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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.
The
International Herald Tribune, on the day after the blackout, reported that
The vast but shadowy web of transmission lines, power generating plants and substations
know as the grid is the biggest gizmo ever built... [O]n Thursday [August 14, 2003], the
grid’s heart fluttered.... [C]omplicated beyond full understanding, even by experts -- [the
grid] lives and occasionally dies by its own mysterious rules.
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What can it mean to say that the “grid’s heart fluttered” or that it lives “by its own rules”? What
is this power wielded by that this material assemblage? Can this power be described as a kind of
agency, despite the fact that the term is usually restricted to intentional, human acts? What
happens to the idea of an agent once nonhuman materialities are figured less as social
constructions and more as actors, and once humans are themselves assessed as members of
human-nonhuman assemblages? How does the agency of assemblages compare to more familiar
notions like that of the willed intentionality of persons, the disciplinary power of society, or the
automatism of natural processes? How does recognition of the nonhuman and non-individuated
dimensions of agency alter established notions of moral responsibility and political
accountability?
My strategy is to focus attention on the distributive and composite quality of the power
called agency. Is not the power to make a difference, to produce effects, or even to initiate
action, disseminated across a diverse range of actors, or actants, to use Bruno Latour’s less
anthropocentric term?
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(Some actants have sufficient coherence to appear as entities; while
Convention