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2021/03/13

Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things: Bennett, Jane: Amazon.com.au: Books

Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things Paperback – 4 January 2010

by Jane Bennett (Author)

4.6 out of 5 stars 83 ratings

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In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.

Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.

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Jamie

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for anyone who wants to truely understand the world we live in.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 November 2015

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Essential reading for anyone working in modern philosophical, archaeological or historical thought who wishes to truely understand the nature of things and the ability apparently inanimate objects have to influence the world around them. This is one of the two texts anyone interested in object agency should read and is the go to book for place, identiry and collective agency at the moment. One of the most influential works of its generation and builds on the work of other great philosophers.

Do not be fooled by the word political, this is not a work on politics it is a work on the political nature of things, political theorists will be disapointed and should just move on as it does not deal with winning votes.

6 people found this helpful

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Susie J

5.0 out of 5 stars Vitality of matter

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 December 2019

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This book has transformed my work as an artist. Brilliant and interesting ideas which need to be heard in this age of ecological breakdown and human agency still trying to be located at the top of the pecking order.

One person found this helpful

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David Rietti

5.0 out of 5 stars Vibrant!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 March 2016

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A must read! bennet is core study for those interested in our world and how it works!

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Katherine S

5.0 out of 5 stars I could not put this book down. It's cogent ...

Reviewed in Canada on 8 October 2015

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I could not put this book down. It's cogent, passionate and profoundly engaging. Anyone interested in material culture or affect theory should read this.

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animal lover

2.0 out of 5 stars Two Stars

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David Rietti

5.0 out of 5 stars Vibrant!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 March 2016

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A must read! bennet is core study for those interested in our world and how it works!

One person found this helpful

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Katherine S

5.0 out of 5 stars I could not put this book down. It's cogent ...

Reviewed in Canada on 8 October 2015

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I could not put this book down. It's cogent, passionate and profoundly engaging. Anyone interested in material culture or affect theory should read this.

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animal lover

2.0 out of 5 stars Two Stars

Reviewed in Canada on 30 October 2015

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not that interesting.

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stuffwrangler

4.0 out of 5 stars Why matter matters

Reviewed in the United States on 20 June 2017

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This is an exceptionally well reasoned religious tract that defines and the argues for the importance and,then, the value of a worldview in which 1) all matter is accorded a kind of equivalent respect, from human beings to animals microbes plants and other living things, as well as inorganic/inanimate matter, include stone, sand , metals, down to their molecular structure and sub-atomic components. In essence she "fuses" the reductionist and its opposite holistic or emergent properties of matter 2) This respect arises from the agency that all matter and assemblages of matter possess 3) this worldview should drive a more comprehensive understanding and humble respect for the complex interrelationships between matter and it temporal/multidimensional property of existence. In the end--the last few lines of the book-- she observes (concedes?) that her ontology consists of a kind of "Nicene Creed for materialists, which is quite elegant, and well worth the effort required to plough through dense arguments laced with generous helping of Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, their disciples and numerous proponents of new wave environmentalism.

7 people found this helpful

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RDD

4.0 out of 5 stars A Fascinating Exploration of Humanity's Relation to Things

Reviewed in the United States on 12 April 2017

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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 <i>élan vital</i>” (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 <i>animated</i> 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.

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Josh Nieubuurt

5.0 out of 5 stars Vibrant enlightening work

Reviewed in the United States on 5 November 2020

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This text illuminates vital materialism reconfiguring the world as coffee and milk: an interaction bridged together in a delicious mish mash of human and non-human variants so fundamentally intertwined that it is nearly impossible to rethink of the world as a place of only humans as thing of agency. Truly a mind blowing dense work of scholarship

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vera long

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant & eloquent

Reviewed in the United States on 21 January 2021

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Incredible..this is the best written book I’ve e Rt read...and I have read quite a few. brilliant

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G.E.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent. Part of the New Materialism's must haves for serious researchers

Reviewed in the United States on 9 May 2015

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Uses Karen Barad's theory of Agential Realism. Thoughtful research.

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EtienneS

5.0 out of 5 stars An important read--and fun to think through

Reviewed in the United States on 11 July 2015

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I think this book--maybe more than any other--set the bar for the new work on vitalist materialism and object oriented ontology. It is not necessarily the most integrative book you will read on vital matter. It drifts around and some of the author's commitments are only sketched out and then--later--loosely realized, or just generally affirmed. But her overall claims and direct approach kept coming back to me. I've used this book in an advanced seminar and the students took to it more quickly than I did. I think it set the tone for work that was to come. An important read--and fun to think through.

5 people found this helpful

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Jeremy Viny

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful book!

Reviewed in the United States on 8 September 2018

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Bennett has a wonderful mind.

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mlynnsmiley

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing

Reviewed in the United States on 30 April 2014

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Such a wonderful book. Jane Bennett has changed my views on "things" in a most profound way that has affected both my scholarship and my personal attitude toward the world of materials.

4 people found this helpful

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Michelle Rose

4.0 out of 5 stars A little fuzzy. I think Thomas Rickert laid it ...

Reviewed in the United States on 23 December 2017

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A little fuzzy. I think Thomas Rickert laid it out a bit more eloquently, but she's certainly painstaking in her logic. I don't think she took it far enough, though. Or maybe in the wrong direction. Individual bodies are ecologies, too, and they negotiate with other ecologies all the time. THAT'S the rhetorical battlefield. The trick is to keep it from turning into WWIII.

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Christopher Schaberg

5.0 out of 5 stars a fantastic book to think with

Reviewed in the United States on 12 June 2011

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I recently taught Jane Bennett's book "Vibrant Matter" in a class on Environmental Theory, and I found it intriguing, challenging, and completely rewarding. My students really seemed to enjoy grappling with Bennett's concepts and the way she weaves a variety of texts and examples together throughout the chapters. Even when Bennett's questions are left unanswered, this is a productive tactic: many of my students took up her open-ended questions in their papers, extending her observations and complex formulations and applying them to local matters. Bennett's book worked very well alongside Timothy Morton's book "The Ecological Thought," Jennifer Price's book "Flight Maps," Arun Agrawal's book "Environmentality," Kathleen Stewart's "Ordinary Affects," and Donna Haraway's book "When Species Meet" (among a few other shorter texts that we read in between these). While definitely demanding at times, the narrative of "Vibrant Matter" is so articulated and strong that the book stands out as a philosophical/theoretical *story*, of sorts. (This was another aspect of the book that made it very teachable.) Bennett's book is speculative and picaresque, but absolutely rigorous and totally genuine. "Vibrant Matter" may frustrate readers looking for step-by-step instructions for a 'political ecology' -- but if readers want a fantastic book to think with, a book that piques philosophical imagination and merges it with ecology, then "Vibrant Matter" is it.

52 people found this helpful

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Brian Kumm

5.0 out of 5 stars I like this book

Reviewed in the United States on 24 October 2015

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I like this book. It's not perfect or the most earthshaking book, but it's thoughtful and well composed. Really a lovely work. Recommend!

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Roger Todd Whitson

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best philosophical books I've read in the past ten years.

Reviewed in the United States on 7 May 2012

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I don't agree with everything that Bennett says, but I do believe that Vibrant Matter encapsulates some of the most important (and most practical) applications of the object-oriented movement to date. Her discussion of the politics of the 2003 blackout, for instance, truly shows why thinking about matter as having agency matters. It's all-too-easy to try to locate fault within the consciousness of (usually one) person. Bennett shows us how metal, worms, and other seemingly non-human things effect our everyday lives. This is a vital book for the future of philosophy and political theory.

7 people found this helpful

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Cristobal C.

2.0 out of 5 stars Falls short.

Reviewed in the United States on 26 February 2013

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The book arises from an interesting premise, that of reformulating the claims of vitalism in a new light as a political project. But that's about as far as it gets: The human component is completely absent in the book, and eventually the project consists in learning to address the "demands" of object assemblages by developing "new methods of perception". I am sorry to say that this sounds like using things as mere sensors for the well being of humans. Ultimately I found the book to be full of flaws and unable (except on a nice chapter on metals) to affecting me or the classmates that read it in an emotional or political level.

5 people found this helpful

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Fred Seigneur

3.0 out of 5 stars Not a great read!

Reviewed in the United States on 15 January 2018

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Not a great read! The author babbles along page after page.

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Reviewer

1.0 out of 5 stars A terrible book in my opinion

Reviewed in the United States on 17 January 2016

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I bought this book to held write the theory chapter of my PhD thesis, which looks at material vs ideational factors and their effects on agency. I wish I could get a refund. At times I did not know whether I was reading a novel, or a textbook, whether I was reading a work of fiction or non-fiction. The book refuses to get to the point, and I am still left not knowing exactly what the author is trying to get at. A terrible book in my opinion.

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2021/03/03

Life after Biopolitics biocracy

Sara Guyer and Richard C. Keller

The South Atlantic Quarterly 115:2, April 2016 Duke University Press

Life after Biopolitics

For a critical frame that has been with us for decades, biopolitics has proven extraordinarily resilient. Writings about human life on almost any scale—from the molecule to the species, from pharmacological development to the stewardship of life, from the rhetoric and poetics of animacy to the logic of genocide—draw deeply from the wells of biopower. The keyword biopolitics is vastly inclusive. Yet the philosopher Michel Foucault’s outline of a theory of biopolitics in the mid-1970s (which many consider the foundation of the concept) was also oddly specific. Foucault wrote of a new form of sovereignty that emerged in the waning days of absolute monarchy, one drawing on nascent principles of public health and hygiene, ideas about individual and social development, novel and increasingly expansive knowledges about sexuality, and overlapping forms of law and science to shape life at the levels of both individual and society. Although Foucault saw how such mechanisms might operate in totalitarian regimes— indeed, the specters of Nazism and Stalinism haunt his essays and lectures—his principal concern was the operation of such discourses toward the shaping of population health and vitality in liberal democracies. This scene of emergence raises a series of questions: does a context of global citizenship and global flows of capital, commerce, information, goods, and populations disrupt the links between a biopolitical and a bourgeois order? In other words, in a deterritorialized world that is both riven and linked by differential flows of ideas, capital, peoples, and technologies, is the biopolitical model too irrevocably linked to the nation-state to be of much use anymore? Are there better ways to think about life in the twenty-first century?

We are convinced that biopolitics has not outlived its usefulness. Hailing from the fields of literary criticism and history, we find a number of ways in which the biopolitical is an important frame with an enduring influence. Yet the study of life in the humanities and the qualitative social sciences has developed such that biopolitics alone is no longer sufficient. As the essays in this issue demonstrate, we live and think in an era that is after biopolitics: one in which the idea of biopolitics will remain a part of meditations about life, but which will call for other frames for conceptualizing life. To capture this understanding, we want to suggest that biopolitics not only survives these shifts but also that survival inheres in biopolitics, that there is no concept of life in biopolitics that is not, at the same time, a notion of survival. For this reason, among others, the “after” of this volume’s title can be heard to resonate with the sur of survival and the history of thinking about living as living on among those who have and have not reflected on biopolitics by name.

Foucault’s description of a bio-power of populations—in which a sovereign state would deploy scientific knowledge toward the end of broadly influencing life on a grand scale—emerged in a moment of fascination about human rights. With roots in Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the place of humanity in the aftermath of totalitarianism, Foucault’s thought—and, later, that of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and others—engaged with the affiliation of citizenship to human rights, the relationship between the individual and the state, the role of dignity as both a legal and a rhetorical concept in the making of the human, and the resilience of fictional biologies, marked at the intersection of the human sciences and the administration of populations. These were long-term historical developments, beginning by some accounts at the foundation of a Western legal tradition in the classical world, by others in the late nineteenth century. But even the terms of this frame long predate Foucault, with the French psychiatrist Edouard Toulouse (1929: 13) advocating the development of a “biocracy,” or “a state that would be directed by the life sciences,” as early as 1929. Several essays in this issue engage directly with this conceptualization of biopolitics, while linking its historical development to contemporary concerns. Invoking the development of an organicist social science at the foundation of the modern humanist disciplines, the place of dignity in the determination of citizenship, and the links between individual illness and social pathology, these essays address how a biopolitical frame continues to offer important lessons for the history of science, the legal paradoxes of the republic, and the writing of inequality on the contemporary body.

Yet, far from a “politics of life itself,” this imagining of biopolitics has profound limitations: in most scholarship, the biopolitical has remained an extraordinarily human-centered endeavor. We now live in an era marked by emergent rights discourses that extend far beyond the human, even though humans are thoroughly implicated in their articulation. One productive site for expanding these boundaries of a human biopolitics is the notion of the Anthropocene. Unknown fifteen years ago, the concept has become unavoidable in the physical, social, and human sciences. As defined by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen (2002: 23), the Anthropocene is a descriptor of a new geological era in which humans have become the primary force shaping the earth’s geophysical, atmospheric, and ecological conditions. As such, it is a logical space of inquiry for exploring the overlaps between the political science of population and environmental change. Three of the essays in this issue operate at this intersection, or, as Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr might argue, this ecotone. Where does the “natural” end, and where does the “human” begin? How can we imagine the coupling of human and natural systems as a site for exploring those categories that are fundamental to the development of the modern political subject, including global capitalism, gender distinction, an entropic understanding of human social evolution, and the transition of the natural world from a repository of fear to a space of domination? Animal sovereignty is another critical space for evaluating the limits and promise of biopolitics. Can a theoretical frame designed for exploring the modern state apply to “a state of nature”? Is there such a thing as a possible politics of animal life itself, and if so, what resemblances might it share with a human-centric biopolitics?

This issue forces both a conversation about such possibilities and a clearer articulation of what biopolitics can do. It engages broad questions about the history of the concept and mobilization of life toward the ends of the state; about the operation and place of life across political, social, cultural, and aesthetic discourses; and about links among discourses of life, the human, the animal, and the ecological, as well as the political or ethical subject. In a political context in which a differential value of life—black, queer, female, human, animal, fetal—remains fundamental, and in which the future of life itself is in question, the concepts and forms through which we imagine life are more important than ever. After biopolitics is the moment at which these questions of living, far from exhausted, linger. After biopolitics, we continue to engage with the complexities and potential of this critical frame, even in all of its limitations.

Note

Nearly all of the authors in this volume presented earlier versions of their essays as part of a 2011–13 John E. Sawyer Seminar on “Life in Past and Present.” We are grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for generous support of this project and Megan Massino for offering crucial assistance throughout. The seminar’s postdoctoral fellow, Amanda Jo Goldstein, graduate fellows Bradley Matthys Moore, Michelle Nieman, and Stephanie Youngblood, and faculty participants Katarzyna Beilin, Helen M. Kinsella, Jimmy Casas Klausen, and Mario Ortiz-Robles, made valuable contributions to our thinking. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the vibrant thought of all of those colleagues who shared their work with us during the seminar in addition to those whose work appears in this volume: Andrew Aisenberg, Timothy Campbell, Stephen J. Collier, Joseph Dumit, Kim Fortun, Michael Hardt, Donna V. Jones, Ranjana Khanna, Jake Kosek, Jacques Lezra, Stephanie Lloyd, Becky Mansfield, Lee Medevoi, Natania Meeker, Gregg Mitman, Timothy Morton, Helmut Müller-Sievers, Susan Oyama, Peter Redfield, Eric L. Santner, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Jason E. Smith, and Roland Végső.

References

Crutzen, Paul. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415, no. 6867: 23.

Toulouse, Edouard. 1929. Le problème de la prophylaxie mentale. Paris: Imprimerie Chaix.