Latour Through the Eyes of a Child

Latour's ideas concerning the delegation to humans and nonhumans sent my mind racing backward, to an earlier time in my life when I encountered these elements of delegation and agency all at once. The way all these ideas converge on top of each other is important to understand the impact of shared agency in terms of these types of situations. In this case, it involves a revolving door--much the same as Latour's example.

At my childhood doctor's office, there were three entrances. One was a wide door built specifically to enable wheelchair access. Another was a manual door designed for foot traffic. The third door was an automatic revolving door with four panels through which a person could walk without touching (or contaminating) a doorknob or lever. I chose the third one most often, simply because I thought it was cool.

One unique feature of the revolving door was that while it was turning, it could also be forced to turn because there was a bar on each glass panel that could be grasped and pushed in case of emergency. My younger siblings and I would often use this to speed up the process of moving through to the other side. This is an example of shared agency that is totally dependent on situation. It gives the user ownership through an option, and it also gives the machine ownership through an opposite option.

By the same token, at some point in my youth, the doctor's office felt the need to put a sign outside the door urging people not to put their hands on the glass. While done mostly for appearance's sake, this sign also provides an example of shared delegation. On one hand, the sign's message causes a reaction from the user, giving it agency in this scenario. On the other hand, doesn't the creator of the sign--who crafted the message in a specific way--have some share in the agency because of the reaction the message elicits? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the whole concept, but it seems to me that following the trail of any nonhuman entity back in its existence will reveal the existence of a creator that conceived of the idea and gave it life. If that assumption is true, then all functions of the nonhuman entity can ultimately be traced back to him or her, giving some agency to the creative being.

This idea seems to go around and around like a merry-go-round in my mind, with very little chance of a definitive answer. I just thought about those early experiences and how each piece of the revolving door shares a little of the credit when discussing the idea of agency.