Tag Archives: Vibrant Matter

Final Thoughts

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In studying object-oriented theory over the course of the semester, I feel like I have undergone a fundamental transformation in how I relate to the world around me. I pay attention to things more than I ever have before. Putting things or objects into separate categories has become something I question on a daily basis, which is remarkable considering how normalized a practice it was before these ideas were introduced to me.

In reference to an example from the beginning of class: a window is not simply a window, an opaque object which one looks through in order to view something on the other side. Now, I look at a window and I notice it for what it is, not what it is (or how it is supposed to function) in relation to me. As a human being, there will always be limitations to how I am going to perceive the world, especially in relation to myself, but this class has shown me how all things, human and nonhuman, actually work together.

No longer can I consciously and/or casually dismiss an object as insignificant, knowing that it has its place in a larger network or assemblage that might also, potentially, count me as one of its participants. Humans are neither the lowest nor the highest, nor can we consider ourselves in terms of inferiority or superiority. In this way, the “natural” order of things might not be so natural after all.

As much as I have struggled to wrap my brain around these concepts, I have also gradually integrated them into the most mundane corners of my life. For instance, simply walking down the street is a completely new experience. The street I’m walking on, the small animals in the trees, the grass that covers the ground, the door I eventually open—all of these are actants with equal agency and, perhaps even, equal vibrancy. Ultimately, the sights, sounds, and smells of everyday life take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of an object-oriented ontology.

Love’s Agency in Marie de France’s “Eliduc”

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For this week’s blog I would like to focus on the agency of love in Eliduc.  The characters of Eliduc and Guilliadun seem kind of helpless to its powers don’t they?  At one point, “love [even] sen[ds] [Guilliadun] a message, / commanding her to love [Eliduc] / that ma[kes] her go pale and sigh” (304-6).  Love has a lot of agency in these lines.  It commands Guilliadun to love Eliduc.  Instead of recognizing herself that she has feelings for Eliduc that respond to his character, she instead attributes it all to love as if she has no part in it whatsoever.  At first, the effects of this love sound pretty terrible:  Guilliadun can’t sleep at night (331-2), her heart is “assaulted” (387), and she is “in grief” (391).  The reader really gets the idea that if love does not get its way here Guilliadun is pretty much doomed and “never in [her] life shall [she] have any joy” (400).

The agency of love is pretty far-reaching because Eliduc feels it too.  He begins to feel distress from the time he sees her (459), and has “no joy or pleasure / except when he th[inks] of her” (460-1).  Though he wants to stay faithful to his wife he literally cannot “keep himself / from loving [Guilliadun]” (467-8).  I would like to take the opportunity here to point out the vibrant materiality of love in this lai.  Not all love is the same here.  The love Eliduc feels for his wife is not the same love that he feels for Guilliadun.  It is almost like it is two different forces just like no two hammers are exactly the same nor do they possess the same agency.

The chapel scene

Then, there is the scene in the chapel with the weasels when an act of love brings the female weasel back to life (1038-53).  Not only is love capable of destruction when it doesn’t get its way, it is also a lifesaver.  It takes many different forms in this lai, but I don’t think that it is one love “thing” that is morphing to suit every character’s needs.  I really imagine a few different “loves” each with their own agency and agenda just like there are different characters in the lai.

The rocks are the humans

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Latour wants us to do some major changing as humans when it comes to looking at innate things and for that matter so does Jane Bennett. The idea of granting power to where it seems to be coming from was exceptionally foreign to me before this class. While Jane Bennett’s motives for granting power are ethically driven, the motives of this class seem to focus more on creating a novel way of reading literature. It amazes me that we have the ability to take a fairly new and steadily emerging theory and apply it to texts that are 100s of years old.

Latour and Bennett both point out the heterogeneous nature of assemblages and the necessity of disentangling them in order to be able to see the agency of everything involved. I feel like this is one of the most important concepts in the entire class because without it I felt somewhat lost. The agency of things seems so much more comprehensible when you take into account the array of actants affecting the final outcome. It seems impossible to look at one particular thing and give it all the agency and power but people tend to do this all the time by giving all the power to humanity.

The rocks in The Franklin’s Tale were revisited during Monday’s class and I think they are a perfect example of the power of assemblages. The rocks never actually hurt anyone but the assemblage that they possibly unknowingly participated in caused a great deal of turmoil. The wife in this tale did not recognize the assemblage and placed all the power on the rocks claiming that they killed people and brought her great troubles. The rocks alone did not do these things. They worked within an assemblage of things such as the ocean, the boats, the men, and even the wife’s blame that caused them to be a burden. It’s interesting to think that if the wife had of never involved them in the relationship between her and her immoral suitor she may have never been faced with the obligation to betray her husband.

The power that the wife gave the rocks seem to be very much like the power that both Latour and Bennett are encouraging society not to give humans. The recognition of assemblages seems to be vastly important to successful thing theory readings of texts, social matters, and ethical matters.

Vibrant Materialism as a Form of Religion

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When we went around in class yesterday, I was very glad and interested that the topic of religion came up. Since reading Jane Bennett’s prologue to Vibrant Matter, I was struck by the way she spoke about her theory in an almost religious-like manner. The basic foundation for vibrant materialism is that we, humans, are not the most important and that instead of the world revolving around us it revolves around all things that are equal and constantly interacting and having agency in combination with other things. In acquiring this knowledge, Bennett expects us to give respect to everything as the way we would respect another human. This particular passage stuck me most:

“the image of dead or thourougly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, testing, feeling) a fuller range of nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies. These matierial powers, which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us, in any case call for our attentiveness, or even respect” (ix).

This idea reminded me very much of what I little I know about Buddhism (which Samuel affirmed for me in class yesterday) and what my yoga teachers are constantly preaching. That to be a real yogi, one must come to regard every thing that they come in contact with with equal respect, that men and women are no better than a rock and have no bigger purpose in the world. Besides using this idea to dissect agency in literature, I think it is a very revolutionary and beneficial way of looking at life. If everyone in the world thought this way there would not be holocausts and wars because people would respect the purpose of everybody, every piece of land, every piece of gold, and let it be what it is instead of trying to possess it. On a smaller scale, it is much easier to find peace with the world if you have this mentality. It goes along the “everything-happens-for-a-reason-idea”. Anyway, I am glad that someone brought up looking at these theories in connection (or in opposition) with religion and I am interested in looking more closely at the possibility it brings up.

Concrete Theories in Chapter Three

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As discussed in class, I feel that chapter three of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter was much more concrete, understandable and straight forward than the preface, chapter one, and chapter two. It seems to me that using the example of food to reveal the agency of non-human objects and assemblages is much more relatable than electrical blackouts, dead rats, and the theories of Foucault and Deleuze, which is most likely because they are, or were, very unfamiliar. Her arguments also feel much more relative, at least to my life, because I do a lot more eating than studying the theories of philosophers and sociologists on most days. I think that her most interesting argument in chapter three is the way in which fats have “the ability to make a qualitative as well as a quantitative difference” (Bennett, 41). We usually think of fats as only changing a person physically, but not mentally or emotionally. The fact that omega-3 fatty acids have the ability to calm down prisoners, cause significant improvement in children’s learning and behavior, and even help to improve both positive and negative effects of schizophrenia clearly says that humans have an often unacknowledged and intimate relationship with food that can make us very much different people socially. I also thought that the process of digestion was a great way to explain assemblages, considering the human has to digest the food, just as the food has to be digestible. It seems strange to me that Bennett waits until chapter three to make such concrete and relatable arguments. Why does she begin by analyzing Odradek’s Nonorganic life and then in chapter three analyze eating a bag of potato chips? I know that when Bennett wrote Vibrant Matter I was in no way her target audience, but I feel like using very relatable concepts to begin with would have helped me ease into such complex theories.

Edible Matter as “Vibrant” Matter

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Thinking of food or “edible matter” in terms of assemblages encourages us to go beyond treating food as something we consume on the basis free will. Without conscious acknowledgement, we all enter into a rather intimate relationship with food every day that isn’t entirely dependent on what we, as consumers, want to eat. The food has just as much of an effect on us as we have on it.

We eat to survive, but our survival isn’t the only part of the equation—we, like edible matter, are only one part of a larger network or assemblage. And while the act of eating is usually conceptualized as a reciprocal relationship, the implications of this reciprocity are rarely contemplated.

The act of eating a potato chip, for instance, can be thought of in terms of an “assemblage.” Bennett is not asserting that our actions are devoid of intention, but that intentionality is beset by other factors that lessen its importance. The hand reaching for the chip is “…only quasi- or semiintentional, for the chips themselves seem to call forth, or provoke and stoke, the manual labor” (Bennett 40). This scenario calls into question how much an action is dependent on the subject and how much is dependent on that which is considered an object. In contrast to how we view ourselves as the sole “actants” in an event, the potato chip is active in its influence over our actions.

As far as the debate over what influences our collective eating habits is concerned, we usually look to the media in ascribing blame. Asserting that the food itself is an active influence is something entirely unique. However, that doesn’t mean we should turn around and blame food for the “obesity crisis” in the absence of another more appropriate entity to blame. Bennett is trying to get away from this human tendency in emphasizing the fact that “matter” (whether intentionally or not) works within networks too complex to attribute individual culpability.

Everything (even food in this case) works together to create a “living” world. Vibrancy cannot be measured in weight, height, or value—all things are equally vibrant for the simple fact that they “persist in existing.” Things have a tendency to fade into the background, but they enrich our lives in numerous (often incomprehensible) ways. Jane Bennett’s notion that objects occupy the roles of “context, tool, and constraint” is an undeniably accurate description of how most of us perceive objects in relation to us. As part of an all-encompassing “background,” objects (including edible matter) blend into the world in a way that deemphasizes their agency.

Agency of Food: Taste, Edibility, Appearance

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I am interested in one part of food that I do not know that Bennett actually spends much (if any) time on:  the taste of food.  She writes a lot about digesting food and the effects that that has on our bodies, but what about the taste of food?  For animals, I know some prey (animals who are preyed on for food) have a defense mechanism of bad taste so that their predators will not want to eat them.  Taste, to the predators, is a warning suggesting that the animal may be poisonous.  For humans, certain tastes have different effects on different people.  Some people can eat extremely spicy food while sugary sweet desserts repel others.  This would lead individuals to either include an abundance of these kinds of items in their diet, or have a lack thereof.  Meaning, for some people, taste determines what food they will eat and thus introduce into their assemblages; nourishment is not the only determining factor.  For others, taste does not even matter.  They would be happy eating cardboard hamburgers as long as their stomach stops screaming at them.   Food has an even bigger agency when bringing taste into the picture.

There is also other potential (or vibrancy?) of food that composes its agency.  Some food is poisonous and can actually kill the eater of it. I am thinking, though, that this would make this thing not “food” because “if the eaten is to become food, it must be digestible to the out-side it enters.  Likewise, if the eater is to be nourished, it must accommodate itself to the internalized out-side” (Bennett 29).  Dying as a result of eating something poisonous is not nourishment, and the food is not digested because the digestive system has stopped operating.

Another agentic (I made this word up for the purpose of this blog.  I declare it the adjective form of “agency.”) quality or potential of food is perhaps appearance.  Bright foods are visually appealing to some and perhaps may be eaten more and may have a wider reaching agency (as a whole).  Adversely, some foods may be difficult to prepare to eat and may not be eaten quite as often—like having to carve a pineapple or pick out pomegranate seeds (of course, we have innovations now that do these things for us).

What I am suggesting, is that food has an agency that exists prior to even being digested that invites or repels some.

Everyday Objects

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The issues brought up in the readings this week are strange, baffling, and overall very interesting. Our readings of the introduction to “thing theory” in Ben Brown’s essay and the possible practical and political imports of these ideas, were difficult but after the discussions in class I defiantly have a better handle on what is going on. I think though that the “What is Actor-Network Theory?”(ANT) article is the one that gave me a more vivid understanding of the ideas in the other readings and specifically the last excerpt from Sidorova & Sarker.

Sidorova & Sarker break down all of the different aspects of the network and what each of these components can be. As I understand it, the actor network is an accumulation of any number of objects, ideas, people, anything really, that are working toward the same interest. Anything that is in a person’s environment that helps them to do something. In Reijo Miettinen’s section the example is given that “the work of science consists of the enrollment and juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements-rats, test tubes, colleagues, journal articles, funders, grants, papers at scientific conferences, and so on…” This gives a rather clear image of how different actors, organic and inorganic, must function in order for any sort of work to be done. I can’t help but think that if this computer I am writing on were to malfunction or the blog were to not publish my post that I would be unable to complete this assignment for the week on time. This way of think has started to deepen my appreciation of the things that I need in order to function on a day to day basis and without which I would be unable to function. Things like dishes and clothes that- if they are dirty for example- can present a drastic obstacle into my everyday comings and goings.

….So as a p.s. to this post, the bit about the blog not publishing this post happened. This is the second time it has happened and I had to find somebody in my network who knew what was wrong. Shouldn’t be anymore problems, sorry for the inconvenience Professor Seaman.

Contemplating Vibrant Matter

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When I first began to read Bennett’s Vibrant Matter I found myself underlining things like, “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies. These material powers, which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us, in any case call for our attentiveness, or even “respect”(ix).

This struck me because the concept that Bennett was explaining seemed almost religious-like and it was hard for me to picture how anyone who truly took this message to heart and incorporated it into their every day life could live normally. By taking into account every “thing”‘s presence, reaction, and effect on yourself could drive a person crazy. For example, this machine that I am typing on is somehow allowing me to submit my homework barely on time. Thank goodness it isn’t breaking, in fact if I didn’t have this machine my life would be completely different. I would spend a lot of my time in the library to keep up with online assignments, printing, and social networking, in fact I probably wouldn’t want to be in the library that much so I would just cut out social networking, and sadly that is a large part of modern social interaction, so then what would my friend circle be like? Would I be living with the friends I am living with? Would I be in this house? This school? All of these questions can arise by thinking too much into the fact that I am typing on this machine that has been deemed “a laptop”.

I find the idea of considering every “thing” and objects presence in our lives and in the world interesting, but the thought of doing so is incredibly overwhelming for no exact purpose except to baffle and overwhelm people, which I guess is a point worth making. I guess I am just wondering what the benefits of considering the role of vibrant matter is and how the theory ties into literature, especially medieval literature.

Anthropocentrism

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I read and reread the preface to Vibrant Matter and felt as though Dr. Seaman predicted my thoughts exactly. I felt as though I had a sense of things, but not a full understanding. This week’s theories have left me feeling quite perplexed. Our in class discussion helped a bit, but I still feel foggy as I try to wrap my head around anthropocentric thinking and how we can avoid such thoughts. I’m left wondering if it is even possible to think in a non-anthropocentric way? As human beings, I wonder if it is possible for us to completely remove ourselves from the equation. If we have difficulty, does it mean we are just selfish? Since our thoughts about, and perceptions of, the world and “things” around us originate in our human minds, how can we remove the human aspect from the process altogether?
In the instance one thinks about the environment and how pesticides negatively impact the environment and then chooses to no longer use pesticides for the sake of the environment, has this person achieved thinking non-anthropocentrically? Or, is the human interest in the environment’s well being and subsequent actions still anthropocentric because it satisfies a human’s need to “take care of” the environment? Does a human need to be completely neutral to an issue to think about it in a removed way, or is it possible to also reap some sort of satisfaction (i.e. the pesticide free way of living) but not be anthropocentric?
Because so much of this still seems abstract to me, I look forward to employing our new approach to texts so I can get a better understanding of what exactly we mean when we talk about non-anthropocentric thinking. I think once we actually put these new approaches into practice, I may be able to wrap my head around these new concepts a bit more and get a greater sense of “things.”