Organs of Process: Rethinking Human Organization

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DOI: 10.1177/0170840607076587

2007 28: 1547Organization StudiesRobert Cooper

Organs of Process: Rethinking Human Organization

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Peripheral Vision

Organs of Process:Rethinking Human OrganizationRobert Cooper

Abstract

Human organization is discussed as a social body or collection of organs and senses thatcreate and re-create the forms and objects that constitute the human world. Organs rep-resent process as the continuous making and remaking of passages between the body andits environment. Organs express a pre-human, impersonal force that transmits itselfthrough the human body and its products in a generic act of making as opposed to themaking of specific forms and objects. Process is discussed as the ceaseless work of alter-nation between the making of presence and the unmaking of absence. The work ofprocess is illustrated through the work of three examples of human organization: thesupermarket, the art gallery and the Church.

Keywords: absence-presence, making-unmaking, organ, pre-work, production-

prediction, projection, sentient continuity

The question of process invites us to think of the human world as the transmis-

sion 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 incom-

plete 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 re-

create 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 spe-

cific knowledge. The organ is anergon

ororganon

, an instrument for makingand moving the forms of life. Human process now appears as relentless trans-

mission or sheer action in order to keep life on the move. Viewed in this way,

article title

www.egosnet.org/os DOI: 10.1177/0170840607076587

OrganizationStudies28(10): 15471573ISSN 01708406Copyright 2007SAGE Publications

(Los Angeles,London, New Delhi& Singapore)

Robert Cooper

Keele University,UK

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process has no end or goal; it simply generates itself as generic making and

movement; the specific forms and products of human organization are sec-

ondary 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 them-

selves as bodily functions but the pure process of generic making and moving.

They are simply incomplete and unfinished parts that extend and project them-

selves 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 ofhuman 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 orig-

inates. 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 meaningfulsense. 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 pro-

duction 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 intrinsi-

cally insentient to human experience. Human organization begins with this orig-

inating 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. Theorgans 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 prod-

ucts 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, hos-

pitals, 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 modernorganization 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

1548 Organization Studies 28(10)



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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 orga-

nization 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 ofobjects 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

pureprocess whosepro- 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 anexpression 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 pro-

jects 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 theirprobings, it is the generic suspension of existential comprehension that keeps

them forever working.

Organs and senses begin as tentacles and feelersthat 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

Cooper: Organs of ProcessRethinking Human Organization 1549



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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 real-

ize itself through a continuous process of sentient continuity with its support-

ing 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 ofsending on in which both sense and sendtogether consti-

tute 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 communi-

cate 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 connectionin space. The ancient meanings ofergon and organon reflect this basic existen-

tial 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 genera-

tion 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 wordorgan: nothing and something, negative and positive, absence and presence,

serve to generate each other in a mutual process of continuous creation. The

archaic meaning oforgan thus suggests a generative power, a vitalizing energy

and a creative spirit that renews itself in a perpetual process ofbeginning.

Organ as beginning is also a perpetual process ofbecoming 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 ori-

gin appears in the ideas of a copy as an imitation of an original or an effectas

the result of a cause. Copy and effect are normally assumed to come aftertheir

originating sources. But the interpretation of organ as a double and reversibleaction 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 gen-

erate 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 andsenses 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 altarwhich

symbolizes the alternation or reciprocity between the bodys inside and outside

which, like original and copy, generate each other and thus become indistin-

guishable. 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 altarsymbolizes 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 exceedsand 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 con-

version 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 prim-

itive sensings of human organs. The products of human organization appear as

reflections of human sentience. No longer simply useful objects or tools, humanproducts 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 andits 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 genera-

tion. Their perceptions and conceptions become materialized in the supportive

products of the human world with which they now experience the felt commu-

nity 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 alternat-

ing 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 toreach 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 visibil-

ity 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 con-struction 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 exis-

tence can also be seen as a form of disembodiment, as if the body were reach-

ing 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 nolonger 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. Themade objects of human production become transmission stations for the send-

ing 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 oforgan. 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 whereeach term is a counterchange of the other. Production asprediction is the repeti-

tion 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 non-

existence just as the lost tool emphasizes its presence through its absence. Every

human product emerges out of an original space of absence which is undifferen-

tiated and unlocatable like a territory before it is mapped. Production as predic-

tion 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 effortof 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 apre-dictor 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 unmap-

pable and its differentiated, locatable representation in a map. Here again we note

the double and reversible action suggested in the archaic meaning oforgan 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 intrin-

sic counterchange and unlocatability of the otherness at the heart of primal alter-

nation 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 theprojection

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 theforms and objects that serve to direct this work. It is in this sense that the work

of organs is aprocess 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 pre-

defines 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 sup-

portive existential structures but also, significantly, as the suspension of the pro-

ductive 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 pres-

ences 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 sen-

tience into the objects and forms of the external world as if to humanize the lat-

ters 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 newand even unpredictable possibilities as though the human world were sur-

rounded by an infinite and endless space that, despite its unknowability, contin-

uously 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 with-

drawal. Every product predicts or projects itself into a space of new possibili-

ties; 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 possibilitieswhich 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 reach-

ing 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 mov-

ing 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 pro-ject 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 back-

ground of space and time that recedes on approach. The work of organs

expresses this suspended background as an infinite origin which, like an hori-

zon, 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 itsuser; 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 inter-

action between objects.

The interaction or intertwining of sentient continuity requires that we per-

ceive 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 andeffect. 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 outof 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 con-

scious capturing of clear, positive, ready-made forms and objects. Presence is

defined in terms of thepresentability or acceptable appearance and meaning of

the forms and objects that make up the human world. The perception of pre-

sentable 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 negativebackground that is normally excluded from our acts of perceiving. To under-

stand the work of organs we have to include the absent background of the




11/28

figure-ground relationship. The archaic meaning oforgan embraces the idea of

alternation and counterchange between a visible figure and its invisible back-

ground. 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 col-

lection 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 map-

pable 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 ongoing-

ness 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, defi-

nite, singular forms in order to take in the mutually constituting features of the

entire visual field as alternating counterchanges. Such undifferentiated or ded-ifferentiated counterchanges are basic to the sentient continuity between bod-

ily 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 visiblyenacted and thus objectify the dynamic intertwining of organs and senses with

their external supports (Scarry 1985: 290). Intertwining returns us to the funda-

mental 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 rad-

ical 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 con-tinuous interaction between the body and its products is vital in order to main-

tain their mutual ongoingness or process which is sustained by the undivided




12/28

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 sin-

gular 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 rec-

ognized 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 orig-

inates 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 unmak-

ing 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 altarcap-

tures this sense of originating alternation as the primal movement between thebodys 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 exis-

tentially 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 makingand 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 con-

tinuous work of saving the appearances of life from dissolution and disappear-

ance. 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 suchimmediate appropriation. The work of organs thus becomes the work of process

as the ceaseless interaction and alternation between approach and withdrawal.




13/28

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 sim-

ply 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 pro-

duction in this sense also requires the background presence of unpredictability

which now has to be seen as a field of negative absence without which produc-

tion 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 genericsense is therefore also the production and prediction of incompletion and with-

drawal or what we earlier called the generic suspension of existential compre-

hension. Production and prediction have to be seen as generic and constitutive

acts of human organization and not as the making of specific products that sat-

isfy specific needs and desires. It is in this sense that we have to understand pro-

duction 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 alsoto 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 per-

petual 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 contin-

uous 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 con-

tinuation not as identifiable properties of singular individuals or specific forms

and objects but as unidentifiable forces that draw us out of our existing presencesinto 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 con-

venient products. The made object now becomes a leverorfulcrum 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 creatingwhich

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 weightlessso 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




14/28

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 ofpro-cess we noted earlier. The

excess of production tells us again that prediction is the unfolding of an expand-

ing field of absence in its generic work of containment and continuation: what

the human being has made is not objectxory but this excessive powerby 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 regenera-

tion 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 pre-

cedes 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, nega-tive 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 iden-

tified in space and time, where both before and after are impenetrably inter-

twined. Process now appears as the pure making and movement of the organon

between the generic and the specific, between the indeterminate and the deter-

minate. 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 whichresists the work of representing the human world as a scene of specific, deter-

minate and enduring forms.

Production and prediction derive their significance and power from the nega-

tive 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 representa-tional 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




15/28

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 thephotograph, the auto-

graph and the topography of the map. Graph tells us that representation is a ten-

tative 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 par-

tial 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 oth-

erwise 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 pro-

duction predicts as a tomorrow that never comes. The work of organs as processderives 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 under-

stood without its accompanying work of approaching. Presence and absence

togetherconstitute 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 prolonga-

tion 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 liv-

ing or the making of a coat to maintain a persons comfort in cold weather freesthe body and its organs from its physical limits and opens up a field of disem-

bodiment 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 disem-

bodies itself through the camera which then further remakes the bodys organs

and senses through the technologies of cinema and television; the central ner-

vous system projects itself in the computer and the flow of information the lat-

ter produces. The work of process becomes the generic flight from the body

through the projection and prolongation of the bodys organs and senses in afield ofexcess where the production of products and artefacts always returns to

their human creators to recreate them and their world in a generic act of lever-

age 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 sig-

nificant but the work of continuous making and remaking: what the human

being has made is not objectxory but this excessive power of reciprocation

(Scarry 1985: 318). The product signifies a power far in excess of its instru-

mental utility; it discloses a capacious power that seems to generate and move

human action from an ultra-human distance. Process in this sense suggestsitself as the generic making and movement of a pre-human urge that stimulates

human action through its withdrawal and self-effacement.




16/28

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 capa-

ble of making decisions that sustain and even enhance their individual lives. In

contrast to this picture of human organization as a general strategy of existen-

tial appropriation to reinforce expectations of utility and immediacy, the recon-

ception of human organization as originating in a pre-human power that

animates the human body through its organs and senses radically recontextual-

izes our conventional understanding of human organization which we nowbegin 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 alwaysexceeds 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 treatthem 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




17/28

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 bod-

ies 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 real-

izing the specific purposes and specific goals that produce a sense of lived real-

ity 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 ofgraphing 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 tempo-

rary 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 exem-

plifies the definitive work of the organ asergon

andorganon

in its pursuit ofthat 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 dis-

appearance. The primal sense of the organ is that of the ceaseless work of main-

taining 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 theword organ. Making present is the productive and predictive work of creating a

sustainable and meaningful reality whose forms have to be madepresentable as

well aspresentand immediate. The modern world of production and prediction

makes the present presentable as a scene ofready-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 med-

ical section displays its products as ready-made solutions to all our common

physical problems and questions; its extensive display of cereal packages tell usthey 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 real-

ity as a structure of immediate convenience. Each night it ensures that its pre-

sentability 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 consump-tion. The supermarkets immediacy of presence is even further complemented

by the daily advertising of its merchandise on television. The supermarket now




18/28

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 super-

market produces an overall effect of catering to the functional specifics that

make up the pressing immediacies of daily living. In its emphasis on the spe-

cific 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 construc-

tions that make the world ready, readable and transmittable. To say that the

supermarket is an existential means for making the world readable and trans-

mittable 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 torecognize themselves as reflections of the products on display: the aspirin bot-

tle 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 veg-

etables 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 con-

sumers in a general existential strategy of making the matter of the world readyand 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 never-

theless 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 ofconcealing the unmappable and placeless origin behind all human production

and projection. In this sense, the supermarkets existential strategy is one of sav-

ing the appearances of daily life from disintegration and withdrawal. Its prod-

ucts 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 supermar-

ket is perhaps a hypertrophic example of how human organization in the mod-

ern 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




19/28

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 orga-

nization in the modern world.

Goodness and closeness of fit between body and environment may be a dom-

inant 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. Makingand 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 fill-

ing in its otherwise vacant space and time. The immediate utility of the super-

markets 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 concealingthese 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 litera-

ture 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; itwanders 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 gen-

eration 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 com-

pleted, readable form (Bersani and Dutoit 1993: 218). The paintings of the

Impressionists also return us to this generic state of being when they conflate theraw materiality of their paint with the forms and objects represented so that we

are again confronted with a spectacle of uncertain visibility. Carl Andres




20/28

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 admin-

istrative 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 aes-

thetic potential of existence which the immediate utility of everyday life conceals

from us. The gallery attempts to make art presentable and meaningful as a col-

lection of products; it explains and thus attempts to make explicit that which is

destined to remain implicit and therefore beyond explicit expression and under-standing. Beyond the gallery, the wider institutional context of the art world cel-

ebrates 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 inits 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. Incertain respects, the artists task of making the invisible visible is institutionally

formalized by the Church whose task is to make visible and graspable the invis-

ible power we call God. The Church recognizes the immanent presence of an

invisible power in the general conduct of human affairs and assumes the respon-

sibility for translating and interpreting this ultra-human presence into a lan-

guage 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 literatureand 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




21/28

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 pri-

mal 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 neces-

sary move in this process of reaching out of the body in order to express its inte-

rior. 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 Godspower 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 fitthe 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 suggesta 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 Markedor humanly distinguished and

differentiated which then, through the narration of Luke, enables us toLookat

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 theinitiatory 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 human-

ized 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, ide-

ally, 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 pow-

ers of withdrawal and disappearance without which there would be no existen-tial process or human continuity. The work of process is thus always preceded

by an indeterminable condition ofpre-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 orga-

nization is the articulate community of organs and senses which constantly cre-

ate and re-create connections and correspondences between themselves andtheir environment. The primary task of human organs in this context is to cor-

respond with the world in order to create and maintain a sense of sentient con-

tinuity between body and environment. Viewed in this way, human

organization is essentially a series of compositional acts rather than a com-

pleted, self-sufficient structure. This is one way of approaching human organi-

zation as the work ofprocess. 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 rela-tionships between the supermarkets parts were contained in a more compre-

hensive, 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 back-

ground, 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 dif-

ferentiated, specific things. The world as process has to be perceived in a sin-

gle 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 ofdifferentiated, finite forms and a pre-world of undifferentiation and incom-

pleteness. 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 differ-

entiation 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 trans-

lated into the visible and readable presences of daily life; it is an absent and neg-

ative 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 contin-

uou

Organs of Process: Rethinking Human Organization

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