like falling into a human-sized chewing gum contaminated with lots of over the top bacterial personalities all called dave and walt, a book sure to leave you sticky and viral and quite probably irritated

the issue bennett has in conceptualizing hoarding in the subchapter titled “inter-objectivity” explains a big part of bennett’s issue in this work. supposedly, the difference between the distinction affect/effect is that it’s equal to “what acts on you, then what results”, whereas influx/efflux, the main conceptual distinction in this work, is supposed to denote “what enters you metabolically or consumes a part of you and exits changed or leaves you emptied”. she puts it this way: “‘influx and efflux’ invokes that ubiquitous tendency for outsides to come in, muddy the waters, and exit to partake in new (lively/deathly) waves of encounter.”

this distinction matters but is subtle enough to where bennett herself may trip up and confuse the two concepts. its difficult because bennett can simply say that objects have the ability to create efflux in a way separate from influx by the way in which they affect us. in “inter-objectivity”, a chapter in “bad influence” which is by far the most narratively important piece in the work, bennett tackles it through hoarding in such a way that makes you wonder what was the point of developing a philosophy of vibrant matter in her last work which she even mentions in her introduction (“a swarm of nonhumans are at work inside and as us; we are powered by a host of inner aliens”) which questions the entire limits of ontology, but isn’t actually deployed. if there’s a swarm of nonhumans, and supposed borders at every limit of our being, why do they only selectively show up when you want them to or are thinking about the idea, rather than infrastructurally at every single point of her philosophy?

even in chapters such as “inter-objectivity” where hoarding dissolves this boundary, the boundary still exists because the hoarder is seen as much more of an objective macro-entity, a constellation of behaviors that others may not have, a being with clear boundaries that can be dissolved or infiltrated by outsider influences. the issue with introducing a micro concept such as vibrancy in matter is that you would expect the concept to conceptually infiltrate her own boundaries in speaking if she believed it. she refers to herself as “i came more and more to experience ‘my’ efforts as a writer as but one vector within a much larger group of conative influences.” but then proceeds to be a writer who very much holds up the boundaries of a non-influenced totality. maybe this concept of writing can hold up ontological boundaries when it needs them to hold.

the concept is very much political in the same way, because it points to things such as security, preservation and etc, when it comes to not just social but material contamination. but this material contamination can’t be selective, it can’t only appear to hoarders, it can’t be possible for us to turn it off or suddenly decide its influence. that’s also the issue with everything having influence, isn’t a much more charismatic idea one where a particular influence you don’t expect to show up does? if not, if influence is really tied to things such as identity and writing, you’d want bennett to start sincerely speaking from the perspective of the mucus in her body, or the thousands of supposed effluxed identities, corporealities or forces speaking in her stead. as opposed to that, academic work is like a vacuum chamber for random influences or scattered forms, it disintegrates them and makes bennett look like a fetishist impressionistically enjoying the weight of ideas without becoming victim to them the way everything else does in this supposed world of hoarding.

she questions this ontological limit separately in “bad influence” along with concepts such as phagocytosis where the environment “eats” the individual and influence is absorptive, only to posit influence later as separate from the chain of efflux/influx, as well as the “lure of space” where our inner borders collapse into space, only for these distinctions to never enter a phenomenological intercorrelation with her descriptive work. take for example “homomorphy”, a concept where the “i” becomes similar to its surroundings and the body starts taking on the form/style of milieu. in “bad influence” she actually has an example including a praying mantis, where the entire female sex is actually related to an eroticized milieu that takes apart the individual through seductive outside force and the looming threat of dissolution. there is also the concept of psychasthenia mentioned in “bad influence” along with other concepts that all associate us with hoarding, but none of them weaponize it.

the simplest way to tackle the issue ontologically in her hoarding section is to de-politicize hoarding as an ideological fixation (asphyxiation). but the political issue isnt whether hoarding ruins peoples lives and is a sign of clinical depression or not, but is a question of phenomenological entry, what forms of being emerge when we relate to overdetermined objects? for bennett however it remains clinical, which means it doesn’t ever become truly political, and enters the weaker political sphere known as fetishism.

this sphere is strong when used ironically or glorificationally, to operate against common sense or to weaponize assumptions as a form of violence against presumption, but in this instance it happens on accident. this happens precisely because for bennett the philosophical glorification of hoarding is actually weaker than the effect it already effluxes. notice how when she talks about hoarding as a general factor, she mentions corporeal environments that require smell as a part of the intensity, but when giving examples of hoarding, she mentions one of a few things, one being alvin: “the things speak out.” his house is so full he can barely move — the things clearly don’t have the power to speak out past desperation itself, or else desperation wouldn’t be the effect they produce. the affect can’t be allowed to overpower the effect. its clear we are already speaking about alvin getting effluxed, but a pure effluxing would require the things to speak out instead of alvin, still, its one of the better examples. bennett actually notes “the voices of the therapists and of the official narration proceed by way of a strict divide between active human agents and passive inanimate objects, which i do not myself affirm.”

another example is beverly from kansas: thousands of vhs tapes recording tv broadcasts from each day of her life since the 1980s, and she says they are part of her. this one is arguably the worst, since not only does it not have a corporeal quality but it’s staunchly non-corporeal. the recordings are in fact an extension of beverly, but a type of extension that she seems to be in command of, far from outsiders partaking in something and leaving to stain other things as bennett’s first definition of efflux, tapes are an example of a local and controlled, self-sustaining influence. sure, maybe the tapes are contaminating her mind, but maybe she’s influxing her mind through the tapes and feedback looping her mind back into herself. a better example is when there is social interference, such as ingrid, who lives with strong smells like cat urine, mold, decay, but does not experience them as separate from herself, or karen, who gets offended when a therapist says the smell is not personally reflective of her. karen insists: “of course it is.”

this does point towards a partially effluxed boundary, and to concepts such as distributed agency (person + hoard becomes an augmented “i”), doting (lingering on repeatedly consistent objective details), “virtual intensities” the deleuzian passive influence of non-functionalized background objects in a phenomenological view & etc. but the conceptual boundaries aren’t clearly defined between these examples, and there’s nothing except hoarding as “proof-of-intensity” at best and “proof of influence” at worst that even necessitates this subchapter existing in this work. it doesnt for example connect to bennett’s claim that “to exist, dividual persons absorb heterogeneous material influences. they must also give out from themselves particles of their own coded substances — essences, residues, or other active influences — that may then reproduce in others something of the nature of the persons in whom they have originated.”

of course, you could say, it would be insane for bennett to attempt to literally sketch out the exact forms of efflux and influx in the possible field of influences that could exist, and as she says “at a very early phase, for example, there may emerge a tiny intensification or ‘surge’ in the noise, as in that ever-so-slightly-higher whine audible above the background sound of wind or that barely perceptible dance of salt water … but maybe it won’t. the logic of ‘it depends’ or ‘it could happen’ is the dao of the process: sometimes noise expresses ‘a welter of aborted beginnings’.”

she calls this process “fluctuation” and argues that it heavily varies. in another paragraph, she also claims that bloom “himself begins in the middle of the process, with misprision. this has the advantage of highlighting relationality or what happens in the encounter between influx and efflux”. she also claims that whitman’s original poem where efflux and influx are mentioned is an example where this “middle i” that is a part of both is highlighted (and this is true, the poem “song of myself” makes use of a middle-classed body that “sea of stretch’d groundswells… i am integral with you, i too am of one phase and of all phases”) this integral “sea of stretch’d groundswells”, being integral to oneself, actually locates the subject within itself.

but anyways, what’s the point of all of this? well, this heterogeneity is actually excused through her fluctuation paragraph as a non-middle influence, which allows her to map out a general trajectory of all forms of phenomenological affectivity, simultaneously whilst claiming that ontology is already destabilized at the highest possible level of flux through her vibrant matter concept, without piecing together conceptually how hoarders are at every level this middle subject. analyzing influx and efflux separately allows the study to be the easiest possible ontological step instead of the hardest one