scholarly journals The empirical falsity of the human subject: new materialism, climate change and the shared critique of artifice

Resilience ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 174-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
New Materialism

scholarly journals On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy

Lateral ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyla Wazana Tompkins
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
New Materialism

A response to the forum, “Emergent Critical Analytics for Alternative Humanities,” edited by Chris A. Eng and Amy K. King. Kyla Wazana Tompkins questions the structures informing claims of newness posed by discussions of “New Materialism.” She discusses the troubling ways in which these discourses, in turning toward the post- or non-human, can ironically reinforce assumptions about a universal human subject and elide considerations of gender, race, and power.

Vibration, Difference, and Solidarity in the Anthropocene

Resonance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-241
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Chung
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
Departure Point ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Black Skin

Taking the new materialist and climate change themes of Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: an Opera for Objects as a departure point, this article examines sound studies’ recent invocations of new materialist philosophy alongside this philosophy's foundational concern toward the Anthropocene ecological crisis. I argue that new materialist sonic thought retraces new materialism’s dubious ethical program by deriving equivalencies of moral standing from logically prior ontological equivalencies of material entities and social actors rooted in their shared capacities to vibrate. Some sonic thought thus amplifies what scholars in Black and Indigenous decolonial critique have exposed as the homogenizing, assimilative character of new materialism’s superficially inclusional and optimistic ontological imaginary, which includes tendencies to obscure the ongoingness of racial inequality and settler-colonial exploitation in favor of theorizing difference as a superfice or illusion. As I argue in a sonic reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, some of new materialism’s favored analytical and ecological terms such as objecthood, vibrationality, and connection to the Earth are also terms through which anti-Blackness, colonial desire, and the universalization of Whiteness have historically been routed. This historical amnesia in new materialism enables its powerfully obfuscating premises. As a result, I argue that new materialist sound studies and philosophy risk amplifying the Anthropocene’s similarly homogenizing rhetorics, which often propound a mythic planetary oneness while concealing racial and colonial climate inequities. If sound studies and the sonic arts are to have illuminating perspectives on the Anthropocene, they must oppose rather than affirm its homogenizing logics.

Beyond Adaptation and Anthropomorphism

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-385
Author(s):  
Danika Drury-Melnyk ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Gilbert Simondon

This paper attempts to bring the work of Gilbert Simondon into conversation with contemporary discourse on climate change and the Anthropocene. Though his work pre-dates the coining of the term, Simondon, with his non-anthropomorphic view of technology, is in many ways a philosopher of the Anthropocene. In this paper I contrast Simondon’s philosophy to the popular idea that technology is something we can use to adapt to the practical problems of the Anthropocene. I will begin by looking briefly at the narrative of adaptation in the Anthropocene. I will then discuss Simondon’s philosophy of individuation in order to understand why he rejects these narratives of adaptation. Next, I will look at his own ideas on the role that can be played by technology. Ultimately, I hope to describe why, for Simondon, a view of technology that centres on relation rather than on a particular view of the human subject is crucial to human life. The significance of a non-anthropomorphic approach to technology extends beyond the current ecological crisis to all manner of injustice, violence, and misunderstanding between human groups as well as the environment.

scholarly journals New Materialism, Technophilia and Emancipation

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordana Jovanović
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Political Emancipation

The aim of this paper is to reflect on psychological, ethical and political implications of new materialisms (Barad, Bennett, Coole, Frost) in the context of expanded and accelerated regimes of measurement as part of a technological governance of the human. As new materialists are committed to both epistemic and political emancipation, I first analyse theoretical, in particular epistemological, foundations of new materialism. The new materialism has achieved liberating epistemic effects in criticizing self-referential discursive and socio-constructionist agendas. It argued instead for a return to material and somatic realities. However, I examine whether its flat ontology, its epistemology of de-differentiation of the human and non-human, even non-living agencies and commitments into a principle of immanence, provide appropriate means to critically assess ethical and political implications of entanglements of humans with the historically- produced technologies and social worlds in general. The next question to be discussed is whether a return (nevertheless a discursive one) to material and somatic realities can in itself protect those very vulnerable realities. As horizontal ontology invokes a horizontal normativity which cannot serve as a foundation for emancipatory projects, it follows that normativity needs other sources beyond the new materialism paradigm. Thus, I argue that such a weak or insecure position of normativity within the new materialisms affects any concept of human subject, regardless of its entanglements, and any project of emancipation. I conclude these critical analyses by claiming that the new materialism’s epistemological and political emancipatory promises cannot be fulfilled by means provided by the new materialism itself.

scholarly journals New materialism and postmodern subject models fail to explain human memory and self-awareness: A comment on Tobias-Renstrøm and Køppe (2020)

2020 ◽  
pp. 095935432097375
Author(s):  
Radek Trnka
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
Human Memory ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
First Person ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
External Observer ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives

Tobias-Renstrøm and Køppe (2020) show the several conceptual limits that new materialism and postmodern subject models have for psychological theory and research. The present study continues this discussion and argues that the applicability of the ideas of quantum-inspired new materialism depends on the theoretical perspectives that we consider for analysis: be it the first-person perspective referring to the subjective experience of a human subject, or the third-person perspective, in which a human subject is observed by an external observer. While the arguments of new materialism are in accordance with the analysis of the act of observation performed by an external observer, some problems arise when trying to theoretically approach the first-person subjective experience of a human subject. For example, new materialism fails to explain why human minds can maintain the awareness of a subject’s identity throughout their lives and to recall the memories about their past personal experiences.

scholarly journals The End of Reality

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul C Mocombe
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Surplus Value ◽  
The World ◽  
Resource Exhaustion ◽  
The One ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Capitalist Ideology

In this article, I argue that in the age of neoliberal (postindustrial) globalization human relations to the environment have been “enframed” by capitalist ideology leading to the end of reality and the rise of human worldviews and ethos based on overconsumption and resource exhaustion as the determinants of existence over and against the environment and nature. Identity politics, the reification and commodification of (serial) identity practices, cultures, and “all of the accoutrements of the economy of spectacle and the manufacturing of images and fetish desires,” on the one hand, and the continuous atomization of the human subject in (neo) liberalism on the other are mechanisms for creating surplus-value and continuing capitalism’s domination over the world in the era of climate change. These two dialectical practices represent two fascist attempts to perpetuate capitalist relations of production and accumulate surplus value amidst its deleterious effects on all life on earth due to climate change, resource exhaustion, and pollution. I conclude the work by calling for an antihumanist philosophy and psychology with emphasis on subsistence living and maintaining a balance between nature and the environment as keys to planetary and human survival in the age of climate change.

Contesting the Material Turn; or, The Persistence of Agency

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred J. López
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Material Turn

This essay begins by asking whether the new materialism, as currently constituted, can say anything useful about race, given that the most widely read texts recognized as belonging to this emerging field pointedly do not. Put another way, this essay examines possibilities for the reading of the raced enfleshed human subject in and beyond the parameters of the new materialism. The essay’s first section locates the raced enfleshed subject as latent (if not actively suppressed) entity in existing new materialist work. The latter half turns to questions of possibility, especially the question of whether a much older, precluded, or occluded voice is already “speaking through” the so-called materialist turn, challenging it as a way of contesting its own (attempted, failed) erasure from the metaphysical founding scene of the liberal humanist subject that informs the material turn.

Un/Limited Ecologies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicki Kirby
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Interest In Science ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
To Come ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

It seems fair to say that Jacques Derrida’s critical legacy has waned with the restyling of the humanities as science friendly. The term posthumanism, for example, accommodates broad themes in ecology, animal studies, evolution and climate change—even the nature of Life itself. This turn toward physical reality attests to a growing interest in science and its methodologies, as we see in popular accounts of affect theory, new materialism, and object-oriented ontology. Indeed, it is often argued that the waning of the linguistic turn and its apparent hermeticism has enabled this recent fascination with the materiality of bodies and things. However, is Derrida’s “no outside of text” about closure, or its im/possibility? And if the limit segregates nothing at all, if the limit is itself no-thing, then is grammatology an open ecology that already includes what it is defined against, including what is yet to come?

Thinking Religion Through Things

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 365-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Bräunlein
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

In recent years, the “material turn” has gained prominence in the humanities and social sciences, and it has also stimulated a shift toward a rediscovery of materiality in the scientific study of religion\s. The material turn aims to dissolve conventional dichotomies and, by emphasizing the concept of assemblage, insists that humans and things are fundamentally co-constitutive. This “New Materialism” addresses ontological alterity, and it radically decenters static anthropocentric arrangements and the position of the human subject as such. The insider–outsider distinction, however, as well as the emic–etic categorization, are based on fundamental dichotomies between the researcher and the researched, and between descriptive and analytical understandings of human beings. This article discusses the possibility and significance of a non-anthropocentric approach to religion, and examines to what extent it is analytically helpful to apply the insider–outsider and emic–etic distinctions while pursuing the goal of dissolving hierarchical and binary thinking. It furthermore argues that these issues can be properly answered only with reference to their methodological implications.

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