NOTE-1482: Bencherki — A pre-individual perspective to organizational action

Contribution

Organization studies frames the individual–organizational relation as two pre-existing entities needing a bridge: principal–agent models, structuration, institutional work (pp. 777–779). The paper inverts the problem. It starts from action, which is “pre-individual, i.e. logically prior to any individual” (p. 778). The questions are then which individuations an action is allowed to contribute to, and who decides. Membership, authorship and power become matters of individuation.

Key insight

Ownership of action is never given and never complete: “a being only possesses its components from a particular perspective: their contribution to its individuation process; possession is never complete or univocal” (p. 782). Because people need their actions to count toward a collective if their own individuation is to continue, the denial or usurpation of authorship is felt (affectivo-emotivity) and is political.

Assumptions

• Simondon’s allagmatic ontology (p. 780): no prior blueprint and no levels to reconcile, because “the phases of being coexist”. Quoted from Simondon 2005 and 1989 in the author’s translation (fn. 1).
• Affect, after Massumi and Spinoza, is autonomous and logically prior to any subject (p. 781). Simondon’s “affectivo-emotivity” is read through Barthélémy (2014) as “emotional and provisional disindividuation of the subject”, a step back toward the pre-individual before social individuation (pp. 781–782).
• The documentary is treated as second-hand ethnography (p. 784), with stated limits: one side is heard, the husbands and the army are nearly absent, and the director presents the women and the army as already-constituted entities (pp. 784–785).

Key results

1. Action is pre-individual (pp. 780–781): “not the deed of any agent … but rather a difference that tilts the stability of a being and provokes change”. It is “not chronologically prior” to beings; “individuations continue into each other ceaselessly”.
2. Affect continues personal into collective individuation (pp. 781–782). An individual “does not exhaust the tensions that allowed its constitution”, and from “that load of reality that is still non-individuated … man (sic) seeks his kindred to constitute a group” (Simondon 1989: 192).
3. Communication is transduction (p. 782): the circulation of actions “from one center to another”, structuring the collective. The actions “escape any given body ‒ they are never quite its actions”.
4. Signification follows the collective (pp. 782–783): “The existence of the collective is necessary for information to be significant” (Simondon 2005: 307). “Concurrent significations, then, are not mere misunderstandings, but rather the outcomes of simultaneous individuation processes.”
5. Table 1 (p. 787) crosses the two allowances, contribution to human individuation and contribution to organizational individuation, giving four cells. The excerpts fill three: political activity (cell 1, channeling), the checklist (cell 1, positive co-individuation) and the daycare (cell 2, usurpation by the army).

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	Treating action as pre-individual dissolves the micro–macro bridging problem	weak	conceptual, pp. 778–783
C2	Affectivo-emotivity is the experience of an individuation whose continuation into a collective is blocked	weak	Simondon 1989 and Barthélémy, read onto the documentary, pp. 781–782, 792–793
C3	Whether the organization recognizes an action as a member’s or as its own sorts into co-individuation, channeling or usurpation	moderate	Table 1 with three documentary excerpts, pp. 786–792
C4	One action can carry several significations because it takes part in several individuations	weak	conceptual; illustrated by the dental plan, which reads as “political activity” to the army and as a legitimate demand to the women, p. 793

Method

Narrative analysis of three excerpts from Nomad’s land (Corriveau, NFB, 2007), treated as second-hand ethnography (pp. 784–792). The base commander labels the spouses’ newsletter on pensions, daycare and dental care “political activity” and threatens them with trespass. An officer presents the family centre’s “checklist”, made by community members, as a service “we offer”. Volunteer-run daycare: “If I volunteered, my daughter could go to daycare for free”. The analysis assumes that the officer speaks for the army, and says so (p. 790).

Concepts

• Pre-individual action. Action logically, not chronologically, prior to its apparent authors.
• Allagmatic. Simondon’s theory of operations (allagma, change), which needs no prior form (p. 780).
• Affectivo-emotivity. The felt questioning of an individual’s existence when its pre-individual load seeks resolution in a collective.
• Disindividuation. The provisional undoing that precedes a new individuation, or that follows its refusal (pp. 781, 792).
• Co-individuation, channeling, usurpation. Table 1’s ways an action’s contribution is allowed or captured.
• Associated milieu. What co-individuates with a being, such as the body for thought. Which is focal and which is milieu “is a matter of perspective” (p. 781).

Connections

• Bencherki & Iliadis (LIT-1922) generalizes the communication side of this paper to CCO theory and drops the affect side.
• Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) restores the affect side, through Massumi’s definition of affect, and renames pre-individual action as agency. The correspondence is tabulated in LIT-1901.
• Letiche & Moriceau 2017 (LIT-1915) and Styhre 2010 (LIT-1903) are cited as the rare organization-studies uses of Simondon (p. 780). Both are Unavailable here.
• Bencherki & Cooren 2011 on the “possessive constitution of organization” is the source of the possession vocabulary.

Bearing on the record

• THEORY-1285 is sourced here: action is pre-individual, authorship is an outcome of individuation, and an action’s signification is its participation in individuations, so it can carry several. Proposed.
• CLAIM-355 (a response’s binding can be real while its single owner is a representational construction) is close to “deciding on an author is the outcome of individuation, not its starting point” (p. 786). The paper does not separate the binding from the attribution. In the daycare it treats the army’s attribution as a real usurpation.
• CLAIM-418 (perspectival, agential and institutional boundaries need not coincide) is what Table 1 tabulates. The cells are the ways agential attribution and institutional recognition come apart.
• The parent paper’s citation of this work (pp. 1354–1355) is accurate to the letter but understates the debt: the 2024 paper’s disindividuation, the continuation of individuations into one another, and coexisting meanings all appear here.
• The parent’s attribution of disindividuation to “Simondon, 1989” (p. 1356) is, in this paper, Barthélémy’s gloss on Simondon (p. 781), with Simondon 1989: 130 quoted on emotion as putting “the individual’s existence” on trial. Whether Simondon 1989 uses the word could not be checked (LIT-1900, Unavailable).

Limitations

• The data are someone else’s framing. One documentary, with one side heard. The analysis repeatedly supposes what the data do not show (“I may speculate”, p. 785; “it is possible to assume”, p. 789; “the documentary does not present enough data to confirm these speculations”, p. 789).
• Affectivo-emotivity is inferred from the women’s stated outrage. There is no independent sign of disindividuation.
• The fourth cell is empty. “acts of God, or … the denial of the action’s very existence” (p. 786). Its emptiness is not discussed as a finding.
• A humanist objection is raised and answered by assertion (p. 792): that separating people from their actions is “central to the pre-individual character of action”.

Open questions

• Whether channeling and usurpation can be told apart without a prior standard of whose action it rightly was. The paper’s own politics, its concern at the women’s “unacknowledged” work, needs that standard, and the theory disclaims it.
• Whether Table 1 predicts anything, for instance that usurpation is followed by exit or counter-organization, as the founding of OSOMM suggests.

Bearing on the record’s own argument

Added 2026-10-31 by a pass connecting the readings of Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy 2024 and the works it leans on to the record’s lines. Analogies are marked as such.

Pragmatic transport

• CLAIM-255. Table 1 (p. 787) merges the performance and the recognition of authorship. The usurpation case (pp. 786–792) needs them apart, which is CLAIM-255’s decomposition.
• CLAIM-226. “Concurrent significations … are not mere misunderstandings” (p. 783) supports the view that disagreement is structured. The paper gives no model of it.

Distributed agency and individuation

• CLAIM-403. Table 1 crosses CLAIM-403’s ladder.
  • Channeling (the newsletter as “political activity”, pp. 787–788) is a failure of recognition in apt terms.
  • Usurpation (the daycare, pp. 791–792) is full uptake without attribution, an axis the ladder lacks.
• CLAIM-405. The daycare is one action with crossing answers to “whose action?”, depending on which individuation is the criterion. Calling the army’s answer usurpation needs a criterion fixed in advance.
• CLAIM-477. Action is “logically prior” (p. 777) but “not chronologically prior” (p. 781). That is a qualified priority of the kind CLAIM-477 asks for. The 2024 paper drops the qualification.
• TERM-086. With the army’s service as the target, the daycare is the army’s maintained organizational achievement. With the spouses’ standing as the target, the same arrangement blocks it.
• TERM-088 and QUESTION-281. An individual “does not exhaust the tensions that allowed its constitution” (p. 782, quoting Simondon 1989). The individual keeps an unresolved residue.
• QUESTION-284. “possession is never complete or univocal” (p. 782) is a constitutive claim about the relation of part to whole, stated and not argued.

Will-organization, organizational affect and authenticity

• Checklist and daycare (pp. 789–792). They end in the same state with opposite verdicts, so the judgment depends on history, which supports CLAIM-518.
  • It does not answer CLAIM-512, since what separates the cases is the authorship standard.
  • The daycare is CASE-128’s collective mirror: the arrangement was authorized and its result misattributed.
• “Political activity” (pp. 787–788): legibility and refusal in one label (CLAIM-523).
• Ownership partial and plural (pp. 782, 786). This bears on QUESTION-011. Ownership based on recognition is open to the manipulation objection, and it meets CLAIM-022’s limit a second time.
• “Seeks his kindred” (p. 781): QUESTION-365.

Nucleating argument and formal apparatus

• Table 1 as a one-copy constraint. Concurrent significations (pp. 782–783; the dental plan, p. 793) never conflict as descriptions (CLAIM-310). Conflict arises where an attribution is held once (CLAIM-313).

  • Usurpation (the daycare credited to the army) is credit held once.
  • Co-individuation is credit copied: the checklist is both the community’s work and a service “we offer”.

  Same structure, not shown to be the same mechanism. The reading locates the politics in exclusive attribution, but it does not supply the missing standard for telling usurpation from incorporation.