Light or Dark Political Ecologies

8/23/2019 Light or Dark Political Ecologies

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Forthcoming in BioSocieties

Light or dark political ecologies?

Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press,

Durham and London, 2010, US$21.95, ISBN: 978-0-8223-4633-3

Jane Bennets aim in Vibrant Matteris to open out an established but still controversial

claim about the world to a wider audience. Her proposition is that matter is lively, that

vitality is not equivalent to life, and that vitality exceeds human orderings and must be

considered a political force. In doing so, the book blends the like of Spinoza, Deleuze,

Whitehead, Latour, and other process-oriented philosophers with some newly recruitedspectres to the post-humanist cause, such as Driesch and Dewey. Several of the eight

short chapters are largely theoretical, while others theorise events, such as encounters

with litter in Baltimore, stem cells in evangelical America, power grid failures, earth

worms and humus. Despite being merely a bundle of acid-free paper, some glue and a

parade of words, Bennets book itselfvibrates it succeeds because it makes youfeelas

well as think: although I suspect not always in ways in which the author might have

hoped.Bennets philosophy will be familiar to many. The book is more a consolidation of

recent thinking than it is a startling new innovation, echoing ideas espoused in best-

sellers like Donna Haraways When Species Meet, Latours Politics of Nature, as well as

speculative realism, certain readings of biopolitics, the object-oriented philosophy of

Graham Harman, or more off-the-wall contributions to ecological thinking such as

Mortons The Ecological Thought(more on this later).1 For those less familiar with the

tenets of relational ontology, post-humanism and the more-than-human, Vibrant Matteroffers a study in clarity and accessibility. Bennets attention is fixed on the forces of non-

human actants, how these affect and are affected, how they are assembled into larger

forms that have a certain precarious durability, but no telos or predetermined vectors of

1The parlous state of British monograph publishing is exposed here, with the audience

of British-based geographer Nigel Clarks (2011) importantInhuman Nature likely to be

restricted by its 63 price tag.


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growth and destruction. In this she aims to recuperate all the dead matter that has

traditionally been seen as mere stuff moving around at the behest of humanitys life

force or political machinations: to theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such, and

to detach materiality from the figures of passive, mechanistic or divinely infusedsubstance (p. xiii). Vitality is neither spiritual essence nor inherent property. On the

other hand, nor is it some shadowy force that is added to materials. Nor is it even

shared relational capacity (as she defined enchantment in her previous work), although

its instantiation most often flickers between bodies or things in this book. Moving

beyond the beings-that-meet paradigm of her 2001 The Enchantment of Modern Life,

Bennet describes how vital materials emerge not just around the human subject, but

through a wider arena of more or less predictable events and in their own terms - but

not entirely independently. Vibrant matter has a persistence and an existence beyond

its appearance liveliness is both emergent from the world and also more than the

event of that emergence. She accounts for this more-than-relational character of

vibrant matter through notions of assemblage and open wholes whose members never

melt into a collective body, but instead maintain an energy potentially at odds with that

assemblage (p. 35). Bennet tries to hold on to this sense of both relation and more-than-

relation through the book to gain a non-anthropocentric sense of things meeting other

things while remaining indifferent to dreams of human force.

Holding on to this sense of the both/and of vibrancy is a difficult trick to pull off.

In its largely successful attempt, the book suggests that we should not indulge in

ontological abstraction, but rather focus on the coming into being and interactions of

events, creatures and assemblages: the indeterminacy of matters vitalities demands

that we stick close to the action, in Haraways terms. But here Bennets book flatters to

deceive. In several chapters I found myself playing the old anthropological game of

guess the key informant: the answer was usually Google or a published news report. In

many ways, the methodology (theorising events) reminded me of another classic in

more-than-human thought, Sarah Whatmores (2002) Hybrid Geographies, in which the

authors interactions with caiman and coyote appear to have taken place entirely

though the medium of a computer. Bennet seems more comfortable discussing

Lucretius and second-hand media coverage than engaging rigorously with bumpy and

lumpy material geographies. Thus, when she claims that the prospective action and

small agency of earthworms have made the soils on which human politics has grown,


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she is actually advancing an argument that needs to be made empirically: which worms,

where, and when; which politics, where and when? How do the worms eking out a life in

the chemically-saturated top soils of suburban America make different politics than did

the Duke and Duchess of Sutherlands worms during the eviction of Highland crofters inScotland in the early nineteenth century?

For all its elegance as a worldly philosophy of the power of quiet receptivity to

the agential force of things, the book does not feel particularly creaturely, to me at

least. On one level, this is a churlish gripe that, in the words of David Harvey, it is far

easier to get a publication out of a discussion of someone elses ideas than to go

grubbing around in Senegal trying to understand forest practices (2006, p. 410). But on

another level, the occlusion of the technical prosthetics of her research practice behind

silky prose misses an opportunity to tackle the ways in which our affective horizons

have been so pervaded by the pulsating vitality of the screen (on this see Pettman

2011). In addition, making the methodological cut with online reports and media

coverage rather than with other ways to deal with vibrant matter that are out there in

the world securing it, squeezing it, making it profitable, letting it be nudges Bennet

away from a more explicitly political analysis ofhowvitality has always been emerging

towards one of revelation and elegant story-telling.

While there are obviously methodological differences between political science

(the authors home discipline) and, say, STS or anthropology, greater ethnographic

work into the assembling and disassembling of vibrant collectivities might well cast

doubt on one of Bennets central claims: that politics has treated matter as dead. Her

figure of dead matter in traditional (read: America and NATO allies) political cultures

must be made of adamantium straw so that its dissolution by the positive force of

vibrant matter is all the more impressive. But geographers have shown, for example,

how problems of biosecurity confronting policy makers and chicken farmers emerge

from projects that aim to govern the flow of matter (Bingham and Hinchlifffe 2008), or

how oil companies are very familiar with the work and energy required to discipline the

strange fugitive propensities of non-conventional fuels (Bridge 2012), while political

scientists have explored the relations between materialities of fossil fuels and

democracy (Mitchell 2011). In fact, bio-political problems of all kinds seem to be

proliferating today because of an excess of vitality, rather than too little (Braun 2008).

The ways in which vital materials come to determine the world can therefore be as


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problematic as they can be enchanting, while the work of politics in rendering matter

mute has never been as successful as Bennet needs to suggest.

Nevertheless, Bennets book is powered by impressive normative as well as

philosophical energies. Her wager is that dead matter feeds our earth-destroyingfantasies of conquest and consumption (p. ix). Granted this does little more than echo

decades of green and feminist thought, but by arriving with a radically anti-sovereign

post-humanism rather than dreams of de-alienation, Bennet can offer a more positive

ontology for multiple kinds of Earthling. The political stakes of inculcating (in

ourselves? in others? the practical prescriptions remain murky) an aesthetic-affective

openness to material vitality are in creating utopian, forward-looking narratives of

care, not simply ever-deadlier and deadening critique that is the stock and trade of

academia (p. x). One practical technique she commends for this is guarded

anthropomorphism as a counter to anthropocentrism. This much-maligned stance

allows us to forget for a time what marks our differences and instead attend to

similarities between things; we sense how we are reciprocally mixed up with them.

This, she suggests, might just prompt less violently acquisitive production and

consumption practices and even begin to reshape the self and its interests (p. 122). She

contrasts this against the environmental and green movement, which she characterises

as being obsessed with Nature, rights and wilderness. There is a welcome experimental

tenor to this micro-politics of forging new sensibility; she writes that she is not sure

that this new attentiveness will translate into more thoughtful and sustainable public

policies, but that she hopes it might (2010b, p. 101).

These political hopes are, however, the least convincing aspects ofVibrant

Matter. One obvious question is the extent to which the vibrancy of matter is sufficient

to move us between ontology and politics. In my own work, for example, while I found

that the gardeners of London are attuned to the vibrancy of plants, as well as living in an

anticipatory zone where they must make calculations and feelings based on skill and gut

about what forms of life may die that others might flourish, this does not make them any

less wedded to fantasies of human (if not private property) sovereignty, or to

hierarchies of care between distant human others and their closer photosynthesising

friends. Simply stated, the obvious objection to her post-humanist ethical arguments

about vibrancy might not be the performative one (the human is the one being post-

human) but the more hoary naturalistic fallacy, where the shouldcannot be inferred


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from the is. In other words, if it is wrongheaded to read of regressive racial or gender

politics from a static, feminized nature, it is unclear why reading a hopeful micropolitics

of care from indeterminate naturecultures is any different.2Of course, it may be deemed

superior if it helps to cultivate more vital, flourishing worlds, but Bennet actually givesus fewer tools to make such normative judgements than, say, Latours (2004) Franco-

democratic multi-natural experiments.

Vibrant Matters sense of humility is extremely attractive and a logical riposte to

hubristic visions of global re-ordering (it reminded me of Mortons (2010) prescription

for dealing with the anthropological machine: not to smash it or to rethink it, but to

crawl through the dirt and out from underneath its crushing weight). But perhaps the

reliance on micro-politics of sensibility-formation (Bennet 2010b, p. 101) risks

downplaying the extent to which our affective and sensible horizons and indeed our

spirit have been so thoroughly worked over by neo-liberalism. The bigger unknown

behind her politics is the mechanism through which our sensibilities and receptivity to

the intertwined vibrancy of matter can be changed is it to be prompted in those who

read her book? Other similar books? To be fair, these are extremely annoying questions:

the kind that would be asked by Zizeks boring idiots who invariably pipe up at the end

of his speeches, Enough of the talking, what practical action needs to be taken!?

Clearly, this is a book of theory and utopia, not political strategy. Refusing to go there is

part of the task in healing our thinking, to dampen our world-engineering fantasies that

someone will give us the magic ten bullet-point plan to save the planet. However, by not

at least indicating a direction of travel, Bennet opens herself up to the charge that she

does not take her own political project seriously enough. I say this not because she

advocates it loosely, as one promising avenue, but because she has not paid sufficient

empirical attention to those environmentalists who should be awkward allies but are

dismissed for cleaving to Nature instead of a vigorous materiality (p. 111). Her idea of

environmentalism seems limited to a Sierra Club vision of wilderness: it excludes

hipster urban greening in Detroit, radical movements coalescing against carbon

offsetting or bio-fuels in Latin America, urban jesters protesting BPs sponsorship of the

2 Bennet in fact outlines the need to attend to the oppressive and cruel potentialities of

naturalisms that draw together the ecological and the political as a future avenue for

research (2011, p. 406).


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London 2012 Olympics, peri-urban agriculture in Rio or Botswana, a growing re-wilding

movement to name but a few. Similarly, it might have been instructive to engage with

the successes and failures of recent anti-capitalist rhizomatic micro-politics. These

diverse movements have a vigour and vitality of their own particular brand that cannotbe simply invalidated because they are stuck in the aporias of human subjectivity and

sovereignty. In the end, then, some readers may feel that Bennet offers more of an

ecological politics of radically decentred humanity and hope-full but endless,

indeterminate engagements with vital matter, than a properlypoliticised ecology.

Since its publication there has been something of a backlash against the

throbbing, evanescent, pulsating, libidinal economy of energetic life at the centre of

Bennets new materialism.3 What, for instance, of inert materials that are not open to

ontological politics, such as rocks which just sit there, hanging out in the world (Clark

2011)? What too are we to make of those absent others quietly dying in dark corners of

the earth? There are many materials with vitality visible only at particular spatial and

temporal scales; to appreciate them may require us to re-learn Haraways trick of

appropriating regressive tools of technoscientific capital such as planetary surveillance

or the tough love zoo (Haraways recent work and her ethico-political challenges to

learn to kill well and share suffering receive only a little attention in the book). So the

main charge against Bennets vitalist ontology is that it fails to fully think through

constitutive exclusions the virtual, the undecidable, and the withheld. To paraphrase

Ingold (2011), might stillness and quiet be the medium through which we experience

vibrancy?

Bennets work contrasts in tone with Mortons (2010) contemporaneous book,

The Ecological Thought. Instead of vibrancy, Morton emphasises the power of matters

reserve. Mortons mesh, self-assembling sets of interrelationships (p. 83), is more or

less synonymous to that of assemblage, except grander; for Morton, there is no bottom

to the mesh, which is infinite and fractal, reaching in both directions, and comprised of

absences (like a net) as well as connections between dissimilar strangers. For Morton,

when we encounter vibrant matter we do not really meetit. Rather we encounter

strangeness behind that meeting the sense that we can never fully know the thing we

3 It is one of the main lines of critique shared by the authors of a review forum in

Dialogues in Human Geography2011 1(3): 390-405.


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meet. Drawing on Darwin and biosemiotics, Morton argues that camouflage, deception

and disguise are the stock of life and that the stranger that we are yet to meet does not

cease being strange once we meet them indeed, we see ever-more the strangeness

that exists in every creature. There is no time when we can declare someone orsomething known and understood fully: the more we know, the more we sense the

void (2010, p. 80) and, since we sense this void within us too, we have a grounds for

compassion and solidarity. As I have noted, Bennet also points to strangeness, to how

something always escape[s] quantification, prediction, control (p. 63). Morton shares

with Bennet a sense that ethics is performative and promissory ethical living will

never arrive but his dark ecology contrasts sharply against Bennets celebration of

positive vitality. Bennet argues that our lives are full enough of Spinozas sad powers

and that a mood of wonder at the creativity of life gives a more positive bright ecology

(2011, p. 405). Morton, by contrast, wants more negativity: depression, melancholia and

passivity (he would rather be a zombie than a tree hugger (2007, p. 188)) are part of

his mesh ecology.

Indeed, if ontology gives us our politics (though that is open to question as I have

already noted), then attending to that which escapes life or its constitutive outside

might lead us to absence, withdrawal, passivity, sleep, depression; all those processes

that are generally seen as anti-political. But and here is the rub given that eco-

planetary crisis is caused by an excess of matter and accelerating metabolism, perhaps

non-politics might be attractive: instead of cutting (adding through division), re-

orienting flows, or adding new things to the world, might a deeper politics be found by

resting in quiet inaction, passivity and withdrawal? Dark ecology is attractive in that it

multiplies the ways we can do this: Bennet may be correct that there is little to love

about alienated life on a dead planet and that frugality is too simple a maxim (p. 122)

but dark ecology allows us to pay attention to more than matters positive vitality; to

what might be absent and to what might lurk beyond the sensible. These are questions

that interest Bennet too; they are part of an on-going project to learn to live better with

the vitalisms of all Earthlings. She concludes Vibrant Matterby noting that sometimes

the good will require individuals and collectivities to ramp down their activeness

sometimes it will call for grander, more dramatic and violent expenditures (p. 122). The

work to be done, then, is to examine vital materialisms (or naturecultures, or bits of the

mesh, or assemblages) in their historical and geographical specificity, their brightness


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and their darkness, in order to imagine and practice better worldliness. We can only

hope that Bennets next contribution to this project is as thought-provoking, beautiful

and vital as Vibrant Matter.

Reviewed by Franklin Ginn, Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh, UK

Franklin Ginn is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh, with

research interests in everyday cultures of nature. He is currently completing a book on

more-than-human ethics, memory and suburban gardening. His newest work focuses on

nature and apocalypse.

References

Bennet, J. (2010b) Interview with Jane Bennet, in Gratton, P. Interviews with Graham

Harman, Jane Bennett, Tim Morton, Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant and Paul Ennis.

Speculations 1: 96-102.

Bennet, J. (2011) Author Response. Dialogues in Human Geography1(3): 390-405.

Bingham, N. and Hinchliffe, S. (2008) Reconstituting Natures: Articulating Other Modes

of Living Together. Geoforum 39(1): 83-87.

Braun, B. (2008) Environmental Issues: Inventive Life. Progress in Human Geography

32(5): 667-679.

Bridge, G. (2012) Politics of State: Oil, Deep Time and the Significance of Liquids.

Presentation at Political Geology: Stratigraphies of Power, 21 June 2012,

Lancaster University.

Clark, N. (2011) Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. London: Sage.

Harvey, D. (2006) Editorial: The Geographies of Critical Geography. Transactions of the

Institute of British Geographers 31: 409412.

Ingold, T. (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London:

Routledge.

Latour, B. (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press.


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Mitchell, T. (2011) Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London & New

York: Verso.

Morton, T. (2007) Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.

Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press.Morton, T. (2010) The Ecological Thought. Cambridge & London: Harvard University

Press.

Pettman, D. (2011) Human Error: Species Being and Media Machines. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

Whatmore, S. (2002) Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces. London: Sage.

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Light or Dark Political Ecologies