Vibrant Matter; a Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennett is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at John Hopkins University.

This article from the book Vibrant Matter; a Political Ecology of Things implores us to consider our relationship to our surroundings, and in particular, the matter and stuff that surrounds us. Bennett tries to dislodge the binaries of organic/inorganic, human/animal and life/matter and questions these oppositions and replaces them with the idea that what we have previously considered inert stuff to be in fact as Bruno latour would call ‘co actants’ in the world. That humans and matter are all elements in the world, all with innumerable possibilities, readings and encounters.

Bennett’s idea isn’t new in that Marcel Merleau-Ponty believed:

‘My body is made of the same flesh as the world...and moreover...this flesh of my body is shared by the world.’

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology charted the element of being in the world of embodied experience, which Bennett also is doing in order for us to see our surroundings in a new way. Bennett’s aim is to draw our attention to sustainability and the environment.

I am interested in this slowing down of vision and experience to the point of ‘being present’ or being in the ‘now’. I think our body, through movement and experience, gives us a grip on such things as nature, survival, seasons and time.

Bibliography
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter; a Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.
Levin, David Michael. The Body's Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology an the Deconstruction of Nihilism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.