File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1999/lyotard.9907, message 186


Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 12:52:06 -0700
From: hugh bone <hughbone-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Agency


Judy wrote:

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Judy, 

These are interesting ideas!  I'll study them and hope others do too.

Hugh

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

> 
> Colin said
> >Because I am interested in Lyotard primarilly in terms of politics,
> >agency seems conspicuous by its absence in his corpus. I need to re-read
> >'The Differend' perhaps, but even as he underscores an ethico-political
> >responsibility to create new idioms for expression, where does the
> >momentum for this paradigm shift originate?
> >I know it's a big question, but where would you locate agency in
> >Lyotard's work?
> 
> Yes, a really big question. An important one to me too. Easy to get lazy
> and not think about it. glad you asked. It's hard for me to address the
> question because the langauges I'm used to using (being used by) don't go
> where I want to go in response to the question.
> 
> When Lyotard emphasizes the way that humans inhabit discourses that have
> lives of their own, and that make demands and that govern, this doesn't
> happen in a vacuum but is a polemic against liberalism, isn't it?  It's not
> that there is no agency located in individuals but that the individual is
> not the only location of agency, and that itself is a big thing to try to
> grasp for any who are captivated by the liberal traditions in Western
> thought. the analytical focus  on human motivation and intention gets
> bogged down in differends. The emphasis on the forces of discourses that
> individuals are carried along by and governed by is refreshing to me
> because of how it provides a way of talking about certain issues that is
> not bogged down speculating about what someone did or did not intend. I
> dont get the idea that Lyotard is denying that individuals will anything or
> have experiences that motivate them in various ways, but that he's onto
> something different that opens things up, potentially anyway. There is
> power that causes happenings that can't be reduced to individual agency.
> 
> When lyotard says that silence is a phrase, this implies for me that
> individual agency can never be extinguished. I'm not yet sure how to say
> what I mean by this though.
> 
> It's individuals who play games. They exercise will when they have
> discretion over what move to make. But the rules of the game also have
> will, that the game be played a certain way and not another. The game plays
> the player just as the player plays the game. But I think in Lyotard is
> that idea that individual players who find that they can't win by the
> rules, may find some way to sidestep those rules. From the point of view of
> the game and of those for who the game is legitimate (e.g. the winners),
> this might be called cheating, or not playing fair, it may involve ruse.
> For me, this implies agency, but not pure individual agency: it's another
> way of linking onto the game. The game will have its influence regardless.
> 
> But I don't know. It's hard to talk about because the answer is not
> either/or, nor systematic. What would you want to say about the location of
> agency, and about accountability, in Lyotard's writings?
> Judy



   

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