On the Agency and Activities of Materials in the 21st Century

»Spontaneous Generations«, the Journal of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto launched a special issue on ›agency‹. We are excited to announce that the volume »From Bacteria to Gaia: Levels of biological agency« includes an article of the Cluster members Karin Krauthausen and Michael Friedman on the agency and activities of materials in the 21st century.

The journal is open access and the issue 11 can be downloaded here: https://spontaneousgenerations.com/issue11

Abstract

Starting the last decades of the 20th century a shift has occurred in how materials are being considered. Materials were no more considered as being passive, inert and shaped by an active human agent, as plastic or iron were usually considered during the end of the 19th century. The rising discipline of materials sciences during the second half of the 20th century, especially with the recent research on ›active‹, ›smart‹, ›autonomous‹ and ›bio-inspired‹ materials, has started to view materials as having their own agency. In our contribution we aim to review few examples of this shift, examining also the works of James Gibson, Tim Ingold and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. We aim to show that in its contemporary uses, ›agency‹ is the point where the dualisms action/passion and agent/patient are erased and also where the subject/agent is defined in a new way. The question arises, not only whether situating agency also at the side of the materials decenters the notion of action itself, but also whether agency has to be understood as being distributed in an ecology that influences and motivates both the material and the human subject.