Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/8

Rh consider two possibilities: vibrant materialism and object-oriented ontology.

A Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter is a valuable point of introduction to the speculative turn and a gateway into disciplines cognate with religious and gender studies. Although not a member of the initial coterie of speculative realists, her work has been widely read, positively reviewed, and actively appropriated by those who self-identify with the movement. Peter Gratton notes from his teaching of speculative realism that Bennett usefully brings together and articulates many of its main themes. Graham Harman, in turn, considers it particularly encouraging that ‘as candid a work of metaphysics’ could emerge from within a Political Science department, adding that ‘[p]erhaps philosophical speculation on fundamental topics is poised to make a comeback throughout the humanities.’

To begin, Vibrant Matter marks a return to thinking the things themselves. Bennett argues for nothing less than a reconceptualization of matter, a re-imagining of the human relationship with the nonhuman, and finally what she terms a political ecology of things. Her project entails making breaks with previous approaches to materialism and an assault on some of the major bifurcations to have dominated the conceptual frameworks of the west: subject-object, organic-inorganic, active-passive and, by implication, human-world. The primary claim is that non-human matter can possess a kind of agency and the line drawn between active humans and inanimate matter is far more controversial and malleable than most believe. Drawing a close alliance with the work of Bruno Latour, she deploys the concept of actants. These, she explains, ‘can be human or not, or most likely a combination of both.’ The world is replete with these actors and agencies. More expansively,

an actant is neither an object nor a subject but an ‘intervener’ akin to the Deleuzean ‘quasi-causal operator’. An operator is that which, by virtue of its 51