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.

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Dewsbury, J-D. (2009) Performative, Non-representational, and Affect-Based Research: Seven Injunctions. In: DeLyser, D., Atkin, S., Crang, M., Herbert, S. & McDowell, L. (eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research in Human Geography. London: Sage. Ch. 18

This is a very welcome paper to find in a handbook of research methods within human geography, advocating resolute experimentalism through the series of seven bold injunctions. Striking in its opening, the chapter is built around four key qualifications that are outlined early on. Firstly, there are few references to qualitative research in geography. Secondly, the emphasis is on the generation of problems rather than solutions. Thirdly, and perhaps unsurprisingly given Dewsbury’s other publications, there is an emphasis on the non-representational. Lastly, the paper attempts to stage the danger of scientism, the view that natural sciences have authority over all interpretations of life. As part of this ethos of disrupting, Dewsbury calls for us to strive to think the unthought and contends that this must take place at every step of the research because “[m]ethodology is far from dull: it is extremely political” (p. 323).

Following a lengthy (though necessary) introduction, the chapter opens out to explore some key agendas within performative research: thinking, sensing and presenting. Arguing that methodologies have always been somewhat improvised, Dewsbury suggests that approaches which fall broadly under the banner of the performative question why only some ways of knowing count. Put differently, performative research embraces the failures as much as the successes of research. This of course raises the thorny question of what might be considered a failure, and who might be able to decide whether or not something is a failure, an issue which is perhaps not adequately addressed. Running throughout the piece is the aforementioned series of injunctions, which are compared to proscriptions rather than prescriptions; proscriptions do not “suggest a formula or a known or better way to proceed to in performative methodological endeavour” (p. 322). This term reminded me of Whitehead’s (and more recently Isabelle Stengers’ and Erin Manning’s) use of propositions. Neither judgements nor necessarily true, propositions are theories-in-the-making, generative constraints for the opening of a relational process (Manning, 2009). Dewsbury’s injunctions-proscriptions-propositions encourage the reader to: embrace experimentation (rather than fret about the risks), have conviction in your experiments, not fear the judgement that tethers social science to scientific values (such as efficacy and rigour), remember you are producing an understanding of the world because it is not given, concentrate on experience, and to be more acute and cute in the research stories told.

The chapter is sharp, witty and eminently readable. It might even be described as a manifesto for doing non-representational geography. Witness:

“The idea is to get embroiled in the site and allow ourselves to be infected by the effort, investment, and craze of the particular practice or experience being investigated. Some might call this participation, but it is a mode of participation that is more artistic and, as with most artistic practices, it comes with the side-effect of making us more vulnerable and self-reflexive. It is not however an argument for losing ourselves in the activity and deterritorializing ourselves completely from our academic remit, but nor does it mean sitting on the sidelines and judging. Rather the move, in immersing ourselves in the space, is to gather a portfolio of ethnographic ‘exposures’ that can act as lightening rods for thought. It is then in those key ‘times out’ as we set upon generating inventive ways of addressing and intervening in that which is happening, and has happened, as an academic, that such a method produces its data: a series of testimonies to practice. This is of course the flipping over of ‘participant observation’ to ‘observant participation’ that Thrift made (2000) to emphasise the serious empirical involvement involved in non-representational theory’s engagement with practices, embodiment and materiality.” (p. 326-327)

It is not however, Dewsbury reminds us, a question of ‘anything goes’. Embracing uncertainty through experimentation and employing an extended notion of the empirical – where encounters might include readings of philosophy, material sites or even research problematics – might allow for alternative methodological strategies (see also Adkins & Lury, 2009). Therefore, alongside an ethos of disrupting, there is also an “ethos of stretching the means by which research is done and striving to continue as experiments fail or always come short in the attempt” (p. 323). Here, research is treated as an ongoing process, where data – or rather materials (see Whatmore, 2003) – could, and perhaps should, include “the feelings, the codes, the awkward intensities, the architected space, the architecture of time, to name but a few” (p. 326). The attempt at the articulation of these empirical experiences or events is more important than its success; indeed, the very attempt to articulate is part of a project which takes materials seriously, allowing them to work-with, and against, initial research questions. Approaches need to be adapted to each singular situation; there is no one-size-fits-all methodology which can be used and re-used again and again. To combat this methodological conservatism we are encouraged to engage with resolute experimentalism, at once productive, proliferative and interfering.

References

Adkins, L. & Lury, C. (2009) Introduction: What Is the Empirical? European Journal of Social Theory, 12(1): 5-20

Manning, E. (2009) Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Whatmore, S. (2003) Generating materials. In: Pryke, M., Rose, G. & Whatmore, S. (eds.) Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research. London: Sage

Joe Gerlach, Cologne

There’s a great post over at Vernacular Mappings which attempts to ‘conjure’ the micropolitics at play in the recent publication of disOrientation². I think it’s great because Gerlach (2009) really tries to stretch and put at risk, in the Stengersian sense, the notion of micropolitics: neither small-scale nor situated on the ‘left’ or ‘right’ of the political spectrum, micropolitics operates transversally, activating the “affective potential of the interval between feeling and doing” (Himada & Manning, 2009: 5). I would like to quote at length from this paper, found in the recent issue of Inflexions, Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics:

“For some, this may make it sound like a “soft” politics, but it’s quite the opposite. What is usually constituted as the real thing – Politics with a capital P – is far less rigorously inventive, precisely because it operates in the sphere of representation where precomposed bodies are already circulating. The micropolitical is that which subverts this tendency in the political to present itself as already fully formed. All politics is infested with micropolitical tendencies. This is what makes the political an event. In my opinion, much of political theory continues to invest too heavily in the already articulated “capital P” Politics. The reason for this is simple: it is extremely challenging to speak of what has not yet fully taken form. Like the microperception that tweaks the event of perception, the micropolitical is the force of the political event that potentially unmoors it.” (2009: 5).

Micropolitics, or the creation of techniques for collaboration, involve experimentation and an openness to be experimental. Micropolitics then, offers a point of departure for a new kind of politics.

The description of the disOrientation² project is rich and does not seek to reduce the mapping as a simple “case of resistance versus a nebulous hegemony, but instead it seems to offer tactics, or lines of flight for others to generate their own articulations of the university and beyond” (2009: 2, original emphasis). I liked the way in which it related the project to the SenseLab’s concept of a ‘technology of lived abstraction’ (the name for the lab’s new series of books): “an active platform of creative productivity and political movement” (Gerlach, 2009: 4).

The exploration of affect, increasingly well-honed with every iteration it seems, is refreshingly clear. It highlights what I find most interesting and productive about affect, that it does not start with the subject, and while it can be bodily it is not embodied. However, Gerlach does point to some difficulties of engaging with affect. One troubling aspect is his suggestion that we strive to animate affect; this seems to suggest that not only does affect exist a priori but that it is qualitatively different kinds of affect that we are generating by seeking to animate. I wonder if it is possible to write of affect without writing for affect.

Navigating the tension between disOrientation² as a representation and as a technology of lived abstraction is not straightforward. I would be very interested to hear how the 3Cs generated techniques to keep the virtual open, to allow space for the unexpected, to not know everything that is possible, when they were working on this project. Gerlach’s engagement with disOrientation²’s micropolitical articulations are at once exploratory and experimental, yet reach-towards a becoming-with the world. This is neither an idealisation nor a festishization of a concept (micropolitics) that has been put to work in a radically empirical manner. Bravo!

Sofas and coffee table, TML

I was invited to initiate a conversation about my work this afternoon, in the TML. Unfortunately it clashed with a lecture at McGill and so several people could not attend; however, there were several people from the lab and beyond. In attendance were Xin Wei (lab director), Harry Smoak (co-founder of the lab, now doing a PhD), Jen Spiegel (a PhD student from Goldsmiths), Christoph Brunner (a member of the SenseLab) and Yu Satow (a Masters student in the lab).

I introduced my work as best I could, explaining my interests and the literature I had been reading. I also outlined the aims and questions of the research and my methods. You can listen to some of the conversation here:

We chatted for another hour or so after the recording stops, discussing among other things: field-sites, collective action and intuition. I really enjoyed the chat and it was good to be asked questions about my work – it made me think carefully!