This work addresses agency within the extensions of spatial organisation; understanding how bio-power and technology operate within biology and politics.
How can you consider agency in a space you are a participant within? Before considering the bio-political dynamics of agency within a space, I want to strip it back to the act of walking and what it means to walk through a space semantically, considering the role of language in relation to agency. Reflective verbs are where the agent and the patient are the same things, with the action being “reflected back to the subject”. According to Khalfa (1999), Spinoza uses the word pasearse, which in ancient Spanish is the verb meaning “to walk oneself”. The self-reflexive verb presents an action where the agent and the patient are indistinguishable through univocality (1). Spinoza used the Latin equivalent si visitare, “to visit oneself”, and further exemplified its form with a singularity “to constitute oneself as visiting”. Spinoza talks about pasearse concerning the vertigo of immanence that can happen when thinking about self-constitution and self- manifestation of Being; Being as pasearse (1). Immanence, in contradiction to transcendence, is to be entirely within, from Latin immanere, “to dwell in, remain” (2). The finitude of immanence phenomenologically
with pasearse directly affects our sense of agency within a space and how we relate to the material world, considering the notion of time within immanence.
Two concepts pertain to a sense of agency in Creative Evolution (1907) by Henri Bergson; duration and dissociation. Duration was for Bergson to pose questions of free will and evolution by considering the role of time in psychological and biological processes (3). The Latin name for duration is durare meaning “to run forward”. The intransitive being “to last” and the transitive being “to bear” or endure (4). Duration is “thought through qualitative multiplicity rather than quantitative multiplicity”. This is where it is based on quality rather than quantity; it is heterogeneous rather than a juxtaposition. Qualitative multiplicity is temporal and defines the duration based on difference (5). Dissociation was a response to biology where dissociation in biology is the division of labour in higher organisms. Dissociation in the context of evolution to Bergson is separated into two main lines. Where a being both organises (its environment) and is organised (biologically). The interplay between activity and passivity lends itself as a continuous tension to Bergson (3). Both of these concepts would then be seminal to his theory Elan Vital, also understood as a creative impulse. Elan Vital is a question of self-organisation and spontaneous morphogenesis. Morphogenesis comes from two Greek words morphê (shape) and genesis (creation). Morphogenesis is one of the three fundamental aspects of developmental biology as well as the control of cell growth and cellular differentiation. It is the shaping of an organism and the differentiation of cells, tissues, and organs, and the development of the organ systems according to the genetic “blueprint” of the growing embryo and environmental conditions (6). Morphogenesis can also take place in a mature organism in cell culture or inside tumor cell masses. Bergson calls this process of cell division or division of labour in higher organisms dissociation. The biological process of morphogenesis is then applied to duration in the sense that there is a set of cells that exist in the present. Simultaneously there is a ‘genetic code’ or ‘blueprint’ that has a very real effect on how that cell moves, looks and goes forward.
Agency in the context of political technology: Preciado considers biology and semantics in thinking about our political agency with technology. Similarly to the process of morphogenesis, where the ‘genetic code’ affects how the cell exists, technology is developed affecting modes of production and productivity. Preciado discusses the sense of agency that is removed when technologies become naturalised in the way that a ‘genetic code’ becomes a script of how the cell is to behave. A question that he poses to re-inscribe a sense of agency is “what are the technologies that I am using and that are constituting me as a subject?” (7).
The panopticon is an example of an architecture that was developed as a mode of subjugation and performance control; also considered a political technology. This architecture was conceptualised by Samuel Bentham in the 18th century to maximise productivity in universities. His concept was actualised in Russia however never made it any further. His Brother Jeremy Bentham decided to implement this concept to prison systems with a social function; for humans themselves to become the object of control (8). The design allowed for all prisoners to be viewed from a central viewing tower without a guard present. The inmates wouldn’t be able to tell if they were being watched or not, but assumed they were. The design was built as a political technology that was implemented globally both within factories and prisons (8). Preciado describes these architectures of power as exoskeletons; understanding the effect of the implicit power structures prescribed in institutions. Depending on your position, you have a different kind of agency. Preciado also talks about the abstraction of the eye that is apparent within the panopticon structure, where the idea of the eye is present for disciplinary control (7). This idea of the abstracted eye lent itself to surveillance culture where the eye is placed in the realm of technology; technology being omnipresent. As the concept of the abstracted eye was utilised as a political technology with the panopticon, public executions utilised the presence of the public eye within capital punishment. Public executions were preferred for deferring the polis, as well as its entertainment value. Capital punishment is still carried out in 54 countries, whereas 108 countries have abolished the practice (9). Public executions in places like France, England and America were carried out up until the early 19th century, when the spectacle of the event started getting out of hand. In France people started wiping up the blood of a serial killer for souvenirs (10), and in America 20,000 people came to see the last public execution (11). “The preoccupation with productivism has characterised so much parochial Western discourse and practice seems to have hypertrophied into something quite marvelous; the whole world is remade in the image of commodity production” (12). The commodification of the body is seen through power and object relations for productivism; death as entertainment, fear and loyalty in the polis.
In beginning to understand the naturalisation of political technologies, Donna Haraway's texts Cyborg Manifesto and The Promise of Monsters helps provide a mind map of these ideological changing structures. Haraway describes nature as a topos, a commonplace. “Nature is a topic of public discourse on which much
turns, even the earth” (12). Haraway states that determinism in both biology and technology is only one ideology that connects human life to either the animal or the machine. It is the cyborg that transgresses both those boundaries and what we consider nature (13). Where organic and mechanical parts collide, “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid machine of organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (13). The understanding of nature as a commonplace allows for agency to be an individual or collective strategy of the physical and imagined. The same applies to the idea of the cyborg as not just a physical image of a human and machine but an imagined space where animal, human and machine co-exist.