“In emphasizing the ensemble nature of action and the interconnections between persons and things, a theory of vibrant matter presents individuals as simply incapable of bearing full responsibility for their effects.” (Bennett 37)
How does Bennett’s statement on the responsibility of actants reflect the previously stated concept of assemblages in the chapter? Why is it that Bennett comes to this statement on responsibility towards the end of the chapter? How does “thing-power” work into these ideas?
Bennett describes “assemblages” as “living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within.” (VM p. 23, 24) Near the end of chapter 2, Bennett theorizes that because of the vast amount of actants working to create each event, no single entity can be blamed for its occurrence. For example, the motives, personality, past occurrences and resources that combine to produce the decision of a Virginia Tech student to open fire on his classmates were all partly to blame. The “cause” of any effect is a hybrid of an infinite number of “things” that come together to produce the result.
I think there is a natural progression from agency to intent to responsibility in this chapter. She asks at the beginning of the chapter “how would an understanding of agency as a confederation of human and nonhuman elements alter established notions of moral responsibility and political accountability” (21).
The traditional understanding of agency makes these ideas easier. The human agent is the one responsible for whatever. Her walk-through of the power failure makes me sympathetic to her viewpoint; there were certainly a lot of factors involved. However, I am deeply uncomfortable with Kaleb’s example of the Virginia Tech shooter. I feel that, unless each actant within an assemblage surrenders its individual agency to the assemblage, blame can still be placed pretty easily on the individual actant, in this case, the shooter. Because he intended to do and then did this thing.
Bennett’s agency “does not deny the existence of that thrust of intentionality, but it does see it as less definitive of outcomes” (32). Now if I trip on a rock and knock someone over who then gets hit on the head and dies from the injury, I’m as responsible as the rock. If I buy a gun and shoot someone in the head, the gun and I are not equally to blame. I can see how viewing inanimate objects as actants distributes some responsibility to an assemblage but I can’t see how it negates the responsibility of active choice by human agents.