Organs of Process: Rethinking Human Organization

Organization Studies
http://oss.sagepub.com/ Organs of Process: Rethinking Human Organization

Robert Cooper Organization Studies 2007 28: 1547 DOI: 10.1177/0170840607076587 The online version of this article can be found at: http://oss.sagepub.com/content/28/10/1547
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article title
Peripheral Vision Organs of Process: Rethinking Human Organization

Robert Cooper
Abstract
Robert Cooper Keele University, UK
Human organization is discussed as a social body or collection of organs and senses that create and re-create the forms and objects that constitute the human world. Organs represent process as the continuous making and remaking of passages between the body and its environment. Organs express a pre-human, impersonal force that transmits itself through the human body and its products in a generic act of making as opposed to the making of specific forms and objects. Process is discussed as the ceaseless work of alternation between the making of presence and the unmaking of absence. The work of process is illustrated through the work of three examples of human organization: the supermarket, the art gallery and the Church. Keywords: absence-presence, making-unmaking, organ, pre-work, productionprediction, projection, sentient continuity
Organization Studies 28(10): 15471573 ISSN 01708406 Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi & Singapore) www.egosnet.org/os
The question of process invites us to think of the human world as the transmission of mutable events rather than as a scene of stable structures. Society as process becomes pure action and ongoingness. Structures and objects become secondary to the movement of process. Process requires that we no longer think of the human world in terms of finished forms or completed systems. Instead, a mobile and provisional way of thinking is called for. The unfinished and incomplete calls out for serious recognition and understanding. Process precedes all finite forms and always proceeds beyond them. Human organization is the relentless praxis of process in pursuit of itself; it is the collective articulation of the social and cultural body. The social body is a corpus, a corporation of organs, whose fundamental work is to create and recreate itself through the constant construction and maintenance of images and structures that reflect and thus speak back to it. The work of the human organs and senses begins in indefinition and lack of perceptual clarity; their task is to create a world of distinguishable and meaningful forms out of structural absence. In this way, human organs sense and feel their origins in a condition of existential beginning that has yet to be expressed as definite forms and specific knowledge. The organ is an ergon or organon, an instrument for making and moving the forms of life. Human process now appears as relentless transmission or sheer action in order to keep life on the move. Viewed in this way,
DOI: 10.1177/0170840607076587
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Organization Studies 28(10)
process has no end or goal; it simply generates itself as generic making and movement; the specific forms and products of human organization are secondary and ancillary expressions of this generic force of creation and action. The organs and senses of the social body are primarily instruments of action and doing rather than knowing; they express and transmit not so much themselves as bodily functions but the pure process of generic making and moving. They are simply incomplete and unfinished parts that extend and project themselves into their environments in a process of ceaseless sensing and exploration in which they become indistinguishable from the process they project: the hand seeks something to hold and manipulate, the eye seeks a visual object to focus on, the ear needs to hear distinguishable sounds. Organs thus have to be seen as passages for the movement of feeling and sensation. Human organizations are thus more like assemblages of organs, senses and limbs which seek to extend and amplify themselves through the construction of routes for the transmission of physical and mental sensibility. Seen in this way, the existential basis of human organization lies in the work of the human organs and senses rather than in the conscious intentions and purposes of its individual members whom we normally assume constitute the social fabric of human organizations. Before the fully constituted individual, before the emergence of conscious thought, organs and senses represent the pre-human urge of the physical body to connect with and make meaningful sense out of the material environment from which it originates. The body extends and moves beyond itself through its organs and senses which reveal the material environment as an horizon of sentient possibilities. Organs and senses project themselves through the bodys limbs into a limbo of invisible and formless space and time out of which they make meaningful sense. Organs thus make sense out of a primal condition of pre-sense which in itself can never be known except as an invisible reserve for the ceaseless production of the products of human organization. Human organs must make human sense out of the pre-human invisibility of pre-sense. This means projecting human needs, feelings and desires onto a material environment that is intrinsically insentient to human experience. Human organization begins with this originating step of human projection. As a social body, human organization expresses the bodily forces of its human members which branch out from the human trunk into the four limbs and the head, extensions which enable the body to prolong itself in space and time in a continuous process of reaching out. The organs and senses of the body reach out to the external environment in order to experience the bodys inside; they turn the body inside out so that it can sense and feel itself as a reflection of the outside world. The bodys reaching out is thus at the same time a reaching in. The made objects of the human world are products of this inside-out movement; they represent the self-extension of the bodys sentient interior. The organs and senses project the capacities and incapacities of the body into external objects such as chairs, telephones, clothes, factories, hospitals, which return to the bodys interior as sentient conversions of the external environment. They remind us that the body is an expression of existential being before it is seen as the residence of a human person. The concept of the modern organization can now be understood as an expression of the basic forces that drive the bodys organs and senses to project and prolong themselves in space
Cooper: Organs of ProcessRethinking Human Organization
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and time. Human organizations are social bodies whose primitive feelings and sensings seek continuous expression through the construction and production of forms and objects that endow their primal and inchoate urgings with conscious sense in order to engage with the external environments that must complement their originating and sustaining sense of incompleteness. The organ as ergon is the ongoing work of human organization as a social body. It is the continuous act of working and making that reveals human organization as a process of infinite and unfinished acts of composition that never complete themselves in a final product or attained goal. The organ as ergon works to generate human being as an ongoing process of coming-to-presence and not as a specific object that already exists. At this level of understanding, the person as a self-contained agent does not exist since it is dispersed in a space and time that is yet to come. Every act of work points to a negative condition that seems to withdraw from all attempts to make it positive and graspable. Human organization represents this universal process of composing a world of objects and forms that are already destined to disappear before they appear. The organ as ergon reveals human work to be the ceaseless pursuit of that which continuously withdraws from positive appropriation. The work of the organ is pure process whose pro- signifies a ceaseless moving forward and approaching and whose -cess signifies an equally ceaseless moving away and withdrawing.
The Work of Organs Organs represent the generic action of the body in its work of being. As an expression of being, the body lives outside itself, projecting and prolonging itself through its made objects. The body is an organic generator that comes before the idea of the human agent as a fully constituted individual. The body thus appears more like the expression of a pre-human force than a vehicle for human character. As a collective organ, the body itself is a made object that projects and prolongs a power whose origin is beyond its comprehension. At best, its organs and senses can only approach this origin through the continuous work of making existential extensions of themselves in space and time. The bodily organs of seeing, hearing and touching seek stimulation and information as ends in themselves; while they seek answers to the questions that emerge out of their probings, it is the generic suspension of existential comprehension that keeps them forever working. Organs and senses begin as tentacles and feelers that project themselves into the environment in order to find and recognize themselves as reflections of the forces that surround them (Gibson 1968: 5). Their work originates in the unknown and uncertain out of which they make meaningful sense. Meaningful sense begins as rough feelings and sensings which are then transformed into distinctive forms and signs. In this way, the human organs and senses construct a world of visible signs and messages out of an environment which otherwise would be invisible and meaningless. Through its organs and senses, the body reaches out to its surroundings in order to know itself. The work of organs at this primal level is essentially the
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construction of artefacts that will enable the body to express its inner feelings and sensings. It is as if the senses can only make sense of themselves through their reflections in the objects of the outside world; that is, the body must realize itself through a continuous process of sentient continuity with its supporting artefacts (Scarry 1985: 248). Inchoate feelings project themselves into the definitional clarity of specific forms and objects. The sentience of organs thus becomes the work of sending on in which both sense and send together constitute the sentient continuity of the body with its world. The primal act of the communication of bodily organs with their environment is thus a sending on of sensation and sentience in order to bring body and world together. Sensing and sending are the bodys ways of reaching out to the world in order to communicate with its inside. Organs reach out in order to reach in. The organ as ergon and organon is primarily the existential means for making the forms of human life and for ensuring their continuation. Sentient continuity includes regeneration and continuity over time as well as connection in space. The ancient meanings of ergon and organon reflect this basic existential need of the body and its organs to project themselves into a space and time that has not yet arrived in order to ensure the continued presence of a world of forms and objects that will serve as routes and passageways for the sending on of sentience. The organ can only find itself as a continuous process of generation and regeneration. The word itself reflects not so much an identifiable part of the human body but a process that must reflect itself in the act of generation. The word has its origin in a family of related roots gan, gen, gin, ken, con, etc. which mean empty, vacant, void as well as birth, reproduction, creation. A double and reversible action is thus suggested in this archaeology of the word organ: nothing and something, negative and positive, absence and presence, serve to generate each other in a mutual process of continuous creation. The archaic meaning of organ thus suggests a generative power, a vitalizing energy and a creative spirit that renews itself in a perpetual process of beginning. Organ as beginning is also a perpetual process of becoming that never reaches an end. Organ is thus an origin or source of perpetual, unfinished action which originates in a state of nothingness and absence. Some sense of this absent origin appears in the ideas of a copy as an imitation of an original or an effect as the result of a cause. Copy and effect are normally assumed to come after their originating sources. But the interpretation of organ as a double and reversible action in which nothing and something, absence and presence, generate each other in a perpetual and unfinished process of beginning and becoming means that copy and original, cause and effect, reproduce each other. There can be no original until there is a copy, no cause without an effect. Copy and effect generate their beginnings just as much as original and cause generate their sequels. Organ in this primal sense of original generation and beginning appears as the implicit theme of the Book of Genesis as discussed by Elaine Scarry (1985) in her penetrating analysis of the roles of making and unmaking in the ongoing constitution of human life. Scarry reveals Genesis as the story of the human body originating itself through the translation and projection of its organs and senses into the made objects of the human world. In other words, the sentient inside of the body can only express and recognize itself through the making and
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reflection of objects external to it. Like original and copy, cause and effect, the bodys sentient inside can only know itself through the objects and tools that support it. This is the essential meaning of sentient continuity in which the bodys inside and outside generate and continue or contain each other. Genesis illustrates the process of sentient continuity as the projection and prolongation of bodily organs through the image of the religious altar which symbolizes the alternation or reciprocity between the bodys inside and outside which, like original and copy, generate each other and thus become indistinguishable. The altar represents the turning of the body inside-out so that its organs and senses can begin to prolong themselves as symbolic and religious expressions: The building of the altar externalizes and makes visible the hidden interior of sentience (which) is lifted out through work into the visible world (Scarry 1985: 190, 204). The altar itself is like a surface on which the eyes and hands, for example, can make the world visible and manipulable. The bodys organs and senses now see themselves through their products. The altar symbolizes the original act of human creation in which the reaching out of the senses is also their reaching in and hence their sentient realization: inside and outside realize each other in a mutual act of sentient continuity. It is a surface on which the organs and senses of the body inscribe themselves in order to reflect the body in its continuous work of creating and re-creating itself as the pure process of beginning and becoming. The altar is that beginning point or origin where earth and body reveal themselves as canvases on which Gods power of alteration continually re-manifests itself in its capacity to make the awe-inspiring alterability of matter visible (Scarry 1985: 199, 192). The altar is the religious route to the ultra, that invisible resource which always exceeds and lies beyond the graspability of the human mind but which nevertheless sources the infinite and forever ongoing work of human creation. Genesis tells the story of this power to magnify, multiply and make visible the invisible forces and feelings that animate the organs and senses of the human body; it reveals human generation as a power that unceasingly repeats itself as the conversion or alteration of nothing into something, negative into positive, absence into presence. Human organization now appears as the creation of the world out of the primitive sensings of human organs. The products of human organization appear as reflections of human sentience. No longer simply useful objects or tools, human products reveal the invisible potential of the bodys organs and senses to make visible and real a world of infinite creation and production; in short, a world without end. The human product visibly reflects the sentient continuity of body and world. The product echoes the call of the bodys primitive sensings to express and recognize themselves in externally identifiable and meaningful forms. The body senses the forms and objects of the world through its organs of sight, touch, taste and smell. Through its organs and senses, the body animates and humanizes the external world to create a sentient community of body and world. This means that the made forms and objects of the human world are not simply instruments of use and convenience but are routes by which the body and its organs project and reflect their sentience. The organs and senses seem to serve as passageways for a primal, pre-human energy that maintains the ceaseless
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process of life while concealing itself behind the familiar and useful properties of the everyday world. Sentient continuity is another name for this primal process. The organs of the body perceive and conceive as acts of generation. Their perceptions and conceptions become materialized in the supportive products of the human world with which they now experience the felt community of sentient continuity. Human products such as a chair, a table, a coat or a computer express in material form the invisible inner-body sensings of the organs which otherwise would remain physically inexpressible. The chair, for example, expresses the complex, mysterious, percipient event of the bodys experience of weight and tiredness which it feels only to wish it could not feel it (Scarry 1985: 290). Here again we see the work of human organs as an alternating process between negative and positive, absence and presence. The chair feels for the tired body and effectively says it is here to return the body to its desired state of non-tired weightlessness. More than a simple object of use, the chair is the visible materialization and representation of the bodys needs to reach out in order to reach in. The chair is the living form of the bodys organs and their continuous work of alternation and alteration between external visibility and internal invisibility. The organs thus do not merely seek the stimulation of externally sourced information but create such information in order to inform and re-form themselves: the chair expresses both the rudimentary genesis of tiredness and the promise of its disappearance. Like all human products, the chair is part of the sentient continuity of human living in which the structure of the act of perception is visibly enacted as the making explicit and visible of an implicit and inchoate bodily sensing which, in much the same way as origin and copy or cause and effect, can only properly know itself through the construction of an object that is made to defer and postpone it as a causal origin (Scarry 1985: 290). The externalization of the body in the supportive products of human existence can also be seen as a form of disembodiment, as if the body were reaching out to free itself from its physical limitations. This is precisely the role of the chair in its reminding us of its ability to free the body from the feelings of weight and tiredness so that its organs and senses can reach out to experience a world beyond its own physical limits. Constrained by its physical limits, the deficient body is reminded of its inability to generate and express itself through the alterability of the worlds mute and mutable matter. When the body can no longer exceed itself, it becomes more vividly aware of the sentient possibilities that surround it now that they are existentially absent. It is like a lost or broken tool whose disconnection from the wider world of sentient possibilities makes those missing possibilities even more obviously present. The deficient body reminds us that its internal sentience is no longer convertible to the externally identifiable and meaningful forms that enable its organs and senses to extend themselves through the passageways of sentient continuity whose significance now becomes more vividly present in its felt absence. Disembodiment is a form of sentient transmission through which the organs and senses of the body project and prolong their feelings and sensings. The made objects of human production become transmission stations for the sending on of sentient continuity. Production in this context means prediction and
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projection as the continuous generation of routes and passageways for the transmission of feelings and sensings. The products of human production become more than objects and forms of use and convenience. They provide existential direction and meaning to the incipient inner sensings of the body and its organs. In other words, products express the altars primal work of alternation between nothing and something, absence and presence, as revealed in the archaic meaning of organ. The concept of production includes this primal alternation in its implicit reference (-duction from the Latin ducere, to draw out or trace from a source; and dicere, to specify, fix, locate) to the drawing out and tracing of an object or form from a rudimentary source. Every human product echoes this alternation between the made and the unmade. Every human act is the enactment of this primal alternation: a making that is also an unmaking, a reaching out that is also a reaching in. The work of organs is thus a double and reversible action which finds its source in an undifferentiated and unlocatable space and time such as we see in the mutually defining relationship between original and copy where each term is a counterchange of the other. Production as prediction is the repetition of this counterchange movement in space and time. The production of useful products is also their prediction or assured presence in space and time but such prediction necessarily implies their absence or nonexistence just as the lost tool emphasizes its presence through its absence. Every human product emerges out of an original space of absence which is undifferentiated and unlocatable like a territory before it is mapped. Production as prediction is an act of extracting something specifiable and meaningful from this secret, unknowable source: This is a place that is everywhere and nowhere, a place you cannot get to from here. Sooner or later, in a different way in each case, the effort of mapping is interrupted by an encounter with the unmappable (Miller 1995: 7). As the primal site of human production, the altar mediates between this secret, unlocatable source and the functional, ready-to-hand products of the everyday human world. Every product is also a pre-dict or retracing and reminding of this unmappable source. The work of organs is thus the act of production-prediction as the alternation between the undifferentiated, unlocatable space of the unmappable and its differentiated, locatable representation in a map. Here again we note the double and reversible action suggested in the archaic meaning of organ which further implies a ceaseless alternation at the heart of all human actions between absence and presence, nothing and something, the unmappable and the mappable. The altar also reflects this alternating source of action in its allusion to the intrinsic counterchange and unlocatability of the otherness at the heart of primal alternation where there is neither one identifiable thing nor another but simply the movement of alternation itself such as we see in the original-copy relationship. The work of organs as production-prediction has to be seen as the projection of the mappable onto the unmappable or the translation of raw, infinite matter into made, finite forms and objects that will reflect the bodily organs and senses in their perpetual work of generation and reaching out beyond themselves. Here, it is the perpetual and repeated action of the organs and senses themselves that motivates their work rather than the specific nature and meaning of the forms and objects that serve to direct this work. It is in this sense that the work of organs is a process that exists independently of human needs and desires; the
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work of organs and senses appears more like a biological force that pre-exists the conception of the fully constituted human person. The ergon of organ predefines human work as the continuous alternation between the production of a world of positive presences and their coexisting absences. Process involves the ceaseless acts of approaching and appropriating the worlds raw matter as well as the equally ceaseless experience of the disappearance and withdrawal of its appropriated forms and objects. Process in this sense informs the organ as organon, an existential means for generating and moving the forms of life. Production as process now has to be understood not just as the creation of supportive existential structures but also, significantly, as the suspension of the productive act in space and time. For what animates and maintains the work of organs is the existential need to keep things going and this necessarily means suspending any sense of completion and finality. Prediction now becomes the production of incompletion, unknowability and the absence of positive presences as well as its conventional meaning of predicting future events. Production and prediction express the reaching out of the bodys organs and senses in order to embody and feel themselves through the products of their work. Production and prediction thus become forms of projecting human sentience into the objects and forms of the external world as if to humanize the latters intrinsic insentience by making it respond to the bodys primal yearnings. Every human product can now be seen as a projection of bodily sensings: the chair, the coat, domestic heating, the newspaper, the motor vehicle, all in their different ways embody the act of reaching out in order to reach in and give form and direction to the raw, inarticulate feelings of the bodys inside. But while projection gives form and direction to the work of organs, it also opens up new and even unpredictable possibilities as though the human world were surrounded by an infinite and endless space that, despite its unknowability, continuously reminds us of its immanent presence. It is this infinite and endless space that maintains the work of sentient continuity by which the organs and senses are kept moving through a permanent sense of incompletion and absence. Every human product is caught in this suspended field of incompletion and withdrawal. Every product predicts or projects itself into a space of new possibilities; it intimates and reveals new ways of creating the world. The computer is perhaps one of the most dramatic examples of a modern human product which has made us see the world as a plastic and pliable field of creative possibilities which seems to call out to us to explore it even further. The computer is itself an extension of the human central nervous system and can be seen as the reaching out by the nervous system in order to maintain its sentient continuity with the bodys external space (Scarry 1985: 282). The computer expresses the body and its organs in the same way that a human limb projects the body as a moving and grasping organism which reaches out into a limbo of incompletion and absence. Like an organ, the computer originates a new and unexplored world of possibilities such as the hyperspace of hypertext or the globalization of the world through the expansion of information and related technologies. Computerization in this context reflects the primal energy of the organ to project and prolong itself as an origin (or original) that can only know itself through the making of new copies.
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The computer reveals the raw matter of the world to be a pliable and plastic source of computation and permutation out of which endless possibilities emerge. Human action appears never complete but seems suspended in a background of space and time that recedes on approach. The work of organs expresses this suspended background as an infinite origin which, like an horizon, withdraws from all our attempts to appropriate it. Process itself is the forever repeated action of grasping meaningful structures and forms from disappearing into this infinitely receding origin which, like tomorrow, never comes. To understand organs as instruments of process requires that we view human action as the dynamic intertwining or sentient continuity between the bodys organs and senses and the external structures and forms which provide intelligible routes and passageways for the expression of primal feelings and sensations. The computer, for example, represents the dynamic intertwining of the body and its organs with the plastic and pliable space of hypertext. The computer is no longer simply a tool to complete the practical purposes of its user; it now constitutes the existential action of the users body and mind and tells us that the user is as much a part of the computers action as the latter is part of the bodys action. In this example, the work of organs cannot be located in a specific object such as body or tool but is actively constituted by the interaction between objects. The interaction or intertwining of sentient continuity requires that we perceive the work of organs not in terms of the actions of specifically determined objects but as the scattered and diffused expressions of movement itself. Intertwining refers to the betweenness or sharing of action and movement such as we see in the alternating or intertwining of original and copy or cause and effect. The movement of intertwining thus cannot be pinned down since it is the action of neither one thing nor the other but of both together. The work of organs follows the same logic since the organ can only reflect itself through the sensing of an externally located object or form. The work of the organ moves in a space and time that is shared between locations and thus intimates itself as part of a more encompassing space of withdrawal in which it is contained. This returns us to the archaic meaning of organ with its double and reversible movement between absence and presence, nothing and something. In order to grasp some sense of this double movement we have to stress the significance of absence and nothingness as hidden motivators of human action. Presence can only emerge out of absence just as the appearance of something requires the support of nothing as a silent and invisible background. Absence and nothingness have to be seen as the ultimate and infinite containers of the presence of finite things. Conventional perception of the everyday world is structured around the conscious capturing of clear, positive, ready-made forms and objects. Presence is defined in terms of the presentability or acceptable appearance and meaning of the forms and objects that make up the human world. The perception of presentable presences requires that we distinguish and differentiate the things of the world and hence focus our attention on specifics and particulars. We see the world largely as a display of well-defined, positive figures against a negative background that is normally excluded from our acts of perceiving. To understand the work of organs we have to include the absent background of the
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figure-ground relationship. The archaic meaning of organ embraces the idea of alternation and counterchange between a visible figure and its invisible background. The background may be excluded from conscious perception but it is a vital and necessary support and origin of the figure. The ground is the ultimate, invisible container of figures which, like a mirror, reflects both the forms and movements of objects. In order to grasp the dynamic alternation between the presence of figure and the absence of ground, perception must view the forms of the world in a single undivided focus of scattered attention (Ehrenzweig 1967: 23). Conscious perception tends to structure the everyday world as a collection of specific and singular forms and objects; it views the world as a field of differentiation and divisions. The work of organs reminds us that human action forever alternates between origin and copy, presence and absence, and thus has no specific location in space and time, caught as it is between the mappable and the unmappable, between a knowable world of divided, finite forms and a pre-world of undividedness and infinitude. The work of organs tells us that human action is pure process and ongoingness before it is the experience of a world of ready-made forms and objects. An essential feature of such process is the invisible background to human action which serves as an essential support for the emergence and mobility of the ready-made contents of the world. In order to include the negative space of the background, perception must not select a specific form or figure but scatter its focus to contain figure and ground in one single undifferentiated view (Ehrenzweig 1967: 23). Undifferentiation requires the relaxation of clear, definite, singular forms in order to take in the mutually constituting features of the entire visual field as alternating counterchanges. Such undifferentiated or dedifferentiated counterchanges are basic to the sentient continuity between bodily organs and the external forms and objects that help express their primal feelings and sensings. The tired body and the chair, the central nervous system and the computer, now have to be seen not as separate and specific parts of the human scene but as interlocking processes that counterchange each other in an active field of undifferentiation and dedifferentiation. The sentient continuity of body and environment now appears as a blurred plasticity which produces an awareness of intensely plastic objects without definite outline (Ehrenzweig 1967: 1415). The chair and the computer are counterchanges of the body in the sense that they each represent the structure of the act of perception visibly enacted and thus objectify the dynamic intertwining of organs and senses with their external supports (Scarry 1985: 290). Intertwining returns us to the fundamental role of undifferentiation in human action and reminds us that perception always occurs as the interaction between the divided and the undivided, between figure and ground. It is the undivided, undifferentiated ground of things, the gaps and intervals between specific terms, that serve to contain and move the differentiated, specific contents of the world. Intertwining in this radical sense tells us that our organs and senses express and reflect themselves in their external products so that the chair and the computer, for example, make the work of organs just as much as the work of organs makes them. The continuous interaction between the body and its products is vital in order to maintain their mutual ongoingness or process which is sustained by the undivided
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ground from which the divisions of body and product derive their existential momentum. In other words, organs and senses are much more than physical components of the body. They seek to express something more than their singular physical structures. As limbs, they project the body into the limbo of the surrounding world where they re-enact their archaic double and reversible action between nothing and something, absence and presence. In this way, the body disembodies and scatters itself in a field of action that goes beyond the limits of specific, finite objects and forms to create a field of existential being where the intertwining of differentiation and undifferentiation can only be recognized through the scattered attention of the single undifferentiated view (Ehrenzweig 1967: 23).
The Work of Process Human organs represent a fundamental force of life that precedes the idea of the human subject as a rational actor in the social world. The work of organs originates in a pre-human impulsion to make and transmit the forms of life. Such elemental work of making occurs always in the permanent context of the unmaking and loss of visible and meaningful forms so that making and unmaking together constitute the basic work of human existence (Scarry 1985). Again we are compelled to note the archaic meaning of organ as that primal act which includes within itself the alternating action between something and nothing, presence and absence, appearance and disappearance. The religious altar captures this sense of originating alternation as the primal movement between the bodys inside and its outside (Scarry 1985). The work of the body and its organs seems to be permanently motivated by the recurring stimulus of loss and absence. The familiar world of everyday routine, for example, only becomes noticeable when some part of it breaks down or disappears. It is in this sense that absence and loss remind us that the missing forms of the world are those which source the work of organs as continuous making, for what moves us existentially is that which is distant, remote, unknown and even unknowable. The chair and the computer both in their different ways exemplify this reaching out by the body in order to reach in and thus know itself. The bodys organs and senses are instruments that make and transmit the forms of life but this making and transmission originates out of the primal alternation between presence and absence, appearance and disappearance. The work of organs and senses depends initially on the mutuality of absence and presence: presence can only appear out of absence and absence itself can only be understood as the missing ghost of presence. Here we see the existential basis of human process in its continuous work of saving the appearances of life from dissolution and disappearance. The body can only know itself by extending itself through its products, by being other than itself. Disembodiment is the bodys continuous attempt to escape its physical limits in order to become what it is not. Every act of the body is moved by the elemental need to bring close to it what must also resist such immediate appropriation. The work of organs thus becomes the work of process as the ceaseless interaction and alternation between approach and withdrawal.
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To understand the work of organs as the alternation between approach and withdrawal is to recognize process as the continuous making of forms that is also accompanied by their unmaking. This, again, is the mutual and reciprocal nature of the primal work of organs which originates in the alternation between presence and absence, something and nothing. Alternation in this context simply means that presence can only be understood as an aspect of absence, that something always requires the presence of nothing, and that making can only be realized through its counterchange of unmaking. Production exemplifies the unmaking of making in its work of prediction. Production produces products that serve to structure and predict the forms and objects of the future but production in this sense also requires the background presence of unpredictability which now has to be seen as a field of negative absence without which production as prediction would be unimaginable. The presence of production thus emerges out of the absence of prediction. By the same logic, unpredictability as the absence of prediction is created by production. Production in this generic sense is therefore also the production and prediction of incompletion and withdrawal or what we earlier called the generic suspension of existential comprehension. Production and prediction have to be seen as generic and constitutive acts of human organization and not as the making of specific products that satisfy specific needs and desires. It is in this sense that we have to understand production and prediction as the primal work of organs and senses whose existential continuity depends on the creation of infinite process where infinity means without limit, unfinished, never-ending and hence everlasting. To say that the body expresses itself through the sentient continuity of its organs and senses with the made forms and objects of the human world is also to say that what continues the body with its world is also what contains it and its actions: the containment and continuation of the work of organs require the perpetual stimulus of infinite withdrawal. Here we begin to understand the idea of the organon as an instrument for making and moving the forms of life. The process of production expresses making and moving as responses to the continuous withdrawal of the forms and objects of the world. Making and movement thus express the essence of process as ceaseless action that seems to exist only for itself and it is in this sense that we are led to recognize containment and continuation not as identifiable properties of singular individuals or specific forms and objects but as unidentifiable forces that draw us out of our existing presences into a forever expanding field of absence. Making and production as expressions of human organization are projections of the body and its organs into the made objects of the human world and not simply the construction of useful and convenient products. The made object now becomes a lever or fulcrum which frees the body from its physical limits and creates a new field of possibilities in which the object is itself only a midpoint in a total action . of human creating which includes both the creating of the object and the objects recreating of the human being (Scarry 1985: 310). Production is the projection of the body into new and unexplored spaces in which the body experiences itself in a radically revised version of its world: the chair re-creates the tired body by making it weightless so that the individual projects this new weightless self into new objects, the image of an angel, the design for a flying machine; and as the bodily lens of the eye is
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projected in a camera, a new kind of camera that can enter into the interior of the human body (and film the events of conception, the passage of blood through the heart, or the action of the retina) comes into being (Scarry 1985: 321). Human production perpetually recreates itself as endless excess where ex-cess repeats the ceaseless moving away and withdrawal of pro-cess we noted earlier. The excess of production tells us again that prediction is the unfolding of an expanding field of absence in its generic work of containment and continuation: what the human being has made is not object x or y but this excessive power by which production magnifies itself to recreate its human makers in their pursuit of sentient continuity (Scarry 1985: 318). The work of process has no specific goal or end but is simply the regeneration of itself as pure action. An essential feature of this action is the double and reversible movement between negative and positive, nothing and something, absence and presence suggested in the archaeology of the word organ. Process here seems to be suspended in a primal condition of dynamic alternation. Production itself as a primal act also suggests an original, ambiguous state in its inclusion of drawing out (Latin ducere) and making explicit (Latin dicere) its products out of an implicit and rudimentary source. The process of production appears as a generic making of artefacts out of formless, unmade matter or, what we earlier called in the context of the alterity and alternation of the altar, the unmappable, or that undifferentiated, unlocatable space which both precedes and withdraws from all attempts to express and represent it in locatable, mappable forms. The work of process is the ceaseless alternation of the organon between the mappable and the unmappable. It becomes impossible to say with certainty what generates what: territory and map, absence and presence, negative and positive, seem to generate each other and hence refuse to be identified as singular origins of production. Each is both prior to the other and later than it, causer and caused, inside it and outside it at once (Miller 1995: 21). Process thus seems to emerge from a placeless place, an origin that refuses to be identified in space and time, where both before and after are impenetrably intertwined. Process now appears as the pure making and movement of the organon between the generic and the specific, between the indeterminate and the determinate. The specific and the determinate express that aspect of process which attempts to approach the world as a structure of locatable forms; the generic and indeterminate suggest process as that permanent presence of withdrawal which resists the work of representing the human world as a scene of specific, determinate and enduring forms. Production and prediction derive their significance and power from the negative field of withdrawal and incompletion which they reveal. They are essentially acts of making and moving before they are acts of knowing and knowledge. They project themselves ostensibly as existential strategies that impose some sense of structure and direction on the generic and indeterminate nature of the placeless and unmappable which forever accompanies them as an immanent absence. Production and prediction project the bodys sentience onto the negative ground of the placeless and unmappable in the form of transitory and partial representational takes or capturings of images and ideas from an origin that pre-exists the techniques and strategies of human representation. We can recognize the act of
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sentient projection in the term graph which reminds us that representation is the product of an act of writing or tracing such as we see in the photograph, the autograph and the topography of the map. Graph tells us that representation is a tentative grip or grab of forces that otherwise would be unrecordable. The photograph of a person, for example, is simply a momentary and partial visual take or capturing of an event extracted from a complex and ever changing social and cultural field whose process has already left the image of the photograph behind in space and time. The topography of the map is also a selection or partial take of an unknown and unlocatable territory which exists prior to the act of mapping; the graphing of the map serves to grab and helps us to grip what otherwise would be lost to sentient projection. The graph is thus a form of sentient projection which extends and prolongs the body and its organs into a pre-human placeless place which is predestined to withdraw from all attempts to locate and know it. This placeless place exists before human production and is what production predicts as a tomorrow that never comes. The work of organs as process derives its ceaseless movement between approach (pro-) and withdrawal (-cess) from the ghost-like presence of this motivating absence. The withdrawal and absence of production and projection cannot be understood without its accompanying work of approaching. Presence and absence together constitute the primal source of the ceaseless work of process. Human production as existential prediction and projection is less concerned with the attainment of specific ends and goals than with the continuation and prolongation of the power of making and moving the forces of life. Process becomes its own end. The construction of a house to create a protective environment for living or the making of a coat to maintain a persons comfort in cold weather frees the body and its organs from its physical limits and opens up a field of disembodiment in which the organs and senses can recreate themselves in yet-to-be discovered ways. The chair recreates the tired body by making it weightless and so freeing it to imagine and project itself in weightless extensions such as the image of an angel or a flying machine; the human eye projects and thus disembodies itself through the camera which then further remakes the bodys organs and senses through the technologies of cinema and television; the central nervous system projects itself in the computer and the flow of information the latter produces. The work of process becomes the generic flight from the body through the projection and prolongation of the bodys organs and senses in a field of excess where the production of products and artefacts always returns to their human creators to recreate them and their world in a generic act of leverage and reciprocation. Pro-cess becomes ex-cess in that it exceeds the limits of the specific and determinate to reveal the generic and the indeterminate. This means that it is not the product or artefact and what it makes possible that is significant but the work of continuous making and remaking: what the human being has made is not object x or y but this excessive power of reciprocation (Scarry 1985: 318). The product signifies a power far in excess of its instrumental utility; it discloses a capacious power that seems to generate and move human action from an ultra-human distance. Process in this sense suggests itself as the generic making and movement of a pre-human urge that stimulates human action through its withdrawal and self-effacement.
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Human organization is conventionally expressed as the work of human beings in the everyday world of practical action. Work in this context is the making and moving of specific, determinate structures that produce practical, utilitarian results that have immediate relevance and meaning. Process in this context is the action that leads to a relevant, specific and meaningful result. Production is seen simply as a means of satisfying the variable needs of users and consumers in the performance of their daily tasks. Work is thus interpreted as the appropriation and construction of a utilizable world of forms and objects by collections of individuals who are themselves seen as rational agents capable of making decisions that sustain and even enhance their individual lives. In contrast to this picture of human organization as a general strategy of existential appropriation to reinforce expectations of utility and immediacy, the reconception of human organization as originating in a pre-human power that animates the human body through its organs and senses radically recontextualizes our conventional understanding of human organization which we now begin to sense as the expression of generic human being. The body itself becomes the translator and transmitter of forces that lie beyond the practical consciousness that sustains our comprehension of human existence as the appropriation of the useful and immediate. The body becomes a medium for the movement and expression of forces that defer and postpone all our attempts to make them part of our familiar and reassuring everyday experience. As the expression of these ultra-human forces, human organization has to be seen as the domesticating and humanizing of a set of forces that do not naturally lend themselves to human control and understanding and that even resist the work of human appropriation. The work of organs and senses reflects this primal, unknowable and negative power in its relentless making and moving of the forms and objects of life. Human products and artefacts express not so much themselves or the specific, immediate needs of self-acting individuals but their work as levers across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes the makers (Scarry 1985: 307). The product as lever is now a midpoint which mediates between objects in an ongoing process of making and moving that always exceeds its constituent components of transmission. Here again we note the stress on process itself rather than specific products of work; the making of making rather than the making of singular, useful forms and objects. Process as pure making reminds us that human existence always exceeds the conventional understanding of human agency as the utilitarian actions of the human-oriented world. Human organization as a generic process of making and moving hides itself in the daily routines of living. Human needs and desires become organized around the productive work of organizations and the demands they make on their human members: the school, the university, the supermarket, the factory, the television company, all create an immediate reality that gives the impression of a ready-made world of reliable forms and objects that are there to sustain and support us in the routines of everyday life. Such routines become habitual and assume a prescriptive role in the conduct of everyday existence so that we treat them less as products of human work and organization and more as natural structures of the lived environment. In other words, we do not see them as the
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work of organs ceaselessly expressing themselves as pre-human forces in the making and moving of the forms of life. Nor do we see ourselves and our bodies as pre-human organs that serve as vehicles and vectors for the transmission of these forces. Organs are ordinarily viewed as tools and instruments for realizing the specific purposes and specific goals that produce a sense of lived reality as immediate experiences. The products of human organization are thus invariably seen as things and presences, and the negative and absent background without which they would not exist is marginalized and even forgotten. Human products, as we have noted, are devices for predicting and making the future out of indeterminacy and disappearance. They are products of an act of graphing or tracing forms out of impermanence and dissolution. The photograph captures its subject matter in an instant that is already gone; it grabs and grips a temporary appearance in space and time in an attempt to preserve for the future what no longer exists. The photograph makes present that which is absent. It exemplifies the definitive work of the organ as ergon and organon in its pursuit of that which continuously withdraws from positive appropriation. Human organization becomes reinterpretable as an organ whose existential purpose is to save the appearances of the human world from dissolution and disappearance. The primal sense of the organ is that of the ceaseless work of maintaining the forms and objects of human life by bringing them close to the human body and thus giving meaningful form to the primitive feelings of the organs and senses. Human organization in its generic work of making and moving the forms of life alternates between the mutually defining actions of making present and making absent, of approaching and withdrawing, such as we previously noted in the double and reversible action revealed in the archaeology of the word organ. Making present is the productive and predictive work of creating a sustainable and meaningful reality whose forms have to be made presentable as well as present and immediate. The modern world of production and prediction makes the present presentable as a scene of ready-made products; it presents an illusion of a world that is already constituted for our existential convenience. The supermarket expresses the essence of modern production as the making of presentability and the consumption of the ready-made and immediate. Its products speak to us as reflections of our bodily feelings and sensings: its medical section displays its products as ready-made solutions to all our common physical problems and questions; its extensive display of cereal packages tell us they are ready to serve us at breakfast as a start to our working day; its freezers and chiller cabinets are packed with an immense range of ready-prepared foods with which we can stock our domestic refrigerators in order to structure our meals for the coming week. The supermarket presents itself as a monumental display of readability and ready-madeness which reinforces the illusion of reality as a structure of immediate convenience. Each night it ensures that its presentability of immediacy and ready-madeness is maintained through the filling up of its empty shelves and spaces in readiness for the following days business. It further underlines the presentability and readiness of its products through their sell-by dates which again stress the need for immediate use and consumption. The supermarkets immediacy of presence is even further complemented by the daily advertising of its merchandise on television. The supermarket now
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appears as a technology of immediate presence which makes the modern world immediately readable and ready for use and consumption. Such technologies of presence reveal production as an existential strategy for translating the raw, archaic matter of the world into a massive display of readiness and readability which structures reality as a scene of specific and reliable supports. The supermarket produces an overall effect of catering to the functional specifics that make up the pressing immediacies of daily living. In its emphasis on the specific and the here-and-now, we lose sight of the supermarkets significant role as a major force in the translation of raw, unreadable matter into the ready-made and readable appearances that constitute modern reality as a series of constructions that make the world ready, readable and transmittable. To say that the supermarket is an existential means for making the world readable and transmittable to its human habitants is to acknowledge it as an organon that makes and moves the forms of the world. The products of the supermarket perform an existential role inasmuch as they enable the organs and senses of the body to recognize themselves as reflections of the products on display: the aspirin bottle says it can relieve the bodys aches and pains; the cereal packet says it is here to prepare the body for the working day; the colourful display of fruit and vegetables calls out to the eyes and taste buds to consume them. The supermarkets products are thus not merely ready-made and presentable objects but they remind the body that they are projections of its organs and senses which return to the bodys interior as sentient conversions of the external environment. They tell us that the supermarket is a projection and prolongation of the body in space and time, and that the supermarket informs and thus converses with its consumers in a general existential strategy of making the matter of the world ready and readable for movement and transmission. The organs and senses of the body thus locate and read themselves through the multiple products of the supermarket and remind us of the double and reversible action of the organ as an origin which can only recognize itself through the after-work of its copies and effects. Human organization as the pre-human expression of the organ which forever seeks to find itself in the mappable space and time of its after-effects is nevertheless also motivated by the indigenous co-presence of the unmappable and the placeless. The supermarket may produce an overall effect of immediacy and readability but this appearance of constant readiness is essentially a means of concealing the unmappable and placeless origin behind all human production and projection. In this sense, the supermarkets existential strategy is one of saving the appearances of daily life from disintegration and withdrawal. Its products appear as transient expressions and momentary graspings of a covert process that never makes itself explicit but merely intimates its presence through hint and allusion. All human organization can be interpreted in this way, especially when viewed as the work of pre-human organs. The supermarket is perhaps a hypertrophic example of how human organization in the modern world projects its sentient continuity and thus ensures its continuation. Human organization in its myriad and variable forms the factory, the hospital, the school, the university, the hotel, the railway station, the department store produces and reproduces its world by creating products that fit the needs and
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desires of the bodily organs and senses. This essentially means making forms and objects that will fit the bodys requirements and thus make distant and vague possibilities clear and convenient for sensory manipulation. The products of the supermarket can be conveniently observed and handled; the television set and the computer reduce the distances of the world to the space of the eyes and hands; the mobile telephone creates a sense of direct communication between its users organs of speaking and hearing. Goodness of fit between the organs and senses of the body and the human environment assumes an increasingly motivating source in the technologically dominated projection of human organization in the modern world. Goodness and closeness of fit between body and environment may be a dominant pressure in the organizing of the modern human world but, since body and environment are intertwined in a double and reversible process of approach and withdrawal, presence and absence, the more immediate and presentable we make the world, the more we reveal the infinity of its latent and foreign spaces. Making and unmaking together constitute the basic work of human existence (Scarry 1985). But the purpose of readability and ready-madeness seems to conceal the latent absence and withdrawal intrinsic to the existential work of organs. The supermarkets production of immediacy and presence blinds us to the missing presence of absence and withdrawal that actively sources its programme of filling in its otherwise vacant space and time. The immediate utility of the supermarkets interpretation of reality disguises its origins in latency and withdrawal. The work of organs is the continuous making and moving of forms and objects in order to supplement the gaps and intervals that threaten existence with the void of disappearance. While the supermarkets work is focused on concealing these existential gaps and intervals and preserving the sentient continuity of its consumer-product relationship, the work of other forms of human organization is more directly threatened by the challenge to readiness and readability posed by the disappearance of presence and presentability. The world of art and literature sustains itself with the general question of the human world as a scene of questionable forms and appearances. The modern art gallery and its associated institutions appear to be caught in an irresolvable struggle between the world of visibility and the unworld of the invisible. In this respect, art reflects the dynamic exchange between presence and absence, something and nothing, implied in the archaeology of the word organ. Art searches for an origin it can never locate; it wanders and explores an unmappable and placeless unworld which lies beyond conventional representation. Modern art even questions the idea that the world can be made readily readable and presentable. It draws us back to the act of generation itself in its struggle to trace the emergence of form and appearance out of the obscurity and indistinctiveness of raw matter. In Czannes landscapes, for example, houses and mountains merge with each other to remind us of their common and predistinguishable source in nature so that we see the beginning of the act of representation as the worlds uncertain visibility rather than its completed, readable form (Bersani and Dutoit 1993: 218). The paintings of the Impressionists also return us to this generic state of being when they conflate the raw materiality of their paint with the forms and objects represented so that we are again confronted with a spectacle of uncertain visibility. Carl Andres
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famous installation of builders bricks in a London art gallery confuses our usual expectation of finding bare bricks on a building site rather than as a formally declared work of art. In these examples, the artists wish to return us to an unworld that pre-exists readability and ready-madeness. What we see is less the supermarkets products of immediate utility and more a coming-to-presence that reminds us of the beginning of things rather than their complete and finished presence. The artist seeks to make present the invisibility of visibility as though to inform us that art is that original generic act which seeks to affirm itself in its essence by ruining distinctions and limits (Blanchot 1982: 220). Yet the administrative purpose of the art gallery is to affirm art as a distinctive area of human culture, even to inform the public of arts capacity to enlighten us about the aesthetic potential of existence which the immediate utility of everyday life conceals from us. The gallery attempts to make art presentable and meaningful as a collection of products; it explains and thus attempts to make explicit that which is destined to remain implicit and therefore beyond explicit expression and understanding. Beyond the gallery, the wider institutional context of the art world celebrates the cultural significance of art by awarding prestigious prizes to individual artists who thus become institutionally accredited with special cultural status as well as making art into a series of events that demand the attention of the media. The gallery and its world occupy an ambiguous position between the publics expectation of ready readability and the artists recognition that the essence of art originates in a profound refusal of easy explication. The work of organs is the work of process as the ceaseless alternation between the movement of approach and the equally ceaseless movement of withdrawal. The work of the supermarket stresses the movement of approach in its constant production of presence and prediction. The work of the art gallery struggles to find itself as a translator and interpreter of the ambiguous essence and uncertain visibility of the art works it promotes. Supermarket and art gallery, in their different ways, exemplify the basic existential work of human organization: that of making and moving the forms of life in order to save the appearances of reality from dissolution and disappearance. But the work of the artist more directly addresses the question of process as that which is moved by withdrawal. The work of the artist seems stimulated by an unknowable force that says it is ultimately uncapturable and hence unrepresentable. At best, the artist can only admit that he or she is trying to represent the unrepresentable. In certain respects, the artists task of making the invisible visible is institutionally formalized by the Church whose task is to make visible and graspable the invisible power we call God. The Church recognizes the immanent presence of an invisible power in the general conduct of human affairs and assumes the responsibility for translating and interpreting this ultra-human presence into a language and symbolism that makes it somehow readily readable and thus brings it down to earth. God, as they say, is everywhere and nowhere. Despite his apparent unlocatability and hence unpresentability, he demands to be made present as an existential necessity in the living of everyday life. The Church organizes his presence and presentability through its architecture, its literature and its sacred rituals. We are able to address him by giving him a territorial address in the local place of worship. While we can never see or converse with
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him directly, we construct institutional fictions which speak on his behalf: Christ as the son of God assumes human form and tells us that God himself is thus indirectly part of the human race; the Virgin Mary, as the mother of Christ, implies that she has had some direct, perhaps carnal, contact with God and thus also testifies to his connections with humanity. The Church performs that primal act of generation and production which the Book of Genesis describes in the image of the altar with its power to magnify, multiply and make visible the invisible forces and feelings that animate the organs and senses of the human body in its work of sentient continuity (Scarry 1985). It symbolizes the archaic double and reversible action of the organ as the production of presence out of absence, of something out of nothing. Projection, as we have seen, is a necessary move in this process of reaching out of the body in order to express its interior. The Church projects its work of production and generation in its architecture the spire of the church reaches out and aspires to the invisibility of heaven and in its furniture the altar is both organ and origin of Gods power of alteration which continually re-manifests itself in its capacity to make the awe-inspiring alterability of matter visible (Scarry 1985: 199, 192). The work of the Church reminds us that human organization is fundamentally grounded in the existential construction of the human world and the continuous making present of its supportive forms and objects. An essential feature of this work is the fitting together of the bodys organs and senses with the forms and objects that support and express them. The act of making present is also the act of making the world fit closely and conveniently to the bodys organs and senses. This again is another version of the bodys reaching out in order to reach its inside. Human projection is that basic generic act which makes the body fit the world and the world fit the body. The Church also expresses this primal need and desire in its literature which seeks to humanize the message of God through the projective device of personification. The invisibility of God and his domain are made visible and meaningful and hence readable and readily understandable through the media of the Bibles humanized narratives. We can thus interpret the specific books of the Bible as institutional strategies for translating the pre-human world into human terms by ascribing their narratives to what appear to be human persons. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John can be understood as personifications of such strategies. The names of these narrators may sound like human messengers of God but they also suggest a more basic existential meaning rooted in the primal act of the organ as organon or maker and mover of living forms and objects. On this interpretation, Matthew personifies the raw, indistinguishable Matter of the earth which, through the person of Mark, has to be Marked or humanly distinguished and differentiated which then, through the narration of Luke, enables us to Look at the world as a scene of distinguishable features out of which, following the gospel of John, we can Generate (from Latin genius, genus, i.e. generative power, human creation) the multiple and varied forms that make up the human world. The Church, in its various institutional manifestations, expresses itself as an organ of generation and regeneration, reminding us through its rituals of the initiatory role of human organization in the making and moving of the forms of life and in their necessary reproduction. Perhaps more significantly, the Church
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constructs its signs and symbols, its images and messages, out of invisibility and absence as though to inform us that the visible world we inhabit is a necessary fiction which without its constructions would otherwise disappear. In their different ways, supermarket, art gallery and Church reveal human organization as an existential means for the creation and sustenance of a humanized world. An essential initiatory feature of their work is the translation of raw, unhumanized material and rudimental forces into forms that fit the organs and senses of the body. This clearly includes the increasing emphasis in the modern world of production on ready-madeness and readability in which everything, ideally, should be all ready for us. But the routine expectations of ready-madeness and readability also serve to conceal their origins in the invisible and absent. Invisibility and absence are immanent presences in all acts of human production. They stimulate the body to make them visible and connectable in the continuous work of sentient continuity. Human production originates in their strange powers of withdrawal and disappearance without which there would be no existential process or human continuity. The work of process is thus always preceded by an indeterminable condition of pre-work.
The Pre-Work of Process Human organization is the work of the social body as a corpus or corporation of organs before it is a collection of individuals. As a social body, human organization is the articulate community of organs and senses which constantly create and re-create connections and correspondences between themselves and their environment. The primary task of human organs in this context is to correspond with the world in order to create and maintain a sense of sentient continuity between body and environment. Viewed in this way, human organization is essentially a series of compositional acts rather than a completed, self-sufficient structure. This is one way of approaching human organization as the work of process. We can thus never see the supermarket as a total entity but as a series of partial and fleeting correspondences between its staff, customers, products and building. The total field of the active and changing relationships between these various parts always exceeds and thus withdraws from our conceptual grasp. It is as though the dynamic field of changing relationships between the supermarkets parts were contained in a more comprehensive, more pliable space that must remain beyond our conventional and categorial systems of representation. To understand human organization as a field of compositional acts that take place in such a pliable and plastic background, we have to adopt a more flexible perceptual strategy for seeing the world as a process of interrelated events and not simply as a collection of differentiated, specific things. The world as process has to be perceived in a single undivided focus of scattered attention (Ehrenzweig 1967: 23) which enables us to see, for example, the work of organs as the dynamic alternation between origin and copy, absence and presence, between a knowable world of differentiated, finite forms and a pre-world of undifferentiation and incompleteness. The perception of process is the sensing of the human world as a
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blurred plasticity which produces an awareness of intensely plastic objects without definite outline (Ehrenzweig 1967: 1415). The work of process is the work of organs as the alternation between differentiation and undifferentiation, between figure and ground. Undifferentiation and ground suggest that they serve as an accommodating negative background to the everyday world of ready-made, readable and hence positive things. The pre-work of process returns us to this invisible background before it is translated into the visible and readable presences of daily life; it is an absent and negative condition that is always with us as a ghost-like presence that refuses to make itself fully evident and that hides behind the familiar forms of the world. The work of organs indirectly recognizes the pre-work of process in its continuous making and moving of the forms of life. The work of the supermarket is essentially the translating of pre-work into the readily useful work of presentable reality. The art gallery attempts to make presentable the pre-work of artists who seem to be suspended in a perceptual limbo that refuses to be translated into the convenient visibility of the work of art. The Church addresses the pre-work of process as a power that cannot in itself be identified and represented when it invents the images of Christ and the Saints of the gospels as devices that can at best only allude to and suggest the presence of God. In each of these institutional examples, the pre-work of process appears as an unidentifiable presence that lies beyond the horizon of human thought but which demands to be translated into the identifiable and meaningful forms of the human world. The pre-work of process now suggests itself as the inaugural source of human organization and the generic production of the human world. Production in its existential sense is the projection of the bodys organs and senses onto the made forms and objects of the world. Production as projection reaches out to the world so that the world can reach into the body. Production reaches out as the projection of prediction in which the unknown and unmapped is translated into specific and identifiable forms and objects that help orient the body in its work of daily living. The pre-work of process also suggests a reaching out to free the body from its limits. Production prolongs the bodys organs and senses into a space and time that exceeds the immediacy of the body to reveal new existential possibilities. Projection, as we noted earlier, is always more than the projection of the organs and senses into the forms of specific objects since a projected object further projects itself into new fields of possibility. The camera projects itself into the cinema, the calculating machine into the computer. The products of projection now appear as levers which elevate the body into new realms of experience and which, significantly, recreate the human being in a generic act of reciprocation (Scarry 1985: 318). Reciprocation opens up new fields of possibility which remind the human being that the source of its existence lies outside itself and not within the supposedly self-contained human person. The body is first and foremost an organ that expresses the generic making and moving of the world. Projection and reciprocation represent the bodys disembodiment of itself through its revealing of absence as a pre-objective, pre-specific space which invites the bodys organs and senses to explore it in order to reveal the bodys own potential for re-making and re-moving itself.
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The body and its organs thus disembody themselves in response to a generic call which, since it is subject to continuous withdrawal, never fully reveals itself and which thus can never be fully and finally answered. Every specific human product may be seen as an attempt to answer this generic call but each specific product simply defers the answer in a further call. The pre-work of process is this unidentifiable, unlocatable space which seems to refuse all attempts to make it speak in any ultimate sense. The work of the artist is one way of recognizing the pre-work of process as something that refuses explicit and readable expression while the work of the art gallery tries to overcome this refusal with its formal displays and explanations. The Church likewise recognizes that the term God implies an inexpressible power that can only be approached indirectly through the familiar signs and symbols of the human world. Projection and reciprocation can be interpreted as a call-and-response relationship between the body and its environment. When the organs and senses project themselves into made objects, they respond to an existential lack or absence that calls them to make it present and presentable. But, since presence is always accompanied by a fundamental absence on which it is existentially dependent, every projected human product opens up a further absent space and hence a further call to make it present. Projection may express itself through the production of specific objects but it is more essentially the making of reciprocation as an ultra-human power that always exceeds the specific and particular. Projection and reciprocation return us to the idea of the organ as an organon that makes and moves the world of human objects; it is the generic making and moving of things rather than the things themselves that demands our attention and understanding. Process in this sense is infinitive action without ends or goals, all origin and cause and no effect; it suggests a field of reciprocal relationship and transitivity rather than a scene of things. Again, we are reminded of pure process whose pro- signifies a ceaseless moving forward and approaching and whose -cess signifies an equally ceaseless moving away and withdrawing. The pre-work of process tells us that the absence that is immanent in all presence the fundamental lack that constantly calls us to fill it with ready-madeness and readability, just as we have to bridge the gaps between the letters and words of a sentence is a placeless place where action seems to have no object and thus seems to be suspended in a limbo of infinitude. This is the vacant and void space of organ whose early meaning was rooted in the alternating action of the ergon and organon between nothing and something, absence and presence. Significantly, the organ generates negative space just as much as it generates positive things. The pre-work of process thus returns us to the archaic meaning of organ as pure action and ongoingness in which the significance of specific objects and specific tasks takes second place to their generation and movement in a field of generic relationship and transitivity. Action as simple doing instead of knowing, becoming instead of completing, starting instead of finishing. Pre-work as pure action tells us it is more about the coming-to-presence of forms rather than the production of ready-made presences; it thus reminds us that the existential origins of human organization are to be found in the ongoing compositional work that must precede the completed forms and objects of our taken-for-granted world. The prework of process implies a pre-world of potential appearances that have not yet
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made themselves explicit and clear, that are still suspended in a state of incompletion and will always remain so. The pre-world of pre-work also significantly suggests a condition of pure matter that has yet to be made into products that signify their human relevance. Again, we are brought back to the archaic function of the organ as a means for translating the meaningless materiality of the earth into the meaningful products of the human world. In this preworld of pre-work, process finds itself irresistibly drawn back to a placeless place that seems to resist all attempts to give it locatable expression. We may name it as the Church names God but this simply represents something that is permanently unknowable and hence ungraspable; the Church and the name of God are devices for locating the unlocatable, for expressing that which originates in the inexpressible. The pre-work of process begins to look like a state of existential withdrawal that permanently provokes us to capture it in some way and to make it ever present to the immediacy of the body. It even reverses the coming-to-presence that precedes the conventional interpretation of work as the construction of finished products through the idea of withdrawal as a receding-to-absence. Pre-work thus becomes the pure absence of work, a state of being which precedes work as the production of presence and presentability but which is also the fundamental source of such production. It remains always implicitly prior to work as the production of presence and thus must be understood as the pre-sense of presence, just as God is the implicit absence which comes before all the Churchs attempts to represent his invisible power. Pre-work asserts itself as an anonymous, placeless and unmappable source which continually reminds us that the conventional world of ready-made representations is rooted in absence and departure. The world we make present to ourselves is strangely founded in an ungraspable void which we can only approach (but never reach) through the continuous work of transient representations and reproductions. Every human product thus appears as a pre-dict which, like the pre-sense of presence, finds its origin in a source that refuses to disclose itself. Pre-work as the pre-sense of process now appears as that which is ab-sent from sense but which the bodys organs and senses must make present to themselves as readily readable representations of their environment, however fictional and questionable these representations may at times appear. Pre-work as the ab-sence or off-sense of sense has been explored by Maurice Blanchot (e.g. 1982) in his analyses of the absence of work as the hidden source of art and literature. The institutional organization of art and literature presents its products as formal categories: pop art, cubism, action painting, etc.; novels, poetry, criticism, etc. Such institutional work attributes meaning and identity to specific works by placing them in a system where they can be made presentable and readily readable. They appear as the finished products of productive labour that are meant to inform, entertain or illuminate us within the categorical worlds they occupy. Art and literature, for Blanchot, reverse this institutional systematization by reminding us that they begin in a radical condition of suspense where nothing is identifiable or articulable. Once we express it and make it readily readable, we lose it. The pre-work of art and literature is this suspended condition that comes before the production and presentation of the painting or
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the novel. And yet this suspension of immediate sense and readability is implicitly present in all the systematized products of art and literature. It is a passive state of raw material that resists translation into specific meanings and uses; it is an origin that can never be expressed in human terms, an abyss in which all things are equal in their utter indifference to the human mind and will and all attempts to give it form can only be sensed as particular expressions of a persistent negative movement that resides in being (De Man 1983: 72, 73). Like God, pre-work can only reveal itself as an unknowable and indeterminable it which permanently hides itself from conscious presence and presentability, intimating only a fundamental distance at the heart of all human experience (De Man 1983: 76). This persistent negative movement and fundamental distance is the absent and negative side of the archaic organ as the double and reversible action which alternates between something and nothing, between the visible and the invisible. Blanchot (1982) calls it a state of worklessness which can never be made to work as a productive act in the conventional sense; it is impersonal and anonymous as though refusing to reveal itself to its human spectators. The products of conventional production are like vehicles of movement that carry us along and when they break down they reveal not just their inutility but the absence that serves to background them. Products as conventional organs of movement are taken-for-granted elements of everyday life; it is only when they break down that we really miss them and realize that their missingness or absence is also a significant part of their presence. Blanchots worklessness is a negative condition in which the meaningful movements of existence are always missing but which nevertheless haunts all our efforts to attribute direction and purpose to the existential ground of our actions. The apparent immediacy and readability of the presentable world finds its generative source in what is unreachable and indeterminable: the immediacy which common language communicates to us is only veiled distance, the absolutely foreign passing for the habitual, the unfamiliar which we take for the customary (Blanchot 1982: 40). The pre-work of worklessness is thus an inexpressible source which withdraws from the immediacy and ready-madeness of conventional production; it resists every effort to fix and stabilize it in a definition or a category, despite all the institutionalized programmes of knowledge that try to capture it in a concept or explanation. It can only be glimpsed in a lateral way through allusion and suggestion and thus can never be appropriated by authoritative statement. For this reason, Blanchot argues that it is the infinite source of the question to which there are no finite answers. Common sense believes that it does away with the question (Blanchot 1982: 211). Common sense seeks the answer which affirms the immediacy and presentability of everyday existence. But it is the question that keeps life on the move by reminding us that the prework of worklessness is a primal process that is unknowable as a thing, that hides itself and at best can only intimate itself as a source of unanswerable questions. The question reasserts itself in production and projection as reciprocation which always undoes the making of a specific product to reveal a forever expanding field of absence. Question and answer are generic expressions of making and moving; they express process as that which continually undoes
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itself, which always departs from the present in order to disclose the vacancy and void of a permanent distance. The question thus ensures the sentient continuity of production and projection by revealing human existence as a condition of unfoundation and infiniteness which has to be continually pursued and re-founded. Process appears in the form of the question as an infinite seeking or questing that knows no end, only an excess that knows no bounds, and which seeks for no other reason than the seeking of itself. The pre-work of process returns us to our initial discussion of human organization as a social body or collection of organs that mediate between the inside and outside of the human body in maintaining its sentient continuity with its material environment. The bodys organs and senses appear to make and move the forms of life. But they also appear to serve as transmission routes for prehuman, impersonal forces which express themselves through the human body and its products. It is in this sense that we have to understand the bodys work of disembodiment or the reaching out by the bodys organs in order to express their intrinsic potential for feeling and sensing. Disembodiment and reaching out reflect the organs primal and generic work of making and unmaking in their alternating movement between presence and absence. The pre-work of process is pure alternation and movement that has no specific location, no end or goal. The bodys inside is conflated with its outside. At this primitive level, body and environment are continuous in the alternating movement of sentient continuity in which body and ground become counterchanges of each other. The conventional idea of the self-contained human subject loses its specificity so that individual subjectivities move beyond their respective particularity toward a common ground in which their specific identities dissolve and which contains them all (De Man 1983: 64). The common ground is a space of undifferentiation in which the particular and specific can only emerge as passing and transient forms in a field of blurred plasticity (Ehrenzweig 1967: 15). It is another way of expressing the idea of withdrawal such as we see in Czannes landscapes in which houses and mountains merge together and lose their individual forms or in the crossword puzzle where individually identifiable words seem to melt into a common ground of mixed confusion to suggest an invisible and unmappable source where sense as a readily readable experience seems to disappear. The purpose of human organization is to make sense out of negative absence. Representation as a fundamental act of making sense reflects the crossword puzzle in its implying that pre-sense inhabits presence as the common ground of pre-work in which everything is condensed and hence undifferentiated. The work of organs and process is the continual making present or re-present-ing of this common ground in the distinguishable and meaningful language of the ready-made. Production as prediction originates in a principle of re-present-ation in its basic work of repeating the existential act of making and generating the pre-sense of presence: prediction may be conventionally seen as the foretelling of future events but, just as significantly, it is also the inescapable repetition of pre-sense as the common, undifferentiated source of all human action. The pre-work of process reminds us that the existential strategies of human organization have their source in the bodily organs and senses that make and move the forms of life. The organs and senses make presence out
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of absence, readability out of unreadability, but their work is also necessarily caught up in the re-creation of absence and unreadability without which there could be no readable presences. Pre-work is the continuous suspension and deferral of sense and meaning as their necessary anticipation. Process emerges as the pre-work of pre-sense that inhabits conventional representation through the infinite deferral of re-pre-sent-ation as the infinite repetition of the organs primal work in its combined and enfolded double action of approaching and withdrawing, of making and unmaking.
References
Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit 1993 Arts of impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Blanchot, Maurice 1982 The space of literature, trans. and intro. Ann Smock. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. De Man, Paul 1983 Blindness and insight: Essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism. London: Methuen. Ehrenzweig, Anton 1967 The hidden order of art: A study in the psychology of artistic
imagination. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Gibson, James J. 1968 The senses considered as perceptual systems. London: Allen & Unwin. Miller, J. Hillis 1995 Topographies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Scarry, Elaine 1985 The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. New York: Oxford University Press.
Robert Cooper
Robert Cooper is a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Culture, Social Theory and Technology, Keele University. He writes mainly on the general theme of social and cultural production. He has published widely on the relationship between technology and modern organizing, on technology and mass society, and on the social and cultural aspects of information. His current work includes an analysis of information as a form of knowledge production. Address: Centre for Culture, Social Theory and Technology, Darwin Building, Keele University, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK. Email: cooper.robert@talk21.com

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