Just as I was getting ready to wind up the Bennett discussions yesterday, Scu posted a substantial piece about chapter 7, and promised more to come on chapter 8. I’m glad to see it, since I thought there could have been more discussion about both (and about some general issues throughout the book).
Picking up on the same lines I had noted (“Since I have challenged the uniqueness of humanity in several ways, why not conclude that we and they are equally entitled? […] To put it bluntly, my conatus will not let me “horizontalize” the world completely”), Scu writes:
It’s difficult to say this, but I’ve decided to – [sob, sniff, sob] – sell my record collection. It took many years building it, though there was also a lot of sifting through and whittling down every time I moved (including two major cross-country moves in the past decade). From what remains (about 900 pieces), I’ve compiled a list of categories and approximate number of units in each; you can find that list here.
I know this goes against the current, just as records have made a solid comeback, at least among the hipsters in the know. But they take up a lot of space, I’ve duplicated most of the best of them in CDs and digital files, and, frankly, I could use the money for a new (used) car. (Horrors. Cars can’t take you where music does…)
I’m planning to post the list to eBay, in case someone wants to take the whole thing as a package off my hands. But I also have an interested buyer here in B-town — the excellent Burlington Records — and I’m not willing to watch it go in drips and drabs, or to do all the work that that involves. It will go as a collection, back into the flow of soundable vinyl that’s been circulating around the planet for some 120 years now. This little dam will break and will release a long, steady flow of very good music (with tears and memories mixed in), the product of many years of searching, finding, and delighting in vinyl and the magic that happens when the needle hits the groove…
In Chapter Eight of Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett asks: “Are there more everyday tactics for cultivating an ability to discern the vitality of matter?” and, in response, mentions allowing oneself
to anthropomorphize, to relax into resemblances discerned across ontological divides: you (mis)take the wind outside at night for your father’s wheezy breathing in the next room; you get up too fast and see stars; a plastic topographical map reminds you of the veins on the back of your hand; the rhythm of the cicada’s [sic] reminds you of the wailing of an infant; the falling stone seems to express a conative desire to persevere.
What I like about this is not so much the argument for anthropomorphism (specifically) as the implied and more general argument for ‘morphism’, that is, for allowing one’s imaginative capacities — the capacities to take on and think with images — to build the forms of one’s perceptions and conceptions of the world. We’ve lost this ability somewhat since the decline of the epistemologies of resemblance that characterized the pre-modern and Renaissance imagination (according to Foucault and others). The ability to read the “signatures” of the world is something poets, of course, have not forgotten, but it’s also something that semiotics (of the Peircian variant) holds, or should hold, as central to the ways sense is made of things.
As for anthropomorphism, as John Livingston taught me, there’s nothing unusual about it. Dogs canomorphize, birds avimorphize, humans anthropomorphize. All of these morphic practices can be tested by trial and error for their validity in specific circumstances. The idea that something that looks somewhat like me and acts in some ways like me is like me is a reasonable starting hypothesis for a relational epistemology and ethic.
The issue is dedicated to Julie Graham, one half of the Gibson-Graham writing duo, who, sadly, died of cancer back in April of this year. See here and here for tributes. Gibson-Graham are best known for The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy and its follow-up, A Postcapitalist Politics. I’ve always thought of them as a kind of female/feminist analogue to Deleuze & Guattari: their work captures the antiessentialism of D & G, but is more grounded in the real-life struggles of women and communities around the world.
Katherine Gibson continues to work and write. But Graham’s death was a bit of a shock to those who thought they were developing one of the most promising political theories around.
The following began as a summary of the final chapter of Vibrant Matter, but it somehow mutated into something more like a position statement (which I hope doesn’t sound like too much of a rant). But I’ll let it go as it is, running the risk of speaking too loudly to no one in particular, since it doesn’t directly address the core issues my cross-blog reader-colleagues have identified so far. I’ll revisit my thoughts about the book in a couple of days.
“Vitality and Self-Interest” is the title of the final chapter of Vibrant Matter, though it’s an odd title, since the “self” is clearly something more like the extended self deep ecologists speak of than the liberal, humanist self. Like the previous chapter, it is among the strongest in the book, and it serves as a worthy conclusion to the project Bennett pursues in this slim but very readable volume.
A quote or two should suffice to demonstrate the relevance of what she is writing about:
For any jam band lovers out there (for some reason, the term has always made me think of “ham”; I guess it’s the French jambon that comes to mind), here’s a set of clips that remind us that the genre peaked about forty years ago. (H/t to Gary Sauer-Thompson at Conversations.) It’s actually from 38 years ago, but I think the version of “Dark Star” that’s on “Live Dead” is much better — less flat and more dynamic, graced by a more central Jerry Garcia and much more mellifluous keyboard than the clunky one here. But I guess it was just that kind of August day this time around. For those who think it all sounds like a far-too-endless stew of mushy and blandly flavored noodling — and whose suspicions are confirmed in the listless version of “El Paso” this turns into part-way through the fourth clip — there is a moment in the Live Dead version that demonstrates it really doesn’t have to be that way at all. (This 1969 version comes closer to the Live Dead version, though I can only see Part 1 online, so it’s missing the moment in question. But taken as a long moment, it’s all still a pretty good one…)
Tom Verlaine used to lament that Television’s “Marquee Moon” was often compared to the Grateful Dead. This 2005 concert version displays both the reasons why it was (especially if you like the Dead) and why it shouldn’t have been (if you don’t) — though at around the 3-minute mark of this second part they show that they still can’t duplicate what happened in that studio in 1977. (Compare, for instance, with the 9-minute mark of the original.) But they do their best to recover.
All of which brings me to relationalism, ecology, earth jazz, and the summer solstice. (Warning: this gets long and complicated, and if you’re not interested in the objects-relations debate, you might just want to skip through most of it. Just don’t miss the Miles Davis clip at the bottom.)
If there’s a musical demonstration of relationalism, and by extension (as Skholiast points out) of ecology, it’s the kind of improvised music that the Dead are supposed to have excelled at (and occasionally did). The universe gives rise to many wondrous entities in its long history of spontaneity, relational responsiveness, habit-formation, and form-building. The habits start as rhythms, melodic chirps that turn into territorial refrains and calls, and that gradually maneuvre their way into verse patterns, melodies, harmonies, polyrhythms. Distinct songs develop for particular purposes and gradually get freed from those purposes, taken up into improvisational routines and performances, some of which crystallize into larger-scale architectonics, but only ever temporarily.
The five week long, cross-blog reading group on Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter is wrapping up this week, with the discussion officially moving here for the final stretch. Here’s what’s been written so far (at least what I’ve seen):
Film director Yuri Ilyenko, one of the outstanding cinematographers and directors of the short-lived but significant Ukrainian New Wave, has passed away at age 74. Ilyenko (aka Illienko, Ilienko) first shot into prominence as the cinematographer on Sergei Paradjanov’s epochal Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), which launched what became known as “Ukrainian Poetic Cinema,” a movement based mainly at Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kyiv. In the years following, Ilyenko directed a series of critically lauded films including “A Well-Spring for the Thirsty” (Krynytsia dlia sprahlykh), considered a sobering, post-Holodomor updating of Aleksander Dovzhenko’s classic “Earth” (Zemlya), the wildly experimental “Eve of Ivan Kupalo” (Vechir na Ivana Kupala), “White Bird with a Black Mark” (Bilyi ptakh iz chornoyu oznakoyu), “A Forest Song (Lisova pisnia: Mavka“), and “Swan Lake: The Zone” (Lebedyne ozero: Zona).
Made in 1966, “Well-Spring” was shelved by Soviet censors for over two decades until it was officially released during the Glasnost era in 1988. “Eve of Ivan Kupalo” (1968) was rarely screened in the Soviet Union as well, but with “White Bird with a Black Mark” (1971) Ilyenko carved out a viable compromise between artistic integrity and a storyline that satisfied the Soviet censors. The film was awarded the Grand Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival. Ilyenko’s efforts in recent years, especially the controversial “A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa” (2001), met with more mixed reviews.
The further I have gotten into Vibrant Matter, the more I have been thinking of it as a kind of half-way house on the route to a process-relational ontology. (I’ll admit I’ve read the whole book now, but I’m trying to defer my comments on the final chapter till next week. And I also strongly suspect that object-oriented ontologists might say it’s the same thing en route to an object-oriented ontology; but I’ll leave that particular debate aside, as it’s being taken up in many other places already.)
It’s a weigh station, a place for mulling over, with its host Jane Bennett, the virtues of a less anthropocentric worldview; a welcoming retreat center for trying on ideas — about the vitality and agency of things, of metal (ch. 4), of stem cells (ch. 6), of worms (ch.7), and about what these things imply for existing political theory.
It’s just a blog post, but Stuart Kauffman is drawing on Whitehead and Peirce to propose a view of reality that sounds intriguingly like Deleuze’s distinction between the Virtual and the Actual. He folds over Descartes to make a new dualism: Res extensa and Res potentia. In other words, a Process Dualism (that, being processual, is really a monism). I’m glad to see it…
Levi has a nice post on pedagogy, objects, and his daughter. His conclusions, I think, can be rephrased in terms more amenable to an objects-relations dialogue. He writes:
“What my daughter has taught me is the withdrawal of objects from their relations. […] What I’ve discovered through my daughter is that all substances are abyssal black boxes. They are influenced by their surroundings, but they relate to their surroundings through their own internal structure or organization, generating deeply surprising responses to the world around them. She quite literally constitutes and creates her own being.”
Since Graham has set out a challenge (“Take that, relationists!”), I’ll take a very quick stab at a process-relational reply:
