consider two possibilities: vibrant materialism and object-oriented ontology.
A Political Ecology of Things
Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter is a valuable point of introduction to the speculative turn and a gateway into disciplines cognate with religious and gender studies.[1] Although not a member of the initial coterie of speculative realists, her work has been widely read, positively reviewed, and actively appropriated by those who self-identify with the movement. Peter Gratton notes from his teaching of speculative realism that Bennett usefully brings together and articulates many of its main themes.[2] Graham Harman, in turn, considers it particularly encouraging that ‘as candid a work of metaphysics’ could emerge from within a Political Science department, adding that ‘[p]erhaps philosophical speculation on fundamental topics is poised to make a comeback throughout the humanities.’[3]
To begin, Vibrant Matter marks a return to thinking the things
themselves. Bennett argues for nothing less than a reconceptualization of
matter, a re-imagining of the human relationship with the nonhuman, and
finally what she terms a political ecology of things. Her project entails
making breaks with previous approaches to materialism and an assault on
some of the major bifurcations to have dominated the conceptual
frameworks of the west: subject-object, organic-inorganic, active-passive
and, by implication, human-world. The primary claim is that non-human
matter can possess a kind of agency and the line drawn between active
humans and inanimate matter is far more controversial and malleable than
most believe. Drawing a close alliance with the work of Bruno Latour, she
deploys the concept of actants. These, she explains, ‘can be human or not,
or most likely a combination of both.’ The world is replete with these
actors and agencies. More expansively,
an actant is neither an object nor a subject but an ‘intervener’ akin to the Deleuzean ‘quasi-causal operator’. An operator is that which, by virtue of its
- ↑ J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press 2010.
- ↑ Peter Gratton, Philosophy in a Time of Error, ‘Vibrant Matters: An Interview with Jane Bennett,’ http://philosophyinatimeoferror.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/vibrant-matters-aninterview-with-jane-bennett/; accessed 12 September 2011.
- ↑ G. Harman, ‘Autonomous Objects’ in New Formations 71 (2011), 125-130.
