#thingpower

Bolt cites Heidegger's example to further her larger point that echoes "The Death of the Author" by minimizing a human shaper's ownership and self-impression on a creation. The authorship of the chalice by a silversmith is mitigated by the miner, smelter, and more to her point the rock and earth from whence it came. Matter matters, in her view, and gives the material (in both form and concept) as much relevancy as each human component of its creation.

Bennett's goal, through this story, is to illustrate the power and force of things. He orients on non-human corporeal material to underline his point that corporeal materials have power and weight independently of humanity and also because of humanity. This story knits the two together, allowing Bennett to describe the materials as both things and objects. Also, he focuses on debris to bring into focus his supposition that thing-power cannot be thrown away.

  Here Bennett lays the groundwork for thing-power, a notion that seemingly inert bodies possess an inherent energy, or are “animate, albeit in different degrees” (p.5)  according to Spinoza.  This leads Bennett to a realization that our corporeal bodies will find the “miracle of expression” (p.5) in all objects which permits self-organization.  The quote leads back to Bennett’s belief that we must incorporate these notions into our materialist philosophies, not the anti-materiality of the American disposable-object mentality.  That anti-materiality discounts the agency of matter in modern society by numbing viewers to both its agency and its energy.  Bennet reminds us in Thing Power 4 that we are minerals, walking talking matter that is not immune to that wild irreducibly strange dimension of matter.

Bennett opens her argument with this quote, intending to persuade the reader that “thing” (being inanimate object) is equal in force to that which is human. Thing-power, as Bennett calls it, is equal to what de Vries ascribes as ‘absolute’ or that which is unloosed and thus no thing at all. But she argues that de Vries overlooks the power of ‘things’ and what their power is. She goes through four different stories delineating the power of things to act as an agent, altering human existence: the glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick story, the garbage dump story, Ondradek from Kafka’s “Cares of a Family Man”, and the trial for murder. She gets closer (in my estimation) to persuading the reader of the truth in her argument when she quotes Deleuze: ….”hint of the animate in plants, and of the vegetable in animals”; and Vernadsky: ….inert strata are “traces of bygone biospheres”. While I can see her point that human and thing should be read horizontally versus hierarchically, I agree with the question she poses as part of her conclusion pondering her own humanity in the ascribed meanings of the rat, plastic, and stick. Regardless of personal viewpoint, Bennett provides a different perspective of the inanimate object and it’s force as a catalyst in the physical world.

This quote is found in the first paragraph of the section Thing-Power III: Legal Actants. It acts as a supporting argument to Bennet's purpose described in the introduction of the essay, which is to highlight the active role of nonhuman materials in public life, to give voice to a thing-power. In this section Bennet discussed the definitions of the terms  actant  and Deluzian's operator. This quote provides a very clear example of how an a collection of objects being found in the right place at the right time can be decisive in a particular event, "thing-power".

In this quote, Bennett attempts to focus in her discussion of the objects she viewed in her story to the point of her argument - thingpower. This quote solidifies what otherwise would seem like a random anecdote to a tool for delivering her message that objects, human and non human, hold power. Once this is established, she goes on to tie this all into the idea of materialism. This is a bridge between story and argument.

  In this statement, Bennett seeks to understand the cultural forms or objects as vibrant matter. Positioned in her first argument following the introduction which helps the reader understand that the argument originated with the discussions on Foucault’s “power,” The first point poses objects/things as forces rather than something mechanical to be forced upon.  In the above quote, she reveals through her experience of seeing trash that objects are things capable of projecting vitality laying the groundwork for her next points. She continues her argument by clarifying in her second point that “thing-power” can emanate from animate or inanimate, providing historical legal support through the “deodand,” where the object/thing is responsible for the action, in her third point, and then by breaking down humanity into a conglomerate of things. These arguments hinge on the readers understanding the initial quote that things contain “energetic vitality”— “one moment disclosing themselves as dead stuff and at the next as live presence: junk, then claimant; inert matter, then live wire”  (p5).

"I have already noted, the items on the ground that say were vibratory - at one moment disclosing themselves as dead stuff and at the next as live presence: junk, then claimant; inert matter then live wire." -Selections from Jane Bennett, "Vibrant Matter" pg 5 This argument is on the fifth page under the heading "Thing-Power 1". In this part of the essay the author discusses the abject as "thing" and recants an encounter with refuse in a storm drain. These collective things were a glove, pollen, rat, cap, and stick. The author had two "moments" of thought with the discarded assemblage, that of disregard and that of the "thing-power". The power of the thing is executed through a causation of one to ponder the object. Therefore the items were vibrant, not dead (like the rat) or inanimate (like the glove) but symbols of materialism, human consumption, and material vitality. Though these items are discarded, the author continues, the things are not dead citing Robert Sullivan's description of the vitality of trash. Even in the American consumerist society of wastefulness, the vitality of material can never actually be thrown away. The author concludes that this is "thing-power".