(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The matter around us, and in us, is alive. And man is not the navel of the world. We need an ecological theory that deals with the living matter of the world. It is demanding to achieve, both theoretically and practically, but the American philosopher Jane Bennett tries. Her efforts were published as early as 2010, but are now for the first time made available to a Scandinavian audience, via Danish.
Jane Bennett (born 1957) is a professor of political theory at Johns Hopkins University. She has particularly worked with subjects within ecophilosophy, nature and ethics, art and politics as well as modern social theory. She is the author of, among other things, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethicsand Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild.
Let me first warn the reader by saying that this is a heavy book. I will not pretend that I have understood everything, or very much. But it is a book of the times, which strives and struggles to get into matter, into existence and into reality. It is a demanding philosophical exercise, and always has been.
Through Living materiality. The political ecology of things and its eight chapters we visit a multitude of philosophers, schools of thought and natural phenomena. The book is Bennett's arguments for a new vital materialism, as she calls it. Through recognition of the matter around us as an acting "actor", we can begin to bring about a more responsible, ecologically correct policy, is the thesis.
Bennett lays out Charles Darwin's studies of the earthworm's enormous impact on modern agriculture, as a soil eater and soil changer. This little creep suddenly appears with a completely different weight, meaning and cleverness. And we learn more about Franz Kafka and thinkers from Baruch de Spinoza to Gilles Deleuze. All this to give us long perspectives so that we can get further into the "vital force" in matter.
It's about nature, ethics and impact, and we get a range of analyzes that include topics such as stem cell research, power cuts, obesity epidemics and food policy. Bennett challenges us with regard to our ingrained thought patterns about the relationship between human and non-human forces. She tries to move away from our world of experience and into what she calls the vitality in all things. Does it sound easy? No, and I fall off, many times. Some of it has to do with the fact that the material is so philosophically demanding that it takes time to get through. Also, I have knowledge gaps. But I always feel like I'm reading something important. Something that counts.
"The material reality is me, it is older than me, it is bigger than me, it lives on after me", Bennett writes towards the end of the book. That sounds like a decent summary of the project – to become part of life in a more direct and immediate way. This has philosophyone worked with since the dawn of time. The question has always been: Are we outside the world, via our exalted soul, or are we part of an ensouled world?
This is the lot of man. We are in nature, but still seem to stand outside it, where it is constantly being turned into raw material for our material desire. Or as a backdrop for what we long for when we write and talk about it.
"The material reality is me, it is older than me, it is bigger than me, it lives on after me."
But Bennett is quite clear that we should not only think about things around us and in nature from a perspective that should be neither human-centred nor instrumental. We will also try to think together with the things. We must imagine ourselves in the world of things. Do we get a new perception of materiality, av nature, technology and the body, it also changes how we behave towards each other and our surroundings in general, she writes.
The North American power grid had a massive breakdown in 2003. This blackout is one of Jane Bennett's many concrete examples of events we often see as being caused by the inanimate parts of a machine. Instead, she writes, we must begin to see these events as ephemeral assemblages of living materialities with agency.
Not immediately comprehensible, this, and as readers we have to stretch ourselves. The book is an attempt to use philosophical thinking to pursue a central question: How would our political attitude to public issues have changed if one tried to take seriously a vitalism that also includes the non-human?
Finally, as Bennett asks: "How would consumption patterns change, for example, if we were not faced with waste, garbage, filth and dung or 'recycling', but instead with a living and potentially dangerous matter? […] if we understood food intake as a meeting between different and diverse bodies, some of which are mine, while most are not, and of which no one has taken over at any given time?”
