Abstract
In
Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
(2010), Jane Bennett encourages her readers to slow down the internal thoughts of human superiority over "intrinsically inanimate matter" --- thoughts that prevent them from "detecting...a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies" and their political systems (p. ix). Some readers of CDQ may wonder why a book from 2010 is worth our attention in 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on women's reproductive autonomy, and the restrictions placed on the EPA's control over carbon emissions all suggest a clear resurgence of what Bennett calls the oft-repeated "vitalism-materialism debate" (p. 90)---the debate over how far affect, agency, animacy, and vitality extend. Bennett resolves the tensions of that debate by fusing traditional ideas of mechanistic materialism with the notions of an unknowable agency in all matter (not just humans), an agency that lacks representation in current political thought. If technical communicators and designers dedicated to crisis/risk communication as well as those studying and producing political technologies (Cheek, 2021, 2022) didn't see the application of Bennett's "vital materialism" at the end of the Bush era's heated debates over stem cell research and the war in Iraq as well as the North American power blackout of 2003, then perhaps, given the current political climate, I can persuade them to find merit in revisiting Bennett's arguments.