Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/9

Rh 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.

Her aim here is nothing short of a reformulated vitalism, in which it becomes increasingly necessary to think in terms of multiple modes and degrees of agency. She de-emphasizes the human, directing attention towards networks of change, more-than-human assemblages, and the agentic contributions of myriad nonhumans to socio-political events. One of her main operating terms is ‘thing-power’, which she elaborates through carefully developed examples and case studies. This thing-power requires its own vocabulary, shifting attention away from the singular authorial power of human decision-making and intentionality toward distributed fields of force. Terms such as productive power, propensity, trajectory and vital impetus become far more appropriate for the interplay of matter she outlines. Her concerns are clearly speculative, but also systematic, realist and linked back to the humanities at various points. As she asks, drawing on the parlance of Latour:

"What would happen to our thinking about nature if we experienced materialities as actants, and how would the direction of public policy shift if we attended more carefully to their trajectories and powers? I am looking for a materialism in which matter is figured as a vitality both inside and outside ourselves, and is a force to be reckoned with without being purposive in any strong sense."

One can barely start to imagine how this revised landscape might play out if and when applied to religious and gender systems. Bennett champions the ability of everyday objects to exhibit a degree of independence, a capacity to exceed the conceptual frames that we impose on them, becoming ‘vibrant things with a certain affectivity of their own’. Her theorization of material agency draws on and adapts the Deleuzean concept of assemblages. No longer is agency firmly anchored within the human, but it is the product of often dispersed but internally related, human-nonhuman aggregates. One example that she unravels is that of the electrical power grid and the case of a widespread blackout in North America in 2003. The blackout, she notes, was extruded ‘from multiple sites or many loci ... a quirky electron flow and a spontaneous fire to members of Congress who have a neoliberal faith in market 52