Vibrant Matter

• “think slowly an idea that runs fast through modern heads:” ⤴️
• ""partition of the sensible,” to use Jacques Ranciere’s phrase.’” ⤴️
• “lively powers of material forma­ tions, such as the way omega-3 fatty acids can alter human moods or the way our trash is not “away” in landfills but generating lively streams of chemicals” ⤴️
• “In the space created by this estrangement, a vital materiality can start to take shape.” ⤴️
• “childhood experiences of a world populated by animate things” ⤴️
• “Henri Bergson described as “a latent belief in the spontaneity of nature.” ⤴️
• “How would political re­ sponses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies? By “vitality” I mean the capacity of things­ edibles, commodities, storms, metals - not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” ⤴️
• “How, for example, would patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash, or “the recycling,” but an accumulating pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter?” ⤴️
• “What dif­ ference would it make to public health if eating was understood as an encounter between various and variegated bodies, some of them mine, most of them not, and none ofwhich always gets the upper hand?” ⤴️
• “What difference would it make to the course of energy policy were electricity . to be figured not simply as a resource, commodity, or instrumentality but also and more radically as an “actant”? The term is Bruno Latour’s: an actant is a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events.” ⤴️
• “attention on specific “things; noting the distinctive capacities or efficacious powers of particular material configurations.” ⤴️
• “The philosophical project of naming where subjec­ tivity begins and ends is too often bound up with fantasies of a human uniqueness in the eyes of God, of escape from materiality, or of mastery of nature; and even where it is not, it remains an aporetic or quixotic endeavor.” ⤴️
• “developing a vocabu­ lary and syntax for, and thus· a better discernment of, the active powers issuing from nonsubjects.” ⤴️
• “material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite­ human things. I” ⤴️
• “my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hu­ bris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.” ⤴️
• “the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies.” ⤴️
• “Deleuze and Felix Guat experi­ ment with the idea of a “material vitalism,” according to which vitality is immanent in matter-energy.6” ⤴️
• “dissipate the onto-theological binaries of life/matter, humanfanimal, will/determination, and organic/inorganic” ⤴️