Bennett 2010 - Revision history

Wtrettien at 17:10, 15 May 2012

2012-05-15T17:10:12Z

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			:Bennett, Jane. ''Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.'' Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

	:"Mine is not a vitalism in the traditional sense' I equate affect with materiality, rather than posit a separate force that can enter and animate a physical body." (xiii)		:"Mine is not a vitalism in the traditional sense' I equate affect with materiality, rather than posit a separate force that can enter and animate a physical body." (xiii)

Wtrettien: /* Vitality and Self-interest */

2010-09-27T22:23:26Z

Vitality and Self-interest

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	Latour: we're better at seeing humans infecting nature than seeing nonhumanity infecting human culture; argues for pragmatics that "explicitly acknowledges this commingling, and for (liberal democratic) public policies designed to 'follow through' or attend to the problems for human flourishing caused by the intimacy of the human and the nonhuman. '''Admit that humans have crawled or secreted themselves into every corner of the environment; admit that the environment is actually inside human bodies and minds''', and then proceed politically, technologically, scientifically, in everyday life, with careful forebearance, as you might with unruly relatives to whom you are inextricably bound and with whom you will engage over a lifetime, like it or not. Give up the futile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman. Seek instead to engage more civilly, strategically, and subtly with the nonhumans in the assemblages in which you, too, participate." (115-6)		Latour: we're better at seeing humans infecting nature than seeing nonhumanity infecting human culture; argues for pragmatics that "explicitly acknowledges this commingling, and for (liberal democratic) public policies designed to 'follow through' or attend to the problems for human flourishing caused by the intimacy of the human and the nonhuman. '''Admit that humans have crawled or secreted themselves into every corner of the environment; admit that the environment is actually inside human bodies and minds''', and then proceed politically, technologically, scientifically, in everyday life, with careful forebearance, as you might with unruly relatives to whom you are inextricably bound and with whom you will engage over a lifetime, like it or not. Give up the futile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman. Seek instead to engage more civilly, strategically, and subtly with the nonhumans in the assemblages in which you, too, participate." (115-6)

			''natura naturata'' (passive matter organized by Creation); ''natura naturans'' (uncaused causality that generates new forms) -- Spinoza, ''Ethics'' (117)

			Greek ''phusis'' -- ''natura'' -- puff, blow, swell up, sproud, growth (118)

			:"an active becoming, a ''creative not-quite-human force capable of producing the new'', buzzes within the history of the term nature" (118)

Wtrettien: /* Vitality and Self-interest */

2010-09-27T22:07:29Z

Vitality and Self-interest

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	== Vitality and Self-interest ==		== Vitality and Self-interest ==

			:"It is difficult, for example, for a public convened by environmentalism to include animals, vegetables, or minerals as bona fide members, for nonhumans are already named as a passive environment or perhaps a recalcitrant context for human action. a more materialist public would need to include more earthlings in the swarm of actants. '''If environmentalists are selves who live on earth, vital materialists are selves who live as earth''', who are more alert to the capacities and limitations -- the "jizz" -- of the various materials that they are. If environmentalism leads to the call for the protection and wise management of an ecosystem that surrounds us, a vital materialism suggests that the task is to engage more strategically with a trenchant materiality that is us as it view with us in agentic assemblages." (111)

			Guattari, ''Three Ecologies'' (1986): environmental, social, mental; IWC (integrated world capitalism)

			Latour: we're better at seeing humans infecting nature than seeing nonhumanity infecting human culture; argues for pragmatics that "explicitly acknowledges this commingling, and for (liberal democratic) public policies designed to 'follow through' or attend to the problems for human flourishing caused by the intimacy of the human and the nonhuman. '''Admit that humans have crawled or secreted themselves into every corner of the environment; admit that the environment is actually inside human bodies and minds''', and then proceed politically, technologically, scientifically, in everyday life, with careful forebearance, as you might with unruly relatives to whom you are inextricably bound and with whom you will engage over a lifetime, like it or not. Give up the futile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman. Seek instead to engage more civilly, strategically, and subtly with the nonhumans in the assemblages in which you, too, participate." (115-6)

Wtrettien: /* Political Ecologies */

2010-08-31T12:53:50Z

Political Ecologies

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	seeing things as part of a public helps "to devise more effective (experimental) tactics for enhancing or weakening that public" (107)		seeing things as part of a public helps "to devise more effective (experimental) tactics for enhancing or weakening that public" (107)

	:"to imagine politics as a realm of human activity alone may also be a kind of prejudice: a prejudice against a (nonhuman) multitude misrecognized as context, constraint, or tool" (108)		:"to imagine politics as a realm of human activity alone may also be a kind of prejudice: a prejudice against a (nonhuman) multitude misrecognized as context, constraint, or tool. A vital materialist theory of democracy seeks to transform the divide between speaking subjects and mute objects into a set of differential tendencies and variable capacities." (108)

	== Vitality and Self-interest ==		== Vitality and Self-interest ==

Wtrettien: /* Political Ecologies */

2010-08-31T12:49:24Z

Political Ecologies

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	:"A touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations." (99)		:"A touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations." (99)

			John Dewey, '''publics''' -- members inducted into; nonvoluntary; "public as a confederation of bodies pulled together not so much by choice ... as by a shared experience of harm" (100)
			* pushes toward vital materialism by saying publics form around non-human things; but still human-governed

			Latour, rejects "nature" and "culture" in favor of the collective; "parliament of things" (104)

			for Ranciere, "the political act consists in exclamatory interjection of affective bodies as they enter a preexisting public" (105)

			seeing things as part of a public helps "to devise more effective (experimental) tactics for enhancing or weakening that public" (107)

			:"to imagine politics as a realm of human activity alone may also be a kind of prejudice: a prejudice against a (nonhuman) multitude misrecognized as context, constraint, or tool" (108)

	== Vitality and Self-interest ==		== Vitality and Self-interest ==

Wtrettien: /* Political Ecologies */

2010-08-31T00:37:14Z

Political Ecologies

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	* worms make vegetable mould, which "makes possible an earth hospitable to humans, which makes possible the cultural artifacts, rituals, plans, and endeavors of human history" (96)		* worms make vegetable mould, which "makes possible an earth hospitable to humans, which makes possible the cultural artifacts, rituals, plans, and endeavors of human history" (96)
	* bury artifacts under their castings, preserving things for archaeologists (!) (qtd 96)		* bury artifacts under their castings, preserving things for archaeologists (!) (qtd 96)

			:"It would be consistent with Darwin to say that worms '''participate in heterogeneous assemblages in which agency has no single locus, no mastermind, but is distributed across a swarm of various and variegated vibrant materialities." (96)

			Darwin noticed this through anthropomorphizing

			:"A touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations." (99)

	== Vitality and Self-interest ==		== Vitality and Self-interest ==

Wtrettien: /* Political Ecologies */

2010-08-30T23:31:27Z

Political Ecologies

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	== Political Ecologies ==		== Political Ecologies ==

			Darwin, earthworms, ''Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Actions of Worms with Observations on Their Habits'' (1881)
			* really about ''history''
			* worms make vegetable mould, which "makes possible an earth hospitable to humans, which makes possible the cultural artifacts, rituals, plans, and endeavors of human history" (96)
			* bury artifacts under their castings, preserving things for archaeologists (!) (qtd 96)

	== Vitality and Self-interest ==		== Vitality and Self-interest ==

Wtrettien: /* Political Ecologies */

2010-08-30T23:14:26Z

Political Ecologies

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	== Political Ecologies ==		== Political Ecologies ==

			== Vitality and Self-interest ==

Wtrettien: /* Stem Cells and the Culture of Life */

2010-08-30T23:14:05Z

Stem Cells and the Culture of Life

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	== Stem Cells and the Culture of Life ==		== Stem Cells and the Culture of Life ==

			"compassionate conservatives" link "culture of life" and violence

			role of '''freedom''' in vitalism; "vitalism recurs because it defends a world that is not predetermined but open, a land of opportunity for creativity, surprise, and choice" (90)

			pluripotentiality of cells points to an open-ended freedom

	== Political Ecologies ==		== Political Ecologies ==

Wtrettien: /* Neither Vitalism nor Mechanism */

2010-08-30T22:33:42Z

Neither Vitalism nor Mechanism

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	* "The task of elan vital is to shake awake that lazy bones of matter and insert into it a measure of surprise" (78)		* "The task of elan vital is to shake awake that lazy bones of matter and insert into it a measure of surprise" (78)
	* not simple or homogeneous; like a "sheaf" (Dreisch's "intensive manifold")		* not simple or homogeneous; like a "sheaf" (Dreisch's "intensive manifold")
			* unlike entelechy, aim is not to maintain the whole, since any "whole" is always in transition, on the way in or out (78)
			* increases instability, inserts indetermination into matter; ''creative'' (78-9) (though not teleological); "the vital impetus is a splaying out, a rendering of itself more indeterminate, and this means that some lines of the spray will conflict or counteract others." (79)

			neither entelechy or elan vital ''reducible'' to the matter they animate -- are ''agents'' (80)

	== Stem Cells and the Culture of Life ==		== Stem Cells and the Culture of Life ==