Polyagency – in-between the virtual and the actual. Polyagentive archaeology, Part IV
Originally, the notion of polyagency pertained to the causative capabilities of materialities and intangibilities in more or less a humanocentric way, similar to Gell’s agency concept (Normark 2004a, 2004b). However, now I see it as a phase of becoming and the word agency here relates to something active. Poly means many, and both words together relate to the plurality of becomings that any actualized entity generates.
Polyagency begins in the intersection of two actualizations/entities that share a milieu, either with a human being or another materiality. This is not a dialectic relationship. What is virtually inside these actualizations/entities is not unimportant, but the actualizations can be aligned to connect and create a plane of coexistence. Polyagency is how these two actualizations transform. The becoming is how the encounter between entities releases them from their actualizations, objects, entities, systems, series or organisms. In this process, the whole is transformed (Grosz 1995:134).
The short version is that polyagency is a collective term for intensive processes between actualized entities whose virtualities generate a multitude of transformations. Polyagency consists of four interrelated concepts that describe inseparable phases of becoming: the in-between, individuation, stratification and the time-shelter. These intensive processes also occur in the formation of actual entities where there is no human relation. Polyagency is used to explain how matter changes in encounters. These processes begin as a body without organs (plane of immanence) and ends in the actualized strata of matter and social interaction, a body with organs arranged as a rhizome.
