Jane Bennett on Whitman’s Solar Judgment

A recent blog post by Peter Gratton brought the following podcast to my attention: In a talk delivered at the Birkbeck Institute on May 20, 2010 Dr. Jane Bennett discussed Walt Whitman’s notions of poetic judgement as a special ability to discern the wider life of things. Bennett argues that just such a cultivated sensibility is exactly what is needed today for us to begin to take the living material potency of the world we come from seriously. 

Jane Bennett is currently Professor of Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University, a fellow in the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) among other publications.

From Backdoor Broadcasting:

Jane Bennett - Walt Whitman’s Solar Judgment

In the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman attributes to the poet this remarkable talent: he has learned how to judge “not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.” To judge as the sun falls: my goal is to examine the techniques — literary, grammatical, conceptual — that Whitman uses to cultivate this queer, even oxymoronic, practice. I suggest that Whitman’s “solar” judging helps to induce a special kind of auditory perception: the ability to detect the voice of “inanimate” things, a voice that announces the role that such things have played in the particular political actions or events to which one is called upon to judge. Thus Whitman’s claim that poets can take on the posture of falling sunlight is linked to his materialism, or the way he conceives of materiality as a living force.

Event Date: Monday 17th May 2010
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LISTEN TO ENTIRE PODCAST: HERE

I read Vibrant Matter last month as part of an online reading group, but failed to keep up with related posts due to severe personal time constraints. And although the reading group is over, I still plan to post thoughts on all 8 chapters before summer’s end. My notes already exist in rough, and I want to continue to use this blog as a kind of thought lab where half-baked thoughts and tentative explorations are allowed to ‘live’. The book was a great little read: beautifully written, terse and powerful in its plea for us to begin understanding and engaging the world in more encompassing and realistic ways.

If we have the courage to look at what is actually going in the universe – within matter and among all things – we might be shocked to learn just how ‘at home’ we really are. Check out my existing comments here.

Podcast Source @ Backdoor Broadcasting