bare yellow bulb, vol 2 12 apr 2012
one of the points i meant to make yesterday was that organic and organise have the same root, but when i think about organic, i think of something that's disorganised. i mean, natural, sure, but something organic wouldn't be in straight little rows. organised items are in straight little rows. that's how i think about it, anyway.
so, i looked up "organic" and it means: of, related to, or derived from living matter. and i looked up "organise": arrange into a structured whole. then, i went to check out "organ" and of course it begins with stuff about the musical instrument, so i dug a bit deeper. an "organ" in biology is a grouping of tissues into a distinct structure. an organisation of organic matter, if you will. the origins of the word organ reach back into middle english and midieval latin, both of which use the word to mean tool or device, organ of the body, or musical instrument. the latin "organum" is derived from the greek "organon" meaning... tool.
this is going nowhere!
how can organic and organise both be derived from tool? is organisation a tool or do you use tools for organisation? i bought two new filing boxes today. they're tools for organisation. organisation organs? that sounds gross.
i kept going and found that organism, coined in the 1660s, means "organic structure, organisation". omg! organism means both organic and organisation. where's the ROOT CONNECTION!
i think when it comes down to the brass tacks, something that is organic isn't actually unorganised - it's just got a natural organisation that grows within it or that it grows within or that it is formed around. so organic is natural organisation, from within. organisation as we usually speak of it is imposed from without.
is this making any sense? i can't tell. i'm still all hopped up on the göööööd stuff.
posted by ace @ 20:35
3 comments
3 Comments:
It all goes back to Aristotle. This is explained in Book 2 of Physics (which for the Greeks simply meant Nature.) http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/physics.2.ii.html
I think that in order to understand the idea that organs and organizations are about tools, you have to have a broader conception of what it means for something to be a tool. A tool is something that *functions for a purpose*. That's the basic idea in Aristotle. All organs and organisms and organizations are constructed around a single function and purpose. That's what makes them organs instead of simply, say, collections of random stuff.
I think you already figgered this out on your own in your post, but I got excited to comment on it.
thanks, jeff. thanks for reading, commenting, and giving me a link to follow and learn something. also, it's difficult to say without sounding wack, but thanks for saying you got excited to comment on something i was saying. nice to know that something i say would hep someone up. if you see what i mean there.
The 20th century French philosophy Gilles Deleuze invented this concept of "the body without organs." I think I wrote a post on it on my own blog. It's a really weird idea, but it sort of asks us to think about the ways in which we traditionally "organize" our bodies through perception--and whether we can understand or even live in our bodies without always organizing them. He thinks that certain ecstatic states of the body (racy!) are fundamentally dis-organized; they release us from normal modes of organization and allow us to relate differently to experience.
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