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.