RELATED TERMS: Affordances; Object-Oriented Ontology; Speculative Realism;
Like new materialism, design practice is interested in, “understanding things as active agents rather than passive instruments or backdrops for human activity” (Barnett and Boyle, 2016).
Certain aspects of new materialist thinking, which Sara Ahmed has called white feminist materialism (Hickey-Moody, 2015: 169), may be of value in design practice and for analysing how designs work, for example, its emphasis on meaning production, on the ‘performative’ character of the world and on the fact of being environed by artefacts fashioned by human design. As a theoretical resource, it could be useful to re-think the interrelationships among the material, the agential or actantial and the human dimensions of designs in situ.
Keith Ansell-Pearson argues that although it is stated by some of its proponents that new materialism is a term coined by Rosi Braidotti and Manuel de Landa in the second half of the 1990s (Dolphijn and Tuin 2011: 383), this overlooks the fact that, in the 1960s, Deleuze was using this term in connection with his reading of Spinoza.
New materialism seeks to demonstrate that the mind, in being ‘bodily’, is always already material but that, nevertheless, the mind takes ‘bodiliness’ as its object, and that nature and culture are always already ‘nature cultures’, in Donna Haraway’s term.
New materialism critiques the dualism inherent in transcendental and humanist traditions which still linger in some cultural theory. The transcendental and humanist traditions continue to stir debates that are being opened up by new materialists who seek to shift these dualist structures by allowing for the fluxes of nature and culture, matter and mind, thereby opening up active theory formation. (Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012)
New Materialism as Media Theory
Jussi Parrika (2012) argues that,
“[n]ew materialism is not only about intensities of bodies and their capacities such as voice or dance, of movement and relationality, of fleshyness, of ontological monism and alternative epistemologies of generative matter, and active meaning-making of objects themselves non-reducible to signification. New materialism is already present in the way technical media transmits and processes ‘‘culture,’’ and engages in its own version of the continuum of natureculture (to use Donna Haraway’s term) or in this case, medianatures.”
Parikka uses the term medianatures to make sense of the continuum between mediatic apparatuses and their material contexts in the exploitation of nature.
New materialism as media theory, Parikka suggests, can be seen as the intensive excavation of the materiality of media, where and when that materiality actually is or takes place. This means that materiality is not simply discovered in technological specificity or scientific contexts, for example. Rather, materialism has to be invented continuously anew.
In consequence, Parrika proposes a multiplicity of materialisms. The task of new materialism, therefore, is to address how to think that multiplicity methodologically so that it facilitates a grounded analysis of contemporary culture. This implies being able to talk about non-solids and the processual, the ‘weird materiality’, as Parrika calls it, inherent in the mode of abstraction of technical media, just as much as being able to talk about objects. This step is necessary so that we are able to understand what the specificity of this kind of materialism might be that we encounter, but do not always perceive, in contemporary media culture.
Parikka cautions that it should not be assumed that the agency of matter is always simply ‘good’. The materiality of waste, for example, is one concrete way to think in a more nuanced way about the agency of matter in a new materialist perspective. The materialism of dirt and bad matter is not only about ‘thing-power’ but about how things can disempower through encounters that reduce the vitalities of material assemblages.
References
Ansell-Pearson, K. (2015). Deleuze and new materialism: naturalism, norms and ethics [Essay]. Academia.edu. Available from https://www.academia.edu/20063620/Deleuze_and_New_Materialism_Naturalism_Norms_and_Ethics?auto=view&campaign=weekly_digest [Accessed 17 February 2016].
Barnett, S and Boyle, C. eds. (2016) Rhetoric, through everyday things. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama.
Coole, D. and Frost, S. (eds) (2010) New materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. (2011), Pushing dualism to an extreme: On the Philosophical Impetus of a new materialism’, Continental Philosophy Review, 44, 383-400.
Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. (2012). New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11515701.0001.001 Accessed on 29 July 2014
Hickey-Moody, A. (2015). Manifesto: The rhizomatics of practice as research. In: Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance. London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.
Parikka, J. (2012) Forum: New materialism new materialism as media theory: Medianatures and dirty matter, Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies, 9(1), pp. 95–100. doi: 10.1080/14791420.2011.626252.
For a discussion of the many lines of flight of new materialism, see New Materialist Cartographies
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