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

[Sean Cubitt]

Absolutely so Simon: and more power to you for having the bottle to go
ontological. The axiom can be -- should be -- further reduced: what is the
materiality of the formative agency which constitutes relationships and
forms things? (You already know which rabbit is in the hat, simon, but allow
me the ta-dah moment): it is is mediation.

Not communication: not every mediation communicates. Just that
everything/process mediates every other contiguous process. This is the
ontological nature of the human universe (to coin Charles Olson's usage):  a
person is a medium for other persons. But it is also the axiom of the entire
sensory and physical universe.

That places it however in the realm of the second law of thermodynamics: a
univers eof pure flux runs down entropically. "Communication" for want of
another term is the ordering of the flow of mediation. Any order is,
especially among our species but certainly also among dogs, the species I
know best of the rest, structural or in-formative. The questions are then
about the modes of order applied to the raw stuff of mediation.

The unit question is then a question about the mode of order applied in any
specific media formation. Grosso modo, we are in an era characterised by
unit enumeration (as opposed, for example, to the geometrical moment of the
renaissance), so the question poses itself as unitary: as digital, as
inflected by the exchange principle. On one hand this is why the temptation
exists to seek out the individual. The effort of thinking otherwise -
deleuze's 'dividual' for example - is troubling, but is necessary if we are
to understand a) how the 'dark matter' becomes the medium (!) of privation
and power ­ that is the specific existential quality of the ontological at
the given moment and b) how to operate on it in such a way as to form it
otherwise - which is where the creative operates

S



On 15/07/10 6:33 PM, "Simon Biggs" <s.biggs at eca.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number
> SC009201
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Prof Sean Cubitt
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Director
Media and Communications Program
Faculty of Arts
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