Agency, Substantiality and Potent Alliances

DMF on the agency of objects:

I'm all for seeing the world of objects as having their own physical capacities but I think that they are truly alien and have nothing like interests, hell I don't even think that most of the objects/processes that make up our own bodies, even at the level of our kluged non-conceptual neurofunctions have interests/intents...

Without a doubt I share Dirk’s hesitation about granting ubiquitous “agency” to non-sentient beings. Yet, I’m not sure that proponents who argue for the general agency of things are in fact seeking to project “intentions” as they are traditionally or commonly conceived. I believe such theorists are in pursuit of a more mutinous reevaluation of the efficacy of things.

That said, I think we might resolve some of the hesitation about the agency of objects by relaxing (or stretching?) what we mean by both ‘agency’ and ‘intentionality’. For example, we could ask, “does a machete have intentions?” Within a certain frame of reference we might reply, “of course not”. A machete doesn’t have the requisite capacities (e.g., plasticity and recursivity) to expressively ‘want’, ‘desire’ or be interested in objects outside its bounded substantiality. So in a traditional sense a machete is not a will-full entity. However, a machete does have certain irreducible (onto-specific) properties that define its intrinsic boundaries and capacities. And these assembled “physical capacities”, as Dirk calls them, are affective - that is, they make differences in the world in terms of where they came from, how other entities or assemblages encounter them (e.g., passively or actively), and the relations they enter into. That is to say, a machete brings with it a material-affective substantiality with capacities (to cut, to threaten, etc.) unique to its individual existence. Such inherent substantial capacities are precisely  to what I call potency. [see here] And it is this general potency of existing entities which theorists refer to when they talk about a thing’s “agency” (e.g., Bennett’s “thing-power”). A machete’s potent capacities are a kind of rudimentary agency.

So it’s not a matter of, say, my spleen having individual “intentions”, but about my spleen expressing inherent capacities and properties irreducible to (but simultaneously enmeshed within) its functioning in my body. Likewise for machetes. Machetes have a potent materiality specific to their actual existence and irreducible to the relations they enter into – despite the crucial relational character of their temporal consistency.

Now this is where it can get very interesting for social theory. No object is an island, and no potent assemblage exists in a vacuum. Every existing entity is implicated (to varying degrees) in forces and relations with a multiplicity of other processes, flows, networks and objects that express rudimentary forms of “agency” or potency in their own right. This implicate primordial mix of differential properties constitutes the generative matrix within which both individual objects and ‘societies’ of entities become possible. Thus, at a fundamental level, what we encounter are a series of inter-acting and intra-acting potencies capable of coalescing into various contingent assemblages (what Latour calls compositions) and ecologies expressing differential degrees of affective force and distributed agency. These substantial matrices (or alliances, complexes, societies, ecologies, situations, contexts, etc., etc.,) of affective force and extensivity operate on all scales of reality.

Each object-matrix contributes its own agentic potency (material and expressive capacities) towards that alliance - thus creating novel material-energetic dynamics and amplifications of affective force hitherto not possible. No ‘virtuality’ needed; only relatively individuated matrices of affective potency colliding and catalyzing to generate unique combinations and assemblies of capacity.

Human agency and cognition is a great example of this: without the affordances of interobjective support, extended symbolic networks, social communication, group affective resonance, etc., humans would have very rudimentary “agency” with relatively unrefined cognitive capacities. It is because we are nurtured and connected beings perpetually implicated in ecologies with potent affordances that we can amplify our abilities and acquire relevant instantiated skills, historical understandings and communal participations. (see the growing 4EA paradigm for details).

To provide one (morbid) example of this analytic, we can understand how the irreducible proto-agency or potency of machetes combined with the agency or potency of humans, combined with the diminished potency of depleted ecological “resources” generated a matrix/situation or “regime of attraction” (Levi Bryant) where 800,000 people were murdered in Rwanda in 1994. Without the affective potency of machetes or the weakened potencies of humans, or the scarce potencies of Rwandan subsistence conditions, genocide may not have actually occurred. And without an acknowledgement of the irreducible “agencies” of all these elements we can’t truly understand what and how it happened, and how to decrease the possibility of it ever happening again.

So, without going too much into here, what fascinates me, first, is how objects/complexes/processual-units/matrices enter into specific, historical “alliances” or networks with other complexes to form complex, potent (“agentic”), novel, distributed and emergent assemblages with irreducible capacities and properties specific to those alliances - and then secondly, what worldly affects and effects (consequences) do specific matrices or assemblages and their alliances have on the evolution and cosmopolitical trajectories of humans and non-humans alike.

[ see also: The Dynamics of Affective Objects ]