This article discusses the basic arguments and important achievements of Jane Bennett’s vital materialism, as well as some problems and limitations of this theoretical perspective. It first analyzes the ontological underpinnings of Bennett’s materialist account and presents two examples she uses to illustrate the notion of a ‘force of things’. The paper then addresses central conceptual and analytic problems of Bennett’s account. The notion of an all-encompassing ‘vitality of matter’ is insufficient to explain the relationality of matter; it is also (...) empirically limited and provides only a selective account of agency. These shortcomings and limitations affect the political perspectives of Bennett’s version of vital materialism. I conclude that there is a tendency in her work to displace political considerations by invoking new ethical responsibilities and sensibilities. Being attentive to the vitality of things translates into a systematic blindness concerning the inequalities, asymmetries and hierarchies enacted in vital materializations. (shrink)

Before photography went digital and camera phones accompanied people most everywhere, Pierre Bourdieu observed in 1965 that photography had become a "middle-brow art". "How and why," he asked, "is the practice of photography predisposed to a diffusion so wide that there are few households, at least in towns, which do not possess a camera?". Novel at the time, the question has been superseded today. Estimates indicate that 1.27 trillion new photographs will be taken in 2017. That amounts to an ambient (...) symphony of over forty thousand clicking shutters per second. That means the human population will take three times more photographs in one year than there are stars in the Milky Way.... (shrink)

This article considers some political potentialities of the post-constructivist proposal for substituting truth with traceability. Traceability is a measure of truthfulness in which the rationality of a truth-claim is found in accounting for the work done to maintain links back to an internal referent through a chain of mediations. The substitution of traceability for truth is seen as necessary to move the entire political domain towards a greater responsiveness to the events of the natural-social world. In particular, it seeks to (...) disarm the strategy of ... (shrink)