Non-human Agents Research Articles

Symbiosis, Anarchy, and Fermentation

Abstract In this article, artist Sergey Katran reflects on practice-based interaction with live nonhuman agents. A kombucha, cultivated at home, gradually assumes anthropic qualities and, promoted by the artist, even starts participating in exhibitions and roundtable discussions. This can be viewed as the first step in establishing and developing ideas of biocentrism within an artistic community. The author also views this case as precedent for the participation of other biological species (and nonhuman agents) in exhibitions normally intended for humans. As the cultivating of kombucha normally involves double fermentation, the artist then proceeds contemplating on the process and its possible outcomes. Fermentation, which brings about rapid change in the environment with subsequent synthesis of various substances, while yeast fungi and bacteria continue producing necessary ferments, is metaphorically linked to major changes in art and society.

Stimmung as an Aesthetic Category: On Influx & Efflux

Stimmung as an Aesthetic Category: On Influx & Efflux Friederike Reents (bio) In order to “add something to the aesthetic” within the “formative process” (Bennett x) of “influx and efflux,” I would like to engage not only with Walt Whitman, but with Jane Bennett on the aesthetic category of the German word Stimmung, which is not widely used in English-language criticism and lacks a one-word equivalent in this language. As a “half-thing” (Schmitz 21) between the “inside and outside,” the aesthetic category Stimmung seems to offer an answer to the question being posed in Influx & Efflux: “how to think about human agency in a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences.” Stimmung seems to be very close to the idea of Jane Bennett’s book: it represents the “hover-time of transformation” (x), the “interval between the impression and the expression” (Thoreau, qtd. in Bennett x), between the “influx and efflux.” Via Stimmung, the I becomes “absorbent and creative”; Stimmung, just like Influx & Efflux, “sketch[es] out another mode of subjectivity and action.” Stimmung, usually translated as “mood” or “atmosphere,” on the one hand, or “attunement,” on the other,1 has had a remarkable comeback not only in critical discourse of the past decade but in contemporary literature and poetics as well. This comeback seems [End Page 1042] to be connected to the bridging function possessed by Stimmung and its intellectual, potentially highly connective idea between subject and object. Stimmung belongs to the history of music theory, where it can mean simply “tuning,” but where it was also used to describe the psychological effects of the medium. The word has since been used metaphorically (intermedially) to describe everything from landscape paintings to Romantic poetry to modern art. In existential and neo-phenomenological discourse, Stimmung is understood as a “half-thing” (“Halbding”), one that can be physically sensed but which is neither visible nor touchable, etc. Through a reading of the collaborative poem State of Gunk. Swine in Full Mourning (from Helmet of Phlox, a nineteen-chapter treatise by a collective of five German poets), I will attempt to show that by means of Stimmung, to use Bennett’s words, the “forces of nonhuman agencies and the ubiquity of stupendous, ethereal influences are acknowledged, become more felt, and given more of their due, become slightly more susceptible to being inflected”—maybe even “toward an egalitarian politics” (116). The concept of Stimmung tries to add something to the idea of “influx and efflux” in order to be open and attentive, susceptible to others and welcoming influences, perhaps even to realize the idea of an ecological democracy. In the treatise Helm aus Phlox, Ann Cotten, Daniel Falb, Steffen Popp, Hendrik Jackson, and Monika Rinck include in their discussion of problems that they encounter while writing poetry the (un)translatability of the word Stimmung(en), as exemplified by their collaborative poem Status Matsch. Schweine in Volltrauer (State of Gunk. Swine in Full Mourning; 92). It is worth reading that text against the background of Jane Bennett’s explorations of “the experience of being continuously subject to influence and still managing to add something to the mix” (xiii): State of Gunk. Swine in Full MourningPig brain in the air, pig brain in the air!Who is there? Who is there?Disembodied heads on a conveyor beltblow blow mush!blow blow mush! then along came a clever little translatorthen along came a clever little translator why, you’re ill!pins and needles in the arms, pins and needles in the legsthe brains are wobbling, and flying from brain to brain!No one understands except the translator!No one understands except the translator!2 [End Page 1043] Status Matsch. Schweine in VolltrauerSchweinhirn in der Luft. Schweinhirn in der Luft!Wer nach mir ruft? Wer nach mir ruft?abgetrennte Köpfe auf einem Förderbandpust pust Brei!pust pust Brei! da kam eine kluge Übersetzerin daherda kam eine kluge Übersetzerin daher ihr seid ja krank!die Arme kribbeln, die Beine kribbelndie Hirne schwabbeln, und fliegen von Hirn zu Hirn!Das versteht nur die Übersetzerin!Das versteht nur die Übersetzerin! (92) The poem perplexes the reader with what seem to...

From biosemiotics to physiosemiotics. Towards a speculative semiotics of the inorganic world.

Abstract In the first part of the article, biosemiotics will be presented in its historical and theoretical dynamics. New areas of research that have emerged in the speculative field of biosemiotics, such as ecosemiotics, will be explored. In all its developments, biosemiotics, which identifies semiosis with life, excludes inorganic matter from any semiotics processes. However, the inorganic world is a fundamental part of the biosphere, especially if we consider the emergence of life. In order to include inorganic matter within semiotic processes of the biosphere we will use James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis reinterpreted in the light of semiotics. If we use the hypothesis of planet Earth as a living system in its complexity and if we consider that every living system is intrinsically semiotic, then inorganic matter must also participate in semiotics processes. In this sense, the semiotics of the inorganic world reveals that it participates in a sort of non-human agency. This type of speculative semiotics engages semiotics processes that are constitutive of matter and that can be read as the story of the planet itself. In conclusion, I will propose a physiosemiotics as semiotics of matter.

The Humans and Non-Humans Interaction: the Features of Digital Discourse

The article is devoted to the interaction between people and digital non-human. The relevance is due to both the speed of the emergence and spread of digital technologies, during which digital non-human objects are created, and the specifi cs of the interaction of people and non-human in the digital environment, in contrast to traditional technological environments. The purpose of the article is to identify and articulate this specifi city. The main methods used are research of sources and analysis, and the methodology is based on an actor-network approach. The article studies how people and non-people interact in the digital space and reveals the specifi cs of these interactions in comparison with the interaction of people with traditional technological non-human. As shown, the key in this interaction is the indistinguishability of digital objects for humans, which leads to very specifi c forms of interaction with them, differing from interaction with well known technological non-human agents. This feature leads to the formation of new forms of sociality and the emergence of new social phenomena, for example, FOMO, post-truth etc. In conclusion, it is recorded that people and digital artifacts in the form of digital objects, creating sociomaterial networks mutually constitute each other. It is necessary to continue research on the interaction of people and digital non-human, so that even at the design stage of digital technological objects, the basic foundations of sociality and human perception are laid in order to minimize possible negative consequences of future interactions between people and digital non-human.

Uncanny Ecologies

AbstractIf secularity ushered in the notion of humans as buffered subjects immune to nonhuman agents, recent attempts to recognize the agency of nonhumans and to see humans as always in relation to nonhumans—the natureculture turn—may be understood as both a posthumanist and postsecularist project. Yet this scholarship has largely restricted nonhumans to entities previously classified as “natural” phenomena, leaving “supernatural” beings out of the conversation and leaving the distinction between nature and supernature intact. Fernando argues that fully undoing the nature/culture distinction means attending to this third domain—the more-than-natural—still banished from our ontological horizons. This is especially important for any consideration of the Anthropocene, since climate crisis affects communities that do not live only in secular worlds nor abide only by secular categories. The author therefore turns to South Asia to theorize what she calls uncanny ecologies—that is, interspecies webs of care and commitment among animals, humans, and deities. The author also asks why these nonsecular multispecies worlds have not been taken up as viable models of relationality and Anthropocene livability to the extent that Amerindian ontologies have, speculating that more-than-natural, more-than-human agency remains a problem for secular sensibilities.

Nonhuman Governance

Abstract The current ecological crisis and its accompanying environmental consciousness has prodded many to reject Western dualism and instead embrace animism. Taking the Sundarbans forests of India as a starting point, the author shows how several animated, nonhuman agents of the region guide both resource use and social relationships through a set of rules known as the “rules of the jungle.” The source of these rules are deities, demons, and spirits—that is, “cosmic polities”—that undeniably govern life in the Sundarbans and across the landscape of South Asia. Mehtta shows how such nonhuman forms of governance and animistic ontologies can act as a source not only of care and an ecological consciousness but also are capable of exclusion and discrimination. Consequently, the South Asian context provides an important cautionary tale about the blind embrace of animism as the sole savior of our ecological crisis by revealing a spectrum of violence within certain strands of animistic ontologies. Simultaneously the author shows how Western repertoires of thought reveal framing devices that transcend dualism and may be read as the precursors of contemporary environmental consciousness. This article ultimately proposes the importance of acknowledging a bricolage of ontologies and realities without entrenching them in a particular identity of caste, tribe, or “indigeneity” or in being of “the West” or of “the rest of the world.”

AUTONOMOUS WEAPON SYSTEMS UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

The article questions the compliance of autonomous weapons systems with international humanitarian law (IHL). It seeks to answer this question by analysing the application of the core principles of international humanitarian law with regard to the use of autonomous weapons systems. As part of the discussion on compliance, the article also considers the implications of riskless warfare where non-human agents are used. The article presupposes that it is actually possible for AWS to comply with IHL in very broad and general terms. However, there is a need for discussion, acceptance, and institutionalization of the interpretation for classification of AWS as well as expansion of the legal framework to cater to the advanced technology. This interpretation will also include a system for allocating and attributing responsibility for their use. The article's results will demonstrate the legal consequences of developing and employing weapon systems capable of performing important functions like target selection and engagement autonomously and the role of IHL and IHRL in regulating the use of these weapons, particularly in human control over individual assaults.

Minority social influence and moral decision-making in human–AI interaction: The effects of identity and specialization cues

In group decision-making, the behavior of each member is sensitive to the social influence of other majority members. Research on majority influence has shown that multiple non-human agents with anthropomorphic cues can exert normative pressure on a lone human decision-maker. However, how individuals perceive and respond to minority influence exerted by a lone machine is rarely discussed. Hence, a between-subjects experiment was conducted to examine how different minority identity (human vs artificial intelligence [AI]) and specialization (specialist vs generalist) cues influence individuals’ perceptions and behavior in response to moral dilemmas in a joint human–AI group. The results confirmed the significant role of specialization cues in predicting in-group identification, source credibility, and conversion behavior. In addition, the participants perceived the human minority as more credible than the AI minority, which prompted conversion behavior when the minority was labeled as a specialist rather than as a generalist.

Materializing the digital landscape: the cinema–ecology complex and Chinese fantasy media

AbstractContemporary cinema and media studies are marked by a materialist turn that highlights material elements, such as objects, non-human agencies, the environment and places on and off screen, as well as the materiality of media productions and consumption. This article expands on the important scholarship of “materialist” media studies as well as existing ecocinema scholarship by stressing the materiality of digital landscapes in contemporary Chinese fantasy (or qihuan and xuanhuan) film and television works that have gained significant popularity in China and Hong Kong. Specifically, this article examines the animist landscape in film and television adaptions of Eternal Love, a fantasy romance television serial that loosely draws on Daoist mythology. Focusing on the material aspects of digital landscapes of Chinese fantasy cinema, the article develops the notion of the “cinema–ecology complex” to address the materiality of digital landscapes, the cinematic footprint of digitally enhanced landscapes through location shooting and the consumption of landscapes as scenic spots, including daka practices, in film studio cities and related film-induced tourism. Ultimately, this article calls for a textual–infrastructural approach in cinema and media studies, which tends to reorient to the infrastructural aspects of media production, distribution and consumption.

:Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism

:<i>Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism</i>

The Impact of Governance Bots on Sense of Virtual Community

Bots are increasingly being used for governance-related purposes in online communities, yet no instrumentation exists for measuring how users assess their beneficial or detrimental impacts. In order to support future human-centered and community-based research, we developed a new scale called GOVernance Bots in Online communiTies (GOV-BOTs) across two rounds of surveys on Reddit (N=820). We applied rigorous psychometric criteria to demonstrate the validity of GOV-BOTs, which contains two subscales: bot governance (4 items) and bot tensions (3 items). Whereas humans have historically expected communities to be composed entirely of humans, the social participation of bots as non-human agents now raises fundamental questions about psychological, philosophical, and ethical implications. Addressing psychological impacts, our data show that perceptions of effective bot governance positively contribute to users' sense of virtual community (SOVC), whereas perceived bot tensions may only impact SOVC if users are more aware of bots. Finally, we show that users tend to experience the greatest SOVC across groups of subreddits, rather than individual subreddits, suggesting that future research should carefully re-consider uses and operationalizations of the term "community."

Infrastructuring Temporality—Temporalizing Infrastructure

Infrastructuring Temporality—Temporalizing Infrastructure

The Plants are Plotting: Political Orders in Ostenso’s Wild Geese

This article attends to non-human agency and plant communities in Martha Ostenso’s 1925 novel Wild Geese. As non-humans shape the novel’s setting and plot, they are entwined with human action but not subordinated to human agency or political systems; on the contrary, plant communities are political forces who ally, resist, and clash during the implementation of European agricultural practises in the early twentieth century. Thus, the setting details of this CanLit novel can be repurposed to think about the possibilities of community beyond colonial control. This article begins by drawing on Vanessa Watts’ articulation of ecosystems-as-societies as a framework for plant agency. It then follows Margret Boyce’s eco-critical engagement with Wild Geese to examine how the farm’s monocrops are connected to, but not determined by, the heteropatriarchal family and the colonial state. Further, by considering how homoeroticism emerges against colonial heteropatriarchy in non-agricultural settings, queerness is shown to pre-exist and resist the organizing tendencies of settler colonialism. Finally, this article turns to non-human alliances in the novel’s finale to demonstrate the ongoing struggle between political powers. To grapple with colonialism and its legacies, non-human agency and political power must also be recognized.

Misplaced Trust and Distrust: How Not to Engage with Medical Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a rapidly increasing role in clinical care. Many of these systems, for instance, deep learning-based applications using multilayered Artificial Neural Nets, exhibit epistemic opacity in the sense that they preclude comprehensive human understanding. In consequence, voices from industry, policymakers, and research have suggested trust as an attitude for engaging with clinical AI systems. Yet, in the philosophical and ethical literature on medical AI, the notion of trust remains fiercely debated. Trust skeptics hold that talking about trust in nonhuman agents constitutes a category error and worry about the concept being misused for ethics washing. Proponents of trust have responded to these worries from various angles, disentangling different concepts and aspects of trust in AI, potentially organized in layers or dimensions. Given the substantial disagreements across these accounts of trust and the important worries about ethics washing, we embrace a diverging strategy here. Instead of aiming for a positive definition of the elements and nature of trust in AI, we proceed ex negativo, that is we look at cases where trust or distrust are misplaced. Comparing these instances with trust expedited in doctor-patient relationships, we systematize these instances and propose a taxonomy of both misplaced trust and distrust. By inverting the perspective and focusing on negative examples, we develop an account that provides useful ethical constraints for decisions in clinical as well as regulatory contexts and that highlights how we should not engage with medical AI.

Into the Woods: Toward a Material Poetics of the Tropical Forest in Philippine Literature

This study considers how the tropical forest as a material and discursive space mediates the ways in which history is imagined in Philippine literary texts and literary production. Mobilizing ideas from new materialism, material poetics, and tropicality, the paper looks at generative moments from indigenous and revolutionary literature—two broad traditions whose conditions of possibility are inextricably linked with the materiality of the tropical forest and thus inevitably evince the structuring force of such nonhuman agencies and subjectivities. By disclosing how the “more than human” is constitutive of history and historical subject formation, it seeks to foreground the agency of Philippine forests in actively and collaboratively contesting the catastrophic violence of capital and state-making on people and the natural world.

A Design Studio on Fantastic Space

This essay investigates the creative approaches of how body–space relations can be enhanced in a design studio through the exploration of fantastic spaces. ‘Fantastic’ is defined as an ‘open work’ with reference to modern literature and a ‘fantastic space’ as an inventive ground that is neither real nor unreal, standing as a paraxial region. This essay analyses a first-year design studio on Fantastic Space; it considers how the content was explored by students, what they designed, and the diverse design approaches that emerged. In the studio, students analysed the spaces and characters of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film, Spirited Away (2001) and reassembled the narrative of the animation by using architectural tools to prepare two- and three-dimensional representations of their designs. Focusing on body–space relations, the studio employed a critical approach to anthropocentrism and discussed human and non-human agencies within a body–space context. In its pursuit to challenge traditional dynamics of spatial representation, the project encouraged creating experimental works inspired by the unlimited potential interpretations of Miyazaki’s fantastic world. A content analysis of the designs of 156 students using both qualitative and quantitative methods was applied to analyse students’ conceptual and spatialproductions. The analysis reveals three key design strategies to categorise the students’ projects: character-based, space-based, and story-based approaches. The unique and overlapping qualities of these approaches were determined by reviewing the time–space and body–space relationships represented in the students’ projects. In this way, the imaginative, diverse re-imaginings of their designs reveal the value of using fantastic spaces to encourage high student engagement and creative studio results.

Listening and Mediation

This article approaches listening practices and the role of technological mediation within ecological sound art, building on findings through the artistic research practices of the two authors. Through documentation of the authors’ ecological sound art practices of aeolian guitar performance, curation, composition, performance on found objects and field recording, we argue that phenomenological variation is inherent to the use of technology across all these forms of performative responsivity, as well as in the analytical forms of listening enacted through stimulated recall and micro-phenomenology. By unpacking the agencies at play in ecological sound art, we discuss how these artistic practices afford “unexpected ways” (Arteaga, 2017, p. 25) to knowledge. The article thus attempts to provide insight into human and non-human agencies at play in phenomenological approaches to ecological sound art and technological mediation, activated through listening.

Radical reassemblages: The life history of a Nile Delta pumping collective

This article investigates how people, technology, and water flows act together in using and transforming infrastructure to improve water access. Analytically, we propose to study collective action over time through the relationships between humans and non-humans as they collaborate to mediate water and other flows. Our case-study lies in Egypt. Over four decades, the Irrigation Improvement Project has introduced various sociotechnical and institutional measures to improve water management in the Nile Delta. By establishing collective pumping infrastructure and Water User Associations, water users were compelled to collaborate to reduce water extraction and over-irrigation. For heuristic purposes, we examine in detail the life history of one pumping collective facing increasing water scarcity. The article presents four life phases of the pumping collective and analyses what drives the assemblage and its transformations. Through time, we understand pumping collectives as heterogeneous and shifting assemblages of human and non-human agents that provide differentiated access to multiple resource flows. We describe the surprising stream of events that unfolds. The pumping collective radically dismantles the standard technological and organizational set-up and replaces it with a more flexible and disaggregated form of irrigation. By tracking this trajectory, the article demonstrates the remarkable agency of a pumping collective in renewing and reassembling itself. On this basis, we argue that the complex entanglement of material objects, human actors, water (and other resource flows) can explain this. Hence, it is important to look beyond the society-nature dichotomy to understand the transformational capacity of collectives.

A Return to the Commons: An Eco-Marxist Reading of Jewett's “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills

A Return to the Commons: An Eco-Marxist Reading of Jewett's “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ <i>Life in the Iron Mills</i>

The Most Beloved Cow in Gokulpur

SUMMARYDuring ethnographic fieldwork in West Bengal, India, I witnessed the comingling of disgust and desire in shaping religious identity, the effervescent force of crowds, and moments of ordinary ethics enacted through labor. This short story is set in a fictional town: Gokulpur is a microcosm of the tension between rural idiosyncrasies and urban aspirations in India, permeated by growing right‐wing Hindu sentiments. Through the evolving relationship between a boy and his family's revered cow, I explore what it means to navigate companionship, community, and everyday life in an increasingly politicized village—and the reverberations of our choices. The piece originates from a desire to inhabit unfamiliar perspectives through closely observed characters and scenes, testing the potential and limits of imaginative empathy as a tool for social understanding. This work of fiction engages with anthropological scholarship on cross‐species friendship, nonhuman agency, religious ritual, and the ethics of care. [fiction, religion, India, animals, agency, ethics of care]