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

[j.martin.pedersen]

...

On 15/07/10 09:33, Simon Biggs 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?

Hmm... Yes, there is something to that in a spiritual sense - for me -
but I am not sure that it would be agency, since I would like to
maintain a creative, spiritual energy (or potential, ie. agency) located
in me - and you - that could perform, be the creator of, instigator of,
source of magic or at least its facilitator, in the sense that we
perhaps find most neatly suggested in A Midsummer Night's Dream
(Shakespeare, of course):

“And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!”

..and to some degree also in the political phenomenology - if there is
such a thing - in Sartre's musings on the imaginary (not that I have
read it, but it sounds good!):

"We may therefore conclude that imagination is not an empirical power
added to  consciousness, but it is the whole of consciousness as it
realizes its freedom"

But that of course, in a sense, takes us back to where you located it -
I suspect - insofar as we consider consciousness a collective form.

These are of course "merely" language games - discursive formations,
narrative structures - that serve to explain what we cannot quite grasp,
but is there not a good reason to maintain a creative agent - hence
agency in ourselves - to cherish and work on, reflect on, and also, in
the case of wankers (think politicians, capitalists...), hold accountable?

In some Amazonian linguistic measures - on anecdotal note - to make
sense of spiritual energies and magic acts, healing processes and so on,
entities other than humans - animals and plants etc. - are also
considered as having creative agency - thus the relational fields are
energy flow and not agency, and agency is what can navigate, manipulate,
reflect, deflect energies - and I think that is rather where I would
want to go to transcend the more limited Western (Cartesian?) framework
of mind, body and connections.

A clarification: The "mystical" here, if anyone should see it as such,
when seen from inside the Amazonian cosmovision (of which I have read
very little, just been hanging out there for a few years with shamans in
other dimensions, so this is a set of particular experiences
gratuitously and opportunistically generalised): is very material.
Indeed, energy flows are the foundation of all things material. (David
Graeber writes some interesting stuff slightly relevant for these
matters of flows and flows of matters with reference to a dispute
between dispute between Parmenides and Heraclitus [1]).

The relations between people as "agency" - to my mind, in my imagination
- leads to a muddle that I cannot navigate satisfactorily, but perhaps
that is a circularity problem, in case your explanation is more to the
point, and I am merely lacking proper access to the big web of agency. A
question remains then, though: How do I get that access? What is my
pilot and my fuel to interact, to stroll through energy flows of
relations, if not my agency?

In other words, Yes - contentious. What is it, that unit? So why not
just stick with human agents? We have trancended the simple notion in
our understanding, but end up in the same place with a new perspective.
Do we need to throw the baby........?

best,
martin

[1]: http://www.commoner.org.uk/10graeber.pdf