Non-human Agents Research Articles

Rhetorical Enactment Theory and a Rhetoric of Chronicity for Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a neurodegenerative disease that progresses along a fluctuating course of changing capacities, affects approximately 5.7 million Americans, an estimate expected to skyrocket as the baby boomer generation ages. Adopting a rhetorical field methods approach I analyze the transcripts of qualitative interviews of 3 patients and 28 caregivers to understand how the chronicity of AD affects informal caregiving strategies as well as the lived experiences of persons with AD. Employing a new materialist framework along with rhetorical enactment theory, I posit chronicity as rhetorical action distributed not only among human and nonhuman agents but also across moments, requiring special attention to time and timing. I argue chronic illness is rhetorically enacted through three material-discursive practices: ontological practices that enact reality, alignment practices that facilitate or disrupt cooperation among entities, and mnemonic practices that enact and outsource memory among AD caregivers. Across all three kinds of practice, a material-discursive sense of kairos and chronos is advanced.

Review: Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization, by Rosalind Galt

Review: <i>Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization</i>, by Rosalind Galt

Radykalna inkluzywność. Posthumanistyczne perspektywy podmiotowego włączenia istot poza-ludzkich w procesy zarządzania

Radical Inclusivity. Post-human Perspectives for Subjective Inclusion of Other-Than-Human Beings in Management Processes The subject of the article is the issue of subjective inclusion of other-than-human beings in management processes. Due to the association of participation with human cognitive tools in management theory, consequent exclusion of other-than-human beings occurs. The aim of the research is to find perspectives in the sources of post-humanist philosophy that make it possible to transcend the anthropocentric barriers. Based on a review of selected literature – Actor-Network Theory, Object-Oriented Ontology, Dark Ecology, and Kinship – the research shows that subjective inclusion of other-than-human beings in management processes is possible. It requires abandonment of the judgement of non-human agency measured by humanly perceived consciousness in favour of a vision of symbiotic co-creation. The article also derives the category of radical inclusivity as a process of changing the perception of the role of other-than-human beings within management, with a particular emphasis on the practice of inclusive management.

Domesticating Women, Animals, the Environment, and Spiritual Entities: Navigating Boundaries in the Pastoral Community of Limi, Nepal

Through a case study of pastoralists in the Limi valley of north-western Nepal, this article revisits the notion of domestication with regards to Limey pastoral practice. Taken in its etymological sense, of “making part of one’s home” (domus), domestication could be seen to draw a line between the inside and the outside. Yet, in Limi, these lines are blurred and shifting in nature: those that are a part of the home are not defined ontologically but relationally. Beyond strictly human–animal relations, domestication is here extended to involve politics and moralities of human differences such as gender and age, politics of relations to spiritual entities, and politics of nature. In Limi, pastoral practice inserts humans in a constellation of relations of co-domestication governed by religious precepts and gender norms, conceived as foundational to multispecies coinhabitation. Domestication is not a solely anthropogenic process but a composition of multiple—including nonhuman—agencies. And yet, pastoralism, as it is practiced today, also contributes to creating a space of hybridity and fluidity of social and ontological boundaries—between women and men, humans and livestock, domestic and wild animals, land and spiritual entities. This article, through a case study of Limey pastoralists’ gendered relation with herds and an animated landscape, adds to the understanding of domestication as not merely the domination of the human over the non-human but as an art of multispecies coinhabitation.

Architecture of the Avant-Apocalypse: Preservation beyond Preservation of the Species

Abstract In an age in which human presence on Earth has become precarious, architects have begun to contemplate their discipline on two parallel timelines: that of human history on the one hand and that of geologica or evolutionary history on the other. Anxieties about the potential disappearance of the human species call into question accepted notions of cultural heritage. The author focuses on the emergence of nonhuman intelligences in architectural discourse by looking at two examples of new materials and their aesthetic qualities—the idea of “self-assembly” in concrete science and an invention involving “guided growth.” She speculates on how including nonhuman agents in a discussion of architecture changes the way we conceive of cultural and civilizational continuity.

Human but not robotic gaze facilitates action prediction

SummaryDo people ascribe intentions to humanoid robots as they would to humans or non-human-like animated objects? In six experiments, we compared people’s ability to extract non-mentalistic (i.e., where an agent is looking) and mentalistic (i.e., what an agent is looking at; what an agent is going to do) information from gaze and directional cues performed by humans, human-like robots, and a non-human-like object. People were faster to infer the mental content of human agents compared to robotic agents. Furthermore, although the absence of differences in control conditions rules out the use of non-mentalizing strategies, the human-like appearance of non-human agents may engage mentalizing processes to solve the task. Overall, results suggest that human-like robotic actions may be processed differently from humans’ and objects’ behavior. These findings inform our understanding of the relevance of an object’s physical features in triggering mentalizing abilities and its relevance for human–robot interaction.

Suzhi, Guanxi, and the Abject Body: Nonhuman Agents of Paradox that Perform Identity Work Together With Chinese Women Political Leaders

Governmental politics in China continue to be a male-dominated arena such that Chinese women political leaders often carefully perform contested gender and occupational identities to negotiate a work-body (mis)alignment. Turning to sociomateriality, this study examines how gender and organizational paradox comes to matter as Chinese women negotiate the occupational identity of political leaders. The study simultaneously explores the types of identity work women leaders perform and the nonhuman actors they routinely encounter while working to make boundaries that outline the identity of political leaders. A thematic narrative analysis reveals the following: Suzhi work(s), guanxi work(s), and abject body work(s). Participants perform identity work constitutive of the masculine shapes/bodies of political suzhi and guanxi, while forming the abject body of a symbolic woman. Meanwhile, these bodies serve as working actors that move and touch participants in paradoxical ways.

What Happens Next? Using the Story Completion Method to Surface the Affects and Materialities of Digital Privacy Dilemmas

People’s ideas and practices concerning their personal data and digital privacy have received growing attention in social inquiry. In this article, we discuss findings from a study that adopted the story completion method together with a theoretical perspective building on feminist materialism to explore how people make sense of and respond to digital privacy dilemmas. The Digital Privacy Story Completion Project presented participants with a set of four story prompts (‘stems’) for them to complete. Each introduced a fictional character facing a privacy dilemma related to personal data generated from their online interactions or app use. Our analysis surfaces how privacy is imagined as simultaneously personal and social, redolent with affective intensities, and framed through relational connections of human and nonhuman agents. While the story stems involved scenarios using digital technologies, participants’ stories extended beyond the technological. These stories offer insight into why and how the potential for and meaning of digital privacy unfolds into more-than-digital worlds.

ЗРИТЕЛЬ В ПРОСТРАНСТВЕ ВИРТУАЛЬНОЙ РЕАЛЬНОСТИ: ФОРМИРОВАНИЕ ПЛАНЕТАРНОЙ ОПТИКИ

ЗРИТЕЛЬ В ПРОСТРАНСТВЕ ВИРТУАЛЬНОЙ РЕАЛЬНОСТИ: ФОРМИРОВАНИЕ ПЛАНЕТАРНОЙ ОПТИКИ

Material Agency and the “Cluttered” Environment in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Travel Narratives

ABSTRACT Recent critical studies have explored the cultural significance of walking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, emphasizing the connection between bodily activity and creative energies: in its rhythmic, repetitive motion, walking can bring the subject into a semi-hypnotic state that invites mental wandering. This essay traces the experience of walking through Dorothy Wordsworth’s travel narratives, but I shift focus from moving unhindered through open spaces to physically navigating more challenging environments. Drawing on James J. Gibson’s theory of environmental affordances and Andrew Pickering’s concept of nonhuman agency, I consider how “cluttered” landscapes persistently conduct our attention to the material continuity between human traveler and nonhuman environment. My suggestion is that this heightened awareness inspires a mode of ecological thinking that alters the individual’s ethical sensibility toward the nonhuman world. This conclusion demonstrates the often overlooked value of those less accommodating natural spaces. Moreover, reading Wordsworth’s narratives with an eye toward her presentation of material agency may help us to recover a sense of Wordsworth’s own authorial agency.

Living in the Flesh: Technologically Mediated Chiasmic Relationships (in Times of a Pandemic)

During the Corona pandemic, it became clear that people are vulnerable to potentially harmful nonhuman agents, as well as that our own biological existence potentially poses a threat to others, and vice versa. This suggests a certain reciprocity in our relations with both humans and nonhumans. In his The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of the flesh to capture this reciprocity. Building on this idea, he proposes to understand our relationships with other humans, as well as those with nonhuman beings as having a chiasmic structure: to sense, or perceive another entity in a particular way simultaneously implies to be sensed or perceived in a particular way by this other entity. In this paper, we show how a postphenomenological perspective expands on Merleau-Ponty: first, it more radically interprets Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh by not only considering it to be a medium that is the condition of possibility for vision but as pointing to the constitution of an intercorporeal field in which entities—both human and nonhuman—mutually sense one another. Second, it augments Merleau-Ponty’s thought by drawing attention to how technologies mediate chiasmic relations. This is clarified through the example of the facemask, which (1) reveals the chiasmic structure of our relation with nonhuman entities, and (2) shows that technologies co-constitute interpersonal relationships by making humans present to one another in a particular way. We suggest that these aspects are not unique to the facemask, but point to a general technologically mediated chiasmic structure of human-world relations.

Listening to Terrestrial Voices in Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence”

Ted Chiang’s short story, “The Great Silence”, takes the perspective of a parrot living in the Rio Abajo forest in Puerto Rico, sharing its habitat with the Arecibo Observatory. The story first appeared as the textual component of a video installation by Allora &amp; Calzadilla, a piece that emphasizes the entanglement of the forest habitat and the massive structure of the telescope). Chiang’s parrot-narrator wonders why humans demonstrate such a commitment to the possibility of interstellar communication while often ignoring the voices and interests of our terrestrial cohabitants. The parrot’s critically endangered species, the Puerto Rican parrot, once filled the forests of the island, and the narrator presents his/her narrative as a sort of final plea to humans, asking us to consider the speech of the nonhumans with whom we live. Bruno Latour’s notion of “the terrestrial” provides a useful framework for approaching the parrot’s narrative, specifically in terms of the demand to come “down to earth”, engaging in the politics of human and nonhuman agents who all have something at stake. The parrot asks that we turn more attention to terrestrial concerns, in order to communicate with those who are already speaking to us.

Infrastructuring ageing: Theorizing non-human agency in ageing and technology studies

Scholars of ageing and technology are becoming increasingly interested in how technology and ageing can be seen as mutually constitutive, an in­terest that is beginning to form new research agendas, alliances and fields of their own. Different concepts have been used to theorise and analyse this relationship of mutual construction. This article explores a concept from Science and technology studies, which has not previously been put in direct relation to ageing, namely the concept of infrastructure. It pro­poses the notion of “infrastructuring ageing” as a theoretical-analytical approach for studying the mutual constitution of ageing and technol­ogy. This approach implies slightly new versions of, or attentions to, the non-human actor, agency and socio-technical transformation, and opens up to fresh ethnographic views on the social, material and techno-political transformations of ageing.

Human–animal conflicts: socio-philosophical aspects (on the example of the problem of Ophidism).

The subject of the study is the problem of venomous snake bites (ophidism), which is relevant for modern public health and accumulates a range of diverse social practices aimed at preventing or reducing the negative consequences of human contact with a non-human agent (a venomous snake). The problem of ophidism is considered as a special case of conflict between humans and animals, in which a typical scenario of such interactions is embodied, due to the increased anthropogenic impact on nature, which received a powerful impetus during the formation of the colonial system and reached its maximum expression in the XX - early XXI century in the context of the cumulative growth of mankind. The study uses a comprehensive methodology based on a comparative historical approach, comparative analysis of statistical information, socio-philosophical interpretation of the problem of ophidism, considered as a special case of conflict interaction between a person and non-human agents. The approach developed within the framework of Critical Animal Studies (CAS). The study shows the evolution of understanding of the problem of ophidism and its significance in the second half of the XX century - early XXI century, the formation of interdisciplinary optics, which made it possible to interpret a set of particular situations as a single phenomenon due to the specifics of human-nature interaction, taking into account socio-economic factors and as one of the challenges for global health. The conclusion is made about the change in the logic of constructing the agency of the non-human side of the conflict, affecting social activity aimed at preventing it, as well as the possible rejection of the understanding of ophidism as a holistic problem under the influence of other challenges to global health, primarily the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the photographic status of images produced by generative adversarial networks (GANs)

The text analyses the new images produced by artificial neural networks such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) from the perspective of photography and, more specifically, cameraless photography. The images produced by GANs are located within the wider framework of the impact of machine learning technologies on contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices. In the final section, the article focuses on the work of two artists who have explicity tackled the relations between GAN-generated images and the traditions of photography and cameraless photography, with their multiple intertwinings of human and non-human agencies: Mario Klingemann and Grégory Chatonsky.

The brand, the persona and the algorithm: How datafication is reconfiguring marketing work☆

Evidence suggests that datafication is bringing a potentially profound yet poorly understood transformation of marketing work. Most companies still struggle to adapt to the data deluge, which challenges the role of marketing inside an organization. This research uses a single case study to analyze how datafication is reshaping marketing work through the lens of sociomateriality and affordance theory. The findings shed light on the agency and imbrication of the persona, the brand and the algorithm together with managers and consumers. They reveal two actualized affordances obtained through datafication: fragmented consumer tracking and organic branding. This research contributes to sociomateriality and affordance theory by introducing a new type of agent, namely, agents of fiction, which are characterized by a symbolic and immaterial nature. This research also contributes to the marketing-as-practice perspective by providing an in-depth understanding of marketing work as a result of dynamic imbrications between human and nonhuman agents.

Towards Turing Test 2.0—Attribution of Moral Status and Personhood to Human and Non-Human Agents

Towards Turing Test 2.0—Attribution of Moral Status and Personhood to Human and Non-Human Agents

Affective stamps: the animating force of pilgrim stamps

ABSTRACT Taking cognisance of the recent theoretical concern with relational ontologies, this contribution explores the dynamic interplay between conceptions of religion, animism, and pilgrimage by focusing on the agency of pilgrim passports and stamps as an affective force to enhance our understanding of the idea of pilgrimage as materially grounded within wider relations of human and non-human agents. Drawing on an emergent body of literature that subscribes to the new material turn, I analyse pilgrimage walks, pilgrimage events, and pilgrimage entrepreneurship in Kent, England, as complex assemblages of people, things, places, and immaterial thought. The contribution thus foregrounds the interweaving of materials, potentials, and processes in which human and non-human agency, including pilgrim passports and stamps, may all be implicated in generating ‘enchantments’ that act as an affective or animating force in the revitalisation of pilgrimage routes, and the narratives, experiential, ethical, and conceptual formations they elicit in Kent and beyond.

A Posthuman Quest for Establishing Self-Image through Nature in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Virginia Woolf, in her highly experimental modernist novel The Waves (1931), depicts the psychological depth and texture of human experience through a series of fragmented and disjointed images, interior monologues and soliloquies, highlighting the feeling of loss, disillusionment, and brokenness. Throughout The Waves (1931), the characters strive to express themselves, and engage in a posthuman quest for a construction of a self-image through interactions with human and nonhuman life forms, and co-existence with the environment. This paper explores The Waves from a material posthumanist approach to offer a new perspective to Woolf’s understanding of the interface of nature and culture, self and the environment, the human and nonhuman agencies. This approach would be useful means to analyze the characters’ yearning for unification and their embodiment with nature, and explore the posthuman materiality of living and non-living beings that would help them redefine their shattered images and modern way of living.

Human Agency in Medieval Society, 1100–1450 by Ionuţ Epurescu-Pascovici

Epurescu-Pascovici makes strong arguments about individual human agency in medieval France and Italy but does not neglect Providence. He deploys five case studies based on different types of sources classified as ego-documents—self-narratives (autobiographies), cartularies (charters), livres de raison (personal cartularies), Tuscan ricordi and ricordanze (memoires, and account books), and vernacular advice manuals. Some well-studied texts also appear, like the ricordanze of the Florentine Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli and the advice book Le Ménagier de Paris, as well as the unpublished charters of an obscure lordship in France. Choosing these sources and not others reflects the author’s effort to expand “agency” beyond the elites and past politics. Other types of sources, like wills (classic ego-documents), or acts, like suicide (self-agency), would have brought women more directly into this account of human agency, but the case studies are admirable in their range—given the practical limitations.Epurescu-Pascovici takes a sophisticated methodological approach to agency and is well versed in the theories that he found most valuable for his work, mainly from sociology and anthropology rather than from political science or economics. The book’s interdisciplinary theoretical stance enables the author to explore his main question: How do ordinary individuals act effectively in this world? He is less interested in how people induce others to act for them. His sharp focus on ego-documents raises philosophical questions (of which the author is well-aware) about the differences between what people expect and what they get, but no irony enters this study. “Action theory,” an established field, requires that there is something outside the text to study, welcome news to most historians.Epurescu-Pascovici commendably avoids rehashing old debates about the medieval “rise of the individual,” striving instead to connect his medieval findings to the broader issues surrounding the rise of European modernity, a development that the Middle Ages probably affected. One of the most interesting findings concerns Providence, which to the author’s great credit he decided not to ignore, even though this title does not promise to include it. In the field of medieval history, some scholars condescend to mock gently or deprecate Providence, even as others pursue sectarian interests in a cloud of vacuous credulity.Surveying personal narratives, Epurescu-Pascovici finds two types of agency, human and providential. He suggests a pattern in which first impressions discerned natural or human causes, and retrospection later found the divine hand in action (34). Beyond this point, the philosophers and theologians take over the debate. “Hindsight,” however, is a subject that historians can study, and Epurescu-Pascovici prudently calls his conclusions tentative, inviting other scholars to confirm or reject his conjectures. They will.Aphrodisiacs, prayers, incantations, and prophetic dreams help to define the boundaries between human and non-human agency (animals do not feature in this book). Events like marriages, gift exchanges, and funerals involve contemporary actions as well as subsequent reflections (143). Morelli’s remarkable self-narrative contains examples of most of these topics; generations of historians have mined it to the point of wondering whether anything new remains to be found in it. Epurescu-Pascovici has carefully studied this text, as edited (twice) by Vittore Branca, to arrive at the sharp question, Was Morelli a person of faith? (183). Most historians (and believers) tend to take Morelli at his word in this matter. Epurescu-Pascovici’s astute analysis on this point is refreshing. He concludes that Morelli saw God in the big things, like war and death in childhood, but that social networks embodying human agency explained most of daily life. Whatever merit this distinction may have, it enables Epurescu-Pascovici to take an old text in new directions.The evidence assembled in this book supports persuasive arguments about the varieties of individual agency and religious experiences. By stressing social networks, Epurescu-Pascovici approaches the frontier of collective agency, but he does not cross it. People acting in groups or in social networks left behind classes of records that we might call “we-documents” (laws?). One of the features of modernity may well be the burgeoning of collective agency, alongside the self-agency so ably charted in this fine book.