Nonhumans

Definition

Nonhumans, in Latour's actor-network theory, are the nonhuman actants — objects, animals, technologies, regulations, materials — that participate in social life as actively as humans do. Against the humanist assumption that only humans have agency, Latour's "principle of symmetry" requires taking "position in the middle of events, paying attention to both humans and nonhumans simultaneously." For architecture, this is a decisive shift: a building is not the product of a human designer imposed on passive matter, but an assemblage in which steel, concrete, building codes, climate, and users all act. The nonhuman turn grounds architecture's engagement with the agency of materials, the "spacing" of built environments, and the recognition that buildings "facilitate the production of social relations" (Yaneva) as much as they are produced by them.

Key Thinkers

• Bruno Latour — nonhumans as active participants; the principle of symmetry.
• Albena Yaneva — nonhumans in architecture: the socio-technical study of design.

Related Concepts

• Hybrids — the mixtures of humans and nonhumans that modernity denied.
• Actor-Network Theory (ANT) — the method that follows nonhuman actants.
• Posthumanism — the philosophical current that de-centers the human.

Source Support

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the Deleuzian scope register: desire "is immanent to everyday life and not limited to the human world. The desire of a plant for light and water or a wasp for an orchid is not fundamentally different from the desire to live in a decent house" (p. 14); territoriality's ethological range — "The territory is first of all the critical distance between two beings of the same species: Mark your distance … Don't anybody touch me, I growl if anyone enters my territory" (D&G quoted, p. 17), "from the rhythms of the urinating dog to nationalism" (p. 17); and the settlement's mixed assemblage — the kampung's river fisheries, the deer park in Merdeka Square, loose parts of the non-human city (timber, tiles, water). The non-human here is not the Latourian actant but desire's pre-human substrate — the ontology that makes place an assemblage rather than a human artefact. See assemblage, becoming. Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
• Latour for Architects — nonhumans as active participants in social life.
• Swimming upstream (Satterfield & Swackhamer 2018) — the nonhuman construction crew: Neri Oxman and MIT Media Lab's Mediated Matter Group "do more than manage construction; they give design authority over to those doing the building" — live silkworms deployed over a stretched net that is "first, a habitat for some 6,500 silkworms, and second, a space for human habitation." The design "leverages the behavior of a natural system to ensure that the final design is unpredictable and serendipitous"; "the precise nature of the pavilion's appearance is left in the hands (or spinnerets) of the silkworms." Here the nonhuman is not an actant to be traced (Latour, Yaneva) but a delegated builder whose behavioral tendencies the "pre-constructed armature anticipates" without determining — nonhuman agency recruited as authorship (see authorship, production-stream).
• Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects (Odom 2018) — the nonhuman as co-constituent of the produced system. Via Harman's Latour: "There are only actants of all possible and actants are fully expressed in each moment" — and the POP system is exactly such an actant-field: "The totality of the system including individual visitors and interactive, informative components – whether simply a spatial sequence, spatial proximity to material, or active user-generated manipulation or manipulation via sensors – expands the system and intertwines constituencies into a coherent, if not completely self-aware, ecology." Humans here are one constituency among actants (materials, sensors, light, emergent conditions), with Bennett's correction against "decoupl[ing] the object from its productions" making the intertwining ontological rather than descriptive: subject and object "linked… rather than dialectical." See actor-network-theory, thing-ontology, productions.- "Living" rooms (Brownell 2018) — the design-practice register: nonhumans as models, clients, and builders. Models: potter wasps' additive nesting and the barnacle's shell-"printing" as 3D-printing precedents (WASProject); client-species: Elevator B's beehive and the Artificial Thicket's birds and insects (see animal-architecture); builders: "empowering silkworms to weave textile surfaces or growing building blocks from crystals," termites fabricating acoustical panels ("each one uniquely crafted by termites"), and Ensamble Studio's calf, whose year-long digestion of the Truffle's formwork is read as "the conversion of a residual building material by a metabolic process." The theoretical consequence is the control inversion: "the incorporation of natural processes in design introduces a new kind of material agency in which biological, chemical, or physical processes are allowed to run their course and subsequently alter the final results," with the designer as "director of the design experiments they set into motion" — nonhuman agency recruited by partnership, "rather than traditional brute consumption of natural resources." See hypernaturalization, authorship.