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Taking Latour's engagement with the literary as a point of departure, this chapter offers a new model for thinking between the disciplines of literary studies and sociology. At the crux of this model is a site, the supermarket, that dramatizes nonhuman agency as a mundane yet complex fact of social experience—a fact that Latour theorizes throughout his writings and that a host of literary authors, above all Don DeLillo, have sought to explore in different ways. It offers a reading of the novel in terms of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and demonstrates how a site that is crucial to both the novelist and the sociologist can facilitate a new interdisciplinary conversation, a mode of inquiry that would divert from a more traditional sociology of literature whose objective would be to identify the deep significance of literary form in the social forces that subtend aesthetic production.

I discuss Jane Bennett’s vitalist materialism, which differs significantly from OOO’s understanding of matter. It puts forward the idea of a comprehensive vitality that undermines traditional ontological and normative divisions and runs through both human and nonhuman matter. Bennett’s account of “thing-power” provides important elements for designing a posthumanist political theory and goes beyond many conceptual limitations of OOO. However, I argue that her “vital materialism” fails to account for the negative and destructive processes that obstruct and hinder the progressive politics she envisions. She tends to displace political questions by the appeal for a new ethical sensibility. Unfortunately, Bennett offers no convincing argument as to how the “energetics of ethics” is coupled with political dynamics or how the vital politics she advocates translates into a radical change in the contemporary structures of production and consumption.

The chapter focuses on the Social Construction of Technology approach (SCOT) by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, introducing the reader to its initial formulation (1984), and to the subsequent extensions – and sometimes reformulations – elaborated in more than 30 year of empirical research. It first clarifies how the Empirical Programme of Relativism, elaborated by the Bath School to address the social construction of scientific facts, was adapted to technological artifacts. In particular the concepts of relevant social groups, interpretative flexibility, closure or stabilization are in-depth discussed. Regarding relevant social groups, the chapter dedicates a peculiar attention to users, sellers and testers, all understudied in the original formulation of SCOT. The chapter then clarifies SCOT’s take on materiality, and discusses its main differences with the idea of nonhuman agency proposed by Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Finally, it goes back to the Golem Trilogy to discuss with the author the specific take on politics implied by SCOT.

Julieanna Preston and Jen Archer-Martin attempt to reveal the agential voices of the assemblages of human and nonhuman agents. Such are the human embodiment in the form of performance as yet another self-organising pile, an assemblage of events operating across scales of temporality, materiality and affectivity and bitumen, a vital and vibrant surface of our living. A language shift away from clichés and stereotypes resets a new ecology of human and nonhuman materiality at work. Impressively vivid, live instances, captured in words, describe the malleability of all agents entangled in the same ecology. Bitumen is introduced through a coagulated dialogue between a poetic and philosophical voice. The labourer is replaced with that of a caretaker, informed by an ethic of care. This call for care is woven as a secondary thread into the context as both a disruptive and a reparative act, much as the roadworker’s high-visibility tribal garbs both screams ‘Take care!’ and reassures ‘I’ll take care of it’.

Tracking fugitive dynamics into the twenty-first century, this chapter probes Paul Muldoon’s exploration of metamorphosing poetic and corporeal forms. It focuses on the ventriloquizing of artworks, artists, and nonhuman agents (animals, plants, bodies, objects, waste products). It offers particular attention to: a) Muldoon’s limited edition pamphlets and literary-artistic collaborations containing photographs, drawings, and paintings. One example is Plan B, the cover of which shows a statue of Apollo wrapped in polythene. The poems within depose the colonizing order Apollo’s torso represents, engaging in refractions of aesthetic and literary inheritance. b) the voice of human and nonhuman bodies, especially Muldoon’s mythological preoccupation with half-animal forms, degenerating waste products, and digesting/gustatory metaphors for the lyric work. Each destabilizes fixed and perfected forms, often in favour of organic mutability and resonance.

This chapter argues that funk produces mythologies about the body, labor, leisure, and pleasure, and that these occur in music as well as in black fiction, art, and performance centered on the potential force or energy that excites or that neutral sexual pleasures might yield. Adding to Tony Bolden's “Groove Theory: A Vamp on the Epistemology of Funk,” where he argues that the sensing techniques that black dancers employ have been central to innovations in black musicianship generally, the chapter discusses how funk's sensing techniques innovate sexual cultures as sites of memory. It brings three disciplines together—literature, performance, and dance—to theorize nonhuman agency in the street party Freaknik, as well as black strip clubs.

In the context of a horse-based warrior culture adapting to the elephant-based traditions of Indian political authority, this chapter not only explores elephants as symbols of imperial authority and masculine virility for the Mughal emperor Akbar, but also considers their significance as decisive agents and as material resources for the formation of state power. Through an analysis of Abu Fazl’s biography of the Mughal emperor, the Akbarnama, we learn of his interest in elephants, who were mastered when they were in the unpredictable state of mast, which conveyed the emperor’s masculine prowess and hence his suitability to rule. We learn how the elephants themselves were valorized, how Akbar rewarded and punished his mahouts, how he used elephants as regal commodities of tributary fealty, extending his patrimonial rule, while also facilitating the mobility of his court to travel, to wage war, and suppress rebellions.