the modern subject’ (Cascardi, 1992:259). Thus constructed, the ‘subjectivity’ of the organizational subject now becomes amenable to further captivation in formal, programmable textures.

Appropriating the organizational subject The ‘humanization of machines’ in the development of contemporary information technology is widely recognized. This process, as Gras (1991) has argued, may perhaps simply constitute the imaginaire and noetics which function as driving forces in the development of large technological projects. Just as the dream of flying may be seen as an imaginary force in the emergence of aeronautics, the dream of constructing humanoid machines may be seen as a necessary mythical force in numerically controlled pseudohumans. From this perspective, it is possible to see the computerization of human endeavour as the core of information technology developments. The general pursuit of what we now call intelligence amplification systems is undoubtedly an outstanding expression of this immanent aspiration. The point of these efforts can perhaps be summarized in Simon’s (1969) argument that information technology, in the last resort, aims at the ‘computer simulation of the human mind’ (Simon, 1969:22). Yet, either under the form of sequential or connectivist computation, only those dimensions of human mental processes that are symbolically, conceptually and transformationally formalizable are, it would seem, as yet appropriatable. In other words, only those human capacities amenable to representational

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communicability (norms) can be computerized. When computation applies itself especially to organizing processes, it is these formalizable aspects of the mind of organizational subjects that are subjected to simulation. As it is, the world of organizations is increasingly permeated with information technology devices. Currently, such devices either ‘support’ or ‘substitute’ for previous humanly performed activities. They are meant to ‘facilitate’ or ‘replace’ organizational performances that are satisfactorily reducible to computational textures. From manufacturing automata to expert systems for various types of decision-making, through computermediated communication systems, computer-aided design systems and programmes for accounting, writing and controlling, the dissemination of computer devices inexorably advances in the world of modern organizing. As a result of such dissemination, the creation of organizational design (representation) through information technology has appeared as a promising possibility. Those, like Keen (1991), for instance, who unconditionally advocate such a development, do not hesitate to consider the necessity of ‘redeploying human capital’ (i.e. the mental and practical abilities of organizational actors) under the premise of an old but newly resurrected organizational metaphor which contends that ‘business has to learn to treat people like machines’ (Keen, 1991:117). It is because of such a prospect that analyses of the meaning and importance of computerized organizational activities have led to the study of ‘virtual organizations’ (Davidow and Malone, 1992; Sotto, 1993). The notion of virtuality, from which the term ‘virtualization’ has been derived for the purpose of the present essay, is not simply the result of theoretical reflection. It rather stems from philosophical and social enquiries attempting to map the ontological specificity of computer knowledge and artefacts. The interest in addressing this question lies, as Heim (1993:109) has expressed it, in the fact that simulation—the primordial mode of being of computer artefacts—despite its apparent mimetographical character, pervades the very nature of the real, the actual. As I have argued elsewhere (Sotto, 1995), the notion of virtuality appears more as a buzzword than as a concept when used in connection with information technology. Buzzwords, however, are not innocent signifiers. Because they appear in discourses at the most general level, buzzwords contribute to the formation of meaning and structure our ways of looking at our most central experiences. Since they are indexical words, buzzwords orient our forms of thought and lead to practices that mediate our culture and institutions. Virtuality as a buzzword of information technology has now been transformed into an object of intellectual scrutiny. We are beginning to witness a range of attempts to fill what was an ‘empty’ signifier with denotative content. These efforts converge around the idea that this virtuality is what most characteristically denotes the computer artefact. For the purpose of the present essay, there are at least three ways in which the term ‘virtual’ is relatable to the nature of computerized artefacts. The first approach is that of etymology where the term ‘virtual’, rooted in the Latin word virtus, means capacity or potentiality. This is a property which all information technology products seem to possess in one way or another (i.e. they have informative and simulative capacities). The second

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approach is that of lexicality where ‘virtual’ is defined as qualifying artefacts that exist in effect or essence though not in actual fact or form. Again, this is a quality which can readily be attached to all information technology products. The third approach is that of philosophy where virtual artefacts have been viewed as artefacts en puissance or possessing a sufficient degree of theoretical perfection or practical plausibility to enable them to be actualized. In sum, and to paraphrase Heim (1993), the term ‘virtual’ can be said to mean: not actually existing but as if actually existing. In this sense, a virtual artefact is an event or entity that is real in effect but not in fact. Formulated in this way, it is also easy to see that all information technology artefacts, even when they stand as pseudo-actors, as in computerized automation, first present themselves as virtualities. Thus, the ‘virtual’, to put the term in substantive form, can clearly be associated with the simulated. And, indeed, simulation is one of the essential forms of the computerized artefact. One way of expressing the simulative potential of virtual artefacts, as revealed in the etymological, lexical and philosophical roots of the ‘virtual’, is to say that they are like but not identical with reality (Benedikt, 1991). It is in this sense that the computerization of organizational performances through the appropriation of the activities of organizational subjects will now be examined as a process of virtualization.

Detaching the subject from its body As we have seen, the discourse of organizing presupposes the agency of the individual organizational members. In this discourse, such members have to be considered as physical entities inhabited by singular subjectivities. The organizational imperative to order the relationships among numerous agents necessarily presumes such entities to be recognizable units. Only with this condition can the legal accountability that entails responsibility be maintained. Here, accountability is viewed in the context of a juridical field where separate body-mind entities can be identified and made responsible. Besides, surveillance and control cannot be exercised if organizational subjects do not present themselves as ‘stable’ and, therefore, ‘manageable’ (predictable) agents. Individual organizational actors are thus fixed in a physical locus—the body. It is this necessary presupposition which implies the presence within these bodies of articulated subjectivities as true sites of agency. Indeed, it is this coupling rather than the presence of the body alone that privileges the body as the locus of organizational authentication and action. It is only because this primary persona or ‘true identity’ is presupposed as being firmly attached to a single physical body that organizational membership can be acquired and grounded. Without such a constructed subject that makes its acts completely individual and locally interpretable, there can be no sense of liability. In short, the organizational subject is inevitably constituted in relation to the physical substrate of the body. Whatever their functions, information technology artefacts are primarily information networks that are constituted through symbolic exchange operating on an electronic substrate. When such symbolic exchanges replicate the symbolic forms used by ‘actual’

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actors, a displacement of origins occurs. It is no longer on the initiative of subjects anchored in human bodies that the exchange takes place but on that of refigured and reinscribed agencies operating from their electronic base. Actors, then, become operators. They have to recognize the modes of agency of the machine and strictly follow its protocol of interaction. The example given by Baudrillard (1987) of the case of a ‘futuristic’ car well illustrates the nature of the relationship between actors and computers: ‘But one can conceive a further stage…a stage where it (the car) becomes an informative network. It talks to you, it informs you “spontaneously” on its general state and on yours (refusing to function if you do not, yourself, function well)’ (Baudrillard, 1987:12, my translation). When human actors join with electronically mediated agencies they undergo a profound change—their subjectivities become detached from their bodily sources. This occurs because, in order to relate to virtual systems, human agents have to be on-line personae. When operating information technologies, human agents have to adopt a ‘terminal’ identity which is part of the technological medium rather than being sourced in a single physical body. A ‘terminal’ identity is much more arbitrarily manipulable than an existential one. Of course, human actors can change their behaviours to suit the occasion, but these changes remain attached to singular bodies. Multiple identities are still understood by others as belonging to the same body. In contrast, terminal identity is much more arbitrary, purposeful and detached from the constant recognition of others. In this way, the relation of an identity or a set of identities to a unique body becomes redundant. Any/ body can operate information networks given a (oftentimes changeable) terminal identity. Put differently, a terminal identity is sufficient to ‘enter’ a virtual system independently of which ‘actual’ body is attached to it. In this respect, Stone (1992), in her reflections on virtual systems, noted that builders of such systems tend to ‘take for granted that the human body is “meat”—obsolete, as soon as consciousness itself can be uploaded into the network’ (Stone, 1992:620). This view is shared by Bukatman (1993) who, in his study of the nature of what he calls the virtual subject, examined the significance of human interaction with information technology devices through the mediation of ‘terminal’ identity. Bukatman’s insights into how ‘terminal identity’ affects the subject can be applied to ‘actual’ human-machine interactions, especially when he observes that: ‘Subject dislocation is enacted by a movement through an excruciating technological decentring spatiality. The site of origin of the subject passes first outside the body and then inside the terminal’ (Bukatman, 1993:180). In this perspective, the presupposed subjective attributes inhabiting bodies such as uniqueness, identity, consciousness and responsibility are detached from their corporeal supports. The uniquely human ‘understanding’ deriving from mind-body entities is dissolved into a general informational resource which is constantly open to disassemblage and reassemblage. Mind-body becomes mind-machine.

The detaching of organizational representation from the subject The observation that virtual reality engineers are making templates for collectivities is now amply documented. At the most basic level, such templates are constituted by the

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architecture of communication networks. These structures not only form relational webs in themselves but also impose specific constraints concerning their modes of operation. Organizational life is increasingly permeated by such virtualized relational devices. But when the activities of organizational agents are mediated by computerized communication networks, their relational loci are displaced. Organizational representations are no longer exposed to subjective idiosyncrasies. When mediated through computer media, the activities of organizational agents are constrained by representations that are already fixed in their electronic base. The development of these relational networks begins with the incorporation of single human modes of expression to more complete patterns of subjective expressive abilities. While the use of databank, financial, accounting, decision-support systems, electronic mail and computer conferencing are unidimensional, the appearance of multimedia and virtual personae (reconstituted ‘informational’ persons) in electronic networks introduces multidimensional expressive modes within the programmed templates of organizational representations. The concept of the virtual workplace expresses this development in the context of the computerization of organizational design. In the virtual workplace, the physical locus of such representations as people, buildings and offices vanishes. Corporate employees can pursue their work through images of themselves beamed into the system, thus making organizational representation essentially virtual and no longer dependent on materialized artefacts (Benedikt, 1991:383–410). It is by drawing on this sort of projection that two organizational theorists, Thach and Woodman (1994), have begun to map areas of organizational activities that can be translated into electronic networks ‘in the future’. According to their analysis, there are four areas of organizational action that are likely to transmute into computerized networks: • individual work support (high bandwidth portable computers, knowbot, advanced forms of multimedia, virtual reality, personal telephone); • group work support (groupware, cyberspace, virtual reality of teams); • advanced organizational automation (electronic data interchange, virtual reality sales, automated customer response systems); • enhanced global communication (language/speech translators, e-mail and voice mail, videophones and desktop videoconferencing, telepresence, informational highways for business communication) (Thach and Woodman, 1994:34). From this mapping, they conclude: One consistent conceptualization of the new structure is a network. This has also been described as a ‘switchboard’, a ‘relational organization’, ‘concentric circles’, and a move from ‘automation islands’ to organizational global systems…Perhaps the ideal organization of the future will resemble a large fluctuating colony of cells or molecules. The cells will be able to cluster in

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groups and then divide into subgroups that can reproduce themselves and absorb themselves, engaging in (symbolic) acts of fission and fusion as needed. (Thach and Woodman, 1994:35) Implicit in such informational and virtual scenarios are specific interpretations of space and time, of proximity and agency. For many philosophers since Kant, space and time have been regarded as a priori categories. In other words, it has been thought that humans cannot conceive of there being ‘no space’ and ‘no time’. Space and time have been viewed as the necessary subjective conditions of human sensitivity; as the preconditions of human perception and existence. Significantly, in virtual reality, space and time are not at all a priori forms. They are artificial constructions. They have to be mathematically formalized and modelled. And the choices extend from already existing models of space and time to space and time with purely arbitrary properties. The same reconception of proximity and agency occurs when organizational representations are situated in communication networks. For telepresence, the electronic mode of presencing is not at all equivalent to human presence. As Queau (1993:17) has commented, telepresence is intrinsically contradictory. It suggests, on the one hand, a form of presence (telepresence) at a distance (telepresence) whereas conventional presence, on the other hand, is the opposite of distance. Human presence is neither a representation nor a distant experience, while telepresence is the sheer ‘presentification’ of representation. Just as unmediated human agency requires human presence, the logic of electronically based agency rests on the inversion of this requirement. This essential difference in understanding space, time, proximity and agency between humans and information technology distinguishes the way in which the presupposed organizational subject is virtualized. Information technological accomplishment expunges human presence in the sense of a situated, positioned, thinking and acting subject that reads, interprets, reinscribes and re-enacts the world of its representation. For information technology, by redefining presence, desubjectivizes human activities as a source of organizational representation.

The relocation of performance Advanced organizational automation can be defined as those technologies that increase the efficiency of the organization. (Thach and Woodman, 1994:37)

Statements of this kind are common in studies of information technology applied to organizational activities. In most of these studies, it is taken for granted that if information technology does not increase organizational performance, then computerization should not be pursued for its own sake. Even when the question of

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organizational performance is not directly addressed in these works, their authors frequently refer to the performance capabilities of computer technology. An example from Keen (1991) will serve to underline my point: USAA, a major insurance firm has dramatically reduced costs and improved customer service, staff productivity, and efficiency through pioneering uses of image technology. One simple measure of benefit to USAA is an increase in policies handled per employee by a factor of five. American Express has used image technology to cut costs in several areas of customer billing by 25 percent. Northwest Airlines got a three-month payback from its investment in image processing to handle the tedious and expensive process of analysing airplane tickets to identify payments to and from other airlines for interlining. Continental Insurance Co. cites as just one example of improved efficiency an underwriter who wanted to see all the claims of over $50,000 filed against a certain client three years ago. What would have taken four clerks a month to find took just one person eight to nine minutes. (Keen, 1991:7) Further, the way in which information technology is presented as improving performance varies according to the nature of the organizational problem. When authors believe that hierarchies constitute obstacles to efficient collective action, then the flattening effect of information technology is used to indicate its performative capacity. When the unequal distribution of knowledge is diagnosed as an impediment to efficient collective action, then the general accessibility of computerized knowledge is advanced as a means of improving performance. When the ‘human factor’ is thought to be an obstruction to performative action—i.e. subjective abilities such as memory, interpretation, reliability— then the superior performative capacities of information technology are emphasized. In such ways, performative action is thus implicitly perceived as situated outside human subjectivity. Ideal performativity is assumed to lie in the operating modes of the computer. Even the subjectively internalized performances of organizational actors are now reinterpreted as being (somehow) intrinsically computer-like in operation. In short, the presupposed subjective consciousness behind the enactment of performative action is now viewed as being essentially machine-like.

Artificial morality It may then come as no surprise to learn that the moral dimension of organizational action—normally understood to be located in the subjectivities of co-operative actors— has also been analysed in computerizable terms by Peter Danielson (1992) in Artificial Morality: Virtuous Robots for Virtual Games. Although presented as a game, the plausibility of such a development should not be underestimated, as the author makes clear:

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You may find my challenge fantastic. This is a mistake. What I propose—my moral olympics—is not science fiction. Similar contests have been constructed; I am merely generalizing what is found in the literature of experimental sociology and economics, and the growing field of Artificial Life. More important, the technology to support ideas like this is readily available. For example, the high-level computer languages and computer-assisted communication which allows widespread participation in my schemes are available free to most academics. (Danielson, 1992:5) My use of this work here is not to analyse its ‘scientific’ claims for the possibility of artificial morality. The purpose of this section is simply to show that the moral dimension of collective action has not escaped attempts at its virtualization. In order to do so, I will simply quote a few passages of Danielson’s work pertaining to morality and co-operation in the context of collective action. To begin with, let us note that the moral dimension of agency, according to Danielson, revolves around questions of individual versus collective interests in the context of co-operative agency. In Danielson’s view, this is expressed as the dilemma between rational (non-self-constraining) and moral (self-constraining) choices: Is it rational to be moral? Morality has evident advantages. A group of moral agents, able to co-operate by trusting one another, will do better than a group of amoralists. Co-operative civilized life is better for each than unconstrained conflict (the so-called state of nature). But this argument goes too fast. We can agree that morality generates social goods but rationality speaks to individuals. From the individual perspective the advantage of morality is problematic. Morality involves—at least—constraints; it requires that an agent sometimes act contrary to her own interests in favour of mutual advantage. Therefore moral behaviour generates a public good available to all. However, rationality recommends free riding on public goods. The rational advice seems to be; let others practice moral constraint: remain amorally free to collect the benefits of other’s constraints…therefore from the point of view of rationality, morality is deeply problematic. (Danielson, 1992:3, original emphasis) From this beginning, Danielson wants to argue that rationality and morality can be combined: ‘In this book I show that there are moral agents which are rational in the following sense: they successfully solve social problems that amoral agents cannot solve’ (Danielson, 1992:17). Consequently, he continues: ‘My overall proposal is that a new method, which I call artificial morality, is the appropriate way to deal with these problems. Artificial morality combines game theory and artificial intelligence to develop instrumental contractarianism’ (ibid.: 17, original emphasis). While Danielson does not reject the possibility of moral expert systems, his attempt is less ambitious. Thus, he first points out: ‘I suspect that the simulation techniques found in Artificial Intelligence can

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advance our understanding of these problems: one could attempt to build moral expert systems’ (Danielson, 1992:54). Then he makes clear that his own project is not concerned with this level of artificiality, by answering the question which he himself poses: ‘Why should someone interested in moral philosophy attempt to build a (software) robot? One lesson of AI (artificial intelligence) has been the enormous distance between plausible philosophical theory and workable computational practice’ (Danielson, 1992:54). But despite this gap, he claims: ‘I hope to show that moral philosophy will prove more tractable than epistemology. My theory is an attempt to implement part of David Gauthier’s theory of morals by agreement which, contrary to McCarthy, I find almost precise enough to be implemented mechanically’ (Danielson 1992:55). It is not necessary to detail further Danielson’s computerized game in order to appreciate its general aim. In our preceding discussion of the subjective attributes of the presupposed organizational subject, the moral subject, through computerization, is submitted to detachment and displacement. The moral dimension of human agency envisioned in this manner is here again translated into computer agency. Eventually, the presupposed necessary moral consciousness, subordinated to contractual engagement and effective responsibility, becomes an attribute of the machine and no longer that of the human subject.

The decentred subject, information technology and organizing In contrast to the subject of modernity that presupposes a body equipped with a centred and unitary ‘subjectivity’, it is possible to envisage, from a postmodern horizon, a subject which is decentred and non-unitary. This alternative view of the subject stems from the work of a number of thinkers among whom Derrida can be said to occupy a prominent place. In the work of these philosophers there are at least two themes considered to characterize the decentred subject. The first is that of mediation and representation in relation to subjective consciousness. The second is that of existential presence versus absence in relation to subjective agency. Contrary to the presupposition underlying the conception of the modern subject according to which consciousness emerges from a unique and controlling self, Derridean philosophy suggests that consciousness is never a direct, unmediated experience. Being conscious is not a state of mind concomitant to bodily experience. It is a ‘suspension’ (reflection) of the never-ending flow of worldly events and experiences through their location in temporal and spatial terms. This complex process of location is what Derrida calls ‘writing’, by which human agents define and order themselves through acts of spacing, categorizing and differentiating. ‘Writing’ is thus a mode of involvement in the world which denies immediate human and worldly presence. As Cooper (1989) defines it, writing ‘is not a direct reflection on the outside world but a relationship made with what has already been inscribed’ (Cooper, 1989:485). Consciousness, then, is not related to the way human actors are immediately present or how they present themselves in the world. It is a mode of relating to the world by re-presentation where the ‘re’ stands

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for already inscribed marks. This process of inscription, however, has no anchorage other than an unending chain of terms, notions, concepts, traces. Once a term or a set of terms structures consciousness, its understanding necessarily involves and excludes other terms ad infinitum. So that, following the thought of Nietzsche quoted at the beginning of this essay, ‘writing’ seems to be subject to an autonomous process which lies beyond individual intentionality. A thought or a state of consciousness comes when ‘it’ wants and not when the presupposed sovereign volition or purpose of the ‘modern subject’ intends. This decentring of volition in relation to consciousness also applies to the presupposed ‘unity’ of the self in the modern subject. For the play of traces, marks, notions, terms which re-present and thereby constitute consciousness is always inhabited by their opposites. Derrida (1972) shows that writing is paradoxical, fragmented, constantly repeating itself in a process that has neither beginning nor end. Consciousness, then, is constituted by a weave of texts—a texture—by intertwined fragments involving constant shifts and displacements. Subjectivity is thus no longer an integrated unitary and selfdirecting entity but a site of accidental and shifting textual encounters. Such a view of consciousness which erases the unitary, modern subject also points to another understanding of the source of agency. The source of agency, far from being located in the knowing self, is distributed in the temporary inter-text that forms a consciousness at a certain moment and in a certain place. This view, as it appears in the work of Derrida, derives from his debunking of what he calls the ‘metaphysics of presence’, that is, the traditional concept of the sign as referring to a thing or concept. Against this conception, Derrida shows how the sign instead represents the present in its absence. Writing, for instance, marks the absence of speech. The word marks the absence of the object which it is supposed to represent. The use of a term marks the absence of its opposite. This mediation by absence, one could say, means that agency does not find its origins in the purposiveness of the self-aware subject, fully present to itself and to the world. Just as the subject is constructed by what is ‘other’ than itself, so is agency elicited by what is ‘absent’. In this sense, the source of agency is essentially relational. It is because, as Derrida argues, a fully present reality directly available to human understanding is not possible that the ‘actual’ world is continuously deferred—that is, ‘absent’—in time and space. And it is this absence that calls for, orients and constrains agency. The decentred subject is thus an open-ended agency. It is an indeterminate subject which is constructed by symbolic orders. It is a topos for the exchange of discourses. Its fixity does not depend upon its nature as subject but on the linguistic, cultural and social orders that constitute it. Viewed in this way, the decentred subject is clearly more amenable to virtualization than is the centred, Cartesian subject of modernity. It is exactly this idea of the decentred subject that Stone (1992) raises in the context of computer technology: Many recent theorists view individuals’ experiences of their own bodies as socially constructed—over and against other approaches that hold the body to be ontologically present to itself and to the experience of the (always unitary) ‘self’ inhabiting it. If we consider the physical map of the body and our

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experience of inhabiting it as socially mediated, then it should not be difficult to imagine the next step in a progression towards the social, to imagine the location of the self inhabiting the body as similarly socially mediated—not in the usual terms of position within a social field or of capacity to experience, but in terms of the physical location of a subject independent of the body, within a system of symbolic exchange—that is, information technology. (Stone, 1992:614) What is emphasized here is the significance of Derrida’s ‘writing’ for comprehending computer technology as a writing space, to use Bolter’s (1991) term: ‘All computing is reading and writing. The computer is therefore a technology for all writers—scientists and engineers as well as scholars, novelists and poets. A text in the computer is always an interplay of signs, which may be mathematical and logical symbols, words in English, or graphics and video images treated symbolically’ (Bolter, 1991:10). Here the decentred subject is better understood as a writing space: ‘With the technique of writing—on stone or clay, papyrus or paper, and particularly on the computer screen—the writer comes to regard the mind itself as a writing space. The writing space becomes a metaphor, in fact literate culture’s root metaphor, for the human mind’ (Bolter, 1991:11). For what we used to call thinking can now also be better thought of as ‘writing’: ‘To think is to write in the language of thought and to remember is to search the space of our memory until we find what is written there. This is exactly the view of artificial intelligence, which completely identifies thought with the kind of symbol manipulation, that is, writing. That is what the computer can do’ (Bolter, 1991:211). Given this conception of the organizational actor as a decentred subject in the computer writing space, the distinction between agency rooted in a bodily support and one in an electronic base begins to seem far less clear. Through the use of writing, of inscriptions that deny purposive subjects as author-ities, both modes of agency are sourced in mediating devices—what we may call the textures of text— writing. Since agency derives from subjects and relationships between subjects are constituted and mediated by writing (inscriptions) as a technology of communication and community, then both modes of agency—the centred and the decentred—coalesce in the unfolding of textures. So that just as soon as textuality (the set of texts that recombine into other texts) can be computerized, computer textures can be substituted for social textures. Before examining this view in more detail, it is necessary to consider a different conception of the unfolding of textures as the source of organizational agency. This approach has been explored by Cooper and Fox (1990) and will serve here as a point of reference. Basic to their argument, these authors assume that texture relates to the idea of connectedness in action on the basis of an ‘endless series of relationships which continually move into each other’ (Cooper and Fox, 1990:576). But this understanding of texture, although equally rooted in the conception of the organizational subject as a decentred subject, does not relate to writing (in the sense discussed earlier). For, as Cooper and Fox write: ‘Texture can be shown or demonstrated but never analysed and defined—by definition, analysis and explanation risk losing the nature of the very thing they seek to elucidate’ (Cooper and Fox, 1990:576). Texture, then, is the tacit dimension of texts: ‘an important feature of texture, namely, that its nature is to remain always tacit,

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invisible, and resistant to theorising; its intrinsic complexity and mobility makes it impossible to pin down’ (Cooper and Fox, 1990:577). In this light, agency as the unfolding of textures puts a different complexion on the idea of writing as a ‘space’. In support of the metaphor of weaving, Cooper and Fox argue that: Glossing is a socially instituted, socially controlled way of fixing the mobile, aberrant tendencies of the texture of the text; the gloss itself is intended for ‘instant consumption’ and is usually the product of a prior idea, expectation or plan; its fixed meaning implies that the agent/‘reader’ is always external to it, i.e., is situated in such a way as to think of the glossed text as something already constituted and therefore beyond his or her influence. In contrast, weaving recognises the implicit tendency of textures to transgress socially contrived meaning; the woven text opens out in a centrifugal way and can only be experienced as an activity of creative production, in which the agent/‘reader’ is caught up as an active element in the ongoing unfinished movement of the text. (Cooper and Fox, 1990:578) In other words, there is a ‘beyond’ to the text—an ungraspable, ongoing, unfinished movement that can be neither explicated nor formalized. It seems that the difference between this inexplicable, infinite movement that characterizes the decentred subject and the movement of the computerized, virtual subject is that the latter would follow explicitly formulated rules. Yet, Bolter argues: We have mentioned intertextuality as a facet of the new literary theory that the computer both endorses and subtly undermines. Intertextuality is more than the references within a text and allusions between texts that are common in literature: it is the interrelation of all texts in the same subject, language, or culture. Some, like Roland Barthes, say that these interrelations cannot be mapped, because a text depends upon many anonymous codes that can never be set forth. Barthes wrote, for example, that ‘I is not an innocent subject anterior to the text. this “I” which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origins are lost)’ (Barthes, 1974:10). But there is a great difference between the infinite and the inaccessible. Electronic writing with its graphical representations of structure encourages us to think that intertextual relations can indeed be mapped out, made explicit—never fully, but with growing accuracy and completeness… it is true that the computer takes the mystery out of intertextuality and makes it instead a well-defined process of interconnection, the collective act of reading one text in the light of others. Any sense of mystery that remains is the residue of the age of writing or printing, when the technology provided no good way to embody the movement from one text to another. (Bolter, 1991:202–203) In this view, the ‘creative site’ of the decentred subject would only be unnecessarily

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‘mysterious’. Unfolding textures would be the same in both computer-generated and decentred human textures. For, if one follows Bolter, it is easy to see that, given a sufficiently large repertoire of organizational modules (texts) and rules of connection, a computer could generate an infinite number of organizational combinations all functioning as different sites of agency. Yet, whatever the differences between agency as the unknowable unfolding of textures and agency as manifest textural unfolding, it remains the case that in both views the central issue of agency becomes that of the mutuality of decentred subject and the text. Cooper (1989), in his outline of the work of Derrida, has used a metaphor from modern transport to illustrate this point. In my view, his insight bears on electronic textualization as well as writing in the Derridean sense: Extending the metaphor of the pathway into the world of modern transport, Derrida’s analysis of writing would compel us to admit that it is the motorway that ‘drives’ (directs) us in our vehicles just as much as we think ourselves to be consciously in the driving seat. We are driven as we drive or, as Derrida would say, we are written as we write. (Cooper, 1989:489–490) This means that the decentred subject has no way to escape the drift of the medium. The subject’s relation to text can claim no special author-ity since its consciousness (thought) is constituted by a network of interrelating and already inscribed signs. In this sense, the sovereign intentionality of the Cartesian subject is eluded since it is also part of the network. From this view-point, it is tempting to think that if there is no privileged authorship but simply textual networks, then it is possible to consider intelligence amplification programs as such textual networks. It is also possible to claim, as many producers of such programs do, that such networks are all there is to thought. The question put by Heidegger quoted at the beginning of this essay now begins to make sense. If human thinking, formerly thought to be the origin of all re-presentation and agency, can be located in computers, it raises significant existential and ontological questions. Bolter (1991) raises one such question in the following quotation: ‘Computers manipulate signs according to formal rules: is this sufficient to constitute thought? Do these manipulations have a content and a possessor? Are they intended by their author, and indeed who is the author of these manipulations: the computer program or the human who wrote the program?’ (Bolter, 1991:222). But, as I have previously indicated, the present essay is concerned not with providing answers (however tentative) to such questions but with sensitizing ourselves to their emergence. Clearly, philosophical thoughts considering consciousness and volition as accidental textual configurations stemming from networks of signs that lead to the view of the decentred subject and agency as the unfolding of textures raise troublesome questions about the efforts in computer technology to virtualize the realm of subjectivity. Unless there actually is a ‘mysterious’ force inhabiting human bodies which ‘transgresses socially contrived meaning’ so that ‘the woven text opens out in a centrifugal way and can only be experienced as an activity of creative production’, a new relation installs

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itself. It is no longer human agents who, by their thinking, unfold and transgress the textures of their histories, social fields and acquired discourses, but formalized writing implanted in machines. Lyotard (1991), in his reflection on the inhuman, reminds us that when it comes to viewing thinking as information processing, it is difficult to avoid the idea of ‘thinking by and through the machines’ implied by the technoscientific view of the world: You know—technology wasn’t invented by us humans. Rather the other way around. As anthropologists and biologists admit, even the simplest life forms, infusoria (tiny algae synthesized by light at the edges of tidepools a few million years ago) are already technical devices. Any material system is technological if it filters information useful to its survival, if it memorizes and processes that information and makes inferences based on the regulating effect of behaviour, that is, if it intervenes on and impacts its environment so as to assure its perpetuation at least. (Lyotard, 1991:12) To resist this view, one has to ask the most basic question: ‘Can thought go on without a body?’ (Lyotard, 1991:12). For Lyotard, a fundamental reason for resisting the mechanistic drift lies in the view that bodily thinking is intimately connected with suffering: If this suffering is the mark of true thought, it’s because we think in the alreadythought, in the inscribed. And because it’s difficult to leave something hanging in abeyance or take it up again in a different way so what hasn’t been thought yet can emerge and what should be inscribed will be. I’m not speaking just about words lacking in a superabundance of available words, but about ways of assembling these words, ways we should accept despite the articulations inspired in us by logic, by the syntax of our languages, by constructions inherited from our reading…The unthought hurts because we’re comfortable in what’s already thought. And thinking, which is accepting this discomfort, is also, to put it bluntly, an attempt to have done with it. That’s the hope sustaining all writing (painting, etc.): that at the end, things will be better. As there is no end, this hope is illusory. So: the unthought would have to make your machines uncomfortable, the uninscribed that remain to be inscribed would have to make their memory suffer. Do you see what I mean? Otherwise, why would they ever start thinking? We need machines that suffer from the burden of their memory. (But suffering doesn’t have a good reputation in the technological megalopolis. Especially the suffering of thinking. It doesn’t even incite laughter anymore. The idea of it doesn’t occur, that’s all. There’s a trend towards ‘play’, if not performance.) (Lyotard, 1991:20, original emphasis) Yet, to situate human thinking beyond the knowably expressible, as suggested by Cooper,

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or in a mode of being (suffering) which machines cannot experience, as suggested by Lyotard, does not remove the growing colonization of the organizational world by computerized ‘writing space’. Building on the metaphor proposed by Cooper (1989), one could say that decentred organizational subjects are now more and more compelled to be ‘driven’ (i.e. written) by the ‘motorway’ (i.e. the computer ‘highway’). They are increasingly bound to act in accordance with the paths inscribed in the virtual writing space. Faced with such a prospect, reflection on organizing may require a reorientation. Rather than codifying processes of organizing, which, as codes, may be captured by information technology and virtualized, organizational theorizing might with advantage concern itself with ‘thinking’ in the senses suggested by Heidegger and Lyotard. Its future, if it is to serve a human end, may lie, in the last resort, in offering an open-ended field for transgression; not only transgression of ‘socially contrived meaning’ but of thinking itself. To pursue this future, it must depart from the rationalistic certitude that organizational activities are regulated by a set of predefined values and principles. It must do away with the traditional conviction that all organizational competence can be translated into formal rules. It must abandon the view that all practical activities can be formulated into propositions, theories or streamlined understandings (see, e.g. Danielson, 1992; Thach and Woodman, 1994). For the seduction of virtualization may engender a habit of thinking that organizing is simply the organization of data without intrinsic meaning. In the longer term, the challenge of the virtualization of the organizational subject is not that it may surpass or substitute for the human decentred one. It is rather that the decentred organizational subject may fall into the complacency of letting itself be comfortably ‘conducted’ and ‘driven’ by the virtual writing space.

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Boundaries of Politics, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 279–312. Cooper, R. and Burrell, G. (1988) ‘Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis 1: an introduction’, Organization Studies 9(l): 91–112. Cooper, R. and Fox, S. (1990) ‘The texture of organizing’, Journal of Management Studies 27(6): 575–582. Corvellec, H. and Sotto, R. (1993) ‘La chanson de la performance—une épopée de l’organization’, Working Paper Series, Institute of Economic Research, University of Lund. Czarniawska-Joerges, B. (1994) ‘The process of organizing’, Working Paper Series, Institute of Economic Research, University of Lund. Danielson, P. (1992) Artificial Morality: Virtuous Robots for Virtual Games, London: Routledge. Davidow, W. and Malone, M. (1992) The Virtual Corporation, New York: HarperCollins. Deleuze, G. (1986) Foucault, Paris: Editions de Minuit. Derrida, J. (1972) La dissemination, Paris: Le Seuil. Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (1984) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester Press. Etzioni, A. (1988) The Moral Dimension: Towards a New Economics, New York: Collier Macmillan. Fellous, A. (1993) ‘STV-Synthetic TV: from laboratory prototype to production tools’, in N. Thalmann and D. Thalmann (eds) Virtual Worlds and Multimedia, Chichester: Wiley. Fisher, P. (1978) ‘The recovery of the body’, Humanities in Society 1:133–146. Foucault, M. (1966) Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris: Gallimard. Frazer, H. (1992) The Subject of Speech Perception: An Analysis of the Philosophical Foundations of the Information-Processing Model, London: Macmillan. Gras, A. (1991) L’imaginaire des techniques de pointes, Paris: L’Armarthan. Heidegger, M. (1967) Wegmarken, Frankfurt: Klostéiman. Heim, M. (1993) The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoskin, D. and Fineman, S. (1990) ‘Organizing processes’, Journal of Management Studies 27(6): 583–604. Kallinikos, J. (1992) ‘Digital songs: aspects of contemporary work and life’, Systems Practice 5(4): 13–45. Keen, P. (1991) Shaping the Future: Business Design Through Information Technology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Latour, B. (1986) ‘The powers of association’, in J. Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 261–277. ——(1993) ‘On technical mediation: the messenger lectures on the evolution of civilisation’, Working Paper Series 4, University of Lund. Lyotard, J.-F. (1971) Discours, Figures, Paris: Klincksieck. ——(1979) La condition postmoderne, Paris: Editions de Minuit. ——(1991) The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby, Cambridge: Polity Press. Nietzsche, F. (1990) Beyond Good and Evil, London: Penguin Books.

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Polanyi, M. (1964) The Tacit Dimension, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Queau, P. (1993) Le Virtuel, Seyssel: Editions du Champ Vallon. Rousseau, C. (1974) ‘Les sujets de droh’, in Droit International Public, vol. 2, Paris: Sirey. Simon, H. (1969) The Sciences of the Artificial, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smircich, L. and Morgan, G. (1982) ‘Leadership: the management of meaning’, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 18(3): 257–273. Sotto, R. (1993) ‘The virtual organization’, Studies in Action and Enterprises, 2, Stockholm University. ——(1995) ‘Organizing in cyberspace’, Scandinavian Journal of Management 12:25–41. Stone, A.R. (1992) ‘Virtual systems’, in J. Crary and S. Naddaff (eds) Zone 6, New York: MIT Press. Thach, L. and Woodman, R. (1994) ‘Organizational change and information technology, managing on the edge of cyberspace’, Organizational Dynamics, Summer. Tichy, N., Tushman, M. and Fombrun, C. (1979) ‘Social network analysis for organizations’, Academy of Management Review 4(4): 507–519. Touraine, A. (1992) Critique de la modernité, Paris: Fayard. Weick, K.E. (1969/79) The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd edn, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. ——(1988) ‘Enacted sensemaking in crisis situations’, Journal of Management Studies 25 (4): 305–331. ——(1993) ‘Collective mind in organizations: heedful interrelating on flight decks’, Administrative Science Quarterly 38(2): 357–381. Williamson, O. (1986) The Economic Institution of Capitalism—Firm, Markets, Relational Contracting, London: Collier Macmillan.

4 DIAGRAMMATIC BODIES Ron Day

We are all partial bodies now, into the future. Ron Day

One element in Robert Cooper’s work which I think is central to it but which may be lost in a reading determined by the traditional parameters of organizational theory is the theorization of the organization of bodies and, especially, the relation of the human body to technological objects. This is an especially important question because it symbolizes the relation of the human body to other bodies, such as ‘natural bodies’ and even other human bodies. The traditional mode of this relation, I will argue, is one of subjective lack. Briefly put, ‘subjective lack’ means that whatever is read as ‘other’ or as ‘object’ is primarily read in terms of the (or a) human body, a body which is not only understood as primary in any social analysis, but is understood in terms of its own self-creative composition (which critiques such as Gasché’s (1986) term, ‘auto-affective presence’ seek to reveal). Hence, even in reading the human body as lack and the other body as supplement, the supplement is read in terms of its fulfilling a lack which is not its own. Against such a traditional reading of bodies as dominated by the classical human subject, I will argue that all bodies are partial and that bodies gain their specificity as bodies based on strongly mutual relations. I will further argue that subjectivity is granted to bodies only through the co-presence of other bodies in space. The consequences of such arguments are, among many others, that traditional divisions between the ‘human’, the ‘technological’, and the ‘animal’ are blurred. What I hope to do, also, is to reinvigorate notions of passivity and negativity in relation to the creation of freedom and history for that series of beings we always provisionally call ‘human’ beings. Cooper’s work investigates the general problematic of organization within various themes: that of inside—outside, that of folds, and that of proximity and distance. Such themes are investigated according to procedures associated with dominant names in the

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history of phenomenology and poststructural theory (Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, among others). Each of these themes not only carries problems about the logic of social space, but also about the role of bodies in constructing that space. Poststructural theory frequently disrupts claims about the self-presence and selfrepresentation of bodies, attacking claims of autonomy derived from organic and dialectical theories. By demonstrating that claims of autonomous, auto-affective presence are dependent upon exteriorities or excesses to those claims (and their respective body or bodies), traditional claims of presence and autonomy may not only be deconstructed, but presence and supplementation can be shown as logically bound to one another in a way that problematizes traditional ontology and the neoclassical politics of individuality. This means that we must trace back the relation of subject and object beyond their particular economies of force and pay attention to those more general economies which exceed both terms, and which set up the conditions for subject and object, presence and supplement, lack and projection. Deconstructing and retheorizing the subject’s investment of objects with desire, however, is complicated. Within traditional psychoanalysis, for example, subjective investments of desire may involve not only ‘traditional’ objects, but also persons and parts of persons (‘part-objects’). Such investments may be in the form of content projections (as in Freud’s penis envy), in the form of the subject’s own lack (as in the Lacanian reading of castration) or, as in Winnicott (1971), may be transitional investments toward ‘higher’ forms of development. In each of these cases, however, the ‘normal’ economy of investment aims toward achieving a presence of person qua the ideal of the classical subject. In Freud, this presence is achieved by the ‘resolution’— however compromised—of Oedipal conflicts. In Lacan (at least the Lacan of the 1954–5 seminar on the ego), presence is achieved by a recognition of the otherness of the other and, thus, the other ceasing to carry the imaginary object of my own lack (what could be read as an incorporation of castration—the same outcome as Freudian analysis). In Winnicott, the transitional object is a momentary compensation for a more original loss which must be redeemed. What is common to these analysts is that the object tends to lose its own ability to determine the scale upon which the subject can and will be measured and upon which the subject may develop. Further, the social conditions for the choice of object remain largely uninterrogated. Space and time become irrelevant other than being structures for narratives of developmental phases, illnesses and fixations. In short, all positive possibilities for analysing the object are themselves castrated and territorialized into a reductive form of analysis. The object loses its ability positively to constitute the subject according to the object’s own terms, and, further, the very synthesis of subject and object remains unanalysed outside the sanctioned structures of family, culture and state. As Deleuze and Guattari write of Freud’s analysis of the Wolf-Man: six, seven wolves are present, and yet Freud feels free to interpret them in terms of the father (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:38). There are two general problems which occur when attempting to free the object of this type of reduction to subjective lack. The first, of course, is to interrogate the logic of reading the object as representing a lack of the subject (in other words, as an intensified

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representational projection of an ideal subject or some part of an ideal subject). This follows the critical path of Derrida’s deconstruction of subject-object, presencesupplement relationships. Second, it requires a positive reading of the results of this critique, and a rereading of the position of the object and the subject—now as generalized as well as specific bodies—in space.

Supplementation Despite Cooper’s (1993) attentiveness to problems of the organized body, there is one point in his essay, ‘Technologies of Representation’, where the logic of supplementation appears. It will be useful to focus briefly on this part in order to advance our analysis. Cooper’s argument cites Scarry’s discussion of technological objects as supplements or replacements for the human body’s lack. A chair, for example, is accorded three aspects of representation: ‘as body part, it re-presents the spine; as bodily need, it re-presents body weight; as a more general projection, it re-presents sentient awareness’ (Cooper, 1993:281). Cooper’s hyphenation in ‘re-presentation’ emphasizes that he is discussing representation as the replication of a prior bodily presence. Yet, at the same time, there are several other logics being pursued: representation as the representation of a part of the body, representation as a lack of a part as well as a lack within the body as a whole, and representation as the fulfilment of the subject’s wish (‘The shape of the chair… represents… not just a perception of an actuality (my tiredness) but also the possibility of reversing that actuality, i.e., feeling the tiredness and wishing it gone’) (Cooper, 1993:281). In brief, the term ‘representation’ contains logics of repetition, extension and displacement. None of this invalidates Cooper’s argument about representation in his essay. What I want to argue, however, is that the multiplicity of meanings above is masked by the singular term, ‘representation’, and that by working through this logic of supplementation, other modes of analysing objects may be arrived at. There is a great temptation to read technological objects as extensions of the human body and as extensions which eventually come to replace that body. There are both older humanist and contemporary critiques which apocalyptically warn of the replacement of ‘the body’ by ‘orders of simulacra’ (Baudrillard, 1983). But extensions and displacements are not necessarily replacements or ‘representations’. In Derrida’s work, for example, the priority of the supplement over any original and originating presence results in a trail of supplementarity—of signifiers without any transcendental signified. Translation, as a term for the general economy of representation, for example, entails a repetition whose very iteration allows a signified, but in which no original term may strictly be referred to as ‘re-placed’ or ‘re-presented’ since there is no presence that could be cited as originary. Whereas Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum carries a strong sense of mourning for a ‘real’ (and thus a debt to that logic of the real), Derrida’s (1976) work problematizes the logic of any originary real and suggests that bodies are site—and time—specific according to the inscriptions of

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language and other modes of writing (écriture générale). Thus, ‘displacement’ entails not a re-placement of an originary body, but rather a translation of an already translated series of signs. This does not mean that the body, say the human body, does not contain empirical resistances to interpretation and is not itself empirical, but rather that the reading of that empiricism cannot escape the conceptualizations which determine it. To put it another way, we must remember that, for Saussure and the critique of signification which Derrida develops from that source, signifieds are not empirical, but rather they are conceptual. Cooper, along with Heidegger, Virilio and many others, is correct in warning of the replacement of the real by universalizing, systematic readings. The problem, however, is not that of masking the real by series of signs, but rather of failing to account for the historicity of signs which constitute and produce the real. The problem of the simulacrum lies in the reification of what is already conceptually there. It also lies in a dire neglect of the negativities and resistances created by bodies reading and writing each other into relations and existence; that is, in neglecting the autopoietic spacings of the real which occur in spite of the conditioning restraints of structural power. Thus, technological objects as ‘extensions’ of ‘the body’ must now be read and understood not according to mimetic epistemologies of ‘re-presentation’, but according to the constructions of bodies and space by pragmatic, affective relations between bodies. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the Body without Organs (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, 1987) is useful here because it allows that bodies are not self-constructed, but rather that they are given specificity according to forces, fluxes and movements of ‘territorialization’ and ‘deterritorialization’ which are neither fully exterior to nor fully interior within those bodies. These terms are not oppositional to each other, but rather they denote the construction of beings and becomings through forces of production and through lines of transversal flight across production machines (i.e. productive bodies and assemblages of bodies). Consequently, the term ‘extensive objects’ no longer refers to appendages to ‘the body’, but now must be understood as sites for the mutation and construction of bodies according to various modes of production, expression and planes of meaning. As Deleuze and Guattari (1983) argue in Anti-Oedipus and in reference to Lewis Mumford, in A Thousand Plateaus (1987:457), the term ‘production machine’ refers to technological, human and natural bodies in productive chains of relations without which they would not be. Production machines produce not simply objects and subjects but, more fundamentally, the actions and meanings by which objects and subjects come to be. The term ‘machine’ is not here a metaphor, but rather it covers a variety of linked productive agencies cutting across traditional ontological categories (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983:36). For example, technological and human bodies link with one another in production; in use, in being used up, and in being hooked on one another (the narcotic language of early computer jargon, as well as literature, is useful here (see, for example, Ronell’s (1992) Crack Wars)). Further, discursive production and technological production work upon each other to such a degree that essentialist distinctions are impossible to determine. Historically, technological production takes place within the context of discourses about production, invention and use. On the other hand, certain discursive productions are only possible through the presence of certain technical

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machines—whether those machines function as rhetorical tropes for discursive production or as actual tools for the production of those discourses (e.g. personal computers and word-processing software allow the writing and editing of this essay in a way not possible twenty years ago). Out of such mixed economies, the relations of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘human’ and ‘machine’, ‘man’ and ‘animal’ develop and change, both concretely and abstractly. The subject’s body, therefore, cannot be posited as ‘the body’ independent of its relations of production, nor can the ‘object’ be situated as a mere thing, solely of a technological or of a ‘natural’ order. All bodies both express external elements of force and internal elements of resistance in their linkages as production machines. Not only does the human body not have clear and distinct positive boundaries, but moreover, the traditional category of ‘the human’ fails to be anything other than generalizations of specific temporal relations with other beings—‘animal’, ‘technological’, and even other humans. In this way, the Heideggerian ‘question of man’, for example, is no longer a question of essence, but is instead a possibility for being according to how a variety of bodies—including the ‘human’—touch or affect one another in space and time (including different types and modes of ‘memory’). The ‘being’ of each body is not the expression of a single internal or external code, nor does it represent a universal essence, rather it follows from the in-common relation of bodies to one another and their relays of replies. (For arguments developing the concept of ‘singularity’ from the ‘in-common’, see Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 and Agamben, 1993). The construction of bodies in space and their being as a function of such activity precludes the possibility of a ‘return to the body’ that could refer to a return to an autonomous agency of self or originary coding. Bodies are spatially related and their being is a function of site-specific and time-relevant forces. Possibilities for invention, becoming and flight demand that such relations be constituted both by a heterogeneity of forces and by a negativity of space so that transversal movements between levels and types of production are, indeed, possible. Within closed systems, transversal movements are of a very limited duration and lead nowhere. Politically speaking, heterogeneity, as a principle of a truly public space and policy, means not simply acknowledging or allowing a multiplicity of elements or production machines within a structured space, but of linking conceptual abstract machines with concrete relations and of allowing negative spaces for withdrawal and subject formations so that transversal movements between levels become not only theorizable but actual and so that the event of history may occur. Transversal relations need a possible negativity in space through which bodies can radically position themselves and engage lines of flight, becoming dynamic agents of radical re-evaluation and change. As Maurice Blanchot has suggested throughout his writing, agency is created by withdrawals in-between the syntactic folds of productive bodies. Withdrawal, the ‘pas’ (the ‘not’ or the ‘step back’ of passivity), drags back with it former structurations of subjects and objects, perverting and defamiliarizing (ostranenie) their expression and reinvesting their desire along lines of flight. (On the ‘pas’ see Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, Le pas au-delà; for commentary, Herman Rapaport, 1989, Heidegger and Derrida: Reflections on Time and

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Language.) Radical (re-)evaluation is an aesthetic undertaking because it attempts to draw back and re-open the form of bodies as agents of flight. It constitutes an opening of bodies and assemblages to those excesses which mark their productive limits within established structure and code. If this negativity is barred and all agency and space are strictly confined to an efficiency of positive production, then there is no future since there is no excess which would allow a future in any shape other than the present-past. (See Heidegger, 1962, especially in regard to the concept of wiederholen [section 74]; in regard to folds and time, see Deleuze, 1988, 1993.) Withdrawal is not a lone phenomenon which is important only to an individual subject, nor is its activity always oriented toward re-evaluation, reinvention, and historical projection (the catatonic’s silence can be read as an act of critique which does not ‘progress’ and so too the punk’s refusal to ‘come through’). Withdrawal, however, can display, cripple and even destroy the everyday effects, affects and power of territorializing production machines, though such events may at first appear to be ‘local’. Every body replies to space and to other bodies’ position in it and toward it. The closing down of the body—the determined body of passive refusal—to compulsive, repetitive, consumption machines may mean the re-opening of the body to other lines of agency and flight, though such lines may not yet be known or available (they may be blocked at more distant organizational levels). Silence cannot simply be analysed as stagnancy, but must also be analysed as a resistive political strategy brought about by the concrete’s relation to a reified abstract production which long ago foreclosed the possibility for interruption. Silence’s ‘no’ often prepares the conditions for something else, if only by determining that evaluation will not be a standardized affair and that normative production machines will not be allowed to ‘do their thing’ here.

Subjectivity and the fold We have just argued that subjectivity, in terms of the creation of a becoming agency, must be thought through a negativity which remains unacknowledged in the traditional productive understanding of the subject as will and other bodies and space as representation. Agency lies in wait for the subject because subjectivity is given within the folds of being. In terms of a broad but traditional bourgeois topology of space, such ‘folds’ are the externalities of ‘public’ space incorporated into the psyche and the psychological projections and purposeful determinations which invest persons into public space. The traditional spaces of inside and outside, private and public—in other words, the defining terms for bourgeois space—are made problematic, however, by the very concept of folds. This is because the investment of the public in the private and the private in the public creates the merging of both poles of personhood, as well as necessitating that a multiplicity of micro-folds may be present throughout the former ideological domains. It is important to note that within production, linkage points between machines and boundaries at the limits of machines constitute folds wherein the joining, mixing,

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repression and rupture of normative production lines can most obviously appear. For example, the fundamental constitution and self-legitimation of new disciplinary fields by metaphors borrowed from older paradigms (for example, the very notion of a disciplinary field itself) displays foreign seams within the essential territory of a discipline. (For more on the concepts of ‘the fold’ and ‘folds’, see Cooper, 1993; Deleuze, 1988, 1993.) How is it possible to think and act as if folds were socially and psychologically existent and were, moreover, politically viable sites for the construction of a subjective agency radically different from that of the traditional subject? We cannot assume that this is the case within a cultural tradition which stresses the subjective will of ‘man’ and brings all within the domination of this concept. Our inheritance of nineteenth-century European historiography stresses the singular nature of will over all those beings reduced to a conquered passivity and silence (for example, the mass of humanity and all which is relegated to the term ‘animal life’). But it is exactly this position of determined passivity and ‘silence’, both at the level of the everyday and at the level of historical construction, which must be thought as the origin of freedom and historical event. In other words, if we are to account for historical events in anything other than mythological terms we must turn from the thinking of history as will and representation to the thinking of historical event in terms of the strategic occupation of folds and the passive and active opening of beings to lines of movement and flight. In his book on Foucault, Deleuze poses the subject in terms of strategy: ‘What can I be, with what folds can I surround myself or how can I produce myself as a subject?’ (Deleuze, 1988:114). As he indicates, these specific questions are bound together not by their location on a single plane of existential will (for example, Sartre’s existentialism), but rather they are bound together by a project of creating a subjective agent out of time-valued and site-specific limitations and specific affects. Deleuze’s questions already require a working through or ‘deconstruction’ of the classical subject (such as Cooper undertakes when he analyses ‘inside’ and ‘outside’). Both the structuralist assumptions of clear and distinct boundaries for analysis and the humanist assumptions of privileged autonomous agents fail to account for the important question of how subjectivity is created and determined by the co-presence of bodies in space. Likewise, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, dialectical analysis fails because it remains haunted by the notion of lack which draws it back to privileging one subject over another. Co-presence must be thought without the notion of lack if it is to take seriously the fundamental relations of space and subjective agency. Since there is no way to think postmodernism without taking as primary problems of space, scale and affect, one completely fails to think the postmodern subject within epistemes predominantly governed by the concept of lack. As Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) suggest, the becoming agency of the subject along lines of flight is not due to the will of the subject, but rather to the transversal engagement of heterogeneously located bodies, assemblages and lines of production. Subjective agency is not an essential property of the subject, but it appears at certain moments for the organism, empowering it to disengage from standard production machines and to re-engage and make active and real transversal trajectories running

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through various levels of production. Such flight engages and re-encodes productive bodies through their cuts and furrows which open them to the world of materials and which form their genealogical tracings from the past and into the future. Nomadic flight is precisely possible because of the historical graftings, limitations and openings of productive bodies to one another in a negative space. Foremost, it is necessary to recognize that bodies are always already marked and cut, not from the moment of familial castration or symbolic initiation, but far before the conceptualization of ‘the body’. Always, the body is deterritorialized and diagrammatically drawn ahead of itself. This is why its openings are so important: they determine the machines, sites and lines which may engage the body and the type of subjectivity that the body may assume. Some of these openings begin at birth: the child is drawn ahead of him or herself into a curiosity about animals and plants—real, represented, imaginary, and historical—surrounding him or her (‘What are these? What are they called? What can I do with them? How do they die? Can I eat them? Will they harm me?’—and much later: ‘What are their general relations (to me)?’) in the same way that the flower is drawn forth (treiben) into the opening of the air and sun. Later, other openings are etched upon the body and they appear in no set chronological order. Determinations of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘before’ and ‘after’ are fallouts of previous ‘in-common’ engagements. Relays of replies draw the body forth and within. Lines of becoming remark the in-common of touch (which occurs on various surfaces, drawing according to various specific and overlapping grammars: ‘physical’, ‘linguistic’, ‘visual’ and so on). Touch and feel construct bodies from the insideout/outside-in—the body of affective folds—from openings, grafts, seams and cuts, moving bodies from territorial rifts (Riss) to exposing those rifts to flight to territoriality to flight, and so on. Touch transcends and reconstitutes memories of the body. Traditionally, we may say that touch turns ‘the body’ inside out, exposing it to the light of the day and the darkness of the night, so that day and night may be folded back and come to constitute the self. Flesh is the after-effect (and after-affect) (Freud’s Nachtraglichkeit) of touch, a moment of the body’s limit in the transcendence of the world. As Deleuze and Guattari write: A becoming is always in the middle; a becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border or line of descent running perpendicular to both. If becoming is a block (a line-block), it is because it constitutes a zone of proximity and indiscernibility…. The line, or the block, does not link the wasp to the orchid, any more than it conjugates or mixes them: it passes between them, carrying them away in a shared proximity in which the discernibility of points disappears. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:293–294) Touches trace bodies and draw them out (and in) to existence, constituting the entirety of the body in its life and in its death. The body is solely made up of touches, traces and scars. These events may be represented and expressed in various manners (the expressive politics of ressentiment in fascism, the reflective display of institutionally suffered

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violence in the Punk’s displays of (‘self-’)mutilation—two very different meanings in the display of the swastika, for example). Production and flight etch the body into its being and into its becomings. The body is a diagram sketched into the future, its beings and becomings simultaneously drawn before it, behind it, to the side of it and, of course, through it at any one moment. As the Body without Organs, it is diagrammatically distributed into its positions and openings in space. The specificity of the body’s traces, its withdrawals, its turnings and its openings—the folds that encompass and compose the body—determine the possibilities for subjectivity. The body’s intimacies lead time and necessarily determine the space, politics and history of both the individual and the group.

Concrete machines and information As Guattari (1984:159) points out in his essay ‘Concrete Machines’, the production which creates part-objects (as psychoanalysis understands such objects in terms of phantasy and projection) is not attributable to abstract machines alone (for example, phallocentric expectations in the psychoanalytic session). Such productions must rise from the bottom up, as it were, in order to function as true. Concrete relations and concrete productions validate abstract machines as much as abstract machines produce conditions through which concrete relations may be organized, understood and examined. We have argued, however, that concrete relations have a relation to negativity and withdrawal that lies at the critical limit of representational production. It is by means of this negativity that lines of flight become actual for the individual and that history moves according to something more than a progressive historiography. It is by means of the withdrawal of normative production and the reorientation of the subject in space that abstract and concrete machines are modified and habits, customs and even institutions change. Cooper, echoing ordinary language usage, writes that information differs from knowledge in the sense that it adds something to a territorialized body or Gestell of knowledge (Cooper, 1993:285). Established production assemblages depend upon an excess to their system for their continued production. Consequently, such machines must endure comparatively ‘raw’ materials which pass through their lines of production. Because all production machines, no matter how abstract or how institutionalized, function in a world of excess, such machines are dependent upon concrete relations which escape them. This may seem an outrageous claim, but we should consider that even those most hermetic and totalitarian of institutions, such as the church and the military, must recruit from outside themselves and must reply to the societies that lie around them in order to maintain and obtain ‘truth’ (even if the criteria for this ‘truth’ originates in prior structurations and is empirically untrue). Even that most abstract of production assemblages, ‘God’, has shown a grudging will to change, for example, within the institution of the Catholic Church. Unlike ‘knowledge’, our grammar of ‘information’ suggests that information carries with it a certain amount of undecidability. This undecidability in relation to knowledge

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paradigms and knowledge production is what gives information the connotations of ‘newness’ and ‘rawness’ and gives it value for the validation, growth, or even ‘revolution’ (in Kuhn’s sense) of knowledge paradigms. Experiments must contain the possibility of producing information which invalidates, as well as validates, theoretical assumptions and claims, otherwise science remains at the level of pure speculation and has no explanatory power. Diagrammatics of agency are not structural because they begin with concrete relations. They are at a ‘lower’ level than the most abstract of production machines, but even the most abstract production must allow information to pass through them, if only to prove themselves, at least for the time being, true. Information must always contain the possibility of detrimentally infecting the production machines for which it is the raw material or source. There is always an ontological risk in becoming informed (making diagrams is both potential and risky). Information must be capable of ‘infecting’ lines of production so as to newly charge them with meaning. Reaction formations may occur so as to crush information. The US military establishment, for example, may institute unenforceable rules regulating the nature and action of homosexuality in order to prevent the illumination of the traditional role (repressed) homosexual libido plays in forming combat units of men. Such reaction formations are inevitably overdetermined when the information proves dangerous to the institution’s main tenets for production. (For a discussion of the role of homosexual libido in traditional military and church institutions, see Freud, 1959.) Information is not only that which fuels the production of knowledge, but as synthetic and as not fully predictable it shows the limits of territorialized production machines, threatening to carry them away along radical lines of flight. Fascist political bodies depend most upon benign mass consensus, because it is through consensus that the production of information from concrete relations can be controlled and the abstract machines of the state can best be safeguarded. The traditional censorship of content (as opposed to the censorship of syntax and form) is a means of controlling production from the top down, and it is always doomed to failure because concrete relations exceed ideologies of the state. When concrete lines of escape and the proliferation of diagrams are formally controlled by moral and aesthetic beliefs, however, the critical limits of the state machinery never appear and, thus, they can never be understood as strategically threatened. Illegalities are barred from the start at the level of concrete relations and production. Negative space is marginalized or blotted out of ‘rational’ productive experience so that the flights of subjective agents are trivialized and, thus, history never occurs except within the confines of an already predictable historiography.

Conclusion What can we now say about bodies, including those which are known as ‘organizations’? First, bodies are results of the affective relations of already existing bodies, of heterogeneity and negativity (as well as, of course, positive production) in and as space, of the operation of forces in organizing, producing and extending bodies and of the

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opening of bodies to one another so that production lines are verified, changed, resisted, transversely crossed and radicalized. Second, bodies occur through previous, current and future relations with other bodies in space and in the construction of space. Group psychologies and social and political expediencies help determine the form and content of a body’s composition in the past, present and future. Negative space must be opened and allowed to exist in order for lines of flight to develop beyond what is the norm. Without such space, history becomes closed, static, repetitive and eventually it is determined to be nihilistic and consequently treated in an apocalyptic manner. (This is the banal consensus and the death drive of fascist organization.) Third, information is not neutral and not without expression; information is produced by a relation of bodies in and as space. Information’s potential for writing upon those bodies and transforming them is a question of the construction and allowance of space and information by bodies and forces of production, and it is a function of the openings of bodies for flight. Information may radically transform those bodies or those bodies may strongly territorialize information by appropriating it or by marginalizing or negating it. This latter strategy is not only dependent upon prior codings at the level of the individual (for example, individual tastes, habits and memory), but it depends upon the sanction of institutions, structures or groups in order to produce the rule of exclusion by law. Considerations of beings—‘humans’, ‘animals’, ‘technological’, ‘natural’—must interrogate subjects and objects first of all as co-present beings, not only according to their being together, but according to their being in-between. Such interrogations must take account of the organization of space and the function of particular bodies in constructing and determining it.

References Agamben, G. (1993) The Coming Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baudrillard, J. (1983) Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e). Blanchot, M. (1992) The Step Not Beyond, Albany: State University of New York Press. Cooper, R. (1993) ‘Technologies of representation’, in P. Ahonen (ed.) Tracing the Semiotic Boundaries of Politics, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 279–312. Deleuze, G. (1988) Foucault, trans. S. Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——(1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. T. Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H.R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——(1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins

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University Press. Freud, S. (1959) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, New York: W.W. Norton. Gasché, R. (1986) The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Guattari, F. (1984) Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, New York: Penguin. Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper & Row. Lacan, J. (1988) The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954—1955, New York: W.W. Norton. Rapaport, H. (1989) Heidegger and Derrida: Reflections on Time and Language, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ronell, A. (1992) Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Winnicott, D.W. (1971) Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock.

5 ASSEMBLAGE NOTES Robert Cooper

Introduction We are not good at thinking movement. Our institutional skills favour the fixed and static, the separate and self-contained. Taxonomies, hierarchies, systems and structure represent the instinctive vocabulary of institutionalized thought in its subordinating of movement and transformation. The philosopher Whitehead (1925) called this the principle of simple location in which clear-cut, definite things occupy clear-cut, definite places in space and time. There is movement—of a kind: the simple movement of definite things from one definite place to another. But it’s a form of movement which denies the restlessness of transformation, deformation and reformation. Simple location reconstitutes a world of finished subjects and objects from the flux and flow of unfinished, heteromorphic ‘organisms’ (Whitehead, 1925). For Whitehead, movement resides in the infinite flow of ‘mutual relatedness’ where mutuality is not a property common to individual terms but an ambiguous space that lies between terms and which resists resolution and identification. Mutuality tells us that betweenness is mute, mutable and motile; it eludes placement and location in the useful and usable scheme of utilitarian things. Movement, then, comes in two forms: the movement of things in locatable space so that one is able to think and speak them (i.e. locate, from the Latin loguor, to say, tell, indicate), and where to place (i.e. locate) means to placate, please (Latin placere, to satisfy, be agreeable, resolve); the movement of the mute and mutable which cannot be spoken because its radical elasticity cannot be limited and thus located. So we might say that strategies of locating and placing are ways of forcing the mute to speak, of disciplining the wildness of mutability. All this is merely another way of saying the division of labour. When Durkheim (1933) formalized the division of labour as the basis of society, he stressed the functions of specialization and determinacy. Everyone had their place and every place had its function. Outside this specialized, determinate world there was art, which Durkheim called ‘the domain of liberty’ (p. 51), free of obligations and constraints. For this reason, says Durkheim, art has no useful place in the world of purposeful organization constituted by the division of labour. In other words, art attempts to communicate with the mute and the mutable, and seeks to intimate its silent chaos, while the division of labour works to give acceptable shape and form to the aberrant omens of the mute and mutable. The division of labour is a production system which factures locatable spaces

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and thus enacts a speakable and thinkable world. We know this already, for it’s what we really mean when we talk about mass production. We ordinarily think of mass production in terms of the assembly line and its mass production of identical items. Fordism is the image that comes to mind. We forget that Fordism is simply one step in a much larger scheme which starts with deconstituting and reconstituting the natural world into a series of resources such as coal, iron, oil, uranium. The mining industry was the first systematic attempt to do this: ‘it is in mining that the world first appears as broken lumps of pure matter’ (Fisher, 1991:223) which is then refined and shaped into functional objects. In the modern economy, the generalized process of mass production occurs in four stages (Fisher, 1991:223): • the stage of materials or stocks; • the stage of parts in which materials have been shaped into repeatable part elements; • the stage of assembly in which a functional object is made out of a pool of parts drawn from different stocks; • the stage of debris, junk or garbage where we see the mixed remains of former objects. These stages help us to reinterpret Fordism, which is now no longer to be understood in terms of the assembly line but as a generalized process of assemblage. Fordism represents the characteristic features of the modern production process in its focus on parts and their assembly. The finished object—the automobile—is a secondary aspect of the part-assembly activity and of the mass production process more generally. To underline this last point, we may note that the automobile leaves the factory as an incomplete object (i.e. as a part) which seeks a further connection with its human driver—yet another stage in the assemblage. In all this, it’s the part rather than the whole object that dominates. And it’s the parts with their suggestion of transience and incompleteness that give us the idea of movement: ‘Parts, in the long run, are the carriers of “being”, not wholes, which are no more than the provisional array of parts’ (Fisher, 1991:213). In this interpretation, we have the production of mass rather than simply mass production. Or, better, we have the reproduction or repetition of mass. This underlines the recognition that it is not the product that is significant but the movement of reproduction itself. And this is how the cultural theorist Walter Benjamin (1968) sees mass reproduction in the modern world: the reproducibility of mass, where mass is an ‘ambivalent, divergent movement’ that is ‘invisible and nameless’ (Weber, 1996:96, original emphasis). Benjamin’s conception of mass is thus equivalent to Whitehead’s (1925) mutuality with its betweenness that is mute, mutable and motile. The apparatus (that which gives form, makes things appear) of reproducibility—in Benjamin’s case, the camera- behaves exactly as Fisher’s (1991) four stages of mass production: it converts the mute and mutable movement of mass into a usable resource by breaking it down into part elements which are then assembled into a product for further transmission. The apparatus of reproducibility constructs appearances but, for Benjamin, these appearances are more like apparitions that come and go, appear and disappear, for what is reproduced is not a product but a part—a movement—of space and time: ‘Parts, in the long run, are

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the carriers of “being”, not wholes, which are no more than the provisional array of parts’ (Fisher, 1991:213). Parts carry and what they carry is a fundamental sense of incompletion which forces us to reinterpret wholes as holes or missing links. So, it’s the part that takes precedence over the whole, and this clearly has important implications for how we look at human systems, institutions and organizations. Systems are now no longer to be viewed as integrated structures. The human body, for example, is never just an organic whole but a collection of parts in the continuous pursuit of re-collecting itself. It is this idea of collection-dispersion-recollection that lies at the heart of assemblage. Assemblage, therefore, must be understood as partial, dispersed, fragile, tentative. Assemblage is simultaneously a part of and apart from.

Assemblage Assemblage comes from the Greek sumbolon, the act of bringing together separate parts. The ancient Greek mystery religions used the sumbolon as a token of recognition: two halves of a broken piece of pottery, when jigsawed together, served to unite the initiates. Separation and joining, dispersion and collection, define the work of the sumbolon. The archaeology of the word reappears in the English symbol and simple, which both mean the joining of the disparate. This is the vocabulary of Whitehead’s (1925) ‘mutual relatedness’. But it’s more than simple mutuality. It’s the continuous movement of parts in a restless flux in which the separate identities of the parts give way to a mutual coming and going, uniting and separating; and in which identities as self-contained units simply semble, seem, feign, pretend. Language itself is a vast linkage of parts that come and go in temporary assemblages that parasite each other just as the terms sumbolon, symbol, simple, semble do as examples of intertextual borrowing and alternation. The core idea of this parasitical alternation is perhaps most conveniently summarized in the term semi, which usually means half. But semi does not mean half as simple division; it means half of a whole that is the same as the other half. Semi is divided same-ness. Not as a property of individual parts but as a parasitical alternation or mutuality between parts. In this world of the semi/same, parts come together and disperse at the same time; they join and separate simultaneously at the seam. Assemblages are constituted by seams which semble or seem. It’s in this sense that human bodies are assemblages: ‘The boundary between bodies is a permeable membrane; it has gaps and holes to let the inside out and the outside in. This interplay of inner and outer makes all bodily events interstitial. Though apparently either inside or outside, bodily activity is properly neither inner nor outer’ (Taylor, 1984:162). Neither inner nor outer but the same. Sameness here is clearly not a property of individual parts but is more like an originary matrix or source in which space and time are indistinguishable. It’s the kind of un-limited source that Michel Foucault called similitude, by which he meant the directionless, the indefinite: similitude ‘develops in series that have neither beginning nor end, that can be followed in one direction as easily as in another, that obeys no hierarchy, but propagate themselves from small differences among small differences’ (Foucault, 1983:44). All this is curiously like

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Whitehead’s (1925) mutuality with its betweenness that is mute, mutable and motile as well as Benjamin’s (1968) mass whose ‘ambivalent, divergent movement’ is also ‘invisible and nameless’ (Weber, 1996:96). While space and time may be nondistinguishable—‘invisible and nameless’—in similitude, they, curiously, can only be approached by being separated. This is the double function of the seam’, it separates and joins at the same time. And this is what Benjamin intends when he interprets modern methods of mass reproduction as the reproducibility of mass. Since mass is ultimately ambivalent and ambiguous, what is continuously reproduced in assemblage is a movement of mutual separation-joining. What reproduction reproduces is essentially this double movement of the seam which mixes the inside and the outside, the near and the far, the conventional and the strange, the normal and the monstrous, in a way that recalls the ancient origin of the word product: both prodigal, prodigious, monstrous, uncontrollable (from the Latin prodigere, prodigus, prodigiosus) and predictable, knowable, efficient, workable (Latin producere, productio). Reproduction is fated to repeat its own seam in its constituting incompleteness and perpetual motion. The movement of reproduction is also the way that Gilles Deleuze sees assemblage. Deleuze uses the French term agencement, which is often translated as assemblage but can also mean arrangement or organization. There is also the hint of agency. But these terms need to be problematized in order to bring out their hidden and uncanny possibilities. For Deleuze, an assemblage is not a collection of individual terms: ‘The minimum real unit is not the work, the idea, the concept or the signifier, but the assemblage…which is always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987:52). An assemblage is neither a unity nor a totality but a multiplicity. Multiplicity actively resists unification: ‘In a multiplicity what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what there is “between”, the between, a set of relations which are not separable from each other’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: viii). Again, it’s a matter of Whitehead’s ‘mutual relatedness’: neither the parts nor the whole but the active separation-joining that goes on between the parts. There’s also movement in all this and, as Deleuze says, movement is a tricky thing to handle, it’s not easily thinkable: ‘Movement always happens behind the thinker’s back, or in the moment when he blinks’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987:1). Movement is ‘almost imperceptible’; it occurs ‘in’ the ‘between’; it’s not a property of things, nouns or effects. Deleuze calls the movement of the ‘in-between’ a becoming’, it’s not a state of being but always an ongoing that never arrives anywhere, never completes itself. Becoming denies dualities: question-answer, man-woman, nature-culture, etc. Deleuze illustrates the becoming process with the example of the relationship between the wasp and the orchid: The orchid seems to form a wasp image, but in fact there is a waspbecoming of the orchid, an orchid-becoming of the wasp, a double capture since ‘what’ each becomes changes no less than ‘that which’ becomes. The wasp becomes part of the orchid’s reproductive apparatus at the same time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp.

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Wasp and orchid together become assemblage as assemblage becomes them. But since we’re so conditioned by the logic of simple location, it’s difficult for us to think becoming. We slide almost naturally into nouns, things, homogeneities: ‘Structures are linked to conditions of homogeneity, but assemblages are not’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987:52). Deleuze gives the example of ‘the middle’ to illustrate how we normally structure and homogenize our world: ‘The middle has nothing to do with an average, it is not a centrism or a form of moderation’ (p. 30). The middle is an active between, a becoming; it’s the seam between inside and outside: ‘assembling, being in the middle, on the line of encounter between an internal world and the external world’ (p. 52). The middle is the seam as same, semi. Again, Deleuze asks: What is an assemblage? And again he answers: ‘It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes…the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987:69). In establishing relations between differences, the assemblage asserts its intrinsic incompleteness, opens up new worlds, and shows becoming as a process of renewal. Deleuze offers the medieval man—horse—stirrup relationship (based on the historian Lynn White’s well-known study of the stirrup and the feudal system) as another example of assemblage: Technologists have explained that the stirrup made possible a new military unity in giving the knight lateral stability: the lance could be tucked in under one arm, it benefits from all the horse’s speed, acts as a point which is immobile itself but propelled by the gallop. ‘The stirrup replaced the energy of the man by the power of the animal’. This is a new man—animal symbiosis, a new assemblage of war…Man and the animal enter into a new relationship, one changes no less than the other…It must not be thought, however, that the invention of the stirrup is sufficient. An assemblage is never technological; if anything, it is the opposite. Tools always presuppose a machine, and the machine is always social before being technical. There is always a social machine which selects or assigns the technical elements used. A tool remains marginal, or little used, until there exists a social machine or collective assemblage which is capable of taking it into its ‘phylum’. (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987:70–71) The stirrup was certainly in use before its incorporation into the feudal system but it was used in more limited assemblages (e.g. by nomadic horsemen). But now the stirrup becomes linked with the medieval knight being given a grant of land for which he was obliged to serve on horseback; so a new cavalry was born which harnessed ‘the tool in the complex assemblage of feudalism’. The knight becomes more mobile, he can travel farther and he can even sleep on his horse. It is a case of reterritorializing space and retemporalizing time, or what might be called the reproduction of space—time. Not only is it a case of a new distribution of land (which is taken from the church by the barons)

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but ‘does not the knight now reterritorialise himself on his mount with his stirrups, for he can sleep on his horse?’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987:72). And this assemblage is fated to perpetual movement: among other things, it leads to the Crusades. The movement of assemblage is likened by Deleuze to the rhizome, the fissiparous and nomadic growth of the underground stem of a plant. A rhizome moves as a multiplicity and goes on moving since it’s movement without stop, world without end. Even so-called rational, instrumental systems are subject to rhizomic growth. Deleuze and Guattari cite accounting and bureaucracy as assemblages which, while seemingly rational, spread and go off in rhizomic diversity. Accounting and bureaucracy may think that they control their assemblages through the identities of numbers and names but numbers and names are also rhizome prone: The rhizome doesn’t allow itself to be reduced to the One or the Many. It is not the One that becomes two, or that might become three, four, or five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from One, nor a multiple to which the One might be added (n+1). It is not made up of units but of dimensions, or rather of shifting directions. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle through which it pushes and overflows. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983:47) Again, it’s a question of assemblage that seams/seems. Deleuze and Guattari (1986) extend their commentary on bureaucracy as assemblage and rhizome in their interpretation of Franz Kafka’s novels. In Kafka’s world, there are neither subjects nor objects, no dualities. In The Trial, K (ostensibly a banker) is seen less as an individual performing an organizational role and more ‘as a functioning of a polyvalent assemblage of which the solitary individual is only apart’ (p. 85). A question of parts yet again. And machines are only interesting as parts that call forth other parts in an endless series: ‘technical machines were only the indexes of a more complex assemblage that brings into coexistence engineers and parts, materials and machined personnel, executioners and victims, the powerful and the powerless, in a single, collective ensemble’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986:57). Significantly, in this world of becomings, there are no metaphors and the word like does not exist; the logic of resemblance does not work here. Men are not like animals, nor animals like men. Instead, it is the assemblage as the becoming-animal of the man or the becoming-man of the animal—another way of saying Whitehead’s (1925) mutuality. Becoming is the movement of assemblage around the middle, where the middle is not only a flexible point of motion but an infinite source of new forms in motion. It’s Deleuze’s way of expressing the simultaneous separation-joining capacity of the middle in a field of possibilities. As Deleuze says, the middle is not a centrism, it’s not a static point or line that divides the world into separate components. It’s not a device for isolating units out of a mass and then making them more visible. It’s a medium that mediates between separate units; it’s neither one nor two, neither singular nor plural, neither part nor sum, neither individual nor group (Wagner, 1991). For these reasons, Kafka does not see himself as an author, an originating subject, but rather as part of a

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writing assemblage which authors/others movement and in which the writer itself is authored and othered. The author known as Kafka is therefore not locatable; he/it is part of a generalized process of assemblage and otherness. The work of assemblage becomes also the work of otherability.

Otherability Otherability is a way of summarizing Deleuze’s varied ideas on assemblage: rhizome, becoming, middle. All these terms remind us of the parasitical alternation that is intrinsic to the semi/same of the seam, where parts join and separate at one and the same time. When Fisher (1991) defines mass production as a process of breaking up matter into parts and reassembling them into larger wholes, he essentially repeats Deleuze’s analysis of rhizomic assemblage as continuous becoming. Benjamin’s (1968) interpretation of mass reproducibility as the simultaneous operation of uniting and dispersing is yet another version of the work of otherability as assemblage: breaking and uniting in one and the same act. Otherability is the ability or capacity to produce and reproduce. This is why it’s fundamental to understanding the reproducibility of mass: not the mass reproduction of self-identical objects or terms but the power to reproduce an elusive otherness that, like Deleuze’s rhizome, resists every attempt to nail down identity. The conventional interpretation of mass reproduction rests on the idea of making as copying or multiple doubling, especially in an economic context. Reproduction in this sense is part of a wider process of cultural renewal. In Fisher’s (1991) definition of mass production, we are reminded of the ultimate stage of all manufactured objects: that of debris, junk or garbage where we see the mixed remains of former objects, as though the objects were returning to some prior stage of mute and mutable dormancy. Cultural renewal is society’s continuous reproduction ‘of itself into new generations of persons, things, practices, styles, clichés, recipes, and rituals’ (Fisher, 1991:99). And this reproduction necessarily entails its own demise or dispersal. In other words, the reproducibility of mass is really the work of the seam which simultaneously assembles and divides, collects and disperses, and in which every becoming is also a disappearing. If reproducibility is the ability or power to make copies or doubles, it necessarily reproduces a latent doubt or oscillation of knowing. For a copy is normally thought to be a repetition or reproduction of an original: the copy is viewed as an effect of the original, but: There can never be an original until there is a copy, which retrospectively creates the ‘originalness’ of the original. There can never be an original until there is a copy of it. In a sense, then, the original can be said to be constituted by the copy, just as a cause and effect… can be reversed, from a temporal perspective, once we realise that it is always the effect that comes first, causing us to look for its cause. (Brunette and Wills, 1989:74)

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Nor is this a case of the copy creating the original; it’s rather that the two terms constitute each other in a process of otherability: the copy makes the original just as much as the original makes the copy. Otherability is neither beginning nor end, neither one nor two, but a curious partible of both. It’s this communal partibility that Derrida (1988) captures in the logic of mediation he calls iterability: that which splits an element while constituting it. Every identifiable element—subject, object, item, etc.—must be reproducible or repeatable in order to be known, re-cognized. But the reproduction of an element requires that it be split up at the self-same moment of its constitution. This is the core of Fisher’s (1991) and Benjamin’s (1968) approaches to mass reproduction: splitting and uniting, separating and joining, necessarily occur together and are thus co-defining. This process of co-definition is bound up with the logic of the seam which insists on the essential self-sameness of space and time; or what Samuel Weber (1996:140, original emphasis) calls a ‘graphics of simultaneity, in which, for instance, what comes after also and simultaneously comes before’. Iterability is not the repetition of simple presence, fact or self-identity. It’s not the simple repetition of the past into the present, and there is no simple before and after. Iterability is more like the after-effect of the future in the present. It splits the present ‘into a past that can never be fully rendered present and a future which is always about to arrive. Past and future are thus no longer construed as a simple polarity’ (Weber, 1996:149, original emphasis). Rather, they are now in-one-another as a coming-to-pass. Iterability is intrinsically indeterminate and indeterminable: past, present and future necessarily constitute each other: It is because the past, through iterability, can be neither fully excluded from the present nor fully absorbed into it that there is anything like a future. For the future is that part of the past that remains after any determinate iteration or repetition. In short, the future is what remains of the possibility of the past. the future itself will only come to be in coming to pass. What is called the present is this coming-to-pass of the future. (Weber, 1996:149, original emphasis) Spelled out here is the movement of mass reproducibility in which Fisher’s (1991) four stages of production constitute each other in a simultaneous process of prediction where the mixed remains (debris, junk, garbage) of former objects represent the coming-to-pass of the future and in which what comes after ‘emerges here as also the condition under which anything can come to be in the first place’ (Weber, 1996:140). In other words, reproduction as repetition must already include its own demise or passing so that it can repeat itself, and its remains thus become the re-means for this re-prediction or second coming. Before and after, original and copy, cause and effect now have to be seen as becomings that gyrate around a mute, mutable and motile middle. Deleuze’s middle thus becomes a hinge which enables differences to turn around each other in a mobile space of articulation. And otherability is not merely the space where differences join and separate; it’s a space of mediation where ‘there is not identity, nor non-identity, or non-

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coincidence, there is inside and outside turning about one another’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968:264). The theme of space as otherability, as hinge, provoked the Cubist revolution in modern art: Cubist painters were concerned not only with an object’s superficial appearance but with everything that was known about it: its sides, its profile, its position in space and its relationship to other objects. How was all this included on a single canvas? By displaying simultaneously all aspects of the object, superimposing all views. (Bernadac and Bouchet, 1993:61) Yet again a question of simultaneity. Cubism addressed the problem of simultaneity by depicting objects as complex assemblages of multiple splittings which attempted to disclose reality as a manifold of scattered differences. Picasso’s Portrait of Vollard (1910), for example, shows a man’s face made up of multiple seams and fractures—a shattered face or, rather, a face of shatterings that seam/seem to make up a visual unity but which reveal the body as a multiplicity of aspects and parts that turn around each other in precisely that sense which Merleau-Ponty (1968) intended when he called the human body a hinge around which the world turns. We are back with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) portrait of Kafka as the writer who is authored and othered by the otherability of assemblage. We are also back with Benjamin’s (1968) apparatus of reproducibility—the camera—which reproduces not products but parts that constitute reality not as an experience of self-identical wholes but as aggregations of appearances that originate in the shatterings and scatterings of split movings.

Part-whole Parts are partial because they’re incomplete, they’re always becoming. This is how Ferdinand de Saussure (1959) sees language: an assemblage of signs, words, that derive their power from other signs and words. The signs as parts seem to allude to an invisible whole but a whole that is never attainable. It’s this sense of sign that is captured in the Greek sema (sign, token, mark) which is yet another version of semi. As we’ve noted, semi is the divided same-ness of assemblage. It constitutes the simultaneous joiningseparating movement of the assemblage’s seam. And as we’ve also noted, same-ness is not a property of individual parts but is more like an un-limited, originary matrix in which space and time are indistinguishable, unlocatable. Like Foucault’s (1983) similitude and Deleuze’s (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987) middle as between. How do we understand the part-whole relationship as a simultaneous movement of joiningseparating? One answer is to be found in cybernetics which interprets the idea of a ‘whole’ as a quasi-total space of possibilities out of which actual objects are made. The making of actual objects requires the collection and joining of individual parts into a coherent structure. In this sense, collecting and joining means constraining the free play

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of parts in the cybernetic space of possibilities. An object such as a chair exemplifies the importance of constraint in everyday life: the chair is a collection of parts that has coherence and moveability since we can carry it around and it can ‘carry’ us. Now any free object in our three-dimensional world has six degrees of freedom for movement. Were the parts of the chair unconnected each would have its own six degrees of freedom; and this is in fact the amount of mobility available to the parts in the workshop before they are assembled. Thus the four legs, when separate, have 24 degrees of freedom. After they are joined, however, they have only the six degrees of freedom of the single object. That there is a constraint is obvious when one realises that if the positions of three legs of an assembled chair are known, then that of the fourth follows necessarily—it has no freedom. (Ashby, 1964:131) Constraint and freedom are clearly ways of saying joining and separation, collection and dispersion. But more significant perhaps is the implication that constraint and freedom are coterminous processes that exemplify Whitehead’s (1925) ‘mutual relatedness’ and Derrida’s (1988) iterability. It is never the case that there is either constraint or freedom: the logic of otherability and betweenness insists on their simultaneity. This is equivalent to the cybernetic interpretation that actuality is the continuous and repeated restriction of a space of total possibilities to some part or parts. Assemblage affirms the complex interdependence between the constrained and the unconstrained, between the predictable and the unpredictable. It also unveils the space of total possibilities as the infinite source and origin of the more limited spaces of constrained actualities. In short, cybernetics suggests that we have to understand parts in the context of this space of unconstrained possibilities. And this is no more than what we argued earlier through—among other ideas—Foucault’s (1983) similitude and Weber’s (1996) simultaneity. Cybernetics also reminds us that parts are not things but relations. Parts are always part of and apart from; they are separate and joined at the same time. It’s this idea of the at once and at the same time that characterizes ‘wholeness’ and which we have already noted in the otherability of original and copy which, while requiring the constraints of orderly separation in space and time, are nonetheless intrinsically undifferentiable. Two worlds, therefore, inhabit (and necessarily inhibit) each other: the one the inverse of the other. It’s what Deleuze (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987) means by between and middle. And it requires a new way of seeing, a double vision, where ‘we must learn to look out of two eyes, not in the same direction but in two different, and indeed divergent, directions at once’ (Weber, 1996:150). This is how Kafka reads the world: constrained unities give way to the full play of possibilities ‘in a conjunction of flux, in a continuum of reversible intensities’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986:22). Double vision is another way of saying part-whole. Deleuze and Guattari (1983) illustrate the workings of double vision through the critical social theory of Samuel Butler. Butler was an active critic of Victorian science, especially the evolutionary biology of Charles Darwin. Darwin’s work relied on the distinction between the organic and the inorganic. Butler could not accept this distinction between ‘life’ and ‘non-life’,

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and argued for their equivalence in the form of ‘the complexity of arrangement of an inconceivably intricate mechanism’ (Butler, 1910:13) that looks surprisingly like otherability. The world, for Butler, was not, as it was for Darwin, a place where discrete unities acted on each other; instead, it was a dynamic, interactive mechanism or machine. It is this point that Butler develops in his satirical novel Erewhon (1970, but first published 1872). Erewhon is the story of an English traveller, Higgs, who crosses a giant mountain range to discover the remote country of Erewhon where the principle of dynamic, interactive mechanism is practised as a way of life. In Erewhon, they abhor static separation as being unreal and unrealistic. For example, the Erewhonian institutions of higher learning—the so-called Colleges of Unreason—insist that Unreason is commutable with Reason: ‘Unreason is a part of reason: it must therefore be allowed its full share in stating the initial conditions’ (Butler, 1970:188). The Professors of Unreason call the co-implication of Reason and Unreason a ‘double currency’, thus recalling the double movement of double vision. The static and the separate are the marks of Reason: ‘Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines…Extremes are alone logical; but they are always absurd; the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme’ (Butler, 1970:187). Butler extends his logic of the double currency to the human-machine relationship in which humans and machines constitute a dynamic, interactive mechanism and in which both are equivalent and where there’s no organicinorganic distinction: ‘Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways?’ (Butler, 1970:199). There are no unities, only dispersions of terms: It becomes immaterial whether one says that machines are organs, or organs, machines. The two definitions are exact equivalents: man as ‘vertebromachinate mammal’, or as an ‘aphidian parasite of machines’. What is essential is not in the passage to infinity itself—the infinity composed of machine parts or the temporal infinity of the animalcules—but rather in what this passage blossoms into. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983:285) And what this passage blossoms into is Butler’s equivalent of Deleuze’s rhizome: the fissiparous and nomadic space of Erewhon with its double currency and its infinite possibilities. For Erewhon is (almost) literally the inverse—the double current, double vision—of Nowhere, or the space that might be or could be but which nowhere actually exists. Sheer possibility. What translates possibility into an order of actuality is constraint. An easy way of grasping this idea of unformed possibilities is through the alphabet as a language source. The twenty-six letters of the English alphabet represent a space of possibilities which, through permutation, permit the endless construction of words and sentences. Butler himself recognized the permutable possibilities offered by words when he inverted conventional English names for his characters (e.g. Robinson into Nosnibor) and when, of course, he turned Nowhere into Erewhon. The potential space of Nowhere

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is thus the multiple possibilities offered by the combinability and permutability of parts, which enable the translation of Nowhere into what Deleuze (1994) calls a ‘now-here’. Double vision is the ability to see the ‘now-here’ and the Nowhere at the same time: ‘Following Samuel Butler, we discover Erewhon, signifying at once the originary “nowhere” and the displaced, disguised, modified and always re-created “here-andnow”’ (Deleuze, 1994: xxi). This is Deleuze’s way of saying otherability whose instantaneous splitting elicits constraint and unconstraint, finitude and infinitude, joining and separation, at once and at the same time. The splitting of otherability is illustrated by Deleuze in the multiplicity of acts that occur in the battle described by Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage: The knife that cuts and the flesh that is cut become inextricably mixed…Indeed, the event ‘cutting/being cut’ belongs to a different order of being from the knife, the flesh and their conjunction. It is not a physical property but an attribute of things: it does not exist in things, it insists in them and subsists in language. (Lecercle, 1985:98) The battle as a whole is constituted by a manifold of such otherabilities: Sabres cut into the warm flesh, bullets penetrate it, cannonballs dismember it, blood and sweat seep into the earth, trees are blown to smithereens…But the battle itself does not exist in any of those unholy mixtures: it does not exist at all…it is everywhere, but nowhere in particular; it clings to every object like a film, yet the actors never perceive it. (Lecercle, 1985:98) In the world of rhizomic assemblage, every object is always a part-object, never a whole object; wholeness is a conspicuous absence. Every assemblage is constituted by partobjects and part-objects are ‘fragments which resist totalization and symbolization, any attribution of identity or meaning’ (Lecercle, 1985:40). As we’ve noted, the logic of otherability and betweenness insists on the simultaneity of constraint and freedom. In this sense, otherability and betweenness work like a hinge, a joint or axis around which things revolve or articulate. The hinge is a seam viewed in the context of the constraint-freedom interaction. This was the point of Cubist painting in which a multiplicity of aspects and parts—degrees of freedom—of a depicted object were made to turn around each other in a seemingly mobile assemblage. It was also MerleauPonty’s (1968) point when he called the human body a hinge around which the world turns. The hinge is an articulating joint which connects and disconnects at the same time. In Latin, articulus means a member or part which mediates between other parts. The various versions of the root semi (sum, sym, sim, same, seam, etc.) represent the power of the hinge to articulate a space of difference around a common centre, a middle. But, following Deleuze (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987), we have to understand the middle as an active between, a seam that enables parts to move in and out and around each other in a hinge of mutual articulation. This is the insight that the literary theorist Elaine Scarry

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(1994:51) captures in her notion of the participial act: ‘Man and world each act on the surface of the other’. In the participial act, parts become each other in a movement of parasitical alternation. Human making—we are still talking production and reproduction—is essentially the intermixing of cultural objects in a way that underlies their roles as part-objects: ‘the object is only a fulcrum or lever across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes the makers’ (Scarry, 1985:307, original emphasis). Scarry analyses the religious altar as the symbol of this reciprocation between body and world: the altar—the sign of otherability—as ‘the symbolic representation of the human body’ (Scarry, 1985:211) and ‘the reciprocity between man and the world, their shared alteration’ (Scarry, 1994:84, original emphasis). The altar is another version of the seam as hinge in its articulation of parasitical alternation. We are parts that participate in the world as participial acts. A part is always incomplete, destined to be part of a dispersing and disappearing whole, always becoming. Parts are split movings: hinges. They make possible the translation of Nowhere into the ‘now-here’ and the ‘here-and-now’. When Merleau-Ponty (1968) called the body a hinge, he meant that the body was not an object or container but a medium by which, and according to which, we sense and act. It is this sense of body as hinge that Scarry (1994) conveys in her analysis of the human body as a rhizome of participial acts. She views the body as a place where immobility and mobility, constraint and freedom, interact. Although the body is detachable, separate, from the immediate ground on which it stands, it shares with most of the vegetable world a predilection to be rooted or constrained to one spot but at the same time ‘to branch and reach, then again in each branch, branch and reach again, until the space in the world available to the living thing is vastly amplified’ (Scarry, 1994:74). The human trunk itself demonstrates the power of otherability to break out and convert Nowhere into ‘now-here’, for its various parts spread out in a multiplicity of forms and directions: the four limbs branch into five digits; the head branches into several forms of mobile reaching out (seeing, hearing, etc.) ‘that extend the human being hundreds of feet further than the twenty small branches on his other four limbs’ (Scarry, 1994:74); the tongue branches into speech; the hand, into written language. The limbs and senses of the body reach out into a limbic space of possibilities, a Nowhere that could be or might be a ‘now-here’. We might remind ourselves that limb is an edge or border that opens out onto a limbo of Nowhere. Human desire resides in the limbs and senses as they survey the space of possibilities before them. If we look at the hand, we see the essence of rhizomic assemblage: continuous movement and articulation of a set of hinges that seeks its outer space of limbic possibilities. Of the hand and its powers of mobility and generation, the art historian Henri Focillon writes: Why does this mute, blind organ speak to us so persuasively? Because it is, like the higher forms of life, highly original and highly differentiated. Jointed on its delicate hinges, the wrist has a structure of many small bones. From it five skeletal branches, each with its system of nerves and ligaments, run beneath the skin, thence they fan out into five separate fingers. Each of them, articulated on

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three knuckles, has its own aptitude and mind…Watch your hands as they live their own free life…Watch them in repose: the fingers are lightly drawn in, as if the hands were absorbed in a reverie. Watch them in the sprightly elegance of pure and useless gestures, when it seems that they are describing numberless possibilities gratuitously in the air and, playing with one another, preparing for some happy event to come. (Focillon, 1989:158–159) The reach of the hand into limbic space seems infinite: through touch, the hand enters perhaps the most intimate of the sensory domains—the private body; through tools, it insinuates itself into the intractability of the earth; through its fingers, it constitutes a world of number and countability; through inscription, it makes routes for the mind to travel by; and, as a final index of the hand’s rhizomic power, it helps translate the infinite space of the heavens (and beyond) into the hand-made space of the electronic workstation. Limbs are the space of otherability; they are the double movement of the seam which combines constraint and freedom, predictability and contingency. They are part-objects that deny totalization, identity and simple meaning. They are auto-mobile processes that have no intrinsic purposes. They are spaces of mediation where ‘there is not identity, nor non-identity, or non-coincidence’, only ‘inside and outside turning about one another’ (Merleau Ponty, 1968:264). Limbic space recalls the confusing, unconstrained double movement of the original-copy relationship where, strangely, the copy comes both ‘before’ and ‘after’ to create the original. Limbs were never made with specific functions in mind: hands were not made for grasping, eyes were not made for seeing; legs were not made for walking. ‘In fact, nothing in our bodies was born in order that we might be able to use it, but the thing born creates the use. There was no seeing before eyes were born, no talking before the tongue was created…. All the limbs, I am well assured, existed before their use. They cannot, therefore, have grown for the sake of being used’ (Lucretius, 1982:156). As part-object, the limb parts from itself in a double movement that combines and preserves connection and disconnection, constraint and freedom. Less object and more trans-action, the limb is a participial act (Scarry, 1994) that links presence and absence, near and far, the finite and the infinite in a parasitical alternation of fusion, defusion and confusion: another way of saying the chiasmic-chaosmic hinge-like motion of the seam through which the human world turns inside out and outside in; and another way of saying assemblage. The part-whole is thus an assemblage that always refuses the sense of a finished whole closed in upon itself. The part-whole is never the simple combination of parts in an overarching whole, never simply the collection of individual units into an aggregate. For what is individual is also and at the same time in-dividual, undivided and indivisible. It’s this point that the social anthropologist Roy Wagner (1991) captures in his notion of the ‘fractal person’. Just as the limb is less an object and more a trans-action, Wagner’s fractal person is embodied movement that refuses the neat divisions of part and whole, individual and society. The fractal person is the hinge-like motion of the seam throughout an assemblage which Wagner illustrates through the movements of

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genealogical and linguistic reproduction: people reproduce each other and are reproduced by each other in a continuous movement of genealogical otherability just as the sema (signs, marks, tokens) of language ‘carry’ and engender (i.e. reproduce) the people who speak and write them. Wagner’s fractal person is another way of saying Deleuze’s becoming. Both fractality and becoming are other ways of saying part-object and participial act. As we’ve seen, part-objects resist totalization, identity and meaning. And this is what Wagner discloses as perhaps the core of the fractal person: it’s neither singular nor plural, neither part nor sum, but a mediation that moves always between objects and never rests in them. Like a limb, the part-object reaches out to a space of possibilities and attempts to escape the constraining specificities of the object-world. And in the mute and motile world of the part-object, it’s the repetition and reproduction of movement that insists and persists, and not the particularities and specificities of singular objects (individual, group, society). The object simply subserves this mediation or movement between. This applies to the human subject, too, who now is secondary to the generic movement of the part-object’s fractality. The fractal person moves between partobjects in a process of parasitical alternation: there is no identifiable agent with conscious objectives, only generic agency in which iterability and repetition reign: where people come together and disperse, add and subtract, alternate between this and that, here and there—repeatedly, ceaselessly. It’s not the object or objective that dictates action but the generic acts of alternation between objects.

Mediations of assemblage Durkheim’s (1933) interpretation of the division of labour stressed the locatability of people and objects in the social grid of society. To locate things in social space and time meant that you could identify, think and speak them. The division of labour thus becomes a set of strategies for translating the mute, mutable and motile nature of Whitehead’s (1925) ‘mutual relatedness’ into a locatable and speakable space. The division of labour works to focus and fix the invisible movement of mutuality. ‘Movement is blindness’, says Paul Virilio (1995:68). Movement is blindness because it passes before we can see it. This is what Deleuze means when he says that ‘movement always happens behind the thinker’s back, or in the moment when he blinks’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987:1). To be visible, movement has to be captured, stilled, located, where it is seen as a property of things and not as an autonomous process. We see things in movement but not movement in things. This is the problem that Cubism addressed when, for example, Picasso painted a man’s face made up of multiple seams and fractures that seam/seem to make up a visual unity but which reveal the body as a multiplicity of aspects and parts that turn around each other in precisely that sense which Merleau-Ponty (1968) intended when he called the human body a hinge around which the world turns. And this is also Virilio’s (1995) point when he says that Cubism’s significance lies in the shattering of ‘man’s unity of perception’ in which objects give way to part-objects. It’s also Benjamin’s (1968) way of thinking mass reproduction as the iteration of split movings. Virilio (1995) connects this

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loss of unity with fractal space in which the notion of a whole dimension becomes obsolete and where instead we are mediated by ‘an infinite number of fractal, deconstructive subdivisions’ (127). This means that mass reproduction is not the reproduction of objects but the reiteration of fractal spaces: spaces which deny wholeness and yet preserve it as both an illusion of and an allusion to a constituting absence and incompleteness. In this sense, mass reproduction separates and joins at the same time. Or, better, it reproduces a space of mediation in which ‘things neither come together nor fall apart’ (Taylor, 1995:34). It’s this sense of mediation that Derrida (1988) displays in his logic of iterability: that which splits an element while constituting it; a going-between that never settles in one place; a kind of perpetual motion in which ‘the structure of the real is indistinguishable from the structure of the medium. In more familiar terms, the medium is not only the message but is nothing less than reality itself’ (Taylor, 1995:26). In other words, it’s not the specific technologies of reproducibility or their products that demand our attention but their latent logic of mediation or fractal movement. Mediation as fractal movement is assemblage. Cubism depicted objects as complex assemblages of multiple splittings. Kafka, too, saw himself not as an author who created fictional objects but as part of an ongoing, generalized process of assemblage that constituted both himself and his products. Deleuze repeats Kafka’s insight when he reflects on his intellectual co-operation with Felix Guattari: ‘We were only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us. We stopped being “author”…we do not work together, we work between the two’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987:17). Here, mediation works to deny the principle of simple location and identity: the individual becomes absorbed into an undivided and undividable assemblage. When Descartes said Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), he was presumably unaware of the mediating, fractal nature of his language and concepts. For his sum is better understood as the part-whole product of a continuous process of addition, multiplication and division: arithmetically, a sum; fractally, a seam. ‘I (am) assemble(d), therefore I think’ or even ‘I seam/seem to think’ are interpretations of Descartes’ cogito that question the assumed self-identity of the thinking subject and recharacterize it as the continuous mediation of assemblage. In Deleuze’s vision, the individual ‘I’ becomes the collective ‘we’. Kafka and his work mediate each other to form a collective ‘we’. But this is never an identifiable ‘we’; it is an assemblage of otherability where parts join and separate at one and the same time and in which unity only seems. Kafka’s book becomes an open field of mediations and possibilities which help us understand Benjamin’s (1968) way of thinking mass reproduction as the iteration of split or fractal movings. In our electronic age, Kafka’s book assumes the appearance of the ‘electronic book’: The electronic book is a multi-media production. It is interactive. The one who uses it may change it. It is, therefore, both unfixed and the product of multiple authorship. It is immaterial, in the sense that it does not exist as a fixed hard copy. It has its material base rather in the invisible arrangement of electrons on the disc where it is stored. (Miller, 1992:36)

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It is the mute, mutable and motile space of Whitehead’s (1925) mutuality. In this ‘realm of multi-media reproduction…pictures, music and words are all treated the same way by the computer’ (Miller, 1992:36) where they become digitized sema (signs, marks, tokens) whose fractal character as divided same-ness (or semi-ness) functions as the originary point where both pictures and letters ‘coincide before their separation into the different sign functions of picturing and writing’ (Miller, 1992:74); and where ‘graphic as image and graphic as word converge in the materiality of the sign’ (Miller, 1992:148–149) or sema in a movement that recalls the coterminous splitting and joining of Weber’s (1996) graphics of simultaneity. The electronic ‘we’ is the diffused and scattered expression of this digitized simultaneity. Benjamin (1968) prefigured the electronic ‘we’ in his analysis of the technology of film when he drew attention to film’s capacity for mutability and assemblage: close-ups, slow motion, montage, etc. In hypertext, the computer offers the same capacity to create mutable and mobile spaces in what Miller (1992:58) calls ‘a perpetually iterated anamorphosis of the real’ in which the distributed, collective ‘we’ is also an anamorphic ‘we’ that is mute, mutable and mobile. The hyperspace of hypertext foregrounds an ancient problematic of the anamorphic ‘we’: the undecidable question of whether the world ‘preexists its representation in picture or word, or is present in something the representation copies, or is generated by the representation’ (Miller, 1992:72–73). Again, it’s Butler’s (1970:199) question of double currency: ‘Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything?’. As well as Stephen Crane’s story of the battle in The Red Badge of Courage where the battle ‘does not exist at all…it is everywhere, but nowhere in particular; it clings to every object like a film, yet the actors never perceive it’ (Lecercle, 1985:98). It’s also the latent doubt or oscillation of knowing that we noted in the strange logic of reproducibility where original and copy constitute each other in a process of otherability in which the copy makes the original just as much as the original makes the copy. In the same way, the electronic ‘we’ both constitutes and is constituted in a seam that seems. The collective ‘we’ is neither one nor two, neither singular nor plural, neither individual nor group, neither part nor sum (Wagner, 1991). It’s a medium that mediates between separate units. The body, we’ve noted, is an assemblage of parts that reach out into limbic space. So is the mediation between human actor and electronic book whose limbic space is the hyperspace of hypertext. The computer and its associated technologies replace ‘the individual I with a new kind of we’; they disperse the ‘autonomous individual subject’, the ‘private I’, in a ‘medium of collective or “polylogical” thought’ (Miller, 1992:59, 37). Cyberspace, as Virilio (1995:147) reminds us, obsoletizes the ‘conditioned notion of a unique and immutable body’ and liberates the ‘notion of “body’” as an assemblage of possibilities in limbic or virtual space. It’s yet another instance of Deleuze’s rhizome and the fissiparous and nomadic space of Butler’s Erewhon: a space that seeks to expand its possibilities of unconstrained freedom. And this is what we see in the seam of assemblage. For the seam is also semi: half of a whole that is the same as the other half. A fractal same-ness of self-similarity that Virilio (1995) sees as the underlying movement of modern techno-science in its mission to

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dedifferentiate the traditional distinction between man, machine, mineral, vegetable, animal, and to substitute for them a language of generic relationships such as we see in the digitized sema of computerized technologies. Like the seam and the semi, the digitized sema is sheer possibility unencumbered by constraint; like Butler’s Nowhere, it is capable of sourcing untold actualities; and, like Whitehead’s ‘mutual relatedness’, it is mute, mutable and motile. This is how Virilio (1995) views the virtual reality of cyberspace which, through its logic of generic de-differentiation, can realize and assemble a wide range of incompatible forms. Cyberspace makes ‘the living present. hardly more than a living cinema’ (p. 151) in which ‘the space of the possible increases’ (p. 150). Thus, techno-science actualizes a future of open possibilities. And, since the future is open and ‘objectively not fixed’ (p. 150), the aim of techno-science is to fix the future, to locate, and thus make it thinkable and speakable. But techno-science’s practice of generic de-differentiation also embraces the human agent; as we’ve noted, it erases the notions of a unique self-contained body and of the ‘autonomous individual subject’ and replaces them with the split movings of fractal assemblage. For Virilio, all this means the dislocation of the locatable, the fusion (and hence confusion) of inside and outside, here and there, etc: ‘Smashing the being’s unity to smithereens, the (fractal) dimensions of cyberspace enable us to transfer the content of our sensations to an impalpable double, suppressing, along with the old inside/outside dichotomy, the hic and nunc of immediate action’ (Virilio, 1995:148). Everything becomes intrastructural. The miniaturization of biotechnology reaches into the human organism. ‘Some people are already seriously pondering the interchangeability of human beings (or their organs) and even the possibility of body substitutability’ (Virilio, 1995:128). Cybernetic space ‘currently secretes an infinite number of fractal, deconstructive subdivisions that end up eliminating the very idea of environment’ (Virilio, 1995:127). In this rhizomic mediation of ‘real-time teletechnology’, how do we locate and therefore know ourselves? Virilio’s answer is: via retroaction, which is feedback in real time. In the context of cybernetics and teletechnologies, real time is the space-time of mediation in which ‘the structure of the real is indistinguishable from the structure of the medium’ and where ‘the medium is not only the message but is nothing less than reality itself’ (Taylor, 1995:26). The real is no longer that which is represented by technology but is technology as percurrent mediation. Retroaction addresses the question of location in ambivalent, de-differentiated and dislocated fields such as those that Virilio identifies as especially symptomatic of cybernetic technologies with their refusal of simple placement in space-time. Retroaction is the ordering and placing of events after they have happened. Retroaction deals in after-effects. It’s like Durkheim’s (1933) division of labour that works to focus and fix the invisible movement of mutuality. Vision, says Virilio (1995), is pervaded by a ‘perpetual anamorphosis’ that, like the seam of assemblage, reproduces a latent doubt or oscillation in the act of knowing: before and after, inside and outside, figure and ground become indistinguishable in a continuous movement of parasitical alternation. Vision’s ‘perpetual anamorphosis’ recalls the limbic space of otherability where, for example, original and copy, cause and effect constitute each other at the same time, thus refusing any idea of a ‘natural’ order of first and second, before and after. Retroaction works

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retrospectively, after the event, to create an appearance of order and location. An appearance is a construction that ‘we’ make out of vision’s ‘perpetual anamorphosis’. As such, it can only be seen, read, understood afterwards. Appearance means that which becomes visible, comes into sight (from the Latin apparere) but it is also an ordering or placing (Latin apparare) as well as a passing away, a perishing (Latin perire) in a latent oscillation and self-similarity between fractal parts (Latin par, same, equal). What ‘we’ see, read, analyse and understand in the age of cybernetic assemblage is, following Virilio (1995) and Miller (1992), not the appearance of self-identical effects but the apparition of the after-effects of future possibilities in the present. It’s in this sense that assemblage seams/ seems to make us look twice: ‘out of two eyes, not in the same direction but in two different, and indeed divergent, directions’ (Weber, 1996:150) at once and at the same time.

References Ashby, W.R. (1964) An Introduction to Cybernetics, London: Chapman and Hall. Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books. Bernadac, M.-L. and du Bouchet, P. (1993) Picasso: Master of the New, London: Thames and Hudson. Brunette, P. and Wills, D. (1989) Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Butler, S. (1910) Unconscious Memory, London: A.C. Fifield. ——(1970) Erewhon, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone Press. ——(1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (1987) Dialogues, London: Athlone Press. Derrida, J. (1988) Limited Inc, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Durkheim, E. (1933) The Division of Labour in Society, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Fisher, P. (1991) Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums, New York: Oxford University Press. Focillon, H. (1989) The Life of Forms in Art, New York: Zone Books. Foucault, M. (1983) This Is Not a Pipe, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lecercle, J.-J. (1985) Philosophy Through the Looking Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire, London: Hutchinson. Lucretius (1982) On the Nature of the Universe, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Miller, J. (1992) Illustration, London: Reaktion Books. Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York: Oxford University Press. ——(1994) Resisting Representation, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Saussure, F. de (1959) Course in General Linguistics, New York: Philosophical Library. Taylor, M.C. (1984) Erring: A Postmodern A/theology, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ——(1995) ‘Rhizomic fields of interstanding’, Tekhnema 2:24–36. Virilio, P. (1991) The Aesthetics of Disappearance, New York: Semiotext(e). ——(1995) The Art of the Motor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wagner, R. (1991) ‘The fractal person’, in M. Godelier and M. Strathern (eds) Big Men and Great Men: The Development of a Comparison in Melanesia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, S. (1996) Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Whitehead, A.N. (1925) Science and the Modern World, New York: Macmillan.

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EPILOGUE Interview with Robert Cooper Robert C.H.Chia and Jannis Kallinikos

Question 1 (RC) In Gareth Morgan’s (1983) edited collection Beyond Method you wrote, in a short biography of yourself, that you are largely ‘self-taught’ in the social sciences and that your youthful intellectual interests were centred around thinkers such as Freud who were critically concerned with the study of the ‘human condition’. I believe you also at a very early age edited a literary magazine which led to your coming into contact with writers such as the American poet Charles Olson. How have such influences shaped your intellectual priorities and what do you see to be the enduring themes underlying your own research over the last twenty years in particular?

My earliest intellectual interests revolved around the order-disorder dualism. And this is still one of my main concerns—order-disorder and its variants: rationality-irrationality, stability-instability, organization-disorganization, differentiation-de-differentiation. My continuing interest in Freud’s work derives from this. Freud’s distinction between the conscious-unconscious mind always seemed to me to be another way of addressing the order-disorder question. It also seemed to connect, at least for me, with Max Weber’s theme that modern rationality was ‘the purging of magic from the world’. Weber’s ‘magic’ was another way of saying Freud’s unconscious. So, Freud’s ideas were highly relevant to the understanding of modern institutions and to the general processes of modern organizing. But, first, we have to remind ourselves that, for Freud, the mind is not a place—it doesn’t have a specific location. Places and locations are the products of the mind’s work. The mind is more like a field of symbolic-material action engaged in ‘a ceaseless dynamics of realization’ (Gillespie, 1995:254). The conscious mind is an active field of cognitive strategies which orders the matter of the world—it literally puts things in order, gives them sequence and clarity. And it’s always in contention with the so-called unconscious, which, again, does not occupy a specific place. The unconscious is literally that of which we’re not conscious. We can only be conscious of the world when it’s laid out for us in more or less formal order, when it’s given structure and direction. That which is unstructured and lacks direction is necessarily the unconscious, that which can’t

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be thought in formal terms. The relation between consciousness and Max Weber’s ideas on the rationalization of the modern world can be seen in the work of John Wilkins and Thomas Sprat who were instrumental in founding the Royal Society in England in the seventeenth century. Wilkins and Sprat were both committed to the idea of developing a rational language for science. In fact, Sprat’s principles of scientific writing were like Taylor’s principles of Scientific Management—both were based on criteria of economy and discipline. Science (according to Sprat) required that we get rid of uncertainties, redundancies, and the slipperiness of everyday language. Science had to be based on a system in which knowledge was placed in tables and hierarchies. Science addressed a world of discrete things with discrete words. As Hugh Kenner (1987:87) has noted of John Wilkins’s similar programme, ‘In Wilkins’s usage, you do not call a thing by its name, which would be arbitrary. No, you use the name to designate the thing’s location in a taxonomic chart. The chart lays out the entire scheme of the world, and it branches and rebranches like a great tree.’ The work of Wilkins and Sprat heralded the general development of formal organization that, for Weber, marked the formation of the modern world: ‘Their impulse was to order and tidy what previously had been random human behaviour: had been, in one word, babble’ (Kenner, 1987:90). The consciousness of modernity is that of order per se—the placing of names/things in a table or grid. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges satirized Wilkins’s programme in a short essay, ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’. For Borges, Wilkins’s ‘analytical language’ creates an exaggeratedly formal world in which the universe is divided into forty categories, designated by monosyllabic names each of which is composed of two characters or sounds. These categories are further subdivided into genres designated by an extra consonant sound; genres are then further subdivided into species indexed by a vocal sound. Borges’s satirizing of Wilkins’s obsession with formal order was taken up by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (1970). For Borges and Foucault, the modern world represents the formalization and institutionalization of tendencies which already existed in the conscious mind—formal knowledge always being a system or ordered structure in which words and things are placed and thus located. The critical theorist Samuel Weber (1987) has shown how fundamental the conscious—unconscious dualism is to the construction of subjectivity and sense of self. What we call the ‘subject’ is a result of continuous contestation between conscious and unconscious processes: If the unconscious means anything whatsoever, it is that the relation of self and others, inner and outer, cannot be grasped as an interval between polar opposites but rather as an irreducible dislocation of the subject in which the other inhabits the self as its condition of possibility. (Weber 1987:32–33) The conscious subject is thus enfolded with unconscious forces which ‘it can neither fully assimilate nor totally exclude’ (p. 33). And Weber shows how this ambivalent process affects Freud himself in his attempts to formalize psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline. Here, the ‘discipline’ of science necessarily involves making conscious what

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is unconscious, taming that which resists taming. Psychoanalysis as a science, as a discipline—in order to found and maintain itself—has to discipline itself by setting itself apart from what it is not. Freud himself was guilty of precisely this when he excommunicated Adler and Jung from the psychoanalytic movement ‘because their thought was too systematic, speculative, and narcissistic’. Weber’s point is that Freud, in attempting to establish his system, was also systematic, speculative and narcissistic. Weber (1987) has applied the same analytical strategy to understanding the formation of professional knowledge in the modern world. He argues that what we understand as professionalism is largely the product of a group of individuals who seek to define themselves in terms of self-contained fields of competence. Now, what’s significant about Weber’s analysis is its remarkable similarity to Wilkins’s and Sprat’s attempt to program science as a discipline. For Wilkins’s and Sprat’s systematization of knowledge—which rested upon a strategy of divide and rule, of categorization and classification, of tabulation and hierarchy—was also Freud’s method, as it is of the development of professional knowledge. Like Freud, Wilkins and Sprat were well aware of the necessity for order to suppress its concomitant disorder. Here we have knowledge as the result of ‘struggle’ or contestation such as Foucault discusses in works like The Order of Things (1970) and The Birth of the Clinic (1975). It’s this contestation between conscious, formalized knowledge and unconscious processes that the art theorist Anton Ehrenzweig (1967) discusses in The Hidden Order of Art. Ehrenzweig takes Freud’s distinction between primary (unconscious) and secondary (conscious) processes as the basis for understanding how we order our experience of the world. Ehrenzweig distinguishes two forms of knowing: one, highly focused and differentiated; the other, unfocused and de-differentiated. The focused, differentiated form is that modern type of knowing introduced by Wilkins and Sprat, and which we associate with the rationalized knowledge of formal organization. This form of knowing is associated with secondary (conscious) process. Unfocused, de-differentiated knowing—associated with primary (unconscious) process—is what Wilkins and Sprat wished to repress in their construction of a scientific system of knowledge and which, I like to assume, was part of the world’s ‘magic’ that Max Weber saw as being suppressed by institutionalized rationality. De-differentiated knowing occurs as a process of complex scanning, a kind of scattered perception over a field of parts, an open field. Ehrenzweig’s two forms of knowing connect Freud’s work on the conscious— unconscious with Charles Olson’s work. Olson (1910–1970) was an American poet and essayist who had a significant influence on postmodern literature, especially in the USA. (See, for example, Paul A.Bové (ed.) 1995, Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays, passim.) Olson developed a way of thinking and a literary practice which reflects Ehrenzweig’s strategy of complex scanning in a de-differentiated, open field. Olson’s literary practice developed out of long reflection on the work of philosophers, especially that of Alfred North Whitehead, who explored the nature of process—as opposed to structure—in both the human and the natural worlds. Olson also took ideas from modern physics, especially from quantum theory which emphasizes the complicity between observer and observed in the study of physical processes, that the so-called observer is

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really a participator in reality. Knowing, thinking, creating were, for Olson, always participatory processes. And the participation was always in a field of symbolic— material forces which denied authorship as the expression of the individual person. In this sense, Olson prefigured the current post-structuralist critique of authorship as selfexpression. Participation in the field also denied the idea of the world as representation. Instead of representing an assumed outer world through discourse, Olson substituted the projective act of the body whereby the actor’s senses and organs participated in the field of action. Here, again, we find Olson presaging current developments on ‘embodied mind’ where ‘thinking becomes more like perception-in-action, where what we do guides thought rather than the reverse’ (Rotman, 1994:262) and where body and environment constitute a mutual fold such as we see in the Möbius strip (Cooper, 1983). Olson’s thesis of field participation, with its foregrounding of the body as material act, is a version of Freud’s primary process and Ehrenzweig’s de-differentiated, open field where form emerges out of action, and where the medium of expression counts more than the thing or idea expressed. Primary process, the de-differentiated field, the participative-projective act are now the ways in which I understand organization. It will help here if we recall the history of the term organization. Raymond Williams (1983), in his Keywords, which traces the historical transformation of key words and meanings that have contributed to our understanding and experience of modern culture and society, reminds us that organization comes from organ and organism. Organ, of course, means an instrument or tool, and in the context of the body it denotes the specialized instruments of seeing, hearing, etc. Organism refers to a living (as opposed to machinic) system or organization of such instruments. But there’s much more to organ and organism than these conventional definitions offer. And this is where primary-de-differentiatedparticipative process becomes significant, for it portrays reality as realizationin-process, as verb rather than noun. If we apply this transformation to organ, we see instrument as part of realization-in-process. Organ becomes a projective act of regen-eration, where the linguistic roots of organ (or=re, and gan=gen) indicate re-gen or re-gain. The same argument applies to ergon (Greek for ‘work’), which is but another way of saying organ. So, human organs do not merely see or hear but actively contribute to that general process of regeneration that we call human culture. Organization in this sense is an ontological process of continuous regeneration of form out of non-form, of secondary process out of primary process. In other words, it’s renewal—renewal of bodies, actions, time, language, memory, etc. It’s what Derrida calls ‘sur-vival’, ‘living-on’, ‘translation’ (Johnson, 1993), or, as Olson would say, it’s projective act. Now, it’s not difficult to see how organizations in the modern world fit this interpretation of organization. For one thing, all organizations perform work that comes back to the human actor/body as organ-organism. Hospitals renew bodies, churches renew souls, schools renew cognitive-informational structures, and so on. I don’t claim that these renewal processes are intrinsically human centred or consciously rational. I’d prefer to say that it’s regeneration as a general process of organization that works on and through human actors. So, following Freud, we might call organization in this sense an

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unconscious or uncanny force. We must understand the renewal-regeneration of organization as a complex process of repetition—or, as Freud would say, an uncanny compulsion to repeat. As organisms, we are compelled to repeat, to regenerate, our worlds. Repetition is thus a basic feature— perhaps the basis—of all social organization. But repetition is a complex action-structure. Deleuze (1990) tells us that repetition takes two forms. One form is the repetition of an original model, a process we normally understand as simple copying or duplicating. The truth of the copy is judged by its degree of correspondence to the original. (Let’s also note that this form of repetition connects origin with organ and ergon as other names for regeneration.) The other form of repetition is simple doubling without any origin or copy, before or after, in which the ‘copy’ retrospectively creates the ‘original’ just as much as the ‘original’ is seen to create the ‘copy’. The first form of repetition we associate with rationality, formal organization and order. It’s also a way of understanding Freud’s conscious mind and secondary process, Wilkins’s and Sprat’s principles of scientific writing, as well as Ehrenzweig’s knowing by differentiation. Each of these implies repetition as sequence, structure and direction. Repetition of the second kind is the disorder of ungrounded doublings which rational organization—strangely, uncannily—both requires for its own existence yet has to exclude and treat as inimical. This is Freud’s unconscious mind and primary process, Ehrenzweig’s de-differentiation, and Olson’s participative, ‘projective act’. Each of these stresses repetition as involuntary regeneration, iteration without direction, without beginning or end. Organization, for me, is a process which rests on the contestation between these two forms of repetition and the symbiotic compatibility—incompatibility between them, just like Weber’s (1987) conscious subject that is co-implicated in the unconscious forces which ‘it can neither fully assimilate nor totally exclude’ (p. 33). Organization as regeneration, regeneration as repetition—these represent the enduring themes of my thinking over the past twenty years. And we might say that nothing is more enduring than repetition. Question 2 (RC) It would not be too far wrong to suggest that many writers and readers in the more conventional mould of organization theory think of you as a ‘postmodern’ organization theorist. A central reference point here is the ‘modernism/ postmodernism’ series of articles written for the journal Organization Studies, beginning with the introductory piece written jointly by yourself and Gibson Burrell (Cooper and Burrell, 1988). Given the vastly different style of thinking you bring to the study of organization, how does ‘postmodern’ organization theory, as you understand it, differ from the kind of writing produced by more conventional organization theorists? We should be careful of labelling, I feel. It can be too convenient, and, in the extreme, intellectually unhealthy. All labels tend to arrest critical thought. This is what has happened with the term ‘postmodern’. As we know, Lyotard (1991) has questioned the ‘postmodern’ as a label that distinguishes it from—and even opposes it to—the ‘modern’. It’s not a case of the postmodern coming after the modern. For Lyotard, the modern is already conflated with the postmodern, ‘modernity contains the promise of its

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overcoming’ (p. 25), it’s already at war with itself. For this reason alone, it becomes difficult to call oneself a postmodernist. In my own case, I have always thought of the modern-postmodern connection as a mutually constituting complicity, or better, as Lyotard (1991) has it, a ‘general agonistics’, in which you can’t have one without the other. And, by the same token, I have never thought of myself as an organization theorist but rather as an intellectual interrogator of the modern condition in which organization, technology and information all call into play their agonistic complicity with disorganization, disorientation and ‘un-formation’. This means that I don’t consciously practise ‘postmodern organization theory’, despite the label that others may apply. Instead, I employ a generic methodology which stresses general process rather than the particularized details of specific methodology. The generic approach underlines the sameness rather than the difference of things. The lack of specific difference or detail means that one’s intellectual strategy is forced to face a world that lacks intrinsic identity and certainty. Applied to organizational analysis, generic methodology means that one analyses organizing as a general process rather than organizations and their specific features. In generic analysis, there are no natural distinctions between ‘individual’, ‘organization’ and ‘society’, for example. Rather, there are only interlocking and intertwining associations that are continually on the move and that thus deny the idea of fixed entities with separate insides and outsides. Generic analysis does not recognize the self-contained human actor with its intentions and objectives. In the conventional view, intention is read as a mental event, a purpose ‘in’ an actor’s mind. In generic analysis, intention is the tensional traction of a field of heterogeneous events, ‘intention means “in tension”, a pattern of actions that is distributed throughout such a field and which serves to maintain it or hold it together. The intention is no longer “in the head” of the actor—it is the actor that is “in” the happening of the field’ (Cooper and Law, 1995:246). Generic analysis subordinates the intentional object and the specific part in order to reveal organization in its most general sense. It’s this sense of the generic that’s implied by organization as the regeneration of general processes of ‘sur-vival’ or ‘living-on’ rather than organization as the specialized pursuit of specific goals (see response to Question 1). Generic knowledge is scattered, flexible and undivided. In contrast, specific knowledge divides and categorizes, locates ‘things’ in simple spaces, and linearizes its subject matter. It’s a product of what the philosopher Whitehead (1925:72) called simple location: the translation of raw matter into ‘things’ that get their definition by being placed in ‘definite finite regions(s) of space and definite finite durations of time’. Specific knowledge answers the specific questions of: What? Where? When? It precasts its questions in a way that demands they be answered in the specifiable space—time terms of simple location. This is the knowledge that modern organization has constructed in its pursuit of modernity—the knowledge of things in specific, self-contained spaces. Michel Foucault’s work is mainly about the development of simple location as a major strategy of modern organizing. His analysis of the gaze, for example, is also a story about the suppression of the generic and its supersession by a form of knowing that specifies the world in terms of increasingly particularized structures and grids. We see the same story in the development of the modern professions in the nineteenth century, which used the

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principle of simple location to ‘place’ knowledge in knowable (i.e. coherent, selfcontained) spaces (Bledstein, 1976). And, of course, it’s a story that repeats John Wilkins’s ‘analytical language’ as the basis for (a form of) scientific knowing in the sixteenth century (see response to Question 1). From these observations, we begin to see that modern organization is much more than an administrative—economic convenience. Organizations are the social organs through which society’s members know, think, remember, etc. They are the social-cultural organs by which society renews the lifeworld of its members. But it’s also in this sense that we have to understand organization as the reproduction of a society’s population, where organization as regeneration takes as its object the individual bodies of the populace: members’ bodies always necessarily included as raw material—human resources—in the production and reproduction of organization. As agents of production, organizational members are also necessarily included as agents of consumption. We can see this recursive process in one of its more dramatic versions in the production of ‘urban man’ in early Victorian Britain, especially through the training of the excretory functions: ‘If man could be forced to yield to interference in such a sensitive domain, he could be made to acquiesce in any kind of control; he could be made to learn many ways of binding his energy, he could be pressed into modernity’ (Schoenwald, 1973:675). Not least, this meant that the organization of orderly private habits could be generalized to the performance of orderly public roles: a version of Michel Foucault’s (1977) ‘docile bodies’. But there’s more to it than productive effort and orderly comportment. The creation of ‘urban man’, of the producingconsuming agent, is the translation of the human body (together with other raw materials) into generic organization. By this, I mean the making abstract and interchangeable of bodies and other objects into a pool of generalizable and transmutable resources. This, of course, is Marx’s view of modernity, especially his characterization of the ‘social human being’ as ‘the most total and universal possible social product’. It’s also Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) idea of ‘deterritorialization’—the de-localizing of matter or raw material from ‘simply located’ bodies and objects for purposes of general transmutability (and hence transmissibility). But Deleuze and Guattari also remind us that the deterritorialization of forms is simply the excuse for their ‘reterritorialization’ in new ‘simple locations’, hierarchies and institutional structures. Behind every example of modern production lurks the ghost of generic organization. In the idea of deterritorialization-reterritorialization we meet a yet further feature of generic organization—general agonistics (Lyotard, 1991). Territorialization is the divisioning and compartmentalization of a territory or field—academic, administrative, cultural, social, etc.—into simple locations. It’s agonistic in the sense that the setting up of divisions demands their continuous maintenance, since divisions are always internally constituted by undivisions, insides by their outsides. Generic organization explicitly recognizes this agonistics or struggle. This is, again, Samuel Weber’s (1987) argument that the concept of the Self is never just a simple difference from others but is an effect of a continuously maintained contestation with others (see response to Question 1). As Bledstein (1976) shows, the organization of American universities in the nineteenth century was formally and consciously based on the divisioning and compartmentalization

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of fields of knowledge. The divisions thus constituted served not only to found individual ‘disciplines’ in the conventional academic sense but—like the anally disciplined ‘urban man’ of Victorian Britain—also served to discipline individuals by excluding the very things that recursively constituted them, that is, by setting apart those things of which they were apart. Both subject as agent and as subject matter are co-implicated in a tensional field of (apparently) discrete elements that neither fit nor do not fit together. It’s in this sense that agonistics is the continuous regeneration of generic organization. Another way of saying generic organization is cyborganization. Cyborganization is short for cybernetic organization. Briefly, cybernetics is the science of communication and control in humans, animals and machines. And, for cybernetics, organization means communication and control. Cybernetic organization is always on the move’, it’s organization as the continuous regeneration of patterns—patterns that perpetuate themselves through changing circumstances. In this sense, organization is really information, or rather reformation, the active making of forms. Cybernetic organization is generic in at least two senses: (1) it reads the world according to an abstract and generalizable language like Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) deterritorializationreterritorialization; and (2) it reveals the world as series of circuits of differences (Bateson, 1972) or becomings in which ‘things’ or ‘states’ are secondary to process or continuous movement. Donna Haraway’s (1991) notion of the cyborg (short for cybernetic organism) illustrates these two features of cybernetic organization. The cyborg is a ‘hybrid of machine and organism’ which relativizes ‘the difference between living and mechanical systems’ and radically challenges ‘the line of demarcation drawn between the natural and the artificial’ (Johnson, 1993:105). It expresses itself through the ‘plasticity of informational patterns (e.g. databases, electronic money)’ which make ‘possible the combinatorial play of matter and thus the continuous disassembly and reassembly of new forms and patterns’ (Cooper and Law, 1995:268). In stressing information on the move, cyborganization stresses translation as the modus operandi of social life: the translation of patterns, ideas, programmes between systems rather than the individual systems themselves. For, in cyborganization, it’s not the systems—the individual, the organization, the society—that count but the patterns of information that move between them and which constitute them as repeated punctualizations. It’s these features of cyborganization that we meet in Haraway’s (1991:164) description of biotechnology as information. Biotechnology is the exemplary science of the cyborg because it translates living organisms into ‘problems of genetic coding and read-out…In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components, that is, special kinds of information processing devices’. Here, cybernetic information surpasses the conventionally recognized separation between biology and technology to form a new punctualization. In this sense, cyborganization eliminates the old labels and categories of thought. In several recent publications, the philosopher Mark Taylor (Taylor and Saarinen, 1994; Taylor, 1995) has discussed similar ‘collapsings’ brought about by the new electronic communication technologies. Taylor sensitively and subtly reveals the underlying—and therefore largely neglected—nature of information in his notion of the

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mediatrix. The mediatrix is ‘that which is constituted by the intersection of electronic media and computelecommunications technology’ (Taylor, 1995:25). The mediatrix is not a stable form—in fact, it’s more like ‘un-form’ because its complex, fleeting, unstable connections and multiplicities defy conventional logic and analysis. For this reason, the mediatrix is beyond formal comprehension—it can only be hinted at, alluded to, because it’s medium-media in the most literal sense of being in the middle or between. All this suggests that the study of organizations and institutions—indeed, all social forms— requires a radically different vocabulary of thinking than conventional methodologies provide. And this alternative vocabulary is exactly what Taylor and Saarinen (1994) offer in their Imagologies book, where they discuss the implications of the new electronic technologies for various organizational and institutional processes. In effect, they provide a generic methodology for the new cyborganizational ‘forms’—a methodology which says that in our late-modern world of electronic interaction ‘everything is everywhere at all times’ (Whitehead) and where, instead of organizations, we have ‘organizings as ongoing actions in heterogeneous fields of tension, as happenings—on the wing, so to speak’ (Cooper and Law, 1995:271–272); a world of collage, mergings and mixings; a world that is always in the middle, always in-between. Taylor and Saarinen’s Imagologies introduces us to a range of cyborganization-relevant ideas and terms to reflect this electronically mediated world of the in-between: Interstanding, Netropolis, Net Effect, Electronomics, Shifting Subjects, etc. This is the vocabulary of generic knowledge— scattered, flexible, undivided. Your question asks how my way of thinking organization differs from conventional organization theory. I have answered you in terms of how I think the subject of modern organizing, rather than how others think the field of organization studies. For me, modern organizing has to be understood (1) by means of a generic methodology which underlines the scattered and heterogeneous nature of organization as distinct from the study of organizations and their specific features; (2) as a repeated process of social-cultural regeneration in which society recursively includes its members as raw material for organizing; (3) as a general agonistics of differentiation-de-differentiation in which organizing defines and recognizes itself through setting-apart that which it needs to exclude; and (4) as the cyborganizational interpretation of organization-information in terms of translation and the transitional space of the mediatrix. Question 3 (RC) Your paper Organization/Disorganization’ (Cooper, 1986), published more than ten years ago now, is still for many a rather difficult read. Together with other papers such as ‘Information, Communication and Organization: A Post-Structural Revision’ (Cooper, 1987), it seems to mark the moment of your assimilation of the rise of post-structural thinking into your own concerns with the nature of human organizing. What affinities and differences do you see between your own intellectual concerns and those of post-structural writers such as Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze? How do you view their contributions in relation to others such as Heidegger, Olson and Whitehead who have influenced your thinking?

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The term ‘post-structural’ is of quite recent origin, having come into general usage only in the last twenty or so years. Post-structural ideas—by which we mean process, complexity, de-differentiation as opposed to structure, simplicity, categorization—have been of intellectual concern since the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers in Ancient Greece. My own systematic exposure to post-structural thinking—although we didn’t call it that in those early days—was in the 1950s through the works of the American poet Charles Olson and—via Olson—the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Shortly after, I discovered the works of the social anthropologist-cybernetician Gregory Bateson, the philosophers of science Gaston Bachelard and Alfred Korzybski, and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, all of whom complemented Olson’s and Whitehead’s concerns. The works of thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze did not appear on the AngloAmerican scene until much later—around 1970. So it’s not correct to suggest that I ‘assimilated’ post-structural writing with the publication of the 1980s papers you mention. In fact, I had already published some personal speculations on ‘process thinking’ in social science in my ‘Open Field’ essay (Cooper, 1976) which was written in 1973. It would be more accurate to say that I welcomed these post-structuralist writers because their approach augmented my own thinking and because they showed how ‘process thinking’ might be used in social theory. I’ve come to recognize that three general themes run through my work, especially over the last twenty years: systemness, interdisciplinarity and imagination. I will try to show how these themes relate, in the first place, to the writings of Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze.

Systemness Let’s define systemness as exaggerated order: a place for everything and everything in its place. Foucault’s work could be described as perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of modern systemness and its transgression. The theme of systemness and its emergence in seventeenth-century Europe is first developed in Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1973) where he described the birth of the mental hospital and the workhouse as mechanisms of increasing social and psychological control by the modern state. The Birth of the Clinic (1975) continues this theme through the institutionalization of modern clinical medicine and the ways in which it ‘carved up’ (Foucault’s term) the human body into separate, specialized spaces that could be ‘understood’ and controlled by separate, specialized terminologies. For Foucault, systemness emerges out of systematic description, for to describe something is to make it visible. The role of language in the creation of systems of knowledge—specifically, the human sciences—is explored by Foucault in The Order of Things (1970) where, again, ‘spaces’ are made visible through the ‘describing’ strategies of tabulation, representation and classification. The Order of Things reveals the complex ordering techniques devised by modern systems of administration in their drive towards systemness. In Discipline and Punish (1977) systemness is exemplified in the idea of the Panopticon, the instrument and symbol of all-

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seeing, centralized power. In Foucault’s work, systemness is the end result of a long historic process of making people and things visibly knowable so that they can be more easily controlled. The essence of this process is the inscribing, describing and prescribing powers of language. For Foucault, language is the major device for making ‘space/s’ and hence for their systematization (see Chapter 4 on ‘Speaking’ in The Order of Things). But Foucault also knew that the systematization of space necessarily includes its own dislocation. This is the problem he analyses in his famous account of Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas, where he shows that Velázquez was working simultaneously with two competing spaces: the space of speaking, of discourse, and the space of seeing (see Cooper, 1993). Speaking designates and locates things in specific spaces. It rests on a logic of representation which works according to a hierarchy of original and copy, so that the original is thought of as cause, and copy, effect. Speaking creates spaces of identity and identification. Seeing, on the other hand, works in a space that is ‘outside’ speaking and discourse, a space that denies the hierarchy of original and copy, not least because there can be no original without a copy, so that copy and original can be said to create each other. The space of seeing is what Mark Taylor (1995) has recently called the mediatrix, an undifferentiated confusion in which there is neither beginning nor end, neither here nor there, neither this nor that—in short, a space that seems to collapse upon itself. The space of seeing is always ‘outside’ systemness while at the same time being integral to it. Systemness has long been recognized as a special feature of the modern world. The scientific determinism of Charles Darwin was a form of systemness. Despite the underlining of transformation in evolutionary development, everything was viewed as predetermined—even chance was thought to be subject to ‘as yet unknown laws’. And for the Victorians more generally, determinism became a widely held way of thinking about the world in its social, economic and political forms: ‘determinism represents a knowable order…an inherent and irreversible order capable of including all phenomena…The individual is directed into a restricted time, space, and activity’ (Beer, 1989:118). Like Foucault’s space of saying, determinism depends on linguistic devices— words, syntax—to systematize its orders of knowledge. It places things in an all-inclusive narrative order of specified relations that are ‘fixed in a succession which more and more acutely delimits and characterizes’, so that ‘the indeterminate, the reversible, the reality of that which might have been, the multiplicity of the future, the moment broken away from sequence, broken away from relations, fear without object, lack without object’ is viewed as ‘wish-fulfilment, impossibility, something freakish and fitful, something delusory’—a kind of ‘second-order experience, doomed and negative’ (Beer, 1989:119). Kant, too, wrote about determinism and its emergence in the modern university in The Conflict of the Faculties (1798). For Kant, the modern university was like an industrial machine which produced knowledge for students who simply became its passive consumers. Knowledge was divided into disciplines and departments, each with its own specialized way of speaking. Kant’s argument is echoed in the recent governmental programme to formalize the knowledge system in British universities—what Marilyn Strathern (1995) has called the ‘enhanced systematization’ of the university or

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‘systematization gone mad…in the name of enhancing the system’ (pp. 28–29). Here, systemness occurs in the forms of knowledge codification, strategic planning, concentration within fields of knowledge, measurement of quality output—all of which are imposed on the universities from above. Strathern reminds us that knowledge is never a product—it’s a continuous and unfinished process whose intrinsic nature resists systematization. It’s self-organizing, non-linear and multi-stranded. It grows from the bottom up and not from top down. To illustrate self-organizing, bottom-up knowledge, Strathern uses Deleuze’s image of the rhizome, a botanical metaphor to describe growth that spreads in all directions, nomadically, without plan, spontaneously. The rhizome cuts across artificially imposed divisions. And it’s this informal transgression of formal systematization that Strathern endorses as the real source of knowledge creation in the university—and elsewhere.

Interdisciplinarity Deleuze’s rhizome (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987) is clearly another way of talking about the interdisciplinarity of the knowledge process. It summarizes the main concerns of Deleuze’s later work—the need to understand the world as unfinished multiplicity and shifting heterogeneity. The rhizome lies beyond conceptual understanding—it can’t be caught in a concept or arrested in a label. It’s always on the move—becoming, as Deleuze has it. Becomings always work between binary terms—between question and answer, human—machine, man-woman, etc. Becoming is, therefore, the basic mechanism of interdisciplinarity—it’s when inter becomes between. Organized knowledge comes to us in discrete packages or disciplinary fields that require an artificial homogeneity or unity to give them authority and credibility. Again, it’s a version of simple location. But Deleuze’s becoming asserts the heterogeneity of understanding, and it’s this that Mark Taylor (1995) calls interstanding, in which ‘understanding’ loses its sense of revealing a permanent truth that lies under and instead reveals a forever open-ended, ambivalent and shifting process that can’t be known in any formal sense. It can’t be known formally because it can’t be simply located: ‘Its place is the dis-place of interstanding’ (Taylor, 1995:33). It’s always inter or between. Taylor uses the new communication technologies to exemplify his idea of interstanding as a version of Deleuze’s rhizome: Our medium is the mediatrix…which is constituted by the intersection of electronic media and compu-telecommunications technology. This mediatrix includes mediating structures ranging from television, radio, film, and video to telephones, faxes, computers, and, perhaps most important, the net. (Taylor, 1995:25) To grasp the significance of the mediatrix as rhizomic interstanding, we have to dispense with the conventional understanding of the media—the specific forms of mass communication such as TV, radio, newspapers, etc. These can be ‘understood’ in the

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conventional sense but the mediatrix—like the rhizome—is beyond formal comprehension; it can only be alluded to, indirectly sensed, improperly grasped. Gillian Beer (1992) has caught this sense of interstanding in her characterization of interdisciplinarity as over-interpretation. While what she calls underinterpretation is the conventional way of understanding that determines its objects through simple location, over-interpretation rejects such scant attentiveness and specificity—instead, it avoids, deflects and even denies the supposed clarity of under-interpretation; instead of fixing and limiting the meaning or significance of an idea, it leaves it unresolved. Thus, a necessary feature of interdisciplinarity as interstanding is over-interpretation. Like interstanding, over-interpretation is always dis-placed, always becoming. Beer exemplifies her understanding of interdisciplinarity as over-interpretation through the metaphor of the ‘missing link’, both in its evolutionary context and, more generally, as a way of thinking the experience of ‘missing connections’. The Victorians became obsessed with the evolutionary implications of the missing link because it suggested that their ‘humanness’ was contaminated by their ‘relationship’ to the apes. But, as Beer makes clear, what underlies the Victorians’ obsession is the peculiar logic of the ‘missing link’ as a general metaphor for division and boundary with its strange power to attract and repel at the same time: ‘The idea of the missing link…was as much a way of reinforcing distance as it was of seeking out connection’ (Beer, 1992:37). As division, boundary, the missing link is an impossible site, a displacement rather than a placement, that haunts every aspect of human activity. And what we call organizing or regenerating is really the continuous contention or agonistics generated by the betweenness and heterogeneity of the missing link: ‘The human psyche may need always the monstrous to reject, that other which lurks inside the self to be split off as enemy. The desire to expel, reify, and control’ (Beer, 1992:23–24). This, of course, is yet another way of expressing Samuel Weber’s (1987:33) argument that the conscious human subject is contextualized by forces which ‘it can neither fully assimilate nor totally exclude’. But, for Beer, the significance of interdisciplinarity is that it keeps open the intrinsic tensions of the missing link—in other words, it keeps the link always missing. In this way, knowledge of our world is kept always alive, always irresolvable, transgressive. And, further, interdisciplinarity is more than a field of tensions—it reflects an intense human need to question, to problematize, to doubt. Or, as Beer has it, to inauthenticate: ‘Inauthenticating, keeping belief wavering, making monsters, or fictions…(may be) a more intense need than authentication or discovery’ (Beer, 1992:41, original emphasis); the need to become, to interstand.

Imagination Interdisciplinarity as interstanding implies imagination—the relaxing of systemness with its divisions and disciplines, and the creating of more open, fluid fields of knowing. Imagination is Ehrenzweig’s (1967) unfocused, de-differentiated form of knowing—a way of interstanding that ‘sees’ the indeterminate, the subliminal. The loosening up of

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determinate systemness was Samuel Butler’s theme in his satirical novel, Erewhon (1970, but first published 1872). Butler was an active critic of Darwin’s evolutionary biology— especially its deterministic bias and its distinction between the organic and the inorganic. Butler could not accept this distinction between ‘life’ and ‘non-life’, and argued for their equivalence. Instead, he posited the world as a dynamic, interactive self-organizing system that becomes in an indeterminate environment. It’s this point that leads me to Butler’s novel, Erewhon. Erewhon is the story of an English traveller, Higgs, who crosses a giant mountain range to discover the remote country of Erewhon. The inhabitants of Erewhon abhor systemness and simple location. For example, the Erewhonian institutions of higher learning—the so-called Colleges of Unreason—insist that Unreason is commutual with Reason: ‘Unreason is a part of reason: it must therefore be allowed its full share in stating the initial conditions’ (Butler, 1970:188). The Professors of Unreason call the co-implication of Reason and Unreason a ‘double currency’, thus recalling the ambivalence and ambiguity of interstanding and over-interpretation. The static and the separate are the marks of Reason: ‘Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines…Extremes are alone logical; but they are always absurd; the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme’ (Butler, 1970:187). The Erewhonian educational system is based on ‘hypothetics’ which, briefly, is thinking in terms of possibilities. Education should not be limited to learning about things—that’s merely factual knowledge. It should be about imagining contingencies and possibilities. Hypothetics is the science of possibilities, as opposed to the science of actualities. Hypothetics as the recognition and cultivation of possibilities is also basic to Butler’s intellectual strategy in Erewhon itself. For Erewhon is almost literally the inverse of ‘nowhere’—a place that might be or could be, a place that is a potential space but which nowhere actually exists. Butler’s hypothetics is Deleuze’s becoming, which always occurs in a potential space of multiple interactions: ‘In a multiplicity what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what there is “between”, the between, a set of relations that are not separable from each other’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: viii). For Butler, for Deleuze, imagination begins with the idea of relation and the endless potential of relations for combinability and permutability, and continues as a rhizome of possibilities. There are, thus, only beginnings, becomings—and, therefore, no ends, no endings. Butler’s argument recurs in the more modern guise of information theory, especially in the way that this has been employed by Umberto Eco (1989) in the context of modern art analysis. Where Butler talks about ‘nowhere’ and Deleuze of the rhizome, Eco talks about the ‘open work’ with its stress on multiplicity and unfinished becoming. Eco’s open work is the work of the indeterminate. And Eco expresses the openness of indeterminacy through the concept of information as used in information theory. (It’s important here to recognize that, for information theory, information is also a definition of organization, i.e. the construction and maintenance of pattern out of chaos, dissipation.) Information is defined by probability—information is what’s least probable. The less likely a message or event, the more information it provides. Novelty and surprise thus constitute information. It’s this point that Eco picks up as a feature of his concept of

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the open work. But Eco transforms the idea of improbability into possibility— information-organization becomes ‘the dialectic between form and the possibility of multiple meanings’ (Eco, 1989:60). Possibility is a consequence of the indeterminate, while probability is a function of the determinate, of systemness. And just like Beer’s (1992) stressing of the human need to inauthenticate, Eco says that modern culture is inherently attracted to the indeterminate, to ‘all those processes which, instead of relying on a univocal, necessary sequence of events, prefer to disclose a field of possibilities, to create “ambiguous” situations open to all sorts of operative choices and interpretations’ (Eco, 1989:44). In other words, the imagination feeds unceasingly on the indeterminate, on possibilities and improbabilities. Or, better, the imagination sees possibilities and even creates them. Finally, you ask how thinkers like Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze relate to other influences like Olson, Whitehead and Heidegger. It is well known that Derrida and Foucault were variously preoccupied with central aspects of Heidegger’s thought, though there are no direct connections between their work and that of Olson and Whitehead (although Deleuze does sometimes call on certain features of Whitehead’s process philosophy). But it is possible to see a fundamental community of thought among these writers if one approaches them through the philosophy of modern science. Not much attention has been given to the implications of quantum theory and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle for the social sciences. But if we examine what these findings actually say, it does not take much imagination to see their relevance to certain themes highlighted in post-structuralist social thinking, including that of the writers discussed here. Ambiguity, ambivalence, duplicity, oscillation, heterogeneity, etc. are all features of modern science’s revealing of reality as unstable and even illusory. Quantum theory in particular reminds us that there is no objective world, that the human agent participates in a construction of the world, that our representations are simply convenient pictures that’ stand in for reality, so that the map is never the territory. Actor and acted-on are complicitous, inextricably intertwined. All this is strangely like Deleuze’s becoming and Taylor’s interstanding, where the ‘between’ becomes the ‘intertwined’. And it’s also like the participation we’ve noted in Olson’s ‘projective act’, where the actor’s senses and organs participate in the field of action. The ‘participative universe’ of modern science is, again, reflected in Heidegger’s ideas of Ereignis and the Open. Ereignis is participation in the sense of ‘mutual reflecting’ or the ‘mirror play’ of the world—Heidegger’s way of saying interstanding and becoming. The German Ereignis is also another way of saying the English origin, organ and organize. In this interpretation, origin, organ and organize are—like Eco’s ‘open work’—strategies and devices for opening up possibilities. Heidegger illustrates this with the example of the body and its organs. The body is part of—or participator in—a mutually reflecting field of possibilities. The mouth, for example, ‘is not merely a kind of organ of the body understood as an organism—body and mouth are part of the earth’s flow and growth in which we mortals flourish’ (Heidegger, 1971:98). The ‘earth’s flow and growth’ is an infinite, unfinished process—it’s Heidegger’s concept of the Open, which is never closed. Mouth and body are origins-organs which organize continuous interstanding of the possible. The mouth

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reaches out to the world through language and its infinite openings and possibilities: ‘Language is the flower of the mouth’, says Heidegger(1971:99). The pliable, plastic, open and indeterminate character of modern science’s reality offers us a way—perhaps a generic methodology—of bringing together (or interstanding) the other thinkers named in your question. Foucault’s space of seeing and Derrida’s space of writing are both translatable into the philosophical language of modern science. But this is a challenge that still remains to be taken up. Question 4 (JK) The notion of bounded rationality has played an important role in organization theory, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence and other social science disciplines. The notion seems to presuppose a subject that, though ignorant or overwhelmed by the plurality and complexity of the world, still remains the ultimate gathering point for what is going on. We know that such a view of the acting subject runs counter to your own assumptions about the status of organizing processes. How are we then to understand the notion of bounded rationality? As we know, Herbert Simon (1979) introduced the idea of bounded rationality in his early work on the economics and psychology of decision-making. Simon argued against the then dominant model of Economic Man: This man is assumed to have knowledge of the relevant aspects of his environment which, if not absolutely complete, is at least impressively clear and voluminous. He is assumed also to have a well-organized and stable system of preferences and a skill in computation that enables him to calculate, for the alternative courses of action that are available to him, which of these will permit him to reach the highest attainable point on his preference scale. (Simon, 1979:7) The reality is, of course, quite different. Human thinking powers are very limited in relation to the complexities of the contexts in which human actors live and act, as your question makes clear. According to Simon, we can’t, therefore, optimize our decisionmaking outcomes—we can only satisfice them, that is, we can only realize a ‘goodenough’ or satisfactory solution. Simon’s model is clearly still anthropocentric, though perhaps less idealistic than previous economic models of decision-making. This is reflected in his stress on psychological factors such as motivation and emotion. The model is also overly presumptive in the sense that it does not question the ontological status of either ‘subjectivity’ or ‘rationality’. Simon’s model stems from an economist’s perspective and assumes—again, the unexamined assumption—that we make decisions. Of course, this way of thinking about thinking is itself bounded, though clearly it does not openly recognize this. To open up the model to critical reflection requires that we recognize that it’s not the rationality that is bounded but rather that the boundedness is rationalized. But why and how do ‘we’ rationalize boundaries, especially in the economic and

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administrative contexts that concerned Simon? First, we have to understand that boundary is an intrinsically ambiguous concept. For the boundary both separates and joins. As such, it represents a dilemma or an irreducible difference that cannot be decisively solved but only deferred. Now, this is exactly the question that Samuel Weber (1987) addresses in his essay, ‘The Limits of Professionalism’. Two points are worth making here: (1) the term ‘limit’ means boundary; and (2) the ‘professionalism’ and its ‘calculability of competence’ that Weber discusses can be applied to the anthropocentric and quasiordered world that Simon seeks to reveal to us. The culture of professionalism cultivates a culture of inclusion-exclusion, that is, it divides the boundary into (what it hopes will be seen as) a simple dualism. In other words, the culture of professionalism actively reduces complex phenomena to simple locations. And, here, let’s note that this is different from Simon’s assumption that human thinking is intrinsically incapable of dealing with complex informational fields, for the professional as human agent is all the time constructing a desired and recognizable identity out of an ambiguous boundary that ‘it can neither fully assimilate nor totally exclude’ (Weber, 1987:33). And we have to understand the boundary and its rationalization as a critical ambivalence and ambiguity not merely in an economic-administrative field but also in a social field. The professionalized field, with its apparently fixed and unquestioned boundaries, is a social relation that acts as a defensive strategy against the anxieties and dangers that accompany the ambivalences and ambiguities that make up the boundary. The nearest that Simon gets to the idea that boundaries are fault lines that can generate danger and anxiety is in his brief discussion of the role of emotion in rationality and decision-making: ‘When the emotion-producing stimuli are persistent as well as intense, they sometimes become disruptive and produce nonadaptive behaviour’ (Simon, 1979:35). It’s easy to see that this is a grossly different way of thinking bounded rationality than that of rationalized boundaries. The professional’s boundaries become rationalized as distinct from rational through the cultivation of a ‘body of systematic, esoteric knowledge, inaccessible to the layman and yet in itself coherent, self-contained, reposing on founding principles’ (Weber, 1987:26). These areas of bounded knowledge gloss over or rationalize the fault lines intrinsic to boundaries and enable the professional to pass him/ herself off as a servant of public needs rather than as the self-interested vendor of the marketplace. There’s another way of approaching the notion of the bounded and this is through Ehrenzweig’s ideas of differentiation and de-differentiation (see response to Question 1). As we’ve seen, differentiation is a form of focused attention which perceives specifics’, de-differentiation, in contrast, is unfocused and distributed. In other words, what’s bounded is also focused, differentiated, while what’s unbounded is unfocused, dedifferentiated. The concept of a relatively self-contained subject that your question implies is, I’d argue, the effect of bounded, focused, differentiated attention or perception, which is another way of describing bounded rationality. What’s significant here is that the so-called rational actor is the product of a so-called boundedly rational structuring of perception. In fact, this is an idea with a long history. It goes back at least to the philosophical psychology of William James. In his Principles of Psychology (1890),

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James analysed the processes at work in what he called ‘the consciousness of self’. The classical view of the self, according to James rests on the assumption of a ‘central nucleus of the self’ which provides a sense of unity and fixed focus. But, for James, all this is too fictive, too vague. When he looks with ‘close scrutiny’, the fictive centre and unity of the self seems to disperse and disappear in a ‘fluctuating play’ of bodily sensations. James concludes that the kind of perceptual strategy we use is all-important here. A focused, differentiated strategy will produce a focused, differentiated sense of a self-contained subject. An unfocused, de-differentiated strategy will result in a ‘loss of self’. For James, the self or subject is not a ‘first fact’—it’s a secondary product. The ‘first fact’ is ‘that thinking of some sort goes on’ (James, 1890:224). James is clearly using a generic methodology that rejects specifics in favour of the minimal assumption that ‘thought goes on’. We don’t know where thought comes from—its ‘source’ is certainly not in the human subject. All we can say is that ‘it thinks’, recognizing that the generic ‘it’ is a cipher for something we’ll never be fully able to grasp. Clearly, when you posit an ‘it’ that thinks, you reject the specific assumption of a human subject that can ‘make up its own mind’, its own decisions. This is what Derrida does in his discussion of Foucault’s History of Madness. In analysing the definitions of reason and madness in the modern world, Foucault uses the term ‘the Decision’. The Decision is what decides the difference between reason and madness. But the Decision is itself subject to a kind of indecision or undecidability—in this case, it both separates and joins reason and madness. For this reason, Derrida (1978:39) says that Decision should be called ‘dissension’, to underline that in question is a ‘self-dividing action, a cleavage and torment interior to meaning in general, interior to logos in general’. In this interpretation of decision-making, there’s no rational subject who makes decisions. Decision-making is a never-ending, labyrinthine process which leads the subject into tensional fields where each decision leads to yet another decision. Derrida calls the Decision a ‘dissension’ because it’s essentially the sensing of a basic indecisiveness or undecidability. A decision—in the conventional sense—merely defers a choice or solution by leading to yet more decisions. Even the decision that there is a conscious self or subject is subject to this ‘law’. And when Derrida says that the Decision is a ‘selfdividing action…interior to meaning in general’, he’s expressing the same idea as James’s ‘it thinks’, that ‘thought goes on’; not the specific objects of thought—just thought itself, in the most general sense. When Derrida calls the Decision a ‘self-dividing action’, he’s also expressing James’s distinction between consciousness of self and consciousness of the material base—the movements of bodily organs and the sensations they generate—of the self. Perception of one seems to exclude perception of the other. It’s like reading a word or viewing a painting. When we read a word, we can’t see the individual letters that constitute it—and vice versa—at the same time. When we view a painting, we can’t see the subject matter and the surface matter at the same time. Seeing a word and seeing its letters, seeing a painting and seeing its paint, are ‘self-dividing’ acts. And self-division is not a feature of the subject who decides—or divides—instead, it’s the subject of the self who’s divided by the act, by the ‘it thinks’. That something thinks instead of us is, of course, unacceptable to the anthropomorphic

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assumption of rationality, bounded or not. That we can never ‘know’ what this something is, is simply absurd to the rational mind. The boundary that rationality establishes categorically says that what’s on the ‘other side’ of the boundary is ‘out of bounds’. In this sense, bounded rationality is not merely a limit on human intelligence, as Simon supposes—it’s more like a law of exclusion. What doesn’t fit into the template of deterministic, cause—effect, beginning—middle—end thinking is excluded by the rational canon. The linear and the definite represents the syntax of binding employed by bounded rationality. And what can’t be bound together in this syntax must necessarily be excluded. So, on this analysis, information-theoretic concepts like uncertainty or complexity take on an entirely different character. Instead of representing information which is momentarily uncertain or complex, and which is simply waiting to be translated into rational terms, uncertain information is placed beyond rational treatment. The more recent fate of Simon’s concept of bounded rationality can be seen in James March’s (1988) various discussions of the limitations of mainstream economic theories of information processing and decision-making. March’s reanalyses of bounded rationality and related ideas such as ambiguity and uncertainty give an entirely different characterization to that proposed by Simon. Where Simon assumed the still rational human agent, March deindividualizes the whole notion of the supposedly self-contained decisionmaker. Where Simon treated information as a processable resource, March sees information as part of human language. Where Simon sought to be scientifically formulaic, March is unashamedly demotic. In fact, March deliberately moves the debate away from the generally accepted criteria of rationality to what’s normally regarded as ‘out of bounds’ to rational discourse. He dispenses with the idea of rationality as the prime source of intelligent behaviour and substitutes what he calls the ‘technology of foolishness’ or, rather, ‘sensible foolishness’ and ‘play’. Both sensible foolishness and play recognize that human decision-making grows out of trial and error, the appreciation of possibilities rather than the rule of predictabilities, experimentation rather than data compilation. And information itself, far from being a decision resource, is a symbol in a complex process of human communication. As such, information is better understood in literary and philosophical terms, which provide insights into that complex and uncertain world which the more restricted theory of bounded rationality excludes. Question 5 (RC) In ‘The Open Field’ (Cooper, 1976), an essay published in the journal Human Relations over twenty years ago, you attempted to articulate what you called an ‘epistemology of process’ in which you drew substantially from the work of the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson. It seems to me that this essay in particular was intended as a polemical statement drawing attention to the possibility of an alternative set of theoretical concerns for the social sciences. To what extent do you think this essay and its concerns relate to the work you are currently doing, and what particular virtues do you see in this approach? The ‘Open Field’ essay was a very personal expression of my general reflections on the social sciences and their theoretical and practical relevance. The essay grew out of a set

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of political concerns I had been engaged with since the mid-1960s—the practical use of theoretical ideas at both personal and social levels. I worked on several practical projects that were related to the realization of these interests. For some years I collaborated with the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London on its Industrial Democracy programme. The Tavistock researchers had been developing action-oriented theory and consultancy in industry and the community for some years. My work with them was theory-based and specifically dealt with refining existing ideas on socio-technical systems and autonomous work groups. I published several technical papers on these and related topics. I was also involved in the early 1970s with the successful transformation of a family-owned factory in northern England into a workers’ co-operative. During the same period, I worked as a consultant on a community development programme in Liverpool, which was part of the then Labour government’s national programme of Inner City Renewal. This work examined the administrative relationship between a local community and the city council with the aim of transferring control over local matters to the community itself. (The general theory and philosophy behind these various projects in self-management are described in Herbst’s, 1976, Alternatives to Hierarchies.) But I was personally dissatisfied with both the social science theory and the change programmes. Local autonomy was a beginning but not an end in itself. So I began to review my involvement in this work and this led to a fundamental questioning of the nature of academic social science, particularly sociology and psychology. I felt that most social science writing lacked imagination or spirit, that it was too limited in its conception of the human world, that it was overly normative and too irreflective to do more than represent a conventionally restricted view of that world. Instead of describing the world ‘as it is’ with the implicit assumption that this is the way to do respectable social science and that alternatives are necessarily limited by the intrinsic intractability of things, I began to think of what was excluded from social scientific thinking. My reading in philosophy and literature contrasted significantly with my reading in social science. Ostensibly, all these disciplines were human sciences since they all dealt with human experience. But the differences I saw suggested that an institutional division of labour had occurred at some point so that philosophy and literature had been accorded the ‘rights’ to certain areas of human experience and to certain methodologies or analytic strategies which were deemed to be less ‘authoritative’ than those of the academic social sciences. This was especially marked in the case of literature which reflected fictive life while social science was somehow seen to be ‘realistic’ and hence more veridical. But the real difference, as I saw it, was that philosophy and literature addressed the imagination and the domain of the spirit—vital features of human community—while social science seemed not to admit these as defining criteria of social and cultural life. I wanted to open up social science to neglected and excluded possibilities, to draw attention to its dereliction of intellectual duty, to its lack of vision, to its limiting positivism and its squeamish obeisance to the mundane. This, then, was my general state of mind when I wrote ‘The Open Field’. It may help if I comment on the actual title of that essay. The title has several sources. I took it directly from a poem of the same title by Robert Duncan, which explored the

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notion of the poetic imagination as an ingredient of everyday life. Another important source was field theory, which the social sciences began to adopt from the physical sciences in the 1930s. Field theory thought in terms of fields of relationships rather than self-contained things or structures. It emphasized the dynamic nature of the world, its constant movement, its conflicts and tensions. (See Mey, 1972, for a detailed overview of field theory in the social sciences.) It also revealed the world as an open, unfinished process. Gaston Bachelard’s The New Scientific Spirit (1937) is a splendid exposition of the philosophy of the new physics—quantum physics and the Uncertainty Principle— which shows the relationship between the human observer and its world to be basically ‘open’, that is, heterogeneous, unlocalizable, differential, ambiguous, and apparitional. So the philosophy and methodology of my essay came from a range of vastly different intellectual fields which I saw as different expressions of the same underlying ideas. Modern science expressed the same intellectual methodology as modern literature. Interchangeability and exchangeability, transformation and deformation, became key terms in understanding both the human and the physical worlds. (Strictly speaking, the distinction between the human and the physical is a fictional convenience which the philosophy of ‘The Open Field’ does not recognize in its problematizing of reality.) All this was echoed in my essay and its attempt to articulate a view of process as chaos, chance, enactment, situatedness and generic abstraction, and its interlacing of the work of philosophers (Bachelard, Heidegger, Whitehead), writers and artists (Breton, Cage, Olson, Pollock, Rimbaud) and social thinkers (Bateson, Berger and Luckmann, Lefebvre, Whorf). The concerns addressed by ‘The Open Field’ were also related, I felt, to Max Weber’s critique of the modern world’s preoccupation with rationality and the ‘purging of magic from the world’. Institutional and organizational rationality has changed our ways of thinking, both about the world and ourselves in relation to it. We have become manipulative and predatory, subverting the naturalness of the earth to our ‘will to power’. And in this process we have lost the sense of the ‘open’ possibilities of the world, of the infinite mystery of nature. Heidegger’s later philosophy is essentially an exploration of Weber’s ‘purging of magic from the world’. Heidegger’s concept of ‘the Open’ is both a critique of modern instrumentality and an exposition of the meaning of ‘magic’. For Heidegger, the earth had become simply a pool of resources to be manipulated at will. The forest is now perceived as a resource for the timber-newsprint industry, the river provides power for electricity. Human beings turn themselves into human resources. Everything subserves what Heidegger calls ‘the will to will’. Yet beyond all this is the Open, that which can’t be contained in the manipulative categories of techno-scientific organization, that which denies the humanistic perspective that the world exists simply for us. In the Open we experience something other than ourselves, something ‘grander’ (or ‘grounder’) than our obsession with specific, anthropomorphic objects and goals. This larger ‘ground’ Heidegger calls Being, which is another way of saying ‘openness’. All my work since ‘The Open Field’ has followed up the general theme of openness. In various papers dealing with the nature of organization (e.g. Cooper, 1986; Cooper and Law, 1995), I have examined the interdependence between organization and

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disorganization, between systemness and unsystemness. Always my purpose has been to remind ourselves that the understanding of organizing as an ontological process is more important than the study of organizations. For this reason, I see my work as a reflection on Weber’s general concern with the opposition between instrumental rationality and ‘magic’. If we insist on thinking in terms of organizations, we miss the bigger question of how organization as a generic process both structures and destructures our world, how our minds and bodies are caught up in its complex, reflexive dynamics. To think of organizations is to think of specific objects external to us. To think of organization is to recognize a more general force which includes us in its perpetual movement between order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. (Weber himself exemplified this conflict, for his life oscillated dramatically between a commitment to rationalism and a subjection to personal and professional ambiguities.) Again, to think in terms of organizations is to think of specific objects that we use—tools, plans, rules, etc. In this sense, organizations are a form of instrumental rationality. But organization as a general force, an ontological process, is not about use but about active participation in the living world. This is the message we get from modern science where the scientist is not merely an observer of the external world but an active participator in it, so that the world is no longer external to us. We are it and it is us. This insight is basic to the idea of openness. It’s what Heidegger means by the Open, that sense of a ‘ground’ that is ‘grander’ than our instrumentality agency. All this means that we have to think openly, to develop a general methodology of openness. This of course is the significance of much post-structuralist philosophy, which—perhaps curiously—echoes the ‘participative’ message of modern science. To say that we are the world and the world is us is to underline the central role of mediation in ‘The Open Field’. Mark Taylor’s (1995) concept of the mediatrix is one interesting attempt to represent the participative, interactive character of mediation and media. Drawing on poststructuralist theory, Taylor shows that the emergence of the electronic media and (what he calls) compu-telecommunications technology is forcing us to recognize the participative, open nature of modern life: ‘New spaces and new times are opening in our midst. Spaces and times that no longer conform to the spacings and timings of the past or present. Openings that open a midst that is not precisely “our” midst’ (p. 24). It’s not ‘our’ world—it’s rather that we’re ‘possessed’ by the mediations and media of the world. The mediatrix explores mediation as a complex, dynamic process of interstanding, which is another way of saying participation and openness. It’s no longer a question of understanding a world that’s external to us but of interstanding the Open as a ‘between’ in which ‘things neither come together nor fall apart’ and which is ‘not closed but open, constantly changing, and repeatedly shifting’ (p. 34), multiple, contingent, heterogeneous, both mergent and emergent. I’ve tried in some recent work to apply this approach to the analysis of the humantechnology relationship, using ideas from cybernetics (see Part 2 of Parker and Cooper, 1998). To reflect the interstanding of human-technology interactions, I devised the term ‘cyborganization’, a neologism of ‘cybernetics’ and ‘organization’. Cybernetics deals in patterns of information rather than things—patterns that continually reconstitute

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themselves out of unstable contexts, patterns in constant movement. Cybernetics denies the fixed term and the specific location. For cybernetics, organization is the action or practice of constructing and maintaining pattern or order in a continually dissolving world—organization is stability in motion. It’s important to recognize here that organization is not a self-contained entity and that it’s always unfinished. This really means that organization and disorganization, order and disorder, are mutually constituting forces. Among other things, this means that human agents are necessarily ‘open’, they need disorder and unpredictability. In fact, they actively seek it. But there’s more to openness than this. There’s also what I call ‘techno-imitation’—the ‘imitation’ (taken in the widest sense) of human agents by machines and vice versa. In techno-imitation, we see the merging together of agents and machines in a process of mutual mimesis that exemplifies Taylor’s (1995) interstanding. Human agent and machine become each other in a process of unfinished openness. It’s this mutual becoming that I call cyborganization—the patterning or ordering between the mutually constituting forces of human and machine. But this becoming, by definition, is always unfinished—it never arrives at a completed state. Becoming is repeated beginning. It’s that state of dynamic suspension that Taylor (1995) sees in the mediatrix, in which ‘things neither come together nor fall apart’ (p. 34). Now, this state of dynamic suspension that I call ‘becoming’ is equivalent to the definition of cyborganization as the mutual constitution of organization—disorganization. This is one way of approaching openness. There’s another way of thinking openness that’s perhaps more radical. This is through Gaston Bachelard’s (1937) brilliant characterization of modern science in what he calls the ‘New Scientific Spirit’. Where older forms of scientific thinking assumed a natural separation of thought from the so-called objective world with the implication that the latter is both independent of and prior to the world of thought, modern science shows the observer and the observed, the subject and the object, to be a co-implicated process that defines both terms in the relationship. There is no objective external world which has its own independent properties and which exists in its own limbo of permanent forms. Instead, observer and observed continually interact to produce a world of ever-changing forms in which deformation and transformation dominate. It’s a provisional, heterogeneous and probabilistic world in which the human actor-observer is, more radically, a participator— part of a larger, dynamic whole—a participator that is itself provisional, heterogeneous and probabilistic. All this, of course, is another way of talking about cyborganization and the mutual constitution of organization-disorganization. It’s also another way of talking about becoming and the infinite or ‘unfinished’, another way of saying ‘openness’. Now, this equivalence between different ways of thinking openness suggests an important feature of openness itself- that it lies beyond the divisions and boundaries of specific disciplines and languages, that it exceeds these and thus always offers ‘more’. It’s a kind of negative space—a space of ‘negative capability’—which seems to deny the world of fact and reason, of specific subjects and objects with their specific questions and their specific answers, and which even resists representation (Scott, 1969). It’s a space that is negative in a special sense—a space of uncertainty, mystery, doubt, where human being is that process of unfinished becoming highlighted by Deleuze (Deleuze and Parnet,

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1987). It’s that space that Foucault termed the ‘outside’ of thought, or the ‘unthought’, which lies hauntingly beyond and between the representations that modern knowledge has constructed to reassure us that we exist in a secure and dependable world—those representations constructed by the modern human sciences (sociology, psychology, psychiatry, etc.) that persuade us that there are the facts of ‘society’, ‘individuals’, ‘organizations’, ‘human minds’, ‘mental health’, etc. It’s that space that Foucault borrowed from Maurice Blanchot’s (1982) ‘space of literature’—a space that is always lateral to the divided, disciplined spaces of conventional representation, a negative space of pure deferral, a bottomless, infinite void that human work continually attempts to fill in. For Blanchot, it was a space where, strangely, science and literature came together, or, perhaps more accurately, where there was no difference between them. A sacred space. Blanchot distinguished his negative space from the positive spaces of everyday life, employing two fundamentally different interpretations of the concept of ‘work’. The work of the conventional world, the work of modern organizations, he called le travail, by which he meant labour, purposeful action, productive organization, all with their senses of getting somewhere, of accomplishing goals. The work of negative space he called l’oeuvre, a form of work which leads nowhere, in which the human agent gives itself up to the void of the ‘unthought’, to a space that resists purpose and production. In science, Bachelard (1968) reinterpreted the concept of mass in similarly negative terms. In conventional interpretations, mass is a positive thing and an object of le travail. In Bachelard’s interpretation, mass is a ‘space’ that is infinitely pliable, open to endless transformation and deformation, to inexhaustible possibilities—the ‘negative capability’ of l’oeuvre. Bachelard saw this interpretation of mass not only in modern science but in literature, in poetry, as well as in the hidden corners of the everyday world. In Bachelard’s eyes, modern science and literature assume the nature of Blanchot’s ‘lateral space’, and in that space are equivalent. In recognizing the significance of negative space, Bachelard (like Blanchot) showed it to be the source of the imagination, and his later work especially was wholly devoted to exploring the distinction in the human condition between the positive space of le travail with its concern for productive organization and the negative space of l’oeuvre with its requirement of passive obeisance to the transformations and deformations of the imagination. My commitment to the questions raised in ‘The Open Field’, as you can see, are still very much alive but they’re now expressed as a struggle, or rather an agonistics, between these two forms of space—that of conventional representation in an increasingly organized and institutionalized world, and that which lies ‘outside’ the work of seemingly purposeful and productive structures, in the secret and even sacred spectres of the imagination. My current work on information, cybernetics and technology, in particular represents this continuing concern with the problematic of openness. The special virtue of this approach lies in its potential for radically reinterpreting the overly limited use of the term ‘open’ in the social sciences (e.g. the concept of open system in systems theory) which is still conceived in terms of objects in positive (i.e. closed) spaces. The negative space of the Open Field knows no positive terms—it denies the existence of objects and entities in single locations. Instead, it requires us to think of a field of transformations in

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continuous movement of solution and dissolution. As yet, the social sciences have not even begun to consider the implications of such an approach for the study of social life. When they do so, they will have to take their cues from literature, art theory and philosophy. Question 6 (JK) You have in your writing drawn attention to some similarities underlying the works of Gregory Bateson and Jacques Derrida. For many people, this would be a surprising connection. Can you say a few words about it in this context? What can the study of social systems learn from it? Let me begin with a general point. Institutional pressures (e.g. specialization) tend to inhibit the cross-referencing of ideas in the academic world. Disciplinary barriers underline the differences rather than the similarities between idea-worlds. No doubt this is why many people would find it hard to accept the claim that Bateson and Derrida share the same intellectual concerns. On the surface, they look so different: Bateson with his Anglo-American directness, his concern with exposition, his interdisciplinary origins in social anthropology and cybernetics; Derrida with his Gallic sinuosity, his concern with equivocity, his interdisciplinary origins in continental philosophy and literature. Despite these differences in intellectual strategy and vocabulary, their work coheres around similar themes and ideas, and often shares a common interpretation. A quick way of introducing the concerns common to Bateson and Derrida is to note that, in the most general sense, their work revolves around the order-disorder relationship. They differ in where they place the emphasis—Bateson on order, Derrida on disorder. As a human scientist, Bateson asks the central question: How do human systems maintain order and stability in a complex, ever-changing environment? In discussing this question, Bateson foregrounds the need to view order-disorder, stability-instability, as mutually defining processes. Curiously, order needs disorder for its definition and continuation. Bateson asks how a cybernetic system such as the organism-in-itsenvironment is able to maintain stability despite (or even because of) its pervasion by inexorable change. His answer is that concepts of disorder such as play, perturbation, noise, interference are vital for system and organization and that without them it is not possible to think systemic order. For Bateson, system-organization and interference-noise are co-definitive. But for Derrida, it’s play, interference, noise that get the attention. It’s the subversion of system and order that fascinates Derrida. Yet, like Bateson, Derrida wants us to see disorder as a necessary accompaniment of order. Derrida’s theoretical programme has been to illuminate the devious and elusive ways in which disorder expresses itself, and, again like Bateson, to show how disorder serves as a force for creative thought and action. Another way of expressing the affinity between Bateson and Derrida is through information theory. Information theory views information in terms of the form-unform dualism. Information is form which emerges out of unform or chaos. It’s another way of talking about the order-disorder relationship. For Bateson, information is difference or transformation. Difference as transformation is basic to the world of form and communication. In the world of form, there are no objects or events—only differences.

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Bateson illustrates this idea with the example of the map. The map-maker doesn’t include all the details of the original territory on the map but only those differences which are important for him: ‘What gets on to the map, in fact, is difference, be it a difference in altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in population structure, difference in surface or whatever’ (Bateson, 1972:457). The map’s information is constituted by these differences. Since a difference is not a thing or event, it can’t be localized, located anywhere—it’s always a transform, a relation between forms, between the map itself and the territory, between differences in altitude, etc. A difference can’t be seen directly—we can only infer it. Now, this is precisely what Derrida means when he says that his notion of différance is not a concept (nor, to be precise, a notion) since it can’t be contained in a system of thought or language. It’s more like an absence that haunts the world of conventional presences. Like difference, différance is never here but always somewhere else. It’s continuous movement that refuses specific location. It’s like looking up the meaning of a word in a dictionary where one definition leads on to another in an endless circuit. In this sense, Derrida’s différance is like Deleuze’s becoming (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987) since it’s always deferred or ‘differed’ in space and time. But there’s already a suggestion of linear form in the idea of something deferred, something yet to come, and Derrida is at pains always to remind us that différance is the continual contamination of form by unform, chaos. Différance as deferring is thus a kind of glossing over of the interference that is intrinsic to all forms. The glossing simply covers up the interference, which is nevertheless still there. (Bateson sees unform as interference or noise that is somehow external to form, although his concept of the ‘double bind’ has more than a hint of Derrida’s différance as form that is already disturbed from the inside by unform.) For Derrida, différance is form’s internal confusion. A simple example of this can be seen in Derrida’s deconstruction of the concepts of origin and original. In conventional usage, an original is the source of a copy, and there can be no copy without its original. But conceived as différance, we can equally say that it’s the copy that originates the original, for the copy retrospectively creates the original as origin. Différance thus reveals that what it defers is the double bind or confusion intrinsic to the cause-effect relationship. (The same argument can be applied to the analysis of system and organization. The interchangeable terms organ and ergon—see response to Question 2—also suggest that the conventional work of organization is basically—we might also say ontologically—the unfolding of the double bind of différance, or the making of form out of unform. This helps explain the significance and meaning of such radically constitutive organizational acts as repetition and reproduction which are versions of the original-copy relationship.) One important implication of Bateson’s way of thinking is its denial of reification. A system or organization is not a thing or object that you can see directly. It’s a matter of form: ‘mental process, ideas, communication, organization, differentiation, pattern and so on, are matters of form rather than substance’ (Bateson, 1972:31). Form is difference in space and time, and what we see in the world are differences rather than things. And, as we’ve noted, a difference can’t be fixed or located in a specific place. ‘The contrast between this white paper and that black coffee is not somewhere between the paper and

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the coffee and, even if we bring the paper and the coffee into close juxtaposition, the contrast between them is not thereby located or pinched between them’ (Bateson, 1972:414). System and organization are, therefore, more correctly understood as transformations or ‘circuits of differences’. The general effect of this approach is to emphasize the contrast between a world interpreted in terms of fixed locations and selfcontained objects and a world understood in terms of non-locatable differences. The perception of locations and objects makes reality appear as stable and enduring, while the perception of difference presents reality as labile, always in motion. In short, difference implies a ‘weakening’ of our traditional conception of reality as positive, permanent. Derrida is also preoccupied with this distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ realities. His idea of logocentrism refers to a supposed firm, objective world which human reason can map. But Derrida wants us to recognize that this is a form of self-delusion, much like Michael Taussig’s (1993) insightful analysis of the cognitive techniques we use to ‘make up’ an inhabitable human world: ‘We dissimulate. We act and have to act as if mischief were not afoot in the kingdom of the real and that all around the ground lay firm’ (p. xvii). Derrida’s task has been to expose the many ways in which we ‘make up’ the illusion that ‘we live facts, not fictions’ (p. xv). What we conventionally call fact and reason are already inhabited by an intrinsic uncertainty. We’ve seen how such uncertainty works from within to destabilize the original-copy relationship. The same uncertainty haunts the so-called logic of all reference-referent relationships, thus introducing a spectral, free-floating quality, a ‘sort of relationless relation’ (Royle, 1995:7) to reality. What Bateson calls unlocatable difference is transformed by Derrida into an apprehension of chimerical appearances, of ghost-like apparitions. Your question also asks about the connections between Bateson’s and Derrida’s work in the context of social systems. There is, of course, a tradition of systems thinking in the social sciences which has applied the general language of systems theory to social action (e.g. Buckley, 1967). Much of this work uses ideas from cybernetics and biology and it’s in the language of these disciplines where we find close connections between social systems thinking and the work of Bateson and Derrida. An important recent study that has attempted this is Christopher Johnson’s (1993) System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida, in which Derrida’s work is systematically reanalysed in the context of cybernetic theory (including Bateson’s contributions to the philosophy of cybernetics) and the life sciences. Johnson shows how the familiar terminology of systems theory— code, feedback, equifinality, goal-seeking, etc.—is really another way of talking about very similar ideas in Derrida (and Bateson): difference-différance, double bind, translation, decision, etc. Johnson’s purpose is to reveal Derrida’s work—despite its wide variation in content and vocabulary—as rigorously systematic in that its latent concerns are common to all ways of thinking and hence are fundamentally cross-disciplinary. The same purpose underlies Bateson’s applications of cybernetic ideas to the varied fields of social anthropology, ecology, animal behaviour, mental illness and communication theory. But let’s be more specific. When the social sciences discuss systems, they commonly distinguish between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ systems. Closed systems are said to be determinate, their final state is completely determined by their initial conditions, while

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open systems are indeterminate, the same final state can be reached from different initial conditions and in different ways. Social systems are said to be ‘open’ in the sense that they are dynamic, renewing, living systems. Yet, despite the formal recognition of social systems being ‘open’, the language of the social sciences tends to express ‘openness’ in determinate terms. The idea of ‘system’ always comes first and this means that closure must always be given priority over openness. The system is already self-enclosed. It has an inside and an outside, but always the outside is supplementary or secondary to the inside. But openness means being open to what’s outside the system, being internally influenceable by external factors. We might say that the system’s openness has been ‘thinned’ out. But this is not Derrida’s idea of openness. He views closure and openness as a doubly bound process in which the term ‘supplementary’ takes on a new meaning. Ostensibly and conventionally, the supplement is that which helps to fill in a gap—it thus performs a subsidiary and secondary role. For Derrida, the ‘supplement’ is literally a ‘supple mind’, where ‘supple’ means pliant and multi-formable—a space that has not as yet been formed, defined or divided. Supplement as supple mind is neither closed nor open—it still hasn’t made up its mind. Supplement in this sense is what’s latent, what hasn’t yet been realized, made real. It is pure medium or mediatrix (Taylor, 1995) or the ‘relationless relation’ (Royle, 1995:7) of the original—copy space. Différances in transition. This is how cybernetics defines the movement of matter in living systems: Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. (Wiener, 1954:86) In this process, it’s not the system as entity that’s important but the translation of differences or différances between systems. (Another subtlety lies here, for trans-lation means the crossing of the latent, from latens, Latin for hidden, secret.) For Derrida and Bateson, the concept of an open system is really this continuous process of translation or the movement of differences in circuit. And this is also what I mean when I say that organization is ergonization or the work of difference-différance (see response to Question 1): organization or system as continuous differing or deferring of the ‘supplement’ which refuses to make up its mind. And it’s the deferring of the supplement that helps us to reinterpret another feature of systems theory: goal-seeking. Since both difference-différance and supplement deny the possibility of possessible things or states and affirm only continuous movement in transient space, they necessarily mean that goals are illusory and therefore elusive. Instead, it’s difference-différance as seeking that originates human action and—importantly—keeps it going. There can be no final goal. Through the work of Bateson and Derrida, we begin to see systems theory in a radically new light. The conventional glossing of human systems as self-identical, purposeful, rational structures gives way to the stranger vision of seemingly subliminal forces that enigmatize and spectralize what Taussig (1993: xvii) calls ‘the public secret, the facticity

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of the social fact’—all of which cries out for a new approach to thinking social systems. Question 7 (JK) In your paper’ The Visibility of Social Systems’ (Cooper, 1989), you reverse the classical concept of the ‘division of labour’ and speak instead of the ‘labour of division’ as an essential process through which rationality is sustained in social systems. How are we to understand this evocative reversal? The division of labour is, of course, an historic part of social scientific thinking and goes back to Adam Smith and Karl Marx. It was memorialized by Durkheim (1933) in his classic study, The Division of Labour in Society, which today still provides the general framework by which we understand the concept as a force in modern society. Durkheim saw modern society as occupationally differentiated in a complex division of labour in which the various specialized functions contributed to the moral and economic maintenance of the social whole. The division of labour was a general principle which applied to all organic part-whole systems, including the biological organism. The parts existed for the benefit of the whole, as though divisions existed for the sole purpose of creating unity. And this was the way that Durkheim viewed the role of occupational division—each social function had a moral obligation to work for the greater whole through the creation of harmony and order. Implied here, of course, was the existence of forces antagonistic to social unity, but Durkheim’s explicit emphasis was always on the moral duty of occupational incumbents to heal the divisions. Durkheim’s book sometimes reads more like diagnosis and prescription than social analysis. In inverting the traditional locution of the division of labour to the labour of division, I was trying to express certain features that traditional analyses had seemed not to notice. In particular, I wanted to reveal the visual nature of the social world, to draw attention to the role of vision in the constitution of social knowledge and to the role of labour in the construction of social objects. In other words, I wanted to expose the hidden depths in the term ‘division’. Instead of accepting its conventional glossing as simple differentiation, I saw ‘division’ as a much more basic ingredient in how we come to see our world and in how our perceptions are constructed. This was the significance of the vision of di-vision. The general idea that the social world is a construction is by no means a novel one, of course. Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) The Social Construction of Reality makes the same argument and also, interestingly, reminds us how we constantly deny our part in the construction of the ordered world of social reality by claiming that it exists independently of us, that it is somehow there ‘naturally’. We simply represent the social order that is already there. But the labour of division emphasizes a special aspect of the construction process—the construction of visible spaces and times. This is how Bledstein analyses the development of the professions in mid-Victorian America: Space and time were the most elementary categories in everyday experience… Mid-Victorians turned their interest toward identifying every category of person who naturally belonged in a specific ground-space: the woman in the residential home, the child in the school, the man in his place of work, the dying person in

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a hospital, and the body in the funeral parlor. (Bledstein, 1976:56) Here, the labour of division represented by the professions was clearly focused on the construction of specific spaces and specific times. And a necessary feature of this process was the filling of these structured, self-contained spaces with special terms that helped to secure them against the vagaries of chance and fleeting impressions. But more important for my argument is Bledstein’s account of the increasing miniaturization of space through the labour of the professions: division was an endless process that segmented life into smaller and smaller spaces. Bledstein records the early development of the medical professions around increasingly particularized parts of the human body: the specialized knowledges of the eye, the ear, the nerves, the skin, the womb, the bones, etc. ‘As professionals, they attempted to define a total coherent system of necessary knowledge within a precise territory, to control the intrinsic relationships of their subject by making it a scholarly as well as applied science’ (Bledstein, 1976:88). We are reminded of John Wilkins’s and Thomas Sprat’s programme for the development of science in seventeenthcentury England, with its knowledge based on discrete spaces and discrete words (see response to Question 1). American universities in the nineteenth century pursued a similar programme of specialization-spatialization by reducing problems to scientific and technical amenability, and thus hoped to reduce the influence of ambiguity, chance and transience on public knowledge. The labour here is clearly the labour of making spaces and times easily and ‘naturally’ visible by including the simple and excluding the complex. Academic knowledge is still today largely a product of the same labour of division described by Bledstein in nineteenth-century America. It follows the distinction made by Maurice Blanchot (1982) between work as le travailthe labour of purposeful action, productive organization—and as l’oeuvre, the work of negative space that resists purpose and production (see response to Question 5). The anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1975) notes a similar distinction in the academic discipline of social anthropology when (borrowing from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle) he talks about two approaches to ethnography—‘thin’ and ‘thick’ description. Thin description glosses its accounts of the social world in basic operational terms, presents social events as isolated phenomena and neglects their contexts (e.g. the abstracted definition of intelligence by standardized intelligence tests). In contrast, thick description recognizes ‘a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit’ (Geertz, 1975:10). Thick description seeks to reflect the labyrinthine nature of social life. (Hidden here is a connection between labour and labyrinth. For example, Penelope Reed Doob, 1990, notes that labour comes from the medieval labor intus, the Latin origin of ‘labyrinth’, which means ‘difficulty going in’, and which is also associated with lack of vision, blindness.) Geertz’s interpretation of ‘thickness’ as ‘knotted, strange, irregular, and inexplicit’ suggests an uncanny connection with Heidegger’s (1971) concept of Dichtung, normally translated as ‘poetry’ but literally translatable as ‘thick language’—not unlike Geertz’s characterization of ‘thick description’ as a ‘confusion of tongues’. Now, what’s ‘thick’, ‘confused’ or ‘mixed up’ is clearly difficult to see and, in the extreme, must remain invisible. The

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function of the labour of division is to make the invisible visible, to sort out what’s confused. This is the ‘vision’ of di-vision. But, for Heidegger, what’s invisible in Dichtung is the unnamable origin of things, a negative space which serves as a divided source for the positive spaces of everyday life and work. It’s the void of ‘di-vide’ (in passing, let’s note that the French vide means ‘empty’) and which the labour of division has to exclude in its construction of positive spaces and times—otherwise nothing (literally) could be seen. But Heidegger’s point is that the positive spaces and times depend on the void, the negative space, of Dichtung. It’s their ontological ground. Heidegger calls it Being, the source of the everyday acts of being. And ‘Being is not to be found as a harmonious whole, but is always already split, divided’ (Melberg, 1995:163). The void is already divided, which is another reason why we can never see it. It ‘retreats’ in the very act of division. This is why Heidegger says that Dichtung is primordial, by which he means pre-linguistic, unnamable, unspoken. It can never be made explicit but only hinted at, like the hinterland (i.e. the ‘underland’, ‘interland’ or ‘underground’) of Being. This sense of the void can be inferred from the form of the word vision itself when it’s seen in its lateral versions of fission (division, thinness) and fusion (unity, thickness)—the three words, superficially different, hint at a common source which is itself pre-linguistic, unnamable. In other words, the common source of the three words ‘retreats’ behind the simple terms that already divide it. This way of thinking the labour of division is strangely similar to the old idea that negative space acts like a hidden common ground to the varied productions of positive space. It’s like Lao Tzu’s famous image of the holes between the spokes that make the wheel. In recent years, the same idea has been articulated more formally in the mathematics of fractals in chaos theory (Gleick, 1988). Fractals are a way of seeing infinite division and the ‘retreat’ of the void. Imagine a line. Divide it by removing the middle section—you have two lines and the space between them remaining. Then divide the two remaining lines—you are left with four lines and three spaces between them. Repeat the division on the four lines, then on the next eight lines, and so on. The lines get smaller while the spaces between increase in frequency. But the size of the initial space— the first line—does not itself change; there’s neither more nor less of it. The significant change lies in the acts of division—it’s they that divide and redivide in a continuous labour of division. As Gleick (1988) points out, developments in the technology of human vision such as telescopes and microscopes were really technologies of infinite and repeated division. They didn’t increase or decrease the actual size of the world—they simply served to increase its divisions. All this, of course, is strikingly similar to Bledstein’s (1976) account of the professions in nineteenth-century America where the labour of division was an endless process that divided society into smaller and smaller spaces. We need also to recall that these divided spaces were made to be unquestionably visible. And, by implication, what lay outside these visible spaces was more difficult— and sometimes perhaps impossible—to see. The labour of division thus works to ‘thin out’ social space and to exclude (or, better, avoid) the ‘thick’ complexities of the void. But this is an endless process because the void is a ‘debased, lateralized, repressed, displaced’ force that exercises ‘a permanent and obsessive pressure from the place where

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it remains held in check’ (Derrida, 1987:270). Here we are back with Taylor’s (1995) idea of the mediatrix that ‘resists reflection’ because its complex, fleeting, unstable connections and multiplicities defy conventional logic and analysis (see response to Question 2). The labour of division thus reveals itself to be much more than that process of occupational specialization which keeps society functioning. We can now perhaps begin to see it as a constitutive feature of social form itself, as that compulsive force that repetitively and iteratively per-forms social forms. Question 8 (JK) You have written about the concept of the ‘Other’. Who or what is the Other and how do we find it in organizational analysis? The Other—or Otherness, Othering—draws attention to the deeply relational nature of the social world. I don’t mean the obvious fact that we live in networks of relationships. Like the concept of division, the Other actually constitutes social life. In fact, the Other can be said to supplement the labour of division. It’s what the labour of division marginalizes yet cannot do without. There are various ways of talking about the Other. There are ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ ways of approaching it. Perhaps the most common way of thinking the Other is in terms of the conventional subject—object dichotomy, or, rather, the assumption that the human subject is at the centre of the world. In this case, the Other is simply other people and objects which the subject sees in terms of its own needs and interpretations. Here, the Other is that which is other than the self, that which is not-me. Otherness is simply a network of relations between self-identical subjects and objects. This is the Other of ‘thin’ connections. A more complex (or ‘thick’) approach starts not from a world of selfidentical subjects and objects but from an analysis of Otherness itself. Otherness is not a property of things but a field of continuously active relations between things. It’s like language where the individual words get their meaning from other words. When we seek the definition of a word in a dictionary, we’re referred to other words. When we read a word in a sentence, we have to wait for the end of the sentence to get its meaning, and that sentence in turn depends for its meaning on the paragraph it’s in. It’s not just a matter of context but of continuous, unfinished movement. The word is never just itself but always Other. It’s distributed throughout a field of relations. Another way of expressing this is through the idea of in-one-anotherness—Otherness resides not in positive, selfenclosed spaces but in its mediation between terms. (It’s this sense of mediation that Taylor, 1995, applies to the medium/media of the mediatrix—see response to Question 2.) The Other is not here and it’s not there, it’s not in you nor is it in me. It can’t be said to occupy a single location but mediates in a field of constant transformation. This is exemplified in two ideas—repetition and iteration—often associated with Otherness. Repetition is when a ‘second’ repeats a ‘first’. But, as we’ve already seen in the example of the original and the copy (see responses to Questions 1 and 6), it’s the ‘second’ that gives primacy to the ‘first’, thus confusing conventional linear order and identity. Iteration (from iter, Latin for again, other) is a form of repetition that transforms what it repeats. Here we have repetition not simply as again but as a gain, a renewal. Otherness as mediation is thus everywhere and nowhere. When Heidegger said, ‘Everyone is the

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other, and no one is himself’, it was this spectre-like aspect of Otherness which he had in mind. In another version of the Other, the anthropologist Michael Taussig (1993:19) has used Walter Benjamin’s idea of mimesis as the basis of what he calls ‘the capacity to Other’. Mimesis is a primitive human compulsion to imitate an aspect of the world, to become like something or someone else. This is, again, a matter of original and copy since the imitator can only become something or someone by copying that Other, so that it’s the something or someone else as Other that originates the imitator or copier as ‘origin’. It’s yet again a matter of mediation in space and time. An example of in-one-anotherness. Benjamin is careful to underline that mimesis is a process of becoming. In this respect, Benjamin’s interpretation of mimetic Othering is very similar to Deleuze’s (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987) conception of life as a network of becomings that occur between objects (see response to Question 3). Mimesis is the act, the action, of ‘becoming something else’. It’s not the ‘something else’, the other term, that’s important here but the action of Othering itself. Taussig draws on some ideas from the French sociologist Roger Caillois to illustrate the workings of mimetic Othering. Caillois argues that living organisms are motivated to simulate aspects of their environments, for example, leaf insects simulate leaves. But it’s not the case of the organism consciously deciding to simulate something other than itself. It’s more like the two terms being appropriated by the space between them. In human terms, there is a loss of self: ‘Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses…He feels himself becoming space…He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar’ (Caillois, quoted by Taussig, 1993:34). The Other is thus the dissolution of identity, of difference, by similarity. Taussig goes on to say that mimetic Othering is a primitive, unconscious process that consists of contact and copy: the material contact between material things (e.g. the physical contact between the rays of the rising sun and the retinal rods and cones of the human eye) and the copy (the image of the sun) that emerges out of this contact. Taussig then extends the contact-copy interpretation of mimetic Otherness to the technologies of what he calls ‘mimetic machines’ such as the camera. The significance of the camera (and its extensions, e.g. film, television) lies not so much in its ability to represent objects in the world but rather in its ability to deobjectify the world. By this, I mean that it forces attention away from a world of selfidentical objects and towards a recognition of reality based in the dynamic Otherness that flows between contact and copy. At the same time, it destabilizes and problematizes the objectified world through repetition and iteration which reveal the Other as an unlocalizable process that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. How do we understand the Other in the context of organization? For a start, we have to give up thinking in terms of organizations. Organizations are specific structures, selfidentical objects. As we’ve noted, Otherness requires that we dissolve the object and try instead to understand organization as an active field of terms mediated by in-oneanotherness. The trick here is to recognize that Otherness is really continuous movement that you can’t pin down. This means translating objects, structures, systems into fields of

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movement. In fact, this is what modern organizations already do. Looked at closely, organizations are not the monolithic systems that conventional economics or sociology likes to suppose. They’re always on the move, always regenerating themselves through repetition and iteration. We have to transform the organization as object, as structure, into organization as regenerative action. This is when organization becomes ergonization, or the work of becoming (see response to Question 1). In the modern world, organization as Otherness, as negation of the world of objects, as mediation, can be seen at its simplest in mass production. From the perspective of Otherness, mass production is not the production of finished objects for the mass market. When we think of mass production we automatically think of the assembly line and its mass production of identical items. Fordism is the image that comes to mind. But we forget that Fordism is simply one step in a much larger scheme which starts with the general deconstruction of the natural world into pools of resources: coal, copper, uranium, oil, etc. The mining industry represents the first systematic attempt to translate the earth into lumps of pure matter which are then refined and eventually shaped into functional objects. In the modern economy, this generalized process of mass production occurs in four stages (Fisher, 1991:223): (1) the stage of materials or stocks; (2) the stage of parts in which materials have been shaped into repeatable part elements; (3) the stage of assembly in which a functional object is made out of a pool of parts drawn from different stocks; (4) the stage of debris or junk where we see the remains of former objects. These stages help us to reinterpret Fordism, which is now no longer to be understood in terms of the assembly line but in terms of the principle of assemblage. Fordism represents the characteristic features of the modern production process—the focus on parts and their assembly. The finished object—the automobile—is a secondary aspect of the part-assembly process and of the mass production process more generally. To underline this last point we may note that the automobile leaves the factory as an incomplete object (i.e. as a part) which seeks a further connection with its human driver—yet another step in the assemblage. In all this, it’s the part rather than the whole object that dominates. And it’s the parts with their suggestion of transience and incompleteness that give us the idea of the relentless movement of Otherness: ‘parts, in the long run, are the carriers of “being”, not wholes, which are no more than provisional arrays of parts’ (Fisher, 1991:213). Otherness is always de-parting. Gilles Deleuze’s various writings on assemblage help to bring out the partial, fleeting, unlocalizable character of the Other (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari, 1983; Deleuze and Parnet, 1987). Deleuze uses the French term agencement, which is usually translated as assemblage but can also mean arrangement or organization. But these terms—as well as assemblage itself- are liable to give the impression of a static structure that (however temporary) is complete in itself. So it’s always the active nature of assembling that Deleuze wishes to foreground. First, an assemblage is ‘neither a unity nor a totality’ but a multiplicity. Multiplicity actively resists unification: ‘In a multiplicity what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what there is “between”, the between, a set of relations which are not separable from each other’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: viii). And it’s movement that comes between the parts of the multiplicity which provides the inexorable,

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unlocalizable locomotions of Othering. But movement is a tricky ‘thing’ to handle, it’s not easily thinkable: ‘Movement always happens behind the thinker’s back, or in the moment when he blinks’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987:1). Movement is ‘almost imperceptible’. It occurs ‘in’ the ‘between’. Deleuze calls it becoming. It’s not a condition, nor a thing or state, but always an ongoing that never arrives anywhere, never completes itself. Deleuze illustrates becoming as Othering with the example of the wasp and the orchid: The orchid seems to form a wasp image, but in fact there is a wasp-becoming of the orchid, an orchid-becoming of the wasp, a double capture since ‘what’ each becomes changes no less than ‘that which’ becomes. The wasp becomes part of the orchid’s reproductive apparatus at the same time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp. (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987:2) But, since we’ve been so conditioned by the logic of simple location, it’s difficult for us to think becoming. We slide almost naturally into thinking in terms of bounded entities. The becomings of assemblages are not just intermittent acts of co-operation between essentially different terms or parts, for part really means part of in the most radical sense of mutual belonging and in-one-anotherness. To emphasize this point, Deleuze says that in this world of becomings there are no metaphors and the word ‘like’ does not exist because the logic of resemblance does not work here. Men are not like animals, nor animals like men. Instead, it is the becoming-animal of the man or the becoming-man of the animal. In this strong sense of Otherness, the part is always a double-part or parasite (para, equal, between; site, place, situation) that is doubled or ‘devilled’ by the tension it creates between being both apart and a part of, just like the queer tension we’ve already noted in the original-copy relationship (see response to Question 1). It’s this strong sense of Otherness as parasite that’s exemplified in Donna Haraway’s (1991) portrayal of the cyborg, ‘a hybrid of machine and organism’ in which the separate terms of machine and organism dissolve into a mixed space—an in-one-anotherness— that is ‘multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial’ (177). The cyborg is an assemblage of parts or components whose significance lies in its combinational possibilities for the disassembly and reassembly of new forms and patterns. The cyborg is less of a thing or object and more of a process of becoming. Biotechnology is the exemplary science of the cyborg because it transforms living organisms into biotic components that can be endlessly combined and recombined: ‘In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components’ (Haraway, 1991:164). The solid world dissolves and gives way to Otherness that’s hybrid, parasitical and transient. In an essay on the significance of cybernetics in the modern world, Italo Calvino (1987) suggests that the mobile, liquefying logic of cybernetics creates a ‘ghost-like’ space that increasingly confutes the expectations of conventional thought for things and objects to stay in place. The Otherness of the cyberneticized organism—the cyborg—is Calvino’s non-place where appearances (not things) move like apparitions and ghosts. And here we have appearance rather than substance—forms that

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seem and thus give the semblance to assemblage. If assemblage seems, it’s because it’s non-localizable, transient and transitional—it always moves between parts in a non-completable whole that is destined always to remain a hole or absence. If assemblage seems, it also seams, i.e. connects and moves across divisions and parts. The worlds of industrial mass production and biotechnology, for example, share the common strategy of translating their raw material into parts that are then freely combined and recombined. As Calvino intimates, this is also the strategy of language and mathematics which work through the combinability and permutability of letters, words and numbers. We are thus left with the suggestion that human systems, whatever their form and function, incline towards a common strategy of self-knowledge and self-renewal that revolves around the continuous assemblage of parts and the refusal of objecthood. It’s this loss of object that prepares the way for Otherness as transient becoming and apparition, as the haunting of a seeming presence by an unnerving absence. It’s exactly this Othering aspect of assemblage that Picasso dramatizes in his famous sculpture of a bull’s head made out of the seat and handlebars of a bicycle. We seem to see an assemblage that strangely hovers between the world of mass-produced industrial parts and the image of a natural object that we know as a bull’s head in an in-oneanotherness that, though divided, refuses division. Question 9 (JK) You have worked with ideas from information theory. Can you tell us why you consider the concept of information to be important for social analysis? Social science seems to me to suffer from two major intellectual vices: objectification and the naturalization of order. Objectification frames the social world as a collection of divided, self-identical objects such as the ‘individual’, the ‘group’, the ‘society’. We even tend to think of these as structures with physical properties. The naturalization of order is the assumption that order and regularity are somehow congenital to social action and that disorder and disturbance are unnatural distortions of an original state of harmony. The significance of the concept of information lies in its capacity to problematize these convenient simplicities and to radicalize the structural tendencies of social analysis. Let’s start with the basic ideas of information theory. Information theory works in terms of probabilities: information is inversely proportional to its probability, so that information is what’s least probable: To calculate the amount of information contained in a particular message, one must keep in mind that the highest probability an event will take place is 1, and the lowest 0. The mathematical probability of an event therefore varies between 1 and 0. A coin thrown into the air has an equal chance of landing on either heads or tails; thus, the probability of getting heads is (Eco, 1989:45) This, of course, is the commonsense version of the binary digit—the ‘bit’—which is the technical definition of information in computer science. The significance of the binary

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digit is that it forces us to see information as the product of probability and improbability in combination. To say that information is what’s least probable is the same as saying that it’s least predictable. If an event is completely predictable, it simply doesn’t provide us with information. We already know it. Information derives its significance from its unpredictability. Information is thus novelty and newness—news, in fact, something that we didn’t previously know. In cybernetics, information is also a measure of organization or order. Organization and order are forms of predictability. But since information is related to improbability, organization and order are also dependent on disorganization and disorder. Communication (i.e. the transmission of information) in social systems is bound up with predictability-organization-order in dynamic interaction with unpredictability-disorganization-disorder. The system is defined as much by what it does not know as by what it knows. In fact, unpredictability-disorganization-disorder is what makes ordered systems possible. Information helps us to understand why this is so. Information occurs on the cusp of probability—improbability. It’s always momentary, tentative and transient. This is what Lyotard (1991:105) means when he writes that ‘information is by definition a short-lived element. As soon as it is transmitted and shared, it ceases to be information, it becomes an environmental given, and “all is said”, we “know”. It is put into the machinery memory. The length of time it occupies is, so to speak, instantaneous.’ Information thus occurs in that imperceptible moment between the known and the unknown. It lasts but an instant and is quickly gone. For this reason it has to be repeated, otherwise knowledge, probability, prediction would also come to an end. Lyotard is telling us that information must never be concluded; by definition, it must remain unfinished, infinite, indeterminate. Information in this sense is what per-forms the forms of social life. I would like to suggest that the technical definition of information as the binary digit (the measure of the probability—improbability of an event) can now be extended to social analysis as the binary act. The binary act not only draws attention to the constitutive role of the probability-improbability relationship in social action but also suggests that human agency is defined by the informational act which is compelled continually to recreate itself out of the infinite and indeterminate. In short, the binary act redefines social action as (1) the making of something out of nothing; (2) never complete; (3) a compulsion to repeat; (4) instantaneous; (5) evanescent. The general significance of these features of the binary act is discussed by Lyotard in the context of techno-scientific research and social practice. Techno-scientific research, according to Lyotard, is motivated primarily by informational possibilities—by the infinite and indeterminate. It responds to the challenge posed by the post-industrial recognition that there is no objective, true reality but only an infinity of possible ‘realities’ which have to be realized as the probabilities or predictabilities of ‘knowledge’. Lyotard describes how this occurs in the social and organizational context through the example of photography. Photography has to be understood as both expression and product of techno-scientific culture. ‘Science, technology and capital, even in their matter-of-fact style, are so many ways of actualizing the infinity of concepts’ (Lyotard, 1991:123). Techno-scientific knowledge is a complex making over of

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the unknown into the known. But this making over hides its real nature by presenting its products as ‘ready-made’ and owing nothing to the infinite and indeterminate. Photography as a product of industrial techno-science and as per-formed on a mass scale by the so-called amateur photographer is also the construction and consumption of objects and knowledge out of the informational possibilities of the infinite. The amateur photographer, ostensibly utilizing the camera’s capacity for personal image-making, is really part of this wider complex that constructs performable knowledge out of the indeterminate: ‘The amateur (photographer) is in this way in the service of experimentation carried out by laboratories and ordered by banks’ (Lyotard, 1991:123). The social subject is thus caught up in a techno-scientific field of binary acts that represents ‘the concretization of an anonymous infinite that ceaselessly organizes and disorganizes the world, and of which the individual subject, at whatever level she be in the social hierarchy, is the voluntary or involuntary servant’ (p. 123). It’s not only that techno-scientific organization insinuates itself into all levels of the social system but that its general elaboration of the principle of information (in the way I have defined it here) subjects all social relations to what Lyotard calls ‘the management of infinite research’, which effectively means information as the endless transformation of spectral ‘realities’. To appreciate the general significance of this ‘information revolution’, we have to remind ourselves of the philosophy and objectives of traditional science which sought to ground knowledge in a rational system of cause and effect and in which ‘all things are reduced to the level of pure presences that can be measured, manipulated, replaced and therefore easily dominated and organized’ (Vattimo, 1992:8). This is an interpretation of knowledge that stresses predictability, order and probability. It marginalizes the unpredictability and improbability that defines information as infinite possibility. It says that laws and regularities constitute scientific knowledge. But information as improbability reminds us that ‘it is necessary to rethink the world… in terms of perturbations and turbulences, in order to bring out its multiple forms, uneven structures, and fluctuating organizations’ (Harari and Bell in Serres, 1982: xxvii). The new technoscience overturns the traditional conception of science as objective law and order and substitutes the idea of a ‘founding disorder’ in which informational improbability becomes the infinite source of ever-changing social forms. It’s no longer the conventional view of technology as the technical means of mastering nature but of the generalized organization of techno-science that is ‘primarily and essentially defined by systems collecting and transmitting information’ (Vattimo, 1992:15). This is what the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo calls ‘the society of generalized communication’, which is sustained by the continuous creation and circulation of new information—news, images—through a techno-scientific complex which relies centrally on the mass media. As we’ve noted, information is by definition momentary and transitory. Its special character is that it does not last. This is what makes Vattimo’s society of generalized communication seem so destabilized, so liquid: ‘The advent of the media enhances the inconstancy and superficiality of experience’ (p. 59). It’s Lyotard’s argument that technoscientific organization can only actualize itself via the production—which is also the prediction—of the infinite or ‘unfinished’. Vattimo vividly illustrates the transience of

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technologized information through Walter Benjamin’s social and cultural analysis of cinema. Cinema, says Benjamin, was constructed to disorient, to destabilize—‘the rapid succession of projected images whose demands on a viewer are analogous to those made on a driver in city traffic’ (Vattimo, 1992:51)—in order to keep the infinite or ‘unfinished’ continually alive. Cinema reveals the special character of information as instantaneous, as imperceptibly transient, much like Deleuze’s insight that ‘movement always happens behind the thinker’s back, or in the moment when he blinks’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987:1). Information happens between the not yet and the no longer. It suggests that time (as tense) is a tension between the not yet and the no longer—a tension that has to be iterated otherwise information will not last and will be lost. This is why Vattimo cites films like Blade Runner and Planet of the Apes in which the future is seen in ‘the light of ruins’. In Blade Runner, for example, the techno-scientific action of the film takes place against a background of urban ruin and decay which serves to remind us not only of the transience of so-called techno-scientific progress but also of the need or compulsion intrinsic to the binary act of information to repeat that strange complicity between the not yet and the no longer. These comments are intended to introduce information as a process that is fundamental to social practice. The concept of the binary act in particular draws attention to the significance of the mutually defining interaction between probability and improbability in everyday social action. And, as I’ve tried to show, the society of post-industrial technoscience not only foregrounds information as an operational and ontological principle but demands its understanding and analysis in information-theoretic terms. Question 10 (RC) It’s clear that you see organization as a general process that is immanent throughout society and social practice rather than as a specific instrumental system. In answering this final question, could you summarize the main features of your approach and suggest how it might be developed? I’ll begin with a general—and perhaps obvious—point. The social world is essentially an infrangible fusion of events and relations in which there are no neat divisions or categories. It doesn’t easily lend itself to conceptualization, yet is forever committed to an endless struggle to make sense of itself, to organize itself, in a matrix of confusion. We saw this happening in John Wilkins’s and Thomas Sprat’s attempt to develop a rational language for science in seventeenth-century England (see response to Question 1). In that example, we noted that order grew out of disorder, that order and disorder defined each other. Wherever we look, we see all around this dynamic and creative antagonism between order and disorder. This is what I mean by organization as a generic process in society. Generic organization is not a thing, it’s not a self-contained structure. We can’t point to it and say ‘That’s it.’ It’s more like a network of relations that keeps on moving. So that even when we try to make sense of it, when we order or organize it, we have to be careful not to reduce it to a state, to a static condition. Yet we seem almost naturally to think of organization not as a general process but in terms of self-contained units which we call organizations. Usually, these are understood as administrativeeconomic systems with specific goals and rational procedures for attaining their goals.

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Organizations in this sense are viewed primarily in instrumental terms, that is, they’re understood as the means for satisfying society’s needs. The more basic order-disorder theme is lost—even suppressed—in this interpretation. This seems to be especially true of the academic field of organization studies which has constructed for itself a professionalized object called ‘an organization’. In other words, organization studies may itself be seen as ‘an organization’ that continues to produce a definable and identifiable product called ‘organization theory’ which is built on the assumption that there are selfcontained, self-identical objects that can be academically ‘consumed’. Organization theory replicates itself through those objects—namely instrumental organizations—which constitute its subject matter. In other words, organization theory has itself become an organizational product. (I’ve dealt with this question in more detail elsewhere; see Cooper, 1986.) This is an example of the specific knowledge of the professions that we discussed earlier (see response to Question 2)—the knowledge of things in specific, selfcontained spaces. In contrast, generic organization requires that we relax the requirements for specific, locatable things that have specific, functional roles. Instead, it thinks of organization as loose and active assemblages of organizings—not static structures but dynamic acts that are always on the move. For example, conventional organization theory understands Scientific Management as a strategy of business management applied solely to factory production, whereas generic organization views it as part of a much wider control movement in the early twentieth century which was applied to housework and the design of the domestic kitchen as well as to factory organization (Lupton and Miller, 1992). Lyotard’s (1991) analysis of photography as a techno-scientific product is another example of organization as immanent acts of organizing (see response to Question 9). Photography is merely one of many ways by which industrial technoscience pervades social practice and in which the amateur photographer acts as its agent in that wider context that Lyotard calls ‘the management of infinite research’. Lyotard’s example of photography is also important here for another reason—it reveals the socio-cultural aspect of generic organization. Techno-scientific organization becomes part of the lifeworld of mass society. I argued earlier (see response to Question 1) that generic organization is also the regeneration of human culture. This is exactly the point that Lyotard makes when he says that techno-science transforms the infinite and indeterminate into per-formable knowledge. It’s not simply a case of producing objects such as the camera for functional consumption. In other words, it’s not a case of organizing for production. For Lyotard, it’s more like the production of organization (Cooper and Burrell, 1988) in which the product serves as a device for predicting or organizing the indeterminate future or the not yet (see response to Question 9). Industrial techno-science and the amateur photographer both share the same problem: how to order the as yet unknown. Pre-diction and pro-duction thus become forms of generic organization that participate in social practice in different yet common ways. Organization as pre-diction and pro-duction suggests another significant feature of generic organization—that various social meanings cohere and condense into the one social act. Generic organization does not simply mean that acts of organizing are

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distributed throughout social networks. Perhaps more significantly, it means that the various ways of describing and understanding social organization are concentrated in the most simple, elemental acts. It’s where difference becomes the same and vice versa. This is the point that emerges out of Mark Taylor’s (1995) analysis of electronic media and compu-telecommunications technology and the ways in which they’re forcing us to rethink the nature of our social and personal realities. The new media technologies— television, radio, film, video, telephones, faxes, computers, the net—are radically reorganizing the sensory and intellectual forms by which we ‘engage with reality’. At the same time, they compel us to rethink the nature of social organization itself. We are no longer in a world that is external to us and which we simply represent. The electronic media now actually produce the images and signs which constitute the world: ‘The structure of the real is indistinguishable from the structure of the medium. In more familiar terms, the medium is not only the message but is nothing less than reality itself’ (Taylor, 1995:26–27). The medium is where everything condenses; where, for example, pro-duction and pre-diction become each other. It’s another way of expressing the mutually defining relationship between original and copy (see responses to Questions 1 and 6). In the medium there is neither beginning nor end but both beginning and end, neither here nor there but both here and there, neither this nor that but both this and that—all condensed together in a middle that is also a muddle. This is a version of Geertz’s (1975:10) ‘thick’ description in which ‘complex conceptual structures (are) knotted into one another’. We see the same interlacing process in the mutual connection between organ and organization where human organs do not merely see or hear but actively contribute to the wider socio-cultural meaning of organization (see response to Question 1). Organ and organization mediate each other. This is also Lyotard’s point in his analysis of photography as both expression and product of techno-scientific organization: the human eye becomes an organ of organization through the camera. The co-implication of organ—organization is more vividly portrayed in Avital Ronell’s (1989) account of the development of the telephone and the Bell Telephone Company (which later became the American Telephone and Telegraph Company). Telecommunication is essentially the mediation of organs. The eye, for example, mediates distances. The same applies to the ear and the mouth. This repeats Heidegger’s (1971) argument that the human body and its organs are part of—or participators in—a mutually reflecting field of possibilities (see response to Question 3). The mouth, for example, ‘is not merely a kind of organ of the body understood as an organism—body and mouth are part of the earth’s flow and growth in which we mortals flourish…(p. 98). Mouth and body are both organs and origins which organize continuous mediation that ‘brings together what it holds apart and holds apart what it brings together…without integrating or synthesizing’ (Taylor, 1995:34). Telephony as the communication of sound over distances through the media of the mouth and the ear was a dream of pagan times and began to take on technical form in the work of the English scientist Robert Hooke in the seventeenth century. In the Victorian period, it marked the beginning of modern techno-scientific research in telecommunications with international attempts to translate the organs of hearing and

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speaking into organizations of mass communication. The Bell system in the USA was one of the more successful attempts at this translation. In more recent developments of technoscientific organization, we find the same mediation between organs and organizations: ‘Microelectronics mediate the translations of labor into robotics and word processing; sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies; and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures’ (Haraway, 1991:166). It thus is no longer possible, as Marilyn Strathern (1991:36) tells us, ‘to sustain a division between the natural and the artificial, between matter and consciousness, or between who makes and who is made in the relations between human and machine’. Nor, we should add, between organs and organizations. For what we have here is another way of expressing the nature of Taylor’s (1995) medium as a middle that is also a muddle. It’s also another version of Geertz’s (1975) ‘thick’ description in which structures are knotted into one another. These observations underline the organ—organization relationship as mediation rather than as a collection of self-identical actors and tools. They repeat the earlier interpretation of organization as participation (see response to Question 1) with its emphasis on mediating parts rather than separate entities: ‘parts, in the long run, are the carriers of “being”, not wholes, which are no more than provisional arrays of parts’ (Fisher, 1991:213). Lyotard’s camera produces a framed picture cut out of the infinite process of medium and media. The photographer temporarily withdraws a form from a background of endless transformation, frames and immobilizes it in a snapshot. This is an example of Lyotard’s thesis that techno-scientific organization can only realize itself via the production—prediction of the infinite or ‘unfinished’. The function of production— prediction is to censor or excise the field of mobile transformations by framing it in a simple location such as the snapshot. At the same time the camera is still part of the wider field of endless transformation as the term ‘snapshot’ itself suggests with its instantaneous capture of a slice of an object in time. And the camera is also an organ that mediates between the eye and its context in that contact-copy transformation that Taussig (1993) saw as defining mimetic Otherness (see response to Question 8), in which the camera de-objectifies the world through the problematic of the original-copy counterchange (see responses to Questions 1 and 6). Here we have two interrelated aspects of the organ-organization relationship: one that fixes forms and figures by screening out their mobile and infinite backgrounds; and the other that refuses fixity of location through the continuous motion of in-one-anotherness and mediation that characterizes the Other (see response to Question 8). Drawing on the work of the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani, Norman Bryson (1988) has discussed the organorganization interaction in terms of framing. Objects and entities are made to stand out against a background of ‘radical impermanence’ or ‘nihility’: The concept of the entity can be preserved only by an optic that casts around each entity a perceptual frame that makes a cut from the (universal field of transformations) and immobilizes the cut within the static framework. But as soon as that frame is withdrawn, the object is found to exist as a part of a mobile continuum that cannot be cut anywhere. (Bryson, 1988:97)

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As Derrida (1987) has convincingly shown, the frame of an object or concept performs an ambiguous and ambivalent role, for it is neither part of the object or concept nor apart from it. Derrida’s name for the frame is parergon—where par means both part of and apart from, and ergon, work. The frame as parergon is thus neither a presence nor an absence. It reminds us that eyes, mouths and ears as organs and ergons are never objects that are complete in themselves but only come alive when, in the company of cameras and telephones, they enter the transformational field of ‘radical impermanence’. The organ-ergon organizes only in that transitional and immanent space which I earlier called the binary act (see response to Question 9). Organization without object. Participial. Without end.

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Boundaries of Politics, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 279–312. Cooper, R. and Burrell, G. (1988) ‘Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis: an introduction’, Organizational Studies 9(l): 91–112. Cooper, R. and Law, J. (1995) ‘Organization: distal and proximal views’, Research in the Sociology of Organizations 13:237–274. Deleuze, G. (1990) The Logic of Sense, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (1987) Dialogues, London: Athlone Press. Derrida, J. (1987) The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. ——(1978) Writing and Difference, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Doob, P.R. (1990) The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Durkheim, E. (1933) The Division of Labour in Society, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Eco, U. (1989) The Open Work, London: Hutchinson. Ehrenzweig, A. (1967) The Hidden Order of Art, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Fisher, P. (1991) Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums, New York: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Tavistock. ——(1973) Madness and Civilisation: A History of Medical Perception, trans. A. Sheridan Smith, New York: Vintage/Random House. ——(1975) The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. Sheridan Smith, New York: Vintage/Random House. ——(1977) Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, London: Allen Lane. Geertz, C. (1975) The Interpretation of Cultures, London: Hutchinson. Gillespie, G. (1995) ‘Scientific discourse and postmodernity: Francis Bacon and the empirical birth of “Revision”’, in P.A. Bové (ed.) Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gleick, J. (1988) Chaos: Making a New Science, London: Heinemann. Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Re-invention of Nature, London: Free Association Books. Heidegger, M. (1971) On the Way to Language, New York: Harper and Row. Herbst, P.G. (1976) Alternatives to Hierarchies, Leiden: Nijhoff. James, W. (1890) Principles of Psychology, New York: Henry Holt. Johnson, C. (1993) System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kenner, H. (1987) The Mechanic Muse, New York: Oxford University Press. Lupton, E. and J.A. Miller (1992) ‘Hygiene, cuisine and the product world of early twentieth-century America’, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter (eds) Incorporations, New York: Zone. Lyotard, J.-F. (1991) The Inhuman, Cambridge: Polity Press. March, J. (1988) Decisions and Organizations, Oxford: Blackwell. Melberg, A. (1995) Theories of Mimesis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mey, H. (1972) Field-Theory: a Study of its Applications in the Social Sciences, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Morgan, G. (1983) Beyond Method: Strategies for Social Research, Newbury Park, CA:

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INDEX

accountability 20, 64, 68, 73 Adler, A. 123 administration 27; business 5; modern systems 130; reformed 19; social 27 ‘Advices’ 12, 25, 29 affects 93, 94, 95, 103 Agamben, G. 92 agencement 154 agency/agents 14, 45, 46, 93, 127; autonomous 91, 94; central issue of 63; centred and decentred 81; computer 79; construction of 46–2, 93; consumption 126; co-operative 78; defined by the informational act 157; diagrammatics of 96; electronically based 75; external 81; flight 92; fluids act to dissolve 22; generic 114; identifiable, specific 62; ‘imitation’ of, by machines 142; instrumentality 141; linkage into collectivity 69; ‘manageable’ 72; moral 70, 78, 79; organizational 65, 66–3; participation in construction of the world 135; production 126; specific interpretations of 75;

Index ‘stable’ 72; subjective 79, 93, 94, 97; total detachment 48; total detachment from disorder 47; understanding 76; unfolding 82; unreflexive 44 agonistics 126, 127, 133, 144 ambiguity 3, 134, 139, 162; anxieties and dangers that accompany 137; critical 136; influence of 149; interstanding 133; personal and professional, subjection to 141 ambivalence 29, 122, 134, 162; anxieties and dangers that accompany 137; critical 136; interstanding 133; necessary 30 Anglicanism 19 animals 51 ‘anti-foundationalists’ 42, 43 appearances 101, 117, 155; aggregations of 108 appropriation 64, 71–79 Archier, G. 70 art 100–9, 134; architectural form 8; theory 7, 19, 144 articulation 112; mutual 111 artificial intelligence 40, 78 Ashby, W.R. 109 Ashmore, M. 40 assemblages 6, 91, 102–30, 155; becomings of 155; loose and active 159; mediations of 114–8; production 96 association 68, 126 attitude 21; ‘natural’ 8; of orderliness 27; rationalistic 8; social 1; Western and Chinese paintings 7

167

Index

168

Austin, J. 68 Bachelard, Gaston 130, 143–7 Barnes, B. 53 Barthes, Roland 82 Bateson, Gregory 128, 130, 141, 145–61 Baudrillard, J. 67, 74, 90 Bauman, Zygmunt 31 becomings 103, 108, 113, 128, 132, 142, 153–8 passim; another way of talking about 143; assemblages 155; Heidegger’s way of saying 135; transient 156; unfinished 134, 143 Beer, Gillian 131, 133–5, 135 being(s) 91, 117, 141, 151; carriers of 154 Bell Telephone Company 161 Benedikt, M. 73, 75 Benjamin, Walter 15, 25, 101–10, 103, 106–16, 108, 114–6 passim, 153, 159 Bentham, Jeremy 27, 3, 4, 8, 10 Berger, John 7 Berger, P. 141, 149 Bergson, Henri 11, 139 Bernadac, M.-L. 108 betweenness 15, 100, 101, 103, 109, 111, 133 Big Bang 42, 43 binary acts 16, 156, 157, 158 biology 56; evolutionary 109; ideas from 147 biotechnology 117, 155; as information 128 bi-univocality 41, 42 Blanchot, Maurice 92, 144, 150 Bledstein, B. 127, 149–3, 151 bodies 45–63, 135, 149; boundaries 21; diagrammatic 88–99; ‘docile’ 127; fallible 38; hybridization of 14; intermediary 22; ‘mysterious’ force inhabiting 83; organs 10; outputs 1;

Index physical map of 80–8; projective act of 123; renewal of 124; separate, specialized, ‘carved up’ into spaces 130; subject in 64–1, 72–74; subjective attributes inhabiting 74; see also assemblages Bolter, J. 81–82, 83 Borel, M.-J. 66 Borges, Jorge Luis 122 Bouchet, P. de 108 boundaries 44, 94, 143, 153, 155; body 21; disciplinary 48; fixed and unquestioned 137; idea that they are fault lines 137; identifiable 5; linkage points between machines and 93; metaphor for 132; positive 91; rationalized 137; why and how do ‘we’ rationalize 136 bounded rationality 136; grossly different way of thinking 137; not merely a limit on human intelligence 138; reanalyses of 139; syntax of binding employed by 138–1 Bové, Paul A. 123 Bryson, Norman 7–8, 162 Buckley, W. 147 Bukatman, S. 74–1 bureaucracy 105 Burrell, Gibson 63, 125, 160 Butler, Samuel 15, 109–20, 116, 117, 133–6 Cage, J. 141 Caillois, Roger 153–7 calculability 31, 69, 137 Calvino, Italo 155–70 Cartesianism see Descartes Cascardi, A. 63, 71 castration 89, 95 categorizations 42, 49, 79, 122 Catholic Church 96 cause-effect relationship 146, 157 certainty 126, 141

169

Index

170

change(s) 70, 96; conceptual categories which deny the primacy of 11; constantly threaten to create chaos/ disorder 13; designed 36, 53; inexorable 145; programmes 140; radical 92; un-designed 36, 38, 44, 52, 53, 55, 56 chaos 44, 141, 146; changes which constantly threaten to create 13; construction and maintenance of pattern out of 134; form emerges out of 145; indiscriminability 55; process as 140; rescuing the community from 51; scholarly 43; silent 100; theory 150 Chia, R.C. H. 6, 38, 44 choices 6, 41, 64; aggregation of 53–9; operative 134; pre-set to exclude resistance 53; rational and moral 78 Christian Faith and Practice (Religious Society of Friends) 22–5, 24–8 Church Government (Religious Society of Friends) 25, 27, 28 codes 24 collectivities 54, 55, 74; action 65, 77; imperatives 70; interests 69; linkage of agents into 69; mind 14; requirements of 71; templates for 74 combinability 134, 156 communication 145, 157; computer- assisted 77; generalized 157–3; mass 132, 161; networks 74, 75; organization means 128; theory 147 competence 137; ‘calculability’ of 136 complexity 16, 38, 49, 58, 101, 110, 130;

Index

171

intrinsic 81; organized 5, 12; social theories of 41, 42, 43; ‘thick’ 151 computerization/computers 4, 63, 71–8, 76, 79, 81, 115; actors and 73; advent/rise of 13, 14; communication assisted by 77; conferencing 74; design by 74; early jargon 91; high-level languages 77; manipulating signs 83; performances 72; taking the mystery out of intertextuality 82; text in 81 connections 113; complex, fleeting, unstable 151; ‘missing’ 132; mutual 160; ‘thin’ 151; unstable 128 consciousness 10, 16, 71, 83, 110, 116, 122; constituted by a weave of texts 80; detached from corporeal supports 74; discrimination of 49; dividing, categorizing operations of 56; individual 70; intentional 65; internal 69; meta-individual 65; moral 79; philosophical thoughts considering 83; redefined 14; self 137, 138; subjective 77, 79; threat to consciousness posed by unready 55; un-ready a stranger to 49; uploaded into the network 73 consensus 53, 56, 97, 98 construction 158; agent continuously under 46–2; artificial 75; bodies 90; identity 9–10; inherited from reading 84;

Index

172

organizational subject 63–71; pattern, out of chaos 134; reality 10, 12; social 9, 12, 70, 149; space 90, 98; subjectivity 121; world, agent participates in 135 consumption 11, 82, 127, 158 contingencies 70, 134 contracts 65 contradictions 4, 54, 56 control 69, 72; acquiescence to any kind of 127; administrative 27; obsession with 3; organization means 128; social and psychological, by modern state 130; ubiquitous presence of 67; unpredictability surrenders to 47 convenience 47; against a disorderly nature 46; ‘making’ 39; production of 38; total 38 conversation 21–4; ‘situated’ 28 Cooper, Robert 4, 6, 9, 10, 14–16 passim, 20, 36–49 passim, 51, 57, 63, 66, 79, 81–9, 82, 84, 88–8 passim, 94, 121–77 copies 106, 113, 116, 147, 152, 153, 162; mutually defining relationship between original and 160; space that denies the hierarchy of 130; truth of 124 Corvellec, H. 67 counting/countability 28, 21, 29, 113; created and denied 30 Crane, Stephen 111, 116 Cubism 108–17, 111, 114, 115 culture 42, 51, 53, 124; curiosity about 41; existence of two speeds in 48; inclusion-exclusion 136; modern 11, 123, 134; practices that mediate 72; regeneration of 160; relatively recent upsurge of 69; stabilized routines that characterize 50;

Index

173

techno-scientific 157; unity of 51 curiosity 42, 43 Curt, B.C. 45, 46 cybernetics 108, 109, 117, 128–9, 145, 148, 157; Cooper’s current work on 144; ideas from 142, 147; philosophy of 147 cyborganization 15, 128–9, 142, 143 cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) 128, 155 Czarniawska-Joerges, B. 63 Danielson, P. 77–6, 85 Daresbury Laboratory 20, 23–7, 23–27, 29–4, 31 Darwin, Charles 109, 130, 134 Davidow, W. 72 Day, Ron 15 decentring 4, 14, 45, 74, 80–85 decision-making 72; collective 54; conscious 55; economics and psychology of 135; fluctuating 55; grows out of trial and error 139; idiosyncratic 68; interpretation 138; Quaker way of 27, 28; role of emotion in 137; satisfying outcomes 136; strategic 12, 19; support systems 74 deconstruction 88; classical subject 94; concepts of origin 146; natural world 153 de-differentiation 15, 48, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130, 137; form of knowing 133; generic 117; infinite speed of 57; slowing the pace of 15 50; warded off 49 deformation 9, 143 deictic markers/reference 7 Deleuze, Gilles 15, 38, 41, 43, 46, 71, 89–7, 91–95 passim, 103–21 passim, 114–6 passim, 125, 127–41 passim, 134–6, 135, 143, 146–9, 153, 154–9, 159 delineation 22, 24, 28, 30;

Index

174

range of perception 62; refused 30 Derrida, Jacques 38, 41–6 passim, 49, 57, 79–8 passim, 83, 89–8, 107, 109, 124, 129, 130, 135, 138, 145–61, 152, 163 Descartes, René 10, 68, 81, 82, 115 description: systematic 130; ‘thick’ 149, 150, 161; ‘thin’ 149 desire 48, 89; resides in limbs and senses 112; subjective 71 detachment 48, 49, 79 determinacy 3, 100 deterritorialization 91, 94, 127 dialectical theories 89 différance 145–9, 147, 148 difference 145, 148; becomes the same 160; ‘circuits of’ 146; dissolution of 153; non-locatable 146, 147 differentiation 16, 42, 50, 79, 112, 122, 129, 137, 149; and assembly 10–12; birth of 51; fundamental 51; institutional 48; interlocking sequence of ontological acts of 9; original permanent 41; semi-stable instances of 49; temporal 42 discrimination 44, 53, 54, 55, 57; institutional’ 13, 48; lack of 46; new and appropriate 43; sacrificial 57 ‘discursive regimes’ 27, 3 disorder 36, 39, 47, 57, 121, 142, 157; agents need 142; changes which constantly threaten to create 13; detachment from 47; dynamic and creative antagonism between order and 159; fresh approach to issues of 52; norm 41; order generated spontaneously out of 51; order needs 145;

Index

175

real 55; refusal to purify 48; responsibility to 42; source of 39; struggle against 41 disorganization 142, 143 displacement 15, 79; logic of 89 dissent/‘dissension’ 18, 138 distance 88; eye mediates 161; reinforcing 132 division labour of 3, 15, 20, 100, 114, 117, 149–5 passim; institutional 140; obsession with 8 divisions 21, 127, 132, 133, 143, 161; artificially imposed 131; infinite and repeated 151; metrication and narration 12, 19; opinion 29; original, results of 42; part and whole, individual and society 113; real, stable, yet impermanent 49; representational 11; self 138; source of all 41; traced back through time 41; unitary, in-advance 51, 56 Doob, Penelope Reed 150 double currency 116, 134 Dreyfus, H. 43, 46, 70 Duncan, Robert 140–3 Durkheim, Emile 3, 15, 100–9, 114, 117, 149 Eco, Umberto 134, 135, 156 Ehrenzweig, Anton 10, 123–4, 124, 133, 137 electronic mail 74 elusiveness 30, 31 England 122; seventeenth century in 18–1, 149 Enlightenment 1, 22, 23–7, 28, 43 entropy 42, 48 epistemes 94 epistemology 8, 40, 79; mimetic 90 ergonization 154

Index ergons 163 ‘escape velocity’ 37 Escher, Maurits 31 Etzioni, A. 69 evanescence 55, 57 events 27; bodily 102; heterogeneous 126; institutional categorizations of 48; ‘local’ 92; real, fundamental 50; unique and solitary 57; worldly 14 evolution 131, 133 excretory behaviour/functions 1, 8, 127, 149 expert systems 64, 72, 78 fascism 95, 97, 98 feudal system 104–13 Fineman, S. 64 Fisher, P. 66, 101, 106–15, 107, 150, 154, 162 fixity 9, 162 flight 15, 39, 93, 95; lines of 96; openings of bodies for 98; reinvesting desire along lines of 92; transversal 90 flow 90, 100; never-ending 79; of Others 27 fluctuation 54, 55, 57 fluidity/fluids 13, 18–35 fluxes 8, 9, 15, 91, 176 Focillon, Henri 112 folds 88, 92 Fordism 101, 154 forms 101, 162; active making of 128; cyborganizational 129; emerge out of chaos 145; ever-changing 142–6; incompatible 117; interference intrinsic to all 146; linear 146; multiplicity of 112; new, reassembly of 155;

176

Index

177

permanent 142; social 129, 157 Foster, H. 7 Foucault, Michel 32–4 passim, 7, 10, 41, 48, 52, 64, 71, 94, 102, 108, 109, 122, 126, 127, 129, 130–2, 135, 138, 144 Fox, George 19, 22 ‘fractal person’ notion 113, 114 fractality/fractals 114, 151 Frazer, H. 66 freedom 41, 113; degrees of 111; illusory 63; individual 54, 63, 71; unconstrained, possibilities of 117 Freud, S. 10, 89–7, 97, 121, 122, 123, 124 functionalism 44, 45 Galam, S. 38, 44, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55–1, 57 Gasché, R. 50, 51, 88 Gauthier, David 79 ‘Gaze’ 8, 126 Geertz, Clifford 150–4, 161 genetic engineering 162 Gerth, H.H. 1 Ge-stell 46 Gillespie, G. 121 Girard, R. 38, 43, 50–6, 52, 54, 57–3 ‘Glance’ 8–8, 10 Gleick, J. 151 goals: accomplishing 143; common 67; illusory 148; intrinsic 67; preconceived 66; pursuit of 63, 126; seeking 148; specific 63, 126, 159 governance 27, 8 Gras, A. 71 grids 31, 121, 126; social 114; technical 66 group conformity 52, 53, 55 Guattari, F. 41, 43, 44, 89–9 passim, 94–4 passim, 105–14, 108–19 passim, 115, 127, 128, 154 guilt 51, 54, 57

Index

178

habits 12, 22, 96; grammatical 14, 62; instinctive 3; private, orderly 127; social 1, 27 Haraway, Donna 128, 155, 162 heedfulness 65, 67 Heidegger, M. 14, 37, 41, 46–2 passim, 62, 83, 85, 89, 91–92 passim, 129, 130, 135, 141–4, 150, 152, 161 Heim, M. 72 Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, 135 Henriques, J. 53 Herbst, P.G. 140 heterogeneity 31, 92, 97, 132; inherent 12–16; of Otherness 30; shifting 131 heteromorphic ‘organisms’ 100 Hiley, D.R. 41 Hillis Miller, J. 115–6, 118 history 18–2, 48, 69, 96 Hofstadter, D.R. 40 homogeneity 13, 24, 31, 104; artificial 131; structures linked to conditions of 103 homosexuality 97 Hooke, Robert 161 Horvath, W.J. 5, 6 Hoskin, D. 64 Hughes, Howard 37, 39 ‘human capital’ 72 humanism 22 ‘humanness’ 133 hybridization 15 hypertext 116 ‘hypothetics’ 134 identity 9, 101, 104, 113; construction 9–10; desired and recognizable 136; detached from corporeal supports 74; dissolution of 153; individual accounting and shaping of 3; intrinsic 125;

Index

179

multiple 73; part-objects resist 113; self 115; spaces of 130; ‘terminal’ 14, 73; ‘true’ 73 ideology 4, 53, 97 illusion 115, 147; partial 30 images 66, 76, 116, 158 imagination 130, 140; mobilization of 70; passive obeisance to transformations and deformations of 144; poetic 140; role in critical thought 16; source of 144 imitation 52; ‘techno’ 142 improbability 135, 157, 158 ‘in-common’ 91, 95 ‘in-one-anotherness’ 152, 153, 156, 162 inauthenticating 133, 134 incompleteness 31, 101–12 passim, 115, 154 inconsistency 13, 31 inconvenience 38–3 indecision 54, 55, 138 indiscriminability 54, 55, 56, 57 individuality 89; organization as 9–10 inferences 62, 84 information: analysis 158; biotechnology as 128; concrete machines and 96–5; Cooper’s current work on 144; cybernetic 128; derives its significance from unpredictability 157; elaboration of the principle of 157; logic of 6; new, circulation of 158; organization 128; part of language 139; power of alphabet to generate and regenerate 11; technologized 158; theory 134, 145, 156;

Index uncertain 139; understanding 158 information technology 4, 79–85; advent of 13; creation of organizational design through 72; enactment of 63; flattening effect of 76–4; ‘humanization of machines’ 62, 71; operating 73; property which all products seem to possess 72; recent developments 4; rise of 14 inscriptions 24, 79, 81, 112 insecurity 42, 49 instability 16, 49, 55 institutionalization 122, 130 intelligence 40, 70, 150 intentions/intentionality 68, 80, 83, 126 interaction 55; constraint-freedom 111; electronic 129; human-machine/ technology 73–1, 142; multiple 133; mutually defining 158; organ-organization 162; physical particles 56; temporary arrangements arising from 70; vague 3 interdisciplinarity 130, 132–5, 144 interference 145, 146 interpretation 77, 134, 144, 152; cybernetic 109; over 132, 133; under 132 interstanding 132, 142; ambivalence and ambiguity of 133; complex, dynamic process of 141; Heidegger’s way of saying 135; rhizomic 132 intertextuality 82 iterability 107, 114; logic of 114 iteration 90, 152, 153; split or fractal movings 115 James, William 137–50

180

Index Johnson, Christopher 124, 128, 147 Jung, C.G. 123 Kafka, F. 15, 105, 108, 115 Kallinikos, J. 66 Kant, I. 76, 131 Kearney, R. 50 Keen, P. 72, 77 Kenner, Hugh 27, 3, 122 knowing 126; associated with Gaze 10; corner-of-the-eye strategy 8; de-differentiated 10, 122, 123, 133; ‘differentiated’ 10; fields of 9; ‘in advance’ 38; modern type of 122; oscillation of 106, 116, 117; tension in 20; unfocused 10, 122 knowledge 10, 22, 56; academic 149; alive, irresolvable, transgressive 132; at a glance 27; bounded 137; clear-cut, separate fields of 12; computer 72; conscious, formalized 15, 122; divisioning and compartmentalization of 127; ever-increasing 44; factual 133; generic 126, 129; industrial machine which produced 130–3; information differs from 96; modern 143; objects of 5; organizational 63; organized 131; per-formable 160; probabilities or predictabilities of 157; production of 97; professional 122; public 149; rationalized 122; reconstruction of objects of 10; role of language in creation of systems of 130;

181

Index

182

scaling 68; scientific 122, 157; self-organizing, bottom-up 131; sharing of 28; simplification of 9; social 149; social scientific 63; special kind of 23; specialized 149; specific 126, 159; ‘strong’ view of 12; systematic, esoteric 137; systematizing orders of 130; techno-scientific 157; total 38; unequal distribution of 77 Korzybski, Alfred 130 Kuhn, A. 6–6, 97 labour 7, 150, 161; of division 16 Labour government 140 Lacan, J. 89 lack 88, 94; subjective 89 language 12, 102, 108, 130; abstract and generalizable 128; alphabet as a source 110; ‘analytical’ 121, 126; decentring 45; differentiations that characterize 50; effects 5; everyday 3, 121; information as part of 139; inscribing, describing and prescribing powers 130; mouth reaches out to the world through 135; narcotic 91; philosophical 135; renewal of 124; representation and 41; role in the creation of systems of knowledge 130; ‘slipperiness’ of 3; strategy of 156; ‘thick’ 150; threat to the primacy of 46; transiting through the use of 69

Index

183

Lao Tzu 151 Latour, B. 37, 39, 57, 63, 65, 68–4 Law, J. 13, 15, 20, 32, 41, 42, 126, 128, 129, 141 law: differentiations that characterize 50; exclusion 138; legitimacy of 41; subjects of 64, 65 Lecercle, J.-J. 111, 116 Lee, N.M. 13, 44, 45 Lefebvre, M. 141 Lingis, A. 11 literature 140; continental 144; modern 140; science and 143–7; ‘space’ of 143 Liverpool 140 location 146; appearance of 117; conceptual 8; fixed 146; fixity of 162; representational 11; self 80; simple 9–10, 15, 100, 103, 115, 126, 127, 131, 133, 155 logic 42, 56, 88, 89, 107, 151; articulations inspired by 84; betweenness 111; conventional 128; cybernetics 155; differentiation and recombination 11; enduring, motionless and august 8; Gaze 8; insulation 12; iterability 114; mediation 115; ‘missing link’ 132; otherability 111; processual 14; representational 10 logocentrism 20, 26, 147 London 140 love 22, 28 Luckmann, T. 141, 149 Lucretius 113

Index

184

Lupton, E. 160 Lyotard, J.-F. 14, 38, 41, 46, 48, 50, 62, 68, 84–2, 89, 125, 127, 157–2, 160–5, 161–7 magic 121, 123, 141 Malone, M. 72 management 20; business 159; infinite research 159–5; laboratory 24; meetings 12, 13; metrication and 18; scientific 19, 121, 159; self 140; urban 27 manpower booking system/forms 23, 24, 29–3 mapping 75; cognitive 31 March, James 139 Marx, Karl 127, 149 mass 144; ‘invisible and nameless’ 102; reproducibility of 101, 102; reproduction or repetition of 100 mass media 158 mass production 4, 11, 15, 156; defined 105–15; generalized process of 154; ordinarily thought of 100; Otherness seen at simplest in 153 masses (urban/social) 34, 3 mastery 41, 63; technological 44; total 40 meaning(s) 5, 65, 66, 97, 124, 152; differentiations that characterize 50; fixed 81; intrinsic 84–3; multiple 134; part-objects resist 113; planes of 90; simple 112; social 160; socially contrived 83, 84; socio-cultural 161; stabilities in 58; technology and organization 6;

Index

185

temporarily stable 41; transformation 123 measurements 22, 28, 68; see also mensurability mediation 15, 16, 79, 113–7 passim, 142, 153; assemblage 114–8; by absence 80; continuous 161, 162; logic of 106, 115; Otherness as 152 mediatrix 129–40, 131–4, 142, 152 meditation 21 mensurability 31; fluidity and 30 Merleau-Ponty, M. 15, 108–17, 111, 112–3, 114 metaphor 31, 44, 81, 82, 85; borrowed 93; botanical 131; division and boundary 132; fluid 21, 22; organizational 72 ‘methodization’ 27, 4, 8 methodology 141; generic 6, 15, 125, 129, 135, 137; intellectual 140; social 15; specific 125 metrics 18–35 Mey, H. 141 microelectronics 162 Milbank, J. 50 Miller, J.-A. 27, 160 Mills, C.W. 1 mimesis 51, 57, 153; mutual 142 mind 74; calculative 21; category able to consider self as different from itself 68; collective 65, 66; computer simulation of 71; conscious 121, 124; ‘embodied’ 123; entities can be identified and made responsible 72; quietness of 28; rational 138; ‘supple’ 148;

Index

186

unconscious 121 mining industry 101, 154 mobility 82, 112 Möbius strip 124 modernity 63–64; Cartesian subject of 80; conditions created 3; ‘contains the promise of its overcoming’ 125; defining features of 10; development of 27; discursive icons of 4; distinctive features 6; founding touchstone of 1; interrogation of 15; late 4, 6; ‘organizational mentality’ of 11; pursuit of 126; shaping 15; speed and 36; tried to generate single order 30; understanding the nature of 7; unfolding of the project 62 Mol, Annemarie 12 morality 65, 68–6; artificial 77–6 Morgan, Gareth 63, 121 Morss, J. 42 Moscovici, S. 38, 44, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55–1, 57 movement 15, 70–7, 74, 91, 94, 100; ‘almost imperceptible’ 103; ‘ambivalent, divergent’ 101, 102; conceptual categories which deny primacy of 11; continuous 112, 113, 117, 128, 144, 145, 148, 152; degrees of freedom for 109; double 113; fields of 153; fractal 115; impossibility of 39; influx 8; invisible 114, 117; perpetual 104; repetition and reproduction of 113; thinking 11, 15, 100; transversal 92; unfinished 152 multimedia 75, 115

Index

187

multiplicity 103–12, 108, 111, 114, 128; actively resists unification 154; complex, fleeting, unstable 151; forms 112; stress on 134; unfinished 131 Munro, R. 43 mutability 100, 101, 114, 116, 127 ‘mutual relatedness’ 100, 101, 114 mutuality 15, 100, 101, 102, 105, 114, 117; defining relationship between original and copy 160 mysticism 22, 25 mystification 43 myth(ologies) 37, 42, 43, 45, 51, 69 narration 13, 20, 175 narratives: grand 14, 67, 69; structures for 88; technology/techno-fix 38, 39 ‘negative capability’ 143 negativities 91, 93, 96, 97; space 91–92 networks: communication 74, 76; computerized 74–2; informative 73; of relations 159; of signs 83; textual 82 Newton, Sir Isaac 11 Nietzsche, Friedrick 62, 80 nihilism/‘nihility’ 41, 162 Nishitani, Kciji 162 norms 29, 41, 53, 98; collective 69; communicable 69; computerized 71–8; disciplinary, of work 1; disorder as 41; internalizing 68; order as 41; rationalized, of urban life 1 Oedipal conflicts 89

Index

188

Olson, Charles 121, 123, 124, 129, 130, 135, 141 ontology 64, 89, 141 ‘ontotheology’ 42 openness 141, 148; another way of saying 143; closure must always be given priority over 147; problematic of 144; unfinished 142 order(ing) 41, 56, 57, 141, 142; appearance of 117; bringers of 27; complex techniques 130; conceptual 12; dynamic and creative antagonism between disorder and 159; enemy of 44; formal 121; fresh approach to issues of 52; generated spontaneously out of disorder 51; global 50; how human systems maintain 145; industrialized society rests on 1; inherent and irreversible 130; interpretation of knowledge that stresses 157; knowable 130; maintaining 13; ‘natural’ 91; naturalization of 156; obsession with 27, 3; opposition to 42; performed by numerical representations 63; production of 37; real 55; refusal to purify 48; repetition associated with 124; representational 1; single, modernity tried to generate 30; social 10, 53, 54, 80; ‘social anthropology’ of 3; space/spatial 10, 68; start of slowing necessary to 55; systemic 145; time/temporal 10, 68; unpredictability surrenders to 47 ‘organization theory’ 159 organizational subject 62–86 origin 41–6, 49, 74, 125, 135;

Index

189

deconstruction of concepts of 146; displacement of 73; lost 81; proper 57 original(s) 116, 147, 152, 161, 162; deconstruction of the concepts of 146; degree of correspondence to 124; space that denies the hierarchy of 130 originality/‘originalness’ 43, 106 otherability 15, 106–17, 109, 117; assemblage of 115; genealogical 113; logic of 111; power of 112; process of 116 otherness 89, 106, 152–70; crucial presence 13; irreducible 12; metaphors for 31; mimetic 162; notes on 18–35; ‘residual’ 13 painting 138; artifice 19; Cubist 107–17, 111; temporality incorporated into 7; Western and Chinese attitudes to 7 Panopticon idea 130–2 paradoxes 13; Zeno’s arrow 39 parasitical alternation 102, 106, 117; articulation of 111; core idea of 101; fusion, defusion and confusion 113; process of 114 parergon 163 Parker, M. 142 Parnet, C. 103–13, 108, 109, 114, 115, 132, 134, 143, 146–9, 153, 154–9, 159 part-objects 88, 111; every assemblage constituted by 110; fractality 113–4; objects give way to 114; resist totalization, identity and meaning 113 parts 155, 156; and wholes 108–24, 149

Index Pepys, Samuel 19 perception 76, 138; delineation of range of 62; difference 146; differentiated 137; how constructed 149; ‘man’s unity of’ 114; scattered 123; verbal 65 performance(s) 23, 72, 84; computerization of 72; linguistic 69; relocation of 76–4; subjects of 66–4 performative imperative/action 4, 67 permutability 134, 156 ‘perpetual anamorphosis’ 117–8 perpetual motion 103, 115 phenomenology 11, 89 photography 157–21, 160; analysis of 159, 161 Picasso, Pablo 15, 108, 114, 156 Pollock, J. 141 population densities/increases 27 positivism 48, 140 possibilities 108; appreciation of 139; assemblage of 116; consequence of the indeterminate 134; imagining 133, 134; inexhaustible 143; infinite 109, 157; informational 157; multiple 110; mutually reflecting field of 161; neglected and excluded 140; open 115, 140; permutable 110; rhizome of 134; space of 112, 113; strategies and devices for opening up 135 thinking in terms of 133; unconstrained 109; unconstrained freedom 117; unformed 110 postmodernism 94, 125

190

Index poststructuralism: arguments 19; critique of authorship 123; ideas 129–1; philosophy 141; theory 88, 141; thinking 129, 130, 134 power 93; all-seeing, centralized 130; discretionary 68; explanatory 96; mobilizing 52; personal, sovereign 64; repressive 52; rhizomic 112; structural 90 prayer 22, 23 predictability 69, 113, 157; interpretation of knowledge that stresses 157 prescience 39, 57 presence 13, 42, 67, 75, 113, 163; ‘auto-effective’ 88; disclosed 8; expunged 76; light of God 27; ‘metaphysics of’ 42, 80; redefining 76; silent 62 Prigogine, I. 49 probability 54, 157, 158; function of the determinate 134; information defined by 134; information theory works in terms of 156; interpretation of knowledge that stresses 157 process(es) 130; ambivalent 122; approach to understanding 15; as chaos 140; becoming 152; computation applied to 72; conscious 122; continuous and unfinished 131; general 124, 125, 126; generic 159; interlacing 160; knowledge, inter- disciplinary character of 15–16;

191

Index

192

mass production 100; mental 71; nature of 123; ontological 124, 141; open-ended, ambivalent and shifting 131; otherability 116; parasitical alternation 114; participatory 123; primary 122, 123, 124; primitive 153; regulating and controlling 69; repetitive 50, 129; secondary 122, 124; sine qua non of 67; ‘things’ or ‘states’ secondary to 128; unconscious 122, 124, 153 production 112, 150, 162; abstract 97; agents of 126; concrete 96; convenience 38; creative 81; discursive 91; factory 159; modern 127; multimedia 115; normative 96; organization of 62, 160; positive 92, 97; rational organization of 64; space that resists 143; stages of 107; technological 91; territorializing 92; transversal movements between levels and types of 92; see also mass production and production machines production machines 91–9, 92; abstract 97; dependent upon concrete relations 96; normative 93; standard 94 professionalism 123, 137, 159 projection 89, 93 ‘projective act’ 123, 124 proximity 76, 88 psychoanalysis 96, 122

Index

193

psychology 136, 140, 144; group 98; philosophical 137; social 52, 55; social-behavioural 5 ‘public opinion’ 46 punks 92, 95 purity 21, 49 Quakers 12–13, 19–1, 21–6, 25–9, 27–2 quantum theory 123, 134, 135 Queau, P. 76 ‘Queries’ 13, 25 Rabinow, P. 43, 70 ‘radical impermanence’ 162 Rapaport, Herman 92 Rapoport, A. 5, 6 rationality 10, 41, 45; abiding interest in 6; anthropomorphic assumption of 138; explosive growth of 11; generally accepted criteria of 139; institutionalized 123–4, 140; instrumental 1, 141; logic of 1; modern 121; obsession with 8; repetition associated with 124; role of emotion in 137; speaks to individuals 78; see also bounded rationality rationalization 10, 122, 137; progressive 27; secular 1; societal and institutional strategies underpinning 9–10 realism 41, 42, 44, 147 reality 15, 56, 73, 115, 117; attempt to disclose as a manifold of scattered differences 108; constituting 9, 10; construction of 12; construing in discrete, stabilized and identifiable terms 8; everyday 11; ‘hard’ 146; maintaining 9;

Index

194

marginal and supplementary aspects of 8; observer really a participator in 123; portrayed as realization-in-process 123; problematizing of 140; science’s revealing of 134–7; sensory and intellectual forms by which we ‘engage with’ 160; social 10, 149; ‘soft’ 146; spectral, transformation of 157; stable and enduring 146; virtual 74 reason 110, 143, 147; definition of 138; discursive 62, 70; familiar form of 1 reflection 46, 62, 79, 142; fascinating possibilities for 62; mediatrix that ‘resists’ 151; silent 25 regeneration 125, 126, 160; continuous 127, 128; involuntary 124; social-cultural 129 relativism 40 renewal 37, 124; cultural 106 repetition 15, 50, 90, 114, 146, 152, 153; complex process of 124; logic of 89; mass 100; movement 113; regeneration as 125 representation 37, 42, 89; abiding interest in 6; abstraction 1; accurate 12; against a disorderly nature 46; analyses of organization of 5; collective 70, 71; constructed by modern human sciences 143; discursive 71; general economy of 90; generalized strategy of 3; idea of 14; language and 41; language of 11;

Index

195

logic of 6, 14, 130; ‘meta’ organizational process of 10; numerical, ordering performed by 63; organizational 63, 65–2, 74–3; perfect, epistemological quest for 8; rational 27; security and 40–5; societal and institutional strategies underpinning 9–10; socio-historical form 7; space withdrawn from 13, 37, 40, 46; subjects of 66; technologically conceived 67; technologies of 40, 45- 46, 47, 56; visual 9; what it achieves 44–9; world as, denied 123 repression 94; artificial 41; speed of 55 repressive hypothesis 52, 53 reproducibility 101, 106; apparatus of 108; mass 107; technologies of 115 reproduction 101, 112, 146, 154–9; genealogical and linguistic 113; mass 100, 102, 106, 107, 115; movement 4, 113; population 126; space-time 104 Rescher, N. 12 resistances 24, 29, 30, 91; choices pre-set to exclude 53; internal elements 91 responsibility 24, 42, 43, 73, 79; detached from corporeal supports 74 rhizomes 104, 105, 106, 109, 131–4; assemblage 112; mediation 117; possibilities 134 rhythms 69 Rimbaud, A. 141 rituals 51, 69 Ronell, Avital 91, 161 Rotman, B. 124 Rousseau, C. 65

Index Royal Society 32, 122 Royle, N. 147, 148 rules 65, 69, 70, 71; collective 69; explicitly formulated 81; formal 14, 83, 84; investigation 43; ‘rules’ not 25 Ryle, Gilbert 150 Saarinen, E. 128, 129 Sameness 31, 126 Sartre, J.-P. 94 Saussure, F. 108 scapegoats 50, 51 Scarry, Elaine 38, 46, 90, 111–2, 113 Schoenwald, Richard L. 1–27, 3, 8, 127 science 19, 56; ‘big’ 18; communication and control 127–9; computer 156; development of 149; ‘discipline’ of 122; exemplary, of the cyborg 155; field theory 140; literature and 143–7; making sure it gets done 23; modern 135, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144; ontic 44, 46; ‘participative universe’ of 135; philosophy of 130, 134; political 5; rational language for 3, 121, 159; supposed naïve realism 42; techno 49, 62, 117, 162; traditional, philosophy and objectives of 157; Victorian 109–19 Scott, N.A. 143 seams 108, 111, 114, 118; multiple 108, 114 security 41–5, 42, 57 seeing 136; see also vision self 147; consciousness of 137, 138; identity 11;

196

Index

197

location of 80; loss of 137, 153; sense of 121; spontaneous organization 55–1; ‘unity’ of 80 sense-making 43, 63, 69 separation-joining 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, 109 SERC (Science and Engineering Research Council) 19, 20, 32 Serieyx, H. 70 Serres, M. 18, 25, 27, 38, 41, 44, 49, 158 Shrewsbury 19, 20, 23 signification 36, 91 signifieds 91 signifiers 72, 90, 102 signs 81, 114, 116; already inscribed 82; computers manipulate 83; historicity 90; linguistic 13, 48; networks of 83 silence 20, 22, 93; artful technology of 25; catatonic 92; ‘centred’ 18; inner 21; prayerful 27 similitude 57, 102, 108 Simon, Herbert 71, 136–9, 139 ‘simulacra’ 90 simulation 72, 152 simultaneity 15, 107, 108, 109, 111; digitized 116 singularities 71, 91 slowings 55, 58 Smircich, L. 63 Smith, Adam 149 social anthropology 3, 144, 147, 149 social reforms/changes 1–1, 33, 3 social sciences 5, 11, 52, 130, 147; discourse of 12; theory 140; two major intellectual vices 156; uncertainty principle for 134 social theory 3, 4–6, 37; complex 42, 45, 49, 51, 52; informed by ‘complexity’ 41;

Index

198

varieties of 57 sociology 140, 144, 154; idealized approach 5 software 20, 79; word-processing 91 Sotto, Richard 4–4, 14, 67, 72 space(s) 31, 11, 89, 101, 108, 142, 153; becoming always deferred or ‘differed’ in 145–9; construction of 90, 98; co-presence of bodies in 88, 94; cybernetic 108, 117; definite finite region(s) of 126; definite things occupy definite places in 10, 15, 100; determined 95; discrete 149; divided 151; fissiparous and nomadic 109, 116–7; fixing and placing of social phenomena in 1, 3; flight simulation 37, 38, 40; fractal 114; geographical 5; ‘ghost-like’ 155; hierarchy of copy/ original denied 130; ‘invisible and nameless’ 102; irrelevant 88; language the major device for making 130; lateral 143, 144; limbic 112, 113, 116, 117; locatable and speakable 114; mediation in 152; might be or could be 109–20; miniaturization of 149; negative 91–92, 94, 97, 98, 143, 144, 149, 150; ordering in 10; orderly separation in 109; positive 143, 144, 150, 152; possibilities 112, 113; possible to be out of 22; potential 133; ‘present-ing’ in 8; primary problems of 94; ‘public’ 93; resists production 143; restriction 109; reterritorializing 104; seeing 135;

Index

199

self-contained 149, 159; self-sameness of time and 107; separate, specialized body ‘carved up’ into 130; ‘similitude’ 47; social 88, 114, 151; specific 75, 149, 159; structured 92, 149; systematization of 130; transient 148; transitional 129; uncertainty 143; understanding 76; virtual 116; visible 130, 149, 151; ‘withdrawn from representation’ 13, 37, 40, 46, 56; writing 81, 84, 85, 135 spatiality/spatialization 74, 150 speaking 131 specialization 100, 145, 150, 152; efficient 3 specificity 91, 133; constraining 113 speed 14, 36–61 spirit (uality) 19, 22, 23, 25–27 passim, 29; fluid apprehension of 12 splitting 107; multiple 108 Spontaneous Symmetry Breakdown 44, 52–56 Sprat, Thomas 27–3, 10, 122, 125, 150, 159 stability 9, 14, 16; how human systems maintain 145; in motion 142; lateral 104; real 36–61; relative 48 starts 43–7, 50, 52 stasis 37, 56 statistics 29, 30 Stengers, I. 49 stimuli 9, 137 stirrups 103–13 Stone, A.R. 74, 80–8 Strathern, Marilyn 131, 162 structure(s) 53, 121; cognitive-informational 124; coherent 108;

Index conceptual, complex 149–4; graphical representations of 81; integrated 101; knotted into one another 161; linked to conditions of homogeneity 103; mediating 132; ordered 121; particularized 126; real 117; relational webs 74; repetition as 124; sanctioned 88; self-contained 159; self-identical, purposeful, rational 148; social 6; specific 153; stable 46, 51; static 154, 159 subjectivation 70, 71 subjectivity 4, 63, 68, 69, 77, 136; accidental and shifting textual encounters 80; attempt at appropriating 63; centred and unitary 79; construction of 121; ‘decentring’ of 14; fold(s) and 93–3; granted to bodies 88; how it is created 94; possibilities for 95; production of 7; singular 72; understanding 4; ‘virtualization’ of 14, 83 superiority 43, 45 supplement(ation) 88, 89–93, 148 surveillance 19, 73 symbiosis 104 symbols 73, 81 syntax 84, 131, 139; censorship of 97 systemness 6, 130–3, 134; abiding concern with 15; analysis should focus on the study of 6; relaxing of 133; unsystemness and 141 systems theory 144, 147

200

Index

201

Taussig, Michael 147, 148, 153–7, 162 Tavistock Institute of Human Relations 139–2 Taylor, Frederick 20 Taylor, Mark C. 102, 114, 115, 117, 122, 128–40, 131–4, 135, 142, 148, 152, 161 techno-fix 48, 53, 57; destiny 38, 39; impossible 40, 57; narratives 39 techno-science 157–2; industrial 159, 160; postindustrial 158; transforms the infinite and indeterminate into per-formable knowledge 160 technologies 37; (ac)counting 23–7; blocks to mastery 39; body 14; calculation 24; communication 128; compu-telecommunications 131, 141, 160; computer 4, 14, 76, 80, 81, 83, 117; Cooper’s current work on 144; cybernetic 117; dramatized 38; electronic 129; film 116; fluid 20–6; hybridization of 14; image 76; media 160; modern 3, 36, 38, 46, 47; not invented by humans 83; Quaker 25, 28, 29; representation 3, 7, 40, 45–46, 47, 56; reproducibility 115; reproductive 161; space flight simulation 38; spiritual 18; stabilities in 36, 57; subjects of 65–2; symbolic panopticism 24; telecommunications 128 teleology 44, 45 temporality 8, 39, 42, 129 tensions 4, 71, 141; in knowing 20;

Index intrinsic 132; queer 155 territorialization/territoriality 91, 95, 98 texture 80, 81–9; unfolding 82, 83 Thach, L. 75–2, 76, 85 theology 20, 21, 25, 45 ‘Theory of Collective Phenomena’ 49, 53 thought/thinking 62, 123, 155; anti-foundational 43; bodily 83; buzzwords orient forms of 72; by and through machines 83; corner-of-the- eye strategy of 8; creative 145; deeply ingrained habits 11; distraction by 20; Enlightenment 43; Heidegger’s 134; instrumental 8; language of 81; modern 10; modes of 5; organizational 65; organizing 69; ‘outside’ of 143; plagued and stimulated by paradoxes 39; post-structural 129, 130, 134; ‘process’ 130; radically different vocabulary of 129; scientific 142; simply located 14; social scientific 140, 149; ‘source’ of 137; static 15; suffering of 84; ‘systematic, speculative, and narcissistic’ 122; systems 147; true, suffering the mark of 83; widely held way of 130 Tichy, N. 63 time 27, 11, 92, 101, 142; becoming always deferred or ‘differed’ in 145–9; body’s intimacies lead 95; ‘bundles of’ 13, 48; definite finite durations of 126;

202

Index

203

definite things occupy definite places in 10, 15, 100; division traced back through 41; fixing and placing of social phenomena in 3; geographical 5; ‘invisible and nameless’ 102; irrelevant 88; mediation in 152; modernist race against 57; ordering in 10; orderly separation in 109; outpacing 56; positive 150; possible to be out of 22; ‘present-ing’ in 8; real 117; renewal of 124; restricted 130; retemporalizing 104; reversals 39, 56; self-sameness of space and 107; social 114; specific 75, 149; understanding 76; visible 149; see also temporality Touraine, A. 70 transcendentals 42, 44, 49, 53, 55, 57 transformation(s) 9, 30, 143, 147; calculable speeds of 55; conceptual categories which deny the primacy of 11; constant 152; difference as 145; endless 162; infinite speed of 44, 51, 54, 56, 57; meanings 123; mobile 162; spectral ‘realities’ 157; subordinating of 100; underlining, in evolutionary development 130 transience 150, 154, 155, 158 translation 68, 90, 124, 129, 147; differences or différances between systems 148; modus operandi of social life 128; raw matter into ‘things’ 126 truth 12, 40;

Index concern for 28; final 39; made temporarily stable 41; ontic 43; permanent 131 uncertainties 122, 139, 141; division in order 10; intrinsic 147; pre-empted or outpaced 38; principle for social sciences 134; space of 143; suppressing all 36 unconscious processes 122, 124; ‘primitive’ 15 undecidability 96, 138 understanding 1, 28, 62; expanded 5, 6, 9; generic, of organization 3; God 22, 25; heterogeneity of 131; implicit command to regulate 66; inchoate masses 27; information 158; key terms in 140; mass society of modernity 3; media 132; modern world/culture 11, 123; nature of modernity 7; order and disorder 13; organizing 69, 141; process-based approach to 15; productive 93; source of agency 80; stability in technology and representation 37; streamlined 14, 84; subjectivity 4; ‘world-making’ capacities of modern organizing 9 unification 51, 103, 154 uniqueness 45, 46, 74 unity 41, 115; constrained 109; creating 149; culture 51; discrete 109; divided 49, 51, 56;

204

Index

205

in-advance 49, 51, 56; military 104; self 80, 137; smashing to smithereens 117; social 149; visual 114 universities 131–3 unpredictability 143; agents need 142; information derives its significance from 157; surrenders to control 47 ‘unready’ concept 14, 38, 46; infinite speed of 48, 53; stranger to consciousness 49; ‘threat’ of 48, 55; violence shares location and function of 50; warded off 56 ‘urban man’ 126–8 values 15, 70, 85 Vattimo, Gianni 158–3 Velázquez, D.R. de Silva 130 vengeance 51 Victorian era 1–1, 27, 3, 126–8, 161 violence: infinite 50, 51; institutionally suffered 95; legitimate/illegitimate 48, 49, 50, 51; vengeful, infinite speed of 54 Virilio, Paul 37, 91, 114, 116, 117 virtualization 14, 62–86 vision/visuality 5, 9, 150, 151; double 109; historicizing 7; lack of 140; margins of 30; peripheral 8; prioritizing of 43; theories of 19 void 151 volition 69, 80–7, 83 Wagner, Roy 105, 113, 116 Warrington 20 Weber, Max 1, 4, 7, 8, 10, 121–4 passim, 141 Weber, Samuel 101, 107, 109, 116, 118, 121–3, 125, 127, 133, 137, 141

Index

206

Weick, K.E. 14, 63, 66 White, Lynn 103–13 Whitehead, A.N. 11, 100, 101–12 passim, 105, 109, 114, 116, 117, 123, 126, 129, 141, 135, 139, 141 Whorf, B.L. 141 Wiener, N. 148 Wilkins, John 32–3, 10, 122, 124, 127, 150, 159–4 Williams, Raymond 124 Williamson, O. 65 Wills, D. 106 Winnicott, D.W. 89 withdrawals 92, 96 Woodman, R. 75–2, 76, 85 World Egg of Dogon Mythology 43 world-making 6, 7, 9, 12 worship 20, 29; silent 20, 22 writing 25–8, 25, 27, 66, 79–8 passim, 91, 116; assemblage 105; computer programmes for 72; Derrida’s analysis of 82; formalized, implanted in machines 83; post-structural 130; scientific 121, 124; social science 140; space of 81, 135