Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 12 Number 2, August 2011

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Chodat, Robert. Worldly Acts and Sentient Things; The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo, Cornell University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8014-4678-8

 

Reviewed by

 

Carla Stalling Huntington

 

 

Robert Chodat’s 2008 contribution of Worldly Acts and Sentient Things; The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo (which I will refer to it as Worldly Acts and Sentient Things from now on) carefully raises the relevances of various notions of agency that have been taken for granted by intellectuals along the modern and postmodern continuum. Methodologically calling scientific method and Cartesian explanations and their underlying assumptions to a type of philosophical and literary tea, to intentionally drink in and discuss the gaps and divides girding the understanding of agency, Chodat succeeds at pointing readers in multiple directions so they can panoptically see where they have perhaps missed an entire phenomenological understanding of the complexities which surround the notion of self. At the same time he focuses on the self as it is defined in his analysis of writings by roles made clear by actions versus those made clear by feelings.

 

After the tea, the reader is intentionally brought by Chodat into what seems to be a private dance performance between several dancers whose work has been choreographed by unidentified presences, mainly embodied culture, history, and political economy. The dance has meaning, ephemerally seen by not looking directly at it: The dancer dances the choreography but does he do it intentionally? Could the dancer be considered a stalactite or does the dancer engage with the presence of the unidentified? Does the audience’s ability to understand the dancer and the choreography come from their intention to understand or do they see the dance as completely disembodied? More importantly, is the language of the dance an arbitrary form that is unintelligible to those who do not entirely grasp the complexities of said language? Chodat writes

 

Doing, talking, performance, learning over time, bodies in an environment, the weave of our lives: we are approaching the deeply literary dimension of these philosophical claims. For to conceive of actions as performances—be they ‘mental’ acts or ‘physical’ acts—is to think of agency in essentially narrative terms. A waltz is not made intelligible by piecing together discrete movements that we can identify ahead of time, one-by-one. Apart from the waltz as a whole, a reverse turn is not only isolatable; it isn’t even a ‘reverse turn—as opposed to, say, a curious New Age exercise or two drunks shambling to the left. … we begin by recognizing a narrative of bodies, environments, and worldly situations … [within] shades of hope… (82).

 

Chodat takes these slippery topics—our intellectual assumptions and productions of literature and philosophy in the realm of agency—as locations for forcing the audience to question whether agency can be ascribed to humans and organizations, whole societies and cultures as well as humans, post-humans, nonhumans and ideologies. Even though many have basically accepted the notion that agency is only ascribable to humans, he points out that over the recent past of some 200 years, we have perhaps schizophrenically vacillated between two polar extremes.

 

The aesthetics of Chodat’s work is demonstrated in part by the comparisons between mind presences, and our beginning to comprehend spaces between atoms as res cogitans, and the unthreading of the worship of scientific valorization such that we end up at the same dissatisfied shoulder shrug of lack of Verstehen. In other words, as soon as we decided we understood agency in the always already framework, and then attempted to express it as wholly and completely human, that was the very moment that understanding agency evaporated.

 

Do societies have intentions? Does American or other national culture have intention? Do the political structures? Are they purposed before acting? If they can and do demonstrate agency, then can’t cyborgs and computers? Are these now “persons” with “insides” if we assign intentionality to them? Or are they “presences”? According to Chodat, we are agents acted upon by other agents and acting on them by virtue of agreed understandings of speech, and our relation to the whole because

 

…language can’t capture the particularity of everything we think and experience. And surely, too, there are moments, as one learns about the massive shifts of geological history, or as one reads about unreported government actions in foreign countries, or as one sits in the roaring crowd at a rock concert, when one senses that a person’s actions have only the slightest effects, and that as single bodies we matter far less than, in DeLillo’s words, the ‘streams and clusters’ of ‘mass assemblies.’ The force of these different intuitions is what makes them the starting point for so many powerful literary texts and philosophical theories. (240)

 

Worldly Acts and Sentient Things forces us, the reader, to ponder and meditate on the dance performance long after its over to consider how s/he has come to rest upon literary and epistemological assumptions about agency after allowing us into the theater to expose the fact that our entrance was gained only by purchasing a Wolf Ticket. One of the ways that Chodat arrives here is by signifying, as I could hear him chiding us, ‘You know, scientists are spirits and texts are disembodied experiments held in the laboratory of books… I’m just saying,’ as he watches us squirm to figure out if he’s kidding or pointing to something real. In considering Chodat’s claims, momentarily your reality will shift, whether intentionally or not.

 

The fact is that while societies, corporations, cyborgs, and other entities can seem to enact things and act with intention, carry out roles real and imagined, it remains that only human beings have agency, at least right at the moment, and human beings still write (and dance). The collective behavior and res extensia of humans results in changes in culture, political movements, economic policy, literature, science, philosophy, and so on. As Chodat talks clearly about what reality would look like if Ants or other creatures were sentient, and buildings had consciousness, it is wonderful to consider the science fiction of displaced agency especially when we’re thinking about attributions of worldly acts that go somewhat awry if not totally askew.

 

Worldly Acts and Sentient Things is presented in two parts, Agents Within and Agents Without, but there is no break in the intensity of Chodat’s agency or role. Each part is equally balanced with three chapters, giving the book a total of six, plus the introduction and conclusion. An index and a list of abbreviations to the works cited are also provided. While the book sometimes wanders off on tangential side paths and creates a labyrinth that makes the reader wonder where s/he is let alone what s/he believes, the overarching result of the book is that we question the roots of agency, what it means, and how it is manufactured in literature, philosophy, and science.