Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (A critique)

 Jane Bennett. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.

I am critical of Jane Bennett's book 'Vibrant Matter', I will try to briefly explain why. Her book is an example of a number of titles discussing the 'New Materialism'. Associated with Bruno Latour this is a philosophical perspective, an ontology (the study of being), which argues, as far as I understand, that matter has a life of it's own. Human beings rather than having exclusive agency, the ability to act and strategise, are part of a universe of things which act. Mammals, worms, light bulbs, mountains, stars, metal, you name it, are 'actants'. Deep ecology extends moral standing to all of nature, the new materialism goes much further to argues that everything is nature, and everything has agency.

I think there is much to commend this.

However reading Jane Bennett's text I was deeply troubled by a reference to Garrett Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons' (Bennett 2010: 27). Hardin was to be blunt a racist, the tragedy is a pessimistic hymn to disaster. Hardin argued that irrespective of individual agency, a free rider problem occurs that means we inevitably tend to degrade common land and other environments.

It is useful to read a text, in my opinion, in terms of its silences. Bennett is silent about Elinor Ostrom. Winning a Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009, Ostrom questioned the tragedy. Potentially it is a problem she agreed but often individuals can with the appropriate institutions over come it. Ostrom is often met in silence, the silence is particularly loud in Bennett.

Hardin is often dropped into texts, a code of the destructive commons, so common sensical, as to need no discussion. Yet his work demands challenge, his 'Tragedy of the Commons' is used to justify a coercive approach to environmental policy making, he used it specifically to argue for authoritarian policies. It demands challenge, along with his 'Life Boat Thesis', I would argue that metaphors can have material effects and dangerous ones at that.

The stakes of a new materialism are potentially high. Bennett argues that materialism might be a better way of approaching ecological problems than environmentalism, 'the discourse of encountering a vital materiality over that of caring for an environment' (Bennett 2010: 111).

I am not convinced but nonetheless seeing the rest of creation as vibrant rather than passive may have positive implications. We are not the centre of the universe, there is arrogance in humanism perhaps.

And yet? The casual use of the 'tragedy of the commons' trope, makes me suspicious. New Materialism is perhaps about ethics, insert Hardin's grim myth, used by him to advocate repression, and the silence about Ostrom's engagement with this question is problematic.

As Ostrom recalled in an interview in 2010:

Hardin gave a speech on the IU [Indiana University, Bloomington] campus, and I went to it, and he indicated the more general – but then it was that he really was worried about population. He indicated that every man and every woman should be sterilized after they have one child. He was very serious about it. […] I was somewhat taken aback: ‘My theory proves that we should do this,’ and people said, ‘Well, don’t you think that that’s a little severe?’ ‘No! That’s what we should do, or we’re sunk.’ Well, he, in my mind, became a totalitarian.

Why are we still silent about a trope used to justify enclosure and displacement, a trope which poetically promotes an authoritarian environmentalism?

Derrida argues somewhere that the margins, the footnotes, the apparently minor elements of a text can be powerful. The 'tragedy of the commons' is so minor in Bennett's text, with little importance for her argument. And yet margins, the tiny things, that are so trivial are so important.

If we don't get the ethics of how humans interact with humans, how are we going ever get on to our interactions with vibrant matter. Perhaps we won't. Commoning is about the ethics of human cooperation, the anti-commons of enclosure so often a tool for rejecting the ethical as utterly unrealistic.

In turn I think the silence around Elinor Ostrom's political ecology and indeed political ecology, might provide a productive comment on Bennett's ecology of things.Bennett concludes her book with the following creed

'And I know that more needs to be said specify the normative implications of a vital materialism in specific contexts. So I will end with a litany, a kind of Nicene Creed for would be vital materialists. I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms, ... (Bennett 2010: 122) '

I wonder whether Ostrom's challenge to Hardin's authoritarianism might help materialise the materialist creed. After all referencing Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattari, Bennett notes their use of 'associations' and 'assemblages'. Commoners build associations between each other, may be while Latour's 'parliament of things' is rather vague, commons might be extended to the non human, at least, commoning with the newts and crows being considered?