The agency of assemblages and the North American blackout

Public Culture

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 445-465

  Bennett, Jane ^a  

^a JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 27844482933     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-17-3-445     Document Type: Review

References (58)

1. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001) and
2. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
3. 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.
4. James Glanz, "When the Grid Bites Back," International Herald Tribune, August 18, 2003.
5. Latour, The Politics of Nature, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75.
6. Patrick Hayden, in "Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism: A Convergence with Ecological Theory and Politics," Environmental Ethics 19 (1997): 185-204,
7. See Henry Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Dover, 1998), 29n1.
8. I develop this materialism in The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001) and
9. "The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter," Political Theory 32 (2004): 347-72,
10. A material body is always in the process of dissolving and reforming, albeit with periods of deceleration or relative arrest. Such bodies are alternately expressive and impressive: initially arrayed in one way, they eventually press out of one configuration and then, newly organized, can again impress upon other bodies.
11. Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 6.
12. For a subtle review of how the notion of generative negativity is differentially developed in poststructuralism, phenomenology, and critical theory, see Diana Coole, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism (New York: Routledge, 2000).
13. Romand Coles, "The Wild Patience of Radical Democracy: Beyond Žižek's Lack," in Radical Democracy: Politics between Abundance and Lack, ed. Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming).
14. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (New York: Hackett, 1992), 199.
15. Damir Novosel, "System Blackout Causes and Cures," www.energypulse.net/centers/article/ article_display.cfm?a_id=495.
16. U.S./Canada Power Outage Task Force, "Initial Blackout Timeline: August 14, 2003, Out-age Sequence of Events," September 12, 2003, www.nrcan-rncan.gc.ca/media/ documents/Black-out_Summary.pdf.
17. U.S./Canada Power Outage Task Force, "Initial Blackout Timeline," 6. According to Novosel, "evaluation of disturbances shows that protection systems have been involved in 70% of the blackout events."
18. Novosel, "System Blackout," 2.
19. Jodi Di Menna, "Grid Grief!" Canadian Geographic, special feature, www.canadian geographic.ca/blackout_2003/grid.html (accessed November 20, 2003).
20. The task force was appointed by Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien and U.S. president George W. Bush. The first report of the task force (issued September 12, 2003) was a description of about twenty grid "events" occurring from 2:02 p.m. until 4:11 p.m. (EST) on August 14, 2003.
21. The grid is an AC (alternating current) system. For a fascinating historical account of the development of electrical systems, see Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (New York: Random House, 2003).
22. U.S./Canada Power Outage Task Force, "Initial Blackout Timeline," 2.
23. Novosel, "System Blackout," 2.
24. Eric J. Lerner, "What's Wrong with the Electric Grid?" Industrial Physicist, October-November 2003, www.aip.org/tip.
25. Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science 162 (1968): 1243-48.
26. John A. Casazza and George C. Loehr, eds., The Evolution of Electric Power Transmission under Deregulation: Selected Readings (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley), www.elucem.com/outlet/books/ ieeeexcerpt.html.
27. U.S./Canada Power Outage Task Force," Initial Blackout Timeline," 7; my emphasis.
28. Matthew L. Wald, "Report on Blackout Is Said to Describe Failure to React," New York Times, November 12, 2003.
29. As indicated by Tyson Slocum in "Bush Turns Blind Eye to Blackout Culprit," August 21, 2003, www.corpwatch .org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid= 8131,
30. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, pt. 2, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 115.
31. See Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon, 1980), 46.
32. Diana Coole, "Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities," Political Studies 53 (2005): 124-42.
33. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes it in The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 1962), 110, motor intentionality is a kind of directionality inside the motion of an arm or a hand that is not reducible to any subjective or self-conscious decision.
34. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. George Collins and Richard Beardsworth (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
35. am grateful to Ben Corson for this point. See his "Speed and Technicity (a Derridean Exploration)" (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2000).
36. Elizabeth Brumfield, "On the Archaeology of Choice," in Agency in Archaeology, ed. Marcia-Anne Dobres and John E. Robb (New York: Routledge, 2000), 249.
37. Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 65.
38. The debate over which is more potent, agency or structure, seems to have been settled with the view that agential individuals and constraining social systems are mutually constitutive-as per Anthony Giddens's dialectical notion of structuration or Michel Foucault's idea of a disciplinary power which engenders the individual as a responsible, moral agent. But despite Foucault's insistence upon the productive power of collective agency, most social scientists continue to conceive of social forces as exercising only A passive or restraining kind of efficacy-that is, the power to block or interrupt the more active agency of purposive individuals.
39. The extensive literature on actor-network theory is usefully summarized at the Actor-Network Resource, www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/ant.html.
40. See Bruno Latour, Aramis, or, The Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
41. See also the elegant account of Aramis in Eric Laurier and Chris Philo, "X-Morphising: Review Essay of Bruno Latour's Aramis, or, the Love of Technology" Environment and Planning A 31 (1999): 1047-71, www.geog.gla.ac.uk/~elaurier/text.
42. Colin Barron, "A Strong Distinction between Humans and Non-Humans Is No Longer Required for Research Purposes: A Debate between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller," History of the Human Sciences 16, no. 2 (2003): 77-99; quote at 81.
43. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1999), 166.
44. Latour, Politics of Nature, 76.
45. Jacques Derrida, "Marx and Sons," in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999), 248-51.
46. Werner Hamacher, "Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida's Specters of Marx," in Ghostly Demarcations, 202.
47. Derrida, "Marx and Sons," 253-56.
48. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Dover, 1998), 73.
49. See William Connolly, "Method, Problem, Faith," in Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics, ed. Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 342-43.
50. Hannah Arendt, "On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding" (1953), Hannah Arendt Papers of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin (accessed November 2003).
51. The essay is now available to researchers at three locations; see lcweb2.loc.gov/ ammem/arendthtml/arendthome.html. My thanks to John Docker for this reference. See also his "Après la Guerre: Dark Thought, Some Whimsy," Arena Journal 20 (2002/2003): 3-16.
52. I am grateful to George Shulman and Bonnie Honig for raising this issue to me.
53. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 313.
54. François Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China (New York: Zone, 1995), 13.
55. Archer, Realist Social Theory, 66.
56. Recall that reactive power is when the waves of current and voltage in an electron stream are ninety degrees out of sync.
57. Hayden, "Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism," 187.
58. Latour, Politics of Nature, 67.