[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 68, Issue 10 / is there a will to create / the social beyond the mechanisim?

[Simon Biggs]

I am using agency in a sense that some might find contentious as I am
considering it as an ontological phenomena in a context where individuals,
whether human or animal, alive or inert, physical or virtual, are not where
agency is located. Rather, I am entertaining the idea that agency is of (or
is) the relationships between things (whatever those things might be). In
this respect I am proposing a folding of agency and creativity into one
thing which might be considered somewhat like a dark matter which binds
everything together. The units that are bound within this prima materia (for
want of a better term) might then be considered rather like quantum
phenomena - the closer you look the more you realise there is nothing there
and that it is the phenomena around the unit that give it its apparent
properties. The subsequent question, of course, is what is the unit (here I
include people)? Clearly there is something there - but what?

Best

Simon


Simon Biggs
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk  simon at littlepig.org.uk
Skype: simonbiggsuk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/

Research Professor  edinburgh college of art
http://www.eca.ac.uk/
Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice
http://www.elmcip.net/
Centre for Film, Performance and Media Arts
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/film-performance-media-arts


> From: Kriss Ravetto <k.ravetto at ed.ac.uk>
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:43:44 +0100
> To: <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 68, Issue 10 / is there a will to
> create / the social beyond the mechanisim?
> 
> I am not so sure that experience
> is agency ? but you probably mean something other than what the new
> left means when you say this. Also we are not arguing for the "will"
> as James points out, but something that is also autopoetic, no? The
> difference between the term "thing"(process) as opposed to
> "object"(dead forms) leads us to communication (process) community
> (dead)? So the relation is affirmative, but the definition (the
> limits) amount to its death (Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of
> the state).
> 
> How is Ingold defining agency ? if I remember well he makes a case for
> a human centered study, something that Latour has refuted with his
> critique of sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) ? Ingold "reads
> back to the mind of an agent," i.e, human.



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