new materialism essay

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section New Materialism

Introduction, general overviews, introductory texts, and anthologies.

• Feminist Epistemologies, Theory, and Praxis
• Sex, Sexuality, and Sexual Difference
• Corpomateriality
• Corpomaterial Differences and Intersections
• Traversing the Sciences
• Deleuzian New Materialism
• Material Ecocriticism and the Nonhuman
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New Materialism by Susan Yi Sencindiver LAST REVIEWED: 26 July 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 26 July 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0016

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.

Given that new materialism is still a relatively new field, only a few general overviews are available; these primarily arise from the social sciences and humanities. The most current and representative anthologies feature prefaces or guides that serve as excellent introductions to the field as a whole. In this respect, Alaimo and Hekman 2008a offers a brief, clear, and provocative presentation of common themes. Coole and Frost 2010a provides an advanced, comprehensive overview that includes a frame of reference covering antecedent, current, and neighboring bodies of work. Whereas Coole and Frost 2010a accentuates the 21st-century sociopolitical backdrop of new materialism, Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012b punctuates its intellectual genealogy and, in addition, presents a concise account of its distinctive characteristics. Reflecting feminist concerns, the collection in Alaimo and Hekman 2008b takes corporeality and nature as its central themes, and the volume contains key papers in the field. A collection of articles by prominent new materialist thinkers, Coole and Frost 2010b rethinks understandings of and modes of inquiry pertaining to matter and materiality, agency, bioethics, and politics. Bennett and Joyce 2010 also shares this politically informed theoretical commitment, with the palpable effects and material processes of power as its focus. The latter two collections, moreover, include essays that concentrate on the agency of the material within the social field. In addition to contributions by the editors, Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012a includes accessible interviews with leading contemporary materialist philosophers. Grusin 2015 is an edited collection noteworthy in that it exemplifies the cross-fertilization of new materialist thinking with contiguous disciplines, such as affect theory, new media theory, science and technology studies, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology.

Alaimo, Stacey, and Susan J. Hekman. “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” In Material Feminisms . Edited by Stacey Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman, 1–19. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008a.

Outlines the limits of linguisticism and social constructionism in its neglect of materiality and concomitant implications for methodology and identifies the new directions in thematic trends and theoretical reorientations within feminist studies toward materiality.

Alaimo, Stacey, and Susan J. Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008b.

Organized into several sections based on topics, such as theory, world, and bodies, the essays collected consider the multifaceted aspects of materiality pertaining chiefly to corporeality, the natural world, and environmental and science studies primarily within, but not apart from, feminist theoretical frameworks.

Bennett, Tony, and Patrick Joyce, eds. Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn . New York: Routledge, 2010.

This collection gathers essays that explore novel approaches to the concrete operations, forms, and organizations of state and colonial power, governance, and material infrastructures in light of the recent material turn and across a range of diverse disciplinary fields; yet, prominence is given to historical examples.

Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics . Edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–43. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010a.

DOI: 10.1215/9780822392996-001

An extensive introduction that contextualizes and situates new materialist philosophies and thinkers within contemporary biopolitical, technological, and environmental developments as well as the global political economy. It delineates the continuities, differences from, and resources in older materialist approaches, traces commonalities shared with adjacent intellectual thought, and addresses the ethical and political challenges for the 21st century consequent upon reconceptualizing materiality.

Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010b.

This thematically organized edited collection brings together many of the most influential essays in the field, covering a breadth that includes the ontologies, political dimensions, and socioeconomic implications of matter and embodied subjectivities.

Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin, eds. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies . Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities, 2012a.

The volume is divided into two parts. The first features interviews with Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux. This interview format provides a way of approaching the thought of these writers through relatively straightforward prose. The second part ties the content of the interviews to an overview of materialist philosophies and intersecting influences and features the authors’ own take on a new materialist understanding of sexual difference and its posthumanist aspects.

Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. “The Transversality of New Materialism.” In New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies . Edited by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, 93–113. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanitiesh, 2012b.

Drawing mainly on the works of Braidotti and DeLanda, the authors map the central facets, concepts, and especially the Continental philosophical pedigree of new materialism. They present new materialism not simply as a backlash against postmodern cultural theory, but carefully delineate their intricate interrelations. Argues a convincing case for the theoretical and methodological purchase of new materialism. Originally published in Women: A Cultural Review 21.2 (2010): 153–171.

Grusin, Richard, ed. The Nonhuman Turn . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

A collection of theoretically sophisticated essays that together provide a useful survey of the braided strands across a variety of disciplines and theoretical orientations engaged with nonhuman turn, which includes a wide-ranging exploration of corporeal, material, affective, ecological, and technological processes, phenomena, and systems. The introduction offers a useful account of the overlapping emergence of these theoretical developments, within which new materialism is situated.

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New Materialisms

Ontology, agency, and politics.

Editor(s): Diana Coole , Samantha Frost

Contributor(s): Jane Bennett , Pheng Cheah , Melissa A. Orlie , Elizabeth Grosz , William E. Connolly , Rosi Braidotti , Rey Chow , Sara Ahmed , Sonia Kruks , Jason Edwards

Subjects Sociology > Social Theory , Theory and Philosophy > Feminist Theory , Politics > Political Theory

“ New Materialisms ... [is], in the truest sense, [a] timely volume; [it] ... illuminates and reflects contemporary compulsions in critical theory while making important contributions to transdisciplinary feminist and queer posthumanist inquiry, a minor arc of theory that nevertheless has an extensive history in feminist studies of science, technology, and epistemology, as Sara Ahmed (2008) has argued elsewhere.” — Women's Studies Quarterly

“ New Materialisms is an extraordinary and in fact interdisciplinary collection in its own right. . . . [T]he work coming out of the material turn is mind-blowing work, both in scholarly and in artistic research, and in art”. — Iris van der Tuin, Women's Studies International Forum

“New materialisms offer democratic theory an important opportunity to regard its own parameters and function – what can be hoped for and why. And Coole and Frost’s volume offers a new view of the human (and the thing) that are well worth regarding. . . .” — Andrew Poe, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy

“Overall, the volume makes a convincing case for the renewal of materialism, in terms of both its theoretical purchase and its radical political potential. It shows, in ways that are often exemplary, that there are rich, and sometimes surprising, resources in the philosophical tradition for renewing materialisms.” — Keith Ansell Pearson, Radical Philosophy

“The essays collected here—authored by leading political theorists and feminist and cultural critics—examine the ‘choreographies of becoming’ and move beyond constructivism and humanism to track processes of de- and re-materialization. The effect is to scramble habitual categories of thought—active versus passive, inert versus animate, political versus ontological, causality versus spontaneity—and force us to think materiality. As the editors put it, ‘materiality is always something more than “mere” matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.’” — Bonnie Honig, author of Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy

“This is a strong and timely collection, one that could very well direct future discussions of the ‘new materialisms’ toward an experimental, process-oriented, and politically-engaged ‘new ontology.’” — Ellen Rooney, Brown University

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Diana Coole is Professor of Political and Social Theory at Birkbeck College, University of London, England. She is the author, most recently, of Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism . She is a Leverhulme Research Fellow, 2010–13. Samantha Frost is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics .

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The New Politics of Materialism: History, Philosophy, Science

Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito (eds.), The New Politics of Materialism: History, Philosophy, Science , Routledge, 2017, 328pp., $140 (hbk), ISBN 9781138240742.

Reviewed by John Protevi, Louisiana State University

Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito have edited a challenging set of essays that can serve as a critical companion to the “new materialist” (NM) movement, the main exemplars of which here are Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Grosz, Luciana Parisi, Jussi Parikka, and Rosi Braidotti. Many essays also mention Gilles Deleuze as an influence on NM, and a few concentrate on him as a NM thinker (Ansell-Pearson, Lowrie, Hayles).

The Introduction sets out three critical themes by means of which the essays interrogate NM: history, ontology, and politics. The extension of the term “materialism” is at stake in all these themes: is it purely a metaphysical stance, one opposed to dualism, or does it also cover any concept of matter as active or passive, etc., with no regard to metaphysics? On the former, restrictive sense, we can say that the physicalist Hobbes is a “materialist,” but not the dualist Descartes, no matter what we might say about his view of matter. Ontologically, we might ask if “materialism” points to any notion of matter as input to production process at any scale (e.g., recruits are the matter from which soldiers are produced) or is it only matter as endpoint of reduction (i.e., “small stuff treated by sub-atomic physics”) to which other regimes are reduced? Finally, intersecting these questions are the onto-political senses of “materialism” as the primacy of the economic, the rejection of a spiritualist notion of mind or soul, and a purely instrumental view of the effects of public religion.

The question about history: has NM staked its claim to novelty for its notions of active matter and widespread non-human agency by constructing a straw man out of the “old” materialism of Early Modern Europe, one supposedly dedicated to the thesis of inert, dead, or passive matter to be studied by mechanistic physics? About ontology: are NM thinkers too profligate in their ontology by attributing agency when mere causal efficacy would suffice? Do they properly account for “scale variance” or differences in power at different levels of emergence? And about politics: can the NM thinkers ground a politics in a new materialism of widespread agency, or do they lack the grappling with a naturalized normativity that would be needed for such political interventions?

Accompanying all these questions is another that appears from time to time (in the essays of Jess Keiser, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Angela Willey, and Christian J. Emden), and is the focus of Zammito’s contribution: wouldn’t it be better to analyze concepts of nature and naturalism than those of matter and materialism?

Ellenzweig starts off by claiming that Coole and Frost’s invocation of a “Cartesian-Newtonian” concept of matter as “inert” (in the popular sense of passivity, rather than the scientific sense of persistence in motion or rest without external influence) is not supportable when subjected to a fine-grained historical analysis. For Ellenzweig, such a notion derives more from one-sided readings by anxious theological critics rather than from the eponymous thinkers, whose works were more ambiguous when it came to the active / passive distinction. Descartes’s physics, with its plenum (refusal to separate space from matter), and the way in which matter maintained motion granted it originally by God was read by idealist contemporaries as granting too much activity to matter and hence threatening the spiritual impetus for motion that they believed necessary. For Ellenzweig it was thus critics of Descartes who insisted on the dichotomy between dead matter and activating spirit; Descartes’s own concept of matter was more ambiguous or even paradoxical in combining activity and passivity. Ellenzweig also claims that Newton’s notion in the first edition of the Principia of a vis insita or “innate force” that amounts to a vis inertiae or “force of inactivity,” amounts to a similar paradox or at least ambiguity between matter as active and passive; Newton will switch to a more passive notion of matter in the second edition of the Principia , after the enthusiastic John Toland had taken up the active matter interpretation and run with it. Anxious about a theological reaction similar to the one Descartes got, Newton then took pains to deaden his notion of matter. Ellenzweig then provides a nod to Spinoza’s conatus , which can now be seen as hearkening back to the active interpretation of matter in Descartes and Newton, before ending with a reading of Lucretius as advocating a limited notion of material dynamism, since too much attribution of activity or life to matter tempts one to animism and away from scientific naturalistic explanation.

Continuing the historical theme, Charles Wolfe explores the 18 th century tradition of vital materialism, focusing on La Mettrie and Diderot. He avoids a universal dynamic matter however, which he sees as the mere counterpart of Engels’s concept of “mechanistic materialism,” a concept he finds echoed in NM. For Wolfe, most 17 th century mechanists were substance dualists or agnostics rather than materialists. Wolfe will instead draw our attention to the 18 th century vital materialists’ concern with embodiment; what La Mettrie attempts is a soul-to-living-body reduction, not a mind-to-matter reduction. For Wolfe, this avoids a notion of body as dead matter animated by a vital principle, and a notion of living or vital matter below the organizational level of bodies. In other words, for his vital materialists, it’s organisms that are alive, and not simply “matter” as the “stuff of the universe.” Wolfe finds a fine statement of organic living emergence in one of his vital materialists: “For Venel, organic molecules and organized bodies are subject to laws that are different from that of matter in motion” (46). After his sketch of vital materialism, Wolfe turns to a criticism of the focus on subjectivity in the enactivist school exemplified by Evan Thompson, which strikes him as dualistic. He concludes with a look at Barad, whom he absolves of a subjectivity focus, but whose notion of materiality doesn’t connect with the biomedical analyses and reductionism of the vital materialists, hence preserving them as resources to be recommended to the current scene.

Wilson and Zammito, however, think Ellenzweig goes too far in purging Descartes of a concept of inert matter (Ellenzweig does admit it’s ambiguous). They emphasize that Hobbes at least was a straightforward mechanistic physicalist, as admitted by both Ellenzweig and Wolfe, so that for Wilson and Zammito “new materialism” is not forging its “old materialist” opponent out of whole cloth. Hence for Zammito, the 18 th Century vital materialists were reacting against 17 th century mechanists, which include Descartes and Newton. Also, he reminds us, let’s not forget late 18 th century Laplacean eliminativist, physicalist, determinism.

While allowing NM some historical accuracy with regard to its relation to “old” materialism (qua concept of matter, rather than metaphysical position), Wilson goes on to criticize the NM writers for a tendency to “declare, rather than to argue for, an intrinsic connection between the metaphysics of self-organization, indeterminate spontaneity, and progressive moral thinking on animal welfare, global inequality, gender, and climate change” (114). If we are to argue politics, Wilson says, we should recognize that Early Modern European materialists were seen as “the party of humanity,” and had the kind of theocratic enemies of which progressive thinkers should be proud. More mildly put, the is-ought distinction and its accompanying human exceptionalism has been the defensive position of contemporary critics of materialism; to illustrate this, Wilson examines the 1998 dialogue of Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricouer. Wilson admits that full-blown normativity, truth, and so on, are resistant to full naturalization, but she approves nonetheless of Changeux’s claim that the sciences can help us with new understandings of human nature. Consider, for example, Wilson asks us, psychological findings that “reveal an underlying disposition to sympathetic identification with others as a powerful human trait” (122). This enables us to question the Kantian move to a noumenal source of the moral will:

Rather than interpreting these conflicting results regarding altruism and selfishness in Kantian terms as the operations, now of a supernatural, now of a natural, element within us respectively, the scientific approach asks us to investigate the co-existence of these two sets of ‘natural’ motivation, as elicited by different cues in the context in which they are experienced (122).

Wilson then poses a very nice question: might it be that the counterpart to NM is not “old materialism” but science-resistant humanities (125)? But not just any science: at the end of the day, Wilson implies, it’s not in the vast sweep of materialist ontology that one should look for help in the battleground of politics, but in the materialist aspect of the biological and human sciences (which themselves are sites of contestation between, for instance, many Evolutionary Psychologists and many feminists).

In an essay with historical, ontological, and normative implications, Jess Keiser proposes a plastic conception of matter as escaping the binary of dead, passive matter and lively, active matter and allowing us to instead investigate the relation of " ‘first nature’ (understood as biophysical matter) and ‘second nature’ (understood as the ‘normative’ realm of discursive practices, social codes, and cultural rituals)" (68). Focusing on the neurophysiological, Keiser seeks to establish two early modern thinkers, Descartes and David Hartley, as possessing a plastic conception of brain matter, and thus resonating with William James and Donald Hebb’s theories. Shifting then to a contemporary, Keiser presents a brisk overview of the work of Adrian Johnston on first and second nature, that is, the way in which nature produces that which ruptures it, exceeds it, and conflicts with it. Johnston’s complex and challenging work resists short summary, but suffice it to say that for Keiser, Johnston enables us to grapple with the problem of how to “somehow reconcile a seeming dualism (between matter and mind, nature and culture) with the demands of monism” (70).

Keith Ansell-Pearson tackles the ontological and the normative aspects of NM in his Deleuze-centered essay. He begins by distinguishing naturalism (as denying human exceptionalism) and materialism (for him, physicalism). He insists that a strong strand of the early Deleuze is that of a “ethically minded naturalist” (92) echoing Lucretius, Spinoza, and Nietzsche in the fight against superstition and the search for human action as norm-generating. A turn to the work of Elizabeth Grosz allows Ansell-Pearson to distinguish a politics of subjective recognition and a politics grappling with the natural and social forces generating subjects with the power to affect and be affected. After a further treatment in detail of the Deleuze-Spinoza-Lucretius nexus, Ansell-Pearson concludes that Deleuze’s naturalism does not “deprive the human animal of its ethico-normative distinctiveness” (106). Hence for Ansell-Pearson, we should read Deleuze as a naturalist, and hence against human exceptionalism, but not as “anti-humanist” if that means denying the distinctiveness of the human; humans are part of nature, but an odd part, if you will.

Lenny Moss’s essay engages both the ontological and the normative. Against what he sees as a too loose notion of agency in new materialism, Moss distinguishes agency from activity by mobilizing a Hegelian insight: naturalized agency appears with taking a position in a normative field, one with values relative to and important for an agent. Moss brings together Aristotle’s flourishing and the Kantian/Hegelian notion of autonomy in his theory of natural “detachment”: “Detachment theory holds that ‘nature explores greater levels of detachment’ and that at increasingly higher levels of detachment this increasingly amounts to moving toward the capacity for normative self-determination” (237). Moss digs deeper than the usual attribution of value to single-celled organisms (“sense-making” in the enactive school) to discuss water, proteins, and enzymes; he finds there a “leap into a new space of self-organizing possibilities and thus a gateway into the possibility of normative causation” (239). Dipping below the biological like this is a bold move by Moss, especially in an essay that goes on to criticize Deleuze for “blurring life/non-life distinctions” (242) and Barad for a scale-free move of seeing quantum effects in the human register, but his insistence on a definite theory of normative agency arguably licenses his gesture.

Angela Willey is another of the contributors who foregrounds “nature” rather than simply “matter.” Feminist theories of the relation of nature and culture posed by Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Sherry Ortner, Gayle Rubin, Catherine MacKinnon, and Judith Butler can help us escape a stale notion of NM as humanist appropriation of already-formed scientific findings about “vital matter.” Instead, we should be focusing on the way NM “insists upon the inseparability of ontology and epistemology, being and knowing, nature and culture” (149). By doing so we open ourselves to a “capacious call for creative and reflexive reimaging of the meaning of meaning making” so that we can “reconsider the stakes of knowledge politics to include the very materialization of bodies and worlds” (149). In this way, Willey sees one of the strongest potentials of NM to be its capacity to challenge disciplinary boundaries and allow us to marshal “proliferating narrative resources for knowing our worlds, and, in turn, making them anew” (150).

The questions of reduction and emergence come most clearly into focus in Derek Woods’ essay on “scale variance.” For Woods, this notion calls into question Barad’s position that quantum effects ramify in the macrophysical register. Referring to Mariam Thalos (2013), Woods calls into question the unity of science model of reductionism to physics. Alongside his critical remarks on Barad, Woods tackles DeLanda’s reading of Deleuze in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (DeLanda 2002). I think there are some problems with his presentation of DeLanda, in which Woods assimilates the fully differentiated virtual to relatively undifferentiated pre-individual ontogenetic fields of individuation such as the egg. Nonetheless, once we leave ontogenesis, Woods poses important questions to DeLanda about the flat ontology of formed individuals and their part-whole relations at different scales.

N. Katherine Hayles picks up on the scale theme in her essay on the “cognitive nonconscious,” which she defines in terms of sub-personal neural processes of synthesizing, filtering, inferring, and anticipating which underlie conscious experience. The “cognitive nonconscious” differentiates levels of natural agency and thus “bridge[s] the gap between quantum effects and cultural dynamics,” a bridge whose mechanisms Barad and other NM thinkers assume must exist but do not explicitly discuss (185). Hayles attributes some of the level-skipping to a Deleuzean influence on NM. However, while it may be true that some NM thinkers (Hayles discusses Parisi, Parikka, Grosz, and Braidotti) emphasize the decentering and centrifugal terms of Deleuze (“deterritorialization” and “destratification”), Hayles neglects the way in which, in A Thousand Plateaus at least, Deleuze and Guattari insist upon the way in which centripetal forces of organismic organization (aka, “reterritorialization” or “stratification”) are both necessary and in many cases salutary. “Staying stratified . . . is not the worst thing that can happen” they say (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 161). Despite these quibbles, Hayles’s essay is a formidable challenge to her post-humanist NM interlocutors to fill in some of the mechanisms subtending the forms of cognition displayed in the natural continuum in which humans fit.

A third essay discussing scale is that of Christian J. Emden, who claims that NM is “self-defeating” (271) if it thinks it can forego an account of naturalizing normativity that, instead, can be found at the intersection of philosophical naturalism and political theory. For Emden, ethical and epistemic norms are not different in kind, but both inhere in the way in which humans cannot easily escape causal networks. Furthermore, Emden adds, we are owed an account of the emergence of normativity in material conditions, and because we “already live in a normative world,” that account should show how the political and ethical worlds engage with the material (273). Emden’s positive move is to naturalize humans by an account of the “emergence of normativity, linked to an uneven ontology of different scales of what we regard as reality” (273). After a treatment of Bennett, Braidotti, and Barad that accuses them of the naturalistic fallacy in one form or another, Emden shows that too oftrn philosophical naturalism and mainstream political theory avoid the naturalistic fallacy at the cost of an unacceptable divorce of the normative and the natural. Including nonhuman actants in the context of politics is acceptable to Emden, but only on the condition that we have an “uneven ontological field” with “complex forms of differentiation” (287). Emden thus closes with a sketch of three “scales of normativity” that impose constraints on different sets of agents: the biological and physical scale shared by all organisms; the affective scale relevant for “higher order animals, including humans”; and  “moral and epistemic norms” and their social institutions, which govern “responsibilities, duties, and obligations” which are “qualitatively unique to human animals” (288-289).

Ian Lowrie will try to make consistent three tenets of his theory of social reality: Durkheim’s notion that social phenomena are objective; Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that the systematic nature of social phenomena are amenable to “a logic of tracing and coding”; and the notion that social phenomena are ordered by the historical and material conditions of their development (155). Objecting to the tendency in some NM thinkers to treat society as yet another assemblage aside others, Lowrie pivots to a discussion of Durkheim’s realist ontology of social systems impinging on the psychic systems of individual inhabitants. Lowrie’s take on Durkheim however insists on keeping contact with a historical materialist perspective linking the social to material practices. This brings him to Deleuze and Guattari, whose thought on the socius or organizing system of material and semiotic “flows” is summarized quite nicely as well as usefully put into relation with contemporary anthropological studies of non-state societies. Lowrie finishes with a challenging reading of contemporary financial capital against that of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus , whom he thinks neglect the still operative coding operations of capital in favor of its schizophrenizing powers, such that desiring machines break free of the socius qua inert recording surface. While that’s plausible as a critique of Anti-Oedipus , I’m not convinced of Lowrie’s charge that A Thousand Plateaus falls prey to “nostalgia of the pure, for unorganized desire” (172). Despite my demurral here, Lowrie’s essay provides the framework of a re-reading of Deleuze and Guattari that will ultimately be fruitful in confirming or nuancing their work.

Mogens Lærke combines historical and political foci. Joining NM in not being satisfied with social constructivism, Lærke warns that materialism may not be the best way to avoid it, insofar as Hobbes, in his radical arbitrariness of signs and contractualist politics, is something of a social constructivist. Earlier in the volume, Wilson had shown that one can’t necessarily pin a regressive politics on “old” materialism, as it was seen at the time as the “party of humanity” against theocrats. Lærke, however, will claim that no politics can be grounded in materialism, though a Spinozist naturalization of politics, grounding it in the power relations of people and sovereign, can provide some hope, as long as we recognize the need to read Spinoza as “a genuine middle ground between materialism and idealism” (262).

We’ve treated some of Zammito’s historical interventions above; let me conclude by turning to his “Concluding (Irenic) Postscript,” where he asks for shift from the “new materialism” framework to that of “complex naturalism” allowing for the emergence of human subjectivity (308-309). Zammito’s call for attention to emergent order in nature brings to mind self-organizing systems (organismic, ecological, social) as the unit of study more than entities emerging from material configurations. The recommended shift from matter to nature works, I think, because we have such an atomic (in the literal and figurative senses) view of “matter” that reductionism and individualism go together. In this picture, the aggregation of individual capacities is always a threat to reduce emergence (that is, seeing emergence as merely epistemological and hence able to be reduced in a future with more exact measurement capacities). Of course, it’s in the question of measurement where quantum uncertainty comes in and why Barad is such an important figure in this collection. Beyond that, the move to a nature in which one can discern complex systems promises to be one that would allow the full fruit of Deleuze and Guattari’s work to be appreciated, as both a member of, and an inspiration to, the new materialist movement.

DeLanda, Manuel, 2002. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy . Continuum.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 1987. A Thousand Plateaus . Translated by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press.

Thalos, Mariam, 2013. Without Hierarchy: The Scale Freedom of the Universe . Oxford University Press.

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• Published: 05 February 2019

Putting speculation and new materialisms in dialogue

• Luke Moffat 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  5 , Article number:  11 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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Over the past decade, numerous disciplines have taken on speculation as a method for research, a tool for thought, or a topic of study. In so doing, sociology, politics, design, geography and other disciplines have all helped to readdress the nature and potential of speculation, as a way of thinking, but also as a way to bridge the gap between theory and practice, something that often plagues philosophy. Despite the variety of perspectives in this range of disciplines, they often draw upon a common philosophical canon. This paper explores current discussions of speculation in the context of speculative philosophy, as well as work in new materialisms from Karen Barad, and Jane Bennett, to address some potential exchanges between new materialisms and speculation. The paper concludes with a brief description of a symposium held in 2018 that explored these themes across disciplines. It advocates further exchanges between speculative and new materialist approaches, as one way of figuring the place of matter in theory.

Introduction: the speculative aspiration

In 1867, the first issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy was published. In a brief editorial called ‘The Speculative’, William Torrey Harris outlines his vision for the role of speculation in philosophy, and intellectual life more generally. He writes that to think speculatively is to ‘think, in the highest sense’ to ‘transcend all natural limits ’ ( 1867 , p. i). Harris includes in his list of natural limits things such as ‘national peculiarities…distinctions in race, habits, and modes of living’ (ibid.). In practice, this meant for Harris and his cohort of authors, that disciplinary boundaries could and should be disassembled, and the barrier between intellectual life and political action dissolved. Harris’s particular ambitions for speculation did not fully materialize. As Stuhr points out in his review of an edited collection of the JSP , ‘intellectuals retreated into research universities throughout the twentieth century, [and] the philosophers of the Bildung movement seemed amateurish precisely because of their social and political involvement ( 2003 , p. 239).

While the ambitions Harris laid out may not have come to fruition, the spirit of those ambitions is something we can still relate to, especially at a time when academic research across the disciplinary spectrum is making moves to show its wider social impact. This paper explores how the spirit of speculation as Harris conceived it might be rendered today, through more recent speculative approaches in research, and new materialisms, drawing on their common philosophical inheritances. Transcending ‘natural limits’ might seem like an overly abstract or even naïve idea, but I will show in the remainder of this paper how contemporary iterations of both speculation and new materialisms share something of this ambition. In particular, I am interested in the how mutual exchanges between speculative approaches and new materialisms can help in shaping frameworks for more-than-human domains. This can be rendered as the problem of moving beyond what Quentin Meillassoux has called correlationism, the idea that there is no way to render an understanding of the world ‘independently of our subjective link to it’ (2012, p. 72). This is something that speculation and new materialisms share, to think beyond the subjective, beyond the merely human, while avoiding both naïve empiricism and extreme rationalism.

Of particular importance here, is that speculation and new materialisms share a concern with showing how a certain conception of existence (ontology) has political and ethical resonances. I defend this idea, with some modifications, against Paul Rekret’s recent critique ( 2016 ), by appealing to post-representational new materialisms such as Karen Barad’s ( 2003 ). It is through this entanglement of existence, matter, politics and ethics that speculation and new materialisms both make a move that challenges correlationism by de-centering the human. How can this decentering be reconciled with the singular, absolutising vision of speculative philosophy that runs through Harris’s editorial? It is necessarily complicated by our own contemporary world, one which Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby call a world of ‘multiple realities’ ( 2013 , p. 159), and the considerations this necessitates about futures, both human and more-than-human. New materialisms have faced challenges to their calls for putting matter in equal standing with subjectivity, and the resulting de-centring of the human. The philosophical inheritances, shared between speculation and new materialisms – particularly Whitehead’s philosophy – can help tend to some of the problems highlighted by critiques such as Rekret’s. To establish this discussion, I summarize some of the prevailing conceptions of speculation in philosophy, including Whitehead’s.

Speculation in theory

There are three distinct but interrelated ways one can describe speculation in philosophy, which all inform the more recent discussions of speculation in other disciplines.

Cartesian speculation is based on a kind of ‘introspection’. This form of speculation is concerned primarily with deducing the primary of human reason in securing the structure of knowledge, and as such is abstracted from the “merely empirical” entirely. Cartesian speculation has no use in experience, but is rather a process of pure thinking.

Kantian speculation adapts and expands this Cartesian introspection, and while it is still ultimately self-referential, Kant does include the caveat that speculation also accepts the necessary existence of things-in-themselves, a world beyond and independent of our experience. Vitally, there is no contradiction in Kant’s view for conceiving of this world beyond our experience, or have its own kinds of productive powers, purposes and even agency. It is simply the case that none of this can be proven within the limits of human knowledge. Speculation, or what Kant calls the speculative employment of pure reason, cannot by itself generate any knowledge. Rather, speculation is a vehicle for establishing the boundaries of what can be known. Hence, in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant claims that ‘all possible speculative knowledge of reason is limited to mere objects of experience’ (Bxxvi) ( 2007 ).

Whiteheadian speculation is a further expansion of the still ultimately subjective form it takes in Kant. Speculation, more than a mode of reason, is an entire philosophical project, in which the endeavour is to ‘frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in which every element of our experience can be interpreted ( 1978 , p. 1). Such a system must be more than merely subjective, as it seeks the whole out of which subject and object relations are constituted. Whitehead contends that ‘there is an essence to the universe that forbids relationships beyond itself’, and that ‘Speculative Philosophy seeks that essence’ (ibid., p. 2). The key factor in Whiteheads case, however, is that while Speculative Philosophy seeks an ultimate ‘coherence’ between all the disparate elements of our knowledge and experience, the goal is not guaranteed at the outset. Speculation is like the ‘flight of an aeroplane’ through the ‘thin air of imaginative generalization’ (ibid.). It ascends from the secure ground of the empirical, but also requires a large amount of abstraction, of thinking above and beyond this ground. This is what gives speculative philosophy its value for Whitehead; that it embraces both the rigour with which the plane is constructed, and the perilous thin air it must navigate.

All three of these notions of speculation refer to grand metaphysical projects beyond the scope of this paper to elucidate. However, they do highlight some of the underlying concerns that recent discussions of speculation inherit.

Whitehead’s aerial metaphors speak to how speculation must embrace an uncertain path, must strive for new knowledge without guarantees, and that, rather than requiring discipline from some other faculty of thought, to contain this uncertainty, speculation must itself be the vehicle both of flight and discovery. Speculation must be the expansion and limit of knowledge.

The call for speculation as practice

The recent collection Speculative Research (Wilkie et al., 2017 ) is an exemplary set of discussions on the conceptual and methodological issues with speculation being used in research about futures. The starting point of the collection is to rescue speculation from the negative associations with which it has historically been burdened beyond the philosophical context. Speculation is associated with prediction and forecasting, particularly in terms of risk analysis. Here, speculation is a volatile element that needs to be managed with proper predictive tools and methods. Speculation is also associated with the global financial system, as a form of investing with potentially high gains, but an attached risk of substantial losses.

While these two forms of speculation are certainly relevant when talking about futures, the kinds of speculation discussed in Speculative Research refer to more philosophical renderings of the term. It is these philosophical renderings that connect back to projects such as Harris’s speculative philosophy.

Rosalyn Diprose claims that speculative thinking and speculative research show that ‘speculation is ontological and political’ (Wilkie et al., 2017 , p. 42). In Diprose’s account, this is taken as motive for dwelling upon and exploring further the potential of speculative thinking for shaping academic practices. For Diprose, this continuity between ontology and politics derives from the Whiteheadian claim that speculative thinking is anchored to experience, that it is ultimately verified by experience. By extension, political agency is tied directly to the affective, corporeal dimensions of individual experience (ibid., p. 45). Diprose suggests that the kind of speculation rooted in Whitehead’s philosophy is ‘crucial to political agency, democratic pluralism, and innovation’, because it opens up possibilities for experience that are futural and unpredictable (ibid., p. 41). The political implications of speculation for Diprose, then, materialize via their opposition to tendencies in conservative democratic forms of government, to try and curtail speculation by holding a monopoly on prediction. By allowing for a speculative ontology sees thinking as intimately bound up with experience of the material world, the totalizing tendency of governments (to control experience of the material world through a particular way of thinking) can be combatted.

Diprose stresses the importance of ‘teaching otherness’ in fostering a speculative political ontology (ibid., p. 45), what she calls ‘inspiration’. Speculative thinking and its creative potentialities cannot be nurtured when kept in isolation from other perspectives, other voices, and a willingness to affect and be affected by these. The challenge here, is to keep speculative thinking balanced in this relationship between one and others, to show how it is more than merely thinking in the air, giving, as Michael Halewood warns, ‘anyone the chance to think whatever she or he wants’ (in Wilkie et al., 2017 , p. 53). Diprose’s account of speculation, as continuity between ontology and politics, operates within this challenge. In addition, her endorsement of inspiration illuminates a dynamic relationship between Harris’s and Whitehead’s forms of speculation. Surely, ‘teaching otherness’ is a route toward thinking beyond national, racial and social differences, as Harris desires. It is a route, however, which relies not upon eliminating these differences, but by embracing their affects, through the Whiteheadian move, thus anchoring thinking in experience. This dynamic is also illuminated by new materialisms. I will now introduce some of the key ideas in new materialisms, before putting them in dialogue with speculation.

Matter matters!

Throughout this paper, new materialisms is written in plural, following Coole and Frost’s book of the same name. For Coole and Frost, a defining feature of new materialist approaches is that they are comprised out of multiple disciplines, histories, and interpretations ( 2010 , p. 4). Materialism, much like speculation, is not singular; it means something different depending upon which school of materialism one subscribes to. As such, I offer a conclusive definition neither of new materialism, nor of speculation. Another important reason for this, is that both perspectives, as I interpret them, resist singular, straightforward definitions. Instead, I work through, and, as Haraway advises, stay with both speculation and new materialisms.

Therefore, given that new materialisms resist definition, a gesture is still needed toward the ways that this paper, and new materialist thinkers, understand the term(s). For Dolphijn and van der Tuin, ‘revolutionary and radical ideas [in academia] are actualized through an engagement with scholars and scholarly traditions of the canonized past’ ( 2012 , p. 13). They continue, ‘contemporary generations read, or more often reread older texts, resulting in “new” readings that do not fit the dominant reception of these texts’ (ibid.). Dolphijn and van der Tuin go on to call this a ‘new metaphysics’, by which they mean a re-assessment of old ideas, and thinking as a whole, according to perspectives not accessible to those who are the subject of this reassessment (ibid.).

While avoiding straightforward definitions, it can be said that new materialist approaches are concerned with challenging the dominance of representationalism, brought about by the impact of the linguistic turn. This linguistic turn, and its rise through movements like post-structuralism and deconstruction, interrogate a perceived language/reality dualism, which has roots in older and more general dualisms entrenched in the European tradition since Descartes, such as mind/matter, subject/object, human/world. For a new materialist like Karen Barad, the issue here is how these dualisms are not objective truths, but are performed, in what she calls the agential cut ( 2003 , p. 815).

Barad’s form of new materialism subverts the assumption that ‘we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented’ (ibid., p. 801). This is what Bruining ( 2016 ) calls one of the founding gestures of new materialism, a general dissatisfaction with the reliance upon language to give us the truth about a world, which is otherwise unresponsive, i.e. palpable only to human cultural concerns. For Barad, representationalism has become so entrenched in Western intellectual traditions that it is treated as common sense, as the only way of interacting with the world ( 2003 , p. 806). One alternative that Barad proposes is performativity. While performativity has an established history in social theory and especially feminist theory, Barad seeks to extend the performative beyond the social to the material.

Barad’s work shares some concerns with other new materialist figures such as Jane Bennett, for demonstrating the need to look beyond the human as a location of meaning, value and agency. Bennett’s iteration of new materialism, which she calls vital materiality, aims to show that material things ‘have a positive, productive of their own’ ( 2010 , p. 1), and highlight the ‘active role of nonhuman materials in public life’ (ibid. p. 2).

Critiques, commonalities and concerns

Why is this relevant to speculation? Aside from Whitehead being a shared influence, speculative approaches such as Diprose’s also seek to challenge the same dualisms with which Barad takes issue. Similar to Barad, Diprose associates subject/object and mind/body distinctions with forms of regulatory power that dampen creative thinking (2017, p. 45). The implication here is that attending more sincerely to materiality challenges ‘instrumental thinking’ and overly abstract notions of agency, in favour of more heterogeneous and diverse intellectual practices. It is this kind of implication with which Rekret critiques new materialisms, Rekret claiming that they commit the mistake of ‘collapsing ontology and ethics’ ( 2016 , p. 226). Rekret argues that the resulting weakness of new materialist thought is a ‘deployment of ethics as a means of asserting the ontological primacy of matter’ (ibid.). Rekret’s main point of contention is his claim that new materialist perspectives assert ‘a continuity between ontology and ethics’ (ibid., p. 227). This seems very close to Diprose’s assertion that ‘speculation is both ontological and political’ ( 2016 , p. 42). There is a sense in both these claims that a particular ontological framework yields either a politics or an ethics. For the remainder of this paper I will dwell upon these two claims and how they relate to each other.

New materialisms have faced challenges to their call for incorporating matter into meaning. Paul Rekret poses one such challenge, by critiquing what he characterizes as the collapsed distinction between ontology and ethics is more complex, namely, that a certain view of matter yields ethical demands with respect to that matter. Central to Rekret’s critique is his claim that new materialisms, Bennett’s among them, is that they rely on a binary choice between either ‘attunement to or resentment to materiality’ ( 2010 , p. 227). This is perhaps where the aspiration for entangling matter and ethics causes problems. But they are not insoluble problems. It need not be the case that caring for the ethical charge of a particular ontology requires a binary choice between either caring about matter or not. Rather, new materialisms, in dialogue with speculation can be employed as a call to move toward, dwell upon, consider, the ethical dimensions that emerge from considering matter as playing a part in intellectual endeavours.

This call can be rendered as a ‘struggle’, as Whatmore calls it, for ethics to ‘smuggle some semblance of the messy heterogeneity of being-in-the-world’ ( 2002 ) back into accounts of that world. To put it simply, if ethical descriptions strive to matter, they ought to incorporate some of that matter into their descriptions. Similarly, is speculation hopes to confront the messiness of multiple futures, then seeing speculation as a material practice may aid in such a pursuit.

A mutually informative dialogue between speculation and new materialisms is useful because in each of their guiding assumptions is contained a search for what is on the other side. In other words, the practice of speculation can be new materialist, and the theory of new materialism can be speculative. It is possible to reclaim new materialisms from the charge that they reduce to either a binary choice between attunement or resentment to materiality, by reformulating this binary as dynamic.

Rekret’s critique constructs the claims of new materialisms according to the same representationalist scheme that both Barad and Bennett challenge. Attending to the role of matter in public life, a la Bennett, or conceiving an ontology that is always-already bound up with ethical resonances, a la Barad, does not necessitate closing off New Materialisms wholly from other modes of discourse. One can see Barad’s onto-ethico-epistemology as a call to action without seeing it as a non-negotiable statement of fact. The anti-representionalist tendencies in new materialisms may seem like a get-out clause, but when reconstructed in the context of the spirit of speculation with which I began, viable ways emerge of both attuning to matter and engaging with speculative thinking. A series of methods proposed by John Law ( 2003 ), help illuminate the common concerns of speculation and new materialisms:

Unpredictability, becoming, mess, spontaneity, in-articulability, responsibility

Staying with speculation symposium.

Speculation has become a buzzword, of sorts, in academia over the past few years. Because of this, and due to my numerous encounters with authors who posit speculation as some positivist, miracle tool for messy issues—smart cities, the Anthropocene, post-truth politics, urban futures—I was moved to dwell on speculation, as tool, as method, as subject, as troublesome. The resulting symposium Staying with Speculation (Halton Mill, Lancashire, June 2018) generated some interesting responses to the issue of speculation, and how it relates to futures.

It was these kinds of themes that informed Staying with Speculation symposium. The content of the symposium was largely exploratory, sharing encounters and conceptions of speculation through co-creative activities.

If an ethics is not straightforwardly necessitated out of a particular ontology, as Rekret criticizes new materialisms for assuming, then what is the significance of attending to the matter of materiality, and in what ways is this a speculative enterprise? Some questions that this work has raised, and which warrant further investigation:

Can or should there be links forged between certain ways of thinking (speculation), certain attitudes towards matter and materiality (new materialisms) and political agendas?

If so, how should these links be negotiated?

In what ways can speculation be construed as a material practice, or, practice of mattering?

New materialisms can help to realize and make real the material, more-than-human worlds with which speculation implicitly deals, to forge a two way street between thinking and matter. If such a process is a political one, it is because attending to the practices of speculation and their matters, requires attending to our entanglements with material worlds, both human and more-than-human. It requires attending to our responsibilities and response-abilities, the abilities we have to respond to matter and the abilities matter has to respond to us.

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Thanks to the Politics, Philosophy and Religion department at Lancaster for supporting the symposium that informed this research.

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Moffat, L. Putting speculation and new materialisms in dialogue. Palgrave Commun 5 , 11 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0219-8

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A critique of new materialism: ethics and ontology

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This article seeks to offer a critical assessment of the conception of ethics underlying the growing constellation of ‘new materialist’ social theories. It argues that such theories offer little if any purchase in understanding the contemporary transformations of relations between mind and body or human and non-human natures. Taking as exemplary the work of Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, and Karen Barad, this article asserts that a continuity between ethics and ontology is central to recent theories of ‘materiality’. These theories assert the primacy of matter by calling upon a spiritual or ascetic self-transformation so that one might be ‘attuned to’ or ‘register’ materiality and, conversely, portray critique as hubristic, conceited, or resentful, blinded by its anthropocentrism. It is argued that framing the grounds for ontological speculation in these ethical terms licences the omission of analysis of social forces mediating thought’s access to the world and so grants the theorist leave to sidestep any questions over the conditions of thought. In particular, the essay points to ongoing processes of the so-called primitive accumulation as constituting the relationship between mind and body, human and non-human natures.

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Rekret, P. A critique of new materialism: ethics and ontology. Subjectivity 9 , 225–245 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0001-y

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• Acknowledgments Introducing the New Materialisms / Diana Coole and Samantha Frost The Force of Materiality A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism / Jane Bennett
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New Materialism and the Eco-Marxist Challenge : Ontological Shadowboxing in the Environmental Humanities

TOBIAS SKIVEREN is an associate professor at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His work is situated at the intersection of new materialism, postcritique, and affect studies and has appeared in journals such as Theory, Culture, and Society , New Literary History , and Literature and Medicine . He is currently leading a collective research project on ecocritical pedagogies funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (“Environmental Literary in L1 Education: Greening Danish Literary History”).

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Tobias Skiveren; New Materialism and the Eco-Marxist Challenge : Ontological Shadowboxing in the Environmental Humanities . Environmental Humanities 1 July 2023; 15 (2): 181–194. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422355

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In recent years, the critical vocabulary of the environmental humanities has shifted. After a decade burgeoning with new materialist explorations of intra-active entanglements and nonhuman vitalities, scholars are today becoming increasingly interested in the environmental effects of capitalism, its ecological rifts, fossil economy, and omnipresent wastescapes. Driving this shift is a reinvigoration of eco-Marxist thinking, which not only offers new focus points but also launches philosophical polemics against the field’s longstanding turn to matter. Facing these polemics, scholars in the environmental humanities are currently facing a difficult choice: should we opt for an “old” or a “new” materialism? This essay argues that this confrontation between new materialism and eco-Marxism pivots not on ontological differences, as is often assumed, but on diverging attitudes toward critical methodologies. It claims specifically that many of the recent polemics practice a kind of philosophical shadowboxing that blurs a more fundamental disagreement about the role and status of “critique.” Staging an encounter between Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm (2018) and Jane Bennett’s Influx and Efflux (2020), the essay makes its case by demonstrating, first, how an attachment to critical methodologies drives eco-Marxists to polemicize against ontologies that, in fact, resemble their own. It then shows how new materialists advance such ontologies to supplement these critical methodologies with more affectively engaged modes of scholarship. By framing the debate in this way, the essay ultimately aims to push back against the methodological dogmatism of eco-Marxists who take critique to be the only legitimate mode of inquiry.

In recent years, the critical vocabulary of the environmental humanities has shifted. After a decade burgeoning with new materialist explorations of intra-active entanglements and nonhuman vitalities, scholars are today becoming increasingly interested in the environmental effects of capitalism, its ecological rifts, fossil economy, and omnipresent wastescapes. 1 Driving this shift is a reinvigoration of eco-Marxist thinking, which, judged by sheer quantity alone, has increased significantly in popularity within the past decade. 2 And yet, as these lines of thought move to the foreground, we are not only offered a new set of focus points but also confronted with a new set of intellectual challenges. At the very least, the eco-Marxist boom drags with it a string of polemics against the field’s longstanding turn to matter, conjuring up an array of fundamental philosophical dilemmas that urge us to pick a side: 3 Does Deleuzian monism or Hegelian dialectics point the way forward? What qualifies as collective agency? Should we opt for an “old” or “new” materialism?

At first sight, this confrontation between new materialism and eco-Marxist theory looks like a rehash of well-known ontological disputes. When the movement of new materialism gathered momentum in the first decade of the new millennium, some new materialists not only pushed back against the textualism of various forms of social constructionism but also framed new materialism as an alternative to Marxist materialisms and their alleged determinism. With one hand, they dismissed social constructivism for rendering matter a blank page for social inscriptions; with the other, they rejected historical materialism for hypostasizing the economy as a material base and downgrading ideology, discourse, and semiotics as mere epiphenomena. 4 By contrast, new materialism itself steered toward a middle course: a poststructuralist version of materialism that recognized the contingent and unpredictable entanglement of all sorts of material and cultural forces. Rather than relegating these forces to dichotomous poles in an ontological hierarchy, new materialists recast matter and discourse as mutually interdependent, or intra-active, as it were, constantly unfolding and coevolving in complex and multifaceted ways. No longer the driver of a historical teleology or a blank screen for cultural projections, materiality unfurled in “bio-social assemblages,” “material-semiotic fields,” “socio-material flesh,” “nature-cultures,” and so on. 5

This new materialist departure from Marxist materialism, however, does not square well with contemporary eco-Marxist scholarship. Here, the model of base versus superstructure has been abandoned in favor of more relational frameworks, as scholars now quarrel about what kind of dialectic best articulates the relationship between nature and culture. Today, John Bellamy Foster argues for a dialectical recognition of “ecological rifts”; Jason W. More advocates a Marxist dialectic of “bundles”; and Andreas Malm claims that only so-called property dualism captures the “dialectics between nature and society.” 6 While these scholars have loudly accused each other over the past couple of years for being either too dualist or too monist, they all converge in their commitment to dialectic models and in that sense ultimately recognize both the interdependency of nature and culture and the respective autonomy of these categories. 7 As ontologies, their views acknowledge that nature is not wholly untouched by culture, while at the same time emphasizing nature as the hotbed of processes and activities that unfold beyond the realm of culture.

Phrased like this, though, these theories do not sound incompatible with the new materialist project. Even for a scholar like myself who has been quite involved in the advancement of new materialism, it is often difficult to tell them apart. After all, new materialism also committed itself to this balancing act of respecting the ontological status of nature without eradicating the significance of culture. And to be sure, if the teleological determinism of old Marxist materialism is abandoned, there are certainly a good number of similarities between eco-Marxist dialectics of nature and society and new materialist intra-actions of matter and discourse. In both cases, nature and culture are related, yet not conflated; they affect each other without determining one another. In that sense, even though the current theoretical confrontation is often framed as an ontological dilemma, it is not major ontological discrepancies that set new materialists and contemporary eco-Marxists apart.

But then, what does set them apart? Why does the advancement of eco-Marxist theory come with a string of philosophical polemics against new materialism if we’re only dealing with minor ontological revisioning? Why all this fuss about dialectics and intra-action if it is often hard to tell the difference? What’s really at stake in the present disputes?

In this essay, I want to argue that the current confrontation between new materialism and eco-Marxist theory pivots not on ontological differences but on diverging attitudes toward critical methodologies. I am claiming, in other words, that many of the recent contributions to these debates practice a kind of ontological shadowboxing that ultimately blurs a more fundamental disagreement about the role and status of critique. In what follows, I will make my case by demonstrating, first, how an attachment to critical methodologies pushes eco-Marxists to polemicize against ontologies that, in fact, resemble their own. I will then show how new materialists advance such ontologies with reference to the need to supplement these critical methodologies with more affectively engaged modes of scholarship. I will do both by setting up an encounter between two recent publications by leading scholars from each side of the aisle, namely, on the one hand, Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm (2018), a more than two-hundred-page critique of trendsetting scholars within and around the field of new materialism, and, on the other, Jane Bennett’s Influx and Efflux (2020), the follow-up to her influential Vibrant Matter (2010), which implicitly engages with intermediate debates about new materialism. By focusing on these two scholars as contrary poles in a larger dispute, I obviously risk reducing the diversity of both new materialist and eco-Marxist scholarship. 8 Yet in doing so, I hope to gain a way of sharply delineating the diverging principles at stake in these debates, while remembering that Bennett and Malm only make up two instances in much more fuzzy and ambiguous fields. With these complexities in mind, the essay ultimately aims to push back against the methodological dogmatism of eco-Marxists who take critique to be the only legitimate mode of inquiry.

• How to Dismiss (Your Own) Monism: Andreas Malm

Andreas Malm is often credited with suggesting the Capitalocene as a historical concept that underscores the planetary impact of capitalism in our contemporary era. 9 But Malm is also the author of one of the most comprehensive critiques of new materialism to date. In The Progress of This Storm , he undertakes the task of summarizing and unpacking a string of eco-Marxist objections, all of which essentially dismiss new materialist ontologies as politically dubious. On closer inspection, however, the ontologies refuted nevertheless resemble those proposed by eco-Marxists themselves.

In this very vocal and direct critique, Malm argues that new materialist ontologies blur distinctions between nature and society in ways that are both conceptually and philosophically problematic. They do so, first and foremost, by robbing humans of their exclusive capacity to act by distributing agency to all sorts of beings, human as well as nonhuman. In their attempt to push back against the textualism of social constructivism, new materialists simply go too far in rendering matter rather than discourse the foundation of all actions, and consequently, Malm insists, they level out significant differences between human and nonhuman forms of existence. “Everything is a blur of hybrids,” the back cover tells us; yet in this warming world, “it is more important than ever to distinguish between the natural and the social.” For how are we to identify the roots of climate change if our theories cannot tell Anthropos from the rest of nature? After all, humans did this, not ants and trees.

As Malm lays out his own ontology, however, things get complicated. For new materialists, at least, he begins to sound more like a distant relative than a mortal enemy. Take Malm’s definition of nature, which seems to designate the very same phenomenon that new materialists refer to with their idea of nonhuman agency. Following Kate Soper, Malm takes nature as “the material structures and processes that are independent of human activity (in the sense that they are not a humanly created product), and whose forces and causal powers are the necessary conditions of every human practice, and determine the possible forms it can take.” 10 Nature, by this account, harnesses forces that are not controlled by humans but in fact condition human practices. Nature is beyond our reach, yet in many ways shapes us. It is characterized by powers that both transcend and transfuse humanity. While new materialists might describe this feature of natural forces in the rather different vocabulary of autonomy, autopoiesis, vitality, or, again, agency, they’re nevertheless aiming at a very similar dynamic. 11 In the end, both stress the ability of nonhuman forces to do stuff without the help of culture, and that this doing ultimately penetrates and regulates any human.

In that sense, Malm actually does recognize some degree of overlap between nature and culture, even as he argues for maintaining their respective distinctiveness. In fact, like most new materialists, he embeds these domains in the very same substance, confessing explicitly to a materialist monism of sorts. “The entwinement of social and natural relations,” he writes, “is made not only possible but inevitable, given that the two are continuous parts of the material world.” 12 According to Malm, however, this monism should not be conflated with the monism of new materialism, which, we’re told, differs significantly. In Malm’s account, new materialist monism implies a flat ontology that attributes the same properties to all entities and beings, whereas his own stance acknowledges the distinct features that distinguish humans from nonhumans. Conceptualizing these features as “emergent properties” that arise randomly through the history of evolution, Malm accounts for the particular qualities of humans (intentionality being his main example) without relapsing into metaphysical dichotomies. The name he provides for this account is “substance monist materialist property dualism.” 13

However, while most new materialists scorn the vocabulary of dialectics and dualism, they nevertheless do acknowledge the differences that set humans and nonhumans apart. Thinkers like Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Elizabeth Grosz, Stacy Alaimo, and, of course, Jane Bennett may spend most of their time highlighting similarities, stressing the more-than-human quality of human corporeality for instance, 14 but none of these scholars takes human and nonhuman species to be one and the same thing. The point here is not to erase these differences altogether, as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost emphasize in their oft-cited introduction to New Materialisms (2010), but to underscore that “the difference between humans and animals, or even between sentient and nonsentient matter, is a question of degree more than of kind.” 15 And surprisingly, like Malm, several new materialists—Jane Bennett or Elizabeth Grosz, for instance—even explain the making of these differences in the very same terms of emergence and evolution. 16

• The Dogma of Critique

Now, this ontological similarity between Malm and his targets surely raises a lot of questions. If Malm’s ontology shares key features with those suggested by new materialists, why care so much about refuting the latter? What’s the actual driver of this polemic if not substantial disagreements about the relation between nature and society? These questions could obviously be approached by a lot of ways, but the main key to answering them, I believe, hides in the specific rhetoric that drives The Progress of This Storm .

Here a distinctive pattern arises. Malm’s favorite rhetorical move is to pick a provocative concept from the new materialist vocabulary and then extend its implications into absurdity. Known within the study of rhetoric as “reductio ad absurdum,” this move allows Malm to rebut new materialism by presenting its consequences as unacceptable. So new materialists think matter is alive? ”No one would ask CO 2 molecules to come down from the heavens or demand that the oil platforms scrap themselves and pay their victims.” 17 So new materialists think that agency is distributed across human and nonhuman actants? “One can imagine how this line of reasoning could enter international climate negotiations. It was not us who initiated coal consumption or emitted the CO 2 ; it was the swarm of actants that caught us up in their whirlwind.” 18 If new materialist vocabularies, Malm continues, “are to have any meaning in our case, we really are instructed to believe that deposits have agency as against those who excavate them, that coal and clouds have acted as outside powers, that non-human species were as much endeavoring to consume fossil fuels all along.” 19

As these examples suggest, Malm’s argument builds largely on a rhetoric of ridicule. Look at all these silly new materialists! Their founding concepts are absurd! And yet, as much as experiences of absurdity can seem self-evident, what qualifies as absurd is not simply given. As Foucault reminds us, any delineation between meaningful and absurd propositions depends upon the norms of their specific epistemic contexts. What is attributed meaning, in other words, is altogether contingent on the criteria for meaning-making of the discursive regime in question. 20 By this line of thinking, the question, then, becomes not whether Malm is right or not, but what epistemic premises enable his ridicule. Or, put differently, what norms about academic scholarship render the new materialist vocabulary nonsensical?

Let’s return to the claim that new materialism would lead us to ask oil platforms to scrap themselves and pay their victims. Why is this funny? Well, it’s funny because of the absurdity of holding oil platforms accountable. New materialism, in other words, is ridiculed for its inability to place responsibility, and in other passages, Malm himself quite explicitly confirms this logic. At the very least, the notion of responsibility becomes particularly important as Malm advances his main argument. In the case of global warming, he writes, new materialism’s extension of agency ultimately inhibits us from pointing out the wrongdoings of humans. 21 In fact, by bestowing nonhuman entities with the ability to act, new materialists even participate in a “whitewashing” of sorts. 22 For how are we to critique those in power if human agency is distributed across human and nonhuman actants? “The only sensible thing to do now is to put a stop to the extension of agency,” Malm writes: “In this warming world, that honor belongs exclusively to those humans who extract, buy, sell and combust fossil fuels, and to those who uphold this circuit, and to those who have committed these acts over the past two centuries.” 23

To be sure, a lot could be said about these passages, but what interests me in this context is the consistent assumption that the aim of new materialism should be to hold people responsible. In Malm’s account, new materialists are expected to locate the social and historical drivers of global warming and condemn those who support these drivers. 24 When all is said and done, he writes, “it will all be a question of responsibility,” 25 and for that reason, “any theory for the warming condition” should not only struggle to stabilize the climate but do so “with the demolition of the fossil economy as the necessary first step.” 26

It is clear that phrases like these inscribe Malm in a larger trend in cultural theory to frame critique as the only legitimate mode of inquiry. By this logic, critique is not merely one of several optional approaches but a necessary component of any theory, as it were. Here, it all comes down to holding people responsible. At work in this line of thinking, as Rita Felski and others have noted, is a kind of methodological dogmatism that validates scholars who aim to demystify false beliefs and denounce societal arrangements, while simultaneously delegitimizing those who operate by other means as nonsensical or even politically dubious. 27 While dominant in a wide range of fields and disciplines, this dogmatism, however, is particularly salient in eco-Marxist critiques of new materialism. In addition to Malm, consider Carl Cassegård, who criticizes Bennett for “an uncritical” attitude that allegedly prohibits her from using macro-level concepts to critique capitalism. 28 Or take John B. Foster who scorns Bruno Latour’s “method of neutral monism” for not challenging “capital accumulation and unlimited economic growth.” 29 In such accounts, all roads lead to critiques of capital, and the cardinal sin is to refrain from joining the eco-Marxist project. It is hardly surprising, then, that the new materialist vocabulary comes across as absurd. Judged by the epistemic premises of critique alone, it certainly doesn’t make much sense to extend agency beyond the realm of culture. What good would it do to identify the acts of ants and trees, if the final aim is to critique and hold accountable? After all, nature doesn’t care if we debunk its doings.

Yet most new materialists do not extend agency with the primary aim of critiquing the acts of ants and trees. In fact, several key figures have explicitly distanced themselves from the traditional methodologies of critique. Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, and Elizabeth Grosz, as diverse as these scholars may be, all frame new materialism as an opportunity to precisely move beyond “the usual critical gestures” and experiment with other routes than ”the well-worn path of critique.” 30 Malm’s ridicule, then, ultimately builds on false premises, or at least on a set of epistemic assumptions about the role and purpose of academic scholarship that is not shared by those he portrays. He takes critique to be the ultimate horizon of the new materialist project, even as many new materialists have moved beyond critique in its conventional forms. In The Progress of This Storm , then, new materialism looks absurd only because key premises are left out. Undoubtedly, this is the textbook definition of a straw man.

• From Responsibility to Response-Ability: Jane Bennett

So far, I’ve argued that eco-Marxist polemics often disguise themselves as philosophical disputes about ontology, while actually advocating a methodological dogmatism that takes critique to be the only legitimate mode of analysis. I’ve also argued that in the case of Malm this maneuver manifests itself in a rhetoric of ridicule that frames new materialists as absurd by leaving out their alternatives to critique. Now, however, it’s time to explore what these alternatives are all about. What’s the methodological purpose of advancing materialist ontologies through the language of agency and vitality?

To underscore the obvious, new materialists do not aim to swap one methodological dogmatism with another. Unlike Malm, they generally do not see their academic practice as an apt lens for any theory on global warming regardless of specific research questions, cases, or contexts. By contrast, some even argue explicitly for a methodological pluralism, in which different types of intervention work side by side. Take Jane Bennett’s recent book Influx and Efflux (2020), which opens with an acknowledgment of the importance of critique in our current political climate. 31 Yet this importance does not mean that other modes of intervention should be abandoned or fought off. Rather than putting all our eggs in one basket, she writes, we need a wide array of analytical and intellectual tools. Bennett’s own aim, accordingly, is not to “supplant” critique but to “supplement” critique. 32

New materialist ontologies are an integral part of that endeavor. By extending “agency” beyond the realm of culture, Bennett seeks not to make ants and trees vulnerable to critique, as Malm would have it, but to help us recognize, affectively and perceptively, our minuscule role in a much larger cosmos, hoping that we’ll act with less superciliousness and self-centeredness. By learning about the ability of nonhumans to act, the logic goes, we may develop alternative feelings about our environment. In that sense, Bennett’s project is to render our mode of perception less anthropocentric and, in doing so, enhance our ability to respond to the multitudes of life within and around us, human as well as nonhuman. Rather than placing “responsibility,” Bennett hopes to cultivate what Donna Haraway has dubbed “response-ability.” 33 We need to be able to respond to life-forms, things, and activities that have hitherto often been relegated to the background of our existence. If we do so, by this line of thinking, we’re not whitewashing but teaching ourselves to care more.

For scholars of critique, this endeavor to help us care more by modulating affective dispositions and perceptual habits can come across as inferior, unambitious, or simply not political enough. Without tackling this issue head-on, Malm, for instance, is quick to reject theories that commit the “pathetic fallacy.” 34 But for the new materialist, affective mobilization is crucial. Without affect, there’s nothing to drive societal change. We can be deeply convinced about what kind of society we prefer or what kinds of actions we approve, but if these convictions are not propelled by corporeal impulses, sentiments, and habits, they’re like a car without an engine (or battery, of course). Political norms about right and wrong, ethical ideas about good and bad, they all need incarnation to work. “If [an ethical code] is to be transformed into acts,” Bennett writes, “affects must be engaged, orchestrated, and libidinally bound to it—codes alone seem unable to propel their own enactment.” 35 This also explains why so many of us are hypocrites, acting in contrast to what we believe in. For new materialists, this is not an issue of false consciousness but an issue of inadequate affective response.

By advising us to speak about nonhumans as “lively,” “agential,” and even “intentional,” new materialists suggest a way of changing these patterns of response, hoping that such terminological anthropomorphizations seep down from the realm of reflection to the realm of corporal dispositions, inculcating a new set of response-abilities. The new materialist vocabulary, the logic goes, is particularly apt for this purpose because it diverges from established anthropocentric regimes of truth in which humans are perceived as alive and active and nonhumans, in contrast, as dead and passive. For that precise reason, though, this vocabulary can also come across as inaccessible, as some scholars have rightfully objected. Toril Moi, for instance, sarcastically describes Vicky Kirby’s writing as “willfully opaque,” 36 and Malm notes similarly that new materialist texts often resemble “poetry,” adding with evident skepticism: “a noble enterprise different from critical research.” 37 And yet, while the inaccessible style of some new materialists indeed is problematic, I don’t think we should be so quick to lament its poetic qualities. As I’ve argued elsewhere, new materialists often incorporate such stylistic features to precisely make their terminological innovations more accessible. 38 For these scholars, practices of fabulation, speculation, and storytelling appear to be attractive epistemological devices for changing affective and perceptual dispositions. It’s no coincidence that Influx and Efflux takes the poetry of Walt Whitman as its main source of inspiration.

Whitman’s poetry is key here because it allows Bennett to move beyond traditional academic writing by mixing philosophical discourse with affective imagery of post-anthropocentric ontologies. Without producing outright fiction, Bennett adopts and transforms Whitman’s many fictionalizing devices—anthropomorphizations, visions, metaphors, and so on—all of which depart from anthropocentric regimes of truth by inventing new ways of feeling and seeing the world. Bennett’s fascination with Whitman—and Franz Kafka and Henry D. Thoreau, for that matter—begins and ends with the endeavor to help us grasp her ontologies not only cognitively but also affectively. And, just to underscore the popularity of this move in new materialist scholarship, similar interest in fiction drives significant parts of Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures (2010), Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016), Rebekah Sheldon’s The Child to Come (2016), and Astrida Neimanis’s Bodies of Water (2017).

To clarify, it’s not that the critical tradition does not also work by affective means. Even a figure like Malm, who stresses reflection as a means to counter emotional impulses, disavowing the pathetic fallacy, he too writes in ways that modulate the affective dispositions of his readers. To expose social injustices, to debunk false ideologies, to uncover the environmental consequences of the fossil economy surely has emotional effects, prompting a sense of indignation, urgency, and anger, which may, hopefully, propel some kind of action. In a certain sense, this is how cultural theory in general works. Malm may place responsibility in his academic writing, yet he has no juridical means to enforce his judgments. All he has is the potential to move people by affecting their worldviews, sentiments, and patterns of response. In contrast to Malm, new materialists strongly emphasize the importance of such affective modulations and allow this emphasis to open new venues for scholarly intervention. For if critical debunking works primarily by providing arguments and ideas that inculcate a sense of indignation and anger, then other kinds of theories may intervene by mobilizing other affective registers. Hence, new materialism’s fascination for care, concern, enchantment, and joy. 39

Some scholars may associate the latter affective register with a happy-go-lucky and hippie-like feel that can seem harmless. On closer inspection, however, there’s unquestionably a gendered aspect to such an association. At the very least, it’s a striking coincidence that the affective dimension offered here by primarily feminist new materialists is ignored completely by Malm, who, like many other eco-Marxists, happens to identify as male. 40 And yet, as much as the affective register of care, concern, and joy is often coded as feminine, this register is not necessarily less powerful than the affects triggered by critique. Each register fuels our engagements with the world and can accordingly, if mobilized correctly, stimulate us to pursue more sustainable ecologies. “If the political,” Bennett writes, “is acknowledged to include all the affects and energies—affirmative and negative—with the potential for societal transformation, then Influx and Efflux can qualify as (among other genres) a political work.” 41 In that sense, the new materialist interest in ontology is driven also by a methodological aim: to reconfigure affective patterns of response and incite more positive engagements with the world.

• Beyond Dogmatism

What I have tried to stress here, ultimately, is that eco-Marxists risk excluding a potentially significant supplement to critical methodologies if they fail to acknowledge such affective experiments as legitimate intellectual endeavors. As we have seen in the work of Malm, this is sometimes the case because of a deep-rooted methodological dogmatism that leads eco-Marxists to dismiss alternatives to critique as absurd or even politically dubious. In fact, it drives Malm to polemicize against the ontological foundation of these alternatives even though this foundation resembles his own.

To be clear, my point is not that these resemblances should lead all eco-Marxists and new materialists to join forces. As much as their respective positions may permit an ontological reconciliation, such a tenet could easily result in a one-size-fits-all methodology that would end up making us all do one and the same thing. Rather than methodological homogeneity, I believe we need methodological pluralism (not to be mistaken for methodological relativism). And so, I actually welcome eco-Marxism’s rise for widening the scope of possible modes of inquiry. At the same time, though, I also hope that its main advocates will drop the habit of disqualifying alternative perspectives simply because they operate on different epistemic premises. In the environmental humanities, as well as most other academic contexts, we do not need one Theory to rule them all. What we need is a broad array of tools and perspectives.

• Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Marie Louise Krogh, Martin Karlsson Pedersen, Karl Emil Rosenbæk, Martin Rohr Gregersen, Mati Klitgård, Mads Ejsing, Valdemar Nielsen Pold, and Nicolai Skiveren for valuable feedback on various versions of my essay as well as Jacob Rosendahl, Søren Mau, and Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen for reading and discussing Malm’s and Moore’s work with me. I would also like to thank the sharp and lively audiences at “Capital, Climate, Crisis,” the 6th annual conference for the Danish Society for Marxist Studies, and “Ecofiction in the Capitalocene,” an annual workshop arranged by the Aesthetics of Empire research cluster at Linnaeus University, where I initially presented my critique of The Progress of This Storm . And finally, my funding: The writing of this essay was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (2102-00187B).

See, for instance, Foster, Clark, and York, Ecological Rift ; Malm, Fossil Capital ; Frantzen and Bjering, “Ecology, Capitalism, Waste.”  

Google Ngram Viewer, s.v. “ecomarxism; 2010–2019; English,” https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ecomarxism&year_start=2010&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3 (accessed December 5, 2021).

See, for instance Malm , Progress of This Storm ; Pasek, “Carbon Vitalism” ; Foster, “Marxism in the Anthropocene” ; Forter “Nature, Capitalism, and the Temporalities of Sleep” ; Cassegård, Toward a Critical Theory ; Soper, Post-Growth Living , 19–27 ; Hornborg, Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene , 177–230 . For related Marxist critiques, see Lillywhite, “Is Posthumanism Primitivism?” ; Cole, “Nature of Dialectical Materialism” ; and Eagleton, Materialism , 1–35 .

See, for instance, Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 591 ; Grosz, Volatile Bodies , 190 ; and Bennett, Vibrant Matter , xvi.

Bennett, “System and Things,” 85 ; Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 588 ; Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh , 149–52 ; Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto .

Foster, Clark, and York, Ecological Rift , 32 , in particular; Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life , 5–8 ; Malm, Progress of This Storm , 59 .

See for instance Foster, “Marxism in the Anthropocene,” 398–402 ; Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life , 77 ; Moore, “How to Read Capitalism in the Web of Life ,” 156 ; and Malm, Progress of This Storm , 97–99 .

Like the disagreements between Malm, Foster, and Moore, Bennett’s reinterpretation of vitalist philosophy differs significantly from Karen Barad’s reinterpretation of Niels Bohr, which, in turn, differs from Elizabeth Grosz’ reinterpretation of Darwin. Notwithstanding their diverging conceptual inspirations, however, these scholars all push back against textualist ontologies by reconceptualizing agency as a material affair—even as many new materialists have recently shown interest in the very same phenomena that the movement initially rejected as anthropocentric. See Skiveren, “New Materialism’s Second Phase.”  

Malm often shares this honor with Jason Moore and Donna Haraway, both of whom, however, credit him. See for instance Welk-Joerger, “Restoring Eden,” 90 ; Bloomfield, “Widening Gyre,” 508 ; Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene ?, 5; and Haraway, Staying with the Trouble , 184 .

Malm, Progress of This Storm , 28 .

For a pertinent summary of the new materialist vocabulary, see New Materialisms , 9, in particular.

Malm, Progress of This Storm , 60 .

Malm, Progress of This Storm , 59 .

See for instance Alaimo, Bodily Natures , and Neimanis, Bodies of Water .

Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” 21 .

Bennett, Vibrant Matter , 24 ; Grosz, Becoming Undone , 11–25 .

Malm, Progress of This Storm , 117 .

Malm, Progress of This Storm , 111 .

Malm, Progress of This Storm , 110 .

Foucault, Order of Things , 183 .

Malm, Progress of This Storm , 112 .

Malm, Progress of This Storm , 18 .

Felski, Limits of Critique ; see also Sedgwick, Touching Feeling ; and Holm, “Critical Capital.” In literary studies, this trend has been discussed with reference to the term postcritique . For a recent overview, see Skiveren, “Postcritique.”  

Cassegård, Toward a Critical Theory , 170–73 .

Foster, “Marxism in the Anthropocene,” 398, 410 .

Grosz, Time Travels , 2 ; Alaimo and Hekman, Material Feminisms , 4 . See also Bennett, Influx and Efflux , xix–xx; Juelskjær and Schwennesen, “Intra-active Entanglements,” 14 ; Braidotti, Metamorphosis , 57 ; van der Tuin, “Different Starting Point,” 22 ; Massumi, “On Critique,” 339 .

Bennett, Influx and Efflux , xix.

Bennett, Influx and Efflux , xx.

Haraway, When Species Meet , 88–93 .

Malm, Progress of This Storm , 100–1 .

Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life , 131 .

Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary , 124 .

Malm, Progress of This Storm , 100 .

Skiveren, “Fictionality in New Materialism.”  

Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care ; Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam” ; Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life ; Braidotti, “Ethics of Joy.”  

Eco-Marxists, however, are not the first to push back against the affective dimension of new materialism. For previous critiques, see Rekret, “Critique of New Materialism” ; Boysen, “Embarrassment of Being Human” ; and Lemke, “Alternative Model of Politics.” For a feminist critique of “big boy” theory, see Katz, “Towards a Minor Theory.”  

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31 Feminist New Materialisms

Nancy Tuana is the DuPont/Class of 1949 Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies at Penn State and the Founding Director of the Penn State Rock Ethics Institute. Her most recent book, coauthored with Charles Scott, Beyond Philosophy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and Anzaldúa (Indiana University Press, 2020), occasions practices of attunement to unspeakable dimensions of experience that are a hitherto seldom-noticed dimension of liberatory thought. Her scholarly work includes books and articles in epistemologies of ignorance and feminist science studies, with particular expertise in intersectional approaches to environmental issues and coupled ethical-epistemic issues in climate change science. She is series editor for ReReading the Canon with Penn State Press and has guest-edited several special issues of Critical Philosophy of Race and Hypatia.

• Published: 12 May 2021
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This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in feminist new materialism, including examples of important contributions to this discussion, as well as current and future directions. The chapter discusses three different sources for the conception of materialism engaged in the feminist new materialisms: (1) attention to materiality in the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and postmodern thought, (2) a turn to the sciences to better understand materiality, and (3) Marxist-inspired conceptions of materiality. The chapter also reflects on the meaning of “new” in feminist new materialism.

“ Feminist new materialisms” is a recent term that is deployed to refer to a group of diverse and often significantly divergent approaches within feminist theory. To grapple with this complexity, it is helpful to first clarify the meaning of “materialism” as it is employed in these theories and then consider the modifier, “new.” I identify three different sources for the conception of materialism engaged in the feminist new materialisms: (1) attention to materiality in the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and postmodern thought, (2) a turn to the sciences to better understand materiality, and (3) Marxist-inspired conceptions of materiality. The question of the newness of feminist new materialisms is addressed in the second part of the entry. The entry concludes with a discussion of current critiques of feminist new materialisms.

Three Lineages of Materialism

Tracing the lineages of the materialism of the feminist new materialism is no simple matter. Rosi Braidotti in Patterns of Dissonance (1991) provides one such genealogy. A key component for Braidotti is feminist attentiveness, such as that of Simone de Beauvoir’s, to the importance of embodiment and its situatedness. Feminist phenomenological accounts of embodiment are an important element of a widespread feminist suspicion of dichotomies such as mind/body or nature/culture. Phenomenological approaches not based on such dichotomies resulted in a rich attunement to materiality in terms of the embodied nature of the subject. In the hands of feminists, this attunement to materiality was accompanied by attention to the complex exchanges between bodies and power. While recognizing the roots of attention to the emergence of materiality and power in Marxist materialism, Braidotti traces its radical transformation in what she calls the neo-materialism of Foucault with his attention to biopower alongside the neo-vitalist materiality proposed by Deleuze. Braidotti argues that feminists encountered in the work of these theorists “a more radical sense of materialism,” that is, “a form of neo-materialism and a blend of vitalism that is attuned to the technological era” (Braidotti 2000 , 161, 160). Braidotti’s vision of matter as lively, emergent, and generative is a theme common in many versions of new materialism. Jane Bennett, for example, in The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (2001), deploys the term “enchanted materialism” to call attention to the agency of organic as well as inorganic phenomena. Identifying resources for her vital materialism in the work of theorists as diverse as Bergson, Deleuze, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, Bennett aims to “give voice to a vitality intrinsic to materiality” such that we recognize and appreciate that we are all enmeshed in a dense network of material relations (2010, 3).

An alternative genealogy for feminist new materialisms concerns the belief by some practitioners that the nature and significance of materiality cannot be fully understood without engagement with the natural sciences. These feminists want to balance what they see as the “cultural turn,” that is, the privileging “of text and context over world and experience” resulting from a shift from materialist to discursive approaches (Hemmings 2011 , 86). Such feminist new materialists want to show that a genuine understanding of materiality requires knowledge based on biological and other natural sciences perspectives. Their critique is that feminist studies of embodiment based on a humanities perspective remain on the surface of bodies. What is referred to as the cultural or linguistic turn is often viewed as epitomized in the work of Judith Butler. As Karen Barad claims, “Perhaps the most crucial limitation of Butler’s [approach]…is that it is limited to an account of materialization of human bodies, or more accurately, to the construction of the surface of the human body (which most certainly is not all there is to human bodies)” (1998, 107). In what has been labeled an ontological turn, Karen Barad develops her version of feminist new materialism through attention to physics. She begins with the physics of Niels Bohr to trace a materialism founded on an ontological shift to an understanding of matter as emerging from dynamic relationality. She argues that “any robust theory of the materialization of bodies would necessarily take account of how the body’s materiality—for example, its anatomy and physiology—and other material forces actively matter to the processes of materialization” (2003, 809). Matter’s dynamism is, for Barad, agential. Deploying an event ontology, she understands the things of the world as grounded not in fixed or stable substances, but rather in events of emergent interaction. She uses the term “intra-action” to displace even the tendency to posit a dualism. Troubled by the divide between language and matter, Barad develops a theory of agential realism in which discursive practices and materiality coemerge (2007, 44–45). Matter is on this account a continuous becoming; both matter and meaning materialize together.

A third genealogy traces the lineages of the materiality of materialist feminism through a Marxist-inspired attention to economic and political inequalities. Myra Hird argues that materialist feminism must be “concerned with women’s material living conditions—labor, reproduction, political access, health, education, and intimacy—structured through class, race, ethnicity, age, nation, ableism, heteronormativity, and so on” (Hird 2009 , 329). Similarly, Elizabeth Wingrove makes a distinction between Marxist-inspired materialist feminists and the feminist new materialists by explaining that for historical materialist feminisms “to speak of materiality is to speak of structural logics and constitutive contradictions, systematic relationality, and social totalities,” whereas for the feminist new materialisms, “to speak of materiality is to speak of contingencies, web-like meshes and multidirectional flows that suggest fluctuating connections and a rich ‘messiness’ whose complexity and indeterminacy preclude the notion of a totality” (2016, 456–57). Unlike the more traditional Marxist focus on the capitalist mode of production as the site of oppression, feminist materialists expand the focus to oppressive relations as the point of departure and fundamental reality to be confronted. Such a lens opens the analysis to the oppressions at the heart of complex systems that serve to privilege whiteness, development, heterosexuality, “first world” citizenship, and humanness. Diana Coole offers a version of this approach to feminist new materialism, understanding matter as “the actual, sensuous, corporeal milieu of everyday survival” (2013, 455). On Coole’s account, there are three dimensions to this version of materialism: “the embodied quotidian”; the social, economic, and political structures; and “the planetary eco-/bio- and geo-systems where ‘nature’ succumbs to or eludes social control” (2013, 464).

Perhaps the most promising approach to feminist new materialism is the merging of the previously noted genealogies to open the field up more robustly to the materiality of the complex deployments of differences. Kathy Ferguson, for example, points to the effectiveness of Donna Haraway’s materialism in which her “open-ended ontologies of becoming are woven into dense histories and careful institutional analyses” where histories of colonialization, capitalism, and power relations within science are key elements of her attunement to material entanglements (2015, 81). While Haraway does not refer to her work by this label, a case could be made for her work being one of its central well-springs. Influenced by a Whiteheadian process ontology, Haraway’s deeply relational account of materiality offers many of the components found in the previously mentioned three versions of feminist new materialism. One can trace lineages from historical materialism throughout her socialist feminist work as well as in her signature manner of pushing dualisms to their limits through her coupling of traditionally bifurcated concepts (e.g., material-semiotic, natureculture, tecnoscience), which are designed to offer radical and nonbinary conceptions of difference. For example, in her “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s” (1985), she states as her aim building “an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism” (1985, 65). Haraway’s cyborg is a trope for “ pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” (1985, 66). The boundaries at stake in what she refers to as a “border war” are those at the heart of feminist historical materialism—production, reproduction, and imagination. “In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics—the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other—the relation between organism and machine has been a border war” (1985, 292). One of the central goals of Haraway’s work is to draw attention to the situatedness of the interrelation of production, reproduction, and imagination—historically, culturally, and ecologically. She offers a relational ontological approach, one that acknowledges the agency of nonhuman actors and, in so doing, compels a rethinking of the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. In When Species Meet she argues, “The partners do not precede the meeting; species of all kind, living and not, are consequent to a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters” (Haraway 2008 , 4).

What Is New about Feminist New Materialisms?

How, then, are we to understand the newness of the feminist new materialisms? While some new materialists frame their work as a response to a postmodern overemphasis on language or discourse (Braidotti 2012 ; Barad 2003 ), such a conception miscarries in that it inscribes one of the very dichotomies that new materialism aims to unsettle—mind/body, language/experience. 1 From the material-semiotic coupling of Donna Haraway to the performative theory of Judith Butler, feminist approaches to topics such as gender, sex, and sexuality provide resources for dissolving this divide. Indeed, while Butler is often cited as the exemplar of a theorist who reduces matter to culture, her attention to how matter materializes or, more specifically, how sex materializes is a helpful resource for understanding processes of materializations. As Sara Ahmed explained, “ Bodies That Matter offers a powerful exploration of how histories are sedimented in the very ‘how’ of bodily materialization: it makes sex material” (2008, 33).

Another way this difference has been framed is through an occlusion of the body. For example, Elizabeth Grosz argues that feminists “have forgotten the nature, the ontology, of the body, the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency” (Grosz 2004 , 2). The newness of feminist new materialisms might be seen as involving an account of biology that is fully appreciative of its role in producing difference, variability, and change. Noela Davis frames the concern about cultural feminists in the following way: “In presenting an argument against biological determinism by pointing out the importance of the cultural effects that impacted on our lives, they relegate biology to a very minor role and restate the idea that biology is a rigid and passive system that could not possibly account for the variety we see in society” (2009, 7). This definition of the newness of materialism through a return to or recovery of the body has been itself the subject of critique. Ahmed, for example, argues that one “can only argue for a return to biology by forgetting the feminist work on the biological, including the work of feminists trained in the biological sciences” (2008, 27). Ahmed worries that the call for a return to biology is a speech act that “constructs the figure of the anti-biological feminist who won’t allow us to engage with biology, and inflates her power” (2008, 31).

New materialist’s rejection of a dualistic ontology (mind/matter) combined with feminist attention to difference posits difference as a process of becoming. Difference is a component of our situated, corporeal location. It is, for Braidotti, a negotiable, transversal, affective space, and one not limited to the human (Braidotti 2012 , 29). While the overcoming of dualisms has been a consistent signature of feminist theory in general, it is also offered as one of the signatures of the newness of feminist new materialisms. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, for example, frame the “new” of new materialisms as a pushing of dualisms and dichotomies to an extreme and, in so doing, offering a new conceptualization of difference, a difference structured by neither prioritization (humans/nature) nor predetermined relations (mind/body). As they explain, “A new materialism is constituted by demonstrating how the canonized relations between the mentioned terms are in fact the outcomes of ‘power/knowledge’ according to which Truth is an instantiation of a politics or régime” (2011, 387). They contend that feminist new materialism will catalyze a revolution in dualistic thought not by overcoming sexual difference, but by, in their words, “traversing it” by “allowing for sexual differing” (2011, 389).

The traversing of dichotomies and the porosity of boundaries between humans and other lifeways found in concepts such as Stacy Alaimo’s transcorporeality ( 2010 ) or my own work on viscous porosity (Tuana 2008 ) give rise to creative movements within feminist new materialism. They offer insights into the importance of the emergence of new forms of conceptualization (Diprose 2000 ). Linda Zerilli, for example, advocates the development of new visions of being and doing that serve as catalysts to new perspectives that unsettle our settled significations (2005, 59–60) in ways that acknowledge the emergence of embodied conceptualizations as well as the centrality of poiesis not only for philosophy but also for life. “Beings do not pre-exist their relatings” (Haraway 2003 , 6), nor does the event “precede the concept; the event is itself constituted through the fabrication of the concept, through the ‘condensation’ or gathering together, in a particular way, of the components of the concept” (Diprose 2000 , 117–18). This conception of gathering together is found in Butler’s conception of self-styling as a form of poiesis that engages and re-engages negotiations with dominant norms that, while not oriented to specific goals, provides in their repetition new negotiations that subtly shift our understandings of sex as well as sexuality. 2 We thereby become attuned to the co-influence of social norms and power with the fleshly manifestations of difference—sex, gender, race, class, disability, and age. And in this way, we develop a theory of how sex matters, as well as a powerful lens that provides insights into which bodies matter and which do not, or, at least, not as much. Such attunements return us to Beauvoir’s pronouncement that women are made not born (Beauvoir 1953 , 301) and include a rejection of essentialism and an appreciation of the fluidity of the very categories and experiences that they denote.

Another component of the newness of feminist new materialisms is the rejection of matter as passive, inert, dead. The overall commitment to understanding materiality as a dynamic, situated, interactive process is a cross-cutting theme of feminist new materialisms. To talk of matter some, like Haraway, turn to an account of becoming that is informed by Whitehead. Braidotti turns to Deleuze and the notion of assemblage and rhizome. Barad engages the physics of Bohr in an effort to rethink the agency of matter. The perspective of active, dynamic matter includes an understanding of the human as only one dimension of these complex interactions. In this way both mattering and agency extend beyond the human domain. A conception of matter as agential has led some to advocate a posthumanism.

Elizabeth Grosz’s The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (2017) offers a genealogy of what she calls the incorporeal, “a tradition that eschews dualism—any conception of the mind or ideality and body, or materiality, as separate substances—in order to develop a nonreductive monism or a paradoxical dualist monism” (2017, 249). Tracing lineages from the Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Simondon, and Ruyer, Grosz offers a path for understanding the emergence of new materialist themes in the history of thought.

Critiques of Feminist New Materialism

While still a relatively new approach in feminist theorizing, feminist new materialism has been the subject of a number of critiques. Some, like that of Ahmed discussed earlier, raise concerns about the “newness” of the feminist new materialisms. But another line of concern is that, as Bonnie Washick and Elizabeth Wingrove phrase it, “systemically (re)produced relations of inequality and domination by and among (agentially nonsovereign) humans recede in the face of a new materialist metaphysical (and rhetorical) aesthetic” (2015, 71). The critique is that while power clearly matters to the feminist new materialists, the effort to grasp power “in the fullness of its materiality” (Barad, 2007 ) overlooks, or at least downplays, the relatively durable structures that support hegemonic positions and the ways that they constrain differently positioned individuals and groups. The worry is that the commitment to a radical openness of the ontological imaginary “cannot help but view any purported systematicity as a potential challenge to the very nature (the very truth) of Being,” which shifts the focus away from structural constraints toward agentic possibilities (Washick and Wingrove 2015 , 70). This worry is compounded by their concern that politics is being subordinated to epistemology in the feminist new materialisms, by “better subjects who practice better knowing” rather than imaginative, affective, or strategic resources for political action (2015, 73, 76).

The concerns of Washick and Wingrove are mirrored by others who argue that new materialists’ claims to newness are made at the expense of such traditions as “First Nations and Indigenous peoples; to those humans who have never been quite human enough as explored, for instance, in postcolonial and revolutionary black thought;…and to other non-Western medical and spiritual modalities” (Wazana Tompkins 2016 , n.p.). A related concern is that the “science that is privileged and often conflated with matter in new materialist storytelling…is the same capital ‘S’ Science, unqualified, critiqued by postcolonial feminist science studies” (Willey 2016 , 994). Willey urges the development of a postcolonial feminist materialism as a means to open materialist feminist theorizing beyond the limits of colonialist lenses.

The aforementioned type of concern is interrelated with critiques showing that work in feminist new materialisms bypasses the racialization central in the Western tradition; it does not engage the work that has been done on the systems of oppression that have formed in connection with race, colonialism, and slavery. That is, is there a limited focus not only on which bodies of knowledge matter but also on which bodies matter. As Emily Lee argues in Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race (2014), “A focus on race, on the material, the physical features of race may shed more light on racism’s perseverance” (2014, 1). It might be argued, for example, through the work of Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers, that the human/nonhuman divide cannot be effectively troubled without recognizing the racialized nature of Western notions of the human. Alexander Weheliye in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014) provides a fertile lens for such work. He argues, “Given the histories of slavery, colonialism, segregation, lynching, and so on, humanity has always been a principal question within black life and thought in the west; or, rather, in the moment in which blackness becomes apposite to humanity, Man’s conditions of possibility lose their ontological thrust, because their limitations are rendered abundantly clear. Thus, the functioning of blackness both inside and outside modernity sets the stage for a general theory of the human, and not its particular exception” (2014, 19). Weheliye builds on the insight of Wynter that “sociogenic phenomena, particularly race, become anchored in the ontogenic flesh” to argue that flesh is both a key to understanding the exclusionary operations of the Western conception of the human and a resource for transforming the figure of the human through corporality.

The work of Mel Y. Chen offers another approach that engages the mattering of bodies. They develop the conception of animacy to theorize how things can “be queered and racialized without human bodies present, quite beyond questions of personification” (2011, 265). Bringing together the many lineages of mattering, Chen argues that “the word animacy has no single definition,” explaining that its multiplicity of meanings, which include “a quality of agency, sentience, or liveness;…the grammatical ramifications of the sentience of a noun…[and] a philosophical concept that addresses questions of life and death,” is a better reflection of the phenomena that “circulate biopolitically, running through conditionally sentient and nonsentient, live and dead, agentive and passive bodies” (2011, 280). While Chen does not embrace the label of feminist new materialisms, their conception of animacy in conjunction with their deep attunement to embodiment, racializations, and queering offers resources that would augment the work of those influenced by feminist new materialisms.

Finally, there are authors working to link both historical materialism and materialist feminisms to the issue of race. Charles Mills offers an example of the former approach in proposing what he calls a materialist anti-post-modernism. Influenced by both Marx and Fanon, Mills argues for a racialization that is “sociogenic” in the sense of the material advantage and disadvantage for privileged and subordinated races. “The materiality of race (apart from the economic dimensions…) inheres in the reflexes of, and associations evoked by, particular bodies in a world where the body politic is normed by the white body” (2014, 37). As an example of the latter approach, Michael Hames-García applies Barad’s conception of feminist new materialism to race, arguing that “a theory of race that does not account for the intra-action of culture and body is inadequate to explain the data,” and notes that “indeterminacy and mutual constitution are equally as characteristic of social, political, and historical phenomena as they are of quantum phenomena” (2008, 326, 325). Finally, Arun Saldanha engages Grosz’s corporeal feminism; his work is wedded to a Marxist materialism and a Deleuzean conception of assemblage and develops what he refers to as a critical materialism that urges a rethinking of race as a culturally embedded phenotype. As he explains, “Phenotype is a crucial element in the assemblage called race, and, because phenotype is already nondiscrete and shaped by culture, race cannot be an essentialist concept” but is rather creative, dynamic, and emergent (2006, 20).

Perhaps the most effective approach to understanding feminist new materialisms is to understand them not as a new field of study or a homogenous approach to feminist theorizing, but as a heterogeneous striving to fully understand and engage the complex lineages of the materiality of oppressions. In this spirit, they provide resources to enhance liberatory philosophy.

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This is a highly contested terrain in feminist theorizing and one that seems difficult to disrupt. The insistence on a “linguistic turn” in feminist theory, particularly in the domain referred to as postmodern feminism, has become a frequent refrain of those wishing to highlight the newness of feminist new materialism. Critics such as Sara Ahmed ( 2008 ) see this critique as a founding gesture, one that too often requires a superficial interpretation of the theorists charged with it.

My inclusion of Butler within the lineages of feminist new materialism is contrary to many lineages, such as those offered by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, in which Butler is viewed as keeping in place dualisms such as sex versus gender, mind versus matter, culture versus nature, language versus materiality (2011, 387). The complexity of Butler’s work often gives rise to misunderstandings of her commitments to the mattering of bodies in ways that trouble such dualisms. See, for example, Edenheim’s analysis of the positioning of Butler within the work of feminist new materialism (2016).

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Past issues, information, privacy policy, terms & conditions, gerardo del cerro santamaría, published on, oct 16, 2019, urban and urbanization, planning new materiality and actor-network theory: a review essay.

The recent work of Robert Beauregard, Laura Lieto and colleagues is at the forefront of attempts at reformulating planning theory around assemblage thinking and the new materialist, post-structuralist and post-humanist thrust it comes with.

October 16, 2019

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‍ The recent work of Robert Beauregard, Laura Lieto and colleagues is at the forefront of attempts at reformulating planning theory around assemblage thinking and the new materialist, post-structuralist and post-humanist thrust it comes with. In his written reflections on the nature of creative work, the widely-recognized Basque-Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) stated:

“the work that is conceived a priori is born dead […] I believe I have to dare to do what I don't know and aspire to recognize what I can't discern. I value knowing over knowledge” (Chillida, 2004:15).

A similar focus on inquiry over conception, vision, plan or critique is a major feature of assemblage thinking (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), of which actor-network theory (ANT) is perhaps the best known variant (Latour, 1987; Mol, 2010). This attention to inquiry implies recognizing the preeminence of objects, things and matter over mind and ideas (see Harman, 2002; Bryant, 2011; also Schrödinger, 1967), a perspective that has generated cohorts of both supporters and detractors.

In the process, ANT has been adopted and adapted in a variety of fields of endeavor, especially over the past decade or so. This includes planning, where the recent work of Robert Beauregard, Laura Lieto and colleagues is at the forefront of attempts at reformulating planning theory around assemblage thinking and the new materialist, post-structuralist and post-humanist thrust it comes with (see also Harrison, 2014; Rydin & Tate, 2016).

These are propitious times for a renewed focus on materiality in planning and the social sciences at large. In a world defined by accelerated transformations, new materialism can work as a viable alternative to perceived explanatory shortcomings and weaknesses of idealist and abstraction-prone modes of thinking, be it systems theory, marxism, or the communicative turn within planning.

Crucially, new ANT-inspired materialist approaches propose to overcome what Alfred North Whitehead named “the bifurcation of nature” (Whitehead, 1920) expressed in the secular dychotomy nature-culture. A step in this direction can be helpful in efforts at developing meaningful research on the ecological crisis and sustainability in the Anthropocene (Morton, 2019).

Within urbanism, materiality and assemblage thinking have found friendly ground (see Farías and Bender, 2010). After all, the built environment is an inescapable material reality to be grasped from the outside, through “the observation of concrete materials, not the workings of the mind in isolation” (Sennett, 1992: 196). Jane Jacobs already observed that buildings, streets and neighborhoods work as dynamic organisms, changing in response to how people interact with them (Jacobs, 2000).

Materiality aims at knowing not by defining the objects but instead by becoming responsive to the immanence of vibrant matter itself, its influences, results and consequences. In this vein, French sinologist François Jullien has stated that “a wise man does not have ideas” that are independent of matter (Jullien, 2001).

Beauregard's Planning Matter

‍ Robert Beauregard proposes an ANT-inspired approach to new materiality in his Planning Matter. Acting With Things (hereafter, PM). Planning for a Material World (PMW), a collective work he edited together with Laura Lieto, is largely devoted to specific case-studies in new materiality from a variety of ANT and assemblage interpretations.

‍ Planning Matter is a tour de force in planning theory. A major strength of the book is that it reformulates planning practice around the tenets of Latourian ANT while using ANT for a larger aim: the renewal of the modernist planning project.

Beauregard's stated aim is not to produce a conventional, rationalist theory to explain planning. He (and his colleagues in PMW) aim at something different and perhaps more necessary and effective: to give meaning to new materiality by fostering a new sensitivity, orientation and disposition towards the central role of non-human elements in the work of planners.

Beauregard has crafted a book that can be seen as an assemblage in itself, both in narrative style (a set of interlocking essays) and content. The author proposes a utilization of ANT that is compelling because it is prudent and contextualized, even if a dialogue with Latour's work takes place throughout the book.

Such contextualization means that ANT works in Planning Matter in symbiosis with an elegant and magisterial synthesis of various elements in the history of planning theory (communicative turn, Marxist political economy) and major social science scholars (inter alia, Dewey, Young, Walzer, Healey, Friedmann).

Ultimately,  Beauregard's intent is to reformulate and enhance the modernist planning project as he proposes to see planners as both craftsmen of good ideas (by gathering knowledge, people and material things) and public intellectuals.

New Materiality: Sensing Non-Human Entities

‍ Beauregard's new materiality (“neither a naive materialism nor a historical materialism”) focuses on the role of non-human entities (plans, documents, arguments, expertise, buildings, etc.) in how planners envisage the connections among norms, technologies and life-worlds through networks of human associations, technologies, natural ecologies and places, sites and settings (PM, 10).

As a heuristic strategy, the author considers ontographies (linguistic representations of assemblages of heterogeneous objects) as the constituent forms of the material world (Chapter Two). Ontographies are characterized by contingency, heterogeneity, symmetry and repletness (PM, 20-23), in stark contrast with the iconography of order in conventional planning (PM, 31).

In both Planning Matter and Planning for a Material World we see that planning, politics and power are about things “because it is things (for example, limited-access highways, rising sea levels, abortion clinics) that bring people together to act “ (PM, 188). New materiality is asking us to shift away from the secular attitude of placing humans at the center of reality and experience and look around to observe the “missing masses” that populate the world, to observe the power of things (see Introduction, Chapter One, Two and Seven in PMW).

In Planning Matter , Beauregard devotes lengthy discussions (see in particular Chapters Two, Nine, Ten and Eleven) where he makes it explicit that the planning profession cannot obey a single definition and that there are multiple approaches to planning, even if some common elements can define what planners do and can help identify planners from non-planners.

Beauregard is also sympathetic to inclusive epistemologies that affirm ontological realism while giving room for the shaping role of the knowing subject via perception, imagination, memory and affects (PM, 65). This is important because the pretensions of pure objectivism in some interpretations of ANT, rejecting or downplaying the crucial role of the mind in shaping human understanding and inquiry, are hard to defend.

This is, in fact, a major argument against so-called “generalized symmetry” in ANT. It is crucial to not misrepresent the causal capacities of non-human objects while effacing the significance of the capacities of human beings. Human attributes such as intuition, affect and emotion are the pulse of socio-materiality (Müller, 2015: 36).

‍ Matter, Space, Time

‍ New materiality affects the ways we conceptualize space, place, scale and context (PM, Chapter Four), simply because “places” are sites and settings that interact with planning practice in various ways (PM, 87). “The planning relationship between people and places takes three forms: the transformation of places into sites and then into new places; the preservation and conservation of places; and defense” (PM, 90).

A relational, new materialist understanding of place reveals that places “are fundamental to planning's micropolitics and involve more than the sites for which plans are being developed and reports written” (PM, 94).

Thus, we could conclude that place is not viewed as topological space: it does not exist until it becomes interactive in actor-networks and becomes subject to the network's dynamic. “Scales” are to be viewed as different dimensions of more or less dense connections; the global is intrinsic to the local (PM, 185; see PMW, Chapter Ten).

A relational view of space (contending that space cannot exist in the absence of matter) goes as far back as Leibniz (see more recently Lefebvre, 1992), and it is becoming more relevant with the emergence of technologies that mediate metric distances, such as social media networks, video conferencing, etc.

Space, place and matter are intrinsically intertwined with time as assemblages. Material reality is “obdurate” and resists change (PM, Chapter Seven, see also Chapter Two in PMW). Obduracy is a consequence of “the stabilizing of assemblages by associations brought into play that last longer than the interactions that frame them” (PM, 134). The “stabilizing of assemblages” is thus related to the notion of temporality, the focus of Chapter Eight in Planning Matter (see also Chapter Seven in PMW).

States and markets (PM, Chapter Nine) resemble networks (see Castells, 1996). Rather than being sites of power, markets and the state emerge as their effect. In Beauregard's conceptualization, this allows for a reformulation of the traditional relationship between planning, states and markets around the idea of “baroque complexity” where “the parts are neither components of a whole nor insignificant and powerless” (PM, 185). Capital mobility, shrinking cities and state growth management plans, among other issues, can be addressed from such a perspective (PM, 178ff).

‍ A focus on planning practice allows Beauregard to focus pragmatically (following Dewey) on the concept of “action,” “ethics,” “responsibility,” “distributed morality” (PM, Chapter Five) and “publics” (PM, Chapter Ten).

Planning (Chapter Three) has always been haunted by a fraught relation between plans and the consequences meant to follow (PM, 36). This is why it is necessary to consider the shifts and alterations from intentions, to knowledge, to actions and to consequences (PM, 42-53) in a planner's work. As is masterfully described in Chapter Six, planners need to connect knowledge to action “by translating between possibilities (what I call truths) and the material manifestations of those possibilities (what I call realities)” (PM, 114-115).

In describing the formation of publics (alliances, assemblages), Beauregard's new materialism is not interested in “facts” or “measures” but rather in “matters of concern” (PM, 8-9). While matters of fact are a combination of models and measures, matters of concern also include actor-networks that help entangle ideas and reality into the world, thus becoming harder to oppose (PM, 9).The essential normative element in Beauregard's proposal ties ANT to the values of progressivism and collective action against structural injustices (Chapter Nine), one of the main goals of planners (both practitioners and scholars) as public intellectuals.

Practicing New Materiality

‍ Even if Planning Matter does not contain an inventory of research strategies, the author profusely shows the possibilities and challenges of an ANT-informed strategy in empirical research (see Chapters Three, Four and Seven, in particular). However, it is in Planning for a Material World, where Beauregard, Lieto and colleagues more substantially illustrate their approach with theoretically-informed examples of assemblage thinking.Readers might ask themselves whether a relational approach such as ANT is similar to conventional sociological or technical applications of network analysis, which are mainly devoted to mapping connections among network members. It is possible to suggest that “network” works in ANT as a metaphor conveying the complexity of trying to capture the multiple and changing relational dimensions of always-mobile assemblages. Planning for a Material World , edited by Beauregard and Lieto, shares with Planning Matter the central tenets of ANT (action theory, obduracy, post-humanism, materiality, assemblages, etc.) and a similar goal to foster a new sensitivity towards new materiality in planning theory and practice. The various chapters bring to assemblage planning a myriad of insights, research strategies, and conceptualizations.

Editors Beauregard and Lieto frame the discussion around new materialist politics. In PMW, Beauregard argues that planners can be more effective if they deploy a “politics of things” in which humans and non-humans both matter. Laura Lieto's chapter shows how the material world is present “in the very bureaucratic procedures that are meant to distance planners from the particularities of realities” (PMW, 7). She applies this insight to the formality-informality dimensions of planning.The six case studies that follow deal with seafronts as socio-natural wholes (Berruti); the remaking of transportation knowledge infrastructure (West); waste picking (Basco); hybrid ecologies and landscapes (Formato); material documentation of public meetings (Vanbellemont); and policy mobility in microfinance (He). All these case studies infuse urban reality with rich descriptions and insights from the angle of new materiality.

The last two chapters in the book inquiry about norms in planning. Mäntysalo, Akkila and Balducci use trading zone theory to assess whether ANT can contribute to the normative aspects of planning. Belli's chapter, on the other hand, argues that assemblages include a normative content and illustrates his point with the case of the European immigration influx.Trading zone theory (explored and used more explicitly in Chapter Nine) is related to the idea of “translation” (Chapter Four) and the “transnational mobility of policy” ideas (Chapter Eight). These are processes embedded in assemblages and consisting of moving ideas, data, technologies and meaning between contexts. Through material means, knowledge is stabilized and circulates, but not in a smooth or linear way – we find serendipity, randomness, distortions, deviations, interruptions, crossings, detours, chance (PMW, 57-58).In Chapter Four and Seven we read illuminating discussions about the stabilizing character of matter. Acting with things provides stability to human relationships. Thus, power relations are not made up exclusively of human social ties or abstract symbolic structures; they can be maintained over long periods and kept in place over vast territories through things; shareholders in assemblages are then “toolholders” (PMW, 102-107). Things (matters of concern) are not the same as objects (matters of fact); “objects become things when they enable or assemble the human world” (PMW, 105-106; see also Lieto, 2017).Assemblages and actor-networks are found in relation to nature (Chapter Six), the realm of “cyborg metabolic chains,” “iterations,” “recombinations” and “spatial accumulations” (PMW, 86-88). The flat topology of open space is land and territory, and planning means “designing urban nature” (PMW, 94), as in ecological urbanism;  “landscapes and infrastructures become civic instigators for new city structures” (PMW, 96).One would expect to see an evolution in the crafting of case studies as the new materialist sensitivity expands within the field of planning. Concepts taken from assemblage thinking, such as “absent present,” “obligatory passage points,” “black box,” or “immutable mobiles,” among others (see Rydin and Tate, 2016), can add to the researcher's “toolbox.”

Conclusions

‍ Planning Matter and Planning for a Material World try to instill in readers and researchers a responsiveness to the material interventions of non-human entities in how agency and politics are constituted.Both books engage in the “baroque complexity” of material reality while cutting out the excesses of some ANT interpretations and the jargon that has characterized some attempts at narrating complex ontological and epistemological assumptions in assemblage thinking. Planning for a Material World offers excellent examples of how new materiality can contribute to empirical research in planning. This book makes an important contribution to understanding how notions such as the simultaneity of change and stability, the reality of the indeterminate and fluid post-human city, the body-machine hybrid, and the overcoming of the mind-matter divide can be put to work in planning research.Robert Beauregard's Planning Matter is an extraordinary, path-breaking contribution to planning theory and the evolution of the field. The author's wise, contextualized use of ANT allows for a more benign interpretation of ANT than proposed by some of its initiators, and enables a compelling utilization of assemblage thinking in supporting the modernist planning project. Planning Matter conveys the wisdom of presenting a radical conceptual and methodological innovation as a sensitizing strategy which is integrated in a larger aim responding to the theoretical evolution in the field of planning. In his intent at shifting dispositions and orientations in the profession towards a new materiality, Robert Beauregard has crafted a masterful, compelling and effective presentation of ANT-informed planning practice with major implications for the field.

‍ Beauregard, R. A. (2015) Planning Matter. Acting With Things , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bryant, l. onticology – a manifesto for object-oriented ontology, part 1, larval subjects . retrieved august 3rd, 2019, link, ‍ castells, m. (1996) the information age. economy, society, culture (vol. i); the rise of the network society, london: wiley-blackwell., chillida, e. (2004) aromas , hernani, spain: chillida leku., deleuze, g. and f. guattari (1987) a thousand plateaus. capitalism and schizophrenia , minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press., farías, i. and t. bender, eds. (2010) urban assemblages. how actor-network theory changes urban studies , london: routledge., harman, g. (2002). tool-being: heidegger and the metaphysics of objects . peru, il: open court., harrison, p. (2014) “making planning theory real,” planning theory 13, 65-81., jacobs, j. (2000) the nature of economies, new york: modern library, jullien, f. (2001) un sabio no tiene ideas ( a wise man does not have ideas ), spanish edition, madrid: siruela., latour, b. (1987) science in action. how to follow scientists and engineers through society , cambridge, ma: harvard university press., lefebvre, h. (1992) the production of space , london: wiley-blackwell., lieto, l. (2016) urban informality as a material affair, association of collegiate schools of planning, session on complexity, relationality and assemblages in international planning, link, ‍ lieto, l. and r. a. beauregard, eds. (2016) planning for a material world , london: routledge., lieto, l. (2017) how material objects become urban things, city, 21:5, 568-579, doi: 10.1080/13604813.2017.1374782., mol, a. (2010) actor-network theory: sensitive terms and enduring tensions, kölner zeitschrift für soziologie und sozialpsychologie. sonderheft . 50., morton, t. (2019) being ecological , cambridge, ma : the mit press, müller, m. (2015) assemblages and actor-networks: rethinking socio-material power, politics and space, geography compass 9 (1), 27-41., rydin, y and l. tate, eds. (2016) actor networks of planning : exploring the influence of actor network theory , london: routledge., schrödinger, e. (1967) what is life mind and matter , london: cambridge university press., sennett, richard (1992), the conscience of the eye. the design and social life of cities , new york: w. w. norton., whitehead, a. n. (1920) the concept of nature , cambridge: cambridge university press, cited in latour, b. (2016) facing gaia. eight lectures on the new climatic regime , london: polity, p. 85., related magazine articles.

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cholars and practitioners of urban planning need to rethink the field’s futures at this important historical juncture: some might call it a moment of truth when there is little left to hide. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, contradictions, and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible. This also includes the global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as I write these words. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

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Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

• Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
• Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
• They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining.
• I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
• They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

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The Haiti That Still Dreams

By Edwidge Danticat

I often receive condolence-type calls, e-mails, and texts about Haiti. Many of these messages are in response to the increasingly dire news in the press, some of which echoes what many of us in the global Haitian diaspora hear from our family and friends. More than fifteen hundred Haitians were killed during the first three months of this year, according to a recent United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights report, which described the country’s situation as “ cataclysmic .” Women and girls are routinely subjected to sexual violence. Access to food, water, education, and health care is becoming more limited, with more than four million Haitians, around a third of the population, living with food insecurity, and 1.4 million near starvation. Armed criminal groups have taken over entire neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas, carrying out mass prison breaks and attacks on the city’s airport, seaport, government buildings, police stations, schools, churches, hospitals, pharmacies, and banks, turning the capital into an “ open air prison .”

Even those who know the country’s long and complex history will ask, “Why can’t Haiti catch a break?” We then revisit some abridged version of that history. In 1804, after a twelve-year revolution against French colonial rule, Haiti won its independence, which the United States and several European powers failed to recognize for decades. The world’s first Black republic was then forced to spend sixty years paying a hundred-and-fifty-million francs (now worth close to thirty billion dollars) indemnity to France . Americans invaded and then occupied Haiti for nineteen years at the beginning of the twentieth century. The country endured twenty-nine years of murderous dictatorship under François Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, until 1986. In 1991, a few months after Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, took office, he was overthrown in a coup staged by a military whose members had been trained in the U.S. Aristide was elected again, then overthrown again, in 2004, in part owing to an armed rebellion led by Guy Philippe, who was later arrested by the U.S. government for money laundering related to drug trafficking. Last November, six years into his nine-year prison sentence, Philippe was deported by the U.S. to Haiti. He immediately aligned himself with armed groups and has now put himself forward as a Presidential candidate.

In 2010, the country was devastated by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake, which killed more than two hundred thousand people. Soon after, United Nations “peacekeepers” dumped feces in Haiti’s longest river, causing a cholera epidemic that killed more than ten thousand people and infected close to a million. For the past thirteen years, Haiti has been decimated by its ruling party, Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (P.H.T.K.), which rose to power after a highly contested election in 2011. In that election, the U.S.—then represented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—and the Organization of American States helped the candidate who finished in third place, Michel Martelly, claim the top spot. Bankrolled by kidnapping, drug trafficking, business élites, and politicians, armed groups have multiplied under P.H.T.K, committing massacres that have been labelled crimes against humanity. In 2021, a marginally elected President, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in his bedroom , a crime for which many of those closest to him, including his wife, have been named as either accomplices or suspects.

The unasked question remains, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in “ The Souls of Black Folk ,” “How does it feel to be a problem?”

I deeply honor Haiti’s spirit of resistance and long history of struggle, but I must admit that sometimes the answer to that question is that it hurts. Sometimes it hurts a lot, even when one is aware of the causes, including the fact that the weapons that have allowed gangs to take over the capital continue to flow freely from Miami and the Dominican Republic, despite a U.N. embargo. Internally, the poorest Haitians have been constantly thwarted by an unequal and stratified society, which labels rural people moun andeyò (outside people), and which is suffused with greedy and corrupt politicians and oligarchs who scorn the masses from whose tribulations they extract their wealth.

Recently, at a loved one’s funeral, in Michigan, the spectre of other Haitian deaths was once again on the minds of my extended family members. Everywhere we gather, Haiti is with us, as WhatsApp messages continuously stream in from those who chose to stay in Haiti and can’t leave because the main airport is closed, and others who have no other home. In Michigan, during chats between wake, funeral, and repast, elders brought up those who can’t get basic health care, much less a proper burial or any of the rituals that are among our most sacred obligations. “Not even a white sheet over those bodies on the street,” my mother-in-law, who is eighty-nine, said, after receiving yet another image of incinerated corpses in Port-au-Prince. At least after the 2010 earthquake, sheets were respectfully placed on the bodies pulled from the rubble. Back then, she said, the armed young men seemed to have some reverence for life and some fear of death.

Lately, some of our family gatherings are incantations of grief. But they can also turn into storytelling sessions of a different kind. They are opportunities for our elders to share something about Haiti beyond what our young ones, like everyone else, see on the news. The headlines bleed into their lives, too, as do the recycled tropes that paint us as ungovernable, failures, thugs, and even cannibals. As with the prayers that we recite over the dead, words still have power, the elders whisper. We must not keep repeating the worst, they say, and in their voices I hear an extra layer of distress. They fear that they may never see Haiti again. They fear that those in the next generation, some of whom have never been to Haiti, will let Haiti slip away, as though the country they see in the media—the trash-strewn streets and the barricades made from the shells of burnt cars, the young men brandishing weapons of war and the regular citizens using machetes to defend themselves—were part of some horror film that they can easily turn off. The elders remind us that we have been removed, at least physically, from all of this by only a single generation, if not less.

We are still human beings, the elders insist—“ Se moun nou ye .” We are still wozo , like that irrepressible reed that grows all over Haiti. For a brief moment, I think someone might break into the Haitian national anthem or sing a few bars of the folk song “ Ayiti Cheri .” (“Beloved Haiti, I had to leave you to understand.”) Instead, they hum the music that the wozo has inspired : “ Nou se wozo / Menm si nou pliye, nou pap kase. ” Even if we bend, we will not break.

Except we are breaking. “It pains me to see people living in constant fear,” the Port-au-Prince-based novelist and poet Évelyne Trouillot recently wrote to me in an e-mail. “I dream of a country where children are not afraid to dream.” Internationally, U.S. deportations continue , Navy ships are ready to be deployed to intercept migrant boats, and Haitian asylum seekers could once again end up imprisoned on Guantánamo, as they did in the early nineteen-nineties. In conversations, whether with strangers or with younger family members, someone inevitably asks, “Is there any hope?”

I have hope, I say, because I grew up with elders, both in Haiti and here in the U.S., who often told us, “ Depi gen souf gen espwa ”—as long as there’s breath, there’s hope. I have hope, too, because the majority of Haitians are under twenty-five years old, as are many members of our family. Besides, how can we give in to despair with eleven million people’s lives in the balance? Better yet, how can we reignite that communal grit and resolve that inspired us to defeat the world’s greatest armies and then pin to our flag the motto “ L’union fait la force ”? Unity is strength.

The elders also remind us that Haiti is not just Port-au-Prince. As more and more of the capital’s residents are forced to return to homesteads and ancestral villages, the moun andeyò have much to teach other Haitians. “Historically, the moun andeyò have always been the preserver of Haiti’s cultural and traditional ethos,” Vivaldi Jean-Marie, a professor of African American and African-diaspora studies at Columbia University, told me. Rural Haitians, who have lived for generations without the support of the state, have had no choice but to rely on one another in close and extended family structures called lakou . “This shared awareness—I am because we are—will prevail beyond this difficult chapter in Haitian history,” Jean-Marie said.

Finally, I have hope because in Haiti, as the American writer and art collector Selden Rodman has written, “ art is joy .” This remains true even as some of the country’s most treasured cultural institutions, including the National School of the Arts and the National Library, have been ransacked. In the summer of 2023, Carrefour Feuilles, a district in Port-au-Prince that many writers, visual artists, and musicians call home, was attacked by armed criminal groups. The onslaught led to a petition that collected close to five thousand signatures. It read in part, “How many more hundreds of our women and children must be raped, executed, burned before the public authorities do everything possible to put an end to the plague of gangs and their sponsors?”

A few days later, the homes of two of the signatories, the multimedia artist Lionel St. Eloi and the writer Gary Victor, were taken over by a gang. The last time I saw St. Eloi was in 2019, in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince’s Centre d’Art, where he had a series of metal birds on display, their bejewelled bodies and beaks pointing toward the sky. Allenby Augustin, the Centre d’Art’s executive director, recently described how some artists, afraid of having to suddenly flee their homes and leave their work behind, bring their pieces to the center or keep them in friends’ homes in different parts of the city. Others add the stray bullets that land inside their studios— bal pèdi or bal mawon —to their canvasses.

St. Eloi, the patriarch of a family of artists, had lived in Carrefour Feuilles since the seventies, working with young people there. “The youth who were neglected or who could not afford to go to school were taken in by our family,” one of St. Eloi’s sons, the musician Duckyns (Zikiki) St. Eloi, told me. “We taught them to paint, to play guitar, and to play the drums. Now they are hired to run errands for gangsters who put guns in their hands.” In spite of what has happened, he still believes that art can turn some things around. He recently sent me a picture of a work by his younger brother Anthony—an image depicting gang members wearing brightly colored balaclavas and holding pencils, a book, a paint palette, a camera, and a musical instrument. “If there are gangs, we’d be better off with art gangs,” Zikiki said. “Gangs that paint, make music, recite poetry. Art is how we bring our best face to the world. Art is how we dream.” ♦

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Sophia Bush Recalls the Unexpected Moment She Fell in Love With Ashlyn Harris

The ‘One Tree Hill’ actress also addresses her sexuality and divorce from Grant Hughes in a candid new essay for ‘Glamour.’

Sophia Bush is ready to share new details about her relationship with soccer player Ashlyn Harris . In her self-written Glamour cover story published on Thursday, April 25, Sophia, 41, recalled the moment her friendship with Ashlyn, 38, turned into something more.

It began in the summer of 2023 when the actress was separated and planning to file for divorce from Grant Hughes .

“Groups of women in my life started opening up about issues they were going through in their own homes,” Sophia wrote. “It seemed like every week there were more of us, including Ashlyn, whom I’d first met in 2019 and who was in the process of figuring out her own split from her wife.”

In August 2023, Sophia officially filed to end her marriage to Grant. One month later, Ashlyn filed for divorce from Ali Krieger after nearly four years of marriage.

In her essay, Sophia assured readers that there was no cheating. Instead, she simply looked at Ashlyn as a friend with a “big, happy life.” But as the pair continued to open up about their splits, things began to change.

“It took me confronting a lot of things, what felt like countless sessions of therapy, and some prodding from loved ones, but eventually I asked Ashlyn to have a non-friend-group hang to talk,” Sophia said. “And that meal was four and a half hours long and truly one of the most surreal experiences of my life thus far.”

Sophia and Ashlyn made their first public appearance as a couple at the Elton John AIDS Foundation’s annual Oscars viewing party in March 2024. While the “Work in Progress” podcast host received support from friends and family, some members of the public were not so kind.

“People looking in from the outside weren’t privy to just how much time it took, how many painful conversations were had,” she wrote. “What felt like seconds after I started to see what was in front of me, the online rumor mill began to spit in the ugliest ways. There were blatant lies. Violent threats. There were accusations of being a home-wrecker. The ones who said I’d left my ex because I suddenly realized I wanted to be with women—my partners have known what I’m into for as long as I have (so that’s not it, y’all, sorry!).”

While Sophia said that she hates the notion of having to come out in 2024, the actress explained that she’s always known that “my sexuality exists on a spectrum.”

“Right now I think the word that best defines it is queer,” she continued. “I can’t say it without smiling, actually. And that feels pretty great.”

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Family Guy 's Gary Janetti to Publish New Essay Collection About Adventures Abroad: ‘You’re Welcome’ (Exclusive)

The writer’s latest book delves into his experiences traveling abroad

 Benjamin Askinas, Harper

Gary Janetti is reflecting on the ups and downs of travel in a new book. The writer and producer, 58, has shared, exclusively with PEOPLE, that his new essay collection is on the way. We Are Experiencing a Slight Delay will be published this summer by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins. Janetti is taking readers on a romp through his worldwide travels in his latest publication. The writer will reflect on the “absurdity and glory” of his trips abroad, including a transformative stay at an Italian spa taken with his husband, celebrity stylist Brad Goreski , a family cruise on the famous Queen Mary 2 and a memorable dinner with Dame Maggie Smith .

The book will also feature the author’s meditations on places like Australia and Mykonos, as well as his own personal travel tips, like how to pack and get trip updates. Janetti will also dole out his personal restaurant recommendations.  Janetti is known for his work as a writer and producer on shows like Family Guy and Will & Grace . His viral Instagram captions, some of which imagined the inner monologues of Royal family members like Prince George , led to the 2021 premiere of his HBO show The Prince .

Janetti published his first essay collection, bestseller Do You Mind If I Cancel? , in 2019. The book detailed his young adulthood in New York, and his time working in a hotel. “It was the first time I was writing personally about myself, as opposed to writing through a character,” Janetti previously told PEOPLE of the book. “You have a bit of a distance — you’re protected by the [characters].” Janetti published his second essay collection, Start Without Me , in 2022.

Charles Sykes/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank via Gett

We Are Experiencing a Slight Delay is poised to make the perfect travel companion, though Janetti says the book will still serve its purpose even if you’re staying home this summer.

"I spent the last year traveling and then wrote a book about it,” he tells PEOPLE of his latest collection. “Now you can go to all those places without having to leave your house. You're welcome."

Never miss a story — sign up for  PEOPLE's free daily newsletter  to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.  We Are Experiencing a Slight Delay will hit bookstores on July 9 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.

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Why Is the Supreme Court Making an Easy Case Related to Jan. 6 Rioters Hard?

By Randall D. Eliason

Mr. Eliason is a former chief of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

Imagine that during a Supreme Court argument, protesters angry about the case storm the court building. The mob breaks doors and windows and assaults security officers while forcing its way into the chamber. Some shout that they want to hang the chief justice. The justices and attorneys are forced to flee for their lives. It’s several hours before law enforcement secures the building and the argument can resume.

Has the court proceeding been obstructed or impeded? That doesn’t seem like a difficult question. But that’s essentially what the Supreme Court heard debated in arguments last week in Fischer v. United States , a case challenging a law being used to prosecute hundreds of people, including Donald Trump, for the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Joseph Fischer is charged with being part of the mob that rioted at the Capitol, forcing members of Congress to flee and disrupting the electoral vote count. Along with assaulting police officers and other charges, he is charged under 18 U.S.C. 1512(c), which provides:

(c) Whoever corruptly — (1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or (2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

Prosecutors charge that by participating in the Capitol riot, Mr. Fischer corruptly obstructed and impeded the joint congressional proceeding to certify the election, in violation of 1512(c)(2). More than 300 other Jan. 6 rioters have faced the same charge. In the D.C. federal indictment of Mr. Trump, two of the four counts also rely on this statute, alleging that through his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, he conspired to and did obstruct the congressional proceeding.

Jan. 6 defendants have repeatedly challenged the use of 1512(c) in their prosecutions. More than a dozen federal judges in Washington have rejected those challenges. But in Mr. Fischer’s case, a Trump-appointed judge, Carl Nichols, concluded the statute must be limited to obstructive acts involving documents, records or other objects. Because Mr. Fischer wasn’t charged with impairing the availability or integrity of any physical evidence, Judge Nichols dismissed the charge.

Prosecutors appealed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed and reinstated the charge, with one judge — also a Trump appointee — dissenting. The Supreme Court is reviewing that decision.

The language of the statute seems clear. Subsection 1 prohibits obstructing a proceeding by tampering with physical evidence, and Subsection 2 is a catchall, backstop provision that prohibits “otherwise” obstructing a proceeding by means not encompassed by Subsection 1. Connected by the word “or,” they define alternative ways to violate the statute. You have to struggle pretty hard to find any ambiguity here.

As the majority in the D.C. Circuit held, that should be the end of the matter. In describing the D.C. Circuit dissent, Judge Florence Pan borrowed a line from an earlier Supreme Court case to say that it seemed like “elaborate efforts to avoid the most natural reading of the text.” After all, textualism — relying on the plain text of a statute and the common understanding of its terms — is the favored method of statutory interpretation today, especially among conservatives.

Despite the plain language of the law, Mr. Fischer and his supporters argue it should be limited based on the reason behind its passage. During the Enron scandal in the early 2000s, the prosecution of the accounting giant Arthur Andersen for shredding an enormous number of documents was hamstrung by weaknesses in the existing obstruction laws. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, which included section 1512(c), in response to that scandal. Mr. Fischer claims the statute must therefore be limited based on Congress’s intent to respond to crimes involving evidence impairment.

But as Justice Elena Kagan noted during oral arguments, that’s not what the statute says. As she also pointed out, Congress easily could have written the statute that way if that was what it meant.

Limiting the statute as Mr. Fischer proposes would lead to absurd outcomes. Members of a violent mob who shut down a proceeding would not be guilty of obstructing that proceeding. But if in the process they happened to damage an exhibit, the statute would apply. Filing a false affidavit in a proceeding would be covered, even if it had no effect at all; violently halting the entire proceeding would not.

There’s no reason Congress would pass a law that makes such irrational distinctions. Congress might have been motivated by document shredding during the Enron scandal, but it sensibly responded by passing a statute that bars all obstruction, not one that prohibits certain types of obstruction while condoning others.

Nevertheless, Jan. 6 defendants maintain the court must disregard the statute’s clear language based on fears about how it might be applied. They argue that if the law is not limited to evidence impairment, prosecutors might target trivial offenses or otherwise protected activities, like lobbying or peaceful protests.

Several of the conservative justices seemed sympathetic to this argument. Justice Neil Gorsuch, for example, questioned whether a sit-in that disrupts a trial or heckler at the State of the Union address would violate the law. Pointing to such supposed dangers, Fischer’s counsel, Jeffrey Green, urged the court not to unleash this sweeping new prosecutorial power.

Except it’s not new. Section 1512(c) has been on the books for more than 20 years. Another federal statute that prohibits the corrupt obstruction of congressional proceedings has been around since the 1940s. If prosecutors were itching to prosecute peaceful protesters and legitimate lobbyists for felony obstruction, they’ve had the tools for decades. And yet we haven’t seen those cases.

As Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar pointed out, that’s because “inherent constraints” built into the statute — chiefly the requirement of corrupt intent — limit its reach. It’s true there are many nonviolent and lawful ways to influence a proceeding. But only those for which prosecutors can prove corrupt intent beyond a reasonable doubt risk running afoul of the law. That’s why, as General Prelogar noted, out of more than 1,300 Capitol rioters prosecuted so far, only about one-fourth — generally the most violent, egregious offenders — have been charged under 1512(c).

Mr. Fischer also argues that Section 1512(c) has never been used in a similar case and that this proves the statute does not apply to the events of Jan. 6. But all this really demonstrates is that unprecedented crimes lead to unprecedented prosecutions. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed, because we’ve never had an event like Jan. 6 before, “I’m not sure what a lack of history proves.”

The use of a relevant, clearly applicable obstruction law to prosecute the unique events of Jan. 6 does not mean prosecutors will suddenly abandon the discretion and judgment they’ve used for decades when applying the law to more routine cases, any more than prosecuting Mr. Trump for those events means that criminal prosecutions of former presidents will become routine.

It would be foolish to ignore the plain language of the statute to excuse the Capitol rioters based on feared abuses that live only in the imaginations of those seeking to avoid liability.

Even if the Supreme Court agrees that 1512(c) is limited to obstruction involving evidence impairment, the charges against Mr. Trump will probably survive. Prosecutors can argue that attempting to submit slates of phony electors and efforts to have the real ballots discarded constituted evidence-based obstruction. Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson both raised that possibility during the argument, although without referring to Mr. Trump’s case.

But a ruling for Mr. Fischer would call into question the convictions, guilty pleas and prosecutions of scores of other Jan. 6 defendants. And it would provide an unjustified rallying cry for those who protest that the Justice Department has overreached when prosecuting Jan. 6 defendants.

Such a disruptive ruling is possible only if the court goes out of its way to disregard the statutory language and create ambiguity where none exists. If the Supreme Court stays true to its textualist principles, this is an easy case.

Randall D. Eliason is a former chief of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and teaches white-collar criminal law at George Washington University Law School. He blogs at Sidebars .

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