Spectres of New Materialism (& the world on fire)
....& the incineration of The Great Transformation somewhere in the midst of it all
Hello dear readers.
I’m not sure about this one: tonally, and in terms of the swerve and pessimism, I don’t quite wanna own the result. There’s some self pity here I don’t like, and like Hardt and Negri I don’t think I’ve skewered it.
All the same, as a commitment to process, it’s undeniable that this is where my mind led me (or I led my mind) when I sat down this morning very early and started trying to get down some things that were bugging me.
Please treat this as a ‘work of process’ whose results I present as an aspect of a commitment I want to have to ‘write and write’ and to hit publish before I feel ready. Maybe I’ll try to come back and say with more precision what I’m getting at.
But more likely, here’s just me presenting some unresolved thoughts and feelings I have, more journal than blog. Please take them as you find them.
~
In 2007 we began a reading group together. “Since each one of us was already several, this was already quite a crowd”. It grew from our experiences in the social and critical theory courses we’d done in 2006-7, as a way to continue to practise what we’d begun, build the rudiments of the life of the mind, and look at some of the things that we thought interesting or important that our profs had neglected or avoided. At base there was a patient ambition there we were trying to push in ourselves, the self confidence and slow ‘sitting with’ required of anyone who would sit in a room with a small group and a dense text and try to understand some essential part of the world by reading aloud what some thinker had said in the past.
As I recall, we began with Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus[1]. I think we might have chosen D&G in 2007-8 because our social theory professors seemed avoidantly exasperated by them: one preferred their own mix of psychoanalytic social theory (using Klein, Schmitt and Beck); the other the nineteenth century and its grand/children in critical theory, a world in which everyone still good was white, male, German, mostly Jewish, and dead by the 1970s, at the absolute latest. French poststructuralism seemed, perhaps, a refreshing contrast, and a critical continuation of social and critical theory’s concerns with Marx and Freud. We could keep talking about Oedipus, but we could be Anti: perfect.
We hadn’t a clue how to read A Thousand Plateaus well enough, hadn’t read enough of the other texts and debates D&G were endlessly riffing on, didn’t pick up on the in jokes, and probably missed a lot of the word play that hadn’t survived the translation to English. I’d read Deleuze’s great little book on Nietzsche and Brian Massumi’s clear, fun User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and thought I understood both well enough. I was up for it, and after all, wasn’t the point to not be one of the ‘sad militants’ Foucault had remonstrated against in his superb preface to Anti Oedipus? Wasn’t the ‘introduction to the non-fascist life’ also about rambunctious playfulness, conceptual invention, and joyful good cheer? Was that not what being an apprentice Spinozist was about? Was this not in stark contrast to the paranoid-schizoid position the Kleinians had warned us about; the dourness of classical sociology a la Simmel and Weber? So if we read A Thousand Plateaus like you listen to a record, just got the gist, and tried to use the concepts as tools and the text as a toolbox, maybe we were using their work ‘as intended’.
Besides, the book was also the name of my favourite record label from the turn of the millennium: this had to add up to meaning something worthwhile, something worth grappling with for months on end of weekly meetings. It had to.
The playful invention and conceptual proliferation of Mille Plateaux was still exhilarating on the page: just what was a body without organs (how would one locate one’s own?); how was the war machine distinct to the state apparatus; what was the difference between the arborescent and the rhizomatic, and how did it fit with the Dogon Egg, Paul Klee, and the ‘geology of morals’?
At the same time, as we read on there was also the creeping sense, especially in some of the bulkier and more esoteric plateaus, that one was stuck in a hard-to-navigate corner of the Pompidou Centre, or some other part of Mitterand’s Paris in 1980, and the contemporary was bubbling up in urgent ways that indicated we needed something directly written to address the living tensions of our own century. D&G was fun, but who or what was it for; who or what was theory for, and how could we use it in a way that had value and meaning now?
~ Does it have any value and meaning now? This is my open question ~
In our search for big books on the contemporary we found our way to Hardt and Negri’s Empire, then Commonwealth, and tried our best to read them generously. Was their endeavour, after all, not an attempt to ‘do’ D&G, Spinoza and Italo-Grundrisse Marx to the capitalism of late 90s neoliberal globalisation, to name the cyclonic power emanating from America in all this?
At the same time, we were tutoring subjects on the Global War on Terror (GWoT) , globalisation, and political philosophy, and when we tested their ideas and provocations on the world around us, we found Hardt and Negri’s propositions to be never quite on the money, their theorisations stubbornly vague and gestural, their language too approximate, kinda sorta maybe intimating something that might be really interesting and important, but never nailing it. Eventually, we decided their books didn’t even have the measure of the late 90s, early 00s they were attempting to grasp, let alone the world ‘after’ the GWoT. At one point, I remember one among the group performatively threw Empire across the room toward the waste paper basket.
Then, in September 2008, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) really hit.
The moment we started trying to think theoretically about the GFC, we reached for Marx. In 2009, we spent the year reading the first volume of Capital and patiently making our way through David Harvey’s OG podcast interpretation of Marx. We devoured hours of LSE podcasts with the world’s experts discussing the unfolding implosion. In one recording, I remember Harvey relating the moment where the queen read the world’s economists to filth during a round table: “you missed systemic risk!?”
In February 2009 then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd appeared on the cover of The Monthly talking about ‘the failure of neo-liberalism’. On February 7th of that year, my copy of Rudd’s feature was incinerated in a house in Marysville I was weekending in, left in a pile by the couch, with Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. I never got a chance to finish either of them, but I did manage to get out alive.
Like the Black Saturday fires, the GFC gave a social theory reading group such as ours the best opportunity imaginable to sharpen its mental pencils and become capable enough of articulating true aspects of the worlds in which we were actually living. Marx had his faults, but it was indicative that, of those we were reading, only Marxian political economists had grasped some measure of the moment. Where Marx was deficient on the state, politics, neoliberalism, and the roles of values and culture, we shifted to Foucault’s Collège de France lectures and Wendy Brown and Thomas Leake; when Brown’s account became a little thin on historical detail and globalisation, we read Timothy Mitchell, Saskia Sassen, and Aihwa Ong.
We did develop an understanding; but what difference did it make? What should it have done?
More generally: there was a sound enough understanding of the GFC produced in the years immediately afterward, but on campus, did it advance knowledge, did it chasten the dissed economists who missed systemic risk, did it change the world, rather than just interpret it?
And as for us, did we get anywhere as a result of our patient efforts during those years; was there any point to any of this – beyond the value of developing one’s own understanding? Could the latter be enough and stand on its own two feet, or did we have some kind of vocational responsibility to act upon what we came to know, including in how we studied the world when we thought, wrote and taught about it on campus? In other words: what’s the point of reading, of social theory, and has academic knowledge production actually happened, for the most part, since 2008?
These are questions that plague me, and that I don’t have clear answers to. However, sometimes, as in the following incident, things happen that give me the feeling that almost everything I’ve been involved in has been in vain and is of no use and value. On my good days and weeks, I don’t believe this to be true; but sometimes, I really do lose faith in the whole enterprise.
It’s a very strange feeling to notice how so much time has passed, and how much has changed, and how little has changed.
~
In 2009 or so, I started tutoring in some different subjects on the borders between the social sciences and the humanities. One of the professors I ended up working with was a Deleuzian: like many likeminded adherents of that time, they had been especially influenced by what was then called ‘new materiality’. A one second ‘eye blanch’ across the slab of text in the next footnote will give any reader a better indication of its style and thrust than I could summarise[2].
In practice and as a tutor (who had also read some Massumi, Barad, DeLanda, and a bit of Spinoza), for me, new materialism tended to talk big about materiality and entanglement, but shook down to a strange insistence on the concept of affect: that it truly mattered, that it was importantly different to and distinct from ‘emotion’, that it was ‘anti representational’, and that it was a key part of a critical attack on the still-dominant conventional social sciences who were still stuck in a Cartesian mind/body split, talking about subjects and objects and ?representing emotions? by discoursing about discourse.
(You know, those Cartesians who are holding critical inquiry back… you know him? Oh, if it weren’t for the Cartesians… )
A few things really struck me in all this.
The first was that proponents of the new materialism I came across used to be involved in new left variants of the old materialism: they were, mostly, once upon a Marxists who had also taken the cultural turn and ended up doing cultural studies, cultural sociology, and cultural politics. This had usually gone by way of youthful encounters with C Wright Mills and Marcuse (if they faced America and had come up in the 70s), second wave feminism and the and actual struggles in the women’s movement, and/or what had grown out of Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart’s ‘real cultural studies’ work (if they faced the UK and had lived through post punk and Thatcher in the early 80s). For the profs I came across in the late 00s – I guess – new materialism seemed to have been a liberating discovery and a new millennium turn in their own thinking and work ‘beyond’ the structures of the old materialism.
Maybe there was good work done, maybe there were some honest scholars doing their best. But to be honest, it seemed to me that, for the most part, it was also about people who had made prof and become middle aged and bourgeois, abandoned involvement in activism and political struggles as they’d had kids, mortgages, and marriages/divorces, become more interested in HBO series (because, like most people in the 2000s they binge watched downloaded shows in the evenings), as well as gallery art, because they went to art galleries on shoulder days when they flew long haul for conferences in Western Europe and North America.
Secondly, proponents of the new materialism tended to really insist that what they were doing was new, critical, and radical. New materialism was gonna knock your socks off; the Cartesians wouldn’t know what hit ‘em. This was usually clearer to proponents than it was to me. When freighting their lectures with these insistences on the new and radical nature of becoming, mattering, getting entangled with relata and affect, and the big challenge this ought to be to the social sciences, they would tend to excoriate dualists, or old fogey bogeymen like Durkheim and Parsons.
For anyone like me, who’d come up as an undergrad in the late 90s and caught the ebb tide after the high water mark of po mo and po co, this was deep weird: it was as if most of what we’d already studied was ‘sociology 101’ (when we’d never studied sociology 101), and as if the latter was still Comte and Spencer. Yet for the most part, none of us had ever/yet read these onto-epistemological bogeyboys that were supposedly holding it all back, those old squares with their AGIL schemas and social facts who were preventing us from getting with this liberating new way of saving the social sciences.
I can’t speak for others, but, for me, new materialism never seemed that radical, nor was it really materialism in the way that Marxism meant it to be. The social sciences did need saving, but they needed saving from the new managerialism, which the new materialists tended not to talk about much. However, it was fashionable in those days, and aligned well with whatever Duke were publishing. If you were planning on doing a Duke book back then, new materialism wouldn’t save the social sciences, but it would get you a long way toward a title with one of those cool covers.
Thirdly, if I focus on the institution where I was tutoring for the new materialist prof, really it seemed to boil down to a factional debate within cultural studies (not sociology!), with another group who were vaguely aligned with Lacan (or if they were really old, Althusser), or maybe Jameson and Eagleton, and any of the other heavy hitters who published ‘old school Verso’ tomes. Thus at the micropolitical level (thank you D&G), this was a stoush between very established tenured people about ‘whom among’ the French theorists should be hegemonic in their tiny corner of discourse (and the wing and floor of the building they all worked), while the new managerialists actually reamed us all.
In other words: new materialism wasn’t even a new way of continuing to be a ‘newly’ re-committed Marxist or ‘tenured radical’, it wasn’t even a fight with the sociologists (they were on the next floor, never spoke to anyone on the level below, and had mostly purged everyone who wasn’t a quant doing highly precise applied research on boring topics), it was a clap back against those who read films using the sliding chain of the signifier. ‘Not everything’s about Oedipus, you know; we do not yet know what a body can DO!’ It was a way of liking Jane Bennett or Karen Barad because you didn’t like Zizek or Jodi Dean or Fred Jameson – when, for most, both ‘sides’ were just two fashionable ways of being a prof. In other words, in the little corners where I saw it take hold, new materialism was mostly just another fashion of the established elite: in old materialist terms, it was class privilege talking; in Bourdieu’s terms, it was a way of deploying cultural capital in one’s milieu while stoking the illusio of one’s own value.
All while during a fifteen year people where being a prof meant taking the privilege and toeing the line, where those I had as sometime mentors and patrons never sought to change anything, rock the boat, go on strike – because they were already sorted.
For in the decade of ‘new managerialism’ (which few talked about in their written work), it totally didn’t matter if one was a new materialist or a neo liberal, because whoever you were, the whole game was about career advancement, giving primacy to grant writing and pumping pubs, and using grant success and publication track record to buy out of teaching, and being cool with what was later found to be wage theft.
~
Refrain:
We did develop an understanding, but what difference did it make? Did it advance knowledge; did we get anywhere; was there any point to any of this beyond the intrinsic value of developing one’s own understanding?
What’s the point of reading, of thinking using social theory, and has academic knowledge production actually happened, cumulatively, or even at all, for the most part, since 2008?
~
In February 2023 I was invited along to a small round table hosted by one of my colleagues. A new materialist had materialised as our guest. I can’t add anything to characterise this appearance that I haven’t already summarised above, and I don’t wish to disparage them in any way as a person, both because they seemed nice, and because freedom of inquiry demands that if a person wishes to pursue new materialism as their topic, and peer review, collegial support, and bureaucratic defensibility beancounts this as admissible, then that’s up to them.
All the same, those two hours sent me into a tailspin, because of the sense that precisely nothing had changed in this corner of academic knowledge production in the decade and a half since we were trying to understand the GFC in our tiny reading group, since the 2010s, since covid; nothing seemed to have been added to the world or learned about it, and yet this was still currency in circulation in the world of academic knowledge. When would the new materialism cease being new, if ever? From an ontology of difference emanated the undeniable intuition that nothing differed at all. All that ‘mattering’, and none of it mattered at all.
‘What if we re-described the world as affect and relata?’
Well, what if we did? So what?
What now?
~
For me at least, the fifteen years since the reading group and the GFC has been marked by a disintegration in academia that has been widely noticed, and perhaps overblogged (we do love to whinge). The substantial cause of this has been the rise of managerialism, a massive ‘push’ from a greatly empowered and ‘embiggened’ part of the university that hasn’t been pushed back against effectively. There are no shortage of causes, but of course, the competitive individualist careerism of academics, and the weakening of unions, driven by declining membership among academics, has played a chunky part. Some of these careerists have been new materialists; some of them had even been old materialists; I never met a Cartesian.
I also feel very deeply and personally the socio-cultural fact of the decline the practice of scholarship: less the idea(l) of a way of life grounded in reading, writing, and thinking with other people who disagree with you (which most of us never lived up to), and more the simple fact that very few academics seem to borrow and read books from the university library anymore. Instead, there is ‘academic research’, most of which is fine, generic, passable; designed to incrementally add, never to upset, certainly not to radically change the managerialist system to which we’re now heteronomously subordinated.
I don’t wish to lionise the ‘good old days’, which were also bad in their own way, especially if you were queer, indigenous, neurodivergent, or differently abled. In the good old days, the best thing you could be was a dead white man. Maybe the perennial fact is that everyone wants their white men dead. And maybe the new or neo fact is that, as a statistical probability, ‘success’ comes to anyone (of any body and gender) willing to ball hard according to the gamified logic, and the cynical and generic playaz whose names and works it tends to promote.
All the same, the world now seems too complex to be understood theoretically, capitalism seems too overwhelming and uncontrolled to find an agentic purchase on through any kind of activism – though we must try.
It could have been just that I had a bad week. But on campus, the relation between career success, new knowledge production, and good scholarship seems to be approaching zero. Is this not, then Kirchheimer’s polemical evocation of a racket society? I don’t quite think so, but I don’t not think so, either.
Kirchheimer:
“The term racket is a polemical one. It reflects on a society in which social position has increasingly come to depend on a relation of participation, on the primordial effect of whether an individual succeeded or failed to “arrive”. Racket connotes a society in which individuals have lost the belief that compensation for their individual efforts will result from the mere functioning of impersonal market agencies… It is the experience of an associational practice which implies that neither the individual’s choice of an association nor the aims that the latter pursues are the result of conscious acts belonging to the realm of human freedom” (The Quest for Sovereignty, 161).
[1] I had unfinished business with the text, having been exhilarated by Semiotext(e)’s ‘Rhizome’ pamphlet as a late 90s undergraduate, where I had tried and failed to make it work as an engine for writing postcolonial essays on post Maoist China. A few years on I had bought the red and white Athlone versions of the books, where they sat on the small shelves of my cramped Tokyo apartment, defiantly awaiting my understanding, while I gave post 9/11 attention to Zizek and Agamben.
[2] “New materialism is an interdisciplinary, theoretical, and politically committed field of inquiry, emerging roughly at the millennium as part of what may be termed the post-constructionist, ontological, or material turn. Spearheaded by thinkers such as Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Vicki Kirby, and Manuel DeLanda, new materialism has emerged mainly from the front lines of feminism, philosophy, science studies, and cultural theory, yet it cuts across and is cross-fertilized by both the human and natural sciences. The revival of materialist ontologies has been animated by a productive friction with the linguistic turn and social constructionist frameworks in the critical interrogation of their limitations engendered by the prominence given to language, culture, and representation, which has come at the expense of exploring material and somatic realities beyond their ideological articulations and discursive inscriptions. Important as this ideological vigilance has been for unearthing and denaturalizing power relations, and whose abiding urgency new materialism does not forego, the emphasis on discourse has compromised inquiry by circumscribing it to the self-contained sphere of sociocultural mediation, whereby an anthropocentric purview and nature-culture dualism, which constructivists sought to deconstruct, is inadvertently reinscribed. Accordingly, the polycentric inquiries consolidating the heterogeneous scholarly body of new materialism pivot on the primacy of matter as an underexplored question, in which a renewed substantial engagement with the dynamics of materialization and its entangled entailment with discursive practices is pursued, whether these pertain to corporeal life or material phenomena, including inorganic objects, technologies, and nonhuman organisms and processes. Reworking received notions of matter as a uniform, inert substance or a socially constructed fact, new materialism foregrounds novel accounts of its agentic thrust, processual nature, formative impetus, and self-organizing capacities, whereby matter as an active force is not only sculpted by, but also co-productive in conditioning and enabling social worlds and expression, human life and experience. Seeking to move beyond the constructivist-essentialist impasse, new materialism assumes a theoretical position that deems the polarized positions of a postmodernist constructivism and positivist scientific materialism as untenable; instead, it endeavors to account for, in Baradian idiom, the co-constitutive “intra-actions” between meaning and matter, which leave neither materiality nor ideality intact. The works cited in this article impart a sense of the growing mesh of new materialism, whose budding fibers are opening new lines of inquiry mushrooming in and across the fields of the human and social sciences and life and physical sciences as well as the literary, visual, and performance arts”.