Influx and Efflux: Writing Up With Walt Whitman

"In her 2009 book Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett explored the vital materiality of non-human objects and the deep interrelation of human and non-human forces.

Yet she was left with a question: if we recognize human agency as bound up with the agentic forces of the material world, what does that mean for our conception of the self?

Bennett's new work, INFLUX AND EFFLUX, draws on the work of Walt Whitman to address this question.

Bennett uses Whitman's ideas of composition and decomposition, physical shapes and dispositions, and material and affective influences to posit a processual form of self that can form the basis for a more ecologically oriented and just world.

This "democratic personality" is formed through constant influx and efflux (a reference to "Song of Myself") or influence, the way in which the sea, or anything external, comes in, changes things, and leaves again.

The first chapter considers Whitman's ideology of "phiz"-a man