The Politics of 'Things'

"Not only do human beings not form a separate imperium unto themselves; they do not even command the imperium, nature, of which they are a part." 

-Baruch Spinoza

Spinoza distinguishes the human body from other bodies by noting that its 'virtue' consists in "nothing other than to live by the guidance of reason." Every nonhuman body shares with every human body a conative nature, and thus a virtue appropriate to its material configuration.

This is not the view long held by the Christian church, which promoted a strict hierarchy of 'being', with the material world of minerals holding the lowest significance, and the virtual world of heaven conversely at the zenith of 'being' (though frequently depicted as being built, paradoxically it would seem, from stone and mineral matter).

Two depictions of the Christian 'Great Chain of Being'

"Why advocate the vitality of matter? Because my hunch is that the image of dead of thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and our earth destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies...


...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."

-Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter:  A Political Ecology of Things

Cornelia Parker, 'Neither From Nor Towards',