Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center Book) [Paperback]

Jane Bennett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 4, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0822346338 | ISBN-13: 978-0822346333

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter is an important work, linking critical movements in recent continental philosophy, namely a vitalist tradition that runs from Bergson to Deleuze and even, on Bennett’s reading, to Bruno Latour, and (on the other hand) a ‘political ecology of things’ that should speak to anyone conscious enough to be aware of the devastating changes underway in the world around us. There is good reason Bennett’s book has, in short order, gained a wide following in disparate areas of political theory and philosophy.” - Peter Gratton, Philosophy in Review

“For the sake of assuaging harms already inflicted we have always cobbled together publics that deal with vibrant matters of floods, fires, earthquakes and so on. For the sake of preventing unseen future harms, Bennett’s book argues that we need to take a closer look at how we are embedded in a web of mutual affect that knows no bounds between living and nonliving, human and nonhuman. It is in this refreshingly naïve ‘no-holds-barred’ approach that Bennett’s work has much to offer for a reconsideration of our role as thinking, speaking humans in a cosmos of vibrant matter that we continually depoliticize even in our efforts to ‘protect’ and ‘save’ the earth . . . a highly recommended read.” - Stefan Morales, M/C Reviews

“Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter is an admirable book for at least three reasons. First, it is wonderfully written in a comfortable personal style, which is rare enough for academic books. Second, Bennett makes an explicit break with the timeworn dogmas of postmodernist academia. . . . The third point
that makes this book admirable is Bennett’s professional position: Chair of
Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. That someone in a Political
Science department at an important university could write as candid a work
of metaphysics as Vibrant Matter is an encouraging sign. Perhaps philosophical speculation on fundamental topics is poised for a comeback throughout the humanities. “ - Graham Harman, New Formations

“Vibrant Matter is a fascinating, lucid, and powerful book of political theory. By focusing on the ‘thing-side of affect,’ Jane Bennett seeks to broaden and transform our sense of care in relation to the world of humans, non-human life, and things. She calls us to consider a ‘parliament of things’ in ways that provoke our democratic imaginations and interrupt our anthropocentric hubris.”—Romand Coles, author of Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy

“Vibrant Matter represents the fruits of sustained scholarship of the highest order. As environmental, technological, and biomedical concerns force themselves onto worldly political agendas, the urgency and potency of this analysis must surely inform any rethinking of what political theory is about in the twenty-first century.”—Sarah Whatmore, coeditor of The Stuff of Politics: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life

“This manifesto for a new materialism is an invigorating breath of fresh air. Jane Bennett’s eloquent tribute to the vitality and volatility of things is just what we need to revive the humanities and to redraw the parameters of political thought.”—Rita Felski, author of Uses of Literature

About the Author

Jane Bennett is Professor of Political Theory and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics and Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild, and an editor of The Politics of Moralizing and In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment.

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (January 4, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822346338
• ISBN-13: 978-0822346333
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #42,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a fantastic book to think with, June 11, 2011

By 

Christopher Schaberg (New Orleans, LA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center Book) (Paperback)

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.

69 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Aesthetic game-playing, May 19, 2011

By 

A. J. Sutter (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center Book) (Paperback)

I had thought that the point of political theory is to reflect on and improve real-world politics. This book presents political theory as something to be hung in a Tribeca loft and made the subject of bon mots - preferably borrowed from French literary theorists.

I was moved to read the book in the context of the March 2011 tsunami that struck the northern coast of Japan. I myself saw the devastation there during a subsequent visit, and, like many people here, have been wondering about what new direction Japan might take in light of it. A passage in the author's (JB's) preface looked promising: "Because politics is itself often construed as an exclusively human domain ... I will emphasize, even overemphasize the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces ... in an attempt to counter the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought. We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism - the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature - to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world" (@xvi).

This turned out to be the last page I flagged. Later on, JB asks exactly the question I had in mind: "What would happen to our thinking abut nature if we experienced materialities as actants [a term JB borrows from Bruno Latour, whose characteristic will-to-cleverness seems to inspire JB throughout], and how would the direction of public policy shift if it attended more carefully to their trajectories and powers?" (@62). The failure of the book is that no attempt is made to answer this second question.

As a philosophical rumination, the book does venture into some interesting territory. JB's discussion of a Kafka story I didn't know, "Cares of a Family Man" (Ch. 1) was surprising and delightful, and her analysis of the vitalisms of Henri Bersgon and Hans Driesch (Ch. 5) reminds the reader about forgotten theories that apparently were very popular in early 20th century America. Chapter 7 does contain some actual discussion of political theory, focusing on John Dewey and Jacques Rancière. But the closest JB comes to an application of her theme is to ask "what if" Rancière's theory of democracy as the "power [of people, who speak and deliberate] to disrupt" were opened up to include non-human and even inanimate agencies (a suggestion Rancière himself has negatived) (@106-108). Again, intriguing question - but no attempt made to answer it.

Unfortunately, these tidbits are embedded in a jargon-filled exposition that is constantly quoting French theorists like Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, or else JB's Johns Hopkins colleague William Connolly, among a multitude of others. Even her discussion of Spinoza relies as much on interpretations of him by Deleuze and others as on her own. When she follows, throughout, D&G in using the word "assemblage" to refer to a mélange of animate beings, inanimate objects and materials, and reified abstractions (e.g. @ 25), it brings to mind the term's more usual context: a sticker on an art gallery wall. (Betraying a preference for literary theory over literature, JB ignores mid-20th Century French poet Francis Ponge, most famous for his many prose poems about the "vibrant" properties of things -- « Le savon [Soap] », « Le parti pris des choses [The Bias of Things] », etc. One might have expected more sympathy for such "bias," not only because of JB's Francophilia but since she herself is actually a "Chair," albeit of the Political Science Department at Johns Hopkins University.)

I suspect many fans of this book would have fallen for the Sokal Hoax. While I support the notion one needn't have a Ph.D. in science to be qualified to comment on science, this book is full of the loopy sorts of references that physicist Alan Sokal sneaked into a literary theory journal whose editors thought him serious. One example is a Deleuze quote referring to "two equally actual powers, that of acting, and that of suffering action, which vary inversely one to the other, but whose sum is both constant and constantly effective" (@21): work that out with a little high school calculus and you'll find that neither "power" can vary at all. Elsewhere she credits Deleuze & Guattari, in a 1987 work, with "anticipating more recent work in contemporary complexity theory, posit[ing] a mode of becoming that is both material and creative, rather than mechanical and equilibrium maintaining." To the extent this description can be connected to "contemporary complexity theory," only a time warp could allow a 1987 book to "anticipate" work done in the 1950s by Nobelist Ilya Prigogine (unmentioned in this book) and described in popular works by him in 1980 (_From Being to Becoming_) and 1984 (_Order Out of Chaos_, with I. Stengers). And while JB thrills at the "quivering" of "free atoms" in the interstices between crystalline domains in metals (@59), it never occurs to her that the atoms in the crystals themselves "quiver" too, as a college physics textbook will inform you.

One of the most striking and damning points about the book, especially considering how heavily reliant it is on Continental theory (though JB cites only to works in English translation), is the particular spin JB gives to the phrase "political ecology". Readers familiar with « écologie politique » will find that JB is referring to something entirely different. For JB, an "ecology" is "an interconnected series of parts, but not a fixed order of parts" (@97; BTW one is never told why it is a "series" rather than, say, an "ensemble"). A "political ecology" is not defined explicitly, but JB quotes with approval Latour's comment that "The most urgent concern for us today is to see how to fuse together humans and non-humans in the same hybrid forums and open, as fast as possible, this Parliament of things" (@104 & 150n23).

Contrast that silliness with the « écologie politique » developed since the 1960s by such Continental thinkers as Hans Jonas, Jürgen Habermas, André Gorz, Ivan Illich, Emmanuel Levinas and others, e.g. as lucidly summarized in Eva Sas's recent « Philosophie de l'écologie politique » (Les Petits Matins 2010). (Exactly zero of these authors are mentioned in JB's book.) According to Sas, this doctrine starts from environmental concerns but builds to a more general political philosophy based on the principles of responsibility, autonomy, solidarity and participative democracy. Agree or disagree, that's something you can sink your teeth into. Compared to Sas's book and those of the authors mentioned in it, JB's book is empty game-playing. Two stars, for being more like the facetious work of tipsy grad students than a serious one by the poli sci chairperson at a major university. Or so one would have hoped.

POSTSCRIPT 2011/06/01: After receiving 5 "unhelpful" votes in a row, without any comment to contest my evaluation, and without a competing review having been posted, I can only suppose that either someone is gaming the review or else it's a manifestation of le parti pris des Critical Theorists, who can't tolerate being critiqued themselves. I invite a more courageous and articulate opposition.

4.0 out of 5 stars Vibrant Matter / a shift in thinking / framing life, January 10, 2012

By 

Kathryn Simon "katsoul11" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center Book) (Paperback)

The book raises presents a productive argument for envisioning how we might see material life so that our actions and deeds can be more positively accountable. Rather than other books on ecology that are staked in jargon, Bennett seems to open up issues so that we are thinking with and in life and its affects/effects. It is a great book on sustainability and how to create sustainability.