There’ve been smatterings of commentary on the posts dedicated to specific chapters of Vibrant Matter, but not the kind of extended arguments I had originally anticipated (before reading the book). So I’m guessing we may be wrapping up this cross-blog reading group (though Scu may still post on chapter 8).<\/p>\n
To the list of entries, which can be found here<\/a>, you can add my last two (on Signatures<\/a> and Partitions of the sensible<\/a>), and Scu<\/a>‘s followed by my response to it. I don’t have much more to say beyond what I’ve already said. So instead what I’ll do here is to interleave several quotes from different posts (including Bennett’s own words from her interview with Peter Gratton) to create a kind of unresolved, non-chronological quasi-conversation among them. I apologize in advance for the selectiveness and for any inaccuracies in perception that may result from such a procedure. They’re merely intended to remind us of a few of the things that have been said. A brief summary comment follows.<\/p>\n The philosophical problem that Bennett confronts is a post-Cartesian description of nature in modernity as mechanistic and lifeless. The subject of modernity lives off the materials of the world and, in contradistinction to the inorganic materials around it, has a freedom and agency that transcends its natural environment. Once we question this opposition between subjects and things, a number of traditional \u201contotheological binaries,\u201d such as organic\/inorganic, human\/animal, will\/determination, etc., begin to \u201cdissipate\u201d (x). […]<\/p>\n It is just this agency that is at work, Bennett claims, in our airfields, in the wild, in the rush of a blackout, and all around and within us (our bodies are nothing but organic and inorganic assemblages). What is crucial is that Bennett takes the deus ex machina of our typical explanations of the world, namely the quasi-divine human being standing over mechanistic nature, and kills this last of the gods. As she argues well, human agency \u201cremains something of a mystery\u201d in the \u201cface of every analysis\u201d (34), and this mastery is a presupposition that grants us sovereignty over nature even as our material bodies tell us otherwise. To ascribe such agency, she notes, risks a \u201ctouch of anthropocentrism\u201d (99) but she is strategically right that without this risk of exporting what was previously considered human to a supposedly mechanized nature, we can never pull off descriptions that render animals and things not merely as \u201cbehaving\u201d but as acting (108).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n For me Bennett\u2019s book presents very few ideas I don\u2019t already agree with and it is presented in a very lucid style. For me this often results in a strange deflation. Whereas when I read someone whose work is presented in a more difficult idiom, say Deleuze (whom she draws on), or when I read someone with whom I disagree quite a bit, say Badiou, I feel spurred to more productive interactions with that text. This isn\u2019t really a fault of Bennett\u2019s though, it is my own particular \u201cecology of reading\u201d. What I also find disappointing about engaging with a book that ultimately is putting forward a perspective I already agree with (and ultimately Bennett\u2019s book is about a perspective) is that it doesn\u2019t involve my moving forward to deal with particular problems within that perspective (and Bennett\u2019s book is not really about those problems, though I would like to see her deal with some of them using the same intellectual ease she presents the perspective).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Woodard<\/a>:<\/p>\n As mentioned in my previous post, my concern with much of Bennett\u2019s work is the humanist traces that remain in her critique as well as the ecological approach as overly horizontal. […]<\/p>\n While Bennett\u2019s attack on biocentrism and anthrocentrism is warranted, if life is equated with vitality the capacities of the biological seem to get lost. The biological is a difference that shouldn\u2019t be taken as a form of ontological superiority but as a stratification of materiality and fundamental forces. There is a difference between life as biological and life as a humanist category (which is also biological). A life (in Deleuze and Guattari\u2019s sense) would seem to erase the material (if not ontological) difference between a hunk of metal and a cluster of bees which creates a poverty of temporal-spatial organizational difference.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Stanescu<\/a>:<\/p>\n And this also is where the conservative nature of the [food] examples weighs down the radical nature of the thought. All the discussions of food seem to center on a certain humanism (though maybe not an anthropocentrism), in which the major concerns are concerns on the vitality of human eaters. Or on the vibrant nature of already dead beings. What becomes skirted are those beings who became instruments to empower the assemblage of us as a human, but where themselves losers or victims in this instrumentality. These questions have to be confronted. I look forward to the rest of the book (particularly on the ending chapters where so much of these issues are going to have to rest).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n Is thing-power not precisely the very condition for democracy? And, finally, is there any ground for being bolder than Bennett in calling for a very different form of democracy? A communism of things, rather than the Latourian (capitalist) parliament of things?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Ivakhiv<\/a>:<\/p>\n There\u2019s clearly an ethico-political intent in Bennett\u2019s writing, which seems to be captured by the term \u201cdistributive agency.\u201d (\u201cThe ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such.\u201d (p. 13)) I’ve elsewhere referred, in a discussion of Latour and allied theorists, to an ethic of circulating agency, by which I meant not only that we should understand agency as distributed or circulating, but also that we should aim to promote and increase its circulation — so that those with whom\/which we network can engage more fully, more intensively, in these networking processes AND so that (simultaneously) those not included in the networks can express their own agency, whether it be through resistance, recalcitrance, or through their selective self-inclusion within them. I think this kind of idea comes through in Bennett\u2019s writing as well, but I\u2019m not sure that it gets articulated in a clear way here (just yet).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Stanescu<\/a>:<\/p>\n Bennett wishes to tap the breaks on her movement towards egalitarianism. Whatever else she may have led us to believe, humans are still firmly in the driver’s seat. Now, this doesn’t just mean that we have greater responsibilities, but like all executives we get more perks, too. So, whatever she has said about enabling instrumentalizations from before, this is a fairly classical move: Deontology for humans, utilitarianism for everything else.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Bennett<\/a>:<\/p>\n My political strategy is indirect because its target is not the macro-level politics of laws, policy, institutional change but the micro-politics of sensibility-formation.<\/p>\n In the book, I also suggest that a heightened sensitivity to the agency of assemblages could translate into a national politics that was not so focused around a juridical model of moral responsibility, blame, and punishment. The hope is that the desire for scapegoats would be lessened as public recognition of the distributed nature of agency increased, and that politics would take on a less moralistic and a more pragmatic (in Dewey\u2019s sense of problem-solving) cast.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nGratton<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n
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