Reddit mentions of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

There are actually several ways one might speak of objects "having" a memory. Are you thinking of objects that pool human memory unwittingly (like Proust's madeleine)? objects that communities have invested with memorial significance (as in what Pierre Nora calls "lieux de mémoire," i.e., sites of memory)? objects that individuals have mnemonically associated with particular things (as in the classical "method of loci")?

Or are you thinking of how objects can retain information as an analogue for human memory (as in Freud's "mystic writing pad")? or how objects can seem to hold and transmit memories between (and onto) people (as in Allison Landsberg's "prosthetic memory" or Rosanne Kennedy's development of that term along the lines of Jane Bennett's "vibrant matter")?

Or do you want to say that an object, independently of humans or even animal life, "remembers" things, and that such remembering is also independent of life? Do you have any examples, even tentative or hypothetical, of what you're wanting to name?

Though less philosophically inclined, but still a really good work that surveys a lot of different vitalist/new materialist positions and their value for political theory: Jane Bennett's Vibrant Mattter

It's a pretty smooth read but gives a good lay of the land.

No, seriously, the word objective has a ton of different meanings, and different aspects of the word are invoked by different people.

I'm quoting from Elisabeth Lloyd who outlined four different ways the word objective is used:

1] " " means detached, disinterested, unbiased, impersonal, not having a particular point of view

2] " " means public, observable, or accessible (in principle)

3] " " means existing independently or separately from us

4] " " means really existing, Really Real, the way things really are


These uses of the word objective can mean different things depending on the context. Detachment is a property of a knower, ontological independence is a relation between a knower and reality, publicity is a relation between knowers and reality, and Really Real is the status is what is regardless of perspective or relation to any knower.

As an example, consciousness is something which is Really Real but not public. I cannot be detached from it but it exists independently of anyone else. Mirages are Really Real--they exist in people's experiences and are public but they do not exist independently of us as knowers.


The sort of materialism I subscribe to certainly isn't boring. If you're interested in a sketch of what it is, check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Vibrant-Matter-Political-Ecology-Franklin/dp/0822346338