Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (A John Hope Franklin Center Book)

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Bennett, Jane (2002), "The Moraline Drift", in Bennett, Jane; Shapiro, Michael J. (eds.), The Politics of Moralizing, New York: Routledge, pp.11–26, ISBN 9780415934787 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.

This past fall, I met Bennett at a coffee shop near the Johns Hopkins campus. Sixty-five, with coiffed silver hair and cat’s-eye glasses, she sat at a table near the window reading the Zhuangzi, one of the two most important texts of Taoism, the Chinese school of thought that emphasizes living in harmony with the world. “The coffee isn’t very good here, but the people are nice,” she told me, conspiratorially. She took out her phone. “I have to show you a picture.” She turned the screen toward me, revealing a photo of two dead rats lying on the pavement—an image at odds with her kindly-neighbor looks. “I was walking by the university, and this is what I found,” she said. I leaned closer. The rats, who had drowned in a rainstorm, lay in artful counterpoint, as though posing for a still-life. Bennett, J. (2004) ‘The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter’ in Political Theory 32, 3: 347–372. a b Watson, Janell (October 2013). "Eco-sensibilities: interview with Jane Bennett". Minnesota Review. 81 (1): 147–158. doi: 10.1215/00265667-2332147. S2CID 145051920. Because Bennett’s objectives are both philosophical and political, she offers two suggestions for fostering a discernment that will temper ontological anthropocentrism. . . . Bennett, through her actionable approach, successfully strays from critical theory’s popular method of ‘demystification,’ a method that leaves ethics out to dry.” — Wesley Mathis, Communication Design Quarterly Bennett, Jane (Winter 2001). "Commodity fetishism and commodity enchantment". Theory & Event. 5 (1). doi: 10.1353/tae.2001.0006. S2CID 144361800.

Weber, M. (1981) From MaxWeber: Essays in Sociology. Translated, edited and with an Introduction by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. (Oxford University Press: New York). 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.

Vibrant Matter promises to invigorate ethical and political judgment by attuning us to the material world, to ourselves, in new ways. Bennett wisely encourages us to practice such judgments without the banisters of deadening binaries of subject-object and human-nonhuman. In this way, we are left with an exciting, but daunting challenge of living democratically as and amidst vital matter.” — Torrey Shanks, Theory & Event Thoreau, H.D. (1968) TheWritings of Henry David Thoreau V: Excursions and Poems. (AMS Press: New York). A weakness of the conversational and sometimes eccentric/awkward voice of the book could be a certain slide toward a truistic rhetoric. Some readers have said that Vibrant Matter makes the rather obvious point that things exercise power over us. There is truth to the criticism, but I don’t mind it. Sometimes the obvious gets lost or buried, in academic and (other) ethical-political forms of speech, and is worth repeating.Bennett invokes Foucault at a number of moments in the book. What I find interesting is that Foucault elucidated the coming into being of the notion of the human as a coherent unit--this was part of the birth of modern discourse. And here we are seeing the idea of the human start to dissolve. It's not the trans-humanism of the technology fetishists (sorry, John Burdett) with the human animal being overtaken by computers, but rather the growing idea that humans aren't a useful unit of analysis. Bennett, Jane (2012), "Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency", in Cohen, Jeffrey (ed.), Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books an imprint of Punctum Books, pp.237–269, ISBN 9780615625355 An] eloquent, carefully reasoned book. . . . With Bennett’s keen insights, I believe I can now show students (and others, maybe even some colleagues) that, through the concept, the sensibility, the practice of vibrant materialities, people in all walks of life can see the sense in treating both nature and artifacts ‘more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically’ (p.18).” — Thomas Princen, Perspectives on Politics 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 Adorno, T. and Horkhiemer, M. (1972) ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ in Edited by T. Adorno and M. Horkhiemer Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cummings. (Herder and Herder: New York).

Bennett, Jane (2012), "Thing-Power", in Elkins, Jeremy; Norris, Andrew (eds.), Truth and Democracy, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp.154–158, ISBN 9780812243796Bennett, J. (2001) The Enchantment of Modern Life: Crossings, Energetics, and Ethics. (Princeton University Press: Princeton). 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, 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)