VIBRANT MATTER
Jane Bennett's concept of "Vibrant Matter" seeks to promote new means of ecological consideration and political/moral action by replacing environmentalism with a new, more effective mentality. The idea that all matter is vibrant and is an actant on other matter and us gives it a previously unconsidered livelihood that may change how we perceive and react to it. The image of dead or inert matter feeds human ego and empowers earth-destroying tendencies by preventing us from detecting and acknowledging a large range of non-human powers and influences that we interact with. As Bennett puts it, "These material powers can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us; in any case, call for our attentiveness or even "respect." Failing to see matter as having vitality or being "vibrant" may be keeping us from becoming more ecologically conscious and materiably sustainable.
The tasks of her book are threefold: The first is to paint a positive ontology of vibrant matter (which will stretch concepts of agency, action, and freedom beyond current reasonable standards). The second is to break down the barriers and reject onto-theological arguments of binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination, and organic/inorganic and create an openness in human bodies to material vitality. Finally Bennett seeks to create a basic scheme of changes to political analyses to account for the contributions of non-human actants. This places human and non-human actants on a less vertical plane that is common in order to highlight the distinctive capabilities and importance of non-human actants and demonstrate the relationships between them. This resistance to anthropocentrism sets Bennett's Vital Materialism apart from previous materialists (such as Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, and Hans Driesch). In doing so, she hopes to encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things, as vibrant materiality runs alongside and inside humans, and see how acceptance of this would change analyses of political events.
A key step to this is to gather together the various links between eco-philosophy and vital materialism and see how we can cultivate ourselves as assemblages of vibrant matter. It is hard to discern the vitality of matter, and once discerned, hard to keep focused on. It is intangible, and our views are colored by our cultural, spiritual, and biological perceptions. But once we are able to give food, trash, or a system such as the North American Electrical Grid the same autonomy and efficacy as not only a human being, but a component that makes up the organism that is a human being, we can begin to understand a connection between ourselves and our environment on a more common level.
Bennett sums up her argument in her conclusion: "I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen, I believe that this pluri-verse is traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms, and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp. I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests."
