[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 68, Issue 12

[James Leach]

my thanks again to all who have posted.
Kriss


> Can
> we read this striving as life affirming (something someone mentioned
> before).  I see that you are arguing that this striving does not have
> to be a single concept or image of creation; it can constantly change
> the nature of the human so that the human can include other things.
> But can it be indifferent as Simon points out with his gravitational
> pull toward dark matter?

that was indeed the intent: life affirming as human, whatever that is. Clearly for us right now that includes the 'technological' and this is an explicit factor, and a problematic one, in its formation, because in its use, a divide is continually remade/represented between the given and the constructed at the heart of what it is to be human. Our 'magic' (to return to that), is in being able to change the very conditions of what it is to be human through human artifice, but in doing so, we are always pushing at the line between what is given (not human construction but definitional of what human beings are, and the constructed (also human, but optive, choice based and conscious). 

What we cannot choose now is whether or not to choose to change our conditions of existence. A fine pickle. 

> 
> Martin also seems to agree with you about the human striving, and its
> connection to agency, yet Martin, your notion of agency seems to
> involve the will, it is not as autopoetic as James suggests???
> 
> James says: "What is being gathered? what are the constraints on those
> gatherings? and what is created through them - ie, what changes
> because of them?"
> 
> Wouldn't each gathering be specific? And if we were to accept Simon?s
> definition of process/agency language would fail us, since it would
> require that we name, situate or objectify something that is always
> already something else, no?  It makes our work more difficult for sure.
> 

Well yes, I am all for the specificity of each form of gathering. But also would suggest that we can also find principles at work in shaping each that are at least comparable. To identify and describe these processes is indeed difficult, but what we have to do (no?)