This week we read chapters one and two of Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett. I enjoyed reading this text, even if this was the longest one we've read so far I felt that this text spoke to me more and I got many good ideas and thoughts while reading. I will try to break it down into sections and discuss what I can connect to within the text.
Drawing on how I saw the text, maybe there isn't only one way to look at things. See it from different angles, directions and so on.
(Click on the underlined words to go to a link about the word or a source/reference)
Chapter 1, Pages 2-4 Thing-Power, or the Out-side
This paragraph introduces us to the idea that everything has its own power to a certain extent. "Every nonhuman body shares with every human body a conative nature". This sentence represents that well, even if there is a plastic bottle it can't really decide what it is doing but it still has an intention to do something, such as holding water to be consumed. Bennett refers to Spinoza in this part of the text and then moves on to an Idea by Henry David Thoreau called the Wild. "Wildness was not quite-not-human force that addled and altered human and their bodies." A third person and their idea is Hent de Vries with "the absolut" and when you look into the word ab (off) + solver (to loosen) you get an understanding of the idea of the word. "A some-thing that is not an object of knowledge, that is detached or radically free form representation, and thus no-thing at all." There is an effect in the detachment, an example is a Catholic Preast that performs an act of ab-solution by separating the sins from the soul. They now stand apart with a life of their own. This is something that we as ("knowing bodies") humans quickly look past in objects and miss "what they can do" as Bennet describes it in the text.
Chapter 1, Pages 4-8 Thing-power I: Derbis, Thing-power II: Odradek's Nonorganic Life
I want to discuss the part of the text with many stories as one because it refers to different texts; Bennett's own thoughts and experiences on pages 4-5, "The Meadowlands" by Robert Sullivan on page 6, Manuel De Landa's notes on how inorganic matter can "self-organize" on page 7, "odradek's Nonorganic life" pages 7-8.
At the beginning of this term, we read Odradek you can read my initial thoughts in my previous blog post. Not knowing why we read the text or how to think about it made me see different things than what I now see after reading this text. I can see how it blends in with the other texts that I mentioned in the paragraph above. They all describe how non-human 'things' communicate and tell things without having the "knowing bodies" as humans do. As Bennett was shown "our gaze, prompted by the experience of our own body, will discover in all other 'objects' the miracle of expression." An expression from the objects that are showing us and telling us things in their own way. I particularly like the example with Robert Sullivan "The ... garbage hills are alive ..." almost everything that humans use somehow ends up in a landfill, we don't take care of what we have anymore and the garbage hills are possibly telling us to stop. Sullivan mentions the toxic streams from the garbage hills, one thing thrown away leads to another and so on and it all just follows like a domino effect. To look at De Landa's notations "even the humblest forms of matter and energy have the potential for self-organization". It is mentioned that systems "choose one path of development rather than another" and it made me think of my slime mould experimentation from last term. A thing that doesn't have a brain but functions at an incredibly high efficacy level of finding its way in the most efficient way possible. It also refers back to how everything in nature behaves, like mycelium which I looked into last term and how it all interconnects. Going back to Odradek and how this 'thing' that is Odradek is described as alive but still not; "Wooden yet lively, verbal yet vegetal, alive yet inert." It helps us see how things become something or communicate something with humans.
Chapter 1, Pages 10-13 Thing-Power IV: Walking, Talking Minerals
This chapter helped me to come up with an idea for my table conversion. "But is this evanescence a property of the stuff or people? Was the thing-power of the debris I encountered but a function of subjective and intersubjective connotations, memories, and affects that had accumulated around my ideas of these items?" Is humans the centre of these things? It is with my mind I give life to non-human objects life? Does this work for animals and plants and other natural elements too? To a certain extent, I think that humans try to control non-human 'things' as much as we possibly can. This is the first idea I want to represent in my table conversion. I will discuss this further later. Continuing with the text I want to talk about a quote that I found interesting from François Lyotard "Humankind is taken for a complex material system; consciousness, for an effect of language; and language for highly complex material system." In this way, I think that humans are similar to any other animal on this planet except we have the ability to use our language in a very complex way, as well as our soul. If I think about how nature works, it communicates with all the elements around it. If a tree is in need of water the mycelium helps the trees to communicate and help each other.
"Each human is a heterogeneous compound of wonderfully vibrant, dangerously vibrant, matter"... "The ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such. Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploration or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such as enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans".
If we see everything as an entangled web, we can start to see that by all things being connected, we can't destroy one part of the web without harming another part or oneself. What my mind wandered to in this part is how we as humans also act in certain ways and it in turn has an impact on our planet. The more actions we take, nature will react and possibly hurt us back or benefit us depending on if it is an action with a positive or negative impact.
Chapter 1, Pages 13-19 Thing-power V: Thing-power and Andorno's Nonidentity, The Native Ambition of Vital Materialism
The pedagogy by Adorno's non-identity is an interesting way to make you think about New Materialism and thing-power. There is both intellectual and aesthetic exercise. The intellectual one has the goal to understand or realize something that might not be known. The way to do so is by critical reflection and it will "intensify the felt presence of nonidentity." In the text, the "discriminating man" will see even the smallest of things and will pay very close aesthetic attention to see the objects' "qualitative moments." My understanding is that this becomes a way of observing things, by critically looking at them you could start to ask more questions and be more curious to understand how they are or what they have to tell even tho they have a negative dialect. The second technique is to use your "utopian imagination." I find it interesting that you turn the first negative thoughts into possibilities. The object has been cheated their reality but is visible in each one of them. The third technique is to admit a "playful element" to the way that you're thinking and to play the fool. Even tho the negative dialectician "knows how far he remains from "knowing nonidentity," and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely." I see this as a way to be confident in what you see and have hope in things. Even if you don't see it or "what is denied him" he must still keep his "clownish traits".
"Andoro also acknowledges that human experience nevertheless includes encounters with an out-side that is active, forcefully, and (quasi)independent."..."What is manifest arrives through humans but not entirely because of them." This part of the text tells us that by having this shared experience with the out-side we "treat nonhumans - animals, plants, earth, even artifacts, and commodities - more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically." In this way if we think about climate change we would have a completely different understanding of what humans are doing to the planet. If people had this out-side perspective we would be more careful, strategic, and more ecological.
Chapter 2, Pages 20-22 The Agency of Assemblages, Affective Bodies
Here we start to look at the fact that "an actant never really acts alone." There is always some "collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces." It is natural to be affected by other things, Spinoza has a "mode" that is neither subject nor object, he calls it "Deus sive Natura" (God or Nature). That made me think about whether God represents human-made actions/things, Nature is things that happen without human involvement. I am not sure this is what Spinoza means but that is how I thought about God or Nature, it would put it in perspective for my focus If humans try to play god over nature instead of in balance with nature.
Chapter 2, Pages 23-28 What is Assemblage?, The Blackout
"Bodies enhance their power in or as a heterogeneous assemblage", all bodies are different, and we enhance our power in or as the differences. Everything around us is participating in how we see and do things and that is why we all are very different from each other. My memories, experiences, and places, followed by sounds, smells, my eye vision etc. all play a big role in how I am as a human. All of these factors are assemblages, we are one part of the "network, meshwork, Empire." An assemblage is described as having a limit or an end but keeps the history of the formation it had. It is not only human factors and how we are or behave that are important in an assemblage, but the non-humans are very powerful actors, such as: "Electrons, trees, wind, fire, electromagnetic fields." That leads us to the next part "The Blackout".
Relating to everything discussed in the previous paragraph the story of how the twenty-four thousand square kilometres that affected 50 million people just shut down over one hundred power plants, including twenty-two nuclear reactors. Some people anthropomorphize the happening "the grid's heart fluttered....[the grid] lives and occasionally dies by its own mysterious rouls." Whereas the materialist would understand it as "a volatile mix of coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legalisation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood - to name just a few actants." It is interesting to see how different people see the world, which relates back to all of the actors of how our own bodies are assembled. For me I think that there must have been some action happening for this to happen, it can't just stop working out of nowhere. It is explained that "The grid includes various valves and circuit breakers that disconnect parts from the assemblage whenever they are threatened by excessive heat." So that would mean that the grid was protecting the system from overheating. Without that safety to shut down there could possibly have been a fire from overheating. The consumers who need more and more electricity without understanding the consequences when they light their lamps and have their fridges on etc. have a big role in this grid and how well it functions. In today's wasteful society, we rarely consider the whole lifespan of an object or an action we take. Some people may think that it is just one... it's not that much, but when you put everything together it ends up being a lot. Another factor is the companies who sell electricity to "geographically distant locations. This greatly increased the long-distance trading of electronic power - and greatly increased the load in transmission wires" So selling this to possibly earn more money or to help places with not enough electricity contributed to the overheating. It is quoted in the text that "freedom in a commons brings ruin to all." Unfortunately, some take more than others and don't think of the consequences for others in need, or they don't care as long as they have what they want. I could relate that back to climate change, humans take and take and that affects the nature and animals that we share this planet with. We have not shared the planet equally with our other co-habitants. Humans can not control everything happening "Electricity sometimes goes where we send it, and sometimes it chooses its path on the spot, in response to the other bodies it encounters and the surprising opportunities for actions and interactions that they afford."
Chapter 2, Page 28-31 The Willing Subject and the Intersubjective Field
If we look closer at the doer (an agent), it brings us to an intersubjective field. "Willing agents can act freely only in support of evil: never are they able by themselves to enact the good, for that always requires the intervention of divine grace, a force beyond human control."..." The propensity for evil lives inside the will itself". But is that something that happens as a free human agency or a passive, deterministic matter? There is a big focus on the human will or intentions, and that puts "too much weight on human will". Coole's spectrum is mentioned as "...it recognizes only human powers: human biological and neurological processes, human personalities, human social practices and institutions. Coole limits the spectrum..." Bennet disagrees with this statement and I agree with Bennet. She says about electricity: "but reactive power will also have to do its part, on condition that it is not asked to travel too far." I believe that humans can't ask too much from non-human actors, for them to do their part well. It has always been an "interplay of human and nonhuman forces" with an "interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity." This is something that humans have become more aware of today.
Chapter 2, Page 31-34 Efficacy, Trajectory, and Causality
Theodor Andoro thinks about efficacy, trajectory, and causality. This is concerning a concept that we can only 'circle' around like "a swarm of affiliates". Non-identity is mentioned as an effect when you get too dizzy from circling a concept and you can not ignore the real anymore.
Efficacy is pointed to as "the creativity of agency, to a capacity to make something new appear or occur." There is a swarm of energy and strengths at play. As I understand it we have to identify the contours of the swarm and see the relations between all the different parts in the swarm. The power is not only focused on humans but on non-human bodies too.
Trajectory is also a part of the agency, but is more a "directionality or movement away". This relates to a human or divine that is capable of choice and intention, so the goal takes a direction. The "consciousness-centered thinking by figuring trajectory as "messianicity". Messianicity is in the open-ended promissory quality of a claim, image, or entity." These alternative thoughts from Jacques Derrida is "condition of possibility of phenomenality: things in the world appear to us at all only because they tantalize and hold us in suspense, alluding to a fullness that is elsewhere, to a future that, apparently, is on its way." It makes me think that we are just waiting for something to happen and that is, described in the text, what being alive is. It should go beyond and surprise a determinate anticipation.
Causality is how I understand, how things happen and what makes it happen."Alongside and inside singular human agents there exists a heterogeneous series of actants with partial, overlapping, and conflicting degrees of power and effectivity." There is also a quote from Connolly and one part of it stood out to me: "[Third] ... a series of ... feedback loops operate between first and second levels to generate the stabilized result. The new emergent is shaped not only by external forces that become infused into it but also by its own previously under-trapped capacities for reception and self-organization." To continue and to link what comes next in the text is that the process of things happening is caused by multiple things. One thing can happen and by the next thing that happens, we can understand the first. So the different levels can show us what has happened and only then can we put words on it. The second action could be to decide to see what happened and then history can be traced back in words.
Many factors happened before the "crystalization", but when that happens, how it has been shaped along the way can be seen differently. Some say that "a sound, a last straw, a shoe, a blackout, a human intention." can shape the process. But the intentions of the event are key factors.
Chapter 2, Page 34-35 Shi
Shi, on the webpage linked here talks about shi as poetry and it mentions; "Ancient Chinese used shi to connect humans with nature, voice aspirations, and give expression to emotions. It embodied the spirit and aesthetic pursuits of literature and art in ancient China, which is very different from the West, which only sees poetry as a category of literature."
Bennett talks about human agency and that it remains a mystery. If we don't know how we operate a human agency, how can we know how non-humans operate? It makes me think about how we as humans can design for non-humans (animals and nature) when we only see things from our individual perspectives as humans.
"An assemblage owes its agenetic capacity to the vitality of the materialities that constitute it. Something like this congregational agency is called shi in the Chinese tradition. Shi helps to "illuminate something that is usually difficult to capture in discourse: namely the kind of potential that originates not in human initiative but instead results from the very disposition of things." Shi is the style, energy, propensity, trajectory or élan inherent to a specific arrangement of things."
Shi can be obvious or subtle in different situations. In a milieu where there is a mobile configuration, such as a school there could be "people, insects, odors, ink, electrical flows, air currents, caffeine, tables, chairs, fluids, and sound." Their shi might only last for a short amount of time.
To understand Shi better I asked Ecosia AI Chat what Shi helps to do. It answered:
"Shi" can help in various ways depending on the specific context. Here are a few examples:
Communication: In the context of poetry, "shi" can be a means of artistic expression and communication. It allows individuals to convey emotions, ideas, and observations through carefully crafted words and imagery.
Cultural Preservation: Classical Chinese poetry, known as "shi," plays a significant role in preserving and transmitting Chinese cultural heritage. It serves as a way to connect with the past, understand traditional values, and appreciate the beauty of the language.
Personal Reflection: Writing or reading poetry, including "shi," can be a form of personal reflection and self-expression. It can provide a creative outlet for individuals to explore their thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
Appreciation of Language: Engaging with "shi" can deepen one's appreciation for the richness and nuances of the Chinese language. It allows individuals to explore the unique characteristics of Chinese poetry, such as tonal patterns, imagery, and symbolism.
The answer helped me to see how Shi can do different things for different purposes. Although the main thing is to help you see things and to convey what you see or feel. So Shi can help you connect and understand things that are happening.
Chapter 2, Page 36-38 Political Responsibility and the Agency of Assemblages
Both humans and non-humans "depend on a "fabulously complex" set of speech prostheses." Humans are not the main actant in many of the cases, when it comes to nature growing, we usually have no or a very small part to do with it. The non-human happenings interconnected with humans can't put full responsibility on individuals for their effects and that is what vibrant matter presents.
Humans are a part of the assemblage and on page 38 there is a good example of a person riding a bike. "One can throw one's weight this way or that, inflict the bike in one direction or toward one trajectory motion. But the rider is but one actant operative in the moving whole." That relates to my design idea for the table conversion, the human inside the dress created from the table is the rider but the three points around that human made from the three lags do their part as well, if I move in one way it will react and move in a way that answers to my movement.
That leads me to the next blog post about my idea/design of the "Imbalanced dress".
Photo of the words and my initial thoughts.
Additional thoughts: Everyone believes different things and everyone sees things differently. There can impossibly a right way and a wrong way. What is right for me can be wrong for someone else. We still have some facts and statistics to follow to guide us, but that can also be seen differently, depending on how it is presented and built up and where, when and why.
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