Bencherki, N. (2017). A pre-individual perspective to organizational action. ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 17(4), 777–799.
Read in full in NOTE-1482.
Key takeaways
- Action “is not the deed of any agent” but “a difference that tilts the stability of a being and provokes change” (p. 781). Whose action it is, a person’s or an organization’s, is settled by individuation, not given beforehand.
- An individual “does not exhaust the tensions that allowed its constitution”. Affectivo-emotivity marks the rediscovery of that load, which is resolved by participating in a collective (pp. 781–782, quoting Simondon 1989).
- A 2×2 (Table 1, p. 787) crosses whether an action may count toward a person’s individuation with whether it may count toward the organization’s. The cells are co-individuation or channeling, usurpation by the organization, usurpation by the person (or avoidance of contamination), and denial of the action.
Why this is here
The owner asked for the works Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (2024, LIT-1902) lean on. Bencherki is the first author of both. The parent cites this paper once, in a list (pp. 1354–1355), as work that tends “to mobilize [Simondon’s] ideas to theorize the constitution of organizations without theorizing the vital role of agency in organizational becoming”.
That characterization is true to the letter and understates the debt. This paper never makes “agency” its concept. But it already holds the parent’s apparatus:
| the parent (2024) | this paper (2017) |
|---|---|
| agency “happens before any becoming process can be recognized as an individual agent” (p. 1357) | “action logically precedes the beings that appear to be its authors” (p. 780) |
| “Simondon (2020) encourages his readers to stop granting ‘ontological privilege to the constituted individual’” (p. 1355) | action as an agent’s deed “would grant ‘an ontological privilege to the constituted individual’ (2005: 23)” (p. 781) |
| disindividuation and its “averse affective experiences” (p. 1356) | affectivo-emotivity as “emotional and provisional disindividuation” (p. 781, after Barthélémy) |
| reaching out to other individuations: the urge resolved by founding a nonprofit (p. 1356) | the pre-individual load resolved “through participation in a collective” (p. 782) |
| “Coexisting meanings of the same action indicate that several individuations are ongoing” (p. 1358) | “Concurrent significations … are … the outcomes of simultaneous individuation processes” (p. 783) |
What the parent adds is Massumi’s definition of affect, with agency as its augmenting direction, the term “excess action”, and the event. The record should read the 2024 paper as a development of this one. THEORY-1285 states the claim both lean on.