On the Issue of Agency

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In writing about nature in an urban setting, Henri Lefebvre argued in his 1968 book, The Right to the City, that the modern city should include all the qualities people seek in their recreational escapes outside the city. However, he simultaneously suggests that the city itself should reflect the virtues of the natural world, while also admitting that human agency destroys nature by converting it into a commodified resource.

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This reduction of the natural world is echoed by Martin Heidegger’s concept of enframing, by which he argues that modern technologies, including architecture, fundamentally transform our perception of the natural world, obscuring its true nature and instead framing it through an anthropocentric lens, where it appears as a resource for human use.

In a similar vein, Giorgio Agamben expands on Michel Foucault’s theory of the apparatus by defining it as “anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.” Crucially, he identifies that every apparatus produces a particular subject with a subjective point of view through which the world seems unquestionably aligned with the actions afforded by the specific apparatus in question.

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Architecture, however, is a uniquely situated apparatus. Not only does the architect design urbanity, but the urban apparatus also directs the architect’s choices, producing an effect that is not linear but instead cyclical and self-reinforcing.

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As the apparatus primarily responsible for the establishment of anthropocentric space, architecture and the city seemingly normalize the exploitation of the natural world through enframing, while simultaneously orienting human agency toward the perpetuation of exploitative behaviors. These factors corrupt human design agency, complicating Lefebvre’s original assumption that a new form of urbanity even could include the virtues of the natural world.

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To escape the cycle of detrimental human agency, a new urbanity must be formulated by living agents beyond humans – architectural entities whose presence might displace anthropocentric norms. Walter Benjamin explores the presence of objects through the aura, writing that the “experience of the aura... rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between inanimate or natural objects and human beings. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.”

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As called for by Jane Bennett in her book, Vibrant matter, autonomous auratic entities might serve to “loosen our attachments to the figure of a unitary self and instead give more recognition to the impersonal forces circulating within and around us,” reorienting our understanding of nature. This thesis is a speculative design exploration of these auratic, non-human agents, and a demonstration of how they induce a new human subjectivity.

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Formal Subversion

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To subvert the formal and material meaning of anthropocentric technologies, used to construct the entities, kit-bashing methods are an appropriate approach. Dipesh Chakrabarty points out in The Climate of History that, whether intentionally or not, nature-exploiting technologies are normalized at an extremely young age. Chakrabarty writes: “I see in a neighborhood park a child unselfconsciously walking around an earthmoving machine and then see the same child moving sand in a sand pit with the help of miniature versions of the same machinery – Anthropocene toys!” Recombining this machinery in a way that is not productive for human use challenges expectations of efficiency and calls human agency into question.

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To expose the negative consequences obscured by the apparatus of the city, the entities each exhibit and power themselves through different human technologies. A creature tethered to existing human infrastructure would cripple its ability to function independently, and as Baruch Spinoza described: “each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its own being.” The three creatures explored here subvert solar, wind, and hydroelectric power sources to force human agents to confront the negative consequences of their own technology.

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