Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (A John Hope Franklin Center Book)

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Bennett invokes Foucault at a number of moments in the book. What I find interesting is that Foucault elucidated the coming into being of the notion of the human as a coherent unit--this was part of the birth of modern discourse. And here we are seeing the idea of the human start to dissolve. It's not the trans-humanism of the technology fetishists (sorry, John Burdett) with the human animal being overtaken by computers, but rather the growing idea that humans aren't a useful unit of analysis.

Forthcoming) "Interview with Jane Bennett". LA+: Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture (11 (Vitality)). Spring 2020. Bennett and I left the park and found ourselves in a spooky area beneath an expressway. We decided to walk up a nearby hill, toward a hip neighborhood called Hampden. In front of an extraordinarily ugly apartment building, we ambled to a stop. Bennett was trying to show me something with great enthusiasm. KKL: Within a short genealogy of materialism – from Epicurus to the most recent accounts by Bruno Latour –“What kind of materialist are you…” Wearing bright-silver sneakers, she dropped her arms and headed off into the woods. I hastened to keep up with her. Soon, we stumbled upon something we found hard to precisely describe. Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy". Sage . Retrieved 25 July 2014.Bennett, Jane (2012), "Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency", in Cohen, Jeffrey (ed.), Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books an imprint of Punctum Books, pp.237–269, ISBN 9780615625355 First, ecology has succumbed to the capitalist imperative of contemporary life, according to which “political action and consumption become fully merged”. While I agree – who could deny it? – that there is little “subversive edge” to green marketing or to ecology reduced to a “problem of sustainable development”, and that capitalism works ruthlessly and creatively to absorb its opponents, Zizek (deliberately) overstates his case. Can ecology (as a complex system of words, sounds, deeds, affects, narratives, propensities) really ever fully merge into the allegedly totalizing system of capitalism? Here I follow Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that “from the viewpoint of micropolitics, society is defined by its lines of flight […] There is always something that flows or flees, that escapes […] the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine. Things that are attributed to a ‘change in values’, to the youth, women, the mad, etc.” 3 Bennett's work considers ontological ideas about the relationship between humans and 'things', what she calls "vital materialism": Bennett's book is small and suggestive, like her earlier one. The early parts of the argument are differently structured, though, weighted heavily toward example, rather than the development of ideas. When she does come to these later on, the argument tends to be suggestive rather than clear. Adorno, T. (1990) Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. (Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd: London).

This article was in response to: Harman, Graham (Spring 2012). "The well-wrought broken hammer: object-oriented literary criticism". New Literary History. 43 (2): 183–203. doi: 10.1353/nlh.2012.0016. S2CID 145048580. and: Morton, Timothy (Spring 2012). "An object-oriented defense of poetry". New Literary History. 43 (2): 205–224. doi: 10.1353/nlh.2012.0018. S2CID 170397563. Bennett, Jane (2012), "Thing-Power", in Elkins, Jeremy; Norris, Andrew (eds.), Truth and Democracy, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp.154–158, ISBN 9780812243796Khan, Gulshan (February 2009). "Agency, nature and emergent properties: an interview with Jane Bennett". Contemporary Political Theory. 8 (1): 90–105. doi: 10.1057/cpt.2008.43. S2CID 144483000. PS If you are interested in Bennett, you'll enjoy this brief post by Graham Harman, where he writes: