The Mediterranean as Agensoma (or vis rerum): Reportage of a Freedive.
a philosophical reportage for a new wor(l)d: agensoma
Introduction
This article, perhaps a bit ambitious for my humble means, is an attempt to name, to name, a concept that Jane Bennett defined in 2010 in "Vibrant Matter," giving "life," one might say, to a school of thought that, to this day, is referred to as vital materialism, to differentiate it from the more well-known historical materialism.
Like any attempt to break with traditional thought, the definition of concepts is always complex and requires recourse to juxtapositions and analogies with previously developed concepts by other thinkers. In her seminal work, Bennett weaves together ideas from diverse fields of thought, including philosophy, natural sciences, ethics, aesthetics, and more, drawing on numerous authors such as Adorno, Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche, Guattari, Deleuze, Derrida, Haraway, and Latour, as well as William Maddock Bayliss.
Jane Bennett uses the compound term Thing-Power (similar to other terms like Black Power and Women Power) to point to a vitalistic force within the matter, aiming to go beyond the humanistic and Enlightenment view that sees it as inert and completely at the disposal of human will. However, the use of a compound term, in some ways, fails to transfer an identitarian and definitional force to the concept, limiting its manipulability. For this reason, as a humble tourist in philosophy, I venture to find a definition that allows this multifaceted concept to have its image, a more comfortable guise that permits its use in critical contexts for deeper exploration and a better understanding of its potential. A proposal, in its way, is provocative.
To give it concreteness, I have tried to use it in a critical discussion, albeit a very simple one, of an equally elusive but living concept that has always aroused interest among many historians and literati: the Mediterranean. The research employs two practices, experiences accessible to everyone, that allow contact with a dimension of knowledge, phenomena, and perception that is quite particular and, so to speak, neutral in terms of rationalisation: meditation and freediving. To perceive living materiality, it is necessary to distance oneself from abstract ideas and metaphysics and immerse oneself in the tangible world. Let's say this is an attempt at philosophical reportage that collects notes emerging from facts and experiences gathered over time, which have found their meaning in the philosophical research that inspired them. A dive into the Mediterranean and its breath.
The Definition
Agensoma /a·gèn·so·ma/
noun (m.); [neologism from Latin agens “agent/acting” + Greek sôma “body”]
Definition:
A corporeal entity endowed with agentic capacity, not reducible to the traditional distinction between subject and object. The agensoma is a body-thing that acts, influences and participates in vital, ecological, social, or symbolic processes in an active, though often non-human or unintentional, manner.
Etymology:
Coined to overcome the modern dualism between the subject (that which acts) and the object (that which is acted upon), the term blends the Latin agens (present participle of agere, "to do," "to move") with the Greek sôma ("body"), suggesting an operating corporeality capable of transforming and entering into relation.
Areas of Use:
Posthuman philosophy and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)
Ecocriticism and Vital Material Theory
Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Theory
Postcolonial anthropology and studies on modern animism
Examples of Use:
The urban landscape is not an inert backdrop, but a complex agensoma that interacts with those who traverse it.
In the installation, the artist allows the metal's rust, humidity, and time to transform the work into a living agensoma.
Electrical grids, tree roots, machine bodies: all these elements, once considered "objects," are now recognised as agensomas that co-determine our environment.
Conceptual Synonyms:
Acting thing, vital body, active matter, distributed subjectivity, relational entity
Notes:
The concept of agensoma is inspired, among others, by Jane Bennett's thing-power, Graham Harman's flat ontology, and Timothy Morton's ecological thought, with resonances in the animism of non-Western traditions. It proposes a worldview in which every corporeal thing participates, even without intention, in the intelligence of reality.
The Mediterranean as Agensoma (or vis rerum): Reportage of a Freedive.
The Mediterranean is not just a sea; it's a fabric of matter, a melting pot, a living archive of history, a complex and stratified ecosystem, a primordial soup of cultures. On and in the Mediterranean, objects, bodies, matter, and natural forces interact, transforming reality and redefining the relationship between human and non-human. One of the best tools to experience firsthand the idea that comprises the Mediterranean is freediving. You don't need to be a professional athlete; natural swimming abilities and enough training to descend between 5 and 10 meters deep and stay there for a few minutes are sufficient.
As inhabitants of the Mediterranean, we approach the immersion with a load of knowledge, smells, sensations, and emotions carved into our flesh and mind over millennia.
In the Mediterranean context, there exists a vis rerum, a vitality of matter that is evident in the ruins that shape the urban and natural landscape: remains of Greek and Roman temples that, despite time, continue to determine the sense of space, attracting tourists, archaeologists, and historians. These stone fragments are not just testimonies of a remote past, but agensomas that shape cultural identities and economic processes. The Egyptian pyramids, the Nuraghe in Sardinia, Greek amphorae, Roman Phoenician vessels for transporting wine and oil, gold, stories passed down for millennia that built armies, gave voice to deities, comfort to men, sacrificed animals, built churches and temples, created the heroic imaginary we absorbed in the fairy tales we were told as children. Those stones, the ideas, and knowledge with which they were assembled into magnificent or small constructions in the countryside and on the coasts to house animals and shepherds, crumbled in the sirocco and libeccio winds. We breathed them in.
They spurred us to journey, to be pushed by the wind or dragged by the tides that drew migration routes, commerce, and geopolitical strategies. Agensomas joined other agensomas like the Mediterranean ports of Marseille, Genoa, Naples, and Alexandria. These are not mere human infrastructures, but points where the Mediterranean, like a god, chose to take a form among us, to bring us salt, sand, or reclaim submerged wrecks, to bring its children home.
Every element of the Mediterranean participates in a continuously evolving, pulsating network of agensomas. The agensoma is the form of evolution in the making, the body/idea within which metamorphosis, adaptation, and possible responses to changing environmental conditions are realised.
There are two simple ways to approach an understanding of the concept of agensoma: freediving and meditation.
Meditation is a useful exercise for detaching oneself from the self, from one's individuality, which for us Westerners is inextricably linked to the concept of subjectivity and vitality, of action, as opposed to the inertia of object matter, acted upon. Freediving is one way among many to try to assume one of the possible forms of an agensoma and experience it.
If you let yourself slide into the water, floating and quieting the mind with meditation, the warmth of the sun, its energetic charge, penetrates us without filters; the sounds of the sea rising from the depths and those coming from afar from land and sky merge into a single liquid and airy music.
You take a deep breath to hold all this—air, warmth, sound—and carry it within instead of thoughts. With a few kicks of the fins, the body begins to fall, lightly, perpendicularly toward the bottom; the weight becomes negative. The blue is now much, much deeper, the silence denser. Air bubbles crackle in the cochlea. We equalise; the pressure between inside and out is balanced.
The heart rate tunes into the rhythm of the universe below, which increasingly resembles outer space. If you let your limbs drift, your mind dissolves like salt in deep waters. The body no longer has a defined shape, as on land, a boundary, or an integument.
The sea becomes a solution.
Immersed in the Mediterranean, we have a different, out-of-place perspective; we see ourselves from the outside to our inside through the lens of the water, like the view of a seabird diving from the sky into the depths seamlessly; flying is like swimming.
We are observed as we observe. We swim suspended in the gaze of other creatures.
Immersed in the Mediterranean, we immerse ourselves in the flow of ocean currents.
Ocean Currents: The Dynamic Spirit of the Mediterranean
The Mediterranean's ocean currents play a crucial role in shaping its ecological and cultural identity. They not only influence the climate and marine biodiversity but also determine migration flows, trade, and the historical narratives of the region. The Atlantic current entering from the Strait of Gibraltar and moving eastward, and the currents circulating in the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Ionian Sea, and the Aegean Sea, create a continuous movement that connects the shores of three continents. This dynamism makes the Mediterranean not only a sea of exchange and encounter but also a space of transformation, where nothing remains static, and every element participates in the creation of new balances and relationships.
Currents have transported cultures, ideas, and people for millennia, serving as arteries of connection between civilisations. They have shaped the routes of explorers, traders, and migrants, influencing the development of coastal cities and maritime economies. Today, their role continues to be crucial in the circulation of nutrients and climate regulation, making them an invisible but essential force for life in the Mediterranean. Their alteration is an alteration of our climate, of our temperature. The agensoma of the currents enters our agensoma and vice versa.
Agensoma and Stories of Coexistence
The agensoma of the Mediterranean in the form of wind – Mistral, Sirocco, Libeccio – determines the construction of buildings with angles and windows designed to reduce air pressure; rafts and dinghies crossing the sea transform from travel tools into tragic monuments of migration and hope. Even fishing nets, left in the sea, become part of the ecosystem, often with unforeseen consequences like the entanglement of marine species or the creation of new artificial habitats.
Mediterranean cities are also artefacts and artificers of the Mediterranean. Venice, built on wooden piles immersed in the lagoon, rests on a delicate balance between technology, environment, and history. The cisterns of Istanbul, which transform water into an architectural and symbolic element, demonstrate how infrastructures can respond and adapt to the ecological needs of the territory, while those in Lebanon, containing ammonium nitrate, explode, sowing death. The agensoma is also flammable; it can detonate.
For a Sustainable Mediterranean: Rethinking Agentivity
Recognising the ontological force of the agensoma also means rethinking our role in the ecological and cultural system. Local circular economies, based on the reuse and recovery of materials, can be interpreted as a form of respect for the vitality of matter, as agensomas, not just as cultural testimonies but as systems, vital bodies to be conserved, preserved. The rediscovery of traditional construction techniques, such as the use of limestone to keep buildings cool. Food, Mediterranean music, languages and their connections suggest a sustainability rooted in the environmental conditions of the Mediterranean itself.
Policies for the protection of coasts and marine resources must take into account not only human needs but also the complexity of non-human systems. Plastic pollution, the reduction of biodiversity, and the overexploitation of fish resources are not just technical problems but broader issues where matter and natural forces interact with political and social choices.
The Mediterranean, Food, and the Agensoma
Jane Bennett tells us about food, edible matter, as a striking example of agensoma. The nutritive process and the transformation of primary matter into food, aesthetics, care, energy, and waste, if analysed in its entirety and not only from a human perspective, perfectly represent the concept we are trying to define with the term agensoma. Food acquires its queer value, as Iovino (Iovino, Paesaggio civile, il saggiatore) would say today.
Bennett states about food:
Thoreau, Nietzsche, and recent studies of omega-3 and hydrogenated fats challenge this model and the form-matter dichotomy at its heart. They instead discern edible matter as a productive power intrinsic to foodstuff, which enables edible matter to coarsen or refine the imagination or render a disposition more or less liable to resentment, depression, hyperactivity, dull-wittedness, or violence. They experience eating as the formation of an assemblage of human and nonhuman elements, all of which bear some agentic capacity.
This capacity includes the negative power to resist or obstruct human projects, but it also includes the more active power to affect and create effects. In this model of eating, human and nonhuman bodies recorporealize in response to each other; both exercise formative power, and both offer themselves as matter to be acted on. Eating appears as a series of mutual transformations in which the border between inside and outside becomes blurry: my meal both is and is not mine; you both are and are not what you eat. (Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter, Duke University Press Durham and London, p 45)
In this sense, literature, as a vital practice also influenced by food (as for Thoreau and Nietzsche), enters the sphere of its agensoma; it is affected by it, and for Iovino, it becomes a theory to explain the world, to identify that body/matter/idea, relationship—the agensoma, precisely—that the specialization of sciences, epistemology, Enlightenment rationality and its principles of validation, and their anthropocentrism, tend to remove or lose sight of.
The Mediterranean has always been food, diet, and literature. Culinary literature on the subject is vast, but it's enough to simply enter the childhood of anyone living on its shores to recognise the same flavours, smells, and landscapes. Olives, capers, myrtle, cereals, legumes, and fruits. They are a language of scents and tastes that constitutes a common text for millions of people. This is why conviviality in the Mediterranean has taken on such an important role, perhaps unparalleled in other cultures. Conviviality has become a celebration and ritual in the Mediterranean, but also trade and conflict.
In Homeric poems (Iliad and Odyssey), food signifies hospitality, and peace among men—think of the banquets of the Phaeacians—but men themselves become food in the jaws of Polyphemus. Wine, oil, and bread are sacred, gifts of the gods and instruments of civilisation, life, and deception.
In the Odyssey, on the island of Ogygia, home of the nymph Calypso, Odysseus eats primarily wild fruits, including figs and olives, which grow abundantly on the island. Calypso, enamoured with Odysseus, holds him for seven years, offering him her body, immortality, and happiness, and Odysseus, trapped but longing to return home, only manages to escape thanks to the intervention of Hermes and Zeus.
These fruits, including Calypso and the Island, are the force that imprisons Odysseus; they are the chemistry that risks changing the hero's nostalgic nature, the agensoma antagonistic to nostos.
The Mediterranean is also a sea, but not only that, and the sea itself is food: salt, fish, algae, plankton, and earth.
Iovino, again, citing Mentz, highlights how humans, water, salt, and earth are intimately connected. The Mediterranean is a food that defines us.
Look at the world through salty eyeballs, remembering that the fluid in our eyes tastes like the sea. Most of our world is water. Most of that water is salt. No matter what it looks like, what it makes us feel, or how our bodies float on its swells, the ocean is no place to live. [...] Long ago, we crawled out of the water. We can’t go back.
In Iovino, S. (2017). Mediterranean Ecocriticism. 24(2), 325–340. https://doi.org/10.2307/26569774
Conclusions
In this essay, we have attempted to name an elusive yet powerful presence that animates matter and dissolves the boundaries between subject and object. The agensoma, as we have outlined it, is not merely a theoretical concept but a perceptual lens, an embodied experience, a hypothesis about the world and its forms of vitality. The Mediterranean, with its historical, ecological, and sensory stratification, has offered us a living laboratory to test this hypothesis: not as a demonstration, but as an immersion.
We have seen how ruins, ports, ocean currents, food, and even mythological narratives participate in a network of distributed agency, where all the bodies – human and non-human – contribute to constructing reality. The Mediterranean thus emerges not only as a geographical space but as a plural agensoma, a multitude of embodied forces that act, resonate and transform. This sea is not merely a backdrop but an actor: it produces effects, influences stories, and shapes imaginaries. And it does so even through our bodies when we swim, breathe, eat, and remember.
In naming this force, we have not sought to enclose it in a formula but to open a conceptual passage that allows us to think differently. The agensoma is a provocation: it invites us to decentralize, to recognize the performative capacity of matter, overcome Cartesian dichotomies, and to rediscover the distributed intelligence of vital systems. It is an invitation to an embodied, sensitive, situated philosophy – capable of listening to the "voice of things" without annihilating them in our language.
If philosophy can still have a transformative function, then it must also become reportage, experience, and contact: it must rediscover the places where theory meets the body, history mixes with salt, and matter finds its voice. In this sense, agensoma is also an ethical proposal: it reminds us that coexistence, sustainability, and ecological justice pass through the recognition of diffuse vitality, the plurality of actors, and the necessity of a new grammar for the world.
Naming is a political and poetic act. The agensoma is our attempt – perhaps uncertain, perhaps premature – to name what already speaks to us, transforms us, and calls us. It is a new word for an ancient intuition: that all that is body is also force.
Minimum Bibliography on the Mediterranean
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
Predrag Matvejević, Mediterranean Breviary
David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History
Minimum Bibliography on Mediterranean Ecocriticism
- , 2022. Paesaggio Civile: Storie Di Ambiente, Cultura E Resistenza. Milano: Il Saggiatore.
- (2017). Mediterranean Ecocriticism. 24(2), 325–340. https://doi.org/10.2307/26569774