http://oss.sagepub.com/ Organization Studies http://oss.sagepub.com/content/26/11/1689 The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/0170840605056398 2005 26: 1689 Organization Studies Robert Cooper Peripheral Vision : Relationality Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: European Group for Organizational Studies can be found at: Organization Studies Additional services and information for http://oss.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts: http://oss.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Permissions: http://oss.sagepub.com/content/26/11/1689.refs.html Citations: What is This? - Nov 3, 2005 Version of Record >> at EGOS on March 27, 2012 oss.sagepub.com Downloaded from
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http://oss.sagepub.com/Organization Studies
http://oss.sagepub.com/content/26/11/1689The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/0170840605056398
2005 26: 1689Organization StudiesRobert Cooper
Peripheral Vision : Relationality
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
On behalf of:
European Group for Organizational Studies
can be found at:Organization StudiesAdditional services and information for
The act of relating is analysed as a constitutive feature of human agency. Relating isviewed as the continuous work of connecting and disconnecting in a fluctuatingnetwork of existential events. Relating re-lates the human world as a restless sceneof flowing parts in which whole, self-contained objects take second place to thecontinuous transmission of movement. The relating of the world of moving parts isillustrated through the examples of modern methods of mass production and thetransmission of information which both produce a ‘weakening of reality’.
Keywords: human agency, information transmission, the latent, part–wholerelationship, production–prediction
Institutional thinking sees the world as a system of categories and things. Itsobjects of attention appear as bounded entities which exist against abackground whose main purpose seems to conceal itself from consciousviewing. The object of attention is thus the objective of focused thought whichfixes the entity as an object in its own right. This is how institutional thinkingframes the social and cultural world for us so that we unthinkingly think interms of categories and things. Sociology, psychology, economics, philos-ophy, literature, art are all institutional products of this divisionary thinking.Sociology and psychology persuade us to think of the human world as anaggregate of naturally integrated forms such as society, groups and individ-uals. We tend to see each of these as separate structures, with society as theoverall 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 self-organizing system, the conceptual emphasis is on structural unity andcompleteness, and the nature of the relationship with the wider backgroundis treated as a secondary aspect of the structure’s inbuilt tendency of self-maintenance. But this emphasis on the human world as a system of unitarycategories and things tells us more about our institutional ways of thinkingand mapping the complex structures we experience in the processual minutiaeof daily life rather than the structures themselves. Categories and things may make it easier for us to grasp reality but they also hide its underlyingcomplexities.
The category of the individual, for example, leaves us with the impressionof 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 behindit. Categories and things suggest that thinking is directed by a centrallyfocused perspective which fixes its forms and thus loses any sense of thehuman world as a field of dynamic and mutable relations. The original doublemeaning of the term individual as both separate and connected suggests thatthe so-called individual is divided and undivided at the same time. Thisimplies a certain distinctive tension between the human agent and theenvironmental objects that sustain it, for nothing can now be seen as a self-bounded, independent form. Individual and environment become complexlymixed together as a field of dynamic interchanges in which locatable termslose themselves in a dense interspace of relations. It is this interspace betweenthe individual and its environment that begins to emerge as a prime mover ofhuman agency in the continuous work of cultivating its world.
Human agency works by reflecting itself through meaningful connectionswith its environment. Human work in its generic sense consists ofconstructing mimetic representations out of the raw matter of the environmentso that the human agent can see itself. This is one way of understanding thesignificance of the interspace between the individual and its environment:inside and outside disappear as separate locations and merge together in thecreative tension of the interspace that both separates and joins them asreflections of each other. Human products are mimetic reflections of thehuman mind and body; they are made to connect with the requirements of thebody’s members and sense organs: everyday technologies such as domesticfurniture, the newspaper, the television and the computer exemplify thebody’s needs to complement and express itself through such extensiveconnections. In the human context, connections are a necessary strategy inrepresenting a coherent world in which disconnected elements are made tofit together. The newspaper brings together the news of the world in theconvenience of its pages, which can be held in the hand and before the eyesof the reader; the letters, words and sentences that convey the news also haveto connect with each other in sequence in order to give meaningful coherenceto the act of reading.
Connections imply disconnections and both are necessary features of theinterspace between the human agent and the objects that surround and supportit. The significance of the newspaper rests essentially on its concealment ofdisconnected space through its general strategy of connection. Yet connectionand disconnection are mutually constitutive of human agency. The ceaselessactions of daily life constitute a fluctuating network of connections anddisconnections with the various objects that extend and reflect our sense ofhuman agency. Instead of an external world of stable objects that support ourneeds and purposes, the space and time of daily life begins to look like arestless scene of acts in permanent suspension, that never reach a final goal.Acts simply act and in themselves do not lead anywhere. They connect and
disconnect. They express relationships between things rather than the thingsthemselves.
Relationships in their turn reveal transitivity and mobility. Objects becomemore like markers around which dense networks of relationships are actedout instead of fixed objectives which predetermine our mental and physicalmovements. The newspaper, television and computer are all transmitters ofrelationship and transitivity rather than ends in themselves. They point to aspace and time in which everything is unfinished, infinite, permanentlysuspended in a state of kaleidoscopic variability. Objects reflect not so muchthemselves but the flux and flow of the connections and disconnections theybecome part of. Objects become the carriers and transmitters of human agencyin space and time. They point to an aboriginal, pre-objective world in whichcategories and things cannot be found as discrete, bounded entities but whichare continually subject to the multiple and changing circumstances in whichthey move as carriers and transmitters of human agency. Everything is relativeto everything else.
In a sense, all this has been said before by the relativity theory of modernphysics, whose observations of the physical world of space and time dependessentially on local circumstances: on the particular methods used, on theparticular location in space and on the particular point in time. Such obser-vations suggest that the structures of our world are constituted by thesituational vectors that carry our ways of knowing and that these vectors varyfrom situation to situation. The experiences of daily life are relative to theparticular person, their surroundings at a particular moment, and the moodand feelings experienced in that situation. Relativity is thus another way ofsaying that the relationships between the human agent and its environmentare not only situational but are also densely intermeshed so that its experiencesare more like unique events that bind together agent and situation. ‘Such aworld cannot be presented in terms of such artificial abstractions as have beenconventional in the past: solid institutions, groups, individuals, which playthe parts of distinct durable entities’ (Wilson 1931: 178). Such dualisms asmind and matter, flesh and spirit, dream and reality also disappear in theemergence of the relative event and its dense intermeshing of relationships.Institutional products such as sociology and psychology also lose theircategorial independence and purity when viewed in the context of the relativeand relational. Since everything in human experience is densely intercon-nected and intermeshed in the event, human agency is a dynamic mix of relationships that intrinsically resist the institutional differentiations ofsociology and psychology, and instead cross and transgress all attempts tocategorize and objectify our experience of reality.
An essential feature of the relative event is the suspended, pre-objectivespace and time of relativity itself. Since everything is relative to everythingelse, nothing is complete in itself but is part of the continuous movement andinteraction between things. The so-called individual can only be defined bywhat he or she is not. You are you because you are not me. Today is todaybecause it is not yesterday or tomorrow. In this space and time of relativityand relationship nothing can be itself and everything is suspended in an
unfinished betweenness that seems to refuse simple location and identity. Itis like the silence that is the necessary background to speech but which alsowithdraws when speech expresses itself and yet is always present as asupportive absence. Like silence, the space and time of relativity is a worldwithout end or purpose; it has no direction, no apparent form; and since it ispre-objective, it cannot be objectified or grasped as an object of thought. Andyet it is the source or re-serve of all our ideas, objects and forms; it is like aninfinite womb which can receive and generate the multiple seeds of humanagency as well as accommodating their complex developments and perpetualmovement. Or it is the unlocatable origin of all beginnings, a placeless placewhose 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 ofmissing presence which we can only vaguely infer and transiently expressbut which is always with us, continually reminding us of our existential needto connect with it.
In this context, the conventional interpretation of relationship opens itselfto hidden meanings. Relationship is commonly understood as connection orassociation between individual terms and thus implies the presence of gapsand intervals which invite us to bridge them in some way. But gaps andintervals are also expressions of that missing presence which serves to containand accommodate the individual terms in an encompassing framework ofspace and time. The newspaper covertly implies this missing presence in itsassembling of information from multiple and distant sources as well as its assembling on newsprint of the words and sentences to express thisinformation. The gaps and intervals of missing presence not only contain andaccommodate the diverse spaces and times reflected in the news items but,significantly, also motivate the complex human work of bridging the multiplegaps and intervals that exist at all levels of news production.
The final connection, of course, is between the newspaper and its reader.Without such connections a coherent and meaningful world would not bepossible. Equally, such connections would not be possible without thedisconnections created by gaps and intervals. But the newspaper not onlyconnects the disconnected. It also tells or narrates the events it reports. And,significantly, it repeats its work of connecting and narrating on a daily basis.Its varied functions of connecting, narrating and repeating itself reveal itsunderlying fragility and impermanence. Less of a stable object, the newspaperhas to create its daily appearance out of the continuous threat of itsdisappearance. It repeatedly makes present a world that is intrinsically relativeand transient, that is permanently haunted by the possibility of it notappearing. Connecting, narrating and repeating seem to suggest that they arestrategies for constructing the human world as a series of representations outof an aboriginal chaos or unidentifiable something rather than directlyreporting it as a series of pre-existing and objective happenings.
Relativity and relationship themselves both point in the direction of thisprimitive source in which differences and divisions lose themselves in aprimal intermeshing and condensation: both relate the human world as ageneric condition of relationality where everything is relative to everything
else, suspended in an interspace of betweenness from which individuallyidentifiable, understandable and meaningful terms have to be extracted.
Relationality reminds us that human agency works at two levels: that of apre-objective, suspended space and time of latency in which the recognizablecontents of the human world have yet to be realized, and that of the taken-for-granted world of everyday objects and meanings which are translationsand realizations of the latency inherent in all human actions and thinking.Relationality re-lates latency. It re-lates in the double sense of connectingterms and thus creating coherent structures of relations out of the gaps andintervals of disconnection as well as narrating and making explicit thedormant and implicit nature of latency. Relationality re-lates the domain ofthe pre-objective and suspended with the objective world of realizable goalsand purposeful action through the trans-lation of the latent into the manifest.And, just as significantly, it re-lates the manifest world of objects and theirobjectives with the latent space and time of the pre-objective and suspended.In this sense, human agency is the expression of relationality, the continuousconstruction 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 thecontinuous re-lating of relationality.
The Latent
To say that something is manifest means that it is clear, definitive and evenobvious. To say that something is latent means that it is unclear, indefinite andeven nebulous. The latent does not easily lend itself to the clarity of definition;it is allusive rather than explicative. It can mean hidden, secret, clandestine; itcan also mean lateral, widespread, disseminated, broad, extensive; it suggestssomething dormant, quiescent, virtual, waiting to be expressed, as well assomething malleable, plastic and even formable. It seems to resist conceptualand practical appropriation, all the time receding from direct, explicitexpression.
The latent suggests a field of relationships rather than an aggregate of things.Its latency is a source or re-serve of possible events to which we attribute somesense of form; it is a suspension of multiple possibilities, always exceeding ourattempts to fix and objectify it. To approach it, we have to abandon ourcustomary habit of seeing the things of the world from the fixed focus of acentralized point of view and recognize their essential incipience when seenfrom a multiple mix of perspectives. A city, for example, is not something thatcan be defined from a centralized perspective. It is an endless kaleidoscope ofpossible viewpoints. Any attempt to express it as in the fixed form of a streetmap, an aerial photograph or a written history has to be recognized as aprovisional and partial glimpse of a territory whose latency exceeds allrepresentation. While replete with the identifiable objects of its buildings,streets and traffic, the city also occupies a pre-objective space through whichits 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
(real or logical) in which things are arranged, but the means whereby thepositing of things becomes possible’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 243). Things derivetheir character and thinghood from the space through which they re-late to eachother: ‘This means that instead of imagining (space) as a sort of ether in whichall things float ... we must think of it as the universal power enabling them tobe connected’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 243). Connection and relationship are thevehicles that human agency carves out of pre-objective space so that its latencycan be re-lated through the meaningful arrangements of the things and objectsthat make up the human world.
The pre-objective world thus reminds us of the fundamental significanceof the relationality of things rather than the things themselves. The pre-objectival is a ‘spatiality without things’ and space in this sense is a mediumthrough which the body and its senses realize themselves:
‘This is what happens in the night. Night is not an object before me; it enwraps meand infiltrates through all my senses ... I am no longer withdrawn into my perceptuallook-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 theobjective world and hence cannot be located:
‘Night has no outlines; it is itself in contact with me and its unity is the mystical unityof the mana ... All space for the reflecting mind is sustained by thinking which relatesits parts to each other, but in this case the thinking starts from nowhere.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 283)
Connection and relationship rather than things and objects thus animate andconstitute human agency in the never-ending work of trying to locate and finditself. The city itself now has to be understood as the never-ending work of connecting and disconnecting, relating and irrelating, its multiple andmutable 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 offices are the transmission stations of relationships andtransitivity. They re-late not so much their functional objectivity but thelatency intrinsic to all relationality, that indeterminate and indeterminableorigin of human agency which withdraws from all our attempts to capture itas an essence and which at best we can only approach through the partial andtransient snapshots of our conceptual mappings. Like the attempts to defineand map the city, the significance of the institutional thinking of sociologyand psychology lies in the act of re-lating — that is, connecting with andtelling or informing about — that latent power which, while resisting allattempts to represent it, is the primal source and animator of all our thinkingand knowledge, however partial and transient the latter may be. The latentre-lates itself like the night and its ‘spatiality without things’; it tempts andtaunts us to ‘know’ it, to give it form and meaning and to recognize it as thesource and origin of our own human agency.
The latent may never make itself explicit but it haunts and hints like aninvisible presence as if to say that it is always with us despite its resistance
to representation. It can be compared to the panoramic views of nature whichexceed conceptual analysis and descriptive grasp, and at best suggest anatmospheric aesthetics which can only be sensed through feelings. This ishow the sea, for example, features in literature: an indeterminable presencethat ‘lies on the far margin of society’ beckoning us to listen to and decodethe ‘ocean of meanings and associations’ of its ‘sacral quality’ (Raban 1992:33–34). Or as a character in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son imploreswhile facing the open sea: ‘I want to know what it says. The sea, Floy, whatis it that it keeps on saying?’ (quoted in Raban 1992: 1). Literature revealsthe sea as a latent call to its human observers to express their own latentthoughts and feelings through its essential indeterminability:
‘The sea in literature is not a verifiable object, to be described, with varying degrees of success and shades of emphasis; it is, rather, the supremely liquid andvolatile element, shaping itself newly for every writer and every generation.’ (Raban1992: 3)
Like night, the sea’s latency ‘has no outlines’; it is simply ‘space for thereflecting mind’ where ‘thinking starts from nowhere’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962:283). The latent space and time of pre-objectivity is thus never a place ormoment which can be located; it is more like a spiritual enfolding thatcaresses its human contacts. The caress reminds us of the ‘nowhere’ thatexceeds every ‘where’, every location; it beckons us to become more thanthe immediate presence that currently defines us (Levinas 1969). The caressre-lates the latent while minding it as a placeless, hidden place, as the‘essentially hidden’ that ‘throws itself toward the light without becomingsignification. Not nothingness — but what is not yet’ (Levinas 1969: 256).The caress reveals the latent as a suspended, pre-objective space which cannever be located or defined: it
‘consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its formtoward a future never future enough, in soliciting what slips away as though it werenot yet. It searches, it forages. It is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search:a movement unto the invisible.’ (Levinas 1969: 257–258)
The latent caresses us from a placeless place that draws us and withdrawsfrom us at the same time. Secret and clandestine, the latent may be revealedbut it is never disclosed: ‘the clandestine uncovered does not acquire the statusof the disclosed’ (Levinas 1969: 260).
When Merleau-Ponty calls the pre-objective ambience of the night ‘themystical unity of the mana’ with its unlocatability of ‘nowhere’, and whenLevinas talks of the clandestine ambience of the caress as a source that neverexplicitly signifies but simply intimates itself as a ‘no man’s land betweenbeing and not-yet-being’ (Levinas 1969: 259), they both express the intrinsicresistance of the latent to being captured as a category or thing. Their languageis both allusive and elusive. They sense the excessiveness of the latent assomething that must remain forever absent and yet is mysteriously present asan absence, as the sense of something missing. It is the same with Dickens’snonplussed beholder of the sea who, however, seems to lack the philosophicalpatience of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. He wants to hear the sea say
something specific, meaningful and immediate while they prefer to bask inthe caress that speaks only of the incommunicable.
Merleau-Ponty’s reference to mana returns us to an early concern of socialanthropology where mana featured as a fundamental negative source ofhuman agency. In the social anthropology of Marcel Mauss, mana indi-cates a general condition of latency that pervades the variable and multiplesocial and cultural expressions of human life. Like the latent, mana is an invisible and missing wholeness out of which human agency extractspartial and transient images and meanings; an infinite and unlocatable source,mana is a condition of zero degree or zero value which can assume any value or significance required for the purpose of representation, provided that the assumed value or significance still remains part of the latent reservefrom which it comes (Lévi-Strauss 1950). The zero degree of mana is thusalways more than the partial and transient values and meanings extractedfrom 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 accom-modate forms and qualities external to it: ‘it is as if there were a layer behindappearances that had no qualities, but took on the character of its surround-ings, accommodating itself to our interpretations, as ambergris acquires andretains fugitive fragrances, giving us perfume’ (Kaplan 1999: 59). Mana’sinvisible wholeness implies a dynamic power that always exceedsrepresentation but whose dynamic absence mysteriously motivates humanagency to give it form.
The latent as a negative but dynamic power in human agency is a centralfeature of Georg Simmel’s theory of forms. Life as the source of humanagency cannot be captured in a form. Like the forms of the city and the visionof the sea, the forms of life for Simmel are merely partial and transientexpressions of a transcendent and invisible source which is neverthelesspermanently present in all the activities of daily life, however mundane theymay seem at times. Like the negative capacity of mana, life is always morethan, always in excess of the forms it seems to generate. Simmel attributes adynamic 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 theirown meanings and significance and thus conceal life as the relentless sourceof all human expression: ‘Whenever life expresses itself, it desires to expressonly itself; thus it breaks through any form which would be superimposed onit by some other reality’ (Simmel 1971: 382). Simmel thus views life as anirruptively active latency rather than a passive source: ‘life is always in alatent opposition to the form’ which it perceives
‘as something which has been forced upon it. It would like to puncture not only thisor that form, but form as such, and to absorb the form in its immediacy, to let its ownpower and fullness stream forth just as if it emanated from life’s own source, until allcognition, values, and forms are reduced to direct manifestations of life.’ (Simmel1971: 377)
In Simmel’s interpretation, the latency of life does not just caress its humanexpressors but directly provokes them to transcend the formulable anddefinable in order to express its sense of the more than. While
‘psychic life is perceived in terms of its contents, it is finite. It consists then of theseideal 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 definiteand definable. Yet, as we experience it, we feel something else to be present,something unformulable, indefinable: we feel of every life as such that it is more thanevery assignable content.’ (Simmel 1971: 370–371)
The latency of life for Simmel is always more-than-life, an aboriginal forcewhich carries its human contents before it. It transgresses all attempts to giveit form, to classify it in the language of categories and things. Yet while themore-than-life of latency may reject its representation through forms, desiringonly ‘to appear in its naked immediacy’, its paradox is that it can only makehuman sense through the expression of form (Simmel 1971: 392–393).Human agency thus finds itself actively suspended between the latent forcesof life which refuse the formal arrest of representation and its own cognitiveneed to locate its world in forms, categories and things. Simmel stresses therelentlessness of these latent forces in their pursuit of that which lies beyondthe 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 oflife’s latency. And for Simmel this is especially evident in the manic work of the modern world in its productive proliferation of things and in itsincessant technological innovations that appear more like repudiations of thepresent than functional aids to the living of everyday life.
The latent suggests itself as a missing presence that can only be alluded tothrough the variable and transient forms and representations of human agency.This means that it can only be re-lated or re-presented in terms completelyother than itself. It, therefore, presents itself always as a missing power thatis concealed by what re-presents it. And yet its missingness is immanent inall human expression as an invisible wholeness which, like the city and thesea, can never be fully conceived. There may be different ways of approach-ing it but these can never be added together to make that whole whose fate isto recede and deny us full access to it. In Merleau-Ponty’s pre-objective space,latency emerges as the pliable and plastic source of the social and culturalforms of human life, out of which human agency creates its structures ofmeaning and communication. Pre-objective space itself cannot be revealedsince its latent nature is to conceal itself. It can only re-late its latency laterallythrough the objects and objectives it serves to bring into existence. The latentthus re-lates itself as a missing presence. Levinas’s caress also tells us that itis a missing presence immanent in all aspects of human agency. The caressspeaks from a placeless place whose missingness is ‘a no man’s land betweenbeing and not-yet-being’ (Levinas 1969: 259). By no man’s land, Levinasmeans to suggest a missingness that accompanies all the forms and objectivesof human experience. Nothing is complete in itself; everything exists in afield of relationality as a mobile matrix of interacting events whose individual
components are never more than partial and transient as though foreversearching for what Levinas calls the invisible and the what-is-not-yet. Thelatent as missingness is also what Simmel intends when he argues that thepractical contents of everyday life are forever haunted by an unformulable,indefinable presence which is always more-than-life. The missing latency oflife continually provokes us to transcend the practical presences that makeup the immediacies of everyday existence as if to suggest that what we desireis what we can never have.
From these various insights into the nature of the latent there emerges aconception of human agency that foregrounds the idea of relationality inwhich human being as a generic process is characterized by its partialnessand incompleteness in the relativity of space and time. To say that everythingis relative and relational is to acknowledge the significant role of absence,disconnection and incompletion when human agency is placed in the widergeneric context of human being. In this wider context, human agency as actsof being is the continuous production and reproduction of presence or theimmediate, ready-made forms and objects that constitute the everyday humanworld and which function as the taken-for-granted supports of daily life. Outof sight and therefore outside the mundane mind is the latency of absencewhich necessarily accompanies every experienced presence. The immediacyof presence as an expression of generic human being has its source in absenceas a missing and volatile presence. The latency of the sea is a dramaticexample of absence that provokes the human call for presence. The absencethat accompanies presence is therefore not a redundant or unnecessary featureof the immediate and practical world. In order to re-late presence as aconstituting force of human agency, the latent conceals itself as a necessarilymissing presence that withdraws from all attempts to make it presentable. It reminds us that the construction of the human forms and objects thatconstitute what we take to be reality is the provisional work of human agencythat seeks to save its presentable products from the threat of withdrawalintrinsic to absence and non-presentability. The re-lating of relationality is thus a kind of creative agonistic between presence and absence, manifestand latent.
Relation
Relation is connection, association. It also implies a world of parts whichfurther suggests a sense of wholeness. But wholeness here is not a sum oraggregate of parts. The relation between part and whole is one of latency inwhich part is latent to whole as whole is latent to part. The latent nature ofthe shared terms means that each implies the other so that they exist in arelationship of betweenness rather than as separate terms. In this conceptionof relation, the conventional way of thinking of society as an aggregate ofindividuals and groups gives way to the recognition of an indivisible andlatent force that condenses and thus connects all three terms together at someprimal and indiscernible level: ‘individual and group are false alternatives,
doubly so implicated because each implies the other’ (Wagner 1991: 162).Part and whole are not separate, static structures but actively constitute eachother and in this sense are undifferentiated or primally enfolded and entangledin each other. This also means that they are relative to each other, that theyexist in a dynamic field of relationality where things do not have independentforms but are more like events or happenings.
Relationality at this level draws special attention to the latent ongoingnessthat underlies our conventional ways of understanding the world in terms ofready-made categories and things. To re-late in this sense is to trans-late thelatency of the pre-objective world into a reserve of parts or elements that canbe endlessly combined and permuted to create and re-create the meaningfuland communicable forms of life such as we see in the letters of the alphabetwhich can be combined and permuted into words and in the further combiningand permuting of the words into sentences. The human body and its organsare 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 justas necessary as the letters and words that make up the sentence. The humanagent ‘exists as a relational term whose identity is connective’ in space andtime 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 thequasi-static connections it makes between categories and things. The‘movement of being’ means that we live not so much in a world of finishedproducts but in a world of continuous composition and happenings betweenthings. In this ‘movement of being’, parts and wholes imply each other sothat the human agent is constituted by its relational acts rather than being theexpression of an inner subjectivity.
‘Relational being is constituted by and as a subject position. This doesn’tmean that being is subjective; indeed, the very distinction between subjectiveand objective is meaningless here’ for the subject is already implied by the‘subject’s active participation’ in its acts of relationality (Bersani and Dutoit1998: 71). The participation of relationality means that the subject participatesas a constitutive part of the ‘movement of being’ and composition just as theother parts participate in the subject. The scientist, for example, is never anobjective observer of the world but is constituted as a subject who participatesin the particular study of a particular part of the world using a particularmethodology and technology. The scientist both re-lates his or her acts ofresearch and in turn is re-lated by them. In other words, the scientist as aparticipator in research does not simply act on an object of research but isalso constituted in turn by the particular object and methods used.Participation in this example means that the scientist exists in the interior ofthe activity of research and not outside it as an external and independentobserver.
Relation and relationality imply that the ‘movement of being’ is motivatedby an invisible and missing wholeness. Neither singular nor plural, neitherindividual nor group, the missing wholeness of relationality bears andtransmits its constitutive parts in an ‘integrally implied’ relationship (Wagner1991: 163) just as the scientist and his or her project imply each other in the
interior of the research activity. Relation here is the re-lating or sending on of latency itself and not the relating of a specific object or message. Human reproduction powerfully exemplifies the work of integrally impliedrelationship in its engendering and transmitting of life in which individualsgenerate each other as vectors in the ‘movement of being’: ‘People existreproductively by being “carried” as part of another, and “carry” or engenderothers by making themselves genealogical or reproductive “factors” of theseothers’ (Wagner 1991: 163). The latency of reproductive re-lating lies in the neutral nature of its integrally implied connections which transcend theidentities of persons as individual generators such as mother and father whoare equally generated by their offspring in an integral relationship where theparts imply each other. To say that the generating parts re-late each otherneutrally is simply to say that they are neither one thing nor the other just asthey are neither singular nor plural, neither individual nor group. Their neutralnature means that they inhabit a placeless place whose latency resists locationand description.
The latent is neutral in the special sense of being an unidentifiableomnipresence that accommodates the categories and things of the world whileretaining its own neutral nature. It is the neutral presence of all integralrelationships, an invisible and missing wholeness which provokes us to re-late it through the creation of locatable and identifiable places such as thepositioning of towns and cities on a map. But the locations of the map are notindividually meaningful since they derive their significance from the terri-torial relationships between them. The territory itself never gets onto the map(Korzybski 1994: 750); it is a neutral omnipresence that exceeds all attemptsto represent it in locatable terms but which serves as an accommodatinginvisible wholeness for the topographical contents of the map. The neutralnature of the territory implies itself between the various locations on the mapas each location is never completely itself but depends for its locatability onits 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 seafaced by Dickens’s nonplussed observer, calls out to us to trans-late and re-late it in a meaningful language.
Neutrality as an unidentifiable omnipresence makes us see latency in a newlight. The neutral as neither one thing nor the other is thus an invisiblewholeness or latency which serves to contain or hold differences together.This effectively means that parts are integrally related and imply a wholenessthat always exceeds their individuality; parts may thus be seen as expressinga latent indivisibility that grounds the relationships between them. Parts thus both carry and are carried by the neutral nature of latency: ‘parts, in thelong run, are the carriers of “being”, not wholes, which are no more thanprovisional arrays of parts’ (Fisher 1991: 213). Parts reflect the interactivenature of integral relationship where parts and whole actively reflect eachother: parts (from the Latin partire, portare, to bear, carry, share, distribute)constitute the ‘movement of being’ between things where betweenness meansinteraction by or via two (i.e. the ‘be two’ of ‘between’) in space and timerather than the movement of individual things. The latent as a neutral state
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 asalways moving beyond the immediate present in order to make yet furtherconnections.
The latency of relationality always defers itself and thus can never bedirectly observed; its neutrality refuses to be identified as a category or thing;it re-lates only the intrinsic latency of integral relationship where partsgenerate each other in an endless process of interchange in which there isneither one thing nor another. All human communication originates in thisprimal latency, all human knowing re-lates the ceaseless movement of theneutral where an ‘answer is another question, a connection a gap, a similaritya difference, and vice versa’ (Strathern 1991: xxiv). To re-late is to carry andbe carried by an unidentifiable force which, like Simmel’s more-than-life,refuses to be caught in a fixed form, re-lating only its own neutrality. Simmelviews the process of re-lating through his idea of pure sociability in whichrelationship exists for its own sake and not for some external goal. Puresociability is a neutral force in which relationship works through a principleof reversal where, for example, answers become questions, connections gaps,and similarities differences. In these examples, relationship re-lates itselfthrough converses which, for Simmel, characterize conversation as the purestform of sociability in which talking is performed simply for itself and in whichthere is ‘nothing but relationship’ (Simmel 1971: 137). Conversation doesnot exist for the transmission of an extrinsic content; its content exists to re-late person and talk as converses of each other so that ‘the talk formed throughthe 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 neutralinteraction and integral relationship in which they are neither one nor theother but both at the same time.
Conversation, for Simmel, carries us along as social parts in a process ofcontinuous transmission in which the content of the conversation is alwayssecondary to the movements between the converses or reversals whosefunction is to imply each other in the act of de-parture. The act of re-latingis 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, theconnection defers the gap just as the gap defers the connection. In its endlesswork of deferral and postponement, the re-lating of relationality drawsattention to the neutral omnipresence of the latent. The latent never revealsitself and appears only as a void or vacuum that can accommodate amultiplicity of mutable forms. It is like Merlin the magician of the ancientmyth who could never be pinned down and changed repeatedly into a seriesof animal forms such as a fox, a rabbit and a fluttering bird.
Like Merlin, the latent withdraws from all attempts to make it visible andyet it is always present as a motivating absence of human agency. It de-partsor withdraws from all attempts to place it in a mental map of categories andthings and simply intimates its presence as a neutral and placeless place, anowhere, which beckons and provokes us to find it. It reminds us of Simmel’s
understanding of conversation as that invisible background which carries thecontent of communication but which in itself ‘has no ulterior end, no content,and no result outside itself’ (Simmel 1971: 130). Simmel’s pure sociabilityexpresses only itself as a vehicle for the ‘movement of being’ and integralrelationship; it cannot be identified with anything other than its own between-ness. In this radical sense, sociability is a ‘social game’ where the play ofbetweenness and interaction frees itself from subjective purposes and practicalgoals. Dissociated from the subjective and practical, the play of the gamecarries its participants along as if it were playing with them in a neutral spacein which they renounce their subjectivities to become neither one nor the otherin a continuous process of deferral.
The latency of conversation and the game suggests an unlocatable butanimating absence which is strangely present as a source of free movementin the playability or pliability of negative space and time where nothing hasyet been determined. The latent in this sense is more like a mirror whichreflects 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 theimages it reflects. Without such images, the mirror would not be noticeableas a source of visibility; it withdraws when it reflects and thus seems morelike an empty space that serves as a supportive background for all the objectsand events it helps to re-present. As an empty or negative space, the mirroropens itself to everything it cannot be; it functions as an infinite receptaclefor the multiple and changing forms of the world. The mirror thus symbolizeslatency as the negative space in and through which the forms of human agencyare both constructed and sent on as the ‘movement of being’.
Human history, for example, can be viewed as a mirror which reflects notso much its originating events but their later re-presentations. Historicalknowledge is subject to endless reinterpretation because the post-historicalperspectives from which it is seen are also subject to continuous change. Andwhen a book is read by various readers, its readings change as they mirrorthe particular person, time and place through which the book is read, and thesame book read a second or third time by the same reader will also present aseries of different readings. It is as if the book itself, like a mirror, withdrawsto permit a variation of readings to appear. The negative spaces of history andbooks exemplify the latent as a creative origin out of which emerge the infinitere-presentations that maintain and sustain the work of culture. Like the mirror,the latent is the inexhaustible reserve out of which human agency developsand in which it circulates.
Anonymous and mute, the latent itself cannot speak. Like the mirror, itsfunction is to reflect and re-late the forms and events impressed upon it.Human agency re-lates the latent by shaping the raw materials of the worldinto a language of forms and objects which reflect and carry human thoughtand movement. It is thus that human agency re-lates itself by continuouslypositioning and situating its thoughts and actions always in re-lation to themultiple and variable forms and objects that surround it. To say that the formsand objects of the human world are re-lative is simply to acknowledge thatthey re-late the human agent just as much as he or she re-lates them. It also
means that the agent becomes a relative term in a fluid field rather than theoccupier of a privileged position of knowing.
Relationality in Context
Relationality re-lates the pre-objective space and time of the latent. The latentis a no man’s land in which human action takes place but in which action isalso permanently suspended. It offers nothing for us to see nor directions forus to follow. If it says anything at all, it says nothing; its message is that ithas no message, that it has not yet been divided in space and time so that itcannot be distinguished as an entity in its own right. It can only intimate itselfthrough the forms we compose and inscribe on it. Despite its intrinsicunknowableness, it inhabits and pervades all human agency as a motivatingpower that resists capture by conscious thought and which refuses any senseof containment or completion. Like Merlin the magician in his variable mani-festations, the latent only communicates a sense of infinity and withdrawal.It expresses itself only through deferral and disappearance. The act of re-lating actively maintains the latent through the continuous construction andtransmission of manifest information which at the same time also serves todefer the latent and thus ensure its enduring power to motivate human agencyas a productive force that re-lates through connection and narration.
To relate ordinarily means to connect or to narrate or tell. In the widercontext of relationality, to re-late means that the human agent is an incompletepart which seeks to realize its missing completeness through establishingconnections with other parts. Narration itself is a further expression of re-lating or connecting letters into words and words into sentences in order tomake meaningful sense of the world. Since the latent is that which has notyet been divided in any way, it has no parts and is simply an invisible whole-ness. Basic to its emergence as a force in human agency is its partializationthrough division. The divided parts are still subject to the call of the latentwhich they experience as an incompleteness that requires connection withother parts. The neutral basis of the latent as neither one thing nor the otheris the primal denial by the latent of division as an act of distinction andseparation.
Relationality reflects this primal desire for connection but also recognizesthe further need to distinguish between the neutrality of parts throughnarration which arranges parts sequentially in space and time. And just asletters and words have to be arranged sequentially in a sentence, so does thehuman body and its organs have to connect with and narrate the multiple partsof its world in order to complete, however temporarily and transiently, itsown sense of incompleteness. Through the body and its organs, human agencyre-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 partsre-emerges to remind us of the everpresence of the latent. The human bodyas a part can only know itself through its aboriginal relationship with otherparts; it finds and defines itself through the continuous work of reflecting itself
through connecting and narrating the forms and objects that constitute itsimmediate world. The ‘total relationality of being’ means ‘that the human hasaffinities — of design, positioning, movement — with the nonhuman and thatobjects (including ourselves) are always being repeated and lost in otherobjects to which they correspond as forms’ (Bersani and Dutoit 1993: 140).All this means that human agency is continually held in a field of suspenseand that the human agent is forever partial and can only realize itself throughcorrespondence with the forms and objects that surround and re-late it.
Relationality makes us see the world as a complex network of activeconnections rather than visibly independent and identifiable forms andobjects. On this view, people as self-sufficient agents do not exist for they areparts of a network of supports that enable them to connect with other partsand to narrate their connections. ‘People are networks. We are all artfularrangements of bits and pieces’ (Law 1994: 33). The bits and pieces ofhuman existence — clothes, furniture, transport, televisions, computers,mobile phones — are all props or supports that supplement our existentialincompleteness. ‘We are composed of, or constituted by our props, visibleand invisible, present and past ... without our props we would not be people-agents, but only bodies’ (Law 1994: 33).
Our props re-late us just as much as we re-late them. And it is in this sensethat we have to understand relationality as an active condition of betweennessin which individual terms can never exist or find themselves since they arealways 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’ andwhat constitutes us is the interactive re-lating that occurs between parts: thescientist exists in the interior of the research activity and not outside it as anexternal and independent observer; the motor vehicle drives me just as muchas I drive it. Relationality says that we are extensions of our supports andprops just as much as they are extensions of us; it reminds us of the essentialreciprocity 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 earth’s eruption intointelligence onto its own surface’ (Scarry 1994: 85). We are left with a pictureof the human agent not as a self-contained controller of its world but as an intrinsically re-lational part of a field of ‘sentient-intelligent-movableattachments’ (Scarry 1994: 85–86).
The supports and props of human agency help us to understand relationalityas the work of parts that carry the ‘movement of being’ as a generic act ofdeferral. A prop supports the human body through transforming the body anditself into a vehicle of transmission and movement. The prop becomes anecessary part of relationality as a bearer and transmitter of human agency:parts are the carriers of ‘being’, and not wholes structures which are simplythe provisional composition of parts (Fisher 1991: 213). And parts areprovisional in the double sense of providing or supplying the means fortransmission and for being transient. The provisional nature of parts meansthat human agency is forever incomplete and thus has to renew itself at everystep in a continuous process of deferral. And what it defers is the invisible
missingness of the latent. Human agency is like a dog chasing its unreachabletail. The latent is thus that aboriginal site of withdrawal which motivates and provokes all human knowing and intelligent action. As such, it is aconstituting feature of all human agency. What we do not and cannot knowspeaks to us through its silence, like Dickens’s nonplussed observer of thesea’s latency which refuses to reveal itself in a human language.
Relationality reveals the latent as a permanently missing presence whosemissingness is present in every act of re-lating. This is the primal meaning ofthe term re-late: to reflect or to mirror the intrinsic absence that haunts all ourattempts to make the world present and presentable, to render it readable,stable, secure and reliable. The latent is the negative that makes possible thepositive, the absence or missingness immanent in every presence; it hauntsthe answer as a further question, it is the gap that makes possible theconnection, and it complements similarity with difference. The props thatsupport everyday existence are never simply positive objects: the tool in itsready-to-hand taken-for-grantedness always points to a space and timebeyond 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 thefundamental significance of missingness in the constitution of everyday formsand objects; the empty space left by the absent object is now seen to be itslatent source, strangely present as a constitutive absence and invisiblepresence (Gadamer 1976: 234–235). Human re-lating thus always draws ona space and time beyond itself; it connects with and narrates a space and timethat is nowhere and not yet, a ‘no man’s land between being and not-yet-being’ (Levinas 1969: 259). In this sense, re-lating is always partial andforever unfinished as though suspended in space and time; its source in thelatent makes its connections and narrations always relative to its othermultifarious manifestations which mirror the latent as a placeless absence inall human presences.
The human agent as subject itself becomes a relative and fluid term in thefield of relationality. No longer consciously self-sufficient, the subject isdispersed in ‘a “field”, a comprehensive realm of interrelated energies, whichare organized yet indefinitely subject to mutation and inflection’ and in which‘the human being, for all his mighty aspirations towards order, is no morethan a detail — a local inflection of the field’ (Bowie 1978: 144–145). Themanifest forms and objects of human agency are continually subject to thelatent possibilities they exclude and which always inhabit the manifest as alateral excess that invites the human agent either to exclude it in order tomaintain the smooth routine of systematic thought or to submit to its specu-lative wanderings and tantalizing ambiguities. But the conventional readingof the world stresses the finished product, the ready-made category or thing,rather than the incipience of composition and construction. To re-late in thissense is to narrate and represent the world as if it were already made up forhuman understanding; it underlines the immediate presence of things in orderto confirm 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, thelatency of the world is denied and the multiple and varied gestures that
constitute its coming-into-presence are hidden from view. What we see andthink assumes a fictional reality and stability.
The immediacy of presence is essentially an inversion of absence.Relationality is the continuous reminder of the latent as an invisible presencethat motivates the ‘movement of being’. What is manifest is not possible with-out the latent; manifest and latent integrally imply each other as do part andwhole (Wagner 1991). In the same way, the human subject is never a singularagent but is always integrally implied in its interactions with its props. Thepower of the latent lies in its active and continuous deferral of presence in ‘aproductive receding of consciousness’ (Bersani 1986: 47). The human subjectis mobilized by what is absent from it, by what has yet to come and thus by asense of anticipation. But here the absent and the not-yet are contemporaneouswith the immediate and the present, so that deferral is integrally implied in allhuman agency. The body lives through its connections with the external worldand these connections are always partial in space and time. The limbs of thebody actively reflect this partialness in that they reach out to a limbo or latencyof pre-objective space and time: the hands seek something to hand-le, the feetbecome a way of measuring domestic space, arms and legs are translated intothe parts of a chair. ‘Every cultural and productive act includes an elaborationof the self outside the boundaries of the body’ so that the self becomes integrallyindistinguishable from the props of its world (Fisher 1991: 233). The relativityof relationality expresses itself through the body’s participation with its pre-objective space and time and the reflections of itself that the body createsthrough that participation. In this context, the act of re-lating appears as aprimal, generic act that has to be continuously repeated in order to maintainhuman agency as an active force in space and time and to defer its possibledisappearance. This has less to do with the re-lating of particular objects andterms, of a specific x or y, since its generic work is to repeat the act of re-latingitself. The re-lating of specific objects and terms simply serves the more genericaction of re-lating re-lating itself. As a primal, generic act, re-lating alwaysrefers and defers to something beyond itself, to what it is not yet, to somethingyet to come. Re-lating in this generic sense re-lates that forever unfinished andsuspended ‘no man’s land between being and not-yet-being’ (Levinas 1969:259) where ‘an answer is another question, a connection a gap, a similarity adifference, and vice versa’ (Strathern 1991: xxiv).
The history of modern methods of production illustrates relationality as anall-pervasive force in the development of the modern world. Industrialproduction is increasingly focused on the production of parts rather thanwhole, finished objects: the mass production methods used in the manufactureof 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 futureevent but more as a way of connecting with and narrating the relativitiesintrinsic to the pre-objective space and time of the latent. The production ofparts rather than complete objects echoes the essential nature of re-lating asthe revealing of the latent as a pre-objective field that calls out to us to exploreand express it. Production becomes the prediction or revealing of this plastic,
pliable and playable field of latency. The production of parts reveals the worldless as a collection of finite categories and things and more as the scene of afluctuating field of interactions which, like the city, is essentially indeter-minable and therefore unknowable as a mappable structure. Structured objects‘become restless and weak, imposing themselves on the stock of parts onlyfeebly ... At first there is, in effect, a feeling of object loss, as though the worldof actual things had ceased to exist’ (Fisher 1991: 249). There emerges aweakening of reality, a dispersal of self-contained objects and forms, in whichfluid and fleeting parts ‘transfer the reality to the system as a whole and tothe play of transformations and possibilities that it invites’ (Fisher 1991: 249).
A relational space of relativities begins to foreground itself as the scene ofhuman agency. Objects become background to relationality as the primemover of human agency. Now seen as moving parts in a field of activesuspension, objects lose their independent character to become vehicles forre-lating the connections and disconnections between things. The humanworld becomes more and more relative, more transient and thus more fragileand indefinite. Production becomes a pure act of becoming and beginningwithout ever reaching an end, as if in pursuit of supports and props thatthreaten to disappear into latent space and time. Production thus re-lates notso much the formulable content of the world but the withdrawal of the latent.Relationality draws its power and action from the implicit and suggestivenon-presence of the latent; it works by attempting to re-late and trans-late the uncapturability of the latent’s placelessness and unlocatability. But everyre-lational attempt, every connection, leads to a disconnection, to anotherquestion. The modern world of information transmission is perhaps the mostfrenetic expression of human agency’s attempt to find and re-late itself in andthrough the unlocatable nowhere of the latent. ‘It seems to us that the ontologymost congenial to an age of information is one that identifies being asrelationality, as the principle of connectedness assumed by all technologiesof transmission’ (Bersani and Dutoit 1998: 110). Relationality here is the‘movement of being’, of human agency in the perpetual work of trying tolocate and re-late itself in a context that offers no natural foundation but onlythe unfoundation of perpetual withdrawal.
The transmission of information necessarily implies the production ofinformation. Relationality, as we have noted, also implies production asprediction or the revealing of the latent as that aboriginal withdrawal of theworld which provokes further production and prediction. Instead of fixedforms and stable objects, the production and transmission of informationpresents the ‘movement of being’ as a series of events or happenings. Thingsand objects now happen rather than exist in their own right. Reality appearsas a flow of events which keeps on flowing. The emergence of the mass mediain modern life — newspapers, radio, television — has produced a ‘society ofgeneralized communication’ in which ‘we are made to realize the contingencyand 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 inwhich entities (including the human subject) dissolve ‘in the imagesdistributed by the information media’ (Vattimo 1992: 116).
Information technologies such as the computer are no longer instrumentalobjects or tools but are relative and relational parts in the production andtransmission of events and happenings. The computer especially expresses theproduction of information as the prediction or unfolding of a new and moremobile space that reflects the hidden capacity of the pre-objective and the latent.As a word processor, for example, the computer redefines the nature of the‘word’ which ‘is no longer a static lexical unit belonging to an inventory pre-registered in a dictionary’ or part of the fixity of a printed text (Harris 2000:240). Electronic writing re-lates the latency of relativity in space and timethrough its stress on the relentless sending on of information in its pursuit ofthe transient and ephemeral. The computer expands the mind outward asthough it were responding to the body’s instinct to find itself by reaching outbeyond its own limbic limits. The traditional conception of the author as thesource of writing gives way to a view of the author as an active part in thehappening of an integrally implied relationship in which both author andcomputer write or re-late each other. The development of computerized musicholds similar implications for the composer, who now explores the multiplemusical possibilities offered by the computer and who is thus ‘less and lessrequired to be able to play any instrument at all (including the human larynx)’(Harris 2000: 241). Computerization is thus the relativization of the humanworld in the special sense of drawing attention to that world as the latent spaceand time in which human agency tries to re-late itself in an increasinglyunstable and dissolving reality whose continuous threat of disappearanceprovokes ever further productions and predictions of the latent. The computerunfolds the latency of pre-objective space and time by deferring the immediacyof presence in the promise of an elsewhere yet to be discovered.
Relationality invites us to see the world as the movement of relationshipsbetween things rather than the things themselves as static or quasi-staticstructures. It re-lates or echoes the need of human agency to constitute andreconstitute itself out of a basic existential condition of deferral, dispersion andunfoundedness. In order to find and found itself, the human subject re-latesitself through the supports and props it constructs as vehicles of movement anddirection in an environment of latency that refuses the stability of conceptualcapture and institutional formalization. Latency haunts the human world likean atmospheric presence which, strangely, appears only as the felt absence ofan invisible something that does not wish to be seen. In this sense, the latentdoes not directly signify or re-late itself but, like the zero degree of mana,intimates itself as an invisible wholeness that can receive and accommodateforms and qualities foreign to it. It intimates itself as a mute and neutral statethat tells us only of its essential remoteness and ungraspability. Despite itsimmanence 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 theomniscient 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 orjustification but in order to regain the space of its unfolding, the void serving as itssite, the distance in which it is constituted and into which its immediate certaintiesslip the moment they are glimpsed.’ (Foucault 1990: 16)
Relationality is that which re-lates or unfolds this ‘thought from outside’ intothe recognizable and familiar supports and props of everyday existence andin which the act of re-lating is the forever suspended unfolding of the latentas that necessarily uncapturable source of the manifest. The computerizationand globalization of the world is the contemporary expression of relationalityas this existential reaching out by human agency in order to re-late itself inthe unfolding latency of relative space and time.
Cooper: Relationality 1709
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1710 Organization Studies 26(11)
Robert Cooper is a visiting professor at the Centre for Culture, Social Theory andTechnology, Keele University. He writes mainly on the general theme of social andcultural production. He has published widely on the relationship between technologyand modern organizing, on technology and mass society, and on the social and culturalaspects of information. His current work includes an analysis of information as a formof knowledge production.Address: Centre for Culture, Social Theory and Technology, Darwin Building, KeeleUniversity, Keele, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK.E-mail: [email protected]
