Non-human Agents Research Articles

Philosophical Posthumanism: A Renewed Worldview and a Methodological Framework for Critical Analysis

Abstract Exponential technological advances capture the zeitgeist of contemporary society. Machines are increasingly gaining agency, which helps in the deconstruction of the humanist notion of humans. Society takes a posthuman turn with large-scale human–machine imbrication and nonhuman agency. The posthuman turn is also reflected in the academic world, which is seriously contemplating the integration of posthumanities. The philosophical posthumanism of Francisca Ferrando is a posthuman theory with three constituent elements: post-humanism, post-anthropocentrism, and post-dualism. Post-humanism revisits the definition of human that has given rise to marginalization within the human species. Post-anthropocentrism critiques the human superiority and exceptionalism that have led to the marginalization of other species. Post-dualism revisits the dualistic mindset that allows hierarchical sociopolitical constructions. Ferrando presents a vision of a posthuman utopian society that recognizes pluralistic voices within the human species on egalitarian terms, accepts and values the agency of nonhuman actors, and sheds the dualistic view of life that keeps humans and nonhumans on either side of the binary system. Philosophical posthumanism can be suitable as a methodological framework to analyze the posthuman discourses in literary works, specifically in science fiction.

The digital turn in memory studies

This article examines the changes experienced by collective memory in the digital era. Contrary to the thesis that digital memory entails a new type of memory, which is radically different from the traditional conceptualization, I argue that the practice of digital memory materializes and implements the theoretical claims made by Memory Studies since the field’s inception – collective memory conceived as a process, mediated and remediated by multiple media, with the participation of dynamic communities that perform rather than represent the past. In the article, I address what I propose are the following four major transformations that collective memory has undergone in the digital era: (1) the new ontology of the digital archive; (2) the shift from narrative as a privileged form of collective memory to the cultural form of the database; (3) the reconfiguration of agency, in which a distributed memory is performed by human and non-human agents in a dynamic entanglement; and (4) the shift from mnemonic objects to mnemonic assemblages, comprising persons, things, artefacts, spaces, discourses, behaviours and expressions in dynamic relatedness.

Identification of Unnamed Non-human Agents in Kalevala-metric Incantations

Kalevala-metric poetry is an oral-poetic system of various genres, shared by multiple Finnic groups. In addition to epic and lyric, one of the prominent main genres of the oral tradition is formed by incantations. The Kalevala-metric incantations regularly invoke non-human agents, which are aligned with the performer in various ways. While these agents are often explicitly named and addressed, in some cases their identity remains unclear. By conducting a case study, the paper proposes that in many occurrences the unnamed agents are identifiable by examining textual cues and the emergent text-structure of the incantations. The results show that the identification of unnamed agents can be achieved by biographic-metrical and contextual analysis of the incantation texts.

Creative Futuring for More-Than-Human Worlds: Exhibitions as Sites to Ponder Environmental Governance

Abstract The article presents the Smart Urban Governance for More-than-Human Future(s) anthology, comprising six speculative creative works. It draws on techniques of futuring as a methodology to explore how creative practice as an act of futuring and exhibitions as sites to ponder environmenta governance can empower more-than-human futures. Reporting on participatory observations and semistructured interviews with the exhibition audience the article posits that creative futuring can empower futures by developing awareness that environmental governance can facilitate nonhuman agencies that conserve and repair the ecological world.

Differences in Social Expectations About Robot Signals and Human Signals.

In our daily lives, we are continually involved in decision-making situations, many of which take place in the context of social interaction. Despite the ubiquity of such situations, there remains a gap in our understanding of how decision-making unfolds in social contexts, and how communicative signals, such as social cues and feedback, impact the choices we make. Interestingly, there is a new social context to which humans are recently increasingly more frequently exposed-social interaction with not only other humans but also artificial agents, such as robots or avatars. Given these new technological developments, it is of great interest to address the question of whether-and in what way-social signals exhibited by non-human agents influence decision-making. The present study aimed to examine whether robot non-verbal communicative behavior has an effect on human decision-making. To this end, we implemented a two-alternative-choice task where participants were to guess which of two presented cups was covering a ball. This game was an adaptation of a "Shell Game." A robot avatar acted as a game partner producing social cues and feedback. We manipulated robot's cues (pointing toward one of the cups) before the participant's decision and the robot's feedback ("thumb up" or no feedback) after the decision. We found that participants were slower (compared to other conditions) when cues were mostly invalid and the robot reacted positively to wins. We argue that this was due to the incongruence of the signals (cue vs. feedback), and thus violation of expectations. In sum, our findings show that incongruence in pre- and post-decision social signals from a robot significantly influences task performance, highlighting the importance of understanding expectations toward social robots for effective human-robot interactions.

Dreams and reality in the tubuan and the corporation

Abstract Beginning with a dream encounter with the tubuan, an ancestral spirit in Papua New Guinea, this article questions conventional anthropological framings that posit a sharp distinction between Western humanist ontologies and non-Western or indigenous ontologies. The article argues that non-human entities essential for human existence come in and out of being across stereotypical cultural divides and that the creation and acknowledgment of non-human agents is as essential for capitalist modernity as it is for any other form of human existence. Non-human “Objects” as diverse as tubuans and corporations are essential for the construction of human subjectivity as much as they are its outcome. The perspectival construction of such different kinds of object is a process by which humans continuously refashion themselves into different kinds of Subjects.

We Have Never Been Modern (Enough)

Abstract This article offers a philosophical-political commentary of Jason Ā. Josephson Storm’s Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021). We welcome Josephson Storm’s integrated interdisciplinary distillation and ambitious ethico-political perspective, but we also point out the necessity to go further in the cross-disciplinary theoretical effort to rebuild a post-postmodernist academia. In particular, we identify the very modern/postmodern dialectic as problematic, and we contend that a materialist philosophy able to rethink politics and non-human agency through all the sciences would better serve the project. We also highlight how the metamodernist project might benefit from the adoption of a Simondonian approach insofar as the conceptualisation of both biology and technology is concerned. Finally, we end with a plea for an ongoing vigilance of the material conditions of possibility that support cutting-edge inter- and cross-disciplinary research, for they are fragile and need institutional and societal support.

Immersive Environment as a Tool for Changing Human-Centric Optic

The article is devoted to the scientific problem of theoretical elaboration and contextualization of an immersive environment implemented in the physical space of a gallery or museum, as well as a site-specific work, or in VR and AR, which work to change anthropocentric optics. The aim of the research is to identify the peculiarities of the formation of an immersive environment and the practice of creating VR and AR projects in Ukrainian contemporary art, to identify the work of Ukrainian artists, which takes place outside the country at the intersection of the latest ideas in European culture with a focus on the relationship between human and nature. The task is to study the theoretical foundations of the subjectivity of nature and the development of immersive environments, review and analysis of projects that use digital technologies to create immersion. The methodology of the study consists in theoretical and field researches at the intersection of eco-topics and immersive technologies and the development of author's experiments as part of the research "Analytical Instruments for Audio-Visual Translation of Metabolomics" merging genotype and environment regarding climate changes at Iméra — the Institute of Advanced Studies in Marseille. The main method is a comprehensive approach to highlight issues of the development of deep ecology, the theory of symbiosis, visual and photometric methods, analysis of concepts, spatial structure and artistic works. The peculiarities of creating an immersive environment in physical space were explored in the projects "Cosmogony", "Homage to Leonardo", "Garden of Divine Songs" after Hryhorii Skovoroda, "Homage to Matisse", "Gaia", "The Ocean", "Espace Ocean: Waters Come Into My Soul", "Ecocide", which analyzes the impact of the ongoing war on ecology, in order to be included into the national art discourse. The concept of "non-human agency" is concidered as an imperative of nature's subjectivity. The possibilities of molecular sonification in metabolomics were analyzed. A brief overview of the VR projects "Invasions 1.2.3", "Atmospheric Forest" and "First Day" and AR "Vegetable Kingdom, Vegetable Anarchy" is provided. Festivals OVNi in Nice, Scientifica #2 in Marseille, Ars Electronica in Linz, RIXC in Riga, UNESCO Media Art City in Karlsruhe and Venice Immersive are considered as platforms for the construction of "future civilization". The instrumentality of immersive environments for changing anthropocentric optics has been revealed.

The Posthuman Body as an EcoGothic Wasteland in Allison Cobb’s After We All Died and Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic

The focus of my inquiry are environmentally inflected metaphors and discourses of toxicity which inform the contemporary North American posthuman lyric. This provisional generic category of the posthuman lyric has been inspired by the recent shift from an anthropocentric understanding of lyric subjectivities to a biocentric perspective which repositions human epistemologies in relation to more-than-human matter. The posthuman angle questions the concept of the sovereign human self, stressing transversal ontologies, open to inter-agential exchanges, diverse biosemiotic processes and communication loops. My primary interest is in poetic representations of the human body as a transversal, toxic, catastrophe- and death-haunted wasteland. The volumes chosen to problematize those processes are Allison Cobb’s After We All Died (2016), an elegiac meditation on the dying human species and anthropogenic change, and Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic (2018), which probes the leaky perimeters of the chemical self using an electronic microscope and burden tests of the poet’s own bodily tissues. The posthumanist angle which informs the analyses is supplemented with an ecoGothic one, as both critical paradigms can be seen as interrogatory discourses which probe human fears and hopes concerning the “edge of the human” and the recognition of non-human agency. Within the ecoGothic framework, nature is seen as “a contested site”—a “space of crisis,” where human and non-human ecologies interact and co-produce meaning. This double lens will be used for the study of posthuman imaginaries and Anthropocene affects employed by Dickinson and Cobb.

Positioning Paradata: A Conceptual Frame for AI Processual Documentation in Archives and Recordkeeping Contexts

The emergence of sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools poses a challenge to archives and records professionals, who are accustomed to understanding and documenting the activities of human agents rather than the often-opaque processes of sophisticated AI functioning. Preliminary work has proposed the term paradata to describe the unique documentation needs that emerge for archivists using AI tools to process records in their collections. For the purposes of archivists working with AI, paradata is conceptualized here as information recorded and preserved about records’ processing with AI tools; it is a category of data that is defined both by its relationship with other datasets and by the documentary purpose it serves. This article surveys relevant literature across three contexts to scope the relevant scholarship that archivists may draw upon to develop appropriate AI documentation practices. From the statistical social sciences and the visual heritage fields, the article discusses existing definitions of paradata and its ambiguous, often contextually dependent relationship with existing metadata categories. Approaching the problem from a sociotechnical perspective, literature on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) insists pointedly that explainability be attuned to specific users’ stated needs—needs that archivists may better articulate using the framework of paradata. Most importantly, the article situates AI as a challenge to accountability, transparency, and impartiality in archives by introducing an unfamiliar non-human agency, one that pushes the limits of existing archival practice and demands the development of new concepts and vocabularies to shape future technological and methodological developments in archives.

Systemic tools integration to fight fake news from a posthumanist perspective

A theoretical-practical framework is proposed for an understanding of fake news stories from an interdisciplinary, ecological and posthumanist perspective. Key elements of three systemic approaches to meaning are integrated that allow for a symmetrical account of human and non-human agencies in fake news as a phenomenon. The findings are descriptioons of (1) fake news as systemic material-semiotic activity that emerges from algorithmic capture of human emotion and social-discursive degrees of freedom; how pre-conscious/emotional triggers can be hacked by informational patterns in fake news pieces; an “ontological syntax” of truthiness and falseness across institutional agencies in fake-news activity.

Technologies of Care: Robot Caregivers in Science and Fiction

In the field of elderly care, robot caregivers are garnering increased attention. This article discusses the robotisation of care from a dual perspective. The first part presents an overview of recent scholarship on the use of robots in eldercare, focusing mostly on scientific evidence about the responses of older adults and caregivers. The second part turns to narrative evidence, providing a close reading of Andromeda Romano-Lax’s Plum Rains (2018), a speculative novel set in Japan in 2029, which explores the implications—ethical, affective, social—of communities of care that include non-human agents. My argument is twofold: (1) although science and fiction operate according to different models of knowledge production, considering narrative insights alongside scientific ones can enlarge our understanding of the complexities of robotic care; (2) hitherto overlooked in literary studies, Plum Rains deserves attention for its nuanced representation of a hybrid model of care, which does not discard robotic assistance on the basis of humanist arguments, nor does it endorse techno-solutionism, reminding readers that the fantasy of robots that care is fuelled by the reality of devalued human care work.

Top-Down Modulation of Motor Priming by Belief About Animacy.

Research has shown that people automatically imitate others and that this tendency is stronger when the other person is a human compared with a nonhuman agent. However, a controversial question is whether automatic imitation is also modulated by whether people believe the other person is a human. Although early research supported this hypothesis, not all studies reached the same conclusion and a recent meta-analysis found that there is currently neither evidence in favor nor against an influence of animacy beliefs on automatic imitation. One of the most prominent studies supporting such an influence is the study by Liepelt and Brass (2010), who found that automatic imitation was stronger when participants believed an ambiguous, gloved hand to be human, as opposed to wooden. In this registered report, we provide a high-powered replication of this study (N = 199). In contrast to Liepelt and Brass (2010), we did not find an effect of animacy beliefs on automatic imitation. However, we did find a correlation between automatic imitation and perceived self-other similarity. Together, these results suggest that the gloved hand procedure does not reliably influence automatic imitation, but interindividual differences in perceived similarity do.

Policy Mobilities, Infrastructures, and Nonhuman Political Agency

Policy mobilities research has explored how policies—particularly urban development policies—spread among sites around the world, mutate along the way, and take hold in distinct contexts. Within the policy mobilities literature, there is particular attention to circulatory infrastructures, which facilitate encounters, learning, and exchange of knowledge that support the (re)production and movement of policies and “best practices.” Policy mobilities scholarship thus understands policy implementation as emerging from relational assemblages of myriad actors and social processes. Drawing on assemblage theory, this work has been attentive to nonhuman objects and infrastructures, nonetheless it has given little attention to nonhuman life. This article draws on more-than-human geographies, particularly emerging work on nonhuman life and infrastructures, to incorporate nonhuman actors into an understanding of policy mobilization. We present a case study of suburban wildlife management programs in Massachusetts and discuss how human–nonhuman relationships undergird policy development, transfer, and change. Drawing insights from municipal surveys, in-depth interviews, and document analysis, we argue that nonhumans are active in the production of policy assemblages and the mobility of environmental policies. Deer, in particular, are lively actors entangled in the circulation of policies designed to manage social-ecological dynamics and processes that also include ticks, forests, bacteria, and many other nonhuman agents. Through this intervention to situate nonhuman life in policy mobilities, we highlight the political agency of nonhuman actors, the materialities of policy mobilization, and the role of nonhumans in shaping relational networks.

Theta synchronization as a neural marker of flexible (re-)use of socio-cognitive mechanisms for a new category of (artificial) interaction partners

Previous work shows that in some instances artificial agents, such as robots, can elicit higher-order socio-cognitive mechanisms, similar to those elicited by humans. This suggests that these socio-cognitive mechanisms, such as mentalizing processes, originally developed for interaction with other humans, might be flexibly (re-)used, or “hijacked”, for approaching this new category of interaction partners (Wykowska, 2020). In this study, we set out to identify neural markers of such flexible reuse of socio-cognitive mechanisms. We focused on fronto-parietal theta synchronization, as it has been proposed to be a substrate of cognitive flexibility in general (Fries, 2005).We analyzed EEG data from two experiments (Bossi et al., 2020; Roselli et al., submitted), in which participants completed a test measuring their individual likelihood to adopt the intentional stance towards robots, the intentional stance (IST) test. Our results show that participants with higher scores on the IST, indicating that they had higher likelihood of adopting the intentional stance towards a robot, had a significantly higher theta synchronization value, relative to participants with lower scores on the IST. These results suggest that long-range synchronization in the theta band might be a marker socio-cognitive process that can be flexibly applied towards non-human agents, such as robots.

Race, Environment, and Crisis: Hurricane Camille and the Politics of Southern Segregation

In August 1969 Hurricane Camille hit the Mississippi coast. We argue that the disaster caused by the Hurricane was an outcome of the entanglement between human and non-human agents. As a non-human agent, Hurricane Camille thrust the prevailing socio-economic situation in the segregationist South into the spotlight, with all its political and cultural ramifications – much to the annoyance of the local political elite that had long sought to isolate southern politics from civil rights and the desegregation agenda. Consequently, it (re)invigorated and furnished the civil rights movement and the politics defining that era with new arguments and approaches that would have been impossible to develop from the perspective of human agency alone. By examining both local and national press discourses relating to the crisis caused by Hurricane Camille in the state of Mississippi in August 1969, we argue that historical agency should not be seen in purely anthropocentric terms but as an entanglement between human and non-human events.

From Devil-Fish to Friendly Whale? Encountering Gray Whales on The California Coast

Eastern North Pacific gray whales are famed for their remarkable ecological history: from near extinction to recovery and from ‘devil-fish’ to ‘friendly whale’. This article critically examines the origins and development of the narrative framing of gray whales’ history as one in which the whales were long known as ‘devil-fish’, until they became ‘friendly whales’ in the 1970s. Drawing on archival sources from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, this article interrupts the premise of a smooth and linear transition from devil-fish to friendly whale. Instead, gray whale histories reveal much more complex and even contradictory human–whale encounters along the California coast. Throughout the time period examined, precursors of the familiar contemporary narrative of gray whale history emerged, each building on prior remembrances of gray whale pasts. More broadly, this article contributes to contemporary conversations in more-than-human historical studies about nonhuman agency, multispecies encounters, memory, and environmental histories of emotion.

A posthumanist reading of the “happy” fish in The Zhuangzi

ABSTRACT This article argues for an alternative interpretation of the happy fish scene in The Zhuangzi: the fish are not happy. The fish undergo an unpleasant experience while the philosophers debate animatedly over the joy of the fish. The dramatization of the fish scene compels us to contemplate anthropocentrism and species communication. Moreover, the contrast between the fish-bird becoming and the subsequent human narrations reinforces the anthropocentric usurpation of nonhuman agency. To get away from anthropocentrism, Zhuangzi proposes a posthumanist approach to deal with species communication in three interconnected stages: to acknowledge the limits of human cognition, to forget anthropocentric prejudice, and to de-obscure childlike innocence.

Culpability and Nature-Nature Infractions in Select Poems in Tanure Ojaide’s Narrow Escapes: A Poetic Diary of the Coronavirus Pandemic

In literary imaginings, the infraction of the law by human and nonhuman agents manifests in different planes and character. With a pathology-inclined compass, this study argues that the representation of culpability for the infraction of natural law in Tanure Ojaide’s poetry emanates mainly from the intentionality of human agents and intersects with the unintentionality of nonhuman nature. In the instance of nature-nature infractions, a first-cause anthropocentric infraction by humans intersects with a second-cause infraction from the nonhuman agents, thereby creating the binary of intentional and unintentional culpability. Tanure Ojaide, in Narrow Escape: A Poetic Diary of the Coronavirus Pandemic (2021), chronicles the themes of agonies arising from anthropocentric recklessness and abuse of the ecosystem, which result in nature-nature infractions and the subsequent culpability. With poignant imagery and electrifying fluidity, Ojaide presents a litany of the havoc wreaked by human agents and the nonhuman coronavirus on the physical and biological environments. This litany is expressed through tones of lamentation and caution. The cautionary notes evince hope in the midst of the pathological miasma that assumed a threshold in 2019. Lawrence Buell’s eco-critical view is chosen because it locates anthropocentric negligence and ignorance as liable reasons for the breakdown of law and order in nature. Therefore, in causing the pandemic, sickness, and death, anthropocentrism as well as the coronavirus are shown to be culpable of homicide in the selected poems.

Uncovering the sociomaterial assemblage of a culinary heritagization: The Wildschönauer Krautinger schnapps

In the search for geographical and historical distinctiveness, the issue of culinary heritage has taken an important role in agri-food studies for safeguarding local culinary knowledge and traditions of food cultivation and production practices. However, it remains unclear how salient culinary heritage emphasizes the intertwining of tangible and intangible elements, and how sociocultural values and notions of terroir, tradition, and identity enable or constrain community-driven heritagization processes. In this paper, we aim to shed light on the sociomaterial assemblage of culinary heritagization by focusing on the case of a distilled turnip schnapps from the Alpine community of Wildschönau in Austria. We demonstrate how the Krautinger schnapps transitions from a subsistence to a commercial product, and how increasing marketization and demand challenges the relationship between commercialization and preservation of cultural heritage. By combining relational perspectives, sociomaterial approaches, and assemblage thinking, we discuss the constituent intertwining of human and nonhuman entities in the process of culinary heritagization. We apply the sociology of translation as a conceptual framework and identify four decisive moments that highlight the progression and continuity of the Krautinger's sociomaterial assemblage. Our study reveals issues and challenges that may arise for the local community in these moments of heritagization, including the chance of internal reconsolidation by recognizing nonhuman agency and bridging potential risks.