User:Good Intentions/Sandbox

An Account of Interaction

Unless one claims that a certain form of grouping individuals is inherent to human beings, and the evidence to support such a claim would need to be very strong, it is necessary to view human collectives as an aggregate of individual agents. What those agents would actually be is already a matter if many questions, forms and interpretations, with diverse and divergent types of agents having appeared at the imperative of their circumstances. As have been demanded of them, even the largest collections of people have acted with cohesion that many individuals lack: it is important to view persons and groups not as essentially separate, but instead as different arrangements of forces along the same continuum, along an axis of cohesiveness. Each agent has its own internal form whereby it gains the ability to mobilise the powers at its disposal. The boundaries of a collective can be cogently described by marking the powers which can be brought to bear by it: thus, an agent is a collection of forces held together by a cohesive fiction arranged around an imaginary centre. The more that the environment of an agent is in accord with is form of cohesion, the more easily will the agent be able to mobilise the forces that surround it and be empowered thereby. This is the goal of interaction, it being the ends that most allows the cohesive fiction, and thereby the prosperity and survival of the agent: its ability to enforce its form upon the world. Interaction is empowerment, the act of world-creation. An agent whose surrounds are at odds with its own form becomes wordless, disempowered, and disappears. Different agents achieve cohesion differently, and attempt to each form the world in their own way. Often the aims of various people, groups, movements and societies are aligned, or they can achieve more together than in isolation: they form, to whatever degree, a larger collective around their shared interests, attaining a greater or lesser cohesion. Conflicts arise, most clearly in the face of irreconcilable differences, most often when determining the exact centre of an alliance and the terms of cooperation: respectively, at the clash of worlds and at world-creation, all being acts on the continuum of expanding one’s influence. Reconciliation will occur, the space between agents will take on a form and those within it with change themselves as little as possible to survive and prosper in the new landscape. Interaction, therefore, is the attempt of one to enforce one’s own forms on one’s environment, assimilating its forces into one’s arsenal, combining with what one can not take up, dispersing that with which what one can not survive. One creates a world out of the formless, and recognising any order other than one’s own carries the risk of undermining the self-enforced cohesion that is a prerequisite for agency. All action is in one’s own interest, all interaction a contest, cooperation being only its postponement or, the only sustainable form of alliance, mutual assimilation into a greater, more powerful cohesion. Nothing that does not act this way will ever become empowered, all agents that have failed at this have been overcome and their elements have been taken up by the survivors. Man came to live, not to let live.

Notes: The most contestable case of agents being the fortuitous combination of disparate elements, achieving agency only when it generates a cohesive fiction, is the case of the individual human being. This self-generation in the face of circumstances has been described by Lacan in “The Mirror Phase”, the first part of his Ecrits. Histories which suggest the above account and its generality include: Marx showing how those owning the means of production have attempted to turn all else into an appendage of capital; Simone de Beauvoir with her study of woman as being an addendum to ma, The Second Sex; and E.P. Thompson who, with his The Making of the English Working Class, saved the histories of small, significant movements whose meanings have been overwritten – the present eradicates all that came before. The attempts of each person, group, movement or ideal to enforce its form as its sole method to prosperity and thereby survival was described by Nietzsche in his doctrine of the will to power, developed piecemeal in his positivist works, laid out in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and playing a major part in all his works thereafter. Of special interest is: aphorism 9 of Beyond Good and Evil, showing how one rules over oneself in order to rule over all around; the insight in paragraph 12 of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals that each form, thing and force carries only the meaning given it by whatever currently has mastery over it; the founding fact of that book, stating that is not what one attempts but the mastery with which one attempts it that determines influence; and the sentiment of Ecce Homo, it being an expression of life, a life, as an attempt at mastery. Heidegger, in various works but especially in Being and Time, gave a clear account of the relationship between actor and environment along the above lines with his study of the at-hand and before-hand. Hannah Arendt took these, and other, considerations and made a study of and vocabulary for the space between agents: politics as interaction and politics as empowerment, as she did in her notebooks collected as The Promise of Politics. I took the final line of this essay from Breyten Breytenbach’s poem Bruin Reisbrief, it being a confident and insightful expression of the process I have described and its effects, one cast in terms I can intimately understand. For the spirit and vocabulary of this account I am indebted to George Silver, gentleman, who in his Paradoxes of Defence, showed how that one particularly pure form of interaction, combat, is the attempt of one agent to impose his fight on another, any other, Silver doing so to bring into the Enlightenment the wisdom of now-forgotten medieval masters. I thank as well those medieval masters whose martial wisdom I have had at hand – the author of the Codex Wallerstein, the various masters of Lichtenauer’s art, and Fiori dei’ Liberi – for attempting to prove, at least when wrestling, at least to their opponents, that the world revolves around them.