7 April

Latour and Tarde Thursday! The world isn't made of stuff. 'Matter'. It's made of agencies, actors. It's alive. Even atoms aren't stuff, their properties change in every interaction. A simple nail is an agent too, not matter. It behaves differently depending on how we interact with it. We came to believe in matter because some interactions are longer-lasting than others, creating the illusion of something unchanging. But everything is interaction between agents. To define anything, human or non-human, alive or inert, you have to list its properties. Those properties come from interactions (e.g. me banging the nail), and change with the interactions. Heating a nail creates entirely different properties. Listing the properties gradually defines who (everything is a who) you're dealing with. Each agent has infinite potential to be other things, in interaction with other agents.