Does New Materialism have a neoliberal problem? — Part 4
Let’s briefly recap the ground we’ve covered so far and wrap up this mini-series on new materialism.
Jeffrey Nealon in Fates of the Performative (Nealon, 2021) argues that the linguistic era severed the link between what ’is’ and what ‘ought’, unmooring us from the social anchors that we once relied upon. At the same time, critical theory has made us stale, cynical and disinterested in the beauty of the world. (For more on this, see parts (1, 2 & 3 of this series).
In their wake we have turned back to a C19 romanticism in order to, once again, pursue the vitalism that we believe is the engine of life.
What differentiates today’s theorists from C19 romantics, however, is that we are extending our search for vitalism to all things, human and otherwise.
And what makes this move so compelling for Nealon is the way new materialism (NM) seems to be doing this in concert with late stage capitalism.
Nealon argues that we can see this in a number of features of NM.
Firstly, it is hard to see how NM can be translated into any form of political resistance. Unlike classical critical theory, there are no more fixed and stable institutions we can attack. Socio-political resistance no longer holds significant, prescriptive meaning when everything is in a state of flow, flux and becoming.
And robbing us of our capacity for resistance — not by force or oppression, but by opening up new avenues for self-actualisation — is one of the great achievements of late-stage capitalism, which seeks to manages people’s conduct through a micro-politics of affects and a diffuse networks of nudges.
Any method that makes the object of social resistance more diffuse, therefore, is doing sterling work in the service of neoliberal biopolitics.
As Jonathan Beller says, ‘New affects, aspirations, and forms of interiority are experiments in capitalist productivity’ (Beller, 2006, p. 27).
Secondly, because capitalism works today through its ability to extract value from the attention economy, human attention has become the ultimate commodity that capital craves.
At the centre of this move is the ability to harness the productivity of everyday human life. Not by passing through the old institutions of obedience described in Foucault’s disciplinary society, but through the heterogenous, diffuse and variegated intra-acting networks and assemblages of today’s capital economy.
All of us are incentivised to become productive consumers ‘in charge of endlessly remoulding his or her life’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 109).
The sensual and experiential has now become fully economic.
The rise of the attention economy
But perhaps the most important part of this process has not been just the ability to capture peoples attention, but to be able to hold it in such a way that people then shape and mould their choices and behaviours accordingly. In doing so we re-define our subjectivity.
Drawing attention to an entity and manipulating that attention to direct or hold a person’s interest ‘has become the most highly-prized marker of cultural “value” in our time’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 111).
We are all ‘invited’ to infuse the world of mundane everyday things with our own artfulness and thereby ascribe value to them.
’This manufacturing and updating of identity, this constant performative remaking of your life, is the daily job of each and everyone of us in a biopolitical world’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 113).
The fact that the object of our attention may be fake, pure reminiscence, simple re-packaging, re-presentation, or cynical ironic copy is less important than its ability to ‘elevate the everyday’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 112). The entity gains value because the right kind of attention is drawn to it.
In the end, ‘no one is comfortable being ordinary’, and everyone today is ‘charged with the task of infusing his or her life with meaningfulness, making your life a work of art’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 112);
So, where there was once a separation between inside questions of one’s personal identity and desire, and outside questions of economic class and finance, today that separation has collapsed (Nealon, 2021, p. 113).
And so the semi-mystical human act of self-overcoming that lies at the heart of the NM project (see Part 3 of this series) — with its desire to re-Wild human subjectivity and seek endlessly transgressive human self-actualisation — begins to look a lot like the fantasy of neoliberal biopolitics.
‘The project of contemporary capitalism (of advertising, social media, and data aggregation on purchases and Internet searches) is sutured by the supposed re-enchanting of every day life through harvesting the value-producing focus of human attention’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 89).
No escape trajectory
To be clear, Nealon isn’t arguing that Bennett, Barad, Latour and other new materialists are necessarily wrong in their ‘ontological claims about how matter actually works’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 89), only that;
‘In a post-linguistic turn environment… it doesn’t really make any sociopolitical difference whether the new materialists are or aren’t correct about the performative, vibrant, co-constitutive workings of all life and all matter in the universe’ (ibid).
Because ultimately NM falls down — literally and metaphorically — because it is, at worst, unknowingly sympathetic to neoliberal biopolitics or, at best, incapable of ever achieving its radical promise.
This is because it offers no escape trajectory: no line of flight to ‘the outside’.
Returning to Deleuze and Guattari, we can only escape the logic of neoliberal biopolitics and its productivist logic when ‘at last the disappearance of the visible body is achieved’ (Deleuze, 2013, p. 190).
So self-overcoming should always be an opening to a radical ‘outside’; an outside that is always resolutely inaccessible, impossible to embody, irreducibly exterior; a place where relations are external to their terms (Kleinherenbrink, 2018).[1]
So, as David Lapoujade says, it is not matter itself that deterritorialises social structures but intensive variation — aberrant movements — that push to an outside ‘still more distant, still more exterior’ (Lapoujade, 2017, p. 229).
Aberrant movements act on the innermost reaches of social structures by disarticulating them and freeing them of all of their rules (Lapoujade, 2017, p. 229). They allow for self-overcoming as long as the line of flight can escape the earth’s orbit and become ungrounded.
Andrew Culp in his extraordinary Dark Deleuze draws the analogy of Barbarians who avoid the ‘liberal trap of tolerance, compassion and respect’ and remain outside the socially conscious economy as one form of war machine built with the express purpose of drawing a line of flight to the outside (Culp, 2016).
But there are others, too. Many others. None succeed in breaking the earth’s gravitational pull, however, if they return, as so many have done before, to questions of human self-overcoming.
So where does all this leave us?
New materialism clearly resonates with a whole field of emerging interest in the intra-active human/non-human life, be it in consciousness studies, eco-criticism, quantum mechanics, new post critical activism, or any of the other currents testing the boundaries of traditional forms of identity.
But like many of these media, NM suffers because, ultimately, its goal is the re-Wilding of human subjectivity.
In this respect, it works very closely — if not as a direct ally, at least on a parallel track — with neoliberal biopolitics and its pursuit of productivity through attention and self-overcoming.
Nealon argues that true deterritorialisation is not possible with new materialism as it is currently configured, and the rash of recent published studies re-imagining methods to reveal our intra-woven, intra-active enmeshment with the world bear this out.
Many radical alternatives exist, however, and I’d like to look more deeply at some of these in the coming months. Perhaps next I’ll dig into Andrew Culp’s anarchistic Dark Deleuze, which turns the common assumption that Deleuze’s work was all about joyous creativity on its head, arguing instead that the path to a new future lies in destruction.
But that’s for tomorrow. Until then…
References
Beller, J. (2006). The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Hanover, NH; Dartmouth College Press.
Culp, A. (2016). Dark Deleuze. University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (2013). Cinema II: The Time-Image. A&C Black.
Kleinherenbrink, A. (2018). Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze’s Speculative Realism. Edinburgh University Press.
Lapoujade, D. (2017). Aberrant Movements: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. MIT Press.
Nealon, J. T. (2021). Fates of the performative: From the linguistic turn to new materialism. Minneapolis, MN; University of Minnesota Press.
[1] Even giving ‘the outside’ a name is an obvious corruption here, because if it is irreducible, unknowable, and inaccessible, it clearly cannot be captured by such a simple name.