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) -3 -- Edible Matter -4 -- A Life of Metal -5 -- Neither Vitalism nor Mechanism -6 -- Stem Cells and the Culture of Life -7 -- Political Ecologies -8 -- Vitality and Self Interest