I am offended by your accusation that I would attempt to seed my ideas to your course. EVERYTHING I have posted in your course framework has be carefully composed for that place. In that I saw others using the posting site to present their interpretation of Latour I decided to see if I could get more response using YOUR blog. I thought it was a blog for the Magellan course.

We have disagreements, one about the relevance of phantoms to comprehending Latour. This was my attempt to clarify my ideas about phantoms.to you and other participants. I am sorry that you view this as spam, as it was a serious attempt to engage you in what I feel is a relevant issue and related to Latour. Obviously we have different opinions of what we are each about.

Maybe you are also at issue with my longer posts – which most other participants appear to ignore, but not all. I am now seriously considering withdrawing from this course, although it is giving me a window to another “reality”. I don’t regret the time I devoted to composing my posts or learning of Latour, but saddened that they didn’t generate the feedback I had hoped, in that Glisten had spoken so highly of the Magellan course.

The network of personal human actions in the Here&Now occur in patterns. When viewed over time (sequences of Her&Now moments) there are patterns that display that are not observable from a Here&Now moment (except as scientific summary reports). Some of these patterns result in coordinated action with agency in Gaia. Significant actions are not momentary events but emergent processes of interaction.

In my model of reality, all systems have network cores. A network can become a system when certain constraints are followed in network exchanges. A case can be made that networks have no agency — though there is the sum of agency of individuals. In my ideal world, systems emerge from networks, act for a time, and then dissolve. Persons can be members of more than one system/network and when one system shuts down they will shift their energy to other system/networks. Stan Pokras, a community activist in Philadelphia – with whom these ideas emerged in dialog (decades ago), started using “sysnet” to label a network or system when the distinction is not necessary.

It is the coordinated pattern of system activity that has agency. The pattern manifest in a Here&Now moment has roots in patterns of past activity and possibilities of patterns in the future. We can give this a name to assist in communication. But humans have a tendency to ascribe a metaphorical reality to the named, and often project agency on these named, making them phantoms. The imagined named entity has no agency; the system labeled may have agency.
I need to think about it more, but I don’t see “causally effective illusions” being what Latour (and I) are calling phantoms. However, a persons belief in phantoms could be part of their personal agency – but those are not the phantoms – the metaphors objectified – of concern.

I find concrete perspective by examining the discourse about current events. The CIA, the Pentagon, Congress, GM, GE, Democrats, Republican, terrorists, the UN are treated as entities interacting with real agency. But, they are all phantoms. There are complex sysnets where the actors have some association with a group with a label. This view permits one to understand how actions can be taken by a subweb of persons in these groups which is often ascribed to the phantom, Or, in that one might believe the phantom could never do an action and be oblivious that a subweb of that group could well have done it. Conspiratorial sysnets make use of this by showing that the phantoms couldn’t have done it, and damning conspiratorial hypothesizing.

Once we can wean ourselves of phantoms we will view ourselves and everything else quite differently. I speculate that this will require our using new languages (to dialog about issues involving many people) as contemporary languages have troublesome frame deeply embedded. We can continue to use phantoms in poetry with no difficulty.

What is the scale at which we can act? Latour looks at this question in his book about actants. He says that even the largest human endeavor is made of human-scaled actions, such as a conversation between two people in a boardroom or bathroom. In these micro-scales of action, how do we act? Maybe planetary health depends upon the effects — positive or negative — of a billion trillion micro-scale actions, and the notion of something along the lines that only Globalized intervention really matters — positive or negative– is, well, a phantom – “a BELIEF that suppresses our actions” ??

On some of the other essays I copy/pasted excerpts and wanted to add them here but am unable to find how to add a post. Clicking on New Post in the header gets me a white space above the old screen but it just sits there. Clicking on the icon of the text bubble gets me a small blank window with a rotating icon that eventually stops rotating but there is nothing to do there either.

Even might I post, you are probably tired of hearing me say: we need new types of technology and tools – to do something more than exchange sems over networks. T&T to Compose Prospectus. I wait here, week after week, expecting insights – the clouds swirl revealing brief scenes in gaps – but where will it appear? In the pattern of cloud swirls or the revealed scenes, or in some mix. Obviously I don’t experience this in imagery, but it characterizes shifting frames and recognizing relevance.

posts and comments re this course are scattered among too many different platforms, difficult to keep track.

nuet

I will continue listening as he suggests and see what is revealed.

and is there a next homework? talk 3 and/or some article?

in a previous blog post the guy named Larry asks when are the conf.calls. He is complaining that nobody answered him… Bonnie, can you do that?

Thanks for all!