The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout

Jane Bennett

The Agency of Assemblages

Globalization names a state of affairs in which Earth, no longer simply an ecological or geological category, has become a salient unit of political analysis. More than locality or nation, Earth is 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 human-centered 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 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 member-actant maintains an energetic pulse slightly “off” from that exuded by the assemblage, such assemblages are never fixed blocks but open-ended wholes.5

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Notes

I am grateful to Natalie Baggs, Diana Coole, William Connolly, Ben Corson, Jennifer Culbert, Ann Curthoys, John Docker, Ruby Lal, Patchen Markell, Gyanendra Pandey, Paul Saurette, Michael Shapiro, and the editorial committee of Public Culture for their contributions to this essay.

1. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
2. An assemblage is, first, an ad hoc grouping, a collectivity whose origins are historical and circumstantial, though its contingent status says nothing about its efficacy, which can be quite strong. An assemblage is, second, a living, throbbing grouping whose coherence coexists with energies and countercultures that exceed and confound it. An assemblage is, third, a web with an uneven topography: some of the points at which the trajectories of actants cross each other are more heavily trafficked than others, and thus power is not equally distributed across the assemblage. An assemblage is, fourth, not governed by a central power: no one member has sufficient competence to fully determine the consequences of the activities of the assemblage. An assemblage, finally, is made up of many types of actants: humans and nonhumans; animals, vegetables, and minerals; nature, culture, and technology.
3. James Glanz, “When the Grid Bites Back,” International Herald Tribune, August 18, 2003.
4. Bruno Latour defines an actant as something that modifies “other actors through a series of trials that can be listed thanks to some experimental protocol.” Latour, The Politics of Nature, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75. “An” actant can itself be a composite entity: scientists and machines may form an actant called “the lab,” which is itself a member of a larger and more diverse assemblage, for example, the pharmaceutical industry, which under other circumstances would be the relevant actant.
5. Patrick Hayden, in “Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism: A Convergence with Ecological Theory and Politics,” Environmental Ethics 19 (1997): 185–204, calls these “non-totalizable sums.” For Henri Bergson, the universe as a whole is a non-totalizable sum, a “whole that is not given” because its evolution produces new members and thus an ever-changing array of effects. The world is “an indivisible process” of movement and creation, where there is “radical contingency in progress, incommensurability between what goes before and what follows—in short, duration.” See Henry Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Dover, 1998), 29n1.