Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (review)

A pile of trash, a scrap of metal, an overtaxed energy grid, hungry worms, and embryonic stem cells: these are just some of the main characters in Jane Bennett’s short though ambitious work that lays out her theory of vital materiality. While at first glance, a book combining such subjects might appear to be apolitical, Bennett’s work, and particularly her first chapter, makes clear the deeply political stakes of her project. This is a book that seeks to complicate the terms “life” and “matter,” but even more importantly, it seeks to define a politics—one that Bennett calls “vital materiality”—which questions the distinction that is at the heart of the American system: namely, that human beings are the supreme and most important life form. Ultimately, underlying her political philosophy is that if—as humans—we accept on a political level that all things—living and not—are in Gilles Deleuze’s words “ontologically one, formally diverse,” then, according to Bennett, “human decency and a decent politics” would emerge (p. xi).

Despite appearances that Vibrant Matter continues the posthumanist tradition, Bennett insists that at the heart of her concern is human interest. She explains in her introduction: “My claims here are motivated by a self-interested or conative concern for human survival and happiness: I want to promote greener forms of human culture and more attentive encounters between people-materialities and thing-materialities” (p. ix; emphasis in original). In other words, and as she emphasizes in her concluding chapter, we should be motivated to adopt a vital materialist politics that no longer privileges humans—or any living forms—over seemingly inanimate matter, because ultimately such a politics will make our human lives better. While Bennett may be critiqued for admitting that at the end, the qualitative life of human beings is most important to her, she seems to readily admit throughout her work that to be human is to be unable to escape being human. Therefore, while at the heart of her argument is a posthumanist claim that de-privileges humanity as the center through which all political systems must be understood, Bennett concludes—with much nuance—that as human beings, we cannot help but center ourselves, even if we claim to do otherwise.

As part of her methodology in constructing vital materialism, she wants to emphasize that poststructuralist thought—from Foucault to Deleuze to Derrida and even to Thoreau—contains a theory of materialism, even if it is not one that traditional Marxists might recognize. However, she distinguishes between the materialism she pursues and what she calls “historical materialism” as the difference between a resistance to anthropocentrism and a reliance on the human as the center. (Whether Marx would agree with her interpretation is another story.) Her goal is to give voice to the moment when things detach from bodies into the absolute. Her project, as she explicitly emphasizes, is importantly ontological, but not epistemological. In other words, she wants to point us to the places where things are and have force, and to give language to those places so that we can see and perhaps even feel the force of (their) motion. By doing so, she begins the work of erasing the distinctions that are often drawn between living and nonliving things. As she explains: “One moral of the story is that we are also nonhuman and that things, too, are vital players in the world” (p. 4).

Key to her critique is the labeling of American materialism as “antimaterialism”; in other words, she suggests that as the life cycles of things we purchase have become shorter and shorter, we are now driven by an economy that privileges throwing things away to make room for new things. Yet in this pile of discarded American trash, she does not identify waste, but what she labels “thing-power,” or “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (p. 6). Trash, in her...