to build from the actions of others?

Resonating bodies connect and coordinate through the mutual involvement of powers and capacities, intensifying and expanding, becoming more than parts and sums - carving niches and generating socialities from the actions of others. It's not about individuals or collectives, agency vs. structure, but about interdependent actions at multiple levels and with differential rhythms. Thinking the particular modes and movements of any existing ecology is about thinking the 'in-between' of individuals and groups via an ongoing engagement with the specificity of things.

Although I find the distinction between exteriority (the physical) and interiority (the mental) unhelpful and a bit distracting, in the quote below Adrian seems to clearly discern the importance of thinking how entities are always being and becoming-with other things as assemblages.

"An ant colony builds itself from the actions of its members: gathering leaf litter, sticks, bits and pieces of the environing world, tunneling, communicating, building, nursing. None of these ant “individuals,” not even the queen herself, could act in this way without the rest of the colony. Both the body and the mind of the colony—its “objective” parts, those we can see, describe, dissect, and measure, and its “subjective” parts, which are the moments of felt decision that turn an ant this way rather than that way in its crossing of a trail in a forest, or those that bring a team of ants together to haul a large leaf or dead grasshopper—these are all dispersed in space, they are spaced, detached from each other physically (or so it appears when we observe them), but mentally, in terms of the interactive processing of signs and relations, they are networked together into a coordinated collectivity. The network of the colony is not only made of those ant bodies, but also what they are capable of and what they do with things—with soil, leaves, sticks, pieces of food. By most objective measures, anthills are cities: they include complex systems of transportation, communication (pheromone-based), ventilation, sewage disposal, food production (the farming of plants, the growing of fungus, the raising of aphid cattle), cooperative labor, warfare, and slavery." - Adrian Ivakhiv