Hiking through the desert once I stopped to hug a large round boulder. I don't know what compelled me to do it. I had never done it before or since, but I can still feel it. It was as if the rock hugged back.
In the classroom I draw a circle at one end of the blackboard and label it “natural system.” At the other end I draw another circle and label it “human system.” This, I proclaim, is the problem, or the root of the problem, or at least an underlying cause of the global environmental problematic. For the rest of the semester I try to bring the two circles together, not completely overlapping but intersecting. It is a struggle.
Why it is a struggle and why the rock hug perplexes me became clear in the pages of Jane Bennett's eloquent, carefully reasoned book, Vibrant Matter. In prose that is itself vibrant, Bennett constructs a politics that, for centuries, no theorist could touch. Why they could not is hard to say, but “surely the scope of democratization,” she argues, “can be broadened to acknowledge more nonhumans in more ways, in something like the ways in which we have come to hear the political voices of other humans formerly on the outs” (p. 109). Her project, though, is more than acknowledgment, or awareness or appreciation. It is about finding a “commonality with the out-side [which] may induce vital materialists to treat nonhumans—animals, plants, earth, even artifacts and commodities—more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically” (p.18). Through persuasive argumentation and expert extraction from literatures as diverse as political theory and philosophy, ethics, physics, complexity theory, ecology, and geography, she points to connection, in fact to reconnection with all that animates our world. The politics that emerges is animate and ecological, not about ecology, not for the environment, but a politics that, as she says, takes seriously a vibrancy in all matter, human and otherwise.
Bennett's purpose is “to give voice to a vitality intrinsic to materiality, in the process absolving matter from its long history of attachment to automatism or mechanism” (p. 3). But if a Western history has suffered from such an attachment, it also, as she shows, includes important yet neglected strands of vital materialism in the works of Nietzsche (a play of forces), Spinoza (conatus), Hent de Vries (that which refuses to dissolve completely), Thoreau (the Wild), Michel Foucault (the unthought), Gilles Deleuze (the virtual), Hans Driesch (entelechy), Henri Bergson (élan vital), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (immanent significance). All of these strands minimize the difference between subject and object, bringing humans as much as any other organism or substance into the swirl of material vitality.
What emerges is an ethic inspired by a sense of all bodies being “enmeshed in a dense network of relations” (p. 13) where harm to one element may very well be harm to oneself. And from this ethic Bennett then develops a politics that is every bit as “natural” as that premised on subject/object, life/matter dualisms, on “man apart from nature,” on hierarchy and domination (of others and nature). It is a politics that is ecological, not because theorists should pay more attention to “the environment” but because these networks of relations permeate all bodies, human and nonhuman, animate and, seemingly, inanimate. From a political ecologist's perspective, she does not simply call on political theorists to embrace the ecological; she demonstrates such an embrace in her language, her metaphors and images. For instance, on the biological side, she evokes a vegetal agency by stating that “savanna vegetation, forest trees, soil, soil microorganisms, and humans native and exotic to the rainforest are all responding, in real time and without predetermined outcome, to each other and to the collective force of the shifting configurations that form” (p. 97). On the social side, she states that “policy directions and political moods are irreducible to the sum of the propositions of even an ontologically plural public, for there is always a slight surprise of action” (p. 103). These are ecological views in the sense that they embody the complexity and limited knowability of interdependent, constantly changing systems.
For me, though, Bennett is at her best, and most convincing, when she takes us to a storm drain, an electric grid in collapse, or a high-fat meal. In such places (and place is indeed important to her overall thesis), she shows us something new in the familiar, something that we all sense at some level of consciousness, something we all “knew” as children. While she and so many others struggle to put a name to it, something like “life force” or, as she prefers, “thing power,” emerges, that which exists in plants and animals, including humans, and even boulders.
To take one of her applications, food might seem like the easy case. One life becomes another. But even here, even in the organic and slow food movements, a pervasive inanimate sense creates separation and hierarchy: Food is a means of acquiring nutrients, or a means to enjoyment. Animating food, says Bennett, might counter the waste of consumerism. How to reorient consumption is still a question, but finding that “two-way street, an encounter between bodies human and non-human” (p. 47) would be a first step, a step radically at odds with “green” consumption and technological salvation, approaches that do not fundamentally challenge the consumerist ethos. Still, I have to wonder about the implications for fast food. Does fast food not also have a life history, a series of actors (and other actants) many of whom reflect intently on its production and consumption? Does fast food not have its own vital materiality? The world knows it is a powerful “actant in an agentic assemblage.” So why, exactly, is fast food less vital, less, presumably, legitimate? Many have made the environmental and health arguments. But what is the material vitalist argument against fast food?
This book might have been titled “To Take Worms Seriously,” not just because great thinkers like Charles Darwin did but because social theorists have not. That is, they have been strangely (strangely from an ecological, complex systems perspective, as well as from a pragmatist perspective) resistant to a full extension of political action. The project has been to separate some humans from other humans and, necessarily, humans from other animate beings, not to mention from the inanimate. Now, with one scientific study after another on climate, toxics, soil, freshwater, and so much more, we see where that separation has led us. Bennett brilliantly shows how to bring my circles together, to make sense of a rock hug (or, more stereotypically, a tree hug) and, most importantly, to carve out a politics that no longer arrogates to one species the privilege of engineering the planet.
Could such a politics emerge? Bennett is cautious, possibly unduly cautious, in at least three ways. First, she concedes that “even if … the vitality of matter is real, it will be hard to discern it, and, once discerned, hard to keep focused on” (p. 119). This frames the issue in perceptual terms, in questions of attention and “seeing,” and in acts of will. But if the pragmatism on which she bases much of her politics is right, then the politics will emerge not through “seeing” but through acting, through problem solving, through rolling up our sleeves and getting to work as biophysical constraints tighten.
Second, if, as Bennett argues, a vibrant materiality repartitions the perceptual, if it opens “the political gate … enough for nonhumans (dead rats, bottle caps, gadgets, fire, electricity, berries, metal) to slip through,” then it “feels dangerous to leave the gate open, for it renders many conceptual, moral, and psychological possessions exposed and vulnerable” (p. 107). For those of us who see dramatic change on the horizon, this is precisely what “possessions” like endless-material-growth-on-a-finite-planet and markets-and-technologies-solve all need—prying open, full exposure and scrutiny, being lassoed and corralled into a nice, safe, out-of-the-way place.
A third sign of cautiousness comes in her treatment of anthropomorphism. To anthropomorphize is to see the nonhuman in terms of human characteristics. For all its problems in scientific inference, anthropomorphizing, Bennett argues convincingly, can be a valuable tool: “We at first may see only a world in our own image, but what appears next is a swarm of ‘talented’ and vibrant materialities (including the seeing self)” (p. 99). It can be a “gesture toward the inadequacy of understanding [something] simply as a machine” (p. 25). It can enable us to see a “whole world of resonances and resemblances” (p. 99).
Having made a strong case for anthropomorphizing, however, Bennett seems to balk: [O]ne might try a “touch” of it (p. 99); “maybe it is worth running the risks” (p. 120). With a first degree in biology, I must say it never occurred to me that anthropomorphizing could be anything but wrong, certainly not a helpful tool. And to think that the father of modern evolutionary biology, Charles Darwin, would be a proponent! But classical biology, often called natural history, was different. Keen observation, on the ground and over long periods of time, was the norm. Maybe such disciplined observation, paying “close attention to the mundane,” as Bennett puts it, along with a willingness to anthropomorphize a “touch” (or, I would venture, a whole lot more, a sustained grab) needs resurrecting, by natural and social scientists alike. Maybe reconnection will be easier than we hardened moderns might imagine. Although the author does not go in this direction, let alone offer evidence, my guess is that a large share of the population—North and South—would have little trouble with more “agentic vitalism” in popular discourse and politics. The ones who have the most trouble are indeed us sophisticated moderns. Unlearning is hard to do. This book can help, a lot, I think.
As I read this book, I kept asking myself whether I could convey these ideas to my students who, for the most part, are not steeped in political theory, who love “the environment,” and yet are prone to pat answers to environmental problems—recycle, use energy more efficiently, buy green, manage resources better, price better. I think I can. But I have to first convince them that what is needed is a fundamentally different politics, a language of, say, sustainability, and an ethic of care that extends not just to pristine forests and alpine meadows but to all that is material, including commodities and throw-away packaging. To construct a politics of vital materiality, Bennett instructs us, is indeed to bring the circles together, to confront the separation in our lived experience. She allows us to see that in so many ways, we are living “in nature” and “of nature” and those very forces that seem “out there” are indeed “in here,” in us. We may not see this because we focus on the built environment, but that may be precisely where we need to look to find vibrancy, not in wilderness and (supposedly) pure nature. She helps us see our experiences of materiality in the everyday, no matter how mundane or “unnatural” that may seem. She does this—and this is where I would have to be careful with my students—without requiring an animistic belief (in fact, for the scientifically inclined, physics and ecology is probably quite enough) or spiritual uplift.
With Bennett's keen insights, I believe I can now show students (and others, maybe even some colleagues) that, through the concept, the sensibility, the practice of vibrant materialities, people in all walks of life can see the sense in treating both nature and artifacts “more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically” (p.18).
