What if I told you that there’s no such thing as an individual action?
In which case, you, as an individual, can't tell me shit.
That every time you eat, walk up the stairs or read a book, you are not the sole agent behind what you are doing, but are engaged in a process of co-creation – as much acted-upon as acting?
So what? The motive for action is to experience some change in circumstances. But this isn't 'co-creation'. We don't say that the cook co-creates the turd we proudly expel.
To grasp what I mean here, imagine riding a horse. While I can effortlessly distinguish between myself and a horse, I’m aware that neither I nor the horse alone can produce the action of riding.
Nor can we produce it together unless the horse has been broken and I have received some training in horse-riding and a saddle has been provided.
Riding emerges as a kind of co-action between myself and others,
Nope. Riding emerges as an action of the rider. The horse can't actually train people to ride it. Similarly, raping is the action of the rapist. It isn't a 'co-action' in which the victim plays an equal part and therefore bears equal responsibility.
and these others are not limited to the horse: they extend towards the particularities of the terrain, the open space that affords movement,
fuck you Space and Time! You are contributing to RAPE!
the training that the horse and I have undertaken together, the bridle and saddle, and even the food we have ingested to give us energy. All these agencies and many more collaborate to produce the event of riding.
There is only one agency- that of the rider. The horse is acted upon. The saddle is wholly inert and can't do shit on its own. As for the food- it no longer exists or is in the process of being digested and turned to shit.
I’m going to suggest that, just like riding, all actions are collective.
In which case, you aren't suggesting shit. Either there is no action- we live in a block universe which either evolves or merely appears to evolve- or else in any action, there is a distinction between actor and acted upon. In the process of riding, it is true, the horse may do things the rider does not want- e.g. throw him off and trample him under its hooves. There may also be 'co-actions'- the polo pony may contribute, by its own agency and initiative, to the rider scoring a goal. Alternatively, the horse may know which way to go when the rider does not. Many a drunkard has been brought home by his sagacious horse.
While this would be close to common sense for a Chinese philosopher of the ‘classical period’ (roughly 6th to 2nd century BCE), it might seem counterintuitive to those of us raised in Western contexts.
Or, it might seem bullshit to the vast majority of ancient Chinese or modern Western people. Philosophers have shit for brains.
There’s currently a dominant tendency in what we call ‘the West’ (the Anglosphere and some parts of Europe) to buy into the myth of individualism: the notion that individuals alone are responsible for their failure or success, that we are self-reliant and independent from each other and the natural world.
Which is why we get up and go to the toilet rather than just shit the bed and then expect the office to come to us rather than catching a train to get to work.
Basically, that we can do things by ourselves.
As opposed to letting the dog and the homework do each other.
A prominent manifestation of individualism is the American Dream – which in her book Cruel Optimism (2011) Lauren Berlant
an American who dreamt of gaining money and fame by writing stupid shite
called a desire that becomes ‘an obstacle to your own flourishing’.
the obstacle to Berlant's flourishing was all the stupid shit in 'their' brain.
Individualism promises prosperity and success
not to those who do stupid shit
based on individual effort and merit,
as opposed to expecting the dog to write your book for you in collaboration with the furniture
but it delivers ideas and conditions that make those things unattainable for all but a privileged few.
whose privilege consists in not doing stupid shit- or expecting the dog and the furniture to do it for them.
Under this ideology, drug addicts are blamed for their weakness,
it was the dog and the furniture which stole Mummy's money to buy the heroin which the potted plants injected into sonny boy's veins.
pregnant women who choose not to become mothers are shamed for their recklessness,
by the co-action of the dog, the furniture and the potted plants- right? If addicts and sluts aint to blame for their predicament it follows that nobody can be blamed for blaming them for their predicament. The pusher who sold the drugs, or the rapist who got the slut preggers, are not responsible for their supposed actions. If you have to blame somebody, blame the universe.
and the unemployed are condemned for their laziness.
but being condemned by the dog and the furniture and the potted plants is no big deal.
Yet in a world where corporations manipulate doctors to overprescribe drugs,
no corporate executive is guilty of anything because everything is the co-action of the dog and the furniture and the potted plants and so forth.
where reproductive rights are in retreat,
because of the dog and the furniture and so on- no fucking Republicans are to blame.
and where jobs are often humiliating, exhausting and poorly paid,
there are no jobs. Why hire a guy and pay him a wage when he is incapable of doing anything on his own?
individualism has become a cover for those very entities responsible for these grave injustices and inequalities.
But nobody is responsible for injustices because they are incapable of doing anything on their own.
The performance of an ideology that supposedly benefits the person but brings about the opposite of what was intended – that’s the notion of cruel optimism.
No. That's the product of stupidity. These guys have some sort of ideology and political agenda. But their stupidity makes that ideology and that agenda hated and reviled by everybody else.
What happens, though, if we dispense with the individualistic way of framing reality?
This silly lady can't keep her story straight. How can we have an 'individualistic way of framing reality'? Everything is a co-action- right?
In parts of contemporary academia,
the stupid parts
the countervailing notion of relationality has become a prism to rethink both the humanities and the sciences.
if by 'rethinking' you mean writing paranoid nonsense- then, sure.
There are Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s assemblages;
Guattari was madder than his psychiatric patients. Deleuze was ignorant of contemporary developments in mathematical logic. Neither understood that Marxism is shit.
Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory;
Callon was actually quite witty. But guys who write about Science are still shit compared to those smart enough to actually do it.
Donna Haraway’s posthumanism; and Karen Barad’s entanglement,
Barad was supposed to be smart. Then they went mad and started writing nonsense.
among many others.
to be found in lunatic asylums.
And this is just in the West. Asia has more resources to think through relationality simply because it’s been doing it for a longer time.
I knew a bloke from Asia once. I asked him if he knew Bruce Lee. He pretended to be Tamil but I persisted and till he confessed that Bruce Lee was his Uncle. All them Asians are related to each other you know. They also all manage to squeeze into the same pair of underpants. True fact.
Along with classical Chinese philosophers,
who died long ago
I support a form of relational and process metaphysics, which favours flowing interrelations, interconnectedness and interdependence.
Very kind of it, I'm sure. Sadly, it is related and interconnected with its co-actor- the Universe- which is guilty of RAPE, not to mention scratching its bollocks incessantly.
These concepts can help us think differently
but only with the cooperation of the dog and the furniture and the potted plants and the Universe- which is constantly scratching its bollocks.
about issues that affect our daily lives, reframing agency in terms of our relations and dependencies with others.
Don't blame me for the dirty dishes piled up in the sink. The dog and the furniture and the potted plants refused to co-act with me which is why the washing up didn't get done.
Much as we can’t ride a horse by ourselves,
unless we actually have a horse and know how to ride
there’s nothing in our social and political life that’s entirely up to us as individuals.
Which is why we can't be arsed to vote.
We are co-constituted, co-acted and co-dependent on others – from the air we breathe
but we don't breathe. Respiration involves a co-action in which doggie and the furniture and the potted plants all have an important role to play.
to the ground that affords our walking. If we start seeing the world like this, it has the potential to make things much better for the many life forms that inhabit this planet.
Especially the worms that will eat us when we starve to death while waiting for the Universe to deliver us a pizza.
According to an influential strand of thought within Chinese philosophy,
philosophers don't get paid enough. This is also an influential strand of thought within Indian philosophy which is why Indians set up Tandoori restaurants, or qualify as Cost and Management Accountants, any chance they get.
humans and other animals are not the only entities with the capacity to act.
Ghosts and fox spirits get pretty frisky.
We are in turn acted upon by everything around us: objects, ideas, laws, genes, food, rules.
ghosts, fox spirits, genies etc.
The claim that these things can act subverts our conventional understanding of agency.
especially if we've been drinking
Traditionally, in the West, agency is linked to intentionality: we have agency – the capacity to act – only insofar as we can represent our intentions and goals.
Nonsense! There is such a thing as subconscious or unconscious intention.
But in classical Chinese philosophy, things like drinking vessels and dress attires, while not animate, have tendencies to behave in certain ways,
My drinking vessels tend to fill up with booze which is strange coz I'm a teetotaler. On the other hand, my tie tries to strangle me.
and such behaviour affords certain possibilities for action.
You could marry your vacuum cleaner.
The Daodejing – a work attributed to Laozi, written around the 4th century BCE – notes that the emptiness of a house allows room for lodging.
Which is why Laozi's neighbors, very kindly, kept stealing all his furniture.
And in the Zhuangzi, a compilation of philosophical writings from the same era, the tree is said to afford shade in which to lie down.
because your neighbor's have stolen your bed. Also they are keeping pigs in your house.
Such affordances can affect, inspire, encourage, invite, forbid, prevent and enable us to do certain actions.
Unless one's drinking vessels show a tendency to fill up with booze in which case, why bother?
Whatever is entangled or related to an agent in a certain situation becomes a co-actor and participant in what is happening.
But this could void your warranty from Dyson.
In classical China, these ideas are the bedrock of what I call the co-action paradigm.
Which tended to yield to the opium smoking paradigm.
If we unpack it more carefully, it contains three claims. The first is that all actions are collective rather than individual (hence ‘co-actions’).
Since perception too is an action, and all actions are co-actions this means there can be no certainty that any action is perceived. But this also means co-actions can't be distinguished. So this is a claim that claims it can't ever be verified. Why not just claim that all 2w2cwe are garbb223u89v?
Also called distributive agency and intra-action by Jane Bennett and Karen Barad, respectively, the idea is that no single subject is the root cause of any event; rather, agency is the result of a dynamism of forces distributed across a diverse field of actors, both human and nonhuman.
So, there's just one 'slingshot' such that all true, and false, statements refer to the same one big fact. But the same could be said of goats bleating.
The second claim, related to the first, is that things also have agency.
My sofa is actually a Talent Agent. I'm waiting for it to get me my break in Hollywood.
A thing is something without awareness and intentions.
Like Rahul Gandhi.
How should we understand this non-subjective and non-intentional form of agency?
We should understand it by co-acting with the dog and the furniture.
I understand this agency – the agency of laws and books and landscapes – in terms of efficacy and propensity.
Ever feel the Universe is out to get you? It actually is! Also cats are surveilling you for the Illuminati.
When applied to actors with intentions, efficacy is about the way we use certain tendencies and affordances to achieve a goal: say, training, saddling and collaborating with our horse in order to ride it.
marrying it, however, is frowned upon- unless you are a member of the Royal Family.
But when it comes to inanimate objects or non-intentional agents, efficacy can also be the power to effect change, to make things happen, to generate a stimulus that calls for a response (ganying 感應: ‘resonance’).
It means 'induction' or 'influence' or to impart a vibration
Propensity becomes a collective capacity to self-organise by harmonising with others
by joining a choir along with your dog and furniture and a tasteful selection of potted plants.
I believe that things have efficacy in the sense that they can make things happen.
Why not stare at the fridge till it fills up with
We might think, in line with Confucian moral theory, about how different types of music excite different moods,
We don't need no Confucian moral theory to know what mood will be excited by putting Barry White on the stereo which is why we keep trying to get Mum to switch to listening to M.S Subbalaxmi.
some inviting peaceful reflection, others instigating rebellion and violence.
listening to MS singing Bhaja Govinda does have that effect on Mum. The only thing which can calm her down is Tom Jones singing 'What's new Pussycat?'
Or, based on the political philosophy of Shen Dao and Han Feizi, how it’s the position of a ruler – rather than his personality, achievements, or virtue
or skill at ping-pong
– that allows him to effectively exercise power, authority and influence.
By contrast, Russian political philosophers thought Stalin effectively exercised power thanks only to his cute mustache and the charming way he threw up his skirt while dancing the can-can.
Propensity, in turn, is a tendency to behave in certain ways that can be anticipated: like the way we can expect fire to burn.
Which is why you don't invite a bonfire to dinner unless you want your house to burn down.
But when we think about things in assemblies rather than in isolation, propensity becomes a collective capacity to self-organise by harmonising with others,
which is why its not your fault if your house burned down just coz you invited your friendly neighborhood bonfire to dinner
in ways that generate new configurations and emerging processes and events
which is how come you end up in ER at 3 AM on a Saturday night with your duck stuck up a vacuum cleaner nozzle.
(he 和: ‘harmonisation’; shi 勢: ‘propensity’; the emergent collective power of an assembly of things).
My furniture got to chatting about me when I was at work. They decided I wasn't meeting their emotional needs. I've had to move out while they see other people.
In the Huainanzi, a 2nd-century BCE collection of philosophical and political essays, natural entities such as trees, birds, fish, rocks, gorges, wind and rain all collaborate to nourish and provide each other with the conditions to thrive – and all this without a plan or desire to do so.
Then a tiger turns up and eats you which is odd because it was actually only planning to pop down the pub for a drink after which it might have gone for a doner kebab. Still, a nice Chinese takeaway always hits the spot.
In these accounts, neither efficacy nor propensity need an intentional subject.
like wanking- right?
Yet, when humans participate in co-acting along with things,
they end up in ER at 3 AM on a Saturday with a mobile phone up their butt
there is more than resonance and harmonisation at play, because intentions are introduced into the equation. This leads us to the third claim embedded in the co-action paradigm: that humans should design their actions so as to take into account all the others participating along with them.
Also, they should remember to breathe in and then breathe out and keep doing so if they want to stay alive.
In classical Chinese philosophy, the principle of acting along with others is called adapting (yin 因).
But classical Chinese philosophers are called worse things by guys they owe money to.
Adaptive actions are effective because they make good use of the available affordances and the agency of things to accomplish a goal.
Only so long as people remember to breathe in and then breathe out. Failure to do so could lead to your getting behind with your Student Loan repayments.
A metaphor that I particularly enjoy speaks of ‘riding’ the power of things,
get the Universe between your legs and ride it ragged.
like the Chinese wingless dragon rides on clouds to fly, according to Chinese culture.
unless Cathay Pacific is running a Black Friday promotion
Adaptive actions start,
quickly otherwise they aint adaptive. Tiger eats you.
first, from understanding the interdependence of all entities in a given situation;
by which time Tiger is chomping down on your head
second, from acknowledging the agency of things in terms of both efficacy and propensity;
Honorable sofa, I acknowledge your Talent Agency but it is totally inefficacious and is showing no propensity to secure me my big break in Hollywood.
and finally, in consequence, from being able to put the power of things to good use.
i.e. selling them on Ebay
In short, the idea is that humans must adapt ourselves to the agentive power of the things we are co-acting with.
But it is a shit idea. Why not adapt things to us? Shit. That would involve doing the washing up. Agentive power of the dishes, kindly form a propensity to clean yourselves. After that you could fill yourselves up with tasty things for me to eat.
In the Zhuangzi, Butcher Ding adapts to the particular piece of ox he’s cutting up.
He carves up the meat along its joints. Then his kids buy him an electric carving knife. He totally loses his shit.
In the story, he’s said not to see with his eyes nor listen with his ears,
same thing happens to me when I've drunk too much. But I can still fart mightily with my asshole.
since these perceptual processes are understood to posit things as dead and passive,
Ding was chopping up dead animals. Live ones would have tried to bite him.
upon which we exert effort and violence. Instead, the butcher resonates with the piece he’s working on, allowing himself to respond to its tendencies, efficacy and propensity; that’s how he can collaborate with it in raising new events in a more effective way.
Or he could just toss the thing in the mixer.
Examples of the agency of nonsubjective entities also abound in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (c5th century BCE).
But a soldier whose spear kept getting stuck up his ass was still sacked.
Here, we see that individual actors are not the source of effective actions;
like Rahul Gandhi
instead, their agency relies on coordinated efforts with others.
but they can still be totally ineffective- like Rahul Gandhi
These others include mountain ranges and fire, and changing weather and terrain conditions, all of which can trump a commander’s strategy unless this is created in adaptation to them.
Also, don't try to cross the ocean on foot. You will get very wet. The Red Sea, on the other hand, might part for you if your name is Moses.
These collectives or assemblages of things display emergent efficacy and propensity in their own right. In The Art of War, the skilled commander is like water:
In a fight, I am like water- in the sense that I piss myself.
fluidly shaping his strategies according to changing conditions in the configuration of collective power.
The US Air Force just bombs the shit out of everything. Sometimes, nothing else will do.
But how can we perform the final claim in the co-action paradigm, the praxis of adapting in order to harness the agency of things around us?
Wicca. Invest in a broomstick and a big bubbling cauldron. Then find some suckers who will buy your love potion which- btw- Amazon now delivers.
First, we must displace our sense of self as a privileged source of values,
by carefully cracking open our skulls and removing our brains
preferences and reasons. Instead, the self becomes just one more interconnected element in a larger situation; it’s not the only standard (not even the main one) by which to decide a course of action.
Though maybe it should be as you ruefully realize after your insurer refuses to pay for having your phone removed from your butt.
Chinese philosophers called this approach forgetting and emptying the heart-mind.
Which is how come Chine ended up being ruled by Mongols or Manchus.
The rationale is that, when our sense of individual self is too strong, it’s hard to invite others in.
Which is also why some people end up on a Saturday Night with their mobile phone up their butt.
We can even become blind to the efficacy and propensity of things around us; we tend to act forcefully, arbitrarily imposing our will without taking others and their context into account.
Your mobile phone doesn't really want to be up your butt. It had dreams of making it big in the fast moving world of competitive fly fishing.
What made Butcher Ding the best at his trade was
that it didn't really attract the finest minds in the world
how he adapted to the particular configuration of flesh, bones and tendons he was facing each time.
But everybody does that- unless they have a really kick ass electric saw.
After many years, his knife would still look like new, because
he didn't let his wife use it.
he avoided the hard parts
His wife complains that he has no hard parts
and moved freely in the open space between them.
Which is what he replies.
The unskilled butchers, on the other hand, would either follow preset guidelines on how to cut an ox or do it forcefully, with the result that they constantly bumped into bones and tendons, and their knives deteriorated quickly.
Which may have been a big deal when knives were expensive.
Classical Chinese philosophers don’t agree on much, but they agree that holding individualistic, forceful and self-centred attitudes inevitably leads to clumsiness, conflict, harm and failure.
unless it leads to tremendous success and you and your descendants getting to be Em-fuckin-peror.
Philosophers interested in adapting also claim that the success of a plan of action lies in its being an ad hoc response to unique, impermanent circumstances.
or in circumstances being too crap to prevent the plan from working- even if there is no fucking plan.
That is, truly adaptive agents should also avoid following inflexible scripts or preset responses for behaviour, and should instead
drop acid or just go on holiday
adapt to the tendencies of things available at a given moment.
or else, you could call in a plumber coz an overflowing toilet has a tendency to just go on overflowing.
The states of emptiness and readiness to tailor a response to ever-changing situations are
quite useless if you brought a samurai sword to a gun-fight. Mankind has prevailed over the tiger and the wolf by changing situations such that we can slaughter our enemies while talking about the Great British Bakeoff.
illustrated in the Zhuangzi and other texts with the metaphor of the mirror, which perfectly reflects any and all forms it encounters without preconception or judgment.
Tell that to my shaving mirror. The thing wants me to bleed.
But it doesn’t store or retain those forms.
Because it is as dumb as shit- unless it belongs to Snow White's Evil Stepmother.
The mirror ‘forgets’ those forms as soon as they are gone,
unless they use lipstick to trace their outline on it.
so there aren’t expectations to make us rigid and inflexible
which is what mirrors tend to be
in our future responses to the world.
Very true. You should get a surgeon to remove your skeleton.
The parable of the hare in the Han Feizi, attributed to the political philosopher Han Fei, 3rd century BCE, offers a sarcastic illustration of this point. A man witnesses a hare bumping into a tree and breaking its neck,
there's something wrong with that hare. Don't eat it or your brains, too, might turn to shit.
and then he patiently waits for another hare to break its neck against the same tree (it happened once, why shouldn’t it happen again?). The man is presented as an absurd and ridiculous figure that we can all laugh at comfortably.
If paid to do- sure. Otherwise we'd tell the dude to fuck off coz he's as stupid as shit.
Yet, as much as we may want to laugh at his silliness, we can also recognise ourselves in it.
If we are studying or teaching worthless shite- maybe.
We often hope for things to go in the same way that they’ve unfolded in the past, and we make plans accordingly.
Which is why we are the dominant species on the planet.
We also tend to jump to hasty generalisations based on insufficient evidence.
See above. Enough of us jumping to conclusions is a great way to explore the fitness landscape. On the other hand, if you aint getting paid to jump, don't.
And we look for reliable standards to guide our actions: for example, we might commit to certain fundamental values,
or skip this step coz we aint in College nor are we teaching stupid shite
and let them serve as unmovable universal standards against which we measure different courses of action.
Till folk tell us to go measure stuff somewhere else if we don't want our heads kicked in.
In contrast to the flaws and foibles of the man in the Han Feizi, the figure of Confucius is an embodiment of variability and inconstancy.
Nope. He is an embodiment of wisdom and public spirit. His boo on the other hand was an utter slut which is why he took up philosophy.
In the Analects we learn that, in seeking to do what is right, there’s nothing that Confucius invariably accepts or rejects, affirms or denies.
Don't fuck your Guru's wife. That is the one thing all great teachers are agreed upon.
What’s right for Confucius necessarily changes along with situations, contexts, actors and their tendencies. Confucius claims to have no preconceptions about what is or isn’t valid and legitimate, and that his lack of preconceptions is precisely what separates him from all other influential moral and political figures.
He didn't get to be Emperor. Still, his descendants did well for themselves. Sometimes its safer not to have the top job.
In one memorable example, Confucius gives radically opposing advice on the same issue to two different students: one is urged to move forward with what he’s learned because he’s naturally withdrawn, while the other is encouraged to hold back before he acts, because he’s too eager.
Premature ejaculation isn't that common. It doesn't happen to everybody and, yes, it is a big deal!
Confucius stands out among aspiring sages precisely due to his inconstancy.
He was pragmatic and focused on training not future Kings but those who would serve them. That way, if a Confucian achieved nothing, the blame could always go to the King or his Court. On the other hand, it must be admitted that Confucius was a great improvement on Xan Shi, the previous Great Sage of the Warring States period whose one great insight was 'I am not a gerbil'.
This isn’t something we typically value; we don’t usually admire people for lacking reliable standards,
unless they happen to be likeable.
nor do we praise them for being noncommittal
unless we happen to be chatterboxes
and inconstant in their actions.
unless what they were constantly farting and we want to encourage their taking a break from that activity.
But that’s precisely what made Confucius the greatest sage of his time: his variability, his self-contradiction, and his capacity to waver.
He said 'Maybe I am a gerbil. Not one of those fancy-shmancy Hollwood gerbils but a proud, blue-collar, Coors drinking, gerbil who fought in Nam- well I would have done if I hadn't been having it off with Jane Fonda'.
Of course, this inconstancy is neither arbitrary nor individualistic; his variable positions were a result of his adaptability, his ability to act along with things, according to the needs of the situation before him.
The guy was a regular MacGyver. One time there was this dragon which was out riding a cloud and his Missus realized he'd forgotten to take his packed lunch. So, she gave Confucius a bell and the guy quickly improvised a functioning jet-pack out of a bottle of Mou Tai and a pair of chopsticks, so as to give deliver the dragon his cheese sarnie.
Adapting, then, is an open process that allows agents to be temporarily guided and filled with a plurality of possible courses of action.
Unless they are Mormons or their wives take a dim view of that sort of thing.
What shapes an adaptive action is not its content (what is done) nor its goal (why it is done). Rather, it is the procedure (the how, or the means by which it’s planned – suoyi 所以).
This just means 'cause and effect'. If you have a good Structural Causal Model and the money for the tech, you don't need to bother with adaptation.
This implies that all sorts of actions can be adaptive as long as they are planned ad hoc along with the agency of things.
No. It implies nothing at all. When it comes to adaptation, only the fitness landscape matters.
For example, in the military classic the Sima Fa (4th century BCE), we see kings and strategists who publicly engage in divination, prayers and sacrifices in order to persuade the people and the soldiers that Heaven and the spirits are favourable to the battle.
Back then, Kings who kept getting defeated didn't remain Kings.
Ritual and prescriptive-looking actions, then, can actually be adaptive if they are responding to people’s psychological or emotional needs, and are not the result of pure conformity.
The reverse is equally possible. Rumors of a defeat could be taken as an omen that the Will of Heaven had changed and so the Empire collapses without a fight. Why is this silly women pretending that 'divination and prayers' are adaptive? China is doing fine without either.
This also means that adapting is not a model of action per se,
unless turning into a gerbil gets you a modelling contract and then your sofa gets you your big break with Disney and suddenly there's action figures of gerbil-secret-agent-you selling like hotcakes and you find yourself very rich and married to a Kardashian.
but a method, or meta-model; it’s a kind of flexible structure for producing an endless number of adaptive co-actions. Some texts refer to this meta-model of action as wufang 無方, a method without a (fixed) method – embracing all available courses of action as possible, and using them as needed. Not having a method (wufang, where wu means ‘absence’, and fang also means ‘place’ or ‘location’) implies not being tied to nor getting stuck in any fixed position, rooted to a place and unable to shift and wander (you 遊).
This is what happens when you go for a walk.
The adaptive agent can take unambiguous and distinct positions each time without fully committing to any of them;
unless that is required of him to get paid his salary.
they do not define her as an agent, and she can let go of them as soon as the situation is over.
Or she gets the sack.
Like water,
which is famously low I.Q. Fire is always saying to Water 'you are one dumb bitch, you know that?' and Water just giggles and carries on pissing on him.
which can adapt to any sort of terrain while none of its shifting shapes ever becomes definitive.
Till I pour it into my ice- tray.
I’ve become fascinated with a silk manuscript discovered at Mawangdui, a burial site from the Han dynasty, titled ‘Entities Necessarily Have Forms Chart’ (Wu ze you xing tu 物則有形圖; thereafter WZYX).
Tangible things are tangible. Intangible things aren't. But tangibility is not itself a thing.There really isn't much more that canbe usefully said on the subject. The plain fact is, if you are doing something which you wouldn't get paid for doing, don't do it. Adaptability is only worthwhile if it involves quitting low paid work for something more remunerative.
The WZYX is a performative text
It is decorative in the manner of a cultic object
that not only tells us something about the co-action paradigm, but performs its message. It affords readers the experience of adaptive co-acting as they manipulate the silk manuscript in their hands. The standard way to read a manuscript in classical China, whether on bamboo slips or silk, was from right to left and top to bottom.
But people had been twisting vases around to read their inscriptions for centuries before that!
But not so for readers of the WZYX. As Luke Waring has shown, to decipher the round design on the piece of silk, we must rotate the physical manuscript in a clockwise direction and read the text from the inside outwards.
This sort of spiral text is associated with incantations inscribed on votive bowls, wine-cups etc.
That’s a unique way to read a text,
unless you are used to reading inscriptions on vases, drinking bowls etc.
both for us and for classical Chinese readers. Precisely because it’s unfamiliar and requires an effort,
not very much of one
it allows us to see the praxis of adaptive co-action very clearly in the event of reading the WZYX.
but we can see that praxis in walking or taking a shit
As the text itself notes, the action doesn’t come fully from the outside (the manuscript doesn’t force me to read or rotate it);
unless that is what you are paid to do.
and it doesn’t come fully from the inside either (since I’m not independently deciding to read the manuscript through a rotational operation).
Because you may be independently deciding to wipe your ass with it.
The successful reading of this silk text
as with the successful reading of any text
is the result of a co-action: a cooperation between a person and other agencies,
because my sofa really is a talent agent and is gonna get my break Hollywood break any decade now.
where the human, an intentional agent, must adapt to the tendencies of things to effectively accomplish a goal.
Fuck that. Use things in ways they'd find morally repugnant. You think toilet paper really wants to wipe your ass?
Notice that this would happen with any successful event of reading (if we hold a book upside down, we’re also co-acting, but in quite an ineffective manner!).
The same is true if we shove it up our ass. That's the sort of thing you only learn in a very expensive Collidge.
What the manuscript does, and where its pedagogical force lies, is to nudge the reader to realise the extent to which the ‘outside’ world constitutes what she conceives to be ‘her own’ individual actions, by offering an unusual kind of reading experience.
Not that unusual. We aren't speaking of some really kinky type of porn.
As the contemporary philosopher C Thi Nguyen argues, games demand we temporarily suspend our ordinary goals, values and means.
certain sorts of video games- sure. Some people play poker for a living.
We must flex our agency to fit the game designer’s art (who has created its environment, aims, rules and the limited means by which to achieve the goal). For example, putting a ball through an elevated basket is not an ordinary goal of mine, and if it were I’d probably raise myself to the height of the basket by using some steps, which is sure to enhance my efficacy. Nevertheless, I can easily adopt the game of basketball’s goals and the available means to achieve those goals (like putting a ball through an elevated basket by aiming at it from the court).a
Similarly, operating a cash till is not an ordinary goal people have, yet if that's what they are paid to do, that's what they do. Thi Nguyen was talking about immersive role playing video games.
Using the co-action framework, we see that games force us to jump into an adaptive-agency mode where we adapt our actions to different tendencies in our environment –
but this is also true of walking or operating a cash till.
even in ways that wouldn’t be reasonable in ordinary, non-ludic states.
Some ludic activities involve rules- e.g. playing Ludo- some don't. Most games are stylized versions of some utilitarian activity. They are a substitute for 'real-time' experience of a useful type.
Much like the WZYX manuscript invites us to rotate it clockwise,
No. The author of the manuscript had that intention. The thing itself can't invite shit.
games invite us to adapt to their unique or unusual rules;
The game designer had that intention. But the game itself has no such ability. On the other hand, maybe this lady thinks Jumanji is a real thing.
they afford some possibilities of action while prohibiting others.
Gravity does the same thing. Fuck you, gravity!
that enable our possibilities to act and to become who we want to be, both personally and as a society.
Cool. Soon we will be able to fly around shitting on the heads of statues.
The way individualism makes us see social reality is the heart of its efficacy
Individualism has no efficacy. Some individuals do but most are useless. As for social reality- we have no means of knowing it- though having a better picture of aspects of it would make us very rich.
The efficacy of relationality, and co-action in particular, is how it lets us see the extended network of co-actors that participate in our actions.
We have no means of seeing that extended network.
It brings to light the structures that enable some to succeed, such as growing up in a safe neighbourhood
That explains nothing. Having parents who take care to live in a safe neighborhood and good school district makes a difference. But a criminal family living in a safe neighborhood are likely to get sloppy and end up being bullied by their cousins from the 'hood.
or having access to high-quality education,
in which case, the vast majority of kids are fucked.
as well as those that hinder success, such as being unable to secure a safe and legal abortion when you can’t care for more children.
Why not give them up for adoption?
Another pressing example is the climate crisis – I’m currently writing from Seville in southern Spain, where we have been experiencing Zoe: the world’s first named heat wave, involving constant extreme temperatures of above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) for the past two weeks. More than 1,000 people have died across the country as a result. We must finally acknowledge that our planet, with all its tendencies and affordances, is a co-agent in all of our actions,
which is why it is equally responsible for getting incessantly raped by big corporations.
and that we can’t act forcefully and individualistically as if we were independent from the natural world.
Thus we can't end global warming till the globe takes grows up a little some fucking responsibility for its actions. You don't hear of the Home Counties getting raped. It's always the fucking Amazon. Obviously, the Environment got high on ayahuasca and then Big Meat porked the fuck out of it. Rain forests are notorious for that sort of thing. Meanwhile, the Cotswolds went to Secretarial College, joined the Young Conservatives, and is now happily married to a rising young Fund Manager. That aint individualistic behavior. It takes discipline and a will to conform.
We’re learning this the hard way, by means of death and destruction of everything we love.
Unless we act forcefully to prevent that death and destruction.
Yet we don’t seem capable of effectively changing our lifestyles to adapt to the tendencies of things, and so to survive.
Some members of our species will adapt and survive. If not, some other species will get to be top dog.
Classical Chinese philosophers emphasised that thinking of human agency as an individual and independent activity is misguided.
Then, it turned out Classical Chinese philosophy was misguided. Study STEM subjects.
At best, individualism leads to clumsy and ineffective courses of action
if the individual is clumsy and ineffective- sure.
and, at worst, to conflict, chaos and harm.
Which may happen anyway if a militarily superior force finds it worthwhile to take your territory and enslave you.
Yet nothing in this theory of co-action intends to take power and control away from humans.
Which is why humans haven't slapped it silly.
Counterintuitively, it’s in the act of acknowledging that we aren’t in full control of our actions that we gain more control over their outcomes,
coz that's how magic works- right?
and greater imaginative scope to create more harmonious and effective social structures.
Which Philosophy Department could be considered an 'effective social structure'? Where in the world would you find a place less harmonious?
In order to more justly attribute responsibility, guilt and merit across the field of entangled actors,
one would need to be a better judge of such matters.
and to design social systems that offer more equitable and nurturing paths for the future,
we'd need to understand 'Mechanism Design' as well as the prevailing economic conditions- in particular, what resource constraints obtain.
we must look to the others around us who participate in our agency.
No. Just get the incentive mechanism right and find cheap screening and signaling devices.
Casting human agency in a more distributive and collective mode will help us to become more genuinely autonomous – as interwoven, interdependent, relational beings.
No it won't. The thing is a waste of time. On the other hand, Chinese philosophy enriches your appreciation of Chinese literature which, in turn, has substantially influenced English and other literature. Anyway, Chinese is worth learning purely for the beauty of the thing. It may be that a lot of their literature really is fortune-cookie level banal- as this author suggests- but, my guess is, there is something consummate in the way that banality is expressed.
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