‘PDOAAI (Peitho dreams of armor and Iynx)’ was accompanied with the following text by James Maguire

(De)cloaking Agencies: Gods, Animals, and Machines

Our actions are oftentimes mysterious, both to others, and even to ourselves. Our hearts fill, our bodies move, our minds reason. But the landscapes of these actions remain elusive, eerily familiar, yet decidedly strange. Desires, urges, needs, motives, affections swirl in a melange of apprehension, memory, and anticipation making competing claims upon, and giving various accounts of, the self. And while what can emerge is beautiful, iridescent even, our capacity to comprehend such action is oftentimes less incisive than our ability to evoke it. 

This has much to do with how we think about action, of how we conceive, frame, and hence figure the maelstrom of agencies that inform what we do. And while such figures matter, we should also be wary of them: they are tricksters, neither true nor false. Their magic lies in their ability to cloak; to form, obscure, hide, yet simultaneously reveal the contours of meaningful action. Such archetypical figures emerge at various moments in different times, in different places, for different peoples. 

In the time of Gods, the agencies of humans were circumscribed, constrained by cavernous entities, mischievously meddling in affairs of the heart, of politics, of tribe. Love was kindled, lives were extinguished, sacrifices were made. The God figure brazenly ‘acted-on’ subjects, usurping powers, riddling minds, distributing iniquitous justice. The proliferation of their agencies cowed the will of the human self in a world that was harsh, where redemption was rare, and capriciousness flourished. And although these times were the cradle of much to come, the enlightenment they foretold cloaked a particular brutalism. Little could be known, less could be achieved, and the proto-sovereign power of the deity reigned supreme.

In the time of Animals, Man ascended the throne of agency. While the Gods were discredited, their motif remained. Man, too, felt emboldened to ‘act-on,’ be it nature, the world, the other. The figure of Man was modern, his will strong, his genius apparent, ushering in the new agencies of Science and Technology. Such forces were not to be taken lightly, yet dark was their import: nuclear reactions, fossil capitalism, planetary ecocide. A vast ensemble of legitimizing ideologies adorned Man’s philosophical tabula rasa: liberalism, extractivism, colonialism. Be it indigenous populations, women, ethnic others, or even mountains, creeks, rivers, birds, and bees. All entities and species out of place, out of time, cloaked by the figure of Man. 

In the time of Machines, the subjectivities of people seem frail, their judgements biased, their hearts weak. Dreams of procedural realities take hold, the impulse to automate, optimize, iterate, is strong. The rarefied atmospheres of computation are valorised, the aesthetics of math adorned, the preponderance of numbers inflicted. All the while statistical inferences become new vectors for beauty, courage, even decency. What is knowable is mapped, sorted, filtered, categorized into apertures of minimalist ‘output’ thinking. What is unknown ceases to exist, as knowledge forms are frozen, complexities reduced and lives re-ordered. Ultra-rationalists, technofascists, crypto-libertarians remake institutions, obliterate alliances, decimate economies. But the agencies of the machine figure continue to ascend, sprawling and accelerating the planet over. ‘Acting-on’ the world at scale, in real time, elevating the formalized statistical visions of math to new heights, beyond the throne of Man, beyond Olympus. But even so, the others lament, ‘we are still here.’ But their cry is faint, muffled through the humming of energy-intensive algorithmic cages, where racks of digital skin see no colour, no gender, no race, no origin. Merely bathing in the purified waters of computational vision. 

What these vignettes invite us to see is the tendency of our literary technologies to over formalize agency. To conceptualize it through an optic that centralizes figures who ‘act-on’ the world, subsuming the agencies of others within their ambit while cloaking their sublimated desires: mastery, domination, liberation, extraction. But in forgetting the vast ensemble of others that constitute action in particular times and particular places, we stumble blindly through time, iterating the logics and mistakes of the past. And even while the figures of each age diverge from one another, they somehow remain the same. Not merely archetypical, but analogical, retaining a recognizable pattern through time. The Machine-figure appropriates the cloak of its antecedent Man-figure, who in turn appropriates the cloak of its antecedent God-figure. All ‘act-on’ the world, all assimilate and organize agencies towards modes of living that embolden progress, growth, innovation, burning the remnant fires of modernism while the ruins of the Anthropocene lie all around us. 

If we want ‘acting-on’ to be an ember on the pyre of history, maybe ‘acting-with’ can be the phoenix of its ashes: multiplying our figures, de-toxifying our motives, and de-cloaking our agencies. To ‘act-with’ a world of others is a means of widening and varying the constellation of agencies that count as part of what constitutes our actions. Think of the eco-historical erasures begotten at the hands of our cloaked figures: not only the ruinous plantations of slavery and the structural racisms of segregation, but also the uncounted hordes of pollinators, microbes, fungi, those invisiblized others without whom our fragile planetary ecosystems would crumble. ‘Acting-with’ reinserts these erased others back within the panoply of action. Think of this as an invitation from the trans-feminist-queer-black-afro-divergent-anthropocene. But such an invitation is pressing. Time is not with us. Tick tock goes the planetary clock. And all the while, the reactionaries are on the move, turning to machinic agencies cloaked in math to revivify the toxic male cultural hegemonies of old. But where can we turn? Shall we merely listen for the faint cry of those that are still here yet invisible or revalorize those out of place and out of time species as they labour into extinction? De-cloaking and ‘acting-with’ is one road, refiguring the maelstrom of agencies that inform our actions beyond the reach of anachronistic figures in our midst, recloaking them through the caring, chaotic embrace of the multitudes.

James Maguire, Ph.d. 

Associate Professor, Technologies in Practice, Center for Climate at ITU