Jane Bennett

sort of the box as cipher, as icon, as art object, as a democratic agent, and thinking about the ways in which we interact with an object or the objects interact with us.

So this is very much object theory in the sort of frame of Timothy Morton or Graham um harman but particularly a philosopher called jane bennett who wrote a book called vibrant matter so if anyone studied object theory they'll know exactly what i'm talking about now if you haven't don't worry because just let this book sort of wash over you it's um very um i wouldn't say unusual but it's very sort of disruptive I guess about how you think about objects so I really found this quite fascinating but very much in that object theory space sort of it is a novel and it's set in a town where well a big city really where the object the box travels through different hands sometimes it's stolen sometimes it gets passed on and there's a woman that is trying to work out the genesis of the object but um yeah there's this interesting little bit at the end which i thought was really really great it says all encounters with objects are oblique no you ever converges with all that as an object because an object also is also a thing a thing isn't for any you a thing is for itself a thing's real self is its secret self so then when you start to think about what an object is, you kind of go down the rabbit hole a bit.

So it's, yeah, it's fun.

It's interesting.

Gerard Grise specifically said he didn't believe in the music of the spheres, and yet he writes this piece, Le Noir de l'Etoile, which is using a recording of a pulsar as kind of the metronome for the piece And it does these great things like transform linear rhythms into kind of a single pulse.

And you ground your thinking in that chapter in the work of Jane Bennett, right? Yes.

And her idea of vibrant matter.

So Jane Bennett is a speculative realist.

And she kind of reinvents the concept of enchantment in terms of direct engagement with material reality.

And when you feel like when you meet someone you weren't expecting to see, or when you see a work of art that kind of blows your mind or something.

Because art creates a moment of ritual around that stuff that sets it apart as something that you...

Are automatically inclined to get enchantment from.

Um, it was very accessible.

It had sort of good, good writing that was, um, sort of going beyond the academic writing, especially if you think of, for instance, uh, Donna Haraway's writing or Bruno Latour's Network, e-e-even Jane Bennett and so on.

They're, they're very accessible, uh, writers.

So I thought if you want to be sort of part of that discourse and make an intervention, you also have to write these kind of stories.

Yeah.

I'm interested in Jane Bennett, the author of Vibrant Matter, um, and her influence on your work.

Uh, when did you first come across her and, and how does, how does she influence what it is that you do?

Well, I came across her when I was, um, working during my MA, and I think what I found really exciting was how she theorizes, uh, a, a kind of a vibrancy that crosses materials and through across non-human, human that actually there's ev- you know, everything's alive.