In chapter one Bennett begins in earnest her quest to give voice to the vibrant, productive power of things and to “highlight the active role of non-human materials in public life” (p.2). Of great interest to me was Bennett’s appeal to W.J.T Mitchell’s distinction between ‘objects’ and ‘things’. Mitchell writes, “objects are the way things appear to subjects” (p.2). Mitchell apparently believes that when objects become truly ‘other’ – that is to say understood as independent of any of our perceptions of them – they appear to us as “uncanny” and begin to assert themselves from a position of “never objectifiable depth”. It is this depth and uncanny-ness of things that renders any attempts to objectify and codify them as mere abstraction. When we attempt to carve out some kind of assumed metaphysical template for how all objects come to be known or exist in the world we project and impose our will on things, and ‘silence’ the very uniqueness that gives things their efficacy. ‘Things’ are thus wild and idiosyncratic - as opposed to ‘objects’ which are abstractions and reifications.
Bennett then goes on to give respect to the “force of things” through a discussion of Spinoza’s notion of conatus. Conatus signifies the “active impulsion” at the core of things, where entities ‘strive’ to persist in their own being through their own character or inherent constitution. This conative character is present in all things, both human and nonhuman, and is the ‘power’ through which all things continue to be and “affect” the other things. Ultimately, Bennett believes her own formulation of what she wants to call “thing-power” bears a close family resemblance to what Spinoza tried to theorize with his notion of conatus.
Next Bennett goes on to give short shrift to what Thoreau called ‘the Wild’– “that uncanny presence that met him in the Concord woods atop Mount Ktaadn and also resided in/as that monster called the railroad and that alien called his Genius” (p.2). The Wild, for Thoreau was a force that pervaded a reality out-side our selves as a powerful ‘otherness’ announcing the deep vital presence of the real world. Again, Bennett wants to link her conception of thing-power to Thoreau’s notion of the presence and power of otherness.
On this I wish Bennett would have expanded her treatment, if only because I share Thoreau’s sentiments, and also take the raw, savagery of Being as a wildly distinct background presence that frames everything we say and do, or could ever mean by the term ‘real’. In fact, the Wild and Wilderness are amazingly important notions for me, and in my own thinking and nascent philosophical vocabulary. I will no doubt explain just what I mean by this in some future posts and essays on this site (and thus give ‘wilderness’ its theoretical due), but for now I will just mention that I finished this chapter wishing Bennett would have taken the time to explore Thoreau’s notions a bit more.
After a brief mention of Hent de Vries, a thinker I am still utterly unfamiliar with, and his use of the notion of “the absolute” (which I found unimpressive and philosophically uninteresting), Bennett again announces her wish to shift our attention from epistemological questions and to present “thing-power” as that which allows material things to be independent “actants” in the world. Bennett writes:
“I will try, impossibly, to name the moment of independence (from subjectivity) possessed by things, a moment that must be there, since things do in fact affect other bodies, enhancing or weakening their power. I will shift from the language of epistemology to that of ontology, from a focus on an elusive recalcitrance hovering between immanence and transcendence (the absolute) to an active, earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness (vibrant matter).” (p.3)This “fact” about affective material ‘bodies’ is indeed important if we are going to take the real world and its myriad of things seriously, but I’m not sure simply switching from epistemology-language to ontology-language indicates anything other than Bennett’s preference of concepts. Her case for a “vibrant materialism” remains to be argued, much less assumed, and the discursive sleight-of-hand of switching vocabularies has never been a tactic that appeals to me.
Regardless, in the first few pages of this chapter Bennett moves swiftly through these associations and announcements and begins unfolding what she calls her “onto-story” (p4). Bennett describes the intent behind her onto-story this way:
“The hope is that the story will enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us, will generate a more subtle awareness the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies, and will enable wiser interventions into that ecology” (p.4).However uncomfortable I may be with the notion of “intervention” (and I am very uncomfortable with it, especially as it refers to ecology) I share Bennett’s desire to have more appropriate onto-stories about how the universe works - stories that might also result in a greater awareness and ecological sensibility. But how plausible and convincing will Bennett’s story actually be?
Bennett begins her story recalling an important encounter with a random collection of debris caught by a storm drain. Bennett recalls that these things – a glove, pollen, dead rat, cap and a stick – provoked in her affects which lead to an acknowledgement of each item’s “thing-power”. What commanded her attention was how each thing exhibited its own being-ness “in access of their association with human meanings, habits, or projects” (p.4). Bennett tells us how she was struck by what she understood as the inherent capacity of each thing to potentially affect other bodies, human or otherwise, and produce real effects in the world.
Obviously, this was a powerful experience for her and it gives the reader some sense of how one can be taken by surprise by the uncanny-ness of seemingly banal things. I have had very similar experiences (most of which have even been when I was not on drugs). One particularly striking example for me is a time when I was sitting curb-side waiting for my ride to pick me up after a training session at the dojo. I was sitting there when I noticed a pristine copper penny reflecting light from its submerged position in a shallow pool of water on the side of the road. The combination of water, pavement, copper penny and reflected light affected me so intensely that I was nearly brought to tears – and for no apparent ‘reason’ other than the actuality of these things in that particular moment.
Why such an emotional reaction? In retrospect, the only rationale I come up with is that this particular assemblage of things (and their inherent properties or ‘powers’) catalyzed in me an experience that deeply resonated with the core of my emotional-aesthetic disposition - and in an utterly non-conceptual manner. In other words, I was deeply moved by the sheer beauty of it all. In remembering how much I was affected by that experience I can now assume that a certain degree of “aesthetic-affective openness”, as Bennett called it in the preface (p.x), made me susceptible to the ‘powers’ of these things, and provoked in me an emotional response.
It was only later, as I pleasantly astonished sitting in the theater watching the film American Beauty, that I began to understanding what had happened for me that day. As I watched the actor Wes Bentley express back to me my own experience of the world with his portrayal of young Ricky Fitts, I began to contextualize that moment. With the iconic lines, “there is just so much beauty in the world”, Bentley deflated any desire for an explanation and gave me impetus to just let it be.
But Bennett offers her own explanation as to why such an encounter might have affected her so:
“This window onto an eccentric out-side was made possible by the fortuity of that particular assemblage, but also by a certain anticipatory readiness on my in-side, by a perceptual style open to the appearance of thing-power” (p.5)I agree with Bennett, in that it is precisely this type of internal “readiness” or “perceptual style” that can engender an experience and interpretation of matter and the world as alive and immanently meaningful. Such disposition or orientation in the world is also, I believe, exactly what needs to be cultivated by individuals, groups and populations in order for our species to begin developing the kind of eco-sensitivity required for a more sustainable and adaptive existence. An increased awareness of the integrity and affective power of things would also generate very different political attitudes and intentionalities.
Bennett then briefly mentions the sources of her own “readiness”: Thoreau and Spinoza again, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty - who’s work and visceral phenomenology has been one of the major influences on my own “perceptual style” and thinking. Merleau-Ponty took Heidegger’s thought-opening philosophy and infused it with a post-Latin penchant for vivid description and fluid expressivity. I believe that Merleau-Ponty is still one of the most underestimated thinkers of the twentieth century.
Next, Bennett presents a long quote taken from Robert Sullivan’s meditation on New Jersey trash. Sullivan’s descriptions provides a vivid reminder of the power and vitality of things, and offer Bennett’s first actual attempt at providing the reader with some evidence for why we should in fact take the power of things so seriously. Sullivan’s description of a New Jersey landfill offers a concrete example of how a variety of things can and do affect the world. As Bennett suggests, “a vital materiality can never really be ‘thrown away’, for it continues its activities even as a discarded or unwanted commodity” (p.6).
The consequences of the mix and mingle of things discarded, of chemicals and obsolesced trinkets, of poisons and ecological systems, needs no further explanation than that which we can read in any standard urban toxicology report. Our civilization is burying the dirty secrets of an unsustainable lifestyle – the metal and plastic carcasses of an ecologically catastrophic mode of existence. The effects of industry, waste and unintelligent disposal indicate directly and intimately the affects and power of things, whether we desire such affects or not.
Sullivan’s descriptions combine in the next section with an equally lengthy quote from Manuel De Landa to further support Bennett’s claims about the vitality and affective power of things. For example, De Landa notes how even inorganic matter can “self-organize” (p.7). Again, I find Bennett’s use of sources interesting, as Manuel De Landa is another thinker whose work and intellectual positions have had a definitive impact on my own. De Landa has an outstanding ability to point out the active, creative and eventful life of matter and energy. And again, here, I wish Bennett would have delved deeper into De Landa’s neo-materialist philosophy, but instead she moves on to a discussion of a story by Kafka that, for me, was neither informative nor interesting.
Another section has Bennett providing her own example of things as power-full and active. Bennett explains how a Gunpowder Residue Sampler (essentially a vial with human samples in it) had an important role in a criminal trial in which she was a member of the jury. The Sampler, Bennett recalls, had a major influence on the outcome of the trial, and therefore displayed its intrinsic power to affect the world as, what Latour calls, an “actant” or “intervener” in that particular “trial” assemblage. As Bennett writes,
“This composite of glass, skin cells, glue, words, laws, metals, and human emotions had become an actant. Actant, recall is Bruno Latour’s term for a source of action; an actant can be human or not, or, most likely, a combination of both” (p.9).This example was less persuasive for me because it could always be argued that this particular thing (the Sampler) was simply an artifact designed and intentionally brought into being by humans, and only caught up, or animated by, human activities and significations. The vial of cells didn’t necessarily impose its inherent power on the world, but instead was bestowed power and efficacy by the scientists who created it, the lawyers who presented it and the jury who interpreted it. Left on its own, the vial would produce little if any effect in the world. Therefore, Bennett’s claims about the vitality and potency of things, at least in this example, as relatively independent actants was not advanced.
On the same page, however, and in reference to the capacity of things to be actants, Bennett introduces the Deleuzian notion of an “operator” (p.9). An operator is a quasi-causal entity that, “by virtue of its particular location in the assemblage and fortuity of being in the right place at the right time, makes the difference, makes things happen, becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event” (p.9). This is an important component that cannot be lightly passed over. By introducing the notion that certain entities have a more decisive impact, or intensive role in any particular assemblage Bennett opens the possibility of discussing the actual specificity of things in relation to each other, and how particular things could sometimes be considered more significant or consequential in a given situation. In other words, from a perspective that posits all matter and energy as vibrant, conative and affective, the notion of an “operator” allows us to be evaluative and begin assessing complex situations in terms of their own inherent functional necessities or immanent imperatives. I will return to this point later in the reading.
It is at this point that Bennett makes a decisive move. Bennett suggests that ‘actant’ and ‘operator’ can be considered “substitute words” for what could alternatively be called “agents”. “Agentic capacity can now be seen”, Bennett argues, “as differently distributed across a wider range of ontological types” (p.9). However, I’m not convinced at this point that such an assumption is either warranted, or beneficial. It will all hinge, for me, on what Bennett means by “agentic capacity”. If by this she means that a baseball bat or SUV should be considered as inherently having the capacity for ‘agency’ then I have some serious difficulties with that claim. But if Bennett means that baseball bats and SUVs act as affordances for agents to expand or augment their agentic capacities, thereby impacting the overall character of the assemblage as a distributed network, then I would most certainly agree.
The important nuances here are many and for me to do justice to this issue it would require me to increase the size of this already too wordy post to a ridiculous degree. I can only say that if Bennett chooses to extrapolate a panpsychic interpretation of the world based on the obvious dynamic materiality of things then she is free to do so, but such an interpretation is in no way the only one possible. I argue that just because all things can affect the world viz. their own inherent properties, or ‘thing-power’, doesn’t mean all things have the same kind of properties or powers – let alone a universal capacity for intentionality or the requisite flexibility and sensitivity to be considered “agents”. This is precisely where most materialists of the past usually fall short: they explain away, reduce and misunderstand sentience by not recognizing its emergent and specific characteristics. By suggesting that sentience is an unremarkable feature of matter, distributed everywhere, but only in lesser degree perhaps, materialists fail to understand the local particularity (or onto-idiosyncrasy) of sentient beings – beings that have different properties from those without actual agency. And in this case it is a difference that truly makes a difference.
For now, however, I’ll wait to learn more about what Bennett intends by thinking about all actants as “agents”, because in the next chapter, it seems, she will take this very issue in more detail. Perhaps I will be wrong in my assumptions, and perhaps Bennett will surprise me with an account of agency that is more nuanced than it first seems to be. But even as Bennett goes on in the next section to consider how humans partake of ‘thing-power’, I get the sense that she hopes to continue to “flatten out” the difference between, for example, the affective powers of trash and human intentionality.
Bennett then returns to De Landa to ask us to consider the relevance of geological time scales and the general history of matter. Again, I am in general agreement with what Bennett quotes from De Landa. I’m still not convinced, however, with regards to the implications Bennett seems to want to draw from geological processes: Bennett suggests that “mineralization” is an agentic process that actually produces the capacity of self-directed behavior in humans (p.11). But I don’t see how the process of mineralization causally “produces” anything like a capacity for intentional or conscious behavior?
We can admit that the mineralization of bones combines with organic genetic and epigenetic processes to make an assemblage (a human body) which then affords or helps occasion the capacities that underpin intentional capacities, but in no way do bones directly produce such abilities. Bennett, at this point seems to be stretching the notion of agency much much farther than I think is plausible – farther even than might be required for us to understand the inherent vitality of matter. Luckily, in an endnote (numbered 32) Bennett qualifies her increasingly hyperbolic claims about agency by writing:
“Although, as I will argue in chapter 2, it is more accurate to say that this efficacy belongs less to minerals alone than to the combined activities of a variety of bodies and forces acting as an agentic assemblage”(p.126).Indeed. For me, this footnote, and some additional qualifications at the bottom of page 11, saved Bennett’s whole project from deconstructing before it even got started. Humans are not just “walking, talking minerals” (p.11), but actually complex, multi-property assemblages with emergent capacities for intentional behavior and recursive awareness. To suggest that minerals as bones are the key “operator” in our assemblage in to drastically misunderstand what kind of assemblage we in fact are. I agree that the differences in complexity between animals and, say, a mountain should not be overemphasized – but at the same time such differences in complexity and capacity should not be underestimated. Our ‘powers’ are indeed ‘thing-power’ but they embody a specifically expressed arrangement of thing-ness.
Bennett even goes on to allude to some problems that might arise when we flatten out the differences between rocks and people: “The fear is that in failing to affirm human uniqueness, such views [as those which deemphasize the difference] authorize the treatment of people as mere things…” (p.11-12). And I believe that this is a justifiable fear, in that we have seen in the concentration camps of 20th century what a “flattened” view of people can (but not necessarily must) lead to. The key issue, for me, here is not that we must retain a notion of some sort of impassible “ontological divide” between matter and human dignity, but that we must respect and acknowledge the degree of difference between those things with less awareness or sentience and those with more. It is the ‘degree of difference’ that truly matters.
Yet, I also agree with Bennett that a vibrant materialist perspective on the world does not automatically lead us to treat humans as “mere things” or instruments to be used. If we acknowledge the degrees of difference, and the differential intensities and specific capacities of all assemblages we could develop a deeply ecological and vital materialist awareness of reality, while, at the same time, cultivate an immanent moral sensibility that respects the uniqueness of sentient beings. Therefore, I also applaud Bennett’s willingness to speak about “enabling instrumentalizations” (p.12) as means of promoting human health and flourishing. As James Stanescu writes in his comments on this chapter:
"…most interesting part of the first chapter for me comes on page 12, where Bennett speaks of the need to create and maintain enabling instrumentalizations rather than escaping from instrumentalizations. It is unclear to me if she argues for this position because she thinks it is a better system period, or if she argues for it because she believes escaping from instrumentalization is a pipe dream. However, I am in broad agreement with Bennett on this point, that politically, ethically, and ecologically we need to start thinking of mutually enabling instrumentalizations that escape anthropocentrism." [source]There is much more to say on what such “enabling instrumentalizations” might look like, or how they can be developed, but for now I will simply say that a more just and sustainable future might require that we spend much more time pursuing ways to enable the flourishing of life and material creativity instead of blindly raging forth with enculturated consumerist interests clothed in ideological-economic drag. The ethical, and therefore instrumental aim of a community should be, as Bennett suggests, “to distribute value more generously” (p.13) through a deeper respect and awareness of the active and affective vibrancy of all things.
Bennett then moves on to discuss the limits of our knowledge of thing-power in terms of Adorno’s “negative dialectics”. This pause for epistemological pondering reminds us of the gap between concept and world. Although it is a brief interlude into her vocalization of the potency of matter that things exercise, Bennett prompts us to, in the words of Adorno, “think more, not less” (p.13) about the non-identity between our representations and the thing-itself. All things, Bennett tells us, allude capture by our concepts. Of this, I think we can be certain.
Yet, despite such limits, I believe there is also cause to speculate and to discourse, and ultimately to involve ourselves in ‘language games’ that do more than signify - because they also orient us in the world, allowing us to communicate and ‘map the territory’ of life for very human purposes. Moreover, our poetics, symbols and codes also produce affects in the world – thus becoming ‘actants’ equally at play in the mix and tangle of the world. Acknowledging the import of Adorno’s cautionary tale of concepts and things can indeed add to our understanding of the texture of life - but, at the same time, the implications of a thoroughly vibrant and material universe can take us beyond mere gestures at a world, towards much richer encounters of consequence and meaning-full-ness. This, however, is an issue to be taken up at a more auspicious time.
Bennett concludes this chapter by reminding her reader that her aim is not to produce a narrative about the ultimate truth of things, because, as Adorno cautions, this is a fool’s game, but rather to provide us with her particular onto-story which, if followed to its logical and sensual conclusions, might just help direct our attention towards more important and vibrant considerations of the world.
See Also:
[and check out Peter Gratton’s links and summary of the reading group so far]
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