Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (A John Hope Franklin Center Book)

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My most generous reading would be that this author is a political scientist longing to be a poet. Not because her writing is particularly lyrical, but because poetry is the domain of metaphor and personification. Poets have the power to make something true just by saying it … poets don’t have to follow rules of logic or accuracy. These are the strategies that this author uses to describe reality in what purports to be a prosaic, literal-truth-based domain. The result sometimes induced eye-rolls, sometimes infuriated me. This article was in response to: Harman, Graham (Spring 2012). "The well-wrought broken hammer: object-oriented literary criticism". New Literary History. 43 (2): 183–203. doi: 10.1353/nlh.2012.0016. S2CID 145048580. and: Morton, Timothy (Spring 2012). "An object-oriented defense of poetry". New Literary History. 43 (2): 205–224. doi: 10.1353/nlh.2012.0018. S2CID 170397563. Lucretius (1995) ‘De Reurm Natura’ in Edited by John Gaskin The Epicurean Philosophers Book 1, no. 1021. (Everyman Libraries: London).

Bennett, Jane (2002), "The Moraline Drift", in Bennett, Jane; Shapiro, Michael J. (eds.), The Politics of Moralizing, New York: Routledge, pp.11–26, ISBN 9780415934787 CISSC Lecture Series: Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins University: Impersonal Sympathy". Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Concordia University, Montreal. 22 March 2013. Archived from the original on 28 July 2014 . Retrieved 25 July 2014. Vibrant Matter is a fascinating, lucid, and powerful book of political theory. By focusing on the ‘thing-side of affect,’ Jane Bennett seeks to broaden and transform our sense of care in relation to the world of humans, non-human life, and things. She calls us to consider a ‘parliament of things’ in ways that provoke our democratic imaginations and interrupt our anthropocentric hubris.” — Romand Coles, author of Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of DemocracyKKL: One path to dissipate ontotheological binaries, such as human/nature, technological/organic, is favouring ecology as the all-inclusive concept. While Slavoj Zizek warns of an unreflected application of this “opium of the masses”, you may argue for another difference (in a purely horizontal juxtaposition of actants) within a cultural ecology – a politics of vital materialism. I did not always like the earlier book--though, in that case as this one, I cheered on her overall project--but it had clarity on its side. That is not true here. First, the exact development of her argument is relatively obscure and piece-meal. Second, the language is overly-burdened with philosophical academic-ese. It is no surprise that the same thinkers appear in both books: Spinoza, Leibniz, Kafka, Deleuze. But her portrayal of their thinking is not as lucid, which serves to obscure her argument. Bennett hopes for a positive outcome. During my time with her, I thought frequently about an old house in Detroit which my spouse and I have been rehabbing for many years now. It was built in 1917. It has its ways. We started our rehab project with many grand ideas about completely transforming the layout of the house. But because we’ve been doing the work ourselves and going slowly, the house has had the opportunity to get its two cents in. It doesn’t speak like a person, of course, but it communicates, day after day, season after season. The house has revealed to us how light travels around its surfaces and interiors in winter, spring, summer, and fall; some of the changes we were planning to make have come to seem wrongheaded with that further information. Other changes we hadn’t even considered suddenly became possible and exciting: its intermittently crumbling ceilings opened the possibility of increasing the height in some rooms. Barclay, Glen St John; Turner, Caroline (1 May 2004). Visiting Fellows and Other Visitors, 1991–2004. Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University. doi: 10.22459/HRC.05.2004. ISBN 9780975122983 . Retrieved 25 July 2014. Did I find the orange thing in the ground enticing? Not really—but it had done something to me. In 1917, the sociologist Max Weber argued that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” Ever since, we’ve tended to think of ourselves as living in a disenchanted world, from which all magic has been stripped. Bennett asks us to entertain the possibility that “the world is not disenchanted”—“that is, not populated by dead matter.” Her response to the disenchantment of the world is to deny that it ever happened in the first place.

Some readers might be forgiven for thinking that Vibrant Matter is a pleasing exercise in philosophical utopianism. It can be read as a thought-experiment, an onto-political wish list. More’s the pity. New research that Sarah Whatmore and others are now publishing on local democracy and environmental hazards may take us into the important political territory that Bennett only gestures towards. This work focuses on practices occurring in the interstices between the current conventions and institutions of political practice. As such, it makes Bennett’s case in a less purely philosophical register and its normative aspects are rather more concrete. Bennett, Jane; Loenhart, Klaus K. (2011), "Vibrant matter - zero landscape: interview with Jane Bennett", in Bélanger, Pierre (ed.), GAM 07: Zero landscape: unfolding active agencies of landscape (Graz Architektur Magazin Graz Architecture Magazine) (German and English Edition), Wein New York: Fakultät für Architektur Technische Universität Graz, ISBN 9783709105368 Also printed as: Bennett, Jane; Loenhart, Klaus K. (19 October 2011). "Vibrant matter - zero landscape: interview with Jane Bennett". Eurozine. Bennett, Jane (2012), "Thing-Power", in Elkins, Jeremy; Norris, Andrew (eds.), Truth and Democracy, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp.154–158, ISBN 9780812243796 First, ecology has succumbed to the capitalist imperative of contemporary life, according to which “political action and consumption become fully merged”. While I agree – who could deny it? – that there is little “subversive edge” to green marketing or to ecology reduced to a “problem of sustainable development”, and that capitalism works ruthlessly and creatively to absorb its opponents, Zizek (deliberately) overstates his case. Can ecology (as a complex system of words, sounds, deeds, affects, narratives, propensities) really ever fully merge into the allegedly totalizing system of capitalism? Here I follow Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that “from the viewpoint of micropolitics, society is defined by its lines of flight […] There is always something that flows or flees, that escapes […] the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine. Things that are attributed to a ‘change in values’, to the youth, women, the mad, etc.” 3 Similarly, you can say that a bag of potato chips Is acting on your hand and mouth to make you keep eating chips (Ch 3), but again this is a personification and actually DISTRACTS from questions of how the potato chip makers have engineered the texture and flavor to create this effect. In this case the “vibrant matter” approach (locating agency in the chips rather than in the manufacturer or eater) seems complicit in corporate mystification. “These chips make me eat them!” is the basis for an ad campaign, not a description of reality.Vibrant Matter promises to invigorate ethical and political judgment by attuning us to the material world, to ourselves, in new ways. Bennett wisely encourages us to practice such judgments without the banisters of deadening binaries of subject-object and human-nonhuman. In this way, we are left with an exciting, but daunting challenge of living democratically as and amidst vital matter.” — Torrey Shanks, Theory & Event Bennett, Jane (June 2004). "The force of things: steps toward an ecology of matter". Political Theory. 32 (3): 347–372. doi: 10.1177/0090591703260853. S2CID 146366679. I was never sure why Debra’s stubbornness fascinated me until I came across the work of Jane Bennett, a philosopher and political theorist at Johns Hopkins. A few years ago, while delivering a lecture, Bennett played clips from “Hoarders,” commenting on them in detail. She is sympathetic to people like Debra, partly because, like the hoarders themselves, she is focussed on the hoard. She has philosophical questions about it. Why are these objects so alluring? What are they “trying” to do? We tend to think of the show’s hoards as inert, attributing blame, influence, and the possibility of redemption to the human beings who create them. But what if the hoard, as Bennett asked in her lecture, has more agency than that? What if these piles of junk exert some power of their own?

Bennett, Jane (2012), "Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency", in Cohen, Jeffrey (ed.), Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books an imprint of Punctum Books, pp.237–269, ISBN 9780615625355 Last night I finished Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Now that I sometimes can find the leisure to read a book, Bennett's latest has been at the top of my list ... and once I began the work, I could not put it down. In ihrem Buch „Lebhafte Materie“ versucht Jane Bennett anhand verschiedener Gegenstände und Ereignisse die materielle Handlungsmacht oder Wirkmächtigkeit nicht menschlicher oder nicht-ganz-menschlicher Dinge zu beweisen. Bennett versteht Materialität als grundsätzlich lebendig. So kommt es auch, dass ihr erster Bezugspunkt ein scheinbar unbedeutender Haufen Müll ist. Doch durch den Haufen Müll wird Bennett an eine Konsum- und Wegwerfgesellschaft erinnert. Hat der Müll hier eine Ding-Kraft? Ist es nicht der Müll, der hier den Anstoß zum Denken gegeben hat oder ist das Unsinn? Die Leitfrage des Buches ist, wie sich politische Reaktionen auf gesellschaftliche Probleme verändern würden, wenn Vitalität (nicht menschlicher) Körper ernst nehmen würden.Bennett, Jane (2014), "Green Materialism", in Kennedy, T. Frank; Keenan, James (eds.), Nature as a Force: Scientists, Social Scientists, and Ethicists in a Dialogue of Hope, Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press - forthcoming. I NEVER want to meet anyone stuffy and close-minded enough to require this much theoretical justification to accept, let alone entertain that "things" have more agency than has been traditionally thought in Western philosophy. I imagine this is only revalatory to contemporary academics who stopped reading 35 years ago when they received their PhD.