Vibrant Matter

A Political Ecology of Things

By: Jane Bennett

Narrated by: Kathleen Godwin

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.

Produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont. ©2010 Duke University Press.

©2010 Duke University Press (P)2022 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC

Super interesting, thoughtful, thorough

I love this account of an alternative way of seeing life and agency. I have long felt that the nature-culture dichotomy is false and agree with Bennet’s characterizations of life, agency and connectedness in all things, even matter. This book is part history, part science and part philosophy - and if you really take it in, it will make your world sparkle with life.

Exquisite

“In a world of vibrant matter, it is thus not enough to say that we are ‘embodied.’ We are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes” (Bennett, 2010, pp. 112-113).

I love the ideas.... I think?

I believe this book has some great ideas in it. But sadly it's filled to the brim with academic jargon and obscure references that maybe you get if you're an academic in Philosophy. The best part of the book is the first chapter, and the only portion of the book I was able to follow.