Vital Materialism Research Articles

Diderot’s Vital Materialism

In what follows I examine Diderot’s chemically influenced vital materialism. Once condemned as “mechanistic,” materialism has had something of a renaissance in recent decades as scholars have rediscovered a tradition of “vital materialism” which they have opposed to older, cruder forms of the idea, e.g. materialisms full of life, affect, chimiatry, and transformation. Sometimes these rediscoveries have attached themselves to a figure of the past, like Margaret Cavendish’s metaphysics of active matter, or to a construct of the still-emerging future, like Karen Barad’s quantum physics-nourished “agential realism” present in all of matter. Another question concerns the extent to which these revivals of “vital” or “active-matter” materialism should be traced back to older Renaissance naturalisms. In what follows, I return to Diderot and the question of his “vital materialism.” Diderot draws both on older traditions, approvingly citing Van Helmont and gesturing towards a new chemistry of living matter and also speaks the language of scientific revolution, writing that “We are on the verge of a great revolution in the sciences.” In earlier work I sought to connect this language of revolution in the sciences to the emergence of biology as a science. Here I focus on his chemically charged materialism.

Locating Indigenous Meitei feminist counterspaces in Linthoi Chanu’s Wari: the (fem)animist prefiguration of Feminist Posthumanities

ABSTRACT This article explores the animist socio-cultural fabric of the Indigenous Meitei community in Manipur, India, to locate the feminist counterspaces embedded within it through a (con)textual analysis of two short stories from the anthology Wari (2019) by the Meitei author Linthoi Chanu. In this exploration, we conceptualize a distinctive praxis of Indigenous Meitei ‘femanimism’ – intertwining Indigenous Meitei feminism with animist philosophies. Furthermore, our discussion illuminates how the Indigenous Meitei ‘femanimist’ praxis, embodying a non-dualistic and relational genderscape, prefigures the emergent Western Feminist Posthumanist theoretical discourses, particularly hydrofeminist and vital materialist concepts of fluid and entangled human embodiment. Accordingly, the present study endeavours to bridge a synergistic conversation between Indigenous Meitei ‘femanimist’ praxis and the contemporary Western theoretical currents of Feminist Posthumanities, aspiring to forge a decolonized feminist vista that transcends hierarchical binaries of gender (man/woman), humanism (human/non-human), and colonialism (the Indigenous as primitive vis-à-vis the Western as modern).

The creation of the Muraka, a Maldivian underwater hotel: A story of sea life, more-than-human architecture, and alloútopic tourism.

Answering Huijbens and Jóhannesson's call to investigate tourist destination development through a relational ontology marked by a vital materialism, this paper focuses on the creation of the Muraka. The Muraka is the underwater villa of the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island-an ultra-luxury resort located in Alifu Dhaalu Atoll. No social scientific research has ever been conducted at underwater hotels. Drawing upon fieldwork at the Muraka-part of a broader project on three underwater hotels (conducted in Singapore, Tanzania, and the Maldives), we aim to contribute original knowledge to more-than-human geographies and tourist studies by bringing attention to the architectural relations that entangle underwater hotels with their environments. In doing so we become attuned to more-than-human lives and create narratives that can help us imagine new relations with the planet both within and beyond the realm of tourist encounters. By focusing in particular on the creation of the Muraka through the lens of the original concept of alloutopia, we contribute to non-representational and more-than-human perspectives on tourism.

The Performic Cycle: release and reorganise

ABSTRACT This article explores the critical potential of theatre practice as research in interdisciplinary environmental contexts. It does this with specific reference to The Performic Cycle, a practice as research methodology that brings environmental adaptation thinking into conversation with vital materialist and critical disability scholarship through experimental participatory performance practice. The Performic Cycle emerged through a series of neurodivergent-led theatre practice as research projects (The Panarchy Projects, 2017-2020), and has since then been tested out in a number of participatory, interdisciplinary and cross-art-form environmental contexts.

Thinking with fire, water and sun – material-discursive entanglements in Swedish outdoor education

In this paper, we empirically demonstrate emerging material-discursive entanglements of different bodies in Swedish outdoor education, and thereby provoke openings for questioning some aspects of the conceptualization of a nature/culture divide. Outdoor and environmental education have been criticized for upholding this divide by not paying attention to the power structures through which bodies become sedimented as either human or nature. By discussing entanglements, and how educators might attend to them as a pedagogical tool, our paper responds to this line of thinking. Vital materialism and agential realism were put to work in a post-qualitative study at a Swedish folk high school. Through engagement with a group of outdoor students, empirical material was created and examples of material-discursive entanglements analyzed. We conclude that outdoor educators can create possibilities for attending to the entanglements of different bodies, thereby making possible a learning with them. This may open alternative ways to conduct outdoor education that challenge the conceptualization of a nature/culture divide.

Mapping presentations of crafts in the Danish heritage industry

In this paper, I present the methodological and theoretical deliberations behind a mapping of how crafts are presented in the Danish cultural heritage industry. I trace the historical background of crafts in the Danish heritage industry and present definitions of key concepts such as ‘craft’ and ‘the Danish heritage industry’. I then develop a research design consisting of a questionnaire and ethnographic fieldwork. I consider how research questions about scope and variation can be operationalized in the questionnaire and how theoretical perspectives from critical heritage studies (Smith, 2006) and vital materialism (Bennett, 2010; 2012) can inform the questionnaire and fieldwork. Finally, some preliminary findings are presented along with some comments on the use of questionnaires in heritage research.

Encountering the world with voice search: A young immigrant and emergent bilingual child’s digital literacies

This article explores a 4-year-old recent immigrant and emergent bilingual child’s encounter with voice search technology to understand how assemblages among a young immigrant child, his voice, his family, digital technology, and materials create new possibilities for the understanding of ethnolinguistically marginalized children and families' literacies and digital literacies practices. Data in this article is taken from a larger ethnographic case study and drawn from the child’s home and the preschool classroom. Situated in critical posthumanist scholarship and vital materialism, I show that a child’s unbounded digital and media access and unpredictable encounters through his voice and crossing over languages take part in redistributing the hierarchy of bodies, performances, and productions. Finally, I suggest that understanding children’s use of voice search as one of their key ways of doing literacies and making meaning and noticing the unpredictable, intimate, and playful literacies can help us disrupt the traditional, assimilatory conceptualization of digital literacies.

Abyssal geography†

Today, we are held to live in the Anthropocene, bringing to an end modern binary imaginaries, such as the separation between Human and Nature, and with them Western assumptions of progress, linear causality and human exceptionalism. Much Western critical theory, from new or vital materialism to post‐ and more‐than‐human thinking, unsurprisingly reflects this internal crisis of faith in Eurocentric or Enlightenment reasoning. At the same time, a radically different critique of modernity has gained prominence in recent years, emerging from critical Black studies, which places the Caribbean at the centre of the development of a new and distinct mode of critical thought. In attempting to grasp the ways in which Caribbean thought and practice have been seen to enable a distinctive alternative non‐Eurocentric imaginary, this paper heuristically sets out a paradigmatic framing of ‘abyssal geography’. We emphasize two key points. The first is that abyssal thought is not grounded in abstract and timeless philosophical assumptions but figuratively draws upon aspects of Caribbean practices of resistance and survival, for example, from the Middle Passage, Plantation, carnival, creolization, dance forms and speculative fiction. The second is that abyssal work engages the legacies of modernity and coloniality by explicitly seeking to question the lure of ontology: seeking to disrupt, suspend and to problematize the modern project of the human and the world.

Materialism, Lebenskraft and the limits of science: metaphysical vitalism in post-Kantian scenarios

Kant's legacy in the history of life sciences has notoriously included a critique of the use of soul and ‘vital force’ ( Lebenskraft ). In this paper I focus on a less-known side of this legacy, i.e. Kant's late critique of vital materialism and its impact on nineteenth-century German science and philosophy. I show that Kant considered materialism as a kind of metaphysical hypothesis since the 1760s and pointed out that it was empirically impossible to distinguish it from different kinds of hypotheses (such as monadology). I focus on Kant's late essay on Samuel Sömmering (1796), arguing that the critical rejection of materialism and the notion of Lebenskraft belonged to an anti-reductive program for life sciences. I maintain that Kant's views influenced Alexander von Humboldt's turn concerning vitalism in the late 1790s and the anti-metaphysical and physicalist epistemology of Hermann von Helmholtz. I follow this Kantian legacy in the works of Friedrich Lange, Emil du Bois-Reymond and Erich Adickes. Finally, I argue that this tradition provides a vantage point to reconsider contemporary debates over materialism and panpsychism.

Clothes and caps: An exploration of the thing-power of objects and activism at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games

Building upon a rich body of literature around politics and the Olympics, this article explores the role of objects in political activism and protest at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Inspired by new materialist theory, Jane Bennett's vital materialism, and her concept of thing-power (2010) , this research thinks about the ways in which objects in the Tokyo 2020 games were lively and agentic players in developing assemblages and discussions around social inequalities at the Games. To accomplish this, the project conducted a thematic analysis of international popular press published during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to explore the thing-power of two objects (unitards and a swimming cap). In so doing, this article explores the ways in which objects were integral actants and helped ignite conversations around gender, the sexualization of female athletes, and the racism and exclusionary practices of elite swimming. The article finishes with a discussion of the thing-power of objects and how a different ontological approach (i.e. one that values nonhuman matter) has implications for athlete protest, policy development, and addressing social inequalities and injustices within sport.

Review of "Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things by Jane Bennett," Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.

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.

Perspektivenwechsel der Politischen Ökologie – Back to the roots!

Abstract. Grown from radical geography roots, political ecology (PE) emerged half a century ago and is now a diverse, scientifically mature field. In German speaking countries, geographical PE was introduced with a time delay of twenty years. This article evaluates perspectives (views, arguments, positions) of the first generation of PE research in geography, i.e. largely structuralist historical materialism and discursive approaches, and compares them with second generation research, i.e. poststructuralist and, among others, new (vital) materialism views. It is argued that, paradoxically enough, both old and new approaches are to be blamed for their ambivalence towards policy (politics, activism, social praxis), while some new approaches face substantial criticism for their opaqueness and pluralist grab bag character of themes. With a focus on emancipatory perspectives, a distinct repositioning of (geographical) PE is suggested on radical roots, i.e. integrating libertarian Marxist ideas with anarchism so as to confront hierarchy/domination and enable direct actions for socioecological transformation.

Random build challenges and vital materialism in The Sims 4: Influences, innovations, and improvisations

• Random build challenges became a popular form of Sims YouTube content in april 2020 and often incorporate a computerized randomizer that dictates composing choices. • Such challenges provide opportunities to explore material agency using Bennett's (2010) vital materialism to better understand relationships of agency, especially when aleatory elements are introduced. • Vitality includes three key concepts: efficacy, trajectory, and fractal causality. • During random build challenges, the vitalities of player, game, and randomizer compete and collaborate to compose the resulting houses; often, these houses do not function for Sims. • Applying Bennett's concept of vitality to random build challenges shows how experienced players navigate material influences, improvise, and innovate. These considerations, and the use of computerized randomizers, could be extended to other composing contexts to prompt further critical thinking and create both risk and challenge. Random build challenges became a trend among Sims YouTubers in April 2020 following Vixella's The Sims 4 but every room is a different pack . This mode of gameplay incorporates computerized randomizers to make building decisions and represent the challenges and risks associated with aleatory invention ( Holmes, 2016 , Lauer, 2016 , Leadon, 2011 , Vitanza, 2000 ). However, these challenges and risks emerge partly from material agency. To explore this phenomenon, I herein use Jane Bennett's (2010) vital materiality as a theoretical lens to examine random build challenges. Central to Bennett's theory is vitality, an agentive quality of both human and nonhuman materials that yields an effect—or in some cases affect—on other materials involved. Through examining three examples from popular Sims 4 YouTubers, Plumbella's random pack build; Lilsimsie's random townie build; and finally LaurenZSide's random meme build, this article demonstrates how player, game, and randomizer vitalities collaborate, compete, and co-exist. In addition to the videos serving as examples of aleatory building processes, random build challenges pose opportunities for experienced composers to implement new approaches in response to aleatory elements that can be adapted to other composing settings.

Поэтика тихого космизма

The article analyzes an issue in Jane Bennett’s vital materialism project, namely, a spe­cific conjunction of ideas about active matter that produces various combinations of be­ings, including humans, and the possibility of this matter to articulate itself in language, including poetic forms. After a brief, but necessary discussion of some essential aspects of Bennett’s theory such as ontology based on postulates of elementary particles physics (particle collisions, resonance, isomorphism), affective ethics (partial actions based on the “positive” repetition of random impressions) and ecology (“courteous” attention to representatives of other species), the author suggests to strengthen the fluctuating nature of Bennett’s project and explore its extremes: the cosmic level of theorizing where even sympathy appears as a “gravitational” force and the level of linguistic articulation where various forms of indirect utterance, the “middle voice”, are involved. Despite the fact that between these two levels one can observe a certain isomorphism of a “weak” “non-dramatism”, the author concludes that the “physicality” of solarity and sympathy viewed as cosmic manifestations are not equal in weight to their own expression in poetic lan­guage in the spirit of Whitman or Thoreau (as exemplified in many by Bennett’s books). Therefore, these two components do not remain in the state of balance, even though Ben­nett repeatedly tries to use the concept of an interval, which is responsible for the discon­tinuation of the narratives of both types. In other words, the project shifts from a study of materiality towards its non-romantic “naming” only.

Research-Creations for Speculating About Digitized Automation: Bringing Creative Writing Prompts and Vital Materialism into the Sociology of Futures

In this article, we present ideas about developing innovative methods for the sociology of futures. Our approach brings together the literature on sociotechnical imaginaries and the sociology of futures with vital materialism theories and research-creation methods. We draw on our research-creation materials from a series of online workshops. The workshops involved the use of creative writing prompts with participants across a diverse range of age groups and locations. The article ends with some reflections on the implications of our approach for researching the futures of emerging digital technologies and the methodological and theoretical development of the sociology of futures.

New Materialism and the History of Agribusiness

New Materialism and the History of Agribusiness

Review of Foucault’s New Materialism: A Review of Thomas Lemke’s The Government of Things

IFIRST WROTE ON Foucault as a complexity materialist in the 1990s and have continued to write on the subject (see Olssen 1996, 1999, 2008, 2015, 2017, 2021). In that Thomas Lemke’s book, The Government of Things: Foucault and the New Materialisms (New York University Press, 2021), supports my view for a materialist reading of Foucault, it constitutes a welcome addition to the literature. Lemke firstly outlines and critiques three “new” materialist approaches: that of Graham Harman’s Object Orientated Ontology (OOO); Jane Bennett’s “Vital Materialism,” and finally, Karen Barad’s “agential realism.” All three share a concern with “the productivity and dynamism of matter” (p. 4). Lemke’s criticisms of these approaches are insightful. OOO is seen as inadequate for representing nonhuman objects in isolation which translates into “an extreme form of subjectivism” (p. 14) and “essentialism” (p. 8) incapable of resolving the “theoretical tension between relationalism and foundationalism” (p. 8. Jane Bennett’s “vibrancy of matter” thesis is unsatisfactory for failing to theoretically articulate the ways in which matter is “vibrant,” or “active” (see Lemke, Chap. 2). This relates to what Bennett refers to as “thing-power,” to “nonhuman things,” and the “force of things” (Bennett 2010). It is unclear whether such a “force” is postulated as internal to “things” or as emerging from contingent relations in historically engendered configurations.

Speculating the Symbio: Possibilities for Multispecies and Multi-Entity World Making in Childhood

In this paper, I attempt to interrupt conventional analyses of childhood and instead illustrate the importance of diverse stories around child-nature relations. Vital materialist perspectives dismantle and disrupt binaries, so by exploring these perspectives, I am decentering the (adult) human and thinking-with the possibilities for multispecies relations in precarious times. This paper finishes with a speculative story that proposes lively experiments in multispecies and multi-entity possibilities, in a near-future contaminated Toronto. Enabled by microbes that have flourished on a shipwreck of e-waste, children, birds, and a dog codiscover the Symbio.

Travelling Noodles and Migrating Pieces of Raw Fish

Travelling Noodles and Migrating Pieces of Raw Fish

Reimaging Human Bodies and Death with Vibrant (Dark) Matters and Puppetry

This article analyzes the effects of the collaboration between dance and puppetry within Crystal Pite’s Dark Matters (2009) and claims Pite’s work challenges nonhuman-human and object-subject binaries. Functioning within a new materialist philosophical framework, specifically in conversation with theorist Jane Bennett’s concept of vital materialism, this study argues that Dark Matters exposes the human body as an assemblage of vibrant multiple objects, and by positioning both the puppet and human corpse as agential matter, poses a radical rethinking of “liveliness” and “death.” Ultimately, this analysis reveals dance’s unique ability to evoke important posthuman reflection regarding physical matter, which always already includes the human body.