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Pushing dualism to an extreme: On the philosophical impetus of a new materialism

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Abstract

This article discusses the way in which a group of contemporary cultural theorists in whose work we see a “new materialism” (a term coined by Braidotti and DeLanda) at work constitutes a philosophy of difference by traversing the dualisms that form the backbone of modernist thought. Continuing the ideas of Lyotard and Deleuze they have set themselves to a rewriting of all possible forms of emancipation that are to be found. This rewriting exercise involves a movement in thought that, in the words of Bergson, can be termed “pushing dualism to an extreme.” By this movement, Deleuze has stated, “difference is pushed to the limit,” that is, using Colebrook’s words, “difference is shown differing.” The article addresses the ways in which modernity’s dualisms (structured by a negative relation between terms) are traversed, and how a new conceptualization, and ontology, of difference (structured by an affirmative relation) comes to be constituted along the way. New materialism leaves behind all prioritizations (implicitly) involved in modern dualist thinking since a difference structured by affirmation does not work with predetermined relations (e.g., between mind and body) nor does it involve a (counter-)hierarchy between terms. The article makes explicit the methodology of the current-day rise of non-dualist thought, both in terms of its non-classificatory mode of (Deleuzian) thinking and in terms of the theory of the time of thought thus effectuated (Lyotard’s notion of ‘rewriting modernity’ is not a post-modernism). Throughout the article we will engage with an example in order to demonstrate the ontology that is being practiced following this methodology: How does a new (feminist) materialism traverse the sexual dualisms that structure modernist (feminist) thinking? This example also shows how a feminist post-modernism (found in the canonical work of Butler) has remained dualist, and what makes new materialism “new.” Freed from a dualist methodology, the modernist emancipatory project comes to full fruition in new materialism.

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Notes

  1. Lyotard (1991, p. 24).

  2. Braidotti (1994, p. 171).

  3. Bergson (2004, p. 236).

  4. Deleuze (2004, p. 32).

  5. Massumi (2002, p. 66).

  6. Holland (1999, p. 38).

  7. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 20).

  8. Deleuze (1994, p. 45).

  9. Van der Tuin and Dolphijn (2010).

  10. Bergson (2004, p. 236).

  11. Foucault (1980).

  12. Butler (1993, pp. 4–5).

  13. Colebrook (2004).

  14. Braidotti (2002).

  15. Kirby (2006).

  16. Scott (1996, pp. 3–4; emphasis in original).

  17. Thornham (2000, p. 188; emphasis in original).

  18. Grosz (2005, p. 156).

  19. Grosz (2005, p. 164).

  20. De Beauvoir (2010, p. 765).

  21. Serres and Latour (1995, p. 81).

  22. Grosz (2005, p. 165).

  23. Grosz (2000).

  24. The feminist point being that women are not “to deny […] the resources of prevailing knowledges as a mode of critique of those knowledges” (Grosz 2005, p. 165). When modernity can be (re)thought as thinking emancipation, women better affirm it.

  25. Cf. Serres and Latour (1995, p. 86).

  26. Bergson (2004, p. 297).

  27. Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 11).

  28. Deleuze (2004, p. 33).

  29. Bergson (2004, p. 235).

  30. Bergson (2004, p. 236). Cf. Balibar (1998, p. 106).

  31. Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 11).

  32. Barad (2003, p. 804).

  33. Barad (2003, p. 807). Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 77) use the concept of ‘(indirect) discourse’ similarly to how Barad does. Following Foucault, this long quote brilliantly explains how this does away with the linguistic representations that have been so important in academia up until today:

    Let us follow Foucault in his exemplary analysis, which, though it seems not to be, is eminently concerned with linguistics. Take a thing like the prison: the prison is a form, the ‘prison-form’; it is a form of content on a stratum and is related to other forms of content (schools, barracks, hospital, factory). This thing or form does not refer back to the word “prison,” but to entirely different words and concepts, such as ‘delinquent’ and ‘delinquency,’ which express a new way of classifying, stating, translating and even committing criminal acts. ‘Delinquency’ is the form of expression in reciprocal presupposition with the form of content ‘prison.’ Delinquency is in no way a signifier, even a juridical signifier, the signified would be that of the prison. That would flatten the entire analysis. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 66).

  34. Bergson (2004, p. 260).

  35. Barad (2003, p. 829; emphasis in original).

  36. Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 11).

  37. Deleuze (2000, p. 280).

  38. Deleuze (2000, p. 280).

  39. Grosz reminds us of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of precisely the onto-epistemological aspect of the work of Bergson. He claims that it is a transcendentalism. We, however, do not define the onto-epistemological as “collapsing our knowledge of a thing with its being” and accept another onto-epistemology (Grosz 2005, p. 123).

  40. Bergson (2004, p. 8; emphasis in original). Cf. Leibniz (1962).

  41. Bergson (2004, p. 243).

  42. Bergson (2004, p. 243).

  43. Bergson (2004, p. 280).

  44. Bergson (2004, p. 236).

  45. In an article that questions the monism of Bergson and claims that his work is Eurocentric and phallocentric, Rebecca Hill ends with the following conclusion, thus undoing the argument presented in the article, yet affirming consciousness as a concept:

    In my view these passages demonstrate the valorization of a hypermasculine theory of life and corresponding devaluation of matter as feminine. This is not a binary hierarchy because Bergson’s concepts of life and matter are never actualised as pure activity and pure space. […] matter’s inclination towards pure repetition is never fully achieved. […] At the same time, life is not manifested as pure creative energy. […] Moreover, Bergson admits that if materiality was pure repetition, consciousness could never have installed itself within matter’s palpitations. (Hill 2008, pp. 132–133).

  46. Deleuze (1994, p. 45).

  47. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, pp. 20–21).

  48. Braidotti (1994, p. 147). When different-from translates into worth-less-than, emancipation either means the inclusion of women, laborers, black people, and other Others in the hierarchically privileged domain (a strategy of equality) or the revaluation of the underprivileged domain (a strategy of difference). This binary opposition has been repositioned in the section on new feminist materialism.

  49. Deleuze (1994, p. 30).

  50. Deleuze (1994, p. 33).

  51. Deleuze (1994, p. 52).

  52. Deleuze (1994, p. 56); emphasis in original.

  53. Colebrook (2004, p. 287).

  54. Cf. Serres and Latour (1995, p. 86).

  55. Colebrook (2004, p. 288).

  56. In other words: Modern and post-modern cultural theories are both structured along the lines of an equivocal logic.

  57. Colebrook (2004, p. 290); emphasis in original.

  58. Colebrook (2004, p. 297); emphasis in original.

  59. Colebrook (2004, p. 304).

  60. Reprinted in Deleuze (1995, pp. 135–155).

  61. Reprinted in Deleuze (2006, pp. 201–203).

  62. Derrida (1988).

  63. Heidegger (1971).

  64. Deleuze (1995, p. 147).

  65. Deleuze (1994, p. 56). Cf. Leibniz (1962, p. 263 §57) and Deleuze (2004, p. 39).

  66. Deleuze (1994, p. 58); emphasis in original).

  67. Deleuze (1994, p. 56).

  68. Deleuze (1994, p. 57); emphasis in original.

  69. Deleuze (1994, p. 58).

  70. Deleuze (1994, p. 67).

  71. Deleuze (2004, p. 33); emphasis in original.

  72. Deleuze (1994, p. 39).

  73. Deleuze (1994, p. 39); emphasis in original.

  74. Deleuze (2004, pp. 40, 42).

  75. Deleuze (2004, pp. 42–43).

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  1. Utrecht University, Muntstraat 2a, 3512 EV, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Rick Dolphijn & Iris van der Tuin

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Dolphijn, R., van der Tuin, I. Pushing dualism to an extreme: On the philosophical impetus of a new materialism. Cont Philos Rev 44, 383–400 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-011-9197-2

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