3
others, because of their greater volatility, or faster pace of evolution, or stronger resistance to
knowledge, are best conceived as forces.) Does not a kind of agency bubble up from within
animals, vegetables, and minerals? For any given event, can not the locus of agency be traced
back to an assemblage of persons, technologies, cultural moods, and atmospheric conditions? In
addition, then, to the agentic capacity of materialities considered individually, there is also an
agency proper to the collectives they form. Agency is distributed to the multiplicity as well as to
its members. And precisely because each member-actant preserves a moment of energy slightly
“off” from that exuded by assemblage, the assemblage is not a stolid block but an open-ended
grouping, a “non-totalizable” sum.
4
Before elaborating further such a notion of distributive agency, let me say a bit about the
materialist ontology with which it is allied. This faith, or better, this wonder, can be described as
a kind of vitalism, an enchanted materialism. Within this materialism, the techno-natural world is
figured as neither mechanistic nor teleological but rather as alive with movement and with a
certain power of expression.
5
By “power of expression,” I mean the ability of bodies to become
otherwise than they are, to press out of their current configuration and enter into new
compositions of self, as well as into new alliances and rivalries with others.
6
Within the terms of
this imaginary, there are various sources or sites of agency, including the intentionality of a
human animal, the temperament of a brain’s chemistry, the momentum of a social movement, the
mood of an architectural form, the propensity of a family, the style of a corporation, the drive of a
sound-field, and the decisions of molecules at far-from-equilibrium states.
So, my profession of faith (with a nod to the Nicene Creed): I believe in one world,
material and overflowing. I believe that this world is filled with multiple modes of agency and
Convention