Assignment #4, Jared S. 1
“When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark… 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.”
Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things,” in Vibrant Matter. p5
In this statement, Bennett seeks to understand the cultural forms or objects as vibrant matter. Positioned in her first argument following the introduction which helps the reader understand that the argument originated with the discussions on Foucault’s “power,” The first point poses objects/things as forces rather than something mechanical to be forced upon. In the above quote, she reveals through her experience of seeing trash that objects are things capable of projecting vitality laying the groundwork for her next points. She continues her argument by clarifying in her second point that “thing-power” can emanate from animate or inanimate, providing historical legal support through the “deodand,” where the object/thing is responsible for the action, in her third point, and then by breaking down humanity into a conglomerate of things. These arguments hinge on the readers understanding the initial quote that things contain “energetic vitality”— “one moment disclosing themselves as dead stuff and at the next as live presence: junk, then claimant; inert matter, then live wire” (p5).