Collaboratory in Critical Security Methods
The International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies is an ESRC funded project (RES-810-21-0072)
Discussion of Jane Bennett's article 'The Agency of Assemblages'
Dear all,
Our group is starting a discussion of Jane Bennett's article, The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout, from Monday 12 April.
Please feel free to join in if you can/would like to. The article pdf is available in the Library.
Best,
Claudia
Claudia Aradau says
I was re-reading some bits of Foucault's Archeology of knowledge and came across the distinction that he draws between things and objects in a sort of 'programmatic way'. It is part of the chapter on the formation of objects.
He says
'What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with things... To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude, which we usually regard as the primitive law of a discourse that has become divorced from it through error, oblivion, illusion, ignorance, or the inertia of beliefs and traditions, or even perhaps the unconscious desire not to see and not to speak. To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance'.
It seems to me that the distinction between things and objects might be an important one to consider. My feeling is that Bennett oscillates between things and objects. The question is: why this oscillation?
On the one hand, there is something 'enchanted' about things, their energetic pulse, she speaks about the essence (sic) of electricity. On the other, she approaches electricity as an object, as something whose particular historical appearance (in Foucault's terms) gets constituted through practice. I find this oscillation quite interesting because it seems that the theorisation of 'objects' has some sort of insufficiency - that something more is needed.
21 April 2010, 09:24
Nadine Voelkner says
This is an interesting reference. I think it points to deeper questions relating to ontology though. First, can things be outside discourse (outside the identity and meaning we give things)? Second, if there is an outside, how do we talk about this place outside discourse when the language we develop to describe this place already puts it back into discourse? Put differently, to relate this back to our discussion, how can we know something of a thing when nothing can be said of it?
For Bennett, I think, there is an outside discourse. This is why there can be an ‘essence’ of electricity that I suspect might relate to Searle’s ‘bruteness,’ following Owen (thanks for the reference!). Bennett certainly relates it to Thoreau’s notion of the ‘Wild’. I don’t think she would negate that objectifications of electricity emerge in discourse (the shortage of reactive power, maintaining infrastructure, Energy Policy Act etc). In the scheme of subject-object, one can argue too that Bennett herself acts as the subject who puts the ‘bruteness’ of electricity into discourse, thereby objectifying it (more later). So, to use Foucault’s word instead, the ‘primitive,’ the ‘foundation’ of the thing we name electricity coexists with a multiplicity of its objectifications.
Incidentally, in my reading oif the passage in Archaeology of Knowledge Claudia mentions, I would say Foucault also suggests there is an outside of discourse. He wants to be clear though that his project is to understand the workings of discourse and not (its relation to) ‘the primitive’. “We shall remain, or try to remain,” he says, “at the level of discourse itself” as opposed to returning to the ‘silent’ state, “the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’” “anterior to discourse-in which nothing has yet been said, and in which things are only just beginning to emerge out of the grey light”. Foucault wants to relate discursive objects “to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance”. In this project, questions concerning the definition of discursive objects with reference to the “ground, the foundation of things,” he says, are “not relevant [!] when we are trying to discover, for example, how criminality could become an object of medical expertise, or sexual deviation a possible object of psychiatric discourse”.
I think the possibility of a space that is “anterior to discourse” in Bennett must be understood in her charge against what she calls “the philosophical project of naming where subjectivity begins and ends”. In other words, hers is a more fundamental critique of the subject-object divide. I think we are also under the spell of subject-object (at least if we think about the opening questions we developed for our cluster!).
Bennett’s project is to develop a grammar, e.g. by reconceptualizing the notion of agency, for “the active powers issuing from nonsubjects”. I think the concept of nonsubject is important here. Bennett says herself that she “courts the charge of performative self-contradiction: is it not a human subject who, after all, is articulating this theory of vibrant matter?” Her answer is yes and no. Remember, her discussion about distributive agency in the article. Rather than developing a new term in order to describe the ability to produce effects in the world, she sticks by agency. She does this in order to show and emphasize not only how human-exceptionalist agency has been understood until now but also how not one of the great philosophers/theorists of agency really knows what human agency is.
28 April 2010, 17:03
Owen Thomas says
I thought this article was a great place to start our debate concerning the role of materiality in social inquiry and its relation to discourse. I may replicate some of Nadine's points above in my response to our debates...
As Nadine drew out for us when we first discussed the article, Bennett’s message here seems to a warning against anthropocentrism, “whereever it looks, social science tends to see only the social activity of humans” (Bennett 2005, p. 455). Whilst the agency-structure debate has led us to think about the inter-subjective relations whose constraints diminish our individual responsibility and possibilities for action, Bennett argues that we must also consider the “spirited actants” of materiality that impose equally important constraints – examples of which are given as biochemically induced stomach aches or, the devotion of the article, the effect of ‘reactive’ electricity on human-controlled power grids.
The notion that material things play a role in the production of effects on political and social interaction can be found elsewhere of course. Foucault made this argument by way of the archaeology, in which discursive practices become connected to non-discursive objects (Foucault, 1972). But I’m not sure this indicated that the objects had an agency of their own? Quite the reverse?
I find Bennett’s discussion of agency and causality featured later in the article particularly interested, but it is this positing of non-human agency that I find both fascinating and troublesome. For me it raised one particular, though broad, question.
We can make sense of both sides of the agency-structure debate because in both circumstances we can find positions from which to suppose notions of identity and meaning; it is found in the rationality and self-reflexivity of agents, and, structurally, in the inter-subjective relations of individuals that constrain possible outcomes. Bennett seems content with neither, encouraging us to transcend this division and include considerations of material agency – Nadine seems right on the mark by asserting that this is a call for a new grammer of agency. What I find troubling about Bennett’s article is that she does not indicate where the knowledge of material agency comes from – this is perhaps why the grammar is so difficult to define.
The question is therefore, how do we know about the agency of a thing? I think this question is important particularly as we are focussing on critical method and its application to empirical sites. If we wish to consider the role of material assemblages, we need to think about how the knowledge of the material thing’s status can be known.
This epistemological question seems to raise another ontological one. Namely, what is the nature of materiality? Well-trodden debates from the philosophy of social sciences would seem to provide two possibilities. Is materiality, as critical realists such as John Searle would suggest, a combination of brute facts (such as mountains and electricity) that exist without humans alongside ontologically subjective facts (such as power grids) that are dependent on the status we collectively bestow upon them? Or are all things ontologically subjective – as Richard Rorty would term ‘mind-dependent’ – in which case it is never possible to know of a thing’s ‘true’ identity and meaning except that which we bestow by language games?
By choosing an ontological status for our ‘things’ we can then consider the epistemological question of how we come to know about their agency. Accepting a Rorty-esque pragmatist ontology may lead us to suggest that the meanings and identities that we determine within a material thing is contingent on the language game we use. Perhaps this leads us to Foucauldian archaeology as above?
Alternatively if we accept Searle’s position that certain things exist without and beyond humans then perhaps we can begin to posit objective agentic capacities to the electricity in the grid. I wonder whether Bennett takes this route, perhaps she must in order to give materiality an importance beyond the “social activity of humans.”
To throw a final spanner in the works, perhaps we should also consider how the naming and classifying of these ‘things’ may have feedback effects on social and political interactions that we believe are affected by material forces in the first place. For example, let’s go back to the North American power grid. What happens if the non-human agency of reactive electricity is accepted, classified, and reacted to by the various human networks involved in the power grid? Presumably we might see a change in behaviour, a new regulation, a new form of movement, or new identity attributed to parts of the grid. To what extent has the very naming of a material agency had a feedback effect on human action in terms of our possibilities for meaningful, sensible, legitimate action?
Ian Hacking has made this sort of argument at length, suggesting that the very act of classifying non-human (indifferent) things impacts our own historically contingent ontology.
Although this article prompted more questions that answers for me, I think at this stage that is most welcome. Moreover, as I think Nadine mentioned, Bennett’s message is still very forceful in asking us to consider wider social forces than those individualist or behavioural causes that often become privileged in social inquiry. A great springboard for further discussion!
Post script
In reference to Claudia’s post above, regarding Foucault’s distinction between thing and object, I think Claudia’s quotataion of Foucault’s contention that we should not,
define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse
is very important. From my own reading of Foucault, I would think that he does not want to grant materiality a role in understanding social interaction until it becomes endowed with ‘enunciative modalities,’ ‘concepts,’ and ‘strategies’ and become a ‘discursive formation’ (Foucault 1972, 48-64). Perhaps ‘thing’ is materiality before discourse, and ‘object’ after.
If that is accurate then perhaps Foucault does not see material ‘things’ as vessels of agency or meaning in themselves, until they become ‘objects’ of discourse. If Foucault does not grant materiality an ontological outside of discourse this seems a reasonable move given that, as Nadine has already noted, saying nothing about a ‘thing’ is as good as saying something when nothing can be known of it.
The page references are from this edition, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972)
28 April 2010, 18:00
Nadine Voelkner says
I think Owen put it nicely: Perhaps ‘thing’ is materiality before discourse, and ‘object’ after. In relation to this, I would add that a thing does not lose its materiality after discourse but is material while being object too. In terms of security, this raises interesting questions.
How does our thus far (very interesting) theoretical discussion relate to security specifically? How do we imagine material things having agency outside of the discourse of security? I think the recent eruption of the Icelandic volcano is a good example. It is a material thing that does not cease to exist or become more or less powerful as it is entered into discourse, be this security today, religion and superstitution millenia ago and so on. Nor, I contend, is discourse ever able to capture fully (predict, order, 'tame') this material thing because, as Bennett suggests, it "maintains an energetic pulse slightly 'off' from that exuded" by the discourses into which it is placed... (Bennett, 1994). As subjects of security, our freedom to circulate was severely affected by the capacity of the volcano to disrupt our 'form of life'. ...
In terms of Foucault and the possibility of material agency (Owen's last point), I do wonder though. But that I'm sure will come up again as we read the other texts. As will the question concerning agency-structure, subject-object, and (beyond these binaries) nonsubject, as Bennett suggests (In Vibrant Matter, 2010)
2 May 2010, 19:31
Owen Thomas says
Although I’m already putting some reflections together on Barad I’d like to briefly respond to Nadine – unfortunately I’ve only just seen the response, apologies.
I think Nadine is right to ask how we make use of these discussions – and the need for constant reflection on the applicability of these ideas to our own empirical sites. From my own perspective, I suppose I want to think about how different ways of theorising materiality impact the methods and methodologies used to study social and political events and interaction – within the area of security.
To briefly respond to Nadine’s suggestions above regarding the volcano – which I think is a very good example by the way! – namely that ‘as subjects of security, our freedom to circulate was severely affected by the capacity of the volcano to disrupt our 'form of life'.
One could argue it was not the volcano – as an ontologically objective thing – that disrupted our form of life. It was the status and identity afforded to it by scientific apparatus of meteorology, aeronautics, vulcanology and so on. Experiments produced models suggesting the ‘failure’ of jet engines encountering volcanic ash, this knowledge combined with discourses of Health & Safety produced an identity construction of danger. So in one sense I suppose one could suggest that discursive practices played a key role in our social behavior.
One the other hand, these discourses did not come to be on their own. Only by interacting with the material volcano thing did someone determine that volcanic ash forms a layer of glass on jet turbines that in turn disrupts the ‘normal’ movements of air used in the engine to create thrust. Thus without interactions with the material, the ontology of Eyjafjallajökull would be different.
Often discourse analysis, has been celebrated as a method that can be used to uncover the contingencies of knowledge and contingencies of subjectivities produced by virtue of that knowledge – it takes seeming certainties and illustrates a process by which they came to be. Curiously we are now witnessing a similar occurrence as more and more European airspace is opened up even though Eyjafjallajökull still throws ash into the upper atmosphere. Through disjuncture of discourses concerning the need for air travel in the world economy versus risk to human life, and contestation over the ‘tolerance’ of jet engines, the risk and security practices ascribed to Eyjafjallajökull are changing – although the scientific community would still argue that they are working toward a ‘true’ tolerance level concerning jet engines and ash. The same would not be said of 'true' knowledge by the community of critical discourse analysts.
What these events suggest is that the changes to security practices and to population control changed, at least in part, due to interactions with the material ‘thing.’
Of course the product of interaction with the thing is also affected by what methods we choose to use in order to study Eyjafjallajökull. I think this is where Barad will be useful as she discusses how the phenomenon is a product of discourse/material apparatus leading to an ontoepistemologically under her agential realism. I won’t develop this point further as we’ll have a separate discussion. Although one thought that would be interesting to explore under a Barad discussion – what if we had no airplanes? How then might Eyjafjallajökull appear as a phenomenon?
I agree with Nadine that discourse cannot fully capture social interactions without materiality – particularly is we describe discourses as formations of language. If we privilege discourse over materiality we end up with claims such as those by Milliken or Hansen that ‘the material world has no meaning.’ It is my suspicion of this argument that formed the basis of my original ICCM abstract. However I remain equally uncertain of Bennett’s material agency for two reasons; I am not sure whether Bennett is ascribing an ontology to things that is objective or subjective – if it is the former then how can we ever know of it if we do not accept positivist principles, if it is the latter then how can the thing ever have its own agency?
As we move forward I think there are several 'problems' that I will interested to explore through other thinkers
- What agency is bestowed to the thing outside of discourse?
- Does ontologically objective materiality produce more or less deterministic accounts? And does ontologically subjective materiality remove altogether the agentic capacity of a thing?
- Finally, does it even make sense to talk about discourse or materiality as separate?
19 May 2010, 17:47
Eva Herschinger says
Being last to comment, I only can subscribe to a lot of what has been said by Claudia, Nadine and Owen. I would only like to outline one question which we have been discussing during our skype-conversation and one point which relates to our interest in methodology and methods.
Bennett’s article has been an excellent starting point (thanks Nadine!) as it raised from the very beginning a number of interesting questions, among those a crucial one: the one of responsibility. While her conception of agency as not only related to human beings and her rejection of ‘human exceptionalism’ opens up new avenues to think about agency, she rightly points out that the question of responsibility immediately comes to the fore when reconceptualizing agency in her way. “Does the acknowledgment of non-human actants relive individual humans of the burden of being held responsible for their actions?” she asks and answers “a theory of vital materialism presents individuals as simply incapable of bearing full responsibility for their effects” (Bennett 1993: 463).
I find her point inconsistent with her argument and troublesome at the same time. Inconsistent because would it not be more consequential from her point of view to attribute responsibility to non-humans, to the assemblage as a collective as well – and, therefore, go not only for a reconstruction of agency but also of what she considers to be full responsibility? The latter might be an equally narrow conception as the one of agency she takes issue with. Troublesome, because responsibility – as one could argue –, first, always needs an identifiable agent (this could also be a non-human being à la ‘nature strikes back’) and, second, in the political arena we will always search for a responsible agent who can at least explain and justify why things happened the way they did.
A thought that come up while reading through your threads: Owen outlined the question so aptly ‘how do we know about the agency of a thing?, i.e. ‘how the knowledge of the material thing’s status can be known’ and pointed to the method/methodological content of this question. In the context of Bennet’s text this reminded me very much about a longtime debated problem in biology (or philosophical biology if this exists??). Here, scholars discuss whether we are able to know if animals can think – of course, this is a hotly debated issue as some contend that animals do not possess the ability to think, however, some say that we cannot solve the problem from a philosophical point of view as it is a problem of methodology. As animals do not speak in the same language as we do, we are not able to investigate whether they are intelligent or not and without language we do not dispose of a method to find out about their ability to think. I find this very interesting as the discussion is clearly linked to a human understanding of rationality and intelligence animals should dispose of to be intelligent and reasonable beings. And if we are not even able to find out about the feelings and the ‘rationality’ of animals – how about things, objects?
One final remark: Owen said in one of his posts that “If we privilege discourse over materiality we end up with claims such as those by Milliken or Hansen that ‘the material world has no meaning.’ I would claim that at least Hansen considers the material world to have a specific meaning (well yes, only in relation to humans) when she speaks about the ability of things and objects to serve as Other in identity construction.
15 May 2012, 18:26