Duke University Press

Chapter Title: The Force of Things

Book Title: Vibrant Matter

Book Subtitle: A Political Ecology of Things
Book Author(s): JANE BENNETT
Published by: Duke University Press. (2010)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv111jh6w.5

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Vibrant Matter

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The Force of Things

In the wake of Michel Foucault’s death in 1984, there was an explosion

of scholarship on the body and its social construction, on the operations
of biopower. These genealogical (in the Nietzschean sense) studies ex-
posed the various micropolitical and macropolitical techniques through
which the human body was disciplined, normalized, sped up and slowed
down, gendered, sexed, nationalized, globalized, rendered disposable,
or otherwise composed. The initial insight was to reveal how cultural
practices produce what is experienced as the “natural,” but many theo-
rists also insisted on the material recalcitrance of such cultural produc-
tions.1 Though gender, for example, was a congealed bodily effect of
historical norms and repetitions, its status as artifact does not imply
an easy susceptibility to human understanding, reform, or control. The
point was that cultural forms are themselves powerful, material assem-
blages with resistant force.
In what follows, I, too, will feature the negative power or recalcitrance
of things. But I will also seek to highlight a positive, productive power of
their own. And, instead of focusing on collectives conceived primarily

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 chapter 1

as conglomerates of human designs and practices (“discourse”), I will

highlight the active role of nonhuman materials in public life. In short, I
will try to give voice to a thing-power. As W. J. T. Mitchell notes, “objects
are the way things appear to a subject—that is, with a name, an identity,
a gestalt or stereotypical template. . . . Things, on the other hand, . . .
[signal] the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sar-
dine can looks back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject ex-
periences the object as uncanny and feels the need for what Foucault
calls ‘a metaphysics of the object, or, more exactly, a metaphysics of that
never objectifiable depth from which objects rise up toward our superfi-
cial knowledge.’”2

Thing-Power, or the Out-Side

Spinoza ascribes to bodies a peculiar vitality: “Each thing [res], as far

as it can by its own power, strives [conatur] to persevere in its own
being.”3 Conatus names an “active impulsion” or trending tendency to
persist.4 Although Spinoza distinguishes the human body from other
bodies by noting that its “virtue” consists in “nothing other than to live
by the guidance of reason,”5 every nonhuman body shares with every
human body a conative nature (and thus a “virtue” appropriate to its
material configuration). Conatus names a power present in every body:
“Any thing whatsoever, whether it be more perfect or less perfect, will
always be able to persist in existing with that same force whereby it be-
gins to exist, so that in this respect all things are equal.”6 Even a falling
stone, writes Spinoza, “is endeavoring, as far as in it lies, to continue in
its motion.”7 As Nancy Levene notes, “Spinoza continually stresses this
continuity between human and other beings,” for “not only do human
beings not form a separate imperium unto themselves; they do not even
command the imperium, nature, of which they are a part.”8
The idea of thing-power bears a family resemblance to Spinoza’s cona-
tus, as well as to what Henry David Thoreau called the Wild or that
uncanny presence that met him in the Concord woods and atop Mount
Ktaadn and also resided in/as that monster called the railroad and that
alien called his Genius. Wildness was a not-quite-human force that
addled and altered human and other bodies. It named an irreducibly

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 the force of things 

strange dimension of matter, an out-side. Thing-power is also kin to what

Hent de Vries, in the context of political theology, called “the absolute”
or that “intangible and imponderable” recalcitrance.9 Though the abso-
lute is often equated with God, especially in theologies emphasizing
divine omnipotence or radical alterity, de Vries defines it more open-
endedly as “that which tends to loosen its ties to existing contexts.”10
This definition makes sense when we look at the etymology of absolute:
ab (off) + solver (to loosen). The absolute is that which is loosened off and
on the loose. When, for example, a Catholic priest performs the act of
ab-solution, he is the vehicle of a divine agency that loosens sins from
their attachment to a particular soul: sins now stand apart, displaced
foreigners living a strange, impersonal life of their own. When de Vries
speaks of the absolute, he thus tries to point to what no speaker could
possibly see, that is, a some-thing that is not an object of knowledge,
that is detached or radically free from representation, and thus no-thing
at all. Nothing but the force or effectivity of the detachment, that is.
De Vries’s notion of the absolute, like the thing-power I will seek to
express, seeks to acknowledge that which refuses to dissolve completely
into the milieu of human knowledge. But there is also a difference in
emphasis. De Vries conceives this exteriority, this out-side, primarily
as an epistemological limit: in the presence of the absolute, we cannot
know. It is from human thinking that the absolute has detached; the
absolute names the limits of intelligibility. De Vries’s formulations thus
give priority to humans as knowing bodies, while tending to overlook
things and what they can do. The notion of thing-power aims instead to
attend to the it as actant; I will try, impossibly, to name the moment of
independence (from subjectivity) possessed by things, a moment that
must be there, since things do in fact affect other bodies, enhancing or
weakening their power. I will shift from the language of epistemology
to that of ontology, from a focus on an elusive recalcitrance hovering
between immanence and transcendence (the absolute) to an active,
earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness (vibrant matter). I will try to
give voice to a vitality intrinsic to materiality, in the process absolving
matter from its long history of attachment to automatism or mecha-
nism.11
The strangely vital things that will rise up to meet us in this chapter—
a dead rat, a plastic cap, a spool of thread—are characters in a specula-

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 chapter 1

tive onto-story. The tale hazards an account of materiality, even though

it is both too alien and too close to see clearly and even though linguistic
means prove inadequate to the task. The story will highlight the extent
to which human being and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the
us and the it slip-slide into each other. One moral of the story is that we
are also nonhuman and that things, too, are vital players in the world.
The hope is that the story will enhance receptivity to the impersonal life
that surrounds and infuses us, will generate a more subtle awareness of
the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies, and will
enable wiser interventions into that ecology.

Thing-Power I: Debris

On a sunny Tuesday morning on 4 June in the grate over the storm drain
to the Chesapeake Bay in front of Sam’s Bagels on Cold Spring Lane in
Baltimore, there was:

one large men’s black plastic work glove

one dense mat of oak pollen
one unblemished dead rat
one white plastic bottle cap
one smooth stick of wood

Glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick. As I encountered these items, they shim-
mied back and forth between debris and thing—between, on the one
hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human activity (the
workman’s efforts, the litterer’s toss, the rat-poisoner’s success), and,
on the other hand, stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as
existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits,
or projects. In the second moment, stuff exhibited its thing-power: it
issued a call, even if I did not quite understand what it was saying. At
the very least, it provoked affects in me: I was repelled by the dead (or
was it merely sleeping?) rat and dismayed by the litter, but I also felt
something else: a nameless awareness of the impossible singularity of
that rat, that configuration of pollen, that otherwise utterly banal, mass-
produced plastic water-bottle cap.
I was struck by what Stephen Jay Gould called the “excruciating com-
plexity and intractability” of nonhuman bodies,12 but, in being struck, I

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 the force of things 

realized that the capacity of these bodies was not restricted to a passive
“intractability” but also included the ability to make things happen, to
produce effects. When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen,
the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark, it was in part
because of the contingent tableau that they formed with each other,
with the street, with the weather that morning, with me. For had the
sun not glinted on the black glove, I might not have seen the rat; had
the rat not been there, I might not have noted the bottle cap, and so on.
But they were all there just as they were, and so I caught a glimpse of
an energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that I generally
conceived as inert. In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is,
as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human)
subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics. In my
encounter with the gutter on Cold Spring Lane, I glimpsed a culture of
things irreducible to the culture of objects.13 I achieved, for a moment,
what Thoreau had made his life’s goal: to be able, as Thomas Dumm
puts it, “to be surprised by what we see.”14
This window onto an eccentric out-side was made possible by the
fortuity of that particular assemblage, but also by a certain anticipatory
readiness on my in-side, by a perceptual style open to the appearance of
thing-power. For I came on the glove-pollen-rat-cap-stick with Thoreau
in my head, who had encouraged me to practice “the discipline of look-
ing always at what is to be seen”; with Spinoza’s claim that all things
are “animate, albeit in different degrees”; and with Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, whose Phenomenology of Perception had disclosed for me “an im-
manent or incipient significance in the living body [which] extends, . . .
to the whole sensible world” and which had shown me how “our gaze,
prompted by the experience of our own body, will discover in all other
‘objects’ the miracle of expression.”15
As I have already noted, the items on the ground that day were vibra-
tory—at one moment disclosing themselves as dead stuff and at the
next as live presence: junk, then claimant; inert matter, then live wire.
It hit me then in a visceral way how American materialism, which re-
quires buying ever-increasing numbers of products purchased in ever-
shorter cycles, is antimateriality.16 The sheer volume of commodities,
and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for
new ones, conceals the vitality of matter. In The Meadowlands, a late
twentieth-century, Thoreauian travelogue of the New Jersey garbage

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 chapter 1

hills outside Manhattan, Robert Sullivan describes the vitality that per-
sists even in trash:

The . . . garbage hills are alive. . . . there are billions of microscopic organ-
isms thriving underground in dark, oxygen-free communities. . . . After
having ingested the tiniest portion of leftover New Jersey or New York,
these cells then exhale huge underground plumes of carbon dioxide and of
warm moist methane, giant stillborn tropical winds that seep through the
ground to feed the Meadlowlands’ fires, or creep up into the atmosphere,
where they eat away at the . . . ozone. . . . One afternoon I . . . walked along
the edge of a garbage hill, a forty-foot drumlin of compacted trash that
owed its topography to the waste of the city of Newark. . . . There had been
rain the night before, so it wasn’t long before I found a little leachate seep,
a black ooze trickling down the slope of the hill, an espresso of refuse. In a
few hours, this stream would find its way down into the . . . groundwater of
the Meadowlands; it would mingle with toxic streams. . . . But in this mo-
ment, here at its birth, . . . this little seep was pure pollution, a pristine stew
of oil and grease, of cyanide and arsenic, of cadmium, chromium, copper,
lead, nickel, silver, mercury, and zinc. I touched this fluid—my fingertip
was a bluish caramel color—and it was warm and fresh. A few yards away,
where the stream collected into a benzene-scented pool, a mallard swam
alone.17

Sullivan reminds us that a vital materiality can never really be thrown

“away,” for it continues its activities even as a discarded or unwanted
commodity. For Sullivan that day, as for me on that June morning, thing-
power rose from a pile of trash. Not Flower Power, or Black Power, or
Girl Power, but Thing-Power: the curious ability of inanimate things to
animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.

Thing-Power II: Odradek’s Nonorganic Life

A dead rat, some oak pollen, and a stick of wood stopped me in my

tracks. But so did the plastic glove and the bottle cap: thing-power
arises from bodies inorganic as well as organic. In support of this con-
tention, Manuel De Landa notes how even inorganic matter can “self-
organize”:

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 the force of things 

Inorganic matter-energy has a wider range of alternatives for the generation

of structure than just simple phase transitions. . . . In other words, even the
humblest forms of matter and energy have the potential for self-organization
beyond the relatively simple type involved in the creation of crystals. There
are, for instance, those coherent waves called solitons which form in many
different types of materials, ranging from ocean waters (where they are
called tsunamis) to lasers. Then there are . . . stable states (or attractors),
which can sustain coherent cyclic activity. . . . Finally, and unlike the previ-
ous examples of nonlinear self-organization where true innovation cannot
occur, there [are] . . . the different combinations into which entities derived
from the previous processes (crystals, coherent pulses, cyclic patterns) may
enter. When put together, these forms of spontaneous structural generation
suggest that inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we
ever imagined. And this insight into matter’s inherent creativity needs to be
fully incorporated into our new materialist philosophies.18

I will in chapter 4 try to wrestle philosophically with the idea of im-

personal or nonorganic life, but here I would like to draw attention to
a literary dramatization of this idea: to Odradek, the protagonist of
Franz Kafka’s short story “Cares of a Family Man.” Odradek is a spool of
thread who/that can run and laugh; this animate wood exercises an im-
personal form of vitality. De Landa speaks of a “spontaneous structural
generation” that happens, for example, when chemical systems at far-
from-equilibrium states inexplicably choose one path of development
rather than another. Like these systems, the material configuration that
is Odradek straddles the line between inert matter and vital life.
For this reason Kafka’s narrator has trouble assigning Odradek to an
ontological category. Is Odradek a cultural artifact, a tool of some sort?
Perhaps, but if so, its purpose is obscure: “It looks like a flat star-shaped
spool of thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon
it; to be sure, these are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and
tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. . . . One is tempted
to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and
is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the
case; . . . nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest
anything of the kind: the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its
own way perfectly finished.”19
Or perhaps Odradek is more a subject than an object—an organic

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 chapter 1

creature, a little person? But if so, his/her/its embodiment seems rather

unnatural: from the center of Odradek’s star protrudes a small wooden
crossbar, and “by means of this latter rod . . . and one of the points of the
star . . . , the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.”20
On the one hand, like an active organism, Odradek appears to move
deliberately (he is “extraordinarily nimble”) and to speak intelligibly:
“He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance
hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has presum-
ably moved into other houses; but he always comes faithfully back to
our house again. Many a time when you go out of the door and he hap-
pens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters you
feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, you put no difficult questions to
him, you treat him—he is so diminutive that you cannot help it—rather
like a child. ‘Well, what’s your name?’ you ask him. ‘Odradek,’ he says.
‘And where do you live?’ ‘No fixed abode,’ he says and laughs.” And yet,
on the other hand, like an inanimate object, Odradek produced a so-
called laughter that “has no lungs behind it” and “sounds rather like the
rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the conversation.
Even these answers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for
a long time, as wooden as his appearance.”21
Wooden yet lively, verbal yet vegetal, alive yet inert, Odradek is onto-
logically multiple. He/it is a vital materiality and exhibits what Gilles
Deleuze has described as the persistent “hint of the animate in plants,
and of the vegetable in animals.”22 The late-nineteenth-century Russian
scientist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, who also refused any sharp
distinction between life and matter, defined organisms as “special, dis-
tributed forms of the common mineral, water. . . . Emphasizing the
continuity of watery life and rocks, such as that evident in coal or fos-
sil limestone reefs, Vernadsky noted how these apparently inert strata
are ‘traces of bygone biospheres.’”23 Odradek exposes this continuity of
watery life and rocks; he/it brings to the fore the becoming of things.

Thing-Power III: Legal Actants

I may have met a relative of Odradek while serving on a jury, again in

Baltimore, for a man on trial for attempted homicide. It was a small
glass vial with an adhesive-covered metal lid: the Gunpowder Residue

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 the force of things 

Sampler. This object/witness had been dabbed on the accused’s hand

hours after the shooting and now offered to the jury its microscopic
evidence that the hand had either fired a gun or been within three feet
of a gun firing. Expert witnesses showed the sampler to the jury several
times, and with each appearance it exercised more force, until it be-
came vital to the verdict. This composite of glass, skin cells, glue, words,
laws, metals, and human emotions had become an actant. Actant, recall,
is Bruno Latour’s term for a source of action; an actant can be human or
not, or, most likely, a combination of both. Latour defines it as “some-
thing that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no spe-
cial motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general.”24
An actant is neither an object nor a subject but an “intervener,”25 akin
to the Deleuzean “quasi-causal operator.”26 An operator is that which,
by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage and the fortuity of
being in the right place at the right time, makes the difference, makes
things happen, becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event.
Actant and operator are substitute words for what in a more subject-
centered vocabulary are called agents. Agentic capacity is now seen as
differentially distributed across a wider range of ontological types. This
idea is also expressed in the notion of “deodand,” a figure of English law
from about 1200 until it was abolished in 1846. In cases of accidental
death or injury to a human, the nonhuman actant, for example, the carv-
ing knife that fell into human flesh or the carriage that trampled the leg
of a pedestrian—became deodand (literally, “that which must be given
to God”). In recognition of its peculiar efficacy (a power that is less mas-
terful than agency but more active than recalcitrance), the deodand, a
materiality “suspended between human and thing,”27 was surrendered
to the crown to be used (or sold) to compensate for the harm done. Ac-
cording to William Pietz, “any culture must establish some procedure
of compensation, expiation, or punishment to settle the debt created
by unintended human deaths whose direct cause is not a morally ac-
countable person, but a nonhuman material object. This was the issue
thematized in public discourse by . . . the law of deodand.”28
There are of course differences between the knife that impales and
the man impaled, between the technician who dabs the sampler and the
sampler, between the array of items in the gutter of Cold Spring Lane
and me, the narrator of their vitality. But I agree with John Frow that
these differences need “to be flattened, read horizontally as a juxtapo-

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10 chapter 1

sition rather than vertically as a hierarchy of being. It’s a feature of our

world that we can and do distinguish . . . things from persons. But the
sort of world we live in makes it constantly possible for these two sets of
kinds to exchange properties.”29 And to note this fact explicitly, which is
also to begin to experience the relationship between persons and other
materialities more horizontally, is to take a step toward a more ecologi-
cal sensibility.

Thing-Power IV: Walking, Talking Minerals

Odradek, a gunpowder residue sampler, and some junk on the street

can be fascinating to people and can thus seem to come alive. But is
this evanescence a property of the stuff or of people? Was the thing-
power of the debris I encountered but a function of the subjective and
intersubjective connotations, memories, and affects that had accumu-
lated around my ideas of these items? Was the real agent of my tempo-
rary immobilization on the street that day humanity, that is, the cultural
meanings of “rat,” “plastic,” and “wood” in conjunction with my own
idiosyncratic biography? It could be. But what if the swarming activity
inside my head was itself an instance of the vital materiality that also
constituted the trash?
I have been trying to raise the volume on the vitality of materiality
per se, pursuing this task so far by focusing on nonhuman bodies, by,
that is, depicting them as actants rather than as objects. But the case
for matter as active needs also to readjust the status of human actants:
not by denying humanity’s awesome, awful powers, but by presenting
these powers as evidence of our own constitution as vital materiality. In
other words, human power is itself a kind of thing-power. At one level
this claim is uncontroversial: it is easy to acknowledge that humans
are composed of various material parts (the minerality of our bones, or
the metal of our blood, or the electricity of our neurons). But it is more
challenging to conceive of these materials as lively and self-organizing,
rather than as passive or mechanical means under the direction of
something nonmaterial, that is, an active soul or mind.
Perhaps the claim to a vitality intrinsic to matter itself becomes more
plausible if one takes a long view of time. If one adopts the perspective

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 the force of things 11

of evolutionary rather than biographical time, for example, a mineral

efficacy becomes visible. Here is De Landa’s account of the emergence
of our bones: “Soft tissue (gels and aerosols, muscle and nerve) reigned
supreme until 5000 million years ago. At that point, some of the con-
glomerations of fleshy matter-energy that made up life underwent a
sudden mineralization, and a new material for constructing living crea-
tures emerged: bone. It is almost as if the mineral world that had served
as a substratum for the emergence of biological creatures was reassert-
ing itself.”30 Mineralization names the creative agency by which bone
was produced, and bones then “made new forms of movement control
possible among animals, freeing them from many constraints and liter-
ally setting them into motion to conquer every available niche in the air,
in water, and on land.”31 In the long and slow time of evolution, then,
mineral material appears as the mover and shaker, the active power, and
the human beings, with their much-lauded capacity for self-directed
action, appear as its product.32 Vernadsky seconds this view in his de-
scription of humankind as a particularly potent mix of minerals: “What
struck [Vernadsky] most was that the material of Earth’s crust has been
packaged into myriad moving beings whose reproduction and growth
build and break down matter on a global scale. People, for example,
redistribute and concentrate oxygen . . . and other elements of Earth’s
crust into two-legged, upright forms that have an amazing propensity to
wander across, dig into and in countless other ways alter Earth’s surface.
We are walking, talking minerals.”33
Kafka, De Landa, and Vernadsky suggest that human individuals are
themselves composed of vital materials, that our powers are thing-
power. These vital materialists do not claim that there are no differences
between humans and bones, only that there is no necessity to describe
these differences in a way that places humans at the ontological center
or hierarchical apex. Humanity can be distinguished, instead, as Jean-
François Lyotard suggests, as a particularly rich and complex collection
of materials: “Humankind is taken for a complex material system; con-
sciousness, for an effect of language; and language for a highly complex
material system.”34 Richard Rorty similarly defines humans as very com-
plex animals, rather than as animals “with an extra added ingredient
called ‘intellect’ or ‘the rational soul.’”35
The fear is that in failing to affirm human uniqueness, such views

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12 chapter 1

authorize the treatment of people as mere things; in other words, that

a strong distinction between subjects and objects is needed to prevent
the instrumentalization of humans. Yes, such critics continue, objects
possess a certain power of action (as when bacteria or pharmaceuti-
cals enact hostile or symbiotic projects inside the human body), and
yes, some subject-on-subject objectifications are permissible (as when
persons consent to use and be used as a means to sexual pleasure), but
the ontological divide between persons and things must remain lest one
have no moral grounds for privileging man over germ or for condemning
pernicious forms of human-on-human instrumentalization (as when
powerful humans exploit illegal, poor, young, or otherwise weaker
humans).
How can the vital materialist respond to this important concern?
First, by acknowledging that the framework of subject versus object has
indeed at times worked to prevent or ameliorate human suffering and to
promote human happiness or well-being. Second, by noting that its suc-
cesses come at the price of an instrumentalization of nonhuman nature
that can itself be unethical and can itself undermine long-term human
interests. Third, by pointing out that the Kantian imperative to treat
humanity always as an end-in-itself and never merely as a means does
not have a stellar record of success in preventing human suffering or
promoting human well-being: it is important to raise the question of its
actual, historical efficacy in order to open up space for forms of ethical
practice that do not rely upon the image of an intrinsically hierarchical
order of things. Here the materialist speaks of promoting healthy and
enabling instrumentalizations, rather than of treating people as ends-in-
themselves, because to face up to the compound nature of the human
self is to find it difficult even to make sense of the notion of a single
end-in-itself. What instead appears is a swarm of competing ends being
pursued simultaneously in each individual, some of which are healthy to
the whole, some of which are not. Here the vital materialist, taking a cue
from Nietzsche’s and Spinoza’s ethics, favors physiological over moral
descriptors because she fears that moralism can itself become a source
of unnecessary human suffering.36
We are now in a better position to name that other way to promote
human health and happiness: to raise the status of the materiality of which
we are composed. Each human is a heterogeneous compound of wonder-

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 the force of things 13

fully vibrant, dangerously vibrant, matter. If matter itself is lively, then

not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but
the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. All bodies
become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and
protean agency are brought into sharper relief. Vital materialism would
thus set up a kind of safety net for those humans who are now, in a
world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer
because they do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois,
theocentric, or other) model of personhood. The ethical aim becomes
to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such. Such a newfound
attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of
human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense
of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably
enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in a knotted world of
vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm
oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good
for humans. As I will argue further in chapter 8, a vital materialism does
not reject self-interest as a motivation for ethical behavior, though it
does seek to cultivate a broader definition of self and of interest.

Thing-Power V: Thing-Power and Adorno’s Nonidentity

But perhaps the very idea of thing-power or vibrant matter claims too
much: to know more than it is possible to know. Or, to put the criti-
cism in Theodor Adorno’s terms, does it exemplify the violent hubris of
Western philosophy, a tradition that has consistently failed to mind the
gap between concept and reality, object and thing? For Adorno this gap
is ineradicable, and the most that can be said with confidence about
the thing is that it eludes capture by the concept, that there is always
a “nonidentity” between it and any representation. And yet, as I shall
argue, even Adorno continues to seek a way to access—however darkly,
crudely, or fleetingly—this out-side. One can detect a trace of this long-
ing in the following quotation from Negative Dialectics: “What we may
call the thing itself is not positively and immediately at hand. He who
wants to know it must think more, not less.”37 Adorno clearly rejects the
possibility of any direct, sensuous apprehension (“the thing itself is not

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14 chapter 1

positively and immediately at hand”), but he does not reject all modes
of encounter, for there is one mode, “thinking more, not less,” that holds
promise. In this section I will explore some of the affinities between
Adorno’s nonidentity and my thing-power and, more generally, between
his “specific materialism” (ND, 203) and a vital materialism.
Nonidentity is the name Adorno gives to that which is not subject to
knowledge but is instead “heterogeneous” to all concepts. This elusive
force is not, however, wholly outside human experience, for Adorno
describes nonidentity as a presence that acts upon us: we knowers are
haunted, he says, by a painful, nagging feeling that something’s being
forgotten or left out. This discomfiting sense of the inadequacy of rep-
resentation remains no matter how refined or analytically precise one’s
concepts become. “Negative dialectics” is the method Adorno designs
to teach us how to accentuate this discomforting experience and how
to give it a meaning. When practiced correctly, negative dialectics will
render the static buzz of nonidentity into a powerful reminder that “ob-
jects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder” and
thus that life will always exceed our knowledge and control. The ethical
project par excellence, as Adorno sees it, is to keep remembering this
and to learn how to accept it. Only then can we stop raging against a
world that refuses to offer us the “reconcilement” that we, according to
Adorno, crave (ND, 5).38
For the vital materialist, however, the starting point of ethics is less
the acceptance of the impossibility of “reconcilement” and more the
recognition of human participation in a shared, vital materiality. We are
vital materiality and we are surrounded by it, though we do not always
see it that way. The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability
to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it. In a
parallel manner, Adorno’s “specific materialism” also recommends a set
of practical techniques for training oneself to better detect and accept
nonidentity. Negative dialectics is, in other words, the pedagogy inside
Adorno’s materialism.
This pedagogy includes intellectual as well as aesthetic exercises. The
intellectual practice consists in the attempt to make the very process
of conceptualization an explicit object of thought. The goal here is to
become more cognizant that conceptualization automatically obscures
the inadequacy of its concepts. Adorno believes that critical reflection

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 the force of things 15

can expose this cloaking mechanism and that the exposure will inten-
sify the felt presence of nonidentity. The treatment is homeopathic: we
must develop a concept of nonidentity to cure the hubris of conceptual-
ization. The treatment can work because, however distorting, concepts
still “refer to nonconceptualities.” This is “because concepts on their
part are moments of the reality that requires their formation” (ND, 12).
Concepts can never provide a clear view of things in themselves, but
the “discriminating man,” who “in the matter and its concept can distin-
guish even the infinitesimal, that which escapes the concept” (ND, 45),
can do a better job of gesturing toward them. Note that the discrimi-
nating man (adept at negative dialectics) both subjects his conceptual-
izations to second-order reflection and pays close aesthetic attention to
the object’s “qualitative moments” (ND, 43), for these open a window
onto nonidentity.
A second technique of the pedagogy is to exercise one’s utopian
imagination. The negative dialectician should imaginatively re-create
what has been obscured by the distortion of conceptualization: “The
means employed in negative dialectics for the penetration of its hard-
ened objects is possibility—the possibility of which their reality has
cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one” (ND,
52). Nonidentity resides in those denied possibilities, in the invisible
field that surrounds and infuses the world of objects.
A third technique is to admit a “playful element” into one’s thinking
and to be willing to play the fool. The negative dialectician “knows how
far he remains from” knowing nonidentity, “and yet he must always talk
as if he had it entirely. This brings him to the point of clowning. He must
not deny his clownish traits, least of all since they alone can give him
hope for what is denied him” (ND, 14).
The self-criticism of conceptualization, a sensory attentiveness to
the qualitative singularities of the object, the exercise of an unrealistic
imagination, and the courage of a clown: by means of such practices
one might replace the “rage” against nonidentity with a respect for it,
a respect that chastens our will to mastery. That rage is for Adorno the
driving force behind interhuman acts of cruelty and violence. Adorno
goes even further to suggest that negative dialectics can transmute the
anguish of nonidentity into a will to ameliorative political action: the
thing thwarts our desire for conceptual and practical mastery and this

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16 chapter 1

refusal angers us; but it also offers us an ethical injunction, according

to which “suffering ought not to be, . . . things should be different. Woe
speaks: ‘Go.’ Hence the convergence of specific materialism with criti-
cism, with social change in practice” (ND, 202–3).39
Adorno founds his ethics on an intellectual and aesthetic attentive-
ness that, though it will always fail to see its object clearly, nevertheless
has salutory effects on the bodies straining to see. Adorno willingly plays
the fool by questing after what I would call thing-power, but which he
calls “the preponderance of the object” (ND, 183). Humans encounter a
world in which nonhuman materialities have power, a power that the
“bourgeois I,” with its pretensions to autonomy, denies.40 It is at this
point that Adorno identifies negative dialectics as a materialism: it is
only “by passing to the object’s preponderance that dialectics is ren-
dered materialistic” (ND, 192).
Adorno dares to affirm something like thing-power, but he does not
want to play the fool for too long. He is quick—too quick from the point
of view of the vital materialist—to remind the reader that objects are
always “entwined” with human subjectivity and that he has no desire “to
place the object on the orphaned royal throne once occupied by the sub-
ject. On that throne the object would be nothing but an idol” (ND, 181).
Adorno is reluctant to say too much about nonhuman vitality, for the
more said, the more it recedes from view. Nevertheless, Adorno does try
to attend somehow to this reclusive reality, by means of a negative dia-
lectics. Negative dialectics has an affinity with negative theology: nega-
tive dialectics honors nonidentity as one would honor an unknowable
god; Adorno’s “specific materialism” includes the possibility that there
is divinity behind or within the reality that withdraws. Adorno rejects
any naive picture of transcendence, such as that of a loving God who
designed the world (“metaphysics cannot rise again” [ND, 404] after
Auschwitz), but the desire for transcendence cannot, he believes, be
eliminated: “Nothing could be experienced as truly alive if something
that transcends life were not promised also. . . . The transcendent is, and
it is not” (ND, 375).41 Adorno honors nonidentity as an absent absolute,
as a messianic promise.42
Adorno struggles to describe a force that is material in its resistance to
human concepts but spiritual insofar as it might be a dark promise of an
absolute-to-come. A vital materialism is more thoroughly nontheistic in

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 the force of things 17

presentation: the out-side has no messianic promise.43 But a philosophy

of nonidentity and a vital materialism nevertheless share an urge to cul-
tivate a more careful attentiveness to the out-side.

The Naive Ambition of Vital Materialism

Adorno reminds us that humans can experience the out-side only in-
directly, only through vague, aporetic, or unstable images and impres-
sions. But when he says that even distorting concepts still “refer to
nonconceptualities, because concepts on their part are moments of the
reality that requires their formation” (ND, 12), Adorno also acknowl-
edges that human experience nevertheless includes encounters with an
out-side that is active, forceful, and (quasi)independent. This out-side
can operate at a distance from our bodies or it can operate as a foreign
power internal to them, as when we feel the discomfort of nonidentity,
hear the naysaying voice of Socrates’s demon, or are moved by what
Lucretius described as that “something in our breast” capable of fight-
ing and resisting.44 There is a strong tendency among modern, secular,
well-educated humans to refer such signs back to a human agency con-
ceived as its ultimate source. This impulse toward cultural, linguistic,
or historical constructivism, which interprets any expression of thing-
power as an effect of culture and the play of human powers, politicizes
moralistic and oppressive appeals to “nature.” And that is a good thing.
But the constructivist response to the world also tends to obscure from
view whatever thing-power there may be. There is thus something to be
said for moments of methodological naiveté, for the postponement of
a genealogical critique of objects.45 This delay might render manifest a
subsistent world of nonhuman vitality. To “render manifest” is both to
receive and to participate in the shape given to that which is received.
What is manifest arrives through humans but not entirely because of
them.
Vital materialists will thus try to linger in those moments during
which they find themselves fascinated by objects, taking them as clues
to the material vitality that they share with them. This sense of a strange
and incomplete commonality with the out-side may induce vital materi-
alists to treat nonhumans—animals, plants, earth, even artifacts and

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18 chapter 1

commodities—more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically.

But how to develop this capacity for naiveté? One tactic might be to
revisit and become temporarily infected by discredited philosophies of
nature, risking “the taint of superstition, animism, vitalism, anthropo-
morphism, and other premodern attitudes.”46 I will venture into vital-
ism in chapters 5 and 6, but let me here make a brief stop at the ancient
atomism of Lucretius, the Roman devotee of Epicurus.
Lucretius tells of bodies falling in a void, bodies that are not lifeless
stuff but matter on the go, entering and leaving assemblages, swerving
into each other: “At times quite undetermined and at undetermined spots
they push a little from their path: yet only just so much as you could call
a change of trend. [For if they did not] . . . swerve, all things would fall
downwards through the deep void like drops of rain, nor could collision
come to be, nor a blow brought to pass for the primordia: so nature
would never have brought anything into existence.”47 Louis Althusser
described this as a “materialism of the encounter,” according to which
political events are born from chance meetings of atoms.48 A primordial
swerve says that the world is not determined, that an element of chanci-
ness resides at the heart of things, but it also affirms that so-called in-
animate things have a life, that deep within is an inexplicable vitality or
energy, a moment of independence from and resistance to us and other
bodies: a kind of thing-power.
The rhetoric of De Rerum Natura is realist, speaking in an authorita-
tive voice, claiming to describe a nature that preexists and outlives us:
here are the smallest constituent parts of being (“primordia”) and here
are the principles of association governing them.49 It is easy to criticize
this realism: Lucretius quests for the thing itself, but there is no there
there—or, at least, no way for us to grasp or know it, for the thing is
always already humanized; its object status arises at the very instant
something comes into our awareness. Adorno levels this charge explic-
itly against Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology, which Adorno inter-
prets as a “realism” that “seeks to breach the walls which thought has
built around itself, to pierce the interjected layer of subjective positions
that have become a second nature.” Heidegger’s aim “to philosophize
formlessly, so to speak, purely on the ground of things” (ND, 78)50 is
for Adorno futile, and it is productive of a violent “rage” against non­
identity.51

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 the force of things 19

But Lucretius’s poem—like Kafka’s stories, Sullivan’s travelogue,

Vernadsky’s speculations, and my account of the gutter of Cold Spring
Lane—does offer this potential benefit: it can direct sensory, linguistic,
and imaginative attention toward a material vitality. The advantage of
such tales, with their ambitious naiveté, is that though they “disavow
. . . the tropological work, the psychological work, and the phenome-
nological work entailed in the human production of materiality,” they
do so “in the name of avowing the force of questions that have been too
readily foreclosed by more familiar fetishizations: the fetishization of
the subject, the image, the word.”52

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