The Benjamin E. Lippincott Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to recognize a work of exceptional quality by a living political theorist that is still considered significant after a time span of at least 15 years since the original date of publication.
Citation from the Award Committee:
A decade before the Covid-19 pandemic radically reshaped the political landscape in ways that are still unfolding, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter urged us to recognize the “curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” that transform our world. In the fifteen years since its publication, Vibrant Matter has itself wrought dramatic and subtle shifts in thinking across an array of disciplines, quietly becoming one of the most influential works of political theory in the 21st-century. A work of foresight and insight that at once calls for and models a rare humility, this founding text of “New Materialism” seeks to upend two dominant trends in how we think about the nature of the world along with the politics that follow from these tendencies. First, Bennett invites her readers to return to the intuitive anthropomorphic stance of childhood, that moment when the material world appears not as passive “stuff” awaiting a human imprint, but as a cosmos of animated things. Instead of assuming a firm demarcation between life and matter, Bennett’s “horizontal ontology” recalls us to a time in our lives when toys had names and stuffed animals could speak, allowing us to see the vitality inherent within matter that needs no human to activate.
Second, building on this insight, Bennett asks us to consider whether the most dire political problems in our world, from public health to consumerism to climate change, stem from a failure to appreciate that agency is “distributed” across living and nonliving beings, and that metals, garbage, electricity, and hurricanes do not simply impede human designs, but have trajectories and propensities of their own. “How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies?” Her answer is at once critical, imaginative, rigorous, disorienting, inspiring and elegant, a tour de force that seeks to re-enchant our myriad relations with the material world and renew our political ecology. Bennett highlights the nonhuman forces at work within the human body that belie its supposed autonomy (e.g. the effect of dietary fats on human moods), and the many ways that the inorganic world outside us is agentic rather than passive (e.g. electricity’s role in the 2003 North American Blackout). Vibrant Matter brings these seemingly abstract matters of ontology to our attention, because democracy cannot address its most serious challenges without radically rethinking the entanglements that traverse and comprise its membership.
The two trends Bennett questions have a common root, the hubris of a kind of humanism that denigrates the capacities of the nonhuman world; elevates human exceptionalism out of fear of its own impotence; and wreaks destruction in its path. In challenging the fantasies of human omnipotence, she draws upon a minoritarian or subaltern tradition in the history of “Western” thought, an anti-anthropocentric pathway she traces as far back as Democritus and Epicurus, and which includes Spinoza, Diderot, Emerson, Thoreau, Darwin, Deleuze, and Guattari. In so doing, Bennett reworks not only our relationship to the “stuff” of the world but also to our dominant intellectual tradition, allowing us to see that the project of human mastery is culturally constructed rather than inherent in our nature, and that we are heir to alternative political ecologies if we engage in more sustained cultural self-reflection.
Vibrant Matter’s remarkable influence spans more than fifty academic disciplines and subfields, extending outward from political theory to embrace philosophy, sociology, history, ecology, communication, education, geography, informatics, critical-race, -animal, and -disability studies, and even reaching all the way to (perhaps ironically) management, marketing, and industrial design. That Bennett’s text has left such an unruly wake in its passing is, of course, an example of the vital materiality she celebrates. The book continues to morph as its reception reverberates in unpredictable ways that defy merely human intention, a shapeshifting that will likely only intensify with the increasing prominence of artificial intelligence and algorithmic governance.
Bennett closes with what she calls a “Nicene Creed” for vital materialists: “I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen…I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests.” In a time of pandemic, war, and ecosystem collapse, where our ability to form a public sufficient to these problems is vitiated by the resurgence of post-truth authoritarianism, Vibrant Matter reminds us that our ability to respond to the world is enriched by the acknowledgment that the world, too, responds.
Jane Bennett is Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, with a double appointment in Political Science and in Comparative Thought and Literature. She works in the environmental humanities, political philosophy, American romanticism, and contemporary social thought. She is the author of Influx & Efflux: Writing up with Walt Whitman (2020); Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010, translated into 14 languages); The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001); Thoreau’s Nature (1994), and Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment (1987).
Bennett was one of the founders of Theory & Event, was former Editor of Political Theory, and was profiled in The New Yorker (“The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things,” by Morgan Mies). Her essays have appeared in Grain/Vapor/Ray, LA+: Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture, Zeitschrift für Medien und Kulturforschung, K: Revue trans-européenne de philosophie et arts, and Journal of Human Rights and the Environment.
Along with Christiane Voss (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar), she coordinates the annual Hopkins-Bauhaus Summer Lab on Comparative Thought. Bennett is an Affiliate Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen, and was Visiting Professor at Oxford University, University of London, and Australian National University. She has advised dissertations on many topics, including ecological philosophy and poetics, political thought, materialisms, and democratic theories and practices.
Bennett is currently working on a comparative study of different models of “action” – in contemporary (ecological) activism and in the Daoist text Zhuangzi, with a focus on techniques of attentiveness, especially attention to the non-metrical or “anexact.”
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Catherine Zuckert (Chair) of Notre Dame University, Dr. Roxanne Euben of the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Stefan Dolgert, Brock University
CONGRATULATIONS JANE!!!! IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING, WELL DESERVED!!