Bennett 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)

"My aim, again, is to theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such, and to detach materiality from the figures of passive, mechanistic, or divinely infused substance." (xiii)

methods of demystification (exposing) is "an indispensable tool in a democratic, pluralist politics that seeks to hold officials accountable", but creates "hermeneutics of suspicion [that] calls for theorists to be on high alert for signs of the secret truth (a human will to power) below the false appearance of nonhuman agency"; "limits to its political efficacy" (xiv)

The Force of Things

actant: Latour; source of action, human or not, combination of both; neither an object or subject but "intervener" (9)

quasi-causal operator: Deleuze; "that which, by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage and the fortuity of being in the right place at the right time, makes the difference, makes things happen, becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event" (9)

in subject-oriented philosophies, the agent or deodand (English law 1200-1846; "that which must be given to God", nonhuman agents of harm like a knife)

"human power is itself a kind of thing-power. At one level this claim is uncontroversial: it is easy to acknowledge that humans are composed of various material parts (the minerality of our bones, or the metal of our blood, or the electricity of our neurons). But it is more challenging to conceive of these materials as lively and self-organizing, rather than as passive or mechanical means under the direction of something nonmaterial, that is, an active soul or mind." (10)

deLanda; mineral material producing bones, enabling evolution (11); humans as "complex collection of materials" (11)

vital materialism

• objection to it: humans become mere things, can be used as such
• answer to objection: "promot[e] healthy and enabling instrumentalizations" (12); "moralism can itself become a source of unnecessary human suffering" (12)

"We are now in a better position to name that other way to promote human health and happiness: to raise the status of the materiality of which we are composed. Each human is a heterogeneous compound of wonderfully vibrant, dangerously vibrant, matter. If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper relief." (12)

nonidentity: Adorno; "that which is not subject to knowledge but is instead 'heterogeneous' to all concepts" (14); haunting feeling that something is being left out

• Adorno denies vital materialism; but is nagged by what Bennett calls "thing-power"

cultural/historical/linguistic constructivism tends to obscure thing-power (17)