I would like to begin my blog this week by examining Dr. Seaman’s request on the Preview of Week 3 to begin thinking about what a “more distributive agency” could be (Bennett ix).  Bennett leads into this topic with a few terms coined by Bruno Latour, author of Reassembling the Social which we will be reading this semester, and how she finds his attempt to be admirable in “address[ing] multiple modes and degrees of effectivity” (viii-ix).  According to Bennett, this is Latour’s effort in moving towards that “more distributive agency.”

The word “more” is usually always used in comparison.  Therefore, it was right here that I gathered that Bennett may be setting herself apart from Latour.  For in Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, any thing in existence that alters another thing is an actant.  I think that what Bennett is suggesting, then, is that by allowing his theory to include all and any thing that may have any effect is giving Latour a “more distributive agency”:  a wider application of his theory because it is all-encompassing.  I am led to further believe this because a couple of sentences later Bennett asserts that she “lavish[es] attention on specific ‘things,’ noting the distinctive capacities or effacious powers of particular material configurations” (ix).  Meaning, perhaps she has a smaller distributive agency than Latour does because she is being more specific.  In her preface she places a personal importance on a greener existence (x), which may also limit her distributive agency when compared to Latour’s.  Though, I am not able to fully make that claim yet only having read “What is Actor Network Theory?,” and not the actual theory itself (Martin Ryder).  However, just from reading that collection of responses to Latour it does not sound as if the things he focuses on are quite as particular as the ones that Bennett does.  In turn, this gives Latour a “more distributive agency.”