The RIBA Aedas Stephen Williams Scholarship 2011-2012

FINAL YEAR REPORT

Joseph Deane
Graduate Design Project
The Maker and the Made: An Alternative Legacy
by Joseph Deane
P R O L O G U E
Any product can take on a life of its own,
and may come to dominate the living
labour that makes it. Te nature of things
is indeed to become non-human actors.
-
Kirsch and Mitchell, Te Nature of Tings: Dead Labor,
Nonhuman Actors, and the Persistence of Marxism
An Atom. A Shoe. A Foot.
Indian Ink on Vellum
Archaeologists discern whether fossilised humans wore primitive
shoes by the size of their metatarsal bones, which decreased in size not
through genetic devolution, but during the life-time of the wearer.
Humans developed shoes from the dermis of other animals to increase
their physiological capacity, but the inanimate have a way of exercising
their own agency. Te things we make, eventually return to make us.
N A T U R E S M A K E C U L T U R E S . C U L T U R E S M A K E N A T U R E S .
We are at the crossroads, where, faced with the autistic, blind, deaf and
mute violence of our mechanisms of technological, industrial, mercantile and
human domination, nature reactswith violence and without warning, in a
faltering of the original chaosin mutiny against the organization of men
unpredictable in spite of our seismographic sciences.
- Franois Roche, Introduction to a Sest Pass Ici
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Between 2000 and 2009 there have been 29
fuvially dominated closures of the Tames
Barrier. Prior to this there had been only 10 in 18
years.
On average Londons sewers overfow 50 times per
year... dispensing an estimated 39,000,000 tonnes
of raw sewage directly into the Tames and its
tributaries. With population increase, this fgure
is predicted to rise to 70,000,000 tonnes by 2020.
Presently, 16 million tons of sewage seep into the
river Lea every year.
Overfows at Abbey Mills Pumping Station are
currently responsible for 40% of the discharge into
the River Lea.
When completed, the current 190m upgrade
works at Beckton are expected to only be sufcient
until 2021.
B Y A C C E P T I N G T H E P O S S I B I L I T Y O F F L O O D I N G , C A N A N A L T E R N A T I V E L E G A C Y
P L A N P R O V I D E A N O P T I M I S T I C F U T U R E F O R A
I L L U S T R A T I N G
A G E N C Y
Te Spatial Consequences of Atoms
Spatial diagrams. (Six from extended series)
Top Lef to Bottom Right:
Construction works
Prevailing winds deposit silt in a concentrated area of the river.
Te minerals therein attract bacteria. Tese consume oxygen,
changing the entire ecology of part of the river.
Fat Accumulation
Saturated fats consumed by Londoners congeal as they travel
down sewers, reducing apertures of sewer lines and causing
overfows, changing the ecology of their surroundings.
Isostatic Recovery
London is thirty centimeters lower than it was ffy years ago;
sinking as a result of a glacier that passed over Scotland. As
particles in the earth move against gravity there, those under
London are moving to take their place.
Tidal Behaviour
Te molecular attraction of atoms: Two attractant bodies pull
liquids around the earth and through solid matter.
Urban Heat Island
Atoms create weathers: As atoms vibrate, they increase the
energy of their neighbours. Expanding, decreasing in density,
those without bonds move up. Other move in. Weathers ensue.
Wastewater Overfow
Human infrastructure is fxed. With interminable persistence,
matter will always escape such structures at the earliest
opportunity.
3 6 Y E A R S :
Dilapidated sewers
Over-stretched treatment plants
Peak phosphate
Fat blockages
Increased urban run-of
Erratic climatic conditions
Reduced tidal defence
S H I T H A P P E N S .
Te Nonhuman Masterplan
Emergence of the Inhabited Wetland
Braided River Heightfeld
Mineral fows
Te Nonhuman Masterplan
circa. 2060
CHP
Methane
Building material
Domestic fertiliser
Surplus Wastewater Mineral exports
Railway Freight Line
City diet
City Catchment
Sewer fow meters
North Outfall Sewer
River Lee Abbey Mills
Rerouted Canal Water
Sewage Overfow
Inorganic minerals
River Catchment
Mineral settlement
Water
City Consumption
Refuse Material
A12 road way
Public Axis
Community space
Centralised recycling
Local refuse markets
Data Barometers
Nonhuman habitation
Organic compounds
of-site mining
ad-hoc mineral trawlers
pH/mineral measures
velocity measures
Digital agents / drones
Polluted Water
Schools
Cottage Industries
local smallholdings
recycling / hacking
3D printing
mineral trading
Plastics
Organic matter
Markets
Loam felds
Livestock
Agricultural produce
Mineral farming
Isostatic Recovery Tidal fow Southerly Winds
Flooding Sinking ground level Flood Winds
Olympic Stadium
Acetogenic Bacteria
Sludge
Sewer Soap
Bio fltration
Anaerobic Digesters
UV Sterilisers
Arcelor Mittal
Sewer mining
Sewage
Water
Fat
Recycling facility
{ low velocity }
=
toxic loam felds
Heavy metals
{unsuitable for human
Aquatics Centre
Aquaculture ponds
Water Hyacinth
Algae focation
Mosquito Fish
Freshwater Bass
Slow Sand Filtration
Mosquito Shrimp
Leisure
Aquatics Centre
Aquaculture ponds
Water Hyacinth
Algae focation
Mosquito Fish
Freshwater Bass
Slow Sand Filtration
Mosquito Shrimp
mineral trawling
Pioneer species
Abandoned housing
Ruin Fields
Tird Nature
mineral deposition
plant litter & leaf mold
{ high velocity velocity }
=
established waterways
nomadic allotments
resource extraction
toxic hydroponic farming
allotment produce
{ high mineral yield }
=
permanent settlement
stercorary houses
exothermic heat
domestic yield
stercorary units
01 River Lea catchment area. Te bounds of the masterplan extend to devices
located of site
02 Te working model for networked mineral buoy
03 Arduino circuit board for network devices
04 Bespoke weight guide
05 Fishing Weight
06 Plastizote waterproofng layer with adjustable circuit mounting system
02
01
Te Masterplan looks to progressions in systems biology for
fnding emergent models of planning and building. On the
micro-scale, small devices will be networked into the system
as part of the internet of things. In this context, machines,
many of which will be situated of-site, become active parts of a
responsive network.
03
04
05
06
Te Cybernetic Masterplam
M I N E R A L B U O Y S
02
Building as fertiliser
Raked sewage efuent is compressed in so-called sludge cakes.
Here, such material is employed as a building material: An
insulator and a fertiliser.
Te conceptual model explores this process. Te eroding
members represent the invisible particles of the air. As the model
erodes, it deposits its mineral content on the canvas below in an
uncontrollable process echoing natural processes.
Such decomposition re-confgures our understanding of building
and landscape as intimately interrelated elements.
C R E A T I V E D E C A Y
I N H A B I T I N G
I N F R A S T R U C T U R E
From Trawler to Allotment to House
1. Trawler fotation deck
2. Trawler house
3. Structural service core
4. Stercorary units
5. Vertical streets
6. Stair circulation
7. Service crane
8. Vertical allotment decks
9. Internal allotment supports
10. External allotment supports
11. Domestic stercorary bladders
12. Communal methane storage
13. Individual inhabited truss prefab unit
14. Stacked prefab units
15. Compressed sludge facade panel
16. External support frame
17. Ancillary frame support
0 5 10 15 20 25 M
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57.1 AOD
53.6 AOD
50.1 AOD
46.6 AOD
43.1 AOD
39.6 AOD
36.1 AOD
32.6 AOD
29.1 AOD
25.6 AOD
22.1 AOD
19.6 AOD
16.0 AOD
14.0 AOD
13.6 AOD
A B C D AE F G H I J
7 AOD
AOD
91.2 AOD
62.3 AOD
Stercorary Housing Tower Elevation
1
Living Unit Plan
2
Stercorary Housing Tower Cutaway
3
600 unit HOB Extractor 300 Drawer Pack 600 unit 600 Hi Unit Oven / Microwave
DW 400 unit
600 unit
600 unit
800 unit DW 400 unit HOB Extractor 300 Drawer Pack 600 Hi Unit Oven / Microwave 300 broom cpd
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A B C D AE F G H I J
Graduate Thesis
Me/We (or) An Investigation into the Agency of Nonhumans
by Joseph Deane
(or) An Investigation into the Agency of the Nonhuman
Joseph Deane
MA Architecture
Royal College of Art
Word count: 9972
WE
WE
Contents
List of Figures p.7
Prologue p. 9
Preface p. 11
e Cleave p. 17
Sum, Ergo Cogito p. 28
I Am Many p. 37
Cheese and Worms p. 51
Conclusion p. 65
Epilogue p. 68
Bibliography p. 70

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List of Illustrations
Fig. 1 Robert Fludd, Integr Natur Speculum Artisque Imago (1617)
http://ouhos.org/2011/09/02/undergraduate-research-in-the-collections/
Fig. 2 Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana (1579)
http://www.stanford.edu/class/engl174b/chain.html
Fig. 3 Ramon Llull, Liber de ascensu et descensu intellectus (1304)
http://www.biology-direct.com/content/4/1/43
Fig. 4 Matthias Grnewald, e Temptation of St. Anthony (1515)
http://www.abcgallery.com/G/grunewald/grunewald23.html
Fig. 5 Michelangelo Caetani, Dante Alighieris Scheme of the Universe (1855)
http://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/boe/img/g091.jpg
Fig. 6 Rene Descartes, Illustration from Trait de lhomme (1664)
http://www.theopensourcescienceproject.com/lectureimg/descartessensation.jpg
Fig. 7 Parasitic Helminth Worm
http://www.usuhs.mil/mic/Davies/Research.html
Fig. 8 Church of Light, Osaka, Japan
Authors own
Fig. 9 e Blind Mans Stick
http://farm1.static.ickr.com/19/110136322_dc9973066d.jpg
Fig. 10 Pre-Cambrian Stromatolites
http://www.nature.nps.gov/geology/cfprojects/photodb/Photo_Detail.cfm?PhotoID=204
Fig. 11 Ribonucleic Acid Protocell
http://exploringorigins.org/protocells.html
Fig. 12 Micrograph of a Polycrystalline Metal
http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/picture.large/21749074/Micrograph_of_a_polycrystalline_metal
Fig. 13 Saidas Mountain
http://www.demotix.com/news/57416/garbage-mountain-saida
8

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Prologue
not in a mans shape
he approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the Pacic, that
laces the suns with planets,
e heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this cosmos? For
him, the last
Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself the mould to
break away from, the coal
To break into re, the atom to be split.
Robinson Jeers
10

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Robinson Jeffers poem speaks of a violent creative force
1
. Not an anthropomorphic
entity, nor a divinity with human sensibilities, but a chaotic agency immanent in the material
world. Humans remain in the dregs of this totality because they persist in considering
themselves as separate from its solution. To Jeffers, humans are the product of such vitality,
not the measure of it; as such if we are to truly understand ourselves we should seek to
deconstruct the imperium of humanity altogether, and instead search out the life of the
nonhuman.

The origin of my fascination with this subject is very personal in nature. Prolonged
interests in the phenomenological inter-relationship between the human body and the gestalt
material world, as well as the spatio-temporal context of such materialitys, have led me to
posit certain questions: As artists and designers we are used to working on matter, but do we
ever pause to consider whether matter works on, or through, us? Is it possible that the
nonhuman bodies
2
that we are so used to considering inanimate might actually be capable of
subverting our will, or inverting our temperament, for instance? Likewise we are used to
exerting our creative agency or intentionality upon nonhuman bodies, but to what extent do
such bodies exercise their own creative intents independent of human intervention? Seldom
do we ask these fundamental questions, and yet their implications are critical to our practice.

1
Jeffers, Robinson, and Tim Hunt. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University
Press, 2001. p.126
2
lt is important to clarify the terminology we will use within this study. We will generally favour the term nonhuman
'bodies', or 'actants' rather than 'matter' or 'material' because the latter carry pre-established connotations with
inertia. Furthermore, by using the term 'bodies' with reference to both humans and nonhumans alike, we might
establish a more democratic approach to our investigation.
1
PREFACE
12 Preface


For me, architectural manifestos such as Le Corbusiers When the Cathedrals were
White
3
, and Georg Simmels Die Ruine
4
seemed to exemplify the underlying desire of
humans to see themselves and their material creations as isolated from the spatio-temporal
effects of Nature. Moreover, and what is pivotal to our study, they spoke of an on-going
tendency in artistic discourse to undermine the life of materials beyond human intentionality.
Such observations led me to pursue these ideas further, and seemed to reveal a persistent
historic trend in occidental philosophy to place the human, (as considered the superlative
agent), above the mechanistic structures of nature. However, in light of the scientific
advancements made over the past one hundred years, it was my suspicion that such
hierarchical dualisms may no longer be tenable, and as such warranted a thorough reappraisal.
There is evidence that such agent-structure binaries have permeated all fields of cultural
discourse. As such to question the agency of nonhuman bodies is to reconsider the normative
presumptions under which we, as designers, operate.

While a study of the historical emergence of such ontological-hierarchies could quite
easily warrant a thesis in itself, we must nevertheless attempt to briefly disclose their origins
if we are to discern whether such suppositions remain tenable. As such, the first chapter of
this study will include a concise excursus through the geneses of such anthropocentric
notions. With an informed understanding of the conditions of their emergence, we will then
attempt to deconstruct these hierarchies. This will be achieved in three ways:

We shall begin by questioning the normative definition of agency itself; anchored as
it is to the conscious human subject. As such, we shall examine whether the essential
agential faculties of consciousness and reason are as efficient as we would first assume. By
consulting recent findings in neuroscience, we will also attempt to deconstruct the mind-body
dualism by examining the extent to which the Cartesian concept of an immaterial mind is
affected by the gestalt materiality of the body.

If human intentionality is found to be susceptible to material influence, we will then
begin to examine how nonhuman bodies might exercise their own agency upon it. We shall
also attempt to simultaneously deconstruct another dualism; that of the human body as
distinct from its surroundings. Addressing issues prevalent in cellular biology we might be
able to establish the extent to which the subjective human is made up of many nonhuman

3
Le Corbusier. When Cathedrals Were White. London: Routledge, 1947
4
Simmel, Georg. "The Ruin, in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics. ed. Kurt H. Wolff, New York:
Harper & Row, 1965

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bodies cohabiting and co-effecting its cognition, will and behaviours, thus extending our
understanding of the potentiality of nonhuman agency further still.

Finally, having examined the extent to which a conglomerate agency operates
between human and nonhuman bodies, we will examine developments in modern Physics
which may permit a new understanding of vibrant matter that negates distinctions between
animate or inanimate, organic or inorganic life. In this way, we might begin to recognise a
universally applicable concept of agency that operates far below the boundaries of human
control, and of which we thus become a small, but irremovable part.

It should be noted before we embark on this enquiry, however, that this topic remains
in its relative infancy, and the ambitions of the investigation are considerable. As such we are
unlikely to conclude this study with a firm proposal for a new definition of agency. We will
hope, rather, to have begun to establish the lines of philosophical and scientific enquiry that
might enable us to investigate this phenomenon further still
5
.



















5
The findings of scientists such as Uexkll, Damasio, Alcoff and Libet as well as the philosophical interrogations of
Spinoza, Lucretius, Deleuze, Guattari, and Merleau-Ponty, have been invaluable. Similarly, progressive
contemporary investigations of socio-political theorists such as Jane Bennett, Diana Coole and Bruno Latour, as
well as those of post-structuralist geographers such as Nigel Thrift, have proven pivotal, and warrant serious
acknowledgement from the outset of this study.
14

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I have no longer any taste for these renements you call life,
but shall dive again instead into brute matter.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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In order to better understand how and why our contemporary disregard for inanimate
matter has emerged, as well as the repercussions this has had on our human-centric notions of
agency, it is essential that we briefly examine the historical circumstances under which these
attitudes were born, as well as the extent to which they have permeated contemporary socio-
cultural practice. While it could be suggested that such distinctions between human and
nonhuman originated in Cartesian dualism, this would actually represent a grossly reductive
understanding. Although it is true that Descartes division between the res cogitans and the
res extensa has been hugely influential in the forming of contemporary mechanistic attitudes
towards nonhuman bodies, it appears that Descartes was in fact struggling to ally his
mechanistic science and philosophy with pre-established theological hierarchies of being
6
.

Such hierarchies are particularly well exemplified in Judeo-Christian art. The Great
Chain of Being, for example, is one of the most popularly circulated Christian diagrams, and
is concomitantly one of the clearest and most explicit examples of historically established
onto-theological hierarchies. Based on Aristotles Scala Naturae (350BC), this ladder of life
proposed a categorisation of organisms that expressed their ascending levels of potentiality
7
.
It is the twin notions of agentic capacity and essentialism that makes The Great Chain of
Being essential to our study, as it created a stratification of vitality while simultaneously
making explicit delineations between organisms. This has been scrupled by academics such as
Arthur Lovejoy, who identified it as the greatest synthetic scheme in pre-Darwinian
biology
8
insofar as it engendered the conception that humans held more efficacy than any
other organism in nature.

6
Tarnas, Richard. The Passion of the Western Mind. London: Harmony, 1991.
7
Aristotle, Balme, D. M., and Gotthelf, Allan. Aristotle Historia Animalium. Cambridge Univ Pr, 2011.
8
Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being. New York: Harper & Row, 1960. p.84
2
THE CLEAVE
18 e Cleave
Fig. 1 Robert Fludd, Integr Natur Speculum Artisque Imago (1617)

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Fig. 2 Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana (1579)
Fig. 3 Ramon Llull, Liber de ascensu et descensu intellectus (1304)
20 e Cleave


What the Great Chain of Being added to Aristotles ladder, however, was the
depiction of a divinity at its zenith. What is particularly noteworthy about this is not
necessarily the inclusion of a divine entity per se, but the fact that the paradise in which this
God resided was shown to be physically separated from a material earth. This was conveyed
in various ways, though always with the same ideological message: Whether shown separated
by numerous celestial spheres [fig.1], protected by a bank of angelic beings [fig.2], or simply
within a walled, hovering kingdom [fig.3], the stark existential division that this implied
between an extracorporeal paradise and the material world is at once made clear. Such notions
were further enforced through the persistent anthropomorphic representation of Angels. By
contrast Demons, as the bearers of pain and temptation, were commonly represented by
animals [fig. 4]. Dantes Scheme of the Universe even goes so far as to depict Hell as the
figurative heart of the earth, with its respective entrance being through a dark wood at the foot
of mountain [fig. 5]. The theological propaganda is at once made explicit: The world of nature
is chaotic and dangerous, and mans salvation lies in his ultimate liberation from the confines
of the material world. This transcendent theology was a sharp distinction to that of the
animistic polytheisms that prevailed in pre-Socratic belief. As Diana Coole asserts, the
productivity that had for the ancients been internal to and of nature was now located in a God
whose agency was external to it, with nature persisting as a mechanical system
9
. The
relevance of this to our study is critical, for it at once removed the notion of agency or vitality
from nonhuman Nature. This notion was fiercely enforced, with assertion to the contrary
considered a blasphemy
10
.

As a being similarly enslaved to the material world, one might assume that the
atheistic materialism that emerged during the Enlightenment such as Baron dHolbachs The
System of Nature (1770)
11
would see the Human assigned a mechanistic existence similar to
the rest of Nature. However, it was Descartes dualism that allowed humans to maintain a
degree of theological exceptionalism above all nonhuman matter
12
. Whereas animals and
material matter were destined to exist as mere extended objects (res extensa), or at best
automatons, humans as res cogitans would remain superlative agents because of what Gilbert

9
Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham [NC]: Duke
University Press, 2010. p.98, (my emphasis)
10
One famous example relates to Baruch Spinoza, who was excommunicated from the Jewish community for his
proclamation that God was 'immanent' in nature. See; Steven M. Nadler. Spinoza: A Life. Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
11
Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, Denis Diderot, and H. D. Robinson. The System of Nature: Or, Laws of the Moral and
Physical World. New York: B. Franklin, 1970.
12
Tarnas, Richard. The Passion of the Western Mind. London: Harmony, 1991.

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Ryle later termed the ghost in the machine
13
. As expressed in Descartes mantra, cogito
ergo sum, it was this ghost, the thinking, willing and ensouled cogito that rendered the
human agent unique. As Jane Bennett postulates, humans thus came to be considered the
most vital in the sense of being the most animate or alive and thus powerful, and also in the
sense of possessing the greatest degree of freedom or capacity to act in ways that cannot be
reduced to their situational or environmental determinants
14
. It is important to understand in
the context of this study that the question of both existence and agency are thus drawn from
theological concepts in which soul, consciousness and existence are considered synonymous.

It is also important to discern the degree to which such dualisms have permeated
contemporary culture, and thus the extent to which such a philosophy has inadvertently
affected normative attitudes towards nonhuman life. In his critique on Descartes, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty identifies that such anthropocentric presumptions have inevitably created a
modern scientific perception of nature that is entirely theological in its infrastructure
15
.
Similarly, Arthur Schopenhauer asserted that the vestiges of religious taxonomies have
persisted throughout modern philosophy
16
. Today, political philosophers such as John Gray
and scientists like Jacques Monod contend that such tendencies continue in the guise of
Humanism
17
. As Gray insists, over the past two hundred years, philosophy has shaken off
Christian faith. It has not given up Christianitys cardinal error the belief that humans are
radically different from all other animals Our image of ourselves is formed from our
ingrained belief that consciousness, selfhood and free will are what define us as human
beings, and raise us above all other creatures.
18


Furthermore, there are indications of the theological ambition towards extra-corporeal
existence persisting in contemporary culture, with such ideas being explored in the writings of
various cybernetic pioneers. Works such as William Gibsons Neuromancer
19
, Hans

13
Ryle, Gllbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson, 1969
14
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, p.88
15
-Ponty, Maurice, and Dominique Sglard. Nature: Course Notes from the Collge De France. Evanston, lll:
Northwestern University Press, 2003, p.88
16
ln his critique of Kant's humanism, Schopenhauer likened Kant 'to a man at a ball, who all evening has been
carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off
her mask and reveals herself to be his wife.' Schopenhauer asserted that the masked beauty was Christianity, for it
was his belief that Kant's moral philosophy, and especially his philosophy of the Bildungstrieb (or 'formative drive'),
had failed entirely to escape from Christian dualism.
See; Schopenhauer, Arthur, E. F. J. Payne, and David E. Cartwright. On the Basis of Morality. Providence: Berghahn
Books, 1995, p.103
17
'The liberal societies of the West still pay lip service to, and present as a basis for morality, a disgusting farrago of
Judeo-Christian religiosity, scientific progressism, belief in the "natural rights of man and utilitarian pragmatism'.
Monod, Jacques qtd. in Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London: Granta, 2002,
p.30
18
Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London: Granta, 2002, p.38
19
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1986
22 e Cleave
Fig. 4 Matthias Grnewald, e Temptation of St. Anthony (1515). Nature as treachorous. Note
the depiction of an Empyrean Paradise in the background, detached from material earth.

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Fig. 5 Michelangelo Caetani, Dante Alighieris Scheme of the Universe (1855)
24 e Cleave

Moravecs Mind Children
20
, and Stanislaw Lems Summa Technologaie
21
all discuss the
human desire to leave the material bounds of the body altogether. Margaret Wertheim
substantiates this notion, suggesting that just as early Christians conceived of Heaven as a
realm in which their souls would be freed from the failings of the flesh, todays
proselytisers of cyberspace proffer their domain as an idealised realm 'above' and 'beyond' the
problems of a troubled material world
22
. Like Heaven, cyberspace seems to be idealised as an
immaterial human paradise.

As we can see, the taxonomic divisions of life that began with The Great Chain of
Being have not only led to a contemporary philosophy which privileges the human as
hegemonic agent, but furthermore the dualist notions that this in turn fosters seem to be
extending further still to the ambition to transcend our own bodies. What hope can there be
then for a delineation of ontological hierarchies? How can we hope to find a renewed
understanding of the relationship between human and nonhuman matter when such humanist
philosophies appear to penetrate socio-cultural thought so deeply? We will examine whether
the answer may be found by returning to a phenomenological occupation with the lebenswelt,
or lifeworld, that is in turn substantiated by modern scientific revelations
23
. Modern physicists
such as Fritjof Capra stress that an essentialist regard towards this milieu creates a misleading
and reductive understanding of reality
24
. As such we should hope to seek a more accurate
comprehension of the complex web of human-nonhuman relations within which we operate,
while simultaneously beginning to deconstruct the perceived boundaries therein. As Merleau-
Ponty insisted, a new ontology must be presented without any compromise with humanism,
nor moreover with naturalism, nor finally with theology to show that philosophy can no
longer think according to the cleavage: God, man, creatures
25
.


20
Moravec, Hans P. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human lntelligence. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1988.
21
Lem, Stanislaw, and Peter Swirski. A Stanislaw Lem Reader. Evanston, lll: Northwestern University Press, 1997.
22
Wertheim, Margaret. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to lnternet. London: Virago,
1999, p.25
23
ln combining these approaches, we might practice something akin to what Merleau-Ponty called hyper dialectics,
or Bordieu's reflexive sociology. Both mean that we engage in an oscillating state between first person lived
experience and third person objective accounts of such experiences, while all the while experimenting with
concepts of the lifeworld that emerge therein. Rather than following a priori idealistic definitions of agency, such an
approach allows us to engage with the variable expressions of agency that may present them selves to us, thus
affording us the flexibility necessary in grasping its inherent recalcitrance.
24
'ln ordinary life, we divide the world into separate objects and events. This division is, of course, useful and
necessary to cope with our everyday environment, but it is not a fundamental feature of reality. lt is an abstraction
devised by our discriminating and categorising intellect. To believe that our abstract concepts of separate 'thing'
and 'events' are realities of nature is an illusion... [This stands as] one of the most important revelations of modern
physics.' Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern
Mysticism. Berkeley: Shambhala, 2000. p.131
25
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the lnvisible, p.274

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25

In this way, we may come to substantiate Nietzsches proclamation that the
nonhuman agents within nutrition, place, climate are inconceivably more important than
everything one has taken to be important so far [i.e.,] God, soul, virtue, sin,
beyond, truth, eternal life
26
. We should attempt to practice what Diana Coole calls an
ontological agnosticism as to who or what exercises agency. For by attempting to
deconstruct the efficiency of the willing human agent, we may open chasms of potentiality
into which new agents can fall and exercise their own powers of influence. Only by doing this
might we hope to arrive at a universal understanding of agency that is, as Gilles Deleuze
describes, ontologically one, formally diverse
27
.









26
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Walter Arnold Kaufmann, and R. J. Hollingdale. On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce
Homo. New York: Vintage, 1989, p.256
27
Deleuze, Gilles. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. New York: Zone Books, 1990, p.66
26

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27
Not only do human beings not form a separate imperium unto themselves; they do not
even command the imperium, nature, of which they are a part.
Benedicte de Spinoza
28














The traditions of humanism that we have just examined persist in the contemporary
definitions of agency: It is maintained in political theory that only humans have
consciousness, and that only they are therefore capable of willed, reasoned, and intentional
action
28
. These are the qualities that are believed to render humans alone as agential
subjectivities.

In his anti-humanist work, Straw Dogs, John Gray criticises Heideggers Dasein and
Nietzsches overman as persistent versions of Christian-humanist ideas that prioritise the
importance of a human reason above all other agential faculties
29
. Similarly, Richard Tarnas
comments in The Passion of the Western Mind that this historic privileging has persisted
further still throughout the postmodernist philosophy that nothing exists outside of
consciousness. In this regard, Tarnas asserts that the modern condition begins as
a Promethean movement toward human freedom, toward autonomy from the encompassing
matrix of nature, toward individuation from the collective, yet gradually and ineluctably
the Cartesian-Kantian condition evolves into a Kafka-Beckett-like state of existential isolation
and absurdity- an intolerable double bind leading to a kind of deconstructive frenzy
30
. As
Tarnas states, not only has an anthropocentric ontology asserted itself as the basis of Western
thought, it has also led to an alienating ontological condition, (what he refers to as the
distancing between human and nonhumans), that grossly undermines the importance of the
agential relationships that occur outside of consciousness.

28
Coole, Diana. "Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities.
Political Studies. 2005 Vol 35
29
Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London: Granta, 2002. p.49
30
Tarnas, Richard. The Passion of the Western Mind. London: Harmony, 1991. p.432
3
SUM, ERGO COGITO

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Despite its preoccupation with the importance of consciousness, the agency debate has
seldom concerned itself with whether it is either a unique or exemplary faculty, and as such
we shall take up this task now. Scientists such as Darwin and De Waal have demonstrated
independently that animals such as apes
31
and worms
32
possess degrees of cognition and/or
intentionality, and as such we should not be so quick to presume that humans are unique in
this capacity. However, attempting to further prove that other nonhuman bodies possess the
faculties of cognition would only serve to reify the notion that reflexive thought is a
prerequisite for agency. The more progressive task would be to instead question the variable
nature of both will and consciousness and the inconsistency of their collective efficacy. Only
by questioning the association of agency with conscious action might we successfully derail
what Giorgio Agamben refers to as the anthropological machine of humanism
33
, and thus
begin to establish a definition that is liberated from such notions.

Maurice Merleau-Pontys accounts of action in The Phenomenology of Perception
were intended to decentralise the importance of will, reason and intentionality by placing
equal importance on both the motor intentionality of the body and the agential influences of
the life-world that engulfed it. Since the time of its writing, this view has been theoretically
substantiated by findings in the fields of neuroscience and cognitive science which show that
even in beings with high levels of awareness, (including humans, amongst others), both
perception and action emerge without consciousness. As the Nobel-prize winning scientist
Benjamin Libet proves in his investigations into the so-called half-second delay, the
electrical impulses and associated neural activity that initiate an action occur one half of a
second before we make the conscious decision to act: The brain evidently decides to
initiate, or, at the least, prepare to initiate the act at a time before there is any reportable
subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place cerebral initiation even of a
spontaneous voluntary act can and usually does begin unconsciously
34
. Thus, the majority
of the actions we execute as agents appear to be the result of unconscious thought.

It has also been shown that as organisms active in the world, we process perhaps
fourteen million bits of information per second. The bandwidth of consciousness is around
eighteen bits. This means we have conscious access to about a millionth of the information

31
Waal, Frans de. The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Relfections by a Primatologist. London: Penguin, 2002.
32
Darwin, Charles. The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their
Habits. London: John Murray, 1881.
33
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2004, p.29
34
Libet, Benjamin. Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
2004.
30 Sum, Ergo Cogito

we use daily to survive
35
. The influence of the subconscious thus becomes far more
important to the action of the human agent
36
. In light of these facts, how can we defend a
perception of agency that is so intimately bound with the idea of conscious action? It is at
once shown to be an untenable association. This revelation is critical to our study, for not only
do such findings undermine the hegemony of the willing human agent, but moreover they
suggest that other types of bodies might operate below these thresholds of consciousness in
order to subvert or influence human action. Perhaps the most immediate instance in which the
mind might be influenced is through the qualia of the human body itself.

While the lingering vestiges of Cartesian dualism would have us believe that the
immaterial Mind exists independently from the body, certain revelations in modern
neuroscience categorically undermine the Cartesian concept of a singular homunculus, or
controlling entity responsible for an agents action [fig. 6]. Rodney Brooks, the pioneer of
modern artificial intelligence, has asserted through his research that just as there is no central
representation there is no central system. Each activity connects perception to action directly.
It is only the observer of the creature who imputes a central representation or central control.
The creature itself has none: It is a collection of competing behaviours. Out of the local chaos
of their interactions there emerges, in the eye of the observer, a coherent pattern of
behaviour
37
. We thus find humans not to be a distinct dualism of mind and body, devoid of
corporeal influence, but instead more akin to what Francisco Varela has defined as a selfless
self a coherent global pattern that emerges from the activity of simple local components,
which seems to be centrally located, but is nowhere to be found
38
. Action, then, is by no
means the construction of an isolated, reasoning mind, but the result of agential bodies
distributed throughout the body. This can be seen as a scientific equivalent of what Merleau-
Ponty has previously called the open and indefinite unity of subjectivity
39
.

In recent years several renowned neurologists have conducted research that helps us to
understand the role of the material world in the formation of agential action. In Antonio
Damasios The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of

35
Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London: Granta, 2002.
36
The efficiency of subliminal perception is not a new revelation: Subliminal advertising was banned in 1974 because
of concerns over its effects; similarly political theorists such Felix Guattari have suggested that lntegrated World
Capitalism works by appropriating unconscious intensities, which result in collected action. See;
The Three Ecologies. London: Athlone Press, 2000.
37
Brooks, Rodney A. Cambrian lntelligence: The Early History of the New Al. Cambridge, Mass: MlT Press, 1999, p.
90
38
Varela, Francisco J. Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press,
1999, p.53
39
Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, 2010, p.473

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Fig. 6 Rene Descartes, Illustration from Trait de lhomme (1664). Descartes believed that all stimuli were
transmitted to a single homunculus or control point. e pineal gland was proposed as the point of contact
for the immaterial mind and thus named the seat of the soul.
32 Sum, Ergo Cogito

Consciousness
40
, and Linda Martin Alcoffs Towards a Phenomenology of Radical
Embodiment
41
, both scientists conclude through extensive testing that subjectivities emerge,
(and are repeatedly reformed in plasticity), through seemingly insignificant exchanges with
the material world which operate below the level of consciousness. Not only are our actions
not decided upon by an immaterial mind, it appears that they in fact emerge directly from our
encounters with matter.

Where established definitions of agency such as those proffered by Lewis and Sibeon
would continue to assert the importance of decision-making as the single most important
criterion of agency
42
, we now find such conclusions to be intrinsically flawed because, as
Diana Coole states, they ignore the corporeal and transpersonal dimensions that render
decision-making only ambiguously agentic in their own terms
43
. In light of these revelations,
we begin to understand agentic action as a complex process which includes the interactions of
multiple actants, rather than the premeditated will of an isolated homunculus. In this way, we
should attempt to adopt a line of enquiry similar to that pursued by Merleau-Ponty in his
posthumously published The Visible and The Invisible, wherein he advocated the need to
eschew notions such as acts of consciousness, states of consciousness, form and
even perception in order to avoid a cutting up of what is lived into discontinuous acts
44
.
Only in this way might we be able to further examine a pre-discursive concept of agency that
does not concern itself with notions of will or intentionality, but instead examines agency as
the consequence of complex, reciprocal interactions.

Once again, such philosophical concepts are subtended by modern scientific findings:
In contrast to a Cartesian-Newtonian model that defines action in terms of linear causality,
contemporary scientists such as James Gleik maintain that Systems Theory, Complexity
Theory and Chaos Theory offer us far more accurate representations of the fractal, emergent
relationships that exist between universal bodies
45
. Coole acknowledges that such scientific
findings play a increasingly significant role in understanding sociomaterial processes
because they help us to appreciate [bodies] inextricability from a wider natural

40
Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body Emotion and the Making of Consciousness. London:
Heinemann, 2000.
41
Alcoff, L. M. 1999. "Towards a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment". RADlCAL PHlLOSOPHY. no. 95: 15-26.
42
Lewis, Paul A. 2002. "Agency, Structure and Causality in Political Science: A Comment on Sibeon". Politics. 22,
no. 1: 17-23.
43
Coole, Diana. 2005. "Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic
Capacities". Political Studies. 53, no. 1: 124-142, p.136
44
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Claude Lefort. The Visible and the lnvisible; Followed by Working Notes. Evanston
[lll.]: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p.158
45
Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. London: Heinemann, 1988.

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33

environment
46
. For Merleau-Ponty, it is this same complexity, inherent to the life-world, that
creates the fissures and gaps into which subjectivities slip and lodge themselves, or rather
which are the subjectivities themselves
47
. In this way, both Coole and Merleau-Ponty
similarly suggest that we are not the product of our will, but rather of our entanglements with
other, (sometimes nonhuman), affective bodies. This chaotic interaction between actants is
what Bruno Latour refers to in Pandoras Hope as the slight surprise of action. He echoes
the previous assertions when he proclaims that there are events. I never act. I am always
slightly surprised by what I do. That which acts through me is also surprised by what I do, by
the chance to mutate, to change, and to bifurcate
48
. Our continual interactions with the life-
world have the potential to invert our actions and thus create effects that are not entirely our
own. In the absence of an I, the local components to which Varela previously referred
appear to play a significant part in the formation of human action, and must therefore hold an
agency of their own. In this way, nonhuman bodies such as animals, food, stones or electricity
could all potentially become imperatives operating within and alongside mans limited faculty
of conscious intentionality. The nature of such generative encounters thus becomes far more
pertinent to our investigation of agency, and should be examined further.







46
Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham [NC]: Duke
University Press, 2010, p.13
47
Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, 2010, p.389
48
Latour, Bruno. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1999, p.281
34

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35
Should the truth about the world exist, its bound to be nonhuman.
Joseph Brodsky

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37


















If the mind, as conceived as the patriarch of free will, is found not only to have lost
its role as the stronghold of human reason and intentionality, but also to be influenced by its
own corporeality, what then happens to the question of human-nonhuman agency when this
fortress is, in turn, found to be porous?

As Elizabeth Brumfield articulates in her essay On the Archaeology of Choice, the
term agency has been used historically to refer to the intentional choices made by men and
women as they take action to realise their goals, despite the fact that these actors are socially
constituted beings embedded in ecological surroundings that both define their goals and
constrain their actions
49
. In this way Brumfield identifies the perpetual tendency in
contemporary discourse to not only separate humans from Nature, but also to undermine the
degree to which this milieu is affective in its own right. George Boas book, Primitivism and
Related Ideas of Antiquity (1935) contained some sixty-six definitions of Nature in its
appendix
50
. If we were to consult modern dictionaries, we would find a definition which
explicitly occludes mans presence
51
.

49
Elizabeth Brumfield. "On the Archaeology of Choice, in Agency in Archaeology, ed. Marcia-Anne Dobres, and
John E. Robb. (London: Routledge, 2000), p.249
50
Lovejoy, Arthur O., and George Boas. Primitivism and Related ldeas in Antiquity. New York: Octagon Books, 1965.
p.447
51
Oxford English Dictionary defines Nature as; "The phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants,
animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.
4
I AM MANY
38 I Am Many


The etymology of the word Nature comes from the Greek physis, meaning either
to blow or swell up. In spite of the Cartesian definition of nonhuman bodies as
mechanistic extensa or automata, scientific findings since Descartes have repeatedly shown
cells to have a kind of generative capacity akin to that implied by its etymology. Nearly a
century ago, the embryologist Hans Drieschs investigations into the development of the cells
of sea urchins led him to conclude that cells were pluripotent, and thus inexplicable if
conceived of in mechanistic terms
52
. The contemporary term stem cell is a neologism used
to express this same pluripotency; referring to a cell that is able to become any of the various
kinds of cells or tissues of the mature, differentiated organism
53
. Henri Bergson, (whose
Creative Evolution (1907) emerged concomitantly with Drieschs lectures on The Science and
Philosophy of the Organism), concluded in light of these revelations; what else can this mean
but that matter extends itself in space, without being absolutely extended therein
54
. In this
way, Bergson similarly urges us not to misconceive cellular life in terms of the stable,
quantifiable extensa that Descartes had suggested. Rather in light of such findings it is to be
understood as a continuing expression of becoming that is altogether unpredictable.

The biologist Jacob von Uexkll explored such a phenomenon in his own laboratory
work, adding his own concept of the umwelt, or around world. In Uexklls terms,
organisms and cells alike are not causal machines but are instead fields of immanent,
individual mechanics; continuously reforming in response to their respective umwelts, which
are themselves found to be perpetually re-composing
55
. In this way, cells and organisms alike
exhibit a form of pre-discursive agency. This theory not only had significant bearing on the
scientific community, but also on philosophers such as Heidegger, Agamben and Deleuze and
Guattari. The significance of Uexkll, Driesch and Bergsons findings are crucial to establish
at the outset of this section of our study; for not only do they overturn a perception of
mechanistic nonhuman life, but moreover they place human and nonhuman bodies in a state
of concrescence with one another.

52
Driesch, Hans. The Science & Philosophy of the Organism. London: A. & C. Black, 1929.
53
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. p.85
54
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. London: Forgotten Books, 2010. p.214
55
Uexkll explains the phenomenon of individual cellular perception thus:
"Everywhere we have nothing but mechanics, not parts of machines. Each individual cell in the reflex arc works not
at the transmission of movement, but at the transmission of excitation. So an excitation has to be perceived by the
subject. [The] external effects that touch the optic nerves, whether they're ether waves, pressure, or electric
current, cause a luminous sensation, so our optical cells respond with the same 'perceptive character'. Therefore
we can conclude that each living cell is a mechanic who perceives and does, that consequently it has its own
perceptive character, and impulsions or 'active characters'. The perception and action complexes of the
assemblage of the animal subject lead thus to the collaboration of little cellular mechanics, each one of which
makes use of just one perception-signal and one action-signal. - quoted in Ballantyne, Andrew. Deleuze and
Guattari for Architects. London: Routledge, 2007. pp. 83-84

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With the notion of an impenetrable, isolated homunculus already questioned, the task
now is to examine the extent to which the human mind-body unit is in turn penetrated and
affected by these nonhuman bodies; thus establishing both the nonhuman condition of our
own capacities as agents, and the dynamic agency of such bodies in themselves. A finding of
contemporary science that illustrates this particularly well concerns the emergent composition
of the human organism itself. In Reflexing Complexity, Brian Wynne identifies that the
surprisingly small number of genomes found in the human organism were too few to
sufficiently explain the complexity with which the mature organism emerges. As such,
models of genomic determinism have since been abandoned by the scientific community,
with geneticists instead favouring hypotheses of systems-biology which take into account
nonhuman elements such as dietary intake, climate, hormone levels and chemical stimuli
56
.
This insight is critical to our study, because it redefines the encounters between humans and
nonhuman bodies not only as affective, but as fundamentally generative. In other words, a
reciprocal relationship between human and nonhuman is a prerequisite for the development of
the human organism.

Existing dichotomies between humans and nature thus indicate a reductive
comprehension of this reciprocity, and as such we must endeavour to seek more accurate
alternatives in the study of somatic agency. As Coole states, paying attention to corporeality
as a practical and efficacious series of emergent capacities thus reveals both the materiality of
agency and the agentic properties inherent in nature itself
57
. Pierre Bordieus theory of
habitus and field is particularly noteworthy in this regard. Instead of invoking a system of
linear, dualist relations, these terms were intended to express a porous network of emergent,
co-constitutive power relations. By understanding this relationship as fundamentally
reciprocal, Bordieu intended to escape from under the philosophy of the subject without
doing away with the agent, as well as from under the philosophy of the structure but without
forgetting to take into account the effects it wields upon and through the agent
58
. In this way,
the internal is externalised, and the external is internalised. Moreover, and what is critical, the
external field is acknowledged as having its own generative agency. This theory is
consistent not only with the proclamations of Wynne and the Complexity and Systems
Theorists, but it is also conducive with the repeated assertions of phenomenologists and
philosophers such as a Deleuze and Guattari, who proclaim that the real truth of the matter-

56
Brian Wynne, "Reflexing Complexity". Theory, Culture & Society. (2005: 22, no. 5)
57
Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham [NC]: Duke
University Press, 2010. p.20
58
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loc J. D. Wacquant. An lnvitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992. p.121
40 I Am Many

the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium- is that there is no such thing as relatively
independent spheres or circuits
59
But far from merely implying a web of relations, what we
are examining herein clearly indicates an agential capacity inherent within such encounters.

We can thus begin to formulate a congregational (rather than atomistic)
understanding of agency in which nonhuman bodies become pivotal. But exactly how, and
where, do these encounters occur? As well as enabling us to identify the various ways in
which bodies merge and exchange agentic properties, a detailed examination of this question
may also help us to deconstruct the notion of the human as an isolated singularity, thus
helping us to further remove any perceived taxonomic divisions between human and
nonhuman life. In Art as Experience, John Dewey asserts that the epidermis is only in the
most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins.
There are things inside the body that are foreign to it, and there are things outside of it that
belong to it de jure if not de facto; that must be taken possession of if life is to continue
60
.
The boundaries of the body are thus brought into question. It is not contained, but porous;
extending into the milieu while the nonhuman, similarly, extends into it. Latour affirms that
this is not a new understanding, only one that has been removed from normative thought,
proclaiming that humans, for millions of years, have extended their social relations to other
actants with which, with whom, they have swapped many properties, and with which, with
whom, they form collectives
61
.

The truth of such assertions is once again being substantiated by modern scientific
findings. The research of Julia Segre and her associates at the National Human Genome
Research Institute has recently established that there are one hundred times as many bacteria
genomes within the human micro-biome than there are human genes
62
. Not only is Latour
correct in his assertions, but furthermore in Uexklls terms it would also appear that we are
vastly outnumbered by nonhuman mechanics. Segres research shows that the human elbow
alone hosts six tribes of bacteria. These are performing commensalist roles by processing
the fat it produces and moisturising the skin. Similarly the human immune system is now
known to require parasitic helminth worms for its proper functioning [fig.7]. Recent research
has shown that absence of such parasites (resulting sometimes from excessive antibiotic use)
can lead to various maladies including Crohns disease as well as various autoimmune

59
Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2004. p.4
60
John Dewey, "Art as experience, quoted in Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010), p.102
61
Latour, Bruno. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1999, p.198
62
Grice E.A., et al. "A Diversity Profile of the Human Skin Microbiota". Genome Research. (18, no. 7) (2008).

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Fig. 7 Parasitic Helminth Worm. Believed to be essential for functioning of human immune system.
42 I Am Many

diseases, and are as result being reintroduced as a form of treatment
63
. Not only are these
nonhumans omnipresent throughout the human, but also it seems that their agency is essential
to our own.

In this way, we begin to understand that the human agent is far from an individual.
There is only what Diana Coole calls the contingent appearing of such agents as
singularities. The appearance of individuals as such should instead be understood as
agentic constellations where agentic capacities manifest a provisional concentration and
integrity
64
. This declaration alludes to Deleuze and Guattaris notion of agencement,
translated in English as assemblage. This concept is explored in depth in A Thousand
Plateaus in order to elucidate the various ways in which bodies enhance their efficacy in the
forming of heterogeneous groupings. What is interesting also is the distribution of power
within Deleuze and Guattaris assemblage: There is no controlling or hegemonic body, but
likewise its collective affects are not evenly divisible between all its members. It is an uneven
topography of agency that fluctuates constantly as its values vary, inducing affects that are
often far greater than the sum of its parts
65
. Such assemblages manifest themselves in a
plethora of ways: Some, like the human, bacteria and parasitic worms, create a super-
organism that becomes irreducible in its functionality. When comprehended in the terms of
Wynne, Coole, or Deleuze and Guattari, the human is then never more than an intensity of a
particular agentic assemblage. We are never a singular human agent; we are composed by
alterity. With this understanding, we should thus aim to follow John Frows assertion in A
Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole, that any perceived difference
between human and nonhumans needs to be flattened, read horizontally as a juxtaposition
rather than vertically as a hierarchy of being
66
.

However, the human-nonhuman assemblages we have hitherto studied are by no
means the subtlest or the most creative examples that we can draw upon. In Jane Bennetts
illuminating study, The Efficacy of Fat, she studies the ways in which omega-3 fatty acids
have been shown repeatedly to effect human behaviour. Controlled tests with omega-3
supplements have induced a variety of behavioural effects; including a thirty-five percent
reduction of violent offences in tested prisoners; improved symptoms in children with
difficulties in learning, reading, and psychosocial adjustment; improvement in both positive

63
RW Summers, et al. "Trichuris Suis Therapy in Crohn's Disease". Gut. (54, no. 1)(2005).
64
Coole, Diana. 2005. "Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic
Capacities". Political Studies. (53, no. 1). p.132
65
For another notable exploration of the assemblage, see "The Book of the Machines in Butler, Samuel, and Peter
Mudford. Erewhon. London: Penguin Books, 1985.
66
Frow, John. "A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole". Critical lnquiry. (28, no. 1)(2001).
p.183

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and negative symptoms of schizophrenic patients; and consistent inverse correlations
between national rates of fish consumption and cases of depression and bi-polar disorder. She
also demonstrates the converse effects of such compounds, citing tests on rats that have
shown hydrogenated fats to adversely effect memory and cognitive capacity
67
. Brian Hone
and Anil Doshi express a similar relationship between nonhuman matter and human
behaviour in their study, Environmental Pollution, Neurotoxicity and Criminal Violence,
examining the manner in which uptake of certain minerals in the atmosphere induces complex
chemical reactions in the brain which cause unusually high instances of violent crime.
68


What is perhaps most significant about these cases is the fact that inorganic bodies
are showing themselves to be affective agents, forming creative assemblages with humans
that in are not entirely predictable. In Deleuze and Guattaris terms, we might say that such
ingested matter has de-territorialised itself within the body only to re-corporealise in the acts
of the consumer-agent. A body such as this is what Latour refers to as a proto-actant, or
similarly what Michel Serres refers to as a thermal exciter. Serres states that such nonhuman
may be deemed affective agents because it makes the assemblage change state differentially,
it inclines it. It makes the equilibrium of the energetic distribution fluctuate. It does it. It
irritates it. It inflames it. Often this inclination has no effect. But it can produce gigantic ones
by chain reactions or reproduction
69
. Serres view further alludes to a distributive account of
agency wherein the degrees of intensity and concomitant effects remain unpredictable. Like
the pluripotency of organic cells, such inorganic matter is also to be considered a nonhuman
agent capable of emergent rather than causal effects within an assemblage. This
understanding is pivotal; for when we relate these various findings to our previous
investigations into the subverted role of consciousness, we may begin to build an
understanding of agency as a series of accumulated propositions between bodies, rather than
an intentionality executed by any one single body. Thus agency might be better understood as
a trajectory of action resulting from semi-chaotic encounters.

However, in order to push this notion of a conjoined agency further still, we should
attempt to discern whether objects and bodies within the extended environment can similarly
act as agents without necessarily requiring a biological reaction or discrete ingestion per se.
With this task in mind, we return to Merleau-Pontys enquiries within The Visible and the
Invisible. In this work he developed his notion of the chiasm; or the conceptual

67
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 40-43
68
Hone, Brian T., and Anil Doshi, Environmental Pollution, Neurotoxicity and Criminal Violence. in Environmental
Toxicology: Current Developments, ed. J. Rose, 11-46. London: Taylor and Francis, 1998.
69
Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. p.191
44 I Am Many

intertwining of bodies such that any distinction between them is rendered obsolete. In the
simple act of touching, for example, Merleau-Pontys identifies three dimensions of
reciprocal encounter between bodies. In the third of these he states the touching subject
passes over to the rank of the touched, descends into the things, such that the touch is formed
in the midst of the world and as it were in the things
70
. This is particularly noteworthy
because such a concept alludes to a creative, metaphysical exchange between bodies that
occurs not through bio-chemical process, but simply through the encounter itself [fig. 8].

Once again, we may find support for such philosophical proclamations within
scientific research. The pioneer of cybernetics and behavioural sciences, Gregory Bateson,
examined the manner in which objects form affective relationships with human and
nonhuman bodies. Through his work in cybernetics and behavioural sciences, he developed
his theory of the Blind Mans Stick in order to convey how such objects become extensions
of a particular body or organism. But far from being reduced to prosthetic function, Bateson
believed that such transpersonal encounters become part of our cognitive architecture
71
. His
theories have since been progressed within the scientific community, with practicing
neuroscientists such as Lambros Malafouris conducting research into what is now termed
cognitive archaeology. Malafouris cites the parody of the Blind Mans Stick as that which
led to the contemporary understanding of the functional anatomy of the human brain [as] a
dynamic bio-cultural construct subject to continuous ontogenetic and phylogenetic
remodelling by behaviourally important and socially embedded experiences. These
experiences are mediated and sometimes constituted by the use of material objects and
artefacts (like the stick) which for that reason should be seen as continuous and active parts of
the human cognitive architecture
72
[fig. 9]. Malafouris branch of archaeological study is
concerned specifically with the agency that has historically recurred in material
engagement, examining our understanding of an extended or distributed cognition that is
thus immanent within nonhuman bodies.

Bernard Stiegler further addresses the anthropological significance of this concept in
the first book of Technics and Time, reasoning that human evolution has shown itself to be

70
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Claude Lefort. The Visible and the lnvisible; Followed by Working Notes. Evanston
[lll.]: Northwestern University Press, 1968. p.134
71
"But what about "me"? Suppose l am a blind man, and l use a stick. l go tap, tap, tap. Where do l start? ls my
mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? ls it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick?
Does it start at the tip of the stick? .The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. lt is immanent also
in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a
subsystem. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. pp.465-
467
72
Lambros Malafouris. "Beads for a Plastic Mind: the `Blind Man's Stick' (BMS) Hypothesis and the Active Nature of
Material Culture". Cambridge Archaeological Journal. (18) (2008): p.401 (My Emphasis)

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Fig. 8 e Chiasm. e touching subject passes over to the rank of the Touched.
46 I Am Many
Fig. 9 e man-stick assemblage. Matter becomes an active part of human cognitive
architecture.

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47

epiphylogenetic
73
; meaning that it emerged as a direct result of our relationship with
nonhuman artefacts (such as crafted tools etc.). What is also noteworthy is that Stiegler refers
to this relationship as morphogenetic, and is thus akin to the pluripotent biological cells in
its generative agential capacity. With regards to Wynnes account of humans genomic
complexity, we thus begin to understand that not only are nonhuman bodies capable of
inducing salient physiological or behavioural effects, but moreover they are critical to both
human evolution and cognition. As impossible as it is to divide mind and body, so it is
equally inconceivable to separate humans from nonhumans, nature from culture, biota from
abiota. The history of agency appears to be one of folds, of assemblages, of encounters and of
propositions between these bodies. As we enter the final section of our study, we will thus
attempt to explore this idea further.







73
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1998.
p.177
48

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Look at the mountain, once it was re.
Paul Cezanne

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We have now begun to formulate a concept of agency that is not so much the product of
a willing singularity as it is an accumulated trajectory of action emerging from encounters
between bodies. In this way we have simultaneously questioned the perceived boundaries
between human and nonhuman such that their agency becomes indistinguishable. However, if
we are to explore the subject of nonhuman agency further still, we must now attempt to
decentre the human altogether and explore an agency within even the most inanimate of
matter. Too often we are prone to prioritise the organic over the inorganic, such is the
ingrained association between agency and willed or intended motion
74
. It is for this same
reason that inorganic matter was represented at the very bottom of the Great Chain of Being;
as the nadir of existence. It seems all the more imperative, then, for us to illuminate the
vitality of such bodies.

In the sixteenth century a miller from Montereale Valcellina named Menocchio was tried
for heresy by the Christian church for proclaiming that;
'God did not create the world out of nothing at all for in the beginning, all was
chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together: and out of that bulk a
mass formed- just as cheese is made out of milk- and worms appeared in it, and these
were the angels among that number of angels, there was also God, he too having
been created out of that mass at the same time.'
75

This serves as a fitting start to our present enquiry; for what was considered five hundred
years ago as a fatal blasphemy, now serves as a parable for two important revelations of

74
Matthews, Freya. For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism. New York: New York University Press. 2003.
p.35.
75
Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1980. p.6
5
CHEESE AND WORMS
52 Cheese and Worms

twentieth century science. The first of these refers to the theory of abiogenesis, the process by
which all organic life on earth first emerged from inorganic matter
76
[fig.10]. Secondly, the
Copenhagen Interpretation developed by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg during the
1920s, which explains that all matter, from the atomic particle itself to its subatomic
divisions, are scientifically regarded as an inseparable whole under laws of quantum
physics
77
. The bulk of which Menocchio spoke might be better interpreted as the so-called
primordial soup, from which a series of chemical reactions are believed to have occurred
which in turn led to the formation of the first nucleic acids. One of these acids, ribonucleic
acid (RNA), is believed to be the form of inorganic pre-cellular life that subsequently evolved
into organic cells. These intriguing bodies are in fact pregenomic chemical and solid-state
agents that, while being inorganic, respond like a cell, containing the information necessary
for their subsequent development and reaction
78
[fig.11]. But just as inorganic life gave rise to
the organic through abiogenesis, so did mineral matter reassert itself again in the evolution of
vertebrates. As Manuel de Landa illustrates;
In the organic world soft tissues (gels and aerosols, muscle and nerve) reigned
supreme until 500 million years ago. At that point, some of the conglomerations of
fleshy matter-energy that made up life underwent a sudden mineralisation, and a
new material for constructing living creatures emerged: bone. It is almost as if the
mineral world that has served as a substratum for the emergence of biological
creature was reasserting itself, confirming that geology, far from having been left
behind as a primitive stage of earths evolution, fully coexisted with the soft,
gelatinous newcomers
79

Such revelations are crucial to our study, as they highlight both the creativity of inorganic
matter and the reciprocity between organic and inorganic life as fundamentals of evolutionary
history. The inherent creative agency within inorganic macromolecules such as RNA is one of
the most important prerequisites for the emergence of all subsequent forms of agency. While
acknowledgement of this is crucial to our study, further preoccupation with such a specific
type of chemical-state body would limit our understanding of the agency of other forms of
inorganic life. The more difficult task, and the one we shall address further here, is to show
how so-called inanimate mineral matter holds similar powers of agency. In this light, we
shall attempt to examine its lively nature below the threshold of human conscious perception,

76
Harris, Henry. Things Come to Life: Spontaneous Generation Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
77
Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism.
Berkeley: Shambhala, 2000.
78
Such cells, now referred to under the neologism 'protocells', are being examined again in contemporary science
and engineering for their inherent creative capacity. See; Spiller, Neil, and Rachel Armstrong. Protocell
Architecture. London: John Wiley, 2011.
79
De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997. p.26.

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Fig. 10 Pre-Cambrian Stromatolites containing 3.5 Ga (Billion years old) fossilised
cyanobacteria; believed to be the rst organic lifeforms which emerged from inorganic nucleic
acids.
54 Cheese and Worms

for only in this way might we avoid returning to humanist or postmodernist understandings of
agency.

The mechanistic physics of Descartes and Newton have been out-dated for more than
one hundred years, and yet our philosophical understanding of inorganic matter is yet to be
appropriately reviewed. In Newtonian physics inorganic matter was lifeless; a fixed mass
subject to inertia
80
. Cartesian science was similarly only concerned with Euclidian
measurement of extended objects believed to be stable and lifeless. But in both cases,
definitions of matter occluded properties such as smell or colour, for example. Similarly they
were inert to the effects of time, and empty of interiority, immanence, or any generative
capacity
81
. In this way, Cartesianism is seen to have broken away form Aristotelian concept of
matter, with terms such as physis, morphe, eidos, entelexia, and energeia (growth, shape,
form, actuality and energy, respectively) being lost from the understanding of inorganic
bodies. The first of these terms, physis we have already encountered as the etymological
origin of nature. It is also the root of the word physics. It seems perhaps long overdue then
that physics should return to such a generative understanding of inorganic life.

Since Einsteins discoveries in 1905, more than one hundred types of sub-atomic
particles have been discovered, along with bodies of radically varying agentic properties and
behaviours such as quarks, gluons and neutrinos
82
. Furthermore, far from finding mass
reliable and stable, twenty-first century physics has to presently concede that it does not even
know what makes a mass remain solid
83
. However, as valuable as such findings are, we
should be cautious not to return to an atomistic understanding of matter, for in contemporary
physics it is the evanescent behaviour of matter that becomes the far more intriguing part of
our study. The atom, for example, is a smeared field of distributive charge whose subatomic
particles are less like planets in solar orbit than they re like flashes of charge that emerge from
and dissipate in the empty space from which they compose. Similarly, particles are said to be
more like vibrating strands of energy, strings that oscillate in eleven dimensions, than like
small versions of the sand grains suggested by their name
84
. The significance of this to our
study is immediately apparent. If all matter is imbued with a variety of evanescent atoms,
vibrating particles, energies, waves, fields and forces, then matter might be better referred to

80
Serres, Michel. The Birth of Physics. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000.
81
Tarnas, Richard. The Passion of the Western Mind. London: Harmony, 1991.
82
Serres, Michel. The Birth of Physics. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000.
83
lt is currently hypothesised to be the effect of a particular type of particle called a 'Higgs Boson', but this is still yet
to be substantiated. See; Smolin, Lee. The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science
and What Comes Next. London: Penguin, 2008.
84
Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham [NC]: Duke
University Press, 2010. p.11.

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Fig. 11 Inorganic protocell comprised of only a fatty acid membrane and RNA ribozymes,
capable of growth, replication and generative evolution.
56 Cheese and Worms

from this point as matter-energy, or similarly to use Deleuze and Guattaris terms, matter-
flow
85
. Thus in investigating this further we might be able to examine a philosophical model
for a universal agency that transcends all matter as well as the perceived taxonomic divisions
thereof.

The historic philosophy of Lucretius is particularly relevant in this regard. As a
follower of Epicurus and the pre-Socratic Atomists, he was also one of the first philosophers
to advocate a universal, atheistic philosophy of agency. In De Rerum Natura he speaks of
bodies, or primordia, falling in a void; not lifeless, but alive, crashing, swirling and
congealing with one another. As well as not being inert, Lucretius also maintained that matter
differed only from organic to inorganic, human to nonhuman, by degree rather than kind- a
theory substantiated by the aforementioned Copenhagen Interpretation. Furthermore, and
what is critical to our study, is that unlike other historical theories of material vitalism, (such
as Kants Bildungstrieb
86
, Drieschs entelechy
87
, Bergsons lan vital
88
), Lucretius
clinamen, or atomic swerve, was not a teleological import heterogeneous to matter, rather
it was an intrinsic part of its gestalt.

In The Birth of Physics, Michel Serres equates the clinamen of such primordia to the
quarks of modern physics encountering other elementary particles within their turbulent,
immanent milieu. Furthermore, for Serres it is the collisions, congealments and subsequent
deterioration resulting from these same encounters that are the basis for all events, affirming
that wherever one looks, one finds the same model of movement, order and relation- that of
turbulent flows and the clinamen
89
. He continues in stating that matter always is or becomes
turbulent. The clinamen is the infinitesimal turbulence, first, but it is also the passage from
theory to practice. And once again, without it, we understand nothing of what goes on
90
. It is
for this reason that Lucretius concept of subatomic agency becomes critical, for it sensitises
us conceptually to the scientific reality of the invisible encounters that surround and engulf us.
The synonymy between encounter and agency is thus affirmed once again. Like the
assemblages that we have previously studied, modern physics similarly shows the semi-
chaotic congealing and colliding of bodies to be vital to agency. Such an idea is akin to Louis
Althussers aleatory materialism. In describing the prerequisites for the emergence of

85
Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum,
2004. p.454
86
Kant, lmmanuel, and Carl J. Friedrich. The Philosophy of Kant; lmmanuel Kant's Moral and Political Writings. New
York: Modern Library, 1949.
87
Driesch, Hans. The Science & Philosophy of the Organism. London: A. & C. Black, 1929
88
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. London: Forgotten Books, 2010
89
Serres, Michel. The Birth of Physics. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000. p.xv
90
lbid. p.83

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matter, Althusser proclaims that without swerve and encounter, [primordia] would be
nothing but abstract elements So much that we can say that [prior to] the swerve and the
encounter they led only a phantom existence
91
. But like Lucretius and Serres, Althusser
expands the significance of such chaotic encounters by suggesting that all events, including
the political, economic and social, are born directly from such atomic agency.

The swerve of matter-energy thus becomes the model for a universal, transpersonal
agency that affects all bodies equally. Furthermore, such a concept of agency is congruent
with the new understanding of a complex, non-linear world in which mechanism and
determinism have become untenable in their simplicity. Whereas need for intentional motion
has historically been emphasised in established humanist accounts of agency, in
contemporary theory fractals and bifurcations, intermittencies and periodicities [become]
the new elements of motion, just as, in traditional physics, quarks and gluons are the new
elements of matter. Contemporary science again puts forth an agency of process rather than
state; of becoming rather than being
92
. Our studies thus far have already emphasised the
importance of trajectories over intentions in agential action. The semi-chaotic encounters that
occur universally at the molecular level are again found to be generative; taking development
paths that cannot be reduced to mechanic causality;
Inorganic matter-energy has a wider range of alternatives for the generation of
structure than just simple phase transitions There are, for instance, those
coherent waves called solitons Then there are the aforementioned stable states
(or attractors), which can sustain coherent cyclic activity of different types
(periodic and chaotic). Finally there is what we might call nonlinear
combinatorics, which explores the different combination into which entities
derived form the previous processes (crystals, coherent pulses, cyclic patterns)
may enter. It is from these unlimited combinations that true novel structures are
generated. When put together, all these forms of spontaneous structural
generation suggest that inorganic matter us much more variable and creative than
we ever imagined
93
.
In this way inorganic matter-energy can be seen to be constantly demonstrating immanent,
evanescent and self-organising properties induced through its intricate reciprocal inter-
relationships.


91
Althusser, Louis, Franois Matheron, and Olivier Corpet. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-87.
London: Verso, 2006. p.169
92
Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. London: Heinemann, 1988. p.5
93
De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997. p.16
58 Cheese and Worms
Fig. 12 Micrograph of a Polycrystalline Metal. Note the mischief present at grain boundaries.

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Deleuze and Guattaris, A Thousand Plateaus is full of lively assemblages and
quivering matter-energies, but it is in inorganic life, or more specifically in metal, that the
authors find their example par excellence of what they refer to as the machinic phylum, the
flow of matter
94
. Whereas a normative regard for inorganic life typically assumes a fixed
form and matter deemed homogenous
95
, what we find upon examining its structure is much
less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality possessing a nomos
96
. As Cyril Smith
illustrates in A History of Metallography, like all inorganic matter, metal is polycrystalline in
structure. Interestingly though, metallic crystals are found to be curved. This, Smith states, is
a result of the reciprocal interference of each crystal with its respective neighbours growth.
Similarly these crystals are also varied in shape and size due to the specific pressures induced
once again by their surrounding bodies. Thus the reciprocal encounters between the crystals
give rise to a creative, non-determinable arrangement in metals structure. This interplay
between bodies in turn creates a proliferation of inter-crystalline voids [fig 12]. Not only
this, but when we further address the atomic structure of metal we find that in addition to the
array of atoms within each grain, there are also loose atoms at the interfaces between grains,
which belong to no particular body. Like the flashing charge of the atom itself, each grain of
metal is thus found to be quivering with movement and evanescence. It is the unforeseeable
variation in these atoms and voids created through the encounters of bodies that renders each
mass of metal unique; rendering it with its own properties, its own weaknesses, its emergent
agency, or its nomos.

Inorganic life is thus not to be understood as inanimate or lifeless, rather it is matter
in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of
expression
97
. But this behaviour is not to be understood as purely limited to metallic masses,
for as Deleuze and Guattari state, the behaviour of metal is coextensive to the whole of
matter Even the waters, the grasses and varieties of wood, the animals are populated by
salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere. Metal is the
conductor of all matter.
98
Thus it is through the study of the inorganic that we arrive at a
universal account of agency, wherein the encounters between [bodies as] singularities [and
their] spatiotemporal haecceities
99
give rise to creative, non-determinable propositions of
action.


94
Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum,
2004. p.453
95
lbid. p.450
96
lbid. p.451
97
lbid. p.451
98
lbid. p.454
99
lbid. p.447
60 Cheese and Worms

It is through such studies that we may make universal comparisons between organic
and inorganic life. As Bennett asserts, all forces and flows (materialities) are or can become
lively, affective and signalling [Thus] an affective, speaking human body is not radically
different from the affective, signalling nonhumans with which it coexists
100
. Indeed even
within the human lifespan, the inorganic world of mineral and chemical bodies will persist in
acting out-side of the human periphery; in the moving hills; in the quivering metal; in the
objects we discard. As Sullivan portrays in his book Meadowlands, an eloquent account of the
life of a New Jersey refuse site;
The garbage hills are alivethere are billions of microscopic organisms
thriving underground in dark, oxygen-free communities After having ingested
the tiniest portion of leftover New Jersey or New York, these cells then exhale
huge underground plumes of carbon dioxide and of warm moist methane, giant
stillborn tropical winds that seep through the ground a pristine stew of oil and
grease, of cyanide and arsenic, of cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, silver,
mercury and zinc
101
.
Thus the reciprocity of matter asserts itself once again; the organic returns to its mineral state;
inorganic and organic congeal and reform; ready to reassemble yet again with worms, humans
and trees without prejudice; creating constellations and propositions of action between
humans and nonhumans alike.







100
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. p.117
101
Sullivan, Robert. The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures of the Edge of New York City. London: Granta, 2006.
p.96

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Fig. 13 Zoological Garden, Lebanon.
62

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As for us:
We must uncentre our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanise our views a little, and become condent
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
Robinson Jeers
64

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As we have come to understand, the subject of agency is a far more complex and
ambiguous concept than established humanist definitions might have us first assume. While it
was unlikely that we would arrive at a concrete redefinition of agency within the relative
confines of this study, we have nonetheless been able to raise lines of enquiry that are
themselves critical in their repercussions; for what we have begun to examine herein is
nothing less than a fundamental revision of some of the most normative presumptions under
which we, as artists and designers, operate.

I set out to examine the reasons for which humans have typically been identified as
the sole or exemplary agent above, and removed from, the nonhuman bodies of nature.
Following this, the intention was to examine the extent to which nonhuman bodies might
exercise their own agency. What I had not anticipated, however, was the emergence of a
recurring concept that was to undermine the very distinctions between human and nonhuman
with which we began this study. This concept was that of the encounter.

Far from discovering any agent acting as a singularity, we have instead begun to
unearth an understanding of agency as a contingent phenomenon whose provisional
emergence depends not on will or consciousness, but rather upon the trajectories of action
CONCLUSION
66 Conclusion

created through the commingling of different bodies. This is imperative for artists and
designers to acknowledge; for while we may prefer to assume that we are masters of our own
creative actions, our findings appear to indicate that neither consciousness nor intentionality
are efficient faculties. Instead it seems that we are in fact subject to the same somatic, pre-
logical influences of our milieu as all other bodies. Furthermore, these encounters are not to
be understood as superficial or conducted at-a-distance, so to speak, but comprise of material
congealments of heterogeneous bodies wherein the precise origin of agency becomes
unidentifiable. Thus it is critical not only in our creative practices, but in all modes of cultural
discourse, to acknowledge the paradoxical truth that humans are themselves nonhuman: That
is to say, our flesh, thoughts and actions are the result of the innumerable human-nonhuman
assemblages that forge us. In this way what we discover is not an ontological hierarchy with
humans at the zenith, but something closer to an ontological field wherein agency is
distributed across the folded, reversible flesh of the world.

But while this is a radical proclamation, it is arguably not the most significant
revelation of our study. For while it is important to understand the agency that operates
through humans, it is vital for artists and designers to similarly acknowledge that nonhuman
bodies collectively exercise their own discrete agency. Once again, it is in the aleatoric
encounter that life and agency emerge side by side. Historically out-dated mechanistic
materialism has failed to grasp the complex emergence of nonhuman bodies and materiality.
Instead we have followed a universal concept of agency that is more attuned to contemporary
scientific understanding: More force than mass; more emergence than causality; more fractal
than linear; more proposition than intention. Matter becomes rather than is. The universe
in which we go about our daily existence has shown itself to be one of fields and forces,
waves and charges, dark energy and nonlinear dynamic systems. There is a field of atoms and
particles swirling within and around bodies that render them more animate than we had ever
previously conceived. There is no such thing as stillness. No matter that is animate. With this
revised understanding of life sciences, we have begun to propose an ontology of lively,
encounter-prone bodies; eschewing a metaphysics of stable atoms or inanimate objects and
embracing instead a kind of vitality immanent in matter-energy. Indeed, in light of our
investigation, we may conclude that any distinctions between organic and inorganic, animate
and inanimate, sentient and insentient become largely irrelevant. We would thus be better
served not to distinguish them at all, but instead to understand ourselves as organs of one
single inter-corporeality
102
.


102
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. . [Evanston, lll.]: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p.168

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But how do we proceed in creative practice in light of such fundamental ontological
revisions? How do we approach such a recalcitrant, quivering world? The concepts that have
emerged herein are radical, and as such I would not be so presumptuous to dictate the answers
to these questions. Instead I am content in knowing that this study only serves as an
introduction to a far larger body of investigation that will inevitably come to occupy my work
for some time. However, one thing that I would suggest is that rather than considering how
we might approach this subject further, we would be better served to consider how we might
let the subject approach us. If the etymology of exist is to stand forth, then we should seek
to widen our field of perception as far as possible in order to feel out the nonhuman bodies
presenting themselves around and within us. When we conduct our work, we should attempt
to decentre our sense of self by acknowledging that not only are nonhuman bodies affecting
our own actions, but moreover that matter has its own life and energy that will continue
beyond our interventions. It is thus necessary for artists and designers to adopt something akin
to a materialists theory of relativity; for to continue to assert that such nonhuman bodies are
inanimate simply because their velocities of expression are incongruent with human scales
of perception would be to return to a reductive, human-centric understanding of agency. With
this in mind, once you have finished reading this thesis put it down, and look around. If the
enquiries have had any effect, your milieu may seem aquiver with movement and energy. But
even if it does not, do not be disheartened: Our nonhuman counterparts will continue to exert
their agency in spite of our blindness.
















68
Epilogue
Do you know what life is to me?
A monster of energy that does not expend itself but only transforms itself
A play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many;
a sea of forces owing and rushing together,
eternally changing.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, e Will to Power, Entry 1067

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