60 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
But what knitted these spaces together? Whose
agency—that is, the ability through will or intent to make
something happen—made it possible for the Mexica to
perceive an inert building like the Templo Mayor (lived
space) as carrying in it the imprint of the larger design of
the cosmos (a representation of space)? On the most quo-
tidian level, it was the daily practices of the urban popula-
tion that imbued lived spaces like the tianquiztli, “m a r k e t ,”
with much of their meaning, but we also see the Mexica
rulers assuming a key role in the public spectacles, them-
selves engaging in a kind of practice that carried represen-
tations of space into the built environment. The Mexica
at large perceived the tlatoani’s agency to be greater than
that of a normal human being, and this enhanced agency
was proclaimed in some of the public spectacles described
above. When Ahuitzotl returned from his successful war,
for instance, the victory celebrations, the processions and
dancing at Chapultepec and as he moved down the cause-
ways and into the temples of the city, were a way of mark-
ing his prowess, his active role in shaping and extending
the empire to spaces beyond the valley, and at the same
time the feathers that he and his retinue of warriors and
courtiers wore carried this representation of the tributary
empire into urban spaces. Because those parts of Tenoch-
titlan that were marked by his presence, like the western
causeway and the four altepetl temple complexes, contin-
ued to carry that association through time, we can think
of the Mexica tlatoani as having had a leaky agency, which
left a residue in the spaces where he commemorated those
acts long after the fact—his spectacular practice leaving
a mark on lived space. And in turn, Mexica artists used
sculpture—often fixed and immovable—to reiterate the
huei tlatoani’s actions within specific spots of the city.
It is easy for us to see Mexica rulers as having had agency
to carry meanings from one spatial sphere to another, since
we live in a world animated by human agency and our
belief in human agency is foundational. But Mexica also
held that nonhuman agencies were at work that allowed
spaces to take on meaning. Sculptural representation, that
translation into stone, also seems to have allowed the effi-
cacy of original acts to survive though time. In other words,
by setting a monument in a particular place and having its
imagery register ritual actions, the work of art extended
the agency of that ritual action. Mexica sculpture, long
admired for its perceived “stoniness,” its inert, monolithic
grandeur, seems to have carried the capacity to shape the
world around it.
This escape of human agency from the (strictly defined)
human domain is the subject of a study by the anthropolo-
gist Alfred Gell, who writes:We can accept that the causal chains which are initiated
by intentional agents come into being as states of mind,
and that they are orientated towards the states of mind
of social “others” (i.e., “patients”: see below)—but unless
there is some kind of physical mediation, which always
does exploit the manifold causal properties of the ambient
physical world (the environment, the human body, etc.),
agent and patient will not interact. Therefore, “things”
with their thing-ly causal properties are as essential to
the exercise of agency as states of mind. In fact, it is only
because the causal milieu in the vicinity of an agent assumes
a certain configuration, from which an intention may
be abducted, that we recognize the presence of another
agent. We recognize agency, ex post facto, in the anomalous
configuration of the causal milieu—but we cannot detect
it in advance, that is, we cannot tell that someone is an
agent before they act as an agent, before they disturb the
causal milieu in such a way as can only be attributed to
their agency. Because the attribution of agency rests on
the detection of the effects of agency in the causal milieu,
rather than an unmediated intuition, it is not paradoxi-
cal to understand agency as a factor of the ambience as a
whole, a global characteristic of the world of people and
things in which we live, rather than as an attribute of the
human psyche, exclusively. 31Our consideration of the space of Tenochtitlan has
given pride of place to the ruler’s agency, and we have seen
how a ruler like Moteuczoma I made his agency manifest
by “disturbing the causal milieu” as a kind of chief engi-
neer: by building a canal or constructing an aqueduct, his
agency was given material testament (the piled stone and
packed earth of the aqueduct). But Mexica understand-
ings of agency were clearly more complex on two fronts:
they granted a ruler an enhanced agency beyond that of
a normal human being (seen when he presented himself
as a deity-delegate), and they seem to have given agency
to inanimate objects, like architecture and sculpture. To
explain these phenomena from a Mexica perspective, we
turn to two entwined Nahua concepts that allowed for
rulers to have expanded agency and endowed even an
inert object or substance with its own agency: first, the
idea of teotl, introduced in chapter 2, that “sacred quality