Response

In the spirit of Raymond Williams, I’d like to indulge in a back-to-basics meditation on usage and history. With any luck, doing so will help us think through what we really mean when we talk about the new materialism.

The word “materialism” has several distinct but related uses.

In philosophical discourse, materialism is opposed to idealism and refers to the ontological position that the world is composed only of matter and its motions. This sense has roots at least as far back as the writings of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius.

This kind of materialism is often conflated with or accompanied by empiricism, the epistemological position that our ideas about the nature of things are formed exclusively by sensory experience of matter and its motions. Empiricism, of course, also has a long history, especially since it was formalized by Locke and Hume.

In common usage, on the other hand, materialism usually means the tendency to value physical (and sometimes financial) possessions and interests, over and above spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual experiences and concerns.

Finally, in the context of political theory, especially since Marx, materialism names the belief that structures of economic power, rather than (or in addition to) ideas or ideology, determine (or shape) social being and history.

The common thread here, of course, is a set of familiar binary oppositions: mind and matter, spirit and nature, words and things.

In the last decade or two, in the context of the humanities, and especially the environmental humanities, materialism has been used to signal a turn away from the reductive linguistic determinism that has dominated academic discourse for the last several decades. It is only in this context that it makes any sense at all to call materialism new. 

Now, new materialists, especially in the environmental humanities, state their motivations in remarkably consistent terms. If we adopt a new onto-epistemological position and acknowledge that everything including ourselves is material, we will horizontalize the ethical field in a way that makes new ethical commitments possible. If we think differently about matter, we will act differently toward it. If we acknowledge that we are material beings living in a material world, we will treat our home with care.

In other words, the new materialism reframes the activist theoretical project that has been at the heart of the environmental humanities since the field was invented a few decades ago under the rubric of ecocriticism. In doing so, it has produced a supple new vocabulary that can help us move beyond the fundamentalist ecocritical insistence that nature is real and that’s that and we’d better respect it. By contrast, new materialism it has taken a big step toward addressing Lawrence Buell’s criticism that ecocriticism offers only a thematic emphasis, not an innovative theoretical approach.

At the same time, the new materialism needs to make sure not to carry forward some of the other bad habits that plagued ecocriticism in its earlier stages.

When we imagine ourselves as material beings, as bodily creatures, we need to recognize that we are not solitary individuals moving through the world having solitary intra-actions and making solitary impacts. So, the ethics we envision needs to go beyond the renunciation of things, the practice of doing without commodities like cars, factory-farmed food, conferences that require air travel, and intensive habits of material consumption in general. As Derrick Jensen put it in Orion Magazine a few years ago, we need to “Forget Shorter Showers.”

Also, the social cannot be something that we blithely leave behind as we light out for the territories in search of bodily intra-action with enchanted matter and strange strangers. We need to recognize that the social is more than just a polluted cultural environment, a degraded habitat of language, or an urban wilderness of signs.

In other words, we need to acknowledge that, as bodily beings, we are embedded not only in the non-human or more-than-human environment, but also in social and political environments that are material in fundamentally important ways. We need to think about why our society engages in such materially intensive forms of production in the first place, and we need to think especially hard about what it will take to change it.

In other words, we need a comprehensive, and even intersectional, materialism that integrates the political sense of the term I mentioned earlier. If we keep walking down the trail that leads from the body in the world toward what we used to call ecocentricity, we will eventually come to politics, which is, essentially, the effort to materialize our individual ethical commitments in a collective setting, in a society shaped and driven by powerful material processes, like a capitalist economy and sedimented histories of inequality.

Some new materialists have been blazing the way forward. In The Material of Knowledge, Susan Hekman, has called for a new “ontology of the social” that can help us understand the way we “intra-act with the natural world through labor.” And Susan’s colleague, Stacy Alaimo, has developed the term “trans-corporeality,” which she uses to explore “the interconnections, interchanges, and transits between human bodies and nonhuman natures” such as food and toxins (2). Alaimo calls our attention to important matters like “the proletarian lung” and other bodily effects of our society’s unequal distribution of environmental risks and benefits.

Of course, as Hekman’s title, The Material of Knowledge, reminds us, even as new materialists, we are in the business of studying language and ideas. Of course, there is a lot to say about what it means to say that knowledge is material, but I don’t have time to go there.

For now, what I want to say is that our role as environmental humanists, as environmentally committed scholars, teachers, and curators of language and literary culture, is to engender ways of thinking that can help us change the way that we collectively make and dwell in our socio-environmental habitat.

I’ll conclude by briefly suggesting how the three papers we’ve heard today contribute to that project.

Katie emphasizes the new materialist deconstruction of the self, which is revealed to be a mobile intra-action of substances, processes, and institutions. This is important and unfinished work, since the stable, autonomous, animate, agentic self remains the protagonist of most of our ethical narratives, especially in environmental ethics. Katie asks the crucial question, what would politics look like without the self?

Aimee’s meditation on dust reveals a material substance that is everywhere but rarely seen. Dust is a mixture of cells, spores, mites, shavings, waste, and more. As such, it is simultaneously dead and alive, inert and active, healthful and toxic, human and non-human, bodily and social, self and other, natural and constructed, timeless and historical, universal and terrestrial, blank and inscribed. It is around us, on us, in us, and falling from us. We make it, we are made of it, and of course, we will return to it. Thinking about dust can be good exercise, since it tends to rouse us from sedentary habits of categorical thinking.

Finally, Kristen makes a related point about the need for flexibility and reach when she argues that we should not overcorrect and reproduce “the binarism between materiality and culture.” Instead, she asks us to attend to the relationality between matter and text. Thinking about Thoreau’s practices of writing and walking can help us see that ideas and language materialize during complex material-semiotic intra-actions between embodied minds and their socio-environmental habitats.

-- Lance Newman, Westminster College