“Assemblages are not governed by any central head: no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group. The effects generated by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen (a newly inflected materialism, a blackout, a hurricane, a war on terror) is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered alone. Each member and proto-member of the assemblage has a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency of the assemblage. And precisely because each member-actant maintains an energetic pulse slightly ‘off‘ from that of the assemblage, an assemblage is never a stolid block but an open-ended collective, a ‘non-totalizable sum’. An assemblage thus not only has a distinctive history of formation but a finite life span.” (Bennett 2010, p.24)
If we regard a given situation as produced by the materials that make up that situation, the people, things, places, institutions and ways-of-doing that come together in that moment, we can begin to let go of a way of understanding that is focussed on making things definite. We are not outside the things that make up a situation, we too are both networked and in networks. The attitude that is best suited for this understanding of the world, an understanding based on infinitely complex processes and interplay, is a more aware, reflective and open or flexible attitude that is not focussed on making things definite but on moving with the situation and its forces.
So far this sounds rather vague, or poetic at least. In her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009), Jane Bennett shows how the dynamic of the emergency or disaster further explains this point (Bennett discusses this through the example of an electricity grid and a blackout). The emergency is that which emerges out of the situation, against our understanding of it. Suddenly things were not as we thought or wanted them to be. Or as Bennett puts it, the conjoint action of a multiplicity of small agencies destabilizes a reality, you are caught off guard; our practices no longer correspond with how the world presents itself to us. Often the emergency is retrospectively understood and we learn from it.
Actor Network Theory gives us a view of the world as an endlessly expanding network of networks, or big meshwork. How can we say anything definite about the infinite? In a sense we are not well equipped to deal with these meshworked realities that ‘get produced’ in practices if we approach them with the objectifying knowledge frames we use to get a sense of reality. A meshworked idea of the world is best understood with an attitude that leans on developing a sense of possibility.
The beauty of the word ‘emergency’ is its root ‘emerge’. It is the emergence of emergency that is an interesting force that should be investigated and used productively. It seems Designerly Research can do just that. Instead of waiting for the emergence of emergencies, instead of waiting for these unseen, we could bring in a reflective force that probes and observes. A force that intervenes from the outside in with less of an allegiance to the dominant ways of doing and making (and seeing) and does not help stabilize the one dominant reality over the others, but challenges the consensus and engages in the development of a sense of possibility. The designer in Designerly Resaerch can do just that. The nomadic or parasitic quality of the designer can be a massive reflective force.
Bennett sees the result, like Latour, as a more ‘vascularized’ collective. The strategies for RE-framing employed by designers in Designerly Research echo a same view. The use of bissociation, empathic-field-work and frame identification to name a few, are ways to vascularize a situation and develop a broader understanding of it. These strategies are ways to get a sense of what is possible and to use the force of that which would emerge as a matter of concern before it becomes disastrous. Part of the reflective power of RE-framing in design is the effect of bringing the possible, the potentially emerging emergency, into the here and now which helps us gather around it. Design then presents us with possible ways of dealing with this new found reality.
“Noortje Marres rightly notes that ‘it is often hard to grasp just what the sources of agency are that make a particular event happen’ and that this ‘ungraspability may be an [essential] aspect of agency’. But it is a safe bet to begin with the presumption that the locus of political responsibility is a human·nonhuman assemblage. On close·enough inspection, the productive power that has engendered an effect will turn out to be a confederacy, and the human actants within it will themselves turn out to be confederations of tools, microbes, minerals, sounds, and other ‘foreign’ materialities. Human intentionality can emerge as agentic only by way of such a distribution.” (Bennett 2010, p.36)
Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.