Jane Bennett: reading group and talk, Royal Holloway, University of London
Last week I was lucky enough to attend a couple of events at Royal Holloway where Prof. Jane Bennett was visiting for the day (thanks to Sebastian for letting me know). The first was a reading group:
The Contemporary Political Theory Research Group and the Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London, are pleased to be hosting Prof. Jane Bennett of Johns Hopkins University. Prof. Bennett will be attending our Contemporary Political Theory Reading Group from 12-1:30 pm, to discuss two chapters of her recently published Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010).1
Jane introduced her book, which draws on alternative traditions of materialism, as both trying to to do away with the idea of inert matter, and attempt to move discourse away from moral responsibility towards a political pragmatism more concerned with problem-solving than with evaluating responsibility. The questions posed at the reading group were not straightforward and, at times, perhaps a little aggressive but Jane did well to respond to claims that (1) the work was reactionary and that (2) there was no argument. The first point, that her work was reactionary, was prompted by a reading of a particular paragraph in Chapter 2 (‘the agency of assemblages’, p.37-38) of Vibrant Matter:
Perhaps the ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one’s response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating: Do I attempt to extricate myself from assemblages whose trajectory is likely to do harm? Do I enter into the proximity of assemblages who conglomerate effectivity tends toward the enactment of nobler ends? Agency is, I believe, distributed across a mosaic, but it is also possible to say something about the kind of striving that may be exercised by a human within the assemblage.
Arguing that perhaps she is not as radical (as some of the people who were sitting round the table?), Jane explained that she was developing an incrementalist political imaginary. There are always lines of flight and dysfunctional elements that you can accentuate, and you never know what the political implications are, or might be, in advance. Indeed, she compares the exertion we might possess as being analogous to that of riding a bicycle on gravel: whilst you can move yourself in different direction to inflect the bike’s path, you are but one actant operative in a moving whole. The second point, concerning the style of the book, was acknowledged by Jane, who noted that there was not a log of antagonism in the book. However, the book was written as a narrative of experience, as a story and not an argument. The relation between politics and ontology is not direct, she contended, and the book was pitched on a micropolitical register, where sensibilities are formed or altered. Although unable to guarantee the effects of a book , there is definitely a mood to the book which Jane hoped was infectious. Perhaps the book itself is another example of thing-power (developed, in part from Spinoza’s notion of power: the capacity to affect and be affected), which encourages, or fosters, a susceptibility to being altered by encounters. My question, at the end of the discussion, concerned a particular passage in the text: if affiliations in an assemblage require a certain proximity, and if so, is that a spatial proximity? Recognising it was controversial among Deleuzeans, she argued that affiliations did require a spatial proximity as her materialism is very literally physicalist. The most potent affiliations have a physical proximity, she argued, and added that she was moving towards an image of politics that is very much at the city-level. I was rather taken aback, and was unable to press her on this. Perhaps another time!
Later on in the day, Jane presented some of her work-in-progress:
Provisional title: “Michel Serres, A Topography of Becoming, and the Practice of History”2
Abstract: There is a group of political theorists today who affirm one of the various ontologies of “becoming” that philosophers such as Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, and Michel Serres have articulated. For these thinkers, the cosmos is best characterized not as a fixed order but as a flow, generative process, creative evolution, or ontological ruckus. While a focus on the fragility and changeability of orders has received much attention, it is also important, I contend, for political theorists of becoming to try to characterize, to give some specificity to, the strange systematicity proper to a mobile and protean world. My essay draws upon Michel Serres to address the question of how it is that forms manage to appear amidst the general hustle and flow of life. Serres, I contend, offers a rich conceptual and metaphorical repertoire for thinking about the formativity of becoming and for mapping the course of its congealments. I first consider Serres’ metaphysics of “noise,” I then turn to the distinctive phases he discerns with it, and I conclude by drawing out some implications of his topography of becoming for the practice of doing history and political theory.
The paper could be seen as a development from her last two books and was modest in its aims. She opened with a discussion of ‘Thing-theory’, mainly discussing the work of Graham Harman who she started reading after finishing Vibrant Matter. An object-oriented philosopher, Harman is critical of two ‘camps’ (process / product) of philosophers who have theorised things. He argues against the grandeur of Duration or Becoming (Bergson, Deleuze), whilst claiming that there is more to the object than its relations (Latour, Whitehead). The task of Jane’s paper was to try to bring these groups together again by seeking to understand how objects withstand the flow of becoming – what she called a ‘strange structuralism’ – through the (perhaps) less well-known metaphysics of Michel Serres, who offers a rich conceptual and metaphorical repertoire for thinking the forms and structures of becoming. Instead of becoming, Serres talks of noise, a hum or buzz, a background of life. So how might shapes take form in this noise?
The aleatory quality of formativity – it could happen, but maybe not – is described using Serres’ vocabulary of surge, fluctuation, rhythm / cadence, vortex, turbulence, and invariance. These phases do not follow a linear progression but are instead contemporaneous, both multi-temporal and poly-chronic. What then, would a political theory alert to the crumpled or unfolded nature of space-time look like? Perhaps (and Jane was not entirely happy with this) theorists might make experimental connections between events or bodies which resemble one another; Serres endorses this experimentalism. Social scientists should be like Hermes: experimental messengers, exporting and importing, traversing, inventing, working through analogies. The social scientist as maker of analogies: we know no other route to invention, we have to proceed by way of analogy. There is a lot of play in analogies, and they are not founded on a causal relationship but rather a co-shimmering. This does not however, sit comfortably with Deleuze’s preference for examples rather than analogies (preferring an exemplary rather than an analogical philosophy) and when asked, Jane explained that she was most interested in thinking about echoes and sympathies (or lines of affective connection) which perhaps have more to do with webs of resemblance and similitude.
—————————————————————————————————————————–
This post is tagged affect, becoming, bennett, deleuze, harman, matter, serres, thing-power