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Paper short abstract:

The paper serves as a counterweight to recent celebrations of the political possibilities inherent in the recognition of “non-human agency.” Drawing on empirical data from the Dow Chemical Company and recent STS-inspired political philosophy, it explores the deployment of ideas about “distributed agency” by corporate personnel.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decade, there has been a pronounced move all across the social sciences to critically rethink and horizontalize the relationship between 'human' and 'non-human' - from Bruno Latour's "parliament of things" (2004) to Marisol de la Cadena's indigenous "cosmopolitics" (2010) to Thomas Berry's "earth jurisprudence" (1999). Such moves have productively encouraged us to recognize forms of agency in the non-human world that we had hitherto neglected or named otherwise. This paper takes up the question of non-human agency by exploring what the political philosopher Jane Bennett has recently called, "more distributed agency" - that is, forms of "vigorous materiality" that challenge the "grammar of agency that assigns activity to people and passivity to things" (Bennett 2010). While environmental anthropologists have rightly tended to celebrate the political possibilities inherent in the recognition of this kind of expanded agency, the paper suggests that we need also, and somewhat more urgently, to attend to the deployment of such expansions by powerful corporations like Dow Chemical. Drawing on recent advertising campaigns and legal briefs, it argues that we need to remain attentive to the ways in which something like "more distributed agency" may, in fact, contrary to our political hopes, be increasingly used to avoid responsibility for environmental damage and to "manufacture consent" for environmentally destructive practices. The paper concludes by reflecting on the critical importance of ethnographic engagement with corporate reconfigurations of the shifting lines between 'human' and 'non-human.'