Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things -- Jane Bennett
Full Citation Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.
Durham, US: Duke University Press, 2010. Print. A John Hope Franklin Center
Book.
Chapter Notes
Preface
1 -- The Force of Things (pp. 1-19)
- Intro section (pp. 1-2)
- Presents a movement towards extending Foucault's research on bio-politics
after hid death in 1984; outcome that cultural forms are themselves
material and have resistive force (pp. 1)
- Proposes to highlight negative power of things and positive, generative
power of things (pp. 1) -Collectives not as collections of "discourses"
associated with the human but focusing on public life of nonhuman material =
"thing-power" (pp. 2)
- Thing-Power, or the Out-Side (pp. 2-4)
- Quick outline of Spinoza's monism from Ethics: all bodies, human or not,
have a shared vitality, conatus; this shared tendency to persist produces
continuity btwn humans and others (pp. 2)
- Thing-power is related to Spinoza's monism, a strange dimension of matter,
an "out-side" beyond our knowledge (pp. 2-3)
- Related also to Hent de Vries' "absolute" = that which disengages; example
of catholic mass (pp. 3)
- Relation to thing-power in how both acknowledge that which does not
dissolve into knowledge
- Focus on what things can do, their capacity to act independent of
subjectivity; this due to the empirical observation that things can act
without us (pp. 3)
- Express the vitality of things, avoid thinking mechanistically (pp. 3)
- Overlap between humanity and thinghood (pp. 4)
- The impersonal life of which we are continuous with; being aware of it may
help us act with it more wisely (pp. 4)
- Thing-Power I: Debris (pp. 4-6)
- Uses a collection of debris in a storm drain to examine the difference
between Objects and Things (pp. 4)
- Objects = "stuff to ignore"; Things = stuff that commands attention,
provokes affects, issues a call (pp. 4); not reducible to contexts for
human action, not exhausted by representation (pp.5)
- Things produce effects themselves; they don't only act as constraints to
human action (pp. 5)
- Access to Things via sensory/preceptive priming or readiness, a specific
style of perception (pp. 5)
- Thing Power II: Odradek's Nonorganic Life (pp. 6-8)
- Examining what nonorganic/impersonal life might be through the example of
Kafka's Odradek (pp. 6-7)
- Adapts the definition from Manuel De Landa (pp. 7)
- Thing-Power III: Legal Actants (pp. 8-10)
- Examines what it means for Things to be actants through exploring
disparate legal definitions of action (pp. 9)
- The example of the gunpowder sampler which exercises intensive force upon
a jury through repetition (pp. 9)
- Gunpowder sampler as human-non-human hybrid which is an "actant" =
(Latour) "source of action", not a subject nor object but "intervener"
whose operation is spatio-temporally specific and fortuitous = "agent" (pp. 9)
- The example of the "deodand" in English civil law [which is read also as
Criminal], when an object can have culpability (pp. 9)
- Horizonal juxtaposition rather than hierarchization of human and thing;
the way "the sort of world we live in" makes this the case and allows for
their exchange of properties (pp. 9-10)
- Thing-Power IV: Walking, Talking Minerals (pp. 10-13)
- Speculative proposal that people are instances of thing-power, of vital
materiality (pp. 10)
- Not that there are no differences btwn ppl and things but that humans
need not be at the centre, things can (pp. 11)
- Material agency as sitting underneath human agency and making it
possible, "mineralization" as first precondition of action (pp. 11)
- The concern that flattening of human-thing relation authorizes human
instrumentalization; responses: (pp. 12)
- 1: Subject-object distinction has not prevented human
instrumentalization, so why keep it (pp. 12)
- 2: Success of subject-object distinction is only through
instrumentalizing nature (pp. 12)
- 3: bad track record of Kantian morality, flattening opens space for
non-hierarchical ethicality which includes "healthy and enabling
instrumentalizations"; physiological over moral ethical descriptors (pp. 12)
- Promotion of human health and happiness through raising status of material
we are composed of; all things become more than mere objects (pp. 12-13)
- Aim of distributing value more widely across all bodies (pp. 13)
- Limitation: it is not a revolutionary nor a reformist political project,
just one that can make us more attune to the relations we are embedded
in (pp. 13)
- Thing Power V: Thing-Power and Adorno's Non-Identity (pp. 13-17)
- Application of the "specific materialism" outlined by Adorno in Negative
Dialectics to Vital Materialism through equating his "nonidentity" with
the out-side of thing-power (pp. 13-14)
- In Adorno, he is trying to access that fundamentally inaccessible bit
left out of all conceptualizations, Bennett is trying to commune with
vital materiality (pp. 14)
- Practical techniques for communing adapted from Adorno's, aesthetic and
intellectual exercises that "uncloak": (pp. 14-15)
- 1) Second order reflection upon conceptualization (pp. 15)
- 2) Exercising utopian imagination (pp. 15)
- 3) clowning, letting a playful element into thinking (pp. 15)
- Break down view of autonomy of the individual, respect of hyperconnection
(pp. 15-16)
- Vital materialism does not have Adorno's political-messianic force behind
it, there's no promise of redemption or even political organization just
nothing (pp. 16-17)
- The Naïve Ambition of Vital Materialism (pp. 17-19)
- Human experience as including encounters with the out-side which is active
in its own rite and quasi-independent (pp. 17)
- Call for a level of methodological naivete which suspends the
historicization (genealogical critique) momentarily to reveal the world of
non-human vitality (pp. 17); example of temporarily taking "premodern"
positions (pp. 18)
-2 -- The Agency of Assemblages (20-38)
- Intro Section (pp. 20-21)
- Rhetorical advantages and disadvantages of "thing power" (pp. 20)
- Advantage: gesturing towards childhood experience of life-matter
collapse (pp. 20)
- Disadvantages: 1) overstating fixed stability of matter rather than
engaging the "force" of materiality; 2) latent individualism of "thing"
and its atomistic agency (pp. 20)
- Assertion that agency is, in fact distributed and always depends on
"...collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference..." (pp. 21)
- This chapter uses a case study of the North American Blackout of 2003 to
examine distributed agency in the power grid (pp. 21)
- Terms of importance: "affective" bodies (Spinoza) and "assemblage"
(Deleuze and Guattari) (pp. 21)
- Affective Bodies (pp. 21-23)
- Outlines Spinoza's monistic theory through Deleuze's reading of him (pp.
21)
- Bodies are "associative" and mutually affective (pp. 21); everything is a
mode of substance, every mode is a mosaic of simple bodies, more bodies =
more complexity = more power to act (pp. 22)
- Each has conatus = the tendency/effort required to maintain its condition;
maintenance means transformation to remain stable in changing conditions;
as a mode (pp. 22)
- To exist is to struggle against other modes for power, power is gained
through forming "heterogeneous assemblages" across which power and agency
is distributed (pp. 22-23)
- What is an Assemblage? (pp. 23-24)
- New conceptualizations of the part-whole relation at the ends of the 20th
cen through military theorization of increasingly complex battlefield (pp.
23)
- The world as a giant whole where events happen, called "network"
"meshwork" "Empire"; D&G call it "assemblage" which is what JB will use
(pp. 23)
- Assemblage = ad hoc groups of diverse vibrant materials of all sorts that
can function despite energies that attack their constitution from within;
have uneven topographies of more and less travelled zones, have unequally
distributed power, not centrally governed, generate emergent properties; action
as assemblage is different from actions of parts; has a history and finite
lifespan (pp. 23-24)
- Power grid as assemblage; example will help reveal limitations of human
centred theories of action; practical implications for "public culture"
and social science (pp. 24)
- The Blackout (pp. 24-28)
- Power grid as more than machine or tool, anthropomorphizing as a useful
technique to get past that (pp. 24-25)
- Outline of the case study and what happened during the blackout (pp.
25-26)
- Examines an example of a non-human "conative body," electricity (pp. 26)
- The concepts of active and reactive power, how a limited amount of
reactive power is produced (pp. 26)
- Examines an example of a human "conative body" the FERC energy regulator
(pp. 26-28)
- FERC deregulation of power grid in 1992, separation of production and
circulation of electricity long distance elec. transmission & no
incentive to produce reactive power; unintended consequence of having no
financial incentive to produce R/P was blackout (pp. 26-27)
- "slight surprise of action" (latour) = effective property of action
itself, the other events that arise around an action (pp. 27)
- Agency as a continuum, the movements of electricity are just as much
causes as the actions of FERC; slight gesture towards how distributed
action can be an excuse or a mode of hiding (pp. 28)
- The Willing Subject and the Intersubjective Field (pp. 28-31)
- Suggestion that there is no singular doer of an action, but a whole
human-non-human assemblage does an action; cannot really apply a morality
to this kind of agency (pp. 28)
- Augustinian and Kantian concepts of morality and free will (pp. 28-29)
- Will as internally divided, intentionality; agency vs. structure,
structure as "context" or passive, negative stricture
- Marleau-Ponty Coole Latour for attempts at non-human centred thinking
about action (pp. 29-30)
- The vital materialist position: that different materialities (assemblages)
express different powers, that human agency has always been and will
always be a mingling of humanity and non-humanity (pp. 31)
- Efficacy, Trajectory, Causality (pp. 31-34)
- Three concepts to circle around (a la Adorno) relating to distributed
agency: efficacy, trajectory, and causality (pp. 31)
- Efficacy (pp. 31-32)
- Creativity (big C) of agency (pp. 31); more like the power to make a
difference (pp. 32)
- Distributed agency does not posit a Subject as root cause, but a
"swarm" of vitalities (pp. 32)
- Task is to trace the contours of the swarm; human intention is within
that swarm and can be powerful but not that powerful (pp. 32)
- Trajectory (pp. 32)
- Assemblages have a drive, they have intentions, they have a promissory
quality though that drive is unknown to us and are not messianic (pp.
32)
- Causality (pp. 32-34)
- The rareness of "efficient causality" within a distributed form of
agency (pp. 32)
- Emergent causality (Connolly) rather than efficient causality (pp. 33)
- Arendt's distinction between "cause" and "origin" (pp. 33); how causes
cannot be discerned but retroactively (pp. 34)
- Shi (pp. 34-35)
- Main argument of Bennett speculation: it could be otherwise; the rubric of
material agency as just a proposal of the most extreme counter to
human-centrism (pp. 34)
- "Shi" as a means of thinking about material agency
- Shi = "style, energy, propensity, trajectory, or elan inherent to a
specific arrangement of things", note its military origin (again) (pp. 35)
- Deleuze's "adsorption" = gathering of elements into a collective that
preserves the agential impetus of each unit, the inherent, internal
creativity within the actants (pp. 35)
- Political Responsibility and the Agency of Assemblages (pp. 35-38)
- Locus of political responsibility is in the human-non-human assemblage;
human intentionality can only emerge through the assemblage (pp. 36)
- Vital materialism proposes that individuals cannot bear the full
responsibility of their actions [convenient for a certain group] (pp. 37)
- Broadening the scope of where to look for sources of harmful effects;
Bennett provides a list of long-term strings of events such as selfish
actions, imperialism (pp. 37)
- Proposes that the most that can be ethically done is for individual humans
to disengage from harmful assemblages and engage with less harmful ones
(pp. 37-38)
- Call for a politics beyond moral condemnation, but not a call for its end
(pp. 38)
