- Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
"Desire is the essence of a man."
- Spinoza
Jane Benett finds in Spinoza and Lucretius a monism that helps sustain her project, one that moves toward a vital materialism which affirms that "deep down everything is connected and irreducible to a simple substrate," and resonates with an ecological sensibility that unlike deep ecology "posits neither a smooth harmony of parts nor a diversity unified by a common spirit."[1] She explains her form of vital materialism "is not a vitalism in the traditional sense; I equate affect with materiality, rather than posit a separate force that can enter and animate a physical body... my aim, again, is to theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such to detach materiality from the figures of passive, mechanistic, or divinely infuesed substance. This vibrant matter is not the raw material for the creative activity of humans or God" (ibid. preface xiii).
The notion of human-nonhuman evokes the affective and afflictive power of matter as a differentiated field of acting things (what Bruno Latour has called ‘actants’), ever moving in shifting assemblages that include, exclude and comprise humans, accumulating, manifesting and dispersing powers to act with and on each other in ecologies of temporary material forms and relations. In this respect, humans can be understood to exert a far wider array of powers as sites of material action and interaction – as things – than as reflexive subjects. This notion of the human-nonhuman is associated with terms such as thing-power, thingness or thingliness and positions of enquiry such as actor-network theory, vital materialism, posthumanism, speculative realism, object-orientented ontology. As Dr Emma J Roe tells us 'Human-nonhuman is a challenge to the category of the human as it leads one to consider how as humans we are inextricably connected to nonhumans from sentient animals to inert pieces of technology by both how we know ourselves and how we form ethical and political relationships with other humans and nonhumans.' [2]
If Bennett has a credo it might be one that absolves us of our humanity and creates a sacred space without gods:
Instead of going into further detail at this time, since I'm still in process of finishing the book, I wish to relay what has already transpired on five other blogger sites who participated in a reading group event which seems to be expertly summed up by Adrian J Ivakhiv on his blog immanence in his post wrapping up Vibrant Matter.
1. Vibrant Matter A Political Ecology of Things Duke University Press (2010) preface xi
2. Dr Emma J Roe, International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 251-257.
If Bennett has a credo it might be one that absolves us of our humanity and creates a sacred space without gods:
"I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms, and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp. I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests." (122)Yet, one wonders, to what end would she reshape the "self and its interests"? Who would control these changes? What powers of politics, persuasion and mastery within the post-human trauma - that singularity beyond us that beckons to us from an inhuman future, would authorize such strange goals; and, for whom?
Instead of going into further detail at this time, since I'm still in process of finishing the book, I wish to relay what has already transpired on five other blogger sites who participated in a reading group event which seems to be expertly summed up by Adrian J Ivakhiv on his blog immanence in his post wrapping up Vibrant Matter.
1. Vibrant Matter A Political Ecology of Things Duke University Press (2010) preface xi
2. Dr Emma J Roe, International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 251-257.