Forthcoming in BioSocieties

Light or dark political ecologies? Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2010, US$21.95, ISBN: 978-0-8223-4633-3

Jane Bennets aim in Vibrant Matter is to open out an established but still controversial claim about the world to a wider audience. Her proposition is that matter is lively, that vitality is not equivalent to life, and that vitality exceeds human orderings and must be considered a political force. In doing so, the book blends the like of Spinoza, Deleuze, Whitehead, Latour, and other process-oriented philosophers with some newly recruited spectres to the post-humanist cause, such as Driesch and Dewey. Several of the eight short chapters are largely theoretical, while others theorise events, such as encounters with litter in Baltimore, stem cells in evangelical America, power grid failures, earth worms and humus. Despite being merely a bundle of acid-free paper, some glue and a parade of words, Bennets book itself vibrates it succeeds because it makes you feel as well as think: although I suspect not always in ways in which the author might have hoped. Bennets philosophy will be familiar to many. The book is more a consolidation of recent thinking than it is a startling new innovation, echoing ideas espoused in bestsellers like Donna Haraways When Species Meet, Latours Politics of Nature, as well as speculative realism, certain readings of biopolitics, the object-oriented philosophy of Graham Harman, or more off-the-wall contributions to ecological thinking such as Mortons The Ecological Thought (more on this later).1 For those less familiar with the tenets of relational ontology, post-humanism and the more-than-human, Vibrant Matter offers a study in clarity and accessibility. Bennets attention is fixed on the forces of nonhuman actants, how these affect and are affected, how they are assembled into larger forms that have a certain precarious durability, but no telos or predetermined vectors of
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The parlous state of British monograph publishing is exposed here, with the audience

of British-based geographer Nigel Clarks (2011) important Inhuman Nature likely to be restricted by its 63 price tag.

growth and destruction. In this she aims to recuperate all the dead matter that has traditionally been seen as mere stuff moving around at the behest of humanitys life force or political machinations: to theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such, and to detach materiality from the figures of passive, mechanistic or divinely infused substance (p. xiii). Vitality is neither spiritual essence nor inherent property. On the other hand, nor is it some shadowy force that is added to materials. Nor is it even shared relational capacity (as she defined enchantment in her previous work), although its instantiation most often flickers between bodies or things in this book. Moving beyond the beings-that-meet paradigm of her 2001 The Enchantment of Modern Life, Bennet describes how vital materials emerge not just around the human subject, but through a wider arena of more or less predictable events and in their own terms - but not entirely independently. Vibrant matter has a persistence and an existence beyond its appearance liveliness is both emergent from the world and also more than the event of that emergence. She accounts for this more-than-relational character of vibrant matter through notions of assemblage and open wholes whose members never melt into a collective body, but instead maintain an energy potentially at odds with that assemblage (p. 35). Bennet tries to hold on to this sense of both relation and more-thanrelation through the book to gain a non-anthropocentric sense of things meeting other things while remaining indifferent to dreams of human force. Holding on to this sense of the both/and of vibrancy is a difficult trick to pull off. In its largely successful attempt, the book suggests that we should not indulge in ontological abstraction, but rather focus on the coming into being and interactions of events, creatures and assemblages: the indeterminacy of matters vitalities demands that we stick close to the action, in Haraways terms. But here Bennets book flatters to deceive. In several chapters I found myself playing the old anthropological game of guess the key informant: the answer was usually Google or a published news report. In many ways, the methodology (theorising events) reminded me of another classic in more-than-human thought, Sarah Whatmores (2002) Hybrid Geographies, in which the authors interactions with caiman and coyote appear to have taken place entirely though the medium of a computer. Bennet seems more comfortable discussing Lucretius and second-hand media coverage than engaging rigorously with bumpy and lumpy material geographies. Thus, when she claims that the prospective action and small agency of earthworms have made the soils on which human politics has grown,
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she is actually advancing an argument that needs to be made empirically: which worms, where, and when; which politics, where and when? How do the worms eking out a life in the chemically-saturated top soils of suburban America make different politics than did the Duke and Duchess of Sutherlands worms during the eviction of Highland crofters in Scotland in the early nineteenth century? For all its elegance as a worldly philosophy of the power of quiet receptivity to the agential force of things, the book does not feel particularly creaturely, to me at least. On one level, this is a churlish gripe that, in the words of David Harvey, it is far easier to get a publication out of a discussion of someone elses ideas than to go grubbing around in Senegal trying to understand forest practices (2006, p. 410). But on another level, the occlusion of the technical prosthetics of her research practice behind silky prose misses an opportunity to tackle the ways in which our affective horizons have been so pervaded by the pulsating vitality of the screen (on this see Pettman 2011). In addition, making the methodological cut with online reports and media coverage rather than with other ways to deal with vibrant matter that are out there in the world securing it, squeezing it, making it profitable, letting it be nudges Bennet away from a more explicitly political analysis of how vitality has always been emerging towards one of revelation and elegant story-telling. While there are obviously methodological differences between political science (the authors home discipline) and, say, STS or anthropology, greater ethnographic work into the assembling and disassembling of vibrant collectivities might well cast doubt on one of Bennets central claims: that politics has treated matter as dead. Her figure of dead matter in traditional (read: America and NATO allies) political cultures must be made of adamantium straw so that its dissolution by the positive force of vibrant matter is all the more impressive. But geographers have shown, for example, how problems of biosecurity confronting policy makers and chicken farmers emerge from projects that aim to govern the flow of matter (Bingham and Hinchlifffe 2008), or how oil companies are very familiar with the work and energy required to discipline the strange fugitive propensities of non-conventional fuels (Bridge 2012), while political scientists have explored the relations between materialities of fossil fuels and democracy (Mitchell 2011). In fact, bio-political problems of all kinds seem to be proliferating today because of an excess of vitality, rather than too little (Braun 2008). The ways in which vital materials come to determine the world can therefore be as
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problematic as they can be enchanting, while the work of politics in rendering matter mute has never been as successful as Bennet needs to suggest. Nevertheless, Bennets book is powered by impressive normative as well as philosophical energies. Her wager is that dead matter feeds our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption (p. ix). Granted this does little more than echo decades of green and feminist thought, but by arriving with a radically anti-sovereign post-humanism rather than dreams of de-alienation, Bennet can offer a more positive ontology for multiple kinds of Earthling. The political stakes of inculcating (in ourselves? in others? the practical prescriptions remain murky) an aesthetic-affective openness to material vitality are in creating utopian, forward-looking narratives of care, not simply ever-deadlier and deadening critique that is the stock and trade of academia (p. x). One practical technique she commends for this is guarded anthropomorphism as a counter to anthropocentrism. This much-maligned stance allows us to forget for a time what marks our differences and instead attend to similarities between things; we sense how we are reciprocally mixed up with them. This, she suggests, might just prompt less violently acquisitive production and consumption practices and even begin to reshape the self and its interests (p. 122). She contrasts this against the environmental and green movement, which she characterises as being obsessed with Nature, rights and wilderness. There is a welcome experimental tenor to this micro-politics of forging new sensibility; she writes that she is not sure that this new attentiveness will translate into more thoughtful and sustainable public policies, but that she hopes it might (2010b, p. 101). These political hopes are, however, the least convincing aspects of Vibrant Matter. One obvious question is the extent to which the vibrancy of matter is sufficient to move us between ontology and politics. In my own work, for example, while I found that the gardeners of London are attuned to the vibrancy of plants, as well as living in an anticipatory zone where they must make calculations and feelings based on skill and gut about what forms of life may die that others might flourish, this does not make them any less wedded to fantasies of human (if not private property) sovereignty, or to hierarchies of care between distant human others and their closer photosynthesising friends. Simply stated, the obvious objection to her post-humanist ethical arguments about vibrancy might not be the performative one (the human is the one being posthuman) but the more hoary naturalistic fallacy, where the should cannot be inferred
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from the is. In other words, if it is wrongheaded to read of regressive racial or gender politics from a static, feminized nature, it is unclear why reading a hopeful micropolitics of care from indeterminate naturecultures is any different.2 Of course, it may be deemed superior if it helps to cultivate more vital, flourishing worlds, but Bennet actually gives us fewer tools to make such normative judgements than, say, Latours (2004) Francodemocratic multi-natural experiments. Vibrant Matters sense of humility is extremely attractive and a logical riposte to hubristic visions of global re-ordering (it reminded me of Mortons (2010) prescription for dealing with the anthropological machine: not to smash it or to rethink it, but to crawl through the dirt and out from underneath its crushing weight). But perhaps the reliance on micro-politics of sensibility-formation (Bennet 2010b, p. 101) risks downplaying the extent to which our affective and sensible horizons and indeed our spirit have been so thoroughly worked over by neo-liberalism. The bigger unknown behind her politics is the mechanism through which our sensibilities and receptivity to the intertwined vibrancy of matter can be changed is it to be prompted in those who read her book? Other similar books? To be fair, these are extremely annoying questions: the kind that would be asked by Zizeks boring idiots who invariably pipe up at the end of his speeches, Enough of the talking, what practical action needs to be taken!? Clearly, this is a book of theory and utopia, not political strategy. Refusing to go there is part of the task in healing our thinking, to dampen our world-engineering fantasies that someone will give us the magic ten bullet-point plan to save the planet. However, by not at least indicating a direction of travel, Bennet opens herself up to the charge that she does not take her own political project seriously enough. I say this not because she advocates it loosely, as one promising avenue, but because she has not paid sufficient empirical attention to those environmentalists who should be awkward allies but are dismissed for cleaving to Nature instead of a vigorous materiality (p. 111). Her idea of environmentalism seems limited to a Sierra Club vision of wilderness: it excludes hipster urban greening in Detroit, radical movements coalescing against carbon offsetting or bio-fuels in Latin America, urban jesters protesting BPs sponsorship of the

Bennet in fact outlines the need to attend to the oppressive and cruel potentialities of

naturalisms that draw together the ecological and the political as a future avenue for research (2011, p. 406).
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London 2012 Olympics, peri-urban agriculture in Rio or Botswana, a growing re-wilding movement to name but a few. Similarly, it might have been instructive to engage with the successes and failures of recent anti-capitalist rhizomatic micro-politics. These diverse movements have a vigour and vitality of their own particular brand that cannot be simply invalidated because they are stuck in the aporias of human subjectivity and sovereignty. In the end, then, some readers may feel that Bennet offers more of an ecological politics of radically decentred humanity and hope-full but endless, indeterminate engagements with vital matter, than a properly politicised ecology. Since its publication there has been something of a backlash against the throbbing, evanescent, pulsating, libidinal economy of energetic life at the centre of Bennets new materialism.3 What, for instance, of inert materials that are not open to ontological politics, such as rocks which just sit there, hanging out in the world (Clark 2011)? What too are we to make of those absent others quietly dying in dark corners of the earth? There are many materials with vitality visible only at particular spatial and temporal scales; to appreciate them may require us to re-learn Haraways trick of appropriating regressive tools of technoscientific capital such as planetary surveillance or the tough love zoo (Haraways recent work and her ethico-political challenges to learn to kill well and share suffering receive only a little attention in the book). So the main charge against Bennets vitalist ontology is that it fails to fully think through constitutive exclusions the virtual, the undecidable, and the withheld. To paraphrase Ingold (2011), might stillness and quiet be the medium through which we experience vibrancy? Bennets work contrasts in tone with Mortons (2010) contemporaneous book, The Ecological Thought. Instead of vibrancy, Morton emphasises the power of matters reserve. Mortons mesh, self-assembling sets of interrelationships (p. 83), is more or less synonymous to that of assemblage, except grander; for Morton, there is no bottom to the mesh, which is infinite and fractal, reaching in both directions, and comprised of absences (like a net) as well as connections between dissimilar strangers. For Morton, when we encounter vibrant matter we do not really meet it. Rather we encounter strangeness behind that meeting the sense that we can never fully know the thing we

It is one of the main lines of critique shared by the authors of a review forum in

Dialogues in Human Geography 2011 1(3): 390-405.

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meet. Drawing on Darwin and biosemiotics, Morton argues that camouflage, deception and disguise are the stock of life and that the stranger that we are yet to meet does not cease being strange once we meet them indeed, we see ever-more the strangeness that exists in every creature. There is no time when we can declare someone or something known and understood fully: the more we know, the more we sense the void (2010, p. 80) and, since we sense this void within us too, we have a grounds for compassion and solidarity. As I have noted, Bennet also points to strangeness, to how something always escape[s] quantification, prediction, control (p. 63). Morton shares with Bennet a sense that ethics is performative and promissory ethical living will never arrive but his dark ecology contrasts sharply against Bennets celebration of positive vitality. Bennet argues that our lives are full enough of Spinozas sad powers and that a mood of wonder at the creativity of life gives a more positive bright ecology (2011, p. 405). Morton, by contrast, wants more negativity: depression, melancholia and passivity (he would rather be a zombie than a tree hugger (2007, p. 188)) are part of his mesh ecology. Indeed, if ontology gives us our politics (though that is open to question as I have already noted), then attending to that which escapes life or its constitutive outside might lead us to absence, withdrawal, passivity, sleep, depression; all those processes that are generally seen as anti-political. But and here is the rub given that ecoplanetary crisis is caused by an excess of matter and accelerating metabolism, perhaps non-politics might be attractive: instead of cutting (adding through division), reorienting flows, or adding new things to the world, might a deeper politics be found by resting in quiet inaction, passivity and withdrawal? Dark ecology is attractive in that it multiplies the ways we can do this: Bennet may be correct that there is little to love about alienated life on a dead planet and that frugality is too simple a maxim (p. 122) but dark ecology allows us to pay attention to more than matters positive vitality; to what might be absent and to what might lurk beyond the sensible. These are questions that interest Bennet too; they are part of an on-going project to learn to live better with the vitalisms of all Earthlings. She concludes Vibrant Matter by noting that sometimes the good will require individuals and collectivities to ramp down their activeness sometimes it will call for grander, more dramatic and violent expenditures (p. 122). The work to be done, then, is to examine vital materialisms (or naturecultures, or bits of the mesh, or assemblages) in their historical and geographical specificity, their brightness
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and their darkness, in order to imagine and practice better worldliness. We can only hope that Bennets next contribution to this project is as thought-provoking, beautiful and vital as Vibrant Matter.

Reviewed by Franklin Ginn, Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh, UK

Franklin Ginn is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh, with research interests in everyday cultures of nature. He is currently completing a book on more-than-human ethics, memory and suburban gardening. His newest work focuses on nature and apocalypse.

References Bennet, J. (2010b) Interview with Jane Bennet, in Gratton, P. Interviews with Graham Harman, Jane Bennett, Tim Morton, Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant and Paul Ennis. Speculations 1: 96-102. Bennet, J. (2011) Author Response. Dialogues in Human Geography 1(3): 390-405. Bingham, N. and Hinchliffe, S. (2008) Reconstituting Natures: Articulating Other Modes of Living Together. Geoforum 39(1): 83-87. Braun, B. (2008) Environmental Issues: Inventive Life. Progress in Human Geography 32(5): 667-679. Bridge, G. (2012) Politics of State: Oil, Deep Time and the Significance of Liquids. Presentation at Political Geology: Stratigraphies of Power, 21 June 2012, Lancaster University. Clark, N. (2011) Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. London: Sage. Harvey, D. (2006) Editorial: The Geographies of Critical Geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31: 409412.

Ingold, T. (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge. Latour, B. (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Mitchell, T. (2011) Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London & New York: Verso. Morton, T. (2007) Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press. Morton, T. (2010) The Ecological Thought. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press. Pettman, D. (2011) Human Error: Species Being and Media Machines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Whatmore, S. (2002) Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces. London: Sage.