Mercedes Valmisa, "All Things Act" (Oxford UP, 2025)

All Things Act explores the collective character of action to expand the ways we think about agency. First, it resists viewing agency as a capacity, much less one exclusive to humans. Instead, it defines agency as an umbrella term for the concrete sociomaterial processes that emerge from the collaborative efforts of multiple entities acting together. Agency isn't the faculty of an individual entity or self; it's always the function of a network or assembly of actors. Second, many of the actors involved in these processes are nonhuman-things without intentions, will, or even awareness. This relational and collective approach adopts a conception of action that doesn't hinge on mental states. To act is to participate in, contribute to, shape, facilitate, organize, constrain, and modify the course of events. This book argues that there's no such thing as an individual action and that agency is collectively distributed across a heterogeneous field of human and nonhuman actors. For readers interested in the link between quantum physics and relational metaphysics, please check out this recorded talk, especially Rovelli's linked here You can also check out his book Helgoland. For a more detailed analysis of why substance metaphysics fail us, see, The Non-Existence of the Real World. For readers interested in wuwei (non-coercive self-organizing communities in nature), please check out Honeybee Democracy, Biocivilisations, and FLUKE. About the urgency of building a non-cruel optimism, check out the classic critique of neoliberal individualism: Cruel Optimism and Psychopolitics and Burnout society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory