Liberation for Straw Dogs? Old Materialism, New Materialism, and the Challenge of an Emancipatory Posthumanism

Abstract

The term 'new materialism' has recently gained saliency as a descriptor for an eclectic range of positions that question the human centred and human exclusive focus of scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. In turn these emerging perspectives have been subject to critique by those writing in the established materialist tradition who argue that new materialism ignores the unique specificity of human agency and the transformatory capabilities of our species. Our previous interventions have endorsed a particular account of posthumanism that draws together complexity influenced systems theory with elements of political ecologism that have incorporated aspects of established materialist and humanist thinking. This article rejects the old materialist critique that denies the emancipatory potential of posthumanist thinking, and explores the potential for an emancipatory posthumanism.

Ecologies of Sustainable Concerns: Organization Theorizing for the Anthropocene

“…Distinctions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ materialisms in ecological matters have been the object of much debate, the latter often criticized as unable to engage with actual power relations in their emphasis on flat ontologies – e.g. ascribing similar agency to human and nonhuman entities in their relationships and therefore ignoring questions of hierarchical power relations that humans can and do exert over the nonhuman world (Cudworth and Hobden, ). Nonetheless, as we bring these representative works together we follow Dolphijn and van der Tuin () and Lemke () in that new materialism re‐reads and re‐arranges old materialist traditions by presenting a different theoretical mapping, which is what we are trying to offer here guided by the notion of ecologies of concern .…”

The leadership role of teachers and environment club coordinators in promoting ecocentrism in secondary schools: Teachers as exemplars of environmental education

“…Relational/material ideology has more recently emerged from ecofeminist literature as new materialism (Cudworth & Hobden, 2015;A. Gough & Whitehouse, 2018;Höppner, 2017;Monforte, 2018).…”

Sustainability, feminist posthumanism and the unusual capacities of (post)humans

“…While acknowledging the validity of the anti-humanist critique of humanism as a totalising conceptualisation, Braidotti (2013, 38, 45) offers instead a critical and affirmative 'posthuman' eco-philosophy that establishes a continuum between posthuman bodies and non-human matter (2013,104) and between subjectivity and ecology (2006b, 41). This, in turn, constitutes an ethics based on a new sense of inter-connectedness between all matter: 'an affirmative bond that locates the subject in the flow of relations with multiple others' (2013, 50, see also Conty 2018, 91;Cudworth and Hobden 2015;Franklin 2006;Pickering 2005, 33-35).…”

“…The other principal criticisms of the new materialisms are that they de-politicise social justice struggles by sidelining essentialist models of identity; that the absence of any conception of social structures, mechanisms or systems undermines capacity to analyse power, resistance and inequalities; and that their 'newness' is only in relation to Western and Eurocentric ontology. For overviews of the new materialisms and discussions of these issues, see (Fox and Alldred, 2018;Coole and Frost 2010;Cudworth and Hobden 2015;Devellennes and Dillet 2018;Rosiek, Snyder, and Pratt 2019). 6 The claimed positive relationship between economic development and environmental protection has been queried by other scholars, who argue that indeed it is economic development and the capitalist model of production and accumulation that has led to the current environmental crises (Baer 2008;Moore 2017;Rees 2003;Wallis 2010).…”