Notes on object agency

As I wrote last week, Thomas and I are trying to work up a paper on the rhetoric of object agency (preliminarily entitled ‘Do Things Act?’). Here are a few thoughts from the reading process: Most reasonable and clearheaded account of object agency so far: Lambros Malafouris’ work on nonhuman agency. He has co-edited a very useful volume (Material Agency: A Non-Anthropocentric Approach with Carl Knappett) in which he has a paper called At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency, which provides a reasoned, well-argued and detailed argument for how agency “is a property or possession neither of humans nor of nonhumans. Agency is the relational and emergent product of material engagement.” And he summarises nicely why we struggle so much with the concept of agency: “The constant errors in our agency judgements are simply the price we have to pay for being skillfully immersed in a physical world and at the same time of being able to experience this world from a subjective first-person perspective. It is the price of being human.” The ultimate cause of action is, as he says, none of the supposed agents, but the flow of activity itself. My gut instincts agree very much with this. My biggest concern with object agency so far: But I can’t help but think about what comes after the ‘merger’ of man and materiality? Is there a different argument beyond pointing to flow, networks, complexity, emergence and process? My concern with object agency...
Source: Biomedicine on Display - Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Tags: aesthetics Source Type: blogs