The New Politics of Materialism

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The New Politics of Materialism

New materialism challenges the mechanistic models characteristic of early modern philosophy that regarded matter as largely passive and inert. Instead it gives weight to topics often overlooked in such accounts: agency, vitalism, complexity, contingency, and self-organization.

This collection, which includes an international roster of contributors from philosophy, history, literature, and science, is the first to ask what is “new” about the new materialism and place it in interdisciplinary per- spective. Against current theories of new materialism it argues for a deeper engagement with materialism’s history, questions whether matter can be

“lively,” and asks whether new materialism’s wish to revitalize politics and the political lives up to its promise.

Contributors: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Sarah Ellenzweig, Christian J. Emden, N. Katherine Hayles, Jess Keiser, Mogens Lærke, Ian Lowrie, Lenny Moss, Angela Willey, Catherine Wilson, Charles T. Wolfe, Derek Woods, and John H. Zammito.

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The New Politics of Materialism

History, Philosophy, Science

Edited by Sarah Ellenzweig

and John H. Zammito

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Notes on Contributors

Keith Ansell-Pearson holds a Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, England, a position he has held since 1998. He is the author of close to 100 essays in journals and edited book collections. His books include Nietzsche contra Rousseau (Cambridge University Press, 1991/1994), Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (Routledge, 1999), Bergson and the Time of Life (Routledge, 2002), and Thinking Beyond the Human Condition with Bergson (Bloomsbury, 2017). He is also the editor of Bergson: Key Writings (Bloomsbury, 2006, 2014), A Companion to Nietzsche (Blackwell, 2006), and The Nietzsche Reader (Blackwell, 2006). He is currently researching a book on ethics and the art of life in Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze.

Sarah Ellenzweig is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Rice University. She is author of The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660–1760 (Stanford University Press, 2008). She has published essays in ELH, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of British Studies, and MLQ. Her recent work on the history of materialism and the philosophy of motion appears in edited volumes from Oxford University Press and University of Toronto Press. She is currently working on a book on the philosophy of motion and the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century.

Christian J. Emden is Co-Director of the Program in Law, Politics &

Social Thought and Professor in the Department of Classical and European Studies at Rice University, where he teaches modern intel- lectual history and political thought. He is the author of four books, most recently Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He also edited, with David Midgley, Beyond Habermas:

Democracy, Knowledge, and the Public Sphere (Berghahn Books, 2012) and Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (Berghahn Books, 2012).

Emden is currently working on three projects: one on normativity and

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philosophical naturalism, the second on political realism in the work of Max Weber and Hannah Arendt, and the third on political citizenship in a postnational world.

N. Katherine Hayles is the James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke University. She teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science, and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her book How We Became Posthuman (University of Chicago Press, 1999) won the René Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory in 1998/9, and her book Writing Machines (MIT Press, 2002) won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Her most recent book is entitled Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Jess Keiser is Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University. He has published essays on early modern materialism, satire, and madness.

His current book project, Nervous Fictions, examines the use of figurative language in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century descriptions of the brain; portions have appeared in Modern Philology and English Literary History.

Mogens Lærke is a permanent researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France with an affiliation at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. He is the author of Leibniz Lecteur de Spinoza. La Genèse d’une Opposition Complexe (Champion, 2008) and Les Lumières de Leibniz. Controverses avec Huet, Bayle, Regis et More (Classiques Garnier, 2015). He is the editor of The Use of Censorship in the Enlightenment (Brill, 2009) and co-editor of The Philosophy of the Young Leibniz (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2009), Spinoza/Leibniz:

Rencontres, Controverses, Réceptions (Presses Universitaires de Paris Sorbonne, 2015), and Philosophy and Its History (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is the author of more than fifty articles and book chapters on a variety of issues in early modern philosophy.

Ian Lowrie is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Rice University whose empirical research focuses on the emergence of data science. He has two ongoing projects. The first investigates emergent forms of academic- industrial collaboration, pedagogical techniques, and forms of inquiry specific to the conduct of data scientific education and research within the Russian science system. The second studies rapprochements between computational neuroscience and data science, with an eye to understanding ongoing transformations in widely circulating analytical approaches to brains and cognition.

Lenny Moss is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Exeter and is a former molecular cell biologist. As a philosophically motivated research scientist Moss was interested in questions of cellular self-assembly,

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membrane biophysics and biochemistry, and the relationship of cancer to development. As a scientifically motivated and trained philosopher, Moss has come to be interested in engaging and renewing the critical tradition from Kant and Hegel, through Nietzsche and Heidegger, to Habermas and Honneth through an “anthropological optic.” Moss has given numer- ous invited lectures throughout Europe and North America and has published in a wide range of philosophical and scientific journals. His 2003 book What Genes Can’t Do (MIT Press) was translated and published in Japanese. He is currently working on a monograph on detachment theory and a co-authored monograph in theoretical biology with fellow scientist/

philosophers Stuart Newman and Sahotra Sarkar.

Angela Willey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She works at the interstices of queer feminist theory, feminist science studies, and sexuality studies. Her work has appeared in Feminist Studies, Signs, Journal of Gender Studies, Archives of Sexual Behavior, and Sexualities, and in volumes on monogamy, the science of difference, and the global history of sexual science. She is the author of Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology (Duke University Press, 2016).

Catherine Wilson is Anniversary Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and Distinguished Professor at CUNY Graduate Center. She has written extensively on the reception of Epicurean materialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on metaethics and normative ethics, including topics related to biology and morality. She is the author of The Invisible World (Princeton University Press, 1995), Moral Animals:

Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory (Oxford University Press, 2004), Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2008), A Very Short Introduction to Epicureanism (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Metaethics from a First-Person Standpoint (Open Book, 2016).

Charles T. Wolfe is a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences and Sarton Centre for History of Science, Ghent University, and an associate member of the IHPST (CNRS-UMR 8590, Paris). He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism.

He is the author of Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (Springer, 2016). He has edited several volumes, including Monsters and Philosophy (Kings College Publications, 2005), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge (with O. Gal, Springer, 2010), Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life-Science (with S.

Normandin, Springer, 2013), Brain Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Philosophy of Biology before Biology (with C. Bognon-Kuss, Routledge,

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in progress), along with articles in journals including Early Science and Medicine, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Journal of the History of Biology, Perspectives on Science, Science in Context, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, and others. His current project is a monograph on the conceptual foundations of Enlightenment vitalism. He is also the Co-Editor of the Springer series in History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences.

Derek Woods is a doctoral candidate in English at Rice University. His research areas include Anglo-American literature, environmental literature, and science and technology studies. His dissertation project addresses shared figurative structures in mid-twentieth-century ecosys- tem ecology and speculative fiction. Woods has been a fellow in the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and is currently a fellow in the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice. His publications appear or are forth- coming in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, The Minnesota Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, American Literary History, and the collections Size and Scale in Literature and Culture and Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geological Time. Woods is also co-author of an endangered species report on the lichen Leptogium platynum for the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

John H. Zammito is John Antony Weir Professor of History at Rice University. His research focuses on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and of his student and rival, Johann Gottfried Herder, as well as on the history and philosophy of science and the philosophy of history. His key publi- cations include: The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 1992), Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (University of Chicago Press, 2004). His current research involves the life sciences in Germany in the eighteenth century and a monograph entitled The Gestation of German Biology is forthcoming from Chicago.

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This volume was put together with the generous support of the Humanities Research Center (HRC) at Rice University. We wish to thank its Director, Farès El-Dahdah, and Nicholas Shumway, Dean of the School of Humanities.

Our project received an initial grant from the Humanities Research Innovation Fund in 2012-13 and then took shape as a Rice Seminar in 2013-14. We are indebted to our visiting speakers and to the scholars in residence during our seminar year. The fantastic staff at the HRC, Carolyn Adams and especially the indomitable Lauren Kleinschmidt, helped our program run smoothly and efficiently. We also wish to thank the Department of History and the John Antony Weir Professorship of History, endowed by Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Dunlevie. The Department of English and the Program in Sexuality, Women, and Gender Studies at Rice provided additional support. Annie Lowe’s research assistance in preparing the manuscript was indispensable. We are grateful to the anonymous readers at Routledge for their helpful comments and to our editor, Tony Bruce, for marshaling the volume through to publication.

Acknowledgements

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Introduction: New Materialism

Looking Forward, Looking Back

Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito

Rice University

In their farthest-reaching ambitions, today’s “new materialisms” propose to mobilize and radicalize energies across the humanities and beyond for cultural and political interventions from the local to the global level.¹ The present volume is an effort to assess and engage with this revitalized interest in matter from a similarly interdisciplinary vantage. We contextualize our approach in the same frame in which new materialism has situated itself:

the crisis of the academic humanities in the midst of global crisis. Indeed, we might well begin with just this notion of crisis and its intrinsic dynamic of danger and opportunity. First, the humanities find themselves in crisis both within the academy and vis à vis the wider world. Why the humanities matter and why they should be supported have become questions of vital concern.

If the humanities are to resolve their internal crisis, they must establish what real difference they make both within and beyond the academy. One strat- egy of humanistic discourse has been to dwell on crisis, making it a topos of inquiry. Thus, the humanities seek their mission and warrant in providing a recourse/resource for crisis; interpretation becomes (political) intervention.

Long ago, Karl Marx ([1845] 1978) disparaged merely interpreting the world;

the point, he asserted, was to change it (145). The rejoinder of the humanities is that only by interpreting the world in a new and percipient manner can we find the orientation through which to change it. Interpretation grounds intervention. And it is on this basis that the new materialism puts itself forward.

It is on this basis that we shall here appraise it.

Arising out of internal contestation within the academic humanities, the new materialism poses challenges to the method of humanistic inquiry—

its resources and style (expression, interpretation, evaluation)—and to the meaning of humanistic inquiry—its topos and telos. New materialism attacks a long tradition of liberal humanism and Enlightenment which it takes to be irredeemably complicit in imperialism, global capitalism, and the oppression or destruction of vulnerable populations—human and nonhuman—and indeed of the inanimate world: the earth, the seas, and the skies. New materialism takes the privilege of the human—with its supposed marks of exception in rationality, subjectivity, and agency—to have been the ideological supplement that the humanities have contributed to the

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juggernaut of capitalism, technoscience, and political domination. Much is at stake here, for “humanism” is seen to have participated in generating a crisis of geological scale—the “Anthropocene.”²

But new materialism also had a more local context of emergence and dispute: its rejection of what had been a preponderant impulse even in oppo- sitional rhetorics in the humanities for the preceding generation—the so- called “linguistic turn.”³ This earlier theoretical project aimed to undercut the very same conventional discourse of humanism, but on the methodologi- cal and political basis of a still more discursive interpretation of language, agency, and human subjectivity. It proposed critique, to be sure, but by dis- seminating the interior of culture and consciousness. For new materialism, theory’s long-standing constructivist enterprise failed to acknowledge the lively productivity of matter itself, and in this way unwittingly continued to privilege the human agent and its self-proclaimed unique characteristics, even if undermining its complacency and efficacy. The impulse behind the new materialism is decidedly posthumanist, deliberately decentering the human into the encompassing dynamics of the world—a critique, as it were, from the outside in. If dissolving the first person into aporia was the goal of the linguistic turn, bringing a relentlessly third-person vantage to bear on human pretensions in the world seems key to posthumanist new materialism.

Now, the third-person view has long been the prerogative of science, and one of the most important dimensions of new materialism is its relation to (natural) science. “Science” as cultural construct and practice has long been a problematic issue for humanistic understanding.⁴ Not only has technoscience played a central role in global subjection and ecological disaster, but the discourse of “science” has also asserted hegemony within the academy, claiming for its method an exclusive warrant (truth), a direct access to the constituents and processes of the world (reality), and, consequently, an equally direct efficacy in manipulation and control of the world (power).

For a generation or more, the humanities have undertaken a searching investigation into these postures, under the rubric of “science studies.”⁵ The origin of many impulses behind posthumanist new materialism can be traced to science studies and especially feminist science studies.⁶ And yet, new materialism now endeavors to move beyond this largely adversarial relation to “science.” As one of our contributors (Willey) puts it, there is in this impulse a strong desire to be “science-friendly” (135). In part at least, this desire is a result of the effort to break free from the first-person confines of traditional humanist appraisal to the third-person vantage that science ostensibly provides.

But, as the new materialist Myra Hird (2004) helpfully articulates, there are three dimensions to the humanistic relation with (natural) science: critique, engagement, and extraction. Critique, as we have suggested, aims to deflate the pretense of science to epistemic sovereignty and ubiquitous impact. The new materialism seeks to move beyond this critique to engagement with the sciences, a common endeavor occasioned by the common

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ground of third-person methodology and even more by a common attention to the materiality in which the human is so thoroughly imbricated.

This engagement with the natural sciences—life sciences, above all—raises crucial questions regarding extraction, i.e. what, from the actual practices of the sciences, should the new materialism take up as established fact, and how is that to be incorporated into humanistic interpretation, notwithstand- ing the implications of prior critique? Of this whole constellation there will be much that needs to be considered.

Materiality is clearly the common ground, but what is the semantic range of this concept? What is materiality? Should we begin with the verbal form:

to matter? How do we tease out the crucial difference between causal effi- cacy and meaningful consequence? Can the humanities fulfill their mission or even exert any significant intervention if they accept without question scientific models of causal efficacy and, still worse, of indifference to consequence? Or should we begin with the substantive sense of matter? What exactly is matter? How adequately does “matter” characterize the “mate- rial” world? Beyond ontology (what there is) looms the question of agency (what has an impact on the processes that constitute the world). New materialism presses for the widest possible distribution of agency in its project of decentering the human. Beyond causal force is the question of worth—

what matters in the outcomes of these processes? Does it change the political landscape of the world to accentuate the material in and over against the human? How does materiality become materialism? Is that primarily a philosophical theory or an ideological agenda? Is the line from ontology to politics straightforward or even determinable at all?

New materialism wants more than anything to be a political intervention.

If it arose within the humanities, its energy, force, and mission have always been directed outward, to change the world. To do that, it has sought to mobilize the rest of the humanities and to forge alliances with impulses in the social as well as in the natural sciences. Since we share the view that the humanities must engage with other elements within academic culture and still more with the cultural and political forces gripping our planet, we wish in this volume to assess what the new materialism offers in this frame.

To make sense of any of this we must ask about the means new materialism adopts to hold its agenda together. What are the arguments? What is the evidence? How coherent is the program, whatever its good intentions?

We must submit new materialism to the interpretive critique which is the métier—the skill and the calling—of humanistic discourse. If we submit its claims to critique, it is for the sake of engagement (to retrieve Myra Hird’s categories). It is not enough to approve or disapprove. First, we will endeavor to understand, so that we can go on to explicate and evaluate.⁷ That is a lot to undertake. But just such an undertaking is what any substantive proposal demands and deserves.

Three major domains structure our investigation. First, we will ask, what is new about new materialism? The idea of the “new” invokes conceptual

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and also temporal novelty. Both call for historical appraisal. Next, we will ask: what is materialist about it? This question calls for a consideration of what there is (ontology) and about how it acts (agency; causal efficacy).

Thus the domains of philosophical and natural scientific inquiry constitute our second topical focus. Finally, the “-ism” that transfigures materiality as a topos into materialism as a telos bespeaks a political motivation. Following this political-theoretical impulse, our third focus will be on normativity and the political agenda at stake in the claims of new materialism.

Novelty: The Status of History

“Make it new” has been the pervasive feature of modernity in the humanities.

This imperative animated the expressive movements that called themselves avant-garde and shaped the trajectory of the modern arts, but it also animated a permanent revisionism in interpretive studies (history, criticism, theory), impelling a succession of “movements” and “turns” in the styles of inquiry. This general pattern has provoked a specific skepticism, enunci- ated by one of the outside reviewers the press solicited for this volume, that new materialism might well be just another fad in an ephemeral and largely inconsequential sequence of fashionable trends going back at least to the linguistic turn itself. Such suspicion is part of the hermeneutic of humanistic inquiry, but it should never preempt the examination of claims to novelty, for without these the humanities would be condemned to stasis. Thus we must be willing to assess new materialism’s claims to novelty.

There have been two core claims. The first is against the linguistic turn, and the second is against an “old” materialism. How are we to assess these claims? What vantage should we adopt in the historical assessment of change?

Are innovations annihilations of what went before, supersessions without remainder? Or are there dialectical concatenations? Is what has gone before simply a “nightmare from which we strive to awaken” or a resource to carry us forward in the face of problematic futures? Indeed, is past thought invariably surpassed thought? Is our presentism, the adamant urge to use every possibility for current concerns, incompatible with historicism, the recogni- tion of the claims and aspirations of other times in their own right? Is there a usable past? And what difference does it make to get that past right? Our view is that these are crucial concerns. Our suspicion is that there is always continuity across change. Thus the linguistic turn lingers as a legacy within much of the discourse of new materialism. Indeed, there may even be elements carried forward from the all-too-despised humanism of older vintage.

But our primary interest here will be with the question of “old” materialism. What exactly was that? Was it just one thing? Is it entirely superseded?

Ought it to be? These are pressing questions for our contributors.

For new materialism, the right appreciation of matter’s vital ontology begins with repudiating the passive mechanistic worldview of Descartes, Newton, and classical science, all of which, as Diana Coole and Samantha

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Frost (2010) argue, defined matter “as extended, uniform, and inert” (7).

Our historical investigations of materialism’s pasts demonstrate both that the sensitivity to matter’s lively properties was even more developed and widespread in earlier traditions than new materialism has recognized, and also that new materialism’s aversion to mechanistic theories of matter, attributed most frequently to Descartes, relies on an overly simplistic, often tendentious account of the history of early science and natural philosophy.

As Peter Harrison (1992) cautions, for example, to “castigate” Descartes for authoring the doctrine of “the ghost in the machine” is to fail to appreciate that in “successfully banish[ing] ghosts from all machines except the human,” Descartes opened the door to the kind of naturalistic explanation on which any critique of human exceptionalism must be based (227).

Was a belief in passive matter in fact the problem we say it was? And if it was not, then do we need a new materialism in quite the way we think we do? In his essay “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” Bruno Latour (2014) observes that “one of the main puzzles of Western history is not that there are people who still believe in animism, but the rather naive belief that many still have in a de-animated world of mere stuff” (8). Latour’s comment is curious, for in stressing the degree to which people’s purported belief in material inanimacy is a puzzle, he comes close to acknowledging that it may not be a fair assessment of what people think (and have tended to think) after all. Perhaps, in other words, our default position has not been to claim with such gross naïveté that the world is fundamentally de-animated.

A central claim of our volume is thus that we need to rethink the dichotomous and often ideologically charged opposition between passive and active matter so frequently mobilized in recent conversations about materialism.

From this dichotomous thinking, we argue, arise several key problems for the reception of materialism among ethically minded scholars of the twenty- first century.

While seeking to dismantle human exceptionalism and related hierarchical thinking, new materialism frequently takes inspiration from the post-secular movement in the humanities. Jane Bennett, for example, is ready to embrace

“quasi-pagan” superstition, animism, and a divinized nature “because the mood of enchantment may be valuable for ethical life” (Bennett 2001, 12, 3;

2010, 120).⁸ Bennett (2001) is well aware that embracing enchantment con- troverts the disenchantment narratives of modernity, but for her these have led us to “a place of dearth and alienation” (3). While enchantment opens us to the vitality of human and nonhuman bodies, disenchantment for Bennett imagines a natural world that is dead, inert, alienated, and instrumentalized.

Yet in conceiving matter’s vitality via the rubric of enchantment, new materialism seems oddly unaware that it breaks tradition with a long-standing and, we would argue, crucial aspect of materialism’s heritage—its naturalism and its staunch secularism.⁹ Catherine Wilson’s chapter points out that beginning with Epicurus, materialism’s progressive stance was inextricable from its rejection of religion and any investment in supernatural, immaterial

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entities. As Lucretius’ first-century BCE Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura makes clear, the vitality of matter was precisely what emerged once we dis- carded forms of enchantment. In a strangely anachronistic gesture, Bennett (2001) calls Epicurean materialism a “neopagan” or “enchanted” materialism because it repudiates “the dull matter of a disenchanted world,” yet far from repudiating disenchantment, Epicurean materialism was itself one of the first agents of same (73, 18).

The problem comes down to whether one agrees that disenchantment, or the related and recently maligned term, “secularity,” is the source of today’s ills. In a provocative reading of these tensions, Bruce Robbins (2011) argues that our perceived need for enchantment stems from the mistaken view both that disenchantment happened in the first place and that it was or would be a bad thing (77).¹⁰ For Robbins (2001), if modernity appears bleak, alienated, and meaning-deprived, the culprit is not disenchantment and rationality but rather their failure: “In short, disenchantment is the wrong diagnosis. And reenchantment is the wrong remedy,” he concludes (92). Most importantly, as Robbins (2013) shows in his critique of the work of Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, the post-secular position becomes potentially dangerous “when a break with secularism or rationality is … taken as the defining criterion of political resistance” (60). Keith Ansell-Pearson’s chapter suggests similar inconsistencies around new materialism’s embrace of Gilles Deleuze as a figurehead for its posthumanism. In neglecting Deleuze’s earlier work of the 50s and 60s, particularly his work on Lucretius and Spinoza, Ansell- Pearson argues, we miss Deleuze’s contribution to philosophical naturalism and his ethical commitment to emancipating the human from the realm of myth and superstition. These are incongruities that any “new” materialism needs to address.

As Charles Wolfe’s chapter argues, our commonplace sense, recently made so much of in new materialism, that the history of materialism was

“mechanistic,” finds vivid articulation in Engels’ chapter on materialism in his Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. As Engels sees it, eighteenth-century materialism “was predominantly mechanical”

because physics reigned supreme in the natural sciences, a situation that led to a misguided “application of the standards of mechanics to processes of a chemical and organic nature” (Engels 1976, 22).¹¹ Wolfe suggests that Engels, clearly critical of the limitations of this mechanical vision, might well be considered the first “new materialist,” yet he also shows what Engels (and his new materialist successors) leave out, namely a rich and complex early-modern history of vital, non-mechanistic materialism advanced by figures like John Toland, Anthony Collins, Diderot, and La Mettrie.

While Wolfe grants that not all early modern materialism was vitalistic or embodied, he also asks us to consider the ways that the term “mechanistic materialism” is incongruous: most early modern mechanists were in fact substance dualists and not accurately described as materialists at all. In a comparable effort to nuance today’s rather blunt picture of the history of

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materialism, Ellenzweig’s and Keiser’s chapters emphasize the ways that mechanism and materialism, activity and passivity, are more closely allied and interwoven than we tend to think. Ellenzweig seeks to complicate the shibboleth known as the “Cartesian–Newtonian legacy” through a closer examination of Descartes’ and Newton’s matter theory and its reception in the period, focusing particularly on the early history of the concept of inertia. In a similarly revisionist approach to Descartes, Keiser’s history of the concept of neuroplasticity from Descartes through to Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou shows how neurophysiology cannot be captured by simple passive/active dichotomies.

The posthumanist program with which much of new materialism is in sympathy tends to perpetuate critical theory’s distrust of the Enlightenment and its twin, secular humanism, seeing both as a hegemonic legacy that underwrites the supremacy of the Western, human subject.¹² Yet this position articulates only part of a more complex picture. As Foucault (1996) usefully points out, Enlightenment “reason” in its first pass was a radi- cally destabilizing engine, a form of anti-authoritarian “reflective indocil- ity.” Enlightenment reason thus allowed for the critical interrogation of existing power structures, most theologically based, in a way that had not hitherto been imaginable (386). We do well here to remember Foucault’s call in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” (1984) to refuse “the black- mail of the Enlightenment”: one need not endorse particular doctrinal elements from the Enlightenment, which may not stand the test of time, in order to appreciate and recognize the power of “a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.” In this way, we avoid the impossible trap of having “to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Enlightenment” (42–43).¹³

Materiality: Science and Ontology

As its fundamental claim to novelty, new materialism affirms “vital” matter over and against an alleged “old” scientific and philosophical view of matter as inert. In this gesture, new materialism aligns itself with a new science of self-organization, systematicity, and dynamic processes, one that seeks to overturn the mechanism and linearity of classical science and its philosophical counterparts. Accentuating vital matter as the basis of the world and its processes, new materialism displaces the privilege of the human by finding agency everywhere. Not only does new materialism’s account of agency blur the animal-human boundary, it also challenges the boundary between the animate and the inanimate, discovering a plural world of “actants” that shape all natural process, including those previously regarded as strictly human interventions.¹⁴ The new materialism extracts from the new science an understanding of what there is, how it works, and even, in a measure, what difference that makes. That is, new materialism believes it can draw upon the new science for a conceptualization of the flux of the world that

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would open crucial spheres of freedom—a freedom shared far beyond the exclusively human. If materialism of a vitalist variety is thus recently “on the move,” emerging, among critically engaged theorists in the humanities, out of the obscurity of a repressed past, it is clearly because contemporary political commitments to posthumanism and critical environmentalism within a biopolitical frame have highlighted its relevance in newly pressing ways (Coole and Frost 2010, 2).

New materialism seeks a particular kind of theoretical ballast from recent work in the physical and biological sciences, work which reveals a material world composed of forces, energies, dynamic processes, and open, complex systems (13–15). But can we be so confident that this is indeed what—or all—the new science portends? Is there only new science? Is new science only one thing? Is the material world as we now conceive it through the sciences one continuous series, like a set of Russian dolls opened up by one uncon- tested method? How can we warrant specific extractions from an actually quite plural and even equivocal science and confidently call that a material world of suitably determinate ontology and process? In particular, is the vitality discerned in natural processes uniform across all the scales of the material world? Is flux agential in any sense that warrants confidence in its liberatory implications? There are crucial issues of scale variance and normativity that must be addressed. Our contributors suggest that a more nuanced and extensive engagement with the sciences and science studies helps us to qualify matter’s liveliness, to see that matter is not all active in the same ways.

We need to understand better in what contexts it may be more useful to explore matter’s relative inanimacy, its states of equilibrium, stasis, and predictability, and in what contexts it makes sense to delineate its capacities for self-organization, creativity, indeterminacy, and change across diverse scales of life and nonlife. Indeed, as Derek Woods’ chapter shows, a deeper investigation of scale domains suggests that the concept of “matter” has little real meaning from the purview of the natural sciences. As Woods cautions, “matter could get in the way of an ontology suitable to what ‘matter’ can do” (24).

What is more, new materialism’s post-secular, anti-Enlightenment ethos, its distrust of “secular scientific rationality,” exists in latent tension with its desire to draw on new developments in the physical and biological sciences.¹⁵ For Rosi Braidotti (2013), for example, Western humanism’s “investment in rationality and secularity as the pre-condition for development through science and technology” is to be rejected but “the current scientific revo- lution, led by contemporary bio-genetic, environmental, neural and other sciences” is celebrated for its ability to “create powerful alternatives to established practices and definitions of subjectivity” (48, 54). New materialism’s tendency to gloss over such contradictions, to refrain from grappling more explicitly and self-consciously with its vexed relationship to science and its history demands further consideration. To the extent that modern scientific practises, on Jane Bennett’s account, are seen to be a major agent of disenchantment, one question that arises is whether new materialism can

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productively endorse enchantment and a new openness to science at the same time?¹⁶ New materialists would likely argue that the disenchanting science they reject is an old science of determinism, rigid quantification, and rationalization, not the latest science of complex systems and emergent properties, yet there is nonetheless a way in which, as Angela Willey comments in her chapter, “science remains a startlingly undertheorized object”

in new materialism (135).

One major symptom of this lack of rigor is new materialism’s preference for science that endorses its vision of active, vital matter and its celebra- tion of flux. But scientific inquiry reveals matter with a range of capacities, not all of them vital and active, some of them latent, arrested, limited, even inert.¹⁷ As Katherine Hayles’ chapter argues, much of new materialist writing makes it difficult to differentiate between kinds of agencies, some more or less active, more or less linear, more or less predictable. Along with accounts of flux, indeterminacy, and variation, we need to allow for moments of balance, cohesion, predictability, and endurance, and even for material forces “whose actions are deterministic” (194), a possibility that new materialism appears loathe to admit. A fuller engagement with science and scientific practices would reinforce this insight, particularly, as Lenny Moss’ chapter argues, as we attempt to move our analysis of material processes across differing scale domains and differing levels of life and non-life.

More attention to scale domains indeed reminds us that constraint is as much a material reality as possibility.

Politics: Normativity and Political Theory

The new materialism is committed to the notion that it can derive a politics from an ontology. But can it? Is ontology a necessary and sufficient platform for political action? Does it have unequivocal implications? Can one even get from “is” to “ought”? Does (new) materialism generate, and does it warrant a specific politics? Does it warrant the politics to which the new materialists are already unequivocally committed? New materialism invests in an ontology of vital matter in order to ensure new forms of political action and engagement, yet it has not been able to demonstrate why or how its ontology yields a progressive political stance. As one instance of this hazard, both Robbins and Catherine Malabou, among other critics, have demonstrated that “flux” (so championed among new materialists as an inherently revolutionary force across the range of levels of material substance) is probably not what new materialism wants to promote in, say, the economic realm: matter’s unpredictability, indeterminism, and plas- ticity, they point out, are in fact the ideal expression of global capitalism and its “force for chaos” (Robbins 2011, 92; Malabou 2008, 40–46).¹⁸ In his chapter, Mogens Lærke’s example of Thomas Hobbes illustrates that materialism as ontology in fact fails to provide grounding for any politics (progressive or otherwise). In a similar vein, Woods’ chapter shows that

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evidence of scale variance—of jumps, discontinuities, rifts, constraints, and qualitative differences across levels and registers—disproves attempts like Karen Barad’s to move seamlessly from a micro quantum register to macro social theory. As Christian Emden’s chapter similarly contends, whether, for example, we should value democracy “cannot be answered by an appeal to the molecular structure of our cells,” even though such normative questions do “depend on what we are as natural beings” (289). The “social,” as Ian Lowrie demonstrates, is a scale or dimension of order of its own, with binding forces and internal rules. Without an account of normativity, of why and how certain claims become possible in the first place and of what gives them binding force, new materialism risks making irresponsible and incoherent ethical and political judgments.¹⁹

The essential issue with which the humanities and the sciences must grap- ple is how to understand normativity and how to apply it in their respective domains. Where does normativity come from? How does it “matter”? Is it the same across all scales of material process? What is the relation between degrees of difference across scales and degrees of agency—not only as causal force but also as moral-political responsibility? These questions bear as much on epistemic claims as on ethico-political ones. As Woods, Moss, and Emden all suggest, there are different scales of (“intra-acting”) normativity, some more binding than others. Moreover, as several critics have noted, the extension of agency to nonhumans can have a surreptitious way of avoiding the problem of how we think responsibly through human political action and ethical engagement, a problem, as our contributors argue, that requires addressing the sources of normativity, an area conventionally neglected in new materialist arguments.²⁰

New materialism has distrusted normativity as a concept that invariably implies value judgment (humanist, anthropocentrist, etc.) but in avoiding the problem of normativity, new materialism actually risks endorsing its own stated enemies. Emden and Moss demonstrate that this problem is una- voidable to the extent that any critique always already entails normative demands. For Moss, as for Emden, if new materialism aspires to be con- sistent with its own stated aims and commitments, it cannot legitimately continue to avoid specifying the sources of normativity (here the central normative focal point would again be the concept of agency) for its science or for its politics. Indeed, as both insist, it is only within the context of normative space that one can speak meaningfully about agency at all.

A paradoxical corollary of neglecting normativity is that emphasizing the agentic capacities of nonhumans in fact re-projects human values onto nature rather than moves us beyond our values.²¹ New materialism’s eager- ness to extend agency to objects, in other words, does little to unsettle a uniquely human obsession with agency and its correlates—selfhood, rationality, choice, intention, mastery—in the first place. In this sense, new materialism’s politics betrays the same anxiety about passivity, dependency, and subjection as does its ontology. Perhaps it is time to question this anxiety,

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to return some attention to passivity and constraint, inertness and stasis, and to consider how they exist in complex and varied relation to activity, vitality, and agency. Can we really dissolve all distinctiveness of the human and still articulate political demands and assign political responsibilities? In what measure is a posthumanist new materialism caught in performative contradiction, given the moral fervor of its demand on human agents to change the world in a progressive direction? These are the ultimate stakes in our assessment of new materialism.

Notes

1 See, for example, Coole and Frost 2010, esp. 1–47; Bennett 2010; Braidotti 2002 and 2013; De Landa 2006; Barad 2007; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012;

Connolly 2013a; 2013b; Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Hird 2004; Grosz 2004 and 2011.

2 On technoscience, see Latour 1990 and 1993; on the Anthropocene, see Chakrabarty 2009; Latour 2014.

3 On the “linguistic turn,” see Saussure (1916) 1983; Jakobson 1960; Derrida 1978; Foucault 1972; Barthes 1967; Lacan (1953–1955) 1988; Lyotard (1979) 1984; Kristeva (1969) 1980; Irigaray (1977) 1985; Culler 1982; Cahoone 2003;

Adams and Allan 1995.

4 See the exemplary volume, Science as Culture and Practice (Pickering 1992).

5 See Biagioli 1999; Galison and Strump 1996; Latour 1987; Shapin 1988.

6 See Harding 1986 and 1991; Tuana 1989; Bleier 1986; Keller 2001; Keller and Longino 1992; Haraway 1989 and 1991; Longino 1990 and 1992; Nelson and Nelson 1996; Hayles 1993; Gergen 1988.

7 “To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a definitive description is the hardest thing of all” (Hegel 1977, 3).

8 See Andrew Cole’s (2016) comment in his review of the new vibrant materialisms that one of its features is to allow “that sometimes there are ghosts in the machine” (23).

9 Christoph Cox and Suhail Malik 2016 urge new materialism to discard “the theological hangover … in all its varieties” (27).

10 See also Robbins 2013.

11 On the terminological complexity of mechanism, see Garber and Roux 2013, xi–xviii; Gabbey 2002, 337–38; Bertoloni-Meli 2006a, 2006b and 2011.

12 See Braidotti 2013, 31–37.

13 Foucault’s notion of “permanent critique” provides a solution of sorts to Horkheimer’s complaint that “Reason” dissolves all metaphysical concepts up to itself (see Horkeimer 1996, 366).

14 Latour 1992b; Johnson (AKA Bruno Latour) 1988; Latour 1992a, 1994a, and 1994b; Latour and Callon 1981; Callon and Law 1989 and 1995; Callon 1991.

15 See Braidotti 2013, 37; Coole and Frost 2010, 95; Connolly 2013b, 402.

16 See Bennett 2001, 60–62.

17 See, for example, Roosth 2014.

18 For the view that Malabou’s critique does not go far enough, see Victoria Pitts- Taylor 2010, 647–48. For the view that new materialism’s vital materialism unwittingly approximates a “metaphysics of capitalism,” see Cole 2015, 323.

19 Note Mel Y. Chen’s (2016) concern that “fictions of scale” in new materialisms end up obscuring “lived differences such as race, class, sex and ability” (22). It may be the case that attention to scale variance does a better job on this front.

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20 On the problem of human ethical engagement, see Johnson 2008; Johnston 2014, 295–323; Connolly 2013b, 400–402. On new materialism’s tendency to

“jump the gap” from ontology to politics, see also Johnston 2014, 299.

21 See Cole 2015; see also Bryan-Wilson 2016, 17–18; Cox and Malik 2006, 26;

Wood 2016, 107.

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Part I

Materialist Prehistories

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1 Who’s Afraid of Inertia? The Cartesian–Newtonian Legacy Reconsidered

Sarah Ellenzweig

Rice University

… we are free from the difficulty in which the Schoolmen find themselves when they wish to explain why a stone continues to move for some time after leaving the hand of the person who threw it. For we should ask, instead, why does the stone not continue to move forever?

René Descartes, The World (w. 1632) New materialism’s bid for novelty hinges on the claim that we understand ontology better now than philosophers did in the past. As the story goes, what has recently been referred to as the “Cartesian–Newtonian” legacy misconstrues matter as mere extended stuff—passive, inactive, inert. To be a

“new” materialist, by contrast, is to appreciate that matter is lively, dynamic, and agential, and to denounce seventeenth-century mechanistic thinking about matter’s inertness (Coole and Frost 2010, 8).¹ New materialist writing thus celebrates its recovery of active matter as an explicitly polemical correc- tion on history. Since so much of new materialism relies on a supersessionist reading of the history of philosophy, it’s important to get that history right.² To this end, this chapter will examine Descartes’ and Newton’s matter theory with an eye toward assessing the novelty of new materialism’s claims and how best to understand present theory in relation to our past.

As the coinage “Cartesian–Newtonian” suggests, when new materialists discuss seventeenth-century ideas about matter, they tend to lump Descartes and Newton together, assuming that their purported thinking about matter’s inertness is interchangeable. This is the first place where new materialism gets its history and its philosophy wrong and thus does today’s theory a disservice. As I will argue, we need to be wary of recent references to a

“Cartesian–Newtonian” legacy, as such references often oversimplify and elide, muddying the history of materialism just when we need illumination most. This chapter will distinguish Descartes’ and Newton’s views on matter in order to bring them back together in a different place, all with the aim of clarifying materialism’s complex history, its ontological stakes, and its continued relevance to today’s theoretical concerns and investments.

New materialists won’t be surprised by my assertion that Descartes’ and Newton’s ideas about matter come together around their articulations of

The New Politics of Materialism

The New Politics of Materialism

The New Politics of Materialism

History, Philosophy, Science

Edited by Sarah Ellenzweig

and John H. Zammito

Contents

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: New Materialism

Looking Forward, Looking Back

Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito

Part I

Materialist Prehistories

1 Who’s Afraid of Inertia? The Cartesian–Newtonian Legacy Reconsidered

Sarah Ellenzweig