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The first comprehensive scrutiny of the theories associated with new materialisms including speculative realism, new materialism, Object-oriented ontology and actor-network theory. One of the most influential trends in the humanities and social sciences in the last decades, new materialisms embody a critique of modernity and a pledge to regain immediate reality by focusing on the materiality of the world – human and nonhuman – rather than a post-structuralist focus upon texts. Against New Materialisms examines the theoretical and practical problems connected with discarding modernity and the human subject from a number of interdisciplinary angles: ontology and phenomenology to political theory, mythology and ecology. With contributions from international scholars, including Markus Gabriel, Andrew Cole, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the essays here challenge the capacity of new materialisms to provide solutions to current international crises, whilst also calling into question what the desire for such theories can tell us about the global situation today.
New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that comprise the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures. Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. Contributors Sara Ahmed Jane Bennett Rosi Braidotti Pheng Cheah Rey Chow William E. Connolly Diana Coole Jason Edwards Samantha Frost Elizabeth Grosz Sonia Kruks Melissa A. Orlie
The first comprehensive scrutiny of the theories associated with new materialisms including speculative realism, new materialism, Object-oriented ontology and actor-network theory. One of the most influential trends in the humanities and social sciences in the last decades, new materialisms embody a critique of modernity and a pledge to regain immediate reality by focusing on the materiality of the world – human and nonhuman – rather than a post-structuralist focus upon texts. Against New Materialisms examines the theoretical and practical problems connected with discarding modernity and the human subject from a number of interdisciplinary angles: ontology and phenomenology to political theory, mythology and ecology. With contributions from international scholars, including Markus Gabriel, Andrew Cole, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the essays here challenge the capacity of new materialisms to provide solutions to current international crises, whilst also calling into question what the desire for such theories can tell us about the global situation today.
In Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics, Cat Moir offers a new interpretation of the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. The reception of Bloch’s work has seen him variously painted as a naïve realist, a romantic nature philosopher, a totalitarian thinker, and an irrationalist whose obscure literary style stands in for a lack of systematic rigour. Moir challenges these conceptions of Bloch by reconstructing the ontological, epistemological, and political dimensions of his speculative materialism. Through a close, historically contextualised reading of Bloch’s major work of ontology, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz (The Materialism Problem, its History and Substance), Moir presents Bloch as one of the twentieth century’s most significant critical thinkers.
An attack on the idea that nature and society are impossible to distinguish from each other In a world careening towards climate chaos, nature is dead. It can no longer be separated from society. Everything is a blur of hybrids, where humans possess no exceptional agency to set them apart from dead matter. But is it really so? In this blistering polemic and theoretical manifesto, Andreas Malm develops a counterargument: in a warming world, nature comes roaring back, and it is more important than ever to distinguish between the natural and the social. Only with a unique agency attributed to humans can resistance become conceivable.
The essays in this volume discuss the various approaches to New Materialism in Sociology and Philosophy. They raise the questions of what New Materialism consists of and whether it in fact should be considered a radical change in Social Theory. Are the ideas of a “material turn”, as the theory is formulated and in its assumptions, foreshadowed by the classical philosophies of Spinoza and Tarde? Do these new approaches bring substantially new perspectives to Social Theory? A further goal of these essays is to formulate the methodological and methodical consequences for its empirical implementation. What conditions must an ethnography of things fulfill if it is to be sufficient? Which participant objects and bodies do the approaches of the various social theories and methodologies include or exclude?
‘New materialisms’ refers to a broad, contemporary, and significant movement of thought across the social sciences and cultural studies which attempts to (re)turn to, renew, or create alternative philosophies of matter. Such philosophies spring from multiple sources but are in general an attempt to bring the indissolubility of the social and environmental more forcefully into our analytical frames and modes of inquiry and tackle a perceived over-reliance on discourse and language in the so-called post-modern era of philosophy and social science. This movement in thought is underlaid by, and meets up with, the climate and biodiversity crises and the nature of the human condition (and modes of learning or becoming), within the field of environmental education. This volume brings together academics working at differing intersections of environmental education and new materialisms, highlighting tensions, knots, and lines of flight across and for research, practice, and theory. As such this collection draws on multiple interpretations and streams of thought within new materialisms and demonstrates their significance for those engaging with environmental education policy, practice and research. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Environmental Education Research.
The first book of its kind, Sociology and the New Materialism explores the many and varied applications of "new materialism," a key emerging trend in 21st century thought, to the practice of doing sociology. Offering a clear exposition of new materialist theory and using sociological examples throughout to enable the reader to develop a materialist sociological understanding, the book: Outlines the fundamental precepts of new materialism Explores how materialism provides new perspectives on the range of sociological topic areas Explains how materialist approaches can be used to research sociological issues and also to engage with social issues. Sociology and the New Materialism is a clear and authoritative one-stop guide for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates in sociology, cultural studies, social policy and related disciplines.
Bringing together authors from two intellectual traditions that have, so far, generally developed independently of one another – critical theory and new materialism – this book addresses the fundamental differences and potential connections that exist between these two schools of thought. With a focus on some of the most pressing questions of contemporary philosophy and social theory – in particular, those concerning the status of long-standing and contested separations between matter and life, the biological and the symbolic, passivity and agency, affectivity and rationality – it shows that recent developments in both traditions point to important convergences between them and thus prepare the ground for a more direct confrontation and cross-fertilization. The first volume to promote a dialogue between critical theory and new materialism, this collection explores the implications for contemporary debates on ecology, gender, biopolitics, post-humanism, economics and aesthetics. As such, it will appeal to philosophers, social and political theorists, and sociologists with interests in contemporary critical theory and materialism.