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

[James Leach]

On 15 Jul 2010, at 10:47, Simon Biggs wrote:

> As I suggested in my earlier post today, which Kriss picked up on, I am
> looking at agency and creativity from an autopoietic point of view. I am not
> seeking to situate agency in the individual but in the collective and,
> specifically, in the in-between. This could be considered a "gathering",
> although this suggests a sense of common purpose, individuals recognising
> they can enhance their capacity to act, to bring themselves and the world
> into being, through collective action. That isn't what I am trying to get
> at. Of course, I am wearing my artists hat when I suggest this and am not
> really equipped to defend what is possibly an indefensible position.
> Nevertheless, I think it is an interesting line of thought.


Yes, this is an interesting line, but the question would become what you could mean by agency, if it is an emergent property of interactions, and thus located outside individual actors, other than a kind of 'social force' - one that is not within any one person's control, authorship, and therefore, not really easily covered by 'agency' as it is commonly understood. 
I think you might be veering towards some notion of the autopoietic as itself as kind of force, the momentum of which bestows form on those those things and persons (interactors in your terms I think) that partake of it? 
But is there a danger here of mixing a descriptive term with a thing that does something? What we call autopoeisis is not a force or thing at all, but a way of describing the way certain elements of relationships condition one another in an ongoing process that is not 'autopoeisis', but people living human lives. The 'danger' (well, the line it might take us down) of thinking of 'it' as 'something' is that we are not too far here from a much older notion of social emergence - Durkheimian notions of the superorganic, (society is sui generis, and arises from but then determines social interaction). Society for Durkheim certainly did have agency. 

James

___________________________________
Professor James Leach
Head of Department, Anthropology
School of Social Science
Edward Wright Building,
University of Aberdeen,
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> 
> 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: James Leach <james.leach at abdn.ac.uk>
>> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:02:33 +0100
>> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 68, Issue 10 / is there a will to
>> create / the social beyond the mechanisim?
>> 
>> But Simon, you also are keen to explore the emergent possibility, to actually
>> look at what is made visible in emerging digital networked forms that is not
>> visible in previous ways of working?
>> 
>> What is being gathered? what are the constraints on those gatherings? and what
>> is created through them - ie, what changes because of them? 
> 
> 
> 
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