Assemblages
With the onset of globalization and organicist models of part-to-whole relationships, new theories emerged to describe this network. Jane Bennett chooses to call upon’s notion of Assemblage. These are groupings of diverse elements of vibrant matter. These are living confederations that function despite the fact that all their parts do not work perfectly in conjunction and are at times at odds with one another. They are not a unified whole, nor are they governed by a central head; no one material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory of the group. Their effects are emergent properties derived from an open-ended collective, and are "non-totalizable" sums of effects of individual parts in a loose conglomeration. The individual parts and the totalizing whole both have forms of agency, and efficacy. The efficacy of the whole points to the creativity of agency, as the will of the subject is not that of an individual subject in this case. With assemblages, the will can be defined as that of an "Agentic Swarm," a chaotic mass of agency from a grouping of agentic objects. The trajectory is the resultant directionality or movement away from somewhere, even if the toward-which it movies is obscure, absent or unknown. The final property of an agent is causality (cause and effect), those with an assemblage, it can be difficult to determine. In an agentic swarm, there is no simple chain of bodies acting solely in one way. Efficient causality will rank the actants involved, treating some as external causes and others as dependent effects, but emergent causality places the focus on the process as itself an actant, in possession of degrees of agentic capacity.1
