A group of us sat, cramped together on the fifth floor of a tiny apartment in the 4th arrondissement. The night was humid, the window cracked open but the air was sticking and heavy. Huddled around a standing lamp, our bodies morphed to fit the small space. Six pairs of eyes were fixed, gazing intensely at a small pool of light cast on the floor, in the middle of which, a knot in the wooden floorboard was wriggling.

The entire room was vibrating with charge and in the only muddled words we could muster, we all agreed we must be seeing the atoms of matter in their quantum states. There and not there simultaneously. Alive with potential. We could feel the space in its becoming. Alix turned to the window suddenly, as if it had suddenly occurred to her.

Everything Is Alive she shouted

Shut the Fuck Up came back a response

We are crystallizations of processes, constantly undergoing transformation and modification. All matter matters in its living, complex woven web of inter and intra-action: affecting, competing, forming alliances, initiating new processes and dissipating others.

It is not a controversial statement to say that all things are connected, enmeshed, lively in some sense. Jane Bennetts notion of ‘vital materialism’ can be useful here in thinking through relationships of things in this texture of material flows. Troubling the de facto Marxist materialist perspective, Bennett asserts a ‘dogged resistance to anthropocentrism’ that separates historical materialism and her pursuit of ‘vital materialism’. Her basic argument is that everything is alive, interconnected, and in process. Not alive in a mechanistic way, or imbued with a non-material or transcendent spirit: things are alive in their complex interrelationships, entanglements, and propensities for open-ended change.

This is to take more seriously the idea that ‘technological and natural materialities’ might themselves be understood as ‘actors alongside and within us’ as ‘vitalities, trajectories, and powers irreducible to the meanings, intentions, or symbolic values humans invest in them.’

Karen Barads thinking also attests to this, stating that materiality is no longer ‘either given or a mere effect of human agency’, but rather ‘an active factor in processes of materialization.’

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: xvi / 47
Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity: 827

‘Neither brick nor mortar, nor soil, nor the ingredients in the kitchen, nor paints and oils, are objects. They are materials. And what people do with materials, as we have seen, is to follow them, weaving their own lines of becoming into the texture of material flows comprising the lifeworld. Out of this, there emerge the kinds of things we call buildings, plants, pies and paintings.'

Tim Ingold, Texility: 96