Jun 10, 2025
Vibrant Matter : Aggregates and Movements by Russell Moreton
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Vibrant Matter : Aggregates and Movements by Russell Moreton
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Vitalism is the reaction formation to mechanistic materialism. There is, of course, a rich tradition of another materialism, one in which atoms swerve, bodies are driven by conatus, and 'unformed elements and materials dance.' From the perspective of this tradition, mechanical materialism underestimates the complex, emergent causality of materiality, a materiality figured by Louis Althusser as a 'process that has no subject.' The machine model of nature, with its figure of inert matter, is no longer even scientific. It has been challenged by systems theory, complexity theory, chaos theory, fluid dynamics, as well as by the many earlier biophilosophies of flow that Michel Serres has chronicled in The Birth of Physics...Yet the popular image of materialism as mechanistic endures, perhaps because the scientific community tends to emphasize how human ingenuity can result in greater control over nature more than the element of freedom in matter. And perhaps that is because to highlight the limits of human power and the indeterminate vitality of matter would bring science into too close an alliance with theology
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, pg. 91
everything speaks
Novalis, via Jacques Rancière (The Aesthetic Unconscious, polity 2001)
An international conference organized by the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University
Jane Bennett: "Vibrant Matter"
Like Stewart, Bennett features lists quite prominently in her book, Vibrant Matter. Bennett presents the reader with a list of five vibrant materials as a way of explicating the notion of the assemblage. In Bennett's work, like in Stewart's, list and assemblage are deeply interrelated, as both constitute a collection or a coming-together of various vibrant elements that interact with each other in complex and often hidden ways. Bennett sometimes accomplished the opening of the list sometimes through the juxtaposition of items that should be contradictory she maintains the open, speculative nature of her lists: "a turbulent, immanent field in which various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph, evolve, and disintegrate" (xi). Other times she explicitely states that her list is incomplete and open to new additions: "These genealogical… studies exposed the various micropolitical and macropolitical techniques through which the human body was disciplined, normalized, sped up and slowed down, gendered, sexed, nationalized, globalized, rendered disposable, or otherwise composed" (1). Bennett concedes she is unable to capture the full network of concepts, things, and connections in her lists. Her lists are not a catalogue, but a beginning.
Like Stewart, Bennett uses lists to create dimension and tension in her text, and leaves her lists open ended. In the section "Thing-Power I: Debris," Bennett builds off of the concept of the assemblage and working in her own theorization of vibrant matter. She launches into her analysis with a list: "one large men's black plastic work glove / one dense mat of oak pollen / one unblemished dead rat / one white plastic bottle cap / one smooth stick of wood" (4). Though the first five enumerated items constitute the central point of Bennett's analysis, the list remains open, as the assemblage they form remains open to interacting and merging with other vibrant matter. Bennett states: "When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark, it was in part because of the contingent tableau that they formed with each other, with the street, with the weather that morning, with me" (Bennett 5). This openness calls for more work to be done, more connections to be made, more speculations to occur, new assemblages to emerge. By bringing our focus to these vibrant materials, Bennett hopes to encourage the reader to "glimpse[] a culture of things irreducible to the culture of objects" (Bennett 5). This list of vibrant materials, Bennett hopes, is irreducible—always becoming more that what meets the eye. Bennett uses the additive nature of lists to question the traditional boundaries between what is included and what is excluded in theory and in academic thought. Her irreducibly open list calls for infinite addition.
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Are lists relevant? A list of lists we all know and love
Grocery list
To-do list
Playlists
Excel Spreadsheets
Buzzfeed and to a lesser extent, all blogs. This is what thoroughly convinced me that lists are quickly becoming a dominant genre of written expression. My generation seems to love lists a lot. This is in large part due to the fact that lists are so easy to consume, and while some people would argue this is because of intellectual laziness, maybe instead of moralizing modes of reading, we could see it as a shift with no particular positive or negative connotations. Maybe Buzzfeed is to popular culture as "Close but Not Deep" by Heather Love is to literary theory, and together, these shifts in reading practices indicate a broader phenomena, and the rise of a different mode of knowledge production and consumption that glides across the surface.
Emily's list
Bucket list
List serves
And for the recently graduated/unemloyed (like me): Idealist, Craigslist, Monster, Simply Hired, Indeed. Job databases are one example of how complex the "simple" writing form of the list can be. By filtering by keywords, location, field, salary range, hours, you can access multiple overlapping, interconnected lists.
Wish list
End of year best-of lists (like this feminist one)
Guest list
Course syllabus
For more lists, see Wikepedia's "List of lists of lists" (I don't know why I was surprised to find that that exists. I should have known Wikipedia would be on its game.)
Zoe, or life as absolute vitality, however, is not above negativity, and it can hurt. It is always too much for the specific slab of enfleshed existence that single subjects actualize. It is a constant challenge for us to rise to the occasion, to catch the wave of life's intensities and ride it, exposing the boundaries or limits as we transgress them. We often crack in the process and just cannot take it anymore. The sheer activity of thinking about such intensity is painful: it causes intense strain, psychic unrest, and nervous tension. If thinking were pleasurable, more humans might be tempted to engage in this activity. Accelerations or increased intensities, however, are that which more humans prefer to avoid.
Rosi Braidotti, The Politics of "Life Itself" and New Ways of Dying
My life atm