New Materialism

Mads Ejsing

Related terms: assemblage, entanglement, matter, more-than-human, non-human agency, actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology, speculative realism

In the not-so-distant past, much of the humanities and social sciences treated the material world – the stuff of rocks, rivers, bones, and buildings – as passive scenery. Nature was the backdrop. Humans were the actors. We built, interpreted, imagined, and destroyed, while the world around us mostly reacted, inert and voiceless. But what if matter matters more than we thought?

Emerging in the early 2000s, but drawing from a much older lineage of thinkers – including Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Marx, Deleuze, and others – new materialism has evolved into a rich and dynamic theoretical movement across fields such as philosophy, anthropology, geography, feminist theory, science studies, and literary criticism. Among its key proponents are influential thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, and Bruno Latour.

At its heart, new materialism invites us to see the world as alive with forces and agencies that exceed a human-centric perspective. We live in a more-than-human world, so to speak. This insight is meant to shift our thinking about the world away from a purely human affair to recognising how nonhuman entities – animals, microbes, plants, machines, weather systems, infrastructures, as well as many other things – actively participate in co-shaping earthly existence (Coole and Frost 2010).

Matter is not mute or inert. It exerts pressure. It resists. It affords, attracts, decays, and transforms. In the words of the political theorist Jane Bennett (2010), there is an inherent “vitality” to all things. Power, therefore, is not restricted to human institutions or discourses, but is distributed across entangled and material networks that include both humans and nonhumans.

As a result, new materialism challenges some of the deepest assumptions in Western philosophy. Instead of thinking with dichotomies like nature/culture, subject/object, mind/body, new materialism invites us to think in terms of entanglement, emergence, and relation (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012). The world is not made up of separate parts but of intra-actions, as the feminist philosopher Karen Barad (2007) calls them, within shifting assemblages where meaning and matter co-constitute one another.

This is not a purely metaphysical exercise. In an era of climate emergency, mass extinctions, and environmental injustices, new materialism offers a way to reimagine how we relate to the Earth and all its many inhabitants. As Latour (2017) reminds us, the ecological crises we face are not problems “out there” in nature, but deeply entangled with how we humans think, live, and know. If we continue to envision the world as inert and passive, we are more likely to continue treating it as a mere background for human activities or, worse, as disposable.

Because of its critiques of dualistic distinctions between humans and nature, new materialism is sometimes accused of obfuscating the role of human agency at a moment when clarity is needed the most (Malm 2018). The point, however, is not to dismiss the importance of human agency, but to situate it within a broader network of agentic assemblages. Whether we like it or not, we humans do not act from above or outside the world, but from within dense and tangled assemblages of other human and nonhuman forces that might enhance or obstruct our agencies. This does not mean that the actions of human beings do not matter. On the contrary, it matters more than ever what “ways of living and dying we cast our lot with” today – not only for other human beings, but for the future conditions of livability on the planet (Haraway 2016, 55).

New materialism, therefore, is not just a theory or a method. It is also a provocation. One that reminds us that the natural world is not only acted upon – it acts back. That knowledge is not an abstract thing, but something embedded and embodied. The line between us and everything else was never as clear as we thought.

At the end of the day, new materialism does not only ask us to think differently, although we must do that too. It also asks us to feel and notice differently. We must stay with the trouble, as Haraway (2016) urges us, and collectively learn how to listen more carefully to the quiet hum of a world that is always becoming, always in motion, and never just human.

References

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Coole, Diane, and Samantha Frost. 2010. New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Latour, Bruno 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight lectures on the new climatic regime. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Malm, Andreas. 2018. The progress of this storm: Nature and society in a warming world. London and New York: Verso Books.

van der Tuin, Iris, and Rick Dolphijn. 2012. New materialism: Interviews & cartographies. London: Open Humanities Press.