On a separate note, now that my PhD has been awarded and my first
difficult semester of teaching
multiple courses is successfully behind me, I mean to devote myself to
some long-postponed
theoretical work I expect to be much more rewarding — among this a
long close reading of some of
your formulations on p2p with an eye to sketching out the many
resonances I find there with my own
thinking. I’ll let you know when I manage to come up with something
substantial at last. Best to
you, d

Here’s the comment from my blog:

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 but “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:

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.�

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.�

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.

�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.�

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.

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 Carrico, PhD
Lecturer, Department of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley
Visiting Faculty, San Francisco Art Institute
Home Page:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~dalec/home.html

[reblogged from a post I made to The Humergence® Weblog] The P2P Foundation Blog has an excellent blog posting by Michel Bauwens on Jaron Lanier’s new essay for Edge. The basic ideas of Lanier’s essay are (quoted from CommunityWiki):There is…

The P2P Foundation Blog has an excellent blog posting by Michel Bauwens on Jaron Lanier’s new essay for Edge. The basic ideas of Lanier’s essay are (quoted from CommunityWiki):* There is a resurgance of the idea that the collective is…