This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
See, for example, Connolly (2002), Bennett (2005, 2010), Barad (2007), and Alaimo and Hekman (2008, pp. 1–19). Note that we are not engaging with the works of Bruno Latour and many other Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars. Indeed, we distinguish new materialisms from the broader field of STS studies on some of the very issues we take up in this article. Consider, for example, that the slippage from politics to ethics and (thus) the threat of occluding the political moment are refused in Latour’s notion of a ‘Parliament of Things’, where he identifies ‘representatives’ learning to speak on behalf of ‘quasi-object[s] they have all created’ as precisely the pressing political project: ‘Half of our politics is constructed in science and technology; The other half of Nature is constructed in societies; Let us patch the two back together and the political task can begin again’ (Latour, 1993, p. 144). At the same time, a more vexed issue is whether STS scholarship also runs the risk we elaborate in this article apropos new materialists’ tendency to occlude the systematic reproduction of inequalities.
On this account, a critique like that of Krause’s (2011, p. 310) might be beside the point. However compelling one finds the claim that ‘taking responsibility’ entails some such reflexivity, that claim remains wedded to a (Kantian) metaphysics of mind in which a being that sees its actions and itself as objects of/for its contemplation – in other words, a subject – circumscribes what counts as meaningful agency and what remains ‘merely’ cause. In pursuing an inquiry into the imaginative resources for political thinking made available by the new materialisms’ ontological claims, we set to the side worries like Krause’s about their conceptual insufficiency vis-à-vis political practice (for example, that agency without reflexivity cannot account for the practice of political judgment).
Hekman reaches a similar conclusion: ‘Agency’, she observes, ‘is everywhere’ (2010, p. 123).
See also: Hekman (2010, Chapter 5); Alaimo in Alaimo and Hekman (2008, Chapter 8).
Of course, we realize that a refusal of all instrumental intra-action is an absurdity (we must, after all, eat something), and not what the new materialisms are arguing for when inviting us to think of ourselves as accountable to the world. For example, Haraway expressly discusses ‘instrumental intra-actions’ in arguing for ‘killing well’, by which she means ‘honoring the entangled labor of humans and animals together … in animal husbandry right up to the table’, (2008, 71 & 81).
Abrahamsson’s (2011) response to Bennett’s Vibrant Matter similarly takes issue with the presumption that subjectivizing the world would give rise to better ways of being by noting the pernicious influence of vitalist thought on Nazi geopolitics.
In subsequent publication, Bennett suggests that human responsibility ‘is perhaps best understood on the model of riding a bicycle on a gravel road. One can throw one’s weight this way or that, inflect the bike in one direction or toward one trajectory of motion. But the rider is but one actant operative in the moving whole’ (2010, p. 38). If we consider the scale of assemblages and the ethical imperative to turn inward, it seems we are more accurately figured as a flea or tick on the biking human.
1 Washick and Wingrove rightly acknowledge diversity within the category ‘new materialism’, though I do not quite see the difference between the two versions they identify: a ‘posthumanist materialism’ (whose primary aim is to ‘dethrone a sovereign knower’) and a ‘feminist materialism’ (which aims ‘to combat the perceived excesses of the linguistic turn’). It seems to me that in both cases the target is human hubris, with the goal being greater modesty with regard to humans as knowers and as makers. For both, the social constructivism (linguistic turn) of the 1980s and 1990s had the unintended consequence of exaggerating the plasticity of the materials that humans turned into discourse or used to perform identities. I thank Jennifer Culbert, Katrin Pahl, Bill Connolly and Bonnies Honig for their help in preparing this response.
2 Washick and Wingrove are silent on the question of what is the best way to characterize the relationship between ‘physical’ and ‘social’ systems. It would be helpful to know where they stood on this issue: do they, for example, view the relationship as one of mutual constitution? Or perhaps analogy? Or do they see the two systems as different in kind and separated by an insuperable gap?
3 Washick and Wingrove state their opposition to the pro-flow bias in the context of a discussion of Karen Barad’s (new-materialist) engagement with Leela Fernandes’ (non-determinist neo-Marxist) ethnography of a Calcutta jute mill. Whereas Fernandes ‘negotiates beautifully the tricky line between the malleability of political … identities and the durability of power relations’, Barad’s onto-vision is said to lead her to overstate the plasticity of both personal identities and impersonal power structures. In short, the ‘posthumanist ontological imaginary apparently cannot help but view any purported systematicity as a potential challenge to the very nature (the very truth) of being. Where determinism remains the behemoth to be conquered, a commitment to understand – to see – repetition, routinization, and durability will always elicit suspicion’ (Washick and Wingrove, 2014: ORIG-15).
4 ‘From the viewpoint of micropolitics, a society is defined by its lines of flight, which are molecular. There is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatuses, and the overcoding machine: things that are attributed to a “change in values”, the youth, women, the mad, etc.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 216).
5 To name just three influential ones: Deleuze’s ‘vibratory cosmos’, Bergson’s ‘creative evolution’ and Whitehead’s ‘process’.
6 I take this phrase from Thompson (2010): ‘We living organisms are historical and developmental beings. We descend by reproduction, not only from our human ancestors, but from countless other living beings, forebears who preceded the human species, all the way back to the earliest bacterial organisms … Although our parents and ancestral organisms supply our bodies with developmental resources and help to guide our bodies on the path they tread in life, that pathway does not lie pre-determined within us – in our genes or anywhere else. Rather the path is our footsteps laid down in walking … there is no clear separation between path and footsteps, the way and its walking’.
7 I grappled with the related problem of a persistent gap between being logically convinced and actually enacting one’s convictions in The Enchantment of Modern Life, whose central argument was that ethical-political action requires both principled beliefs and a set of moods, sensibilities and bodily energies capable of carrying them out.
8 ‘Assemblage’ here refers to that interrelated set of bodies, ideas, objects that appears to be the generator of a troubling effect, say the pollution of a watershed or the ‘ungrievable lives’ of a certain populations, as per Butler (2004).
9 New materialisms, broadly defined, also have attended to persistent hierarchies and tried to assess how these are periodically subjected to surprises (such as the rise of a new alliance between free-market advocates and evangelical Christianity, or the acceleration of fascism after the 1929 stock market crash). These are not points of emphasis in my work, but they are for others, and there is nothing in the ontology that countervenes them. Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus is exemplary in its combining of onto-narration with more specific issues of empire, colonialism, fascism. More lately, such concrete public concerns have been discussed from a new-materialist perspective in posts by William Connolly, John Buell, Jairus Grove, Jake Greear, John Protevi, Kathy Ferguson, Tim Morton and others at contemporarycondition.blogspot.com.
10 My position is not that single, nonhuman actants are agents, but that agency itself is located in the complex interinvolvement of humans and multiple nonhuman actants, which together form an effective assemblage.
11 Here I agree with John Dewey that ‘philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of (sic) philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men’.
12 This is a project I begin to pursue in Material Ecocriticism (Iovino and Oppermann, 2014).
References
Abrahamsson, C. (2011) Book review forum: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Dialogues in Human Geography 1 (3): 399–402.
Alaimo, S. and Hekman, S. (eds.) (2008) Material Feminisms. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IL: Indianapolis University Press.
Barad, K. (1998) Getting real: Technoscientific practices and the materialization of reality. Differences 10 (2): 87.
Barad, K. (2003) Posthuman performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs 28 (3): 801–831.
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Barad, K. (2011a) Erasers and erasures: Pinch’s unfortunate ‘uncertainty principle’. Social Studies of Science 41 (3): 443–454.
Barad, K. (2011b) Nature’s queer performativity. Qui Parle 19 (2): 121–158.
Bennett, J. (2001) The Enchantment of Modern Life: Crossings, Energetics, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bennett, J. (2005) The agency of assemblages and the North American blackout. Public Culture 17 (3): 445–465.
Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Braun, B. and Whatmore, S. (eds.) (2010) Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy and Public Life. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.
Connolly, W.E. (2002) Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Coole, D. (2005) Rethinking agency: A phenomenological approach to embodiment and agentic capacities. Political Studies 53 (1): 124–142.
Coole, D. and Frost, S. (eds.) (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Fernandes, L. (1997) Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class, and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Haraway, D.J. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouseTM. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, D.J. (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, D. (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Harding, S. (2006) Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Hekman, S. (2010) The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.
Hird, M.J. (2004) Feminist matters: New materialist considerations of sexual difference. Feminist Theory 5 (2): 223–232.
Hird, M.J. (2009) Feminist engagements with matter. Feminist Studies 35 (2): 329–346.
Iovino, S. and Oppermann, S. (eds.) (2014) Of material sympathies, Paracelsus, and Whitman. In Material Ecocriticism. Indiana University Press.
Khan, G. (2009) Agency, nature and emergent properties: An interview with Jane Bennett. Contemporary Political Theory 8 (1): 90–105.
Kirby, V. (2008) Natural convers(at)ions: Or, what if culture really was nature all along? In: S. Alaimo and S. Hekman (eds.) Material Feminisms. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IL: Indianapolis University Press.
Krause, S.R. (2011) Bodies in action: Corporeal agency and democratic politics. Political Theory 39 (3): 299–324.
Krause, S. (2011) Bodies in action: Corporeal agency and democratic politics. Political Theory 39 (3): 299–324.
Latour, B. (1993 [1991]) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Marres, N. (2012) Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marx, K. (1996) The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. In: T. Carver (ed. and trans.) Marx: Later Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, E. (2010) Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Van der Tuin, I. (2011) New feminist materialisms. Women’s Studies International Forum 34 (4): 271–277.
Washick, B. and Wingrove, E. (2014) Politics that matter: Thinking about power and justice with the new materialists. Contemporary Political Theory, this issue.
Wingrove, E. (1999) Interpellating sex. Signs 24 (4): 869–893.
Zerilli, L. (2005) Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Acknowledgements
This collaborative project was originally supported by the University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School Spring/Summer Research Grant. For their helpful feedback and challenging questions on earlier versions of this essay, we would like to thank Lisa Disch, Leela Fernandes, Don Herzog, Patchen Markell, Torrey Shanks, Justin Williams, Patsy Yaeger, and audience members at the University of Michigan’s Political Theory Workshop, Northwestern University’s Political Theory Workshop, and the 2012 Western Political Science Association annual meeting.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Washick, B., Wingrove, E., Ferguson, K. et al. Politics that matter: Thinking about power and justice with the new materialists. Contemp Polit Theory 14, 63–89 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2014.19
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2014.19