Distributive agency: “an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces” (21). Agency is a combination of efficacy, trajectory and causality: “Efficacy points to the creativity of agency, to a capacity to make something new appear or occur” (31). Trajectory is “a directionality or movement away from somewhere even if the toward which it moves is obscure or even absent” (32). Causality the way we understand it, then, is a myth.
“What it means to be a ‘mode,’ then, is to form alliances and enter assemblages: it is to mod(e)ify and be modified by others. The process of modification is not under the control of any one mode – no mode is an agent in the hierarchical sense” (22).
“Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within… The effects gathered from assemblages are, rather, emergent properties” (23-4).
Vital materialism: “I am looking for a materialism in which matter is figured as a vitality at work both inside and outside of selves, and is a force to be reckoned with without being purposive in any strong sense” (62).
She shows that food is an actant because it can make itself look appealing, because it can produce fat, and because it can shape how we think and behave; in other words, food has both cognitive and behavioral effects on humans. At some point, food is also digested so it becomes inseparable from the body. It is in an assemblage with the human, metabolism, cognition, and moral sensibility. Along these same lines, she cautions us from thinking about our bodies as fixed and determined parts because it has material like bacteria and can grow things like embryotic cells, which were not part of the body previously.
She asserts that materials form publics (being political). She uses Dewey’s understand of public formation: “a public does not preexist its particular problem but emerges in response to it. A public is a contingent and temporary formation existing alongside many other publics, protopublics or postpublics. Problems come and go, and so, too, do publics…The field of political action is thus for Dewey a kind of ecology. No one body owns its supposedly own initiative, for initiatives instantly conjoin with an impersonal swarm of contemporaneous endeavors, each with its own duration and intensity, recombining with others” (100-1).
Some parts of anthropomorphism can be beneficial because it encourages us to see material as worthy of attention; “it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism: a chord is struck between person and thing, and I am no longer above or outside a nonhuman ‘environment’” (120).
“The ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such” (13). “Perhaps the ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one’s response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating: Do I attempt to extricate myself from assemblages whose trajectory is likely to do harm?” (37).