Definition of Agency

What is Agency?

Agency is the power of anything to affect and be affected by anything else. Things - objects, people, events all shape us and everything else. We are not the only things with agency or the power to produce changes.

Agency is always relational; it is coming out of the holistic emergent dynamics of an assemblage of things. 

Too often, we think of ourselves as being the sole agents in a world of passive stuff. And from this ethos, we have modeled creativity as being focused on having novel ideas and then making them real, which is to say, imposing them on the world. 

But the world is not passive. It is active. It has agency. Mere “stuff” has agency. Go ahead and try to impose a design on a piece of wood with a knife. It will not happen. As you hold a knife and meet the wood with intentions, the situation will teach you, and as it teaches you, it will form you anew. Muscles and bones will grow. Embodied habits will come into being. New concepts and tools will develop. 

Who Has Agency in Craetivity?

So, Who has agency in this creative situation? Is it the maker? Is it the knife or the piece of wood? Perhaps this is the wrong question?

We like to think of our individual selves as having agency—that we’re independent “agents” who, when we think of some action, can then will our bodies do it with the necessary “stuff.”

But creativity does not work this way. 

Bruno Latour & Michel Callon define an agent as “any element which bends space around itself, makes other elements depend upon itself, and translates their will into a language of its own.”

What is interesting about this definition is that anything could fulfill this definition — a thing, a person, an environment, an event, or even a concept.

While agent & agency are related, they are not the same thing. Agency, which is the power to affect and be affected, is always the property of a situation. When we carve the wood with a knife, we are forming and being formed by the situation. 

Thus, agency is ultimately an emergent property irreducible to a person—or any one thing. It is a relational property. It does not have its source in your head, nor is it something you possess.

Features of Emergent Agency

1. Is different from—but nothing other than the components + relations that give rise to it.

2. The relations as they integrate into a stable holistic practice give rise to an emergent enabling of novel different propensities.

3. These emergent propensities create/shape and limit the possibilities of the system & additionally transform the component parts & relations.

What are the Compon ents of a Creative Agency?

What components make up situations? Things, environments, histories, habits, practices, tools, bodies, affodances... Too often, especially in relation to creativity, we focus on the content of our minds and a rational decision making process as the source of our agency. But, in doing so, we ignore the very material things and relations that give rise collaboratively to “our” actual agency  and the emergent propensities of the situation. 

But we cannot stop here. Situations are not random assemblies of things; they are always organized in some fashion. Situations are configured, and these somewhat stable configurations are what is creative—enabling and stabilizing (or constraining) a set of propensities.

As people engaged in creative practices, we need to slow down and actively come to recognize the active nature of stuff—the wood, the knife, our bodies, our environment, others, and our histories. 

As we attune ourselves to the active power of the things we are intra-dependent upon in all acts of making, we can come to know agency as an emergent property of material engagement.

This means that how we do things with things—this is what matters deeply to all creative practices.

Stuff—matter, things, objects, practices, concepts—none of these are passive. None of these merely bend to our will.

“Agency is not something given, but something realized. In short, as far as agency is concerned, what an entity is doesn’t really matter; what does matter is what the entity becomes and where it stands in the network of material engagement. The important question is not “What is agency?” (as a universal property or substance). The important question is, rather, “When and how is agency constituted and manifested in the world?” (Lambros Malafouris).

For a creative practice, we need to actively consider

1. The habitual patterns of how we think emerges from, and are maintained by a thick tangle of relational things, environments, practices, concepts, and embodiments. And thus, to change how we think requires changing what we do and things that make up our worlds. New ideas will not emerge from the same conference room as the old ideas.
2. The agency of this tangle of things—the configuration productively creates, enables, and stabilizes (constrains) propensities in new and creative ways.
3. We have to let go of our anthropocentric biases: “the social universe is not human-centered but activity centered, & activity is a hybrid state of affairs. Agency and intentionality are not the innate property of humans; they are the emergent properties of material engagement.”
4. To understand why we think and act in certain patterns, we cannot look just inward, we need to consider the agential role of things and environments.

How Does a New Model of Agency Affect Invention?

The classical way we tell the stories of great inventions and the emergence of new creative practices, is to talk exclusively about the people involved, their ideas, and their struggles. But almost nothing is said about the objects, materials, tools, and environments involved. Equipment of all kinds has surprising powers to shape outcomes and plays a fundamental role in innovation. What do we mean by “powers”? 

Put simply we mean that things shape us. Contemporary studies of cognition have shown that the objects (and environments) we use, fundamentally shape and transform our thinking. 

Tools and their use rewire our brains, change our muscles and skeletons, remake our organs, make new patterns of thought, change our sense of self, and as Marshall McLuhan argued “leave no part of us, or our culture, untouched or unchanged.” 

To be human is to use things — lots of things, and these things – and environments – that we make and then use, change us. 

Objects don’t merely support or extend existing human capacities but fundamentally transform us: we are what we use. 

Critical to innovation is that we recognize that the things we make in turn make us. We are not merely making things that solve problems but we are always making new things that change us and our surrounding environment to such a degree that new worlds emerge. 

Examples of Agency

Smartphones have transformed us extending our brains memory from inside our heads to on the phone (phone numbers are a great example.)

A less obvious example of agency, but perhaps more profound are the tools that we seldom notice such as our alphabet. 

Creativity is more than ideas or reducible to the . We must turn to things as our partners in experimentation and invention: Making is thinking. 

See: Affordances, Emergence, Feedforward, Assemblage, Enaction, Creating Enabling Configurations, Sense-Making, Individuation, Affordances

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