VIBRANT MATTER
What is commonly taken as distinctive or unique to humans is found within "Vibrant Materials." Inspired by Thoreau's notion of the Wild, Deleuze's idea of the virtual, and Foucault's Notion of the Unthought, Vibrant Materiality represents a force that is real and powerful, but intrinsically resistant to representation. In essence, objects possess AGENCY, or the ability to act and cause reactions in other objects or subjects, a power that had previous been attributed to beings with the conscious will to cause desired results (efficacy). 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 Jane Bennett (the author of "Vibrant Matter") 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 materially sustainable. 1 The purpose of the proposal of the vibrant matter theory is to challenge whether or not environmentalism is the best way to frame the problems of the American equation of prosperity with wanton consumption, or for inducting the political will to create more sustainable political economies in or adjacent to global capitalism. In essence, it is difficult to get the public to be concerned about what they view as a passive environment that is less conscious and relevant than our own needs. Based on Guattari's contributions to the subject, Vital Materiality redefines the environment as a substrate of human culture in which materiality is a term that applies more evenly to humans and nonhumans. By seeing matter as vibrant, our world becomes one of lively matter in which biochemical-social systems can sometimes unexpectedly choose developmental paths that could not be foreseen. This makes them more similar to us, and by treating our own flesh and composing bodies as "alien" vibrant material, it creates a "kinship" between the human and the non-human. The resistance to anthropocentrism, (the placing of higher importance on humans and human actions) is the primary difference between the theory of material vitalism and the historical notion of materialism.2
