Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center…

In Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, she explores the role of inanimate bodies and how humans interact with them. Vibrant Matter serves as Bennett’s manifesto for the benefits of anthropomorphizing. Bennett writes, “I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms, and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp. I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests” (pg. 122). To this end, Bennett uses various case studies to expand her readers’ understanding of what agency is and who or what is capable of possessing and using agency. Some of these agents include worms, the electrical grid, and accumulations of detritus in a storm drain. Bennett writes with the goal of shaping consciousness in order to expand humanity’s understanding of its place in the world. She writes, “My hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” (pg. ix).
Bennett examines the historical debate over a mechanistic or essential arrangement of life. Describing the situating of a basic essence in each subject, Bennett writes, “While I agree that human affect is a key player, in this book the focus is on an affect that is not only not fully susceptible to rational analysis or linguistic representation but that is also not specific to humans, organisms, or even to bodies: the affect of technologies, winds, vegetables, minerals” (pg. 61). She writes of these philosophers’ work, “Something always escaped quantification, prediction, and control. They named that something élan vital” (pg. 63). According to Bennett, Driesch’s goal “was not simply to gain a more subtle understanding of the dynamic chemical and physical properties of the organism but also to better discern what animated the machine” (pg. 71). This recalls the words Master Yoda spoke to Luke Skywalker on Dagobah, “For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes.” In sum, Bennett’s manifesto demonstrates the importance of resituating humanity’s place in the world by placing humanity within the world rather than outside of it. ( )

An excellent primer on new materialisms/object-oriented ontologies and their relevance to political theory. ( )

I can't believe I put all my recreational reading on hold for this! Bennett has an interesting concept, but as so many others have/will note: there's nothing new and there's nothing here (outside of Bennett's grasp of philosophy) that you couldn't find in a New Ager's anthology. I don't think this book will shake political or philosophical foundations and it's a neat footnote, but has little value in anything that I am interested in. Some of it comes off as lazy, but Bennett did put a great deal of work into it. I think it serves as an example of the strange position that many academics in the humanities into which they are corralling themselves.

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Some intriguing ideas raised about the way inanimate objects exert their own force in the world -- it put me in mind of the work of Joseph Beuys, but with neither his whimsy nor loopy conviction.

Bennett starts with an interesting concept, but remains necessarily vague about what effects it might have, if any. Ultimately, the work here feels sort of negligible. ( )