Material+Agency+(Banks)

Material Agency refers to the ability of inanimate objects to influence human social actors and society in general. It is a controversial concept that many authors have attempt to explain through various theories. A few examples of material agency include:
 * //Trash cans placed in the dining area of a McDonalds implies that customers are meant to throw away their own garbage.//
 * //Emails from a pen pal in Ghana are routinely identified as spam by an algorithm.//
 * //An iPhone's spell checking software routinely replaces "shit" with "shot".//
 * //The "dirty joints" of a bubble chamber prevent the detection of sub-atomic particles.//

The biggest difference between the various theories on material agency is the degree of intentionality attributed to the inanimate object. The debate surrounding material agency is closely linked to the concept of Nonhuman Agency, which has been taken up by those interested in interspecies ethnography.

=Material Agency in Major Schools of Thought=
 * Social Construction of Technology (SCOT)-** SCOT theorists frequently ask the question, "X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things, it is not inevitable." At the heart of this sort of argument, is the idea that material objects, as they are, are shot through with social considerations other than "objective" design and innovation. Wiebe Bijker is a founder of SCOT and continues to publish in this genre. One of his most recent articles on water management systems makes the claim that cultural differences in engineering professions in different countries produces physically different technologies. The politics of any given country, has a strong influence on what kind of expertise is brought to bear on issues of water management. In short, "Things are thick with politics."


 * Actor Network Theory (ANT)-** ANT theorists are much more interested in the connections between things and people, and the effects these connections produce, than the things themselves. Most authors that deploy ANT in their writing, explicitly use the same language to talk about human and nonhuman actants. John Law describes this as a generalized symmetry applying, "to ontology, to the different kinds of actors in the world." For Law, individual material objects do not hold much value as a unit of inquiry.He notes,

//"An actor is always a network of elements that it does not fully recognize or know: simplification or ‘black boxing’ is a necessary part of agency."//

He later goes on to clarify:

//"Prison walls work better if they are part of a network including guards and penal bureaucracies, while knotted bed-sheets or the sheer passage of time will subvert them. As with Bentham’s panopticon, in the end it is the configuration of the web that produces durability. Stability does not inhere in materials themselves."//


 * The Mangle-** a lesser-known but highly adaptive school of thought, utilizes a performative analysis outlined in Andrew Pickering's The //Mangle of Practice// (1995). Pickering argues that when a scientist is formulating hypotheses and building experiments to test them, the researcher is met with resistance from nature. This can come in the form of "dirty joints" (see example above) or an ineffective environmental conservation law. The resistance is met with an accommodation. That accommodation can take many forms, but only one is chosen. Similar to the statements made by SCOT theorists, another science is possible. But unlike SCOT or ANT, the mangle helps us realize the power of path dependence and technological lock in. E.g. Once scientists start building particle accelerators it is very difficult to pursue anything other than high-energy physics.

Dawn Coppin's chapter in //The Mangle in Practice// (2008) neatly summarizes some of the most influential philosophical writing on the subject in the past decade:

//"Derrida's (2003) belated foray into animal studies in which Derrida asks why humans say they have agency rather than addressing the arguments that nonhumans do not. It is perhaps more useful to examine thew ays in which agency is expressed through relating to one another. Karen Barad proposes the notion of "intra-action" whereby it takes two or more things to create action, and it is not possible to subtract one thing that will retain its agency outside the relationship."//

=The Politics of Technological Artifacts= In the second chapter of //The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology// Langdon Winner asks the question "Do artifacts have politics?" This question still provokes debate among STS scholars and philosophers of technology. Winner asserts that "machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions to efficiency and productivity and their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority" (P.19). Winner's philosophy of technology is couched in the previous work of Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul. "Advances" in technology have not necessarily changed society, (as Mumford and Ellul have argued) but modern societies have changed their their relationship to technologies. Ellul claims that "technique" or, the method of efficiently achieving ends, has always been a part of but this tendency has been kept in place by stronger forces of nature such as religion or morality. It was only after technique gained prominence in society, that the industrial revolution was politically, economically, and socially possible. For Mumford, modern industrial nations are facing the "third wave" of the technic. The first two were efforts towards standardizing processes and increasing production for the needs wants and desires of state societies. But the third wave works in the opposite direction, causing social systems to conform to the dictates of technological systems.

Winner demonstrates the ability of technologies to enforce politics using the (apocryphal? ) story of Robert Moses' Long Island Expressway. As Winner describes it, the expressway was built to service the newly opened Jones Beach. Access to Jones Beach was very difficult without a car. Buses (and the poorer, darker population that used them) could not get to Jones Beach because the bridges spanning the expressway were built too low for the tall buses. The bridges, by preventing buses from using the expressway, are enacting the politics embedded within them. Bijker makes a similar argument, from a SCOT perspective, when he talks about Dikes and Dams that are "thick with politics." Technology, by and through its material properties, exerts material agency. This kind of agency is both intended and unintended. Moses' bridges seem to be an intended kind of racism. But when Google's programers write algorithms to prevent Nigerian email scams, and those algorithms end up flagging all of your emails from Ghana as a phishing scam, unintended racism can occur. One of the more common forms of material agency is the force of centralization of production. Winner gives the example of mechanical tomato harvesters that only work in very large farms. Consequently, commercial tomato farming has become much more centralized as farmers seek to gain the economic benefits of mechanical tomato harvesters.

Steve Woolgar and Geoff Cooper (1999) contend that the bridges over the Long Island Expressway are actually tall enough to let buses go underneath, but it does not diminish the instructive nature of the example or Winner's philosophy. Instead, the story becomes an urban legend of sorts, used to organize people and ideas in such a way that Winner's philosophy is more understandable.