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