Thing-power

With the proviso that I'm writing with all of the presumptions and false demands of someone who has not read the whole book, I am interested to think a little more around the concept of thing power which is introduced in chapter one and developed in chapter two. Unlike the 'thinginess' that might be implied from the term, thing power evokes a materiality of intensities and extensions that works 'in excess of the human meanings, designs, or purposes they serve' (p20).

I like to consider how this idea reconfigures the way we might think about experimentation. In a world where agency is distributed across bodies and matter, the experimental aspect is not so much in the relation between the parameters I choose to set and the data yielded, but the degree to which the movements of the world are allowed to influence my interactions. In this sense we could go so far as to wonder how we may allow the world to experiment with us. By which I do not mean to avoid the issue of accountability (or responsibility) which Bennett raises in her discussions of the electricity grid; but to suggest it is reframed. Responsibility is rethought as the capacity to be affected – to be interrupted – by what is not yet intelligible; to become sensible of that which we did not know how to think. On a very simple level, I do not know what adventures I may have if I allow my plans to be disrupted by that which I did not know it was possible to seek out. But experimentation not grounded in the thought of a sovereign subject is also an ethical question – it is a matter of responding, and becoming more responsive, to that which we do not currently know how to register.

I wonder if this is also an issue of time – I think I can detect Bergson stirring - in the sense that the 'thing' is a space of encounter between a biographical or chronological time (in my experience) and a durational aspect invested with topological intensities. As with the madeleine biscuit in Proust's (2002) famous evocation of involuntary memory, this is a 'banal object' which has become caught up in the logics of other worlds. Lodged somewhere between the repetition in memory of associations and experience, and temporalities belonging to the micro-movements of other mattering processes: this object for a moment marks the crossroads for a higher traffic of affects and bodies (p24). I am not so convinced, however, that the 'trajectories' of this thing-power is that same messianicity, or directionality, 'away from somewhere' which Bennett links with Derrida's promise of phenomenality. I do not see in this perpetual departure how we can account for what returns – a problem which the Deleuzian vitalist materialism seems better set up to explore.

A final thought: because of this rethinking of experimentation and agency, the 'adequacy' of ideas (from Spinoza's ethics) relates to truth processes differently. Instead of placing emphasis on the individual's capacity to correctly untangle the relationship between causes and effects, this variety of ethics seems to insist that we work to untangle ourselves from the 'tool' thinking (p25) in which the becoming of material processes is stabilised according to an 'external purpose' (as in the case of the electricity grid). It is a thought of ethics which reiteratively provokes questions of how we are to live adequately to the world.

Proust, M. ([1921] 2002) In Search of Lost Time, L. Davis, M. Treharne, J. Grieve, J. Sturrock, C. Clark, P. Collier & I. Patterson (trans.), London: Allen Lane, 2002 (6 vols).