Having just finished reading Vibrant Matter, may I urge you all to complete your reading of this remarkable, quiet and delightful book by finishing it to the end. Before we continue with discussions, it might be best to finish reading it. The busy-ness and business of dissection before we have appreciated its richness, simplicity and complexity will do it injustice. Upon finishing it, one might come to a similar conclusion, that the questions we have posed of it are far too quick. Bennett does answer our queries, or, at least, she addresses them. Had we continued our reading, we would not have asked the same questions, or, at least, not have asked them in the ways that we have.My plea is to read it all, including the excellent footnotes, and then we can begin discussing it. (Incidentally, this was Keith's original suggestion. We should defer to those wiser than ourselves,... sometimes.)
MSJ
On the one hand I quite agree with Mark - the sentiments towards the book and the overall performative effect of the complete text; on the other hand a reading can be richer when having posed perhaps naive, unfair, too complex and too crude a set of questions - equally many of the chapters where published as separate articles first. I think if we don't ask these kinds of questions as we go the book at the end has a more hermetically sealed quality; and I think that the book asks us to question - not it, but ourselves. So when asking the questions - or staging the points for discussion - for my part, these were less questions for Jane and more questions for myself and how such competing and contestable ontological claims can resonate with each other to effect the alternative material politics she testifies to.
ReplyDeleteCan I suggest that we look to draw out overall themes - these no doubt will fold out and echo those found in the preface - that encompass a reading of the whole book. And set these up as separate posts which we can then comment too (rather than posting more individual posts for each theme).