Jane Bennett

The Force of Things Steps toward an Ecology of Matter

This essay seeks to give philosophical expression to the vitality, willfullness, and recalcitrance possessed by nonhuman entities and forces. It also considers the ethico-political import of an enhanced awareness of “thing-power.” Drawing from Lucretius, Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, and others, it describes a materialism of lively matter, to be placed in conversation with the historical materialism of Marx and the body materialism of feminist and cultural studies. Thing-power materialism is a speculative onto-story, an admittedly presumptuous attempt to depict the nonhumanity that flows around and through humans. The essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of the ecological implications of thing-power.

The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout

Globalization names a state of affairs in which Earth, no longer simply an ecological or geological category, has become a salient unit of political analysis. More than locality or nation, Earth is the whole in which the parts (e.g., finance capital, CO2 emissions, refugees, viruses, pirated DVDs, ozone, human rights, weapons of mass destruction) now circulate. There have been various attempts to theorize this complex, gigantic whole and to characterize the kind of relationality obtaining between its parts. Network is one such attempt, as is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s empire.1 My term of choice to describe this whole and its style of structuration, is, following Gilles Deleuze, the assemblage.2

“How is it, Then, That We Still Remain Barbarians?”: Foucault, Schiller, and the Aestheticization of Ethics

The wholesale aestheticization of society had found its grotesque apotheosis for a brief moment in fascism, with its panoply of myths, symbols, and orgiastic spectacles.... But in the post-war years a different form of aestheticization was also to saturate the entire culture of late capitalism, with its fetishism of style and surface, its culture of hedonism and technique, its reifying of the signifier and displacement of discursive meaning with random intensities. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic

Deceptive Comfort: The Power of Kafka's Stories

FRANZ KAFKA HAD POLITICAL OPINIONS he was, for example, drawn for a time to socialism -and it is likely that these judgnents were based in a larger framework of understanding, in a political theory. This framework did not seem to be of much interest to him. It is not the subject of this essay. Kafka did not write political theory, but perhaps his stories express one? Not if a political theory includes a more or less coherent set of claims about political authority, legitimacy, identification, consent, obligation, dissent, oppression, or freedom. It is difficult to discern a systematic political vision in the stories or at least to rearticulate it outside of them. It is not simply that his texts are amenable to a variety of plausible interpretations; Kafkas writing, as widely noted, resists thematic interpretation per se. Just as one begins to formulate a thesis about its political vision (or any thesis, for that matter), hitherto unthematized elements jump out and confound the effort. Kafkas stories are, I think, relevant to political theory in two ways. First, they evoke experiences of frustration, exhaustion, and interference in a way that challenges the image of power derived from more theoretical approaches. Second, by calling attention to links between contemporary theories of power and certain ideals of self, they offer insight into what I will call the existential function of theory. My tasks in this essay participate in paradox: I try to gather insights about power that I believe to have come to the surface through decentered and decentering stories; I seek to articulate (in theoretical language) just how this

Whitman’s Sympathies

This essay explores five figures of “sympathy” at work in Walt Whitman’s writings, with a focus on Leaves of Grass. Of particular note is the way Whitman presents sympathy as not only a moral sentiment but also a more-than-human natural force that draws bodies together. Sympathy was a key term in the lexicon of nineteenth-century American political debates, and we find in Whitman and others elements of a non-modern sense of sympathy as a vital or physical force operating below, through, and beyond human bodies.

Response to Thomas Princen's review of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

Tom Princen and I share many commitments—to treading lightly on the earth, to the political potential of everyday habits, to practicing the difficult art of countercultural persuasion, to a political economy of sustainability, and to the advantages of short and earnest books.

Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order . By Thomas Princen

Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order . By Thomas Princen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 224p.

Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

22.95. When you are trying to get someone to embrace new habits of mind and body, like, say, those of ecological sustainability, it sometimes works to appeal to common sense. Thomas Princen employs this stragegy of persuasion—he also invokes enlightened self-interest, but I think he prefers to appeal to common sense—in his bold, tolerant, honest, and powerful short book. To be more specific, he invokes a set of minor or currently rather quiet “segments” (p. 171) inside the mixed bag that is American common sense. Common sense is not, after all, a stable block but a conglomeration of diverse parts, some of which do not fit at all well with the others. And it is the heterogeneity of the common store of wisdom that makes possible Princens reorganization of it. He highlights some underutilized segments of the “old normal” and harnesses their power to the project of building a society that “takes infinite material growth as impossible,” “embraces limits” (p. 187), and is devoted to “living well by living well within our means” (p. 124).