9
New Materialism

Abstract

This review essay focuses on how the year’s work in new materialism builds on a vibrant discourse in literary studies and nascent, growing trends in postcolonial and indigenous new materialisms. A variety of new materialist works published in 2023, from the monographs Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking and The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America, to the journal article ‘New Materialism and Posthumanism in Roman Archaeology’, explore the ways in which the pillars of new materialist thought, such as the agentic capacity of vibrant matter, ‘speaking objects’, and entanglement, can lead to decolonial revelations about human culture and history. The essay is grouped according to common themes addressed in this year’s body of work: 1. Introduction; 2. Literature and Beyond; 3. Colonial Plants and Enslaved Objects; 4. New Materialism and Eco-Marxism; 5. Immanence and Planetary Thinking; 6. New (Materialist) Topics of Conversation in Science; and 7. Conclusion. The varied scholarship surveyed points to the conclusion that what was once seen as new materialism’s ethical weakness—its focus on matter over human beings—is now becoming a decolonial strength.

1. Introduction

In last year’s review essay of work published in 2022, I argued that new materialist discourse was on the brink of a second era, dubbed ‘neo-materialism’ by scholars like Rosi Braidotti and Tobias Skiveren. Whereas first-wave new materialism in the 2010s focused on the agency of matter in its own right, neo-materialism sought to revise the field by, first, acknowledging its Eurocentric bias and, second, focusing more heavily on human events.

Works published in 2023 continue these neo-materialistic trends, but the most successful scholarship from this year seems to prioritize practical application over theoretical opining. The common thread across the year’s work in new materialism is a pattern of practice: of humanities critics applying some of the most traditional new materialist concepts, such as ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett, Vibrant Matter [2010]) and ‘intra-action’ (Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway [2007]), to interdisciplinary ecocritical discourse. Scholars such as Mary Kuhn, Eva Mol, Karen Bray, Heather Eaton, Whitney Bauman, and Daan Oostveen share the conviction that new materialism is an important illuminatory tool in researching the environmental humanities. Without the new materialist basics, they argue, we cannot engage with historical and philosophical discourses concerning topics like human–plant relationships, historical enslavement, or planetary thinking.

Continuing to make decolonial neo-materialist strides, the scholarship of 2023 also shows that the basic pillars of new materialism, especially a close reading of matter, prove more relevant than ever. This year’s work demonstrates new materialism’s ability to break open the biases and blind spots in longstanding humanities fields like eighteenth-century literature, environmental history, botany, animal studies, classics, and theological studies. It is from the origins of the field—in that relatively simple idea of agentic objects—that new materialism continues to grow and matter.

2. Literature and Beyond

Many new materialists like myself found indoctrination via literary criticism, which is why the appearance of Laura Brown’s The Counterhuman Imaginary: Earthquakes, Lapdogs, and Traveling Coinage in Eighteenth-Century Literature deserves mention here. Brown’s book reminds those interested in new materialism of its inherent ties to literary analysis, and, more importantly, that literary studies’ new materialist phase is nowhere close to being over. Brown’s book builds on a specific body of scholarly work dealing in new materialism and eighteenth-century ideas, such as Sean Silver’s The Mind is a Collection (2015) and Lynn Festa’s Fiction Without Humanity (2019). Silver examines the material origins of eighteenth-century theories of the mind and thinking, tracing the Enlightenment canonization of mind/body dualism while at the same time theorizing that the material spaces of Enlightenment genius, such as John Locke’s library or Alexander Pope’s grotto, afforded the expansion of the human mind itself. Festa’s book examines how eighteenth-century writers defined the human via the nonhuman. In her terms, ‘nonhuman’ intertwines animal and object, animate and inanimate, biotic and abiotic. Within this methodology, creatures, machines, and material objects are all part of the human-defining project of literature and art. Festa argues that eighteenth-century nonhuman literature reveals exactly how Western culture began to conceptualize the fiction of humanism to both ostensibly progressive and subtextually colonial ends.

Brown begins her book by rehearsing a decade of theory that defends literature as the transcript of nonhuman vitality. Citing Jane Bennett, Diana Coole, Samantha Frost, and Richard Grusin, Brown reminds her readers that for over a decade critics have presented literature as the space where the human imagination aligns with the nonhuman and represents its agency (p. 5). She writes, however, that ‘any human access to the other-than-human is confounded by the indisputable intervention of the human in that process’ (p. 7). For Brown, reading nonhuman literature means always already acknowledging that the imaginary is ultimately human, even if the nonhuman disrupts the human facade.

Rather than solving this paradox, Brown seeks to directly incorporate it into her theorized framework of reading—‘the counterhuman imaginary’—which works as an alternative to Festa’s ‘fiction without humanity’ (p. 7). Althusser’s idea of interpellation (i.e. the way in which the human subject always reflects the omnipresent social and political structures in which it is embedded) proves essential to Brown’s counterhuman framework. She proposes integrating human assumption, or humanist interpellation, into any reading of a nonhuman representation. In spite of the imaginary nature of human representation, we can nevertheless, Brown argues, identify ‘counterhuman disruptions that are generated alongside those claims [of human authority] through the self-efficacy of the other-than-human’ (p. 9). Brown’s ‘counterhuman’ is a textual phenomenon in which the nonhuman unveils its relevance to the human imagination along what she calls the ‘meta-paradox of human access to the other-than-human’ (p. 9). In other words, while Festa examines the ways that the nonhuman historically and self-agentically constituted definitions of the human, Brown’s ‘counterhuman’ idea examines how literature makes the nonhuman ‘perceptible on an axis counter to […] the human’, generating ‘pressures on human discourse’ (pp. 12, 16). In simpler terms, Brown’s counterhuman imaginary offers a new materialist reading of the human imagination, rather than the material world itself.

The danger in forging this third category of ‘counterhuman’ methodology is that it runs the risk of misguiding readers back to a poststructuralist idea of literature. The counterhuman implies that literature is a product of the human mind alone, separate from any agentic, participating material reality. Brown’s focus therefore becomes primarily discursive rather than material-discursive, as if unconsciously haunted by mind/matter dualism. In contrast to Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman (Material Ecocriticism [2014]), who see the literary as a collaborative process between the human imagination and the expressive agency of the biological world, Brown’s definition of the counterhuman potentially undervalues matter’s ability to express itself in spite of the human imagination. Nevertheless, by acknowledging her Althusserian debt, we can see that the counterhuman imaginary Brown defines only exists because of a material reality beyond the human imagination, even if it is always already interpellated through the humanist perspective in literature.

Brown’s counterhuman is best articulated in her case studies, previewed in her book’s whimsical subtitle, Earthquakes, Lapdogs, and Traveling Coinage in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Her discussions of the eighteenth-century it-narrative and analysis of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 are especially effective. Although scholars like Mark Blackwell, Bonnie Blackwell, and Aileen Douglas have already produced exciting scholarship on the the it-narrative, a popular eighteenth-century genre that gave voice, character, and emotion to things such as banknotes or lapdogs, Brown’s contribution explicitly articulates the genre’s new materialist significance. New materialism, she writes, ‘emphasizes the transformative potential of the actant thing’, just like the it-narrative (p. 25). Moreover, by ‘suffusing [the] thing-protagonist with human emotion’ as in the love shared between a lady and her lapdog, the genre creates, she argues, a ‘corporeal cross-species intimacy’ (pp. 25, 19). Although lapdog narratives like Pompey the Little (1750) satirized elite women’s fondness for their pets, Brown also argues that, via affect, these works create a genuine connection that challenges nonhuman alterity and humanist hierarchy by placing the reader in the body of the lapdog as opposed to objectifying it (p. 43). At the same time, the ability of materiality to overwhelm, as in Daniel Defoe’s proliferation of objects in Robinson Crusoe (1719), and the widespread suffering brought about by the single event of an earthquake in Lisbon, challenge human coherence in writing.

Brown’s Counterhuman Imaginary returns to important questions about how we read literature and matter’s essential role in the literary process. Despite potentially getting caught up in the semantics of counterhuman versus nonhuman, Brown’s examples and language remind her readers time and again that literature is imbricated in a material reality that is, in her words, ‘just beyond’ human experience and expression (p. 5). Thus, we can again confirm that words alone are not enough to understand the human imagination—we also need the nonhuman world’s input, or at the very least for Brown, its destabilizing pressure.

Moving a century or two back in time, Steven Swarbrick’s The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton makes a case for a new strain of material reading in early modern literature through an incorporation of psychoanalysis. His early modern readings of matter are framed by a Lacanian sense of lack. He argues that writers like Spenser, Milton, and Marvell offer a unique kind of materialist poetic vision: one structured by loss. While Swarbrick’s close readings of topics (trees, oceans, rivers, plants, fossils) are interesting, his argument that their materiality consists of their ‘failure to be there’ feels counterintuitive for a new materialist (p. 5). He argues that poems by Spenser and Milton make matter into a void, voids that are evidenced in a number of canonical poems such as The Faerie Queene (1590) and Paradise Lost (1667). He builds this reading into a conclusion that emphasizes what he calls the ‘impossibility of ecocriticism’ because he maintains, like these early modern writers, that matter and meaning will never cohere (p. 31).

One of Swarbrick’s main aims in this book is to critique new materialist ecocriticism and bring forth a more theoretical eco-psychoanalysis in its stead. In particular, Swarbrick critiques current new materialist scholarship by the likes of Karen Barad for its disavowal of language. By seeing meaning in matter instead of language, he argues, new materialists ultimately reaffirm the humanist subject instead of challenging it. He locates his deconstruction of new materialist theory in one of new materialism’s favorite materialist poets: the classical writer Lucretius, who experienced a renaissance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and again in the twenty-first among new materialists. Rather than affirm what Swarbrick sees as matter’s ‘sense-making abilities’, he claims that Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura argues that matter itself is a system of letters (a language) that is both impossible and futile, which he sees reflected in early modern writing (p. 10). Swarbrick later articulates what he calls ‘the environmental unconscious’ by using the example of The Faerie Queene, which, he argues, enters the psychoanalytic terrain of a tree’s suffering in Book I. However, Swarbrick’s critique that new materialism tries to cohere matter and meaning in perfect order—which also serves as his defense of early modern poets—is not necessarily an accurate characterization of the field. New materialism embraces messy entanglement, not a material ordering, as Swarbrick seems to imply. From Bennett’s notion of assemblage to biosemiotics, new materialists have historically embraced the multitudinous ways materiality can communicate its own narratives simultaneously and, often, disharmoniously.

Swarbrick’s attempt to integrate psychoanalytic theory with material reading is an admirable one. His book blends two theoretical fields that warrant further exploration in future new materialisms. This central idea of an environmental unconscious underpinning early modern poetry is compelling and can certainly find continuation throughout other eras and styles of literature. In spite of all his attempts to disavow new materialist theory, or at the very least to distinguish his psychoanalysis from new materialist ideas of entanglement, several of his claims—like the idea that ‘matter thinks’ albeit in ‘untranslatable ways’—sound an awful lot like new materialist tenets (p. 12). In short, Swarbrick is indeed adding interesting concepts about Lacanian lack and psychoanalytic voids to new materialist literary criticism, but he does not necessarily need to critique its foundation in the process. The two can coexist.

This year’s work also saw new materialist ideas animate critical conversations around contemporary avant-garde speculative fiction, an umbrella term for fantasy and science fiction. John Landreville and Tony Vinci released a special edition of Extrapolation, a journal specializing in science fiction, thematized around new materialism. Landreville and Vinci praise new materialism’s ability to ‘disavow the human subject as the agent of our world’ (p. 286). At the same time, the editors are conscious of warnings from 2022 about new materialism’s tendency to ignore human violence by focusing too intently on the nonhuman. Thus, in this issue, the writers present speculative fiction as a new materialist space that can transcend humanism while also maintaining human accountability for ecological wrongdoing. Recent works in speculative fiction, such as Future Home of the Living God (2017) and The Moonday Letters (2021) are shown to critique humanism while pointing to the human origins of climate change and nonhuman suffering.

The special issue offers a cosmopolitan picture of contemporary speculative fiction from American, Finnish, and Chinese writers. That picture is ultimately a bleak one: these contemporary works collectively present what Landreville and Vinci see as a ‘metaphysics of relinquishment’ to ‘our terminal world’ (pp. 287–88). Modern fantasy engages the material primarily in its transitory state in relation to humanity’s own prophesied extinction. The pessimism of the issue’s disintegration of human life does not quite harmonize with the overarching lively tone of new materialist discourse, but nevertheless presents an important counter-perspective that aligns with wider ecocritical discussions.

As part of this special issue, Jesse Cohn makes a claim for new materialist potential in a contemporary Black Gothic science fiction novel by Rivers Solomon entitled Sorrowland (2021). Sorrowland has been read as a supernatural rendering of Black trauma, but new materialism enables Cohn to add another layer to this analysis. The text is one of hybridity between the human and nonhuman, especially in the protagonist Vern, who is ‘a hybrid of the human and the fungal’ (p. 313). According to Cohn, this supernatural human hybrid protagonist models an ‘anarchic flow of matter’ that resists hierarchical social relations. As Cohn’s essay suggests, new materialism offers a helpful framework for analysing new, imaginative, complex, and decidedly weird literary texts while also enhancing decolonial readings. The range of literary texts discussed in the context of new materialism this past year speaks to the field’s wide range of applicability, while, simultaneously affirming that the nonhuman has an important role to play in literary studies.

3. Colonial Plants and Enslaved Objects

As Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman seemed to predict in Material Ecocriticism, their 2014 co-edited collection that theorized how to blend new materialist ideas with ecocritical analysis, new materialism has become so intertwined with the environmental humanities as to often appear indistinguishable from them. Indeed, reading materiality in its own right has become a common practice of ecocriticism indebted to new materialist theory. However, because new materialism has become a practiced reflex within the wider project of ecocriticism, scholars do not always self-identify their new materialist bent. One fascinating study that exemplifies this implicit new materialism is Mary Kuhn’s environmental history, The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America. Although Kuhn’s work does not declare itself new materialist, her methods of analysis are influenced by some of the most important new materialist thinkers, such as Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Catriona Sandilands, and Kathryn Yusoff.

Kuhn’s book is particularly indebted to Yusoff’s postcolonial theorization in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018). In that short, impactful book, Yusoff makes the powerful argument that the categorization of rocks and minerals (specifically, gold) operationalized the categorization of brown and black bodies as subhuman sources of energy that could be extracted into energy and labor, just like coal. Despite the complexity of her work, Yusoff distills her postcolonial new materialist theory into a simple idea: ‘the categorization of matter operationalizes race’ (p. 4). Kuhn adopts an almost identical premise, examining how bioprospecting—surveying and categorizing exotic plants—was ‘a vital tool in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, allowing colonial powers in Europe to catalogue potentially useful plants around the globe’ (p. 3). Put in the Yusoffian way, Kuhn’s book shows how cataloguing plants mobilized empire. The Garden Politic traces how botany’s ‘classification practices’ reinforced the idea of ‘managing plants and animals alongside people’ (p. 4). She states that plants like the cinchona were the ‘material resources upon which political and economic power could be erected’ at the global, imperial, and national scale (p. 8). Her book compellingly argues that plants helped fuel empires and define American nationality.

Kuhn’s book thinks about ‘plant agency,’ a term with direct allusions to Jane Bennett’s work. In spite of human attempts to order plants, Kuhn explains that the ‘tenacity’ of plants (something like Bennett’s conatus) ‘challenged human efforts to control them’ and ‘influenced’ the ways home gardeners like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe reflected on ‘race, empire, and home’ in their writing (p. 6). The cultivation of plants, Kuhn argues, became both an informative material practice and a metaphor for cultivating America’s democratic identity at the same time as it indoctrinated men and women into moral and gendered social orders.

The Garden Politic offers the kind of cultural history that affirms new materialism’s continued vibrant life in the humanities. By thinking about the unique and ‘lively materiality’ of plant life, rather than ‘nature’ at large, Kuhn adopts a materialist ecocritical approach that multiplies into all kinds of exciting observations about the role of plants in ideological constructions. Kuhn’s work evinces that new materialism is at its best in practical application in fields like cultural history. Her methodology is refreshingly straightforward, and showcases traditional new materialism in an exciting new octave. Kuhn’s book reminds new materialists that the simple practice of paying close attention to materiality can enable academic revelations. Again, that Kuhn does not declare her work new materialist can be seen as a boon to the field rather than a detraction from it. It suggests that new materialism is beginning to move toward mainstream thinking in the environmental humanities and perhaps even the humanities at large. Attending to material agency is, happily, becoming a given of ecocriticism rather than a unique selling point.

Another work considering the ontology of objects in the creation of empire is Eva Mol’s new materialist article on Roman archaeology, ‘When Objects Speak for Others’, which also offers an important reflection on the ways a scholar should and should not integrate new materialism with postcolonialism. Mol argues that new materialism creates ‘room for more radical and fundamental ways of otherness’ in the study of Roman classics (p. 716). Mol points out that her field was at one time too quick to adopt object-oriented ontology as a defense of archaeology. Suddenly, object was paramount, and archaeology appeared more consequential than ever. However, sidelining the human meant forgoing a more ‘ethically informed’ archaeology that addressed historical inequality and Western domination (p. 716). Mol’s own contribution to archaeology is to implement new materialism to ‘advance the decolonialization of classical antiquity and show otherness without essentialism’ (p. 717). She implicitly invites other scholars to do the same.

Like Kuhn, Mol provides a simple definition of the potential and promise of new materialism: ‘a radical rethinking of the human position’ (p. 716). This is precisely why new materialism is experiencing such popularity in a variety of humanities fields turning to the post- and de-colonial. As many other new materialists are coming to realize, the field must address human inequality across history, and despite initial tendencies to sideline the human, the field’s focus on matter can be extremely productive for decolonizing the humanities. Yet Mol also articulates an important warning for new materialists seeking a postcolonial or decolonial angle: simply ‘cherrypicking […] Indigenous knowledge to challenge Western ontology’ is its own ‘neo-colonial strategy of abstraction’ (p. 717). Mol seeks to rewrite Victorian tendencies to exoticize animism and rationalize the Roman world. Sounding like Bennett herself, Mol asks us to approach some Roman statues not as representations or ‘mere matter’ but as material ‘spirits’, in line with a more fluid understanding of classical Greco-Roman ontology where objects were, at times, seen to almost speak (pp. 718–19).

This idea that matter speaks can be especially fruitful in approaching Roman slavery, which is Mol’s main interest. Her work seeks to draw attention to the ‘entanglement of material and unfree bodies’, and argues that classical studies must be less reticent in conversing with slavery studies (p. 726). She explains that the excavated tools used to make public monuments in ancient Rome were nonhuman and human (enslaved bodies). Indeed, writings from Aristotle show us that slaves in Roman society were considered ‘articulate tools’ (p. 720). As Mol argues, ‘by interrogating the interrelations between objects, humans and non-humans, it is possible to bring a different understanding to Roman slavery beyond the archaeological approach of looking for visible traces of slavery in material culture’ (p. 721). For example, Mol uses new materialism to engage an intelligent re-reading of Roman slave collars, which bore inscriptions about how to return a slave to his or her master, much like a dog collar today. The object thus becomes a ‘messenger for the master’ over the speaking authority of the human slave himself (p. 721). As Mol brilliantly points out, the collar becomes ‘a material conflation of ontological categories, where humans are objects that can speak, but not for themselves, and where animated objects must speak for them’ (p. 721). In another example, Mol discusses the excavation of a slave quarter in Pompeii, once described as a bedroom and a storage space. By applying the more theoretical new materialist framework—by letting the objects speak for themselves—Mol is able to deduce that the room was never, in fact, considered a bedroom, but rather a store of both human and nonhuman objects. Her layered readings are a model for how material culture studies can and should move forward: toward methodologies that expand material evidence into wider postcolonial analyses of ancient societies.

Mol’s reading of space echoes another work from 2023: Angel Paniagua’s new materialist approach to the related field of geographical studies as articulated in his article ‘Conceptualizing New Materialism in Geographical Studies of the Rural Realm’. Like Mol with archaeology, Paniagua uses new materialism to imagine a new iteration of his field of geographical studies. New materialism enables what Paniagua calls ‘experimental materiality’, which hybridizes the materiality of the house and the individual in the recovery of a rural home. Here, the space is co-produced and understood as a joint venture between humans and materiality that, Paniagua implies, can combine individual heritage with public heritage. This chimes with Mol’s attempt to read the slave quarter as a space that held certain individuals as well as communicating public messages about relationships between people and things in Roman antiquity.

Mol’s new archaeological methodology announces the important fact that new materialism moves beyond material inscription into what is implied by matter, opening all kinds of new narratives and inferences. A new materialist understanding of the relationships between human bodies, voices, objects, and material artifacts centuries in the past helps to fill in the gaps of the experiences unarticulated by an empirical (and imperial) account of an excavation site. The studies by Mol and Kuhn represent, for me, some of the most exciting and insightful new materialist work from 2023. They offer a distinctive blend of new materialist theory, history, and postcolonial studies—a mix that seems to increasingly define the future of new materialist practice.

4. New Materialism and Eco-Marxism

Theorist Tobias Skiveren is always on the cutting edge of new materialist discourse, highly attuned to the field’s shifts and challenges. This past year, he identified the false opposition created between eco-Marxism and new materialism as a growing conundrum in modern academia (‘New Materialism and the Eco-Marxist Challenge: Ontological Shadowboxing in the Environmental Humanities’). The early stages of new materialism at the turn of the twenty-first century seemed to resist Marxist ideas about social construction and teleology. However, more recent evocations of Marxist ideas in ecocriticism are not that far afield from new materialism, despite appearances. New materialism has long been perceived as antithetical to Marxist materiality, and to the idea of ideology in particular. Marxists seem to have a tendency, as Skiveren points out, to label new materialist ideas ‘silly’ or ‘absurd’ (p. 186). This reputation is problematic given new trends in ecocriticism—new materialism’s direct kin—toward Marxist theory. Ecocritics are increasingly invoking dialectics; however, discoursing dialectically about nature and culture is not unlike new materialist practice. New materialism, like eco-Marxism, is interested in the ways that nature and culture impact one another. After all, new materialism’s foundation is material-dialectic, the intra-action between matter and discourse. Skiveren, then, logically asks, ‘why all the fuss?’, if we are only talking about ‘minor ontological revisioning’ between new materialist deconstruction of nature/culture binaries and eco-Marxism’s dialectical one (p. 183).

This opposition between new materialism and Marxism is, for Skiveren, an act of mistaking the wood for the trees. What is at stake in the debate is really a difference of opinion when it comes to academic practice. He unapologetically suggests that eco-Marxists have become overly attached to critical methodologies to the point of making critique their only form of inquiry. On the other hand, new materialists tend to turn to affect and engagement. These differing attachments have orchestrated a false opposition where in fact eco-Marxists have far more in common with new materialists than the traditional Marxists themselves.

Skiveren turns to Andreas Malm and his book The Progress of This Storm (2017) as a synecdoche for the critical eco-Marxists. According to Skiveren, Malm fundamentally misunderstands the point of new materialism, erroneously fusing it with the aim of his own eco-Marxism: that is, holding people responsible for climate change. As Skiveren points out, ‘judged by the epistemic premises of critique alone, it certainly doesn’t make much sense to extend agency beyond the realm of culture [i.e. the human]’. The eco-Marxist ridicule of the ‘silly’ new materialists who focus on all kinds of nonhuman entities is built ‘on false premises’ (p. 188).

As Bennett’s Influx and Efflux (2020) evinces, new materialism is not about finding the subject responsible for climate violence, but rather about shifting our communal human affect so as to identify with the nonhuman world. New materialism does not pretend to engage a moral crusade against the culpable—that is why it is an adjacent or ancillary field to the environmental humanities, not a replacement of it. Instead, it offers to help change our thinking so that our actions might more easily align with climate justice.

Skiveren’s article offers a refreshing and overdue deconstruction of new materialism’s Marxist opponents, as well as the false idea that one interested in the Capitalocene cannot possibly align with Bennett. New materialism, at its core, is a field of exploring new epistemic pathways, rather than excluding them. It has survived in its vibrancy because of its adaptability and willingness to merge with other critical methodologies, such as, as we have already seen, postcolonialism. This is its virtue, even if it makes it vulnerable to Marxist condemnation. Eco-Marxists would do well to read Skiveren’s article and see there is nothing really to squabble about at all.

Sociologist Mads Ejsing approaches this same question in a different way in his 2023 article ‘The Arrival of the Anthropocene in Social Theory: From Modernism and Marxism Towards a New Materialism’. For Ejsing, the core issue between eco-Marxists and new materialists is a different understanding of how to approach the Anthropocene, and the false idea that there is only one kind of Anthropocene. Eco-Marxists address what he calls the ‘bad Anthropocene’, or Capitalocene, and critique it. New materialists, on the other hand, imagine an ‘uncanny’ Anthropocene, looking to alternatives or other eco-futures (p. 243). The answer, Ejsing says, is not one or the other but an allowance of multiple, pluralistic Anthropocenes that coexist in discourse. We need a ‘multiplicity of Anthropocene stories’ to displace the human subject at the core of the climate issue (p. 256).

The more productive answer to climate change, Ejsing suggests, is in the new materialist methodology that encourages us to think differently about the way we ‘perform the relationship between society and nature’ (p. 255). In fact, he convincingly points out that the issue with eco-Marxism is that is presumes a shared global starting point, that we are all living in the same Anthropocene. Instead, we should act in response to climate change with an awareness of ‘situated difference’ and forge a shared political stance where we can imagine new kinds of relationships with and within the Anthropocene (p. 257). Consequently, like other thinkers this year, Ejsing articulates why new materialism finds an enthusiastic methodological partner in postcolonialism: because it embraces pluralism as opposed to an overarching narrative, even if that narrative (as in the case of the Capitalocene) has very good intentions and productive academic outcomes.

5. Immanence and Planetary Thinking

The essay collection Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking builds on last year’s exciting advancements in the theological application of new materialist theory. Editors Karen Bray, Heather Eaton, and Whitney Bauman seek to analyse what we all implicitly acknowledge: that new materialism is not new. Rather, it circles back to much older ideas of theological immanence (that is, the belief expressed in various spiritual practices that the material world is imbued with divine spirit, and that God is in everyday materiality rather than beyond or above the material world). Earthly Things puts older animisms and shamanisms in conversation with the new materialisms in order to examine the essential importance of new materialism to the wider environmental humanities through a specifically theological lens. But the purpose of this essay collection is best expressed by the editors themselves, who playfully write that their work is an attempt to ‘weave the material and ideal, the dust and the spirit, the body and the mind, back together again after the Cartesian humpty dumpty fell off the wall’—a sentence that in and of itself merges fantastic and spiritual belief with earthly matter (p. 5).

Theologians who bring new materialism to bear on religious studies have contributed to a deliberate decolonial effort in theological criticism, challenging Western colonialism’s historical grip on religion and instead conceptualizing ‘religiosity’ as part of various kinds of philosophies and ‘meaning-making practices’ among numerous cultures across historical time (p. 3). The collection covers a number of diverse and Indigenous traditions, from Confucianism and Hinduism to African religions. Materialism grounded in Indigenous cultures, as explained in an essay by John Grim, gives rise to an appreciation of cosmovision—that is, stories that locate generative wholeness in people’s lives (p. 9). Even Christianity can be seen to be immanent. One of the more intrepid essays in the collection, Terra Rowe’s ‘Oily Animations’, argues that nineteenth-century American descriptions of oil challenge the Christian belief that matter is inert and instead characterize oil as animated, even divine.

A key feature of this book is its move toward a planetary framework. Ecologists have begun to argue that an academic focus on immanence is essential in response to climate change and growing ecological problems. Immanence, these editors argue, bridges frameworks like new materialism with new ideas about planetary thinking (p. 5). Indeed, studying a variety of these indigenous worldviews speaks to the kind of planetary thinking proposed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, which embraces multi-perspectivism as opposed to a global sameness. Again, this collection reminds its readers that new materialism is not new, and neither is a planetary perspective. For example, the first essay, by Mary Evelyn Tucker, shows how Confucianism is distinguished by a cosmological perspective that places humanity and everyday mundanity in relation to the wider world. Furthermore, Kevin Minister uses new materialist theory to insist that religious studies must adopt a new interreligious model in academia. The local or particular is only useful in how it might make connections and move toward thinking beyond national and species boundaries.

New materialist essay collections, in their multiplicity of voices, have been an important driver of the field, especially Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010), Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s Material Feminisms (2007), and Iovino and Opperman’s Material Ecocriticism. Earthly Things reads like a collection that can claim its own important contribution alongside these foundational new materialist anthologies. It combines the theological and new materialist with the planetary in ways that ask hard-hitting interdisciplinary questions and point to new avenues of efficacy for the new materialist framework, specifically a planetary new materialism. Bray, Eaton, and Bauman conclude with an important call to political action—if new materialism begets planetary ethics, then planetary ethics demands a new politics for ‘a planet in crisis’ (p. 13). Thus, this interdisciplinary collection is, as its title suggests, both spiritual and practical in application, giving new materialism a planetary vision that bridges old world religious practice with new world climate crisis and theory.

6. New (Materialist) Topics of Conversation in Science

The most surprising and timely topic to enter new materialist discourse in 2023 was that of psychedelics. Daan Oostveen (‘Towards a New Materialism in Psychedelic Studies’) uses the new materialist framework to examine the recent cultural fad for psychedelic drugs like LSD, psilocybin, DMT, and mescaline. Interestingly, Oostveen argues that new materialism offers a suitable way forward for this psychedelic renaissance of our current moment. At the time of writing, Oostveen sees the modern fad for psychedelics as caught between ‘reductionist materialism’ and ‘psychological optimism’ that frames psychedelics as a solution to society’s mental health crisis (p. 468). In contrast, critical monism and vital materialism offer a solution to this dichotomy by reframing the capitalist business of psychedelics (what Oostveen calls ‘cognitive capitalism’) into an assemblage à la Deleuze and Guattari, where consciousness is no longer ‘something that mysteriously arises from brain tissue’ nor the act of ‘lifeless atoms’ (p. 469). In short, new materialism breaks down the hierarchical distinction between mind and body currently plaguing the psychedelics discussion, where the drug is either all matter or all mind.

In line with recent new materialist impulses to study matter in relation to racist and imperial processes, such as those discussed in Section 3 of this essay, Oostveen makes an important point regarding the colonial implications of this cognitive capitalist fad. He rightly points out that psychedelics have been ‘orientalized […] as a spiritual antidote to the supposedly materialistic Western world’ (p. 471). New materialism, on the other hand, enables access to ‘indigenous knowledge’ around psychedelic plants and a living material world while also integrating Western science, along the lines of the planetary model proposed in Earthly Things. Both strains of the conversation—spiritual and scientific—need to be included, Oostveen explains, and integrated like mind and body, instead of diametrically opposed.

Rather than bifurcate the human brain from psychedelic drugs, new materialism allows us to view these materials as intimately connected, as a vibrant assemblage instead of a mind/body problem (p. 476). Challenging a commodifying culture, Oostveen’s approach encourages us to view psychedelics as plants and fungi that are ‘equal material players […] in an interplay of forces’ (p. 478). It is a provocative revision that has the potential to radically shift the conversation around the benefits and harms of psychedelics. Oostveen ultimately believes that encounters with psychedelics are always ‘unique’ and therefore can give rise to a multitude of unique epistemologies—a pluralistic model that the new materialist framework can accommodate (p. 477).

Like Oostveen, researchers Niamh Ní Shuilleabháin, Emma Rich, and Simone Fullagar use new materialist theory to intervene in another contemporary pressing issue: digital media and feminism. Ní Shuilleabháin, Rich, and Fullagar’s article, ‘Rethinking Digital Media Literacy to Address Body Dissatisfaction in Schools: Lessons from Feminist New Materialisms’, finds Barad’s agential realism to be particularly enlightening in relation to what they call body pedagogy (that is, modes of teaching and learning around body practices such as eating and physical activity) (p. 3250). Barad’s intra-action helps to crystallize how experiences like body dissatisfaction are material-discursive intra-actions between spaces like school and social media. This reframing enables researchers to see how young people become ‘entangled’ in body pedagogy. Because these experiences are material as well as discursive, media literacy about photoshopping is not sufficiently instructive in and of itself, and must be supplemented by affect theory. The authors adopt a new materialist research method of entanglement, where subjects and researcher intra-acted with certain media as a means of gathering data. Although new materialism is increasingly dominating the humanities, Ní Shuilleabháin, Rich, and Fullagar demonstrate that it can have profound results in the sciences as well.

New materialism’s connection to a darker yet equally prescient modern issue is the topic of Janine Natalya Clark’s 2023 article ‘Why Matter Matters: Conflict-Related Sexual Violence and the Relevance of New Materialism’. Clark seeks to introduce new materialism to sexual violence research as a way to reframe this field’s definition of structure and agency. Clark proposes to reconceptualize conflict-related sexual violence as an assemblage of human and nonhuman materials in order to consider ‘the role of non-human agencies in shaping how victims/survivors deal with their experiences’ (p. 789). In particular, she implies that thinking through new materialism reveals how current sexual violence discourse places too much emphasis on structural factors. Instead, these nebulous structures must be redefined as material, heterogeneous assemblages.

By de-privileging human agency and considering nonhuman actors, the new materialist lens can bring critical conversations around conflict-related sexual violence closer to Indigenous worldviews that see the land and material world as alive and contiguous with the human (pp. 794–95). A new materialist perspective can highlight a material object’s role in sexual harassment. Most poignantly, using new materialism allowed one of Clark’s interviewees in Bosnia and Herzegovina to express the ways in which soil was a vital life-force in her personal history, inviting the nonhuman into the conversation and enabling more varied expression from the survivor/victim (p. 807). New to conflict studies, new materialism may seem, on the surface, to present a controversial reframing that could potentially undermine the survivor’s experience by broadening the picture to include the nonhuman. However, Clark makes a compelling argument that new materialist ideas like assemblage and thing power can enhance social scientific methodology by allowing for greater expressivity and awareness in the interview process.

7. Conclusion

The variety of approaches and research topics in this review speaks for itself. Through its wide applicability in the humanities and social sciences, new materialism speaks across disciplines and breaks down departmental divides in academia, so that a literary scholar like myself can gain methodological insight from a classical archaeologist or social scientist as much as a fellow English professor. Indeed, the power of new materialism is in its inter-relationality, in the way its core concepts about challenging and repositioning the human can grow along with new movements in the humanities, especially decolonial history. Finally, as the body of work published in 2023 evinces, what has previously been a damning critique of new materialism—its omission of colonial injustice—is gradually becoming one of its greatest strengths.

Books Reviewed

Journal Articles Reviewed

References