Does new materialism have a neoliberal problem: A compendium

Over the last few weeks I’ve been posting a short series on Jeffrey Nealon’s critique of new materialism. This felt timely for me, because at present we’re seeing a significant turn towards new materialism (NM) in the healthcare literature, but so far there has been little critique of the reasons for that turn or its implications.

Nealon’s argument is powerful in large part because it sets NM against itself: where its advocates argue that it provides new tools for the analysis of asymmetrical power, Nealon suggests it is playing into the hands of neoliberal biopolitics.

As with the posthuman and postprofessional series, I’ve compiled the five articles into one compendium for ease of reading. And as before I’ve removed all of the decorative images and assimilated the references into a long list at the foot of the article.

To cite this collection: Nicholls, D.A. (2024). Does new materialism have a neoliberal problem: A compendium. ParaDoxa. DOI https://doi.org/10.14426/080424

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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:

1. 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;

2. 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;

3. 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.

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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.

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What sets new materialism (NM) apart?

In Fates of the Performative, Nealon (2021) argues that the search for the vital, animating force that differentiates a living, breathing person from a cadaver is nothing new. In fact it’s been a feature of Western metaphysics for centuries. What makes NM so interesting, then, is that it seeks to extend this interest to all things.

(I’m assuming you already have a good understanding of what NM is. But if you’d like a refresher, the earlier series on posthumanism may be useful.)

NM is a river fed by a number of fast-flowing streams, including a dissatisfaction with the lack of progress made by established critical theory, the challenges being posed by artificial intelligence, the growing importance of quantum mechanics, and the failure to adequately explain the biophysical roots of (human) consciousness.

But at its heart is a feeling that the deadening effects of C20 disciplinary society have made us stale, cynical, disinterested, apathetic, lazy, disconnected, and indifferent to the beauty of the world. What we needed, NM advocates argue, is a turn towards the enchantment of the inner, hidden life that exists ‘beyond’ empirical observation and objective reason.

We needed less Tame and more Wild.

Reviving the C18 romantic era’s desire to once again bathe in the beauty of the world, NM researchers try to re-connect, re-entangle, and re-vitalise our interest in our collective flourishing.

‘Things’ are no longer seen as mute inert matter or the lifeless stuff of the world, but performatively lively; ‘seething with their own powers of excessive enchantment’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 69).

Entities are now characterised by their leaky excess, quasi-miraculous animate flow; the forceful flux that enlivens their intra-actions; by the active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable, entangled, vital, contingent, constant, and immanent movement that defines their endless becoming.

We have become enchanted by the ‘overflowing wonder of life within what we thought were inanimate objects’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 70).

’In sum, new materialists are rediscovering a materiality that materialises, evincing immanent modes of self-transformation’ (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 9).

Problems?

There is no doubt that NM has tapped into a deep-seated frustration many people now have with contemporary scholarly thinking. Be it the lack of progress in addressing misogyny, racism, and homophobia, or our colletive passivity in the face of an impending climate catastrophe, ongoing genocide, or the death of democracy.

If nothing else, NM achieves the remarkable double-handed trick of reminding us that humans are both cosmically insignificant and yet disproportionately powerful.

But it is not without its detractors, and I have explored two of my own personal criticisms of NM elsewhere (Nicholls, 2018; 2019; 2022).

Chiefly, I’ve picked up the OOO argument that NM cannot explain creation and emergence (see, for example, Harman, 2016; 2018). Crudely put, if everything can be explained by relations and intra-actions (the capacity of an entity to affect or be affected by another — as advocates of NM, ANT and others claim), then there is no ‘surplus’ from which ‘the new’ can emerge. Everything is contained within the relation, so nothing can exceed it. Nothing new can emerge. NM can’t allow for a space of emergence to exist outside of the relation, because then the relation would not be enough to explain what’s going on.

But there are other criticisms, too.

Many readers have argued that NM looks a lot like the ‘old’ dialectic materialism Friedrich Engels developed in his uncompleted work Dielectics of Nature published in 1883 (pdf, web version), which proposed that;

’From ants to asteroids, the world is a dynamic complex of interlocking forces in which all phenomena are interrelated, nothing stands still, quantity converts into quality, no absolute standpoints are available, everything is perpetually on the point of turning into its opposite and reality evolves through the unity of conflicting powers’ (Eagleton, 2017, p. 7).

Puncturing a hole in any sense of self-congratulation we might feel for the shiny new materialist thing we’ve found, Eagleton reminds us that;

‘It is not clear what to make of the claim that everything is related to everything else. There seems little in common between the Pentagon and a sudden upsurge in sexual jealousy, other than the fact that neither can ride a bicycle’ (ibid).

So perhaps Nealon and others are right that, ‘The least-new thing about the new materialism is its founding commitment to making it new’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 89).

Perhaps more tellingly though, Nealon echoes an argument I made in the earlier series on posthumanism, arguing that NM is, paradoxically, deeply anthropocentric.

This is a hard argument to make, given NM’s aspiration to flatten our ontologies and equilibrate human relations with all things. But as Bennett and others have made clear, ’My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analysis of [human] political events might change if we gave the force of things more due’ (Bennett, 2009, p. viii, my emphasis and insertion).

NM’s goal is the semi-mystical human act of self-overcoming; the ‘vital, animal movements’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 74) of excessive desiring; of reaching ‘beyond’, of change and growth, endlessly transgressive human self-actualisation.

This is the reason, Nealon argues, for Bennett’s fascination with the writings and actions of Henry David Thoreau (Bennett, 2002; 2016), because his writings were about the necessity to ‘to locate and then regularly expose oneself to the Wild sites and sights, to maximise opportunity for shock and disorientation’ (Bennett, 2002, p. 3).

The subtext of NM is the desire to be surprised by what we see; jolted out of our torpor; enhanced by our sensuous engagement with the world; and to find a more authentic form of human individualism.

And you can see this repeatedly in the literature, especially in the recent health care literature. Search any recent edition of Qualitative Inquiry — the journal that has perhaps done the most to advance NM in healthcare research — and you will encounter studies that creatively rewild ecologies of health (Carless et al., 2024), develop new ‘capacious methodologies’ for an unravelling world (Germein et al., 2024), and explore approaches to ‘experiencing the eternal through swimming’ (Boyle, 2023). (Becoming watery does seem to be quite a popular thing here: Link and Link).

Nealon suggests that if we are fuelled by the ‘blooming buzzing confusion all around us’, then we will ‘likewise see that the universe is based on openness and welcoming of others, and that’ll make us better people’ (Nealon, 2021, pp. 83-84). The truth about the vitality of things will set you free, because the universe will bend towards justice, as Karen Barad has argued (Barad et al., 1996).

But as Nealon argues that we have known for some time that ‘What someone does can’t be indexed to or explained by what that person believes about the nature of things’ (Nealon, 2021, p. 87).

In fact, this is a point that NM openly acknowledges, and indeed uses this argument to advocate for an approach that no longer relies on a direct link between peoples’ values and actions (in critical theory, for instance). The ‘is’ and prescriptive ‘oughts’, NM argues, are no longer connected.

Bennett, for instance, makes it clear she is not interested in the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. So what is the approach that NM believes will bring about the widespread structural change it yearns for?

Sadly, the trail goes a little cold here. Or at least a little overgrown and entangled. Bennett advocates for greater aesthetic consciousness, for developing a mood of sensuous enchantment, for more aesthetic effects, the ‘strange combination of delight and disturbance’, and a focus on quotidian everyday world and so on (Bennett, 2002).

But once again, is there anything particularly new here? Hasn’t this been a constant concern for the arts and humanities in the C20? And doesn’t this also sound a lot like Foucault’s concept of care of the self? Nealon thinks so.

‘Having reduced intensity to a special kind of feeling, practitioners of “affect studies” perform autoethnographies of the ineffable’ (Culp, 2016).

But this isn’t the biggest problem with NM for Nealon. That lies in its links to biopolitical neoliberalism. And perhaps, given the critique above, you can already see where Nealon is going here.

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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.

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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.²

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.

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References

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Bennett, J. (2009). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Bennett, J. (2016). The enchantment of modern life. Princeton University Press.

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Coole, D., & Frost, S. (2010). Introducing the New Materialisms. In D. Coole & S. Frost (Eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics (pp. 1-43). Duke.

Culp, A. (2016). Dark Deleuze. University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. (2013). Cinema II: The Time-Image. A&C Black.

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Germein, S., Adams, P., & Dollin, J. (2024). Capacious Methodologies for an Unravelling World: Three Research Ecologies. Qualitative Inquiry. Link

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Nealon, J.T. (2015). Plant Theory: Biopower and vegetable life. Stanford University Press. Link

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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

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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?

2. 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.