Organization Studies 2005 Relationality Cooper 1689 710

Organization Studies
http://oss.sagepub.com/ Peripheral Vision : Relationality

Robert Cooper Organization Studies 2005 26: 1689 DOI: 10.1177/0170840605056398 The online version of this article can be found at: http://oss.sagepub.com/content/26/11/1689
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Authors name
Peripheral Vision Relationality

Robert Cooper
Abstract
Robert Cooper Keele University, UK
The act of relating is analysed as a constitutive feature of human agency. Relating is viewed as the continuous work of connecting and disconnecting in a uctuating network of existential events. Relating re-lates the human world as a restless scene of owing parts in which whole, self-contained objects take second place to the continuous transmission of movement. The relating of the world of moving parts is illustrated through the examples of modern methods of mass production and the transmission of information which both produce a weakening of reality.
Keywords: human agency, information transmission, the latent, partwhole
relationship, productionprediction
Organization Studies 26(11): 16891710 ISSN 01708406 Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA & New Delhi) www.egosnet.org/os
Institutional thinking sees the world as a system of categories and things. Its objects of attention appear as bounded entities which exist against a background whose main purpose seems to conceal itself from conscious viewing. The object of attention is thus the objective of focused thought which xes the entity as an object in its own right. This is how institutional thinking frames the social and cultural world for us so that we unthinkingly think in terms of categories and things. Sociology, psychology, economics, philosophy, literature, art are all institutional products of this divisionary thinking. Sociology and psychology persuade us to think of the human world as an aggregate of naturally integrated forms such as society, groups and individuals. We tend to see each of these as separate structures, with society as the overall container of groups and individuals. Each structure is framed by a boundary which distinguishes an inside from an outside, a system from its environment. Since each structure is seen as a self-consistent and selforganizing system, the conceptual emphasis is on structural unity and completeness, and the nature of the relationship with the wider background is treated as a secondary aspect of the structures inbuilt tendency of selfmaintenance. But this emphasis on the human world as a system of unitary categories and things tells us more about our institutional ways of thinking and mapping the complex structures we experience in the processual minutiae of daily life rather than the structures themselves. Categories and things may make it easier for us to grasp reality but they also hide its underlying complexities.
DOI: 10.1177/0170840605056398
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Organization Studies 26(11)
The category of the individual, for example, leaves us with the impression of a bounded, self-motivated human agent which acts on its environment. Both agent and environment are viewed as relatively independent terms. While it may be institutionally convenient to see the individual in this way, closer analysis begins to reveal the questionable nature of the thinking behind it. Categories and things suggest that thinking is directed by a centrally focused perspective which xes its forms and thus loses any sense of the human world as a eld of dynamic and mutable relations. The original double meaning of the term individual as both separate and connected suggests that the so-called individual is divided and undivided at the same time. This implies a certain distinctive tension between the human agent and the environmental objects that sustain it, for nothing can now be seen as a selfbounded, independent form. Individual and environment become complexly mixed together as a eld of dynamic interchanges in which locatable terms lose themselves in a dense interspace of relations. It is this interspace between the individual and its environment that begins to emerge as a prime mover of human agency in the continuous work of cultivating its world. Human agency works by reecting itself through meaningful connections with its environment. Human work in its generic sense consists of constructing mimetic representations out of the raw matter of the environment so that the human agent can see itself. This is one way of understanding the signicance of the interspace between the individual and its environment: inside and outside disappear as separate locations and merge together in the creative tension of the interspace that both separates and joins them as reections of each other. Human products are mimetic reections of the human mind and body; they are made to connect with the requirements of the bodys members and sense organs: everyday technologies such as domestic furniture, the newspaper, the television and the computer exemplify the bodys needs to complement and express itself through such extensive connections. In the human context, connections are a necessary strategy in representing a coherent world in which disconnected elements are made to t together. The newspaper brings together the news of the world in the convenience of its pages, which can be held in the hand and before the eyes of the reader; the letters, words and sentences that convey the news also have to connect with each other in sequence in order to give meaningful coherence to the act of reading. Connections imply disconnections and both are necessary features of the interspace between the human agent and the objects that surround and support it. The signicance of the newspaper rests essentially on its concealment of disconnected space through its general strategy of connection. Yet connection and disconnection are mutually constitutive of human agency. The ceaseless actions of daily life constitute a uctuating network of connections and disconnections with the various objects that extend and reect our sense of human agency. Instead of an external world of stable objects that support our needs and purposes, the space and time of daily life begins to look like a restless scene of acts in permanent suspension, that never reach a nal goal. Acts simply act and in themselves do not lead anywhere. They connect and
Cooper: Relationality
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disconnect. They express relationships between things rather than the things themselves. Relationships in their turn reveal transitivity and mobility. Objects become more like markers around which dense networks of relationships are acted out instead of xed objectives which predetermine our mental and physical movements. The newspaper, television and computer are all transmitters of relationship and transitivity rather than ends in themselves. They point to a space and time in which everything is unnished, innite, permanently suspended in a state of kaleidoscopic variability. Objects reect not so much themselves but the ux and ow of the connections and disconnections they become part of. Objects become the carriers and transmitters of human agency in space and time. They point to an aboriginal, pre-objective world in which categories and things cannot be found as discrete, bounded entities but which are continually subject to the multiple and changing circumstances in which they move as carriers and transmitters of human agency. Everything is relative to everything else. In a sense, all this has been said before by the relativity theory of modern physics, whose observations of the physical world of space and time depend essentially on local circumstances: on the particular methods used, on the particular location in space and on the particular point in time. Such observations suggest that the structures of our world are constituted by the situational vectors that carry our ways of knowing and that these vectors vary from situation to situation. The experiences of daily life are relative to the particular person, their surroundings at a particular moment, and the mood and feelings experienced in that situation. Relativity is thus another way of saying that the relationships between the human agent and its environment are not only situational but are also densely intermeshed so that its experiences are more like unique events that bind together agent and situation. Such a world cannot be presented in terms of such articial abstractions as have been conventional in the past: solid institutions, groups, individuals, which play the parts of distinct durable entities (Wilson 1931: 178). Such dualisms as mind and matter, esh and spirit, dream and reality also disappear in the emergence of the relative event and its dense intermeshing of relationships. Institutional products such as sociology and psychology also lose their categorial independence and purity when viewed in the context of the relative and relational. Since everything in human experience is densely interconnected and intermeshed in the event, human agency is a dynamic mix of relationships that intrinsically resist the institutional differentiations of sociology and psychology, and instead cross and transgress all attempts to categorize and objectify our experience of reality. An essential feature of the relative event is the suspended, pre-objective space and time of relativity itself. Since everything is relative to everything else, nothing is complete in itself but is part of the continuous movement and interaction between things. The so-called individual can only be dened by what he or she is not. You are you because you are not me. Today is today because it is not yesterday or tomorrow. In this space and time of relativity and relationship nothing can be itself and everything is suspended in an
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unnished betweenness that seems to refuse simple location and identity. It is like the silence that is the necessary background to speech but which also withdraws when speech expresses itself and yet is always present as a supportive absence. Like silence, the space and time of relativity is a world without end or purpose; it has no direction, no apparent form; and since it is pre-objective, it cannot be objectied or grasped as an object of thought. And yet it is the source or re-serve of all our ideas, objects and forms; it is like an innite womb which can receive and generate the multiple seeds of human agency as well as accommodating their complex developments and perpetual movement. Or it is the unlocatable origin of all beginnings, a placeless place whose absence we treat as a permanent loss we are committed to replace. Relativity reminds us of the presence of this unlocatable origin as a kind of missing presence which we can only vaguely infer and transiently express but which is always with us, continually reminding us of our existential need to connect with it. In this context, the conventional interpretation of relationship opens itself to hidden meanings. Relationship is commonly understood as connection or association between individual terms and thus implies the presence of gaps and intervals which invite us to bridge them in some way. But gaps and intervals are also expressions of that missing presence which serves to contain and accommodate the individual terms in an encompassing framework of space and time. The newspaper covertly implies this missing presence in its assembling of information from multiple and distant sources as well as its assembling on newsprint of the words and sentences to express this information. The gaps and intervals of missing presence not only contain and accommodate the diverse spaces and times reected in the news items but, signicantly, also motivate the complex human work of bridging the multiple gaps and intervals that exist at all levels of news production. The nal connection, of course, is between the newspaper and its reader. Without such connections a coherent and meaningful world would not be possible. Equally, such connections would not be possible without the disconnections created by gaps and intervals. But the newspaper not only connects the disconnected. It also tells or narrates the events it reports. And, signicantly, it repeats its work of connecting and narrating on a daily basis. Its varied functions of connecting, narrating and repeating itself reveal its underlying fragility and impermanence. Less of a stable object, the newspaper has to create its daily appearance out of the continuous threat of its disappearance. It repeatedly makes present a world that is intrinsically relative and transient, that is permanently haunted by the possibility of it not appearing. Connecting, narrating and repeating seem to suggest that they are strategies for constructing the human world as a series of representations out of an aboriginal chaos or unidentiable something rather than directly reporting it as a series of pre-existing and objective happenings. Relativity and relationship themselves both point in the direction of this primitive source in which differences and divisions lose themselves in a primal intermeshing and condensation: both relate the human world as a generic condition of relationality where everything is relative to everything
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else, suspended in an interspace of betweenness from which individually identiable, understandable and meaningful terms have to be extracted. Relationality reminds us that human agency works at two levels: that of a pre-objective, suspended space and time of latency in which the recognizable contents of the human world have yet to be realized, and that of the takenfor-granted world of everyday objects and meanings which are translations and realizations of the latency inherent in all human actions and thinking. Relationality re-lates latency. It re-lates in the double sense of connecting terms and thus creating coherent structures of relations out of the gaps and intervals of disconnection as well as narrating and making explicit the dormant and implicit nature of latency. Relationality re-lates the domain of the pre-objective and suspended with the objective world of realizable goals and purposeful action through the trans-lation of the latent into the manifest. And, just as signicantly, it re-lates the manifest world of objects and their objectives with the latent space and time of the pre-objective and suspended. In this sense, human agency is the expression of relationality, the continuous construction of the manifest out of the latent and the continuous inspiring of the manifest by the latent. The generic work of the human world is the continuous re-lating of relationality.
The Latent
To say that something is manifest means that it is clear, denitive and even obvious. To say that something is latent means that it is unclear, indenite and even nebulous. The latent does not easily lend itself to the clarity of denition; it is allusive rather than explicative. It can mean hidden, secret, clandestine; it can also mean lateral, widespread, disseminated, broad, extensive; it suggests something dormant, quiescent, virtual, waiting to be expressed, as well as something malleable, plastic and even formable. It seems to resist conceptual and practical appropriation, all the time receding from direct, explicit expression. The latent suggests a eld of relationships rather than an aggregate of things. Its latency is a source or re-serve of possible events to which we attribute some sense of form; it is a suspension of multiple possibilities, always exceeding our attempts to x and objectify it. To approach it, we have to abandon our customary habit of seeing the things of the world from the xed focus of a centralized point of view and recognize their essential incipience when seen from a multiple mix of perspectives. A city, for example, is not something that can be dened from a centralized perspective. It is an endless kaleidoscope of possible viewpoints. Any attempt to express it as in the xed form of a street map, an aerial photograph or a written history has to be recognized as a provisional and partial glimpse of a territory whose latency exceeds all representation. While replete with the identiable objects of its buildings, streets and trafc, the city also occupies a pre-objective space through which its objects re-late to each other in a mobile panorama of interacting events. Space, any space, is much more than the container of things; it is not the setting
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(real or logical) in which things are arranged, but the means whereby the positing of things becomes possible (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 243). Things derive their character and thinghood from the space through which they re-late to each other: This means that instead of imagining (space) as a sort of ether in which all things oat ... we must think of it as the universal power enabling them to be connected (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 243). Connection and relationship are the vehicles that human agency carves out of pre-objective space so that its latency can be re-lated through the meaningful arrangements of the things and objects that make up the human world. The pre-objective world thus reminds us of the fundamental signicance of the relationality of things rather than the things themselves. The preobjectival is a spatiality without things and space in this sense is a medium through which the body and its senses realize themselves:
This is what happens in the night. Night is not an object before me; it enwraps me and inltrates through all my senses ... I am no longer withdrawn into my perceptual look-out from which I watch the outlines of objects moving by at a distance. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 283)
Like the latency of pre-objective space, night surrounds and embraces the sensing body, makes it feel it is part of something that lies beyond the objective world and hence cannot be located:
Night has no outlines; it is itself in contact with me and its unity is the mystical unity of the mana ... All space for the reecting mind is sustained by thinking which relates its parts to each other, but in this case the thinking starts from nowhere. (MerleauPonty 1962: 283)
Connection and relationship rather than things and objects thus animate and constitute human agency in the never-ending work of trying to locate and nd itself. The city itself now has to be understood as the never-ending work of connecting and disconnecting, relating and irrelating, its multiple and mutable aspects. It can never be seen as an object, a thing-in-itself. Its houses, factories, schools, trains, roads, bridges, tunnels, department stores, hotels, supermarkets and ofces are the transmission stations of relationships and transitivity. They re-late not so much their functional objectivity but the latency intrinsic to all relationality, that indeterminate and indeterminable origin of human agency which withdraws from all our attempts to capture it as an essence and which at best we can only approach through the partial and transient snapshots of our conceptual mappings. Like the attempts to dene and map the city, the signicance of the institutional thinking of sociology and psychology lies in the act of re-lating that is, connecting with and telling or informing about that latent power which, while resisting all attempts to represent it, is the primal source and animator of all our thinking and knowledge, however partial and transient the latter may be. The latent re-lates itself like the night and its spatiality without things; it tempts and taunts us to know it, to give it form and meaning and to recognize it as the source and origin of our own human agency. The latent may never make itself explicit but it haunts and hints like an invisible presence as if to say that it is always with us despite its resistance
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to representation. It can be compared to the panoramic views of nature which exceed conceptual analysis and descriptive grasp, and at best suggest an atmospheric aesthetics which can only be sensed through feelings. This is how the sea, for example, features in literature: an indeterminable presence that lies on the far margin of society beckoning us to listen to and decode the ocean of meanings and associations of its sacral quality (Raban 1992: 3334). Or as a character in Charles Dickenss Dombey and Son implores while facing the open sea: I want to know what it says. The sea, Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying? (quoted in Raban 1992: 1). Literature reveals the sea as a latent call to its human observers to express their own latent thoughts and feelings through its essential indeterminability:
The sea in literature is not a veriable object, to be described, with varying degrees of success and shades of emphasis; it is, rather, the supremely liquid and volatile element, shaping itself newly for every writer and every generation. (Raban 1992: 3)
Like night, the seas latency has no outlines; it is simply space for the reecting mind where thinking starts from nowhere (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 283). The latent space and time of pre-objectivity is thus never a place or moment which can be located; it is more like a spiritual enfolding that caresses its human contacts. The caress reminds us of the nowhere that exceeds every where, every location; it beckons us to become more than the immediate presence that currently denes us (Levinas 1969). The caress re-lates the latent while minding it as a placeless, hidden place, as the essentially hidden that throws itself toward the light without becoming signication. Not nothingness but what is not yet (Levinas 1969: 256). The caress reveals the latent as a suspended, pre-objective space which can never be located or dened: it
consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its form toward a future never future enough, in soliciting what slips away as though it were not yet. It searches, it forages. It is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search: a movement unto the invisible. (Levinas 1969: 257258)
The latent caresses us from a placeless place that draws us and withdraws from us at the same time. Secret and clandestine, the latent may be revealed but it is never disclosed: the clandestine uncovered does not acquire the status of the disclosed (Levinas 1969: 260). When Merleau-Ponty calls the pre-objective ambience of the night the mystical unity of the mana with its unlocatability of nowhere, and when Levinas talks of the clandestine ambience of the caress as a source that never explicitly signies but simply intimates itself as a no mans land between being and not-yet-being (Levinas 1969: 259), they both express the intrinsic resistance of the latent to being captured as a category or thing. Their language is both allusive and elusive. They sense the excessiveness of the latent as something that must remain forever absent and yet is mysteriously present as an absence, as the sense of something missing. It is the same with Dickenss nonplussed beholder of the sea who, however, seems to lack the philosophical patience of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. He wants to hear the sea say
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something specic, meaningful and immediate while they prefer to bask in the caress that speaks only of the incommunicable. Merleau-Pontys reference to mana returns us to an early concern of social anthropology where mana featured as a fundamental negative source of human agency. In the social anthropology of Marcel Mauss, mana indicates a general condition of latency that pervades the variable and multiple social and cultural expressions of human life. Like the latent, mana is an invisible and missing wholeness out of which human agency extracts partial and transient images and meanings; an innite and unlocatable source, mana is a condition of zero degree or zero value which can assume any value or signicance required for the purpose of representation, provided that the assumed value or signicance still remains part of the latent reserve from which it comes (Lvi-Strauss 1950). The zero degree of mana is thus always more than the partial and transient values and meanings extracted from it. Its latency appears as an invisible wholeness which mutely serves to connect the gaps between the humanly constructed parts of the world. Mana reveals the latent as the negative capacity of the zero degree which in itself is featureless and characterless but which can receive and accommodate forms and qualities external to it: it is as if there were a layer behind appearances that had no qualities, but took on the character of its surroundings, accommodating itself to our interpretations, as ambergris acquires and retains fugitive fragrances, giving us perfume (Kaplan 1999: 59). Manas invisible wholeness implies a dynamic power that always exceeds representation but whose dynamic absence mysteriously motivates human agency to give it form. The latent as a negative but dynamic power in human agency is a central feature of Georg Simmels theory of forms. Life as the source of human agency cannot be captured in a form. Like the forms of the city and the vision of the sea, the forms of life for Simmel are merely partial and transient expressions of a transcendent and invisible source which is nevertheless permanently present in all the activities of daily life, however mundane they may seem at times. Like the negative capacity of mana, life is always more than, always in excess of the forms it seems to generate. Simmel attributes a dynamic restlessness to the latency of human life: Life as such is formless, yet incessantly generates forms for itself (Simmel 1971: 376). Life, it seems, can only know itself through the generation of forms but forms assume their own meanings and signicance and thus conceal life as the relentless source of all human expression: Whenever life expresses itself, it desires to express only itself; thus it breaks through any form which would be superimposed on it by some other reality (Simmel 1971: 382). Simmel thus views life as an irruptively active latency rather than a passive source: life is always in a latent opposition to the form which it perceives
as something which has been forced upon it. It would like to puncture not only this or that form, but form as such, and to absorb the form in its immediacy, to let its own power and fullness stream forth just as if it emanated from lifes own source, until all cognition, values, and forms are reduced to direct manifestations of life. (Simmel 1971: 377)
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In Simmels interpretation, the latency of life does not just caress its human expressors but directly provokes them to transcend the formulable and denable in order to express its sense of the more than. While
psychic life is perceived in terms of its contents, it is nite. It consists then of these ideal contents, which now have the form of life. But the process reaches beyond them. We conceive, feel, desire this and that ... something in principle completely denite and denable. Yet, as we experience it, we feel something else to be present, something unformulable, indenable: we feel of every life as such that it is more than every assignable content. (Simmel 1971: 370371)
The latency of life for Simmel is always more-than-life, an aboriginal force which carries its human contents before it. It transgresses all attempts to give it form, to classify it in the language of categories and things. Yet while the more-than-life of latency may reject its representation through forms, desiring only to appear in its naked immediacy, its paradox is that it can only make human sense through the expression of form (Simmel 1971: 392393). Human agency thus nds itself actively suspended between the latent forces of life which refuse the formal arrest of representation and its own cognitive need to locate its world in forms, categories and things. Simmel stresses the relentlessness of these latent forces in their pursuit of that which lies beyond the existing forms of life or what we earlier called, following Levinas, the what-is-not-yet. The urge to transcend emerges as the subversive work of lifes latency. And for Simmel this is especially evident in the manic work of the modern world in its productive proliferation of things and in its incessant technological innovations that appear more like repudiations of the present than functional aids to the living of everyday life. The latent suggests itself as a missing presence that can only be alluded to through the variable and transient forms and representations of human agency. This means that it can only be re-lated or re-presented in terms completely other than itself. It, therefore, presents itself always as a missing power that is concealed by what re-presents it. And yet its missingness is immanent in all human expression as an invisible wholeness which, like the city and the sea, can never be fully conceived. There may be different ways of approaching it but these can never be added together to make that whole whose fate is to recede and deny us full access to it. In Merleau-Pontys pre-objective space, latency emerges as the pliable and plastic source of the social and cultural forms of human life, out of which human agency creates its structures of meaning and communication. Pre-objective space itself cannot be revealed since its latent nature is to conceal itself. It can only re-late its latency laterally through the objects and objectives it serves to bring into existence. The latent thus re-lates itself as a missing presence. Levinass caress also tells us that it is a missing presence immanent in all aspects of human agency. The caress speaks from a placeless place whose missingness is a no mans land between being and not-yet-being (Levinas 1969: 259). By no mans land, Levinas means to suggest a missingness that accompanies all the forms and objectives of human experience. Nothing is complete in itself; everything exists in a eld of relationality as a mobile matrix of interacting events whose individual
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components are never more than partial and transient as though forever searching for what Levinas calls the invisible and the what-is-not-yet. The latent as missingness is also what Simmel intends when he argues that the practical contents of everyday life are forever haunted by an unformulable, indenable presence which is always more-than-life. The missing latency of life continually provokes us to transcend the practical presences that make up the immediacies of everyday existence as if to suggest that what we desire is what we can never have. From these various insights into the nature of the latent there emerges a conception of human agency that foregrounds the idea of relationality in which human being as a generic process is characterized by its partialness and incompleteness in the relativity of space and time. To say that everything is relative and relational is to acknowledge the signicant role of absence, disconnection and incompletion when human agency is placed in the wider generic context of human being. In this wider context, human agency as acts of being is the continuous production and reproduction of presence or the immediate, ready-made forms and objects that constitute the everyday human world and which function as the taken-for-granted supports of daily life. Out of sight and therefore outside the mundane mind is the latency of absence which necessarily accompanies every experienced presence. The immediacy of presence as an expression of generic human being has its source in absence as a missing and volatile presence. The latency of the sea is a dramatic example of absence that provokes the human call for presence. The absence that accompanies presence is therefore not a redundant or unnecessary feature of the immediate and practical world. In order to re-late presence as a constituting force of human agency, the latent conceals itself as a necessarily missing presence that withdraws from all attempts to make it presentable. It reminds us that the construction of the human forms and objects that constitute what we take to be reality is the provisional work of human agency that seeks to save its presentable products from the threat of withdrawal intrinsic to absence and non-presentability. The re-lating of relationality is thus a kind of creative agonistic between presence and absence, manifest and latent.
Relation
Relation is connection, association. It also implies a world of parts which further suggests a sense of wholeness. But wholeness here is not a sum or aggregate of parts. The relation between part and whole is one of latency in which part is latent to whole as whole is latent to part. The latent nature of the shared terms means that each implies the other so that they exist in a relationship of betweenness rather than as separate terms. In this conception of relation, the conventional way of thinking of society as an aggregate of individuals and groups gives way to the recognition of an indivisible and latent force that condenses and thus connects all three terms together at some primal and indiscernible level: individual and group are false alternatives,
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doubly so implicated because each implies the other (Wagner 1991: 162). Part and whole are not separate, static structures but actively constitute each other and in this sense are undifferentiated or primally enfolded and entangled in each other. This also means that they are relative to each other, that they exist in a dynamic eld of relationality where things do not have independent forms but are more like events or happenings. Relationality at this level draws special attention to the latent ongoingness that underlies our conventional ways of understanding the world in terms of ready-made categories and things. To re-late in this sense is to trans-late the latency of the pre-objective world into a reserve of parts or elements that can be endlessly combined and permuted to create and re-create the meaningful and communicable forms of life such as we see in the letters of the alphabet which can be combined and permuted into words and in the further combining and permuting of the words into sentences. The human body and its organs are also active parts in this basic work of composition: the eye and the hand, for example, participate in the acts of reading and writing and are thus just as necessary as the letters and words that make up the sentence. The human agent exists as a relational term whose identity is connective in space and time so that we begin to understand human agency as the movement of being (Bersani and Dutoit 1993: 143; Bersani and Dutoit 1998: 72) rather than the quasi-static connections it makes between categories and things. The movement of being means that we live not so much in a world of nished products but in a world of continuous composition and happenings between things. In this movement of being, parts and wholes imply each other so that the human agent is constituted by its relational acts rather than being the expression of an inner subjectivity. Relational being is constituted by and as a subject position. This doesnt mean that being is subjective; indeed, the very distinction between subjective and objective is meaningless here for the subject is already implied by the subjects active participation in its acts of relationality (Bersani and Dutoit 1998: 71). The participation of relationality means that the subject participates as a constitutive part of the movement of being and composition just as the other parts participate in the subject. The scientist, for example, is never an objective observer of the world but is constituted as a subject who participates in the particular study of a particular part of the world using a particular methodology and technology. The scientist both re-lates his or her acts of research and in turn is re-lated by them. In other words, the scientist as a participator in research does not simply act on an object of research but is also constituted in turn by the particular object and methods used. Participation in this example means that the scientist exists in the interior of the activity of research and not outside it as an external and independent observer. Relation and relationality imply that the movement of being is motivated by an invisible and missing wholeness. Neither singular nor plural, neither individual nor group, the missing wholeness of relationality bears and transmits its constitutive parts in an integrally implied relationship (Wagner 1991: 163) just as the scientist and his or her project imply each other in the
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interior of the research activity. Relation here is the re-lating or sending on of latency itself and not the relating of a specic object or message. Human reproduction powerfully exemplies the work of integrally implied relationship in its engendering and transmitting of life in which individuals generate each other as vectors in the movement of being: People exist reproductively by being carried as part of another, and carry or engender others by making themselves genealogical or reproductive factors of these others (Wagner 1991: 163). The latency of reproductive re-lating lies in the neutral nature of its integrally implied connections which transcend the identities of persons as individual generators such as mother and father who are equally generated by their offspring in an integral relationship where the parts imply each other. To say that the generating parts re-late each other neutrally is simply to say that they are neither one thing nor the other just as they are neither singular nor plural, neither individual nor group. Their neutral nature means that they inhabit a placeless place whose latency resists location and description. The latent is neutral in the special sense of being an unidentiable omnipresence that accommodates the categories and things of the world while retaining its own neutral nature. It is the neutral presence of all integral relationships, an invisible and missing wholeness which provokes us to relate it through the creation of locatable and identiable places such as the positioning of towns and cities on a map. But the locations of the map are not individually meaningful since they derive their signicance from the territorial relationships between them. The territory itself never gets onto the map (Korzybski 1994: 750); it is a neutral omnipresence that exceeds all attempts to represent it in locatable terms but which serves as an accommodating invisible wholeness for the topographical contents of the map. The neutral nature of the territory implies itself between the various locations on the map as each location is never completely itself but depends for its locatability on its relationship with the map as a whole. It is as if the neutrality of the territory, of its being neither this nor that, were a missing presence that, like the sea faced by Dickenss nonplussed observer, calls out to us to trans-late and relate it in a meaningful language. Neutrality as an unidentiable omnipresence makes us see latency in a new light. The neutral as neither one thing nor the other is thus an invisible wholeness or latency which serves to contain or hold differences together. This effectively means that parts are integrally related and imply a wholeness that always exceeds their individuality; parts may thus be seen as expressing a latent indivisibility that grounds the relationships between them. Parts thus both carry and are carried by the neutral nature of latency: parts, in the long run, are the carriers of being, not wholes, which are no more than provisional arrays of parts (Fisher 1991: 213). Parts reect the interactive nature of integral relationship where parts and whole actively reect each other: parts (from the Latin partire, portare, to bear, carry, share, distribute) constitute the movement of being between things where betweenness means interaction by or via two (i.e. the be two of between) in space and time rather than the movement of individual things. The latent as a neutral state
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that is neither one thing nor the other moves always between categories and things and it is this continuous movement that mobilizes parts as a process of continuous de-parture. Relationality thus re-lates the latent as always moving beyond the immediate present in order to make yet further connections. The latency of relationality always defers itself and thus can never be directly observed; its neutrality refuses to be identied as a category or thing; it re-lates only the intrinsic latency of integral relationship where parts generate each other in an endless process of interchange in which there is neither one thing nor another. All human communication originates in this primal latency, all human knowing re-lates the ceaseless movement of the neutral where an answer is another question, a connection a gap, a similarity a difference, and vice versa (Strathern 1991: xxiv). To re-late is to carry and be carried by an unidentiable force which, like Simmels more-than-life, refuses to be caught in a xed form, re-lating only its own neutrality. Simmel views the process of re-lating through his idea of pure sociability in which relationship exists for its own sake and not for some external goal. Pure sociability is a neutral force in which relationship works through a principle of reversal where, for example, answers become questions, connections gaps, and similarities differences. In these examples, relationship re-lates itself through converses which, for Simmel, characterize conversation as the purest form of sociability in which talking is performed simply for itself and in which there is nothing but relationship (Simmel 1971: 137). Conversation does not exist for the transmission of an extrinsic content; its content exists to relate person and talk as converses of each other so that the talk formed through the person implies the person formed through the talk (Wagner 1991: 166). Re-lating here means that person and talk re-late each other in a neutral interaction and integral relationship in which they are neither one nor the other but both at the same time. Conversation, for Simmel, carries us along as social parts in a process of continuous transmission in which the content of the conversation is always secondary to the movements between the converses or reversals whose function is to imply each other in the act of de-parture. The act of re-lating is always an act of deferral or departure that ensures the movement of being: the question defers the answer just as the answer defers the question, the connection defers the gap just as the gap defers the connection. In its endless work of deferral and postponement, the re-lating of relationality draws attention to the neutral omnipresence of the latent. The latent never reveals itself and appears only as a void or vacuum that can accommodate a multiplicity of mutable forms. It is like Merlin the magician of the ancient myth who could never be pinned down and changed repeatedly into a series of animal forms such as a fox, a rabbit and a uttering bird. Like Merlin, the latent withdraws from all attempts to make it visible and yet it is always present as a motivating absence of human agency. It de-parts or withdraws from all attempts to place it in a mental map of categories and things and simply intimates its presence as a neutral and placeless place, a nowhere, which beckons and provokes us to nd it. It reminds us of Simmels
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understanding of conversation as that invisible background which carries the content of communication but which in itself has no ulterior end, no content, and no result outside itself (Simmel 1971: 130). Simmels pure sociability expresses only itself as a vehicle for the movement of being and integral relationship; it cannot be identied with anything other than its own betweenness. In this radical sense, sociability is a social game where the play of betweenness and interaction frees itself from subjective purposes and practical goals. Dissociated from the subjective and practical, the play of the game carries its participants along as if it were playing with them in a neutral space in which they renounce their subjectivities to become neither one nor the other in a continuous process of deferral. The latency of conversation and the game suggests an unlocatable but animating absence which is strangely present as a source of free movement in the playability or pliability of negative space and time where nothing has yet been determined. The latent in this sense is more like a mirror which reects the various and changing objects and events that pass in front of it. The mirror itself is like a negative space which only appears through the images it reects. Without such images, the mirror would not be noticeable as a source of visibility; it withdraws when it reects and thus seems more like an empty space that serves as a supportive background for all the objects and events it helps to re-present. As an empty or negative space, the mirror opens itself to everything it cannot be; it functions as an innite receptacle for the multiple and changing forms of the world. The mirror thus symbolizes latency as the negative space in and through which the forms of human agency are both constructed and sent on as the movement of being. Human history, for example, can be viewed as a mirror which reects not so much its originating events but their later re-presentations. Historical knowledge is subject to endless reinterpretation because the post-historical perspectives from which it is seen are also subject to continuous change. And when a book is read by various readers, its readings change as they mirror the particular person, time and place through which the book is read, and the same book read a second or third time by the same reader will also present a series of different readings. It is as if the book itself, like a mirror, withdraws to permit a variation of readings to appear. The negative spaces of history and books exemplify the latent as a creative origin out of which emerge the innite re-presentations that maintain and sustain the work of culture. Like the mirror, the latent is the inexhaustible reserve out of which human agency develops and in which it circulates. Anonymous and mute, the latent itself cannot speak. Like the mirror, its function is to reect and re-late the forms and events impressed upon it. Human agency re-lates the latent by shaping the raw materials of the world into a language of forms and objects which reect and carry human thought and movement. It is thus that human agency re-lates itself by continuously positioning and situating its thoughts and actions always in re-lation to the multiple and variable forms and objects that surround it. To say that the forms and objects of the human world are re-lative is simply to acknowledge that they re-late the human agent just as much as he or she re-lates them. It also
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means that the agent becomes a relative term in a uid eld rather than the occupier of a privileged position of knowing.
Relationality in Context
Relationality re-lates the pre-objective space and time of the latent. The latent is a no mans land in which human action takes place but in which action is also permanently suspended. It offers nothing for us to see nor directions for us to follow. If it says anything at all, it says nothing; its message is that it has no message, that it has not yet been divided in space and time so that it cannot be distinguished as an entity in its own right. It can only intimate itself through the forms we compose and inscribe on it. Despite its intrinsic unknowableness, it inhabits and pervades all human agency as a motivating power that resists capture by conscious thought and which refuses any sense of containment or completion. Like Merlin the magician in his variable manifestations, the latent only communicates a sense of innity and withdrawal. It expresses itself only through deferral and disappearance. The act of relating actively maintains the latent through the continuous construction and transmission of manifest information which at the same time also serves to defer the latent and thus ensure its enduring power to motivate human agency as a productive force that re-lates through connection and narration. To relate ordinarily means to connect or to narrate or tell. In the wider context of relationality, to re-late means that the human agent is an incomplete part which seeks to realize its missing completeness through establishing connections with other parts. Narration itself is a further expression of relating or connecting letters into words and words into sentences in order to make meaningful sense of the world. Since the latent is that which has not yet been divided in any way, it has no parts and is simply an invisible wholeness. Basic to its emergence as a force in human agency is its partialization through division. The divided parts are still subject to the call of the latent which they experience as an incompleteness that requires connection with other parts. The neutral basis of the latent as neither one thing nor the other is the primal denial by the latent of division as an act of distinction and separation. Relationality reects this primal desire for connection but also recognizes the further need to distinguish between the neutrality of parts through narration which arranges parts sequentially in space and time. And just as letters and words have to be arranged sequentially in a sentence, so does the human body and its organs have to connect with and narrate the multiple parts of its world in order to complete, however temporarily and transiently, its own sense of incompleteness. Through the body and its organs, human agency re-lates the parts of its world just as the parts of its world equally re-late it. Within this complex act of mediation, the neutrality of the individual parts re-emerges to remind us of the everpresence of the latent. The human body as a part can only know itself through its aboriginal relationship with other parts; it nds and denes itself through the continuous work of reecting itself
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through connecting and narrating the forms and objects that constitute its immediate world. The total relationality of being means that the human has afnities of design, positioning, movement with the nonhuman and that objects (including ourselves) are always being repeated and lost in other objects to which they correspond as forms (Bersani and Dutoit 1993: 140). All this means that human agency is continually held in a eld of suspense and that the human agent is forever partial and can only realize itself through correspondence with the forms and objects that surround and re-late it. Relationality makes us see the world as a complex network of active connections rather than visibly independent and identiable forms and objects. On this view, people as self-sufcient agents do not exist for they are parts of a network of supports that enable them to connect with other parts and to narrate their connections. People are networks. We are all artful arrangements of bits and pieces (Law 1994: 33). The bits and pieces of human existence clothes, furniture, transport, televisions, computers, mobile phones are all props or supports that supplement our existential incompleteness. We are composed of, or constituted by our props, visible and invisible, present and past ... without our props we would not be peopleagents, but only bodies (Law 1994: 33). Our props re-late us just as much as we re-late them. And it is in this sense that we have to understand relationality as an active condition of betweenness in which individual terms can never exist or nd themselves since they are always mediated by the neutrality of the latent. Never a thing in itself, relationality tells us that we are also parts in the movement of being and what constitutes us is the interactive re-lating that occurs between parts: the scientist exists in the interior of the research activity and not outside it as an external and independent observer; the motor vehicle drives me just as much as I drive it. Relationality says that we are extensions of our supports and props just as much as they are extensions of us; it reminds us of the essential reciprocity between ourselves and the world of objects. On this reading, human agents do not simply use the earth to extend and magnify themselves; equally, they are born as extensions of the earth, as the earths eruption into intelligence onto its own surface (Scarry 1994: 85). We are left with a picture of the human agent not as a self-contained controller of its world but as an intrinsically re-lational part of a eld of sentient-intelligent-movable attachments (Scarry 1994: 8586). The supports and props of human agency help us to understand relationality as the work of parts that carry the movement of being as a generic act of deferral. A prop supports the human body through transforming the body and itself into a vehicle of transmission and movement. The prop becomes a necessary part of relationality as a bearer and transmitter of human agency: parts are the carriers of being, and not wholes structures which are simply the provisional composition of parts (Fisher 1991: 213). And parts are provisional in the double sense of providing or supplying the means for transmission and for being transient. The provisional nature of parts means that human agency is forever incomplete and thus has to renew itself at every step in a continuous process of deferral. And what it defers is the invisible
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missingness of the latent. Human agency is like a dog chasing its unreachable tail. The latent is thus that aboriginal site of withdrawal which motivates and provokes all human knowing and intelligent action. As such, it is a constituting feature of all human agency. What we do not and cannot know speaks to us through its silence, like Dickenss nonplussed observer of the seas latency which refuses to reveal itself in a human language. Relationality reveals the latent as a permanently missing presence whose missingness is present in every act of re-lating. This is the primal meaning of the term re-late: to reect or to mirror the intrinsic absence that haunts all our attempts to make the world present and presentable, to render it readable, stable, secure and reliable. The latent is the negative that makes possible the positive, the absence or missingness immanent in every presence; it haunts the answer as a further question, it is the gap that makes possible the connection, and it complements similarity with difference. The props that support everyday existence are never simply positive objects: the tool in its ready-to-hand taken-for-grantedness always points to a space and time beyond itself; the word in a sentence is a transient indicator of something yet to come. The tool when lost, the word when missing, both reveal the fundamental signicance of missingness in the constitution of everyday forms and objects; the empty space left by the absent object is now seen to be its latent source, strangely present as a constitutive absence and invisible presence (Gadamer 1976: 234235). Human re-lating thus always draws on a space and time beyond itself; it connects with and narrates a space and time that is nowhere and not yet, a no mans land between being and not-yetbeing (Levinas 1969: 259). In this sense, re-lating is always partial and forever unnished as though suspended in space and time; its source in the latent makes its connections and narrations always relative to its other multifarious manifestations which mirror the latent as a placeless absence in all human presences. The human agent as subject itself becomes a relative and uid term in the eld of relationality. No longer consciously self-sufcient, the subject is dispersed in a eld, a comprehensive realm of interrelated energies, which are organized yet indenitely subject to mutation and inection and in which the human being, for all his mighty aspirations towards order, is no more than a detail a local inection of the eld (Bowie 1978: 144145). The manifest forms and objects of human agency are continually subject to the latent possibilities they exclude and which always inhabit the manifest as a lateral excess that invites the human agent either to exclude it in order to maintain the smooth routine of systematic thought or to submit to its speculative wanderings and tantalizing ambiguities. But the conventional reading of the world stresses the nished product, the ready-made category or thing, rather than the incipience of composition and construction. To re-late in this sense is to narrate and represent the world as if it were already made up for human understanding; it underlines the immediate presence of things in order to conrm the reality of the world and thus saves us from the latent threat that presence may not take place (Bersani and Dutoit 1993: 121). Here, the latency of the world is denied and the multiple and varied gestures that
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constitute its coming-into-presence are hidden from view. What we see and think assumes a ctional reality and stability. The immediacy of presence is essentially an inversion of absence. Relationality is the continuous reminder of the latent as an invisible presence that motivates the movement of being. What is manifest is not possible without the latent; manifest and latent integrally imply each other as do part and whole (Wagner 1991). In the same way, the human subject is never a singular agent but is always integrally implied in its interactions with its props. The power of the latent lies in its active and continuous deferral of presence in a productive receding of consciousness (Bersani 1986: 47). The human subject is mobilized by what is absent from it, by what has yet to come and thus by a sense of anticipation. But here the absent and the not-yet are contemporaneous with the immediate and the present, so that deferral is integrally implied in all human agency. The body lives through its connections with the external world and these connections are always partial in space and time. The limbs of the body actively reect this partialness in that they reach out to a limbo or latency of pre-objective space and time: the hands seek something to hand-le, the feet become a way of measuring domestic space, arms and legs are translated into the parts of a chair. Every cultural and productive act includes an elaboration of the self outside the boundaries of the body so that the self becomes integrally indistinguishable from the props of its world (Fisher 1991: 233). The relativity of relationality expresses itself through the bodys participation with its preobjective space and time and the reections of itself that the body creates through that participation. In this context, the act of re-lating appears as a primal, generic act that has to be continuously repeated in order to maintain human agency as an active force in space and time and to defer its possible disappearance. This has less to do with the re-lating of particular objects and terms, of a specic x or y, since its generic work is to repeat the act of re-lating itself. The re-lating of specic objects and terms simply serves the more generic action of re-lating re-lating itself. As a primal, generic act, re-lating always refers and defers to something beyond itself, to what it is not yet, to something yet to come. Re-lating in this generic sense re-lates that forever unnished and suspended no mans land between being and not-yet-being (Levinas 1969: 259) where an answer is another question, a connection a gap, a similarity a difference, and vice versa (Strathern 1991: xxiv). The history of modern methods of production illustrates relationality as an all-pervasive force in the development of the modern world. Industrial production is increasingly focused on the production of parts rather than whole, nished objects: the mass production methods used in the manufacture of the motor car conveniently illustrate production as the re-lating of parts. Production in this context begins to look like a gigantic act of prediction, though not in the statistical sense of predicting the probability of a future event but more as a way of connecting with and narrating the relativities intrinsic to the pre-objective space and time of the latent. The production of parts rather than complete objects echoes the essential nature of re-lating as the revealing of the latent as a pre-objective eld that calls out to us to explore and express it. Production becomes the prediction or revealing of this plastic,
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pliable and playable eld of latency. The production of parts reveals the world less as a collection of nite categories and things and more as the scene of a uctuating eld of interactions which, like the city, is essentially indeterminable and therefore unknowable as a mappable structure. Structured objects become restless and weak, imposing themselves on the stock of parts only feebly ... At rst there is, in effect, a feeling of object loss, as though the world of actual things had ceased to exist (Fisher 1991: 249). There emerges a weakening of reality, a dispersal of self-contained objects and forms, in which uid and eeting parts transfer the reality to the system as a whole and to the play of transformations and possibilities that it invites (Fisher 1991: 249). A relational space of relativities begins to foreground itself as the scene of human agency. Objects become background to relationality as the prime mover of human agency. Now seen as moving parts in a eld of active suspension, objects lose their independent character to become vehicles for re-lating the connections and disconnections between things. The human world becomes more and more relative, more transient and thus more fragile and indenite. Production becomes a pure act of becoming and beginning without ever reaching an end, as if in pursuit of supports and props that threaten to disappear into latent space and time. Production thus re-lates not so much the formulable content of the world but the withdrawal of the latent. Relationality draws its power and action from the implicit and suggestive non-presence of the latent; it works by attempting to re-late and trans-late the uncapturability of the latents placelessness and unlocatability. But every re-lational attempt, every connection, leads to a disconnection, to another question. The modern world of information transmission is perhaps the most frenetic expression of human agencys attempt to nd and re-late itself in and through the unlocatable nowhere of the latent. It seems to us that the ontology most congenial to an age of information is one that identies being as relationality, as the principle of connectedness assumed by all technologies of transmission (Bersani and Dutoit 1998: 110). Relationality here is the movement of being, of human agency in the perpetual work of trying to locate and re-late itself in a context that offers no natural foundation but only the unfoundation of perpetual withdrawal. The transmission of information necessarily implies the production of information. Relationality, as we have noted, also implies production as prediction or the revealing of the latent as that aboriginal withdrawal of the world which provokes further production and prediction. Instead of xed forms and stable objects, the production and transmission of information presents the movement of being as a series of events or happenings. Things and objects now happen rather than exist in their own right. Reality appears as a ow of events which keeps on owing. The emergence of the mass media in modern life newspapers, radio, television has produced a society of generalized communication in which we are made to realize the contingency and relativity of the real world in which we have to live (Vattimo 1992: 10). A generalized weakening of the world of categories and things occurs in which entities (including the human subject) dissolve in the images distributed by the information media (Vattimo 1992: 116).
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Information technologies such as the computer are no longer instrumental objects or tools but are relative and relational parts in the production and transmission of events and happenings. The computer especially expresses the production of information as the prediction or unfolding of a new and more mobile space that reects the hidden capacity of the pre-objective and the latent. As a word processor, for example, the computer redenes the nature of the word which is no longer a static lexical unit belonging to an inventory preregistered in a dictionary or part of the xity of a printed text (Harris 2000: 240). Electronic writing re-lates the latency of relativity in space and time through its stress on the relentless sending on of information in its pursuit of the transient and ephemeral. The computer expands the mind outward as though it were responding to the bodys instinct to nd itself by reaching out beyond its own limbic limits. The traditional conception of the author as the source of writing gives way to a view of the author as an active part in the happening of an integrally implied relationship in which both author and computer write or re-late each other. The development of computerized music holds similar implications for the composer, who now explores the multiple musical possibilities offered by the computer and who is thus less and less required to be able to play any instrument at all (including the human larynx) (Harris 2000: 241). Computerization is thus the relativization of the human world in the special sense of drawing attention to that world as the latent space and time in which human agency tries to re-late itself in an increasingly unstable and dissolving reality whose continuous threat of disappearance provokes ever further productions and predictions of the latent. The computer unfolds the latency of pre-objective space and time by deferring the immediacy of presence in the promise of an elsewhere yet to be discovered. Relationality invites us to see the world as the movement of relationships between things rather than the things themselves as static or quasi-static structures. It re-lates or echoes the need of human agency to constitute and reconstitute itself out of a basic existential condition of deferral, dispersion and unfoundedness. In order to nd and found itself, the human subject re-lates itself through the supports and props it constructs as vehicles of movement and direction in an environment of latency that refuses the stability of conceptual capture and institutional formalization. Latency haunts the human world like an atmospheric presence which, strangely, appears only as the felt absence of an invisible something that does not wish to be seen. In this sense, the latent does not directly signify or re-late itself but, like the zero degree of mana, intimates itself as an invisible wholeness that can receive and accommodate forms and qualities foreign to it. It intimates itself as a mute and neutral state that tells us only of its essential remoteness and ungraspability. Despite its immanence in all acts of human agency, the latent appears always beyond us, feelable but conceptually unformulable. Forever outside conscious thought, the latent speaks to us out of its unspeakability as if to say it is nevertheless the omniscient source of all living mind, a kind of thought from outside which
stands at the threshold of all positivity, not in order to grasp its foundation or justication but in order to regain the space of its unfolding, the void serving as its site, the distance in which it is constituted and into which its immediate certainties slip the moment they are glimpsed. (Foucault 1990: 16)
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Relationality is that which re-lates or unfolds this thought from outside into the recognizable and familiar supports and props of everyday existence and in which the act of re-lating is the forever suspended unfolding of the latent as that necessarily uncapturable source of the manifest. The computerization and globalization of the world is the contemporary expression of relationality as this existential reaching out by human agency in order to re-late itself in the unfolding latency of relative space and time.
References
Bersani, Leo 1986 The Freudian body: Psychoanalysis and art. New York: Columbia University Press. Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit 1993 Arts of impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit 1998 Caravaggios secrets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bowie, Malcolm 1978 Mallarm and the art of being difcult. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, Philip 1991 Making and effacing art: Modern American art in a culture of museums. New York: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel 1990 Maurice Blanchot: The thought from outside in Foucault: Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi and Jeffrey Mehlman, 758. New York: Zone Books. Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1976 Philosophical hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Harris, Roy 2000 Rethinking writing. London: Continuum. Kaplan, Robert 1999 The nothing that is: A natural history of zero. London: Allen Lane/Penguin.
Korzybski, Alfred 1994 Science and sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics, 5th edn. Englewood, NJ: Institute of General Semantics. Law, John 1994 Organizing modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Levinas, Emmanuel 1969 Totality and innity: An essay on exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Lvi-Strauss, Claude 1950 Introduction luvre de Marcel Mauss in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1962 The phenomenology of perception, trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Raban, Jonathan 1992 The Oxford book of the sea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scarry, Elaine 1994 Resisting representation. New York: Oxford University Press. Simmel, Georg 1971 On individuality and social forms, ed. Donald N. Levine. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Strathern, Marilyn 1991 Partial connections. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littleeld.
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Vattimo, Gianni 1992 The transparent society, trans. David Webb. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wagner, Roy 1991 The fractal person in Big men and great men: The development of a comparison in Melanesia. Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern (eds), 159173. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, Edmund 1931 Axels castle: A study in the imaginative literature of 18701930. New York: Charles Scribners Sons.
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, Keele, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK. E-mail: cooper.robert@talk21.com

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Organization Studies 26(11)

Organization Studies 26(11)

Organization Studies 26(11)

Organization Studies 26(11)

Organization Studies 26(11)

Organization Studies 26(11)

Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at EGOS on March 27, 2012

Organization Studies 26(11)

Downloaded from oss.sagepub.com at EGOS on March 27, 2012

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