The Assemblage - Michelle Sumovich

This week’s readings unite many seemingly unrelated concepts into the coherency of the “assemblage.” Latour and Bennett are both concerned with the interconnectedness that exists among the scientific, social, human, and non-human realms. The authors show us the shaping of matter into scientific form through the mobilization of not only the most obvious scientific actants, but also through the influence of the social, public, political, bureaucratic, and peripheral. To use Latour’s chapter for example, the functions of uranium and heavy water would be irrelevant to Joliot were it not for their necessity in the making of his atomic reactor. Were it not for the production of uranium and the discovery of the isotope used to make heavy water, Joliot may have never worked for Raoul Dautry nor the French military. Each of these actants is causally responsible in some way for the production of Joliot’s atomic reactor, and they continue to act as his achievement affects other elements of the world. However, as Bennett points out, this causality is nonlinear. X does not affect Y. There are many (infinite?) Xs which influence many Ys. Bennett refers to this as “emergent causality” in which “effects and cause alternate position and rebound back upon each other” (459). In other words, all humans, non-humans, and concepts have influence upon “the others” and are influenced by “the others”. This is the shapeless blob known (or unknown) as the assemblage.

Bennett makes reference to a traditional Chinese concept known as Shi which is impressed upon me as a state of knowing, seeing, and sensing the many actants which make up an assemblage. Shi is not simply the essence of the world as expressed through human causality, but an illumination of the shifting dispositions of the world. The author attempts to bring the reader into a sort of state of Shi through her analogy of the electric power grid which Bennett describes as a flow of electrons whose mobility is not entirely predictable, as evidenced by the 2003 direction reversal between Pennsylvania and New York following an outage (451). The unforseeable occurred when this electron flow changed course, behaving as an “entity with uncertain boundaries,” or directionality without reason. I think this example shows us that by making science (building electric grids and atomic reactors) we are sometimes harnessing, taming, or shaping nature to reach a goal BUT when we shape reason into structures, contexts, settings, climates, and conditions, and likewise when we inappropriately assign human agency to causality, we can easily rob ourselves of an understanding of the Shi operating among the assemblage. I believe that Latour and Bennett would agree that how we perceive cause and agency can affect the ways in which we put the world into words.