A Goats Story. Postcards from the “Metamorphic Zone”

To bridge the Great Divide between subject and object,  Bruno  Latour uses the notions of 'agency', which neutralises this division, and 'metamorphic zone', as the place where 'performances' of an anonymous agency are translated into 'skills' of an identified agent.  But  in  literature, as the repressed often returns in defence formations, this translation tends to describe agents in the distorted guise of subjects – i.e. as persons or characters. This article proposes to re-  evaluate the notion of agency  in  the light of  the notion of  form, and thus explore a way to shunt the anthropormorphic bias where still dwells the spectre of our thwarted modernity.

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