The Agency of Things

            In the beginning of Jane Bennet’s description of “thing power” she poetically begins with a list of seemingly commonplace objects.

            One large men’s plastic work glove

            One dense mat of oak pollen

            One unblemished dead rat

            One white plastic bottle cap

            One smooth stick of wood

Bennet notices these objects upon chance, when sunlight is reflected upon the surface of the workman’s glove, delineating the “thing” from its seemingly mundane environment. Her eye is then attracted to this peculiar grouping of things that seem to revert back and forth between simple forms of debris and the remnants of human activity. Undoubtedly, their classification as “debris” is simply a product of the surrounding environment, a gritty storm drain, but there is a higher potential to these things, which is continuously ignored by the passerby. These things persist as forms of nature by rotting and decaying, exuding energy and odor and chemical byproducts into the air. Therefore, the things that we often ignore as waste and debris ultimately enclose a potential force to affect our health, behavior, ideals etc. Over the years, the arts and sciences have taken two different approaches to investigating the agency of things over human life. In the arts, a conglomeration of things can inspire us to think of our personal or cultural relationship with the seemingly inanimate. In the sciences, papers are published that force us to consider how we use things or how we waste them. These different approaches force us to regard things as something more than simply the inanimate.

            Bennet’s odd assemblage of things reminded me of the work of Abraham Cruzvillegas, a Mexican sculptor renowned for his use of everyday objects to create visually stimulating installations. Cruzvillegas creates these installations based on the principle of “Autoconstrucción.” Autoconstrucción in Mexican culture refers to the construction of houses made by low-income families who often settle illegally in abandoned territories and build makeshift dwellings from found objects. In turn, these dwellings are constantly begin added to or changed by their inhabitants. Accordingly, Cruzvillegas uses objects that he finds in communities all around the world to reflect the common cultural of those places. However, these sculptures are haphazardly created to form asymmetrical and unstable structures, which leaves the viewer to openly interpret the piece.  In describing his work Cruzvillegas stated, “I wanted to join specific practices from contradictory contexts in order to make an unstable sculpture, both physically and conceptually, as it could be interpreted or watched as a result from a mixture of subjective experiences.”  (Art 21, 2001) Cruzvillegas touches on the universal human desire to relate the aesthetics of things to their own personal history, especially when looking at art. In addition, the artist manipulates these things in such a way that they lose their original purpose or identity and become transformed into an entirely new concept.

            Another body of work that rectified the “thing” were the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. Beginning in the early 1900s, Duchamp began to challenge the idea of “retinal art” or art made only to please the eyes, by extrapolating things from their original environment and putting them in a museum setting. One of Duchamp’s first readymades “Bicycle Wheel” was one of the first kinetic sculptures, creating a kind of non functional machine. The bicycle wheel is mounted on a stool as if it is meant to be the focus of attention, and reflects a sense of motion and energy associated with machinery. Duchamp once stated, “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.”DuChamp, Marcel. ”The Creative Act”. 1957. Here, Duchamp modestly submits his work to the public’s interpretation. The viewer’s acknowledgment of the ‘inner qualification’ of the work is ultimately out of Duchamp’s control, and what determines this qualification is the unique interaction that each person has with the thing or the assemblage of things. Duchamp’s ultimate goal was to revolutionize the definition of art itself by exploiting the power of the ordinary “thing.” Seeing an everyday thing stripped of its use value and put into a different setting invokes a sense of confusion in the viewer. This confusion stems from our desire to place all the non-human entities into categories. For example, animals and things are defined by us as the “other” but only under certain conditions. When they are removed from their usual environments and placed into new ones, we are forced to come up with new explanations for their unfamiliar existence.

            From a more scientific perspective, things in our current technological age such as food, electronics, and general consumer have a continuous power over our behavior and lifestyle. Advertising is specifically targeted to reflect our unique evolutionary biology as humans thus influencing our desire for consumer goods. Between males and females, certain aspects of our evolved psyche are triggered by advertisements to make one believe that they “need” the product. For instance, throughout the evolutionary history of animals and humans, hormonally induced competition among males is crucial in establishing dominant status and consequentially improving their reproductive success by attracting members of the opposite sex.  In accordance, testosterone is theorized to also affect male consumer behavior and financial risk taking because the accumulation of finance is considered a characteristic of high status and male dominance in the modern age. Studies that support this theory show that men’s testosterone levels increase when participating in the finance markets or when buying a luxury item. The advertising industry can utilize this theorized trait in males to associate their products with high status and increased attractiveness to females. For example, the 2012 Fiat scorpion commercial features a man looking at an attractive woman and leans in to kiss her, when suddenly he realizes that it is actually a car. This kind of juxtaposition between the advertised thing and sexual reward is thus common in advertisements for many different products and can be targeted at both men and women based on our generalized desires.           

            Bennet also discusses the relationship between things and human biology in her chapter “stem cells and the culture of life.” In this chapter, the concept of vitalism is discussed, which is to stay that non living entities are distinct from living organisms because the living contain the “spark of life” or in other words, a soul. The theory of vitalism, although rejected by mainstream science, is essentially still used by some politicians and scientists to establish the moral boundaries of scientific experimentation. On the other hand some other vitalists believe that the study of the non-living will ultimately uncover the ontology of the living. To quote the German biologist and philosopher Hans Driesch:

            There is the material world as the world of chance, but there is also a world of            
             form or order that manifests itself in certain areas of the material world, namely,            
             in the biological individual, and probably, in another way, in phylogeny and            
             history also; there may be formlike constellations in what we call the organic.

            (Vibrant Matter, 83)

I personally agree with this form of vitalism, because I am very interested in the used of model organisms to uncover certain aspects of human biology. Driesch himself experimented with sea urchin development and discovered that sea urchin embryos can display indeterminate cell cleavage, similar to the development of twins in human embryology. Moreover, a shared evolutionary history allows us to examine conserved genetic, metabolic, and disease pathways in a variety of different animals and even microscopic organisms. For instance, our genetic material can be inserted into E. coli bacteria and expressed in their genome to reveal the specific functions of our genes and how they are regulated. Therefore, because all the matter that currently exists on this earth arose from the same evolutionary origin, it is logical that the study of animals and of things would relate to our own biological development. If we were to place ourselves in a higher order, perhaps as closer to god than any other being on planet, than the study of biology would be lacking in essential information.

            I was also very interested in Bennet’s chapter on “Edible Matter” and looking at what we eat as having control over our mood and lifestyle. The problem of obesity in America undoubtedly displays the agency of food and nutrition on human life. Fast food although affordable and easily accessible is also highly addictive due to the increased content of salts, sugars, and fats. Certain studies using rats have actually demonstrated that when their calorie intake was doubled, reward systems in their brains were manipulated so that increased food consumption was needed to satisfy their daily appetite (Time Magazine, “Can Eating Junk Food Really be an Addiction?”). This same kind of manipulation, caused by inhibited neurotransmitter uptake is also seen in drug and alcohol addition.

            Therefore, often people who become addicted to fast food lose agency over what they eat and how they eat. Eating becomes a kind of unconscious activity, and one disassociates with the evolutionary purpose of eating, which is to provide energy. Over the course of our evolutionary history, food became more readily available from the development of agriculture to the mass production of food in factories. These changes in the production of food prompted the risk of not only over-eating, but also eating unhealthy or synthetic foods. As a consequence, the need to survive and be healthy became less of a driving force and we have evolved to do things that we know will negatively affect our health.

            In David Sloan Wilson’s book “Evolution for Everyone” the author compares our desire for fast food to a misguided evolutionary instinct, “Our lust for fat, sugar, and salt makes great sense in an environment where these substances were in perennial short supply, but putting a fast food restaurant on every corner is like lighting up the sky for inland baby sea turtles.” (Evolution for Everyone, 55) The reference to baby sea turtles alludes to the behavior of these animals to be drawn to the sea by moonlight after hatching. However, the unnatural lighting of coastal neighborhoods have caused them to become lost inland. Humans on the other hand, know that there is a problem with the way they consume, but we are simply unable to solve it even with our willpower and higher intelligence. In this sense, our rational mind cannot control the agency that non-living fat, sugar, and salt has over our body. I am not trying to say that I do not experience these unconscious cravings myself, I too have frequently experienced the desire to overeat not necessarily because I am hungry but because I am stressed out, unhappy, or just because I feel unable to stop.

            In conclusion, my personal relationship with non-living things is principally influenced by the arts and sciences. I was introduced to modern art at a very young age because my mother is an art collector and curator. In my house there are a lot of things that are considered art but could also be ordinary things in a different setting. For example, we have a pair of children’s leather shoes in my living room, which sit on a pedestal. For a while I questioned the artistic value of the shoes but by reading about the agency of things in this class, it has become clearer to me. Sometimes the artist has no major role in how one will interpret their work, and it is really up to the viewer to disregard their own notions of what art is and simply look at the thing as having its own identity and history. As my interests in the sciences started to develop, I also started looking at the thing has having energy and force over human life. I started to look at the relationship between humans and things through an evolutionary lens, and recognized that things do in fact have agency over our every day lives. Therefore, while many people may disagree with me, I think that it is important to keep studying animals and non living things to further our knowledge human diseases and behaviors. If we keep ignoring the agency of things, our environment and health will deteriorate by blind consumption and waste. Thus, it is up to people to recognize the power of even the unnoticeable things, that they might pass by everyday. With that in mind, I will end with my own list of seemingly commonplace objects that I encountered on the sidewalk while walking home:

            One broken pencil

            One adidas sneaker

            One empty beer can

            One crushed potato chip

            One dead radio





An  interesting interview with Abraham Cruzvillegas:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ5Ca9PlgSw