“How can we simultaneously be part of such a long history, have such an important influence, and yet be so late in realizing what has happened and so utterly impotent in our attempts to fix it? Far from trying to “reconcile”or “combine” nature and society, the task, the crucial political task, (in the Anthropocene) is on the contrary to distribute agency as far and in as differentiated a way as possible. “Bruno Latour:
Agency is a capacity usually identified with the human experience of being the subject or owner of one’s actions. The term usually refers to the capability of an agent to perform deliberate and intentional action as opposed to forced, determined or random behavior. It is most frequently taken to be the power and freedom to act for oneself. It seems that when we act, we have a sense of doing something: a sense of control and of being the agent or owner of the action. (from SEP) …Our agency is to a significant extent motivated, guided, and constrained by our long-terms plans and commitments (which are representational states.
One defining feature of the Anthropocene is the emergence of the human species per se as a different form of ‘transpersonal agency’. It is an agency that must now, for the first time, be posited ‘as operating at the universal level of the human species as a whole – a super-subject beyond all possible subjective experience’, or, in Michel Serres’s memorable phrase, ‘enormous and dense tectonic plates of humanity'. Other authors have called into question the “anthropogenic’, claiming that examples such as anthropogenic climate change ascribes responsibility to humanity as a whole, when in fact only some humans contribute to this phenomenon to any great extent. (see Capitalocene) (see also Us, We, Them).
A belief in the irreplaceable contribution of human agency to technospheric function becomes less secure with the knowledge that agency is a general property of all dynamic systems. Peter Haff describes Acting-as-if-to-survive as a general system property, which he calls ‘intrinsic agency’. He describes the Technosphere as acting as if survival were its purpose, with its parts operating collectively to sustain the system’s metabolism, i.e. its functionality.
This belief that agency is a property exclusive to humans (and some animals) and lacking from most of the rest of the furniture of the world, such as technological artifacts and other non-human objects and systems, is what the German philosopher Erich Hörl calls The Anthropocene Illusion
Sketch by Peter Haff
For Bruno Latour, the crucial political task, (in the Anthropocene) is to distribute agency as far and in as differentiated a way as possible. In this view, agency is not limited to humans or other living beings. It may also extend to non-biological systems, such as the technosphere. Latour looks to a range of actants, including humans and non-humans.
But what are different forms of agency and who has it?
Non-human species? social groups and distributed subjects? eg: for the architectural community, agency also involves the power and responsibility to act as intermediaries on behalf of others.
A global subject? (Anthropos)? more-than-human environments?
Other actants? (to use Latour’s expression) including carbon, glaciers — as highly dynamic, volatile, and agentic environments, with their immense powers that chafe and polish rocks and leave moraines in their paths, . — aerial and marine currents, geographical strata, [and] expansive biomes.”
Agency, understood broadly to include living beings as well as such forces as radioactivity, solar energy, weather, gravity, and flows of matter, is thus a distributed, emergent force that can create order or disorder with or without intentionality. Defining agency broadly to include human and animal activity as well as other nonhuman factors does not eradicate human agency, but rather aligns it on a continuum with matter’s agentic capacity.
The current situation calls for a world-wide reaction to the societal and planetary crises that the era of neo-liberal governance produced. It is in this context of crisis and future possibility that a new order of governance may be taking shape.
For Freud, agency (german Instanz , French instance ) refers to one or other of the various substructures of the psychical apparatus. Examples would be the agency of censorship in the first topography, the agency of ego or super-ego in the second topography. For Marvin Minsky, human understanding functions by running multiple representations in parallel through agencies he calls the "society of mind." Thus, "If you understand something in only one way, you do not really understand it at all. If something goes wrong, you will be stuck with a thought that just sits in your mind with nowhere to go. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we have connected it to all the other things we know. If you have several different representations, when one approach fails you can try another. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many different perspectives, until you find one that works for you." (from Scientific American, October 1994) (cf metaphor)
Agency may be coextensive with life. Life certainly burgeons nowhere without agency. We act on our own behalf. In the Kantian form: What must something be such that it can act on its own behalf?" (Stuart Kauffman, Investigations, p.49) For Kauffman, autonomous agents, defined as autocatalytic systems that can reproduce and carry out work cycles, define life. He emphasizes that "all free-living systems we know -- single-cell bacteria, single-cell eukaryotic cells, and multicelled organisms -- fulfill his definition of an autonomous agent.