Vibrant Matter

 In this book, Jane Bennett tries to connect the political implications and ecological issues through objects that we either use in everyday life or are around us in the environment. Also, the book “Vibrant Matter” helped me understand the multi-purposes that several everyday objects or materials have. Moreover, I revised the term “object” and what exactly we can describe with this term. I feel that this book can help my process and the choice of materials or objects that I use. Furthermore, the book  helped me  understand how everyday objects  can  metaphorically portray several weaknesses and problems of our modern life.

 

As an example, I quote two pieces from the book “Vibrant Matter”. The first quote is from chapter 1 (Henry Thoreau, The journal of Henry David Thoreau):

 

“I must let my senses wander as my thought,

  My eyes see without looking….

  Got not to object; let it come to you”

 

The second quote is from chapter 8 on page 112:

 

“My ‘own’ body is material, and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively human. My flesh is populated and constituted by different swarms of foreigners. The crook of my elbow, for example, is “a special ecosystem, a bountiful home to no fewer than six tribes of bacteria….The bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as  many genes as the mere 20.000 or so in the human genome….We are, rather, an array of   bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested se of microbiomes.”

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​(Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things, Jane Bennet, Duke University Press, 2010)