Vital Materialism

Vital Materialism

Chapter 2 of Oryx and Crake is entitled "Floatsam"

This "floatsam" is composed of treasures and oddities for the Children of Crake - they have no idea what these objects were or what they were used for. Every single morning they scour the beaches for the flaotasam that has washed ashore

Jimmy, or Snowman, is often charged with identifying these objects. To him, the floatsam becomes an assemblage of the past - a time when things were different, when the floatsam was more than floatsam

Snowman is described as using many "things" within the first few chapters - sometimes trying to use the things for what they were meant for, but more often than not, using them as survival tools

Since the Children of Crake do not really know what the flaotsam used to be, Snowman can make up new identities and meanings for the floatsam. Their agency has changed, but the meanings for him have not

Shi/Chi

An assemblage owes its agentic capacity to the vitality of the mate­rialities that constitute it. Something like this congregational agency is called shi in the Chinese tradition

"Shi is the style, energy, propensity, trajectory, or elan inherent to a specific arrangement of things. Origi­nally a word used in military strategy, shi emerged in the description of a good general who must be able to read and then ride the shi of a configu­ration of moods. winds, historical trends, and armaments: shi names the dynamic force emanating from a spatia-temporal configuration rather than from any particular element within it." pg 35 chapter 2

Thing Power

Where does all that trash go? Into the ocean - out of mind, but not out of sight.

An Eastern philosophy - energy is contained within every single object, whether it be organic or inorganic - chi is inside every single thing

Thing Power I: Debris - that which we throw away

• even objects thrown away as trash still have "vibrancy" - can still cause reactions, still contain vitality
• Thus vital materiality can never be thrown away - even if the things are still not in use, at least by humans, they still possess a vitality that cannot be denied
• Example - Great Pacific Trash Island

Thing Power II: Power from Inorganic Material

• Kafka's Odradek - can move and possesses some ability to communicate

Thing Power III: Legal Actants

• Evidence as Agency - example - evidence used in a trial gains agency because of the human emotion, cells, words, and laws. It becomes a force with enough power to change the outcome of the trial
• Law of Deodand - compensation for loss of human life due to non-human forces and objects

Environmentalism vs. Vital Materialism

Thing Power IV: Walking, Talking Materials - Human power is a thing power: how?

• human culture applied to things
• human energy itself is a vital material
• humans have evolved and changed the face of the planet - a feat of a vital energy
• are humans treated as "things"?

• Futile to try to live in a world unmarred by human activity
• Must learn to live harmoniously with humans, things, and the environment
• Instead of separating non-human from human, see it as a whole - we share a planet with non-things and we must learn to live with them

Vital Materialism could help with the environmental issues of the world by helping humans spark kinship into their lives – not only for each other but for their environment – a sustainable relationship with things, or non-human nature

Philosophical Core of Vital Materialism

Oryx and Crake - Things

Vital materialism has a philosophical core upon which Bennett uses to build her idea of vital materialism

Deleuze and Guattari

Operator - director or center of an assemblage. Can alter direction or function of entire assemblage

Actants

Bruno Latour

• an actant is a course of action that can be either human or non-human

Similar to Deleuzean "quasi-causal operator"

From Spinoza:

• affective bodies - being a body, by nature, continuously affects and is affected by other bodies
• Conatus - thing power - "each thing...strives to preserve in its own being"
• Continuity between humans and non human things instead of the idea of human narcissism
• Mosaic Philosophy - every mode is an assemblage of many simple bodies
• "The process of modification is not under the control of anyone mode-no mode is an agent in the hierarchical sense" - pg. 22 chapter 2

From Deleuze and Guattari:

Assemblage - "Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living. throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that

confound them from within. They have uneven topographies. because some of the points at which the various affects and bodies cross paths

are more heavily trafficked than others. and so power is not distributed equally across its surface.

Assemblages are not governed by any central

head: no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group. The

effects generated by an assemblage are. rather. emergent properties. emergent in that their ability to make something happen (a newly inflected materialism, a blackout, a hurricane. a war on terror) is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered alone. pgs 23-24 Chapter 2

An actant

• has efficacy
• can do things
• has sufficient coherence to make a difference
• produces effects
• alters the course of events

Adorno - Nonidentity and Negative Dialectics

• Nonidentity - that which is not subject to knowledge but instead heterogeneous to all concepts
• Negative dialectics - "objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder" - pg 14 chapter 1
• Life will always exceed our knowledge and control

Latour defines it as "something

that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general."

Roots of Vital Materialism

What are things?

• Garbage
• dead things
• inorganic material
• organic material
• Elements or forces of nature
• Metals

Dead Matter vs. Vibrant Matter

• There has been a divide between dead matter (it, things) and vibrant matter (us, ((human)) beings)
• Tendency of humanity to think egocentrically about their place in the world
• Things bend to human will and energy

What is vitality?

• According to Jane Bennett, it means "capacity of “things” to not only impede or block the will and designs of humans but also act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own"
• Things have their own energies and powers that lie beyond human control - pollution, for example
• This energy co-exists with human energy