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Materia Vibrante: Una Ecología Política de las Cosas
Una montaña de basura, un trozo de metal, gusanos hambrientos, huracanes y células madre son algunos de los protagonistas de este ambicioso trabajo de Jane Bennett en el que expone por primera vez su teoría de una materialidad viva. Nuestro hábito conceptual tiende a dividir el mundo en elementos inorgánicos y vida orgánica y a trazar una distinción jerárquica entre lo humano y lo no-humano. ¿Pero qué pasaría si asumiéramos el desafío de dejar de considerar a la materia como una sustancia no organizada o inerte? ¿Y si en lugar de relegar a la naturaleza a ser el escenario pasivo de nuestro drama humano le otorgáramos también capacidad de acción?
La perspectiva materialista ha ocupado, desde Marx para acá, un rol central en el campo de las ciencias sociales. Pero la mayoría de las veces se refiere a las estructuras económicas o a los significados humanos “encarnados” en los objetos y tiende a pasar por alto lo que estos objetos mismos son capaces de hacer. Los nuevos materialismos, un rico campo de investigación crítica surgido en los últimos años del que esta obra es un claro exponente, se proponen profundizar esta preocupación. Valiéndose de autores como Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze o Latour, Bennett desarrolla aquí una teoría de la agencia distributiva que expresa los poderes activos que emanan de las cosas. La coexistencia y la mutua afectación entre entidades biológicas, tecnológicas, geológicas y climáticas se vuelven cada vez más evidentes en el contexto actual de crisis ambiental por lo que este libro implica un proyecto filosófico, pero también político. Tal como sugiere la autora, los patrones de consumo podrían cambiar si cayéramos en la cuenta de que aquello que vemos como desperdicio es en realidad un mundo sujeto a infinidad de imperceptibles transformaciones. Lo mismo podría ocurrir en el campo de la salud pública, si el acto de alimentarse, por ejemplo, fuera entendido como un encuentro entre cuerpos diversos. ¿Y qué implicaría para el rumbo de la política energética si no tratáramos a la electricidad simplemente como un recurso o una mercancía sino también como un ensamblaje complejo de electrones, carbón, viento y programas informáticos?
La perspectiva materialista ha ocupado, desde Marx para acá, un rol central en el campo de las ciencias sociales. Pero la mayoría de las veces se refiere a las estructuras económicas o a los significados humanos “encarnados” en los objetos y tiende a pasar por alto lo que estos objetos mismos son capaces de hacer. Los nuevos materialismos, un rico campo de investigación crítica surgido en los últimos años del que esta obra es un claro exponente, se proponen profundizar esta preocupación. Valiéndose de autores como Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze o Latour, Bennett desarrolla aquí una teoría de la agencia distributiva que expresa los poderes activos que emanan de las cosas. La coexistencia y la mutua afectación entre entidades biológicas, tecnológicas, geológicas y climáticas se vuelven cada vez más evidentes en el contexto actual de crisis ambiental por lo que este libro implica un proyecto filosófico, pero también político. Tal como sugiere la autora, los patrones de consumo podrían cambiar si cayéramos en la cuenta de que aquello que vemos como desperdicio es en realidad un mundo sujeto a infinidad de imperceptibles transformaciones. Lo mismo podría ocurrir en el campo de la salud pública, si el acto de alimentarse, por ejemplo, fuera entendido como un encuentro entre cuerpos diversos. ¿Y qué implicaría para el rumbo de la política energética si no tratáramos a la electricidad simplemente como un recurso o una mercancía sino también como un ensamblaje complejo de electrones, carbón, viento y programas informáticos?
268 pages
First published January 4, 2010
287 people are currently reading
4127 people want to read
About the author
Jane Bennett
44 books70 followersJane 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 136 reviews
November 7, 2011
Jane Bennett writes on "new" vitalism for 120 pages without mentioning indigenous epistemologies. By engaging extensively with western philosophy in outlining the history of vitalism she completely erases the ontological foundations of First Nations peoples who are and have been actively recognizing "intra-connections" (to borrow from Barad) between human & nonhuman in their philosophies and politics.
She encourage the reader to consider the possibility of non-hierarchical existence and "thing power" and addresses the possibilities this way of thinking may have for political projects on the Left, such as environmentalism and reproductive rights. Too bad she doesn't take time to decolonize her research - these ideas are not new (and Harman and Bryant weren't the first to have them either, nor Deleuze). I would love to see the OOO/Speculative Realism folks address their privilege as academics, on one hand, and their complicity in replicating Western/nonWestern oppositional binaries in philosophy (via cognitive imperialism of indigenous ontologies and genocidal tendencies through erasing indigenous epistemologies) on the other.
She encourage the reader to consider the possibility of non-hierarchical existence and "thing power" and addresses the possibilities this way of thinking may have for political projects on the Left, such as environmentalism and reproductive rights. Too bad she doesn't take time to decolonize her research - these ideas are not new (and Harman and Bryant weren't the first to have them either, nor Deleuze). I would love to see the OOO/Speculative Realism folks address their privilege as academics, on one hand, and their complicity in replicating Western/nonWestern oppositional binaries in philosophy (via cognitive imperialism of indigenous ontologies and genocidal tendencies through erasing indigenous epistemologies) on the other.
March 9, 2015
For the Deluzian dogmatist, this will be the perfect book. Bennett presents an act of sustained ignorance that 20th century physics and biology ever happened or exists and displays she has no grasp of 'enviromentalism' nor the earth-sciences this political movement partially arises from. The reviewers quoted on the back of book should be ashamed (but maybe they didnt read this book)... but perhaps one could read their acceptance as a sign of why the humanities is dying; it suffers from a lack of engagement with science and logic and critical thinking and is too inbred in poststructural thought and thinking and tradition.
Bennett is not clear what matter is nor how matter, objects and things are different, nor is she clear about what 'mechanics' means because she obviously doesn't have access to wikipedia. Or rather she appears to be using these terms in their 19th century connotation and dennotations and seems to forget that late Victorian concepts of vitalism have been eclipsed by break throughs in biology, genetics and chemistry. It is too bad the only scientific theory she engages with is Actor-Network Theory (bastardized for her purposes) and a few late 19th century scientists/philosophers such as Darwin and Driesch. But her drawing of a parallel between Driesch's entelechy and stem-cells is interesting, but grossly wrong (although I do wonder why DNA and RNA are not spoken of, nor the structuring of atoms into material reality).
Moreover, although I sympathize with her program of extending our inclusion of objects, animals and plants into our political considerations as well as her idea that we should pay attention to things as things more, I totally reject this book as worth anyone's time (except the first 3/4ths of the 7th chapter) because it is full of misinterpretation, spin, and a non consulting of contemporary science. A great example of this is her exclusion of how Nietzsche is all about human agency fir the sake of humans. Additionally her argument is inchorent and contradictory and at times non existent. Radical yes, but radical isnt enough because this book maybe just career filler for another professional thinker.
Lastly, and for me worst of all, there is no way her theory supports her moral of the theory; and in fact as she states on pg. 127 n. 36 she doesnt want to take her ideas to the logical extremes because if she did, no act of moral accountability would exist and thus one could, by her 'theory' blame everything (including the victim) of an act of rape and reduce the blame of the raper. Thus, in her act to empower environmentalism, she would have us both consult and blame the carbon creating the greenhouse effect which threatens life as it is now embodied on earth because the carbon is as much actant as we are. Moreover, in my opinion, her need for a quasi-mysticism of 'matter' and how 'matter' becomes form and a complex universe full of forms will not help us ecologically to estrange objects or change our self destructive trajectory.
I like how she wants to defamilarize the objects around us but feel she fails to find a way suitable to it.
Bennett is not clear what matter is nor how matter, objects and things are different, nor is she clear about what 'mechanics' means because she obviously doesn't have access to wikipedia. Or rather she appears to be using these terms in their 19th century connotation and dennotations and seems to forget that late Victorian concepts of vitalism have been eclipsed by break throughs in biology, genetics and chemistry. It is too bad the only scientific theory she engages with is Actor-Network Theory (bastardized for her purposes) and a few late 19th century scientists/philosophers such as Darwin and Driesch. But her drawing of a parallel between Driesch's entelechy and stem-cells is interesting, but grossly wrong (although I do wonder why DNA and RNA are not spoken of, nor the structuring of atoms into material reality).
Moreover, although I sympathize with her program of extending our inclusion of objects, animals and plants into our political considerations as well as her idea that we should pay attention to things as things more, I totally reject this book as worth anyone's time (except the first 3/4ths of the 7th chapter) because it is full of misinterpretation, spin, and a non consulting of contemporary science. A great example of this is her exclusion of how Nietzsche is all about human agency fir the sake of humans. Additionally her argument is inchorent and contradictory and at times non existent. Radical yes, but radical isnt enough because this book maybe just career filler for another professional thinker.
Lastly, and for me worst of all, there is no way her theory supports her moral of the theory; and in fact as she states on pg. 127 n. 36 she doesnt want to take her ideas to the logical extremes because if she did, no act of moral accountability would exist and thus one could, by her 'theory' blame everything (including the victim) of an act of rape and reduce the blame of the raper. Thus, in her act to empower environmentalism, she would have us both consult and blame the carbon creating the greenhouse effect which threatens life as it is now embodied on earth because the carbon is as much actant as we are. Moreover, in my opinion, her need for a quasi-mysticism of 'matter' and how 'matter' becomes form and a complex universe full of forms will not help us ecologically to estrange objects or change our self destructive trajectory.
I like how she wants to defamilarize the objects around us but feel she fails to find a way suitable to it.
December 2, 2021
2.5 stars. Somewhat interesting, but I'm not convinced. She doesn't engage at all with any indigenous scholarship on similar subjects; the book is very centered in Western thought and ideology with no acknowledgement that these were not the first thinkers to have these thoughts.
July 31, 2012
Variations on object-oriented ontology are all the rage these days. Vibrant Matter lacks the verve and comprehensiveness of Hodder's Entangled or the clear specificity of Bogost's older Unit Operations, but it's a quick, clear, graceful tour of philosophy from Spinoza to modern environmentalism that makes a point, sketches its origins without tedium, and moves on.
Bennett is clear on distinguishing her work from ANT, and on its potential consequences as an alternative to hair-shirt environmentalism, which I found particularly intriguing. She addresses criticisms clearly, so for the first time I feel as if I have some grasp on the differences between object-oriented approaches and animism, poetry, anthropomorphism, and politicized make-believe.
Eminently readable, graceful, short and useful: you really can't ask for more from an academic monograph.
Bennett is clear on distinguishing her work from ANT, and on its potential consequences as an alternative to hair-shirt environmentalism, which I found particularly intriguing. She addresses criticisms clearly, so for the first time I feel as if I have some grasp on the differences between object-oriented approaches and animism, poetry, anthropomorphism, and politicized make-believe.
Eminently readable, graceful, short and useful: you really can't ask for more from an academic monograph.
May 4, 2017
Thought-provoking without being quite urgent or angry enough to be really provocative. Like so many theory books, this begins promisingly, loses its mojo in the middle, then tentatively puts forth a sort of call to action at the end. Bennett reveals how tentative her own call is by invoking the tepid phrase "sustainability" to describe her eco-politics. Despite this lukewarm quality the book offers challenging approaches to matter that might be made into something sharper and more dangerous.
September 8, 2024
This is probably the worst theory book I’ve ever read. Obvious criticism out of the way first: this book does a terrible job acknowledging the non-Western precedents of object-oriented ontology, as many have pointed out. I’m not typically one to criticize what books don’t do, since no one can text can do everything, but the presentation of these ideas as novel is rather frustrating when it engages almost exclusively with the European philosophical tradition since 1700. No philosophy is ever really “new,” even within the Western tradition, and I think that’s part of why the tone was so off-putting to me. Any of us can copy off of Deleuze and Spinoza and call it new (and they weren’t properly new either!).
Now for my main issues. Posthumanism always walks a tightrope between its obvious epistemological origins in human consciousness and the desire to move beyond this as much as possible. To me, a given text’s quality is in large part dependent on the humility of the author; any text that claims to theorize with any degree of “knowing” is incredibly presumptuous to me. This book is perhaps the most egregious example I’ve ever seen, even if she repeatedly mentions the human limits of her project. Sentences like “the capacity to detect the presence of impersonal affect requires that one is caught up in it. One needs, at least for a while, to suspend suspicion and adopt a more open-ended comportment” have such an air of smugness that I can’t believe people try to defend this strand of post-critique as being a more humble discipline than traditional criticism. The biggest theoretical problem is that it’s impossible to say the language and meanings ascribed to any of the objects discussed within the text are anything but human projections. She argues that this is not a valid objection because all “speech” is mediated in some way, but if her point is that all language is unreliable and contextually variant, then there’s a contradiction between her emphasis on an object’s “agency” as an active communicator and the deconstruction of human agency in this regard. If we are the mediums of speech for objects, then what they signify is as culturally contingent and hermeneutically open-ended as a word on a page (a comparison she directly makes), in which case the intention behind the language is fundamentally lost in translation.
I think what annoys me the most about this book is that it has the exact same pretense of “the work I’m doing is better and more ethically pure than yours,” of seeing the truth that nobody else can see, that everyone (rightly, in some cases) lambasted Marxist theorists for. She speaks of freeing things from the subject/object binary and then goes on to say her goal is to “give voice to a vitality intrinsic to materiality, in the process absolving matter from its long history of attachment to automatism or mechanism.” But if objects communicate on their own, as she argues, why do we need her to “give voice” to them? Because she is so uniquely attuned to their language? That would be an ironic sentiment given that most of this book is quotation and paraphrase, and most times we get an original sentence it’s some self-oriented anecdote like “I was repelled by the dead (or was it merely sleeping?) rat and dismayed by the litter, but I also felt something else: a nameless awareness of the impossible singularity of that rat, that configuration of pollen, that otherwise utterly banal, mass-produced plastic water-bottle cap.” The coinages are the only reason I can think of that anyone would cite this over older, more well-written OOO books, which just feels like wrongly attributing credit.
TL;DR: pretentious, unoriginal, laden with contradictions.
Now for my main issues. Posthumanism always walks a tightrope between its obvious epistemological origins in human consciousness and the desire to move beyond this as much as possible. To me, a given text’s quality is in large part dependent on the humility of the author; any text that claims to theorize with any degree of “knowing” is incredibly presumptuous to me. This book is perhaps the most egregious example I’ve ever seen, even if she repeatedly mentions the human limits of her project. Sentences like “the capacity to detect the presence of impersonal affect requires that one is caught up in it. One needs, at least for a while, to suspend suspicion and adopt a more open-ended comportment” have such an air of smugness that I can’t believe people try to defend this strand of post-critique as being a more humble discipline than traditional criticism. The biggest theoretical problem is that it’s impossible to say the language and meanings ascribed to any of the objects discussed within the text are anything but human projections. She argues that this is not a valid objection because all “speech” is mediated in some way, but if her point is that all language is unreliable and contextually variant, then there’s a contradiction between her emphasis on an object’s “agency” as an active communicator and the deconstruction of human agency in this regard. If we are the mediums of speech for objects, then what they signify is as culturally contingent and hermeneutically open-ended as a word on a page (a comparison she directly makes), in which case the intention behind the language is fundamentally lost in translation.
I think what annoys me the most about this book is that it has the exact same pretense of “the work I’m doing is better and more ethically pure than yours,” of seeing the truth that nobody else can see, that everyone (rightly, in some cases) lambasted Marxist theorists for. She speaks of freeing things from the subject/object binary and then goes on to say her goal is to “give voice to a vitality intrinsic to materiality, in the process absolving matter from its long history of attachment to automatism or mechanism.” But if objects communicate on their own, as she argues, why do we need her to “give voice” to them? Because she is so uniquely attuned to their language? That would be an ironic sentiment given that most of this book is quotation and paraphrase, and most times we get an original sentence it’s some self-oriented anecdote like “I was repelled by the dead (or was it merely sleeping?) rat and dismayed by the litter, but I also felt something else: a nameless awareness of the impossible singularity of that rat, that configuration of pollen, that otherwise utterly banal, mass-produced plastic water-bottle cap.” The coinages are the only reason I can think of that anyone would cite this over older, more well-written OOO books, which just feels like wrongly attributing credit.
TL;DR: pretentious, unoriginal, laden with contradictions.
Read
April 15, 2025Not without its critiques, but still a good enough book for any hardened materialist or idealist looking to push their thinking further, whether or not you agree with Bennett's assertions.
March 2, 2024
Parte de una nueva conceptualización sobre la materia, no estaba segura de que el libro fuera a gustarme. Pero así ha sido. Creo que la combinación de referentes literarios -Thoreau,Whitman,Kafka- y filosóficos -Adorno, Foucault, D&G principalmente- es muy interesante y es llevada a cabo de manera excelente. También pienso que el materialismo vital requiere del interlocutor una voluntad de trascender los parámetros básicos de la lógica y razón europeas, y que en este sentido precisa de una sensibilidad en el corazón del lector que la filosofía clásica no trataba. Para mí, es un texto ciertamente bueno, y espero pronto poder leer su obra sobre la poesía de Walt Whitman. Entiendo, de todos modos, que podría haber hecho un mejor trabajo haciendo referencia a cosmologías indígenas que, bajo el paraguas antropológico de animismo y totemismo, tratan la materia como viva desde hace milenios.
February 20, 2025
Interesante, importante y, a veces, muy perturbador. Excesivamente estadounidense. El capítulo sobre la comida es un despropósito, pudiendo haber conseguido algo guapísimo. La gran parte del libro me parece desaprovechado. Lo útil, muy muy útil, pero es un libro que podría ahorrarse en un email. O que podría haberse hecho en condiciones y que fuera un mamotreto, cosa por la que creo que podría ser más interesante aún, porque se abre esa puerta.
January 10, 2011
Clear account of the conceptual components required for an active ("vibrant") materialism, though Bennett doesn't really add too much in this regard, and it occasionally lacks detail and argumentative force. Not sure how convinced I'd be if I wasn't already broadly on-board with the Deleuzian/DeLandian elements - and some parts felt very under-developed (eg. the use of Deleuze's indefinite "a life" from his final published essay). The chapter on the history of vitalism was the most detailed and effective so far as the ontology goes. As far as the politics... Something that definitely needs a much more detailed thinking through from this realist/anti-anthropocentric position, I think, but Bennett does a great job of pointing out possible avenues and heading off some of the more obvious politically-motivated criticisms of a "transhumanist" (or whatever you want to call it) thought. Made me want to read the "non-representational geography" works she references and of which I'm entirely ignorant.
February 12, 2012
Read all the chapters for the colloquium on friday. I am very excited by this book and think of it, frankly, as companion species to my own book Networked Reenactments, and helpful for thinking about the angle into my next book, Speaking with Things.
September 30, 2020
a lovely idea articulated in a lovely fashion. Bennett’s enchanted vision of a lively world is occasionally more utopian than pragmatic, but a utopia worth aspiring to.
August 20, 2025
THIS is the kind of philosophical text that should define the field. I often find that I have a short leash with certain philosophers whose questions about "humans" and the "universe" so often seem like just one more arm of the White, Western propaganda machine. Bennett does just the opposite with this book, opening the categories of human and agent to a serious consideration of the power/agency/vibrancy contained in the world of which humans are just one part. I disagreed pretty heavily with a few of her points (namely the potential contribution of anthropomorphisation), but overall I thought this text was a valuable, radical take on just how we understand agency and human exceptionalism. The chapters on food and self-interest were particularly interesting to me, and felt particularly relevant to current political issues. I also appreciate that Bennett understands and acknowledges the limitations of her own work and the difficulty of holding it in mind when her concepts are so radically different from the dominant ideologies that she and I were raised with. I'm curious to read responses to this work, and to see if Bennett has updated her own arguments since this book was published.
January 17, 2025
I really liked (and agree with) the idea of this book but it just seemed slightly noncommittal at times in ways that were either personally irritating or intellectually shoddy ie downstream implications of distributive assemblagic agency or the qualification of differentially empowered actants. Would be interested to see how these ideas work in the absence of assemblage theory asw. Could definitely have been more radically ecocritical also. Much more of a piece of intellectual history (almost?) than political theory interestingly. Main arg was that vitality is this excessive force [that suffuses both humans, nonhumans, and the nonliving world of things] which is greater than the sum of its parts and emerges through relational networks thereby distributing any sort of causative agency (opts instead for a nonlinear causality / distributive agency)- cool stuff! 3.5
October 2, 2023
This book genuinely felt like the stone that Sisyphus was rolling uphill and it flattened me. I rarely have to pull up a dictionary when reading theory because most scholars define their concepts well enough, but I feel like this is a great example of chronic thesaurus-itis. What is the point of publishing a book with the most inaccessible and gatekeepy language possible?
February 8, 2019
A beautifully written and well-argumented book about how we should view reality and ourselves within it.
May 27, 2025
Bennett was COOKING when she came up with the concept of vitality! Also shoutout to Darwin’s worms 🪱🥺🥺
October 2, 2024
Penultimate chapter is sexyyyyy
March 12, 2021
Although not an easy read, Vibrant Matter is fairly short and packs quite a punch. Bennett's overall thesis is interesting, and was revolutionary at the time, at least in the white West: that nonhuman things are not passive objects, but rather that they act on humans in unpredictable ways, forming what she calls "assemblages" with us that influence us just as we influence them – and that this means we should redefine our notions of politics and ecology to reflect this more holistic perception of reality and make allowances for the initiative and agency of things.
Using examples like the Northeast blackout of 2003, stem cells, trash, metal, and more, Bennett builds on the work of Bruno Latour and others to point out that humans, although we like to think otherwise, are not so different from the things around us. We ourselves are an assemblage of living and nonliving things – bacteria, minerals, elements, cells – and we link to other living and nonliving things in assemblages whose agency often is indeterminate.
What struck me most is that while Vibrant Matter is not about religion per se, Bennett speaks in near-theological language about this, describing the human experience in ways that remind me of how biologists talk about evolution or Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson talk/ed about the cosmos. We are all part of a vast evolving cosmic landscape, she argues, and the notion that we at this moment are active and all other things are passive is a myth, a perceptual crutch we use to (mis)understand the world around us.
And of course, the religious implications are profound. Bennett explicitly rejects the notion of free will as it has come to be understood – that individual humans are the sole determiners of their destiny – and therefore rejects purely individualist notions of accountability. Her ideas tend to support universalist notions of eschatology, and not just universalist for humans, but a truly universal concept of the new heaven and new earth. They raise questions about the role of God in such a materialist construct, but I would argue no less than what were raised by Darwin, Mendel, Einstein, Hawking, etc.
That the cosmos is governed by natural laws, that we are all enmeshed in networks that both influence us and are influenced by us – this is in some ways not particularly new. But Bennett takes the step of describing "vital materiality" in a way that takes seriously the agency of the other parts of those networks, the things, alive and "not," that act on humans, whether we recognize it or not.
Using examples like the Northeast blackout of 2003, stem cells, trash, metal, and more, Bennett builds on the work of Bruno Latour and others to point out that humans, although we like to think otherwise, are not so different from the things around us. We ourselves are an assemblage of living and nonliving things – bacteria, minerals, elements, cells – and we link to other living and nonliving things in assemblages whose agency often is indeterminate.
What struck me most is that while Vibrant Matter is not about religion per se, Bennett speaks in near-theological language about this, describing the human experience in ways that remind me of how biologists talk about evolution or Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson talk/ed about the cosmos. We are all part of a vast evolving cosmic landscape, she argues, and the notion that we at this moment are active and all other things are passive is a myth, a perceptual crutch we use to (mis)understand the world around us.
And of course, the religious implications are profound. Bennett explicitly rejects the notion of free will as it has come to be understood – that individual humans are the sole determiners of their destiny – and therefore rejects purely individualist notions of accountability. Her ideas tend to support universalist notions of eschatology, and not just universalist for humans, but a truly universal concept of the new heaven and new earth. They raise questions about the role of God in such a materialist construct, but I would argue no less than what were raised by Darwin, Mendel, Einstein, Hawking, etc.
That the cosmos is governed by natural laws, that we are all enmeshed in networks that both influence us and are influenced by us – this is in some ways not particularly new. But Bennett takes the step of describing "vital materiality" in a way that takes seriously the agency of the other parts of those networks, the things, alive and "not," that act on humans, whether we recognize it or not.
April 16, 2021
Haben Gegenstände eine Wirkungsmacht, die uns Menschen beeinflussen kann? Wenn ich an einer roten Ampel stehen bleibe, wer ist es dann, der mein Stehenbleiben hervorruft? Bin ich es oder ist es das Rot der Ampel.
In ihrem Buch „Lebhafte Materie“ versucht Jane Bennett anhand verschiedener Gegenstände und Ereignisse die materielle Handlungsmacht oder Wirkmächtigkeit nicht menschlicher oder nicht-ganz-menschlicher Dinge zu beweisen. Bennett versteht Materialität als grundsätzlich lebendig. So kommt es auch, dass ihr erster Bezugspunkt ein scheinbar unbedeutender Haufen Müll ist. Doch durch den Haufen Müll wird Bennett an eine Konsum- und Wegwerfgesellschaft erinnert. Hat der Müll hier eine Ding-Kraft? Ist es nicht der Müll, der hier den Anstoß zum Denken gegeben hat oder ist das Unsinn? Die Leitfrage des Buches ist, wie sich politische Reaktionen auf gesellschaftliche Probleme verändern würden, wenn Vitalität (nicht menschlicher) Körper ernst nehmen würden.
Bennett argumentierte in ihrem Buch auf erstaunliche Art und Weise, dass von Dingen eine Handlungsmacht ausgeht. Handeln bedeutet aber nicht, Absichten zu haben, sondern Wirkungen zu erzielen. An Beispielen wie der Odradek-Figur aus Franz Kafkas Erzählung „Die Sorge des Hausvaters“ oder einem real existierenden Stromausfall in den USA zeigt sie, dass Dinge ein Gefüge bilden und Handlungen erzeugen.
„Lebhafte Materie“ ist ein politisch philosophischer Versuch, die Schranken zwischen stumpfer Materie und dynamisch Lebendigen aufzubrechen, um so ein anderes Bewusstsein für Menschen und Umwelt zu schaffen. Bennett schafft es, Theorie und Alltagsbeispiele zusammenzubringen, um so ein wirklich sehr gut lesbares Buch zu gestalten. Das englische Original ist zwar schon 2010 erschienen, doch ist die Thematik heute nicht aktueller denn je? Welche Handlungsmacht geht von einem Virus aus? „Lebhafte Materie“ ist allemal eine Lektüre wert, nicht nur unter dem Aspekt der Umwelt zu Liebe, sondern auch um vielleicht die Welt und ihre Dinge aus einer anderen Perspektive zu betrachten.
Eine klare Leseempfehlung
Note: 2
In ihrem Buch „Lebhafte Materie“ versucht Jane Bennett anhand verschiedener Gegenstände und Ereignisse die materielle Handlungsmacht oder Wirkmächtigkeit nicht menschlicher oder nicht-ganz-menschlicher Dinge zu beweisen. Bennett versteht Materialität als grundsätzlich lebendig. So kommt es auch, dass ihr erster Bezugspunkt ein scheinbar unbedeutender Haufen Müll ist. Doch durch den Haufen Müll wird Bennett an eine Konsum- und Wegwerfgesellschaft erinnert. Hat der Müll hier eine Ding-Kraft? Ist es nicht der Müll, der hier den Anstoß zum Denken gegeben hat oder ist das Unsinn? Die Leitfrage des Buches ist, wie sich politische Reaktionen auf gesellschaftliche Probleme verändern würden, wenn Vitalität (nicht menschlicher) Körper ernst nehmen würden.
Bennett argumentierte in ihrem Buch auf erstaunliche Art und Weise, dass von Dingen eine Handlungsmacht ausgeht. Handeln bedeutet aber nicht, Absichten zu haben, sondern Wirkungen zu erzielen. An Beispielen wie der Odradek-Figur aus Franz Kafkas Erzählung „Die Sorge des Hausvaters“ oder einem real existierenden Stromausfall in den USA zeigt sie, dass Dinge ein Gefüge bilden und Handlungen erzeugen.
„Lebhafte Materie“ ist ein politisch philosophischer Versuch, die Schranken zwischen stumpfer Materie und dynamisch Lebendigen aufzubrechen, um so ein anderes Bewusstsein für Menschen und Umwelt zu schaffen. Bennett schafft es, Theorie und Alltagsbeispiele zusammenzubringen, um so ein wirklich sehr gut lesbares Buch zu gestalten. Das englische Original ist zwar schon 2010 erschienen, doch ist die Thematik heute nicht aktueller denn je? Welche Handlungsmacht geht von einem Virus aus? „Lebhafte Materie“ ist allemal eine Lektüre wert, nicht nur unter dem Aspekt der Umwelt zu Liebe, sondern auch um vielleicht die Welt und ihre Dinge aus einer anderen Perspektive zu betrachten.
Eine klare Leseempfehlung
Note: 2
April 12, 2021
Jane Bennett is a contemporary political theorist, social theorist, and ecological philosopher. She Her book, Vibrant Matter (2010), is an evolution of a line of her previous works (most notably The Force of Things (2004) and In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment (1993)), in developing her theory of vital materialism, or thing-power materialism. Like her previous works, the text is laden with reference to and conversation with multiple other theorists across the fields of art, animism, materialism, humanism, and political ecology.
Vibrant Matter does a good job at making its ideas accessible without presupposing a scholarly reader through its clear statement of argument, frequent use of metaphor, and led-by-the-hand analysis of case studies to clarify its points, but some knowledge regarding existing theories of materialism greatly helps in processing its meandering discourse; the book takes its time to unpack and string out example after example in support of its main points or simply to name them, whose sheer quantity can sometimes distract the reader from the author’s central theses.
The book’s point is that humans and nonhuman things - all of them, from living to nonliving - are so interconnected, sharing the basic components of vibrant matter, that any practical solution to ecological and political issues must acknowledge their two-way influences. It is a criticism of the narcissistic anthropocentrism of materiality in political theory, presenting an alternative ‘vital materialism’ in opposition to ‘historical materialism’ and the dangerous (unsustainable) definition of nonliving matter as ‘objects’. It advocates for more attentive, responsible views on processes and events to a shared vibrant matter connecting all bodies, human or nonhuman, refuting the binary of living and nonliving matter, questioning the overemphasis of individual human responsibility in such processes and events in favor of acknowledgement of a broad assemblage of human-nonhuman actants.
Bennett lays the foundations of her vital materialism in the first couple chapters of the book, defining it and positioning it with respect to prevailing political and material theories. The middle two chapters further broaden the scope of her argument by framing the bodies of human food and the identity of metal in her comprehensive picture. The latter half of Bennett’s book delves into fuzzier, more cerebral questions that are typically considered to be moral in nature, such as the fundamental nature of life versus nonlife, as well as directly applying vital materialism to political ecology, addressing its viability and place in modern politics. Specific terminology she uses are thus: Bruno Latour’s actants is preferred over actors, useful in unshackling one’s perspective of humans acting on a passive environment, and presenting nonhuman, nonliving things as conative, driven bodies constantly brushing against, affecting, and reacting to humans in importance and efficacy. She also uses the concept of thing-power, avoiding the terms of subject on object, asserting that all bodies in their simple and complex assemblages (a shifting collection of relations between human-nonhuman actants that can be anything from a human being and its needs and related forces to the ecosystem of the public) have power to affect and take action; this conceptual and physical power gives them the moniker thing. The unifying component of all things is vibrant matter, the base unit of vital materialism that all matter, and all things composed of matter, are vibrant, active, cogent and driven.
In terms of concept, the book excellently captures the importance of narrative fomentation in political ecology discourse, attacking the anthropocentric, fault/causal narrative on all sides and explaining the efficacy of a non-anthropocentric, fluid process-based vibrant matter. Bennett goes into great detail the practical and conceptual powers of narrative and naming, in placing horizons on what human action and sympathy are capable of. The book suffers however, in the human aspect. Bennett spends a lot of time bringing into question the uniqueness of humans and human agencies in a vivid, active amalgamation of conative bodies, and while her concepts of expanding self and self-interest to beyond merely the human is useful and somewhat optimistic, she leans too far in that direction, casting a broad plethora of human relations over the history of capitalist violence in a non committal, almost detached stroke that undersells the enormity of capitalism’s effects on human and nonhuman matter alike. Yes, Vibrant Matter is comprehensive in bringing the nonhuman perspective to the table, but it underdevelops the varieties of human actants and agencies at play, engaging in primitive accumulation or the power of race and gender in economics and the exercise of violence.
As for argumentation itself, Bennett uses a variety of examples, from personal anecdote to broad-scale real-world events (i.e. the Northeast blackout of 2003) to short stories or children’s fables (Bennett 6, 52) to open up the reader’s conceptions of things in their truest sense, repeatedly breaking down the binary between matter and life, between subject and object, between self and other. To bolster her argument, she peppers her paper with metaphor to continually bring forth to the reader’s mind the manifold forces both prospecting, present, and past that shape even strange and conventionally-immaterial things such as language; “My speech, for example, depends on the graphite in my pencil, millions of persons, dead and alive, in my Indo-European language group, not to mention the electricity in my brain and laptop.” (Bennett 35).
Since Bennett’s argument is hinged on redefining one’s inherent paradigm of the nature of things and events, she spends a generous portion of her book walking through the theories, criticisms, and conceptual designs of materialist and existential philosophers throughout Western academia, as much as she does discussing her own theory. These include (but are not limited to) Immanuel Kant’s free will, Henry David Thoreau’s romanticism, Bruno Latour’s actants, or Guattari's "transversal" humans. This ultimately serves her book’s thesis, as defining her theory in relation to others both clarifies its identity but also anticipates and corrects or acknowledges criticisms and flaws in its structure. Some theorists she does not present for opposition, but instead to lean on, openly drawing quotes and concepts from several other material vitality theorists, most notably Baruch Spinoza's "affective" bodies and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's "assemblages". These sections do not reduce her argument’s merit as she simply borrows concepts from such theories without being subsumed by their own.
Bennett’s text Vibrant Matter makes a strong case for re-evaluating one’s perspective on events and processes as interactions among a broader, interconnected assemblage of actants beyond the anthropocentric view of typical conservation or ecological policy and action. In this respect, it is very effective, in spite of perhaps discounting the types of human-related actants and bodies that exist, if not independent from, certainly alongside a strictly material or physiological existence, such as the strength of narrative, imperialism, and racism in broadly determining human action. It accomplishes what it sets out to do: take the reader into Bennett’s vibrant world of interconnected matter, in which humans are just one conative piece alongside their vivid, active nonhuman, nonliving roommates, so that they might find new interest in a world of things called dull by human rhetoric.
Vibrant Matter does a good job at making its ideas accessible without presupposing a scholarly reader through its clear statement of argument, frequent use of metaphor, and led-by-the-hand analysis of case studies to clarify its points, but some knowledge regarding existing theories of materialism greatly helps in processing its meandering discourse; the book takes its time to unpack and string out example after example in support of its main points or simply to name them, whose sheer quantity can sometimes distract the reader from the author’s central theses.
The book’s point is that humans and nonhuman things - all of them, from living to nonliving - are so interconnected, sharing the basic components of vibrant matter, that any practical solution to ecological and political issues must acknowledge their two-way influences. It is a criticism of the narcissistic anthropocentrism of materiality in political theory, presenting an alternative ‘vital materialism’ in opposition to ‘historical materialism’ and the dangerous (unsustainable) definition of nonliving matter as ‘objects’. It advocates for more attentive, responsible views on processes and events to a shared vibrant matter connecting all bodies, human or nonhuman, refuting the binary of living and nonliving matter, questioning the overemphasis of individual human responsibility in such processes and events in favor of acknowledgement of a broad assemblage of human-nonhuman actants.
Bennett lays the foundations of her vital materialism in the first couple chapters of the book, defining it and positioning it with respect to prevailing political and material theories. The middle two chapters further broaden the scope of her argument by framing the bodies of human food and the identity of metal in her comprehensive picture. The latter half of Bennett’s book delves into fuzzier, more cerebral questions that are typically considered to be moral in nature, such as the fundamental nature of life versus nonlife, as well as directly applying vital materialism to political ecology, addressing its viability and place in modern politics. Specific terminology she uses are thus: Bruno Latour’s actants is preferred over actors, useful in unshackling one’s perspective of humans acting on a passive environment, and presenting nonhuman, nonliving things as conative, driven bodies constantly brushing against, affecting, and reacting to humans in importance and efficacy. She also uses the concept of thing-power, avoiding the terms of subject on object, asserting that all bodies in their simple and complex assemblages (a shifting collection of relations between human-nonhuman actants that can be anything from a human being and its needs and related forces to the ecosystem of the public) have power to affect and take action; this conceptual and physical power gives them the moniker thing. The unifying component of all things is vibrant matter, the base unit of vital materialism that all matter, and all things composed of matter, are vibrant, active, cogent and driven.
In terms of concept, the book excellently captures the importance of narrative fomentation in political ecology discourse, attacking the anthropocentric, fault/causal narrative on all sides and explaining the efficacy of a non-anthropocentric, fluid process-based vibrant matter. Bennett goes into great detail the practical and conceptual powers of narrative and naming, in placing horizons on what human action and sympathy are capable of. The book suffers however, in the human aspect. Bennett spends a lot of time bringing into question the uniqueness of humans and human agencies in a vivid, active amalgamation of conative bodies, and while her concepts of expanding self and self-interest to beyond merely the human is useful and somewhat optimistic, she leans too far in that direction, casting a broad plethora of human relations over the history of capitalist violence in a non committal, almost detached stroke that undersells the enormity of capitalism’s effects on human and nonhuman matter alike. Yes, Vibrant Matter is comprehensive in bringing the nonhuman perspective to the table, but it underdevelops the varieties of human actants and agencies at play, engaging in primitive accumulation or the power of race and gender in economics and the exercise of violence.
As for argumentation itself, Bennett uses a variety of examples, from personal anecdote to broad-scale real-world events (i.e. the Northeast blackout of 2003) to short stories or children’s fables (Bennett 6, 52) to open up the reader’s conceptions of things in their truest sense, repeatedly breaking down the binary between matter and life, between subject and object, between self and other. To bolster her argument, she peppers her paper with metaphor to continually bring forth to the reader’s mind the manifold forces both prospecting, present, and past that shape even strange and conventionally-immaterial things such as language; “My speech, for example, depends on the graphite in my pencil, millions of persons, dead and alive, in my Indo-European language group, not to mention the electricity in my brain and laptop.” (Bennett 35).
Since Bennett’s argument is hinged on redefining one’s inherent paradigm of the nature of things and events, she spends a generous portion of her book walking through the theories, criticisms, and conceptual designs of materialist and existential philosophers throughout Western academia, as much as she does discussing her own theory. These include (but are not limited to) Immanuel Kant’s free will, Henry David Thoreau’s romanticism, Bruno Latour’s actants, or Guattari's "transversal" humans. This ultimately serves her book’s thesis, as defining her theory in relation to others both clarifies its identity but also anticipates and corrects or acknowledges criticisms and flaws in its structure. Some theorists she does not present for opposition, but instead to lean on, openly drawing quotes and concepts from several other material vitality theorists, most notably Baruch Spinoza's "affective" bodies and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's "assemblages". These sections do not reduce her argument’s merit as she simply borrows concepts from such theories without being subsumed by their own.
Bennett’s text Vibrant Matter makes a strong case for re-evaluating one’s perspective on events and processes as interactions among a broader, interconnected assemblage of actants beyond the anthropocentric view of typical conservation or ecological policy and action. In this respect, it is very effective, in spite of perhaps discounting the types of human-related actants and bodies that exist, if not independent from, certainly alongside a strictly material or physiological existence, such as the strength of narrative, imperialism, and racism in broadly determining human action. It accomplishes what it sets out to do: take the reader into Bennett’s vibrant world of interconnected matter, in which humans are just one conative piece alongside their vivid, active nonhuman, nonliving roommates, so that they might find new interest in a world of things called dull by human rhetoric.
November 29, 2012
Bennett makes a great effort to defend her materialist position from a vitalist stance. Her way of presenting is great in that she uses a succesful example as a starting point, reading almost as a case study. Overall a great read. I found some of the chapters inconvincing to support her arguments. She defends for example that a vital materialist ontology can act as a “safety net” for inequalities produced by essentialist views simply by blaming heteronomy as responsible for much of the human suffering, and because “Kantian morality is the standard”. Being familiar with the works of DeLanda I was able to understand what she wants to defend, but for someone unfamiliar with this line of thought, I am not sure how convincing she would sound. The first chapter she has written in New Materialisms goes a lot further in defending some of her thoughts.
July 24, 2022
Jane Bennett's 2010 Vibrant Matter presents a dense, careful argument for extending our sense of agency beyond ourselves and, perhaps, some animals, to the entire material world. For me her case is compelling, though sometimes I wished she were more specific about just how the non-animate world exercises its agency. She exploits Bruno Latour's Network Actor Theory as one of the bases of her argument; he's well worth reading in conjunction with Bennett, especially his more recent 2017 Facing Gaia.
Vibrant Matter isn't always an easy read, but it is well worth the time and careful attention it demands. Especially in the face of climate change, a revision of our relation to the material world is long overdue; we need to move beyond the Nature/Culture dichotomy (Latour's argument) and the Biblically based idea that we are masters of the Earth. It ain't so.
Vibrant Matter isn't always an easy read, but it is well worth the time and careful attention it demands. Especially in the face of climate change, a revision of our relation to the material world is long overdue; we need to move beyond the Nature/Culture dichotomy (Latour's argument) and the Biblically based idea that we are masters of the Earth. It ain't so.
August 20, 2025
Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter strikes me as an overview work that gestures toward acknowledging the indeterminate vitality in the world. Problematically, however, she leaves out certain developments and contexts—namely those she considers unscientific, “too spiritual,” and thus unserious, by which she means the animism of Indigenous epistemologies.
At the same time, Bennett only sparsely takes political positions—for instance, in relation to Nietzsche’s meat-diet, which, historically, corresponds to a fascist ideal. Here, too, there is little critique of meat consumption, which I find quite incomprehensible if the focus is supposed to be on political ecologies, non-hierarchizations, and responsibility. Paradoxically, Bennett does in fact position herself quite often, but without substantiating these stances.
A meaningful step forward would be to reflect more deeply on her own situatedness and to recognize that what she frames as “new” is, in fact, epistemically colonialist appropriated knowledge.
Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies and Karen Barad’s Agential Realism, by contrast, are more responsible works: they engage with the activity of (non-)human matter and connect it with (Dis)ability Studies and Postcolonial Studies.
At the same time, Bennett only sparsely takes political positions—for instance, in relation to Nietzsche’s meat-diet, which, historically, corresponds to a fascist ideal. Here, too, there is little critique of meat consumption, which I find quite incomprehensible if the focus is supposed to be on political ecologies, non-hierarchizations, and responsibility. Paradoxically, Bennett does in fact position herself quite often, but without substantiating these stances.
A meaningful step forward would be to reflect more deeply on her own situatedness and to recognize that what she frames as “new” is, in fact, epistemically colonialist appropriated knowledge.
Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies and Karen Barad’s Agential Realism, by contrast, are more responsible works: they engage with the activity of (non-)human matter and connect it with (Dis)ability Studies and Postcolonial Studies.
August 1, 2025
This book presents an argument that feels true and right to me. And also I was always a little annoyed with it. Why is that? The academic quirks, the overused jargon, the pontificating posture about how this idea is better than that idea. I rolled my eyes. But I also learned some things and feel more excited about these questions than I did before.
One dominant criticism of this book is that it doesn't engage with indigenous thinking, which is clearly light-years ahead of the western tradition on this subject. But that didn't bother me. I'm not turning to Jane Bennett to learn about indigenous thought -- her scholarship is about how even within the philosophical tradition that has most hated and abused matter, you can reach logical conclusions about matter's vitality and importance.
One dominant criticism of this book is that it doesn't engage with indigenous thinking, which is clearly light-years ahead of the western tradition on this subject. But that didn't bother me. I'm not turning to Jane Bennett to learn about indigenous thought -- her scholarship is about how even within the philosophical tradition that has most hated and abused matter, you can reach logical conclusions about matter's vitality and importance.
January 20, 2023
Love the opening up of thinking, especially in terms of moving away from the nature/culture imagined divide. But I’m surprised at how often she hedges. "Anthropomorphism can be useful" "self-interest is good for humans" "newfound attention to matter and its powers will not solve human oppression" etc.
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December 4, 2024Libro que esconder disimuladamente detrás de ti durante una escena en la que tus amigos entren en tu cuarto mientras te dicen: "¡Mike, no te vas a creer...! ¿Estás vestido de chamán?"
April 7, 2024
A beautifully written seminal book of New Materialism drawing primarily on Western thought, particularly Spinoza and Bergson. Bennett's political goal is perhaps more ambitious than the theoretical goal: though it attributes ontological multiplicity to humans and nonhumans, Bennet’s aim is ultimately to expose the web of interconnections between actants (borrowing Latour's term). Disordering, ruptures, frictions, and turbulences are of necessity – if we tune into them we can move away from 'fatalistic passivity' and foster a more responsible, ethical engagement with the world. Her theory of political ecology is built upon democratic theory (Dewey, Ranciere), and so comparisons with the non-democratic world leave some space for elaboration.
For me, crucially, it lacked sustained engagement with the materialist critique of capitalism, did not fully address the concept of violence, and aside from the brief reference to the Chinese concept of 'shi' was entirely Western-centric (to the detriment of the argument).
For me, crucially, it lacked sustained engagement with the materialist critique of capitalism, did not fully address the concept of violence, and aside from the brief reference to the Chinese concept of 'shi' was entirely Western-centric (to the detriment of the argument).
October 20, 2025
sometimes if you really don’t have very much to say just write a journal article man.
September 17, 2025
El libro sabe perfectamente que le faltan patatas fritas.
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