Techniques of notation and behaviour : remarks on elementary forms of organization

The paper accords signification or representation a decisive role in the context ofinstrumental action. It is argued that the diverse practices subsumed under thenotion of organizing are but varied manifestations of the basic operative schemaof representation: something for something else. Representation is therebyposited as “consubstantial” with the mundane notion of organization. Bothrepresentation and organization imply the institution of diverse systems ofnotation whose mobile, stable and combinable elements enable the making, andby the same token, also the unmaking and remaking of the world. The vicariousand rehearsable character of the representing elements renders the worldmanipulable in the sense of imposing on the sheer flow of experience itscontrived schemata of temporality and distance and its encoded versions ofobjects, states and processes. It establishes the proto-conditions of socialdifferentiation, and hierarchy as it appears in its modern version, by creating in abipolar fashion differences in perspective and knowledge between a centre, i.e.those that encode, accumulate and control combinations of these encodedversions of the world, and a periphery, i.e. local sources of knowledge that arebeing encoded or controlled. However, these ways of worldmaking obey, at leastpartly, the logic enfolded in the forms by means of which a representing universeorganizes and structures its elements. An attempt is made to reveal this logic bydistinguishing different organizing principles falling within the categories ofnumerical, verbal and pictorial representation, and to connect these principles withthe bureaucratic ideal of accountable and calculable behaviour