The Head, the Hand, and Matter: New Materialism and the Politics of Knowledge

Abstract

This article seeks to examine the political connotations of a recent ‘material turn’ in social and political theory and its implications for theorizations of political agency. ‘New materialist’ theories are premised upon transcending the limits which social constructivism places upon thought, viewed as a reification of the division of subject and object and so a hubristic anthropocentrism which places human beings at the centre of social existence. Yet new materialist theories have tended to locate the conditions of the separation of mind and world they seek to overcome upon the terrain of epistemic or ethical error. By taking the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett and Karen Barad as exemplary, this article contends that new materialist theories not only fall short of their own materialist pretensions insofar as they do not interrogate the material conditions of the separation of the mental and material, but that the failure to do so has profound repercussions for the success of their accounts of political agency. This essay seeks to offer a counter-narrative to new materialist theories by situating the hierarchy between thought and world as a structural feature of capitalist social relations.

Incomegetting and Environmental Degradation

“…We maintain that a more adequate approach, an essentially "nonideal" account of social activity [4,5], can be found in the work of the Austrian born social theorist Alfred Schütz , whose "pragmatic theory of the life-world" [8] is particularly useful in understanding relevances-what is relevant for people in everyday life [9,10]. We relate Schutz's work to other philosophies, in particular to Theodore Schatzki's practice theory, in an attempt to bring phenomenological insights into how activities of getting income structures contemporary life-worlds beyond those activities themselves, aiming to contribute to the environmental social theory that has begun to focus on work [11][12][13][14]. While Schutz [15] saw the "world of work" as the paramount of multiple realities that we can experience, we conceptualize incomegetting-the manifold practices of getting income-as the paramount structurer of the life-world that constitutes the conditions for other issues of life.…”

“…Getting income, typically waged work, seems to be (much) more relevant to practical reason than whatever impacts such activities may have on the "natural" environment-also at the political level in our "era where the primary demand of the electorate is 'jobs, jobs, jobs'" [16] (p. 277). There is a growing understanding in the literature that the "normal workings" of industrial societies [17] (p. 221) entail cumulative socio-material changes [10] and that the normal workings are chiefly mediated in particular life-worlds by work [11,13,14]. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, waged work has been institutionalized and gained centrality as a chief dimension in the pragmatics of everyday life [11,17].…”

“…Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, waged work has been institutionalized and gained centrality as a chief dimension in the pragmatics of everyday life [11,17]. For this, it appears to be also the chief mediator, or the very origin of separation [13], between humans and their biophysical-"natural" as well as "built"-environments. There seems to be a need to return to Karl Marx, who claimed that the metabolic interaction between the humans and society unfolds through labor [18].…”

“…651-652). More specifically with regard to waged work, the separation between humans' inorganic condition and their activity can be understood "only in the relation of wage labour to capital" ( [20] cited in [13] p. 51).…”

“…Since changes in the "natural" environment are not immanently experienced within the "technologically textured" modern life-worlds [21], the environmental predicament enters the life-world of most urban people merely as an intellectual issue-as Max Weber already wrote a century ago [22]. While the salient role of waged work is an age old focus of social sciences, it has only recently appeared in the main stage of environmental social scientific theorizing [11][12][13][14]23]. In this paper, we aim at a "nonideal" account of social activity [5] by combining phenomenological analysis of the life-word with historical analysis of the real social conditions-"what really goes on in our social lives" [6] (p. 7)-in order to clarify the conditions for radical transformation when facing deepening global environmental predicament.…”