New Materialisms: Ontology) Agency) and Politics
New Materialisms: Ontology) Agency) and Politics
New Materialisms: Ontology) Agency) and Politics
Contents
ix
Acknowledgments
70
Non-Dialectical Materialism
PhengCheah
92
II6
Impersonal Matter
MelissaA.Orlie
POLITICAL MATTERS
139
158
.LH''-
.....,"U."H~ Material:
Acknowledgments
Orientations Matter
Sara Ahmed
258
281
299
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
319
32 3
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their invaluable participation in the "New Materialisms" conference at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign that enabled
many of the contributors to discuss and refine their arguments during
February 2007, thanks to Ted Bailey, Pradeep Dhillon, Brenda Farnell,
Debra Hawhee, Patrick Smith, Charles Varella, Linda Vigdor, and Martha
Webber. For especial assistance and encouragement, thanks to Michael
Rothberg and his helpers at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. For calm and reliable assistance in coordinating the conference,
thanks to Jacque Kahn, Theodora Kourkoulou, Lawrence Schehr, Melodee Schweighart, and Aprel Thomas. We would especially like to convey
our gratitude to the Andrew Mellon Foundation, whose funding for
"State-of-the-Art" conferences made this conference possible.
Individually, we would like to express sincere gratitude for the many
stimulating conversations we have had with particular friends and colleagues over the lifetime of the project and for the encouragement they
have given us. Jane Bennett, Kristin Cain, Sam Chambers, Alex Colas, Bill
Connolly, Tim Dean, the late Paul Hirst, Kim Hutchings, Cecile Laborde,
James Martell, Cris Mayo, Siobhan Sommerville, Jenny Bourne Taylor,
and Caroline Williams all made special contributions, often in unexpected
ways they may not even realize. As individuals, we would also like to
acknowledge the mutual support we have experienced from each other as
editors, in a transatlantic friendship that has yielded a genuinely collaborative project.
Thanks, too, to staff and colleagues in the Gender and Women's Studies Program and the Political Science Department at the University of
illinois, and to colleagues and students in the Department of Politics at
Birkbeck College, University of London, for their ongoing support and
interest in our research.
distance ourselves from it, and within the space that opens up, a host of
immaterial things seems to emerge: language, consciousness, subjectivity,
agency, mind, soul; also imagination, emotions, values, meaning, and so
on. These have typically been presented as idealities fundamentally different from matter and valorized as superior to the baser desires ofbiological material or the inertia of physical stuff. It is such idealist assumptions
and the values that flow from them that materialists have traditionally
contested. It is true that over the past three decades or so theorists have
radicalized the way they understand ~mbjectivity, discovering its efficacy in
constructing even the most apparently natural phenomena while insisting
upon its embeddedness in dense networks of power that outrun its control and constitute its willfulness. Yet it is on subjectivity that their gaze
has focused. Our motivation in editing this book has been a conviction
that it is now time to subject objectivity and material reality to a similarly
radical reappraisal. Our respective researches have prompted our own
interests in changing conceptions ofmaterial causality and the significance
of corporeality, both of which we see as crucial for a materialist theory of
politics or agency.. We now advance the bolder claim that foregrounding
material factors and reconfiguring our very understanding of matter are
prerequisites for any plausible account ofcoexistence and its conditions in
the twenty-first century.
Our commitment to editing a book on the new materialisms at this
time springs from our conviction that materialism is once more on the
move after several decades in abeyance and from our eagerness to help
define and promote its new directions. Everywhere we look, it seems to
us, we are witnessing scattered but insistent demands for more materialist
modes of analysis and for new ways of thinking about matter and processes of materialization. We are also aware of the emergence of novel if
still diffuse ways ofconceptualizing and investigating material reality. This
is especially evident in disciplines across the social sciences, such as political science, economics, anthropology, geography, and sociology, where it
is exemplified in recent interest in material culture, geopolitical space,
critical realism, critical international political economy, globalization, and
environmentalism, and in calls for a renewed materialist feminism , or a
more materialist queer theory or postcolonial studies. We interpret such
developments as signs that the more textual approaches associated with
the so-called cultural turn are increasingly being deemed inadequate for
understanding contemporary society, particularly in light of some of its
most urgent challenges regarding environmental, demographic, geopolitical, and economic change.
The eclipse of materialism in recent theory can be negatively associated
with the exhaustion of once popular materialist approaches, such as existential phenomenology or structural Marxism, and with important challenges by poststructuralists to the ontological and epistemological presumptions that have supported modern approaches to the material world.
More positively, materialism's demise since the 1970S has been an effect of
the dominance of analytical and normative political theory on the one
hand and of radical constructivism on the other. These respective Anglophone and continental approaches have both been associated with a cultural turn that privileges language, discourse, culture, and values. While
this turn has encouraged a de facto neglect of more obviously material
phenomena and processes, it has also problematized any straightforward
overture toward matter or material experience as naively representational
or naturalistic. Notwithstanding the capacity of these currently dominant
theories to clarify arguments and to alert us to the way power is present in
any attempt to represent material reality, however, we believe it is now
timely to reopen the issue of matter and once again to give material factors
their due in shaping society and circumscribing human prospects. The
essays we have commissioned for the current volume are exemplary of
some of the new and innovative ways of conceptualizing and responding
to this reorientation.
The essays that follow are at the forefront of current thinking about
matter; about how to approach it, and about its significance for and
within the political. They resonate with our own belief that to succeed, a
reprisal of materialism must be truly radical. This means returning to the
most fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the place of
embodied humans within a material world; it means taldng heed of developments in the natural sciences as well as attending to transformations
in the ways we currently produce, reproduce, and consume our material
environment. It entails sensitivity to contemporary shifts in the bio- and
eco-spheres, as well as to changes in global economic structures and technologies. It also demands detailed analyses of our daily interactions with
recreate or procreate, we are finding our environment materially and conceptually reconstituted in ways that pose profound and unprecedented
normative questions. In addressing them, we unavoidably find ourselves
having to think in new ways about the nature of matter and the matter of
nature; about the elements of life, the resilience of the planet, and the
distinctiveness of the human.. These questions are immensely important
not only because they cast doubt on some of modernity's'most cherished
beliefs about the fundamental nature of existence and social justice but
also because presumptions about agency and causation implicit in prevailing paradigms have structured our modern sense of the domains and
dimensions of the ethical and the political as such. Recent developments
thus call upon us to reorient ourselves profoundly in relation to the world,
to one another, and to ourselves.
In terms of theory itself, finally, we are summoning a new materialism
in response to a sense that the radicalism of the dominant discourses
which have flourished under the cultural turn is now more or less exhausted. We share the feeling current among many researchers that the
dominant constructivist orientation to social analysis is inadequate for
thinking about matter, materiality, and politics in ways that do justice to
the contemporary context of biopolitics and global political economy.
While we recognize that radical constructivism has contributed considerable insight into the workings of power over recent years, we are also
aware that an allergy to "the real" that is characteristic of its more linguistic or discursive forms - whereby overtures to material reality are dismissed as an insidious foundationalism - has had the consequence of dissuading critical inquirers from the more empirical kinds of investigation
that material processes and structures require. While by no means are all
the essays in this volume hostile to constructivism, and new materialists
countenance no simple return to empiricism or positivism, we share the
view current among many critics that our contemporary context demands
a theoretical rapprochement with material realism.
Congruent with these imperatives for readdressing materiality, we discern three interrelated but distinctive themes or directions in new materialist scholarship, and we use these to organize the rest of our discussion
here. We do so in the hope of setting a framework for ensuing debate,
although we are aware that our three themes are somewhat unevenly
represented in the essays that follow. First among them is an ontological
reorientation that is resonant with, and to some extent informed by, developments in natural science: an orientation that is posthumanist in the
sense that it conceives of matter itself as lively or as exhibiting agency. The
second theme entails consideration of a raft of biopolitical and bioethical
issues concerning the status oflife and of the human. Third, new materialist scholarship testifies to a critical and nondogmatic reengagement with
political economy, where the nature of, and relationship between, the
material details of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures is being explored afresh. An important characteristic
shared by all three components is their emphasis on materialization as a
complex, pluralistic, relatively open process and their insistence that humans, including theorists themselves, be recognized as thoroughly immersed within materiality's productive contingencies. In distinction from
some recent examples of constructivism, new materialists emphasize the
productivity and resilience of matter. Their wager is to give materiality its
due, alert to the myriad ways in which matter is both self-constituting and
invested with - and reconfigured by - intersubjective interventions that
have their own quotient of materiality.
Given the lively immanence of matter associated with new materialisms, it is unsurprising that they should be emerging contemporaneously
with a new vitalism. 3 Gilles Deleuze, whose work has been influential in
much of the new ontology, did not count himself a materialist despite his
radical empiricism and some evocative descriptions of materialization.
But he was emphatic that everything he wrote "is vitalist, at least I hope it
is."4 Hostilities between these respective approaches have traditionally
been staged as an opposition between mechanistic and vitalist understandings of (dead versus lively) matter. Typically, they were resolved by distinguishing between the sort of mechanical, inorganic matter described by
physicists and the evolving organic systems described by biologists. But
new materialists are attracted to forms of vitalism that refuse this latter
distinction. They often discern emergent, generative powers (or agentic
capacities) even within inorganic matter, and they generally eschew the
distinction between organic and inorganic, or animate and inanimate, at
the ontological level. Jane Bennett has provocatively labeled this an "enchanted materialism:' ascribing agency to inorganic phenomena such as
the electricity grid, food, and trash, all of which enjoy a certain efficacy
that defies human will. 5
Even natural science, whose influence on some of these new accounts of
matter is far from nugatory, now envisages a considerably more indeterminate and complex choreography of matter than early modern technology
and practice allowed, thus reinforcing new materialist views that the whole
edifice ofmodern ontology regarding notions ofchange, causality, agency,
time, and space needs rethinking. Perhaps most Significant here is the way
new materialist ontologies are abandoning the terminology of matter as
an inert substance subject to predictable causal forces. According to the
new materialisms, if everything is material inasmuch as it is composed of
physicochemical processes, nothing is reducible to such processes, at least
as conventionally understood. For materiality is always something more
than "mere" matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference
that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable. In
sum, new materialists are rediscovering a materiality that materializes,
evincing immanent modes of self-transformation that compel us to think
of causation in far more complex terms; to recognize that phenomena are
caught in a multitude of interlocking systems and forces and to consider
anew the location and nature ofcapacities for agency.
10
II
12
13
14
weather patterns, but also new social movements, health and crime, and
economics are all amenable to the kind of explanation developed by complexity theorists. 13 Such phenomena are now understood as emergent
systems that move with a superficially chaotic randomness that is underlain by patterns ofcomplex organization, which in turn function as foci for
further organization and development. Such systems are marked by considerable instability and volatility since their repetition is never perfect;
there is a continuous redefining and reassembling of key elements that
results in systems' capacities to evolve into new and unexpected forms.
Their logic ofproliferation is again resonant with new materialist senses of
contingent, immanent self-transformation.
If such patterns of organization are not predictable or determinable,
this is in part because there is no longer a quantitative relationship between cause and effect. For any emergent material configuration, infinitesimally small causes can transform successive conditions for interaction
among elements such that they end up having massive but unanticipated
effects. 14 What is famously known as "the butterfly effect" in weather
patterns, for example, refers to the possibility that a slight disturbance of
air preCipitated by a flapping of diaphanous wings could set off a succession of complex meteorological andattnospheric changes that trigger a,
hurricane in another hemisphere. In such cases it is not, as John Urry
explains, that "the sum is greater than the parts - but that there are system
effects that are different from their parts. [The] components of a system
through their interaction 'spontaneously' develop collective properties or
patterns.... These are non-linear consequences that are non-reducible to
the very many individual components that comprise such activities."ls
Because innumerable interactions between manifold elements that produce patterns of organization successively transform those elements, it is
impossible either to predict outcomes in advance or to repeat an event. 16
Since, moreover, determination within dynamic systems is nonlinear, terminal effects cannot be construed as possibilities that were already latent
in some initial moment. 17 Again, one can discern in such material productivity a posthumanist sense of material agency and a limitation of humans'
agentic efficacy.
In outlining elements of a new materialist ontology in this section we
have drawn attention to the vibrant, constitutive, aleatory, and even immaterial indices that characterize the new senses of materiality and mate-
15
16
medical and digital prostheses, too, now enable, enhance, and enrich our
physical and social lives in many ways. Whether it is pacing the heartbeat,
dispensing medication, catching the news on a podcast, elaborating an
internet-based community, finding directions via the web or GPS, or sending family love via wireless communications, digital technologies have
become a part of our lives and of who we are. It is not merely the case that
more people are becoming something akin to Donna Haraway's cyborg
(a fusion of human and technology).21 More radically, as N. Katherine
Hayles argues, our saturation with networked and programmable media
shunts us out of the realm of the human and into the realm of the posthuman: "an informational pattern that happens to be instantiated in a
biological substrate."22 Such changes have significant implications for.our
understanding of the human as a distinctive biological or moral entity.23
A further example of the way new materialists are being obliged to recognize the interactions of different orders of matter is evident in genetics.
For some geneticists, insight into the porosity of organisms' boundaries
has been prompted by the discovery that there is a considerably smaller
mimber of genes in the human genome than was initially anticipated.
Before mapping the genome, many had imagined that each gene produces
a corresponding protein that is responsible for a specific trait: a distinctly
mechanistic conception of the work of genes. 24 The assumption that followed was that once all the genes were known and mapped, humans
might be able precisely to predict and control their organic life process.
The unexpectedly small number of genes that geneticists actually found
compelled them to abandon the explanatory framework of Simple genetic
determinism and to acknowledge that an organism's particular properties and susceptibilities are produced through complex interactions between genes and a host of other factors such as hormones, neurochemical
stimuli, dietary intake, and environmental conditions. This has in turn
prompted a reappraisal of organisms as discrete, autonomous units with
relatively tidy, bounded causal patterns. It has also provided an incentive
to study gene behavior using more complex ideas of "systems-biology;'
epigenomics, and gene-ecology.25
While such conclusions reinforce some of the new physics' challenges
to older Cartesian-Newtonian conceptions of matter and to correspondingly Promethean ideas of human mastery over nature, they also suggest
that previously separate fields such as those of medical and political science
17
18
must work together more closely since in such models the body is also
understood as an open system and one whose interactions with its environment significantly shape its neurochemical functioning and the trajectory of disease and health. Indicative of such cooperation is the way
exponents have used an "open developmental systems approach" to examine the effects of successive social contexts on differential health outcomes
over time26 or to reconsider patterns of social behavior, for example, by
pOinting to suggestive correlations between the demographics of criminal
behavior and the geographic distribution of industrial pollutants. Inasmuch as the aggregated effects of environmental toxins can be shown to
have deleterious effects upon judgment and behavior, the implication is
that cleaning up the environment or changing diet may be more efficacious than incarcerating disaffected urban youth. 27 Such examples show
the important policy-malting implications of new ways of understanding
the internal dynamics of material processes as well as suggest how social
stratifications such as class affect and cycle through apparently natural
processes.
Biotechnological developments may also have more indirect political
repercussions whose complex unfolding it is difficult to predict or control. At issue here is the complex interrelationships between open systems
that enable events in one "ecodomain" to precipitate events in another. For
instance, petroleum is not only a pillar of the global economy but also, and
consequently, a central feature of current foreign policy and international
relations. Accordingly, recent efforts to create synthetic bacteria that might
produce biofuel could generate considerable macrolevel effects: to end
dependence on fossil fuels might not only catapult a different configuration of economies to international prominence, but such a shift in the
balance of economic powers might also transform the imperatives that
guide international diplomacy and foreign relations, shift the direction of
capital flows, and reconfigure tl1.e topography of economic migration.
Insofar as politiCS is understood as an ongoing process of negotiating
power relations (a perspective, we suggest, that is particularly congruent
with materialism) rather than as a merely formal constitutional, institutional, or normative edifice, political analysts cannot afford to ignore
the way biotechnological developments and their corporate owners are
implicated in the entire geopolitical system. Clearly, too, deVelopments in
biomedicine and biotechnology prompt renewed reflection on the rela-
19
20
21
22
managing the life, health, and death ofits populations since the eighteenth
century. The state's management of fertility rates, marriage and funeral
rites, epidemics, food hygiene, and the nation's health is not new or even
necessarily malign. But there has until recently been a dearth of attention
paid to this material aspect of power that justifies incursions into the most
intimate habits of daily existence and thus warrants critical investigation.
Similarly, while the bevy of new biotechnological capacities, as well as
movements to ameliorate environmental degradation, are to be welcomed
in many ways, the tools, practices, policies, and regulations they occasion
must also be considered critically in terms of their capacity to facilitate and
encourage more intensive interventions in the everyday minutiae of our
material lives. For even as we might welcome a broad transformation
in lifestyle according to an ecoethos, the norms, incentives, and identities people adopt inevitably become part of new disciplinary formations
whose contours need to be specified and traced.
Biotechnological developments also raise specifically political questions
about what life is and how far it can or must fall under state control.
According to Agamben, contemporary history has witnessed the "growing inclusion of man's natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of
power."36 As we see in debates about fetal rights, abortion, stem cell research, and euthanasia: medical, scientific, or religious accounts of the
boundary between life and death are currently becoming further enmeshed with issues surrounding sovereignty because increasingly the state
must legislate on matters that were formerly left to God or nature. Seemingly technical questions about biological life processes enter the political
order because the state must frequently make decisions about the worthiness of different lives. Assisted suicide, for example, demonstrates how the
very definitions of life and death are thrown into the political arena once
decisions about survival rely on medical expertise. 37 Agamben himself
explains how the condition called coma depasse (a state in which vital
functions cease but life-support machines maintain the comatose, artificially surviving body in a limbo between life and death) has obliged legislators to redefine death by shifting the final border of life. In tlle face of this
"bare life" that is sustained and controlled by human technologies, nature
is no longer a reliable guide to the difference between life and death.
Instead, the distinction becomes a scientific, medical, and ethicopolitical
question. 38
23
24
The current interest among social scientists and policymakers in demography similarly demonstrates how scientific innovations and their
widespread social uptake in areas of formerly unregulated natural processes - notably reproductive technologies facilitating the reliable management of fertility and medical advances extending life expectancy - may
have unexpected but extensive macrolevel consequences to which political
actors are increasingly obliged to respond. Aging and even declining populations pose significant political and economic challenges for the welfare
state, as well as potentially engendering widespread structural shifts in the
balance of global power as developed and developing regions exhibit
differential demographic momentums that affect the relative sizes ofworkforces and armies, ethnic groups and electoral age profiles, and ecological
footprints. 39 The sheer materiality and mass of bodies - their numbers,
their needs, their fecundity, their productivity, their sustainability and so
on - is becoming a key dimension of political analysis and intervention.
In this section we have sketched a number of directions that we discern
within new biomaterialist thinking and whose importance for ethicopolitical inquiry we are especially eager to foreground. Our main argument here has been that new ways of thinking about living matter are
radically and rapidly reconfiguring our material world - both empirically
and conceptually- not only transforming our most basic conceptions of
life and the human but also intervening in the very building blocks of
life and altering the environment in which the human species - among
others - persists. While these reconfigurations pose huge ethical and political questions with which many new materialists are engaging, we are
also aware that from a materialist perspective normative questions cannot
be treated adequately in isolation from a well-informed understanding of
new scientific and technological developments or from their material implications and context. In turning now to the third main direction we see a
new materialism taking, we emphaSize this renewed attention to material
context in terms of its economic and political power relations.
25
26
in shaping, constraining, and constituting life chances and existential opportunities. The challenge for them is thus to track the complex circuits at
work whereby discursive and material forms are inextricable yet irreducible
and material structures are simultaneously over- and underdetermined.
It is entirely possible, then, to accept social constructionist arguments
while also insisting that the material realm is irreducible to culture or
discourse and that cultural artifacts are not arbitrary vis-a-vis nature. Even
as the most prosaic or carnal lifeworld unfolds within a socially con"
structed milieu, it does not follow that a) material objects or structures are
devoid of efficacy in the way they affect either our moods or well-being, or
our concepts and theories, b) matter is without recalcitrance or directedness in its own brutish way, or c) acknowledging nondiscursive material
efficacy is equivalent to espousing a metaphYSical claim regarding the Real
as ultimate truth. For critical materialists, society is simultaneously materially real and socially constructed: our material lives are always culturally
mediated, but they are not only cultural. As in new materialist ontologies,
the challenge here is to give materiality its due while recognizing its plural
dimensions and its complex, contingent modes of appearing.
We now turn to the second aspect of a new critical materialism, where
returning to a more materialist mode of social analysis suggests a shift of
perspective or focus within social theory. Alongside ethical concerns about
subjectivity, normative concerns about social justice, cultural concerns
about posttllodern diversity, and discursive concerns about the construction of gender or ethnicity, this entails paying attention to the material,
historical, and sociological structures of international political economy
that lend context as well as practical inertia to identities that entail unequal
life chances. It calls for a detailed phenomenology of diverse lives as they
are actually lived - often in ways that are at odds with abstract normative
theories or official ideologies.
What we have in mind in referring to a critical new materialism is a
range of approaches in which interest is currently being rekindled in the
wake of poststructuralism and which complement one another in a fairly
pragmatic way. They include the Weberian insights of critical theory regarding the bureaucratic state, whose tentacles reach increasingly deeply
to control ordinary lives through governance and governmentality, and
aspects of Foucauldian genealogy that describe how the minutiae of power
develop and practically manage embodied subjectivities. They are mani-
27
28
29
30
biopolitical interests in the nation's health also circle through the food and
pharmaceutical industries, while private companies profit from a market
in carbon trading and organic food fuelled by ecological anxieties. Whatever passes through these economic circuits is redistributed to the material
advantage of some rather than others, while entering into systemic relations that outrun the comprehension or intentions of individual actors.
Questions about livable lives are thus as economic as they are ethical and
political.
As should already be clear, the renewed critical materialisms are not
synonymous with a revival of Marxism. Yet, this legacy does remain important, not least because traditionally Marxism has been the critique of
capitalism par excellence. A critical understanding ofglobal capitalism and
its multifarious effects remains crucial for contemporary critical materialists, for some of whom a Marxist label has helped to signify their opposition to dominant neoliberal trends. But coming after poststructuralism
and its criticisms, no workable version ofMarxism can advance a historical
metanarrative, aspire to the identification of determining economic laws,
valorize an originary, pristine nature, or envisage communism as history's
idealized material destiny. As a method that facilitates and orients an ongoing critical analysis of emergent economic and geopolitical structures,
revised versions of Marxism accommodate novel approaches and perspectives that help them forge the conceptual and empirical tools needed to
gain insight into the intricacies of twenty-first-century global capitalism.
In its more authentic modes, a dialectical approach calls, after all, for
appropriate theories and concepts to be engendered out of an interrogation of the material conditions of the times, not to be imposed as a rigid
formula aiming for accurate representation.
Work by the Regulation School is one example ofsuch a living Marxism
construed as ongoing, critical analysis of the material conditions of the
times. 46 This is a Marxism that takes seriously the political in political
economy and that sees the state, governance, and production as entwined.
This view encourages its exponents to incorporate Foucauldian analyses
of governmentality, biopolitics, and the role of discourse in maintaining
social order, while taking heed of the state's enduring importance for
maintaining conditions conducive to capital accumulation. Focusing on
regimes of capital accumulation and the regulative structures that help
reproduce them, it takes into account the intersectionality of social rela-
tions while still recognizing the importance of class. If it examines everyday customs and practices as well as the broader geopolitical developments
they sustain or disrupt, this is because it is aware of the complicated,
reversible relationships that link micro- and macrolevel processes. It investigates the emergence of new social and economic forms, such as postFordism, examines potential sources of rupture immanent to the system
and its reproduction, and also remains sensitive to global developments
that are uneven, contingent, and pluralist. 47
From the vantage of the new recessionary phase of capitalism that
commenced in 2008, it is abundantly clear just how important is such
ongoing analysis and identification of its material elements. For example,
if there is a lesson to be learned from recent events associated with subprime lending and the consequent banking crisis, it is how few people any
longer grasp the complexities of the deregulated financial system, and yet
how many are affected, in so many places worldwide and in such immediately material ways, by any hiatus in financial markets. 48 Among social
theorists it has been fashionable to talk about deterritorialized, dematerialized capital flows. Yet it is me poverty of individuals induced to
talce on mortgages they could ill afford that remains the material bottom
line underpinning the elaborate but fragile structures of recent financial
growth. Spasms in the convoluted flows of capital and futures causes
immense and immediate material hardship for real individuals. People
lose their life savings, their pensions, their homes, and their jobs; industries are brought to a standstill and national economies to their knees.
Indeed, the effects of neoliberal financialization have included the dispossession of peoples from their land, the privatization of services and
commodification of formerly free or communally owned goods, internal
migrations into cities without jobs but with burgeoning slums and mass
poverty, and external migrations by those seeking better standards of living far from their indigenous homelands. 49 These are some of the economic and political conditions sometimes eclipsed in the celebration of
pluralistic immigrant cultures: it is surely incumbent on social theorists to
study the differential effects of world population growth, the reasons for
mass migration, the social and economic backgrounds in which divergent
immigrant cultures were nurtured, and the broader effects on global population movements of a volatile global economy.
In summary, we have associated new materialism with renewed atten-
31
32
tion to the dense causes and effects of global political economy and thus
with questions of social justice for embodied individuals. We have also
noted the affinity between the rhythms of materialization discerned in the
socioeconomic processes of global capitalism and those described in the
previous sections of our analysis. Commensurate with these dimensions
of the new critical materialisms is what we are calling a multimodal methodology, one congruent with the multitiered ontologies, the complex
systems, and the stratified reality we have been describing. In particular,
we emphaSize here the way new materialist analysis traces the complex
and reversible causalities that run between different levels of the social
system and especially between the microlevel or everyday, and the macrolevel or structural. Indeed, there is currently a surge of interest in everyday
life, one that is elaborated through a combination of phenomenological,
anthropological, and ethnographic studies on the one hand, and genealogical and sociological studies on the other.50 Interestingly, some indication of how new materialists might investigate both the quotidian and
structural dimensions of late capitalism can already be found in work by
Althusser and Foucault. Here we present a few aspects of their ideas that
we find salient and provocative for a multimodal materialism.
While Foucault's work has been widely used to study the powerful
effects of discursive constructs and to pose posthumanist questions about
agency and ethics, what we emphasize here is the concrete material analysis
genealogy encourages vis-a.-vis the prosaic details of bodily existence. This
is the aspect that has often commended itself to feminists eager to investigate the construction of female flesh. 51 Of particular Significance is Foucault's insistence that genealogy requires "a knowledge of details": that it
documents a discontinuous, "effective history" of the body that is "broken
down by rhythms of work, rest, and holidays . . . poisoned by food or
values, through eating habits or moral laws"; a body that also "constructs
resistances:' In its emphaSiS on "the body, the nervous system, nutrition,
digestion and energies;'52 such an approach talces seriously the material
intricacies of existence and the way bodies are constituted as productive
but docile matter through disciplining, enhancing, and redirecting their
visceral capacities.53 This in turn opens the way to understanding a more
general field or economy of power relations in which bodily capacities are
rendered determinate. Foucault describes the kind of micropractices that
are at stake in pacifying and reproducing social regimes in order to demon-
strate how thoroughly our ordinary, material existence is affected by, and
saturated with, power and how protean yet banal many of its tactics remain. While he insists that the development of such powers is not to be
explained simply as an effect of, or as functional for, broader structural
changes associated with capital, demography, or state building, he does
show that these micro- and macromodalities (the everyday and the structural) are mutually interdependent. In other words, he recognizes the
multimodal materialist analysis needed to explain the production and reproduction of the modern social order. The matter whose materialization
Foucault describes is malleable, socially produced, and inscribed with its
histories; paradoxically, it is obliged to acquire (additional, redirected)
agentic capacities as an aspect ofits subjection.
This attention to material detail and to the plural dimensions and
power relations in which such details are to be understood is elaborated in
Althusser's essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)?' Althusser's work attracted considerable attention when it first appeared because of the way it developed a materialist
alternative to more reductionist or teleological forms of Marxism that
rejected its then dominant mechanical and humanist modes. Althusser
claims in this particular essay that Marx had envisaged social structure in
terms oflevels or instances, each with their own "indices ofeffectivity" and
ways of relating to other levels.54 From this perspective, it is insufficient to
regard the state as simply functional for reproducing the social relations of
production; one needs to examine its complex, differential elements that
are both repressive and ideological in their operations. Similarly, it is
necessary to pay attention to "all the direct or indirect forms of exploitation" and to the "subtle everyday domination" whose material details are
redolent, we suggest, of Foucault's descriptions inDiscipline and Punish.
Althusser goes on to distinguish between the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and the Ideological State Apparatus (lSA), but he acknowledges that both utilize a mixture of coercive and ideological means: ''Very
subtle explicit or tacit combinations may be woven" and these need to be
"studied in detail" (19f.). Thus parts of the ideological apparatus, such as
the church, school, or family, use symbolic modes of discipline that include various forms of punishment, expulsion, or exclusion. And while
"the relations of production are first reproduced by the materiality of the
processes of production and circulation;' ideological relations are also
33
34
"immediately present in the same processes" (22 n. 12). Habits of working or practices of consuming help to stabilize the system as something
that is daily renewed as the familiar, material horizon of ordinary lives and
maintained through their routinized performances. As such, the capitalist
economy, the juridico-political domain, and the material quotidian are
interrelated but not in any fixed or formulaic way. It is these different
levels and their shifting interconnections that a multimodal materialist
analysis investigates.
Of especial interest here is Althusser's insistence that despite its apparently ideal forms, ideology "has a material existence" (39). "Of course:' he
adds in a caveat that is crucial for our appropriation of his argument, "the
material existence of the ideology in an apparatus and its practices does
not have the same modality as the material existence of a paving-stone or a
rifle. But, at the risk of being taken for a Neo-Aristotelian, ... I shall say
that [in Marx] matter is discussed in many senses, or that it exists in
different modalities, all rooted in the last instance in 'physical' matter"
( 40 ). This recognition of different modalities of matter allows Althusser
to explain that for the complicit subject, "the ideas ofhis belief are material
in that his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices
governed by material rituals which are tl1emselves defined by the material
ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of the subject" (43). He
accordingly draws attention to the way "ideas" are inscribed in actions
whose repetitive, ritualized performances are borne by concrete individuals who are thereby practically constituted as compliant or agentic subjects. While such performances are institutionalized in rituals and ceremonies, they also become sedimented at a corporeal level, where they are
repeated as habits or talcen for granted know-how: lodged in the bodily
memory that Bourdieu calls habitus or which phenomenologists refer to as
a lifeworld. It is indeed this nonreflexive habituality and the way it imbues
objects with familiarity tl1at malces artifacts, commodities, and practices
seem so natural that they are not questioned. It is in this sense that ideology or power operate most effectively when embedded in the material,
practical horizons and institutions of everyday life. Althusser's materialism here is surely exemplified by Foucault's insistence that an analytics of
power must focus on its "real and effective practices"; that "we should try
to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and
materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, ener-
35
36
thing more than simple diverSity. Broadly, the authors concur in their
recognition that new materialist ontologies demand a rethinking of, and
renewed attention to, the dynamics of materialization. They also share an
acknowledgment that such a project demands, as a corollary, a radical
reappraisal of the contours of the subject, a reassessment of the possibility
and texture of ethics, an examination of new domains of power and unfamiliar frames for imagining justice, and an exploration of the sources,
quality, and dimensions of agency. Indeed, as editors, what we have found
so striking is that each essay is both profoundly philosophical and also
insistently politically engaged: even without our explicit directive, each
writer endeavors to linle ontological and metaphYSical questions with their
ethical and political correlates and implications. The essays' convergence
on this point binds them into a coherent yet multifaceted constellation.
At the same time, the themes and questions that emerge and reemerge
in the essays make it difficult to separate, group, and order them in a
definitive way. Drawing on what we learned from the essays as well as our
own researches for the project, we decided to divide the text into three
sections whose topics - "the force of materiality:' "political matters:' and
"economies of disruption" - rehearse the themes that organize the distinct sections of this introduction: ontology, bioethics/politics, and critical materialisms. Since the authors all engage questions about the forms of
subjectivity, power, agency, and ethics opened up by new materialist ontologies, it would have been entirely possible to place most of the essays
under any of the rubrics that divide the text. We must acknowledge, then,
that there is a respect in which the ordering of the essays is somewhat
arbitrary, and we invite readers to reinvent the collection by reading the
essays in whichever order commends itself to them. For us, this has meant
grouping the essays in a way that allows the discordance and resonance
produced by the textual proximity of sources, framings, and focal questions to provoke illuminating reconsiderations and conceptual shifts.
The essays in the first section, "The Force of Materiality:' explore the
ontologies of the new materialisms, suggesting how we might conceive of
matter and materiality outside of the dualism of the material and the ideal.
In her comparative study of the vitalist philosophies of Hans Driesch and
Henri Bergson, Jane Bennett explores efforts to specify and give a philosophical and scientific language to the liveliness ofliving matter while also
warning of the ways vitalism can be given troubling new life in the po-
37
38
litical rhetoric of Nazism or the contemporary "culture of life." Intracing Jacques Derrida's and Gilles Deleuze's distinctive projects of figuring
materiality outside of the grasping hold of consciousness, Pheng Cheah
marks the ways the new materialist ontologies call into radical question
some of the foundational concepts in politics. Diana Coole uses Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, among other thinkers, to trace the philosophical paths by
which phenomenologists have tried to refigure perception and agency by
relocating and reimagining the body-in-the-world. Emphasizing and analyzing the impersonal character of both Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of
the will to power and Sigmund Freud's account of psychic life, Melissa
Orlie explores how we might imagine creativity and freedom from within
a new materialist framework.
The essays in the second section, "Political Matters:' investigate how
the ontological, scientific, and technological dimensions of the new materialisms demand a reformulation of the forms and domains of power,
ethics, and politics. Elizabeth Grosz analyzes Henri Bergson's effort to
sidestep the "freedom versus determinism" problem that is often posed as
an obstacle to political elaborati0l1s of new materialist ontologies. She
explores the feminist political possibilities in Bergson's contention that
freedom is best conceived not as a characteristic of a subject but rather as a
characteristic of acts that express the subject. Samantha Frost draws out
Thomas Hobbes's materialist analysis of the ways the passions orient subjects in space and time to suggest that fear is a passion through which
individuals produce a sense of themselves as autonomous agents. William
Connolly weaves together insights about perception and power gathered from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and
contemporary neuroscience to explore how our attachment to the world
shapes the texture ofpolitical judgment and critique. And finally, situating
pain and death in relation to impersonal life processes, Rosi Braidotti
reassesses contemporary forms of biopower and sketches the possibility of
an affirmative ethics and citizenship.
The essays in the third section, "Economies of Disruption;' analyze the
relationship between the materiality of the corpus and the materiality of
practice, exploring the ways social and economic practices produce and
reproduce embodied subjectivity and existential inequalities, as well as
the spaces of, and possibilities for, political transformation. Using Alfred
Sohn-Rethel, Louis Althusser, and Slavoj Zizek to reexamine historical
materialism and its progressivist teleology, Rey Chow considers the potential for terror as well as progress when iterative practices are presented
as a model of political agency. Reading Edmund Husserl's phenomenology alongside Karl Marx's historical materialism, Sara Ahmed meditates
on the ways the materialization of bodies is bound up with the materialization and objectification of the world (s) in which they live. Sonia Kruks
uses Simone de Beauvoir's diagnoses of the infirmities and oppressions of
old age to illustrate how the materialisms in existential phenomenology,
Marxism, and social constructivism can, in tandem, provide fruitful insights on the genesis, experience, and perpetuation of injustice. Jason
Edwards supplements Karl Marx's and Louis Althusser's analyses of the
development of capitalism with Henri Lefebvre's studies of the practices
of everyday life, in order to propose an expansive and more politically
useful conception of the material practices that reproduce global capitalism and structure the geopolitical system.
We conclude by sincerely thanking all our contributors and by reiterating our great pleasure at presenting these essays. We do so in the conviction that, collectively, they set the new materialisms on course to become a significant orientation for social research after the cultural turn.
Our hope is that they will not only encourage debate about a new materialist paradigm but also inspire inrrovative investigations of the fragile,
volatile world we inlrabit.
Notes
White, Sustaining Affirmation, 3f.
See Israel, Radical Enlightenment for a rich elaboration of the history of Spinoza's work. See also Tuck, Philosophy and Government) IS72-I6SI for a historical analysis of the development of Cartesian and non-Cartesian materialist
philosophies.
3 See, for example, the special issue of Theory) Culture and Society, "Inventive
Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism~' Mariam Fraser, Sarah Kember, and
Celia Lury, eds. Vitalism, the editors contend in their introduction, "matters
now" because its attention to "vital processes" assists in current attempts at
thinking of process as a mode of being and at introducing "information,
knowledge or 'mind' into social and natural entities, making them seem less
inert, more process-like: bringing them alive." Fraser, Kember, and Lury, eds.,
"Inventive Life~' I.
4 Deleuze, Negotiations, 143.
I
39
40
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
provided those risks were borne by others, notably those in developing countries with lime access to legal redress. The case of the Bhopal chemical works
in India and the shocking treatment of its victims proVides an especially
clear example of Beck's argument, while reinforcing the sense in which riskmanagement requires an intricate systems-wide approach. See Beck, TheRisk
Society; Beck, "The Terrorist Threat"; Franklin, The Politics ofRisk Society.
Haraway, ''A Cyborg Manifesto." See also ''Annual Review;' the special issue
of Theory) Culture and Society, Mike Featherstone and Nicholas Gane, eds.,
which includes a series of articles considering the legacy of Haraways notion
of the cyborg.
Hayles, "Unfinished Work;' 160. See also Hayles, "Computing the Human."
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future;
Cheah, Inhuman Conditions.
Wynne, "Reflexing Complexity."
Ibid., 72-74.
Daniels, At Women)s Expense; Oyama, The Ontogeny ofInformation; Oyama,
Evolution>s Eye; Fausto-Sterling, "The Bare Bones of Sex."
Masters and Coplan, "Water Treatment with Silicofluorides and Lead ToxicitY'; and Roger, Hone, and Doshi, "Environmental Pollution, Neurotoxicity,
and Criminal Violence."
Jasanoff, Designs on Nature; Rajan, Biocapital.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; The Primacy of Perception; The
Visible and the Invisible. For further development of this phenomenological
argument see Coole, "Rethinking Agency;' and Coole, "Experiencing Discourse." For a critical realist account that has many points of similarity and
which also uses Merleau-PontYs work, see Archer, Being Human.
Agamben, The Open, 29.
Sunstein and Nussbaum, eds., Animal Rights.
Rose, The Politics ofLife Itself. See also Sharp, Strange Harvest.
Goodwin, Black Markets; Waldby and Mitchell, Tissue Economies; Sharp, Bodies) Commodities) and Biotechnologies.
MacIntyre, DependentRationalAnimal.
Such issues have been subjected to serious attention in films such as 200I) A
Space Odyssey; 1, Robot; and Blade Runner.
Agamben, HomoSacer, 119. The text of Foucault's he has in mind here is The
History ofSexuality, vol. I.
Agamben, Homo Sacer, I 36ff.
Ibid., 160-64.
See, for example, Jackson and Howe, The Graying of the Great Powers; and
Magnus, The Age ofAging.
Honneth, "The Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory;' 345.
Shapiro, The Flightfrom Reality in the Human Sciences.
Archer, Being Human, 2, 4, 9, 22, 44, I II, 121.
41
42
147
45
46
47
4S
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
omous initiatives (an ethic). The characteristically subtle logic of these 'ordinary activities comes to light only in their details." The Practice of Everyday
Life, ix.
While a more poststructuralist use of Foucault's work by feminists and queer
theorists has emphaSized the construction of discourses, there is a rich field of
more materialist feminist studies that examines the material strategies artd
effects that produce gendered flesh. See, for example, Diamond and Quinby,
eds., Feminism and Foucault. Biddy Martin's intervention concerning materialism in "Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault" (4-5) is significant, although
it is the concrete nature of the analyses to which we especially wish to draw
attention.
Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History:' 153, ISS
As Paul Patton argues, this way of understanding Foucault's argument does
not endorse naturalism but neither does it efface the bodys materiality; rather,
it understands power "in its primary sense of capacity to do or become certain
things" and presents power as redirecting such capacities. Patton, "Foucault's
Subject of Power:' 65.
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an
Investigation):' sf.
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 97.
Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter.
43
Jane Bennett
48
Jane Bennett
A VITALIST STOPOVER
49
50
Jane Bennett
Entelechy
Driesch was a Kantian, at least at first. Kant, in the Critique ofJudgment,
had repeatedly insisted upon the figure of passive matter: matter "as such"
can have no "spontaneity."6 "We cannot even think of living matter as
possible. (The concept of it involves a contradiction, since the essential
character of matter is lifelessness, inertia) ."7 We must not "endow matter,
as mere matter, with a property ([namely, the property of life, as] hylozoism [does]) that conflicts with its nature."8 Driesch affirms Kant's image of matter to the extent that Driesch affirms the need for a nonmaterial
supplement to direct, organize, and animate matter. Driesch also echoes
Kant's claim that the vital principle would never become fully transparent
to us and could be known only as an invisible presence that performs the
tasks that are in fact performed within the organism but which no mechanical matter could ever possibly perform by itself. Entelechy is born in
the negative spaces of the machine model of nature, in the "gaps" in the
"chain of strictly physico-chemical or mechanical events."9
Driesch's case for entelechy proceeds thus, first, by way of transcendental arguments: "x must be operative, given the indisputable reality of y." To
show how the vital principle cannot be "physico-chemical" in nature, for
example, he starts from the observation that, in morphogenesis (the process by which a fertilized egg becomes an adult organism), "manifoldness
in space is produced where no manifoldness was." Though on first glance
it might seem that this manifoldness in space emerged directly from the
spatially uniform, undifferentiated egg, theoretical reason reveals this to
be impossible: a spatial manifold cannot have a spatial unity as its source.
Thus, it must be that some other kind of "manifold" is present "previous to
morphogenesis." Lacking an "extensive character:' this prior manifold, the
basis of the organism's later differentiation, must be an "'intensive manifoldness: "10 that is, "an agent acting manifoldly without being in itself
manifold in space" (vol. 2, 250). "That is to say, [it is] ... composite,
though not in space" (vol. 2, 316). We have, then, a first definition of
entelechy: it is tl1e intensive manifoldness out of which emerges the extensive manifoldness of the mature organism.
Driesch's negative and indirect case for vitalism proceeds, second, by
way ofhis positive and direct interventions and observations in the laboratory. Indeed, what had initially provoked Driesch to posit the "autonomy
A VITALIST STOPOVER
51
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Jane Bennett
gates; but the organism is not an aggregate" (vol. 1,25). The parts of a
plant, unlike the mineral and chemical elements of a mountain, are members: when a change occurs in one, the others are not only thereby affected
but affected in such a way as to provoke a coordinated response.
Developing the contrast between machines and organisms further,
Driesch argues that whereas a phonograph "receives vibrations of the air
and gives off vibrations of the air" and so "previous stimulus and later
reaction are of the same nature:' in an organism the "impressions on its
sensory organs" (for example, sounds) can issue in somegung (for example, conversations) that belongs to an "absolutely different class of phenomena" (vol. 2, 61, my emphasis). Neither can inorganic systems (as
mere matter) learn from their experiences, says Driesch, for that entails
not only "the mere recollection of what has happened, but ... also the
ability to use freely in another field of occurring the elements of former
happening for newly combined individualised specificities of the future
which are wholes" (vol. 2, 79). Driesch describes the productivity of organisms as folloWing "a curious principle, which may be called ... individual correspondence. That is to say: any real action is an individual 'answer' to
an individual stimulus."16 Such individualized action tailored specifically
to the situation at hand constitutes the "directing" action of entelechy.
Elsewhere, Driesch describes this "directing" power as the power to
allow one of the many formative possibilities inside the emergent organism to become actual. There are always more potential shapes and lines of
development for a cell, organ, or an organism than become actual. In
(what we would call) the stem cells of the sea urchin, for example, there is
"an enormous number of possibilities of happening in the form of difference of 'potential'" in each cell. 17 But if "something else can be formed
than actually is formed, why then does there happen in each case just what
happens and nothing else?" Again Driesch reasons that there must be
some agent responsible for the singular specificity of the outcome, some
decisive agent guarding the entrance to actuality:
According to our hypothesis, ... in each of the n cells the same great
number of possibilities of becoming is physico-chemically prepared,
but checked, so to say, by entelechy. Development of the system now
depends, according to our assumption, upon the fact that entelechy
relaxes its suspensory power and thus . . . in cell a one thing is allowed to
A VITALIST STOPOVER
occur, in cell b another, and in cell c something else; but what now
actually occurs in a might also have occurred in b or c; for each one out of
an enormous number of possibilities may occur in each cell. Thus, by
the regulatory relaxing action of entelechy in a system in which an
enormous variety of possible events had been suspended by it, it may
happen that an equal distribution of possibilities is transformed into an
unequal distribution of actual effects. 18
Note that, once again, Driesch describes the power of entelechy to
determine the trajectory of organic growth in negative terms: it acts by
selectively "relaxing" its "suspensory power." This capacity for (negative)
choice operates in a context of multiple possibilities, and so the actual path
of organic growth is not determined in a rigid, mechanical way. Likewise,
neither are the individual movements of an adult organism fully determined or mechanically caused by the stimuli of the individual's environment: outside events do affect the individual, but they create only "a
general stock of possibilities for further acting and have not determined all
further reactions quite in detail."19 There is thus an "indefiniteness of correspondence between specific cause and specific effect."2o It is in this indefiniteness that "freedom" exists.
In the Gifford lectures, Driesch affirms a qualitative difference between
life and matter. Entelechy, that self-directing activeness apparent in some
bodies, is what distinguishes a crystal from an embryo, a parking lot from
a lawn, me from my corpse. But does Driesch also affirm a qualitative
difference between human and other forms of life? The question is an
important one, I think, because it seems that much of the appeal of vitalism resides in the desire to view man as the apex of worldly existence. 21
Driesch's response is ambivalent. On the one hand, the "directing" power
of entelechy (unlike its "formative" power which is distributed equally
across all organisms) operates inside man with special intensity. This is
evidenced in his greater capacity for "knowing" and "willing." But, on the
other hand, Driesch also believes that some analogue of knowing and
willing exists in all organic processes: "Indeed, as far as morphogenesis
and physiological adaptation and instinctive reactions are concerned,
there must be a something comparable metaphorically with specified
knowing and willing."22
Close attention to morphogenesis reveals to Driesch a modality of
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Jane Bennett
A VITALIST STOPOVER
entelechy might be conceived as "energy;' and thus as a special kind of
physico-chemical entity. Again he answers no, rejecting the idea of "vital
energy" as oxymoronic, for life is unquantifiable and all energies remain
for him quantities: "In asserting ... phenomena to be of the energetical
order, we state that there can be a more or less of them. . . . But entelechy
lacks all the characteristics ofquantity: entelechy is order ofrelation and absolutely nothing else."28
As I have already noted, Driesch's "critical vitalism" emphasizes the
necessarily intimate relationship between entelechy and the regular, observable operations of matter. Entelechy can make use only of "the possibilities of becoming" that are "physico-chemically prepared;' for "life is
unlmown to us except in association with bodies";29 entelechy always
"uses material means in each individual morphogenesis" (vol. 2, 295);
entelechy cannot malce sulphuric acid if no hydrogen is present, but it can
"suspend for as long a period as it wants anyone of all the reactions which
are pOSSible with such compounds as are present, and which would happen
without entelechy" (vol. 2, I 80 ). These formulations display Driesch's
struggle to make the life-matter relationship as close as it can possibly be
without going all the way over to a (mechanistic) materialism and without implying a metaphysics of "soul."
What intrigues me perhaps the most about entelechy is the way it is a
figure of an impersonal kind of agency. Like Machiavelli's fortuna or the
Homeric Greek notion ofpsuche,30 entelechy is not the Imique possession
of each individual but ratller a vitality flowing across all living bodies.
Entelechy coordinates parts on behalfofa whole without following a rigid
plan; it answers events innovatively and perspicuously, deciding on the
spot and in real time which of the many pOSSible courses of development
will in fact happen. Neither is the agentic capacity of entelechy a disembodied soul, for it is constrained by the materiality that it must inhabit
and by the preformed possibilities contained therein. But despite this
heteronomy, entelechy has real efficacy: it animates, arranges, and directs
the bodies of the living, even under changing conditions. It is "an effective
extra-spatial intensively manifold constituent of nature."31
Driesch's invention of entelechy as a creative causality was initially
propelled by his assumption that materiality was matter, that is, stuff
so passive and dull that it could not pOSSibly have done the tricky work
of organizing and maintaining morphing wholes. Sometimes this mat-
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Jane Bennett
ter is infused with entelechy and becomes "life;' and sometimes it isn't
and coagulates into inorganic "machines." Driesch thought he had to figure entelechy as nonmaterial because his notion of materiality was yoked
to the notion of a mechanistic, deterministic machine. In 1926, Mikhail
Bakhtin rebutted Driesch on this point, arguing that Driesch failed to
imagine the possibility of "a relentlessly self-constructing, developing machine [which] ... builds itself not from pre-prepared parts, but from selfconstructing ones." Such a machine, were it to be damaged, would indeed
be capable of a self-repair, a restitution prompted and guided by subtle
and interactive physico-chemical signals, and thus would have no need for
entelechy.32
Bakhtin poin~ed out that Driesch's vitalism depended upon his critique ofmaterialism and that critique depended upon equating materiality
with mechanical causality, with an image of machine as a "totally prefabricated" and "fixed and immovable" assemblage. 33 Balchtin recommended
that Driesch rethink what a "machine" can be rather than reject physicomaterialist explanation per se. 34 I agree.
But I applaud the way Driesch yokes his vital principle to experiential
activities in the lab. This helps him to ward offthe temptation within vitalism to spiritualize the vital agent. As an example of a vitalism that surrenders to this temptation, I turn now to another figure of vital force, the
"soul" inside human embryos produced as a result offertility technologies.
A VITALIST STOPOVER
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Jane Bennett
opposes embryonic stem cell research because the extraction halts the
morphological process at the gastrula stage. Former House Republican
leader DeLay describes this as "the dismemberment of living, distinct human beings for the purposes of medical experimentation."41 Many Americans agreed with him. Stem cells can also be taken from umbilical cord
blood, adult human bone marrow, and fertilized embryos too old to be
capable of developing furtht;r. The Bush administration does not object to
these sources of stem cells, perhaps because blood, marrow, and decayed
embryos are conceived as dead matter rather than life and thus pose no
threat to the "culture of life."
But what is the "culture of life"? The phrase was the central theme of
Pope John Paul II's 1995 "Evangelium Vitae" before it was adopted by
non-Catholic evangelicals in the United States to refer to a cluster of
theological beliefs linked to a set of public policies. 42 The policies are easy
to name: the culture oflife, defined in contrast to "the [secular] culture of
death:' has been invoked to support legislation to keep a feeding tube
inserted into a woman whose brain function had ceased, to restrict access
by minors to abortion and to outlaw certain surgical techniques of abortion, as well as to oppose federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
The theological or cosmological beliefs within the culture of life are less
clearly articulated, but the following four claims seem central:
I
Life is radically different from matter. Life is organized, active, selfpropelled, and, in diverse registers of the term, "free." Matter is
intrinsically passive and predetermined in its operation. Life may be
embodied, and when it is, it operates alongside physico-chemical
entities and processes. But life is irreducible to the sum of those
entities and processes. Life is detachable from embodiment.
Human life is radically different from all other life. The life of human
bodies is not only qualitatively different from matter but also from
every other life-form. Like other animals, humans are endowed with
a life-force, but unlike all others, this force is "a unique life-principle
or soul."43 "If society loses the sense of the essential distinction of
human life from animal life and material things, whether in theory
or in the practice of attempting to clone a human embryo, it has lost
its stature as a human society. It has lost the compass of humanness
and is, instead, laying the foundation for the replacement of a hu-
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A VITALIST STOPOVER
of The History and Theory of Vitalism, Driesch goes so far as to reject his
own image ofnature as divided into dead matter and organic life. He there
concludes that everything, whether "inorganic" or "organic;' must be
entelechial, life-ly, or vitalistic: "nature is a something in evolution. All natural becoming is like one great embryology." Driesch thus ends his defense
of vitalism by "destroying" "the [very] difference between 'mechanism'
and 'Vitalism; ... which we have established so carefully."49
And when the Nazis took up his theory of organic wholes directed by a
vital principle in support of their claim that the German nation had to
fulfill its vital destiny and wage its vital wars,50 Driesch objected vehemently. "Entelechy recognized no state boundaries and . . . therefore the
only biological 'whole' to which one could rightfully belong was 'humanity.' He opposed rising militarism in equally biological language, declaring
that the militaristic actions of nature against nation needed to be recognized for what it was: 'the most terrible of all sins' against the vitalistic
principles of life, holistic cooperation and higher development."51
As I see it, the important political question that "culture oflife" vitalism
raises is not "Is the embryo matter or life?" but "How can the figure of life
join forces with a celebration of (righteous) violence?" I have tried to
illumidate an inner link between, on the one hand, Bush's repeated invocations of life, freedom, and care for the weak, and, on the other hand, his
policies of torture, economic inequality, and preemptive violence. The
charge of hypocrisy does not quite get at what is at work here. Rather, it
seems that faith in the idea of a divinely created hierarchy - of the righteous domination of some parts over others - flows into faith in the otherwise inexplicable ideas that the rich deserve to get richer, that war is
prolife, and that force can set us free.
Whereas Drieschean and Bushean vitalisms diverge on the question of
hierarchy, they share a valorization of freedom or the element of unpredictability and indeterminacy in action. For both, the world contains persistent moments of freedom, despite the comforting regularity provided
by natural or divine law. To believe in entelechy is to affirm the freedom of
a certain "indefiniteness of correspondence between specific cause and specific effect;'52 a capacity for the aleatory that Driesch extended to the
universe as a whole. To believe in the soul is also to affirm a kind of
freedom, though one restricted to the "life" embodied in humans: this is
the freedom for the sake of which America invades the territories of those
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humans who "hate freedom" because "they love terror:'53 but also the free
will of a humanity capable of acts worthy of moral credit or blame.
Bakhtin was critical of the way Driesch's ostensibly scientific descriptions insinuated the metaphysical assumption offreedom. Driesch claimed
that the blastomere contained multiple intensities, only one of which will
be chosen by entelechy) but because at any given time and place there is in
fact only one possible outcome ofmorphogenesis, Driesch's "talk ofseveral )
potentials and possibilities serves only one purpose: it allows for the presupposition that they are all equally possible ... and that therefore it is
possible to choose one of them freely. Freedom ofchoice ... is the ground of
all of Driesch's constructions;'54 Bakhtin, I think, correctly identifies what
is at stake in the vitalism of Driesch, and, albeit in a different one of its
registers, also at stake in the vitalism of Bush. It is freedom, or faith in the
existence of an undetermined world.
This resilient faith may help to explain vitalism's ability to repeatedly
rise from the dead, to recur in history despite serial attempts to debunk
and dispel it. Vitalism may also draw some of its enduring, or at least
periodic, vitality from the fact that there seems to be something inside the
practice of experimental science - its pragmatic quest for useful results,
perhaps? - that leads it to understate or downplay the freedom, the energetic fluidity or surprising creativity of the natural world. This seems to be
the case long after mechanistic models of nature have morphed into systems theory and complexity theory, and long after the figure of inert
matter has been challenged by fluid dynamics and chaos theory, as well as
by the many earlier biophilosophies of flow that Michel Serres chronicles
in The Birth ofPhysics. But if there is something internal to scientific thinking that is uneasy about highlighting the idea of an element of indetermination intrinsic to nature, perhaps this is also because, in the West, to
admit to indetermination is always to invite its colonization by dogmatic
forms of Christian theology. Hence, Bush and the politics of the culture
of life.
Vital Materiality
The National Institutes of Health 2001 Report on Stem Cells made two
claims that surprised me, a surprise that revealed the extent to which I too
had absorbed a machine model of nature. The first claim was that no one
A VITALIST STOPOVER
yet knows whether "embryonic stem cells" exist as such in human embryos in the womb, that is, whether they have a presence before they are
extracted from blastocysts and placed in a new, laboratory-generated milieu. Though"most scientists now agree that adult stem cells exist in many
tissues of the human body (in vivo), . . . it is less certain that embryonic
stem cells exist as such in the embryo. Instead, embryonic stem cells ...
develop in tissue culture after they are derived from the inner cell mass of the
early embryo;'55 The second unexpected claim was that it is also uncertain
whether even the stem cells produced in the lab are in fact "homogeneous
and undifferentiated:' even though they appear to be and their promise of
pluripotency is premised upon that state of pure, quivering indeterminacy. What?! "Embryonic stem cells" might not even exist in the body and
their laboratory avatars might not even be an exemplar of undifferentiated
pluripotency?
I would not have been so surprised by this evidence of indeterminacy
unless I had been thinking of my body as a physiological mechanism with
fixed and determinate parts, including stem cells. In contrast, the NIH
researchers seem to be encountering materiality as a continuum of becomings, of extensive and intensive for111s ifivarious states of congealment and
dissolution. If no "embryonic stem cells" turn out to exist in vivo, it may
be because an embryo is not a collection of discrete parts, perhaps not even
of protoparts or preformed possibilities, and that it is only in the closed
system ofthe lab that a vital materiality allows itself to be sliced and diced
into "embryonic stem cells;'
If we think of the term entelechy as an attempt to name a force or an
agency that is naturalistic but never fully spatialized, actualized, or calculable, as akin to what Georges Canguilhem described as "des enclaves
d'indetermination, des zones de dissidence, des foyers d'heresie:'56 then
this vitalist gesture is not inimical to the materialism I seek. This materialism, which eschews the life-matter binary and does not believe in God or
spiritual forces, nevertheless also acknowledges the presence of an indeterminate vitality - albeit one that resists confinement to a stable hierarchyin the world. It affirms a cosmos of a lively materiality that is my body
and which also operates outside it to sometimes join forces with it and
sometimes to vie against it. Despite his great admiration for the wondrous complexity of nature, Driesch could not quite imagine a "material-
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A VITALIST STOPOVER
10
II
Notes
I
5
6
7
8
9
12
13
14
IS
16
17
18
19
20
21
field of biological phenomena, can only be indirect proofs: they can only mal<e
it clear that mechanical or singnlar causality is not sufficient for an explanation
ofwhat happens:' Driesch, The History and Theory ofVitalism, 208.
Driesch, The Science and Philosophy ofthe Organism, vol. 2, 144.
In Nature conceived Scientifically-as here-now-such, there is "no room for
'psychical' entities at all." Driesch, The Problem of Individuality, 33. Driesch
makes the same point in The Science and Philosophy ofthe Orgfnism, where he
says that "there 'are' no souls ... in the phenomenon called nature in space"
(vol. 2, 82).
Driesch, The Science and Philosophy ofthe Organism, vol. I, 50, my emphasis.
On this point Driesch echoes Kant's claim tllat in judging organized beings,
"we must always presuppose some original organization that itself uses mechanism:' Kant, Critique ofJudgment, sec. 80, #418, my emphasis.
Driesch, The Problem ofIndividuality, 34.
Driesch does not elaborate on his differences with Aristotle and says only that
he will retain Aristotle's idea that "there is at work a something in life phenomena 'which bears the end in itself.''' Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of
the Organism, vol. 1,144.
A blastocyst is the name for the developmental stage of a fertilized egg when it
has changed from a solid mass of cells into a hollow ball of cells around a
fluid-filled cavity.
Driesch, The History and Theory ofVitalism, 213. Or, as he puts me point in The
Science and Philosophy ofthe Organism, vol. I, 67: mere is an "'individuality of
correspondence' between stimulus and effect."
Driesch, The Problem ofIndividuality, 38. In me vocabulary of today, it might
be said mat me stem cells have not yet been channeled into meir respective
"fate pams."
Ibid., 39.
Driesch, The History and Theory ofVitalism, 213.
Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, vol. 2, 72, my emphasis.
The organism's ability to respond perspicuously and inventively to an event
(its capacity for "individual correspondence") is not radically free: entelechy
is incapable of producing mat which is utterly new, for its intelligent responsiveness remains under me guidance of compacted intensities, which Driesch
describes as "a general stock of possibilities."
This desire is quite overt in Joseph Chiari's defense of Bergson and Driesch:
"Darwin mought mat changes and mutations were due to chance; Lamarck
ascribed mem to me pressure of me environment and to functionalism; Bergson ascribes them to tlle natural resistance mat matter offers to me informing
spirit which, tlrrough man, evolves into consciousness and merefore gives
man his favored position as the goal and me apex of creation." Chiari, ''Vitalism and Contemporary Thought;' 254.
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A VITALIST STOPOVER
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JaneBennett
22 Driesch says he doesn't know just what this "something" is, but though it
"may seem very strange" that the most perspicuous" 'means' toward [the] ...
end [of maintaining the organic whole] are known and found" by every
organism, "it is a fact:' The Science and Philosophy ofthe Organism, vol. 2, 143.
23 Driesch, The History and Theory ofVitalism, 210.
24 The Science and Philosophy ofthe Organism, vol. I, I 10.
25 Driesch distinguishes, in his empirical proofs for vitalism (which are betrer
described as disproofs of the sufficiency of a mechanistic account of morphogenesis) between the process of "the differentiation of the harmonious
systems" and the development of the original cell within which differentiation will occur. The latter is "not what comes out of the complex systems, but
what they themselves come from. And we shall take the ovary as one instance
standing for them all. The ovary develops from one special single cell which is
its Anlage, to use a German word not easy to translate." Driesch, The Problem
of1ndividuaU~,2I-22.
Hades"; it is "Simply that whose presence ensures that the individual is alive:'
Adkins, From theManyto the One, 15
31 Driesch, The Science and Philosophy ofthe Organism, vol. 2, 326, my emphasis.
32 Bakhtin, "Contemporary Vitalism;' 95-96. Bakhtin names this alternative
machine-image "modern dialectical materialism" in contrast to Driesch's
"naive-mechanist point ofview with its fixed and immovable machines" (9 6 ).
K. S. Lashley makes a similar point in 1923: "The vitalist cites p~rticu
lar phenomena - morphogenesis, regeneration, habit-formation, complexities of speech, and the like - and denies the possibility of a mechanistic account of them. But he thereby commits what we might term the egoistic
fallacy. On analysis his argument reduces every time to the form, 'I am not
able to devise a machine which will do these things; therefore no one will ever
conceive of such a machine: This is the argument from inconceivability of
Driesch and McDougall, put badly. To it we may answer, 'You overvalue your
own ingenuity:" Lashley, "The Behavioristic Interpretation of Consciousness;' Part I, 269.
33 Bakhtin, "Contemporary Vitalism;' 95-9 6 .
34 So do Deleuze and Guattari. InA Thousand Plateaus they describe Nature as a
plane of morphogenesis, which they call a "war-machine:' Paul Patton suggests that a better term would have been "metamorphosis machine": "the
'war-machine' ... is a concept which is betrayed by its name since it has little
to do with actual war and only a paradoxical and indirect relation to armed
conflict. [Its] ... real object ... is not war but the condition of creative
mutation and change:' Patton, Deleuze and the Political, I IO.
35 Stolberg, "House Approves a Stem Cell Bill Opposed by Bush~' 1.
36 Cole, "Bush Stands against 'Temptation to Manipulate Life:"
37 The lower estimate is from iraqbodycount.org, the larger one from Les Roberts and Gilbert M. Burnham of the Center for International Emergency,
Disaster, and Refugee Studies at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health in Baltimore; Richard Garfield of Columbia University in New
York; and Riyadh Lafta and Jamal Kudhairi of Baghdad's Al-Mustansiriya
University College of Medicine.
38 White House, "President Bush Discusses Iraq War Supplemental:'
39 A stem cell, while pluripotent, is not "totipotent" or, as Driesch described it
before the concept of stem cell was invented, is not a "potency" able to "play
every Single part in the totality of what will occur in the whole system:'
Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, vol. I, 120-21. See also
National Institutes of Health, Stem Cells, ES-2.
40 Maienschein, "What's in a Name~' 12.
4 1 Tom DeLay, quoted in Baer, "In Vitro Fertilization, Stem Cell Research
Share Moral Issues:' There is some dispute over whether a pregastrulated
mass is an "embryo:' If an embryo is defined as a fertilized egg, then the
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A VITALIST STOPOVER
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42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
answer is yes. But others define an embryo as a dividing egg that has passed
through gastrulation: "many biologists . . . don't call these early stages of
development an embryo, but a preimplantation embryo or pre-embryo. The
preimplantation embryo passes through three stages during its week of development: a zygote (one cell), morula (multiple cells in a cluster, all the
same), and blastocyst [blastula] (when it develops sections, including a yolk
sac, and has an inside and outside but still none of the defined structures of an
embryo):' Spike, "Open Commentary:' 45.
"Evangelium Vitae:'
Best, "Testimony of Robert A. Best, President, the Culture of Life Foundation:'
Ibid.
Driesch, The History and Theory ofVitalism) 1. Driesch defines vitalism as "the
doctrine of the autonomy of life. ... I know very well that ... 'autonomy'
usually means the faculty ofgiving laws to oneself, and ... is applied with
regard to a community of men; but in our phrase autonomy is to Signify the
being subjected to laws peculiar to the phenomena in question:' The Science and
Philosvphy ofthe Or;ganism, vol. 1, 143. Although, in the main, by the "autonomy" oflife, Driesch is referring to the ability oforganisms to self-arrange and
self-restore, his use of the term also retains something of the Kantian sense of
freedom, freedom from determinism. Henri Bergson affirms something close
to Driesch's view; for Bergson, while "analysis will undoubtedly resolve the
process of organic creation into an ever-growing number ofphysico-chemical
phenomena, ... it does not follow that chemistry and physics will ever give us
the key to life:' Bergson, Creative Evolution) 31.
The History and Theory ofVitalism, 57-58.
It is worth noting here that one need not be an atheist to reject the particular
constellation of ideas inside the "culture of life": pantheisms of various sorts
discern divinity in all things, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic;
many "Jewish and Muslim scholars ... regard life as starting ... 40 days" after "
fertilization; some believers affirm that God would approve of embryonic
stem cell research as a fuller realization of the potential within the process of
morphogenesis. See Maienschien, "What's in a Name:' 14.
In 2001, Donald Rumsfeld "recommended that the military 'ensure that the
preSident will have the option to deploy weapons in space'''; in 2002 Bush
"withdrew from the 30-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which banned
space-based weapons"; and in 2005 General Lance Lord of the Air Force
Space Command "told Congress [that] ... 'we must establish and maintain
space superiority:" New York Times News Service, "U.S. Policy Directive
Might Open Door to Space Weapons:'
Driesch, The History and Theory ofVitalism, 223-24.
"Apres 1933, l'entelechie est devenue un Fuhrer de l'organisme:' Canguilhem,
"Aspects du vitalisme:' 124.
51
retired" (191).
52 Driesch, The Science and Philosvphy ofthe Or;ganism, vol. 2, 72, my emphasis.
53 Terrorists kill because "they hate freedom:' White House, "Remarks by President and Mrs. Bush in Interview by Television of Spain:' "The more free the
Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available,
the moreldds that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can't stand the thought of a free society. They hate freedom. They love terror:' White House, "President Bush, Ambassador Bremer
Discuss Progress in Iraq:'
54 Balchtin, "Contemporary Vitalism:' 92. The fuller quotation reveals Bald1tin's
own deterministic materialism: "It obviously goes without saying that at
every place and every time, some specific conditions prevail. Therefore it is
completely absurd to say [as Driesch does] that any particular possibility of
development is really contained in a given blastomere. The potential is contained within it ... to the same degree that it is part of the complex of its
surrounding conditions. What is Driesch doing? He strays from any real
conditions, locating abstract blastomere outside of the frames of time and
space.... Talk of several potentials and possibilities serves only one purpose:
it allows for the presupposition that they are all equally possible ... and that
therefore it is pOSSible to choose one of them freely. Freedom of choice, not
determinism in organic life, is the ground of all of Driesch's constructions:'
55 National Institutes of Health, Stem Cells, ES-9, my emphasis.
56 Canguilhem, ''Aspects du vitalisme:' 121. This is a description evangelical
Christians, with their strong sense of an ordered Creation, would most likely
reject.
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NON-DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
PhengCheah
N on -Dialectical Materialism
I gave this essay the tongue-in-cheek title of "non-dialectical materialism" to counterpose what one might call the
materialisms of Derrida and Deleuze with that of Marx.
Marx himself never used the phrase "dialectical materialism." It was a phrase first used by Plekhanov to distinguish the Marxist approach to the sociohistorical process,
which focuses on human needs and the means and methods of their satisfaction, from the teleological view of history in Hegelian idealism. l But the concept was already
implicit in the distinction Engels drew between the metaphysical mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century
and the modern materialism that arose in the wake of the
critique of German idealism. "Old materialism looked
upon all previous history as a crude heap of irrationality'
and Violence; modern materialism sees in it the process of
evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws
thereof." Hence, "modern materialism;' Engels wrote in
"Socialism: Utopian and Scientific;' "is essentially dialectiC."2 He further distinguished the materialist dialectic
from the Hegelian dialectic in terms of its understanding
of history as the history of class struggles, where social
classes are the products of economic conditions: "Hegel
had freed history from metaphysics - he had made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the
philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's 'knOWing' by his 'being', instead of, as heretofore, his 'being' by his 'knowing.'''3 Simply put,
the two key features of the materialist dialectic are first, the understanding
of nature and history as law-governed processes that can be rationally
understood instead of immutable metaphYSical substances, and, second,
the determination of these processes as processes with a material existence
that can be explained through empirical science.
Regardless of Althusser's qualifications concerning how Marx inverts
the Hegelian dialectic, the concept of negation as the source of actualization remains a fundamental principle of Marxist materialism. 4 The decomposition of immediately present reality into social processes and the
imminence of the proletarian revolution as the radical transformation of
existing social conditions are premised on Marx's understanding of material existence as something created through the purposive mediation of
human corporeal activity as this is historically conditioned. Marx suggested that human beings indirectly produce actual material life when we
produce our means of subsistence through labor. Material reality is therefore produced by negativity. This is because Marx defined creative labor
as a process of actualization whereby given reality or matter is negated
through the imposition of a purposive form. As a result of the complex
development of forces of production, each immediately given object and
also each individual or social subject comes into being only by being
constitutively imbricated in a web of social relations that form a system or
totality.s The template and synecdoche for this system of reciprocally interdependent relations is the vital body of the organism. As I have argued
elsewhere, Marxism is irrigated by an ontology of organismic vitalism. 6
The labor of the negative remains of fundamental importance in the
entire tradition of Marxist philosophy even when this power is no longer
viewed as primarily manifested in corporeal labor but in the aesthetic
sphere, as in the work of the Frankfurt SchooL Herbert Marcuse expresses
this succinctly: ''Art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced
positions, it is the Great Refusal- the protest against that which is."7 This
shadow of negativity also animates the accounts of resistance and dynamism in varieties of social constructionism and theories of performativity.
In contradistinction, a nondialectical materialism is a materialism that no
longer grants primacy to the work of the negative and, indeed, treats
71