On Contemporary Materialism

One of the most interesting and engaging trends to emerge in recent contemporary philosophy is the attempt to develop a rigorous materialism - one shorn of any hand-wringing over the inevitable mediation of language, with its endless hermeneutics and language games. Against the interpretation which would see immanence as the common theme of cutting-edge philosophy (and this I take to be one of the claims of John Mullarkey's Post-Continental Philosophy), it is rather materialism which provides the basic framework for much of the more interesting work today. Immanence itself is a fairly common thesis, put forth at least since Kant's rejection of the transcendent uses of reason; materialism, on the other hand, seems to me to be only a fairly minor position (Marx excepted, of course). It is only lately that it has really become a widespread movement. As Lee Braver shows in his excellent A Thing of This World, most of 'continental' philosophy - Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, along with many, many others - are all idealist in the sense of focusing on the linguistic and representational construction of reality. This idealist tendency has had a number of unfortunate side effects: foremost, in my mind, being the fear of science. This is no doubt thanks in large part to Heidegger's criticisms, but also, I would argue, because the idealist tendency has played into the literature circles who would (obviously) much rather endlessly interpret passages of Joyce, than perform experiments or grapple with mathematical equations. (Not that there's anything wrong with either!)


One of the startling parts of contemporary materialism, on the other hand, is the full-fledged willingness to incorporate scientific discoveries into their philosophical system (without, for all that, making philosophy simply subordinate to science as some analytic philosophy has done). Deleuze, being the devourer of any and all knowledge, makes biology and evolutionary theory one of the central points of his philosophy. He also cites esoteric debates over early calculus interpretations, and references virtually unknown mathematicians like Albert Lautman, along with incorporating Gilbert Simondon's previously unknown work on technology and scientific models of individuation. Alain Badiou, of course, makes the radical (for continental philosophy) claim that mathematics is the discourse of ontology. While set theory provides the basis for his ontology, in Logiques des Mondes, category theory has become the new discourse used to illuminate the relationality of worlds. Ray Brassier, in his work Nihil Unbound (which I aim to read in the next little while) cites Paul Churchland who is famous for his denial of qualia (the subjective experience of the world) and his reduction of the mind to neurological functions. Graham Harman, meanwhile, makes the constant polemical plea in Tool-Being to return to the things themselves, against the repetitive movement into deeper and deeper conditions of things. Quentin Meillassoux, lastly, makes his 'correlationist' argument by employing scientific data to show the existence of an item which escapes any idealist tendency to make the world (even an independent one) necessarily correlated to thought. The "arche-fossil" indexes a truly materialist world, one that has only retroactively been discovered by science.

As a result, part of what makes aspects of contemporary materialism (also known as speculative realism) truly exciting is its potential to bridge gaps that have been virtually impassable for 100 years. The gap between analytic and continental philosophy can be decreased since one of the hallmarks of many modern materialists is not only their commitment to scientific insights, but also the clarity of their writings. No longer bound to respect the infinite interpretability of texts, these thinkers often provide some of the clearest arguments for their positions to be found in continental philosophy. This overcomes the immediate hurdle which plagues any reconciliation between analytic and continental camps, namely the difficulty of entering into continental discourse. The respect that the materialists have for science also facilitates this reconciliation, while hopefully giving pause to those analytic philosophers who dogmatically make philosophy secondary to science. Therefore, science, analytic philosophy, and continental philosophy need not be seen as mutually exclusive interpretations of the world, but rather mutually conditioning forces that aim at (perhaps) different levels of reality.

One question that initially arises, though, is the relation of contemporary materialism to the more classical accounts. In particular, the Marxist form of materialism. In what sense can these be productively related to each other? Does the modern form of realism sacrifice all the materialist insights of the Marxist account? I'll leave the details to some one more well-versed in Marx than I, but the questions seem worthwhile.

More generally though, and more importantly, what does contemporary materialism have to say about socio-political issues? In what ways does developing an object-centred ontology change the ways we perceive specifically human issues? This, to me, seems to be one of the major failings of Manuel DeLanda's otherwise excellent work - the negation of any sort of specifically cultural or human aspects. In his rigorously materialist history of societies, there is no question of gender or racial or ethnic identities, or any sort of immaterial power struggles. His reduction is more of a physical reduction than a material reduction, effecting a sort of synthesis of sociobiology and complexity theory. While the complexity theory avoids any strict determinism, the sociobiological aspect seems to leave aside the primary questions about the uniqueness of human societies, instead reducing them to merely plays of physical flows. Is this the necessary endpoint of materialism? Or can there be a materialism that avoids the physicalist bias, and provides a viable explanation of systems like culture, language, religion, and international relations?

Ray Brassier - undoubtedly the theorist pushing the nihilistic implications of speculative realism to its ultimate conclusions - still retains a focus on struggling against capitalism, as attested to in a number of his articles and works. This would suggest that he believes that materialism still has a powerful voice to critique modern socio-political systems. Badiou also believes his form of materialism is capable of introducing revolutionary sequences into politics, in the form of a generic community of equal entities forcing change upon the situation. Gilles Deleuze, too, argues that his transcendental materialism reveals an absolute becoming that escapes even capitalism's destruction of all stable points, effecting a revolutionary change that refuses to be bound by exploitative structures.

Anyways, I'm presently making my way through Graham Harman's Tool-Being, and I'll hopefully put up some thoughts on it when I get inspired to do so. It's fascinating to see the emergence of a new philosophical position, but nearly all of the important issues are missed in summary posts like this one. So I intend on tackling the details in future posts, if I get the chance to. For anyone who's interested though, there's also a discussion going on over at Larval Subjects about very similar issues, including a debate over art's contribution to a meaningless, material world.