Does New Materialism have a neoliberal problem? — Part 2

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Introduction

In last week’s opening post, I briefly set out some of the reasons for the rise of new materialism in healthcare research and some of its potential flaws. One of its detractors is Jeffrey Nealon, and in his book Fates of the Performative he makes a strong case that new materialism bears a latent sympathy with biopolitical neoliberalism. In this second part I want to tackle the question of how we arrived at the performative era that is a key foundation for new materialist thought.

Nealon believes that we are now in the era of the performative, and that we have largely left behind the social linguistics of the second half of C20. He makes his case for this in Chapter 3: The bodacious era.

Since the C18 our way of understanding the world has been to attribute names to things, build taxonomies and systems of categorisation, link signs to signifiers, create binaries, think dialectically, and create two-dimensional maps of the world.

This interest turned in the C19 away from visible world to the unplumbable depths and invisible inner spaces and processes that separated the living from the dead. 19th century philosophers became fascinated by the unpredictable, vibrant, secret, discontinuous, inscrutable, even mendacious vitalism working as the invisible engine of change and growth.

These insights were used to reinforce beliefs about human exceptionalism and to rank species in a great chain of being as well as create differential categories of human life. Social hierarchies were consolidated by political and social ordering in the early C20 and the disciplinary society was born.

In Foucault’s classical notion of the disciplinary society, people passed through various social institutions (the family, the school, the profession, the hospital, etc.) which captured them and traded social prestige and legitimacy for docility and constant panoptical surveillance.

But Saussure arrived in the early C20 and showed that really there were no ‘positive’ connections between what a thing was and how it was described. This opened the door to a century of speculation on the true nature of being and the essence that separated thought and world. What a thing ‘was’ become a quest for new forms of transcendence: a search that manifested in all sorts of arts, humanities, social sciences, psychologies and sociologies, but a quest that was ultimately underpinned by the search for the Wild lying beneath human life.

This search for human vitalism turned, after WWII, from its somewhat academic interest in the rational and logical basis of what life ‘is’ to a political and social question about why human vitalism was so unevenly distributed. Why was it, for instance, that cis gendered, white, English-speaking men were seen to possess more of the right stuff than others?

But the rise of critical theory and structuralism had the unfortunate effect of dulling our appreciation for the wild vitalism that was the engine of life on earth. What ‘mattered’ became a dead, static backdrop to our lives, and we became stale, cynical, disinterested, apathetic, lazy, disconnected, and indifferent to the beauty of all things.

Perversely, our concern for asymmetries of power in society created a disenchantment that only served to fuel imperialist fantasies, human hubris and anthropocentrism.

Hence the call for a shift away from the macrovision of critical theory to the microvision of performativity; ’The world requires aesthetic re-enchantment because it’s fallen under the spell of a sinister instrumental rationality that mass produces experiences; so it’s time to get back in touch with the nature of things’ (Nealon, 2021, pp. 70-71).

The turn to the performative

Under disciplinary society, life had become too Tame. Modernism — with all of its normativity, instrumental reason, order, social and political structuralism, conformity, and capitalist fantasies of efficient white ware — had alienated and disenchanted us to the point that we no longer saw its deadening effects. We had all become disciplined, routinised robots.

What we needed was more Life. More Wild. To throw off the habits of accepted social convention and reinvigorate the experience of everyday life. And as Nealon points out, the need for more Wild can be seen in everything from American pragmatism, to European existentialism, phenomenology, critical theory, deconstruction, Dewey, Husserl (bracketing), Fisher (hauntology), Stiegler, Heidegger (attunement), Adorno, Derrida (trace structure), Austin (performativity), Habermas (communicative rationality, Bennett (vibrant matter), Barad (space-time mattering), and new materialism (Nealon, 2021, p. 82).

All of these diagnose the problem that life is not Wild enough; not enchanted, alive or, to use Nealon’s own preferred word, bodacious enough. Real living only really means more life.

So, having gone through what seems like quite a long introduction, we now arrive at the crux of the issue and the radical shift made by new materialism.

In next week’s post I’ll explore the radical turn made by new materialism and begin to unpack what Nealon sees as its fundamental problem.

Until then,

Dave

Reference

Nealon, J. T. (2021). Fates of the performative: From the linguistic turn to new materialism. University of Minnesota Press.