"Under the influence of similar theoretical influences, especially Spinoza and Deleuze, paired with a Latourian notion of the ‘actant’, Jane Bennett pushes this aesthetico-materialist investment one step further towards properly inorganic, nonhuman bodies. Interested in the ‘material agency of natural bodies and technological artefacts’, Bennett does not rest at a transindividual(ising) capacity of the vital forces that she finds in these things (‘thing-power’), but thinks of them as impersonal, as being for themselves.15 Her project here is political, since she hopes to ‘induce in human bodies an aesthetic-affective openness to material vitality’ in order to give the nonhuman its proper, equal place in the realm of the political in order to make possible a greener, more sustainable human culture.16 Politics must be thought, here, as an ecology that is made of human and nonhuman agents, which can equally shape and disrupt the common ground of existence. It is at this point that a vitalist-materialist aesthetics of affects and vibrations is paired with an overwhelming concern for a working environmental politics. This step from an ecology of human and non-human objects to the formation of a new political public that, together with worms, trees and aluminium as equally potent actants, is suddenly able to tackle formerly irresolvable problems such as climate change, amounts to a naïve attempt at redefining politics. One that sees its main challenge as defining the right means and institutions of communication. While Bennett’s fundamental assumption is that our current democracy fails because of an imbalance between nature and culture, or non-human and human participation, she fails to see that any such horizontal relationship is foreclosed from a democracy that exists within a capitalist state in which humans, with their powers and needs, are necessarily divided from a relationship with nature and the political realm that is not mediated by capital and class.“
Posted on: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 21:09:55 +0000
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