tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post114939419084458985..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: P2P: It's About Now, Not MaoDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-1149479985102952522006-06-04T20:59:00.000-07:002006-06-04T20:59:00.000-07:00I am deeply indebted personally to the account of ...I am deeply indebted personally to the account of agency I learned from my mentor Judith Butler, an account that is central to my conception of a nonthreatened interdependent individualist agency of a kind I think is complementary to the one you invoke here. I discussed (and idiosyncratically elaborated) Butler's view of post-sovereign "performative" agency in a section of the first chapter of my dissertation, entitled "Sovereign or Subject?" excerpted here:<BR/><BR/>In a nutshell, for Butler: “To become a subject means to be subjected to a set of implicit and explicit norms that govern the kind of speech that will be legible as the speech of a subject.”<BR/><BR/>To be a subject is always crucially to be intelligible as a subject. And this intelligibility is in turn crucially a matter of being (treated as) a competent speaker of the language of agency, competent in the intelligible citation of agency’s proper conventions. But just because a language is sufficiently stable as an object that one can usually reliably distinguish competent from incompetent speakers of that language, this does not foreclose the capacity of those very speakers, precisely because they are competent, to reform their language in speaking it, through figurative language or coinages, for example. Citation is almost never recitation, almost never a perfect repetition of some established norm. “To be constituted by language is to be produced within a given network of power/discourse which is open to resignification, redeployment, subversive citation from within, and interruption and inadvertent convergences with other such networks,” Butler goes on to say. And “’[a]gency’ is to be found precisely at such junctures where discourse is renewed.”<BR/><BR/>Language is competent to produce effects in the world (notice even in their most trivially “descriptive” registers languages risk the proposal of sufficient similarities among the play of differences in the environment on the basis of which one attends and acts decisively and then differentially succeeds or not in manipulating that environment and anticipating experience), and the competent speaker of language is thereby more or less efficacious for it. But a linguistic account of agency can never afford the consoling fantasy of omnipotent invulnerability. The interminable play of differences, among them the key instance of an ineradicable difference between world and word, provide the constant and conspicuous occasion for failure and frustration. Neither can a linguistic account of agency afford the consoling fantasy of omnipotent autonomy. Language confers intelligibility, and so its special measure of independent existence, only as a function of an ineliminable interdependence of speakers.<BR/><BR/>“Untethering the speech act from the sovereign subject,” writes Butler, “founds an alternative notion of agency and, ultimately, of responsibility, one that more fully acknowledges the way in which the subject is constituted in language, how what it creates is also what it derives from elsewhere.” She goes on to emphasize that “[w]hereas some critics mistake the critique of sovereignty for the demolition of agency, I propose that agency begins where sovereignty wanes.”<BR/><BR/>This is a stronger claim by far than that a linguistic account of agency affords adequate agency to satisfy our legitimate needs, despite, say, its registration of a disconcerting or unappealing vulnerability and radical dependency for the agent so construed. Hers is not necessarily a plea for a more modest accounting of agency. If efficacy is indeed importantly a function of intelligibility, then the radical inter-dependency of linguistic practice is a general condition for agency, even if it is frequently the occasion for its particular frustration as well. If freedom is indeed importantly a function of the open-ended character of linguistic practice, then the radical vulnerability of language to error, misinterpretation, and misunderstanding is a condition for agency as well, because it is the condition for the openness of language to improvisation, novelty, and poetry.<BR/><BR/>The disavowal of this dependency and vulnerability at the heart of the sovereign figuration of agency is not of course the same as the accomplishment of the autonomy and invulnerability it pines for, but on the contrary Butler suggests “weakens the sense of self, establish[ing] its ostensible autonomy on fragile grounds… requir[ing] a repeated and systematic repudiation of others in order to acquire and maintain the appearance of autonomy.” What is wanted instead, she proposes, are “fundamentally more capacious, generous, and ‘unthreatened’ bearings of the self in the midst of community” for which linguistic as opposed to sovereign accounts of agency have a more conspicuous affinity.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.com