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

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a b Watson, Janell (October 2013). "Eco-sensibilities: interview with Jane Bennett". Minnesota Review. 81 (1): 147–158. doi: 10.1215/00265667-2332147. S2CID 145051920. 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 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. This article was a response to: White, Stephen K. (Spring 2000). "Affirmation and weak ontology in political theory: some rules and doubts". Theory & Event. 4 (2).

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. In other words, I don’t think the problem with correlationism is simply that it’s human and world, as though bringing non-humans in can fix things. Shifting from (cor)relationism to simple relationism is already a refreshing step, but still leaves the central problem untouched. There are too many pitfalls that arise when you think a thing is only what it is for other things, without reserve.

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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. Bennett argumentierte in ihrem Buch auf erstaunliche Art und Weise, dass von Dingen eine Handlungsmacht ausgeht. Handeln bedeutet aber nicht, Absichten zu haben, sondern Wirkungen zu erzielen. An Beispielen wie der Odradek-Figur aus Franz Kafkas Erzählung „Die Sorge des Hausvaters“ oder einem real existierenden Stromausfall in den USA zeigt sie, dass Dinge ein Gefüge bilden und Handlungen erzeugen. Bennett, J. (2001) The Enchantment of Modern Life: Crossings, Energetics, and Ethics. (Princeton University Press: Princeton). Bennett, Jane (Spring 2013). "The elements". Postmedieval. 4 (1): 105–111. doi: 10.1057/pmed.2012.39. S2CID 195217226. a b "Jane Bennett". Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University . Retrieved 25 July 2014.

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. 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 Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822346197.

Bennett, J. (1994a) Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment: Nature and State in a Post- Hegelian Era. (New York University Press: New York). Fellow, Bauhaus University, Internationales Kolleg fur Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie [4] Bennett, Jane; Connolly, William E. (2002), "Mouths, bodies and the state", in Honig, Bonnie; Mapel, David R. (eds.), Skepticism, Individuality, and Freedom: The Reluctant Liberalism of Richard Flathman, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.244–265, ISBN 9780816639700

Vibrant Matter will reward readers by opening many fields of inquiry that require responses. The reconceptualization of the material world that Vibrant Matter represents is a meaningful step in the direction of reformulating many of the debates within environmental philosophy that continue to retain the vestiges of overt dualism and its less obvious manifestation in the subject-object distinction.” — Bryan E. Bannon, Environmental Philosophy 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. Lastly, and for me worst of all, there is no way her theory supports her moral of the theory; and in fact as she states on pg. 127 n. 36 she doesnt want to take her ideas to the logical extremes because if she did, no act of moral accountability would exist and thus one could, by her 'theory' blame everything (including the victim) of an act of rape and reduce the blame of the raper. Thus, in her act to empower environmentalism, she would have us both consult and blame the carbon creating the greenhouse effect which threatens life as it is now embodied on earth because the carbon is as much actant as we are. Moreover, in my opinion, her need for a quasi-mysticism of 'matter' and how 'matter' becomes form and a complex universe full of forms will not help us ecologically to estrange objects or change our self destructive trajectory. Wearing bright-silver sneakers, she dropped her arms and headed off into the woods. I hastened to keep up with her. Soon, we stumbled upon something we found hard to precisely describe. 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.

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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. Adorno, T. (1990) Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. (Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd: London). Vibrant Matter is a sequel of sorts to Jane Bennett's "The Enchantment of Modern Life." While that first book focused on the emotional response of people to the modern world around them--suggesting that there was a sense of awe, and that this affective reaction was a good thing, leading to a (potential) politics of generosity--here Bennett turns her eyes to the things themselves: the metal, machines, and microbes that make up the world around us. She says that these are more than things, that the have some degree of agency in our networked world. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brain Massumi. (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis). Because Bennett’s objectives are both philosophical and political, she offers two suggestions for fostering a discernment that will temper ontological anthropocentrism. . . . Bennett, through her actionable approach, successfully strays from critical theory’s popular method of ‘demystification,’ a method that leaves ethics out to dry.” — Wesley Mathis, Communication Design Quarterly

Bennett, Jane; Chaloupka, William (1993). In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9780816623082. i do respect the goal of it and obviously it's important to consider nonhuman things in issues of politics and rights and ethics blablabla Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and Rationalization of Society. Volume One. (Polity Press: Cambridge).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.