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Contesting the Material Turn; or, The Persistence of Agency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2018

Alfred J. López
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

new materialismrace humanist subjectJane BennettFred Motenagency
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 371 - 386
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

1 Epigraphs: See respectively Moten, Fred, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1 Google Scholar; and Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. and notes Alan Bass ([1972]; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 213.

2 Moten, Fred, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 502 (2008): 183 Google Scholar.

3 Wynter, Sylvia, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory and Re-imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies toward the Human Project,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, eds. Lewis Ricardo Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), 109 Google Scholar.

4 My first encounter with the idea of a “dialectics of permission” came in an informal discussion with Thomas Rickert, a colleague and friend here at Purdue. It struck me at the time as an apt metaphor for the dance of interdisciplinarity: what scholars do when we a more- or less-informed, but sometimes unwelcome questions of a discipline that is not “our own.” Subsequently, I have seen the term occasionally, usually deployed in the context of managing free-market economies on a state or global level. See for example Herman, Stewart W., “A Short Economic History of Vietnam, 1945–1986,” in International Businesses and the Challenges of Poverty in the Developing World: Case Studies on Global Responsibilities and Practices, eds. Frederick Bird and Stewart W. Herman (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 139–151 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Dolphijn, Rick and van der Tuin, Iris, “Introduction: What May I Hope For?” in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Library, 2012), 13 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 I obviously do not have space to fully address the profoundly overblown notion of a “new metaphysics,” a project that even the most radical exponents of deconstruction in its prime never seriously suggested. From whichever end one opts to start addressing this notion—that is, whether to start from “new” or from “metaphysics”—one finds that Derrida, among others, got there first. The slim volume of interviews Positions fairly brims with Derrida’s admonitions regarding any surpassing or “transgression” of metaphysics: “There is not a transgression, if one understands by that a pure and simple landing into a beyond of metaphysics. . . .” The rest of this particular interview, entitled “Implications,” contains much that would be helpful in reading the present moment’s seeming obsession with a return to scientific or material objectivity. See Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. and notes Alan Bass ([1972]; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 12–13.

7 Braidotti, Rosi, “Teratologies,” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 159 Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., 159. Kairos, for the Ancient Greeks, provided an alternate view of time. In opposition to the better-known chronos, kairos refers to the aptness or correctness of the time, the right time to act or move. Kairos thus invokes the timeliness of the subject, which must act in response to change, contingency, and chance. See White, E. C., Kaironomia: On The Will to Invent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

9 Dolphijn, Rick and van der Tuin, Iris, “Interview with Rosi Braidotti,” in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Library, 2012), 21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 I refer here specifically to Alexander Weheliye’s sustained critique of Agamben’s deracializing reading of the Muselmann in Chapter 4 of his Habeas Viscus, a systematic book-length takedown of new materialism’s occlusion of the raced subject. See Weheliye, Alexander G., Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 53–73 Google Scholar.

11 To parse the difference between precluding (to prevent or disqualify a priori) and occluding (to actively shut out or exclude that which would otherwise belong) in this context may or may not be simply a matter of semantics. But it is worth at least noting that occlusion comes to us from the Latin verb occludere, itself constituted by the prefix ob- (“in the way”) and the verb claudere (“to close or shut”). One is able to read here the unraced or postracial liberal humanist subject as standing “in the way,” ideologically speaking, of the raced enfleshed subject that might otherwise be visible in new materialist discourse. Whether this occlusion is a methodological blindspot or simply bad faith is a matter for another essay. See Merriam-Webster Dictionary for their definition of occlusion. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/occlusion. May 9, 2018.

12 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 19.

13 Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar, 1 and 6, respectively.

14 Ibid., 4.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., 5.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Steve Hendrix. 2017. “The Demolition of Baltimore: The History of North Bradford Street,” Washington Post, Baltimore Local edition. Accessed February 2, 2017, now titled “Life, Death, and Demolition,” at https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/local/baltimore-life-death-and-demolition/?noredirect=on.

22 Ibid.

23 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 5.

24 Ibid.

25 See Chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively, in Bennett, Vibrant Matter.

26 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 48.

27 We should distinguish here between critiques of new materialist approaches to race and ethnicity and writings that attempt to account for race within its methodological premises. In the latter camp, Mel Chen’s explores, among other things, the processes by which material objects become racialized. See for example Chen, Mel, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 159–188 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Likewise, Arun Saldanha’s “Reontologizing Race” explicitly seeks “to defend a machinic ontology of race” (9). See Saldanha, Arun, “Reontologizing Race: The Machinic Geography of Phenotype,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24.1 (2006): 9–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more discipline-focused journal articles, see for example Carter, Bob and Dyson, Simon M., “Actor Network Theory, Agency and Racism: The Case of Sickle Cell Trait and US Athletics,” Social Theory & Health 13.1 (2015): 62–77 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Merrill, Andrew, “The Life of a Gunshot: Space, Sound and the Political Contours of Acoustic Gunshot Detection,” Surveillance & Society 15.1 (2017)Google Scholar.

28 Yi Sencindiver, Susan, “Introduction,” in New Materialism (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographies, 2017), 1 Google Scholar.

29 Dolphijn, Rick and van der Tuin, Iris, “A ‘New Tradition’ in Thought,” in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Library, 2012), 85 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Lennon, John, “Old Dirt Road,” in Walls and Bridges (London: Apple Records, 1974)Google Scholar.

31 Given that “the primacy of matter” harkens back to Lenin himself as a core materialist axiom, it is perhaps not surprising to find it circulating anew in the new materialism. One certainly finds it, and various paraphrases of it, across a range of texts, retaining in the process echoes or traces of a former materialism it claims to have outgrown. See for example Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Sencindiver, “Introduction.”

32 Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 406 Google Scholar.

33 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, x, emphasis added.

34 Ibid., ix.

35 We might think here also of Sartre’s formulation of “indifference toward others” from Being and Nothingness, a term he does not unfold in racial terms but which finds a later postcolonial articulation in the work of Fanon and Stuart Hall, among others. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. and notes and intro Hazel Barnes ([1943]; New York: Washington Square Press, 1953), 380.

36 Quoted in Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xi.

37 Ibid., xii–xiii and xiv, respectively.

38 Ibid., xvi.

39 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 8.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 25.

43 Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 181–82.

44 Ibid., 182.

45 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 2 and 122, respectively.

46 This question of the active, acting, unrecognized other that “exceeds and escapes” a Western metaphysics that would contain and conscribe it is admittedly a long-running preoccupation for me, one that I can trace at least as far back to the concluding chapter of my first book nearly twenty years ago. The context (or pretext) then was magical realism, a genre that I very much believe invites the kind of careful analysis that a truly awakened new materialism could bring. For the curious, see López, Alfred J., Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 205–210 Google Scholar.