Psychology in AIME and in Activity theory, the work in Cradle and transformative agency in "Reset Modernity!"

Cradle is a Center in the University of Helsinki (http://www.helsinki.fi/cradle/) which I think produces very interesting work based on the development of activity theory and related to Expansive learning in various organizations.

I find some similarity in the stance they take relative to a psychology of the King-Subject (if I am allowed to call it so) and the similarly hostile stance that is present in Latour's "Inquiry into the modes of existence book" and AIME (http://modesofexistence.org/).

So in Haapasaari, A., Engeström, Y., & Kerosuo, H. (2014). The emergence of learners’ transformative agency in a Change Laboratory intervention. Journal of Education and Work, 1-31. 
the authors contrast their proposal of the concept of "transforamtive agency" to "individually focused psychological approaches...As Deci and Ryan (1995, 35) define it, ‘the term human agency refers to those motivated behaviours that emanate from one’s integrated self’"

There is similarity here with the mode of [MET] , a psycho-genetic mode (among other things if I get it right) who comes "from the outside" to support the gradual making of a psyche (in the further process of building gradually subjectivity through the presence of many modes- not in the sense of us looking upon such a creating like looking to a 3-D printer , but in the sense of being able to communicatively participate to a swarm of significant activity) 

The authors of the article  further claim "Transformative agency differs from conventional notions of agency in
that it stems from encounters with and examination of disturbances, conflicts and contradictions in the collective activity.". In this claim I hear resonance with the trails presented in AIME. The concepts of pseudo-subjects and pseudo -objects , their [ATT] trails, the image conveyed in the MOE book pg 410 ("We see that economics is very ill equipped to follow the thread of experience. It had taken the individual as its basis and had endowed it
with innate rationality!....What do we find in its place? Quivering little beings wandering around groping in the dark while waiting to receive something from the passage of scripts: sometimes fragments of projects, sometimes allocations of preferences, sometimes suggested roles, sometimes quittances.") all these sujest to me the presence of "sister aproaches" to our lives. ( Similarly in the above mentioned article "Agency appears in actions, and it develops in historically shaped collective activity systems, tightly connected to the motives and contradictions contained within them.")


Transformative agency provides a way to understand what is going on in AIME and Reset Modernity! (http://zkm.de/en/event/2016/04/globale-reset-modernity). 

"An individual’s transformative agency can be understood as breaking away from a given frame of action and taking of initiatives to transform it...Agency cannot thus be defined only as a primary characteristic of an individual, but it develops in collective interaction over time (Engeström 2007b)."

However once applied on Reset Modernity! one may ask how the different expressions of transformative agency mentinoed in the article find their way to practice: (WANRING: I have not attended the exhibition. I judge based on the field book  http://zkm.de/media/file/en/2016-zkm-reset-modernity-fieldbook_e.pdf)

• Resistence (opportunity to register and discuss resistence to the very idea of reseting modernity?) , 
• Criticising the current way the moderns navigate themselves (this finds its way in Reset Modernity in quite a strong way), 
• Explicating new posibilities or potentials to the activity, expression of the old "good practices" (I think this was done better in MOE and AIME where the positive sides of modernity were more prominent. In Reset Modernity I find  many questions but not as many fecund starting points in the old activity)
• Envisioning new patterns or models in the activity.(for the general visitor I think this is left open in Reset Modernity!. There is probably an one day contact with the event but then the general visitor just leaves with the experiences and the field book schemas and perhaps can read some comments through twitter http://modesofexistence.org/reset-modernity-hashtags/. It does not sound very strong scaffolding for the general visitor. Maybe things are different for selected audiences https://twitter.com/AIMEproject/status/732204378761928705  . And there is also this "power distance" (?) between the organizers (who are in the workshops and "collect" experiences and changes) and the visitors who flow in and out)
• Committing to actions (I do not know if this is present at all. In a sense this is a political dimension that is always present in MOE and AIME and Modes of Existence! but I feel that it does not have much support here. I wander: no current political movement is sensitive to a call for reseting modernity? )
• Taking actions (Although actions related to the reseting modernity exhibition might be taken by the participants there is no structure to support sharing such actions. A you tube channel perhaps? A facebook group? )

So the notion of transformative agency is a tool to think on the transformative potential of Reseting Modernity!