The “philosophical” project is an attempt to create some conceptual think-space to re-imagine the existing world and break down some of our most pernicious habits of thought about matter, life, agency, and the mingled contacts between them. Bennett informs the reader that she wants nothing less than to produce in us a “cognitive effect” that results in our parsing the materiality of things in a more creative and lively manner. Matter, Bennett suggests, is no mere “passive stuff” but vibrant and alive - and we would be better off and more attuned to the actual life of things if we understood just how vibrant and alive “its” are.
A richer understanding of matter could then leads us, Bennett assumes, to cultivate a deeper and more dynamic sensibility towards the wider life of things. More importantly, if we can develop what Bennett calls an “aesthetic-affective openness” (p.x) towards ‘things’ we might also become more capable of addressing the significant ecological issues of contemporary life. Instead, our current misreading of materiality, Bennett tells us, has us either retreating to our default folk ontologies – more traditional cosmologies which often posit a distinction between matter and subjectivity - or leads us to an instrumental rationality with its warped internal justifications for a lust for control and mastery over things and others.
Bennett wastes no time in identifying her allies in this quest to rethink ‘matter’ as something more than dirt: Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, Deleuze, Bergson, Driesch, and, as we find out later in the book, Kafka, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Lucretius and a whole host of other characters and ideas will factor in.
The “political” project flows from her philosophical goal. If we become open to thinking matter as alive and active Bennett believes we would then change the way we view the political. On this I’ll quote her at length:
“The political project in this book, to put it most ambitiously, to encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things. A guiding question: How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (non-human) bodies? By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due” (p.viii)
In fact, if political pundits and policy-makers were encouraged to actively develop the kind of perceptive ecological intelligence Bennett suggests here, perhaps collectively we would be more capable of generating governmentalities that resonate much wider spheres of concern and as a result begin to take seriously both the vitalities and deep pathologies operating within our current social formations and manufactured realities.
Bennett turns to such considerations on the very same page:
“How for example would patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash, or ‘the recycling’, but an accumulated pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter? What difference would it make to public health if eating was understood as an encounter between various and variegated bodies, some of them mine, most of them not, and none of which always gets the upper hand?” (p.viii).
Of course, I think it would make all the difference, in that ‘difference’ itself - as it exists in a vibrant, living kosmos - could then be understood as an intrinsic and dynamic property of reality. All things great, small, disgusting or divine might then be understood as modifications of the deeper creative life of things. We could begin, as Deleuze suggests, to understand the world as “ontologically one” but “formally diverse” (p.xi).
But let me pause right there a moment, because I do not wish to imply that taking the vibrancy of a material world seriously necessarily leads to some variety of monism (because I don’t think it necessarily does, Spinoza’s faith notwithstanding). What I do wish to imply, however, is that a deeper appreciation - a more “aesthetic-affective openness” (p.x) - and orientation towards the flesh and flux of the world would generate thoughts, behaviors and decision-making that, in turn, could potentially move us towards more adaptive social practices, life-ways and affective assemblages.
I am very sympathetic to both of the projects Bennett sets out for the book – and would even suggest they are not actually two projects, but one multi-layered endeavor to change the tone and tenor of our embodied psychic lives and affective social practices. Our philosophical orientations, whether implicit, lay, learned or folk, always inform our actions and commitments, and therefore there is always something “political” about the “philosophical”.
And as an ‘applied’ anthropologist and public health specialist I have a committed interest taking Bennett’s project seriously. Bennett's attempts to positively affect the psychic, cultural, political and practical lives real human beings existing in the world is urgently needed. I will explore this link more as I continue to read the book, but for now I again want to emphasize how important it is for me as both a professional ‘interventionist’ and as an anthropologist to remain attentive to whatever insight, tactic or resonance Bennett’s more “political” discussions disclose. Tactics that might even be useful on a personal level for, as Bennett suggests, “cultivating the experience of our selves as vibrant matter” (p.xix).
Bennett’s deployment of Bruno Latour’s notion of “actants” here also provided me with a high degree of anticipatory joy. Latour is a formidable thinker and sociologist, and his theories on networks, actants and social reality in general will provide and excellent basis for Bennett’s attempt to develop her politico-ecological project. Of particular interest for me is to find out if Bennett can effectively synergize Latour’s ‘Actor Network Theory’ with Delueze’s theorizing on assemblages and the Spinozian line of thought on ‘affect’ and conative bodies. As I have massive respect for each of these thinkers, my hope is that through Bennett’s rhythmic and sparking prose she will articulate the common ground upon which all three theorists cross-fertilize and enhance each others already significant contributions.
It was also encouraging to read Bennett make her theoretical commitments quite clear: “Mine is not a vitalism in the traditional sense; I equate affect with materiality, rather than posit a separate force that can enter and animate the body”. (p.xii) This further assuaged my skepticism about whether or not Bennett’s vibrant materialism was just another dressed-up version of classical vitalism. Bennett, at least in the preface, shows herself to be dedicated to envisioning a new vitalistic and immanent description of the world. As Bennett reiterates: “My aim, again, is to theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such, and to detach materiality from the figures of passive, mechanistic or divinely infused substance.” (p.xiii)
Bennett next moves on to the topic of “methodology”. I like what she has to say about theorizing ‘events as encounters’ because I believe doing so leads us to some interesting onto-epistemological positions. Indeed, Bennett’s call for a “cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces operating outside and inside the human body” (p.xiv) echoes my own advocacy for a deep attentiveness to our visceral embodiment and embeddedness in the world [here]. For me, and it seems for Bennett as well, this ‘attentiveness’ to the flesh of the world is where a truly immanent philosophical endeavor must begin. And it is the visceral force of being-in-the-world that bursts forth as the Real in our otherwise fantastic imaginations.
Whereas Bennett mostly turns to writers such as Whitman, Kafka and Thoreau to look for ways of inducing such attentiveness, I would suggest that we also expand our methods to include scientific instruments, sensory multimedia technologies, meditation, primal experimentation and many other non-literary techniques and practices in order to radically reorient our sensory ratios and cognitive attunements. (Marshall McLuhan immediately comes to mind in this context.)
For me, a truly world-saturated and open attentiveness to being and life would require an explicit 'methodological pluralism' that expands our capacities while not overwhelming them. Moreover, as Bennett contends, our survival as a species might very well depend on just such a pluralistic and “action-oriented perception” (p.xiv) of the world.
Before the end of the 'Preface' Bennett also opens up some ethical questions. Bennett is again forthright in her ambitions for the book she hopes to begin “developing a vocabulary and syntax for, and thus a better discernment of, the active powers issuing from non-subjects”. (p.ix) Such “discernment” and potential sensibility of what (in chapter one) she will call “thing-power” might just prove consequential enough to stimulate new kinds of ethical engagements. If, Bennett assumes, we can “tune into the strange logic of turbulence” (p.xi) immanent in the world we might then be able to “augment the motivational energy needed to move selves from an endorsement of ethical principles to the actual practice of ethical behaviors.” (p.xi)
Bennett’s brief treatment of the influence of Foucault’s work and its embodied ethical sensibilities augments the ethical discussion, but does not introduce anything new. What it did do, for me, was help to highlight where she might be heading in subsequent chapters in terms of linking ethical behaviors and evaluations to affect and human suffering. This, for me, is another positive sign. If we live in a world buzzing with active and vibrant matter and life – and I believe we do inhabit such a world - we will need to develop more ontologically justifiable ways of interacting with each other while also dealing with the relentless presence of human suffering in the world. I am very interested in finding out how Bennett's onto-politics might address such issues.
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