Rodriguez 1 Roberto Rodriguez Contemporary Political Theory T.

Dumm Notes on Jane Bennetts Vibrant Matter Vibrant Matter is an endeavor to reveal the vibrant vitality that lies dormant and ignored in the depths of non-human things. Positioning us in an engagement with a heap of forgotten trash, a sheet of scrap metal, a squirming bundle of hungry worms and a cluster of embryonic stem cells, Jane Bennett propounds a philosophical and political injunction to recognize the agency that inheres in those things we routinely take to be inert, passive, and therefore dispensable. Problematizing the partition between life and matter, a constitutive split to the configuration of the human, Bennett seeks to trouble the vertical axes that poise human life as quantitatively different from all other life, thereby lifting and consolidating its stance at the crest of the ontological hierarchy, in a position superior to everything else on earth (86-87). Yet, despite being relegated to the shadows of political life, these objects act on humans, the world and other living things in both calculable and unpredictable ways, revealing the distinctive capacities or efficacious powers that are exerted by particular material configurations that are normally neglected (ix). With the guidance of figures in the history of Western philosophy (between Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze), she promotes a theory of vital materiality to cast light on those forces eclipsed by the supremacy of the ontological status of human life; she further broadens the semantic field of vitalism to articulate a vibrancy that is active in things and enforces their capacities not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own (viii). This is to say that the ultimate objective of vital materialism is to stimulate our

Rodriguez 2 attentiveness to the non-human powers that orbit around and interact with bodily and ecological processes. In Bennetts account, understanding our interdependent relation with the forces of things might allow us to perceive how they demand attention and respect from us; moreover, by perceiving ourselves as their human partners, we begin to make sense of the potential these forces inherently possess to aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us (ix). Mobilizing her project along a political valence, she does not stop by evaporating the ontotheological delimitations that distinguish life/ matter, human/ animal, will/ determination, and organic/ inorganic (x). For if it is true that agency, action, and freedom are intrinsic to the vitality of vibrant matter, and if it follows that these forces hold both nourishing and damaging possibilities, then it is the responsibility of humans to expand the very limits of the political, conceived as a sphere that is constituted by inter-human relations, predicated by the circulation and exchanging of words.

Accepting Spinozas configuration of affect as the capacity of any body for activity and responsiveness, Bennett proposes to engage us in affective relations with organic and inorganic bodies, natural and cultural objects, relations that remind us of the complex procedures by which nonhuman bodies affect us, and how we affect them in turn. Bennett argues for an impersonal affect or a material vibrancy not to deny the significance of human, animal or organic bodies and their affective processes (is she not, after all, attempting to blur these categorical and hierarchized distinctions all together?), but to name a form of affect that is inherent to matter: the affect of technologies, winds, vegetables, minerals. In her own words, What I am calling impersonal affect or material vibrancy is not a spiritual supplemenet or life force added to the matter said to house it [] I equate affect with materiality, rather than posit a

Rodriguez 3 separate force that can enter and animate a physical body (xiii). By this she is arguing for a denser network of affective and affected agents that not only possess and are possessed by other bodies in ways that are both nutritive and destructive; impersonal affect directs us towards a broader spectrum of agents that incessantly collide and engage in a dynamic continuum between organic and inorganic matter. This is why she calls our attention to the agency of the things that produce (helpful, harmful) effects in human and other bodies (xii). It is at this juncture that politics may begin to be reconceived to both incorporate things in the act of collective decisionmaking, and to sustain a more horizontal relationship between human actors and nonhuman actants. But before elaborating on the political implications of Bennetts enterprise, I wish to outline the contours of the optic she offers for perceiving the vitality or vibrancy in matter as such. Underwriting the theory of vital materialism is a register of philosophical concepts that Bennett borrows from philosophers that we have already named; though, it is the theoretical legacies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that most saliently inflect the lexicon she advances. She commences with a reconsideration of the ontology of things, proposing two concepts she terms thinker-power and the out-side. First, she carefully untangles the status of things from normative concepts of what constitutes an object, taken, in her account, as brute matter, a thing, as it appears before a subject who perceives with regard to a name, an identity, a gestalt or stereotypical template. Contrary to this figuration, things emerge as more than dull objects, shocking the subject in an uncanny experience where the object glove, pollen, rat, cap stick reciprocates the gaze of the subject becomes wholly Other (2). Thing-power, she says, is attentive to the unintelligible activity of things as actants, a word she borrows from Bruno Latour to not an actor, human or non-human, with the capacity to produce effects on other things, to

Rodriguez 4 alter the course of events (viii). Actants, then, [modify] another entity in a trial, something whose competence is deduced from [its] performance rather than posited in advance of the action (ibid.)This is to say that the incomprehensible knowledge and competence of things (qua actants) are evinced in the performance or energy they exert (ibid.). Thing-power directs us to the capacity of ordinary, artificial, man-made things to challenge their status as mere objects and to produce effects that send ripples unveiling their own independence (from subjectivity) or form of vitality. Moreover, the moment things emerge as independent actants, they trace over the limits the out-side of human knowledge, exposing the exterior of intelligibility. The out-side troubles the ratiocinative procedures from which knowledge is produced, and it bars us from ever comprehending in full clarity the liveliness concealed in the materiality of things. Facing toward the out-side occasions a mode of engagement whereby humans not only confront the limits of comprehensive knowledge, but may begin to resist the violent human will to dominate and control (xvii). This moment of respect for what lies outside our comprehension is also an acknowledgement of our ignorance and vulnerability as limited beings in the world, as much as it opens us to viewing our interrelatedness with things. It also allows us to broaden our conception of life, and Bennett does this by borrowing a concept introduced by Deleuze towards the end of his life: namely, the concept of a life, visible only fleetingly, for it is a pure event freed . . . from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens (53). She attributes a life to the liveliness of inorganic matter and metal is the protagonist of the narrative she weaves. Indeed, this is not life, but a life, a singular or particular but an impersonal, neutral, indefinite life that is dwells in all things, discernable in the immediate and singular presence of an event as a glimpse of the virtual subsisting in [our] life world (ibid.). But she is not so hastily exalt the positive character of a

Rodriguez 5 life, for she amends the Deleuzeian formulation to provide a more nuanced perspective of the restless activeness and destructive-creative force-presence of a life. A life, in her view, is sometimes experienced more as a terror than a beatitude, as Deleuze would have it. Not merely suggestive of the plentitude of the virtual, it may appear as a radical meaningless void: it draws us toward an interstitial field of non-personal, ahuman forces, flows, tendencies, and trajectories that precipitates destructive and terrifying occurrences (take, for instance, the conditions that precipitate a mass power outage.) Just as both organic and inorganic matter possess a life and a vitality that precipitates both positive and destructive events or effects, they conglomerate to form heterogenous clusters of human and nonhuman working [groups] (xvii). Here, Bennett indexes a term from the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, namely the concept of assemblages. An assemblage is a collectivity or confederation constituted by ad hoc groupings of diverse elements that exert their own, differential levels of energies, and their efforts in tandem possess a form effectivity that exhibits the particular agency of assemblages (as an example, Bennett gives a story of the assemblages at work in North American blackout of 2003.) Assemblages function and thrive without a central locus from which energy is exerted, meaning that no one material configuration is sufficiently capable of consistently guiding the course of the group and the impact and reverberations of the effects that it generates. Neither a closed circuit nor a solidified block, an assemblage is an open-ended collective and thus not only has a distinctive formation but a finite life span (24). In view of the agency of these distributive collectivities of actants, Bennett argues for a configuration of politics that is able to produce guides to action appropriate to a world of vital, crosscutting forces (38). Herein lie the ethico-political stakes of Bennetts project, for introduces the concept of political ecologies to challenge the androcentric

Rodriguez 6 formulation of political life that confers privileges the perspectives of (some) human actors and neglects their necessary partnership with nonhuman actants: here, what was once considered the polity, an entirely human artifice, is reconceived as ecology that interfaces humans and nonhumans in a collective. This collectivity or public, in Bennetts invocation of John Dewey, would be structured on a horizontal field where both human and nonhumans are recognized as equivalent participants, thereby producing conjoint (and democratic) forms of action. More than a sphere that is circumscribed by and for human agents, this human-nonhuman public could more democratically and responsibly respond to the shared experience of harm that aroused its emergence. Bennett, therefore, encourages us to view the human in the non-human, but this form of anthropomorphism requires several conditions so that we may reveal, as she does, a whole world of resonances and resemblances that promote a more leveled continuum between humans and nonhuman life. Though, admittedly, I share many of Bennetts political commitments, I would like to pose a few questions about the impasses today that might threaten the viability of her project. While I agree that we must perceive a vibrant energy in things, how do we adequately transform the perspective of a global consumer society in which commodities are animated as fetishized objects? (Take, for instance, the sex appeal of Mac products, obfuscating the damaging effects of these devices. On the one hand, we might recall the ramifications that the incessant fabrication process may have on our environment and the ecosystems surrounding Apples factories; on the other, we should consider that engagement with computers affects our bodily and cognitive processes in ways that we may not even suspect.) This brings me to the question of whether we can imagine a world where the perpetual production of commodities has ceased to be accepted as a routine and trivial procedure. Can we

Rodriguez 7 begin to perceive even an iota of the energy and resources devoted to the production of plastic bags? How can I full practice the ideals of vital materialism when I am conditioned by a society where excess is naturalized? (I am pointing, here, to how the experience of shopping at megastores like Target and Walmart has been naturalized, desensitizing us from the feeling of shock and dismay that might ensue from seeing the surplus of commodities that are destined to be ignored or discarded.) I lastly wish to point out that we do not yet live an a world that has fully addressed the techniques of dehumanization that are deployed to subordinate, exploit and annihilate human beings themselves. Indeed, many human lives do not ever amount to the value conferred to commodities, for we often privilege our goods above the bodies producing them. In this way, are we not colluding with the dehumanization of laborers each time we buy a plain, cotton t-shirt produced in a labor shop in the developing world? How do we address the exclusion of both human and nonhuman actors from the sphere of political action without privileging the intrinsic vitality and import of one or the other? How do we resist the violent tendencies of political strategies that sustain vertical structures of power and hierarchical forms of social relations?