48. Yoni Van Den Eede, “In Between Us: On the Transparency and Opacity of Technological Mediation” Foundations of Science, 16 (2011): 143-4
49. Coole and Frost, “Introducing the new materialisms,” 7. 50. Coole and Frost, “Introducing the new materialisms,” 10.
Material agency
Generative materiality also helps to develop a processual approach to agency. If materiality itself is generative, then agency exists before the subject and object, between different materialities. If the primacy of the generative material relation is to be taken as the basis of analysis of an engagement between a person and a screen, then it follows that both the person and the screen have their own stake
in this engagement. As both are the product of a process of materialisation, each is wholly
dependent on the other, not simply reflexively,
but generatively. However, it also means that the materiality of both the screen and the person will be reconstituted, and constituted differently, in each encounter as the process of materialisation recurs anew. In as much as the process is generative, it makes no more sense to say that a person can ‘use’ a screen than it does to claim that the screen ‘realises’
a person – that it exhibits an influence over
the way that the person is realised through material relations. In this way, the screen
in its materiality is “both self-constituting and invested with – and reconfigured by –
intersubjective interventions that have their
own quotient of materiality.”49 The screen
object can reshape bodily being, introducing new gestures, actions and understandings, just as a person can reshape the materiality of the screen object.
Material arises as an active process of
materialisation, not a “massive, opaque plenitude,” but as “constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways.”50 This is
an effective process, it causes material to happen, and simultaneously brings about people, contexts, references and opportunities for action. This effectivity suggests a type of agency to the process. Although materiality
and agency are held separately in a relata- based analysis, from within relations material itself is agential – it generates and affects. It is unclear, however, whether this material agency can be considered in the same terms as the political agency of the subject as relatum;
whether it is the sort of agency identified with
alterity, or something of a different kind. To resolve the role of material agency more fully, I will now turn to a reframing of agency along the same lines as this discussion of materiality – agency as a generative difference.
Agency, agentialisation and the screen
Agency was also held as a fundamental difference in relata-based analysis – a difference that expressed the separation of the subject from the object. Agency was a property
that defined the subject and was refused to
the object, showing a clear directionality.
This section will define a different sort of
agency as it belongs to screens. It will begin
by using Coole’s article “Rethinking Agency,”
which poses a de-individualised political agency based on agentic capacities. It will then discuss these agentic capacities against
screenic examples to define the qualities of a
processual agency that can generate active materiality as well as active subjectivity. It will conclude with a discussion of prolonging the moment in which agency is determination to reveal an active, agential screen.
51. Diana Coole, “Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to embodiment and Agentic Capacities,” Political Studies 53 (2005): 124-5.
52. Coole, “Rethinking Agency,” 125.
Capacities for action, not intent
Coole posits political agency as a spectrum of scaled emergences – of capacities for action.
She insists that these “agentic capacities”
are not the properties of the subject per se,
but “are only contingently, not ontologically, identified with rational, individual agents.”51 She defines three attributes – potency, reflexivity and motivation – which she uses as agential markers “while denying that such agentic properties entail a specific
ontological assumption as to whom exercises
them.”52 Potency, reflexivity and motivation
are concerned with the ability to bring about effects, be concerned with their nature, and to show an attitude towards these effects respectively. Coole then demonstrates these capacities across three scales – pre-personal, singular and trans-personal – to show agency as it arises within these contexts.
Coole’s schema is intended to demonstrate that agency is not a by-product of subjectivity – that it does not ‘belong’ to the subject. The agentic spectrum she describes implies that agency arises out of situations, it is a process rather than a property. Although Coole does effectively demonstrate the de-individualised nature of political agency, thus loosening agency from issues of intent and will, she retains a sense that agency belongs to the realm of the human. In her aim to decouple issues of intent from action, she retains a particularly
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“Things… [signal] the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can looks back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny and feels the need for what Foucault calls ‘a metaphysics of the object’” Jane Bennett54
Gaze Returner is noticing something about his relation to space and to me. He is reflecting on this relation and forming an opinion. He is communicating this opinion to try and bring about an effect. Gaze Returner
is warning me. He knows I’m here, he knows I’m getting closer and he’s trying to stop me. What does this warning mean?
The warning is a strange kind of interaction. It is both an acknowledgement and a denial, passive and active, a communication and an effect. It indicates a desire that is not being met, an action that must be fulfilled by another. But Gaze Returner is just a screen flashing different colours at me. It isn’t a warning, it has no intent.
Warning signs
human intonation to agency – she outlines
an agency that is “irremediably embodied.”53 The pre-reflexive and situated nature of embodiment opens questions in regard to such reflexive capacities as subjectivity. However,
if agency is considered as a generative force in the context of the screen, it needs to be able to generate the agentic object as well as the subject; or, more generally, it needs to be able to generate agentic material.
53. Coole, “Rethinking Agency,” 127. 54. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 1. 55. Coole, “Rethinking Agency,” 140.
56. Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Artifacts and Attachment: A Post-Script Philosophy of Mediation” in Inside the Politics of Technology: Agency and Normativity in the Co-Production of Technology and Society, ed. Hans Harbers (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 129.
potency, reflexivity and motivation need to
be considered in terms of the material rather than the political. Coole’s discussion of trans- personal agency gives some insight into how this framework might be extended into the material realm to look at agentic capacities that emerge within objects.
Potency and efficacy
Coole remarks that the potency of the transpersonal domain lies in its
“transformative efficacy,”55 its ability to
generate effect without individual intent. Of
the three of Coole’s agentic capacities, efficacy
is perhaps the most directly applicable to material agency. Ihde and Verbeek have shown in detail the capacities of objects to
affect change “by virtue of their materiality: their concrete ‘thingly’ presence.”56 The use of
tools, particularly, shows the ability of things to bring about material effect. In this sense,
the material efficacies of the screen can be
recognised in the ability of its material to support its function. In this case, the lattice’s actions as a barrier can be assigned to the strength of timber and its ability to be carved. The television’s actions in representing space can be seen as a by-product of the pixel and its ability to translate information into coloured light.
To apply this schema to an understanding of the screen, emerging agentic capacities need to be recognised as material rather than embodied. In the last section, the body arose as
a pre-reflexive generative entity with a certain
directedness alongside other, nonhuman entities with similar types of directedness. Materialisation was seen as an interplay of
these undefined material capacities. Agency could be defined similarly if agentic capacities could be seen as arising from pre-reflexive
materialities rather than purely from human bodies. To develop the idea of material agency further, Coole’s agential capacities of
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“To qualify as a ‘real’ actor in the drama, the agent
has to be able to preserve its own identity and defend itself against encroaching foreign elements.
The winners are those actors who can subvert and co-opt another’s agency while keeping their own intact”
N. Katherine Hayles58 As I share space with Moubie, I find myself more interested in what he’s doing. His movements, his flashing lights and his simple repetitions of process engage my attention. He seems to be trying to communicate with me, to tell me things about what he is doing and what he sees. I put my head down and follow alongside him for a while; watching his screen as it updates, seeing what he sees.
When I look up, I notice that I’ve been seeing from his point of view and at his pace of seeing, because I’ve returned now to my point of view and my pace of seeing. His demeanour has very quietly hijacked my relation to space, persuaded me to see things from his perspective. I’ve been attending to him as a person, as something which sees, reflects and communicates.