Under the Knife: Anatomising Organisation Theory

Abstract

In an Open University programme on ‘cell structure and function’ there is an incredibly detailed demonstration of how a rat’s kidney is prepared for biological study. Luckily (for my sensibilities, at least) the initial stages of killing and dissecting the rat to obtain its kidney are omitted (see Birke, 1994; Hubbard and Birke, 1995). However, every­thing that follows this is premised on death and fragmentation. The kidney is first of all sliced into paper thin pieces. One piece is then put through a large number of processes to ‘fix’ it, so that the structures will stay in place and not merge, and ‘stain’ it, so that these structures can be differentiated under the microscope. The whole process is acknowledged to be ‘denaturing’; it is also extremely dextrous work. Finally, the fragment, bearing no resemblance to an organ, let alone an animal, is attached to a microscope slide and the ‘true’ scientific work of examining its parts can begin.

For us, it is the structure of our bodies and of their organs that is the essential, a structure whose stability is for us the image of the stability of our psychic identity. The fluids in our bodies but circulate refurbishment throughout the structure; their seepings into it and evaporations or discharges from it are neither regulated by our public codes nor valued in our politico-economic discourse. For the Sambia of Papua-New Guinea, it is the fluids that are the essential. The body is perceived essentially as a conduit for fluids — for blood, milk, semen. Body fluids are drawn from without, from couplings with other bodies, from couplings with other organism-conduits in outside nature. Among the Sambia, the transmissions of fluid from one body-conduit to another are metered out as social transactions. (Lingis, 1994, p. xi)