Does new materialism have a neoliberal problem? - Some reflections
If you read The Guardian review of this year’s Waterstones children’s book prize winner, the language bears an uncanny resemblance to the kinds of writing we’re now seeing in new materialist healthcare research;
’The book follows Daisy as she searches for her missing mother and discovers another world behind a hidden doorway in Kew Gardens. She soon learns that the new realm, filled with plants and magic, is under threat, and she bands together with a botanical expert, a boy who can talk to animals and a cat to save the green paradise’ Link.
This sense that the book evokes of a realm beyond this world to which our lives defer has always carried mystical significance for people, but writers like Jeffrey Nealon now believe it’s taken on new meaning in our performative, biopolitical, neoliberal age (Nealon, 2021).
There’s another example from last week in this otherwise lovely short video from artist Sam Hamper in which he meditates on our obsession with productivity.
In the video, Hamper talks about the day prior when he was in a joyous state of flow and painted furiously all day. Only today to find that he now hates the work and wants to scrap it. His point is that we should embrace such thoughts because our focus should not be on the end product but the process. And any day spent in a state of flow is a day spent in creativity, regardless of the value of the work that results.
11m 45s into the the video, Hamper starts to talk about the resonance between creativity in art and religion. To paraphrase: because worship doesn’t come with the same “tangible, real-world, this-world rewards”, people understand the value of ritualistic attention to process — through daily prayer, for instance — without the constant pull of productivity.[1]
But whether one looks at life as the quest for the hidden doorways into a fairer fundament, or as the kinds of mindful, meditative flow that can transport us to a bigger more bodacious world, the message is essentially the same: this world is not, in itself, enough; that there must be a realm beyond to which this life refers; something that can help us better understand the human condition and perhaps explain why, despite years of struggle, misogyny, racism, privilege, violence, intolerance and injustice persist.
Jeffrey Nealon — the subject of this mini-series — finds the root of this dismay in the new biopolitically-infused forms of social critique.
Where once we debated the ‘constative truth-value’ of terms like woman, trans, black and disabled, and tried to establish ‘disciplinary mastery and sanction’ over such terms (Nealon, 2021, p. 146), now we push such academic questions aside because people’s very lives are at stake.
Now it ‘makes all the difference in the world who’s speaking, insofar as our contemporary modes of veridiction hold that knowledge can no longer speak for itself, or no longer speaks in the voice of noninterested, normative disciplinary authority: biopolitically, knowledge necessarily speaks for and from a life’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 147).
New materialism, Nealon argues, feeds on this biopolitical turn towards performativity, by balancing the desire to hear not just human life but all forms of life whilst, at the same time, resolving questions of our entanglement back to the problems of human suffering, injustice and indifference.
Nealon suggests this is a significant and not unproblematic shift;
’One can always decry this new biopolitical performativity as neoliberal utopian, mere identity politics, or the coddling of the American mind, as many critics nostalgic for disciplinary norms routinely do; but in a Foucaultian sense what you see here is neither the wholesale abandonment of norms nor a return to ancient modes of truth telling, but a decisively changed relation between what counts as “knowledge” and its “modes of verification”. The triumph of biopolitics forges a new knowledge connection between an author and value’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 147).
Nealon is concerned about the turn to the performative in part because it has become so ubiquitous. For instance, in his recent book Smooth City, René Boer suggests that even our urban spaces have fallen under the spell of bodaciousness, with their focus on ‘optimised, frictionless happiness’ (Wagner, 2024); convenience, consumerism and productivity; quietness, cleanliness, and order. All underpinned, of course, by a normative, ideal image of whiteness, relative financial stability, and unrestricted physical mobility (ibid).
As anyone knows who lives in an urban environment, ’Policies of increased policing and surveillance’ have become pervasive in recent decades, directed at placating and attracting the ‘middle-class transplants’ who have now taken control of the city (ibid).
But the middle classes have also learned that those tools of the old disciplinary society were always going to be insufficient on their own, and would always need to be supplemented with ‘new technological tools for social control, commodification, and self-surveillance that lead us to optimize ourselves, restrain ourselves for fear of punishment in the digital and real world, and trade away our privacy in exchange for technological convenience’ (ibid).
Of course, this seems a long way away from the goals of new materialism, but the idea of the smooth city and NM both share the goal of ‘a utopian world without conflict’ (ibid).
But this utopian view is also underpinned by an open acknowledgement that the pursuit of ‘commodified pleasure centers’ in the smooth city or pluralistic, heterogeneous and equitable healthcare depend upon conflict; conflict that is underpinned ‘by a profound and deliberate violence against all that is different, queer, unfinished, volatile, democratic, or open—in other words, all that is human’ (ibid).
Note here Wagner’s phrase ‘all that is human’.
In this simple, taken-for-granted phrase lies the crux of the issue; the place where, to my mind, we keep coming unstuck.
Is it our desire to make cities work for people; to make healthcare equitable for people; to make mystical stories for and about people that trips us up?
For the longest time I’ve wondered if it might be possible to address the many injustices we all face — human or otherwise — by returning to the great Enlightenment sovereign human project of making better humans.
This has, after all, been the critical, progressive project of the left throughout my lifetime. It’s what I know and instinctively understand.
It’s empirically clear, though, that many of the left’s projects have failed. The world remains as biliously bigoted as it always has been, and the age-old injustices levelled by ‘man’ against ‘man’ are now joined by an even bigger existential threat in an impending climate catastrophe.
So, perhaps even the existence of new materialism and the performative era is just evidence of our failure?
But if new materialism is the upgrade on the performative era that was the last new hope for the left, then it surely has to do more than just placate our own human psychic sense of impotence.
And perhaps this starts by being aware of just how much new materialism plays into the hands of biopolical neoliberalism.
Ultimately, I think the problem comes from the fact that NM can’t describe a strong enough escape trajectory to free itself from its the gravitational pull of human desires and interests. And so it will never provide the line of flight needed to radically revise our place in the cosmos.
And this remains a problem throughout the post-human canon. Some of the strongest anti-new materialists like Ian Buchanan, Jeffrey Nealon and Andrew Culp remain firmly committed to the human social project.
So the search continues for me in my attempt to find ways to problematise our increasingly dire situation and think about solutions that don’t fall back on a world that’s designed by us and for us.
If you have any thoughts and comments on these last few posts, please feel free to share them in the comments. It’s always lovely to hear from you: for, against, or indifferent.
Until next time…
References
Nealon, J. T. (2021). Fates of the performative: From the linguistic turn to new materialism. Minneapolis, MN; University of Minnesota Press.
Wagner, K. (2024). A seamless dystopia: What happend to the 21st century city? https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/what-happened-to-21st-century-city/
[1] I think Max Weber might make a strong case here that Calvinism found a way around this dialectic by firmly tying real-world economic success to pre-destination. And surely the idea of any transcendent religion is that all of this sacrifice and process work is undergone in the belief that it will result in a good end-product?