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be so sure that the processes through which nonhumans make their mark is qualitatively
different? A more plausible hypothesis is that the eventing of both shares a series of family
resemblances, even operate isomorphically.
Humans and nonhumans live and act in open wholes that pulse with energies only some
of which are actualized at any given time and place. The point that I would like again to
underline is that, in addition to the agential propensity of each member of an assemblage, there is
also the agency proper to the grouping itself. Deleuze and Guattari describe this force field as a
milieu, the agentic force of human-nonhuman assemblages: “Thus the living thing ... has an
exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substance,
an intermediary mileu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and
actions-perceptions.”
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Something like this agency, which attaches to assemblages, is called shi in the Chinese
tradition. Shi helps to “illuminate something that is usually difficult to capture in discourse:
namely, the kind of potential that originates not in human initiative but instead results from the
very disposition of things.”
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Shi: the style, energy, propensity, trajectory, or elan inherent to a
specific arrangement of things. Originally a word used in military strategy -- a good general must
be able to read and then ride the shi of a configuration of moods, winds, historical trends, and
armaments – shi names the dynamic force emanating from a spatio-temporal configuration rather
than from any particular element within it.
But again, the shi of an assemblage is vibratory; it is the mood of an open whole where
both the membership changes over time and the members themselves undergo internal alteration.
Each member “possesses autonomous emergent properties which are thus capable of independent
Convention