Jane Bennett — Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010)
Bennett develops a “vital materialism” — a philosophy that attributes a kind of agency or thing-power to nonhuman entities and matter itself, rather than treating the material world as inert backdrop to human action. Drawing on Spinoza, Deleuze, and Hans Driesch, she argues that things have a vitality, a capacity to affect and be affected, that participates in political assemblages alongside and entangled with human actors.
Case studies include: the agency of electricity grids (the 2003 North American blackout as an event with nonhuman actors), the politics of food (how edible matter acts on bodies and political dispositions), the actancy of metal, and the assemblage politics of “thing-power.” Throughout, Bennett insists that this is not animism or mysticism but a serious political ontology with practical implications — if we understand matter as vibrant rather than inert, we are more likely to take seriously the distributed, nonhuman dimensions of political problems.
Key concepts:
- Vibrant matter / thing-power: the capacity of nonhuman entities to affect political events
- Vital materialism: a flat ontology that grants agency to matter without reducing it to human projections
- Assemblage: heterogeneous groupings of human and nonhuman actants that produce political effects
For OM: Bennett supports the posthuman and flat-ontological dimensions of OM’s framework — particularly the claim that protocol undergrounds engage with “exotic entities” (scene egregores, agential vibes, crowd consciousnesses) that deserve empirical rather than dismissive treatment.