Leseprobe

9 distributed ‘in relational networks’ 14 or ‘art nexuses 15 that may constantly change. It ‘resides’—as Latour put it himself—‘in the blind spot in which society and matter exchange properties.’ 16 Action does not merely rely on a single actor who intentionally uses things to act on passive objects. Rather, it implies situations inwhich humans become entangled with non-human entities. Therefore, Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris have emphasized that we should be ‘more concerned with understanding agency as a situated process, rather than debating what or who is or is not an agent.’ 17 Current developments in the humanities offer a good basis to do so. Several approaches fromdifferent disciplinary contexts share the common objective of overcoming traditional definitions that trace agency back to causal relations between human intentions and events. Developed mostly independently from each other, these new approaches highlight phe- nomena that effectively codetermine the situations inwhich agency is produced, but which were hitherto underestimated or dismissed and condemned as idolatry, primitivism or fetishism. They throw light on factors that are different from the involved subjects and objects but nevertheless are indispensable for performing specific actions. The theory of affordances, recent research on ‘cultural techniques’ as well as practice theories, tomention only a few of the relevant approaches, show a shared interest in leaving behind the sub- ject-object-dichotomy by exploring the relations and networks in which actions are situ- ated. In doing so, these approaches prove to be highly attentive to largely neglected factors and to the potential relevance of contingencies for the production of agency. By the neologism affordance James J. Gibson has conceptualized offerings or action possibilities in the environment of human actors that are not necessarily identical to specific functions of the thing concerned. One of Gibson’s key examples is an object that may be used as a seat without being constructed for this purpose: ‘If an object that rests on the ground, has a surface that is itself sufficiently rigid, level, flat, and extended, and if this surface is raised approximately at the height of the knees of the human biped, then it affords sitting-on.’ 18 Focussing on action possibilities , Gibson has not attributed agency to objects that exhibit affordances, nevertheless he has underlined that this perspective cuts across traditional distinctions between subject and object or actor and environment: ‘The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the envi- ronment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complemen- tarity of the animal and the environment.’ 19 ra’s Hope , 1999, p. 190.  17 Knappett andMalafouris, ‘Material and Nonhuman Agency,’ 2008, p. XII.  18 Gib- son, ‘The Theory of Affordances,’ 1977, p. 68. See also: Hodder, Entangled , 2012, especially pp. 48–50.  19 Gib- son, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception , 1979, p. 127. See also: McGrenere and Ho, ‘Affordances,’ 2000 [http://graphicsinterface.org/proceedings/gi2000/gi2000-24/ ; DOI 10.20380/GI2000.24 (last accessed 3March 2018)]: ‘By cutting across the subjective-objective barrier, Gibson’s affordances introduce the idea of actor-environment mutuality, the actor and the environment make an inseparable pair.’