Numb Networks

• Author: Cristin Ellis
• Published date: 01 September 2016
• Date: 01 September 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1065912916657187
• Subject Matter: Mini-Symposium: Walt Whitman (The 2015 Maxwell Lecture)

Political Research Quarterly

2016, Vol. 69(3) 626 –632

© 2016 University of Utah

Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1065912916657187

prq.sagepub.com

Mini-Symposium: Walt Whitman (The 2015 Maxwell Lecture)

Turning to the material agency of affect, Jane Bennett’s

new work expands the geography of sympathy by explor-

ing the no man’s land in which sympathy ceases to be

human. As she reminds us, in classical philosophy, sym-

pathy was often understood to designate a propensity for

affiliation built into the physical economy of material bod-

ies. By contrast, then, to our modern conception of sym-

pathy as a felt sentiment, this impersonal, material

sympathy—what Bennett terms “(onto)Sympathy” or

“onto-affectivity”—describes an embodied yet nonvoli-

tional attraction that draws bodies into material, as distinct

from moral, relations with other bodies. In Whitman,

Bennett carefully distinguishes five distinct modalities of

onto-affectivity, each of which attests to the same funda-

mental difference between onto-affective affinities and

sympathetic affections: that is, all of these types (viral con-

tagion, congenital predisposition, cosmic impartiality, erotic

impulse, and gravitational tug) highlight (onto)Sympathy’s

involuntary—even unconscious—agency. This raises an

important question. For if (onto)Sympathy is so imper-

sonal—that is, if it is less like moral intuition than it is like

the autonomic functions of respiration or circulation—

then in what sense can it still be said to speak to the deon-

tological questions that we have heretofore called upon

sympathy to solve? How is (onto)Sympathy relevant to

the politics of interpersonal recognition; how can it help

us to decide which entities deserve rights or our care?

Bennett’s work answers this question in two parts. Most

broadly, Bennett (2016) argues that (onto)Sympathy is “an

underdetermined vital force” or embodied penchant for

affectivity out of which feelings of sympathy sometimes

crystallize (616). In other words, (onto)Sympathy is the con-

dition of possibility for moral sympathy: the material entan-

glements it generates form the ontological substrate out of

which sympathetic feeling and in turn the politics of moral

recognition can develop. But this explanation only raises a

further set of questions, for, as Bennett notes, (onto)

Sympathy’s politics are “underdetermined”: our porous

mutuality is sympathy’s condition of possibility but not its

direct physical correlate. Indeed, as onto-affectivity is a uni-

versal condition of matter, it must therefore also crystallize

into whatever other feelings exist. This leads Bennett to

wonder whether the process of sympathy’s crystallization

might be brought under the direction of our will. Is it possi-

ble to cultivate the transformation of ontological force into

deontological feeling—to mobilize the impersonal currents

of affectivity into a politics of sympathetic recognition?

Bennett finds her yes in the example of Whitman’s practice

657187PRQXXX10.1177/1065912916657187Political Research QuarterlyEllis

research-article2016

1University of Mississippi, Oxford, USA

Corresponding Author:

Cristin Ellis, Department of English, University of Mississippi,

Bondurant Hall, P.O. Box 1848, University, MS 38677, USA.

Email: cristinellis@gmail.com

Numb Networks: Race, Identity,

and the Politics of Impersonal

Sympathies

Cristin Ellis1

Abstract

In this response to “Whitman’s Sympathies” by Jane Bennett, I show how Whitman broke with Romantic poetic

convention by representing sympathy as an involuntary, embodied affect—as, in Bennett’s terms, “(onto)Sympathy.”

However, as I argue, the ontology of Whitmanian sympathy undermines the notion of individual identity—of

autonomy, singularity, and difference—upon which sympathy’s traditionally inclusive, pluralist politics depends. Instead

of persons and interpersonal ethical relations, Whitmanian sympathy conjures a networked and processual ontology

in which discrete entities cannot finally be distinguished. Thus, I argue that Bennett’s notion of “(onto)Sympathy” is

incommensurable with the syntax of individual identity and (race, sex, gender, class, species) difference. But even if

this makes it incompatible with a politics of recognition, I argue that this networked ontology may nevertheless be

strategically better adapted to address the political challenges of ecological crisis.

Keywords

new materialism, posthumanism, race, identity, sympathy