Building a Bike

 Darwin claims that worms inaugurate human culture and then, working alongside people and their endeavors, help preserve what people and worms together have made. Darwin does not claim that worms intend to have this effect so beneficial to humankind, or that any divine intention at work through them. Rather, that the exertions of worms contribute to human history and culture is the unplanned result of worms acting in conjunction and competition with other (biological, bacterial, chemical, human) agents. Worms do not intend to enable human culture, but worms do, according to Darwin, pursue what appear to be prospective endeavors.

In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey presents a public as a confederation of bodies, bodies pulled together not so much by choice (puvlic is not exactly a voluntary association) as by a shared experience of harm that, over time, coalesces into a 'problem'. Dewey makes it clear that a public does not preexist its particular problem but emerges in response to it. The public is a contingent and temporary formation existing alongside other publics, protopublics, and residual or postpublics. Problems come and go, and so, too, do publics: at any given moment, many different publics are in the process of crystallizing and dissolving. When diverse bodies suddenly near and form a public, they have been provoked to do so by a problem, that is, by the 'indirect, serious and enduring' consequences of a conjoint action.

materiality is a rubric that tends to horizontalize the relations between humans, biota, and abiota. It draws human attention sideways, away from an ontologically ranked Great Chain of Being and toward a greater appreciation of the entanglements of humans and nonhumans.