6 thoughts on “Post-Humanism”

1. I expected that I was going to dislike this book. I had seen it cited many times, often in the kinds of over-the-top poststructural writing that I really just can’t engage with. Materiality has become a new buzzword, and ‘vital materiality’ has developed its own discursive connotations, at least in my own mind. In so many contexts of its use, it feels a bit unsubstantiated, as if citing the Bennett’s book/term justifies any argument and makes it invincible, whether or not that argument has evidenced and structured its claims in a sufficiently coherent manner. But this is also why I wanted to stick with Bennett for this week, and to force myself to engage with the book – ‘know your enemy’.

   I am therefore happy to report that my understanding of the book has grown, and my normative opinion of it has changed completely. I found it to be a clear, concise, and accessible book with a compelling structure and logic. It provoked me to think differently, to challenge my conceptual categories, to ponder the meaning of agency, and the power of things. I have some significant disagreements with the philosophical and political arguments of the book, but the book itself has succeeded in advancing its claims and argument clearly, and thus is something I may well return to (and perhaps even cite myself!).

   BETWEEN THE ‘BOOK’ AND ITS USE
   The disjunct between the clarity of Vibrant Matter (VM) and its uptake in the literature (at least within postmodern geographical writing) reflects a significant concern I have with the VM political project. This concern is shared by Christian Abrahamsson in his review of the book – noting how Driesch’s entelechy was taken up by the Nazis, we cannot safely or simply assume that the VM proposition will lead to a progressive politics and a ‘lessening of harm’ across all bodies (question: how can one harm a rock?). Until these questions are worked out into specific and practical political projects, we cannot conclude a priori that a VM-inspired policy or whatever will lead to better outcomes.

   DISTRIBUTED AGENCY AND THE PROBLEM OF RESPONSIBILITY
   Perhaps related to this is the problem of assigning/practising moral responsibility that comes with ‘distributed’ agency. Bennett tries to expand thinking from linear ‘causality’ to complex and contingent ‘origins’ (as per Arendt), and in her explanation of the US blackout thus sides with absolving Enron of ‘blame’ for the event. This causal relativism poses major problems for the administration of law and the assignment of responsibility. If a killer is merely an actant in an agentic assemblage with includes a knife, a victim, a motive, adrenaline, and so on, does that mean they should not be held responsible for the crime of murder? Would Bennett be consistent with her assertions in this context that our intentions are always being interrupted and actively influenced by the vitality of things? Perhaps her attempt to ‘horizontalize’ everything comes with risks. Metals are probably more amenable to enabling human intention than (say) biological organisms – they follow physico-chemical laws with less ‘error’ or liveliness. The project of horizontalizing everything may be social-theoretically progressive (in one narrow interpretation), but essentially ignores hundreds of years of the accumulation and application of scientific knowledge. One can predict with some certainty that an airplane will fly, and this realization/acceptance will help to understand the working of the world in ways which help us move toward a progressive politics.

   Reply ↓

2. Victoria
   Vibrant Matter
   I found Jane Bennett’s “Vibrant Matter” (2009) a masterful effort at building a new epistemological foundation for approaching the world, things, actions, events, processes. This new base works through the understanding of the interactions of the human, the non-human, materiality and assembled agency. I found Bennett’s work a lot more accessible than I expected. Often I even found it in a way commonsensical, but perhaps that is the combined effect of clear writing and compelling arguments.
   Bennett’s work is certainly a task of redistribution and democratizing in a way. Bennett argues that the job of the “vital materialist” is not to claim that there is no difference between humanity and non-humanity, but to assert that there is no need to ascribe value to this difference. This is, to give human an ontological center place or a top rank in the hierarchy of existence. By ascribing importance to every kind of materiality and the quality of being lively to non-human “material” (thing-power) it all meets in a new equal status of vibrant matter. The ethical aim is, in her words: to distribute value more generously.
   In this redistributive spirit Bennett problematizes her thing-power configuration as it seems to imply fixity and atomism. This is not allowing for a relational understanding of agency. She argues for an understanding of agency as only possible in assemblages. These are unplanned groupings of vibrant materials that all together act or produce an effect. The issue here as she admits it is political responsibility. If humans can only really act within, through and with assemblages their responsibility is at the very least diluted. Her answer does not lie in materiality but on human conscious response to the assemblages in which one finds one self. It seems that perhaps sometimes in order for humans to do good they need to trump materiality and assemblages.
   Aside for the complexity of accounting for human non-material intentionality within assemblages, I do agree that perhaps, materiality can be useful in decentering the human and allowing for a more interconnected understanding of the world and an epistemology not based on segmenting but connecting. In Bennett’s words: “Materiality is a rubric that tends to horizontalize the relations between humans, biota, and abiota. It draws human attention sideways, away from an ontologically ranked Great Chain of Being and toward a greater appreciation of the complex entanglements of humans and nonhumans.” (112). I do sense that the possibility for this to have political effect is still too far way for us to see.
   Q. I do wonder what new categories and concepts we need to deploy to make vital materialist analysis? How do our existing frames of analysis can interact with these categories? What is more, what kinds of categories are materially inclusive and not segmenting or dichotomizing?
   I also, still feel that we need to consider how we can acknowledge the complexity of agency without hierarchies and still hold humans accountable? What do we do with human intentionality?

   Reply ↓

3. I found Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things to be an incredibly interesting read. Though quite heavily entrenched in theory and philosophy, I appreciated the way that she frequently turned to matters close to home, such as the 2003 power outage, in which she illustrated her points by employing the assemblage of the enormous electrical grid, comprised of an almost endless number of actants and matters. Yet in her discussion of the electrical grid, when she invokes a journalistic description of the grid as a body, she illuminates one of the problems that I just couldn’t shake with this book. That is to say, as she does address, this story is always told by a human. Giving agency to matter is interesting, but it is always through a human lens, here through Bennett’s own words. So even though Bennett attempts to avoid anthropomorphizing matter, per se, this is a human tendency when examining “things”, as addressed in discussion last week.

   I think one of the successful ways that she countered this problem was by consistently drawing out webs, or confederations of things, reacting against the tendency for atomization. This confederation worked more effectively than looking at a “thing”, like a loaf of bread, and attempting to determine its subject position. Nevertheless, the assemblages she discusses seem to be important because of how they relate to human interests. As in the case of the electrical grid, certainly metals acted “vitally”in their saying “no”, but Bennett is discussing this because of the impact the outage had on humans.

   I was intrigued by how Bennett turned to environmentalism at the end. (Perhaps in interesting resonance with our discussion of wildlands). It was certainly a provocative point to end on, that while traditional environmentalism encourages “frugality”, “this may be too simple a maxim.” Vibrant materialism, according to Bennett leads to a more complex view of being part of the world. Sometimes, she says, it may require more action, not less.

   I will end with a further concern, that perhaps this book, and position, rely too much on a return to mysticism. Though this was a personal aversion. Bennett’s hope to reacquire naivete, coupled with animating matter felt a bit concerning, though I see her point. I think my concern was reinforced though when she ends with “a litany, a kind of Nicene Creed for would-be vital materialists”. Invoking the tools of religious practice may have turned the mystical aspect of the argument into a red herring for me.

   Questions

   I would be interested, since I missed the “Weighing In”discussion, to talk about how Bennett’s discussion of food and eating fits in with Guthman’s arguments?

   Is there a risk, while focusing so intently on materiality, of reinscribing gender, race, etc in biology?

   Reply ↓

4. Bennett’s book offers an intricate examination of the concept of post-humanism and the importance of considering the “vitality of matter”. I believe the book represented a very relevant continuation of our discussion of last week, especially on the work of Mitchell and Sundberg. Bennett argues for a better understanding and inclusion of the non-humans in any philosophical and/or political project; she argues that the consideration of the “vitality” of the non-humans can lead to more intelligent and sustainable political practices. Bennett conceives a theory, “vital materiality”, that she believes offers a way to escape from the subject/object duality and from the hierarchy of a worldview that places human in a higher rank than non-human organisms. Interestingly, she believes that considering the importance of non-human in our own body would make us become more conscious of our intricate relationship with the non-human: “Vital materiality better captures an “alien” quality of our own flesh, and in so doing reminds humans of the very radical character of the (fractious) kinship between the human and the nonhuman.” Her proposition goes further than just considering the agency of animals, which are increasingly considered to have “biosocial, communicative, or even conceptual life”; vital materiality also considers the “life” of nonorganic bodies.

   One of Bennett’s concept that I found very interesting was the idea that, as she puts it, “all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations” (p. 13). Basically, she argues that agency must be considered as a set of “heterogeneous assemblage,” which appears very similar to the concept of “collective” used by Sundberg. Actually, Bennett later presents the concept of collective – “an ecology of human and nonhuman elements (p. 103)” – as theorized by Latour. To illustrate the idea of assemblage, Bennett draws on many examples of “collectives”, including the blackout (e.g., electricity, fire, components of the electric grid, electricity consumers, companies, politicians, etc.), the exotic rainforest (e.g., “Sacanna vegetation, forest trees, soil, soil microorganisms, and humans (p. 98)”) and metallurgy (e.g., metal, human, biology, geology). These examples, in the same way than the border politics used by Sundberg (e.g., dessert, rivers, thornscrubs, cats, law enforcement officers, migrants, state officers) or Egypt’s development (e.g., dam, war, sugar cane industry, politics, capitalists, malaria, mosquitoes) described by Mitchell, show how human and non-human both play roles as “actants”, and that even “small agencies[…], when in the right confederation with other physical and physiological bodies, can make big things happen (p. 94).”

   I also found interesting the critics of constructivism made by Bennett. Even though she recognizes the importance of considering the cultural, linguistic, social or historical construction of phenomenon, especially because it allows considering “expression of thing-power as an effect of culture and play of human powers, politicizes moralistic and oppressive appeals to ‘nature’”, she also argues that it “tends to obscure from view whatever thing-power there may be (p. 17).” I see this as a strong argument against the pitfall of relativism brought by constructivism, which does not allow for the consideration of objects, or non-humans, as potential actors. However, can a post-humanist analysis of phenomena based on “vital materiality” escape the “subjectivity” or social construction of the observer? Would two observers with different cultures or worldviews construct different conceptions of non-human agency? As Bennett herself puts it, “is it not, after all, a self-conscious, language-wielding human who is articulating this philosophy of vibrant matter (p. 120)?”

   Reply ↓

5. Reflection – Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett
   Colin Sutherland

   I too encountered a dead rat on the street, strangely enough just before I started reading this book. It was on the corner of Alder and West Broadway by the Toys R Us. A crow was pecking away at its eyes and it was lying there next to a bush on the cold pavement. Bennett’s book made me look back and wonder if this dead rat had affect. I can certainly say that it had a profound impact on me, I’m still unsettled by the thought of rats dead or alive, but if the dead rat had an ability akin to human agency seemed to be a bit out of reach. I can say that the dead rat impacted me and likely other pedestrians; it altered our path or maybe even spoiled our appetite. It also fed the crow and will likely decompose morphing (?) into another part of the ecosystem. While I find it easier to see something biological within the realm of Bennett’s vibrant matter, it was certainly harder for me to unpack other nonorganic actants like metal. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t follow her argument so much as I found it difficult to see why it would be important to acknowledge these other actants.
   In an attempt to broaden my understanding I tried to apply this approach to something I could deal with, ice. Ice in the Arctic is certainly disappearing, but is itself an actant? If I compare ice, but more importantly water, to her chapter on electricity and the blackout of 2003, I can see how processes, electrical or fluid, can take on a ‘life’ of its own. Yet I find it so difficult to escape the centrality of the human component of this analysis. Ice melt, and the blackout, are still very much framed within the vulnerability, or even opportunity, of humans. The very context exists because we exist alongside it, we experience it, we describe it. The very ‘dangers’ of ice melt including flooding, ice bergs, the release of methane gas, are not only rooted in how we perceive our vulnerability as humans but in the actions that have lead to that melting ice. Within this example I find it hard to draw the line between a raw actant’s being being rooted in itself, and not rooted in how we understand that being unfolding. Bennett from the beginning stresses that our human condition limits the extent to which we can understand these things but, and I agree, there is some value in acknowledging their thing-power. What I am consistently skeptical of though, is that this power that we speak of is still rooted in a human conception of power, of dominance, of a hierarchy that I felt we were trying to avoid. I guess I’m wondering if a tree falls in the woods, and a human isn’t there to witness, describe and analyze it, is it still an actant?
   While I loved many of the concepts the Bennett brings up throughout, I found myself somewhat skeptical of her arguments. In each chapter I was introduced to what she said she was going to do, and within a few pages she was done, claiming to have proven her point. Perhaps it is the nature of the writing style that is not closely rooted in a single empirical exercise and rather the culminating event of a career in this vein of philosophy. Nevertheless I found, more than once, that she seemed to be stretching her point or lacking in detail, more often returning to narratives of long-gone philosopher eating berries (I’m pretty sure Thoreau just got gout), rather than engaging with the actants she is fighting for.
   While this all seems rather critical I think Bennett gives us the tools to be critical of how human our analysis can really be. One example from the chapter on metals that I did appreciate was the notion of time. I thought this dimension of analysis was so obvious yet often missed. Her point really embodied how are perspectives are so fundamentally human to the point that event he way we look at an actant’s potential is constrained by our human lenses.

   What are some of the other ways a human-centric lens of analysis is exposed?

   Does an acknowledgement of the power of the actant dilute the power of the agent?

   How much of this book is about broadening what can have agency, to fostering a broader language for the way we interact with the non-human? Would it be less contentious or less useful to frame it in this way?

   Reply ↓

6. I was consistently delighted while reading Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. Bennett’s writing is clear and precise, and her engagement with the matter at hand just seemed so curiosity driven.
   I was thrilled as I was reading of all the potential of imagining the world in a different way. The idea of re-thinking the self is fascinating; what does self interest become when the self itself is an assemblage, a confederation of human and nonhuman actors? Much of Vibrant Matter is concerned with the question of agency and how we deal with both human and nonhuman agency. As she states: “No one really knows what human agency is, or what humans are doing when they are said to perform as agents” (34). In effect, her argument is that human agency is never really human; it distributed throughout what Bennett terms ‘confederations’ of humans and nonhumans that share in common an ability to affect and be affected by change. For Bennett, all events that are typically understood as the result of human agency occur as a result of the participation of nonhuman forces. While Bennett covers a lot of ground, the possibilities of applying some of her ideas to other issues is endless. I am particularly interested in what her work might mean for reimagining the body, particularly in terms of diseases and parasites which form ‘confederations’ with bodies/cells/etc, but not in a benign way. How might Bennett think about disease?

   Yet as much as I really do see promise in the political possibilities of developing a vital materialism, it’s important to remember that progress politics don’t necessarily follow from theory; they emerge out of practice. Bennett is quite clear on this point. She clearly states that no particular ethics or politics emerges from metaphysics; she addresses this further when she talks about ‘culture of life vitalism’ and the stem cell research debate. I found that chapter really interesting, and I appreciated her attempts to field off potential pitfalls or criticism by taking on these issues so directly.

   One issue that I had while reading is the question of responsibility. Where is there room for responsibility in this philosophy? How could, or should we, hold nonhuman actors ‘responsible’? It’s a big question, and one which Bennett also holds: “…should we acknowledge the distributive quality of agency to address the power of human-nonhuman assemblages and to resist a politics of blame? Or should we persist with a strategic understatement of material agency in the hopes of enhancing the accountability of specific humans?” (38). I’m reminded, in a way, of the tension between long-term and short-term kinds of social change. Many advocates and activists working in the prison abolishment movement accept no compromise. They view any short-term program that works to better the lives of those already in prison (library programs, letter-writing, etc) as a further enablement of that system. It’s a battle that won’t be won for a long time, but people are fighting it anyways. I wonder if Bennett might argue that perhaps there’s hope in looking towards the long term; that if we work towards a politics that more fully includes nonhumans issues of responsibility would emerge differently—that the conversation itself would change. Should our energy be directed at making the existing world better, (reform), or towards creating a new one?

   My main question after reading this piece is perhaps more practical: how would one actually “do” a political ecology of things? What might a Bennett inspired methodology look like?

   Reply ↓