Bruno Latour’s (2004) Politics of Nature
“political ecology” to describe forms of political deliberation and recognition in which people are not the only significant actors.
politics needs to be “ecological,”
in a more “vitalist” sense that de-privileges humans without presupposing the membership or interests of the new polis.
‘vitality,’
- the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans, but also to act as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.
- a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due
stem cell research, power black-outs, obesity, and food politics
Spinoza, Bergson, Epicurus, Deleuze, Guattari, Whitehead, and Dewey
these thinkers took seriously the world’s liveliness, with some of them (like Guattari) prepared to unthink “politics” as a purely human pursuit.
“vitality” has been a focus of European thought for over 2000 years, starting with the ancient Greeks, re-emerging during the early Enlightenment period, and re-surfacing again at the turn of the 20th century.
image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting … a fuller range of non-human powers … which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us, [but] in any case call for our attentiveness, or even ‘respect’ …”
written in the name of non-human others in order to give them their due. These others are understood in relational, co-constitutive ways — as part of what Timothy Morton (2010: 8), in The Ecological Thought, calls ”… a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite centre or edge.”
Bennett does not present readers with a fresh vocabulary of concepts designed to re-value the non-human or the human in their vibrant relationality. Indeed, she tends to ignore five decades of ‘green’ political thinking: as noted, her interlocutors are not out-and-out advocates for the ‘rights’, ‘needs’ or ‘entitlements’ of species or ecosystems. Most of the book is an abstract manifesto for a vitalist philosophy, leavened with case material.
seeks to rethink the idea of the public building on John Dewey’s formative contributions.
Bennett’s “political ecology”—where the novelty of her book ought to lie—amounts to a set of recommended sensibilities arising from her philosophical worldview. It does not approach the systematicity or specificity of Latour’s (2004) call for a “new constitution.” Equally, Bennett’s political theory suffers, in my view, from failing to engage critically with the rich arguments and concepts proposed by green philosophers and bioethicists. Thoreau, Barry Lopez, and Wendell Berry all get a positive mention, but only because they are not considered “typical” of the genre.
Bennett ignores too much literature that is arguably germane to her own concerns.
Why, for example, is the work of Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and other animal rights philosophers deemed irrelevant to the project of rethinking the moral and practical basis of human action in a more-than-human world?
Bennett’s positive case for political ecology, it seems to me, is at once highly general and based on relatively narrow foundations. Even her ‘case’ material is brief and, at worst, reads as a set of philosophically-driven examples designed to illustrate (rather than build) the wider case.
New research that Sarah Whatmore and others are now publishing on local democracy and environmental hazards may take us into the important political territory that Bennett only gestures towards.
References
Castree, Noel. “Vibrant Matter By Jane Bennett.” Society and Space, 14 Sept. 2011, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/vibrant-matter-by-jane-bennett.