The official description from the New School:
How can objects sometimes be vibrant things with an effective presence independent of the words, images, and feelings they may provoke in humans? This question is posed by Political theorist Jane Bennett delivers the inaugural lecture as the Vera List Center for Art and Politics embarks on a two-year exploration of "Thingness," the nature of matter. In the face of virtual realities, social media and disembodied existences, the center's programs will focus on the material conditions of our lives. Jane Bennet is a professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University. In her latest book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke, 2010), she asks how our politics might approach public concerns were we to seriously consider not just our human experience of things but the things themselves. How is it that things can elide their status as possessions, tools, or aesthetic objects and manifest traces of independence and vitality? Following the tangled threads that link vibrant materialities, human selves, and the "agentic assemblages" they form, Bennett examines what hoarders, people who are preternaturally attuned to "things," can teach us about the agency, causality, and artistry in a world overflowing with stuff. Professor Bennet is a founding member of the journal Theory & Event, and is currently working on a project on over-consumption, new ecologies, and Walt Whitman's materialism.
Posts
7 comments:
I think that she is lacking a certain poetic sensibility, if we are more interested in what is effective than we might adopt a more pragmatic attitude as-if that isn't focused on what the source of effect/affect is but in manipulating it, but if we are concerned with a more basic understanding we would do well to peal away what layers of human affect/projection we can as we sort out which powers lie where.
-dmf
back in the day anthropology was at a bit of a loss when it came to taking in the full implications of post-structuralism (Rabinow and co being rare exceptions) my (largely unwelcome) suggestion at the time was that if case examples (like hoarders) could no longer be used as generalizable examples of structures/principles/laws/systems perhaps they could still serve as perspicuous re-presentations or as I have said before as prototypes and not archetypes. We need to own these foregrounding efforts (even if they are un-conscious) instead of presenting them as discoveries that we have unearthed or found in their natural settings.
-dmf
@Dirk:
Hmmm, I quite like her prose and manner of speech, and I think there is a real strong poetic resonance to her work. Have you read Vibrant Matter? If I recall right, you have a problem with the suggestion that inanimate objects have “agency”…
Sorting out “which powers lie where” is exactly the right project. Ontography! And the skillful engagement (not domination) of all such powers would afford us the opportunity to build saner, healthier and more creative worlds. All of this I would group under the umbrella of ‘adaptation’.
I think Bennett is explicit that what she is doing is a kind of speech performance, trying to call attention to and accentuate the “force of things” so we can being cultivate our awareness and seek out experiences in which we are more attuned to the active materiality of life. I respect her efforts in this regard - regardless of what I think of traditional forms of “vitalism”.
As for owning “these foregrounding efforts” I’m not sure what you mean. Can you elaborate? What are the relevant implications of post-struc in your view?
I don't think that she really owns these as speech-acts/accentuations (Haraway is sometimes better about this in terms of taking scientific discoveries as images/models that she will than lift from their context and employ them to other means tho she frequently also gets carried away by the intimacy of her interactions), but sees/experiences the agency of things as much more akin to human concerns than I do (reminds me of Michael Pollan's earlier rhetoric). I think she is often bearing witness in her accounts and not taking into account say related works in neurophemenology (as you know much of what we experience of ourselves as passive/receptive is an un-conscious work/construction).
It does raise a question of whether or not one might lose rhetorical power by bringing a kind of studied reflection to such matters but my impression is that Bennett is carried away by her first impressions.
Wittgenstein rightly critiqued Frazier's functionalist accounts of rituals for missing a vital human dimension (of poetic/expressive dwelling) and I think we are still missing that '3rd' by shifting from instrumentalism to fetishism, going native as it were.
I'm looking forward to hearing your own account of how we might broaden our interactive capabilities, the how-to part of all of this is much needed.
Ah yes, praxis. That is the crux. I should say more on that...
http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/pico-iyer-conversation-paul-holdengr%C3%A4ber?nref=90281
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=1341
Post a Comment