196THE ALLURE OF THE VENEERplant deaths that occurred in the making of the postcards, books, and
newspaper clippings—if animals die, then plants die too.
INVISIBLE ANIMAL DEATHSOne of the obvious contributions of Harman’s philosophy lies in its non-
anthropocentric stance, or in its attempt to craft a conception of objects
that is less anthropocentric than previous ones. Yet to what extent can
objects be really known, and should this be our central preoccupation at
all? And how can we quantify or evaluate the impact of their agency? It is
at this point that object-oriented ontology’s negative answers to these
questions become intriguing, especially if we consider the positive alter-
native proposed by new materialism.
Jane Bennett’s new materialism defies reliance upon traditional defi-
nitions of matter as passive by emphasizing the “active powers issuing
from non-subjects.”^7 Her model of materialism draws from the tradition
of Democritus, Epicurus, Spinoza, Diderot, and Deleuze, but it most im-
portantly finds inspiration in Derrida’s conception of intimacy between
being and following—the being in response to a call from something Der-
rida developed in his thinking about animals.^8 Like Harman, Bennett
conceives objects as beings in themselves, but larger networks of agency
are what she is really concerned with—assemblages that are capable of
acting and interacting. The ultimate aim, once again, is that of decentering
the human, yet, as Bennett acknowledges, the vital qualities she attributes
to material bodies might be intrinsic to an inescapable anthropocen-
trism.^9 The vibrant vitality of matter might therefore not be solely an in-
dependent and intrinsic quality of things, but a field of intensities of some
description that defines the affections that the undeniable presence of
objects causes. To Bennett, not only can objects impede or block the will
and designs of humans, but they can “also act as quasi agents or forces
with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.”^10
At the beginning of the first chapter of Vibrant Matter, Bennett tells of
the encounter with a random assemblage of objects, including a dead, or
perhaps sleeping, rat found on a grate over a storm drain.^11 Her attention
is not simply drawn to the objects because of their materialities. As she