[Let us] describe a more distributive agency [...]
The philosophical project of naming where subjectivity begins and ends is too often bound up with fantasies of a human uniqueness in the eyes of God, of escape from materiality, or of mastery of nature; and even where it is not, it remains an aporetic or quixotic endeavor. [...] I want to highlight what is typically cast in the shadows: the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite human things. [...]
What I am calling impersonal affect or material vibrancy is not a spiritual supplement or "life force" added to the matter said to house it. Mine is not a vitalism in the traditional sense; I equate affect with materiality, rather than posit a separate force that can enter and animate a physical body. My aim, again, is to theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such, and to detach materiality from the figures of passive, mechanistic, or divinely infused substance. This vibrant matter is not the raw material for the creative activity of humans or God. It is my body, but also the bodies of Baltimore litter Prometheus's chains, and Darwin's worms as well as the not-quite-bodies of electricity, ingested food, and stem cells.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, 2010
