This semester, I am enrolled in Sociology 4100, titled Contemporary Social Theory. In this course, we look at important sociological theories that help us understand and study society. It explains how sociological theories are created and how they connect to research methods in real-world studies. Each week, we are given readings to complete, followed by a reading response assignment. The task is straightforward: we summarize the readings in the first part and then choose a notable aspect to elaborate on for the remainder of the response.
I read two different works about and by Jane Bennett for this module. In the first article, The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things, the author discusses how Bennett believes that “stuff has agency. Inanimate matter is not inert. Everything is always doing something.” (pg. 6) In the book titled Vibrant Matter, written by Bennett, she further explores those concepts while also bringing in theories devised by other scholars. In her book, she quotes Bruno Latour, who devised the concept of Actor Network Theory (ANT). He believed that human and non-human entities, referred to as actors, form networks of relationships that shape and define social phenomena. “An agent is a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events. It is ‘any entity that modifies another entity in a trial,’ something whose ‘competence is deduced from [its] performance’ rather than posited in advance of the action.” (pg. viii) Bennett also introduces Thing-Power in her book as the “strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience.” (pg. xvi)
I decided to watch the optional video posted of Jane Bennett’s lecture titled Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter. In this lecture, Bennett refers to her book and explains how finding one large men’s black plastic work glove, one dense mat of oak pollen, one unblemished dead rat, one white plastic bottle cap, and one smooth stick of wood made her stop in her tracks in Baltimore one day. She explains how those inanimate objects spoke to her that day, and that she was able to get a glimpse of what hoarders or artists see where others may see nothing. In her lecture, she describes hoarders as receiving an aesthetic call from their things and listening or talking to their belongings. She mentions that they notice too much about their items, whereas we may see just the items as themselves. This lecture was very interesting to me as I understand Bruno Latour’s ANT and how non-human items can work together with humans. I am a minimalist within my home and all other aspects of my life, and I am also an artist. The readings and videos for this module helped me to broaden my mind to see beyond my own opinions and to not judge a book, or a hoarder in this situation, too swiftly.
References:
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.
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