Bennett 2010

"Mine is not a vitalism in the traditional sense' I equate affect with materiality, rather than posit a separate force that can enter and animate a physical body." (xiii)

"My aim, again, is to theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such, and to detach materiality from the figures of passive, mechanistic, or divinely infused substance." (xiii)

methods of demystification (exposing) is "an indispensable tool in a democratic, pluralist politics that seeks to hold officials accountable", but creates "hermeneutics of suspicion [that] calls for theorists to be on high alert for signs of the secret truth (a human will to power) below the false appearance of nonhuman agency"; "limits to its political efficacy" (xiv)

The Force of Things

actant: Latour; source of action, human or not, combination of both; neither an object or subject but "intervener" (9)

quasi-causal operator: Deleuze; "that which, by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage and the fortuity of being in the right place at the right time, makes the difference, makes things happen, becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event" (9)

in subject-oriented philosophies, the agent or deodand (English law 1200-1846; "that which must be given to God", nonhuman agents of harm like a knife)

"human power is itself a kind of thing-power. At one level this claim is uncontroversial: it is easy to acknowledge that humans are composed of various material parts (the minerality of our bones, or the metal of our blood, or the electricity of our neurons). But it is more challenging to conceive of these materials as lively and self-organizing, rather than as passive or mechanical means under the direction of something nonmaterial, that is, an active soul or mind." (10)

deLanda; mineral material producing bones, enabling evolution (11); humans as "complex collection of materials" (11)

vital materialism

• objection to it: humans become mere things, can be used as such
• answer to objection: "promot[e] healthy and enabling instrumentalizations" (12); "moralism can itself become a source of unnecessary human suffering" (12)

"We are now in a better position to name that other way to promote human health and happiness: to raise the status of the materiality of which we are composed. Each human is a heterogeneous compound of wonderfully vibrant, dangerously vibrant, matter. If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper relief." (12)

nonidentity: Adorno; "that which is not subject to knowledge but is instead 'heterogeneous' to all concepts" (14); haunting feeling that something is being left out

• Adorno denies vital materialism; but is nagged by what Bennett calls "thing-power"

cultural/historical/linguistic constructivism tends to obscure thing-power (17)

The Agency of Assemblages

problems with vital materialism/thing-power:

1. overemphasizes "thinginess" -- stable identities -- of things (20); wants rather "to theorize a materiality that is as much force as entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension"
2. "latent individualism"; "atomistic rather than a congregational understanding of agency" (20)

conative/affective bodies: Spinoza; things as neither subject nor object but "mode" of Nature that is an assemblage/mosaic of simple bodies

• conatus in simple bodies expressed as "a stubbornness or inertial tendency to persist"; in complex body/mode, to "the effort required to maintain the specific relation of 'movement and rest' that obtains between its parts" (22); continual invention
• modes enter into alliances, form assemblages

"bodies enhance their power in or as a heterogeneous assemblage. What this suggests for the concept of agency is that the efficacy or effectivity to which that term has traditionally referred becomes distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field, rather than being a capacity localized in a human body or in a collective produced (only) by human efforts." (23)

assemblage: Deleuze and Guattari; "ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts" (23); effects generated are emergent properties (23); each member has vital force, but also an efectivity to the grouping as such

2003 black-out example; power grid as assemblage; agency distributed along a continuum, extruding from multiple loci (28)

in Augustine, Kant; concept of human will/free agency divided against itself

Bernard Stiegler, stone tools as first "archives" for human reflection, by persistant objectness

distributed agency tied up with three notions:

• efficacy: creativity of agency, capacity to make something new appear
• trajectory: directionality/movement away
• causality: emergent and fractal; indeterminate, after-the-fact

Chinese shi (34-5)

"Autonomy and strong responsibility seem to me to be empirically false, and thus their invocation seems tinged with injustice. In emphasizing the ensemble nature of action and the interconnections between persons and things, a theory of vibrant matter presents individuals as simply incapable of bearing full responsibility for their effects." (37)

confederate agency attenuates the blame game, but still identifies harmful effects -- even broadens scope of search

"Perhaps the ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one's response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating: Do I attempt to extricate myself from assemblages whose trajectory is likely to do harm? Do I enter into the proximity of assemblages whose conglomerate effectivity tends toward the enactment of nobler ends?" (37-8)

"A moralized politics of good and evil, of singular agents who must be made to pay for their sins ... becomes unethical to the degree that it legitimates vengeance and elevates violence to the tool of first resort. An understanding of agency as distributive and confederate thus reinvokes the need to detach ethics from moralism and to produce guides to action appropriate to a world of vital, crosscutting forces." (38)