Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (John Hope Franklin Center Books) [Paperback]

I recently taught Jane Bennett's book "Vibrant Matter" in a class on Environmental Theory, and I found it intriguing, challenging, and completely rewarding. My students really seemed to enjoy grappling with Bennett's concepts and the way she weaves a variety of texts and examples together throughout the chapters. Even when Bennett's questions are left unanswered, this is a productive tactic: many of my students took up her open-ended questions in their papers, extending her observations and complex formulations and applying them to local matters. Bennett's book worked very well alongside Timothy Morton's book "The Ecological Thought," Jennifer Price's book "Flight Maps," Arun Agrawal's book "Environmentality," Kathleen Stewart's "Ordinary Affects," and Donna Haraway's book "When Species Meet" (among a few other shorter texts that we read in between these). While definitely demanding at times, the narrative of "Vibrant Matter" is so articulated and strong that the book stands out as a philosophical/theoretical *story*, of sorts. (This was another aspect of the book that made it very teachable.) Bennett's book is speculative and picaresque, but absolutely rigorous and totally genuine. "Vibrant Matter" may frustrate readers looking for step-by-step instructions for a 'political ecology' -- but if readers want a fantastic book to think with, a book that piques philosophical imagination and merges it with ecology, then "Vibrant Matter" is it.

I had thought that the point of political theory is to reflect on and improve real-world politics. This book presents political theory as something to be hung in a Tribeca loft and made the subject of bon mots - preferably borrowed from French literary theorists.

I was moved to read the book in the context of the March 2011 tsunami that struck the northern coast of Japan. I myself saw the devastation there during a subsequent visit, and, like many people here, have been wondering about what new direction Japan might take in light of it. A passage in the author's (JB's) preface looked promising: "Because politics is itself often construed as an exclusively human domain ... I will emphasize, even overemphasize the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces ... in an attempt to counter the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought. We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism - the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature - to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world" (@xvi).

This turned out to be the last page I flagged. Later on, JB asks exactly the question I had in mind: "What would happen to our thinking abut nature if we experienced materialities as actants [a term JB borrows from Bruno Latour, whose characteristic will-to-cleverness seems to inspire JB throughout], and how would the direction of public policy shift if it attended more carefully to their trajectories and powers?" (@62). The failure of the book is that no attempt is made to answer this second question.

As a philosophical rumination, the book does venture into some interesting territory. JB's discussion of a Kafka story I didn't know, "Cares of a Family Man" (Ch. 1) was surprising and delightful, and her analysis of the vitalisms of Henri Bersgon and Hans Driesch (Ch. 5) reminds the reader about forgotten theories that apparently were very popular in early 20th century America. Chapter 7 does contain some actual discussion of political theory, focusing on John Dewey and Jacques Rancière. But the closest JB comes to an application of her theme is to ask "what if" Rancière's theory of democracy as the "power [of people, who speak and deliberate] to disrupt" were opened up to include non-human and even inanimate agencies (a suggestion Rancière himself has negatived) (@106-108). Again, intriguing question - but no attempt made to answer it.

Unfortunately, these tidbits are embedded in a jargon-filled exposition that is constantly quoting French theorists like Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, or else JB's Johns Hopkins colleague William Connolly, among a multitude of others. Even her discussion of Spinoza relies as much on interpretations of him by Deleuze and others as on her own. When she follows, throughout, D&G in using the word "assemblage" to refer to a mélange of animate beings, inanimate objects and materials, and reified abstractions (e.g. @ 25), it brings to mind the term's more usual context: a sticker on an art gallery wall. (Betraying a preference for literary theory over literature, JB ignores mid-20th Century French poet Francis Ponge, most famous for his many prose poems about the "vibrant" properties of things -- « Le savon [Soap] », « Le parti pris des choses [The Bias of Things] », etc. One might have expected more sympathy for such "bias," not only because of JB's Francophilia but since she herself is actually a "Chair," albeit of the Political Science Department at Johns Hopkins University.)

I suspect many fans of this book would have fallen for the Sokal Hoax. While I support the notion one needn't have a Ph.D. in science to be qualified to comment on science, this book is full of the loopy sorts of references that physicist Alan Sokal sneaked into a literary theory journal whose editors thought him serious. One example is a Deleuze quote referring to "two equally actual powers, that of acting, and that of suffering action, which vary inversely one to the other, but whose sum is both constant and constantly effective" (@21): work that out with a little high school calculus and you'll find that neither "power" can vary at all. Elsewhere she credits Deleuze & Guattari, in a 1987 work, with "anticipating more recent work in contemporary complexity theory, posit[ing] a mode of becoming that is both material and creative, rather than mechanical and equilibrium maintaining." To the extent this description can be connected to "contemporary complexity theory," only a time warp could allow a 1987 book to "anticipate" work done in the 1950s by Nobelist Ilya Prigogine (unmentioned in this book) and described in popular works by him in 1980 (_From Being to Becoming_) and 1984 (_Order Out of Chaos_, with I. Stengers). And while JB thrills at the "quivering" of "free atoms" in the interstices between crystalline domains in metals (@59), it never occurs to her that the atoms in the crystals themselves "quiver" too, as a college physics textbook will inform you.

One of the most striking and damning points about the book, especially considering how heavily reliant it is on Continental theory (though JB cites only to works in English translation), is the particular spin JB gives to the phrase "political ecology". Readers familiar with « écologie politique » will find that JB is referring to something entirely different. For JB, an "ecology" is "an interconnected series of parts, but not a fixed order of parts" (@97; BTW one is never told why it is a "series" rather than, say, an "ensemble"). A "political ecology" is not defined explicitly, but JB quotes with approval Latour's comment that "The most urgent concern for us today is to see how to fuse together humans and non-humans in the same hybrid forums and open, as fast as possible, this Parliament of things" (@104 & 150n23).

Contrast that silliness with the « écologie politique » developed since the 1960s by such Continental thinkers as Hans Jonas, Jürgen Habermas, André Gorz, Ivan Illich, Emmanuel Levinas and others, e.g. as lucidly summarized in Eva Sas's recent « Philosophie de l'écologie politique » (Les Petits Matins 2010). (Exactly zero of these authors are mentioned in JB's book.) According to Sas, this doctrine starts from environmental concerns but builds to a more general political philosophy based on the principles of responsibility, autonomy, solidarity and participative democracy. Agree or disagree, that's something you can sink your teeth into. Compared to Sas's book and those of the authors mentioned in it, JB's book is empty game-playing. Two stars, for being more like the facetious work of tipsy grad students than a serious one by the poli sci chairperson at a major university. Or so one would have hoped.

POSTSCRIPT 2011/06/01: After receiving 5 "unhelpful" votes in a row, without any comment to contest my evaluation, and without a competing review having been posted, I can only suppose that either someone is gaming the review or else it's a manifestation of le parti pris des Critical Theorists, who can't tolerate being critiqued themselves. I invite a more courageous and articulate opposition.

I don't agree with everything that Bennett says, but I do believe that Vibrant Matter encapsulates some of the most important (and most practical) applications of the object-oriented movement to date. Her discussion of the politics of the 2003 blackout, for instance, truly shows why thinking about matter as having agency matters. It's all-too-easy to try to locate fault within the consciousness of (usually one) person. Bennett shows us how metal, worms, and other seemingly non-human things effect our everyday lives. This is a vital book for the future of philosophy and political theory.