Jane Bennett’s Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman picks up from where her earlier work, Vibrant Matter (2010), left off. Whereas Vibrant Matter was concerned with developing a philosophy that takes seriously the agency of nonhuman forces, Influx and Efflux explores what concept of “selfhood” is appropriate to a worldview that decenters human beings. More specifically, Bennett asks how this orientation might change not only how humans see ourselves but also how we act.

To develop her alternative account of human agency, Bennett turns to the work of the nineteenth-century American author Walt Whitman. Bennett contends that Whitman’s work discloses a “process-oriented self” (p. xv), one that is constantly influencing and being influenced by the world around it. The titular phrase “influx and efflux,” from Whitman’s well-known poem “Song of Myself,” succinctly captures this flow. Influx—the porosity of the self to energies both human and nonhuman; efflux—the creative capacity of the self to alter whatever is taken in; and the “and” of influx-and-efflux—the interval between impression and expression, where the process of transformation takes place—all feature prominently in his work. Yet Bennett not only wishes to show how Whitman’s “I” more accurately depicts the complex reality of material interaction; she also seeks to demonstrate how this “I” can help shape a more thoroughly democratic culture.

To support this argument, Bennett devotes the first three chapters of Influx and Efflux to an in-depth exploration of Whitman’s “self.” Chapter 1 examines his view of the relationship between a person’s posture and inner character. Bennett shows how Whitman not only affirms the straightforward claim that posture reflects a person’s mood but also suggests that altering postures can actively shape mood and, ultimately, personality. In Bennett’s view, this insight both agrees with recent scientific research and can be used to cultivate the “‘manners’ of democracy” (p. 25). In chapter 2, Bennett analyzes Whitman’s use of the term “sympathy,” emphasizing how it operates not only among people but also among bodies and nonhuman matter. This expansion of sympathy away from human interaction might seem to make it irrelevant to guiding ethical behavior. However, Bennett suggests that becoming more sensitive to our sympathies with all kinds of matter helps enlarge our capacity for sympathy across difference more broadly (p. 29). Chapter 3 extends this analysis of sympathy to the process of judgment. Bennett argues that Whitman favors an attitude of impartiality and the suspension of judgment, allowing people more time to absorb new and changing impressions. This “solar” judgment deprioritizes single moments of decision making in favor of an ongoing process of “feeling things out” (50), which, in Bennett’s view, has the potential to minimize distrust and entrenched conflict in pluralistic societies.

After elaborating Whitman’s process-oriented “I,” the center chapter of Influx and Efflux, chapter 3, explores what the implications of such a self-concept would be in the contemporary political climate. First, Bennet considers how capitalism and neoliberal precarity dominate people’s “affective networks," instilling a pervasive anxiety about change that tends to thwart efforts to mobilize large-scale resistance. In Bennett’s view, Whitman’s poetry operates at a subtle, affective register to counter this anxiety, projecting confidence in “dilation,” or openness to change. Second, Bennett tackles Whitman’s complex treatment of race. She argues that his indirect approach to critiquing racial violence amounts to a political strategy that could serve as a useful supplement to continued efforts to fight racism head-on (p. 71). In her view, such an approach might “detour around entrenched racist prejudices” rather than provoke further retrenchment, opening space for the development of sympathy across social difference (p. 70).

The second half of Influx and Efflux shifts its focus to more philosophical critiques of a Whitmanian “I” and Bennett’s rejoinders to them. Chapter 4 focuses on three potentially destructive consequences of a “porous” self. First, a radically sympathetic person might mimic their surroundings to such an extent that all distinction between self and nonself dissolves; second, a person might draw increasing amounts of matter into themselves, expanding the boundaries of the personal to their breaking point (reflected in the experience of hoarders); and third, people may become overwhelmed by how indebted they are to outside influence, failing to exert any creative effect on the world. Bennet argues that Whitman’s “I” does not succumb to any of these forms of full depersonalization. Rather, his poetry preserves a (permeable) boundary of the self that Bennett calls a “seawall.” Using Henry David Thoreau’s writings, chapter 5 and the epilogue explore how this “seawall” might function. Thoreau, in Bennett’s view, better articulates the need to play an active role in filtering the panoply of influences around us, deciding which to intensify and which to soften. As Bennett shows, this process is on display in Whitman’s and Thoreau’s acts of “writing up,” in which they use inventive language to emphasize the “promising positivities [already] afoot” (p. 118). Altogether, Influx and Efflux argues that Whitman’s sensitive and creative “I” helps foster a pluralist, egalitarian public culture.

Bennett’s approach to reading Whitman is unorthodox for contemporary Whitman scholars, and this distinctiveness is at the heart of the book’s strengths and vulnerabilities. As Whitman has become more accepted as a political theorist in his own right, scholarship has tended to examine the relationship between his democratic theory and his social and political context. Bennett generally eschews contextual analysis, instead using close readings of his work and comparisons to more contemporary philosophy to investigate what Whitman conveyed about the foundations of a democratic ethics. This allows Bennett to correct still-common misperceptions of Whitman as a megalomaniac who sees in the world only himself, writ large. The Whitman that emerges in Influx and Efflux is too explicitly indebted to the influences around him to be an egoist in any straightforward sense of the term. More broadly, I was also persuaded that Whitman’s concept of self is consistent with a “new materialist” understanding of agency as distributed among human and nonhuman matter. As such, Bennett’s reading of Whitman contributes to a broader effort to challenge “sovereign” conceptions of individual agency.

Yet, although Whitman is, in my view, a fruitful theorist with whom to think through the work of fostering a democratic culture, Influx and Efflux neglects frank discussions of some of the most pressing challenges to this project. Putting Whitman back in context helps clarify some of these obstacles. First, Bennett frequently suggests that Whitman’s efforts were aimed at cultivating sympathy toward Black Americans and immigrants (pp. 33, 59, 70). There is evidence to suggest, however, that at least one group of intended beneficiaries of that sympathy was white Southerners. Whitman believed that a key part of “healing the nation’s wounds” after the Civil War was forgiving former slaveholders and bringing white Southerners back into the political fold—before the promises of Radical Reconstruction were fulfilled (“Origins of Attempted Secession”). This suggests that Whitman’s emphasis on nonjudgmental treatment of others and “nonchalance” might be less antiracist than it at first appears.

Further, Bennett’s discussion of Whitman’s views on race does not address the attitudes Whitman expressed outside of his controversial poems. Although she acknowledges in a footnote that “there was a racist filter obscuring [Whitman’s] reception of the extent of the violence of racism” (p. 153n32), she nonetheless argues that Whitman’s poetry tacitly, rather than explicitly, critiques racism (p. 69). This claim would be more persuasive if she attended to less savory statements in Whitman’s notes and correspondence, where Whitman explicitly marks his deep “personal, physiological, and emotional” attachment to “the whites,” asserting that “the blacks can never be to me what the whites are” (Notes and Unpublished Manuscripts, 2160). It seems possible that Whitman’s white readership might interpret his lack of explicit critique of racism as an implicit endorsement of the circumscribed, intraracial sympathy that he expresses in these notes. Do Whitman’s documented views matter less than the possible antiracist implications of what he wrote? Bennett’s claims, which seem to rely on a distinction between the two, would be stronger if she defended this distinction rather than presupposed it.

These contextual readings of Whitman raise more contemporary concerns about the political import of a Whitmanian “I.” Bennett notes that she does not think that Whitman’s “indirect responses to social evil” should be the only strategy to pursue against injustice (p. 71). Rather, as she argues in the prologue, Whitman’s approach should supplement more unequivocal forms of critique. But what would it look like to suspend judgment and indirectly seek to encourage interracial sympathy alongside a strategy of holding white nationalists to account? As responses to the January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol reveal, calls for unity and more oblique censure of racism—much like Whitman’s approach after the Civil War—often work at cross-purposes with head-on resistance to the far right. In fact, the failure to swiftly act against white militia groups over the summer and close down far-right media platforms—the opposite of Whitman’s “solar” judgment—arguably enabled the threat to grow over time. Although I am sympathetic to Bennett’s defense of a pluralism of pro-democratic tactics, it is unclear to me how Whitmanian and agonistic approaches might complement one another in practice.

The questions that Influx and Efflux raises about cultivating an egalitarian public culture are the most difficult and most central of Whitman’s time and our own. Bennett’s efforts to grapple with these questions move recent work on new materialism in a generative direction. More broadly, theorists will find in Influx and Efflux provocative explorations to engage with for years to come.