Bennett (2013) The Forces of Things (original) (raw)
Related papers
Political Theory, 2004
This essay seeks to give philosophical expression to the vitality, willfullness, and recalcitrance possessed by nonhuman entities and forces. It also considers the ethico-political import of an enhanced awareness of “thing-power.” Drawing from Lucretius, Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, and others, it describes a materialism of lively matter, to be placed in conversation with the historical materialism of Marx and the body materialism of feminist and cultural studies. Thing-power materialism is a speculative onto-story, an admittedly presumptuous attempt to depict the nonhumanity that flows around and through humans. The essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of the ecological implications of thing-power.
Thing Politics and Life-Worlds: On the Dynamics of Materiality (2019)
Open Cultural Studies, 2019
The history of the study of material culture is essentially guided by the notion that things function as representatives of society, of the persons involved, and of status differences. “Tell me what you have, and I’ll tell you who you are” is the motto of this way of thinking. In this context, stability and traditions are closely associated with material culture, culminating in readings that consider material culture an expression of individual as well as collective identities. In many cases, material objects are also taken as evidence for the continuity of social relations and the expression of stable orientation and values. Informed by the widely acclaimed essays by Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel and Pierre Bourdieu, material culture studies propose a strong nexus of social structure, material equipment and the characteristics of certain social groups. Most probably this is the guiding theme in the long tradition of investigating the significance of materiality in societies.
Theorising Things, Building Worlds: Why the New Materialisms Deserve Literary Imagination
Open Cultural Studies
The New Materialisms constitute a rich field of critical inquiry that does not represent a unified approach; yet there is a general tendency to theorise objects by highlighting their agency, independence, and withdrawnness from human actors. Jane Bennett speaks of “thing power” in order to invoke the activities of “nonsubjects,” and she suggests to marginalise questions of human subjectivity and focus instead on the trajectories and propensities of material entities themselves. This essay takes issue with Bennett’s and other New Materialist thought, and it also offers a critical engagement with Bruno Latour’s notion of nonhuman agency. In his recent work, Latour has been concerned with the question of how we can tell our “common geostory.” Taking up his literary example (by Mark Twain) and adding one of my own (by William Faulkner), this essay argues that our understanding of the powers of rivers and other nonhuman agents remains rather limited if we attend primarily to the mechanic...
Vital Materialism, Thing Power, & Political Ecologies of Fecal Dust
2021
The thesis appropriates the Vital Materialist thought of political theorist Jane Bennett working in the philosophy of new materialism. Informed by a Deleuzian tradition, Bennett’s reading of Spinoza cements an understanding of materiality as lively and vibrant, wherein things demonstrate a thing-power along lines of effect that correspond to inert tendencies of persistence and activity in the object itself. This account of physical matter as vibrant, or lively, accommodates a distributed image of agency; that is to say, vital materialism seeks to take seriously the political activity and power of non-human bodies within an ecology, interrogating a traditionally anthropocentric privileging of ‘the human’ in ontology and metaphysics. A distributed image of agency rewrites traditional discourses on political thought and political problem-posing. The thesis contests that distributed agency in the form of an assemblage structure pulls politics out of prototypically human concerns—where p...
Democratic Matter, review of Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter
Theory & Event, 2011
s Vibrant Matter begins from a deceptively simple question, one that seems familiar, yet quickly catapults readers into less charted terrain: "Why is there not a more robust debate between contending philosophies of materiality or between contending accounts of how materiality matters to politics?" (xvi). In response, she invites readers into an expanded conversation among materialisms and vitalisms that sets the stage for her novel articulation of a materialism beyond humanism. Bennett guides the reader through a world of intersecting, intermingling entities-plant, animal, mineral, artifact, organism-that participate diversely in a universe of lively matter, both human and nonhuman. Her narrative or "onto-story" of vital materialism poses challenges that go to the very root of ecological and political thinking, indeed to the very notion of 'being-with' (4).
In Search of the Lost World: the Modernist Quest for the Thing, Matter, and Body
Vernon Press, 2023
From a historical perspective, the book studies how modernist artists, as the first generation who began to rethink intensively the legacy of German Idealism, sought to recreate the self so as to recreate their relationships with the material world. Theoretically, the book converses with the topical de-anthropocentric interests in the 21st century and proposes that the artist may escape human-centeredness through the transformation of the self. Part One, “Artificiality,” begins the discussion with the fin-de-siècle cult of artificiality, where artists such as Theophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, J.K. Huysmans, and Gustave Moreau dedicate themselves to love stony sphinxes, marble statues, and inorganic appearances. The cult of artificiality is a mischievous subversion to Hegel’s maxim that inwardness is superior to matter. In the cult of artificiality, art is superior to nature, though art is no longer defined as immaterial imagination but rather reconfigured as mysterious appearances that defy signification and subjugate the feeling heart. Part Two, “Auto-philosophical Fiction,” discusses the genre where the artists (Marcel Proust, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf) set philosophical ideas in the laboratory of their lives and therefore translate their aesthetic ideals—the way they wish to relate to the world—into a journey of self-examination and self-cultivation. In Pater’s novel 'Marius the Epicurean', the hero explores how a philosophical percept may be translated into sentiments and actions, demonstrating that literature is a unique approach to truth as it renders theory into a transformative experience. Exploring the latest findings of empiricist psychology, the artists seek to escape the Kantian trap by cultivating their powers of reception and to register passing thoughts and sensations. Together, the book argues that de-anthropocentrism cannot be predicated upon a metaphysics that presumes universal subjectivity but must be a form of aesthetic inquiry that recreates the self in order to recreate our relationships with the world.