Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman

by Jane Bennett

In influx & efflux Jane Bennett pursues a question that was bracketed in her book Vibrant Matter: how to think about human agency in a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences? “Influx & efflux”—a phrase borrowed  from Whitman's "Song of Myself"—refers to everyday movements whereby outside influences enter bodies, infuse and confuse their organization, and then exit, themselves having been transformed into something new. How to describe the human efforts involved in that process? What kinds of “I” and “we” can live well and act effectively in a world of so many other lively materialities? Drawing upon Whitman, Thoreau, Caillois, Whitehead, and other poetic writers, Bennett links a nonanthropocentric model of self to a radically egalitarian pluralism and also to a syntax and style of writing appropriate to the entangled world in which we live. The book tries to enact the uncanny process by which we “write up” influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us.

Genres: Philosophy, Poetry, Nonfiction

232 pages, Paperback

Published May 22, 2020

About the author

Jane Bennett is Professor of Political Theory and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics and Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild, and an editor of The Politics of Moralizing and In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jane Bennett is not the first to read American poetry through a Thoreauvian lens; Sherman Paul's The Lost America of Love reads Duncan through Thoreau. (But that was in the Eighties.) Bennett's ideas about vitalist materialism, "vibrant matter," here applied to Whitman, take excursions in Roger Callois, Thoreau and Whitehead (through whom Duncan must be read), and have to do with "the instinct to preserve living substance, joining it to ever-larger units," forms, then, of "micro-citizenship" that include posture, physiognomy, position, disposition, homomorphy, the stance, things like "pluck": "a combination of assiduousness, thrift, prudence, and the independent-mindedness of men and women who 'think lightly of the laws' and for whom 'outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside authority,' self-respecting self-discipline." With Whitehead, these Whitmanian stances (consider the frontispiece of Leaves) value judgement "only as a small subset of propositional feelings," or "lures" that concern themselves "to dote" as the sun shines on an object. At times I wonder whether her use of proof from Michael Moon's edition to Whitman isn't aided by quantitative humanities.

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vibrant Matter already had me thinking Jane Bennett is a goddamn genius but this is one of the most fascinating theory-world things I've ever read and it's changed the way I want to think and write about poetry.

[FireFlyFlowers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whitman, Thoreau, breathing in and drinking out, on the search for a way to read literary language as vibrant matter.

[Cana McGhee · Rating 4 out of 5]

a delightful little experimental book that explores themes about proto-agency, porousness, and the role of posture/body in shaping solidarities of human/nonhuman assemblages

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jane Bennett continues the project that I know from _Vibrant Matter_ (also excellent) of seeking a vocabulary and grammar for talking about a world in which "things", normally thought of in the Western philosophical tradition as inert objects, have a kind of universal agency (are "vibrant", in her terms), a world more familiar from Chinese, or at least Eastern, thought. She approaches this difficult undertaking here with a close reading and explication of some of Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_, wandering off into many side-trails along the way.

Her intellectual framework seems to come mainly from Deleuze, Whitehead, and Latour (I'm no expert so lots of others could be right there and I wouldn't notice), she shows (and acknowledges) strong affinities with Francois Jillien, Michel Serres, William Connelly, Zhuangzi, and the "New Materialists". Half of the book is footnotes, mandatory reading IMO because they often offer a "look over here" change of vista and not just more detail on a textual point.

You're not going to breeze through this in one sitting. It's conceptually difficult, for one thing, but more importantly it opens intellectual views that you will want to pause and take in, views mostly concerning the efficacy of things and what that means for our politics, "politics" in the sense of how we work out how to live together. Or, maybe you won't get through the preface without shouting "Oh, bullshit!" and tossing the book aside. If that's your urge, then you REALLY need to pick it back up and finish.

There are lots of ways to rate books. My way is to rate them on how much they make me think, or how many threads they reveal, or how persuasively they present counters to my established habits of thought. Also, a sense of humor, feelings of sincerity and humor, and (of course) an ability to string a really good sentence together from time to time. Ms. Bennett's work succeeds on all these criteria, and I recommend it very highly.

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

xi ‘Whitman, I will suggest, offers a distinctive model of I: it is a porous and susceptible shape that rides and imbibes waves of influx-and-efflux but also contributes an “influence” of its own.’

xii ‘Influx & Efflux explores the experience of being continuously subject to influence and still managing to add something to the mix.’

67 ‘Whitman brings to the fore something like what Hans Ulrich Gombrecht calls the “presence effects” of things;21 his poetics works to highlight the physicality of “impression.” An impression is never solely a mental or psychological image, but also an outside pressing in and making a dent—as typeface impresses its three-dimensional shapes on paper.22 Such lively materials also “vibrate”:’

84 ‘Noise, surge, fluctuation, bifurcation, rhythm, vortex, turbulence, phenomena: these are phases of genesis.’

91 ‘Influence: a tendency for outsides to ooze, drift, seep, incur across the perimeter of insides; the propensity to cross over an edge; to cause to flow in; to infuse, inspire, or instill, as the spread of liquid or emanation of stars.’

111 ‘It’s not that the poet, as a subject of action, gives form to an inert object; it is rather that she arranges words to mark the cooperation of the many formative efforts of varieties of vibrant matter [...] Many “shapes” do and should be formed. It is rather that Whitman draws attention to the shared and distributed quality of the agency of consolidation.’

[Molsa Roja(s) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Leaves of grass a few months ago and felt impressed by its beauty, by how my body related to Whitman's, an American -gay, which seems somewhat relevant- poet from the second half of the XIXth Century. But now, now I've read Bennet's account, I feel in awe.

This book is a masterpiece. If you're interested in literature -poetry, mainly- and philosophy -processual ontology, new materialisms- this is it for you. Please, read it. It's an incredibly beautiful book, full of poetry and Bennett inspired sketches, that goes deep into Whitman's oeuvre and opens up a very practical space to think about new materialisms, about what being a body -a sensitive one- is. This is not a difficult piece; she has a gift, for she explains some of the most difficult conceptual terms of Whitehead's philosophy in a few lines. Magnificent. Moreover, she brings forward some very interesting writers -like Callois-. I couldn't be happier with this reading. Wonderfully inspiring.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Brilliant. I loved this book. I think the influx/efflux idea, the porousness of people and of things, is fascinating and brings vibrant matter to an intriguing fore. I was particularly surprised and intrigued by Caillois, even more so because Bennett seemed wary of Caillois going too far in his thinking about the relationship between the dividual and their environment. Bennett seems to still be on the surface of worrying about losing the self. And while she’s critical of the most egocentric, almost-fascist power of the likes of Zeus with his bolts, she seems unwilling to relinquish the self and the importance of the self entirely.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd love to read anything by Bennett, and her Vital Matter has to be one of the most eye-opening books I've ever read. I admit, I was hoping for more of an extension of her theories in Vital Materialism than the case-study on Walt Whitman that this book is. Though, as an exploration on this particular poet and his occasional poetic forays into VM-like thinking, I think the book does an excellent job. I'm just not sure how much the Walt Whitman lens has enhanced my perspective on VM.

[Beth Quick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was my introduction to new materialisms, and I really love both Walt Whitman and Bennett's engagement with his work. Thought-provoking. Plus, what a visually lovely book!