On cyborgs as marginal figures

Abstract

In this presentation, we propose a reflection on the agency of objects understood as participants and products of heterogeneous networks. What we call objects do not have a different ontology from what we call people—both result from stabilization processes that attribute intentionality to humans and instrumentality to things (Latour, 1994). It should be noted that understanding the action of things or objects does not imply proposing a kind of animism that attributes intentionality to things (Tirado, 2000), nor the denial of intentionality to people. Action is a property of a collective in which some entities acquire stable properties in certain circumstances in which they act. Incorporating the action of entities to which humanity is not conferred—objects—is a challenge that, alongside other authors, we propose to address based on the analysis of situations that have occurred in different contexts: artistic (Gullar, 1966; Oiticcica, 1968), scientific (Mol, A., 2000), and ecological (Tirado et al, 2003).