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The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout Jane Bennett The Agency of Assemblages One thing that globalization names is the sense that the ‘‘theater of operations’’ has expanded greatly. Earth is no longer a category for ecology or geology only, but has become a political unit, the whole in which the parts (e.g., finance capital, CO2 emissions, refugees, viruses, pirated DVDs, ozone, human rights, weapons of mass destruction) now circulate . There have been various attempts to theorize this complex, gigantic whole and to characterize the kind of relationality obtaining between its parts. Network is one such attempt, as is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s empire.1 My term of choice to describe this whole and its style of structuration is, following Gilles Deleuze, the assemblage.2 The electrical power grid is a good example of an assemblage. It is a material cluster of charged parts that have indeed affiliated, remaining in sufficient proximity and coordination to function as a (flowing) system . The coherence of this system endures alongside energies and factions that fly out from it and disturb it from within. And, most important for my purposes here, the elements of this assemblage, while they include humans and their constructions, also include some very active and powerful nonhumans: electrons, trees, wind, electromagnetic fields. I will be using the idea of an assemblage and offering an account of the blackout that struck North America in August 2003 in order, first, to highlight the conceptual and empirical inadequacy of humancentered notions of agency and, second, to investigate some of the practical implications, for social scientific inquiry and for politics, of a notion of agency that crosses the human-nonhuman divide. The International Herald Tribune, on the day after the blackout, reported that ‘‘The vast but shadowy web of transmission lines, power 6 02 T HE AG E N CY OF A S S E M B L AGE S generating plants and substations known as the grid is the biggest gizmo ever built . . . on Thursday [August 14, 2003], the grid’s heart fluttered. . . . complicated beyond full understanding, even by experts—[the grid] lives and occasionally dies by its own mysterious rules.’’3 What can it mean to say that the grid’s ‘‘heart fluttered’’ or that the grid lives ‘‘by its own rules’’? What is this power it wields? Can it be described as a kind of agency, despite the fact that the term is usually restricted to intentional human acts? What happens to the idea of an agent once nonhuman materialities are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans are themselves assessed as members of human-nonhuman assemblages? How does the agency of assemblages compare to more familiar notions, such as the willed intentionality of persons, the disciplinary power of society, or the automatism of natural processes? How does recognition of the nonhuman and nonindividuated dimensions of agency alter established notions of moral responsibility and political accountability? My strategy is to focus attention on the distributive and composite nature of agency. Are there not human, biological, vegetal, pharmaceutical, and viral agents? Is not the ability to make a difference, to produce effects, or even to initiate action, distributed across an ontologically diverse range of actors—or actants, to use Bruno Latour’s less anthropocentric term?4 Some actants have sufficient coherence to appear as entities; others , because of their great volatility, fast pace of evolution, or minuteness of scale, are best conceived as forces. Moreover, while individual entities and singular forces each exercise agentic capacities, isn’t there also an agency proper to the groupings they form? This is the agency of assemblages: the distinctive efficacy of a working whole made up, variously, of somatic, technological, cultural, and atmospheric elements. Because each memberactant maintains an energetic pulse slightly ‘‘off’’ from that exuded by the assemblage, such assemblages are never fixed blocks but open-ended wholes.5 Before elaborating such a distributive and composite notion of agency, let me say a bit about the materialist ontology with which it is allied. This faith, or better, this wonder, can be described as a kind of vitalism, an enchanted materialism. Within this materialism, the world is figured as neither mechanistic nor teleological but rather as alive with movement and with a certain power of expression.6 By ‘‘power of expression,’’ I mean the ability of bodies to become otherwise than they are, to press out of their current configuration...

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