Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

16. Agency

16 Agency Objects are like houses built from playing cards that, in their weakness, manage to stand only by leaning on each other. Each object is an actor, an agent, but the strength of its agency is always a borrowed grace. With Latour’s objects, we need to give full weight to the ordinary meaning of agency. To be an agent is to act on someone else’s behalf. All objects, as agents, are endlessly engaged ‘‘in the process of exchanging competences’’ with each other (PH 182). All objects, endlessly engaged in negotiation and compromise, are forever acting on behalf of others—even when they are only struggling to make others work for them. In an experimental metaphysics, agency, like transcendence, gets dispersed into the cloudy multitude . Agencies resolve from a swarming cloud of overlapping but not entirely compatible trajectories. It is true, on Latour’s account, that ‘‘actors themselves make everything, including their own frames’’ (RS 147). 55 But this is never true in the singular. ‘‘Nothing is by itself ordered or disordered, unique or multiple, homogeneous or heterogeneous, fluid or inert, human or inhuman, useful or useless. Never by itself, but always by others’’ (PF 161). Objects, and the agencies of objects, are postestablished, not pregiven. Each object is ‘‘defined by its associations and is an event created by the occasion of each of these associations ’’ (PH 165). And objects, as events, create interruptions , slow things down, generate friction, and impose on the course of events an alien will. Further, even if an object is fresh off the assembly line, it is still composed of histories that, even as they are overwritten, continue to shape what the object can do. ‘‘The point is that the new object emerges from a complex set-up of sedimented elements each of which has been a new object at some point in time and space’’ (SA 92). An object’s situation is always composed of ramifying complexities. We are always working with objects made of objects made of objects, with agencies made of agencies made of agencies. An agent’s strength to act coalesces when the available sedimentation is leveraged into a workable configuration. Strength depends on productively stacking the multitude of extant agencies in such a way as to facilitate an exchange of competences. This kind of stacking depends on forcing equivalences even when they can only be provisional and approximate. ‘‘To establish relations’’ is ‘‘to render [things] commensurable’’ even when they are not (WM 113). To establish a relationship is to leverage the advantages of an object’s availability against the disadvantages of it persistent resistance. By successfully leveraging another object’s availability , an agent acquires the right to represent them. Though it cannot entirely absorb, encompass, or reduce them, as a representative it nonetheless ‘‘speaks in their 56 Agency names’’ (PF 160). The representation is imperfect, but functional. Even when an agent has successfully wrangled a sufficient subset of the multitude into alignment, this success will have forced the agent to undergo a trial that continues to inform and deform its own composition. Empowered to act by a sufficiently queued multitude, the multitude’s swarming complexity will still animate its representative agent in surprising ways. Even in cases where the agent is conscious, its ‘‘action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomeration of many surprising sets of agencies’’ (RS 44). In this sense, the line between the conscious and the non-conscious, between the purposeful and the purposeless , between the intentional and the non-intentional, is blurred. The human and the nonhuman bleed into each other as human intentions are animated by powerfully purposeless forces and purposeless processes like natural selection bear the emergence of order and direction. ‘‘Purposeful action and intentionality may not be the properties of objects ,’’ Latour argues, ‘‘but they are not the properties of humans either. They are the properties of institutions, of apparatuses’’ (PH 192). Agency is always only borrowed and a specifically human agency can be borrowed only from a complex of nonhuman objects. Everything human is organized around an unavoidable detour through the nonhuman because everything human is composed of and dependent upon nothing else. The human way of being is a fragile and peculiar way of being non-human. According to Latour, we might in general refer to representative...