PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE FORCE OF THINGS Steps toward an Ecology of Matter (original) (raw)
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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.
Bennett (2013) The Forces of Things
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.
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...
Politics that matter: Thinking about power and justice with the new materialists
Contemporary Political Theory, 2014
Although wide-ranging in their aspects and concerns, 'new materialist' approaches in feminist and political theory share a commitment to trouble binaries central to humanist inquiry, for example sensuous/ideal, natural/artificial, subject/object. 1 In distinction from an 'old materialism' rooted in Marxian critiques of idealism and continuing that tradition's humanist bent, the new materialisms underscore a need to reconceptualize matter: nature, in both its animate and inanimate guises, but also the apparatuses, artifacts and other objects that are produced by and productive of human capacities, and indeed of the world itself. In so doing, these approaches compel a rethinking of the boundary between human and nonhuman. At stake is the claim that such reconceptualizations can clarify our ethical imperatives and political possibilities: a recognition that matter is not the passive receptacle or recipient of human agency, which is in turn neither sovereign nor unified, conditions a post-humanist perspective said to promote generosity, responsibility, and/or receptiveness to difference. 2 From the perspective of an earlier materialism, by contrast, where exploitation and oppression happen to 'species-beings' rather than being enacted through such biologistic distinctions, political and ethical critique hinges on a human/nonhuman divide. The curious commodity that is labor power, for example, or the conundrums of commodity fetishism and alienated labor, are demystifiedand the capitalist system perpetuating them is exposed as dehumanizingthrough analyses that traffic heavily in the binaries now being questioned. In that earlier context, subjects appeared as makers of their own history (although of course not 'just as they please[d]' (Marx, 1996, p. 32), objectivity was accorded both to social structures and to historical materialist analyses of them, and the power of 'things' was more likely to be linked to their reification than to an inhering vibrancy. Pursuing a thorough investigation of the differences between these interpretive paradigms is well beyond the scope of our essay. But we begin by contrasting them in
Stepping-out-of-Oneself: An Intercultural Dialogue on the Power of Things
Yearbook for Eastern and Western Philosophy 7 (1):183-202, 2024
The concept stepping-out-of-oneself concerns a process by which things manifest themselves and make themselves present. This process does not depend on subjective influence but on the power of the thing itself. In this respect, the value of the thing itself and its impact on the sensory experience are brought to the foreground. From an aesthetic point of view, this concept corresponds to a new orientation of contemporary aesthetics of nature, which reflects the programmatic weakening of the subject-centered approach, the estrangement from the substance ontology as well as the phenomenological interest in the power of things. In this article, I attempt to argue that traditional Daoist thought can also provide a point of contact for the exploration of stepping-out-of-oneself. The focus on my study is on two issues: 1. under what circumstances is stepping-out-of-oneself possible? 2. how is it possible to perceive stepping-out-of-oneself?
Review: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2015
The impact of new materialism on the study of rhetoric is indefinite, but one cannot deny the fact that it is having an impact. Simple but important questions, such as how new materialism differs from either rhetorical materialism or material rhetoric, have not been addressed rigorously, even as new materialism scrambles familiar questions such as whether rhetoric is a byproduct of humans or humans are a byproduct of rhetoric. More fundamentally, new materialism reignites smoldering questions of what rhetoric is and whether studying it is valuable because new materialism abandons a bifurcated ontology in favor of a flat one, shifting “from a world of nature versus culture to a heterogeneous monism of vibrant bodies” (121). I believe that new materialism challenges us to reconsider the relationships between rhetoric and power and, indeed, the powers of rhetoric. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things is an important text for scholars of rhetoric who would take up such questions.