In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett takes the reader straight to the scene of the crime. “In front of Sam’s Bagels on Cold Spring Lane in Balti­more, there was:

one large men’s black plastic work glove

one dense mat of oak pollen

one unblemished dead rat

one white plastic bottle cap

one smooth stick of wood” (2437).

She acknowledges premeditation, noting her “anticipatory readiness” (2438) for such an assemblage. There’s even an intelligent accomplice, “looking always at what is to be seen” (2438). While Bennett, of course, is the detective solving her own mystery, the visceral reaction elicited when introduced to the liveliness of her of New Materialism makes one feel that the blood is still fresh on the page. 

Jane Bennett is making the case for things. Particularly, “the moment of independence (from subjectivity) possessed by things, a moment that must be there, since things do in fact affect other bodies, enhancing or weakening their power” (2436). In plain terms, when we recognize what is conventionally considered to be inanimate (like the trash in her example) as something which affects or communicates in its own way to us, we recognize a kind of “vitality” in that thing. Material is always exerting force and independence in its own capacity, but because we live in a culture hostile toward things as exemplified through an economic system predicated on hyperconsumption/disposal (2438) and placement of “humans at the ontological center or hierarchical apex” (2443), we largely fail to recognize the “conatus” of objects and their tenacity to “persist” (2435), alter, and exist in dynamic ways. 

Bennett’s imperative, however, is to alert the reader that humanity itself “can be distinguished…as a particularly rich and complex collection of materials” (2443). We’re our own special kind of assemblage of things, with our own “thing-power.” Furthermore, “the extent to which human beings and thinghood overlap” (2437) is worth consideration in a host of different disciplines, ranging from the literary as when examining Kafka’s “Cares of a Family Man” which follows the story of a lively (if not living?) spool of thread to the environmental where a healthy recognition of thing-power could lead “toward a more ecological sensibility” (2442). While the piece deftly touches upon a number of different fields, I would argue the question she ultimately poses with Vibrant Matter is one which is ontological in nature. Namely, how should we orient our conception of object-subject and “cultivate a more careful attentiveness to the out-­side?” (2448)

Her answer, I think, is best illustrated when engaging with the philosopher Theodor Adorno. She recognizes in his own terms that there is something hollowing in the paradigm that has been manufactured between the subject and the object in critical theory. When confronted with Adorno’s “non-identity,” or what exists between the “it” and its representation, we “are haunted…by a painful, nagging feeling that something’s being forgotten or left out” (2445). Adorno, and much of Western philosophy, addresses this rather formidable claim that “life will always exceed our knowledge and control” (2445) as something to be reconciled with as individuals and that this endeavor, to accept the unbridgeable distance of oneself from everything is “the ethical project par excellence” (2445).

Bennett takes a different approach: 

“For the vital materialist… the starting point of ethics is less the acceptance of the impossibility of ‘reconcilement’ and more the recognition of human participation in a shared, vital materiality. We are vital materiality and we are surrounded by it.” (2445)

In the face of a profoundly alienated culture, in the midst of an ecological collapse, in spite of hundreds of years of philosophy which says otherwise, Bennett contends that we are, indeed, connected to the other. We are connected to our surroundings. We are connected to the out-side.

And, in a philosophical tradition which so often leaves me feeling distanced from others, from myself, and from the material world, Bennett’s message comes across as wildly hopeful. Shatteringly hopeful! It smashes old ways of conceptualizing and ordering the universe, but does it so elegantly, succinctly, soundly, as if to make me feel that this answer was right in front of me all along. Of course, she reminds us that a vital materialist outlook doesn’t fill that emptiness Adorno alludes to with a “messianic promise” (2448) or with any particularly simple solutions to bridging “the gap between concept and reality, object and thing” which “Western phi­losophy…has consistently failed [to do]” (2445). But, perhaps through measured consideration, a way out of the isolation and destruction inherited from the anthropomorphic, “self” centered model of society is possible. Maybe if we change the way we think about things, we can change things about ourselves.

So, the crime Bennett commits? It’s killing all of us off. It’s shedding our “subject”, leaving us to sit with, to be, and experience our thingness in that Baltimore storm drain.

I say let’s all try and play dead. It has me feeling more alive.

Those who have prior knowledge of the mirror test might believe it will be a smooth journey into understanding what Lacan is getting up to in his paper “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” They would be wrong, and I would suggest they buckle up because Lacan goes where no “monkey” (1112), man, or magpie has gone before when he takes the otherwise ordinary event of an infant encountering their image in a mirror and synthesizes from it a moment which “would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form” and claims it is when “the agency of the ego” (1112) is manifested. 

Lacan emphasizes the “imagos of one’s body” (1113) is of particular potency for the child who before encountering it exists as Gestalt; a form (or formlessness, rather) defined by the infant’s very lack of the necessary “imago…to establish a relation between the organism and its reality” (1114). So it is the “drama” of the mirror phase which transfers the child from a state of “insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject…the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality” (1114). In short, this experience works to manufacture a sort of dialectical relationship between self and image which leads to a “fragmented body” (1114). That our bodies and notions of self are built upon the “misrecognitions” (1116) apparent to the child who, in their reflection, see a capable, whole being even when they remain “sunk in [their] motor incapacity and nursling dependence” (1112) or Gestalt is something which Lacan argues must lead to a resolution. This fundamental tension or “alienation” (1115) between the Gestalt and the Imagos is precisely where the child learns to associate with the image they are confronted with; “which [they] must resolve as I” (1112). Thus, it is through the process of identification that we are alienated… 

But… also through the process of alienation that we are… identified…

And, I think this contradiction might be my major problem with this moment that Lacan signals as being vital for subject formation. He spends a great deal of time emphasizing this point of visual contact and has to continuously rely on the ineptitude of the child in the Infans stage to legitimize his claim. However, I think that there is something a bit reductive in believing that the child has no contact with or notion of “self” prior to the body fragmentation that transpires in the mirror. There are, of course, quite obvious examples when we think of blind children, children without regular access to mirrors, and so forth who all still come to develop a robust sense of self. But, perhaps more generally, I get the feeling that Lacan doesn’t seem to recognize the manner that other bodily senses are very much so happening for children before (or if) they find their own reflection and that these experiences are developmental. The child feels and hears and tastes and has preferences for certain sensory input. A child knows its own voice and its own desires. And, I think it is for this reason that the infant can be identified (and thus alienated) at all! They are already more than the abstracted Gestalt Lacan makes them out to be by the time their Imagos appears before them.

This isn’t to say that I disagree with Lacan, though. We are alienated from ourselves to a certain extent. There is a dual relationship between the body and the ego and we exist neither as one nor the other and, yes, obviously something important does happen when a child realizes that they are more than the sum of their “jubilant activity” (1112). But, there seems to be something far more relevant going on when we stop viewing the mirror stage as a one off event and start thinking of it as something ongoing and multifaceted. For example, I love thinking about the mirror stage in relation to my virtual identity. I think body fragmentation was/is more real for me not when I looked in the mirror, but when I used avatars on video games or logged onto social media. In a similar vein, what does “gaze” have to do with subject formation? Is ego something that develops from the self and the mirror alone? What about the other subjects around us that confirm what we see in the reflection?

There’s a lot more that can be said and a lot more I still want to gain from this piece. But, for now, I’ll leave with a quote from The Eyes of the Skin by the brilliant Juhani Pallasmaa whose work I was reminded of after reading Lacan:

“The gradually growing hegemony of the eye seems to be parallel with the development of Western ego-consciousness and the gradually increasing separation of the self and the world; vision separates us from the world whereas the other senses unite us with it.”

According to Barthes in his essay “Eiffel Tower” the “mobilization” of the structure’s symbolism in modern culture is merely the tipping point of its power. In line with Saussurean traditions, he argues that while semiology is present everywhere, The Eiffel Tower in particular represents a sort of limit case in its capacity to “transgress [the] separation, [the] habitual divorce of seeing and being seen” inherent within the signified-signifier binary. Unlike the classic example of the arbre, whose signifieds are multifaceted (think Oak or Willow or Rollins), the Tower, Barthes claims, acts as a “virtually empty – sign…ineluctable because it means everything.” He points to how the structure can be seen everywhere – both physically when in Paris (where its looming presence is practically inescapable) but also within the psychological mindscape of the culture who can’t seem to isolate the physical Tower from its association with the City of Lights. He continues to abstract the monument further, pointing to certain phenomena involved when one visits the structure. Seemingly, one can be both within and without of its interior; at any given time, it is simultaneously empty and full; crucially, the Tower permits us to “see things in their structure.” What are those things Barthes is talking about, though?

Well, he speaks of the ways in which the Tower grants the viewer a “euphoric vision” of Paris, the physical place. This process of topographical “reconstitution” which occurs atop its viewing deck allows one to “plunge into the mysteries of time,” rendering the metropolis as somewhere “conquerable” “owned” – understood, in short. It would seem that above all, the vantage point allows for a structural reading on the thing which is right in front of the viewer: the city itself. Plainly, the Tower renders Paris as a text to be read… And vice-versa. The Towers’ extremity as a “pure signifier” complicates immensely and in fascinating ways when paired with the work of Genette. Just as much as the Tower is the “universal symbol of Paris” I’d argue it is the City (spatially and temporally) which holds the essential, paratextual-character of the Tower’s singular, enigmatic allure.

When Genette writes that the “location of [a] text” and its “temporal situation” have massive implications on the ways in which a piece is interpreted by its reader, we can apply a similar framework to that of the Tower. What happens when the Eiffel Tower is placed in the middle of Kansas? Better yet, the middle of a field with no historical, state, or cultural affiliations? Does it retain its “mythic” status? Barthes himself recognizes the Tower as a symbol of “modernity” “nineteenth century” and as a “Parisian statement” with all of its loaded connotations of romanticism, aestheticism, historicity, and cultural magnificence. So, in the case of the Tower, it seems that one must also consider the “book” that the “text” is embedded in as it does not stand in isolation from its geographical or historical positioning. So, I might rub up against this idea that one is “cut off from the world” high in the Tower. In fact, when climbing up the imminence of its transcendental abstraction, it’d be best not to forget how close one still remains to the ground.