Ι often watch the television show “Hoarders.” One of my favorite episodes features the pack rats Patty and Debra. Patty is a typical trash-and-filth hoarder: her bathroom contains horrors I’d rather not describe, and her story follows the show’s typical arc of reform and redemption. But Debra, who hoards clothes, home decorations, and tchotchkes, is more unusual. She doesn’t believe that she has a problem; in fact, she’s completely unimpressed by the producers’ efforts to fix her house. “It’s just not my color, white,” she says, walking through her newly de-hoarded rooms. “Everything that I really loved in my house is gone.” She is unrepentant, concluding, “This is horrible—I hate it!” Debra just loves to hoard, and people who want her to stop don’t get it.
I was never sure why Debra’s stubbornness fascinated me until I came across the work of Jane Bennett, a philosopher and political theorist at Johns Hopkins. A few years ago, while delivering a lecture, Bennett played clips from “Hoarders,” commenting on them in detail. She is sympathetic to people like Debra, partly because, like the hoarders themselves, she is focussed on the hoard. She has philosophical questions about it. Why are these objects so alluring? What are they “trying” to do? We tend to think of the show’s hoards as inert, attributing blame, influence, and the possibility of redemption to the human beings who create them. But what if the hoard, as Bennett asked in her lecture, has more agency than that? What if these piles of junk exert some power of their own?
This past fall, I met Bennett at a coffee shop near the Johns Hopkins campus. Sixty-five, with coiffed silver hair and cat’s-eye glasses, she sat at a table near the window reading the Zhuangzi, one of the two most important texts of Taoism, the Chinese school of thought that emphasizes living in harmony with the world. “The coffee isn’t very good here, but the people are nice,” she told me, conspiratorially. She took out her phone. “I have to show you a picture.” She turned the screen toward me, revealing a photo of two dead rats lying on the pavement—an image at odds with her kindly-neighbor looks. “I was walking by the university, and this is what I found,” she said. I leaned closer. The rats, who had drowned in a rainstorm, lay in artful counterpoint, as though posing for a still-life.
Dead rats are almost a theme in Bennett’s work. In her best-known book, “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things,” from 2010, she lists some of the objects that she found on a June morning in front of Sam’s Bagels, on Cold Spring Lane, in Baltimore:
One large men’s black plastic work glove
One dense mat of oak pollen
One unblemished dead rat
One white plastic bottle cap
One smooth stick of wood
These objects affected her. “I was struck by what Stephen Jay Gould called the ‘excruciating complexity and intractability’ of nonhuman bodies,” Bennett writes. “But, in being struck, I realized that the capacity of these bodies was not restricted to a passive ‘intractability’ but also included the ability to make things happen, to produce effects.” Bennett likes to reference Walt Whitman, who once described people who are highly affected by the world around them as having “sensitive cuticles.” Bennett hopes to cultivate a sensitivity in her cuticles. That means paying a lot of attention to everything—especially to experiences that might otherwise go unnoticed, uninterrogated.
The idea that objects have agency might be familiar from childhood. When we’re small, we feel connected to a blanket that can’t be thrown away, or to a stuffed animal that’s become a friend. As adults, we may own a precious item of threadbare clothing that we refuse to replace—yet we wouldn’t think of that shirt as having agency in the world. It seems pretty obvious to us that objects aren’t actors with their own agendas. When Alvin, another Hoarder, says that “things speak out” to him, we know that he has a problem.
Bennett takes Alvin’s side. “The experience of being hailed by ‘inanimate’ matter—by objects beautiful or odd, by a refrain, by a piece of cake, or a buzz from your phone—is widespread,” she writes. “Everyone is in a complicated relationship with things.” In her view, we are often pushed around, one way or another, by the stuff we come into contact with on any given day. A piece of shiny plastic on the street pulls your eye toward it, turning your body in a different direction—which might make you trip over your own foot and then smash your head on the concrete, in a series of events that’s the very last thing you planned or intended. Who has “acted” in such a scenario? You have, of course. Human beings have agency. But, in her telling, the piece of plastic acted, too. It made something happen to you.
The idea that a piece of plastic has genuine agency places Bennett in an intellectual tradition that originated with the late French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour. “When we claim that there is, on one side, a natural world and, on the other, a human world, we are simply proposing to say, after the fact, that an arbitrary portion of the actors will be stripped of all action and that another portion, equally arbitrary, will be endowed with souls,” Latour wrote, in “Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime.” Latour thought that we needed to stop arbitrarily restricting agency to the human sphere; by extending our sense of who and what may act, he argued, we might more easily acknowledge obvious facts about our world. “A force of nature is obviously just the opposite of an inert actor,” Latour wrote. “Every novelist and poet knows this as well as every expert in hydraulics or geomorphology. If the Mississippi possesses anything at all, it is agency–such a powerful agency that it imposes itself on the agency of both regular people and the Army Corps of Engineers.”
Stuff has agency. Inanimate matter is not inert. Everything is always doing something. According to Bennett, hoarders are highly attuned to these truths, which many of us ignore. Non-hoarders can disregard the inherent vibrancy of matter because we live in a modern world in which the categories of matter and life are kept separate. “The quarantines of matter and life encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations, such as the way omega-3 fatty acids can alter human moods or the way our trash is not ‘away’ in landfills but generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds as we speak,” she writes. Hoarders suffer at the hands of their hoards. But the rest of us do, too: that’s why a modern guru like Marie Kondo can become famous by helping us gain control over our material possessions. Bennett describes herself as something of a minimalist—but her minimalism is driven by a sense of the agency of things. “I don’t want to have such a clamor around,” she told me.
In a park called Druid Hill, we walked along a path through the woods. Bennett paused, then led us off the path, down a hill so steep that we had to grab at small branches and tree trunks to slow our descent. We stopped to consider an especially notable dead tree. I thought it looked a little wistful.
“It’s stretching its hands out to the sky!” Bennett said, lifting her own arms up and laughing.
In Bennett’s most recent book, “Influx & Efflux,” she describes an encounter with an Ailanthus altissima, or tree of heaven—a fast-growing tree with oval leaves—on one of her walks around Baltimore. “I saw a tree whose every little branch expanded and swelled with sympathy for the sun,” she writes. “I was made distinctly aware of the presence of something kindred to me.” Ailanthus altissima is often considered an invasive species. Bennett’s musings have an ethical component: if a nuisance tree, or a dead tree, or a dead rat is my kin, then everything is kin—even a piece of trash. And I’m more likely to value things that are kindred to me, seeing them as notable and worthy in themselves. Most environmentally minded people are comfortable with this kind of thinking when it’s applied to the pretty part of nature. It’s strange to apply the concept of kinship to plastic gloves and bottle caps. Bennett aims to treat pretty much everything as potential kin.
Wearing bright-silver sneakers, she dropped her arms and headed off into the woods. I hastened to keep up with her. Soon, we stumbled upon something we found hard to precisely describe.
“What is that?” Bennett asked, her voice rising.
It seemed to be a shock of almost luminescent bright-orange stuff growing right out of the ground. She bent down to touch it.
“It’s plastic,” she said, at first disappointed but then intrigued. The individual orange bristles were sticking straight up, like vertical pine needles.
“How’s it in?” Bennett asked. She turned to me. “Try to pull it out!” I leaned down, grabbed an orange handful, and yanked. It wouldn’t budge.
“This is amazing,” she said. “This is almost like a trick someone’s playing on us.” She took out her phone to snap a photo, then nodded. “That’s an excellent find,” she said.
In “Vibrant Matter,” Bennett uses the phrase “thing power” to capture the lively and active qualities of objects. She describes the things that she came across near Sam’s Bagels on Cold Spring Road as “vibratory—at one moment disclosing themselves as dead stuff and at the next as live presence: junk, then claimant; inert matter, then live wire.” She argues that there’s a sense in which even metal is alive—it can crack in interesting ways, and “the line of travel of these cracks is not deterministic but expressive of an emergent causality, whereby grains respond on the spot and in real time to the idiosyncratic movements of their neighbors, and then to their neighbors’ response to their response, and so on, in feedback spirals.” Borrowing a phrase from the philosopher Mario Perniola, she concludes that there’s a “sex appeal of the inorganic”—“a shimmering, potentially violent vitality intrinsic to matter.”
Did I find the orange thing in the ground enticing? Not really—but it had done something to me. In 1917, the sociologist Max Weber argued that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” Ever since, we’ve tended to think of ourselves as living in a disenchanted world, from which all magic has been stripped. Bennett asks us to entertain the possibility that “the world is not disenchanted”—“that is, not populated by dead matter.” Her response to the disenchantment of the world is to deny that it ever happened in the first place.
Bennett is a philosopher and political theorist. But her intellectual work is not primarily about creating new theories. In her writing, she expertly distills and juxtaposes the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, Immanuel Kant, Martha Nussbaum, and others, but her goal is often to create a mood. She wants readers to adopt and embody an ethos that makes room for the vitality of matter. In her view, it’s a useful attitude. “Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy or inspiration to enact ecological projects,” she writes. We might find it hard to “contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities.”
Could noticing an old Snickers wrapper in the park really help us save the world? There might, or might not, be an element of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Philosophy in the idea. Bennett conceded that her point of view could be criticized as being “bullshitty,” or “airy-fairy.” But she likes to “take perspectives that seem implausible and find the good intuitions embodied in them, and then go with it,” she said. “I don’t believe crystals have the power to do this or that, in any New Age way,” she continued. “But what’s the intuition that prompted it?” The intuition behind New Agey crystal enthusiasm involves a sense of the fascination crystals create in us. They have inserted themselves into human civilization in any number of ways—as dishware, ornamentation, and aids to worship, as writing instruments (graphite is a crystal), and as a primary material in microchips. The study of their unique structure has been important to various branches of scientific research. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, a crystallographer who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in 1964, described herself as “captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.” Even in Hodgkin’s telling, the crystals did the capturing. Perhaps the New Age crystal enthusiast and the experimental scientist have something in common.
On a meta level, Bennett’s work suggests an attitude that we might take toward others’ attitudes. When I mentioned to her that her excitement about thing power might be thought of as stoner philosophy, she more or less agreed—but then went with it. “If you encounter somebody that is different from you, maybe, if you’re good at lingering for a moment or two in wonder at that person, you can postpone the moment of fear or rejection,” she told me. The subtitle to “Vibrant Matter”—“a political ecology of things”—hints at an interpersonal politics: in her view, politics should always include a sense of wonder, not just at marmosets, viruses, rivers, pieces of plastic, concrete, and dead rats but at other people.
Bennett and I left the park and found ourselves in a spooky area beneath an expressway. We decided to walk up a nearby hill, toward a hip neighborhood called Hampden. In front of an extraordinarily ugly apartment building, we ambled to a stop. Bennett was trying to show me something with great enthusiasm.
“This is a famous Baltimore thing called formstone,” she said. “It’s like stone wallpaper.” This seemed right: the formstone, out of which the building’s façade was constructed, looked like a kitschy stucco version of a medieval stone wall. Bennett pointed to an otherwise unnoticeable flaw in the formstone.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a crack with caulk in it,” Bennett answered, triumphant.
I wasn’t getting it right away. Later, she explained to me that the caulky crack was interesting to her because it showed that there are tendencies in the formstone itself to “guide and shape and nudge and call upon people even as they’re designing things.” A person put a bunch of caulk into the wall of a building, she said, but this person was “guided” by the specific, independently established shapes and contours of the formstone. Often, she went on, “you basically have to follow the form of the material.” Agency goes both ways.
It was hot, and I was tired. An hour before, I’d been entranced by a dead tree; now the houses and lawns and trash and lampposts and caulk cracks were starting to lose their vibrancy. I felt a strange sense of guilt. Was I letting Bennett down—letting the formstone down, too? “Even if, as I believe, the vitality of matter is real, it will be hard to discern it, and, once discerned, hard to keep focussed on,” Bennett writes. “I have come to see how radical a project it is to think vital materiality.” It’s not just that concentration can be wearisome. Bennett had shown me that picture of the dead rats for a reason: being genuinely open to and affected by everything around us means that there is no picking and choosing. It is everything or nothing—the good, the bad, and the ugly. This can be inspiring; it can also be overwhelming. Perhaps this explains why so many hoarders feel bewilderment and distress: they’re burdened and sometimes beaten down by their hoards. Human beings have a lot of difficult work to do if we’re to learn to recognize the inherent worth of all vibrant matter.
Bennett hopes for a positive outcome. During my time with her, I thought frequently about an old house in Detroit which my spouse and I have been rehabbing for many years now. It was built in 1917. It has its ways. We started our rehab project with many grand ideas about completely transforming the layout of the house. But because we’ve been doing the work ourselves and going slowly, the house has had the opportunity to get its two cents in. It doesn’t speak like a person, of course, but it communicates, day after day, season after season. The house has revealed to us how light travels around its surfaces and interiors in winter, spring, summer, and fall; some of the changes we were planning to make have come to seem wrongheaded with that further information. Other changes we hadn’t even considered suddenly became possible and exciting: its intermittently crumbling ceilings opened the possibility of increasing the height in some rooms.
Working on the house has started to feel like an ongoing dialogue. Rather than imposing our preconceived ideas onto a bunch of inert matter, we often find ourselves asking, What does the house want? People who visit sometimes remark on the special feel of the place. They’ll ask, How did you make this house so cozy? The answer, as Bennett has shown me, is not clear and definitive. We listened to the house, and the house listened to us. Enchantment happened. ♦
By Morgan Meis
