The force of things: Steps toward an ecology of matter

Political Theory

Volumn 32, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 347-372

  Bennett, Jane ^a  

^a JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Adorno; Ecology; Immanence; Latour, Deleuze; Materialism; Materiality; Nonhuman; Spinoza

Indexed keywords

EID: 2542598602     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591703260853     Document Type: Article

References (93)

1. Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1338.
2. Henry Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Vol. 4, edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 351.
3. Cited in Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Light, 1988), 81, from Spinoza's Short Treatise II, 16, 5.
4. Slogan from the days of glass-bottle soda. Thanks to Steven De Carol! for this reference.
5. There is too much good work here in feminist theory, queer studies, and cultural studies to cite. The three volumes of Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989) offer one map of the terrain. The first volume explores "the human body's relationship to the divine, to the bestial and to the machines that imitate or simulate it"; the second takes a "'psychosomatic' approach, studying the manifestation - or production - of the soul and the expression of the emotions through the body's attitudes"; and the third shows "how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions and, reciprocally, how a certain political or social function tends to make the body of the person filling [it]... the organ of... the social body." For a good summary of the role of the concepts of the material, materiality, and materialization in recent feminist thought, see Momin Rahman and Anne Witz, "What Really Matters? The Elusive Quality of the Material in Feminist Thought" (paper presented at the Annual Congress of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, University of Toronto, May 2002). Rahman and Witz argue that "the feminist desire to engage 'at the level of material life'... was intimately linked to a desire to re-locate questions of sexuality and gender within the sphere of the social and thus political" (p. 9). Good examples of such work include Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York; Routledge, 1993); "Merely Cultural," New Left Review 227:33-44; Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Kathy Ferguson, The Man Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
6. There is too much good work here in feminist theory, queer studies, and cultural studies to cite. The three volumes of Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989) offer one map of the terrain. The first volume explores "the human body's relationship to the divine, to the bestial and to the machines that imitate or simulate it"; the second takes a "'psychosomatic' approach, studying the manifestation - or production - of the soul and the expression of the emotions through the body's attitudes"; and the third shows "how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions and, reciprocally, how a certain political or social function tends to make the body of the person filling [it]... the organ of... the social body." For a good summary of the role of the concepts of the material, materiality, and materialization in recent feminist thought, see Momin Rahman and Anne Witz, "What Really Matters? The Elusive Quality of the Material in Feminist Thought" (paper presented at the Annual Congress of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, University of Toronto, May 2002). Rahman and Witz argue that "the feminist desire to engage 'at the level of material life'... was intimately linked to a desire to re-locate questions of sexuality and gender within the sphere of the social and thus political" (p. 9). Good examples of such work include Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York; Routledge, 1993); "Merely Cultural," New Left Review 227:33-44; Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Kathy Ferguson, The Man Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
7. There is too much good work here in feminist theory, queer studies, and cultural studies to cite. The three volumes of Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989) offer one map of the terrain. The first volume explores "the human body's relationship to the divine, to the bestial and to the machines that imitate or simulate it"; the second takes a "'psychosomatic' approach, studying the manifestation - or production - of the soul and the expression of the emotions through the body's attitudes"; and the third shows "how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions and, reciprocally, how a certain political or social function tends to make the body of the person filling [it]... the organ of... the social body." For a good summary of the role of the concepts of the material, materiality, and materialization in recent feminist thought, see Momin Rahman and Anne Witz, "What Really Matters? The Elusive Quality of the Material in Feminist Thought" (paper presented at the Annual Congress of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, University of Toronto, May 2002). Rahman and Witz argue that "the feminist desire to engage 'at the level of material life'... was intimately linked to a desire to re-locate questions of sexuality and gender within the sphere of the social and thus political" (p. 9). Good examples of such work include Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York; Routledge, 1993); "Merely Cultural," New Left Review 227:33-44; Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Kathy Ferguson, The Man Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
8. There is too much good work here in feminist theory, queer studies, and cultural studies to cite. The three volumes of Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989) offer one map of the terrain. The first volume explores "the human body's relationship to the divine, to the bestial and to the machines that imitate or simulate it"; the second takes a "'psychosomatic' approach, studying the manifestation - or production - of the soul and the expression of the emotions through the body's attitudes"; and the third shows "how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions and, reciprocally, how a certain political or social function tends to make the body of the person filling [it]... the organ of... the social body." For a good summary of the role of the concepts of the material, materiality, and materialization in recent feminist thought, see Momin Rahman and Anne Witz, "What Really Matters? The Elusive Quality of the Material in Feminist Thought" (paper presented at the Annual Congress of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, University of Toronto, May 2002). Rahman and Witz argue that "the feminist desire to engage 'at the level of material life'... was intimately linked to a desire to re-locate questions of sexuality and gender within the sphere of the social and thus political" (p. 9). Good examples of such work include Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York; Routledge, 1993); "Merely Cultural," New Left Review 227:33-44; Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Kathy Ferguson, The Man Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
9. There is too much good work here in feminist theory, queer studies, and cultural studies to cite. The three volumes of Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989) offer one map of the terrain. The first volume explores "the human body's relationship to the divine, to the bestial and to the machines that imitate or simulate it"; the second takes a "'psychosomatic' approach, studying the manifestation - or production - of the soul and the expression of the emotions through the body's attitudes"; and the third shows "how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions and, reciprocally, how a certain political or social function tends to make the body of the person filling [it]... the organ of... the social body." For a good summary of the role of the concepts of the material, materiality, and materialization in recent feminist thought, see Momin Rahman and Anne Witz, "What Really Matters? The Elusive Quality of the Material in Feminist Thought" (paper presented at the Annual Congress of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, University of Toronto, May 2002). Rahman and Witz argue that "the feminist desire to engage 'at the level of material life'... was intimately linked to a desire to re-locate questions of sexuality and gender within the sphere of the social and thus political" (p. 9). Good examples of such work include Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York; Routledge, 1993); "Merely Cultural," New Left Review 227:33-44; Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Kathy Ferguson, The Man Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
10. There is too much good work here in feminist theory, queer studies, and cultural studies to cite. The three volumes of Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989) offer one map of the terrain. The first volume explores "the human body's relationship to the divine, to the bestial and to the machines that imitate or simulate it"; the second takes a "'psychosomatic' approach, studying the manifestation - or production - of the soul and the expression of the emotions through the body's attitudes"; and the third shows "how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions and, reciprocally, how a certain political or social function tends to make the body of the person filling [it]... the organ of... the social body." For a good summary of the role of the concepts of the material, materiality, and materialization in recent feminist thought, see Momin Rahman and Anne Witz, "What Really Matters? The Elusive Quality of the Material in Feminist Thought" (paper presented at the Annual Congress of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, University of Toronto, May 2002). Rahman and Witz argue that "the feminist desire to engage 'at the level of material life'... was intimately linked to a desire to re-locate questions of sexuality and gender within the sphere of the social and thus political" (p. 9). Good examples of such work include Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York; Routledge, 1993); "Merely Cultural," New Left Review 227:33-44; Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Kathy Ferguson, The Man Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
11. See, in particular, Moira Gatens's Spinozist take on bodies in Imaginary Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1996).
12. See Thomas L. Dumm, A Politics of the Ordinary (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 7, for a subtle reckoning with the "obscure power of the ordinary." My attempt to speak on behalf of "things" is a companion project to Dumm's attempt to mine the ordinary as a potential site of resistance to conventional and normalizing practices.
13. My thanks to Bonnie Honig for helping me to focus on this point.
14. Henry Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Walden, edited by J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 111. Thoreau trained his gaze upon things with faith that "the perception of surfaces will always have the effect of miracle to a sane sense." Thoreau, Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 313.
15. Henry Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Walden, edited by J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 111. Thoreau trained his gaze upon things with faith that "the perception of surfaces will always have the effect of miracle to a sane sense." Thoreau, Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 313.
16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge and KeganPaul, 1981), 197.
17. For a good analysis of the implications of the trash-and-waste culture for democracy, see John Buell and Tom DeLuca, Sustainable Democracy: Individuality and the Politics of the Environment (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996). I argue in The Enchantment of Modem Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) that commodity culture is not wholly reducible to this environmentally destructive dimension, for it also includes an aesthetic, even artistic, dimension whose moral standing is more ambiguous.
18. For a good analysis of the implications of the trash-and-waste culture for democracy, see John Buell and Tom DeLuca, Sustainable Democracy: Individuality and the Politics of the Environment (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996). I argue in The Enchantment of Modem Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) that commodity culture is not wholly reducible to this environmentally destructive dimension, for it also includes an aesthetic, even artistic, dimension whose moral standing is more ambiguous.
19. Steve Martin, Shopgirl (New York: 40 Share Productions, 2000), 3.
20. Dumm, Politics of the Ordinary, 169.
21. Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 2000), 16.
22. Franz Kafka, "Cares of a Family Man," in Complete Stories, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1983), 428.
23. Ibid., 428.
24. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What Is Life? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 50.
25. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone, 1991), 95.
26. Spinoza imagines the world as an infinite substance with many, many modes, each of which can be thought of, interchangeably, as a body-in-space or as an idea. Bodies and ideas operate in perfect tandem though also perfectly uncontaminated by each other. Spinoza's parallelism may disqualify him from being classified as a materialist, though bodies and their encounters do occupy a crucial place in his ontological imaginary. Moreover, Spinoza tends to emphasize the special status of human bodies/ideas. Human relations of movement and rest have the unique potential to organize themselves "under the guidance of reason" and be "determined... to act in a way required by... [one's] own nature considered only in itself rather than "by things external." Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley. (New York: Hackett, 1992), 174. This is why Spinoza says that humans are right to make use of animals as we please and deal with them as best suits us, "seeing that they do not agree with us in nature" (p. 174). (Though Spinoza does say that all bodies are animate in the sense of possessing a conatus or vitalistic drive to persevere.)
27. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 407.
28. I take these terms from Bruno Latour, who develops them in Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). See especially pages 303 and 308 for his glossary definitions.
29. Daniel Tiffany, "Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and Poetic Obscurity," Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 74. Tiffany draws an analogy between riddles and materiality per se: both are suspended between subject and object and engage in "transubstantiations" from the organic to the inorganic and the earthly and the divine. In developing his materialism from out of an analysis of literary forms, Tiffany challenges the long-standing norm that regards science as "the sole arbiter in the determination of matter" (p. 75). He wants to pick "the lock that currently bars the literary critic from addressing the problem of material substance" (p. 77).
30. William Pietz, "Death of the Deodand: Accursed Objects and the Money Value of Human Life," Res 31 (1997): 97-108.
31. John Frow, "A Pebble, A Camera, A Man," Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 270-85, 283.
32. Quoted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty also speaks of scissors and pieces of leather that "offer themselves to the subject as poles of action" (p. 106).
33. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 110.
34. I am grateful to Matthew Scherer for drawing my attention to this ad. For an account of the dangerous power of Nike shoe production, see Peter Hitchcock, Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 129: "Nike moved to Indonesia from the middle of the 1980s.... The solvents used to glue the soles of these shoes are highly toxic, and even when the extractor fans are working well the women constantly breathe fumes. Interestingly, the co-founder of Nike, Bill Bowerman, often made shoe prototypes using similar glue solvents and was eventually crippled by them. He developed narapathy, a degenerative condition often experienced by shoe and hat makers that gives us the popular phrase 'mad as a hatter.' " For an excellent account of the genesis and politics of the Free Trade Zone factories where most U.S. corporations now have their manufacturing done, see Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Vintage, 2000).
35. I am grateful to Matthew Scherer for drawing my attention to this ad. For an account of the dangerous power of Nike shoe production, see Peter Hitchcock, Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 129: "Nike moved to Indonesia from the middle of the 1980s.... The solvents used to glue the soles of these shoes are highly toxic, and even when the extractor fans are working well the women constantly breathe fumes. Interestingly, the co-founder of Nike, Bill Bowerman, often made shoe prototypes using similar glue solvents and was eventually crippled by them. He developed narapathy, a degenerative condition often experienced by shoe and hat makers that gives us the popular phrase 'mad as a hatter.' " For an excellent account of the genesis and politics of the Free Trade Zone factories where most U.S. corporations now have their manufacturing done, see Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Vintage, 2000).
36. William E. Connolly, "Voices from the Whirlwind," in In the Nature of Things, edited by Jane Bennett and William Chaloupka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 205. As for Spinoza, Nature naturans, nature as the very activity or process of producing, making, creating, is the first of two aspects of God-or-Nature in his ontology. The second is natura naturata, or nature as a system of already produced (or spatialized) things. See Spinoza's Ethics, book I, prop 29; see also Seymour Feldman, "Introduction," in Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (New York: Hackett, 1992), 11.
37. William E. Connolly, "Voices from the Whirlwind," in In the Nature of Things, edited by Jane Bennett and William Chaloupka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 205. As for Spinoza, Nature naturans, nature as the very activity or process of producing, making, creating, is the first of two aspects of God-or-Nature in his ontology. The second is natura naturata, or nature as a system of already produced (or spatialized) things. See Spinoza's Ethics, book I, prop 29; see also Seymour Feldman, "Introduction," in Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (New York: Hackett, 1992), 11.
38. William E. Connolly, "Voices from the Whirlwind," in In the Nature of Things, edited by Jane Bennett and William Chaloupka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 205. As for Spinoza, Nature naturans, nature as the very activity or process of producing, making, creating, is the first of two aspects of God-or-Nature in his ontology. The second is natura naturata, or nature as a system of already produced (or spatialized) things. See Spinoza's Ethics, book I, prop 29; see also Seymour Feldman, "Introduction," in Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (New York: Hackett, 1992), 11.
39. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 78. I leave open the question of whether Adorno's understanding of Heidegger is defensible. See Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (New York: Gateway, 1967).
40. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 78. I leave open the question of whether Adorno's understanding of Heidegger is defensible. See Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (New York: Gateway, 1967).
41. This is Bill Brown's account of Arjun Appadurai's project in The Social Life of Things (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986). See Brown's "Thing Theory," Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 1-22, for a useful survey of different approaches to the thing.
42. This is Bill Brown's account of Arjun Appadurai's project in The Social Life of Things (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986). See Brown's "Thing Theory," Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 1-22, for a useful survey of different approaches to the thing.
43. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, (II, 216), in John Gaskin, ed., The Epicurean Philosophers (New York: Everyman, 1995).
44. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 407-8.
45. My thanks to Bill Connolly for introducing me to Bergson, whom I had not read when I first composed this essay. Since then, Bergson has alerted me to the limitations of an ontological imaginary presented primarily in terms of bodies-in-space. He argues that there is something about the very imaginary of bodies-in-space that obscures becoming, that conceals from view the active and continual morphing in which we are only participants along with other things. For Bergson, it is not simply that a thing is always changing its physical and cultural locations. Rather, each "thing," as a slice of duration, is itself engaged in an internal process of deformation. Internal differentiation as the way of the world. See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone, 1991) and Creative Evolution (New York: Dover, 1998).
46. My thanks to Bill Connolly for introducing me to Bergson, whom I had not read when I first composed this essay. Since then, Bergson has alerted me to the limitations of an ontological imaginary presented primarily in terms of bodies-in-space. He argues that there is something about the very imaginary of bodies-in-space that obscures becoming, that conceals from view the active and continual morphing in which we are only participants along with other things. For Bergson, it is not simply that a thing is always changing its physical and cultural locations. Rather, each "thing," as a slice of duration, is itself engaged in an internal process of deformation. Internal differentiation as the way of the world. See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone, 1991) and Creative Evolution (New York: Dover, 1998).
47. The phrase "aleatory materialism" is taken from Althusser and the project is also inspired by postmodernist critiques of essentialism and teleology. See Antonio Callari and David Ruccio, Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); J. K. Gibson-Graham, "An Ethics of the Local," Rethinking Marxism 15, no. 1 (2003).
48. The phrase "aleatory materialism" is taken from Althusser and the project is also inspired by postmodernist critiques of essentialism and teleology. See Antonio Callari and David Ruccio, Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); J. K. Gibson-Graham, "An Ethics of the Local," Rethinking Marxism 15, no. 1 (2003).
49. Antonio Negri, "Notes on the Evolution of the Thought of the Later Athusser" in Callari and Ruccio, Postmodern Materialism, 62.
50. Paul Patton pointed out to me that Deleuze described his own work as "naive": "[Foucault] may perhaps have meant that I was the most naive philosopher of our generation. In all of us you find themes like multiplicity, difference, repetition. But I put forward almost raw concepts of these, while others work with more mediations. I've never worried about going beyond metaphysics . . . I've never renounced a kind of empiricism. . . . Maybe that's what Foucault meant: I wasn't better than the others, but more naive, producing a kind of art brut, so to speak, not the most profound but the most innocent." Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 88-89.
51. Lucretius, for example, says that "it is right to have this truth... surely sealed and to keep it stored in your remembering mind, that there is not one of all the things, whose nature is seen before our face, which is built of one kind of primordia, nor anything which is not created of well-mingled seed. And whatever possesses within it more forces and powers, it thus shows that there are in it most kinds of primordia and diverse shapes" (II, 581).
52. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 98; Richard Rorty, Rorty and Pragmatism; The Philosopher Responds to his Critics, edited by Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 199.
53. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 98; Richard Rorty, Rorty and Pragmatism; The Philosopher Responds to his Critics, edited by Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 199.
54. Margulis and Sagan, What Is Life? 49, emphasis added.
55. De Landa, Thousand Years, 26.
56. Ibid., 26-27.
57. Lucretius describes it thus: "although external force propels many along and often obliges them to ... be driven headlong, nevertheless there is something in our chest capable of fighting and resisting.... [T]hat the mind should not itself possess an internal necessity in all its behaviour,... that is brought about by a tiny swerve of atoms." De Rerum Natura, trans. Long and Sedley, II, 277-93.
58. Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, 29.
59. I take this list of negativity terms and the notion of a productive resistance from Diana Coole's Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism (New York: Routledge, 2000).
60. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5. Romand Coles offers a developed interpretation of Adorno as an ethical theorist: he presents negative dialectics as a "morality of thinking" or a "mode of conduct" that fosters generosity toward others and toward the nonidentical in oneself. According to Coles, Adorno's morality of thinking acknowledges (and thereby begins to mitigate) the violence done by conceptualization and the suffering imposed by the quest to know and control all things. See Romand Coles, Rethinking Generosity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), chap. 2.
61. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5. Romand Coles offers a developed interpretation of Adorno as an ethical theorist: he presents negative dialectics as a "morality of thinking" or a "mode of conduct" that fosters generosity toward others and toward the nonidentical in oneself. According to Coles, Adorno's morality of thinking acknowledges (and thereby begins to mitigate) the violence done by conceptualization and the suffering imposed by the quest to know and control all things. See Romand Coles, Rethinking Generosity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), chap. 2.
62. I treat idealism as a historically established position against which thing-power materialism is defined even while I resist the image of matter bequeathed to us by idealism.
63. All concepts "refer to nonconceptualities, because concepts on their part are moments of the reality that requires their formation." Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 12. Because nonidentity simply does not avail itself to any immediate relationship, all access to it, however obscure, must be via the mediation of concepts. But it is possible, says Adorno, to become a "discriminating man" who "in the matter and its concept can distinguish even the infinitesimal, that which escapes the concept." Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 45.
64. All concepts "refer to nonconceptualities, because concepts on their part are moments of the reality that requires their formation." Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 12. Because nonidentity simply does not avail itself to any immediate relationship, all access to it, however obscure, must be via the mediation of concepts. But it is possible, says Adorno, to become a "discriminating man" who "in the matter and its concept can distinguish even the infinitesimal, that which escapes the concept." Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 45.
65. Ibid., 14.
66. "The means employed in negative dialectics for the penetration of its hardened objects is possibility-the possibility of which their reality has cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one." Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 52. Diana Coole elaborates this point: "In aiming for the impossible, [negative dialectics]... practices negativity and dwells irredeemably in the realms of the is-not, yet it thereby practices the very non-identity thinking that exemplifies the only practicable subject-object reconciliation." Coole, Negativity and Politics, 184-85.
67. "The means employed in negative dialectics for the penetration of its hardened objects is possibility-the possibility of which their reality has cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one." Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 52. Diana Coole elaborates this point: "In aiming for the impossible, [negative dialectics]... practices negativity and dwells irredeemably in the realms of the is-not, yet it thereby practices the very non-identity thinking that exemplifies the only practicable subject-object reconciliation." Coole, Negativity and Politics, 184-85.
68. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 202-3. Adorno also describes this pain as the "guilt of a life which purely as a fact will strangle other life" (p. 364). Coles calls it the "ongoing discomfort that solicits our critical efforts." Coole, Negativity and Politics, 89.
69. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 202-3. Adorno also describes this pain as the "guilt of a life which purely as a fact will strangle other life" (p. 364). Coles calls it the "ongoing discomfort that solicits our critical efforts." Coole, Negativity and Politics, 89.
70. I make the case for the ethical role of the positive affects in The Enchantment of Modern Life, especially in chapters 1 and 7.
71. Adorno himself discerns no such ethical potential in moments of joy or in the attachment to life that they can induce. For him, the feeling of "the fullness of life" can only be an illusion in a world whose essential characteristic is the gap of nonidentity and, ultimately, death. Adorno identifies with Kant, who "disdained the passage to affirmation," and rejects those who offer "positivities" for this world, for "no reforms . . . [can ever suffice] ... to do justice to the dead,... none of them [touch]... upon the wrong of death." Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 385. What is more, the joyful passions are all bound up with the desire for domination, the very thing that negative dialectics seeks to combat: the idea of fullness of life "is inseparable from ... a desire in which violence and subjugation are inherent.... There is no fullness without biceps-flexing." Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 378. From the perspective of the thing-power materialist, Adorno teeters on the edge of what Dumm describes as "the overwhelming sense of loss that could swamp us when we approach [the thing's] unknowable vastness" Dumm, Politics of the Ordinary, 169, emphasis added.
72. Adorno himself discerns no such ethical potential in moments of joy or in the attachment to life that they can induce. For him, the feeling of "the fullness of life" can only be an illusion in a world whose essential characteristic is the gap of nonidentity and, ultimately, death. Adorno identifies with Kant, who "disdained the passage to affirmation," and rejects those who offer "positivities" for this world, for "no reforms . . . [can ever suffice] ... to do justice to the dead,... none of them [touch]... upon the wrong of death." Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 385. What is more, the joyful passions are all bound up with the desire for domination, the very thing that negative dialectics seeks to combat: the idea of fullness of life "is inseparable from ... a desire in which violence and subjugation are inherent.... There is no fullness without biceps-flexing." Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 378. From the perspective of the thing-power materialist, Adorno teeters on the edge of what Dumm describes as "the overwhelming sense of loss that could swamp us when we approach [the thing's] unknowable vastness" Dumm, Politics of the Ordinary, 169, emphasis added.
73. Adorno himself discerns no such ethical potential in moments of joy or in the attachment to life that they can induce. For him, the feeling of "the fullness of life" can only be an illusion in a world whose essential characteristic is the gap of nonidentity and, ultimately, death. Adorno identifies with Kant, who "disdained the passage to affirmation," and rejects those who offer "positivities" for this world, for "no reforms . . . [can ever suffice] ... to do justice to the dead,... none of them [touch]... upon the wrong of death." Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 385. What is more, the joyful passions are all bound up with the desire for domination, the very thing that negative dialectics seeks to combat: the idea of fullness of life "is inseparable from ... a desire in which violence and subjugation are inherent.... There is no fullness without biceps-flexing." Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 378. From the perspective of the thing-power materialist, Adorno teeters on the edge of what Dumm describes as "the overwhelming sense of loss that could swamp us when we approach [the thing's] unknowable vastness" Dumm, Politics of the Ordinary, 169, emphasis added.
74. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 43.
75. Ibid., 183. It is, moreover, only "by passing to the object's preponderance that dialectics is rendered materialistic" (p. 192).
76. Ibid., 181.
77. Ibid., 186.
78. "Preponderance of the object is a thought of which any pretentious philosophy will be suspicious.... [Such] protestations... seek to drown out the festering suspicion that heteronomy might be mightier than the autonomy of which Kant... taught.... Such philosophical subjectivism is the ideological accompaniment of the ... bouigeois I." Ibid., 189.
79. Ibid., 174-75.
80. "What we may call the thing itself is not positively and immediately at hand. He who wants to know it must think more, not less.... It is nonidentity through identity." Ibid., 189.
81. Ibid., 404, 375. The gap between concept and thing can never be closed, and withstanding this unconcilement is possible for Adorno, according to Albrecht Wellmer, only "in the name of an absolute, which, although it is veiled in black, is not nothing. Between the being and the nonbeing of the absolute there remains an infinitely narrow crack through which a glimmer of light falls upon the world, the light of an absolute which is yet to come into being." Albrecht Wellmer, Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 171, emphasis added.
82. Ibid., 404, 375. The gap between concept and thing can never be closed, and withstanding this unconcilement is possible for Adorno, according to Albrecht Wellmer, only "in the name of an absolute, which, although it is veiled in black, is not nothing. Between the being and the nonbeing of the absolute there remains an infinitely narrow crack through which a glimmer of light falls upon the world, the light of an absolute which is yet to come into being." Albrecht Wellmer, Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 171, emphasis added.
83. Thanks to Lars Tonder for alerting me to the messianic dimension of Adorno's thinking. It is also relevant to note Adorno's admiration for Kant, who is said to have found a way to assign transcendence an important role while making it inaccessible in principle: "What finite beings say about transcendence is the semblance of transcendence; but as Kant well knew, it is a necessary semblance. Hence the incomparable metaphysical relevance of the rescue of semblance, the object of esthetics." Negative Dialectics, 393. For Adorno, "the idea of truth is supreme among the metaphysical ideas, and this is why... one who believes in God cannot believe in God, why the possibility represented by the divine name is maintained, rather, by him who does not believe." Negative Dialectics, 401-2. According to Coles, it does not matter to Adorno whether the transcendent realm actually exists, what matters is the "demand... placed on thought" by its promise. Coles, Rethinking Generosity, 114.
84. Thanks to Lars Tonder for alerting me to the messianic dimension of Adorno's thinking. It is also relevant to note Adorno's admiration for Kant, who is said to have found a way to assign transcendence an important role while making it inaccessible in principle: "What finite beings say about transcendence is the semblance of transcendence; but as Kant well knew, it is a necessary semblance. Hence the incomparable metaphysical relevance of the rescue of semblance, the object of esthetics." Negative Dialectics, 393. For Adorno, "the idea of truth is supreme among the metaphysical ideas, and this is why... one who believes in God cannot believe in God, why the possibility represented by the divine name is maintained, rather, by him who does not believe." Negative Dialectics, 401-2. According to Coles, it does not matter to Adorno whether the transcendent realm actually exists, what matters is the "demand... placed on thought" by its promise. Coles, Rethinking Generosity, 114.
85. Thanks to Lars Tonder for alerting me to the messianic dimension of Adorno's thinking. It is also relevant to note Adorno's admiration for Kant, who is said to have found a way to assign transcendence an important role while making it inaccessible in principle: "What finite beings say about transcendence is the semblance of transcendence; but as Kant well knew, it is a necessary semblance. Hence the incomparable metaphysical relevance of the rescue of semblance, the object of esthetics." Negative Dialectics, 393. For Adorno, "the idea of truth is supreme among the metaphysical ideas, and this is why... one who believes in God cannot believe in God, why the possibility represented by the divine name is maintained, rather, by him who does not believe." Negative Dialectics, 401-2. According to Coles, it does not matter to Adorno whether the transcendent realm actually exists, what matters is the "demand... placed on thought" by its promise. Coles, Rethinking Generosity, 114.
86. My thanks to Morton Schoolman for this point. Schoolman develops this reading of Adorno, and links Adorno's thought to the project of democratic individuality, in Reason and Horror (New York: Routledge, 2001).
87. Dumm, Politics of the Ordinary, 7.
88. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 254-56, 250.
89. I've tried to avoid conceiving of that relationship in terms of "subjects" and "objects," though I have come to see that such a formulation is not entirely dispensable.
90. The modem use of the term "ecology" "came from Darwin through Ernst Haeckel, who... spoke of 'nature's Economy' (1866) with reference to interrelationships and interactions among competing organisms in a community." Joseph M. Petulla, American Environmentalism (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1980), 31 -32. Arnold Berleant argues that in recent years the scope of the ecological has enlarged: "The notion of an ecosystem has expanded the organism-environment interaction to encompass an entire community of bacteria, plants, and animals, joined with the physical, chemical, and geographical conditions under which they live. . . . We are slowly beginning to realize that no domain of our planet can any longer be regarded as an independent and sovereign realm. Indeed, the concept of environment as outside, external to the human organism, is a comforting notion now utterly discarded both by ecological studies and post-Cartesian philosophy." Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 4-5.
91. The modem use of the term "ecology" "came from Darwin through Ernst Haeckel, who... spoke of 'nature's Economy' (1866) with reference to interrelationships and interactions among competing organisms in a community." Joseph M. Petulla, American Environmentalism (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1980), 31 -32. Arnold Berleant argues that in recent years the scope of the ecological has enlarged: "The notion of an ecosystem has expanded the organism-environment interaction to encompass an entire community of bacteria, plants, and animals, joined with the physical, chemical, and geographical conditions under which they live. . . . We are slowly beginning to realize that no domain of our planet can any longer be regarded as an independent and sovereign realm. Indeed, the concept of environment as outside, external to the human organism, is a comforting notion now utterly discarded both by ecological studies and post-Cartesian philosophy." Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 4-5.
92. I am grateful to Stephen White and John O'Dougherty for helping me to think about the implications of thing-power for an environmental ethics.
93. James A. Nash, "On the Subversive Virtue: Frugality," in Ethics of Consumption, edited by David A. Cricker and Toby Linden (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 427.