La agencia de las cosas: una semiosis de las redes de transporte en Bogotá

Urban transport network is a social space in which agents interact with multiple artifacts –signs, speed bumps, bridges, other vehicles, etc.– As Latour states, the study of social spaces needs to be “materialized”, in this case, considering the material infrastructure that allows –or not– the fluid use of the system, as a fundamental part of the analysis of the transport phenomenon. From an agentive semiotics approach, I discuss if the transport infrastructure functions as a regulator of human actions, with an equivalent agency to that of the actors. In my proposal, the notion of agency is not assumed, by default, as an intrinsic characteristic of objects –position widely assumed–, but is based on the concept of dislocation (Latour, 1996), which introduces a delegation of human tasks to artifacts. Unlike Latour, for agentive semiotics the origin of actions –and, therefore, who is responsible for the action– is central to the analysis of emergent semiosis in our interaction with things. Based on this thesis, I describe the particular semiosis of local interaction practices, using experiences analyzed in the sustainable mobility observatory of National University of Colombia, in Bogotá.