UNDERSTANDING THE NONHUMAN AGENCY: 

THE CREATIVITY OF MATTER

If you google “agency,” you will find the meaning of the word as “the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment.” Here, to “act” in a given environment involves the ability to observe, communicate, respond to and modify the environment around oneself. From this respect, “agency” or agentic capacity is a form of creativity. In the section named “Creativity of Matter,” Serpil Oppermann points out that bacteria are talking to one another through chemical signaling molecules. This communication process, which is called “quorum sensing,” enables bacteria to communicate in “multilingual” and hence “detect the presence of other bacteria” (Material Ecocriticism 33).

Moreover, it allows bacteria to observe the environment and “response to changes occurring in the community” (33). It is through these essential steps (co-operative communication, adapting and making changes to the environment) that bacterium is able to get foods and survive; this acting-on-their-own-behalf-in-an-environment system illustrates the agentic capacity of bacteria. In fact, not only bacteria, all organisms (humans, animals, plants) and matter’s basic constituents (rocks, rain, etc.), subatomic particles (protons), also modify their environment and perform creativity (33). Creativity thus “locates agency as a property ‘inherent in nature itself’” (qtd. in ME 24). Following this perception, one can consider the world/reality we are living in as a “‘creative becoming,’” that everything exists in this universe is created in operative relation to others and that every matter owns its narrative agency (qtd. in ME 24). As Oppermann also notes, “narrative agency is a display of ‘nature’s literacy’ (Kirby, Telling 127), a poetic panorama of dynamism” (ME 30).

Understanding this non-humancentric perception is the key to reduce human oppression over the nonhuman animals and nature. As we, modern humans, often think that we are the most intelligent beings among all other species in the world and thus holding power to oppress and destroy other species for our own benefits. This hierarchal mindset continues to dominate one’s behavior, making one think that one is capable of living in this world without interacting with other species and nature. However, one should not forget that human bodies are actually colonized by a whole bunch of bacteria rather than ourselves (Bennett 120; qtd. in ME 26). In this respect, a human can be viewed as “an assemblage of microbes and other substances” (ibid). This example shows that we are incapable of isolating our bodies from other beings either it is in term of materiality or cultural psychology. Think of our cultures—the metaphors that we use in daily life, the poems, haiku, and songs—that we create throughout the history. None of these can be entirely constructed without getting inspiration from the natural world. After all, it is our mindsets that we should really look into and makeshift, as

[t]he image of the nonhuman world as inert, passive, and inanimate “feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption,” whereas acknowledging the vitality, creativity, and effectivity of nonhuman entities enables us to detect “a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies.” (Bennet ix; Oppermann emphasis 26)

To sum up, we should acknowledge that every living organism, even every non-living plant, holds its own narrative agency in the sense that it changes its surroundings by creating some sort of meaningful connection with other kinds of organisms. Somehow not all of these networks are visible to us, but this doesn’t mean that they do not exist. All we need to do is to try to observe their narrative agencies through studying their relations not only to ourselves but also to other beings as well. After all, our dependency on nature and animals leads us to understand that we are never beyond nature because we are part of nature.

Reference:

Oppermann, Serpil. “From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism.” Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014.