Making-to-be: Documents, Facta, and Material-Discursive Agency

Abstract

This paper presents the performative analysis of agency within and surrounding documents as a path towards uniting the otherwise incompatible insights of both meaningcentric and materialcentric approaches. I contrast the terms agentical, providing agency, and agentic, possessing agency, to help clarify the apparent incompatibilities of prior approaches. I argue that a relational conception of agency, wherein the agentical/agentic distinction is blurred, preserves important virtues of both meaning and materialcentric approaches to documents. This paves the way for a unified materialdiscursive account of documents and a cure for document studies’ inherited duality malady. Extending prior work on capta (Drucker, 2011) and the agency of truthmaking, I propose the more general concept of facta, the madetobe. I briefly outline the research program this term suggests: investigating this agency of documental making, its agentical and agentic dynamics, and progressing towards a unitary understanding of documents’ meaning and materiality. In short, I outline a novel approach to a central question in document studies: how do documents come to matter?

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