Ideas
Matter has force and agency
Tags: new materialism - agency
One can invoke bacteria colonies in human elbows to show how human subjects are themselves nonhuman, alien, outside, vital materiality. One can note that the human immune system depends on parasitic helminth worms for its proper functioning or cite other instances of our cyborgization to show how human agency is always an assemblage of microbes, animals, plants, metals, chemicals, word-sounds, and the like.1
“Thing-power” is “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle”1. It is not limited to organic matter, but also applies to all inorganic matter. → Oil-spills and microplastics2
This idea challenges the idea of human exceptionalism that only we have agency.2
“Viewing everything as matter, and all matter as powerful, new materialism refuses to treat humans as more than material, separate from and superior to the world around us.”2
Link to original Footnotes
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822391623 ↩ ↩2
Allen, P. (2023). What is New Materialism? Perlego Knowledge Base. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
Reading List
Main
- Parikka, J. (2012). New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2011.626252
- Parikka, J. (2010). 1 Nineteenth - century Insect Technics. In University of Minnesota Press eBooks (pp. 1–25). https://doi.org/10.5749/9780816675241-003
- Rees, A. (2022, September 8). Rethinking Intelligence in a More-Than-Human world. NOEMA.
- Haraway, D. J. (2016). A Cyborg manifesto. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816650477.003.0001
- Allen, P. (2023). What is New Materialism? Perlego Knowledge Base.
Additional
- Hofer, K. P., & Stockburger, A. (2017). Questions & Answers : New Materialism, Old Media. https://doi.org/10.25595/1558
- Parikka, J. (2012). New Materialism of Dust.
- Littau, K. (2011). The ghost is the machine: Media-philosophy and materialism. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294851_10
- Reichert, R., & Richterich, A. (2015). Introduction. Digital Materialism.
- Richterich, A. S., & Parikka, J. (2015). “A geology of media and a new materialism”: Jussi Parikka in Conversation with Annika Richterich. https://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2015-0113
- Gamble, C. N., Hanan, J. S., & Nail, T. (2019). WHAT IS NEW MATERIALISM? https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725x.2019.1684704
- New materialism. (n.d.). https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/s/situated-knowledges.html
- Rekret, P. (2016). A critique of new materialism: ethics and ontology. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0001-y
- Choat, S. (2017). Science, Agency and Ontology: A Historical-Materialist Response to New Materialism. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717731926
Ideas
- New Materialism is typically an ontology at its core, even though it may lead to specific ethical imperatives
- What does it demand of our society, of us?