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

Product Information

Heidegger, M. (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated and with an Introduction by William Lovitt. (Harper Row Publishers Inc: New York). Khan, Gulshan (February 2009). "Agency, nature and emergent properties". Contemporary Political Theory. 8 (1): 90–105. doi: 10.1057/CPT.2008.43. S2CID 144483000. You ask how it came to pass that it now seems to me wrong (not morally wrong but perceptually imprecise) to speak as if materiality or landscape were mere matter. No one knows exactly how one comes to believe and perceive as one does, but I’ll give it a try, speaking first of a biographical factor, and then naming some literary-philosophical influences. Bennett, J. (1994a) Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment: Nature and State in a Post- Hegelian Era. (New York University Press: New York).

JB: I have tended to emphasize the poetic, joyous or bracing aspects of vibrant matter and I have argued that thing-power often first reveals itself as a negativity, a confounding or fouling up of an intention, desire, schema, or concept. But, as many thinkers have noted, such negativity is also the same stuff out of which positive things emerge. It is a negativity that is profoundly productive: the materiality that resists us is also the protean source of being, the essentially vague matrix of things. You are also asking me now to say something more about the repulsive, violent or lethal aspects – the London Graduate School recently sponsored a conference on “dark materialism” (where I listened to the podcast) and I want to follow up on that lead, and to read Reza Negarestani’s 8 work, which was an important reference point for the conference. In Bennett’s most recent book, “ Influx & Efflux,” she describes an encounter with an Ailanthus altissima, or tree of heaven—a fast-growing tree with oval leaves—on one of her walks around Baltimore. “I saw a tree whose every little branch expanded and swelled with sympathy for the sun,” she writes. “I was made distinctly aware of the presence of something kindred to me.” Ailanthus altissima is often considered an invasive species. Bennett’s musings have an ethical component: if a nuisance tree, or a dead tree, or a dead rat is my kin, then everything is kin—even a piece of trash. And I’m more likely to value things that are kindred to me, seeing them as notable and worthy in themselves. Most environmentally minded people are comfortable with this kind of thinking when it’s applied to the pretty part of nature. It’s strange to apply the concept of kinship to plastic gloves and bottle caps. Bennett aims to treat pretty much everything as potential kin. 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. Overall, I am attracted by the ideas Bennett presents. They lead to new ways of thinking about things and artifacts, and for those of us who are used to think about embodied interaction, user experience, etc. many of the ideas are not that far fetched. I am curious to see how this and similar new philosophical attempts will be translated into more concrete activities and approaches relevant for design. This new evolution of ideas concerned with the status of 'things' and of the material world is highly interesting and with Bennett's work we have another example of why we need it and how it could be used.” — Erik Stolterman, Transforming Grounds blog JB: What I tried to do in the book is to take “things” very seriously. This is a project that a group of object-oriented philosophers or “speculative realists” (Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, Ian Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux, Timothy Morton and others) were also pursuing independently and whose work I am currently exploring. By “things” I mean the ordinary stuff around us that we possess and use, and are possessed and used by.

A Political Ecology of Things

Largely unoriginal scholarship and ideas, purely an attempt to reconcile/articulate object oriented ontology and animistic metaphysics through an entirely Western philosophical tradition, i.e. dumb and useless as hell? Most of this just cites Deleuze and Guattari while extending the """unbelievable""" notion that living agents, aka not-human matter, are capable of something like intent and affect... Bennett's book is small and suggestive, like her earlier one. The early parts of the argument are differently structured, though, weighted heavily toward example, rather than the development of ideas. When she does come to these later on, the argument tends to be suggestive rather than clear. Khan, Gulshan (February 2009). "Agency, nature and emergent properties: an interview with Jane Bennett". Contemporary Political Theory. 8 (1): 90–105. doi: 10.1057/cpt.2008.43. S2CID 144483000. Bennett invokes Foucault at a number of moments in the book. What I find interesting is that Foucault elucidated the coming into being of the notion of the human as a coherent unit--this was part of the birth of modern discourse. And here we are seeing the idea of the human start to dissolve. It's not the trans-humanism of the technology fetishists (sorry, John Burdett) with the human animal being overtaken by computers, but rather the growing idea that humans aren't a useful unit of analysis. An] eloquent, carefully reasoned book. . . . With Bennett’s keen insights, I believe I can now show students (and others, maybe even some colleagues) that, through the concept, the sensibility, the practice of vibrant materialities, people in all walks of life can see the sense in treating both nature and artifacts ‘more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically’ (p.18).” — Thomas Princen, Perspectives on Politics

Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and Rationalization of Society. Volume One. (Polity Press: Cambridge). 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. Bennett, Jane (2008), "Modernity and its Critics", in Phillips, Anne; Bonnie, Honig; Dryzek, John S. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780199548439 a b "Jane Bennett". Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University . Retrieved 25 July 2014. The second problem was ecological destruction, or the globalizing political economy devoted to extraction and exploitation, waste, commodification, human imperialism and winner-take-all. I am a vital materialist who sees positive, pro-green potential in raising the profile of the fact that any human “I” is itself made up of “its”– of a vast array of originally and to varying degrees persistently nonhuman elements, such as bacteria, metals, ambient sounds, the “trains” of images of other bodies, etc. Here I have been inspired by the straightforwardness of Bruno Latour’s rejection of the anthropocentric bias in the social sciences.Weber, M. (1981) From MaxWeber: Essays in Sociology. Translated, edited and with an Introduction by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. (Oxford University Press: New York). Adorno, T. (1990) Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. (Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd: London). Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822346197.

And of course, the religious implications are profound. Bennett explicitly rejects the notion of free will as it has come to be understood – that individual humans are the sole determiners of their destiny – and therefore rejects purely individualist notions of accountability. Her ideas tend to support universalist notions of eschatology, and not just universalist for humans, but a truly universal concept of the new heaven and new earth. They raise questions about the role of God in such a materialist construct, but I would argue no less than what were raised by Darwin, Mendel, Einstein, Hawking, etc. Lebhafte Materie“ ist ein politisch philosophischer Versuch, die Schranken zwischen stumpfer Materie und dynamisch Lebendigen aufzubrechen, um so ein anderes Bewusstsein für Menschen und Umwelt zu schaffen. Bennett schafft es, Theorie und Alltagsbeispiele zusammenzubringen, um so ein wirklich sehr gut lesbares Buch zu gestalten. Das englische Original ist zwar schon 2010 erschienen, doch ist die Thematik heute nicht aktueller denn je? Welche Handlungsmacht geht von einem Virus aus? „Lebhafte Materie“ ist allemal eine Lektüre wert, nicht nur unter dem Aspekt der Umwelt zu Liebe, sondern auch um vielleicht die Welt und ihre Dinge aus einer anderen Perspektive zu betrachten. Orienting us to re-encounter both nature and familiar objects as newlystrange and pulsing with ‘thing-power,’ Bennett challenges our worn assumptions concerning the hierarchy between humans and things, the workings of causality, and our deep cultural attachment to matter and nature as inanimate. . . . Her book is surprising, refreshing, and troubling.” — Lori J. Marso, Political Theory Bennett, Jane; Connolly, William (2012), "The Crumpled Handkerchief", in Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), Time and History in Deleuze and Serres, New York: Continuum, pp.153–172, ISBN 9781441163868 The idea that objects have agency might be familiar from childhood. When we’re small, we feel connected to a blanket that can’t be thrown away, or to a stuffed animal that’s become a friend. As adults, we may own a precious item of threadbare clothing that we refuse to replace—yet we wouldn’t think of that shirt as having agency in the world. It seems pretty obvious to us that objects aren’t actors with their own agendas. When Alvin, another Hoarder, says that “things speak out” to him, we know that he has a problem.

Inside the Krieger School

Moreover, although I sympathize with her program of extending our inclusion of objects, animals and plants into our political considerations as well as her idea that we should pay attention to things as things more, I totally reject this book as worth anyone's time (except the first 3/4ths of the 7th chapter) because it is full of misinterpretation, spin, and a non consulting of contemporary science. A great example of this is her exclusion of how Nietzsche is all about human agency fir the sake of humans. Additionally her argument is inchorent and contradictory and at times non existent. Radical yes, but radical isnt enough because this book maybe just career filler for another professional thinker. Bennett and I left the park and found ourselves in a spooky area beneath an expressway. We decided to walk up a nearby hill, toward a hip neighborhood called Hampden. In front of an extraordinarily ugly apartment building, we ambled to a stop. Bennett was trying to show me something with great enthusiasm. Bennett, Jane; Connolly, William (2013), "Earthling: Now and Forever?", in Ellsworth, Elizabeth; Kruse, Jaime (eds.), Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, Brooklyn, New York: Punctum Books, pp.244–246, ISBN 9780615766362