Stacy Alaimo in ‘Gender: Matter’ defines agency as “the ability to act in such a way to produce particular results.
Posthumanist theorists have pointed out the importance of not only applying agency to humans, but also non-human actors.
Latour also pushes inclusive agency in his Actor-Network Theory, in which an actant is “something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general.”
“Agency cannot be restricted to a bounded subject, but is diffused across multiple entities and achieves its capacity within assemblages.”
Jane Bennett in ‘Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things’ therefore states that as such, an actant’s “efficacy of agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces.” This idea goes right down to molecular level as Samantha Frost explains.
Haraway sees “the object of knowledge … as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource” in ‘Situated Knowledge’.
“Agency exists not as an influence of one pre-exisiting entity upon another, but as “intra-action”, a cooperative force that brings entangled materialities into being through their relationship”. ‘Agential realism’ and ‘intra-action’ are ideas of Karan Barad in ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning’.
This reconceptualisation of agency hopes to improve relations between human and non-human actors in the Anthropocene, but also make for more just human relations with each other. For example, Alexander Weheliys talks of the sociopolitical processes that have ben constructed on the basis of ‘full humans, not-quite humans, and nonhumans’, stemming from racial grouping.
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