A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism

2020 ◽  
pp. 47-69
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
The Way

scholarly journals Mobilizing the Sense of “Fat”: A Phenomenological Materialist Approach

Human Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Slatman
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Fat Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Conceptual Frame ◽  
Fat Bodies ◽  
The Way ◽  
Phenomenological Exploration

AbstractThis paper aims to mobilize the way we think and write about fat bodies while drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of the body. I introduce Nancy’s approach to the body as an addition to contemporary new materialism. His philosophy, so I argue, offers a form of materialism that allows for a phenomenological exploration of the body. As such, it can help us to understand the lived experiences of fat embodiment. Additionally, Nancy’s idea of the body in terms of a “corpus”—a collection of pieces without a unity—together with his idea of corpus-writing—fragmentary writing, without head and tail—can help us to mobilize fixed meanings of fat. To apply Nancy’s conceptual frame to a concrete manifestation of fat embodiment, I provide a reading of Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger (2017). In my analysis, I identify how the materiality of fat engenders the meaning of embodiment, and how it shapes how a fat body can and cannot be a body. Moreover, I propose that Gay’s writing style—hesitating and circling – involves an example of corpus-writing. The corpus of corpulence that Gay has created gives voice to the precariousness of a fat body's materialization.

scholarly journals Interrogating the Founding Gestures of the New Materialism

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Bruining
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Way

In this article, I aim to further thinking in the broadly ‘new materialist’ field by insisting it attends to some ubiquitous assumptions. More specifically, I critically interrogate what Sara Ahmed has termed ‘the founding gestures of the “new materialism”’. These founding rhetorical gestures revolve around a perceived neglect of the matter of materiality in ‘postmodernism’ and ‘poststructuralism’ and are meant to pave the way for new materialism’s own conception of matter-in/of-the-world. I argue in this article that an engagement with the postmodern critique of language as constitutive, as well as the poststructuralist critique of pure self-presence, does not warrant these founding gestures to be so uncritically rehearsed. Moreover, I demonstrate that texts which rely on these gestures, or at least the ones I discuss in this article, are not only founded on a misrepresentation of postmodern and poststructuralist thought, but are also guilty of repeating the perceived mistakes of which they are critical, such as upholding the language/matter dichotomy. I discuss a small selection of texts that make use of those popular rhetorical gestures to juxtapose the past that is invoked with a more nuanced reading of that past. My contention is that if ‘the founding gestures of the “new materialism”’ are not addressed, the complexity of the postmodern and poststructuralist positions continues to be obscured, with damaging consequences for the further development of the emerging field of new materialism, as well as our understanding of cultural theory’s past.

Thinking Outside the Body: New Materialism and the Challenge of the Fetish

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 304-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Green
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
The Body ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Everyday Experience ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
The Way

Fetishism has become such a key concept within Western thought, largely as a result of the work of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, that it is easy to forget its origins. But the notion of fetishism originates in a very different context, and in many ways, an incommensurable system of thought—animism. Returning to this submerged backstory, I deploy the concept of the fetish to confront the recent enthusiasm for materiality that has emerged in response to current environmental crises. New materialism considers matter to have a liveliness not dependent on human subjects. This paper considers what divides “vital materialism” from the “animist materialism” that continues to structure everyday experience in a range of contexts in Africa and elsewhere and investigates the way in which fetishism, within the intellectual tradition of animism, alerts us to the strange ephemeralness of the avowed materialism of the new materialist project.

scholarly journals Beyond Entanglement

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-33
Author(s):  
Christina Fredengren
Keyword(s):  
Rock Art ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Equal Importance ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Thinking Tools ◽  
Published Research ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Way

This keynote discusses how human-animal relationships can be studied as entanglements to understand more of the situatedness of human and animal bodies and lives. It provides a selection of thinking tools from critical posthumanist feminism and new materialism which should prove useful for studying more-than-human worldmaking through archaeology. These tools can be used to study how humanity and animality are produced, how to recognise animal agentiality, and to highlight challenges on the way. Key issues are identified in concepts such as taxonomies, hybridity, othering and killability. Examples are drawn from recently published research on human-animal relations in archaeology on rock art, depositions, sacrifices, burial practices and more. The paper also tests how speculative methods can be a way of approaching more-than-human exposedness, situatedness and agentiality. It makes an argument that while it is important to study the entanglement of bodies as material-semiotic phenomena, it is of equal importance to also address questions on inequalities and injustices, and who carries the burden in particular situated entanglements and thereby move beyond the study of entanglement on its own.

scholarly journals Materialism new and old

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles T. Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
Cut Set ◽  
The Way

New materialism is not a clear-cut set of theses, or a firmly unified school of thought. It crosses discourses and theoretical commitments, but, as its name indicates, seems consistently to oppose ‘new’ materialism to an older form, or perhaps several older forms of this doctrine. The latter are typically associated with ‘mechanistic’ standpoints, with ‘reductionism’, with the denial of life, agency, embodiment, meaning, value … What happens when a historian of materialism confronts such claims? In what follows, I reflect on the historical problems which affect such theoretical positionings. It is not that there is no need to distinguish passive from active forms of materialism, or single out a focus on organic life. But that a distinction between ‘new and old’ might not be the way to capture such crucial theoretical and historical features.

scholarly journals Human uniqueness on the brink of a new axial age: From separation to reintegration of humans and nature

2016 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornel W. Du Toit
Keyword(s):  
Natural Sciences ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Axial Age ◽  
Human Uniqueness ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Vital Forces ◽  
The Way

Karl Jaspers’ Axial Age concept is used to depict the way humans interact with their environment. The first Axial Age (800-200 BC) can be typified among others as the age in which humans started to objectify nature. Nature was dispossessed of spirits, gods and vital forces that humans previously feared and used as explanation for the origin of things. Secularised and objectified nature became a source of wealth for humans to use and abuse as they like. This has peaked in the post-industrial era which also introduced the Second Axial Age in which we presently live. The Second Axial Age can be typified by a new approach to nature mediated among others by insights from the side of the natural sciences, especially developments in cosmology, our understanding of the quantum world and new insights into the nature of consciousness. Another development in the Second Axial Age is the emergence of the nonhuman turn, new materialism, panpsychism, the notion of the post-human and theological concepts like the ‘entangled God’. These developments are discussed with reference to leading thinkers. The nonhuman turn is welcomed as it introduces respect for nature which may contribute to the survival of our planet.

scholarly journals Materials, forensics and feminist geopolitics

2020 ◽  
pp. 030913252090565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Sharp
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Feminist Geopolitics ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Materialist Feminist ◽  
Discursive Turn ◽  
The Way

This article seeks to advance the case for feminist geopolitics that recognises the challenges both to the Enlightenment individual and the discursive turn in geography posed by ‘new materialisms’. I will argue that for a distinctively feminist geopolitics a consideration of the way that representational categories align the material around bodies is vital. After a brief discussion of feminist geopolitical approaches, the article moves on to consider accounts of new materialism and assemblage approaches as they are applied to geopolitics, before moving on to consider what a forensic approach might offer to a materialist feminist geopolitics.

Introduction: Voice, Voicetracks, New Materialism

Voicetracks ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norie Neumark
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Situated Knowledge ◽  
Media Work ◽  
Voice Calls ◽  
The Way

This chapter establishes the theoretical underpinnings of the book, introducing theories of voice, new materialism, posthumanism, carnal and situated knowledge, and affect. It discusses the unusual writing voice that a new materialist book about voice calls for. Presenting the implications of a new materialist approach to voice, the author discusses why she listens to this as voice particularly, rather than sound in general. Listening and conversations as the modes and methodologies are introduced. There is further discussion of voicetracks as the way through the book’s diverse works and transversal or inter-disciplinary theories. This chapter also introduces the engagement with the author’s own sound and media work which has shaped her apprehension of voice and the assemblages with/in which it speaks.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Andrew Mangham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Problem Novel ◽  
Social Novels ◽  
The Way

An outline of the way in which the nineteenth century invented the idea of hunger as a physiological and material phenomenon whose radical epistemological powers were constructed across literature, medicine, and physiology, this Introduction seeks to offer an outline of how the book’s reading of the social-problem novel will draw on the methodologies associated with literature and science, new materialism, and somatic (bodily) or anthropological realism. It also introduces how the social novels of Kingsley, Gaskell, and Dickens promoted the development of knowledge and sympathy through both an emphasis on the material sufferings of the starving and a detailed analysis of what it means to go hungry, and to observe and to write about it in a way that seeks to be truthful.

A Politics of Things? Deleuze and the New Materialism

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-542
Author(s):  
Simon Schleusener
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
The Way

Concentrating on the way in which new materialist authors like Jane Bennett have read and appropriated the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, this essay has two major objectives: first, it aims to point out the shortcomings of the new materialism's concept of the political (as it is formulated in Bennett's Vibrant Matter). Second, it seeks to investigate the differences and affinities between neomaterialist thought and Deleuze's philosophy. While Deleuze's focus on material becomings and concrete assemblages certainly lends itself to being utilised by neomaterialist authors, what many of these authors tend to ignore is the Marxian influence in Deleuze's thinking. It would be misleading, then, to see Deleuze as a new materialist avant la lettre, thereby implying that he categorically dismissed the ‘old’ (i.e. historical) materialism. Rather, what is unique about Deleuze's philosophy is its combination of a Marxist understanding of modes of production and their material conditions with a social ontology – inspired, among others, by Spinoza and Tarde – that emphasises the complex intermingling of human and non-human actors.

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