The Pedagogical Power of ThingsToward a Post-Intentional Phenomenology of Unlearning

Jane Bennett's book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things has two overlapping and mutually supportive aims. First, she has a philosophical project: to problematize and hopefully overcome a major bias in Western philosophical thinking that separates life and death, activity and passivity, vibrancy and inertness. As counterintuitive as it may seem, Bennett proposes that brute matter exerts its own power that exists below the human world. Focusing on the "vitality" of things means coming to terms with the "capacity of things … not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own" (viii). This philosophical project is linked directly to an overarching political hypothesis. Bennett argues that one of the causes of the destruction of the natural world and the impending ecological disaster is precisely the Western belief that matter is inactive, a mere resource for human consumption. But, if we see matter as vibrant and powerful then perhaps we will not instrumentalize it or uncritically consume it.

Here I do not want to review possible criticisms of these two projects or their underlying assumptions and arguments. Instead I want to bracket off these lines of inquiry in order to expose and think through another project of this book, one which Bennett only indirectly gestures toward but is nevertheless essential for forming a bridge between the philosophical and political poles of her overall aim. This other project concerns the possibility of an aesthetic pedagogy of things—a new educational practice that would route our collective attention away from issues of cultivating human-centered knowledge, skills, and aptitudes toward a perceptual receptivity and attentiveness to things that fall outside our worldly concerns. I call this an "aesthetic pedagogy" first and foremost because it concerns the sensorial dimension of our experience of things—their ability to gross us out, make us feel uncanny, or provoke weird pleasures that emerge when we recognize the secrete lives of things.

Although much more focused on philosophical and political issues, varieties of speculative realism (including object-oriented, vitalist, and materialist incarnations) do have a weak strain running through them that concerns educational questions. Like Bennett, Ian Bogost ends his book Alien Phenomenology, or What It Is Like to Be a Thing with a gesture toward the meaning and purposes of education. Critical of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) educational policies, Bogost observes that when all art and science are reduced to instrumental ends serving predefined economic functions, then there is no room left in education for the experience of things as such. He writes, "But what if the real obstacle to youthful interest in science arises not from a distaste for mathematics or the natural world but from a latent dissatisfaction with the way science melts the shell of wonder around ordinary objects?" (129). Bogost, like Bennett, sees things as an interruption of anthropocentric (human-centered) educational aims, opening up a space wherein the mere thingliness of the thing can appear in its own right. The goal here is not to reduce things to resources that can be studied in order to improve human worlds. Rather it is to let shine the irreducible material power of things. Of course, such thingly presence can be important for rethinking future political actions, but such actions need to be predicated on a perceptual sensitivity toward the weirdness of things as such.

For both Bennett and Bogost, an aesthetic education in things is essential, yet largely undertheorized. In the rest of this article, I will tease out the complexity of such an education. What is at stake here is an education that does not merely reinforce the human-centered nature of perceptual grasping but rather reveals something about perception itself that is object-centered (or, even better, object-infused). In this sense, things need to be seen as having pedagogical power of their own, as nonhuman teachers that do work on our perceptual common-sense orientations and bodily comportments. Instead of human perception shaping how things appear, I want...