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The Agency of Assemblages
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Jane Bennett, August 2004
The Agency of Assemblages
One thing that “globalization” names, at least for the social scientist, is the sense that the
relevant theater of operations has expanded greatly. Earth is no longer only a category of ecology
or geology, but has become a political unit, the whole in which the parts (e.g., finance capital,
CO
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emissions, refugees, viruses, pirated dvd’s, 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 Hardt and Negri’s “Empire.” My term of choice to describe this whole and it
style of structuration, is, following Gilles Deleuze, the assemblage.
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The electrical power grid is a good example of an assemblage. It is a material cluster of
charged parts that have in deed 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/or 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, electro-magnetic
fields.
I will be using the idea of an assemblage and offering an account of the blackout that
struck North America in August of 2003 in order, first, to highlight the conceptual and empirical
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I am grateful to Diana Coole, William Connolly, Ben Corson, 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.
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