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Bennett, J. (1994b) Thoreau’s Nature Ethics, Politics, and the Wild. (New York University Press: New York). PS If you are interested in Bennett, you'll enjoy this brief post by Graham Harman, where he writes:
Bennett, Jane (2012), "Stones", in Sæbjörnsson, Egill; Herzogenrath, Bernd (eds.), Stones According to Egill Sæbjörnsson, New York: Revolver Publishing / Continuum, pp.27–36, ISBN 9781441163868 Bennett, Jane, 1957-". Library of Congress . Retrieved 25 July 2014. Her Unthinking faith and enlightenment, c1987: CIP t.p. (Jane Bennett) data sheet (b. 7/31/57) Vibrant Matter is a lucid and compelling account of how materiality, too often considered as an inert substance, can be rethought as a plethora of things that form assemblages of human and nonhuman actors (or actants, to use the term Bennett takes from Bruno Latour). When humans are but one force in a potentially unbounded network of forces, everyday phenomena no longer seem so quotidian (now wonder Bennett's earlier work was on enchantment in everyday life). Power grids, refuse atop a storm drain, stem cells and fatty foods are some of the things she explores as vibrant matter, as a web of objects with agency -- and if this effectivity is at times aleatory, it is seldom negligible and always a challenge to anthropocentricism. She concludes the book with what she calls a "kind of Nicene Creed for would-be materialists" -- and that religious designation is only partly tongue in cheek. Vital materialism is a kind of spiritualism without gods, a way of restoring sacredness to worldliness. The creed: Bennett, Jane; Connolly, William (2012), "The Crumpled Handkerchief", in Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), Time and History in Deleuze and Serres, New York: Continuum, pp.153–172, ISBN 9781441163868 How’s it in?” Bennett asked. She turned to me. “Try to pull it out!” I leaned down, grabbed an orange handful, and yanked. It wouldn’t budge.
Student & Faculty Resources
Bennett, Jane; Shapiro, Michael J. (2002). The Politics of Moralizing. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415934787. 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. KKL: Within a short genealogy of materialism – from Epicurus to the most recent accounts by Bruno Latour –“What kind of materialist are you…”
Bennett, Jane (18 August 2010). "On the call from outside". The Immanent Frame. Social Science Research Council. Overall, I am attracted by the ideas Bennett presents. They lead to new ways of thinking about things and artifacts, and for those of us who are used to think about embodied interaction, user experience, etc. many of the ideas are not that far fetched. I am curious to see how this and similar new philosophical attempts will be translated into more concrete activities and approaches relevant for design. This new evolution of ideas concerned with the status of 'things' and of the material world is highly interesting and with Bennett's work we have another example of why we need it and how it could be used.” — Erik Stolterman, Transforming Grounds blog
Table of Contents
Similarly, you can say that a bag of potato chips Is acting on your hand and mouth to make you keep eating chips (Ch 3), but again this is a personification and actually DISTRACTS from questions of how the potato chip makers have engineered the texture and flavor to create this effect. In this case the “vibrant matter” approach (locating agency in the chips rather than in the manufacturer or eater) seems complicit in corporate mystification. “These chips make me eat them!” is the basis for an ad campaign, not a description of reality. 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. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. 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).
Forthcoming) "Interview with Jane Bennett". LA+: Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture (11 (Vitality)). Spring 2020. How elating I found reading Vibrant Matter, with its eloquent vision of an ethics of the nonhuman. Bennett argues for a perceptual style open to the appearance of thing-power: we who study the texts and objects of a remote age can get behind that, I think. Indeed, for those of us for whom time doesn't simply pass into lostness we are already behind it, still feeling the power of history's things, which didn't know they were supposed to be still. “ — Jeffrey J. Cohen, In the Middle blog Bennett, Jane (2002). Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (2nded.). Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780742521414. Bennett, Jane (September 2016). "Whitman's sympathies". Political Research Quarterly. 69 (3): 607–620. doi: 10.1177/1065912916656824. S2CID 151664131. Bennett is a philosopher and political theorist. But her intellectual work is not primarily about creating new theories. In her writing, she expertly distills and juxtaposes the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, Immanuel Kant, Martha Nussbaum, and others, but her goal is often to create a mood. She wants readers to adopt and embody an ethos that makes room for the vitality of matter. In her view, it’s a useful attitude. “Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy or inspiration to enact ecological projects,” she writes. We might find it hard to “contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities.”I read this book because its title seems to have become a catchphrase in articles that a couple of our bright-eyed young grad students keep sending me. So I’m late to the new-materialist party, but this book makes me feel that i didn’t miss much. Bennett, Jane (December 2017). "Mimesis: Paradox or encounter". MLN. 132 (5): 1186–1200. doi: 10.1353/mln.2017.0091. S2CID 165619743. 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. Public lectures she has given include "Impersonal Sympathy", a talk theorizing 'sympathy' in which she considered the alchemist-physician Paracelsus (1493-1541) and Walt Whitman's collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass. [11] In 2015 Bennett delivered the annual Neal A. Maxwell Lecture in Political Theory and Contemporary Politics at the University of Utah entitled “Walt Whitman and the Soft Voice of Sympathy.”
Bennett, Jane (2014), "Systems and Things: A Reply to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton", in Grusin, Richard (ed.), The Nonhuman Turn, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press - forthcoming. Bennett and I left the park and found ourselves in a spooky area beneath an expressway. We decided to walk up a nearby hill, toward a hip neighborhood called Hampden. In front of an extraordinarily ugly apartment building, we ambled to a stop. Bennett was trying to show me something with great enthusiasm. Wearing bright-silver sneakers, she dropped her arms and headed off into the woods. I hastened to keep up with her. Soon, we stumbled upon something we found hard to precisely describe.
Bennett, Jane (2008), "Modernity and its Critics", in Phillips, Anne; Bonnie, Honig; Dryzek, John S. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780199548439 The SINISTER side of this book is that it makes it harder to hold human powers accountable for destructive actions. This is the downside of Bennett’s apparently virtuous and humble goal of de-centering human agency, intentions, and actions while elevating non-human factors. The oil-soaked pelican and the polluted water DO deserve as much respect and value and protection as humans. But I don’t believe we’ll achieve that by declaring them to be equal participants in an “assemblage” with the oil company whose tanker poisoned their environment. To really get out of the human-world correlate, you have to be able to say something about “world-world” relations too: or rather, thing-thing relations... I’m not a scientist, but I believe the movement of electricity around a power grid is most usefully explained by physics and chemistry - you could write a poem about the electricity “choosing” or “deciding” which way to flow (Ch 2), but this personification will not help anybody make more sustainable energy policies or more effective regulations.
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