The Production of Process: The Case of Bitcoin

Process organization studies is an attempt to overturn, and this involves, among other possibilities, switching from an emphasis on being toward becoming, on structure toward process, and on presence toward absence. The process attitude discusses the world as more than what can be captured in representationalist models. It claims that the world cannot be brought to complete presence before us, that we have to resist and treat as suspicious the assumption that in the end the truth will be like a map, where the mapped and the map perfectly correspond with one another. The process attitude claims that the unrepresentable is a part of the narrative of the world, and for this reason process thinking can be a frustrating exercise since it tolerates elusive concepts, such as negativity, withdrawal, and absence. In this paper, we look at a major source of tolerance for what Introna (2019) calls the ‘perhaps ineffable’ work of absence in particular (p. 747). We claim that the traditional dominance of the metaphysics of presence has caused the absence of absence in organization studies. In opposing this dominance we can find ourselves on tricky argumentative ground, because the metaphysics of presence is closely linked to logos, that is to rationalism, objectivity, and the correspondence theory of truth. In contrast to the standards these epistemologies hold, the language of post-metaphysical thinkers can appear ambiguous, even relativist, especially in a field such as organization studies. Therefore, it would be no harm to demonstrate how deconstructive practice approaches absence and what the consequences are, in processual terms. The most significant consequence, the focus of our attention, is the occluding of 1 absence in and through organization, but we hold that this absence is never truly “empty” or unproductive; it is actually what is most productive.