Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-07T19:16:50.058Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - A Sociality of Death: Towards a New Materialist Politics and Ethics of Life Itself

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2017

Peta Hinton
Affiliation:
feminist new materialist scholar who has held several postdoctoral fellowships
Vicki Kirby
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales
Get access

Summary

New Materialist Ontologies

Introducing the new materialisms in the seminal anthology of the same name, the editors, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010), provide us with a sense of the sociological import of this contemporary field. Materiality, they contend, is everywhere. It is the very stuff of the quotidian: the dependence of our existence on ‘diverse species’, our bodily and cellular reactions, ‘the material artifacts and natural stuff that populate our environment’, and the ‘socioeconomic structures that produce and reproduce the conditions of our everyday lives’ (2010: 1). Such reckonings with materiality demand an analysis commensurate with the ubiquity and complexity of its myriad relations and processes. Thus, as the editors outline, new materialist perspectives emphasise matter as a way to both identify and to address some of the most ‘urgent challenges’ in contemporary society (2010: 3). Their aim is to return our focus to ‘material phenomena and processes’ that have been de facto neglected by the ‘dominance of analytical and normative political theory’ and the styles of ‘radical constructivism’ that characterise Anglophone and Continental traditions associated with ‘the cultural turn’ (2010: 3).

With this focus, new materialism should not be regarded as a neopositivist approach that might take materiality for granted as the mere foundation of sociological concerns. Matter does not presuppose the ‘baser desires of biological material’ or the ‘inertia of physical stuff’ that is inferior to a ‘host of immaterial things’ (2010: 2). Nor can it be reified for the purposes of critical interventions that aim to think its processes differently. On the contrary, new materialism opens the dualisms that would insist on matter's separation from mind, cognition, language, representation, and so on. Instead, it offers a different, we could say broadened, ontology that puts into question the nature of materiality itself, as well as the status and shape of the human actors who would ordinarily comprise our conventional understandings of ‘the social’. It is this non-dualist (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, Coole and Frost 2010) and posthumanist (Irni 2013; Coole and Frost 2010; Thiele 2014) orientation within new materialism that redefines material activity beyond ‘substantialist Cartesian or mechanistic Newtonian accounts of matter’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 12–13), and it requires that humans, ‘including theorists themselves, be recognised as thoroughly immersed within materiality's productive contingencies’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 7).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×