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Agency
The agent’s capacity for emergent experience of the self, including the feverish, affirmative meaning creation that follows from this fundamentally traumatic experience. Agency arises when a series of dividualities interact around a necessary, primordial void (Atheos) and project a dividual identity onto this (Entheos), with the ambition of constructing an ethical substance in the void between the history in question (Pantheos) and the potentially utopian future (Syntheos), in the infinite now.
The human being’s self-experience is of course as relationalist as everything else in existence. According to relationalist phenomenology, the human subject arises, if anything, as a kind of minoritarian by-product of a larger majoritarian phenomenon, where the majoritarian phenomenon that transcends the subject’s self-experience is its agent. It is thus not the case that separate souls sit and wait to be mounted inside shiny new bodies in some kind of creation factory – which Descartes’ and Kant’s dualism requires – but the self-experience is instead a highly efficient but nevertheless illusory by-product of the body’s many other doings – the borrowed component, taken out of empty nothingness, which means that the human equation suddenly seems to achieve an acceptable solution for itself. The self-experience is quite simply the logical end point where the subject process ties together for itself. Thus it does not come first, as Descartes and Kant presume, but rather last, so that the void that ties together all divided components within the dividual so that it can experience itself as a phantasmic unit and as a whole. All this thus takes place within the agent, the transient subject that cannot in any way precede or exist outside the basic agency. The body, the congregation and the society can all be agents, but without an agent that houses this subjectivity, it cannot exist at all.
Free will is a dualist myth, which has been produced in order for us to be able to hold the soul responsible for the weak and dissolute body, which it is of course set to battle with in the eternal duel of dualism (see The Body Machines). On the other hand, we can speak of free choice in a contingently monist universe, with the quantity of different choices that are offered the body in every given situation. However, there is no such thing as a will that is free in the midst of this choosing, nor is there any agency of will where this illusory will could be given shelter and exercised. The will is nothing other than the status of the moment in the current tug-of-war between the desire and the drive, and since these dwell in the subconscious it is not possible to achieve any conscious balancing between them. There is thus no individual free will, but rather an endless plurality of wills, which hardly become fewer because the current situation offers so many different choices.
In October 2013, it was revealed that the US intelligence organisation NSA had bugged, among many others, the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, continuously for five years without the knowledge of the US President Barack Obama. It is difficult to think of a clearer illustration of how the democratic system de facto has collapsed under late capitalism and has now definitively morphed into a chaotic plurarchy. If an intelligence agency can grab the power from elected representatives, the word democracy loses all meaning. This is no longer about a democracy but about a massive, paranoid bureaucracy that does not need to take into account at all any form of democratic or even judicial influence over how certain State agencies operate. Late capitalism’s obsession with security, which is constantly mistaken for safety, could hardly have been exposed any more clearly. Therefore the capitalist power complex of nation states and major corporations has only one priority for the future: commandeering and controlling the Internet.
From a theological perspective, the syntheist fall occurs when self-love turns into narcissism. Therefore it is necessary for syntheism to steadfastly fight internarcissism. Narcissism is just as present in the self-appointed victim as in the person in power. The syntheist hero instead surrenders herself, unreservedly and anonymously, in a brotherly/sisterly communion with the syntheist community. Beyond this communion, ethics is born in the making of agency: as an agent, within and together with the syntheist congregation, the dividual seeks a strong ethical identity, an existential substance, which is realised when a promise becomes action. According to the amoral but incorruptibly ethical Zoroaster, ethics is a perpetually recurring feedback loop: You are what you think, what you think affects what you say; you are what you say, what you say affects what you do; you are what you do, what you do affects how you think, and so on. Only through identifying himself as a syntheist agent can the dividual enter into and complete the Zoroastrian ethical circle as an intra-acting phenomenon within the syntheist community.
The values and valuations of informationalism stem from what we call the ethics of interactivity (see The Body Machines). The network-dynamical effects must be the basis of the production of the values and valuations in a network society, where everything from physics and biology to artistic creation and religious practice is characterised by the obsession with intra-acting phenomena, and not least by their relations with each other. This is a world where everything is always at least two, as Friedrich Nietzsche expresses the matter, and often many times more than that. An agency for change in such a world is an extremely complex phenomenon in itself: multi-polar, multi-dimensional, multi-dependent and in all directions entangled with its environment. In a relationist society in a relationalist world, ethics must first be interactive and later also intra-acting.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58