Does New Materialism have a neoliberal problem? — Part 1
Introduction
New materialism (NM) is having a moment. Based on the number of new books and journal special issues, conference talks and social media burblings, new materialism and things seem to be the new thing in healthcare.
It seems to me there are three good reasons for this:
NM gives us a much more diverse and inclusive view of the world than quantitative evidence-based and humanistic qualitative research have offered thus far. So it’s a direct challenge to the kinds of human hubris that many of us feel has been the cause of so many problems now facing the world;
It opens up a vast field of new methodologies that not only allow for greater sensory engagement with the world but almost mandate that we leave behind our ‘old ways’ and embrace the shock of the new. By focusing on our entanglements with other things, we’re forced to attune our senses and attention in new ways and put aside the logic chopping and language games of older research methods;
And it surfaces a kind of humility and caring concern for others — human and non-human — that has always been part of healthcare work, but feels even more precious (and rare) these days. So much of our work is dog-eat-dog, competitive and adversarial, and we’re surrounded by toxic politics and so much nihilism that NM can feel like an opening to something more generative, positive and wholesome.
Sally Thorne recently captured some of this enthusiasm in a special issue on critical posthumanism in Nursing Inquiry;
’I am truly excited by the direction of thinking toward which this collection of papers takes us, and I hope that the arguments put forward by these authors will inspire the next generation of nurse scholars to press beyond that which has traditionally been considered the domain of nursing theorizing and philosophizing and into this much larger and more complex world of embedded ideologies and impacts’ (Thorne 2024).
But, at the same time, NM is not without its problems. Some of these were explored in an earlier ParaDoxa series posthumanism Link.
Suffice to say, despite its popularity and my own strong interest in ‘post’ philosophies, I’m not a fan of new materialism. I certainly used to be (Nicholls 2018; 2019). But since then I’ve found my toes increasingly curling every time I read a new article in Qualitative Inquiry where someone effects an embodied affective intra-action with slime mould or co-opts Louise Glück to write some very questionable poetry.
I know I sound a bit mean here, (and probably quite the snob), criticising people who are genuinely making an effort to break free from the stale mold of past research methodologies. But novelty isn’t enough when the stakes are so high, and NM has been around long enough now for us to identify some of its discursive drivers. So, if it is the philosophical equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes — as I suspect it is — we should try to make a case and work out why.
So far I’ve found two grand reasons for my antipathy towards NM. I explored the first of these in the series on post-humanism linked above. And this is the idea that NM doesn’t really give us anything methodologically new. Take a lot of the NM literature back to its primary intention and most of it is old school critical (in the sense of wanting to emancipate the voice of the marginalised ‘other’). You see this in much of the feminist new materialism, which is by far the largest form of NM, but there are also strong communities of postcolonial, queer, disability and eco-critical researchers using NM to find new ways to speak about old problems. Are these new approaches really a significant upgrade on the revolutionary formulae of C20 critical scholarship? Are they helping us get closer to a more tolerant, diverse and inclusive world? I’m not sure.
So this is my first reason for being skeptical. But my second is bigger and potentially far more serious, and it’s the one I want to unpack over the course of the next few blogposts.
In short it’s the question of whether new materialism is fundamentally neoliberal; either in latent intent or in execution.
And to answer this question I’m going to draw on the writings of Jeffrey T. Nealon, specifically his 2021 book Fates of the Performative.
Jeffrey T. Nealon is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy a Liberal Arts Research Professor of English at Penn State University Google Scholar. I’ve read a few of Nealon’s books in the past (Plant Theory being one of my favourites) and he, like Thomas Lemke, comes to the question of new materialism through a strongly Foucauldian, biopolitical lens. But Fates of the Performative does as good a job as any at arrowing straight into the heart of the neoliberal problem with NM, so I want to unpack it here.
Here’s the gist of Nealon’s argument. In recent decades we have moved from a linguistic era dominated by the naming of things, to a performative era interested in what things do; from being to becoming. This move is both a critique of our old desire to tame the world and an opening to new forms of enchantment. But this, Nealon argues, is not that new. The need for less Tame and more Wild has run through philosophy, the arts and humanities for decades. What’s different now is that NM (along with ANT, OOO, and other materialisms) implicates all forms and matter, not just human beings, into those things that can enchant and be enchanting. This sounds like old dialectic materialism to Nealon, and he can’t see how this approach encourages the universe to ‘bends towards justice’, as Karen Barad has claimed. More than this though, Nealon smells the odour of biopolitical neoliberalism in new materialism’s attempt to foster our hyper-attention and promote human self-overcoming. Nealon thinks this performative self-overcoming sounds an awful lot like the rhetoric of biopolitical neoliberalism in which the sensual and experiential have become fully economic.
There’s quite a lot to unpack here, so next week I’ll begin with the first part of Nealon’s critique and focus on the deadening quality of habit that NM is trying to overcome.
References
Nealon, J.T. (2015). Plant Theory: Biopower and vegetable life. Stanford University Press. Link
Nealon, J.T. (2021). Fates of the Performative. University of Minnesota Press. Link
Nicholls, D. A. (2018). New materialism and physiotherapy. In B. E. Gibson, D. A. Nicholls, K. Synne-Groven, & J. Setchell (Eds.), Manipulating practices: A critical physiotherapy reader (pp. 101-122). Cappelen Damm Forlag. Link
Nicholls, D. A. (2019). What’s real is immaterial: What are we doing with new materialism? Aporia: The nursing journal, 11(2), 3-13. Link
Thorne, S. (2024), Exploring that which lies beyond nursing's historic humanist preoccupation. Nursing Inquiry, 31: e12623. Link