Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/10

Rh .’ There was, ‘not so much a doer (an agent) behind the deed (the blackout) as a doing and an effecting by a human-nonhuman assemblage.’ Ethical problems and questions follow from such revised metaphysical framings of agency, a fact Bennett clearly recognizes. However, she argues that human intentionality, interiority and reflexivity have always been shaped by human tool-use and encounters with the nonhuman. The case for religious and gender identities being shaped by interactions with complex networks of materialities does not seem too contentious in this regard.

A Democracy of Objects

A speculative metaphysic sharing some affinities with Bennett’s vibrant materialism, is that of object-oriented ontology. It is worthwhile dedicating rather more space to this, given that it is perhaps the largest and most developed wing of speculative realism, featuring the work of four active contributors: Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost and Tim Morton. Moreover, it has shown itself to be the most amenable and committed to applications beyond its immediate environment. Taking Vibrant Matter as a point of departure, for Bennett metaphysical emphasis typically rests with the agentic potential of more-than-human assemblages, in which material objects may blur or dissolve into one another, and where there is a presumption of ‘one matter-energy’ subtending these formations. By contrast, for object-oriented ontologists it is individual objects that are the primary units of reality, and, although not adverse to assemblages, they staunchly oppose the dissolution of individual things and the positing of any underlying metaphysical substrates or unities. For want of a better phrase, it is objects all the way down.

In order to elaborate basic object-oriented principles, certain differences between the main writers may be elided. I will limit myself to four fundamental principles here. First, objects are the basic units of reality, 53