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84: śramana, Vol 64, No. III, July-Sept. 2013
except insofar as it betokened human activity (the workman's efforts, the litterer's toss, the ratpoisoner's success) and on the other hand, stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits or projects. In the second moment, stuff exhibits its thing-power: it issued a call, even if I did not quite understand what it was saying." 36
Following a tradition that is informed by a wide variety of Western philosophers and thinkers, from Deleuze and Guattari to Spinoza to Thoreau to Adorno, Bennett traces the contours of vital materialism through her notion of "thing-power.” Thing-power, she writes, is "the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle."37 It is this capacity or quality, a hard-to-describe trait, of random debris that commands to be known. In describing thing-power, Bennett explores the idea of trash as having some productive ability; she cites Robert Sullivan who explains how the piling of garbage in New Jersey creates polluting ooze and sludge, so that we realize that “a vital materiality can never really be thrown 'away,' for it continues its activities even as a discarded or unwanted commodity.”38 In this way, thingpower challenges the typical idea of what are certain substances by asking the question: what can a substance do? Indeed, it becomes a good starting point for thinking beyond the lifematter binary, the dominant organizational principle of adult experience."39
Bennett's project has her think about the power of electricity, fat, metal, stem cells and garbage. This engagement with these substances, her arguing that they have vitality to them, lends itself to a new understanding of acting." Bennett in this instance takes cue from theorist Bruno Latour and his term actant. Bennett writes, “Actant, recall, is Bruno Latour's term for a source of action; an actant can be human or not or most likely, a combination of both. Latour defines it as "something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general.” An actant is neither an object nor a subject but an 'intervener,” akin to the Deleuzean "quasi-casual operator.” An operator is that which, by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage and the fortuity of being in the right place at the right time, makes the difference, makes things happen, becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event.”40
Bennett's drawing of Latour to describe the nature of actants creates an axiom, "an actant never really acts alone."41 Her understanding of actants in vital materialism emphasizes a constantly shifting web of relationality between different types of things: human bodies, plant bodies, plastic, fat and lightning, for example. Following Deleuze and Guattari, Bennett describes this constantly (re)shaping relationships an assemblage. Bennett describes assemblages as "ad hoc groupings of diverse elementsē living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within.":42 The beauty of an assemblage is that a single force does not guide its activity, but rather, it is an emergent culmination of forces, each one activity together (or against one another) to cause something to happen. The vitality of the constituent members of an assemblage still remains, enabling them to break off from the assemblage upon whom to enter into new assemblages and relationships. This description
