Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 09:03:43 +0100
From: Judy <jaw-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Trusting liars to lie


>Ingrid Markhardt wrote:
>
>>  I leave this querstion on the "table":  what would we have, if not agendas?
>
>Your friend invites you to a dinner party and unbeknown to you she
>invites a sibling with the purpose of getting you together.  Maybe
>you'll hit it off.  But you have a relationship and you would not have
>come if you had known.  She knows that.  But she had an agenda.
>
>Later that night, by yourself, you go into the kitchen to get a glass of
>water.
>
>Both of these cases can fit under the rubric of "having an agenda" - or
>even under the rubric of "having a private agenda."  But it would be
>handy to have a way of making a distinction between them.  If we treat
>all conscious life as "having an agenda" just because we can say "This
>is what I understood myself as doing" then the phrase "having an agenda"
>becomes meaningless.
>
>..Lois Shawver

Lois, having a way of distinguishing different kinds of 'having an agenda'
by giving them different names is valuable for certain purposes, while
deemphasizing distinctions and showing what is shared by giving the same
name to seemingly different things can be valuable for other purposes, and
not at all meaningless. To say that a certain way of doing something is
meaningless is to take a position, to support an agenda, to attempt to
persuade, to engage in politics, to put give support to (enter consensus
with) a certain opinion in an agonistic relation to other opinions. I can
imagine that while for the individual who goes to get a glass of water,
there is no underlying motive other than to quench thirst--I have no way of
knowing whether this was the reason, or any number of other things the
person may be thinking or feeling, I don't know if the person, conscsiously
or unconcsciously, also wanted something else to result from going to get
the water such as absenting themselves from whatever interaction they had
been in the midst of or various other possibilities. But their action will
have had some effect on (will have linked in some way onto) whatever
discourse they were a part of prior to making the move of going to the
kitchen. the person may not have had an agenda in the sense you want to
distinguish as meaningful, but the person's role, for example as the one
who does not want to be fixed up with the other person, does have its own
agenda, and regardless of what the person may be thinking or motivated by,
in social interactions people affect each other quite meaningfully and
potently in ways they don't fully control, related to how they are
situated, the situating of their roles so to speak. Deemphasizing the
distinction between such agendas reminds me of Lyotard saying that silence
is a phrase and there is no last phrase, no possibility to not phrase, and
I think this is far from meaningless for certain political purposes related
to other opinions. I know what you mean by 'meaningless' above and I agree.
But I want to take a position on behalf of what is lost if the cause of
deemphasizing such distinctions is successfully dismissed.

Judy