Actant
An Actant has AGENCY or EFFICACY, also known as the ability to affect other things or cause events to happen. Efficacy specifically refers to will and the ability to produce a desired result. Any source of action, the actant, can be either human or nonhuman and it has not only the efficacy, but sufficient coherence to make a difference or produce effects. Jane Bennett's idea of "Distributive Agency" means that the property of agency is no longer confined to is traditional carriers, but instead viewed as a property of all things. This is heavily based on Bruno Latour's work and also Baruch Spinoza's. Spinoza's idea of Conative Bodies are entities which strive to enhance their power of activity or ability to be an actant by forming alliances with other bodies. In doing so, these become "affective bodies." These are associative or social bodies, in the sense that each is, by its very nature as a body, continuously affecting and being affected by other bodies. Together, these bodies enhance their power in or as a heterogeneous assemblage. This implies that agency or efficacy, which has traditionally been associated with a human body or a collective human effort, can instead be distributed across a heterogeneous field of entities.
These ideas are condensed into the concept of "Thing-Power," in Jane Bennett's work, or, the ability of items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, creating an experience OUTSIDE of humans. There are two liabilities to this concept. First, that it deals only with the vitality of stable or fixed entities (i.e. things), and secondly, that it presents this vitality in terms that are too individualistic to each item (essentially, that what gives each object its autonomy cannot necessarily be generalized to all objects). Thing-power can be compared to the childhood sense that the world is filled with animate, thinking beings, whether they are human or not, organic or not. "Each thing [res] as far as it can by its own power, strives [conatur] to persevere in its own being." This is defined in Conatus as an "active impulsion" or trending tendency to persist. "Any thing whatsoever, whether it be more perfect or less perfect, will always be able to persist in existing with that same force whereby it begins to exist, so that in this respect, all things are equal." Jane Bennett tries to apply this materiality to a force or energy, as opposed to a fixed, stable matter, while simultaneously rising above the anthropocentric view that Spinoza attaches to his theories. 2