Agency and Alterity in New Materialist Philosophy

Why do we need a new materialism, and what makes it new? The short answer may be nothing much, particularly for students of Derrida, Butler, Deleuze, Zizek, and others. In different ways, these writers have been producing what Toril Moi calls “a third way” for theory, “one that steers a course between the Scylla of traditional essentialism and biologism, and the Charybdis of idealist obsession with ‘discourse’ and ‘construction’” (qtd. in Kruks, “Simone de Beauvoir: Engaging Discrepant Materialisms,” 262-3). Simply put, this is the materialist project: our ongoing attempt to provide an account of material being that is dynamic, non-linear, and non-deterministic, without relying on outdated frameworks of selfhood. In their introduction to New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (2010), Diana Coole and Samantha Frost argue that “materialism’s demise since the 1970s has been an effect of the dominance of analytical normative political theory on the one hand, and of radical constructivism on the other,” approaches often “associated with a cultural turn that privileges language, discourse, culture, and values” (Coole and Frost 3). The essays collected in their volume of recent work in this field try to avoid the paradox of constructivist approaches that “recente[r] the human subject despite the intention to undermine such claims” (26). In other words, as I argue in a review of the volume, “new materialisms attempt to theorize freedom without tethering it either to deterministic or libertarian notions of the human subject. Rather, they insistently challenge the forms of subjectivity that foreclose freedom” (Van Wert 66).

This project is certainly not new; it is at least as old as Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, who declared in 1925 that she was a “part of people she had never met; being laid out like mist between people she knew best” (Woolf 9). Indeed, for Deleuze and Guattari, whose work has been central to new materialist philosophy, Clarissa is the quintessential “nomadic subject,” one who is always in states of becoming (Van Wert 69). Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies exhibit a new materialist vitalism similar to Woolf’s. In the elegies, composed around the same time as Mrs. Dalloway, the poet cultivates an “animal gaze onto the Open,” which makes the animal a part of what it looks upon (Rilke 55-56). This was Rilke’s effort to avoid holding the natural world at a distance through artistic or philosophical mastery – a process that Maurice Blanchot called “bad interiority” (135). Like Rilke, new materialists “eschew the distinction between organic and inorganic, or animate and inanimate, at the ontological level” (Coole and Frost 9). In the monolithic ontology of new materialism, “‘matter becomes’ rather than . . . ‘is,’” and “there is no definitive break between sentient and nonsentient entities or between material and spiritual phenomena” (Coole and Frost 10). I cite Woolf and Rilke as a reminder that theory often lags behind fiction and poetry in understanding. Nevertheless, new materialism is exciting – and if not strictly new, then at least renewed – for the ways in which it tries to answer a question put to us long ago by writers like Woolf, a question so difficult that we have continually failed to answer it. What becomes of identity politics if we acknowledge what a tentative, fleeting, material thing the self really is? And “what does agency become when it is no longer the expression of a uniquely human or even creaturely will?” (Van Wert 68). What would it mean to catch up with Woolf and Rilke, to trade the ego of Cartesian dualism for an “animal gaze?” What kind of agent would I be if I replaced my sovereign self with Clarissa Dalloway’s fluid intersubjectivity? To put it most simply: is my self the disease or the cure?

Such questions can seem inordinately academic. But the popular press suggests that they are very much on the public’s mind. In an article entitled “Enlightenment’s Evil Twin,” published last month by The Atlantic, Gracie Lofthouse offers a short history of “depersonalization disorder,” a common if episodic experience in which, to quote the article’s subtitle, “the self doesn’t feel real.” In the words of one sufferer, “it’s like I’m too aware of certain larger aspects of reality” (“Enlightenment’s Evil Twin”). Notwithstanding the clinical treatment of depersonalization as a disorder, Lofthouse notes that “romantics” from Keats to Timothy Leary have been trying for centuries to “break free from personality into new realms of consciousness,” and she wonders whether depersonalization might also be a form of enlightenment. “Have you ever played that game,” she asks, “when you repeat a word over and over again until it loses all meaning? It’s called semantic satiation. Like words, can a sense of self be broken down into arbitrary, socially-constructed components?” (“Enlightenment’s Evil Twin”). And furthermore, might depersonalization represent what one psychoanalyst calls “a Dostoyevsky-style illumination – where clarity cannot be distinguished from pain?” (“Enlightenment’s Evil Twin”). Yes; and one might also call it a Steinbeckian illumination; as one of the unnamed victims of the dust bowl asks in The Grapes of Wrath: “How’ll it be not to know what land’s outside the door? How if you wake up in the night and know – and know the willow tree’s not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can’t. The willow tree is you. The pain on that mattress there – that dreadful pain – that’s you” (Steinbeck 89).

Steinbeck’s dispossessed farmer offers a lyrical articulation of one of new materialism’s most crucial insight about selves: the spirit is not, as Jacob von Uexkull argues, “what descends into the body in order to organize it, but . . . what emerges from it” (qtd. in Coole, “The Inertia of Matter,” 103). Emphasizing the aleatory element of this emergent being, Coole argues that “the animal is accordingly conceptualized as a field rather than a machine,” resulting in a “new biological sense of life as a contingent unfurling of possibilities” (103). This sense of the self’s absolute contingency enables new materialism’s powerful critique of all philosophical determinism. But as an account of daily life, it can be hard to swallow. As Lofthouse points out, “people suffering from depersonalization disorder don’t appear at a doctor’s or psychiatrist’s office to explore mysticism, philosophy, or the deep blue sea. They make the appointment because they are in pain” (“Enlightenment’s Evil Twin”).

I would not gainsay the experience of suffering people. But what if “depersonalization” is not the source of pain, but rather a response to the pain of an orderly personhood? What if the pain comes not from losing one’s self, but, as Melissa Orlie argues, from our panicked efforts to avoid losing ourselves? To avoid acknowledging that we are closer to planes than machines? “Compared with a machine,” I argue, “a field is open to contamination, incursion, and the force of otherness. The openness and radical vulnerability of the body-as-field is both the threat and the gift of a materialist ontology; how much it is the latter depends on how brave you are” (Van Wert 70). Orlie explains that “we are positively averse to the experience of impersonality; hostile to the claim that neither the matter of our selves nor that of the world is me or mine, ours or yours. Indeed, most of our mental activity, as well as the content of the dominant ego psychology, is constructed as a defense against experiencing or acknowledging the impersonal forces that compose us” (Orlie 120). According to this theory, the mind is a mechanism “by which the body imagines itself as master of the conditions of its experience but at exactly those moments when the body actually feels the limits of its strength and suffers under these conditions” (123). As I argue in the review, “one of new materialism’s most affirmative elements is its faith that if we open ourselves to the impersonal material forces that ceaslessly compose, recompose, and decompose us, we can achieve a degree of existential joy that otherwise eludes us” (Van Wert 70). Echoing Winnicott’s theory of “unintegration,” a less normative account of depersonalization disorder, Orlie concludes that “to become increasingly awake to all that is, is to wake up to the impersonality of matter which is nature; it is to live with a joyousness that arises only when we are able to cease holding the self together without at the same time falling apart” (126). Or, as Rosi Braidotti puts it most beautifully: “This is just one life, not my life. The life in “me” does not answer to my name: “I” is just passing” (210). Braidotti suggests that the reward for what she calls “nondefensive sublimation” (134), a.k.a. radical acceptance, might be a more joyous being—one for whom the pain of Steinbeck’s narrator and the elation of Woolf’s Clarissa are mingled inextricably.

But if, as Braidotti says, “the ‘I’ is just passing,” then so is agency as we ordinarily define it. New materialism’s newest and most challenging claim is that we derive not only joy from the fleetingness of “I,” but also our ability – however limited – to act. New materialists understand agency as an ongoing relation to alterity and otherness, to that which cannot be mastered. Drawing on Derrida, Pheng Cheah argues that “since the other is that from which time comes, the experience of absolute alterity, however disruptive, must be affirmed because without it, nothing could ever happen [. . .] The experience of alterity is essentially the urgent force of any rational decision and action that cannot be reduced to the mastery or sovereignty of the rational subject [. . .] For if the freedom of the rational subject comes in or as its response to the other, then decision is prompted by and also comes from the other" (78-81). Voicing a similar insight in less abstract terms, Frost argues that we have yet to accept “the complexity of causation and the heteronomy of our actions” (174). In fact, she argues, we are so afraid of acknowledging the inchoate forces that compose us that we erect images of sovereign power to conceal from ourselves the metaphysical limits of our agency. In other words, “my obsession with the sovereign’s mastery over me, however tyrannical, conceals from me the more painful reality that in crucial ways, no one can master my life, least of all me” (Van Wert 70).

So to return to my earlier question: what, if anything, does this mean for identity politics? What will I lose if I acknowledge that self-mastery is a politically beneficial illusion? “Acknowledge” is perhaps not the right word here, since it implies a mainly cerebral activity. Rather, what would be the price of organizing my being not as a defense against materiality, but as an ongoing encounter with alterity? Is the Nietzschean joy of fully material being adequate recompense for the weakening of a politics founded on individual rights? For inevitably, Braidotti argues, a rapprochement with radical alterity will also require us “to look beyond compensatory ethics and a culture of justice that answers pain with money” (Van Wert 70). On what ground will I claim or contest my rights if I reconceive myself as barely an “I,” always in states of becoming, and capable of projecting agency onto my actions only retrospectively? In this sense at least, the blessing of new materialism is also its threat, because “the same indeterminacy that subverts totalizing and oppressive forces also places limits on human ‘agentic efficacy’” (Van Wert 71). As Rey Chow argues, “whereas the very contingency of iteration –– its inherent instability –– represents for Althusser, Zizek, and Girard a potential for instrumentalization by institutions of power such as the church or the state, institutions which typically capitalize on such contingency for the purposes of domination and indoctrination, for [Judith] Butler, precisely the same contingency lends itself to the chance of differentiation . . . and thus to the possibility of subversion” (230).

Is the paradox of iteration a problem for new materialism? Not necessarily. But if we believe that agency is not the province of rational selves but inherent to all matter, we run the risk of political irrelevance. Elizabeth Grosz asserts that “freedom is . . . not primarily a capacity of mind but of body: it is linked to the body’s capacity for movement, and thus its multiple possibilities of action” (152), and moreover, that “indetermination liberates life from the constraints of the present” (153). This is a beautiful claim, but is it always true? Is it sufficiently cognizant of the real-world constraints on material freedom? How, for example, can it be reconciled with the institution of chattel slavery? I suspect that we will answer this question without reverting to facile notions of resistance; but for now, it remains an open question.

Ultimately, the newest – and for me, most exciting – facet of new materialism is its attention to the complex roles that contingency and alterity play in our lives. This is hard to do, particularly if one is limited to theoretical discourse. Alterity is “the other,” the Lacanian “real,” and in some ways very counterintuitive. As Derrida said, “the impossible gives their very movement to desire, action, and decision: it is the very figure of the real. It has its hardness, closeness, and urgency” (qtd. in Cheah 76). In other words, “for materialisms informed by poststructuralism, matter cannot be presence” (Van Wert 68). Yet its absence makes it all the more forceful. And so, when we are not using jargon like “alterity,” we turn to poetry: it is the “pain on that mattress there,” “the animal gaze onto the Open,” and the state of being “laid out like mist” between the people we know best. These are wonderful new materialist claims, even if they are also quite old.

-- Kathryn Van Wert, University of Minnesota Duluth

Works Cited

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Print.

Braidotti, Rosi. “The Politics of ‘Life Itself’ and New Ways of Dying.” Coole and Frost 178-200.

Cheah, Pheng. “Non-Dialectical Materialism.” Coole and Frost 70-91.

Chow, Rey. “The Elusive Material: What the Dog Doesn’t Understand.” Coole and Frost 221-233.

Coole, Diana. “The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh.” Coole and Frost 92-115.

Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” Coole and Frost 1-46.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Print.

Frost, Samantha. “Fear and the Illusion of Autonomy.” Coole and Frost 158-176.

Grosz, Elizabeth. “Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom.” Coole and Frost 139-157.

Kruks, Sonia. “Simone de Beauvoir: Engaging Discrepant Materialisms.” Coole and Frost 258-280.

Lofthouse, Gracie. “Enlightenment’s Evil Twin.” TheAtlantic.com. The Atlantic Monthly Group, December 2014. Web. 5 Jan. 2014.

Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Print.

Orlie, Melissa A. “Impersonal Matter.” Coole and Frost 116-138.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies. Trans. A. Poulin. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Print.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 1939. Print.

Van Wert, Kathryn. Rev. of New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, eds. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Modern Language Studies 43.2 (2014): 66-71. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Harcourt, 1925. Print.