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lies above, beyond or behind worldly phenomena, and which determines their form.
In the words of Gilles Deleuze (1988, p. 122), there is only one 'common plane of
immanence on which all bodies, all minds, and all individuals are situated'. What-
ever 'is' must therefore be understood to have emerged from the fl ux of bodies and
matter in the practices of everyday life. This is related closely to a
second
emphasis
on individuation rather than identity, which holds that the world is not character-
ised by discrete classes of being, or by the eternal repetition of the same, but by
ongoing differentiation and individuation, both in human and nonhuman nature.
We can make this concrete if we think back to Steve Hinchliffe's example of water
voles in the urbanised ecologies of Birmingham, England. Hinchliffe argues that the
capacities of the urban voles were not simply the innate qualities of a species in
general; they were emergent effects of an assemblage within which
these voles in
particular
came to take on unique qualities and capacities. This fl ies in the face of
identity-thinking, which assumes that the world can be unproblematically divided
into different classes of being, as well as conservation policies like habitat trading
that are based on the same assumption, and thus fail to recognise that organisms
are constituted not simply through genetic selection, but through their activities in
specifi c environments. Voles do not just differ from rats and mice, they differ from
themselves. It is equally important to stress that Hinchliffe's point is not that this
sort of ontogenesis is a uniquely urban, and hence 'unnatural' phenomenon -
although the particular environment makes a great difference to the emergent
capacities of the organisms composed in its spaces - but that the contingent com-
position of the organism
is an underlying
ontological
truth equally valid in all con-
texts, urban or rural.
Here we might pause to note that this emphasis on contingency and self-
organisation is not far removed from similar discussions in the physical sciences, a
point that I will return to below. Before I do, let me note that if taken to their logical
conclusion, new materialist approaches present a sharp challenge to the subject-
object dualism that has long characterised Western thought, as well as how we think
about and locate 'agency' in the world. Within these heterogenous networks entities
are simultaneously subject
and
object, or, in the words of Michel Serres, 'quasi-
subjects, quasi-objects', since all entities, human and nonhuman alike, have the
capacity for
affect
(Serres and Latour, 1995). This is to say that they can
receive
affections from other entities (consider the way that a cyclist gains bodily knowledge
of the resistance of hills, the ratios of gears, or the pressure required to activate
brakes), and in turn can
cause
affects in others (such as in the training of a dog,
although the trainer is just as often the trainee).
The
third
contribution of new materialists, then, is not only to have shed new
light on the age-old matter of nature's agency, but to have given geographers some
radically new ways to think about the what is
meant
by agency. For writers like
Latour, Callon, Whatmore and Hinchliffe, agency is not an innate property that
belongs to things, but an emergent effect of the ways in which entities enter into
combination with others (Callon and Law, 1995; Whatmore, 1999). Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari may have captured this best in their concept
agencement
, a
concept that lies behind Bruno Latour's more widely referenced fi gure of the actant.
Agencement
relates and combines two different ideas in a clever wordplay in which
the idea of a layout or a coming together of disparate elements contains within it
also the idea of agency or the capacity to cause affects. The effect is to neatly relate
the coming together of things with the capacity to act, where the latter is seen to
