#thing power

     From this point forward the bear pictured above will be referred to as “Lake Bear” (I choose this title because it does not constrict the abstract thought, but still guides the perspective of the viewer).   

                                        Lake Bear: A Vibrant Matter   

     Objects are truly significant forms of human expression. An object may be used to portray an everlasting love to a partner either through rings or a marriage license. An object could demonstrate the accomplishments that have been made by way of a diploma or degree. Objects can illicit distinct feelings, invite speculation, or divide communities. Though these observations raise a question that deserves to be pondered: do these objects, these things, provoke individual effects in us because of our own personal backgrounds? Or do they themselves represent their own lively nature that calls to all intentionally (Bennett, 4-5)? Consider the gun that was used to kill Trayvon Martin in 2012. This gun was auctioned off and closed at a price of $138,900. The idea of the the gun was nothing special, yet the experience of the gun formed a desire, its exuberant nature required that it be valued so highly.

Tammy Lu, detail from Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects

One of the most common ways I can think of to define a "society" in the terms most common to the word is by its location.  I have considered it a group of people, most often  describing those living together and possibly sharing other similar characteristics,though not everyone in the society necessarily agrees with everything to which the society strives to adhere.  I'm sure many have shared this definition, yet Latour troubles that saying it is "not a special domain, a specific realm, or a particular sort of thing, but only (as a) very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling".  

This makes it much more temporary and ever-changing.  More of an effect than a cause. More of an element to be considered in a situation than an explanation for said situation.  This seems to make my original idea of what society is into thing which, in turn, becomes an "actor".  

Latour says for "non-human" things to gain "ANT membership" they must be "actors and not simply the hapless bearers of symbolic projection".  This would make my idea of society more like a setting.  And many settings (or "sets" in tv and film) seem to be as much an actor as the characters themselves.  Who doesn't recognize the living room from the Roseanne show?  Or the bar from Cheers?  Even the post-apocalyptic world of  the popular "Walking Dead" plays as much of a role as the people themselves.  These places possess thing power, bringing to mind our favorite scenes or moments much like a character's catch phrase does.  

I really enjoyed the Bennett reading and was intrigued by one of the passages on pg. 4:

“The story will highlight the extent to which human being and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other. One moral of the story is that we are also nonhuman and that things, too, are vital players in the world. The hope is that the story will enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us, will generate a more subtle awareness of the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies, and will enable wiser interventions into that ecology.”