Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter raises some really good questions, few of which are, as far as I can tell, novel. While Bennett is clearly well versed in several schools of political philosophy, one has to wonder whether she has critically engaged with postcolonial literature before. Take, for example, the following passages, in which she explains why we should not balk at the idea of nonhuman affect:
“The fear is that in failing to affirm human uniqueness, such views [i.e. vital materialist] authorize the treatment of people as mere things; in other words, that a strong distinction between subjects and objects is needed to prevent the instrumentalization of humans. Yes, such critics continue, objects possess a certain power of action…, and yes, some subject-on-subject objectifications are permissible…, but the ontological divide between persons and things must remain lest one have no moral grounds for privileging man over germ or for condemning pernicious forms of human-on-human instrumentalization.” (pp. 11-12)
She then continues:
“How can the vital materialist respond to this important concern? First, by acknowledging that the framework of subject versus object has indeed at times worked to prevent or ameliorate human suffering and to promote human happiness or well-being. Second, by noting that its successes come at the price of an instrumentalization of nonhuman nature that can itself be unethical and can itself undermine long-term human interests. Third, by pointing out that the Kantian imperative to treat humanity always as an end-in-itself and never merely as a means does not have a stellar record of success in preventing human suffering or promoting human well-being: it is important to raise the question of its actual, historical efficacy in order to open up space for forms of ethical practice that do not rely upon the image of an intrinsically hierarchical order of things.” (p. 12)
So far, so good. But then things take a telling turn:
“Vital materialism would…set up a kind of safety net for those humans who are now, in a world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer because they do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other) model of personhood. The ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such. Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans.” (p. 13)
My response to this argument is, does she really feel comfortable claiming that this supposedly “enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans” [in general]? How could Bennett reach this conclusion based on the sources that she relies on for her arguments? Does she not realize how critical other “Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other” thinkers are to her understandings of human/nonhuman affect? Does she not realize that these thinkers were also, alongside Kant, the architects of the “enlightened” notions that she is recycling for her audience? Is she really suggesting that the way to break down the hegemony of some Enlightenment thinking that “does not have a stellar record of success in preventing human suffering or promoting human well-being” is to substitute these men for other, contemporaneous men? Did she not consider that non-Euro-American, non-bourgeois, non-theocentric peoples have been contending that nonhuman objects have affective (or similar) influences on humans for millennia?
I should mention that I actually enjoyed reading Vibrant Matter because it contains a number of stimulating thought experiments, it has a really good chapter on metal, and it forced me to reassess some of my assumptions about environmentalism and materiality. Moreover, I think there are some important takeaways from the book about affect in general. I also recognize that she had to limit herself to certain scholarship, but at the same time, I don’t think my critique misrepresents her argument. In my opinion, she should have at least acknowledged the intellectual tradition within which she is working, or, at the very least, acknowledge that thinking about these subjects has not been the exclusive domain of Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric individuals. Nevertheless, the book does have some useful observations, which I will comment on in conjunction with Nicole Starosielski’s The Undersea Network.
In her concluding remarks, Bennett offers three conclusions that effectively summarize Vibrant Matter’s claims: (1) we should assign the concept of materiality unequivocally evenly to humans and nonhumans alike; (2) matter is ‘vibrant’ or ‘lively,’ i.e., it can take indeterminable paths that are neither linear nor deterministic; (3) human materiality is not exclusively human, or, as she puts it, the “its outnumber the mes.” (pp. 112-113) I find the second of these claims to be the most attractive, while the third claim is certainly the most radical (as Bennett is quick to point out), and, for me, the least attractive. I also more or less like the first claim. My reading of The Undersea Network suggests that Starosielski would view Bennett’s claims similarly to me. Starosielski urges us to recognize the materiality of undersea fiber-optic cables, and she also wants us to get away from a linear or deterministic understanding of nonhuman forces. More convincingly than Bennett, however, she stresses the interconnections between humans and the things or forces we think we have control over, but often do not, or at least not in the way we think. Her ecological intervention is grounded in media studies, but I found her attentiveness to varying cultural, spatial, and temporal (historical) understandings of human and nonhuman interconnection to be much more useful than Bennett’s treatment. Bennett did well to counter claims that her philosophy lacks morality. For me, though, the morality of Starosielski’s view is much more self-evident and applicable. She recommends that we be nimble in our treatment of the virtual, the material, the international, and, significantly, the local. Both authors want us to work towards more equitable global networks of human-human and human-nonhuman interactions. I think Starosielski’s conceptualization of these interactions is more likely to prove useful.
Part of Starosielski’s interest in framing global digital communications as an ecological (rather than wireless) phenomenon is that it points us to its potential security weaknesses (10). That said, prototypical wireless communications media—for example radio transmissions—seem to raise many of the same security concerns. Radio transmissions, after all, have been intercepted or interrupted, particularly by governments with a strong interest in surveillance/censorship. While still recognizing that digital communications are environmental in real life, then, I wonder to what extent “materiality” actually represents something conceptually new or conceptually challenging in media studies, at least on the issue of security.
Second—and this is a comment more aimed towards the other “boat people”—I was struck by how central fishing vessels were in Starosielski’s book. It makes sense given the nature of undersea cables. But I’m curious as to what Starosielski’s book might do for our understanding of technological change in fishing. People often talk about bottom trawling (basically combing large swaths of the ocean floor with football field- sized nets) as extremely disruptive of ocean ecosystems, but that discussion is rarely framed as something that is extremely disruptive to us—perhaps more like something we should consider when we’re at the supermarket. So I wonder if Starosielski’s view of trawling as destroyer of the internet & text messaging is actually pointing us forward in this regard, in pointing to a history of modern fishing that reflects back a bit more onto us urbanites.
I think that the texts we read for this week were quite an interesting pairing. I could clearly see a number of themes that Bennett talks about in her book echoed in The Undersea Network. The way in which Starosielski describes the multitude of environmental, political and social factors involved in where cables are deployed and what I would call the “cable-eyed” view of history she takes were especially reminiscent of some of the calls that Bennett makes in her book. However, despite those similarities, one would be hard pressed to say that Starosielski is actually a Vital Materialist. The Undersea Network, while organized around undersea cables, is still mostly centered around human actors, and Starosielski does not really assign cables the kind of agency that Bennett wants to grant non-human actants in her philosophy. Further, I would argue that without another chapter on methodology, Starosielski could not honestly employ such a novel ontological framework in her book. We as historians should never adopt a radical philosophy like Bennett’s without thoroughly investigating the kind of truth claims that it makes and the arguments it uses to establish them.
Reading Vibrant Matter was pretty mind blowing. Having never read Spinoza, I had never encountered an ontological framework which so radically and clearly defies Cartesian dualism, an idea which I have recently realized has infected the way I think about most things in subtle and nefarious ways. However, until I got to the end of the book I had trouble buying Bennett’s argument because instead of critically assessing the assumptions that Spinoza has about the world, she simply states that she has “his faith that everything is made of the same substance” (Page x) and moves on, leaving us with none of the necessary justification that usually accompanies such a revolutionary ontological hypothesis. While the examples Bennett provides, which show what politics and scholarship might look like if we accept the hypothesis of Vital Materialism are certainly intriguing, my doubts about the foundations of her argument cast a shadow over my reading of her account. That was until I realized that Bennett is playing by different rules than I thought she was. Throughout her book, Bennett makes references to John Dewey and his Pragmatic Philosophy, but it wasn’t until I got near the end of Vibrant Matter that I realized that Bennett, herself is a Pragmatist, too.
For Pragmatists, Truth (with a big T) means something very different than what people usually mean when they talk about our capitalized friend. The pragmatic idea of truth is centered around usefulness. This is something akin to a radically empirical view of the world in which people are supposed to decide what is True based on their assessment of the results that holding such a belief would entail (there is a bit more to pragmatism than this, but that’s the basic idea). Such an approach to Truth is clearly evident in Bennett’s work. It’s not that she neglects to logically justify adopting Spinozian assumptions; she doesn’t need to. In Pragmatist land, her examples, which clearly show how a Spinozian view of the world could be beneficial in the political sphere, are enough to justify adopting it—at least provisionally until we have more empirical evidence showing the true value of such an ontological experiment. Upon realizing this, the darkness cast by Bennett’s seemingly brash assumption in her preface suddenly dissipated, leaving me with these questions:
1. Do we need foundational texts like Bennett’s in order to practice history? I think our readings from last week, which claim that traditional historical narratives are essentially Hegelian, are very relevant to this question.
2. More importantly, even if one was to say that history doesn’t need foundational texts, there are certainly assumptions latent in the different methodological approaches currently in vogue in the discipline. What standard of Truth (or truth) should we use to evaluate those methodological assumptions? Is the Pragmatic approach that Bennett uses the best one?
As a merger week, this was a little complicated to navigate, but I hope I do both works (equally fantastic) justice.
Bennett was the example of the “material turn,” but Starosielski was the example of “post humanism.” I am continually wondering what the actual difference is between these two fields, and I think I have some preliminary ideas, though they are not as sophisticated as I would like them to be. I am also not even certain that it is useful to separate works this cleanly. One of the most striking differences is that Starosielski feels more like history and engages less with theory (though does engage wonderfully where she does), where Bennett’s work feels more like a manifest of how to talk about things.
Generally (and there are exceptions in each work), I find that Materiality is more about small scale, where posthumansim feels to be in a larger scale. Materiality is more about the influence on bodies, and perhaps individual people, where post humanism is an engagement with groups of people. I was really impressed by Starosielski’s engagement with the critique of oceans as more assemblages than just unified bodies of water. I had previously only had the luxury of really experiencing these notions through the book The Myth of Continents and the occasional work applying borderlands methodologies to seas, though never oceans.
I think the ocean is far more connected than we like to think, and this is just one view into the connections which make the world closer together. In a way Starosielki and Bennet are similar in that they are politicizing something which we generally assume to be neutral. In a way, this takes us back to the expansion of what can be known as an archive, and I think objects and networks of cables are themselves an archive. I hope one day I can take these two works and use them to speak to my work. I (greedily) fit my own project into the space of these theories, and am very satisfied with the results. I genuinely wish to intersect the steamship with materiality and Bennett’s work in general, though a closer reading would be needed to reconcile my hesitations of doing that.
Are the differences between the material turn and post humanism reconcilable by scope?
Do these works (particularly Starosielski) only work in recent historical periods? Could we bring the methodologies produced in these works back to the Early Modern or even Medieval age?
I found the social, political and ecological layering of the material embeddedness of cables quite fascinating. I like Jacob’s term “cable history”, because it emphasizes how the object of inquiry is a lens to view a diverse amount of detail and perspectives that otherwise might not have been viewable in one study. It brought up a few issues for me.
First, I found this despite some of the author’s claims to be a very human-centered approach, meaning most of the agency is granted to humans doing human things: laying cables, arguing about cables, learning about the sea to lay cables better etc. However, I wonder what it would have been like to write part of the book, at least, from a viewpoint which examined how the environment provided the parameters for which the goal of extending communications infrastructure operated. In Chapter six, the ecology of cables is discussed alongside the issue of the production of knowledge about the oceans, both directly for the laying of cables and indirectly for marine science. This is still a narrative of man embedding something of his in nature, learning about nature etc. I wonder how the environment embeds itself in human projects. I do not know if it comes across as clearly as it could how the materiality of media and communication is a function of the natural environment and ecology. Within the theme of “strategies of insulation”, companies’ attempts to protect cables from environmental hazards is only one aspect. It still seems to be a problem which is surmounted, rather than an issue which defines how cables are embedded. I would like to have seen a narrative a little more emphatic of the role of environment. The author after all begins her story with the reflection that we are becoming more wired than wireless, satellites taking a backseat. If that is not a function of both terrestrial and celestial environments, I am not sure what is.
At times when reading histories that are so intimately connected with the present as this is, I wonder if it would not make the history more impacting by integrating a call(s) for action. I know she does say in the introduction that there is a definite danger in seeing our modern media as wireless and rhizomatic. It just had me thinking that she had such an opportunity here to write a chapter at the end calling for a specific program of change. My initial reaction that this was “missed”, but then it occurred to me that if a historian were to write something like that, it might condemn the work to dismissal or put an expiry date on the “usefulness” of the greater argument. The question seems to be how married a piece of history tied so very intimately with the present should be to specific reform agendas.
I find striking how the approach that Starosielski takes in the book could be applied in large part to the history of the Grand Canal in China (even silk road routes). While Starosielski is working with a system that has a rather limited history, the application to the Grand Canal could prove even more fruitful given that it has around 1500 years of history. The two themes of “strategies of insulation” and “strategies of interconnection” seems particularly apt. The Canal was largely built as a mechanism to facilitate the transportation of foodstuffs and goods towards the imperial center (Hangzhou, Beijing, etc…), especially before the commutation of taxes from grain to silver in the Ming Dynasty. Security issues for the main source of physical tax revenue were overwhelming, and often characterized how the canal was designed, where major junctions were placed and how it was policed. Like cables, authorities tried to make it function unobstructed over the landscape. In terms of interconnection, the canal worked itself into local systems of transportation, social orders, and ecologies which aided official goals, but which also diverged from them, yet operated adjacent to them. The rich private trade attached to official barges is a case in point. Furthermore, the Grand Canal provided an impetus for research into hydrology, a noted a developed science that even Max Weber famously commented on, which could be easily expanded to demonstrate how this knowledge production affected Chinese agriculture and irrigation. (There might be a little chicken before the egg phenomenon going on here.) I cannot say that like Starosielski this would have an immediate impact on policy formation or resource allocation vis a vis communications systems, but it would certainly deepen our understanding of how large scale communication and transportation systems are embedded in ecologies, geographies, topographies and even histories, with a great deal of continuity over time. It might also allow the fragility of these great projects and their underlying intense and continuing labor and material costs to be revealed, showing that they are less monolithic than adaptive and living nexuses of material and interests. I think this possibility is the most exciting thing for me I have taken from this book.
I enjoyed this book quite a lot, but I should explain that I am fascinated with industry, infrastructure, production, I am a big fan of those “how it’s made” television shows for children (today we’re visiting the salt mines of Goderich, Ontario? I’m in!), Soviet novels about the heroic efforts of workers to get their cement factory up and running again, etc.
Essentially what the author has done here is taken a topic in industry/technology, and extracted from it this seemingly bottomless well of history and inter-connections: colonialism, the Cold War, sociology, race, labour, working lives, ecology, capitalism, etc. In that sense the book is a great example of the possibilities of doing this kind of research. Although the topic of undersea communication cables might be particularly “rich” in this regard due to its transnational nature, and how closely related it is historically to issues of security, power, international relations etc., I would argue that you could engage in a similar kind of exercise with any number of topics of industry, technology, commodity, etc. In this sense, perhaps this book belongs somewhat to the same trend of history books such as “Salt: a World History” by Mark Kurlansky (which I have not read, but has come up a few times this semester).
On the other hand, it becomes quite apparent at some point in the book that the author is a scholar of the humanities – not an engineer or someone with a background in science, technology, business or finance. When she steps out of historical study and decides to examine the ins and outs of the contemporary industry, it bears a laymen’s quality so stark as to put its relevance in question. This raises the question of who she is writing for. If she is writing for people within the industry, policy makers, engineers, etc., I think her discussions of what happens when an alarm goes off or the relative skill-set of a given cable stations staff in relation to the equipment present is so surface-level and vague it would offer little. On the other hand, her thorough exploration of such specifics and internal matters, I imagine, would make the book of limited interest to the lay reader. In short, the book ends up being something like a specialist-book written by a non-specialist.
Speaking of vague…this was something else I found difficult about the book. I frequently found myself not knowing where exactly (geographically speaking) she was talking about. This could be because my head was in the clouds, as it frequently is. But then I’d check the citation and it would be something like “interview with anonymous cable worker” and a date! I imagine this may have been forced on her by necessity, nevertheless I felt the absence of contextual details and the author frequently speaking in vague generalities did affect the quality of the book.
The shortcomings of her efforts to step beyond a strictly historical study become particularly apparent in her conclusion. She seems to think her book offers some kind of constructive guide to future possibilities of undersea infrastructure that presumably policy makers, investors or scientific authorities could make use of, but I wasn’t left terribly convinced. Her contention that the world’s undersea cable networks can be “recycled” into “art” because some guy in England recorded sounds emanating from an abandoned cable, and her even more vague reference to the John Griesemer novel just looks like she desperately grasping at straws to invent utility where there is none, or extremely little. Here one is left thinking that she should have been happy with creating a very interesting work of niche history.
I apologize that I didn’t realize we were writing replies to both books – I will have to save my many opinions about Vibrant Matter for the discussion tomorrow. For now I will be content to say that I thought it was a great example of petty-bourgeois armchair psuedo-leftism completely divorced from real life, and basically a repackaging of various worn-out strands of “change your mind change the world” trends rooted in the 60s counter-culture/New Age movement in a scholarly garb.
Being a historian of imperial China(specifically the 7th to 10th century), I have never thought about the history of transoceanic communication cables and the very nature of it. Starosielski’s new book The Undersea Network opened a new gate for me in that sense. She emphasizes the methodology to consider network topography, “the way that infrastructures are embedded into existing natural and cultural environments”(28). By saying that, she examines the history of cable and cable buildings throughout time and argues that our global infrastructure has been constructed in relation to historically specific social and environmental imaginations (29). Therefore, she challenges my understanding of the “wireless nature” of our communication system and argues that they are grounded under ocean rather than through air; and they are built upon historical evolution rather than a rupture into the new “wireless” international age. Moreover, she counters the rhetoric that media is de-territorializing and dematerializing; rather, she stresses on the ecological dimension of media. I just found this argument very interesting and thought-provoking to me.
Besides that, she also emphasizes the potential threats. For example, in the 19th century, “companies moved from a concern about protection from the ocean to a preference for using the ocean’s depths as a layer of protection from potential colonial unrest, rival nations, and ships’ anchors” (37). Moreover, in the post-colonial era, “the focus of securing the cable network shifted from routing via one’s territory or colonial holdings to having national control over the processes of building, operating, and maintaining the cable network” (41).
However, this book and the methodology it provides are clearly aimed at media and cables in recent historical periods. I appreciate Aaron’s effort to use this methodology in examining pre-modern history. I think this is something that worth investigating.
One element that I really appreciated about The Undersea Network is that it asks us to examine the ‘edges’ of the network – both of the specific undersea cable network that is the subject of the book, and in networks more generally. In this case, the vector links of a network is traditionally represented graphically as a “simple line between two nodes” (xiii), essentially ‘blank space’ which stands “independent of time and place.” Although almost the opposite is true of land-cable systems where proximity to the hub is of utmost importance – take the stock exchange networks for instance – it seems to stand up for the undersea network where the ocean is conceptualized as blank space.
I would be interested to hear how the “boat people” in our class (to use Devin’s term) respond to Starosielski’s intervention into recovering the ocean(s) as dynamic environment (agent/force) in the history of undersea cables. In particular, the idea of Bamfield (on the west coast Vancouver Island and being the “graveyard of the Pacific”), and the marine scientists that are taking advantage of the cable network infrastructure to “communicate with the ocean itself, tracking seafloor processes as they occur in real time and shifting the temporality and spatiality of oceanographic research.
I would also be interested to know if anyone else is more familiar with network theory and would be able to give us a sense of how astute Starosielski’s application of it is? There is a fairly liberal interplay of networks in terms of technology/ecology/sociology almost simultaneously that I’m intrigued by, but also slightly wary of taking in wholesale.
Also, for those interested in ‘edges’ and coastal studies, the Hakai Institute (http://www.hakai.org/) does really interesting research, mostly scientific, and also has recently started a magazine which is pretty great. http://www.hakaimagazine.com/
The „Undersea Network“ was interesting to read, but I’m not sure what for. For me, it seems to satisfy a gap in some niche history. Probably it is nice or useful for these cable companies to read the history of their profession. Yet I am not sure if this book can serve anything else.
But I don’t want to be too negative, because the book indeed puts the focus on the very important, but very often neglected material basis of our (post-)industrial world. Not only this, but also the book could be a starting point for more research on the Internet: Who controls it? Who profits from it? Who is excluded? But for this, one needs to leave both the oceans and the exclusive focus on the material infrastructure, because many countries and almost every consumer does not get the internet directly from the ocean and second it is not only a matter of technology or infrastructure but also of the social conditions if one will get access to the internet.
As is frequently the case, my thoughts here align with Max. I do not see the Undersea Network as important. I don’t foresee people citing this in ten years, unless they are explicitly writing about the cable companies or the Internet infrastructure. Perhaps this opens a question for debate, then: What is the salience of this project? For me, I found it hard to attach to any larger project or concern in historiography, beyond the quotidian need that may exist for a history of any old thing. Obviously, it falls within the scope of materialist history, but I don’t think it is transcendental, nor do I think it offers too many lessons for how such projects should be undertaken. Is that too harsh? Do some people see more here than I do?
Again on the theme of importance, I kept wondering about some of Starosielski’s conclusions. None of them hit me with any punch. She ends the book calling for “more robust, resilient, and equitable global networks (234).” Now there’s a rabble-rousing rally cry. Elsewhere, Starosielski often refers to the colonial and political factors which led to the particular location of the cables (30-31, for one example). Should we be surprised at that? I thought it was self-evident that the cable locations would conform to where hegemonic powers wanted them; I think we all knew that Papau New Guinea wasn’t spearheading undersea telecommunications at any point. On a final note, she entreats us to see cable networks not merely as technological systems but as places where “capital, labor, and knowledge have been sunk into the Earth’s surface (30).” The same would be true of a railroad spike, a picket fence, a power station, a stop sign, a sewer system, my Mother’s herb garden, and on and on. The way she phrases it is deep, but this is a superficial book, if you ask me.
I look forward to hearing what you guys thought about it!
Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter raises some really good questions, few of which are, as far as I can tell, novel. While Bennett is clearly well versed in several schools of political philosophy, one has to wonder whether she has critically engaged with postcolonial literature before. Take, for example, the following passages, in which she explains why we should not balk at the idea of nonhuman affect:
“The fear is that in failing to affirm human uniqueness, such views [i.e. vital materialist] authorize the treatment of people as mere things; in other words, that a strong distinction between subjects and objects is needed to prevent the instrumentalization of humans. Yes, such critics continue, objects possess a certain power of action…, and yes, some subject-on-subject objectifications are permissible…, but the ontological divide between persons and things must remain lest one have no moral grounds for privileging man over germ or for condemning pernicious forms of human-on-human instrumentalization.” (pp. 11-12)
She then continues:
“How can the vital materialist respond to this important concern? First, by acknowledging that the framework of subject versus object has indeed at times worked to prevent or ameliorate human suffering and to promote human happiness or well-being. Second, by noting that its successes come at the price of an instrumentalization of nonhuman nature that can itself be unethical and can itself undermine long-term human interests. Third, by pointing out that the Kantian imperative to treat humanity always as an end-in-itself and never merely as a means does not have a stellar record of success in preventing human suffering or promoting human well-being: it is important to raise the question of its actual, historical efficacy in order to open up space for forms of ethical practice that do not rely upon the image of an intrinsically hierarchical order of things.” (p. 12)
So far, so good. But then things take a telling turn:
“Vital materialism would…set up a kind of safety net for those humans who are now, in a world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer because they do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other) model of personhood. The ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such. Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans.” (p. 13)
My response to this argument is, does she really feel comfortable claiming that this supposedly “enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans” [in general]? How could Bennett reach this conclusion based on the sources that she relies on for her arguments? Does she not realize how critical other “Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other” thinkers are to her understandings of human/nonhuman affect? Does she not realize that these thinkers were also, alongside Kant, the architects of the “enlightened” notions that she is recycling for her audience? Is she really suggesting that the way to break down the hegemony of some Enlightenment thinking that “does not have a stellar record of success in preventing human suffering or promoting human well-being” is to substitute these men for other, contemporaneous men? Did she not consider that non-Euro-American, non-bourgeois, non-theocentric peoples have been contending that nonhuman objects have affective (or similar) influences on humans for millennia?
I should mention that I actually enjoyed reading Vibrant Matter because it contains a number of stimulating thought experiments, it has a really good chapter on metal, and it forced me to reassess some of my assumptions about environmentalism and materiality. Moreover, I think there are some important takeaways from the book about affect in general. I also recognize that she had to limit herself to certain scholarship, but at the same time, I don’t think my critique misrepresents her argument. In my opinion, she should have at least acknowledged the intellectual tradition within which she is working, or, at the very least, acknowledge that thinking about these subjects has not been the exclusive domain of Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric individuals. Nevertheless, the book does have some useful observations, which I will comment on in conjunction with Nicole Starosielski’s The Undersea Network.
In her concluding remarks, Bennett offers three conclusions that effectively summarize Vibrant Matter’s claims: (1) we should assign the concept of materiality unequivocally evenly to humans and nonhumans alike; (2) matter is ‘vibrant’ or ‘lively,’ i.e., it can take indeterminable paths that are neither linear nor deterministic; (3) human materiality is not exclusively human, or, as she puts it, the “its outnumber the mes.” (pp. 112-113) I find the second of these claims to be the most attractive, while the third claim is certainly the most radical (as Bennett is quick to point out), and, for me, the least attractive. I also more or less like the first claim. My reading of The Undersea Network suggests that Starosielski would view Bennett’s claims similarly to me. Starosielski urges us to recognize the materiality of undersea fiber-optic cables, and she also wants us to get away from a linear or deterministic understanding of nonhuman forces. More convincingly than Bennett, however, she stresses the interconnections between humans and the things or forces we think we have control over, but often do not, or at least not in the way we think. Her ecological intervention is grounded in media studies, but I found her attentiveness to varying cultural, spatial, and temporal (historical) understandings of human and nonhuman interconnection to be much more useful than Bennett’s treatment. Bennett did well to counter claims that her philosophy lacks morality. For me, though, the morality of Starosielski’s view is much more self-evident and applicable. She recommends that we be nimble in our treatment of the virtual, the material, the international, and, significantly, the local. Both authors want us to work towards more equitable global networks of human-human and human-nonhuman interactions. I think Starosielski’s conceptualization of these interactions is more likely to prove useful.
For your consideration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8rYQLGnWHQ. Not his best work, but quite apropos for this week if I may say so. A couple thoughts:
Part of Starosielski’s interest in framing global digital communications as an ecological (rather than wireless) phenomenon is that it points us to its potential security weaknesses (10). That said, prototypical wireless communications media—for example radio transmissions—seem to raise many of the same security concerns. Radio transmissions, after all, have been intercepted or interrupted, particularly by governments with a strong interest in surveillance/censorship. While still recognizing that digital communications are environmental in real life, then, I wonder to what extent “materiality” actually represents something conceptually new or conceptually challenging in media studies, at least on the issue of security.
Second—and this is a comment more aimed towards the other “boat people”—I was struck by how central fishing vessels were in Starosielski’s book. It makes sense given the nature of undersea cables. But I’m curious as to what Starosielski’s book might do for our understanding of technological change in fishing. People often talk about bottom trawling (basically combing large swaths of the ocean floor with football field- sized nets) as extremely disruptive of ocean ecosystems, but that discussion is rarely framed as something that is extremely disruptive to us—perhaps more like something we should consider when we’re at the supermarket. So I wonder if Starosielski’s view of trawling as destroyer of the internet & text messaging is actually pointing us forward in this regard, in pointing to a history of modern fishing that reflects back a bit more onto us urbanites.
I think that the texts we read for this week were quite an interesting pairing. I could clearly see a number of themes that Bennett talks about in her book echoed in The Undersea Network. The way in which Starosielski describes the multitude of environmental, political and social factors involved in where cables are deployed and what I would call the “cable-eyed” view of history she takes were especially reminiscent of some of the calls that Bennett makes in her book. However, despite those similarities, one would be hard pressed to say that Starosielski is actually a Vital Materialist. The Undersea Network, while organized around undersea cables, is still mostly centered around human actors, and Starosielski does not really assign cables the kind of agency that Bennett wants to grant non-human actants in her philosophy. Further, I would argue that without another chapter on methodology, Starosielski could not honestly employ such a novel ontological framework in her book. We as historians should never adopt a radical philosophy like Bennett’s without thoroughly investigating the kind of truth claims that it makes and the arguments it uses to establish them.
Reading Vibrant Matter was pretty mind blowing. Having never read Spinoza, I had never encountered an ontological framework which so radically and clearly defies Cartesian dualism, an idea which I have recently realized has infected the way I think about most things in subtle and nefarious ways. However, until I got to the end of the book I had trouble buying Bennett’s argument because instead of critically assessing the assumptions that Spinoza has about the world, she simply states that she has “his faith that everything is made of the same substance” (Page x) and moves on, leaving us with none of the necessary justification that usually accompanies such a revolutionary ontological hypothesis. While the examples Bennett provides, which show what politics and scholarship might look like if we accept the hypothesis of Vital Materialism are certainly intriguing, my doubts about the foundations of her argument cast a shadow over my reading of her account. That was until I realized that Bennett is playing by different rules than I thought she was. Throughout her book, Bennett makes references to John Dewey and his Pragmatic Philosophy, but it wasn’t until I got near the end of Vibrant Matter that I realized that Bennett, herself is a Pragmatist, too.
For Pragmatists, Truth (with a big T) means something very different than what people usually mean when they talk about our capitalized friend. The pragmatic idea of truth is centered around usefulness. This is something akin to a radically empirical view of the world in which people are supposed to decide what is True based on their assessment of the results that holding such a belief would entail (there is a bit more to pragmatism than this, but that’s the basic idea). Such an approach to Truth is clearly evident in Bennett’s work. It’s not that she neglects to logically justify adopting Spinozian assumptions; she doesn’t need to. In Pragmatist land, her examples, which clearly show how a Spinozian view of the world could be beneficial in the political sphere, are enough to justify adopting it—at least provisionally until we have more empirical evidence showing the true value of such an ontological experiment. Upon realizing this, the darkness cast by Bennett’s seemingly brash assumption in her preface suddenly dissipated, leaving me with these questions:
1. Do we need foundational texts like Bennett’s in order to practice history? I think our readings from last week, which claim that traditional historical narratives are essentially Hegelian, are very relevant to this question.
2. More importantly, even if one was to say that history doesn’t need foundational texts, there are certainly assumptions latent in the different methodological approaches currently in vogue in the discipline. What standard of Truth (or truth) should we use to evaluate those methodological assumptions? Is the Pragmatic approach that Bennett uses the best one?
As a merger week, this was a little complicated to navigate, but I hope I do both works (equally fantastic) justice.
Bennett was the example of the “material turn,” but Starosielski was the example of “post humanism.” I am continually wondering what the actual difference is between these two fields, and I think I have some preliminary ideas, though they are not as sophisticated as I would like them to be. I am also not even certain that it is useful to separate works this cleanly. One of the most striking differences is that Starosielski feels more like history and engages less with theory (though does engage wonderfully where she does), where Bennett’s work feels more like a manifest of how to talk about things.
Generally (and there are exceptions in each work), I find that Materiality is more about small scale, where posthumansim feels to be in a larger scale. Materiality is more about the influence on bodies, and perhaps individual people, where post humanism is an engagement with groups of people. I was really impressed by Starosielski’s engagement with the critique of oceans as more assemblages than just unified bodies of water. I had previously only had the luxury of really experiencing these notions through the book The Myth of Continents and the occasional work applying borderlands methodologies to seas, though never oceans.
I think the ocean is far more connected than we like to think, and this is just one view into the connections which make the world closer together. In a way Starosielki and Bennet are similar in that they are politicizing something which we generally assume to be neutral. In a way, this takes us back to the expansion of what can be known as an archive, and I think objects and networks of cables are themselves an archive. I hope one day I can take these two works and use them to speak to my work. I (greedily) fit my own project into the space of these theories, and am very satisfied with the results. I genuinely wish to intersect the steamship with materiality and Bennett’s work in general, though a closer reading would be needed to reconcile my hesitations of doing that.
Are the differences between the material turn and post humanism reconcilable by scope?
Do these works (particularly Starosielski) only work in recent historical periods? Could we bring the methodologies produced in these works back to the Early Modern or even Medieval age?
I found the social, political and ecological layering of the material embeddedness of cables quite fascinating. I like Jacob’s term “cable history”, because it emphasizes how the object of inquiry is a lens to view a diverse amount of detail and perspectives that otherwise might not have been viewable in one study. It brought up a few issues for me.
First, I found this despite some of the author’s claims to be a very human-centered approach, meaning most of the agency is granted to humans doing human things: laying cables, arguing about cables, learning about the sea to lay cables better etc. However, I wonder what it would have been like to write part of the book, at least, from a viewpoint which examined how the environment provided the parameters for which the goal of extending communications infrastructure operated. In Chapter six, the ecology of cables is discussed alongside the issue of the production of knowledge about the oceans, both directly for the laying of cables and indirectly for marine science. This is still a narrative of man embedding something of his in nature, learning about nature etc. I wonder how the environment embeds itself in human projects. I do not know if it comes across as clearly as it could how the materiality of media and communication is a function of the natural environment and ecology. Within the theme of “strategies of insulation”, companies’ attempts to protect cables from environmental hazards is only one aspect. It still seems to be a problem which is surmounted, rather than an issue which defines how cables are embedded. I would like to have seen a narrative a little more emphatic of the role of environment. The author after all begins her story with the reflection that we are becoming more wired than wireless, satellites taking a backseat. If that is not a function of both terrestrial and celestial environments, I am not sure what is.
At times when reading histories that are so intimately connected with the present as this is, I wonder if it would not make the history more impacting by integrating a call(s) for action. I know she does say in the introduction that there is a definite danger in seeing our modern media as wireless and rhizomatic. It just had me thinking that she had such an opportunity here to write a chapter at the end calling for a specific program of change. My initial reaction that this was “missed”, but then it occurred to me that if a historian were to write something like that, it might condemn the work to dismissal or put an expiry date on the “usefulness” of the greater argument. The question seems to be how married a piece of history tied so very intimately with the present should be to specific reform agendas.
I find striking how the approach that Starosielski takes in the book could be applied in large part to the history of the Grand Canal in China (even silk road routes). While Starosielski is working with a system that has a rather limited history, the application to the Grand Canal could prove even more fruitful given that it has around 1500 years of history. The two themes of “strategies of insulation” and “strategies of interconnection” seems particularly apt. The Canal was largely built as a mechanism to facilitate the transportation of foodstuffs and goods towards the imperial center (Hangzhou, Beijing, etc…), especially before the commutation of taxes from grain to silver in the Ming Dynasty. Security issues for the main source of physical tax revenue were overwhelming, and often characterized how the canal was designed, where major junctions were placed and how it was policed. Like cables, authorities tried to make it function unobstructed over the landscape. In terms of interconnection, the canal worked itself into local systems of transportation, social orders, and ecologies which aided official goals, but which also diverged from them, yet operated adjacent to them. The rich private trade attached to official barges is a case in point. Furthermore, the Grand Canal provided an impetus for research into hydrology, a noted a developed science that even Max Weber famously commented on, which could be easily expanded to demonstrate how this knowledge production affected Chinese agriculture and irrigation. (There might be a little chicken before the egg phenomenon going on here.) I cannot say that like Starosielski this would have an immediate impact on policy formation or resource allocation vis a vis communications systems, but it would certainly deepen our understanding of how large scale communication and transportation systems are embedded in ecologies, geographies, topographies and even histories, with a great deal of continuity over time. It might also allow the fragility of these great projects and their underlying intense and continuing labor and material costs to be revealed, showing that they are less monolithic than adaptive and living nexuses of material and interests. I think this possibility is the most exciting thing for me I have taken from this book.
I enjoyed this book quite a lot, but I should explain that I am fascinated with industry, infrastructure, production, I am a big fan of those “how it’s made” television shows for children (today we’re visiting the salt mines of Goderich, Ontario? I’m in!), Soviet novels about the heroic efforts of workers to get their cement factory up and running again, etc.
Essentially what the author has done here is taken a topic in industry/technology, and extracted from it this seemingly bottomless well of history and inter-connections: colonialism, the Cold War, sociology, race, labour, working lives, ecology, capitalism, etc. In that sense the book is a great example of the possibilities of doing this kind of research. Although the topic of undersea communication cables might be particularly “rich” in this regard due to its transnational nature, and how closely related it is historically to issues of security, power, international relations etc., I would argue that you could engage in a similar kind of exercise with any number of topics of industry, technology, commodity, etc. In this sense, perhaps this book belongs somewhat to the same trend of history books such as “Salt: a World History” by Mark Kurlansky (which I have not read, but has come up a few times this semester).
On the other hand, it becomes quite apparent at some point in the book that the author is a scholar of the humanities – not an engineer or someone with a background in science, technology, business or finance. When she steps out of historical study and decides to examine the ins and outs of the contemporary industry, it bears a laymen’s quality so stark as to put its relevance in question. This raises the question of who she is writing for. If she is writing for people within the industry, policy makers, engineers, etc., I think her discussions of what happens when an alarm goes off or the relative skill-set of a given cable stations staff in relation to the equipment present is so surface-level and vague it would offer little. On the other hand, her thorough exploration of such specifics and internal matters, I imagine, would make the book of limited interest to the lay reader. In short, the book ends up being something like a specialist-book written by a non-specialist.
Speaking of vague…this was something else I found difficult about the book. I frequently found myself not knowing where exactly (geographically speaking) she was talking about. This could be because my head was in the clouds, as it frequently is. But then I’d check the citation and it would be something like “interview with anonymous cable worker” and a date! I imagine this may have been forced on her by necessity, nevertheless I felt the absence of contextual details and the author frequently speaking in vague generalities did affect the quality of the book.
The shortcomings of her efforts to step beyond a strictly historical study become particularly apparent in her conclusion. She seems to think her book offers some kind of constructive guide to future possibilities of undersea infrastructure that presumably policy makers, investors or scientific authorities could make use of, but I wasn’t left terribly convinced. Her contention that the world’s undersea cable networks can be “recycled” into “art” because some guy in England recorded sounds emanating from an abandoned cable, and her even more vague reference to the John Griesemer novel just looks like she desperately grasping at straws to invent utility where there is none, or extremely little. Here one is left thinking that she should have been happy with creating a very interesting work of niche history.
I apologize that I didn’t realize we were writing replies to both books – I will have to save my many opinions about Vibrant Matter for the discussion tomorrow. For now I will be content to say that I thought it was a great example of petty-bourgeois armchair psuedo-leftism completely divorced from real life, and basically a repackaging of various worn-out strands of “change your mind change the world” trends rooted in the 60s counter-culture/New Age movement in a scholarly garb.
Being a historian of imperial China(specifically the 7th to 10th century), I have never thought about the history of transoceanic communication cables and the very nature of it. Starosielski’s new book The Undersea Network opened a new gate for me in that sense. She emphasizes the methodology to consider network topography, “the way that infrastructures are embedded into existing natural and cultural environments”(28). By saying that, she examines the history of cable and cable buildings throughout time and argues that our global infrastructure has been constructed in relation to historically specific social and environmental imaginations (29). Therefore, she challenges my understanding of the “wireless nature” of our communication system and argues that they are grounded under ocean rather than through air; and they are built upon historical evolution rather than a rupture into the new “wireless” international age. Moreover, she counters the rhetoric that media is de-territorializing and dematerializing; rather, she stresses on the ecological dimension of media. I just found this argument very interesting and thought-provoking to me.
Besides that, she also emphasizes the potential threats. For example, in the 19th century, “companies moved from a concern about protection from the ocean to a preference for using the ocean’s depths as a layer of protection from potential colonial unrest, rival nations, and ships’ anchors” (37). Moreover, in the post-colonial era, “the focus of securing the cable network shifted from routing via one’s territory or colonial holdings to having national control over the processes of building, operating, and maintaining the cable network” (41).
However, this book and the methodology it provides are clearly aimed at media and cables in recent historical periods. I appreciate Aaron’s effort to use this methodology in examining pre-modern history. I think this is something that worth investigating.
One element that I really appreciated about The Undersea Network is that it asks us to examine the ‘edges’ of the network – both of the specific undersea cable network that is the subject of the book, and in networks more generally. In this case, the vector links of a network is traditionally represented graphically as a “simple line between two nodes” (xiii), essentially ‘blank space’ which stands “independent of time and place.” Although almost the opposite is true of land-cable systems where proximity to the hub is of utmost importance – take the stock exchange networks for instance – it seems to stand up for the undersea network where the ocean is conceptualized as blank space.
I would be interested to hear how the “boat people” in our class (to use Devin’s term) respond to Starosielski’s intervention into recovering the ocean(s) as dynamic environment (agent/force) in the history of undersea cables. In particular, the idea of Bamfield (on the west coast Vancouver Island and being the “graveyard of the Pacific”), and the marine scientists that are taking advantage of the cable network infrastructure to “communicate with the ocean itself, tracking seafloor processes as they occur in real time and shifting the temporality and spatiality of oceanographic research.
I would also be interested to know if anyone else is more familiar with network theory and would be able to give us a sense of how astute Starosielski’s application of it is? There is a fairly liberal interplay of networks in terms of technology/ecology/sociology almost simultaneously that I’m intrigued by, but also slightly wary of taking in wholesale.
Also, for those interested in ‘edges’ and coastal studies, the Hakai Institute (http://www.hakai.org/) does really interesting research, mostly scientific, and also has recently started a magazine which is pretty great. http://www.hakaimagazine.com/
The „Undersea Network“ was interesting to read, but I’m not sure what for. For me, it seems to satisfy a gap in some niche history. Probably it is nice or useful for these cable companies to read the history of their profession. Yet I am not sure if this book can serve anything else.
But I don’t want to be too negative, because the book indeed puts the focus on the very important, but very often neglected material basis of our (post-)industrial world. Not only this, but also the book could be a starting point for more research on the Internet: Who controls it? Who profits from it? Who is excluded? But for this, one needs to leave both the oceans and the exclusive focus on the material infrastructure, because many countries and almost every consumer does not get the internet directly from the ocean and second it is not only a matter of technology or infrastructure but also of the social conditions if one will get access to the internet.
As is frequently the case, my thoughts here align with Max. I do not see the Undersea Network as important. I don’t foresee people citing this in ten years, unless they are explicitly writing about the cable companies or the Internet infrastructure. Perhaps this opens a question for debate, then: What is the salience of this project? For me, I found it hard to attach to any larger project or concern in historiography, beyond the quotidian need that may exist for a history of any old thing. Obviously, it falls within the scope of materialist history, but I don’t think it is transcendental, nor do I think it offers too many lessons for how such projects should be undertaken. Is that too harsh? Do some people see more here than I do?
Again on the theme of importance, I kept wondering about some of Starosielski’s conclusions. None of them hit me with any punch. She ends the book calling for “more robust, resilient, and equitable global networks (234).” Now there’s a rabble-rousing rally cry. Elsewhere, Starosielski often refers to the colonial and political factors which led to the particular location of the cables (30-31, for one example). Should we be surprised at that? I thought it was self-evident that the cable locations would conform to where hegemonic powers wanted them; I think we all knew that Papau New Guinea wasn’t spearheading undersea telecommunications at any point. On a final note, she entreats us to see cable networks not merely as technological systems but as places where “capital, labor, and knowledge have been sunk into the Earth’s surface (30).” The same would be true of a railroad spike, a picket fence, a power station, a stop sign, a sewer system, my Mother’s herb garden, and on and on. The way she phrases it is deep, but this is a superficial book, if you ask me.
I look forward to hearing what you guys thought about it!