Traditionally understood as the capacity of human actors to act and influence their surroundings, agency has long been regarded as an exclusively human quality, a form of power distinct to human autonomy. “Modern humans” have historically obscured this multiple forms of agencies by maintaining the binary opposition of Nature/Culture, entrenching object/subject distinctions.
However, agency extends beyond humans, distributed across the network of both human and non-human actors. In the Anthropocene, we can no longer view nature as a passive backdrop for human agency; it must be recognized as an active, dynamic subject in its own right. Agency is not a unilateral power from a single side but rather shared, emerging from the interactions between various entities. It is the process of mediation, the relational redistributions across subjects, whether animate or inanimate.
To reset ourselves within these intersubjectivities – from matters of fact to matters of concern – we, as Earthbound, must recognise the active roles of human without eliminating the myriad sources of agency that we co-inhabit with. This collective, where humans and non-humans exchange properties, underscores the need for a politics rooted in a common world that is progressively composed through these interactions which is required by the establishment of cosmopolitics. Demanding the recognition of the multiplicity of agencies open towards divergent futurities.