The SINISTER side of this book is that it makes it harder to hold human powers accountable for destructive actions. This is the downside of Bennett’s apparently virtuous and humble goal of de-centering human agency, intentions, and actions while elevating non-human factors. The oil-soaked pelican and the polluted water DO deserve as much respect and value and protection as humans. But I don’t believe we’ll achieve that by declaring them to be equal participants in an “assemblage” with the oil company whose tanker poisoned their environment. Bennett, J. (1994b) Thoreau’s Nature Ethics, Politics, and the Wild. (New York University Press: New York). There are stronger and weaker forms of this argument, though Bennett does not really draw the line between them: Depending upon how committed one is to vitalism, one can see nature and matter as nearly purposive; or one can see that because the human and natural world have been so interwoven into assemblages that the world is beyond the complete control of humans--that things have effective agency, even if they do not have intentions. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brain Massumi. (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis). I NEVER want to meet anyone stuffy and close-minded enough to require this much theoretical justification to accept, let alone entertain that "things" have more agency than has been traditionally thought in Western philosophy. I imagine this is only revalatory to contemporary academics who stopped reading 35 years ago when they received their PhD.

In Bennett’s most recent book, “ Influx & Efflux,” she describes an encounter with an Ailanthus altissima, or tree of heaven—a fast-growing tree with oval leaves—on one of her walks around Baltimore. “I saw a tree whose every little branch expanded and swelled with sympathy for the sun,” she writes. “I was made distinctly aware of the presence of something kindred to me.” Ailanthus altissima is often considered an invasive species. Bennett’s musings have an ethical component: if a nuisance tree, or a dead tree, or a dead rat is my kin, then everything is kin—even a piece of trash. And I’m more likely to value things that are kindred to me, seeing them as notable and worthy in themselves. Most environmentally minded people are comfortable with this kind of thinking when it’s applied to the pretty part of nature. It’s strange to apply the concept of kinship to plastic gloves and bottle caps. Bennett aims to treat pretty much everything as potential kin.

In this Book

Bennett, Jane (June 2004). "The force of things: steps toward an ecology of matter". Political Theory. 32 (3): 347–372. doi: 10.1177/0090591703260853. S2CID 146366679. You ask how it came to pass that it now seems to me wrong (not morally wrong but perceptually imprecise) to speak as if materiality or landscape were mere matter. No one knows exactly how one comes to believe and perceive as one does, but I’ll give it a try, speaking first of a biographical factor, and then naming some literary-philosophical influences.

KKL: In distinction to other materialist thinkers, your objects unfold thing-power foremost in the state of assemblage, which unfolds through a contingency of their co-presence. In Vibrant Matter, you argue that “in this [state of] assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics”. 6 At one point, when you argue for a culture of assemblages –“for a cognizant of our embeddedness in a natural-cultural-technological assemblage” 7– I have to think of landscape (in its multi-dimensionality between matter and idea) as interface for this proposed practice. One example of a vital materialism of our contemporary landscape is your account of infrastructure.

Project MUSE Mission

Bennett, Jane (2013), "From Nature to Matter", in Archer, Crina; Ephraim, Laura; Maxwell, Lida (eds.), Second Nature: Rethinking the Natural Through Politics, New York: Fordham University Press, pp.149–160, ISBN 9780823251421 They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. KKL: Your work is most inclusive in that it accounts for its context of discourse in a conversational way. I understand Vibrant Matter‘s conversational style as a technique or practice to actively do what you so convincingly promote: to assemble and to unfold agency between “things”. As you present it, the intrinsic facets of active materiality seem to have developed and transformed in a lively manner. My most generous reading would be that this author is a political scientist longing to be a poet. Not because her writing is particularly lyrical, but because poetry is the domain of metaphor and personification. Poets have the power to make something true just by saying it … poets don’t have to follow rules of logic or accuracy. These are the strategies that this author uses to describe reality in what purports to be a prosaic, literal-truth-based domain. The result sometimes induced eye-rolls, sometimes infuriated me. Fellow, Bauhaus University, Internationales Kolleg fur Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie [4]