Preface vii-xix

Summary of Points for Discussion
1. What is vibrant matter?
2. What ground does Latour clear for the debates of this book?
3. Can we avoid subjectivity; and is this the central task required to redistribute the sensible frameworks of agency?
4. Overcoming knee-jerk representationalism that centres the human: can it be done?
5. What are the implications of the Deleuzian Spinozism at work here?
6. How can we help propagate the positive formulations of these alternative affective dispositions that take matter on its own terms?

1. What is vibrant matter?. Matter, and its related definition in contrast to materials, materiality, materialities and materialism are left relatively unattended: what should we make of that? Do we have operative definitions implicit in our own arguments? Is this the point, that we need to unpack the assumptions behind these terms? What are the precise differences of these terms as far as they can be discerned today in the key thinkers of materiality? Further it seems that matter is quickly conflated with 'things', objects, actants, and non-human agency. And vibrancy with 'vitality' where we have this exciting definition:

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.

The language of trajectory, propensity and tendency is a common approach in thought articulating process based philosophies of affect; so what do we gain from this language? And what is lost? Does it help us weaken the grip of correlationism when accounting for the world (despite the performative self-contradiction Bennett alludes to)?

2. Turning to Latour Advocating Latour as the first fully engaged with philosopher/social theorist is interesting - pitching the book to a readily available and strategic audience perhaps. Further though I wonder about the implication that this position brings as matter only matters when it "has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events" (viii). I don't think this is Bennett's full argument at all - I think it immediately shows what is skillful about the writing in this book, that it stages the key questions and problematics that we confront when attempting to think matter more effectively and politically on its own terms (itself a key debate viz speculative realism and object-oriented ontologies).

3. Giving subjectivity short shrift This is an important tactical move in the writing and argument, and yet I think it flags one of the key problematics here: that is how do we access and make apparent the agency of matter itself. This plugs into Whitehead's 'speculative metaphysics' which addresses "the contingent conditions of things as they happen to be"; one of the key contingencies for Whitehead being "the bifurcation of nature into subjects and objects and relatedly, primary and secondary qualities" (Fraser, 2010:59; quoting Rose 2002: 3). The central concept is that of agency (and I am not sure that the label distributive agency will do); but I am excited and challenged by Bennett's argument and call for us to look for revisions in the "operative notions of matter, life, self, self-interest, will, and agency" (ix) - this is something to track as the book unfolds as we read it. It is also picked up directly in the section entitled 'A note on methodology' where Bennett questions, and arcs back to the language of tendencies, propensities, and lures:

What method could possibly be appropriate for the task of speaking a word for vibrant matter? How to describe without thereby erasing the independence of things? (xiii)

The central tasks of the book are:

(1) to paint a positive ontology of vibrant matter, which stretches received concepts of agency, action, and freedom sometimes to the breaking point; (2) to dissipate the onto-theological binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination, and organic/inorganic using arguments and other rhetorical means to induce in human bodies an aesthetic-affective openness to material vitality; and (3) to sketch a style of political analysis that can better account for the contributions of nonhuman actants.

4. Suppressing the substitutions for vibrant material agency Here the role of representation for and through human signification is something to eschew; and yet it often takes primary place, whereas I think the ethos of this book is in staging the primacy of matter before the retrospective mattering in meaning. In other words, we encounter materially as well as, and aside from, and before, necessarily encountering only through a symbolic order or signfying representing machine that orders such encounters for us. It is not that such symbolic orderings don't matter; rather it is where the place of emphasis is made first and foremost.

5. Spinoza's monism and lump-ontology of substance Following Harman's critique of this lump-world - (which interestingly he also targets at Levinas' "rumbling primal il y a (‘there is’), hypostatized into specific chunks only by human consciousness" and Nancy's "surprising theory of the world as a formless ‘whatever’ articulated only by the interactions among its parts" (2009: 153) - Deleuze is slightly different for Harman in that he combines Spinoza with Bergson with Simondon to produce "instead of a total lump-world, ... one animated in advance by different ‘pre-individual’ zones that prevent the world from being purely homogeneous" (ibid:160) - how does this belief in one substance array and order the world in particular ways, even if Bennett also adds a Deleuzian virtual of turbulent flows to the lump mix? I am with her on this - something to debate - as contra Harman I don't believe in a world just of straightforward actuality.

6. The politics of affective dispositions This is I think the central politics of the book: that the realm of the subjective grip of affective dispositions below that of conscious attention is crucial; and is materially catalysed and subtly steers the body-in-action (as matter) through much more viscerally atuned habits; thus this realm is precisely the one where modest but vitally incremental habits can be changed for those 'interim futures' of which Connolly speaks (2008). Thus Bennett argues that, for example, "if a set of moral principles is actually to be lived out, the right mood or landscape of affect has to be in place" (xii); thus answering the need that as well as critique (akin to demystification) we must posit "positive formulations of alternatives" (xv).

Endgame question underwriting the preface:

How did Marx’s notion of materiality—as economic structures and exchanges that provoke many other events—come to stand for the materialist perspective per se? Why is there not a more robust debate between contending philosophies of materiality or between contending accounts of how materiality matters to politics? (xvi)

REFERENCES
Connolly, William (2008) Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Duke University Press.
Fraser, Mariam (2010) "Facts, Ethics and Event" in C. Bruun Jensen & K. Rödje (eds) Deleuzian Intersections in Science, Technology And Anthropology. New York: Berghahn Press; 57-82.
Harman, Graham (2009) The Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics.re-press, Melbourne, Australia.
Rose, Philip (2002) On Whitehead. Belmont, CA, Wadsworth.